Rickman exhaled, relief flooding him like sudden sunshine. He thought he understood: he thought perhaps he could make sense of what Simon had told him. ‘I think it’s okay,’ he said. ‘I need to take Simon out for a while. Will you be all right?’
* * *
He drove Simon along empty roads. Only an occasional police car or taxi swished by them in the mizzly rain. A faint mist hung over the city and the trees, some with fat spring buds just opening, dripped heavier droplets onto the pavements and verges. The traffic lights seemed to change in their favour, oddly silent without the accompanying roar of traffic, and they sailed through Penny Lane and onto Smithdown Road.
The look on Tanya’s face as they drove away from the house made him wonder how long she could go on, meeting crisis after crisis.
Simon stirred and Rickman said, ‘Do you know where we are?’
He didn’t respond, but he sat up and looked out of the window, his agitation growing as they approached the top of the hill nearing the junction with Lodge Lane. Rickman turned left, glancing again at his brother. Simon seemed to repeat something over and over, softly, as though the words comforted him.
Lodge Lane was much changed since their childhood: many of the shops that had burned down in the Toxteth riots of ’81 had never been replaced, but the left-hand side of the road was much as they had known it.
‘There!’ Simon shouted.
Rickman braked hard, stopping in the middle of the road. A single cab rattled past in the opposite direction. The driver gave them a cursory glance but didn’t slow down.
‘He was there,’ Simon shouted excitedly. ‘Right there.’ He pointed to a spot ten yards in front of them. His breathing was rapid, close to hyperventilation.
‘Just breathe slowly,’ Rickman said. ‘Slow, and steady. Tell me what you see.’
Simon stared, his eyes wide, his hands gripping the dashboard. ‘He’s lying on his side. His right leg is bent the wrong way.’ He gave a short, snorting exhalation and Rickman put a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s . . . stuff.’ He began taking a breath between each word. ‘On — on the road.’
Even in the artificial light of the streetlamps, Rickman could see he had lost colour and there was a sick sheen on his face.
Simon tried again to control his breathing, then said, ‘His . . . eyes are — open.’
‘Simon,’ Rickman said. ‘This is important. Do you remember when this happened?’
Simon nodded shakily. ‘My . . . seventeenth birthday.’
Rickman relaxed, waiting for his brother to grasp what he had said.
When the realisation came, Simon repeated more calmly, a look of wonderment on his face, ‘My seventeenth birthday.’
‘Dad took you for a drink to celebrate,’ Rickman said.
‘He’d been drinking before we went out. God he was so pissed . . . We went to The Boundary pub on the corner of Smithdown and Lodge Lane. We could have walked it in five minutes, for God’s sake — but he had to take the car.’
Rickman pulled over to let a delivery truck pass them.
‘The kid walked out. There was plenty of time.’ Simon’s eyes widened, still fixed on that spot in the road. ‘Dad hit the accelerator instead of the brake.’ He shuddered. ‘He could have stopped, but he hit the wrong pedal. The kid — I saw his face — it was . . .’ There were no words to describe the horror of that moment. ‘He hit the windscreen and . . .’ He released his grip on the dashboard and his hands slid into his lap.
‘You didn’t kill anybody, Simon,’ Rickman said. ‘You didn’t hurt anybody. You didn’t do anything wrong.’
Chapter Thirty-five
Doran turned left onto Paradise Street and walked down to the Radio Merseyside offices. Its grey concrete frontage was rendered darker and more drab by the smoked glass windows. The receptionist’s desk was lit, but the main lighting had been switched off; only the late shift and security staff were in the building. The Merc’s engine purred softly, almost inaudible over the laughter of a group leaving the Moat House Hotel, pouring tipsily into taxis and shouting their goodnights. He saw nobody else.
He slid into the passenger seat and closed the door; Warrender looked at him and then away, knowing better than to speak at that moment. The steady thrum of the car’s engine felt like a pulse of blood in his heart, his neck, his throat.
‘Was it the police?’ Doran said, at length.
‘You’re sure it wasn’t Megan?’ That was Warrender’s style — questions and counter-questions.
