The Balance of Guilt (22 page)

Finally, Dan stood back up and forced himself to breathe, great shuddering gasps of air.

Rutherford had been deliberately poisoned. And the description of who did it could match only one man.

T
HE SWIRLING RUSH OF
red-hot rage propelled Dan towards the door of the surgery. He groped for the keys and fumbled them in the lock. He was about to open the door when a noise stopped him.

Rutherford. And he was spluttering.

Dan spun around and lurched back into the operating room. The dog’s chest was heaving, more saliva foaming from his mouth.

Dan heard himself moan. He grabbed his mobile and called Cara.

One ring, two, three.

More coughing from Rutherford. More jerking. Dan ran a hand over the dog’s head and let it slide down to his chest. He was fearful to do it, but felt for the heartbeat. Sometimes, short seconds can feel so very long.

There was a pulse. It was faint, but steady.

He groaned in relief.

Another ring from the phone, and another.

‘Come on, come on,’ Dan urged.

Rutherford twitched. The coughing stopped. Dan pressed his hand harder to the dog’s body. The heartbeat was still there, still regular.

Another ring from the phone, then, ‘Hello? Dan! Is he OK?’

‘I don’t know. He’s coughing, spluttering, twitching.’

‘How much?’

‘A couple of coughs. Then a bit of a shudder.’

‘What’s he doing now?’

Dan studied his dog. He was lying still and breathing evenly. ‘Nothing. He’s just sleeping.’

‘Let me hear. Hold the phone to his mouth.’

Dan did. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, after a few seconds. ‘Is he OK? What does it mean? Had you better come back? Give him some more drugs? See if there’s anything else you can do for him? I’ll pay, I don’t mind what it costs, if you need to come back, the call-out, anything you need …’

‘Dan!’ she interrupted. ‘He’s doing fine. A bit of movement and some coughing is perfectly natural. We’re doing all we can for him. He just needs to rest.’

‘OK, but …’

‘He just needs to rest. As I’d suggest you do.’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘OK then. Look, he’s doing all right. There’s nothing more we can do at the moment.’

‘Cara – just one more thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m sorry I bothered you, but I got so frightened.’

‘That’s OK. I understand.’

‘How did he sound?’

‘What?’

‘When you listened to his breathing – did he sound like he was getting any better?’

Her voice grew softer. ‘Dan, it’s too early to tell.’

‘But – I mean – it must be a good sign that he’s survived the first few hours, mustn’t it? That he’s still going?’

‘Yes. That is a good sign. Every hour that passes, the chances of him recovering get better.’

‘So the odds have improved?’

‘A little.’

‘How much?’

‘Dan!’

‘No, please, I need to know. How much?’

A sigh, then, ‘It’s probably about 55-45 now that he’s going to be OK.’

Dan could have pulled the numbers from the air and danced with them. A fifty-five per cent chance of survival felt so much better than evens. The gods had smiled and tilted the odds in his favour. He found some tissues and gently wiped the spittle from around Rutherford’s mouth, stroking the dog’s head all the while.

He was comfortable and cared for.

Now it was time for revenge.

The clock on the wall said it was a quarter past one. The temptation was to leave the surgery, go home, get in the car and hunt down the person who had poisoned Rutherford. But he would need Adam’s help, and it was the middle of the night. His friend had sounded tired enough earlier and could do with being allowed to rest.

He could go alone. But to where exactly, and what would he do when he got there?

Another twitch from Rutherford. Dan was back beside the dog, holding his paw. What if Rutherford had another fit? He could easily relapse and there would be no one here to help him, no one to call Cara. The dog couldn’t be left alone overnight.

Facing the poisoner could wait until the morning. Coolly, logically, the confrontation didn’t have to happen right now, no matter how much Dan wanted it. He forced himself to sit back down again and ran a hand over his face. It was flushed with anger.

He would stay with Rutherford. At first light he would call Adam, explain what had happened and who had done it. And, more importantly, why.

And then they would act.

Dan was woken by a hammering at the door. He jerked awake, got up, ignored the persistent noise and instead checked Rutherford. The dog’s breathing was still even, his heartbeat regular.

