It wasn’t a suggestion.
Thirty minutes later we were all down in the beer cellar of the Viaduct Tavern on Newgate Street. Hacked into the walls were cells that could have been built to contain large animals. They were cold, dark and reeked of ancient terrors. The pub above was a place of warmth and cheer and it was light years away from this ancient place of horrors. The cells seemed designed to muffle human screams. I felt my skin crawl.
Whitestone and Edie were looking at me.
‘Anything look familiar?’ Whitestone said.
‘This is not where they took me,’ I said. ‘Nothing like it.’ My spirits sank. ‘Chump bait, as you say.’
‘Fair enough,’ Whitestone said, patting me lightly on the back. ‘Every investigation has its share of false leads, Max, and this was one of them.’
We went up to the pub. The Viaduct Tavern is a beautiful Victorian pub with a wrought-copper ceiling that gives the place a warm and rosy glow. After the fetid air of the cells, being up here felt like breathing out. I sank into the nearest chair. Suddenly I was very tired.
‘I think we deserve a round,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ll get them in.’
Hitchens was excited. ‘Their selection of real ales is first class,’ he said.
I saw Tara Jones slip outside. I placed an order for a sparkling mineral water and a triple espresso and followed her. She was staring up at the sky. I looked up at the white wash of moonlight on the dome of the cathedral.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘I wasn’t looking at St Paul’s,’ she said.
And I saw what she had been looking at.
The giant black silhouettes of the cranes standing out against the night sky, those huge constructions that dwarfed even the highest shining towers, the cranes that would build tomorrow’s skyscrapers.
I drove her home. It was surprisingly easy to arrange. Nobody looked at us twice when I offered to give her a lift back to Canonbury. But she was distant in the car and when I touched her arm she just shook her head.
‘You don’t want to be that guy, Max,’ she said.
‘What guy?’
‘The cynical romantic. The man who gets his heart broken early on and spends the rest of his life moving from one married woman to the next. Taking no chances, risking nothing, leaving all these wrecked marriages in his wake that, most times, never even know that they’re wrecked.’ She shot me a brief look. I smiled at her beautiful face. She didn’t smile back. ‘Women will come to you,’ she told me. ‘All kinds of women. Don’t make the mistake of only wanting what you can’t have. Don’t become that man, Max. I mean it. You’re better than that.’
I laughed.
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.
But I did and she could see it in my face.
We had reached Canonbury Square and she told me I could let her out at the corner. I said that I would drive her to her front door and she didn’t argue with me. But of course I understood that I could not kiss her goodnight in front of her home.
The door opened as she went up the path and I could have looked away but I forced myself to watch. Her husband appeared in the light of the doorway, shirttails outside his trousers and a glass of red wine in his hand, the successful money man at the end of his busy day, and I saw them briefly kiss. More of a quick peck between two sets of lips than a proper kiss. There was affection in the gesture, and familiarity, and even love – the kind of quiet, understated love that comes with the years.
But there was no hunger.
There was nothing like our coffee-flavoured kisses in the Bar Italia.
What she had with her husband was very different.
Their front door closed and I went home and read about Newgate Prison until the sky began to lighten.
I read of how a gaol had been built on the fringe of a Roman fort, a place of punishment born at a moment in history so unremarkable that no man ever thought to record it or remember it.
And as the meat market buzzed with its nighttime life beyond the windows of our loft, I read of Newgate becoming a crucible of misery and disease and corruption across the centuries, constantly destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666 and rising yet again, like a disease that could never be killed.
I read of the virulent strain of typhus that fermented in Newgate’s filthy black depths. I read of Rob Roy and Casanova rotting there, and of Robin Hood and Captain Kidd dying there, and the London crowds who queued to peek at its horrors and flocked to see its public executions and the appalled visitors like Charles Dickens who saw Newgate as London’s mark of eternal shame.
And as the total blackness of the night began to bleed away into the milky dawn, I read how, at the start of the twentieth century, Newgate was torn down brick by brick by brick, as if the city was seeking to hack out the tumour that had grown in its heart for almost a thousand years.
And when real morning came, one of those cold bright mornings that make summer suddenly seem like the stuff of dreams, I shaved and showered and I walked Stan and I made Scout breakfast and saw her settled with Mrs Murphy.
Then I walked to the Old Bailey to wait for justice.
31
As I waited for Alice Goddard inside the Central Criminal Court I stared up at a large shard of broken glass embedded in the wall at the base of the main staircase.
The jagged chunk of glass was as big as a dinner plate. It glinted with the golden light of an early autumn morning as the traffic of the Old Bailey bustled beneath it. The QCs in their wigs and gowns, the lawyers in black carrying cardboard boxes of evidence, judges, jurors, witnesses and – mostly younger, poorer and blacker than everyone else – the defendants in their best suits or newly laundered sportswear.
At least, I thought it was a chunk of glass. It looked like a chunk of broken glass. But I couldn’t understand how it got up there. Perhaps I was seeing things. Security at the Central Criminal Court is tighter than any public building in the country. No mobile phones, no bags and no food and drinks are allowed. So how did a random hunk of broken glass get stuck in the wall?
‘It’s from the IRA car bomb in 1973,’ said a voice beside me.
I looked at him. He was a large man with the beginnings of a beard. There was a name card on his dark suit.
ANDREJ WOZNIAK, it said. BAILIFF.
And now I knew him.
He was the court bailiff who had stood in front of me and blocked my path when Steve Goddard’s killers had got away with murder.
He was the big man who had prevented me from doing something stupid.
I held out my hand and he shook it.
‘Before my time,’ he said. ‘But I understand the IRA made a bit of a mess. One dead and two hundred injured that day.’ He nodded at the broken glass embedded in the wall, almost smiling now. ‘We keep it as a souvenir.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t fall on some judge’s wig,’ I said.
Wozniak laughed.
‘It’s buried quite deep,’ he said. ‘I think we’re safe.’
Wozniak had a reassuring presence. Although the Central Criminal Court is the venue for some of the highest profile cases in the land, a large part of its daily life is devoted to cases concerning gangs. Far more than the average policeman, the bailiffs of the Old Bailey have to be physically capable men with skill sets somewhere between diplomats and bouncers.
Over Wozniak’s shoulder I could see Alice Goddard coming through the main doors. Her children, Stephen and Kitty, followed her. Now I saw the entire family looked much older than the night I met them. The children on the edge of maturity, and Mrs Goddard worn down by stress, growing old before her time. She waved to me. The big bailiff was still looking up at the chunk of broken glass buried deep into the wall of the Old Bailey.