‘Where did they take her? St Thomas’s?’
‘I believe so. Want me to talk to the doctor?’
‘Good idea. But let me ring the mother first.’
With a heavy heart, Bryant made the call. As much as Rose Marquand was upset about losing her only daughter, it seemed to him that she was more fearful for her own future. Anna had been caring for her mother since her father had died.
Bryant explained that he would be sending Longbright to visit her. Perhaps his detective sergeant would be able to help in ways that the Met had no time for. Something about Anna had penetrated his heart; clever, shy and somehow lost, she had not been able to find her place in life, and now that confused existence had ended. If she had been bullied by a local gang, he needed to see the wrong put right.
He had an ulterior motive in offering his detective sergeant’s services; Longbright was to reassure Rose that she would be looked after, but he also asked her to collect the notes Anna had excised from his memoir. They were, after all, of a sensitive nature, and as Anna had indicated, were prohibited from publication by the Official Secrets Act. If the local service visitors came in to assess Rose, Bryant didn’t want them stumbling across incendiary material.
He sat back in his cracked green leather chair and rubbed his red eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. The excitement of moving the Unit into new premises had worn off as soon as he realised they would face the usual uphill battle against budgets and bureaucracy to keep the place alive. An infanticide; it would probably not turn out to be much of an investigation, but it would keep them ticking over until something meatier came along. The case wouldn’t have turned up at all if it hadn’t been for Gail Strong’s ministerial connection.
Bryant wiped his filthy computer screen and tried to understand Banbury’s WECS spreadsheet. He was annoyed with himself; it should have been obvious who was responsible for the child’s death. He felt sure that the matter would be wrapped up in a day or two. The crime was bound to have been committed by someone close to the baby or his mother—domestic investigations, even those that took place among the wealthy, were usually the easiest to solve.
The Mr Punch element intrigued him, though.
He could afford to indulge himself and study it from a more esoteric angle, safe in the knowledge that it would all have blown over in a day or two.
And yet. The lurid rictus of Mr Punch grimaced out at him from its hand-coloured plate in mockery, daring him to find a darker solution, and a shadow passed across his soul. The puppet on the floor had the laughing face of someone who knew they had killed and could get away with it.
If they were capable of taking the life of an innocent child and hiding the crime in plain sight, what else might they have the confidence to do?
Police officers are social drinkers. They have to be. The stresses of shifts are washed away with pints, and debriefs turn into scandalmonger sessions at the backs of boozers where the landlady can be relied upon to keep her barrels bled and her mouth shut. The alcohol is soaked up with carbohydrate-laden pub grub, but the cruelties of criminals are not so easily absorbed.
DS Janice Longbright and Sergeant Jack Renfield had detested each other at sight, but the death of a colleague had recently drawn them into a cautionary orbit. Longbright was lonely. Statuesque and physically imposing, she scared off men who wanted their girlfriends to behave like Barbie dolls, and as her conversation frequently revolved around the tragedy of sudden death, few civilian women remained in her circle for long.
Renfield, on the other hand, was the kind of Arsenal-supporting, beer-hammering mate who would never be alone in a North London pub. But there was something about Longbright that made him want to ditch his friends and be alone with her.
However, as Renfield settled into a corner at the King Charles I with his pint, that thought was cut short with the arrival of Meera Mangeshkar and Colin Bimsley. Sometimes the group liked to meet and chew over the day’s events without the senior detectives. They dealt with the grim practicalities of crime, and occasionally enjoyed leaving the abstruse thinking to their bosses.
The King Charles I was the oldest pub in King’s Cross. It had The Smiths on the jukebox, animal heads on the walls and a clientele that often ended up on the floor. It was home to a number of obscure games played by drinkers, including Mornington Crescent, the Drunk Shakespeare Club and the Nude Alpine Climbers Society of London, an inebriated challenge that involved making your way around the bar naked except for a coil of rope, a pith helmet and crampons, the loser being the first one to fall and touch the floor.
‘We just had Gail Strong’s old man on the line,’ said Meera, chucking packets of pork scratchings onto the table. ‘He went nuts at Raymond, warned him to keep his daughter out of the tabloids or he’d personally oversee the axing of our budget. Says it’s bad enough she’s working on this play without getting mixed up with a negligence case.’