The Dying Hours (24 page)

Thorne had not expected Frank Anderson to still be in his office at quarter to ten at night, but he’d enjoyed calling on him nonetheless; hammering on the door hard enough to put another small crack in the glass.

Resigned to no more than scant and momentary satisfaction, he suddenly remembered the bar on the other side of the road. The one from which he’d called Anderson on his previous visit and the one – so Anna Carpenter had once told him – in which Anderson drank most days, alone or with prospective clients to whom he did not wish to show the sordid reality of his less than impressive business premises.

Thorne jogged across the road, dodging between cars.

Anderson was at a table just inside the door, sitting close to a woman in her mid-forties. His back was to the door, but the woman saw Thorne approach and immediately stopped laughing.

‘New client, Frank?’ Thorne waited for Anderson to turn round then pointed at his companion. ‘Or is this a lady friend?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Anderson said.

Thorne stepped closer and looked at the woman. ‘Seriously, love, if you’re thinking of sleeping with him, you’re going to want a really hot shower afterwards.’

The woman opened her mouth but said nothing.

‘What do you want?’ Anderson asked.

Thorne tossed the folder down on to the table, opened it up and removed the photographs. He held them for a second before dropping them and spreading them out quickly, scattering beermats as Anderson and the woman scrabbled to remove their drinks.

Anderson took a cursory glance. Said, ‘And?’

There were more than twenty photographs and though Thorne only recognised two of the subjects – Jacqui Gibbs and Andrew Cooper – he had known straight away who they were. What he was looking at. All of them photographed without their knowledge: coming out of houses, climbing into cars, kicking a football in the park. The families of those Terry Mercer had been targeting.

Men, women and children.

Grandchildren
…

Mercer had offered his victims a simple choice. Take their own lives or forfeit those of the people they loved. No choice at all.

‘You lying piece of shit,’ Thorne said.

‘Now, hang on—’

Now, people at nearby tables were staring, but Thorne could not have cared less. ‘You took these, didn’t you?’ He stabbed a finger at the picture of Jacqui Gibbs walking away from a supermarket. ‘This was all part of the job you did for George Jeffers.’

‘You asked me about the old people,’ Anderson said. ‘Remember? You wanted the names of the old people Jeffers had told me to find and I gave you their names. That was our deal.’

‘You found these people too though, didn’t you?’

Anderson looked. ‘I didn’t take all of these.’

‘The ones he asked you to find. You took their pictures and handed them over for Jeffers to pass on to his mate.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘His mate, Terry Mercer.’

‘Never heard of him—’

‘Have you got any fucking idea what you’ve done?’

The woman – a blowsy brunette wearing too much make-up – got to her feet a little unsteadily, but Thorne looked at her and she quickly sat back down again. Seeing that one of the staff had moved from behind the bar she leaned across to Anderson and said, ‘Shall I call the police?’

Anderson shook his head.

‘Already here,’ Thorne said.

The woman looked confused. She reached across for Anderson’s hand.

‘I asked you a question.’ Thorne picked up a photo, pushed it into Anderson’s face. ‘Any idea how many of these people’s parents and grandparents are dead now because of these?’ He held up the photo of Andrew Cooper. ‘This man’s mother and father.’

‘What’s going on, Frank?’ the woman asked.

Seeing the fear in his companion’s eyes, Anderson seemed compelled suddenly to react as though he had a spine of some sort. ‘OK, you’ve come in here and you’ve shouted the odds and I’m sure you feel a lot better. Now, we both know full well that I’ve not done anything illegal, so why don’t you take your collection of snaps and leave us to it.’ He held out his arms as though all the others in the bar were his friends. ‘We’re just trying to have a quiet drink, OK?’

Thorne looked at him.

Anderson stood up. ‘Right, good. Now, I’m going for a piss.’

He walked around the table, slid past Thorne and disappeared towards the Gents. Thorne stood breathing heavily for half a minute, staring down at the photographs while the woman went back to her drink and those around them returned to their conversations. Then he gathered up the pictures, turned from the table and began pushing through the crowd.

He walked in just as Anderson was turning from the urinal, zipping himself up.

‘Oh, this is getting silly,’ Anderson said. He moved towards the door, but Thorne barred his way. ‘Look, I don’t know what your problem is, but unless you’ve got anything else, I’m on a promise, so…’

‘You need to wash your hands,’ Thorne said.