‘I’m sure,’ Doran said.
‘Then probably, yes, it was the police. I can find out easy enough.’
‘Do it.’ Doran pushed his fingers through his hair. What do they know? What has she told them? Why the hell is she hounding me? They listened to the thrum of the engine for a couple of minutes. Oh, God — what if Bentley was being followed? The engine stuttered and then picked up the rhythm again.
‘What do I do now?’ he asked.
‘Get a lawyer.’
‘I can’t afford a lawyer. And I can’t claim my own money back without implicating myself.’
‘In what?’ Warrender asked. ‘There’s no proof of anything — nothing on record.’
Doran shielded his eyes despite the dark: the streetlights seemed to dazzle from the damp road surface. ‘The tax records,’ he said. ‘They were on the office network.’
Warrender fell silent again.
‘I’m looking for advice, here, John.’ Doran’s employees all knew the danger when he adopted this particular tone.
‘Talk to Kieran Jago,’ Warrender said. ‘He’ll fix it — you might end up a bit out of pocket, but you’ll get the bulk of it back — and you’ll stay out of prison.’
Doran glanced sharply at his Security Manager and Warrender stared back, his cop’s eyes flat and empty. They had killed a man only hours before and yet Warrender showed no signs of emotion or agitation.
‘It’s what you pay me for,’ he said, as though he had read Doran’s thoughts.
‘Your cold, cold heart?’ Doran said, half-joking.
‘My honesty,’ Warrender said.
Doran was almost afraid to ask the next question: Warrender’s honesty might be too much for him in his present state. ‘What if Bentley was followed?’
‘He wasn’t.’
The certainty in Warrender’s voice was reassuring, but Doran needed more than a reassuring tone.
‘What makes you so sure? If he was working with the police—’
‘If he was, they wouldn’t have offered you a bag of cash, they’d have arrested you. Because they would have the photographs and they would know that he went onto a building site with you and me, and never came out again.’
Doran glanced over his shoulder; talking about cops with them so nearby made his nervous. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Warrender gunned the engine and they took a left, up Duke Street. Neither man looked in the direction of the new development, nor spoke as they passed the site. They had dealt with such matters before, and only referred to them when it was absolutely necessary. Once they were over — once they knew they had covered the bases and were out of danger, they were done with, history. And both Warrender and Doran were men who looked to the future. They did not forget, but they knew how to keep a bond of silence, and this had forged a trust, if not a friendship that had endured more than twenty years.
‘It might be an idea to send the lads on holiday for a bit,’ Warrender suggested. He meant the men who had been involved in Sara Geddes’s death.
‘How’s Danny taking it?’ Doran asked. Technically, Danny was the one facing a possible murder charge.
‘He’s pleased with his bonus — they all are,’ Warrender said with a sly glance at his employer.
‘So, there’s no need to send them away, is there?’ Doran said.
‘They’d be out of the way.’
‘Getting rat-arsed and bragging to the first scrubber they pick up and take back to their hotel. No
— I want them near me. The police have got nothing — no eyewitnesses, no forensics, nobody with a sudden urge to confess.’
* * *
Fay was waiting at the door when he arrived home. She looked pale and tired, her blue eyes had lost their sparkle over the last week, but she looked determined, and prepared to fight if she had to.
‘Not now,’ he said, walking past her, heading for his office; he needed a drink and some quiet.
‘If not now, when?’ she demanded. ‘You’re never here, Patrick. What the hell is happening to us?’
Doran wheeled on her. ‘It’s already happened, Fay. It happened as soon as you began your little internet fling.’
‘It wasn’t a fling.’
‘What? Because it wasn’t consummated?’
‘I was — lonely. I fell into conversation.’
Doran remembered her as a young girl, still with the country bloom in her cheeks, serving drinks in a bar downtown. She was lonely then, and desperately homesick, though she tried to hide it. That was in the days when his emotions had not been so blunted, when he had been aware of her presence even before her saw her, could feel her like an electric charge making the hairs on his skin stand up. He had seen her loneliness and fallen into conversation.
