The Fountain in the Forest Read online

  One of the last photos in the file showed the back of one of the paint frame doors. Like all the other doors backstage, the entrance to the paint frame was full stage height, in order that scenery flats could be moved around freely. They always reminded Rex of the giraffe house at London Zoo. The double doors that opened on to the paint frame were also thickly padded for soundproofing, so that you could shut them and carry on working during a performance. Most of the crime-scene photos seemed to show these two doors fully opened into the space, but one of them, and only one, showed the left-hand door closed. The photo must have been taken after Rex had left, and the odd thing about it was that there were some marks on the back of the door.

  He nearly missed it.

  As Rex would tell Webbo later, it was only after he’d scrolled past the photo that he realised there was something about it that niggled at him, and he had gone back to it. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly unusual about writing on the walls per se. Generations of painters had been chalking up jobs and specs, or calculating costings, on the walls of studios just like this one, and Terence was no exception. You could see it in some of the other photos – quick sums or phone numbers scribbled here and there – but this was new. He zoomed in until that part of the photo filled his screen. In a loose but sinuous hand the name ‘Trudi B’ had been chalked on to the black-painted wooden panelling of the door, and followed by a big tick:

  Trudi B

  He made a screen grab of the detail and quickly typed himself and Eddie an email – ‘Just seen this on the back of doors at scene. Definitely new, not seen it before. Who the hell is “Trudi B” and why has she been ticked off?’ – but there was not much more he could do about it now. It would have to wait for the morning. He pressed ‘Send’, then closed the window and shut down. Picked up his Harrington off the floor, where he’d thrown it a couple of hours earlier.

  ‘G’night,’ said Eric Jinks, the Enquiry Desk Officer, as Rex King walked past, one arm halfway into the sleeve of his jacket and his body half-turned ready to shoulder through the door and leave the building. ‘Or good morning. Oh, but skip? You’ll like this. You’re still SD cover, right?’

  ‘For my sins, yeah,’ said King warily, stopping in his tracks and turning back to face the desk. ‘’Less you fancy it?’

  The EDO was quick to politely decline: ‘No, you’re alright.’

  ‘Sorry. Long day,’ King said. ‘What about it?’

  After a decade working with the London-wide murder investigation team on the Homicide and Serious Crime Command – and with a particular responsibility for a loosely defined patch that skirted the city, west to east, from somewhere around the Drury Lane end of Shaftesbury Avenue all the way to Shoreditch High Street – DS King had found himself saddled with being temporary lead on Safe Detention and Handling of Persons, SD for short. ‘Temporary’ in this case meaning two years and counting. The role had come up when Spoony took early retirement in the last restructure, and none of the remaining uniform sergeants at Holborn was up to it. At least, that was how Detective Chief Inspector Lawrence had put it. So they were having to go wider. Then, ‘Come on, Rex, mate. Help me out, for fuck’s sake.’

  The tone was convivial, but that had been an order, of course. Barnsley lad that he was, and for all his rank, Lollo had a kind of no-nonsense Yorkshire informality about him, a gruff non-conformity. It was part of why he was so popular. But in all of their years of working together, Rex had learned that there was no question of ever being able to say no to Lollo. So he hadn’t. And in so not doing, DS King had added to what was already more paperwork than he could reasonably get through in a full shift and still do his actual fucking job. But then, if you want something done, as they say, find someone busy.

  Still, it had given him a bit more of a toe-in here at Holborn, and, to be fair, the SD role was not so bad. Piece of piss, really. It was mostly about skimming data from other people’s paperwork, and the occasional one-to-one with Lollo in the run-up to liaison with the programme team at directorate level. Hop on the tube to St James’s Park once a year for flip charts and biscuits with some MPS or MOPAC twats in an airtight conference room that still smelled of the farts of whoever had been in the previous meeting, then back here to cascade down a ‘lessons learned’ bulletin and circulate the updated manual to a bunch of Dodos – officially, Dedicated Detention Officers – who, earlies, lates or nights, it didn’t matter, could always be guaranteed to claim never to have received the group email.

