In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  The crew took it more seriously, too; took Theo more seriously. Those nods and looks, as if he’d moved a lot further than he’d intended. Like he’d taken a big step up from street boy to major player in the crew.

  He was aware of Mikey getting to his feet, reaching for the pistol on the table in front of the sofa, saying, ‘You deaf or what?’

  He hadn’t heard the door.

  He picked up his own pistol - not the one he’d used three nights before, which had already been spirited away by Wave - and moved across to the front door. The knock sounded again, clanging against the metal reinforcement. He looked at the monitor on the wall, at the picture from the camera mounted above the door outside.

  Ollie peered up at the camera, then leaned in close to the intercom. ‘Come on, fuck’s sake.’ He held up a pair of twenty-pound notes. ‘Punter wants two, man. Needs them quick, you get me?’

  Theo stared at the picture. Ollie’s dreads looked almost silvery in the grainy black-and-white image. The gun felt hot and heavy at the end of his arm.

  ‘Fucking let him in, man,’ Mikey said.

  Theo slid back the bolts and opened the door to let Ollie crash into the room.

  Helen put on one of Paul’s old Queen albums while she cleaned. Turned it up loud and sang along. She vacuumed everywhere, moving the lighter bits of furniture to get underneath and using vinegar on all the mirrors and windows. She emptied the fridge and washed it out; wiped down all the walls and kitchen cabinets. She would have got down on her hands and knees to do the floor but she knew it would be like lying across a space-hopper.

  She was sweating by the time she’d finished, and she sat in front of the television until it got dark. She felt the baby shift and roll in her belly, and tried to cry.

  It wasn’t as though she didn’t know this was often the way it went - that the tears could be the last thing to come. She’d seen how it could hit plenty of people, seen the way that even the news itself had a different effect on one person from another. She’d seen them scream, or laugh, or hurl abuse. A lot of the time there was just silence, a shutter coming down . . . in front of others at any rate. That’s how it had been with her: sitting up in bed and scrabbling for the light when the phone had rung at four-thirty on a Saturday morning.

  Listening, and feeling a switch snick quietly off inside.

  She knew that the tears had to come at some point, but wondered if cleaning what was already clean and scrubbing at surfaces until your hands were raw might be a grieving of sorts. Wondered why she’d spent so much of the last few months crying like a child but couldn’t squeeze out a single tear when she wanted to so badly.

  Like she’d just wasted them all.

  Jenny had brought a saucepan of soup across the day before - she was a fabulous cook, on top of everything else - and once Helen had eaten and washed up, she sat down with the plastic bag she’d brought back with her from Becke House.

  Paul’s personal effects: the suit and shirt returned from the Forensic Science Service lab; shoes, socks, underwear; briefcase and umbrella; wallet, car keys and mobile phone. She laid everything out neatly on the table, folding the shirt to hide the bloodstains at the neck, and tried to make some decisions.

  She would have the suit dry-cleaned and take it to the charity shop. She needed to sort out all of Paul’s clothes as soon as possible. To choose something for him to wear whenever the time came.

  His blue suit with a white shirt. Maybe his dress uniform if that was what other people wanted.

  She would take the car keys and head over to Kennington the following morning.

  Drive Paul’s car back.

  Think about selling it, maybe.

  The mobile phone had turned itself off. She fetched the charger that was plugged in by Paul’s side of the bed and powered up the handset. The last call had been the one made to her while she was driving back from Katie’s, an hour or so before the crash.

  The message she’d listened to twenty or thirty times since then.

  ‘It’s me. Just heading back to Gary’s place . . . trying to find a cab or a night bus or whatever.’ There is singing in the background, then some shouting. ‘Shut up. Sorry . . . that’s Kelly being a twat. See you tomorrow afternoon, OK?’ More shouting, then laughter from both of them. ‘Actually, better make that evening . . .’

  She knew with certainty which face he’d been pulling when he’d said that.

