37
Fifty minutes later, a car pulled up at the front gates. At first I thought it was Ewan Tasker, but then realized it wasn’t a Porsche. A man in his fifties, gunmetal-grey hair and a moustache to match, got out of a Volvo and came up the drive. I moved to the front steps.
‘Afternoon,’ he said.
‘Can I help you?’
In his hands was a Manila file.
He stopped about six feet short of me, hitching a foot up on to the first step, and eyed the front of the house. ‘My name’s Detective Sergeant Kevin Sallows.’
I nodded. ‘What can I do for you?’
He didn’t ask me who I was, which meant he already knew. ‘Sorry about intruding like this,’ he continued, even though he didn’t seem sorry. ‘I’ve got a few questions I was hoping you might be able to answer. I know it’s a Saturday, the sun’s out and there’s beer to be drunk. They won’t take long.’
I opened my hands. ‘Sure. If I can help, I will.’
He tapped the file against his thigh and cleared his throat. ‘Yesterday we arrested someone called Eric Gaishe.’ My heart sank. He paused, looked at me, but couldn’t see anything worth stopping for. ‘A real arsehole. No education, no job as far as we can tell, no home address. He hasn’t said anything since we brought him in, other than one minor slip-up when he told us some guy called Ben Richards dumped him at a warehouse in Kennington.’
So Gaishe hadn’t mentioned Wellis, or his connection to the events at the house, even though Wellis had hung him out to dry. Maybe it was out of some skewed kind of loyalty. Or maybe Gaishe was scared about what Wellis might do to him if he talked.
‘Thing is, guys like Gaishe are a waste of oxygen: record as long as my arm, nothing to contribute to society. If some bloke took it upon himself to go all Charles Bronson, then that’s fine by me. It’s just one less piece of shit for me to scoop up.’
He paused, forefinger tapping out a rhythm on the file.
‘But yesterday we found Gaishe’s prints all over a house just off the Old Kent Road, near The Firs. We also found some weapons in a holdall. You know The Firs?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Where dreams go to die.’
I shook my head again.
‘House belongs to an Adrian Wellis.’
I looked at him.
‘You heard that name before?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Not sure if he lived there, or if he just rented it to Gaishe. Difficult to tell when Gaishe is playing dumb. Wellis seems pretty kosher – no record, properties across the city – so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. But you never know people – not really – do you, Mr Raker?’
‘I guess not.’
‘There was a girl inside that house,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Gaishe kept her locked up in there. Raped her. Beat her. Almost killed her.’ So she wasn’t dead. I’d made the right decision. ‘Someone called an ambulance for her from the phone in the house, and it wasn’t Gaishe. So who could this mystery man have been?’ He finally flipped open the front of the file and tapped a finger on the top sheet. ‘Says here you have a habit of stumbling across crime scenes, Mr Raker.’
It was my file.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m sure I don’t need to explain.’ He was referring to a case the October before. His eyes flicked up at me. ‘Says here that, on 23 October of last year, you turned up at a house up in north London and there were two dead bodies inside.’
I gazed at him. ‘If that what it says, it must be true.’
He didn’t say anything else, just scanned the rest of the file. When he was done, he took a step back from the porch. ‘Most civilians go their whole lives without reporting a crime like your one.’ Sallows looked at me again, and I got the sense this was somehow personal for him, that he’d specifically asked to be here. Have we crossed paths before? ‘I mean, it’s a hell of a thing, stumbling across a scene like the one you found, right?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s the nature of my work, sadly.’
‘Missing persons?’
‘People who are missing for a long time tend not to turn up alive.’
‘But you have to admit you’re like a magnet for trouble.’
‘Why would I have to admit that?’ I said to him. ‘If you’re accusing me of something, then come out with it. Otherwise, I think we’re done.’
He nodded slowly. ‘You found that farm up in Scotland.’
It had been eighteen months since I’d walked on to that farm and almost lost my life, and the scars on my body remained. Not as painful as they once were, because all pain died in time, but a reminder of what had been done to me, like a memory that would never fade. Sallows looked down at the first two fingers of my left hand, where the nails would never grow back, and then up to me.
‘That case …’ He stopped, shook his head, and his eyes flicked to me again. ‘I read some of the paperwork. I read your interviews, the statement you made, what you said went on up there. I was interested because, at the time, I had this religious nut going round killing people and dumping their bodies in Brockwell Park, and I thought to myself, “Maybe my case is related.” ’ He paused, studied me again. ‘It wasn’t, by the way.’
I remained silent.
‘Here’s the thing, though: I’m not sure how much of your statement I believed. I mean, we all know what they did to you up there …’ His eyes moved to my fingernails again. ‘But there were gaps. Big gaps. There were bullet holes all over that place but no one to account for them. Not a single person. So who fired the guns? You said it wasn’t you. You said it was them. But they were either dead or they’d vanished into thin air.’
‘So?’
‘So ten months later – in October last year – suddenly you’re back, and we’re picking the bones out of the mess you made in those woods over in east London.’
I frowned. ‘Have you got a point, Sergeant Sallows?’
‘If you say that wasn’t you at that house yesterday,’ he said, ignoring me, a smile – lacking any warmth – lost beneath his moustache, ‘then I guess I’ll have to go with it. I mean, whoever it was wiped the place down, so it’s not like we’ve got any evidence. But witnesses at the warehouse say they saw an unidentified man running full pelt away from the scene dressed in only a coat, and a grey BMW 3 series leaving shortly after.’ He turned and made a show of eyeing my BMW, parked on the drive next to him. And then he looked back at me. ‘Not dissimilar to this one, actually.’
He let that sit there.
Again, I didn’t respond.
Finally, he continued. ‘So if you say you weren’t there at the house, and you weren’t there driving that BMW, then I guess that’s what we have to run with. But it doesn’t mean I think you’re telling the truth.’ He paused and flipped the file shut, eyeing me before speaking. ‘In fact, quite the opposite. I think you’re a f*cking liar.’