35

OFFICIAL ESTIMATES SAY THAT BETWEEN 1,000 AND 1,500 people sleep rough on the streets of London on any given night. Many of them are young runaways, fleeing abuse of various kinds at home. Some are elderly, people at the end of their lives who have lost everything. Quite a few have mental-health problems, made worse by the impossibility of getting their required medication. All are vulnerable; always cold, always hungry, slowly getting more weak and more scared. Even that isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is making it through the day.

I started looking for Cooper in the tunnels around Tottenham Court Road where street people gather during the day to beg from Tube travellers. London Underground has a policy of moving them on, so none stay in one place for any length of time. I’d wanted to come alone and had been informed, in triplicate, that that really wasn’t going to happen. Neither had I been allowed to come with women detectives.

In the end I’d agreed to take two of the youngest and smallest male detectives in the division. Both were now trying to balance two directly opposed instructions: from Tulloch and the others, not to let me out of their sight; and from me, to stay well out of the way.

I went to the women whenever I could, which wasn’t always easy because around 70 per cent of street people are male. I gave them hot drinks and spoke to them for just a few minutes. By St Martin-in-the-Fields, I spotted a girl who didn’t look much more than fifteen.

‘Hello,’ I said, crouching down and holding out a carton of tomato soup. ‘I brought you this. Can I speak to you for a second?’

The girl looked distrustfully at the soup. ‘What about?’ she muttered.

‘St John’s church hall in Bayswater are giving out food from four o’clock this afternoon,’ I said. ‘And the Lamplight shelter in Soho has some free beds tonight.’ I’d checked out various websites before coming out. There are organizations around London who offer a lot of support to homeless people. Sadly, most street people don’t have access to the internet.

‘OK,’ she said and stretched out her hand to take the soup. I pulled Cooper’s photograph out of my pocket.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said. ‘Could you look at this for a second, see if you recognize him?’

She glanced at the photograph and shook her head.

‘He could be dangerous,’ I said. ‘He may have hurt people.’ Immediately her eyes went back to the photograph. Street people respond to danger. They understand violence only too well.

‘Who did he hurt?’ she asked.

‘Some women,’ I said. ‘I really need to find him.’

She looked up from the photograph and saw my two minders, leaning against the wall of the tunnel only twenty metres away. If they’d had CID tattooed on their foreheads they couldn’t have been more obvious.

‘Are you police?’ she asked, and now it was me she was frightened of.

‘Have you seen him?’ I asked again. ‘It’s really important.’

She wasn’t looking any more. She shook her head and started to push herself to her feet. A few seconds later she was gone.

I stayed out for the rest of the afternoon, handing out the telephone number of Joesbury’s glitzy new phone and buying endless cups of soup. Most people who talked to me had glanced at Cooper’s picture and shaken their heads. Just before four o’clock, I spoke to a man in his late sixties who looked properly at the photograph for several seconds and I started to hope. The street community isn’t a huge one. Live rough for any length of time and you get to know most of the faces. Then the man shook his head.

‘Not seen that one for a while,’ he said. ‘What did he do?’

I couldn’t let myself sound too interested. ‘But you do know him?’ I asked.

‘Nasty piece of work,’ replied the bloke. ‘Takes money from those young Eastern European girls – you know, the ones who take their children begging.’

‘Where might I find him?’ I asked, when I realized he wasn’t going to say any more.

He shook his head. ‘Took up with a young woman, I heard,’ he said. ‘Got a place over in Acton.’

By the end of the day I was tired and more than a bit depressed. It gets to you, life on the streets, even when you know that for the moment at least you have somewhere else to go. It’s like you know it’s waiting, always there, for the time when the reins slip between your fingers.

Still, we knew that Samuel Cooper might be living with a woman somewhere around Acton. It was something. We could put his mugshot on posters around the area, run it in the local papers. Someone would know him.

On the way back to the station, I called in at my flat to find four men working there. I wandered around for two minutes, finding out about the various improvements Joesbury had ordered – alarms, CCTV cameras, panic buttons and hi-tech locks – but seeing that many people in a space that had previously been for me alone was unsettling and I left.