‘“Fell into conversation,”’ he muttered. ‘Would you have fallen into bed if you’d got the chance?’ That was cruel and he saw the injustice of it in the flush that rose to her face.
‘She’s a woman, for God’s sake! How can you be jealous of a woman — a — a fantasy?’
He stared coldly at her. ‘A fantasy,’ he said. ‘That’s really what I needed to hear.’
‘You’re twisting my words,’ she said. ‘I meant that the person I conversed with was a creation — like a character on TV. It wasn’t real.’
‘But this is,’ he said. ‘This’ — he spread his hands as though the mess they were in was visible, tangible — ‘this is real. And if it doesn’t bankrupt us, it might end with me in prison.’
Her eyes grew round, filled with apprehension, and she put a hand to her throat. ‘What have you done?’
‘What I’ve always done,’ he said. ‘What was necessary.’
Fay knew him better than anyone; she knew that Megan Ward had taken their money, she knew that Megan Ward was missing, that Sara Geddes was dead. She nodded to herself. She knows, he thought. He watched her, waiting for her response. The only people he cared about on this earth were Fay and Maura and the boys. He couldn’t imagine life without them, didn’t think he could live in a world without them. But he would not apologise and he would not beg.
‘You’ve always provided well for me and the children,’ she said, and his heart began thudding thickly in his throat. ‘You’ve been a good husband and father.’
This was it: this was the build-up to telling him to leave. He clenched his jaw and looked into her face. He would not beg.
She held herself erect, her hands clasped in front of her, her face pale and solemn. He had never seen her more poised or more beautiful. He wanted to stop her, to walk away so he wouldn’t hear the words; and yet he remained, unable to move, unable to use persuasion or threats or force, because he loved her. He knew he was a bad man, that he had lost the knack of reading her because he had done so many things that required coldness and distance, but he loved Fay more than he loved life itself and if she told him he must go to prison, that he must atone for the terrible things he had done, he thought perhaps he would.
‘Do what is necessary,’ she said, calmly and clearly.
He felt a rush of gratitude, relief and confusion and he looked at her, unable to speak. His legs felt weak and he didn’t trust his voice.
‘But I don’t want to know about it,’ she went on, ‘And I don’t want the children to know.’
He relaxed, exhaling in a long rush of air. He moved in close and put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t pull away, but he saw a dull resentment in her eyes.
‘I didn’t start this,’ he said.
‘I know.’ She sighed, looking away from him. ‘I know, Patrick.’
He slid one hand to the back of her neck and pulled her to him, kissed her forehead and then left her.
No eyewitnesses, no forensics, nobody with a sudden urge to confess. He intended to make damn sure of it. He might be a bad man, but he was a good husband — Fay had told him that, and he believed in Fay more than he had ever believed in himself — and he would protect his family no matter what it took.
* * *
The ward was quiet. Most of the patients slept a narcotic-induced dreamless sleep that would carry them untroubled and unrested through the night, tumbling them from their beds the next morning exhausted and hung-over.
Nathan Wilde sat in the nurse’s office, sipping a cup of coffee. Without the gel and styling mousse to give it structure and form, his hair lay flat to his scalp. He had barely eaten in the days since his arrival, and he looked thinner and less florid than when he had first been admitted. He flicked nervously at the join between the cup and the handle with his thumbnail, sending out a series of ringing notes, like a tocsin.
‘Warlock infected the system,’ he said, his voice low and calm, though it trembled a little as he added, ‘He was everywhere. That’s where the bugs came from.’
The nurse took a breath and he corrected himself. ‘I mean where I thought they came from.’ He glanced swiftly at her face. ‘I got into his head — or he got into mine . . .’ He stared past the nurse into a puddle of light from a spot-lamp on her desk. He felt lost and baffled.
The nurse sighed. ‘Nathan, we talked about this: it isn’t possible for somebody to get inside your head.’ She raised her voice, as she always did when the patients said something she didn’t understand. Nathan had noticed that in the last day or two; it was like emerging from a fog, seeing people take shape out of the muddle of voices and images and terrors. This was her quirk: shout, and the crazy people will hear you better; shout and they’ll hear your voice over all the others clamouring for attention in their heads.
