Game Over (34 page)

Over the parapet and on to the flat concrete. There were ventilation outlets, steaming slightly in the drizzle, a light haar which became visible like a gauze veil as a security light was triggered. It was mounted over the square brick protrusion that housed the fire door back into the cinema. Bates ran to it and tried the door, briefly and hopelessly. It would only open from the inside.

Slider stopped, turned back to where Fathom was just reaching the top of the fire escape. ‘Stay there!’ he shouted. He didn’t want Bates dodging them all in a Dick Van Dyke chase round the chimneys and nipping back down. Atherton had stopped too, facing Bates, who backed now, slowly, away from the fire door, his eyes darting round to assess the situation. The haar was standing on his red hair like jewels. Slider could see his chest rising and falling under the close black leather. The fox was cornered and spent.

Slider walked forward towards him. ‘Give it up,’ he said. ‘There’s nowhere else to go. Come on, you know you’ve had it now.’

‘Come quietly, is that it?’ Bates said. His teeth were bared as he caught his breath, and his voice was higher and harsher than Slider remembered. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Plod. Not for you, that’s for damn sure. If you want me, you’ll have to take me.’

Slider felt a weariness that was nothing to do with his trembling legs come over him. ‘Oh, don’t be so bloody silly,’ he said impatiently. ‘You’re cornered, you’re nabbed, and there’s nobody watching you but us, so you can drop the phoney heroics. This is real life, not a film.’

‘You don’t know the meaning of real life,’ Bates said, backing all the while towards the parapet. ‘You pathetic second-rater, do you really think you can get the better of me? You can’t touch me.’

‘You have friends in high places, I know,’ Slider said. ‘Don’t think they’re going to bale you out this time. You’re going down.’

Bates reached the parapet, a low wall topped with flat stone slabs. He glanced quickly over to see if there was any escape that way, and began to inch along beside it. Atherton and Slider advanced steadily, adjusting to his direction. He reached the corner and glanced over the second side. Slider suddenly wondered if there was another fire escape. Bloody Nora, if he had to start running again . . .! ‘For God’s sake, give it up,’ he said.

Atherton exchanged a glance with him. His look said it all: why didn’t they just grab him? Slider opened his mouth to answer that look when he saw that Fathom, disobeying orders, was creeping up from the right, the direction in which Bates was sidling.

Bates glanced in that direction, scowled horribly, mouthed one short word of anger. He jumped up on the parapet, looking left and right for escape, staring at the next building – far too far away to jump, even for an egotistical athlete.

As one man, Slider and Atherton stepped forward. Bates dodged left, running along the parapet. As if he could read his mind, Slider knew he was going to make for the fire escape. He turned his head back to Fathom, jerked an arm towards it. ‘Get back over there!’

Perhaps Bates looked round too, or reacted to Slider’s arm movement. Slider replayed it afterwards a hundred times in his mind. Perhaps it was nothing but the sheerest accident. The parapet was damp from the mizzle; Bates had been limping, so he must have hurt his leg. Whatever it was, his foot slipped and he rocked off balance. His arms flailed, and his eyes met Slider’s in one awful locked instant of mutual knowledge. Slider and Atherton both leapt forward, arms out, hands reaching. But Bates was gone, and there was only rough concrete under their grasping hands as they leaned over, looking down into the alley. Someone said, ‘Christ!’ and he never knew who it was, Atherton or Fathom. Maybe even himself. And a sound came up to them, a ghastly thud of a sort that Slider hoped he would never have to hear again.

Twenty

Time Wounds All Heels

A
fter that, Slider felt as if his feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. There was so much to do, and so much trouble to get through. The proverbial shit storm wasn’t in it. If it hadn’t been for Porson standing firm at his side, Slider could never have survived it. And by the time he and Porson were both called before Commander Wetherspoon, their superior at Hammersmith, and he said, ‘This is a dog’s breakfast of a case. I can’t make head or tail of it,’ Slider would almost have been grateful to say, ‘Oh, well, don’t let’s bother then.’

