by Tim Weaver
He looked back at the house and fixed his gaze on the front. I could see his eyes narrowing, as if he knew something was up. It was like he’d studied the street before my arrival — had seen which cars were where, and who they belonged to — and now saw a piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit.
He patted the front of his jacket. Has he got a gun? I unzipped the holdall and took out the knife. It wouldn’t be much of a fight, unless he got close without seeing me. But it was better than surrendering. If there was one thing I’d learned over the past couple of days, it was that there was no point in surrendering. They’d kill you anyway, whether you gave them what they wanted or not. Fighting back didn’t give me much of a chance — but it did at least give me something.
I gripped the knife as hard as I could, adrenalin pumping my heart faster. But then the man took another look at the car, spun on his heel and headed the other way. I watched him go, reaching the end of the road. He looked back once and disappeared around the corner.
I stayed put. It was a trap. Had to be. He knew the car belonged to them, and if it was parked in my street, he knew I was home. He could have gone to make a call. He might not want to come at me alone. He could have heard by now what I’d done to the others. Either way, I had to make my move.
I got to my feet and headed across the street, flipping the locks on the car with the remote and sliding in and starting it up in one swift motion. I looked in my rear-view mirror, put my foot to the floor and drove away. When I got to the bottom of the road, I checked my mirrors again. There was no sign of him — at least for the moment.
30
There was a Starbucks about three miles north. I left the car in a multi-storey a mile down the road. If I was driving one of their vehicles, it made it easier to find me. I’d noticed a satellite tracking sticker on the front windscreen. If they were smart — which they were — they’d call the tracking company and locate the car.
I chose a sofa at the rear of the coffeehouse with the least amount of lighting above it, and sat with my back to the wall. I used their wi-fi connection to log into my Yahoo. In my inbox there was an email from Cary. The subject line was Pic. Underneath, he had written: This doesn’t exist on the server any more — if you want another copy, tough. It’s gone.
I dragged the attachment to the desktop and opened it up. It had been blown up big. At its default size I could make out the side of Alex’s face and some window in the background. I took it down in size.
The photograph was much lighter. Alex’s face was more defined. I could make out the scar on his right cheek, the one he’d got playing football as a kid, and could see his hair properly now. It wasn’t shaved, as it had been when Mary saw him, but it was cut so close his scalp reflected light coming in through the window. Cary was right. It was taken at an odd angle. It looked like Alex might be on the bed while the photographer — maybe Myzwik — was on the floor.
I looked at the view through the window.
Beyond the veranda, beneath the endlessly blue sky, just a tiny speck in the corner of the photograph, was another patch of blue. A different shade. I moved closer to the screen and zoomed in.
Sea.
The room overlooked the sea.
Then I noticed something else. I resized the picture, and zoomed in on the window pane on the left-hand side. There was a reflection in the glass: veranda railings looking out over a hillside covered in heather; a sign nailed to a railing, reading backwards in the reflection. I flipped the photo to reverse the picture, and the writing read the right way.
LAZARUS.
A couple of days before I’d seen the same name on Michael’s mobile phone.
* * *
I got a second coffee and called Terry Dooley, one of my old contacts at the Met, to tell him the car I’d hired the day before — still in Bristol — had been stolen.
‘You don’t call me for months and then you call me up to tell me your hire car’s been stolen?’ Dooley said. It sounded like he was having lunch. ‘Fuck do I care?’
‘I can’t get down to your hole in the ground to report it. So, I need you to fill in the paperwork for me.’
He laughed. ‘Do I look like your secretary?’
‘Only when you’ve got your lipstick on.’
He said something through a mouthful of food. Then: ‘Davey boy, you and me used to have an understanding. You scratched my back by leaking a few case details as and when I needed you to, and I scratched yours and got you what you needed on whatever investigation tickled your fancy. Now?’ He paused. Continued eating. ‘Now you ain’t got anything I want.’
‘You still owe me.’
‘I don’t owe you shit.’
‘I’ll email you the details, you fill out the form for me and liaise with the rental company, and I’ll carry on pretending I don’t know where Carlton Lane is.’
He stopped eating.
Carlton Lane was where Terry Dooley and three of his detectives were one night about four years before I left the paper. There was a house at the end, hidden from the street by trees, that doubled up as a brothel. One of Dooley’s detectives ended up having too much to drink and punched a girl in the face when she told him he was getting a bit rough. She got revenge the next day by leaking enough details to the newspaper to protect her income and the brothel while landing Dooley and his friends in serious trouble. Luckily for Dooley — and his marriage — the call came through to my phone.
‘You gonna use that on me for the rest of my days?’ he said.
‘Only when I need something. So you’ll do it?’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, whatever.’
‘Good man, Dools.’
‘Just send over your fucking shit, Raker.’
And then he hung up.
