Bottled Spider Read online

And you’re afraid of him, Shirl, Suzie decided, detecting the tiny hint of apprehension. She wondered if they were all a shade leery of the Guv’nor. ‘Okay, so can you fill me in on the state of crime in this Division, or is that out of bounds as well?’ Her tone was harsher than she intended.

  Jimmy Mortimer was following up on a couple of white collar problems. Someone had knocked off a lorry load of tinned goods last week. Probably organized in Camford. Also there was a cherry picker on the loose: knickers and bras disappearing from clothes lines like conjuror’s props.

  ‘Really tough crime.’ WDC Cox raised an eyebrow and canted her head to the right. Pete Pinchbeck was looking into what you might call a sneak thief, she told Suzie. ‘Crimes of opportunity: doors or windows left open, that kind of thing.’

  ‘And what’s-’is-name? Richards?’

  Sammy Richards, local expert on motor crime: car thefts, petrol, petrol coupons, spares. These kind of offences were heavy around Camford where they had a high percentage of people still allowed to use their cars.

  ‘A hive of criminal activity, then?’ Suzie grinned, though she knew the war was rapidly bringing new kinds of crime on to the streets: looting blitzed buildings was high on the list — it wasn’t all singalongs and togetherness down the shelters as the newsreels would have you believe. Then there was the theft of petrol coupons, a roaring trade in forged ration books, illegal black market deals and a steady business in food, drink and cigarettes.

  ‘And the girls — the GBH — they’re street girls from here, or do they come from up the West End?’

  ‘Oh, here. We have our red light district. In fact I think we’re getting clients who won’t go into Soho because of the air raids.’

  ‘You don’t get the raids here?’ Sarcasm wasn’t really her best thing.

  ‘Exactly the same as the rest of London, Skip, only we haven’t had any bombs landing on our patch yet.’

  It’ll come. Suzie thought. ‘So the girls’re local?’

  ‘Home-grown, and we’ve got our own particular brand of villains. You’ll soon hear the Guv’nor on them, Sarge: the Balvaks. The Balvak brothers; a very nasty kind of crook. After the Devil made this pair he broke the moulds.’

  Suzie waited for a moment, expecting more, but it didn’t come. ‘And you, Shirl?’ she eventually asked. ‘How do you spend your days?’

  ‘Like any other policewoman. I do the typing, make the tea. If I’m very good and they have a female witness, I look after her, hold her hand. Then there’s helping old ladies and kids across the road.’ She grinned.

  ‘You live locally?”

  ‘I’m lucky. A bed-sitter five minutes from the nick.’

  ‘Plenty to do off-duty?’

  ‘What off-duty, Sarge?’ A quick smile. ‘Until the Blitz, yes. Nice palais de dance, two cinemas — one’s a fleapit — the pubs’re good and people’re friendly: around here, of course, not over in the Cut.’

  ‘The Cut? You said that’s where the girls got duffed up. What is that exactly?’

  ‘Our version of the badlands, where the vagabonds live. It’s the place where they invented crime around here. The GWR Goods Marshalling and Shunting Yard and its environs. That’s what they call the Cut. It’s the reason for Camford Hill existing at all.’ Shirley raised her head, catching sight of something over Suzie’s shoulder. Then, almost in a whisper, ‘Here comes the Guv’nor looking bright as a searchlight, God help us.’

  The doors into CID clattered open and Detective Chief Inspector Anthony Harvey appeared: Big Toe himself, making an entrance — long, dark overcoat flapping around his calves, trilby at an angle on his head, eyes hard as granite, mouth set grim in his face, all angles and shadows. Behind him the two DCs strode to keep up looking all the world like minders.

  Have a care, Mountford, she told herself. Life’s never going to be the same again.

  Three

  Suzie turned and smiled. Make a good impression, she thought.

  ‘WDS Mountford, Guv.’ The smile turned into a grin that did no good. Oh bugger, she thought.

  He looked through her, moving towards his door, ‘Oh! Yes! Well! Okay, Sergeant Mountford! Yes!’ Ignoring her outstretched hand he walked straight into his office behind the opaque partition.

  Subtle as a Molotov Cocktail. Damn! Confound it! The only oaths she had ever heard from her late father’s lips.

