The Dying Hours (8 page)

‘It’s fine,’ Thorne said. ‘Stay there.’

She walked over to him anyway and they stood together, a little awkwardly, in the open doorway.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘Everything you’ve told me, I mean it’s not exactly good news… I still can’t take it in if I’m honest, but I feel better. Does that make any sense?’

‘I think so,’ Thorne said.

‘If somebody did this, at least it means that Dad hadn’t been miserable. He wasn’t so unhappy that he’d do that to himself.’

Thorne told her that he understood, though in clinging to that meagre crumb of comfort, he knew that she was somehow ignoring the pain that her father must have suffered. The terror Brian Gibbs must surely have felt at the end. Perhaps the full implications of what she’d been told had not sunk in yet, or maybe that small measure of Glenlivet had been one too many.

Thorne stepped out into the hall.

Jacqui followed him and at the front door he took a card from his wallet and gave it to her. It was an old one, with his mobile number only and with the word
Detective
coming before the word
Inspector
. If he were ever called upon to answer for it, he would say that he had simply handed over an old card by mistake. He doubted that a single misleading word on a business card would be the worst of his problems by that point.

He tried not to think about it too much.

‘Call me on that number if there’s anything you want to talk about,’ he said. ‘Or if anything occurs to you.’

Thorne doubted that anything would. He was almost certain that no run-of-the-mill motive would emerge for the murder of Brian Gibbs or for any of the others. Not that he’d told Jacqui Gibbs there were any others.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

He had not gone there expecting the woman to reel off a list of her father’s mortal enemies or to name the individual who had borne a terrible grudge against him after a falling-out over dominoes in the local pub. ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘You can call me any time you like, about anything.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s really nice that you’re taking such a personal interest in whatever happened to my dad. You don’t expect that kind of thing these days. Everything’s call centres, isn’t it?’

Thorne nodded and turned away in case the guilt washed blood to his face. Because he was keeping the truth from her. Because, in the interests of self-preservation, he needed her to call him and nobody else. And because he knew that taking such a ‘personal’ interest rather than handing it over to others who would do the job properly might be the very thing that enabled her father’s killer to escape justice.

As he reached for the door, he cast an eye across the framed photographs on a shelf above the radiator.

‘What’s this?’ he asked. He picked up a tarnished frame and studied its contents. He had seen many such pictures before. On a manicured lawn in the sunshine or occasionally outside Scotland Yard, with that iconic sign spinning slowly behind them. The same formation of smartly dressed men and women, senior police officers in dress uniform on either side.

The same ceremony.

Jacqui Gibbs stepped close to him and looked down at the picture. ‘Oh, Dad got some kind of medal or a commendation or whatever. Donkey’s years ago, this was.’ She placed a fingertip to the glass. ‘Doesn’t he look lovely in that suit?’

‘A commendation for what?’

‘God, I’m trying to remember it all,’ she said. ‘He never talked about it that much afterwards. I mean, I can remember us all getting dolled up the day he got it. The dress I was wearing, all that. I’d’ve been about fourteen, something like that, so that tells you how far back we’re talking.’

Thorne waited, tried hard to keep the impatience from his face. ‘It would be good if you could really have a think about this.’

‘There was a trial,’ she said. ‘He was a witness at a trial. I’m sure he must have kept all the newspaper cuttings…

A few minutes later, when Jacqui had finished telling him as much as she could remember, she said, ‘Do you think this might have something to do with what happened? I saw the look on your face.’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Thorne said. It was a fact, but so was the tickle at the nape of his neck, his desire to get out of the house as quickly as possible and make a call.

‘Do you want to hang on to it?’ she asked. ‘The picture?’

Thorne looked at it again.

‘No, really,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. I mean, I want it back, obviously.’

Thorne guessed that the photograph would not be of any further use. He knew the way the commendation system worked – that there were only a small number of such ceremonies each year and that the members of the public honoured had been of assistance in any number of different investigations – but he thanked her anyway and promised that the photograph would be taken care of.

‘I need to clean it up a bit. It got so filthy up in Dad’s loft.’

As Thorne walked away from the front door, she was still clutching his card and saying, ‘I’ll call if I can think of anything else.’

The second he was out of sight and walking quickly towards the car, Thorne reached for his phone. Holland was rather short with him when he answered.

