Jo stretched across and blocked him with her arm. ‘Sexton could pick up the call,’ she reminded him. ‘Phones only.’
They were still negotiating traffic when Dan rang Foxy, who relayed each sentence, covering the mouthpiece in between.
‘The O2 is all clear, Jo,’ he said, pausing to listen. He drew a breath, and held the phone on his lap. ‘Still no sign of Sexton, and his phone’s off.’
Jo frowned.
Foxy put the phone back to his ear. He grunted, and hung up. ‘Dan wants us back there now, Jo.’
‘Fuck that,’ Jo said. ‘I’m going to Sexton’s home.’
‘You can’t go in there without a warrant. Anything you get without one will be inadmissible.’
‘Life always takes first priority, remember?’
‘Not when we don’t have any missing-persons reports to justify a search.’
‘Spare me,’ Jo said, pulling up. ‘Station’s a ten-minute walk from here.’
‘I’m not leaving you.’ Foxy folded his arms obstinately.
Jo thought for a few seconds. ‘Why don’t you call Dan and tell him we’re on our way back? We don’t have to mention we’re going via Sexton’s. Okay?’
Foxy grunted, and did as he was told.
Jo pulled out again into the traffic.
‘I say the name Gavin Sexton to you, what’s the first thing you think of?’ she asked.
‘The job,’ Foxy said. ‘Someone who lives and breathes the job.’
‘That’s what I was afraid you were going to say,’ Jo said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, in all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never known him not to call in even when he’s on holiday – that’s when he takes his holidays.’
‘He went to Old Trafford a couple of years ago.’
‘So he supports Man United – so do half of all Irish males. I don’t know anything about his private life, though. Do you?’
‘It’s not easy, to get over something like that,’ Foxy said. ‘Finding yourself suddenly alone, I mean. It’s hard.’
‘I know, Foxy, I know,’ Jo said, pulling up outside a bookie’s on Dorset Street. Sexton lived in the flat above it.
‘You know, he never once asked me in,’ she said as they approached Sexton’s door, at the side of the shopfront. ‘All those times I dropped him home, or he kipped in my house, he never so much as offered me a cuppa.’
After picking up a key from the manager of the Indian restaurant next door, whom she knew was leasing the place, Jo opened the door to a narrow set of stairs.
‘Stairs?’ Foxy said, reading her mind.
Access to and transport from off-street parking without being noticed would have been difficult, next to impossible even, especially if Sexton was trying to haul anything life-sized in or out.
Jo’s eyes travelled the skirting for any stains. Nothing. She climbed the stairs and rapped the door then, realizing it had been left unlocked, pushed it open.
The place was the kind of bedsit that gets called a studio flat in a classified. It was sparsely furnished: an armchair facing a TV, a computer on the dinner table. It all looked desperate for a woman’s touch. There wasn’t even a carpet on the floor.
‘Christ, it’s a hovel,’ Foxy said. ‘I wouldn’t leave my dog here for the night.’
‘Wouldn’t the dust rising from the concrete play havoc with your lungs?’ Foxy asked.
‘Or sinuses,’ Jo replied, glancing at the two doors on the back wall and crossing the room.
‘Do you remember how Maura died?’ she asked Foxy over her shoulder as she pushed the first door open. It led to a toilet. ‘With a vacuum-cleaner cord, wasn’t it?’
The second door led into the bedroom. Jo headed to a bedside locker and started going through the drawers.
‘You think that’s why he’s got no carpet?’ Foxy asked.
Jo pulled out a credit-card receipt and held it out to Foxy. It was dated 9 p.m. the previous night and was from an off licence, showing the purchase of a bottle of red wine.
‘Sexton brought one round to my house last night, but there was one in Mac’s bin too.’
Foxy nodded. ‘I know the place. It’s right beside the IFSC. Where Mac lived.’
‘And died,’ Jo said. The receipt put Sexton at the right time and place for Mac’s murder. It was all the proof she needed to get a warrant for his arrest.
