Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  ‘You really want to know, Danny?’ she snapped. ‘I was three months gone with my first child when I found out that my husband was having an affair, okay? My whole life fell apart, I got diagnosed with acute stress, and for some reason the change in hormones triggered a natural termination. I miscarried, lost the baby, lost my husband and lost my whole fucking life!’

  Honor tossed her fork onto her plate, her appetite withered amid churning adrenaline, grinding regret and loathing for herself, for her past, for now, for everything. Danny sat in silence for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘I see.’

  Honor stared at him. ‘You see?’

  Samir was watching her as though he was circling a wounded predator, the nervous suitor in the Black Widow’s web. Danny, on the other hand, merely nodded as though they were discussing the price of bloody apples.

  ‘I see what’s eating at you, and it makes sense,’ he replied. ‘Hiding all this stuff away, hiding yourself away, it’s not fixing anything, it’s not making you feel any better, right?’

  Right. Fuck off, Danny. You’re right, but I can’t let you see that. I can’t let anybody see that. Why the hell can’t I let anybody see that? Honor tucked her legs beneath her. ‘I don’t think that anything is going to just fix things, funnily enough. Losing a child

  kind of does that to people, but you wouldn’t know.’

  Danny continued to eat, not letting her anger get to him. Jesus, why was he putting her through a bloody interrogation after the day that she’d had? The lighting in the apartment was low enough that shadows abounded around them like slumbering demons.

  ‘I lost my mother when I was young,’ Samir said softly, ‘so I do know something of what you’re feeling, actually.’

  There was a quiet dignity about Samir’s reply that furthered her shame. She sighed, the boil of her indignation lanced once more.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  Danny mopped up after his meal and tossed the napkin onto his plate.

  ‘And I lost my wife to the job. You’re sorry for a lot of things, just like all of us. This isn’t your first rodeo, you don’t need to hear this crap, but I’m done with you sitting there hating yourself. There’s no reason to beat yourself up over what happened. You didn’t fail Jayden. I didn’t fail Jayden. The department didn’t fail Jayden. Nobody did. That man out there, this is all part of what he wants, just like you said. Notoriety. Discord. Conflict. The media feed on it like bugs on a corpse, they love it, and so does the public, although they won’t admit it to themselves, but there’s a reason headlines sell. There’s only one person to blame for everything going on here: what’s important is that the person to blame isn’t you.’

  Honor sat for a moment in silence. She looked down at her food, and reluctantly picked up her fork and started playing with it, unable to think of anything to say, like an admonished child who didn’t quite understand what they’d done wrong.

  ‘You’re the person who’s meant to fix it all,’ Danny added. Honor blurted a bitter little laugh. ‘I can’t fix any of it.’

  ‘You can,’ Danny insisted. ‘That’s what you won’t let yourself see. You think that you’re less than you are.’

  ‘Since when the hell are you a psychologist?’ she asked, but this time managed a smile, even though it felt as though she was trying to bend an iron bar with her lips.

  ‘Armchair shrink,’ he smiled back, ‘pub philosopher and full–time know–it–all. I don’t know what I’m talking about, not really, but it’s instinct – I can see what you’re going through because I’m outside of it, not consumed by it. I can see the answers, what I would do if I were you, but they’re no good to you because you need to solve this your own way, the way that works for you. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say – do this all for you, nobody else. Stop surviving and start fighting.’

  Honor leaned back and took a sip of her wine. ‘Sounds easy if you say it quickly enough, right?’

  Danny nodded, gulped down a mouthful of wine, then pointed at her over the rim of his glass.

  ‘My dad used to tell me that the best way to handle stressful situations was to treat them like a dog would: if you can’t eat it or hump it, just piss on it and walk away.’

  Honor sprayed a fine mist of wine into the air. Endorphins flushed her system with a warm embrace and she realised it was the first time she’d laughed in as long as she could remember. Samir noticed it too, grinned quietly.

  ‘You light up when you laugh.’

