Thicker Than Water

‘If you were down in South London that night, you might not want to tell us about it.’

‘I can’t even remember the last time I was south of the river,’ I said. ‘Well, I mean before this thing broke.’

‘Days? Weeks? Months?’

‘Months. Must have been.’

‘How many months?’

‘At least six.’

Basquiat didn’t answer, but she did finally unzip the document wallet. On top of the papers inside was a small stack of A4-sized photographs, one of which she held up for me to see. It was a grainy enlargement from a badly framed original, taken at night without a flash but with some kind of light-enhancement technique that made everything into an over-contrasted soot-and-chalk cartoon.

It showed a white Bedford van, stationary at a traffic light. Someone had drawn a ring around the registration plate in thick black marker.

Basquiat flicked that photo down onto my bedsheets like a blackjack dealer, revealing the second one behind it. This was a zoom in from the previous image, focusing on the driver.

He was hunched over the wheel, squinting sideways at the red light that had stopped him in his tracks as though he could make it turn green just by facing it down. The resolution was surprisingly good: it was me at the wheel, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt. Basquiat dealt me that one too and showed me the third: a close-up on my face, the image looking a little washed out and raggedy-edged this time. So did I, for that matter. My mother would have said ‘Poor Felix!’ by automatic reflex.

‘Speed camera?’ I asked, conversationally.

‘Do you see any motion blur? Bus-lane camera, Castor. St George’s Road, Elephant and Castle. You tried to overtake a truck in the left-hand lane and got caught by the red at just the wrong moment. This was three weeks ago. The night of the third. ‘

I handed her the first two photos back. Might as well keep the whole set together.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You got me. Being vague on dates isn’t evidence of murder, though.’

‘No, just of having something you needed to lie about.

We traced the reg back to a dodgy little runt in Cheshunt. Name of Packer. The worst kind of dodgy little runt, in a lot of ways - the kind that’s on parole, and caves in at the first whiff of a search warrant. He was telling us first of all that he’d hired the van out to a Greek gentleman named Economides. But I reminded him that every time a lag on probation actively colludes in a criminal enterprise, a fairy dies.