Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  When Stella came up to them, having made a wide circle to approach from behind, Morgan was talking about a fact-finding trip he had to make soon. They couldn’t go together, of course; couldn’t travel together; but they could certainly find one another once they were there.

  Stella said, ‘Mr Morgan?’

  His shoulders tightened as he turned, and she said, ‘I’m not a journalist.’ She waited a beat, just a beat or two, before adding, ‘Though I do know a few.’

  The blonde said, ‘Neil –’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Morgan told her. ‘She’s the police.’

  *

  They sat at a corner table by a window, their reflections at their sides. Morgan looked out to the street. It was dusk, and London was lighting up against the night.

  Morgan said, ‘So you think he meant to kill me?’

  Stella had a fresh drink in front of her and could feel the merest hint of blurriness. ‘I think it’s a possibility.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Why Leonard Pigeon?’

  ‘The cowardice thing, wasn’t it? I mean, this guy’s crazy, isn’t that it? He killed a prostitute, hung her in a tree and wrote on her, filthy bitch, then the same with Len, but with him it was the incident on the bridge, the woman they threw in…’

  Stella’s hand was stalled over her drink. The blonde appeared in the middle of the room and stood there a moment, as if waiting for a decision, her reflection merging with theirs. Morgan looked at her, then away. She waited another second or two, then made for the door, walking briskly.

  Stella said, ‘Dirty girl.’ Morgan laughed, but made no comment. Stella shook her head. ‘Not her. Not Abigail. The prostitute. He wrote dirty girl, not filthy bitch.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Filthy bitch is your thinking.’

  ‘I knew it was something like that.’

  ‘Filthy bitch is what you might have said.’

  Morgan’s face darkened. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘A few things,’ Stella told him. ‘To begin with, I’d like to know who told you about the girl in the tree and the writing. For instance, was it the same person who told you about the writing on Leonard Pigeon and the possible connection with the incident on the bridge? I ask because none of this has been released to the press – the writing, the bridge – so no one has connected the two deaths.’

  Morgan said, ‘I’m a Member of Parliament.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. Who told you?’

  ‘I think that’s covered by privilege.’

  ‘No, it’s not, and you’re coming dangerously close to obstructing –’

  ‘It was common knowledge. People saw the girl in the tree; people saw Len on the bench by the river.’

  Stella sighed with annoyance. ‘No. Very few people saw the girl, and when we brought her down, it was dark. People walked past Leonard Pigeon without noticing he was dead – or else they didn’t want to notice. The couple who found him thought the writing was a tattoo… and, in any case, weren’t all that eager to go public on the fact that they were together at the time. If it was common knowledge, it would have been in the papers. Try again.’

  He tried. ‘Paula Pigeon told me.’

  Stella smiled. ‘She knew about the writing on her husband, sure; she knew nothing about the girl in the tree.’ Morgan turned to the window, and his own reflection confronted him with a stern look. ‘You were expecting me,’ Stella said. ‘You knew that I was a police officer.’

  ‘Not here. I wasn’t expecting you to come –’

  ‘Someone got in touch. Someone who thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ Morgan said, suddenly combative, ‘one of yours, yes, to give me a bit of background. So you’d better sort it out yourself, hadn’t you?’

  Stella wanted to hit him; it was a strong impulse. She said, ‘Let’s assume it was you he wanted – that the killer got the wrong man, that it was your throat he wanted to slit.’

  ‘All right, assume it. Now tell me why.’

  ‘No, you tell me. Filthy coward, that was what he wrote. Now, why would that have fitted you better than it fitted Leonard Pigeon?’

  ‘Some lads on a bridge, a woman being attacked… Would I have made a better showing than Len? Run towards them instead of away? Taken them on? Well, I don’t know. I’ve never been in a situation like that, so I’ve never had to make the choice.’

  ‘No reason why anyone should think of you as a coward?’

  ‘Honestly? No.’ He was turning a drinks coaster in his fingers: flip-flip. He said, ‘If you were coming here to talk to me about this, you must have intended to tell me yourself – about the writing on Len’s arms and so on.’

  ‘But not about the girl in the tree, not about the connection between the killings, so listen: if I hear it’s being talked about or it appears in the press, I’ll be looking for you with a warrant.’

  Morgan allowed her to see his smile. ‘Yes, sure…’

  Stella laughed. ‘Try me…’ The smile disappeared. After a moment she said, ‘You don’t think much of my theory, do you?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘So no protection, then.’

  The question startled him. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘If we’d agreed that it was a possibility you were the target, that someone somewhere might think of you as a filthy coward who deserves to die, then I would have suggested surveillance-and-protection cover for you and your family. After all, two murders, both in public places, people around, but no one seems to see or hear anything – this guy is good at what he does.’ She finished her drink. ‘Still, if you’re not worried, I’m not worried.’

  They sat in silence for a full minute, Morgan with his head lowered. Finally, he looked up and said, ‘I can’t think of anything. I can’t think of a single thing. Some act of cowardice…’ He shook his head, as if trying to remember and failing. ‘But this man, whoever killed them, he’s not sane, is he? He could pick on anything, anything I might have done, anything he decided he didn’t approve of.’

