The Dying Hours (23 page)

Thorne took his own car, staying close behind Carlowe and the young female PC as they pushed through traffic on the Western Way, following the arc of the river until it widened out at Thamesmead. It was a ten-minute drive and they could have made it in even less time, but there was no call for blues and twos; no point risking life and limb when there was only a dead man waiting for them at the other end.

‘Not like he’s going anywhere,’ Carlowe said, when the PC suggested it.

With the grim silhouette of the pumping station up ahead, they came off the main road and half a mile further on, after missing the unmarked turning once, they finally pulled into a narrow, unlit alleyway. It was rutted and pot-holed; the tyres churning up mud and stones as the cars moved slowly past high walls that were crumbling and overgrown. Fifty yards on, the track swung round to the right and broadened out, just as the river had done, into a patch of near-wasteland with a row of four shabby-looking garages at its far end.

Other units had arrived ahead of them. Two officers were leaning against their Fiesta, cradling cups of takeaway coffee, while a third spoke to a civilian a few feet away. The first vehicle on the scene had now been moved and reparked more strategically, its headlights beaming directly into the open garage at one end and lighting up the rear end of the car inside.

Thorne clocked it, and understood everything.

While Carlowe disappeared into the open garage, Thorne took out his warrant card and wandered across to the officers enjoying their coffee. With a number of units still in attendance at the Mallen scene, the two women had clearly been pulled off their break. The elder of them, a sergeant, nodded towards the civilian and explained that he was the one who had made the 999 call.

‘Says that nobody really uses these garages at all, just kids smoking weed every now and again. He could hear the engine running inside.’

Thorne looked across at the man. Black, in his late thirties; nodding and gesturing towards the garage while the officer he was talking to scribbled in his notebook. After one final draw, the witness flicked away the remains of a cigarette and immediately reached for another.

‘See, it’s a damn sight harder with modern cars.’ The younger of the two officers took a quick slug of coffee. ‘Electrically controlled combustion and catalytic converters, whatever. These days they produce so little carbon monoxide it’s almost impossible to do it.’

‘So how old you reckon that one is then?’ The sergeant nodded towards the garage.

The PC turned to look. ‘Fifteen years old, something like that?’

‘What is it, a P-reg?’ The sergeant began counting back.

‘Surprised the engine ran at all, to be honest.’

‘You seen the body?’ Thorne asked.

The younger woman nodded. ‘It was me that went in with a wet hankie over my gob and turned the ignition off.’ She sipped her drink. ‘You know, in case he hadn’t been in there too long.’ Her eyes widened above the large plastic cup. ‘Very dead, unfortunately.’

The sergeant said, ‘P-reg is more like seventeen years old.’

Thorne stepped away when he saw Carlowe emerge from the garage, pulling off plastic gloves with a practised flick of each wrist, sucking in deep breaths and squinting against the glare of the headlights.

He walked to meet him.

‘We’ll have a proper rummage around when the fumes have cleared a bit more,’ Carlowe said. He took another long, slow breath. ‘Nothing you wouldn’t expect though. There’s a note, too… sort of. Scrap of paper on the front seat.’ Before Thorne could say anything, the inspector leaned down to his radio and casually thumbed the button. ‘Listen, anybody at the hanging in Woolwich… can you just tell the doctor to get straight over to this one when he’s finished?’ A voice said, ‘Understood,’ and Carlowe looked back to Thorne. ‘He’ll be earning his money tonight.’

‘What’s the note say?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘What?’

‘A man of few words, obviously,’ Carlowe said. ‘Or maybe his pen ran out.’

Thorne waited and Carlowe let him. There was the hint of a smile on the man’s face, but something decidedly unamused in the narrowing of his eyes, beady slits in the half-light. Suspicious that he was being played for a mug and not happy about it.

‘It says,
Job done
.’ Carlowe paused. ‘The note.’ He reached inside his Met vest and scratched. ‘Good job too, no question about that. Whoever he is, he was a dab hand with a plastic hose and a roll of gaffer tape.’

‘No ID yet then?’

‘Nothing in his wallet except cash,’ Carlowe said. ‘An old photo of a woman and a couple of kids. They’re running the car through the system right now, so we’ll have the name in a minute.’