I emailed him all the information he’d need to complete the paperwork, then called the car rental company to fill them in, and request a replacement car. They said I’d have to pay an excess on the stolen vehicle, but because I’d taken out premium insurance cover when I’d hired it, the amount would be minimal. Next, I called Vodafone. I told them my phone had been in the car when it was stolen and asked them to redirect all incoming calls to the new phone. They set it up there and then.
After that, I put the two files Cary had sent on the table in front of me.
The first was Myzwik’s. It detailed his record before and after prison, right up until his body was discovered in the reservoir. There was a black-and-white photograph of him from his last arrest. The file confirmed that Myzwik’s body was brought ashore by police divers after part of his coat had been spotted floating on the surface of the water. They’d found his credit cards in a wallet on the other side of the reservoir. Forensics had worked on the recovered hands, but a definitive fingerprint match couldn’t be made, owing to the amount of time the body had been underwater.
Then something hit me.
I reached down into the holdall, took out Alex’s file, and flicked to the odontologist’s findings. Teeth had been found in Alex’s stomach and windpipe. Although the intensity of the fire had shrunk some of them, a fairly precise approximation of his jaw had been reconstructed. This had allowed for eventual identification. At the bottom, before the two pages that were missing, I found what I was looking for: only two teeth had been left in his skull, both loose, both less damaged by the fire. Both had traces of bonding glue — used to secure braces — and an etching agent, which prepares the enamel for sealant. This was consistent with orthodontic work Alex had had as a child, which was why I’d skim-read it the first time round. But now I noticed a pattern: like Alex, Myzwik’s identity had been confirmed using dental records; and, like Alex, he had been found with bonding glue on one of his teeth.
But not just on the enamel.
In both files, in both pathology reports, traces of the same bonding glue had been found on the root of the tooth as well.
Oh, shit.
Parts of the odontologists’ findings were missing from both files; but wherever the
y’d gone, and whoever had deleted them, they hadn’t got rid of enough. Because I knew what I was looking at now.
Myzwik couldn’t be fingerprinted because the longer the body was in water, the less accurate the technique became; without a face, no one could ID him either. And as Alex’s body was more skeleton than flesh, burnt black from a two-thousand-degree fire, dental records were all anyone had to go on.
Except, like Myzwik, Alex’s teeth weren’t his.
And neither was his body.
* * *
The second file was much thinner than the first.
Leyton Green owned two electronics stores in Harrow, and a third in Wembley. The night he died, he’d been driving a dark blue Isuzu Trooper. It was new, bought the week before from a dealership in Hackney. The police had done some background checks on the vehicle, toying with the idea of the murder being related to the purchase of the jeep. But, like everything else in the case, it was a dead end.
The report detailed the night Green was hit by the silver Mondeo. Eyewitness accounts were thin on the ground. A couple of people identified the Mondeo. No one could identify who was driving it.
Towards the back were some photographs. The biggest was of the murder scene. Green’s body was under a white sheet, only the sole of his shoe poking out. Blood had stained the sheet. Little circles of chalk were dotted around the body, ringing pieces of the Mondeo. The next pictures confirmed this: shots of pieces of the bumper, and even a chunk of the bonnet. He must have been hit hard. Close-ups of his face followed, bloodied and battered. One of his left hip, black with blood and misshapen, where the Mondeo had struck him.
I was about to return the printouts to the holdall when right at the back, close to a description of the strip bar, I found another photo. Staring up at me, dressed in a black suit, his hair parted, a familiar smile creeping across his face, was Leyton Alan Green.
The same man I’d seen in a photograph in Mary’s basement.
Leyton Alan Green was Alex’s Uncle Al.
31
Gerald opened the door a fraction. Recognition sparked in his eyes and he pulled it all the way back. ‘What the fuck d’you want?’ he said, glancing over his shoulder to where the guillotine sat in the centre of the room, pieces of card and cellophane strewn on the floor around it. Half-finished IDs lay on top of empty cartons of food.
‘I need to speak to you.’
‘You did all your talkin’ last time.’
‘I want to buy something from you.’
He smirked. ‘You must be outta your fuckin’ mind.’
I reached into my pocket. He backed up half a step, as if I might be taking out a gun. Instead, it was my wallet. I opened it up. There was over £800 in it.
He glanced at the money, then back at me. ‘You shouldn’t be walkin’ around with that.’
‘I know.’
‘So, what do you want?’
I closed the wallet.
‘I want a gun.’
* * *
Michael left the church at six o’clock. The night was cold, steam hissing out of vents, warm air rising out of the ground as the Underground rumbled through the earth. I waited for him in a darkened doorway outside the Tube. As he approached I zipped up my top and followed him inside. He went through the turnstiles and down the steps to the platform. A train was already in the station when I got there.
I had a ski hat on. I pulled it down as far as it would go over my face then stepped on to the train a couple of doors down. He sat and removed a book from a thick slipcase that probably had his laptop in as well.
