In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Do you want me to do it?’

  Helen thanked him, but said she could manage. She got up and made the call, making sure they knew she was Job.

  ‘At least let me wait with you,’ Deering said when she’d hung up. ‘Help you clean up a bit afterwards.’

  ‘There’s really no need.’

  ‘It’s fine, honestly,’ he said. ‘I wanted to talk to you anyway.’

  ‘Right . . . sorry,’ Helen said, suddenly realising that she hadn’t even asked Deering why he’d come to see her in the first place.

  Easy loved his burgers and his chicken, same as the rest of them, but that was all most of those boys ever ate. It was usually a time thing - being able to grab something on the run and get back to business - but even when it was about nothing else but the eating, they’d still settle for shit. Wearing four figures’ worth of chains and spending less than a fiver on your dinner, it didn’t make sense.

  You couldn’t eat chains or a flashy watch.

  Sometimes, he liked to spend whatever it cost and get something decent; something that didn’t come quick; with champagne if he was minted, or maybe a glass of wine where they poured a bit out first for you to taste. It was important to do that, to look like it was something you were used to.

  Unless there was some girl he was trying to bone or something to celebrate, he preferred eating on his own, too. It wasn’t like he didn’t want to be seen, but he loved the food and didn’t want any distractions. Chit-chat and whatever was fine over KFC, but he wanted to enjoy what he was eating and he couldn’t relax with rubbishness flying at him across the table. He’d always been impressed with people who could do that, sit there and eat with nobody but themselves. He thought they must be pretty special; comfortable with what they were doing, you know?

  He’d driven over to Brockley, to a French place he’d seen in the paper; a bistro or whatever. It wasn’t as posh as some of the places he’d tried up west, but the food was out of this world. He’d had snails, and beef in pastry, and some fantastic pudding with meringues floating around in thin custard. Waiters in some of the other places took one look and acted like a turd had been walked across the carpet, but the woman bringing his food tonight had been nice, even if she was about as French as he was, and he’d left a big tip, same as always.

  Walking back to the car, he wondered about calling in at the Dirty South for a drink. See what the atmosphere was like; if things had settled.

  He came around the corner and saw some fucker at his Audi, working at the window with a screwdriver, like he didn’t care.

  ‘Fuck you think you’re doing?’ Easy moved fast, ready to do some damage, and the man at the car stepped back. ‘You’re fucking dead, man. Stupid fucker.’ He was almost on him when the man produced the gun and suddenly Easy was the one who felt stupid.

  ‘Get in the car,’ the man said.

  Easy heard footsteps behind him and another voice, which said, ‘Do as you’re told.’

  He got behind the wheel, while the big man who had come from nowhere climbed into the passenger seat beside him. Told him it was a nice evening for a drive. The first man got into the back and Easy winced when he felt the muzzle of the gun poking into the soft flesh behind his ear.

  He remembered what he’d said to Theo about being ready for this, but he could feel the beef rising up and the taste of that wine, and in the end, the only thing he could do was what he was told.

  Sweet and simple.

  ‘I’ve put all this in my report, obviously,’ Deering said. ‘But I wanted to tell you in person, too. Because I know you.’

  ‘“All” what?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Remember when we met up last week and I said there were a couple of things I was still trying to clear up.’

  ‘Just procedural, you said.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you anything until I was sure.’

  Helen reached for her tea, but it was nearly cold. The baby had settled down. She told Deering to continue.

  He cleared his throat and set down his tea. He seemed, to Helen, like someone who had carefully thought through what he was going to say and how he was going to say it. She felt another small shiver as she wondered why that would be.

  ‘The first thing was the glass.’

  ‘Which glass?’

  ‘The glass from the window in the BMW,’ Deering said. ‘You saw it when you came to the garage.’

  Helen nodded, remembering the back of the car, the mats removed. The pieces of glass beneath the seats and in the rear footwell, glittering against the dark metal.

  ‘Plenty in the car, but none on the road. I checked.’

  ‘I’m not with you. Wouldn’t all the glass have been inside the car anyway? It would fall inwards, surely.’

  ‘The vast majority of it, certainly, but you’d still expect a few fragments to have fallen onto the road. I read the initial report and double-checked. I spoke to the first officer on the scene, and to the collision investigator after he’d been back. There was no glass.’

  ‘Maybe it was scattered by passing cars or a street-cleaner had been past.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Maybe the traffic officer wasn’t very thorough.’

  Deering cocked his head, acknowledging that possibility too, but he seemed eager to press on. ‘Maybe, but the collision investigator certainly was, which was why I was also worried about the speed.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘He took all the necessary measurements, checked for skid patterns and so on, and was able to calculate exactly how fast each car was going when the incident occurred. The answer, oddly, was not very.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Twenty miles an hour, tops, when the BMW was supposedly trying to get away, at a time of night when there was very little other traffic on the roads.’

  ‘It was raining pretty heavily.’

  Deering shook his head. ‘In fact, the only time the BMW got up to anything like a decent speed was after the shots were fired, when it veered towards the bus stop.’

  Now Helen was utterly confused. ‘What’s funny about that? Wouldn’t you speed up if somebody was shooting at you?’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s the thing,’ Deering said.

