*
Aimée had written a letter to Peter and Ben. It said many things, but mostly it said no way back. Ben had an after-school club, so he and Peter would both be home at about six o’clock, by which time Aimée would be clear and gone, on the train, somewhere else. She had thought she might feel something drawing her back – the child, perhaps – but all her thoughts lay in the future.
She packed a bag, taking, as she had promised herself, nothing of the past. The house was oppressive to her, the rooms stifling. She thought of Gideon and ached for him.
89
Stella Mooney in the scorched room, the TV on, the computer showing its yellow-eyed screensaver.
Forensics had turned up the gun, the knife, the combats, the long coat. They had done their preliminary work and were now going through the rest of the house, though it was clear they had got what they wanted: the room was thick with traces. Stella was dressed in SOC whites, the hood up, her shoes covered. The sun was flooding the window and the burned smell scratched her sinuses.
Harriman came in looking rueful. ‘He picked the right time to be out.’
Stella nodded. ‘Either he left in a hurry and won’t be back, or he’ll see the door off its hinges and police vehicles in the street.’
‘Why would he have left?’
‘The pimp brought us here, but he could equally well have tipped Woolf off, just for fun. He thinks he’s doing himself a favour, not us.’
‘Put the door back,’ Harriman suggested, ‘send forensics away, then sit and wait.’
‘News travels fast on the Strip.’
‘Sure, but –’
‘If you like,’ Stella said. ‘Sounds reasonable. You fix it.’
She sat in the operator’s chair, brought up the internet connection and went to Bookmarks. Two men in orange jumpsuits and behind them the self-styled warriors. One of the warriors stepped forward, drawing a long knife.
Stella in top-to-toe white, a ghost in the scorched room.
*
Aimée had been to the supermarket: the last time she would drive that car, the last time she would make that round trip. She brought the shopping indoors and packed it away in the fridge. It was food Peter could cook, food he and Ben particularly liked.
The last time she would be the goodwife.
She put the letter on the mantelpiece where it could be seen. She went out, slamming the door and giving it a little shove, to ensure it was properly shut, the way she always did.
He didn’t know where he was or how he’d got there. There was a band of pain behind his eyes and his legs felt weak, as if the battle of shadows had been a real contest and himself the loser.
Must I kill her?
He walked on, hearing only one answer to his question. The sun seemed to be bearing down on him and the roadside slipstream was a toxic mist. He turned away, finding a gate between railings, and then, suddenly, he was somewhere he knew, somewhere he recognized.
Aimée had known she would be early, but then why not? She was living the new life, she was stealing a little of their future before he came to claim his part.
She sat at their chosen bar in the station concourse with a glass of cold white wine and watched the travellers. Everyone with a purpose, everyone with a destination, everyone – Aimée included – brightened by the sun.
She checked her watch. She couldn’t decide whether to look for him – to catch him coming across the concourse towards her, smiling as she rose to greet him – or to lose herself in her thoughts and allow herself to be surprised when he was suddenly there at her side.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
She was anonymous until he arrived and happy to be so. The sun struck rainbows from the bevel of her glass.
They had set up as Harriman suggested – door restored, vehicles cleared, officers waiting in the room, others deployed in the street to give warning. Activity on the Strip slowed to a near-halt, except for the kerb-crawlers, who speeded up. It would be a semaphore to Woolf, and Stella knew it. She walked down the Strip and found Costea in a cubicle bar; when she walked in, the silence was cymbals and drums.
Costea pointed to the street. When they were outside, he said, ‘You come here, you find me, you do this to fuck me up?’
‘To talk, that’s all. He’s not there.’
‘This is my problem?’
‘Where else might he be?’
‘Did I say this guy is my brother? I know where he live and I show you, what else you want me to do?’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Fuck sake, these guys see me talking to you…’
‘Would anybody else know? Did he use any of the girls?’
‘No. Never fuck, never score, I didn’t know him from that. Just see him going up and down. All I do – watch Strip, watch punters, watch girls. Watch out for me.’
‘Okay,’ Stella said. She looked up and down the street. ‘Everything’s gone quiet.’
‘Yeah. Fuck, Mrs Mooney, you are bad for business.’
She headed back up to the rise, but then kept walking, as if she knew where she was going.
And, after a while, she did.
Aimée went to the station entrance, although they had arranged to meet at the bar. Then she went back. He wasn’t outside, so she tried the bar-room. Going from sunlight to the bar’s dim interior made her half-blind, so she visited each table in turn, peering at people, barely noticing their indignant stares. He wasn’t there.
She ran across the concourse to the platform where the train waited, their destination announced on the red LCD display, the digital clock ticking the time away. Then she made a tour of the shops, the newsagents, the cafés, before going back to the bar, back to the concourse, back to the platform. She was crying, though she hadn’t noticed it.
But he’ll come. There’s time. He’ll be here.
