Holsworth wants to know about the last night of Operation Atlantis. He’s asked the question and is silent now, his piggy eyes staring at Dom as he waits for an answer.
Dom likes the silence. What he doesn’t like is how Holsworth’s question has brought the memories to the forefront of his mind. He keeps it brief. ‘Like I put in my statement, Therese and I went into the property alone. An assailant took me out with a blow to the head. The comms failed.’
Jan Ekman, all glossy black bobbed hair and high-buttoned shirt leans forward. ‘What else do you remember about the comms failing? Can you show us your decision log?’
Fuck. Dom shakes his head. ‘I was injured in the line of duty. I went to hospital, didn’t complete my decision log straight away.’
‘So you didn’t follow procedure?’ Donald O’Byrne’s voice has a tone of disbelief. ‘But you’re a senior officer, DI Bell. Surely you’re aware of proper—’
‘Of course I’m aware. But I was knocked unconscious.’ Dom points to his forehead. ‘I’ve got a bloody dent in my head to prove it.’
‘Now, now, DI Bell. There’s no need for that kind of language.’ Holsworth can barely contain a smirk. ‘We’re just trying to get the facts clear.’
Dom doesn’t answer. He’d waived his right to be accompanied by a union rep, thinking it showed he had nothing to hide. He’s only meant to be being interviewed as a witness after all, but with the line of questioning they’re taking he’s beginning to regret that decision.
Ekman smiles. ‘Let’s refresh your memory about the comms.’ She taps a couple of keys on the laptop in front of her. Turns the screen to face him so he can see the audio file. Clicks play.
The comms feed sounds crackly. Then he hears Therese’s voice, confident and clear, ‘Keep your mouth shut.’
Dom hears their stilted conversation replayed, ending with his own gruff ‘Let me.’
Ekman stops the tape. ‘Why did you use “Let me”, the code for “something’s wrong”?’
‘I had a bad feeling.’
‘A bad feeling?’ Holsworth repeats, raising his eyebrow. He nods at Ekman to continue the recording. ‘Your colleague DI Weller didn’t have any such qualms.’
The audio restarts, and Therese’s voice is decisive as she tells Dom, ‘It’s fine. Remember your place.’
Ekman stops the audio. Raises her eyebrow.
‘There was no sign of Genk or his people, that felt wrong,’ Dom says. ‘We knew Genk would be cautious but had expected people, guns.’
O’Byrne sniffs. ‘So why didn’t you give the amber code word and get the back-up prepared?’
‘I wanted to. Should have. But Therese, DI Weller, was in command and she wanted to proceed.’
‘So it was DI Weller’s fault she got shot?’ Ekman says.
‘No it fucking wasn’t. She …’ Dom takes a deep breath, mustn’t let these fuckers see how riled they’re getting him. Exhales. ‘Look, it was a tough call to make. We’d been setting this up for eighteen months – no one wanted to leave empty-handed.’
Ekman doesn’t comment, just restarts the tape. They hear the crack as the baseball bat hits Dom’s skull. The clatter as he drops his torch. The thud as he hits the ground. After that there’s only white noise.
‘I said “Eclipse”,’ Dom says, staring at Holsworth as he speaks. ‘I said it twice, then “Bring the Rain”. I told them we were in trouble. I told them to send in CO19.’
‘Did you know the comms were down?’
Dom shakes his head. ‘I didn’t until the confirmation failed to come. I still had DI Lindsay’s voice in my ear gobbing off about some girl.’
‘Did you deliberately turn off the comms?’
Dom glares at Holsworth. ‘No I didn’t.’
O’Byrne makes a note. Ekman turns the laptop screen back to face her.
Holsworth doesn’t acknowledge what he’s said. Instead he asks another question. ‘What else do you remember before DI Weller was shot?’
Dom doesn’t answer right away. Things had happened fast. He was immobilised on the ground. ‘I remember trying to clear my sight. To my right, almost outside my field of vision, were three pairs of trainered feet facing away from me, and Therese’s boots, toes pointed in my direction. I heard a voice – male, Russian-accented – it had to be Genk – say, “You should have come alone” and Therese reply that she’d told him she wasn’t coming alone and he’d overreacted.’
