Four Below (32 page)

The ramp had been completely cleared, swept and gritted. Once at the bottom, he powered himself on to the pavement. It was a pleasure to be moving again, even at these modest speeds. He enjoyed
the exertion, the forward movement, the crisp air. Even car fumes became sharp, separate smells in this cold, rather than an all-enveloping miasma. The sun was beginning to break through and the
light intensified as it reflected off the snow on cars parked along Ashley Road. The going was good until a cluster of uncollected rubbish sacks forced him to slow down. A stupid van had been
parked half on the pavement by some thoughtless moron. The side door slid open and a swarthy-looking idiot jumped out right into his path. Before he could shout his protest, the man landed a punch
on his throat. Now all he could do was struggle for air; it was like trying to breathe through a straw. A broad sheet of MDF slid like a ramp from the van, his chair was tilted backwards, and
seconds later the door slammed to behind him, shutting out the light.

Fairfield checked her purse for cash. Had to leave enough for a cab. Plenty there. Not that this pub was that expensive. It just felt like it. Another pint of Butcombe, then.
She always drank beer in pubs, wine at home. Though this being a posh gastropub, they probably had drinkable wine here. Not the same, though, not when you had worked up a thirst during a long,
frustrating, annoying, bloody tedious day at work. What you dreamt of then was a cool pint standing on a polished bar top with many of its mates waiting in the barrel.

Not exactly her usual haunt, the Albion. Or Clifton, for that matter, though she did like Boyces Avenue in summer. She was looking for a new pub to adopt, one uncontaminated by association with
her ex or her job. She’d left the car at the station, knew then already she would drink more than was good for her, and had taken a taxi. It was an ancient place tarted up tastefully and
minimally, with polished wood floors and practically bare walls, just the antidote she needed tonight for the poison that had leached into her mood from interview rooms full of stupidity and frozen
squats smelling of stale piss. Two men drinking at a table across the room kept looking over. Only a matter of time before
woman drinking on her own
would transform in their minds to
woman needing to be chatted up
. There were other, slower poisons, too. Being stuck at a small station with Superintendent Denkhaus was one. It was inner city but definitely not inner circle;
for that you had to be at Trinity Road, not at a crumbling, make-do-and-mend nick like Albany Road.

‘Anything else for you?’ the barman asked.

She realized she’d been staring into space, staring right through him. She was getting drunk, no doubt about it. And why the hell not? Should have eaten something, though. Should probably
eat something now, before it was too late. ‘Yeah, some olives would be nice.’

The barman furnished her with a triangular dish bearing a small mount of olives, a little dish of olive oil and some pieces of crusty bread to dunk into it.
Meze
. Her mother would
approve. In Greece, no one drank without some food on the table. She dunked the bread and savoured the earthy taste of the oil – it wasn’t bad. For a split second Katarina Vasiliou made
an appearance, remembering Corfu, smelling the dusty tracks through the olive groves. A good draught from her pint of Butcombe should have washed her away. Not this time, it seemed. Of course after
the divorce she could go back to her maiden name, though she had not felt maidenly for some time. She had only toyed with the idea out of anger, had long decided that Fairfield worked for her and
changing her name back would simply attract attention to her domestic arrangements and the failure of her marriage. As a police officer you could more or less do what you liked in your private life
as long as it didn’t attract public attention, but if you wanted to progress beyond inspector it became an issue, and beyond superintendent you could forget it. A presentable spouse and
preferably a couple of kids at uni were practically a precondition.

Ah well, here it came. The one who’d been sitting with his back to her had decided to make his move. He came over carrying two empty pint glasses. ‘Hi. Erm, I, that is, we
couldn’t help noticing you were on your own. I hope you’ve not been stood up?’

Fairfield took a draught from her pint before looking up at him. ‘Shouldn’t that be
I hope you’ve been stood up
? I haven’t, thanks for asking.’

‘I’m just off to the bar. Can I get you a drink?’

‘No thanks, I’m fine.’

‘You’re quite welcome to join us at our table.’

‘Ditto.’

‘Suit yourself.’ He stood there for a few seconds more, looking down at her with an expression that was meant to say
what
are
we going to do with you?
, then went on his
way.

