Suffer the Children (3 page)

‘I don’t think you know what I do,’ she said.

‘I think I do. And I don’t think I care,’ he said.

He took her out for dinner and afterwards they went to a place of his in Belsize Park. He told her she was like one of Goya’s women. Later, he had to explain it was young Goya. He showed her and it made them laugh. That first night, they listened to Miles Davis and Bessie Smith and he made her real hot chocolate and he held her and nothing happened. When she went to the bathroom, he rifled through her diary and clocked the name of the guy who was down for that evening. He wanted to go out and beat him to a pulp. But he didn’t.

‘You all right? You don’t look all right,’ she had said when she came back. ‘You look sad.’

‘Don’t I always?’ he had said.

‘Not to me.’ She pulled him towards her and began kissing him. He let her, for a while; then he said, ‘I love somebody.’

‘You deserve to,’ she said.

Three days later, Staffe found out where Rosa’s client worked and went through his police history. The man worked as a money broker and Staffe guessed his employers didn’t know what their young gun had done in his past. So he told them. He felt bad about it for as long as it took him to
remember
the bruises on Rosa’s face.

A middle-aged man comes out on to the deck in front of Rosa’s flat. He’ll have come straight from work – for a happy hour. Staffe makes his way up there, passes the man on the stairs. He smells expensive, has a kindly smile and a wedding ring. He knocks on Rosa’s door and her face lights up. She kisses him and ushers him in, and they talk, not much more – the way it has always been – and when he gets back to the
renovated
house in Kilburn, he draws the new curtains against the still bright mid-evening sun and lays back on his sofa, listening to the children playing in the street. He closes his eyes and incants a mantra that lulls him into sleep.

He dozes briefly and fitfully, tossing and turning through visions of Sohan Kelly and Jadus Golding – his family and gang with their smug threats. ‘We’ll kill you, Kelly. We’ll kill you, Wagstaffe!’

And he wakes to the telephone rattle and rubs his eyes. It is still light and he leans down, reaches for the old Bakelite phone – an SOC freebie that was never called as evidence. He could have returned it to its owner but the owner never made it back from intensive care. There was no next of kin.

‘Yes!’ he snaps.

‘Sir?’ says Pulford.

Staffe hears his DS anew – the voice sounding older, more grave than in the flesh.

‘It’s bad, sir. Bad.’ His breathing is short.

‘Bad?’ says Staffe.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Pulford is a graduate trainee, resented by practically all his colleagues, and even though Staffe can’t be sure he’ll last any kind of distance, he resists the temptation to hold a person’s intelligence against them. ‘What is it?’

‘I didn’t know whether I should call you.’

‘Well you did.’

‘I can refer it to Pennington.’

‘I said “what is it”!’

‘A murder, sir.’ Staffe pictures Pulford pacing, his ruddy cheeks gone pale, grey. ‘No. More an execution.’

‘Where?’

‘On the Limekiln estate.’

‘Put me through to Janine.’

‘You’re supposed to be…’

‘Just do it!’

Staffe imagines the walk to the scene of crime, up through a guard of honour of ten-to fourteen-year-olds taking time out from running crystal meth and crack. It’s the very bottom rung on the most rickety ladder. One or two will get to have the Subaru Impreza and drink Cristal, have someone else running bags for them. Most will end up using, going down the line, falling by the wayside for ever. It’s as easy as a slow, soft squeeze on the trigger of a gun that’s slipped into your hand by a man with a smile on his face.

As he waits to be put through he stands up, kicks the bed, forgetting his feet are bare. ‘Shit!’

‘What?’

‘Janine? You’re on the Limekiln?’ He thinks he can hear her swallow before she speaks.

‘Been here an hour or so. You’re supposed to be on holiday.’ There’s a quiver in her voice.

‘I’ll be there in quarter of an hour.’

Staffe washes his face and under his arms, then throws on a button-down shirt. He picks up his packed bag and feels
himself
switch on as the setting Kilburn sun spears into the hall through the stained-glass panel of the front door. It’s a Victorian house and the door is a perfect match. He got it years ago from a reclamation yard up in Southgate. He was with Sylvie when he bought it.

Staffe’s heart sags and he says ‘No’ out loud to himself. He can’t quite stop all the sadness. He wants to have been a better man. He shrugs, even though he’s alone. He’s been alone too long not to value himself as an audience.

