The Dying Hours Read online

  This was why Thorne was there and there was no easy way to get into it.

  ‘Can you think of any reason why someone might want to hurt your father?’

  ‘Hurt him?’

  ‘I don’t think it was suicide,’ he said.

  ‘But I saw him.’

  ‘I think it was made to look like suicide.’

  Jacqui said, ‘What?’ and then thought for a few moments. She took a deep breath and set down her tea, and said, ‘I suppose it’s still too early for something a bit stronger.’

  A quick look at Google Maps told Holland that Graham Daniels lived no more than a few minutes from the reservoir in which his mother had drowned five weeks earlier. It also confirmed that his work address was only a mile and a half from where Holland was based at the Peel Centre. There and back in an hour, tops. By mid-morning, Kitson was deep into a meeting, so Holland decided to go while he had the chance. The lunch hour would have been marginally less risky, but it made sense to try and get away before the man he was going to see had the chance to disappear in search of his own lunch.

  Made sense. Like doing it made any bloody sense at all.

  It was a small printing business on a busy stretch of West Hendon Broadway, in a parade of shops between St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church and Hendon Mosque. There were no customers waiting. A man and a woman were at work behind the counter, so Holland was fairly sure that the man in the Pleased-2-Print T-shirt stepping forward to greet him was Graham Daniels. He was tall and balding and his smile revealed teeth that had yellowed near the gums.

  Holland showed his warrant card and asked if he could have a chat. The man stopped smiling and stared at him, and Holland said, ‘About your mother.’

  Daniels thought about it for a few seconds, then told the young woman, who was busy at a guillotine at the back of the shop, that he would not be gone long.

  ‘My daughter,’ he said, following Holland out on to the pavement and reaching for cigarettes. ‘Only supposed to be helping out, earning a few quid before she goes to college, but now she reckons she’s enjoying herself so much she might not bother with college at all.’

  They walked towards a small café a few doors along. It was dry but windy, and while Daniels struggled to light his cigarette, Holland fastened his jacket to prevent his tie flapping.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m torn, if I’m honest,’ Daniels said. ‘Obviously I want her to go, but it’s great having her around, you know? Her mother certainly wants her to go, mind you, so I probably won’t have a lot of say in it.’

  ‘Right,’ Holland said, like he knew what Daniels meant.

  Once Daniels had finished his cigarette, they found a seat in a quiet-ish corner and Holland bought them both a cup of coffee. As soon as it was laid in front of him, Daniels said, ‘So, what about my mother?’

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’ Holland asked.

  Daniels looked shocked, then annoyed. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Broadly,’ Holland said. ‘This is a… separate investigation.’

  Daniels considered this for a few seconds. He sighed heavily. ‘She walked out of her front door in the middle of the night in her slippers and dressing gown. She walked across a main road and across the field to the Welsh Harp. That’s the Brent reservoir…’

  Holland nodded.

  ‘She took off her slippers and her dressing gown and she… walked into the water.’ He swallowed. ‘They found the dressing gown neatly folded in the mud the next morning. Her slippers were side by side. Then they found her. OK?’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘There was CCTV,’ Daniels said. ‘Bloody everything’s on CCTV these days, isn’t it? Only as far as the field, and they were able to piece the rest together.’ He stared down into his coffee. ‘It wasn’t the easiest thing to watch.’

  ‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t,’ Holland said.

  ‘So?’ Daniels picked up his cup, studied Holland across the top of it. ‘Listen, I really don’t want to be away from the shop too long.’

  ‘Was there anyone else on that footage?’

  Daniels blinked. ‘Why would there be?’

  ‘I just need to make sure.’

  ‘It was the middle of the night.’

  ‘Nobody walking the same way she was? Just ahead of her or behind her, maybe?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ Daniels said. ‘I only watched the bits that my mother was in.’ He raised a hand, let it drop to the tabletop again. ‘Look, obviously I’m missing something here, because you seem to be suggesting… well, I don’t know what you’re suggesting, but—’

  ‘At the time, you said you were shocked that your mother had taken her own life.’

  ‘Christ, of course I was shocked. Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘No, more than that,’ Holland said. ‘You talked about how she’d booked a holiday. How she was the last person in the world who would do anything like that.’

  ‘Yes, she’d booked a holiday.’ Daniels drew a nicotine-stained finger slowly back and forth along the edge of the table. ‘She was a member of a gardening club and she drove to the cinema once a week. She read books and had friends and she loved her grandchildren. She had a life… she had a good life and deciding to end it like that was something I never dreamed she might do, not in a million years. None of us did. That doesn’t mean that I thought there might be any other explanation. I mean, bloody hell… it doesn’t mean I thought for one second that somebody else might have… been responsible.’

  Holland leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. ‘Look, I know this is out of the blue,’ he said. ‘But I need to tell you we’re looking at exactly that possibility.’

  ‘Possibility?’ Daniels opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘Based on what? Have you got evidence?’

  ‘I can’t really go into details,’ Holland said. ‘Look, I know this is a lot to take in.’

  Daniels appeared to take it in quickly enough. ‘Who?’ he asked. Then, ‘Why, for God’s sake?’

