by Joel Hames
She didn’t blink.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A fake. You know, a fraud, a liar. When did you find out?”
She frowned at me, stood, swayed slightly, and held out an arm to steady herself against the kitchen island. The frown deepened. I could almost see the outlines of thoughts chasing each other through her head. I’d have killed to know what those thoughts were.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I glanced over at Gaddesdon, whose mouth was hanging open and who looked almost as shocked as Sally Carson. It was, I realised, a risky move. All I had was the word of a career criminal, and I hadn’t even mentioned it to Roarkes, who’d warned me not to do precisely this sort of thing and was already on thin enough ice himself. I hoped I hadn’t put a crack in it. It was a bold step, which was lawyer-speak for a stupid one. But I’d taken that step, and there was no going back now. I tried to ignore my tiredness and the tension, and spoke slowly and calmly.
“Thomas Carson is a false identity. Thomas Carson doesn’t exist. He never has existed. Your husband made him up.”
Sally Carson sat back down, bit her lower lip and slowly shook her head. She took a long, deep breath, as if she were gathering herself for something, and spoke.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I can assure you it’s nonsense. Now please, if you don’t mind, I’d rather you left.”
I couldn’t fault her reaction, but something was still nagging at me. I nodded at her, stood, and picked my four years out-of-date Samsung phone out of my pocket.
“Do you mind?” I asked, and she frowned at me.
“Do I mind what?”
“I need a photo,” I replied. I was hoping she wasn’t going to ask why, because I didn’t think a sense of déjà vu or something equally vague would cut it.
“No,” she said, “I don’t think so. I think you’ve got a damn nerve, to be honest. I thought you were here to help me.”
I’d thought much the same, until Maloney’s call. I wasn’t sure why I was there at all now. I looked at her, trying to keep the guilt and confusion off my face, and she stared right back at me. She was furious, and if she was faking it, she was good. The seconds ticked by, and just as I was about to turn away and leave she took a deep breath and relented. “Oh, OK. It’s not like I’ve got anything to hide.”
One photo, with Sally far from her best, but it would have to do. Her reactions had been spot on, close to perfect, but something about Sally Carson still didn’t seem right. Her comment about the book. That brief, expectant pause. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t anything at all, really. But somewhere, something was jarring, even as it rang a bell somewhere else. Something wasn’t quite right.
I was barely out of the door before she slammed it shut. Bursington by night was cold, wet and windy. I had the feeling that we’d just been lucky, earlier, and Bursington by day was usually the same. We hurried back to the Mitsubishi.
A man was waiting for us there. Round, smiling face, glasses, white hair. He didn’t look like a farmer, I thought.
“Hello,” he said. “Daniel Cullop. I live just over there.”
He didn’t sound like a farmer, either. He pointed back over his shoulder, into the darkness, where I could just make out a different shade of darkness that might have been a building or might just have been another cold wet hill.
“How can we help you, Mr Cullop?” I asked. Maybe it was being with Gaddesdon, standing next to the patrol car, but I knew I sounded like a police officer even as I said it. I knew precisely what Roarkes would have to say about that, too. I didn’t care.
“Just wondering what the latest is. We heard about Thomas, this afternoon.”
No surprise there. I doubted Sally Carson had been shooting her mouth off, but Mia Arazzi and her colleagues would have been all over it. Gaddesdon took over.
“I’m afraid we can’t say anything about that, sir,” he announced, and moved past Daniel Cullop to open the driver’s door. I went to the passenger side and was about to climb in before I had a sudden thought.
“Mr Cullop,” I said, and he turned to me, smiling, eager, ingratiating.
“Yes, erm…”
I ignored the unspoken question. He didn’t need to know my name. He certainly didn’t need to know I wasn’t a police officer.
“Can you tell us anything about the Carsons? Anything out of the ordinary.”
Cullop shrugged, still smiling.
“Not really. They seem pleasant enough. My other half has tea with Sally from time to time. Of course they’re not so popular now they’re trying to turn the place into some kind of Glastonbury Festival, but what can you do about that?”
