The Dying Hours (15 page)

When Mercer steps out of the van in the rear courtyard, he sees that tosser Herbert in the doorway, jabbering to one of the other gorillas from the security firm. They’re sharing a cigarette and some joke that clearly they both think is hilarious. They keep nodding towards him and pissing themselves; him standing there like a prize plum in his polished shoes and his best blue suit, handcuffs locked that extra bit tightly so it takes the skin off his wrists.

Shivering his tits off and waiting for them to finish, keen to get inside.

‘Bit of a pickle this morning,’ Herbert says. ‘Seems like the world and his wife’s on trial for something or other today so all the holding cells are full.’

Suddenly the other security guard is next to him and he and Herbert take Mercer’s arms and lead him towards the doors. ‘Not a problem though,’ Herbert says and cheerfully tells him that they’re taking him to the old holding cells instead. The ones down in the basement, the ones the tourists go to look at.

Everywhere you look in the basement there are museum pieces: a door from Newgate, inches thick; some medieval stocks; an ancient set of shackles streaked brown with rust or old blood. The holding cell that has not been used for more than a century is the last one on a damp, musty-smelling corridor.

The special cell.

‘Won’t keep you long,’ Herbert says, as he slams the door.

So, he paces for a while, avoids leaning against the wall for fear of dirtying his suit, knowing that he needs to look his very best up there in the dock. When Herbert does not come back, he sits and wraps his arms around himself and tries to block out the whispers that come up from the floor, the voices repeating the messages gouged long ago into the crumbling, blackened brickwork.

Bastads.
 

No justiss for the lykes of us.
 

Only God can be my judge
.

It might be hours later when the door eventually opens again and he screams at Herbert. He tells him that they’re going to be late, that the trial will have started already. Herbert tells him to calm down. ‘The trial’s already finished,’ he says. ‘Job done. Bish, bash, bosh.’

He tries to protest, to force his way past the guards, but they push him back, laughing, towards the small black door at the other end of the cell and out into the light.

Dead Man’s Walk.

He is shoved along the narrow passageway. It’s tiled with grubby cream bricks and water runs down the high walls on either side and he knows he is tramping across the dead, the ones who have taken this walk before him. He can hear them below him. They are laughing too, the rhythm of it rising up through the soles of his good shoes and, for the life of him, he can’t think what they’ve got to laugh at; stuck down there, godless and gaping, their mouths filled with black mud and quicklime.

He walks on, passing beneath a series of low arches that seem to get narrower the further he goes. It’s like Alice in Wonderland or something, like an Alfred Hitchcock film, and by the time he reaches the final arch he can barely squeeze through. It’s not an illusion, he realises, it’s deliberate; designed that way to prevent the condemned man turning and trying to run, and he has to hand it to the vicious so-and-so who built it, even as his legs start to give way and he’s shoved through and round the corner and he gets his first sight of the rope.

‘Might as well,’ Herbert says. ‘Seeing as we’re here.’

Guards step forward then with the thick leather belts for his wrists and ankles, and the hangman’s lips are moving as he makes his calculations, and for some reason they’re still hammering the crossbeam into place when Mercer opens his eyes…

There’s banging outside – workmen in the road below his window – and for a few seconds he cannot be certain where he is.

He knows he’s no longer dreaming, knows it’s a bed and not cold earth, but still it takes him a few moments to get his bearings. To remember that he’s not staying with the coke dealer and his family any more. That he’s woken in the umpteenth different room since he left Her Majesty’s facilities behind.

He stretches and farts; he needs to piss.

He knows he’ll be dreaming about prison for the rest of his life and even when he was inside he dreamed about the trial; those last few weeks when he was technically innocent, when he still had some hope. But he’s been dreaming about little else since he came out. He’s decided it’s because of what he’s doing. His subconscious or whatever it is, giving him a nudge; reassuring him that he’s doing the right thing. Taking away the twinges of doubt and reminding him of what they did.

What he’s lost.

When he can’t hold on any longer he gets up. He pulls on underpants and a T-shirt and pads out on to the landing then along to the bathroom. He can hear voices downstairs, hushed so as not to wake him or be overheard if he’s already awake.

The toilet’s been cleaned very recently and, as he’s pissing the bleach up into a froth, he thinks about those bits of his dream that remain vivid; yet to fragment and scatter. Maybe this one was rather more than a nudge and he’s always been able to take a hint when he’s given one. Gift horses and all that.

He flushes, and as the cistern slowly fills he can still see the water running down those grubby cream tiles on either side of him. He moves to the sink and washes his hands, enjoying the smell of the expensive soap as he thinks about the one he still blames the most. The one who’s already on Dead Man’s Walk, even if he doesn’t know it yet.

The one who’s been hiding.

