Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne looked across at the man behind the desk, at the look of confusion on a face that was considerably paler than it had been just a few moments before. ‘Oh sorry, here you go.’ Thorne stepped across and pushed the phone across the desk. He watched as the man picked it up and stared at the photograph.

  ‘Looks like you were having one hell of a night, Dr McCarthy.’

  The doctor spoke without taking his eyes from the picture. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I mean, I’m not sure if this was taken before or after you’d had sex with an underage boy, but either way it looks like you and your friends are enjoying yourselves.’

  McCarthy said nothing.

  Thorne leaned against the desk.

  For almost half a minute there was no sound save for McCarthy’s breathing, and his finger tap-tapping against the edge of the phone, and a few seconds of indecipherable shouting from one of the wards.

  ‘So I was at a party.’ McCarthy pushed the phone back across the desk at Thorne. ‘I’m not an expert in these matters, but I’m not convinced there’s a law against that.’

  ‘Depends on the party.’

  ‘I don’t know what you think you can see in that picture.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see too many women.’

  ‘Again, not illegal.’

  ‘Men and boys.’

  ‘My memory isn’t quite what it was, Inspector, so why don’t you remind me where that party was?’ McCarthy waited. ‘How about when it was?’ There was the hint of a smile, cold and tight. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  ‘The person who took that picture knows.’

  ‘You don’t know anything, you don’t have anything, so-’

  ‘I know about Jonathan Bridges.’

  ‘So, if there’s nothing else, I’d appreciate the chance to get on with my work.’

  Thorne leaned closer. Said the name again. Hissed it, like a threat.

  McCarthy sat back and raised his hands. ‘He was a patient here.’

  ‘I know he was, and I know when.’

  ‘Well good, because that saves me the trouble of looking it up.’

  ‘In for something serious, was he?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In-growing toenail? Athlete’s foot?’

  ‘The patients’ medical records are confidential.’

  ‘Methadone, I’m guessing, but it doesn’t really matter,’ Thorne said. ‘The fact that you admitted him is all that matters. The fact that he was in here at the same time as Amin Akhtar.’

  ‘I was at home when Amin died, as you well know.’

  ‘But Jonathan Bridges was here, doing exactly what you’d set him up to do.’

  ‘Which was what?’ The smile made its presence felt again, but now it was looking a little frayed around the edges. ‘How exactly do you think Amin Akhtar was killed?’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘You’re a liar,’ Thorne said.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Did you have sex with Amin Akhtar?’ Thorne picked up the phone, held up the photo. ‘Did you have sex with him that night?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘On other occasions?’

  McCarthy stood up. ‘I think that’s enough.’

  Thorne was already on his way round the desk. ‘Fucking sit down!’

  The chair sighed as McCarthy dropped back into it and rolled a few inches away across the polished vinyl on squeaky wheels.

  ‘Sit down… ’

  Thorne sucked in a deep breath that tasted of metal and bandages. He blinked away an image of himself jamming the phone into McCarthy’s mouth, holding it steady with one hand and smashing it through the teeth with the heel of the other.

  I was joking, Dave.

  Instead, he held up the phone with his left hand, spread the fingers of his right hand around the back of McCarthy’s head and slowly but firmly moved one towards the other. ‘The man on the left, I know,’ he said. ‘You with me?’

  McCarthy nodded.

  His head moved a few inches closer to the phone.

  ‘So who’s the ugly-looking article in the middle?’

  McCarthy said nothing.

  ‘Name not coming to you?’

  ‘No… ’

  A few seconds later, his nose was pressed up against the screen.

  ‘I mean you look matey enough there,’ Thorne said. ‘So I presumed you knew one another.’ McCarthy was pushing back hard against Thorne’s hand, but Thorne kept the pressure on. ‘The thing is, I’ve got a real sense that you’re not exactly top dog in this particular set-up. Trust me, you get a feel for these things, Ian, and if I’m honest, I don’t believe you were the one calling the shots. I’m not saying you weren’t the one with the brains or anything like that, I mean you’re clearly hugely intelligent and you may have been the one who planned the whole thing for all I know.’

