Night Vision (16 page)

Munroe looked amused. ‘DS Parks. Keeps his head down, does the job, goes home.'

‘There are worse things.' He could tell Munroe was expecting more. ‘Maybe the boss wants a different perspective.'

‘Well, it must be obvious by now he won't be getting one. Come on, let's get ourselves a coffee and start looking at the CCTV.' He nodded to the uniformed officer keeping watch on the vehicle, and Parks followed him inside.

‘You think he knows more than he's telling?'

‘What, Alec? No. No, I don't, but I don't think he's telling all he knows, if you see what I mean.'

‘No, I don't see what you mean.'

‘I mean, Alec interviewed Robinson at length, and he knew this journalist woman well at one time. He's bound to know more than he thinks he does. You get to pick things up, to log things in the brain, and it's only a matter of time before something jogs the memory out. I think that's what Eddison's hoping for. Why he's keeping Alec around.'

Parks had to laugh. ‘Then he's clutching at bloody straws,' he said.

Munroe was looking at him intently. Parks felt uncomfortable, as he often did around Phil Munroe.

‘He often clutch at straws, does he?' Munroe asked.

‘No. No, he does not.' Agreed, sometimes he'd seem to pull a theory out of nowhere and you'd wonder where the hell he got it from, and then it would fit with something else and the whole damn pattern would fall into place. But that was what a good copper did, wasn't it? You put the bits together slowly and carefully until you saw the whole story. But sometimes, with Eddison, it could be hard to see the logic of the thing, where he got that initial impetus from, and sometimes, Parks admitted to himself in very private moments, that really bothered him.

He could feel Munroe's gaze on him.

‘You don't like him very much, do you?' Munroe said.

Parks didn't see the sense in denying it. Munroe wouldn't have believed him, anyway. ‘I'm not paid to like him.' He glanced across the car park at the white van heading towards the lorry. ‘Looks like the SOCOs have arrived. Maybe we should head back.'

‘Let's have a coffee first. They've got to set up, get their kit out – it'll be ages before they're ready for us.'

Parks agreed, and they turned back towards the services and the CCTV control room.

Alec was in agreement with Patrick. It was possible there had been something Jamie had sent to them that had not seemed relevant at the time. He had taken Megan Allison and Constable Watkins with him back to the house, Naomi insisting he did not go alone.

‘So, how's she holding up?' Megan asked. ‘We heard that recording. Christ, I don't think I'm ever going to forget it. Never.'

PC Watkins looked uncomfortable, but nodded sagely. Alec decided Watkins was more concerned with saying the wrong thing right now than with worrying about remembering the sound of Jamie Dale's screams. Megan was having quite a profound effect on the young man.

‘Naomi's OK,' Alec said. ‘I'm just glad Harry was with her. Wish I had been. I'm grateful, Megan. She says you've been a great help, both of you.'

Watkins blushed, and Megan smiled proudly at him, which just turned the blush from carmine to crimson.

‘Right,' she said. ‘So what are we looking for?'

Alec knew approximately where he'd stored unopened boxes from Naomi's flat, and also approximately where they kept old correspondence and cards. Naomi insisted on hanging on to a couple of years' worth, so they knew who they needed to send the damn things to. He knew she was right, but he still regarded it as something of an imposition on his time.

Together they went through the boxes, sorting out cards from Jamie, old letters and pictures, a photo album Alec had almost forgotten existed. He flicked through the pages, gazing in amazement at the collection of images. Young Alec, young Naomi, younger Jamie.

‘There's an address on this one,' Watkins said. ‘And another on this.'

Alec took the cards and glanced at what Jamie had written. These were from when she had first moved down to London. She'd moved three or four times in quick succession and written lengthy correspondence about the good time she was having.

Took the night off and went to the theatre. You'd have loved it, Naomi, I saw
Cats
. The actual musical at the actual theatre in that there actual London. You've got to come down and stay – soon as I've got my own place and somewhere to sleep, you've just got to come down.

