A night that was far from Q----, but still Thorne managed to get through the write-ups and handover protocols relatively quickly and make it back to Tulse Hill in time to have breakfast with Helen and Alfie.
‘Sounds like you had fun,’ Helen said.
‘You forget how much they hate us.’ Thorne was eating cereal – the sugary stuff that actually tasted good – while Helen worked her way through something that was supposed to be good for cholesterol, but looked like it was scooped from the bottom of a budgie cage. ‘When you’re in plain clothes, you forget that. It’s not like anyone’s ever pleased to see you, I mean you’re always there because something bad’s happened… but being on the streets in uniform…’
‘Yeah, but it’s the uniform they hate,’ Helen said. ‘It’s not you.’ She reached across to push a plastic beaker of orange juice towards Alfie who was happily gnawing a piece of toast.
‘I could understand it if it was me.’ There was milk left in the bottom of his bowl, so Thorne poured more cereal in. ‘A lot of people hate me.’
‘It feels like I haven’t seen you for days,’ Helen said.
‘I know.’
‘Haven’t spoken to you, I mean.’
‘We’ve both had a lot on.’
It had only been thirty-six hours, in fact, since Thorne had left for work after their rain-drenched Sunday stuck indoors. He knew what she meant though. Night shifts could do that, throw your grasp of time off kilter.
‘We can catch up tonight,’ he said.
‘Actually I’ll be late tonight—’
‘Tom!’ Alfie said. Though it might also have been ‘dog’ or ‘toast’ or whichever sound he was currently making to announce that his nappy needed changing. ‘Tom!’
‘I said I’d go for a quick drink with Gill after work,’ Helen said. ‘Is that OK?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Any chance you could pick Alfie up?’
Thorne told her it was fine, that with four days off lying ahead, he could probably pick Alfie up every day if she wanted him to. He didn’t mean it of course, he was hoping that he would have other things to occupy him, but whether Helen knew that or not, she thanked him for the offer.
‘Well, I’m around,’ he said.
‘Let’s take Alfie to my dad’s one of the nights. Go for a meal or something.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Actually, he was saying how much he wanted to meet you.’
Thorne nodded, his mouth full, trying to decide if the moment was right.
‘OK, I’d better get a shift on,’ Helen said, pushing her chair back.
Thorne reached across and laid a hand on her arm. ‘Listen, I know how pissed off you were about me lying… before. So, I thought I’d better tell you there’s been another suicide. Another murder that was made to look like a suicide.’
Helen’s mouth tightened. Thorne withdrew his hand.
‘But… you’ll be happy to know that the MIT’s looking at this one, so… nothing to do with me.’ He managed a weak smile. ‘Looking at me too, as it happens.’
‘What d’you mean, “looking”?’
He told her about running into Hackett and how suspiciously friendly the DCI had been during their chat outside the Jacobson house. ‘I don’t know what to make of it, to be honest.’ He told her what Hackett had said. ‘Maybe three hours in that precinct with forty-odd kids looking like they’d happily cut my balls off is making me even more paranoid.’
‘Tom!’ Alfie shouted, brandishing his toast for extra emphasis.
‘Why would it make me happy?’ Helen asked.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean happy. More like… relieved, or whatever.’
‘OK.’
‘Anyway, I wanted you to know, so you wouldn’t think I was doing anything behind your back.’
Helen looked at him for a few seconds, then shrugged as though she really didn’t care what he was doing, behind her back or otherwise.
She lifted Alfie out of his chair. Said, ‘I’m going to be late.’
While Helen was busy with coats and bags, Thorne talked rather more than anyone who was comfortable had a right to. He asked her to give his best to Gill Bellinger, though he’d only met her once for five minutes. He told her to have a good time and not to worry about Alfie or getting back late. He said that he’d knock something together for dinner and leave some in case she was hungry when she got back. Helen made the appropriate noises; not angry as she had been a few days before, just lacking in enthusiasm, as though she’d flicked a switch off. Thorne found it rather more disconcerting than the anger had been.
He was asking her if she wanted him to get any shopping in when he heard the door slam.
He walked aimlessly into the bedroom, stood there in the semi-dark for a while, then trudged back into the kitchen. He felt irritated, aggrieved, but that didn’t last long. He knew very well that he had no right to one single inch of the moral high ground, and not just because he’d told Helen about the MIT investigation but chosen not to tell her it had failed.
For all sorts of other reasons.
He was still hungry, so he made himself toast. He ate it quickly in front of the Breakfast News, then dug out his Met Emergency Contacts list and called the three other inspectors who were his opposite numbers for the various shifts on his days off. He asked each of them if they would mind letting him know – didn’t matter what time of the day or night – if any sudden deaths were reported. He gave them all the same story, couched it in language they would understand. Jesmond was on his back and he was making an effort to look like he gave a toss.
The third one he called – a genuinely lazy piece of work called Simon Carlowe – had much the same reaction as the others, but voiced it rather more succinctly.
‘Never had you down as an arse-licker, Tom.’
‘New leaf and all that,’ Thorne said. ‘Never too late, is it?’
Then he called Yvonne Kitson.
