The Murder Code (35 page)

I looked around the room.

It was a nursery—or the makings of one, anyway. The walls were painted a childish sky-blue, but needed a second coat, and there was a half-constructed crib resting in one corner. Opposite, against the wall, there was a desk with a computer monitor on it. At the far end, beyond Wilkinson himself, the cream curtains were closed, catching the morning sun and filling the room with soft light. To him, if he had his eyes open, it probably felt like facing heaven.

‘Tony. Put the gun down.’

Again, no response. I edged even further to the side of the door frame, as far as I could get while still maintaining my aim. Despite his stillness, or maybe because of it, there was a tension to the air. The feeling that something might explode at any moment.

I forced myself to ignore the sensation. It was the kind that can hypnotise you if you let it. It can get you killed.

‘What are you doing, Tony?’

No reply—but the answer was obvious enough. He knew we’d discovered the truth, and that sooner or later we’d catch him, so, rather than running, he’d returned here to get changed into this uniform and wait. He could have ambushed me if he’d wanted—or tried to, at least—but he hadn’t. Which meant that, despite the gun, he wasn’t planning to take anyone else down with him. But he hadn’t surrendered either.

Suicide by cop.

‘Tony …’

‘He would have been proud of me, you know.’

He sounded almost wistful.

‘Who would?’

‘My father.’

‘I doubt that somehow.’

‘Oh, but you didn’t know him.’

Outside, the sirens were louder now. Almost here, perhaps. Not that it would solve anything.

I said, ‘Is that his uniform?’

‘Yes. He was a good man. A military man. A soldier.’

‘Right.’

‘He was a code-breaker. A hero.’

‘I believe you.’

‘And this is his weapon. That’s what you call it. That’s what he told me: always a
weapon
, never a
gun.
Because you never know for sure what your enemy is holding, only that he’s armed.’ Wilkinson paused. ‘And you’re armed, of course.’

The tension in the air went up.

‘Yes.’ I checked my grip on the gun. ‘But I don’t want to shoot you, Tony. What I want is for you to kneel down very slowly and place the gun on the floor.’

‘You mean the weapon.’

‘Yes.’

‘And if I don’t, then you’ll shoot me?’

I didn’t reply. Behind me, from downstairs, I heard footfalls. The backup had arrived and was inside. Laura called my name, but I ignored her. Wilkinson did too. He seemed oblivious to the officers storming the house below us.

‘Why did you do it, Tony?’

It was his turn now to remain silent.

‘Was it that bad for you, the prospect of becoming a father?’ No reply, so I fought for something else to say. Some other desperate insight. All I had was close to home: ‘Were you worried your son might turn out like him?’

‘No.’ His voice flushed with sudden anger. ‘He was a good man. He never laid a hand on us. Raised me well. Or tried to, anyway. I never made it easy for him. But he’d be proud of me now. Finally.’

‘Not if he was such a good man, he wouldn’t. Not after what you’ve done.’

People on the stairs behind me: feet clattering on the wood. I didn’t turn around, but I took a one-handed grip on the gun and waved behind me urgently—

Stay back.

—then got a better grip on the gun again.

I said, ‘You think he would have been proud of you killing your wife?’

‘He would have understood my reasons.’

‘Which are?’ He didn’t reply. ‘What about all those other people, Tony? None of those people deserved to die.’

‘He wouldn’t have minded about them.’

‘No?’

‘He would have called them collateral damage.’ Wilkinson’s voice sounded smaller now. Was he starting to cry? ‘They would have meant nothing to him.’

Christ.

‘Why the hell did you do it, Tony? What were you trying to prove? If you didn’t want a child that badly, you could have just walked away.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘I want to.’
Needed
to, even. ‘Try me.’

‘I would no longer have been able to serve.’

The answer pulled me up short.
To serve?
What—as a fucking janitor at the army base? But then, like his father before him, he worked for the military, didn’t he? Albeit in a far more limited way … perhaps one that wouldn’t pay enough to support a child.