‘Listen, I’ll be quick,’ Thorne said. ‘When you talk to Graham Daniels—’

‘I’m with him now,’ Holland said.

‘OK, that’s great,’ Thorne said. He pressed the remote on his key fob to unlock the BMW. ‘Call me when you’ve finished. Just make sure you ask him what his mother was doing thirty years ago.’

Monday was a quiet night in the Grafton Arms. No laughter or salsa music from the room upstairs to disturb those in search of a little something to take the edge off before they got home or others quietly drinking away the evening. The mechanised soundtrack of till and fruit machine was lively enough for all concerned. There was certainly nothing close to exuberance from the three men at a table in the corner. This, despite the progress they had made that morning and had continued to make, thanks to the one sitting nearest the toilets; the one who looked the least happy of any of them to be there in the first place.

Thorne handed him his pint and sat down. Said, ‘Listen, Dave, I know you’ve still got concerns, all right?’

Holland swallowed and grunted into his glass.

‘I just want you to know I’m taking them on board.’

‘How, exactly?’

Thorne’s turn to drink.

‘I still don’t know why you’re not handing this across.’ Holland looked to the third man at the table for some support. ‘Especially now, I mean, Christ…’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Hendricks said. ‘You have worked with him before, haven’t you?’

Thorne flashed a sneer at his friend, then looked back to Holland. ‘I tried,’ he said. He remembered the look on Hackett’s face when he’d walked across the bridge to the MIT, and that night in Stanmore. ‘I tried on several occasions and I was politely told where to go. Only not very politely. I promise you, Dave, they think it’s a joke.’

They think
I’m
a joke.

‘Maybe they don’t,’ Hendricks said. ‘Maybe it just suits them to sit on their hands.’ He took a drink as Thorne and Holland turned to him and waited. ‘Well, let’s face it, suicides look a damn sight better on the balance sheet than unsolved murders, don’t they?’

Thorne nodded, considering it. Hendricks had almost certainly been half joking himself, but what he had said was horribly plausible.

‘Well if this goes tits up, we’ll be the only ones who aren’t laughing. The ones looking for jobs.’

‘I really appreciate what you’re doing, Dave. This morning, and the stuff you got for us this afternoon. That was over and above.’

Hendricks raised his glass in salute.

Holland’s face softened, but only a little. He said, ‘I must need my head looking at, seriously,’ then pulled out a few folded sheets of paper from his pocket. He flattened them against the tabletop and handed the other two a copy each.

‘It won’t go tits up, Dave,’ Thorne said.

‘Why won’t it?’

‘Because we’re going to catch him.’

Hendricks and Thorne looked at their printed sheets, pints in hand, as if casually perusing a menu of bar snacks. At the top of each sheet was a name.

Terence Mercer
.

‘He ran a very well-connected firm in south London from the mid-seventies onwards,’ Holland said. ‘Banks, building societies, security vans, all the usual.’

Thorne nodded. ‘Back when the Flying Squad were top dogs, charging about in Cortinas and wearing sheepskin coats like they were on the telly.’

‘That retro look’s coming back in,’ Hendricks said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘Anyway,’ Holland said. ‘Then in eighty-three a job went bad at this bank in Croydon and some of his firm got pinched. He only just made it away himself, but the Flying Squad got a tip-off that he was hiding out at an address in Crystal Palace. Bit of a disaster all round from that point on by the looks of things… left hand, right hand, all that… and the long and the short of it is that some poor DC goes in there without back-up and Mercer shoots him in the face in the back garden.’

‘Bet that made a mess of his sheepskin,’ Hendricks said.

‘So, loads of press coverage, major trial at the Bailey blah blah, and Mercer gets life with a twenty-five-year minimum.’ Holland glanced back down to his notes. ‘The tariff’s increased a few years later when Terence loses his rag in Maidstone and shanks a prison officer and from then on he gets shunted around, basically because one place after another gets sick of keeping him. Regular parole requests, all denied obviously, usual scenario… he does thirty years in the end and was finally released from Gartree prison seven weeks ago.’

‘Three weeks before Brian Gibbs died,’ Thorne said. ‘And only a fortnight before Fiona Daniels.’

They laid their sheets of paper on the table.

‘So Gibbs was a witness to the shooting,’ Hendricks said.

