by Elena Forbes
TEN
It was past five in the afternoon and already dark when Dan finally stood outside the house in Kilburn where Mickey Fraser was apparently now living. He and Zofia had started by driving to a house in Tooting, which they had on file as Mickey’s home address. But Mickey hadn’t been there for almost a year. It seemed that he moved flats every few months and they had driven from Tooting, to Clapham, to Cricklewood, asking for Mickey at every one, and had finally been sent to 20b Acacia Grove, Kilburn. This had taken up most of the day. The Kilburn address at least seemed promising; a woman at the Cricklewood house said that Mickey had called her only a few weeks before about forwarding some post to him there. Dan had insisted on Zofia going back to the office after that. He felt angry and disappointed in Mickey and he wanted to speak to him on his own. Mickey had been tasked with tracing Jane McNeil’s former housemates, Grace Byrne and Holly Crowther, as well as following up on the dead racing journalist, Kevin Stevens. He couldn’t wait for Mickey to decide to resurface in his own time; he needed to find out how far Mickey had got, particularly with Eve now on his back.
Mickey’s house was halfway along a terrace of tall, Edwardian red-bricks, most of which had been converted into flats with the front door up a steep flight of stairs. He pulled out his phone, switched on the torch and shone it over the dirty line of bells. A small, grubby card pinned to the top stated that flat B was in the basement. He went back down to the garden and found a short, narrow flight of stairs leading below, hidden behind a line of overflowing communal bins. Although basements were cheap and private – two reasons why they might appeal to Mickey – like a scurrying creature of the dark, it was appropriate that he would live in such a hellhole. He put his hand over his mouth, trying to block out the stench, as he carefully made his way down the slippery steps. The curtains were drawn, no light on inside, but that meant nothing. Mickey was probably sleeping off one of his periodic binges. It was dark at the bottom and it smelled even worse. The front door was tucked away deep under the stairs, in shadow from the streetlight above. Using his phone torch, he found the bell. He rehearsed in his mind what he was going to say if Mickey appeared and pressed it long and hard. He heard the buzz inside, but nobody came to the door. Music and voices drifted down from one of the flats above, but although he waited a good minute or so, no sign of life came from Mickey’s flat. Just so that he could tell Zofia that he had made sure, he thumped his fist loudly on the door, calling out Mickey’s name. He felt the door give a little under the weight of his hand and, in the pale wash of light from his phone saw that it had opened a crack. It seemed to be unlocked. He put his shoulder against it and shoved and this time it swung open, banging loudly against the wall behind. If Mickey was at home, he must have heard.
Dan reached inside the doorjamb and fumbled until he found a light switch. He flipped it down, but no light came on. Tentatively, he shone his phone inside and saw a little bathroom to the left, under the stairs. Fumbling in the dark he found the light cord and pulled it, but that didn’t appear to be working either. To the right was another door. As he pushed it open and stepped inside, a waft of cold, damp air greeted him. It had a musty smell, as though nobody had opened a window in a long while. He shone the dim light slowly around the room, illuminating a kitchenette along one wall, the counter clean and tidy, nothing in the sink or on the small draining board. He turned the wash of light on the other side of the room, where an old sofa and an armchair were grouped around a TV. The walls were bare and the carpet was cheap and threadbare, as were the flimsy, patterned curtains. It all had a transient feel and he wondered if Mickey actually spent any time there. If he didn’t, where was he? A printer stood on top of a filing cabinet, next to the chimneybreast, on the other side of the room. The drawers were hanging open and, as he crossed the room to take a better look, he saw that the carpet behind the sofa was covered with a mess of files and papers. It looked as though somebody had been searching for something in a hurry and a lamp had been knocked over and lay on its side in the middle. He picked it up, placed it on a side table, and clicked the switch. But it, too, was dead.
Wondering if Mickey had had some sort of a drunken tantrum in the dark, he called out, ‘Hello, Mickey. It’s Dan. Are you there?’ No reply.
A narrow corridor led from the room to the back of the house and what he assumed was the bedroom. He called out again, hoping to wake Mickey, if he was there. Again, no answer. He imagined Zofia at his shoulder, whispering in his ear. Go on, Dan. Don’t give up now. He must be in there. Maybe he’s ill. Maybe he needs help. What if he’s hiding from you? £500 is a lot of money. He knocked at the bedroom door, put his hand on the handle, then pushed it open.
The first thing that hit him was the stink. Urine. Vomit. Something even more unpleasant. The stale air was thick with it and it caught in the back of his throat. He wanted to retch and clamped his jacket sleeve over his nose and mouth as he shone the torch into the room. The small double bed stood at an odd angle away from the wall and clothes had been pulled out from the little chest of drawers and strewn around all over the floor.