Was that really what it came down to? All of this so he could continue to work at the base.
He’d be proud of me now.
But it couldn’t just be that. If that was all he’d wanted, then he wouldn’t have sent the letters, because they were the only evidence we had that Miller hadn’t acted alone. To risk that, the challenge in them must have been necessary to him too. A code we wouldn’t be able to crack. Except that both the job and the code were broken now. Whatever he’d hoped to achieve and prove by his actions, he’d failed.

‘Tony,’ I started—but he shook his head. He was talking very quietly, almost a whisper. I couldn’t make out the words.

His hand, holding the gun, twitched slightly.

‘Tony,’ I said. ‘Don’t.’

‘You’re a soldier. So you should be able to do this.’

And now that I could hear him, it sounded like he was talking to someone else. His hand twitched again.

‘Tony,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me.’

‘You should be able to do this.’

And before I could react, he lifted the gun in one swift, furious movement to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

‘A
NDY.’

Franklin leans forward. The little boy has finished his story, and he is not satisfied with the ending—the way the boy stays in his dark bedroom. Does nothing. Sees nothing.

‘Andy. Did you shoot him?’

‘No.’

The boy shakes his head vehemently. For the first time in this interview, he looks properly distressed. Shaken.

‘You’re sure?’ Franklin says. ‘It was John?’

‘Yes. I mean, it must have been.’

‘But you saw it, didn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You were there and you saw what happened.’

‘
No.
’

And at that, Andrew begins to cry. For the briefest of moments, Franklin feels a flash of anger. The boy is lying—about part of it, at least. But at the same time, the tears are real. The distress is real. There is no longer a trace of the older, wiser, slyer boy he suspected of sitting in front of him before. Now, he is simply faced with an eight-year-old boy, sobbing his heart out, far smaller—once again—than his years.

Franklin touches the cross inside his shirt.

And he thinks:
what of it?
What does it really matter whether Andrew was there or what he saw? The facts remain, and they are obvious. This little boy has been through so much. He is not evil. Evil is what was done to him. Evil is to neglect and beat a human being who is at your mercy and should be able to rely on you. Evil—he realises with another flash, and this time not of anger but shame—is to make a child cry, without reason, without justification.

‘Okay, Andy. Okay.’

He leans back and lowers his voice, tries to sound sympathetic.

‘It’s all right. It’s nearly over now.’

The boy is still distraught and sobbing. But then, his words are meaningless, aren’t they? It isn’t nearly over. It never will be. In one way or another, this child will be haunted by what he’s experienced and what he’s seen for the rest of his life.

‘I want to see my brother. I want to see John.’

And Franklin, thinking of the scene at the house and what was done there, has no choice but to shake his head.

‘I’m sorry, Andy. That’s not going to be possible.’

‘When can I? When can I see him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Franklin says. ‘I don’t know.’

T
HERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN
a part of her that knew it would come to this. Burying her husband.

They had never discussed it over the years, but the knowledge was there regardless: that Gregor would be the one to die first—to die first
again
—and that Jasmina would live long enough to live without him. It was not a feeling based on health or risk, but on fate. There had always been a sense that her husband was living on borrowed time. They had both known it.

In some ways, it had helped. It had made every day precious, and cast even the quietest of loving moments into gold. But it leaves her worse than empty now. It is as though, having known this was to come, even more should have been made of the time they’d had together. Even though that makes no sense, because you can never love anybody enough to make up for their sudden absence.

You must think of the good memories.

That was what her sister Corinna told her this morning, in the car on the way to the chapel. She meant think not of the manner of his death but the manner of his life, and the life they had lived together. Jasmina has been doing that, of course, but it does not help in any way. Thinking of that life only reminds her it is over, just as happy memories of her daughter’s life inevitably bring her to the vast hole of that absence. What good does it do to recall happy memories from the past when the future is empty? Better to think of nothing at all.