The days following Thorne’s meeting with Frank Anderson and the confrontation with Helen seemed endless. Hectic and stressful, packed with major headaches and minor incidents. They were also hugely frustrating as Thorne made the decisions he was paid to make, filed reports and stared at clocks in overheated meeting rooms while he waited for something to break in the Mercer investigation, well aware that Holland and Kitson were busy on the jobs they were
supposed
to be doing. Waiting for Mercer himself to make his next move; terrified that if and when that happened, he would wonder if it was a death he could have prevented, if he’d only done what Helen was telling him to do.

What they were all telling him to do.

Two days on late turns – 2.00 p.m. until midnight – then the worst day of the rotation. The ‘day off’ between late turn and night shift, when you fell into bed at one in the morning – if you were lucky – got up around 10.00 a.m. and started your night shift at 10.00 p.m. the same day. Twelve hours down time, then twenty-four without sleep. It was the day they all hated, but falling on a Sunday, when Helen was at home, had made it potentially more unpleasant than usual.

They had not seen much of each other since the argument, Thorne eager to please whenever they had been in the flat together and Helen seemingly happy enough to let him try. They slept in the same bed, but no more than that. Their exchanges had been pleasant enough, workmanlike. Sunday, though, would mean an effort to avoid one another and Thorne’s plans to do just that by sleeping as late as possible then offering to take Alfie out for a few hours had been scuppered when he’d woken at nine to find it pissing down outside.

‘I know,’ Helen had said. She had moved to join him at the window, the rain like tin-tacks thrown against the glass. She sounded every bit as unhappy about the day ahead as Thorne did, but her half-smile made him feel a little better. She said, ‘We are going to be watching a
lot
of
Peppa Pig
,’ then made them both bacon, egg and beans.

As it was, they only ended up having to watch a couple of hours of a programme that had clearly been thought up by someone who was as high as a kite. When Alfie went for his nap in the afternoon, Thorne was able to watch the football, while Helen sat at her computer and lobbed the occasional sarcastic comment across. Later, she cooked them all pasta and, by the time Thorne was thinking about heading in to work, he had decided that the day had gone a whole lot better than it might have done.

That things were pretty much back to normal, in fact.

Just before he had left, though, Helen had said something about hoping he had a good shift, said it in such a way that it was clear she had forgotten and forgiven nothing. That she was pleased to see him going to do the job he was getting paid for and that the shitty weather had at least kept him at home; kept him from getting himself and others into even more trouble than they were in already.

Now, three hours into his shift and one hour into a no less shitty Monday morning, trouble of a very different kind was brewing. The TTFN crew were gathering in numbers outside a fast food place in the shopping precinct and the units in attendance were calling for back-up.

‘Doesn’t look like they’re queuing for kebabs,’ Woodley had said, when she’d radioed in.

Thorne had been sitting in his office, staring at the photograph of Terry Mercer that Holland had dug out, copied and emailed to him. It was the photo taken on Mercer’s arrest more than thirty years ago and, though he would obviously look very different now, it was the only one they had. Thorne had seen countless such pictures over the years, but not too many of the men and women in them had been smiling. Cocky, that’s what Tully had said. Always thought he would walk away. Thorne had every reason to believe that Terry Mercer would be thinking the very same thing three decades down the line.

Another burst of radio chatter. The TTFN soldiers were now openly taunting the officers in attendance.

Thorne folded up the picture and slipped it inside his Met vest as he walked out to meet Christine Treasure. On their way towards the car, a message came through that a unit was on its way in with a young male arrested on suspicion of rape. Thorne and Treasure went through to the custody suite to wait, while the details filtered through.

A woman attacked walking home across Ladywell Fields. The description of a suspect quickly circulated. A young man arrested within twenty minutes, still carrying a kitchen knife and making no attempt to hide the scratches on his face.

When the suspect was brought in, Thorne recognised the boy from the cemetery; the harmless truant who had been ‘caught short’ four days earlier. The waste of time. The boy saw Thorne staring at him, nodded a casual greeting as the handcuffs were removed.

As the boy was being booked in, Treasure took Thorne to one side. ‘Come on, there’s no way we could have known, is there?’

Thorne was still looking across at the boy with the ragged wound beneath one eye and blood on his collar, watching as he turned out his pockets and handed their contents across to be logged by the custody sergeant. A few feet away, the arresting officer was on the radio to a colleague who had accompanied the victim to Lewisham Hospital. He said, ‘Run the rape kit as soon as she’s been patched up.’

‘It was a judgement call.’ Treasure hitched up her vest and straightened her hat. ‘Nobody’s fault.’

As much to himself as to anyone else, Thorne said, ‘I keep getting them wrong though, don’t I?’