More banging from the front of the surgery. It was Cara. Dan had left the keys in the lock and she couldn’t get in. He opened the door.

‘How is he?’ she asked.

‘Doing OK, I think.’

She tested Rutherford’s heartbeat, changed the drip, took some blood and fussed over him. Dan watched in silence. His neck was aching from where he’d fallen asleep on the chair and he noticed he felt cold, but none of that mattered. Only the prone dog was important.

Eventually Cara pronounced, ‘Yep, he’s doing OK.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘You know what.’

‘Well, he’s still not out of the woods. There’s a long way to go.’

‘But he’s got though the first night.’

‘Yes.’

‘Which has to be good.’

‘Yes.’

‘So his chances must have improved.’

‘Dan!’

‘No, look, it’s just that – well, the numbers seem to help. Give me sixty percent that he’ll be OK?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to go away thinking everything’s all right. He could still suffer complications.’

‘Sure, I understand that. But it was fifty-five percent earlier. And he’s got through the night. So it must be up to sixty now.’

She frowned. ‘Any advance on sixty?’

‘Please, Cara.’

‘OK then, if it makes you happier, a sixty per cent chance of survival it is.’

Dan reached out and hugged her, held her tight. Only a pointed cough from behind made him disengage. It was a middle-aged man, dressed in a suit. He was carrying a poodle, but doing so at arm’s length, as if the dog were crawling with the most foul of infectious diseases.

‘He’s been sick all night,’ the man said, with sharp distaste. ‘The wife wanted him rushed in here. She couldn’t do it herself, naturally.’ He handed the dog to Cara. The creature was a masterpiece of topiary, all spheres, discs and patterns of white fur. ‘His name’s Whiteball, by the way.’

A phone began ringing in the man’s jacket. He took it out and answered. A few seconds later another rang in a different pocket. He answered that too and asked the caller to wait.

Cara placed Whiteball down on a table. The dog turned, teeth bared and tried to bite, but she was too quick.

‘Occupational hazard,’ she told Dan. ‘You get to know which animals are going to be the awkward ones. Oddly enough, they usually take after their owners.’

She cast a glance at the man, who was entirely oblivious. He had a phone clamped to each ear and was trying to talk into both at the same time. And now yet another mobile rang. The man wedged one of the pair currently in use under his chin and fumbled in his trousers to find the latest call on his precious attention.

Dan stared in disbelief. Three phones. He was kept plenty busy enough by one.

And then came the beautiful instant, like a beam of sunlight through the clouds. Where before all was blurred and indistinct, suddenly the picture was clear.

Dan sat down heavily on a chair.

‘Are you OK?’ Cara said. ‘Maybe I should see if I’ve got something to treat you. How about a nice big horse suppository?’

‘No, yeah, um, right, err – I’m fine,’ Dan managed. ‘Just a little tired. After the stress of the night.’

She nodded understandingly and returned to her patient. The poodle began an unpleasant yapping, but Dan hardly heard. All he could see was John Tanton, detonating his bomb in Wessex Minster, and the phone call the young man had made just minutes beforehand.

The call that was the key to the case, which would give them the radicaliser. And now he knew who that was, and what the person had done with the phone, the one piece of evidence which would lead to a conviction.

It was almost half past seven. They would have to move fast.

‘Cara, is Rutherford going to be OK today?’ Dan asked quickly. ‘If I go off to work?’

‘Yep. I’ll be here to keep an eye on him.’

‘Right, great. I’ll ring you later.’

Dan made for the door and started walking home, striding quickly. Everyone he passed stared at the strange man wearing trainers, shorts, and a white lab coat. A group of schoolchildren pointed and laughed. Some even shouted abuse.

He noticed none of this. Dan walked fast, heading automatically for the flat, took out his mobile and called Adam.

S
OME DAYS, LIFE FEELS
different. All around is exactly the same, but something has changed within.

