The Bug House (9 page)

‘Morning, Father,’ says one of the flat caps, looking up from the seven dominoes he holds expertly in the swollen knuckles of one hand.

‘Fred.’

‘You in for a game?’

‘Not today, thanks, Fred. How’s Mary?’

‘Not so good, Father. Not so good.’

‘Sorry to hear it. Tell her I’m asking after her, will you?’

‘Will do. Will do.’

Painstakingly, Father Meagher picks at the layers of clingfilm around his sandwich, then scrunches the plastic into a small ball and drops it on the table. He lifts the lid of the soggy white bun. A solitary cross-section of withered tomato lies squashed on the square of processed cheese like something monstrous you would find under a stone. He quickly closes the sandwich and takes a bite. All he can taste is margarine. He chews until it is a bolus of paste in his mouth, then swallows it whole to avoid it making contact with his tastebuds. He pours half of the Guinness into a glass and rinses away the detritus that has clung to his teeth.

A TV at the far end of the bar is showing horse racing from some deserted, fogbound venue. The prices for the twelve thirty scroll across the screen as the camera searches for runners and riders in the gloom.

‘Afternoon, Father.’

Father Meagher groans inwardly as Vos sits down on a stool opposite. But he has had plenty of practice at pretending to smile today.

‘Mr Vos. How are you?’

‘Not so bad.’ Vos jabs a thumb at the TV set. ‘Are you having a flutter?’

‘No,’ says Father Meagher. ‘It’s a mug’s game. I prefer online poker if truth be told. Have you played at all, Mr Vos?’

‘Can’t say I have.’

‘You should try it. Very exciting. Very addictive, though.’ He takes a sip of his stout. ‘So what can I do for you? One of my flock gone astray again?’

‘As if you’d give a fuck, Father. Have you read the papers recently?’

Father Meagher nods. ‘Ah yes. The fellow in the footballer’s garden. Very mysterious. Do you know who he is yet?’

‘Maybe.’ Vos pulls a photocopied mug shot of the dead man from his coat pocket and passes it over the table. ‘I was wondering if you might have seen him around.’

Father Meagher squints at it, winces, then shrugs. ‘He’s not one of mine. By the look of him I’d suggest you’d be better off asking at the mosque.’

‘His name is Okan Gul. Turkish, out of Amsterdam. Works for one of the local gangs over there. Apparently he’s been doing some business on Tyneside.’

The priest attempts to return the mug shot, but Vos raises his hand. ‘You keep it. Show it to your parishioners, see if they know anything.’

‘I trust you’ll be making a donation to the church roof fund in return?’ Father Meagher says with a glint in his eye.

‘Let’s just say I’ll keep turning a blind eye to your out-of-hours collections.’

The priest laughs and brushes stray crumbs from the bobbles on his jumper. ‘You’re an evil man, Mr Vos.’

‘It takes a man of the cloth to know one, Father,’ Vos says. He makes to leave, but the older man puts a hand on his arm.

‘Why don’t you stay for a while longer,’ he says. ‘You look like you could use a drink. And maybe a listening ear.’

‘Is this your idea of confession?’

‘I’m off the clock,’ Father Meagher says. ‘At least as long as I’m in here.’

Vos sits. The priest calls across to the bar for two whiskies.

‘I haven’t seen you since your sergeant got himself hurt.’

‘He didn’t get himself hurt,’ Vos says. ‘Terry Loomis shot him.’

‘I was sorry to hear that, truly I was.’

The drinks arrive: two fingers each and a small jug of water. Father Meagher dilutes his drink almost imperceptibly.

‘But things didn’t end up too clever for Jack Peel, neither,’ he says.

‘No,’ Vos says. ‘They didn’t.’

‘Hell of a way to go, I imagine. Headfirst onto a hard surface. Just enough time to contemplate your fate.’

‘I guess so.’

The priest takes a sip. ‘Rumour has it you pushed him, Mr Vos,’ he says.

Vos looks at him dispassionately. ‘Well, you know what rumours are like, Father. Funny, though – at the time I recall it was just me and Jack Peel on that fire escape.’

‘Like the ’66 World Cup Final, eh? If everybody who said they were at the match was telling the truth, the attendance would have been fourteen million.’

He picks up his glass again and raises it in a toast.

‘To Geoff Hurst,’ he says.

Vos drains his whisky and stands up. ‘Thanks for the drink, Father,’ he says.

