Читать книгу A Bad Bad Thing - Elena Forbes - Страница 10

A curtain of icy rain swept over the graveyard as the funeral cortége pulled up outside the church. It was barely midday, but the sky was iron grey. Eve ducked out of sight, quickly finding shelter under the dripping branches of an ancient yew tree. It was high up on a bank in a far corner, beside some ancient-looking monuments and the thick trunk and canopy provided a good shield from any prying eyes below. On another day, she would have liked nothing better than to wander around the graves, reading the inscriptions, thinking about the people buried beneath, imagining their lives, their loves, their deaths. ‘Sometimes I think you feel more at home with the dead than the living,’ Jason once said, when she was particularly wrapped up in a case. ‘Somebody has to speak for them, and fight for them,’ she replied. What he couldn’t grasp was that for her the dead were ever present.

A hasty eight days after his headline-grabbing murder, the funeral had been billed as a quiet affair, for close family and friends only. Even so, a group of bedraggled reporters and cameramen were gathered around the main entrance gate and there must have been a good thirty vehicles clogging the parking area outside and overflowing down the narrow lane, testament to the fact that Detective Sergeant Jason Scott had been well-liked. The church was on the outskirts of the village, within commuting distance of London, it felt prosperous and secure. It was a postcard-pretty, roses-around-the door sort of village; everything clipped and tidied to within an inch of its life. The sort of place where people cared what colour you painted your front door, or if you parked your car in the spot outside their house, or put your bins out on the wrong day. It would drive her mad to live somewhere like that. She liked the transience and anonymity of London, where you could be married, or divorced, or dead, for months before your neighbours found out. She had never given much thought to where Jason lived, with Tasha and their young daughter, Isabelle, but she had certainly never imagined him in such a place. It seemed so at odds with his easy-going, unfussy nature. She assumed that Tasha had chosen the location, as with most things, according to Jason. All Eve remembered was his complaining about the long daily commute to the office and how tired it made him. With a pang of sadness, it struck her how little she had known about him, or had wanted to find out.

The occupants of the cars collected in a subdued huddle in the road, sheltering under umbrellas. Eve spotted several of her work colleagues and pulled in even more tightly against the tree, watching as Jason’s coffin was lifted out of the flower-laden hearse and carried up the steep flight of stone steps into the graveyard. She had been dreading that moment, wondering how she would react. But in the event, she felt nothing more than sadness and a weary acceptance. Tasha led the procession, her face downcast and veiled, leaning heavily on the arm of Jason’s close friend and best man, DS Paul Dent. A middle-aged woman, who looked like her mother, followed closely behind, holding on tightly to the hand of a little blonde-haired girl. Isabelle: the reason why Jason had married Tasha. The only reason, Jason had insisted on more than one occasion, as though it mattered. He had brought Isabelle into the office before Christmas the previous year, while Tasha was off doing some shopping, and had proudly showed her off to everyone. When Tasha came to collect Isabelle a little later, the tension between her and Jason had been palpable. He had been seeing somebody else even then, Eve thought. She certainly hadn’t been his first affair, which had made things easier from her point of view. She had no desire to break up any marriage, although she was intrigued to know why he seemed incapable of being faithful. Not long after they had started seeing one another, she had asked him about it, but he had mistaken her curiosity for something more. ‘Don’t think about it,’ he said, cupping her face in his hands and tilting her chin up to meet his gaze, before kissing her. ‘It’s all in the past. There’s nobody else – nothing matters, but you.’ She hadn’t needed, or wanted, the reassurance, something he couldn’t understand.

She took a deep breath and exhaled, remembering the look in his eyes. She missed him – missed the touch of him, the smell of him, his sheer physicality more than anything. Because of her, he was no longer there. Again she pictured the scene at the house in Park Grove. What neither of them had known was that it had been under surveillance by a team from SCD9, the Met’s Organized Crime Command. Hearing gunfire, the officers had rushed out of their van parked somewhere along the street, smashed down the wooden gate and found Jason lying unconscious in a pool of blood on the other side. Calling for backup, they had left her with him while they searched the flat and garden. She had cradled him in her arms in the passageway, holding him as close as she could, whispering to him, telling him to hang on, although she knew it was useless. The bullet had passed through him like a shaft of ice. How cold he felt, how heavy. The smell of his blood filled the dark, narrow space. Her hands were slippery with it; it was in her hair, on her clothes, on her lips. She was alone with him for less than ten minutes, but it had seemed an eternity. By the time the paramedics arrived, he was dead. Only that morning they had been lying in bed together in her flat, his arms locked around her as he tried to stop her from getting up, laughingly hoping to persuade her to call in sick and spend the day with him. If only she had listened.

As she squeezed her eyes tight shut for a moment, shaking her head vigorously as she tried to force the image of him from her mind, her phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw the words:

Are you ready to talk, Eve? I told you I’m here to help. John.

She didn’t know who John was, but it was the fifth text she had received from the same number in the past twenty-four hours. So far, she hadn’t responded. But he appeared to know exactly what had happened at the shooting in Park Grove, the errors she had made, as well as various details that hadn’t been released to the press or to her general work colleagues. Even so, she assumed it was yet another journalistic ploy, or somebody else, maybe one of her colleagues, trying to wind her up. Why would ‘John’, whoever he was, want to help her? As she stared at the screen, wondering whether or not to text back and tell him to leave her alone, another message came through:

You know you were set up, don’t you?

