The Dying Hours

by Mark Billingham

  He says, ‘Right, our kids, and I want to see them.’

  She can’t look at him. ‘They don’t want to see you.’

  Those boots on his chest gain a little weight. He swallows and swallows but there’s no spit in his mouth and he presses the flat of his hand against the screen for a few seconds until one of the screws tells him to remove it.

  ‘They told me,’ she says. ‘They can’t handle this any more. I’ve got piss-covered sheets to deal with every morning and they’re both getting into trouble at school and they’re bright enough to know why that’s happening.’

  ‘They’ll get used to it.’

  ‘They shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘It’s normal.’

  ‘It’s not normal.’ She raises her voice for the first and only time and that’s when he knows he’s lost her, that he’s lost all of them. That there’s no point clinging on like someone who’s forgotten how a man should behave. No point asking his mates on the outside to keep her in line for him. That’s when he feels something break. ‘It’s normal we want,’ she says. ‘Can’t you understand that? And if you love us even half as much as you say you do in those letters, you’ll give us a chance to try and have it.’

  He tells her he loves her twice as much, and he leans forward again so he can smell her through the holes at the top of the screen.

  The screw in the corner shouts, ‘Two minutes.’

  And Mercer blinks, back in the present, when the man standing on the chair says, ‘Please, Terry…’

  Mercer takes a step closer to him. The man on the chair instinctively tries to shy away, but there’s nowhere he can go. Not with the staircase at his back and the washing line tight around his neck. ‘That’s what you did,’ Mercer says. ‘What you’re responsible for. That’s why you’re going to make me happy and step off that chair.’

  Mallen shakes his head, desperate. He tries to speak and manages no more than a mangled croak. He tries again. ‘There’s no need for this, Terry.’

  ‘What, you just thought we were going to have a quick chat and sort it all out? Thought I’d popped round so we could bury the hatchet?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thirty years too late, old son.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to say.’ Mallen’s eyes are wide and wet. ‘Thirty years, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Mercer says. ‘Water under the bridge, forgive and forget, all that carry-on.’ He nods, like he’s thinking about it. ‘Only problem is, Mr Mallen, I think those thirty years have been a bit kinder to you than they were to me.’ He cranes his head forward. ‘Now stop whining like an old woman and do it.’

  Mallen shakes his head again and his Adam’s apple squeezes up and down against the washing line as he swallows. He splutters and coughs a spray of froth, which settles on his collar. ‘I can’t…’ There’s a tremor in one of his legs, which he is fighting to control. The chair begins to wobble just a little and he lets out a racking gasp. ‘Christ… oh, Christ.’

  Mercer groans, disgusted. When he had arrived, there had been cosy cooking smells lingering in the small hallway between the front door and the kitchen. The sausages the man had eaten for his tea. Now there is only the sharp tang of sweat and urine.

  ‘All the others were only incidental really,’ he says. ‘None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for you.’ He gathers up the contents of his plastic bag, which had been laid out in a line at Mallen’s feet. ‘To be honest, I’m surprised you didn’t do this yourself, a long time ago. You had any sort of decency, I could have just pissed on your grave and been done with it.’

  He moves even closer. There are three items in his hand. Plenty of leverage with this one.

  He holds the first one up, nodding admiringly as he makes a show of looking at it. ‘Just imagine,’ he says. ‘Well, now you know exactly what it feels like.’ Then the second. ‘I mean, if I have to knock you off there myself, you won’t be any less dead, will you?’ The final one, pushed hard into his face, sliding against the sweat and the slobber. ‘Only if I do it, the last thing you’ll be thinking, dangling there like a soap-on-a-rope for those final few seconds, is what I’m trotting off to do as soon as I walk out of that door.’ He moves his head until he meets his victim’s eyes. ‘How much I’m going to enjoy it.’

  The man on the chair screams in his face; a bellow of rage and of determination.

