Die Twice

But Malik was right. There were a fair few people involved, some of whom I didn’t know from Adam. Any one of them could end up talking, although it was a bit late to worry about that now. I was glad that, through Malik, I at least had a means of finding out how well the investigation was going.
‘One way or another, it’s going to be a difficult one to crack,’ I added. ‘Time consuming.’
‘Perhaps. But definitely interesting. I’d love to talk to the man who did it. You know, the one who actually pulled the trigger.’
‘Why? What’ll he tell you? I expect he did it for money; something nice and mundane like that.’
Malik smiled. ‘I’m sure he did – it’s almost certainly a professional hit – but it takes a special kind of man to shoot dead three people without a second’s thought. Just like that.’ He clicked his fingers to signify his point. ‘People he’s almost certainly never met before. People who’ve never done him any harm.’
‘You’d probably find that whoever did it was pretty normal underneath it all.’
‘Normal people don’t murder each other.’
This time it was my turn to smile. ‘Normal people murder each other all the time.’
‘I don’t agree with that. Most murderers might look normal, but there’s always something rotten inside that makes them do what they do.’
‘I don’t know. It’s not always as cut and dried as that.’
Malik stared at me intensely. ‘It is always that cut and dried. Murder’s murder, and the people who commit it are bad people. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a black-and-white issue. Some murders aren’t quite as horrific as others, but none of them are justifiable. Under any circumstances. They’re just different shades of black.’
I could tell he felt passionately about what he was saying and thought it best not to say too much more on the matter. You never know when such conversations can be regurgitated and used against you somewhere down the line. So I conceded the point and the conversation drifted on through the awkward avenues of small talk before inevitably coming back to the case. After all, what else was there to talk about?
We both concluded that Welland was right about momentum. If we didn’t turn up clues in the next few days, and it really did turn out to be someone unknown to the victim – which I have to say is what everything seemed to point to – then the bottom would fall out of this case very quickly and we’d be left with nothing. Either waiting for our mystery perpetrator to strike again (a worrying enough scenario in itself) or losing him for ever amid the vast ranks of the unsolveds, which somehow I felt would be even worse.
Malik stayed for two drinks to give him the opportunity to buy me a brew back, then it was time for him to return to the family seat in Highgate where his pretty wife and two young children awaited him. He offered to share a taxi with me but I decided to stay put for a while. I was hungry, but I fancied one more drink before I headed back to the flat. I’d got the taste of beer now.
One of the regulars, an old guy with a raspy voice whom I knew vaguely, came and joined me and we chatted about this and that for a while. Normal shit: football results, the price of beer, what a fuck-up the government was making of everything. Sometimes it’s nice to talk to civilians. It doesn’t require you to rack your brains in case you missed something. Things just flow along nice and easy. But when the guy started going on about his wife’s pickled-onion-sized bunions, and I started thinking that I hoped I’d be dead by the time I got to his age, I knew it was time to go.
It was eight o’clock when the cab dropped me off outside my front door. The iron-grey cloud cover that had sat above the city most of the morning had now broken up completely, you could even make out the odd star. The temperature had dropped accordingly and the night had a pleasant wintery feel about it.
The first thing I did when I got inside was phone Danny, but he wasn’t at home. I tried him on his mobile but got diverted to the message service, so I left one telling him to be in at five p.m. the next day so that I could drop the money round to him. Then I showered, washing off the dirt of the day, and thought about food.
I found a carton of something called creamy prawn risotto in the freezer. It said ‘ready in twenty minutes’ on the sleeve and the photo didn’t look too unappetizing so I defrosted it in the microwave. While it was cooking, I took my usual seat on the sofa and switched on the TV, turning straight to the news channel.
Two passport-type photographs dominated the screen. They were of the Cherokee driver and his front-seat passenger. The driver looked different from the previous night. In the photo he was smiling broadly and there were laughter lines around his eyes. It gave you the impression that he’d probably been quite a nice bloke when he was alive. Old greasy face next to him looked better as well. He was still staring moodily at the camera, like he’d just been told off by someone twenty years his junior, but he’d lost the shiftiness he’d been exuding the previous night, and it looked like he’d washed his hair and given it a decent comb, which had improved his appearance no end.
The report named the driver as Paul Furlong, a thirty-six-year-old father of two young children, and his passenger as forty-nine-year-old Terry Bayden-Smith, who’d been with customs since leaving school. Bayden-Smith was divorced and presumably had no kids because none were mentioned.
Their faces disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a male reporter in a