The Dying Hours Read online

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Like Dave said, MIT would have to be pretty stupid not to work it out for themselves now. How long it takes, that’s another matter.’

  ‘Mercer didn’t really think he was going to get away with it,’ Hendricks said. ‘Did he? I mean even if the time of death thing hadn’t been obvious they’d have run tests, whatever. Jeffers’ family would have reported him missing at some point.’

  Jeffers’ family. Their pictures somewhere among the stack of photographs in that battered green folder. The last faces Jeffers would have seen; the faces he would have focused on as he sealed himself up inside that car and started the engine.

  ‘God knows,’ Thorne said. ‘He wanted Jeffers out of the way anyway and maybe he thought it might buy him a bit more time.’

  ‘If he’s tying up loose ends, you thought about giving Frank Anderson a heads-up?’

  ‘Yeah, thought about it,’ Thorne said. He washed the poppadum down with a mouthful of lager. ‘Now, seeing as you ask, no… the rest of my day wasn’t particularly great, as a matter of fact. An hour on the phone buttering up a custody sergeant for a kick-off.’

  Thorne explained his decision to have Anthony Dennison’s ‘bailed-to-return’ status cancelled. He had told the custody sergeant that he was cultivating the boy as a source and asked very nicely if the necessary ‘amendments’ could therefore be made to the files. A couple of mouse-clicks and a courtesy call to the officer who had questioned Dennison on the night and the job was done. Dennison was off the hook.

  ‘I don’t get it.’ Hendricks reached for the pickles. ‘Kid smacked you in the face, for God’s sake.’ He pointed; the worst of the bruising below Thorne’s eye had gone, but there was still a mark. ‘A damn sight harder than you punched that private detective as well, not that that’s saying very much.’

  ‘I made a deal with him,’ Thorne said. ‘He gave me good information and the simple truth is I provoked the kid.’

  ‘You provoke a lot of people.’

  ‘I went looking for it.’

  ‘Up to you, mate, but you know the kid’s going to end up inside anyway, presuming he lasts that long. Better off in prison, you ask me.’

  Thorne knew that Hendricks was probably right. He hoped that Anthony Dennison was smart enough to stay out of the sort of trouble that could cost him his life. Still, he could not be certain that he’d done the boy any real favours. ‘So, other than that, just sitting around on my arse all day waiting for the axe to fall.’

  He told Hendricks about running into Neil Hackett outside the bar where he’d confronted Frank Anderson. How he was more certain than ever that Hackett was on to him, despite the fact that the MIT man seemed to be taking his time doing anything about it.

  ‘I wish he’d just get on with it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Put you out of your misery.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Maybe you’re wrong and he knows bugger all. Maybe he’s just digging around.’

  ‘He knows more than enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Has to.’

  ‘So, he’s trying to make you sweat.’

  ‘Well, he’s doing a bloody good job of it.’ Thorne wiped the sheen of sweat from his forehead, pointed at the bowl of lime pickle. ‘Almost as good as this stuff.’ He held up his glass, signalled to the waiter for another beer and Hendricks did the same. ‘It’s not just about him though,’ he said. ‘It’s where he’s getting his information from.’

  ‘Yeah… that’s a worry,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Who he’s getting it from. Somebody’s telling him what we’ve found out, what the connections are. He seems to know where I’m going to be every minute of the day.’

  ‘He might just be following you.’

  ‘Yeah, but if he’s doing that, it’s because somebody’s telling him I’m worth following. He knows who I’m talking to and when, and I’m damn sure he knows why.’ Despite himself, Thorne’s eyes were on Hendricks as he laid out his suspicions.

  Looking for a reaction. Not seeing one.

  ‘Something to bear in mind though,’ Hendricks said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words, like a doctor delivering unwelcome news. ‘Before you get too… worked up about all this. If someone is telling the powers that be what’s happening, they might be doing it for good reasons. For the right reasons, you know?’

