After the Fire (Maeve Kerrigan) Read online

‘Just over two months ago. After the police van got shot up on the estate.’ She took a deep breath. ‘He approached me. I wouldn’t have gone near him. He wanted to know what it was like to grow up here. We had one short conversation about it and at the end of it he tried to kiss me.’

  Derwent’s tone was matter-of-fact. ‘Did he know you were—’

  ‘What? That I was what?’

  ‘Transsexual.’ Repeated diversity training courses were really paying off for Derwent.

  ‘No. He had no idea.’

  ‘When did you tell him?’

  ‘After I let him kiss me.’ She looked at Derwent, challenging him. ‘After I let him feel me up.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He was shocked.’ She laughed. ‘He was terrified someone would find out. He gave me five hundred quid. I didn’t even ask him for it. I wouldn’t have said anything anyway. But he said he wanted to make a gesture.’

  ‘And you took the money.’

  ‘I’m saving up.’ She cupped her chest. ‘I had my boobs done last year but I haven’t done the rest. I’ve found a really good surgeon in Thailand. He does these operations all the time. I don’t want to have it done here and get something that looks weird and doesn’t work properly.’

  ‘So you’re not …’ Derwent trailed off, floundering.

  ‘I’m halfway through the process. Would you like to see?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’ He looked down, embarrassed, then back up at her with a rueful grin and she loved it, sitting a little taller. Treating her like a woman was the best way he could have gone about winning her trust.

  ‘Did you contact Armstrong again?’ I asked.

  ‘No. He called me. I didn’t know who it was at first. He said he couldn’t stop thinking about me and he wanted to meet me again.’

  I could believe it. She was fascinating, graceful, feminine in every way. The other day, in her heavy jumper that hid her implants, wearing masculine glasses, she had been playing dress up. Dean was a character she’d been playing. Justine was the real person.

  ‘And you agreed because you needed the money.’

  ‘I’m not a tart.’ She was defensive, straight away. ‘I said no at first. Then he kept calling. He begged me for one more chance.’

  ‘So you arranged to meet.’

  ‘I didn’t want him in my flat. I knew 103 in Murchison House was empty because I knew the girl who used to live there. It was supposed to be renovated before the next tenant came along and I still had a key so it seemed like the obvious place to meet.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Do you want the details of that too? Everything we did to one another? All the filthy little tricks I showed him?’

  ‘No.’ Derwent was patience personified. ‘I want to know what arrangement you came to that meant he was here every Thursday with a roll of banknotes in his back pocket.’

  ‘Oh.’ She leaned back against her chair, looking tired. ‘I never charged him but he liked to give me a gift at the end. He wanted me to have nice things. He brought me presents sometimes. Wine, food, bits of jewellery. Underwear. The kind of things rich men give women. Because that’s how he saw me. He didn’t know Dean. He didn’t want to know.’

  ‘So it was more than a business relationship to both of you,’ I said.

  ‘Very much more.’ Justine laughed, but there were tears in her eyes. ‘I fell in love with him. Stupid, wasn’t it? We were so different. I was everything he was supposed to hate. He was kind to me, though. He saw me the way I wanted people to see me. I think he liked that I wasn’t one thing or another – that turned him on. But he still wanted me to have my operation. He wanted to be the first, afterwards. He offered to pay for the whole thing but I turned him down. I thought – I thought he would find it hard, afterwards. It’s a big operation. It takes time to recover.’ Her lip curled. ‘Geoff wasn’t made to be a nurse.’

  ‘But you still loved him,’ I said.

  ‘He worshipped me. That’s hard to resist when you’ve grown up being called a freak and a pervert and getting beaten up at least once a week.’ She caught herself. ‘Anyway, that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we had feelings for one another.’

  ‘Did you talk about him leaving his wife? Going public?’

  ‘I did. He didn’t. He was terrified we’d get found out. He wouldn’t even leave the flat with me in case anyone saw him.’

