Blood Work Read online

  But that 'now' was twenty-three years ago, he thought bitterly as he trudged up past the hordes of office workers who were spilling down the short steps into Piccadilly Circus station. Twenty-three years ago; and three weeks after her strictly non- Metropolitan Police regulation knickers had hit the floor of her eight foot by eight foot bedroom, he had got the phone call. He was having Sunday dinner at his parents' at the time, roast pork and parsnips, thinking life didn't get much better. No, it got worse.

  Audrey was up the stick, he was the father, and his plans for joining the army were right in the shitter.

  She wouldn't hear of him joining up. She wanted him home with her, not swanning off overseas whenever Maggie wanted to win another election. She wanted them to get married as soon as possible, and it wasn't just one baby she wanted, it was three. And there was no way she was walking up the aisle looking like Alison Moyet with a pillow stuffed under her jumper. Derek wasn't even thinking about marriage let alone a family but abortion was out of the question, seemingly. Audrey had her way; they got married and had three kids. Derek's application to join the police force was turned down and he ended up in the prison services. And the worst of it was, she refused to wear the uniform ever again. After her third baby her stomach had thickened and her back broadened and her once coconut-like breasts were now like flabby pumpkins that were long past their Halloween best.

  So, he was going to put the touch on the copper and his CID mate. The information he had should be worth a couple of C notes and he was going to put the money to good use. A feisty little Irish tart he liked to visit when he had enough folding squirrelled away.

  He smiled to himself as he pulled out his mobile phone and stood outside Boots on the north side of Piccadilly Circus, turning the collar of his raincoat up as the wind had freshened. There was moisture in the chill air. An hour ought to do it, he figured. Give him time to get some cash from DI Jimmy Skinner, a couple of drinks to set the ball rolling and then round to the auburn-haired strumpet for another round of Sergeant Strict and the love truncheon. He punched in the number and grinned expectantly.

  *

  Delaney took a sip of his Guinness and wended his way through the crowd at the Pig and Whistle over to a back table where Sally Cartwright and a bunch of other people were sitting, He nodded to some of them, all uniform, all fresh-faced and eager. Cops really were getting younger these days, he thought.

  'Glad you could make it, sir.' Sally pulled out a chair for him. 'I think you know most people.'

  'Sure.'

  Delaney nodded generally and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, the pain in his shoulder throbbing and reminding him that his own youth was far behind him. He took another pull of his Guinness. Creamy analgesic by the pint glass.

  Sally gestured at the young, black constable. 'This is Danny Vine.'

  'Nice to meet you again, sir.'

  Delaney flashed him a quick smile as he shook his hand, pain lancing into his shoulder and making him regret it. 'Please don't call me sir. Not in here, anyway.'

  'Sure.'

  'And this is Michael Hill.'

  She smiled at the blond-haired man in his mid-twenties. Delaney picked up the slight catch in her voice and the sparkle in her eye. Danny Vine had competition. He nodded at the man, not risking another handshake. He recognised him from somewhere, but couldn't quite place him. 'I know you?'

  'You'd have seen me earlier, sir.'

  'Like I said, no sirs. When you're out of uniform I'm just plain old Jack Delaney.'

  'I'm not uniform.'

  'Oh?'

  'I'm the police photographer.'

  Delaney nodded a little guiltily. 'Sure, I thought I recognised you.' The truth was he hardly noticed any of the myriad support staff when he was working. Especially if they were all kitted out in white spacesuits. Some detective.

  'Any developments on the case, Inspector?' Danny Vine asked. He was clearly eager to show he was keen. Sally had better look out, Delaney reckoned. Youth and energy were dangerous enough, particularly when you added testosterone to the mix.

  'Nothing new. We'll track down who she is tomorrow with any luck. Give us somewhere to start.'

  'How are you going to do that?'

  Michael Hill this time. Delaney sensed that they weren't really interested in talking to him per se, but thought that if they got on his good side they'd get on the good side of Sally Cartwright.

  He was relieved to see Bob Wilkinson coming in and heading up to the bar. He smiled apologetically at Sally. 'Sorry, got to have a word with Bob.'

  Sally nodded back distractedly but Delaney could tell she had other matters on her mind. Young love, he thought as he worked his way back through the noisy hubbub, God and all his angels save us from it.

  'Inspector.'

  'Get us a pint, Bob, for Christ's sake.'

  Bob smiled at the barmaid and jerked his thumb at Delaney. The barmaid, a button-nosed temptress called Angela something, Delaney never could remember, grinned at him as she poured a fresh pint of Guinness. 'Shot with that, Jack?'

  'No. Being a good boy tonight.'

  Angela laughed, a throaty, husky laugh that started somewhere low. 'Can't see that somehow.'