‘I remember her,' Megan said. ‘I was a probationer the year before she left. Naomi introduced us. She said I should watch my mouth around the rest, but that Jamie was all right. I even went out with them a time or two.'

‘She was pretty,' Watkins said.

‘She was,' Megan agreed. ‘But we were none of us bad looking once upon a time, isn't that right, Alec?'

Alec smiled. In his opinion Naomi was even more beautiful than she had been back then.

‘This the lot, do you think?'

‘I'm really not the one to ask. Naomi will know if there's anything missing. Oh, there's a picture frame in the other room, I'll just grab that.' He went through to the front room, glancing around to check there was nothing else. The address book in the hallway, which had her latest address in it. Alec thought he should take that too, just in case he hadn't found the relevant card.

The little green book always sat on the hall table beside the phone. He went through and looked. No book. A quick glance under the table in case it had been knocked down, on the stairs in case it had been moved.

‘Megan?'

‘What's wrong, Alec?' She and Watkins, laden with boxes, came into the hall.

‘Someone's been here since Naomi left.'

‘How do you know?'

‘There's a little green address book I keep by the phone. It isn't here.'

‘That doesn't mean – Naomi might have moved it.'

‘No, it always stays there. She hardly uses the home phone, anyway. She's got her mobile, and she doesn't use the book, obviously. I've kept it there since before we were married. It's never moved.'

‘It had Jamie's latest address in it?'

‘Yes. It did.'

‘Right,' Megan said. ‘We get these things into your car, and I'll arrange to get the CSIs out here. It might take a while. Obviously, it's not an emergency, but—'

Of course it would take a while, Alec thought. His suspicion that someone might have been in his home and might have taken just a little green address book would hardly be given high priority. But Alec knew it had gone.

Carefully, he packed the boxes into the car, grabbed some clean clothes and thanked Megan and Watkins for their help, his sense of unease acute.

Nick Travers was dreaming again. A proper dream this time, not the heavy fragmentary action sequences that had thus far dominated his slow return to consciousness. He was dreaming of a time long ago, when he had been a very young man. A very young squaddie, to be exact, conscious of his uniform and his gun and his responsibility and the prickle at the back of his neck that told him he should be afraid.

He was on point, up ahead of the others and dodging from shadow to shadow in some small, night dark village that must have had a name, but in his dream he could no longer recall it. It wasn't, Nick realized slowly, an actual location, rather a blurring of many places half remembered, feelings and fears conflated. The sense of dislocation, though . . . He could remember that with such intensity. The ‘this isn't me, I am not really here' mantra that had seen him through one of the most miserable episodes in his life.

Travers had known, from the moment he joined up, that he was not cut out to be a soldier. That he was there because he couldn't think what else to do and knew it would get his dad off his back. And at least he would be with his friends.

That night, Charlie Eddison was close by, second man. Ben Sanders was rear guard. Gregory and Flynn were somewhere between. Nick Travers knew he should have been more aware of them – Charlie would have sensed exactly where each man was, Gregory could have told him to the millimetre, and even Ben would have been better than him. Nick Travers, dreaming, felt the mix of hard-packed rock, baked earth and loose cobbles beneath his feet and the rough texture of the house wall as he tucked in close and it scraped against his hand.

He signalled the others to halt. Still not certain he had actually seen anything at all, if he had imagined that flicker of movement across the narrow street.

And then, all hell broke loose – Flynn was down, lost in a hail of gunfire; Charlie and Greg were beside him. Charlie had his hand pressed tight on Nick's thigh, and it dawned on him that he'd been hit and was bleeding ferociously.

It's the femoral artery, he thought. I'm gone . . .

Nick remembered waiting to die and being astonished that he had not. Recalled Charlie Eddison and Gregory dragging him into a house, and then Ben was there too, shouting something that Nick tried hard to recall but found made no sense. He was told that it took no more than minutes for backup to arrive and no more than an hour before they were out of there and headed back to base. Nick, heading home. Lucky. The dream receded, memory back where memory should be.

