From the Dead (2010)

by Mark Billingham

Gary Brand was the only shot Thorne had.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Langford sipped his beer and wondered what Brand's game was. He'd always been able to sniff out anything iffy, had prided himself on the fact, and though he couldn't be sure exactly what was happening, something was definitely starting to stink.

  All the same, he had to tread carefully.

  'What happened to that girl you were seeing?' Brand asked.

  'I see a lot of girls.'

  'Yeah, but one was a bit special, wasn't she?'

  'I chucked her,' Langford said.

  Worst possible scenario, the arsehole had grassed him up to save himself and was wearing a microphone. All that shit about not being much for swimming. But dealing with it would be tricky to say the least. There were consequences to be considered whichever way it went, and until then he just needed to watch his temper, to keep his wits about him. There was not a great deal he could do for the time being, other than mind his Ps and Qs and let things play out.

  What else could he do? Rip the sneaky little fucker's shirt off then and there?

  If he was wrong, he'd risk losing someone who had been a valuable source of information for over ten years. Brand was very useful, no question about it, and Langford didn't particularly want to piss him off by coming on like some paranoid nutcase. If he was right, though, things might get even more complicated. He'd been kidding himself, thinking he could play this whole thing like Clint Eastwood or whatever and stay calm. He should have seen that back when he was slapping that silly fucker in the club who'd used his real name. He was still capable of losing his rag, same as anyone else . . . same as he'd done the last time he'd seen Candela . . . and if he did find out that Brand was having him over, he could easily end up having to push a bottle into the mongrel's face or seeing how long he could stay underwater.

  It would feel good, course it would. It would feel merited. But if the conversation was being monitored, if his new friend from Ronda was listening in, it might not turn out to be the smartest thing he'd ever done.

  He needed to keep on his toes, simple as that.

  He'd always loved that line from The Godfather, the one about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. Something the Pacino character had been taught by his old man. Loads of good stuff in that movie of course, but that bit was right on the money.

  If Brand was no longer a friend, Langford needed to keep him as close as possible.

  'How long you planning on staying, Gary?'

  'I'll go back tomorrow,' Brand said. 'In and out.'

  'That's good. Presumably you can't just waltz off to Spain without your bosses getting suspicious, can you?'

  'I had some holiday owing, so . . .'

  'That's a bit of luck.'

  Brand took a long swig of beer. Then another to empty the bottle.

  'Got yourself a decent hotel?'

  Brand swallowed fast. 'A place in Malaga. In the old town.'

  'What's it called?'

  'The hotel?'

  'Yeah, I've stayed in quite a few places down there, might be able to recommend a couple of decent restaurants.'

  'It's one of those boutique-type places,' Brand said. 'There's a chain of them, I think. Room Mate? Something like that, anyway. Nice enough.'

  No real hesitation. Well briefed or on the level, it was hard to tell the difference . . .

  A young girl stepped on to the deck from inside the house. She wore a thin, pale blue sarong over a white bikini and a sullen expression. Brand turned to look at her.

  'You remember Ellie?' Langford asked.

  'Course I do.'

  'Last time you saw her she'd have been what, seven or eight?'

  Brand said hello. The girl mumbled it back at him.

  'Go and get us another couple of beers,' Langford said. 'There's a good girl. Actually, make it four, will you? I reckon we're on for a heavy session here.' He pointed at Brand. 'You hungry, mate? We could rustle up a sandwich or something . . .'

  'I ate on the plane,' Brand said.

  The girl turned and went back into the house without another word. Langford watched her go, then grinned at Brand.

  'She's grown up,' Brand said.

  'She looks so much like her mother did at that age it's not true.'

  Brand nodded. Langford finished his beer. They both looked out across the swimming pool for a minute or more.

  'Listen . . . we really need to talk about what we're going to do,' Brand said. 'That police liaison officer - Murray . . . she's been getting far too cosy with Andy Boyle and it's starting to look like they've got some serious ammunition to use on Grover, you know? Organising something at Wakefield is obviously going to be trickier now that Howard Cook's gone, but--'

  Langford cut him off. 'Of course, I would have been happy to put you up here, but I don't think that's a clever idea.'

  Brand took a few seconds, and Langford saw frustration on his face that was every bit as obvious as the sweat patches under his arms. He had few doubts now about what was happening; fewer still that disposing of Brand would be even easier than getting rid of Candela had been.

  Another one he would happily handle himself.

  'The hotel's fine, honestly.'

  Laughing, Langford nodded towards the house. 'Some of the locals are already wondering what I'm doing shacked up with a girl who's young enough to be my daughter. Last thing I need is them thinking I'm on the bloody turn!' He laughed again, louder. 'So, we probably shouldn't spend too much time together.'

  'No.'