Already, she has cleaned the house from top to bottom. Already, her beautiful husband’s shop is immaculate, as though at any moment he might return and place a pan of rattling wax on the cooker.

You must think of the good memories.

In the car, she had squeezed her sister’s hand, pressing her own against its good intentions.

Just as she does now, seated at the front of the chapel.

The coffin is larger than she has been expecting. It would have to be, of course, to hold him.

The casket is closed, but a photograph of him rests on top. In the picture, he has a full head of black hair and a thick moustache, and although it is a photograph primarily of him, you can make out—if you know—the faces of his wife and daughter squeezing in from the sides to touch their cheeks to his. He is smiling. However haunted he might have been—whatever omens hung above him—at that moment he was happy.

Behind them, there is the hush of movement—of bodies gathering—the sound of suits brushing suits, of throats cleared politely, of quiet, understated talk that forms a soft sea in the air.

Jasmina turns to watch the rows filling. So much black. There is love in this room too, but it has nowhere to go any more, like a lost animal.

Death is disgusting, she thinks, turning back. Despite their inevitability, there are too many funerals in this world, because even one is too many. Their inevitability is the tightest knot of life.

Corinna leans in and asks quietly:

‘Are you all right?’

She nods once. ‘Yes.’

It is true in the sense that it matters—she will survive this. She has survived a great deal, and this will be no different.

At the front of the chapel, the priest is waiting patiently; he catches her eye and smiles gently. She does her best to return it. It is different for him, perhaps, being a man of confident faith. Jasmina is not sure what she believes any more, although she has always tried to respect her husband’s world view. He believed, as much as he could—though again, perhaps it was easier for him, given his second life. Regardless, it is not too much to hope that he is in heaven now, beginning a third, and that whatever impenetrable purpose God kept him alive for is over now.

Even if nobody can ever know it.

Even if they would never be able to understand it if they did.

E
IGHT YEARS AGO, GREGOR
Levchenko came to see me because his daughter, Emmeline, was living with a man who had seriously assaulted her. The reality, as I’d told him, was that if she wasn’t prepared to co-operate with us, there wasn’t a whole lot we’d be able to do about the situation.

I knew that.

And yet the afternoon after talking to him, the memory of Emmeline Levchenko’s pale face, framed by dark hair, with one eye swollen shut, had remained with me. I’d decided I was going to do something about it anyway.

When John Doherty opened his front door, I towered over him. He was short—five foot five at most—and what little there was of him looked pudgy. His hair was brown and wispy, receding, and as soft as his body. His eyes were bleary, as though he was either drunk, had just woken up, or else had been crying. As I held up my warrant card, I wondered if it was all three. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

‘Mr Doherty?’ I did my best to hide the disgust I felt for him. Ever since my childhood, I’ve always despised violent men. ‘Constable Hicks. Can I come in, please?’

He nodded, looking predictably sorry for himself. Even this early in my career, I’d seen the reaction countless times before. Sometimes when you were dealing with domestic abuse, the perpetrators toughed it out, but often it was the opposite, mostly it was like this—the men apparently contrite, ashamed, disgusted with themselves. Afterwards, it was all too easy for the victims to believe the apologies, the promises that it would never, ever happen again, because often the men really meant them. On the surface. Until the next time.

‘Where’s the front room?’

‘Just there on the right.’

His voice was as weak and flimsy as the rest of him, but … something about it struck me. Not a straightforward recognition, but familiarity of some kind. Instead of heading to the front room, I turned around and looked at him, closing the door behind us.

Do I know you?

‘Just there on the right,’ he repeated.

I frowned to myself and went through to the living room. It was cluttered with random belongings, as though he just accumulated things without having proper places to put them. There was no settee, just four armchairs, backs pressed against the walls as though space had been cleared in the centre of the room for a party or a fight. The television was on a coffee table above a swarm of cables, and there were feathered piles of magazines by the chairs. An ashtray was balanced on top of one; a coffee mug, half full, on another. Tangled bunches of clothes were scattered around.