Chapter Seven

‘You won’t get much out of him today, I’m afraid,’ the doctor said. They were standing in intensive care, separated from the patient by a thick glass window. It reminded DI Fairfield of the mortuary viewing suite, the difference being that this junkie was still alive. Just. His sallow skin was stretched tight across his skull, his arms covered in dark lesions. He was hooked up to heart monitor, oxygen and a drip. The diagnosis of anthrax had been confirmed.

‘Will he live?’ Fairfield asked.

‘We’re giving him high doses of antibiotics,’ the doctor continued. ‘It’s a lethal disease. It’s not invariably fatal. But close enough when it gets to this stage. He has a small chance of pulling through. His chances would be a lot better had he been brought in earlier. That’s what I told the girl as well.’

‘What girl?’

‘The one who brought him in yesterday. She was here a minute ago. Still wouldn’t give her name. Or his.’

‘Damn. What did she look like?’

‘Thin. Mousy hair. Blue tracksuit bottoms, grey hooded top.’

The inspector was already running.

‘Like a half-empty sack of potatoes,’ the doctor called after her. ‘The way they all do.’

Fairfield ran along the corridors and took corners at a skid. If they were to stop the hospitals filling with half-dead junkies infected with anthrax, then they had to find out where the contaminated drugs came from. This was only the second victim they knew about, but across the city there could be hundreds of users infecting themselves. She didn’t see anyone fitting the girl’s description until she reached the main exit, when she spotted her getting into the passenger seat of an old red Polo, dull with grime. The hard-faced girl looked straight at her as the driver pulled away. Fairfield only got a partial look at him, but thought he was young, with very short hair. She noted the index number of the car, requested a check and waited behind the steering wheel of her Renault for the results. It came back after three minutes.

‘Car is logged as having no keeper. No insurance or MOT.’

‘Par for the course.’ She requested a marker to be put on it and drove off towards Albany Road. What she really needed was a decent coffee.

There was now a permanent incident room at Albany Road station, which for obvious reasons many called the Murder Room. All information regarding the Leigh Woods murder was gathered in the incident room, all actions were planned and most briefings given there. CID officers and civilian computer operators worked side by side. The room had a wall map of the city and one of the county, picture- and whiteboard, printers, phones and desktop computer units, no air-conditioning, strip lighting and probably several miles of cable. There was a gap where, until recently, the kettle had sat. The windows afforded a similar view as the one in McLusky’s office, and the beige plastic blinds looked like they were 1970s originals and were permanently at half-mast.

McLusky’s desk faced Austin’s and the door to the corridor. An internal window beside it allowed the inmates to see anyone approaching from the left; unfortunately the superintendent had a habit of approaching the incident room from the right. McLusky thought it might be a good idea to install a bicycle mirror as an advance-warning system, though he would be the first to admit that the superintendent was preferable to the universally disliked DCI Gaunt, who was at present safely hospitalized.

In front of him on his desk he had spread out a series of photographs of the body in Leigh Woods, taken before the tent had been erected. They showed the grizzly find from all angles. It was easy to see how the six of them had missed it in the mist; from any distance it looked like so much twig, stone and leaf. Only from certain angles was it obvious what the camera had captured. The pictures of the partial hand were there too, not that there was much they could do with them. He was about to lift the receiver to try and put pressure on forensics when Austin came in.

‘Result! We got a preliminary ID from the body. He has distinctive tattoos on both upper arms, dragons of some sort. It’s on file.’

‘So who have we got?’

‘Wayne Deeming. Career criminal and first-class moron. We thought he might have had links to Ray Fenton, but we couldn’t find any at the time.’

‘Perhaps someone else had better luck,’ McLusky said.

Austin brought up the results on his computer screen. ‘Born May ’83, convictions for theft, blah blah, taking without consent, burglary, ABH, GBH, assaulting police and possession of cannabis with intent to supply.’

‘Good riddance,’ DC Dearlove ventured from behind the safety of his monitor.

‘Less of that,’ McLusky said. ‘You’re allowed to think it, though perhaps you’re in the wrong seat if you’re thinking it too often. Do we have an address for him?’

‘Yup, place he was last arrested, eight months ago.’

McLusky scooped up his car keys. ‘Worth having a look, then.’

The address turned out to be an anonymous rented property in a terrace of narrow houses in Bedminster. The front-room window had dark blue curtains drawn, the front door was locked. There was no answer to Austin’s knock, and no one appeared to be at home on either side.

‘We can always ask the chaps from the drug squad to come and charge the door for us,’ Austin suggested.

‘And find the place is now occupied by an old lady who’s hard of hearing? Try two doors down.’

