Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(37)

She hunched up the collar of her padded coat and shuffled a few short paces forward, even though they were not really moving, the queue simply becoming more compressed. Someone’s elbow poked into her back and she turned, the man’s face an apologetic leer.

‘Sorry, darlin’.’

Sorry, darlin’, who spoke like that any more? Outside of EastEnders, that is? The East End itself, mostly Bangladeshi now as far as she could tell, other than a few smart young Metropolitans busily rebranding it with artists’ studios and architect-designed apartments.

‘Seen him before, have you? Ronny? Fuckin’ brilliant.’

His nose pushed, like a chisel, down from the centre of his face, his teeth, when he smiled, were large and yellow – horse’s teeth.

With a quick, dismissive shake of the head, Carla edged forward. This guy was actually hitting on her. Unbelievable!

Unable to move farther, she squeezed herself towards the wall.

As well she did.

In retrospect, she heard the car approaching fast, faster than was safe; the sudden braking, shouts and screams from those positioned near the kerb, and then the shot. A single gunshot. Loud. Close. No backfire. Little doubt what it was.

Someone cannoned against her from behind and, as she turned, stumbling, something splashed, warm, stickily wet, across her face, and the man with the chisel face was suddenly in her arms. Close up, hissing through yellow teeth, before, heavy, he fell away, and Carla, stooping, aware – amidst the shouting, the panic – of three more shots, one echoing into another and then the squeal of brakes, a car door slamming, the engine accelerating fast away.

There was a long moment in which nobody seemed to speak or move, and the dead man – she supposed he was dead – lay at her feet, one arm stretched out, fingers bent back by the wall, as if trying to tunnel to safety.

The side of his head no longer seemed to be there.

Carla shook. Shuddered. Jumped when a hand gently touched her arm.

‘You’re hurt,’ the young woman said, pointing. ‘Your face. It’s bleeding.’

Carla blinked the blood away from her eyes and brought her fingers gingerly to her cheek. She could hear the sirens, police and ambulance, drawing closer. Knew she should use her mobile, contact Karen: as soon as she stopped shaking, she would.





23


By the time Karen arrived the street was cordoned off from below the crossroads north to the junction with Arlington Road. Uniformed officers, yellow tape, police vehicles in abundance.

The lights over the Jazz Café still stood out brightly, but the blue shades had been pulled down low across the windows and the interior was dark. People stood around in twos and threes outside the immediate cordon, stunned, too stunned to go home; talking in an abstracted, desultory way, some of them, to officers with notebooks at the ready. Ronny Jordan had departed long since, the short journey from dressing room to limo, from limo to his hotel.

Karen knew the senior officer on the scene, a detective inspector from Albany Street who’d been pulling a late shift when he’d taken the call. Blue-black raincoat, thinning hair, heavily lidded eyes; hands in pockets, his voice gravelly from too many cigarettes, too little rest.

‘It’s a bastard,’ the DI said.

Two dead, one at the scene, a single bullet to the head; the other, gunned down as he ran, had been shot three times, twice in the chest, once in the neck. He had bled out in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. DOA.

‘A real bastard.’

Karen agreed.

She found Carla sitting in a huddle of clothes in the entrance to the Odeon cinema opposite, leaning back against the wall. One of the attendants had fetched her a cup of sweet tea and tissues to wipe the blood from her face. It still clung here and there to her skin, tendrils of her hair.

The moment Karen approached, she burst into tears.

Karen squeezed her shoulders, gripped both hands hard.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Carla said, forcing out a smile. ‘I told you you’d be missing something.’

Karen squatted down beside her. ‘You okay?’

‘What’s it look like?’

‘You weren’t hit?’

‘Just frightened out my f*cking wits.’

‘And you didn’t see …?’

‘I didn’t see anything. Just this guy, the one, you know …’

Carla clenched her eyes closed and he was still falling towards her, only slowly now, slowly as if through water, and she was reaching out to catch him, because, automatically, it’s what you do, and, just for a moment, he was there in her arms, safe, then gone.

‘Just the guy who got shot,’ she said, recovering. ‘Nothing else. Not the … the shooter. Is that what you call him? The shooter? Too many of those cop shows, you learn the language, the lingo.’

‘The gunman, maybe,’ Karen said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Either way, I didn’t see him. Not really. Just someone ducking away, back towards the car.’

Karen nodded. Knew she didn’t need to ask Carla about the car itself, there’d be descriptions of that by the dozen, too many, too many of them conflicting. The gunman, the same. The man behind the wheel. Too many witnesses as against too few.

‘I’ll organise a driver,’ Karen said. ‘Get you home. Sometime tomorrow, you’ll need to come in, make a statement.’