‘What did you take that to mean?’ Ekman asks.
‘I took it to mean she was pissed off with him for hitting me.’
Holsworth gestures for him to continue.
‘The pain in my skull was intense. Their voices became raised. I tried to follow the conversation but I kept losing consciousness.’ Dom looks down. Doesn’t want Holsworth to see he’s hiding something. The moment Therese lost control of the interaction with Genk replays in his memory.
Therese’s voice: ‘The police know about you, they—’
‘This is not news. Of course they know. You waste my time. Go back to your whore business.’ Black brogues stepped into Dom’s field of view; Genk was leaving.
‘I’m the officer in charge of the operation to bring you in,’ Therese’s voice is too quiet for the mic to register, even if it was working.
The black brogues halted in front of Dom’s face. At close range, he could see Markus Genk was trembling.
Therese again: ‘I’m here to offer you a deal.’
Dom’s head pounded. What the hell was Therese doing? This wasn’t the agreed script. She was supposed to keep her cover as the owner of a bunch of massage parlours looking for product. Their objective was to get evidence proving a direct connection from the trafficked girls arriving weekly in the capital, all the way up the chain to Genk; proof that would put the bastards away for a very long time. They were so close.
Genk pivoted round and strode back to Therese. The trainered guards parted, letting him closer to her. Dom heard Therese gasp, then Genk’s voice again: ‘You little cunt.’
‘Did you see DI Weller act in an inappropriate manner?’ O’Byrne says.
The dent in his forehead aches. Dom massages it with his left hand, trying to fool himself that it’ll help. It won’t, and he knows it. The pain is as much in his mind as physical. Had Therese acted inappropriately? Fuck. She’d gone off-script, but he’d been injured; maybe she felt their cover hadn’t stayed intact. Therese wouldn’t be the first officer to try to convince a big player they were willing to play both sides, and it could well have been a ploy to get him back onside because she thought she’d lost him.
Dom shakes his head. Holds back the fact Therese told Genk she was a police officer. He has to believe she did it to try and salvage the operation, because if she didn’t, if she really was offering to play both sides, it means he’d have to admit that he really doesn’t know her at all, and he doesn’t want to believe that’s true.
Holsworth frowns. ‘For the tape, DI Bell is shaking his head.’
Ekman shifts in her seat. ‘What else happened before CO19 went in?’
Dom looks at her. Takes care to maintain eye contact and keep his tone calm. ‘Another body had entered the room. I didn’t see their face.’
O’Byrne makes a note on his pad. His spidery writing is angled steeply backwards.
Holsworth leans forward, narrows his eyes. ‘What did you see?’
An image of Chrissie, all smiling and happy, her arms wrapped around Darren Harris, floats across his mind’s eye. He forces it away. He can’t lie on record. Won’t. No matter how much he wants to. He has to answer a direct question with a truthful answer. Always knew he’d have to. ‘High-laced cherry-red Doc Martens. That’s what I saw.’
‘And you recognised them.’ More a statement than a question, but the pause afterwards tells Dom that Holsworth’s waiting for him to go on.
Dom’s head starts to pound. ‘DC Darren Harris wore boots like that, but he wasn’t deployed undercover. He stayed behi
nd the scenes, supporting us with intel on the comms. Whoever entered the room before CO19 knew Genk.’
He rubs his forehead again. The question he’s been trying to answer ever since that night loiters at the front of his mind; how could Darren know Genk?
Holsworth leans forward across the table. ‘What made you think they knew each other?’
‘Whoever it was shouted a warning before opening the door. Genk recognised him, told him to come in. They sounded friendly.’
Holsworth smiles as he smooths down his goatee; it makes him look like a cut-price psychiatrist. ‘Interesting. Did it sound like Harris?’
Bastard.
