Thank Christ, he thought, and smirked at the two cops on his way to the car. ‘Hang loose, guys,’ he told them cheerfully. ‘You doin’ a good job.’
6
Frank Palmer switched off his phone and stared blankly through the windscreen of his Saab into the thin morning light. He was parked in a south London trading estate, adjacent to a chain-link security fence bordering a series of warehouses and storage facilities.
Until the call from Riley two minutes ago, his focus had been on a distribution depot a hundred yards away, where three shift workers were unloading an Italian haulage truck prior to filling up a fleet of delivery vans. He knew that at least one of the men was conspiring on a regular basis to load more than the job sheets called for, and with the co-operation of one of the drivers, was steadily plundering the company of a fortune in electronics goods. Palmer had been hired to find out who was doing the plundering and how.
He’d just returned to England after following the haulage truck all the way from a wholesale warehouse in Italy. The trip had been free of incident; no unusual contacts, no unscheduled stops in lay-bys, and no night-time handovers to other drivers. But at least he now knew where the company’s problem lay.
He glanced up at the mirror and wondered if the face staring back at him really looked that cold or whether it was simply the effects of days and nights of surveillance and a lack of sleep. He ran a hand through his scalp, barely disturbing his scrub of fair hair, and felt the nerves tremor all the way down his neck. Just before his phone rang, he’d been fantasising about coffee, breakfast and his bed — in that order.
Now all that was forgotten.
Instead, he had a cold feeling lodged deep in his chest, as if shards of iced water had been pumped into him under pressure. His brain felt oddly scrambled, and he was having difficulty concentrating on the fact that someone once close to him was dead. And not simply through natural causes.
Murdered.
He watched the men in the loading bay for a few more moments. Mentally, at least, he’d already tuned them off his radar. They would keep. Too greedy to stop their little operation now it was working so well, they would continue for as long as they were allowed to get away with it. If he had to, he already had someone in mind who could wrap this up for him.
He turned the ignition key and pulled quietly away from the kerb. He followed the road through twin lines of commercial units with their shuttered warehouses and darkened office fronts out of the estate to the main road, allowing the speed to build smoothly. Speed, now, that was something else. Speed could help you survive, get you out of a tight spot. Speed could provide a sort of solace, when other things couldn’t.
The speedometer surged upwards, charging past 50 and above with no more effort than the desire it took to go there. The tyres hissed on the wet road surface, smacking through puddles and fissures in the worn tarmac, and the engine noise diminished to a steady hum, as if it were being gradually drained away and left behind by the increased speed. Street lights became a washed-out blur and other vehicles mere furniture, there momentarily, then lost in the slipstream.
Palmer steered smoothly round a battered mini emerging from a side street, catching a momentary glimpse of a pale, shocked face from the corner of his eye. A truck was slow in accelerating from changing lights, and he stabbed the brakes, skimming past a traffic island and a barely-visible cyclist wobbling along in the opposite direction.
He breathed out, his heart drumming, and allowed his speed to drop. His eyes went to the mirror. Not clever, he told himself, his hands tight on the steering wheel. Not cool.
He turned north and found himself thinking about Helen, and what she would have thought of his reaction. He hadn’t got to know her that well, in spite of the fact that their relationship had, for a while, been intense in more than a merely physical way. They had discovered in each other a shared preference for risk-taking, with Helen admitting to eschewing the safety of a salaried job with a national daily and all the perks on offer, in favour of freelance work. Flying solo. Never knowing where the next job was coming from, and never having a guarantee other than a certainty in one’s own ability. Even if the story you were going after might take you out over a gaping chasm with no safety net.
He’d once asked her about it, knowing the offers had been there. She had laughed and said nothing, and he’d instinctively known the answer: the lure of danger and the unknown had been too much of a pull. Like another reporter he knew. Like himself. Kindred spirits.
In the end, however, it had not been enough to sustain what lay between them. With too much time spent apart on their various assignments, it had been Helen who had gradually begun to pull away. She had still been passionate, still the same person, yet with an increasing reserve as time went by, as though she were gently easing herself out from anything too committed.
Finally, she had told Frank that she wanted to remain friends. It had been like a knife piercing his soul, and probably the moment he had realised just how much she had meant to him.
He surged between speed cameras, opening up the car in brief bursts, wary of cruising patrol cars. All the while, a map was constantly rolling through his mind in case he needed to cut off and lose himself amid huddled rows of houses or the mish-mash of small suburban trading estates.
He reached Uxbridge and parked outside his office. It was on the first floor above a row of small businesses. A dry-cleaners stood on one side, and a large, glass-fronted shop on the other. The latter was currently a photocopier display room, but had already changed business use three times in as many months. Palmer lived in hope of it becoming something useful, such as a coffee shop with comfortable chairs and crisply-ironed newspapers for patrons to use all day. It would make the times between jobs so much easier to bear.
A plain wooden door with a scarred front led to a moribund pot plant and a narrow flight of stairs. A scattering of mail lay on the bottom step, and he scooped it up. At the top of the stairs stood a glass-panelled door. Behind it lay a single office with a desk, chairs and a filing cabinet, and a kettle in lieu of a coffee shop. A computer fan purred beneath the desk, and the air was stodgy with the smell of warm plastic. He had gone out several days ago and left it on by mistake. Riley would have a fit. She might be another risk-taker, but he was certain she was developing a thing about carbon footprints.
The room’s appearance was what Palmer liked to think of as lived-in and comfortable, like the jackets he wore. His clothes provided anonymity, a necessity for the kind of work he did. But they also reflected the deliberate distancing of his years spent in uniform — an existence according to Queen’s Rules and Regulations. What he had now, he freely acknowledged, was another kind of uniform, but at least it was his by choice. And that choice spilled over into his workplace, where comfort was key and dust was allowed to settle and accumulate over long periods until he felt concerned enough to move it around a little.
He switched on the kettle and made coffee. A large spoonful and three sugars. The milk had solidified so he did without. He slopped some cold water into a pot plant that was showing signs of becoming a twig. It had been a present from Riley, who seemed eager to prove that even Palmer could make things grow, given time and regular care.
Another one of her presents was a Rolodex file sitting on one corner of his desk. She had insisted that every PI worth his salt had to have a Rolodex. He hadn’t felt inclined to argue — mainly because he’d been quietly pleased at the idea. While he waited for the kettle to boil, he fanned the cards, enjoying the clatter as the cylinder spun, the gentle, dry sound echoing almost comfortingly in the room.