Authors: Robert Bryndza
I
t was bitingly cold outside
. The main entrance of Lewisham Row Police Station was lit up, but the car park was a pool of darkness. Long rows of cars twinkled with frost under the street lamps, and beyond, the traffic crawled steadily by. Erika’s hand was still throbbing. She pointed the key fob to her left and clicked, then did the same to her right. A car down the far end of the car park gave two pulses of orange light. She cursed and set off, dragging her case through the deep snow.
She stowed the case in the boot and got inside. The car was freezing, but smelt new. She turned on the engine and activated the central locking. When the heaters had warmed the inside up a little, she pulled out of the parking space and drove slowly towards the exit.
Ivy was standing on the pavement outside. The children were huddled together under her arms, shivering uncontrollably. Erika stopped level with them and opened her window.
‘Where are you going, Ivy?’ she asked. Ivy turned, the wind catching a wisp of her long grey hair and pressing it against her face.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’ said Ivy.
‘I can give you a lift.’
‘Why would we get in a car with a kiddy-bashing pig?’
‘I’m sorry. I was really out of order. I’ve had a bad day.’
‘You’ve had a bad day. Try being me, love,’ snorted Ivy.
‘I can take you wherever you need to go, and the kids can warm up,’ said Erika, noting the little girls’ bare legs underneath their thin dresses.
Ivy narrowed her eyes. ‘What do I have to do in return?’
‘All you have to do is sit in the car,’ said Erika. She dug out a twenty-pound note. Ivy went to take it, but Erika held it away. ‘You get it when I drop you off, provided there’s no more knives, or biting.’
Ivy shot the little boy a look and he nodded obediently. ‘Fine,’ she said. She opened the back door and the kids clambered in, crawling across the back seat. When Ivy got in beside Erika, she gave off a nasty, tramp-like whiff. Erika swallowed the fear of Ivy’s proximity.
‘Seat belts,’ she said, thinking that it would be safer for her if they were all strapped down.
‘Yeah, we wouldn’t want to break the law,’ laughed Ivy, pulling the seatbelt round and fastening it with a click.
‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Catford,’ said Ivy. Erika pulled out her phone and clicked on her Google maps app. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ivy, ‘I’ll direct you. Go left.’
The car was a very smooth drive, and as the street lights played over the windscreen, the unusual combination of Ivy, her grandchildren, and Erika settled into an almost comfortable silence.
‘So. You got any kids?’ asked Ivy.
‘No,’ said Erika. She put on the windscreen wipers as a dusting of snow hit the windscreen.
‘You a lezzer?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t bother me. I don’t mind lezzers. You can have a good drink with a lezzer, and they’re good at DIY . . . I tried it once, mind. Didn’t like the taste.’
‘Of what? DIY?’ joked Erika.
‘Very funny. Sayin’ that, I’m thinking of going lezzer again. I’ll have to split the money but I’m getting sick of the taste of cock.’
Erika looked across at her.
‘Come on love, you didn’t think I worked in Marks and Spencer’s, did yer?’
‘Where do you live?’ asked Erika.
‘Why should I tell you where I fuckin’ live?’ Ivy lurched towards her, but her seatbelt locked, holding her in place.
‘Easy . . . You just told me that you’re “sick of the taste of cock”. I thought asking for your address wouldn’t be too impolite?’
‘Don’t you try and be clever with me. I know you. Like your job, do you? Got any friends?’ There was a silence. ‘No I thought not, never off duty, are you? You lot would shop your own mother . . . Left here.’
Erika put on the indicator and turned. ‘I don’t live anywhere, right now,’ she said, figuring she could offer up some info of her own. ‘My husband died recently, and I’ve been away, and . . .’
‘And you lost your marbles, yeah?’
‘No, but I came close,’ said Erika.
‘My ’usband was stabbed. Years ago. Bled to death in my arms . . . Go right here. You’re all right though, ain’t yer? Good job. I could’ve been a police officer, or something better,’ sneered Ivy.
‘You know this area well, then?’ asked Erika
‘Yeah. Bin ’ere me whole life.’
‘What bars do you recommend?’
‘What bars do I recommend?’
she said, mimicking Erika.
‘Okay, what bars do you know?’
‘I know ’em all. As I just said, I’ve been round ’ere for years. Seen places come and go. The rough ones last the longest.’
They passed the Catford Broadway Theatre, the front lit up, still advertising the Christmas pantomime.
‘Drop us here,’ said Ivy.
Catford High Street was deserted. Erika pulled up by a pedestrian crossing, next to a Ladbrokes betting shop and a branch of Halifax.
‘There aren’t any houses,’ said Erika.
‘I told you, I ain’t got a house!’
‘Where are you staying then?’
‘I’ve got business to attend to. Come on, wake them up,’ snapped Ivy to the boy. Erika looked through her rear-view mirror. The two girls were asleep, their heads leant together. The boy stared back at her with a white face.
‘I’m sorry I hit you,’ said Erika. His face remained impassive.
