Philip Kerr - January Window

Dear all,

I’ve come to the end of my rope, if you’ll excuse the cliché. My time in football being over now, there doesn’t seem to be anything worth living for. My life at the bottom of a glass isn’t any kind of substitute for how things used to be when I was a player. I figure it’s better to check out before I really fuck up big time. Tiff, I love you, I love you. I am so, so sorry. For everything. But I want to say an especially big sorry to my pal Scott Manson. Feeling guilty at having let you down so badly for all these years. I kept my mouth shut when I should have said something long ago. It was me that put Mackie up to stealing your new car, back in 2004. Just a joke. I knew how much you loved it. But I didn’t know Mackie would nick it and then do what he did. It was him that raped that lassie. I couldn’t say then because I couldn’t grass him up. See, he did time for me years back, in Scotland, when I fucked up the first time. I tried to get him to hand himself in but he just wouldn’t do it. Every time I used to see you in the nick it used to cut me to pieces. I made Mackie join the army to serve his country by way of atonement. He’s dead now so it doesn’t matter, I suppose. Wanted to tell you the other night but didn’t have the guts to look you in the eye, Scott.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Cheerio. See you in God’s dressing room.

‘I’ve managed to get hold of a photograph of Sergeant MacDonald,’ she said, ‘and if you’ll forgive me I think it’s fair to say that he looks not unlike you. He was part Nigerian. It might account for why Mrs Fehmiu was prepared to identify you as the rapist.’

I nodded slowly.

‘You’re nodding like it seems to make sense,’ she said.

‘It certainly explains one or two things that have always puzzled me about what happened back then,’ I said.

‘Such as?’

I told her how my car had disappeared from outside Karen’s house in St Albans, and then reappeared again; and how Drenno had visited me regularly in prison.

‘He obviously felt guilty,’ she said.

‘I suppose so. And now I come to think of it, Mackie had a conviction for car theft. Drenno used to say he’d nicked cars, too, when he was a kid in Glasgow, only he never got caught.’ I sighed. ‘The fucking idiot. Drenno was always playing stupid practical jokes like that. Every day. And I mean every day. Sometimes it seemed to me that he wanted to make people laugh more than he wanted to play football. Once some bloke’s wife bought him one of those fat Mont Blanc Meisterstück pens as a birthday present and Drenno filled it with his own piss. Stupid. Juvenile. But at the time very funny.’

‘So he must have known that you were having an affair with this woman, Karen, and where your car would be. Did you tell him?’

‘God, no. But for all his stupid larks he was actually quite clever, so he must have worked it out. And now I seem to remember that one day he tailed me in his car from the Arsenal training ground at Shenley. I was sure it was him and then I wasn’t, if you know what I mean. But it must have been him, I think. I should have known there were no lengths Drenno wouldn’t go to for the sake of a practical joke.’ I nodded. ‘Wait, I remember now. My car keys. He came to the garage with me when I bought the car. He said he was thinking of buying one the same. Maybe he did, for all I know. Anyway, he must have rung up the salesman, pretending to be me, told him I’d lost my key and asked him to order me a spare from Germany. That’s the only way they could have done it. If he gave that bastard Mackie a key.’

Louise Considine nodded. ‘I know Helen Fehmiu is dead and it won’t help her, but rape is a serious crime and we’re reopening the inquiry because we have to, although it seems pretty cut and dried. I may have to interview you formally, so that you can tell me the full story again. I hope you’ll understand. And I give you my word that when I do, the press won’t know about it.’

‘Thank you.’

She touched my hand. ‘I’m sorry I had to mention it at all. But you had to know the truth about what happened. I think you know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m just sorry it’s going to change your perception of Matt Drennan.’

I shook my head. ‘It won’t, you know. I honestly can’t find it within me to condemn him. After all, he’s paid a dreadful price. He’s dead. That’s much, much worse than anything that happened to me.’

Sometimes, modern buildings function in ugly, hidden ways never quite conceived by the men and women who design them. They have their own inbuilt wastelands — leftover spaces which go unseen by the public and which often end up having minor, unplanned, alternative uses. The place at Silvertown Dock where Zarco’s body had been found was such a space — a forgotten area that existed in the bird-shit gap separating one independent structure from another — a no-man’s-land space between the seating bowl and the outer steel frame. In an attempt to hide this particular space — or perhaps to protect it from illicit use — a crude, triangular gunmetal grey door with a weather-tough Abus padlock had been installed; and stepping through it now I found myself in a similarly triangular concrete spot that was dominated by a long, sloping, polished steel column that reached up through the uppermost branches of the distinctively jagged support structure and into the afternoon sky.

I closed the steel door behind me, sat down on my haunches and looked up and around, trying to picture the dreadful fate that had befallen Zarco. As Jane Byrne had observed, with no windows in sight there was nowhere he could have fallen from — unless he’d jumped off the very top of the building — and it was just the kind of secluded, fag-end place where a savage beating could have been handed out to Zarco without any fear of disturbance. It seemed a lonely, awful place for a convivial man like him to have ended his life. I had hoped in some vague way to connect the scene of the crime with the texts on Zarco’s ‘something else’ phone. Could this be the ‘123’ where Paolo Gentile was supposed to have brought fifty grand in cash?

The key to the door had a plastic tag on the end which read ‘SD Outer Ground 28/1’, which was a long way from ‘123’. And since there was no roof, it was hard to imagine that Gentile would have left fifty grand exposed to the elements, even if the money had been inside one of those ‘overboard’ waterproof hold alls that yachtsmen use. Suppose someone from building maintenance had come in here and found it? There were a few brushes and brooms stacked in the corner which seemed to suggest that might have been a possibility. The keys to the door’s padlock — two of them — had been easily located; they were still in the dock caretaker’s key-safe. Had there ever been three keys? No one was quite sure, but other such padlocks had been supplied with three.

If I’d hoped to have some great detective moment and somehow ‘see’ the crime in my mind’s eye, it didn’t happen. Right then the only insight I had was that I was entirely unsuited to any of the tasks my new employer had given me. I felt cold and more than a little bewildered, especially after Louise Considine’s unwelcome news. Things were moving much too quickly for me right now. It was all I could do to remember where I had parked my car. Which was when I remembered that Maurice had done it for me.

I stood up and went outside again, locking the door carefully behind me. I was halfway back to my office when I saw Simon Page striding towards me with a face like a calamity was about to befall us.

‘Disaster,’ he said. ‘Bloody disaster.’