In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  ‘He claims Paul gave them to him, in case you both got locked out.’

  Helen shook her head. ‘That’s Paul’s set. I’ve checked, and they’re not in the bag I got back after the crash. He must have taken them.’

  ‘I think . . . he might have taken them from Paul’s body,’ Moody said, ‘at the bus stop, while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. The witness says he was down on the floor next to Paul. It would have been easy enough.’

  Helen swallowed, handed back the photograph. ‘Not going to be easy to prove, though.’

  ‘Like everything else.’

  ‘We’ve got the CCTV tape. We’ve got him talking to Wave.’ Moody nodded. ‘What about Sarah Ruston?’ Helen asked.

  ‘She’s co-operating.’

  ‘In return for a reduced sentence?’

  Moody shrugged; they both knew the way things worked. ‘She’s identified Errol Anderson, a.k.a. Wave, as one of the men who gave her the instructions, who fired the shots into her car the day before, ran through all the times and speeds and so on. She claims there were two of them, but she can’t give us a positive ID on the second one. It might have been one of the other boys who were shot, but she can’t be sure. He kept his hoodie up the whole time.

  ‘But we’ve still got a direct connection to the gang.’

  ‘We’ve got film of Kelly talking to one of them. We have no way of ascertaining what was said.’

  ‘It’s one hell of a coincidence, though, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘He happens to be talking to a gang who then arrange the crash that kills one of his colleagues. A close personal friend who just happens to be investigating bent coppers.’

  ‘It’s not me that needs convincing, Helen.’

  She took a deep breath, told Moody she was sorry. He reddened and waved her apology away. ‘How does he explain it? The meeting at the snooker club?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Well, against his solicitor’s advice, he’s being quite chatty.’

  Helen remembered the fake concern on Kelly’s face as they sat and talked about which reading he should give at the funeral. ‘I bet he is.’

  ‘He claims he was doing undercover work. Some anonymous tip-off or other.’

  ‘On whose authority?’

  ‘Off his own bat. Says he knows he was taking a risk, not following the proper procedure and all that. Happy to admit he’s a bit of a glory-hunter. ’

  ‘Better than being a murderer, right?’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘So how’s it looking? Overall.’

  Moody leaned back, puffed out his cheeks. ‘The problem is that it’s such a weird one, and the CPS haven’t got a clue how to handle it. They had a hard enough time working out what to charge Ruston with.’

  In the end, they’d opted for manslaughter. Helen had slammed down the phone when Tom Thorne had called to give her the news.

  ‘Like I said, it’s not going to be straightforward.’

  ‘He’s going away, though?’ Helen said. ‘You told me he would.’

  ‘Look, it’s all circumstantial, but if we’re lucky, the weight of that evidence might well be enough. The keys, the video, what have you. Motive’s going to be a problem, though.’

  ‘What was on the computer?’

  ‘As far as anything that might be relevant, not a lot. Certainly no mention of Gary Kelly or anything that might implicate him.’

  ‘He needed Paul out of the way before that happened.’

  Moody nodded. ‘He couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t happened already, though, which was why he wanted the laptop, why he broke into your flat. He wasn’t banking on finding you at home.’

  ‘I’d told him I was staying at my father’s that night,’ Helen said.

  ‘What we need to know is why Kelly thought Paul was a danger to him in the first place. How he found out about the operation.’

  Helen had barely left the flat for a week. She had sat, and eaten and slept, and thought about exactly what Gary Kelly had done, why he had arranged it as he had.

  ‘That’s what’ll help us nail him,’ Moody said.

  It had to look random, like the worst case of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The nature of Operation Victoria meant that even an ‘accident’ might have seemed suspicious. Paul could not just forget to turn the gas off or fall down a flight of stairs. And any sort of contract hit was clearly out of the question.

  Once Kelly had decided what to do and how to do it, he must have been patting himself on the back for days.