‘Leave it out, just give me the money,’ said Ivy, unclipping her seatbelt and opening the car door. Erika fumbled in her coat and brought out the twenty. Ivy took the note, stuffing it in the folds of her parka.
‘Before you go, Ivy, what do you know about pubs in Forest Hill? The Stag?’
‘There’s a stripper there who’ll do anything once her pint glass is full of pound coins,’ said Ivy.
‘And what about The Glue Pot?’ asked Erika.
Ivy’s whole body language changed. Her eyes went wide. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about that place,’ she said hoarsely.
‘You just said you knew all the bars around here. Come on, tell me about The Glue Pot?’
‘I don’t ever go in there,’ Ivy whispered. ‘And I don’t know nothin’, you hear me?’
‘Why not?’
Ivy paused and looked at Erika. ‘I’d get that hand looked at. Little Mike, he’s HIV positive . . .’
She got out, slamming the door, and vanished in between the shops, the kids trailing after her. Erika was so focused on Ivy’s reaction to hearing the name of the pub that she didn’t take in what Ivy had just said. She quickly opened her door and followed them to the entrance of a dank alley. She peered down, but it was too dark to make them out in the shadows. ‘Ivy,’ she shouted. ‘Ivy! What do you mean, you don’t ever go in there? Why don’t you?’
Erika started down the alley, the street lights quickly fading. She felt something soft and squelchy under her feet.
‘Ivy. I can give you more money, you just have to tell me what you know . . .’
She pulled out her phone and flicked on the light. The alley was filled with empty needles, condoms, and discarded packaging and price tags. ‘I’m investigating a murder,’ she continued. ‘The Glue Pot was the last place this girl was seen . . .’
Her voice echoed. There was no response. She reached a ten-foot high chain-link fence with metal spikes on top. Beyond, she could just make out a scrubby yard with some discarded gas canisters. She looked around.
‘Where the hell did they go?’ she said under her breath. She doubled back down the alleyway, but she could see no way out – just the high brick walls of the buildings either side.
When Erika came back to the car, her door was still open, the warning alarm gently chiming. She looked around and got back in. Had she imagined them? She spent a few seconds worrying that she had hallucinated the whole episode – Ivy, the kids – and then she felt a throb of pain in the back of her hand, and saw the square sticking plaster.
She quickly activated the central locking, then pulled away with a squeal of tyres. Fresh adrenalin surged through her body. Something wasn’t right about Ivy’s reaction to The Glue Pot. She had been terrified. Why?
Erika didn’t care how late it was, or how deprived she was of sleep. She was going to check out that pub.
E
rika drove back
over to Forest Hill, and parked a couple of roads back from the high street in a quiet residential area. The pub was halfway up the high street, a two-storey brick building with a wine-coloured frontage.
The Glue Pot
was written in white, the ‘t’ trailing away to a cartoon of a paintbrush hovering above a pot of white glue. It was an irritating sign, both naff and clueless. There were four windows, two on each storey, with thick stone sills. The windows on the first floor were dark. Of the two below, one was boarded up, leaving the other to glow murkily behind a net curtain.
Despite the cold, the outer door was wedged open. A sign promised that if you bought two glasses of house wine, you could get the rest of the bottle free. Erika went inside and found the bar was accessed via an inner door with badly cracked safety glass.
The bar was almost empty, with just two young men sitting smoking at one of the many Formica tables. They glanced up at her as she passed, taking in her long legs, and then returned to their beer. A small dance floor to one side was filled with old stacking chairs, and a Magic FM jingle played over the sound system, introducing the opening bars of
Careless Whisper
. Erika went to a long, low bar at the back that was framed by hanging glasses. A dumpy young girl was sitting watching
Celebrity Big Brother
on a tiny portable television.
‘Double vodka with tonic, please,’ Erika said.
The girl heaved herself up, reached for a wine glass, then pushed it against an optic, keeping her eye on the screen. She was wearing a faded Kylie
Showgirl
tour T-shirt stretched to capacity over her large bosom and dumpy frame. She adjusted the back of the T-shirt, pulling it down over her large backside.
‘You looking for an au pair? Childcare?’ the girl asked, presumably having picked up on Erika’s slight accent. Erika detected the hint of an accent in the girl, too, Polish? Russian? She couldn’t place it. The girl pushed the glass against the optic again.
‘Yes,’ said Erika, deciding to play along. The girl pulled out a plastic bottle of tonic water, and filled the wine glass up to the brim. She placed the drink down on the bar, then slid across a square of card and a biro.
‘You can put a card on the board for twenty pounds. New cards go up every Tuesday. Twenty-three fifty for that and the drink,’ she said.
Erika paid and sat down, taking a gulp of the drink. It was warm and flat.
‘Why didn’t you send your husband?’ asked the girl, watching to see what Erika wrote on the card.
‘Like I need my husband to drink more!’