Dom remembers the pain in his ears, the fogginess in his brain and the sickness. ‘I couldn’t tell. My hearing was screwed.’
‘Could it have been Harris?’
‘Possibly.’ Dom glares at Holsworth. Hates him for pushing him into a corner. ‘I don’t know for sure.’
‘What exactly did he say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think you do. So tell me. It’s your career on the line here.’
Dom glares at Holsworth. ‘I told you, I can’t bloody remember.’
O’Byrne jots something onto his pad, then shuts it so Dom can’t read what’s written.
Dom forces himself to keep his arms relaxed, hands resting in his lap. It’s hard. What he really wants is to shove the pad up O’Byrne’s arse.
Holsworth’s voice cuts into his thoughts. ‘So this man enters, with boots like DC Harris. Then what?’
Dom remembers the light, the explosion. The room filling with smoke. ‘A flash-bang disorientation grenade went off.’
‘Go on.’
‘I couldn’t see or hear much, but I sensed movement around me. There was shouting, I think. Then gunfire.’ The memory replays in his mind. Therese was shouting, Genk too. Feet moved past his face, he couldn’t tell whose. Everything was hazy. The noise alternately muffled and deafening. Then it happened. Dom flinches at the memory of the whip-crack sound. Gunfire. One of the trainered guys fell forward onto the sofa. A quarter-second later, Therese dropped limp to the floor. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open, blood gushing from the wound in her head. ‘DI Weller was shot.’
Holsworth picks up the file on the table and flicks through the pages until he reaches a report printed on yellow paper. ‘It states here that the shot was a through-and-through. The bullet killed one of Genk’s men, but continued on and grazed the side of DI Weller’s head. The medical report says you applied pressure to the wound using Black Nasty and your hands until help arrived.’
Dom remembers the blood flooding through the gaffer tape, and the bloodstains that never seemed to fade no matter how hard he’d scrubbed his hands. ‘Yeah.’
‘Any reason you were able to move then, when you’d been incapacitated until that moment?’
He’d asked himself that question a thousand times. ‘No.’
‘I see. So you were quite the hero.’
‘Therese, DI Weller, was in a coma for four weeks. Genk got away.’ Dom shakes his head. ‘There’s nothing heroic in what I did.’
Holsworth stares at him, unblinking. ‘That’s for me to establish.’
The interview is done, for now at least. From the questions, and the way the smug-faced bastard looked at him, Dom knows things are going to turn bad. As he heads to the tube, Dom replays the meeting in his mind. He’d answered the questions as well as he could, and as honestly as he was willing to, but he knows his answers sounded weak. There are too many holes in his story. It’s obvious Holsworth wanted him to confirm the person with the Doc Martens was Darren Harris, and maybe he should have, but he feels bad enough for saying as much as he did.
Shit.
Chrissie is so happy with Darren, and after all the heartache she’s endured she deserves some happiness. When she met Darren it was as if both she and Dom were finally moving on with their lives. They sold the house they’d grown up in and bought flats in different parts of town. Dom got promoted and began to date for the first time in years. Chrissie got a part-time job, and started making plans. For just over two years she’s been in a happy, stable relationship. Now Dom knows he’s jeopardised it all by putting Darren squarely in Holsworth’s crosshairs.
He hurries along the pavement. A constant stream of traffic passes along the road beside him: cars, cabs, a bus and a skinny lad on a pizza delivery scooter. He steps off the kerb to dodge round a group of slow-moving tourists, then weaves across to the other side to avoid the solid mass of a sightseeing walking tour. Dom wishes, just for once, that the street wasn’t so busy. That he had more space to think, to breathe.
He’s almost at Embankment tube. He tries to push the interview from his mind, but he can’t. All he can think about is Holsworth; that smile he gave whenever he asked a question. The way he’d grilled him about Therese – had she acted inappropriately? Holsworth had known Dom was keeping something back, and Dom knows Holsworth will keep pushing, digging, questioning until he finds what it is.
She wants to see you, Lindsay had told him on the phone.