  Delaney winked at her. 'Turning over a new leaf. Jack Delaney. Modern man.'

  'Yeah, you and Hugh Hefner.' She put the pint on the counter. 'Let it settle and if you want a top-up give me a whistle.' She moved off to serve some others at the end of the bar. Her hips swinging like a Tennessee two-step.

  Bob looked at Delaney watching her. 'They reckon if a woman swings her hips like that, she isn't ovulating.'

  Delaney looked back at him. 'That a fact?'

  'Mine of them, me. Fuck police work, I should have been a black-cab driver.'

  Delaney couldn't be bothered to wait for the Guinness to settle properly and took a long gulp. 'Got a stupid question for you, Bob?'

  'Shoot?'

  'What's a belt buckle used for?'

  Bob Wilkinson shrugged. 'Well, in the good old days it would be used to keep your women and children in line.' He grinned. 'Nowadays just to keep your dignity, and your trousers up.'

  'Yeah.' Delaney nodded.

  Bob frowned. 'Why do you ask that?'

  Delaney shrugged and immediately regretted asking Bob the question. 'I have no idea.' He took another pull on his drink and as he put the pint down on the bar and gestured to Angela for a top-up, his mobile phone rang. Irritated, he pulled it out from his pocket but his expression changed as he saw who was calling.

  'Delaney.'

  'Jack, it's Kate.'

  'I saw. What's up?'

  'I need to talk to you.'

  'What about?'

  The large group at the bar started singing loudly. Kate said something on the other end of the line but Delaney couldn't catch it. 'Hang on, Kate, I'll take it outside.'

  Angela watched him, puzzled, as he walked towards the exit. She picked up Delaney's unfinished pint. 'Does he want this or not?'

  Bob grinned at her. 'I may be the fount of all wisdom, darling, but what I am not, is a psychic.'

  'No, what you is, is an arsehole.'

  Bob nodded with a self-satisfied grin and took a sip of his pint. Some things you couldn't argue with.

  Jimmy Skinner liked coming to Soho for very different reasons to the prison officer from Bayfield Prison. Jimmy had two vices. One was Internet poker and the other was Scotch. Unlike Delaney, however, he didn't drink it like lemonade. He treated himself every now and again with a small glass when he had won a high stakes game. He never drank when he was playing. That way disaster lay. You played the odds, you trusted the maths. What you didn't do was get drunk and risk all on chance, on the vagaries of the turn of a card. Lady luck was for losers.

  Soho had a couple of great places to shop for the whisky connoisseur. One was on Old Compton Street and the other was on Greek Street. Just down from a bookshop specialising in spanking magazines and one of the entrances to the Pillars of Hercul
es, which was why he was more than happy with where Derek Watters had suggested they meet.

  He stepped out of the whisky shop, pleased with himself. In his carrier bag a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label. A blended whisky but at one hundred and sixty pounds it wasn't the kind of stuff you found on special offer in the alcohol aisle of Tesco's. It wasn't about the money for Jimmy Skinner, it was about the victory. And victory always deserved to be marked, in his opinion.

  He looked up at the narrow, black clouds scudding across an already dark and crimson sky then suddenly down again as he heard the sound of an engine screaming in high revs and the concurrent sound of tyres screeching on tarmac. He looked up the street and the carrier bag in his right hand slid from his open fingers. The bottle inside it hit the pavement hard and smashed. But Jimmy Skinner didn't register it all. He was too busy shouting, straining his lungs in the face of the gusting wind.

  'Look out!'

  But for Derek Watters as he spun round to the sound of the tortured engine, it was too late. Far too late.

  The jet-black Land Rover Discovery hit into him still accelerating. The bull bar on the front of it crushed his ribs, splintering them and piercing his heart before the front of his head smashed down onto the bonnet. He was thrown back into the street as the driver stamped on the brakes and then into reverse, the tyres biting and screaming once more. As Jimmy Skinner ran across the road the back of Derek Watters head slapped hard down on the road with the crunching sound of a coconut being cracked by a hammer.

  The Land Rover roared backwards into Soho Square, then drove round the green and, accelerating once more, shot up Soho Street and out into the busy traffic of Oxford Street, oblivious to the blaring of horns and sudden screeching of brakes, and disappeared as it turned left heading towards Marble Arch. Skinner watched it go, trying to see the number plate, but it had been taped over. He knelt down and put his fingers to Derek Watters's carotid artery on the side of his neck, though it was a movement made more by instinct than expectation. But, surprisingly, the prison officer had one last breath in him. As his eyes clouded over he looked at the tall, thin, bone-faced policeman kneeling beside him and sighed more than spoke: 'Murder.'

  Then his eyes froze, motionless, and Derek Watters, forty-one years old, who never got to serve his country by bearing arms, died on a chill, wet street in a city that had a heart as cold as a solar system where the sun had died out many millennia ago.

