by Tim Weaver
A couple of minutes later, as the man continued along the Old Kent Road, he looked back over his shoulder. I took a subtle half-step to the left, moving in behind a couple a yard in front of me. Anything more, any great shift into the shadows at the edges of the pavement, and he’d notice. After a few seconds, I leaned – peeking past the couple again – and saw him passing a Chinese takeaway flanked by stone dragons. He’d slowed down a little now, head bowed, fiddling with something in front of him. As he came to a junction, he stopped, still concentrating on what he was holding. I slowed, using the shadows of a building, set back from the street, as cover. Then I saw what he had in his hands.
His phone.
Is he texting someone?
Or is someone texting him?
He passed a burnt-out building, sandwiched between an English-language centre and a vacant record shop. Windows were boarded up. Graffiti adorned the lower floors. Charred tongues of smoke licked their way up the paintwork. And then, suddenly, as we moved left on to New Kent Road, I saw where he was heading: towards the Tube at Elephant and Castle. Up ahead, framed by the grim shell of the shopping centre, were the grey-green glass panels it was housed in. Above that, the sky was black, light rain starting to drift in. The drizzle was barely visible, but I could feel it against my face and hear it against the buildings around me. It beat a soft tempo, like a distant chant.
Inside the station, he took the escalators down into the earth, heading for the northbound platform on the Northern line. I hung back, conscious of being seen. It was after ten now and the platform was almost empty. Hovering in the gangway between the concourse and the line, I held my position, the man about thirty feet further down, on the platform edge. Over his shoulder, along the gloom of the line, headlights started to burn holes in the dark, the tracks making an electrified twang, brakes starting to squeal. Then, finally, the train entered the station, whipping past the man, his face reflected in the glass over and over, countless windows forming and re-forming him. I edged closer, his features replicated more fully as the carriage slowed to a halt. Inside the hood I saw the paleness of his face and eye sockets reduced to black puddles under the overhead lights.
As he boarded, his back to me, I did the same, casually striding through an open door, at the end of the next carriage down from his. I looked through to the next car and could see him clearly, half turned towards me, muscular arms reaching to a handhold. After a couple of seconds, he seemed to sense someone watching him and started to turn in my direction. I backed away from the glass, out of sight. The door closed. The train juddered into motion. I grabbed a handhold myself, deciding not to look again for now.
But then he came into view again.
He was back out on the platform.
His eyes moved along the passing carriages, one to the next, until he found me. I stepped forward. When his gaze met mine, a smile splintered across his face and he followed me with his eyes, all the way along the station until we finally disappeared from each other’s line of sight. And then the darkness of the tunnel claimed back the train.
Shit.
He’d figured out I was tailing him.
But I hadn’t made any errors, any slip-ups.
It was a textbook tail.
My thoughts quickly came together, as I remembered him using his phone on the walk up from the warehouse. Had he been warned I was on to him? If he’d been warned, it meant someone had been stalking me while I’d been shadowing him. But that didn’t make sense to me either: I’d been so conscious of my surroundings, of him, of other people, it seemed impossible I’d missed a tail.
Unless the tail wasn’t physical.
I got out my own mobile phone.
Unless they never had to move at all.
32
By the time I got to Borough, I’d removed the battery and SIM card from my phone. I double backed to Elephant and Castle, then exited and returned to where I’d left my car. As I slid in at the wheel and fired up the engine, I popped the SIM back in and powered on the phone briefly, to check if I’d missed any messages. A few seconds later, it buzzed.
Craw.
I quickly called her back.
‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ she said, and immediately it was clear that something had got to her. ‘I might as well go out with a bang before I get the sack in the morning.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I did your database search.’
I thought of the man I’d just lost on the Tube. She meant she’d gone against all her instincts and put his description through the computer. I couldn’t say I was disappointed.
‘And?’
‘And you were right.’
‘About what?’
‘The chipped tooth got us a match.’
I grabbed my notepad. ‘Who’s the match?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Everything’s complicated.’
‘It is when you’re involved.’
She was on the defensive because she felt I’d forced her hand; that I’d made her go searching in the database against her will. But she wouldn’t have gone searching if she didn’t want answers. Craw was one of the most uncompromising people I’d ever met.
‘Remember, it’s your father I’m trying to find here.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you sure?’
A pause that doubled as an apology.
‘He was a cop,’ she said finally.
‘Who?’
‘Chipped incisor.’
I thought of him standing on the platform. Looking off into the dark of the warehouse. Holding a knife to the boy’s throat. ‘So he’s not a cop any more?’
‘No. Reason he’s on the database is because he got done for speeding on the M25 two years ago. Like, really speeding. One hundred and thirty-two miles per hour. It was his second serious speeding offence in as many years, so this time he got twenty hours’ community service and a five-year driving ban.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Neil Reynolds,’ Craw said.
‘Have you heard of him?’
No response.
‘Craw?’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard of him.’
‘How?’
‘Jim Paige pushed him out.’
‘Of the Met?’ I took that in. ‘When?’
