Hart looked at him with fake fondness. ‘You big kid. You love all this. For two pins you’d be begging ’em for a ride.’
‘My good woman, it costs a lot more than two pins these days. Come on, stop gawping. We’ve got a job to do.’
The fair people were already doing a good job of ignoring the hangers-about, and somehow managed to ignore Atherton and Hart even more intensely because they were police, narrowing eyes that were already narrowed and turning away faces that were already averted, like cats punishing an errant owner. Sometimes their questions were answered by a grunt, more often by complete silence. When words were forthcoming, it was, ‘Don’t know nothing about that.’ They were armed with photos of Zellah and of Mike Carmichael but could hardly get anyone to glance at them, let alone recognize the faces.
The first proper response they got was at a snack stall, presently closed up, where a stocky man in shirt-sleeves and braces was around the back, spanner in hand, connecting up a new Calor gas canister. He had a cigarette clamped in his mouth, a cap clamped down over his head, and two days of white stubble sprouting from the whole lower half of his face. He stopped and straightened when they addressed him, though it seemed more to stretch his back than for their benefit.
But then he rolled the fag to the other side of his mouth, glared at them through narrowed eyes, and said, ‘Why don’t you piss off, copper?’
It was the friendliest thing anyone had said to them. Atherton felt pleased and encouraged. ‘Just look at this picture and tell me if you saw her here,’ he said beguilingly.
The man grew angry. ‘Is that the girl that got murdered? Why d’you come asking us questions? We don’t know nothing about it. You people never leave us alone.’
‘Take it easy, mate,’ Hart said, letting her accent slip a little further towards the of-the-people end of the spectrum. ‘We don’t fink you had anyfing to do wiv it. Course we don’t. We’re just trying to work out where she was Sundy night. We fink she might’ve been here, thass all. It ain’t no grief for you. Did you see her? Have a look at the picture, go on.’
He squinted unwillingly sideways at it, and then, as Hart urged it at him with little pushes, took it, looked once properly, and then thrust it back at her as if unwilling to be caught holding it.
‘Might have been here. Lotter people here Sundy night.’
Hart glanced at Atherton. In these-people speak, that was a yes. ‘We reckon she might’ve been here wiv her boyfriend. This is him.’ She held out Carmichael’s picture. He didn’t touch that one. He removed the cigarette from his mouth and spat out a shred of tobacco on to the grass. ‘That who you reckon done it?’
‘Yeah,’ Hart said, and Atherton let her. If it took the heat off . . .
‘I seen her. She was wiv a bloke. Coulda been him. Never saw him proper.’
‘Thanks. That’s great. What was he wearing, d’you remember?’
He shrugged, and turned back to his barrels. He muttered something, and Hart bent forward, ‘Say again?’
‘Rifle range,’ he mumbled. Then he turned back sharply and glared at them. ‘Sod off. I got work to do.’
The man at the rifle range was just taking the covers off, in between stretching, yawning, scratching himself, and trying to light a roll-up that would not catch. He was younger than snack-stall man, lighter skinned, with greasy mouse-brown hair and a puggy, cockney face. ‘Cor, you ain’t ’arf stirred up a few people,’ he said as they approached. He was not exactly friendly, but did not seem to be suffering from the same congenital hostility as the others. ‘They don’t like your sort round here.’
‘We noticed,’ Atherton said.
The man shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t care. I ain’t one of them. Pikey bastards! They keep themselves to themselves. I’m a gayjo to them, even though my dad was in fairs forty years, and I’ve had the stall twenty. You can’t ever be one of them unless you’re born in one of the families. Fuckin’ gyppos. Well, they can keep it. I don’t care. I’m as good as they are. I make me money and stay out of it. You looking for that girl that was killed?’
‘That’s right. This is her. Did you see her?’
‘She was here all right. Pretty girl. Couldn’t miss her. Having a great time, she was. Screamed her head off on the waltzer and the atomic rocket. Having too much of a good time, if you get my drift.’
‘Showing off? Drunk?’
‘Both, I reckon. She was with this bloke. He was showing off as well. Took her on the dodgems, show her what a great driver he was. Banging into everything. Danny on the dodgems had to warn him. Had a couple of goes on my range. Not a bad shot,’ he conceded with professional grudgingness. ‘I let him win a teddy bear for her. Do me bit for our side.’
‘Our side?’ Atherton queried.
‘Men,’ Hart elucidated.
The rifle man nodded. ‘He was trying to pull her, but it wasn’t working. I could see that. She was flirting with him, but she wasn’t going to put out. I could’ve told him. She had the cold eye, for all her screaming and hanging on to him. Ended up having a row.’
‘Did they?’
‘I wasn’t surprised. I reckon he worked it out in the end, realized he was spending his money for nothing.’
‘Did you hear what they were rowing about?’
‘Nah. Just arguing back and forth, yap yap yap. At it for quite a while they were. Then she walks away. That’s all I seen.’
‘Did he follow her?’
‘Nah. He went off in that direction.’ He jerked his head towards the entrance on Scrubs Lane. ‘He might’ve come back, though. But I never seen him.’
‘Did you see her again?’
‘Not after that. But I wasn’t looking out for ’em. I had other things to do.’
‘And do you know what time that was? When she walked off?’
He scratched his head again. ‘It was just getting busy. I reckon – maybe half-nine, ten o’clock.’
Hart and Atherton looked at each other. That was awfully early. They must have got together again afterwards. She showed him Carmichael’s picture. ‘Is that the man she was with?’
‘Could’ve been. Looks like him. I wasn’t that interested in him, tell you the truth. Had a leather jacket on, though. I saw that. Could’ve been him.’ He passed the photo back. ‘You won’t get anything out of the others. They don’t talk to the cops. But Gary on the waltzer’ll remember her, and Danny on the dodgems. They won’t tell you, though. They’re all giving me filthy looks for talking to you, but I don’t care. My family’s bin in the fairs as long as any of them. We’re as good as them any day.’
He was half right. They couldn’t get anyone else to talk to them, though one or two of them looked at the photos and grunted before freezing them out. To counterbalance that, and to dispel any suggestion the fair folk were going soft, Danny on the dodgems crawled out from under a maintenance panel with a two-foot-long spanner in his hand, which he slapped suggestively against his other palm, while his brindled pit bull advanced snarling to the end of its chain and burst into a fusillade of barking, effectively drowning out any possibility of conversation.
They worked conscientiously towards the back of the fair, where the living vans and lorries were parked, between the rides and the open space of the Scrubs. No one in the caravans would speak to them either, and many of them would not even open the door. Eventually they got to a large van parked right on the edge of the lot, its open door towards the Scrubs, where a woman was sitting on the step knitting what looked like a string dishcloth, and smoking a roll-up wrapped in liquorice paper. She was so massively fat she looked like a shipping hazard, but she might have been beautiful once: the face above her accumulation of chins suggested it, with striking dark eyes and abundant black hair done up in large rollers all over her head. Her hands were like a couple of pounds of pork sausages, but they flashed away nimbly, and were decorated with a large number of gold and diamond rings. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and voluminous smock-like top, probably because nothing else would have fitted her, and the lobes of her ears were pierced and carried thick, heavy gold rings which had enlarged their holes over the years into hanging loops of skin. But her plump bare feet, protruding into the sunshine from the hem of the skirt, were surprisingly small and rather pretty, with gold rings on three toes of each.