In the Dark Page 25

  ‘A donation, then?’

  ‘I need to make lots of other calls, so—’

  ‘Have you picked out a headstone?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m sure you’d want Paul to have something special. He deserves something special, and I know they can cost an arm and a leg.’

  ‘We’ll find something.’ Helen felt hot. She sat back against the arm of the sofa. ‘I won’t be using cardboard and a marker pen, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean anything,’ Linnell said. ‘I’d like to make a contribution, that’s all.’

  Helen struggled for something to say; listened to Linnell breathe for a few seconds before she hung up.

  Christ, it was sick. Almost funny.

  They would probably club together for the stone - Helen, Paul’s mother, his sister maybe - and whatever came from Helen’s side would be money that was now hers alone but had been earned by both her and Paul.

  So when Linnell had suggested making a contribution, Helen could only think that, in all probability, he already had.

  Theo felt the flutter start when he let himself in and smelled it.

  He was shaking by the time he’d closed the door behind him and seen the stains on the carpet. Three big ones - two near the table and one on the far side of the room next to the single wooden chair - just starting to dry but still glistening against the worn and dirty material. There was a trail of smears and spots snaking away into the bedroom, and Theo stood still for a minute or two, afraid to follow it.

  They’d got into the stash house.

  The place he’d felt safest.

  Had they come there looking for him?

  The night before, after the business with Easy, he and Javine had spent the next hour screaming at each other. She’d heard enough of what Easy had been saying and let Theo know exactly how stupid he would be to follow in the footsteps of his worthless friend. She’d stood in the doorway, her face and neck all tight and creased up with it as she leaned towards him and spat her anger out.

  Theo had shouted right back: telling her that he hadn’t agreed to do anything; that he was only thinking about how they could do with the extra money; that she had no fucking idea what was going on in his head. He’d carried on shouting even after she’d gone to comfort the baby. He’d shouted because he hadn’t liked her telling him what to do and because he’d been boyed out on that walkway by Easy; made to feel like he couldn’t make a big man’s decisions.

  Not that it was likely to matter now, whichever way he might have jumped. It was tickling his nose, the smell in the room: metal and sweat, and something . . . burned, like the streets on Bonfire Night.

  He walked slowly into the bedroom, knowing what Javine’s reaction was likely to be if he found Easy in there. Not sure who he wanted to find . . .

  There was much more blood on the floorboards and a small pool by the headboard, where some had dripped from the bare mattress. Theo stood at the end of the bed and looked at the bodies: Wave’s tossed across Sugar Boy’s. Bare flesh where a shirt had ridden up and an arm stretched out across a face. He knew they had been after Wave; that Sugar Boy had just been unlucky.

  He felt weightless suddenly, and wasted.

  He wanted to lie down where he was and wait for them to come back. To slip between the cracks in the floorboards like the blood. He wanted to run until the soles of his Timberlands were gone and the skin on his feet was worn through and raw.

  Now he really had a big man’s decisions to make, because he saw exactly what there was to be afraid of. Theo guessed that when the trigger was being pulled, the killers had felt less for the boys they were shooting than they had for Wave’s bloated, ugly dog; flat out at the end of the bed, like he was watching over them.

  He’d spent a lot of money installing a top-of-the-range Bose system in his study. Sub-woofers, direct reflection speakers, the lot. It wasn’t exactly like being in a concert hall, but when Frank cranked the levels right up, he had to admit it was pretty incredible.

  He sat with his eyes closed, listening to the Bruckner fill the room: the strings cutting right through him, the horns almost loud enough to make the windows shake and the timpani bouncing off the walls when it really kicked off towards the end of the third movement.

  He’d read the CD notes from start to finish, same as he always did, hungry to put everything into context. Apparently, Wagner, who was his big inspiration, had died while Bruckner was writing the Seventh. Frank thought he could hear a lot of regret, real sadness, in some of the recurring tunes, the themes, or whatever they were called. On top of that, von Karajan had croaked just a couple of months after conducting this very recording, which, as far as Frank was concerned, made it even more poignant. The sleeve notes said that Hitler had been very fond of it by all accounts, that he thought it was almost as good as Beethoven’s Ninth. But that couldn’t be helped.

  Strange, Frank reckoned, to think that someone like that could have appreciated something so beautiful.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that Laura had come downstairs and was standing in the doorway. He knew it wasn’t really her kind of thing; asked if he’d disturbed her. She said it was fine and that she quite liked it, but Frank turned down the volume anyway.

  He told her about Paul’s funeral, that he’d been talking to Helen again.

  ‘You’ll be there, won’t you?’ he asked. ‘You should be there.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be there.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a new dress.’

  ‘Does it have to be black?’

  ‘Well, there’s something of a fashion for blues and browns at funerals these days,’ Frank said. ‘Even light colours sometimes. But I think traditional is best. Most respectful.’

  ‘Whatever you think.’

  ‘You know she’s having a baby, don’t you? Paul’s girlfriend.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘Any time now. You should see the size of her.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Laura said. She walked further into the room and sat back against the window ledge. ‘It’s terrible, though. The circumstances, I mean.’