But Porson, magnificent as the Old Man of Hoy, talked and talked at Wetherspoon, and pointed out with graven dignity so many matters of simple honesty, justice and pride in the Job that Slider wanted to cheer; and Wetherspoon, who wouldn’t have got where he was today without being something of a trimmer, was won over on to their side and in the end even said, ‘I’m not having politicians telling me how to do my job, thank you very much.’ And he went in to bat for them.

So then it was the head of SOCA, and Ormerod, the head of the Organised Crime Government Liaison Team, who was higher yet, and so on to the Commissioner of the Met, and the Home Secretary himself. There was grave internal trouble because Bates’s escape could not have been managed without some complicity high up in the Met. Slider supposed that was what Pauline had been trying to warn him about. In the end there were two quite senior suspensions and an arrest of a political appointee in the Home Office just on the Bates escape alone. While Slider’s heart ached that any policeman had been able to be bought like that, he had to admit that, given the size of the prize Tyler and Bates were going after, they had been in a position to make the price very attractive indeed, even to a senior Yard officer.

Through all this Tyler didn’t run, didn’t move a muscle, was so certain he was invulnerable and untouchable that he stayed put in his glamorous house and laughed at them.

Thomas Mark ran, but without either Bates or Tyler to protect him he didn’t get far, and when they nabbed him, he didn’t take much persuading to roll over. They had his fingerprints from the black Focus, the paint match from the car to the damaged bike, mud under the wheel arches matching that of the lane, and Mrs Masseter’s identification. He was bang to rights for murder and perverting the course, and in the end he was glad to have the murder dropped to manslaughter and failing to report an accident in return for fingering Bates and Tyler, which he wasn’t unwilling to do anyway.

‘They were going to make millions out of Clydeview, and what was I going to get?’ he said resentfully. ‘I wanted a percentage, but they laughed at me. A flat fee, that’s what they offered me. And who was doing all the dirty work?’

Slider, of his own interest, asked about Bates’s plans for him.

‘Oh, he was going to kill you,’ Mark said indifferently. ‘That was one of the things Tyler said when he got him out of jail. Kill Stonax for me and I’ll let you kill Slider while you’re at it. Of course, Tyler wanted you dead, too.’ He looked at Slider with mild interest. ‘You don’t half piss a lot of people off.’

‘So why didn’t he kill me straight away, when he had the chance?’ Slider asked.

‘I suppose he liked tormenting you,’ Mark said indifferently. ‘He was like that. Anyway, Tyler said he hadn’t to kill you before you’d nicked Dave Borthwick and charged him for doing Stonax. But you didn’t charge him.’

‘We knew it wasn’t him, you see,’ Slider said.

Mark stared at him. ‘I reckon you’re not as stupid as Trevor thought you were,’ he said. ‘But he reckoned everyone was stupid, compared to him. And he was right, most of the time.’

It was an epitaph, of sorts, Slider thought.

It took an immense amount of time to assemble all the evidence against Tyler, and to squeeze out of Vollman Zabrinski the admission that the BriTech shares were held in Tyler’s name. When they were able at last to take Tyler’s house apart they found a mass of equipment that he had arranged to get out of Bates’s house and installed for Bates’s use. He claimed he had taken it out of Bates’s house for safe keeping, and since he had all the proper paperwork he at least had a workable defence for it, although a lawyer might argue that there had been no need for him to hook it all up.

One of the interesting things that emerged was that both Stonax’s flat and his phone had been bugged. So they had known from his conversations that Danny Masseter was coming to see him and probably that he had received a parcel from him too. Slider considered that it might have been the imminent arrival of Stonax’s daughter that had moved his elimination up the agenda. He did not air that thought to Emily or Atherton, or even Joanna.

It also emerged that Stonax had been trying for several days to get an appointment to see the Prime Minister privately and alone, and had not succeeded largely because he would not tell anyone what he wanted to talk about. That was reason enough to offer Emily for his murder. What interested Slider most about that piece of information was that Stonax had apparently chosen the political rather than the legal route to right the wrongs of Waverley B. He supposed it was simply old habit: politicians and journalists alike tend to think that the solution to everything is political.

