Gone to Ground (13 page)

"Fuck," Lesley said quietly to herself. "Oh, fuck."

Grabbing both her recorder and her bag, she set off in Natalie's wake.

"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO REPORT THE NEWS," ALAN PIKE said, "Not be it."

"Alan, come on..."

"Come on, nothing. Let you loose in the city with a bit of high profile tottie and the next minute it's like fucking Baghdad."

"Oh, yes, exaggerate a little, why don't you?"

"All right, how's this? One of the customers, eighteen-year-old girl, took a piece of flying glass in her left eye. Could still lose her sight."

"Well, I'm sorry."

"She's threatening to sue your pal Natalie, the owners of the club, and just about anybody else she can think of."

"You mean her insurance company is."

"No matter. Natalie, meantime, has spent the night in custody and, the last I heard, the police still haven't decided whether or not to bring charges."

"Seems to me," Lesley said, "instead of complaining, you ought to be pleased I was there."

Pike's face suggested otherwise.

Lesley moved toward the door. "There's a voicer all cued up and ready for the next bulletin."

"And where do you think you're going now?"

Lesley glanced at her watch. "With any luck, I'll be in time to catch Natalie when they kick her out of the cells."

Of course, it was a circus. Press, local television, and radio: Lesley recognized Mel Mast and a couple of stringers for the nationals; photographers gazing lustfully along their long lenses, cameramen with cigarettes in cupped hands and featherweight equipment at the ready. Gawkers and hangers-on. Lesley didn't know exactly who Scarman's contacts inside Central Police Station were these days, but she knew there'd be someone. So when the tall, slim figure with the collar of her leather coat up high, heavy dark glasses, hat pulled low, emerged, escorted, at the top of the main steps, Lesley wasn't taken in. The action was elsewhere.

Leaving the bulk of her brethren breathlessly pursuing a decoy, she scooted round to the motor vehicle exit on South Sherwood Street in time to see Scarman's Audi easing through the gate. Natalie, she guessed, was hunkered down on the rear seat.

With an extra lick of speed, Lesley set herself on the sidewalk edge, blocking its progress. Not wanting to attract the wrong attention by sounding his horn, Scarman wound down his window instead.

"Lesley, for fuck's sake..."

"Ten minutes, that's all I want. Fifteen."

"Jesus!"

"Come on. She's got to talk to someone. Let her talk to me first."

With a scowl, Scarman reached across toward the passenger door and Lesley jumped in. The next moment they were away, even as the first of the media crew, realizing they'd been had, hove into view at the bottom corner of the street.

***

Scarman had taken two rooms in a budget hotel out near the motorway. The kind Lesley imagined was patronized by low-level water board officials and sales reps trading in surgical appliances. Beyond six lanes of traffic, dark clouds rose ominously above Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

Cheerful, Lesley was examining the decor. "The last time I saw so many plastic flowers was on a B&B holiday in Scotland when I was sixteen."

"It's times like this," Scarman said, "when I remember how bloody irritating you were to live with."

Natalie had still not said anything. She was sitting in the one easy chair, legs drawn up beneath her, hand bandaged, several items from the minibar in her lap. Without a scrap of makeup on her face, tired, fractious, her lip pushed out like a petulant child, she was, nevertheless, Lesley thought, beautiful. The beauty more striking, perhaps, for the lack of artifice.

A camera now and a picture of that face would find its way onto most the newspapers in the country and some beyond.

For Lesley, the wrong medium. She took out her Nagras recorder and moved one of the hard-backed chairs closer to where Natalie was, at that moment, twisting the top from a miniature of vodka.

"That's great," Scarman said. "Smart. Just what we need. You half-pissed and it's still morning."

"Scott, for Christ's sake. Who's gonna know?"

"Who? That's a reporter sitting in front of you, in case you've forgotten."

"That's my friend," Natalie said, reaching out and squeezing Lesley's hand.

Scarman mumbled some obscenity and shook his head in disbelief.

Lesley, despite herself, was oddly moved. "Why don't you tell me what happened yesterday evening?" she said. "In your own words."

