In the Dark

by Mark Billingham

  ‘So, this gun, yeah?’

  ‘Wave says it’s gone. He found it, he lost it again. No more.’

  They both knew that Wave had young cousins, twelve and thirteen, and the smart money was on him using them to hold onto firearms. It was a common enough ploy. Kids . . . real kids, were less likely to be picked up with guns, and wouldn’t be looking at a mandatory five-year sentence if they were. The likes of Wave didn’t get where they were without playing all the angles; operating smooth.

  ‘I don’t want some ten-year-old passing that thing round in exchange for sweeties,’ Theo said. ‘All I’m saying.’

  Easy laughed, took back the spliff. ‘It’s gone, T, I said. You need to trust me on this, yeah?’

  Theo stared at him. That was another thing that had changed since the drive up to Hackney and back. He remembered how Easy had been with him that night: the looks and the laughing from the back seat; the back and forwards with Wave and SnapZ, getting in little digs and putting him down. There’d been something . . . hard about him, and cruel. Theo had seen him like that with other people when he’d had to be; knew that Easy had a wicked temper. But not with him; not before.

  He’d pulled him up on it as soon as they’d got back. Easy and the others had been high on the night, while Theo just waited for the adrenaline to stop rushing through him, like a white-knuckle ride he couldn’t wait to get off.

  Easy had laughed, said, ‘It’s just chit-chat, man. Just trying to keep you on your toes and fired up for it, you get me? You still my Star Boy, T.’

  Now, Easy looked across the table at him through a curtain of smoke; that smile building slowly as the skunk did its job. ‘Got something I need you for,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Little bit of fundraising. No big thing at all.’

  Theo spread his arms. ‘Got this to look out for now, man.’

  ‘It’s sorted.’

  Theo took what was left of the spliff.

  ‘Wave gets a nice cut of whatever I come out with so he’s happy,’ Easy said. ‘SnapZ looks after the cash for a bit, and you come with me. Next week you buy yourself three of these nice sick chains, you get me?’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  Now the killer smile really kicked in. ‘This one is very sweet and very simple,’ he said. He reached a hand out towards Theo’s face. ‘And all I need is a boy with that nice, innocent look you got.’

  Theo moved back, pushing his chair onto two legs. Thinking that it was bullshit. That even if it wasn’t, the look was all that he had left.

  ‘I’ll bell you with the whats and whens,’ Easy said.

  They turned at the urgent knocking and watched Mikey jump up and move towards the door. There was a muffled conversation via the intercom and a few seconds later SnapZ came charging into the kitchen, nodding and grinning, dropping the early edition of the Standard onto the table.

  Theo saw the headline and felt the puke rise up.

  SnapZ didn’t bother taking off his headphones and the beat that leaked from them was like an angry insect buzzing around the kitchen. He drummed his forefingers on the paper then pointed them both at Theo. ‘Now you’re a serious playa, T,’ he said. ‘Big-time gangsta, for real.’ He took the remains of the joint from between Theo’s lips, sucked on it and hissed out the smoke. He nodded towards the newspaper, his voice far louder than it needed to be. ‘Now you’re a cop-killer . . .’

  FOURTEEN

  Frank Linnell tried to get back for lunch as often as he could, enjoying the chance to relax for an hour or two in the middle of the day, and happy enough that Clive was keeping an eye on progress at the pub.

  He had picked up the paper on the way home.

  Sitting in the office downstairs, he had read the entire story through twice: the front-page splash and full report across three further pages inside; the sidebar with the Commissioner’s response and an appeal for information; the editorial comment condemning the shocking waste of life and demanding that something be done about the city’s drug gangs.

  There had been a tear or two the night before, when Paul’s girlfriend had called. Now he shed a few more and had a stiff drink before he read the story a third time. Got all that out of the way so he could start to think clearly.

  Through the open door he saw his sister Laura drift down the stairs on her way to the kitchen. He shouted that he’d be through in a minute and went back to the paper.

  There were just the two of them now, his mother having passed on eighteen months before in the basement he’d had converted into a granny flat. Just him and Laura, rattling around in the big house in Blackheath. But Frank was happy enough. He knew some of the stupid things that were said about his domestic set-up - behind his back, of course; always behind his back - but he was long past caring what other people thought, and the arrangements suited him nicely.

  When she was on the way out, his mum had urged him to do up the basement flat and rent it out, but it wasn’t as though he needed the money, and he didn’t want strangers around the place. Didn’t relish the intrusion. A Russian girl came in to clean when he wasn’t there, and a woman named Betty spent each Monday in his kitchen knocking up enough food for the week, leaving the freezer stocked with pies and casseroles, pasta dishes and fruit crumbles.

  It wasn’t doing his weight any good, mind you.

  He didn’t need anyone else around; he was never short of company. There were always a few of the boys knocking about talking business and what have you; and there were times, weeks on end if there was something serious on, when Clive more or less lived there. Even when things were quiet, a drinking partner or someone to watch a TV programme with was only ever a phone call away.

  Whatever anyone thought or said, it worked for him. And, as Frank was fond of telling Clive, or anyone else whose ear he was bending, he was ‘far too old and ugly to change anything now’.

