The Death Knock

by Elodie Harper

  ‘That’s a shame. Who’s going to implement the fifteen minute rule?’

  Charlie raises an eyebrow at her. ‘I didn’t hear that.’ He turns back to his computer screen. ‘So, I’ve got you a name and address. Donald Emneth, he’s over in Costessey, not far from where girl number two was dumped.’

  Frankie heaves herself to her feet. ‘Please tell me it’s not a self-shoot.’

  ‘Would I do that to you?’ He sees her face. ‘All right, don’t answer that. Ray’s already on his way there.’

  Even if Charlie hadn’t given her his address, she would have been hard pressed to miss Donald Emneth’s street. Three satellite trucks dwarf the row of bungalows and the quiet road is full of people clutching notepads, cameras and takeaway coffees. She spots Ray loitering near a privet hedge, dark glasses on, having a smoke. She parks up and walks over to him.

  ‘You’ll have to wait your turn with Captain Birdseye,’ he says, nodding in the direction of their bearded prey standing in his front garden gesticulating at another reporter and camera crew. ‘There’s quite a queue.’

  ‘Did you see the news this morning?’ she says. ‘I don’t think he’s right in the head.’

  Ray shrugs. ‘Still might be the killer, I suppose. So it’s as well to get a few shots of him, they’ll be handy at the trial.’

  ‘You don’t think he did it surely? Why would he invite the press into his garden?’

  ‘She’s right, it’s never the mad ones.’ Malcolm from the Press Association joins them. He looks haggard with dark circles under his eyes and there’s a large white blotch on the shoulder of his navy jumper. He follows the line of Frankie’s gaze and peers at the stain. ‘Toby was sick this morning. Bang on cue for Daddy’s goodbye cuddle. Babies.’ He shakes his head. ‘Don’t have one, you’ll never sleep again.’

  ‘No need to tell me, mate,’ says Ray, taking a drag. ‘Our youngest has just started toddling. You just wait till they get to that stage. Bloody nightmare.’

  The two men laugh. Frankie isn’t keen to get sucked into this fatherly chat; she knows the next stage will be an exchange of phone screensavers, the bragging disguised as complaints, followed by questions about when she and Jack are going to ‘get started’. She’s feeling unusually chippy about it, with her thirtieth birthday just a few months away. ‘Our Ancient Mariner,’ she says. ‘Do you think the police are likely to arrest him?’

  ‘Be surprised if they don’t,’ says Malcolm. ‘They’ll have to take him in for questioning at least. Looks a bit iffy if he did know all the girls. Assuming that’s not a lie.’

  Frankie can see the other TV crew are heading out of Donald Emneth’s garden gate. He’s still talking to the reporter, jabbing at the elbow of her bright blue coat. ‘We’d best head over,’ she says. ‘No point hanging about, we’ll have to interview him at the same time as one of the others.’

  ‘See you, Malcolm,’ says Ray, lifting the camera up from where it was resting by his feet. They head down the road. A couple of newspaper reporters are already in the garden. With a sinking feeling, she sees Luke Heffner dart out of a satellite truck just ahead. By the time they get to the bungalow, his cameraman is rolling. Donald Emneth shouts into it while Luke nods sagely.

  Ray and Frankie join the gaggle. She doesn’t introduce herself; there doesn’t seem much point. Donald Emneth is clearly up for talking to every journalist in the land. Ray is already in record, catching his speech, which now seems to be directed at nobody in particular. Mr Emneth is glassy-eyed, his beard even more unkempt at close quarters. He looks every bit as wired as you might expect of a man who has been live on various news channels since 7 a.m.

  ‘. . . So I says to Lily, be careful, love, watch whose car you get into. Lovely girl, she was, she came round for tea, regular. I used to lend her money. Tried to persuade her off the game, didn’t I? No sort of life for a girl like that . . .’

  ‘And how did you know Hanna?’ Luke interrupts.

  ‘She did my hair once. Nice lass.’

  Frankie exchanges glances with one of the other hacks. Mr Emneth doesn’t look like he’s been to a hairdresser since the 1990s.

  ‘Why would you go for a haircut in Great Yarmouth,’ she asks. ‘Isn’t that a bit of a trek?’

