TWENTY-SIX
By the time he got off the phone, it was as sorted as it was ever going to be, but Brooks wasn’t happy. It didn’t feel right having to involve other people; having to rely on anybody. Each one should have been his alone, by rights.
This wasn’t the way he did things.
He sat up on the soft bed in Tindall’s spare room, looked at himself in the mirror on the dressing-table opposite.
It was almost beyond belief, this shit-house he’d become.
The way he did things.
Christ…
And it wasn’t like he was talking about the way he packed a suitcase or drove a car. These weren’t things he’d ever thought about, not seriously; even at the darkest moments, just after he’d gone inside. But everything changed you, big or small, didn’t it? Turned you into someone else. Every single thing you saw or thought, so that you were never the same person from one second to the next. How the fuck could you be? Maybe, eventually, good and bad, that made you into the person you were always meant to become.
Murder was now something he did, simple as that. And he was a damn sight happier doing it on his own.
Nobody made him take the advice, or accept the offer of help, on this one, but it made sense under the circumstances. It squared things. And this fucker clearly deserved it as much as anyone else.
He pulled faces at himself…
It wasn’t like he couldn’t work with other people. He’d really enjoyed those couple of years when him and Angie were doing the houses together; loved them. But you had to be working for the same thing, doing it for the same reasons. The two of them had nicked shit and sold it to put food on the table. To pay for clothes and holidays and stuff for Robbie. End of story. They both had the same attitude to the work, so they thought the same way when it came to whether a risk was worth taking, whether the payoff was worth it, whatever. They had the same boundaries.
Nobody else involved in what he was doing could feel the same way he did. Not when he was bringing the hammer down. There’d have to be a moment, some point, when any other person would think they’d had enough, and walk away. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to reach that point.
Nobody else could feel as much, or as little, as he did.
He shuffled forward and off the bed; moved across to the mirror on his knees and pressed his face up close to it. Fuck, he looked like he was pushing fifty. Like his dad had looked those couple of times in the visitors’ room.
Sorry, baby, he thought. I swear I was looking good right before it all happened; looking better than this, anyway. I’d even been working out for a few months, watching what I ate and all that. I didn’t want to come back to you flabby and fucked, like Nicklin and the rest of them, you know?
Everything changes you, big or small; changes your plans. Course, I didn’t know that when I was leaving my spuds at dinnertime and doing circuits in the gym at Long Lartin. Didn’t think you were going anywhere, did I?
That I’d be walking out of one prison and into another.
‘Mr Yashere? DI Thorne.’
A pause. ‘I left a message with you three days ago.’
‘The missing training shoe.’
‘Correct. The shoe that has gone walkabout. Do you have it?’
‘No…’
‘Losing such an important piece of evidence is causing something of a problem, to put it mildly.’ Yashere spoke slowly, with precision. A Nigerian accent.
‘I promise that I will find it,’ Thorne said. ‘And when I do, I will personally deliver it to you, in a box, with a fuckoff red ribbon round it. But right now I need a favour.’
‘I was just about to go home.’
The Crown Prosecution Service had a small office round the corner at Colindale station, but via the out-of-hours service Thorne had been put through to their Criminal Justice Unit at the main station in Edmonton. This was where Anthony Yashere and his fellow-caseworkers were based: collating exhibits; ensuring the integrity of evidence chains; firing off snippy emails and phone calls when blood stained training shoes disappeared.
Thorne explained what he needed.
Yashere took details, dates and names. Told Thorne that he could probably get him the trial transcript in a few days.
‘Not quick enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Sorry.’
Yashere began to think out loud, guiding Thorne through the process as he logged into his IT system. It provided a summary of all ongoing cases, but was not yet fully up to date with trials whose details had been on the system it had replaced three years before.
Thorne listened to the click of computer keys. To grunts and sighs of frustration.
‘We are going back quite a long way,’ Yashere said. ‘Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.’
Thorne had a better idea. ‘Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you have a number?’
Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.
‘I think you will need a home number,’ Yashere said. ‘There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.’ He said that he’d try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.
Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. ‘Can you tell him that it’s very urgent?’ he said.
‘Please don’t forget my missing training shoe, Inspector…’
Thorne tried Hendricks’ mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he’d see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.
Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.
Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall’s cellar. There was no electricity down there and he’d had to use a shitty little torch he’d dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid’s thing with a thin, milky beam. He’d managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.
He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.
There was plenty of time yet.
He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall’s dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.
He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.
He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie’s tiny West Ham shirt.
The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog’s bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn’t sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son’s face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.
That would be the picture he’d try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.
Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.