* * *
It was around eleven when they got back to Catford. They had each made an obvious effort to talk about other stuff on the way, though when Ross started to weigh up various dead ends in the op, he had gently shut her down. Yeah, that was just normal. She should know when to let herself not work. She liked having someone tell her that, actually. It was seductive. It was probably quite deliberate on his part.
They walked to her place; the housing block loomed above them. They stopped by his car. She wasn’t going to invite him in.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘thank you for a lovely evening.’
She couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘No, thank you.’
‘So, neither of us is going to tell the others about…?’
‘No.’
Instead they were going to play out this game of theirs. He was looking at her very determinedly. She let herself look challengingly back.
‘Well.’ She put a little tired sigh in her voice. Time to turn in. She was going to see how far he was prepared to take this.
He suddenly stepped forwards and put his hands on both sides of her face, and with incredible gentleness and force at the same time, kissed her.
She realized that she’d raised her hands. What she did with them, what she did next, this was so important, she had just a second to decide …
She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back. She let the kiss become passionate. She closed her eyes. She let his tongue into her mouth. Okay, so she was now the full-on scarlet woman. Damn it.
She had to stop this before it got too intense and in a moment he’d think they’d be going inside to-
He broke away. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with the most gorgeous, scared, vulnerable expression. His hands dropped from hers.
‘Good night,’ he said. With a smile that again had just that hint of the cat that had got the cream about it, he got into his car.
She stood there while he drove away. After his car turned the corner, she dropped her head to one side, confused. ‘Oh,’ she whispered, ‘well played.’
* * *
Quill woke from dreadful dreams that he couldn’t now remember to find himself sweating in his duvet, and his phone once more ringing.
‘Would you please tell him,’ Sarah groaned, ‘to kill people in the morning?’
Quill answered his phone. It was Lofthouse. ‘A third murder, same MO,’ she said. ‘It’s open season on rich white males.’
EIGHT
The bar in Hoxton was called Soviet, all sofas and low tables and big red projections of Stalin on the wall, so deeply ironic that Quill wasn’t sure he quite followed it. It had been packed at the time of the incident. There were dozens of witnesses, who were now slouching around looking vaguely annoyed, glancing at their expensive watches, as uniforms and Scene of Crime Officers moved between them. There was a huge splatter of blood on the ground between fallen tables, from where a body had recently been removed. Only Quill’s people could see that there was also a splatter of cold silver, which continued across the establishment, right to the window, where this time entry as well as exit splatters could be seen on both sides. An enormous dripping mass of it also covered the far wall. The name of the deceased was Rupert Rudlin, twenty-eight years old, worked for Challis Merchant Bank as an analyst. Parents in Twickenham, single, one sister living in the States.
‘He kept looking over at this young girl, I mean, young woman,’ said Jamie, who was, to give him credit, visibly shaken in his bomber jacket and necktie. ‘He kept saying he was going to go over and talk to her, and everyone was, you know, laughing at him. She was sitting at a table with this guy; Rupert kept saying she was out of his league. And then there was a crash from the window. It was the protestors outside.’ There had been, Quill had gathered, a major Toff gathering outside the bar that evening, something approaching a flash mob, swiftly brought together by Twitter. There were enough youths with those masks in this suburb to do that now, he supposed. ‘They’d thrown a dustbin or something. So we all cheered and waved to them, you know? The bouncers — sorry, security staff — went out there and talked to them. Some of the lads in here — and I don’t agree with this, okay? — they got out their wallets and started waving their cash at them, and pointing to themselves, and they got this chant going, “bankers” … “wankers” … pointing back and forth. Really stupid. Everyone was texting and tweeting about it and, you know, wondering if the police were even going to show up, what with this strike vote and everything.’ Quill was sure that his expression hadn’t revealed anything, but the young man stopped and looked awkward. ‘Sorry. Anyway, that’s when we started to hear the sieg heils from outside, and we realized there were bloody skinheads … well, not real skinheads now but, you know, that lot, they were out there too, and they’d started to fight the Toffs. You could see them outside the window, laying into them, chasing each other across the square, getting into scuffles. There were cheers from in here, not for either side, really. Anyway, I looked back and Rupert had gone over to the woman at the table, had gone to chat her up. That was Rupert all over. The bloke she was with just got up, looked at his watch, didn’t seem like he wanted to get in the way of that. More of a business drink than a date, I got the feeling. But I still thought it was a bit odd that he didn’t want to make sure Rupert wasn’t going to hassle her.’
‘Did she respond well to Rupert’s advances?’
‘It looked as if he was getting somewhere. She was smiling, anyway.’
‘What about the bloke she was with?’
‘He headed off. I didn’t see if he actually left.’
‘What happened then?’
The young man paused, and Quill, through experience, knew that now he was at the point where the impossible had intervened. The boy was trying to navigate through what he could say that might be believed.
‘Just tell the truth.’
Jamie hesitated, then gave in. ‘I thought maybe I was on something, that maybe someone had dropped something into my pint. That table — ’ he pointed — ‘right beside Rupert and this girl just … erupted. All the glasses went flying. This guy that had been standing there was knocked down by it, got cut across his head, and he was screaming. The girl went to help him, squatted down to see what was wrong with him, and Rupert went too. I was thinking maybe some sort of bomb had gone off. And I think the security people started to come over.’
‘And?’
‘She went flying backwards. Like she’d been on one of those springboards stuntmen use. I mean, she shot upwards, I saw her feet off the ground, backwards, and she sort of flew, just a couple of feet, and hit the back wall there, and she stayed there, hanging there, and she was struggling, she was yelling, it was like she was actually fighting with something. She had no idea what was going on, no more than I did.’
‘What was Rupert doing?’
‘He went to try to get her down. But then … he spun round, and blood came out of his mouth. I thought he’d been shot. I ducked down. Really, I did. But then these … wounds … they just started to appear on him, up and down his body, across his neck, and he was staggering about, screaming. And then, then it was like something just burst out of him, like he’d been ripped open. There was this enormous spray of blood, more than you’d think there could be. He fell down. The crowd panicked, I mean, everyone just went apeshit, trying to get outside, running right into the Toffs and the skinheads, and then the police got here, thank Christ, and…’ He trailed off. He was looking at Quill almost desperately. ‘That’s the truth,’ he said. ‘Is that okay?’
* * *
‘Not many of the witnesses did tell the truth, actually,’ said Ross, reading the report that had been thrust into her hand by an annoyed-looking member of Jason Forrest’s staff. ‘You can’t really blame them. Our own witness statements tend to greater accuracy in cases like this because we let them know it’s okay to say mad shit. We have statements here taken by the main operation, saying that both a skinhead and a Toff protestor did the killing. Which means, I hope, that Forrester will just regard the statements we’ve harvested, when we share them with him, as equally mad.’