Shatter (54 page)

The bloodstain is drying on her shirt.

‘They’re sending a military chopper. I can’t stop them. They have a warrant signed by the Home Secretary.’

‘What about Charlie and Julianne?’

Her shoulder blades flinch beneath her shirt. ‘There’s nothing more I can do.’

It’s what I feared. The MOD cares more about silencing Gideon Tyler than it does about a missing mother and daughter.

‘Let me talk to him,’ I say. ‘He wants to see me.’

Time shimmers for a moment. The hubbub of the world disappears.

The DI takes a cigarette from a packet in the pocket of her trousers. She rests it between her lips. I notice a tiny tremor in her hand. Anger. Disappointment. Frustration. It could be al of them.

‘I’l get rid of the military lawyer,’ she says. ‘You might only have twenty minutes. Take Ruiz with you. He’l know what to do.’

The insinuation in her voice has not been there before. She turns and moves slowly along the passage towards the stairs.

I enter the interview suite. The door swings shut behind me.

We’re alone for a moment. The very air in the room seems to have congregated in distant corners. Gideon can no longer jump to his feet or pace the floor. His handcuffs have been secured on the surface of the table, fixed with bolts and recessed screws. A doctor has bandaged the cut to his palm.

I move closer and take a seat opposite him, placing my hands on the table. My left thumb and forefinger are beating a silent tattoo. I take the hand away and press it between my thighs.

Ruiz has slipped into the room behind me, shutting the door softly.

Gideon gazes at me steadily with a formless smile. I can see the ruins of my life reflected in his glasses.

‘Hel o, Joe, heard from your wife lately?’

‘Where is she?’

‘Dead.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘You kil ed her the moment I was arrested.’

I can smel the very odour of his insides, the rancid, festering, misogyny and hatred.

‘Tel me where they are.’

‘You can only have one of them. I asked you to choose.’

‘No.’

‘I wasn’t given a choice when I lost my wife and daughter.’

‘You didn’t lose them. They ran away.’

‘The slut betrayed me.’

‘You’re making excuses. You’re obsessed with your own sense of entitlement. You believe because you’ve fought for your country, done terrible things for them, that you are owed something better.’

‘No. Not better. I want what everyone else wants. But what if my dream conflicts with yours? What if my happiness comes at your expense?’

‘We make do.’

‘Not good enough,’ he says, blinking slowly.

‘The war is over, Gideon. Let them come home.’

‘Wars don’t end,’ he laughs. ‘Wars thrive because enough men stil love them. You meet people who think they can stop wars, one person at a time, but that’s bul shit. They complain that innocent women and children get kil ed or wounded, people who don’t choose to fight, but I’m betting a lot of them wave their sons and husbands off to war. Knit them socks. Send them food.

‘You see, Joe, not every enemy combatant carries a gun. Old men in rich countries make wars happen. And so do the people who sit on the sofas watching Sky News and voting for them. So spare me your bul shit homilies. There are no innocent victims. We’re al guilty of something.’

I’m not going to argue the morals of war with Gideon. I don’t want to hear his justifications and excuses, sins of commission and omission.

‘Please tel me where they are.’

‘And what are you going to give me?’

‘Forgiveness.’

‘I don’t want forgiveness for what I’ve done.’

‘I’m forgiving you for who you
are
.’

The statement seems to shake him for a moment.

‘They’re coming to get me, aren’t they?’

‘A chopper is on its way.’

‘Who did they send?’

‘Lieutenant Greene.’

Gideon looks at the mirror. ‘Greenie! Is he listening? His wife Verity has the sweetest arse. She spends every Tuesday afternoon in a budget hotel in Ladbroke Grove fucking a lieutenant colonel from acquisitions. One of the lads from ops put a bug in the room. What a tape! It’s been passed round the whole regiment.’ He smirks and closes his eyes, as if reliving the good times.

‘Could you adjust my glasses for me, Joe?’ he asks.

They’ve slipped down his nose. I lean forward and place my thumb and forefinger on the curved frame, pushing it up to the bridge of his nose. The fluorescent lights catch in the lenses and turn his eyes white. He tilts his head and his eyes are grey again. There doesn’t seem to be any magnification from the lenses.