  Mercer steps back to avoid the spittle, but he knows the job’s as good as done. He stares, eyes wide as the man sucks in fast, frantic breaths and then begins to mumble.

  ‘You’re not serious?’ Mercer says. ‘Are you praying?’ He claps a hand to his chest. ‘Oh, that’s beautiful.’

  He is still laughing when Mallen steps off the chair.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  There were a dozen or so cars on the lot: low-end models for the most part with high mileage, but polished up to look halfway presentable. The brightly coloured signs inside the windscreens pronounced them all as ‘Bargains’, ‘Star Deals’ or ‘Good Runners’, but Thorne knew enough about the man who was selling them to doubt that many would make it to the top of the Mile End Road. Trading Standards would have had a field day, he decided, weeding out the insurance write-offs and insisting on signs with more truthful descriptions.

  ‘Cut-and-Shut’. ‘Clock Turned Back’. ‘Riddled with Rust’.

  The owner appeared within a few minutes of Thorne’s arrival. He materialised like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn and sauntered towards the car Thorne was inspecting. He straightened his tie as he passed beneath strips of Union Jack bunting, which were probably bought cheaply a week or two after the Diamond Jubilee.

  Keith Fryer wore a light blue suit over a striped business shirt and shoes shaped like Cornish pasties. There was a good deal of jewellery. A strong breeze played havoc with hair that was suspiciously dark for a man who was clearly in his early sixties.

  ‘Best car I’ve got,’ he said. He nodded at the Mini Cooper, which Thorne was slowly circling. ‘Done a lot of miles, I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t, but there’s a full service history.’

  Thorne said, ‘One lady owner, right?’ and bent to peer in through the car’s front window.

  Fryer laughed, wheezy. ‘Are you looking to trade in?’ He turned and nodded towards Thorne’s BMW, parked on the main road. He had obviously watched it pull up. ‘I can give you a decent price for that, if it’s in good nick.’

  Thorne stood up, stared at Fryer across the car. The man clearly believed in the ‘no bullshit’ approach to dealing with his customers. The irony would almost certainly have been lost on a second-hand car salesman who made the character of Frank Butcher in EastEnders look positively nuanced.

  He had more front than Jordan.

  ‘I was actually looking for an Astra,’ Thorne said.

  Fryer raised a meaty palm to flatten his flyaway hair and looked around, as if there might have been one he’d forgotten about. ‘Nah… sorry, mate. I can keep an eye out if that’s really what you’re after, but if you ask me the Golf’s a much better bet. Got a nice silver one in yesterday as a matter of fact.’

  ‘No, it needs to be an Astra,’ Thorne said. ‘A red one, preferably.’

  There was no obvious reaction. ‘I mean, yeah, we do get them,’ he said. ‘They’re nice motors, so they tend to get snapped up. Reliable, you know?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘How reliable was the one you sold Terry Mercer?’

  Fryer blinked, sniffed. The wind picked his hair up again, but he was suddenly a little less bothered about it. ‘Sorry, who?’ he said. ‘What was the name again?’

  Thorne reached into his jacket for his warrant card.

  Fryer was already turning away. ‘Yeah, yeah. Obviously…’

  Thorne watched the man walking towards a rickety, single-storey building that was only a step up from a Portakabin. Hands in pockets and boot-black hair flying, well aware that Thorne was going to follow hi
m.

  By the time Thorne stepped into the tiny office, Fryer was wedged in behind a desk in the corner, doing his best to appear busy with a stack of paperwork. Thorne glanced around as he moved to pick up a folded plastic chair from against the wall: a plywood case with rows of car keys on hooks; a tattered Formula One calendar; a signed picture of a dog-faced Millwall player Thorne didn’t recognise.

  Thorne sat down and Fryer continued to ignore him.

  ‘A lot of red tape, I should imagine,’ Thorne said. ‘Business like yours.’ He waited, got no response. ‘Clocking, falsifying service histories… lot of shredding as well, I’m guessing. You should get yourself a secretary.’

