locked on to Sam, and he moved across and said something to him. Sam looked up at him, as if he didn’t know who Pell was or what he wanted, then he seemed to process whatever it was that Pell had asked, and started nodding slowly. A few seconds later, Sam pointed to Quinn on the floor. He must have known by then that he’d done some serious damage to him. Quinn hadn’t moved an inch.
But it was Pell I couldn’t take my eyes off.
As Sam stood there, his hands still on his knees, in shock and worried about what he might have done, Pell was looking off towards Stonehouse with nothing in his face at all.
No emotion. No regret.
As if he didn’t feel anything.
36
After seeing him in action, I figured the rest of the footage on the DVD would give an even better sense of who Duncan Pell was. For Sam, the pattern mostly remained the same: he’d come in through the three-arch entrance at Gloucester Road and head across the ticket hall towards the turnstiles. The only day that changed was the day after the fight. Sam didn’t turn up at all. I assumed that was down to the events of the previous twenty-four hours: he’d been in a fight, he’d punched a man unconscious and the police had probably warned him it might be about to get worse. He would have been shaken up by what happened, which is why he must have taken the day off work.
But Duncan Pell was different.
He came to work the next day, and every morning – just as on the morning of the fight – he’d stick to the same routine: head for the front of the station where the homeless man had returned, and ask him to leave. Except he didn’t just ask. Every day he became a little more aggressive: only pointing and gesturing initially; then actually planting a hand on the man and pushing him away from the entrance; then grabbing him off the floor and dragging him along the pavement until they both disappeared from sight. Finally, Pell resorted to another tactic: he dropped to his haunches, the man slumped at one of the entrances, and Pell leaned in to him and said something into his ear. The reaction was instant: the homeless man glanced at Pell like he couldn’t believe what he’d heard, and Pell grabbed him by the arm, hauled him to his feet and threw him off, out of view. The man’s black holdall remained in shot for a moment, before Pell kicked it off in the direction he’d thrown the man.
No other Tube employee got involved at any point. Only Pell. Some looked on, but none of them said anything. But then, on the final day of footage, something changed: the man didn’t turn up. For the first time in a week, presumably the first time in a long time, he wasn’t sitting at the entrance, knees to his chest, fingers clasping his cardboard sign.
He was gone.
I made some lunch for Liz and me, and then we sat out on the decking at the back of the house and had a couple of glasses of wine. It was a beautiful day: beyond the trees at the bottom of the garden, the markless sky was vast.
‘You found your guy yet?’ Liz asked after a while.
‘No. Not yet.’
A long pause. I looked at her.
‘Do you think this is the one?’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
She shifted forward in her seat. ‘The one you can’t save.’
There was no malice in the comment. No bitterness. Liz wasn’t like that. And yet I saw where the words had come from. I could trace them all the way back to their origins; to an interview room in east London eight months before when she’d told me who I was: a man trying to fix holes in the world that couldn’t be fixed. Sometimes I worried our relationship had become defined by that conversation.
‘I don’t give it a lot of thought,’ I said eventually, reaching over and taking her hand. But it wasn’t much of a lie. We could both see through it to what lay beneath. All the doubts and fears about what we had – and whether it could go the distance.
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
‘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.’
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.
