by Tim Weaver
It feels like I’m being watched.
The platform was busy, lined three-deep with people waiting for an Earl’s Court connection: mostly tourists, clumped together, and businessmen in interchangeable suits. My eyes moved between faces. No one seemed to be paying me any attention, either on this side or across the line. I stood, giving myself a better view of the crowd, but as the train squealed to a stop, I started to doubt myself and eventually cast the thought aside.
I found a café, nursed a coffee and an overcooked melted cheese sandwich, and watched traffic feed off Westminster Bridge for forty-five minutes. I thought of Annabel, of what we’d talked about, and vowed – once this case was over – to give Healy a shout. Then my mind switched to the cases I was about to pick up from Tasker. Four unsolveds Franks had a confirmed connection to, one of which didn’t sit right at all: the drug murder.
Why did Franks decide to step in and run it himself?
I’d made a timeline of events for the start of the year – from when the file arrived with Franks, to that last call from the phone box – but now I constructed one in parallel:
Between May 1995 and May 2004 – Franks writes ‘BROLE108’ and makes ‘stick man’ sketch on scrap of paper.
April 1996 – Pamela Welland is murdered by Paul Viljoen.
May 1996 – Viljoen arrested and charged by Franks/Murray.
1997 – Viljoen sentenced to 20 years.
2001 – Murray finds Franks watching CCTV footage of the night Viljoen picked Welland up in a bar. Unrelated to case they were on. So why was he watching it? Why after all that time?
March 2011 – Unidentified victim is found dead (apparent drug murder?) in Lewisham. Franks writes ‘UnID’d victim + CB?’ in notebook. What is CB? WHY WAS FRANKS SIO ON THE CASE?
February 2013 – Franks writes ‘Milk?’ and ‘108’ on flyer.
As I looked at the timeline, I thought again about Franks acting as SIO on the drug murder. By March 2011, he was weeks away from retirement and had already spent years as command lead, way beyond the day-to-day running of individual cases like that. Why not leave it to Murray, like he’d done with countless other cases in the years before?
Grabbing my phone, I dialled the Met and asked to be directed to Murray. She answered after a couple of rings. I told her who it was, and I could immediately sense her stiffen.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve got a question.’
‘Don’t ever call me here.’
‘It’s about another case.’
A pause. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Does this case from March 2011 ring any bells with you? A guy had his throat cut in what looked like a drug-related killing. Cops found about five kilos of coke in his flat.’
Silence.
‘Murray?’
‘It rings a bell. So?’
‘So I’ve been going through Franks’s notes and I’ve found mention of it. Weird thing is, he seems to have taken the lead on it. Why would he take the lead on a case?’
‘Why wouldn’t he?’
‘Because he’d stopped running cases ten years ago. He was the command lead, not a foot soldier. Plus this was six weeks before he retired.’
‘So?’
‘The murder of this guy wasn’t high profile. The media didn’t care. The general public barely bat an eyelid at that type of crime. I find it hard to believe that Franks was actually asked to step in and run it by the top brass. And yet he stepped in nonetheless.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t remember?’
She sighed. ‘Let me tell you how these things work, okay? Someone gets killed, we get assigned cases, that’s it. This isn’t like clothes shopping. You don’t take one case off the rack, decide you don’t like the look of it and then put it back again. So did I ever question what I got given? No. Did I ask the Boss the reasons why he decided to deal with the fallout from some random drug murder? No. Here’s what I was thinking: the recession was in full swing, we were underfunded and understaffed, we were all waiting for the axe to fall. I cared about keeping my head down and not getting my P45.’
I made a couple of notes.
‘Did he take on many cases himself?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘That’s what I figured. So this was pretty unusual?’
‘The Boss mucked in when he needed to, especially around that time when the government were busy ripping the heart out of the force. Now, are we done?’
‘Can I just –’
She hung up before I could finish.
Scooping up my pad, I headed out into the cold again, down to the western end of Westminster Bridge, where Task was already waiting. At six-three and sixteen stone, he was still a powerful man and easy to spot among the Christmas crowds. He produced a newspaper, folded in half, and handed it to me.
‘Printouts of the four unsolveds we talked about on the phone,’ he said.
I took the paper from him. ‘Thanks, Task.’
‘Burn them when you’re done,’ he said. His eyes lingered on the newspaper. A corner of a brown file was visible now, up beyond the edges of the broadsheet. ‘You’re not going to get yourself killed again, are you, Raker?’
‘I never got myself killed last time.’
He smiled. ‘Just be careful.’
‘Do you know something I don’t?’
He shook his head. ‘No. But I know you. Trouble follows you around.’
Box of Regrets
July 2008 | Five Years Ago
‘I have this box I keep in the loft,’ she said, looking across the office at Garrick.
He was more casual today – open-necked shirt, woollen sleeveless jumper, black denims, black brogues – but they were all name brands. She’d asked him what he earned once, which made him laugh, but he never ended up telling her. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and came forward slightly.
‘And what do you keep in the box?’
