The Dying Hours (11 page)

Mercer jogs in the park – nice and easy, nothing ridiculous – and he looks at the faces of the kids and the young couples as they pass him. Some smile, there is the occasional nod and a muttered greeting, but he knows what they’re thinking, give or take.

Silly old sod
.

Game old bird
.

Stupid old bugger’s going to kill himself
.

They see him, but they don’t have the first idea what they’re looking at.

He slows to a brisk walk, hands on hips, puffing a bit, and thinks how odd it is that expressions don’t ever change. Not really. Faces aged, course they did. Lines etched themselves and bags took up residence. Things puckered, yellowed, dropped; he’d watched it happening in that shitty excuse for a mirror, year after blasted year.

Not the expressions though.

Were they lifelong, he wonders. Was a baby’s look of confusion that first time it sees a dog or a cloud or a garden covered in snow the same as when it grows old and frail and stares death in the face? The same as when a gun barrel gets jammed against its gums?

The hate in that old bastard’s eyes, the movement around the mouth, he certainly recognised
that
from thirty years before. The same look Herbert had worn on his fat face every morning when he’d collected him from that cell beneath the Bailey. Standing there and scowling, like he’d been sent to fetch a scabby dog or pick up a turd.

And it was such a simple thing he’d asked him to do. A simple, stupid thing that cost him dear in the end. Cost all of them, if you want to look at it like that.

He sits on a bench and watches a few lads messing about with a ball, shouting the odds. He’s bloody sure he never swore quite so much when he was their age. He takes a swig from a plastic bottle of water, lets his head drop back, listens to a blackbird singing her little heart out.

Hard to tell it apart from a song thrush, but he knows the difference.

He’d been amazed, the first time he’d seen the photograph; wondered how much the reporter had paid to get into the house, to take the picture in the first place. Plastered all over the front of the previous day’s
News of the Screws
, it was. That stupid headline in the biggest typeface they’d got, his own ugly mug underneath it.

The Murder Garden
.

Sitting there in his cell and staring at the photograph, it had been clear as bloody day. It was obvious. It was taken from the same window Gibbs said he’d been standing at, showed exactly what he would have seen from there, which was precisely sweet F.A. and that picture proved it.

He’d almost shat himself with excitement.

Brian Gibbs would not have seen a thing… couldn’t have, certainly not what he claimed to have seen, not clearly anyway, not unless he had some kind of X-ray vision and was able to see through a dirty great tree. One of those huge things neighbours got stroppy about, right there between the gardens. Smack in the nosy sod’s line of vision.

That Monday morning he’d barely been able to contain himself, standing at the cell door, lively as anything when Herbert opened it, bang on nine o’clock as usual. He’d waved the newspaper at him. He’d told him exactly what it meant, asked him if he’d mind doing him this one favour, passing it on to his brief, they’d be able to take it from there.

The usual expression. Lack of interest,
distaste
…

He’d begged him… come on, mate, just give it to my brief, not like I’m asking a lot, and eventually…
eventually
, the miserable toe-rag had mumbled something and taken it. Taken it and kept it. Done the crossword or looked at the football pages or wanked himself silly staring at the dolly-birds, then chucked it away.

Too late, of course, by the time his brief had finally found out about it. Too late to be accepted into evidence, and when the judge had said
that
, Herbert was standing right there in the dock next to him, eyes front doing his job and smirking like an idiot.

He’d actually shrugged.

Not so anyone else could see, just a little shift of those shoulders he was so proud of, meant for no one else but the poor mug whose chances he’d just flushed down the toilet.

Like, ‘Sorry, mate, forgot…’

Mercer makes a fuss of a small dog that’s sniffing around his ankles. He talks to its owner about the good weather that’s set to change, then stands up and starts to jog again.

He
didn’t forget.

One bit of selfishness, a couldn’t-give-a-toss attitude that cost Alan Herbert his life. Herbert knew it too, it was there in his eyes right at the end. That was what was going through his head, a second before most of it ended up plastered across the wallpaper.

Another ten minutes, he decides, and he’ll knock it on the head. Knees aged every bit as much as faces. Once more around the park should do it, then home for a bit of lunch and a kip… and he can still hear that blackbird, going like billy-o, as he turns right at the far end of the pond.

Thinking about the next one.

