FOUR BELOW

Evidence of dealing had been discovered at Deeming’s house but no significant amounts of drugs. Forensic analysis had thrown up a dizzying number of fingerprints, none of which looked promising. Some were of known drug-users, one or two of lowlifes who McLusky knew dealt small-time to finance other unsavoury habits. All of it was pond life that Deeming, who had been six foot tall and no slouch in dishing out violence, would hardly have been scared of. No matter, they still had to find them, pull them in, interview them.

In the small, drab interview room, McLusky was sitting opposite one of them now, a creature by the name of Gareth Keep. Not a junkie, but a thief with a weed and alcohol habit and, as McLusky suspected, very few brain cells to spare for the toll that it was taking on them. He was twenty-six and still only managed to grow an unconvincing line of fluff above his upper lip, making him look like a teenager trying to look older. He was clad in a blue tracksuit with double white stripes and an imitation leather jacket that was patently too large for him. The hapless punter had been scooped up in a supermarket car park after he’d been seen shoplifting CDs. He was unperturbed at having been arrested. He had been pulled in by the police and then let go by the courts so many times that now it hardly registered. In court he had a good line in contrition and promises of reforming, and he knew that the most he could expect to be handed by the magistrate was a few hours’ community service, for which he rarely showed up anyway. When he did, he was usually stoned.

McLusky had teamed up with DC French for this interview. As with the last lowlife they had pulled, he was happy to let her do most of the questioning. He was really there to take a sniff at the punters and pounce should he get the slightest whiff that the specimen in front of them might be involved.

‘No comment,’ was how Gareth answered most questions, watched over by his brief, who appeared equally bored by the occasion. Things got more animated when McLusky sprung the news on him of Deeming’s death.

‘Your prints were found in Deeming’s hall. His blood was on the ground and on the wall. You were there.’

The solicitor instantly protested about the unexpected turn of events and demanded to speak with his client alone. McLusky was glad. He felt his energy was being drained by the necessity and futility of spending time with these drifters. Gareth might quite conceivably one day break someone’s skull, stab someone in an argument or strangle his girlfriend, but McLusky found it hard to believe that he had snatched Deeming from his house, tied him up, put a bag over his head, driven him to Leigh Woods and there beaten him to death. Not unless he was taking some very strange drugs at the time.

In the corridor, he handed Gareth Keep’s file to French. ‘He’s yours. Get all you can out of him about who else he saw at Deeming’s house, how often he used to go there et cetera. Oh yes, and charge him with theft for lifting the CDs, of course.’

With a hardening heart, French watched DI McLusky walk off down the corridor. If ever she nursed doubts about being a police officer, it was at moments like this. She flicked the cover of the file with a fingernail. ‘No comment.’

McLusky stuck his head in at the incident room. Dearlove sat at a computer, concentrating hard on reading the back of a crisp packet. No sign of Austin.

‘He’s just popped downstairs to dump some files,’ Dearlove told him through a mouthful of crisps.

‘When he gets back, tell him I’m in my office.’

McLusky’s earlier plans had been interrupted; now he was going to set them in motion. His office was far too small to install an espresso machine, however compact. There was such a dearth of surfaces, there wouldn’t even be enough space to set one down. This morning he had smuggled in a tiny electric travel kettle, which he hid in the bottom compartment of his desk, connected by an extension lead. How the mighty had fallen, he thought, as he stirred whitener into his instant coffee. He knew that according to Sod’s Law, someone would knock on his door as soon as he lit a cigarette. Naturally this never worked when you wanted someone to turn up, so perhaps by wishing someone to knock on the door he could prevent it? A kind of reverse superstition. He opened the window for ventilation and reached for his pack of Extra Lights. The knock on the door was Austin’s.

‘I’ve been looking up and down the station for you,’ he complained.

‘Keep you fit.’ McLusky lit a cigarette.

‘Don’t for one moment think you can’t smell that outside, Liam, because you can.’

‘My predecessor smoked a lot. The smell never goes away.’

‘Aye, they’ll believe that.’

‘Did we get anything from the house-to-house around Deeming’s address? Is it too much to hope that someone saw a man being led away against his will? Possibly with a bloody bag on his head?’

