Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

‘Told me he had a big dick.’

  Harriman smiled a slow, broad smile. ‘A prince among men,’ he said.

  *

  The prince had left a message for Stella with Maxine Hewitt. Maxine delivered it along with the morning’s paperwork: My office now.

  Stella looked through the reports and emails, sorting the wheat from the chaff. There was a letter marked ‘Personal’. She dropped it in the bin, then took a moment to read the opening paragraph of an article on serial killings that Anne Beaumont had sent as an attachment. There was a highlighted passage:

  One notable characteristic of serial killers is their tendency to recklessness. They proceed with a plan and part of the plan is, of necessity, repetition. There might be a rationale to their actions – some sort of spurious reason for these killers to act as they do – but studies suggest this is less important to the killer (though no less important to the investigator) than the simple need to kill. This irresistible impulse is more important to the perpetrator than the need for preparation or caution and is more likely to lead to an arrest than the discovery of any motive, not least because motive is often irrational or obscure.

  Anne’s accompanying email message said:

  In other words, serial killers get a taste for it; already have a taste for it. This is right, though it underplays the business of motive, especially in this case, since the writings on the bodies indicate some specific (and therefore traceable) reason for their deaths. But, yes, he might slip up. Is there something you can do to get ahead of him?

  Stella was aware of being watched and knew it must be Collier. Resisting the impulse to look towards the door, she put Anne’s email down on her desk, turned her back and made for the corridor and then the exhibitions room. She had nothing to do in there, but she took her time doing it. When she came out, it was just Maxine and Sue Chapman, eyes down over keyboards.

  As Stella walked through, Sue said, ‘He doesn’t look pleased.’

  Collier was smoking, but he was a dilettante compared to Sorley: he smoked his cigarettes one at a time. He was working on some papers and didn’t look up when Stella came in, a technique so worn round the edges that she almost laughed out loud. Acting DI.

  He said, ‘I told you to tread carefully: my exact words, I think.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Neil Morgan?’ Collier didn’t reply. ‘I called on him to offer the theory that he might have been the killer’s real target. We’d agreed that I should.’

  ‘You harassed him.’

  Stella’s laugh almost took her by surprise. ‘I offered him protection.’

  ‘Don’t bullshit me, Stella. You could have gone to his home, instead you nobbled him at a club in Orchard Street. You embarrassed him.’

  ‘There was a blonde with him – she wasn’t his wife. He embarrassed himself. Here’s another thing: it’s very likely that he’s using his position as an MP to some advantage in business.’

  ‘We’re a murder squad. And he’s not a suspect. In fact, he’s a potential victim. So in future –’

  ‘How did he know about the connection with Bryony Dean?’ Her wait-and-nail-him tactics shot in one flush of anger.

  Collier started to speak, stopped, started again. ‘Did he?’

  ‘About the link between her and Pigeon, about the writing on both of them.’ Collier shrugged, as if that would do the job. ‘He wasn’t supposed to talk about that, was he? Okay to mark his card; okay to give him the drop on me; okay to fill him in on confidential details… he’d know what was coming, and he’d know the background; but he forgot to keep his mouth shut.’ She let a silence develop, then: ‘Something you forgot – politicians and journalists, they think they stand outside the normal conventions, think they have some kind of licence; and the word “loyalty” doesn’t exist in their vocabulary.’

  ‘He’s a man with contacts,’ Collier observed. ‘Anyone could have –’

  ‘Who?’ Stella asked. ‘Who would be looking for an advantage? Who’d want to impress the great and good? Who’d want to jeopardize this investigation just to have the opportunity to kiss ass? The SIO? Sam Burgess? One of my squad? Me?’ She waited. ‘You?’

  Collier coloured up. His hand moved reflexively, raking the desk – a blow redirected – and papers spilled on to the floor. He said, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’

  Stella walked to the door. She said, ‘Now I know it was you.’

