Get out! Come on, man! You gotta get out!
Fumbling for the door catch. Something sticky in his eyes. Blood! The pounding in his head like it’d been split open with an axe.
Senses dulled by … The pungent smell of hash in his nostrils, the inside of the Porsche thick with it. And something else.
Jesus Christ! Gotta get out!
Hands flapping uselessly like the wings of a stricken bird at the licks of flame nipping at his legs. Panic!
Help me! For fuck’s sake, help me!
Then the door was open and he was thrashing about on the ground. Arms and legs working overtime, scrabbling clear.
The fierce whump! as the fuel lines caught and the petrol tank went up, heat scalding his face. Still thrashing, beating at his smouldering jeans.
Darren Pinder’s eyes shot open. The bed was a mess and he was drenched in sweat. The same dream. He gently fingered the puckered scar tissue above his left eye. Proof that it’d really happened. Living proof, actually, that there was no turning back the clock, that the other scars, the ones he couldn’t touch and which would never heal, were equally real.
“‘s alright, girl.”
Skelly was crouched on the floor, thin body quivering, eyes wide with fear. Darren stretched out a hand, fondled her head.
“Come ‘ere.”
Back on the bed, Skelly arched into the curve of his body. They lay watching the dawn come up, the first hazy rays of light probing at the grime-smeared glass, while Darren sniffed back the tears as the misery took hold of him, sobbed his anguish for what had been taken from him.
The squat was midway along a terrace of jerry-built sixties dwellings, boarded up and empty, waiting in drab silence for the contractors to turn up and flatten them. Fresh out of nick and restored to his old stamping ground, Darren’d chanced on them three months earlier. On a tour of inspection, he’d come across a drooping figure moping in one of the bedrooms. Whether she’d been dumped or her owners moved away, he didn’t know. He’d fed her up, brought her back to health, lavished what love he had left to give on her.
They left via the back door and slipped through a gap in the fence at the bottom of the tangled mass of vegetation that had once been a garden.
Cutting through the council estate, Darren couldn’t help but notice the brace of red-stripes and the anonymous white Transit parked outside the main block of flats. Drugs raid, he reckoned. He imagined heavy boots pounding up the concrete stairwell, doors stoved in, flats ransacked. They might get lucky, but he doubted it. Soon as they’d gone it’d be business as usual.
He passed a group of youths kicking a football around on a patch of waste ground. At their age, he’d been out nicking cars, turning a tidy profit. And a shitload of trouble it’d got him into. Fragments of the dream flickered in his head – afterwards, in the hospital ward, policemen round his bed, then the three-stretch. He shut it off there, couldn’t face the rest.
“Oi, mate. What’s a nice dog like that doing with an ugly sod like you?” One of the youths called out to him. The group dissolved into raucous laughter.
Darren felt the tremors welling up red-hot inside him, bubbling close to the surface. They’d taught him how to handle it in prison, after the nonces and hardmen’d finished with him. Lowering his head, he quickened his pace, away from the danger zone.
Duane had already opened up when he arrived at the workshop, a radio blaring out an R and B number from inside. A Mondeo with mock leopard skin seat covers and no hubcaps stood half-mounted on the pavement, nosed up to the rear-end of a rust-ridden Corsa.
Duane grinned a mouthful of Daz-white teeth. “Mornin’, ma man.” He bent down to stroke Skelly’s head. “You puttin’ on weight, girl.”
Darren tentatively asked the question. Any work?
Duane jerked a thumb at the open workshop door. “Subaru. Up on the ramp. She all yours, man.”
Darren’s brow arched. “What’s the problem?”
Duane was already climbing into the Corsa. “Fuck do I know? You the mechanic.”
It was an arrangement that suited the pair of them – Duane, because it helped him out of a bind when he had more cars than he could manage on his own, and it put a few quid in Darren’s pocket.
When he’d pitched up one day looking for work, Duane’d listened then given him the steely eye. “Sure, I could use some of that expertise you have with motors. But on the right side of the law. You hear what I’m saying?”
Shrugging into a set of oil-stained overalls, he started checking out the Subaru.
By mid-afternoon, he’d done for the day. Duane slipped him a few notes, told him that Thursday and Friday both looked good. He stopped off at a phone booth to make a call, then spent half an hour killing time over a pint of lager in a spit-and-sawdust dive off the high street.
He retraced his steps through the council estate. The red-stripes had gone but there were several uniforms dotted about and, in the distance, he spotted a posse in dark overalls, line abreast, scouring a large area of open ground. Avoiding them, he headed for the hump of a skateboard ramp standing on a patch of concrete littered with empty vodka bottles and discarded syringes. A girl in her early teens was leaning nonchalantly against one of the supports. She held out her hand. He knew the rules – cash first, then the goods.
“Where’s Luke?”
The girl shrugged like she couldn’t care less. “Fuck knows, but he ain’t around. Bin missing since yesterday. ‘is mum’s reported it.” Her eyes took in the scattered police presence.
Darren nodded. Luke and the girl were mules. The punter called the dealer and they did the carrying. Less risk to the dealer. They were expendable, he wasn’t.
He parted with his earnings from Duane, palmed the tiny foil package.
On his way back to the squat, he began to plan his evening. Something to eat, then out again. Skelly needed to run, to stretch out those long legs of hers. And he needed to watch her go, to marvel at the power and speed.
After that, oblivion.
It was oppressively hot inside the incident room. Detective Sergeant Charlie Izzard’s shirt felt like it was glued to his skin, tight across his protruding gut and up under his arms. Izzard put it down to the computers, spewing out heat like a sauna.
He sucked hard on the end of his pencil. A placebo fag that did nothing to address the craving for the real thing. Give it ten and he’d slope out the back for a quick drag behind the rubbish skips.
He readjusted the crotch of his trousers, unpeeled the material stuck to his armpits. Luke Houghton. Izzard leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and stared thoughtfully at a patch of flaking paint on the ceiling.
Only child, mother separated, new boyfriend. It had a depressingly familiar ring to it. Voices, fists, anything else to hand raised in anger. A bludgeoned corpse on the living room carpet, disbelief followed by panic and a body dumped in a secluded spot, culminating in a tearful televised appeal with a bunch of hard-nosed coppers on the sidelines analysing body language, looking for chinks. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Except that Mark Gurney, the boyfriend, was a squaddie busy winning over hearts and minds for Queen and country out in Afghanistan, poor bastard, and forensics had been over the Houghton flat with a fine-tooth comb. Besides which, a search of Luke’s room had revealed over a hundred quid in accumulated paper round money stuffed in a trainer. Not something you’d leave behind if you were off on your travels.
So, either an accident or the poor little sod had run into the wrong sort of company.
Izzard noticed that the hand clutching the pencil was shaking. Christ, he needed that fag. As he made his way down the fire escape at the rear of the building, Izzard reminded himself that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t directly involved in the Houghton case. Didn’t stop him caring, though.
Duane was in a foul mood when Darren reached the workshop. Two of his punters hadn’t shown and he was short on work.
Darren shrugged his disappointment. No point in bitching. It wasn’t Duane’s fault and he still had just about enough to cover today’s score. He made for the park. Early September and it didn’t look as though the summer was ever going to end. Might as well make the most of it. He’d bell his supplier later.
Back at his desk, Izzard sniffed appreciatively at the satisfying aroma of nicotine on his fingers. The acrid taste of smoke was still in his mouth and he felt a whole lot better.
His mobile started ringing and he reached into his trouser pocket. Checking the caller ID, the hint of a smile passed across his face.
The call was short and to the point. A time, a place. Izzard said he’d be there and rang off.
Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he left the incident room at a brisk walk. He wondered what his man had for him this time. Too much to hope it’d be about young Luke.
Alone in his car, Izzard wound down the driver’s window and lit up, his nose wrinkling in disgust. Along with some very tasty product, his informant had left an unpleasant odour behind. Both needed actioning.
Inhaling deeply and blowing smoke towards the vacant passenger seat, Izzard reflected on the details. He saw it for what it was – a plain, old-fashioned grudge. The man that’d just been fingered had obviously pissed off his informant at some point. Now his man was getting his own back. Not that Izzard gave a stuff. One less dealer on the streets was a result in his book.
Finishing his cigarette, he called in for back-up. Where he was headed, you never went in without the cavalry.
Mid-afternoon and an exhausted Skelly lying on the pavement outside the phone booth, Darren made his call. No answer, which was strange because Darren knew his man was twenty-four/seven. A hint of concern twitched in his gut. Give it half an hour and he’d try again.
Three failed phone calls later and the concern had mutated into full-blown panic. As he trudged despairingly back to the squat, Darren Pinder was at his wit’s end.
He’d stopped yelling out ages ago, knew no one could hear him. Not down here. It had to be the middle of the night now because the machinery that drove the lifts had fallen silent. The chain bolted to the wall was chafing his ankles and he winced as he tried to make himself comfortable on the thin mattress that stank of piss and sweat and despair.
Darren Pinder was a in bad way. He couldn’t stop shaking, the sweat pouring off him, saturating the bedding. The only chink of clarity through a haze of pain was that he needed to get fixed up sooner rather than later. No way could he go through another night like the last one.
Not that he could remember much about it. He just about recalled getting back, feeding Skelly. Then the demons’d returned and he was out of it. As he drifted into sleep, he wondered why he was still fully dressed beneath the thin blanket.
Steve Wicks was knackered. A PC drafted in from out of area, he’d been at it more or less solid since first thing on Wednesday. Now, he leaned on the stick he was carrying and closed his eyes for a few seconds.
“Think of the overtime,” his mate Andy’d said.
Thinking about it was one thing, stopping his missus spending it was another matter entirely.
Last seen wearing baggy blue 501s and a replica Arsenal football shirt, according to the sergeant in the briefing. Wicks’d chipped in, “Probably buggered off ‘cos he couldn’t stand the shame.” Everyone knew Wicks was a Spurs supporter. And that’d kicked off the banter. Gallows humour, but it took the edge off things. None of them was overly keen on this type of work. Too shit-scared of what they might find.
It was all knotted undergrowth and thick brambles that snagged your overalls and ripped your hands like razor wire. Shopping trolleys, enough discarded white goods to stock a Comet warehouse, even a rusted motor or two, they’d unearthed the lot.
Planting his right foot forward, Wicks felt it hovering in thin air. Then he was down in the bottom of the ditch, face buried in damp earth and rotting vegetation. There was an appalling stench and Wicks gagged.
The ditch was no more than a couple of feet deep, masked from view by heavy undergrowth. Standing in the bottom, Wicks parted the canopy with his stick, bent low to peer into the gloom.
This time he lost the fight to keep his breakfast, retched once, then started yelling at the top of his voice.
The station was buzzing.
Izzard gleaned the news piecemeal as he cleared his desk. The AMIP team due any time soon were requisitioning real estate remotely and Izzard was one of the casualties.
Around the same age, but it wasn’t Luke Houghton, not unless he’d changed shirts. Besides, SOC reckoned the boy’d been there for anything between six and eight weeks, give or take at either end, long enough for the local wildlife to put the mockers on any kind of identification. They had a pretty clear idea as to cause of death, though, since what remained of a plastic bag still covered the head, fastened round the neck with Duck tape. Pathology was fast-tracking the post mortem.
Two kids – one dead, the other missing. Suddenly, the prognosis for young Luke wasn’t looking that special.
Izzard took it in his stride. A twenty-plus-year man and counting, he wore the T-shirt for most things he was likely to come across. Wore it? Christ, he bloody owned it! Traipsing down the corridor, clutching the files from his current caseload and other assorted oddments, he had three priorities. The first was to find a new home, then a quiet fag and a cup of tea in the canteen.
Finally, when he was good and ready, he intended to alternate between Cliff Richard and the Beast From Thirty Thousand Fathoms with the revolting piece of low-life he’d pulled the previous afternoon.
It was after midnight, into Saturday, that Darren Pinder finally collapsed on his bed, the craving that’d ravaged his body like a raging bush fire finally satisfied. He’d spent the best part of the evening huddled in a shop doorway opposite The Volunteer. Waiting. Somehow holding himself together and waiting, the chill of the night creeping into his bones.
It was the usual story – someone knew someone, who knew … Eventually, a tall man reeking of beer had emerged from the pub, crossed the street and cut the deal. Darren was in such a state by then that he couldn’t've identified the bloke in a month of Sundays. Just tall and boozed. Nor did he care that he’d paid over the odds.
Izzard struck early, before the prisoner in the cells was properly awake. A Full English and a mug of strong tea, followed by a couple of slow-drawn smokes that’d loosened the phlegm in his lungs, and Izzard was set up. Belching loudly, he sank into the chair, kick-started the tape machine and surveyed the man opposite him with a tired expression verging on disinterest.
Shaun Blundon’d been charged the night before and, courtesy of the impressive array and quantity of Class ‘A’ drugs stockpiled in his flat, was liable to go down for a long while. But Izzard wanted more. Blundon was a foot soldier, a guy who took the fall if things went pear-shaped, which they spectacularly had. Izzard was aiming higher up the food chain. And he had the ammunition. Once he’d dropped Luke Houghton’s name in passing and seen Blundon turn a funny colour, he’d realised immediately that the wad of cash in Luke’s trainer hadn’t come from any paper round.
Seeing no good reason to illuminate Blundon that the still unidentified body in the ditch wasn’t Luke, Izzard made his play. Dispatching the DC sitting in on the interview for three teas, Izzard lazily flipped off the tape machine, enjoying the wary look that entered Blundon’s eyes.
“A warm feeling came over me this morning when I thought of you, Shaun.”
“What? Pulling yerself off, were you?”
Izzard chuckled, wagged an admonishing finger. “I just knew you’d say that. No, I was imagining the look on your face when I charged you with the murder of Luke Houghton.”
Blundon’s face froze, jaw dropping open like a hangman’s trapdoor.
Izzard pointed. “That’s the one.”
Blundon’s response was barely audible, an asthmatic’s wheeze. “The kid in the ditch? Fuck’s sake, Mr Izzard, that’s not down to me.”
“He ran drugs for you. Maybe got lippy, greedy … I don’t know. You tell me.”
“No way. OK, he ran a few errands. That’s all. If someone topped him, it wasn’t me.”
And so it went on. Until Izzard cut to the chase.
Finger the man who paid his wages and Izzard would see what he could do to soften the landing of the ton of shit poised to fall from a great height on Blundon’s head. Otherwise …
Blundon knew exactly what Izzard meant. He’d been around long enough to be familiar with the expression ‘fitting up’.
“Think about it.” Producing a smile cold enough to freeze diesel, Izzard dismissed Blundon back to the cells.
Although Darren’s body was on shut-down, his mind was racing deep beneath the heavy blanket of drug-induced sleep. Violent images criss-crossed his sub-conscious like tyre tracks on a snow-covered highway. Visages etched with cruelty dissolved, reformed, morphing into sneering mug shots that brutalised with their eyes. And from the pit, a tiny voice quavered: “Why me?”
