by Dal Maclean
Will had always known that there was corruption in the Met. For years he’d ached and strained to drag the festering core of it out into the light. But he’d never wanted to find it so close to home. He wished now he’d never followed the trail of crumbs. He didn’t want to know which officers had done what, back in 2006. He wanted it all to go away, and never to have met June. Never to have talked to Eve. For some other SIO to have been called to Daria’s murder scene that first night.
But that was the thought that dragged him back every time.
He owed Daria. And he owed June.
This was why he’d become a police officer. To catch the bad guys. To stop them hurting anyone else. Even if the bad guys wore Metropolitan Police Service uniforms. Even if the bad guys were people he cared about.
Hansen opened the door seconds after he knocked, dressed in pale gray leggings and a tight cut-off vest, makeup-free and with a towel turban on her head. For a moment, Will was right back in 2012, the last time he’d seen her out of uniform. He’d always been a bit startled by how much younger and less intimidating she looked.
Perhaps she was remembering the old days too, because she gave him the kind of warm, intimate, welcoming smile she hadn’t shown him since he’d ended their affair.
“I’m just back from the gym. Come in. Have you eaten?”
Hansen led the way into a huge living area—a sizable, expensive-looking kitchenette, a beautiful hardwood floor and plenty of space for a long dining table and a couple of huge sofas. The sofas faced a wall with a media unit set against it, a vast flat-screen TV hanging at its center and displaying books, framed photographs and an audio system. Two walls of the room were made entirely of metal-framed glass, and Big Ben and Westminster Abbey were part of the view.
The flat Will had known had been in a less central location and much smaller. Much less luxurious.
He had to wonder how much more an Assistant Commissioner was paid than a Commander.
“My husband got a lot richer,” Hansen said and Will became aware only then that she had been studying his reactions since he’d come in. He needed to sharpen up. He couldn’t let distraction over his private life fuck him up again. “You like it?” she asked.
What wasn’t to like? But she looked genuinely pleased when he nodded.
She dialed up the sound on the TV then left to dry her hair, so Will restlessly examined the books and photographs on the shelves before sitting on one of the sofas and trying to focus on the news program she’d chosen. But his mind ground round and round like a rusty carousel. Trying to shove away his anxious, churning grief over Tom and the realization that his worst fears about their relationship were starting to play out. He refused to look at his phone, in case Tom had messaged him. In case he hadn’t. So he tried distracting himself deliberately with thoughts about the case, only to flinch away from that too. And back compulsively, to Tom.
In the end he focused on how unnervingly familiar and comfortable this felt: sitting, waiting for Hansen to get ready after a shower. Like stepping back into a favorite pair of shoes.
When she reappeared in the lounge, Hansen’s hair was dry and fluffy and she’d put on fresh makeup. She sat beside him on the sofa forcing him to turn his body to face her as she turned toward him.
“So. You said you have ‘sensitive information’ to disclose.”
And then Will told her the entire story, from the point he was called out from Jamie’s party. He could feel the beginnings of a kind of relief at unburdening himself of his pile of unwanted secrets, how he remembered Confession had felt when he was a kid. Bless me Ma’am, for I have found out too much.
By the time he’d finished, he only had to look at Hansen to realize he’d merely shared a poisoned chalice. She’d slumped back in the sofa beside him and she looked beyond stunned. Appalled. If he hadn’t known her, he might even have said, afraid.
“There has to be a mistake.”
Part of Will wanted to just . . . laugh at the predictable banality of her reaction. But it had been his response as well. And Salt’s. Bargaining with the universe.
“No mistake,” he said.
He thought he’d probably flipped through most of the stages of grief before he even reached Rocco’s for dinner with Tom, and he’d reached acceptance. Then he’d been whacked by the next blow.
He said stiffly, “DCI Ingham pretty much ordered me to leave the Winton case alone and to focus on present-day leads around Daria’s murder. I almost bought it.”
“You’re leaping to conclusions,Will.”
