‘Isn’t he in?’
The man turned his head slowly towards me. I didn’t like the look of his face. It was grey and hard like the side of a house.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ he said. ‘Any idea where he’d be?’
He was standing up straight now, his head handing down over mine. Police, I thought for a second. But he wasn’t police. I swallowed. I started to shake my head, but then I had an idea. I released my grip on the knife.
‘If he’s not in he’s probably down the club,’ I said. ‘Do you know where it is?’
‘No.’
‘Go back down to the bottom of the road, take a left, and when you come to the shops it’s up a side road between the laundrette and the chip shop.’
He studied me. ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘You know what he looks like?’
He nodded in perfect slow motion. He never took his eyes off me.
‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Oh, and you might have to park outside the shops. The car-park’s usually full when there’s a band on.’
‘There’s a band?’
‘In the club.’ I smiled. ‘It gets noisy, you can hardly hear a word that’s said to you, even in the toilets.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is so.’
Then I walked back down the path and gave him a slight wave as I headed for home. I made sure I walked home too. I didn’t want him thinking I was on my way to the club ahead of him.
‘Short walk,’ mum said. She was pouring tea for Mrs Gregg.
‘Bit cold.’
‘Cold?’ squeaked Mrs Gregg. ‘A lad your age shouldn’t feel the cold.’
‘Have you seen my knife?’ mum asked. She was looking down at the cake she’d made. It was on one of the better plates and hadn’t been cut yet. I brought the knife out of my pocket.
‘Here you are, mum.’
‘What’s it doing in your pocket?’
‘The lock on the car-boot’s not working. I’d to cut some string to tie it shut.’
‘Do you want some tea?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said. ‘I’m off to bed.’
It was the talk of the estate the next morning, how Daintry had been knifed to death in a toilet cubicle, just as the band were finishing their encore. They were some Sixties four-piece, still performing long past their sell-by. That’s what people said who were there. And they’d compensated for a lack of ability by cranking the sound system all the way up. You not only couldn’t hear yourself think, you couldn’t think.
I suppose they have to make a living as best they can. We all do.
It was the assistant manager who found Daintry. He was doing his nightly check of the club to see how many drunks had managed to fall asleep in how many hidden places. Nobody used the end cubicle of the gents’ much; it didn’t have any toilet seat. But there sat Daintry, not caring any more about the lack of amenities. Police were called, staff and clientele interviewed, but no one had anything much to say.
Well, not to the police at any rate. But there was plenty of gossip on the streets and in the shops and in the lifts between neighbours. And slowly a story emerged. Mr McAndrew, remember, had been a lad at one time. He was rumoured still to have a few contacts, a few friends who owed him. Or maybe he just stumped up cash. Whatever, everyone knew Mr McAndrew had put out the contract on Daintry. And, as also agreed, good riddance to him. On a Friday night too. So anyone who’d tapped him for a loan could see the sun rise on Monday morning with a big wide smile.
Meantime, the body was found in Daintry’s lock-up. Well, the police knew who was responsible for that, didn’t they? Though they did wonder about the broken locks. Kids most likely, intent on burglary but doing a runner when they saw the corpse. Seemed feasible to me too.
Mr McAndrew, eh? I watched him more closely after that. He still looked to me like a nice old man. But then it was only a story after all, only one of many. Me, I had other things to think about. I knew I could do it now. I could take Brenda away from Harry. Don’t ask me why I feel so sure, I just do.
FULL MOON RISING by JESSICA PALMER
The tiny coffin stood, a silent indictment against society and man. About two feet long and a foot wide, it was about the same size as a shipping carton. Certainly, it did not need the two pallbearers who now carried it. A single man could have lifted it easily and tucked it underneath his arm, without even raising a sweat.
Outside the chapel life went on as usual. Tourist boats chugged up and down the Thames. Cars sped through the Blackwall Tunnel and the Woolwich Ferry did its slow relentless glide back and forth across the waters. Children played and people went about their business oblivious to this small life that had ended too soon.
The men moved the coffin gently into position upon the upraised dais and centred it before the discreetly-curtained doors to the crematorium. Detective Superintendent Mark Noble grimaced as he heard the whisper of metal coasters on a belt that was meant to accommodate far greater weights.
The detective didn’t normally attend the funerals of victims, but this case had touched his heart as few others had. Some would say he was getting soft, but the emotion he felt was anything but malleable. Rather he felt the hard knot of fury and rage. No, outrage. Outrage against a legal system that perpetuated crime. A system that paralysed by protocols. A system that saw the habitual criminal turned loose ‘on a technicality’ and society’s victims on trial.
The government’s recent White Paper proposed to change the system even more, centralizing it here in London, as if the police didn’t have enough to keep them busy. And introducing a quota system. All in the name of efficiency. Noble snorted. Police work was dehumanizing enough without concocting a scheme where crimes were numbers on a rating scale and victims were seen through the haze of statistics and the spectacles of distance.
The officer eyed the coffin. Perhaps that was why he was here because the clear line that had once divided right and wrong had shifted, getting slippery in his grasp. Even his concept of victim and criminal had blurred, as the social welfare system in London disintegrated and the economy worsened. Noble could no longer look at hookers – whether they plied their trade in Piccadilly, Soho, Kensington or near the docks – as anything other than casualties in a war where there were no winners. Once, when he had still been in uniform, Noble had been able to regard the homeless of cardboard city as vagrants, nothing more. Now that they cluttered all of London’s streets, the officer found he couldn’t even make that simple distinction without a great deal of soul-searching.
Since Noble had transferred to London’s eastern Area Two some three years ago, the quality of crime had changed. Its ferocity and brutality had increased. Battery and violence within the home were up, as families instead of pulling together were being pulled apart. Since Noble had been moved to the Major Investigative Team, or AMIT, he only saw it when it reached its ultimate conclusion – death. He coped by carefully closeting his emotions and keeping them under lock and key, or so he thought. He would have liked to believe that he was immune to most things, but not this, not this tiny casket and its sad burden.
The victim had been less than six weeks old. If he remembered correctly with his own children, not even old enough to lift its head and flip from back to tummy unassisted. At that age an infant was a bundle of reflexes. It was like a tiny toy or a marionette, who would be manipulated by touch, movement or sound. Brush something lightly against the bottom of the foot, and the tiny toes curled. Turn its head and watch the arms extend or contract, much like the adult reaction when a doctor tapped upon the lax knee.