by Alex Walters
There were people out there who had lives. Maybe not happy lives. Maybe tough lives. But normal lives. Not the kind of life where you have to take calls in your back fucking garden because someone might be listening in. Not the kind of life where someone breaks into your house and tries to kill you. Not, she thought, the kind of life where your partner, the love of your life, is slowly slipping away from you, but still has to take second place to your work.
Not her kind of life.
So she had to change it. And change it now. And Keith Welsby seemed the best place to start.
24
‘I can’t allow it. It’s too risky.’
She watched him coolly across the table, enjoying the discomfort he was trying hard to conceal. ‘What’s the risk, Hugh? He’s a sick old man.’
‘A sick old man who tried to kill us both.’
‘Seriously, Hugh, we can’t just let this go.’
‘He’s playing with us, sis. You know what he’s like. The devious old bugger. I thought we’d got rid of him, but he even comes back from the dead to bloody haunt us.’
‘It might be serious, Hugh. He’s not well. Maybe he wants to clear the decks before it’s too late. If we can get him to cough up what he knows, it won’t just make his trial easier. It might open doors for us.’
‘And what’s Welsby’s testimony worth? He’s a bent cop, sis. Whatever he comes up with won’t be worth the time you spend listening to it.’
He looked rattled, she thought. Salter was a good actor – he’d worked undercover himself – and he was putting on a good show of being his usual urbane, cynical self. But he wasn’t quite pulling it off. He was saying a little too much, and saying it a little too quickly.
‘You know that’s not true, Hugh. Okay, it might not be useful, or even admissible, as evidence, but it’ll be critical intelligence. You’re not telling me that Welsby couldn’t provide us with more leads than we’d know what to do with if he wanted.’
‘If he wanted. That’s the point. And – if he wanted – he could bugger us around till three weeks after doomsday. You know Keith Welsby.’
‘Jesus, Hugh. What have we got to lose? If I see him, the worse that happens is I spend an hour listening to fluent bollocks.’
‘The worse that happens is that he tries to save his own arse by sending us off on a wild goose chase.’
‘He’s not going to pull the wool over our eyes for long, is he? If we follow up what he gives us and it turns out to be nonsense, we just abandon it.’
‘We don’t even know he’s going to give us anything,’ Salter pointed out. ‘He might just want to beg your forgiveness in his last days on earth. Or, alternatively, tell you he’s sorry he didn’t finish the job properly. Knowing that bastard, it could be either.’
‘But Welsby’s not going down without a fight, is he? He’s going to muddy the waters with as much dirt as he can dish.’ She paused, looking to play her advantage. ‘If it comes out at the trial that he wanted to squeal and we said no, what kind of ammunition would that give to a defence council?’
Salter stared back at her as if he were construing her words as a threat. For a moment, she thought that he might lose his temper, something she’d never witnessed in her years of working with him. Then he shook his head. ‘It’s your funeral. Go and have a chat with him. See if he drops any pearls of wisdom in your ear. You’re much more likely to get an earful of abuse.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time, Hugh. I’m a big girl. And I think this is worth a shot.’
‘If you say so, sis.’ He looked down at the papers on the desk in front of him, in what was clearly intended as a gesture of dismissal.
‘Thanks, Hugh. You won’t regret it.’
He looked sharply up at her. ‘I bloody well hope not. Just get it over with. And Marie?’
He still looked tense, but she couldn’t read his expression. ‘Yes, Hugh?’
‘Give the bastard my regards, won’t you? Tell him he’s always in my thoughts.’
She returned from Salter’s office thinking that she ought to feel pleased with herself. She’d secured Salter’s permission for her visit to Welsby, and had dislodged his usual equanimity in the process. Things were moving.
But she felt uneasy at meeting Keith Welsby again. In her head, Welsby had transformed from a near father figure into a man who had intended to kill her. Almost fairytale territory. Maybe the meeting would bring what Winsor, their in-house shrink, would no doubt describe as closure.
