Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

He said nothing. Same driver too. Victor Clutton, father of the late Dean. No mistaking him this time.

The old Sierra rattling off into the twilit town centre. Suzanne gazing at him, looking genuinely, spontaneously happy. A glow about her that shone through the ubiquitous grey, kindling something half forgotten in the late Bobby Maiden.

Don’t get fooled again .

‘This the very same car, isn’t it? Bit of a risk.’

‘Not a dent on it, Bobby. You went whizzing over the bonnet, banged your head on the kerb. Jesus, I really can’t believe this. In the papers, it was touch and go. Touch and gone, in fact. Inspector Lazarus, you might say. Pretty scary all round, Bobby. Especially as Vic was trying so hard to avoid you. As it was, in fact, all your own fault.’

‘That’s the story you’ve agreed, is it?’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘Just like Tony’s your uncle?’

‘Well, yeah, that was a lie. I also know a Van Gogh from an Atkinson Grimshaw. And a Wordsworth from a Larkin. I was just having fun, Bobby. You know that. Hey, I’m not kidding.’

Suzanne crooked her head to peer directly into his eyes.

‘Whether you remember or not, it was a genuine bloody accident. We just couldn’t believe you didn’t get out of the way.’

Vic Clutton said, ‘Ask him why he was walking down the middle of the road, sorter thing. Ask him what he thought I was supposed to fucking do.’

‘You did look awfully strange, Bobby. Like you’d been dropped out of a UFO.’

‘I was walking towards you . You were under a street-lamp. You were waiting.’

‘I was in the car, Bobby. I went straight back to the car. Vic’d been parked round the corner the whole time, hadn’t you?’

‘You were under the bloody-’ The faulty streetlamp, coming on, going off, lighting the figure of the woman. Had he imagined her?

‘Waste of bleedin’ breath.’ Clutton hit the accelerator to overshoot the junction with Old Church Street. ‘Like I said. He’ll either finger us or he won’t.’

Suzanne said, ‘Just do the driving, Vic.’

‘He thinks we fitted up his son, isn’t that right, Mr Clutton?’

‘Don’t be naive, Bobby. Vic knows Dean was dealing, freelance. He was a very silly boy, was Dean, God rest his poor, corrupt little soul. Had to prove he was smarter than his old man, didn’t he, Vic?’

Vic said nothing, drove down towards the suburbs, the sun low over a horizon spiked with pylons.

‘They were never close,’ Suzanne said. ‘But we won’t open that particular can of worms.’

‘OK.’ Maiden leaned his head back until it was almost on the parcel shelf. ‘If it was an accident, why, not long before this … accident happened, did you advise me to go back in the flat and lock the door?’

Suzanne was silent for a long time.

‘Oh yeah?’ Vic said, suspicious. ‘That’s what you said to him, was it?’

‘Look, there’s a kids’ playing field back there,’ Suzanne said. ‘I fancy a bit of a swing. You up to pushing me, Bobby?’

The playground was deserted in the dusk. Maiden wedged himself into a metal roundabout; Suzanne sat on the lip of a rusting slide. Maiden felt calmer than he could remember.

‘What gets me, Bobby, is not so much why a halfway decent artist like you became a copper, as how you got so good at it. Putting two and two together and making seventeen.’

‘I was pissed. Out of interest, though … purely out of interest … was seventeen the right answer?’

‘You know it bloody was.’

Vic Clutton was leaning on his Sierra, parked fifty yards away. He was having a smoke, feigning unconcern.

‘Look, I’m not saying Tony’s a good man,’ Suzanne said. ‘He’s a businessman. In the free market. First and foremost, a businessman is what he is. He can be, like, awkward, if anybody threatens his regular income, but he’s never — and he wouldn’t lie about this, not to me — he’s never done anything terminal .’

‘Terminal.’ Maiden sighed. ‘You’re really into this vintage gangland vernacular, aren’t you, Suzanne?’

‘Look, Inspector, no bullshit … it would’ve upset him quite a bit if somebody’d suggested to him that the only way of removing a particular obstacle was that he might actually do something, like … I mean, cold …’

‘You mean a wet job in cold blood.’

‘Don’t laugh. I didn’t.’

Something close to anxiety in Suzanne’s eyes. The eyes were dark but no longer black. She looked a little older, but softer. Her voice had softened too, the brittle edges planed off.

‘Are you saying somebody did suggest something like that to Tony?’

She shrugged.

‘I wonder who that could have been.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Suzanne looked him frankly in the eyes. ‘But you could probably expect it to be somebody who might not find it so convenient to do it himself.’

‘Or compatible with his chosen profession?’

Maiden thought about this for a while in his new state of calm. The double-glazing again; everything far below him, an insect world. Superintendent Martin Riggs had invited Tony Parker to help him decommission Bobby Maiden?

‘So …’ Closing his eyes to trap the thoughts. ‘… what I think you might be saying is that Tony thought … or was persuaded to think … before he went along with the suggestion of this other person … that he ought to have one attempt at dealing with the problem in an equally time-honoured but less drastic fashion. Based on Tony’s usual philosophy of everybody having his price.’

‘I wouldn’t know about any of that.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t.’

‘But someone else might’ve been strongly disapproving if he’d had it done. I mean the other thing.’

‘Who?’

‘Me, for a start.’

Suzanne stood up, smacking grass-cuttings from her trousers, as if she was brushing off extraneous lies.

‘Stuff this.’ Facing him, hands behind her back. ‘If you hadn’t worked it out. Emma Curtis. Nee Parker.’

Maiden grabbed the bars of the roundabout, almost losing his balance.

‘Oh,’ he said.

Tony Parker was known to have a grown-up kid Elham had never seen. A kid raised at the house he’d given his former wife in the nice part of Essex, where a daughter might attend a good school, learn languages, have riding lessons, grow up respectable.

‘Bugger me,’ Maiden said.

Of course, she’d have loved it: doing herself up like a faintly sinister tart: white make-up, little black number to spill out of when she reached for her drink.

He grinned. Surely the first time since his previous life. Was that your idea? The pictures?’

‘Not bad, I thought, Bobby, for a spur of the moment thing. I was quite proud of it. For a while. But then …’

Then, when it started to go badly wrong, the reality of her old man’s world thrown in her face like a bucketful of ice.

After which, she might have been expected to wash off the white-face in a hurry, go running back to Essex to hide under the bedclothes, avoid reading the papers for a while.

Only she hadn’t. A few coloured sparks started crackling across the drabness, the rippling electricity of sex.

‘Tell me,’ he said. What made Riggs decide drastic action was called for?’

‘Oh,’ she said. Well …’ She lay back in the arms of the playground slide, looked up at the darkening sky. ‘All right, what the hell? A guy called Percy Gilbert — I don’t know these people, I don’t spend much time up here — this guy’s a police informer, right? They all know that, but it’s tolerated because it works both ways, in his case, and these days he only grasses up the people they want grassed up.’