BLOOD.

WORK.

MARK.

PEARSON.

For Mum and Dad.

The woman's muscles spasmed and as she floated towards consciousness she heard a man's voice, and what she heard made her want to scream and kick and thrash her arms. But she couldn't move. She had been drugged, she knew that. And the drugs held her paralysed. She could barely open her eyes a millimetre but it was enough to see what the man held in his hand and if she had been able to scream she would have ripped her lungs apart doing so.

The blade in the man's hands dipped and she could feel the flesh and muscles of her stomach parting. No pain. But she could feel it. She could see his head bending lower, his other hand reaching forth, reaching into her. Violating her. Then he stood back, holding a ma.s.s of tissue in his hand, blood dripping from it as if he was squeezing what he held. And she closed her eyes, willing it to stop. Suddenly she could feel the cool air, feel it lift the heat from her skin. As she sank deeper inside herself, she could picture that heat like a fine cloud of particles swirling up into the black inkiness of the night sky, separating, dissolving and lost to the universe.

And then she didn't feel anything at all.

PROLOGUE.

A group of noisy, enthusiastic young men gathered around one corner of the bar of the Unicorn, a mock- Tudor pub. A large-screen TV was commanding their attention. England was playing South Africa in a friendly and the atmosphere in the pub was rowdy, but not aggressive.

Detective Inspector Jack Delaney stood at the other end of the bar and waited patiently for the young man, with short cropped hair and arms like strings of rope and the word 'WRATH' tattooed in big, black letters along the length of one forearm, to get around to serving him. Any other day he would have been simmering with barely contained fury as the barman flirted with a couple of South African girls with hair as yellow as corn and strong, bright teeth. But Jack Delaney had other things to occupy his mind that night.

All things coalesce somewhere. All things come together in a pattern. He couldn't see it yet, but he knew it was there. Finding patterns was his job, after all, seeking what linked seemingly disa.s.sociated events. What Delaney did know just then, as he waited at the bar, with dark images flashing through his memory, was that he had a focus again. Something to help concentrate all the hurt and pain and anger he had lived with for four years into a single point of energy and use that to move forward out of the wreckage of his past, annihilating anything that got in his way. Jack Delaney didn't do standing still very well.

The barman's casual smile died as he approached Delaney.

'Help you?'

'Pint of Guinness and a pint of lager.'

Delaney threaded his way back through the crowd, smiling almost imperceptibly at the pair of blonde women, who were straining quite noticeably the yellow and green fabric of their 'Boks' rugby shirts, happy to draw attention to themselves. He put the drinks down on the table in front of his erstwhile boss who held a cigarette, as ever, in one hand and a lighter in the other.

Chief Inspector Diane Campbell looked up at him, a devil-may-care smile dancing in her puppy-brown eyes. 'Fifty-pound fine, it's almost worth lighting the b.a.s.t.a.r.d up.'

She held the cigarette aloft as if there may have been some doubt as to the ident.i.ty of the illegitimate object.

Delaney pulled out a chair and sat down. 'True.'

'Meanwhile the fat cats of Westminster can smoke in their bar at the Houses of Parliament. Never mind their bleeding expenses, that's the real problem.'

'Not going political on me, are you, Diane?'

Campbell whipped her neck, flicking her bobbed hair left and right. 'Not in this lifetime.'

'Good to hear.'

Campbell looked at him for a moment, the mischief still in her eyes. 'I saw Kate Walker talking with you at the cemetery.'

'And?'

'Anything you want to tell me about that?'

Delaney took a long pull on his pint of Guinness and thought about it. Thought about Kate and her dark hair, her haunted eyes, her beauty. Her fragility. Remembering the hurt in her eyes as he had stood beneath the naked sky of a west London cemetery and told her that they had no future. He knew the damage that had been done to her as a child by her uncle, his ex-boss Superintendent Walker, knew that damage had scarred her as an adult, knew that that same uncle had tried to kill her because she was helping Delaney rescue his own child, Siobhan, from his clutches. Kate Walker had suffered enough, but he had made her suffer more. He'd already buried one wife, had carried the guilt of it for four years, and when it came to making a choice between the living and the dead . . .

He had chosen the dead.

He took another swallow of Guinness before putting the gla.s.s down and looking Campbell in the eye. 'Not a thing.'

'Wouldn't blame you if there was. She's got a fine figure on her for a brunette.'