  ‘Even when the building was on fire?’

  ‘Even then. He was getting dressed …’ The tears filled her eyes again. ‘I was mean to him. I did hit him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He called me a stupid bitch for opening the door when there were people in the corridor.’ She shrugged delicately. ‘I don’t like being spoken to that way.’

  ‘Understandable,’ Derwent said. ‘What else did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. I warned him to hurry up and he said he would. He told me to go. That was it. I waited for him outside to make sure he was okay but he didn’t come out. In the end I rang 999 and told them he was there and where to look for him.’

  I made a note: that was the anonymous call that had come in about Armstrong.

  Justine looked miserable. ‘Do you know what really hurts? He chose to die rather than risk anyone finding out about us. He said he loved me but when it came down to it he was too ashamed of me to save his own skin.’

  Derwent shook his head. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘What?’ She dug her fingernails into the arms of her chair, eyes wide. ‘What happened?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out.’ Derwent opened his folder, consulting Dr Early’s report on Armstrong’s injuries. ‘So you did hit him.’

  ‘Once. Here.’ She indicated her jaw.

  ‘You didn’t spray him with pepper spray?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you didn’t strangle him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was conscious when you left.’

  ‘He was putting his clothes back on.’

  ‘Did you see anyone strange when you were leaving the flat? Anyone hanging around?’

  She took a moment to think. ‘I mean, it was chaos in the hall. Pure chaos. People coming and going, there was smoke, it was dark, the lights weren’t on – I don’t know if I’d have noticed anyone.’

  ‘Did you shut the door after you?’

  She nodded. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Would Geoff have answered the door if someone knocked on it?’

  ‘I really doubt it. He was terrified of being discovered. I mean, that was part of the thrill. But he would have shat himself if someone tried to get into the flat.’

  ‘Unless he was expecting them,’ I said, thinking out loud. Derwent frowned at me, not following, and I waved a hand at him. Not now.

  ‘Is that everything you know?’ Derwent asked Justine.

  ‘Everything.’ She took a deep breath and let it out. ‘It feels good to say.’

  ‘And you’ve been completely honest with us.’

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘And you have nothing to hide. You didn’t harm Armstrong.’

  ‘He was fine when I left, I swear.’ She looked from Derwent to me. ‘You have to believe me.’

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is why you went back to dressing as Dean. If you didn’t do anything wrong, what did you have to hide?’

  ‘I was ashamed,’ she said quietly. ‘Not of being trans. Of sleeping with Geoff. I didn’t want anyone to know – not after he’d let me down. He was so bothered about his reputation he didn’t seem to realise people would have judged me for sleeping with him. He thought he was the only one with something to lose.’ She half-smiled. ‘I loved him, you know, but he wasn’t half a dickhead sometimes.’

  Chapter 27

  ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU arrest her?’ Una Burt was looking for something on her desk, rifling through pil
es of paper and emptying folders. To say she was impressed by what we’d found out from Justine Rickards would be an exaggeration.

  ‘Why didn’t you arrest him?’ Chris Pettifer said.

  ‘Her.’ Derwent stared him down, daring him to argue about it. ‘And for what?’

  ‘Killing Armstrong.’

  ‘Because there’s no evidence she did.’ Derwent folded his arms, casual in shirtsleeves, outwardly relaxed. If I’d been Pettifer I would have been feeling nervous, though. There was an edge to Derwent’s voice that I recognised as a red flag. ‘She was with him. She saw him regularly. She was paid to meet him even though, according to her, she’d have done it for free. She left him alive and she had no reason to kill him. So tell me why I should have arrested her, because I’m not seeing it.’

  ‘She gave you a story about Armstrong and you swallowed it because you’re not interested in finding out what happened to him.’ Una Burt paused for a second, reading the page in front of her, then put it in the bin and kept searching. ‘She came up with an ingenious explanation for the large sums of money Armstrong kept transferring to her. Do we have any evidence she wasn’t blackmailing him?’

