The Dying Hours

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne did not need to ask what she was thinking. ‘Look, you know I went to MIT at Lewisham. I tried to tell Hackett what was going on and he wouldn’t have any of it.’

  ‘That was before,’ Helen said.

  ‘Before what?’

  ‘Listen to yourself! That was before you put all this together. Before you had five murders. Go to him with exactly what you’ve just told me and hand it over so it can be investigated properly. I think he might listen now.’

  ‘They had their chance.’

  ‘God, how old are you?’ She tried to hang on to Alfie, but he wriggled away on to the bed. ‘Do your bloody job.’

  ‘I have been doing my job,’ Thorne said. ‘How d’you think I put this thing together? Me, OK?’

  ‘Good, well done.’ She spat the sarcasm out. ‘Give yourself a pat on the back, Inspector. Then get your head out of your arse and do the right thing for everybody.’

  The child crawled across to Thorne. He reached out a hand and Alfie used it to haul himself to his feet. Thorne held on to him. ‘Do you want me to move back to my place?’

  Helen shrugged. ‘Do what you want.’

  ‘Obviously it’s handier for me to stay here, but if you’d rather I was out of your way…’

  ‘It’s done now, isn’t it?’ Helen sounded sad and sullen, her eyes on Alfie as he bounced on the bed, still whimpering as he clutched Thorne’s sleeve. ‘So I can’t really see what difference it makes. You’ve told me, so I can’t pretend I don’t know what you’re up to.’

  ‘I didn’t want to keep on lying.’

  ‘Oh yes, well done for being honest.’ The anger flashed back into her voice. ‘Now we just have to deal with the huge mess you’ve made.’

  ‘You don’t have to deal with anything,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Really?’ She pushed the duvet away, as if she were suddenly hot. ‘Have you any idea of the position you’ve put me in? Do you honestly believe that when this all comes out, and it is going to come out… they won’t think that I knew what you were doing? How many careers are you trying to ruin, exactly?’

  Thorne had nothing to say, certainly nothing that would help things. He was grateful when Alfie came into the crook of his arm and instinctively he raised his free hand and laid it against the boy’s forehead. ‘He feels a bit hot,’ Thorne said. ‘Maybe he’s got an ear infection or something.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Do you want me to go and fetch the Calpol?’

  ‘No.’ Helen was already half out of bed and she quickly snatched Alfie up from Thorne’s arms without a word. She looked less than happy when he began to cry even louder.

  ‘Listen, it wasn’t even my idea to tell you.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ Helen said.

  ‘Christ, I can’t win, can I?’

  Helen stopped at the doorway, hoisting Alfie a little higher on to her shoulder. ‘No, Tom,’ she said. ‘I really don’t think you can.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Mercer is a little startled when Jacobson comes round suddenly, coughing and spluttering. He’d been looking around the garage while he was waiting, killing time and struggling to take in all the old rubbish Jacobson has amassed.

  Unbelievable…

  He’s sitting a few feet away on a metal stool he’s dragged from behind the workbench. He has the plastic bag on his lap and now he’s wearing the thin, plastic gloves that had been stuffed in his pocket. He’s turned the music off.

  ‘Who the hell collects old lawnmowers?’ he asks.

  Jacobson says nothing. He just moans, his hand moving to his shattered nose, and he shuffles back until he’s sitting against the wall. He spends a few seconds trying to work out why he’s wet, what’s dripping from his hair.

  He says, ‘Oh, God,’ when he smells the petrol.

  ‘Handy for me though,’ Mercer says, ‘because I didn’t have to bring any with me in the end. All the petrol anyone could want sloshing about in this load of old junk, isn’t there?’ He sticks a foot out, nudges one of the mowers. ‘I mean, I know everyone needs a hobby and all that. Stamps or trainspotting maybe, but this is just stupid. What’s the point of it?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. He knows he isn’t going to get one, that Jacobson has better things to think about. ‘As it happens a lot of lads take up hobbies inside, but, you know, at least they’ve got an excuse with all that time on their hands. Spending weeks making models, ships in bottles, all that carry-on. Endless boxes of Swan Vestas, just so they can make a scale model of some cathedral or what have you out of matchsticks. Months and months it takes them… years, sometimes. Lovely to look at, I’m not denying it… or at least they are until some nutcase smashes it to bits just because they got a smaller portion of steak and kidney pie in the canteen.’