Delaney didn't smile. 'We're about to put her uncle away for a long, long time, Diane. That's all I care about.' He leaned across the table and gripped his ex-boss's hand. His grip was firm, uncompromising, but she neither flinched nor sought to release herself from his hold. 'Just tell me what you've heard about my wife's death.'

She nodded, and Delaney released his grip. She resisted the temptation to rub her hand but held Delaney's gaze as he took another long pull on his pint of Guinness.

'Kevin Norrell.'

Delaney put his gla.s.s down, his voice arctic. 'What about him?'

The water fell like hard rain. The kind of powerful, punching rain you get in a tropical downpour. Kevin Norrell put his hand against the cool white tiles of the prison shower and felt it pound his body, the jets of water like needles. He bared his teeth. If he had his way the man who had put him in this prison was very shortly going to get him out. The water sounded like rain too as it spattered and puddled around his feet. He'd never liked the sound. It reminded him of his father, Sean Norrell. The memory, as ever, making his hand form involuntarily into a hamlike fist as his mind wandered back to his childhood, the summer of 1977 and the first time he was ever incarcerated.

The Hunter's Moon was a spit-and-sawdust pub halfway between West Harrow and Harrow on the Hill, set in a concrete housing development built in the sixties, complete with a small, built-in shopping precinct. The pub was at the end of a row of shops including a laundromat, a convenience store, an off-licence and a chemist. Three floors of council flats rose above the shops and pub, and were echoed on the opposite side of the street by four floors of similarly grey, utilitarian boxes. The Labour government's vision of utopian, urban living on the architect's drawing board may well have looked like a sunny vision of an ideal future; but whereas his green ink had imagined trees and benches and contented people, the stark concrete reality was inked in far more abrasive colours. The graffiti, though distinctly urban, certainly wasn't art, and couldn't be considered political, unless 'Jane f.u.c.ks Ted' counted. You could lay money on the fact that the romantic dauber wasn't referring to Edward Heath and Jane Fonda.

It was raining. The kind of constant, wind-blown, swirling, miserable rain that clogged up drains and sewers, and it went with the soulless, plastic signboards above chain-link shutters, the sick, yellow light that leaked from the street lamps, and the garbage that floated on the street like rats go with sewage, or pigeons go with s.h.i.t.

Half past eight on a cold November's night and the reality of the place was as far removed from the architect's sunny vision as Sean 'The Coat' Norrell was from a working grasp of quantum physics.

Inside the Hunter's Moon, the smoke hung heavy in the air, like a pale cloud. The lino on the floor was colourless and faded, but had once been red, presumably to hide bloodstains. The lights behind the bar were bright, though, as were the coloured lights in the jukebox that was pumping 'Float On' through crackling speakers that, like the rumpled person standing at the bar, had long since seen better days. He was a long-haired, fifty-year-old man with a knee-length, black leather coat. He scowled as he ran filthy, dirt-stained fingers through his greasy locks of hair and winked at the barmaid as he sang along with the record. He cupped his crotch with the other hand and bucked his hips forward in a crude, suggestive motion.

The barmaid had been in the job for well over thirty years and hadn't been impressed by much in the last twenty-nine years of it. Her low-cut top revealed a chest as smooth as corrugated cardboard, and her rasping voice held as much affection as a wheel clamp. 'I wouldn't touch your f.u.c.king c.o.c.k, Sean, if I was wearing asbestos gloves.'

Norrell leered at her and gave a final thrust. 'Your loss, darling.'

'Sit down, and shut the f.u.c.k up, Norrell,' came a voice beside him.

Sean Norrell turned to say something but, when he saw who was standing next to him, the words died on his lips. He nodded a deferential smile and sat back on his stool, fumbling a cigarette nervously from a stained packet. He took a sip of his lager and scowled. Harp, thirty-two pence a pint now and it still tasted like cat's p.i.s.s.

The man stood next to him was dressed in denim jeans, with a denim jacket, short blond hair and piercing, blue eyes. Mickey Ryan, thirty years old with a heart as cold as a Norwegian wh.o.r.e working al fresco. He looked at Norrell now with the kind of approval usually reserved for faecal matter discovered on footwear.

'You got my money?'

'It's in hand.'

Ryan's voice was level, dispa.s.sionate as he leaned down and glared in his eyes. 'Your d.i.c.k will be in my left hand and I'll cut your f.u.c.king b.a.l.l.s off with a rusty knife you haven't got it by Friday.' The barmaid smiled, approvingly.

