‘Not really. Did you go out to the skating park?’
‘Yup, nothing. I was given the impression that no one would admit to owning a motorized board anyway, if they ever came there at all, and the description didn’t seem to ring a bell.’
‘Well, after what the old guy said about the skateboarder I had a look at the map. Around the harbour basin, the Floating Harbour and out Ashton way are tarmac paths he could use. There’s also the cycle paths. One cycle track runs from here all the way to Bath along the river. He could be running around on that.’
‘Do a lot of people use that path?’
‘No one with any sense. We had loads of problems along that path. People got kicked off their bikes left right and centre. They’d rob them, take their bikes and then ride off on them.’
‘Why don’t they close the paths then?’
‘I wish they would. Unfortunately you can get a lottery grant for making cycle paths but not for getting rid of them. It’s anarchy down there. It’s where St Paul’s kids take their stolen mopeds to ride and the glue-sniffers hang out there. Closer to the access points you get the prozzies using it if it isn’t raining. We had people grow cannabis on the verges. Last year one guy tested his home-made jet-engine down there. Strapped it to an old children’s go-cart. Hadn’t thought of fitting brakes. He fell off and the jet went on and set fire to everything it passed. It’s pretty much nutter country so our skateboarder should fit right in. We have stepped up patrols.’
‘I’ll check the place out.’
‘Don’t go alone after dark is my firm advice. Oh yes, I was told to remind you about Frank Dudden’s autopsy.’
‘What time is that?’
Austin checked his watch. ‘In about fifteen minutes, actually.’
‘Then what are you sitting around here for? Get going, DS Austin.’
Austin’s face fell. ‘Me? I thought you … Oh, right. Okay.’ He took a gulp of his coffee and rushed off, clearly indignant.
McLusky reached for Austin’s abandoned mug. If police work were a popularity contest he’d never get anything done. He sipped the coffee. It tasted appalling and he knew it would give him heartburn. As a kind of penance he drained the mug anyway.
Five hours later the heartburn was still with him as he wrestled with paperwork at his desk. Whatever had happened to ‘freeing front-line officers from unnecessary red tape’?
Not even a nano-second passed from the perfunctory knock to his office door opening. Denkhaus, back from the press conference, filled the frame.
‘Where the hell is that report on the written-off Skoda? The ACC is asking. And as if I didn’t have enough to contend with, Phil Warren needled me about that very escapade at the press conference.’
‘Who?’
‘Reporter on the Post. Never mind that, where’s the damn report? I thought I’d asked for that days ago!’
‘And I went straight to work on it but I kept getting distracted by the noise of explosions.’
‘Don’t get distracted, McLusky. If I ask for something I expect DIs to deliver.’
McLusky nodded his head at the computer screen in front of him. ‘I’m actually working on it right now. Nearly done.’
For a moment it seemed as though the superintendent was going to walk around the desk to take a look at it. Had he done so he’d have found that McLusky was frowning at a fish-tank screensaver with the bubbling sound turned off.
But Denkhaus just grunted. So far he was singularly unimpressed by the new DI. He sniffed the air. ‘Has someone been smoking in here? You realize the entire station is a no-smoking zone?’
McLusky made a show of sniffing and nodded. ‘This office always smells of smoke. My predecessor must have smoked heavily.’
‘That he did.’
‘The smell got into the furnishings.’
Denkhaus seemed satisfied with the explanation. He gave a curt nod with his chin towards the computer. ‘Get on with it. I’ll be in my office. Waiting.’ He closed the door heavily behind him.
McLusky breathed a sigh of relief when he heard Denkhaus in the corridor bark at his next victim.
Around four o’clock Austin returned from witnessing the autopsy. As it turned out it had been his first and he hadn’t enjoyed it much. He had been berated by Dr Coulthard for being late. The pathologist had been expecting a DI and showed his displeasure by treating Austin as though he suspected the DS had suffered brain damage on the way to the morgue. Even though the viewing area was separated from the theatre by a glass wall and he had been spared the smell of the mutilated corpse, Austin had felt his stomach churn. The pathologist dug up no surprises. He pronounced that in life Dudden had been a slightly overweight middle-aged man with a troubled liver and straining kidneys who, had he not picked up a booby-trapped beer can, might have had another ten years’ drinking in him before his own internal time bomb put an end to it. Austin reported to McLusky in short sentences then quickly disappeared to the incident room.
To McLusky it only confirmed his belief that going to autopsies was a waste of time and put one in a bad mood for the rest of the day. ‘I wonder who else I can piss off on this shift.’ He pushed the other bumf aside and pulled his keyboard towards him. How I destroyed a good-as-new Skoda fifteen minutes after it was issued to me and how it was unavoidable by Detective Inspector Liam McLusky…
When after one hour and three drafts he eventually brought the sober report to Denkhaus’s office Lynn Tiery, his steel-eyed secretary, knew all about it.
‘Ah yes, the super’s been waiting for this.’ She put it on a pile of papers on her desk and went back to clacking on her keyboard.
‘You’d better take it in to him then.’
She smiled up at him without slowing her typing. ‘No rush, the super went home an hour ago.’
While McLusky had been buried under his fast-accumulating paperwork the return of the sun had worked a transformation on the city. The late sunshine softened the architecture. People looked brighter, happier, moving more slowly. As he walked along Albany Road he caught a glimpse of the old harbour between two buildings. A tall ship was moored down there and the old harbour ferry chugged across the brightly mirrored water. The footbridge looked like a spindly limb in black silhouette against the sun. In this light the sprawl of the city felt mysterious to him, so large, full of the unknown, full of new people, the promise of a new life. For a brief moment he was visited by a feeling he had last experienced as he first arrived by train in Southampton. Then he had looked across the busy harbour and thought the place must contain everything a man could possibly want from life. Now he snatched at the feeling, wanting to own it again, but it escaped him like the tail end of a dream. He blinked it away and walked on. It was of course all an illusion, there was nothing mysterious about cities. With all those people climbing over each other like so many ants the only mystery was why the pavements were not stained with blood more often.
A few turns left and right brought him to Candlewick Lane. He stopped opposite the Green Man. It was a CID pub and he should go and make himself known, drink, socialize, talk shop. Not tonight. There was plenty of time for that, preferably with Austin in tow and when he was in an indestructibly good mood. Tonight all he wanted was a quiet pint. Or perhaps more than one. He turned down several steep flights of uneven medieval steps between narrow timber-frame houses, getting into a rhythm and letting his feet make all the choices. It brought him close to the harbour on Ropemakers, a surprisingly quiet one-way street with cars parked on either side. Just as he scanned its low brick buildings the sun dipped behind clouds and the lights of a pub sprang to life. The illuminated pub sign proclaimed this to be the Quiet Lady, above the picture of a woman in a yellow dress carrying her own head under her arm. Inside, it was an unreconstructed drinking hole, just the way McLusky liked it.