In the Dark (15 page)

He listened to the music for another few minutes; closed his eyes and thought about the best way to proceed. The means to sort things expeditiously. He thought about stick men on their knees, begging; and later twisted in damp ditches, with holes in their perfectly round heads.

Then he wandered through to the kitchen, fancying that he might defrost a lasagne if he had one left.

 
‘Will they charge him with murder? When they catch him?'

‘They'll
go
for murder; probably get manslaughter.'

‘I'm still not sure I understand the difference.'

‘But they won't catch him,' Helen said.

She'd met Jenny at a Pizza Express in Waterloo. Her sister had seemed keen to talk about the investigation, the nuts and bolts of things, thinking perhaps that, being work-related, it might be easier for Helen to deal with than other stuff.

‘I'm sure they're trying their best,' Jenny said.

Helen studied the menu, decided on an American Hot with extra jalapeños and a soft egg. Thought about salmonella and decided the egg might not be such a good idea.

It
was
marginally easier to think about the investigation rather than which coffin she was going to choose for Paul. But there wasn't a great deal in it. With so little progress, there wasn't much to say anyway; and Jenny's limited grasp of police procedure tended to limit the conversation a little.

It struck Helen more than usual how little interest her sister had ever shown in her work. She sensed that Jenny found what she did distasteful somehow. As though sordid tales of abuse and dysfunction could only sully her own perfect family, the picture of them all that she carried around in her head.

‘You doing OK?' Jenny asked.

Not that Helen was any stranger to denial herself, of course. She conjured the same smile she'd been producing like a heavily drugged white rabbit over the last few days. ‘Not too bad.'

‘How's the baby?'

‘Definitely cooked, I reckon.' Helen patted her belly. ‘It's been a godsend, actually. It's hard to dwell on things too much when you're being sick or needing to pee all the time.' The pat became a rub. ‘Plus, I've got someone else to think about, you know?'

‘This might not be the best time, but I wanted to ask if you'd thought any more about the birth-partner business.' Jenny was fiddling with her napkin. ‘I mean, now it's obviously . . .'

‘There've been other things to sort out, you know?'

‘I know, but it could happen any time, Hel.'

‘Spicy pizza might do it.'

‘
Seriously
. I even thought you might . . . you know, with the shock.'

‘There
were
a few twinges,' Helen said. She remembered the panic cutting through the numbness; sitting there in the early hours after the phone call, waiting for Jenny to come and take her to the mortuary. ‘I'd have a good story to tell the baby, anyway.'

‘You need to think about it,' Jenny said.

Helen promised that she would and signalled to the waiter that they were ready to order. ‘I meant to say, do you think Tim would like to come round, see if he wants any of Paul's clothes?'

Jenny reached for the sparkling water.

‘Have a look through before I chuck stuff out.' Jenny's husband was a little chunkier than Paul, but Helen guessed that there would be plenty of shirts and jackets to fit him.

‘Right . . .'

It was obvious to Helen that Jenny was flustered and uncomfortable. ‘Paul had some nice stuff, believe it or not,' she said. ‘I know he was a scruffy bastard most of the time . . .' She trailed off, seeing the relief on her sister's face when the waiter arrived at the table.

They gave him their order, and Helen went back to explaining the difference between murder and manslaughter.

Frank ate at the kitchen table, while Laura leaned against the island unit, working her way slowly through a plate of crispbread and cheese. After a few minutes she asked him what the matter was and he walked to the office to fetch the paper.

He dropped it in front of her and stabbed at the headline. ‘That's Paul,' he said. ‘
Paul
.'

She quickly scanned the front page. ‘Oh Jesus, Frank, I'm sorry.'

He sat back down at the table, picked up his fork and watched her read. She was his half-sister to be precise, but it was a distinction that never concerned Frank. They'd been close for years, but now that she was no longer part of her own mother's life, and with nobody knowing if the father she and Frank shared were dead or alive, they had never been closer.

Laura was the only family Frank had, that he was ever
likely
to have, but she was enough. She was twenty-three, thirty years younger than he was, and . . .
delicate
. That was the word that always came into Frank's head if he thought about her for long enough. Beautiful,
obviously
, and far brighter than he was - must have got that from her mother, he supposed - but definitely someone who bruised a bit too easily.

Who needed looking after, whether she liked it or not.

When Laura raised her head from the paper, she was pale. She'd tied her long hair up this morning; held it there with what looked, to Frank, like chopsticks. ‘That's terrible.' Her voice was high and light, accentless. ‘I don't know what to say. It's . . .
evil
.' There were tears in her eyes, but she didn't try to wipe them away.

‘Not evil,' Frank said. ‘There's nothing you can do about evil.'

‘There's nothing you can do about
this
.'

‘We'll have to see.'

‘You can't bring Paul back.'

Frank walked across to join her. He looked down at the newspaper again, at the simple black-and-white drawings. ‘This can't stand,' he said. ‘It
cannot
stand.'

‘You should just think about things for a while,' she said.

‘Paul was your friend too.'

‘I know.'

‘You do remember how I met him, don't you?'

She nodded. ‘Please don't do anything stupid.'

He didn't know what he was going to do yet; not in specific terms. Of course, he'd call Clive - it always started with that - and they would put their heads together. They would formulate a business plan, same as always.

‘Promise me,' Laura said.

Frank picked up the paper and tossed it into the bin. He pictured more unhappy stick men with their little round mouths wide open in surprise; zigzags through the straight lines of arms and legs, and red streaked across the squares of their tiny, black-and-white world.

He carried his plate across to the dishwasher, opened the door and leaned down.

Said, ‘Don't worry.'

