Death Message Page 11

  Turning from the doorstep – Skinner watching them all the way and his wife peeking, somewhat nervously around him, from further back down the hall – Thorne and Holland were all but flattened by a big man barrelling across the front garden.

  Holland held up a hand. ‘Easy, mate.’

  The man stopped but stood his ground, waiting for Holland to move aside and let him past.

  Thorne could smell the Job on him.

  Skinner stepped down on to the path, made the introductions. Richard Rawlings was an old mate, he said. A fellow masochist who was off to the New Den with him to see Millwall destroy the beautiful game.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Thorne said. ‘And he just happened to pop in four hours before kick-off, did he?’

  ‘I don’t see as it’s your business,’ Rawlings said.

  Skinner smiled at Thorne and shrugged. ‘You know how it goes,’ he said. ‘Always good to have a bit of moral support when a couple of lads like you come knocking and you’re not sure what’s happening.’

  Thorne smiled back. ‘What is it you’re not sure about, exactly?’ When Skinner’s answer was not forthcoming, Thorne turned his attention to the new man. ‘Should have got here half an hour ago. We’re just leaving, I’m afraid. I’m sure your friend will fill you in.’

  Rawlings grinned and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. He had a large head, bad skin. A well-tended gut hanging over the top of his grey tracksuit bottoms. He moved, none too politely, past Thorne and Holland, jabbing a thumb towards the main road while the other worked at a lighter. ‘Traffic’s fucked all along Green Lanes,’ he said. He nodded to Skinner. ‘Sorry, mate…’

  As Thorne and Holland moved away, Thorne was aware of Rawlings sauntering into the house to be warmly greeted by Skinner’s wife. And of Skinner’s eyes on his back, as Holland opened the gate and they stepped on to the street.

  Holland had picked Thorne up first thing. They’d eaten bacon sandwiches on the drive from Kentish Town and found a parking space in the street next to Skinner’s. Now, the wind was picking up as they walked back to Holland’s car. Newly fallen leaves skittering across the pavement, and older ones gathered into a slick, mud-coloured mulch in gutters and against walls.

  ‘What did you make of Skinner?’ Holland asked.

  ‘I think, bearing in mind what we told him, he made a very good job of not looking shit scared.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, he’s a fucking idiot then.’

  ‘What about his boyfriend?’

  ‘Like he said. “Moral support”.’

  ‘Bollocks.’ Holland stepped to one side, let a woman with a buggy walk between them. ‘We went round to tell him to look out for himself. Maybe save the twat’s life. What’s he need back-up for?’

  Thorne had to admit it was a fair question. Skinner hadn’t struck him as the type who would need his hand holding. Rawlings had been spiky all right, but the plain fact was that you didn’t have to be DPS to put the wind up other police officers. Or to put backs up. Whatever the situation, coppers were never happy being on the receiving end.

  Holland took out his car keys as they approached a red Astra that still looked brand new. ‘He wasn’t keen on having any protection, was he?’

  ‘Sort it out with Brigstocke when you get back,’ Thorne said. ‘Skinner might have a point about being OK at work, but we should get someone at the house tonight and over the weekend.’

  ‘So where are you going?’

  Thorne walked around to the passenger door, rubbed theatrically at a dirty spot on the car’s roof. ‘More fun and games, mate. Can you drop me off at Paddington?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s on the way back, more or less, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Cheers, Dave.’

  It hadn’t taken him too long to find them.

  They’d said enough, back when they were setting him up, for Brooks to work out that they were based in north-west London, so he’d had somewhere to start. Even after all his years out of the game, he’d still got enough contacts with high-level firms to get a decent list of coppers’ pubs in the area: Camden, Golders Green, Edgware, Muswell Hill…

  He’d done a fair amount of drinking. He’d chatted to landlords and bar staff; to regulars with their own tankards behind the bar and warrant cards in their jacket pockets. He’d poked around and asked questions; leaned across bars to get a closer look at the photos of customers pinned up among the optics and the dry-roasted nuts.