  ‘If he’d gone to the papers and said, “Geoff Armstrong is a hypocrite who tried to kiss me even though I’m black and a transsexual and I live on benefits and I’m everything he claims to despise”, he’d have got a hell of a payday,’ Pettifer said.

  ‘But she didn’t do that,’ I said. ‘And can you stop calling her he?’

  ‘You two are so politically correct,’ Pettifer said. It was certainly the first time Derwent had ever been accused of that and he took offence.

  ‘She’s more of a woman than anything you’ve ever shagged, mate.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ Burt sat down but she was still hunting, distracted. ‘It was worth much more to Justine Rickards to keep Armstrong on the hook. Regular payments are better than a one-off.’

  Derwent raised one eyebrow. ‘Do you really think Armstrong would have let Justine suck his cock if she’d been blackmailing him?’

  Burt’s head snapped up, her mouth tight with irritation. But she conceded the point. ‘Possibly not.’

  ‘Look, everything she’s told us fits in with what we know,’ Derwent said. ‘She left him getting dressed. He was half-dressed when he died. She admits she punched him. He had a mark from that. She didn’t know anything about the pepper spray and why would she have needed it? They were the same height and I reckon she’s stronger than most women, even though the hormone treatment would be taking the edge off her. She could have taken him in a fight. He didn’t hit her back when she punched him.’

  ‘So who did need pepper spray to subdue him?’

  ‘Someone who wanted to kill him,’ I said. ‘Someone knows he’s there. Someone starts a fire. Maybe they pretend to be a firefighter when they knock on the door. He opens it, gets hit with the pepper spray, which incapacitates him. Then he’s strangled and thrown out the window. We’re meant to assume he jumped or fell while trying to escape the fire.’

  ‘How does Justine fit into that?’ Una Burt asked. ‘She was there too.’

  ‘It’s possible she was in on it.’ I looked at Derwent. ‘Did you believe she loved him? I’m not so sure.’

  ‘He didn’t strike me as a particularly lovable person,’ Derwent agreed. ‘But then again, Justine was trying to distract us from the prostitution angle.’

  ‘Or maybe she didn’t want us to think of her as a possible suspect. She’s part of a community that had no love for Armstrong – quite the opposite, in fact. And she’s an angry person.’ I remembered how she’d jostled me, how she’d looked at me with total disdain. There was something ruthless about Justine. She’d had to hide the real her while she grew up; she’d had to fight to become what she was. That required strength of character and determination and an ability to dissemble. ‘She could have set him up.’

  Derwent glowered at me. ‘Got any evidence?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then go and get some,’ Burt said crisply. She shooed us out of her office and we straggled back to our desks.

  ‘Tea?’ Pettifer suggested.

  My stomach lurched and it wasn’t just because Pettifer made legendarily bad tea. ‘No thanks.’ I sat down, feeling exhausted, and sick, and miserable. I’d slept badly. Derwent had been back in my flat, since Melissa Pell was out of hospital and staying in his place. I should have felt safer to have him with me but it bothered me that he was there, knocking things over in the bathroom, opening drawers, watching me, judging. It bothered me a lot more when he got up at a quarter past five and slammed the front door on his way out for a run that had ended with muddy trainers in my hall and a sweaty, rain-soaked Derwent stretching in front of the television while I tried to eat a piece of toast and ignore him.

  I leaned back in my chair and frowned at Derwent, who was standing near my desk, staring into space. ‘Why are you being so nice about Justine Rickards? It’s not like you to be so understanding.’

  The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘I feel sorry for her.’

  ‘Really?’ You’re capable of that?

  ‘She must have been miserable for her whole life. Still is, probably. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hate yourself. I’ve never wanted to be anything other than what I am.’ He drew his shoulders back, standing tall. ‘There’s nothing better than being a white man, is there? Especially an Englishman.’

  ‘Yep. That’s the kind of thinking that won the Empire,’ I said acidly.

