Doing things quickly was not one of Lennie’s strong suits, so it was a surprise to see her among the first out of school. She stalked across the playground with her head down, on a mission. Behind her, kids foamed through the double doors like a pot boiling over, a bubbling hormonal mass of blazers and backpacks. If part of the point of school uniform was to render teenagers as unattractive as possible, Savvy’s – shapeless black trousers, white shirt, shiny black blazer – was an unequivocal success. The white kids – boys and girls – looked like third-rate snooker players from the Eighties, basically translucent after years without natural light, raised on chips. At RPG, most of the girls looked as if they spent the summer on yachts off St Tropez and some of them probably did. At least that pressure was off. She’d wanted the top-notch education for Lennie but not the nagging sense they were poor relations tolerated because Len was bright. Or what she thought of as the Octavia von Country-Estate factor: ‘Henrietta tells me you’re a detective. How very … exotic!’
Lennie opened the door and dropped into the seat next to her. ‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Hi, lovely.’
‘Can we go? We’re right outside. I thought you’d wait round the corner like Gran does.’
‘Sorry.’ She started the engine and indicated to pull out just as a coach cruised alongside, blocking her in. ‘How was your day?’
‘Pall Mall.’ It was one of their in-jokes, Del Boy French – ‘Bonnet de douche, Rodney!’ – but it was a half-hearted effort.
‘What do you fancy doing? We could go for a walk, have a hot chocolate …’
‘Do you mind if we just go home?’
‘Really?’ God. ‘No, of course not. Probably a good idea.’
Lennie wrapped her arms round her knees, feet on the seat. Robin thought about telling her off then decided against it.
‘What do you think of your new teachers? Anyone good?’
‘Too early to tell, really.’
‘How about the science ones – chemistry? Biology?’ Ms Rosetti, the biology teacher at RPG, had been Lennie’s favourite.
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Not sure.’ She turned to the window and rested her head against the glass. For a couple of minutes they drove without talking, Robin’s guilt now laced with a sense of rejection that even she knew was unreasonable. Suddenly, though, Len lifted her head.
‘Why have you never told me about that guy?’
‘Which guy?’
‘The one Grandpa told the police about.’
‘Samir.’ Amazing, she hadn’t said his name in years and now it felt like she couldn’t stop. ‘I have.’
‘Yeah, you told me he existed. Not that you loved him.’ For a level-headed kid who’d always been more dinosaurs-and-fossils than dolls-and-clothes, Lennie was weirdly sentimental. Too much Disney at a formative age, probably, all those big-eyed princesses on the weekend afternoons when it was raining and Robin’s will to drag her broken body off the sofa after a week of fourteen-hour days had failed. Despite the example in front of her, Lennie believed in Love with a capital L – The One, the happily-ever-after.
‘I did say that. Or I thought you’d probably … read between the lines.’
Lennie shook her head, not buying it. ‘Grandpa said he broke your heart.’
Christ alive. ‘Well, he kind of did. We made plans – promises – and he broke them.’
‘How? What plans?’
‘You know we went travelling together, him and me? We talked about it all the time then, all the way round Europe and Botswana, Zambia, South Africa.’ Spinning dreams at street cafés by ferry ports on Greek islands; on a flat-bed truck from Lusaka to Victoria Falls. Eight months. ‘We had this whole plan for our lives. We were going to go to London together – UCL like I did, he had a place, too – get our degrees then join the Met together. But then, like Grandpa said, just like that,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘he bailed.’
‘Why?’ The million-dollar question. ‘Grandpa said it was because of his family. Staying close.’
No lies to Lennie. ‘That’s what he told me.’
‘But you didn’t believe it. So what was the real reason?’
‘When it boiled down to it? He just didn’t love me as much as I loved him.’
Lennie frowned. ‘Poor Mum.’
‘Oh, I was all right. After a bit. Takes more than that to crack me.’ She reached across and squeezed Lennie’s nylon-clad thigh. ‘And if it had all worked out between him and me, I wouldn’t have had you, would I? He did me a big favour. Massive. Biggest ever.’
Lennie nodded slowly, not agreeing but absorbing, taking it in.
The traffic was thickening, Friday afternoon. The weekend stretched bleakly ahead: no school, no work, no distraction from the grim reality of their situation.
‘Has Gid rung you this week, Mum?’
‘No.’
‘Have you been in touch with him?’
‘On Monday, before I heard the news about Rin. I texted him.’
