Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  Costea half turned. Maybe he’d heard Harriman, maybe he’d felt a tell-tale coldness in the small of his back. Either way, it was a mistake. He was close to the next barrier between the houses and turned only in time to run into it, smacking his thigh against the brickwork. His leg went from under him and, when he tried to get to his feet, let him down immediately. He pulled himself up as Harriman came close. The razor was back in his hand.

  Harriman said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

  Costea edged along the wall, dragging the dead leg. He was heading for the edge, as if there were some way down from there, as if he might step off and somehow find himself in the street, looking up at Harriman, stranded amid cables and phone masts.

  ‘Put it down,’ Harriman told him. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’

  Costea beckoned him, crooking his finger to bring Harriman on. ‘Now you and me.’

  Harriman laughed. ‘Put it down, you stupid fuck, or I’ll kick you off the roof.’

  ‘You and me – ready?’

  A laser dot hit him on the chest and travelled up to his left eye. Harriman stretched out a hand and blocked the sightline. Without turning round, he shouted, ‘I need to talk to him. Okay? I need him.’ Then he lowered his hand. A second dot joined the first, shimmying about for a moment, then settling on Costea’s right eye. CO14 with a sense of humour.

  Costea closed the razor and tossed it across to Harriman. He said, ‘Jesus, man, it was just a game of poker.’

  Stella and Harriman sat down with Costea.

  He said, ‘So, let’s cut a deal.’ When Stella’s hand went out to the tape button, he added, ‘Off the record.’

  She delayed but kept her hand close to the machine. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘You want money?’ Silence from Stella; silence from Harriman. ‘Information – what? You people know how things are up there. That casino got guys from Clubs and Vice play blackjack regular. How many casinos you think they run on the Strip? Five? Ten? Sure, you’re getting close.’

  ‘Gambling?’ Harriman said. He shook his head. ‘Not interested.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We asked about you,’ Stella said. ‘Costea Radu. Stable of ten, all from Romania, all young. Some very young. That’s what we hear.’

  ‘I need some way out of here, okay?’

  ‘You’ve been arrested for malicious wounding and kidnap. Out of here is a long way off.’

  Costea sighed and looked down at his hands, folded and resting on the table: a man displaying patience, a man ready to talk. ‘You are not anti-gambling cops, right?’

  ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘And you are not charging me with accident with the girl.’

  ‘Accident?’ Harriman laughed.

  Costea ignored him. ‘Okay, good, so you don’t mind blackjack and you don’t mind I cut the girl. You mind about other things.’

  ‘I mind,’ Stella said. ‘I mind that you cut her.’

  ‘But other things’ – he looked for the word – ‘official.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Some questions…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. So I ask you for deal. Maybe we can do some business. What questions?’

  Stella took Lizzie’s enhanced post-mortem shot from an envelope and pushed it across the table. ‘First question: did you kill her?’

  Costea’s body seemed to take a little jolt, as if he’d picked up a charge of static electricity. ‘You are murder cops?’

  Stella hit the record button, then stated the date, time and those present. She observed that Mr Costea Radu had waived his right to have a solicitor present. She made it clear that she had passed him a photograph, mentioned its nature and the catalogue number given to it in the evidence room; then she repeated the question she had just asked.

  ‘You fucking kid me?’ Costea asked.

  ‘Do you recognize the person in the photograph?’

  ‘Never see her.’ He looked more closely. ‘She dead here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said, ‘she’s dead. Violence against women – part of your stock in trade, Costea, that’s what we heard.’

  ‘Stock in –’

  ‘Something you do,’ Harriman said, ‘something you like to do.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not me that killed her.’

  Stella said, ‘You knew her, though. You’d seen her.’

  ‘I don’t know. A whore. How should I know?’

  ‘She was on your turf. She was poaching, you tried to get to her.’

  Costea looked at the photo again. Little white face, big brown eyes. ‘Maybe. There was one like her. I never found her. I saw her, but never found her.’

  ‘You went looking.’

  ‘She was taking business. Fucking me around.’

  ‘Why your business especially?’

  Costea pointed at the photo. ‘She’s young, see? My girls are young. Some men want only this.’

  ‘What kind of men?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Men with wives.’ Costea shrugged. ‘Older men, of course. What happened to her?’

  Stella weighed the risk and decided to take it. ‘She was found hanging in a tree a few streets –’

  ‘Oh.’ Costea looked again. ‘That girl.’ He seemed curious: nothing in his face of things hidden or relived, no shadow of guilt. After a moment he said, ‘Guess what – I didn’t do that. You want to take DNA? Take it, no problem.’

  ‘We intend to,’ Stella said, but she knew she wouldn’t find a match; Costea Radu hadn’t hauled Lizzie up into the tree. He had forgotten her already as he looked across the table, half smiling, eager to help, hoping for a deal that would put him back on the Strip before nightfall.

  ‘Who would do this?’ Stella asked. ‘Who was running her?’

  ‘I never saw anyone,’ Costea said. ‘We can do something, okay? Do a deal.’

  Harriman asked, ‘No one putting her out there?’