  Harriman saw her walk into the squad room and through to the rest room. He followed her and went in. She was bending over to wash her face at a sink and spoke through the water.

  ‘It’s probably sexual harassment.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Your being in here.’

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Heavy breathing.’ Harriman laughed. ‘You want to know what happened.’

  ‘Well, you did look pissed off, so… yes.’

  Stella pulled a handful of paper towels and dried her face. ‘With myself. He knows I know.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He prodded me; I prodded back.’

  ‘Harder.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘He’ll be covering his ass, and I’ll have to watch my back.’

  ‘All sounds a bit…’ he searched, ‘…anatomical.’

  Stella laughed: a genuine, hearty, out-front laugh. ‘You do cheer me up, Pete.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘About Collier? Nothing, for the time being. Try to find out what else Morgan might be involved in. If he was the intended victim, there’ll be more to find in his life than in Bryony Dean’s.’

  ‘They’re still an odd pairing.’

  ‘As are Bryony and Leonard Pigeon.’

  ‘Do you want me to take a closer look at Morgan?’

  ‘Maybe…’ Stella nodded. ‘Leave it a while… I’ve got a bit of inside track with our MP.’

  A little silence fell between them, and Harriman raised his eyebrows: What?

  ‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind leaving,’ Stella said, ‘I’d quite like to take a piss.’

  47

  Woolf was bench-pressing two hundred, staring up at patterns of reflected sunlight on the ceiling. At two in the afternoon the gym was almost empty. The brokers, the bankers, the traders, the head-hunters, the sidesteppers and the second guessers were back at their desks; the leotard-and-Botox sisterhood had left for lunch in their shiny SUVs. Woolf got through his reps, plus five, turned to bicep curls for a while, then made three circuits of the weight machines before getting on to the treadmill. He liked running. When he ran, he blanked.

  He set a gradient and worked steadily for half an hour, barely thinking a single thought, then stepped off and went back to the weights section and loaded the bar. The patterns on the ceiling had changed. Somewhere, outside, a tree was filtering the sunlight before it struck up off the chrome weight bars, and, when he stretched out on the bench and looked up, there were forms shifting and shimmering, human forms, seeming to walk forward as the light fluctuated.

  He remembered the day; he remembered the heat-haze on the dusty road and the sudden silence like a vacuum that had to be filled.

  He lay on the bench, his breathing short and quick, his mouth twisted in something like pain, something like grief, and tears ran from the corners of his eyes across his cheeks and into his hair. He cuffed the tears away. He bench-pressed two-twenty, his teeth grinding, the veins cording on his neck and arms.

  He took a cool shower and walked out into the afternoon sunlight. He was ready. He was pumped up and ready to pop.

  Stella had stopped off before going home; it was a while since she’d done that, but Collier was a problem that needed some thought, and Delaney worked alone, so was often eager to talk when she got back.

  The pub was close to the squad room and she was known there: well enough known for the barman to reach for a shot glass as she appro
ached the bar. A single ice cube in a shot glass, vodka poured over and taken to the brim. She carried it to a booth at the back of the bar.

  Collier: keep tabs, keep quiet. On the other hand, does it matter? Well, if Morgan shot his mouth off and the business of the writing became common knowledge, they’d have round-the-clock loonies walking in the door to confess: then it would matter. She’d look pretty silly making a retrospective report that fingered Collier; but if she went to the SIO with it now, she’d need something more than a long-standing resentment and doubts about the size of Collier’s dick.

  Leave it. Let it lie.

  Her mind went to Delaney, the Rich List, her man on the inside. She laughed at the notion. She wondered what question he was going to put that night before she had left to look at Bryony’s body strung up and naked.

  She wondered why he hadn’t asked it since.

  When she got back, he was asleep in a chair by an open window, his hair ruffled by the breeze. She kissed him awake and took him to bed.

