Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(2)
Before that a fatal stabbing in Wood Green. An argument over nothing that had ballooned from threats to fists, fists and boots to knives. By rights it should have been handed over, lock stock and barrel, to Operation Trident, which dealt with violent crime in the black community, but since the new government had taken power Trident’s resources had been cut and they were already overstretched. Sixteen murders in London the year just ended, none of the victims older than nineteen.
‘Enough, sir,’ Karen said.
‘Handle this yourself then, or …?’
‘A reason why I shouldn’t? Sir?’
Something interested him near the toe of his boot. ‘See how it develops, but at the moment I can’t see any need …’
‘Need?’
‘You know, delegate. Reassign. Besides …’ Inclining his head towards her, he smiled. ‘Can’t go on plundering the minority thing for too much longer. Good result now, not go amiss. Been a while.’
‘Which minority thing is that, sir? The gender minority or the black?’
‘Either. Both. You choose.’ The smile had disappeared.
Fuck you, Karen thought, the words unsaid.
Burcher heard them nonetheless, read them in her expression, her stance.
‘Don’t let me keep you, Chief Inspector.’
A magpie startled up raucously from a branch as she walked away.
Back down at the pond, they were gingerly breaking the ice in a broad circle around the body, preparing to float it closer to the shore.
All the way back to the office it nagged at her, a good result, not go amiss. Knowing it to be true. She remembered the first time she’d been introduced to him, Burcher, some function not long after he’d been confirmed in post; the way he’d looked at her, appraisingly, so much prime meat.
She’d seen the victim’s face freed from its frozen mask before she’d left, the last drops of moisture caught along his upper lip, hair that curled against the nape of his neck: a young man’s face, eighteen at most. Younger. The body stripped naked before immersion. Two knife wounds in his back, either one deep enough to have punctured his lungs. Bruises. Other marks. The second finger of his left hand missing, severed below the knuckle. Expediency? Identification? A stubborn ring?
At the last check there were no mispers that matched, no worried parents, lovers, brothers, aunts. Not his. Within an hour, the details, such as they were, would have been passed on by the Press Bureau to the media. Some Riz Lateef wannabe on work experience with BBC London News, shivering in front of the camera and hoping her make-up hadn’t smudged and the cold wouldn’t make her nose run. If nothing new had emerged by the end of the day, they’d release the victim’s photograph in time to catch the dailies, maximum exposure, pray no natural disaster or ministerial cock-up shunted them off to the bottom of page six or eight.
On the computer screen the images were strangely bleached out, so that the face resembled something sculpted, cast in plaster: Roman, Greek. An altarpiece. A minor god. All colour gone from his eyes.
Karen remembered his eyes.
His eyes had been blue.
2
Christmas came and went. Karen spoke to most of her close family on the day itself – mother, uncle, aunt, a smattering of cousins – trying not to count the cost of calls back and forth to Jamaica; talked to her sister later, reining in her impatience while her nieces vied with one another over never-ending litanies of presents.
Mid-afternoon, she sat herself down in front of the TV, a bargain meal from M&S assembled on her tray, a decent red to wash it down. New Year’s Eve she went for a meal in Exmouth Market with four of her girlfriends, then on to a club near the Angel; not for want of offers, she was home by half twelve, in bed before one alone, reading a book. There’d been a time, not so long ago, when if she hadn’t pulled she’d have reckoned the evening a failure.
God, girl, she thought, you’re getting old!
January kicked off with sleet, then rain, then snow, then sleet again. At night it froze. Coming down the steps from her front door her first full day back in the office, she’d almost lost her footing, had to grab hold of the railing to avoid going headlong. The pavement was like a skating rink, ice packed solidly along the kerb’s edge. Fresh snow fluttered, moth-like, in her face as she walked. The latte bought at Caffè Nero had lost most of its heat before she even reached the Tube.
Photographs and a description of the Heath victim had been passed on to the Met’s Intelligence Bureau before the holiday for possible identification. Since when, nothing. Karen had emailed the Intelligence Bureau’s Co-ordinating and Tasking Office from home and chased up her request. Co-ordinating and Tasking Office – it sounded like something out of Bleak House, the boxed set of which her sister had sent her for Christmas. Automatically generated, a reply had bounced back by return. This office is currently closed.
At her desk her stomach rumbled; coffee aside, no breakfast. Maybe she should give Mike Ramsden a call: Ramsden, for years now her bag man, aide-de-camp, her sergeant-at-arms. Mike, if you’re coming in, you might stop off at Pret and pick up one of those egg and tomato baguettes. Pain au something while you’re about it.
She wondered if he’d spent Christmas alone like her or whether he’d found company; Ramsden, who seemed to be permanently between wives, usually other people’s.