  ‘That’s something you might like to give some thought to. Maybe talk to some of her friends.’

  ‘Me?’

  Holland nodded. Yes, because this ‘investigation’ I’m banging on about does not exactly have the biggest of teams working on it. ‘They might be a bit more comfortable talking to you,’ he said.

  ‘This is stupid.’ Daniels shook his head. ‘She was a seventy-year-old woman, there’s no reason anyone would want to hurt her. She got on with everyone.’

  ‘We need to make sure,’ Holland said.

  ‘So, how…⁠?’ Daniels’ voice cracked. He lowered his head. ‘Do you think someone took her into the reservoir? Pushed her…⁠?’

  ‘Was your mum a strong swimmer?’

  ‘She was seventy, I told you. It was freezing that night. Just the shock of the water must have…’ Daniels’ voice was raised now and he pushed away tears with the heel of his hand. There were people looking across at them from other tables.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Holland said.

  ‘Are your parents still alive?’

  The affectionate father was long gone now and Holland could only sit staring at the bereaved son, whose grief was still all too real and raw. Holland had been confronted with more than his fair share of anguish over the years. He had delivered death messages, stood at hospital bedsides, watched fathers, mothers, husbands and wives break down and demand to be told what to do; told how they were ever supposed to get up in the morning again. That was work. That was what he was paid to deal with.

  But this was not his job.

  He did not have to do this, should not have let himself get talked into doing it, and at that moment he could happily have punched Tom Thorne.

  Thorne pulled on his jacket and watched Jacqui Gibbs pour herself a second small measure of Glenlivet.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘Who’s going to care?’ She took a sip, then stood
as she saw Thorne move towards the living-room door.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Thorne said. ‘Stay there.’

  She walked over to him anyway and they stood together, a little awkwardly, in the open doorway.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘Everything you’ve told me, I mean it’s not exactly good news… I still can’t take it in if I’m honest, but I feel better. Does that make any sense?’

  ‘I think so,’ Thorne said.

  ‘If somebody did this, at least it means that Dad hadn’t been miserable. He wasn’t so unhappy that he’d do that to himself.’

  Thorne told her that he understood, though in clinging to that meagre crumb of comfort, he knew that she was somehow ignoring the pain that her father must have suffered. The terror Brian Gibbs must surely have felt at the end. Perhaps the full implications of what she’d been told had not sunk in yet, or maybe that small measure of Glenlivet had been one too many.

  Thorne stepped out into the hall.

  Jacqui followed him and at the front door he took a card from his wallet and gave it to her. It was an old one, with his mobile number only and with the word Detective coming before the word Inspector. If he were ever called upon to answer for it, he would say that he had simply handed over an old card by mistake. He doubted that a single misleading word on a business card would be the worst of his problems by that point.

  He tried not to think about it too much.

  ‘Call me on that number if there’s anything you want to talk about,’ he said. ‘Or if anything occurs to you.’

  Thorne doubted that anything would. He was almost certain that no run-of-the-mill motive would emerge for the murder of Brian Gibbs or for any of the others. Not that he’d told Jacqui Gibbs there were any others.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

  He had not gone there expecting the woman to reel off a list of her father’s mortal enemies or to name the individual who had borne a terrible grudge against him after a falling-out over dominoes in the local pub. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You can call me any time you like, about anything.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s really nice that you’re taking such a personal interest in whatever happened to my dad. You don’t expect that kind of thing these days. Everything’s call centres, isn’t it?’

  Thorne nodded and turned away in case the guilt washed blood to his face. Because he was keeping the truth from her. Because, in the interests of self-preservation, he needed her to call him and nobody else. And because he knew that taking such a ‘personal’ interest rather than handing it over to others who would do the job properly might be the very thing that enabled her father’s killer to escape justice.

  As he reached for the door, he cast an eye across the framed photographs on a shelf above the radiator.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked. He picked up a tarnished frame and studied its contents. He had seen many such pictures before. On a manicured lawn in the sunshine or occasionally outside Scotland Yard, with that iconic sign spinning slowly behind them. The same formation of smartly dressed men and women, senior police officers in dress uniform on either side.

  The same ceremony.

  Jacqui Gibbs stepped close to him and looked down at the picture. ‘Oh, Dad got some kind of medal or a commendation or whatever. Donkey’s years ago, this was.’ She placed a fingertip to the glass. ‘Doesn’t he look lovely in that suit?’

  ‘A commendation for what?’

  ‘God, I’m trying to remember it all,’ she said. ‘He never talked about it that much afterwards. I mean, I can remember us all getting dolled up the day he got it. The dress I was wearing, all that. I’d’ve been about fourteen, something like that, so that tells you how far back we’re talking.’

  Thorne waited, tried hard to keep the impatience from his face. ‘It would be good if you could really have a think about this.’

  ‘There was a trial,’ she said. ‘He was a witness at a trial. I’m sure he must have kept all the newspaper cuttings…

  A few minutes later, when Jacqui had finished telling him as much as she could remember, she said, ‘Do you think this might have something to do with what happened? I saw the look on your face.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Thorne said. It was a fact, but so was the tickle at the nape of his neck, his desire to get out of the house as quickly as possible and make a call.

