The Bug House (5 page)

The squad is assembled and waiting.

‘I take it you’ve all met DC Ptolemy,’ Vos says, sweeping past them on his way to the board, and Ptolemy, who feels like the new girl in a classroom where everyone knows each other and, more importantly, knows the teacher, finds herself with a rictus smile on her face and wondering if she should wave or give a bow or just stand up and curtsey.

Instead she looks for help from Huggins and Fallow, with whom she has spent most of the morning, but they are just staring ahead with grim faces, as if they can sense teacher is in a bad mood. As for the other guy –
Calvert
? – he’s only just arrived himself and hasn’t made a sound, other than a dismissive grunt on his way to the nearest computer terminal. In fact, as she looks round the room, the only one who meets her gaze is the only other woman on the squad, Acting DS Seagram – and her nod of acknowledgement, while little more than a fractional tilt of the chin, seems like the most heart-warming welcome imaginable.

‘OK,’ Vos says. ‘So what we know is this: some time before 8.47 p.m. on Sunday night, Ahmed Doe is tied to a railway bridge by person or persons unknown. Prior to that, according to the pathologist, he was incapacitated with a stun gun. At 8.47 p.m. he is struck by the Newcastle to Edinburgh train. The body is catapulted into the neighbouring garden of our footballing friend, where it is discovered the next morning by the gardener. As yet we have no name for the victim, and his only distinguishing feature is a distinctive tattoo or branding mark on his testicles. Any questions? John?’

‘The branding mark,’ Fallow says. ‘Are we thinking torture?’

‘I’m more inclined to go with gang initiation. Mayson, do a trawl of the international databases. See if there’s any mention of this KK design.’

‘You think our guy is foreign?’ Huggins says. ‘I mean he
looks
foreign, but—’

‘I don’t think anything, Phil. I’m relying on you people to tell me. And unless he was a masochist escapologist who got it wrong, we are treating this as murder. I take it you’ve worked a murder case before?’

It takes a moment for Ptolemy to realize that Vos is talking to her.

‘Yes, sir.’

Ptolemy wonders if Vos has read her file. Her one and only murder case as a detective was a domestic disagreement that got out of hand in a remote cottage in the Cheviots. A farm hand had returned home at the end of a two-day bender and taken exception to his wife’s nagging, killing her with a single punch. He had then called the police and had been sitting in his kitchen, waiting, when Ptolemy and the uniformed response unit arrived an hour later.

‘So what do you think?’

She clears her throat. ‘I was . . . thinking about motive, sir?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, the nature of the victim’s death suggests to me one of two things: either the killer was teaching him a lesson, or he was sending a message.’

To her surprise, Vos nods at Seagram, who writes the two words ‘LESSON’ and ‘MESSAGE’ on the board in black felt-tip.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘What do we think about that?’

‘Either way it’s been carried out with extreme prejudice,’ Huggins says.

‘It’s got to be gang-related,’ Fallow says.

And then everybody is speculating at once, leaving Ptolemy not knowing what to say.

Eventually Vos calls order. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘I think we all know what needs to be done. Let’s get to work.’ Then he looks at Ptolemy. ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

Vos’s car is parked in the staff car park at the rear of the building. By the time Ptolemy has finished buckling her seatbelt, Vos has already swung the vehicle into the traffic streaming west out of the city.

‘So what do you think?’ he says.

‘Of the team? They’re nice. I like them.’

‘No doubt Huggins and Fallow have already invited you out for a drink.’

She smiles. ‘Phil did suggest it would be a good idea to bond.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Maybe another time.’

‘Wise move,’ Vos says. ‘Huggins has still got one foot in the sixth-form common room. Fallow is just easily led astray. You go drinking with them, you’ll end up at two in the morning in a lap-dancing bar on the Quayside.’

‘I thought DC Fallow was married, sir.’

‘He is,’ Vos says.

‘DC Calvert seems a little . . .’

‘Odd? He is. Sometimes I don’t understand a word he says. But he’s harmless. And if you ever want your house rewiring, he’s your man. But if you have any problems, see Bernice Seagram. Or Una Cattrall. In fact, just see Una. She runs the department.’

They head down the hill, past the municipal crematorium and out beyond the Western Bypass to the A69 dual carriageway that connects the city to the market towns and villages of the Tyne Valley commuter belt.