‘Mum.’ Lennie took a breath. ‘I know things are really crap at the moment and you must feel like … I don’t know what you feel like but it must be a hundred times as bad as I feel and that’s crap.’ Another breath. ‘And I know things are going to be bad for a while, really bad, and we’ll always be sad about Auntie Rin, that won’t ever stop, but I wanted to say … Just, don’t forget about our other life. Our real life. Please. This is only temporary, isn’t it? You said. We live in London – we’re going back. But you have to get things going. You’ve got to keep the pressure on.’
What pressure? All she had were her texts to Gid, and those were like fly-fishing: long, speculative lines sent glancing out across the distance, gossamer-weight.
And here was Lennie in a hideous shiny blazer on her way to spend the weekend at her grandparents’ stifling house, a hundred miles from all her friends and her old haunts, everything she’d known for the thirteen years of her life so far.
‘Len,’ she said, making a flash decision, ‘how do you feel about going to London tomorrow? I could go and see Gid, try and get things moving; you could get in touch with Carly and Emma, see if they’re around?’
Lennie’s face brightened instantaneously. ‘Really?’
As soon as they got through the door, Len raced upstairs to get changed. Robin fiddled with her phone as long as she reasonably could then buckled up and went into the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the counter where she looked up stagily from the Daily Mail crossword.
‘Hi.’ Robin dropped her jacket onto a stool then quickly picked it up again. ‘Mum, look, I’m sorry about this morning. When I was talking about money and … relationships, I didn’t mean to imply anything about your life. I just …’ Christine raised her eyebrows and the words dried up. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry.’
‘Is it okay if I put the TV on, Gran?’ came Lennie’s voice as she passed the doorway.
‘Of course, love. Would you like a biscuit?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘You sit on down, I’ll bring you one in.’ She stood up and got the tin out of the cupboard. ‘Let’s not say any more about it, Robin. We’re different, we do things differently. We know that, don’t we, after all these years?’
And there it was again, the drawbridge, chains clanking as her mother pulled it up, leaving her stranded on the other side. ‘No, please, can’t we …?’
‘I mean, I just wish you’d try and be a bit less … brutal.’ She took a knife from the block and decapitated a packet of chocolate digestives. ‘I expect it’s a good thing to be hard in your line of work but it isn’t very attractive. Your attitude towards your brother …’
‘My attitude? Do you ever think about what it’s like for me, your favouritism? Always taking his side in a fight, always taking his word before mine …’ Justifying his crapness while she found the negative in everything Robin did that was good.
Christine paused then seemed to come to a conclusion. ‘Luke came over last night,’ she said, ‘because he and Natalie are having a tough time.’
Something in her tone stopped the glib response on Robin’s tongue. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, tough?’
‘They thought they were expecting but it was a false alarm. They’re both very disappointed, obviously, and things got a bit … heated. Your brother needed a bit of support.’
And now she felt like a cow. Great. ‘Just for the record,’ she said, ‘I came in here to apologize.’
‘And there you go. Why do you always assume I’m criticizing you?’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘I’m trying to help you.’
‘By what? Telling me I’m hard?’
‘By telling you that storming around bickering and pushing people away all the time isn’t going to make you happy. It’s no wonder you can’t hold down a relationship. This idea you seem to have that relying on anyone else is a sign of weakness or in some way against your feminist principles …’ The usual disdain at the phrase, as if she wished she had her rubber gloves on.
Somewhere in her jacket, Robin’s phone rang. ‘It’ll be the seventeenth century, I expect,’ she said, ‘wanting their worldview back.’
‘Mum, Gran,’ came a plaintive voice from the other room, ‘could you please stop fighting?’
They stared at each other, the phone ringing. Christine turned away and took a side plate from the cupboard. ‘Are you going to get that?’ she said, cold.
Robin dug it out of the jacket pocket and looked at it: Number withheld. She hesitated then went out into the tiny hall. ‘Hello?’
‘Robin? It’s Samir.’
Oh, for fuck’s sake. ‘Hold on.’ She reached back into the kitchen for her jacket then let herself out of the front door, an instant temperature-drop of about thirty degrees. ‘Right,’ she said, jacket on, ‘let me guess. You’re calling because Webster saw me in Bishop Street?’
‘Correct.’
‘I was in my car, didn’t even get out. I wasn’t doing anything.’
‘Apart from putting yourself in the frame. Do you want him to think you’re involved? Is that the idea?’
