Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  There was always pasta, of course. Delaney emptied a carton of carbonara sauce into a saucepan, while Stella opened the wine. They had fallen asleep after lovemaking and Delaney had woken first; Stella had come to find him, walking naked into the living space, and now she stood at the counter, still naked, drawing the cork from a bottle of chilled Sancerre, her breasts drooping slightly as she bent to her task.

  She poured two glasses, then disappeared briefly and came back wearing a pink and gold silk robe that Delaney had bought her. It wasn’t her sort of thing at all and she suspected he knew as much and had bought it as a challenge; she wore it because it made her look like someone else.

  He was putting pasta into a pan of boiling water, and she let him finish and get clear before asking, ‘Why do you want to know if I’m happy with us?’ as if he’d asked the question just a moment ago.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘At dinner, last week.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  ‘So why?’

  ‘I’m trying to remember.’

  ‘I asked you if you were about to fetch a ring out of your pocket.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He smiled. ‘Did you think I was about to propose?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What would you have said?’

  She could hear him edging her away from the question. ‘I’d’ve said yes, church wedding, white-silk meringue, reception for two hundred, honeymoon in the Maldives.’ She knew him better than to push. Instead she asked, ‘Neil Morgan’s on your Rich List, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  She told him why, because, if she wanted his help, there was no avoiding it.

  ‘You think he has things to hide – beyond the blonde and the usual undeclared this and that.’

  ‘I think it’s possible.’

  ‘Things that would make him a target for this killer?’

  ‘Who knows? At present, I haven’t got a thing to connect the girl and Pigeon or the girl and Morgan. All I’ve got is the fact that Morgan seems to have been using Pigeon to cover his tracks.’

  ‘The company?’ Delaney asked. ‘The Americans?’

  ‘Pigeon knew who they were. He’s dead. Morgan’s denying he ever had any involvement.’

  ‘I did some superficial research on him,’ Delaney said. ‘It’s a superficial article.’ He heaped the pasta on to two plates and poured on the sauce. ‘I could go a little deeper: would that help?’

  ‘It might. This is all classified information, Delaney.’

  He smiled sweetly at her. ‘I know that.’

  The moon was thick and yellow and sat four square in the centre of the window-pane as they ate.

  Delaney said, ‘Suppose it should have been Morgan. A teenage hooker and a millionaire MP with ambition. I can only think of one connection.’

  ‘He has slightly classier taste,’ Stella said. Then: ‘Well, maybe not.’

  ‘But sex aside –’

  ‘Dirty Girl. Filthy Coward. There’s a logic somewhere.’

  ‘Mad logic. He’s mad – whoever did it.’

  ‘There are those’ – Stella was thinking of Anne Beaumont – ‘who would tell you that mad is a term so broad as to be meaningless.’

  ‘Yeah? What term would you use?’

  ‘No. Mad is okay with me. He’s mad, all right. Totally fucking mental.’

  51

  He ran the sequence in his head. Silent Wolf walking the city streets, the job done, the world a better place. Too smart to hail a cab or take a train, because who could fail to notice a man like that: his narrow face, the mane of coarse hair, the yellow pupils. He wore the cut-off glove on his left hand to show that he was armed and ready. It was a long way back to the Strip, but he wanted the trip, a chance to walk off the surplus energy, a chance to make more plans.

  Good – yes, he felt good, he felt fine. He crossed a bridge to the north side of the river and walked east along the towpath.

  Moonlight danced on the water.

  Valerie Turner listened to the voicemail message on his mobile once more, then topped up her gin. It was a sticky night and she’d taken a shower, pulling back on the linen trousers she’d worn earlier and a fresh T-shirt. The kitchen floor was cool to her bare feet.

  He was late, though he’d been later. She could hear the kids in the living room fighting over which computer game to play. They had eaten, but she hadn’t, so she put some olives in a dish and broke open a pack of breadsticks. There was a TV in the kitchen, and she was half watching a rerun of a comedy classic.