  Thorne felt the smallest movement beneath his fingers, a shake of the head, aborted.

  ‘I’m just saying, you might want to think about being the one that names the names. That does it now, because it’s the kind of thing that’ll do you a favour when the sentences are handed out. And they will be handed out, Ian. I promise you that.’

  Another shake of the head, firmer this time.

  ‘No, you don’t know his name?’ Thorne asked. ‘Or no, you’re not going to tell me?’

  ‘Take your pick.’

  McCarthy raised his hand and grabbed at Thorne’s wrist. There was a second or two of resistance before Thorne reluctantly loosened his grip and the doctor ducked smartly away. He was quickly out of his chair and moving into the centre of the room. Keeping one eye on Thorne as he backed away, rolling his neck around on his shoulders, then smoothing down the hair at the back of his head.

  He turned to see a female PHO staring in at them through the window. He raised a hand and nodded. He stuck up a thumb. The woman looked Thorne up and down before moving away.

  ‘Listen, I don’t have to tell you a thing,’ McCarthy said. ‘I don’t have to talk to you at all, in fact, because the truth is you’ve got nothing but a single, pointless photograph and a very sick mind.’ He began to pick at the corner of his goatee. ‘Actually, I think your options at this point are rather limited, don’t you? I mean you’re certainly not going to arrest me, because the fact is that you haven’t got a shred of evidence on which to charge me with anything and you’re only going to end up looking like an idiot.’

  Thorne came slowly round the desk. He watched and listened.

  ‘You’re pissing in the wind, and you know it.’

  It was not the worst attempt at a show of confidence that Thorne had ever seen, but the smile was now looking awfully ragged. The words had clearly been well rehearsed, but they were spoken a fraction too quickly and Thorne could hear how dry the mouth was.

  ‘That business at the newsagent’s,’ McCarthy said. ‘It was still going on, last time I checked.’

  Suddenly, Thorne’s mouth was equally dry.

  ‘I mean we can take a trip to the station if you want, and I promise to come quietly. Might be quite an adventure. We can hang around and make small talk while I wait for my lawyer and then you can sit and listen to me saying “No comment” for a couple of hours, by which time those poor people being held at gunpoint may well be dead, and whose stupid fault do you think that will be?’

  The PHO reappeared at the window, watching for a few seconds before gesturing at McCarthy that she needed to speak to him. He held up one finger to let her know that he would only be a minute, then turned back to Thorne.

  ‘So… those options. Well, just the two really. You can waste a little more time asking me some more questions I’m not going to dignify with an answer. Or you can get the hell off my wing.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  There was strictly no food or drink allowed inside the Technical Support Unit vehicle, so with a few minutes left unt
il they were due to put the next call in, Pascoe finished her coffee walking around the playground. There was rain in the air, and it had turned a little colder, so anyone who did not need to be out here was back inside the school, but it was still busy enough. Kidnap, traffic, CO19. Uniform and CID. A situation like this was one of the few that brought a large number of different Met Police units together on the same operation. ‘Suits’ and ‘lids’ in something almost approaching harmony. They just needed Vice, Anti-Terror and the Royalty Protection branch, maybe a copper or two on horseback, and they would have pretty much the whole set.

  Pascoe lit a cigarette, then walked across to a chalked-out hopscotch court and stepped slowly from square to square, careful to avoid the lines.

  Not forgetting the one poor bugger from the Murder Squad, of course. Who, if he succeeded, would almost certainly receive no credit for his part in a successful outcome, and who she felt sure would blame himself if things did not turn out well. She thought about Tom Thorne; grim-faced, a blue-arsed fly, desperately searching for answers with no guarantee there were any there to find.

