was alright, but attending too many management workshops had given him a nasty dose of jargonitis.
After he left, Streaky called her over.
‘So let me guess,’ he drawled, flipping through Waterhouse’s PM report. ‘The good doctor has got you all overexcited about a dodgy drugs racket. You do know he’s a tenner short of the full cash register?’
‘The tox report backs it up, though, Sarge,’ said Kershaw, keeping her voice nice and low. He had once informed the whole office that women’s voices were on the same frequency as the sound of nails scraped down a blackboard. Scientific fact, he said.
Streaky just grunted. ‘So you’ve got an OD with this stuff, wassitcalled … PMT …’ – no fucking way was she taking that bait – ‘but even assuming you had a nice juicy lead to the lowlife who supplied the drugs, what’s your possible charge?’
Keeping her voice nice and steady, Kershaw said, ‘Well, Sarge, it could be manslaughter …’
Streaky whistled. ‘Manslaughter. We are thinking big, aren’t we?’
‘Supplying a class-A drug to someone which ends up killing them is surely a pretty clear-cut case, Sarge.’ As soon as the words left her mouth she realised how up herself they made her sound.
Streaky leaned back in his swivel chair and put his arms behind his head.
‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘I remember my early days as a dewy-eyed young Detective Constable …’
Here we go, she thought.
‘It was all so simple. Wielding the warrant card of truth and the truncheon of justice, I would catch all the nasty villains fair and square, put them in the dock, and Rumpole of the Bailey would send them away for a nice long stretch. End of.’
She resisted the urge to remind him that actually, Rumpole had been on the dark side, aka defence counsel.
‘Then I woke up,’ he yawned, ‘and found myself back in CID.’ He leaned forward and waved the PM report under her nose. ‘Even if you did find the dealer – which you won’t – and prove he supplied the gear – which you can’t – I can assure you that our esteemed colleagues at CPS will trot out 101 cast-iron reasons why it is nigh-on impossible to get a manslaughter conviction in cases of OD. The main one being it’s “too difficult to establish a chain of fucking causality”, if memory serves.’
He scooted the report into his pending tray with a flourish.
‘I’ll tell those long-haired tossers in Drug Squad about it. They might be interested if there are some killer Smarties doing the rounds. You carry on trying to trace the floater, just don’t spend all your time on it.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’ She hesitated, ‘But I still think that whoever gave the female the PMA – maybe her boyfriend, this guy Pawel – panicked and dumped her in the river after she OD-ed. I mean why else would she be starkers?’
She tensed up, half-expecting him to go ballistic at that; instead, he sighed, and picking up the report again with exaggerated patience, flicked through to the page he was looking for and started reading out loud.
‘The levels of PMA found in the blood may have caused hallucinations’ – he shot her a meaningful look – ‘… the subject’s core temperature would have risen rapidly, causing extreme discomfort …’ – his voice was getting louder and angrier by the second – ‘PMA overdose victims often try to cool off by removing clothing, wrapping themselves in wet towels and taking cold showers …’ He slapped the report shut. ‘Or maybe, Detective, seeing as they are off their tits, by jumping in the fucking river!’
Kershaw noticed that Streaky’s chin had gone the colour of raw steak, which was a bad sign. Now he picked a document out of his in-tray and shoved it at her.
‘Here you go, Miss Marple, the perfect case for a detective with a special interest in pharmaceuticals – a suspected cannabis factory in Leyton. Enjoy!’
Three hours later, Kershaw was shivering in her car, outside the dope factory, with the engine running in a desperate bid to warm up, smoking a fag and trying to remember why she ever joined the cops.
Thank God that ponytailed, earring-wearing careers teacher from Poplar High School couldn’t see her now. When she’d announced, aged sixteen, that she wanted to be a detective, he’d barely been able to hide his disapproval. He clearly had no time for the police, but could hardly say so. Instead, he adopted a caring face, and gave her a lecture on how ‘challenging’ she’d find police culture as a woman. She’d responded: ‘But sir, isn’t the only way to change sexist institutions from the inside?’
In truth, the police service hadn’t been her first career choice. As a kid, when her friends came to play, she’d inveigle them into staging imaginary court cases, with the kitchen of the flat standing in for the Old Bailey. Turned on its side, the kitchen table made a convincing dock for the defendant, while the judge, wearing a red dressing gown and a tea towel for a wig, oversaw proceedings perched up on the worktop. But the real star of the show was Natalie, who, striding about in her Nan’s best black velvet coat, conducted devastating cross-examinations and made impassioned speeches to the jury – aka Denzil, the family dog. As far as she could recall, she was always the prosecutor, never the defence. It wasn’t till she reached her teens that it dawned on her: the barristers in TV dramas always had names like Rupert or Jocasta, and talked like someone had wired their jaws together. The Met might be a man’s world, but at least coming from Canning Town didn’t stop you reaching the top.
The dope factory was in an ordinary terraced house in Markham Road, a quiet street, despite its closeness to Leyton’s scruffy and menacing main thoroughfare. Driving through, she had counted three lowlifes flaunting their gangsta dogs, vicious bundles of muscle, probable illegal breeds, trained to intimidate and attack. Obviously, she’d stopped to pull the owners over for a chat. Yeah, right.
The report said that the young Chinese men who had rented number 49 for four or five months hadn’t aroused any suspicions among the neighbours. Kershaw suspected that in a nicer area, their comings and goings at all hours, never mind the blackout blinds and rivers of condensation running down the inside of the windows, might have got curtains twitching a lot sooner, but then round here, maybe you were grateful if the place next door wasn’t actually a full-on crack house. In the end, number 49 had only got busted by accident, when a fire broke out on the ground floor.
As she pulled up, the fire tender was just driving off, leaving the three-storey house still smoking, the glass in the ground-floor windows blackened and cracked but otherwise intact. It looked like they’d caught the blaze early. Inside the stinking hallway, its elaborate cornice streaked with black, she picked her way around pools of sooty water, now regretting the decision to wear her favourite shoes. In the front room, once the cosy front parlour of some respectable Victorian family, she found a mini-rainforest of skunk plants, battered and sodden from the firemen’s hoses. Overhead, there hung festoons of wiring that had powered the industrial fluorescent strip lights; on the floor, a tangle of rubber tubing that presumably supplied the plants with water and the skunk-equivalent of Baby Bio.
‘Hello, beautiful, come to see what real cops do for a change?’
Frowning, she turned round, to find a familiar face – Gary, an old buddy from her time at Romford Road nick a few years back.
‘Gaz!