55
Sexton slid the glass door open and stepped inside the porch, knocking gently on the front door. He never rang the bell when he called to the Freemans’, in case Katie was sleeping.
Stepping back into the tarmac driveway, he lifted the flap of his jacket, eyeing the box he had tucked under his arm critically before readjusting it to make sure it was well hidden. He expected Katie would already have Barbie in her showjumping costume, but he hadn’t had time to look for something original – he was up the walls with work on the investigation. Still, it was better than arriving with his hands empty. And it was his way of letting Ryan and Angie know that Katie would always come first with him, no matter what either, or both of them, turned out to be mixed up in.
He opened a couple of the buttons on his shirt and pushed his sleeves up. He’d only come because Ryan had texted him it was urgent. Sexton had tried phoning him back to tell him there was no way he could walk off the job, not with Mac’s body having been found in the early hours of this morning, but Ryan hadn’t answered. After failing to get any answer from Angie’s mobile, or their landline either, he’d stood up from his desk in the incident room and announced that he was heading to the newsagent’s across the road to grab a sandwich. Then he’d switched his phone off and hopped into his car to speed over.
He looked over both shoulders, checking the street both ways, nervously. It was still only mid-afternoon, and he knew from having switched his phone on briefly to check his messages that nobody was looking for him, yet he was jumpy as fuck. He hadn’t had a wink’s sleep last night after seeing Mac strung up like that. It reminded him of how he’d found Maura, and that opened up a whole other can of worms, which had required a lot of high-percentage alcohol to close again. Still, if Jo Birmingham found out he was here, there’d be no excuses. And she could stop here at any stage, given their conversation last night. Now she knew about what had happened to Katie Freeman, it was only a matter of time before she called.
In front of him, the door creaked half open. A man in his late twenties peered back at him through the gap. He had a shaved head and a familiar face, but Sexton couldn’t place him or see the rest of him from the neck down. ‘All right?’ he asked him. ‘Ryan home?’
The man shook his head and went to close the door.
Sexton put his hand flat on it and held the door open. ‘I’m not selling anything, mate. I’m here because Ryan told me to come around.’ When the man still didn’t budge, he felt his heart speed up. ‘What about Angie?’ he asked. ‘Is she here?’
‘No.’
Sexton leaned back and placed a hand on the bonnet of Angie’s car, which was parked in the drive directly behind him, not taking his eyes off the man. It was still warm.
‘You sure?’ he asked, springing forwards with his arm extended so that the ball of his hand knocked the door straight into the man. The man stumbled back. Sexton put one hand around his throat and pushed him up against the hall wall inside. The Barbie box fell to the ground.
The man held his two arms up in surrender. He was barefoot and wearing an overwashed Metallica T-shirt and jeans.
‘Who are you?’ Sexton demanded. Pulling his wallet out of his jacket pocket, he let one half fall open to reveal his ID.
‘Relax, mate, I’m Angie’s brother,’ the man replied. ‘I’m just housesitting for them till they get back. They’re on a visit to the hospital.’
Sexton heard a whimper from upstairs. He tightened his grip. ‘Who’s that then?’ he asked.
‘Their dog,’ the man answered calmly.
Sexton releas
ed his hold. Taking another couple of steps into the house and down the hall, he picked up the landline and dialled Ryan’s number, not taking his eyes off the guy. A phone in the sitting room rang.
The man met Sexton’s stare. ‘He’ll have forgotten it, that’s all,’ he said.
Sexton pushed the door to the sitting room open to get the phone and saw Cassie lying motionless on her side. He pushed past the man, who’d moved to the doorway, grabbed the banisters and took the stairs two at a time.
There was no mistaking the sound when he got to the top. It was someone crying. Turning right, he pushed open the bedroom door. Ryan and Angie were bound and gagged and lying on their backs on the floor, eyes frantic.
56
Am I in a coffin? Sexton asked himself. He was in pitch darkness and relying on his other senses to work out what was going on. He remembered seeing Ryan and Angie, then there was a blow to his head that made stars burst before his eyes and another bang as he chipped the banister rail; he recalled feeling his legs buckle beneath him – and now this. Have I been buried alive?
