Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  Bryony and Nelms were personal. Turner and Morgan were public and unignorable.

  Now the squad-room white-board had been stripped of all material except the names of the victims.

  Leonard Pigeon’s name was at the top and in brackets: dispensed with; a mistake. The words on Pigeon’s arms had been meant for Morgan, that was clear. The other names all carried a rider.

  Bryony Dean: ‘DIRTY GIRL’ – GW’s involvement with local woman.

  Martin Turner: ‘LYING BASTARD’ – editorials/press reports.

  George Nelms: ‘HAPPY NOW?’ – persuaded GW to join army.

  Neil Morgan: ‘FILTHY COWARD’ – pro-war MP.

  Anne Beaumont was at the briefing, because Stella wanted everyone to hear what Anne had to say.

  ‘It’s to do with effacement – of his actions and of himself. The one depends on the other. It also has to do with self-worth and with a very unpleasant system of equivalents. Okay? Men died because he was afraid, so he needs to prove himself fearless. To do this he performs the very act he was incapable of: he kills. Not only that, he kills people who seem, to him, blameworthy, just as he was blameworthy. He kills a prostitute, because a prostitute betrayed him. Or, if not a prostitute, a woman who traded sex for information. He kills the man who talked him into becoming a soldier. He kills a journalist and an MP, both of whom were high-profile supporters of the conflict.

  ‘He’s trading one death for another: cancelling them out, and, what’s more, he thinks they deserve it, so that’s all right. He’s also reinventing himself: no longer the despised coward, no longer the man who left his comrades to die, he’s a killer, he’s fearless, he brings justice to an unjust world.’

  Anne paused and smiled a rueful smile. ‘Think of the moment when he found the vehicle for this – someone with his own name, a games hero, someone who doesn’t really exist until Gideon Woolf becomes Silent Wolf, someone who’s without fear and also free of doubt, someone whose killings exist only in gamesworld. It must have been like finding himself, a remade self, someone who could be the new him.’

  Silano asked, ‘He says he’s stopped.’

  ‘Four deaths,’ Anne said, ‘or at least, four attempts. That balances the deaths he has on his conscience, it proves he’s no coward, it removes four sinners from the world: sinners in his terms, anyway. So, yes, maybe he will stop.’

  ‘Okay,’ Silano said. ‘Let’s say he’s stopped. Who is he now?’

  ‘You mean is he the disgraced Gideon Woolf or is he Silent Wolf, the avenger…’

  ‘Yes.’

  Anne nodded. ‘That’s a very good question.’ After a moment she added, ‘I wonder if he knows.’

  The squad was chasing leads, though there were few.

  Friends: none could be found. Other men from the regiment, yes, but no one who knew much about him. People said he was a loner, he was quiet, he didn’t complain.

  Teachers: they had him as an average student; no, a little better than average. He was quiet, he wasn’t a problem.

  People from his old neighbourhood: he seemed like a nice enough boy, a quiet boy. Look, who knows? He kept himself to himself.

  Anne Beaumont picked on the words ‘quiet’ and ‘loner’. ‘A secret life,’ she said. ‘A strong fantasy world is a protection against things. Ask another question: he was quiet, yes, and he seemed nice enough, but ask whether he was liked. Ask whether he was likeable.’

  ‘Because?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Because I suspect “quiet” will become “surly” and “loner” become “loser”.’ Anne sighed. ‘On the one hand, you have to wonder why there might be damaged and disturbed people in the army; on the other, it’s not a puzzle at all.’

  Maxine Hewitt and Frank Silano visited the home-from-home that Gideon Woolf’s father had picked out for himself. A care-worker took them to a room where twelve elderly people sat round the walls in chairs and slept while the television played to their dreaming heads.

  Gideon’s father was woken, and all four of them went to a side room. The old man informed them that they wouldn’t be able to speak to Gideon, because he had been killed in action. Maxine glanced at Silano, wondering what to say next.