  ‘Do you want to hang on to it?’ she asked. ‘The picture?’

  Thorne looked at it again.

  ‘No, really,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. I mean, I want it back, obviously.’

  Thorne guessed that the photograph would not be of any further use. He knew the way the commendation system worked – that there were only a small number of such ceremonies each year and that the members of the public honoured had been of assistance in any number of different investigations – but he thanked her anyway and promised that the photograph would be taken care of.

  ‘I need to clean it up a bit. It got so filthy up in Dad’s loft.’

  As Thorne walked away from the front door, she was still clutching his card and saying, ‘I’ll call if I can think of anything else.’

  The second he was out of sight and walking quickly towards the car, Thorne reached for his phone. Holland was rather short with him when he answered.

  ‘Listen, I’ll be quick,’ Thorne said. ‘When you talk to Graham Daniels—’

  ‘I’m with him now,’ Holland said.

  ‘OK, that’s great,’ Thorne said. He pressed the remote on his key fob to unlock the BMW. ‘Call me when you’ve finished. Just make sure you ask him what his mother was doing thirty years ago.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday was a quiet night in the Grafton Arms. No laughter or salsa music from the room upstairs to disturb those in search of a little something to take the edge off before they got home or others quietly drinking away the evening. The mechanised soundtrack of till and fruit machine was lively enough for all concerned. There was certainly nothing close to exuberance from the three men at a table in the corner. This, despite the progress they had made that morning and had continued to make, thanks to the one sitting nearest the toilets; the one who looked the least happy of any of them to be there in the first place.

  Thorne handed him his pint and sat down. Said, ‘Listen, Dave, I know you’ve still got concerns, all right?’

  Holland swallowed and grunted into his glass.

  ‘I just want you to know I’m taking them on board.’

  ‘How, exactly?’

  Thorne’s turn to drink.

  ‘I still don’t know why you’re not handing this across.’ Holland looked to the third man at the table for some support. ‘Especially now, I mean, Christ…’

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Hendricks said. ‘You have worked with him before, haven’t you?’

  Thorne flashed a sneer at his friend, then looked back to Holland. ‘I tried,’ he said. He remembered the look on Hackett’s face when he’d walked across the bridge to the MIT, and that night in Stanmore. ‘I tried on several occasions and I was politely told where to go. Only not very politely. I promise you, Dave, they think it’s a joke.’

  They think I’m a joke.

  ‘Maybe they don’t,’ Hendricks said. ‘Maybe it just suits them to sit on their hands.’ He took a drink as Thorne and Holland turned to him and waited. ‘Well, let’s face it, suicides look a damn sight better on the balance sheet than unsolved murders, don’t they?’

  Thorne nodded, considering it. Hendricks had almost certainly been half joking himself, but what he had said was horribly plausible.

  ‘Well if this goes tits up, we’ll be the only ones who aren’t laughing. The ones looking for jobs.’

  ‘I really appreciate what you’re doing, Dave. This morning, and the stuff you got for us this afternoon. That was over and above.’

  Hendricks raised his glass in salute.

  Holland’s face softened, but only a little. He said, ‘I must need my head look
ing at, seriously,’ then pulled out a few folded sheets of paper from his pocket. He flattened them against the tabletop and handed the other two a copy each.

  ‘It won’t go tits up, Dave,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Why won’t it?’

  ‘Because we’re going to catch him.’

  Hendricks and Thorne looked at their printed sheets, pints in hand, as if casually perusing a menu of bar snacks. At the top of each sheet was a name.

  Terence Mercer.

  ‘He ran a very well-connected firm in south London from the mid-seventies onwards,’ Holland said. ‘Banks, building societies, security vans, all the usual.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘Back when the Flying Squad were top dogs, charging about in Cortinas and wearing sheepskin coats like they were on the telly.’

  ‘That retro look’s coming back in,’ Hendricks said. ‘Did you know that?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Holland said. ‘Then in eighty-three a job went bad at this bank in Croydon and some of his firm got pinched. He only just made it away himself, but the Flying Squad got a tip-off that he was hiding out at an address in Crystal Palace. Bit of a disaster all round from that point on by the looks of things… left hand, right hand, all that… and the long and the short of it is that some poor DC goes in there without back-up and Mercer shoots him in the face in the back garden.’

  ‘Bet that made a mess of his sheepskin,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘So, loads of press coverage, major trial at the Bailey blah blah, and Mercer gets life with a twenty-five-year minimum.’ Holland glanced back down to his notes. ‘The tariff’s increased a few years later when Terence loses his rag in Maidstone and shanks a prison officer and from then on he gets shunted around, basically because one place after another gets sick of keeping him. Regular parole requests, all denied obviously, usual scenario… he does thirty years in the end and was finally released from Gartree prison seven weeks ago.’

  ‘Three weeks before Brian Gibbs died,’ Thorne said. ‘And only a fortnight before Fiona Daniels.’

  They laid their sheets of paper on the table.

  ‘So Gibbs was a witness to the shooting,’ Hendricks said.