Austin was in luck. The slightly crumpled, quiet man who opened the door didn’t recognize Deeming from the picture he showed him but was happy to allow them into his back garden. McLusky was hoping to jump the fences into the back of Deeming’s place and get a look through a window.

‘I pretty much keep to myself here,’ was how the man explained his failure to recognize his neighbour from the picture. ‘I don’t get involved in what goes on in the street. There’s a lot of students.’

In the tiny, dispiriting garden, McLusky dragged an empty concrete planter to the fence and, standing on it, vaulted into the garden next door. This was equally bleak but also contained the trashed remains of a kitchen. Some of it looked more modern than his own. He used an upturned black bucket in which plaster had thickly set to get himself over the next fence into what he hoped was Deeming’s garden. The kitchen window at the back was obscured with net curtains, but an uncovered chink of glass afforded him a glance at the interior. ‘Bingo.’ Everything he saw spelled drug-fuelled chaos.

‘Do you want me to come across?’ called Austin, who had stayed behind.

McLusky waved him off. ‘Front door, DS Austin.’ He looked around for something with which to smash in the kitchen door. A large mossy rock at the edge of the muddy lawn looked good. Then he changed his mind. He fished out a pair of fresh latex gloves from his jacket, put them on and tried the door. It was unlocked. ‘More taxpayers’ money saved.’

The kitchen was small and in a mess. He had seen some of it through the window, but what he was looking at now went beyond the usual slobbery. Apart from unwashed dishes, empty cans and pizza cartons, there was disturbance here – the two chairs had been overturned, an ashtray spilled and a mug broken on the floor. It was warm in the house, the heating obviously running. The place smelled stale, slightly mouldy. As he passed an encrusted pedal bin, the smell got stronger. He flipped the lid open and lowered it again. Festering rubbish. He’d leave that to forensics; they always loved a nice mouldy bin. He gingerly made his way from the kitchen into the hall, where he let Austin in. ‘Gloves,’ he said automatically. Austin wriggled his fingers in mad-strangler mode: he was already wearing them.

‘This door wasn’t locked or bolted, just pulled shut. Back door was unlocked. I think he left through the front door but not necessarily of his own accord. Drops of blood on the floor.’ McLusky pointed to a circular pattern of drops on the carpet, turned almost black with age.

‘Could just be a nosebleed, of course.’

McLusky pointed to a brighter spray pattern on the yellow wall. ‘This nose also bled sideways. Someone persuaded it to bleed. I’ve seen enough, no point trampling all over the house. I’ll call scene-of-crime; you see if any of the motors in the street are registered to Deeming. We’ll wait outside, make forensics happy.’

‘Shame, nice and warm in here.’

A blue Ford Focus with a long scrape along the driver’s side turned out to be Deeming’s. It would be carted off to the pound for forensics shortly. McLusky wanted to cast his eye over the interior beforehand, but it was locked. Back in the house, he went through the front room and the kitchen. ‘Have we found any car keys?’ he asked the SOCOs. No one had. In the kitchen, he asked the nearest officer: ‘Where do you keep your spare keys at home?’

The man thought for a moment. ‘In a tin in the kitchen with loads of other stuff.’

McLusky lifted the lid on a china biscuit barrel and emptied the contents on to the counter. Mobile phone batteries, cigarette papers, plastic rubbish, painkillers and keys for a Ford. ‘Genius. Gold star.’

The SOCO allowed himself a smile; he didn’t get much praise in his job.

The car’s interior was as messy as that of the house. McLusky searched while leaving everything as he found it: among the empty cans and food debris he saw plastic wraps for parcelling up class A, a long kitchen knife in the driver’s door pocket, cigarette papers, crumbs of herbal cannabis on the seats and in the glove box another knife, a sharpened screwdriver and a blister pack of what looked like Viagra. All as expected.

Traffic was building as he and Austin drove back towards Albany Road. ‘The papers are going to call it “another gangland killing”.’

Austin agreed. ‘And they’ll be right, won’t they? Deedee called it “good riddance”.’

‘So will most people.’ They both knew that the citizens of Bristol would echo the sentiment expressed earlier by DC Dearlove: one less. ‘What they don’t see is that if one lot of dealers kill the other lot, all it means is that they’ve now been replaced with a more murderous mob than the first.’

‘Sound capitalist principles. Triumph of the greediest.’

Traffic in the centre was at clutch-burning pace. While stationary in Baldwin Street, McLusky saw her.