‘Saw it from his upstairs window.’ Thorne put his drink down. ‘Gave evidence, even though he was being threatened by some of Mercer’s mates. That’s why he got the medal. And Fiona Daniels worked in the bank.’ He looked to Holland. ‘Right?’

Holland nodded. ‘She gave evidence too. I spoke to Andrew Cooper this afternoon and his dad was the doctor who provided the expert testimony about the gunshot injury. That’s what proved conclusively that the police officer had been shot at point-blank range, that Mercer hadn’t been where he said he was when the gun was fired. Proved it was an execution, pure and simple.’

Hendricks tore at a large bag of crisps, opened it lengthways and put it in the middle of the table. Thorne and Holland dug in. ‘So, basically, Terry’s getting his afters on the people he thinks were responsible for having him put away. That’s what connects the victims.’

‘Basically,’ Thorne said. He looked anything but delighted that the connection had been made. ‘Piece of piss, this job.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Hendricks froze, about to put a handful of crisps into his mouth. ‘How old must Mercer be?’

‘He’s seventy-three,’ Holland said.

‘There’s going to be others.’ Thorne leaned forward, reached for more crisps. ‘Other witnesses, his legal team. God knows how many coppers. We’ll need to make a list.’ He glanced up at Holland, all three of them well aware that he was the one who would be able to put such a list together, the one with instant access to the computer systems. When the offer was not immediately forthcoming, Thorne stabbed a finger at the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘Listen, thanks again for this, Dave. Seriously.’

Holland shrugged. ‘Didn’t need to do a lot of digging, if I’m honest. Most of that was straight off the internet.’

Thorne did not know if Holland was being modest or if he was simply trying to convince himself that he had not done too much that might get him into trouble later on. Looking at the notes, it was clear that plenty of material had been taken off files that would have demanded access to several Met databases. Access that would certainly have been fully logged and monitored.

‘God bless Google,’ Hendricks said. ‘I reckon you’ll be making good use of it.’

‘Maybe we need to bring somebody else on board,’ Thorne said. ‘Spread the load a bit.’ He looked at Holland. ‘Make it a bit harder for them to join the dots later on, if it comes to that.’

‘Such as?’ Holland asked.

‘What about Yvonne Kitson?’

Holland looked unsure. ‘I reckon she’s got more reason than most to say no.’

‘I can only ask,’ Thorne said. ‘If she doesn’t want to get involved, I think she’d just pass and forget I ever asked her. Got to be worth a try, though.’

‘Maybe,’ Holland said.

Hendricks began humming a tune and held up four fingers.

‘What?’ Thorne looked confused.

The tune became suddenly recognisable: Elmer Bernstein’s iconic theme from
The Magnificent Seven
. Hendricks said, ‘I’m Steve McQueen, obviously.’

Even Holland smiled. ‘I reckon a Mexican bandit would be a damn sight easier to deal with than Terry Mercer. They had the villagers to help them, remember.’

‘There’d have to be an address on file,’ Thorne said, thinking out loud. ‘Probation arrangements or whatever. Must be some way to get that without ruffling too many feathers.’

‘What about the prison?’ Hendricks asked.

Thorne nodded. ‘I’ve got a contact up there. On top of which, I reckon it might be useful to find out who was visiting Mercer before he was released.’ Looking at Holland and Hendricks, Thorne could see that they’d already reached the same conclusion he had. What Terry Mercer was doing would have taken a good deal of planning. For the killing to have begun so soon after he was released, there had to have been someone helping him.

‘So, what about this list then?’ Hendricks asked. Thorne had been fighting shy of coming straight out and asking Holland, but Hendricks clearly had no compunction.

Seeing Holland’s hesitation, Thorne stood up, guessing that the time might not be right to push. ‘Who wants another drink?’

When he returned and handed out the beers, Holland said, ‘It’s going to mean pulling another file.’

Thorne waited, sipped his beer like he was in no hurry.

‘At least one other file.’

‘You’ve done more than enough, Dave,’ Thorne said. ‘We’re up and running, so if you’d prefer to call it quits now, that’s not a problem. And however this pans out, it won’t come back on you, I swear.’

Holland looked at Hendricks, then Thorne, then his beer. ‘What the hell,’ he said. ‘In for a penny.’

Hendricks helped himself to the last of the crisps. Said, ‘In for a P45…’