In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Doesn’t matter whose. Anywhere that’s not here is somebody else’s.’

  ‘You always been a worrier, T.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  ‘Ever since we was kids, man.’

  A uniformed copper and two community police support officers - plastic plods - came sauntering towards them. The copper got a good eyeful of Easy and Theo, while the CPSOs seemed rather more concerned about the pit-bull.

  Easy gave them all a grin, yanked the dog away. They turned the corner onto Lee Bridge. ‘All these extra pigs gonna be trotting off soon,’ he said. ‘Things can get back to normal, yeah?’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘This is the Wild West, man. You can see it on their faces, they don’t fancy it.’

  They stopped a few yards further on when Wave’s Mercedes drew alongside and stopped on yellow lines. As If was behind the wheel and calmly signalled the car behind to come round when its driver sounded his horn. Theo watched as Easy strolled across and leaned down to talk to Wave through the window. They talked for a few minutes and Theo saw Wave’s eyes flash across to him; saw him nod and laugh at something Easy had said. Theo nodded back. He knew they were talking about him and tried not to think about it.

  Could have been anything. The clothes he was wearing, whatever.

  When Wave had driven away they carried on walking. Easy said he was still planning on giving As If a good slap when the chance presented itself, then he talked about the various hassles he was getting from assorted women. He had a fair few on the go, so he claimed, and there were at least two children knocking around somewhere.

  ‘Like to keep my options open,’ he said. ‘Get some variety, you know what I’m saying? Never been one to settle.’ They walked on. ‘I tell you, man,’ he laughed, ‘that woman of yours is a serious handful.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Serious . . .’

  Theo smiled and stepped carefully to avoid a brown smear on the pavement. Thought, Yeah and she’s my handful.

  They talked rubbish for a few minutes, Easy pouring scorn on some local DJ he’d heard on the community radio station and bragging about how he’d put the fear of God into some loser who’d cut up his Audi on Shooters Hill. Theo did his best to look relaxed. He was still thinking about those three uniforms around the corner; the look on the face of that copper as he made eye contact. He struggled to listen to Easy’s ramblings above the whine in his brain as it raced and his imagination fought to escape from dark corners.

  ‘T? You listening, man?’

  ‘Nothing worth hearing, man.’

  ‘I’m hungry. You hungry?’

  They stopped at the McDonald’s just inside the Lewisham Centre. ‘I need a piss as well,’ Easy said. ‘Two birds with one stone, man. Sweet and simple.’ He handed the leash to Theo, asked him to look after the dog while he went inside to get them both McFlurries.

  Theo waited while Easy went about his business, trying to control the dog as it lunged at passers-by, fighting the temptation to let the mutt run free, see how it handled a busy main road.

  Easy came out and handed Theo his ice-cream. ‘Before,’ he said. ‘All that stuff about stepping on toes. You think it was my fault Mikey got killed?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘Felt like that was what you was saying.’

  ‘It’s fucked up, that’s all,’ Theo said. ‘Shouldn’t be happening.’

  Easy shrugged. He ate fast, and when he was finished he lobbed the plastic container towards a litter bin. He turned to Theo, spread out his arms, the dog chasing its tail at his ankles. ‘This is the way it is, man. You get me? It’s supposed to be like this.’

  ‘What? Feeling shit scared?’

  Easy narrowed his eyes, wrapped the dog’s leash around his wrist, yanked the animal close. ‘Who’s scared?’

  Theo stared at the traffic.

  ‘You finishing that?’

  Theo handed over his untouched McFlurry, then closed his eyes and tried to remember the taste of barley wine on a windy balcony, enjoying the sun on his face for half a minute while he waited for Easy to finish.

  She and Paul had never lived in each other’s pockets. They had kept their own space, given it to each other, and been happy enough with that. They’d seen their own friends and never felt the need to report every conversation, to ask the other who they had been talking to whenever the phone was put down. They had rarely been compelled to co-ordinate diaries and each had held a separate bank account; an independence that had been easy, though it had later become enforced, especially by Paul, in the aftermath of Helen’s affair.