  ‘You’re wasting your breath.’ Fryer did not even look up. ‘And your time.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty of time,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s my day off. I might go to the zoo later on.’ He dragged his chair closer to the desk, the legs scraping against the cheap industrial carpet. ‘Anyway, it’s nice to hear the Astra’s reliable, because I’m sure Terry Mercer wouldn’t want some bag of hammers that’s going to keep breaking down on him. He’s got places to go, people to see.’

  Fryer pushed the stack of papers away and sat back. ‘Look, I met Terry Mercer a few times, all right? Thirty-odd years ago, longer than that. I don’t know what you’re on about, ’cos he’s inside anyway.’

  Thorne smiled at the attempt and politely told Fryer that now he was the one wasting his breath. ‘Listen, we know that the red Vauxhall Astra I’m talking about was registered to you. Now, considering you’ve not clapped eyes on Mercer for so long, it’s a hell of a coincidence that it’s the same one he’s currently getting about in.’ He sat back and shook his head at the mystery of it all. ‘So, why don’t you stop pissing about and tell me about selling him the car?’

  ‘I never sold him any car.’

  ‘So who did you sell the car to? I mean we know you sold it to someone because you haven’t got it any more. So why don’t you have a look through your sales receipts and remind yourself?’

  ‘I don’t remember any red Astra, all right?’

  ‘I’ve got the registration number if that’ll help.’

  Fryer shrugged, but for the first time he began to look frightened. Thorne knew that the car dealer had good reason to be afraid and that it was not the police or what they might do that was draining the colour from his face or causing his fingers to flutter against the desktop.

  On another day he might almost have felt sorry for him.

  ‘He paid you in cash, right?’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Didn’t want any records kept.’

  ‘I don’t do business like that.’

  ‘Did you owe him a favour? Or did he just put the frighteners on?’

  Fryer shook his head, then snatched gratefully at the mobile on his desk when it began to ring. ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan.

  ‘Nice,’ Thorne said.

  Fryer listened, grunted once or twice then hung up. ‘I’ve got a business to run, all right? So we’d best call it a day.’ He stood and moved towards the door.

  Thorne got up and barred his way, a hand on his chest. ‘Have you any idea how much shit I can bring down on your head with just one call to Trading Standards? They’ll close you down without blinking. I mean clearly you don’t want Mercer finding out you said anything, but trust me, I’m going to catch him long before he finds out.’

  Fryer stared at him, his face even paler than it was before. He said, ‘Do what you have to.’

  Thorne stepped aside and invited Fryer to leave. ‘Oh… I noticed you’ve got some nice flashy security cameras out there. I’ll need to see the tapes from a couple of months ago if that’s OK.’

  Fryer stopped in the doorway and suddenly he looked a little happier. ‘Fill your boots, mate. You’re right though, it is pretty flashy. Trouble with these digital things though is the disks get full up so quickly.’ There was even a hint of a smile now. ‘So every week we just have to wipe them and start again.’ He adjusted his tie and his hair, then marched out towards the lot.

  Thorne stayed where he was for a few minutes. Waiting until he was more or less certain that he could walk back across the car lot without putting a rock, or a fire extinguisher, or Keith Fryer’s head through one of the windscreens. When he did go – a hundred small Union Jacks snapping in the wind above him – he was aware of Fryer clocking his exit; ignoring the customer he was with and watching him every step of the way.

  Do what you have to…

  He pulled the BMW away fast from the kerb and was almost clipped by a van he should really have seen coming. The driver leaned on his horn and, screaming in shock and frustration, Thorne did the same. He accelerated away, but not before he had glimpsed another BMW parked on the opposite side of the road.

  One that Keith Fryer would have paid an even better price for.

  An uncomfortably familiar figure at the wheel.