He pulls the heavy front door closed behind him and wishes the kids weren’t still playing kerbie in the road. He thinks about telling them to watch themselves but says nothing. Sometimes your spirit is too frail to take casual profanities from the nine-year-old loved ones of your neighbours.

Round the back, up the narrow lane that his house backs on to, he slips the big fat key into the big fat padlock that tries to ward off evil spirits from his lock-up. He takes two steps back, bringing the doors with him, looking at his two cars. It’s a night for the crap one. It’s almost always a night for the crap one.

There’s an ingrained pall of long-ago cigarettes in the old Peugeot and as he twists the ignition key, Staffe feels a burning yen for a long, slow, drag on a Rothmans. The diesel engine coughs up like a one-lung smoker. The radio comes on of its own accord and he turns it up a notch. Stravinsky, he thinks, and the violins scratch away over the long slow swoon of brass and wind. He thinks it’s the Firebird. He doesn’t mind Stravinsky but he wishes it was Grieg. Something smoother for a night like this. He pictures himself on a Basque waterfront. All alone, watching the Atlantic swell.

Janine is outside the victim’s flat when Staffe gets to the Limekiln. The victim is Karl Colquhoun: thirty-six years old with two conditional discharges. Round here, that makes him an angel.

As Staffe approaches Janine, walking along the decked,
concrete
access, it looks as if she might be taking in the sunset, leaning on the rusted railing and peering out over the
quadrangle
of the Limekiln. The crime-scene tape is out: more a curtain going up on a new drama than a shield to keep folk away. The people have come, hanging around in groups. It’s like a bear pit and Staffe thinks what a sick joke it is that it takes
something
like this to bring a community together.

Staffe leans out and calls down to the uniformed officers to disperse the growing crowd. The officers shrug. They move towards the cluster of small groups and Staffe waits for a
reaction
, half expecting something to flare. But it doesn’t. One or two women move forward, out of the groups and up to the officers. They start talking, gesturing up to the fifth floor, snarling.

‘What the hell’s going on, Janine?’

She shakes her head, says nothing and nods towards a door. Two uniformed officers are standing by it. Their faces are ashen. These are men who’ve seen most of the worst that London can muster.

‘I’ll take a look. You can talk me through it in a minute, hey?’ he says, putting a hand on her shoulder. He lets it rest, comfortable. He takes a step towards her, whispers into her hair, ‘Take your time.’

‘Thanks, Staffe. I’ll be all right in a minute.’

He runs his hand down her back, feels the hollow of its small with the ball of his thumb. He smiles. Her eyes go soft, damp and they each remember a happy time that should have lasted longer. Staffe remembers her eyes, wild and wide, the unlikely words that came out of her thin mouth.

‘Staffe,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

She takes a hold of his hand, looking around to make sure they’re not seen. ‘Nothing.’ She squeezes his hand.

Staffe takes a deep one, makes his way in.

‘Where is Pulford?’

‘He’s gone back to the station. It hit him hard, poor love.’ She says it without irony.

‘It’s not his first.’

‘You’ll see when you get there.’

Everywhere, there are signs that the usual people have attended to the usual necessaries. The evidence is bagged and sitting on the plastic-looking oval dining table. But nobody’s here. No one’s stayed longer than necessary.

A brown Formica display unit matches the dining table. Its veneered ply shelves shoulder school pictures of two different kids. The kids aren’t smiling. Most school photographers can cun a smile from the shyest or most miserable of children. And now Staffe feels it. A cold shiver runs up his spine. His scalp pinches. Not a happy home, this. Not by any stretch.

The hallway to the bedrooms is papered with big dark
flowers
and as he opens the first door the smell hits him. A deep, sweet smell which catches at the top of his throat. He takes a big stride in, clocking the feet splayed at the foot of the bed, trainers still on, a piece of pink gum between heel and sole in the hollow that never rubs clean. Karl Colquhoun’s trousers are ruched round his ankles and a brown crust has formed all around the leg flesh. It spreads on to the unmade bed. Blood, still red, is streaked down Karl’s thighs, thickest around his groin.

Then Staffe sees it. His hand instinctively takes a hold of his mouth and nose. He wants to gag but hears Janine rustling up behind him.