  She told herself these things in an effort to explain away the existence of the computer she had collected from Kennington on the way home. To play down its presence, sleek and grey on the table in front of her. To make herself feel a little less apprehensive as she fired it up.

  She’d opened all the windows in the flat, but it still felt muggy; close, her father would have said. She was sweating in baggy shorts and one of Paul’s old T-shirts. A cold glass of wine, or better still a beer, would have been more than welcome.

  Bescott had been waiting for her in the car park.

  He had taken her into his office and handed over the laptop wrapped inside a plastic bag. He’d seemed friendly enough but, as always, it was hard to decide how much of that was down to her condition. Her . . . circumstances. There’d been something in his face, though, like he was trying too hard, and Helen couldn’t help wondering if he, and others above him, harboured the same suspicions about Paul’s activities that she did. How long would it be before an earnest-looking sort from the Directorate of Professional Standards came knocking?

  The Rubberheelers.

  The screen on the Mac turned blue as the system booted up.

  How hard would the DPS pursue an investigation if the officer in question was dead? Was there a danger that she herself would be implicated? She knew how these people worked and how they might presume that, as Paul’s partner, her own integrity had been compromised.

  She clicked on the icon above Paul’s name and told herself she was being ridiculous. Worst-case scenario, they’d probably want to go through Paul’s stuff and take a look at whatever was on this computer. Poke around for dirt.

  Same as she was.

  The desktop appeared and Helen felt like the breath had been punched out of her: a grainy picture of herself and Paul, grinning at the camera in a Greek taverna three summers before. Paul’s hair had been cut really short and his face was red. Her tits were almost coming out of a bikini top she should never have worn.

  ‘You tosser,’ Helen whispered, stabbing at the keyboard. ‘Make me feel even worse, why don’t you?’

  She opened Paul’s ‘Home’ folder and looked around. All the default system files were where they should be. There was nothing at all in ‘Pictures’ or ‘Movies’, and the ‘Documents’ folder contained only the expected user data.

  The Mac had barely been used, or at least not been used for very much.

  They’d shared the IBM at home, switched between users on the same system. Paul’s desktop had always been littered with random documents and clippings, assorted folders bulging with downloaded songs and mildly offensive video clips courtesy of Gary Kelly and other mates at work. She’d been the one with nicely organised folders with names like ‘utility bills’, ‘baby’ and ‘council tax’.

  On the laptop, it was easy enough to spot the folder she was looking for. It contained a single document, labelled ‘Victoria’. Helen double clicked to open the file and was asked to enter a password.

  She stared at the empty box on the screen for a minute, at the blinking cursor inside, then entered Paul’s surname and date of birth. Like most people, he’d used his birthdate as the PIN for his bank account.

  No good.

  She tried his mother’s name, married and maiden. His father’s. Then she tried her own name, asking herself as she typed why it wasn’t the first thing she’d
thought of.

  The password you have entered is incorrect.

  How tricky could it be, for God’s sake? Paul wasn’t . . . had not been any kind of a whizz when it came to this stuff.

  Victoria . . .

  Maybe he had got his own back, after all. Christ, could this be about something as simple as a bit on the side? A bit of posh too, by the sound of her. It was a painful thought, but perhaps less painful than the alternative.

  There was still Kevin Shepherd to explain away, though. And Frank Linnell.

  She began to type quickly, shouting at herself any time she mistyped and when she accidentally hit the CAPS LOCK; trying out words as they popped into her head and jabbing at the ENTER key. Anything that might mean something to Paul: the name of his best friend at school; the dog he had when he was a kid; Queens Park Rangers; The Great Escape; Freddie fucking Mercury . . .

  The password you . . .