Half an hour later, it was done. All through their conversation, Lesley could hear Scarman on his mobile phone in the adjacent room, not the actual words, but the tone; Scarman smoothing away rough edges, unruffling feathers, making promises he had little or no intention of keeping.

"What will you do now?" Lesley asked.

"Go back down to London, I suppose," Natalie said. She gave Lesley a wan smile. "It's easier there, somehow. Up here it's like being in a goldfish bowl. Fart in the wrong place and you're in the gossip column of the
Post.
"

"Maybe if you kept a lower profile..."

"Didn't get pilled up and pissed, that's what you mean."

Lesley laughed. "That might help, too."

Natalie started to walk with her to the door. "Your brother," she said.

"Stephen."

"Yesterday, I'd never have said what I said..."

"It's okay."

"No, I didn't realize..."

"Look." Lesley put her hand on Natalie's shoulder. "I don't think he'd have much minded being called a geek. It's one up on being an anorak, after all."

"How about queer as a clockwork mouse?"

Lesley grinned. "Guilty as charged."

"When did you...?" Natalie blurted out the beginning of the question, then stopped.

"Go on. When did I what?"

"No, it doesn't matter."

"When did I realize Stephen was gay?"

"Yes."

A small sigh slipped from Lesley's mouth. "It's funny, isn't it? Because Stephen was older than me, not by much, but when I was still at nursery, he was already at school, and then by the time I was at the juniors, he was moving into the seniors or just about, so I suppose I never really questioned what he did. He was just my big brother. And he was nice to me. He'd play with me, sometimes anyway, this farm I had—you know, cows and sheep and stuff—and, oh, God, dressing up." Lesley laughed. "I should have known then, shouldn't I? And he used to read to me, when I was a lot younger. All those stories about Little Grey Rabbit and Squirrel and Hare, I remember." Lesley was smiling, but there were tears running down her face. "
Hare Joins the Home Guard,
that was our favourite. Hare getting it all wrong and hurling his ham-and-egg sandwiches at this army of weasels because he doesn't know what an ambush is."

She was crying loudly now, taking in great gulps of air.

Scarman looked round the door from the other room and quickly withdrew.

Natalie put an arm around her and led her back to the bed. "Come on, sit down. Sit here."

"I'm sorry, I..."

"Don't be stupid, it's fine."

"I just haven't..."

"It's all right."

"I haven't..."

"For fuck's sake, shut up and cry."

Lesley laughed and cried and carried on crying until the tears had all gone.

The sleeve of Natalie's top, on which she'd been leaning, was soaked. What makeup she'd been wearing had smeared down her face.

"Jesus, I must look a sight!"

"Nothing half an hour in the bathroom won't cure."

Lesley looked at her watch. "I don't have half an hour."

"Come on," Natalie said, grabbing her hand. "I'll help."

After ten minutes, give or take, Lesley looked fit enough to return to work. "I still didn't tell you," she said, making the last adjustments in the mirror.

"Tell me what?"

"When I knew Stephen was gay."

"It doesn't matter."

"I don't think there was any one time," Lesley said. "No, you know, startling revelation, defining moment. I think I just realized—I suppose I was thirteen or fourteen, so Stephen must have already finished school, been going off to university—I just realized that's what he was. Gay."

"You didn't mind? I mean, you weren't—I don't know—disgusted or anything? I'm trying to think back to when I was that age."

Lesley smiled. "No. It was just Stephen."

Natalie gave her a quick kiss and a squeeze of the hand. "Come on, let's get you out of here. Before you start up again."

As the previous night's incident was reported, Natalie had been lifting an almost empty lager bottle from the table and it had slipped through her fingers, no more than that. There were press photographs of her turning up at the hospital with an array of flowers for the young woman with the injured eye. The injury itself had proved less serious than had been at first suspected; there would be some slight scarring but that, in time, would fade. In a brief interview for local television, the woman, holding the bouquet she'd been given up to her bandaged face, had absolved Natalie of any blame. "Accident, weren't it? Gould've happened to anyone." Lesley wondered if anything other than promises had changed hands. Either way, Scarman had done his job well.

