A Face in the Crowd (11 page)

If when they’d seen him the previous time Harvey was on his last legs, he was at death’s door now. He looked even more haggard, and kept swallowing tablets—ten different shapes, sizes, and colors—as if they were candy. Tennison, seated opposite him on the sofa, treated him as gently as she knew how. She spread the photographs of Nadine on the coffee table and gave him plenty of time to mull them over. Finally, chest wheezing and rattling, he shook his head.

“No, I’ve never seen her before. I did let the basement room that summer, I admit it. There’s nothing wrong with that.” He fixed Tennison with his rheumy eyes. “The big darkie complained about everything I did. He just wanted me out.”

“Why did you let the room, David? Did you know the girl already?”

“No, I’d never seen her before. It seemed such a big house for just me and I needed the money. I put a card in the newsagent’s window.”

“What was her name?” Muddyman asked, leaning against the back of the sofa.

“Tracey? Sharon? I don’t remember,” Harvey said wearily.

“How long did she stay?” Tennison asked.

“Couple of months.”

“What months?”

“June, July . . .”

“Not August?”

“No, she’d gone by then.”

“Did you know that she was a prostitute?” Muddyman said, his tone nowhere near as gentle as Tennison’s.

“No.”

“Could she have been friends with that girl?” Tennison indicated the photographs.

“It’s possible.”

“Could she have had a set of keys to the flat?”

Harvey’s narrow shoulders twitched. “Possible I suppose . . .”

“Could she and some friends have used the flat that Sunday you were at your sister’s?” Tennison pressed him.

“How should I know?” His eyes were upon her, but unfocused, as if he couldn’t quite make her out. “As you say, I wasn’t there . . .”

His shoulders started heaving as he went into a coughing fit. Muddyman hesitated when Tennison pointed to the kitchen, but then went off and came back with a glass of water, which Harvey gulped down with four more assorted pills.

“Just one last thing, David.” Tennison smiled at him encouragingly. “Could we have a photograph of you, please?”

Harvey wiped his mouth. Beads of water clung to the ragged fringes of his mustache. “Why?”

“It’ll help us eliminate you from our inquiries.”

“Will I get it back?”

“Of course.” Tennison watched him on his snail’s progress to the glass-fronted bureau. “One from the mid-eighties if you’ve got it.”

Harvey took a tattered, red album from the drawer and leafed through it. Tennison went over to stand beside him. She picked up one of the framed photographs, a moody sunset over a gray, restless ocean, which to her inexpert eye looked to be of a professional quality.

“Are you the photographer?” Muddyman asked, taking an interest.

“No. My nephew Jason.”

“They’re very good,” Tennison said, putting it back.

“Here.” Harvey gave her a snapshot of himself, a darker-haired, stronger-looking Harvey with a brown mustache. “Younger and fitter, eh?” he said with a wan smile.

“Thank you. I’ll get this copied and get it back to you as soon as possible.” She put it in her briefcase along with her notebook and snapped the catches.

They went through into the tiny hallway. Harvey leaned on the jamb of the living room door, resting. Tennison reached out to release the Yale lock when she noticed the front door key hanging down from the mailbox on a piece of string. “I’d remove that if I were you, David. Not very safe.”

“It’s so someone can get in if I collapse.” Harvey stated it matter-of-factly; no self-pitying appeal for sympathy.

Tennison gave him a look over her shoulder as she went out. “Even so.”

As they were going down the stairs, Muddyman said mockingly, “You’d make a wonderful Crime Prevention Officer.”

“Oh yeah?” Tennison drawled, punching him.

DS Oswalde lingered by the frozen food cabinets, not even bothering to put up a thin pretense that he was wondering what to buy. The supermarket wasn’t all that busy at this late hour, and Oswalde had an uninterrupted view along the aisles of Tony Allen, neat and dapper in his short dark-blue coat and polka-dotted bow tie, the plastic badge on his left lapel engraved in black letters: “A. ALLEN. TRAINEE MANAGER.”

Tony was aware of the scrutiny. Oswalde had made sure of that. The more rattled the young man became, the better he liked it. Esme Allen had called it an asthma attack. A load of old baloney. Tony had been scared shitless the minute he laid eyes on Nadine’s clay head. He’d recognized her instantly, of that Oswalde hadn’t the slightest doubt.