'You take my gear you pay me for it.'

'I'm good for it, Mickey. You know that,' Norrell muttered.

But Mickey had already turned back to the barmaid. 'Double vodka.'

She fluttered her spider-leg eyelashes at him and smiled seductively. 'On the house.'

Ryan looked back at Norrell, his eyes like flint. 'You still here?'

Norrell hastily swallowed his lager as Mickey Ryan picked up his drink and headed back to the pool table where a couple of nineteen-year-olds, in skintight hot pants and platforms shoes, waited for the territorial pat of his hand on their young backsides, marking ownership. He'd have liked to pick up a pool cue and smash it across Ryan's smug face. But as the blue-eyed man turned back to look at him pointedly, Norrell put his empty gla.s.s on the counter and scurried for the door. You didn't mess with Mickey Ryan. Not ever. Sean Norrell knew where to pick his fights and it wasn't at the Hunter's Moon.

He stepped out from the pub, blinking as the driving rain lashed his face and made his way across the street to the block of flats where he lived. He stumbled into the stairwell and held his hand against a concrete pillar to steady himself, and shake water rain from his long hair. He grunted and walked up the steps to his flat and fumbled his key into the lock of the faded red door of 13 Paradise Villas. They got that about right. Paradise in neon and street lamp. Nirvana by substance abuse. Heaven and h.e.l.l in a f.u.c.king handcart.

He fumbled the door open and stumbled inside to domestic bliss. The theme tune to The Good Life was playing on the television, his runt of a son curled up on the stained, brown velour sofa watching it, his eyes fixed, not even glancing at him. Norrell's nose wrinkled at the smell of charred food.

'For f.u.c.k's sake, Linda. How f.u.c.king hard is it to cook a sausage?'

His wife, Linda Norrell, glared at him from the kitchen set off the small lounge. She was thirty-two but looked fifty, a sick fifty at that. Rail-thin, with straggly mousy hair that had, at some time, been dyed blonde, she was wearing a pair of tight, drainpipe jeans that made her legs look like sticks, a mauve shirt and a white tank top. The make-up on her face was applied with the delicacy of roadworks and did little to hide the bruising, or the emptiness, around her eyes. A cigarette dangled from tightly pursed lips as she flipped some sausages in a smoking pan, she looked across at her husband, expressionless for a moment, and then a light flickered somewhere in her eyes. 'f.u.c.k you, Sean.'

On the sofa Kevin Norrell tensed. He knew what was about to happen next. On the television screen Barbara Good was telling her husband off for not wiping his wellies before coming into her kitchen. In his kitchen his father was slapping his wife openhanded across the mouth, opening up her lip to bleed afresh. Her screams of abuse mingled with his father shouting back at her, slapping the side of her head like a contrapuntal melody. And suddenly Kevin Norrell had had enough. Tom and Barbara Good might not have a television, but he did, and all he wanted to do was watch it.

The thin boy uncurled himself and stood up from the sofa. At school they called him Pencil Norrell. A gangly boy, tall for his age, his head disproportionately large, a head his neck seemed to struggle to hold up. Once of the older boys had stuck a condom over his head, and laughed as he almost suffocated. Pencil Norrell with a rubber top!

Kevin walked over to the kitchen table and picked up the almost empty bottle of cheap vodka that was stood on it. Lipstick marks smeared the spiralled gla.s.s at the top. He held it for a moment listening to the sound of his parents' invective mixing with the cutting bray of Tom Good's laugh. Then he smashed it against the wall. His parents stopped, and looked back at him astonished, their mouths agape like cartoon characters.

Sean Norrell was the first to find voice. 'What the f.u.c.k you think you're doing?'

And Kevin Norrell punched the jagged, broken bottle forward, as hard as he could, stabbing it into his father's thigh. Sean Norrell squealed like a snared rabbit and dropped to his knees, his hands cupping the wound, watching horrified as blood spilled through his spread fingers.

Thirty-two years later on and Norrell held up his own hand, letting the shower water run through his fingers, shaking his head as if to clear the memories.

