Suffer the Children (24 page)

‘But not Paolo?’

‘I’d better go.’

‘I’m trying to make us a family, Will. Say goodbye to Paolo.’

Staffe looks back into the room, sees Paolo burning a corner of his hash resin. ‘He’s got other things on his mind,’ says Staffe and as he lets himself out he can hear Marie sounding off at Paolo. He chastises himself for stirring things up, then chastises himself for not stirring things up more. He makes a quick prayer that his sister comes to no harm and clicks open the car but before he can get in, his mobile goes off again. He answers without looking. ‘Hi Josie.’

‘It’s not Josie,’ says Pulford. ‘We’ve had some bad news. Nico Kashell tried to top himself last night. They’ve been asking what we said to him, saying we should have told them to put him on suicide alert.’

Staffe looks back up at the flat and wonders what damage he might be leaving in his wake. He gets in the car.

‘How did you find out?’

‘The governor rang me. We’re on Kashell’s visits list.’

‘Nobody else knows?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll tell Pennington. You say nothing.’ He shuts down his mobile phone and turns off his police radio, leans back in the Peugeot’s driving seat and rests his head. He closes his eyes and breathes deep, in, out. Deeper. In, out. He pictures the air in his lungs burning clean, burning to a shining silver and his pulse slows, slows further until he opens his eyes, looks at the VABBA phone bill. The only number he recognises is Debra Bowker’s. The call was made eighteen months ago. Not necessarily sinister.

As he drives, he takes out the cheque stubs, flicks through, wondering if he needs a trace putting on the account. Pulling on to the High Road, with the winos and Sunday shoppers stumbling and milling, he puts the brakes on, pulls in. The car behind blares its horn, swerves and gives him the V’s. But Staffe doesn’t care. He’s looking at the blue-black fountain ink figure of 50,000 on one of the cheque stubs. Underneath is a single letter, ‘
J
’. The date is 20 September 2005 – a week before Nico Kashell reputedly killed Lotte Stensson. 

‘You look like shit, Rick,’ says Josie.

Johnson holds the mug of tea in both hands. He looks like death warmed up. They are in a cafe opposite Smithfield
market
, just round the corner from Leadengate. It’s old school, from the days before the media and City types took the area over with their offal eateries and gastro shacks.

‘Thanks, Josie. I feel a lot better for that.’

‘How are the kids? Still keeping you on your toes?’

‘Smethurst gave me a ring, says he wants me on board the AMIP ship. You too?’

Josie nods.

‘And what about Staffe?’

Josie studies her empty cup of coffee. Bites her lip.

‘What is it, Josie? What’s he done now?’

‘I need to get hold of him. I think I might have dropped a bollock.’

‘Tell me.’

She takes a deep breath. ‘We broke into some premises and I left my jacket there.’

‘Which premises?’

‘You’ve heard him talk about VABBA?’

‘He’s still barking up that tree, is he?’

‘We didn’t find anything. You won’t tell Pennington, will you? Or Smethurst.’

For a moment he has a devilish glint in his eye, then the tiredness bites back. ‘You know, Josie, you can tell me if he’s dragging you deeper than you want to go. I can help.’

‘It’s not dragging me deeper that worries me. I think he might be going out on his own.’

‘Upriver?’ says Johnson, mainly to himself. He looks outside and a slow cloud rolls a shadow over the market. He can’t remember the last time he saw a cloud in this stifling summer. He shivers, pulls the jacket across his chest and calls for the bill. 

Prison Sundays are bad news. It is twenty-three-hour bang-up for everybody bar Christians and as he is shown across the yard to the new healthcare wing, Staffe sees a gaggle of the prison faithful slouching towards the chapel, all smoking, all with an effortless profanity on the tips of their tongues. Surprising, how popular God can be.

‘Thank God for his next-door. He could have been a lot worse,’ says the duty governor.

Staffe feels a pang of guilt for the prints he left on Nico Kashell’s desperate prison life. ‘I’d like to speak to his next-door.’

‘Wedlock?’ The governor shoots a wry smile. ‘It doesn’t quite work like that, Inspector. Maybe we can arrange an interview some other time.’

The governor flicks the keys from his pocket and catches them in mid-air. He selects one from a ring of many and twists as he puts it to the lock and kicks open the heavy steel door. He does the whole thing without breaking his stride. Staffe
wonders
how many tens of thousands of times a year he does the same thing.

