‘Excuse me?’
‘He’s had complaints, that’s why he’s been sent over here. But then he’s not shy of chucking his own complaints about, so be careful.’
‘Right. Thanks. D’you mind if we talk about the job? Anything from the house-to-house?’
‘Nothing much. I was going to start on this block when the uniformed constables get back. But you can do it if you like.’
Sean stared up at Eagle Mount One.
‘Might be a slight conflict of interest if I take this one,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could do Attlee Avenue?’
‘I think you’ll find I’m in charge of allocating manpower, Acting DC Denton.’ The emphasis was heavy on the ‘acting’.
‘I understand. But the thing is, I grew up in that block. My dad still lives there.’
He waited to see if she was going to apologise for calling his former home a shithole, but she didn’t. She just shrugged and unclipped a list of house numbers and handed it to him.
‘All right. Attlee Avenue. Be back here in half an hour and you can come with me to see Mrs Armley again. She might relate to someone local. And if we can’t get any sense out of her, we’ll have to bring her in and do it on video. The paperwork’s underneath. Make sure you fill in the forms correctly, otherwise it’s a waste of everyone’s time.’
He decided not to take it personally and was glad to be out of the car. She was like a negative-energy black hole, pulling everyone in range of her force field down with her. He took his jacket off, slung it over his shoulder and loosened his tie. On Attlee Avenue, a few people were sitting out in their front gardens and there was a smell of freshly lit barbecues. Two uniformed officers were walking over the grass of the recreation ground, heads down, checking to see if anything had been missed.
‘Gav!’
‘Now then. Look at you!’ Gavin Wentworth stood up straight and rubbed the small of his back.
‘You off nights as well?’ Sean called over to him.
‘Aye, made sense to swap me too, and put me on this unit. Thanks for the night off, sunshine, though I’m not sure I’ve acclimatised yet. I could fall asleep on my feet, to be honest.’
Gavin’s new partner kept going towards DS Simkins’s car, while Gav offered to carry on down Attlee Avenue with Sean. In the first house, a nervous Polish woman shook her head and said ‘sorry’ to everything they asked. At the next, a tired woman with numerous children running around, said she’d had the telly on all evening in the back room, and didn’t know a thing until the police arrived this morning.
‘It’ll be to do with all the immigrants,’ she added as they turned to go.
‘Sorry?’ Sean said.
‘It never used to be like this here.’
‘Thank you for your time,’ Gav said. ‘Come on, son,’ he said quietly to Sean, ‘it’s not worth it.’
Sean was wondering what glorious part of Chasebridge’s past she was harking back to. Certainly not one that had existed in his lifetime. The names of the people doing the fighting might have changed, but that was all. The next few houses gave them nothing and one man just told them to f-off, he was having a sleep. Gav suggested they break off for ten minutes and pick up a bar of chocolate to give them the strength to face the other end of the street.
They followed Attlee Avenue down to below the primary school and walked round Winston Grove to the shops. Sean glanced up towards the flats at the top of the hill and picked out Mrs Armley’s window, mentally marking the distance again. Inside the newsagents, the same young woman in a hijab was serving behind the counter. They waited behind an elderly lady buying scratch cards.
‘Tax on the daft, that lottery,’ PC Wentworth muttered. ‘If she saved that up, she’d have a nice nest egg for Christmas.’
When their turn came, the girl looked at them warily.
‘Look, I’ve already told the other officer, Mo was here until about eight that evening, helping me.’ She looked around the shop, as if she was checking that they wouldn’t be overheard. When she was sure they were alone, she spoke quietly. ‘He was really happy. Checking his hair and all that in the mirror, I thought … no, it doesn’t matter.’
The shop door opened behind them and the bell chimed. Sean was about to say something, when PC Wentworth cleared his throat.
‘Thank you, young lady. Now, can I have a large bar of milk chocolate, please? And if there is anything else, just get in touch.’
Outside Gav snapped the end off the chocolate and looked up at the names above the door.
‘The licensees are called A Asaf and K Asaf, so is she family too?’
‘Yeah, I reckon she’s the victim’s cousin, Saleem’s sister,’ Sean said. ‘Ghazala, I think he called her.’
Gav gave him a friendly pat on the back. ‘Nice piece of deduction, Mr Watson.’
‘Don’t you start. I’ve had enough stick from Carly.’
‘We’re all made up for you, lad, truly. Anyway, that’s something for you to give your new boss, all part of a routine inquiry, and no need to own up to our unscheduled chocolate break. So long as the Rottweiler with the clipboard doesn’t spot we went off plan. Here …’ He broke off a line of squares and handed it to Sean.
‘Do you think he was meeting a girl?’
‘Probably, or a boy,’ Gav said.
‘Surely not!’
‘Why not? Because Pakistani boys can’t be gay? Let me tell you something. A few years ago, I was based in Leeds and I was driving with a colleague round one of the outlying estates. We came across a group of lads, fifteen or twenty of them. I thought, hey up, this is some sort of gang. I was braced for trouble.’
‘What was it?’
‘Lads who took the bus out to the edge of town, or got on their scooters or whatever, to meet up where nobody knew them, nobody to tell their families. Young gay lads. Asian lads.’
‘All right. Point taken. He got a text from a lover, or a prospective lover. He was on a promise and he ended up dead. That doesn’t get us much further.’
Back on Attlee Avenue they encountered shrugs, monosyllabic responses and a door shut in their face by a toddler, who they could hear screaming inside the house. Eventually the mother opened the door and said she was sorry about that, but the little girl was scared of the police since they kept taking her dad away and no, they hadn’t seen anything. Finally, as Sean was giving up hope, an elderly man outside his house said he’d been sitting in his front garden on Tuesday night, watching the world go by. He’d come out to do the watering and decided to have a bit of a rest on his bench as it was such a nice evening. He showed them a low stone bench under his window, flanked by roses and giant daisies.
‘It was very quiet. A young lad went by, smoking a cigarette. I remember that because I could smell it. I’ve packed them in myself, but now and again I get the smell of one and it brings back the cravings, you know what I mean?’
The boy he’d seen was wearing a hood, that’s all he could remember, strolling casually, not in any rush. He didn’t see his face. He got the feeling he stood about for a while, because the cigarette smell lingered. Sean sat on the bench and realised that the hedge was so high, you saw people only as they passed the gate. The rest of the estate disappeared once you were seated and you could be a hundred miles away from the Chasebridge estate. They thanked the old man and carried on to the last few houses. Sean looked back down the hill.
‘If you were planning to visit Eagle Mount Two,’ he said, ‘it would be straightforward. You’d turn the corner of Winston Grove, come up the centre of the estate past the school and the community centre and then across the rec at some point. You’d never be out of sight of Mrs Armley’s window. Unless you were trying to hide from someone. I suppose he could have cut between the community centre and the back of the primary school and come up Attlee Avenue, where nobody claims to have seen him.’
‘There you go, boss.’ Gav said, handing Sean a clipboard with the house numbers all ticked off. ‘Put your squiggle there.’
‘Gav, mate, I’m not your boss.’ Sean picked up the pen.