  'Especially now that we've got the Met's finest running around the place.'

  FORTY-FIVE

  Especially now that we've got the Met's finest running around the place.

  In the van, Thorne bristled slightly. For a second or two, he thought Langford had worked it all out and was cheerfully taking the piss. Thought the last remark had been meant specifically for him. He glanced at Samarez and Boyle, and could see that they were thinking much the same thing.

  'So, what do you want to do?' Thorne asked.

  'Not much we can do,' Samarez said.

  'We sit it out, then.'

  'Right.' Boyle lifted the bottom of his T-shirt and flapped it, revealing a generous roll of pallid beer-gut in his efforts to cool down. 'Let's see if Langford gives us what we want before we roast to death.'

  Brand had arrived at the villa in a taxi driven by a Guardia Civil officer, but Thorne and the others had been in position well in advance of that. By now, they had been there almost two hours, and the inside of the van was baking and airless. As an observer, Boyle had seen no reason to wear anything even remotely formal, but Thorne had felt unable to dress quite so casually for this sort of operation. He was sweating in khakis and a short-sleeved shirt, sucking in warm air that tasted of sweat, while Samarez, who was wearing a similar outfit, did not look a great deal happier.

  'Perhaps we could just arrest him,' Samarez suggested. 'Confront him with what Brand has told us.'

  'Arrest him for what?'

  'We can come up with something.'

  'He knows that Brand isn't a reliable witness,' Thorne said. 'And anyway, whatever Brand might say, he knows we've got nothing concrete to tie him into any of the big stuff.'

  They listened for another few minutes. Again Brand said how worried he was about what was happening back at home, that he needed Langford to tell him what to do. Langford ignored him, refusing to bite and began talking about some film he'd seen. Told Brand he had to get the DVD out when he got home.

  'I think we're stuffed,' Boyle said. 'He hasn't even admitted knowing who Grover is and we haven't got him within a million miles of the Anna Carpenter killing.'

  'All we need is one slip,' Samarez said.

  Thorne drank deeply from a bottle of water that was already warm. His shirt was pasted to his back and he was starting to catch the smell of his own sweat.

  One slip . . .

  You're not much of a detective, are you?

  The fi
rst words Anna ever said to him.

  A radio squawked and Samarez reached for the handset next to the speaker. He talked in Spanish for a few seconds, then told the others, 'There's a car coming.'

  They waited, watching the gates, knowing that any vehicle passing the Guardia Civil car positioned down the hill could only be on its way to the Langford villa. After a minute or so, a white VW Golf pulled up outside the gates.

  'I know that car,' Thorne said.

  He recognised the driver, too, but could not get a clear view of the woman sitting next to him. Then the passenger door opened. The woman got out and walked up to the gates.

  'Donna . . .'

  Samarez looked confused. 'The wife?'

  'What's she doing here?' Boyle asked.

  They heard a faint buzzing through the speaker: the microphone picking up the noise of Donna ringing the bell. Langford said, 'Won't be a minute,' then there was nothing but Brand's breathing.

  Thorne realised now that the man watching him had been working for Donna. She had clearly hired herself another detective. He had probably been watching Samarez and Fraser, too. Then, as soon as he had found Langford's villa, he had fed the information back to his client.

  'Oh, Jesus,' Thorne said. 'She's here for her daughter.'

  There was a minute of muffled conversation, then silence until Langford returned to the pool and Donna climbed back into the car.

  'It's my ex-wife,' Langford told Brand. 'Why am I so popular all of a sudden?'

  'What?'

  Thorne watched as the gates begin to swing slowly open.

  'You'd best make yourself scarce, Gary,' Langford said. 'She might recognise you. You wouldn't want that, right?'

  'What the hell does she want?'

  'Well, I don't think she's popped by for tea and biscuits, do you?'

  In the van, they could hear the rasp of Brand's breathing and the sharp scrape of his chair against the tiles. As he walked away from the pool and moved inside the house, Brand whispered into the microphone, 'This is all going tits up.'

  'You're telling me,' Boyle said.

  The Golf was disappearing from view, heading up the driveway, when Langford shouted Ellie's name somewhere in the house. Thorne moved quickly towards the rear of the van.

  'Where are you going?' Samarez asked.

  Thorne was already opening the doors. 'This could all get very nasty very quickly,' he said.

  'What about Brand?'

  'I don't care.' Thorne jumped down on to the path, talking fast. 'Langford's not exactly predictable right now, and if Donna's come for Ellie, I can't see him just handing her over, can you?'

  'We do not have enough,' Samarez said.

  Boyle shook his head. 'We don't have anything.'

  'Keep listening,' Thorne said, slamming one of the doors. 'He might get careless now that he's got something else to worry about.'

