70
Edwin Smart’s house was about half a mile from Duncan Pell’s and backed on to the old line at Fell Wood. It was almost on top of it, just beyond the line of trees I’d passed on my way to the Tube station. I’d walked past his house two days before without even knowing. Again, I tried to put it all together in my head: how Pell had first entered the equation, how he and Smart had begun working together, which parts were Pell and which were Smart. But there was nothing but noise around me now as I headed north towards Highgate. Rain hammered against the windows of the BMW. Horns blared. Tyres squealed. Lorries rumbled past. I couldn’t get silence, I couldn’t get the time I needed to piece it together. And then my phone started ringing.
I reached across and answered it. ‘David Raker.’
No reply. Then finally: ‘I got your message.’
‘Healy?’
No answer again. But it was him.
‘Are you okay?’
He cleared his throat. ‘You were right, then.’
‘About what?’
‘About Wren.’
‘It’s not about being right or wrong.’
‘It’s always about being right or wrong,’ he replied, his voice so small I could barely even hear it. He sniffed. I tried to make out any sounds in the background but there was nothing but silence. I turned up the volume on the speakerphone as high as it would go, trying to offset the noise of the rain, of the traffic, of a Monday in the middle of the city. ‘So how do you know this Smart guy took Wren?’ Healy asked, but there was nothing in his voice. He didn’t sound invested in the answers, just curious.
‘I saw him.’
‘On CCTV?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did you miss him before?’
‘He had a handle on everything. Every second of it. He knew where the cameras were, how to disguise himself, how to get Sam out. It was blind luck that I found him.’ Or maybe fate, I thought. If I’d left Gloucester Road five minutes before I did, I’d never have seen Smart again, never talked to him, never seen the T-shirt in his gym bag or made the connection with his father.
‘Raker?’
I filled in the rest of the details for Healy and then pushed the conversation on. ‘He lives in Highgate, close to Pell. I tried to call Craw, but all I got was Davidson. I need you to call her and let her –’
‘They’re all over Pell.’
‘What?’
‘Tip-off. Caller said they saw someone snooping around Pell’s place.’
‘Who was the caller?’
‘It was anonymous.’
‘Could have been Smart.’
‘Could have been. If he’s going to make a break for it, he probably thought the phone call would be enough to buy him a couple of days. You think that’s what he’s going to do – make a break for it?’
I thought of Smart’s dad, of the anniversary. ‘Not today.’
More silence. A sniff. ‘So what’s Pell to him?’
‘To Smart?’
‘Yeah.’
‘He must be just an insurance policy. A scapegoat. Someone who would look good for all the terrible things Smart had done. Pell’s angry and violent, and Smart would have seen that part of him early on. He probably saw it before anyone else, because a killer recognizes his reflection. When Pell started to go for Leon Spane, started pushing him around and making his life a misery, Smart saw an opportunity. I doubt whether Smart would have killed anyone by that stage, but he would have been thinking about it the whole time, it would have been consuming him, and Spane fitted the bill. He didn’t have a home, didn’t have a family, didn’t have anyone who would miss him. And best of all, if people like me dug deep enough and found that CCTV footage of Pell being violent towards Spane –’
‘You’d automatically suspect Pell, not Smart.’
‘Right.’
I stopped, wondering whether to take it any further with Healy, whether it was even worth the effort, and then I realized it was worth the effort for me: I needed to get everything clear in my head, in some sort of order, and thinking aloud was the best way.
‘Except Smart’s first kill was a mess,’ I continued. ‘Everything about Spane was a mess. Nothing went to plan. There was none of the control or the finesse Smart showed with the other victims. He must have panicked after killing Spane, which was why he dumped him.’
‘Why’d he chop his dick off?’
I thought about it. ‘Maybe he was working out his frustration and his anger on Spane; he probably blamed him for it all going wrong. Or maybe it was more symbolic than that. In a lot of ways, I imagine Smart is like Sam: he’s in denial about who he really is, and when he cut off the penis, he was taking away what made Spane a man.’