‘Detective Superintendent Anderson thinks a great deal of you,’ Vos says. ‘She tells me you were hand-picked to join my squad.’

‘It was a surprise,’ Ptolemy admits. ‘I didn’t even know I was on a shortlist.’

‘You could have said no.’

‘You don’t say no to a detective superintendent, sir.’

Ptolemy sees a half-smile on Vos’s face.

‘Good answer, Ptolemy,’ he says. ‘You’ll go far.’

They’re out beyond the city now. Though it’s only six o’clock, ahead of them the sun is already starting to sink with the depressing inevitability of early autumn.

‘
You
could have said no, sir,’ she says.

‘No to what?’

‘To me joining your squad. I assume you’ve read my file. I’m not very experienced.’

‘I haven’t read your file, Ptolemy,’ Vos says. ‘And I don’t intend to.’

He indicates left and turns onto the slip road marked Heddon-on-the-Wall. Soon they come to a pub called the Three Tuns, positioned on a crossroads. Vos swings into the car park and he and Ptolemy go inside. It’s the calm before early doors; just a handful of regulars at the bar. Vos buys a pint of bitter and a lime and soda and then leads Ptolemy into a quiet corner, away from the inevitable TV screen.

‘Can I ask you something, sir?’ Ptolemy says.

‘Sure.’

‘What do
you
think happened? To the victim.’

Vos says nothing for a while. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what to think,’ he says presently. ‘But I will soon enough.’

‘Well, thanks for including me,’ Ptolemy says. ‘I won’t let you down.’

‘I’m not including you, Ptolemy.’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘There’s more to Major Crime than murder investigations. There’s something else I want you to do for me.’

The main door opens and a man comes in. He is skinny, with unkempt dark hair and a couple of days’ growth on his pale face. He is wearing drainpipe jeans and a battered biker jacket. He orders a pint of lager and a bag of crisps and then, to Ptolemy’s surprise, comes over to where they are sitting and pulls up a stool.

‘Who’s this?’ he says. His eyes are hooded, with dark circles underneath.

‘The new recruit,’ Vos says. ‘Kath Ptolemy, meet DC Sam Severin.’

Nobody ever asks Mayson Calvert for a drink after work. They know he’ll just look at them through his glasses, with his head cocked quizzically to one side as if they’re some sort of microbial species, and then he’ll give a shy, almost embarrassed smile and shake his head; and then he’ll say ‘No, thank you,’ and walk away, and in that instant he’ll have forgotten you ever asked. It’s not that Mayson is rude, or even antisocial, and he doesn’t have OCD or ADHD or Tourette’s or any of the other syndromes that Huggins and Fallow think he’s got. Mayson Calvert is just, well,
singular
.

People who meet him – other policemen – wonder how the hell he ever got to be a detective. When they discover he’s part of Theo Vos’s Bug House squad they are astonished. But there’s more to Major Crime than swagger and physicality. The big-time thugs with shaven heads and steroid-enhanced muscles make up a very small percentage of those who are classified as Major Criminals. Looking and acting like a villain is a distinct disadvantage if you’re really serious about crime. The criminal who succeeds in making a living at it, who runs it as a business, is the one you never see or suspect. He is the next-door neighbour who walks his dog round the block every night, the twinkly-eyed old gent enjoying a quiet half of bitter in the pub, the family man who takes his wife and kids to Greece once a year on easyJet, who stays in modest three-star hotels and drinks inexpensive local wine at the local taverna.

These are the Major Criminals.

These are the people Mayson Calvert is employed to catch. Mayson lives alone, but he lives in some style. He has a two-bedroomed apartment on the top floor of an Art Deco building in the upmarket suburb of Jesmond. From his living-room window, he looks out over the verdant slash of Jesmond Dene as far as the Armstrong Bridge, where every Sunday he visits the arts and craft stalls. He shops at the local delicatessens and listens to eclectic live music at the Sage Centre in Gateshead, and he is a patron of the independent Tyneside Cinema, where once a week without fail he will watch a foreign language film. If it is in French or Italian, he will not need the subtitles.

Mayson Calvert is very much a Renaissance man, a connoisseur of culture.

But compared to normal people he is a little weird. There is no doubt about that.

