hoped he would never have to hear again.
Twenty
Time Wounds All Heels
After that, Slider felt as if his feet didn’t touch the ground for weeks. There was so much to do, and so much trouble to get through. The proverbial shit storm wasn’t in it. If it hadn’t been for Porson standing firm at his side, Slider could never have survived it. And by the time he and Porson were both called before Commander Wetherspoon, their superior at Hammersmith, and he said, ‘This is a dog’s breakfast of a case. I can’t make head or tail of it,’ Slider would almost have been grateful to say, ‘Oh, well, don’t let’s bother then.’
But Porson, magnificent as the Old Man of Hoy, talked and talked at Wetherspoon, and pointed out with graven dignity so many matters of simple honesty, justice and pride in the Job that Slider wanted to cheer; and Wetherspoon, who wouldn’t have got where he was today without being something of a trimmer, was won over on to their side and in the end even said, ‘I’m not having politicians telling me how to do my job, thank you very much.’ And he went in to bat for them.
So then it was the head of SOCA, and Ormerod, the head of the Organised Crime Government Liaison Team, who was higher yet, and so on to the Commissioner of the Met, and the Home Secretary himself. There was grave internal trouble because Bates’s escape could not have been managed without some complicity high up in the Met. Slider supposed that was what Pauline had been trying to warn him about. In the end there were two quite senior suspensions and an arrest of a political appointee in the Home Office just on the Bates escape alone. While Slider’s heart ached that any policeman had been able to be bought like that, he had to admit that, given the size of the prize Tyler and Bates were going after, they had been in a position to make the price very attractive indeed, even to a senior Yard officer.
Through all this Tyler didn’t run, didn’t move a muscle, was so certain he was invulnerable and untouchable that he stayed put in his glamorous house and laughed at them.
Thomas Mark ran, but without either Bates or Tyler to protect him he didn’t get far, and when they nabbed him, he didn’t take much persuading to roll over. They had his fingerprints from the black Focus, the paint match from the car to the damaged bike, mud under the wheel arches matching that of the lane, and Mrs Masseter’s identification. He was bang to rights for murder and perverting the course, and in the end he was glad to have the murder dropped to manslaughter and failing to report an accident in return for fingering Bates and Tyler, which he wasn’t unwilling to do anyway.
‘They were going to make millions out of Clydeview, and what was I going to get?’ he said resentfully. ‘I wanted a percentage, but they laughed at me. A flat fee, that’s what they offered me. And who was doing all the dirty work?’
Slider, of his own interest, asked about Bates’s plans for him.
‘Oh, he was going to kill you,’ Mark said indifferently. ‘That was one of the things Tyler said when he got him out of jail. Kill Stonax for me and I’ll let you kill Slider while you’re at it. Of course, Tyler wanted you dead, too.’ He looked at Slider with mild interest. ‘You don’t half piss a lot of people off.’
‘So why didn’t he kill me straight away, when he had the chance?’ Slider asked.
‘I suppose he liked tormenting you,’ Mark said indifferently. ‘He was like that. Anyway, Tyler said he hadn’t to kill you before you’d nicked Dave Borthwick and charged him for doing Stonax. But you didn’t charge him.’
‘We knew it wasn’t him, you see,’ Slider said.
Mark stared at him. ‘I reckon you’re not as stupid as Trevor thought you were,’ he said. ‘But he reckoned everyone was stupid, compared to him. And he was right, most of the time.’
It was an epitaph, of sorts, Slider thought.
It took an immense amount of time to assemble all the evidence against Tyler, and to squeeze out of Vollman Zabrinski the admission that the BriTech shares were held in Tyler’s name. When they were able at last to take Tyler’s house apart they found a mass of equipment that he had arranged to get out of Bates’s house and installed for Bates’s use. He claimed he had taken it out of Bates’s house for safe keeping, and since he had all the proper paperwork he at least had a workable defence for it, although a lawyer might argue that there had been no need for him to hook it all up.
One of the interesting things that emerged was that both Stonax’s flat and his phone had been bugged. So they had known from his conversations that Danny Masseter was coming to see him and probably that he had received a parcel from him too. Slider considered that it might have been the imminent arrival of Stonax’s daughter that had moved his elimination up the agenda. He did not air that thought to Emily or Atherton, or even Joanna.
It also emerged that Stonax had been trying for several days to get an appointment to see the Prime Minister privately and alone, and had not succeeded largely because he would not tell anyone what he wanted to talk about. That was reason enough to offer Emily for his murder. What interested Slider most about that piece of information was that Stonax had apparently chosen the political rather than the legal route to right the wrongs of Waverley B. He supposed it was simply old habit: politicians and journalists alike tend to think that the solution to everything is political.
So then there were the political ramifications to get past, and they were immense. There was no way for them at the bottom to know how far anyone else in the government was implicated, even if it was only by turning a blind eye, but hints filtered down from time to time, relayed at the last link by Porson to Slider, that it had gone all the way to the very top, both on the political and the police side. Porson hinted that this made it unlikely any action would be taken, and Tyler all along remained supremely confident that knowing where an immense number of bodies were buried would make him untouchable. If he had to leave the country again, a High Commissionership in some agreeable country was the least he was ready to settle for.
Slider himself wondered how it would be possible to put Tyler on trial, when all he had to do was threaten to finger the PM. And would the CPS even consider making the attempt if the PM was able to say that Commissioner of the Met was implicated? Slider and Atherton agreed, unhappily, that it looked as though it was another of those cases that would be buried deep and the whereabouts of the grave forgotten, which, as Atherton pointed out, made it look bad for them. They would be bound to secrecy under the Official Secrets Act, and be under surveillance for the rest of their careers, if any, to make sure they didn’t spill the beans to anyone.
But in the end it was pressure from the bottom that changed things. Porson kept agitating to Wetherspoon, and Wetherspoon, marvellously shaken out of his usual servile complacency, kept poking those above him. In the end the Assistant Commissioner, who quite fancied his boss’s job, leaned on the Home Secretary by reminding him that after the war the government had handed back the contaminated land to be run as a shipbuilding yard again, and who knew how many people had got sick and even died as a result? Even if they hadn’t known the site was contaminated, the potential for compensation suits was beyond computation. There was a hopeful passage of play at the break-down when the Home Secretary suggested the late Trevor Bates might conveniently be blamed for everything, and the Assistant Commissioner suggested to Wetherspoon that it might be best to go that way. But Wetherspoon countered by pointing out that by now far too many people at the bottom knew too much and would not be satisfied with that, and the Assistant Commissioner told the Home Secretary that since it was impossible to get the brown sauce back in the bottle, it must be Tyler’s head on a platter, or the whole Waverley B story to come out, with politically disastrous results. The Home Secretary pedalled hard on the PM’s paranoia, the PM persuaded the Commissioner to take early retirement in return for a full pension and a seat in the Lords, and Tyler’s fate was sealed.
Slider was dog-weary, and sick to his stomach with the game-playing, by the time it was resolved, and it was small comfort to him that they let him be in on the final arrest of Richard Tyler. Deputy Commissioner Ormerod, who had used Slider to arrest Bates the first time, insisted on it, and even laid a huge, meaty arm across his shoulders and said, ‘You’ve deserved this. You deserve a medal, but I’m not in charge of that. But I can see to it that you’re in at the kill.’
‘And what happens afterwards?’ Slider was driven to ask. He still didn’t see how they’d ever allow him to be put on trial.
Ormerod did not pretend not to understand. ‘There’ll be a deal of some kind,’ he admitted. ‘No mention of
