*
The light flicks off and her heart hurdles a beat. After hour upon hour of nothing happening, just the slow arc of the sun and the pale fading of the weather against the Welsh hills, Zoe is nervous of change. The man and the woman who come, in masquerade masks and black raincoats, keep telling her she need not worry. They asked her about the baby and gave her a vitamin supplement. It will be soon, she thinks. It feels soon; sooner than the dates she gave the doctor. The last baby was too soon: too small, too weak.
She closes her book in the dark. She has been reading it slowly and deliberately, so as not to be without it. She has tried to get inside the mind of Toni Morrison, to distinguish her from the narrator. The task stretches the book and exercises her mind, something she has learned to do in private.
Zoe undresses and slides between the sheets on the mattress which she has moved to beneath the window. Last night the moon was unobscured. Not so tonight. The shapes within the room emerge slowly from the dark as her eyes adjust.
She passes her hand across her belly in slow circles. The baby hasn’t kicked since after lunch. She wishes it would. She closes her eyes, remembers the look on the doctor’s face as they agreed upon a termination. The woman was insisting on a final scan, but there was no smear of emotion, no hint of the right and wrong of it.
And before she finds sleep, in those bulrushes between the conscious and the not, Zoe wonders whether, if this one dies, it will find its brother. And she dreams that when she wakes, she is crying. She begins to dream that she is between the leaves of a book, listening to this stupid woman cry.
A sea fret comes up from Albert Dock and drifts around the sandstone monolith of Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral which broods high above cobbled Huskisson Street. Below, the city slopes away from Staffe. Above the seam of mist, he can see the sun glint on the hills, which must be Wales.
Staffe has stopped by the entrance to a bail hostel – fashioned within a grand neo-classical house. He looks behind him, up to the beautiful, stately Falkner Square where the brass is already out, tricking, or buying their daily dose. Boys in black track suits and black trainers skulk with their hoods drawn up. Somewhere, a peal of laughter smooths through the mist. It is the sound of students. He checks the address he jotted down from the stamp in Zoe’s books, and carries on.
Before long, he sees the large Chinese arch and carries on past, down Duke Street. There are more junkies in these streets, just one block off the main drag, and even though it isn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning, they are carrying cans of super-strength lager as if they were styrofoams of coffee.
The Curious Cat is no ordinary bookshop. Tucked away between a done-up boozer and a fancy Japanese restaurant, it is in a double-fronted, rickety Victorian building that opens out into a small bazaar. The sandwich board at the entrance to the indoor market tells you these are shops for the socially aware, funding the victims of government crime. It says, ‘IF YOU CARE, SHOP HERE’. Above the entrance, on a cracked plastic banner, in red letters: ‘ALL PROCEEDS TO THE VICTIMS OF GOVERNMENT CRIME’.
The Curious Cat is opposite a tattoo parlour called Free Ink. Behind its counter, chewing on an unlit roll-up and reading the
Guardian
, is a dreadlocked woman aged thirty, or thereabouts. She smells of cat and Staffe wonders if this could be deliberate.
She looks up and frowns at Staffe, sussing him for precisely what he is. ‘I ain’t done nothing wrong,’ she says.
Staffe ignores her, clocks that a final demand for her council tax is lying on the
Guardian
: ‘Ms Petal Broome’ of 102 Devonshire Road. He mooches around the bookshop, winding up and down between the shelves which go back and back. The books are mainly fiction and travel but there are good sections on politics and biography, too. They are alphabetised and fairly priced. Every now and then he takes a book down, flicks through, thinking about the lives the books have had before. It makes him wish he had more time to read.
Ms Broome comes up to him, says, ‘I’m going for a fag. Don’t nick nowt.’
‘Don’t you want to know why I’m here?’
‘Couldn’t give a toss. I’m clean.’
‘There’s a woman shops here, mid-twenties, smartly dressed. She comes regularly. Called Zoe.’
‘Zoe. She won’t take no money for them. The deal is, we buy our books back. We pay half what they paid if they bring them back, so long as they’re in good nick. We sell some dozens of times. It’s a good cause.’
