From The Dead (38 page)

Only Gene Hackman isn’t really sorted out, not yet. Says he doesn’t deserve to die. Clint tells him that ‘deserves’ has got nothing to do with it before he finishes him off, up nice and close. He walks slowly into the rain then, past his mate’s body, and one by one all the hookers come out too, the whores like Candela who started it all. They all stand there and watch him ride away, even the one with the messed-up face.

Fucking priceless.

Langford waited and let the credits run, because he believed it was rude not to. Then he reached for another beer and pointed the remote so he could watch the scene one more time.

Alison Hobbs, who used to be Alison Talbot, had remarried three years earlier. Six months after her first husband Chris had finally been declared legally dead. When she answered the door, there was a toddler peering from behind her legs, and her new husband was waiting for them when Holland and Kitson were shown into the living room.

Stuart Hobbs had a firm handshake and gave a suitably solemn nod.

Alison went to make tea, leaving Holland and Kitson to fill an awkward few minutes with small talk while her husband wrestled his small son on his lap. The drive up from London had been pretty good, despite the average speed checks on the M1. The toddler’s name was Gabriel, and the ‘terrible twos’ were kicking in. They were waiting on a quote to have the kitchen extended.

Everyone looked happy when the tea arrived.

‘It’ll be a relief, actually,’ Stuart Hobbs said, ‘if you
have
found Chris. It’s not been particularly easy for either of us.’

Holland said he could understand that. ‘Like I said on the phone, though, we can’t make a positive identification at the moment. That’s why we’re hoping you can answer a couple of questions that might help.’

Alison sat down next to her husband. He took her hand. ‘Fire away,’ she said.

‘Did you know much about what Chris was working on?’ Kitson asked.

She shook her head. ‘He didn’t really talk about it and I didn’t really want to know. Not once he’d moved into plain clothes, anyway. I knew there was a good deal of secret stuff, some seriously nasty people they were after, but he didn’t bring it home with him, if you know what I mean.’

‘Sensible,’ Kitson said.

Hobbs shifted his son gently to one side and leaned forward. ‘I thought this was just about . . . identification.’

‘It is,’ Holland said. He had already put a call in to Chris Talbot’s former
DCI
at Serious and Organised, but was still waiting to hear back. So far, Alison had certainly said nothing to suggest that the work her former husband was doing would
not
have brought him into contact with Alan Langford ten years before.

‘You think the fact that Chris was a copper is important?’ Alison asked.

‘Yes, it might be.’

‘Might have had something to do with what happened, you mean?’

‘Well, as I said before—’

The door to the living room opened suddenly and a boy walked in – twelve or thirteen, with shoulder-length hair and a My Chemical Romance sweatshirt. He stopped as soon as he saw that there were visitors, shifted awkwardly from one trainer to the other. ‘My
World of Warcraft
account needs topping up,’ he said, looking at the carpet.

‘I’ll sort it out later,’ Hobbs said.

The boy mumbled a ‘thanks’ and left quickly.

‘That was Jack,’ Alison said.

Holland and Kitson nodded; the maths was easy enough. Chris Talbot’s son.

‘Stupid bloody computer game,’ Hobbs said.

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence until Alison got up, saying ‘oh’ as though she had remembered something and going to fetch a cardboard box that Holland had seen at the bottom of the stairs on their way in.

‘I got this down from the loft,’ she said. ‘It’s a few of Chris’s things. I thought they might be useful.’ She laid it on the carpet in front of Holland and he leaned down to look at it. ‘There’s a few photos and some other bits and pieces. Not much, really. Considering.’

‘That’s great,’ Kitson said. ‘Thank you.’

Holland lifted the flaps of the box, tried to make his question as casual as possible. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know if Chris had his appendix out,’ he said.

Alison looked taken aback, then nodded slowly. ‘I think so. I mean, there was a scar, but you should probably check with Chris’s mum. I can put you in touch with her, but we don’t really talk much these days.’ She shrugged, summoned a thin smile. ‘She wasn’t exactly thrilled when Stuart and I got married.’

Kitson said, ‘It’s difficult.’

Alison squeezed her husband’s hand.

