The Dying Hours (26 page)

Helen was still up when Thorne got back to Tulse Hill, though as the TV was tuned to a documentary about ice-trucking, he suspected that she’d been asleep on the sofa for some time before he’d come in. He made tea for them both. When she asked, he told her that his hand was feeling a lot better and that Hendricks had been on good form.

‘You two should go out,’ he said. ‘Get to know each other a bit better. See what I’ve been putting up with all these years.’

He asked her how her day had been. It struck him that, except when he was trying to avoid talking about what he had been doing, it was not something he’d done often enough recently.

She told him she’d had lunch with a social worker, one of those she worked with regularly. ‘Not exactly a bundle of laughs,’ she said. ‘She’d been to see a family she was concerned about in Streatham. Three kids under six, one of them an infant. Found a pit bull terrier chained to the baby’s cot.’

‘Bloody hell. Was the kid OK?’

‘That’s the problem,’ Helen said. ‘Legally they can’t touch any of the children they visit, so it’s hard to tell. If a child’s fully dressed, any injuries from the neck down stay hidden.’ She sipped her tea. ‘They’re all so bloody… disheartened, you know? People have them pegged as over-officious lesbians who are trying to take their kids away, but they’re the first people that get it in the neck when it all falls apart and a child dies. They’re understaffed and under-resourced and the good work they do is completely unrecognised. They’ve got so much shit to deal with, and
they’re
the ones getting their hands dirty and they’re doing their best.’ She reached down to pick up one of Alfie’s toys and casually tossed it into the plastic box next to the sofa. ‘Same as we are.’

‘I know,’ Thorne said.

‘The entire system’s outdated.’

Thorne sat down next to her. ‘I know.’

‘Children should not be dying because of neglect in a city like fucking London.’

The ice-truckers had suddenly become a little too noisy, so Thorne reached for the remote and turned the TV off.

‘I
mean
it, Tom.’

Thorne had heard other officers refer to Child Abuse Investigation as the ‘Cardigan Squad’, the perception among some being that those working on a CAIT were no more than glorified social workers. That career-wise it was a dead end and that anyone with an ounce of ambition should be looking at the more glamorous departments with real excitement and decent budgets such as Drug Enforcement or Firearms. He made a promise to himself that the next time he heard the phrase being used, he would do some damage to his other hand.

He said, ‘You do an amazing job.’

He looked at her, desperately hoping that his words, which to him now seemed trite and pathetic, had not sounded patronising. God knows, it was the last thing he intended, but he knew there had been a good deal of misunderstanding – all of it his fault – between them in recent weeks.

Helen stood up. She carried her empty mug across to the sink then came back and pulled Thorne to his feet. Together they went to check on Alfie, then carried on through to the bedroom and got undressed.

Helen turned the light out, leaving only the spill from the lamp she always left outside her son’s room. Thorne tried to say, ‘Sorry,’ but she kissed the word off his mouth. The tenderness between them quickly became something more fierce and continued that way until, forgetting his injury, Thorne foolishly tried to take his own weight on his hands and all but collapsed on top of her.

Thorne rolled away, swearing, but Helen gently moved and eased herself on top of him.

‘Looks like I’ll have to help myself,’ she said.

Mercer sits in a branch of a well-known coffee shop, drinking tea and wondering when the hell coffee became so popular. He stares out at the pinched faces of the pedestrians and the necklace of rush-hour traffic crawling past, catching glimpses of the palm trees and sunsets in the window of the travel agent’s on the other side of the road.

He remembers a holiday…

Margate. Back when he was still working his way up, before the Jags and the conservatories and the family trips to Disneyland or the south of France. A week in Margate: long before the place had galleries filled with modern art that wasn’t really art at all and everything was neon and kebab shops. These are the holidays he thinks about most often. When the kids were small and she still bought clothes for them all in Deptford market.

When he wasn’t looking over his shoulder quite so much.

He remembers his eldest boy, can’t have been much more than seven or eight at the time, in floods of tears on the pavement outside this arcade. He’d been transfixed by the machine with the toy crane inside, had stood there for half an hour and fed it every ten-pence piece Mercer had given him in an effort to grab one of those plastic trolls with the long green hair. He had wanted one of those stupid trolls more than anything in the world and now all his money was gone and he hadn’t been able to grab one.

‘It’s not fair, Daddy,’ the boy had wailed. ‘It’s not fair.’

Mercer had agreed and promptly marched back inside the arcade to have a quiet word with the manager. When he’d emerged a few minutes later bearing aloft one of those trolls as if it were the FA cup, it had been the look on his wife’s face he’d clocked first. The suspicion.

‘It’s all right,’ he’d told her. ‘I just had a quiet word with him.’

‘Yeah, I know what that means,’ she had said.

‘No, nothing like that.’ Obviously the arcade manager hadn’t been
thrilled
to see Mercer bearing down on him. Mercer knew he could look a little… intimidating, even when he wasn’t trying very hard. He leaned close to his wife and whispered, ‘I just bunged him a fiver, that’s all. Piece of piss.’

