Nothing Else Remains

by Robert Scragg

  Get tomorrow out of the way, Milburn and Misra double-teaming him, Styles somewhere in the mix, and face up to the IOPC head on. For now, all he could think of was sleep. Maybe Holly would visit him again tonight. Might even be a good one, something happy, enough to remind him what that felt like. One last stop to make first, though, before he could head home.

  Styles’s face was a picture when he opened the door and saw Porter, like he was expecting a pizza and had just got doorstepped by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  ‘Guv? Everything alright?’ He looked past Porter as if expecting to see a squad car or two blocking off the road.

  ‘Ask me on the way out,’ said Porter, stepping towards the door.

  Styles retreated inside, leaving Porter to pull the door closed behind him. Truth be told, Porter still wasn’t sure this was a good idea after the day he’d had. Part of him still said to let things stew until tomorrow, but he knew heading home would make things worse. More chance of things boiling over at the station in the morning; public, messy. Not his style. No point letting fester what you can lance today.

  ‘Emma not about?’ Porter asked, having just watched her leave five minutes earlier from the safety of his car.

  ‘Popped round to drop something off at her mum’s. Coffee?’ Styles said, flicking the kettle on without waiting for a reply.

  ‘Nah, I’m good, thanks.’

  A cuppa meant committing to at least a ten-minute stay, and Porter still wasn’t sure whether he’d want to hang around that long. Styles rattled a teaspoon of instant coffee into his cup, back to Porter.

  ‘How’s Max? They let him home?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Overnighter to be safe.’

  Porter waited patiently as Styles picked up the half-boiled kettle, sloshed water in and gave it a noisy stir. Styles looked uneasy as he took a seat opposite him at the kitchen table, like a suspect about to be grilled. There was something else, though – remorse, maybe? Whatever it was, Porter felt himself dial back a notch, set aside the full-frontal approach he’d mapped out on the way over here. Styles was eyes down, staring into his coffee for a second, deciding how to start.

  ‘I love being a copper,’ he said, looking up at Porter now. ‘S’all I’ve wanted to do since I was kid, and since I joined Homicide and Serious, it’s been …’ He looked cross at himself, struggling to pick the right words. ‘We don’t win ’em all, but the ones that we do really feel like they count, you know?’

  Porter nodded but stayed silent.

  ‘When Emma told me she was pregnant, I was made up. I mean literally over the moon. You know we’ve been trying for a while, and when she told me, it felt like I’d won the lottery: job, wife, family.’ He counted them off on his fingers.

  Porter measured himself against the checklist. One out of three. Saw Styles trying to make his point but struggling.

  ‘Em thinks the world of you, you know that? We both do. It’s just …’ He tailed off, looking around the kitchen for inspiration. ‘She worries. About me. The job. I keep telling her it’s not like we’re across in the States, everyone packing pistols, but she’s not been the same since what happened with Locke.’

  That had been without a doubt the messiest case Porter had worked on. East End gangster passing himself off as a pillar of the community, all the while knee-deep in everything from drugs to people trafficking. It had ended badly for some. People had died, including Locke, shot twice, and another officer, Andy Palmer, had been gunned down. Could just as easily have been Porter or Styles.

  ‘She’s paranoid now. Thinks that’s how every day is going to play out for me.’

  He looked back down at his coffee. Porter bit back the urge to speak, sensing his partner hadn’t quite finished.

  ‘She’s asked me for a compromise,’ he said finally, lips pursed tight enough to show he wasn’t convinced that a compromise is what it would be. ‘She doesn’t want me to leave the force, but she wants me to go back to my old job. Reckons there’s less chance of running into nutters with guns. I love what I do, but I love my wife as well. I just … ah, God, I don’t know.’

  Styles sighed, long and loud. Looked up at Porter like a kid asking their parents’ blessing. Porter had come here ready to tear a strip, to tell Styles where to go, but seeing him clearly squashed between the two sides, nowhere to turn, the anger he had left just melted away, changing shape, reforming into something else. Not quite jealous at the fact that his partner had something away from work, something powerful enough to pull at him like this. No, not jealousy. More like acceptance. That this wasn’t personal, at least not about him. The fact that Styles hadn’t approached Milburn yet, and Porter believed him when he’d said that; it spoke volumes of how hard this had been for him.

  Who was he to expect Styles to choose him, the job, over his wife and child? What would he have done if Holly had presented him with the same choice? That decided it for him.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said.

  Styles didn’t react, just stared at the table, lost in his own thoughts still, not back into listen mode yet.

  ‘Hey, it’s OK,’ Porter said again.

  This time Styles heard him. Looked up, confused, clearly expecting something else – an argument, a fight, but not that.

  ‘I don’t blame you for not saying anything, and I don’t think you’re with Milburn. I was out of line saying that. I can tell it’s not been an easy decision for you, and that counts for something. That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Look, guv, it’s not like—’

  Porter held up a hand, getting up from the table. ‘Honestly, it’s fine. I understand. Anyway, it’s been a long day, and I know you can be a bit of a diva if you don’t get your beauty sleep, so I’ll see you in the morning, yeah?’