  She slammed down the lid as hard as she dared and sat there until she got her breath back. Until the sweat had begun to cool on her neck and shoulders.

  She remembered that Jenny’s husband Tim was good with computers, how he’d bored the arse off them any number of times talking about networks and firewalls. She thought about asking him to help, then quickly thought better of it. She knew that Jenny would have a field day as soon as she found out, would interrogate her endlessly. Maybe she could ask Tim to do it on the sly and keep it to himself. A blow-job might do the trick; she knew he’d always had a thing for her.

  Jesus, where the hell had that come from?

  The baby kicked, good and hard. She felt dizzy suddenly, light-headed. She went into the kitchen and drank half a bottle of water.

  Once she felt steadier, she took the laptop to the bedroom, wrapped it inside the plastic bag and stashed it away at the bottom of the wardrobe, behind Paul’s guitar. She felt herself redden even as she was doing it, but knew that whatever was on the hard disk needed to be hidden.

  She thought that Frank Linnell might have the answers, but it wasn’t going to be easy finding him. There was no way she could ask anyone to help without needing to explain why, and it wasn’t feasible to stroll into her office and sit down at the computer. Tracing a number plate, as she’d done with Ray Jackson, was a simple enough business, but any usage of the PNC would involving logging on and entering her password. The session would be a matter of record.

  Christ, if she just had the name of one of Linnell’s businesses, it might be as simple as picking up the Yellow Pages.

  Back in the living room, she glanced across at the rest of Paul’s stuff, still sitting where she’d left it on the table: his diary, tapes and CDs, the mapbook from the car, his sat-nav unit.

  ‘Come on, Hopwood, admit it. That’s bloody genius . . .’

  Maybe not, but it was a decent idea, and even though it might take a while, it wasn’t like she had much else to do.

  Maybe this time the technology would be on her side.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  They’d found SnapZ first thing that morning.

  There were police all over the estate again; shouts and sirens, its dawn chorus. A blanket of blue, vehicles clogging up the side streets, and yellow tape flapping around the entrance to the block where SnapZ had lived. The rumours started flying pretty fast, and by mid-morning anyone with ears knew what had happened.

  A crew-boy down. Another one.

  According to some mouth almighty, who had heard it from a gobby copper, a girlfriend had phoned the police the day before, when she had been unable to get SnapZ on his mobile for twenty-four hours. The report had been dutifully logged and forgotten. Twenty-four hours before that, a woman had called to complain about a disturbance in a neighbouring flat; about how it wasn’t the first time the toe-rag living two doors along had ruined her Sunday by blasting out his music and slamming doors. That had received even less attention, reports of excessive noise or anything approaching a domestic coming somewhere below dropping litter and dogs fouling the pavements when it came to the Lee Marsh estate.

  Easy had been spot on. They just didn’t fancy it.

  It wasn’t until some sharp-eyed desk sergeant put the two reports together and noticed the one name they had in common that anyone got off their arse. An hour later they were smashing in SnapZ’s door. Then, before they had a chance to take off their stab vests, those officers who had been happily returning to desk jobs or foot patrol in Greenwich and Blackheath were racing west, pale and pissed off, back to SE13.

  Theo stood watching from just behind a crowd of fifteen or twenty that was as near to the action as it could get. Most of them probably didn’t know that they’d already taken SnapZ away; were still waiting in the hope of getting a glimpse of the drama.

  It was an odd mix: shopkeepers; a family or two who lived on the estate; and a few bemused souls who looked like tourists and must have taken a seriously wrong turn. One or two of the crew were hanging around as well, to pay their respects or maybe just to gain some comfort from being close to the others. Theo had seen Gospel and Sugar Boy loitering, had exchanged those all-purpose nods before letting his eyes drop.

  Near to where he was standing, a small boy stood with his father, slurping at an ice-cream and craning his head to get a good look at whatever was happening. Theo’s guts were jumping. He’d called in at the café early on and now he felt like he might chuck his bacon sandwich up at any time.

