Hard Evidence

'Everything all right, sir?'

Delaney smiled. 'Absolutely perfect.'

But the expression on his face as he walked back into his office told a different story. Bonner hung up the phone as Delaney entered the room.

'What's up with you then, boss? You look like you've got a pain somewhere only a doctor should be looking at.'

Delaney shook his thoughts away with a covering smile. 'Any word on Billy Martin?'

'Absolute zip. But we're scouring every dive, brothel and bar from Wembley Park to Bethnal Green. He'll turn up sooner or later.'

'He usually does.'

'What are they charging Morgan with?'

Delaney shrugged. 'Whatever it is, he isn't going to be out for a good long while.'

'And his sister?'

Delaney shook his head. 'Shouldn't think they'll charge her with anything.' He picked his jacket up from the back of his chair. 'Come on. You're with me. You can drive.'

'What's on?'

'I've got a meet with one of London's genuine scumbags.'

'A grass?'

'My bank manager.'

Delaney used to joke that he liked both kinds of music, country and western. It was an old joke, but that didn't bother him. It was how he'd got his nickname, Cowboy, and the music playing in his car as he pulled to the side of the street would have made Johnny Cash smile in his grave. The latest in a long line of southern belles with a voice of pure sunshine. Some man was going to do her right by doing her wrong and that was just the way she liked it. Oh yeah, baby, that's the way she likes it. So much for women's liberation, thought Delaney, eat your heart out, Tammy Wynette. He flicked the music off and opened his car door, turning to Bonner. 'I won't be long. If I'm not out in ten minutes, come in and shoot the bastard.'

'You know, boss, sometimes I don't think you show the proper respect for the capitalist system we are sworn to protect and serve.'

'Make that five minutes.'

*

Chief Superintendent Walker sat back in the padded leather chair in his plush office, which was neat and spotless. The paintings on the wall were not prints and the brandy in the decanter sitting on his walnut cabinet was not from a supermarket at just over ten pounds a litre. He smiled as DC Sally Cartwright responded to his summons and entered the room. He looked at her appraisingly. She could be sitting behind the reception desk of a top London advertising agency, or modelling bikinis, or singing banal pop songs; instead she had come to work for the police force. His police force. Maybe she expected her healthy good looks to curry favour, and maybe they did. In the cut and thrust of police work on the factory floor, as it were, they might serve her very well. But Chief Superintendent Walker couldn't care less what she looked like. She was a police officer and that was that. One of his pieces to move about the board. He glared angrily at the file she held in her hand.

'Do you have a boyfriend, Detective Constable Cartwright?'

'Sir?' Her smile fading.

'Somebody on the force? Somebody to chat to on refs. Someone to sneak off with. Have a crafty fag, a quick kiss, a fumble in the corridor.'

She shook her head, puzzled. 'No, sir.'

'What the bloody hell kept you with this then?'

He snatched the file from her hands. She blinked nervously. 'Records, sir.'

Walker waved a dismissive hand. 'Go.' Sally walked slowly back to the door. 'And where the blue bloody hell is Delaney?'

She shrugged apologetically at him and closed the door behind her.

Walker drummed his manicured fingers on the polished mahogany of his desk, his eyes hardening as he read the report that the detective constable had just delivered.

Jasper Harrington was in his early thirties. As polished as the pine desk he sat behind. Which was to say, if you were to take a penknife and scratch beneath the surface, you wouldn't find a great deal of character in either. In truth Harrington looked a lot like Richard Hadden, and if Delaney hadn't disliked him before he met him, he certainly did now.

'Thirty thousand pounds really is quite a large sum of money to carry around on your person.'

'I'll be all right. I have a police escort.'

Harrington flicked a small condescending smile. 'If you could tell me what you need the cash for? I'm sure the bank could arrange proceedings in a far safer manner for you and your capital.'

Harrington had a large stack of bundled twenty-pound notes on the desk in front of him. Delaney gestured at the cash. 'Is this the bank's money?'

'Technically not. But we still have a duty of responsibility.'

Delaney held his hand out. 'A duty which you have fulfilled. By getting the money out and returning it to me.'

The manager still hesitated. 'Things can be done far more safely electronically now.'

'It's not a loan, is it?'

'No, sir.'

Delaney stood up and opened a small overnight bag he had brought with him. The look in his eye made Jasper Harrington sit back a little too sharply for his normal studied poise.

'If it had been a loan you'd have every right to keep me here, filling in forms, asking endless questions,' Delaney said as he started filling the bag with the stacks of notes.

'Naturally we need to take certain steps…'

'But this isn't your money. It's my money. And what I do with it is my business. Not your business, not the bank's business. My business. We clear on that now?'

Harrington nodded, swallowing nervously. His throat had suddenly gone very dry. As a bank manager he wasn't used to dealing with dangerous, violent men, but he could see that that was what he was dealing with right now.

Delaney walked out, pulling the door shut quietly behind him.

Harrington took a moment or two to recover his composure, and then picked up the phone, punching in some numbers quickly.

*

Delaney walked up to his car, where Bonner was snapping his fingers to the rhythmic rapping of a white English teenager singing about slapping his bitches around. Delaney leaned in through the window and turned it off.

'What have I told you about my radio?'

'Jeez, Cowboy, if I had to listen to one more song about a lonely trucker missing his sweetheart Mary-Jane-Jo-Bobbi I'd have ended up cutting my wrists.'

'Touch it again and you won't need to bother.'

'Had a couple of calls whilst you were sorting out your pension in there.'

'Good for you.'

'You want the good news or the bad news?'

'No such thing as good news, Bonner.'

'We've found Billy Martin.'

Delaney slid in to the passenger seat and threw the sergeant a knowing look. 'You see.'

'Out near Henley.'

'Only he isn't going to tell us a thing? Right?'

'Right.'

'Somebody beat us to him and made sure of it.'

'What's that, Irish intuition?'

'Call it a stab in the dark.' He reached over and pushed the preset button on his radio, and Kenny Rogers' smooth voice flowed out like a twentyyear-old single malt.

'Are we going to Henley, then?'

'We're going to Wigmore Street first.'

'What's there?'

'Nothing you need to know about.' Delaney held the bag close to his chest as Bonner pulled out into the traffic.

23.

The same river that had earlier swallowed him into her cold depths in the dead of night had disgorged Billy, tiring perhaps of his company, as did all who had spent more than a little time with him in life. But in the full brightness of day, that river was a different thing. The air was busy with the sounds of tourists, of wildlife, of oarsmen stroking in their skiffs and sculls, of powered craft chugging softly through the water, of gentle lovers strolling and laughing far in the distance on the footpath. The banks seemed closer together by day, and the masonry of the bridge ahead was a soft grey, not a forbidding black. The sunlight sparkled on the surface of the water like the flash of revelation. The depths below were soothing, inviting. On a day such as this, when the relentless sun burned like an all-cleansing fire, the human spirit looked back to its past and would slip into the water to be reborn. Born again in the cool, ancient water as a beautiful creature of supple movement and flight.