  Styles looked like he had more to say, but just nodded. They walked to the door in silence, and Porter turned as he stepped outside, hands in pockets.

  ‘Might not feel like it, but this was a good day at the office. We won today. This was one of those ones that count.’

  He didn’t wait for a response but hadn’t heard the door close behind him by the time he got to his car. Styles stood framed in the doorway, hand raised, waving goodbye. Porter returned the gesture, smiled even though he doubted Styles could see it in the fading light, and climbed into his car.

  This was a win, he reminded himself as he turned the corner, Styles no more than a glow in the rear-view mirror. Max was safe. Stuart Leyson, the last man standing from the list, was safe. To hell with Milburn, and whatever spin he’d put on this. Probably a good thing that Styles would be moving on. No sense in him getting tarred and feathered as well.

  He’d stand and take whatever Milburn threw. That went for the IOPC as well. He didn’t need them to tell him they’d won today. He’d stand up in front of all those sanctimonious bastards and stare them down. Alone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Porter held out both hands to take the mug from Jen. She retreated back to the sofa, sliding under Max’s arm. The pair of them put on a good front, but the effects were still there if you knew where to look. Jen wouldn’t meet his gaze for more than a few seconds, eyes constantly flicking to the door and windows. Max drew her in close, some of last week’s tension still there in the way he sat, a little too stiff and upright.

  Only a week had passed since Baxter had ploughed into the river; it felt more like a month. The story had only just moved to the inside pages of the tabloids, and the clips of Milburn at the press conference had stopped appearing on the news highlight reels. Milburn had been noticeably distant this past week, although Porter guessed it was more for selfish reasons. Wouldn’t play well to be the man disciplining an officer who the press was bigging up for bagging two huge cases in the space of a year. Why run the risk when he could just wait and let the IOPC do that for him? A hearing had been scheduled for a week tomorrow, and Porter could practically hear Milburn’s hands rubbing together every time he walked through the office.

  Sameera Misra wa
s another itch still to be scratched. She’d called in sick the day after they fished Baxter out of the water, but Porter knew he couldn’t dodge that bullet for ever. He fully expected the IOPC to mandate it as part of whatever they decided.

  In total, nine bodies had been removed from the chest freezers in Baxter’s storage unit. Harold Mayes took the tally into double figures, not including Baxter himself. Stuart Leyson had paled with relief to the point of looking anaemic when they told him what had happened, and that he was safe.

  The car Baxter had fled the scene in had been pulled from the river, his body still pinned in place by the seatbelt. The irony was that at the time he’d lost control and plunged into the water, the officers in pursuit had actually lost sight of him. He’d been within touching distance of escape before he skidded through the guard rails and into the icy water.

  Both front windows had been open, which had meant the water could flood in unchecked. Best guess said it would have flooded in less than a minute. When they pulled him out, his face looked like he’d gone twelve rounds. The airbag had evidently failed to work, and the steering wheel showed signs of impact where his face had struck, more damage to the smashed nose Max had already told them to expect.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you and say I don’t know how much further we’ll get,’ said Porter, sipping at his coffee. ‘We’re following the money trail, but he didn’t leave us a hell of a lot to go on.’

  He ran them through what they’d managed to uncover so far. All the bodies on ice had been positively identified, as had Baxter himself. Max and Callum’s accounts of Baxter’s confession, plus the evidence at the storage unit, made for a pretty compelling case that nobody had tried to poke holes in.

  Preliminary autopsy results showed that all the men had a significant amount of water in their lungs, suggesting drowning as the likely cause of death. Poetic, then, that Baxter had met the same fate. Taking the lead from Baxter’s confession to Max, there was no motive or link to the victims other than money. They had all been successful men in their own right, and Baxter had tricked, tormented and tortured them out of a little over eight and a half million all told. Sold shares, emptied accounts, even sold property. That was what ten lives had been worth when you stripped it back. Saddest part of it all was that nobody had even noticed they had gone.

  They hadn’t found anything in Baxter’s past that should have marked him out as someone capable of anything like this. A plane ticket to Mexico, leaving Heathrow the evening after he’d snatched Max, suggested he hadn’t planned to stick around. Whether it was to have been just a break, or maybe him disappearing for good, they’d never know for sure. With the kind of money he had to hand, his options would have been almost limitless, so maybe it was better it had ended this way rather than have risked him getting away entirely.

  The money was the piece of the puzzle that still eluded them. Baxter had covered his tracks well. As each man’s accounts had been closed, the money had done a hop, skip and jump into a dozen banks across half a dozen countries, any trail evaporating like dew in the morning sun.

  ‘We’ll keep trying,’ Porter said with a shrug. ‘But you want my honest take, it’s highly unlikely.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ said Max, ‘I know you’re doing everything you can.’

  ‘Goes without saying. Even if they shelve it, I’ll keep looking at it whenever I can. He took nigh on three quarters of a million quid from your dad, if you include the house. That’s yours if we can find it.’

  Max gave a sad smile that Porter read all too easily. Money wouldn’t bring him back. The doorbell rang, and Jen went to get up but Max patted her leg.