  The faces imprinted on his memory would be a bit older now, he knew that, so he’d tried to age up the descriptions. Although he’d been given a few names, none was mentioned more than once. He took to telling people that his dad had been a custody skipper at a number of different stations – Kentish Town, Swiss Cottage, Holborn. Said that cancer was getting a grip on the poor old sod, and that he’d thought, you know, it would be a nice idea to get all his old man’s mates together while he still had the chance.

  They’d loved all that, the sentimental twats. Getting teary over their lager-tops and throwing ideas at him. Several people had offered to help, to pitch in and maybe raise a few quid. Then somebody had suggested The Job; told him that it might be a good way to trace his dad’s old muckers and that the paper was archived online…

  It had only taken a couple of days after that. Hour after hour poring over pages on the Internet, until he’d finally seen a face he recognised; one that he would never forget. Posing like a prat, outside a station with French detectives who’d come across from Paris on some exchange scheme. He wouldn’t forget that headline in a hurry either: THE GENDARME OF THE LAW.

  Now he had a name, a real one, and from then on it was a piece of piss. He’d rung around stations. Asked for him by name until he got a hit. Then all he’d had to do was watch, and wait; feeling fairly sure that once he’d started keeping tabs on one, the other fucker would turn up sooner or later.

  Jennings and Squire.

  He’d written to Angie the day it had all come together. It felt like it was serious then; that he was really going to go through with it. It had been one thing sitting in his cell, burning with it, making plans. But then, seeing them, the bastards responsible for everything, he’d known he would have to do exactly what he’d been fantasising about. So he’d written and explained what he had in mind.

  And asked for her blessing.

  Now he needed to get on. These were the ones that mattered. The bikers had it coming, no question, but there were others who shared the blame. No, who shouldered most of it. The ones who’d taken Angie and Robbie away to begin with; the ones who’d put him inside.

  He trotted down the steps at Hammersmith Tube station. Half an hour on the Piccadilly Line to Finsbury Park, then he’d walk from there. He’d already scouted the place out, sorted himself a way in.

  He drifted down on the escalator, wondering what Detective Inspector Tom Thorne was making of it all; asking himself why he was even bothering to do what Nicklin had asked.

  The shit with the phones and the pictures.

  Because he’d said he would, end of story. There wasn’t too much he believed in, but not grassing and paying your debts were what made you staunch, and people had always been able to count on him. Nicklin was a twisted fucker, no question, and not the sort he’d normally have anything to do with. But things changed in prison. The slate tended to get wiped clean once you were inside. Favours mattered. Small kindnesses mounted up, little things, and the bloke had been all right with him, so it had seemed a simple enough favour to grant in return. Nicklin had a way of making people do him favours, do the things he wanted. Some of the screws even.

  Besides which, Brooks didn’t really care; certainly not about the likes of Thorne. Coppers hadn’t been his favourite people, even before any of this had happened, and sympathy was something he knew he would never feel again.

  He dug in his pocket for the change to buy a newspaper, thinking about paying back what was owe
d. And about how you couldn’t let down the people who counted on you, even after they’d gone.

  ELEVEN

  ‘It suits you, sitting there,’ Nicklin said. ‘You look… comfortable.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Five years ago. You’d like to have been the one sitting where the judge was, wouldn’t you? Putting me away…’

  They were seated in the Adjudications Room on Long Lartin’s Segregation Unit. There were no legal visits on a Saturday, and normally a request for any kind of visit at such short notice would have been denied. But Thorne had explained the situation to everyone necessary; had sucked up shamelessly to the prison’s police liaison officer; and had finally managed to wangle a session with Stuart Nicklin, albeit in somewhat unusual surroundings.

  The room was, in essence, a miniature court.