  She blinked and saw his face again, pallid and blank, floating above the white sheet in the mortuary’s viewing suite. They’d combed his hair. His mum had reached up and run fingers through it; said that he always hated it looking too neat.

  She noticed the envelope icon in the corner of the screen, checked and saw that there was one unread text message. She called it up.

  A message from ‘Frank’ received the day before: What about next week for Chinese? F.

  Paul’s mother and father had talked about putting an announcement in the paper, but nobody had quite been able to decide which one. They’d made a few phone calls, asked people to pass on the message, and between them and Helen, the news had probably reached most of Paul’s close friends. She’d already considered going through his address book, to try to reach anyone Paul might have lost touch with, or with whom she had no contact herself. This seemed as good a time to start as any.

  She dialled the number.

  ‘Paul?’ A quiet voice, a London accent.

  ‘Is this Frank?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Sorry . . . my name’s Helen. I’m Paul’s girlfriend.’ There was a pause. Helen was about to speak again.

  ‘I know who you are.’

  Helen was a little taken aback, stumbling over the words more than she might have done anyway. ‘Look, I’m sorry to bother . . . be bothering you, but I wanted to let you know that Paul died at the weekend.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  It was a reflex: matter of fact but disturbing all the same; the power of his dismissal. ‘I’m really sorry.’ She waited, listening to him breathe for a few seconds, until she decided he wasn’t going to say anything more. ‘I saw that you’d left a message, so—’

  ‘How did he pass away?’

  ‘There was a car accident.’

  ‘Where? What sort of accident?’

  ‘I’d rather not—’

  ‘Was Paul driving?’

  ‘No, he was . . . hit.’ She glanced across at Paul’s things on the table. There was a bloodstain on one of the shoes as well. ‘OK, like I said, I saw the message. I just wanted to . . .’

  ‘I’m sorry about the language before.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No. It’s unforgivable.’

  His tone had suddenly become almost melodramatic, and Helen wondered what she must sound like to him. Calm? Cold, even? ‘Listen, I know it’s Frank, but I don’t have a second name.’

  ‘Linnell,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  He said it again. ‘Emphasis on the second syllable.’

  She leaned across to take a pen and paper from her bag. ‘There isn’t a date yet - you know, for the funeral - but if you let me have an address I can let you know the details when we’ve got them.’ Again she waited, until she’d begun to think that he’d hung up; she heard a cough and a series of sniffs. ‘So, if you could—’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

  The line went dead.

  THIRTEEN

  Driving from Kennington, she could smell Paul in the car; his cigarettes and sweat. He’d obviously been smoking a lot more than he’d let on, and she felt herself getting cross with him. There were empty cans in the footwell and Kit-Kat wrappers and scraps of paper. ‘And your car’s a bloody disgrace,’ she said.

  At the station, she’d been keen to get in and out quickly. She’d shown her ID at the front desk and hurried through to the car park with her head down. She’d almost been away and clear, had just closed the car door, when the custody sergeant came bustling ou
t. She’d met him in the pub a few times and he’d always seemed nice enough.

  Every station had one like him: tough as old boots and soft as shit.

  ‘Helen, hang on . . .’

  She wound down the car window.

  ‘I just wanted to say how sorry we all are. Christ.’ He rubbed at something on the roof of the car. ‘Couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She couldn’t remember his name. Harry? Henry?

  ‘Such a ridiculous way for it to . . . happen, you know?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Not that she could see how it would have been any less ridiculous to be knifed by a drunk or blown up on a tube train.

  ‘Listen, the lads are organising a bit of a collection . . .’

  She nodded; of course they were. Love and marriage, fish and chips, dead coppers and whip-rounds. She didn’t quite know what she was expected to say, so she just said ‘thanks’ and started the car.

  The sergeant watched her back out and turn round; waved as she eased out of the car park.

  The Met had a number of garages on either side of the river. One was in Hammersmith, hidden behind blue metal gates on a side street off the Fulham Palace Road. Helen parked up and walked round to the main workshop. It was a warm morning and the doors were open. A number of people were working on vehicles outside - two written-off police Saabs and a Mercedes with its passenger door caved in - while inside, a group of three men stood around a table, examining an engine block as if they were trying to decipher the Dead Sea scrolls.