I got back to Lewisham to find no one on the team had had much luck. Neither the Jones family nor anyone on the Brendon Estate could remember seeing Cooper before. Someone placing him in Acton was the best we could do.

An hour later, I got word that the work on my flat had been finished. I wanted to go home and curl up, safe behind the barriers Joesbury had ordered be put up around me. It wasn’t going to happen; I still had to go across to Scotland Yard to have SO10 fit me out with intimate tracking devices. The phone rang as I was closing down the computer.

‘DC Flint,’ I said.

‘Yeah, right, hi,’ said the voice of a young man. ‘I’m worried about a shed in the park. I think there’s something gone bad in there.’ His accent sounded north London. His voice was slightly thick, as though he’d been drinking.

I sighed. This was a matter for uniform. Sometimes when the switchboard was busy, calls could end up anywhere. ‘OK,’ I said, reaching over to grab a pen, and taking down his details and where he was calling from. ‘Sorry. Did you say a shed?’

‘Yeah, the boat shed. In the park.’ The door opened and Joesbury came in. Suddenly I found myself in a very helpful mood.

‘What appears to be the trouble?’ I asked as Joesbury sauntered over and leaned against the window ledge just a few feet from my desk. He was wearing a deep-blue rugby shirt. An inch or two of chest hair was just visible against the buttons of the neck.

‘It stinks,’ was the reply. Joesbury had a small mole just below one ear. ‘And there are flies everywhere,’ the caller was saying. ‘I think something’s died in there.’

‘Probably just a rabbit or something, but we can check it out,’ I said. What I’d probably do was pass the call on to the appropriate environmental-health department. ‘Which park is it?’

‘Victoria.’

Great. Victoria Park was north of the river. Not even our borough.

‘Thank you for calling, sir. We’ll get right on to it,’ I said, as Joesbury gave a heavy sigh, clearly not thinking much of my policewoman-of-the-year act. I put the phone down.

‘Ready?’ he said.

‘Just got a call to make,’ I said. ‘Something died up in Tower Hamlets.’ I pulled out the directory we use for transferring calls around the Met.

‘What did you say?’ Joesbury had stepped away from the window.

I shook my head. ‘A shed stinks and there are flies … probably just rubbish or something. Maybe a dead rat. Give me two minutes.’

I picked up the phone again. Joesbury leaned across the desk and cut the line off.

‘Something died up in Tower Hamlets and you’re getting the call?’ he said.

‘Well, of course we’d love to think the general public understands the various intricacies of the Met’s internal structure, but, sadly, some of them still don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Do I have to use another phone or are you planning to release this one?’

‘Where in Tower Hamlets?’

‘Victoria Park.’

He blinked, then reached out and took the receiver from me.

‘Oh, be my guest,’ I sulked, as he stepped away.

‘Hi, this is DI Joesbury.’ He’d turned his back on me now. ‘The caller you just put through, did they ask to speak to anyone in particular? … OK, for her personally? Are you sure? … Are you recording calls at the moment? … Pity. Thanks anyway.’

Joesbury put the receiver down. I could see a pulse beating in his neck just above the mole. Then he turned and looked at me for several seconds without speaking.

‘Got plans this evening, Flint?’ he said finally.

‘Why, are you asking me out?’

Joesbury gave a tiny half-laugh and shook his head. ‘Let’s hope I get the chance,’ he said. He crossed the room, held the door open and looked back. ‘In the meantime,’ he went on, ‘there is a body out there to be found and someone has just phoned here, asking for you personally, to tell you about a bad smell and flies in a park that isn’t even in this borough.’

‘I should let DI Tulloch know,’ I said, feeling like an idiot.

‘Let’s just you and me quietly check it out first,’ he said. ‘If it’s a rodent, we can stick it in the nearest skip and scoot off to the Yard. And it’s just possible I’ll be so relieved I will ask you out. Come on.’