The preliminary post mortem report came through late in the afternoon. Izzard wasn’t the only one clocking up the overtime. Cause of death, asphyxiation. Which wasn’t a total surprise, given the presence of the plastic bag. What was, though, was evidence of systematic beating or torture inflicted before death.
Izzard flicked through a bootleg copy of the report. Right forearm fractured in two places, four cracked ribs and several broken fingers. Even more disturbing, there were signs consistent with anal penetration. Izzard’s mind was drawn like a magnet to the Houghton boy. His thoughts contained a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’.
Help me! Help me!
Sobbing his heart out, he scuffed at the tears streaming down his cheeks with the backs of his hands. His entire body was on fire, the pain spiralling upwards to his brain, limbs and torso throbbing out in agony. Then there was the shame. Shame at the terrible things that’d been done to him. But he knew he had to hang in there, cling onto hope. Because when that went, there’d be nothing left.
Darren Pinder jerked into consciousness. He hadn’t a clue where he was and, for a heart-stopping moment, he imagined he might be back inside, banged up at the mercy of … Then he felt the comforting warmth of Skelly, lying close, curled up in the crook of his arm, and the desperate images evaporated.
It was still dark outside and, squinting at his watch, Darren realised he’d been out of it for more than twenty-four hours.
Jesus! He leapt off the bed, his mind suddenly alert and focused. And, somewhere deep within the cellars of his soul, the slumbering beast stirred into wakefulness.
The man that really was in a cell hadn’t slept a wink. His limited options churning through his mind, Shaun Blundon’d come to the conclusion that, either way, he was up shit creek, not only without a paddle, but minus a bloody canoe as well.
He’d give Izzard a name, and an address for good measure, and pray to God that the Detective Sergeant was in a good enough mood to contrive a way of laying the blame elsewhere. Not that Blundon believed over much in the power of prayer.
Izzard surveyed the scene through a fog of cigarette smoke, shook his head in disbelief. A quiet street lined with semi-detached houses, all fronted by postage stamp gardens, side-by-side brick-paved driveways uniformly containing the family motor. Sunday morning communion with wine and wafer replaced by wax wash and sponge.
Trouble was, the congregation to a man had its eyes fixed on the pair of red-stripes and the police Transit gently rocking on its springs as a dozen eighteen-stone coppers shifted restlessly around inside. Not the covert approach he’d hoped for, Izzard conceded bitterly. If the target had any nous at all, he’d be halfway up the M1 by now.
Maybe not the M1, but he was certainly long gone when the front door sprang open under the frenzied attack from the metal ram, and the lumbering support team piled into the hallway. The general consensus, backed up by an observant neighbour, was that their man’d scarpered as soon as word of Blundon’s arrest’d reached him.
Worth every minute from the audience’s point of view, but a real pisser for Izzard.
Back at the station, Izzard heard the news from a woman DC with shot putter’s thighs on the AMIP team as they sucked smoke together round the back of the building.
Positive ID on the body, all down to a distinctive birthmark and a community relations WPC with a brain up in Manchester. Jamie Talbot, aged fourteen, and missing from home since April.
On a hunch, Izzard hauled Blundon out of his cell.
“Look, Mr Izzard, you’ve had the lot. There’s bugger all else to tell you.”
Izzard slouched in his chair, started nonchalantly picking his fingernails, refusing to make eye contact. “Jamie Talbot. He one of yours?”
He heard a long shuddering sigh.
“Was. Jamie moved on.”
“Moved on where?”
“I dunno. He just upped and left.”
“Suddenly?”
“Yea, as it happens. He was dossing down in one of the flats. Left his gear behind. Why?”
Setting himself up with a bacon roll the size of a small rocket launcher, Izzard delved into the computer records. The man, Blundon’s employer, had form like teenagers have acne. Demanding money with menaces, GBH , trafficking – it read like an encyclopaedia of crime.
Then Izzard spotted something that really made him sit up and take notice. Automatically reaching for his cigarettes, he remembered it was a no-smoking zone, then thought “sod it”. Eyes narrowed against the rising plume of smoke, he clicked on the report submitted by Social Services.
Nothing proven, so it hadn’t come to court, but a strong suspicion that the young son’d been subjected to systematic physical abuse over a lengthy period, resulting in the mother leaving home and the boy being taken into care. The lad’d been fourteen at the time.
Izzard searched for the name of the caseworker. Janet Stevens. He hoped Ms Stevens was an early bird because, first thing in the morning, he’d be beating a path to her door.
“Hey, man, you look like shit.” Duane was leaning nonchalantly on the roof of a white Vectra, head shaking. “You up to this work jive?”
Darren wasn’t, but he needed the money. “Bring it on.” Suppressing the jangling nerve ends rippling through his body, he forced a wan smile.
Duane looked uncertain but let it ride. “Timing’s out on this baby. She all yours.” He gave the Vectra’s bonnet an affectionate pat.
“And you, girl. You in charge.” Winking at Skelly, he slid in behind the wheel of a pick-up standing idling on the forecourt, gunned the engine and shot off down the street, radio thumping out high decibel bass beat.
Darren watched him go. He’d fix the Vectra, then slip out for an hour. Sunday’d been good to him. He’d run into the tall bloke from the pub. A midday meet and, with a bit of luck, he was sorted.
The over-effusive woman at reception directed Izzard to the third floor. Paying lip service to a non-existent fitness regime, he puffed his way up the stairs. He’d worked out long ago that the fags and crap diet’d probably do for him in the long run but, equally, he didn’t see himself as a muesli and pasta salad man. Clogged arteries it was, then. He reckoned Janet Stevens was in her mid- to late-thirties and, despite her almost arctic greeting, he found her attractive in a second-hand sort of way.
He flashed his warrant card, explained why he had reason to darken her door this early on a Monday morning and, five minutes later, they were cheek-to-cheek over plastic cups of insipid cappuccino from the machine and the six-year-old file laid out on the desk.
Fighting the twin urges to replace the file with Janet Stevens and indulge in a pre-coital cigarette, Izzard decided that the ciggy won by a short head. Waving the pack hopefully in front of her, he received a curt shake of the head, which would probably’ve encompassed the other urge had she been able to read his mind.
“How well do you remember the case?”
She gave it a moment’s thought. “Well enough. We got a call from the boy’s school. Two black eyes and, when he was examined later, a ribcage that looked like it’d been used as a punchbag.”
She fished through the sheaf of papers. “The doctor’s report puts it in less emotive language.”
Izzard smiled. He liked her no-nonsense attitude. “And?”
“Said he’d fallen down a flight of stairs. Same reason he’d given a few weeks previously when he’d turned up in class with a broken nose. That’s what finally persuaded the school to call us in.”
According to Stevens, the father was a real hard case and, in her view, quite capable of inflicting such savage injuries. However, both the boy and his mother were too petrified to speak out. Stand-off. Until the mother upped and left. Then Stevens’d been in there like a rat up a drainpipe and, in spite of the father’s protestations, the lad’d been taken into care.
Izzard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was dying for a fag and his close proximity to Janet Stevens was giving him the horn.
“What I’m really after is more background on the father.”
Stevens cocked her head on one side, appraising. If she was intrigued, she wasn’t about to show it. “Why don’t you speak to Bob Perryman? He was the local beat constable. There was no way I was going to lock horns with a bloke like George Pinder on my own.”
Izzard remembered vaguely that Perryman’d left the force a year earlier. A friendly face in Admin gave him a number in Barnstable.
