Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  ‘On the one hand, any hooker, any coward; on the other, that particular hooker, that particular coward?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Meaning did he know them?’

  ‘Yes. And if he did, then Leonard Pigeon becomes my focus.’

  ‘Because anyone could be a client of the hooker, but Leonard Pigeon’s friends and acquaintances are fewer and easier to find. Do you want one of these?’ He waggled his glass.

  ‘No.’ She got up and went to the kitchen. ‘Coffee.’

  ‘In fact,’ Delaney observed, ‘whichever way you look at things, Leonard Pigeon is a particular case, isn’t he? It wouldn’t be difficult for your killer to choose a whore at random, but he had to know about Leonard’s ignoble retreat from the bridge.’

  ‘It was reported pretty widely.’

  ‘Sure, yes; but he would have had to be looking for some such act; trying to find a coward.’

  Stella opened a cupboard and took out coffee beans, a grinder and a cafetiére. She started to load the beans into the grinder, then said, ‘The hell with it,’ and found a jar of instant.

  ‘I sometimes forget,’ Delaney told her, ‘that you’re off the estate.’

  Stella said, ‘A mind’s-eye picture of him… not his face, not a photo-fit, just a notion about him. He’s almost certainly white, young, strong –’

  ‘You got this from what’s-her-name.’

  ‘Anne Beaumont. From her and from Sam Burgess.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pathologist. Psychological typing from Anne – white, young, the serial-killer clichés; physical type from Sam – strong enough to haul her into the tree, and to cut Leonard Pigeon’s throat to the neck-bone.’

  ‘Who’s your forensics man?’

  Stella was spooning coffee into her cup. Delaney’s question jogged her, as if he had nudged her elbow, and coffee granules arced over the counter. She tore off some kitchen paper.

  ‘Tom Davison.’

  ‘You must be hoping for something from him.’

  ‘DNA match.’ She felt a little blush come to her throat and turned away.

  ‘He’s a man on his own…’

  ‘What?’ For a moment she wasn’t sure who he meant. Then: ‘Not necessarily. There have been killers who were happily married, an apparently normal home-life, the wife in ignorance, the kids well cared for.’

  ‘Secret lives,’ Delaney said. ‘Who could ever know everything about anyone?’

  Dawn came in, cool pastels, blue and pink, a clear sky above shreds of mist that the sun would soon burn off.

  Woolf stood on the street outside the Park Clinic. He wanted to know where she worked. He wanted to know where he could find her again. He wanted to know what the place looked like and how quickly he could get there from where he lived and what route he might take.

  He didn’t know why he wanted to know these things. He felt uneasy, like a man in a locked room who hears a voice not his own.

  32

  Each new day began with mopping up from the night before: break-ins, muggings, domestics, bar fights, street fights, casualties in the drugs war, casualties in the turf war. Up on the Strip, police tape sketched the area in which the followers had met Gideon Woolf. The statistic was one dead, one comatose. The local cops had already put it down to a territorial issue.

  It was Blondie who was in the coma: the guy Woolf had stamped on. The other man had suffered impacted vertebrae, a fractured skull and a cranial bleed that had left his eyes looking like cherry tomatoes. His death had occurred fifteen minutes after Woolf had run him on to the wall; for the moment Blondie’s death seemed to be on hold.

  A new day also brought the usual piles of paper, some of which Stella was reading before shipping the lot down to Mike Sorley. The door to door had expanded to take in an area five streets deep on each side of the scene of crime, but to no effect; the yellow-board request had resulted only in the theft of the yellow-board; a cross-reference computer search for lookalike crimes had drawn a blank.

  Stella fished out an email from Anne Beaumont:

  I’ve been thinking about him. Easy to assume he’s an avenger, bringing rough justice to the unworthy. That way, he’s tracking down anyone who’s offended his dubious moral standards. But what if there’s a pattern?

  She emailed back:

  I wondered about that too. But what sort of pattern?