His father hadn't died that night. The damage to his thigh was excruciating but treatable, an inch higher and it would have been his groin, the surgeon had pointed out, and that would have been a lot more serious. Sent home from hospital he managed to sell the remaining lump of cannabis resin he had left and pay Mickey Ryan most of what he owed him, not enough to save himself from a beating, mind, and the boys who gave him it laughed as they remembered that he had been nearly bottled in the nuts by his own son. They made sure to give him a kick or two in the groin before they were done. The kicking reopened the wound and Sean Norrell, rather than seeking medical attention, simply self-medicated with cheap whisky and strong lager and the wound became infected. He died some weeks later from septicaemia.

Norrell turned the shower off and wrapped his towel around himself. He had been in juvenile detention when he had heard the news of his father's death, and if he had shed a tear at the time it was certainly not through grief. As he left the shower block he nodded at a thickset man who occupied the cell next door to his. The man didn't meet his eye and Norrell knew it meant something. But he was ready. The time was long past when Kevin Norrell was going to be anybody's b.i.t.c.h. That interfering, b.a.s.t.a.r.d Irish copper was going to make sure of that.

Jack Delaney shrugged. 'So he's not happy where he is. Why should we give a monkey's toss?'

'He claims he knew nothing about Walker's paedophile activities. He fears for his safety at Bayfield.'

'The sooner that s.h.i.te is put down like a rabid dog the better, you ask me.'

'Not too soon. Norrell claims to know something about your wife's death. That's his bargaining chip. He says he'll only speak to you.'

'And you'll let me do it?'

'I will if you're back on the force.' Diane dug into her pocket and pulled out an unopened letter. 'I never processed your resignation, Jack. Far as anyone knows you've been on extended leave these last weeks.' She smiled once more. 'Emotional problems.'

'You must have been pretty sure about me.'

Diane held the smile like a sniper cradles a rifle. 'Men might not be to my taste, Jack. Doesn't stop me understanding them pretty d.a.m.n well.'

Delaney finished his pint and stood up.

'Where are you going?'

'I'm going to talk to him.'

Campbell shook her head. 'Not today. I've arranged the interview for tomorrow morning. Come on, cowboy. Sit down, I'll get you another pint.'

Diane Campbell picked up his empty gla.s.s and headed for the bar, threading her way through the group of young men who had now started singing, 'Get 'em down you Zulu warrior, get 'em down you Zulu chief.' She had never understood what the song was about, and the prospect of seeing a naked man, however young and fit, held as much attraction for her as a Cherry Cola held for Jack Delaney. She waited at the bar for the drinks and looked back at him. She had put her career on the line keeping him in his job. Bringing down Superintendent Walker, however guilty he might have been, had not enamoured Delaney to the senior bra.s.s. In fact she had to outright lie to the powers that be to keep him out of jail, let alone keep his warrant card. Possession of an unlicensed firearm was not looked upon with favour, not to mention the little matter of nearly killing one of her sergeants. That the sergeant in question, Eddie Bonner, helped to cover up Walker's activities was neither here nor there. Sergeant Bonner was dead and, whatever forensic pathologist Kate Walker might think, the dead did not make good witnesses. Diane handed the barmaid the correct change, flashed her a flirty smile then walked back to Delaney carrying the drinks carefully through the packed bar. It might very well come back and bite her on her bony a.r.s.e, but she reckoned she had done the right thing. Delaney was a good man to have in her camp, she knew that much about him if little else.

Diane handed the Irishman his pint, spying the barely contained violence in brown eyes and figured Norrell better not be yanking on the cowboy's lariat.

Kevin lay on the top bunk in his cell squeezing an exercise ball, the tendons of his hand standing out like ropes of wire as he contracted it. The man below him fidgeted nervously. Norrell didn't blame him. Like the man in the shower, he wouldn't meet his eyes. Something was in the air. He could almost taste the tension. Norrell smiled humorously as he squeezed the ball again. Whatever it was he would be ready to meet it, or die trying. One way or another he was getting out of prison.

Diane Campbell glanced across at the pub windows, noticing that the rain had eased up a little. She sipped on her third gla.s.s of mineral water and looked across at Delaney. There was a gla.s.sy look in his eyes now, less anger and a softer focus. Not surprising since had moved on to drinking Scotch with his Guinness, for some reason insisting on Glenmorangie rather than his favoured Bushmills, and had had six or seven doubles. She wasn't sure that he hadn't slipped in a quick one or two when she had gone to the Ladies. Never mind about the ban on smoking in pubs, what about putting enough cubicles in and banning women from using the place like a lounge for gossip? She didn't envy a man his p.e.n.i.s, that was for sure, but she did admire its functional practicality. She swallowed her drink. She was desperate for a cigarette. Diane looked at Delaney pointedly. 'Come on, cowboy, drink up. I'm taking you home.