  ‘Okay, someone, what do I know? I never saw anyone. If she had someone looking after her, he never came up on the Strip. She was… what is it? Solo.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe her mother sends her out, maybe her husband.’

  ‘Do you know her name?’

  ‘Her what?’ Costea laughed. ‘Sure, I know her name. Bitch, that would be her name.’ A pause, then: ‘So what kind deal we talking about?’

  Stella switched off the tape. She said, ‘You can talk to the judge about a deal, you bastard.’

  A PC collected the prisoner from the interview room to take him down to the cells. Costea looked back at Stella. He mouthed the word Bitch. Stella smiled a smile so wide it would almost have read on the interview tape.

  The leg was still giving Costea trouble. As the door closed, Harriman flicked a glance at Stella.

  ‘Pimp with a limp.’

  25

  There was music, as usual, this time some slow jazz, and Sam Burgess was using a Stryker saw to open Leonard Pigeon’s chest cavity. Then he cut through the ribs on each side and lifted the chest plate. The heart and lungs sat soft and inert.

  Giovanni cut away some residual soft tissue from the chest cavity and made the cuts along the spinal column that would allow the principal organs to be lifted and removed. Open-coffin work: all done with care; all done with the skill and attention to detail that would allow the body to be seen by relatives without undue distress.

  Once the organs had been examined, weighed and tested; once the stomach contents had been sifted; once the heart and lungs, liver and lights had been salami-sliced for the path lab; once the skull had been trepanned and the brain scooped out and scrutinized, Sam and Giovanni would put Leonard together again, his guts lumped back into the body cavity, his cranium sutured, the gash in his throat closed and tricked with cosmetics, the great ‘Y’ incision that went from shoulder wings to breastbone to pubis cobbled together with blanket stitch.

  ‘Overweight,’ Sam said, ‘and under-exercised and on the road to a coronary occlus
ion.’

  ‘He was young.’

  Stella was standing some ten or fifteen feet back from the autopsy table. People reduced to their constituent parts had an unsettling effect on her. She could see the living person at the same time as seeing the skull beneath the skin.

  Sam said, ‘I don’t mean soon. Not next year, or the year after that; no. Soon enough, though.’

  ‘What can you tell me?’

  ‘About the wound?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A sharp blade, obviously, but a heavy one, I think. Not a fish-gutting knife or a paring knife.’

  ‘Not a flexible blade.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Hunting knife?’

  ‘Sort of thing, yes. He didn’t know it was coming.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘No defensive cuts on the hands or arms, and the wound is clean and very deep. The killer could have avoided much of the blood.’

  ‘Of which there would have been lots?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes. Arterial jet, like a hosepipe.’

  ‘But not all of it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The killer’s clothing would have been bloodstained.’

  ‘For sure.’

  Someone must have seen him, Stella thought. Blood like a burst pipe. Sue Chapman had organized yellow crime boards on the towpath twenty yards either side of the bench, but no one had come forward to say: Yes, I saw a man who… running in the direction of… acting in a strange…

  Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, don’t make their problem your problem. London thinking.

  ‘How much strength needed for the job?’

  ‘Strength…’ Sam considered. ‘Not so much strength as energy, I’d’ve thought. You come up behind someone, you’re intending to cut his throat, you’ve equipped yourself with a really keen blade… You yank his head back, you slash.’ Sam made an appropriate gesture, then realized he was holding a scalpel in his hand and gave an apologetic laugh. ‘Not strength but determination.’ He went back to work: measuring, assessing. ‘Will the graphologists need him?’

  ‘They will, yes.’ But Stella didn’t expect them to say anything other than: see our previous report.

  Filthy coward.

  Who are you to pass judgement? Stella thought. Who are you to be judge and executioner? She gave a little shudder and suddenly was filled with a just and intense loathing for this man, this lone vigilante, this angel of wrath or whatever he considered himself to be.

  ‘Did you say he was a politician?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No. Worked for one.’

  ‘Ah…’

  Stella took a step forward. ‘What made you ask?’

  ‘I thought you said politician… and he would have been a very unusual specimen.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sam was transferring something to the scales: he held it up for Stella to see. ‘He still had a heart.’

  26

  Late in the day, and a storm was building in the Thames Basin, rolling up from Greenwich to the Isle of Dogs. Over west London the cloud cover bellied down and darkened. Lights went on in the AMIP-5 squad room, and in Mike Sorley’s office eddies of tobacco smoke wafted around the desk lamp: one cigarette burning forgotten in the ashtray, another clipped in Sorley’s fingers. He took a long toke, then scratched his head. Ash dropped into his hair. He picked up a sheet of paper that lay atop the other sheets, files, memoranda, faxes, emails, reports, reminders, draft budgets, schedules, minutes, FYEO documents and interdepartmental bullshit.

  ‘I have to answer this,’ he said. ‘I have to make some kind of a fucking comment.’

  ‘I know.’ Stella was sitting in a chair on the other side of the desk; she only sat down in Sorley’s office when there was a problem. As it happened, there was a problem, and she was it.