‘But then he went back to the drawing board.’
‘Right. After that, he planned it all out. He was meticulous, patient, determined not to make the same mistakes. He probably spent weeks following the men around after spotting them on the Circle line. He’d initiate conversation by pretending to check their tickets and, from there, I assume he’d start watching them, seeing who they were, their lifestyles, their routes, and then slowly begin to reappear around them. They’d have believed it was all by accident. But he wasn’t bumping into them by accident: he was getting them to warm to him.’
‘How did he even know if they were gay or not?’
‘He didn’t. Couldn’t. He just showed incredible patience. There must have been countless failures, men who caught his eye and turned out not to be homosexual, or proved too difficult to get at. But once he zeroed in on the viable ones – Wilky, Erion, Symons and Drake – he worked his way into their lives and then dragged them off into the night. And he didn’t dump them this time. He kept them. Or, at the very least, he hid them somewhere deep.’
‘What about Erion?’
‘What about him?’
‘He was as risky as Wren.’
‘You mean because he worked for Adrian Wellis?’ He didn’t reply, but I knew that’s where he was headed. I could sense a reticence in him to get involved, but at the same time he’d worked hard for these answers, and now he wanted to know how it all fitted together just like I did. ‘Wellis operated a policy of meeting potential clients face to face the first time,’ I said, letting it unfold. ‘He liked to know who he was dealing with so he knew where to drop the shitstorm if something went wrong. That was a major problem for Smart, so as soon as Smart chose Erion, he knew he’d have to deal with Wellis at some point because Wellis had seen his face, however fleetingly.’
In front of me, traffic slowed to a crawl. It was all coming together now.
‘When Smart saw me the first time I went to Gloucester Road, he probably worked out the worst-case scenario there and then: that I’d get to Wellis through Sam, which I did, and I’d eventually get to the man who’d taken Erion. As long as Wellis was alive, Smart was compromised, so he put a plan into place: he somehow got to Wellis in the days after he slipped from my grasp at the warehouse, and he lured him down to the line at Westminster. Persuaded him it was a safe haven, a place he could hide. Then he killed him and dumped his body there, somewhere no one would go or even think to look.’
I expected some kind of reaction from Healy. But I got nothing.
‘Are you okay, Healy?’
‘And Wren?’ came the response. ‘Smart set him up too.’
‘The message on the phone only came much later. By then he knew I was looking into Sam, and he’d started to panic again. The wheels had already been set in motion with Pell – he worked with him, had begun to move himself into Pell’s line of sight, had seen the potential for violence in Pell – so Smart kept at it, placing Spane’s coat and a set of knives at Pell’s house; and then the DVDs of Pell with the girl. Smart must have realized that Pell’s connection to the girl, and to the other prostitutes he’d used, would eventually lead back to Wellis, which was just another way for Smart to insulate himself. But Sam remained a problem. That was why the phone was so clumsy, why it never felt right. Smart recorded the message in desperation, hoping it would lead away from him.’
‘So I was wrong,’ Healy said, in a soft, stilled way I’d never heard before. I’d never heard him admit to a mistake in all the time I’d known him.
‘Wrong about what?’
‘I said the message wasn’t recorded under duress.’
‘It wasn’t, at least in the traditional sense. Smart didn’t put a gun to Sam’s head. All he had to do was pump Sam full of drugs and get him to read from a cue card. If he could walk them out against their will, Smart could also get them to say what he wanted. You remember what you said to me about that message on Drake’s phone?’
‘No emotion in his voice. Just empty words.’ I heard a deep intake of breath and then a sigh crackled down the phone line. ‘But why take Wren from the train? Smart had a foolproof MO. Why change it?’
I didn’t have an answer, just another theory. ‘Maybe he became consumed by Sam for some reason.’
‘Consumed?’
‘Obsessed.’ I shrugged. ‘Thing is, though, if Smart first saw Sam on the Circle line like he did with the others, then he would have followed him and found out – as soon as Sam got home – that he was married. Smart’s thing, the thing that gets him off, is gay men. He wouldn’t have known Sam was gay, not from his daily …’ I trailed off, a memory stirring.