  After ten minutes or so, she would notice that the kids were unusually quiet. She would glance at her watch and think, Really late. She would try his mobile again and hear his voice saying, ‘Can’t take your call… leave a message…’ as she walked through to the living room and saw her sons kneeling up on the sofa by the window that looked out to the front garden.

  She would cross the room to see what they were looking at, catching sight, suddenly, of their open mouths, their frozen expressions, and look out of the window herself, at the drive in moonlight, the figure splayed against the railings of the gate, body slumped, arms spread wide.

  She would leave the house at a run, calling, already knowing it was him the way a wife knows her husband, her bare feet cutting up on the driveway concrete, and fall on her knees in front of him, calling his name, shaking him, crying, fizzing with shock, not knowing what or how or why, holding his head up to try to make him see her, see who she was, the thickness of congealed blood clinging to her fingers like glue, calling for help, screaming for help, barely noticing the fact that he was half naked or that there was something scrawled across his belly, as she held him and rocked him and called his name and howled and howled and howled.

  LYING BASTARD

  52

  In another life Ricardo Jones would have been a Tony Ryan or an Alan Sugar; a Donald Trump or a Howard Schultz. Ricardo had an instinct for second-guessing market movements and for predicting a trend, but he knew that those skills – those talents – were nothing without a network of contacts. He had only been able to guarantee the kinds of discounts he’d offered to Jonah the bling king because he knew he could offload fast at a fixed price.

  To Ricardo, everything was merchandise, and that included money. Money that had to be laundered wasn’t money that could be spent, so it was a commodity, its market value nothing to do with its face value. In fact, nothing, Ricardo had discovered, was worth its face value: not when it came into his hands, anyway. Precious stones, cars, booze, cigarettes, guns, electrical goods – everything was priced minus its risk value and the dealer’s cut. Only two kinds of merchandise Ricardo didn’t touch: drugs and girls. It wasn’t so much a moral issue, just that these were specialist items, and the risk factor was proportionately high.

  Another aspect of Ricardo’s success was that he worked alone. It meant he worked long and hard, but it also meant there was no one to foul up, no one to get greedy, and no one who could lift his methods or his contacts. The downside to this was that Ricardo had no back-up. On a few, rare occasions he’d hired some muscle, but those guys were just attack dogs. Because he didn’t want a partner or permanent protection, Ricardo’s method was to stay in the shadows as much as possible. He wasn’t showy, he wasn’t flash, he didn’t hang out with the guys, he drove a mid-range Peugeot, dressed in off-the-peg casuals and, because he never took any extras off the top, his clients had no cause for complaint.

  He thought now that it had been a mistake to run a book at the cage fight; it was too visible, too exposed; but it was a fast way to make money and shifting operations from Manchester had involved cash-flow problems. Ricardo had done so well in the north that he’d attracted attention, and people had begun to crowd him out. He’d had offers to join bigger outfits, bigger set-ups, and his refusals hadn’t met with universal approval. All in all, it was time to move on. London was the obvious option. Business was good in cities all over the country, but London was wide open. Londo
n was one big market.

  When Tina had told him that her daughter was a police officer, Ricardo had said, ‘Get in touch. Ask her round for a drink. I could use a laugh.’

  The sky was deep blue, the moon high, dabs of cumulus backlit by a hard, blue light.

  Ricardo slipped along the walkways to Jonah’s apartment. He had just received a text that told him an offshore money-transfer had been made, and Jonah would be happy about that: happy enough, perhaps, to put some more business Ricardo’s way. A rough calculation told Ricardo that he could get rich on something like three per cent of the Harefield throughput, and Jonah was a fair percentage of the percentage.

  Music from all directions, shockwave bass and the seamless, angry monotone of rap. People on the walkways were whores and punters, gamblers and boozers, druggies and dealers. Ricardo slipped through it all, head down, a man minding his own business. The doors of the righteous were barred against the night.

