The Memory of Blood(41)

Longbright studied Anna’s mother coldly. Rose Marquand could not see how much she had contributed to her daughter’s misery. There was a bad atmosphere in the house. Sheena was watching her from the stairs.

She took her leave, stepping between the trash-filled puddles in the alley to reach the corner house where the Hagan family lived. In the unkempt front garden were two gigantic cardboard boxes that had once contained plasma TV screens, and an empty Apple Mac carton, yet the upper windows had silver tape stuck over cracked glass, and there were slates missing off the roof. Somewhere inside, a large dog barked.

She was all too familiar with houses like this. Within it, all generations of the family would gather to bicker and get drunk, obsessing over each other’s fluctuating loyalties. It was a hellishly closed world, but if any outsiders intruded, the family would briefly unite to make them a target for harm.

All the local beat officers could do was watch the Hagans and wait for anything that would incriminate them. Drugs, stolen goods, a fight that resulted in physical signs of abuse. Families like the Hagans survived because they knew no witnesses would ever come forward to speak out against them, and nobody would volunteer to give evidence in court. But the Hagans were also an anachronism, a dying breed; Longbright was aware that there were over 180 criminal gangs in London, speaking 24 languages, responsible for a third of all the capital’s murders, and their roots lay in ethnic divisions. Criminals were more likely to be bound by a common homeland now than by sharing the same house. Families like the Hagans still practiced money laundering, tax evasion and handling stolen goods, but trafficking in drugs, weapons and people belonged to an insidious new order of outlaws.

Heading back to the tube, Longbright resolved to speak with one of the sergeants at Southwark Police station, but knew there was little chance of fulfilling Rose Marquand’s wish to prosecute the Hagans. She set off toward Tooting Bec lido.





On Wednesday evening the sky cleared so suddenly that it looked as if the clouds had been vacuumed away like dirt, leaving a rich azure sky. The buildings lightened and the pavements dried. People reappeared on the grey streets of King’s Cross, and workers once more began drinking outside pubs. Smokers surrounded buildings. Cautious smiles were even spotted.

Inside the PCU, the Turkish workmen who were refitting the electrics and repairing walls had returned, and were mopping up pools of water left by the holes in the building’s roof. In Bryant and May’s shared office, the detectives pored over the spreadsheet May had created to track the movements of everyone at the Kramers’ party. Bryant was visibly bored and itching to return to his books.

‘It’s very attractive, all these nice coloured panels,’ he said, ‘but absolutely of no use. I don’t know why you keep insisting I should study them.’

‘Look, you can see who left the room, when and why,’ said May. ‘It saves you having to talk to anyone.’

‘I don’t need to be protected from the public, thank you.’

‘I’m protecting them from you. By studying this we can tell who was missing at the time of the murder.’

‘Ah, but this is where your reliance on technology lets you down. Your fancy chart is based on the memories of witnesses, which are nearly always faulty. It can’t show us what we need to understand most of all. We can’t know what each of them saw and heard that night. Upstairs, there was a queue outside the toilet. At the back, there were people smoking on the rear fire escape. Everyone else was either in the lounge or the kitchen. Are we agreed on that?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’ve got there.’

‘Then, at approximately ten past nine, somebody heard an odd noise from the fire escape stairs. This is in the testimony of Gail Strong, who was outside having a cigarette at that time. Strong says she passed Sigler coming in as she went out, but Sigler says he only saw Pryce coming out, and Pryce only saw Sigler, did Renfield tell you that?’

‘No. I’m getting confused.’

Bryant tapped the chart. ‘Look at your time lines. At nine-ten Sigler, Strong and Pryce were absent from the room. Upstairs, a chap called Mohammad al-Nahyan, the theatre’s carpenter, and Larry Hayes, the wardrobe chap, went to use the loo. So altogether there were five people missing from the lounge, three smokers, two full bladders, all accounted for. In the corridor we have al-Nahyan, in the toilet we have Hayes, out on the fire escape we have the others. But Hayes doesn’t remember seeing al-Nahyan even though he must have passed him when he left the loo. People remember things imperfectly. If you overlap the times of the smokers, the bladders and the remaining guests, who were all within each other’s sight in the lounge, there are no other suspects left to consider apart from the wait staff.’