Val Mcdermid - Killing the Shadows

“What do you think, Ron? Will it work?” Duvall asked.

The big man nodded. “I think you’ll get all the cooperation you need. I’ll have a word with Darren, make sure he lets people know that the traders aren’t under any suspicion at this point.”

Duvall nodded. “You seem very confident that you can spot what we’re after, Professor,” she said.

“If I’d sounded as dubious as I feel, your Mr. Green would have been as obstructive as possible. It’s not easy to identify human flesh by sight, Chief Inspector. It’s simple enough to run tests to confirm it once we have something suspicious, but whether we find anything depends entirely on how good your killer is.” Blackett paused, then raised his eyebrows. “Always providing he exists.”

Detective Constable Neil McCartney was tired. Watching Francis Blake for twelve hours a day was a killer assignment, in no small part because the man led such a bloody boring life. Sometimes he wouldn’t see hide nor hair of his target for the whole shift. At least Neil had swapped over on to days, ten till ten, which was slightly less desperate than the long nights when all Blake seemed to do was watch videos and sleep. But Neil knew this was only a brief respite. With Joanne stuck in the office bashing the computer, it wouldn’t be long before John was hassling to get the day shift again. It wasn’t unreasonable he had a wife and young kids who didn’t want to be quiet all day because daddy was sleeping.

That could have been his life, Neil thought with an edge of sourness. If he hadn’t been stupid enough to choose the wrong woman. He’d met Kim on the job. She was bouncy and vivacious, the life and soul of every party. Not the sort he’d normally have gone for, being a quiet sort of bloke, really. He’d thought the looks he got were envy. It was only a long time later that he realised they were pity. He was her alibi for her affair with one of the custody sergeants, the perfect distraction to fool the man’s wife at every police function. And the best possible alibi was marriage.

At first, his bitterness had been turned on himself. But there was no point in being sour about Kim; she was the woman she was. So his search for somewhere to put the blame had ended with the job.

He could so easily have turned into another rancorous copper, taking out his spite on those he came into contact with professionally. But the transfer he’d sought had taken him into plain clothes and on to Steve Preston’s team. And that had saved him. It had reminded him of why he’d joined the police in the first place. Putting villains away, that was what it was all about, and to hell with the office game-playing. That was how Steve ran his squad, and officers who couldn’t live with that didn’t last long.

So now Neil’s loyalty, first and last, lay with his boss. That was why, however tedious the surveillance got, he was prepared to stick it out. The fiasco of Francis Blake’s entrapment and subsequent trial had only stiffened his resolve. That was what happened when politics got in the way of policing, and he was as determined as his boss to set the record straight and catch Susan Blanchard’s killer. So he stifled his doubts about the point of what he was doing and stuck to Blake like chewing gum.

He yawned. The rain drizzled relentlessly down his windscreen. It seemed a fitting counterpoint to the lack of excitement in his and Francis Blake’s lives. If he had the kind of money that Blake had trousered over his newspaper deal, Neil was bloody sure he’d be living somewhere with a bit more class than this. No two ways about it, this was a dump.

The flat Blake had rented on his release was less than a mile from his old place in King’s Cross. The new place was in a busy but faintly seedy street off the Pentonville Road, the sort of place where the locals were off-duty hookers, the hopelessly unemployed, the elderly poor and the mentally ill. The best you could say about it was that it was handy for public transport. Halfway up the road, some uninspired architect had designed a utilitarian block in grey brick that looked like it had been jerry built in the sixties. It was cut off from the neighbouring terraced houses by a service lane that ran up either side and round the back. On the ground floor were half a dozen shop units, a news agent, an off-licence, a betting shop, a mini market a kebab shop and a minicab office. The two floors above were divided into flats, and it was in one of these drab boxes on the second floor that Blake had taken up residence. It depressed Neil just thinking about it.

Not only would he be living somewhere with a bit more class than this, he’d be doing something a bit more exciting than the occasional trip to the bookies or the video shop round the corner.

From what Neil could see, Blake might as well still have been locked up in the Scrubs.

A couple of miles away, Steve Preston and Terry Fowler were having a very different evening. For once, Steve had managed to drag himself away from work with time to spare, leaving Joanne ploughing her way through apparently endless criminal record searches. Neil had had nothing of significance to report, so there was no specific professional worry niggling at the back of his mind to distract him from the company.

Terry had been five minutes early, claiming pathological punctuality made it impossible for her to be fashionably late for anything. “I’m always the one who arrives at parties while the hosts are still in the shower,” she’d said. “Makes for an interesting start to the evening.”

Steve didn’t mind in the least. He was perfectly happy with an extra five minutes in the bar to enjoy admiring her. Terry was wearing a simple knee-length black dress in some material he didn’t recognize that seemed to flow and shimmer around her body whenever she moved. For someone who’d been languishing in the doldrums for what he now realized was far too long, Steve allowed himself warily to wonder if his luck had truly changed as much as it appeared. Careful, he cautioned himself. You know as soon as your emotions are engaged you build too much too fast. Take it easy, don’t let her see how much you need this. Just for once, treat your personal life with the same circumspection you bring to building a case.

But nothing happened over dinner to change that feeling of overwhelming luck. He was aware of being an engaging companion, and she seemed more than willing to appreciate him. The conversation never lurched into one of those awkward silences while someone figured out what to talk about next. They’d swapped stories, made each other laugh, started to sketch the details of their lives. For a man accustomed to containing himself in a private place for most of his waking hours, Steve was pleasantly surprised to find that Terry’s apparent candour had the knack of making him open up. For the first time since he’d met Fiona all those years ago at university, he recognized a woman who allowed him to relax, who made no demands other than that he be himself. Ironic, intelligent and apparently lacking all pretension, Terry seemed to Steve to be as attractive inside as she was on the outside. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what she’d seen in him. When she left him at one point to go to the toilet, he found himself watching the door, eager for her return as he hadn’t been with anyone for years. I feel like a teenager again, he thought, bemused. This is insane, Preston. Put the brakes on.

All through dinner, Steve had kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it didn’t. She didn’t even demur when he insisted on paying for the meal. “You earn a lot more than me, sugar,” she’d said with a casual shrug.

It was after ten when they emerged on Clerkenwell Green. A thin rain had started while they’d been inside so they huddled together under the awning to wait for a vacant taxi. The white neon of the restaurant’s name cast its shadow on Steve’s face, turning it into a chiaroscuro of planes and angles. Terry’s hair flared platinum in its glow. She snuggled into Steve and grinned up at him. “So, handsome,” she said, “did you put clean sheets on this morning?”