  He left the office door open, threw his overcoat on to a chair, sat at his desk and began talking into the telephone. She heard him ask the internal operator for a number, then his voice became an indistinct murmur.

  ‘Sarn’t Mountford?’ Shirley Cox said quietly.

  ‘Yes?’

  In his office DCI Harvey raised his voice so that everyone could hear. ‘What am I supposed to do, sir?’ Then louder still, ‘I asked for a real sergeant, not another girl!’

  ‘Sarn’t Mountford, you’d better meet the lads,’ Shirley moved a little closer, embarrassed. ‘DC Magnus and DC Thomas. Philip Magnus — “Pip” — and Dave Thomas. “Doubting Dave” Thomas.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Skip.’ Magnus didn’t look her in the eye; a thickset man with straw-coloured hair, rubbery lips and slightly bulging eyes. A boozer, she reckoned, wrongly as it turned out.

  ‘Welcome to the team,’ Thomas, sing-song Welsh accent, sure of himself, the kind of person who never admits to mistakes, a man always in the right. Cocky, prone to impertinence: she knew the type.

  Conscious of a noise behind her. Suzie half turned and saw Harvey shifting his chair, the legs rasping against the linoleum-covered floor, as he continued to speak into the telephone.

  ‘You mean I’m stuck with her for six months? Yes? ... Yes, I know there’s a bleeding war on, sir. Yes, and thank you, sir.’ His hand went to his forehead, touching the smooth, polished skin above dark, expressionless eyes. He wore a double-breasted suit, well cut, in a nice herringbone, and his shoes had that glassy shine she knew from the Major who had married her mum. This mental association with her stepfather would colour much of her short relationship with Harvey.

  ‘Always keep your kit clean! Sparkling!’ The Major barked — interminably. Suzie and Charlotte would mimic him, using the words as a code to indicate when one or the other looked particularly smart.

  ‘Your kit’s clean, bright and sparkling, Suze,’ in her head she heard her sister. Childish, but at the time it had helped pour oil on the troubled waters of their anger at the Galloping Major.

  After their mother’s wedding Charlotte had quickly lost herself in a whirlwind romance and marriage to a young accountant — Vernon Fox, a boy she’d known since she was sixteen and who now had a job with a firm in the Hampshire town of Andover. Suzie — who had taken a secretarial course in the year she left school — grabbed a job as far away as possible: at a solicitor’s, Jonas, Jonas & Jennings, in Cambridge, where she rented a bed-sitter, put up with the monotonous routine work and spent most of her spare time being squired by desirable undergraduates.

  Finally it all came to an unpleasant end, mainly because of the ultimate dullness of the job, plus the drama of a fractured romance with Ned Griffith, an undergraduate reading law. Recently she’d heard Ned had joined the RAF and now, three, four years later, she found that she could think of him without heartache.

  At the time, however, it had been emotionally traumatic. Lost and confused, she had gone home, hoping to be comforted. But her mother was not the woman she had known even a year ago, and the overbearing, autocratic bumhole of a stepfather ... well, you know how it goes. Why hadn’t he taken Mummy off to a new house of his own instead of polluting the rooms that held such happy memories of childhood and Daddy? Helen, her elegant mother, remained silent, as though stunned by her new wifely duties, and Suzie quickly identified her stepfather as a bully.

  ‘You’re well out of it, Charles,’ she told Charlotte on the telephone, ‘Mum’s married him for his money and to see James through school.’

  ‘I know, but what’re you going to do,
Suze?’

  ‘I want some action. Something different. A real change. I’ve even thought of joining the police force. At least then I could arrest the blighter.’

  Which, in the end, was what almost happened.

  By the time she’d been home for a week Suzie could hardly stand to be in the same room as the Galloping Major. By the same token he could sense her irritation and, like all bullies, played on it like a boxer concentrating on an opponent’s cut eye. There were times when they could hardly be civil to one another. Two days later the domestic balloon went up when she accused the Major of treating her mother like an unpaid skivvy. Worse, that he was actually physically ill-treating her.

  Her mother tried to be conciliatory, defending him. ‘He can’t help it, Suzie. The war. He was very badly shell-shocked on the Somme. I’ve told you before. One has to understand. He wouldn’t hurt me. You have to make allowances for men like him. Brave men like him.’

