Birdman

'Ah!' He snatched clumsily at the bags. 'Morning, boss.'

'The PM photos, Logan.'

'Of course, of course, no probs, sir.' Moving a trifle too quickly he stacked all the bags back on the desk and busied himself with a blue box file in the corner. Essex met Caffery's eyes for a moment then looked away. It was enough. Caffery closed the door behind him and leaned against it with his arms folded.

'Well?' he said. 'What's up?'

'The SA at Lambeth's been on regarding Gemini's car,' DI Diamond said calmly.

'I see. What's she got for us?'

'Four hairs found.' His washed-out blue eyes had centres of hard indigo. 'Didn't match any of the victims.'

'Yes?'

'But that doesn't matter.' In the corner Logan gave a short discomfited cough and Essex stared at his hands. Diamond took the time to run his hand over the hard, gelled helmet of hair. He sniffed, straightened and plucked the report from the desk with an ornate flick of the wrist. 'Numerous smudged partial prints, and someone had had Kodian-C out to the interior.'

'An industrial-grade cleaning fluid,' Logan explained.

'Which seems well suss to me.' Diamond blinked slowly like a lizard in the sun. 'Then the lads at Lambeth found three prints with enough points to make a match.'

'I see.'

'One with Craw and one with Wilcox.'

'He cabbied for them.'

'He says he doesn't even know them.'

'OK.' Caffery pushed himself away from the door. 'Does the super know?'

'Oh yes. We caught him on the way to the CS's.' Diamond smiled and rolled his sleeves down, buttoning them carefully. 'He's clearing it with Greenwich. We're going to give that shitty little scrote a chance to come in and answer some questions voluntarily. And if he doesn't want to play, we're arresting him. Don't want him heading back home and losing himself in the Blue Mountains.'

'You can see his point, I suppose,' Essex said, and Caffery could feel his empathy straining out.

'I suppose,' he said coldly. He turned to go, stopping briefly, his hand on the door. 'Essex?'

'Sir?'

'I still want those PM photos on my desk.'

24

Mrs Frobisher took her coat off and hung it carefully on the rack in DI Basset's Greenwich office. She kept her hat and gloves on.

'A cup of tea, Mrs Frobisher?'

She smiled. 'That would be nice.'

Basset kept a discreet eye on her as he opened the blinds and flicked the switch on the kettle. A little worm of unease was crawling across his stomach. Mrs Frobisher was well known to the staff at Greenwich police station: in the last six months she had been a methodical visitor, complaining about anything from the fights in the council block opposite, the dirt and noise of local building works, to the antisocial behaviour of the tenant in the flat below. She had refused to be foisted off onto the environmental health department, and was considered by the duty team to be part of the Monday-morning drudgery.

Until this Monday, when, at 10 a.m., she had ambled in as customary, wearing her best hat and coat on a hot summer's day, and given a statement to the desk sergeant which had made him reach for the phone. DI Basset, who had been one of the first attending CID officers at the aggregate yard last weekend, had cancelled his morning meeting with the community liaison officer and invited Mrs Frobisher into his office.

She sat, sparrow-like, on the edge of the chair, staring out of the window at the sun on the striped awning of Mullins dairy on Royal Hill. 'It's lovely here, isn't it?' she sighed. 'Absolutely lovely.'

'Thank you,' Basset said. 'I think so too. Now—' He lifted the tea bags on a spoon and dropped them in the waste-paper basket. 'Now, Mrs Frobisher, our desk sergeant tells me you've been having some bother. Shall we have a little chat about it?'

'Oh, that? It's been going on months, not that any of them would take a blind bit of notice.' She took her gloves off, put them in the matching fawn mock-leather shopping bag and zipped it up. The hat remained in place. 'I've been in here like clockwork every week, and no joy until now. Wouldn't listen to me. I might be old, but I'm not stupid, I know what they're saying — crazy old witch — I've heard them.'

'Yes, yes.' He held a mug out to her. 'I'm sorry about that, Mrs Frobisher. Sincerely sorry. It's just you've had one or two of our lads out to you in the past, and I think they feel—'

'Only for the foxes! At this time of year they will insist on having their little romances and what-not. The noise they make! It sounds like a woman screaming, and you can't be too careful, not in this day and age.' She took the tea, resting it on her knee. 'When my George was alive he used to throw bricks at them. Now he'd know the difference between a fox and a woman screaming.' She leaned forward, glad of the audience. 'I was born in Lewisham, you know, Officer, and I've been in Brazil Street fifty years now. Got a special fondness for this area in spite of everything. I've seen the Jerrys bomb the place, the council get their hands on it, the foreigners and now the developers. They've pulled everything down I cared about and there's new buildings going up. Hyper this and hyper that, loft conversions and I don't know what.'

'Mrs Frobisher.' Basset placed his tea next to his notepad and sat down opposite. 'In the statement you gave our desk sergeant you talked about a neighbour of yours, is that right?'

'Him!' She cocked her head back and pursed her lips. 'Yes. And there's him. As if I haven't got enough worries.'

'Tell me about him. He owns the flat downstairs?'

'Owns it. Don't mean he gives a tinker's for it, does it? Never bloody home.'

'Been there long, has he?'

'Years. Ever since my George died. No sooner had I got him in the ground than my son decides the old place is too big for me — has the council in, the planners, the gas board and I don't know who else, and even more dust, if you please. They bricked off the staircase, put a door round the side and one of those carport affairs, horrible American-looking thing, I can't be doing with it myself. Next I know they've sold that floor off to him and me and the cat are marched off upstairs like a pair of lepers in our own home.'

'His entrance is at the side?'

'At the back, under the carport — so he's got the garden, you see. Not that he looks after it. Oooh no.' She sucked in a breath and shook her head. 'No, no, no. Not with him never being there. Covered in bindweed it will be by July, the rate he's going. But even if he did get it nice, what then? Who'd want to sit out there with the noise and dust and hammering every minute of the day? And if it's not that it's them over the road screaming and shouting — you can't win, Officer, you can't win.'

'I'm sure,' Basset nodded. 'I'm sure you can't. Now shall we concentrate on what you were telling the desk sergeant about your neighbour?'

'I was telling your sergeant that I think he's left that freezer of his unplugged again. The smell! Well, you've never known the like of the smell, Officer. It's not healthy whatever it is. He was all right when he first moved in — kept the place reasonable from what I could tell. But, see, now he's got to the point where he'll leave the place for days on end, never check on it. And this' — she tapped an arthritic finger on the desk to punctuate each word — 'this is the sort of thing that is bound to happen. You'd think, wouldn't you, him being a professional, you'd think he'd show a bit of respect.' She put the mug on Basset's desk and started to unpin her hat as if she was finally comfortable. 'It's his patients I feel sorry for.'