  He shrugs. ‘Waste of bloody time in the end.’

  He reaches into his jacket. Says, ‘Talking of matches,’ and takes out a box from his pocket.

  He shakes it.

  Jacobson says, ‘Oh no… oh, Jesus.’

  ‘It was such a simple thing I asked you to do, Richard, and now look where we are.’ Mercer smiles. ‘You haven’t got the first idea what I’m on about, have you? You can’t even remember it.’

  Jacobson tries to speak, but his words are lost in a fit of spluttering and he reaches up to wipe away the petrol that is running into his eyes.

  ‘I know you were only a pupil barrister back then, doing all the menial stuff, but that was supposed to include carrying messages backwards and forwards, wasn’t it?’ He opens the matchbox slowly, then quickly shuts it again. ‘Remember a woman called Fiona Daniels? No, course you don’t… well, she was the silly cow behind the counter at the bank in Croydon, the one standing on the other side of a very filthy bit of glass, I should add. Coming back now, is it?’

  He waits, and Jacobson manages a small nod.

  ‘Right, well I should probably kick off by letting you know that Mrs Daniels got what was coming to her a couple of weeks ago. All got a bit much for her by all accounts, so out of the blue she just gets up and walks into a reservoir, poor old soul.’ He sits back, his hands together on top of the plastic bag that is still sitting on his lap. ‘Not a bad way to go, I suppose. Compared to some, at any rate.’

  Jacobson cries out and throws his head back into the brick wall behind him.

  ‘Now, all you had to do was make sure they asked Fiona Daniels about that screen. The one she stood behind all day long doling out readies or whatever. Pointed out that it was dirty… cracked as well, let everyone know that she couldn’t possibly have been as certain as she said she was, that her positive identification was hardly positive at all. That was all. Just make sure your boss pulled her up on that, but you never passed it on.’

  ‘Couldn’t,’ Jacobson croaks.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘It would have……incriminated you.’ The shouting makes Jacobson cough loudly and he turns his head to spit out the blood and the petrol that has leaked into his mouth. ‘Shown you’d been in the bank.’

  ‘Yeah well, that’s crap for a start. I could have gone in there any time to cash a cheque or something, same as anybody else.’

  ‘I couldn’t…’’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Mercer says. ‘So, thirty years later, here we are.’ He shakes the matchbox again and now Jacobson struggles to stand up. Mercer comes off the stool fast and moves towards him and Jacobson quickly drops to the floor and begins to cry.

  Mercer sits down again and holds up the matchbox.

  ‘Now, let’s get one thing straight. This is going to happen one way or another. There’s no way out of it, so no point whatsoever begging or struggling or generally messing about. Fair enough? But… you do have a choice.’

  He takes a battered green folder from the plastic bag, opens it, then leans down to lay the contents out on the floor. He spreads them out carefully in front of Jacobson. ‘You see where I’m going with this?’

  Jacobson says, ‘No!’ Screams it.

&nbs
p; ‘So, you need to have a quick think and make a decision, old son.’ He watches Jacobson move on to his hands and knees, moaning as he reaches towards the things that Mercer has laid out on the floor. ‘That’s right, have a good look at that lot. It’s obvious what they mean, isn’t it? Then have a think about what’s going to happen if you don’t do the noble thing and let me know.’

  ‘Please,’ Jacobson says. ‘Please, please…’

  Mercer leans forward and takes a match out of the box. ‘Are you going to strike this thing, or am I?’

