Murder Club - Mark Pearson [19]
‘What?’ Bob Wilkinson asked her as he stopped walking and looked at her curiously.
‘Nothing,’ she said, keeping the smile on her face. She couldn’t imagine what the perennially cranky police constable would make of her thoughts, or her plans for that night. She certainly had no intention of telling him. Her private life she kept exactly that. And when she did attend the kind of clubs like the one she was going to later, she always wore a mask and went incognito. A sexy mask, mind. She was not only a doctor but a police surgeon, after all, not the sort of thing she wanted to be public knowledge. Fetish wasn’t quite the new gay yet. Hell, gay wasn’t even the new gay in the Metropolitan Police. She had lost count of the number of women who had hit on her. Some of them married, some with boyfriends, others not. But a lot of them asking her to keep it strictly between themselves. There were some women who were out and proud, of course. Chief Inspector Diane Campbell and her gorgeous girlfriend, who worked in the evidence area back in White City, for one. But a lot of gay women – and men come to that – kept that part of their life separate from work and, in all honesty, she didn’t blame them. It was a lot easier for her to come out as a student going on to be a doctor than it was for a cadet over at Hendon.
‘Down here,’ said PC Wilkinson, snapping her out of her thoughts and heading her off the main drag down a small cul-de-sac of a lane. There were a few shops, closed for the night now; some offices where homeless people were huddled together with their backs against the wall, taking some small comfort, she assumed, from the heat emanating from it. She looked up at the night sky, heavily swollen with snow, and wondered why they didn’t make it to one of the homeless shelters. Maybe they would later. She fished in her pocket and came up with a couple of pound coins. She threw them onto the blanket laid out in front of a young woman seated with a man and another woman, both much older than her. The girl looked up at her. She had the face of an angel, Laura found herself thinking. A malnourished, haunted-eyed angel. Homeless girl by way of Margaret O’Brien. But the girl’s eyes were unfocused as well as enormous and sad, the pupils dilated and huge. God knows what cocktail of booze and pills she was on. Laura wanted to stop and speak with her but the girl mumbled some thanks and closed her eyes, unable to keep them open, and leaned up against the older man next to her.
Bob Wilkinson pointed ahead some twenty yards further on to the Chinese restaurant. An elderly Chinese woman was waving angrily at them. In front of her restaurant window a homeless man lay sprawled on his back, a broken whisky bottle on the pavement near him, his arms outstretched. Cruciform. A hobo Christ nailed to a London side-street.
‘He piss on window,’ the Chinese woman was saying as they approached, still waving her hands around. ‘All the time he come and piss on window, and police do nothing!’
‘Yeah, well, we’re here now, missus,’ said Bob Wilkinson, trying to be placating, but his gruff tone did little to assuage the indignant old woman.
‘Yeah, you here now!’ she continued, spluttering with rage. ‘Then you let him out, and then he come and piss on my window. People eating dinner here! How you like him to come and piss on you when you having your roast beef and gravy?’
Bob looked down at the man lying near his feet for a moment, and then back