‘Mayson.’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the story with Sam Severin?’
Mayson stops typing. He looks at her and blinks, and Ptolemy is sure she can hear a whirring sound as his mind reboots to consider her question.
‘Sam Severin works undercover,’ he says.
‘I know that. But does he ever come into the office?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘But he is part of this team. I mean, he answers to DCI Vos, right?’
‘Yes. At least, I think he does. Why do you want to know?’
‘Because it looks like I’m his new admin assistant.’
Mayson frowns.
‘He’s infiltrated a car-ringing gang,’ Ptolemy explains. ‘I’ve been told to input all the paperwork from the stolen cars onto a computer database.’
‘It’ll be needed if the case ever gets to court.’
‘I know that, but—’
What Ptolemy really wants to say is that she can’t understand why she’s stuck in the office doing Severin’s paperwork while everyone else in the squad is busy trying to solve the murder of Okan Gul. But she can see that Mayson’s cyber-brain has already decided this conversation is not worth continuing. His attention, which was fleetingly concentrated on her, has now wandered back to his computer screen.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
Mayson’s fingers hover above the keyboard. His face twitches with a momentary spasm of irritation. She is like a fly buzzing around his head. Ptolemy knows this, and more to the point she realizes she is enjoying it. It is sweet, childish vengeance for two hours of unbroken humming.
‘I am checking Border Control CCTV footage from Newcastle Airport and North Shields Ferry Terminal, and crosschecking all incoming EU-registered passports with photo IDs,’ he says.
‘I’m impressed. I thought men weren’t supposed to be any good at multitasking.’
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read,’ Mayson says.
Ptolemy stands and saunters across to his desk. She sees that he appears to have three computer screens working simultaneously, as well as a flimsy laptop balanced on a stack of case files. ‘So what have you got?’
‘Nothing. Yet. But then it’s hardly likely that Mr Gul entered the country using his own passport. And we are only assuming that he flew into Newcastle. Or indeed that he flew in at all.’
A soft ding announces the arrival of an email in Mayson’s inbox, and with that the dialogue is over. Ptolemy returns to her desk, to Severin’s paperwork, a seemingly never-ending series of car registrations and logbooks.
And now Mayson Calvert has started humming again.
EIGHT
Paralysed from the chest down, Vic Entwistle lies in an intensive-care ward while a heart monitor pulses and peaks silently on a wheeled trolley by the bed and fluid from his chest cavity is siphoned into a plastic container. The noise reminds Vos of someone sucking the last dregs of Coke from a paper cup with a straw. The lower half of Entwistle’s waxen face is obscured by the fogged mask over his nose and mouth. He turns his head slightly so that he can see Vos and rolls his eyes in almost good-humoured resignation at his predicament.
‘Got some good news for you, mate,’ Vos says, pulling up a chair next to the bed.
Entwistle raises his hand and pushes the mask to one side. ‘Oh yeah?’ They have only recently removed the tracheal intubator from his throat and his voice is still little more than a rasping whisper.
‘There’s a guy on ward six who wants to buy your slippers.’
Entwistle smiles. ‘Fuck you, Theo.’
‘Actually I just talked to the nurse. She says they’ll be moving you out of intensive care in the next couple of days. And I got Alex to look up C7 spinal injuries on the internet. Apparently the paralysis can sometimes be temporary. The nerves in the spinal cord are traumatized and—’
Entwistle raises his hand again, this time to stop Vos from talking. ‘The good thing about the doctors in here is that they don’t bullshit you,’ he says. ‘I’m fucked, mate. My dancing days are well and truly over.’
‘Jesus Christ, Vic—’
‘You got to look on the bright side,’ Entwistle says. ‘They brought a young kid in here yesterday who’d come off his Kawasaki at a hundred miles an hour. Poor bastard’s dead from the neck down. At least I can still wipe my own arse. How is Alex anyway?’
‘He’s OK – in a nerdy sort of way. I’m still waiting to catch him staggering home pissed or smoking dope in his bedroom like any normal teenager. What was Jules like when she was sixteen?’
‘The same.’
‘What’s wrong with kids these days? They’re all so fucking serious.’
‘I know, I know. Pass me a glass of water, will you?’
Vos fills a plastic cup from a jug on the night stand.
‘How’s the Ahmed Doe investigation going?’ Entwistle asks. ‘Well, we’ve got a name.’
Vos fills him in on all the details. Entwistle listens without interruption, and even as he’s speaking Vos feels a sudden ache in his chest that his friend and colleague is not part of the case, that he’s trapped in his hospital bed, when he should be marching around the Bug House, his mind whirring as he processes all the details of Okan Gul’s murder.
‘There’s something else,’ he says. ‘Gul was a frequent flyer. Mayson’s isolated CCTV footage of him going through border control at Newcastle Airport on six separate occasions, each time using the same false passport.’
A low whistle. ‘Six visits in as many months. And we still don’t know who he was visiting?’
The use of the word ‘we’ is not lost on Vos. ‘The usual wall of silence,’ he says.
‘Well somebody killed him,’ Entwistle says. ‘We find out who hung him from that bridge, we find out who he was working with.’
‘I know, I know. But I’m getting a bad feeling about this, Vic. You see, I can’t think of one single Newcastle villain that a mob like the KK would even think twice about doing business with.’
‘That’s not very patriotic.’
‘Maybe not, but it’s true. We’ve shaken up Timmy Wok and Ma Breaker and half a dozen more of Tyneside’s finest, and when we’ve told them about the Turks they’ve all looked as if we’re talking about space aliens. Even Father Meagher hasn’t got a clue.’
‘So what are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking that we might just be navel-gazing,’ Vos says. ‘That it’s bigger than we thought. In other words—’
‘You haven’t got a clue.’
Vos laughs. ‘Well at least you can see nothing changes in the Bug House.’
‘Yeah, but we get our man in the end, don’t we?’
‘That’s the theory.’
Entwistle reaches out his hand and grips Vos’s arm. ‘It’s good to see you, mate. I’m going fucking mad in here. I’d swop that morphine feed for a fix of gossip any day. What’s new in the BH?’
‘We’ve got a new girl,’ Vos says, instantly cursing himself for doing so.
Entwistle smiles. ‘A replacement, you mean?’
‘Temporary,’ Vos says. ‘She’s a nice kid. I’ve got her doing leg-work for Sam Severin on the car-ringing job. Breaking her in gently.’
Entwistle raises one eyebrow. ‘Tits?’
‘I never noticed, Vic.’
‘ ’Course you did.’
‘I’m old enough to be her father, for Christ’s sake.’
‘That’s no longer a valid excuse,’ Entwistle says. ‘You’re old enough to be the father of any girl under the age of twenty-six.’
‘Whatever. If you’re interested, I suggest you ask Phil Huggins’s opinion. In any case, she’s married.’
‘You’re no fun any more. So what else is fresh?’
‘I’m under investigation by the IPCC,’ he says. ‘I spent all day yesterday locked in mortal combat with some fat ex-superintendent from South Wales.’
Entwistle frowns. ‘IPCC? What for?’
‘Peel’s people want an inquiry.’
‘Into what?’