Mackillop’s hand hovered above the gun. He wondered if it had once belonged to one of those soldiers he’d seen kneeling in the desert. Taken from him before another was put to the back of his head. He picked up the bayonet instead.
“That’s seriously sharp, by the way.”
“I bet.” Mackillop stood and held the bayonet up in front of himself. In the skinny mirror of its blade he could see the refelction of bathroom door, the TV and VCR, the black wire that snaked across the floor from the PlayStation to the controller.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Eales said.
“This might sound morbid, and a bit… geeky or whatever.” Mackillop turned the hilt, throwing a sliver of reflected sunlight across Eales’s face. “Has this thing ever… killed anyone?”
Eales walked across and took the bayonet from Mackillop’s hand. “This?” he said. He examined the blade as if he were seeing it for the first time, leaned forward, and slid it into Mackillop’s belly. “Not until now…”
The policeman’s hands flew to the hilt, wrapped themselves tight around the soldier’s; hands that were bigger and stronger and drier. He tried to push, and when he opened his mouth he produced only the gentle pop of a bubble bursting.
“You ready?” Eales asked. “Here we go.” He nodded, counting quietly to three, before twisting the bayonet and dragging it up hard, through muscle, toward the sternum.
Mackillop sighed, then sucked the air quickly back in, as if he’d just dipped a foot into a hot bath or touched a sensitive filling.
There was only the sound of breathing for a while after that, labored and bubbly, and the low moan of boards beneath shifting feet, as both sets of fingers grew slippery against the hilt.
“Luck always runs out in the end,” Eales said.
And he never broke eye contact, not for a moment. Holding fast to what was bright in Jason Mackillop’s eyes, which seemed to blaze, just for that final second or two, before it went out. Like the last dot of life as a TV screen fades to black, shrinking quickly from a world to a pinprick.
And then nothing.
Part Four
Finished Falling
THIRTY-FIVE
At first, so he told everyone later, he thought that Mackillop had simply got tired of waiting for him and buggered off…
By the time Andy Stone’s taxi had finally worked its way through the Saturday-afternoon traffic and reached the house where Asif Mahmoud lived, the Volvo was nowhere to be seen and Jason Mackillop wasn’t answering his phone. Stone had visited the ground-floor flat. He’d been told by Mr. Mahmoud that though he hadn’t seen any police officers, he had heard comings and goings. Someone had come into the house a short time earlier, then left again fairly soon afterward. Stone had immediately knocked at the other three flats in the building-including, of course, the one on the top floor-but had received no reply.
Confused and pissed off, he had decided to head back to Becke House, so had made his way to the tube station. It wasn’t until thirty minutes later, when he got above ground at Colindale, that the message had come through about Ryan Eales…
“How long d’you think Stone missed him by?” Thorne asked.
Holland was pulling sheets of paper from his case. He looked up. “Impossible to say for sure. It must have been pretty close, though. Hendricks has the time of death at somewhere between one-thirty and two- thirty…”
“I was calling Brigstocke just after two,” Thorne said. “We should have moved faster. I should have moved faster.”
When, after an hour, TDC Mackillop could still not be contacted, a team had been dispatched back to West Finchley. While the car-which was found in a side street behind Finchley Central Station- was being towed away, witnesses described seeing it parked outside the house on Rosedene Way. A woman who’d been walking her dog gave an accurate description of Mackillop, and a man who lived opposite gave a statement saying that he’d seen the driver of the car talking to someone on the street.
More officers had gathered, serious and uneasy, as the Saturday began to dim. An armed unit was called into position. Residents were evacuated and the road was sealed off, before finally-five hours after he’d driven into Rosedene Way-the door to the top flat at number forty-eight was smashed open, and Jason Mackillop was found…
Thorne had never met the murdered trainee. He wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or not to deal with his death, but it certainly made it easier to idealize him as a victim. Thorne didn’t know if Mackillop had bad breath or a foul temper; if he fancied himself or was close to his family. He’d never seen him at work, or fallen out with him, or heard him talk about anything important. Thorne knew only that he was naive, and keen, and almost ridiculously young. This not knowing made Jason Mackillop less real than many victims. But it didn’t mean that the dirty great slab of guilt that had been laid down on top of the others had any less weight.
“He shouldn’t have gone in there on his own,” Holland said.
Thorne looked wrung out by exhaustion and anger. “That doesn’t help.”
“It’s all Andy Stone’s got to hold on to…”
It was Monday afternoon; two days since Ryan Eales had murdered Jason Mackillop and fled. Police, continuing to investigate the killings of homeless men in and around the West End, had taken a room at the London Lift to conduct interviews, including one with a rough sleeper known only as Tom.
Thorne and Holland were catching up…
“He must have got out of there in one hell of a hurry,” Holland said. “No money in the place, but he seems to have left more or less everything else behind.”
They were in a poky, self-contained office in one corner of the bigger, open-plan admin area: a small sofa and a chair; a desk with a grimy computer and several heaps of cardboard files. The day was gray outside the frosted glass of a thin window. Thorne took the sheets as they were handed to him. “He knew that after what he’d done it wouldn’t much matter if we got hold of this stuff. And it’s not like any of it gives us a name, is it?”
Holland passed yet more paper across: photocopies of documentation found during the search of Eales’s flat. All indicated that although Eales had killed the other three men in his tank crew, as well as Radio Bob, Terry T, and the others, he’d actually been working with somebody else. Or rather, for somebody else…
The man behind the camera.
Thorne had been made aware of all this within hours of the entry into Eales’s flat, but this was his first look at the material evidence. He flicked through the bank statements and credit-card slips as Holland talked.
“Half a dozen different accounts, in four different names, and he managed to empty all but one of them before he did his vanishing act. Major payments into one or other of his accounts within a few days of Jago’s death, and Hadingham’s ‘suicide.’ Money paid in after each killing.”
“All in cash?”
“All in cash, and completely untraceable to anybody. He was well paid for what he did.”
“He was very good at it,” Thorne said.
Holland dug out another piece of paper from his case and held it out. “And very good at not being caught…”
Thorne took the sheet and began to read.
“I meant to tell you about this,” Holland said. “Then, when everything kicked off on Saturday afternoon, you know, I thought it could wait.” He pointed. “ That’s how they got away with it. Remember, we were talking about what they did with the bodies of the Iraqi soldiers? When we went to Taunton they told us about these war diaries, and at the time I didn’t think it was worth chasing up, because our boys would only have been mentioned if they’d been wounded or commended…”
Thorne saw where it was going. “You’re shitting me…”