  The crash not only got Paul out of the way, but completely eliminated Kelly himself from the merest hint of suspicion. He was almost killed himself, after all, with a witness at the bus stop helpfully validating the fact. Helen had been thinking about that, too. The man at the bus stop had talked about Paul pushing Kelly out of the way as the car veered towards them, but he could have misinterpreted what he’d seen. Witnesses did that routinely, and in far less stressful situations.

  It was nice to think that Paul’s last actions, however misplaced, had been heroic; but when Helen closed her eyes she saw Kelly as the one doing the pushing; ensuring that Paul was hit while he got himself clear. Staggering away with a few nice cuts and bruises, weeping for his mate, dropping to the floor to take Paul’s keys as he lay dying.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘I think I know how Kelly found out,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Kevin Shepherd. He was in Shepherd’s pocket.’

  Helen told him about her conversation with Ray Jackson in the back of his taxi. The comment whose significance she’d missed. It had been no more than a slight misunderstanding or at least that was what she’d thought at the time:

  ‘You had a passenger in the back of your cab, a police officer, on Friday . . .’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Which Friday?’

  She remembered that Jackson had been flustered for a second or two. He had covered up his slip, and she hadn’t seen it. ‘When he asked, “Which one?” he initially meant which copper, not which day.’

  ‘Shepherd pays a lot of coppers,’ Moody said. ‘That’s why Paul was looking at him in the first place.’

  Helen shook her head. She was certain. ‘Shepherd told Kelly about Paul. That’s what you need to be working on.’

  Moody thought about it. ‘It makes sense, from a timing point of view at least. Shepherd was the only target Paul was working on when he was killed.’

  ‘There’s your motive,’ Helen said.

  ‘I hope you’re right. Then all we have to do is convince the CPS. They might still decide the best we can hope for is conspiracy to commit.’

  ‘As long as he goes down, Jeff.’

  Moody’s briefcase was open on his knees. He leaned across it. ‘Look, if there’s any chance at all of putting Kelly away for what happened to Paul, they will.’ He shut his case, cleared his throat. ‘But I know he did it, which means, apart from anything else, that he’s seriously bent. If all else fails, I will put him away for that. OK?’

  Helen didn’t answer, so he asked her again. She could see that Moody meant it, and knew that she could hope for no more. She thanked him and he promised to call as soon as there was any news. Then he made her promise to do the same.

  ‘What about Frank Linnell?’

  ‘Well, it’s not my area, obviously, but we’ve passed your information on and those investigating the shootings in Lewisham will certainly be looking at him. The way people like Frank Linnell operate, though, I don’t think that’ll be easy either.’

  Helen agreed, but it wasn’t what she had meant. ‘I was talking about Linnell and Paul. You said you’d try and find out.’

  ‘Yes, right.’ He looked uncomfortable, as though he had news that was not so much bad as embarrassing. ‘We’re as certain as we can be that there was never any illegal business arrangement between them, so all I’ve got is a little his
tory.’

  ‘Linnell told me that,’ Helen said. ‘Some case that Paul was working on.’

  ‘Linnell’s half-sister, Laura,’ Moody said. ‘She was murdered by a boyfriend six years ago and Paul was one of the DCs. Looks like they stayed in touch afterwards.’

  Helen remembered the photographs in Linnell’s kitchen. Not a daughter, then. ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘Stabbed. The jealous sort, apparently.’

  ‘How long did he get?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. He was stabbed to death himself while on remand in Wandsworth. Two days before he was due in court.’

  ‘Somebody saved the taxpayer some money.’ It was clear from Helen’s face who she thought that ‘somebody’ might have been.

  Moody’s smile was suitably grim. ‘Well, I spoke to the original SIO and that’s what he reckons, anyway. Never came close to proving it, of course . . .’

  Helen was still seeing the young girl’s face; and Linnell’s face, when he was looking at the pictures. She didn’t find it hard to believe that the shootings in Lewisham weren’t the first time Frank Linnell had meted out his own form of justice.

