The 50/50 Killer Page 12

  ‘He wouldn’t hurt her.’

  Hunter laughed.

  ‘You know that, do you? You know about the circumstances in which he attacked his ex-wife, that she was in her car at the time? That he smashed the window with a hammer, dragged Amanda out of the car, and beat her by the side of the road?’

  ‘You’re enjoying telling me that too much.’

  Hunter, for all the play of his taunts, sounded genuinely angry.

  ‘Karli was there, of course, strapped in the passenger side. His baby, covered in broken glass, screaming, while he’s kicking her mother around outside the car. That’s how much he loves that child, Mrs Mercer. That’s how much she means to him.’

  Eileen pushed the emotions away and turned round. ‘Is there anything else, Detective?’

  ‘Yes. Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I guess we’re done.’ Hunter clicked off the tape and then nodded to himself. ‘Thanks for your time. I’ll see myself out.’

  ‘Yes, you will.’

  She watched him go, resisting the urge to slam the living-room door behind him. Instead, she remained where she was, listening as the front door opened and closed, then watched through the nets as he passed the window and walked off down the path.

  When he was gone, she turned to the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece, in which she and John had been frozen in one black-and-white moment of time, so many years before. They were young there. John had aged so much, especially recently. All that was left of the man in the frame was his eyes and something in his smile. But these days he hardly smiled at all, and his eyes, when he looked at her, often seemed to be gazing all the way through.

  I love you, too.

  Very quickly, Eileen walked out of the room.

  They were partners, and she needed to be strong. He would be all right, and he’d be home soon. There was nothing to worry about.

  And she was damned if she was going to break down and cry in front of him. Not even in a photograph.

  3 DECEMBER

  12 HOURS, 5 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  7.15 P.M.

  Mark

  In keeping with the style and décor of the department, the canteen was old and half shut-down. It was a large, drab room filled with fixed-in formica booths that looked as though they’d been ripped out of a truck-stop and given the most cursory of wipe-downs in transit. On the far side, shutters were closed against the night. The bulbs in the ceiling produced a constant nasal buzz.

  I went over to the counter. There were roasting dishes full of curry that looked like turf, and sausages that were mostly burned skin, so despite my hunger I just picked up the first couple of sandwiches I saw and took them to the till.

  ‘That’s two thirty.’

  ‘And another coffee, please.’

  ‘Two eighty, then.’

  I sorted through my pocket change absently, still thinking about Mercer and the 50/50 case file. The timing of the two events - Dyson’s death and Mercer’s breakdown - was too close for it to be coincidental. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t say in his book: that was a book, after all; a single snapshot he wanted the world to see.

  To me, this connection made sense: I could hardly imagine what it must have been like. Bad enough to be supporting the weight of such a terrible investigation, feeling both professional and personal pressures to stop this man hurting anyone else. But then, while pushing your team, to have one of them die at his hands ... Christ, it would be too much for anyone. So I thought I understood a little better what had been going on today: Mercer’s determination and distraction; the team’s unease. It all seemed a lot clearer now.

  ‘Two eighty,’ the counter-girl repeated.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I gave her the correct change, then located Pete, Greg and Simon in the corner of the room. Pete raised his hand; I nodded and made my way over. At the same time, I clocked their body language and thought I saw a conversation being hushed and finished. I was nervous as hell. With what I’d learned, they seemed more like a small, self-contained gang than ever. Although I belonged with them, I knew I didn’t really, not yet. Not in terms of all this shit, anyway.

  ‘Hi, there.’

  Simon was arranging forkfuls of salad on a large plate, while, opposite him, Greg had an early evening fry-up of eggs, bacon and chips. Pete was holding one sandwich, while the empty packets on the table indicated he’d devoured another already. Without saying anything, he moved a couple of trays over to give me some table-space.

  ‘Thanks.’ I squeezed in beside them. ‘So what have I missed?’

  Greg nodded across at Pete. ‘I’m just complaining. Pete’s spent the afternoon talking to beautiful women.’

