Fumbling in my pocket, I take out a morphine capsule and swallow it dry, feeling it catch in my throat. Twenty minutes later I'm peering through pale translucent gauze. The car seems to float between the red lights and people drift along the pavements like leaves on a river.
A conga line of buses comes to a stuttering halt. My stepfather died at a bus stop in Bradford in October 1995. He had a stroke on his way to see a heart specialist. See what happens when buses don't run on time? He looked very distinguished in his coffin, like a lawyer or a businessman rather than a farmer. His remaining hair was plastered across his scalp and parted exactly in a manner he never managed in life. I copied it for a while. I thought it made me look more English.
Daj came to live in London after the funeral. She moved in with me and Miranda. The two of them were like oil and vinegar. Daj was the vinegar of course: balsamic—strong and dark. No matter how they were mixed together, they always separated and I was caught in between.
On the pavement, beneath a canvas awning, a young flower seller is enclosed by buckets of blooms. Tugging at the sleeves of her jumper, she covers her fists and hugs herself to keep warm. Aleksei employs a lot of refugees and immigrants on his flower stalls because they're cheap and grateful. I wonder what this girl dreams about when she goes to sleep at night in her bedsit hotel or shared house. Does she see herself as being blessed?
Tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans have washed up here from former Soviet satellite states that have declared themselves independent and then immediately begun to crumble. Sometimes it seems as if the whole of Europe is destined to tear itself apart, divided into smaller and smaller parcels until there isn't enough land left to sustain a language or a culture. Maybe we're all destined to become Gypsies.
Fury and fear are driving me. Fury at being shot and fear of not finding out why. I want to either remember or forget. I can't live in the middle. Either give me back the missing days or erase them completely.
Ali senses my despair. “Facts not memories solve cases. That's what you said. We just have to keep investigating.”
She doesn't understand. Rachel had the answers. She was going to tell me what happened.
“He was never going to let you see her. We have to find another way.”
“If I could get a message to her . . .”
Suddenly, the curious, chemical detachment lifts and a face floats into my thoughts—a woman with dark-brown hair and a birthmark that leaks across her throat like spilled caramel. Kirsten Fitzroy—Rachel's best friend and former neighbor.
Some women have a particular gaze from the day they are born. They look at you as though they know exactly what you're thinking and will always know. Kirsten was like that. In the days after Mickey disappeared she was the rock that Rachel clung to, shielding her from the media and making her meals.
Kirsten could get a message to her. She could find out what happened. I know she lives somewhere in Notting Hill.
“I can get the address,” says Ali, pulling off the road. She punches speed dial on her cell phone, no doubt calling “New Boy” Dave.
Twenty minutes later we pull up outside a large whitewashed Georgian house in Ladbroke Square, overlooking the communal gardens. The surrounding streets are painted in candy colors and dotted with coffee shops and outdoor restaurants. Kirsten has moved up in the world.
Her flat is on the third floor, facing the street. I pause on the landing to get my breath back. That's when I notice the door is slightly ajar. Ali peers up and down the stairwell, automatically on edge.
Nudging the door open, I call Kirsten's name. No answer.
The lock has almost been torn off and splinters of wood lie inside the door. Farther along the hallway there are papers and clothes strewn haphazardly on the sea-grass matting.
Ali unclips her holster and motions for me to stay put. I shake my head. It's easier if I cover her back. She spins through the door and crouches, peering down the hallway to the kitchen. I enter behind her, facing in the opposite direction into the sitting room. Furniture is overturned and someone has filleted the sofa with a samurai sword. The stuffing spills out like the bloated intestines of a slain beast.
Rice-paper lampshades lie torn and crushed on the floor. Floating flowers are marooned in a dry bowl and a shoji screen is smashed into pieces.
Moving from room to room, we discover more wreckage. Foodstuffs, appliances and utensils litter the kitchen floor between upturned drawers and open cupboards. A chair lies broken. Someone has used it to search above the cabinets.
At first glance it looks more like an act of vandalism than a robbery. Then I notice several envelopes lying amid the destruction. The return addresses have been carefully torn off. There is no diary or address book beside the telephone. Someone has also cleared the corkboard of notes and photographs. Torn corners are all that remain, trapped beneath colored pins.
The morphine has left me with a sense of depleted reality. I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face. A towel and chemise are folded over the towel rail and a lipstick has fallen into the bath. Retrieving it, I unscrew the lid and stare at the pointed nub, holding it like a crayon.
Above the washbasin, tilted slightly downward, is a rectangular mirror with mother-of-pearl inlaid into the frame. I've lost weight. My cheeks are hollow and my eyes are deeply wrinkled at the edges. Or maybe it's someone else in the mirror. I have been replicated and imprisoned in a slightly different universe. The real world is on the other side of the glass. Already I can feel the opiate wearing off. I want to hold on to the unreality.
