Where the Devil Can’t Go

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With that he swivelled his chair to turn his back on her and circled a horse in the 2.30 p.m. at Newmarket. Face radiating heat, she slipped the report into his in-tray, and returned to her desk by the window. Browning, whose desk faced hers, caught her eye, his face a study in faux-sympathy.

‘Hangover,’ he hissed, leaning across the desk. ‘It turned into a bit of bender last night.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Kershaw, opening her mailbox.

‘You should have come,’ he said. ‘We had a good laugh at Obsessions – you know, the lap dance place?’

Suddenly, he started tapping on his keyboard. Glancing over her shoulder, Kershaw saw DI Bellwether standing behind them, deep in conversation with the Sarge.

Bellwether, a tall, fit-looking guy in his early thirties, was all matey smiles, although it was clear from his body language who was boss. Streaky had put on his jacket and adopted the glassy smile he employed with authority. Kershaw could tell he resented the Guv – not because the guy had ever done anything to him, but probably because Bellwether had joined the Met as a graduate on the now-defunct accelerated promotion programme, which meant he’d gained DI rank in five years, around half the time it would have taken him to work his way up in the old days. The very mention of accelerated promotion or, as he preferred to call it, arse-elevated promotion, would turn Streaky fire-tender red.

Kershaw thought his animosity toward Bellwether was all a bit daft, really, since Streaky was a self-declared career DS without the remotest interest in promotion. As he never tired of explaining, becoming an inspector meant kissing goodbye to paid overtime, spending more time on ‘management bollocks’ than proper police work, and having to count paperclips to keep the boss-wallahs upstairs happy. An absolute mug’s game, in other words.

She could overhear the two of them discussing the latest initiative from the Justice Department.

‘We’ll make it top priority, Guv,’ she heard Streaky say. He was always on his best behaviour with the bosses, and never uttered a word against any of them personally – a self-imposed discipline that no doubt dated from his stint as an NCO in the army.

As Bellwether breezed over, she and Browning got to their feet – Kershaw pleased that she’d chosen her good shoes and newest suit this morning.

‘Morning Natalie, Tom. Are you early birds enjoying the dawn chorus this week?’

Ha-ha, thought Kershaw, while Browning cracked up at the non-witticism.

‘What are you working on, Natalie?’ Bellwether asked her, with what sounded like real interest, causing Browning’s doggy grin to sag.

‘I’m on a floater, Guv, Polish female taken out of the river near the Barrier.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘OD. Some dodgy pseudo-ecstasy called PMA – might be coming over from Europe.’

‘PMA? That rings a bell …’ mused Bellwether. ‘Let me surf my inbox and give you a heads-up later today.’

Kershaw stifled a grin. Bellwether was alright, but attending too many management workshops had given him a nasty dose of jargonitis.

After he left, Streaky called her over.

‘So let me guess,’ he drawled, flipping through Waterhouse’s PM report. ‘The good doctor has got you all overexcited about a dodgy drugs racket. You do know he’s a tenner short of the full cash register?’

‘The tox report backs it up, though, Sarge,’ said Kershaw, keeping her voice nice and low. He had once informed the whole office that women’s voices were on the same frequency as the sound of nails scraped down a blackboard. Scientific fact, he said.

Streaky just grunted. ‘So you’ve got an OD with this stuff, wassitcalled … PMT …’ – no fucking way was she taking that bait – ‘but even assuming you had a nice juicy lead to the lowlife who supplied the drugs, what’s your possible charge?’

Keeping her voice nice and steady, Kershaw said, ‘Well, Sarge, it could be manslaughter …’

Streaky whistled. ‘Manslaughter. We are thinking big, aren’t we?’

‘Supplying a class-A drug to someone which ends up killing them is surely a pretty clear-cut case, Sarge.’ As soon as the words left her mouth she realised how up herself they made her sound.

Streaky leaned back in his swivel chair and put his arms behind his head.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘I remember my early days as a dewy-eyed young Detective Constable …’

Here we go, she thought.

‘It was all so simple. Wielding the warrant card of truth and the truncheon of justice, I would catch all the nasty villains fair and square, put them in the dock, and Rumpole of the Bailey would send them away for a nice long stretch. End of.’

She resisted the urge to remind him that actually, Rumpole had been on the dark side, aka defence counsel.

‘Then I woke up,’ he yawned, ‘and found myself back in CID.’ He leaned forward and waved the PM report under her nose. ‘Even if you did find the dealer – which you won’t – and prove he supplied the gear – which you can’t – I can assure you that our esteemed colleagues at CPS will trot out 101 cast-iron reasons why it is nigh-on impossible to get a manslaughter conviction in cases of OD. The main one being it’s “too difficult to establish a chain of fucking causality”, if memory serves.’

He scooted the report into his pending tray with a flourish.

‘I’ll tell those long-haired tossers in Drug Squad about it. They might be interested if there are some killer Smarties doing the rounds. You carry on trying to trace the floater, just don’t spend all your time on it.’

‘Yes, Sarge.’ She hesitated, ‘But I still think that whoever gave the female the PMA – maybe her boyfriend, this guy Pawel – panicked and dumped her in the river after she OD-ed. I mean why else would she be starkers?’

She tensed up, half-expecting him to go ballistic at that; instead, he sighed, and picking up the report again with exaggerated patience, flicked through to the page he was looking for and started reading out loud.