‘Of course not.’ She kicked a loose stone and sent it skittering all the way past Christine’s mini-roses to the pavement. The houses across the street looked back unimpressed.
‘So …?’
‘You asked me to tell you something that proves Josh didn’t do it. I’m trying.’
‘Robin.’
‘You can’t tell me anything, I know that, but I can tell you. Ana, their babysitter – she’s nervous. Why? And if Josh basically didn’t have a job any more, why did they even need a babysitter? If they were getting by on Corinna’s salary, how were they paying her? I know they paid her in cash but where were they getting that? It must have been a couple of hundred a month at least, and—’
‘Hold on, hold on. Just stop a minute.’ When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. Was he at work? ‘We’re on the same side here.’
‘Are we?’
‘I understand where you’re coming from, I do, but …’
‘What’s Ana frightened of, Samir? Because she is. Both times I’ve talked to her – when I went there, she was afraid to open the door. Why, if it was a domestic?’
‘She saw something? She’s a witness?’
Robin said nothing.
‘Okay, look,’ he said. ‘She’s nervous because she’s here illegally. In the UK, I mean.’
‘How? She’s Slovakian – we’re not out of the EU just yet.’
‘She’s not Slovakian, she’s from Serbia, which, as you’ll know, has never been in the EU.’
Oh. ‘She told Rin she was Slovakian.’
‘I know, she said. But she was lying, for obvious reasons. She’s scared now because she doesn’t want to get removed. That also tells you why they were paying her in cash, by the way.’
‘Why but not how. Where were they getting the money? How about the loan against the machines – have you got anywhere on that?’
‘How do you know about that?’
Robin considered obfuscating but decided against. ‘Kath.’
‘You spoke to her, too?’
‘She’s a friend.’
A pause long enough to let her know he didn’t accept that. He knew how she’d felt about Kath back in the day. ‘Well, obviously,’ he said, ‘she told us about it as well, and Webster’s team have been looking into it.’ He hesitated and in the background at his end, she heard a distant scream, not fear but excitement – a kid’s scream, part of a game, the exhilaration of being chased, nearly caught. Was he in a playground? Or at home? If he was on his own phone, he either had it set to withhold his number automatically or he’d done it specially for her.
‘Don’t do this,’ he said. ‘Don’t involve yourself. You’ve got too much to lose.’
News to me.
‘If word reaches the Met, you’ll screw up any chance of an appeal.’
‘How do you know about that?’ Ha.
‘If it’s what you’re thinking of doing,’ he said smoothly. ‘If there’s a chance you can still sort it out, don’t wreck it.’
What was it to him? Unless he wanted her gone, of course, safely back in London and off his ground. Which was a strong possibility.
‘I’m asking you to trust Webster and his team,’ he said. ‘My lot. Me. I understand that it must be very hard.’ For five or six seconds, there was silence on the line, the unspoken drowning them out. ‘So I’ll tell you two things. First, DS Thomas has been following up on the loan. She’s excellent, as I’m sure you saw when you met her, and she’s found no evidence that Josh had outstanding debts, kosher or otherwise.’
‘But …’
‘Second, we’ve had the PM back.’
Robin’s heart made a single hard beat, like a kick on the inside. ‘And?’
‘You promise this’ll go no further? I can trust you?’
‘You’ve always been able to trust me, Samir.’
The scratch of shoes on a rough surface, a soft fabric crumple. She imagined him on a bench, leaning forward, looking at his feet. ‘Rin was dead before the fire started. I wanted you to know that so you didn’t have to imagine …’
‘How?’
‘Head injury. Blunt force.’
She closed her eyes. ‘How many blows?’
‘Just one, at the temple. It matches the shape of the brass table lamp they had in the sitting room, the square base. Robin, there’s just no evidence that anyone else was involved.’
She turned to go back inside but when she reached the front door, she sat down on the step instead. Chest aching, eyes unfocused, she stared unseeing at the same bit of the path until Lennie came to find her. ‘Mum, you’re frozen! Come in.’
Should she tell her about the post mortem? Could she stand to let her imagine the violence, Josh swinging a table lamp at Rin’s head? But then, what was she imagining now? Rin burning alive, in agony?
She told her, and Christine, too, who was folding sheets in the utility room, and whose expression went from tight disapproval through apprehension to pained horror in the few seconds it took to say it. ‘Oh, love.’ She dropped the sheet into the laundry basket and took a step forward. For a moment, Robin thought she was going to hug her but then her mother reached out a hand and gave her a sort of pat, a double-tap on her shoulder, there there.