  Thorne looked at him, but Hendricks had lowered his eyes before he’d finished talking. ‘What, to protect me from myself, you mean?’

  ‘Just saying.’

  ‘You got any ideas who that might be?’

  ‘Not the foggiest, mate.’

  ‘Sure?’ Hendricks glanced up for just a second and now Thorne saw a reaction. He could tell when his friend was lying.

  The beers arrived and they drank for a while without saying much. The place was busy as usual and there was plenty to look at and listen to. A couple who seemed determined not to speak to one another at all, a group of businessmen in shirts and ties complaining about a ‘bonding initiative’, a loud trio of lads who’d been three parts pissed when they’d arrived.

  ‘So, how are things with Helen?’ Hendricks asked. ‘Really.’

  ‘Yeah, not bad,’ Thorne said. ‘She was obviously happy to hear about what had happened, that it was all over.’

  Hendricks nodded at Thorne’s hand. ‘What about that?’

  ‘Actually she was pretty relaxed about it.’ Thorne lifted his glass up with his good hand. ‘She really doesn’t like me trying to bullshit her, but she knows where she is when I’m punching someone.’

  ‘I presume she doesn’t know about Mercer not being dead.’

  ‘No, and I don’t see any point in telling her,’ Thorne said. ‘Or anyone else telling her.’ The night before, he had sensed that Helen was not altogether surprised to hear about Mercer’s ‘suicide’ and guessed that someone had told her already.

  Once again, there were not too many candidates.

  The waiter appeared at their table with a trolley and picked up the first of half a dozen serving dishes. ‘Chicken bhuna?’

  ‘Just put them anywhere you like,’ Thorne said. ‘We’re sharing.’

  Hendricks reached for the dish. Said, ‘News to me.’

  They walked south towards Camden Town, in the direction of Hendricks’ new flat and Thorne’s old one, where Thorne had left his car. It was after eleven, but there were still plenty of people about, in cars and on foot. Drinking up outside pubs trying to close, coming out of restaurants or hurrying into the chippies and kebab shops that were just starting to enjoy their busiest few hours of the day.

  When the beer-goggles lowered all manner of standards.

  ‘So, what’s the plan for tomorrow?’ Hendricks asked.

  ‘Haven’t got one,’ Thorne said. ‘Last day off, then I’m back on earlies Saturday.’

  ‘Make the most of it, then.’

  ‘I’m open to suggestions.’

  ‘I don’t know, go to a sodding museum or something.’

  Thorne nodded, like he was considering it. ‘Well I was thinking more along the lines of cheese on toast and internet porn, but it’s a thought.’

  ‘I’m just saying. Don’t…’

  ‘Don’t what, Phil?’

  They walked on, falling into step without meaning to, and stopped a minute or so later on the corner of Prince of Wales Road, where they would part company.

  ‘You really think Mercer’s gone to ground?’

  ‘If he’s sensible,’ Thorne said. ‘He could be out of the country by now.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Thorne could see that Hendricks was unwilling to leave without an assurance of some sort. ‘Listen, Phil, I’m out of it, all right? It’s done and dusted, one way or another.’

  ‘Good. Because it’s time you were sensible too.’

  Thorne watched his friend walk away, then set off towards his car. As soon as he and Hendricks could no longer see one another, Thorne reached for his
phone and made a call. When it was answered, he told the man at the other end of the phone that he was sorry for calling so late. He was assured that it wasn’t a problem.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ Thorne said. ‘You got anything on tomorrow?’

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Helen was still up when Thorne got back to Tulse Hill, though as the TV was tuned to a documentary about ice-trucking, he suspected that she’d been asleep on the sofa for some time before he’d come in. He made tea for them both. When she asked, he told her that his hand was feeling a lot better and that Hendricks had been on good form.

  ‘You two should go out,’ he said. ‘Get to know each other a bit better. See what I’ve been putting up with all these years.’

  He asked her how her day had been. It struck him that, except when he was trying to avoid talking about what he had been doing, it was not something he’d done often enough recently.