“He’s away on a fishing trip and I’m not expecting him back until sometime tonight,” Mrs Perryman informed Izzard in a voice that suggested she wasn’t overly bothered if a shark got him.
Izzard wondered what the main attraction was, the fishing or maintaining a healthy distance between himself and his wife.
Izzard was fast asleep, feet on his desk, head lolling somewhere near his navel, when his mobile went off. Disorientated, he winced as he struggled to sit up, the images of Janet Stevens wearing nothing but a fluffy feather boa lost for ever. His neck hurt like hell and he massaged it with one hand, the other fumbling in his pocket for the phone. It was Perryman.
“Big George Pinder? Course I remember him. So would you if you’d met him. Nasty bastard. It was the kid I felt sorry for. No question Pinder used to do him over. Hardly surprising he turned out a wrong’un, poor sod. Got a three-stretch for nicking cars.”
It was like listening to a soccer commentary on the radio, Perryman revisiting the past in sound bites. Izzard let him ramble on until …
“Used to do what with him?” He was bolt upright now, the crick in his neck forgotten.
“I didn’t find out ’til later. They had a ground floor flat up on the council estate. It was round the back, in the basement. Where the machinery for the lifts was housed. Pinder used to lock the boy in, leave him there in the dark. Told you he was a nasty bastard. What’s this all about, anyway?”
Ten minutes later, Izzard was in the back of a squad car. The heavy-duty padlock securing the door didn’t stand a chance against the bolt croppers and they were in, the beam from a powerful flashlight lancing down the concrete steps into the blackness.The stench was appalling – heat and grease from the machinery mingled with human waste.
Luke Houghton was just about alive. His breathing was shallow, his eyes dulled with pain. They popped wide as Izzard and the uniforms drew near, the torch beam lighting up his misery, casting silhouettes on the wall behind.
“Easy, son. We’ll have you out of here in no time.” Izzard leaned closer. “Who did this to you?”
Then the paramedics were hurtling down the steps. The PC with the bolt croppers sliced through Luke’s chains and he was on a stretcher and away before Izzard could put his question again.
At the hospital, Izzard sat nursing his second cup of foul coffee that day, digesting the fact that Luke was severely traumatised and in no fit state to be interviewed until the morning. Maybe not even then.
Meanwhile, George Pinder, who used to brutalise his own son and who had links with Luke Houghton and Jamie Talbot, was on the loose. And Izzard wanted him badly.
He’d seen enough. As he moved deeper into the shadows, away from the flats and the arc lights and the men in white coveralls, he wondered how they’d found the kid. Not that it mattered now.
Izzard’d given up on the hospital. Young Luke was still out of it, heavily sedated, and no one could say when he’d be in a fit state to be interviewed. Instead, he turned his attention to George Pinder’s son. If what Perryman’d told him was true, the lad had a criminal record. Sure enough, there it was. Darren Pinder.
As he clicked on the details, he couldn’t shake the belief that Darren’s future’d been shaped for him as a direct result of his father’s brutality. In short, he’d come off the rails bigtime, the three-year sentence in a hardcore jail the inevitable result of a youngster lost and out of control.
Izzard needed to know more. Mixing with the criminal fraternity was part and parcel of the job and it didn’t take long to dig out a name.
Cruising the streets, Izzard spotted his quarry exiting the Social Security office, riffling through a wad of cash. The permanently worried look on Jacko Newman’s podgy features went into overdrive as Izzard braked to a halt at the kerb, threw open the passenger door invitingly.
“I ain’t done nuffing, Mr Izzard! Honest!”
Izzard grinned malevolently. “I’m not interested, Jacko. It’s your grey matter I want to access.”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. Darren Pinder. You were banged up with him. What can you tell me?”
Ten minutes after Jacko’d gratefully legged it up the street like his backside was on fire, Izzard was still sitting there, barely moving a muscle, the revulsion rising in him like a flash-flood.
On his way back to the station, Izzard’s phone went. As the Yanks say, the solids’d come into violent contact with the air-conditioning. There was a sighting on George Pinder and the boys in blue were closing in.
“Trilby hat and a long dark trench coat,” the uniformed chief inspector at the scene informed Izzard. “Bloody market day and the place is heaving.”
“You’ve lost him.”
“Temporarily, yes. He’s in the mix somewhere.”
Jostling his way into the crowds, Izzard worked the pavement, eyes flitting amongst the stalls that stretched the length of the street. Plain clothes had the area covered and he spotted several faces from the AMIP team standing out like tarts at a vicarage tea party.
Perhaps it was his lucky day because he made the trilby and trench coat inside five minutes. He also clocked the switch taking place in a side street. He wondered how Pinder’d played it. A couple of crisp twenties and a plausible line? Whatever, the mark was in for a nasty shock when he was bundled to the ground by a couple of hefty coppers leaping all over his back.
Not Izzard’s problem. Keeping his distance, he tracked Pinder, now minus hat and topcoat, to the tube station. As he ducked below street level, he heard the commotion behind him and grinned.
Afterwards, Izzard couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t nab Pinder then and there. Curiosity was his best guess.
Pinder was a pro, which meant he switched trains at such short notice that it left Izzard’s head spinning.
Kentish Town and he had Pinder in sight in the next carriage. Tufnell Park, Archway, Highgate. Pinder appeared more relaxed now, his feverish de-training seemingly at an end.
When Pinder stayed put at East Finchley, Izzard decided to get in close, forcing his body through the doors as they were about to close, huffing and puffing like he’d only just made it. Flopping into the seat opposite Pinder, he glanced at his watch. 2.15. He’d had enough. Time to stop pissing about. He’d haul Pinder’s sorry arse off the train at the next stop, Finchley Central.
The moment the train’d lurched out of the station, he stood up, tapped Pinder on the knee and smiled his shark’s smile. Pinder looked up, frowning. He stared first at the warrant card held loosely in Izzard’s left hand, then at the leather-covered blackjack clenched in his right.
“George Pinder, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder …” Izzard trotted out the caution, watched Pinder’s jaw drop to somewhere near his navel.
Pinder focused on the cosh for a moment. Hardly standard issue, but the steely look in Izzard’s eyes told him the detective’d enjoy using it. He shook his head sadly.
“You stupid muppet. You honestly think I did for those kids? What, crap on my own doorstep when I had a good thing going?”
The blinding flash hit a millisecond before the deafening roar of the explosion. At least, Izzard thought it did. Then he was being whirled round in a cement mixer, a crescendo of screams and screeching metal battering his eardrums. A massive jerk as the driver slammed on the brakes, and he was catapulted down the carriage, a human pinball bouncing off seats and people.
Jammed up against the doors, the stuffing knocked out of him, he forced his eyes open. Darkness and an eerie stillness, punctuated by the plaintive cries of the injured.
Through the pain and the dust and the stench of death, a sudden clarity filled Izzard’s mind, Jacko Newman’s words coming back to him out of the fog.
No, George, you didn’t do it. Because it wasn’t you that was brutalised as a kid and buggered half to death in some godawful jail.
South of the river, in a shop doorway, the youth shifted in his sleeping bag, peered up at the skinny young man with the dog at his side.
The young man smiled down awkwardly. “I’m Darren. What’s your name?”
Geoff
The Funfair
Seven Days
He travelled alone to the funfair
His instincts honed sharp as a knife
He could always rely on the funfair
To provide for his mission in life
He spotted his prey at the funfair
She was standing apart from the rest
He liked what he saw at the funfair
It reminded him what he did best
He chatted her up at the funfair
A seduction scene straight out the book
She fell for his line at the funfair
Took the bait and swallowed the hook
They left hand in hand from the funfair
She was dreaming of love and romance
If only she’d sussed at the funfair
That she was his victim of chance
He drove home alone from the funfair
Adrenalin flooding his brain
And nobody knew at the funfair
That soon he would do it again
Back to top
Wednesday
Get out! Come on, man! You gotta get out!