Mayson Calvert has a particularly annoying habit of humming through his nose when he works, but as the new girl in the office, Ptolemy is reluctant to tell him to shut up. She wouldn’t mind if he was humming a tune she knew, but it seems to be emerging fully formed out of Mayson’s head – a complex, multi-tempo, often atonal symphony for the nostrils. And it appears to have no end; for more than two hours now he’s been sitting at his computer, fingers dancing on the keyboard, humming his bloody tune and driving Ptolemy mad.

But perhaps, Ptolemy thinks, it’s only maddening because of her own frustration. While Mayson has been humming, she has been wading through a stack of paperwork, laboriously transcribing digits and notes onto a database and wondering why, if Vos was looking for a number cruncher, he didn’t recruit someone from the Fraud Squad or, better still, some keen school kid with a GCSE in statistics.

‘Mayson.’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the story with Sam Severin?’

Mayson stops typing. He looks at her and blinks, and Ptolemy is sure she can hear a whirring sound as his mind reboots to consider her question.

‘Sam Severin works undercover,’ he says.

‘I know that. But does he ever come into the office?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘But he
is
part of this team. I mean, he answers to DCI Vos, right?’

‘Yes. At least, I think he does. Why do you want to know?’

‘Because it looks like I’m his new admin assistant.’

Mayson frowns.

‘He’s infiltrated a car-ringing gang,’ Ptolemy explains. ‘I’ve been told to input all the paperwork from the stolen cars onto a computer database.’

‘It’ll be needed if the case ever gets to court.’

‘I know that, but—’

What Ptolemy really wants to say is that she can’t understand why she’s stuck in the office doing Severin’s paperwork while everyone else in the squad is busy trying to solve the murder of Okan Gul. But she can see that Mayson’s cyber-brain has already decided this conversation is not worth continuing. His attention, which was fleetingly concentrated on her, has now wandered back to his computer screen.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

Mayson’s fingers hover above the keyboard. His face twitches with a momentary spasm of irritation. She is like a fly buzzing around his head. Ptolemy knows this, and more to the point she realizes she is
enjoying
it. It is sweet, childish vengeance for two hours of unbroken humming.

‘I am checking Border Control CCTV footage from Newcastle Airport and North Shields Ferry Terminal, and crosschecking all incoming EU-registered passports with photo IDs,’ he says.

‘I’m impressed. I thought men weren’t supposed to be any good at multitasking.’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read,’ Mayson says.

Ptolemy stands and saunters across to his desk. She sees that he appears to have three computer screens working simultaneously, as well as a flimsy laptop balanced on a stack of case files. ‘So what have you got?’

‘Nothing. Yet. But then it’s hardly likely that Mr Gul entered the country using his own passport. And we are only assuming that he flew into Newcastle. Or indeed that he flew in at all.’

A soft ding announces the arrival of an email in Mayson’s inbox, and with that the dialogue is over. Ptolemy returns to her desk, to Severin’s paperwork, a seemingly never-ending series of car registrations and logbooks.

And now Mayson Calvert has started humming again.

Paralysed from the chest down, Vic Entwistle lies in an intensive-care ward while a heart monitor pulses and peaks silently on a wheeled trolley by the bed and fluid from his chest cavity is siphoned into a plastic container. The noise reminds Vos of someone sucking the last dregs of Coke from a paper cup with a straw. The lower half of Entwistle’s waxen face is obscured by the fogged mask over his nose and mouth. He turns his head slightly so that he can see Vos and rolls his eyes in almost good-humoured resignation at his predicament.

‘Got some good news for you, mate,’ Vos says, pulling up a chair next to the bed.

Entwistle raises his hand and pushes the mask to one side. ‘Oh yeah?’ They have only recently removed the tracheal intubator from his throat and his voice is still little more than a rasping whisper.

‘There’s a guy on ward six who wants to buy your slippers.’

Entwistle smiles. ‘Fuck you, Theo.’

‘Actually I just talked to the nurse. She says they’ll be moving you out of intensive care in the next couple of days. And I got Alex to look up C7 spinal injuries on the internet. Apparently the paralysis can sometimes be temporary. The nerves in the spinal cord are traumatized and—’

Entwistle raises his hand again, this time to stop Vos from talking. ‘The good thing about the doctors in here is that they don’t bullshit you,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, mate. My dancing days are well and truly over.’

‘Jesus Christ, Vic—’

‘You got to look on the bright side,’ Entwistle says. ‘They brought a young kid in here yesterday who’d come off his Kawasaki at a hundred miles an hour. Poor bastard’s dead from the neck down. At least I can still wipe my own arse. How is Alex anyway?’