  After another ten minutes or so, a pair of bored-looking uniforms ushered the crowd further back and some of them started to drift away. Theo knew that people would already be preparing their speeches. There were a few local news teams there as it was and he knew that the bigger ones would be arriving later on. National TV and stuff, probably.

  As the father and son walked past him, Theo caught the small boy’s eye, the shrug and the look on his sticky face.

  Nothing to see.

  Others, going back to whatever they’d been doing, shared a different expression.

  Nothing they hadn’t seen before.

  Theo hoped his own face wasn’t giving too much away. That it gave no hint as to what was going on inside his head; raging in there. He hadn’t got a clue why, and even less who, but he knew now that all this had nothing to do with Easy and his . . . excursions. Knew that it was not about territory.

  There were thirty, maybe more in the street crew, with plenty of others further up, in the triangles above, for those who knew where to look.

  Mikey dead, and now SnapZ. It was more than a coincidence.

  As far as the media were concerned, the explanation would be simple. They would be marked down as casualties in a vicious gang war or a dispute about ends. They would probably be seen as victims of something bigger, too: symptoms of alienated this and disenfranchised that, the product of a messed-up ethnic underclass or some such.

  But Theo knew they also had something more specific in common, something they shared with only Theo himself and two others. The night ten days before when that police officer had been killed. When he had killed that police officer.

  Mikey and SnapZ had both been sitting on the back seat.

  Theo turned away and all but collided with Gospel. She kept her head down, ran a hand through her locks. ‘Out of order, man,’ she said.

  Theo felt his breakfast starting to move.

  Gospel moved away like she was in a hurry. ‘Out of fucking order.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Theo said.

  Helen had to admit that some of these small-time toe-rags were pretty bloody clever.

  Before she’d taken her maternity leave, she’d heard about a spate of car thefts in which kids would break into cars with sat-nav systems, hit the HOME button and be directed to a house which they would promptly burgle, safe in the knowledge that the homeowner was somewhere else. Finding out that his car had just been nicked.

  The gadget could, of course, be put to more noble use; not that what she was doing felt particularly noble.

  Paul had known his way arou
nd most of south-west and central London, so he had only really used the sat-nav for getting home if he found himself north of the river or needed to drive to another city. Helen knew that the ‘recent destinations’ were listed in the order they’d been programmed into the unit, and hoped there wouldn’t be too many to work through. She recognised a couple and discounted them. Then, remembering what Gary Kelly had told her about where Frank Linnell operated, she started looking for addresses in the south-east of the city.

  The first two were a waste of time: Linnell was obviously not based at Catford police station, and the terraced house in Brockley turned out to belong to a retired couple whose daughter had been a witness in a murder case Paul had investigated a few months earlier.

  The old woman had remembered him. ‘Nice man,’ she’d said. ‘Polite.’

  Helen had started out early, and just after ten-thirty she turned into a side street by Charlton Park and stopped near a pub a mile or so south of the Thames. She saw a black Range Rover parked alongside and a skip out front and remembered that Kelly had also spoken about Linnell being in property development.

  Third time lucky.

  As she walked from the car, a man in paint-spattered overalls came out of the pub and emptied the contents of a heavy-looking plastic bucket into the skip.

  ‘Is the boss in?’ Helen asked. Her warrant card stayed in her bag. The man grunted - could have been ‘yes’, could have been ‘no’ - and went back inside.

  She found herself some shade and waited.

  Five minutes later, the door opened again and a well-built black man appeared. He sized her up, then asked what she wanted to drink. Helen was a little taken aback, but tried not to show it. ‘Just some water would be fine.’ The man held open the door for her.

  He walked her through the pub, where half a dozen men were painting, hammering and drilling. She heard two of them talking in an East European language. Polish was her best guess. There were so many Poles working in the UK as plumbers and builders that their government had recently issued an official request, asking if they could have a few back.