‘Who do you give your profits to?’
‘It’s a co-op. There’s plenty causes – political, like. We’re very political.’
‘When did you last see Zoe?’
The woman shrugs.
‘She’s missing, Petal.’
‘How d’you know my name?’
‘I want to help her. We’re not all bastards, you know.’
Petal shrugs. ‘She’s nice enough. Sometimes, she brings me ginseng tea. Proper stuff. Not Starbucks shit. What’s happened to her? She was having a baby.’
‘Do you believe in a woman’s right to choose, Petal?’
‘Up to the woman to decide if she’s a right to choose. She’d be due soon. She’ll have finished that Toni Morrison, and an A.L. Kennedy.’
‘Do you have another
Beloved
?’
Petal slinks away and comes back with a dog-eared copy. He gives her a fiver. When Petal gives him the change, he leaves a quid for her, says, ‘Have a ginseng tea.’
‘Week or so since she’s been in. She’s not come to no harm, has she?’
Staffe gives her a card with his number on, can practically hear Petal’s cogs whirr. ‘She’s in trouble. That’s for sure. Do you have anything to tell me?’
Petal shakes her head.
‘You ever see her with anyone else? A fella?’
‘A fella? Nah.’
‘A woman, then. Or women?’
Petal shakes her head.
‘If she’s a friend of yours, you should tell me if Zoe said anything unusual. If she was planning a change.’
‘She can’t change. She’s got a baby coming, hasn’t she?’ Petal says this with a disapproving gurn of her face. ‘Look, I hope she’s OK, I really do. She’s a good woman, an intelligent woman, but I’ve nothing to say about that girl.’
*
Pulford says to Josie, ‘I could go in on my own, you know.’
‘You think it’s too risqué for me, David?’ She gives him a knowing, sidelong glance and looks up at the Rendezvous. ‘You should know better than that.’ A distant memory wafts through the unilluminated glass doors. Tonight, the curious will queue beneath the pink and blue neon, waiting for their fix of Phillip Ramone’s taste of old Soho. He was here before they cleaned it up. And he’s still here.
Pulford raps on the glass and they wait.
Josie came here with a hen party, years and years ago, and then just a couple of years since, on a weird date. She should have known better. The Rendezvous is no place for a second date.
Nobody comes and Pulford raps again.
The bloke who brought her here was a doctor, for crying out loud, and he had tried to show her the middle toilet: one for girls, one for boys, and the middle one for the unsure or inquisitive. Doctor Finney had certainly possessed an enquiring mind.
Inside, the light flickers on and a big man comes. He walks slowly, wide-gaited, as if he has a problem ‘down there’. He mouths something through the glass and his face is angry. He has black stubble all over his head and a low hairline. Pulford takes out his warrant card and holds it to the glass. The big man talks into his lapel, squints at the warrant card as he speaks.
He unlocks the door, and as he heaves it open, he breathes heavily, smells of garlic. ‘What you want?’
‘Mr Ramone.’
‘What you want?’
‘It’s about a woman called Kerry Degg.’
The man turns his back which pushes out against his chalk-stripe jacket. He has haunches like a bull and a small waist. He talks into his lapel again, turns and says, ‘You lucky.’
They follow the man in, through the lobby with the ticket office on the right and the cloakroom on the left. The place smells of too many humans and bleach. However, when they make their way past the three toilets and round along the raised dining area opposite the stage, the smell evolves into a blend of booze and greasepaint and cologne. The lights are dim, but you can almost hear the echo-garble of good times: a bodiced woman, or man, in a spotlight, crooning, seducing the willing.
Phillip Ramone is in an office off the first floor, up a winding stairway and past a raised mezzanine with six small tables, tight up against a gold-speckled balustrade which overlooks the stage.
The proprietor – and this is only one of six businesses he runs in this parish – is waif thin and has his legs crossed like a forties Hollywood dame, talks with a cigarette drooping from his lips, which appear to have a tattooed outline, so that they can be distinguished from the rest of his grey face. He has a pencil moustache which Josie thinks must be to draw his gender. His hair is silvery thin and back-combed into a candy fluff that almost covers his skull. The light is low and his voice disarmingly so. The big man sits down next to him.