She sounded vaguely surprised that Thorne had called her and not Dave Holland, but the choice had been carefully made. Thorne still had a nagging sense that Holland was backing away from it all; choosing to take his time doing anything, if not actually coming right out and speaking his mind.
‘I know how tricky it would have been getting access to multiple CCTV recordings,’ Thorne said.
‘Bloody tricky, if you don’t want people asking questions.’
‘But now we only need to look at one. I’ve got Mercer’s car.’ He gave Kitson the make and colour. ‘If Dave… or you can check out the nearest CCTV to the Jacobson house, get a single shot of that car going in or out—’
‘Right,’ Kitson said. ‘I get it.’ She sounded as though talking openly was difficult. ‘I’ll see.’
‘Look, I know it’s still asking a lot.’
‘I’ll talk to Dave.’
‘Is he getting cold feet?’
There was a pause. Kitson said she had to go, that she would try and call back later. Then the line went dead.
Thorne sat down in front of the television and began flicking quickly between the channels. Judge Judy, Animal Rescue, Homes Under The Hammer. He managed five minutes of Jeremy Kyle before the rage threatened to become murderous, then he turned the TV off and took out the radio he would normally have left in his locker at the end of the shift. Carlowe and the others had promised to call, but Thorne couldn’t be certain that they would and this way, if he was lucky, he would find out about any sudden deaths at the same time they did.
He switched on the unit, careful as always to avoid pressing the orange EMER button on the top.
The ‘Oh Shit’ button.
Use of the button cut across any transmission being made anywhere else and gave twenty seconds’ uninterrupted airtime to the user. It was the button you only ever used if you were in real trouble. It usually meant ‘officer down’. Thorne cradled the handset in his lap and listened. The Airwave received broadcasts from every officer in every borough in the c
ity, but bearing in mind where Mercer seemed to have been most active, Thorne decided to focus on those in the south-east. He flicked between them every few minutes: Lewisham, Greenwich, Bromley, Southwark.
Papa-Lima, Papa-Delta, Papa…
The chatter was almost ceaseless. Hundreds of voices, thousands of incidents. Babble and banter.
A few hours earlier, Thorne had been dead on his feet, but five minutes in the car with a savvy seventeen-year-old had changed everything. Thorne knew it wouldn’t last long. The tiredness would catch up with him eventually, but he was determined to stay one step ahead of it for as long as he could.
Right now, the last thing he wanted to do was sleep.
FORTY-THREE
He had almost laughed out loud when he’d finally been given the address.
Now, sitting outside the house, waiting for a glimpse of the man he will soon have the great pleasure to watch suffer and die, he thinks how funny it is, the way that people always come home. They come home to reconnect with their past, he supposes. They come home because it’s where they feel safe or because they’re desperately trying to hold on to something half remembered that seems precious.
They come home because it’s the end.
He’s been watching for a while now. The car is parked streets away and he’s checked, so he knows that no cameras can see him. He’s just standing about, reading the paper; a harmless old codger with nothing better to do. A woman walking her dog on the other side of the road smiles at him.
He smiles back and returns to his paper.
England football team in the doldrums, unemployment through the roof and the economy up the Swanee. Different faces, but still, could have been the same paper he was reading thirty years ago when he went inside.
He glances across at the house again, sees movement behind the net curtains in the downstairs window.
He’s trying to read, but he finds himself thinking about the woman who walked into the water, because she was the only one whose face he couldn’t see at the end. The nosy cow from the bank. He’d followed her out of the house after they’d talked things over, gone a slightly different route so as to avoid the cameras, but kept her in sight all the way. He’d stopped under some trees and watched her walk up to the edge in the dark; seen her take off her slippers and her nice, toasty dressing gown and pile them up tidy as you like a few feet back from the water itself. Careful that they wouldn’t get wet, I mean, how mad was that?
He couldn’t see her face, just the side of her lit by a sliver of moon, so God only knows if she looked scared, but he remembered how easily she’d gone into the water. There was a moment, course there was, when she took that first step – the shock of the freezing water against her bony white leg – but after that tiny hesitation she just strolled in, good as gold, like she was walking into the pub or something.
I mean, obviously she had to, that was the whole point, but at the end it was like she was happy to. OK, he decides, maybe that’s putting it a bit strongly, but she was… all right about doing it, because in the end, the alternative simply wasn’t worth thinking about. Sounds arse-about-face, he’s well aware of that, but the truth is she was willing to die because she had so much to live for.
He looks towards the house again, and thinks, that’s the irony, isn’t it?
Her and the rest of them, the whole sorry shower, have paid the price because they took all that away from him. He made sure they knew it too, while he was opening up his plastic bag and laying everything out. He made sure they knew exactly what he’d lost.
He can still remember the last time he saw her.
What she was wearing, how she smelled, all of it.
His hands tighten around the edges of the newspaper and, for a few seconds, he just wants to march straight up to the front door, force his way in and batter the fucker there and then.
A white blouse and tight jeans. That perfume she got duty free the last time they’d all been on holiday together and big earrings that swung around when she started to shake her head.
‘It’s not fair on the kids,’ she’d said.
