In the Dark (42 page)

‘Helen . . .?'

She saw the expression on Linnell's face and began to understand why.

Linnell leaned out of the window and nodded towards the tape in Helen's hand. ‘Anyone you recognise?'

‘Never seen him before in my life,' Helen said.

 
Frank stared out of the back window as Clive drove him home, following the 380 bus route that ran all the way from the High Street to Belmarsh Prison. Once they were through the traffic the Mercedes would be cruising up Lewisham Hill, turning east towards Wat Tyler Road and Blackheath. Down the other side and across a vast expanse of green with detached houses around its edge; huge three- or four-storey places that had not been converted into flats. For now, though, the view was limited: doorways crowded with bin-bags and names on signs that he could barely pronounce. He'd hung around in these streets as a younger man, done business in them thirty-odd years before, but now he scarcely recognised them.

‘It's like Eastern Europe,' he said to Clive. ‘It's vexatious to the spirit.'

He didn't know if it was down to immigrants, or to drugs, or to guns being passed around like football cards. He didn't have any answers. There was always the odd mental case, even back then, but Christ . . . When you could get sliced up for looking the wrong way at somebody's shoes, Frank knew something had to be done, and maybe the likes of him were better placed to do it than the police or politicians.

Frank couldn't say if Helen had been lying to him or not. It didn't really matter as things stood. He knew he'd done the right thing, giving this one to her. This was something she could do for Paul, and it might make her feel a little better after everything she'd suspected him of. She also was in the perfect position to get it organised. Even if she didn't know the individual in question, she had the contacts to find out who he was. Frank would probably be able to get the name himself, eventually, but he knew that passing it over to Helen was the more satisfactory option. He'd been thinking about the best way to handle it ever since Clive had told him what had been said in that stash house; since he'd put that together with what Jacky Snooks had told them.

It was frustrating in the short term, maybe, letting the law handle things, but this way would pay dividends down the line. A copper always suffered more inside. Whoever he was, he'd pay for what he'd done to Paul a hundred times over, and every day.

Payback could be an instant pleasure, Frank had decided, but sometimes it was better to invest in a little of it.

He wondered if Helen Weeks might send some of her colleagues after
him
, when she'd had her baby and things had settled down a bit. He felt safe enough, had kept the proper distance from everything, but he guessed there might be a little aggravation coming his way later on. She clearly knew about his business with the stick men. That much was obvious from the third degree she'd given him a couple of days before. Making suggestions and asking if he knew anything, as though he was just going to hold his hands up and cough to it, right there in his kitchen.

Silly . . .

He liked her well enough, and had been civil to her for Paul's sake, but neither of them were daft, were they?

Up the duff or on their holidays, it didn't matter; the likes of Helen Weeks were never off duty. That was why he and Paul had never talked business; at least not until the very end. It had made sense to both of them. Every proper friendship had parameters, after all.

Frank stared out at the shops and the youngsters doing nothing outside them and wondered who he was trying to kid. If it was all sorted out and the muck was hosed away overnight, he knew that something else would be along soon enough to replace it. Something even worse, probably. That kind of gap in the market didn't stay unfilled for long.

Same went for the stick men. Once all that was done with, another group of them would say, ‘Thank you very much', and move in sharpish to take up the slack.

There would be someone sitting at Paul's desk too, by now. And how long until the girlfriend found someone to help bring up his kid?

‘Got much on for the rest of the day?' Clive asked.

Frank turned from the window and sat back. ‘Up to my eyeballs.'

Life moved on.

PART FOUR

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘How long overdue are you?'

‘A week and a half,' Helen said. ‘They're inducing me if nothing's happened by the weekend.'

‘I suppose we should crack on, then.'

Jeff Moody was sitting opposite her on the sofa, as he had been the first time he'd visited the flat. He was wearing what seemed to be the same blue suit, though Helen guessed he probably had several of them. He certainly wasn't the type to waste time shopping, especially not recently. He'd been busy.

‘How's he being?' Helen asked. She couldn't bring herself to say his name.

‘Fronting it out,' Moody said. ‘It's not going to be straightforward.'

Helen nodded. Things rarely were, though she was usually the one handing out the explanations to the frustrated relatives of victims. She'd felt frustration too, of course, but it was only now that she really understood how trivial hers were by comparison. She would always have the opportunity to move on to another case. Victims, and those close to them had only one life.

Moody opened his briefcase and passed across a photograph. Helen looked down at the bunch of keys in the picture; the faded leather fob she'd seen a thousand times. ‘We found those in Kelly's house,' Moody said. ‘It's obviously how he got in here.'

‘Hard to explain away, I would have thought.'

‘He claims Paul gave them to him, in case you both got locked out.'

Helen shook her head. ‘That's Paul's set. I've checked, and they're not in the bag I got back after the crash. He must have taken them.'

‘I think . . . he might have taken them from Paul's body,' Moody said, ‘at the bus stop, while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive. The witness says he was down on the floor next to Paul. It would have been easy enough.'

Helen swallowed, handed back the photograph. ‘Not going to be easy to prove, though.'

‘Like everything else.'

‘We've got the CCTV tape. We've got him talking to Wave.' Moody nodded. ‘What about Sarah Ruston?' Helen asked.

‘She's co-operating.'

‘In return for a reduced sentence?'

Moody shrugged; they both knew the way things worked. ‘She's identified Errol Anderson, a.k.a. Wave, as one of the men who gave her the instructions, who fired the shots into her car the day before, ran through all the times and speeds and so on. She claims there were two of them, but she can't give us a positive ID on the second one. It might have been one of the other boys who were shot, but she can't be sure. He kept his hoodie up the whole time.

