‘Andrea had their picture from the Plumstead Gazette? Why?’
‘That’s a good question. She’s got passport records of every overseas trip they’ve ever made-how did she get those? She just laughed when I asked her. And she’s got graphs tracking the share prices of their companies against the FT Index. Michael Grant sounds rational enough, but I think he’s obsessed. He’s convinced the Roaches are behind half the drugs trade south of the river, and he’s got Andrea dredging for anything that might fit into an incriminating pattern.’
‘How does she feel about it?’
‘She believes him. He’s very convincing, very impassioned. She thinks he’s wonderful.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘You can meet her. Grant’s daughter is giving a concert on Saturday evening to raise money for one of her father’s good causes.We’re invited, Brock too.Will you come? Apparently she’s very good.’
‘Oh, well . . . Nicole and Lloyd suggested we go out with them on Saturday.’
‘They could come along, then we could get a meal together afterwards.’
‘All right, I’ll ask her.’
‘You’re right, you know, about the case,’ Tom said. ‘We’re doing it all wrong, not being aggressive enough. What’s Brock doing, do you know?’
‘He seems to be immersed in old police files.’
Tom shook his head. ‘More paper. It’s like he’s becoming bogged down in the past. Either we should have a go at the Roaches or we should forget about them and get on with something useful.’
‘What could we be doing?’
‘I’ve got one or two ideas.’
‘Like what?’
‘Not now.’ He looked at her.‘There are more important things to think about, like what we’re going to eat. The steamed sea bass is supposed to be a speciality of the house, so I’m told.’
Later she caught him looking at her with an oddly sad expression.‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’ve been neglecting you,’ he said.
‘We’ve both been a bit preoccupied with work.’
‘I’ll make it up to you, soon. Maybe we could go away somewhere, take a trip, get out of London.’
‘Where do you fancy, Jamaica?’ She smiled, but he just looked nonplussed, as if he couldn’t see that it was meant as a joke.
Later, he drove her home. She asked him up for a nightcap but he refused, saying he needed to get a few things prepared for the morning.
Kathy wasn’t required in court until ten that day, and decided to pay another visit to the flat above the laundrette in Cove Street. She guessed that George, if he was living there, was probably not an early riser. As she pulled into the kerb outside the tyre yard she saw the woman step out of the flat onto the access deck, this time unencumbered by her twins. Kathy waited while she hurried down the stairs and ran towards the street, then she went up to the front door. There was a light visible through the frosted window.
She knocked, waited, then knocked again. Finally the door opened.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .’ George grumbled, wiping his hands on a cloth.‘Wha-’
He stared at Kathy and his mouth stayed open as he recognised her.
‘Morning,’ she said.‘Can I come in?’
He recovered himself, sticking his head out of the door and darting his eyes up and down the deck and over the street below. ‘What you want?’
‘A few words, George.’ From somewhere inside a baby began to cry, then another, their wails rising to a coordinated shriek. ‘Won’t take a minute.’
He looked harassed.‘All right then.’
She followed the sounds of distress as he closed the door behind her, and found the source on the floor of a cramped living room, two shiny brown sets of limbs thrashing on newspaper.
‘Oh, phew.’ A pair of soiled, freshly opened nappies lay next to their bottoms.
‘Yeah, ’orrible, innit?’
‘Got fresh nappies? I’ll give you a hand, if you like.’
She squatted down and they took one each.
‘You’re better at this than me,’ Kathy muttered, trying not to breathe.‘Are they yours?’
He shook his head, mouth turned down with disgust. ‘No way.Where you parked?’
‘Outside the tyre yard.’
‘Anybody see you come up here?’
‘I don’t think so, why?’
‘The landlord don’t like coppers. He’d get really pissed off if he knew you were here.’
‘Teddy Vexx, eh?’
‘Teddy, yeah. How do you know that? What you want anyway?’
‘Winnie’s worried about you, George.Why did you leave?’
‘She got on my nerves, nagging all the time, wouldn’t stop telling me what to do. I couldn’t take it no more. Carole said I could move in here as long as I helped out with the twins.’
From the look on his face as he stared down at them he wasn’t sure he’d made the right choice. Kathy noticed a keyboard and some sophisticated-looking electronic gear on the table, mixed up with the jumble of breakfast things.‘You working, George?’
‘Off and on.’
‘Where did you nick that stuff?’
‘Give over, that’s all mine. That’s the other reason I had to leave Winnie-she couldn’t stand me practising.’
‘Is your group playing at the moment?’
‘Yeah,at the JOS.It’s the place,man.We just started there.It’s our big break.’ For a moment he grew a little stiffer with pride, then he sagged again.‘What do you want, anyway?’
‘Where are the binoculars?’
George looked startled.‘What binoculars?’
‘I want to know why you spied on us when we were digging up those bodies on the railway land.’
Now he was acting offended.‘I never did! Who told you that?’
‘Don’t lie to me.We found a spliff you were smoking over there. Pretty potent.You want me to arrest you and talk to you on tape?’
‘Oh . . .’ He slumped into a chair, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘This is so unfair. All the stuff that’s goin’ on and you pick on the little people like me.’
‘Stop moaning, George, and tell me what you were doing.’
‘I don’t know. They paid me, that’s all that mattered to me, but I don’t know what was the point. I sat up there freezing day after day and I said,What’s the point? They’ve cleared the snow, they’ve put up tents, I can’t see anything. And he just said, How many
tents? Where are they? He wanted a daily report.’
‘Who did?’
‘Teddy. But it was for somebody else. He was doing a favour for somebody who was interested, I don’t know who.’
‘You must have some idea. How did Teddy contact him? Did they meet? Did you ever see Teddy talking to him?’
But George was too afraid of Teddy Vexx, and knew he’d already said too much.‘You’ve no idea,no idea at all,what he can do. Just leave me alone. I don’t know nuffing.’
‘You should get away from Teddy and his friends, George. Concentrate on your music.’
‘I don’t have no money, do I? And he got us the gig at the JOS.’
‘Good luck.’
George darted ahead of her to the door and looked cautiously around outside before letting her go. Behind them the twins started bawling again.
When she got to court she found herself on hold once again, and she took the opportunity to make a couple of phone calls. She started with the Rainbow Coordinator at Greenwich Borough. When she got through she told him about the camera at the gates of the golf club, and he promised to check and get back to her. Then she rang Nicole and told her about the invitation to the concert on Saturday night.
‘What sort of music is it?’ Nicole asked.
‘I don’t know. Classical, I think. It’s for a good cause, not sure what.’
‘Oh well, we’ll give it a go.’ She made a note of the arrangements, then added, ‘What’s got into your boss these days, Kathy? He’s driving us mad with his demands for old files, buried in the deepest recesses. Is he writing a history book or something?’
On Saturday morning Brock sat at his desk surrounded by columns of stacked files that looked as if they’d been unearthed from some ancient crypt. Dot had attempted to rearrange them, he saw, perhaps to make an easier route to the door, but she hadn’t made much impression.From her withering looks the previous day he understood that she no longer considered the situation tenable. He sympathised, of course, but he couldn’t stop now, not having come this far. The problem was that the material evoked so many memories, so many side trails, that it was easy to get distracted. To focus his researches he had pinned a large sheet of detail paper over the top of the Brown Bread wall, and it was now covered with a hand-drawn timeline and incident record chart decipherable only to himself. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, something would emerge out of the mist. He knew he couldn’t go on much longer. Then the phone rang, his mobile not the office one.‘Hello?’