‘You offered Kerry Degg a residency,’ says Josie. Ramone has a standard lamp on behind him and she has to squint. Plumes of smoke curl around him.
‘Kerry? You mean Lori. Lori Dos Passos.’
‘That’s her stage name,’ says Pulford.
‘And you have come to that stage. This is her world.’
‘Was.’
‘Yes, I heard. A tragedy.’
‘When did you last see her, Mr Ramone?’ asks Josie.
Ramone shifts, square to Pulford. He might have taken a shine to the tall young policeman. ‘I thought I had done something to upset her. Either that or her idiot husband had her shipped away onto a cruise. Have the child at sea, perhaps. The shame of it.’ He laughs, unconvincingly, at his own joke.
Josie says, ‘Would you say Kerry was upset at the pregnancy?’
Ramone leans forward, presses a button on his telephone. ‘Not upset. Pissed off, more like. Her career – her blooming life – was about to take off. She was going to get rid, that’s for sure.’
‘And you encouraged her?’
‘Me? I love children.’ He laughs. ‘It was really of no consequence to me.’
‘But what about the residency?’
‘We have a very mixed clientele, but they’re decent people. Nobody would have objected to a pregnancy – except maybe the last month or so. That would have been her pigeon.’ He laughs again, louder, lights another cigarette.
An elderly woman appears through the door, stands beside Ramone and reads from a diary, as if it were sacred text. ‘Miss Dos Passos was last here, officially, in December. The
twenty-eighth
. But if I recall, she did come to the Hoot-a-Fanny.’
‘Of course,’ says Ramone. ‘New Year’s Eve. Oh my, that is some time ago. Has she been gone
so
long?’
‘You replaced her residency?’ says Josie.
‘I have a public, miss.’
‘Have you seen her husband since then?’ says Pulford.
‘An irascible little scrote.’
Pulford smiles at Ramone. ‘I wouldn’t have put her with him. Still, it was Sean’s offspring this time, apparently.’
‘You surprise me.’
‘He calls himself a curator.’
‘He’s nothing more than a pimp.’
‘A pimp with connections. Tell us about Sean’s connections,’ says Josie.
‘What do you mean?’ Ramone regards his cigarette, takes a deep drag, as if it was his last, and stubs it out. He smiles at Pulford. ‘I don’t know his connections. I doubt you’ll find anybody does. If I were you, young man, I would let that sleeping dog be. Now, if you wish to talk further, you can arrange an appointment with June here, but I must tell you I have little to add.’
Josie says, ‘We know for a fact that someone looked out for Sean.’
Ramone smiles at her. ‘I liked Kerry and I’m sad she’s gone, but I don’t make the world we’re up against. I have to try to survive it.’
‘And we are only trying to make it easier to survive. We’re not on opposite sides, Mr Ramone. Are we?’
He smiles at Pulford and pulls two tickets from his desk, hands them to the detective sergeant. ‘These are good for any night. Come along. I have nothing to hide, but I am a
terribly
busy man.
Terribly
.’
Staffe climbs up to Alicia Flint’s flat. When he gets to the second floor, her place is open. From the door, he watches Alicia hold her boy tight, his head nestled into the shallow of her collarbone. With her free hand, she takes his meal from the microwave. ‘You hungry, young man?’ she says to her boy, Ethan.
The flat is two-storey, but the whole of this floor is
open-plan
. Three large windows look out onto Princes Park. Every now and then, Alicia checks her watch whilst she feeds young Ethan. Staffe reckons he is eight months or so. He can’t walk, can’t talk. Staffe wants to ask what happened to dad, but doesn’t. Ethan pushes the food from his mouth with his tongue.
‘You enjoying our fine city?’ she asks Staffe, looking at Ethan.
‘I like it. It’s more a big village – after London. I even went to a second-hand bookshop yesterday. The Curious Cat.’
‘Lucky to have time to read.’
‘It’s where Zoe Bright got her books.’
‘How d’you know that?’ Alicia looks up at him, accusingly.