  His hand wrapped tightly around the shitty end of the stick.

  She bent to pick up a smooth, flat stone and weighed it in her palm. She walked back to the first square of the court and told herself that if she could toss the pebble cleanly into the semicircle at the end, she would be drinking tea with Helen Weeks before the day was out. She crouched and prepared to throw the stone, wondered how many people as control-freakish as she was were also superstitious.

  ‘DS Pascoe… ’

  She turned to see Donnelly beckoning her from the back doors of the TSU truck. She threw her cigarette away and slipped the stone into her jacket pocket as she crossed the playground to join him.

  As she climbed up a small set of metal stairs into the truck, Donnelly asked her if she had thought about what to say, how to get the necessary message across. She told him how she was planning to handle things and he said that it sounded ideal. Clear enough, but still subtle.

  ‘She’s clever,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘So is he,’ Donnelly said.

  Pascoe took her place on a low stool on the left-hand side of the truck and picked up a headset. Donnelly settled in next to her and did likewise. A large pair of speakers were mounted above a line of TV monitors on the rear wall, while on the right-hand side a pair of civilian technicians – a twenty-something woman and a forty-something man – sat in front of a console that made the cockpit controls of a 747 look primitive.

  ‘Can you get Radio 1 on there?’ Pascoe asked.

  The woman looked over her shoulder. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Scott Mills is on in a bit.’

  Donnelly managed a grunt of amusement, but the woman just shrugged as though Pascoe had been speaking a foreign language and slowly turned back to her bank of knobs and faders.

  ‘We set?’ Donnelly asked.

  The man turned, said, ‘Absolutely.’ What was left of his hair was fine and sandy-coloured and his paunch was exaggerated by the tight black polo shirt he wore over neatly ironed jeans. His name was embroidered in red just above his left man-boob: TSU: Kim Yates.

  Donnelly looked at his watch. ‘About a minute.’

  Pascoe nodded. She knew that the slightest break in routine could wreck many days of delicate negotiation and be enough to push a hostage taker over the edge. A change of voice at the end of the phone, or a call coming at one minute past the allotted hour.

  ‘Off you go, Sue.’

  Yates saw Pascoe take out her mobile and waved a hand. ‘You won’t be needing that again,’ he said. ‘It’s programmed into our system as a speed-dial. More or less instantaneous, and obviously we’ve made sure that yours will still appear as the incoming number on Sergeant Weeks’ handset.’ He half turned back then stopped. ‘If you’ve got any questions, feel free to fire away.’

  ‘I think I’ve got it.’

  Yates spun back round to his console and he and his colleague put on their own headsets. He stabbed at a button. ‘Here we go.’

  The ringing of Helen Weeks’ phone immediately filled the van.

  It was answered after three rings and Helen said, ‘Hold on.’ A few seconds later and the quality of the silence changed, as she switched the call on to speaker. ‘Now Javed can hear,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ Pascoe said.

  Straight away, Yates and his colleague began making minor adjustments to their settings. The voices of Helen Weeks and Javed Akhtar would be relayed inside the vehicle via the microphones that had been carefully sunk into two of the storeroom walls. It was crucial, however, that this sound did not feed back to Helen’s phone. That she and – more importantly – Akhtar were not able to hear their voices broadcast back at them through the TSU speakers.

  Yates gave Donnelly and Pascoe the thumbs-up.

  ‘It all looks very busy out there,’ Akhtar said. ‘Like Piccadilly Circus or something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Pascoe asked.

  ‘We have got the television on with the sound turned down,’ Akhtar said. ‘We can see it all on the six o’clock news. All the reporters, the flashing lights and what have you. A lot of police officers.’

  ‘This is a major operation, Javed.’

  ‘There is a picture of me in the corner of the screen.’ There was a grunt of shock or disapproval. ‘Where did they get that? Did Nadira give them that?’

  ‘Probably the passport service,’ Helen said. ‘DVLA maybe.’

