In the Dark (43 page)

‘Linnell told me that,' Helen said. ‘Some case that Paul was working on.'

‘Linnell's half-sister, Laura,' Moody said. ‘She was murdered by a boyfriend six years ago and Paul was one of the DCs. Looks like they stayed in touch afterwards.'

Helen remembered the photographs in Linnell's kitchen. Not a daughter, then. ‘How was she killed?'

‘Stabbed. The jealous sort, apparently.'

‘How long did he get?'

‘Well, that's the thing. He was stabbed to death himself while on remand in Wandsworth. Two days before he was due in court.'

‘Somebody saved the taxpayer some money.' It was clear from Helen's face who she thought that ‘somebody' might have been.

Moody's smile was suitably grim. ‘Well, I spoke to the original SIO and that's what he reckons, anyway. Never came close to proving it, of course . . .'

Helen was still seeing the young girl's face; and Linnell's face, when he was looking at the pictures. She didn't find it hard to believe that the shootings in Lewisham weren't the first time Frank Linnell had meted out his own form of justice.

‘So, as far it goes with . . . Linnell and Paul.' Moody was gathering together his things. ‘Just friends. No more to it than that.' Seeing the look on Helen's face, he opened his mouth to say something else, but she stopped him.

‘You once played tennis with some bloke who was a forger. Yes, I
know
.'

Moody held up his hands, as though his point was made.

‘How many people did this forger kill, though?'

THIRTY-EIGHT

She slept for most of the afternoon after Moody had left, and spent the rest of it stretched out in front of the television, looking for distraction but for the most part failing to find it. For perhaps ten minutes at a time something would engage her and briefly take her mind somewhere a little less dark.

She took in bits of a programme about stand-up comics at the Edinburgh Festival, and remembered how she and Paul had talked about going. They would occasionally go down to the Hobgoblin in Brixton and had always enjoyed it, and they'd both said how great it would be to get some time off and spend a week up at the Fringe, seeing a few of their favourite comedians. They could do the castle, too, Paul said, and all the other touristy stuff. He reckoned he had Scottish blood in him somewhere and had been determined to find out if there was a Hopwood tartan.

‘You're as Scottish as I am, you silly bugger . . .'

Watching the programme, Helen decided that she
would
go, as soon as she got the chance. For a very stupid second or two she even thought about going to the Hobgoblin that night; calling Jenny up, seeing if she fancied it. She could do with a laugh, and the comedians would certainly have enjoyed taking the piss out of her waddling off to the toilets every twenty minutes.

It was a terrible idea, of course. She'd had plenty of those recently.

Barring that, and the time spent idly competing with the contestants on
Countdown
, she lay there like a zombie. It was strange, she thought, how that phrase was used to describe people who were somehow out of it; miles away, unfocused. Strange, because in those horror films Paul had made her sit through, zombies were anything but unfocused. They had only one impulse as they crashed around and smeared bloody hands down people's windows; one fixed idea, terrible and all-consuming. Now, something equally brutal was occupying her own thoughts while she lay there and let the sound and the pictures wash over her.

She thought about Gary Kelly, and how she might get to him.

How she could talk her way into the interview room, or the remand cell, with her warrant card and some cock-and-bull story or other. She worked out in great detail what she would say to him before she did what she'd come to do, and what damage she could safely inflict without endangering her baby.

Ask him to read that poem again, maybe.

See how many other expressions he could do.

It was sour, stupid stuff that made Helen hate herself, and made her hate Kelly even more for what he was turning her into. She drifted in and out of sleep, wincing at the voices and the absurdly cheerful music, but unable to raise herself up to turn it off.

 
It was just gone six when the phone rang. She would remember the time later because she'd been dimly aware of the theme to the six o'clock news, the noise of the phone cutting through it.

It was a DCI from the Murder Squad. Spiky Bugger's boss, by the sound of it. ‘Helen, we took a call. Can you hear this OK?'

She heard a number of clicks, then the faintest hiss before the voice of a police operator came on the line. After five seconds of silence the operator urged the caller to speak; asked again about the nature of the call. The caller's voice was muffled at first as he said something to the operator. Then, more distinctly, he said that he wanted to leave a message. The operator told him to go ahead.

‘This is for the woman whose old man was killed at that bus stop, yeah?'

There was a pause. The operator said she was still listening.

‘The pregnant one.' Another few seconds of silence, then some mumbling as though he were talking to himself. Finally he spoke clearly again. ‘I was the one who shot into the car, OK? I'm sorry for what happened . . . it wasn't supposed to. Won't make no difference to you, probably, but it wasn't.' He sniffed, cleared his throat. ‘That's it, that's the thing. I'm getting on me toes, yeah . . . so, I just wanted to let you know before I go.' More hiss and clicking; a hum that might have been the noise of distant traffic. ‘I'm sorry . . .'

There were a few more seconds of ambient noise and one long breath before the call ended.

Poor as the quality of the recording had been over the phone, Helen recognised the voice as well as something it had said. Remembered the boy's face as she'd listened and the conversation as he'd lifted her bags into the car.

‘
Probably a good time to take a holiday, if you ask me
.'

‘
Can't see me getting on me toes any time soon
.'

She'd told him to keep his head down . . .

‘Helen?'

‘I know him. It's a kid I met in Lewisham.'

‘Sorry? You
know
him?'

‘I just bumped into him.'

‘Where?'

‘Just . . . on the street. Jesus . . .'

‘Is there anything you can tell us that might help? Anything he said? A description?'

Nothing that wouldn't sound ridiculous.
He carried my shopping.
He seemed nice enough. He asked about my baby
. ‘Not really,' Helen said. ‘We only spoke for a minute.'

‘Well, if you think of anything . . .'