‘I wonder if you could check up on someone called Petal Broome. She runs the shop. Be nice to have a carrot to dangle.’
‘Or a stick. Petal’s holding out on you, is she?’
Staffe goes to the windows, looks out across the park. The sky is big here and gulls squawk. He wonders where Zoe Bright might be, and is she reading her
Beloved
, her baby inside her?
The entryphone buzzer goes and Alicia lets them in without talking, and says, ‘It’s odd, chasing down Anthony Bright and the Flanagans and having this political angle, too, especially when you’ve practically got a confession from that Crawford bitch.’
‘We can’t touch her,’ says Staffe. ‘And the politicians are only people, too. The same urges and regrets and broken homes.’ He stops himself. He and Alicia look at each other, and he wonders how well he will come to know her.
Alicia’s mother comes in and seems startled to see Staffe. She raises her eyebrows and Alicia says, ‘Don’t start, Mum.’ She hands Ethan across and whispers something to her mother, which makes them both laugh.
As they make their way down, Alicia bemoans the fact that they can’t haul Lesley Crawford in and give her the third degree.
Staffe thinks twice, says, ‘Don’t you have mixed feelings? You’re a mother. A part of you …’
‘No. Absolutely not. We work the law, don’t we? There’s nothing but violation going on here.’
‘But if we were to find Zoe Bright now. Right now …’
‘That’s what we have to do. It’s all we have to do.’
‘I know. But I’m not a mother.’
‘You ever get close?’ laughs Alicia, popping the locks to her car.
He watches her get into the car, thinks he might enjoy spending the day with her. As he gets in, he says, ‘Let’s think politics, then.’
‘Ahaa. You’re on my wavelength, Inspector. Let me introduce you to a friend of mine.’ She pulses the accelerator, indicates, looks over her shoulder and tears out into the road, cutting up a cab and keeping it in second all the way to five thousand revs.
*
It takes them six minutes to get from Alicia’s flat to Declan Hartson’s office in the centre of town. They park up on Water Street and Staffe looks up at the civic glory of Liverpool’s central business district, its aspic wealth.
They are shown straight to Hartson’s office, where the councillor sits behind a six-foot partner’s desk. He doesn’t get up. Staffe can tell the time by looking at the dial on the Liver Building through the window behind the diminutive, cheeky chap. Staffe recognises him, vaguely, and Hartson must clock this.
‘We had our moment in the sun, back in the eighties. Didn’t we, ’Leash?’
‘Speak for yourself,’ says Alicia Flint. ‘I was a child.’
‘She believed, too. And then she joined the police. A great loss.’
Alicia Flint helps herself to a glass of water and takes a seat. ‘Do you have that list, Declan?’
He hands her a sheet of paper and Flint puts on her glasses, reads, turns over the paper. Meanwhile, Staffe gets the feeling that the cut of his jib isn’t to Hartson’s liking. If he recalls correctly, Hartson was once an MP, involved with the far left. He has a slender recollection of scandal. ‘Nice office,’ he says.
‘Bourgeois spoils. I’d rather the money went to those who need it, but what can I do? We rage and we rage but the machine just gets stronger. See anything you like, ’Leash?’
Flint hands the list to Staffe, says, ‘This is every political group with an official presence on Merseyside.’
‘No Breath of Life?’
‘There’s plenty of right-to-life organisations here – as you’d expect. We’re Dublin’s eastern suburb, so some say. The Church isn’t what it was, but even so.’
‘Did you ever come across Vernon Short when you were in Westminster?’ says Staffe.
‘We overlapped. He loved it. Always in this bar or that, supping on the cheap.’
‘He’s having
his
time in the sun.’
‘He’s a bastard. Doesn’t believe in anything apart from himself. I don’t know who put him up to that bill of his.’
‘Put him up to it?’ asks Staffe. ‘His own party’s against it. Isn’t he just being bloody-minded – a final throe?’
‘He’s his father’s son. We have to do better than our fathers, don’t we? I’d say he was trying to gain some leverage with the PM or the Home Secretary, but that would take balls and Vernon isn’t overly endowed in that department. He’ll be acting from fear, if I know him.’