It took him two steps to find Mickey. He lay on his side, on the floor behind the bed, naked apart from a pair of tight blue underpants, his hands and feet tightly shackled behind him to a kitchen chair. A pool of thick, dark liquid surrounded his head like a halo and his eyes were open, as far as Dan could tell from the swollen, beaten face, which was smeared with dried blood. His mouth was stretched wide, stuffed with what looked like a rolled-up sock, the toe poking out between his lips. Blindly, Dan staggered out of the room, through the sitting room, and into the bathroom. His phone clattered to the floor, as he fell to his knees and vomited into the toilet bowl. The smell from Mickey’s bedroom still filled his nostrils and his head was throbbing. He felt hot and cold all at once, the nausea coming in waves. He couldn’t focus. He couldn’t think. His first reaction was to run, but he couldn’t even stand up. Was Mickey’s killer still in the flat? He didn’t think so. The blood was dark and several hours old at least. When had it happened? He couldn’t get the smell of it out of his mind. He vomited again and closed his eyes, the image of Mickey still in front of him.
Eventually, the nausea began to fade. He sat back on his heels and felt around the cold floor in the darkness for his phone. Finding it, he switched the torch back on and pulled himself up to his feet. He had to clear his lungs. He stumbled back to the front door and yanked it open, letting in a wet gust of air from the street. He stood just inside the door for a few moments, breathing in and out to calm himself. His head was throbbing worse than ever. Somehow he had to work out what to do, but he couldn’t think clearly. He needed painkillers. He went back into the bathroom and shone the torch around the tiny room. It appeared to be untouched by whoever had been searching the flat and he was surprised, given Mickey’s usually dishevelled appearance, how orderly it was, with just the basic essentials neatly lined up on a shelf above the basin. A small, mirrored medicine cabinet hung over the bath, half hidden behind the shower curtain. There was nothing in it apart from some spare razor blades, a jar of Vicks and a large plastic tub of Advil, which he assumed was left over from a recent trip Mickey had made to the US. It would have to do.
Hands shaking, he fumbled with the childproof cap. As he finally wrenched it off, the bottle slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor, spilling a mass of small red pills around him that bounced like beads on the tiles, along with something else that made a click as it dropped. He shone the torch over the floor and eventually found what he was looking for lurking behind the basin. He picked it up and studied it. It was a little, red memory stick, almost the same colour as the pills. 128GB. For Mickey to have hidden it so carefully, it must be important. He slid it into his jeans pocket. Mickey had been a secretive sort and he imagined him having a whole host of little hiding places dotted around the flat. He wondered how many of them the killer had found – and how many Mickey had been forced to give away under torture. He down
ed a couple of pills with a handful of water and then splashed some more water on his face as he studied himself in the mirror, wondering what to do.
There was no point in running away. His prints were all over the flat. He had no memory of exactly what he had touched and he knew it would be impossible to get rid of them all. His prints were also logged on the national system, thanks to a charge of affray as a student, and it wouldn’t take long for the police to link him to the flat. He would have to call them, as soon as he’d worked out what to say. He smeared some Vicks under his nose and went back into the sitting room for a final look. There was no sign of Mickey’s laptop and he assumed the killer had taken it, along with any external hard drive. If Mickey’s mobile was still around, it would be in the bedroom, but he couldn’t face going back in there. He was feeling shaky again and was about to leave, when he noticed a piece of paper lying facedown in the out tray of the printer. He picked it up and turned it over. It was a printout of a race card from the Racing Post, showing the runners for the 1.50 at Ascot the previous Saturday. He remembered what Mickey had told him the week before, about needing some funds to go racing. ‘For research purposes,’ Mickey had said. He had only half believed him. He photographed it, then returned the sheet to the printer tray as he had found it. He had seen enough. He needed a drink. He would go and sit in the car, while he worked out what to do.
As he went outside, the cold night air hit him with force, along with another wave of nausea. He sat down on the steps outside Mickey’s front door and put his head in his hands. His phone started to ring in his back pocket. It was probably Zofia demanding an update. He decided he would have to speak to her and pulled it out but he didn’t recognize the number on the screen. He stared at it for a moment, then pressed the green button, putting it on speaker. A woman’s voice, low in tone and English, was saying something he couldn’t quite hear against the background buzz of traffic. He caught the name Sean Farrell, then the word ‘prison’. It took him a moment to realize it must be Eve West.
‘Hello? Dan? Are you there?’
The image of Mickey tied to the chair flashed again in front of his eyes. He cleared his throat, thinking he was going to be sick again.
‘Dan, are you OK?’
He leaned back against the damp wall, taking several deep breaths of air. Then slowly, with difficulty, he held the phone to his lips and spilled out the gist of what had happened.
ELEVEN
‘Are you back at the office yet?’ Dan heard traffic in the background but Eve’s voice was clear this time over the phone.
‘Yes. Just got here,’ he said.
‘Good. I’m just down the road. I’ll be with you in five.’
