Mark Pearson - Hard Evidence

'Thirty thousand pounds really is quite a large sum of money to carry around on your person.'

'I'll be all right. I have a police escort.'

Harrington flicked a small condescending smile. 'If you could tell me what you need the cash for? I'm sure the bank could arrange proceedings in a far safer manner for you and your capital.'

Harrington had a large stack of bundled twenty-pound notes on the desk in front of him. Delaney gestured at the cash. 'Is this the bank's money?'

'Technically not. But we still have a duty of responsibility.'

Delaney held his hand out. 'A duty which you have fulfilled. By getting the money out and returning it to me.'

The manager still hesitated. 'Things can be done far more safely electronically now.'

'It's not a loan, is it?'

'No, sir.'

Delaney stood up and opened a small overnight bag he had brought with him. The look in his eye made Jasper Harrington sit back a little too sharply for his normal studied poise.

'If it had been a loan you'd have every right to keep me here, filling in forms, asking endless questions,' Delaney said as he started filling the bag with the stacks of notes.

'Naturally we need to take certain steps…'

'But this isn't your money. It's my money. And what I do with it is my business. Not your business, not the bank's business. My business. We clear on that now?'

Harrington nodded, swallowing nervously. His throat had suddenly gone very dry. As a bank manager he wasn't used to dealing with dangerous, violent men, but he could see that that was what he was dealing with right now.

Delaney walked out, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.

Harrington took a moment or two to recover his composure, and then picked up the phone, punching in some numbers quickly.

Delaney walked up to his car, where Bonner was snapping his fingers to the rhythmic rapping of a white English teenager singing about slapping his bitches around. Delaney leaned in through the window and turned it off.

'What have I told you about my radio?'

'Jeez, Cowboy, if I had to listen to one more song about a lonely trucker missing his sweetheart Mary-Jane-Jo-Bobbi I'd have ended up cutting my wrists.'

'Touch it again and you won't need to bother.'

'Had a couple of calls whilst you were sorting out your pension in there.'

'Good for you.'

'You want the good news or the bad news?'

'No such thing as good news, Bonner.'

'We've found Billy Martin.'

Delaney slid in to the passenger seat and threw the sergeant a knowing look. 'You see.'

'Out near Henley.'

'Only he isn't going to tell us a thing? Right?'

'Right.'

'Somebody beat us to him and made sure of it.'

'What's that, Irish intuition?'

'Call it a stab in the dark.' He reached over and pushed the preset button on his radio, and Kenny Rogers' smooth voice flowed out like a twentyyear-old single malt.

'Are we going to Henley, then?'

'We're going to Wigmore Street first.'

'What's there?'

'Nothing you need to know about.' Delaney held the bag close to his chest as Bonner pulled out into the traffic.

The same river that had earlier swallowed him into her cold depths in the dead of night had disgorged Billy, tiring perhaps of his company, as did all who had spent more than a little time with him in life. But in the full brightness of day, that river was a different thing. The air was busy with the sounds of tourists, of wildlife, of oarsmen stroking in their skiffs and sculls, of powered craft chugging softly through the water, of gentle lovers strolling and laughing far in the distance on the footpath. The banks seemed closer together by day, and the masonry of the bridge ahead was a soft grey, not a forbidding black. The sunlight sparkled on the surface of the water like the flash of revelation. The depths below were soothing, inviting. On a day such as this, when the relentless sun burned like an all-cleansing fire, the human spirit looked back to its past and would slip into the water to be reborn. Born again in the cool, ancient water as a beautiful creature of supple movement and flight.

But the thing that lay on the bank would never go swimming again, would never dart and shimmer in the cool water, and, truth to tell, had never been considered beautiful.

Delaney pushed roughly through a crowd of morbid onlookers and ducked under the yellow police tape, wincing as his neck muscles objected. He walked over to the group of officers processing the scene, followed by an amused Bonner.

'You're getting old, Cowboy.'

'Every day.' He was surprised to see Kate Walker in attendance. Henley was out in the sticks, and although her accent blended into the background as smoothly as a cucumber slice in a crust-trimmed sandwich, she was a town girl work-wise. Strictly city limits.

'Bit out of your jurisdiction isn't it, Dr Walker?'

'I was asked.' Kate turned her attention back to the thing that had washed up on the shallow bank. The time in the water had not been kind to Billy Martin. His corpse was bloated with gas and his skin was loose and grey; a rough stroke would slough that skin straight off the body.

'Lucky for us he was carrying ID. His mother wouldn't recognise him.'

Delaney watched, feeling neither pity nor loss, as Kate carefully tilted the head to one side. Billy Martin was the kind of person Delaney joined the police force to hurt. Not physically hurt, but in every other way he could. To stop him and to stop his kind. He was a pimp, a rapist, a trader in other people's misery, and Delaney wouldn't have thrown him a rope of piss to save him from drowning. What he did feel as he looked down on Billy Martin's aborted body was disappointment. His death was linked to his sister Jackie Malone's death, Delaney was sure of it, and now whatever secrets Billy Martin had to tell were beyond his powers of persuasion to extract. Delaney dealt with the living; it was up to Kate Walker now to probe Martin's inner recesses and find, if any, what secrets the bloated corpse might conceal.

'What have you got?'

Kate looked back up at Delaney, squinting still in the bright sunlight. 'He was tied up with coat-hanger wire. Hands and feet. Then dumped in the water.'

'Alive?'

Kate nodded grimly. 'For a while.'

'They say drowning is one of the better ways to die.'

'Not like this. He must have been terrified out of his wits.'

'Billy Martin didn't have a lot of those.'

'You knew him?'

'He's Jackie Malone's brother. Her maiden name was Martin.'

'What happened to her husband?'

'He died of a heroin overdose eight months after they got married and six months after she fell pregnant.'

'Not a lucky family.'

'Never were. Can you make a guess at what time it happened?'

'Judging by the state of his skin and the time he was found, I would say he's been in the water a few days. Roughly about the time of the Malone murder. Can't be more specific, I'm afraid.'

'Anything else you can tell me now?'

Kate nodded towards one of the forensic officers. 'He had a quarter of an ounce of cocaine on him. Kept sweet in a waterproof plastic container.'

'Convenient.'

'Yeah.'

Delaney took in the dark lustre of her hair, the brilliant flash of emerald from her eyes, the way she almost always had a hint of a smile dancing on her lips, then he caught himself and looked down again at Billy Martin's grossly disfigured face.

'Thanks, Kate.' A dismissal. He walked over to speak to the Scene of Crime Officers, feeling her gaze on his back but not turning round.

Half a mile or so upriver from where the body of Billy Martin was found was an old ivy-covered brick pub called the Saracen's Head. Bonner, at the bar, scowled as Delaney fed the jukebox some more coins and punched buttons. It was an old-fashioned country pub. The kind that had a large fireplace and bowls of water and nibbles for dogs. A pub with history, with original oak beams and warm brick walls, and photos of the Victorian forebears of local people who still used the place. A half-a-yard-of-ale glass hung on the wall, and the stone flags on the floor in front of the bar were worn smooth and slightly concave by the countless pairs of feet that had walked across them over the passing centuries.