  She told him she’d had lunch with a social worker, one of those she worked with regularly. ‘Not exactly a bundle of laughs,’ she said. ‘She’d been to see a family she was concerned about in Streatham. Three kids under six, one of them an infant. Found a pit bull terrier chained to the baby’s cot.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Was the kid OK?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Helen said. ‘Legally they can’t touch any of the children they visit, so it’s hard to tell. If a child’s fully dressed, any injuries from the neck down stay hidden.’ She sipped her tea. ‘They’re all so bloody… disheartened, you know? People have them pegged as over-officious lesbians who are trying to take their kids away, but they’re the first people that get it in the neck when it all falls apart and a child dies. They’re understaffed and under-resourced and the good work they do is completely unrecognised. They’ve got so much shit to deal with, and they’re the ones getting their hands dirty and they’re doing their best.’ She reached down to pick up one of Alfie’s toys and casually tossed it into the plastic box next to the sofa. ‘Same as we are.’

  ‘I know,’ Thorne said.

  ‘The entire system’s outdated.’

  Thorne sat down next to her. ‘I know.’

  ‘Children should not be dying because of neglect in a city like fucking London.’

  The ice-truckers had suddenly become a little too noisy, so Thorne reached for the remote and turned the TV off.

  ‘I mean it, Tom.’

  Thorne had heard other officers refer to Child Abuse Investigation as the ‘Cardigan Squad’, the perception among some being that those working on a CAIT were no more than glorified social workers. That career-wise it was a dead end and that anyone with an ounce of ambition should be looking at the more glamorous departments with real excitement and decent budgets such as Drug Enforcement or Firearms. He made a promise to himself that the next time he heard the phrase being used, he would do some damage to his other hand.

  He said, ‘You do an amazing job.’

  He looked at her, desperately hoping that his words, which to him now seemed trite and pathetic, had not sounded patronising. God knows, it was the last thing he intended, but he knew there had been a good deal of misunderstanding – all of it his fault – between them in recent weeks.

  Helen stood up. She carried her empty mug across to the sink then came back and pulled Thorne to his feet. Together they went to check on Alfie, then carried on through to the bedroom and got undressed.

  Helen turned the light out, leaving only the spill from the lamp she always left outside her son’s room. Thorne tried to say, ‘Sorry,’ but she kissed the word off his mouth. The tenderness between them quickly became something more fierce and continued that way until, forgetting his injury, Thorne foolishly tried to take his own weight on his hands and all but collapsed on top of her.

  Thorne rolled away, swearing, but Helen gently moved and eased herself on top of him.

  ‘Looks like I’ll have to help myself,’ she said.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Mercer sits in a branch of a well-known coffee shop, drinking tea and wondering when the hell coffee became so popular. He stares out at the pinched faces of the pedestrians and the necklace of rush-hour traffic crawling past, catching glimpses of the palm trees and sunsets in the window of the travel agent’s on the other side of the road.

  He remembers a holiday…

  Margate. Back when he was still working his way up, before the Jags and the conservatories and the family trips to Disneyland or the south of France. A week in Margate: long before the place had galleries filled with modern art that wasn’t really art at all and everything was neon and kebab shops. These are the holidays he thinks about most often. When the kids were small and she still bought clothes for them all in Deptford market.

  When he wasn’t looking over his shoulder quite so much.

  He remembers his eldest boy, can’t have been much more than seven or eight at the time, in floods of tears on the pavement outside this arcade. He’d been transfixed by the machine with the toy crane inside, had stood there for half an hour and fed it every ten-pence piece Mercer had given him in an effort to grab one of those plastic trolls with the long green hair. He had wanted one of those stupid trolls more than anything in the world and now all his money was gone and he hadn’t been able to grab one.

  ‘It’s not fair, Daddy,’ the boy had wailed. ‘It’s not fair.’