  PART THREE

  THE STATE OF THE REMAINS

  THIRTY-TWO

  When Mercer steps out of the van in the rear courtyard, he sees that tosser Herbert in the doorway, jabbering to one of the other gorillas from the security firm. They’re sharing a cigarette and some joke that clearly they both think is hilarious. They keep nodding towards him and pissing themselves; him standing there like a prize plum in his polished shoes and his best blue suit, handcuffs locked that extra bit tightly so it takes the skin off his wrists.

  Shivering his tits off and waiting for them to finish, keen to get inside.

  ‘Bit of a pickle this morning,’ Herbert says. ‘Seems like the world and his wife’s on trial for something or other today so all the holding cells are full.’

  Suddenly the other security guard is next to him and he and Herbert take Mercer’s arms and lead him towards the doors. ‘Not a problem though,’ Herbert says and cheerfully tells him that they’re taking him to the old holding cells instead. The ones down in the basement, the ones the tourists go to look at.

  Everywhere you look in the basement there are museum pieces: a door from Newgate, inches thick; some medieval stocks; an ancient set of shackles streaked brown with rust or old blood. The holding cell that has not been used for more than a century is the last one on a damp, musty-smelling corridor.

  The special cell.

  ‘Won’t keep you long,’ Herbert says, as he slams the door.

  So, he paces for a while, avoids leaning against the wall for fear of dirtying his suit, knowing that he needs to look his very best up there in the dock. When Herbert does not come back, he sits and wraps his arms around himself and tries to block out the whispers that come up from the floor, the voices repeating the messages gouged long ago into the crumbling, blackened brickwork.

  Bastads.

  No justiss for the lykes of us.

  Only God can be my judge.

  It might be hours later when the door eventually opens again and he screams at Herbert. He tells him that they’re going to be late, that the trial will have started already. Herbert tells him to calm down. ‘The trial’s already finished,’ he says. ‘Job done. Bish, bash, bosh.’

  He tries to protest, to force his way past the guards, but they push him back, laughing, towards the small black door at the other end of the cell and out into the light.

  Dead Man’s Walk.

  He is shoved along the narrow passageway. It’s tiled with grubby cream bricks and water runs down the high walls on either side and he knows he is tramping across the dead, the ones who have taken this walk before him. He can hear them below him. They are laughing too, the rhythm of it rising up through the soles of his good shoes and, for the life of him, he can’t think what they’ve got to laugh at; stuck down there, godless and gaping, their mouths filled with black mud and quicklime.

  He walks on, passing beneath a series of low arches that seem to get narrower the further he goes. It’s like Alice in Wonderland or something, like an Alfred Hitchcock film, and by the time he reaches the final arch he can barely squeeze through. It’s not an illusion, he realises, it’s deliberate; designed that way to prevent the condemned man turning and trying to run, and he has to hand it to the vicious so-and-so who built it, even as his legs start to give way and he’s shoved through and round the corner and he gets his first sight of the rope.

  ‘Might as well,’ Herbert says. ‘Seeing as we’re here.’

  Guards step forward then with the thick leather belts for his wrists and ankles, and the hangman’s lips are moving as he makes his calculations, and for some reason they’re still hammering the crossbeam into place when Mercer opens his eyes…

  There’s banging outside – workmen in the road below his window – and for a few seconds he cannot be certain where he is.

  He knows he’s no longer dreaming, knows it’s a bed and not cold earth, but still it takes him a few moments to get his bearings. To remember that he’s not staying with the coke dealer and his family any more. That he’s woken in the umpteenth different room since he left Her Majesty’s facilities behind.

  He stretches and farts; he needs to piss.

  He knows he’ll be dreaming about prison for the rest of his life and even when he was inside he dreamed about the trial; those last few weeks when he was technically innocent, when he still had some hope. But he’s been dreaming about little else since he came out. He’s decided it’s because of what he’s doing. His subconscious or whatever it is, giving him a nudge; reassuring him that he’s doing the right thing. Taking away the twinges of doubt and reminding him of what they did.

  What he’s lost.