  The place was like any other garage, though perhaps a little cleaner and without the girlie calendars. There were winches and pits, benches and racks of tools. Gas bottles and cutting equipment were arranged along one wall and next to the other were stairs at the top of which Helen guessed there would be offices and engineering labs with high-tech equipment for more delicate work.

  She showed her ID to one of the men working on the Mercedes and gave the name of the crime scene manager she was looking for. He pointed to the group studying the engine and Helen walked across to a big man wearing blue overalls and a dirty white baseball cap.

  She flashed the warrant card again. ‘I’d like to see the silver BMW,’ she said. ‘The Hopwood case?’

  Roger Deering was the CSM whose name she had copied from the DI’s notebook, along with the address of the garage and several other bits and pieces. He led her across to where three vehicles were lined up with covers stretched across them. He pulled off the cover from the car in the middle. ‘Here you go . . .’

  Helen walked slowly around the BMW, aware that Deering was watching her. The front of the car had crumpled, with the bonnet buckled. She stared. It was impossible to tell how much of the damage had been done by the wall which the car had eventually hit, and how much was down to Paul.

  ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’ Deering asked.

  The windscreen had shattered and imploded. It bowed back into the car like glass webbing. There wasn’t any blood.

  ‘I’m about done on this one, to be honest,’ he said. ‘You might be better off talking to the collision investigator.’

  In a fatal traffic accident where death was deemed to be suspicious, the CSM took the role that would otherwise have belonged to a scene-of-crime officer. Like many SOCOs, the crime scene manager was not a police officer and could not give evidence in court. He or she would be responsible for the forensic examination of the car: taking swabs, prints and paint samples and liaising with other scientific experts where necessary. Once that had been done, a collision investigator - usually a specially trained traffic officer - would step in to take charge of accident reconstruction. Then the vehicle would be stripped down so that brakes and steering could be properly analysed; so that the car’s broken body could tell its story.

  A post-mortem of sorts.

  Helen walked around to the near-side rear door and opened it. The back seat was missing and the mats had been removed. There was still some glass on the floor from the window through which the shots had been fired.

  ‘We dug one bullet out of the wheel arch and the other out of the far door.’

  Helen was startled. She hadn’t been aware of Deering moving up behind her. She turned to look at him.

  ‘They’re with ballistics,’ he said. ‘So we’ll wait and see. Thirty-eights, if you ask me.’

  ‘Not that they’ll ever find the gun,’ Helen said.

  ‘Right, right.’ He nodded and let out a strange laugh, like a strangled cough.

  She found herself leaning back against the car, retreating a little from the CSM’s gaze. She felt almost as though he were studying her.

  ‘Why don’t we go and get some tea?’ he said.

  He led her upstairs and into a small office. The filing cabinets looked pre-war and the two computers were grey with grime. Helen sat in a stiff-backed armchair against the wall, while Deering went to get the tea. He was back quickly with two mugs and an open packet of digestives. She took one and he carried a second chair across.

  ‘You’re his girlfriend, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘The bloke that was hit.’

  She looked up at him, her mouth full of biscuit.

  The nod towards her belly answered the unasked question. ‘Somebody said that he had a partner who was expecting.’

  She smiled at the word; it wasn’t one she’d heard from anyone other than her grandmother. She could suddenly hear a gentle hint of the North-East in Deering’s accent. ‘Expecting’ sounding like ‘expectant’.

  ‘Did you see what you came to see?’ he asked.

  ‘I just wanted to see the woman’s car.’ She shrugged like that was perfectly reasonable. He nodded as if he agreed that it was, but still she wondered what he was thinking. ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘Nothing I wasn’t expecting to find. The bullets, obviously. Some of Mrs Ruston’s blood on the front seat.’ He looked at her across the top of his mug. ‘She was the driver.’