  ‘Free, wasn’t it?’ Donald Emneth doesn’t ask who she is or seem perturbed to find another stranger in his garden. ‘Got the flier somewhere.’ He rummages in his pocket, taking out a fistful of lint. ‘Not there,’ he says, looking down at the washed-up fragments. ‘Anyway, the college advertised. Free haircuts by the young girls. Because they was training, see? Not qualified yet.’

  Frankie is certain the college won’t have phrased the offer quite like that. She begins to feel queasy at the idea of Donald Emneth hotfooting it to Yarmouth, eager to have his hair washed and blow-dried by teenagers.

  ‘And did you strike up a friendship with Hanna afterwards?’ asks Luke.

  ‘Nah. I just recognised her face on the news. Little poppet. I was watching and thought, that’s the little girl who did my hair. I helped her get her training done.’

  ‘And what about Ava?’ says one of the newspaper journalists. It’s a young man in a pink shirt who Frankie hasn’t seen before.

  ‘Oh, Ava,’ says Donald Emneth with a sigh. ‘Now she was something special. I met her at a demo last year. A protest against those monster crops they’re making at the John Innes.’ He looks at Frankie, and for a horrible moment she thinks he might be about to accuse her of having a boyfriend who works there. ‘You know what I mean, the genetically modified whatsits. The plants that are going to give us all cancer and kill the field mice and butterflies and whatnot. I helped her too,’ he says with an air of triumph. ‘Brought her a cup of tea. But she had already got one.’

  Mr Emneth is ignoring Luke and the other two journalists now. Frankie has caught his attention and he’s staring at her tight jumper.

  ‘So just to recap,’ she says. ‘You’re saying you helped Lily and Sandra, gave them cups of tea and friendly advice. Hanna cut your hair and you met Ava at a demo. Isn’t that all a bit of a coincidence? And how can you be sure it really was Hanna and Ava, given the meetings were so fleeting?’

  ‘Never forget a pretty face,’ he says, his gaze transfixed several inches below her chin. ‘Always remember a lovely girl when I see one.’

  Ray and Frankie trot down the road. Another horde of journalists has turned up at Mr Emneth’s front door, giving them a chance to escape. He took an unwelcome shine to Frankie, and seemed reluctant to let them get away, even asking for her number. She gave him the telephone line for the company’s planning desk, and could just imagine the gratitude of her colleagues if the old man called. She would have to warn them.

  ‘Frances!’ A yell from behind makes her turn. It’s Luke Heffner. She waits. Perhaps he’s going to apologise for broadcasting the interview with Professor Marks.

  ‘This demo the old guy mentioned Ava was at,’ he says. ‘Will you lot have filmed that?’

  ‘Might have.’

  Luke frowns. ‘Well, could you check?’ He looks at her as if she’s a bit slow. ‘Obviously if we’ve got moving footage of one of the girls that would be really helpful.’

  ‘Women.’

  He looks perplexed. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘They’re women,’ she almost shouts. ‘They’re all over eighteen. That makes them women. Not girls.’

  ‘Only just eighteen in Hanna’s case,’ Luke says, unperturbed. ‘So could you check please? For the footage?’ Without waiting for her reply he turns and walks back to his satellite truck. She watches him go, restraining the urge to throw her notepad at his perfectly coiffed head.

  ‘I know he’s a bit of a wanker,’ Ray says, speaking quietly so there’s no way Luke can hear. ‘But wasn’t that a slight overreaction?’

  Frankie can feel anger churning in her stomach. The complaint from Martin Hungate, sleazy Donald Emneth gawping at her breasts and finally Luke, with his insufferab
le entitlement. But she can’t really direct all that annoyance at Ray, simply because he’s standing next to her. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t just that.’ He looks at her, waiting for more. She feels too tired to try to explain. ‘Never mind. Let’s get back to the newsroom and find that archive footage. Wonderboy is right. It would be useful if we’ve got Ava on tape.’