‘I think it might be.’

‘Naturally. Every day the emergency lines are jammed with idiots calling about their pizzas being late or their budgie having hiccoughs, but no one in this town takes any notice of what happens to other people.’

‘People opposite saw a van, double-parked, about a month ago. It was double-parked and annoyed them, that’s how they remember.’

‘Did they see anyone associated with the van?’

‘Nope.’

‘Of course not. A van. What kind of van? Camper van, delivery van?’

‘Just a van. Blue or grey.’

‘Blue or grey? It’ll turn out to be red, then. Great. Is that it? Well tell them an arrest will be imminent.’

There was a knock on the door and Austin opened it. DC Dearlove had added tiny specks of potato crisp to the array of cat hair on his suit jacket. ‘Call from area control, sirs. Suspicious death, male body found by the river. I’ve got the details here.’ He handed the note to Austin.

‘Marvellous.’ McLusky nodded to Austin and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Okay. You drive.’

Austin got stuck in traffic twice, which meant they were the last to arrive. On the Ashton to Pill cycle path, just north of the Avon Bridge, two inches of snow had accumulated, now trampled into a brown mulch by many cold feet. There were several bicycle tracks too, running close to the body. People had cycled along the river without giving the dead man under the snow blanket a second glance.

‘Just a lump under the snow. It was probably the black nylon jacket,’ Austin speculated. ‘At least two people came past here on bicycles but probably thought it was bin liners full of rubbish dumped under the bushes. With all that snow on top of the body, it was hard to make out.’

The PC standing guard at the river’s edge spoke up. ‘Just recently there’s been a lot of fly-tipping along here.’

McLusky whisked round. ‘Yes, thank you, Constable, you can update us on the local rubbish problems later.’ He turned to Coulthart, who puffed loudly through his face mask as he examined the body. ‘Killed here or dumped here, Doctor?’

‘Deposition site. Killed elsewhere. And brutally so. The face is … well, you can see.’

McLusky could see. The face was a bloodied, broken mess.

‘I’m sure I’d be able to tell you more if you cared to join me at the post-mortem, Detective Inspector.’ Coulthart tried to make it seductive, being well aware of McLusky’s aversion to post-mortem examinations.

‘Thanks, I’ll wait.’

‘You may well have to. These are busy times at the mortuary. Death rates rise rapidly in these weather conditions. How the human race ever survived the ice age is a miracle.’

‘We went south for the duration, I expect.’

‘And a good thing, too. That’s exactly what I have planned myself. Though regrettably not until after Christmas.’

‘What’s his age?’ From where McLusky was standing, and despite having looked closely at the man’s face, he found it impossible to tell.

‘Late fifties, I’d say, perhaps early sixties.’

‘No ID on him, of course? Wallet? Library card?’

‘I went through his clothing,’ said a SOCO waiting nearby. ‘No ID, no car keys or house keys. Some small change and a packet of mints.’

‘Mints.’ McLusky turned back to Coulthart. ‘Cause of death?’

‘Not mints, Inspector. I couldn’t say.’

‘How long?’

Coulthart stood up, signalling to the SOCOs that he had finished his examination. ‘How long has he been dead, or how long has he been here?’

‘Either. I mean both.’

‘Difficult to say with any degree of confidence because of the frozen conditions. But he hasn’t been lying here for long.’

A SOCO stopped his quiet cursing of the muddled footprints long enough to add his observations. ‘He had about an inch of snow on him. There’s a little bit of shelter here from the bushes, but that’s about the amount that’s fallen since three in the morning.’

‘So to have an inch on him, he would have to have been here since the middle of the night.’

‘Correct.’ The SOCO, who had an encyclopaedic memory of local weather conditions, returned to the puzzle of footprints and began brushing at the snow.

Well away from the deposition site, McLusky lit a cigarette and looked around him. As a dumping ground this was pretty perfect. There was access from the A369 a few yards from where the body had been found. Austin stood next to him, sniffing nostalgically at the cigarette smoke and stomping his feet to keep them from going numb. McLusky could no longer feel his. He’d buy winter boots at the first opportunity. ‘First impressions, Jane?’