With a jolt, the train took off. Michael looked up, then around at the other passengers. I turned away, staring down into my lap, conscious of him seeing my reflection in the windows. After a while, I flicked a look at him and could see he was sitting with his legs crossed, the book held up in front of him.
After we changed at Liverpool Street, I glanced at the scrap of paper Gerald had given me the first time I’d been to see him — written at the top was the address where he’d been told to drop the IDs: Box #14, Store ’N’ Pay, Paddington. I’d found it in the Yellow Pages and called them from Starbucks. It was a storage facility; a thousand lockers. People paid a daily or monthly rate for a unit and got a swipe card that gained access to the building any time they wanted. The lockers weren’t huge, but big enough to store holdalls and briefcases, coats and suits. They’d certainly be big enough for what Michael was going to pick up.
When we got to Paddington, commuters filed out; a tidal wave heading for the exit. Michael went with them. I waited until the last minute then bundled out after him.
The escalators were rammed. I could see him halfway up, his face still buried in his book. I followed him, taking two steps at a time all the way to the top. On the other side of the turnstiles he headed for the mainline trains, then moved through the crowds and out into the night.
He headed south-east. We were moving in the direction of Hyde Park, slivers of residential streets running like capillaries either side of us. I maintained a distance from him, following from the other pavement where it was darker and safer. I could see the park up ahead as he veered right into a narrow road with cars parked on either side and a shop front at one end. A sign hanging above the door said STORE ’N’ PAY. I stopped as he climbed the steps up to the front. He slid a swipe card through an electronic lock and pushed the door open.
Store ’N’ Pay had a big window at the front, a blue neon SECURE LOCKERS sign buzzing at the top. There was an unmanned front desk and a series of red lockers behind it. Michael stepped past another man, who was standing in front of an open locker, and up to Box 14. It was on the left of the window. He put his laptop case down, punched in a combination number and pulled open the locker. Inside was a small brown envelope.
As Michael looked through the envelope, the other man finished up and started coming towards the main door. I quickly crossed the street and headed up the steps, catching the door as he left. He glanced at me, then did a double take when he laid eyes on what they’d done to my face, turning round and looking again as he moved off down the street. Five cars down, he passed my new rental vehicle. Before getting the Tube out to Redbridge, I’d parked it there.
I’d need the car close by — for when we left.
I stepped inside and pulled the door shut. Michael was standing with his back to me, the locker open, still checking the contents of the envelope. After a few seconds, he pushed the locker shut, picked up his laptop and turned around.
He locked eyes on me.
‘David,’ he said. He looked shocked, his mouth dropping a little, the colour draining from his face. But, quickly, he regained control of himself. ‘I’ve got to admit, I didn’t think we’d see you again.’
‘Well, even the Church doesn’t get it right all the time.’
‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘We certainly don’t.’
‘Where’s Alex?’
He acknowledged the name, but only with a slight nod of the head.
‘Do you need me to speak up?’
‘No, I heard you. Why do you want to know?’
‘Where is he?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m not going to ask you again.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘why don’t we trade? You tell me why this is so important to you, and I’ll tell you where Alex is.’
I didn’t reply this time. He was trying to redirect the conversation.
Trying to force me into another trap.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not going to turn this into a confessional.’ He paused, smiled again. ‘Our Catholic friends seem to find forgiveness in the blink of an eye. A couple of Hail Marys and you’re away. I believe you should have to work a little harder at redemption.’
‘I don’t give a shit about anything you believe. Where is he?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re making big problems for yourself here, David.’
‘You tried to kil
l me.’
He shrugged.
‘You tried to kill me.’
‘That was nothing to do with me.’
‘Oh, of course,’ I said, nodding at the envelope in his hands. ‘You’ve got no idea what goes on outside the walls of your church.’
‘A name means nothing, David.’
‘You saying you came all this way for nothing?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand what drives you. I mean, why? Why come this far? This has nothing to do with you. You could have turned away at any time. But you didn’t and now… now you’re going to get torn apart. Why? Is it the money?’
I didn’t reply.
‘I don’t believe it’s the money. You’ve probably earned enough already. Are you a completist, David — is that it? You want to finish what you started. I respect that. I’m the same. I like to finish what I start. I don’t let anything get in the way of what I want.’
I could see where this was going: the same place it had gone before. This quest of yours, is it about the kid — or is it about your wife? They’d hit on something, and now they were going back to it again. Derryn mattered to me. She was the chink in my armour.
‘Did you think there was any hope for your wife, even at the end?’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘There’s always hope, right? If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Are you deaf?’
‘Death’s not something you can fight. It’s not a tangible thing. It’s an undefeatable enemy, an unfair battle, an adversary you can’t see coming.’ The corners of his mouth turned down: a sad expression, but only skin deep. ‘I know how you feel. I know about the fear of death, David — and the fear of what comes after. I know that you were scared for her.’
