The duty sergeant scampered back towards the front desk, bouncing along the wall as if his hair was on fire. ‘Call a bloody ambulance,’ he shouted to no one in particular, ‘quick!’
Pushing Carlyle out of the way, Ross slipped through the door and headed towards the noise of the alarm bell. Following him into the corridor, Carlyle saw the sergeant stop by an open cell, three doors down.
‘Fuck!’
Reluctantly, Carlyle went to take a look.
Ross stepped aside, to afford him a better view. ‘That’s the kid that killed Beatrice Slater.’
The kid that was accused of killing her, Carlyle thought. He looked at Ian Williamson’s feet dangling maybe an inch or so above the pool of urine that had spread across the floor.
Breathe.
Squeamish at the best of times, the young constable focused on retaining the contents of his stomach. Clamping his jaw shut, he slowly inhaled — one, two, three — and exhaled — one, two, three. The last thing he wanted to do was puke in front of the hard-as-nails superior.
The alarm suddenly shut off. There was the sound of shouting from down the corridor but no one came towards them. Once his guts were under control, Carlyle turned to face the sergeant. ‘Can you really kill yourself like that?’
‘Och aye, son.’ Ross gestured at the body hanging limply from the bars on the window by a length of torn bed sheet. ‘It takes a while, mind.’
‘Mm.’
‘Yes, indeed. It takes something like thirty seconds to a minute before you lose consciousness, five minutes ’til you’re brain dead, twenty before the heart stops beating.’
Despite the morning chill, Carlyle felt a bead of sweat trickle down his spine. He gestured back down the corridor. ‘Shouldn’t they have been checking on him?’
Charlie Ross shot him a sharp look that said, What kind of a stupid fucking question is that? ‘In the old days,’ he mused, ‘when we had the death penalty, they would let them drop, so that it was a case of breaking their neck. Strangulation is not really a nice way to go.’
‘No.’
‘But then again,’ Ross chuckled, ‘what is?’
They were shaken from their thoughts by the sound of an ambulance in the distance. ‘Shouldn’t we get him down?’ Carlyle asked as the siren came closer.
‘Fuck, no,’ said Ross, pushing him away from the door. ‘What we should do is get the fuck out of here, right now.’
How long would it be until it was her lying there on the slab? Five years? Ten? Now that she was getting older, Millicent Olyphant hated hospitals even more than ever the morgue especially. The cold made her shiver. The smell made her want to gag. It took all her willpower to remain in the room.
‘Okay, let’s get on with it.’ Gritting her teeth, the lawyer watched as the balding young man in the white coat pulled back the sheet. Looking up, the morgue technician gave her an enquiring look.
‘That’s him,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s Ian Williamson.’
Standing by her side, Inspector Rob Holt looked at his shoes. They needed a good polish. He would attend to that as soon as he got out of here. He tried — and failed — to invoke the smell of polish in his nostrils.
Impatient for him to say something, Millicent cleared her throat. ‘Are we done, inspector?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Holt nodded. ‘Thank you for that. Ian’s parents are on their way, but at least you’ve saved them the ordeal of having to make a formal identification of the body.’
Oh, it’s ‘Ian’ now, is it? she thought, anger blooming in her chest. You’re on first-name terms, now that you’ve killed the poor lad? Balling her hands into two small fists, Millicent dug her fingernails deep into her palms as she fought an almost overwhelming urge to jump up and scratch the inspector’s eyes out. ‘Fuck you,’ she hissed. Without waiting for a reply, she turned on her heels and fled, in search of some fresh air and some sanity.
Careful to avoid standing in the slowly evaporating pool of piss in the corner of the phone box, Martin Palmer looked out through the broken glass. Assuming that the clock next to the station entrance was correct, his train to London should be arriving in just under ten minutes.
‘So that’s it then?’ said the voice on the other end of the phone.
‘Yes, sir.’ Palmer grabbed a ten-pence piece from the pile of coins he had placed on the shelf by the phone and fed it into the slot. ‘With the Williamson boy dead, the case is now officially closed.’
‘Good, good.’ There was a pause while his superior thought of something else to say. ‘I suppose that’s what we wanted. If nothing else, it’s one less thing to worry about.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he did it, you think?’
‘What? Kill the Slater woman?’ Palmer made a face. ‘The police seem to think so. Otherwise, they wouldn’t really have finished their investigation, would they?’
‘Quite, quite.’
Martin tried not to sigh as he endured another of the pained pauses that his boss specialized in.
‘It’s just that it’s not quite what we had in mind when we sent you up there.’
Palmer thought about that for a moment. ‘No.’
‘But, I suppose,’ he repeated, ‘under the circumstances. .’
‘Yes, under the circumstances. .’ How much longer could they keep going round in circles? ‘Anyway, I’m just about to get on my train.’
‘Second class?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I hope you’re going second class,’ his boss explained. ‘There’s a big clampdown on expenses at the moment. We’ve got to save money, you know. I don’t think I could sign off first class.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Martin said soothingly, ‘I haven’t bought my ticket yet. I’ll make sure I get the right one.’
The good news seemed to perk up his boss considerably. ‘Fine, fine,’ he trilled. ‘Jolly good. So we’ll see you back at Gower Street tomorrow morning.’
‘Ye-’ But before Martin could get the word out there was a click and the line went dead.
No ‘thank you’, then? Palmer thought sourly. No, ‘well done’? Returning the handset to the cradle, he scooped up his remaining change and dropped it into his jacket pocket, next to the pair of soiled cotton panties that he had kept as a memento of his trip. The thought of them nestling there sent an embarrassed tingle through his groin, making him smile. ‘Martin Palmer,’ he mumbled to himself in a cold American accent, ‘licensed to kill. .’
Duran Duran’s ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ began playing in his head as he picked up his holdall, pushed open the phone box door and stepped back out on to the narrow pavement. Stepping into the gutter to give way to an old woman carrying a bag of groceries, he glanced again at the clock. His train should be here in five minutes. That should be just enough time to grab a ham roll, a Kit Kat and a cup of tea from the station cafe before heading for home.
It had remained overcast all day, but warm and humid with it. Police Constable John Carlyle yawned as he watched a shabby-looking black and white cat saunter across no-man’s land, a small rodent clamped between its jaws, apparently uninterested in the massed ranks of men on either side.
‘Incoming!’
Looking up, Carlyle watched as a half-brick sailed through the air towards them. A few moments later, it exploded at the feet of a surprised constable further down the line. With a yelp of surprise, the officer jumped a foot into the air and fell backwards onto his arse, to the general amusement of his colleagues nearby.
‘That was close,’ Dom observed. ‘You don’t want one of those bouncing off your bonce.’ He gestured towards the massed pickets, lined up twenty yards or so away across the same depressing scrap of waste ground that they had been fighting over day after day. ‘There’s a lot of the buggers here today.’ He shook his head. ‘You’d think they’d have got bored with all this bollocks by now, but no, these stupid bastards keep on coming back. I didn’t think the scabs were going to get in this morning.’
‘Where were you last night?’ Carlyle asked grumpily. ‘I thought you were coming back to the pub.’
‘Sorry,’ Dom grinned sheepishly, ‘I got a bit. . waylaid.’