  ‘So, as far it goes with . . . Linnell and Paul.’ Moody was gathering together his things. ‘Just friends. No more to it than that.’ Seeing the look on Helen’s face, he opened his mouth to say something else, but she stopped him.

  ‘You once played tennis with some bloke who was a forger. Yes, I know.’

  Moody held up his hands, as though his point was made.

  ‘How many people did this forger kill, though?’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  She slept for most of the afternoon after Moody had left, and spent the rest of it stretched out in front of the television, looking for distraction but for the most part failing to find it. For perhaps ten minutes at a time something would engage her and briefly take her mind somewhere a little less dark.

  She took in bits of a programme about stand-up comics at the Edinburgh Festival, and remembered how she and Paul had talked about going. They would occasionally go down to the Hobgoblin in Brixton and had always enjoyed it, and they’d both said how great it would be to get some time off and spend a week up at the Fringe, seeing a few of their favourite comedians. They could do the castle, too, Paul said, and all the other touristy stuff. He reckoned he had Scottish blood in him somewhere and had been determined to find out if there was a Hopwood tartan.

  ‘You’re as Scottish as I am, you silly bugger . . .’

  Watching the programme, Helen decided that she would go, as soon as she got the chance. For a very stupid second or two she even thought about going to the Hobgoblin that night; calling Jenny up, seeing if she fancied it. She could do with a laugh, and the comedians would certainly have enjoyed taking the piss out of her waddling off to the toilets every twenty minutes.

  It was a terrible idea, of course. She’d had plenty of those recently.

  Barring that, and the time spent idly competing with the contestants on Countdown, she lay there like a zombie. It was strange, she thought, how that phrase was used to describe people who were somehow out of it; miles away, unfocused. Strange, because in those horror films Paul had made her sit through, zombies were anything but unfocused. They had only one impulse as they crashed around and smeared bloody hands down people’s windows; one fixed idea, terrible and all-consuming. Now, something equally brutal was occupying her own thoughts while she lay there and let the sound and the pictures wash over her.

  She thought about Gary Kelly, and how she might get to him.

  How she could talk her way into the interview room, or the remand cell, with her warrant card and some cock-and-bull story or other. She worked out in great detail what she would say to him before she did what she’d come to do, and what damage she could safely inflict without endangering her baby.

  Ask him to read that poem again, maybe.

  See how many other expressions he could do.

  It was sour, stupid stuff that made Helen hate herself, and made her hate Kelly even more for what he was turning her into. She drifted in and out of sleep, wincing at the voices and the absurdly cheerful music, but unable to raise herself up to turn it off.

  It was just gone six when the phone rang. She would remember the time later because she’d been dimly aware of the theme to the six o’clock news, the noise of the phone cutting through it.

  It was a DCI from the Murder Squad. Spiky Bugger’s boss, by the sound of it. ‘Helen, we took a call. Can you hear this OK?’

  She heard a number of clicks, then the faintest hiss before the voice of a police operator came on the line. After five seconds of silence the operator urged the caller to speak; asked again about the nature of the call. The caller’s voice was muffled at first as he said something to the operator. Then, more distinctly, he said that he wanted to leave a message. The operator told him to go ahead.

  ‘This is for the woman whose old man was killed at that bus stop, yeah?’

  There was a pause. The operator said she was still listening.

  ‘The pregnant one.’ Another few seconds of silence, then some mumbling as though he were talking to himself. Finally he spoke clearly again. ‘I was the one who shot into the car, OK? I’m sorry for what happened . . . it wasn’t supposed to. Won’t make no difference to you, probably, but it wasn’t.’ He sniffed, cleared his throat. ‘That’s it, that’s the thing. I’m getting on me toes, yeah . . . so, I just wanted to let you know before I go.’ More hiss and clicking; a hum that might have been the noise of distant traffic. ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  There were a few more seconds of ambient noise and one long breath before the call ended.