Returning the lipstick to a shelf, I marvel at the salves, pastes, powders and potpourri. From among them I can summon up Kirsten's fragrance and our first meeting at Dolphin Mansions the day after Mickey disappeared.
Tall and slim with tapered limbs, Kirsten's cream-colored slacks hung so low on her hips that I wondered what was holding them up. Her flat was full of antique armor and weaponry, including two samurai swords crossed on the wall and a Japanese warrior's helmet made from iron, leather and silk.
“They say it was worn by Toyotomi Hideyoshi,” Kirsten explained. “He was the daimyo who unified Japan in the sixteenth century: the ‘Age of Battles.' Are you interested in history, Detective Inspector?”
“No.”
“So you don't believe we can learn from our mistakes?”
“We haven't so far.”
She acknowledged my opinion without agreeing with it. Ali was moving through the flat, admiring the artifacts.
“What did you say you did?” she asked Kirsten.
“I didn't.” Her eyes were smiling at the edges. “I manage an employment agency in Soho. We provide cooks, waitresses, hostesses, that sort of thing.”
“Business must be good.”
“I work hard.”
Kirsten prepared us tea in a hand-painted Japanese teapot and ceramic bowls. We had to kneel at a table while she dipped a ladle into simmering water and beat the powdered tea like scrambled eggs. I didn't understand the elaborate ceremony. Ali seemed more in tune with the idea of meditation and “the One Mind.”
Kirsten had lived at Dolphin Mansions for three years, moving in just a few weeks after Rachel and Mickey. She and Rachel became friends. Coffee buddies. They shopped together and borrowed each other's clothes. Yet apparently Rachel didn't confide in Kirsten about Aleksei or her famous family. It was one secret too far.
“Who would have thought . . . talk about Beauty and the Beast,” Kirsten told me, when she learned the news. “All that money and she's living here.”
“What would you have done?”
“I would have taken my share and gone to live in Patagonia—as far away as possible—and slept with a gun under my pillow for the rest of my life.”
“You have a vivid imagination.”
“Like I said, I've heard the stories about Aleksei. Everyone's got one, right? It's like the one about him playing blackjack in Las Vegas and this Californian dot-com millionaire comes over and tells him that he's sitting in his chair. Aleksei ignores him, so the Californian says, ‘Listen, you limey faggot, I'm worth sixty million dollars and this is my goddamn chair.' So Aleksei takes a coin out of his pocket and says, ‘Sixty million? I'll toss you for it.'”
She didn't expect anyone to laugh. Instead she let the silence stretch out. I wish my legs could have done the same.
She had an alibi for when Mickey disappeared. The caretaker, Ray Murphy, was fixing her shower. It had only taken him three attempts, she said.
“What did you do afterward?”
“I went back to sleep.” She looked at me quizzically and then added: “Alone.”
Twenty years ago I would have said she was flirting, but I knew she was making fun of me. Being older and wiser doesn't help the ego. Youth and beauty rule the world.
Returning to the sitting room, I find Ali going through the contents of the toppled bookcase. Whoever did this opened every book, box file and photograph album. Diaries, address books, computer disks and photographs were taken. This wasn't a robbery, it was a search. They were looking for Kirsten. They wanted the names of friends and contacts—anyone who might know her.
“We should call this in, Sir.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell them the truth. We found a break-in.”
We wait downstairs for the uniforms to arrive, sitting on the front steps and going over possible scenarios. Misty rain has started falling. It settles on Ali's hair and the weave of her coat.
Across the road a handful of muddy boys spill from a Range Rover with football boots hanging from laces and socks pushed down around their ankles.
Farther along the street, someone is waiting in a car. I wouldn't have noticed except for the flare of a cigarette lighter. It crosses my mind that Keebal has had me followed but almost immediately I consider another explanation. Maybe someone is waiting for Kirsten to come home.
I step out onto the pavement and stretch. The sun is trying to break through but keeps getting swallowed by fat putty-gray clouds. I begin to walk around the square. At first I'm heading away from the suspicious car but at the corner I turn and cross the street. I pause to read the plaque beneath a statue of a bronze horseman.
I turn again and set off. A pigeon takes flight in an awkward flurry. I'm walking toward the car now. I can just make out the silhouette of someone at the wheel.
I stay close to the gutter, keeping the line of vehicles between us. At the last possible moment I step alongside the Audi. Resting on the passenger seat is a photograph of Kirsten Fitzroy.
