Letters faded to the blue of his eyes: O+ S.O.F.A.
“I’ve no idea if he killed Chris Jago or not, but I’m the fourth member of that crew, and I want to stay alive as long as possible, thank you very much. I’m not claiming to be Brain of Britain. I was just a pig-thick squaddie, but it seemed like a good idea to keep a fairly low profile. Like you said, I kept my head down, and I’ve got away with it. Until now, at any rate.” Eales shrugged, blew on his coffee. “You lot might want to talk to me, but last time I checked, that wasn’t fatal.”
Mackillop felt like straps were being fastened tight across his chest. Dry-mouthed in a second, he sucked in the words and tried to arrange them into the question that was begging to be asked: You’ve no idea of who killed Chris Jago?
But he said nothing. The suspicion that he was out of his depth had suddenly become a horrible certainty. He felt like he was back on the course, that this was part of some elaborate training exercise. It was as if Eales were one of his tutors playing a role and this was the crucial point in the assessment process. The part where he could fuck up everything if he wasn’t very careful. Mackillop knew that he was being given the chance to put the big question, but he also knew that the moment belonged by right, and by seniority, to others.
Eales nodded toward the mug in Mackillop’s hand. “Do you want another one of those?”
The clever thing to do, the correct thing, was to back off a little. To sit tight, and wait for Andy Stone to arrive. Mackillop handed the mug across and turned back toward the bed-sitting room.
THIRTY-FOUR
The Latest Victim. The First Picture…
The newspaper felt a little spongy. It was stained in places by whatever liquid had pooled, brown and viscous, in the bottom of the bin. But the headline remained stark enough; the expression on the face of the young Terry Turner still hopeful, and heartbreaking.
“Weird to see him looking so young,” Maxwell said. “Without the bloody padlock…”
Thorne tore through the pages until he found the one he was after: the photo of another young man, this one in uniform, staring into the camera; wideeyed and half smiling, like it didn’t much matter what was coming.
Thorne got up off his knees. “Look at this.” He folded the newspaper over and handed it across.
Maxwell stared at the picture for a few seconds, at the appeal for information beneath it, then turned back to Thorne. The expression on his face made it clear that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at; what he was meant to be seeing.
“Could that be him?” Thorne asked.
Maxwell went back to the photo. “ This bloke?”
“Could he be our Detective Sergeant Trevor Morley?”
“How old’s this picture?”
“Just look, Bren…”
Maxwell did as he was told. Let out a long, slow breath…
Thorne moved quickly across to stand alongside him, nodded down at the photograph. “That was taken when he joined up in the late eighties.” He suddenly remembered the digitally aged version that had been broadcast the night before; that Hendricks had talked about watching. “Did you not see this on Crimewatch last night?”
“I was out,” Maxwell said.
“Shit…”
“I was out on the streets, doing my fucking job. Fair enough?”
“Just stick twenty years on his face, all right? He’d be late thirties now, somewhere round there. Hair longer, obviously. A beard. From what you said, the coloring’s the same, right?”
“Sandy, but with some gray. And the freckles are darker, but I suppose that would have happened…”
“Look at the mouth,” Thorne said. “The smile would almost certainly be the same.”
“Maybe. Yeah… this could be him.”
“ ’ Could be,’ or is?”
“Jesus. I should have looked at this properly when I saw it the first time. I read about what had happened to Terry; that’s all. I never really took this in.”
“Well, now’s your chance. Come on, Brendan.”
Maxwell stabbed at the page. “The face has filled out a bit and it’s lined. Not wrinkles exactly; hard lines, like creases, you know? Like it’s weathered.”
It was good enough…
Thorne knew that they’d made a huge mistake; that they should at least have considered the possibility of this for longer and not dismissed it as quickly as they had. Though the evidence had certainly pointed toward the man behind the camera, they’d got it the wrong way round.
“It’s me…”
“What?” Maxwell turned, thinking that Thorne was talking to him, but he saw that Thorne had his phone pressed hard to his ear.
“We’ve been idiots, Russell,” Thorne said. “Ryan Eales isn’t the next one on the list. He’s the one who’s been working his way through it…”
Ryan Eales turned side on, leaned against the wall in the archway between kitchen and bed-sitting room. “Bit of luck that I came back when I did. That you were sitting outside in your car like that.”
“We’d have knocked on your door eventually,”
Mackillop said.
“I might not have answered it.”
Which would, Mackillop thought, have been understandable. All in all, things had turned out pretty well. It was equally likely that, if there had been no reply, and the man in the ground-floor flat turned out to have been the pothead Eales said he was, nobody would have bothered coming back. Mackillop laughed. “I suppose we should be grateful that you’d run out of biscuits,” he said.
“Right…”
The weather had changed suddenly yet again. Sunshine was screaming in through the big bay window and a smaller skylight toward the bathroom, flashing where it kissed the white walls and the varnish on the honey-colored floorboards. From where he was standing, near the top of the stairs, Mackillop saw the gleam from two pairs of boots, highly polished and placed side by side between bed and wardrobe. He saw magazines neatly piled beneath the bedside table and freshly ironed shirts folded symmetrically on a chair next to the bathroom door. “You can tell the person who lives here’s ex-army,” he said.
