“You’ll have to take a look for yourself. I don’t do stairs.”
Longbright made her way to the upper floor and let herself into Anna’s neat, light bedroom. Bryant had found his biographer through Dr Harold Masters, who insisted that Anna was far too good to be transcribing documents for academics at a pittance. But she was also employed by government agencies helping to prepare white papers, so she was required to keep a secure area in her office for documents of a sensitive nature.
A cheap Ikea desk stood against the back wall, with books arranged in tidy piles. There were hardly any photographs or personal belongings on display. A small threadbare teddy bear that had probably been a childhood friend sat on colourful cushions at the head of her single bed. A window overlooked the untidy back garden. Two unlocked cupboards were filled with research folders, reference books and magazines. Apart from a flimsy wardrobe of clothes and a high-backed chair, there was nothing else.
This was Anna Marquand’s small world, a haven away from her overbearing mother, a place of safety and comfort. Longbright felt suddenly overwhelmed by sadness.
She took up the frayed rag rug and found it underneath, a slim steel cabinet neatly recessed into the floor, locked with a single standard Yale key. Not exactly impregnable, but it probably fulfilled the conditions of her contracts. Dan had lent Longbright his key kit and she managed to open the safe in a few seconds. Inside were around thirty CD-ROMs labelled with the names of their clients, their contents numbered according to a system that Anna probably matched up in her notes. Simple and effective, but hardly secure. Nothing from Arthur or the PCU. Then she remembered: Anna had only just returned from town and would not have had time to refile the disc. She relocked the safe with its contents intact.
She picked the single framed photograph from the desk and studied it. Anna in happier times, with her father and mother on a bright Spanish beach. There was hope back then, and happiness. No sign of the future, of lives derailed and unfulfilled. She set it gently back down and closed the bedroom door as quietly as possible, as if Anna were sleeping inside.
“Your daughter went outside and found the shopping bag on the step,” she reminded Rose Marquand. “Do you still have the contents?”
“No, I unpacked it and put everything away.”
“There was just shopping in it, nothing unusual?”
“No. But she’d been working on her laptop and had some discs. I think I put them on the sideboard.” Rose pointed across the cluttered lounge. Longbright sifted through the stacks of TV listings magazines and gossip papers but found nothing more.
“I don’t see them here.”
“I don’t know where anything is any more. Look, can you put a stop to those Hagan kids? They made the last few moments of my daughter’s life a misery. She was shaking when she came in. She told me she was frightened, and I could see the fear in her eyes. It was probably why she accidentally cut herself in the first place. I should have prepared supper for her. I want you to arrest them.”
“I promise I’ll see what I can do.” Janice searched through the sideboard and underneath it, but found nothing. Anna had taken the disc with her when she had gone to see Arthur, but didn’t seem to have returned home with it.
“Did your daughter have another place where she kept things safe?” Longbright asked. “Somewhere outside the house?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me much about her work. It was just, you know, writing.” She made the last word sound absurd, like some kind of incomprehensible and pointless hobby.
“Did she mention going somewhere that struck you as unusual?”
Mrs Marquand tried to think, but looked blank. “Only the lido. Isaid, what do you want to go there for?”
“A swimming pool? Which one?”
“The open-air one up in Tooting Bec.”
“Why did you think it was so odd that she would go there?”
“She used to swim every day when she was a little girl. But that was years ago. Tooting Bee’s miles out of her way. That, and the weather.”
“What exactly did Anna say?”
“She called me after seeing your boss on Monday afternoon. I asked her to pick up some dinner and she said she’d be a bit late. That she had to go to the lido on the way home to see someone.”
“Can you remember who?”
“A girl with a similar name. Diana or Donna. That’s it, Donna. Perhaps she can tell you more.”
“Thank you.” Longbright paused in the doorway. “Would you say Anna was happy?”
“I don’t know. I think she wanted a fella. We all do, don’t we? She shouldn’t have died like that. It don’t seem fair. What did she get out of life?”
Longbright studied Anna’s mother coldly. Rose Marquand could not see how much she had contributed to her daughter’s misery. There was a bad atmosphere in the house. Sheena was watching her from the stairs.
She took her leave, stepping between the trash-filled puddles in the alley to reach the corner house where the Hagan family lived. In the unkempt front garden were two gigantic cardboard boxes that had once contained plasma TV screens, and an empty Apple Mac carton, yet the upper windows had silver tape stuck over cracked glass and there were slates missing off the roof. Somewhere inside, a large dog barked.
She was all too familiar with houses like this. Within it, all generations of the family would gather to bicker and get drunk, obsessing over each other’s fluctuating loyalties. It was a hellishly closed world, but if any outsiders intruded, the family would briefly unite to make them a target for harm.
All the local beat officers could do was watch the Hagans and wait for anything that would incriminate them. Drugs, stolen goods, a fight that resulted in physical signs of abuse. Families like the Hagans survived because they knew no witnesses would ever come forward to speak out against them, and nobody would volunteer to give evidence in court. But the Hagans were also an anachronism, a dying breed; Longbright was aware that there were over 180 criminal gangs in London, speaking twenty-four languages, responsible for a third of all the capital’s murders, and their roots lay in ethnic divisions. Criminals were more likely to be bound by a common homeland now than by sharing the same house. Families like the Hagans still practised money laundering, tax evasion and handling stolen goods, but trafficking in drugs, weapons and people belonged to an insidious new order of outlaws.
Heading back to the tube, Longbright resolved to speak with one of the sergeants at Southwark police station, but knew there was little chance of fulfilling Rose Marquand’s wish to prosecute them. She set off towards Tooting Bee lido.
∨ The Memory of Blood ∧
17
Highways
On Wednesday evening the sky cleared so suddenly that it looked as if the clouds had been vacuumed away like dirt, leaving a rich azure sky. The buildings lightened and the pavements dried. People reappeared on the grey streets of King’s Cross and workers once more began drinking outside pubs. Smokers surrounded buildings. Cautious smiles were even spotted.
Inside the PCU, the Turkish workmen who were refitting the electrics and repairing walls had returned and were mopping up pools of water left by the holes in the building’s roof. In Bryant and May’s shared office, the detectives pored over the spreadsheet May had created to track the movements of everyone at the Kramers’ party. Bryant was visibly bored and itching to return to his books.
“It’s very attractive, all these nice coloured panels,” he said, “but of absolutely no use. I don’t know why you keep insisting I should study them.”
“Look, you can see who left the room, when and why,” said May. “It saves you having to talk to anyone.”