He opened his eyes and saw Maureen's face. She smiled, but he could see the tension at the corners of her mouth that told him she was angry about something. What had he done this time?

‘I'm not very good at this,' he said. He could tell she didn't understand.

‘It's all right,' she said, but he knew it wasn't.

‘Who is Gregory?' Another voice was asking him something he didn't want to remember.

There was pain attached to the memory – searing, sharp, stabbing pain that rent him.

‘Nick, you said that Gregory wasn't dead. Can you tell me what you meant? Was it Gregory that attacked you?'

‘Gregory,' Nick said, then realized he might be answering a question. That he might be getting it wrong. ‘He was my friend.'

‘Gregory who?' Maureen demanded. ‘You don't have a friend called Gregory.' She sounded hurt and impatient, as she always did when he talked about things she didn't know or understand. But whenever he did try and explain, she didn't want to know. She found it too hard, too distasteful, he thought. Much too real.

Nick closed his eyes and drifted away from her. She doesn't really want to know, he thought. She never really wants to know . . .

Susan Moran left the little side room. DI Travers had been moved this morning; no longer in the main high dependency unit, he'd been shifted off to one side so the armed guard was less visible and fewer visitors could be upset. She walked to the end of the hallway and dialled out, calling Eddison.

‘He's been talking about Gregory again. He says this Gregory was a friend, but Maureen doesn't recognize the name. I did what you asked and put it to Nick that this Gregory was the one that attacked him.'

‘And?'

‘Well, he's still pretty much out of it, but I think—'

Eddison thanked her when she had finished and rang off. No, he thought, Gregory would mean nothing to Maureen. He wasn't even sure she knew about Travers' stint in the army. He knew it was something Travers didn't talk about, not unless he was among . . . ‘friends' was putting it too strongly. People who had shared that time. Everyone, Charlie Eddison thought, had bits and pieces of their lives they'd prefer not to be reminded of. For most it was often a simple matter of embarrassment. They'd cocked up, behaved like a prize prat, or simply been screwed over by someone they thought should have been trustworthy. No one likes to admit to those moments, Charlie Eddison reflected. At least, no one likes to be publicly reminded of them.

Among friends, close friends, those same moments can become the ties which bind, the bonds of stupidity admitted to with those you come closest to knowing.

Though, in Travers' case, he hadn't really cocked up. He couldn't really have prevented any of it. When folk with guns go up against other folk with guns, someone is going to be on the receiving end of the bullets.

SIXTEEN

O
rdinarily, Paul Thompson would have felt exposed on a deserted beach, but it was strange how your perceptions were changed by circumstance. And the girls loved it here, that was the thing. They felt free and safe, and thankfully they had not been at the house when the men came and so had no memory to carry with them out into the sunshine.

They had seen their father's bruises, of course. Or rather, they had seen the marks on his face, and they knew he'd hurt his ribs and that he'd been in pain when he'd driven the car, but, as kids do when told with conviction, they had accepted his story of a fall at work.

Paul watched them run, hair flying loose, summer dresses belled by the strong wind. Barefoot on the sand.

They had discovered this funny little headland one summer when he and Clara had just met. More than once, Tilly, who owned the nearest farm, had let them camp up on the bank overlooking the beach, first in a tatty little tent they had bought from a charity shop, and later, as lives and incomes improved, she let them park their caravan in the hollow behind the bank that held back the dunes. This time, Paul had pulled the caravan right in beneath the trees and tucked the car close behind it, pointing back towards the track, ready for a swift departure. He tried not to think that the track was barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and the idea of escaping from someone coming the other way was therefore a little pointless.

‘You here without yer woman?' Tilly had questioned when they'd arrived unexpectedly the week before.

‘I'm in trouble, Tilly. Clara sent us out of the way.' He knew better than to try and lie to Tilly. He had known how it sounded, though, and would not have been surprised if Tilly'd sent him away. Instead, she looked at his face, marked the bruises and the pain he was in, and told him to get his van parked up.