Thorne nodded. ‘Do you mind if I go and have a look?’

Carlowe thought about it for a second or two, any suspicions seemingly tempered, for the time being at least, by his satisfaction at being deferred to as the senior officer on duty. He said, ‘Help yourself,’ then turned to greet the female PC who had driven him there and who was now approaching them, open notebook in hand.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘We should have that ID now.’

Knowing that they would have no such thing, Thorne walked towards the garage, pausing on the way to tug a pair of plastic gloves from an open box on the bonnet of one of the patrol cars. His hands were clammy as he pulled them on. Moving into the tunnel of yellow light cast by the patrol car’s headlamps, he was passed by an officer coming from inside the garage, gulping the fresh air hungrily. Thorne held up his warrant card, but the officer did not bother looking at it. Instead, he pulled a face as though he were stepping from a rank toilet stall and said, ‘I should give that a couple of minutes if I were you.’

Against the dark dirt floor, a few fragments of broken glass caught the light. Cobwebs around the door glistened, moving in the breeze, and lingering fumes from the exhaust scratched at the back of Thorne’s throat as he approached the Astra. The car was every bit as old and tired as the officers outside had said it was. The patches of rust were far more vivid than the faded red of the paintwork or the dirty streaks of grey filler on both rear wings.

Thorne remembered exactly what the officers had been talking about and wondered if this was precisely the reason Mercer had bought such an old car. If Thorne had been right about him having plenty of money to play with, he could certainly have afforded something a lot better.

Had this been the plan all along?

Job done
…

He used his phone to take a couple of quick photos, then moved round to the side of the car. His eye followed the line of the white plastic tubing that had been taped to the end of the exhaust and fed in through the top of the rear driver’s-side window. That door, like all the others, had been opened to help dispel the fumes, but Thorne could see the remnants of the grey gaffer tape on the glass that had been torn into thick strips and used to seal the opening from the inside.

He moved forward – the fumes even stronger suddenly – and stared through the open driver’s door into the darkened interior.

Got his first look at Terry Mercer.

The body was slumped to the left, though not quite touching the passenger seat. Thorne could not be sure if this was how he had been found, or how the sergeant had left him after searching for signs of life. Mercer was wearing a dark jacket and a light blue shirt, training shoes that looked almost brand new in the gloom of the footwell. His white hair looked to have been oiled and swept back, but now a few thick strands hung loose and untidy from the drooping head, as though he’d just woken up. His left hand was a fist in his lap while the other stretched out towards the open door.

Thorne leaned in and touched fingers to Mercer’s face. It still felt warm, but, glancing down, he could see that the car’s heater had been turned up and guessed it had been running while the engine was on.

No point sitting there freezing for those last few minutes.

Glancing across, he saw the scrap of paper that Carlowe had mentioned and reached for it. Mercer’s final statement – simple, triumphant – had been scrawled in slanting capital letters. There was a cheap yellow biro on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Thorne held on to the note for a few seconds longer; it was slippery between his plastic-coated fingers. Then he set it back where he’d found it.

He felt light-headed, uncertain of how to feel.

It was over, his ridiculous phantom investigation, though he and those he had dragged into his doomed orbit might already have spent too much time off the grid to avoid the inevitable fallout. He was happy, or at least relieved, that the killing was at an end. But at the same time he could not help feeling that he had been robbed of something.

That he had been cheated.

He needed air, and not just because of the exhaust fumes.

He stood up and took a step away from the car, but then a glance inside caught the mess of litter on the back seat. An overcoat bundled up on the floor. He wondered if anyone had bothered searching the rest of the vehicle yet or opened the boot.

Had that ‘proper rummage’ Carlowe had mentioned.

There was only one other officer lurking at the entrance, but she was looking the other way, so Thorne ducked quickly down into the back of the car. He turned over the jumble of discarded cans and fast-food wrappers. He looked through the pockets of the jacket and came up empty. As he was backing out again, he glimpsed the edge of a white plastic bag wedged beneath the driver’s chair and reached down to pull it out.

The weight told him it was not empty.