It was how Dan had come to think of the turning points of the investigations he’d worked on. The time after that dizzying epiphany moment of sheer realisation, when in a single second the inquiry had shifted from the slog of a search for a faceless criminal to a beatific understanding.

Once, at the end of a long Dartmoor walk, perhaps tired and light-headed, he’d confided to Claire the only analogy he could imagine. And she’d laughed so hard the tears had poured from her eyes.

It was, Dan said, a feeling like the hours after the first time he’d had sex. Aged sixteen, walking around his home town taller and stronger than ever before, empowered with having made a great leap of experience. A man who had just undergone an initiation into an esoteric club.

All around remained just as it had been. But something had changed in his own world.

Thus it was with the great possession of the solution to a case. Around Dan, the world progressed as it always had. Men and women commuted to work. Children walked to school. Radios played. Cars drove. The world turned.

But something felt different.

They met at the Minster. Adam wanted to go straight to the shopping arcade, but Dan found he couldn’t.

‘I’m not sure why,’ he explained on the phone earlier. ‘I just need to see the smashed window again.’

‘It’s still smashed,’ the detective objected, with emotionless practicality. ‘We’ve got to get on with the case. We don’t have time to mess about.’

‘It’s only a minute from the Minster to the arcade. And I kind of – well, I need to get a sense of the crime again before we actually solve it.’

A groan on the end of the line. ‘Your bloody melodrama just gets worse. This isn’t a book, you know. It’s a criminal investigation. And a big one. Dead people. Terrorists. In case you’d forgotten.’

‘It’ll only take a minute. See you at the Minster in an hour, then.’

‘If you must.’

It was another fine September day. The drive to Exeter was quiet and easy. Dan had inadvertently timed the trip well, just a little too late for the rush hour, a little too early for the shoppers. There were plenty of parking spaces in South Street. Automatically, he bought a ticket and walked through to Minster Green.

A couple of tramps sat outside the Homeless Mission, drinking cans of cider. The time was a quarter past nine. Pigeons and crows wandered across the freedom of the grass, undisturbed yet by the inevitable assaults of human visitors. A man washed the windows of the row of shops, whistling a tune to himself. The odd bubble floated free in the sunshine. Office workers carried take-away teas and coffees, or talked on mobiles as they walked.

Adam was already waiting when Dan arrived, pacing back and forth. He’d obviously left his house in a hurry. His usually impeccable tie was just a little off-centre, and – horror amongst horrors – there might even have been the slightest of a suggestion its narrow green stripes clashed with the blue of his shirt.

‘Right, there it is, the smashed window. You’ve seen it again, now let’s get on with the case.’

‘Just indulge me a moment.’

‘I indulge you too much.’

‘Just a minute, that’s all.’

Dan stood staring at the ruined window, while Adam pointedly and petulantly tapped a foot on the pavement.

He could see John Tanton, walking along the cobbles outside the Minster, a mobile phone at his ear and a rucksack on his back. Now he could hear the deafening explosion, the hissing of shrapnel, the shattering of glass, the silence, and then the moans and the screams. And he could smell the blood, just as he had when they filmed inside.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

They crossed the shopping precinct. Dan felt his mind slipping to Claire and that phone call earlier. He allowed the memory to linger for a second as they walked.

When she turned her mobile on that morning, it had registered a missed call from his number. She rang to see what he wanted and Dan explained what happened to Rutherford.

‘No! Oh, Dan, no. How’s he doing? How are you? Is there anything I can do?’

Dan reassured her he was coping OK, or some very rough approximation, and that Rutherford was making progress. They chatted for a couple more minutes, solely on the safe ground of the dog, then Claire said, ‘Can I see him?’

‘What?’

‘I’d like to see him. It might help him to know I’m thinking about him too.’

‘You really want to see Rutherford?’

A pause on the line, then Claire said quietly, ‘This might come as a surprise to you, but I loved that stupid dog. I came to think of myself as – I don’t know, mother to him I suppose, to your dad.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Very much really.’

‘Well, OK then, yes, of course you can see him. When?’

‘Tonight.’

It was a statement, not a question.

‘Sure.’