“Am I? It all looks pretty damning to me.”
Hansen seemed to give up even trying to pretend. “Dear God this is a disaster.” She pressed her closed fist against her mouth, thinking hard. “That was a huge case. It helped polish up the Met’s image at a very difficult time. It made careers. Jo got pushed up to DCI but there were others who got a huge leg up too. A bigger boost than Jo. Robin . . . he was the Commander in charge of the case. And Ian . . . God. Ian. He was Assistant Commissioner Specialist Crime.”
Covering homicide. Great.
“Do you remember? Ian was the public face of the Met for the case.”
Will shook his head.
“No. You’d be too young. When we solved it so quickly and got a conviction—you know how charismatic he is. There were opinion pieces in the papers about what a fabulous job he’d done.”
“Are you going to talk to them? Sir Robin? Sir Ian?”
Hansen raised distressed eyes to his. Pale gray, framed by dark mascara and eyeliner. But not as light as Tom’s. Will choked off the thought.
“We have no way of knowing how high this might go,” she said. “Anyone who worked on that case or guided that case is suspect.”
“Then what can we do?” Will asked in desperation. “We have a likely major miscarriage of justice. And also likely . . . overt corruption among MPS officers. And there’s nowhere to take it?”
“We don’t have solid proof,” Hansen retorted. “Who do we point the finger at? There’s nothing in what you told me that a good lawyer can’t talk their way out of. And Jo . . . she’s a brilliant officer with an exemplary record. If it was her . . . if it went higher than her . . . it’s a disaster.” She rubbed her mouth with the pads of her fingers. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her so thrown.
“So where do we go?” Will asked again, impatiently. “Who do we tell? The ACC?”
The Anti-Corruption Command was part of the Directorate of Professional Standards, in place to investigate bent cops. They and the whole DPS were generally isolated and despised.
But Hansen shook her head. “I can’t make insinuations against officers with impeccable records, including the two top officers in the force, without something . . . undeniable to go on.” Hansen frowned hard at the floor, then she looked up. “Who else knows about June Winton’s DNA results?”
“Just my sergeant. And his contact at the lab,” Will said. “At the moment I’m in charge of the unit. But the DCI’s back the day after tomorrow.”
“Right.” And Hansen was entirely back on track again. “I want you to look into this further. You have my full authority. But keep it strictly between yourself and your sergeant for now. Don’t tell anyone else yet that we know about the swapped DNA, or June’s possible innocence.”
Will stared at her with horror. “You’re telling me to run a parallel investigation into my own boss? That’s what the DPS is for.”
“Think! If this goes higher than Jo, if it’s higher than me . . . .” She shook her head impatiently. “They all benefited from June’s conviction . . . Jo, Robin and Ian. And others. The DPS and the ACC come under Robin’s jurisdiction. The head of the DPS is Ian’s golfing buddy. Not to mention the DPS and the ACC were investigated for corruption themselves not that long ago. I’ve . . . .” She grimaced. “I may have heard a few . . . odd things about Andy Cochrane.” Cochrane was the Superintendant in charge of the ACC. They couldn’t even trust he was clean?
Will pressed both palms against his face. He couldn’t believe he’d sleepwalked into the middle of this. Except he hadn’t. He’d refused to take the out Ingham had tried to give him.
He dropped his hands. “None of that gives me the right to start spying on colleagues,” he said. “We should take this to another force. Outside the Met.”
Hansen’s lips thinned. “I need more. Because once I set this in motion, there’s no going back. As it is, all the MPS’s dirty linen’s going to be shoved in the public’s face when June appeals. And that means, whatever happens, people senior to me will be embarrassed. If I point the finger at any one of them and they don’t go down, I definitely will.”
Will blew out a long breath and they both sat for a moment or two, silent, taking in the enormity of the situation.
Then Will said wanly, “Bet you wish I hadn’t told you.”
Hansen’s face softened. “No. I’m honored you trust me.”
“I do,” Will said.
