The Cutting Crew (14 page)

'It's not a case of missing anything,' I said. 'It just wasn't working for me anymore.'

'Holy shit. Did it ever work for you?'

'Once upon a time.' I shrugged. 'I guess it wasn't just that. There were lots of things.'

I thought about Lucy. Nothing in particular about her - a jumble of images and memories that were more like the mental scent of her than an actual thought.

He turned the wheel slightly.

'You mean your wife?'

This time I didn't even shrug. Rosh had a cop's instinct for hunting out thoughts through conversation. That's what you get like: you use words to rustle people's undergrowth and then watch what bolts out. At the moment, I didn't particularly feel like being prey.

'Lots of things,' I said. 'You want to go left here.'

He followed my direction and was quiet for a moment.

'I grew up round here,' I said.

'I know. Harris's address is just up ahead, isn't it?'

I looked up the road, saw the block of shops. 'Yes.'

Rosh pulled the car over to the kerb and put on the handbrake.

He left the engine running and tapped the wheel a couple of times, staring out front and thinking.

'That's the post office, isn't it?' he said.

I looked out. The furthest building to the left had red shutters all the way to the ground and a postbox flush with the brick wall beside it. I used to go in there all the time with my mother; I had memories of her unclasping her handbag and searching for change, while I looked at the cards and the rack of small, cheap toys, and the tray of assorted sweets that the owners kept near the window.

The last man we'd killed together as a group - Carl Halloran - had robbed this post office, tying up and eventually shooting the people who owned it. For no real reason; just because he could. That was why we found him and killed him.

I stared at the shutters out of the van window, remembering him a little. Another insignificant man. To see him die, you'd never have thought he could have had such a terrible impact on the world, but I guess it doesn't take much.

'That's the one,' I said.

'Hmm.'

After a moment, Rosh clicked off the engine and opened the door.

'Well, there's no time like the present.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'Come on.'

We approached the line of shops. After the post office, there was an estate agent's with an illuminated display in the window of properties that surely nobody around here could afford. Next door, there was a fat, low liquor store: bright and open and full of treasure, although the counter guy was reading a paper and didn't seem to be doing much business. Then, a small driveway leading down. Then, a shuttered-up cafe and a blacked-out newsagent's.

And last of all, more rusty, grey shutters, this time down over a pharmacy. After that, there were houses. Harris was renting the flat above the cafe. I looked up and saw that the lights were on. I looked back down. There were no residential doors on the main street.

'Round back, I guess.'

We headed down the driveway onto a spread of wasteland that was probably supposed to be a car park. The security light here was already on so there wasn't much we could do to avoid being seen. Two cars were parked - quiet, still and full of shadow. We both noted the licence plate on the nearest.

'The good doctor is home,' Rosh said.

'Seems that way.'

The buildings were humming slightly in the way that backs of shops always do. There was a set of wooden steps leading up to a slight extension on the rear of the cafe, and I figured that it must be the entrance to Harris's flat. We headed up and found a half-glass back door that a strong wind would have blown down.

And then, we both took out our guns.

'Do you want to knock?' Rosh asked. 'Or shall I?'

'The pleasure's all yours,' I said. 'Especially since you're the investigating officer here.'

He gave me a smile and then kicked the door off its hinges. Only one smash, but a loud one - Harris was going to know he had visitors. We moved quickly into a dark kitchen. Rosh shouted out: 'Police!'

No answer.

We moved through the kitchen and up a flight of stairs that led onto a narrow hallway. Two doors - one left, one right - and one at the far end. We each took one of the side doors. I kicked my way into what turned out to be a small, empty bathroom. Rosh emerged from across the corridor at the same time as I did, and we took the far door together, into the lounge above the cafe, where the light was on.

The front room was empty. Maybe Harris had left the light on to deter burglars. I began to say something to that effect, but Rosh interrupted me.

'You hear what I hear?'

I listened. The sound of an engine. Tyres on gravel.

'Fuck.'

I started to run back down the corridor.

'You'll never make it,' Rosh said, and he was right. So I turned halfway and joined him again at the front room window. He pulled the curtains aside and we watched Harris's car disappear down the main street. I couldn't make out who was inside, beyond the fact that it was just one man, hunched over the wheel.

'Sneaky fucker,' Rosh said, glaring at the vehicle as it rounded a corner and went out of sight.

I was annoyed as well. Maybe my time out from the job was catching: the security light out back should have told us that someone had been moving around there very recently, and we hadn't even bothered to check if there had been anyone crouching down out of sight.

Rosh stopped glaring and sighed. 'I'll call it in.'

'Do we want this official?'

He shook his head. 'We'll do a cut-up.'

'Fine.'

We did that every now and then, like everyone else in the department. Off duty and out on the road, if a guy pissed us off say by cutting us up and flipping us off - we'd report the car in question and teach him a lesson. Perk of the job. Another cop would pull him over and give us a call, and any resulting carnage would be off the record. Carnage sounds bad, I know, but it was only ever a case of scaring people a little bit.