‘But we've still got a direct connection to the gang.'

‘We've got film of Kelly talking to one of them. We have no way of ascertaining what was said.'

‘It's one hell of a coincidence, though, don't you think?'

‘Yes . . .'

‘He happens to be talking to a gang who then arrange the crash that kills one of his colleagues. A close personal friend who just happens to be investigating bent coppers.'

‘It's not me that needs convincing, Helen.'

She took a deep breath, told Moody she was sorry. He reddened and waved her apology away. ‘How does
he
explain it? The meeting at the snooker club?' Helen asked.

‘Well, against his solicitor's advice, he's being quite chatty.'

Helen remembered the fake concern on Kelly's face as they sat and talked about which reading he should give at the funeral. ‘I bet he is.'

‘He claims
he
was doing undercover work. Some anonymous tip-off or other.'

‘On whose authority?'

‘Off his own bat. Says he knows he was taking a risk, not following the proper procedure and all that. Happy to admit he's a bit of a glory-hunter. '

‘Better than being a murderer, right?'

‘Right . . .'

‘So how's it looking? Overall.'

Moody leaned back, puffed out his cheeks. ‘The problem is that it's such a weird one, and the CPS haven't got a clue how to handle it. They had a hard enough time working out what to charge Ruston with.'

In the end, they'd opted for manslaughter. Helen had slammed down the phone when Tom Thorne had called to give her the news.

‘Like I said, it's not going to be straightforward.'

‘He's going away, though?' Helen said. ‘You told me he would.'

‘Look, it's all circumstantial, but if we're lucky, the weight of that evidence might well be enough. The keys, the video, what have you. Motive's going to be a problem, though.'

‘What was on the computer?'

‘As far as anything that might be relevant, not a lot. Certainly no mention of Gary Kelly or anything that might implicate him.'

‘He needed Paul out of the way before that happened.'

Moody nodded. ‘He couldn't be sure that it hadn't happened already, though, which was why he wanted the laptop, why he broke into your flat. He wasn't banking on finding you at home.'

‘I'd told him I was staying at my father's that night,' Helen said.

‘What we need to know is why Kelly thought Paul was a danger to him in the first place. How he found out about the operation.'

Helen had barely left the flat for a week. She had sat, and eaten and slept, and thought about exactly what Gary Kelly had done, why he had arranged it as he had.

‘That's what'll help us nail him,' Moody said.

It had to look random, like the worst case of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The nature of Operation Victoria meant that even an ‘accident' might have seemed suspicious. Paul could not just forget to turn the gas off or fall down a flight of stairs. And any sort of contract hit was clearly out of the question.

Once Kelly had decided what to do and how to do it, he must have been patting himself on the back for days.

The crash not only got Paul out of the way, but completely eliminated Kelly himself from the merest hint of suspicion. He was almost killed himself, after all, with a witness at the bus stop helpfully validating the fact. Helen had been thinking about that, too. The man at the bus stop had talked about Paul pushing Kelly out of the way as the car veered towards them, but he could have misinterpreted what he'd seen. Witnesses did that routinely, and in far less stressful situations.

It was nice to think that Paul's last actions, however misplaced, had been heroic; but when Helen closed her eyes she saw Kelly as the one doing the pushing; ensuring that Paul was hit while he got himself clear. Staggering away with a few nice cuts and bruises, weeping for his mate, dropping to the floor to take Paul's keys as he lay dying.

‘Helen?'

‘I think I know how Kelly found out,' she said.

‘Go on.'

‘Kevin Shepherd. He was in Shepherd's pocket.'

Helen told him about her conversation with Ray Jackson in the back of his taxi. The comment whose significance she'd missed. It had been no more than a slight misunderstanding or at least that was what she'd thought at the time:

‘You had a passenger in the back of your cab, a police officer, on Friday
. . .
'

She remembered that Jackson had been flustered for a second or two. He had covered up his slip, and she hadn't seen it. ‘When he asked, “Which one?” he initially meant which copper, not which day.'

‘Shepherd pays a
lot
of coppers,' Moody said. ‘That's why Paul was looking at him in the first place.'

Helen shook her head. She was certain. ‘Shepherd told Kelly about Paul. That's what you need to be working on.'

Moody thought about it. ‘It makes sense, from a timing point of view at least. Shepherd was the only target Paul was working on when he was killed.'

‘There's your motive,' Helen said.

‘I hope you're right. Then
all
we have to do is convince the CPS. They might still decide the best we can hope for is conspiracy to commit.'

‘As long as he goes down, Jeff.'

Moody's briefcase was open on his knees. He leaned across it. ‘Look, if there's any chance at all of putting Kelly away for what happened to Paul, they will.' He shut his case, cleared his throat. ‘But I know he did it, which means, apart from anything else, that he's seriously bent. If all else fails,
I
will put him away for that. OK?'

Helen didn't answer, so he asked her again. She could see that Moody meant it, and knew that she could hope for no more. She thanked him and he promised to call as soon as there was any news. Then he made her promise to do the same.

‘What about Frank Linnell?'

‘Well, it's not my area, obviously, but we've passed your information on and those investigating the shootings in Lewisham will certainly be looking at him. The way people like Frank Linnell operate, though, I don't think that'll be easy either.'

Helen agreed, but it wasn't what she had meant. ‘I was talking about Linnell and Paul. You said you'd try and find out.'

‘Yes, right.' He looked uncomfortable, as though he had news that was not so much bad as embarrassing. ‘We're as certain as we can be that there was never any illegal business arrangement between them, so all I've got is a little history.'