A burly, gray-haired man, gapes at me dumbfounded. I can see two bloated versions of myself in his sunglasses. I try to open the door. He reaches for the ignition and I yell at him to stop.
At that moment Ali arrives, slewing her car across the road to block his getaway. Finding reverse, he plants his foot and rubber shrieks on pavement. He slams into the car behind and then lurches forward, pushing the cars apart. Tires screech and smoke as he fires into reverse again.
Ali is out of the door with a hand on her holster. The driver sees her first. He raises a pistol, aiming at her chest.
Instinctively, I smash my walking stick across the windshield, where it explodes into shards of lacquered wood. The sound is enough to make him hesitate. Ali drops and rolls into the gutter. I spin the other way, falling fast and nowhere near as gracefully.
In the adjacent house, barely eighteen feet away, the door opens. Two teenage girls appear, one of them pushing a bicycle. The pistol swings toward them.
I yell a warning, but they stop and stare. He won't miss from this range.
I glance across at Ali. She has her feet planted and arms outstretched, with the Glock in her right hand and her left hand cupped underneath.
“I can take him, Sir.”
“Let him go.”
She drops her arms between her thighs. The driver accelerates backward along the road, doing a handbrake turn at the end of the square, before swinging north into Ladbroke Grove.
Ali sits next to me in the gutter. The air stinks of burning clutch and rubber. The teenage girls have gone but curtains have opened and anxious faces are pressed to windows.
Ali wipes a smudge of gun oil from her fingers. “I could have taken him.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
“Because when they teach you how to shoot people, they don't teach you how to live with it.”
She nods and a puff of breeze pushes hair across her eyes. She brushes it away.
“Did you recognize him?”
I shake my head. “He was waiting for Kirsten. Someone wants her very badly.”
A Panda car rounds the corner and cruises slowly up the street. Two kids in uniform peer from side to side, looking for house numbers. Five minutes earlier they would have shat themselves or been shot. Thank heavens for small mercies.
Interviews must be conducted and statements taken. Ali fields most of the questions, giving a description of the car and driver. According to the computer the license plates belong to a builder's van in Newcastle. Someone has either stolen or copied them.
Under normal circumstances, the local CID would label the whole incident as road rage or call it a fail-to-stop accident. By normal circumstances, I mean if ordinary members of the public were involved instead of two police officers.
The Detective Sergeant, Mike Drury, is one of the young Turks from Paddington Green, who cut his teeth interviewing IRA and now Al Qaeda suspects. He looks up and down the street burying both hands in his pockets. His long nose sniffs the air as though he doesn't like the smell of it.
“So tell me again, why did you want to see Kirsten Fitzroy?”
“I'm trying to find a friend of hers—Rachel Carlyle.”
“And why do you want to see her?”
“To catch up on old times.”
He waits for something more. I'm not budging.
“Did you have a warrant?”
“I didn't need one. Her door was open when we arrived.”
“And you went inside?”
“To make sure there wasn't a crime in progress. Miss Fitzroy might have been hurt. There was probable cause.”
I don't like the tone of his questions. This is more like an interrogation than an interview.
Drury scribbles something in his notebook. “So you reported the break-in and then noticed the guy in the car.”
“He seemed out of place.”
“Out of place?”
“Yes.”
“When you approached him, did you show him your badge?”
“No. I don't have my badge with me.”
“Did you announce yourself as a police officer?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“I tried to open the passenger door.”
“So this guy was just sitting in a car, minding his own business, and you appeared from nowhere and tried to break into his car?”
“It wasn't like that.”
Drury is playing devil's advocate. “He didn't know you were police officers. You must have scared the shit out of him. No wonder he took off—”
“He had a gun. He pointed it at my partner.”
“Partner? I was under the impression that DC Barba worked for the Diplomatic Protection Group and is currently on holiday leave . . .” He consults his notebook. “And according to my information, you were suspended from all duties yesterday and are now the subject of an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.”
I'm getting pretty pissed off with this guy. It's not just him—it's the whole attitude. Forty-three years on the force and I'm being treated as if I'm Charles Bronson making Death Wish XV.
In the old days there would have been sixty officers crawling all over this place—searching for the car, interviewing witnesses. Instead, I have to put up with this crap. Maybe Campbell's right and I should have retired three years ago. Everything I do nowadays is either against the rules or treading on someone's toes. Well, contrary to popular opinion, I haven't lost my edge. I'm still smarter than most scrotes and a damn sight cleverer than this prick.
“Ali can answer the rest of your questions. I have better things to do.”
“You'll have to wait. I haven't finished,” says Drury.
“Are you carrying a gun, DS?”
“No.”
“What about handcuffs?”
“No.”
“Well, if you can't shoot me and you can't shackle me—you can't keep me here.”