Scorcher is close on six foot, an inch or so taller than me, but he holds himself like a little guy: chest out, shoulders back, neck very straight. He has darkish hair, a narrow build, a serious set of jaw muscles and a knack for attracting the kind of women who want to be status symbols when they grow up and don’t have the legs to bag a rugby player. I know, without being told, that his parents have serviettes instead of napkins and would rather go without food than without lace curtains. Scorch’s accent is carefully upper-middle, but something in the way he wears a suit gives him away.
On the steps of Number 16, he turned and took a second to look around the Place, taking the temperature of what he was dealing with here. He spotted me, all right, but his eyes went over me like he’d never seen me before. One of the many joys of Undercover is that other squads can never quite figure out when you’re on the job and when you’re, say, on a genuine night out with the lads, so they tend to leave you alone, just in case. If they called it wrong and blew your cover, the bollocking in work would be nothing compared to the lifetime’s worth of slagging waiting in the pub.
When Scorch and his little bum-chum had vanished into that dark doorway, I said, “Wait here.”
Shay asked, “Do I look like your bitch?”
“Only around the mouth. I’ll be back in a while.”
“Leave it,” Kevin said to Shay, without looking up. “He’s working.”
“He’s talking like a fucking cop.”
“Well, duh,” Kevin said, finally running out of patience; he had had a long day, brotherwise. “Well spotted. For fuck’s sake.” He swung himself off the steps and shouldered his way through a bunch of Hearnes, towards the top of the road and out. Shay shrugged. I left him to it and headed off to retrieve the suitcase.
Kevin was nowhere in sight, my car was still intact, and when I got back Shay had sloped off too, gone wherever Shay goes. Ma was on her tiptoes outside our door, flapping a hand at me and squawking something that sounded urgent, but then Ma always does. I pretended I didn’t see her.
Scorcher was on the steps of Number 16, having what looked like a deeply unrewarding conversation with my favorite guard bogger. I tucked the suitcase under my arm and strolled in between them. “Scorch,” I said, slapping him on the back. “Good to see you.”
“Frank!” He caught me in a macho two-handed shake. “Well well well. Long time no see. I hear you got in here ahead of me, yeah?”
“My bad,” I said, throwing the uniform a big grin. “I just wanted a quick look. I might have a bit of an inside track here.”
“Jesus, don’t tease me. This one’s ice cold. If you’ve got anything to point us in the right direction, I’ll owe you big-time.”
“That’s the way I like it,” I said, shunting him away from the bogmonster, who was earwigging with his mouth open. “I’ve got a possible ID for you. My information says it could be a girl called Rose Daly who went missing from Number Three, a while back.”
Scorcher whistled, eyebrows going up. “Sweet. Got a description?”
“Nineteen years old, five foot seven, curvy build-maybe ten stone-long curly red hair, green eyes. I can’t tell you for sure what she was last seen wearing, but it probably included a denim jacket and fourteen-hole ox-blood Doc boots.” Rosie lived in those boots. “Does that match what you found?”
Scorch said, carefully, “It doesn’t exclude what we found.”
“Come on, Scorch. You can do better than that.”
Scorcher sighed, ran a hand through his hair and then patted it back into place. “According to Cooper, it’s a young adult female, been there somewhere between five years and fifty. That’s all he’ll say till he gets her on the table. Techs found a bunch of unidentified crap, a jeans button and a handful of metal rings that could be the eyelets from those Docs. The hair might’ve been red; it’s hard to tell.”
That dark mess soaked with God knew what. I said, “Any idea what killed her?”
“If only. Bloody Cooper-do you know him? He’s a prick if he doesn’t like you, and for some reason he’s never liked me. He won’t confirm anything except that, no shit Sherlock, she’s dead. To me it looks a lot like someone whacked her in the head a few times with a brick-the skull’s smashed open-but what do I know, I’m only a detective. Cooper was droning on about post-mortem damage and pressure fractures…” Suddenly Scorcher stopped glancing around the road and looked hard at me. “Why all the interest? This isn’t some informant who got herself in the shit for you, is it?”
It always amazes me that Scorcher doesn’t get punched more often. I said, “My informants don’t get whacked in the head with bricks, Scorcher. Ever. They lead long, happy, fulfilling lives and die of old age.”
“Whoa,” Scorch said, putting his hands up. “Excuse me for living. If she’s not one of yours, then why do you care what happened to her-and, not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but how did you happen to wander in on this one?”