The girl nodded with familiarity. Erika moved over to the small corkboard the girl had indicated, which was on the wall beside the bar. It was plastered with hundreds of cards, one over the other, handwritten in Slovak, Polish, Russian, Romanian – all advertising construction jobs, childcare, or au pair positions.
‘Is it always this quiet?’ asked Erika, looking around at the empty bar.
‘It’s January,’ shrugged the woman, wiping ashtrays with an old cloth. ‘And no football.’
‘My friend got her au pair from an advert here,’ said Erika, coming back to her bar stool. ‘Do you get many women in here? Young girls? Looking to be au pairs?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘My friend said that there was a girl looking for work, that I might meet her here?’
The girl stopped wiping an ashtray and regarded her with a cold eye. Erika took another sip of her drink then pulled out her phone. She scrolled through to the picture of Andrea and turned it round.
‘This is her.’
‘Never seen her,’ said the girl, a bit too quickly.
‘Really? My friend did say she was in here just a few days ago . . .’
‘I didn’t see her.’ The girl lifted up a wire tray half-filled with empty glasses and went to leave.
‘I’m not done yet,’ said Erika, placing her police ID on the bar.
The girl hesitated and put the wire tray back. When she turned, she saw the ID and looked panicked.
‘No it’s okay, I just need you to answer my questions. What’s your name?’
‘Kristina.’
‘Kristina . . .?’
‘Just Kristina,’ she insisted.
‘Okay. Just Kristina. I’ll ask you again. Have you seen this girl in here?’
The girl looked down at the picture of Andrea on the phone and shook her head so furiously that her cheeks wobbled.
‘Were you working here the night of the eighth? It was a Thursday, just over a week ago.’
The girl thought about it, and shook her head again.
‘Are you sure? She was found dead earlier today.’
The girl chewed her lip.
‘Are you the landlady?’
‘No.’
‘You just work here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who’s the landlady, or landlord?’
Kristina shrugged.
‘Come on, Kristina. I can find out this information easily, with the brewery. And those men were smoking in here, despite the smoking ban. Do you know how much that would cost in fines? Thousands of pounds. And then there’s the illegal employment agency. You just charged me twenty pounds to advertise. I could make a call and have a team of officers here in five minutes, and you’d be responsible . . .’
Kristina started to cry. Her huge chest heaved, her face went red and she scrubbed at her beady little eyes with a corner of a tea towel.
‘If you can just answer a couple of questions,’ said Erika, ‘I can make sure that you are seen as an innocent employee.’
Kristina stopped crying and caught her breath.
‘Okay . . . It’s okay, Kristina. Nothing bad is going to happen. Now, please, look at this photo again. Did you see this girl here on the night of the eighth? That was last Thursday. She was abducted and murdered. If you can tell me anything, you might help me find whoever did this.’
The girl looked down through swollen eyes at the picture of Andrea. ‘She sat there, in the corner,’ she said, finally. Erika turned and saw the small table by the dance floor. She also noticed that the two men drinking had gone, leaving half-full pints.
‘You’re sure it was this girl?’ said Erika, holding up the picture on the phone again.
‘Yeah. I remember how beautiful she was.’
‘Was she alone? Did she meet anyone?’
Kristina nodded. ‘There was a young woman with her, short blonde hair.’
‘As short as mine?’ asked Erika.
The girl nodded.
‘Anything else?’
‘They had a drink, or two, I don’t know, it was a really busy night . . . and . . . and . . .’
Erika could see she was becoming more worked up and scared,
‘Go on, Kristina. It’s okay, I promise.’
‘Then I don’t know when she went, her friend – but when I looked again, there was a man sitting with her.’
‘What did he look like?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Tall, dark . . . They argued.’
‘What do you mean, tall and dark? Can you be a bit more detailed?’ said Erika, trying to hide her frustration. This was a real breakthrough, but Kristina was being too vague. She made a decision and pulled out her phone.
‘Kristina, I want you to come with me to the station, and do what we call a photofit of the woman and man you saw Andrea sitting with.’
‘No, no, no, no,’ Kristina started, backing away.
Erika dialled the number for the duty desk at Lewisham Row. It started to ring. ‘Your information could lead to us finding out who killed this woman, Andrea.’
‘But I’m at work . . . and . . .’
‘I can get the officers to come here. We can do this now.’ The duty officer picked up the phone. ‘It’s DCI Erika Foster. I need uniform and a squad car to The Glue Pot pub on London Road in Forest Hill, and who do we have on duty who can do a photofit?’
There was a movement, and Erika realised Kristina had darted through a door at the back of the bar.
‘Shit! Hang on, I’ll call you back.’ Erika swung herself over the bar and through the doorway to a filthy little back kitchen. A door stood open. Erika stepped into the alleyway. It stretched away long and empty in both directions. A light dusting of snow began to fall. It was eerily silent.
Erika walked the length of the alley in both directions. The houses backing onto it were dark, and the roads at either end were empty. The snow started to fall more heavily, and the wind whistled through the buildings. Erika pulled her coat around her against the freezing cold.
She couldn’t shake off the feeling she was being watched.