‘I delivered one — to an address in East Ham.’
‘Chaucer Road?’
‘Yes.’
‘Same as me. I don’t reckon it’s some big important address, they’re just testing us. They won’t let us go to really important addresses until we’re further in.’
‘I thought you were established. It was just an impression I had.’
‘Yes, I have been here a while. . just not getting anywhere with Yates. He’s still not certain of me. Have you had a slap yet?’
‘No.’
‘I have, Yates slapped me round the head and punched me on the nose. . just enough to make it bleed and said, “No one leaves me, remember that”.’ Billy Kemp paused and gulped some tea. ‘Then he sent a couple of guys to check on my home address in Norwich.’
‘Think they did the same to my old dad in Stoke.’
‘Yes, I think that he’s not checking on you so much as letting you know he can get to your kin if you do a moonlight.’
Yewdall gasped.
‘Well. . maybe he’s doing both. Checking on you and also letting you know he can hurt your family if you allow yourself to drop off his radar. I’m in too deep.’
‘Me too.’
‘What do I do? What do we do? That bitch upstairs, the butch lesbian, Sonya Clements, she told me that you only get to be a proper gofer, get paid and all that, once you’ve seen someone get a kicking. Then you’re in the firm. Bottom rung of the ladder, but you’re in. But you need to see what happens to someone who gets out of order.’
‘I don’t want to watch,’ Yewdall pleaded.
‘You think I do? But keep your voice down, Clements tells Yates everything. You can’t cough in this house without her telling Yates. She’ll have been through your room.’
‘I thought someone had been in.’
‘It will have been her, poking round while you were out begging.’
Yewdall paused, then asked, ‘What about the Welsh girl?’
‘Gaynor? What about her?’
‘Well. . Josie told me she was murdered in that front room.’
‘Yes, one night. Yates doesn’t kill in daylight, it’s just his thing.’
‘So why do you also have to watch a kicking?’
‘Different story, I think. Don’t know but I think she was just. . used. . she hadn’t gone left field. Curtis Yates needed a body to frame the guy who had the room before you, Mickey Dalkeith by name. . nice geezer, but if Josie said “we” witnessed it, she must have meant her and Sonya Clements. I wasn’t there.’
‘I see.’
‘So how much money have you got?’
‘About six or seven pounds.’
‘I’ve got about ten.’
‘So what are you thinking?’
‘The pub.’ He glanced at the clock on the wall — it read ten minutes to eleven. ‘Get dressed. . walk slowly — they’ll just have opened by the time we get there.’
‘I thought we had to stay in?’
‘They’re coming for us at one thirty, and like I said, we can’t hide anywhere. I think I’d rather wait in the pub and have a stiff one or two. I’ll need it if I am going to watch someone get kicked to death.’
‘To death!’
‘Well it could go that far, whether they intend it or not. I mean they kicked J.J. Dunwoodie to death.’
‘So I heard. He wasn’t even in the firm. .’
‘Of course he was.’ Billy Kemp smiled. ‘He was well in, just played the wide-eyed innocent.’
‘I never knew him.’
‘It happened just before you moved here. He was battered to death in an alley close to the office where he worked.’
‘This is one hell of a mess.’
‘Where to go?’ Billy Kemp sighed. ‘What to do? Wonder how long it took to batter him to death?’
Yewdall and Billy Kemp sat in the pub. Yewdall thought that they must have made a strange couple — she so much larger than he, and clearly older — sitting together, side by side, yet saying little. It was early in the day and the landlord scowled at them, but they were paying, and the licensed retail trade is struggling. It was, Yewdall noticed, a clean pub, with a deep carpet, a highly polished wooden bar and wall panels containing sepia prints of Kilburn in a different era — an era of horse-drawn trams and drays, men in bowler hats and women in ankle-length skirts and dresses, and of solid, medium-rise buildings, many of which, she had noticed, still remained.
Yewdall’s mind worked feverishly. . what to do. . what to do. . to rescue the quaking Billy Kemp and walk with him into the police station? Would that prevent what was going to happen to some wretched soul in ‘the garage’? No, she thought, no, it probably wouldn’t and what had she got to offer? An address in East Ham which was clearly used only as a practice drop — the police would find nothing there if they raided. The intelligence that kickings took place in a lock-up called ‘the garage’, that Michael Dalkeith did not murder Gaynor Davies, that he was in fact rescuing her and was going to be fitted up for the murder, that. . that might be worth blowing her cover for if Michael Dalkeith was still alive and under suspicion. In the end, she decided to remain silent and keep her cover. She wanted something to offer for her time. It was early days yet and she still had nothing to connect Yates with anything.
‘We’d better be getting back,’ Billy Kemp said when the large clock above the bar read one o’clock. ‘We’ll have to fill our mouths with toothpaste to cover the smell of booze. Mind, we can say it was from last night.’
‘I’ll be back.’ Yewdall rose and walked into the ladies’ toilet. Ensuring that all the cubicles were empty she stood in front of a large frosted mirror, mounted within an elaborate plaster surround, and fixed herself in the eye, and said, ‘I. . am. . a. . police. . officer. .’ She then returned to where Billy was, by then, standing; waiting obediently, Labrador-like, she thought.
Yewdall and Kemp returned to the house and sat in the kitchen after putting large quantities of toothpaste into their mouths as they had planned. They waited in silence. At twenty-five past the hour a key was heard turning in the lock of the front door; heavy footfall tramped down the hallway and the kitchen door was pushed open. A tall, well-built, muscular man stood in the doorway. He looked at Yewdall and then at Kemp and said, ‘Come on.’
They rose and followed him out of the house. In the road, double-parked, was a black Mercedes with the rear door opened. Without a word being said, Kemp and Yewdall slid into the back seat. The door was closed behind them. Yewdall tried to open her door but couldn’t. The child locks had been put on; a useful piece of kit for parents and felons alike. The man who had collected them sat in the front passenger seat, and the driver started the car and pulled away.
Yewdall sat in silence but took careful note of the route. They drove north-west out of London, past the wealthy, well-set suburbs, out to Hemel Hempstead, and then to a village Yewdall noticed was called Water End.
Water End.
Water End.
Water End.
She committed the name to memory.
The phone on Harry Vicary’s desk warbled twice. He picked it up leisurely. ‘Vicary,’ he said.
‘We have a problem. .’ the voice on the other end of the line said.
‘Who’s we?’
‘I’m Penny Yewdall’s handler.’
‘Yes.’
‘We got the DNA results from the cigarette butts — just been delivered.’
‘Sorry, you have lost me. . calm down. .’
‘Sorry, we fixed Penny up with a false ID — a home in Hanley in the Potteries; a retired officer from the Staffordshire force occupied the home address posing as her father.’
‘Yes.’
‘She was checked out by a couple of heavies who sat outside her “father’s” house in a car. . then they emptied the ashtray in the road.’
‘Ah. . hence the DNA results,’ Vicary observed, ‘I see now.’
‘Yes, they came back no trace, which was unusual, but not only that, the DNA is from four people not two. . and two of those four are female. .’
‘Oh no!’
‘Yes. . oh yes. . those two geezers must have picked up the cigarette ends from the ground, knowing we’d pick them up for DNA sampling. She’s been rumbled. From day one, she was rumbled as being a cop.’