  ‘Threatening a woman is an act of cowardice, not bravery.’ Suzie was convinced that she’d seen him raise a hand to her.

  She left the next day.

  Nobody would ever enslave her. Marriage, yes. Oppression, no.

  So she got a job at Harvey Nichols — ‘Selling frocks to matrons from New Malden’ — and dutifully rang her mother three times a week from the pied-à-terre off St Martin’s Lane which had been one of her father’s spendthrift luxuries, and her mother’s great secret from Major Gordon-hyphen-Lowe.

  Charlotte said she’d always thought the flat was a bolt hole. ‘There if Mum needs to run away. That’s why she’s never told him about it.’

  But, they agreed, their mother had already sacrificed herself on the altar of middle-class respectability and would never leave the ungallant Major — at least not until James had been educated.

  So Suzie made the final decision about joining the Metropolitan Police. She was convinced that she could make a difference: imagining a life fighting crime at the sharp end, maybe even detecting — her head full of car chases and clues.

  In the present, Big Toe finally cradled the telephone, stood up and walked the couple of paces to the door. Like a street fighter, she thought, with that rolling strut, the hands clenched and held in front of his body as though in search of a target.

  Leaning a shoulder against the jamb, he gave her an amused smile. ‘Yes, welcome to Camford Hill.’ He cocked his head towards his office. ‘A word, I think, Sergeant Mountford.’

  The partition was made of a thick Perspex, corrugated so that figures seen through it were distorted: like people swimming through turbid water.

  ‘How d’you make a good cup of tea, Mountford?’ He smirked.

  ‘I’ve not long had lunch, sir.’ As she said it, Suzie realized she’d misheard.

  ‘You’re not listening to me, Sergeant,’ he had a surprisingly soft voice and the accent of a man who had moulded himself to fit a class: sponging up the BBC English of announcers.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Not listening ... I don’t ...’ Flustered and confused.

  ‘I asked how you’d make a good cup of tea, Sergeant. You see, Shirley’s not always around and we have to be certain that at least one woman knows how to do it — make a good cup of tea, I mean.’ There was an implied snigger in his tone.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll have problems drinking any tea that I might make, sir. And I’ll be only too pleased to make it if you teach me as much as my superintendent expects you to teach me.’

  ‘Words a minute then, Sergeant?’ he snapped.

  ‘Words a ...?’

  ‘Typing. How many words a minute?’

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with —’

  ‘Catching criminals? Detecting crime? Keeping the King’s peace? Well, let me show you what it has to do with those things. Get your coat.’ He followed her into the main office, waiting until she put on her raincoat.

  ‘Sergeant Mountford and I are going out for a while,’ he announced. ‘We’ll be having a word with those toms up the hospital. Ready then?’ He led her outside, up the stairs into the garage and parking area at the back of the building, all the while reciting a monologue about the enormous amount of paper that was generated by even the smallest investigation.

  ‘Take this morning,’ he said as they climbed the stairs. ‘This morning I ran Magnus and Thomas down to St Mary Mother’s Hospital — our local hospital if you didn’t know — to talk to a couple of girls who were suddenly taken with a spot of GBH.’ He explained how they’d interviewed the girls, Cathy Watts and Beryl Pegler.

  ‘On the game, these two. Harlots, whores, tom tarts, brass nails. You follow?’ he asked, as though she might not understand the words.

  ‘They haunt a well-known area just south of the gasworks,’ he explained. ‘Down by the railway line on the edge of the Cut. There’s a little caff there called Amy’s Tea Shoppe and don’t be misled by the name. This isn’t your Kardoma, or a Nora’s Nook olde worlde place.’

  They had passed through the garage to the white-lined parking spaces at the rear of the building and he led her to a grey unmarked Wolseley, the ubiquitous police car usually black with a blue light on the roof and a gong to attract attention or move traffic out of the way.

  Harvey climbed behind the wheel, indicating with a nod for Suzie to sit next to him in the front. ‘This is the CID transport, Sergeant. The super uses it on occasion; otherwise it’s ours. If you need it, you ask me, and if you haven’t been cleared to drive you get a driver from the pool. Got it? You have not got permission, because I hold a firm belief that women drivers all have two left arms and three left feet. Right?’