Sitting on the back seat and taking care to keep his head down, Thorne drew a tattered green-cardboard folder from the bag. He opened it and as soon as he had taken out its contents and begun to examine them, he knew
exactly
how to feel. He barely registered the discomfort as he gasped in a lungful of exhaust fumes…

A minute later Thorne was walking out of the garage at a nice steady pace; gratefully sucking in the cold air as he moved out of the light, through the low-lying flood of the patrol car’s headlights and back into the chill of the semi-dark.

Carlowe turned from a conversation with his sergeant. Said, ‘You must be good at holding your breath.’

Thorne managed a sickly smile then pulled an appropriate face and turned away to spit copiously into the dirt. ‘I’ll get out of your hair then,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Thanks for letting me tag along.’ He began walking towards his car, aware a moment or two later that Carlowe was following a few steps behind and not turning round when he was spoken to.

‘No way Jesmond can think you’re slacking now, eh, Tom?’

‘Sorry?’

‘All this, on your night off.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said.

A car came round the corner – the doctor’s possibly – bumping slowly across the ruts towards them. ‘Why do I get the feeling you know something the rest of us don’t?’ Carlowe asked.

Thorne said nothing and reached into his pocket for car keys.

Doing so was a little awkward, with his right arm held rigid at his side; keeping the necessary pressure on the folder tucked away inside his jacket, holding it tight against his ribs.

What he knew, was exactly how Terry Mercer had persuaded seven people to kill themselves.

Helen had a bottle of wine open and was doing her best to stay awake in front of the television, when Hendricks called.

‘I thought you should know,’ he said, ‘Terry Mercer’s dead.’

‘How?’ It took a few seconds for her to get the word out; to shake the conviction that Thorne had managed to track down the man he was after and do something from which there would be no coming back.

Hendricks told her as much as he knew, explained that Thorne had called from his car to ask if he could pull whatever strings were necessary to ensure he did Mercer’s post-mortem.

‘Can you?’

‘This isn’t a job where people volunteer too often,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some calls though.’

Helen turned at the sound of a whimper from Alfie’s room. She stepped into the hall and listened, but she knew every noise her son made and it didn’t sound like he was awake. ‘Sorry, Phil…’

‘Anyway, there you are,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

‘Come on, I think even Tom might have to let this one go now.’

‘Did he sound pleased? When you spoke to him.’

‘Yeah, kind of. He sounded… enthusiastic.’

Helen grunted, non-committal. In the last few weeks enthusiasm had become something to be afraid of.

‘Like I said though, he was in the car and it was only a couple of minutes.’

‘Where was he going?’

‘Well, I presumed he was on his way home.’

Neither of them spoke for a few seconds, then Helen told him how much she’d enjoyed their night out. Hendricks said that he’d had a good time too, despite having paid for it the following morning.

‘Bit of a shaky scalpel hand,’ he said.

‘Bloody hell.’

‘It was fine. I mean, it’s not like I’m a brain surgeon, is it?’

Helen laughed, but she was thinking about Thorne searching for his jacket a few hours earlier. The urgency as he prowled between rooms, the adrenalin fizzing in him. It was a drug he had struggled to say goodbye to once and she wondered how easy it would be for him to do it again.

Hendricks said, ‘The other night, when I was talking about why he did it.’

‘The summit fever stuff?’

‘It’s like he has this compulsion to do things properly, you know? Like there’s only ever one way to come at anything and I know it’s a pain in the arse for the rest of us, but it’s usually for the right reasons.’

‘Yeah, he’s a sodding perfectionist when it suits him.’

‘Basically, love, you’ve hooked up with a control freak.’

Helen’s voice softened. She wanted Thorne home; wanted to take the piss because secretly he liked it and see his face when Alfie came to him, and trace a finger across the small, straight scar on his chin. ‘There are worse things to be,’ she said.

‘I suppose.’

‘It means you give a shit, at least.’

‘Did you know more control freaks kill themselves every year than manic-depressives?’

Alfie whimpered again, and this time it sounded as though he wanted attention. ‘I didn’t, but it’s good to know.’

‘Sorry,’ Hendricks said. ‘Bit of a suicide nerd.’

‘That must have come in handy the last few weeks…’

When Helen had hung up, she called Thorne’s mobile, but it went straight to answerphone. There seemed no point in leaving a message, not if he was on his way home anyway. She heated Alfie’s bottle, then collected her own on the way to his room, the two of them wide awake suddenly.