  Maxine Hewitt stopped at Stella’s desk to report on the number of confessors so far: nine, mostly anonymous letters, though none had made mention of the fact that the victims had been written on. Of the confessors, three were angels of death sent by the Almighty to rid the world of prostitutes, two slept each night in coffins filled with the soil of their country, and the others were just standard-issue deranged souls with lively imaginations and a limited vocabulary. They all had to be investigated just in case one of them was a killer with a bleak sense of humour, though the chance of finding any of them was pretty remote. Stella added photocopies of their letters to the pile she would soon deliver to Sorley.

  Maxine said, ‘Everyone’s talking to a chis.’

  Stella nodded. ‘And they’re all saying that this is obviously the work of a serial killer, so why ask someone who only knows career criminals.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Maxine had poured herself a plastic cup of squad-room coffee and grimaced as she sipped. ‘The girl’s still a complete mystery: she’s anonymous; no one knows her.’

  ‘Or no one wants to know her. Keep asking.’ Stella picked the top letter from the pile.

  I kiled her becose she was slut all wimon like her shood die.

  ‘Given that it’s computer-generated,’ she said, ‘you’d think the prick would have used spell-check.’

  She was still going through paper, sorting paper, hating paper, when she picked up a return email from Anne Beaumont.

  Who knows?

  33

  Frank Silano was in a riverside bar, buying a lunch-time drink for a man called Derek Crane. Crane was his real name and one he sometimes used, though, in his time, he’d carried credit cards, driving licences and passports that provided him with a dozen other identities. Just now, or so Derek claimed, he wasn’t impersonating anyone: after his last conviction he’d turned the corner; he’d straightened out; he’d found a job.

  ‘Job?’ Silano said. It wasn’t a question, it was an expression of disbelief.

  Derek smiled. He was a dapper type with thinning sandy hair and freckles that were beginning to look like liver spots. His dark suit and grey Oxfords were dressy without being tasteful.

  ‘Self-employed.’

  ‘Please don’t tell me,’ Silano said, ‘then I won’t have to inform Customs and Excise.’

  Crane laughed, but not at Silano’s cynicism: he was looking at a couple sitting on the far side of the bar, the man leaning close and talking softly, the woman looking at him wide-eyed with love.

  ‘He’s promising her the earth,’ Derek said, ‘but I don’t think he can live up to it.’

  Silano always liked to see a craftsman at work. Derek had made his living as a con-man and one of the con-man’s desirable skills was lip-reading. You hang out in local bars, you sip your drink, you read your paper, and you watch people talking about themselves, because when you know about their lives you know how best to con them.

  ‘You think he’s lying to her?’

  ‘I know he is. When she went to the ladies’ room just now, he was on the phone to his wife. The woman he’s with doesn’t know he has a wife. That’s why she’s agreed to the weekend in Paris.’

  Silano thought it was quaint of Derek to use the term ladies’ room, but then a certain dated charm was part of the man’s technique. ‘Paris,’ Silano said. ‘He’s a romantic anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think so. He’ll be there on business, and she’s joining him. He’s flying her budget from Stansted. I know who he was,’ Derek said, as if it were all part of the same train of thought, ‘and I know a little about him, but nothing
of interest; not really.’ He was talking about Leonard Pigeon.

  ‘Tell me.’

  Derek hesitated. ‘I wasn’t working, Mr Silano. It’s just force of habit: watching people, filing secrets.’

  ‘Of course you were working.’ Silano shrugged. ‘But I’m assuming you didn’t use what you learned, because if you had you’d be denying you ever knew him.’

  ‘There wasn’t much I could have used. He was relatively clean – for someone involved in politics anyway. I wasn’t really…’

  ‘… interested in him so much as in his boss,’ Silano said, finishing the indiscretion.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Certain possibilities. Morgan is ambitious and playing both ends against the middle. He plans to be party leader and doesn’t much care what he has to do to get there: kiss ass or bust ass.’ Derek shrugged. ‘He’s a politician.’

  The couple at the far end of the bar got up to leave. The man put a guiding arm round the woman’s shoulders, ushering her out.

