And nothing of the bodies I’d put in the ground.
The people in the hallway had been those killers, and they’d been those bodies, waiting in line to enter the bedroom. The hiding spot I’d used in the dream had been the same spot I’d used once, back at the start, when one of them had come to my home in the middle of the night to kill me. I understood why I’d returned to that hiding place in the dream and I understood why those men – the ones now in prison, and the ones who were nothing more than bones and earth – had come to me. They were my memories. The men who’d tried to walk me to my grave. The men who’d attacked me, shot at me and tortured me.
And right at the back, behind the devils and executioners, had been someone else. A deep unease had slithered through my stomach as I watched him – an ominous feeling, spreading fast like an oil spill – and even though I told myself it was a dream, felt the unreality of it, I couldn’t pull myself out. It was like I was drowning. I just gasped for air, desperately trying to reach for the surface, and became frightened in a way I hadn’t been for a long time. And all the time, the man just stood there, looking into the room at me.
Hood up. No face.
Just darkness.
PART FOUR
52
When I woke the next morning, the sun was gone. Through the gap in the curtains, all I could see was swollen grey cloud and rain spitting against the windows, breaking into lines and running the length of the glass. I returned to Pell’s place in Highgate, found a parking space just up from the entrance, and sat there and waited. It was harder to be inconspicuous on a Sunday: even though it was raining, the clouds a granite grey, the gutters swirling with dead leaves and water, people passed the car frequently, on walks, with dogs on leashes, heading to the park or down the road to the Tube station. I tried my best to make it look like I was busy: I opened and closed the glovebox when people walked past, polished the dashboard with an old rag, got out to open the boot and look through it. But eventually, as lunch came and went and Pell still hadn’t returned, I gave up and just sat there. The house remained the same as it had been the day before: fewer shadows because there was no sun, but its windows no less dark.
At just gone two, hungry and impatient, I scooped my phone up off the passenger seat and dialled Gloucester Road to see if Pell had turned up for work today. It seemed unlikely. The house had the lifeless feel of a building that had gone days without being occupied. When I finally got through, the lady I spoke to said he’d called in sick for the second day running, and before she could ask me anything in return I hung up. Pell wasn’t ill; at least not in the way they believed he was. If he was strong enough to put his boot through my face, he was strong enough to make it into work. The question wasn’t whether he was lying about being sick.
It was why.
An hour later, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and noticed something.
I’d walked past it without even taking it in the day before, but now a memory flared, like a brief spark of light. Two cars behind me, on the other side of the road, a vehicle sat awkwardly between a Range Rover and a black Lexus. It was an old Toyota; an early 1990s Corolla, its blue paint damaged and chipped down the doors. But it wasn’t just that the car looked out of place.
It was that I’d seen it before.
Three nights earlier, outside Wellis’s home, I’d watched Eric Gaishe walk up to the corner of his street and wait for someone. Someone driving a blue Toyota.
This blue Toyota.
It had come down the road to Gaishe, he had leaned in through the passenger window and then – after the car left again – Gaishe had suddenly been holding money. A business transaction. At the time I hadn’t thought about it, but now it seemed obvious. You can’t call up an escort agency and ask for a thirteen-year-old, Wellis had said to me. There’s not a number for that in the Yellow Pages. So I run a service for people. And the night I’d seen the Toyota, he’d been running that service.
And Duncan Pell had been the punter.
Wellis knew both of them, Pell and Sam, but it wasn’t a coincidence. I could see that now. When Wellis had been telling me about using Sam to legitimize his business, he’d said, Someone I knew told me about him. This guy said Wren was in finance.
Who was the guy? I’d asked him.
Just a guy who I do some business with.
Pell. He went out for a drink with Sam after the fight at the Tube station. And some time after that – maybe right at the start when he was being vetted by Wellis, and maybe only in passing – Pell must have mentioned that he’d met this guy who was in finance. I looked back at his house, and something disquieting took flight inside me: Leon Spane was dead and dumped on Hampstead Heath, his holdall and coat in Pell’s home; then there was the pouch full of knives, coated in blood; and finally, there was Pell’s taste for underage prostitutes.
The task force thought Sam Wren had killed Marc Erion. They had evidence that was difficult to dispute, a killer every profiler in the land would tell you was gay, and victims who were homosexual. Sam looked good for this.
But Duncan Pell had a link to Wellis’s prostitutes too.
And if I had doubts about Sam, I didn’t have doubts about Pell.
Not a single one.
53
The inside of Pell’s house was cooler than the day before. Outside, the temperature had dropped to the mid teens and the rain had brought some relief from the heat. Inside, the stuffy, enclosed smell had been replaced by the stench of damp; deep in the walls, in the floor, in the ceiling. I made my way upstairs, into his bedroom, and went through his cupboards again. I’d been pretty thorough the first time, but I checked everything again anyway: every shelf, every drawer, under the bed, on top of the wardrobes. I moved across the hall to the second bedroom and did the same. The holdall was still in there, returned – along with the contents – to the way I’d first found it. Magic Trees swung gently as I searched the wardrobe, pushing clothes aside and sliding out shoeboxes. Jewellery was in one of them: some chains, a couple of rings, and the two stars of an army lieutenant, loose among the rest of the clutter. In the others were receipts and old bills. I’d been through it all already.
I stacked them back inside and then closed the wardrobe door. It rocked slightly, the legs unsteady, and on top – on the other side of the ornate, carved front panel – I heard something shift. I reached over, feeling around. I’d done the same the day before and not found anything, but now my fingers brushed the hard edges of another shoebox. I teased it towards me until I could get a proper grip, then brought it down and flipped it open.
Inside were a stack of blank DVDs, numbered one through to ten.
I headed downstairs into the living room, opened the disc tray on the DVD player and pulled the TV towards me. It was sitting on an old-fashioned stool, in the same dark wood as the wardrobe upstairs. I dropped the first disc in, closed the tray and hit Play. The television kicked into life.
A black screen.
And then a picture: video footage of the inside of a flat. I didn’t recognize it. It looked small and pokey, half lit, a couple of worn red sofas and a kitchen behind that, most of it in shadow. Two other doors, one left, one right. In the right-hand one, the light was on and I could see the edge of a bed and a dresser with a mirror on it. In the left one the light was off.