Chapter 15

A Dim Dawning Light

"Thanks Chas," said Makepeace softly, "I owe you one."

"Actually," replied Chas in equally measured tones, although for a very different reason, "I think you owe me several for this."

He glanced about him furtively, guilt already beginning to weigh heavily, even before the deed had been done. "When do you think you'll make it back here?" he asked.

"I'm not even going to bother trying with the roads as they are. I'll wait here for you to ring me back. Write down the number would you?"

"What?" he hissed loudly down the receiver. "It could be hours before they get back to me. You can't stand about inside a bloody phone box in this weather!"

"There's your angle then. Tell them you have an officer in danger of getting hyperthermia and you need a fast response time."

Chas reckoned her flippancy was down to nerves which did nothing to appease his own.

"I'm really not comfortable with this, Harry. My balls are on the chopping block here."

"And I can't tell you how much I appreciate what you're doing," Harry placated in earnest. "You know if I had your access levels I'd be doing this myself, Chas."

"Okay, okay," he sighed. "I know you wouldn't be asking without serious justification."

"Exactly. Believe me, something is very wrong in that flat and I'm really not sure how to go about getting to the bottom of it by myself." Harry tried to swallow down her fears as she said, "Quite frankly, Greg Roosa scares me. Lord only knows what he might be capable of."

She gave him the number and thanked him again for consenting to do her 'dirty work'. She pushed open the door of the telephone box and went to stand a few feet away, absently knawing at the skin at the side of her thumbnail.

It was bitingly cold, standing out here in the heavily layered blanket of snow. She was on a little residential side street where the result of each recent snowfall was very much in evidence. Virgin snow sat pristine, deep and heavy atop the high hedges that ran from here to the fifth house down. The foliage gave way then to black painted metal railings that stood out starkly against the white backdrop of the small, neat front gardens. A trickle of watery sunshine leaked from a grey-blue sky but it was enough to bring forth a vista of sparkling crushed diamonds from out of the frozen landscape. Everywhere glistened, everything shone, be it with fresh, pure unadulterated snow or the hard and compacted ice that ran the length of the road.

Harry listened to the empty hollowness of the deserted street and for a moment was able to relish the peacefulness. It was the sort of blanketed quiet that you rarely came across in London.

But then she was suddenly back in the quiet of that room, with Dempsey and Toni and the disturbingly unpredictable Greg. He had led her into the dimly lit bedroom where the two of them lay sleeping but there had been the strangest atmosphere. How could sleeping people create an atmosphere like that? After insisting that Greg let her at least see her partner, she had felt extremely uncomfortable gazing down upon him lying there, as though she were intruding and really had no right to be there at all. What was she supposed to do? She had tentatively reached out her hand to brush away an errant lock of hair from his forehead and her fingers had slid slickly across cold, perspiring skin. She had heard him breathing, breathing too deeply and had watched his lips move feverishly. Was there something unnatural in the way he was sleeping? A gut feeling told her she was right.

She had looked across at Toni then, screwing up her eyes in the semi-darkness and was taken aback by the pinched, waxy appearance of her. Gone was the stunning vibrancy and beauty of the woman she had spoken to in the club the other night and in its place was… nothing.

An uneasy few moments had followed then. It was almost as though Greg had called her bluff. She had all but demanded to be allowed into the bedroom and then, only a minute later, her demands met, she was uncertain how she should react. There was something wrong, she was convinced of it – she could see it for God's sake but she was no closer to proving it. Had she expected to find the pair of them writhing in agony and frothing at the mouth?

Greg had just stood by the door, watching her with a fixed, smug expression, defying her to find fault with the situation.

Harry's attention was drawn to a couple walking arm in arm down the centre of the road and ridiculously, she imagined herself with her arm linked through Dempsey's.

They would be talking about something, unrelated to work, light-hearted and chatty. The subject of the conversation was irrelevant, it was more the feel , the easiness between them. That was what Harry liked and it was what had made that afternoon the weekend before last so perfect.

She had never had a friend like James before. She smiled to herself at the use of his first name – who would have thought she would ever be applying a Christian name to that heathen?

But he was a friend, wasn't he? He was certainly more than just a colleague. But their relationship had progressed in such a way as to make it nigh-on impossible for Harry to decipher any longer. She had tried to analyse it and had finally come up with the theory that things were different between them simply because he no longer set out to deliberately embarrass or belittle her in front of others. Did that imply a new-found respect for her? The jibes he made at her expense were often more a joke for them both to share rather than a personal attack these days.

Why was that?

In her more cynical moments, she might find herself wondering if it was a particularly cunning route to fulfilling his self-confessed ambition of bedding her.

That cosy, chocolatey Sunday at his flat had given him the perfect opportunity to try it on but he hadn't – didn't even come close. At the end of the night he had gone downstairs with her and walked her to her car like the perfect gentleman. Not even a peck on the cheek. That said, the way his eyes had caressed her lips had moved her with the passion of a thousand kisses. That unmistakeable 'look' that had passed between them had evidently had a profound effect on James too because when he bade her goodnight, it was with a voice husky with emotion.

Harry had driven home feeling light-headed and restless. Dempsey would have jokingly accused her of being sexually frustrated. The trouble was, he would have been right.

She was startled back to the present by the sound of two small children laughing and shrieking as they came tumbling out of the front door of a house on the opposite side of the street.