  Here was where all the prison’s internal disciplinary matters were settled and punishments meted out when necessary. The room was high-ceilinged and windowless. Dark furniture on a thick blue carpet; a gold pattern snaking around its edge below the wood-panelled walls. Thorne was sitting at the centre of a T-shaped table where the governor, or more often his deputy, would preside. There was a metal water jug and glasses on a tray. There were rows of notebooks and pencils.

  ‘I think the judge made a pretty good job of it,’ Thorne said.

  Nicklin stared at him from ten feet away, at the tail end of the ‘T’. ‘But how many times do they fuck up? How often does all your hard work count for nothing? It must really hurt to see people like me get off because someone gets the procedure wrong. To watch some overpaid legal team arguing that their client isn’t mentally competent to stand trial, when you know they’re as sane as you are.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far,’ Thorne said. ‘Certainly not in your case. Besides which, you didn’t get away with it.’

  ‘Can’t blame a bloke for trying though, can you?’

  Nicklin was right, of course. On those occasions when months, maybe years, of graft came to nothing in the face of ineptitude, or when the law proved itself to be more of an arsehole than an ass, it hurt like hell. Thorne’s major fear, five years before, had been that the issue of mental competence would override all others. That Nicklin would escape sentence and spend the rest of his life as patient rather than prisoner.

  Among many other things, Nicklin was a conman; an individual who could be powerfully persuasive, one whose influence had driven others to kill for no other reason than it had made him feel good. But, thankfully, the jury had seen through the ‘mad not bad’ sham. Or if not, they had decided that killing because the voices in your head told you to made you no more deserving of a fluffy pillow and paper slippers than anyone else. Made you no better than the killer who did it because of greed or racial hatred, or because someone had looked at his girlfriend.

  ‘Why does Marcus Brooks want to kill a police officer?’ The question Thorne had come here to ask.

  ‘Why not?’

  Thorne poured himself a glass of water.

  ‘Oh, right,’ Nicklin said. ‘Sorry.’ He straightened in his chair, mock-sombre. ‘All very serious now, is it? Could I just ask first: why is the life of a police officer any more important than any other? Than a little old lady’s or a child’s. Or mine.’

  ‘Now you’re just being ridiculous.’

  ‘I’m right though, aren’t I? I bet things have really gone into top gear, now it’s about a copper. I bet things are frantic.’

  ‘Did you tell Brooks to do it?’

  ‘I never tell anyone to do anything.’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘I talk to people, that’s all.’ Nicklin looked up at the ceiling. ‘Invite them to weigh up their options.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘Until they start believing the ideas you’ve put in their heads are their own.’ He remembered a superintendent telling him once that this was the essence, the trick, of good leadership. Thorne knew that the man sitting opposite him had no shortage of ideas. A dark tangle of them; barbed and brilliant.

  He took a deep breath and blinked away the face of Charlie Garner.

  ‘Tell me why I should help you.’ Nicklin scratched at the surface of the table. ‘Why should I tell you anything other than how far you can stick your questions up your arse?’

  ‘Because this is what you wanted all along, isn’t it? To get me involved enough that I’d come here looking for help. Well, I’m involved.’

  Nicklin smiled. ‘Twice in two days.’

  ‘I understand about the bikers-’

  ‘Friend of yours, is he? This police officer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it. Wouldn’t want you knocking around with too many bad apples.’

  ‘You saying he’s bent?’

  ‘Look, Marcus is hardly what you’d call a model citizen,’ Nicklin said. ‘Most decent people wouldn’t want him living next door, you know? But he didn’t murder anybody.’ He grinned. ‘He’s making up for it now, though, obviously.’

  ‘Come on, how many people in here claim to be innocent?’

  ‘Plenty. But not for six years, and not to each other.’ Nicklin leaned forward, his head only inches above the table. ‘You get to know people intimately in here. You know when to look away from someone and when to let someone in on a confidence. After a while you can tell who’s had a shit just from the smell drifting along the landing. And like I said, eventually the bright ones realise there’s no point lying.’