Even so, it wouldn’t be a comfortable meeting. It was a fashionable idea. Restorative justice. Putting the perpetrators of a crime in communication with its victims. It was supposed to be helpful to both parties. But Marie suspected that, when she met Welsby, her overwhelming desire would be simply for retribution.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Salter had allocated her to back room tasks, working through yet more intelligence records. He’d told her to take a few days off, and she knew she should take up the offer. As it was, she spent the day staring into a computer screen, correlating numbers, trying to spot patterns of calls that might be worth investigating further, reviewing the trends that the computer analyses had identified. Getting nowhere slowly. She exchanged a few words with colleagues she barely knew, got up now and again to fetch water from the cooler, stretch her legs, grab a sandwich from the restaurant. Part of her wanted to spend the rest of her working life like this. Another part of was screaming inwardly at the very thought.
On the dot of five, she called it a day and took the Northern Line home. Autumn was well set in now, and it was growing dark as she walked back along the High Street from South Wimbledon station. Only a few weeks until the clocks went back. She was feeling a growing sense of anxiety. More than once she glanced over her shoulder, almost convinced that she was being followed. More likely, her paranoia was simply growing.
Sue and a fellow carer were still in the house, preparing an evening meal for Liam. They were running late because of some minor crisis with another client, and Marie found that she was grateful for the other women’s presence. Their domestic bustling in the kitchen gave the house a more comfortable, homely feel, reassuring after the nagging concerns of Marie’s day.
Even Liam seemed a little better. He was still sitting in the armchair, his posture slightly twisted and awkward. But he looked up and acknowledged her presence with a smile. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Good day?’
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Just in the office. You know.’
He nodded. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Wanted to paint today.’ He shrugged. ‘But – well. Watched TV.’
For a moment, she could feel tears welling in her eyes. It wasn’t just the sense of loss. It was that, for the first time, Liam didn’t even care about what had gone. His mind is likely to slow down, the doctor had said. He’ll become more passive, more apathetic. Now she could see it in front of her.
Marie left Sue to deal with helping Liam eat the soup and bread that she’d prepared, and made her way out into the hallway. She hadn’t noticed on entering, but there was a small package on the floor by the front door. It had been sent special delivery, so must have been signed for by Sue on one of her earlier visits. Marie tore open the Jiffy bag and tipped the contents into her hand. A CD in a slim plastic wallet. Brennan’s evidence.
She took it upstairs to the spare bedroom at the back of the house. Liam’s old MacBook was sitting on a table in the corner, unused now for months. It would be wiser not to look at this on her Agency-supplied laptop, in case its presence could be traced later. She booted up Liam’s machine and inserted the disc.
If anything, she thought, Brennan had undersold this. There were the photographs he’d described, and more of them than she’d expected. Blurred and distant for the most part, but unmistakably Salter and, in one or two cases, other figures that she recognised. One photograph, clearly a few years old, showed Salter enjoying a drink with Jeff Kerridge.
She played some snippets of the audio
files. Unmistakably Salter’s voice. She had no idea who the other speakers were, but the content was potentially incriminating.
There was probably nothing here that would stand up as evidence, and certainly not unless the identity of the various speakers could be confirmed. Most of the conversations sounded as if they’d been gathered from surveillance devices. But at least one was clearly a telephone conversation which would be inadmissible as evidence in any case. And a smart defence lawyer would challenge the rest unless their provenance could be proved.
But the material was better than she’d feared. It might not be enough to support a criminal trial, but it might be the foundation of something that could be presented to Professional Standards.
‘Marie?’ Sue’s voice from downstairs. ‘We’re going to help Liam get to bed, then we’ll be off. Is there anything else you need?’
She ejected the disc and stepped over to the door. ‘I’m fine, thanks, Sue. How is he?’
‘Seems more responsive today.’
We’re already talking about him as if he were a child, Marie thought. She stood for a moment with the disc clutched in her hand, unsure what to do with it. She felt almost as if Salter were watching her, as if, whatever she did with the disc, he’d know.