‘He’s OK – in a nerdy sort of way. I’m still waiting to catch him staggering home pissed or smoking dope in his bedroom like any normal teenager. What was Jules like when she was sixteen?’

‘The same.’

‘What’s wrong with kids these days? They’re all so fucking serious.’

‘I know, I know. Pass me a glass of water, will you?’

Vos fills a plastic cup from a jug on the night stand.

‘How’s the Ahmed Doe investigation going?’ Entwistle asks. ‘Well, we’ve got a name.’

Vos fills him in on all the details. Entwistle listens without interruption, and even as he’s speaking Vos feels a sudden ache in his chest that his friend and colleague is not part of the case, that he’s trapped in his hospital bed, when he should be marching around the Bug House, his mind whirring as he processes all the details of Okan Gul’s murder.

‘There’s something else,’ he says. ‘Gul was a frequent flyer. Mayson’s isolated CCTV footage of him going through border control at Newcastle Airport on six separate occasions, each time using the same false passport.’

A low whistle. ‘Six visits in as many months. And we still don’t know who he was visiting?’

The use of the word ‘we’ is not lost on Vos. ‘The usual wall of silence,’ he says.

‘Well somebody killed him,’ Entwistle says. ‘We find out who hung him from that bridge, we find out who he was working with.’

‘I know, I know. But I’m getting a bad feeling about this, Vic. You see, I can’t think of one single Newcastle villain that a mob like the KK would even think twice about doing business with.’

‘That’s not very patriotic.’

‘Maybe not, but it’s true. We’ve shaken up Timmy Wok and Ma Breaker and half a dozen more of Tyneside’s finest, and when we’ve told them about the Turks they’ve all looked as if we’re talking about space aliens. Even Father Meagher hasn’t got a clue.’

‘So what are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that we might just be navel-gazing,’ Vos says. ‘That it’s bigger than we thought. In other words—’

‘You haven’t got a clue.’

Vos laughs. ‘Well at least you can see nothing changes in the Bug House.’

‘Yeah, but we get our man in the end, don’t we?’

‘That’s the theory.’

Entwistle reaches out his hand and grips Vos’s arm. ‘It’s good to see you, mate. I’m going fucking mad in here. I’d swop that morphine feed for a fix of gossip any day. What’s new in the BH?’

‘We’ve got a new girl,’ Vos says, instantly cursing himself for doing so.

Entwistle smiles. ‘A replacement, you mean?’

‘Temporary,’ Vos says. ‘She’s a nice kid. I’ve got her doing leg-work for Sam Severin on the car-ringing job. Breaking her in gently.’

Entwistle raises one eyebrow. ‘Tits?’

‘I never noticed, Vic.’

‘ ’Course you did.’

‘I’m old enough to be her father, for Christ’s sake.’

‘That’s no longer a valid excuse,’ Entwistle says. ‘You’re old enough to be the father of any girl under the age of twenty-six.’

‘Whatever. If you’re interested, I suggest you ask Phil Huggins’s opinion. In any case, she’s married.’

‘You’re no fun any more. So what else is fresh?’

‘I’m under investigation by the IPCC,’ he says. ‘I spent all day yesterday locked in mortal combat with some fat ex-superintendent from South Wales.’

Entwistle frowns. ‘IPCC? What for?’

‘Peel’s people want an inquiry.’

‘Into what?’

‘They’re still claiming I pushed him off that fire escape.’

‘For Christ’s sake!’

‘That’s what I said. But Anderson wants to play it by the book. Hence the grilling. It’s nothing. They’re just fishing to see if there’s any grounds for a full inquiry. But I thought I’d tip you off in case a fat Welshman comes calling.’

‘Let him come,’ says Entwistle. ‘Even if you did push Peel off the fire escape, I wouldn’t tell him. Good riddance to bad rubbish if you ask me. Have they fixed a trial date for Terry Loomis yet?’

‘They’re waiting until they’re sure you’re fit to testify.’

‘Tell them I’m ready, Theo. I want to look that bastard in the face when they send him down.’

Vos nods, but he knows that Entwistle won’t be giving evidence against the man who paralysed him for a while yet. He looks gaunt, shrunken somehow, and there is an ominous yellowish tinge to his skin – the result, the doctors say, of the damage to his internal organs that nearly killed him.

‘Hey, Dad.’

Entwistle’s drawn face brightens as his daughter Julia enters the room. ‘Hey, sweetheart!’