  When he got to Jonah’s apartment, he stood outside and made a phone call. No one ever knocked. Knocks were anonymous. Jonah didn’t take the call, Ricardo hadn’t expected he would, but a voice said, ‘Yeah, okay, wait.’ After a moment a man appeared at the door. He stepped outside and looked around. He said, ‘Just you?’

  ‘Ricardo Jones. He’s expecting me.’

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  The man stood aside and Ricardo went past him, hearing the lock fall. He walked into the room they’d been in before, the room where the deal was struck. Jonah was sitting in an armchair and smiling at him. Ricardo smiled back: for just the merest moment, he smiled back. Then he noticed that Jonah’s posture was odd – strangely formal in the way his back was so stiffly upright, and the precise manner in which his hands extended along the arms of the chair. And he wasn’t smiling.

  Jonah’s head was up because his dreadlocks had been tied to the chairback. His hands had been nailed to the arms of the chair, and his posture was odd because he was in considerable pain. The smile was a rictus of pain. Pain was all Jonah could think about.

  Ricardo noticed that there was something about those nailed hands, something odd and unaccountable; then he saw that neither had a thumb. He registered all this in about as much time as it took for him to give a little heave and let go a gob of vomit on to his shirt-front. When he turned, the man who had let him in was leaning on the door-frame.

  He said, ‘Hello, Ricardo.’ And his smile was genuine.

  Delaney shuffled through some interview notes. He said, ‘Rich people: what are they good for?’

  ‘How many more do you have to see?’ Stella was watching TV: the news. So far as she could tell, the weather had turned on the human race: in one country a famine, in another a hurricane, in a third mud slides had buried a village. These, it seemed, were acts of God.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Do you hate them all?’

  ‘All, yes.’

  On TV, refugees crowded a mud-slick road, carrying what they could, rendered silent by misery. ‘When they say act of God,’ Stella asked, ‘do they mean our God or someone else’s?’

  Delaney laughed. He watched her for a moment as she sat cross-legged on the sofa, her face in profile to him, her expression serious and occupied. He knew he loved her, and that she loved him, but wasn’t sure what the love would bear.

  He said, ‘The question I asked – if you were happy with us – has another question attached.’

  ‘Which depends on the answer I give?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Okay.’ She switched the TV off. ‘Yes, I’m happy with us.’

  ‘Me too.’ He grinned at her. ‘So I thought maybe we should move in together.’

  A little silence, then she said, ‘We have, haven’t we?’

  ‘Sort of. You still have the flat in Vigo Street.’

  ‘Which I’m selling.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m here all the time.’

  ‘Sure. I don’t mean live here.’

  ‘Buy somewhere together?’

  ‘That’s right. Somewhere a bit bigger perhaps.’

  She nodded, speechless. When her phone rang, she crossed the room to get it, looking at him all the time, still nodding. He’d only given her half the reason for the question, of course.

  If you’re happy with us, we could buy a place together.

  And if you’re happy with us, maybe you’ll let me go away for a while, and ditch armchair journalism like the fucking Rich List, and do the kind of thing I’m really good at, and run the risk of getting killed in some war zone halfway round the globe.

  So the look of guilt on his face was plain to see when she flip-closed her mobile phone and said, ‘Do you know a man called Martin Turner?’

  53

  They had police-taped both ends of the road, but Andy Greegan had called in help from the locals to keep the neighbours at bay. Now he was establishing an uncontaminated area, which took in the ground between the trees and the hedge as well as the gate, the driveway and the pavement. The tent was a jerry-rigged affair, because Turner was still tied to the rails of the gate, and the screen had to be on each side. One of the uniformed men had gone from house to house asking for a Stanley knife, and Harriman had slit the thick plastic so it slotted over the rails.

  Halogens fizzed. The video man and the stills photographer took turns. The police doctor gave an accurate account of how and when. A forensics team were covering the ground inch by inch. Turner’s coat and shirt were already in an evidence bag. A tightly controlled crime scene was a method for bringing order out of chaos.