  The tape proves easy enough to find. A quick Google search for the date of the demo and she fetches it from the company’s library. Sitting at an edit machine, she plays the recording, moving through the crowd shots in slow motion. Bullseye. A flash of pink hair and there’s Ava. There’s something uncanny about seeing video of her. She looks so alive, her face lit with passion, waving her placard. Then the camera pans across the crowd of students and she’s lost from view. In all, the clip of her lasts fifteen seconds. Not much, but enough.

  Frankie watches it again, this time paying attention to the rest of the shot. She takes a sharp intake of breath. There, at the edge of the crowd, is Donald Emneth. His beard is in better trim and he doesn’t have the same air of bumbling ineptitude from their filming that morning. But it’s unmistakably him. Frankie freezes the frame, zooms in on his eyes.

  ‘Charlie!’ she shouts. ‘Come have a look at this.’

  He heads over. ‘You found her? Brilliant.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not all.’ She points at the screen. Charlie bends over, peering in the direction of her finger.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. Donald Emneth is staring at Ava, a look of focused malevolence on his face.

  Ava

  I spend so long staring at the door handle, waiting for it to turn, that when it eventually does I can’t believe my eyes. I think I must be hallucinating.

  But no, he’s here. I scramble to my feet. He steps into the room, locking the door behind him. We stand facing each other, just a few steps between us.

  ‘Jesus, it stinks in here,’ he says. ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I reply. ‘It doesn’t smell great.’

  ‘You all think you’re so irresistible, don’t you, covering your fucking faces with make-up? But you’re bags of stinking piss and shit underneath.’ He shudders, as if I might be contagious. I can’t think of anything to say back, I don’t know what he wants. He lowers a plastic bag to the floor. My heart leaps. Perhaps it’s more food, perhaps that means he’s not going to kill me. ‘Still, you’re not as bad as the first four,’ he carries on. ‘Fucking crack heads. Vomit and piss everywhere. Gibbering and shaking for want of a fix. God they stank.’ I feel like my insides are going to shrivel up at the mention of the other women. Four? I don’t remember there being that many missing. ‘Can you believe one of the vile bitches actually came here willingly, thinking I wanted to fuck her?’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m done with whores now. They’re too much. You and Hanna are a treat in comparison.’

  He stares at me, as if expecting some response. I dredge my mind, but it’s blank. There’s nothing in the section marked ‘polite small talk with psychopaths’. But I know I have to say something. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t like all the women who stayed here.’

  ‘I didn’t expect to like them. They were whores. You don’t like whores. You kill whores.’ He smacks the flat of his hand against the wall for emphasis. ‘Do you know the parents of one had the gall to go on the news, bleating away about what a lovely daughter she was to some fat slag of a reporter. Our darling Lily. Made me laugh. You should have seen your darling Lily after I knocked all her teeth out, I wanted to say. Ugly bitch didn’t look so pretty then. It took nothing to break her, Ava, she was pathetic. Always whining.’

  My hand flutters to my own mouth, as if I can feel Lily’s pain. For one dark moment I imagine I can hear her screams, still reverberating in this concrete room. I sway on my feet. He’s tapping his black-gloved fingers against the side of his dark trousers, his head cocked on one side, watching. He wants to break you too, says the voice in my head. Don’t let him see your fear. With a massive effort of will I force my panic back under control. ‘I guess most parents love their children,’ I say. ‘Whatever they’re like.’

  He gives a slow clap. ‘Very good, Ava, very good.’

  I gasp. It’s Peter Marks’s voice, the slight Edinburgh lilt, so soft you might miss it. The same stress he always makes on my name. I stare at the masked figure in total disbelief. ‘Well done. Don’t antagonise him. Try to make him feel comfortable.’ He stands with his hands meshed before him as he speaks, a gesture I’ve seen hundreds of times in his lectures. ‘You always were a very able student.’

  ‘Professor Marks? Is that really you?’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ says the Scottish voice, though this time it sounds more like David Tennant. ‘Maybe it isn’t.’ With the last words he seems to shrink back into his old aggressive posture and it’s the same harsh voice as before.