It was so cold. Freezing. His teeth were trying to chatter, but his mouth was gagged with a wad of something foul-tasting, his tongue wedged against a rough texture, like gauze. The taste and the smell were overpowering. It was chemical, and he could feel it stripping his mucous membranes. Formaldehyde? His stomach gagged, and the effect almost choked him. Don’t, he thought. Don’t resist. Save energy.
There was a hardness against his back, and his wrists and ankles were bound with zip ties; his fingers could feel the tail of the plastic. He’d already tried to sit up, but had banged his head. Whatever the ceiling was over him, it was so low he couldn’t even turn sideways either. He banged again with his head and listened to the zinging noise the bone made against steel. Hollow, I think it’s hollow. That means I’m not underground.
How long had he been like this? he wondered. Not long in this cold. You could not survive for long in this cold. He could hear his rasping breath, his lungs heaving for air. There wasn’t much of it, he realized. The thought made him panic. He could feel his throat restricting. And he hated confined spaces at the best of times. What had happened?
It’s a fridge, he thought, watching his breath cloud in front of him. Not a coffin, because it was not made of wood and the walls were cold, hard and silky. Steel. As he kicked the enclosure surrounding him, he realized he was naked. The bastard had stripped him. What was the smell? Bleach? He could hear the wheeze in his chest, and concentrated on his breathing. He thought about a case some years back in which two bachelor brothers were burgled in the west of Ireland, tied up and left to die. A neighbour found them a couple of days later, but they’d died of cadavaric spasm. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die fighting, not because this evil bastard has scared me to death, he thought. ‘You’ll have to kill me, you bastard,’ he tried to call. But his tongue didn’t move. Think, think. Like in an investigation, build up the picture. He lifted his hand and hit a solid wall.
He could hear something. He held his breath so he could hear over the pounding of his heart in his eardrums. Footsteps.
A scraping noise, a rattle, like a filing cabinet, a slide of wheels against a runner, and he was out in blinding light. He blinked rapidly. When his corneas had shrunk to the size of pinholes, he realized he knew where he was. He was in the morgue, on a slab, on one of the storage shelves. He heard the steel rattle of a trolley as it was wheeled up to him. He tried to rotate his head to see who it was, and found he was staring at a face under a hood.
‘Matthias,’ a voice said gravely. ‘Do you not know me?’
Sexton shook his head.
The man was dressed like a monk. He lowered his hood.
Sexton stopped moving. He knew him now – it was the man who’d introduced himself as Angie’s brother, and who was also, he now realized with blinding clarity, Hawthorne’s assistant, the man who’d helped perform Rita’s autopsy in the morgue, but his beard was gone.
He groaned as everything fell into place and watched as the killer reached for a scalpel off a kidney-shaped tray. He felt its cool, slick point at the base of his neck. He shook his head desperately, almost choking on the gag, and felt a trickle of wet roll down the side of his neck. Had his throat been cut? No just pricked. If it had been cut, there’d be a gush. There was no gush.
Sexton stopped moving as he realized something else. If Angie’s brother worked in the morgue, it meant he hadn’t broken in. No alarm bells would go off. Nobody would come looking.
It was Friday evening, and they had the whole night ahead of them.
57
It was 6 p.m., and the station was a hive of activity. Every uniform who had ever asked a question at a checkpoint, sat in on an interview or so much as passed on a phone message was there. Condensation was rolling down the walls and fogging up the windows. There were more officers out on the corridor, shouting in to find out if there were any updates. Mac had been murdered, and now word was spreading that Gavin Sexton was missing. All the phone lines were being used, and as soon as one phone was put down, it started to ring again, mobiles going off in between. This was the atmosphere Jo pushed her way into when she and Foxy got back from Sexton’s flat.
