The Heights - Parker Bilal

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mean, I don’t want to be judgemental.’ Another micro glance in Drake’s direction felt like a cautious feeler. A means of gauging whether he might be treading on sensitive ground. Drake was silent. ‘I just have a feeling about this guy.’

      ‘A feeling?’ Drake fought the urge to laugh. ‘Meaning you didn’t like the cut of his jib?’

      ‘The cut of his …?’ echoed Foulkes.

      ‘Do you have a name?’ Crane interjected quickly. ‘For the uncle?’

      ‘No, sorry.’ Foulkes shook his head. ‘I only met him once. He wasn’t happy for her to be around men. I got the feeling he was a little jealous. I mean, I think he wanted her for himself.’

      ‘He said this?’ said Crane.

      ‘No, he didn’t say it. But it was clear, in the subtext.’

      ‘The subtext?’ Drake exhaled slowly. ‘So, what you’re saying is that this nameless bearded male relative planned to throw her over his shoulder and cart her off to Arabialand?’

      ‘Are you taking the mickey?’ Foulkes was offended. ‘Look, I don’t have to put up with this.’ He appealed to Crane. ‘I actually thought I was doing you a favour coming here. You know, your father said …’

      ‘Hold on.’ Crane lifted a hand. ‘You spoke to my father about me?’

      ‘I came here partly because I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t doing well.’ Foulkes sighed as he got to his feet and headed for the door. ‘Obviously, that was a mistake.’

      ‘You seem to have trouble grasping the fact that we actually need clients,’ said Crane, when Foulkes had gone.

      She had walked Foulkes to the door. Drake was standing by the window watching their lost client walking towards his car. A nice little two-door Porsche, white with a racing stripe down the middle. It looked like a later version of the 911, not as stylish as the original. The kind of car that screamed insecurity. Holding open the door, Foulkes paused to look straight up at Drake. It wasn’t a kind look.

      ‘In the Met you were paid whether you solved the crime or not. Out here in the real world, it’s a little different.’

      ‘Right.’ Drake leaned his weight on the window sill and folded his arms. ‘What exactly is your connection to this guy?’

      ‘We’ve been over this.’ Crane shooed him away as she went behind her desk. ‘Our families were friends, back in the days when I had family.’

      Drake waited, expecting her to go on, but Crane was looking at her wristwatch.

      ‘Oh, what the hell. Is it too early to go for a drink?’

      ‘Not by my watch.’

      3

      The Moonstone was quiet at that hour. The only customers being a skinny, white-haired man in a cloth cap reading a well-creased newspaper and a postman furtively downing half a lager. Drake fetched a large white wine for Crane and a bottle of IPA for himself. They sat in the far corner.

      ‘What happened to your hand, by the way?’ she asked, indicating the bandage.

      ‘A mishap in the kitchen. Opening a tin, if you must know. Don’t let anyone tell you cooking is fun.’

      ‘I’ll try to remember that.’ Crane paused as she stared into her glass. ‘He’ll call back.’

      ‘What makes you so sure?’

      ‘The air of desperation about him.’

      Drake wasn’t entirely convinced, but he let it go. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see Foulkes again. A ray of sunshine sneaked through the window, briefly lifting the tired air.

      ‘So, Sir Edmund? You kept that quiet.’

      Crane swallowed two large gulps out of her glass.

      ‘It’s not the kind of thing that comes up in conversation.’

      ‘Right, but to be clear, we are talking about Edmund Crane? The Iraq War? The fake dossier?’

      Crane winced. ‘No need to rub it in.’

      Drake was surprised at how much the subject still angered him. It was a long time ago and Ray had nothing to do with it, but still. ‘Sorry,’ he managed to say, quite evenly. ‘I just never saw that coming.’

      ‘Family. What can I say?’

      It was a little more than that. Three years ago, Drake had read the Chilcot report into the Iraq war. Not that he’d expected to find any answers. He’d been in the Met for long enough to have pretty low expectations when it came to bringing politicians to book. They lied and then they were forgiven, or forgotten. It was the name of the game. He never voted, for that same reason. There wasn’t a single one of them that he trusted.

      Drake had seen the consequences of their actions. He’d lived through it. The roadside bombs, the men, women and children covered in ash and grey dust. The bodies of mates twisted into unrecognisable corpses in a split second. At a certain point it felt as if there was no enemy, just death. The hot metal of destruction thrust through blood and bone.

      He’d read the report because he wanted to know who or what had sent them to their deaths. There wasn’t a day went by when he didn’t think what he would like to do to the people who had engineered the war. He wanted to understand, to come to terms with what he’d seen out there. Later on he realised that he never would, not fully.

      One thing he had learned was the name Edmund Crane. One of the foremost architects of the intelligence dossier that linked Saddam Hussein to WMDs. The dossier was a sham, a piece of imaginative fantasy designed to dig into the fears of the nation, offering a forty-five-minute countdown before weapons of mass destruction could be launched. If there was one person in Drake’s eyes who deserved a long and slow death in the lowest depths of hell, it was Edmund Crane.

      ‘I haven’t seen him in over ten years,’ Crane said, adding, ‘Not after what he did to my mother.’

      Drake was beginning to get a sense of how deep this ran with her. He watched her get up and walk over to the bar. He waited until she came back with two large whiskies. So far he’d barely touched his drink, but he sensed this wasn’t the moment to quibble.

      ‘When Blair decided to throw his lot in with Bush’s crusade to rid the Middle East of anyone willing to stand up to America, my father was the one who constructed the fake dossier.’

      ‘Tell me about it. I read the report.’

      ‘Let me ask you a question.’ Crane sipped her drink. ‘What made you join up?’

      ‘It seemed like a way out.’ Drake sighed. ‘I was trying to get away from something.’

      ‘You didn’t believe in the war?’

      ‘I didn’t believe in anything.’ Drake studied the golden colour in his glass before correcting himself. ‘Maybe I just needed a place to belong.’

      Ray nodded. They were times when she thought she understood him, perhaps more than he realised.

      ‘I never figured out what brought my parents together,’ she said, going back into her own thoughts. Marco Foulkes had walked into the office and suddenly this. Everything she had spent so long getting away from. ‘The whole thing has always been a mystery to me. Why would two people so clearly unsuited to one another get together.’

      ‘Maybe it was just instant attraction. No logic to love.’

      ‘Of course not. Besides, this was the seventies. They were lost in some kind of late hippiedom. They thought they could do anything.’

      ‘I think drugs had something to do with that.’

      ‘In his case, for sure. He was a pot head for years.’

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