Fairfield’s mood plummeted further. He’d been an okay-looking guy, nothing wrong with him, not pushy or geeky or full of himself, and she’d even liked his sweater, but somehow
the mere thought of nice blokes in nice sweaters made her heart sink. Nice shoes, too, she noticed. She drained her glass, popped the last olive into her mouth and got to her feet. She wanted
another drink, but it was getting late. She’d call a taxi out there, from her mobile, rather than wait for one in here, with the nice bloke and his mate throwing glances in her direction.

The narrow little street was still busy. The air didn’t feel as cold as when she had come up here, or perhaps that was the alcohol. While she stood on the pavement buttoning up her coat
and digging for her mobile in her bag, the door of the Primrose Café across the street opened to let out a murmur of conviviality and a couple linking arms. Fairfield looked up and froze.
McLusky with what had to be his partner. She didn’t know he had one. It was too late to hide; he had spotted her straight away.

‘Hey, Kat!’ He happily steered his companion towards her and made the introductions. ‘This is Kat Fairfield. Katarina. Louise Rennie.’

‘Hi, Katarina. I’ve heard a lot about you,’ Louise said.

‘I’m sure you have,’ Fairfield said. ‘It’s all lies, you know.’

‘I see. But the idiot failed to mention just how stunningly beautiful you are.’ Rennie squeezed McLusky’s arm to stop him protesting.

‘What are you doing up here?’ he said instead.

‘Oh, I just came up for a quiet drink after work.’ Damn, why had she said that? She could see on McLusky’s face that he had no problems doing the arithmetic: four hours of
quiet drinking. And Louise had also lifted one ironic eyebrow. ‘I was just calling myself a cab.’ She waggled her phone as evidence.

‘On a Saturday night? Forget it,’ Rennie said. ‘You’d be waiting out here in the cold for ever. I live just around the corner. Literally. Come in for a coffee, then you
can call a cab and wait for it in comfort.’ Fairfield was still looking for polite words of refusal as Louise Rennie gently took the mobile out of her hand and with a smile dropped it back
into her handbag. ‘Good, let’s go.’ She abandoned McLusky’s arm and linked hers with Fairfield’s instead. ‘You’re the first of Liam’s colleagues
I’ve met. At last someone who can dish the dirt on DI McLusky.’

As Louise steered her away, Fairfield looked over her shoulder to see how all this was going down with him, but he seemed in an indestructibly good mood, smiling back at her. She fell into step
and sighed with resignation. She was not in the mood for chat, but if the woman really lived just around the corner, then perhaps waiting for a cab there did make sense. Two minutes later, Louise
disengaged her arm to unlock the front door.

‘When you said literally round the corner, you meant that … literally.’

‘Yes, it’s different from
practically round the corner
, which in my experience means a ten-minute walk.’ Their eyes met for a second. ‘For the record, you can
always take me at my word. Literally.’

Once inside the flat, McLusky was dispatched to the kitchen to make the coffee. Louise flicked on the gas fire in the grate with the remote.

‘Witchcraft,’ Fairfield said accusingly. Despite herself, she was impressed. The size of the sitting room, of the windows, of the bookcases. The quality of the furnishings. None of
this had arrived flat-packed. ‘I obviously have the wrong job, I see that now.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, for a start you must get a lot more leisure time than me if you have time to read all those books.’ She also wouldn’t have the space for them; there had to be a couple
of thousand volumes.

They faced each other across the coffee table, each sitting in a corner of their own two-seater sofa while McLusky clinked and clattered in the kitchen. ‘Do you have a television?’
Louise asked.

‘Yes, why?’

‘Put it out for the binmen to collect. You’d be surprised how much time to read books you’ll find once you’ve got rid of it.’

Fairfield looked around. ‘I take it you don’t have a TV set?’

‘Listen, no woman lies on her deathbed thinking
I wish I’d spent more time watching telly.
’ She got up. ‘I can smell coffee; I’d better give the invalid a
hand with the carrying.’

Fairfield watched her traverse the room and disappear through the door. There was so much space here, and air. The room seemed to breathe clarity, exhale order and purpose. You could feel freer
in a room like this, uncrowded. And Louise belonged here, she saw that straight away; it was
very her
, as the cliché went.