  Delaney sat behind the wheel of his car taking a moment to collect his thoughts. Adjusting the rearview mirror he looked at himself. He didn't know what had got Kate Walker so agitated, she wouldn't tell him on the telephone, just told him to meet her at the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead. He knew it well enough, it was just up the road from his new house. What he didn't know was what had got her so rattled; he could hear it in her voice, the thinnest form of politeness covering someone close to breaking point. It had something to do with what happened in the hospital car park that morning, he'd bet his life on it. Whatever it was that had gone down, the clear fact was that Kate needed his help. She didn't say it in so many words, but it was expressed in her barely restrained emotion. She needed his help. And that was the one thing Jack Delaney couldn't walk away from.

  He'd put the mirror back in position, switched the engine on and slipped the gearstick into first, when his phone rang. He angrily slipped the gear back into neutral, glanced at the cover of his phone and snapped it open.

  'Make it quick.'

  'Jack. It's Jimmy Skinner.'

  Kate Walker sat at the long wooden bar in the Holly Bush. Comforted on the one hand to be surrounded in the warmth and hubbub of familiar faces and voices of the early-evening crowd, and yet starting every time the front door opened. She wanted it to be Delaney coming through that door but was terrified of the notion that it would be Paul Archer walking in instead. She didn't know what made her suggest this pub to Delaney. She wasn't thinking straight. Hadn't been since she had woken up this morning to find that man in her bed. She took a sip at her Bloody Mary. Cautiously. She had no intentions of getting hammered again tonight; besides, she was pregnant. God knows what she was going to do about that. And maybe she hadn't been raped. Maybe she was blowing things all out of proportion. She certainly had drunk a lot last night, maybe they had gone back to her flat, got paralytic and just passed out in bed. But if that was the case, why couldn't she remember any of it?

  She looked at her watch again. Where the bloody hell was Jack Delaney? It had taken all her nerve to call him in the first place and if he stood her up now, leaving her alone at the bar like a jilted teenager, she would kill him. She downed her Bloody Mary and gestured at the barman for another. After all, two wouldn't hurt. Would they?

  The ambulance pulled away from the kerb and drove slowly down Greek Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. It had no need for sirens and lights. The police cars that had cordoned off the area, blocking traffic from Soho Square, Bateman Street and Manette Street, pulled away too. Nothing to see here either. Not any more, at least. Delaney leaned back against the painted glass of the porno bookshop and put a cigarette in his mouth. He held the packet out to Skinner who shook his head then lit the cigarette with a lazy scrape of a match.

  He inhaled deeply and looked up at the night sky. It was like a carmine canvas that an artist had dragged thick, soot-stained fingers across. Like the black fingers of blood that had crept along the cobbles where Derek Watters had been murdered. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke and looked back at his colleague.

  'Definitely not an accident?'

  Jimmy Skinner shook his head.

  'Professional hit?'

  'I'd say so. The guy didn't have a chance. Walking along the street when suddenly out of nowhere . . . Bang!' Skinner slapped one hand hard against the other.

  Delaney took another thoughtful drag on his cigarette. 'And that was all he said. The one word.'

  'Yeah. "Murder." Hardly the most insightful final utterance, seeing as I had just watched him being splattered halfway up Greek Street.'

  'What's going on, Jimmy?'

  Skinner shrugged drily. 'Looks like somebody doesn't want anyone talking to you.'

  Delaney nodded in agreement. 'Looks like.'

  'I'd watch your back, if I were you, Jack. Somebody going to all this trouble, easier maybe to just take you out.'

  A cloud cleared the moon, throwing for a moment a spill of yellow light that reflected in the black orbs of Delaney's eye.

  He threw his cigarette on to the road, the sparks flaring briefly then dying out as he crushed it under heel. 'Maybe.'

  Kate sipped on her third or fourth drink. She wasn't drunk, just couldn't remember how many she had had. Time passes in a different way when you're lost in thought. No matter what Einstein said, some things aren't relative. She tasted the fluid in her mouth, thin and liquid and she realised that all she was drinking was melted ice, any vodka in the glass long since gone. She rattled the glass and held it out to the barman, who refilled it and added the drink to her tab. She swirled it in her hand, watching the splash of red wine, which the Holly Bush always added to a Bloody Mary, spin like a star system in a universe of its own. Like a black hole. Like the eye of Sauron.

  Some time later she looked at the oak-framed mirror above the bar and could see the front door to the pub opening and a man with curly dark hair entering and her heart pounded suddenly in her chest and she struggled to breathe. She knew the symptoms. It was a panic attack. And being the doctor that she was, Kate knew that sometimes panic was absolutely the appropriate response.