People were hurrying towards the gate that led to the train, hurrying in case they might miss it. Aimée thought that if she looked away, then back, he would be there, running, held up somehow but here now, and they would sprint for the train and get aboard just as it moved away, breathing hard, falling into one another’s arms and that moment, the moment when they nearly missed the train, would be a part of their new life, something they would laugh about sometimes, a story to tell their new friends.
She looked away, then looked back. He was nowhere.
90
Not chance: it wasn’t anything remotely like that, and certainly not guesswork or deduction. What had led Stella to her destination was a certain kind of knowledge that arrives unbidden: infallible, irresistible. It rose from the kind of certainty that brings to you, in a crowded street, the person you have just been thinking of.
The park was full of people but he was the only one Stella could see. He was sitting on a bench quite close to the tree where he had hanged Bryony; so much tension in him, so much grief, that it seemed to radiate. He didn’t look much like himself, but, as she got closer, Stella could see the indistinct lines of the Indian-ink home-made tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. Closer still, she saw it clearly, though she had known what it would be.
The procedure was keep your distance, observe, follow if necessary, don’t approach, call for back-up. She took out her phone, turned to face away from him, pressed a speed-dial number, spoke two sentences, then turned back. He was still there, sitting quietly, his hands in his lap, his forearms upturned as if to catch the sun. As she walked towards him, he leaned back on the bench, looking up at the tree, and Stella followed his eye line to where a breeze shifted the leaves and the leaves scattered sunlight.
She sat down next to him. She said, ‘I know who you are.’
The train pulled out.
Aimée watched it until it was out of sight. The platform was empty, but if she looked hard enough, if she refused to look away, there was a ghost train with two ghost passengers, the only two aboard, sitting in a window seat and watching her as she watched them leave. She raised a hand to wave, but the image wo
uldn’t hold.
Something kept him. Something prevented him. Something not his fault.
She knew it wasn’t so.
She went through the concourse at a dead run, howling. She teetered in a wild arc, her arms outstretched, her mouth wide open, as the other travellers, the ones with somewhere to go and someone to go with, moved away, amazed.
There was no one near her as she ran, spinning, arms out, a mad woman, shouting his name, over and over, as if he might hear her, as if, even now, he might come.
Stella Mooney and Gideon Woolf, side by side on the bench.
She spoke to him in a voice that was both soft and low, and he nodded, listening carefully, because she seemed to know all sorts of things, and understand them too. His life seemed clearer to him when she talked about it, his needs more obvious, his reasons more credible.
After a while, it was his turn to speak, his voice barely more than a whisper, letting her in on secrets, sharing hopes, answering all her questions, his new-found friend, his patient confidante.
91
Gideon Wolf sat in a holding cell at Notting Dene. It was daylight outside, but dark in the cell and a light high on the wall threw a pale shadow. His shadow. His own.
He stood up and extended his arms and the shadow flew. He smiled because things had turned out well.
Now he wouldn’t have to kill Aimée, which was good.
Now the world would know him for himself, which was good.
Now there would be no more talk of cowardice or betrayal.
He would tell them everything. He had already made a start with the woman who had sat with him on the bench. When the others arrived and had driven him to this place, he had continued to talk. He was anxious to let them know who he was and what he was capable of, because the more he explained the more he understood.
The only thing he would keep from them was the moment when Silent Wolf stood on the prison wall, searchlights scanning the towers, the siren blaring, guards with rifles running this way and that, the Wolf’s silhouette stark and clear for just a moment before he swung down into the city streets and was lost to sight.
It was as if the house had exhausted most of its oxygen.
Aimée’s breath came short and shallow. There were tiny silver spangles flickering at the corner of her vision, and she felt as if each step might pitch her forward on to her face. She took the note from the mantelpiece and opened it, going line by line, as if she were reading it for the first time. Then she burned it.
It was ten to six. She sat on a kitchen stool and looked round – everything just as she’d left it, everything as it should be – and wondered how it could be possible that she was there in that utterly strange place.
Somewhere the hiss and rumble of a high-speed train.
Somewhere a landscape beyond a window.
Two people looking out, side by side, lovers in love.
When Peter came through the door ten minutes later, Aimée was preparing dinner. There were days when he brought her flowers, and this was one of them.
A day like any other.
92
Rain came in from the west.
It rained for three days without stopping, which slowed the city down. The tailbacks were longer, tempers were shorter. The AMIP-5 squad wrote reports and signed off, one by one, the job done. Brian Collier was a happy man. There was still the catch-up paperwork, of course, but he’d already vowed ‘never again’.
Stella hadn’t ever taken a liking to Collier, but a corner had been turned when he’d got shot saving Donna from a certain gang-rape. And at least he hadn’t been hitting on her, a fact she shared with Maxine Hewitt.
‘No,’ Maxine said, ‘he’s been hitting on me. He tells me he’s blessed with a gigantic cock.’
‘I can’t vouch for it,’ Stella said. ‘Did you tell him you’re gay?’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘He didn’t believe you.’
‘Apparently, I need a gigantic cock to change my life. Is our man still talking?’
‘As if he’ll never stop. His life is one big adventure in which the bad guys go down and justice is served.’