  ‘You’re making the news, Javed,’ Pascoe said. ‘What you’re doing.’

  ‘I don’t care about that.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, I know that, Javed. I know that this isn’t about making headlines.’

  ‘Not until my son’s murderer is caught and sent to prison. Then I want to see big bloody headlines, believe me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Biggest ones they have.’

  ‘Biggest ones they have, absolutely,’ Pascoe said. ‘But until then you can at least see how seriously we’re taking everything.’

  ‘Everybody looks very serious, that’s for sure,’ Akhtar said. ‘Everybody seems very busy, but still there is nothing really happening. I have heard nothing more from Inspector Thorne.’

  ‘He wanted me to tell you that he’s still chasing that lead, Javed.’ Pascoe glanced at Donnelly. ‘A very strong lead.’

  ‘The dead boy, yes I know.’

  ‘He has more information now-’

  ‘I’m getting impatient.’

  Pascoe looked at Donnelly again. They did not need top-quality speakers and high-definition stereo to hear the anger in Akhtar’s voice.

  ‘That’s understandable, Javed.’

  ‘I will not be strung along, do you understand?’

  Donnelly waved to get Pascoe’s attention, pointed at his headset and nodded.

  ‘That’s not what’s happening, Javed,’ Pascoe said. ‘You need to believe that. You need to know that there’s support for you out here. A lot of support, for all of you. Can you hear me, Helen?’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said.

  ‘Whatever happens, you need to know that we’re out here, that there’s support here and that we’re listening. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Helen said.

  ‘I do not want to be… fobbed off,’ Akhtar said. ‘I do not want to be messed around.’ The anger was blossoming now, his voice ranting and ragged. ‘There has been far too much of that.’

  ‘I will not mess you around,’ Pascoe said.

  ‘You give me your word?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Good. OK. That’s it.’

  There was a second or two of silence before the line went dead.

  ‘Nice,’ Donnelly said. He took off his headset. ‘You think she got the message?’

  ‘Like I said, she’s clever.’ As Yates and his fellow technician began to confer about DBs and balanced output, Pascoe excused herself and stepped down from the truck into the playground.<
br />
  I’m getting impatient…

  She thought about the textbook response to anger on the part of a hostage taker. The strategies she had been taught to deal with the increased threat of volatility. She considered the options as she walked back towards the hopscotch court and felt for the pebble in her pocket.

  FIFTY-SIX

  It was just beginning to get dark as McCarthy’s silver Astra drove out of the Barndale car park and its headlights came on as the barrier was raised at the security checkpoint. The car turned on to the quiet country road towards the M25 and Thorne waited for another vehicle to pass before he pulled out of the unmarked track opposite, flicked on his own lights and began to follow. It would be easier to stay out of sight once they reached the motorway and until then it would just be a matter of staying far enough back. Thorne did not think there would be a problem. He guessed that Ian McCarthy would have more important things to worry about than whether or not he was being followed.

  He hoped so at any rate.

  Though not quite able to pull off ‘blase’, the doctor had done his best to appear cocky, defiant even, and Thorne’s first thought when he had left the prison almost an hour before had been to race back into central London and confront the person he believed had given McCarthy the coaching. He had quickly decided that he would almost certainly have even less luck with him than with McCarthy. So, with no idea who the third man was, he could do little for the time being other than stay close to the doctor and see what happened.

  See where the weakest link in the chain would lead him.

  Or to whom.

  Thorne was now convinced that Amin Akhtar had been the victim of a conspiracy. He also knew that he could base this on no more than a single picture on Rahim Jaffer’s phone, which actually proved nothing at all. The names and the reasons were what mattered now of course, were what would get Helen Weeks out of that newsagent’s, but if those responsible were to pay for what they had done, Thorne would need evidence that the conspiracy had been maintained. He had to prove that the men in that photograph were still in contact with one another.