The Score (25 page)

She opened the door, moved slowly through the gap between the pews into the nave. At first she wondered at the strange quality of the light, then the flapping wings of a pigeon alerted her to the cause. She looked up, saw that a hole in the roof diluted the coloured patterns created by the fading daylight filtering through the stained glass. Briefly she wondered whether the place was structurally sound.

Ahead there was no chancel or altar. Instead, in a central area which should have contained more pews, a curtain sheltered a covered space. She listened. Again, nothing. She moved the velvet drapes apart, nose wrinkling at the displaced dust.

Inside it looked like some sort of stage, a small performance space. The rostra had been fastened together, stood no more than six inches off the floor. On each side a couple of wooden uprights had been painted eau de Nil, decorated with Baroque gilt scrolls. There was the illusion of a grand old theatre, although one that had seen better days.

Above, instead of a formal arch, a steel pole acting as a batten on which theatrical spotlights had been hung. Laid on its side, supported by a row of old chairs, a threadbare theatrical flat depicted a fairy-tale scene: a Mad Ludwig castle topped with jagged battlements. There were patterns on the battlements, some moss painted in between the faux-boulders of the castle walls and in an area on the right-hand side, superimposed over the rest, was what looked like an advertising poster. She studied it – a vintage ad for a Scotch whisky – and wondered why the scene painter had bothered to put it in. It diminished the illusion of the castle and the colours didn’t harmonise with those of the wall.

In the centre was a microphone on a stand, an instrument which had likely captured the voices of five girls who were now dead. On the ground, in front of the stage, three low tables and
plush
chairs formed a child’s vision of nightclub sophistication. A painted vaudeville-style sign advertised the Café Moon.

Cat stood, drapes still clutched in her hands, listening carefully for any sound. She heard only the flap of the pigeons flying in and out through the roof. Strange to be here at last, knowing that her flat had been trashed, believing that someone would dearly love to kill her. Not properly understanding why.

She stepped inside the drapes, picked her way warily around the stage, walked behind it. There was a bed there, a fairy-tale-style half-tester, satin sheets, white eiderdown. A vase on a table, empty of flowers. A silk carpet on the floor.

Silk carpets and pigeon-droppings.

She reached for her phone, took a picture of the bed. She moved round to the front, listened carefully again, opened the drapes wide, took more of the stage area, the tables and chairs at the foot of the stage. She checked through each shot to make sure the camera’s night setting had worked.

The door to the vestry was still as she had left it – pulled to, but not closed. She winced as it scraped against the floor. She’d damaged the door somewhat when she forced it. But not much, it had been in bad shape before.

She stopped with her back against the door, listening. The gulls were still there, but there was something else besides. A scraping, shuffling sound outside on the street. Heart in mouth, she eased round the building, trying to get a clear view. The gates, previously padlocked, were open. A white Berlingo van was parked just beyond, its rear backed up to the entrance.

A man crouched by the gate, dropping weeds into a bin bag. He tugged the bag full of weeds to the open doors of his van. And turned to his side. He was average build, early or mid sixties maybe, with a boozer’s veiny nose. He walked with a slight limp.

Cat held back, watching him. He seemed an improbable Mr
Big,
but Cat didn’t feel like testing the limits of chance, not right now.

She heard the van’s back doors closing, then the gate being shut. Waited until she heard the sound of the van starting, then ran through the gap into the hedge, to find Jen still waiting bravely.

Cat leaped into the car, grinned at Jen, and told her to follow the van.

‘Really?’ Jen tried starting the car with the handbrake on, stalled, tried again and Cat needed to release the handbrake herself before they got going. ‘Sorry,’ said Jen. ‘Nerves.’

A high-speed chase it wasn’t. The van cruised slowly, never breaking the speed limit. It took backroads, past scrapyards, rows of lock-ups, a closed-up garage specialising in the repair of freezer lorries. The road ran downhill, underneath a railway embankment, through red-brick arches black with years of pollution. After about ten minutes, the van pulled into a small yard framed by two open steel doors. At the back of the cobbled yard there was a low warehouse.

Jen drove, on Cat’s orders, just beyond the steel doors and parked up. Cat got out and hurried back.