  Mercer had agreed and promptly marched back inside the arcade to have a quiet word with the manager. When he’d emerged a few minutes later bearing aloft one of those trolls as if it were the FA cup, it had been the look on his wife’s face he’d clocked first. The suspicion.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he’d told her. ‘I just had a quiet word with him.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what that means,’ she had said.

  ‘No, nothing like that.’ Obviously the arcade manager hadn’t been thrilled to see Mercer bearing down on him. Mercer knew he could look a little… intimidating, even when he wasn’t trying very hard. He leaned close to his wife and whispered, ‘I just bunged him a fiver, that’s all. Piece of piss.’

  He’d turned to his son then and handed the prize across and the boy’s smile had made his stomach turn over. A poxy fiver, for that smile. He watched his son clutch the doll to his chest and knew that he would happily have handed over every penny he had, everything, just to feel the way he felt at that moment.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy…’

  ‘You deserved it,’ Mercer had said. ‘Must have been something wrong with the machine, that’s all.’

  His wife was already on her way towards the nearest café, steering the pushchair through the crowd, their youngest already tired and starting to whine. His son took his hand as they followed and held it tight. Mercer squeezed and the boy squeezed back and Mercer knew that his son was thinking the same thing at that moment that he’d felt about his own old man once upon a time.

  My dad can do anything…

  Mercer’s hands are wrapped tight around his mug.

  And I could, he thinks.

  He’s not daft; he knows that every child grows out of that eventually, stops believing that their father is a superhero. The strongest, the fastest, the one who can produce trolls from thin air. The lucky ones though, they get to grow up thinking like that for a while at least and the fathers of those kids are luckier still. Instead, he was left with two kids that pissed the bed and got into fights and forgot that he’d ever done a single thing that made them feel good, or happy, or safe.

  He brings the mug to his lips, his gaze still fixed on those posters of palm trees. Happy families on beaches, splashing in pools. The tea’s gone cold, so he pushes the mug away.

  He starts suddenly when a young woman appears at his shoulder. Well, younger than him, anyway. Late forties, maybe.

  She lays a hand gently on his shoulder. Says, ‘Are you feeling all right, love?’

  Mercer realises that he is crying. He reaches for a serviette and wipes it across his eyes and mouth, then balls it into his fist. He thinks about
Herbert, Jacobson, Mallen; their faces at the end.

  He thinks about all of them, then turns to the woman and smiles.

  ‘Feeling a lot better than I was,’ he says.

  SIXTY

  Keith Fryer was patting the bonnet of a tired-looking Renault Clio as if it were the head of a much-loved dog when he saw Thorne wandering on to his car lot. The young woman on the receiving end of the dealer’s practised patter could not have mistaken the look of distaste on his face, or the way in which it became something rather more circumspect when he realised that Thorne had brought someone with him.

  ‘Shit,’ Fryer hissed.

  His potential customer seemed to lose interest in the car fairly quickly after that and, satisfied that their arrival had had the desired effect, Thorne and his companion watched as Fryer marched away towards his office like a man in sudden need of the toilet, or strong drink.

  They gave him a few minutes to compose himself.

  ‘Busy?’ Thorne asked, when he stepped into the doorway.

  Head down at his desk, Fryer said nothing, opting for the same paper-shuffling routine as last time, so Thorne and the man with him wandered in without being invited. Thorne took the folding chair while the other man stayed standing. He moved slowly around the small space, hands in his pockets; looking at files on shelves, examining sheets pinned on to the noticeboard.

  Fryer finally looked up. ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ Thorne said. ‘I wanted to pick up where we left off the other day, when you were a little unwilling to talk to me about one of your customers. When your memory was playing up a bit. Remember?’

  Fryer sat back and folded his arms. ‘Vaguely. Like you say, I’ve got a bad memory.’

  ‘Things have moved on since then, so I’m hoping today might go a little better.’

  ‘How do you mean, moved on?’ Fryer kept his eyes on the man he didn’t recognise.

  ‘Terry Mercer’s dead,’ Thorne said.