Fumbling for the door catch. Something sticky in his eyes. Blood! The pounding in his head like it’d been split open with an axe.
Senses dulled by … The pungent smell of hash in his nostrils, the inside of the Porsche thick with it. And something else.
Jesus Christ! Gotta get out!
Hands flapping uselessly like the wings of a stricken bird at the licks of flame nipping at his legs. Panic!
Help me! For fuck’s sake, help me!
Then the door was open and he was thrashing about on the ground. Arms and legs working overtime, scrabbling clear.
The fierce whump! as the fuel lines caught and the petrol tank went up, heat scalding his face. Still thrashing, beating at his smouldering jeans.
Darren Pinder’s eyes shot open. The bed was a mess and he was drenched in sweat. The same dream. He gently fingered the puckered scar tissue above his left eye. Proof that it’d really happened. Living proof, actually, that there was no turning back the clock, that the other scars, the ones he couldn’t touch and which would never heal, were equally real.
“‘s alright, girl.”
Skelly was crouched on the floor, thin body quivering, eyes wide with fear. Darren stretched out a hand, fondled her head.
“Come ‘ere.”
Back on the bed, Skelly arched into the curve of his body. They lay watching the dawn come up, the first hazy rays of light probing at the grime-smeared glass, while Darren sniffed back the tears as the misery took hold of him, sobbed his anguish for what had been taken from him.
The squat was midway along a terrace of jerry-built sixties dwellings, boarded up and empty, waiting in drab silence for the contractors to turn up and flatten them. Fresh out of nick and restored to his old stamping ground, Darren’d chanced on them three months earlier. On a tour of inspection, he’d come across a drooping figure moping in one of the bedrooms. Whether she’d been dumped or her owners moved away, he didn’t know. He’d fed her up, brought her back to health, lavished what love he had left to give on her.
They left via the back door and slipped through a gap in the fence at the bottom of the tangled mass of vegetation that had once been a garden.
Cutting through the council estate, Darren couldn’t help but notice the brace of red-stripes and the anonymous white Transit parked outside the main block of flats. Drugs raid, he reckoned. He imagined heavy boots pounding up the concrete stairwell, doors stoved in, flats ransacked. They might get lucky, but he doubted it. Soon as they’d gone it’d be business as usual.
He passed a group of youths kicking a football around on a patch of waste ground. At their age, he’d been out nicking cars, turning a tidy profit. And a shitload of trouble it’d got him into. Fragments of the dream flickered in his head – afterwards, in the hospital ward, policemen round his bed, then the three-stretch. He shut it off there, couldn’t face the rest.
“Oi, mate. What’s a nice dog like that doing with an ugly sod like you?” One of the youths called out to him. The group dissolved into raucous laughter.
Darren felt the tremors welling up red-hot inside him, bubbling close to the surface. They’d taught him how to handle it in prison, after the nonces and hardmen’d finished with him. Lowering his head, he quickened his pace, away from the danger zone.
Duane had already opened up when he arrived at the workshop, a radio blaring out an R and B number from inside. A Mondeo with mock leopard skin seat covers and no hubcaps stood half-mounted on the pavement, nosed up to the rear-end of a rust-ridden Corsa.
Duane grinned a mouthful of Daz-white teeth. “Mornin’, ma man.” He bent down to stroke Skelly’s head. “You puttin’ on weight, girl.”
Darren tentatively asked the question. Any work?
Duane jerked a thumb at the open workshop door. “Subaru. Up on the ramp. She all yours, man.”
Darren’s brow arched. “What’s the problem?”
Duane was already climbing into the Corsa. “Fuck do I know? You the mechanic.”
It was an arrangement that suited the pair of them – Duane, because it helped him out of a bind when he had more cars than he could manage on his own, and it put a few quid in Darren’s pocket.
When he’d pitched up one day looking for work, Duane’d listened then given him the steely eye. “Sure, I could use some of that expertise you have with motors. But on the right side of the law. You hear what I’m saying?”
Shrugging into a set of oil-stained overalls, he started checking out the Subaru.
By mid-afternoon, he’d done for the day. Duane slipped him a few notes, told him that Thursday and Friday both looked good. He stopped off at a phone booth to make a call, then spent half an hour killing time over a pint of lager in a spit-and-sawdust dive off the high street.
He retraced his steps through the council estate. The red-stripes had gone but there were several uniforms dotted about and, in the distance, he spotted a posse in dark overalls, line abreast, scouring a large area of open ground. Avoiding them, he headed for the hump of a skateboard ramp standing on a patch of concrete littered with empty vodka bottles and discarded syringes. A girl in her early teens was leaning nonchalantly against one of the supports. She held out her hand. He knew the rules – cash first, then the goods.
“Where’s Luke?”
The girl shrugged like she couldn’t care less. “Fuck knows, but he ain’t around. Bin missing since yesterday. ‘is mum’s reported it.” Her eyes took in the scattered police presence.
Darren nodded. Luke and the girl were mules. The punter called the dealer and they did the carrying. Less risk to the dealer. They were expendable, he wasn’t.
He parted with his earnings from Duane, palmed the tiny foil package.
On his way back to the squat, he began to plan his evening. Something to eat, then out again. Skelly needed to run, to stretch out those long legs of hers. And he needed to watch her go, to marvel at the power and speed.
After that, oblivion.
Back to top
Thursday
It was oppressively hot inside the incident room. Detective Sergeant Charlie Izzard’s shirt felt like it was glued to his skin, tight across his protruding gut and up under his arms. Izzard put it down to the computers, spewing out heat like a sauna.
He sucked hard on the end of his pencil. A placebo fag that did nothing to address the craving for the real thing. Give it ten and he’d slope out the back for a quick drag behind the rubbish skips.
He readjusted the crotch of his trousers, unpeeled the material stuck to his armpits. Luke Houghton. Izzard leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and stared thoughtfully at a patch of flaking paint on the ceiling.
Only child, mother separated, new boyfriend. It had a depressingly familiar ring to it. Voices, fists, anything else to hand raised in anger. A bludgeoned corpse on the living room carpet, disbelief followed by panic and a body dumped in a secluded spot, culminating in a tearful televised appeal with a bunch of hard-nosed coppers on the sidelines analysing body language, looking for chinks. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Except that Mark Gurney, the boyfriend, was a squaddie busy winning over hearts and minds for Queen and country out in Afghanistan, poor bastard, and forensics had been over the Houghton flat with a fine-tooth comb. Besides which, a search of Luke’s room had revealed over a hundred quid in accumulated paper round money stuffed in a trainer. Not something you’d leave behind if you were off on your travels.
So, either an accident or the poor little sod had run into the wrong sort of company.
Izzard noticed that the hand clutching the pencil was shaking. Christ, he needed that fag. As he made his way down the fire escape at the rear of the building, Izzard reminded himself that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t directly involved in the Houghton case. Didn’t stop him caring, though.
Duane was in a foul mood when Darren reached the workshop. Two of his punters hadn’t shown and he was short on work.
Darren shrugged his disappointment. No point in bitching. It wasn’t Duane’s fault and he still had just about enough to cover today’s score. He made for the park. Early September and it didn’t look as though the summer was ever going to end. Might as well make the most of it. He’d bell his supplier later.
