The Two O'Clock Boy Page 7

  ‘I like to think,’ Elliot ploughed on, ‘that we’re a family, the three of us. We support each other, and trust—’

  ‘But we’re not, though, are we?’ Dylan’s voice cracked with emotion. ‘Me and Mum are family, but you’re not, you’re some passing bloke.’

  ‘Dylan!’ Rhonda strode forward. ‘Take that back.’

  ‘You can’t take back a fact.’

  ‘Go to your room!’

  ‘I’m not five years old! I’m going out.’ He stormed past Elliot.

  A moment later, they heard the front door slam. The old sash windows rattled.

  ‘He makes me so angry.’

  Elliot bunched kitchen towel and gave it to Rhonda. ‘He can’t help it. At his age, he’s got all these hormones flying about. He doesn’t know if he’s coming or going half the time.’

  ‘He shouldn’t talk to you that way.’

  ‘He’ll calm down. And later he’ll get into a state about something else. Look, he’s left his phone.’ Dylan’s beloved android device sat on the table. ‘So he won’t have gone far.’

  He pulled Rhonda to him. Her tears dampened his shirt.

  ‘I just don’t know what’s going on in his head right now.’ Her voice was muffled against his chest.

  ‘He’ll come good; he’s not a bad kid.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She folded the tissue to dab at her eyes. ‘You came good, after all. It was touch and go, but you’re a good boy now.’

  ‘I am.’

  She’ll know the kind of man you are.

  He pressed her head to his chest so she couldn’t see his bleary eyes. But she pushed away from him. ‘I’d better get back to the cleaning. Somebody didn’t do it this morning.’

  ‘Sorry, I—’

  ‘Went down the pub.’

  ‘Bren had something he wanted to talk about.’

  ‘And you stink of smoke.’

  He held up his palms. ‘I’ve had a couple.’

  ‘Whatever it was, I’m sure it must have been important for you to spend all day there.’ Rhonda sighed. ‘Maybe what we need is a holiday.’

  Elliot’s chest tightened. ‘We could go see your mum in the valleys.’

  ‘I was thinking somewhere more exotic. Palm trees, cocktails, white sand. We could do with some sun. Mauritius, maybe. Let’s splurge.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We can talk about it.’

  ‘I’ll look on the internet tonight.’

  ‘There’s no rush.’

  Moments later she was dragging the vacuum cleaner up the stairs. He was about to take out his phone when the front door opened. Dylan came into the kitchen, snatched up his own mobile.

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ said Elliot, ‘but I think your mum is angry.’

  ‘You think?’ Dylan smirked. ‘You’re an idiot, Elliot.’

  ‘That’s me.’ Elliot was glad he could still dredge a smile of sorts from the boy. Every week brought some painful change in Dylan’s personality, some complicated new reaction to the world. Perhaps in a few months he wouldn’t smile at all. But Elliot, like a prospector clinging to a mountainside, would continue to dig deep for them. ‘Elliot the idiot.’

  ‘I’m going out.’ Dylan headed towards the door.

  ‘So,’ Elliot said, ‘if you were going to steal from that shop, what would you have taken? Hypothetically, I mean.’

  Dylan made a big show of taking a container of mints from his pocket, shaking one into his hand and popping it onto his tongue.

  ‘Don’t do it again,’ said Elliot, serious.

  And then the boy was gone. Elliot heard the thud of the hoover against the skirting upstairs. He took out his phone and called Bren.

  ‘Ell, what gives?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning. Let’s set up a meet with Owen. Just for a chat.’

  ‘Sure thing. When do you want to see him?’

  ‘Soon,’ said Elliot hoarsely. ‘As soon as possible.’

  12

  Convinced that he kept seeing the same vehicle hanging back in the distance, Drake pulled his car to the kerb and killed the engine. In the rear-view mirror, clubbers staggered down the Pentonville Road towards King’s Cross and the Tube. At a bus stop, a man’s head rested facedown on a briefcase hugged to his chest.

  It had been a long night at the tower block. A tent had been erected around the shattered body of Ryan Overton, its white walls rippling and cracking in the wind whistling through the estate. Access to the block was restricted so that the lifts, stairwell and twelfth-floor corridor could be dusted for prints.

