‘Who’s this?’ he says. His eyes are hooded, with dark circles underneath.
‘The new recruit,’ Vos says. ‘Kath Ptolemy, meet DC Sam Severin.’
FIVE
Nobody ever asks Mayson Calvert for a drink after work. They know he’ll just look at them through his glasses, with his head cocked quizzically to one side as if they’re some sort of microbial species, and then he’ll give a shy, almost embarrassed smile and shake his head; and then he’ll say ‘No, thank you,’ and walk away, and in that instant he’ll have forgotten you ever asked. It’s not that Mayson is rude, or even antisocial, and he doesn’t have OCD or ADHD or Tourette’s or any of the other syndromes that Huggins and Fallow think he’s got. Mayson Calvert is just, well, singular.
People who meet him – other policemen – wonder how the hell he ever got to be a detective. When they discover he’s part of Theo Vos’s Bug House squad they are astonished. But there’s more to Major Crime than swagger and physicality. The big-time thugs with shaven heads and steroid-enhanced muscles make up a very small percentage of those who are classified as Major Criminals. Looking and acting like a villain is a distinct disadvantage if you’re really serious about crime. The criminal who succeeds in making a living at it, who runs it as a business, is the one you never see or suspect. He is the next-door neighbour who walks his dog round the block every night, the twinkly-eyed old gent enjoying a quiet half of bitter in the pub, the family man who takes his wife and kids to Greece once a year on easyJet, who stays in modest three-star hotels and drinks inexpensive local wine at the local taverna.
These are the Major Criminals.
These are the people Mayson Calvert is employed to catch. Mayson lives alone, but he lives in some style. He has a two-bedroomed apartment on the top floor of an Art Deco building in the upmarket suburb of Jesmond. From his living-room window, he looks out over the verdant slash of Jesmond Dene as far as the Armstrong Bridge, where every Sunday he visits the arts and craft stalls. He shops at the local delicatessens and listens to eclectic live music at the Sage Centre in Gateshead, and he is a patron of the independent Tyneside Cinema, where once a week without fail he will watch a foreign language film. If it is in French or Italian, he will not need the subtitles.
Mayson Calvert is very much a Renaissance man, a connoisseur of culture.
But compared to normal people he is a little weird. There is no doubt about that.
It is 4 a.m. and Mayson is sitting upright in his armchair, staring at his mobile phone, which is held in both hands in his lap. He is debating whether or not to call the number on the screen. The number is DCI Vos’s. He has been debating this for two hours. He presses a button and a second number appears. Acting Detective Sergeant Bernice Seagram’s. Click, click. Vos, Seagram, Vos, Seagram. He settles for Seagram and his thumb hovers over the Send button.
The time is irrelevant to Mayson Calvert. Since he was a child he has been able to exist on four hours’ sleep, and it doesn’t matter to him when he takes them. They don’t even have to be consecutive. But he knows that, in this respect at least, he is different to most people. Their sleep requirements are set in stone and he knows from bitter experience that you disturb them at your peril. It is four in the morning, and that means nothing to Mayson but everything to Vos, Seagram and everyone else in this city.
He sighs and puts the phone on the armrest of the chair. There is no point in calling either of them. There is no point in calling anyone. Everyone is dead to the world and will be for at least another two hours. It never ceases to baffle him why, when there are so many things to do in life, the hours in which it is deemed acceptable to do them are restricted to a narrow window between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon.
Mayson turns his chair to the window and looks out through the open blinds. The room faces east, and in a little under two hours the sky will begin to lighten.
His news will have to wait until then.
John Fallow turns the corner of his street and sees the welcome sight of his own front door a hundred yards ahead. He checks his watch and notes to his dismay that he has added a whole minute to yesterday’s time for his two-mile morning run. This is not supposed to happen.
Paah! Whoargh! Paah! Whoargh! Ah-aach! Thwaoarf! That is the sound of Fallow’s breath, followed by a hawk, followed by a full-blooded, foamy gob onto the pavement before him as he heads for home and the sanctuary of the shower.
Fallow has always regarded runners as the most unsavoury characters imaginable, with their red faces, their startled expressions, their gasping and gobbing, their sweat-soiled groins, chests and armpits, and the malodorous smell that broils in their wake. He still does. But at the age of thirty, he lives in fear. He was scared to start running because he was so unfit; now he is scared to stop in case all his good work goes sproing! like the innards of a watch.
Most of all, he is scared of Phil Huggins.
It is two weeks since the CID piss-up. Two weeks since he and Huggins emerged from the Memories of Punjab at one in the morning, the last two standing. Two weeks since he categorically stated: ‘Nah, mate. I’ve had enough. I’m going home.’
Huggins had looked at him with disgust. ‘Whassa matter with you, Johnny-boy? Clubbing, man! Fuckin’ Aces High!’
‘Nah, I’m off home,’ Fallow had said, pulling his coat sleeve away from Huggins’s insistent grasp. ‘Shirley will kill me.’
‘Ah, fuck Shirley, man!’
‘She’s my fucking wife, Phil!’
But later, inevitably, Fallow had found himself in the dimly lit, half-empty nightclub, lurching along the edge of the dance floor to where a bouffant-haired woman in a low-cut T-shirt and tight-fitting jeans was sitting alone at an alcove table, running a long, dark fingernail around the rim of a cocktail glass and giving him an approving look.
‘Fancy a dance?’ he’d shouted over the music.
‘Why not?’ the woman had said, taking the can of Red Stripe from his hand and leading him by the other into the thin coppice of bodies swaying drunkenly on the strobed parquet. And at first light, as he silently let himself out of her house and made his way through the godforsaken council estate to the nearest main road, he’d cursed Huggins for leading him astray but felt nothing but disgust for himself, for his own weakness.
And now he is home, untying his trainers on the doorstep and stowing them neatly with all the other outdoor shoes beneath the coat rack in the hall, padding upstairs on the pristine cream carpet and entering the bedroom, where Shirley has already smoothed the duvet to eradicate any evidence that the bed has been slept in. He takes off his running gear and deposits it in the washing basket, picks a perfectly folded towel from the heated rail and steps into the en suite bathroom. He showers, dresses and goes downstairs to the kitchen, where she has already set the table for supper and left a note propped against the Tupperware cornflake container that he will be expected to clear away once he has had his breakfast.
‘Please empty dishwasher before you leave,’ it says.
Fallow puts the note in his pocket, empties the dishwasher, puts the cornflakes container in the cupboard and leaves the house without bothering to eat.
Bernice Seagram is in her dressing gown, watching breakfast TV and munching on a bacon sandwich, when Huggins emerges from the spare room. He is wearing boxer shorts and one of Seagram’s T-shirts, which only comes down as far as his navel, exposing the incipient beer belly that only his lanky frame keeps from being prominent. He grunts ‘Good morning’ and heads directly for the frying pan, tweezing a slice of cooling bacon and flopping it on a slice of white bread.