called Davidson an hour before I got to Smart’s house, spoke to him on the phone, tried to tell him what was happening, and he hung up on me.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ he said from beside me.
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is. You’re a fucking fantasist, Raker.’
I looked at Craw. ‘I called him to tell him to come to the house and he didn’t want to hear it. If you’d got here after I called him, you might have been able to swoop on Smart before he showered the walls of the station with his brains.’
There was no comeback to that. Off to my right, Richter was watching me, pen hovering above the notebook. Craw looked across to him. ‘You actually going to write anything down?’ The irritation was obvious in her voice. I wasn’t sure whether it was with me or with Davidson. ‘What was Smart using that station for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Really?’
I shrugged. ‘Look at the photos in this room. He had an attachment to the Tube, and to the railways in general, so the building would have meant something to him. But it was practical too. He kept hunting equipment in there.’
‘So?’
‘So maybe he started off killing animals before he moved on to killing men. A place like that, abandoned and locked up, no one’s going to come calling.’
‘And Pell? Where does he fit in?’
‘The best person to ask is Pell.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s in an ambulance.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t even really know him.’
Davidson snorted, and looked from me to Craw. ‘This is a waste of time, ma’am. The guy doesn’t know what’s the truth and what’s a lie any more.’
I kept my eyes on Craw. ‘I told you everything I knew earlier.’
‘
‘Of course it wasn’t,’ Davidson said, before I had a chance to respond. ‘If you read the file about what him and Healy got up to last year at those woods –’
‘I don’t care about last year, I care about now.’
Davidson stared at her, obvious disgust in his face, and then started to shake his head, sinking back into his chair. Momentarily, Craw’s emotions played out in her eyes. I didn’t bother getting involved, but I got the sense that after this was all over, Davidson’s future was going to be high on the agenda for her. Even Healy would have seen the irony in that: Davidson following him out the door, or following Sallows into semi-retirement on the south London beat, after they’d teamed up to get Healy kicked off the force.
‘Mr Raker?’
We were back to Mr Raker now. Not David.
‘Like I said, I don’t know Pell that well. I know what he does for a living, know he’s ex-army, realized pretty early on he had a violent streak a mile wide; and even if he wasn’t the same type of killer as Smart, he’d killed on the battlefield and could do it again back home. Smart would have encouraged that side of him. He would have been manipulating Pell the whole time, working him up into a frenzy in order to position him exactly where he wanted.’
‘You sound like you admire him,’ Davidson muttered.
‘I don’t admire him. I think he’s a piece of shit.’
Now the only sound was Richter frantically making notes.
‘What about Adrian Wellis?’ Craw said.
‘What about him?’
‘His buddy’s locked up and won’t talk to us. That Romanian girl was found in his house. When you gave us a rundown earlier, you said Marc Erion worked for him, Pell used to get his women from him, and this squeaky-clean facade Wellis built for himself is a lie. So where is he?’
I looked at her, blank-faced.
‘Mr Raker?’
If I told her where Wellis was, where his body was dumped, I let her know that Healy had taken me down there with him and broken another rule, and maybe this time she would bring him back in and maybe this time he’d get charged. There were other dangers too. Any conversation about Wellis would eventually lead to his house, to when I’d found the girl and made the anonymous call to police, to when I’d tossed Wellis and Gaishe into the back of the BMW and driven them to the warehouse.
Healy was already gone from the Met, his reputation in the gutter, so the first problem didn’t really matter much. But I wanted to insulate myself and perhaps, on some deeper level, wanted Craw to hurt too. The minute Davidson entered the room, Craw started putting her trust in cops who’d lost sight of their calling; who came into work to seek revenge, to play with lives, and ultimately to misunderstand the people they worked with. She could see Davidson’s flaws a mile off, but she’d brought him here for one reason and one reason only: to get at me. Healy was flawed too, perhaps irredeemably so, but everything he’d done, all the mistakes he’d made, were at least for the right reason: for his daughter, for the child he lost. Somehow I felt Craw recognized that side of him, despite her officiousness, because she was probably a parent herself and could imagine what a parent is prepared to do. But men like Davidson and Sallows didn’t, and that made her guilty by association.
‘I don’t know where Adrian Wellis is,’ I said.
Davidson sighed. ‘Do me a fucking favour.’
‘Why would I know where he is?’
‘Are we really going to believe this shit?’ he said to Craw.
‘Why would I know?’
‘Because you know everything about him and you made that call from Wel–’ He stopped himself. Eyes flicked to Craw.
By bringing in my unauthorized help on an open case like the Snatcher, Healy had broken every rule in the book, and it had made an easy win for them; easy to present to Craw and impossible for her to defend. Davidson gave her the photos of Healy and me at the hospital, and Healy got the push. But whatever Davidson and Sallows were cooking up for me was also off the books. It was an investigation that hadn’t been approved by Craw, involving one cop already discredited by her, and another she was increasingly having doubts about. The irony was they were like Healy: putting something together – and trying to bring someone down – outside of the rules they had to abide by.
‘I made that call from where?’ I said.
He looked at Craw again. ‘We can’t trust him. We can’t trust anything he says. Everything that comes out of his mouth is a fucking lie.’
Craw said nothing, just stared across the room at him.
Finally she got up from her seat. ‘Let me show you something,’ she said to me, and gestured for me to follow her.
We moved along the route put in place by the scene-of-crime officer, through the kitchen and down to the office. A forensic tech was at the computer. Next to that, inside an evidence bag on the desk, was a letter, written on lined A4 paper. It was from Smart.
‘Simon,’ Craw said to the tech, ‘would you give us a moment, please?’
The tech did as Craw asked, got up and disappeared.
She pointed to the evidence bag. ‘This was left in the drawer of the desk. Why don’t you have a read?’
I moved in front of her and studied the letter. It was headed with yesterday’s date, the writing untidy and spidery. The last outpourings of a dead man.