  ‘Inspection date is fixed, or so I hear,’ said the EDO.

  ‘ICV?’ asked Rex. It was a long shot and he knew it, but Independent Custody Visitors he could handle.

  ‘Yeah, you wish. No: SiC’ – he pronounced it ‘ess-eye-sea’ – ‘the works. Inspectorates, Care Quality mob, Custody Directorate. Full document audit, detainee questionnaires, the lot. Bastards’ll be here for weeks. Reckon they’ll call all the team leads in on Monday for a briefing: Gnat’s Piss, Fuck Me, PACE, SD. That’s probably why Webbo got Deputy SIO today. Lollo must have known this was coming. What d’you reckon?’

  If the EDO was visibly enjoying this, and he was, it was because he knew that he wouldn’t have to be stuck in a room with that lot for an hour. The Fuck Me lot, Forensic Medical Examiners, were great people to have with you on the job, but you wouldn’t want to spend too much time in their riveting company if you could help it. King wasn’t even sure who the lead on NSPIS – National Strategy for Police Information Systems, or Gnat’s Piss for short – was these days. What a cock-up! Someone had probably got Chief Inspector for that, leading the development teams and the rollout on what had once, King remembered, seemed an impossibly futuristic online data-entry system. A couple of years down the line and Gnat’s Piss had turned your basic ten-minute booking procedure into a frustrating hour of micro-tasks, pointing and clicking at frozen computer screens.

  ‘It’s like the Olympics, innit,’ said Jinks, interrupting his train of thought.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Team GB, skip. International obligations, mate.’

  That was true. SiC went all the way up, way beyond Scotland Yard and MOPAC, past the Home Office and up through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the UN, the United bloody Nations. The fact that they had all known that an SiC was coming did nothing to soften a blow the impact of which was now written all over Rex King’s face, and the fact that he hadn’t moved and was still standing in reception with one arm in his jacket and the other reaching blindly behind his back for his left sleeve. The EDO waited a beat and a half more to let the full reality of it all sink in, before following up with the punchline: ‘Working this weekend?’

  That woke Rex up. ‘Sod off, Jinksy,’ he said. ‘You’ll be shitting it like the rest of them. Better hope your own house is in order, eh?’ Then, sotto voce, ‘Twat!’

  ‘Steady on. Don’t shoot the messenger,’ said Jinksy. ‘I’m not the enemy! I hadn’t finished yet. I was going to say be careful, because word upstairs is there’s been another leak. Looks like we’ve been hacked again, mate.’

  ‘What’s out there?’

  ‘Nothing yet, but I hear it could be one of yours, Rex. Sorry, pal.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Tennyson.’

  ‘Oh, great!’ said Rex. ‘That’s a name I hoped I’d never hear again.’

  Christ! Tennyson was the last thing you wanted hitting the fan on the eve of a Safety in Custody inspection. First Terry, and now this pair of nightmares? What was it they said about shitstorms?

  That they were like London buses.

  You could wait for ages and then three come at once.

  As DS Rex King pulled on his Harrington, the jacket’s ribbed waistband snagged on the Hiatts and the radio on his belt, just like it always did. After reaching down to unhook it, he smiled and did a two-handed Vs-up to the EDO, then turned and pushed through the double doors, letting them swing shut noisily behind him.

  2: VÉLAR (HEDGE MUSTARD)

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nbsp; Sometimes – on mornings like this, perhaps, when it would have been nice not to have to start work until 3 p.m. – Rex King missed the old days of shift work, and envied the uniform ranks their two-two-twos and four days off: two earlies, two lates and two nights. Sure, spend a few years with that shift pattern rolling through your life and you might forget your own name, let alone what day of the week it was. Plus it played havoc with your relationships and social life, having to forgo those little things that other people took for granted, like weekends. But still, even if it hadn’t seemed so at the time, life was certainly simpler when all of that was decided for you. You might get a bit crabby when there was only a six-hour gap between finishing a night shift and starting a late, but truth be told that had never been such an issue with Rex, since he lived locally.