‘The human eyeball is spherical,’ she says. ‘The testicle measures 2.5 centimetres by 5 centimetres but it’s oval. That’s why it’s protruding,’ says Janine. ‘They would have had to sever the optic nerve, which is half a centimetre thick. It would require some kind of blade or a pair of scissors. Same with the vas deferens.’

‘His balls?’

She nods. ‘It would require significant force. A decent blade.’

‘And someone who knew what they were doing?’ Staffe
pretends
to be observing the body but he focuses on infinity.

‘Either that or a quick learner. A strong stomach, for sure.’

‘Wouldn’t there be two of them – one to hold him down?’

‘We’ll have to wait for the autopsy but my guess is he was paralytic. There’s an empty litre of Scotch by the bed,’ says Janine. She sounds tired. ‘There’s swelling to the jaw, I’d guess it is fractured.’

Staffe forces himself to look back at the body; he needs to see it in situ. He focuses on the man’s face, feeling himself about to heave but he swallows it away and squints. He
suddenly
feels as if he is connected somehow to this awful
situation
. He knows this man. He’s sure he does.

He grabs a pair of gloves and pulls them on, goes into the lounge and rummages through the drawers in the sideboard, eventually finds a photograph of Karl Colquhoun. He’s right. This man has been in Staffe’s house. The best part of a year ago, he had gone down to Staffe’s flat in Queens Terrace, South Ken. Not only that, Staffe had made him cups of tea while he repaired the marquetry on a Cobb writing table. Karl Colquhoun did a wonderful job. He was painstaking and uncompromising. A craftsman. You’d think he had something to offer a civilised society.

Staffe goes back to the bedroom and looks down at Karl Colquhoun. The man this happened to, the way they did it …… he is no ordinary victim. Perhaps no kind of victim at all – in some people’s eyes. He turns his back and walks through the flat, nods at the uniformed officer on the door, who says, ‘Sir, shall I lock the place down?’

Staffe nods and thinks of the warmer clime that awaits him with the far older and political crime that killed his parents – supposedly a crime of reason. And he wonders whether that makes it better or worse than the brutal slaying of Karl Colquhoun, no angel, perhaps. Regardless, he’ll chase them down. It’s what he does.

Walking down the stairwell, the sounds of his own footsteps echo against others coming up at him. As he passes them, they look down, and at level two the smell of aerosol paint is thick and new. Even while the police are here, they’re tagging the place. The chemicals catch in his throat and Staffe takes the last few flights two steps at a time and runs out into the
courtyard
, gulping at the air.

‘Someone’s in a hurry.’

Pennington is leaning against the old Peugeot. He pushes himself off the rusted car and dusts himself down, adjusts the knot of his tie. He looks more like an accountant than a chief inspector. He is wiry, with dark, sheened hair that has more than a hint of Just For Men. As always, he wears a
double-breasted
suit. He shoots his cuffs. ‘Didn’t expect to see you here, Staffe.’

‘I’m off in the morning, sir. First thing.’

‘Couldn’t resist a look, eh, Inspector?’ Pennington puts a hand on his Seamaster watch, takes a studied look at the time. ‘We
can
manage without you.’ He fixes Staffe with a lame smile.

‘I just thought, what with Rimmer off on the long sick.’

‘Stress. Ha!’ Pennington looks past Staffe and up, towards the Limekiln tower. He talks as if he is being recorded. ‘Don’t you think that if the word didn’t exist, the condition would never arise.’ He mimics a whine. ‘“I’m all stressed out.”’ He looks straight at Staffe, slit eyes. ‘Well, everybody’s stressed, unless they do fuck all. It’s what keeps us going. It’s good for us!’

‘Some more than others, perhaps. Sir.’

‘You don’t get stressed, though, do you, Staffe? No chance of that! You get yourself on holiday. How long’s it been? Two years? Longer?’

He nods. ‘You don’t want me to stay, sir?’

‘I’d have thought that with the Golding episode you’d see the advantage in keeping a low profile. A bit of sun on your back.’

‘And what about Sohan Kelly? Will he be feeling the sun on his back? I hear he’s about to be magicked off to India but there’s trouble with his visa.’

‘Kelly’s taken care of. He needn’t concern you.’

‘But he does, sir.’

‘He got us our conviction.’

Staffe feels Kelly’s original statement, safe in his pocket. He wants to know exactly what kind of a hold Pennington has over Sohan – to make him change the evidence the way he did. ‘And what did it get him?’