He burped acidly. His stomach had turned sour after all that cider he had gulped earlier. Kicking about impatiently at a mouldering cardboard box in one of the empty plots he looked about for a place to relieve himself. He just couldn’t bring himself to ask one of these weirdos for permission to use their toilet. Only a dozen of the creepy little bungalows were still being lived in, if you could call this living. The rest did service for target practice by passing kids. The ones that were inhabited were being broken into one by one, three so far. The empty ones had now been boarded up to try and keep the junkies out.
Behind him he could hear Kat doing her ‘reassuring the public’ bit with two wrinklies, probably a lot better than he could himself, he had to admit. But then women were always going to be better at that kind of thing. What a dump this was. It had probably been all right fifty years ago but even then these flimsy things must have been freezing in winter and roasting in summer. And anyone in possession of a tin opener could break in. Pathetic.
DI Fairfield said her goodbyes to the old couple and soon joined him with her clipboard. ‘You didn’t spend a lot of time with your lot, did you?’
‘Well, there isn’t really all that much to say, is there? If you live in a stupid place like this it’s no wonder you get broken into.’
‘You didn’t tell them that, did you?’
‘Not in so many words, though I did point out that if they don’t have locks on their windows then they might as well leave them open. Same thing to a burglar.’ Sorbie rubbed his unruly stomach, which was churning. ‘I’ve never been any good at this stuff, not when I was in uniform and not now. And this is definitely a uniform job.’
‘I know. They’ve been round too.’ Fairfield sniffed the air and didn’t look at all put out. The sun was going in and out of the clouds, beginning to burn away the greyness that had hung around her mind all winter. When she first joined the force she’d never imagined it would mean spending so much time sitting indoors hammering on keyboards, filling in forms, chasing targets, following initiatives. She much preferred being outside, talking to people away from neon lights and computer screens. She should move away from the city, get a job in a little seaside town … it would take forever to make DCI. ‘You know exactly why we’re here.’
‘Yes, so Denkhaus doesn’t get his gold stars tarnished.’
‘It’s politics, Jack. People need to see that we take this seriously, that’s why the ACC wants us to show our faces. To reassure people. We’ll have one more chat before we go. That chap standing in the door, last-but-one house.’ Fairfield cheerfully waved at a man in his sixties standing in his front door. He didn’t wave back. ‘That’s the last of the inhabited ones. It’s vulnerable that one, it’s the last-but-one, has empty houses on either side and it backs on to the old service road. He hasn’t been burgled yet, perhaps we can convince him to get some security. This is all about perception of crime anyway, not actual crime. Denkhaus doesn’t want another newspaper crusade over this one. Or more suggestions that we’re not protecting these people because the city wants them to pack up and go. Of course the fact that these prefabs are isolated and full of old folks was publicized by the stupid papers in the first place.’
The morose expression of the man didn’t change when Fairfield showed her ID and introduced DS Sorbie. ‘Caught them yet?’ He snorted dismissively before Fairfield could draw breath to answer. ‘Thought not. According to your own statistics it isn’t likely you ever will. And if you do, the courts will let them off with a slap on the wrist so they can go and do it again.’
‘Not quite, Mr …’ She looked down her list.
‘Cooke.’
‘Mr Cooke. We have been quite successful in driving down the rate of burglaries in the city. One of the ways in which householders themselves can help of course is by fitting locks and shutters to windows. Has anyone spoken to you about that yet?’
‘They have. I told them what I’m telling you now: fitting window locks won’t make a blind bit of difference to the criminals. They just go somewhere else. Do you think they’ll go, “Oh dear, window locks, well, I’d better go straight then and get a respectable job”? Rubbish! It won’t stop a professional housebreaker and it’ll just make the drug addict try next door. You don’t stop criminals with locks on your windows, you stop them with locks on their cells. And by keeping them locked up.’
‘There might be something in that, Mr Cooke. In the meantime I hope you’re not making it easy for them.’ She looked down the sad cul-de-sac. One more boarded-up house separated Mr Cooke from a derelict and overgrown site where a brickworks had been demolished. She certainly wouldn’t feel safe living here.
‘Making it easy? It’s the council who are making it easy for them. The burglars and the kids who throw empty beer bottles at our houses and the drug addicts who leave their needles lying about, they all come down the service road. Then they come through the fence. We’ve asked the council to put in a decent fence several times but they’d rather wait until we’ve all been robbed blind or brained by a flying bottle.’
‘I’ll look into that for you and tell the council what I think about it.’ What was left of the flimsy wooden fence that separated the cluster of prefabs from the derelict road was richly overgrown, the gaps full of builder’s waste, fly-tipped rubbish and rubble. It wouldn’t keep out anyone. Even to her it looked like the council had deliberately let the area become run down to make staying there less attractive. Fairfield had the heavy feeling CID would sooner or later be down here again, perhaps sorting out worse than plain house-breaking. Sorbie was right, she thought, these people should have moved away. Only now did she notice that Sorbie was no longer standing behind her. ‘Mr Cooke, you wouldn’t by any chance have noticed where DS Sorbie has got to?’
‘I would. He’s down there, throwing up against the back of number twenty-two.’
Witek Setkievich could already see the end of his shift. Getting there was another matter. He only had three punters left on top, the others had got off at the science museum, but passenger numbers hardly mattered. Getting back to the starting point at Broad Quay and handing over at the end of his shift was all that mattered. The ancient red Routemaster open-top bus may have been fitted with a low-emission engine but it was still as big as a house and nearly as hard to drive. In this traffic it could take ten minutes to cover the last five hundred yards to the harbourside stop. This was where the company’s touts hunted for tourists, trying to entice them to take the ‘hop-on hop-off’ tour of the city. A few hundred yards away near the Hippodrome the company kept a draughty little ground-floor office.
As was usual at lunchtime the roundabout was clogged with idiots not knowing where they were going and all getting in each other’s way. But Witek didn’t really mind. He liked driving the bus. Getting a licence was the best thing he had ever done. It had fed him since coming to this country. And driving the city tour bus was much, much better than driving a regular bus around the city which he had done for a year before landing this job. Tourists were much more polite than the passengers on ordinary buses. Especially foreign tourists. They hardly ever wanted to beat him up, did not call him stupid Polack, didn’t tell him to ‘go back home to Moscow’ and didn’t spit at the security screen. Tourists never pissed between the seats and didn’t throw up so much.
Traffic moved on for a few car lengths and he could at last cross the junction. The road system in this city was madness, of course. Three times they had changed the layout, reversed the one-way systems, and nothing they tried worked properly. Some people wanted tourist buses banned to lighten the traffic but looking at this chaos that would be a drop in the ocean. It did worry him though. Driving was all he had ever been good at and he liked this job. He liked the bus.