For the remainder of that day, Lesley was swept along on a slurry of news: police officers involved in Operation Kingdom had made 160 arrests for criminal and anti-social behaviour on the Bestwood Estate; the trial began of the men accused of murdering three homeless women, two of the bodies having been discovered in a derelict warehouse, the third in a burnt-out flat; a man previously cautioned for downloading pornographic images of children had been discovered teaching in a school in East Anglia, and local parent groups here in the city were demanding assurances that there were no such instances in their own schools. There might have been some good news somewhere, but if so, it passed Lesley by.

Scarman sent her a card, hand delivered.
Thanks. Let's keep in touch! Love, Scott.
The pieces floated like confetti in the toilet bowl and then they disappeared.

And despite everything else, odd thoughts about Stephen and what had happened kept drifting through.

Towards the end of the afternoon, finding five minutes to herself, Lesley phoned Cambridgeshire Police and asked to speak to either Detective Inspector Grayson or Detective Sergeant Walker. Neither, she was told, was available. To what was her call relating? The details were carefully, even laboriously noted and she was assured her message would be passed on and someone would call her back.

"Before the end of the afternoon?" Lesley asked.

"Before the end of the afternoon."

Nobody did.

When the phone rang at last it was James Crawford. He had received a visit from Special Branch, two officers who had questioned him politely but intensely for the best part of an hour, then left.

"So much for publicity," Crawford said.

"I'm sorry."

"Not to fret. Besides, you should be pleased. Shows there's someone out there listening to local radio. If it is only the so-called security services."

A smile crossed Lesley's face. They'd have to soak up an awful lot of Abba and Neil Diamond before lighting on anything remotely subversive.

"Take care," she said.

"You too."

It was well past five. She considered ringing Will Grayson again, but thought better of it. There was a local residents' meeting out at Bestwood, with a police spokesperson and the local MP in attendance, and, even though one of the other reporters was covering it, she thought she might put in an appearance.

Back home, after a bath and a reheated bowl of Sainsbury's broccoli and Stilton soup, she was having second thoughts. Let someone else report the meeting, she would go up to the estate the following morning and talk to some of the residents, those who'd perhaps not gone along for reasons of their own. She made a mug of coffee, switched on the television and switched it off again. The same with the radio. After half a dozen pages, a book she'd already made several attempts at reading failed to keep her attention. As did a magazine. Several magazines.

Lesley looked at her watch.

It was too late to go to the meeting now, little sense in getting there after the main speeches were over.

In her bag there was a comp someone at work had given her for a gig at Rock City. Beth Orton. Vaguely, she remembered a song about a woman coming home alone in the early hours of the morning after. What was it? Walking down somewhere in last night's dress, the smell of some man on her fingers, the taste of him on her breath. Been there, Lesley thought, done that. One night stands. Though not for a while. Knickers either stuffed down into one of her pockets, or pushed down into the bottom of her bag.

There'd been a time, somewhere between leaving university and coming to her senses, when if she'd been out with mates on a Saturday night and not pulled, she'd felt she failed. Life coming to an end. Now she didn't care. She didn't go out, not much, and when she did it was relatively sedate, most of her friends either married or with long-term partners. Tucked up in bed before the twelve o'clock news.

She looked again at the ticket, flicked it with her finger, then phoned the venue. Beth Orton would be on stage at nine fifteen. Time enough to walk across town.

She hadn't been to Rock City in ages. The slightly scruffy entrance, just a few paces up from the back of the Royal Concert Hall, seemed scarcely to have changed; neither had the black-jacketed doormen who looked her over cursorily before nodding her through. The interior was dark, save for the bars at either end and the all-but-empty stage on which the ubiquitous roadie was going through the usual prolonged routine of testing mikes and tuning guitars, putting out set lists, towels, and bottles of water. The place, Lesley judged, was a good two-thirds full, a real mix of people, some quite a bit younger than herself, students, but others in their thirties and even forties, couples many of them, women in twos and threes, the occasional intense man off on his own.