  He slammed the other door before Boyle or Samarez could argue and sprinted towards the gates. He stopped momentarily when he reached them, to check that the Golf was out of sight, then slipped through just before they closed with a clang.

  He waited for ten seconds, fifteen, his hands on his knees, panting. His mouth was dry and the spit he sucked up tasted coppery.

  Like he was waiting to face a bull.

  Then, still breathless, Thorne began jogging uphill towards the house.

  FORTY-SIX

  It took Thorne three or four minutes to reach the house, but it felt like a lot longer. The Golf was parked outside, and though Thorne would have loved to tell the man in the driver's seat precisely what he thought of him, there wasn't time. He settled for a hard stare and the satisfying look of panic on the private detective's face as he walked past the car.

  The door to the villa was open and Thorne could hear shouting from inside. He stepped into a large, vaulted lobby. There were acres of white marble, potted palms whose leaves almost brushed the glass roof and a staircase that swept up and around to his right. He walked beneath it, his breathing and heart-rate finally beginning to slow a little, and followed a tiled corridor towards the far side of the villa, towards the screams of rage and frustration that echoed off the tastefully decorated walls.

  'Well, you've wasted your fucking time . . .'

  'Christ, what's he done?'

  'What's he done?'

  'Please . . .'

  'You really are a stupid bitch, aren't you?'

  Just before the corridor ended, Thorne passed a room whose door was slightly ajar. He pushed it open and saw Gary Brand, sitting and flicking through a newspaper as though it were a doctor's waiting room. Brand looked up, alarmed, and opened his mouth to say something.

  Thorne put a finger to his lips as a glass shattered somewhere near by.

  'You've lost it, love.'

  'Just tell her to go . . .'

  Brand tried to stand up, but Thorne pushed him back into his seat. Told him quietly but firmly to shut his mouth and stay where he was. Then he stepped back into the corridor, took another few paces and peered around the corner.

  'You heard what she said.'

  'I'm not going anywhere.'

  'Maybe I should call the police . . .'

  Thorne was now at the entrance to a large, open-plan seating area. There was a pool table and a white piano beyond the L-shaped sofa. On the far side was what looked like a well-stocked bar, with rows of bottles in gleaming optics and vintage movie posters framed on the wall above.

  The Dirty Dozen. Where Eagles Dare. The Italian Job.

  The room led directly out, through an open pair of sliding doors, to the pool, and from where he was standing, Thorne had a clear view of the action.

  Langford was sitting on the edge of a sunlounger, with Ellie standing behind him. A few feet away, on the other side of a glass-topped table, Donna stood, her fists clenched at her side and her eyes fixed on her daughter's right hand, which was resting on Langford's shoulder.

  'I was struggling not to laugh out loud,' Langford said, 'when that copper accused me of "taking" her.' He glanced up at Ellie. 'She couldn't wait to get over here, could you, love?'

  'I dreamed about it.' Ellie squeezed her father's shoulder, but spat the words across at her mother. 'Just had to wait until I was eighteen, so nobody would bother looking too hard.'

  'For ten years, you were all I thought about,' Donna said.

  'Oh, I thought about you, too. Only not quite in the same way.'

  'That last day I saw you, before the trial, you cried and cried and begged them not to take me away.' Donna's voice was weak and cracked. 'You wouldn't let go of my arm.'

  'I was a kid,' Ellie said. 'I was stupid.'

  'No . . .'

  'I didn't know what you'd done. What you'd tried to do. I didn't know what a vicious cow you were, did I?'

  'But I did it for you.'

  'You tried to kill my father!'

  'For us.'

  'You didn't think about me, how I would feel.'

  'That was all I thought about, I swear. All those years . . .'

  'Funny,' Langford said. 'I thought you were too busy becoming a rug-muncher to give a shit.'

  Even from his vantage point twenty feet away, Thorne could see the hatred etched into Donna's face.

  'When did you contact her?' she asked.

  Langford thought about it. 'About eighteen months after I got here, once I was settled. I got word to her, had a few friends keep an eye out, passed on some money whenever she needed it. We started making plans for you to come out here fairly early on, didn't we, love?'

  Ellie nodded.

  Donna was shaking her head as though trying to make sense of what she was hearing. 'I don't understand,' she said. When she looked across at Ellie, it was as if Donna herself had become the child. 'I don't understand . . .'

  Thorne had seen and heard enough. He stepped into the open and watched as Langford spotted the movement, focused on him . . . then smiled.

  'I thought you must be knocking about somewhere,'
Langford said.

  Donna and Ellie both stared at Thorne - the daughter looking straight through him, the mother ashen.

  Langford held out his arms. 'Come and join our happy family reunion.'

  Thorne walked on to the pool deck and across to Donna.