‘Right,’ said Louise as she reappeared carrying the tray of coffee things and with McLusky in tow. ‘No cop-shop talk allowed tonight, however tempting it must be for you
two.’

McLusky dismissed it. ‘Shop talk tempting? Hardly.’

‘Well, detectives do moan a lot at each other,’ Fairfield admitted. ‘Pay and conditions, that kind of thing. It’s a stressful job and it’s easy to take it with you
everywhere.’

McLusky sat down, then wriggled a moment until he had freed his radio from the back of his trousers. He slid it on to the coffee table.

‘I rest my case,’ Fairfield said.

While Louise poured the coffee, McLusky lit a cigarette. ‘If you’re smoking, then so will I.’ She took a short, slender cigar from a box on the coffee table and lit it,
releasing blue smoke towards the ceiling. She sat back and gave Fairfield an inquisitive look. ‘Right, I’m starting my own investigation now. Your parents are Greek? Where in Greece are
they from …?’

Half an hour later, it was McLusky’s mobile that interrupted the conversation. He answered it and limped towards the kitchen as he talked, but stopped before he even got to the door.
‘Hotwells? Give me ten to fifteen, Jane.’

Louise closed her eyes and took a deep breath before self-control was restored. ‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Yes, sorry.’

‘Another body on the cycle path, perhaps?’

‘Oh no, this one’s different.’

Louise walked McLusky to the front door and put her arms around him. ‘Will it take all night?’

‘I expect so.’

‘How about breakfast, then? Here, take my keys. It’s your turn to wake me with something freshly squeezed. Pick up a few croissants or something.’ She kissed him goodbye and
gently closed the door behind him.

In the sitting room, Fairfield was standing up, mobile in hand. ‘I’d better call that taxi, then.’

‘Oh, nonsense, put that phone away. I think more coffee would be a bad idea, though. How about some whisky? Or better still: some brandy. There’s a bottle I’ve been meaning to
open for ages. And then I’ll teach you how to smoke cigars. Brandy and cigars were meant for each other.’

He stood by his car, waved to Austin and quickly lit a cigarette to fortify himself before he had to enter the zone where face masks and protective clothing would make such
luxuries impossible. The dead man had been a wheelchair user; that was as much as McLusky knew. His chair lay upturned near a concrete pillar, more than thirty feet from the body, which was lying
in the snow closer to the road.

The body had ended up in the unclaimed wilderness under the Cumberland Basin flyover. Even drifts of snow and the darkness of the night could not hide the hideousness of this place. It was a
non-space, a forlorn area in the concrete shadows of the roads, between fat concrete pillars. This stretch of the A4 had now been closed to traffic. Police vehicles with blue lights flashing marked
each end of the area. Torchlight swept the ground; generators for the arc lights were being unloaded from a van. An ambulance stood idle.

McLusky had pulled on to the verge before the roadblock, next to a burnt-out motorbike. There was so little left of it, he found it impossible to guess what make it had been. He tried not to
think of the place he had just left as he stood there and quietly cursed with smoking breath. Even the graffiti on the nearest bit of concrete looked as if the artist had been depressed by his
canvas. Austin walked up. ‘Give me one minute,’ McLusky told him, holding up his cigarette in defence.

‘All right if I talk?’

‘Oh, by all means, Jane. Have you caught who did it yet?’

Austin ignored him. McLusky was not the only one in a bad mood; when the call had come, Eve had been halfway through undressing him on the sofa. While he took the call, she’d slammed into
the bathroom and not answered his knock on the door. ‘You’ll like this one. We have a witness who saw the body being dumped.’

‘What? Where? How? Is he still here?’ McLusky took a last greedy drag from the cigarette before flicking it towards the burnt-out bike.

‘He’s over in that Polo, a Mr Hicks.’ Austin waved his notebook towards a red car parked close to a police vehicle under the flyover. McLusky was already limping in that
direction. ‘Nothing brilliantly useful, though; he only saw the vehicle.’ Austin fell into step. ‘According to him, the victim was pushed out of a moving van. In his
wheelchair.’

‘Marvellous. That really is the height of laziness.’ The man in the Polo was talking on the phone, but when McLusky approached the car, he put his mobile away and got out. ‘We
can talk in your car if that’s better,’ McLusky told him.