Never Coming Back (24 page)

Except they wouldn't have come from Schiltz. Lee seemed to think he was already dead by then, so whoever was sending Graham e-mails, it wasn't Eric Schiltz.

Cornell
.

“Has anyone ever expressed concern over a photograph you might have, maybe of the three of you—your friend Eric, Ray Muire, you—from some point in your past?”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

This already felt like a wild, unfocused stab in the dark. I knew there was a photo of the three of them, possibly—if Carrie's notebook entry was correct—taken in 1971, and Lee had seen a reference to a D.K., presumably the man in the background. But, apart from the likelihood that they each owned a copy, and the fact that Graham was the only one left now, it was about as much as I had. “Maybe you've got a photograph of the three of you somewhere at the house here that you keep hidden away for some reason.”

He looked confused.

“Or maybe you've been
asked
to keep a photograph hidden?”

The same expression. “I'm not sure I follow.”

“Okay. Do the initials D.K. mean anything to you?”

“D.K.?”

“Yeah. Maybe someone you knew in the early seventies?”

He seemed totally lost now.

“What about Eric? Did he maybe mention one that he had in his possession that he wished he didn't, or one that he thought might land him in some kind of trouble?”

He studied me as if he was trying to work out where this had come from—and where it was about to go. I didn't offer to help, just waited him out.

Eventually, he shrugged. “If he did, I don't remember.”

I nodded. “What about Cornell?”

“Cornell?”

“Did he ever mention a photograph?”

“No,” Graham said, and I caught a flash of fear in his eyes.

“Are you okay, Carter?”

“You've got me thinking.”

“About what?”

He swallowed. “About whether Cornell is the reason Eric and Lee stopped coming to the get-togethers.”

“When are you next due to see him?”

“Cornell?”

I nodded.

He paused, his eyes back on the pictures. At his side, both hands had formed fists, like some sort of defense mechanism. “I'm supposed to be flying out next weekend. The middle of November is when we have our autumn meeting at the Bellagio.”

“Can I suggest you don't make the trip out?”

He turned to me. “Do you think it's that serious?”

“I think Cornell's interest in you might not be a consequence of your success in the business world. I think he might have invited you to the high-rollers group so he could get the measure of you. Was it your idea to bring Schiltz to the group, or Cornell's?”

Graham thought about it. “Well, he said to me . . .” And then he stopped, the truth dawning on him. “Cornell asked me if I had a friend I'd like to invite along.”

“Because he already knew about Eric.”

Graham seemed in shock.

“I need you to think: was there anything, growing up, anything the three of you—Eric, Ray and you—did, or were photographed doing, that might interest Cornell?”

He was just shaking his head now, dazed.

“Anyone you might have met?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

I thought back to what Lee had said about the photograph Carrie Ling saw. There had been a man in it, someone Lee didn't know.
He's someone bad. If I had to guess, I'd say someone bad enough to bring down Cornell and whatever he's involved in
.

“I need you to do something for me.”

He still looked shell-shocked. “Yes, of course.”

“I need you to go through your belongings, wherever it is you keep things that are important to you, and I need you to see if you have a photograph of the three of you.”

“I'm sure there must be lots of them.”

“Okay. Well, if that's the case, grab any you've got. I also want you to check your e-mail inbox for any messages, or attachments, Eric might have sent you.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Okay.” But it was clear something else was playing on his mind. “Do . . .” He stopped, ruffled, alarmed. “Do you think Cornell's coming for me?”

“I don't think he'll make the journey over.” But then my mind spooled forward:
Ray Muire had fallen into a river only a few miles from here
. “Have you got security?”

“Yes. They're all downstairs.”

“I haven't got any reason to think you're in any immediate danger.” I looked at him, unsure if I believed what I was saying. “But now might be a good time to call your people and get some extra men sent down here. I'd make sure that happens today. I'll also take your number, if you don't mind, just in case I need to ask you anything more.”

“Yes. That's fine.” He shook his head. “I can't believe this.”

“It's just a precaution.”

“All of this because of—what?—a photograph?” For the first time, his confidence and professionalism had disappeared. “What the hell's so important about a photograph?”

“I don't know,” I said. “But I'm going to find out.”