  He turned on the CD player - a bit of Elgar that he liked - and stared at the front page: ‘POLICE OFFICER NAMED AS VICTIM OF GANG SHOOTING. FLASHED HEADLIGHTS LEAD TO TRAGEDY’.

  There was a picture of the bus stop where it had happened; the metal frame mangled and beads of glass piled like ice in the gutter. There was crime-scene tape and a yellow INCIDENT board at the side of the road. On the inside pages the events had been recreated in a series of simple drawings, like a cartoon strip: a stick man pointing a gun from the window of Car A; and the moment of impact rendered with a jagged line where the front of Car B met the legs of a second stick man on the pavement.

  He understood now why the girlfriend had been so vague about the ‘accident’ when she’d called, poor cow. She’d sounded nice, he thought. Not that he’d expected Paul to be with anyone who wasn’t nice.

  He listened to the music for another few minutes; closed his eyes and thought about the best way to proceed. The means to sort things expeditiously. He thought about stick men on their knees, begging; and later twisted in damp ditches, with holes in their perfectly round heads.

  Then he wandered through to the kitchen, fancying that he might defrost a lasagne if he had one left.

  ‘Will they charge him with murder? When they catch him?’

  ‘They’ll go for murder; probably get manslaughter.’

  ‘I’m still not sure I understand the difference.’

  ‘But they won’t catch him,’ Helen said.

  She’d met Jenny at a Pizza Express in Waterloo. Her sister had seemed keen to talk about the investigation, the nuts and bolts of things, thinking perhaps that, being work-related, it might be easier for Helen to deal with than other stuff.

  ‘I’m sure they’re trying their best,’ Jenny said.

  Helen studied the menu, decided on an American Hot with extra jalapeños and a soft egg. Thought about salmonella and decided the egg might not be such a good idea.

  It was marginally easier to think about the investigation rather than which coffin she was going to choose for Paul. But there wasn’t a great deal in it. With so
little progress, there wasn’t much to say anyway; and Jenny’s limited grasp of police procedure tended to limit the conversation a little.

  It struck Helen more than usual how little interest her sister had ever shown in her work. She sensed that Jenny found what she did distasteful somehow. As though sordid tales of abuse and dysfunction could only sully her own perfect family, the picture of them all that she carried around in her head.

  ‘You doing OK?’ Jenny asked.

  Not that Helen was any stranger to denial herself, of course. She conjured the same smile she’d been producing like a heavily drugged white rabbit over the last few days. ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘How’s the baby?’

  ‘Definitely cooked, I reckon.’ Helen patted her belly. ‘It’s been a godsend, actually. It’s hard to dwell on things too much when you’re being sick or needing to pee all the time.’ The pat became a rub. ‘Plus, I’ve got someone else to think about, you know?’

  ‘This might not be the best time, but I wanted to ask if you’d thought any more about the birth-partner business.’ Jenny was fiddling with her napkin. ‘I mean, now it’s obviously . . .’

  ‘There’ve been other things to sort out, you know?’

  ‘I know, but it could happen any time, Hel.’

  ‘Spicy pizza might do it.’

  ‘Seriously. I even thought you might . . . you know, with the shock.’

  ‘There were a few twinges,’ Helen said. She remembered the panic cutting through the numbness; sitting there in the early hours after the phone call, waiting for Jenny to come and take her to the mortuary. ‘I’d have a good story to tell the baby, anyway.’

  ‘You need to think about it,’ Jenny said.

  Helen promised that she would and signalled to the waiter that they were ready to order. ‘I meant to say, do you think Tim would like to come round, see if he wants any of Paul’s clothes?’

  Jenny reached for the sparkling water.

  ‘Have a look through before I chuck stuff out.’ Jenny’s husband was a little chunkier than Paul, but Helen guessed that there would be plenty of shirts and jackets to fit him.

  ‘Right . . .’

  It was obvious to Helen that Jenny was flustered and uncomfortable. ‘Paul had some nice stuff, believe it or not,’ she said. ‘I know he was a scruffy bastard most of the time . . .’ She trailed off, seeing the relief on her sister’s face when the waiter arrived at the table.

  They gave him their order, and Helen went back to explaining the difference between murder and manslaughter.

  Frank ate at the kitchen table, while Laura leaned against the island unit, working her way slowly through a plate of crispbread and cheese. After a few minutes she asked him what the matter was and he walked to the office to fetch the paper.

  He dropped it in front of her and stabbed at the headline. ‘That’s Paul,’ he said. ‘Paul.’

  She quickly scanned the front page. ‘Oh Jesus, Frank, I’m sorry.’

  He sat back down at the table, picked up his fork and watched her read. She was his half-sister to be precise, but it was a distinction that never concerned Frank. They’d been close for years, but now that she was no longer part of her own mother’s life, and with nobody knowing if the father she and Frank shared were dead or alive, they had never been closer.

  Laura was the only family Frank had, that he was ever likely to have, but she was enough. She was twenty-three, thirty years younger than he was, and . . . delicate. That was the word that always came into Frank’s head if he thought about her for long enough. Beautiful, obviously , and far brighter than he was - must have got that from her mother, he supposed - but definitely someone who bruised a bit too easily.

