The Bug House (14 page)

‘You’re a big girl, Melody. You know what Jack was.’

He feels the animal’s hot breath on his hand as it pulls to get away, and when he looks at Melody he sees her for what she really is: a confused, grief-stricken child. For a fleeting moment he feels a twinge of guilt for Jack Peel’s death. But the sensation is replaced almost immediately by anger at Peel himself – for his selfishness, for his abdication of responsibility, for choosing to lead the sort of life that was going to bring him up against Vos, that was one day either going to get him jailed or killed.

‘Your dad was a criminal,’ he says. ‘A drug dealer. An extortionist.’

Melody Peel’s face is twisted with fury and sorrow in equal measure. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘But he was my dad.’

And then, with a tug on the reins, she brings the horse around and sets off at a gallop towards the stables.

When he gets back to his car he sees there are three missed calls, all of them from Seagram.

‘What is it, Bernice?’

‘Ptolemy found something in one of Dale Tiernan’s stolen cars,’ Seagram says.

‘Don’t tell me: a winning Lottery ticket.’

‘Better than that, boss. You should get back. You’ll want to see this.’

‘I know this guy,’ Huggins says through a mouthful of Big Mac. ‘From way back. Works as a freelance journo in the Midlands somewhere. Last time I saw him, he gave me his number and told me to give him a call if ever anything came up that needed wider exposure. I’ll never forget that phrase he used: “wider exposure”. What he meant was, he wanted me to be a
whistleblower
. His very own Deep Throat. I, of course, told him to fuck off. But I was thinking about him the other day with this Turkish business. You know what I mean? I mean, all the billions of pounds the taxpayer has forked out for the new, improved border control and yet Okan Gul – a known fucking drug dealer – can enter the country on six separate occasions with six separate passports and nobody raises an eyebrow. Now I’m not saying I’m going to ring my journo guy, but if anything needed wider exposure it’s that.’

‘Phil.’

‘What?’

‘What the hell happened at Timmy Kwok’s?’

Huggins stares at Fallow open-mouthed, a mound of masticated burger visible in his lower jaw. ‘What?’

‘Timmy Kwok. The meat cleaver.’

‘Oh, that.’ Huggins shrugs and continues chewing.

‘Yes, that,’ Fallow insists.

‘What’s the problem, Johnny-boy? He talked, didn’t he?’

Fallow’s eyes flash with anger. ‘You threatened him with a
fucking meat cleaver
, Phil!’

‘Don’t be so dramatic. I didn’t threaten him.’

‘Waving the fucking thing above his head? That’s threatening in my book. Christ, I thought you were going to take his fingers off.’

Huggins shakes his head and carefully places the remains of his burger in its cardboard box. ‘Have you been stewing over this all this time?’

‘I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you did it in the first place.’

‘Ah, grow a pair, John. I don’t know what’s happened to you lately.’

‘I could say the same thing about you. It’s like you’re in your own fucking Dirty Harry movie.’

‘So what are you saying? That we treat these fucking lowlifes like they’re some sort of social-work project? That we’re
nice
to them? Jesus Christ, Johnny-boy, you’re further gone than I thought.’

Fallow stares out through the windscreen as Huggins finishes his Happy Meal.

‘Here he comes,’ he says presently.

‘It’s about fucking time,’ Huggins says, dabbing his mouth with a napkin.

Fifty yards ahead a man has emerged from a betting shop. He is in his mid-fifties, wearing a donkey jacket and a knitted bobble hat. He pauses to light a cigarette, eyes screwed shut against the smoke and the daylight. Now he is now plodding blankly towards them on the main street, hands shoved into the pockets of a grubby jacket, head down, watching the progress of his trainered feet.

‘You’re not going to beat the shit out of him, are you?’ Fallow asks sardonically.

‘Might do,’ Huggins says.

The two detectives get out of the car.

‘Howard Iley?’

‘Yeah?’

‘DCs Huggins and Fallow. We’d like a word.’

‘What about?’ Iley says, his eyes flicking from one man to the other.

‘About twenty-five years, give or take, with no parole or time off for good behaviour.’

‘Eh?’ says Howard Iley in a strangled voice. He smiles, but it is the smile of a man who has just been told he has terminal cancer.

‘It’s an O-Mega Stun Gun,’ says Mayson Calvert, holding up the object that Ptolemy had found in the warehouse. ‘American-made. A basic model but still highly effective. It produces 150,000 volts from a 9-volt battery. More than enough to incapacitate an adult male.’

‘What about the rope?’ Vos says.