As soon as she decently could, she went upstairs. Christine had vacuumed during the day, and the nap of the six-by-four patch of carpet was brushed into stripes like the lawn at a stately home. Robin sat down at the small white desk. How many hours had she spent here back then, the little radio blasting in her ear, Let’s all meet up in the year 2000, Robert Smith keeping her company from the side of the wardrobe? All the messing around, Rin and Josh and Kev, Samir, that was what she remembered when she looked back but actually, the truth was, if she was at home and she wasn’t asleep or eating, she’d been here at this desk with her eyes glued to her files. She’d been driven then, really driven, and it had paid off. She’d blown her A-levels out of the water.
She needed that drive again now, that same intense focus. She reached for the laptop, opened Google and typed in ‘Farrell Hinton’. The list of hits appeared, the Mail piece number one, right at the top: VIOLENT GANGSTER FREED BY ROGUE MURDER COP. She moved the cursor over it then swung off quickly and opened Hotmail in a new tab instead. Five new messages, four of them spam offering her Viagra, Cialis and money off at Nando’s – now there was an evening. One of them, sent an hour earlier, wasn’t spam.
Hi Robin, thanks for your message. Yes, I’m friends with Becca and I’m really worried about her, of course, so if there’s anything you think I can help with, let me know. Tarryn
Robin hit ‘Reply’. Hi, thanks for getting in touch. I’m an investigator working with Becca’s mother, Valerie. We’re following up on a couple of things and it’d be great to talk to you. I’m happy to ring you or, if you prefer, you can call me.
She gave her number then went back to the Mail piece.
The photograph was one of the worst of her ever taken. Whoever had leaked the story to the Mail had given them either her address itself or enough information to find it, and the photographer had lain in wait outside until she’d put on her rattiest coat and trainers. No make-up, no sleep – she looked like she’d spent the night carousing in an underpass. By comparison, Hinton looked like an upstanding citizen or at least a City banker. If you didn’t know the photo had been taken outside court, you’d think he was on the steps of a particularly smart office building or his country pile. His suit and hair were impeccable, his inner pit bull chained up for the day so that here, unalloyed, was the suave, charming Hinton – Jamie, so innocuous-sounding – the one whom Freshwater, in that final showdown, had actually suggested she fancied.
The photographs captured the spirit of the piece entirely: look at the slobbish, morally bankrupt woman the Met set against this sophisticated criminal mastermind. No wonder she didn’t have the chops to get him – or had she even been under his sway? He was good-looking, charismatic, persuasive; she was an unmarried mother forced to earn her own living, no doubt desperate to be financially supported …
Hinton, said the Mail, was a slippery bad apple, ripe for the picking – actually in police custody – until this un-made-up slattern whose highlights needed redoing wilfully let him go.
Robin looked at Hinton. Of course he was bad but when it came to the murder of Jay Farrell, that wasn’t the issue. However much Freshwater – who seemed to believe that all crims were mentally a crowbar short of the full house-breaking kit – wanted it to be true, Hinton was too switched on by a factor of about fifty.
Her hypothesis – Get me, Patel! – which she hadn’t had time to prove before being kicked out, was that a rival, as yet unidentified, was trying to frame him, picking off Farrell, who wasn’t really in the life, to limit their own exposure to comeback.
Now, with the severely limited resources currently at her disposal, working solo from a hundred miles away, she had to find out who that rival was. It didn’t help that she’d pissed off her guy at Central Task Force at the end of last year, either, killing any hope he’d help. He was a bit of a jobsworth, though, she consoled herself; he probably wouldn’t have anyway, knowing – because who didn’t? – what had happened to her.
She clicked off the Mail piece and went back to the page of hits. They’d been through reams of this stuff before, both her team and, in the first mad days after she’d been booted out, she herself, staring at the screen until three in the morning, barely able to keep her eyes open. But maybe with so much else going on, the tornado in her head, everyone else certain they’d got their man, they’d missed something.
Her phone rang on the bed behind her. She leaned back on the chair and managed to scoop it up without standing. She didn’t know the number but when she picked up, the voice was Australian. ‘Hi, is this Robin?’
‘Yes. Tarryn? Thanks for calling.’
‘No problem. Like I said, I’m so worried. I’ve been away for a few days and no one from work knows anything. Is there any news? Has anyone heard from her?’