‘Give me a call later, when you’re back in Plymouth and I’ll come up to the vet’s.’

‘OK.’

‘And Dan …’

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe we could have a drink and a chat afterwards?’

This time it was a question, and a tentative one, soft with vulnerability. But he didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d like that.’

‘So would I.’

And then came a vision of Rutherford, choking after eating the poison pellets, the dreadful dull thud as he collapsed. Dan had told Adam about that earlier too, who he thought had done it, and why. It took his friend several minutes of hard persuasion to stop Dan going after the poisoner first.

‘See the bigger picture,’ Adam said firmly. ‘He’ll still be around later. But time’s running out if we’re going to get Ahmed. His solicitor’s coming to Heavitree Road this morning and is expecting us to release him.’

Ahmed. In his cell, counting off the minutes until he was released. Anticipating a swaggering walk from the police station, a middle finger up to the forces of law and decency. Back on the streets of the society he detested, spreading his toxic propaganda and doubtless keeping a predator’s eye out for someone else like John Tanton.

Adam was right. They had to go after Ahmed first.

The penetrating warble of his mobile brought Dan back to the shopping arcade. It was a withheld number. That meant the newsroom. In the whirl of the morning he hadn’t even bothered to check in with the early producer, let alone tell them he was going to Exeter.

Dan switched the call to his answer machine. Later, he would have a great exclusive for Lizzie. The charging of Ahmed, with plotting a terrorist attack and conspiracy to murder.

Or so he hoped. It all depended on the next few minutes.

Adam waited for a delivery lorry to pass, then crossed the road. He stopped outside the arcade. ‘Right. Now get on with it.’

Dan blinked hard, tried to free his mind of the vision of confronting the man who had poisoned Rutherford, and of Claire, and the thought of seeing her later.

‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘Ahmed comes running into the arcade. If we’re assuming he is the radicaliser, as we’ve suspected all along, he knows he’s only got seconds before you arrest him. And he knows that in his pocket is the one piece of evidence which will see him convicted. But he knows too that he can’t just dump it, because either someone will see, or, even if they don’t, that you’re probably going to carry out a search and find it.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ Adam replied impatiently. ‘But we’ve been through all that. Just get to the point will you?’

Dan started walking into the arcade. ‘I don’t think Ahmed’s panicking. He hasn’t in any of the interviews we’ve done with him. He didn’t when you arrested him. He’s calm and deliberate. He knows he has to get rid of that phone which Tanton has called just a few minutes ago.’

Adam rolled his eyes. ‘Will you please just get to the point? I hate all this teasing.’

Dan wondered whether to mention the irony of Adam accusing someone else of enjoying the irritating vice of delayed gratification, but decided against it. He walked further into the arcade, his footsteps echoing on the tiles.

‘So, Ahmed’s looking around for a hiding place – somewhere he can’t be seen. He spots the CCTV cameras, but ahead he can see an area where there aren’t any. There are cops behind and he knows there are going to be cops coming from the other entrances too. He’s got to find somewhere to hide the phone here and he’s got to do it fast.’

Dan stopped, said suddenly, ‘So what does he do?’

They were standing at the intersection of malls where Dan had timed Adam hiding his mobile. Around them were the greengrocer’s, supermarket, optician’s, and the second-hand shop. Ahead were the couple of stalls, selling winter-wear accessories. The floor had been polished and was alive with reflections of people passing by, the sweet smell of wax lingering in the air.

‘He hides the phone,’ Adam said tetchily. ‘We’ve been through all this. He sticks it in the drain and we come along and find it later. But that just brings us back to the same problem. We can’t link that phone to the call Tanton made, and we can’t break the code in the names and numbers to find out what Ahmed was trying to hide.’

Dan nodded, but then said quietly, ‘There is no code.’

Adam stared at him. ‘What?’

‘There is no code. No hidden message, no riddle, no magic solution to the case all bound up in that mysterious list of names and numbers. There’s nothing in there at all.’

‘But – there has to be … surely? What’s the point of it otherwise? And if there isn’t anything in it, what the hell are we doing here?’

