It was easy enough to figure out which of the two people in the room was the solicitor. He was suited, thin and reedy, with skin that gave away what must have been a difficult time for him as a teenager. The other male, on the other hand, wore the uniform black trousers and T-shirt with the force logo on the left-hand side. Ray introduced himself. The identification officer gave his name as Ash Reid. He had a permanent smile on his face. Even when he had stopped talking and was prepping the computer.
Ray stood quietly in the corner as Ash pulled out the paperwork, asked Ray the questions he needed to ask, marked his answers, again smiling, and shuffled his papers to the side.
‘Come and have a seat, DI Patrick.’
Ray sat. The tension had brought on a headache. A deep throb over his eyes that squeezed like a vice around his head.
It was nearly here. He knew what to expect. He’d sent more people than he cared to consider to these viewings, and now here he was, about to sit through one himself, knowing full well he would fail it, regardless of whether Billy’s killer was here or not. And if he was, he was going to tank the entire investigation.
Ash explained what was to happen; even though Ray knew the procedure, Ash said he still had to go through it all. He looked at the solicitor. It was protocol, he said. Ray waited him out.
And then it started. The video, which Ray knew would last roughly three minutes. Nine video clips of nine males against a grey background, all facing forward, who would then turn left and right so you could see a profile view of them, before the video moved to the next person.
It started.
Grey background.
An Eastern European male.
Turned left.
Turned right.
Ray had no idea.
Another Eastern European male against a grey background.
Turned left.
Turned right.
This time he had a different T-shirt on.
It happened a further seven times.
Ray stared at the screen. He didn’t flinch. Not a muscle moved.
‘Okay. I’ll play it again before you make comment,’ said Ash.
Ray could feel the solicitor standing immobile in the corner of the room, watching behind him.
A trickle of sweat trailed its way down his spine. The video started up again. His shirt clung to his back.
Grey background.
Male.
Left.
Right.
Next.
And again. And again, and …
‘Okay. All done!’ Ash switched off the monitor. Pulled the paperwork back in front of him. ‘Did you see the man who shot Billy Collier?’
‘No.’
49
Rusnac walked away from the lawyer without a backward glance. The weasly little man was trying to talk to him about what would happen next. What he should or shouldn’t do. His neat leather briefcase banging against his legs as he tried to keep up with his client. His voice lost amongst the noise of life on Stoke Newington High Street.
Rusnac had no intention of listening. He had no need of his advice. He wasn’t a good honest citizen of the country who needed to obey the rules or fear the consequences. Scared of the slightest little infraction. He was bigger than that.
The street was noisy. Traffic moving, people walking, talking, shouting, pushing. Shops spilled their goods out onto the pavement, fruit and veg, the usual and unusual, small hardware shops displayed handy utensils. Handwritten signs, quirky coffee shops and takeaways. Hustle. Bustle. Food.
The sky overhead was leaden, oppressive. Like his mood. And mixed in with the darkness was confusion.
What he needed to do now was buy a phone, as the police had seized his on arrest and had informed him that they would keep it for as long as he was on bail so that they could examine it.
Once he had a new pay-as-you-go phone he could organise to be picked up from the godforsaken place and assess if there was any damage to the organisation, to his business.
The High Street was rammed with phone shops, and within two minutes he held a new one in his hand. He knew the number he needed. It was always a risk back home that the cops would take your phone simply because they could, so he’d taken to memorising numbers as well as storing them. Not like the idiots here who took it for granted that every number lived forever in the phone’s memory.
It was then that Rusnac realised he’d managed to lose the inadequate little man who had been clinging to his coat-tails as they left the police station. He hadn’t even noticed when it happened.
The call made, Rusnac found a bar to sit in. Ordered himself a drink and waited in the darkest corner he could find.
Why was he here, out in the world, waiting to be picked up? He checked the door of the pub; no one had followed him in. It didn’t seem to be a ploy to tail him in order to round others up. Why would it be, when they had the killer and the head of the organisation in their hands?
That left a problem with the cop who had seen him fire the gun into the kid’s side. That cop must have been the one who did the identity procedure, and yet they’d released him. The cop hadn’t identified him, because if he had, along with the DNA evidence – which Rusnac decided he’d done a pretty good job of explaining away – he’d still be rotting in that damn stinking cell right now and not drinking a bottle of beer in the pub.
The beer was cool and felt good as he took a drink, enjoying the taste after the swill he’d been given over the past couple of days. The corner of the label peeled back easily as his fingers searched for something to do while his mind searched for answers.
What did the cop get out of not chasing after him at the memorial and not identifying him today? What did he want? Did it mean he was bent?
All Rusnac had was an endless stream of questions and an inability to answer them.
Popa rolled up in a well-worn Audi. It wasn’t easy to continue to get his hands on vehicles, he’d had to burn one and the police had seized one. Popa looked relaxed, one elbow on the edge of the window where it had been rolled down, even though the air was cool.