  Frank nodded. ‘But she’ll always have a part of Paul with her. That’s a bonus. Something living and breathing.’

  ‘It’ll help her.’

  ‘That’s important. I know.’

  They listened to the music for half a minute.

  ‘Is this the one Paul gave you?’

  Frank nodded.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  So Frank took the liner notes from the jewel case and read them aloud to her, explaining, when the music was drawing to an end, that this was the really sad part, the bit that was sometimes called the ‘tragic sonata’.

  It was getting dark outside. When the CD had finished, Frank asked Laura if she’d like to listen to something else, but she said that was enough classical music for one day. Told him she was going back upstairs to listen to something a bit more cheerful.

  ‘Some horrendous noise with too many drums and no bloody tune?’ Frank asked.

  She laughed and said she’d do her best to find something really annoying.

  Frank followed her out and watched her walk upstairs, then carried on towards the kitchen to organise some dinner for himself.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The copper at Helen’s door on Saturday morning was definitely not there to talk about pension arrangements. But thankfully he was not a Rubberheeler, either. The man who introduced himself as DCI Jeff Moody handed across his identification, and Helen recognised the distinctive logo. The big cat leaping across a stylised globe was supposed to represent a fierce determination coupled with an international outlook, but the design was also revealed to have cost £160,000 of public money, and the subsequent fallout had hardly been the best bit of early publicity for the newly formed Serious Organised Crime Agency.

  Helen invited Moody inside, joking about the badge as she showed him into the living room and asked
if he wanted tea. He told her that water would be fine. That as far as the logo row went, the Olympics had rather got them off the hook, their multicoloured squiggle having cost almost four times as much and being even less popular.

  ‘It gives people fits too,’ Helen said.

  ‘Well, we have been known to do that . . .’

  Helen laughed as she brought in his water and kept up the small talk, but all the time her mind was racing, trying to work out what a senior officer at SOCA might want with her; fighting not to let her face show she had anything to be afraid of.

  Moody was fifty or so, tall and skinny, with glasses and a decent head of greying hair. He wore a nice suit and tie and Helen guessed that most people would have him down as an accountant; an architect, if they were being generous. He sat on the sofa and Helen took a seat at the table, instinctively unwilling to let him look down on her. She guessed that he knew exactly what she was doing.

  He cleared his throat and took a file from his briefcase. ‘You’ve been busy, Helen. Especially considering your situation.’

  Helen’s mind was still jumping around. At least he hadn’t said ‘condition’. She said something about needing the exercise.

  ‘Very busy . . .’ He flicked through the pages of his file, glanced up. ‘You know broadly what SOCA does, yes?’

  Helen said she knew as much as anyone who wasn’t involved but had read the literature. The so-called British FBI, an amalgamation of the old National Crime Squad, National Criminal Intelligence Service and parts of the Inland Revenue, Customs and Immigration. A couple of years on, and some people were already saying that this supposedly holy alliance had proved to be something of an unholy mess.

  ‘Not hard to see why there might have been teething problems,’ she said.

  Moody smiled. ‘Right. Coppers and taxmen isn’t necessarily a marriage made in heaven. Not to mention the ones who get to wear those special rubber gloves.’ He was trying his best to be likeable, and Helen thought he was making a decent job of it.

  It looked as though he finally had his papers in order. ‘So . . .’

  ‘Do you need any more water?’

  He said he was fine. ‘You should know we’ve been tracking your movements since you ran a check on Ray Jackson’s vehicle registration. ’

  Kevin Shepherd’s tame cabbie. Helen did not know what to say.

  ‘Jackson’s someone of interest to us, for reasons I’m sure you can work out, so any enquiry related to him is flagged up on our system straight away.’

  ‘That’s handy,’ Helen said.

  ‘Since then, we know you’ve had meetings of one sort or another with Kevin Shepherd and Frank Linnell. Well, you’ve been doing all sorts of things, but they’re the ones we think are most significant.’

  ‘“Significant” how, exactly?’

  Moody waved a hand, like he was saving her the trouble; as though there were a very quick and simple way for them to proceed. ‘We know why, Helen.’

  She could do little more than nod.

  ‘We know you were following in Paul’s footsteps.’

  ‘Not at first . . .’

  ‘Do you mind telling me how you came up with Ray Jackson’s name?’

  Helen took a few seconds, then told Moody about the parking tickets. She described her visit to the CCTV monitoring centre and told him that she’d seen Paul taking the same taxi on two separate occasions. How that got her interested. She felt like she was confessing to being a suspicious, distrustful bitch, and she was breathing heavily by the time she’d finished.

  Moody stood and offered her his glass of water. She shook her head and he sat down again. ‘It can’t have been easy from that point on.’

  ‘Not very, no.’

  ‘Mixed emotions . . .’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘Look, I can imagine what you must have been feeling, going through, on top of . . . everything else. Well, I wouldn’t have a bloody clue, in point of fact, but I can guess.’ He laid the papers to one side. ‘I’m sorry that had to happen.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘But you can leave it now, OK?’

  Helen waited. One hand was flat on top of the table, but the other was balled into a fist by her side.