  For Stella, sex displaced doubt; with most people it was doubt’s double-agent. She felt a rush of desire and took him in hand, drawing him on so he covered her, then looked past him to where sunlight smudged shapes and patterns on the wall. She felt good when he touched her: good in a way like no other.

  The breeze rippled the curtains. The shapes on the wall shifted, like watchers jostling for position.

  48

  From: martin.turner@brnnews.co.uk

  To: jdelaney@lang4all.com

  John: Uzbekistan is looking choice. Or anywhere in the Middle East: esp. the wrong side of the Israeli wall. No pressure, but I’m not short of eager bastards with full visas. Iraq catered for. MT.

  From: jdelaney@lang4all.com

  To: martin.turner@brnnews.co.uk

  OK, look, there are a few things I have to take care of. Don’t hold a job for me. If I decide to go, I’ll take what’s on offer – if nothing available, I’ll wait. Bear with me. Sorry. John.

  From: martin.turner@brnnews.co.uk

  To: jdelaney@lang4all.com

  Dozy fucker. Call me when you’re ready. If never ready, we could still have a drink sometime. Martin.

  Turner walked away from his desk, leaving the computer on screen-save. Like all computers in all London offices, it was doing its bit to accelerate climate change.

  It was late, nearly eight thirty, and he’d had enough. He walked through a deserted outer office, using his mobile to make a call to a well-paid mole in the Cabinet Office, who told him that things were quiet – nothing duplicitous, scandalous or globally significant was likely to happen within the next twenty-four hours. He lost the signal when he got into the lift, but the call was effectively over anyway.

  Turner leaned against the lift wall. He was forty, over-weight and truculent; he was also tired of bad news, and that was all the news there was these days. At one time bad news was all he’d thrived on; now he thought the world was going to hell in a handcart and he worried for his children, two boys, one six, one four, growing up amid bad things happening with warnings of worse to come. He wondered whether he would have grandchildren: whether there would be time. Put like that, he hoped not.

  His worry, though, somehow didn’t extend to switching off his computer or driving something more eco-friendly than a Mercedes SL. The lift let him out into the underground car park, false neon daylight on rough concrete. An alarm was sounding somewhere on the other side of the space, and, for some reason, it made Turner more edgy than annoyed. Then it occurred to him to wonder who had set it off.

  He imagined someone coming at him through the lines of cars, one hand slapping the bodywork, eyes locked on and wide with fury, one of London’s army of crazy people, the ones who lived on the edge of things, lived in the fissures and cracks, the city’s fault lines. The mind-picture lasted only a moment, but was so vivid that he caught his breath and quickened his pace, taking his key from his pocket and blipping his car doors from thirty feet away.

  He got into the car and grinned at his own foolishness, then pulled out and drove to the mesh portcullis that closed off the exit. His radio fizzed and buzzed, unable to get a signal underground. He lowered his window and slipped a user’s card into the exit pillar.

  As he pulled out on to the road, the radio came clear, a news broadcast, the trivial caught up with the catastrophic. Turner thought he badly needed a drink.

  Woolf walked past the house, taking a quick glance sideways to make sure that everything was as it should be. The front garden wasn’t the sort of place where children might play or people gather; the birch trees were there to screen the house from the road, and the space between the trees and the house was given over to the driveway and parking spaces for three cars. On the left-hand side of the driveway, just by the gate, was a concrete trash bunker over which someone had grown creeper. A wheelie-bin for green waste stood just to one side.

  He knew what to expect. Turner was usually home between eight and nine. Woolf had made three or four dry runs and things had gone according to plan. Then he’d picked a night, arrived prepared, walked the street just as he was doing now, and Turner had never shown up. Woolf had scouted early the next morning, and Turner’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so an overnight trip, perhaps. That was all right. There was no time-scale on things. The next time Woolf had intended to set things up was when Aimée had taken him to the flat in North Kensington. That had been more frustrating; he didn’t want to keep running the moment in his head like a dream from which he would have to wake.