She felt reluctant to leave the disc in any of the obvious places – in her handbag or a pocket. She contemplated hiding it in plain sight among the rows of discs – largely copies of his own work – that Liam had left piled on the bedroom table. As she considered the matter, another thought struck her. She sat down at Liam’s laptop and picked up an unused CD-R from the half-empty box beside the computer. She burnt a new copy of the original disc, double-checked its contents, and ejected it. After a moment’s thought, she knelt by the table and found a join in the carpet. She reached up to the desk where she’d noticed one of Liam’s pallet knives. She slid the knife blade into the join, and, lifting up one side of the carpet, gently slid the disc, inside its wallet, underneath. She patted down the carpet and leaned back to inspect her work. There was no sign that the carpet had been disturbed.
‘I’m off now.’
Marie jumped to her feet just as Sue pushed open the door. ‘You okay, Marie?’
‘Yes. Thanks. Just sorting out some of Liam’s bits and pieces.’
Sue looked past her to where a couple of Liam’s paintings were propped against the wall. ‘He was good, wasn’t he?’ Then she caught herself and added: ‘Is good, I mean.’
‘You were right the first time,’ Marie said. She gestured towards the pictures. ‘He’s not going to get back to this, is he?’
Sue shrugged. ‘Who knows? All we can do is hope.’
‘You’re right, though,’ Marie said. ‘He was bloody good. Let’s hope that others recognise it too, eventually.’ She shook her head, staring at the canvases. ‘Poor bugger.’
‘Both of you,’ Sue said. ‘You need support too.’
Marie glanced at the dark space under the table where the duplicate CD-R was concealed. ‘More than you know,’ she said. ‘More than you bloody know.’
25
The first sight was a shock. He was lying on the bed, apparently asleep. There was a thin blanket over him, and he was dressed in an old pair of pyjamas. Even watching from the doorway, she could see he’d lost weight since she’d last seen him. His thinning hair was bone-white. It occurred to her that he must have dyed it in the old days. She’d never associated Keith Welsby with vanity.
But then she’d never associated him with corruption either.
She paused in the doorway and looked at the two prison officers sitting by the wall. Both of them looked bored out of their heads. What a farce, she thought. Two officers deployed full-time to keep watch on a man scarcely capable of dragging himself out of bed. But that was the system. Prisoners are most at risk of escaping when they’re outside the prison environment – being escorted to court, being moved between prisons, in hospital. So these two were stuck on bed-watch to make sure that Welsby didn’t abseil down from the second floor window.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Marie Donovan. You should be expecting me.’ She held out her ID card and warrant.
One of the officers – even prison officers are getting younger, she thought – peered at the card. His colleague continued to flick through the Daily Express, apparently uninterested by her presence. ‘Thanks, Ms Donovan.’ He held out his hand; ‘Eddie Brady.’
She smiled and shook his hand, wondering how long it would take for the enthusiasm to be knocked out of him. His colleague had clearly already suffered that fate. ‘Hi, Eddie. Okay if I talk to Mr Welsby?’
‘Yes, of course. We’ll have to stay in the room, of course.’
As he spoke there was a rustling from the bed. Welsby had turned on his side and was glaring at them. For all his white hair and emaciated frame, he looked at least a shadow of his old self. ‘Just fuck off for a few minutes, you two, and let me talk to the lass. I’m not going to vanish. Apart from the fact that I can barely walk three steps, you’ve got me chained to the fucking bed.’ He shook his arm, confirming that his wrist was manacled to the bed frame. ‘Last time that happened, I had to pay for the fucking privilege.’
Brady turned to his colleague, who shrugged and folded up his newspaper. ‘This is strictly against regulations,’ Brady said. ‘If you tell anybody–’
‘If I tell anybody,’ Marie said, ‘I’ll get busted too. So why would I?’
Brady nodded, apparently satisfied by this logic. ‘We had one of your colleagues in here a week or two back.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Marie responded casually. She could feel Welsby listening intently behind her.
