The David Raker Collection

by Tim Weaver

  Simon Mbebeni.

  Over the phone, PC Brian Westerley said the official police report had Stonehouse as the instigator, and I watched as the taller of the two men – the one wearing a T-shirt and summer jacket – said something to his friend. Mbebeni turned around, frown on his face, and spoke to them. Stonehouse smiled at Mbebeni and shrugged. Mbebeni – six foot, around fifteen stone, plainly not about to be intimidated – took another step towards them. And then Stonehouse threw a punch.

  It missed Mbebeni and he moved quickly to react: he pushed Stonehouse back into a ticket machine on the right, Quinn getting knocked aside on the way through. Stonehouse came back, fists swinging, and connected with Mbebeni’s face. A second later, as the footage glitched a little, I could see blood all over Mbebeni’s shirt.

  Then, from the top of the picture, came Sam Wren.

  At first he seemed oblivious to what was going on, checking his phone, but then he looked up and was pulled right into the eye of the storm. As Stonehouse and Mbebeni squared off again, Quinn stepped back into Sam. All around the ticket hall, people had stopped and backed away, some looking on in horror, others faintly amused. Quinn turned to see who he’d bumped into, Sam said something – an automatic reaction to being hit – and Quinn punched him. It was just like a lot of fights: created out of nothing. Sam clutched his face and took a couple of steps back.

  Then he moved towards Quinn.

  I paused the video. This was only the second time I’d seen Sam in motion. I’d looked at photographs of him over and over, and I’d watched footage of him disappearing into thin air. But now here he was, a different man at a different time. He looked bigger around the face, healthier, but he also looked more assertive, more forceful, and not only because he’d just been attacked. Maybe this was the Sam everyone talked about: the one who worked as an investment banker, who earned six-figure bonuses, who could swim with the sharks. At the end he was none of those things. At the end he was small, confused and forlorn. A man with none of the fight left in him.

  I started the video again. Within a couple of seconds, Pell emerged from the same position as earlier, heading towards Stonehouse and Mbebeni, and then Sam was on Quinn – Quinn half turned away from him – and throwing a punch. It looked clumsy, but because of Quinn’s position, it was devastating: it connected with Quinn’s throat, and – in the blink of an eye – his legs gave way and he hit the floor. It was difficult to make out Sam’s face after that: he was bent over, hands on his knees, blood dripping from his face to the floor, as more Tube staff emerged. One made for Quinn, the other for Stonehouse.

  Except Pell already had Stonehouse.

  Mbebeni was somewhere off to the side, leaning against a wall, looking dazed. Stonehouse was wrestling with Pell, the two of them locked together, arms on each other’s shoulders, gritted teeth, fierce, unrelenting expressions like neither of them was about to give in. Finally, Pell got the better of Stonehouse: he swept his legs out from under him – a quick, efficient movement – and Stonehouse hit the deck hard. I remembered for a moment what Westerley had told me about Pell being an ex-soldier, and that immediately seemed obvious in how he moved, in how precise he was. But as the clock rolled on, as I expected Pell to suppress his opponent and keep him there until he had help, he instead went on the attack. When Stonehouse hit the floor, Pell clamped a hand around his throat and jabbed a fist into the side of Stonehouse’s face. Once. Twice. Three times. Stonehouse was done already, limp and unresponsive, but Pell just continued punching, over and over, even as Stonehouse lay there unconscious, until finally, like a light switching off, he stopped, got up and looked down, a foot placed either side of the body.

  About ten seconds later, a couple of cops rushed in through the doors at the front of the station, and Pell stepped away from the body for the first time, straightening out his jacket and looking around the hall. His eyes locked on to Sam, and he moved across and said something to him. Sam looked up at him, as if he didn’t know who Pell was or what he wanted, then he seemed to process whatever it was that Pell had asked, and started nodding slowly. A few seconds later, Sam pointed to Quinn on the floor. He must have known by then that he’d done some serious damage to him. Quinn hadn’t moved an inch.

  But it was Pell I couldn’t take my eyes off.

  As Sam stood there, his hands still on his knees, in shock and worried about what he might have done, Pell was looking off towards Stonehouse with nothing in his face at all.

  No emotion. No regret.

  As if he didn’t feel anything.

  36

  After seeing him in action, I figured the rest of the footage on the DVD would give an even better sense of who Duncan Pell was. For Sam, the pattern mostly remained the same: he’d come in through the three-arch entrance at Gloucester Road and head across the ticket hall towards the turnstiles. The only day that changed was the day after the fight. Sam didn’t turn up at all. I assumed that was down to the events of the previous twenty-four hours: he’d been in a fight, he’d punched a man unconscious and the police had probably warned him it might be about to get worse. He would have been shaken up by what happened, which is why he must have taken the day off work.

  But Duncan Pell was different.