  ‘Anything he thought cowardly.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying. It won’t necessarily be rational.’

  ‘You mean it won’t necessarily have been cowardly.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You’re opting for protection.’

  ‘It seems the sensible thing to do.’

  ‘For you and your family.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about Abigail?’

  Morgan looked startled. ‘How do you know her name?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say.’ Stella almost smiled: those snippets of official bullshit that keep civilians at bay. ‘So… Abigail…’

  ‘Even in the best marriages,’ Morgan said, and offered what he hoped might be a conspiratorial grin.

  Stella nodded as if to say: Why tell me? She said, ‘I’ll need to speak to her.’

  ‘There’s nothing she can tell you.’

  ‘I bet you’re right. I still need to speak to her.’

  Morgan took out a business card, wrote a name and number on the back and handed it to Stella. In the same moment that she took it, she saw the sudden panic in his eyes: My business card; her name on the back; how stupid is that?

  She said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a cop, not a counsellor.’

  Morgan was still flipping the coaster. As Stella got up to leave, he said, ‘By the way… Len wasn’t impersonating me; he wasn’t even standing in for me. He had some sort of business with an American company, I know that. Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘That’s not the way I heard it.’

  ‘Then you heard wrong. Why would I lie?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Stella told him. ‘No idea.’ She paused. ‘Unless your involvement with the American company in question involved passing on privileged information of some sort, and you wanted to be able to say that you knew of no such company, had never met its representatives, there was no paper trail from you to them, and you had evidence
to prove you were somewhere else entirely on the dates in question.’ She shrugged. ‘Just a guess.’

  The coaster speeded up. Morgan said, ‘You’re on dangerous ground, DS Mooney. Len’s business was his own affair.’

  ‘His wife claims he attended those meetings with the express purpose of pretending to be you.’

  ‘I wonder why Len would tell her that. I imagine he had something to hide. Still, he’s dead now and beyond recrimination.’

  ‘She’s pretty clear on the matter.’

  ‘If that’s what he told her, I suppose she would be.’

  The place had filled up: older men and younger women; older men and younger men; business deals going down in quiet corners; lone gamblers at the bar waiting for a place at the backroom table. Eyes followed Stella as she walked out, as if she had ‘Police’ in large, white letters across the back of her much-older-than-last-year’s jacket from T. K. Maxx.

  45

  Even in the best marriages…

  Stella drove down to the Embankment, parked and took a walk. She thought about her conversation with Tom Davison and the way she had felt when he’d stood close to her; she thought back to the evening at Machado’s, strings of lights round the square, swifts circling, Delaney asking, ‘Are you happy with us?’

  He was restless, she knew that, but she didn’t know why.

  The Imola-red Beamer went by. Someone had fitted blue sill-lights that shed a glow on the tarmac – car-bling. The sound-system slammed off the Embankment wall and the boys were hanging out of the windows, laughing, yelling, cruising for girls.

  They saw Stella and ran through their repertoire.

  Hey, bitch…

  Aimée lay in the arms of her lover, tucked into him, holding on. His chest, slowly rising and falling, was hard; his stomach carried little ridges of muscle; she could feel his bicep, bunched against her shoulder. She had made him a meal, they had drunk some wine, they had made love in a way that was new to her for its intensity and pleasure, new to her for its touch of pain, and it was what she wanted, what she now craved, even as she lay beside him, still damp between her thighs, still hot from his touch.

  Gideon, Gideon…

  Love had taken her by surprise, but she had adapted quickly to its demands. She had a mother in Oxford who was mostly deaf, somewhat infirm and a good alibi. If her daughterly trips became more frequent, if she had to spend the night down there, or the weekend, who could possibly complain?

  Over dinner they had talked about themselves, lies going back and forth, each of them open to believe.

  Aimée had lived in this flat for a year or so. She had been engaged, once, a long time ago; since then there hadn’t been anyone, really. No one special, anyway. She worked as a dental nurse, he knew that. There wasn’t much else to tell.

  Woolf had worked as an engineer. He chose ‘engineer’, because it was vague and sounded complicated. He’d been made redundant and got a really handy payoff. He was looking for a job but wasn’t in any hurry. There wasn’t much else to tell.

  She had suggested a weekend away together. He’d told her it sounded fine.

  She thought he was sleeping, and maybe he was, but when her hand trailed down over his belly, he turned to her at once, scooping her up, and she cried out, shivering, knowing she could never get enough of him. Afterwards, it was Aimée who slept while Woolf lay awake.

  He thought, If we go away somewhere, not a city, somewhere wild, no people, woods and sea and open land, I could kill her there.

  Mike Sorley was sitting up against his pillows and seemed to be looking at a football match on the TV angled out over the bed, but in fact he was looking at the wall opposite. The wall was blank, the usual hospital magnolia, but he could see something there, something from a dream. The dream had come when he was dead.