FIFTEEN

Aside from a few minutes polishing off the remains of the soup Jenny had made, Helen felt as if she had spent most of the evening so far on the phone. Jenny had called within seconds of her arriving home; then Katie had checked in. Paul's mother had wanted to know if she had heard any more about the body being released and her father had rung to remind her that there was a bed made up if ever she wanted it.

Grateful as she was that so many people were concerned for her well-being, she'd taken the phone off the hook. But she'd replaced it almost immediately, deciding that both Jenny and Katie were just hysterical enough to send the police round, imagining that she'd done something stupid.

And anyway, she'd dreamed about Paul calling.

She wasn't sure
when
she'd dreamed it, if she had been half awake or fully asleep at the time, but the sense-memory was powerful; the feeling of elation on picking up the phone and hearing his voice.

She knew such thoughts were not unusual; the feeling that the person who had died would come waltzing through the door at any moment. It was somewhere between denial and prayer, Helen supposed, and she felt a sense of relief that at least
some
of the things she was feeling were normal.

Still no tears, though.

She had gone down to the car park and cleaned out Paul's car, loading everything from the footwells and the boot into two carrier bags. She had just walked back through the front door when the phone rang again. There was a deep breath before she snatched it up.

‘Helen? It's Gary.'

She felt guilty that she hadn't spoken to Gary Kelly since it happened. She knew that it was stupid to attach blame to anyone except the toe-rag who'd fired the gun, but that hadn't stopped her; hadn't stopped the irrational thoughts crowding in.

If the silly cow in the car hadn't panicked.

If Paul had been sober enough to react quicker.

If they hadn't been going back to Gary's place.

She asked him how he was and he told her he was on the mend. That the leave he'd taken was compassionate rather than medical and that he'd be returning to work the following week. He asked how she was, then began crying before she'd had a chance to answer.

Everyone but me, Helen thought.

‘It's my fault,' he said.

‘It's not.'

‘I asked him to stay . . . because I didn't want to go home on my own. I might have reacted faster if I hadn't been so pissed.'

‘Paul was pissed too,' Helen said. ‘It was pretty obvious when he called me. He sounded happy, Gary. OK?'

‘He pushed me out of the way, did you know that?'

‘Yeah, I know.' Helen had been told what a witness at the bus stop had said he'd seen. How the two men had been standing close together and how the one who had died had shoved his friend away a few moments before the impact. Helen listened to Paul's friend sobbing and couldn't help wishing that it had happened the other way around.

Once Kelly had stopped crying, they talked for a few minutes about practical issues. She asked him if he wanted to say something at the funeral and he said that he'd be honoured. She told him about the collection that was being organised at the station and that she'd decided to give all of the proceeds to a police charity. Kelly told her that he'd get it sorted.

‘Whatever you need,' he said. ‘You've got all my numbers, right? Just call if you think of anything else. Doesn't matter what time.'

Helen said thanks. ‘Actually, there is something. Does the name Frank Linnell mean anything to you?'

The phone conversation from the previous night had been nagging at her all day. She felt herself tensing up whenever she thought about it and couldn't understand why. She had no idea who Linnell was, nor how he had known Paul, but a friend and work colleague like Gary Kelly might.

She
did
know that in the weeks leading up to Paul's death, she had been neither.

‘Why d'you want to know about Frank Linnell?'

Something in Kelly's voice bothered her, and the lie came easily. ‘You know how a name comes into your head and you've no idea where you've heard it.'

‘You're probably better off if he stays in your head,' Kelly said. ‘Frank Linnell isn't really someone you want to get close to.'

‘Now I
really
want to know.'

Though Kelly had never actively worked on any Organised Crime Unit, he knew enough to give Helen a potted history: the swathes of south-east London that Linnell's organisation controlled; the list of charges that never stuck; the methods used to secure contracts for his assorted building and development companies. ‘Not the nicest individual in the world, you know?'

‘OK, thanks . . .'

‘You doing a bit of undercover work for Organised Crime, then?' He laughed. ‘It's a bloody good cover.'

‘What is?'

‘The whole pregnancy thing. Certainly had me fooled.'

Helen laughed too, but it was an effort. ‘It was just a name somebody mentioned, I think. Must have been Paul, I suppose. Although he's never had much to do with any of that stuff, has he?'

‘Not as far as I know. But, to tell you the truth, last few months I've not had a clue what he's been up to.'

‘Sorry?'

‘He was just a bit . . . distracted, I think. What with the baby and everything.'

‘What do you mean “been up to”?'

Kelly sounded reluctant, but Helen pushed until he told her about the amount of time Paul had spent away from the station. His vague explanations when confronted. What he had said about an old case that was causing him some grief. Though Kelly never said as much, Helen could hear in his voice that he hadn't believed a word of it.

‘I'm sure you're right,' Helen said. ‘He was probably distracted.'

‘Paul wasn't someone who liked the world knowing his business,' Kelly said. ‘Fair enough, I reckon. I think he had a bit more on his plate than the rest of us, that's all.'

There wasn't too much more after that, and when she'd hung up, Helen walked through to the bathroom. She showered, then sat down in the cubicle to shave her legs. She tried singing along with one of Paul's REM albums while she was getting ready for bed, but she couldn't make out many of the words. When the CD finished forty minutes later she was still sitting on the edge of the bed in a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, wondering exactly what Paul had had on his plate.

And why any of it concerned Frank Linnell.

 
Frank was alone, watching TV in the kitchen, when Clive arrived; he hadn't seen Laura for several hours. He took Clive's jacket and led him down the long corridor that ran off the entrance hall. They walked past the gym that Frank had installed the year before, and out into the conservatory.