  Helen nodded. Another name she’d taken from the notebook.

  ‘I don’t think the airbag deployed until the car hit the wall. She broke her nose at the . . . first impact.’

  ‘When she hit Paul, you mean.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Helen took a slurp of tea and Deering did likewise.

  ‘I haven’t written everything up yet,’ he said. ‘I prefer getting my hands dirty, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Like most of us.’

  ‘Right, right.’

  They sat in silence for ten, fifteen seconds. Deering removed his cap and Helen saw that he was virtually bald on top. She was surprised, as there was plenty of hair at the sides and he couldn’t have been more than forty. He finished his drink and said, ‘This feels a bit weird.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s like there’s something you think I can tell you. You know, that’ll help you feel better. Truth is, I don’t even know how fast the car was going.’

  ‘That’s not why I came.’

  ‘Like I said, you’d be better off talking to the collision investigator.’

  ‘It’s fine, honestly.’

  She wasn’t just trying to make him feel more comfortable. She understood what he was talking about, but there were things she really didn’t feel a need to know.

  She had not seen the post-mortem and had no plans to do so. She did not know if Paul had died instantly. She knew that he had gone by the time he reached hospital, had been dead for a while by the time she got the call. That was enough.

  Suffering and struggle. Last words. That kind of knowledge could not help anybody, surely. Then again, she might develop a burning desire to know that sort of stuff later on. It didn’t really feel as though she were doing any of the things she was supposed to, or at least not in the conventional order. She certainly couldn’t explain why she’d wanted to see the car.

  Why she wasn’t at home, curled up and howling.

  The phone rang, and though Deering ignored it for a few seconds colour rose in h
is face. He ran thumb and forefinger around the edge of his cap. ‘I’d best be getting on,’ he said. The DI had said much the same thing. It was becoming obvious that heavily pregnant widows were not the most relaxing of company.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Have you got a card or something?’

  She handed one over and Deering walked her back downstairs. She pointed to the pair of mangled Saabs on her way out. ‘What happened there, then?’

  ‘Chasing some drugged-up teenager across most of Essex,’ Deering said. ‘The driver didn’t get out of it. Young PC with a couple of kiddies. ’

  As Helen got back into Paul’s car, she found herself wondering where they kept all the pallbearer’s white gloves.

  Easy arrived at the stash house announcing that he’d brought lunch with him. Theo opened the bag and pulled a face.

  ‘Fuck you, Jamie Oliver,’ Easy said. ‘That’s the quality gear, man, the shish, yeah? I wouldn’t be bringing no doner kebab rubbish, would I? That stuff’s just pig’s lips and stomachs and shit.’

  They left Mikey sprawled on the sofa and moved through to the kitchen to eat. Easy had on a red tracksuit and a couple of new chains; heavy ones that Theo liked the look of. He decided he might get himself one come the end of the week.

  ‘Got to do it, man,’ Easy said. ‘Why else you working your arse off? I’ll take you to see this guy I know, get you the best deal.’

  When they’d finished eating, Theo gathered up the plates and paper, flicked on the kettle. Easy stayed at the table rolling himself a spliff.

  ‘You positive Wave got rid of that gun?’ Theo said.

  Easy slid the Rizla across his tongue. ‘What’s this now?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Still the bus stop thing, yeah?’

  ‘Fuck sake, you not seen the extra police walking about out there?’ Easy shrugged and lit up. ‘You think that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘You got to breathe easy, T. Stay collected.’ Easy opened his mouth wide, let the pungent smoke drift out and up. ‘Nobody asking any questions.’

  Mikey shouted through from the other room: ‘Any of that coming my way?’

  Easy passed the joint to Theo, who took it gratefully and drew hard. Anything that was going to relax him was a good idea. He’d not slept well for three nights, and with the tiredness on top of everything else he’d found himself fighting with Javine for no reason. Shouting at the baby, which he knew was mental, and which only led to more arguments. He was increasingly unnerved by crowds and loud noises. It was becoming hard to concentrate, to think about business.