Back at his desk, Izzard sniffed appreciatively at the satisfying aroma of nicotine on his fingers. The acrid taste of smoke was still in his mouth and he felt a whole lot better.
His mobile started ringing and he reached into his trouser pocket. Checking the caller ID, the hint of a smile passed across his face.
The call was short and to the point. A time, a place. Izzard said he’d be there and rang off.
Slinging his jacket over his shoulder, he left the incident room at a brisk walk. He wondered what his man had for him this time. Too much to hope it’d be about young Luke.
Alone in his car, Izzard wound down the driver’s window and lit up, his nose wrinkling in disgust. Along with some very tasty product, his informant had left an unpleasant odour behind. Both needed actioning.
Inhaling deeply and blowing smoke towards the vacant passenger seat, Izzard reflected on the details. He saw it for what it was – a plain, old-fashioned grudge. The man that’d just been fingered had obviously pissed off his informant at some point. Now his man was getting his own back. Not that Izzard gave a stuff. One less dealer on the streets was a result in his book.
Finishing his cigarette, he called in for back-up. Where he was headed, you never went in without the cavalry.
Mid-afternoon and an exhausted Skelly lying on the pavement outside the phone booth, Darren made his call. No answer, which was strange because Darren knew his man was twenty-four/seven. A hint of concern twitched in his gut. Give it half an hour and he’d try again.
Three failed phone calls later and the concern had mutated into full-blown panic. As he trudged despairingly back to the squat, Darren Pinder was at his wit’s end.
He’d stopped yelling out ages ago, knew no one could hear him. Not down here. It had to be the middle of the night now because the machinery that drove the lifts had fallen silent. The chain bolted to the wall was chafing his ankles and he winced as he tried to make himself comfortable on the thin mattress that stank of piss and sweat and despair.
Back to top
Friday
Darren Pinder was a in bad way. He couldn’t stop shaking, the sweat pouring off him, saturating the bedding. The only chink of clarity through a haze of pain was that he needed to get fixed up sooner rather than later. No way could he go through another night like the last one.
Not that he could remember much about it. He just about recalled getting back, feeding Skelly. Then the demons’d returned and he was out of it. As he drifted into sleep, he wondered why he was still fully dressed beneath the thin blanket.
Steve Wicks was knackered. A PC drafted in from out of area, he’d been at it more or less solid since first thing on Wednesday. Now, he leaned on the stick he was carrying and closed his eyes for a few seconds.
“Think of the overtime,” his mate Andy’d said.
Thinking about it was one thing, stopping his missus spending it was another matter entirely.
Last seen wearing baggy blue 501s and a replica Arsenal football shirt, according to the sergeant in the briefing. Wicks’d chipped in, “Probably buggered off ‘cos he couldn’t stand the shame.” Everyone knew Wicks was a Spurs supporter. And that’d kicked off the banter. Gallows humour, but it took the edge off things. None of them was overly keen on this type of work. Too shit-scared of what they might find.
It was all knotted undergrowth and thick brambles that snagged your overalls and ripped your hands like razor wire. Shopping trolleys, enough discarded white goods to stock a Comet warehouse, even a rusted motor or two, they’d unearthed the lot.
Planting his right foot forward, Wicks felt it hovering in thin air. Then he was down in the bottom of the ditch, face buried in damp earth and rotting vegetation. There was an appalling stench and Wicks gagged.
The ditch was no more than a couple of feet deep, masked from view by heavy undergrowth. Standing in the bottom, Wicks parted the canopy with his stick, bent low to peer into the gloom.
This time he lost the fight to keep his breakfast, retched once, then started yelling at the top of his voice.
The station was buzzing.
Izzard gleaned the news piecemeal as he cleared his desk. The AMIP team due any time soon were requisitioning real estate remotely and Izzard was one of the casualties.
Around the same age, but it wasn’t Luke Houghton, not unless he’d changed shirts. Besides, SOC reckoned the boy’d been there for anything between six and eight weeks, give or take at either end, long enough for the local wildlife to put the mockers on any kind of identification. They had a pretty clear idea as to cause of death, though, since what remained of a plastic bag still covered the head, fastened round the neck with Duck tape. Pathology was fast-tracking the post mortem.
Two kids – one dead, the other missing. Suddenly, the prognosis for young Luke wasn’t looking that special.
Izzard took it in his stride. A twenty-plus-year man and counting, he wore the T-shirt for most things he was likely to come across. Wore it? Christ, he bloody owned it! Traipsing down the corridor, clutching the files from his current caseload and other assorted oddments, he had three priorities. The first was to find a new home, then a quiet fag and a cup of tea in the canteen.
Finally, when he was good and ready, he intended to alternate between Cliff Richard and the Beast From Thirty Thousand Fathoms with the revolting piece of low-life he’d pulled the previous afternoon.
Back to top
Saturday
It was after midnight, into Saturday, that Darren Pinder finally collapsed on his bed, the craving that’d ravaged his body like a raging bush fire finally satisfied. He’d spent the best part of the evening huddled in a shop doorway opposite The Volunteer. Waiting. Somehow holding himself together and waiting, the chill of the night creeping into his bones.
It was the usual story – someone knew someone, who knew … Eventually, a tall man reeking of beer had emerged from the pub, crossed the street and cut the deal. Darren was in such a state by then that he couldn’t've identified the bloke in a month of Sundays. Just tall and boozed. Nor did he care that he’d paid over the odds.
Izzard struck early, before the prisoner in the cells was properly awake. A Full English and a mug of strong tea, followed by a couple of slow-drawn smokes that’d loosened the phlegm in his lungs, and Izzard was set up. Belching loudly, he sank into the chair, kick-started the tape machine and surveyed the man opposite him with a tired expression verging on disinterest.
Shaun Blundon’d been charged the night before and, courtesy of the impressive array and quantity of Class ‘A’ drugs stockpiled in his flat, was liable to go down for a long while. But Izzard wanted more. Blundon was a foot soldier, a guy who took the fall if things went pear-shaped, which they spectacularly had. Izzard was aiming higher up the food chain. And he had the ammunition. Once he’d dropped Luke Houghton’s name in passing and seen Blundon turn a funny colour, he’d realised immediately that the wad of cash in Luke’s trainer hadn’t come from any paper round.
Seeing no good reason to illuminate Blundon that the still unidentified body in the ditch wasn’t Luke, Izzard made his play. Dispatching the DC sitting in on the interview for three teas, Izzard lazily flipped off the tape machine, enjoying the wary look that entered Blundon’s eyes.
“A warm feeling came over me this morning when I thought of you, Shaun.”
“What? Pulling yerself off, were you?”
Izzard chuckled, wagged an admonishing finger. “I just knew you’d say that. No, I was imagining the look on your face when I charged you with the murder of Luke Houghton.”
Blundon’s face froze, jaw dropping open like a hangman’s trapdoor.
Izzard pointed. “That’s the one.”
Blundon’s response was barely audible, an asthmatic’s wheeze. “The kid in the ditch? Fuck’s sake, Mr Izzard, that’s not down to me.”
“He ran drugs for you. Maybe got lippy, greedy … I don’t know. You tell me.”
“No way. OK, he ran a few errands. That’s all. If someone topped him, it wasn’t me.”
And so it went on. Until Izzard cut to the chase.
Finger the man who paid his wages and Izzard would see what he could do to soften the landing of the ton of shit poised to fall from a great height on Blundon’s head. Otherwise …
Blundon knew exactly what Izzard meant. He’d been around long enough to be familiar with the expression ‘fitting up’.
“Think about it.” Producing a smile cold enough to freeze diesel, Izzard dismissed Blundon back to the cells.
