She tapped her fingernails against the mug, some indecipherable, long-buried rhythm. Charlie told her she did it when she was thinking and that it was very irritating. The tapping stopped. Famie shrugged, shook her head.
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t feel good though.’
Famie sipped and swallowed, relishing the first burn in her throat. The radio played some Mendelssohn. She knew this was just for her.
‘Great service,’ she said. ‘I must come again.’
‘Any time,’ said Jo, ‘especially if the press are after you.’
‘Listen, before I go,’ Famie said, ‘can we just compare notes on this?’ She indicated the ad in the paper. ‘I’m assuming we never hear from whoever it is again. So, meantime, who killed our friends? Between us we should be able to cover the bases. Two journalists, or former journalists’ – she raised her mug to Sam – ‘and a copper. Best theories. Does everyone buy the al-Qaeda line?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Speculation, all of it. And journalist speculation is the same as everyone else’s. Islamist terrorists obviously are number one, some al-Qaeda affiliate presumably. Or the Russians. Their security services have been pretty incompetent recently but they are still capable of great brutality. I’d start there.’
Jo’s turn. ‘The drug cartels. So much of the knife crime in London is gang- and drug-related. Scores of deaths a year even without our friends joining the list. If your investigators were deep into organized crime, they would have rattled some pretty big cages. With some pretty big beasts in them. I’ve had three stabbings this year in my patch. Just kids really, but no one really reports on this stuff any more. We have two rival gangs fighting for territory and selling rights. It’s brutal stuff.’
Famie blew steam from her coffee. ‘That makes some kind of sense,’ she said. ‘Seven stabbings in half an hour shows a level of sophistication but it isn’t exactly flying a plane into a building. Anything else?’
Jo put a hand up. ‘One thing. Again, speculative. The word we seem to be getting out of the Yard operation is that your investigators had nothing of interest on their hard drives. Not only that, but that nothing had been added for weeks. As though their computers had stopped working.’
‘They were working,’ said Famie. ‘Andrew Lewis told me. Emails working. Just everything else is blank. No files, no reports, no contacts. Must be all offline.’
‘On paper?’ said Jo.
Famie shrugged. ‘Their work must be somewhere. It must exist somewhere.’
No one answered.
‘Anyway, that’s it,’ said Jo. ‘All I have.’
Sam’s phone buzzed. ‘Tommi suggests a drive-past, to see if the good men and women of the Fourth Estate are still camping out at yours, Famie. He’ll be outside in five.’
Famie gulped the rest of her coffee and was dressed and outside in four. Another hot day coming. She already regretted not showering. When Tommi’s Peugeot 306 pulled up, she jumped in, retuned his radio. He tutted. She ignored him.
‘Got a call from Sophie Arnold,’ he said once they were moving. ‘About four this morning. Why so early I have no idea. I answered because I always do these days. She says she wants to meet you, Famie. Says she only had your house number and you weren’t picking up.’
‘She has my email. Work haven’t switched it off just yet.’
‘I mentioned that. Said she didn’t want to write anything down.’
‘Was she drunk?’
Tommi thought about that. ‘Could have been. But she was pretty coherent.’
Famie was puzzled. ‘Maybe she’s resignation number fifteen. Did she leave her number?’
‘She did,’ said Tommi, ‘and said that she’d come to you.’
When the Peugeot turned into Famie’s street, they’d gone only ten metres before they saw a couple of TV crews crossing the road.
‘Maybe Sophie coming to mine’s not such a wise move,’ Famie said. ‘I’ll call her.’
As they drove past her flat, the scrum and their microphones, Famie, unseen, saluted them all with her middle finger.
24
AN HOUR LATER, Famie was on an already airless Tottenham High Road, two iced coffees in a cardboard tray, searching for 235 Flat B. She’d convinced a tired-sounding Sophie to stay where she was, that she would come to her. Famie assumed the coffee would be welcome.
Walking out from Seven Sisters tube station she had bought a baseball cap from a street vendor, pulled it low over her head until the peak touched her sunglasses. ‘Paranoid already,’ she told herself. As far as she could see there had been no photos of her published, just her name. The hat was a decent disguise. She caught her reflection in a twenty-four-hour supermarket shop window. The cheap blue hat looked ridiculous but at least she didn’t look like Famie Madden.
235 Flat B was an apartment above a Chinese restaurant. The front door was shut, the blinds closed. Famie found a side door next to an overflowing rubbish bin. Foil take-out trays, congealed sauce and discarded ribs had spilled on to the pavement where they were beginning to heat up a second time. Famie held her breath.
The four buttons on the door’s intercom were unlabelled. She pressed the second one in the row, hoping for the best. The door buzzed and she pushed her way in. She stepped over a pile of junk mail to reach the stairs. One flight took her to a landing and an adjacent door with a large A scrawled on it. Along a poorly lit corridor another door clicked open. Sophie Arnold leant out, waved her in.
‘Hey,’ said Sophie.
‘Got you a cold brew,’ said Famie.
‘Thanks. Come in. And, er, sorry about the mess.’
‘No worries. I’m not your mother.’
Famie stepped inside. It wasn’t messy. One living room with a corner kitchen. A small sofa, an armchair, two wooden chairs, one holding a laptop charging. Two small framed prints were on the wall – old maps, Famie thought – and a family photo sat in a gilt frame above an electric fire. An open door led to a darkened bedroom. A clean sink, no plates or cups waiting to be washed up. The two small windows were open wide, the smell of the kitchens below already filling the flat.
‘I hope you like Chinese food,’ said Famie.
‘I used to,’ said Sophie.
She appeared agitated, preoccupied.
‘Where’s the mess?’ said Famie, looking around. ‘Looks pretty damn clean to me.’
‘The bin is full,’ she said, ‘overflowing. And yesterday’s clothes are behind the cushions. I just shoved them there.’
She was a young twenty-six, wild, curly blonde hair and a slender frame. Loose-fit cotton pyjamas billowed around her as she moved. They were right about the alcohol; Famie could still smell it on her breath.
‘Hangover?’
Sophie grimaced. ‘Just a small one.’
She sat on the armchair, Famie perched on the sofa.
‘Tommi said you called him at four a.m.’
Sophie nodded, glanced down. ‘Took me that long to get the balls to call. And the gin helped.’
‘The gin always helps,’ said Famie. ‘But you didn’t tell him anything.’