‘The levels of PMA found in the blood may have caused hallucinations’ – he shot her a meaningful look – ‘… the subject’s core temperature would have risen rapidly, causing extreme discomfort …’ – his voice was getting louder and angrier by the second – ‘PMA overdose victims often try to cool off by removing clothing, wrapping themselves in wet towels and taking cold showers …’ He slapped the report shut. ‘Or maybe,Detective, seeing as they are off their tits, by jumping in the fucking river!’

Kershaw noticed that Streaky’s chin had gone the colour of raw steak, which was a bad sign. Now he picked a document out of his in-tray and shoved it at her.

‘Here you go, Miss Marple, the perfect case for a detective with a special interest in pharmaceuticals – a suspected cannabis factory in Leyton. Enjoy!’

Three hours later, Kershaw was shivering in her car, outside the dope factory, with the engine running in a desperate bid to warm up, smoking a fag and trying to remember why she ever joined the cops.

Thank God that ponytailed, earring-wearing careers teacher from Poplar High School couldn’t see her now. When she’d announced, aged sixteen, that she wanted to be a detective, he’d barely been able to hide his disapproval. He clearly had no time for the police, but could hardly say so. Instead, he adopted a caring face, and gave her a lecture on how ‘challenging’ she’d find police culture as a woman. She’d responded: ‘But sir, isn’t the only way to change sexist institutions from the inside?’

In truth, the police service hadn’t been her first career choice. As a kid, when her friends came to play, she’d inveigle them into staging imaginary court cases, with the kitchen of the flat standing in for the Old Bailey. Turned on its side, the kitchen table made a convincing dock for the defendant, while the judge, wearing a red dressing gown and a tea towel for a wig, oversaw proceedings perched up on the worktop. But the real star of the show was Natalie, who, striding about in her Nan’s best black velvet coat, conducted devastating cross-examinations and made impassioned speeches to the jury – aka Denzil, the family dog. As far as she could recall, she was always the prosecutor, never the defence. It wasn’t till she reached her teens that it dawned on her: the barristers in TV dramas always had names like Rupert or Jocasta, and talked like someone had wired their jaws together. The Met might be a man’s world, but at least coming from Canning Town didn’t stop you reaching the top.

The dope factory was in an ordinary terraced house in Markham Road, a quiet street, despite its closeness to Leyton’s scruffy and menacing main thoroughfare. Driving through, she had counted three lowlifes flaunting their gangsta dogs, vicious bundles of muscle, probable illegal breeds, trained to intimidate and attack. Obviously, she’d stopped to pull the owners over for a chat. Yeah, right.

The report said that the young Chinese men who had rented number 49 for four or five months hadn’t aroused any suspicions among the neighbours. Kershaw suspected that in a nicer area, their comings and goings at all hours, never mind the blackout blinds and rivers of condensation running down the inside of the windows, might have got curtains twitching a lot sooner, but then round here, maybe you were grateful if the place next door wasn’t actually a full-on crack house. In the end, number 49 had only got busted by accident, when a fire broke out on the ground floor.

As she pulled up, the fire tender was just driving off, leaving the three-storey house still smoking, the glass in the ground-floor windows blackened and cracked but otherwise intact. It looked like they’d caught the blaze early. Inside the stinking hallway, its elaborate cornice streaked with black, she picked her way around pools of sooty water, now regretting the decision to wear her favourite shoes. In the front room, once the cosy front parlour of some respectable Victorian family, she found a mini-rainforest of skunk plants, battered and sodden from the firemen’s hoses. Overhead, there hung festoons of wiring that had powered the industrial fluorescent strip lights; on the floor, a tangle of rubber tubing that presumably supplied the plants with water and the skunk-equivalent of Baby Bio.

‘Hello, beautiful, come to see what real cops do for a change?’

Frowning, she turned round, to find a familiar face – Gary, an old buddy from her time at Romford Road nick a few years back.

‘Gaz! How’s life on the frontline?’

Gary was a few years older than her – well into his thirties by now – and still a PC. He had been her minder when she had first gone on the beat as a probie, but they became proper mates after a memorable evening when they got called to a pub fight between football hoolies. West Ham had just thrashed old enemies Millwall at Upton Park, so it was the kind of ruck that could easily have become a riot. She and Gary could hardly nick them all: instead, they ID-ed the ringleaders and pulled them out, putting the lid on it without even getting their sticks out. Back at the station, Gary had told anyone who’d listen that Kershaw had thrown herself into the fray ‘just like a geezer’.

‘All the other rooms like this?’ she asked, after they’d done a bit of catching up.

‘Yep. Third one this month,’ said Gary, shaking his head. ‘You missed the best bit, though.’

Apparently, when he’d arrived on scene, he’d found a bunch of locals having an impromptu party outside the burning house.

‘It was quite a sight – there was a boom box blaring, they were drinking beer, dancing around in the smoke, everyone getting off their face on the free ganja,’ said Gary, shaking his head, grinning. ‘It was like Notting Hill Carnival.’

Kershaw smiled but her eyes were uneasy. Gary was probably the least racist cop she’d ever met, but she hoped he watched himself in front of the Guvnors. That sort of chat could get you into big trouble these days.

‘Down to us to do the clear-up, I suppose?’ she asked.

‘Got it in one, Detective,’ he grinned.

Kershaw spent the next few hours cursing the Sarge for dumping this nightmare job in her lap. The cheeky slags who ran the factory had powered it for free, running a cable from the lamppost next to their garden wall, which meant she had to call out the Electricity Board. She took half a dozen statements from the neighbours – total waste of time, of course, but she’d still have to type them up – and the worst job was still to come. Kershaw, Gary, and a single probie would have to bag and label every single one of the 1000-plus plants and load them onto a lorry to go to the evidence store.