‘Memories.’
‘What kinds of memories?’
‘Some good.’
‘Some not so good?’
She nodded.
‘Some you regret?’
She nodded a second time.
He flipped to a new page of his pad, picked up his fountain pen from the edge of the desk and then inched off the lid with his thumb. ‘We’ve talked about this before, of course. You hold on to a lot of regret.’
‘I’ve done a lot of regretful things.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ve told you what.’
‘Indulge me,’ he said.
‘Like get together with Simon.’
‘You don’t want to be with him any more?’
‘I hate him.’
‘Then why stay with him?’
‘Because what else is there?’
Garrick frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘What if there’s no one else out there for me? What if arseholes like Simon are as much as I can expect? Maybe my chance has gone now. Maybe this is all I am.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
She shrugged. ‘Simon and I …’
‘What?’
‘I look at him sometimes, and I wonder …’
Garrick studied her. ‘What?’
She swallowed, flicked a look at Garrick and then dropped her eyes to her lap. ‘I had a massive row with him last week, and as we were standing there, screaming at one another, I realized I had a kitchen knife in my hand. I’d been making the sandwiches.’
For the first time in a long while, she noted a flicker of concern in Garrick’s face.
‘And what happened after that?’ he asked evenly.
‘He was disrespectful to Lucas. He said, “Fuck your son.” ’
‘That must have hurt.’
‘Yes. It did. At the time, I was conscious of having a knife in my hand, but after Simon left, I sat there in the loft, with my box of regrets …’ She pa
used, a smile ghosting across her face at the name she’d chosen for it. ‘I sat there in the loft, and I thought to myself, “I wonder what he would look like with this knife in his eye?” I imagined it. I imagined stabbing him over and over, until his face became a mess of blood and bone and pulp. And do you know what the worst bit was?’ She looked up at Garrick. ‘I actually felt better afterwards.’
He leaned forward. He had a new pair of glasses, and he’d allowed what hair he had left to grow in a horseshoe shape around the dome of his head. She thought it made him look older than fifty-three.
‘I think your relationship with Simon may be having a detrimental effect on your recovery,’ he said, rolling his pen between thumb and finger.
‘I think you’re probably right.’
‘So why not do something about it?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve done a lot of things in the past that I thought were right, and look where it’s landed me. I’ve spent the last nine years being psychoanalysed.’
‘That makes it sound bad,’ Garrick replied. He was smiling, trying to make her feel comfortable, to get her to open up, to listen. When the smile finally dropped away, he rephrased the question: ‘If you could go back, what changes would you make?’
She looked at him but didn’t respond.
‘You don’t want to answer that?’ he said.
‘Are there things you would change in your life, Dr Garrick?’
‘John,’ he said. He put down his pen. ‘Of course.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, we’re not here to talk about me.’
‘Indulge me,’ she said, echoing what he’d said to her earlier on.
He smiled briefly, then glanced at the fountain pen, balanced on the pad now, as if he was searching for some sort of inspiration in it. I knew it, she thought, I knew that fountain pen meant something to him. She’d seen its importance in one of her earliest sessions, the way he handled it so carefully, the way he seemed so attached to it.
‘You can always harbour regrets,’ he said. ‘Always.’
‘You don’t seem the type.’
He broke out into that big, reassuring smile again. ‘Why don’t we get back to you?’ It was clear that he wasn’t going to go any further down this road.
‘I wish I hadn’t stopped painting,’ she said.
‘You painted?’
‘Yes. I used to paint a lot.’
‘That’s wonderful. What sort of things?’
‘I was never very good.’
‘But it made you happy?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it really did.’
‘Why don’t you paint now?’
She shrugged. ‘It just doesn’t feel like the right environment.’
‘That’s a shame.’
He wrote something down.
‘I wish I hadn’t taken my eyes off my son,’ she said.
Garrick looked up at her.
She took a long breath. ‘Ten seconds was all it was. I wish I could take those ten seconds back.’ She stopped again, trying to suppress the tremor in her throat. ‘I regret that neither Robert nor I could deal with the aftermath as well. He blamed me, and I blamed myself, and it took us to the divorce courts – and then it took me to this place.’
A long silence.
‘Pamela Welland,’ she said finally.
Garrick nodded again. ‘She’s the girl who was murdered?’
She stared off into the space between them, tracing her life back nine years, to the days and weeks after police found Pamela on wasteland near Deptford Creek. She’d read about it the next day in the papers, seen the photo of the girl – beautiful, unblemished – perched on the wall outside a Spanish hotel, hair plaited, mirrored shades, barely even an adult. And as she’d read the story, her chest had filled with a desperate, cloying sense of anxiety, fear clawing its way up her throat until she could hardly breathe any more.
Why me? Why me?
‘Why me?’
Garrick leaned closer. ‘Sorry?’
She didn’t reply.
‘Why you?’ he said.
She realized she’d said it out loud. ‘Why did it have to be me?’
‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘My life could have been different without her.’