Although Darren’s body was on shut-down, his mind was racing deep beneath the heavy blanket of drug-induced sleep. Violent images criss-crossed his sub-conscious like tyre tracks on a snow-covered highway. Visages etched with cruelty dissolved, reformed, morphing into sneering mug shots that brutalised with their eyes. And from the pit, a tiny voice quavered: “Why me?”
The preliminary post mortem report came through late in the afternoon. Izzard wasn’t the only one clocking up the overtime. Cause of death, asphyxiation. Which wasn’t a total surprise, given the presence of the plastic bag. What was, though, was evidence of systematic beating or torture inflicted before death.
Izzard flicked through a bootleg copy of the report. Right forearm fractured in two places, four cracked ribs and several broken fingers. Even more disturbing, there were signs consistent with anal penetration. Izzard’s mind was drawn like a magnet to the Houghton boy. His thoughts contained a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’.
Help me! Help me!
Sobbing his heart out, he scuffed at the tears streaming down his cheeks with the backs of his hands. His entire body was on fire, the pain spiralling upwards to his brain, limbs and torso throbbing out in agony. Then there was the shame. Shame at the terrible things that’d been done to him. But he knew he had to hang in there, cling onto hope. Because when that went, there’d be nothing left.
Back to top
Sunday
Darren Pinder jerked into consciousness. He hadn’t a clue where he was and, for a heart-stopping moment, he imagined he might be back inside, banged up at the mercy of … Then he felt the comforting warmth of Skelly, lying close, curled up in the crook of his arm, and the desperate images evaporated.
It was still dark outside and, squinting at his watch, Darren realised he’d been out of it for more than twenty-four hours.
Jesus! He leapt off the bed, his mind suddenly alert and focused. And, somewhere deep within the cellars of his soul, the slumbering beast stirred into wakefulness.
The man that really was in a cell hadn’t slept a wink. His limited options churning through his mind, Shaun Blundon’d come to the conclusion that, either way, he was up shit creek, not only without a paddle, but minus a bloody canoe as well.
He’d give Izzard a name, and an address for good measure, and pray to God that the Detective Sergeant was in a good enough mood to contrive a way of laying the blame elsewhere. Not that Blundon believed over much in the power of prayer.
Izzard surveyed the scene through a fog of cigarette smoke, shook his head in disbelief. A quiet street lined with semi-detached houses, all fronted by postage stamp gardens, side-by-side brick-paved driveways uniformly containing the family motor. Sunday morning communion with wine and wafer replaced by wax wash and sponge.
Trouble was, the congregation to a man had its eyes fixed on the pair of red-stripes and the police Transit gently rocking on its springs as a dozen eighteen-stone coppers shifted restlessly around inside. Not the covert approach he’d hoped for, Izzard conceded bitterly. If the target had any nous at all, he’d be halfway up the M1 by now.
Maybe not the M1, but he was certainly long gone when the front door sprang open under the frenzied attack from the metal ram, and the lumbering support team piled into the hallway. The general consensus, backed up by an observant neighbour, was that their man’d scarpered as soon as word of Blundon’s arrest’d reached him.
Worth every minute from the audience’s point of view, but a real pisser for Izzard.
Back at the station, Izzard heard the news from a woman DC with shot putter’s thighs on the AMIP team as they sucked smoke together round the back of the building.
Positive ID on the body, all down to a distinctive birthmark and a community relations WPC with a brain up in Manchester. Jamie Talbot, aged fourteen, and missing from home since April.
On a hunch, Izzard hauled Blundon out of his cell.
“Look, Mr Izzard, you’ve had the lot. There’s bugger all else to tell you.”
Izzard slouched in his chair, started nonchalantly picking his fingernails, refusing to make eye contact. “Jamie Talbot. He one of yours?”
He heard a long shuddering sigh.
“Was. Jamie moved on.”
“Moved on where?”
“I dunno. He just upped and left.”
“Suddenly?”
“Yea, as it happens. He was dossing down in one of the flats. Left his gear behind. Why?”
Setting himself up with a bacon roll the size of a small rocket launcher, Izzard delved into the computer records. The man, Blundon’s employer, had form like teenagers have acne. Demanding money with menaces, GBH , trafficking – it read like an encyclopaedia of crime.
Then Izzard spotted something that really made him sit up and take notice. Automatically reaching for his cigarettes, he remembered it was a no-smoking zone, then thought “sod it”. Eyes narrowed against the rising plume of smoke, he clicked on the report submitted by Social Services.
Nothing proven, so it hadn’t come to court, but a strong suspicion that the young son’d been subjected to systematic physical abuse over a lengthy period, resulting in the mother leaving home and the boy being taken into care. The lad’d been fourteen at the time.
Izzard searched for the name of the caseworker. Janet Stevens. He hoped Ms Stevens was an early bird because, first thing in the morning, he’d be beating a path to her door.
Back to top
Monday
“Hey, man, you look like shit.” Duane was leaning nonchalantly on the roof of a white Vectra, head shaking. “You up to this work jive?”
Darren wasn’t, but he needed the money. “Bring it on.” Suppressing the jangling nerve ends rippling through his body, he forced a wan smile.
Duane looked uncertain but let it ride. “Timing’s out on this baby. She all yours.” He gave the Vectra’s bonnet an affectionate pat.
“And you, girl. You in charge.” Winking at Skelly, he slid in behind the wheel of a pick-up standing idling on the forecourt, gunned the engine and shot off down the street, radio thumping out high decibel bass beat.
Darren watched him go. He’d fix the Vectra, then slip out for an hour. Sunday’d been good to him. He’d run into the tall bloke from the pub. A midday meet and, with a bit of luck, he was sorted.
The over-effusive woman at reception directed Izzard to the third floor. Paying lip service to a non-existent fitness regime, he puffed his way up the stairs. He’d worked out long ago that the fags and crap diet’d probably do for him in the long run but, equally, he didn’t see himself as a muesli and pasta salad man. Clogged arteries it was, then. He reckoned Janet Stevens was in her mid- to late-thirties and, despite her almost arctic greeting, he found her attractive in a second-hand sort of way.
He flashed his warrant card, explained why he had reason to darken her door this early on a Monday morning and, five minutes later, they were cheek-to-cheek over plastic cups of insipid cappuccino from the machine and the six-year-old file laid out on the desk.
Fighting the twin urges to replace the file with Janet Stevens and indulge in a pre-coital cigarette, Izzard decided that the ciggy won by a short head. Waving the pack hopefully in front of her, he received a curt shake of the head, which would probably’ve encompassed the other urge had she been able to read his mind.
“How well do you remember the case?”
She gave it a moment’s thought. “Well enough. We got a call from the boy’s school. Two black eyes and, when he was examined later, a ribcage that looked like it’d been used as a punchbag.”
She fished through the sheaf of papers. “The doctor’s report puts it in less emotive language.”
Izzard smiled. He liked her no-nonsense attitude. “And?”
“Said he’d fallen down a flight of stairs. Same reason he’d given a few weeks previously when he’d turned up in class with a broken nose. That’s what finally persuaded the school to call us in.”
According to Stevens, the father was a real hard case and, in her view, quite capable of inflicting such savage injuries. However, both the boy and his mother were too petrified to speak out. Stand-off. Until the mother upped and left. Then Stevens’d been in there like a rat up a drainpipe and, in spite of the father’s protestations, the lad’d been taken into care.
Izzard shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He was dying for a fag and his close proximity to Janet Stevens was giving him the horn.
“What I’m really after is more background on the father.”