  Poor as the quality of the recording had been over the phone, Helen recognised the voice as well as something it had said. Remembered the boy’s face as she’d listened and the conversation as he’d lifted her bags into the car.

  ‘Probably a good time to take a holiday, if you ask me.’

  ‘Can’t see me getting on me toes any time soon.’

  She’d told him to keep his head down . . .

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘I know him. It’s a kid I met in Lewisham.’

  ‘Sorry? You know him?’

  ‘I just bumped into him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just . . . on the street. Jesus . . .’

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help? Anything he said? A description?’

  Nothing that wouldn’t sound ridiculous. He carried my shopping. He seemed nice enough. He asked about my baby. ‘Not really,’ Helen said. ‘We only spoke for a minute.’

  ‘Well, if you think of anything . . .’

  She put down the receiver, walked across to the sofa and turned the sound back up on the TV. Something about mortgage rates. A fatal house fire. Too much salt in processed food.

  He was calling to say sorry, that it was his fault. So he couldn’t have been in on it. For the first time, she wondered how many in that car had been?

  How many of the dead boys?

  ‘Won’t make no difference to you, probably . . .’

  He hadn’t known.

  It wouldn’t be dark for another couple of hours, but she decided to get an early night. She’d thought she and Roger Deering had made a decent job of clearing up the bathroom after the break-in, but stepping back from the sink, a small piece of glass had gone into the sole of her foot. Slipped into the soft part.

  Sitting on the edge of the bath, picking at the glass with tweezers, Helen looked up and saw herself in the mirror. Her dressing gown had fallen open. Her breasts were swollen and sagging, the veins livid beneath the skin. The waistband of her tracksuit bottoms was folded down on itself, pressed flat by her belly. Her ankles looked thick.

  She wrapped the piece of glass inside the bloody tissue and tossed it into the toilet; ran a hand down a pale, hairy shin.

  A mummy nobody would like to fuck.

  And thinking it, wondering if her sister knew
what a MILF was, Helen remembered the conversation between the boy and one of his mates as they’d been walking towards the car park. The boy’s embarrassment as his friend had postured and pointed and made his dirty suggestions.

  ‘You’re a seriously dark horse . . .’

  She remembered what the other boy had called him.

  It wasn’t much to go on. Next to useless, probably. Certainly not enough to go bothering DI Spiky Bugger or his boss at nine o’clock at night.

  Helen winced as she put weight onto the foot, but she’d walked it off by the time she’d reached the bedroom and started to get dressed.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Friday was a bad night to try to get anywhere quickly. The traffic had started to build on the hill down into Brixton and was almost solid on Coldharbour Lane from the Ritzy to Loughborough Junction. Helen banged her hands against the wheel in frustration. Time was not on her side, or that of the boy who had made the call.

  Linnell had found the others easily enough, after all.

  She knew now that the boys in the Cavalier that night had been killed in revenge for Paul’s murder, when all they had done - unwittingly , some of them - was provide a smokescreen for it. Kelly’s plan had worked out better than he ever could have hoped. Those who were ignorant of the set-up had been his victims every bit as much as Paul had been, and the boy who had held the gun, who thought he had fired the shots, might well be the last one left.

  The traffic was just as bad towards Camberwell, so she turned south, deciding to go the back way instead.

  He had been used, Helen decided; that was all. But Frank Linnell would not know that. And even if she were to let him know, she wasn’t sure he’d be inclined to care.

  She was still thinking about Linnell as the traffic eased through East Dulwich, and about the girl in those photographs.

  Linnell’s murdered sister.

  Helen wondered if the girl had been the reason why Paul’s relationship with Linnell had survived for so long. Paul had been deeply affected by a few cases in the time she’d known him, and it was easy to see, just from the pictures, why he would have found it hard to let go of this one. Why he might have wanted to stay close, even when there was nothing left to investigate.