‘If you hadn’t read about her in the papers, you mean?’
Her thoughts wandered again, this time to her dog, Bear, to the moment when she’d first touched his coat, run her hand through it, felt the rise and fall of his belly.
‘Maybe in some ways.’
‘What ways are those?’
A small, anaemic half-smile. ‘Every way that counts.’
After her session with Garrick was over, she sat on one of the stone benches at the side of the building and waited for the bus. She watched a gull climb thermals, all the way up to where the fence traced the circumference of the hospital. Once the bird passed across the razorwire and on to the roof of the building, she couldn’t see it any more, only hear it, squawking in the muted hush of the morning as other, more distant noises played out beyond that. The purr from one of the generators. The gentle drone of a vacuum cleaner. The soft sound of music from the day room.
Someone screaming on one of the wards.
She unzipped her handbag and pulled out her phone, checking for messages. There were none. She never went out. She hated her job. She hated her life. She barely spoke to Simon any more. Garrick kept saying the relationship might set her back; that Simon could prove a destructive influence on her, sending her into another spiral. He was worried she’d end up back at the start, as low as she’d been in the days and weeks and months after Lucas had drowned.
But what Garrick didn’t know was that there were other spirals she could ride. Moments she’d kept back from him that had ripped her heart out just the same.
There were other, even bigger secrets in her box of regrets.
26
In total, I wasn’t gone longer than two and a half hours – but I knew something was wrong as soon as I got to the front gates of my house. Here, snow was still everywhere, matted to the road and pavements like a layer of white tar, and on my driveway a path had been carved in footsteps: Annabel’s and mine, as we’d made our way out that morning.
And now a third trail.
I could see the imprint from my boot, the swirl from Annabel’s shoes too. The third was bigger than both of ours: size twelve or thirteen, the manufacturer’s mark at the centre of the shoe perfectly replicated in the space between the blanketed flower beds and my BMW. For a moment, I dismissed it as nothing: the postman, someone delivering leaflets, people coming door to door. But then reality kicked in: the footsteps moved parallel to the edge of the drive, all the way up to the front steps of the house.
They didn’t come back again.
I looked around me. The street was muted, unmoving, the hum of traffic out on Uxbridge Road still audible, but suppressed by the snow. I’d seen kids heading out that morning, but there was no one now, and the only cars were the ones parked and paralysed by the weather. As I began to move, unease curdling in my stomach, I quickly realized the screen on the porch had been forced open and the front-door lock was smashed. It was most of the way shut, giving the impression from the street that the house was still locked. But, as the breeze picked up, it gently fanned back and forth, bumping against the frame.
I gave it a shove.
It swung back into the shadows of the hallway. Off to the left was the kitchen. The door at the side of the house, leading directly into it, remained locked. Ahead of me the hallway opened into the living room. I edged forward, the controls for the alarm on the wall to my right. A green LED should have been visible at the top of the pad, and the numbers should have been illuminated. Instead, both were off, and the sensors – watching me from the corners of the house – didn’t blink into life as I moved. In the kitchen, on the stove, I could see the clock was still on, and showing the right time. The microwave too.
&nbs
p; Which meant the electricity was still on.
But the alarm had been cut.
As I got to the living room, my heart dropped: furniture had been moved, shoved aside and thrown around. Pot plants had toppled over, spilling dirt across the carpet. The doors of the TV cabinet were open, films cascading out. To my right the house changed direction, heading along another hallway, where the bathroom and two bedrooms were.
I inched along it, hands against the walls either side of me, wary of making too much noise, in case someone was still here. I got to the bathroom first. Except for an open cabinet, it was mostly intact. But in my bedroom everything had been pulled out of the cupboards, drawers from my bedside cabinet on the floor, their contents scattered.
In the spare room it got worse.
My files were all over the place, paperwork everywhere, photographs littering the room like confetti. Everything I’d kept separate – Franks’s file, all the notes I’d made, photographs I’d collected, the DVD of the house that Craw had shot, the scrap of paper with the sketch and ‘BROLE108’ on it, the pub flyer – were gone. So were the Moleskine notebooks and the printout on which I’d logged everything. So was Franks’s iPad. Even my MacBook had been taken. Its power lead snaked across an empty desk, no longer tethered to anything. I used a mouse instead of the laptop’s trackpad – that was now on the floor next to the chair. Anger fizzed through me as I looked at the walls: every photo frame had been smashed, the photos that had existed inside them only hours before – of my paper days, of Derryn – removed and deliberately ripped up, then left among the debris on the floor. As I looked at them, an image formed: standing on the freezing cold platform at Paddington station two hours before, feeling as if someone was watching me.
Then: a noise, like splintering wood.
I backed out of the spare room and looked along the hallway. Listened again. There was no sound now except for the gentle whine of a breeze. When I returned to the living room, I could see the front door beating smoothly against the frame, massaged by the wind. And something else: a breeze at ankle level, passing from front to back. Suddenly, I recalled the footsteps out on the driveway.