Stevens cocked her head on one side, appraising. If she was intrigued, she wasn’t about to show it. “Why don’t you speak to Bob Perryman? He was the local beat constable. There was no way I was going to lock horns with a bloke like George Pinder on my own.”
Izzard remembered vaguely that Perryman’d left the force a year earlier. A friendly face in Admin gave him a number in Barnstable.
“He’s away on a fishing trip and I’m not expecting him back until sometime tonight,” Mrs Perryman informed Izzard in a voice that suggested she wasn’t overly bothered if a shark got him.
Izzard wondered what the main attraction was, the fishing or maintaining a healthy distance between himself and his wife.
Izzard was fast asleep, feet on his desk, head lolling somewhere near his navel, when his mobile went off. Disorientated, he winced as he struggled to sit up, the images of Janet Stevens wearing nothing but a fluffy feather boa lost for ever. His neck hurt like hell and he massaged it with one hand, the other fumbling in his pocket for the phone. It was Perryman.
“Big George Pinder? Course I remember him. So would you if you’d met him. Nasty bastard. It was the kid I felt sorry for. No question Pinder used to do him over. Hardly surprising he turned out a wrong’un, poor sod. Got a three-stretch for nicking cars.”
It was like listening to a soccer commentary on the radio, Perryman revisiting the past in sound bites. Izzard let him ramble on until …
“Used to do what with him?” He was bolt upright now, the crick in his neck forgotten.
“I didn’t find out ’til later. They had a ground floor flat up on the council estate. It was round the back, in the basement. Where the machinery for the lifts was housed. Pinder used to lock the boy in, leave him there in the dark. Told you he was a nasty bastard. What’s this all about, anyway?”
Ten minutes later, Izzard was in the back of a squad car. The heavy-duty padlock securing the door didn’t stand a chance against the bolt croppers and they were in, the beam from a powerful flashlight lancing down the concrete steps into the blackness.The stench was appalling – heat and grease from the machinery mingled with human waste.
Luke Houghton was just about alive. His breathing was shallow, his eyes dulled with pain. They popped wide as Izzard and the uniforms drew near, the torch beam lighting up his misery, casting silhouettes on the wall behind.
“Easy, son. We’ll have you out of here in no time.” Izzard leaned closer. “Who did this to you?”
Then the paramedics were hurtling down the steps. The PC with the bolt croppers sliced through Luke’s chains and he was on a stretcher and away before Izzard could put his question again.
At the hospital, Izzard sat nursing his second cup of foul coffee that day, digesting the fact that Luke was severely traumatised and in no fit state to be interviewed until the morning. Maybe not even then.
Meanwhile, George Pinder, who used to brutalise his own son and who had links with Luke Houghton and Jamie Talbot, was on the loose. And Izzard wanted him badly.
Back to top
Tuesday
He’d seen enough. As he moved deeper into the shadows, away from the flats and the arc lights and the men in white coveralls, he wondered how they’d found the kid. Not that it mattered now.
Izzard’d given up on the hospital. Young Luke was still out of it, heavily sedated, and no one could say when he’d be in a fit state to be interviewed. Instead, he turned his attention to George Pinder’s son. If what Perryman’d told him was true, the lad had a criminal record. Sure enough, there it was. Darren Pinder.
As he clicked on the details, he couldn’t shake the belief that Darren’s future’d been shaped for him as a direct result of his father’s brutality. In short, he’d come off the rails bigtime, the three-year sentence in a hardcore jail the inevitable result of a youngster lost and out of control.
Izzard needed to know more. Mixing with the criminal fraternity was part and parcel of the job and it didn’t take long to dig out a name.
Cruising the streets, Izzard spotted his quarry exiting the Social Security office, riffling through a wad of cash. The permanently worried look on Jacko Newman’s podgy features went into overdrive as Izzard braked to a halt at the kerb, threw open the passenger door invitingly.
“I ain’t done nuffing, Mr Izzard! Honest!”
Izzard grinned malevolently. “I’m not interested, Jacko. It’s your grey matter I want to access.”
“Eh?”
“Never mind. Darren Pinder. You were banged up with him. What can you tell me?”
Ten minutes after Jacko’d gratefully legged it up the street like his backside was on fire, Izzard was still sitting there, barely moving a muscle, the revulsion rising in him like a flash-flood.
On his way back to the station, Izzard’s phone went. As the Yanks say, the solids’d come into violent contact with the air-conditioning. There was a sighting on George Pinder and the boys in blue were closing in.
“Trilby hat and a long dark trench coat,” the uniformed chief inspector at the scene informed Izzard. “Bloody market day and the place is heaving.”
“You’ve lost him.”
“Temporarily, yes. He’s in the mix somewhere.”
Jostling his way into the crowds, Izzard worked the pavement, eyes flitting amongst the stalls that stretched the length of the street. Plain clothes had the area covered and he spotted several faces from the AMIP team standing out like tarts at a vicarage tea party.
Perhaps it was his lucky day because he made the trilby and trench coat inside five minutes. He also clocked the switch taking place in a side street. He wondered how Pinder’d played it. A couple of crisp twenties and a plausible line? Whatever, the mark was in for a nasty shock when he was bundled to the ground by a couple of hefty coppers leaping all over his back.
Not Izzard’s problem. Keeping his distance, he tracked Pinder, now minus hat and topcoat, to the tube station. As he ducked below street level, he heard the commotion behind him and grinned.
Afterwards, Izzard couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t nab Pinder then and there. Curiosity was his best guess.
Pinder was a pro, which meant he switched trains at such short notice that it left Izzard’s head spinning.
Kentish Town and he had Pinder in sight in the next carriage. Tufnell Park, Archway, Highgate. Pinder appeared more relaxed now, his feverish de-training seemingly at an end.
When Pinder stayed put at East Finchley, Izzard decided to get in close, forcing his body through the doors as they were about to close, huffing and puffing like he’d only just made it. Flopping into the seat opposite Pinder, he glanced at his watch. 2.15. He’d had enough. Time to stop pissing about. He’d haul Pinder’s sorry arse off the train at the next stop, Finchley Central.
The moment the train’d lurched out of the station, he stood up, tapped Pinder on the knee and smiled his shark’s smile. Pinder looked up, frowning. He stared first at the warrant card held loosely in Izzard’s left hand, then at the leather-covered blackjack clenched in his right.
“George Pinder, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder …” Izzard trotted out the caution, watched Pinder’s jaw drop to somewhere near his navel.
Pinder focused on the cosh for a moment. Hardly standard issue, but the steely look in Izzard’s eyes told him the detective’d enjoy using it. He shook his head sadly.
“You stupid muppet. You honestly think I did for those kids? What, crap on my own doorstep when I had a good thing going?”
The blinding flash hit a millisecond before the deafening roar of the explosion. At least, Izzard thought it did. Then he was being whirled round in a cement mixer, a crescendo of screams and screeching metal battering his eardrums. A massive jerk as the driver slammed on the brakes, and he was catapulted down the carriage, a human pinball bouncing off seats and people.
Jammed up against the doors, the stuffing knocked out of him, he forced his eyes open. Darkness and an eerie stillness, punctuated by the plaintive cries of the injured.
Through the pain and the dust and the stench of death, a sudden clarity filled Izzard’s mind, Jacko Newman’s words coming back to him out of the fog.
No, George, you didn’t do it. Because it wasn’t you that was brutalised as a kid and buggered half to death in some godawful jail.
South of the river, in a shop doorway, the youth shifted in his sleeping bag, peered up at the skinny young man with the dog at his side.
The young man smiled down awkwardly. “I’m Darren. What’s your name?”
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