‘Judging by the state of his arm,’ said Gerry, ‘it’s probably a good thing for all of us that he didn’t drive. I mean, you know, before he...’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Annie. ‘Aha. He’s got a senior’s bus pass here. Howard Stokes, age 67.’
Annie passed Gerry a scrap of paper she found stuck between two dirty five-pound notes, on which was scrawled something that resembled a mobile phone number. ‘Could be his dealer or someone?’
‘I’ll check it out,’ said Gerry. ‘Think it was an accident, guv?’
Annie peered at the body again. ‘No way of telling,’ she said. ‘Not yet. Not until the doc gets him on the slab and the experts go over the scene. Who knows, even then? We’ll need to find out if he was right-handed, for a start. If he wasn’t, we may have another murder to deal with. We also need to know whether his prints are on the syringe, where he might have got the drugs from, and so on. Even if we think we’ve got all the answers, there’ll always be a chance that someone else injected him, wiped the syringe and made sure his fingerprints would be found on it. Vic Manson’s good with this sort of thing. Odds are he’ll be able to tell us by the angles and impressions whether Stokes would have handled the syringe in that way to get it where it is. I can’t see any evidence of it, but there’s also a chance he was killed in some other way and it was made to appear like a drug overdose. But who would want to go to that much trouble, I have no idea.’
‘Should we call in the super?’ Gerry asked.
Annie shook her head. ‘No need. Let him have his evening out. I’ll talk to the AC in a while and see what she says. You have a chat with Sean and Luke. In the meantime, I’ll call for the forensics team. We’ll wait here for Dr Burns and the CSIs. We’ll get Peter Darby to take some stills and video, too. Then, when the doc’s finished, he can get the body wrapped up and transferred to the mortuary at Eastvale General ready for Karen tomorrow morning.’
‘She’s got the boy from the wheelie bin slated for tomorrow,’ said Gerry.
‘Right. Forgot.’ Annie looked at the late Howard Stokes again. ‘Well, he’ll just have to wait his turn, won’t he? I don’t imagine he’ll mind all that much.’
After a long telephone conversation with Raymond in New York, who urged her to go and see the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Modern if she had some spare time on her hands, Zelda picked up her book and went out to dine alone. She chose a waterfront restaurant that she had passed on one of her walks around the neighbourhood. The cuisine was French, which was her favourite. The restaurant was noisy inside, and though it was a mild enough evening, it was perhaps a little too cool for some people and she was able to get a table outside, from which she could see the river in all its twilit glory. The tourist boats were still out offering cruises, and tugs and barges plied their trade back and forth, as they had done for centuries.
Still on her Japanese reading jag, she had moved on from Kawabata to Mishima’s Spring Snow, the first of his Sea of Fertility quartet. But every once in a while, she needed a break from serious literature and went back to the books of her youth, sometimes even as far back as Enid Blyton or A.A. Milne. That afternoon, after her visit to Hawkins’s house and the pub, she had found a copy of Modesty Blaise in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road and decided to read through the whole series again. She had read them all years ago, back at the orphanage, but she didn’t care. Modesty Blaise was her heroine from her early teenage years, and she knew she could enjoy Modesty’s adventures with her right-hand man Willie Garvin all over again. She had already got well into the story in her hotel room. The evening light was still good enough to read by, and she flicked her eyes between the words on the page and the view. Modesty was tied up at knife-point and being forced to phone Willie and lure him into a trap by the time Zelda’s food arrived.
Zelda turned to her Sancerre and sea bass, put her book aside and thought over her day. Hawkins’s death still troubled her. She hadn’t known him well, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t felt anything at his passing. What a terrible way to go. Of course, she knew more than Danvers did — his meeting with Phil Keane, the man Banks and Annie were after — and that Keane favoured fire as a means of getting rid of people. That didn’t mean Hawkins’s death had been anything other than an accident, but given the world he and Keane inhabited, in Zelda’s opinion they were far more likely to die by violence than anything else.
The main sticking point in her theory was that given the talents Alan had outlined, Keane would have been a documents man, a facilitator of movements across borders, of identity creation and manipulation. Such assets weren’t usually asked to kill people. That pleasure fell to others, to specialists whom Zelda had met, men who enjoyed their work and did it as professionally and as bloodily as possible. Still, Keane might have become an obvious choice for some reason — the fires, perhaps — and Hawkins may somehow have fallen afoul of those he worked for. Or it could have been something personal, something between Keane and Hawkins. But the gang wouldn’t like that, losing one of their well-placed informants on a whim, so where would it leave Keane? Was he still alive?
But that was all speculation. She needed to find Keane and, if possible, get him to lead her to Goran Tadić. Only then, when she had done what she had to do, could she hand Keane over to Alan and Annie.
She was well aware that she had lost much of her impetus in tracking down Keane after that one sighting had led nowhere. True, she hadn’t been in London very often since then, and never for long, but she would be the first to admit that she had felt discouraged. She was no detective. She had no resources to call on to find someone. And for what? True, Keane might lead her to Goran, but there could be other ways of locating him, through contacts she already had. She was in no hurry. She knew that whatever small dent she made, the organisation and its trade in female flesh would go on as ever. This was personal. Of that she was under no illusions.
But Hawkins’s death, for whatever the reason, had rekindled her interest in the task.
There was really only one other place she might find out something useful, she realised. When she had followed Hawkins that rainy night just before Christmas, when he had met Keane in a Soho restaurant, a woman had come out with them. Keane’s girlfriend, or so it had seemed. Zelda had taken photographs and followed the two of them afterwards while they went window-shopping and finally jumped in a taxi on Regent Street. There was a slim chance that the woman and Keane might have been regulars at that restaurant. In which case, perhaps someone who worked there might know something about them. It was a long shot, but then so was this whole business. It would have to wait until tomorrow, anyway. She had had enough of sleuthing for today. She considered checking out the dessert menu, then decided not to bother, drank some more of her Sancerre and went back to Modesty Blaise. Modesty would escape. She always did. That was one of the things Zelda so admired about her. The lonely call of a ship’s horn sounded from far away, downriver.
It was after nine o’clock and getting dark when Gerry finally arrived at Luke Farrar’s house near the top of Elmet Hill. Sean Bancroft was present, too, as were both boys’ parents. The boys were sipping hot chocolate and their parents red wine. Mrs Farrar asked Gerry if she would like a glass, but she declined. Much as she would have enjoyed a glass of wine right then, it wouldn’t do to accept alcohol from interviewees. Maybe Banks could get away with it, but he was Superintendent and Gerry was a lowly DC. She did, however, accept the cup of tea offered as an alternative. The children seemed no worse the wear for their adventure, and no doubt when the immediate shock wore off, they would end up with an exciting tale to tell at school. Out of the window, the tree branches silhouetted against the night sky swayed and creaked in the breeze that had sprung up. Cars were parked on both sides of the hill, but there was hardly any traffic at that time. Things would be different when the shopping centre was built.