‘He’s up and with it,’ says the governor, ‘but I can’t let you have more than ten minutes. He’s weak.’

‘How did he do it?’

‘Hang and slash. He meant it all right. The inmates call it double bubble. You hitch up to the top of the window, plaited sheet around the neck and then you slash up along the wrists with two safety blades wedged in a toothbrush and kick the chair away. Bleed as you swing. Luckily for Kashell, Wedlock was listening out, heard him saying a prayer. We reckon he must have sounded the alarm even before Kashell slashed up.’

‘Not exactly a cry for help, you’d say.’

‘Oh no,’ says the governor, striding into the hospital
reception
, picking up the visitors book and scanning down as he shows Staffe to Kashell’s bedside with a slow sweep of the arm. He hands Staffe a pen and indicates where to sign the book. ‘Ten minutes. There’s an alarm bell above each bed and an officer back on reception.’ And he’s gone.

Kashell has dark rings around his eyes and dressings on each of his wrists. ‘Can’t you leave me in peace?’

‘Didn’t your blessed revenge bring you the peace you thought it would, Nico?’

‘You wouldn’t know the half.’

‘Or is that it, Nico? Is it only half the story, when you take someone’s life. Once they’ve gone, you can’t forgive them, can you? Is that what you really want, to forgive, to let the hate go?’

‘Quite the philosopher, aren’t you?’ Kashell is propped up in bed, his head on plumped pillows and a half-drunk glass of blackcurrant juice on the bedside table. A CCTV camera is fixed to the ceiling.

‘Or maybe I should be asking these questions of the person who actually killed Lotte Stensson.’

‘You are.’

‘Last time we talked you wished you could bring her back.’

Kashell has a picture of Nicoletta next to the glass of juice. She smiles out at them. Looking at the picture, he says, ‘It can’t be right – to make yourselves as bad as the people who do the bad things.’

‘You’re not a bad man, Nico. And that’s the problem.’ Staffe thinks about what he has heard. ‘Yourselves.’ Not ‘yourself’.

Kashell looks down at his bandaged wrists. His jaw goes weak and his bottom lip trembles. It seems as though he has to summon a last drop to raise his eyes. His voice is weak. ‘If there is a loving God, he must love the badness in us, just as much as the goodness. How can we live in such a world?’

‘Who is
J
, Nico?’

‘What you talking about?’

‘Someone you might have paid, to help you.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There were no signs of a forced entry to Stensson’s house. It was a professional job, or someone she knew, someone she trusted. You didn’t know her, did you, Nico? How did you restrain her?’

‘She’s a woman.’

‘Did you tie her up?’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Where did you get the chloroform from, Nico?’

‘Shut up!’

‘And the hammer? Which hand did you start on?’

‘Nurse!’

‘It’s OK, Nico.’ A nurse appears in the doorway and Staffe stands up. ‘It’s OK,’ he says to the nurse. He waits for her to come forward, to stop him upsetting her patient any more, but she doesn’t. Instead she crosses her arms under her breasts and nods her head, mouths the words, ‘Go on.’

‘It doesn’t make you a bad man, to have not killed her. It doesn’t make you a better man to be in here, doing someone else’s time. You have to be with your daughter. Don’t you think she needs you?’ Kashell drags the back of his bandaged arm across his face, wipes away some of the tears. As he does it, Staffe sees smears of blood where the wound has leaked. ‘If there’s anything you want to tell me, Nico, anything at all, you call me. Don’t hesitate. It can’t be any worse than this.’

‘That shows how much you don’t know. I’d like you to go, Inspector.’

The nurse shows Staffe towards a small waiting room with a steel door. She is in her early twenties and has a mop of auburn hair twisted into a trendy confection with long strands curling down to frame her face. She has the greenest eyes. ‘There’s something I feel I have to tell you,’ she says, looking up and down the corridor before closing the door, locking them in. She plays with the strands of her hair and wraps an arm across her own waist. ‘Inmates all have a story about how they’ve been abused by the system. Some are stitched up by the police or grassed by a friend. Some say they’re innocent. But he’s the first I’ve come across who swears he’s guilty. You can see he’s lying just the same.’ She goes to the window and nods to another nurse. ‘There’s someone you should talk to. It’ll have to be quick.’