She put down the receiver, walked across to the sofa and turned the sound back up on the TV. Something about mortgage rates. A fatal house fire. Too much salt in processed food.

He was calling to say sorry, that it was his fault. So he couldn't have been in on it. For the first time, she wondered how many in that car
had
been?

How many of the dead boys?

‘
Won't make no difference to you, probably
. . .'

He hadn't known.

 
It wouldn't be dark for another couple of hours, but she decided to get an early night. She'd thought she and Roger Deering had made a decent job of clearing up the bathroom after the break-in, but stepping back from the sink, a small piece of glass had gone into the sole of her foot. Slipped into the soft part.

Sitting on the edge of the bath, picking at the glass with tweezers, Helen looked up and saw herself in the mirror. Her dressing gown had fallen open. Her breasts were swollen and sagging, the veins livid beneath the skin. The waistband of her tracksuit bottoms was folded down on itself, pressed flat by her belly. Her ankles looked thick.

She wrapped the piece of glass inside the bloody tissue and tossed it into the toilet; ran a hand down a pale, hairy shin.

A mummy
nobody
would like to fuck.

And thinking it, wondering if her sister knew what a MILF was, Helen remembered the conversation between the boy and one of his mates as they'd been walking towards the car park. The boy's embarrassment as his friend had postured and pointed and made his dirty suggestions.

‘
You're a
seriously
dark horse
. . .'

She remembered what the other boy had called him.

It wasn't much to go on. Next to useless, probably. Certainly not enough to go bothering DI Spiky Bugger or his boss at nine o'clock at night.

Helen winced as she put weight onto the foot, but she'd walked it off by the time she'd reached the bedroom and started to get dressed.

THIRTY-NINE

Friday was a bad night to try to get anywhere quickly. The traffic had started to build on the hill down into Brixton and was almost solid on Coldharbour Lane from the Ritzy to Loughborough Junction. Helen banged her hands against the wheel in frustration. Time was not on her side, or that of the boy who had made the call.

Linnell had found the others easily enough, after all.

She knew now that the boys in the Cavalier that night had been killed in revenge for Paul's murder, when all they had done -
unwittingly
, some of them - was provide a smokescreen for it. Kelly's plan had worked out better than he ever could have hoped. Those who were ignorant of the set-up had been his victims every bit as much as Paul had been, and the boy who had held the gun, who
thought
he had fired the shots, might well be the last one left.

The traffic was just as bad towards Camberwell, so she turned south, deciding to go the back way instead.

He had been used, Helen decided; that was all. But Frank Linnell would not know that. And even if she were to let him know, she wasn't sure he'd be inclined to care.

She was still thinking about Linnell as the traffic eased through East Dulwich, and about the girl in those photographs.

Linnell's murdered sister.

Helen wondered if the girl had been the reason why Paul's relationship with Linnell had survived for so long. Paul had been deeply affected by a few cases in the time she'd known him, and it was easy to see, just from the pictures, why he would have found it hard to let go of this one. Why he might have wanted to stay close, even when there was nothing left to investigate.

Had he fallen a little in love with a murdered girl? In some ways, that was easier to accept than the alternative. To think, he'd called some of
her
friends wankers . . .

‘She was pretty, Hopwood, I'll give you that.'

She got lucky with a few green lights and it wasn't quite a quarter to ten when she turned onto Lewisham Way. She parked on a double yellow, a hundred yards or so from where the Lee Marsh and Orchard estates backed onto each other, and stuck a MET POLICE card on the dashboard. She might get a brick through the window, but at least she wouldn't be clamped.

Across the road there was a small parade of shops: a newsagent's, a bookmaker's and an electrical-repair shop. Three boys were passing a joint around outside a Threshers, and she could hear a car being revved up on a street somewhere behind them.

There were two more estates, the Downton and the Kidbrooke, a few streets further up, but this was where the boy had pointed to when she'd asked him where he lived. She had not given much thought to how she might find him and now, looking at the various blocks, she wondered where on earth she was going to begin. There were probably a hundred and fifty flats in each block. God alone knew how many people.

Helen walked into the open space at the centre of the Orchard Estate, across a square of browned grass with spray-painted benches dotted along each side. She stood for half a minute and tried to get a sense of the geography. It was a warm enough night, but there was a decent breeze moaning around the walls and she wished she'd brought a thicker jacket. She looked up at each three-storey block, a doorway to lifts at either end and concrete stairwells up to the first level. There was music thumping from somewhere high to her left, but it faded as she crossed to the far corner and moved through the walkway that connected the Orchard to the Lee Marsh next door.

The central area was identical, save for a rudimentary children's play area, and there was music from two, no three, sides. Words she couldn't make out above the drum and bass. She could feel its frantic, insistent rhythm in the metal of the children's slide when she leaned against it.

There was a row of garages set back from the road on one side, and she recognised the group of kids she'd spoken to when she'd been there the first time. The day she'd met the boy.

Four of them, moving around slowly in shadows that were almost gone.

She kept walking towards them, feeling her heart thump, the dryness in her mouth. At work, she'd been in worse places on risk-assessment visits, but she had never been this scared; this aware of the fear, at any rate. She'd had back-up then, obviously, but she knew it was more than that.

Now there were two hearts thumping inside her.

The short one she'd spoken to before was playing on his mobile phone and barely looked up when she approached. Two others had their heads together. The tallest one - the baby giraffe - whistled when he saw her and the four of them huddled a little closer.

Helen stopped a few feet away from them and waited a second or two. Said, ‘Am I pregnant or just fat? Remember?'

The baby giraffe took a step towards her and thrust his thumbs into the waistband of his jeans. Showed her another few inches of his Calvin Kleins.