  Pete shrugged self-deprecatingly.

  ‘And it’s not even my day off, you know.’

  I smiled. Pete was wearing a thick wedding band. Earlier on, I’d noticed the passport photo tacked to his desk divider: two young girls crammed into a picture-booth.

  ‘Talking to Simpson’s ex-girlfriends?’ I said.

  Pete nodded. ‘Not as enjoyable as Greg might imagine. Obviously, none of them were exactly pleased to hear the news. And they all gave pretty much the same impression of him.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Too much of a lad to go out with - ever again - but basically a nice guy. The last girl said he was a disaster in a relationship, and a cheating bastard, but they’d been good friends since they broke up. Said he was like a lost little boy.’ Pete blew on his coffee. ‘Go figure.’

  ‘Which is typical,’ Greg said. ‘Here we have more evidence that women love a bastard, and I can’t even get a date.’

  ‘Strange when you put it like that, yeah. Anyway, none of them is this “Jodie”. We’ve accounted for all their whereabouts.’

  ‘Right.’

  It was predictable, but still disappointing.

  ‘We do have six white vans, though,’ Greg offered sarcastically. ‘Surely that’s the break we’ve been looking for?’

  Simon arched an eyebrow at him. As he did, I realised I’d caught a glimpse of the conversation they’d been having before I arrived.

  ‘What you mean,’ Pete said quickly, ‘is that you have nothing constructive to say.’

  ‘Well ...’

  ‘The killer drives a white van, yeah? The CCTV has given us leads to follow up on white vans. And that’s it. Let’s see if anything comes of them.’

  ‘I’ll bet you a thousand pounds we get nothing.’

  ‘Let’s just keep the whole fucking thing positive. Okay?’

  Greg conceded the point with a shrug. If I hadn’t been there, maybe he’d have carried it on - but then maybe Pete wouldn’t have shut him up so quickly either. I wondered; the tensions were difficult to read. But whatever, we ate quietly for a moment. When I was halfway through my sandwich, Greg broke the silence, changing the subject to the more comfortable one of me. Comfortable for everyone else, anyway.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how was the move?’

  ‘Fine.’ I nodded. ‘Not much of a move, in all honesty. It’s kind of depressing when you find your whole life fits into one car-load.’

  ‘You’ve got to be ruthless.’

  ‘That’s what I figured.’

  In fact, I’d spent my month’s notice sieving my property and working out what I was going to keep, what I was going to throw. It had been an agonising process. There was so much I wanted to hold on to for sentimental reasons. I kept imagining what Lise would have said and done. I told myself that if she’d still been around to look after me, she’d have binned it all herself to stop me moping. ‘Everything important enough to keep,’ she’d have told me, ‘is stuff you don’t need to pack. It’ll turn up wherever you are by default. So get rid of all this pointless crap.’

  But even though I knew that would have been her attitude, I couldn’t summon it up myself. When I could bear to picture
her in my head, I found that she wasn’t saying anything at all to me. I couldn’t read the expression on her face or imagine what she’d be thinking.

  In the end, I’d sorted the stuff I needed to bring from the stuff I didn’t. The latter items were now in storage in my parents’ garage.

  Greg smiled. ‘You’re not married, I guess?’

  I picked up my coffee and blew on it gently. I didn’t want to talk about this, and there were things I could say to move the conversation on, but for some reason it would have hurt not to be honest.

  ‘I was engaged,’ I said, ‘but not any more.’

  ‘Ouch. I’ve been there. Well, I wasn’t engaged, but we were living together. Sometimes these things don’t work out.’

  ‘She died,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, shit. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay. It was a while ago now.’

  One thing I’d found whenever I told anybody for the first time was that - bizarrely - it was me who felt the need to reassure them. ‘It’s okay,’ I’d tell them, when of course it wasn’t. In the same way, six short months turned into ‘a while ago’. And the other thing I’d found was that reassuring people generally led to more questions.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Greg.’ Pete warned him off with both words and eyes.