  Thorne took a sip of water. It was tepid; tasted metallic, old. ‘They went through all this when he was arrested: the story that he was fitted up.’

  ‘They didn’t look hard enough,’ Nicklin said. ‘Nobody believed him. But even if they had, they would have presumed that the two “police officers” were bogus – members of a rival gang or whatever.’ Despite the thick carpets and the panelling, there was the slightest of echoes: the low wheeze of Nicklin’s voice rising up from the polished surface of the table towards the elaborate cornicing and the ceiling rose. ‘Nobody considered it seriously enough to come to the more obvious conclusion.’

  Thorne didn’t need it spelling out: nobody could play the part of a bent copper better than a bent copper.

  Nicklin could see that Thorne had got it. ‘Hardly the most fiendish of plans, was it? They just gave false names. I don’t know if they had fake warrant cards, or if Marcus even bothered to ask. Doesn’t really matter now, does it?’

  ‘It’s starting to matter to quite a lot of people,’ Thorne said.

  If Nicklin was right, then clearly Marcus Brooks would not have held just the Black Dogs responsible for the death of his family. He would also have blamed the people who got him sent to jail in the first place; those whose actions had ensured that his girlfriend and son would one day become targets. That he would not be around to look after them when it happened.

  Thorne could understand why Brooks thought these men had to die. ‘I don’t suppose you know the names of these two men? Their real ones, I mean.’

  Nicklin shook his head. ‘Marcus didn’t know their real names six months ago. I’m guessing he does now, though.’

  Jennings and Squire. Thorne wondered which one Paul Skinner had been.

  ‘“Want to kill”,’ Nicklin said suddenly. ‘You said “want to kill a police officer”. So I gather that Marcus hasn’t got round to it yet.’

  ‘Well, you know, seeing as he gave us advance warning, we thought we might try to do something about it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you to get on his high horse about who deserves to live and die?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Nicklin said. ‘But as you bring it up, you can’t tell me you care quite as much about a bent copper as you do about a nice, dull, honest one, can you?’

  Thorne said nothing.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother… because unless you’ve got this fucker locked up safe and sound in one of his own cells, Marcus is go
ing to kill him.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll bear that in mind.’

  Whatever was on Thorne’s face, whether he was visibly holding his anger in check or being nakedly sarcastic, Nicklin seemed to enjoy every reaction he provoked. ‘I’m not saying he’s any kind of lethal weapon or whatever. He’s not a fucking ninja…’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘But he won’t give up. It’s very simple. You’ll be in a world of trouble unless you appreciate that.’

  Thorne was already starting to, but he let Nicklin continue. Looked past him, staring at the prints on the white wall beyond. Washed-out landscapes and hunting scenes.

  ‘I’ve seen every sort of gate fever in the last few years,’ Nicklin said. ‘Blokes going mental, starting to lose it when that magical release date appears for the first time on their Page Three calendar. Getting hyper. Doing something silly, a few of them, and blowing it at the last minute. But Marcus just looked… lighter, you know? Like he’d slipped off some sodden, shitty overcoat, so he could go running out of here that little bit quicker. Then those coppers turned up with their best bad-news faces on, and it was like something cracked open inside him. Let the bad blood out. Everything he’d spent six years looking forward to was gone, and you could see the poison spread.’ Nicklin gestured as he spoke, splaying his waxy fingers. ‘It was in his face, in the way he spoke, strung a sentence together… everything. When he finally walked out of here, he went just as quickly, but there was something very dark slopping about in his head.’

  ‘Something you stirred up.’

  ‘It drove him,’ Nicklin said. ‘And I can’t believe that you don’t understand exactly what that must be like. I know that if someone did that to you, if they took away someone you loved, you’d want to hurt them. More, probably…’

  Thorne looked up. Nicklin was staring at him; something intense, joyful in his eyes, and Thorne had to ask himself if this was more than just free character analysis. Could Nicklin really know such things? About what had happened to Thorne’s father.