‘Set up’. She stared at the words for a moment. Who was he? What did he want? The idea of a set-up had occurred to her, but she had dismissed it. The tip-off had been a good one, from a reliable source, Jason had assured her more than once. Like a child bearing a gift, he had been delighted to offer her what he thought she wanted. All that was ever on his mind was to please her. She had trusted him and had taken it at face value, being so keen to get hold of Liam Betts that she hadn’t questioned him too deeply about where the information had come from. But it was clear that Betts was a decoy. He had never been at that address, or anywhere near it. Had somebody deliberately planted the information, knowing how she would react? If so, why? Did they want to wreck the surveillance operation or get at her? Her attempts to find out more had been thwarted. She was suspended, pending an internal enquiry and disciplinary hearing: locked out of the on-going investigation. Nobody would talk to her. In the end, she had tried to convince herself that she and Jason had just been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. But instinct told her it wasn’t that simple.

As she tucked the phone away in her pocket, she heard someone call out her name a little way off behind her. She turned and saw a man coming towards her along the public footpath in the adjoining field, picking his way slowly and carefully over the heavy, wet ground, as though unused to the outdoors. The hood of his baggy, brown jacket was pulled down low over his brow against the rain and she couldn’t make out much of his face, but he waved.

‘Hey, Eve,’ he called out, before scrambling untidily over the low wall separating the field from the graveyard. As he waved again, she recognized the familiar pudgy features of Nick Walsh, a reporter from one of the tabloids. Shit. Too late to hide now.

He came up to where she was standing, panting heavily, his freckled face bright pink. ‘God … I’m unfit,’ he said, between breaths. The rain was dripping off the edge of his hood onto his cheeks, his trainers were caked in mud and his jeans were soaked to the knee, but he didn’t seem to care. ‘I just need a few words. That’s all.’

‘Piss off, Nick. Now’s not the time or place.’

‘When is?’ He put his hands on his hips and bent forwards for a moment, looking up at her expectantly. ‘I can meet you anywhere … any time. Whatever you like.’

‘I told you before to leave me alone.’ She was inclined to say something a lot sharper, but depending on how the enquiry went, there might come a time when she would need Walsh, or someone like him, to put across her side of the story.

He stood up, his broad chest still heaving. ‘Do you blame yourself—’

He wasn’t particularly tall, but he had a powerful voice and the words resonated in the quiet of the churchyard.

‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling. ‘Jason Scott’s death. They say … it was your fault. That you shouldn’t … have gone there with him.’

She gave him a hard stare, although he was only saying to her face what others were whispering behind her back, as though she had ever tried to pretend otherwise. Nowhere, not even in the darkest corners of her heart, had she attempted to justify what had happened, let alone delude herself into thinking someone else was responsible.

‘You’re wasting your time. I’ve got absolutely nothing to say to you.’

‘Come on, Eve. Give me a break, will you?’

His voice boomed out and a series of shouts pierced the air from below, accompanied by a long, shrill wail. Eve looked over towards the church where Tasha stood, with her arm raised high, pointing up at Eve and Walsh, the sea of faces that surrounded her all looking in the same direction. Even though the wind drowned out most of her words, the gist was clear. A series of brilliant flashes erupted from the cameras down by the gate and she collapsed into Paul Dent’s arms.

‘That’ll make a nice spread,’ Walsh said grinning. He took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, cupped his hands against the wind and lit up. As he took a drag, he edged closer to Eve. ‘So tell me, when’s the disciplinary hearing?’

‘Piss off.’

Not caring if Walsh followed her, she was about to strike off back across the fields, when her boss, Detective Superintendent Nigel Kershaw, broke away from the group below and started striding up the hill towards her. She backed away from Walsh, wanting to put some distance between them.

‘You’d better go. There’s nothing for you here.’

He was still smiling. ‘Come on. They’ve hung you out to dry. You don’t owe them nothing. What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know any more than you do. Probably less, in fact.’

With a glance towards Kershaw, he leaned towards her. ‘Why don’t you tell me quickly what happened, in your own words?’

She shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘That’s not what I hear. My sources say you shouldn’t have gone to that house.’

‘No comment.’

‘Is it true you and Jason Scott were more than just good friends? Would you care to comment on that?’

She folded her arms tightly across her chest and shook her head. ‘I told you before. You’re wasting your time.’ She spoke as loudly as she dared. Kershaw had come up behind Walsh and she hoped he had heard.

‘Hop it, Walsh,’ Kershaw said. ‘You’re on private land. DCI West has nothing to say to you.’ He was a big man, with a deep and gruff voice and a thick South London accent, and he towered over them both.

Walsh looked unfazed, but gave a slight shrug and held up his hands. ‘No problemo.’ He glanced over at Eve. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said, making the sign of a phone and pointing his finger at her as he turned away. He pulled the peak of his hood over his face and, shoulders hunched, started ambling down the hill, whistling, towards the main entrance.

‘Right, Eve,’ Kershaw said. ‘You better come with me. There’s another gate just over there. Let’s go and find somewhere quiet to sit down. We could both use a drink.’