Oswalde stalked him around the store for another ten minutes, watching him openly, noting with satisfaction the jerky body language, the fumbling with the clipboard when he tried to make an entry. At last, deciding that Tony had stewed long enough, Oswalde moved in. He cornered him next to cooked meats and stuck the description, the one Vernon Allen had given of the girl living in the basement, under his nose.

“Your father remembers her,” Oswalde said, looking down on Tony, a good eight or nine inches shorter. “Bleached blonde, slim, about five-foot-two . . .”

“Well, I don’t.” Tony dodged around him and strode off.

“Do you like reggae, Tony?” Oswalde asked, matching stride for stride.

“What?”

“I do. Reggae, soul, jazz. Do you like jazz?”

Tony whirled around. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m just talkin’, man.” Oswalde shrugged, all sweetness and light.

“Well don’t, just leave me alone . . .”

“All right, Tony,” Oswalde said with a glimmer of a smile, “don’t jump the rails.”

Tony started off, turned back, his face twitching. “I don’t remember any girl,” he said, grinding it between his teeth.

Oswalde stood watching him stump off. Nearly done, but not quite. Tony Allen needed to stew just a little while longer.

“This’ll do,” Tennison said, and Muddyman pulled over at the corner of Glasshouse Street and Brewer Street. She tucked her briefcase under her arm and opened the door. “I’ll get a cab home.”

Muddyman raised his hand. “ ’Night, Guv. Hope you get something.”

Tennison strolled along through Soho, past the strip joints with their garish neon signs and life-size color photographs of semi-naked women contorting themselves to entice the johns downstairs. Separating the strip clubs were shadowy booths peddling racks of soft porn, and at the back, behind a curtain of fluttering plastic streamers, the hard Swedish and German stuff wrapped in cellophane. There was plenty of business about, and groups of working girls in miniskirts and fishnet stockings, clustered around the concrete lampposts, their faces anemic in the harsh sodium glare, black slashes for mouths.

Tennison glanced across the street. A tall girl with a mass of dark hair piled on top of her head, wearing a lime-green shortie plastic raincoat, registered who it was, and gave a nod. Tennison strolled on. She stopped in a darkened doorway, waiting for Rachel, and hadn’t been there more than a few seconds when a man approached and leaned towards her. She smelled whisky on his breath.

“Oh, I wouldn’t if I were you,” Tennison said, and the man moved on, bewildered. A minute later Rachel appeared, and Tennison gave her a smile. “You look like you could use something to eat, darling.”

In the cafe on the corner they sat at a plastic-topped table while Rachel did justice to a hot salt beef sandwich and Tennison sipped an espresso.

“If he’s a pimp, I’ve never seen him before,” Rachel said, handing back the snapshot of David Harvey. She took another bite of her sandwich. “I’ll ask around about the bleached blonde, but it’s not much to go on.”

“You’re telling me,” Tennison said with feeling.

Rachel chewed while she had another think. “Maybe she was one of those that tried it for five minutes and decided it was no kind of life. One of the sensible ones,” she said, the corner of her mouth curling up in a bleak, sardonic smile. “I suppose someone might remember, since most of the girls who worked that area are black.”

Tennison held up the picture of Nadine.

“Look. This is the likeness of the dead girl . . .”

Rachel bent forward to peer at the clay head, staring sightlessly into the camera. She pulled away with a little shudder. “Spooky. No.” She shook her head of tousled curls. “Never seen her before either.”

Tennison folded a twenty-pound note and slipped it under Rachel’s saucer. “Do your best, darling,” she said with a smile, and got up to leave.

“I always do,” Rachel said.

“Ask around. I must go . . . ’bye.”

Jane poured herself a treble of neat Bushmills and on her way back to the sofa pressed the playback button on the answering machine. She kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa, closing her eyes and resting her head on the cushions. She felt bone-weary, yet her brain was ticking like an unexploded bomb. She couldn’t turn off her thoughts, they crowded in, swamping everything. When she was working on a case, she gave it every ounce of her concentration and emotional energy. No wonder Peter hadn’t been able to stick it out. Would any man? If it wasn’t an empty-headed bimbo they wanted, it was a wife and homemaker, and she didn’t fit either category.

The machine clicked on. It was her mother.

Jane, remember, this Friday is Emma’s first birthday, so don’t forget to send a card, will you?

