The Score (28 page)

‘No. Never prisoners. They had freedom to go at any time. I gave them passports, identities, cash. I gave them a base, safe houses really, where they could regroup, get their heads together. When they needed more help or more money, or just a rest, they came back to me. We spent time together.’

Cat thought about that a moment. It sounded good, but wasn’t really. Tilkian might not be a murderer but his selfishness and obsession had still ruined these girls’ lives. Turned them into a succession of Hetty Moon imitations, his one true love. Turned
them
into targets for those who wanted to find him. So they became fugitives and dependants. He wouldn’t have told them any of that when he’d recruited them.

‘Moose Hopkins, Nia’s brother, wrote graffiti accusing you of murder.’ Cat repeated the words of the graffiti. ‘He was too frightened to say he’d written it, but he wanted you caught.’

‘I know. The Kilroy part I put there. I told Nia that it was my old tag. Nia must have told him so, when the girls went missing, he presumed I was the killer and wrote the words underneath.’ He gestured into the near darkness. Against one wall over some planks leaning there she could just make out several faint scratches, Kilroys, their eyes peeping back at her. Silent witnesses.

‘And the accusation?’

‘Look, I loved Nia. I would never hurt her. I was giving her a new passport. I told her I was turning her into somebody else.’

‘And Esyllt?’

‘She’s fine.’ Cat didn’t let that answer go and kept her gaze boring into her one-time friend, until he gave a fuller answer. ‘I gave her three thousand quid and sent her to the Caribbean. After Nia and Del, I was afraid for her safety. I thought I could make her safe and use her absence as a way to get you involved. Maybe track down the people who did
that
to Nia and Del.’

‘And Katie Tana.’

‘Find the people who did all the killings.’

Even under these strange circumstances, in the gloomy chapel with pigeons flapping in the roof, Cat could feel the ghost of their old friendship present. Even knowing what Tilkian had done, their friendship flickered still. It mattered that he had never killed or used violence. That would have been unforgivable.

But something had shifted in the atmosphere. Tilkian felt it too. Where the fuck was the support Kyle had promised? Was the Met deliberately going slow because Thomas had pissed them off
so
much already? There was something bad in the air and Cat had a nasty feeling she knew what was coming.

‘Martin, are there weapons here?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve never been into that.’

They stared at each other with apprehension in their eyes. Someone had, like Cat and Riley, stumbled across the Hetty Moon sound-alikes as a way to track Griff Morgan. Riley had wanted a story. Cat had wanted justice. These others wanted Morgan’s drugs and were prepared to kill and torture their way to them.

At the far end of the chapel, there was a dull boom merging with the groan of metal. A second boom told them what was happening. Someone was using a silenced gun to shoot away the lock on the main door.

Tilkian looked frightened but composed. His ankles were tied and his feet were now too damaged to walk on. He nodded at Cat with a half-grin.

‘You know the old tethered goat trick?’

She smiled back her assent, moved off between the theatrical flats, out of sight. There was a pile of spare timber, offcuts from the stage set. Cat chose herself a length of two by two. Not the best weapon, but all there was. Her taser had fired two shots. It had no more.

Cat palmed her phone, set it to silent. She couldn’t risk calling Kyle but she could text her. ‘SOS’, she wrote. ‘NOW’.

She clicked send. At the end of the church, there were a couple of heavy, dulled blows and the sound of the big door opening. Tilkian glanced across at her, caught her eye. He mouthed something. First she couldn’t read it, then she could.

Your turn
, he was saying. To honour the oath. To save a life.

She’d do what she could.

There were footsteps coming up the aisle. More than one set. Odds that were maybe manageable, maybe not.

Must be a strange sight for the newcomers. To find Tilkian battered and bound at the foot of his mountain of drugs. A tethered goat indeed.

Cat craned cautiously round her corner. Two men in face masks. Both armed with automatic weapons. One built of muscle, the other older, fatter, but still chunky, still powerful. The sadist and the brains.

The bigger man pointed at Tilkian with his gun, asking something of the other man. Asking permission to kill, Cat guessed. Tilkian heard the same. His eyes, in a moment’s giveaway, flashed towards Cat. Only for a moment, but the tell was there.