He whispers. ‘They’re going to kil me, Joe. And if I die, you’l never find Julianne and Charlie. The ticking clock— we al have one, but I guess mine is running a little faster than most and so is your wife’s.’

A bubble of saliva forms and bursts on my lips as I open them but no words come out.

‘I used to hate time,’ he says. ‘I counted Sundays. I imagined my daughter growing up without me. That was mechanical time, the stuff of clocks and calendars. I deal in something deeper than that now. I col ect time from people. I take it away from them.’

Gideon makes it sound as though years can be traded between individuals. My loss can be his gain.

‘You love your daughter, Gideon. I love mine. I can’t possibly understand what you’ve been through, but you won’t let Charlie die. I know that.’

‘Is that who you want?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re making a choice.’

‘No. I want them both. Where are they?’

‘No choice is a choice, remember?’ He smiles. ‘Did you ask your wife about her affair? I bet she denied it and you believed her. Look at her text messages. I’ve seen them. She sent one to her boss saying that you suspected something and she couldn’t see him any more. Do you stil want to save her?’

A blood-dark shadow shakes my heart and I want to lean across the space between us, one arm drawn back like a bow, and smash my fist into his face.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Look at her text messages.’

‘I don’t care.’

His voice erupts in a hoarse laugh. ‘Yes, you do.’

He glances at Ruiz and back to me. ‘I’m going to tel you what I did to your wife. I gave
her
a choice too. I put her in a box and told her that your daughter was in a box next to her. She could breathe through a hose and stay alive but only by taking her daughter’s air.’

His hands are bolted to the table, yet I can feel his fingers reaching into my head, wedging between the two halves of the cerebel um, levering them apart.

‘What do you think she’l do, Joe? Wil she steal Charlie’s air to stay alive a little longer?’

Ruiz launches himself across the room and hurls his fist into Gideon’s face with a force that would knock him down if his wrists weren’t bolted in place. I hear breaking bones.

Gripping Gideon beneath his lower ribs, he drives his knee into his kidneys, sending bolts of pain shooting through his body. Perspiration. Empty lungs. Fear. Faeces. Ruiz is screaming at him now, pounding his face with his fists, demanding to know the address. For a violent, bloody minute he takes out al his frustrations. He’s no longer a serving member of the police force. Rules don’t apply. This is what Veronica Cray meant.

Waves of pain break and crash on Gideon’s body. His face is already beginning to bruise and swel from the beating, yet he’s not complaining or crying out.

‘Gideon,’ I whisper. His eyes meet mine. ‘I’l let him do it. I promise you. If you don’t tel me where they are, I’m going to let him kil you.’

A bloody froth forms on his lips and his tongue rol s across his teeth, painting them red. An unearthly smile forms on his face as the muscles contract and relax.

‘Do it.’

‘What?’

‘Torture me.’

I look at Ruiz, who is rubbing his fists. His knuckles are torn.

Gideon goads me. ‘Torture me. Ask me the right questions. Show me how good you are.’

He sees me hesitate and bows his head in the posture of the confessional. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t tel me you’re a sentimentalist. Surely you’re justified in torturing me.’

‘Yes.’

‘I have the information you need. I know exactly where your wife and daughter are. It’s not like you’re uncertain or half-sure. Even if you were fifty per cent certain, you’d be justified. I tortured people for far less. I tortured them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

He stares at his hands like a man considering his future and discounting it.

‘Torture me. Make me tel you.’

I feel as though someone somewhere has opened a sluice gate and my hostility and anger are draining away. I hate this man more than words can describe. I want to hurt him. I want him dead. But it’s not going to make any difference. He won’t tel me where they are.

Gideon doesn’t want forgiveness or justice or understanding. He has bathed in the blood of a terrible conflict, done the bidding of governments and secret departments and shadowy organisations operating beyond the law. He has broken minds, obtained secrets, destroyed lives and saved countless more. It changed him. How could it not? Yet throughout it al , he clung to the one pure, innocent, untainted thing in his life, his daughter, until she was taken away from him.

I can hate Gideon, but I cannot hate him more than he hates himself.

