The fifth caller had not identified himself.
She played the message through a second time, trying to identify a voice she recognised but couldn’t place; then a third time, as soon as she’d fetched a pen and paper to take down the relevant information.
The address, the name of the man she would be meeting, what she would need to see.
She knew that the place would be open late, but there was no way she could summon the energy to go out again tonight. She already felt as drained as she would be after the shittiest week at work. She decided to try to get a good night’s sleep and go in the morning.
With tomorrow being her due date, Helen knew what Jenny and her father would have to say about it, and that they might well be right. She’d used it as an excuse with Paul’s mother, but she knew it would probably be more sensible to stay close to home.
She played the message through again, but still couldn’t identify the voice. If the baby did decide to be punctual, it wasn’t like there was any shortage of hospitals. And it hadn’t taken her long to get to Lewisham last time.
THIRTY-SIX
Helen arrived at the club no more than half an hour after it had opened, but the man she’d been instructed to look for was already there, and exactly where she’d been told he would be. He was sitting at the bar hunched over a mug of tea and a plate of toast, and when Helen got close, she saw that he was studying the form in the racing pages of the Sun, circling his selections in blue biro between mouthfuls.
There didn’t appear to be anyone else in the place.
Jacky Snooks wasn’t pleased at being interrupted, but when Helen showed him a warrant card and told him what she wanted to talk about, his demeanour changed. He seemed surprised. Interested.
‘How d’you find out about that, then?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
Snooks shrugged as though it probably didn’t. He tore a chunk from a slice of toast and gestured with what was left. ‘That real? Or have you got a cushion shoved up there as a disguise, like?’ He hissed out a laugh, showing a mouthful of soggy toast and dodgy teeth.
‘Not a cushion,’ Helen said. She nodded towards the snooker tables stretching away behind them in the half light, still hidden beneath patched, silver covers. ‘And I really don’t fancy squeezing this thing out lying on one of those, so if we can speed this up.’
Snooks popped the rest of the slice into his mouth and wiped his hands on the legs of his trousers. ‘A twenty tends to hurry things along,’ he said.
Once the cash was tucked into his shirt pocket, he told her that one of the local crews hung about at the club, or used to, until a couple of weeks ago. He hadn’t seen too many of them since then.
‘Any names?’ Helen asked.
‘Just those bloody silly nicknames they all have.’
‘I’m listening.’
He mentioned a few names that Helen recognised from the mural she’d seen the last time she was in Lewisham. The roll of honour. It confirmed what the anonymous caller had said, and she started to feel the excitement building; shortening her breath.
And she knew there was more.
‘Tell me about the man in the suit,’ Helen said. ‘The one you saw them talking to.’
Snooks was starting to cast longing glances back towards his newspaper. ‘I saw a bloke in a suit. End of story, really.’
‘I’ll have that twenty quid back, then.’
Snooks sighed, turned on his chair and pointed to the stairs. ‘Coming down there, they were, like they’d had some kind of meeting upstairs. This is going back five or six weeks, something like that. Wave . . . the one with the stupid hair, who acted like he was in charge, and his Paki minder. And this white bloke in the suit, looked like an estate agent or something. All very pally, shaking hands and that, and there was a few of the others standing around, looking like they didn’t know what was going on.’
Helen didn’t bother asking for a description. The man who’d left the message on her machine had said she could do better than that.
‘Who else did you tell about this?’
‘I don’t know, a few people. I can’t remember.’
Even if Helen hadn’t known he was lying, it would have been obvious from his face, the apprehension in it. ‘Come on, I didn’t find out by magic, did I?’
Snooks looked uncomfortable, as though he’d already said more than his twenty pounds’ worth.
Helen didn’t suppose that it would matter much. She waved away her own question and told him he could go back to his racing once he’d pointed her in the direction of the manager.
‘Why didn’t you just take it?’
‘We don’t need it.’
‘Course we don’t. We can just borrow some from the bank, right? We can just use some of our savings, all that money we’ve got stashed away. Yeah, no problem.’
Theo knew, as soon as he’d opened his mouth, that it had been a mistake. Javine had seized on it like a pit-bull, and had been giving him grief ever since, like he’d blown some big chance.
‘She was just saying all that stuff, man,’ Theo said. ‘About getting a job, about it being fine and all that. You didn’t see her face, though.’
‘It’s what parents are supposed to do. They make sacrifices, yeah?’
Theo shook his head. ‘Yeah, when you’re a kid, when you can’t look after yourself. After that, it’s up to you. You’re supposed to take care of them.’
They were in the living room. Benjamin was lying on his back in the corner, under a brightly coloured baby gym, squealing and flapping his arms at the little mirror that dangled above him. Theo sat on the sofa while Javine moved in and out from the kitchen, where she was getting a feed ready.
‘It’s just a shame, you know?’ she said. She stood in the doorway, shaking a bottle. ‘When something’s on a plate like that and you miss out. It’s not like it happens all the time.’