‘Aramid fibre. Similar to the rope that was used on our victim.’

‘Similar?’

‘George Watson is making a comparison at the lab,’ Seagram says.

Vos turns to Ptolemy. ‘And the car?’

‘A 1986 Jaguar XJ6. Registered to one Howard Paul Iley, age fifty-six, last known address Murchison Street, Shieldfield.’

‘Huggins and Fallow have just picked him up,’ Seagram says.

‘When was it stolen?’ Vos says

‘That’s the thing, sir,’ Ptolemy says. ‘It was never reported stolen.’

In an interview room at Byker Police Station, close to where he lives, Howard Iley has removed his bobble cap to scratch his head, only to expose a fist-sized, fleshy protrusion rising from the top of his skull like a purple hillock.

‘Jesus, Howard, what happened?’ Huggins says, staring at the lump with horrified fascination. ‘Is that where your mum dropped you on your head when you were a baby?’

Iley quickly replaces the hat. ‘I’ve got a condition,’ he says. ‘Lymphangioma.’

‘Nasty,’ says Fallow. ‘Now I understand the stupid hat.’

‘What do you want?’

‘What do you do for a living, Howard?’

‘I’m on sickness benefit,’ Iley says.

‘What, because of that thing on your head?’

‘Nah. Chronic sciatica.’

Huggins whistles. ‘Bloody hell. Chronic sciatica
and
lumpy-headitis or whatever the fuck it is. It’s a miracle you can get to the bookie’s.’

‘Answer me this, Howard,’ says Fallow. ‘How does a bloke on benefits afford a Jaguar XJ6?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Take your hat off, Howard,’ snaps Huggins.

‘Uh?’

‘I said take your stupid fucking hat off.’

Iley removes his hat.

‘You’re lying to us. You know how I know you’re lying, Howard?’

‘No.’

‘Because every time you tell a lie that fucking lump on your head starts glowing red.’

‘Tell us about the car, Howard,’ says Fallow.

‘It’s mine!’ Iley says. ‘It’s legit! I bought it from scrap and did it up.’

Huggins stares at him disbelievingly. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘Took me five years. I haven’t always been on the sick, you know. I used to work in a body shop. I was bloody good at it, too. Doing up old wrecks is a passion of mine. Or was, till my
fucking
sciatica kicked in.’

‘So why didn’t you report it stolen?’

‘I didn’t
know
it was stolen.’

‘Your lump’s glowing, Howard,’ says Huggins.

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

‘Nice car like that, your pride and joy, you’re telling me you didn’t give it a polish every day?’

‘Is this what this is all about? A stolen car?’

‘No, Howard,’ says Fallow. ‘It’s about a murder.’

Iley goes white. ‘A murder?’

‘You see a 1986 Jaguar XJS, registered to you, was stolen last week. In the boot was a stun gun and a rope.’

Now Iley’s mouth drops open.

‘Fucking hell, Jimmy,’ he says. ‘What have you done?’

‘Jimmy Rafferty, age twenty-three. Howard Iley’s nephew. Apparently Howard lent him the car six months ago so he could go to job interviews.’

‘He lent him the car?’ says Vos.

‘Jimmy’s just come out of prison,’ Seagram says. ‘Four years for aggravated assault. Apparently he beat some kid half to death with a wooden paling as he was walking home through Scotswood Park. Claimed the kid had been “disrespectful” to his girlfriend at the time.’

‘Christ almighty. Just the sort of person you want driving your wedding car.’

‘What’s his connection to Okan Gul?’ Ptolemy asks.

‘Good question,’ Seagram says.

‘Huggins and Fallow are at the house now?’ says Vos.

‘Yes, boss,’ says Seagram. ‘That’s their car there.’

Seagram brings her own car to a shuddering stop in the middle of the road, and she, Vos and Ptolemy jump out. Fifty yards away, armed officers from the Rapid Response Unit have already battered down the door of the ground-floor, two-bedroomed flat that Jimmy Rafferty shares with his mother, Barbara, on the Meadow Well Estate in North Shields. By the time they reach the gate, the flat has already been cleared.

‘Rafferty’s not there,’ says Huggins, emerging from the front door. ‘His mother is, for what it’s worth.’

‘That’s him?’ Vos says, staring at a mug shot of a young man with short brown hair parted sharply from the left and a jagged S-shaped scar running from the base of his neck up along his jawline to his left ear.

‘Yeah,’ says Huggins. ‘That’s him.’