‘I’m trying to explain,’ he said. It was like working out a three-dimensional puzzle in his head — when a piece slotted into place in one dimension, it was hopelessly misaligned in another. ‘WiFi,’ he said. ‘They jump the gap.’
The nurse folded her plump arms across her chest. ‘Are you seeing bugs again?’
Like it was a choice — like he’d been caught having a crafty smoke in the bog.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The signals jump the gap. You don’t need a connection. He got in and he knew . . .’ What was he trying to say? That Warlock knew how he thought — exactly how he would defend the network?
The steady ping ping ping ping of his thumbnail against the cup handle sounded like a church bell pealing an alarm, a ship’s bell warning of danger. Yes, he thought. That was it. He tried again. ‘Warlock gets inside your head . . .’ He faltered. ‘I think that’s what happened. But I didn’t mean to kill Sara.’
The nurse drew up a chair and sat next to Nathan. ‘Sara?’ She leaned forward, eager, attentive.
He hadn’t remembered the name before, but now he couldn’t understand how he had forgotten it. ‘Sara Geddes.’
The nurse’s shoulders slumped. ‘Sara Geddes,’ she repeated. ‘The woman who’s been on TV every news bulletin for the past week?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Nathan, you were in hospital when Sara Geddes died.’
He knew he was right. Sara was Warlock’s guardian. And Warlock had let her die, but it was Nathan had sent the wolves to destroy her. ‘I’m not making it up,’ he said.
‘I know. But it’s not real,’ she said, her voice loud and adamant again. ‘You didn’t do anything.’
Nathan smiled, but tears stood in his eyes. ‘Sometimes doing nothing is the worst sin of all.’
Chapter Thirty-six
The mood in the Incident Room was subdued. Many of the team had worked a double shift to be there at the hand-over, and a one o’clock finish with an ei
ght-thirty briefing hard on its heels was not good for team spirit or tempers.
Tunstall heaped three spoons of coffee into a mug and added another three of sugar before pouring hot water onto the granules. DC Reid snoozed at his desk, his head resting on one hand; the rest of the team sat or perched or leaned on furniture, steaming mugs of coffee in hand. Some had brought a breakfast of pastries or chocolate bars, which their more squeamish colleagues watched them eat with queasy distaste. Conversation was minimal and the atmosphere of despondency hung over them all like fog over the Mersey.
Tunstall turned away from the tea tray to face the room and discovered that there were no chairs free. He muttered, ‘Bloody hell,’ and lumbered over to a filing cabinet, complaining about the accommodations. Even the arrival of Naomi Hart didn’t trigger the usual rustle caused by the men noticing her and trying to make her notice them.
‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘Did somebody die?’
‘Hopes and dreams, Naomi,’ Foster said. ‘Hopes and dreams.’ He’d had a preliminary briefing from Rickman and was more up to speed than Hart, who had taken sole responsibility for Megan Ward when Rickman called him in at seven.
‘There you go again,’ she said. ‘Coming over all philosophical.’
He smiled, leaning his back against the wall. ‘Some women find that very attractive in a man.’
‘But they don’t know you like I do,’ she said, wafting past him, in search of coffee, and a place to perch during the briefing.
Rickman came in moments later, his manner brisk and businesslike. His grey suit looked smart and uncreased and he was smooth-shaven and fresh, despite having had only two hours’ sleep. Simon had stayed the night and needed to talk.
Rickman looked around the room at the sagging figures of his team. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We took a chance — it didn’t pay off.’
‘What the hell happened, Boss?’ Garvey asked. ‘I know we weren’t spotted — was he tipped off, or what?’
‘I don’t know, Garve,’ Rickman said. ‘But he didn’t fall for Megan’s double.’
‘I knew it,’ Tunstall said bitterly. ‘Dozy chuffing woodentop blew it.’
SEE HER DIE a totally gripping mystery thriller (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 2) Page 24