  ‘He’s got a train to catch,’ Derek said. ‘Newcastle on business.’

  ‘Has he?’

  ‘Not from what he said to his wife on the phone.’ Derek laughed. ‘Perhaps he’s got another one lined up.’ Still laughing, he went to the bar, then came back with refills. Silano looked surprised.

  ‘You buying, Derek?’

  ‘Are you serious? They’re running a tab for you.’ He sipped his white-wine spritzer: con-men don’t drink: it clouds the memory, and memory is all important. ‘He has a few directorships that might not be quite kosher’ – he was back to Morgan now – ‘and a few contacts in the Middle East that his party might frown on, but mostly his business interests are just the right side of legal.’ Derek laughed. ‘Pigeon took a few meetings for him: with an American manufacturer, I think it was.’

  ‘Took meetings for him?’

  ‘Did the business. Cut the deal.’

  ‘You mean he pretended to be his own boss?’

  ‘That’s right. Either Morgan had to be somewhere else, or the business was sensitive and he needed to be able to say he’d never met them. I expect they make jump-leads for Abu Ghraib, or something similar. Look’ – he spread his hands in a gesture of innocence – ‘I pick these things up from lip-reading conversations. I get fragments. I remember everything, but most of it doesn’t help me.’

  ‘The business interests would have helped.’

  Derek lifted his spritzer, dampened his lips and put it down. ‘Only if I’d been planning a con.’

  ‘You were planning a con,’ Silano said, ‘but someone got murdered, so you backed out fast.’

  Derek shook his head. ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘Where were you, when you got all this?’ Silano was trying to picture the scene. Morgan and Pigeon on one side of a room, like the cheating husband and his lover who had just left, Derek Crane on the other.

  ‘Sometimes the local Conservative Club, sometimes a House of Commons bar; or there’s a club Morgan likes to go to in Orchard Street.’

  Silano looked at him. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Anyone can join a club.’

  ‘No, the House of Commons.’

  Derek smiled. ‘All you need is a pass in a plastic holder and a confident tone of voice. Years of practice give you the voice.’

  ‘The pass?’

  ‘Please.’ Derek looked affronted. ‘A computer, a passport snap.’

  Silano went to the bar and paid the tab. When he turned, Derek was standing beside him.

  ‘You put the word out, and I said I could help. I didn’t say it would come free.’

  Silano reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. It looked disappointingly thin, and Derek sighed.

  ‘I didn’t get much,’ Silano said. ‘It cuts both ways.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘I thought at least there might have been a shag on the side.’

  ‘Pigeon? No, not Pigeon.’

  Something in Derek’s voice alerted Silano. ‘Not Pigeon, but –’

  ‘Morgan.’

  ‘I’m pulling teeth,’ Silano said.

  Derek waited until Silano had dipped into his wallet. ‘She’s either a natural blonde or her hairdresser’s a genius. Late twenties. Named Abigail.’

  ‘Where does he meet her?’

  ‘I said: a club in Orchard Street.’

  ‘You were saving the best till last.’

  ‘Well,’ Derek said, ‘I didn’t know we were going to be talking about Morgan.’

  Silano walked out of the bar into bright sunlight.

  Couples were walking by the river, arm in arm, hand in hand. He wondered how many of them were married to someone else.

  34

  By day, business on the Strip slowed down. There were even a few shops, a dingy café, a pawnbroker, a gimcrack arcade. Harriman walked past the police tape and a scene-of-crime tent, where a forensics team was still brushing and tweezering. He didn’t look twice. SOC teams weren’t that rare on the Strip.

  Harriman was there to rattle a few cages. He knew that Costea Radu’s arrest would have caused problems: problems and opportunities. Radu’s girls would have to be managed, his turf covered, his profit redirected. It took Harriman two hours to work the street on a drop-in basis; during that time he spoke to pimps, dealers, gamblers and other assorted lowlifes, but got no nearer to Lizzie the Tree Girl. She was freelance, she was taking risks; she made tricks, she made money, but she made no friends.