  The effect of what he’d said, or his expression as he spoke, must have been clear for him to see on Helen’s face. He looked concerned suddenly, and lifted his mug. ‘Let me get you another one of these.’

  Helen shook her head, eager to hear it.

  ‘OK . . . Well, I told you we’d dug two bullets out. One from the wheel arch and one from the bottom of the off-side rear door, right? Thirty-eights, like we thought.’

  Helen nodded.

  ‘But they weren’t in the right place.’

  ‘What’s the right place?’

  ‘The Cavalier isn’t that high off the ground. I mean it might have made sense if the BMW was one of those low, sporty models, or if they’d been firing from a higher car, a big four-by-four or something, but the angles are all wrong.’

  ‘The angles of the shots?’

  ‘Right. Look, they were shooting like this.’ He leaned forward and stretched out an arm towards her, two fingers shaping themselves into the muzzle of a gun. He saw Helen’s face and dropped his arm, embarrassed. ‘Hang on, look at these.’ He hurried to fetch a briefcase that he’d left by the door and produced a series of computer printouts. ‘They’ve got a software program that can map the trajectory of the bullets based on the relative heights of each vehicle.’ He passed the sheets across and pointed. ‘You can trace the path that each bullet took. See? Neither point of impact is where it should have been.’

  Helen studied the sheets, trying to take in what he was saying. ‘Wouldn’t the bullets have changed their trajectory anyway, once they hit the glass?’ It was the best she could come up with. ‘That might explain why they ended up where they did.’

  ‘The first bullet, possibly,’ Deering said, as though he’d been throug
h this already. ‘But there wouldn’t have been any glass for the second bullet to pass through. It’s nothing to do with the glass. It’s all about where the shots were fired from. And when they were fired.’

  Helen stared at the sheets while Deering got up and walked behind the sofa.

  He pointed down. ‘Like this . . .’

  Helen looked up and stared at Roger Deering, and the panic she’d felt in the bathroom just a short time before seemed like a distant memory. It was replaced by something deeper and more desperate; a terrible notion that she could feel strengthening its grip on her by the second.

  ‘You said “when”.’ Her voice was a whisper.

  ‘The shots were fired earlier,’ Deering said. ‘I don’t know when exactly, but certainly before the accident. They were fired by someone standing outside the car while it was stationary.’

  ‘You’re telling me the whole thing was staged? What happened . . .’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m not telling you anything. Just what I found out, that’s all.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  Deering looked uncomfortable, as though they’d passed beyond the limits of his expertise. ‘Not the sort of accident we thought it was, no.’

  ‘You’re saying that all this was done to cover up something else. That Paul was . . . targeted.’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’ He looked even more uncomfortable. ‘I can’t say that. There were other people at that bus stop, Helen.’

  But she knew something that he didn’t. She knew about Operation Victoria.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  She knew that Paul had been killed deliberately.

  Helen jumped when the doorbell rang, and Deering saw the movement. ‘That wasn’t the baby, right?’

  She got up from the sofa without a word and walked slowly towards the door.

  Deering followed and put a hand on her arm. ‘Listen, I’d like to come tomorrow. If that’s all right.’

  She said yes without really taking in the question.

  ‘So, what are you going to do tonight? Once they’ve finished?’

  Helen turned. She wasn’t thinking straight, had been moving like a sleepwalker, but she knew one thing for certain. She didn’t want to spend the night alone in the flat. ‘I want to go to my dad’s,’ she said.

  Deering nodded and told her he’d drive her over later. He rubbed her arm. ‘You’d better let them in.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  As it was, she wanted it over with as quickly as possible, and she never wanted it to end.

  The last bit was the worst, as she had always known it would be. Those few seconds when the coffin slid out of sight. The goodbye moment. When words tumbled and bumped around her head: the things she’d never said and the things she needed to say, now, after everything she had thought and felt in the weeks since Paul had died. But when it came to it as the short velvet curtains closed, with music not quite drowning out the mechanism’s hum or the sobs from the people close to her, there was only one thing she really wanted to say to him: ‘Sorry . . .’

  Her dad had been brilliant; not that she’d expected anything else. He’d said it wasn’t a problem when she’d woken him in the early hours to let him know that she’d changed her mind about coming over. In the morning, he’d cooked her breakfast and told her she looked fine, and had stayed close from the moment they’d arrived at Paul’s parents’ place.

  Helen hadn’t told him about the break-in.

  ‘Doesn’t seem right,’ he’d said when they’d set off. ‘Gorgeous weather on a day like this.’

  ‘It was nice for Mum’s too, remember?’

  ‘I think it only rains at funerals in films.’

  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, Helen thought, as Paul was being cremated. She remembered Paul and Adam fighting in a grave - and wondered why she’d dreamed about a burial.

  No one would have guessed that she and Paul’s mother had ever exchanged a cross word. The embrace when Helen arrived was warm and strong, and though Helen wasn’t quite sure what it meant, Caroline Hopwood said that her son ‘would have been proud’. While everyone stood around in her living room, she moved among them with a bottle and some glasses, keen to ensure that each person had a drink, or was at least offered one. Most took a small brandy, and Helen heard one of Paul’s aunties talk about needing a ‘stiffener’, which seemed an unfortunate choice of word, considering. She told her dad and he laughed.