‘Fear?’
‘Or cash, of course. That’s a common cause.’
‘Does he have hidden depths?’
‘We
all
have hidden depths, Inspector. Even me,’ laughs Declan, too chirpily for Staffe’s liking.
‘The Ropewalks Caucus, Declan. Do you know them?’ says Alicia.
‘A few charity shops. We extended their council tax exemption the other month. All in a good cause.’ He looks quite pious, now. ‘They have a good bookshop.’
‘You come across a woman called Petal Broome?’
‘Aaah, Broome. Her mother’s an old SWP mate of mine.’ He taps his nose. ‘We go back. Virginia Broome. Hmm.’
‘Did she have any particular bees in her beret?’
‘The usual. Palestine mainly, and CND.’
‘Right to Choose?’
‘Of course, but she had her girl when she was young and on her own. I wouldn’t have thought …’ Councillor Hartson seems to drift into a private space. He plays with his lip, with finger and thumb. ‘This is to do with that Zoe Bright. Am I wrong? They kidnapped her.’
‘Not for me to say, Declan.’
‘Direct action – sounds so archaic now.’ A nostalgic glaze forms upon Hartson’s face. ‘… Got to take your hat off.’
‘You’re just an old traditionalist,’ says Alicia Flint, standing.
‘You’ll scratch my back some time, won’t you, ’Leash?’
‘What do you have for me?’
‘Virginia Broome is on the dragon’s tail.’
*
Baby Grace seems to look straight at Josie. Could this be the first time she has opened her eyes? She is stock still,
pincushioned
with her nutrient tubes. Josie rubs her eyes, knows she should get some sleep. Grace’s eyes close.
A nurse comes in and Josie says, ‘Can she see?’
‘It’ll be a blur for her, my love. It’s early days.’ The nurse smiles at Josie, as if she is a child. She cheerily jots on the board that hangs from the side of the monitor, then flicks each of the tubes that lead from the plastic sacks down into the baby’s blood and stomach.
When Josie has to leave, she seeks out the nurse – the jolly, golden-haired one called Natalie – to make sure she has her mobile number in case anything happens, but she can’t find her. In a recess down the corridor from Grace’s room, there’s another nurse she has seen before. This one has sad, dark eyes. ‘Can you give this to Nurse Natalie?’ says Josie, handing her number across.
‘Who are you?’ The dark nurse’s eyes flit. She looks as if she might burst into tears at any moment. Her name card says ‘Eve Delahunty’. Josie takes the card back, not wanting to burden her.
As she goes down the corridor, she looks back and Nurse Eve makes her way towards Grace’s room.
Outside, it has turned cold in the City and the early breath of summer seems to have expired. The sky is black and full of rain.
Josie thinks about the people she has met since she found Grace. Sean Degg and Cello Delaney and Phillip Ramone, and even though she is dead on her feet, they all pull her west, to the Half Moon.
*
Vernon Short tucks in his shirt, precisely buttons up his flies. He thumbs up his braces, then shifts the way he is dressed. He regards himself in the mirror and, for some reason, finds himself recalling the day he gave his maiden speech to the House. He takes his jacket from the hook on the back of the stall door. His heart beats fast and he considers where all the years and the hope went. He shoots his cuffs. He can still see the young man, can still feel the principles even though they were trampled into the Westminster earth a long time ago. He wonders what might be in his blood.
Are they finally going to see what he has to offer? He looks at his notes, writ small in his fastidious hand on a business card. According to the
Telegraph
, sixty per cent of the people are now with him on the bill. Today, Baby Grace had been relegated to page five. The Liverpool woman hasn’t caught nationally. It will, if there is a baby – but that’s not now. Not today. Politics is a twenty-four-hour game, these days.
He checks his watch. A minute late, already, for the Home Secretary. Who would have thought it? Vernon breathes deep, thinks of his father, once a vociferous backbencher and universally regarded as one of the last of the House’s true characters: a landed, fuck-them-all free thinker. That look in his father’s eye – when he visits him on the farm in Sussex for the monthly Saturday lunch – dismounting after the drag hunt, four sheets to the wind and evaluating his son: no disgrace, but not nearly a match.
