Mark Billingham - Bloodline

Reece looked up from his desk, his head almost perfectly framed by a large year planner on the wall behind him. ‘Well, I haven’t got all day, so…’

‘Some of the fun and games you and Ray Garvey got up to, thirty-odd years ago.’

‘Fun and games?’

‘I spoke to his ex-wife. She told me the two of you were quite a pair back then.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Right couple of likely lads, she said.’

Reece leaned back in his chair, and gradually a smile that said, ‘It’s a fair cop’ spread across his doughy features. Chamberlain smiled back, suitably conspiratorial. Although looking at him now, the only thing Malcolm Reece seemed likely to do was burst the buttons on his pale blue nylon shirt or drop dead from heart failure.

Chamberlain put him somewhere in his mid-fifties, maybe a year or two younger than she was, and it was hard to envisage him as the man whom Jenny Duggan had described as never going short of female company. He was bloated and jowly, with glasses perched halfway down a drinker’s nose. He had kept his hair, but it was grey and wiry, the kind she remembered her father having.

‘Blimey, you’re going back a fair way,’ Reece said. ‘And there was a bit more about me then, if you know what I mean.’

Chamberlain nodded, thinking: I doubt that.

‘I was single, for a start.’

‘Ray Garvey wasn’t, though, was he?’

‘Neither were a lot of the girls,’ Reece said. ‘Didn’t seem to matter much to anyone, though.’ He took off his glasses and leaned forward. ‘Look, it wasn’t like there were orgies every day, anything like that. We were lucky, that’s all. A lot of the girls in the office back then were very attractive and they didn’t mind a bit of flirting. We were in our twenties, for God’s sake. Come on, you must have been the same.’

Chamberlain reddened a little, in spite of herself.

‘I mean, that’s all it was most of the time, harmless flirting. Every so often you’d have a drink and things might go a bit further, but it was just a bit of fun at work, you know? These days, you as much as tell a woman she looks nice and you get slapped with a, what do you call it… sexual harassment charge.’

Thinking that she’d like to slap him in a way that would be rather more painful, Chamberlain told him that she sympathised, that things were even worse in the police force. ‘So, you and Ray put it about a bit, then?’

‘Well, like you said, Ray was married, so he had to be more careful.’ He unfastened his top button and loosened his tie, enjoying himself. ‘I was probably more of a naughty boy than he was. I told you though, some of those girls didn’t need a lot of encouragement.’ He grinned. ‘A couple of gin and tonics was usually more than enough.’

‘Can you remember any names?’

‘The girls, you mean?’

‘Sounds like it might be a long list.’

‘Bloody hell, now you’re asking.’

‘Come on,’ Chamberlain said, smiling, still playing the game. ‘I know what you blokes are like. You can’t remember to put the bins out, but you can remember the name of every girl you ever copped off with.’

‘Well…’

‘Ray, I’m talking about.’

Reece looked disappointed. Eventually, he said, ‘I suppose he had a few over the years.’

‘Anyone special?’

Reece thought about it. ‘Maybe one girl, worked as a secretary. A little bit older than he was, if I remember, and married. Yeah, he was seeing her for a while on the quiet.’

‘Name?’

‘Sandra.’ He closed his eyes and fished for a surname. When it came to him, he snapped his fingers and pointed at Chamberlain, delighted with himself. ‘Phipps!’ He shook his head. ‘Bloody hell… Sandra Phipps.’

Chamberlain noted down the name and stood to go.

‘That all finished when she left, though,’ Reece said. ‘She moved away, I think. In fact, there were a few rumours flying about at the time.’

‘Rumours about what?’

‘Well, Ray didn’t say much, but I know one or two people thought she might have been up the duff.’

Chamberlain nodded, as though the information were of no more than minor interest.

‘You on the train?’ Reece asked.

She said that she was, and when he offered her a lift to the station she lied and told him that she had pre-ordered a taxi. Reece walked her out of the building and up close, pushing through the swing doors, she noticed that he smelled quite good. As he told her how nice it had been to meet her, Chamberlain thought, just for a second or two, that she could understand what those girls had seen in him thirty years earlier. It was only momentary, though. Walking away, she decided that back then British Telecom must have had a policy of employing young women with particularly poor eyesight or very low self-esteem.

She called Tom Thorne and talked him through the interview, told him that she might finally have a name for Anthony Garvey’s mother. He said it would be good to catch up in person and they arranged to meet later on at Chamberlain’s hotel.

‘I’ll see you about seven unless anything comes up,’ he said.

Then, she called Jack.

Listening to the phone ring out, imagining her husband turning off the TV and taking his sweet time strolling into the hall, she remembered how she had blushed when Reece had asked what she had been like in her twenties. When Jack finally answered, she snapped at him.

‘What’s up with you?’ he asked.

She had blushed not because she had put herself around back then, but because she had not.

Andrew Dowd turned from the window of Graham Fowler’s apartment. ‘You think we’re the only ones? The last ones?’

Fowler was sitting on the sofa, a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. On the table in front of him were the remnants of several previous beers and many previous cigarettes. He shook his head. ‘There’s at least one more,’ he said. ‘Those two coppers were talking about it.’

‘I wonder why he isn’t staying here.’

‘She,’ Fowler said. ‘I heard one of them mention a name.’ He put down his can. ‘Fuck, you think she’s already dead?’

Dowd shook his head and resumed looking out of the window. After half a minute he said, ‘What if they don’t get him?’

‘I can put up with this for a while,’ Fowler said.

‘I mean ever.’ Dowd walked across and dropped down into the small armchair. ‘They’ll give it a couple of months and then, if they haven’t got him, it’ll just fizzle out. They’ll have other fish to fry.’

‘You reckon?’

‘How can we go back to a normal life?’

‘Some of us never had one, mate.’

‘OK, any life, then.’ Dowd sounded irritated suddenly, or perhaps it was just nervousness. ‘They’ll have to protect us somehow… set us up somewhere else. New identities, maybe.’

‘Like those blokes who blow the whistle on the mafia,’ Fowler said. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad, tell you the truth.’

Dowd shook his head again, then let out a laugh as he picked up the coffee he had been drinking a few minutes before. ‘You’re just about the most optimistic bastard I’ve ever come across,’ he said. ‘Especially considering you’ve got every right to think life is shit.’

Fowler raised his can in a salute. ‘Things can only get better, pal.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Dowd said. ‘You reckon that bloke Thorne’s up to much?’

‘Seemed like it,’ Fowler said. He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette. ‘There’s not a fat lot we can do about it either way, is there?’

They sat for a while, the silence broken only by the noises of the block – the water moving through the central-heating system, the low hum of a generator – and the grumble of the traffic moving along the Euston Road. Fowler took a fresh cigarette from his pack and rolled it between his fingers.