‘Shame about the footprints.’

‘It’s a SOCO nightmare. They’re hoping to find some under the snow. Or in between layers. But it’s pretty much buggered. The couple who found the body trod all over the site, then an ambulance crew, then a couple of constables, then the rest of us.’

‘There’s no CCTV here and no one about at night. Yet it’s very close to the city. Couldn’t be better, could it? Dumping a body is always a risky business, so this place is quite convenient.’

‘Yes, but leaving a body lying about where it can easily be found is also a risky business. It’s ten feet from the river. Why leave him here if you can simply tip him into the water? Even without being weighed down, he’d likely drift a bit and give us a headache.’

‘Perhaps they thought someone might hear the splash. Or they meant to chuck the body in and someone came along and interrupted them. Along the path or by boat. So they dumped it and legged it.’

‘Boat. Good thinking, Jane. Make sure someone does a house-to-house, or boat-to-boat rather, in the harbour and the moorings on this side, too. Establish if anyone came by here at night and saw anything.’

‘There’s not a great deal of boat traffic at this time of the year. Even less at night.’

‘I know that.’ McLusky flicked his cigarette butt towards the slow-moving water, where he instantly lost sight of it. ‘I still think the river is a missed opportunity if you want to get rid of a body.’

Fairfield shoved the tiny cup under the nozzle, pressed the button and watched the evil-looking liquid dribble from the machine. Espresso was the one other vice she admitted to, and she tried to keep her daily total to fewer than five. Last night she had felt the need to open a second bottle of wine; consequently she needed all the caffeine she could get today. Why had it unsettled her so much? There were photographs of two dead people on her desk, both of whom she had also seen in the flesh, yet none of it had unsettled her as much as Paul’s voice on the phone, even down a bad line. It had been her who had finished the relationship, because of his constant absences due to his job, their rows about when to have children, whether to have children, his career, her career. Why now, she had asked him, why divorce now after three years of separation? She had guessed the answer all along. Paul was thinking of getting married to his current girlfriend, also an electrical engineer. How quaint. Lots to talk about there then, she was sure. They could engineer a wonderful life together for themselves. Paul and Carrie.

She took a sip from the cup and found she had a slight tremor. Last one for today, she vowed silently. She pulled a stack of forms towards her and started reading.

Divorce. Her thoughts kept coming back to it despite her best efforts to get some paperwork done. Uncontested divorce. It was so easy now. He’d already initiated it; all he wanted now was for her to sign some papers. Or was it? She had told him to put them in the post, but he had said something about being between addresses and she had ended up arranging to see him on Sunday. They were meeting at the Nova Scotia, for a drink and a quick divorce. She had agreed and now she couldn’t stop thinking about it. When the phone on her desk rang, she was grateful to hear she had business out on the streets.

‘Number three.’ Sorbie stepped out of the way to let the photographer take pictures of the car from all angles. The dead junkie was barely visible through the windows of the clapped-out Renault. The snow had covered the windscreen and part of the rear window and there was frozen condensation on the side windows. The body had only been discovered because the car was illegally parked in a narrow residential street off Ashley Down Road, and a traffic warden had raised the alarm, saying he could not wake the person lying across the rear seats. At first it had been thought the man had simply frozen to death, but the duty doctor’s suspicions had been aroused when he saw the lesions on the dead man’s arms, something he had been told to watch out for.

On the other side of the car, DI Fairfield looked on stony-faced. The dead man had been young, still in his twenties. Another set of relatives to inform. Often they took it as something they had half expected; sometimes it came as a devastating shock. A good child. A normal child. A wasted child. Her mobile rang. She reluctantly took her gloves off to answer it. An icy wind was driving the snow flurries through the streets, making it feel twice as cold. ‘Did he have any more visitors?’ she asked the caller. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Doctor.’ She pocketed the mobile and pulled her gloves back on before correcting Sorbie. ‘You were wrong, it’s number four. That was the hospital. Our nameless chap didn’t make it.’

‘I thought they said he had a chance of recovery?’

‘I know. Apparently these things are unpredictable. He got worse overnight. No one came to see him and we still have no ID for him. Dead loss. I’d best let the super know.’