Hansen made an effort at a smile. “If you find out who killed Daria Ivanescu,” she said, “You find who killed Ricky Desmond, and maybe then we find who got June Winton sent down for it.” Hansen raised a hand and settled it on his arm, a gesture of encouragement perhaps. Or sympathy. Her nail varnish was a pale pearly pink, like the inside of a shell. It looked absurdly delicate against the dark gray cloth of his suit jacket. “The Clarkson connection could go nowhere Will,” she warned. “However much you want it to be him.”
Will’s gaze jerked away. It seemed all of his colleagues believed he chucked his judgment over the side when the name was mentioned.
He said with careful calm: “I discounted him when I thought the DNA was planted, because that drew attention to his kid. But now? He’s right back in the middle of the frame. He’s connected to June and Daria. He has professional killers to hand. He has cops in his pay.”
“Allegedly, Will,” Hansen interrupted. “You can’t prove it. And . . . what are the odds of a professional leaving their DNA at both scenes?”
“We should at least contact Serious and Organized Crime. Detective Superintendent Coleridge. They must be monitoring Clarkson. They could be—”
Hansen cut in, “Spencer Coleridge is currently under investigation by the ACC. And that is confidential.”
“Christ!” Will breathed. He could feel his grip on professional calm beginning to skitter away. “Is the whole bloody force rotten?”
“Melodrama is not a good look, DI Foster,” Hansen chided.
Will glared at her. “Is it melodramatic to point out that the unit can’t investigate Daria’s murder if they don’t know the facts? They should all be trawling the Desmond case now to find connections to Daria. There’s far more to go on with that case, even though it’s stone cold.”
Hansen took her hand from his arm. “You can’t tell anyone you’re reinvestigating Desmond, because that’ll alert whoever in the force colluded in framing June. And if they start to cover their tracks by destroying any remaining evidence . . . then we lose. The one advantage we have is that no one knows yet we’ve discovered the truth. Then again . . . if they know Ricky Desmond’s murderer’s DNA popped up at Daria’s murder scene, they’re probably already watching you.”
Will scowled. He was remembering Ingham’s reaction when June’s DNA was identified at Daria’s murder scene. Shaken, irritated, as if something personal to her had been threatened. Scrivenor taking his cue, lashing out to defend her record.
“We should be requesting that June be segregated for her own safety,” he said.
“And that’s exactly what I mean,” Hansen snapped. “We may as well announce we know she was framed and she’s our witness. We have to play for time.”
And Will couldn’t even argue, not when he recalled the look in Eve’s eyes when she told him she’d view it as a declaration of war.
“What about Eve Kelly’s demand to see her son?” Will asked. He almost expected Hansen to tell him to hide that too.
But she said, “Yes. Okay. Tell Jo about it. Everyone at Bronzefield’ll know you met Kelly by now anyway. There needs to be a good reason and the son angle covers it.”
Will rubbed an exhausted hand over his face. He felt stunned by everything that had hit him—professionally and personally—all at once.
“I know it’s hard,” Hansen said. Will glanced up at her to find her gaze fixed on him. She looked sad. “You’re going to have to lie, Will. Duck and weave and dig to find evidence against your own colleagues. And I know it’s the loneliest thing in the world, because they’re your friends too.” She put her hand back on his forearm and squeezed gently. “But you can’t tell anyone, and you can’t trust anyone.”
“That sounds fair,” Will said with furious bitterness. “Since they can’t trust me.”
Hansen looked away from the misery underlying it.
“There’s nothing worse than a corrupt copper, Will,” she said distantly. “That’s the biggest breach of trust of them all.”
12
On a normal evening Will would have enjoyed the drive back from Hansen’s flat in Westminster through Belgravia to South Kensington—even in the sodium glare of streetlights they were some of the prettiest and architecturally richest parts of London. But tonight nothing could distract him from the pain and dread of all that was going wrong in his private life and in his work life.
Finally when he stopped the car in the station carpark, he sat for a moment or two in ticking silence until he allowed himself, in that rare moment of privacy, to finally check his phone messages.