  Since going Detective, and now DS, he’d been on the basic eight-to-four, which sounded good, almost like a normal job, but you quickly found out that it was no such thing. In reality you worked all hours: ‘as required’ was how they put it in the small print. It had taken a bit of getting used to, always being swamped with work, but Rex figured that it was part of the bargain. Investigations were often a matter of life and death, and when there was that much riding on your actions, you could hardly clock off at four. You didn’t join the force for a free and easy life, even if you had joined by accident.

  When asked, that’s what Rex always said. That he had joined by accident, but had discovered that he liked police work. After college, he had been staying on the sofa of a shared house on Coptic Street, close to the British Museum, signing on and scraping by. Coptic Street had been a shithole but, since his friends were renting it from a short-life housing co-op, it was cheap. The only catch – albeit a big one – was that you could be evicted at any time, with less than a month’s notice and with no guarantee of anywhere to move to. They’d all been looking for work and one of his mates had seen an ad in the Camden New Journal, which had been placed as part of what Rex later realised had been a temporary initiative, a pilot scheme to recruit graduate policemen. Much to his housemates’ amusement, Rex had written off for the form. Within a month or two he had been for an interview, passed an entrance exam and had a letter from the Metropolitan Police saying they would assign him a place on training.

  By this time, Rex’s friends had been kicked out of Coptic Street, so throughout the interview process and the run-up to his start date he had been sleeping on sofas all over London. He continued to attend the monthly short-life housing co-op meetings down at Seven Dials, just in case any other places came up. But they never did.

  Finally someone from the co-op’s management committee had taken pity on Rex, pulled him aside and told him not to bother. The co-op already had more members than places. But he had sweetened this home truth with a timely bit of advice: ‘Now,’ he had said, ‘and I mean right now, might be the last opportunity for a homeless – no offence – young man like you to get on the waiting list for a council place.’

  His housemates had laughed and ignored the tip, none wanting to be tied down to anything so humdrum as a council flat. But in spite of their collective incredulity, which had only increased since he’d applied to join the police, Rex had acted on it right away. He had gone to the Camden Housing Office, quite truthfully pleading homelessness, and got his name on the list. Rex couldn’t know for certain, but he’d felt sure that it was the promise in writing of a job in an essential occupation in the borough that had clinched it. He had moved into the one-bed flat in the Falcon building on Old Gloucester Street in the summer of 1989, and – sign of the times – was offered it as a right-to-buy early the following year for what at the time had seemed like the exorbitant sum of £45,000. In the intervening period, of course, he had started on the job, and the way Rex would usually tell the story was that he’d thought he might stick it for a year or two, clear some debts, then move on.

  Now here he was, how many years later, still living in Falcon. He did have a washing machine but there was no room for a tumble dryer in his tiny kitchen, so he still dried his shirts and underwear out on the balcony. He also still used the letterbox to pull the door to behind him when he left the flat, and still jogged down the stairs, as he was doing right now. He still picked up the newspaper from Golding’s every morning, and did the crossword when he had a minute; still enjoyed this ten-minute stroll to work.

  ‘The scenic route’ was what he called it, along Great Ormond Street, site of the famous children’s hospital – the jewel in Nye Bevan’s crown – with its attendant twenty-four-hour traffic of doctors and nurses, carers and service users.

  Later in the morning, to a soundtrack of sliding car doors and wheelchair ramps, doctors and consultants would hold pavement conferences as they walked from round to round and building to building in twos and threes. Taxi drivers were rendered more solicitous than usual by their frail cargoes, but would leave the motor running for a quick getaway and a sigh of relief nonetheless. Waves of parental anxiety breaking against the calm acceptance of their various charges. ‘Patients’ was about right. The pun always struck him: the patience of the sick. Even now, at just gone 7 a.m., there were families arriving for their 8 o’clock appointments. Porters in their uniform polo shirts and blue polyester overalls stood and smoked under the old carriage-works arch opposite.