Even in an unfamiliar winter coat and with a huge scarf wound round her neck, he recognized her instantly. It felt as though his abdominal muscles had seen her first, so instant was the fist-in-the-stomach feeling at the sudden, unexpected sight. The man she was walking with took her arm as they slipped between cars. He had a mop of dark hair and looked to be barely in his twenties. McLusky was relieved to see him let go of her arm once they had gained the other side of the street. He craned his neck to see past the cars crawling in the opposite direction. Both seemed to be talking simultaneously, and their walk looked more like a dance. Then they turned a corner.

‘Liam?’

Austin’s prompt and the impatient horn of the car behind brought him back to the task in hand. Ahead of them a long gap had opened in the traffic. He quickly caught up to the bumper of the car in front, already stationary again.

‘Sorry. That was Laura. My ex.’

‘Ex … girlfriend – you weren’t married, were you?’

‘No, none of that.’

‘I remember you saying she was studying here now. Was that the first time you’ve seen her since …’

‘Since we broke up? No. She came to see me once. In the spring. To tell me she’d be coming to study here. At least I think that’s why she came.’ Back then McLusky had briefly entertained hopes that they might see more of each other, but the meeting, if it could be called that, had not gone well. He hadn’t seen her since and he didn’t know where she lived. Of course it wouldn’t take much for him to find out, but he was sure that Laura would not take it kindly if he used his police powers to track her down. And there were other, less carefully thought out reasons why he hadn’t made an effort to get in touch. Louise Rennie, the chemistry lecturer, was one. A suspicion that one more unhappy meeting with Laura might make their separation absolutely final was another.

‘Archaeology, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Laura had always been good at digging up things from the past.

With the door closed, the blinds drawn and a dozen people inside, the incident room was warming up. It was the first time since getting up in the morning that McLusky had felt warm enough to take his leather jacket off.

‘This doesn’t of course come as a surprise to any of us.’ Denkhaus, who outside his office was never seen without his jacket on, hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the A4 mug shots of Wayne Deeming pinned to the board in front of which he held forth. ‘DNA results have confirmed it, it’s him. We knew after we put Ray Fenton away that it wouldn’t be long before the remaining groups started to fight it out between themselves. Nature abhors a vacuum. Out with the old, in with the new. Wayne Deeming, it appears, was the old. We know he was involved in drugs. We always thought he was part of Fenton’s chain. Perhaps he fancied stepping into shoes too big for him; perhaps he was simply too close to Fenton.’

‘Or it could be completely unrelated, sir,’ DC French suggested.

‘We’ll keep that in mind, naturally.’ That young DC was forever trying to show that she could think laterally. It hadn’t worked for her so far. ‘We all heard the rumours that outsiders have moved in to mop up Fenton’s old business, but that’s all they are so far, rumours. No one seems to know.’

‘It took us years to discover Fenton’s identity,’ French said. ‘He had time to make millions while we kept arresting replaceable people. Expendable people.’

‘Are you trying to cheer us all up, DC French? In which case, please stop.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

McLusky quickly jumped in. ‘The Ford Focus we recovered from outside Deeming’s house was pretty new. I checked, and he bought it two months ago from a dealer here in Bristol. A car dealer, I should add.’

‘When he was last arrested, he was driving a ten-year-old Honda,’ Austin supplied.

‘So he was definitely moving up in the world,’ McLusky continued. ‘But I had a swift dekko at the car, and apart from dealing, he definitely had a drug habit himself. It might only have been herbal – there were crumbs all over the place – but no one who smokes pot himself is going to get very far in the business.’

The room murmured agreement.

McLusky thought about it again that night at home as he cracked open a can of Murphy’s and sprayed froth across his laptop screen. Earlier he had eaten a bowl of spaghetti at the Barge Inn, opposite his flat in Northmoor Street, and washed it down with a pint. He was glad his stomach was back to normal, since it allowed him to sink a few pints of stout, the only form of relaxation he knew.

Brewers drank beer. Vintners drank wine. Alcohol was a drug, but here lay the difference: the drugs bosses, the ones with the real connections like Fenton, never touched drugs. They despised drugs and the wretches who bought them. McLusky wiped the beer froth off the laptop’s screen, double- clicked on Channel Four’s view-on-demand site and sipped frothy beer while he waited for it to load. The real drugs bosses drank vintage champagne and age-old brandies and ate at fine restaurants. The more successful they became, the further they moved away from the physical presence of drugs or violence. Their money was well laundered through legitimate businesses and they lived in houses far from drug-riddled city streets.

‘A quiet village in Cambridgeshire,’ said Tony Robinson on the screen, ‘is about to be invaded by Time Team’s finest and have its back gardens riddled with trenches. Why? Because last year, a local farmer ploughing his field came across this.’ The presenter offered up a broken piece of pot to the camera.

McLusky lay back on his sofa, perched the laptop on his stomach and adjusted the screen. It was high time he swatted up on some archaeology.