Eales seemed to find this funny. “How come?” “The boots.” Mackillop pointed across to them. “The way they’re arranged; the way everything’s laid out. Neat, you know, and well organized.”
“It’s just the way we’re taught to do things.”
“It must take a lot of effort, though.”
“Not really,” Eales said. “You do things a particular way because it makes sense. Being organized and tidy makes things simpler.”
Mackillop considered this. “I thought about the army myself before I joined the Met. For a short while, anyway.”
“You’d’ve been good.”
“You reckon?”
“Chances are, if you’re a good copper.”
“Getting there,” Mackillop said. He felt himself redden slightly. Looked around the room once again. “Yeah, definitely a soldier’s place
…”
Eales smiled. “Look underneath the bed.”
Mackillop glanced across, then started to move when Eales nodded his encouragement. As he bent down he could see that the base of the bed was actually a drawer. He pulled it out and found himself staring at a collection of military memorabilia: a dress uniform, pressed and folded; a gas mask; badges and medals displayed in open cases; bundles of photographs. And weapons: grenades, guns, a highly polished bayonet
…
“Bloody hell!”
“Don’t worry, the guns have been decommissioned,” Eales said. “Firing pins removed and barrels drilled.”
Mackillop reached toward one of the pistols. “May I?”
“Help yourself. That smaller one’s a Browning nine-millimeter. It’s Iraqi.”
Mackillop’s hand hovered above the gun. He wondered if it had once belonged to one of those soldiers he’d seen kneeling in the desert. Taken from him before another was put to the back of his head. He pick
ed up the bayonet instead.
“That’s seriously sharp, by the way.”
“I bet.” Mackillop stood and held the bayonet up in front of himself. In the skinny mirror of its blade he could see the refelction of bathroom door, the TV and VCR, the black wire that snaked across the floor from the PlayStation to the controller.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Eales said.
“This might sound morbid, and a bit… geeky or whatever.” Mackillop turned the hilt, throwing a sliver of reflected sunlight across Eales’s face. “Has this thing ever… killed anyone?”
Eales walked across and took the bayonet from Mackillop’s hand. “This?” he said. He examined the blade as if he were seeing it for the first time, leaned forward, and slid it into Mackillop’s belly. “Not until now…”
The policeman’s hands flew to the hilt, wrapped themselves tight around the soldier’s; hands that were bigger and stronger and drier. He tried to push, and when he opened his mouth he produced only the gentle pop of a bubble bursting.
“You ready?” Eales asked. “Here we go.” He nodded, counting quietly to three, before twisting the bayonet and dragging it up hard, through muscle, toward the sternum.
Mackillop sighed, then sucked the air quickly back in, as if he’d just dipped a foot into a hot bath or touched a sensitive filling.
There was only the sound of breathing for a while after that, labored and bubbly, and the low moan of boards beneath shifting feet, as both sets of fingers grew slippery against the hilt.
“Luck always runs out in the end,” Eales said.
And he never broke eye contact, not for a moment. Holding fast to what was bright in Jason Mackillop’s eyes, which seemed to blaze, just for that final second or two, before it went out. Like the last dot of life as a TV screen fades to black, shrinking quickly from a world to a pinprick.
And then nothing.
Part Four
Finished Falling
THIRTY-FIVE
At first, so he told everyone later, he thought that Mackillop had simply got tired of waiting for him and buggered off…
By the time Andy Stone’s taxi had finally worked its way through the Saturday-afternoon traffic and reached the house where Asif Mahmoud lived, the Volvo was nowhere to be seen and Jason Mackillop wasn’t answering his phone. Stone had visited the ground-floor flat. He’d been told by Mr. Mahmoud that though he hadn’t seen any police officers, he had heard comings and goings. Someone had come into the house a short time earlier, then left again fairly soon afterward. Stone had immediately knocked at the other three flats in the building-including, of course, the one on the top floor-but had received no reply.
Confused and pissed off, he had decided to head back to Becke House, so had made his way to the tube station. It wasn’t until thirty minutes later, when he got above ground at Colindale, that the message had come through about Ryan Eales…
“How long d’you think Stone missed him by?” Thorne asked.
Holland was pulling sheets of paper from his case. He looked up. “Impossible to say for sure. It must have been pretty close, though. Hendricks has the time of death at somewhere between one-thirty and two-thirty…”
“I was calling Brigstocke just after two,” Thorne said. “We should have moved faster. I should have moved faster.”
When, after an hour, TDC Mackillop could still not be contacted, a team had been dispatched back to West Finchley. While the car-which was found in a side street behind Finchley Central Station- was being towed away, witnesses described seeing it parked outside the house on Rosedene Way. A woman who’d been walking her dog gave an accurate description of Mackillop, and a man who lived opposite gave a statement saying that he’d seen the driver of the car talking to someone on the street.