‘So I took some bloody pictures, all right? I was doing my job.’ He stared at Thorne, waiting for him to move. ‘Come on, that’s enough now, I’m trying to be nice about this.’

‘
Nice?
’ Thorne could not remember the last time he had wanted to hit anyone quite this much. He also knew that whatever else he had done, whether he would get away with it or not, a straightforward physical assault after a confrontation witnessed by a bar full of people would be the end of him. The Job would be gone in a second and there would be plenty of people queuing up to get him put away.

Anderson saw Thorne’s hesitation and sensed the weakness. He smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I know. You’d love to.’

Thorne punched him hard in the face.

He moved quickly back through the crowded bar, keeping his head down and avoiding the stare of Anderson’s girlfriend as he passed the table. He barrelled out through the door, the folder under his arm, his injured hand hanging loosely at his side.

He ran straight into Neil Hackett.

Thorne stepped back and they stared at each other for a few seconds while traffic rumbled by. A couple passed between them, walking towards the bar. The wash of passing headlights showed only mild amusement on Hackett’s face, while Thorne knew he looked every bit as horrified as he felt.

‘Someone’s in a hurry,’ Hackett said.

‘Need to get home,’ Thorne said, dredging up a smile. The rain that had begun to fall was not heavy, but he was aware of each drop landing with an audible
smack
on the folder he was carrying.

‘Under the thumb?’ Hackett said. ‘You need to do something about that.’

‘This isn’t your neck of the woods, is it?’ Thorne still did not know where Hackett lived, but the idea that this bar could possibly be his local would be stretching the notion of coincidence to a ludicrous degree.

‘No, it isn’t,’ Hackett said.

‘So why this place?’ Thorne nodded towards the bar. As he did so, the door opened and two lads peered out, excited at the sniff of trouble that had drifted from the toilets and keen to follow it outside. Thorne turned away, saw that Hackett was calmly staring them out. He heard the noise from the bar fade quickly as the door closed again.

‘I’ve heard good things,’ Hackett said. ‘Decent beer, nice crowd. Never any trouble.’ He glanced at Thorne’s hand. ‘Hurt yourself?’

Thorne flexed his fingers, winced. He hoped it wasn’t broken. ‘Trapped it in a door.’

‘Ouch.’

‘I’ll live.’

‘I quite like trying out places I’ve never been before,’ Hackett said. He took a step towards the bar, towards Thorne. ‘I’m usually pretty good at making myself at home. Finding interesting people to talk to.’ He thrust huge hands into the pockets of his long, dark coat and looked towards the door. ‘Any in there?’

‘No idea,’ Thorne said. ‘I just nipped in for a quick one.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m driving.’

‘Because it’s not really yours either, is it?’

‘What?’

‘Neck of the woods.’

‘I was visiting a mate.’

‘Anything interesting?’

‘Not really.’

‘In
there
, I mean.’ Hackett nodded at the folder in Thorne’s left hand.

Thorne lifted the folder up as though he had forgotten it was there and looked at it. It was clear that Hackett knew
something
, but as yet there was no way of knowing how much. For a second or two, Thorne wondered if he should just casually open the folder up and show Hackett its contents. There was no compulsion to explain them and it would be helpful to see whether or not Hackett recognised the people in the photographs. Thorne thought it might give him some idea of what he was up against. He said, ‘No, not particularly.’

Hackett nodded, but there was tension in his face suddenly, a tightening around the mouth, eyes unblinking. ‘We should go back in,’ he said. ‘We could have that drink I was talking about.’

‘Better not,’ Thorne said, fastening his jacket. ‘Driving, remember?’

‘Course, and you need to get home.’

‘I
want
to get home.’

‘Be ironic though, wouldn’t it?’ Hackett said. ‘Getting nicked for drink driving, after everything else.’

Thorne looked at the DCI, not sure what he meant. After everything that had happened to get him bumped off the Murder Squad? Or everything that was happening now? He certainly wasn’t going to ask. He started to walk away. ‘Enjoy your drink,’ he said.

‘She’s Child Abuse, isn’t she?’

Thorne stopped and turned. The message being delivered was simple enough: the futility of trying to keep secrets, the non-existence of privacy. It was not something Thorne needed telling, but Hackett clearly relished doing so anyway.