  King didn’t have to walk this way. Theobalds Road was a minute or so quicker, and he had once even taken a 55 bus that single stop, but coming the back way was a habit he’d picked up in his first days on Borough Crime, and it had stuck. At first he had found it calming to go via the leafy expanse of Queen Square. He had been pretty green himself too, at the time, and had only just discovered that you saw things as a detective that other ranks didn’t need to engage with. At the end of what had seemed a particularly grim week managing the exhibits relating to the death of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, King had found himself on Great Ormond Street. The scenes of suffering that confronted him on the steps of the hospital were redolent of the Passion, or a pietà on some grimly rendered Gothic reredos: every mother in the eternal role of Mary; every father gaunt and red-eyed, standing with head bent like some beseeching apostle.

  It had put Rex’s own squeamishness firmly into perspective, and he had taken this route ever since. It still grounded him that, however bad he thought he might have had it, these kids were going through far worse, and facing it down with ten times more courage than any copper. However tough a case might seem, for Rex this was just a job, he could walk away, where for some of these kids that struggle was the burden of their whole short life.

  Some colleagues couldn’t handle it. There were a couple of supposedly hardened coppers he knew who would do almost anything rather than walk down Great Ormond Street. They just couldn’t hack it. But having this on his doorstep was part of who Rex King was. He was proud of it. He even rattled the collection tins and sold a few books of raffle tickets at Christmas.

  When he was very drunk or maybe looking for a sympathy fuck, King had sometimes spoken about the twin brother he had never known, who had died without gaining consciousness a few days after being born. When Rex was a child, he had overheard hushed conversations between his mother and grandmother, and learned that his brother had been strangled by Rex’s umbilicus. If they hadn’t gone in to get his twin out, Rex might have died too.

  Sometimes, if Rex looked in the mirror when he was particularly tired, he thought he could see his brother looking back at him. Other times he wondered what life would have been like if there had been no problems with the delivery and he had had a brother all these years; a twin brother at that. Or what might have happened if his severely brain-damaged twin had survived more than a few days. Perhaps he would have ended up like one of these Great Ormond Street kids.

  Right now, though – today – Rex King had other things on his mind, and top of the list was coffee. Having got home after midnight and ‘wound down’ for longer than he had planned, Rex had awoken with a hangover that was r
oughly commensurate – emphasis on rough – with the bottle of industrial Australian Shiraz he had finished at one thirty in the morning. He had just about had time for a shit and a shower, but not enough to load up the stove-top pot and make his usual espresso.

  There were plenty of cafes and restaurants to choose from around here, but Rex liked to put his money, such as it was, the way of local businesses who paid their taxes, rather than filling the non-dom coffers of the more ubiquitous chains that didn’t. He wasn’t an unreconstructed food philistine like some of his colleagues, but, given the choice, Rex would go for a good fillet steak and chips over confit of onglet on a salad of wild hedge mustard every time. For even simpler fare – bacon-sandwich simple – Sid’s was hard to beat. It opened early too. Situated where they were, between a hospital and a cop shop, the staff at Sid’s were ready to cater to those clocking off nights or on to early shifts, and they had a sizeable menu. They also did good coffee, unlike the majority of builders’-type caffs in London, where ‘coffee’ often meant a spoonful of Nescafé dissolved in boiling water and topped up with milk.

  The late-spring air was fresh enough to cut through his hangover a little, but the headache was only compounded by lack of sleep. He had been too drunk to seriously practise any of the relaxation techniques that Helen had once taught him – Imagine that the in-breath is a wave! Breathe out quickly through your teeth! – so had been unable to stop his mind from racing, replaying and dissecting the events of the day. At three in the morning he had realised he was still awake and listening to the steady, duple beat – usually inaudible – of the kitchen clock.

  Sitting outside Sid’s with the Guardian on the table in front of him, folded up and unread – crossword not even started – and his coffee and a bacon sandwich on white toast on the way, there was plenty to think about. Three conflicting narratives that would be competing for his attention in the coming days, if not weeks and months. Firstly there was his old friend Terry Hobbs, who was suddenly, astonishingly, front runner to be the lead suspect in a murder investigation. Then there was the news of the Safety in Custody inspection. Now – cherry on the cake – Tennyson was about to be dumped in the public domain all over again.