As I got back to the village, I passed a marked police car coming the other way, heading out into the darkness, where the road bisected the Ley and the beach. There was no sign of any other cars, no police presence anymore, not even the remnants of any police tape in and around the beach, which suggested the uniforms were either on their way through or they'd been doing follow-up interviews with some of the locals. Canvassing the whole village would take days, which meant return visits to clarify statements and check details.

Winding the car up into the hills overlooking the beach, I thought of Rocastle, of the interview he'd done with me the day after the body washed up.
I don't care if you're looking into that family's disappearance. I really don't. What I care about is closing my case, and if you're getting in my way .
 . . that's when we have a problem
. I understood why he'd been given the body: that required a senior cop, one with experience of working murders, and a knowledge of the local area. He ticked the boxes. But the Lings' disappearance was much less of a fit, and it was like—by passing it off on to McInnes after only three days—he knew it.
You're a clever guy
, he'd said, obviously aware I was trying to lead him down that road,
that's probably why everyone at the Met hates you
. He would never front up and tell me why he took the Ling case, even if there was nothing worth telling. It wasn't how he worked. From a single, sixty-minute conversation, I'd seen as much as I'd needed to: he was a man who gave as little as possible in order to gain as much as he could.

When I pulled into the driveway, all the lights in the house were off. That didn't surprise me: if the past year had taught Lee anything, it was how to keep his head above water. No one knew he was here, no one even knew he was back in the country, but that wouldn't stop twelve months of instinct kicking in: locking doors, pulling the curtains, using the darkness and the silence. Everything focused on survival.

Turning off the engine, I grabbed my phone and my notebook and opened the door of the BMW. Then stopped.
That's probably why everyone at the Met hates you
. Rocastle had been talking about the enemies I'd made at the Met: cops I'd had to cross in order to get to the missing, the laws I'd had to bend so I could do what I felt was right.

But how did he know they hated me?

None of the cops I'd dealt with would have put their personal feelings about me into a file. So he was either making a claim based on an assumption or he'd put in a call to them before he'd come to the house to speak to me. Or there was another reason.

He hasn't always been based in Devon
.

I pulled the car door shut again and went to my phone's address book. A couple of seconds later, I found the name I wanted: Terry Dooley.

Dooley was a name from my old life, a cop I'd snared as a source after a tip-off about him and three of his detectives landed on my desk. In a moment of madness, they'd visited a south London brothel, got wasted on cheap booze and then one of them had started throwing punches. I'd called Dooley with an offer the next day: I kept him out of the papers if he got me information when I needed it. He was married with two young boys and didn't fancy the idea of only seeing them on weekends, so he took the deal. I didn't use him as much as Ewan Tasker, because he wasn't as discreet or reliable, but while Task was already in semiretirement, Dooley was still there at the coalface, working murders and making other people's business his own. He was difficult, snide and arrogant, but that was exactly why he was so useful. He went out of his way to know things about other cops at the Met, in case he ever had to use those things against them.

As I waited for him to pick up, my eyes drifted over the house and I noticed a flash of color at the top window. Lee was watching from the spare room. He waved once, I waved back, then he retreated into the darkness.

Finally, Dooley answered. “Oh joy.”

“I thought you were ignoring me.”

“If only it was that easy.”

“How you doing, Dools?”

“Probably better than you.” He didn't say anything else, but I understood. He always liked to give the impression he was dictating terms, that he had some kind of control over the way our working relationship moved. If he started pandering to me, in his head it would be a sign of submission. So he didn't ask about my recovery, except in the most evasive way. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“I wanted to ask you about someone.”

“There's a surprise.”

“You ever heard of a Colin Rocastle?”

“Doesn't ring any bells. Can I go now?”

“Just think about it for a minute.”

A grunt of contempt. “
Think
about it? Yeah, sure. Why don't I put my feet up on the desk and crack out the cigars, because working murders is like a Buddhist retreat.”

I got his frustration. Every time I called it was like a reminder of what he'd done: a drunken night out, a bad mistake, the thin line between a secret staying buried and his wife getting an anonymous call. The truth was, I would never make that call, even if he refused to help me, because I wasn't in the business of breaking up families. But Dooley didn't have to know that.