‘That phone was a decoy. It was a beautiful way of throwing us off the track and giving us something to work on for days, just wasting our time while the clock ticked towards Ahmed being released. He’s smart. Just on the tiny little chance that the cops do catch up with him, he’s all ready. He’s got the everyday phone he uses, the one you found on him when he was arrested, and he knows there’s nothing incriminating on that. He’s got the mobile he used to talk to Tanton, the one we need to find, but he’s also got a decoy phone. It’s full of random names and numbers he’s invented, to give us a lovely puzzle to play with. And we’re never going to find anything in it – because there’s nothing to find. That’s why only a few of the numbers were real and none corresponded to the names. Ahmed just made them up and typed them in. A huge red herring.’

Adam sat down on a bench. ‘So, if that’s the case – why bother taking all that trouble to hide it?’

‘To throw us off the real scent. Because he knew we’d do a search and that we’d find it. And that would be it. We’d be happy with our clever little discovery. We could work away at the hidden clue contained in it, like good investigators, and we’d never think that …’

Adam let out a loud groan. ‘That there was something else hidden here. The missing thirty seconds.’

‘Exactly. We only lose Ahmed for forty seconds. By our own experiment, he took about ten of those to hide the decoy phone, just doing it well enough to make it look realistic. So, what was he doing with the other thirty seconds?’

They waited while a couple of kids rode their bikes through the arcade, sending shoppers dodging from their path. One old man waved a walking stick at them. Adam must have been distracted. The paragon of the law didn’t look remotely like intervening.

Finally the detective said, ‘He was hiding the real evidence. Getting rid of the actual phone that Tanton had called. He used those thirty seconds to hide it.’

‘Exactly. And where do you think he did that?’

Adam looked up and down the arcade, an expression of puzzlement growing on his face. It was a cheap emotion, admittedly, but Dan couldn’t help enjoying it.

‘It has to be here?’ the detective said.

‘Yep. Ahmed only had those few seconds. He couldn’t have gone anywhere else.’

‘But we searched everywhere.’

‘Almost everywhere.’

‘Where did we miss then? Come on, stop this bloody teasing, will you?!’

Dan sat down beside his friend, stretched out his legs and rolled his neck. It was still stiff after the night in the vet’s surgery. He knew he should feel tired, but didn’t.

Finally, he said, ‘Ahmed put the phone right in your face. Directly under your nose. The one place he might guess you wouldn’t see it.’

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘Do you know what one of the wisest teachers at my school used to say? It was very clever. I’ll never forget it.’

‘What? Dan, what the hell are you talking about? Look, Ahmed’s going to be released at any minute and if this phone’s here, we need to find it. I don’t have time to mess about with your bloody teasing and …’

Dan stood up. ‘Come on then. Let’s go get it.’

‘Get what? The phone? Ahmed’s mobile?’

‘Yep. Follow me.’ Dan pointed along the mall. ‘It’s just up there, waiting for us. Shall I tell you what my old teacher said, while we walk?’

‘What?’

Dan smiled, couldn’t help himself. ‘It’s this. He used to say – where better to hide a pebble than on a beach?’

Adam’s mobile rang. He glared at it, but answered and held a brief, almost monosyllabic conversation as they walked along the arcade. Ahmed’s solicitor had been in some heated discussions with Greater Wessex Police’s legal department. There were threats of a writ and High Court action. Now, unless any new evidence could be found, the solicitor would be calling at Heavitree Road police station at half past ten to have his client freed.

Dan glanced down at his watch. They had an hour. It should be enough.

If all went smoothly.

He checked the message on his own mobile. It was indeed Lizzie, and she was on fizzing form. The non-good morning greeting lasted almost a minute, of which approximately ninety-five per cent was a list of demands for another story on the bombing. The ratings apparently had the temerity to sag a little overnight and needed immediate boosting with an exclusive. The weight of the very future of broadcasting was set squarely upon Dan’s shoulders.

He sighed. It was ever thus with his manic editor. He would call in later when he had the ritual sacrifice of a story to offer. He hoped.