  He likes you. Honor stifled the giggles, stared at her plate. Samir wasn’t somebody she was interested in, not in that way. She instead found herself looking at Danny, scruffy–haired, cocky, a born scrapper and yet more insightful of the human mind than she’d have given him credit for. The light in the apartment seemed warmer, the demons banished into dark recesses, afraid of the light.

  ‘I can’t go back,’ she said to him. ‘The press crucified me in that conference and it’s all over the bloody planet.’

  ‘Yep, you’re famous for screwing up on one of London’s biggest investigations.’ ‘That wasn’t the supportive appraisal I was hoping for.’

  ‘I know,’ Danny replied, ‘so what are you looking for?’

  Honor didn’t know. She really didn’t bloody know. She shrugged.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Danny said, as though reading her mind. ‘You’ve got to change the way you look at things. You think that you can’t go back to work, that you’re a laughingstock?’

  Again, she shrugged.

  ‘It’s bullshit,’ Danny snapped. ‘You’ve convinced yourself that you’re worthless. Everybody in that office knows that you’ve conquered every unknown since you started work on the case. You were the one who first deduced that Sebastian Dukas was murdered. You were the one who first suggested that the killings were an attempt to emulate Jack the Ripper. You were the one who figured out he was using the sewers to travel across the city unobserved, and you were the one who narrowed down where Jayden Nixx was. Every detective in the department knows all of that, and right now every one of them thinks that you got a bad deal in that conference. They’re disgusted at the way you were treated, and so am I.’

  Honor now felt ashamed at herself for sinking so low, for not being able to separate herself from her anxieties.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said, unable to think of anything else worthwhile to share. ‘That’s right, because you were sitting on your arse feeling sorry for yourself. You need to stand up. You need to fix this. You’re not a pariah at work, you’re held in high esteem.’

  ‘The rest of the world sees me as a failure,’ Honor protested. ‘The department will have to fire me due to the public pressure. I can’t fix that.’

  Danny watched her for a moment.

  ‘Can’t you?’ he asked, and then leaned forwards. ‘Catch him. Find this bastard and bring him to justice. Prove them all wrong. Prove yourself wrong. That’s how you fix this – by doing nothing more than your job.’

  Danny picked up his glass and drained his wine, then he got to his feet.

  ‘I need to get back,’ he said. ‘Grab a shower and some kip before I head back into work. Do me a favour – get some sleep, get over this and get back into the office as soon as you can, okay? I don’t think we’re going to catch this guy any quicker if you’re not alongside us.’

  Honor stood up, surprised that Danny was leaving so soon, and then instantly wondering why she felt that way.

  ‘I will do,’ she promised, surprised all over again that her voice sounded calmer in her own ears. Danny had an unexpected way with words that seemed to have quelled the black chasm inside her into an ocean of gentle swells. Or maybe it was the bloody wine, she couldn’t really tell.

  Danny shot Samir a glance, and Samir belatedly stood up and joined Danny as he headed for the front door, opened it, and stepped outside.

  ‘We’ll see you in a while. Did I forget to mention that we got CCTV of a tall man in a hooded t
op entering Jayden Nixx’s apartment block before she returned home?’

  ‘Jesus, Danny! Yes, you bloody forgot!’

  ‘Jason is also on the footage, as well as Jayden’s friends, but they are all seen leaving again,’ Samir added. ‘The unidentified male in the hoodie enters the building, but isn’t seen to leave.’

  Honor’s mind raced.

  ‘He found another way out,’ she said, ‘one not covered by the security cameras.’ ‘They have them covering the entrances,’ Danny confirmed, ‘not so much the exits.

  He’s our guy, and we already checked Wheeler out – it’s definitely not him, he was with his solicitor at the time. The apartment is covered by a camera and a security pad, with a four–digit keycode pass.’

  ‘He knew the code?’