Delaney looked at her steadily, the very faintest of slurs in his voice. 'I've got my car outside.'

'Yeah, and that's where it's staying. You're not causing anyone else's death this month. Not on my watch.'

Delaney laughed. 'Did you really just say "not on my watch", Diane?'

'You heard it, partner. The mule is staying parked right where you left it, and I'm taking you back to the High Chaparral.'

Delaney shook his head as he stood up. 'Just drop me off at a Tube station.'

'Which one?'

'Northern Line.' He drained his pint of Guinness, coaxed the last drop of whisky from his gla.s.s into his mouth and walked with her to the door. He was almost balanced.

Kate Walker didn't normally take the Tube. It wasn't so much that she was a sn.o.b, she just didn't like the crammed-in, close proximity of people. It wasn't just the look of them or the smell of them a which was bad enough with their wet, rain-sodden clothes a but she knew what people were capable of, the extent of their random cruelties. As a forensic pathologist she knew that far better than most. If she had learned the hard way that you couldn't trust the people you were related to or worked with . . . then you sure as h.e.l.l couldn't trust strangers. She wouldn't be taking the Tube at all, in fact, but her car was booked in at the garage for a service and an MOT, and her mechanic wouldn't be dropping it back at her house until the early evening. So she had gone by train and taxi to the cemetery for the funeral earlier that afternoon of the caretaker who had been murdered in the course of Delaney's last case. She was pleased she had been able to take flowers for the grave, but in all other ways the journey had been wasted. She had hoped to be able to speak to Jack, discuss what happened with them, but she might as well have been speaking to the dead caretaker for the amount of emotional response she got from Delaney. The prospect of going straight home to an empty house had depressed her even more and so she had spent the rest of the afternoon shopping and buying nothing. Nothing fitted. Nothing was right. Nothing shifted the black cloud of her mood. And so here she was now, stuck on the Tube with a bunch of people she neither knew nor felt any inclination to know.

She looked down at her court shoes. Expensive, chic, s.e.xy, she thought. Black suited her colouring. The shoes were now spattered with mud and rain and the shine had come off them, just like the shine had come off her day.

The train juddered to a halt, mid-tunnel, and the lights in the carriage flickered and dimmed before coming back up. She positioned her heel in one of the grooves that ran along the floor and swivelled her foot, wondering when they were going to update the trains. It took just over a couple of hours to get from Paris to St Pancras on the Eurostar fast link nowadays, but it could take an age just to go a few stops on this d.a.m.ned service. The lights dimmed again; low and yellow. Kate looked along the length of the carriage. There was something curiously Gothic about the Northern Line, she thought. Other lines, other stations had a late-Victorian sensibility to them, she knew that, but the Northern Line in places had a quintessentially spooky feel to it. Wood and bra.s.s and strange lamps, transportation by Hammer House of Horror.

The train shuddered and clanked as the wheels started turning again. She looked out of the window as the train flashed noisily through the tunnel once more and pulled her coat tight about her. It was early evening and the train was full, its motion, as it rocked from side to side, throwing the overweight man next to her against her body every time the train rounded a corner. He didn't seem too keen to move away, either, perfectly happy to invade her personal s.p.a.ce. She sighed and gritted her teeth.

She was in a foul mood. Jack Delaney, the son of a b.i.t.c.h. She didn't know why she let him get to her, but he did. Kate Walker, in her own opinion, was, if anything, a woman born of logic, of reason. She was clinical, sharp; her judgement a precision instrument. Only that instrument was letting her down lately, and she didn't know how to fix it. She looked out of the window again, seeing her reflection smudgy and blurred, and that was exactly how she felt. Smudgy and blurred. She wasn't sure quite who she was any more. She leaned against the side of the train, putting as much s.p.a.ce between her and the fat man as possible and felt a shiver run up her spine. Somebody was walking on her grave. Dancing on it. She looked around expecting to see someone watching her, but, if they were, they had looked away. Looking away was the English virtue after all. Never get involved, never show your emotions, never get off the boat. Maybe Jack Delaney was more English than he would have liked to admit. There was a man who was never going to get off the boat.