Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(27)

Martin tugged at the front of his shirt, hitched up his trousers and sat back down with a shake of the head.

‘Okay, okay. You’re just winding me up, I know. But I tell you, dealing with those people, it gets to you. It really does.’

Lowering his head, he pinched the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb, then looked back up.

‘Trying to get some factory owner to realise if he doesn’t up his output without hiking his prices, he’s going to lose every ounce of his work to f*cking China before he can turn around. Jesus!’ He shook his head, more vigorously this time. ‘To think we used to have a textile industry in the country served two-thirds of the f*cking world. Now look at us. Having to import every pair of bloody women’s knickers from Eastern Europe or the depths of the Third f*cking World on account of we can’t make jack shit.’

Costello looked impressed; he hadn’t been expecting a lesson in world economics. Karen gave it five seconds and repeated her question.

‘That evening?’ Martin said, Mr Reasonable, ‘I went down the pub, didn’t I? What else? Wife’d thrown a wobbly over nothin’ and gone stalking off, God knows where. Me daughter’s been lying to her back teeth, giving her arse away to some drug-dealing little shite from just about the poorest country on the globe outside f*cking Africa. Went down the Four Hands and got stinking. Christmas piss-up on so it weren’t a problem. Someone must’ve poured me into a minicab in the small hours, ’cause I can’t remember getting home at all.’

‘And you were there all evening?’

‘When I arrived to when I left.’

‘So there’ll be witnesses to that?’

‘I suppose so. It was busy, rammed, I don’t know.’

‘That’s not very helpful.’

‘The bloke whose shoes I threw up on in the khazi, you could ask him for starters.’

‘He have a name?’

‘Jimmy. Jimmy something-or-other.’

‘I thought it was your local. Regular, anyway.’

‘So ask the landlord, why don’t you?’

‘We already did. Said he remembers you coming in, not leaving.’

‘Makes the two of us, then.’

‘No memory of seeing you after ‘round eleven, eleven thirty.’

‘Like I said, it was busy. Wall to wall.’

‘Leave there the right side of midnight, cab across London, Hampstead in forty minutes, tops. Half an hour.’

‘And why’d I want to do that?’

‘You tell me.’

‘I don’t know, do I?’

‘Keep the appointment your daughter had made with Petru Andronic.’

‘You’re joking. You are joking.’

‘Teach him a lesson.’

‘No way.’

‘You’d already warned him what would happen if he tried to see Sasha again. And there he was, going behind your back. Getting his hands on your daughter. This – what did you call him? – drug-dealing little shite. And by the way, why drug-dealing?’

‘Why? Cause it’s what they do, isn’t it? Not the Poles, the Poles are okay, they know how to do a day’s work. Not now, mind you, they’ve clocked the writing on the wall an’ buggered off back to Warsaw an’ wherever else it is they come from. No, it’s the rest of them. Your Bosnians and Albanians, Moldovans and f*cking Romanians. Breed like f*cking rats, those Romanian bloody gyppos worst of all, just so’s they can send the kids out on the streets, begging. Soon as they’re old enough the girls are out whoring and kids like that Andronic are peddling drugs on street corners. All that on top of milking Social f*cking Security.’

‘The world,’ Costello said, ‘according to the British National Party.’

‘Laugh, you smug bastard,’ Martin said. ‘Go ahead. One day you’ll be laughing on the other side of your cocky little face.’

‘Maybe that’s what it was,’ Karen said, reclaiming the conversation. ‘With Andronic. The chance to teach him his place, teach him a lesson. Only it went too far – you’d been drinking after all – got out of hand. Next thing you know …’

Martin rocked his chair back then forward. ‘No, you had the least bit of evidence put me near where it happened, you’d have had me in cuffs the minute I stepped off that plane. But you’ve got sod all and you’re fishing. That’s what this is. Only the line’s broke, and, any case, you wanna hook me you best get yourself some better f*ckin’ bait – so I’m leaving. You want to stop me, arrest me. If not, I’m gone.’

And with neither Karen nor Costello making any attempt to stop him, he walked out the door.





16


‘What d’you reckon then?’ Ramsden said. ‘Martin?’

‘Do I fancy him for it?’ Karen said.

‘Yeah.’

‘I’d like to. Like to, but I don’t know.’

They were standing at the side door of a pub Ramsden favoured in the bowels of Camden. A fine view of the waste bins and a few parked cars. Ramsden, as he sometimes did, smoking one of his small tightly rolled cigars. Their breath visible on the night air.

It had been an Irish pub when Irish was more in vogue, plastic shamrocks in the window, a greenwood bodhran hanging down above the bar; this last year or so, evenings and weekends, it had been taken over by Goths and heavy metallers; Black Sabbath and Metallica on the jukebox and whip-thin girls with faces powdered white and lipstick the colour of dried blood. Other coppers never set foot there, unless it was a raid. The bitter wasn’t bad, either.