  He came to work the next day, and every morning – just as on the morning of the fight – he’d stick to the same routine: head for the front of the station where the homeless man had returned, and ask him to leave. Except he didn’t just ask. Every day he became a little more aggressive: only pointing and gesturing initially; then actually planting a hand on the man and pushing him away from the entrance; then grabbing him off the floor and dragging him along the pavement until they both disappeared from sight. Finally, Pell resorted to another tactic: he dropped to his haunches, the man slumped at one of the entrances, and Pell leaned in to him and said something into his ear. The reaction was instant: the homeless man glanced at Pell like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard, and Pell grabbed him by the arm, hauled him to his feet and threw him off, out of view. The man’s black holdall remained in shot for a moment, before Pell kicked it off in the direction he’d thrown the man.

  No other Tube employee got involved at any point. Only Pell. Some looked on, but none of them said anything. But then, on the final day of footage, something changed: the man didn’t turn up. For the first time in a week, presumably the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sitting at the entrance, knees to his chest, fingers clasping his cardboard sign.

  He was gone.

  I made some lunch for Liz and me, and then we sat out on the decking at the back of the house and had a couple of glasses of wine. It was a beautiful day: beyond the trees at the bottom of the garden, the markless sky was vast.

  ‘You found your guy yet?’ Liz asked after a while.

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  A long pause. I looked at her.

  ‘Do you think this is the one?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She shifted forward in her seat. ‘The one you can’t save.’

  There was no malice in the comment. No bitterness. Liz wasn’t like that. And yet I saw where the words had come from. I could trace them all the way back to their origins; to an interview room in east London eight months before when she’d told me who I was: a man trying to fix holes in the world that couldn’t be fixed. Sometimes I worried our relationship had become defined by that conversation.

  ‘I don’t give it a lot of thought,’ I said eventually, reaching over and taking her hand. But it wasn’t much of a lie. We could both see through it to what lay beneath. All the doubts and fears about what we had – and whether it could go the distance.

  37

  Fifty minutes later, a car pulled up at the front gates. At first I thought it was Ewan Tasker, but then realized it wasn’t a Porsche. A man in his fifties, gunmetal-grey hair and a moustache to match, got out of a Volvo and came up the drive. I moved to the front steps.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he said.
r />   ‘Can I help you?’

  In his hands was a Manila file.

  He stopped about six feet short of me, hitching a foot up on to the first step, and eyed the front of the house. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Kevin Sallows.’

  I nodded. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He didn’t ask me who I was, which meant he already knew. ‘Sorry about intruding like this,’ he continued, even though he didn’t seem sorry. ‘I’ve got a few questions I was hoping you might be able to answer. I know it’s a Saturday, the sun’s out and there’s beer to be drunk. They won’t take long.’

  I opened my hands. ‘Sure. If I can help, I will.’

  He tapped the file against his thigh and cleared his throat. ‘Yesterday we arrested someone called Eric Gaishe.’ My heart sank. He paused, looked at me, but couldn’t see anything worth stopping for. ‘A real arsehole. No education, no job as far as we can tell, no home address. He hasn’t said anything since we brought him in, other than one minor slip-up when he told us some guy called Ben Richards dumped him at a warehouse in Kennington.’

  So Gaishe hadn’t mentioned Wellis, or his connection to the events at the house, even though Wellis had hung him out to dry. Maybe it was out of some skewed kind of loyalty. Or maybe Gaishe was scared about what Wellis might do to him if he talked.

  ‘Thing is, guys like Gaishe are a waste of oxygen: record as long as my arm, nothing to contribute to society. If some bloke took it upon himself to go all Charles Bronson, then that’s fine by me. It’s just one less piece of shit for me to scoop up.’

  He paused, forefinger tapping out a rhythm on the file.

  ‘But yesterday we found Gaishe’s prints all over a house just off the Old Kent Road, near The Firs. We also found some weapons in a holdall. You know The Firs?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Where dreams go to die.’

  I shook my head again.

  ‘House belongs to an Adrian Wellis.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘You heard that name before?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Not sure if he lived there, or if he just rented it to Gaishe. Difficult to tell when Gaishe is playing dumb. Wellis seems pretty kosher – no record, properties across the city – so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. But you never know people – not really – do you, Mr Raker?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘There was a girl inside that house,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Gaishe kept her locked up in there. Raped her. Beat her. Almost killed her.’ So she wasn’t dead. I’d made the right decision. ‘Someone called an ambulance for her from the phone in the house, and it wasn’t Gaishe. So who could this mystery man have been?’ He finally flipped open the front of the file and tapped a finger on the top sheet. ‘Says here you have a habit of stumbling across crime scenes, Mr Raker.’

  It was my file.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to explain.’ He was referring to a case the October before. His eyes flicked up at me. ‘Says here that, on 23 October of last year, you turned up at a house up in north London and there were two dead bodies inside.’

  I gazed at him. ‘If that what it says, it must be true.’

  He didn’t say anything else, just scanned the rest of the file. When he was done, he took a step back from the porch. ‘Most civilians go their whole lives without reporting a crime like your one.’ Sallows looked at me again, and I got the sense this was somehow personal for him, that he’d specifically asked to be here. Have we crossed paths before? ‘I mean, it’s a hell of a thing, stumbling across a scene like the one you found, right?’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s the nature of my work, sadly.’

  ‘Missing persons?’

  ‘People who are missing for a long time tend not to turn up alive.’

