Peter Robinson - Blood At The Root

“He’s taken some time off.”

“Pretty inconsiderate time to do that, isn’t it?”

“I’m sure he has his reasons.” Susan pushed her empty dessert plate aside. “Mmm. That pie was divine.”

“How very mysterious,” Gavin said. “Is he often like that?”

“Sometimes. He can be a bit enigmatic when he wants, can the DCI. Anyway, I’m glad Jimmy Riddle’s happy, but this just isn’t the sort of solution that makes you feel exactly wonderful, you know.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for Mark Wood.”

“Sorry? I thought he was supposed to have kicked his mate to death?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Isn’t that about as vicious as it gets?”

“I suppose so. But he was provoked. Anyway, I don’t mean that. It’s not so much him I feel sorry for, it’s his family. He has a young wife and a baby. Poor devils. I can’t help but wonder how they’re going to manage without him.”

“He should have thought of that before he killed Jason Fox, shouldn’t he?”

Susan drank some more wine. It tasted thin and acidic after the sweetness of her dessert. “I know,” she said. “But you should have seen where they live, Gavin. It’s a dump. Thin walls, peeling wallpaper, damp, cramped living space. And it’s a dangerous neighborhood, especially for a young woman alone with her baby. Gangs, drugs… And it was partly because he was defending his wife, her race, that he ended up killing Jason.”

Gavin shook his head. “I never took you for a bleeding heart, Susan. You can’t allow yourself to start getting sentimental. It’ll make you soft. He’s a villain and you’ve done your job. Now let’s just hope the court puts him away where he belongs. Poverty’s no excuse. Plenty of people have it tough and they don’t go around booting their pals to death. My dad was a miner, for crying out loud, and more often out of work than in. But that doesn’t give me an excuse to go around acting like a yob. If you want anything in this life, you go out and get it, you don’t idle around moaning about what a bad hand you’ve been dealt.”

“I suppose so,” Susan said. She refilled her wineglass and smiled. “Anyway, enough of that. Cheers.”

They clinked glasses.

“Cheers,” Gavin said. “To success.”

“To success,” Susan echoed.

“Why don’t we pay the bill and go,” Gavin said, leaning forward. His hand touched hers. She felt the tingle right down to her toes. “I’ll walk you home.”

Susan looked at him for a moment. Those soft, sexy brown eyes. Long lashes he had, too. “All right,” she said, her hand turning to clasp his. “Yes. I’d like that.”

No more than a few hundred miles away, over the North Sea, Banks and Craig McKeracher had passed the Rijks-museum and were walking down the quiet streets toward Prinsengracht.

“Basically,” Craig was busy explaining, “Nev met this right-wing loony in Turkey who had a load of heroin he wanted to shift, and he wondered if Nev could help. Nev couldn’t, of course. He knows bugger-all about dealing drugs. Doesn’t know a fucking joint from a tab of acid. But he’s always one to leave the door a little ajar, so he tells this bloke, hang on a while, let me see what I can do. Now there’s only two people he knows with any brains who have ever had anything to do with drugs. One of them’s yours truly, and the other’s Mark Wood.”

Banks paused. “Wait a minute. Motcombe knew Mark Wood?”

“Yes.”

“This is Jason’s business partner?”

Craig snorted. “Some partnership that’d be. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between them, as far as I could see.”

“Is Mark a member of the league?”

Craig shook his head. “No, he wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Then how-”

“Mark and Jason met on this computer course, and they got on well enough at first. They were both good at it, too. Anyway, when they finished, Mark couldn’t get a job. I understand he’s got a wife and kid and lives in a shit-hole out Castleford way, so he was pretty desperate by then. Nev finances Jason in the computer business – only because he knows it’s something he’ll be able to use to his advantage down the line – and Jason decides he’ll take Mark on as partner, seeing as he came top of the class. Naturally, because Nev’s putting money into the business, he’s curious about Mark, so Jason arranges a meeting. I wasn’t there, but I gather Nev had got details of his record by then and quizzed him about the drug arrest.”

“What were the details?”

“Mark used to be a roadie for a Leeds band, a mixed-race band, like UB40, and one of the Jamaicans, a Chapel-town bloke, was into dealing in a big way. Used the group van, and got Mark involved. They got caught. End of story. So Nev finds out that Mark has some contacts in Chapel-town who might know someone who’ll be interested if the price is right.”

“This wouldn’t involve a bloke called Devon, would it?”

Craig raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. How’d you know about him?”

“Same source I heard about the steaming. Just a lucky guess. Carry on.”

“Right. Well, like I said, living in this shit-hole with his wife and kid, Mark was definitely interested in making money, even though he didn’t give a flying fuck for Nev’s politics. But he made a perfect go-between. Devon and his mates probably wouldn’t be any too happy if they knew their supplier was a fascist bastard who thought they should all be sent home to rot in the sun, at best. But Mark got on with the black community okay, and they seemed to accept him. And he wasn’t a member of the league.”

Banks nodded. “Okay. That makes sense.”

They spotted a vendor at the street corner, and as neither had eaten that evening, they bought bags of chips with mayonnaise, something Banks would never think of eating back in Eastvale. Here, they tasted wonderful.

“But how did Jason square all this with his politics?” Banks asked as they walked on. “You said he was dedicated. Straight.”

“He didn’t. That’s the point. I’ll get to it in a minute. See, in general, neo-Nazis aren’t only racist, they’re also anti-drug, same way they’re anti-gay.”

“Even though many of Hitler’s lot were homosexuals or junkies?”

Craig laughed. “You can’t expect logic or consistency from these buggers. I’ll give Nev his due, though. Normally, he could make raping and murdering old ladies sound like a good thing to do for the cause. A true politician. A week or so later, when Mark’s out of the way, he has another meeting with just me and Jason, and he tells us about this idea he came up with after traveling in America and talking to fellow strugglers there. What he thinks is that by providing a steady and cheap supply of heroin, you weaken and destroy the fabric of the black community, making them much poorer and more vulnerable when the big day comes, blah-blah-blah. It’s his version of the smallpox blankets the whites gave the American Indians. Or, more recently, that newspaper story about the CIA financing the crack business in south-central Los Angeles. As a bonus, the blacks become complicit in their own destruction. That’s the kind of irony Nev can’t resist. And all the while he makes a tidy profit out of it, too. Couldn’t be better.”

“Jason fell for this crap?”

Craig kicked at an empty cigarette packet in the street. “Ah, not exactly. There’s the rub. Motcombe needed one of us, someone inside the league, just to keep an eye on Mark and make sure everything was going tickety-boo. He didn’t fully trust Mark. Jason, being Mark’s partner, seemed a natural choice. But Jason didn’t go for it. Jason wasn’t interested in profit; he’d have starved for the cause. Nev seriously underestimated his right-hand man’s dedication. Jason didn’t fall for all that rubbish about weakening the community from within. In fact, he saw the scheme for exactly what it was – a money-making venture on Nev’s part. Apparently, he already suspected Nev of skimming for his own gain, and there was quite a little power struggle brewing between them. They argued. Jason said he knew the organization needed money, but this just wouldn’t work, that there was no way they could limit the sale to blacks, that it would spread to the white community too and sap their spirit as well. He said drugs were a moral evil and a pure Aryan would have nothing to do with them. He also said heroin wouldn’t encourage the immigrants to go back home, which is what the organization was supposed to be all about, and that they’d be better concentrating on making the buggers feel uncomfortable and unwelcome than plying them with opiates.”