It was OK when she was shouting - he could shout back - but he couldn’t stand it when she used that sad voice. Like she didn’t want to make a fuss, but she was just disappointed. Like it wasn’t his fault he’d let them down.
‘It might have been a chance for us to go, that’s all.’
If he regretted telling her that his mum had offered him the money, he could have kicked himself for telling her why. He’d felt guilty even thinking about getting away somewhere, about leaving his mum and Angela behind, and it was even worse now that his mum had brought it out into the open. It was like she could tell it had been on his mind. Was it really what she wanted or was she offering to help because she realised that he couldn’t cut it? That he needed saving, like a little boy?
Even now, thinking that it would be the wrong thing to do, he felt selfish.
Maybe they would be all right without him. It wasn’t like they had ever been able to rely on him for anything. But how would he handle it? Not being on the spot if he ever was needed. Not seeing Angela growing up, or being there to look after her when boys just like him came sniffing around.
‘You’re a good son,’ Javine said.
‘Who has to go crying to his mother for cash.’
‘She offered it.’
‘It’s her life savings.’
‘I know you’re thinking about your mother, T . . .’
She didn’t have to say any more. But what about me? What about Benjamin?
Theo watched her turn and go back into the kitchen, heard the fridge door close, and the microwave hum as she heated up the bottle. ‘We don’t need that money,’ he said.
He looked across at Benjamin, kicking his legs and staring up at his image in the little plastic mirror. If he got away with his life, wherever he might end up, Theo knew that all he really wanted was for his son to be able to look at himself and feel OK about it.
The manager of the Cue Up was a balding blob called Adkins. He had a fat backside and wore a tie with a short-sleeved shirt, which always struck Helen as faintly ludicrous. She wasn’t certain what he’d been up
to at the computer in his small, cluttered office, but he wasn’t in the brightest of moods when he opened the door.
Once again, the warrant card seemed to do the trick, although Adkins barely glanced at it before leading Helen across to a cluster of grimy-looking monitors below the single window.
It looked very much like he’d been told to expect her.
The security set-up looked comprehensive enough, with feeds from a camera at the entrance to the club, several in the bar and playing areas and others on stairwells and outside the toilets. The arrangements for reviewing the tapes, however, were somewhat less efficient than those at the CCTV monitoring centre, where Helen had watched Paul getting into Ray Jackson’s cab two weeks earlier.
‘Might take a while,’ Adkins said.
‘How long?’
‘Don’t hold your breath.’
It was stifling in the office, and while Adkins was searching through the footage, Helen walked across to a small water-cooler in the corner and helped herself to the drink her host had shown no inclination to offer. She felt the sweat prickling across her back and belly, and even after three cups her mouth felt dry and she was finding it hard to swallow.
The baby was moving. Several times every few minutes, she felt her stomach shift; a deep lurch, low down, that she had not felt before, and which snatched her breath for a few seconds each time. She could not be sure if it was her body anticipating the imminent natural trauma, or the nerves . . . the fear at what she might be about to see.
What someone had decided she ought to see.
‘Here you go.’ Adkins walked back to the computer and dropped into his chair. ‘Help yourself . . . Second one from the left.’
Helen moved over and leaned down to get a better view, putting herself in line with the window to reduce the glare on the monitor. It was a small screen, just eight or nine inches, housed in a battered steel box. The picture was frozen: a fuzzy, black-and-white image of a corridor; the dark line of a handrail in the bottom left-hand corner.
‘I’ve paused it,’ Adkins said. ‘Just press PLAY.’
Helen hit the button and watched. Nothing happened for half a minute, save for the time-code changing, second by second, in the bottom right-hand corner. The only sound was a low hiss. She turned and asked where the volume controls were.
‘No audio on that system,’ Adkins said. ‘Too bloody expensive.’
When Helen turned back, she saw two figures moving quickly towards the camera with a third a few feet behind. The two men at the front were deep in conversation, nodding, gesturing with their hands.
Wave and the man in the suit.
Just before they reached the camera and began to distort, they turned right and moved out of shot, heading down the stairs. The third figure, a well-built Asian youth, followed. Helen rewound the tape until the moment before Wave and the man in the suit disappeared. Then she froze the picture and sat there in front of it, equally still.
Stared at a face she recognised, whose smile she had returned; a face that she had seen care-worn and folded into sympathy just two days before.
Adkins heard the gasp as she sucked in a breath. ‘You all right, love? You’re not . . .?’
‘I need this tape,’ she said.
‘Fine. I’ll make a copy.’
‘I want it now.’
While Adkins was still hauling himself upright, Helen ejected the tape from the VCR. He shouted something after her as she walked out, but she didn’t hear it. Didn’t care. Down two flights and out onto the street, wanting to run but watching her step; the cassette clutched so tightly that she felt as though her fingers might push through the plastic casing.
Remembering something Ray Jackson had said, sitting in the back of his taxi. Something she should have realised was significant.