“I think he might have worked at the Met.”

A moment of silence, as if he was taking it in.

“Dooley?”

“So what? A lot of people work at the Met.”

“If I had to take a guess, I'd say he knew about me through people like Phillips and Craw.” Phillips was the lead on the case that had first brought me into contact with Healy; Craw was the SIO on the case that had almost killed me. “Maybe he was involved in those cases, maybe he wasn't, but he knows who I am. Now I want to know who
he
is.”

“Congratulations.”

“Specifically, you're going to tell me.”

He sighed. “I'm sick of this garbage you bring me.”

“Yeah, well, lap it up, Dools.”

No response. Then: “What did you say his name was?”

“Rocastle. Colin Rocastle.”

“Gimme a sec.”

He put me on hold. I guessed he was probably checking the computers or asking around. About half a minute later, he came back on. Another long silence on the line. Dooley didn't give any indication as to whether he knew Rocastle or not, but the silence didn't worry me. This was all a part of his game. “What's he got to do with anything?”

“So you've heard of him?”

Another pause. His brain was probably skipping ahead about now, trying to figure out what I wanted with Rocastle. “Yeah, I remember him now. You were right.”

“He used to work at the Met?”

“Yeah.”

I knew it.
I pulled my notebook across to me, opened it up and wedged the phone between my shoulder and my ear. “When was he up in London?”

“Seven or eight years ago. Maybe more.”

“Doing what?”

“He started out as a rubber heeler.”

“He worked for the DPS?”

“It was the plain old CIB back then. CIB3 would have been the one Rocastle was in. They were the extra-special arseholes who worked out of Scotland Yard investigating Scotland Yard officers. Bunch of half-cops and circus freaks, but the Met poured a shit-ton of money into it after some bent coppers dropped their guard and got weeded out by the tabloids. When it was set up in '98, it had fifty officers working for it.
Fifty
. We wouldn't get that now, even if Jack the Ripper crawled out the fucking ground.”

I wrote down the gist of what he'd said. The Complaints Investigation Bureau was the precursor to the Directorate of Professional Standards, the UK equivalent of internal affairs. The term “rubber heeler” was old-school cop slang: when, in 1971, the deputy commissioner Robert Mark set up A10, an anti-corruption branch, cops took to calling the officers that worked for it “rubber heelers”—because you could never hear them creeping up behind you.

“Did Rocastle make himself unpopular?”

“He was eyeballing his own people—what do you think?”

“Yeah, but did he do anything to stand out from the crowd?”

“I don't know,” Dooley said. “Never knew him personally. I just remember a few guys saying he was an arsehole. Stiff, humorless, took a bit too much pleasure in nailing cops to the wall. He probably pretended he really loved exposing all the Met secrets.”

“Maybe he wasn't pretending.”

“What, are you a fan of his?”

“Maybe he just didn't like dirty cops.”

Laughter on the line. “You're a naïve prick, Raker, you know that? We're talking about a guy who took down good investigators here. You think you walk in off the street with a talent for catching bad guys? You don't. It takes years. I'm not defending corrupt cops, but there's a difference between a guy who's tampering with evidence and someone who
gets a bit too aggressive in an interview because some lying piece of shit won't admit to what we all know he's done. You ask me, cops like Rocastle are pond life.”

“So, what did he do after he left the CIB?”

“Spent a couple of years working for Sapphire.” That was the Rape and Serious Sexual Assault command. “Career went a whole lot of nowhere.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? No one liked him. No one wanted him on their team. You can't trust a guy who stabs his own people in the back.”

“What if he was just doing his job?”

A snort. “Unbelievable. Aren't you listening to
anything
I'm telling you? Who gives two shits about Rocastle? He's a weasel. The way the guys tell it, the best thing that ever happened to him was when he had his existential ‘What the fuck am I doing here?' moment and realized everyone hated his guts. Now he gets to spend his days down in Trumpton chasing his tail because the local corner shop ran out of toothpaste.”

I saw Lee come to the top window again and look down at me. In the moonlight, he looked pale and alien, half covered by the shadows of the house.

“All right, Dools. Thanks for that.”

“No problem. Don't call again.”

I hung up, got out and headed into the house.