It had always been in Thorne’s mind to avoid going straight back to the flat when his shift had ended and wait until Helen had left for work. Even though things on the domestic front seemed to be moving in the right direction, he decided that he would stick to his original plan and stop off somewhere for breakfast.

No point pushing his luck at home as well.

So, half an hour after signing off reports on the rape, what turned out to be a minor fracas in the shopping precinct and a dozen other incidents, Thorne stared down at his second fry-up in less than twenty-four hours. The tinned tomatoes spilling from the plate, what might have been an egg, sausages like fat, pale fingers. If the Job was messing with his head, it wasn’t doing the rest of him a lot of good either.

‘Yes? What you wanted?’

Thorne looked up at the teenage girl behind the counter – what was she, Russian? – and nodded. Said, ‘Great, thanks.’

He took out the photo of Terry Mercer and propped it up against the plastic, tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser. If the food itself didn’t do the job, he guessed it might curb his appetite a little.

He studied it as he ate.

Mercer had been a good-looking man thirty years ago. A Mediterranean face, fine-featured with thick black hair and dark eyes. A charmer, Thorne guessed, when he wasn’t wearing a balaclava and pointing a sawn-off shotgun at you.

What had Caroline Dunn said to him at Gartree?

People change. They get old
…

He became aware of the teenage girl hovering at his shoulder, waiting for the chance to lean over and take his plate away. He turned and looked up at her.

‘Finished?’ she asked.

Thorne said that he was.

‘No good?’

‘I wasn’t as hungry as I thought,’ Thorne said.

The girl reached across to pick up the dirty plate and he saw her looking at the photograph. She stood still for a moment or two, one hand on the plate, her mouth creased in concentration as if she was trying to work something out.

‘OK?’ Thorne asked.

She shrugged and said, ‘It’s nothing,’ and was moving back towards the counter as Thorne’s phone began to ring.

‘This is Alastair Howard…’

It took Thorne a few seconds to place the name.

‘You left a message, asking me to call?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Thorne said. ‘Thanks for getting back to me.’ The junior barrister on Terry Mercer’s defence team, now a senior judge. Thorne was hugely relieved to be hearing from him, having been unable to make contact four days earlier when he’d rung around to put the word out that Mercer had been released from prison.

‘I’d have returned your call sooner,’ Howard said, ‘but I’ve been away and then I came home to discover that an old colleague of mine had died. So, all been a bit hectic.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorne said.

‘I’d known him over thirty years, so it was something of a shock.’

Thirty years. Thorne swallowed and looked at the picture of Terry Mercer. Those big dark eyes, a smile like it was a holiday snap. He said, ‘God.’

‘I know, and it was extremely unpleasant.’

‘Oh?’ Thorne looked across, saw that the teenage girl was watching him.

‘I hope you’re not eating,’ Howard said. ‘I really don’t want to put you off your breakfast.’

Helen had evidently left for work in a hurry, as the breakfast things had not been cleared away. There was a half-drunk mug of tea on the table near the front door and gobbets of Alfie’s porridge clung to every available surface in the kitchen. Thorne knew there were Brownie points available for cleaning up, but, much as he needed them, they would have to remain unearned.

He desperately needed to sleep – at least for a few hours – before he left the flat again. He trudged through to the bedroom and called Holland as he undressed. He told him about his conversation with Alastair Howard, about Richard Jacobson’s death.

‘I heard about that,’ Holland said. ‘I was going to call you.’

Thorne said, ‘Right,’ but could not shake the suspicion that Holland was lying. He dropped down on to the edge of the bed and, with a groan, reached down to take his socks off.

‘Good news is there’s a Murder Squad looking at this one.’

Thorne grunted. Howard had mentioned it.

‘Understandable, though.’

‘Should have looked at the Coopers,’ Thorne said. ‘Should have looked at all of them.’

‘Not too many suicides like this though, are there?’ Holland was talking quickly, he sounded nervous. ‘Immolation, or whatever you call it. Kind of thing people usually do when they want to make a point about something… you know, in public. Plus, I think the judge might have had a quiet word. Put some pressure on.’

‘Why is it
good news
, Dave?’

‘Sorry?’

Thorne said nothing. He lay down and pushed his feet beneath the duvet, reached for the edge of the cover and dragged it slowly back towards his throat.

‘Come on, it’s got to be a good thing, surely? Whichever way you look at it.’ Holland paused, waiting for Thorne to cut in, then pressed on a little more tentatively. ‘If they do put it down as suspicious… you know, if they can get some sort of decent lead and they follow it up, this can get done properly.’

‘And you’re off the hook.’

‘Well, yeah,’ Holland said. ‘With any luck. We all are.’

Thorne reached to turn the bedside lamp off. Holland was still talking, winding up, saying something about keeping an ear to the ground. A blade of grey light cut into the room through a gap in the curtains, but Thorne was too tired to get up and do anything about it.