She stood under the yard’s wall, bobbed her head out, got a look through the open gates. The place was small. In front of the warehouse, a jumble of items littered the ground. There were extending ladders, stacks of buckets, squeegees on extendable poles, stacks of roof tiles, wheelbarrows that looked too rusted to be of any practical use, rolls of electrical cable, sacks of compost. The gardener had stepped out of his van and was unlocking the back doors to tug out his bag of weeds.

Cat surveyed the yard. The awkward way the man was moving suggested he had bad arthritis.

She approached through the open gates, moved quietly over
the
cobbles towards him. She could see him clearly now. Apart from the booze-wrecked nose, his other features were moleish: small mouth, deepset eyes. She was practically within touching distance before he realised that she was there. As he heard her he whirled round. He flinched, reached for his heart, put an open palm across it, steadied himself.

‘What? You made me jump.’

She’d go in softly at first. ‘Sorry, I did shout,’ she lied. ‘You didn’t hear.’

‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘Lugholes not what they were.’

He looked at her, lowered his lids, seemed puzzled. She could see his wits gathering as the surprise began to wear off. He was about to ask her what the hell she was doing in his yard. She nodded back up the road in the direction of the chapel. ‘That your place back there? The chapel?’

He frowned, realised she’d followed him down, as she had intended he would. He seemed to take a moment to gather himself, took a greasy rag out of his pocket, reached into the back of the van, pulled out the hedge cutters. He wiped them with the rag, ran his finger along the opened blade. Was he trying to menace her?

‘Who are you?’ He was angry now.

She reached in her pocket and took out her police ID. His face wrinkled as if she was handing him something rancid. He didn’t look at it. From the first time she saw him close up he had reminded her of someone she knew. Or was that just her nerves and the failing light? She didn’t know.

‘I’m the landlord,’ he said. Standing up straight with the box in his arms, he paused, turned to her. ‘I’ve a few units around here, bedsits and one-beds mostly, nothing fancy. Bought the whole portfolio from a foreclosure sale. A buy-to-let thing that went bad. That dump came with it.’

‘It’s tenanted?’

He looked to the side, as if seeking some reason to excuse himself. Cat noted his reaction. ‘Well?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Are you being paid rent for it?’

‘Punctually.’

‘So, who’s paying?’

He dumped his box on the ground, puffing with the exertion. ‘I’ve never met him, and he doesn’t seem to use the place.’

‘Someone does.’

He rested the hoe against the van, picked up the box, carried it towards the doors of the warehouse. Cat followed him, moved in front so he wasn’t able to open the door. ‘There’s sound equipment there, lights. It’s like a film set for a nightclub.’

He flapped his hand dismissively, reached in his pocket for the keys. Cat put her hand on his arm. ‘So this is a sitting tenant you inherited?’

He pulled his hand out of his pocket, the keys hanging from his middle finger. ‘He just leaves cash in an envelope every six months.’

Cash, no receipt. The way you paid if you wanted to stay out of the system. The way she was using now. ‘So what name’s he given you?’

‘Never has. His predecessor was called Archibald Leach.’

Cat thought that she saw a flicker of a smile on that otherwise morose face. She knew the cause of his amusement. ‘Archibald Leach, huh?’ It was one of the more famous pseudonyms in show business.

‘That’s right. I’ve got Cary Grant for a tenant. And him well over a hundred by now.’ He gently moved Cat aside as he locked his van. ‘Look, I don’t ask questions. I’m paid above market rate. I’ve never seen anyone in there. A big place like that, no
heating,
no roof, just an empty shell, it would be impossible to rent otherwise.’

So near and yet so far. The front of Cat’s brain felt like she was chasing shadows again. No sooner did she catch up with one, than it melted away under her grip.

That wasn’t what the back part of her mind thought, however. That part felt the light bulbs stringing together again, blinking on, illuminating the darkness. She didn’t feel defeated. She felt whatever it is you feel one stop before triumphant.

21

CROUCH HILL, THE
following morning.

Cat had spent the night in another anonymous hotel. She scrubbed her clothes with a bar of soap when she undressed for the night, hung them out to dry, and put them on again, still slightly damp, in the morning. She’d had three cups of coffee, three roll-ups, not much by way of food. She’d done some good work on the internet and phone, checked in with Kyle, chatted with Thomas.