For a moment I didn’t understand what he was talking about, and then I remembered the moles and the yurts. Hardly Glastonbury, but this was a small village in the middle of nowhere. Half a dozen families with kids in a field would be Armageddon as far as they were concerned. Daniel Cullop was still talking.
“I mean, we’ve all spoken to Thomas, and he tried to reassure us, but he would, wouldn’t he? And as for the council, well, everybody knows if you throw enough money at them you can build whatever you want.”
Daniel Cullop sounded like he could go on for the rest of the night if we gave him the chance. I thanked him, said goodbye and climbed into the car where Gaddesdon was already waiting with the face of a bored teenager enduring a long and dreary family dinner.
“Let’s go,” I said, and moments later we’d left Bursington behind to its wind and rain and curious neighbours. I had a photo of Sally Carson, who still reminded me of something and I couldn’t think what. I had a fake husband, and all I could do about that was wait for Maloney to tell me who he really was. I had a scrap of paper with the coordinates of an Argentine glacier on it that had turned up eight thousand miles away with no good reason – and the name of a dead man next to those coordinates. I had a suspect in hospital and a police station full of people who wanted me two hundred miles away. And now I had a bunch of angry neighbours – no, not angry, just disgruntled, I thought – and council officers who were happy to let you do whatever you wanted as long as you threw them a big enough bone.
No leads indeed, I thought, and smiled into the darkness.
11: No More Than a Flicker
“JUST FUCK OFF,” said Claire, and hung up on me. She lingered a while on that first “f”, stretched it out like the string on a catapult, long enough that I had time to take it in while she was still on it, to wonder how serious she was, how serious all this was, whether I’d made the kind of mistake that couldn’t be put right.
I’d texted the photo to Claire the moment I’d got back to the hotel room, which didn’t show much sign of having been tidied, but I was past expecting any kind of “quality” from the place. I’d included a cryptic little message alongside the image, this face could blow the case, it said, enough to whet her appetite and, I hoped, gloss over the way our last conversation had ended.
I called her at ten in the morning, and it didn’t take me long to realise that hope was a little ambitious. A frosty greeting, a vaguely disparaging comment about the woman in the photo (she couldn’t possibly think there was something between me and Sally Carson, could she?), and that was just the start. OK, I thought, I can work with this, I can bring her round. I asked her how she was doing, whether she’d made any more progress on her story, an obvious enough trick to make it sound like I was genuinely interested in what she was doing, and I could almost see the frown on her face as she replied “Fine” in a voice that sounded anything but. I pushed on regardless.
“Thing is, that Sally Carson – suspect’s wife, the woman in the photo – she rings a bell and I can’t figure out why. Reckon you can dig through the files on my laptop? See if I’ve come across her before?”
I was prepared for a sigh and a why the hell didn’t you take the bloody thing up there with you?, I’d even rehearsed a cute, self-mocking response, but Claire’s answer, her o
bvious, inevitable answer, was the one thing I didn’t see coming. So that “Just fuck off”, with its long deep crescendo on the “f”, hit me like a hammer in the dark.
A uniformed officer from Blackmoor turned up twenty minutes later to take me to the Fiat. I had time, while the constable drove me in silence through some surprisingly colourful parts of Manchester, to hammer out an apology to Claire on the Samsung, redraft it three times, and delete it anyway because the mood she was in, there wasn’t anything I could send her that would work. A text hit my inbox while I was crafting the final round of abject apologies, from Michael Slaney, an old Mauriers colleague who’d taken up a Government policy post at the Home Office a couple of years back.
Re Hasina Khalil, it read. Politics my arse. Speak later.
Now I was intrigued. But Hasina Khalil could wait. We were turning into the pub car park, and there was the Fiat, right where I’d left it, no more battered than it had been, certainly better-looking than its owner. Even while I’d been staring at my phone with my mind full of Claire and Hasina Khalil, I’d realised what I needed to do about Carson, and I knew Roarkes wouldn’t like it.