It was just after ten o’clock at night. He had texted her as soon as he left Kilburn Police Station and she had replied, saying she was coming straight over. A couple of slices of thin-crust pizza from the Domino’s down the road lay congealing in the open box in front of him. Unusually he hadn’t been able to finish them. He felt too sick. He closed the box and stuffed it in a bin. He badly needed a drink. He fetched a bottle of vodka from the back room, where he was sleeping, but it was warm. There was nothing worse than warm vodka. He walked upstairs to the little kitchen on the half-landing, which they shared with the other office in the building, opened the door of the fridge, looking for ice, but there was none and he remembered that he had forgotten to fill the ice-tray the previous night. Zofia was sure to have ice in her flat in the attic – she wasn’t the sort to run out of anything. She had the place rent-free, for the time being, which was a lot better than most post-graduate law students could dream of. The least she could do was make her ice available, and her bath. But ever since he had moved out of Kristen’s flat a few weeks before and set up camp temporarily in the back room of the office, Zofia had started to get territorial about the top floor. Wearily, with the bottle dangling from his hand, he climbed the stairs to the top floor and let himself into her flat, where he found several full trays in her kitchen freezer. He took a glass from her cupboard and added a handful of cubes. But as he tried to top it up with vodka, his hand trembled so badly, he had to put it down again. Maybe he was in shock. Perhaps that was what it was. Using both hands, he managed to fill the glass and slowly and carefully put it to his lips. It was the first drink of the evening and he took a large gulp. Christ, what a day. He leant back against the wall and downed the rest of it.
After speaking to Eve at Mickey Fraser’s flat, he had gone to his car outside and dialled 999. The police took no more than five minutes to arrive, cars screeching to a halt, lights flashing like a series of Christmas trees. They had sealed off the area immediately outside the house, as well as a section of the street, much to the annoyance, as well as morbid curiosity, of some of the neighbours. On discovering that he was the ‘Dan’ who had made the 999 call, they had swiftly carted him off to the local police station for interview. He had also voluntarily allowed his fingerprints to be taken, along with a mouth swab, and had then been kept waiting for over an hour until a pair of plainclothes police – a very young man, with greasy skin, and a hatchet-faced woman – had arrived from somewhere else to question him. Although they had been relatively polite, it was clear that they viewed his presence in the flat as very suspicious.
‘Are you a friend of Mickey Fraser’s?’ one of the detectives had asked.
‘No.’
‘What is your relationship to him?’
‘There is no relationship. He just did some work for us from time to time. On a freelance basis.’
‘Why did you go to the flat?’
‘He wasn’t returning our calls.’
‘Is it normal, if someone works for you, to go over to where they live, if they don’t return your calls?’
‘I’d advanced him some money. I wanted to find out how close he was to being able to repay me.’
‘How did you first meet Mickey?’ they had asked. ‘Who introduced you?’
He mentioned the name of his former editor at one of the Sunday magazines and imagined that he would be next on their list to call.
One question led to another in an inevitable downwards spiral and he felt increasingly uneasy. He was so tired, he started stumbling over some of the answers, which only added to their suspicions. He knew nothing about Mickey’s personal life, or who else he had worked for, or what else he had been doing. It was the first time he had been to Mickey’s flat in Kilburn, or to any of his previous addresses. He told them a little about 4Justice and the Sean Farrell case, and he was interested to see their curiosity cool a little. He sensed, with relief, that they considered a ten-year-old murder case, with a man convicted and in jail for the crime, to be a less likely reason for Mickey’s murder than something else Mickey was working on. Dan clung to that thought as they continued to question him until finally they, too, appeared to have had enough.
He filled his glass with more vodka and, tucking the bottle under his arm, closed the door to the flat and carried his drink back downstairs. To his surprise, he found Eve already standing in the middle of the office, gazing around as though she were carefully taking in all the details.
‘The front door was open,’ she said a little sharply.
‘I left it open to make sure I didn’t lock myself out.’
‘No. I mean the door to the street.’
He looked at her wearily. She had to make a point about everything. Security was the last of his worries. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t shut properly, but maybe I didn’t close it when I came in. OK?’
‘Are you alright?’ She gave him a cursory look as she peeled off her coat. It looked as though she was intending to stay for a while, which was not good news. She was wearing a well-cut, dark-grey trouser suit that emphasized the curves of her slim figure and he wondered why she was so smartly dressed at that hour.
‘A little shaken, but not stirred.’ He attempted a grin. It was just something to lighten the mood, but either she didn’t get the reference, or wasn’t
taken with it, as nothing registered on her face. Did she ever smile, he wondered. That was the problem with beauty. It took itself far too seriously. Along with her handbag, which she had left on the floor under her coat, he noticed a small leather briefcase and remembered she had been to visit Sean Farrell. He held up the bottle of vodka. ‘Would you like a drink?’
She shook her head. He sensed disapproval, which annoyed him. He plonked the bottle down on the floor and collapsed onto the sofa with his glass, legs stretched out in front of him so that he was almost horizontal. If he had known her better, he would have lain down properly on the sofa, but he was in danger of falling asleep. It probably wasn’t a good idea to get too comfortable. Hopefully, he could get this over and done with quickly.
‘I’m the chief suspect, of course, but they let me go,’ he said, aware that he was slurring his words a little. It was more from exhaustion than the alcohol, but he doubted she knew the difference. ‘Zofia’s with them now, giving her side of things.’
Eve pulled up the chair from Zofia’s desk and sat down in front of him, one leg neatly crossed over the other, as though it were another professional interview. ‘So who did you see?’
He leaned forwards and fumbled in the back pocket of his jeans for a moment, but the business cards weren’t there. ‘I guess I must have left their cards on the table at the police station,’ he said, stifling a yawn.