  Stella and Harriman stood just outside the circle of light. She said, ‘I want the whole team down here. Better to be at the scene than look at snaps on a white-board.’

  ‘They’re on their way,’ Harriman said. ‘Except DI Collier.’

  ‘No, I said the team. Fuck Collier.’

  Harriman looked up and down the street. ‘No cameras,’ he observed. ‘Same with the other two scenes – a street by a park, the towpath; no CCTV.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘You don’t think that’s a factor?’

  ‘In his choice of killing ground, perhaps. Not in his choice of victims.’

  A night-wind rustled the leaves on the silver birches. There was a smell of charcoal smoke in the air, mixed with the whiff of early decay coming off the body of Martin Turner.

  ‘Dirty girl,’ Harriman said, ‘filthy coward. Now we’ve got lying bastard.’

  Stella asked, ‘Where’s the wife?’

  ‘Local A & E. She went into shock.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Two boys – one six, one younger. They’re with a neighbour.’ He hesitated. ‘They saw it.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘That’s just it. We don’t know. Neighbours heard her screaming. When they arrived on the scene, the kids were up at the window.’

  ‘And who knows how long they’d been there or what they’d witnessed –’

  ‘Yes, that’s the issue.’

  ‘How many neighbours?’

  ‘We think a dozen or so. The uniforms are doing a house to house.’

  ‘We need to be careful with the children.’

  ‘I know.’

  Stella was watching Maxine Hewitt walking down the empty street towards them. ‘Isn’t DC Hewitt one of our ABE staff?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Okay, put her on to it.’ Then: ‘The neighbours – how many of the dozen or so saw the writing?’

  ‘All of them. It was dusk, but the street lighting’s pretty good.’

  Maxine ducked into the scene-of-crime tent, shepherded by Andy Greegan. There were places she could stand and places that were out of bounds: areas that the forensics team had marked off and would come back to. She looked down at the body of Martin Turner, arms out in a wide cruciform, half his face blown away, the inscription scrawled across his bare midriff, and thought how like waxworks the dead seem, how very far from life.

  The low, persistent hum in the tent, like
a running dynamo, was flies. They formed a black crust on Turner’s face and were swarming over gobbets of blood and matter on his chest. She made mental notes: the bruising round his throat, the lack of blood for a wound that gross, the grass stains on the knees of his trousers. She held her breath against the smell.

  When she emerged, Frank Silano was talking to Greegan. He looked at her but didn’t say a word. The halogen lights would make anyone look pale, the smell make anyone grimace. He went in, brushing through the slit in the plastic.

  Stella and Harriman sat with Mark and Carrie Phipps, who had heard the screams, been first to reach Valerie Turner, had pulled her off her husband’s body and also had the foresight – in Carrie’s case, at least – to throw up a fair way off from the crime scene. It was Carrie who had finally looked up, perspiring, trembling, to see the two little faces pressed to the window-pane. She had entered the house through the wide-open front door and gone into the living room. When she spoke, the boys made no response, nor did they move; they stared out, eyes wide and fixed, tiny dabs of breath misting the window.

  She went to them, talking softly, trying to coax them away, though it was impossible for her to keep the ragged edge out of her voice. Finally, the younger had turned to her, dry-eyed, and asked, ‘Who is it?’

  Stella asked questions that brought no useful answer. ‘Did you see anyone, anything? Did you hear anyone, anything? His car had been driven to the end of the street, so did you –? A shot was fired, so did you –?’

  Carrie shook her head. A fine evening, she explained, barbecues were lit, all the activity was in back gardens, people talking over the fence, music playing, children running about –’

  ‘Did the children say anything to you?’ Stella asked.

  ‘The little boy – James – wanted to know who it was.’

  ‘What did he mean?’

  ‘He was asking about the dead person – asking who it was.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Stella worked to keep the note of challenge out of her voice.

  ‘What else could he have meant?’ Mark asked.