Good Bait

She snapped the thread free.

‘After he’d gone, he told me I wasn’t to have nothing to do with him again. Said he’d stop me using the computer, Facebook an’ that, take away my mobile phone.’

‘So that’s when you started using Lesley as a go-between?’

‘Yeah. She didn’t mind. Liked it, really.’

‘And this particular evening, the one we’re talking about, that was how you’d arranged to meet him?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Hampstead — why Hampstead? Not exactly round the corner.’

‘That’s why, yeah? No way we’re going to bump into anyone we knew. Anyone who knew me and might tell my dad.’

‘This would have been late, though. It would have been dark.’

‘That was okay. I didn’t care.’

‘How about getting home?’

A quick glance away. ‘I wasn’t. I told my mum I was staying at Lesley’s. A sleepover.’

‘Little liar,’ Fay Martin said quietly.

‘There was this place, stayed open all night. Burgers and stuff. That’s where we’d go, just sit, you know, and talk. What was going to happen, what we were going to do.’

‘Do?’

‘Once we were married.’

‘Holy Jesus!’ Fay Martin rolled her eyes up towards the heavens.

‘Sasha,’ Tim Costello leaned forward, ‘you said your dad found out you were going to see Petru that evening — how did that happen?’

‘Mum was out and he was here. They’d …’ She looked towards her mother, then away. ‘I think they’d had a row. Mum’d stormed out.’

‘I walked,’ Fay Martin said, flatly.

‘Anyway, he was here and he asked me, you know, where was I going and I said, like, Lesley’s, and soon as I said it I could tell he didn’t believe me. Made me call her. Didn’t stand up to him more’n a couple of minutes, did she? Told him. After that it all come out. Everything. How I’d been going behind his back. Where we was goin’ to meet that evening, everything. I thought he was go

Tears were rolling slowly down Sasha’s cheeks.

‘You know where he went?’

A shake of the head, shoulders down.

‘Sasha?’

‘No.’

An ambulance went past along the main road, siren wailing.

‘You wouldn’t know, I suppose, Mrs Martin, where your husband went to after he’d locked Sasha in her room?’

‘Wasn’t here when I got back, I know that.’

‘And this was when?’

‘Eleven, eleven thirty.’

‘And you wouldn’t have any idea where he might have been?’

‘The pub, I dare say. Where he usually went off to when he was in one of his moods. And when he wasn’t.’

‘Any pub in particular?’

‘Four Hands, most likely. Down Lewisham. Landlord has a lock-in most nights.’

‘And that’s where you think he was?’

‘Good a guess as any. Gone three in the morning time he got home, anyway. Hammered didn’t come into it.’

‘Mr Martin,’ Karen said, ‘you’re expecting him home this evening?’

‘Not ’less he’s changed his plans.’

‘Which are?’

‘Over in Talli

‘Estonia?’

‘Last time I looked.’

‘Stag do?’ Costello suggested.

‘Business.’

‘So when are you expecting him?’ Karen asked.

‘Couple of days, maybe three.’

‘Only we’ll need to talk to him.’

‘What for?’

‘Hear his version of Sasha’s story. Confirm his whereabouts, the night Petru Andronic died.’

‘You don’t think he had anything to do with that? Terry? You must be jokin’.’

‘Normal procedure, Mrs Martin, that’s all.’

‘He’ll not like it.’

‘I’m afraid that’s too bad.’ Karen placed one of her cards on the table. ‘Ask him to contact this number as soon as he returns. We’ll need to see you as well, Sasha. Make a statement, what you’ve just told us.’

‘Do I have to?’

‘I think so. Best to get it all clear once and for all. Perhaps you could bring her in, Mrs Martin? Tomorrow around ten thirty?’

Fay Martin’s glare followed them all the way to the door.

Outside, the air bit cold and Karen shivered. Tim Costello pulled his coat collar up against his neck.

‘“He’d’ve hurt him, I know he would,” is that what she said?’

Karen nodded. ‘“Hurt him bad.”’

‘And then what was it? Before he went out? “That’s an end to it.”’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘Out of the mouths …’

‘I know.’ Karen glanced back at the house, silhouette at one of the upstairs windows, Fay Martin looking down. ‘You fancy a drink,’ she said, ‘before we head back?’

‘The Four Hands?’

‘Why not?’

11

Over the sea the sky loomed u

The piece starts off with an easy swing, relaxed, a wash of cymbals behind the horns; and then, without warning, thirty seconds in, the trumpet unleashes itself into a blistering run, a chorus torn from another place, a world moved on. After that — an anti-climax, how could it be anything else? — the trombone and then the saxophone take their own pedestrian time, the sax straining towards the end, wanting more without seemingly knowing how. Only in the closing bars do we hear the trumpet clearly again, skittering irrepressibly around the final statement of the theme — puckish — up and down and in between.

‘Good Bait’. Dizzy Gillespie All Stars: New York City, 9 January.

Cordon poured the coffee, added milk.

Set the track to play again.

Concentrated on the sound.

A couple of days now since he had seen the report in the paper? The paragraph in the Cornishmanconcise and to the point.

The body of a woman who was fatally injured after falling under a Tube train at Finsbury Park, north London, four days ago, has been identified as that of Maxine Carlin, aged 46, formerly resident in Penzance. A neighbour, who did not wish to be named, told The Cornishman she thought Mrs Carlin had gone to London to see her daughter.

How many days?

Maxine Carlin, forty-six.

Heroin. Alcohol. Children aborted, almost certainly; children taken into care. Men who spoke with their fists or not at all.

Forty-six.

A wonder she lived as long as she did.

For an instant he saw the train. The speed of it as she fell. The music again, unchanging. Outside, the sky offered no release.

It was none of his business, none. Gone to London to see her daughter. Well, so what if she had? Gone missing, i’n’t she?Rose. Letitia. That stupid bloody name!He saw her face, Letitia’s, younger, smiling, the dog lifting her head to lick the back of her hand. Letitia. Rose. Thought a lot of you, fuck knows why.

Jack Kiley and himself were of an age. Kiley, ex-professional footballer, albeit briefly; ex-Met. Now eking out a living as a private investigator. Security work a lot of it, private security, small scale: B-list celebrities, sports stars, hangers-on amongst the minor royals. There was a firm of local solicitors for whom he ran checks, chased payments, sat hour on hour in nondescript cafes, staring out through steamed-up windows; hunkered down behind the wheel of a borrowed car, waiting to witness some all-too-human indiscretion, reveal the truth behind the lie: the affair with the best friend’s wife or husband; the disability that magically disappeared; a second family on the far side of the city, kids nicely set up in private school; a hopeless addiction to gambling or drugs or being tied up and blindfolded, then hoisted upside down and beaten with a cane.