While Fairfield made the call, she watched the coroner’s van and a tow truck arrive. Soon the street would be clear again, another body on its way to the morgue, another car on its way to the vehicle pound. She folded the mobile again and nodded her head towards Sorbie’s Golf. ‘Drive me to my coffee machine, Jack. The super wants a word. For that I’ll need all the drugs I can get.’

Outside the superintendent’s office, she found that her tremor had returned. She now regretted her last coffee. She also regretted having turned up five minutes early because now she had to wait in the presence of Lynn Tiery, the superintendent’s secretary. She had no idea why, but somehow she found the impassive, steel-eyed woman more intimidating than Denkhaus himself. It was more than five minutes after the appointed time when the super’s ‘All right, send her in’ squawked from the old-fashioned intercom on her desk.

‘What’s this new epidemic all about?’ he wanted to know even before Fairfield had managed to sit down.

‘I wouldn’t call it an epidemic yet, sir.’

‘Well it looks like one to me: five junkies dead in one week? They’re dropping at an alarming rate.’

‘Four,’ Fairfield corrected him.

‘Not according to this,’ Denkhaus said, tapping his computer monitor with a fleshy finger. ‘Drug-user found dead in Totterdown.’

‘That’s news to me; must only just have come up.’

‘Perhaps.’ Denkhaus knew it had, yet he liked to keep his team on their toes. ‘But I expect you to stay on top of developments.’

With difficulty Fairfield suppressed the urge to point out that she had just spent ten minutes sitting outside his door. And that she wasn’t psychic. ‘I’m sure Sorbie is taking care of it as we speak.’

‘Anthrax, that’s not something I wanted to see in our city.’ He managed to make that sound like an accusation too, as though she had somehow failed to keep it out.

‘The lab says it’s contaminated heroin. The most likely source is Afghanistan or eastern Turkey. It may be the cutting agent that carries the contamination, but they haven’t isolated it yet.’

‘Not that it matters: the result is the same and we can’t do a thing about it. Is that it?’

‘If we go with the theory that the contamination happened over there, then no.’

‘And are we? Is that the presumption?’

‘If it is the cutting agent. It normally arrives in this country already cut. About ten per cent purity is normal at the moment, but it does fluctuate. It’s usually cut with stuff like lactose, paracetamol or caffeine.’ Fairfield felt her fingers tremble and folded her hands.

‘So the contamination is accidental?’

‘Almost certainly. Hygiene is appalling over there and anthrax in cattle is rife. According to the pathologist, this isn’t the first case. It has cropped up before, in Europe.’

‘In Europe? This is Europe.’

‘Sorry, on the Continent, I should have said.’

‘Quite. So no one is trying to poison drug-users?’

‘They’re doing a pretty good job of that themselves, sir.’ The image of the dead woman, slumped forward on her bed, intruded on her mind. ‘It’s not impossible, but I don’t think it’s likely that someone has deliberately infected the heroin supply. If you wanted to kill heroin users, you’d stick something fast-acting into the batch, like, I don’t know, rat poison. That would be much easier to get hold of. And less dangerous to yourself. Just inhaling this stuff can be lethal.’

‘Granted. Right. We have a rogue batch of accidentally contaminated heroin in the city. How much of it is there likely to be?’

‘There’s no telling.’

‘Then we must get a press release done immediately, tell people that this stuff is about and to avoid it at all costs.’

‘Yes, sir, I’ll see to it.’ When Denkhaus dismissed her with a nod, Fairfield stood up, then stopped by the door. ‘I doubt it’ll make much difference, of course.’

‘Oh?’

‘You can’t tell if your supply is contaminated from looking at it, and there’s no test a drug-user could do.’ To tell a junkie not to use heroin because it might kill him was like telling a man who was dying of thirst not to drink pond water because it might give him a tummy upset. ‘They’ll go on using anyway, whatever is in it, whatever the risks.’

‘I expect you’re right. Yet it would amount to a dereliction of duty not to warn them. At least we can tell them what the symptoms are so they can seek help before it’s too late. There is a cure, isn’t there?’

‘For anthrax or heroin addiction? I think the prognosis is pretty bleak for both, sir.’