  Flick Crowley, shell-shocked, had kept herself busy. The shoebox of cuttings was barcoded and removed by Holloway’s team.

  Drake had joined the MIT at the section house for a couple of hours, fielded an anxious call from Harris, and then left. Traffic was thin at this early hour – an occasional vehicle climbed the road – but he had a nagging sense, barely more than that, of the same car in the distance.

  A silver open-top roared up the hill towards the Angel, a scream in the stillness. Drake was reaching for the ignition when his phone rang. His immediate hope was that it was April, but the caller’s number was blocked. He touched the screen.

  ‘DI Drake,’ he said, listening to the purr of an engine at the other end.

  Nobody spoke, so he cut the call. It rang again. With a fluttering sense of unease, he put it to his ear and listened. A long way behind, just beyond the junction at the Angel, a car slowed to a stop and killed its lights.

  Down the phone he heard a handbrake crank, the jangle of keys.

  ‘Who is this?’ said Drake. ‘You’ve got the wrong number.’

  The seat belt whipped across his chest when he unclicked it. He had a vague idea about walking towards the car, was reaching for the driver’s door when he heard a sound in his ear.

  Faint, barely more than a breath …

  The angry sobbing of a boy.

  Drake snatched at the door release and stepped onto the road – just as a car blipped by inches from him, its horn blaring angrily. He threw himself against the Mercedes. When he returned the phone to his ear, the call had been cut.

  Trotting towards the junction, picking up speed, he saw the full beams of the car flash on. An Audi, he thought, but couldn’t be sure. The engine fired, and when Drake ran, the vehicle turned in a screeching swerve and accelerated away. Drake watched it disappear down the City Road. Then went back to his car to continue his journey home.

  Ray Drake lived in a five-storey townhouse in an expensive Islington square. Technically, it was still Myra Drake’s house; she’d been born there, and insisted she had every intention of dying in it. But she now lived in a flat in the basement with internal access to the main house. Myra sneered at the stair lift Laura had fitted to the basement stairs and refused to use it. She sourly observed all the improvements Ray’s wife had made to the house down the years. For so long a musty Victorian pile, Laura had painstakingly modernised and refurbished it. Walls were knocked down, creating a sense of light and space, ancient wiring and fittings ripped out and much of Myra’s dark and fusty furniture banished to her flat. The old woman had put up stiff resistance, but with velvet stubbornness Laura had got her way. A few short months ago all Drake’s family had lived there, but his wife was gone now and April was barely there.

  Water spattered noisily into the gleaming stainless-steel sink when Drake ran the cold tap in the kitchen. He drank a glass of water and pulled out a stool to scroll down his logged calls to April. So far she’d ignored every single one.

  Drake squinted when the light went on. Myra shuffled into the kitchen, a clawed hand holding her dressing gown tight at the neck. The old woman had never been much of a sleeper, and often drifted around the house in the early hours. More than once she’d scared the wits out of them all by floating past in the dead of night, like a wraith.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘I just got in.’
<
br />   ‘You look shattered, Raymond. Go to bed.’

  ‘I will, in a minute.’

  Waving dismissively, the old woman edged to the fridge to pour a glass of milk. Without her glasses she was long-sighted, and hooked a crooked forefinger over the top of the glass so that she didn’t overfill it. When she returned the jug to the fridge, she stood with her aged, bony hands, as thin and sharp as the talons of a bird of prey, flat on the counter. At eighty-seven, age had evaporated the round lines of her face, leaving her gaunt and skeletal. High cheekbones curved into triangular shadow beneath her pallid eyes. Her hair, once fashioned into a muscular perm, was thinning against her skull. But she was still an imposing figure, despite a stoop, and her mind was as sharp as ever.

  ‘Where’s April?’

  Myra looked at him grimly over the glass. ‘She’s gone, Raymond.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  The old woman’s voice was brittle. ‘She’s packed her things and left.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ he asked, shocked.

  ‘Yesterday.’ He bit down on his annoyance. God forbid the old woman actually rang him to tell him. ‘The boy came to pick her up.’