  When he can’t hold on any longer he gets up. He pulls on underpants and a T-shirt and pads out on to the landing then along to the bathroom. He can hear voices downstairs, hushed so as not to wake him or be overheard if he’s already awake.

  The toilet’s been cleaned very recently and, as he’s pissing the bleach up into a froth, he thinks about those bits of his dream that remain vivid; yet to fragment and scatter. Maybe this one was rather more than a nudge and he’s always been able to take a hint when he’s given one. Gift horses and all that.

  He flushes, and as the cistern slowly fills he can still see the water running down those grubby cream tiles on either side of him. He moves to the sink and washes his hands, enjoying the smell of the expensive soap as he thinks about the one he still blames the most. The one who’s already on Dead Man’s Walk, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

  The one who’s been hiding.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The days following Thorne’s meeting with Frank Anderson and the confrontation with Helen seemed endless. Hectic and stressful, packed with major headaches and minor incidents. They were also hugely frustrating as Thorne made the decisions he was paid to make, filed reports and stared at clocks in overheated meeting rooms while he waited for something to break in the Mercer investigation, well aware that Holland and Kitson were busy on the jobs they were supposed to be doing. Waiting for Mercer himself to make his next move; terrified that if and when that happened, he would wonder if it was a death he could have prevented, if he’d only done what Helen was telling him to do.

  What they were all telling him to do.

  Two days on late turns – 2.00 p.m. until midnight – then the worst day of the rotation. The ‘day off’ between late turn and night shift, when you fell into bed at one in the morning – if you were lucky – got up around 10.00 a.m. and started your night shift at 10.00 p.m. the same day. Twelve hours down time, then twenty-four without sleep. It was the day they all hated, but falling on a Sunday, when Helen was at home, had made it potentially more unpleasant than usual.

  They had not seen much of each other since the argument, Thorne eager to please whenever they had been in the flat together and Helen seemingly happy enough to let him try. They slept in the same bed, but no more than that. Their exchanges had been pleasant enough, workmanlike. Sunday, though, would mean an effort to avoid one another and Thorne’s plans to do just that by sleeping as late as possible then offering to take Alfie out for a few hours had been scuppered when he’d woken at nine to find it pissing down outside.

  ‘I know,’ Helen had said. She had moved to join him at the window, the rain like tin-tacks thrown against the glass. She sounded every bit as unhappy about the day ahead as Thorne did, but her half-smile made him feel a little better. She said, ‘We are going to b
e watching a lot of Peppa Pig,’ then made them both bacon, egg and beans.

  As it was, they only ended up having to watch a couple of hours of a programme that had clearly been thought up by someone who was as high as a kite. When Alfie went for his nap in the afternoon, Thorne was able to watch the football, while Helen sat at her computer and lobbed the occasional sarcastic comment across. Later, she cooked them all pasta and, by the time Thorne was thinking about heading in to work, he had decided that the day had gone a whole lot better than it might have done.

  That things were pretty much back to normal, in fact.

  Just before he had left, though, Helen had said something about hoping he had a good shift, said it in such a way that it was clear she had forgotten and forgiven nothing. That she was pleased to see him going to do the job he was getting paid for and that the shitty weather had at least kept him at home; kept him from getting himself and others into even more trouble than they were in already.

  Now, three hours into his shift and one hour into a no less shitty Monday morning, trouble of a very different kind was brewing. The TTFN crew were gathering in numbers outside a fast food place in the shopping precinct and the units in attendance were calling for back-up.

  ‘Doesn’t look like they’re queuing for kebabs,’ Woodley had said, when she’d radioed in.

  Thorne had been sitting in his office, staring at the photograph of Terry Mercer that Holland had dug out, copied and emailed to him. It was the photo taken on Mercer’s arrest more than thirty years ago and, though he would obviously look very different now, it was the only one they had. Thorne had seen countless such pictures over the years, but not too many of the men and women in them had been smiling. Cocky, that’s what Tully had said. Always thought he would walk away. Thorne had every reason to believe that Terry Mercer would be thinking the very same thing three decades down the line.