  ‘But you have to admit you’re like a magnet for trouble.’

  ‘Why would I have to admit that?’ I said to him. ‘If you’re accusing me of something, then come out with it. Otherwise, I think we’re done.’

  He nodded slowly. ‘You found that farm up in Scotland.’

  It had been eighteen months since I’d walked on to that farm and almost lost my life, and the scars on my body remained. Not as painful as they once were, because all pain died in time, but a reminder of what had been done to me, like a memory that would never fade. Sallows looked down at the first two fingers of my left hand, where the nails would never grow back, and then up to me.

  ‘That case …’ He stopped, shook his head, and his eyes flicked to me again. ‘I read some of the paperwork. I read your interviews, the statement you made, what you said went on up there. I was interested because, at the time, I had this religious nut going round killing people and dumping their bodies in Brockwell Park, and I thought to myself, “Maybe my case is related.” ’ He paused, studied me again. ‘It wasn’t, by the way.’

  I remained silent.

  ‘Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure how much of your statement I believed. I mean, we all know what they did to you up there …’ His eyes moved to my fingernails again. ‘But there were gaps. Big gaps. There were bullet holes all over that place but no one to account for them. Not a single person. So who fired the guns? You said it wasn’t you. You said it was them. But they were either dead or they’d vanished into thin air.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So ten months later – in October last year – suddenly you’re back, and we’re picking the bones out of the mess you made in those woods over in east London.’

  I frowned. ‘Have you got a point, Sergeant Sallows?’

  ‘If you say that wasn’t you at that house yesterday,’ he said, ignoring me, a smile – lacking any warmth – lost beneath his moustache, ‘then I guess I’ll have to go with it. I mean, whoever it was wiped the place down, so it’s not like we’ve got any evidence. But witnesses at the warehouse say they saw an unidentified man running full pelt away from the scene dressed in only a coat, and a grey BMW 3 series leaving shortly after.’ He turned and made a show of eyeing my BMW, parked on the drive next to him. And then he looked back at me. ‘Not dissimilar to this one, actually.’

  He let that sit there.

  Again, I didn’t respond.

  Finally, he continued. ‘So if you say you weren’t there at the house, and you weren’t there driving that BMW, then I guess that’s what we have to run with. But it doesn’t mean I think you’re telling the truth.’ He paused and flipped the file shut, eyeing me before speaking. ‘In fact, quite the opposite. I think you’re a fucking liar.’

  38

  At Ealing Common Tube station, I grabbed a Travelcard and headed down the steps to the eastbound District. I was on my way to see Duncan Pell for a second time.

  It was two on a Saturday afternoon, so the platform wasn’t empty, but it was still pretty quiet. I moved about three-quarters of the way along, to where the sun arrowed through a gap in the roof. It must have been in the high twenties now: heat haze shimmered off the track, shadows were deep and long and the building shifted and creaked around me. A couple of seconds later, my phone went off.

  I grabbed it and looked at the display. Terry Dooley.

  Dooley was part of my old life; a source I’d managed to get my hooks into as a journalist, and one who had been forced to come along for the ride ever since. He was a reluctant passenger. In a moment of madness, he and three of his detectives had visited a brothel in south London, where things turned drunk and nasty and one of the cops put a prostitute in a neck brace. The next morning the story landed on my desk. I’d called him and offered to keep it out of the papers if, in return, he got me information when I needed it. It was a better trade for him: he was married with two boys, and if there was one thing Dooley hated more than dealing with me, it was the idea of battling for custody of his kids. I hit Answer. ‘Carlton Lane.’ Carlton Lane was where the brothel had been.

  ‘Funny,’ sai
d a voice. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t answer.’

  ‘How you doing, Dools?’

  ‘Yeah, great,’ he replied with zero enthusiasm. The line drifted. I heard footsteps and then a door closing. ‘You got five minutes, then I’ve got to get the boys to football.’

  I’d called him as soon as Sallows had left. Dooley hadn’t answered, but I’d left a message on his voicemail, asking him to call me back. Tasker and Dooley were the two sources I used most from my previous life: Tasker was more reliable, more discreet and less prone to putting obstacles in my way; but Dooley was like the oracle. He kept his ear to the ground, knew the comings and goings at the Met, and had his fingers in all sorts of pies. I couldn’t work out why Sallows was trying to squeeze me. I’d made problems for myself by staking out the house, calling an ambulance for the girl and letting Wellis get the better of me, but there was still little for the cops to go on. A witness spotting a car a bit like mine wasn’t going to lead to the Met turning up on my doorstep, not if they didn’t even have my plates. So what had got Sallows interested in me?

  ‘Did you listen to the whole of my message?’ I asked.

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s great, Dools.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ He gave a little snort, as if by asking him to check his messages properly I was asking the impossible. I could see things his way: we went months without talking, and just as he started to believe he’d got rid of me from his life, he picked up the phone and there I was. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve got a real job here, not some Mickey Mouse operation like you.’

  I ignored him. ‘Does the name Kevin Sallows mean anything to you?’

  ‘Sallows?’

  ‘Yeah. You know him?’