‘June 2011.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Never met him, never worked with him. Reynolds is so far off my radar he’s just a blip. All I remember is overhearing a couple of the lads on my team talking about him in the kitchen at work one morning. There were whispers about him.’
‘What sort of whispers?’
‘People said he was on the take.’
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know. Like I said, all I’ve heard are vague whispers.’
‘So he was part of Sapphire, working under Paige?’
‘For a while. Then he worked murders. After Dad retired in April 2011, Jim was made acting chief of the Homicide command for six months, so he became Reynolds’s boss a second time.’
I paused, one hand on the wheel, one on the gearstick, my mind moving ahead. So why would Reynolds care that I was looking for Franks? He’d broken into my house, stolen my casework, copied what he’d needed and burned the rest. That spoke of a man trying to hide something – or get to something first. Could he be looking for Franks as well?
‘Raker?’
‘So Paige sacked this Reynolds guy two months after your dad retired?’
‘Yeah.’
Had the whispers about Reynolds being on the take turned out to be true? Or had Reynolds done something even worse two months into Paige’s stint as Homicide chief? I’d need to speak to Paige again, even if the idea didn’t make me comfortable: he’d been hard to chisel away at first time around, and if my phone conversation with Murray was anything to go by, I’d have to work even harder to get anything more out of him.
‘I’ll give Paige a call in
the morning,’ I said.
No response on the line.
‘Craw?’
‘Maybe there’s a workaround.’
‘Workaround?’
‘Maybe there’s someone else you can talk to instead.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone else who worked with Reynolds.’
‘Who?’
A long pause. ‘Colm Healy.’
33
I parked the car a couple of streets away from my house, and approached from the south, coming in via a series of alleyways. I’d gained a clear enough view of Neil Reynolds – from the knife he’d held, without blinking, to a six-year-old’s throat; even from just being inside the same four walls as him – to know I couldn’t write off the possibility that he might come back to my house again and wait for me. He was violent, merciless, unpredictable – and he was smart. He’d messed up the first time and left a trail all the way back to the warehouse, but I doubted he would make the same mistake again.
The night was colder than ever and the side roads hadn’t been gritted. I moved as quickly as I could, Santas and reindeers in gardens all the way down, lights winking from drainpipes and fascia boards. A couple of times I could feel my feet slide, but I managed to spot most of the ice before I hit it. As the house came into view, I slowed, looking up and down the street. Curtains were pulled. Blinds were shut.
The whole road was quiet.
I moved up my driveway to the front door. It was still locked. Letting myself in, I kept the lights off and grabbed a torch from the kitchen. I checked the rooms one by one.
There was no one waiting for me.
I packed a suitcase, grabbed a spare phone I kept in a drawer in my bedside cabinet, and an old laptop I’d had as a journalist and never given back, and moved through to the living room, untouched from the way it had been left by Reynolds. On the drive home, I’d bought a new SIM card. I put it into the spare phone, powered it on, and texted Craw to let her know that I’d be on this number now if she needed me. I let Annabel know about the change as well. Pocketing it, I slid out the files Ewan Tasker had got me from under the TV cabinet, and checked them briefly.
The three other unsolveds I skim-read and then immediately set aside, feeling certain now that they weren’t going to open doors for me.
But the drug murder was different.
It felt like there was something in it.
As I leafed through the pages, I got my first official confirmation that Franks had indeed acted as SIO on the case, and my first look at the unidentified male victim. He was lying on a mortuary slab, a photograph that must have been taken in the days just after his death. The file listed him as thirty-nine but he looked at least ten years older, gaunt and hoary, hollow dents in his cheeks, skin drawn so tight his jaw was as sharp as a razor’s edge.
I looked out across the back garden, checking for signs of movement, but save for the fir trees – swaying gently in the breeze – everything was still. I’d managed to pull the broken gate back into place and secure it with a new padlock, but everything else would have to wait. My furniture, my things, my memories, would remain strewn across the rooms of the house like rubble until I found the time to align them again. The alarm would remain unconnected too. The only thing I’d moved was a picture of Derryn and me – one of the few Reynolds hadn’t ripped up – which I’d put inside a book, to keep it flat, and slid under the mattress.
I snapped the file shut and returned to my conversation with Craw.
Healy.
He’d worked with Neil Reynolds.
Digging out his number, I tried calling him, but it quickly went to voicemail. ‘Healy, it’s Raker. I just wanted to …’ I paused. He’d hate thinking this was some kind of charity call, so I made it clear it wasn’t. ‘I wanted to talk to you about a case.’
I hung up.
He’d never been able to solve the case that had broken him; never found the man who’d killed the twins. He’d carried demons for so long – fought them, been beaten by them and dragged himself out the other side – it was a miracle he was even still able to function. But if there was something Healy recognized, it was a monster.
And Reynolds was one of them.