Dan was standing at the top of the incident room alongside Jenny Friar, arms folded, listening and nodding as she pointed things out to him on the wipe board. Dave White was immersed in a file. Frank Black was on the phone, covering his ear and then shouting the word ‘minister’ often enough to let everyone know who was on the other end. Merrigan was recounting the story of how his colleagues had got one over on him and hadn’t let him in on the joke all the way to the station after they’d picked him up, but as soon as people realized he was talking about himself, they turned away. All conversations dimmed as word went round Jo was there. Dan headed over to a desk and sat on it, facing her.
She rolled up her sleeves. ‘Right! Anyone not attached to this investigation leaves now.’ Nobody moved. ‘Full time!’ she clarified.
The crowd began to vibrate.
‘What’s happened to Sexton?’ a voice called.
More questions followed hard on its heels, officers demanding more information, not giving Jo a chance to answer. She raised her voice. ‘You’ll all find out what’s going on soon enough. Right now I need some organization in here. Out, the lot of you!’
The crowd began to disperse begrudgingly.
‘You too,’ Jo said to a straggler, motioning a thumb to the door.
Ten uniforms who’d been attached to the incident room full time, most of them given the task of trawling painstakingly through the CCTV footage, remained behind. A couple of them went back to work in front of monitors and put their headphones back on. The rest were on the phones, or inputting information from the paperwork into the system.
‘Is Sexton dead or alive?’ Jenny Friar asked baldly.
Jo ignored her. ‘We have five victims, all of them known to each other, one of them known to us all,’ she said to Dan.
‘Boss, if Sexton’s missing, shouldn’t that be two of them we all know, and six victims?’ one of the uniforms asked.
‘We don’t know that yet,’ Jo said. ‘What we do know is that our killer has got a Bible fixation and that he’s wiping out everyone connected with a crime against a little girl who is unable to talk. We know Gavin Sexton has been conducting his own parallel investigation, and we have reason to suspect that he’s either going to be the next victim – or he could be the killer. That’s all we’ve got.’
‘Sexton’s a good cop,’ Dan said. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree there, Jo.’
‘You also brought Mac in for questioning,’ Friar said. ‘Or are we all on your suspect list?’
‘Look, I don’t want to believe Sexton is the killer either,’ Jo said. ‘Of course I don’t. But not one of you suspected Mac was on the take – and look what happened to him.’
Nobody said anything.
‘Now, let’s stop thi
s maniac today – whoever he is. The way I see it, we have to split up and approach it from either end. At one, we’ve got our victims, and at the other, the killer. Victim-wise, we don’t know if anyone else was involved in what happened to Katie Freeman, but if they were, we have to presume they are now in serious trouble. Everyone else has been wiped out.’
‘Doesn’t that make you a possible victim?’ someone called from the back. ‘If the killer knows you’re trying to stop him, he’s going to consider you fair game.’
Jo kept going. ‘Foxy has a team over at the Freemans’ house now to bring her parents in for questioning. We’ll work on this end of the investigation when they get here.’ She looked around. ‘Any questions?’
Again, there was silence.
‘The other end we could use to crack this case is the killer himself. He’s got a modus operandi, and his victims are all linked, meaning we’ve got a pattern. Most importantly of all, it’s looking like his next and last killing will be in the O2. Dan, can you look after setting up the surveillance inside and outside the venue?’
Dan looked startled. ‘You been there lately? It’s a huge place,’ he said.
‘We’re in the closing stages,’ Jo said. ‘We don’t find our killer there, we never will. But we will find a victim, that I promise you. Let’s just pray it’s not Sexton.’
‘I was at a concert there recently,’ one of the uniforms piped up from the back. He was fresh-faced, and looked no more than twenty-one. ‘They got cameras everywhere, which means there’ll be a control room.’
‘Good thinking,’ Jo said. ‘You head down there now and find out more about the surveillance. Oh, and organize a blueprint – you know, drawings of the O2 layout. And bring it straight back here. Pronto, yeah?’
The uniform stood up so quickly his chair fell over.
The phone on the computer desk rang and Merrigan answered. ‘They don’t have enough people in reception to deal with the ladies of the night,’ he said accusingly. ‘Shall I tell the lads to send them home?’
If I Never See You Again Page 22