He’d turned to his son then and handed the prize across and the boy’s smile had made his stomach turn over. A poxy fiver, for that smile. He watched his son clutch the doll to his chest and knew that he would happily have handed over every penny he had,
everything
, just to feel the way he felt at that moment.

‘Thanks, Daddy…’

‘You deserved it,’ Mercer had said. ‘Must have been something wrong with the machine, that’s all.’

His wife was already on her way towards the nearest café, steering the pushchair through the crowd, their youngest already tired and starting to whine. His son took his hand as they followed and held it tight. Mercer squeezed and the boy squeezed back and Mercer knew that his son was thinking the same thing at that moment that he’d felt about his own old man once upon a time.

My dad can do
anything
…

Mercer’s hands are wrapped tight around his mug.

And I
could
, he thinks.

He’s not daft; he knows that every child grows out of that eventually, stops believing that their father is a superhero. The strongest, the fastest, the one who can produce trolls from thin air. The lucky ones though, they get to grow up thinking like that for a while at least and the fathers of those kids are luckier still. Instead, he was left with two kids that pissed the bed and got into fights and forgot that he’d ever done a single thing that made them feel good, or happy, or safe.

He brings the mug to his lips, his gaze still fixed on those posters of palm trees. Happy families on beaches, splashing in pools. The tea’s gone cold, so he pushes the mug away.

He starts suddenly when a young woman appears at his shoulder. Well, younger than him, anyway. Late forties, maybe.

She lays a hand gently on his shoulder. Says, ‘Are you feeling all right, love?’

Mercer realises that he is crying. He reaches for a serviette and wipes it across his eyes and mouth, then balls it into his fist. He thinks about Herbert, Jacobson, Mallen; their faces at the end.

He thinks about
all
of them, then turns to the woman and smiles.

‘Feeling a lot better than I was,’ he says.

Keith Fryer was patting the bonnet of a tired-looking Renault Clio as if it were the head of a much-loved dog when he saw Thorne wandering on to his car lot. The young woman on the receiving end of the dealer’s practised patter could not have mistaken the look of distaste on his face, or the way in which it became something rather more circumspect when he realised that Thorne had brought someone with him.

‘Shit,’ Fryer hissed.

His potential customer seemed to lose interest in the car fairly quickly after that and, satisfied that their arrival had had the desired effect, Thorne and his companion watched as Fryer marched away towards his office like a man in sudden need of the toilet, or strong drink.

They gave him a few minutes to compose himself.

‘Busy?’ Thorne asked, when he stepped into the doorway.

Head down at his desk, Fryer said nothing, opting for the same paper-shuffling routine as last time, so Thorne and the man with him wandered in without being invited. Thorne took the folding chair while the other man stayed standing. He moved slowly around the small space, hands in his pockets; looking at files on shelves, examining sheets pinned on to the noticeboard.

Fryer finally looked up. ‘Who’s your friend?’

‘We’ll get to that,’ Thorne said. ‘I wanted to pick up where we left off the other day, when you were a little unwilling to talk to me about one of your customers. When your memory was playing up a bit. Remember?’

Fryer sat back and folded his arms. ‘Vaguely. Like you say, I’ve got a bad memory.’

‘Things have moved on since then, so I’m hoping today might go a little better.’

‘How do you mean, moved on?’ Fryer kept his eyes on the man he didn’t recognise.

‘Terry Mercer’s dead,’ Thorne said.

Fryer sat up. Said, ‘Is he fuck!’

‘Afraid so. Sorry to spring sad news on you like that.’

‘You’re full of it.’

‘Topped himself.’

‘Right. Now I
know
you’re full of it.’

Thorne reached into his pocket for his phone, called up the photographs he had taken with it two nights earlier and pushed it across the desk. ‘You can use your fingers to blow that up a bit if you want.’

Fryer didn’t need to. He picked up the phone and stared at the photo. The back of the car, the pipe taped to its exhaust and running round to the rear window.

‘Recognise it?’ Thorne asked. ‘Honestly, that thing was rustier than Christ’s nails, so I hope Terry managed to knock the price down a bit.’ He took a few seconds, enjoying the shock on Fryer’s face. ‘Yeah, I know. Bit of a game-changer, isn’t it?’

Fryer put the phone back down on the desk and shrugged. ‘Well, there you go.’

‘So, now the only person you need to be afraid of is me.’

‘Why the hell should I be afraid of you?’

‘Well, if not me, then my mate here.’ Thorne turned his chair round, drew the man with him into the conversation. ‘This is John Williams, from Trading Standards.’

The man took a step forward and waved ID. Said, ‘I’m actually based in Barnet, but I’ve got plenty of mates in Tower Hamlets. I
think
they’d be the ones looking at you.’ He glanced at Thorne. ‘I can check that.’