  ‘We’re checking up on it,’ Samir said. ‘First thought was that it might be Jenson Cooper, Wheeler’s manager, as he has skills in that area. But he didn’t fit the security system and he has an alibi; he’s on camera headed home about the same time that the abduction took place. Again, same goes for his contractors, O’Rourke and the others clearly seen heading home after work. Somebody, somewhere, knew that code and could access the building ahead of Jayden.’

  ‘We searched Jayden’s apartment, but nothing was found,’ Danny added. ‘Forensics are there too. The apartment manager said that although they change the door codes once a month, it would be easy for someone to note the code by watching others enter the building ahead of them. We’re checking to see if this guy shows up on previous footage, but it’s gonna take a while. So,’ Danny said with a grin, ‘you need to come back in the morning, right, or this arsehole might yet slip away again, and we don’t want that, do we?’

  Honor managed a smile. Danny turned and walked with Samir away from her through the door to the stairwell, leaving her with a simple choice: fight or flight?

  There wasn’t much time.

  He moved with quiet efficiency, his hood up against the rain still pelting the city streets. His route carried him through Whitechapel, always hugging the backstreets, moving from shadow to shadow like the dangerous thoughts flitting through the vaults of his mind.

  This was how the Ripper had moved, unafraid, unchallenged. The alleys were no longer as narrow and dangerous as they had once been, apartment blocks in place of warrens of cut–throughs and alleys that had been the Ripper’s lair, but nonetheless the rain kept people inside, and moisture in the air cast the light from streetlamps into diaphanous orbs. Although much of the old city had been demolished and new buildings erected after the Second World War, he knew the locations of all the 18th century buildings that remained.

  But now he ignored them, for the time of worshipping the past was coming to an end. Now, the time to honour was his own. Would, someday, citizens walk these streets and think of the great killing campaign conducted by a mysterious figure in the early 21st century? He liked to think that such a thing might happen, hundreds of years from now. His legacy was becoming legend, and he walked with urgency but also in high spirits again, for he was close to his goal. Jayden Nixx had died, and his next victim was close at hand.

  Emily Wilson, aged thirty–two, an office assistant who worked up near Hoxton. A fanatical tennis fan and skilled player in her own right; married, no children, lived in a rented apartment in Whitechapel, right on his doorstep. The target was perfect, and although his plans for her had been set for a few weeks’ time, the recent discoveries by Detective Sergeant Honor McVey and her team meant that he needed to revise his timeline.

  McVey was something of a mystery. The woman intrigued him intensely, and he’d watched her recent press conference with great interest. The media had torn into her, as expected given what was happening in the city, but she had shown great dignity despite the unwarranted attacks. McVey represented the greatest threat to his plans, to his grand design, and so he had taken the time to investigate her. It had not taken long. London detectives found themselves in the papers and on the news more often than people would at first think, and he had soon been able to track her down via former school friends, associates, colleagues and other people who either knew her, had known her, or were connected to her in some way in the digital age. Within an hour he had figured out where she lived, some of her routines, her likes and dislikes, the times she travelled to and from work, and some of her history. And there, he had been delighted to discover, was the source of his greatest interest: Zach Arnold, a thirty–four–year–old computer graphics artist, and his new fiancé, Natalie Delray, thirty–six. What interested him was the fact that Facebook photos on friends’ profiles featuring both Zach and Honor showed them clearly as a couple perhaps just a year previously, and yet now Zach was engaged to another woman.

  He smiled. Something there was afoot, and he knew that he would need to research a little further. He had listened to her assessment of him as a killer and had enjoyed it, duly impressed at her insight: her only mistake was in assuming that he was somehow deranged, a man suffering from mental health issues. In truth, he had never felt more of purpose and conviction than now, his nerves jangling to primitive chords as he hurried along, revelling in the darkness and shadows and rain spilling from black skies.