The house she was after was a two-storey detached affair made from pale stone, and topped by a loft conversion. It had to be worth a fair bit, maybe as much as three-quarters of a million now that Crouch End had become one of the fashionable suburbs.

She paused before she pressed Farrell’s doorbell, felt the confusion of the case temporarily bulge in her mind: the certainty that he had done it, the certainty that he could not have done it. She felt herself spinning into the unthinkable. Light bulbs flickering on and off in the dark. But more on now than off.

She concentrated on the doorbell. It looked like an original fixture but when she rang it, the buzzer played the first bars of ‘Summertime’. After only a few seconds there was a click as the door opened a crack. She put her hand against it, pushed. There was nobody on the other side.

‘In here. Close the door behind you.’ The speaker had a rough
voice,
a smoker’s voice with too much phlegm. Frogspawn sliding over gravel. She followed the sound along a short passageway. The light faded as she moved away from the front door. On her left a door was ajar, the wheezing audible from within, a flickering emerging from the room.

She stepped inside. The place was a shrine.

Every surface had been covered in photographs, some in sharp minimalist frames, others in elaborate antique versions. The curtains were closed, the lights off. Each frame was lit by its own candle. The photographs all featured the same woman. Farrell, a gaunt, bent figure in a tracksuit, was sitting in an armchair in the corner, a dark outline beyond the reach of the light. On the wall opposite hung a large flat-screen TV, a home cinema system resting on a table beneath it.

Farrell looked at Cat, almost smiled when he saw her gawping at the photos. His expression said,
Go ahead, take your time
. Cat moved in closer, took a good look. One in particular made her think of the girls in the ‘Street Spirit’ videos. A woman in a long, flowing white robe moving through an immaculately manicured garden, arms outstretched, a beatific expression on her face, as if in the throes of some religious – or erotic – trance. Her mouth was parted, her face hinted that she was looking at the world for the first time and liked what she saw.

‘This is her?’ Cat asked, but it was a stupid question.

‘Yes. That’s her.’

Hetty Moon, a singer. At the chapel, the stage set was intended to evoke – or more precisely, to replicate – a nightclub, a smoky jazz singer’s dive. The poster on the castle wall had been the tell. If you want to evoke a castle, paint a castle. If you want to evoke a set
pretending
to be a castle, then insert something, in this case an advertising poster, that makes the pretence clear.

The lead Cat had worked with initially was that ‘Café Moon’
sign.
She’d searched for nightclubs of that name. First in London, then nationwide, then internationally. When that search had become too frustrating, she switched tack and started searching for female singers, with the surname Moon. Five minutes and she had her: a minor club singer from the Nineties. Her stage name, Hetty Moon. Jimmy Farrell had once been her manager, was still her brother.

Cat’s eyes became more accustomed to the light. She noticed the three paintings on the wall. Two were traditional head-and-shoulders portraits. The third was a version of the garden scene in oils. In between the portraits Farrell had hung half a dozen prints of medieval paintings, all pietas.

Farrell coughed, the sudden noise startling Cat. It was his signal that her gazing was now over, that the visitor needed to talk.

‘Beautiful girl, your sister,’ Cat said.

He looked up at her, his fist clenched in front of his face as though suppressing another cough. He was weak, but his eyes looked canny and stubborn. She sensed a wounded awkwardness. She’d got this interview pretending to be a journalist for an obscure jazz magazine. She’d probably have to continue with that charade now.

For a few minutes she asked conventional questions about Moon’s singing career. She adopted a reverential tone, as if she were talking about someone whose importance the world had yet to see. Throughout Farrell murmured approvingly.

Cat sensed she’d done enough. ‘I heard she took up with a rich bloke,’ she said.

Farrell made another noise. Not a cough this time. A sudden cry of pain. He hunched over in his seat, bent down towards his lap. Revealed a bald patch on the top of his head, haloed by badly cut, greying hair. Cat moved over to him, put a hand on his shoulder.
Her
hand vibrated as his body shook. She waited for him to regain control.