‘I’m sorry, no. Not yet.’
‘You said you’re an investigator – are you with the police?’
‘No, I work with a small private agency. We have police contacts if we need them and we’re ex-cops, we’re trained, but we’re not police, no.’
‘Okay.’
Robin thought she heard a note of relief. ‘Is that a good thing?’
‘No. I mean, not as far as I know. Except that if the police aren’t involved and it’s just private, it’s less worrying, you know? From the point of view of her being safe, I mean, not …’
‘Not …?’
‘Hurt. Or worse.’
‘How long have you known Becca – you don’t mind me asking a few questions?’
‘No, that’s fine. Whatever, if it’ll help.’
‘Did you meet at The Spot? My colleague and I were there yesterday and Lisa, is it, who runs the back room?’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t remember if she said you two had known each other before.’
‘No, we met there. I’ve been there a bit longer, I started in July, and I’m full time so I helped train Becca and we worked together quite a bit. We just hit it off, she’s fun. Actually – she’s a couple of years younger than me – she reminds me of my little sister.’
‘In what way?’
‘She’s funny, kind of self-deprecating. Ironic one-liners, generally at her own expense. She’s good on a night out – likes a few drinks, likes a dance, she’ll always come for a kebab with you at the end of the night. And she’s kind. She knew I was missing home round my birthday so she made me this amazing chocolate tart – it was like something from a patisserie in Paris but she’d done it herself, all these decorative curls. She’s the only person who’s been shown a photo of the KP’s new baby.’
‘KP?’
‘Kitchen porter. Pot-washer, vegetable-peeler. She talks to him – or tries anyway, his English isn’t great. She says hello, brings him a lemonade from the bar, you know?’
‘Right. So she’s popular?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Any of the blokes ever shown an interest? Or customers?’
‘A bit – there was some flirting but nothing major. And even if they had, they wouldn’t have got anywhere.’
‘Why?’
A little pause. ‘Have you met her friend Harry?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re going out. Seeing each other.’
‘Did she tell you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t guess or work it out?’
‘No, she told me.’
Interesting. ‘I’m sorry, that probably sounded a bit weird but I wanted to be sure. You’re the only person we’ve come across that she actually did tell.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘How’s Harry doing? Is he okay?’
‘Not really. Tarryn, do you have any idea why they were keeping it quiet? He said it was because of their friend Lucy.’
‘That’s what she told me, too, yeah.’
‘Did that strike you as strange at all?’
‘Honestly? Yes. But, you know, she and Harry have only just got together, it’s new, and the three of them have been friends for years. She said she wanted to give it a bit of time before she upset the dynamic. And people are strange, aren’t they? I think that all the time. They do things totally differently from how you ever would.’
‘What did you make of her? Lucy.’
‘I thought she was all right. Sweet. Straighter than Becca.’
‘How so?’
‘Just …’ Robin imagined her frowning on the other end of the phone. ‘It’s hard to put a finger on. She came out with us a couple of times, she was always fun, but not … I guess she just felt a bit more … conventional.’
‘Becca isn’t?’
‘Not in the same way. She still lives with her mum, obviously, and all that but she has her wild side. It’s not even that wild, to be honest. Just … freer. Less limited. I don’t know, it’s hard to describe. I guess it’s just a mind-set thing, attitude.’
Robin got the impression she was choosing her words carefully. ‘Tarryn, I don’t want you to feel like you’re betraying her confidence but we heard that Becca was using prescription drugs.’
She’d expected her at least to hedge but instead she said frankly, ‘I knew she did a bit last year, yes, she told me. But she wasn’t doing it any more.’
‘Really? When did she stop?’
‘Some time in the autumn. October? Yes, it was – “birthday present to myself”, she said.’
‘Do you know why? I mean, what changed?’
‘She bumped into the friend she did it with the first few times and she said he looked like shit, excuse the language. Like he was letting it get out of control. That wasn’t the road she wanted to go down, so she stopped.’
‘Just like that? Morphine, opioids – they’re extremely addictive, as I’m sure you know. Just to be able to stop …’
‘She said she’d smoked a lot of weed to compensate.’ A little snort, half a laugh. ‘That’s what I mean about her being different. She’s – surprising. When I met her, I wouldn’t have guessed she’d be someone who’d even try painkillers in the first place but she said she was curious – she wanted to know what it was like. Then, like you say, how many people can just stop? That’s the thing about her – she’s got a will of iron.’