It wasn’t her he was angry with, never had been. Well, maybe for a while at the time, but in the end she did what she thought was best for her and the kids. He was never one of those nutcases who thought his other half had a sacred duty to stick by him, any of that nonsense. She was still young, they all were, and that kind of sentence was a lifetime.
‘What sort of life would it be for them?’ Those big silver hoops, swinging. ‘Doesn’t mean they’ll stop loving you though. Doesn’t mean I will.’
He hasn’t seen her or the kids in thirty years and he has no intention of doing so. He’s kept feelers out, just enough to know they’ve all made decent lives for themselves, and he isn’t going to throw a spanner in by turning up now like a ghost. A bitter old man, pale and pathetic, trying to claw back all the time he’s lost with them.
It was them that put her in that position though. The nosy bastards and the incompetents… and him, the last one on the list. The ones who got him put away and cost him everything he might have had.
Plenty of anger where they’re concerned.
He casually moves a few feet away when he sees the front door open, steps into the cover of a large tree on the corner of the street.
Gets his first look at him.
The years haven’t been kind, but fear will do that. Fear and guilt. Whittle away at you, grind you down to skin and bone.
He looks across at the man whose name is as new to him as the face and stance are familiar. He watches him peering out from behind a half-open door and thinks of animals emerging from traps and soft fruit gone rotten.
He thinks: Do you know I’m here? That I’m coming for you?
He remembers his dream; tiles the colour of cold flesh and the sound of those echoing steps towards the gallows. He’d read once that in the old days, the ones that took the job seriously could calculate the condemned man’s weight and work out the necessary drop just by shaking hands with him. No point leaving anyone dangling there and choking to death, but no desire to pull their head off either.
Mercer certainly does not foresee a handshake and besides, he’s got no intention of being quite that careful.
Still, looking across at what’s left of the man who’s now pulling the door shut again – who’s almost certainly drawing bolts and dragging chains across – he can’t help thinking that a shoebox and a strand of cotton would do the trick.
FORTY-FOUR
Thorne was walking Alfie back from the childminder’s when Holland called, having done whatever had been required to get access to the CCTV footage nearest the Jacobson house. Thorne thought it was best not to ask how he had done it, but he was pleased that it was Holland calling. That those cold feet appeared to have warmed up a little.
‘OK, we’ve got a red Vauxhall Astra caught on the main road near Blackheath station,’ Holland said. ‘Heading north towards Eliot Place just before four thirty last Thursday afternoon. We’ve got the same car on the same cameras, driving south again at quarter to ten that night. Single occupant. Elderly white male.’
Alfie burbled happily as Thorne picked up his pace, urging the pushchair on that little bit faster. The timings fitted with Thorne’s theory about how Mercer had been able to get close enough to Jacobson and how he had known enough about the couple’s movements to do what was necessary and be out of there before Susan Jacobson returned from her book group. He had taken time and taken care.
Even accounting for however long the killing itself would have taken, Mercer had to have been hiding in that garage for over four hours.
Thorne stopped at the pedestrian crossing and punched the button. ‘Have we got a registration?’ he asked.
Holland told him that they had, and that he had already run the Astra’s licence plate through the system. ‘Car was last registered to a dealer in Mile End,’ he said. ‘Bloke’s dodgy as you like, been done half a dozen times already. He’ll have
sold it to Mercer for cash. No documentation, no questions asked, you know how it works.’
‘You spoken to him?’
‘Not had a chance.’
‘What about Kitson?’
‘Same.’
Thorne looked at his watch, tried to work out how long it would take him to get to Mile End. Then Alfie said, ‘Tom,’ or an approximation of it, and Thorne remembered that he was more than a little tied up for the rest of the day. The lights changed, and Thorne started to cross, quickly weighing his options up. He wanted to get there as soon as he could and put some pressure on whoever had sold that car. If the dealer had decent security cameras installed, they might at the very least get a better picture of Terry Mercer than a CCTV still could provide. Helen had already said she’d be back late, and Thorne wondered how she would react if he tried palming Alfie off on her sister for a couple of hours. He would be back in time to collect him before Helen got home. He wondered if he should just take Alfie with him to Mile End and not tell her.
Halfway across, Alfie dropped his toy frog on to the road and Thorne had to stop and bend to pick it up. He stared at the woman behind the wheel of a Chelsea tractor who was mouthing at him impatiently and said, ‘I’ll try and get down there tomorrow.’
‘Right,’ Holland said.
Thorne pushed that little bit harder as they got close to their block, the last hundred yards or so all uphill. ‘You know what I’m going to ask you now, don’t you?’
‘ANPR…’
The Automatic Number Plate Recognition system could be used to identify and locate any vehicle of interest to the police. With the national ANPR Centre in Hendon able to store more than 100 million ‘reads’ per day, of which twenty-five thousand were ‘hits’ of one kind or another, it was now a hugely important weapon in apprehending criminals ranging from the highly dangerous to the simply uninsured. Thorne knew that if they were able to put Mercer’s car into the ANPR database and get lucky, they could locate and track it in more or less real time. He also knew that doing so would leave behind the electronic fingerprints of whoever was inputting the data.
The Dying Hours Page 21