He doesn’t need this shit. He needs to focus on the case, on getting some kind of justice for Kate and Zara and Jenna. He has to prevent the killer from killing again. But the memories, and the questions, from that last night of Operation Atlantis are pinging around in his head. Taunting him. He hates to admit it, but he needs answers just as much as Holsworth. The not knowing is driving him insane.
Why did Therese tell Genk she was police?
Was it Darren who came into the room before shots were fired?
Why was telling Therese he loved her such a bad move?
Why did she ask Lindsay to call?
He jogs up the steps and enters the station. Pressing his Oyster card to the reader, he goes through the turnstile and follows the flow of people towards the escalator. He stands on the right, still thinking. He has to be able to focus. Maybe if he sees Therese, speaks to her and gets some answers, then he’ll be able to concentrate on the case.
She wants to talk. Maybe we need to.
28
DOM
He finds her in the steel and glass new-build part of University College Hospital, rather than one of the original red-bricks. A flash of his warrant card to the efficient-looking receptionist helped him discover that Therese has moved from ICU into a private room. His relief mingles with the nerves he feels about seeing her again. He loves her, and she pushed him away. It still hurts.
When he gets to her room on the third floor, the door is shut and the glass panel has the shade drawn down. He almost bottles out, but just manages to hold his nerve. He needs to see her.
He knocks twice, and opens the door.
She’s sitting in bed, watching TV. Her frown turns into a smile when she realises it’s him. ‘Hello, stranger. Trust you to pitch up without calling first.’
‘Lindsay said you wanted to talk.’
‘Not brought me chocolates? No asking how I am? Jesus, Dom. Some people might not think you cared.’
He stares at her. Can’t believe she’s acting this casually with him. She looks smaller than usual, paler too. Her cheekbones are more pronounced and there are dark shadows beneath her eyes. The energy buzz he always associates with her is gone.
‘Don’t you pity me,’ she says, pointing a finger at him, ‘and don’t say you don’t, because I can see it all over that mug of yours.’
He loiters at the foot of her bed, unsure whether to kiss her or keep his distance. ‘How’s it going then?’
‘As well as I can hope, I guess. The doc says I have to be patient, that I need to rest … blah, blah, blah.’
‘And are you?’
‘For now.’ She lowers her voice. ‘Lindsay said you had an interview with the IPCC …’
‘They did me today.’
‘Holsworth?’
‘Yeah, and his two sidekicks.’
She straightens up a little. Winces. ‘He came here yes
terday. Asked me a few questions, background stuff to do with Atlantis. Said he’ll be back.’
‘Did you—’
‘I didn’t tell him we were screwing.’
That wasn’t the question he’d been going to ask. He’s silent, not sure what to say next. He wonders if the only reason she wanted to see him was to talk about the IPCC investigation. He’s winded by how much the thought hurts.
‘It’s none of his business and it was just a bit of fun, wasn’t it? Nothing serious.’
It was for me.
Dom clenches his jaw, holding back the questions: was that all it was to you? Why don’t you want more? Aren’t we good together? His jaw begins to ache. ‘Did Holsworth ask about what happened?’
‘Not really.’
Is she being evasive, or just answering the specific question he’s asking? Dom’s not certain. He asks her again, more direct this time. ‘So what did happen?’
She smiles. ‘You checked out.’
He feels the guilt, hot and spiky, like chilli powder in his blood. ‘I’m … I …’
She laughs. It makes her cough. He can tell the movement hurts. ‘Don’t get all humble, Dom. Doesn’t suit you. Some bastard twatted you with a bat, I’m surprised it isn’t you lying here.’
Him too. ‘I’ve got a hard head, that’s what the doc said.’
‘Yes.’ There’s amusement in her tone. ‘I could have told you that.’
He suppresses a smile. Can’t let himself get sidetracked; he needs answers about what happened, why she did what she did. His tone is harder than he’d intended as he says, ‘I heard you and Genk. Heard you telling him—’
‘What I thought I needed to say to keep us alive.’
My Little Eye Page 15