Harry watched them make their way along the pavement, both of them hanging from their mother's hands, dancing like puppets in their glee.

They hadn't a care in the world between them.

The cold was beginning to take hold now. Ten minutes standing in the same spot was taking its toll but pacing up and down in the snow and ice was hardly ideal.

She had left the car parked outside Dempsey's building and walked to the nearest phone box knowing it was residential parking only and as it turned out, she'd have been lucky to have made that treacherous bend without slewing into a hedge. As she had approached on foot, she had seen an Astra Estate spinning its wheels on the corner before losing control and careening into the kerb. That would have been all she needed. The thought reminded her of the accident Dempsey had had earlier in the week – his back-end violation – and it brought a smile to her lips.

"Idiot," she murmured softly, wriggling her toes against the cold.

A chill ran through her causing her to shudder and she took her hands from her coat pockets, cupping them to her mouth and expelling warm air into them.

Checking her watch again, she noted it was still only fifteen minutes since she'd spoken to Chas. He'd warned that her wait could be hours rather than minutes.

She fished inside her handbag and drew out the red woollen gloves she'd removed before she made the phonecall. Not that she was superstitious but maybe putting them back on would act as some kind of catalyst – a preternatural jump-start.

"Ring, damn you!"

It wasn't really practical though, was it, standing here indefinitely, just waiting.

Spikings would be wanting to know where she was eventually, telling Chas to get her on the R.T and she couldn't expect him to lie for her. She had already asked too much of him by getting him to go over Spiking's head and contact Captain O'Grady at Dempsey's old New York precinct. She sensed that like Spikings he was dubious to say the least about Harry's suspicions. But she had persisted and maybe something in her voice had caused him to relent. If she was wrong about Greg, she was more than happy to take the fall but if she'd done nothing, just sat back and left Dempsey's welfare in Greg's hands, she would never forgive herself if something bad happened.

When the phone began to ring, her heart flew up into her mouth. She turned and skidded slightly in her haste to scrabble back into the box.

"Chas?" she queried neutrally.

"Listen. I've got good news and I've got bad news," he began.

"Please don't ask me which I'd like first," she said testily.

But Chas ploughed on. "O'Grady wasn't around and I got passed from pillar to post…"

"But you've got somebody to agree to do a P.N.C check on him haven't you, or whatever their equivalent is?"

"That's the thing, I didn't need to in the end…"

"What are you talking about?" she exploded. "That was the whole bloody point!"

"Just hold on a minute," Chas calmed, "I didn't need to because according to one…" he was reading from his notes and there was a pause whilst he picked out the name, "Detective Chabbie Tok…"

Harry rolled her eyes, exasperated by what she deemed to be irrelevant detail.

"…it's already been done."

"What?" Harry drew herself up perfectly straight. "When?"

"Apparently his name was run through the N.Y.P.D database this morning. Instigated by our Chief Superintendent Spikings and sanctioned by O'Grady."

So he'd taken her seriously afterall.

"And?"

"And nothing. Your Greg Roosa fella doesn't exist."

"You mean he doesn't have a criminal record?"

"No, I mean he doesn't exist! They got a copy of the passenger list for flight LGA376 departing from La Guardia airport last Wednesday. Toni Lovász and Greg Roosa checked in together and were seated on the plane together but there's no such person as Greg Roosa. False passport."

"Shit."

Harry was suddenly all over the place, her chest heaving as Chas's words hit her, confirming what she had tried to convince herself was pure fantasy on her part.

"Looks like that hunch of yours could be right."

Harry unconsciously gripped the receiver tighter as she asked, "So who is he?" and then speaking her thoughts aloud, "And does Toni know who he really is?"

"They're doing some investigating…"

"Shit!" she said again, the word crystalizing on the air as it was exhaled.

Picking up on the note of panic in her voice, Chas ploughed on. "Like Detective Tok said, Toni Lovász is one of their own, they're on it, the moment they turn up any information, they'll let us know."

"And that's it? That's all they have – just that whoever Greg Roosa is, he's travelling with false documents?"

"They're asking around in her department, talking to colleagues she's talked to about their trip to the U.K. Somebody's bound to have some information on him."

"And in the meantime?"

"Think that's up to you, Harry," Chas said. "How do you wanna play it?"

But she'd already decided on a course of action.

"I'm going to organize a doctor's visit and I'm going to go back to Dempsey's flat to wait until they've been seen. God knows why I didn't do it yesterday," she berated herself.

"You honestly think they're in danger?"

"I think he's poisoning them Chas. Don't ask me why but I think, for some reason, he means them serious harm."

Chas had his eye trained on Spikings, viewing him through the glass partitioning where he sat behind his desk on the telephone.

"Is it wise to go back on your own?" Chas queried, watching Spikings slam the receiver down and then with both hands clenching the edge of the desk, rear up out of his chair.

"Well I'm not going to leave him in the hands of a potential lunatic!" Her voice had risen sharply and she checked herself. "I'm quite capable of handling the situation and if the worst comes to the worst, I'm also armed."

"I know, I know, just don't go taking any risks, that's all I'm saying."

Looking quickly at her watch, Harry said, "I'll call in before close of play tonight."

Spikings was on his way out of his office.

"You do that. Got to go. Boss is on the warpath," and he smartly put the phone down.

But Harry had already ended the call and was anxiously leafing through the slim address book she kept in her handbag, her index finger coming to rest on the telephone number of her G.P., Dr. Malcolm Herman.