  ‘All right, half-breed.’

  ‘One hundred per cent Irish, thanks.’

  ‘Genetically. But you were born here. What does that make you?’

  ‘It makes me tired of this conversation.’

  Instead of answering, Derwent sank to the floor in front of my desk. I sat in silence for a second, then broke.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  A grunt. ‘Thinking.’ Another grunt.

  I stood up to see what he was actually doing. ‘Push-ups. Of course.’

  ‘It helps.’ He was rattling through them and it pained me to admit that his form was good, his back flat. ‘Gets … the blood … flowing.’

  ‘You’re not in the army now.’

  ‘Thank God.’ He paused in the up position, holding it for a moment, then stood up, tucking his shirt in. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Going through the threats against Armstrong that Elaine Lister gave us.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘I’m learning some new vocabulary.’ I sat down again, staring at the piles of paper that had spread across my desk. ‘I’m trying to organise it by date first. Then thematically. I’ll say this for him, he pissed off a lot of different types of people.’

  ‘Who votes for someone like that?’

  ‘People who want to shake things up. People who don’t trust the main parties, the career politicians who always say the right thing. People who love a character.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘People who shouldn’t have the vote.’

  ‘Have we got Armstrong’s phone records yet?’

  ‘I’ve requested them from the phone company. The techs are still trying to get something out of Armstrong’s phone. They never found the SIM card.’

  ‘Chase up the phone company.’

  Phone calls made and received, numbers we could link to people we knew or those who hadn’t cropped up in our investigation yet, records of text messages although not their content, not unless the phone could be persuaded to give up its secrets … It could make Armstrong’s last moments three-dimensional for us, shade in the background, make him live again for long enough to find out who ended his life.

  All that from a phone.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me that Chris Swain was using mine in much the same way: to know what I did and where I went, who I was communicating with, and how. And he probably knew much more about me than I could ever find out about Geoff Armstrong. We had to stay within the law, by d
efinition. We had to fight to get every scrap of information that might help us. The playing field was by no means level but we still had to win.

  I got off the phone after a long journey through buck-passing middle managers to someone who promised me that yes, it would be today, or tomorrow at the latest, they understood it was urgent, they would do their best. Frustration knotted my stomach. I needed to eat something, I thought, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make me feel sick. I found half a cereal bar in my desk drawer and picked at it. I was thinking about whether I’d ever be well again, whether being sick like this was a response to the way I lived – whether my job was, in fact, killing me. Then again, most of the stress and worry in my life was outside of work, when I had nothing to distract me from the shadow Chris Swain cast across my life, or when I was alone, replaying the last minutes of my relationship with Rob, changing what I said and did. There were times when concentrating on my job felt like sanctuary.

  Conclusion: I just wasn’t very good at having a life.

  Derwent knocked on my desk, interrupting me midgloom. ‘We’re wanted.’

  I looked around to see Una Burt waiting at the door of her office as Colin Vale went in after a man with dark hair. I recognised the people-trafficking expert, though it took me a little longer to remember his name: Tom Bridges. And Kev Cox was already inside, standing by Una Burt’s desk with a folder. I followed Derwent across the room, my misery shelved for the time being in favour of curiosity. Pettifer and Mal Upton were right behind me. The small office filled up quickly and felt more than crowded with eight of us in it. I found a filing cabinet to lean against, judging that Derwent would disapprove of me sitting in one of the two chairs by the desk. Bridges took one, Colin Vale the other. Pettifer and Derwent battled briefly for the window sill and Derwent, of course, got it.

  ‘What have you got, Kev?’ Burt asked.

  ‘It’s about the door on the eighth floor.’ He flipped open his folder. ‘Quite a few DNA profiles, as you’d expect, and I don’t think it’s too surprising to anyone to hear that we were able to attach the profiles to individuals who are known to the police.’

  ‘Not on that estate,’ Derwent said. ‘They should give them CRO numbers at birth. It would save time.’