So then there were the political ramifications to get past, and they were immense. There was no way for them at the bottom to know how far anyone else in the government was implicated, even if it was only by turning a blind eye, but hints filtered down from time to time, relayed at the last link by Porson to Slider, that it had gone all the way to the very top, both on the political and the police side. Porson hinted that this made it unlikely any action would be taken, and Tyler all along remained supremely confident that knowing where an immense number of bodies were buried would make him untouchable. If he had to leave the country again, a High Commissionership in some agreeable country was the least he was ready to settle for.

Slider himself wondered how it would be possible to put Tyler on trial, when all he had to do was threaten to finger the PM. And would the CPS even consider making the attempt if the PM was able to say that Commissioner of the Met was implicated? Slider and Atherton agreed, unhappily, that it looked as though it was another of those cases that would be buried deep and the whereabouts of the grave forgotten, which, as Atherton pointed out, made it look bad for them. They would be bound to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act, and be under surveillance for the rest of their careers, if any, to make sure they didn’t spill the beans to anyone.

But in the end it was pressure from the bottom that changed things. Porson kept agitating to Wetherspoon, and Wetherspoon, marvellously shaken out of his usual servile complacency, kept poking those above him. In the end the Assistant Commissioner, who quite fancied his boss’s job, leaned on the Home Secretary by reminding him that after the war the government had handed back the contaminated land to be run as a shipbuilding yard again, and who knew how many people had got sick and even died as a result? Even if they hadn’t known the site was contaminated, the potential for compensation suits was beyond computation. There was a hopeful passage of play at the break-down when the Home Secretary suggested the late Trevor Bates might conveniently be blamed for everything, and the Assistant Commissioner suggested to Wetherspoon that it might be best to go that way. But Wetherspoon countered by pointing out that by now far too many people at the bottom knew too much and would not be satisfied with that, and the Assistant Commissioner told the Home Secretary that since it was impossible to get the brown sauce back in the bottle, it must be Tyler’s head on a platter, or the whole Waverley B story to come out, with politically disastrous results. The Home Secretary pedalled hard on the PM’s paranoia, the PM persuaded the Commissioner to take early retirement in return for a full pension and a seat in the Lords, and Tyler’s fate was sealed.

Slider was dog-weary, and sick to his stomach with the game-playing, by the time it was resolved, and it was small comfort to him that they let him be in on the final arrest of Richard Tyler. Deputy Commissioner Ormerod, who had used Slider to arrest Bates the first time, insisted on it, and even laid a huge, meaty arm across his shoulders and said, ‘You’ve deserved this. You deserve a medal, but I’m not in charge of that. But I can see to it that you’re in at the kill.’

‘And what happens afterwards?’ Slider was driven to ask. He still didn’t see how they’d ever allow him to be put on trial.

Ormerod did not pretend not to understand. ‘There’ll be a deal of some kind,’ he admitted. ‘No mention of Waverley B in return for a lighter sentence. Something like that. But we’ve got to be realistic. He’s going down, let’s be glad of that, at least.’

The words reminded Slider of what he had said to Bates, moments before he went over the top. He met Ormerod’s eyes, and read in them a different certainty; and he remembered how on previous occasions, felons who had been in a position to finger the government of the day in some serious manner had committed suicide – in their cells and in inverted commas – before coming to trial.

‘Tyler’s finished,’ Ormerod assured him. Slider tried to think of Phoebe Agnew. He thought of Ed Stonax. It was just an old-fashioned streak in him that didn’t want a right by way of two wrongs. ‘It’s justice,’ Ormerod concluded.

Of a sort, Slider amended, but only inside his head.

So Slider went along as a spear-carrier when the final drama was played out. Not that it was very dramatic. There was no kicking down of doors, of course, no raised voices. Tyler stared at them all with his feral, golden eyes, and if he was pale – well, his long, smooth face had always been unnaturally colourless.