  ‘So what do you suggest I say? You were along for the ride. They were doing you a favour. They raided the casino so you could nab this guy’ – he glanced at the memo – ‘Radu. The whole thing was headed up by a CO14 inspector. He’s looking at a situation, he’s handling it, you come jumping in through all the fucking windows.’

  ‘Except he wasn’t handling it. As I’ve explained. He was likely to wind up with the girl dead and Radu dead.’

  ‘So I should say my sergeant quickly appraised the situation, took note of your gross incompetence and decided to save your ass.’

  ‘That would do it.’

  The lights dimmed a moment and there was a far-off crackle of thunder. Sorley took the last of his cigarette in a long pull, crushed it into the ashtray and reached for his ever-open pack.

  ‘This is just between us and CO14 at present: unofficial. My unofficial reply will be that you acted foolishly, but things turned out for the best… that sort of bollocks. It will include an apology from you.’

  ‘He was getting it wrong.’

  ‘Okay, I believe you. At the moment this is just bitching, rank to rank. I can’t get caught up in some sort of fucking inquiry, DS Mooney. It’s not going to happen.’

  That ‘DS Mooney’ made matters clear.

  Sorley gestured at the piles on his desk. ‘If kiss-ass is the way to avoid that, kiss-ass is what will happen.’ Stella was tight-lipped. He added: ‘Jesus Christ, a line will do.’

  ‘Do I have an option?’

  ‘No.’ Sorley glanced at his watch and started to stack papers into an attaché case. ‘Have we got a DNA match for the killer?’

  ‘You mean DNA found at both crime scenes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re waiting for the lab. But, listen, it’s the same guy: has to be.’ Sorley looked at her. She said, ‘You’re not thinking copy-cat?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s unlikely, given that we haven’t released anything about the victims being written on. Depends who might have seen the bodies before we did.’ Then: ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Nothing. No motive, no link between the victims… and if it’s serial, then the likelihood is that any connection lies in the mind of the killer, and logic isn’t going to help us much. Basically, we need more evidence; need to see more of the pattern.’

  ‘Would another body help?’ His weary tone leached all humour out of the question.

  DI Mike Sorley had left his wife because whenever they had a row she would hit him, and he’d been frightened: not of her but of himself. Frightened he would forget to tolerate it; frightened that he would hit back, one time, and find he couldn’t stop. He’d lived in the office for a while, bringing pizza and Thai takeaways back, sleeping between two chairs, using the AMIP-5 bathroom for a strip-wash and a shave before the team arrived.

  Stella had known about Sorley’s problem. She’d been working late in those days too; returning to the squad room after downing a couple of vodkas at the pub, trying to displace a problem of her own: a problem called John Delaney. She’d lived with George Paterson for five years, and George loved her in the way people want to be loved, which wasn’t enough to save him, because to make an even match Stella would have needed to love George in the same way. Her love for him was a different thing, had become a different thing: fondness and tenderness and admiration. Admiration – that was the killer.

  Delaney had come into her life at just the right time. Just the wrong time.

  Sorley had lived in the office not because he couldn’t think of anywhere else to be, but to avoid that final, that conclusive, move; Stella was staying late because she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – make a decision. They would sit together in the AMIP-5 squad room – green curry and Tiger beer, cigarettes and sympathy – with Sorley doing most of the talking. He was a man lost; he needed advice, and he needed reassurance, and Stella had done what she could. It had created a bond of friendship between them, which is why, when he called her DS Mooney, she knew she had to listen. Eventually Mike Sorley found a new wife. Karen was almost pretty and liked to laugh and was generous in bed.

  The storm was circling in the middle distance as he put his key
in the lock of his own front door and felt, as he always had since they’d started to live together, as if nothing bad would happen under that roof. They had their first-of-the-evening drink together, as always, and talked and made a few unimportant plans.

  While Karen cooked, Sorley spread his papers out on the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. Karen sighed, and he said, ‘I know.’ It was her habit to underline the health warnings on the packs in red pen and put Nicorette in the pockets of his jackets. It was evidence of the way she felt about him, and he had vowed to give up smoking to make her happy. In fact, he was going to give up tomorrow; or the day after that, for sure.

  He thought being happy was a knack and wondered why it had eluded him for quite so long.

  27

  Storm-light over London: yellow, blue-white, dirty pinks in the cloud-wrack, and the rain still holding off like bad news delayed.

  Arthur Dorey, aka Sekker, was standing in the hallway of a grand house admiring the paintings. He didn’t know much about art, but he decoded the female nude pretty quickly. It made him laugh, just as it had made Delaney laugh. After a short while he was shown into a large room where a man with a goatee and a gunslinger’s moustache sat behind a broad desk. It was a straightforward deal, the terms already agreed, the job already done.

  Sekker pocketed a white envelope that was reassuringly bulky. He said, ‘It was slow coming.’

  Stanley Bowman nodded. ‘It was on its way.’

  ‘Yes. Slowly.’

  Bowman pressed an intercom button on the phone, and the man who’d brought Sekker up to the room took him back downstairs, to a side door. The first few fat raindrops hit as Sekker emerged on to a side road close to the park, and a wind was shaking the trees. It was two hours before sunset, and already the street lights were flickering into life.