‘Commander?’ he replied.
‘If it helps, that would put you on equal footing with ACC status, but more prestigious.’
‘Cassian Pewe won’t like that.’
‘I thought that might appeal,’ Vosper said.
He was thinking hard about the implications on his family life. The commute to London. Even longer hours than he was currently working.
Balanced against getting away from the clutches of Pewe. And being on his level. Or above him!
‘I really want you to think about it, Roy. This could be a stepping stone for you to one day getting a top job in the Met. I know you are ambitious — and I know you have massive ability. Would you consider it?’
He looked at her, unsure for one of the few times in his life how to reply.
‘It would be a big upheaval for you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to paint a rosy picture. It would be 24/7, full on, and if you got the job you would be in the national spotlight. Go home, talk it over with your wife, think about it. Personally, I can’t think of anyone better for the job.’
‘I’m very flattered,’ he said.
The waiter reappeared. ‘On the bone or off?’ he asked in an Italian accent.
‘Off for me, please,’ she said.
‘On the bone for me,’ Grace said.
Alison Vosper said, without a hint of acidity, ‘That’s the Roy Grace I remember. Always up for a challenge!’
86
Thursday 11 October
Kofi Okonjo liked to work out. He let his lunch digest, then took his turn in the exercise yard, with its tall fence topped with two rolls of razor wire, and began running circuits in the pelting rain. No one else was out here and that was good.
As he ran he thought of his life back in Reutlingen. His cars. Julia. They’d had a similar background. She’d told him all about her father, an angry farmer, angry all the time at the EU subsidies, angry when she tried to read books to educate herself, angry at her mother. And who’d abused her throughout her childhood.
Kofi told her about his background, about stuff he’d done as a boy soldier, and it shocked and excited her. She understood. They were two of a kind. He dreamed of her now, her pale white skin. Her sexy mouth. Her bright-red nipples and her small but firm round breasts. The ring in her navel. The other ring, down below, that drove her crazy when he flipped it around with his tongue.
He felt himself growing stiff inside his loose grey tracksuit as he ran. When he finished his circuits he’d whack off in the shower, perhaps, thinking of her. Imagining her voice. Talking him through it. Imagining her hand on him. Slow, slow, gently, then firmer. Harder. Faster.
An hour later, sodden with rain, he re-entered the First Night Centre, and the sour reek of disinfectant. He walked past the cells and went into his. His mean-looking cellmate wasn’t there. No big loss. He stripped off his clothes, picked up his meagre towel, wrapped it round his midriff and headed off to the showers.
Entering, he slung his towel on one of a row of hooks and turned the tap, standing well back to check the temperature. Then stepped forward, immersing himself, feeling the jet of hot water, gratefully, on his face, body and hair. He washed his body and his hair thoroughly, rinsed off and stepped back, his eyes stinging from soap residue.
As he did so, a voice behind him startled him. ‘Nice fresh towel, Dunstan?’
Who knew him by that name in here?
He spun round. To see a man with a towel over his head and face. Holding what looked like a home-made knife.
‘Mr Barrey told me to take care of you.’
Before he could move, the man rammed the blade into his stomach. Okonjo felt for a second he had been punched by a fist. An instant later his stomach erupted with burning, searing pain. The towel fell away from his assailant’s face. It was the silent Eastern European man who had been in the prison van with him from the magistrates’ court.
‘I’m told you like blades, don’t you, Dunstan? Or should I call you Kofi?’
He moaned in agony.
The man held him against the wall with the hilt pressed against his stomach.
He was dimly aware that his bowels were evacuating. The man was eyeballing him.
‘I’ve a message from Mr Barrey. He told me to take care of you in prison. Do you know anything of history? Those old medieval knights, in wars, had a code of honour. They would ask the knight who’d pierced them with a sword not to twist — it gave them a better chance of survival, because if they twisted the blade, it would tear their guts, ripping open their bowels, all that muck getting into the bloodstream. Sepsis would follow. Too far gone for doctors. A slow, agonizing death. Eh?’
Okonjo stared at him, shaking in agony and terror. ‘No, please,’ he mouthed, but the sound came out strange, distorted, lost inside another moan of agony.
‘Plenty of time to think about your life, yes? All your loved ones. Got a girl you’re sweet on waiting for you back home, have you? Julia, that her name?’
His assailant shot a quick, wary glance behind him. ‘I could just twist the blade and then you’ll have a few hours before you die. A few hours to think about Julia, yes? Or you would if I left you like this, but I can’t take that chance. Sorry.’ He withdrew the shank, Okonjo gasping as he did, blood and something darker and vile-smelling running from the wound. Okonjo jammed his hands over it, panting in pain. An instant later the man plunged the blade through Okonjo’s chest. Pushing it in hard, right up to the makeshift hilt again. Then gave it a sharp twist.
The African jerked, once. A gurgling sound came from his throat, then he collapsed into the shower tray.
His assailant removed the shank. He rinsed it under the running water for some while, wiped it carefully with a towel and slipped away, taking the towel with him.
87
Thursday 11 October
Roy Grace had once been backstage at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, some years ago when he was a young DS, and had never forgotten the experience. A stressed stage-door manager named Setch had called the police after the mysterious disappearance of an actress in a touring play who had failed to turn up for a performance and had subsequently been reported missing from her lodgings.
There had been reports of a creepily obsessive fan repeatedly hanging around outside the stage door — ‘Stage Door Johnny’, the staff had called him. Fortunately there had been a good outcome: it turned out she’d had a breakdown unrelated to this stalker, and had gone home to the north of England without bothering to inform any of the play’s company.
What struck Roy, interviewing the stagehands, was the contrast between the opulence of the front-of-house, with its chandeliers, ornate decor and plush red velour seats, as well as the stage set of a Victorian drawing room, and the whole different world of darkness, shabbiness and seeming chaos of the cavernous dark spaces behind, with tangles of cables, ropes and pulleys, and props all over the place.
It was the same with barristers’ chambers, he thought, as he left the tube station following his meeting with Alison Vosper and walked along busy Fleet Street, past the imposing Gothic facade of the Royal Courts of Justice, then turned right, away from the hubbub, down through an archway into the sanctuary of Inner Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court, which housed barristers and their clerks. He was in a vast courtyard surrounded by tall, handsome red-brick terraced buildings, in front of which were gardens and a pond, as well as a car park containing a fair amount of expensive metal. Successful barristers, who acted as both prosecutors and defending counsel in the nation’s antiquated legal system, were among the highest paid professionals in their field. Their clerks did pretty well, too. And yet he knew, as he stood on the doorstep of No. 82 and rang the bell marked G. Carrington QC, that just like front-of-house at the Theatre Royal, compared to the grandeur of the courts in which they performed, barristers’ chambers tended to be in the main unimpressive and often quite cramped.