‘Bastards,’ he says, aloud, opening the door, stepping out into the halls he always dreamed he would bestride. They think he is a fool, but he got a double first and salvaged the family firm in the late eighties. In his time at Westminster, he has body-swerved all the scandals. No mud stuck to Vernon – somehow – but he was born just beyond his time. Until now. He looks up the corridor. It is a five-minute walk from here. ‘Bastards,’ he says again, striding towards Catherine Killick, Home Secretary.
*
Killick opens the door herself, shows Vernon in, even though she has people to do that for her. The modern way. She is ten years his junior and it’s an airbrushed, widely known secret that Killick was militantly pro-choice when she first cut her teeth on politics. Since Blair and the bland new Clause Four, though, it has been a relentless drift towards the centre for Cathy, especially after she was made a parliamentary private secretary to the PM, when he was in Trade.
She pours Vernon’s tea. Vernon: a man, a type, she has always despised. She beams the best smile she can at him. But she won’t fuck about. ‘We can’t be having this turn into a circus, Vernon,’ she says.
‘Serendipity,’ says Vernon.
Cathy Killick puts down his tea on her desk and goes behind, rests her feet up on a stool to the side of her desk and interlocks her fingers on her swollen, pregnant tummy. ‘Serendipity is a wanky shop for hippies that sells Indian scarves and moonstones up Camden Market. Been going for years. There’s nothing real about serendipity. It’s just what we’re dealt and, as you know, we can change what we’re dealt.’
‘The baby is still in the papers.’
‘All this Whole Family claptrap.’
‘I thought that was our claptrap, Home Secretary.’
‘Word is, your bill would pass if it went before the House today,’ says Cathy Killick.
‘Let us hope. We’re up for debate next week.’
‘For what, exactly, do you hope, Vernon?’
‘To serve my country.’
‘What would it take, to do that? I don’t think the country really wants this bill. We certainly don’t want our legislation flapping like dirty laundry.’
‘I don’t write the headlines.’
‘And journalists don’t make law.’ Killick adjusts her posture, sighs heavily, looks Vernon dead in the eye. ‘Nor do they understand you, Vernon. You have pedigree and you have integrity. I need statesmen, Vernon. I need you with me.’
‘In what capacity?’
‘We’ve been talking about you.’
‘
We
?’
‘You know there’s a reshuffle in June.’
‘What are you saying?’ Vernon tries to remain calm, but there is a bubble between his heart and his stomach. He barely dare listen.
‘Your father was in Education.’
He nods. ‘Briefly.’ Beyond, he can see the splendid white fondant of Whitehall, high above the people. ‘He was his own man, in the end.’
‘It wouldn’t do to follow. The PM wondered about Enterprise. With your connections in the City, we wondered if you might be able to spearhead our clampdown on bonuses, tighten up on derivatives, you know. Headline stuff – you’re good at that.’
‘Minister for Enterprise?’ murmurs Vernon, not believing his own words.
Cathy Killick presses a button on her laptop and across the room a printer begins to softly hum as the laser does its work. ‘Pick it up and have a read,’ she says, nodding to the printer and smiling wide. ‘We thought you might say something along these lines.’
Once Vernon has closed the door behind him, Cathy Killick places a hand on her baby within, says, ‘Who in God’s name does he think he is?’ She reflects, considers her rise to this moment and all the prices she paid. How much of her is left?
*
Staffe watches as Alicia Flint gets to work on Petal Broome. She talks softly, touching Petal’s elbow and guiding her towards a pair of chairs at the back of the Curious Cat, where they sit opposite each other, shoulders rounded, talking about what might possibly be happening to Zoe Bright. Every now and then, Petal looks across at Staffe. Alicia Flint says, ‘Will, perhaps you could get us some tea?’
‘Ginseng?’ says Staffe. As he goes, Alicia Flint flicks him a wink.
By the time Staffe returns with the tea, Petal is shaking her head, saying, over and again, ‘No. No. I don’t trust you, it’s a violation. A bloody violation.’