34
Armed with Reynolds’s home address, I headed back into the heart of London. Craw said he lived in a house at the southern end of the Old Kent Road, half a mile from the warehouse. I’d hunted around on websites that handled industrial properties and discovered that the warehouse had been unoccupied for almost two years – which meant he’d been using it illegally. I toyed with the idea of calling the police anonymously and giving them the warehouse, and especially the evidence of what Reynolds was disposing of in there, in an attempt to head him off. But while it would give me some wriggle room, and it would be hard for him to get at me from the inside of a custody suite, it was too risky for now.
If I gave the police Reynolds, I also gave them Craw and me. He had copies of all my notes, of my case, of Craw’s part in it. It would jeopardize her career, and it would halt the forward motion of the case – and I wasn’t prepared to let the police dictate the pace and direction of my search for Franks. With the cops between us, I’d be unlikely to ever get at Reynolds, at his motivation, at the reasons why – as seemed likely now – he’d called Franks from the phone box on Scale Lane. He’d turned over my house, sacked it, tried to dismantle my case. I wanted to know why, even as the idea formed that Reynolds was yet to really come at me. He’d destroyed my belongings – but he’d stopped short of actually harming me.
That was before I went after him.
Before he knew he’d been compromised.
Now the game had changed.
An hour after leaving home, I reached a parking lot opposite Reynolds’s place. It was gone midnight, his windows were all dark, so there was a chance he was already inside, asleep.
But somehow I doubted it.
Pulling into a space that faced the front of his house, I checked for signs I was being followed. The only pair of eyes I could make out was a CCTV camera on a lamp post sixty feet from his front door.
The house was in a row of brown two-storey buildings, the ground floors home to beauty salons, betting shops, newsagent’s and corner shops, the first floor a series of matchbox flats. Some had net curtains, some no curtains at all. The doors up to the flats sat in between the shopfronts, almost like they’d been squeezed in at the last minute, each door painted a different colour.
On the way down, I’d picked up a coffee and a bacon roll at a petrol station. I began unwrapping the roll, eyes fixed on the front door of Reynolds’s place.
Then my phone started ringing.
I scooped it up and looked at the display. A central London landline I didn’t recognize. Slotting the phone into the hands-free, I pushed Answer.
‘David Raker.’
‘It’s Healy.’
I’d been half expecting him not to phone back at all, so the call took me by surprise. I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Twelve-fifteen.
‘Healy. How are you?’
A pause. ‘Okay. You?’
‘Yeah, not bad. It’s been a while.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Almost thirteen months.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What have you been up to?’
‘Not a lot.’
I looked at the clock again. ‘You got a job?’
‘Yeah. Twelve-month contract.’
‘Doing what?’
No response. I’d first got to know him over two years ago, and Healy’s default mood was pissed off, so the terse answers didn’t throw me. But there was something else hidden in the shadows, something weary and sad about his lack of reply.
‘Healy?’
‘I’m working as a security guard,’ he said, his Irish accent softened by years in London.
‘How’s it going?’
‘How do you think it’s going?’
He said it quietly, but he failed to disguis
e the resentment in his voice. I imagined the man I’d known – angry, bitter, overweight – sitting behind a desk in the front entrance of some office building, clock-watching his life away. Eighteen months ago, he had been Craw’s right-hand man, helping to spearhead one of the largest manhunts in Met history.
‘You said something about a case?’ he asked.
‘Yeah. You remember a guy called Neil Reynolds?’
Silence. ‘What’s he got to do with anything?’
‘Craw told me you worked with him.’
‘Craw? You working for her now?’
‘She came to me. Her father is missing.’
Another, even longer silence. I glanced at the clock in the car again. Either he was at work, at the end of a shift, or he was having trouble sleeping. Given everything that had happened to him – the case that had torn his life apart, the death of his daughter, his dismissal from the Met – I sometimes wondered how he slept at all.
‘Healy?’
‘So you’re looking for Leonard Franks?’
‘Yeah. You know him?’
‘I know him enough.’
‘What do you make of him?’
‘He’s a decent guy.’
He didn’t say anything else, but that was high praise from Healy. I steered the conversation back around to the reason I’d wanted to speak to him. ‘And Reynolds?’
Another long pause.
‘I’ve got to do my rounds in five minutes,’ he said finally. ‘Let me give you a call when I’m back at my desk.’
He hung up without stopping for an answer.
While I waited, I returned to my bacon roll, my eyes on the house. There were two windows on the first floor, still no lights on in either. I reached into the back seat, unzipped the suitcase I’d brought with me and got out the file on the drug murder.
A few pages in, my mobile sprang into life again.
‘What’s your interest in Reynolds?’ Healy asked, after I answered.
‘His name came up.’
‘In relation to what?’
‘In relation to Franks.’
A deliberate pause, as if he was threatening to hold back whatever he’d found out. But then, quietly, slowly, he started again. ‘Reynolds was in Trident, working gangs, then moved to Sapphire, under Jim Paige. After that, he became part of a Murder Investigation Team in Lewisham. I was working in an MIT in Southwark, and the two commanders organized this tie-up where we’d share resources across borough lines. I met Reynolds a few times, sat in on a lot of meetings he was in, but never worked directly with him.’ He stopped. ‘They used to call him Milk.’