There were two from Tom. The first: I’m sorry.
Then forty-two minutes later: We have to talk.
Will had almost got used to the dull, gnawing lump of apprehension stuck in the middle of his chest since he’d left Rocco’s. But as he looked at the phone screen, the sick feeling seemed to sharpen and to spread down to his belly.
He was pretty sure he had a good idea what Tom wanted to talk about now that Will had ripped away their last pretenses himself. Refused to pretend he didn’t see the gulf between them.
“It’s not you; it’s me.” “At least we tried.” “I love you but . . . ”
There was no point hiding from it.
He’d been expecting it, hadn’t he, since the day Tom had turned up on his doorstep with a bag and a cat box? Waiting for it.
So tear off the fucking plaster.
He typed a quick message: I’ll let you know when I get free.
The reply whooshed off into the ether and he sat in the car for a minute or two, though he didn’t know what he was waiting for. Something back from Tom. Some crumb of hope? Something to tell him he’d got it wrong.
But when the response came, it was just: Okay.
Will let his head rest on the steering wheel, eyes screwed shut, trying to overcome the sick feeling seething, relentless, in his guts. He gave himself a few moments then he straightened up again quickly.
He couldn’t afford to be seen like this. He had work to do. And hellish as that was also becoming, at least he knew he could rely on distraction.
He gave a sour smile and got out of the car, just as a patrol car pulled into the space beside him.
It occurred to him as he walked into the thinly manned Incident Room, that he was going to cling to work the way he had when Tom had left him the last time. But this time, he was not going to use alcohol as a crutch. This time, he wasn’t going to try to numb feelings that wouldn’t be denied. He may have repeated a massive mistake, but he’d learned something at least from the first time round.
Salt had gone home for the night so Will worked alone at his desk for a few hours, then sheer exhaustion gave him some hours of dreamless sleep on an office camp bed.
He woke to the worried face of DC Omar Saddiq, who was trying to slide Will’s mobile phone under his pillow, having found it on the floor beside his desk. Which was a sign in itself. Will could ignore his exhaustion for only so long, before he
began to make stupid basic mistakes. Maybe he was making those mistakes in all directions. The investigation and Tom.
But he was up, showered, shaved and back at his computer when Ingham phoned just after nine a.m., from the superintendent’s conference. Will thought, in his own weariness, that she sounded anything but refreshed, though she perked up when she heard that Mulligan had made three arrests on the West Kensington case.
Just hearing her voice, the force of Will’s anguish startled him. The sense of betrayal. Suspecting Ingham might be crooked had hit him in a way he couldn’t explain, except perhaps that, from the time he’d first worked for her years before, he’d pretty much viewed her as the ideal copper. He’d loved her solid core of fairness and decency; her unwillingness to play politics with her own people. Her determination to bowl everything straight down the line. His doubts now made him feel like a kid who was just starting to understand his parents might have lied about Father Christmas.
Will stolidly recounted his version of events after the TV roadshow, second-guessing what he could say and what he shouldn’t; how much he had to lie and evade and omit. He edited out his discovery about Holly Clarkson, and the fact that he’d gathered a fresh DNA sample from June. The implications of those facts. But the rest, he told her.
He finished to an unnerving silence on the other end of the line. Then Ingham’s horror matched all of Will’s expectations.
“Eve fucking Kelly,” she groaned. “I’d have paid serious money never to hear that name again.”
Will waited a tactful second before asking, “Are you going to pass on the message to her son?”
“I have to.” Ingham sounded genuinely upset. Then she burst out, “Why the fuck would she threaten to expose his identity now? And use you to send the message?”
Will frowned straight ahead past his monitor at Salt’s empty chair. The dim overnight lighting had given way to glaring brightness.
“She just said,” Will repeated. “She knew her son’d got engaged and she was pissed off he hadn’t come to see her. June must have told her my name and where I work. I gave her my card. June, I mean.”