More officers had gathered, serious and uneasy, as the Saturday began to dim. An armed unit was called into position. Residents were evacuated and the road was sealed off, before finally-five hours after he’d driven into Rosedene Way-the door to the top flat at number forty-eight was smashed open, and Jason Mackillop was found…
Thorne had never met the murdered trainee. He wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or not to deal with his death, but it certainly made it easier to idealize him as a victim. Thorne didn’t know if Mackillop had bad breath or a foul temper; if he fancied himself or was close to his family. He’d never seen him at work, or fallen out with him, or heard him talk about anything important. Thorne knew only that he was naive, and keen, and almost ridiculously young. This not knowing made Jason Mackillop less real than many victims. But it didn’t mean that the dirty great slab of guilt that had been laid down on top of the others had any less weight.
“He shouldn’t have gone in there on his own,” Holland said.
Thorne looked wrung out by exhaustion and anger. “That doesn’t help.”
“It’s all Andy Stone’s got to hold on to…”
It was Monday afternoon; two days since Ryan Eales had murdered Jason Mackillop and fled. Police, continuing to investigate the killings of homeless men in and around the West End, had taken a room at the London Lift to conduct interviews, including one with a rough sleeper known only as Tom.
Thorne and Holland were catching up…
“He must have got out of there in one hell of a hurry,” Holland said. “No money in the place, but he seems to have left more or less everything else behind.”
They were in a poky, self-contained office in one corner of the bigger, open-plan admin area: a small sofa and a chair; a desk with a grimy computer and several heaps of cardboard files. The day was gray outside the frosted glass of a thin window. Thorne took the sheets as they were handed to him. “He knew that after what he’d done it wouldn’t much matter if we got hold of this stuff. And it’s not like any of it gives us a name, is it?”
Holland passed yet more paper across: photocopies of documentation found during the search of Eales’s flat. All indicated that although Eales had killed the other three men in his tank crew, as well as Radio Bob, Terry T, and the others, he’d actually been working with somebody else. Or rather, for somebody else…
The man behind the camera.
Thorne had been made aware of all this within hours of the entry into Eales’s flat, but this was his first look at the material evidence. He flicked through the bank statements and credit-card slips as Holland talked.
“Half a dozen different accounts, in four different names, and he managed to empty all but one of them before he did his vanishing act. Major payments into one or other of his accounts within a few days of Jago’s death, and Hadingham’s ‘suicide.’ Money paid in after each killing.”
“All in cash?”
“All in cash, and completely untraceable to anybody. He was well paid for what he did.”
“He was very good at it,” Thorne said.
Holland dug out another piece of paper from his case and held it out. “And very good at not being caught…”
Thorne took the sheet and began to read.
“I meant to tell you about this,” Holland said. “Then, when everything kicked off on Saturday afternoon, you know, I thought it could wait.” He pointed. “ That’s how they got away with it. Remember, we were talking about what they did with the bodies of the Iraqi soldiers? When we went to Taunton they told us about these war diaries, and at the time I didn’t think it was worth chasing up, because our boys would only have been mentioned if they’d been wounded or commended…”
Thorne saw where it was going. “You’re shitting me…”
“I just double-checked.”
Thorne read the words aloud. “ ‘Callsign 40 from B-Troop, under the command of Corporal Ian Hadingham, engaged with and destroyed an enemy tank, killing all four on board…’ ”
“The Iraqi tank surrendered,” Holland said, “or was captured or whatever. Then, after they’d shot them, Eales and the others just put the bodies back in the tank and blew the thing to shit. Whether anybody ever found out or not…”
“They got commended?” Thorne looked as though he might be close to tears of one sort or another. “Christ on a bike…”
Holland was rummaging in his briefcase again. “Something else that just came through. We finally got the transcript back from that lab in California: the techies who enhanced the sound on the video.” He passed across the sheaf of papers and closed his case.
Thorne took what was handed to him without really looking at it and placed it on the desk with the rest of the paperwork. He groped for the swivel chair behind him and slid clumsily onto it. “Another couple of loose ends tied up. It’s all good, I suppose…”
“None of it gets us anywhere, though. Right?”
The silence that hung between them for the next few seconds was answer enough.
“So what’s happening indoors?”
“Everyone’s busy,” Holland said. “Fired up, like you’d expect, you know, but…”
“Aimless,” Thorne said.
“The Intel Unit’s digging around. Hoping that the paper trail might throw up an address or something. Somewhere Eales might hole up.”
Thorne was dismissive. “He’s long gone.”
And Holland didn’t argue. He suspected that the brass had already taken the decision to scale down surveillance at all ports and airports.
The fact was that Mackillop’s death and Eales’s flight had torn the guts out of the investigation, and everyone knew it. It might, in other circumstances, have been what united the team and drove it on with renewed vigor, but this was more coffin nail than spur. Though they wanted Eales more badly than ever, they had to accept that, for the time being at least, they weren’t likely to find him. And, despite what they now knew, there was little chance, without Eales, of ever catching the man who’d bankrolled at least half a dozen killings over a year or more. Overstretched budgets were always important factors, as were limited resources and time constraints, but once a team lost the appetite for it, everything else became secondary.
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