  FORTY-NINE

  Back at the flat, Thorne turned on his radio again to monitor the broadcasts. He ate what was left of the previous night’s pasta for lunch, then, faced with the prospect of bouncing off the walls for the rest of the afternoon, he opened up his laptop and set about looking for anything he didn’t already know about Terry Mercer.

  A Google search produced more than sixty-five thousand hits.

  Thinking that a shot in the dark could do no harm, Thorne quickly searched through ‘images’. He was rewarded with nothing but the familiar mugshot, a few black and white photos of Mercer as a teenager, a press picture of the garden where the shooting had taken place and, somewhat confusingly, several photos of Ray Winstone and Vinnie Jones.

  Mercer even merited his own entry on Wikipedia.

  Terence James Mercer (born 1940) is a career criminal responsible for a series of high-profile armed robberies but most notorious for the murder of a police officer, for which he was jailed for a minimum of twenty-five years. He remains imprisoned…

  Thorne stopped reading and scrolled down, thinking that somebody needed to update the information, then deciding that if things worked out the way he hoped, they should probably not bother.

  He glanced at the contents.

  1.

  Early life.

  2.

  Crystal Palace shooting.

  3.

  Trial and imprisonment.

  4.

  Screen adaptation and legacy.

  The fourth entry pulled him up short. He was amazed and appalled to read that in the late nineties, at the height of the craze for Lock, Stock-style gangster chic, repeated efforts had been made to bring Mercer’s story to the screen. The failure to raise the finance was clearly no great loss to cinema, but it explained the pictures Thorne had seen before. The go-to screen hard men of the time.

  Thorne felt slightly sick, even thinking about it.

  However things panned out in the end, and whatever his own part in it turned out to be, it was likely there would be even more film interest in the final chapters of Terry Mercer’s story. There were a lot more bodies this time round, after all. Blood usually meant box office.

  For Christ’s sake, though… legacy?

  Thorne had seen that with his own eyes, had smelled it. The varying state of the remains. Heard it in the voices of John and Margaret Cooper’s son and Brian Gibbs’ daughter, the dreadful Keep-Calm-And-Carry-On civility of Richard Jacobson’s wife.

  He closed the laptop and walked quickly to the fridge, needing something to wash the taste of overcooked meat from his mouth.

  The bottle of beer became two as Thorne sat and waited for Helen to get home. With the Airwave close enough so that he could still hear the radio chatter, he put on a CD; the same Johnny Cash album Hackett had been playing in his car a couple of days before, one of his favourites. He skipped the song they had listened to together and went straight to the second track. Another cover version.

  ‘Solitary Man’.

  Now, Thorne wondered if subcon
sciously he was sending himself a message.

  Hackett…

  Thorne had been willing to believe that it had been a coincidence, the MIT man turning up like that at the Jacobson house only a few minutes after he had arrived. Hackett had been the one with every right to be there, after all. There was no earthly reason for him to be parked up opposite Keith Fryer’s car dealership though.

  Thorne was less concerned about what Hackett wanted than with how he had known where to find him. He must have known what Thorne was doing there and why, and if that was true, there was every reason to believe that he knew everything.

  So, why wasn’t he doing anything about it?

  Why weren’t the Rubberheelers banging on Thorne’s front door at that very moment?

  More importantly, if Hackett did know, then who the hell had told him?

  Cash was singing about life alone for the third or perhaps the fourth time, and, lying stretched out on the sofa, Thorne was no nearer coming up with an answer to the Hackett question that was not unthinkable, when he heard Helen’s key in the door. He quickly turned off his radio and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Alfie was first into the living room, burbling and pulling off his hat, a determined look on his face as he toddled towards the television.

  Thorne had not seen Helen that morning and had woken only briefly when she had come to bed the night before after her evening out. Just long enough to smell the drink and mumble something about hoping she’d had a good time; to get the distinct impression that she was feeling horny and to realise that he was still too tired to even think about it. Within moments of Alfie waking up and taking so much as a cuddle off the agenda anyway, Thorne had been asleep again.