  He glanced at her; a nasty, knowing look. ‘Far as I’m concerned, women police officers are good for two things: making the tea and typing.’

  ‘Now these two girls —’ He started the engine, smoothly put the car into gear and negotiated what was known locally as Lockup Alley, coming out on to Camford High Street in front of the police station, where he joined the thin flow of traffic. ‘These two girls, Cathy and Beryl, they’re not your expensive bits of brass, a couple of quid for a short time in a flat up the West End. These two are more your half-a-crown bunk-up against the wall at the back of Amy’s caff.’

  Once on the main road he drove smoothly, anticipating the intentions of other drivers, utilizing gaps in the traffic, constantly changing gear up and down, keeping it fluid just like they taught on the Hendon Police Driving Course. You could almost hear the fury of other drivers.

  ‘What’s this got to do with the standard of my typing, sir?’ She wasn’t intimidated by Big Toe — after all she had stood up to the ungallant Major.

  ‘Wait-wait-wait.’ Harvey repeated the words softly. ‘Just a minute.’

  ‘Well, sir?’

  ‘All crime generates a pile of paperwork. Remember that. We asked young Cathy and Beryl — they couldn’t be more than eighteen, nineteen at the outside — we asked them how they’d come by their injuries, and, guess what? Fell off their bicycles didn’t they? No cycles around, mind you. Not a wheel in sight, not a pedal to push, nor a saddle to sniff. Yet one of them, Cathy, has three broken ribs, smashed nose, a ferocious black eye and a face battered out of recognition; while young Beryl has a broken arm, broken nose and assorted facial damage: maybe a chip out of a cheek bone. They’ve both got dental problems as well. Unusual that. Silly really ’cos they won’t be able to work for a while. Cutting off noses to spite their faces. Bloody pimps.’

  ‘And the typewriter, sir?’

  ‘The typewriter, yes. What d’you think? It’s all got to be typed and logged. Every last detail: typed, logged, sorted, filed.’

  He swung the car in through the hospital gates and up the gravelled drive. In a second they passed from the busy streets and shops of Camford Hill into a country of landscaped gardens, lush with trees: rhododendrons flanking the wide driveway with its speed limit 5mph signs.

  ‘I’ve been lucky enough to have you assigned to CID. Sergeant Suzie — th
at’s what they call you isn’t it, Suzie?’

  ‘It’s what my friends call me, sir, yes.’ She wondered how he had got that detail so quickly. He knew already, she realized with a flash of clarity. He had known before she arrived. Everything since then had been carefully choreographed.

  ‘Oh, I’m your friend, Suzie. Make no mistake about that.’

  The best way to learn the job, he told her, is to watch and follow investigations on the ground. ‘Watch, listen and learn,’ he said. ‘Then, when you’ve done that, type up the reports. That way you’ll familiarize yourself with cases. You’ll learn method and logic; when to push and when to stay shtum; how to make four out of two and two.’

  He ran a very tidy department and was proud of it, he said. Most of all he was proud of the neat, well-typed reports he placed in front of the Station Commander each week. Other people didn’t take that kind of trouble, sent reports in willy-nilly. Bad handwriting. Spelling all over the place. ‘You’ll learn a great deal by doing those reports,’ he told her. ‘Collating the evidence. Reading the evidence itself. Gruelling and laborious, but it’ll pay off and you’ll look back on your time here and realize that you’ve learned the hard way.’

  St Mary Mother’s (The Hospital of Mary the Mother of Jesus) was an ancient place of healing, dating from the thirteenth century, when documents described it as a refuge. It was on the original site that a brand new modern hospital had been built in the 1860s: a great gothic structure standing in parkland, a huge oasis in the middle of the built-up area.

  Big Toe had brought her not simply to see the two sad and injured girls, nor even to investigate their case. She had been brought here to get a squint of the vicious ruthlessness of a certain brand of criminal who operated on their patch. On any patch come to that.

  ‘Armitage Ward,’ he muttered, leading the way up the wide, uncarpeted stairs, turning left at the top and clattering along an uncarpeted passageway.

  Then as they reached the entrance to the ward a short, neat woman — all breasts, bum and tight-fitting clothes — came through the doors. As she saw Harvey her small eyes widened in recognition and she all but launched herself at him.