‘John got himself into a spot of bother a year or so ago.’ Thorne closed one nostril with a finger, then sniffed theatrically. ‘Stupid really, but I helped him out, so every so often he does me a bit of a favour in return. You see where this is leading, Keith?’

Fryer undid his top shirt button and loosened his tie. ‘What’s to stop me going to the authorities?’ He pointed to the man behind Thorne, then at Thorne himself. ‘Telling them he’s bent. That you’re both bent.’

‘Nothing at all,’ Thorne said. ‘Other than the fact that you’re way more bent than either of us.’ He leaned forward, the mock-friendliness gone from his voice, keen now to get into it. ‘One phone call and John’s mates will be round here in a heartbeat to shut you down. You get that, Keith? Shut you down and bang you up.’

‘What do you want?’ Fryer asked.

‘Where was Mercer staying?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Thorne turned to look at the man behind him. ‘What kind of fine are we looking at to start with, John?’

‘Five grand for clocking one car,’ the man said, quickly. ‘Same for falsifying service histories with the likelihood of imprisonment if that’s widespread or if the vehicles are unsafe.’ He looked at Fryer. ‘Pretty likely, I’m guessing.’

Fryer looked as though he was toying with smashing his head down on to the desk. ‘I heard… Deptford, but he was moving around, so I don’t know how long for.’

‘Heard where?’

‘Some bloke in the pub.’

It rang true on several counts. However careful Mercer thought he was being, however seriously those he had been staying with had been warned to keep his whereabouts to themselves, somebody always said something. A few years before, a major gang of organised criminals had come up with an ingenious way to dispose of a body, burying it in a grave that had already been dug and which was filled in – complete with the body it was intended for – the following day. It was fool-proof and they would certainly have got away with it, had several members of the gang been able to resist telling anyone they went for a drink with just how clever they’d been.

Deptford.

In Thorne’s own borough.

It made sense. This was the part of the world Mercer knew best. Where he’d worked, where he’d grown up. Though he’d obviously had to travel outside the area to call on some of his victims, Thorne could well understand why a man released after thirty years into a world he didn’t recognise would want to base himself close to home. Or the place that felt most like it.

‘Anywhere else?’ Thorne asked.

‘Deptford was the only thing I heard, I swear.’

‘Who was he staying with?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Thought you might have “heard”.’

Fryer’s head fell back, then a few moments later he raised it again. ‘Look, I heard him on the phone… out there.’ He nodded towards the lot. ‘He mentioned a name, I don’t know if it was the bloke he was speaking to, or what.’

‘What name?’

‘Dean,’ Fryer said. ‘That’s the only name I heard. Dean…’

‘So, somebody called Dean in Deptford.’ Thorne nodded. ‘I’m going to need a bit more than that, Keith.’

‘I don’t know any more.’

Thorne turned as though to confer with the man from Trading Standards again.

‘Oh for God’s sake… look, he might have been a drug dealer.’

‘Might have been?’

‘He mentioned it,’ Fryer said. ‘When he bought the car. Saying he didn’t want anything flashy, like a drug dealer’s car, all that. He kept going on about it. He never liked blokes who did all that.’

‘But he wouldn’t mind one of them putting him up?’

‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ Fryer was starting to look pale and flustered. He loosened his tie a little more. ‘Look, this is just me putting two and two together.’

Thorne turned to the man behind him, who was no more a Trading Standards officer than he was. The man gave a small nod.

It might be nothing. It might be enough.

Seeing there was a chance that he’d finally given his visitors what they wanted, Fryer sat back and sighed. ‘Now will you please piss off and leave me alone.’ He clamped two hands to his chest. ‘I’m on tablets, you know.’

Thorne stood up. ‘Just out of interest, what
did
Mercer pay you for that piece-of-shit Astra?’

‘Fifteen hundred,’ Fryer said.

Thorne shook his head. ‘Scared to death of him, but you were still happy to rip him off.’ He stepped towards the door. ‘You know what, if he wasn’t already dead, I’d be suggesting you might want to take a nice, long holiday.’

Walking back across the lot, Thorne’s partner stopped to tuck the fake ID he’d knocked up on his computer that morning beneath the Clio’s windscreen wiper. ‘Think you’ve got something to work with there,’ he said. ‘Decent lead.’

Thorne was already thinking hard about it, trying to decide which way to go next. ‘There’s a lot of drug dealers in Deptford,’ he said.

‘Can’t be too many called Dean, can there?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Talking of names… why “John Williams”?’

‘It was that or “Hank Cash”,’ Thorne said.

The man grinned, and didn’t stop talking about what a good team he and Thorne had made until they had reached the car. Thorne looked up and down the road, checking to make sure that Neil Hackett’s BMW wasn’t parked somewhere close by. Now he was watching out for it everywhere he went, waiting for Hackett to pop up again. He half expected the DCI to be waiting for him whenever he got home.

Thorne opened the doors and thanked the man with him for helping out.

Ian Tully said, ‘Any time you want, mate. I haven’t enjoyed myself that much in ages.’