‘Your other half?’ Hackett shook his head sadly. ‘See, I’ve always thought it was a dangerous business, shacking up with someone else who was in the Job. A nightmare waiting to happen.’ He shrugged. ‘What do I know, though?’ He turned and walked towards the bar. Said, ‘You definitely want to get that hand looked at.’

Holland and Kitson were unable to get away from the office for too long, so Thorne drove over to Colindale. He texted to let them know he’d arrived, and at lunchtime the three of them convened in Thorne’s car, five minutes’ walk and a few streets away from the Peel Centre.

Kitson asked Thorne what had happened to his hand, but he waved her question away. He wanted to talk about what had happened before he’d paid Frank Anderson a visit the night before.

What he’d found in Terry Mercer’s car.

‘He might have needed a gun to get them where he wanted them,’ Thorne said. He remembered what Anthony Dennison had told him about Mercer buying two guns. ‘To get through the door and get everything set up… the bath, the pills, whatever. But persuading them to take that final step was easy enough in the end.’ Thorne passed the photographs to Yvonne Kitson in the passenger seat. She looked through them and then handed them back to Holland. ‘These were all the weapons he needed.’

‘Jesus,’ Kitson said. ‘That’s…’

‘They knew he’d do it, too. Kill them without a second thought if they didn’t do it themselves and then go after their families.’

Nobody spoke for a while. Thorne lowered his window an inch or two to let some air in.

‘In the end, you do whatever it takes to protect your kids,’ Kitson said.

Thorne nodded.

‘Simple as that. Doesn’t matter how old you are, or they are.’ She turned to look at Holland. ‘Right, Dave?’

Thorne felt a sting of irritation seeing the two of them confer; the implication that, as the only one in the car without children of his own, he could not possibly understand.

‘I do
get
it, Yvonne,’ he said.

Holland picked out a photograph of someone he recognised. ‘That’s Graham Daniels,’ he said. He showed them another, pointed. ‘And that’s his daughter.’ The girl who was helping out in the printer’s, earning money to go to college.

There were plenty of other pictures, other faces. Without talking to the relatives of the dead, they could not identify all the people in the photographs. Members of the extended Cooper family, the Gibbs, the Jacobsons…

‘It’s fair to assume that Anderson took most of these,’ Thorne said. ‘Jeffers probably took the rest, or maybe Mercer himself.’

Holland handed the photographs back to Thorne. ‘Well one of them took a trip up to Newcastle,’ he said. ‘To take the pictures of Edward Mallen’s kids.’

Thorne looked at him.

‘We did a bit of digging this morning,’ Kitson said. ‘That’s where he was living until recently.’

‘We any the wiser about what connects Mallen to the Mercer trial?’

‘Yeah, well that’s the thing.’ Holland looked at Kitson. They had come with news of their own. ‘Edward Mallen wasn’t his real name. His real name was Barry Mercer.’

Thorne looked at Kitson. ‘Brother?’

Kitson nodded. ‘Younger brother,’ she said. ‘He was given a new identity thirty years ago. After he helped the police catch Mercer. They moved him and his family to the north-east under a witness protection scheme. Set them all up with new identities, new lives.’

Thorne nodded, putting it together. It had been Mercer’s own brother who had provided the ‘intelligence’ Ian Tully had mentioned. The information about the armed robbery.

‘It’s why Mercer left that one until last,’ Holland said.

‘But why the hell would his brother come back to London, if he knew Mercer had been released from prison?’

‘God knows,’ Kitson said. ‘Guilt, or something? A death wish?’

‘Well he got what he wished for,’ Holland said.

‘More to the point, if he was part of a WP scheme, why did anyone
let
him?’ It was a question to which inside experience provided an answer even before Thorne had finished asking it. He knew very well that few programmes of witness protection could be maintained at the highest level of security for thirty years. There simply wasn’t the money, or the will. It was perfectly possible that nobody had even bothered to inform ‘Edward Mallen’ that his brother had been released. Equally, they could have approved Mallen’s move back to London and set him up in a WP scheme here, but that begged the question of how Mercer had found the address.

‘It does mean we need to draw a line under all this very quickly,’ Holland said.

‘Well, I think Terry Mercer’s already drawn a line under it.’

Kitson said, ‘Seriously, Tom.’

