He got out of his car and pretended to fiddle around in the pocket on the driver’s door. He’d been watching her for almost six weeks, and today was the first day he was making any sort of contact with her. He glanced up to see her getting closer. Healy had parked here for a reason: it was right next to her Mini. She had to come across him, and step in next to him, to get to her car.
He heard her shoes in the slush about six feet away from him, closed the door of his car and then purposely bumped into her without looking.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at her.
She glanced at him. ‘No problem.’
They stood like that for a moment, across from one another, and he saw how old she looked close up. Weathered. That’s what happens when you spend your life making nice with scumbags. Healy frowned. ‘Do I know you?’ he said.
She returned the frown. ‘I don’t think so, no.’
‘You’re not Teresa, are you?’
Her face softened. ‘Yes,’ she said, and then paused, obviously embarrassed she didn’t recognize him. ‘I’m so sorry … I can’t quite place your, uh …’
He held up a hand, forced a smile. ‘It’s fine. Colm Healy. I work at the Met. I think you came into my station after the riots last year.’
Her mouth formed an O. Healy had checked all this. He didn’t know her and had never met her, but he’d found her in the system when the station chief superintendent, Bartholomew, had had some ridiculous idea about getting psychologists involved in the interviewing of looters. There was no thought behind it other than getting him into his favourite place – the papers – but Teresa Reed had been one of the shrinks he’d brought in.
‘Anyway,’ Healy said, locking the car. ‘Nice to meet you again.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You too.’
He left her, walking off towards the prison building. When he heard her Mini start up and drive off, he turned around and headed back to the car. Unlocked it. Slid in at the wheel. His heart was beating fast and his palms were slick with sweat, even in the cool of the morning. Slowly the windows of the car began to steam up and he wondered whether he was doing the right thing. But then he felt the burn of grief and anger in the centre of his chest, and any doubts were washed away.
25
While I watched the house, I used my phone and went searching for Wellis online. Facebook was the world’s greatest detective. Inside a minute you could get yourself a picture. And if there were holes in their privacy settings, seconds after that you had their whole life. It was even easier if you had an unusual surname. My Facebook account was a shell – no details, no photos, no posts – but it got me access to other people’s, and although I couldn’t see Wellis’s wall, info or friends, I could see all his photos.
There were fifteen in alclass="underline" Wellis at the beach, in woodland somewhere, standing on the edge of a lake with a hunting rifle. He was five-ten, stocky, about forty, with a shaved head. He had a tattoo of a crucifix on the side of his neck. In most of the photos he was on his own, but when he wasn’t he was always with the same guy: taller, thinner, late thirties. They both had looks I didn’t like, but Wellis – his eyes small, like an animal’s – I’d have to watch the closest.
After a while light began to fade from the day, the sun burning out in the sky, the clouds bleeding red and orange. Inside twenty minutes it became a different world: shadows grew deep and long, like vast curtains being pulled across a stage, and although the temperature didn’t drop much, a faint breeze picked up, whispering past the car and down towards the house.
Twenty minutes after that, I heard voices on the other side of the road.
Two men were approaching, silhouettes beneath the faint orange glow of a street light. I lowered myself into my seat, using the lack of light as a disguise, and turned the radio off. They drew level. They couldn’t see in, but I could see out.
One of them was Adrian Wellis.
In real life, he looked a little shorter than five-ten, but in all other areas he was exactly the same as his photo: fierce, shaved head, dark eyes. He wore a red bomber jacket over a blue check shirt and dark blue trousers. All name brands. I thought about the reasons a man might live in a place like his if he was making enough money to buy £200 trainers, but then my eyes fell on the guy next to him. Taller. Thinner. Blotchy skin and greying hair, and without Wellis’s sense of style. He was the other guy in the photos.
They got to the house, and Wellis started fiddling around in his pocket for his keys. But when he finally found them, he paused.
He looked along the row of houses.
It was like he’d sensed someone had been here. In the front garden. Up to the house. In the still of the night, it was possible to hear the other guy asking him what the matter was, but Wellis didn’t reply. He just stared at the front of the house – and then up the road towards me.
Even though there was no possible way he could see me, no way he could know I was watching, it felt like he’d zeroed right in on me. He took a step away from the house, his trainers crunching against a crumbling piece of concrete, and then he stopped, one foot slightly in front of the other as if he was primed, ready to strike. There was something different about him now. He stood rigid, his body taut, his eyes oil-black circles in the shadows. He stayed in the same position – absolutely still – for a long time, hands out either side of him, fists balling and opening, over and over. And then eventually he said something to the other guy and let the two of them into the house.
A light went on in the hallway. The door closed.
And I waited some more.
Not long after, the front door opened again. The other guy stepped out, into the night air, and pulled the door shut. He stood there for a moment, lighting a cigarette, and then started making his way up the road in my direction. I sank back down into my seat and watched as he passed the car and headed up towards a fork in the road about thirty yards behind me. In between a pair of street lights, where it was more shadow than light, he perched himself on somebody’s broken garden wall and waited.
The rhythmic glow of his cigarette.
The brief light from a mobile phone screen.
A couple of minutes later, headlights emerged from the darkness. The road was even quieter now, so the noise of the car travelled across the stillness: every tick of the engine, every stone spitting out from under its wheels. Just short of the man, it stopped and killed its headlights. It was a blue Toyota. The windscreen was just a rectangle of darkness. No shape inside. No idea who was driving. The man got up off the wall, flicked his cigarette out into the road and walked to the car. He bent down at the passenger window.
There was a short conversation, not lasting more than thirty seconds, and then the car’s lights switched back on, the man stepped away, and the vehicle pulled a U-turn and headed back up the road. The man stood there, not moving, just watching the car all the way along the street until it melted away in the night. Once it was gone, only then did he move from his spot and head back towards the house.
As he passed, I noticed something in his hands.
Money.
At 4.40, dawn started to break and light edged its way across the sky, a faint, creamy glow the colour of tracing paper. But in Adrian Wellis’s house, the lights remained on. Throughout the night there’d been movement inside: a shadow passing, a silhouette forming, but never for very long. All I knew for sure was that they hadn’t been to bed.