BAD BLOOD: A DI Charlotte Savage Novel. Mark Sennen
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Kemp going for a beef stew, Riley choosing the Thai sweet chilli chicken. Two beers as well, Kemp laughing at Riley’s lager top as he supped his bitter.
‘How did you come to be down here then?’ Kemp said, polishing off the mushroom sauce with the last of his new potatoes. ‘I mean …’
‘You mean because I’m black?’
‘Well, not exactly wall-to-wall diversity in this part of the world, is it? And your accent, posh, educated, but London in there somewhere. South of the river?’
‘Good, Marty. Postcode?’
‘Given enough time I can come up with the colour of your first fuck’s knickers. Still thinking about my original question though. Why?’
‘Nosey, aren’t you?’ Riley said, taking a mouthful of noodles before considering his answer. ‘Let’s just say circumstances.’
‘Oh, those. Plenty of the buggers around. Work related?’
‘Yeah, work related.’
‘Enough said. I’ll not intrude on your misery any further.’ Kemp took a drink of his beer. ‘You settled down here? Got a girlfriend? Plans?’
‘Yes,’ Riley said, thinking of Julie Meadows, the woman he’d met a couple of months ago and had been seeing ever since. Julie worked for NeatStreet, a charity dealing with deprived youngsters on some of Plymouth’s worst estates, and at the tail end of last year she’d wangled him into taking a group of boys from North Prospect up to London to watch his beloved Chelsea play. From that day on he’d been smitten. Now he was unable to prevent a smile forming and, embarrassed, he looked away and out through the pub window. On the far bank of the river Plymouth shone gold in the light from the low winter sun. He turned back to Kemp. ‘For the first time in a long time I suppose I do feel settled. I guess it’s not having to do what you do any more. You know, undercover. I’m not sure I could deal with the crap any more, the fear. Getting settled is easier now I’m away from all that.’
‘Here,’ Kemp reached into his jacket, pulled out his wallet and slipped it across to Riley. ‘My little girl.’
‘Thought you were offering to pay for a moment there.’ Riley opened the wallet, saw the smile before anything else, then the blonde hair and the blue eyes.
‘Elsie. She’s eight. Keeps me grounded. Her and her mother. Trouble, both of them. Trouble you get to love.’
‘Elsie. That in real life?’
‘Not the name, but the picture, yes. Makes it easier to play the part, doesn’t it?’
Easier to play the part, Riley thought, his mind slipping back to his time in London again. Sometimes playing the part was all too easy. You forgot who you were in real life, you went native. And when that happened the inevitable followed: circumstances. He shook his head as he passed the wallet back to Kemp, and bent to his food again.
After the meal they went back outside so Kemp could have another smoke. They watched as a tiny sailing yacht nosed its way out from the Mayflower Marina and into the main channel, one of thousands of boats of all sizes that used Plymouth Sound as a base.
‘If Gavin Redmond had kept a low profile, stuck to something like that, we might never have known.’ Kemp waved his cigarette at the boat. ‘It’s those bloody gin palaces. You can smell the illegality in the fumes whenever one passes. From Russian oligarchs to small-time dodgy car ringers, they all want the same thing: a tanned blonde and a penis substitute.’
As if in response to Kemp’s statement, a loud parp from an airhorn caused them both to look to their right. The sailing boat was drifting in the channel as the skipper fought with a line which trailed behind the boat. Blue language drifted across the water and Riley guessed the rope may have fouled the prop. The horn came from a large motor boat, forty foot or more, moving up the main river and into the pool. On the flybridge a man gestured at the little boat and it wasn’t the friendly greeting of one seafarer to another.
‘Talk of the devil.’ Kemp turned away from the water and leant on the railings, his back to the action. ‘That’s Redmond.’
‘He’s got other things to worry about than spotting us,’ Riley said as the motor boat spurted forward, lifting its nose and sweeping round the sailing boat. A large bow wave washed across and rocked the little yacht and the man hung onto the backstay for balance. He returned Redmond’s gesture with interest, the single finger held aloft followed by a string of obscenities.
A rigid inflatable boat appeared from between the pontoons with two Mayflower staff on board. They nosed up to the yacht and began to guide the disabled vessel back to the marina.
‘Cocky fucker, isn’t he?’ Riley said.
‘All on the surface,’ Kemp said, watching as the white hulk of Redmond’s boat glided up the pool to the Tamar Yacht pontoons, leaving behind a swirling vortex of water. ‘Underneath he can barely hold it together. The business is on the rocks – excuse the pun – and Kenny Fallon has him by the bollocks.’
With the boat gone, Kemp turned to Riley, hand outstretched.
‘Well, I’m off, back up the motorway. Pity I won’t be here for the bust, but Mr Kemp needs to stay low in case he’s needed again. I’ll be seeing you. In court, I hope. When it’s all over we’ll have some more beers and you can introduce me to your girl. She must be sweet if she can make you smile like you did just now.’
He shook Riley’s hand and walked away without looking back, disappearing round the corner of the pub and into another life.
‘Cocky fucker,’ Riley said again.
Durnford Street was in the Stonehouse area of the city, on an odd-shaped piece of land reached by an isthmus running between the ferry terminal and the Royal Marine Barracks on one side and a creek on the other. Surrounded by water on three sides, and accessible only across the isthmus, the location had risen in affluence relative to the rest of Stonehouse. The latter had acquired a reputation for vice, hardly helped by the presence of Union Street and its array of nightclubs at its centre.
‘We’re too late,’ Savage said to Calter as they parked up.
They got out of the car and approached the imposing terrace of four-storey houses. At number one twenty-three a young woman stood holding a baby. She was talking to Dan Phillips, the Herald’s crime reporter, while a photographer took shots of the next door property, where someone had spray-painted the immaculate gloss-white door with the vivid red words ‘Paedos rot in hell’.
‘Detective Inspector?’ Phillips turned and came down the steps, blocking her way along the pavement to one twenty-one. Pinprick eyes scanned her face trying to read her mind from her expression. ‘A child’s body is found under a patio and next, the police are visiting the house of a certain Mr Franklin Owers. According to my sources he’s a known paedophile. Anything to say on the matter?’
‘Give us a chance, Dan.’ Savage wanted to ask him how the hell he had got here before them, but instead she pointed to the graffiti. ‘I can tell you the idiots who did that have got the wrong address. Or maybe I should say you have got the wrong address.’
‘Hey!’ Phillips said. ‘You don’t think I would do such a thing, surely?’
Savage pushed past the smiling reporter, knowing that spraying the door himself just to get a good picture was exactly the sort of thing he would do. She opened the little iron gate to one side of one twenty-one and descended a narrow set of steps, leading down to a basement flat which lay below the level of the road. At the bottom, the small concrete area had flooded at one end and a plastic bin had fallen on its side, disgorging its contents to float on the grimy liquid. A distinct odour of dog shit hung in the air, overpowering the whiff of the rubbish, and Savage spotted little piles of the stuff half-submerged in the water.
‘Ma’am?’ Calter had joined Savage at the bottom of the steps and now she crouched in front of the frosted-glass door, peering through the