  The boy. Myra could never bring herself to utter Jordan’s name. Something like this had been on the cards for a while, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself.

  ‘The girl has always had too little structure in her life. You have given her too much rope.’

  ‘She’s old enough to make her own choices.’

  ‘She needs her father, now of all times. That boy is …’ Myra’s thin lips curled in distaste. ‘What we used to call a Flash Harry.’

  Jordan never stood a chance with Myra. His father was a self-made businessman, a cockney market trader made good. Myra’s family was old money, as was her late husband’s. Notions of class and entitlement gnawed at Myra.

  ‘She’ll come back; she just needs time.’

  A thin band of milk glistened in the down of her top lip. ‘She’s a selfish child, always has been. You must bring her home.’

  He sighed. ‘Myra …’

  ‘I don’t like to see you unhappy, Raymond.’ Those eyes, yellowed and spotted by broken blood vessels, studied him. ‘You do not cope well. And there’s something else, I can see it in your eyes. Something is troubling you. Is it that case I heard on the news? The triple murder.’

  ‘There’s been a fourth killing. A mother, a father and their two sons are dead. One of the victims … his name was Kenny Overton.’

  ‘And what’s the significance of this person?’

  ‘He was at the home,’ he said.

  ‘That place.’ She pushed away the glass. ‘Well, these things happen.’

  ‘There’ve been other deaths. People from the Longacre.’

  Myra’s long fingers absently rubbed the locket she always wore around her neck. ‘You’ve been under enormous strain recently.’

  ‘Something’s happening, Myra.’ Picking up on his anxiety, she waited for him to continue. ‘There’s a photograph … from a newspaper cutting.’

  ‘And these murders, do they have anything to do with what … happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, meeting her eyes. ‘I think so.’

  ‘I shall retire to bed. I’ll wash up in the morning.’ The rough towelling of her dressing gown brushed against his thigh as she passed him, stopping at the door. ‘I’m sure you are perfectly capable of handling it. You must do whatever is necessary, as you always have, to protect your daughter.’

  His eyes lifted to hers. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘I’m SIO.’

  ‘Well, then.’ The old woman plucked a speck of lint from the arm of her gown and placed it in a pocket. ‘It gives me no pleasure to say it, Raymond, but—’

  ‘Not now, Myra.’ He rinsed the glass at the sink, placed it on the draining board.

  ‘She made you soft, that wife of yours.’

  ‘Myra …’

  ‘I know you don’t like to hear these things, but you must act before it’s too late. Before you lose your daughter for ever.’

  ‘You’ve made your point.’ He snatched up his keys.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘There’s something I’ve got to do.’

  When he slammed out of the front door, she switched off the light and stood, absently rubbing the locket, thinking about her beloved son.

  13

  A heavy metal door stuttered beneath a harsh yellow light, the image frozen on a computer screen.

  ‘The bad news is there’s only one camera on the estate.’ Eddie Upson pressed a button on the keypad and the image moved. ‘Good news is it’s just above the entrance.’

  Numbers at the top of the screen – a time stamp – began to hurl forward, the milliseconds a blur of movement. The image showed the entrance to Ryan Overton’s tower block taken from a high angle in the dank lobby. The light was gloomy, the exterior beyond the heavy metal doors pitch black.

  ‘The video is low resolution so don’t expect terrific quality.’

  He moved the jogging mechanism on the player to reveal a family, a man and a woman, a small boy, moving into the frame from the direction of the elevator. The frame rate on the image was so poor that the figures jerked forward with every step, cheating time and space. With a final tug of his arm, the boy was pulled out the door, which snapped closed.

  ‘We’ve yet to identify everyone who came in and out around the time of Ryan’s death. That’s fourteen people. I’d imagine most, if not all, live on the estate.’

  The rooftops outside the window were swollen with the imminent dawn. A pile of printouts littered the desk, images of everybody who had entered and exited the building an hour each side of the murder. Men and women in winter coats, carrying shopping bags, pushing buggies, kids surging inside with bikes and skateboards.

  ‘This guy looks like our best bet. He entered the building fifteen minutes before Ryan took the express elevator.’