70

‘There’s another anomaly,’ says Oliver Rabb, adjusting his crooked bowtie and dabbing at his forehead with a matching handkerchief.

When I don’t answer he keeps talking. ‘Tyler turned on his mobile and turned it off again at 7.35 a.m. It was on for just over twenty-one seconds.’

The information rises and fal s over me.

Oliver is looking at me expectantly. ‘You wanted me to check for anomalies. You seemed to think they were important. I think I know what he was doing. He was taking a photograph.’

Final y there is awareness. It’s not a grand vision or a blinding insight. Things have become clearer, clearer than yesterday.

Gideon took photographs of Julianne and Charlie. He used a mobile phone camera, which had to be turned on for the pictures to be taken. The anomalies can been explained. They support a theory.

Oliver fol ows me upstairs, through the incident room. I don’t notice if detectives are back at their desks. I don’t notice if my left hand is pil rol ing or my left arm is swinging normal y.

These things are unimportant.

I go straight to the map on the wal . A second white pin is stuck alongside the first. Oliver is trying to explain his reasoning.

‘Yesterday’s anomaly happened at 3.07 p.m. The mobile was turned on for fourteen seconds but he didn’t make a cal . Later, he transmitted a photograph from the same phone to your wife’s mobile. Afterwards, he left the handset on a bus.’

He pul s the image up on screen showing Charlie with her head encased in tape and a hosepipe in her mouth. I can almost hear the rasp of her breath through the narrow opening.

‘The second anomaly was this morning, just before he sent another photograph— the picture of your wife. It explains things.’

Gideon knew police could trace a mobile every time he turned it on. He didn’t make mistakes. In each case he turned on the mobile phone for a reason. Two signals. Two photographs.

‘Can you trace the signals?’ I ask.

‘I was struggling when there was only one, but now it might be feasible.’

I sit alongside him, unable to comprehend most of what he’s doing. Waves of numbers cross the screen as he quizzes the software, overrides error messages and circumvents problems. Oliver seems to be writing the software as he goes along.

‘Both signals were picked up by a ten metre GSM tower in The Mal , less than half a mile from the Clifton Suspension Bridge,’ he says. ‘The DOA points to a location west of the tower.’

‘How far?’

‘I’m going multiply the TOA— Time of Arrival— with the signal propagation speed.’

He types and talks, using some sort of equation to do the calculation. The answer doesn’t please him.

‘Anywhere between two hundred and twelve hundred metres.’

Oliver takes a black marker pen and draws a large teardrop shape on the map. The narrow end is at the tower and the widest part covers dozens of streets, a section of the Avon River and half of Leigh Woods.

‘A second GSM tower picked up the signature and sent a message back but the first tower had already established contact.’ Again he points to the map. ‘The second tower is here. It’s the same one that carried the last mobile cal to Mrs Wheeler before she jumped.’

Oliver goes back to his laptop. ‘The DOA is different. North to north-east. There’s an overlapping connectivity.’

The science is beginning to lose me. Rising from his chair again, Oliver goes back to the map and draws a second teardrop shape, this one overlapping the first. The common area covers perhaps a thousand square yards and a dozen streets. How long would it take to doorknock every house?

‘We need a satel ite map,’ I say.

Oliver is ahead of me. The image on his laptop blurs and then slowly comes into focus. We appear to be fal ing from space. Topographical details take shape— hil s, rivers, streets, the suspension bridge.

I walk to the door and yel , ‘Where’s the DI?’

A dozen heads turn. Safari Roy answers. ‘She’s with the Chief Constable.’

‘Get her! She has to organise a search.’

A siren wails into the afternoon, rising from the crowded streets into a coin-coloured sky. This is how it began less than four weeks ago. If I could turn back the clock would I step into that police car at the university and go to the Clifton Suspension Bridge?

No. I’d walk away. I’d make excuses. I’d be the husband Julianne wants me to be— the one who runs the other way and shouts for help.

Ruiz is alongside me, holding on to the roof handle as the car swings through another corner. Monk is in the front passenger seat, yel ing commands.

‘Take the next left. Cut in front of this bastard. Cross over. Go round this bus. Get that arsehole’s number plate.’