  He came up from a basement club, all stained velvet and stale air, and started to walk down towards the church. On the other side of the road, Gideon Woolf was walking uphill, looking neither left nor right, a little movie running in his head: scenes of violence and vengeance, in which he himself played the dark hero.

  John Delaney was sitting in Martin Turner’s Canary Wharf office and watching a garbage scow push against the tide; gulls were tracking it, wheeling on the breeze. From inside the room, with its air-con and its plexiglas, the whole thing looked contrived: a world at one remove.

  Delaney and Turner were having a lunch-time beer and a sandwich and talking in carefully constructed circles. The editor was wearing a blue shirt with red braces, like a man who believed in his role. He said, ‘Why did you go in the first place? I mean, why did you ever go?’

  ‘Well, it was no accident. I asked to go.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘Northern Ireland.’

  ‘Then we sent you…’ Turner tried to remember ‘… the First Gulf War, and…’

  ‘Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo…’

  ‘Five years, wasn’t it?’

  ‘More.

  ‘Then no more.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a point at which death becomes personal.’

  ‘Isn’t it always?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  An intercom voice told Turner he was needed: a fiveminute problem. He took a gulp of beer and got up. ‘And now?’ he asked, then left before he could get an answer.

  Delaney walked to the window and looked out at the silent world. He remembered the smell of smoke and the juices flowing. He remembered nights in some bar or another, journos in combat gear, booze and laughter and the sound of incoming mortars. All of that. He also remembered skeletal men in camps, sitting still, hollow-eyed, dead inside their heads. He remembered women from the rape camps unable to speak of what had been done to them. He remembered the bodies being flung on to trucks like cordwood, some without legs, without arms, without heads. He remembered his fingers stalling over the keyboard, because nothing he could write, nothing, would even come close.

  Turner came back, bringing with him two more bottles of beer. He said, ‘And now?’ as if he’d never been away.

  ‘I think,’ Delaney said, ‘I’m trying to work out where I really belong.’

  Turner laughed. ‘Don’t get all fucking philosophical with me, John. Look, there’s Palestine,
there’s Iraq, there’s Chechnya, there’s Somalia, there’s the Congo. Last time I looked, about ninety small wars going on round the globe. Take your pick; I’ll have you on a plane tomorrow.’

  Delaney said, ‘I’m contracted to do this Rich List thing.’

  ‘Sure,’ Turner said. ‘Sure, of course you are.’

  Stella piled up the files and photocopies and reports and carried them up to Mike Sorley’s office. The door was partly open, and a little fog of cigarette smoke was seeping into the corridor. When she went in, Sorley was staring thoughtfully at two cigarettes smouldering in the ashtray, one down to the tip, one freshly lit. His desk was six inches deep in files and photocopies and reports.

  Stella said nothing. She put her pile on the floor near his chair. She said, ‘Today’s load. Sorry, Boss.’

  Sorley looked at her. He said, ‘You know what? I think I’m having a heart-attack.’

  Stella looked at his desk. She gave a brief laugh. ‘I’m not surprised.’

  Sorley said, ‘No, call an ambulance. I think I’m having a heart-attack.’

  35

  In a scene from the movie running in Gideon Woolf’s head, a man left his office and took the lift to a basement car park. No one was there apart from the man and Woolf. When the man used his key to blip the lock on his car, Woolf stepped out of hiding. He said, ‘You lying bastard.’

  He liked it: the gloom of underground, the concrete pillars, neon strips reflecting hard, white rods of light back off the rows of cars. He liked the sudden surprise, the way he appeared from behind a pillar or from between two high-sided vehicles. He liked the startled look in the man’s eyes and the way it quickly turned to fear.

  There was a problem, though. The car park was a ‘restricted access facility’; only employees went there, and singly unless they were part of the company’s share-a-ride scheme. Woolf needed a more public place: where the man would be seen; exposed, like the others; held up to shame. He constructed other scenes that allowed for this. The man at his office, at his club, at his home… yes, that had possibilities.