She works the magic with her keys and opens the door, takes a step back to let in a fearsome bulk of pasty white menace. ‘This is Wedlock. Billy Wedlock.’

Wedlock is about the same age as Nurse Louisa, but as far from her in every other respect. He has prison tatts all up his arms and even one on his forehead – done with needles and burning matches and biro ink. Staffe’s guess is he’s been jailbirding all his life.

One step ahead, Wedlock laughs at Staffe. ‘You checking the tatts, man? Got me for a jaily, yeah? But you be wrong, man. This just where I belong now. That’s what society wants, that’s what society gets. They want me down the gym and beefing up and mixing with these evil fuckers teaching me the business for when I get out? That’s what Billy’s doing, man. I’m learning the language, I’m graduating.’ He looks at the nurse and says, ‘Miss? You not told him what I done, miss?’

She shakes her head.

‘Just cleaning the streets, just like Nico wants.’ Cept I know he’s not cleaned no streets. He’s just fucked himself over, man. He done nothing. For real.’

‘He told you?’

‘Like the cat sat on the fuckin’ mat, man. He told me straight up.’

‘And you’ll testify to that?’

‘No way, man! What do you think I am?’

‘But he told you. Maybe he wants to be discovered.’

‘Wasn’t like that. He just had to get it out of his mind – like a priest thing in the what you say?’

‘Confessional. So why are you telling me?’

‘Kashell has to do any more time, he’ll die, man. And he’s a good man. A proper good man.’

‘What exactly did he say to you, Billy, to make you believe him?’

Wedlock looks at the nurse and she nods for him to go ahead. She looks anxiously through the reinforced glass, up and down the corridor. ‘I mashed some man proper. He was fiddlin’ some kids of a woman I knew. Just a neighbour but I’d heard her crying. I couldn’t get it out my head. She was marrying him. Fucksakes!’ Wedlock is pacing up and down the small room, pressing up to the glass and looking left and right. He turns on Staffe and gives him a look to kill. ‘He’s not putting his dirty prick near no one, man. You get me.’

‘And you told all this to Kashell.’

‘I heard he was in for the same beef. But he wouldn’t talk, man. Over and over he’d listen to me tell what I served that perv.’

‘And what else did he tell you, Billy?’

Wedlock shakes his head and punches one open palm with the fist of the other. ‘I swore down I wouldn’t tell.’

‘He told you he didn’t do it, Billy?’

‘I’m saying nothing, man.’ He shoots the nurse a look, as if she has betrayed him. But she’s having none of it.

She takes a step towards him and plants her feet, puts her hands on her hips. ‘It was you that came to me, Billy. It’s me who’s sticking her stupid neck out here.’

Wedlock hangs his head, says, quiet as a church mouse, ‘Sorry, miss.’

‘You don’t always have to blame, Billy.’

‘Did he tell you who did it, Billy? Who killed Lotte Stensson?’

Wedlock shakes his head, sadly defiant, without looking up.

‘I’m not asking you to tell me who, just did he tell
you
who killed Stensson?’

He shakes his head again and the nurse works her key magic, pulls open the door and shows Wedlock out, reaching up to give him a pat on his shoulder as he goes. 

Pulford watches Staffe on his video-entry phone. He looks all washed out: bags under his eyes, unshaved, grey-skinned. He lets him in and kicks a pizza box under the sofa, puts all the newspapers into one pile. He turns off the game, even though he’s got too much on Ashton for the first goal. He boots his computer and opens the door.

‘How can you live like this,’ says Staffe, striding into the room.

‘You want a coffee or something?’

‘I might catch something.’

Pulford shrugs and flops into his armchair, lets his arms dangle to the floor and stretches his legs out, waving a hand casually towards the sofa. He smiles to himself as Staffe sits down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, unable to relax. From where he is, he can see the debris of too many weekends on the floor, less than a foot below Staffe’s backside. He nods at the computer. ‘Just keeping track of the victim site.’

‘Any change to the fourth quadrant?’

‘No.’

‘You’re not going across to AMIP?’

‘Smethurst doesn’t want me.’

‘I’ll have a word.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does and I will.’

Pulford hands Staffe a sheet with those names appearing on both the case’s database and the VABBA telephone bill.

‘Any key names?’

Pulford smiles and begins to read the highlighted names from the sheets. ‘Debra Bowker.’