The smaller man was saying ‘Fuck’s sake, no,’ but things had already moved on.

The bigger man raised his gun and shifted position. He was planning to fire first at Tilkian, shoot next at whatever it was his eyes had darted to.

Cat didn’t plan her move, just made it. She burst from her position, waving her timber. One step, two, three. Walter’s words were in her head: ‘Not rage, Catrin. Not fear.’ Words that made no sense until you understood that those words held the only sense there was.

There was a shot from somewhere. Fired at Cat, but missing. Her move. She swept her make-shift club down. Simultaneously, Tilkian lashed out with his bound feet. Tilkian’s move was understandable, but wrong. It shifted the balance. Instead of catching the bigger man’s head, Cat’s blow caught the man on the angle of his shoulder and neck. The blow was hard, but the man had built his body from countless gym-hours and protein-powder.

Ox-like, he blinked off the pain and raised his gun a second time. He was too close to miss. Cat dived, looking to roll into shelter behind the speaker, but it was a desperate move and any shelter would be strictly temporary.

Where the fuck was Kyle’s cavalry?

She heard the shot, felt her body smash onto the stone floor. She executed her roll badly, but somehow found herself behind the speaker.

She wasn’t dead.

She looked for the wound. Patting herself down to find crimson. She found nothing. Muzzily she looked up.

The smaller man was looking down at the big one. The man he’d just shot dead. Above them, Cat could finally hear rotor blades. Out on the road there were sirens, screaming in the distance but closing fast. She could hear nothing from the river flats, but there would be armed police there too. Searchlights. Boats. Assets.

Cat dragged her way out of shelter.

She was exposed to the older man’s fire but this brutal endgame was finally coming to a close. He hadn’t much use for his weapon now. He held it at his side, but indolently, not poised. She pulled off the big man’s mask. Probert. The bastard who’d grabbed her at Kyle’s place. Fucking sadist.

The older man looked at her. Humour in his voice. ‘I thought I’d cancelled that lot,’ he said, gesturing outside at the sirens, the helicopter. You could see the copter’s searchlight beaming down on the chapel now, poking through the holes in the roof, baffling the pigeons.

‘I got Kyle to un-bloody-cancel, didn’t I?’

The man removed his mask. Thomas. ‘Well,’ he said, nodding at Cat, at Tilkian, at the world. ‘Fair play to you. I was close but no cigar, eh?’ To Tilkian, he said, ‘Nice to meet you at last. Funny the way these things work.’

And then in one fluid move, he raised the gun to his head and fired. He hit the floor before his gun.

Briefly, just briefly, the chapel felt silent.

23

IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON
and the pier lay in outline against the ribbon of the sun dilating the clouds over the estuary. Cat had her old helmet on, the one with the strap under the chin. The air rushed free over her face so she had to squint. She buzzed along the front. As she worked the throttle, her shoulder ached, but not unpleasantly.

She dismounted at Penarth Marina. Already the chill of autumn was in the air, and there were fewer birds over the water. For a moment she watched them. The gulls flapped slowly back towards the shore. Further out, a large black bird swooped down towards its shadow. It glided at an even height above the glistening foam, hardly moving its wings.

All the time its shadow was there, a few feet behind, like something following under the surface of the water. Finally the bird rose and disappeared. She thought of Thomas. He had shot himself in the head but, the stupid sod, his hand had been shaking. He’d blown off the right-hand parietal part of his skull, driving bone fragments deep into his brain. He’d been in intensive care for two weeks now, in a coma for the first few days, then in a state of very low responsiveness, unable to talk, unable to eat.

He might live, he might die. If he lived, he might make a full recovery. Or he might spend the rest of his life brain-damaged and high-dependency. He deserved death for his crimes, but he had still been Cat’s partner. A friend. Could you wish someone
gone
and yet still grieve for them? Was someone still alive if the essence of who they were had vanished? If they were dependent on an IV drip for nutrients and liquid? Cat was discovering the answers now.

What Thomas had done to the girls was unforgivable, and for what? To find the drugs and sell them for cash. She did not even pity him. He had tortured for cash. She guessed that he had probably got Probert to do the dirty work, egging him on, exploiting his sadistic tendencies. She saw him managing things, stopping Probert now and again, giving the girls a chance to talk. Not that they would have had anything to tell the two men. None of them would have known Morgan’s real location.