It is 4 a.m. and Mayson is sitting upright in his armchair, staring at his mobile phone, which is held in both hands in his lap. He is debating whether or not to call the number on the screen. The number is DCI Vos’s. He has been debating this for two hours. He presses a button and a second number appears. Acting Detective Sergeant Bernice Seagram’s.
Click, click
. Vos, Seagram, Vos, Seagram. He settles for Seagram and his thumb hovers over the Send button.

The time is irrelevant to Mayson Calvert. Since he was a child he has been able to exist on four hours’ sleep, and it doesn’t matter to him when he takes them. They don’t even have to be consecutive. But he knows that, in this respect at least, he is different to most people. Their sleep requirements are set in stone and he knows from bitter experience that you disturb them at your peril. It is four in the morning, and that means nothing to Mayson but everything to Vos, Seagram and everyone else in this city.

He sighs and puts the phone on the armrest of the chair. There is no point in calling either of them. There is no point in calling anyone. Everyone is dead to the world and will be for at least another two hours. It never ceases to baffle him why, when there are so many things to do in life, the hours in which it is deemed acceptable to do them are restricted to a narrow window between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon.

Mayson turns his chair to the window and looks out through the open blinds. The room faces east, and in a little under two hours the sky will begin to lighten.

His news will have to wait until then.

John Fallow turns the corner of his street and sees the welcome sight of his own front door a hundred yards ahead. He checks his watch and notes to his dismay that he has added a whole minute to yesterday’s time for his two-mile morning run. This is not supposed to happen.

Paah! Whoargh! Paah! Whoargh! Ah-aach! Thwaoarf!
That is the sound of Fallow’s breath, followed by a hawk, followed by a full-blooded, foamy gob onto the pavement before him as he heads for home and the sanctuary of the shower.

Fallow has always regarded runners as the most unsavoury characters imaginable, with their red faces, their startled expressions, their gasping and gobbing, their sweat-soiled groins, chests and armpits, and the malodorous smell that broils in their wake. He still does. But at the age of thirty, he lives in fear. He was scared to start running because he was so unfit; now he is scared to stop in case all his good work goes
sproing!
like the innards of a watch.

Most of all, he is scared of Phil Huggins.

It is two weeks since the CID piss-up. Two weeks since he and Huggins emerged from the Memories of Punjab at one in the morning, the last two standing. Two weeks since he categorically stated: ‘Nah, mate. I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’

Huggins had looked at him with disgust. ‘Whassa matter with you, Johnny-boy? Clubbing, man! Fuckin’ Aces High!’

‘Nah, I’m off home,’ Fallow had said, pulling his coat sleeve away from Huggins’s insistent grasp. ‘Shirley will kill me.’

‘Ah, fuck Shirley, man!’

‘She’s my fucking
wife
, Phil!’

But later, inevitably, Fallow had found himself in the dimly lit, half-empty nightclub, lurching along the edge of the dance floor to where a bouffant-haired woman in a low-cut T-shirt and tight-fitting jeans was sitting alone at an alcove table, running a long, dark fingernail around the rim of a cocktail glass and giving him an approving look.

‘Fancy a dance?’ he’d shouted over the music.

‘Why not?’ the woman had said, taking the can of Red Stripe from his hand and leading him by the other into the thin coppice of bodies swaying drunkenly on the strobed parquet. And at first light, as he silently let himself out of her house and made his way through the godforsaken council estate to the nearest main road, he’d cursed Huggins for leading him astray but felt nothing but disgust for himself, for his own weakness.

And now he is home, untying his trainers on the doorstep and stowing them neatly with all the other outdoor shoes beneath the coat rack in the hall, padding upstairs on the pristine cream carpet and entering the bedroom, where Shirley has already smoothed the duvet to eradicate any evidence that the bed has been slept in. He takes off his running gear and deposits it in the washing basket, picks a perfectly folded towel from the heated rail and steps into the en suite bathroom. He showers, dresses and goes downstairs to the kitchen, where she has already set the table for supper and left a note propped against the Tupperware cornflake container that he will be expected to clear away once he has had his breakfast.

‘Please empty dishwasher before you leave,’ it says.

Fallow puts the note in his pocket, empties the dishwasher, puts the cornflakes container in the cupboard and leaves the house without bothering to eat.