  ‘SOCA recruits from all across the service, OK? And most of that doesn’t make the press releases.’

  ‘Listen, you’re starting to do my head in—’

  ‘You can relax, Helen, is what I’m saying. Everything’s fine. Paul was working for us . . .’

  Leaning out from the end of the walkway, Theo could look across the corner of the estate to the neighbouring block and see the comings and goings. He’d stood there the day before as well and watched for hours: the arrival of the police vehicles, half a dozen at least; the men and women setting up the tapes and tents and spreading out onto the adjacent streets; the body bags taken out and loaded into the mortuary van.

  The dog had come out in a black bin-liner.

  As soon as he’d got out of the stash house, he’d called Easy, told him to ring back straight away. Then he’d called again, worried that Easy might take his time after the argument they’d had, and told him exactly why he needed to talk to him. Afraid that Javine would be at home, he’d called the police from the street, given them the address, then gone back to his flat and spent half an hour in the shower, trying to scrub away the stink.

  There didn’t seem to be much going on now, but Theo couldn’t tear himself away. He wondered when Sugar Boy’s mum and dad had got the call. Wondered what that stuff was that coppers smeared under their noses before they went in, and if you could buy it in Boots.

  He checked his phone again, even though he knew he had a perfectly good signal.

  He was still waiting for Easy to ring him back.

  ‘Paul’s job was to target fellow officers,’ Moody said. ‘To secure evidence that might convict any officer who was passing information to organised-crime figures. Individuals, gangs, whatever.’

  ‘How long?’ Helen asked. She had moved over to the armchair and was looking through some paperwork that Moody had considered suitable for her to see. There were photocopies of reports and surveillance logs, details of meetings. Most of the names and locations had been blacked out.

  ‘A little over a year. It was going pretty well.’

  ‘Who knew about it?’

  ‘For obvious reasons, it was all done very discreetly,’ Moody said. ‘As far as anyone Paul worked with, the details of the operation were only passed on to DCI level and above. Martin Bescott didn’t know, none of Paul’s close colleagues. It was as much about compromising fellow officers as risking the integrity of the operation.’

  ‘And that included me.’

  Moody nodded. ‘He couldn’t have told you anything anyway. It wouldn’t have mattered what you did for a living.’

  Helen passed back the sheaf of papers and stood up. ‘It’s what I did for a living that made me suspect him, though.’

  ‘An instinct maybe,’ Moody said. ‘You don’t need to blame yourself on that score.’

  She walked into the kitchen and leaned against the worktop. After a few moments she reached into the sink for a cloth and ran it back and forth across the surface. She was thinking through moments with Paul that suddenly took on new significance; replaying conversations in her head. She could hear Moody shuffling more papers in the sitting room and clearing his throat.

  She walked back in and sat down again. ‘So Paul was working on Kevin Shepherd?’

  ‘Shepherd is a target Paul had been making decent headway with before the accident. You met him, so you know the kind of person we’re talking about there.’

  ‘He’s an arsehole.’

  ‘Correct, and he’s an arsehole we suspect has made payments to a number of officers on various units.’

  ‘What about Frank Linnell?’

  Moody took off his glasses and leaned back. ‘We’re not too sure about that one. He’s not someone we have an a
ctive interest in. Plenty of our colleagues do, of course . . .’

  ‘So what was Paul playing at?’

  ‘What did Linnell say?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  He smiled. ‘You were being observed, Helen, that’s all. Nobody’s bugging your phone.’

  ‘He said they were friends.’

  ‘Maybe it’s as simple as that, then.’ Moody’s smile widened. ‘I used to play tennis with a pretty well-known forger.’

  Helen was still not convinced. ‘He also said something about not giving Paul some names; not being willing to help him out.’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ Moody said. ‘If it’ll put your mind at rest.’

  Helen could tell he meant it, and that it was something he was willing to do for no other reason than that. She told him she’d be grateful, and that she would be happy to do some more detective work herself, but that she was going to be a bit . . . tied up over the next week or so.

  Moody thanked her for the water and said that he ought to be making a move. ‘Is there anything else you found out through doing all this that you think might be useful? Did Shepherd say anything, or . . .?’

  ‘The computer,’ Helen said. She told him about the laptop that Bescott had turned up, that she’d hidden away.

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ Moody said. ‘We’d sort of lost track of it after what happened to Paul.’

  ‘Operation Victoria, that the one?’

  ‘Did you . . .?’

  ‘I couldn’t open the file,’ Helen said.

  Moody seemed happy enough. ‘It’s my daughter’s name actually,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit random really. Like naming hurricanes.’

  Helen stood up and asked if he’d like to take the laptop with him. He shook his head. ‘I’m on my way to catch the Eurostar.’

  ‘Nice,’ Helen said.

  ‘Conference. Chief inspectors and above.’

  Helen pulled a face. ‘Sorry.’

  Moody reached for his jacket. ‘I’ll arrange for a car to come and pick it up,’ he said. He moved towards the door. ‘There’s a lot of hard work on that thing. Paul’s hard work.’ He looked a little embarrassed. ‘I wouldn’t want to leave the bloody thing on the train.’