  ‘No jokes, please, Eddie.’ Flick wasn’t in the mood.

  Cranking the jogging wheel on the playback equipment, Upson pointed at the screen. A dark shadow could be glimpsed on the window of the entrance. The image jumped. The door was ajar. A figure stepped inside – face buried in a red hoodie – to move at the extreme edge of the screen. Flick saw a shoulder and an elbow, the fingers of a gloved hand, the soft point of the hood.

  ‘You’d have to be clinging to the wall to skirt the lens like that.’ Millie Steiner leaned forward. ‘They’re avoiding the camera.’

  Moments later the figure was gone.

  ‘Show me again,’ said Flick. She made Upson replay the image several times. He jogged the sequence back and forth. A dark figure. The door swung open. Tip of the hood. A gloved hand. Gone, repeat.

  ‘How tall would you say?’

  ‘Five foot eight or nine,’ said Steiner.

  ‘Man or woman?’

  Upson sipped from a can of coke. ‘It’s difficult to say. That hooded top is baggy. Whoever it was had to be powerful enough to tip a strong lad like Ryan Overton over the balcony. A bloke, if I had to guess.’

  Maybe not, thought Flick. They’d have to wait for the autopsy report, but if the empty Bacardi bottle in the flat was anything to go by, Ryan had been drowning his sorrows. Taken by surprise, unsteady on his feet, and with the right momentum, it wouldn’t have taken much effort to tip him over that balcony.

  ‘Now run it on.’

  Upson jogged the image forwards. The screen became an explosion of undulating lines. The time stamp went crazy. Slowing the image, he touched the screen.

  ‘There’s the guv.’

  Drake crashed through the door and disappeared immediately. A moment later a mother and toddler left the building. Flick was gripped by the image of empty space. The numbers hurtled onwards. A couple of minutes later the hooded figure, face still hidden, ran from the elevator side of the frame to press the exit
button and lunge through the entrance. It was barely onscreen for a second.

  ‘The DI had a choice: take the stairs or stay in reception. Unfortunately, he chose wrong.’

  ‘I probably would have done the same.’ Steiner stifled a yawn.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ said Flick, looking with surprise at the time on her phone. ‘Go home and sleep. Come back in refreshed tomorrow.’

  Upson didn’t need telling twice. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ Flick heard his bones pop when he stood and stretched, tugged his jacket from the back of the chair. ‘You coming, Fli … boss?’

  ‘I’ve a couple of things to finish up,’ she said, but Upson had already left the glassed-in office, barely bigger than a cubicle, where they kept the video equipment.

  Crushed cans were lined up on the desk. Millie Steiner picked up a bin and swept them into it. ‘Whatever you’re thinking, don’t.’ When Flick didn’t respond, she added: ‘He was protected.’

  ‘Not well enough.’

  Flick hadn’t eaten anything since a sandwich at lunchtime, God knows how many hours ago. She was shattered, her blood sugar was bumping along the bottom, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was responsible for Ryan Overton’s death, despite everyone’s reassurances. If she’d insisted he stayed in a Met safe house, he’d still be alive.

  ‘I shouldn’t have let him go home, it—’

  A lump formed in her throat and she stopped. Steiner was a sweet and empathetic girl, and Flick knew she could speak in confidence, but she wasn’t about to get emotional in front of her.

  ‘Why don’t you go home? It’ll look better in the morning.’

  ‘I will.’

  When Millie had gone, Flick turned off the lights and walked through the empty Incident Room. Met Police badge screensavers bounced across computer screens. Her first day as lead officer on an investigation, and it had all been a bit of a mess. In her office, she collapsed into the chair.

  It was a surprise to Flick that Ray Drake had seen fit to go to Ryan Overton’s flat last night, almost stumbling upon Ryan’s killer in the process. The DI said he’d decided on the spur of the moment to look in on Ryan, but the fact that he had even gone there without informing her didn’t seem like a huge vote of confidence. Did he trust her to lead the investigation? The murder of a family was going to heap pressure on everyone to get a quick result, she understood that, but if he had concerns she wished he’d raised them with her directly.