A sleek blue Mercedes was idling at the kerb opposite the entrance. Jacky Snooks was bending down, talking to the man in the back seat. When Snooks stood up and stepped to one side, Helen saw Frank Linnell. She stopped a few feet away, desperate to get to her own car, but knowing there would have to be an exchange of some sort. That Linnell had been waiting for it. Glancing into the front, she recognised the driver as the man who had let her into Linnell’s pub and brought her a drink. Now she remembered his voice, too, and finally knew who had left the anonymous message on her answering machine.
‘Helen . . .?’
She saw the expression on Linnell’s face and began to understand why.
Linnell leaned out of the window and nodded towards the tape in Helen’s hand. ‘Anyone you recognise?’
‘Never seen him before in my life,’ Helen said.
Frank stared out of the back window as Clive drove him home, following the 380 bus route that ran all the way from the High Street to Belmarsh Prison. Once they were through the traffic the Mercedes would be cruising up Lewisham Hill, turning east towards Wat Tyler Road and Blackheath. Down the other side and across a vast expanse of green with detached houses around its edge; huge three- or four-storey places that had not been converted into flats. For now, though, the view was limited: doorways crowded with bin-bags and names on signs that he could barely pronounce. He’d hung around in these streets as a younger man, done business in them thirty-odd years before, but now he scarcely recognised them.
‘It’s like Eastern Europe,’ he said to Clive. ‘It’s vexatious to the spirit.’
He didn’t know if it was down to immigrants, or to drugs, or to guns being passed around like football cards. He didn’t have any answers. There was always the odd mental case, even back then, but Christ . . . When you could get sliced up for looking the wrong way at somebody’s shoes, Frank knew something had to be done, and maybe the likes of him were better placed to do it than the police or politicians.
Frank couldn’t say if Helen had been lying to him or not. It didn’t really matter as things stood. He knew he’d done the right thing, giving this one to her. This was something she could do for Paul, and it might make her feel a little better after everything she’d suspected him of. She also was in the perfect position to get it organised. Even if she didn’t know the individual in question, she had the contacts to find out who he was. Frank would probably be able to get the name himself, eventually, but he knew that passing it over to Helen was the more satisfactory option. He’d been thinking about the best way to handle it ever since Clive had told him what had been said in that stash house; since he’d put that together with what Jacky Snooks had told them.
It was frustrating in the short term, maybe, letting the law handle things, but this way would pay dividends down the line. A copper always suffered more inside. Whoever he was, he’d pay for what he’d done to Paul a hundred times over, and every day.
Payback could be an instant pleasure, Frank had decided, but sometimes it was better to invest in a little of it.
He wondered if Helen Weeks might send some of her colleagues after him, when she’d had her baby and things had settled down a bit. He felt safe enough, had kept the proper distance from everything, but he guessed there might be a little aggravation coming his way later on. She clearly knew about his business with the stick men. That much was obvious from the third degree she’d given him a couple of days before. Making suggestions and asking if he knew anything, as though he was just going to hold his hands up and cough to it, right there in his kitchen.
Silly . . .
He liked her well enough, and had been civil to her for Paul’s sake, but neither of them were daft, were they?
Up the duff or on their holidays, it didn’t matter; the likes of Helen Weeks were never off duty. That was why he and Paul had never talked business; at least not until the very end. It had made sense to both of them. Every proper friendship had parameters, after all.
Frank stared out at the shops and the youngsters doing nothing outside them and wondered who he was trying to kid. If it was all sorted out and the muck was hosed away overnight, he knew that something else would be along soon enough to r
eplace it. Something even worse, probably. That kind of gap in the market didn’t stay unfilled for long.
Same went for the stick men. Once all that was done with, another group of them would say, ‘Thank you very much’, and move in sharpish to take up the slack.
There would be someone sitting at Paul’s desk too, by now. And how long until the girlfriend found someone to help bring up his kid?
‘Got much on for the rest of the day?’ Clive asked.
Frank turned from the window and sat back. ‘Up to my eyeballs.’
Life moved on.
PART FOUR
LIGHTS OUT
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘How long overdue are you?’
‘A week and a half,’ Helen said. ‘They’re inducing me if nothing’s happened by the weekend.’
‘I suppose we should crack on, then.’
Jeff Moody was sitting opposite her on the sofa, as he had been the first time he’d visited the flat. He was wearing what seemed to be the same blue suit, though Helen guessed he probably had several of them. He certainly wasn’t the type to waste time shopping, especially not recently. He’d been busy.
‘How’s he being?’ Helen asked. She couldn’t bring herself to say his name.
‘Fronting it out,’ Moody said. ‘It’s not going to be straightforward.’
Helen nodded. Things rarely were, though she was usually the one handing out the explanations to the frustrated relatives of victims. She’d felt frustration too, of course, but it was only now that she really understood how trivial hers were by comparison. She would always have the opportunity to move on to another case. Victims, and those close to them had only one life.
Moody opened his briefcase and passed across a photograph. Helen looked down at the bunch of keys in the picture; the faded leather fob she’d seen a thousand times. ‘We found those in Kelly’s house,’ Moody said. ‘It’s obviously how he got in here.’
‘Hard to explain away, I would have thought.’
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