  ‘I’ll get it, sweetheart. It’ll be her, right on time.’

  ‘I’d best head, then,’ said Porter. He bent over to give Jen a brief hug, and followed Max to the front door, seeing a pair of arms reach around, patting lightly against his back. Max’s mum wore a plain back skirt and jacket, hair tied back in a tight bun. Porter had only met her a handful of times over the years but could have sworn the grey streaks to her hair were a new addition. She released her grip on Max and stepped inside, spotting Porter leaning against the wall.

  ‘Jake,’ she said, advancing on him, arms out.

  ‘Hey, how you doing?’ he said as she hugged him, cringing at how inadequate his own words sounded.

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘You’re coming with us?’

  He nodded, and she turned back to Max, giving him a once up and down. ‘You’ve forgotten your top button,’ she said, stepping closer, tutting as she fastened it, sliding the knot of his black tie up an inch, flush against the collar.

  ‘Can’t have you keeping your father waiting,’ she said, trying to smile at her own joke, but she wore it more like a grimace.

  Porter felt like an intruder. Wished he’d made his excuses and met them there. An engine growled softly outside.

  ‘Jen?’ Max called out. ‘Honey, that’s the car. They’re here.’

  It was time.

  Only six other people besides Porter were there to pay their respects, and that included the priest. Two of Gordon’s former colleagues had turned up. Max, his mum and Jen. Porter looked around at the empty pews in the church, listened to the priest’s voice echo, and it struck him how sad it was that this was the best send-off Gordon Jackson could get.

  The service dragged, and the wooden bench was as comfortable as sitting on concrete. That’s the answer, he thought. You want more people to come to church, invest in a few cushions. He stood and sat mechanically when prompted by the priest, and, when it was all over, filed out at the back of a pitifully small line, across the churchyard, and stood at the graveside as the priest said a few final words before the coffin was lowered.

  He saw the words carved into granite included ‘Father’, giving Gordon the title in death that he hadn’t realised he had for most of his life. He looked at Max, tried to read the expression, but it kept shifting. Could be grief, might be anger or frustration. Most likely a mix of the lot. One thing he knew Max felt for sure was guilt. He’d said as much when they spoke yesterday. Porter felt an element of responsibility for that. Stupid, he knew, but that was him all over. Blaming himself for other people’s shit. He wished he’d never pointed it out all the same.

  The fact that Baxter had chosen Gordon, with no family to speak of, because Max had written his letters to Gordon’s office. There had been nothing in the house when Baxter had come calling. No emails in the inbox. If Max had written sooner, had met up with his dad sooner, would Baxter have crossed him off the list?

  Porter knew the guilt would fade in time. No sense judging yourself on things you had no knowledge of, no idea of what was about to happen. Even as he thought it, he knew he was being a hypocrite. He’d clung on to his own guilt over Holly the way a child hangs on to their comfort blanket. Maybe if Max could let go of his, he could too. Could, or should? Both.

  Porter walked in just in time to see Styles coming out of Milburn’s office, head down, looking at his phone. Texting Emma, most likely, telling her it was a done deal. He could blame Milburn for many things, but Styles wasn’t one of them, even if he had tried to manipulate him into talking behind Porter’s back.

  Porter went for the head down, look busy approach. He knew in his heart this was the right thing for Styles to do, maybe not career-wise in the short term, but for him, for his family. He heard the chair squeak as his partner dropped into it but kept staring at his screen as he spoke.

  ‘All sorted then?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Styles, sounding a little too cheery for Porter’s liking. He could at least pretend it was still a tough call. No need to sound bright and breezy just because Porter hadn’t been arsy with him this last week.

  ‘So that’s it then. Hope you’re not expecting too much of a send-off. We’ll wait till you’re gone to throw the real party.’

  ‘There you go again, making those assumptions of yours. They’ll get you into bother one of these days.’


  ‘Assumptions about what?’ Porter gave him half a glance.

  ‘About me going. Word is you’re too much of a liability to be left on your own.’

  That got Porter’s attention, his head snapping up. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘What do you think I mean? Just told Milburn that rumours of me wanting to leave have been greatly exaggerated.’

  Porter shook his head. ‘You don’t have to do that. Emma will kill you.’

  Styles folded his arms, huffed out a loud breath. ‘We talked it out. She’s OK with it now.’

  ‘How the hell did you change her mind?’

  ‘I told her that I’d struggle to give any kind of lecture about standing up for what you believe in to our son or daughter if I didn’t do it myself. That whole mess with Locke was the exception, not the rule. We don’t go up against guys like that every day, thank God!’ He leant forwards now, elbows on knees. ‘And I told her you’d always have my back, so she could take it out on you if anything bad happened.’

  What little tension was left between them fell away, like shrugging off heavy wet clothes. They both laughed, and, for the first time in weeks, Porter felt like it wasn’t just him against the world. A small victory, but he’d take whatever came his way.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Porter tried every angle he could think of, but it was like chasing shadows. The money was like smoke on the breeze. Max and Jen were both back at work. Milburn had publicly said they’d keep pursuing the missing funds in his last statement, but, two-faced tosser that he was, had said privately that the case was on the back burner.