Barbara Rafferty is a breathtakingly ordinary-looking woman of forty-eight, with the same forgettable face as her brother, Howard Iley, and the same lank brown hair as her son Jimmy, except hers is worn to shoulder length. Her features are slack and her eyes are dead. She is sitting in an armchair in the front room, still staring at a fifty-inch plasma screen TV, which until a few moments ago had been showing
Cash in the Attic
.

‘Where’s Jimmy, Mrs Rafferty?’ Vos says.

‘I don’t know.’ When she speaks, it’s in a low, dreamy monotone.

‘Come on, Barbara, I don’t have time for this.’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘And he didn’t say where he was going?’

‘Jimmy is very . . . He keeps himself to himself.’

‘He’s very what, Barbara?’ Seagram says.

She taps her temple with a stubby finger. ‘Up there.’

‘Mad? Schizo? What, Barbara?’

Jimmy Rafferty’s mother snaps briefly out of her dreamlike state. ‘Intelligent,’ she says. ‘He’s a very intelligent boy.’

Vos looks around the flat. The furniture is functional but the room is utterly lifeless. There are no pictures on the wall, no indication of any personality at all. Barbara herself looks like a faded painting. There is something about this whole setting that gives him the creeps.

‘Sir.’

Ptolemy is gesturing to him from the doorway. He follows her into the bathroom, where Fallow is staring at the mirrored medicine cupboard above the sink. Its shelves are packed with bottles of pills, mostly prescription antidepressants.

‘That explains a lot,’ Vos says.

‘He’s cleared out,’ Fallow says, returning from Jimmy Rafferty’s bedroom. ‘All that’s left in his cupboards are a couple of pairs of socks.’

Vos is thinking this is starting to look like déjà vu.

There are six beds in ward 26A of Newcastle General Hospital. The one occupied by Delon Wombwell is positioned between an elderly man crazed by a bladder infection and another man in his thirties, with pancreatitis, who does nothing but lie on his front all day moaning with pain. Delon is trapped, unable to move due to the fact that his shattered right leg has been bolted to a metal frame, which is in turn suspended from an intricate gantry arrangement above his bed. To take his mind off his predicament, he listens to Slipknot and Metallica on his iPod and stares blankly at the subtitled daytime shows on the flatscreen TV on the wall at the end of the ward.

The hours blend into one on ward 26A, delineated only by mealtimes and bed baths. But Delon, numbed by pain medication, lost track of time long ago. When Severin and Ptolemy arrive shortly after lunch, he is asleep – but only because his body clock still works independently of his brain.

‘Wakey-wakey,’ Severin says, tickling Delon’s bare foot with his fingernail while Ptolemy draws the privacy curtain around the bed.

Delon stirs and his eyelids flicker. ‘Fuggov, Sammy,’ he says dreamily. Then his eyes snap open and terror freezes his features. He knows all about Sam Severin by now. Knows he is polis; knows what happens to people who talk to the polis. ‘
Sammy
?’ He tries to shift backwards but succeeds only in clanging the back of his skull against the iron rungs of the bedstead.

And now he emits a tiny yelp of fear and pain as Severin grabs his big toe between finger and thumb and begins to twist it.

‘DC Ptolemy and I don’t have long, Delon,’ Severin says calmly. ‘That’s why we’ve come to see you instead of Philliskirk – or Mr Tiernan for that matter.’

Half-formed thoughts smash against each other in the void behind Delon’s eyes. ‘What do you want, Sammy?’

‘I want you to tell me about a 1986 Jaguar XJ6.’

‘Wha—?’

‘It was stolen last week. I want to know where from.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Of course you know, Delon. You were the designated driver for all of Tiernan’s crews.’

‘I don’t remember,’ Delon says.

‘Delon,’ says Ptolemy in her sweetest voice. ‘Do you know what will happen when Mr Tiernan goes to court? DC Severin here will be called to give evidence, and the first question they will ask him is, “Who tipped you off about Mr Tiernan’s operation?” Do you know what he will say?’

‘I’ll say it was you, you fucking halfwit,’ Severin says, giving Delon’s toe another painful tweak. ‘And Mr Tiernan will be sitting in the court when I say it – and he’ll be looking at you, Delon. He’ll be looking at you and working out just how soon he’ll be able to break every other bone in your body.’

‘But—’

‘No buts, Delon,’ says Ptolemy.

‘So think again, my man,’ says Severin. ‘Think nice and hard, and maybe I’ll say it was Philliskirk who was pissed and running his mouth off in that pub. Where was the XJ6 taken?’