‘You can’t miss it,’ the woman said while eyeing up his almond Danish as though she really fancied a bite. McLusky offered but she just laughed and walked away. Somehow he had managed to get lost, which wasn’t good, not for a police officer and not on his first day. Should have called a cab. He checked his watch. Plenty of time.
Of course he’d been to Albany Road station before but not from this direction. He’d looked it up on the A-Z. Easily walkable from his Northmoor Street flat and it would help him get to know the place. Should have brought the map of course. He was in the right district though. The warren of Bristol’s town centre had grown over centuries like a rich fungus, the mycelium of its streets stretching senselessly out across the hills behind the harbour area. Dark streets, bright streets, tightly wound streets, steep streets, allowing only brief, surprising glimpses of the harbour basin and the river. The city was built on nothing but hills it seemed. The Romans had vineyards here on the steep, south-facing slopes where the Old Town had grown up. Or perhaps it was a different hill; he’d read something about it in a guidebook. Some of the houses were tall and narrow timber-frame buildings, a lot of Victorian houses too, but the scars left by WWII bombing had been filled with drab utilitarian concrete buildings, some towering high above their more elegant neighbours.
The most noticeable thing however was always the traffic. These streets had not been built for it and the centre was too busy, too crowded to pedestrianize. Successive traffic schemes had failed. The ever-changing one-way system had become so unworkable half of it had simply been abandoned and the streets handed back to the chaos merchants. The result was a mess of Mediterranean intensity: noisy, polluted, crowded, dangerous and during peak times bordering on anarchy. Delivery vans driving over pavements, taxis going everywhere, car drivers desperate for a place to stop, the usual bikers and suicidal cyclists, the even more suicidal skateboarders, enough scooters for an Italian teen movie and pedestrians dodging the lot. Many cyclists wore dust masks, some wore actual gas masks, probably as a mark of protest against the dense pollution. He had been reading the local paper to get a taste of the place. A campaign was under way to stop motorized traffic coming into the city altogether with protests every Saturday morning, bringing more chaos to the streets. And how were emergency vehicles supposed to get through this, he wondered? How on earth did you move an ambulance through these streets?
McLusky hadn’t bought a new car yet, his last having been wrecked in the chase in which he’d been injured. He’d been promised the loan of a plain police unit until he ‘sorted himself out’ — so much sorting — but taking in this traffic chaos he thought that perhaps roller blades might well have the edge.
He asked directions again, this time of a grey, elderly man rummaging for something in his canvas satchel while pushing an electric bicycle along the gutter. The man looked up with a closed-off face and seemed to consider ignoring him, then pointed. ‘Albany Road station? Down those steps, then turn right. You can’t miss it, it’s the ugliest building in town. Wants dynamiting.’
‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.’ He crossed the street carefully, remembering too well the sound of his own breaking bones as they’d made contact with the car bonnet. He had no desire to repeat the experience. He didn’t really believe he could survive a second time. Or even wanted to. Perhaps this would go away or perhaps the feeling might never leave him. Or it might even help him live, the flat feeling that he no longer minded dying. He didn’t want to die. But equally he wasn’t sure he wanted to survive at all costs. Living and surviving were different things after all.
A shadowy network of alleys and worn, irregular steps connected some of the Old Town streets. Small shops and artisans’ workshops clung on here but the business rates and rents had driven many of them out, making way for the national chains that could afford to pay them.
He recognized the place instantly. The man had been right, Albany Road police station was quite the most unlovely building he had come across so far, something he hadn’t really taken in when he had come for his interview six weeks earlier.
Comparing the station with the surrounding architecture, a small eighteenth-century church and several well-kept Victorian houses, wasn’t really fair. It would be like comparing a plastic stacking chair with Chippendale furniture. This was definitely the stacking kind of architecture. He checked his reflection in the window of an electrical retailer’s, too late to worry really. Hair a bit wild though. He smoothed it down.
Reaching for the handle of the tinted glass door of the station he hesitated just a fraction — new job, new era, new life, new crew, new town, new day — then walked inside.
The desk officer buzzed him through the next door. ‘Morning, sir, they’ll be expecting you.’ Just the slightest hint of doubt in his baritone. ‘Will you find your own way …?’
He nodded and the desk officer gratefully returned to what he’d been doing, far too busy to nursemaid freshly minted detective inspectors.
McLusky remembered his way to CID from his interview though he hadn’t met many of his new colleagues at the time since most had been off sick with some sort of virus.
Inside, too, the station was undeniably sixties or seventies. Recently refurbished, the super had said. He’d just have to take his word for it. The place was busy, the stairs echoing like a tunnel with footsteps and voices. Eight forty: he was early, his meeting with Superintendent Denkhaus was not until nine. Straight into the CID room and he instantly felt at home. CID rooms were CID rooms: desks, waste baskets, computer screens, phones — several with detectives attached to them — maps of the force area and city centre on the walls, whiteboard, noticeboard, fax machine, photocopier and kettle. The windows were firmly closed against the noise of the traffic below. The place smelled of printer ink, cheap aftershave and deodorant overwhelmed by sweat.
One man looked up, frowned, then tried for a smile and got up. ‘Inspector McLusky, sir? I’m DS Austin.’ He stretched out a broad and darkly hairy hand. McLusky shook it. The whole man was darkly hairy and broad, probably worked out. Intelligent, open eyes, blinking fast. The soft Scottish accent sounded like Edinburgh to him, but he was no expert. ‘Welcome to Albany. Ehm, your office, sir, is just along here.’
His office. He’d never had his own office. He’d not been a DI long enough for them to even find one for him in Southampton before the bastards rammed him off the road. Then came back and ran him over as he staggered from his car.
Austin led the way back into the corridor and to a door right at the end. ‘You’re taking over from DI Pearce, it’s his old office.’
McLusky had read about Pearce, a bent copper, currently on the run with a goodly amount of drug money, probably in Spain. Enjoy it while you can. Spain was no longer a safe hiding place.
He walked straight in. It was about the size of the box room in his new flat — space for second midget here — and smelled aggressively of cleaning products. It contained a dented filing cabinet, two chairs, an empty bookshelf, a metal dustbin and a small battered desk. The window faced out the back overlooking graffiti-covered walls, chaotic pigeon-shit rooftops and the shadowy backs of houses. In the middle distance, between tall buildings, he glimpsed a sliver of the harbour. Apart from in- and out-trays, monitor, keyboard and phone he’d been furnished with a set of car keys sitting on a form for him to sign and an envelope lying across the keyboard which he knew would contain the gaff he needed to log on to the computer.