The Dead Tracks

Chapter Seventy

The interview took two and a half hours. Liz sat beside me the whole time, stopping me if she felt I needed to be redirected away from something harmful. Hart and Davidson came at me hard, like attack dogs, trying to catch me out, trying to lead me into blind alleys and oneway streets. They both played on my relationship with Healy. They tried to make it sound stronger and more purposeful than it was. They used the moment outside the safe house when Healy had pulled a gun to underline their case, Hart making mention of how I'd done nothing to dissuade Healy.

'I told him to put the gun away.'

'Once,' Hart said. 'Half-heartedly. The second time, when you saw what I was telling you to do, you ignored me. Then you ran off into the sunset with him.'

'I felt—'

'You felt a kinship for him, David.'

'No.'

'You believed what he was doing was right.'

'No.' I sighed.

'Then why did you do it?'

I paused, glanced at Liz and then back to them. 'I felt his actions were wrong — but his reasons were right.'

Davidson snorted. 'How do you figure that?'

'I think he was frustrated.'

'With who?'

'With you.'

Silence descended. It was hot in the room, and the only sound now was the whirr of an air-conditioning unit.

'Look at it from his point of view,' I continued. 'You brushed his daughter's disappearance under the carpet with the other seven, but you didn't even have the decency to link her to Glass.'

A tremor passed across the room.

Davidson whitened. Hart crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. 'What are you talking about, David?'

'You know what I'm talking about.'

No reply. They didn't want anything committed to tape. In their faces, I could see they were trying to figure it out. How I knew. Whether Healy had told me. How he'd found out so much. I had them by the balls and there was no backing out now.

'I get it,' I said. 'Deny all knowledge, maintain the silence. Trouble is, your circle of trust has been breached. You're not the only people who know what really happened any more. The rest of the world might think it's a one-in-a-million chance that we stumbled across seven women in that place, but all of us here know different.'

Davidson looked away. Hart maintained eye contact, but his hand was hovering close to the tape recorder, desperate for this to end. I nodded for him to push the button.

He stopped the tape.

Liz leaned forward. 'Okay,' she said. 'Here's the deal: David walks out of here, without charge. You leave him alone. You don't come back for him. Anything to do with his part in this investigation is over. In return, he maintains a dignified silence.'

They looked between us.

Finally, Hart nodded. 'Let me make some calls.'

They left me alone in the interview room with a cup of coffee and a bland ham and cheese sandwich. Liz disappeared to call the office and see what she'd missed out on. She smiled as she left - touching my arm and telling me I'd done brilliantly - but she didn't mention anything we'd talked about earlier. I was too tired, too drained, to figure out if the fissure that had opened between us could ever be pushed back together again. But I was glad, at least, to have got some kind of reaction out of her.

There was no clock in the interview room, but it felt like about fifteen minutes had passed when the door opened again. I turned, expecting to see Liz.

But it was Phillips.

He looked at me, closed the door behind him and walked around to the other side of the table. I felt like grabbing him by the collar and smashing his face through the wall.

'How are you, David?' he asked, sitting down.

I smirked. 'Oh, just great.'

'Can I get you anything else?'

'Yeah,' I said, pushing the coffee cup across the table. 'Another one of those — and an explanation of what the hell you were doing at Jill's.'

He nodded as if he'd expected that straight off the bat. 'She called me.'

'Why would she do that?'

'Because Frank and I went way back. We came up through the ranks together and then I basically got him the job here at the Met. I've known Jill for years.'

'So, what - you just hang around outside her house?'

'She left a weird message on my phone. She didn't say anything — it was just ten seconds of silence - but when I called her back she didn't answer.'

And then it all shifted into focus: the night before, she phoned and didn't answer, and then she'd been odd when I'd called her on the landline. Because Crane had come for her at home. The first one had been a distress call. She must have made the same call to Phillips as well. But Crane had found out — and the next time I rang her, Crane had made her tell me everything was fine. Probably with a knife at her throat.