  Silano said, ‘We heard he was alive after all…’ Maxine admired the ‘after all’. ‘We wondered whether he’d been to see you.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ the old man insisted. ‘He died out there.’

  ‘Who told you he was dead?’

  ‘We weren’t supposed to have children. Too old. She died, then he died, and that leaves me.’

  ‘Did Gideon ever come here to see you?’ Maxine asked.

  The care-worker caught Maxine’s eye and shook her head.

  Maxine tried again. ‘When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Gideon’s dead. He’s dead, he died in battle, that’s for sure, I know that for sure.’

  The sun high and bright, the care-home lawn dotted with chairs where residents dozed away what was left of their lives.

  The care-worker asked, ‘Has he got a son? We’ve never seen anyone. No visits, no letters…’

  ‘You thought he might have made it up – someone who died in action?’

  ‘We wondered. So many of them invent things. He’s not so old, and he’s not incapable. More than anything, he seems to have just given up.’

  ‘On what?’ Silano asked.

  ‘On himself.’

  ‘He has a son,’ Maxine said, ‘somewhere.’

  In the car, Silano said, ‘They have to – have to make up the past.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Maxine was lowering a visor against the sun. ‘Why?’

  ‘They forget the truth of it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  Silano just shrugged. Maxine realized that she didn’t know a hell of a lot about Frank Silano.

  Gideon Woolf’s father went back to the TV room and sat in his usual chair. He wanted to sleep but couldn’t. On screen was a wide-shot of a young couple standing on a hilltop and looking out at a green valley with a river running through. The man had his arm round the woman’s shoulders and, as they stood there, you could tell they had overcome some troubles, made some right choices and had a good life ahead of them.

  The old man looked round the room at the faces shuttered by sleep. He said, ‘Well, he’s dead to me.’

  87

  Because Anne was in the squad room, Stella showed her Tina’s letter, which Anne read without comment. Later they went to Coffee Republic, because Anne had declared AMIP coffee a contravention of her human rights. On their way, Stella bought a paper which had somehow tied Woolf’s killings to the phases of the moon, a method that enabled them to tell the police when he would kill again.

  ‘Which is the big question,’ Stella said. ‘Will he?’

  ‘His psychopathology is likely to have been modified by recent experience,’ Anne said. Stella looked at her. ‘Depends what killing people did to his head. How unstable he’s become.’

  ‘He’s killed several people,’ Stella said. ‘Becoming unstable isn’t the issue – he is unstable.’

  ‘Depends what you mean.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘Think about it,’ Anne said. ‘The army considered him unstable because he didn’t kill people.’

  The text-tone on Stella’s mobile rang. She read the text and sent a quick reply. When she looked up, Anne was smiling at her. ‘I thought I’d leave it to you to mention the letter.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder,’ Stella said, ‘whether I’m misremem-bering everything – she’s right and I’m wrong. Maybe it really was like that, tough but happy, a mother who did her best. Maybe she did read me bedtime stories.’

  ‘People often reinvent the past,’ Anne told her, ‘if it’s too painful to remember.’

  *

  The text had been from Andy Greegan, letting Stella know that the compufit she had ordered was on her desk. The image was a compilation of Woolf’s army mugshot and the Silent Wolf logo, stranded somewhere
between man and graphic, Silent Wolf’s dorky human half-brother. Alongside it was a reproduction of the games-hero and a note to say that the killer’s appearance might resemble that image. Finally, it gave his name.

  Stella and Brian Collier looked at it together. She said, ‘It’s a risk. He goes to ground, or he changes his appearance – and if he really looks like this, that would be easy enough to do. There’ a good chance he’s already changed his name.’

  ‘I know.’ Collier shrugged. ‘But if he’s really backing off, we have to go after him.’

  ‘Press release?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Everything… everywhere… Especially the tabloids, they’ll love it.’

  An odd silence settles over hospitals at night, not a dead silence but a silence that certainly has something to do with death: as if there were a stealthy presence in the empty corridors, as if sleep might be just a step from oblivion.