‘Wind it up, you dick,’ Rusnac moaned. It hadn’t been particularly warm in the cell and all the bastards had provided him with was a scratchy grey blanket that wouldn’t have kept a skinny girl warm on a hot day.
Popa pressed the window control without comment, moved his arm out of the way.
‘What happened while I’ve been gone?’ asked Rusnac once Popa had manoeuvred the car into the traffic.
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean, nothing?’
Popa looked across at Rusnac as if he’d asked a trick question.
‘You going to answer or –’
‘Just that, nothing of significance has happened while you been gone.’ He looked nervous now. Not understanding what his boss expected to have happened.
‘The cops haven’t been to any of our places? Done anything online? Spoken to anyone or taken anyone else in? No jumpy clients?’ He glared at the young male beside him, ready to grab the steering wheel and make him pay for his lies.
Popa’s hands shook as he gripped hard as he drove. ‘I promise, Vova. All is safe. They’ve been nowhere near us. They don’t know anything.’
Rusnac told him to take a hike while he showered and changed. He felt as though he had a layer of grime covering both his clothes and his body, as though the filth had seeped underneath the material of his jeans and T-shirt and made themselves at home. He had an urge to scrub himself. It felt as though that would be the only way he would rid himself of the smell and the feeling that clung to him like a second skin. He wanted to scour himself. He wanted to burn his clothes.
The smell, he thought as he stripped out of his jeans, was hard to describe; it was like the toilet basin in the cell, mixed with someone else’s bad foot odour, along with microwave meals. He wanted to retch. To clean his insides as well as wash his skin. The inside of his mouth felt as though it belonged to someone else, someone who lived in a
bog.
His bathroom was tiny. The bath and shower was pushed so close to the sink and toilet that he could piss in the toilet and wash his hands in the sink while he showered if he so wished.
As the water drove down over him, the temperature as high as he could push it, Rusnac thought back to the cop and the memorial service. The way he looked when he turned to face him – what was the look he wore? Did he have a bent cop on his hands? The possibility to turn one? But how would he do it? If he was wrong, then he was in serious trouble. One option was to wait for the cop to come to him. He now knew where he was. But in the meantime he had to be careful with the business. He had to protect it. He also had to protect himself from the Russians. They couldn’t know how close he had come to having it all come crashing down around him. They’d finish him in a way that would be a lot worse than the idiots who had spent hours questioning him.
He didn’t like this uncertainty. He needed answers.
When he’d finished his shower, he called Popa and told him to return.
‘Boss?’ His voice held a quiver.
Rusnac held a bottle of Becks. He wasn’t interested in being sociable and didn’t offer the boy one. He was here to work. ‘We’ve a busy time ahead of us.’
‘Yes, boss.’ The quiver less prominent now. He squared his shoulders back.
‘I want all clients, both sides, buyers and sellers, contacting and reassuring. I want the medical staff checked on. I want visits to them all at their home addresses to make sure we don’t have another leak, and I want the name and home address of the cop who saw me kill the kid, the one at the memorial service, the one who did the ID procedure.’ Rusnac looked at the boy in front of him, young but eager to please. ‘I’ll get you his photo.’
‘Yes, boss.’
A silence pervaded the room.
‘Well, don’t just stand there.’
50
‘What the hell, Ray?’ Jain slammed the door to Ray’s office, not bothering to keep his voice down before it had fully closed. He was furious, and Ray couldn’t say he blamed him. He looked at the photo of Alice and Matthew on his desk. The two small faces no longer connected in his brain, no longer provided him with the comfort he could do with right now, and only served to remind him of the abject failure he’d been.
‘I told you I didn’t see him, that he was too far away as we were running. And he had his back to me.’ Ray threw Jain a glare, going on the offensive. ‘And then he shot Billy, remember Billy? And –’
‘Don’t give me that “remember Billy” crap. That’s why he was dragged in. That’s what all this is about. That’s why I’m so pissed off. If we’re talking about remembering things, try remembering the IPCC investigation I’m shielding you from,’ Jain spat back.
Ray stood. The feeling of being at a lower level to Prabhat, who had not seated himself, was not comfortable. He was tense, his whole body cried out to move, his muscles aching for action. He was on full alert. He tried to lower his tone to compensate. ‘As I was saying, my eyes were focused on Billy, his injury, trying to stem the bleeding, not on the man running in the opposite direction.’
Jain paced around the office. Arms waving as he spoke. ‘He’s admitted to being near the garages, he was in an associate’s car who was running an errand – a bloody errand – and though he doesn’t remember, he said it’s likely he could have been smoking and thrown a tab-end down. He’s placed himself quite legally at the scene of the fire. But not inside, and we can’t place him inside because it was torched so goddamn well, even though we can ID the car as the one from that day from the VIN. No evidence has survived to place anyone in it. And now you can’t ID him for the murder.’
‘I can’t and I’m sorry I can’t, but what do you want me to do about that?’
‘I want you to catch Billy’s killer, Ray. Is that too much to ask?’ And with that he stormed back out, slinging the door behind him with as much force as when he’d entered.