'I didn't like it,' Phillips continued. 'So I went round there…' He glanced behind him, even though the door was closed. 'And I managed to get into her house'. Just like Ewan Tasker had suspected. 'But she wasn't there. She was gone.'

I looked at him. 'She called me in a panic one night and said she thought someone had been watching her place. It was you. She saw your car.'

'It was me. It was my car.' He paused. A long-drawn- out breath. 'Frank and I had a kind of… arrangement. A promise we made.'

'You'd look out for each other.'

'Right. If either of us…' He stopped briefly. 'Look, when I made that promise to Frank, when we made that promise to each other, it was one I never believed I'd have to see through. But now I do. So from time to time, I check in on Jill. I went past her place a couple of times on the way to the station yesterday evening. That night you're talking about, when you went round, I guess I didn't hide well enough. It had been a long day.'

I didn't say anything. Just stared at him.

'You're pissed off,' he said. 'I get it.'

'Do you?'

He nodded, trying to defuse the situation. 'Believe it or not, I do.'

'So where's Jill?'

'We don't know.'

'She wasn't in his place in the woods?'

'No. Seven dead women were recovered from there - none of them her.'

'Seven?'

'We found Susan Markham's body in a wall cavity.'

She hadn't been placed with the others. No coffin. No formalin. Which meant he obviously didn't see her as part of his plan. She was just bait to reel Markham in. The other women — even Leanne — were something else. All blonde. All blue-eyed.

All worth keeping.

'Anyway,' Phillips said. 'Jill wasn't there. We tore that place apart.'

'She's not back home?'

'Hasn't been back. Hasn't been anywhere as far as we can tell. Not home, not to work, not with her family.'

Crane knows where she is. 'He won't tell you?'

'He's not said a word. But we found photos of her in his hideout. Pictures of her, her house, her friends. You were in some of them.' His fingers drifted to his wedding band and he leaned back in his chair. 'He took her, I think we both know that.' Finally his eyes moved back to mine. 'Look, David…'

I knew what was coming, and I wasn't about to make it easy for him.

'I know you could use what you know against us.'

'You're damn right I could. What you did with those women…' He didn't say anything, just looked at me. I felt the anger prickle beneath my skin as I watched him, waiting for him to justify what he'd done. 'It was wrong.'

'Agreed.'

'But you did it anyway?'

'By keeping Glass unaware we were on to him, we were within touching distance of the Russians. That doesn’t make it right. That doesn’t erase those women. But now we have everything, murders, drugs, prostitution, people-trafficking, gunrunning, money-laundering. Was it a sacrifice worth making?' He shrugged. 'It depends where you're standing.'

'You had a legal and moral obligation to tell their families.'

'Try standing next to the body of a ten-year-old prostitute who has had every hole in her body ripped to shreds. Or at the back of a van that's just brought seventeen women and kids into the country, all of whom have suffocated to death because the van has no ventilation. Or next to the imported guns or the shitty drugs that are killing people, day after day. Things aren't so clear.'

'They look clear.'

He leaned forward. 'Seven women, or seven ten-year-olds?'

'It's not about choosing — it's about doing it all.'

Phillips smiled. You're an idealist.'

'Maybe so. But you were wrong.'

Phillips started turning his wedding band again. Then he glanced at his watch. We haven't got time for this. We need to find Jill.'

'So find her.'

He eyed me again but didn't speak.

What's going on here?

'Hart tells me we should cut a deal with you,' he said eventually, 'and, given what you know, I think he's right. But what about your new friend Healy?'

'What about him?'

'You willing to help him?'

'Help him how?'

'He's going down, David. Once he's well enough to walk out of that hospital, it'll be in a set of cuffs. Then he'll be up in front of a judge. Then he'll be behind bars. You know what they do to bent coppers on the inside?'

'So?'

'So, we're willing to go easy on Healy in return for a favour.'

'Which is?'

Phillips paused. 'We need you to interview Aron Crane.'