  He knew he’d died, and he knew when, because Karen had told him how they had used CPR and defibrillation, working hard to haul him back. The dream wasn’t tunnels of white light or sweet meadows in the peaceable kingdom; it was a series of dark alleys and dimly lit dead ends, himself running through, going this way and that, every turn a wrong one, every wall a blank, unable to find a way in, unable to find a way out.

  In the end, he stopped and sat down on the ground. He knew the alleys and pathways went on for ever, and his heart shrank at the thought. He felt bereft in a way that was so great it was almost beyond pain: everything he had ever loved lost to him, everything he’d ever cared for come to a black negative. He sat on the ground and cried. Then they had brought him back, but he couldn’t remember how: just that there had been glare and voices and pain and anxiety and relief.

  Karen came in and sat beside him and continued to sit for a minute or two. Someone scored in the match, and the crowd went wild, but Sorley didn’t seem to notice. Finally, she pushed the TV aside and said, ‘Are you there?’

  Sorley turned, startled, then laughed. She had brought him some fruit and a book and a TV guide but not the Tree Girl/Leonard Pigeon case reports he’d asked for. She kissed him, and he held on to her, so she got up on the bed and he lay with his head on her shoulder, her arm round him as if to guard and protect.

  He said, ‘You know what being dead is? It’s being afraid and alone. I used to think it was nothing, you know, like being switched off. It’s not. It’s being on your own for ever.’

  Karen gave a little shudder. She said, ‘You’re not dead.’

  ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘You know what’s totally fucking outrageous about this place? They won’t let you smoke.’

  Stella watched the night-time river craft and the black waves lapping the stone wall.

  Dirty girl. Filthy coward.

  Who are you to say, you arrogant bastard? You murdering bastard. She had a picture of him in her mind’s eye: young, white, strong; the body was easy to imagine, but the face stayed blank. She thought of Bryony Dean, her eyes plucked out. She thought of Leonard Pigeon, his head sunk on his chest, his features fallen and out of true. Killer and victims, none of them looking themselves.

  She felt a chill at her back, something more than the wind off the river, and turned fast to see him coming towards her, one of the city’s haggard desperadoes, clothes stained and torn, face dark with grime, one hand held low and in that hand something that caught a glint from the riverside lights.

  Hit him with anything that will stop him, anything that cuts.

  She reached for her keys, sidestepping at the same time, and held them in her clenched fist, the serrated car key protruding through her knuckles, but he turned, eyes wide and vacant, and set off down the street at a fast shuffle. She realized that he hadn’t even been looking at her; might not have known she was there, able to see only the vision inside his own head.

  The glint had been from the soda can that doubled as a crack pipe. But another time, it wouldn’t be that. Another time it would be a knife.

  London at night. Expect the worst.

  46

  Pete Harriman was a man who liked women. He liked them so much, he tried not to be exclusive: why deny himself or them? At present he had three relationships in progress, and schedules were a part of his life, but one woman took precedence. Her name was Gloria, and she was dangerously close to stealing the show. She walked naked into her bathroom where Harriman was shaving and held his mobile phone up to his ear, but a fraction away from the foam on his cheek.

  He said, ‘Hello?’ then, ‘No kidding,’ then, ‘On my way.’

  He watched Gloria as she walked out of the bathroom. She had the clear skin and firm lines of youth. The way her back curved out to her ass, the way her ass curved in to her thigh, was enough to leave any man breathless, and he wished she hadn’t picked up the phone, because under other circumstances he wouldn’t have been on the road for another thirty minutes.

  Stella was in the local Coffee Republic with an espresso and a Danish that carried a sky-high calorie count. She had chosen the smoking area as a concession to Harriman, who came in looking a tou
ch surly and sat down without placing an order. Stella told him about her moment with Neil Morgan: that someone had put Morgan ahead of the game, that she was pretty sure the person in question – the asshole in question – was Brian Collier.

  She said, ‘I want you to know, because, just for the present, I’m saying nothing.’

  ‘And you want a witness to that fact. Also a witness to confirm, if necessary, that you did suspect that Acting DI Collier might have overstepped the mark.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Because you ought to be sending a report to the SIO.’

  ‘I’m unsure of my ground.’

  ‘Not enough to go on.’

  ‘Just a feeling.’

  ‘And it would be wrong to make an accusation against a brother officer on the basis of a feeling.’

  ‘Highly irresponsible. Also bad tactics.’

  ‘Because you’d sooner wait until you have got some evidence and then nail the bastard.’

  ‘Long pointy nails.’

  ‘Which evidence might well be forthcoming, if you bide your time.’

  ‘My fervent hope.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Harriman wondered. ‘Tell Morgan to expect you, let him know that we had information about the blonde?’

  ‘He’s career-building. Names in high places, favours to be done in the hope of eventual payback, putting himself on a name-check list…’

  The raw contempt in her voice was plain to hear, a rankle from the past. Harriman asked, ‘When he hit on you – what did he say?’

  ‘He told me he was hung.’

  Harriman was caught in the act of bringing a match to his cigarette. ‘He what?’