‘Did he ever have an operation to put pins into his leg?’ Holland asked.

‘Yeah, Chris smashed his leg up playing rugby, the silly sod,’ Alison broke into a smile. ‘He was pretty good, actually. Played for the Met’s first fifteen a couple of times.’

Holland nodded, impressed. He reached down and began rummaging in the box, but could not resist a glance across at Stuart Hobbs.

‘I play football,’ Hobbs said.

Holland looked up at Alison and he could see then that she knew they had found Chris Talbot’s body. He had no idea what she still felt for the man to whom she had been married and whom she now knew to be dead, but the swell of sympathy he felt was not just because of her loss. He could see that the woman simply did not know how she was supposed to react. Sitting there as wife and widow, ten years on, with her new husband and his firm handshake.

Alison laughed softly, remembering. ‘He used to have all sorts of problems with airport X-ray machines . . .’

‘Be even worse these days,’ Hobbs said.

Holland pulled a framed photograph of a rugby team from the box. He looked for Chris Talbot’s name at the bottom and found him halfway along the second row. His arms were folded high on his chest and his ears stuck out. Holland could not detect much of a resemblance to the boy he had seen a few minutes earlier.

Kitson started to say something about Jack and
DNA
, but Holland was no longer paying attention.

He was staring at the photograph.

Two along from where Chris Talbot was standing was a face Holland recognised.

Ten minutes later, he and Kitson were walking back towards the car.

‘We have to tell Thorne,’ Kitson said.

Holland held up a hand. He already had his phone out and was listening to a message. ‘Sonia Murray,’ he said. ‘Asking me to call her back urgently.’ He shook his head, unable to place the name.

‘I’ve seen her name somewhere,’ Kitson said.

Then Holland remembered an attractive black woman, the barrage of abuse as she walked along the landing.

Sonia Murray was the police liaison officer at Wakefield Prison.

Thorne’s mood had been bad enough already when he’d got the call from Fraser . . .

He had managed to find a copy of the previous day’s
Daily Mail
and having bitten back the bile – he had only been looking for a report on the Spurs – Villa game anyway – had taken it to the cafe to read over breakfast. The match report had been brief and uninformative, probably because there was no scope to make any comment on illegal immigrants or dole scroungers, but flicking through the paper he had come across a double-page article written by Adam Chambers’ girlfriend.

Natalie Bennett had been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice. Although there was little doubt she had lied, the charges had been dropped following her boyfriend’s acquittal. In the article, beneath a caption that read ‘Picking up the Pieces’, she movingly described her efforts to rebuild her life after the trauma she and Adam had endured. There was a photo of her smiling bravely.

If Thorne had been served his breakfast by then, he would have heaved it up across the table.

Even more disturbingly, Bennett mentioned that she and Chambers were currently working on a book that would ‘lift the lid’ on the abysmal failings of the police investigation and in which the full extent of their suffering would be revealed. Thorne read on, thinking things could not get any worse, until he spotted that the book was being co-written by a hack journalist and true-crime writer called Nick Maier. Thorne had had dealings with Maier in the past, and the thought of him profiting in any way from what had happened to Andrea Keane turned his stomach still further.

By the time he had thrown the paper away, his appetite had all but gone and the call from Fraser killed it altogether.

Now, he was stepping gingerly through a crime scene, in the apartment from which Candela Bernal had fallen to her death the night before.

‘You seen many jumpers?’ Fraser asked.

‘She didn’t jump,
Peter
.’

‘Just saying. They take their glasses off, did you know that? I saw it in an old episode of
Inspector Morse
.’

‘She didn’t wear glasses,’ Thorne said, ‘and she didn’t fucking
jump
.’

‘I know, OK? Just making conversation, Christ . . .’

The sliding door that led to the balcony was open and there were more officers working outside. A blue tarpaulin that had been secured to the railings snapped and fluttered in the wind.

‘Why was nobody watching this place?’ Thorne asked. ‘We told her there would be protection.’

Fraser raised his hands. ‘Nothing to do with me, mate.’

‘Well,
somebody
screwed up,’ Thorne said. He considered everything Silcox and Mullenger had told him back in London. ‘Or looked the other way.’

