I was lying on the sofa with Stan and the new issue of Your Dog, feeling myself slipping into the sweet deep sleep of exhaustion.
And then the doorbell rang.
It was just after midnight. As always, our neighbourhood was coming awake. Lights were blazing at the meat market on the other side of Charterhouse Street and the dancing kids in their glad rags were heading for the clubs that line our street.
But my doorbell ringing at this hour meant trouble.
There was a little monitor that showed the street.
DCI Pat Whitestone was standing outside the front door.
I buzzed her up.
She stood in the doorway, running a hand across her mouth.
I saw she was shaking. Not just her hands. All of her. The smell of vodka was very strong.
‘I didn’t know where else to go,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What happened?’
‘I hit someone, Max.’
I thought she meant that she had lost her rag and given someone a beating. I thought of the yellow security guard at Eden Hill Park and how angry his cowardice had made her. I knew she had it in her to fly at anyone if her blood was up. I remembered her slapping Flowers in West End Central.
But it was too much to hope for.
This was worse, I saw as she came into the loft.
Much worse.
She had not hit someone with her fists.
‘I was in my car,’ she said. ‘And he came out of nowhere.’ Behind her glasses, her eyes were wide with shock. ‘And I didn’t see him, Max. Not until it was already over.’
Stan stirred himself at the happy sight of an unexpected visitor.
Whitestone sank to the sofa and absent-mindedly ran her hands through his fur.
I went to one of the huge loft windows and stared down at the street.
Her Prius was parked right outside and even from four floors up I could see that the headlamp on the driver’s side had been caved in and was now a crumpled mess of broken glass and smashed metal.
The car was parked right under a streetlamp. That was not good.
‘What happened?’ I repeated.
She had her head in her hands.
I stood before her.
‘Pat,’ I said. ‘Come on. What have you done?’
She looked up at me and nodded, composing herself, ready for a hot debrief.
‘I was driving home,’ she said. ‘Round the back of King’s Cross. The area that didn’t get developed. Where it still feels like – I don’t know – a wasteland. Like the surface of the moon.’
She looked up at me and bit her lip. There were tears in her eyes. I felt my heart falling. Whatever had happened tonight was something that she was going to live with for the rest of her life.
‘A kid on a scooter came out of the petrol station down there,’ she said. ‘Do you know the one I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘He came out really fast. No indicator. No warning. No chance to miss him. It sounds like I’m making excuses, doesn’t it?’
‘What did you do?’
‘I kept going.’
A pause.
‘Did you kill him?’
Silence.
‘Did you kill him, Pat?’
‘I don’t know! There was that moment where I could have stopped and I let the moment pass. And then it was gone forever. And nobody saw. And nobody came. And the kid – he looked like one of those delivery kids, Max, on a scooter – he was just lying there. And his scooter was at the side of the road and it had L-plates on, Max. He was just some kid on a scooter who still had his bloody learner plates.’
I grabbed my keys and my coat and headed for the door.
‘What are you going to do?’ she said.
‘Listen out for Scout,’ I told her. ‘She’s not going to wake up. But listen out for her anyway.’
I left the Prius where it was under the streetlamp outside my home and I drove to King’s Cross.
The area above the station that had somehow missed out on development covered a bleak, sprawling expanse of the city.
But there was only one petrol station up there.
I slowed the BMW as I drove past it. And I didn’t see anyone in the street. I didn’t see anyone at all. Whitestone was right. It looked like the surface of some uninhabited planet. Even the streetwalkers who used to patrol the area before the developers arrived further south in King’s Cross had moved on.
I breathed out.
And this is what I hoped.
That someone had spotted the kid in the street and called for an ambulance. Or the kid himself had only been stunned and had got up by himself. And that, impossibly, everything had turned out all right.
At the end of the street I did a U-turn and came slowly back.
And that was when I saw the phones in the middle of the road. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds, scattered across that empty street. It took me a while to realise that they had been stolen, snatched from the hands of the owner by a scooter that mounted the pavement and was driven away at speed by a rider who knew the police were not going to follow him because they would get into trouble if he got hurt during a pursuit. Which was ironic.
I pulled over and got out.
A trail of stolen smartphones led towards the lights of the garage.
And then I saw the scooter.
It was on its side in the darkness of the old automatic car wash. Nobody used the car wash any more. People are cheaper, some garage owner in some other place had once told me.
I walked towards the scooter.
And now I was not hoping.
Now I was praying.
Praying that someone had found him. Praying that he was at this moment being treated in some emergency ward.
But his body lay not far from his scooter, hidden in the darkness of that old car wash. I bent over him, doing deals with God.
But there were no deals to be done on that lonely road, and his lifeless eyes stared up at the orange glow of an empty sky.
The smell of coffee filled the loft.
Whitestone looked at my face and she knew what she had done.
She reached for her phone and started dialling 999.
‘Pat,’ I said.
‘Which service do you require?’
I took the phone from her and turned it off.
‘I have to tell them what I’ve done,’ she said.
‘Too late,’ I said. ‘You had to do that when it happened or you can’t do it at all.’
She shook her head. ‘No!’
‘Listen to me – hitting him was not your fault.’
‘I was on the Grey Goose! Of course it’s my bloody fault! I’m in the wrong, Max. And I’m sick to the stomach with it.’
I smelled the vodka on her breath and in my home.
‘Then maybe hitting him was your fault,’ I said. ‘I don’t know. And nobody is ever going to know. Certainly leaving the scene is on you, Pat, and it will always be on you. But this is the cruel truth – confession doesn’t help anyone now. Not that dead boy. Not you. Not your son. And not Jessica Lyle. If we lose you, then we are all finished. If you go down for this – and you will go down if you tell them what you did – then it’s all over. I need you, Pat. And your boy Justin needs you. And Jessica Lyle needs you.’
She was not convinced.
Her every instinct was to tell the truth about what she had done. Her every instinct was to face the punishment for her crime. She was a decent woman. I did not tell her that the boy she had killed probably didn’t have a decent bone in his body.
Because Pat Whitestone would not have cared.
‘What if someone saw me? What if they ask you what I did, Max?’
‘I’m never going to lie for you,’ I said. ‘But I will never rat you out.’
She shuddered with the horror of it.
‘This is what is going to happen,’ I said. ‘You are going to go home to Justin. And in the morning, you are going to take your car into the garage and get it fixed. And you are never going to talk about this to anyone. Not even me.’
‘But it’s wrong,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it just wrong, Max?’
‘Not if we find Jessica Lyle,’ I said.