  In the midst of that silence, Neil Morgan woke up. He lay open-eyed for a while, the instruments around him registering the sudden metabolic change, then he raised an arm like a man waving to a friend. He tried to sit up, and the motion triggered a sensor that set off an alarm. A staff nurse rushed to the door of the side ward; another put in a call to the duty doctor.

  Morgan smiled at the nurse, though he didn’t know he was smiling. He spoke to her, though he didn’t know what he was saying.

  *

  Aimée lay awake listening to the patter of her heartbeat. Peter slept at her side, unmoving. It had been another hot day, and the roof beams creaked as the house cooled.

  The room was dimly lit by a low-wattage bulb on the landing and Aimée could see her clothes stored on a dress-maker’s rail beyond the bed. She would take almost nothing with her, she had already decided on that, just a small bag of clothes and the few things that mattered to her. It was a new life and she wanted to start fresh. It would be wrong to put photographs about the place, wear the clothes she had always worn, behave as she’d always behaved. She wanted a new way of seeing the world.

  She supposed she should feel guilty or afraid or both, but she didn’t. Just tomorrow to get through, then everything would change. Her heart fluttered like a bird in a cage trying its wings.

  Candice sat with a doctor in an office not far from the side ward. A few initial tests had been made but, at this time of night, it wasn’t possible to explore Morgan’s new waking state comprehensively. More tests would be arranged for the morning.

  The doctor had good news and bad news. The good was obvious: Morgan had emerged from the coma. The bad was less easy to see at first, though it was there in the glazed look in his eyes and the randomness of his speech. The doctor spoke of neurological damage. He spoke for a while, using the terms of his trade, but the short and comprehensible version was that Neil Morgan was away with the fairies.

  ‘Can he understand me?’ Candice asked.

  ‘It seems very unlikely.’

  ‘Can he respond to questions?’

  ‘Well… no. Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘In what way, then?’

  ‘We know so little about conditions of this sort. It’s possible that he has his own method for interpreting the world and some sort of codified means of communicating with it, but in real terms – terms that you and I recognize – he’s lost contact. His understanding of what’s going on round him appears to be severely impaired, he can make sounds but not form words, and he’s lost the ability to monitor and control his own actions.’

  ‘Will he recover?’

  ‘People do.’

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say.’

  Candice managed to shout without raising her voice. ‘Make a guess.’

  The doctor shrugged. ‘All right. My guess is that he won’t.’

  Candice returned to Morgan’s bedside. He was propped up by a bed-back. He turned his head to look at her, then seemed to lose interest; he uttered a long, involved sentence that made no sense at all; when she leaned in close he recoiled slightly, then gave a little, wet laugh. Watching from her desk, the nurse thought Candice had leaned in to kiss her husband. This wasn’t true. She was cursing him.

  Candice knew that Morgan had numbered bank accounts offshore. She knew that only he knew those numbers. She knew that the accounts contained millions. They’d had conversations about that money. What if something should happen to you? What if you suddenly dropped dead?

  Morgan’s response had always been the same: ‘It’s better that you don’t know.’ Candice understood this to mean that the money wasn’t strictly legal. It irked her to be kept in the dark, but she assumed that, though she didn’t know, someone would: the family solicitor, it had to be.

  When Morgan was comatose and likely to die, she had got in touch with the solicitor and asked about the money. He had no knowledge of any such accounts. She told him that was impossible – he must have been told. He assured her that he had not. There were, of course, certain instructions in the case of death or impairment, but none of these made mention of offshore accounts.

  Which is why Candice had sat so long at Morgan’s bedside, waiting, saying over and over like a prayer, Don’t die, you bastard. Which is why she now leaned close to him, her lips at his ear, and cursed his soul to hell.