51
The email glared back. As though daring Elaine to suggest it wasn’t real, or that it was untrue. She ran her hands through her hair. Looked around the office.
Will and Paula were fighting over whose turn it was to make the coffees. Will was adamant he’d made the last two, and that, though Paula made the shittest coffee in the building, it didn’t exempt her from having to make it. In fact, Elaine heard him complain, he wouldn’t put it past her to make it like pigswill on purpose so that no one would want her to make it again.
Paula then jumped into a diatribe about Will calling her lazy.
She looked back to the screen.
The email was still there. The pixelated black letters on the solid white background.
Her mind had already run through the meaning, added up the sums and come up with the answer, but she didn’t like what she’d found. She didn’t understand it.
In his office, the guv was at his desk, head bent over his keyboard, tapping away, occasionally looking up at the screen to check his typing before he continued. He was hell-bent on finding Billy’s killer. He’d been devastated when the op had gone wrong. She knew he’d had it out with the Super. It had gone around the station like wildfire. Internal arguments like that tended get be hooked up to the gossip grapevine pretty quickly.
The investigation had also been pushed hard. They’d done long hours. Hours when she hadn’t been able to put the children to bed, to read them a bedtime story or ask them about their day. She only saw them in the morning, when they were fractious, as was she. Overtired due to the hours worked, which ruined the only time she had with them. Paul was still awake when she got home, usually in bed, either reading or marking, jotters thrown across the bedcovers. His reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. They tried to talk about their day, but they were both exhausted and a quiet settled over them before sleep.
She’d told herself that they all knew it was just for a short period of time, as it always was when a murder inquiry first got off the ground. It was always the same. Family routine would soon return, and she held on to that.
But reading the email again, Elaine faltered. Where had her strongly held belief in what they had been doing gone?
Had she neglected her family for nothing? Put her marriage at risk? The emotional health of her children?
She looked into Ray’s office again, ran her hands through her hair, scrubbed at her scalp. If this email was to be believed, then her guv, Ray Patrick, was not to be trusted.
52
Rusnac pushed himself back into the dim shop doorway and pulled the scarf tighter around his neck. The evening cold nipped at his face. He blew into his hands. Breath visibly shifting through his fingers into the night.
It was already dark, although the shortest day had long been and gone, back in December, when the wind had relentlessly whipped the rain through the days one after the other. But the days still fled too soon and left darkness to wrap its fingers around the buildings, streets and people far too early. Now spring was supposed to be upon them; there were occasional weather breakthroughs but the lighter evenings were only gradually creeping in.
Two men walked by. Arms wrapped around each other. One leaning in, smiling up into the face of the other, who was laughing at a shared joke.
Rusnac didn’t understand the need to be so close to someone that way. To be so reliant on someone that you leaned on them, rested on them, changed the way you walked. Altered your mood around them. His life was about taking care of himself and his mother. It was about survival. The rest was there to get in the way and put you at risk.
Twenty-five minutes had passed. He had no idea how long he’d have to wait out here, and standing still in one place made his bones ache. The cold seeped in and gnawed at him. This annoyed him. The winters were so much harsher back home, he was turning into a wimp here.
It had to be done. He had to watch the large glass and green steel-fronted building. Lit up and glowing with perceived warmth in the now dark night. But he had to be discreet
.
Fifty minutes and he was getting frustrated.
An hour and a half and he wanted to walk away because of the boredom and the inane idiots that continued to pass him, especially the ones that insisted on saying ‘good evening’ to him as they did so. His response was invariably a grunt. He had patience, though, and he was the only one who could do this. And it had to be done.
He stamped his feet.
Two hours.
Rubbed his hands together.
Two hours twenty minutes.
The glass door opened and Rusnac lifted his chin out his jacket. This was it.
But it wasn’t.
He swore quietly into his collar as he pushed his chin back down.
Three hours five minutes.
A lone figure walked from the rear of the building. Walking out of near darkness. Rusnac watched. He was the right height. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. The figure had his hands pushed deep into pockets. Shoulders hunched up to ears. Rusnac continued to watch. Then the figure hit the light from the street lamps and Rusnac raised his phone. Tapped through to camera, zoomed in and clicked a couple of times to make sure he had a decent photograph.
53
Elaine wished spring would hurry up and show its face properly. These patches of blue sky did nothing but tease her about the season she preferred.
Ray had given them a day off. Part of the team, anyway. To attempt to revive them, as they’d been working through without a break. It was a Saturday but with a big case they often worked through a weekend, so it was helpful to the parents in the team.
It was cold and grey but dry. They’d bundled the kids up in coats, hats and gloves and were now crossing Silver Street towards Pymmes Park after managing to grab a parking space on the main road. The sky was clear again but a wind was blowing. The children both moaned about how cold they were and how they’d rather watch television: Teletubbies and CBeebies, specifically. Elaine knew she dumped them in front of the TV more than she would like to, and tried to get out of the house as often as the job and her energy levels allowed.
Dead Blind Page 17
