Down into Darkness (21 page)

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 approached 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.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

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.

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 kicked 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.

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.

There was always pasta, of course. Delaney emptied a carton of carbonara sauce into a saucepan, while Stella opened the wine. They had fallen asleep after lovemaking and Delaney had woken first; Stella had come to find him, walking naked into the living space, and now she stood at the counter, still naked, drawing the cork from a bottle of chilled Sancerre, her breasts drooping slightly as she bent to her task.

She poured two glasses, then disappeared briefly and came back wearing a pink and gold silk robe that Delaney had bought her. It wasn't her sort of thing at all and she suspected he knew as much and had bought it as a challenge; she wore it because it made her look like someone else.

He was putting pasta into a pan of boiling water, and she let him finish and get clear before asking, ‘Why do you want to know if I'm happy with us?' as if he'd asked the question just a moment ago.

‘Did I?'

‘At dinner, last week.'

‘Oh. Okay.'

‘So why?'

‘I'm trying to remember.'

‘I asked you if you were about to fetch a ring out of your pocket.'

‘That's right.' He smiled. ‘Did you think I was about to propose?'

‘Not really.'

‘What would you have said?'

She could hear him edging her away from the question. ‘I'd've said yes, church wedding, white-silk meringue, reception for two hundred, honeymoon in the Maldives.' She knew him better than to push. Instead she asked, ‘Neil Morgan's on your Rich List, isn't he?'

‘Yes. Why?'

She told him why, because, if she wanted his help, there was no avoiding it.

‘You think he has things to hide – beyond the blonde and the usual undeclared this and that.'

‘I think it's possible.'

‘Things that would make him a target for this killer?'

‘Who knows? At present, I haven't got a thing to connect the girl and Pigeon or the girl and Morgan. All I've got is the fact that Morgan seems to have been using Pigeon to cover his tracks.'

‘The company?' Delaney asked. ‘The Americans?'

‘Pigeon knew who they were. He's dead. Morgan's denying he ever had any involvement.'

‘I did some superficial research on him,' Delaney said. ‘It's a superficial article.' He heaped the pasta on to two plates and poured on the sauce. ‘I could go a little deeper: would that help?'

‘It might. This is all classified information, Delaney.'

He smiled sweetly at her. ‘I know that.'

The moon was thick and yellow and sat four square in the centre of the window-pane as they ate.

Delaney said, ‘Suppose it should have been Morgan. A teenage hooker and a millionaire MP with ambition. I can only think of one connection.'

‘He has slightly classier taste,' Stella said. Then: ‘Well, maybe not.'

‘But sex aside –'

‘Dirty Girl. Filthy Coward. There's a logic somewhere.'

‘Mad logic. He's mad – whoever did it.'