  ‘It’s okay.’ I put my coffee down, then got through it quickly. ‘We were on holiday, camping. This beach campsite. We went swimming. Just messing about, really, but we drifted out of our depth, and didn’t realise the current was so strong. We called for help, but there wasn’t anybody on the beach. So we just had to swim for it. And basically, I made it to shore and she didn’t. There was nothing anyone could have done.’

  ‘Christ. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Forget about it.’ Carefully, I picked up my coffee again and blew on it. ‘So what about you guys? All attached?’

  ‘Married and happy,’ Pete held up his hand, showing me the thick gold band. ‘And Simon has a woman in every port.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I couldn’t resist raising an eyebrow at him.

  Simon waved it away. ‘An exaggeration.’

  ‘I’m far too single,’ Greg said. ‘They should have sent me to interview Simpson’s ex-girlfriends. The opportunity was wasted on Pete.’

  ‘Well, they looked like they had taste, so the opportunity would have been wasted on you, too.’

  ‘You’re not funny.’ Greg pointed a chip at him. ‘At least not in the way you think.’

  I smiled. The atmosphere improved slightly, and we chatted a little more while finishing our food. The whole time, I was weighing and judging the way the three of them interacted. Despite the vague animosity of the day, there was the easy banter between them that comes from working with people for a long time. I recognised and appreciated the rhythms, but I also knew better than to try to emulate them. Things had relaxed, but we weren’t there yet.

  Nevertheless, they did their best to include me. Simon asked where I was living, so I told them about the small flat the department had found for me until I could scope out somewhere better. We talked about where I’d worked before, some of the cases I’d handled.

  ‘Nothing like this, I bet,’ Greg said.

  ‘No. It’s been an intense first day.’

  ‘Busy so far. And there’s still a way to go yet.’

  ‘My empty flat isn’t exactly calling me.’

  Greg laughed without humour. ‘Fuck me, mine is.’

  ‘How’s the afternoon gone?’ Pete asked me.

  ‘Well, I’ve worked through the file. As best I can, anyway.’ I paused, but then decided it needed to be said: ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about what happened.’

  Greg dipped his last chip into a pool of ketchup and stirred it around; Simon nodded, serious for once. For a moment, I thought I’d misjudged it and spoken out of place. Pete leaned back, looking over at the window, as though there was something interesting to see there rather than just flat, pale shutters.

  Pressed too hard, I told myself.

  Then Pete sighed.

  ‘It hit us all hard,’ he said. ‘Some of us more than others, obviously. It’s a difficult thing, losing a colleague. And Andy was much more than that.’

  I nodded, catching the subtle reference to Mercer. ‘Obviously’, Pete had just said, and ‘some of us more than others’. It was tacit confirmation, beyond the timings in the file, that this case had contributed to Mercer’s breakdown, if not caused it outright.

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Greg and Simon were silent, deferring to Pete. I could guess what this was about: whether I was going to be included in whatever was on their minds. Pete was still looking away, tapping his finger on the table. After a moment, he came to a decision and turned back to me, and I knew that I was.

  ‘What do you make of him so far?’ he said.

  ‘Mercer?’

  ‘Yeah. What’s your opinion of him?’

  I paused. The question was so loaded that I let it hang for a moment, considering what to say. A divide of some kind clearly existed between Mercer and his team, but it was also obvious that they’d worked with him long enough to have developed a complicated dynamic. There were things he’d said and done today that had pissed me off, probably them, too, but over time you can develop a weird kind of affection for those sorts of eccentricities. It would be a mistake to say anything negative about him. And perhaps strangely, I found I didn’t want to, anyway.

  ‘He’s not what I expected,’ I said. ‘I mean, his reputation precedes him a bit. And so I guess he’s a lot more ... human than I was expecting.’

  Pete nodded, but it wasn’t quite what he’d been after.

  ‘Does he seem fragile? It’s okay. Be honest.’