‘Come on, we couldn’t have guessed it would be so quick.’

‘
Couldn’t
we?’ Thorne was as angry with himself as he was with Fraser or any of his colleagues. ‘Langford probably sussed it when she told him she had to go home early. He might even have seen her put the champagne glass in her bag.’

‘Look, none of this was my idea, all right?’

Thorne moved away, but Fraser followed, a pace or two behind, his hands stuffed sulkily into the pockets of his plastic bodysuit. Thorne stepped across a local scene of crime officer who was on his hands and knees, scraping at the carpet. The officer muttered something in Spanish that was almost certainly not ‘Good morning and how are you?’ as Thorne walked over to where the two suitcases lay near the door.

‘She was trying to leave,’ Thorne said.

‘Looks that way.’ Fraser moved alongside him, nodded at the door. ‘No sign of forced entry, so maybe she knew him.’

‘You should check with all the local taxi companies.’

‘Wouldn’t she just have taken her own car?’

‘Too easy to trace,’ Thorne said. ‘She’d have known Langford has friends in high places. Including police officers.’

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to suggest, mate,’ Fraser said.

‘I’m not
suggesting
anything.’

‘One or two of the local boys might be a bit dodgy, fair enough, but . . .’

Thorne had already stopped listening to him. He was staring at a small, glass-topped side table next to the sofa. There was an empty wine glass and a beer bottle minus a label. In the ashtray, dark gobbets of rolled-up paper lay scattered among the lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

‘Langford did this himself,’ Thorne said.

‘Come again?’

‘He killed her.’

‘No way,’ Fraser said. ‘You’ve said it yourself, he doesn’t get involved in the messy stuff.’

‘Messy’ was the only way to describe the scene on the street seventeen floors below. By the time Thorne had got there, the area had been sealed off and hidden from the public, but there was still a good deal of cleaning up to be done. They would be lucky if there was enough of Candela Bernal left for a post-mortem.

‘He’s rattled,’ Thorne said. ‘His girlfriend does the dirty on him and he takes it personally. He’s already had the job on me go wrong and he’s fired up enough to do this one himself.’

‘I can’t see it.’

Thorne pulled Fraser across to the small table and pointed. ‘He had a drink with her, OK? Or sat down and helped himself to one after he’d killed her.’

‘Jesus . . .’

Thorne remembered the terror on the girl’s face when they confronted her, and what she had said about cops and villains. The difficulty in telling one from the other. She had not been given much of a choice in the end, but she had still picked the wrong side. ‘Make sure you get prints off that bottle,’ he said. ‘Match them with the ones from the glass Candela brought in.’

‘Doesn’t matter if his prints are all over the place,’ Fraser said. ‘This is his girlfriend’s flat.’

‘But he’d never been here, remember?’

‘Yeah, but the only person who can corroborate that is the girl and she’s pavement pizza, so what’s the point?’

There was a sudden burst of laughter from the balcony.

‘The Spanish are even more hard-arsed about this stuff than we are,’ Fraser said. ‘Some of the
jokes
.’

‘Just get the prints.’ Thorne turned and began unzipping his bodysuit as he walked quickly towards the door.

‘Where are you off to?’ Fraser asked, two steps behind him again.

‘A bit more sightseeing,’ Thorne said.

The villa was at the edge of one of the countless golf resorts that had been developed beneath the Sierra Blanca, and it was more exclusive than most. At the highest point of a winding road, Thorne could not see any neighbouring properties, and though he had not followed the perimeter fence for any distance, he guessed that there was a fair amount of land attached to it. Plenty for a man to stroll around and feel good about himself.

However hard that might otherwise be.

There were solid metal gates at the end of the driveway, and from what Thorne could remember from the helicopter pictures he had been shown, it was about a quarter of a mile from them to the house itself. Thorne could not see any security cameras, but he did not much care if he was seen anyway.

He rang the bell and waited. Rang again, then stepped back and walked a few yards along the perimeter fence. Densely cultivated firs obscured the view, so he moved back to the gates, pushing the sweat out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. He pressed the bell one more time, then leaned down to the speaker that was built into a concrete post. He had no idea if anyone was listening.