‘What?’ Healy said.
My mind moved back three days to my meeting with Robert Wren and then to the conversation Healy and I had in the coffee shop at Shepherd’s Bush. Healy had accused me of being too invested in Sam as a person, of not being able to see the killer in him. But there had never been a killer in him. The lies he told were the lies I knew about. And he hadn’t been lying when he’d talked to his brother about the night he met Marc Erion. He said the guy lived in this place where there were no lights, Robert Wren had told me. He said he got to his door, on to the floor this guy was on, and all the bulbs were out. We knew why the lights were out. Smart had been through the building a couple of nights before taking Erion, creating cover for himself. And when he got to the flat, Robert Wren had told me, Sam said it felt like someone was there in the corridor with him.
‘The first time Smart saw Sam was at Erion’s flat.’
‘How d’you figure that?’
‘Something Robert Wren said to me.’ I paused, trying to line everything up. ‘Robert Wren said Sam went to see Erion on 11 November. Erion was taken on 13 November. Two days later. By then, Smart had already taken the lights out in Erion’s building, and he was doing the last of his recon. When he saw Sam come up to the door of the flat, he liked the look of him immediately. Perhaps, given the risks he took to get him, liked the look of him more than any of the others. And because Sam had come to see a male prostitute, Smart assumed he was gay. So Sam wasn’t part of the plan. But as soon as Smart saw him, he made him a part of it.
‘He was different from the others: he lived with someone, he didn’t live in the anonymity of a tower block, there was no way Smart could knock out lights in Sam’s street and then walk him out without anyone seeing. So he had to come up with another idea. He would have known about the protests on 16 December, he would have foreseen the risks, but what risk there was in taking Sam from the train was reduced by the chaos of the protests. He must have got on at Gloucester Road, stayed close to Sam and then used the first opportunity that came his way. With or without the fight on the platform, he would have done it. But the fight just made it all much simpler.’
‘Yeah, but why not just take Wren outside on the street? That time of year, it’s dark early, lots of shadow and cover. Much easier than from the inside of a carriage.’
‘But Smart knew the Circle line intimately.’
‘So?’
‘So maybe, to him, the train was less risky than outside on the street. Or maybe he was just watching Sam that day, with no actual plan to take him, and then the fight kicked off and he saw his chance. Or maybe … I don’t know, maybe it was symbolic.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Something to do with his father. Some connection to the trains.’
The conversation died away and I hit traffic lights at the top of Heath Street, as it forked into Hampstead High Street. Rain chattered away against the roof of the car. The wipers whined back and forth across the glass. People passed along the pavements under umbrellas. And in that time, all I got from Healy was silence.
‘I’m almost here.’
No reply.
‘Are you going to meet me at Smart’s?’ I asked him, and realized how prophetic this moment was. The October before, we’d ended up hunting the same man together. Now we were doing it again, as if we were bound to one another somehow. Two sides of the same coin. At the beginning, I’d always thought I was on the other side to Healy. Now I was starting to wonder if we weren’t the same: built for the same reason, to hunt the same monsters. I glanced at the phone again as nothing came back but silence. ‘Healy? Are you going to meet me?’
‘I can’t do that,’ he said.
‘Fine. Then you need to call Craw and tell her –’
‘I’m not calling Craw.’
‘You need to tell her what’s happening, Healy.’
‘It’s too late for that.’
‘What are you talking about?’
He sniffed. Cleared his throat. Is he crying?
‘Healy?’
‘She fired me this morning,’ he said, and there was so much pain in his voice, it was like an electrical current travelling down the line. ‘They found out what I was doing.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘So she fired me.’
‘I’m so sorry, Healy.’
Silence.
‘Where are you now?’ I asked. Faintly, in the background of wherever he was, I could hear rain and the distant sound of people’s voices getting louder and then fading.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Where are you, Healy?’
‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
‘Don’t go and do anything stupid.’
A pause. ‘It’s too late for that now.’
And then he hung up.