I said, 'Let's clear this place first.'

We looked around the living room, but there actually wasn't much to see: for a man who lived alone, Harris seemed to be remarkably house-proud, although perhaps that was only in comparison to me. Where I'd done nothing to my flat since I'd moved in beyond sit in it and rot, Harris had made his own place feel like home. The carpet was new; he had a matching suite in good condition, with the settee and chairs clustered like friends around a coffee table; there was a natural fire. The man had even indulged in three modern art prints that formed a neatly arranged triptych on the wall behind the settee. I made do with patches of damp.

I walked across and looked at the artwork. It was two eyes, spread over the three canvases, and they were spaced out correctly to give the illusion of a face. I frowned. The irises were purple. I'd seen this somewhere before, and after a second or two I placed it. It reminded me of the picture taped to the wall in the alley by Whitelocks. But I couldn't remember that well enough to say whether it was the same artist.

'Computer,' Rosh said, and I turned around.

There were alcoves to either side of the fireplace, filled from about halfway up with crammed bookshelves. Underneath the bottom shelf in the left-hand alcove, there was a television and video set-up; in the right - sure enough - a computer desk. The monitor was on stand-by and the hard drive, pushed back underneath the table, was humming gently to itself. We'd obviously interrupted him. Although I did wonder how he had known that we were on our way.

I walked over and gave the mouse a nudge.

'You got something?' Rosh said.

'Hopefully. Let's see.'

Rosh might have had a few advantages over me - still officially being a cop; still sharp from the life - but he was nowhere near as good with computers as I was. He watched as I clicked carefully around Harris's desktop, locating his email account and opening it up.

'Here we go.'

Harris was using a personal email address, but he had it set up to download messages from his university account - presumably so that he could spend as little time at work as physically possible.

There were about three hundred messages in his inbox and no other folders. I hit the tab at the top of the window that sorted the mail by subject matter and then scrolled down until I found the messages beginning fwd. These were the ones that had been automatically forwarded from Alison Sheldon's account to Harris, and then downloaded from work to his computer here. There were about twenty of them in all. On first glance, they mostly looked like circulars, but after all this effort I hoped that there'd be something here worth looking at.

'This is what we want,' I said.

'Let's just take the hard drive,' he said. 'Be easier.'

'I hope that you have an authority for seizure?'

'I'm sure I can rustle something up.'

'I trust you. Hang on for a second.'

I sorted the emails by date, so that the program showed me the most recent ones first. The last one he'd received had been about an hour ago, and there was a little tick next to it, which indicated that it had been read. The address caught my attention. It wasn't a fwd. It was more interesting than that.

'Look at this.'

Rosh peered over my shoulder and frowned, probably mostly because he didn't understand what he was looking at.

'Did that come from Alison's email account?' he asked.

I shook my head.

'No, there's a couple from her further down. But this one's different.'

The address was just a load of random numbers, followed by an inoffensive-looking server address. I might have even mistaken it for spam if not for the unusual size of the message - over two megabytes - and the subject line, which read urgent, doctor. So the message had a large attachment, and it had been sent for Harris's specific attention.

I double-clicked the envelope icon to open it up.

Doctor, You have been shirking your duties and they grow pressing.

We will not tolerate further delays. There is growing interest in our activities and you have been less than careful. The other girl knows too much. You will bring her to us as you brought the detective.

If at this late stage your conscience is bothering you may we direct your attention to the video attached? Copies can easily be sent to the authorities in addition to members of your family. And perhaps even to members of the family of the young man in question. That is how we will begin with you.

Delete this email immediately. Arrange to meet the girl as soon as possible and we will be in touch.

'This is from the people who killed Sean,' Rosh said.

'Yes,' I told him quietly.

I was thinking. I'd been wondering why Sean had sent me the information when he did - what had been about to go down that made him feel he needed insurance. Now, we knew. Some kind of meeting with Harris.

'Harris helped them get him,' Rosh said.

'It looks like that.'

'Why?'

I said, 'We'll find that out when we get our fucking hands on him.'

'Too right. Who sent it?' Rosh nodded at the screen. 'The address is ... what the fuck is that?'

'An anonymity server,' I said. 'There are these sites on the internet. You set up an account and they let you send messages through that, and all of the detail gets wiped clean off. Gives you a false address, basically. It's a way of sending faceless mail.'

I double-clicked on the attachment. The computer whirred a little, thinking carefully about whether it could handle a file this large. Then it grumbled to itself and got on with it.

Rosh said, 'A site like that must keep records.'

'Probably not,' I said. 'And if it did, we'd never get our hands on them. It's probably not based in this country, and even if it was the people who run these things don't tend to cooperate with the authorities.'

In fact, they were generally the equivalent of those separatists that live in the woods, shooting at trees and wearing camouflage combat pants twenty-four-seven. Just a bit nerdier.