  88

  Two days later Costea Radu walked into the front office at Notting Dene and asked to speak to DS Stella Mooney. Costea the Pimp was wearing a three-quarter-length black leather coat, a black T-shirt and a sunny smile. Stella called Frank Silano in to sit with them.

  Costea said, ‘I got something you want.’

  Stella gave date and time to the tape, repeated what the man had said and asked him to agree that he had, indeed, said it.

  ‘Something you want.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Yeah, first I need something back – guarantee.’ He gave Stella a little knowing grin. ‘I got bail. You fix this. Good. This time, better deal, okay? This time I walk.’

  I didn’t fix your bail, you creep, but I’m glad you think I did.

  She said, ‘Difficult for me to give something in return for something you haven’t yet given me.’

  Costea had to think this through. When the process was complete, he took the folded front page of a tabloid news-paper from his pocket. ‘This was yesterday. I know this guy.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Not know him, not like that. I see him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Places…’ Stella waited. ‘Places, around, I see him sometimes.’ The tape recorded Silano’s cough, then silence. ‘I can tell you where is he, but there must be something for me.’

  ‘Tell me what you have in mind.’

  ‘Soon I am in court, yes?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I give, you give.’

  Stella chose her words carefully. ‘I’m not able to offer any undertaking to you concerning the charges against you, or the outcome of your trial. However, if any information you give to us does assist us in our inquiries, I’m prepared to let this be known to the court. DS Mooney ending the interview with Mr Costea Radu.’

  She signed off with a time-check. Costea looked at her, still smiling. He said, ‘And now?’

  ‘Reduced sentence.’

  ‘Discharge.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake…’

  ‘Community service.’

  ‘You’re facing kidnap and malicious wounding, bottom line.’

  ‘How bad you want this guy?’

  ‘It’s an offence to withhold information.’

  ‘Okay, I tell you I see this guy on tube, that help? I see him at airport, I see him in big car next to Queen Elizabeth.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’ Stella asked. ‘Community service, a hundred hours. Last offer.’

  It made no difference to Costea whether it was a hundred hours or five thousand, because he wasn’t planning to be the person doing it. He said, ‘Up on the Strip. Big house on the rise, he live there. Come with m
e and I show you.’

  Stella said, ‘Stay put. This officer will wait with you.’

  She ran to Collier’s office. She said, ‘We might have a location. I think we have. I need authorization for sidearms issue, Hatton gun, extra bodies.’

  In the interview room Costea smiled at Silano, who smiled back. Costea’s smile meant I know police. There’s always a deal. Silano’s meant She was lying. You’re going down.

  *

  Gideon Woolf was walking the streets. He looked different now. The compufit was bad, had only appeared in two tabloids and didn’t look much like him, but the picture of Silent Wolf made him particularly edgy: the clothes, the hair. He had worn a beanie to go out and buy a home-dye, then taken his hair back to its natural brown. Black 50IS and a loose shirt had taken the place of the combats and the long coat. He felt weakened; he felt insignificant.

  How did they know about Silent Wolf?

  Aimée had given him a mobile phone number in case of problems. He called her and listened carefully for any sign that she might have seen the papers. She sounded fine, excited, a woman in love. She repeated their meeting time to him and he said, yes, that was right, that was when the new life would begin.

  He walked for an hour, circling, his head bowed. Silent Wolf stalked his footsteps. Their shadows collided and merged. He thought of his new life as Silent Wolf and his new life with Aimée and knew he had to choose.

  She knows me. She knows who I am. She knows my name, and they know my name. Safer if she’s dead.

  As he walked, he thought of what the new life might have been. The image that came to him was of a couple standing on a hilltop and looking out over a placid valley where a river cut a silver seam, the man’s arm round his lover’s shoulders. He thought he’d seen it in a movie on the TV in the scorched room, the TV that was never switched off.

  Gideon paused, as if he could see that scene in front of him; then Silent Wolf’s shadow blotted it out.

  Safer if she’s dead – and soon…

  He didn’t know if the voice in his ear was his own or that of the hero.