And so in the end Probert had gone further, until their hearts stopped with shock and pain. Was that why Thomas had shot Probert in the chapel? Because he hated him for the torture, hated Probert even though he, Thomas, had colluded in it? Perhaps that bullet in Probert’s head was really aimed by Thomas at himself. A sighting shot for what would follow.

Or was it that he didn’t need Probert any more? That he’d decided to take the drugs for himself, alone. Or was it Cat? Was it that, when it came to the crucial moment, he found he couldn’t let Probert kill her? All possible answers. Cat would never know. Perhaps Thomas didn’t even know himself.

She walked down the ramp to the quays. She could see Kyle already, beckoning her to a small sail boat moored at the end. Cat approached, stepped up and onto the boat. At the back of the deck was a seating area, some wine open on a low table. Kyle wore a long fisherman’s jersey, her legs bare and tan.

‘Wine?’

Cat refused and Kyle passed her some water from a cooler at her feet. The bottle of wine was almost empty – drunk alone before lunch – and Kyle looked tired and slightly ashamed. Her
connection
with Probert, though innocent on her part, was not something that would be forgotten in a hurry, and it could always be used against her. There were rumours of an imminent inquiry. Cat felt for Kyle. As far as that was possible.

Kyle half-smiled, looked at her, seemed about to say something friendly then changed tack. ‘Thomas had an informant who knew Diamond Evans. That’s how he heard about the switch on the night of the bust. He knew Morgan was out there with the first half of the stash. He just had to find him.’

‘That’s where Probert came in.’

‘Right. He’d been mouthing off about Morgan’s connection to my Tilly, about Morgan’s obsession with Hetty Moon. Thomas must have heard him yammering on about it.’

Cat raised her eyebrows. The post-bust clean-up was running full steam, but what the courts would be told wasn’t always the whole truth. A portion of that truth sat here in the boat with Kyle.

‘My foster-daughter, Tilly. She was his first avatar – his first Hetty Moon. The girl in the hotel-room story. At any rate, that’s what he wanted her to be. Pressured her. Used drugs.’ Kyle’s face puckered with emotion. There was grief present in the mixture. Also anger. Also something unreadable beyond both things. ‘He didn’t get what he wanted. But he’d messed with her head. She was fragile anyway and the drugs … Don’t ever tell me that Morgan didn’t kill. He killed all right. And not just Tilly. Those others. He was responsible for them, too.’

Cat nodded. She couldn’t disagree.

‘And that was it. Thomas and Probert. Both knew a piece of the truth, wanted to get rich. They teamed up.’

‘The brains and the brawn,’ Cat commented. ‘I thought Thomas moved out to Tregaron because of burn-out. But it wasn’t that. It was the opposite. Your foster-daugher, Tilly, was
in
Tregaron. Odds were then that Morgan had some link with the place too. It was just too remote for him to have found her otherwise.’

‘But Tregaron itself didn’t give them their breakthrough. They must have found the Croat girl, Tana, online covering Moon’s act. When they saw she had form for mandies they knew they were getting close. They found Tana, tortured her, but she could tell them nothing. Morgan had not disclosed his location nor his identity to her.’

Cat put down her water.

‘But Morgan was an obsessive with a conscience. When Tana got pulled, he gave the rest of his girls access to safe houses. The cottage by the mine for the Tregaron girls, the chapel in London for the others. Passports, identities, cash, just like he said. The girls’ presence online was shut down completely. So Thomas and Probert were back where they started. The trail went dead.’

Kyle nodded in recognition.

‘Then after a year,’ Cat continued, ‘the girls got slack. Stupid really. They began posting their reels again in the hope of attracting talent scouts. I imagine Morgan never knew about that; he wouldn’t have been so stupid. Thomas and Probert picked up their performances. Used their IP addresses to track them to Tregaron. Then did exactly what you did. No warrant, just a quiet word with the relevant ISP. Got an address. The safe house at the mine. I imagine they arrived when only Delyth Moses was there. Nia Hopkins must have been terrified when she found her friend gone, so she began using the mine itself to hide in. A place she knew, because it had been a teen drinking hole.’