Hard Evidence

'Sergeant.'

Bonner spun the broken bottle on the counter.

'Irish party games?'

'Something like that.'

'You're going to have to come with me, I'm afraid.'

'Ah, Jesus. Come off it, Eddie.'

'Out of my hands.'

'Don't tell me it's that prick Hadden again. What are you doing, Sergeant Bonner, kissing arse and running errands for that slag now?'

'It's not about the missing cocaine.'

What the fuck is it about then?'

'Jackie Malone.'

Delaney was genuinely puzzled. 'What are you on about?'

'She's been making a nuisance of herself asking for you.'

'So? Since when do the wants of a brass like her send the Met's finest out on errands?'

Bonner gave him a flat look. 'Since the brass got rubbed.'

Delaney sighed, picked up his jacket and walked with Bonner to the door, Tricia giving him a grateful but nervous smile as he passed. Bonner opened the door.

'Would you have used the bottle?'

'Who knows? I try to live in the present.'

Bonner shook his head. 'You know your trouble, Delaney?'

'Yeah.'

And he did.

3.

Bonner shifted gear and his fifteen-year-old Porsche Carrera growled slowly through the traffic. Camden Town on a hot and busy Monday night was not where he wanted to be, not on any night in fact, but getting out of there quickly was a different matter. The streets were clogged with drunken people lurching from pub to pub to the kebab shop and burger bars. The heat wave London was in the middle of was showing no signs of abating, and the world and his wife seemed to be taking their pleasures al fresco.

Bonner cranked the window handle on his door to let a bit of breeze in, and looked over at Delaney, whose dark eyes glittered with the yellow flash of the passing street lights. Christ, he looks like a wolf, he thought, and shuddered it away.

'Where you been, Cowboy?'

'Here and there. You know…'

'No.'

'What happened to Jackie Malone?'

Bonner shrugged. 'Just got the call.'

Delaney nodded and looked away. Bonner kept his eyes on him. 'It wasn't just her. Wendy was looking for you too. And Siobhan.'

'I had things on my mind.'

Bonner nodded sympathetically. 'She told me it was your anniversary.'

Delaney flashed him an angry look. 'Would have been. It would have been our anniversary. Four years and they're still walking around somewhere with blood pumping in their hearts while she rots to bones in her grave.'

'You can't blame yourself.'

'If I wanted to talk about it I would have gone to confession, Sergeant.'

'Yeah. You'd go to confession and I'd cut my penis off and call myself Madeline.'

'Could get yourself promoted that way.'

Bonner slammed the palm of his hand hard on the horn as a couple of women stumbled in front of the car. A blonde and a brunette, pissed. The women peered through the windscreen and cracked their lipstick in seductive appreciation, the blonde raising a bottle of strong cider in a toast.

'You boys want to party?' Irish accent.

'One of yours, Cowboy. From the land of Sodom and Begorrah. Want to stop and play with the colleens?'

Delaney looked across at him without answering.

'That's right, you're wanted in a murder investigation. Murder, another thing your countrymen specialise in.' He edged the car forward, spilling the blonde to a laughing heap on the pavement. The brunette helped her up and, slack-kneed and laughing like donkeys, they linked arms and headed into the nearest pub.

'Murder and prostitution. The Emerald Isle's most popular exports… short of the black stuff, of course.'

'One of these days, Sergeant Bonner, someone is going to shut your mouth permanently.'

Bonner laughed, genuinely amused. 'I know plenty of people would like to, and frankly I can't say I blame them, but if you don't have a sense of humour, how are you going to survive in this wicked world?'

'Maybe you aren't going to.'

'Oh, I'm a born survivor, me. The original cat with nine lives.'

'Jackie Malone thought she was indestructible too.'

Bonner looked at him shrewdly. 'She tell you that, did she? In an intimate moment.'

Delaney ignored him, yawned and looked out of the window as the Porsche picked up speed and headed west. Bonner flicked another sideways glance at him, trying to read him. Failing. He carried on anyway.

'Of course death can be an intimate moment, can't it, Cowboy? She breathes out, you breathe in. But she doesn't. Again. Ever. And that last breath of hers… you can almost taste the departing life. The smell of her. The heat leaving her body. Her muscles relaxing.'

He shook his head and looked across again with a dry smile.

'What do you reckon, Cowboy? Almost better than sex?'

4.

Ladbroke Grove. West London. Parts of it were pleasant; upmarket professionals who couldn't quite make Holland Park lived there. Tall Victorian townhouses stocked with Jennifers and Nigels. Vivaldi and Bruckner floating through the still air on hot summer nights, with talk of options and opera and immigration laws. Parts of it weren't so pleasant. Flats and houses stocked with students, drug-dealers, prostitutes, and script editors who worked at the BBC's Television Centre up the road in Shepherd's Bush. Delaney got out of the car and wondered which of them was worse.

Across the road the entrance to a large townhouse converted to a block of flats was sealed with yellow tape and guarded by uniformed police. A young female constable with honey-blonde hair stood more upright, flexing her spine with an almost feline sensuality, and smiled as Delaney approached. Her last day in uniform; she was due to transfer to CID soon as part of her graduate fast-tracking and was keen to impress.

'Good evening, Inspector.'

'Sally.' Delaney gave her a nod and a quick smile. Time was he'd have stopped and chatted with her. She was an attractive young woman and he'd have flirted with her, as sure as sin, even as a married man. Harmlessly of course; he'd loved his wife. Before he was married, however, it would have been an entirely different matter. A lot of people on the force thought it a bad idea to dip the pen in company ink. Delaney hadn't been one of them. His pen had written far, far more than custody reports over the years. But that was then. Delaney was now in a world that had no joy in flirting. He walked up to the front door, letting out a long breath.

Time to go to work.

He put his hands in his pockets and walked into the hallway, barely registering the curious gazes and nods from the uniformed police who guarded the crime scene.

'Upstairs, guv.'

'I know where she lives.'

'Bit of a nasty one.'

'They're all nasty, Constable. People are nasty.'

Delaney looked down at the geometrically patterned mosaic on the floor. Reds and yellows. Late Victorian, the only original feature left of what would have been a beautiful townhouse. We get what we are given, he thought, and then we screw it all to hell. He walked up the stairs, stairs he'd been up a lot of times before, stairs that had seen thousands of people come and go over the years, and the odds were that more than one of those people were murderers. The last person, or persons, to see Jackie Malone alive definitely was. That was a stone-cold fact.

He paused at the landing and wondered what the one-bedroomed flat had originally been. A nursery, perhaps? A master bedroom? Had children through the years played and laughed and fallen asleep here to bedtime stories and nursery rhymes played on musical boxes? Had they looked out of the high Victorian window longing for Peter Pan to fly in and whisk them off to Never-Never-Land.

Whatever it had been, it was a murder scene now, and Jack Delaney wasn't about to start clapping his hands. Truth was, he never believed in fairies, but he knew evil existed, and he could feel its presence hanging in the air like the cold, damp touch of a corpse.

The burly constable stood aside deferentially and let Delaney pass into the room, where his practised eye immediately started looking for what was familiar, what was out of place.