Emma was her sister Pam’s little girl. Pam was happily married to Tony, a company accountant, with three children, the perfect nuclear family. While Jane was the black sheep of her own family, the mad, obsessive career woman doing a job no woman should do—or so Jane’s mother thought. She had learned to live with, if not fully accept, her family’s total lack of understanding about the kind of work she did; it never ceased to puzzle them why she didn’t find herself a steady guy and settle down, have a couple of kids before it was too late, forget all this career nonsense.

“I haven’t forgotten, Mum . . .” Eyes closed, both hands around the glass, she took a sip of whisky.

.
.
. if you’re in before ten thirty you can telephone me. Daddy sends his love.

There was a click, a hissing pause, followed by the next message.

Mike Kernan at nine thirty-five. I was hoping for an update, Jane. Any results from your clay head?
A slight hesitation then, throat-clearing.
Er .
.
. it’s my interview tomorrow and they’re, um, bound to ask me about Operation Nadine. Particularly whether my DCI’s come in on budget. Anyway, ring me tonight if you can—or drop by my office first thing.

Jane stretched out and took another sip, feeling the Bushmills burn a molten path all the way down. She had no intention of calling a living soul.

Tennison was at the station bright and early the next morning. After dumping her coat and briefcase in her office, she went to the Incident Room and checked on the duty roster for the day. It was a few minutes after nine thirty when she hurried along to Kernan’s office and found him primping in front of the mirror, getting ready for his interview.

She reported, “We’ve spoken to the Sunsplash concert organizers. They’ve given us the names of the bands using backup singers. We’re talking to them now.”

“Tread carefully there, Jane. We’re under the microscope.” Kernan adjusted the knot in his silk tie, glancing at her in the mirror. “How’s Oswalde getting on?”

“Fine.”

He turned and caught her smiling. “What?” Tennison edged up his breast pocket handkerchief a fraction and smoothed it flat. “How do I look?” he asked anxiously.

“Like a Chief Superintendent.”

“Good,” Kernan said, and she could almost see his chest swell.

As she entered the Incident Room, DC Jones called her over.

“Guv!” He was elated, his eyes bright behind his rimless glasses. “I thought you’d like to know—Forensic have found a fragment of our girl’s tooth between the floorboards of the front room of Number fifteen . . .”

Tennison punched the air with her fist. “Yes!”

News was coming in thick and fast. Next it was Oswalde’s turn. He came over waving a page of computer printout, the result of all those hours crouched over the VDU screen.

“I think I might’ve found her.”

“Yeah?” Tennison barely glanced at him, her tone neutral.

“Joanne Fagunwa, mixed parentage, became missing in early eighty-five from Birmingham.”

“Is there a photograph?”

“Yes, well, I suppose that’s with the file in Birmingham.”

Tennison nodded brusquely. “Let’s get it faxed through. If it looks promising, then go . . .”

Oswalde looked incredulous. “To Birmingham?”

“Yes.” She turned away. “Richard, have we checked when Mrs. Harvey died?”

“August eighty-five, wasn’t it?” Haskons said.

“Let’s check.”

“Course.”

Muddyman put his head in and said to Tennison, “Let’s go.”

She was gone, leaving Oswalde with the computer printout in his hand and an expression of pent-up frustration on his face.

“Nice one, Bob,” Haskons said sincerely, a small token in lieu of Tennison’s lukewarm appreciation for his efforts. Oswalde went back to his desk; he was getting more than a bit pissed-off with being given the brush-off. As if he were here on sufferance, not really part of the team at all. Well. We’d see about that.

DI Burkin didn’t like what he saw, and he took no great pains to disguise the fact. The recording studio was in a prefabricated building, provided by the council, two streets away from Honeyford Road. A sheer criminal waste of poll tax, in Burkin’s view, most of which had been coughed up by white people to give these jungle bunnies somewhere to hang out all day, amusing themselves at the taxpayers’ expense.

In respect to his seniority, Rosper let Burkin carry out the questioning, though he was uncomfortable about it.

There was a recording session in progress. Through the large glass panel they could see, but couldn’t hear, a group of musicians banging away at guitars and drums, with three guys in the brass section. The band they were interviewing had played at the Sunsplash festival, but they were none too cooperative; mainly, Rosper suspected, because of the hostile vibes coming off Burkin like a bad smell.