  Who needed looking after, whether she liked it or not.

  When Laura raised her head from the paper, she was pale. She’d tied her long hair up this morning; held it there with what looked, to Frank, like chopsticks. ‘That’s terrible.’ Her voice was high and light, accentless. ‘I don’t know what to say. It’s . . . evil.’ There were tears in her eyes, but she didn’t try to wipe them away.

  ‘Not evil,’ Frank said. ‘There’s nothing you can do about evil.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do about this.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’

  ‘You can’t bring Paul back.’

  Frank walked across to join her. He looked down at the newspaper again, at the simple black-and-white drawings. ‘This can’t stand,’ he said. ‘It cannot stand.’

  ‘You should just think about things for a while,’ she said.

  ‘Paul was your friend too.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do remember how I met him, don’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘Please don’t do anything stupid.’

  He didn’t know what he was going to do yet; not in specific terms. Of course, he’d call Clive - it always started with that - and they would put their heads together. They would formulate a business plan, same as always.

  ‘Promise me,’ Laura said.

  Frank picked up the paper and tossed it into the bin. He pictured more unhappy stick men with their little round mouths wide open in surprise; zigzags through the straight lines of arms and legs, and red streaked across the squares of their tiny, black-and-white world.

  He carried his plate across to the dishwasher, opened the door and leaned down.

  Said, ‘Don’t worry.’

  FIFTEEN

  Aside from a few minutes polishing off the remains of the soup Jenny had made, Helen felt as if she had spent most of the evening so far on the phone. Jenny had called within seconds of her arriving home; then Katie had checked in. Paul’s mother had wanted to know if she had heard any more about the body being released and her father had rung to remind her that there was a bed made up if ever she wanted it.

  Grateful as she was that so many people were concerned for her well-being, she’d taken the phone off the hook. But she’d replaced it almost immediately, deciding that both Jenny and Katie were just hysterical enough to send the police round, imagining that she’d done something stupid.

  And anyway, she’d dreamed about Paul calling.

  She wasn’t sure when she’d dreamed it, if she had been half awake or fully asleep at the time, but the sense-memory was powerful; the feeling of elation on picking up the phone and hearing his voice.

  ‘Must be a million-to-one chance: someone at that bus stop with the same name as me. Nice to know that everyone was so cut up, mind you. How’s the baby, by the way?’

  She knew such thoughts were not unusual; the feeling that the person who had died would come waltzing through the door at any moment. It was somewhere between denial and prayer, Helen supposed, and she felt a sense of relief that at least some of the things she was feeling were normal.

  Still no tears, though.

  She had gone down to the car park and cleaned out Paul’s car, loading everything from the footwells and the boot into two carrier bags. She had just walked back through the front door when the phone rang again. There was a deep breath before she snatched it up.

  ‘Helen? It’s Gary.’

  She felt guilty that she hadn’t spoken to Gary Kelly since it happened. She knew that it was stupid to attach blame to anyone except the toe-rag who’d fired the gun, but that hadn’t stopped her; hadn’t stopped the irrational thoughts crowding in.

  If the silly cow in the car hadn’t panicked.

  If Paul had been sober enough to react quicker.

  If they hadn’t been going back to Gary’s place.

  She asked him how he was and he told her he was on the mend. That the leave he’d taken was compassionate rather than medical and that he’d be returning to work the following week. He asked how she was, then began crying before she’d had a chance to answer.

  Everyone but me, Helen thought.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘I asked him to stay . . . because I didn’t want to go home
on my own. I might have reacted faster if I hadn’t been so pissed.’

  ‘Paul was pissed too,’ Helen said. ‘It was pretty obvious when he called me. He sounded happy, Gary. OK?’

  ‘He pushed me out of the way, did you know that?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Helen had been told what a witness at the bus stop had said he’d seen. How the two men had been standing close together and how the one who had died had shoved his friend away a few moments before the impact. Helen listened to Paul’s friend sobbing and couldn’t help wishing that it had happened the other way around.

  Once Kelly had stopped crying, they talked for a few minutes about practical issues. She asked him if he wanted to say something at the funeral and he said that he’d be honoured. She told him about the collection that was being organised at the station and that she’d decided to give all of the proceeds to a police charity. Kelly told her that he’d get it sorted.

  ‘Whatever you need,’ he said. ‘You’ve got all my numbers, right? Just call if you think of anything else. Doesn’t matter what time.’

  Helen said thanks. ‘Actually, there is something. Does the name Frank Linnell mean anything to you?’

  The phone conversation from the previous night had been nagging at her all day. She felt herself tensing up whenever she thought about it and couldn’t understand why. She had no idea who Linnell was, nor how he had known Paul, but a friend and work colleague like Gary Kelly might.

  She did know that in the weeks leading up to Paul’s death, she had been neither.

  ‘Why d’you want to know about Frank Linnell?’

  Something in Kelly’s voice bothered her, and the lie came easily. ‘You know how a name comes into your head and you’ve no idea where you’ve heard it.’