Good Bait (DCI Karen Shields #1)(44)

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes, why not? Try, anyway.’

‘Try?’ She laughed. ‘Fuckin’ try?’

She stood to face him.

‘Sir Lancelot, now, is it? Knights of the Round f*cking Table?’ She shook her head. ‘Okay, here we are, me and the kid, in need of rescue maybe and what do we get?’ She laughed, ragged and deep. ‘That bloke with a broken lance on some old nag. I saw a film about him once. That’s you, Cordon, about as much use as a tit in a trance.’

Cordon drew a slow breath and continued to stand where he was, the boy peeking out at him from behind his mother’s arm, only looking away when Cordon smiled.

Later.

They were sitting side by side on the stairs, the middle landing. It had seemed as good a place as anywhere. Clifford Carlin had gone in to open up his shop and left them to it.

Cordon sat with a mostly empty can of Carlsberg wedged between his feet; Letitia was drinking vodka and Coke, not the first.

She was still wearing one of her father’s old sweaters, faded jeans, feet bare, chipped polish on the toes. She’d pulled her hair away from her face and wiped most of the tiredness from around her eyes. The child was in one of the rooms above them, sleeping, thumb in his mouth, making occasional sucking sounds, a plastic stegosaurus tight in his other hand.

She’d cuddled him close earlier, the pair of them loving, silent; something inside Cordon’s gut had twisted like fish caught on a hook.

‘Your son,’ Cordon said quietly. ‘I don’t even know his name.’

‘Danya.’

‘Danya?’

‘Ukrainian. Means gift of God. Some f*cking joke.’

‘And that’s what you call him?’

‘What his father calls him. I call him Danny. Dan.’

‘His father?’

‘Anton.’

‘Also from Ukraine?’

‘Oh, yes. From Odessa. Yellow and blue blood in his veins.’ She brought the glass to her mouth, a swallow rather than a sip. ‘Anton Oleksander Kosach. Oldest of five brothers. Anton, Taras, Bogdah, Parlo, Symon. Parlo and Symon are twins. Bogdah, the third eldest, he’s still in the Ukraine.’

‘The rest are here?’

‘Most of the time, yes. Anton’s here legally. Taras, too, maybe. The others, I’m not so sure.’

‘And he wants you to come home. Anton. The pair of you. That’s what all this is about? The phone calls, whatever. That’s what he wants?’

‘Danny, that’s what he wants. Me, I doubt if he could give a flying f*ck. Not any more.’

‘But he wants you to go back, right? To wherever. You and Danny?’

‘His son, he goes on and on about his son. As if I’ve stolen him away. As if I’ve no intention of ever going back.’

‘And have you?’

A pause. Letitia fiddling with her hair. ‘I don’t know.’

‘So he’s right?’

‘No, he’s not f*cking right.’

‘But if you’ve left him …’

‘I told you, I just don’t know. I don’t know, okay?’

‘So what is this?’

‘This?’

‘You and Danny, here?’

‘The funeral, my mum’s funeral – Danny, I was going to take him – but then I thought, no, no, time enough for all that. So I brought him here, to my dad, just a few days, right? While I was down in Penzance.’

‘He knew this? Anton, he knew?’

‘Sort of, yeah.’

‘And that was okay?’

‘Okay? Okay with Anton is he’s got you practically under lock an’ key, knows where you are every minute of the f*ckin’ day. Him or his bloody brothers. Only wanted two of ’em to come down all the way to f*ckin’ Cornwall with me, didn’t he? Parlo and Symon. I told him, I don’t want no Ukrainian bloody gangsters hangin’ round my mum’s funeral.’

‘Is that what they are then? Gangsters? Some kind of Soviet Mafia?’

She shot him a look, then turned her face away.

Anton, Letitia had told him earlier, had called her mobile when she and the boy hadn’t arrived back as expected, called and texted; threatened her, threatened her father, issued ultimatums. Forty-eight hours more. Then he would send someone to bring them back. She had already seen cars passing slowly along the street outside; glimpsed a face she thought she recognised.

Not enough to be sure.

Cordon straightened, stretched his arms. The edge of the step above was sticking uncomfortably into the small of his back.

‘We have to keep sitting on the stairs?’

‘No one’s forcing you to sit anywhere.’

‘For God’s sake …’

‘What?’

‘Why does everything with you have to be so bloody difficult?’

‘Because it is.’

He shook his head. There was a cry from above them, muffled, Danny caught in a dream.

While she was settling him, Cordon went downstairs. Tipping what remained of his lager down the sink, he set the kettle to boil and started opening cupboards. There was a jar of instant coffee, untroubled for some time, the granules set in a stiff rind that resisted the first taps with a spoon.