So Roarkes wouldn’t find out until it was too late.
Getting back to the hospital wasn’t exactly a breeze, what with all those road closures and Christmas markets and no Tarney to follow this time round, but I got there only twenty minutes after my phone had said I would, and kept my smile serious enough and my stroll brisk enough to smuggle me past anyone who might have wondered who I was and whether maybe they ought to stop me. Idiots. The guy had tried to hang himself, and someone had helped him, so it wasn’t like no one knew security was an issue. Serena Hawkes was right: there was no doubt he was vulnerable now. And there I was, not a cop and not his lawyer, could have been anyone, standing in front of him and watching him sleep.
Most of the wires and tubes had gone. He was breathing on his own, at least. There was an IV into his hand, but they put an IV in your hand if you graze your knee, so that didn’t mean a thing.
“Mr Carson?” I said, softly. Nothing. “Thomas” – a little louder. He twitched, shoulders jerking minutely and so quickly I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking right at them. It might have been nothing, it might just have been a sleeping reaction to a voice in the room, but I didn’t think so. The bastard was awake.
“I know you can hear me, Thomas. I’m sure someone’ll be along soon and tell me you can’t be disturbed or some crap like that so I’ll be quick. Two questions for you.”
Nothing. My eyes were stuck on him so tight you’d have needed white spirit and a blade to peel them off. I could see every tiny bead of sweat on his forehead, but I couldn’t see a hint of anything else. I carried on.
“What’s with the glacier, Thomas?”
Still nothing.
“Is it your mate? Alejandro? That where you buried the poor sod?”
No more sweat. No more twitching. But he was awake. I was sure of it. I tried the other line.
“And while we’re on the subject of buried, where’s the real Thomas Carson?”
This time there was movement. A tiny one, no more than a flicker round one eye and a cheek, but it was there. I hadn’t imagined it.
“Did you just make him up, or is he some other dead bloke you thought you’d turn into?”
The flicker went out. Thomas Carson – I couldn’t help thinking of him as Thomas Carson, even though I was sure he wasn’t – was marble again, a statue, immobile bar the steady rise and fall of his chest.
“OK, Thomas. Have it your way. But we’ll find out soon enough. It doesn’t look good, though, does it? Two dead cops and the man who might have done it isn’t who he claims to be. Doesn’t look good at all.”
I turned and left the room and made it all the way to the end of the corridor before I walked round a corner and straight into a very unhappy Detective Inspector Roarkes.
Gaddesdon was standing next to him, avoiding my gaze, looking rather like a dog who’d been caught with half the fridge in his mouth. I was wearing an old t-shirt and a sweater and Roarkes had grabbed a lump of the sweater, and the t-shirt, and, I thought, possibly a little skin underneath, and twisted, and pushed me back into the wall. I heard a quiet tear, felt the sweater give, and mentally consigned it to the same bin as the shirt I’d been wearing when Tarney had gone for me. Unlike Tarney, Roarkes was supposed to be a friend. I didn’t like to think what he did to people who weren’t his friends.
“What the FUCK do you think you’re doing, Williams?” he hissed. Another hospital corridor, another scene. Visitors and nurses scurried past behind him. I shrugged, or came as close as I could with half my upper body in his hand.
Five minutes later we were sitting in the hospital canteen drinking coffee with the consistency of chicken fat and the taste of burnt wood. It turned out Roarkes wasn’t particularly angry about me going to see Carson, or if he was, it was in the background. What had really pissed him off, he said, was our little visit to Bursington. A barely-coherent Sally Carson had woken him at seven in the morning with a story he’d found difficult to believe, he said, until he remembered the level of stupidity I was capable of.
“Her husband’s just tried to top himself, and you go round there with this nonsense, this pile of crap, and you expect she’s going to be pleased to see you?”
I shrugged again. Gaddesdon was still looking at the floor. I hadn’t much cared how pleased Sally Carson was. It was what she had to say that interested me.
“And you were, what, surprised she didn’t just cave in and say oh yes we’re Bonnie and Clyde how clever of you to find us Mr Williams?”