‘Seriously, what?’

‘We’re out,’ Holland said. ‘Me and Yvonne. We can’t do anything else, nothing at all.’ He looked at Kitson and Thorne could see that they’d spent time talking about this, working out what to say between them.

‘That’s fine,’ Thorne said, holding up his hands. ‘Look, you know how grateful I am for what you’ve done already and I don’t see why I’d be asking you to do any more anyway. Now Mercer’s dead, I can’t see there’s a lot more needs doing.’

‘I’m sure you would have thought of something,’ Holland said. ‘So, as long as you understand that I’m done.’ He flashed another look to Kitson. ‘That we both are.’

Thorne looked at Kitson, but she was facing front. He sat back. ‘You’ve made your point, Dave, but I don’t think there’s any need to panic. I mean, they haven’t put it together so far.’

‘I kind of think they might put it together
now
though.’ It was clear that Holland was worried and was unhappy about it. ‘Even supposing we’ve got away with it so far, you’d have to be as thick as mince not to work it out now, wouldn’t you? Soon as they find out who Edward Mallen really was and who he grassed up. Soon as some genius points out that his brother was released from prison a few months back, I’ve got a feeling they might have a sneaking suspicion who strung him up.’ He slammed a palm against the headrest. ‘The whole lot’s going to unravel.’

‘Dave—’

‘I know, you said. “How much more shit can we be in?”’

Seeing the look on Holland’s face, Thorne once again found himself wondering how Neil Hackett seemed to know so much more than he had any right to. Where he was getting
his
‘intelligence’ from. There was certainly enough anger, enough resentment at what Thorne had asked of him to give Holland cause to go running to the brass.

And if not Holland…⁠?

Even
considering
the alternatives was enough to send bile rising into Thorne’s throat, but at the same time he had to be realistic. He knew that the number of suspects was limited.

‘Look, it’s over,’ he said. ‘One way or another. We should at least be grateful for that.’

‘I’m sorry we didn’t catch him, Tom,’ Kitson said.

‘So am I. But that’s not always the most important thing, is it?’ Thorne looked at Kitson and could see that she didn’t believe it any more than he did.

The short silence that followed was broken by the ringing of Thorne’s mobile. He saw that it was Hendricks calling, so answered and said, ‘Hang on, Phil, I’ve got Yvonne and Dave here, so I’m going to put you on speaker.’

He pressed the button on the phone then laid it down between the seats.

‘Phil…⁠?’

‘The gang’s all here then, is it?’ Hendricks’ voice was tinny through the handset’s small speaker. ‘Everyone all right?’

Holland and Kitson muttered their hellos.

‘Bloody hell, you lot sound cheery.’

The atmosphere in the car was tense, subdued; a far cry from the raising of glasses privately in the Oak, as they might have been doing had an official investigation ended in the same way.

‘We’re listening, Phil,’ Thorne said.

‘OK, so I’ve just finished the PM on the body in the Astra. Nothing you wouldn’t expect. Male of approximately seventy years of age, hypoxia due to the inhalation of carbon monoxide, blah blah. Now, I have got one question.’

‘What?’

‘You’re positive that Mercer was responsible for the hanging in Woolwich, yeah?’

‘It was his brother,’ Thorne said. ‘Grassed him up thirty years ago.’

‘Ah… in which case we
do
have a bit of a problem. Unless Mercer did it from beyond the grave.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I checked with the pathologist who did the PM on the Woolwich body and we’ve got a slight issue with time of death. There’s not much in it, maybe no more than an hour or two, but the fact is, our man in the car died
before
the man who hung himself.’ Hendricks paused. It sounded as though he was eating crisps. ‘You see where I’m going with this, boys and girls?’

Holland and Kitson looked at Thorne.

‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ Hendricks said.

Thorne closed his eyes and remembered putting fingers to the dead man’s face. Remembered something else that kid Dennison had said: ‘
I told you, he was old. White hair and wrinkles and all that
.’ There could only be two explanations for what Hendricks was telling them and Thorne was in little doubt as to which of them to believe.

Holland leaned forward between the front seats. ‘So assuming Mercer
did
kill his brother, it can’t have been his body in the car.’

Kitson lowered her head, swore quietly.

‘It wasn’t Mercer in the car,’ Thorne said. ‘It was George Jeffers.’