  Emily would be home soon, and he didn’t want to miss her. He hefted the rucksack he wore into a more comfortable position as he walked, but that was easier said than done, as the contents writhed and tumbled within, caressing his back as he strode through the deserted back alleys. Detective McVey had noticed that he avoided the sight of blood. That didn’t mean his victims should. If they wanted blood, he would give them blood.

  Emily staggered out of Legends nightclub and sucked in a deep lungful of air, stunned at how drunk she felt. A group of her friends spilled from the club in a colourful little flood onto the glistening pavements, the rain falling more lightly now, which was just as well as they struggled with umbrellas and coats. The whisper of the rain competed with a dull thudding bass coming from within the club as they said their goodbyes, huddled together beneath a canopy of umbrellas before turning their separate ways and heading home.

  Emily was not used to staying out this late, nor drinking as much as she had done. However, Lucy’s birthday did come but once a year, as she had told her friends repeatedly as they downed tequila shots and danced the night away. The club had been busy, filled with students who looked considerably bloody younger than Emily, another sign that her clubbing days were long behind her. So, it would seem, were her drinking days as she swayed unsteadily, her heels clicking on the wet pavement. She hadn’t had that many, had she?

  Emily breathed deeply on the cool air, keeping her mind focused as she walked along the main road. Stay close to the traffic, her husband Alex had advised her – never cut through back alleys, or across the common. Despite her weariness she obeyed, avoiding the darker recesses as she made her way into Whitechapel. It wasn’t a long walk, but the rain and her increasing fatigue made it more laborious than usual, and she was glad when she finally reached her front door, one in a row of small town houses. Emily had >been lucky – her late father had bought several homes in London, back in the 1960s when property had been cheaper, and four years previously she had inherited one of them in his will.

  With some struggle Emily managed to unlock her front door, feeling as though she was sixteen again and suffering the after–effects of too much sangria, as she staggered inside and then locked the door behind her. With a sigh of relief, she slipped out of her coat and shoes and dumped them on the floor, too tired to bother putting them away. The house was dark, unsurprising given it was almost half past one in the morning – Alex would be long asleep.

  She made her way up the stairs, swaying dangerously and leaning on the bannister for support. Jesus, this was really out of hand – Lucy had a lot to answer for. She made it to the top of the stairs, feeling as though every breath was becoming harder to make, but she was beside her bedroom now and she could see Alex asleep beneath the covers. Emily cre
pt into the room, not wanting to wake him, then slid out of her dress and underwear in the darkness, one arm against the wall for support. She had never wanted to sleep so much in her life, and with a grateful sigh she slipped under the covers alongside Alex, felt the warmth of his naked body as she snuggled up against him and heard him shuffle about.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,’ she murmured softly.

  Beside her, Alex turned over, and in the dim light Emily saw the face of a complete stranger smiling back at her. She opened her mouth to scream but one large hand clamped over her jaw and she felt the man’s large, naked body press against hers with immoveable force. Pinned beneath the sheets, her consciousness beginning to waver, she felt a rough hand slide up and down her naked body, caressing her gently as her world faded into blackness.

  20

  Honor walked into Bishopsgate at six–thirty in the morning, enshrouded within a suffocating bubble of anxiety. She had no idea how the team would look at her, whether they would mock her, ignore her or just not notice her at all. Danny had told her without any shadow of a doubt that they were all on her side, but her stomach was tumbling as she rode the elevator up to the second floor and walked into the Incident Room fourteen heart beats later.

  Detectives were already hard at work behind their desks, and a few said “good morning” to her as she passed. Despite the horrible mauling she had endured at the hands of the press, there seemed little further reaction from them. She had been forced to watch the morning news before leaving, as much to update herself on the situation as anything else and, as expected, she was still the face of the investigation.

  Slightly buoyed, she made her way to her desk. ‘Got something here, boss.’

  Danny was at his desk, hands burrowing into a pile of papers while he watched CCTV feeds on his monitor, clearly seeking evidence of their quarry’s movements around the times of the killings. He looked like he’d been there since the early hours, his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, wearing the same shirt he’d had on the night before.