As it turned out, the dog was by far the most dangerous criminal that Thorne and his team encountered for the rest of the shift. Things got a little hairy at one point when the dog – actually called Geezer, though Thorne had not taken Treasure’s bet – threatened to chew Nina Woodley’s leg off and armed officers were summoned. In the end, the beast showed the good judgement to let go and was taken away to meet a rather more prosaic fate at the hands of a local vet.

Twenty-eight stitches for Woodley, and the needle for Geezer.

The presence of a firearms unit, together with the injury to an officer and a request to have the animal destroyed, resulted in more paperwork than would usually have been the case. It meant that Thorne got to spend the best part of the afternoon in his office, and he wasn’t complaining. He was certainly having a better day than his stitched-up constable or the soon-to-be-dead dog.

He was able to get the paperwork out of the way fairly sharpish and concentrate on other things, fired up by the text message from Yvonne Kitson that he received just after lunch.

Don’t know whether to call the dps or the funny farm. Because it’s you, I’ll wait a while. Maybe it’s
ME
that needs to go to the funny farm. Y x
 

He called Holland back and told him it was his guess that Alan Herbert had been one of the security guards on duty during Mercer’s trial. These days, the City of London police were responsible for running security at the Old Bailey – ferrying the accused to and from the holding cell, standing guard over them in the dock – but Thorne was almost certain that back then the job had been done by a private company.

Holland told him he would check.

Having explained that his was one of the teams charged with trying to locate Terence Mercer for breaching the terms of his licence, Thorne was not surprised to learn from his probation officer that the address provided by Mercer on his release had turned out to be entirely bogus. In a brief conversation, Alison Macken went on to explain how Mercer had failed to show up for a single one of his monthly meetings and that his mobile phone appeared to have been disconnected.

‘Say hello from me when you find him,’ she said. ‘Actually, make that hello and goodbye. Can’t say I’m too upset that he’ll be going back inside.’

Thorne was ticking off jobs.

He’d been thinking about the trickiest one of all since he’d spoken to Holland. They’d talked about their list, about those men and women without a D next to their name, and Holland had said, ‘Aren’t we going to warn them?’

It had been in Thorne’s mind since Holland had first put the list together, something he’d unconsciously been putting off for reasons he did not wish to examine too closely. This latest killing, though, had tipped the balance. It was just a question of how best to do it without revealing the details or letting anyone know what was going on who didn’t have to.

The chat with Alison Macken provided the obvious solution.

‘
We’re looking for a recently released prisoner who’s breached the terms of his licence and it struck me that you might not even be aware he
has
been released. Terence Mercer? I understand you were involved in the case thirty years ago, so I thought I’d call just to give you a heads-up. Nothing to worry about, I’m sure, but it can’t hurt to be aware of these things, can it
…
⁠
?
’

Mercer’s QC was long dead and the junior barrister – now a senior judge – was away on holiday. Thorne left a message, asking him to call when he returned. There were four detectives on Holland’s list who had been part of the murder or armed robbery investigations and were still serving either in the Met or elsewhere. By the end of the afternoon, Thorne had managed to get hold of two.

Both officers had thanked him for getting in touch and for the heads-up. ‘Not everybody’s quite so bloody thoughtful,’ one of them had said.

Two was better than none at all and Thorne certainly felt a lot better about things, about himself, by the time he made the call to the one person on the list he was intending to warn face to face.

With fifteen minutes until the end of his shift at four o’clock, Thorne rattled through the sign-offs and the handover sheet. He asked a limping Nina Woodley how she was feeling, turned off his radio and tossed his uniform into his locker.

He was in his car by five past.

The owner of the eclectically stocked twenty-four-hour grocer in Finsbury Park was a young and garrulous Turkish man called Yilmaz. Within moments of Yvonne Kitson introducing herself, he had explained in heavily accented English that working all hours God sent, along with two shiftless brothers who did not pull their weight and getting crap from his wholesalers, meant that the last thing he needed was problems with the small flat he rented out above the shop.

‘The flat is cheap,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of extra money, that’s all, but definitely not worth all this trouble.’

‘I won’t keep you long,’ Kitson said.

‘This man, Jeffers, he pays me a month’s rent and then he vanishes. No notice, nothing like that. So then I have to find another tenant, put an advert in the paper, all that. Three weeks to find someone else. Three weeks without any rent.’

Yilmaz was at the till, waiting for someone to come from the stockroom and take over so that he could show Kitson the flat. She stood off to one side as he talked and continued to serve customers, grabbing packets of cigarettes from behind him, ringing up baskets of groceries, taking the money and handing back change without a word.