I glanced over at Gaddesdon. Maybe that looking-at-the-floor thing wasn’t such a bad idea. I’d been ready to stand my ground, because Maloney’s information was always good. But what had we really got out of our trip to Bursington? A photo of a distraught-looking woman; some gossip from an inquisitive neighbour. And on my part, a girlfriend who was so angry with me she probably wasn’t my girlfriend any more. I’d missed the point. It’s not the quality of the information. It’s what you do with it. Something Roarkes had told me, I remembered, back when I’d asked him how he’d cracked an apparently motiveless murder without a single witness on an estate whose residents would rather have thrown themselves out of a twentieth-floor window than be seen talking to the police. That was all he’d told me, too. Typical Roarkes. He was still talking. Not quite so loud, now. He’d got that out of his system.
“Of course I’m not one to dismiss a lead out of hand, however absurd it might be and however dubious its source. So I asked Sally Carson what might have given you the impression her husband was – what did you call him – a fake, that was it, I asked her if she could think of anything that might have led you to believe her husband was a fake, and of course she couldn’t.”
“No surprise there,” I said, and immediately regretted it.
“I’m doing the talking here, Williams!” shouted Roarkes, and slammed his fist down on the table so hard the coffee would have been all over me if it had been normal coffee. Instead it just wobbled. Williams, this time. Roarkes wasn’t messing around.
“I asked Sally Carson if she could vouch for her husband’s past – following up every angle, I said, just doing my job, had she met his family or his friends from before he went to South America, and of course she hadn’t, because he was an only child and his parents were dead and he’d gone to South America to get away from all that and start again.”
“Denial,” I said, and saw his jaw tighten. I shut my mouth. It was the wiser choice.
“And where precisely did you pick up this little gem of information, Williams?”
I carried on saying nothing.
“Gaddesdon!”
Eyes still on the floor, Gaddesdon mumbled something that sounded like “I don’t know, sir. It was someone on the phone.”
“It was Maloney, wasn’t it?”
I did my best impression of Thomas Carson
, sitting there – lying there, right now – giving as close to nothing away as I could.
“Fine. Have it your way. Some idiot calls you up in the middle of the night and tells you Carson’s not who he says he is but – and tell me if I’ve got this wrong – he’s not who he says he is but your source can’t tell you who he actually really is. And armed with this superb, impeccably-researched nugget of intelligence, off you go to have a word with a woman who’s just a few hours and the width of a belt away from being a widow. You’re not a cop, remember. Don’t try and act like one. And don’t make me look like a prick.”
He shook his head. I didn’t think it was worth trying to justify myself. I wasn’t sure I could.
“And you call yourself a lawyer, Williams. Christ. I pity your clients. I really do. As for you,” he turned to Gaddesdon, who met his eye for all of half a second before looking back down, “you’re just an imbecile, but I wouldn’t worry, because that makes you smarter than everyone else in that bloody station.”
Roarkes took a sip of his coffee and grimaced.
“Lawyers and Manchester cops,” he said, and shook his head. I tried not to laugh, failed, and noticed Roarkes failing to stifle the beginnings of a beaten-down grin himself.
“Come on, you pair of bloody morons. Let’s get back to the station.”
The main entrance to the hospital was a large revolving glass door, into which Roarkes strode without looking back. The other moron and I were left to the compartment behind. As I stepped onto the zebra crossing outside I heard a shout from behind – Gaddesdon – and looked up to see a car coming towards me, yards away, with no sign of slowing down. I jumped back and watched it shoot past, dark green and nondescript and driven by a mop of bushy blond hair. Gaddesdon was laughing. So was Roarkes, from across the road.
I was shaking.
“Fuck off!” I shouted. A woman who had just emerged from the revolving door carrying a toddler with his arm in a sling stopped and stared at me. I wasn’t sure who I was shouting at, the driver, Roarkes, Gaddesdon, Carson, Claire, the bastard who’d beaten me up the night before. They all deserved it.