‘Hugh something. Slater?’ Brady grinned, awkwardly. ‘Bit of a smart-arse, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
Marie shook her head. ‘Know the name,’ she said. ‘But it’s a big place. Wonder what he was doing here. Did he say anything?’
‘Not much. Not much polite anyway. Seemed to be checking up on Mr Welsby here.’
‘Probably just concerned for my health,’ Welsby growled from the bed.
The young man nodded, his gaze flicking between Marie and Welsby. ‘Well,’ he said, finally, ‘if you need us, we’ll be just outside.’
‘Thanks,’ Marie said. ‘And thanks for being so helpful.’
As the door closed behind her, she turned towards Welsby, who was lying on his back once more, his eyes half-closed. ‘Hi Keith,’ she said. ‘I’d like to say it’s good to see you, but I’m not sure it is.’
He nodded, as if she’d just offered a pleasant greeting. ‘And you were such a polite, well-brought-up little thing, as well.’
‘And you used to be someone I respected, Keith. What went wrong with us, eh?’ She sat down on the plastic chair by his bedside.
‘You’ve every right to be angry with me, Marie,’ he said.
‘Well, thanks for that, Keith. Funnily enough, your opinion on the matter isn’t of much interest to me.’
He nodded, wearily, his eyes closed. ‘Not going very far, this conversation, is it?’
‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But we have to have it. You were going to kill me, for Christ’s sake, Keith.’
He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have gone that far, Marie. I wouldn’t have let it. I had stuff on Kerridge. I’d have sorted things out.’
‘Like fuck, Keith,’ she said. ‘It had already gone too far. That’s only part of it. I trusted you. I looked up to you, for Christ’s sake. And all the time you were fucking bent.’
‘Nothing I can say to that, Marie. Except sorry. And I don’t expect you to accept that. It’s the way it is.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘For the money?’
‘Partly. But this goes way back. There was a lot of it about. That’s not an excuse. But it’s an explanation. It was part of the culture. There were a lot worse than me.’
‘Spare me this crap, Keith.’
‘I’m just saying that once you’re in, you’re in. Once you’ve done
enough to let them blackmail you, it’s all or nothing. There were plenty of others. Most have buggered off by now.’
‘Whereas you hung about long enough to become Jeff Kerridge’s bagman.’
‘I always thought of myself as his fucking conscience,’ Welsby laughed, bitterly. ‘But, yes, something like that.’
‘Until Salter exposed you?’
‘That little gobshite. Yeah, he exposed me because it took the spotlight off him.’
‘You’re saying Salter’s bent, too?’ She sat back in the chair, watching Welsby’s expression.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, girl. Don’t treat me like an idiot. You know exactly what Salter is. You know he shot Kerridge in cold fucking blood.’
‘So why’d he shoot Kerridge?’
‘Because he’s on Pete fucking Boyle’s team. What is this, girl? Fucking Mastermind?’
‘No. Keith,’ she said, slowly. ‘It’s just that I want you to spell it out for me. Word by fucking word. I’m sick of guesswork. I’m sick of innuendo. Tell me the fucking story.’
He stared at her for a moment, as if he were seeing her in a new light. ‘Okay. Let me tell you how it is. You might despise me, girl. That’s fair enough. I probably deserve it. But Hugh Salter’s a whole different animal. People like me – well, we got into this to make a few bob on the side. I never did a lot of harm. A few tip-offs to Kerridge. The odd blind eye turned–’
‘I get it, Keith. You were on the side of the angels.’
‘Salter’s not like that. You know Salter. He’s ambitious. He’s driven. Whatever he’s doing he wants to be top dog. So he threw his lot in with Pete Boyle. Not because he thought Boyle was destined for great things. But because he knew that Boyle wasn’t the brightest bulb in the Christmas tree.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ she said. ‘Why would he do that?’
Welsby closed his eyes for a moment, as if the effort of narration was proving too much for him. ‘Because Boyle’s his puppet. It’s not Pete Boyle who runs that operation. It’s Hughie fucking Salter.’