‘When was the last time you saw him?’ Kitson asked.

Yilmaz thought about it, holding out his hand to a woman who had laid a magazine and a bottle of milk on the counter. ‘He took the flat around the end of June and he was here for about a month.’ The woman slapped a five-pound note into his palm. He put it into the till, dug out the change and held it towards her, still looking at Kitson. ‘So, nine, ten weeks, maybe.’

‘No, thank
you
,’ the woman snapped angrily.

Yilmaz nodded towards Kitson. ‘She’s from the police,’ he said, as though talking to a five-year-old; as though that explained what Kitson guessed was his usual attitude to customers.

The woman was already on her way out.

Yilmaz shrugged and slammed the till shut. ‘At last,’ he said, nodding towards a woman plodding up to the counter from the other end of the shop. ‘Now, I can show you the flat.’ He muttered something to the young woman in Turkish, then came round the counter and showed Kitson out of the shop and along to a small door that separated it from a dry-cleaner’s.

He reached into his pocket and took out a bunch of keys.

‘I thought you said you had a new tenant,’ Kitson said.

‘A nice girl.’ Yilmaz nodded. ‘Turkish.
Quiet
…’

‘Won’t she mind you just waltzing in?’

Yilmaz slid the key into the lock. Said, ‘She’s at work.’

After giving Kitson the address, George Jeffers’ probation officer had explained that her client had shown up for their first meeting shortly after his release, but that there had been no contact since, so Kitson was not surprised at what Yilmaz had been telling her. It made sense. Jeffers would not have wanted to stay in one place any more than his friend Terry Mercer, not if he was working for him in some way. Still, Kitson had decided that it might be an idea to take a look at where he’d been holed up for that first month, especially once the landlord had told her on the phone that Jeffers had left some of his belongings behind.

‘It’s a small flat, but it’s nice,’ Yilmaz said, as he pushed the door open.

They stepped into a narrow hallway leading to a steep flight of stairs. Kitson could feel particles of grit and other things crunching beneath her feet as she walked across the thin carpet, wondering exactly how Yilmaz defined ‘nice’.

At the top of the stairs was a landing, with a small kitchen, bedroom and bathroom running off it. Yilmaz showed Kitson into each of the rooms, opening the doors one by one, as though revealing hidden treasure. The bedroom was very tidy, the bed nicely made and the cosmetics neatly lined up on a table in the corner. Yilmaz nodded, pleased. He seemed perfectly at home in the place and Kitson could not help wondering if he ever came into the flat on his own to poke around in his tenant’s underwear drawer.

Kitson could see quickly that there was nothing to be gained by spending any more time here. ‘Where are these things that Jeffers left?’ she asked.

Yilmaz pointed to a small cupboard built into the wall on the landing. ‘This is another thing,’ he said. ‘He leaves this for me to deal with.’ He reached inside and yanked out a dusty red sports bag, explaining that the girl in the flat did not mind it being here. The flat was cheap, after all, so she had not objected to the bag, or to the cardboard boxes of toilet tissue, tinned goods and shampoo Yilmaz was storing in the kitchen.

‘Nice of her,’ Kitson said.

Yilmaz dropped the bag on to the floor. ‘It is a good job I am a nice person,’ he said. ‘Most landlords would have thrown this into a skip.’ He watched as Kitson knelt down and unzipped the bag. ‘When he disappeared, I thought maybe he had just forgotten where he lived, something like that. He was an old man and sometimes they forget things, you know?’

Kitson pulled out a pair of shoes, some socks and underpants, brown trousers and a dark jacket. There were a couple of tatty paperback thrillers at the bottom, some empty crisp packets and beer cans, a small radio. She held up the empty cans. ‘I think you could have thrown these away.’

Yilmaz shrugged and she understood that he had not been generously holding on to Jeffers’ belongings in case he ever came back. It had simply been the quickest and easiest way to tidy the place up, to prepare the flat for the new tenant. He’d simply grabbed everything he could see that had not been there when Jeffers had moved in, stuffed it into the bag and shoved the bag into a cupboard.

‘How much longer?’ Yilmaz asked.

Had she not been pushed for time, Kitson would have found something to arrest him for, just for the hell of it.

‘Only, that girl on the till is an idiot.’

Kitson lifted up the jacket and began to look through the pockets.