  It was dusk. The sky was clear and the moon, almost full, was showing just above rooftops. The suburb where Turner lived was close to the river, and Woolf could hear the chug of a pleasure vessel making the last leg of the last round-trip of the day. There was music playing and a cross-hatch of voices and little plumes of smoke from backyard barbecues. He reached the end of the street and turned round. When he got to Turner’s house, he vaulted the iron gate and slipped into the tree cover. The gate was high, but he’d cleared it with little more than a three-step run-up.

  The grass between the trees and the hedge had been recently mown and gave off a warm, sweet smell. He sat down cross-legged. The SIG Sauer was pushed into the waistband of his jeans by the small of his back and hidden by his jacket; when he brought his legs round, he could feel the gun, hard against his lower spine.

  He heard the door of the house open, and light from the hall spilled out over the drive. He moved sideways, taking cover behind one of the birch-tree boles. A woman came into view by the gate; she was carrying a full bin-liner and stood in profile to him while she opened the bunker lid and dropped the garbage in. She was wearing linen trousers with a designer T-shirt, and Woolf liked the look of her full figure, liked the way her hair fell to her shoulders in a thick sweep, liked her bare arms and the way the linen moulded to her when she bent over to catch the lid and close it. She turned to go back to the house but paused, just a moment, to look up – at the moon, he guessed; and he liked that about her too.

  He knew that some sadness would soon come into her life, but he thought she would get through that and, eventually, find happiness again. He could hear his thoughts as a voice-over as Silent Wolf walked back through the empty streets under a rising moon, his work done.

  It was ten to nine. Woolf got up and walked out of cover, thinking of himself as a shadow against shadows. He lifted the green-waste bin and laid it sideways across the drive and just inside the gate.

  49

  When the Merc whispered up to the gate, Turner already had the remote in his hand. The iron bars rolled back, and the car inched forward, then stopped. Woolf heard the ratchet of the handbrake going on before the driver’s door opened and Turner stepped out.

  He said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

  As he reached the bin and stooped, Woolf caught him by the throat, one-handed, his fingers closing hard. Turner made a noise like water in a drain as he was dragged sideways into the tree-cover. Woolf kic
ked the man’s legs out from under him, and he fell on his face; the flat of the gun-barrel took him on the side of the head, and he bucked, then lay still. Woolf stripped Turner of his jacket and shirt, made a bundle of them, pushed the SIG Sauer into the cloth and placed it against the back of the man’s head. The shot sounded like a door being slammed. It had taken a minute; a minute or two.

  The clothing had caught the blood spurt, just a splash or two landing on Woolf’s gun-hand and forearm. He stepped over Turner’s body, walked quickly to the Merc, found the remote, closed the gate and drove the car to the end of the street. Voices, still; music, still; but no one walking the dog or arriving for dinner. He walked back feeling light and powerful, no need to run, no need to worry.

  He hopped the gate as before and walked into the tree-lined space. A dark stain on the clipped grass was seeping and growing, though it was a couple of feet clear of the body, a thin track seeming to connect it to Turner’s head. The man had moved. It brought Woolf up short. He tried to imagine the moment: Turner shot through the head, bone and brain matter and blood a pulpy mulch on the grass, his life drawing off like vapour into the dark air, and somehow he finds the strength, somehow he finds the last jot of instinct that allows him to dig at the grass with his nails, pull himself an inch or two, then an inch or two more. He wished he could see that moment preserved on a Silent Wolf game: the last moment, the agonizing hope against hope.

  He took some twine and a magic marker from his pocket. The moon was higher now, its light silvering the boles of the trees as he worked.

  50

  In the days before Stella, Delaney’s fridge had been for wine, milk, bacon and eggs. Even now, it was never stocked for two. Sometimes, Stella went back – she never now thought back home – to the flat in West Kensington that she had shared with George Paterson. There was even less in that fridge. The place was to be sold and the money divided, but she was slow moving on the matter and realized it might be a bridge she was reluctant to burn.