  I frowned. ‘Be honest,’ Pete had said. Did Mercer seem fragile? My impressions of him today were of a man surrounded by paper files, taking the full heft of the investigation on his shoulders, thinking it all through at once. Intense and full of concentration - and, being honest, not much different from many other team leaders I’d met.

  But then I remembered my first encounter with him at Simpson’s house - when I’d noticed how old he seemed. And yes, he was far from the superman his reputation implied. He had the look of a man who’d lost weight and could be pushed over more easily than he used to. There was certainly an air of vulnerability about him.

  ‘A little, maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Do you remember how he was at the interview?’

  ‘He was a bit distracted.’

  That was a charitable understatement, and we all knew it. Mercer had barely spoken to me, except when we’d briefly discussed my encounter with Jacob Barrett. The rest of the time he’d been content to sit back and let the others ask whatever questions they wanted. As though he was just waiting for it to be over.

  ‘Distracted,’ Pete agreed. ‘He’s been that way for a while. Since he’s come back to work, he’s basically been pottering around. Nine to five, not taking on anything too heavy. Not engaging.’

  It was a sensitive issue, but we were having the conversation so I decided to bring it out into the open.

  ‘Since the breakdown?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pete looked down, nodded once. ‘Since the breakdown. He’s been taking things easier. Doing the bare minimum.’

  ‘Treading water,’ Greg said.

  ‘Exactly. But today he’s been totally different. More like how he was in the old days. Committed. Absorbed.’

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘I mean, it’s half past seven. He’s not been in the office this late for two years.’

  ‘So you’re worried?’

  ‘Not just about that,’ Greg said. ‘It’s this case. He shouldn’t be on it.’

  ‘We talked about that,’ Pete snapped. His voice was too loud, too harsh. He toned it down, turning back to me. ‘We talked about that - before John came back to work. If the case went live again, we knew he’d want to be involved, and we decided if th
at happened we’d play it by ear. Problem is, I guess, we’re listening to different music.’

  I looked at Greg, who shrugged, making no attempt at an apology.

  ‘My objections are pretty clear. It was always going to be Pete’s call.’

  ‘It’s a shit day for you to have started,’ Pete said. ‘I’m sorry about that. I don’t know where we’re going with this at the moment.’

  ‘How do you think he’s coping so far?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. When he first came back, there’s no way I’d have let him take this on again. But ... he seems okay to me. Part of me is pleased to see him so engaged. Back to his normal self, I guess. The other part of me is just worried.’

  I breathed out heavily. Before I could say anything, Greg interrupted.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Pete. He needs to know the rest of it.’

  I looked from one to the other.

  ‘Needs to know what?’

  ‘Have you seen that the cases aren’t connected?’ Greg asked me. ‘Officially, I mean. On the computer system.’

  I hadn’t. ‘No. But I did notice he didn’t mention it in his reports to DI White.’

  Greg nodded. ‘Exactly. Deniability.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Pete leaned forwards, taking over. ‘Greg means all that stuff he was arguing with John about earlier. He was doing it to give him at least some level of deniability.’

  ‘No, I was giving us deniability.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  I shook my head. ‘Deniability of what?’

  ‘Deniability of the cases being connected,’ Pete said. ‘This investigation doesn’t belong to John. On paper, it’s Geoff Hunter’s. And given the history here, there’s no way White would allow John anywhere near it if he knew. Not a chance. When he finds out ... Well.’

  ‘Deniability,’ Greg repeated.

  I sat back in my chair and folded my arms, processing what I’d been told.

  From the moment I’d read about Andrew Dyson’s death, I supposed I’d been expecting something like this. The first time Mercer had confronted this case, it had ended in the murder of a colleague and his subsequent breakdown. It was only natural that the team were concerned. They had to balance their loyalties and friendship to their boss with their worries about what facing this investigation for a second time might do to his state of mind. It was good they felt able to include me in that. What I hadn’t thought about was the professional repercussions of that choice - our responsibility to the department as a whole. Now, I was included in that as well, and I had to consider my position carefully. Deniability was one thing; misconduct was another.