‘His brief will go for post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘All this could have been avoided,’ Stella observed, ‘if he had simply done his job.’
‘His job?’
‘Killing people.’
Stanley Bowman didn’t really notice the rain, he was too busy dealing and playing, playing and dealing. Just now he was in a West End casino looking at ace/king of diamonds in the hole and two diamonds in the flop.
He had received the call from Vanechka and given the code word. The call had proceeded just as Bowman had expected, but what he didn’t know was that the code word had sent a little shock-wave down the line. It was the word he’d been given by Ricardo, but it was a bad word: not the wrong word, but a word that meant Deal this guy out and fast; that meant This money is tainted, this money is cutting a pathway that will take you straight to jail.
He caught a high diamond on the river and went all in. At just the same moment his dirty money was travelling at terrific speed back up the laundry line and making a noise like a lit fuse. The people who had received Stella’s tip-off would see it and know what it meant. They would intercept the money and reroute it, just to keep things flowing, just to keep Bowman sweet. When they’d got everything, everything, then they’d make their move.
A player with three jacks thought he saw a bluff and matched the bet. Bowman flipped up his ace/king. He smiled the smile of a man who expected to win.
A Rich List smile.
Lawyers had asked questions and doctors had given the answers: they didn’t expect Neil Morgan to recover his faculties. Candice wondered what unbelievably, unspeakably, unchangeably shitty luck had brought her to this. She sat at his bedside and asked him for the numbers of the offshore accounts; he responded with a wet grin. She asked him again; he grinned again. She was surprised to find just how deep hatred could go.
The lawyers had taken note of a clause in Morgan’s papers that read ‘if I die or become incapable of managing my affairs’. The instruction concerned a woman named Abigail Gray, and the file contained a letter that should be delivered to her. There were clear instructions to the lawyers that all this should be dealt with as a matter of the strictest confidence. When Abigail opened the letter, which she would, three weeks later when clearances had been secured, she would find the names of several banks, each with an account number beside it. The number alone was authorization for withdrawal of funds.
Beyond the rain-streaked window, planes were dropping out of the cloud-cover, one every half-minute. Candice thought Barbados would be nice. For Neil, a day nurse and a night nurse; for herself, sea, sand and sex. She would take the flight a week later, sharing business class with Sekker and his girl, who were beating the hurricane season, just as they’d planned.
Stella touched base with Mike Sorley and got him on his mobile. He was taking a walk by the river, and Stella could hear the sound of rain rattling his umbrella.
‘Should you be out in this?’
‘Light exercise is what the doctors said.’
‘You got my report?’
‘They’ll go for post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘That’s what DC Hewitt said.’
‘What was it with the MP – Morgan?’
‘Pro-war, like Martin Turner, but we now know that he was mixed up with a company that deals arms, a non-executive director.’
‘A fixer.’
‘That would be it, yes. And recipient of a fat backhander.’
‘You think Woolf knew?’
‘It’s doubtful, Boss. Any idea of when you’ll be fit for work?’
‘Soon. Definitely. A week or so. I heard DI Collier hasn’t enjoyed his time behind a desk.’
‘You heard right.’
‘But did he do a good job?’
‘Ask the SIO,’ Stella said, ‘but, look, it’s a piece
of piss, isn’t it – shuffling a few files around, issuing memos.’
Sorley sat on a bench under his umbrella and watched the rain dimpling the water. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
Just this one.
93
When the rain stopped, the summer came back in: clear skies, a hot sun. Everything dried off and London moved back outdoors. In the square by Machado’s restaurant, tables had been set out and strings of white lights hung in the trees.
Stella and John Delaney were drinking champagne and sharing a seafood platter. The champagne was because Delaney had signed off on his Rich List. Editorial tact had removed Neil Morgan from the series.
Stella said, ‘Any of them you liked?’
‘No. Well, Bowman, classy sort of guy, you know… cool operator.’
‘Not a job you enjoyed.’
‘It paid well.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘It wrote easily.’
‘You hated it.’
Delaney laughed. ‘Okay, I hated it.’ He poured champagne, then upturned the empty bottle in the ice bucket and signalled for more.
Stella tapped the back of his hand. It meant ‘listen’. She said, ‘I know what you’re thinking and I know why you’re not sharing it with me.’
‘Think so?’
‘You’re thinking of a war zone.’
He looked genuinely surprised. ‘Shit-hot Detective Mooney.’
‘You’re thinking of the old life, and you’re thinking that feature articles are for has-beens.’ He was silent. She asked, ‘Seen anyone yet?’
‘A couple of people.’ He didn’t mention Martin Turner; it seemed unnecessarily complicated. ‘Look, Stella –’
‘Any takers?’
He shrugged. Then: ‘Well, yes…’
‘Will you go?’
He drank the last of his champagne. The swifts were back, circling and banking, their cries lacing the night air.
‘The reason I quit,’ he said, ‘was because I came too close. I could have died – not just once, three times, four… I was frightened; I was so frightened I vowed I would never go back.’
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