  ‘She’s bearing up,’ he said, watching Paul’s mother drift from group to group. It was his phrase of the day, though some variation or other on how kind the weather was being ran it a close second.

  Paul’s dad and sister were equally welcoming, even if they weren’t holding up quite as well, with less to keep them busy. Paul’s father was ten years older than his wife and never said much. When Helen went into the kitchen to see if she could lend a hand, he shook his bald head slowly and pulled her close, and only let go when someone said that the cars had arrived.

  ‘I can’t bloody do this,’ he said. He looked as though he wanted to lie down and never get up again.

  It was a ten-minute drive out to the crematorium. Sun streamed into the big Daimler, bringing the smell out of the cracked leather seats. Sitting there with her father and Paul’s parents, Helen watched the reactions of pedestrians as the cortège drifted by. She remembered being on the way to her mother’s funeral and seeing people stop and lower their heads; watching a man raise his hat. Perhaps they just didn’t do that any more, she thought. Maybe one more person’s passing meant less now that everyone was used to seeing so much death and destruction on live TV. She mentioned it to her father, and he leaned across to watch with her.

  ‘Maybe people have just got no manners any more,’ he said.

  There were a lot of police already gathered outside the chapel. Helen saw cigarettes being stamped out as the car approached. Gary Kelly and Martin Bescott were standing with many of Paul’s other colleagues from Kennington CID. She saw Jeff Moody with what she guessed was a small group of SOCA officers, and there were plenty there in uniform, as part of the official police presence.

  She was helped from the car by the driver and spoke to several people. She said something about how lovely the grounds looked, but she was drifting, as though none of it were quite real.

  In the doorway to the chapel, the area commander introduced himself, and told her that Paul had been a fine officer who had been doing great work. Helen thanked him. For a moment, she wondered if he knew about Operation Victoria, but guessed that he was saying what he usually did on such occasions; that he’d probably never heard of Paul Hopwood until he received the memo. She turned to look at the hearse as they started to unload the coffin, and was aware of the area commander taking a piece of paper from his top pocket, sneaking a last glimpse at the speech he would be giving in a few minutes.

  The pall-bearers stepped forward, each in immaculate dress uniform, and were briefed in low tones by the funeral director. Helen thought they looked beautiful, and nervous. As they took the coffin’s weight on their shoulders, she glanced across at Paul’s mother and watched pride and grief struggling for control of her expression.

  A Metropolitan Police flag had been draped across the coffin and now Paul’s dress cap was laid on the lid, behind the simple wreath of white flowers that Helen had chosen. She was aware of eyes on her and wondered what her own expression was. She felt blank and heavy. Like she was falling.

  She leaned into her father as the pall-bearers started to move. They came slowly; not quite a slow march, but in step, staring straight ahead. The look on the face of the officer nearest her was like a punch to her heart, its dutiful determination. So she let her eyes drop and looked instead at the highly polished boots as the coffin was carried past her; at the sharp creases in their dress trousers and the small stones that were kicked aside with each step.

  Paul’s father put a hand in the small of his wife’s back and they moved into line
behind the pall-bearers.

  ‘You ready, love?’ her father asked.

  Heartburn had kicked in half an hour after breakfast. It was just starting to ease. Her tights were itchy and she’d need the toilet soon. When she sucked in a breath she could taste cut grass and wax, and she hoped that her legs wouldn’t give out before she had a chance to sit down.

  ‘Don’t let me down, Helen.’

  ‘Only the once, Hopwood. It won’t happen again.’

  She put her arm through her father’s and followed the coffin.

  After the service, Helen spoke briefly to Roger Deering and Martin Bescott, introducing them to each another. Bescott said that Paul would be greatly missed by the team, and Helen thanked them both for coming. She had several reasons to be grateful to Deering, even if he was a little too touchy-feely. She thought Bescott seemed nice enough, and wondered why Paul had so rarely had anything good to say about him.

  Together with Paul’s mum and dad she joined those moving along the line of wreaths laid out in front of the flower bed that skirted the building. After a few minutes she stopped leaning down to read the cards and let others move past her. She stepped back and stared up at the elaborate golden dome above the chapel, an afternoon sky behind that was perfectly blue in all directions.

  The weather had been every bit as kind as her father had said.

  Looking to her left, she saw Frank Linnell at the end of the line. He’d probably sent flowers anyway, she thought, and was checking to see that they were suitably impressive. He saw her and raised a hand, and she turned away quickly in case he decided to come over.

  To look suitably gutted and tell her what a beautiful service it had been. To pass her a fistful of notes when nobody was looking. ‘Just a little something for the stone, love. My gift . . .’

  Walking towards the cars, she heard footsteps catching up with her.

  ‘Helen?’

  She turned, expecting to see Linnell, and saw Detective Inspector Spiky Bugger, clutching his order of service. ‘DI . . .’ She struggled to remember the name, only for a second, but long enough for him to spot it, to look at his shoes. ‘Thorne.’