  ‘Who are you?’ I scream at him. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You don’t need to know who I am. Though I know what you are. You’re an animal,’ he spits. ‘Just like the others. You might not be a whore but you’re still just as dirty and revolting inside.’ He starts to pace round me. ‘Look at this place. Look what you’ve done to it!’ He kicks at the bucket, which wobbles but doesn’t tip over. I want to retaliate, point out that anyone would smell disgusting locked in a dungeon, that all human beings crap, that men are animals too, but I don’t dare. He’s still pacing. I try to work out if this horrible man might really be Peter Marks, or if he was just doing an impression, playing a trick on me. I can’t make up my mind. The way he changed from one to the other. It was like a hallucination. My head hurts with the confusion. The brown eyes watch me through the ski mask. ‘Not that it matters,’ he says. ‘You all fail my experiment in the end. It’s inevitable. You can’t stop yourselves.’

  I feel tears come to my eyes. ‘You don’t have to run the experiment,’ I say. ‘If you are Professor Marks, then you know me already, don’t you? You know I respect you. Maybe we could work this out, maybe we could be friends.’

  ‘Friends?’ he says. ‘Are you fucking insane?’

  He strides towards me and I lurch backwards, try to get away, but it’s useless. He grabs my arm and I cry out. ‘Look at me,’ he says, as I twist and struggle. ‘I said look at me.’ I turn my face towards him. His brown eyes are cold in the padded mask. He has me pushed against the wall so I can’t escape. He lets go of my arm and for an awful moment, I think he’s raising his hands to choke me. I start screaming, I can’t stop myself. He clamps a hand over my mouth and grabs one of my breasts, twisting it so hard the pain almost makes me black out. ‘Listen to me, bitch. You disgust me. Think I’m wearing these gloves for forensics? I’m wearing them because I don’t want to fucking touch you with my skin.’ He lets go and I collapse to the floor.

  He heads to the door, picks up the plastic bag and rifles through it, takes out a sandwich, ripping off the packaging. Then he shakes it out of its wrapper onto the floor and stamps on it. He looks over at me. ‘There you go, Ava. You can eat it off the floor. Like the dog you are.’

  Frankie

  Donald Emneth is crucified by the media coverage. His mad beard and staring eyes are on the front of almost every national newspaper. The coverage strays well into the danger zone of prejudicing a trial if he’s charged. One tabloid even uses a screen shot of him from Frankie’s report with the headline: ‘If Looks Could Kill.’

  She sits with Jack on their new sofa, watching the paper review on the late news. They have already sat through all the broadcasters’ coverage of Mr Emneth’s interview. It’s more restrained than the papers, but the cumulative effect is damning. Charlie sold the footage of Ava at the demo to all their rivals, so every viewer has the chance to judge his murderous look, repeated over and over again in slow motion. Then there’s the interview: the salacious glee at Hanna’s haircut, and the highly suspicious-sounding ‘support’ he gave to Sandra and Lily in his supposed quest to help them give up sex work.r />
  ‘He was blatantly paying for their services, wasn’t he?’ says Jack.

  ‘Probably,’ says Frankie. She scrolls through her phone, reading some of the newspaper articles that are already online. The reports are stuffed with neighbours’ damning opinions about the ‘local eccentric’ and one has an exclusive interview with his ex-wife, accusing him of being a pervert. ‘Well, that’s his life trashed,’ she says, putting the phone down. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be inviting any more reporters into his garden now.’

  ‘Do you think he did it though?’ Jack says. ‘Bit of an own goal in that case, going to the press.’

  ‘I think he’s a sleazebag,’ says Frankie, scowling as she remembers his leer. ‘And the fact he’s incriminated himself doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t do it. If you think about it, the killer has been baiting the police, almost as if he’s desperate to be noticed.’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s him?’

  ‘No, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

  Jack rolls his eyes. ‘Talk about hedging your bets. It’s as well you’re a journo, not a police officer.’

  ‘Yeah well, I’m meant to hedge my bets. Unbiased and accurate reporting is my thing. I don’t want to be sued.’ She waves her phone at him, one of the red top front pages still on the screen. ‘Unlike some newspapers I won’t name. Or national TV reporters.’ Frankie is feeling the need to reassure herself about the virtue of her own reporting. Kiera gave her a roasting for the Peter Marks interview, refusing to listen when she tried to explain that the clip Luke used wasn’t even meant to be recorded. ‘You’re a hack not a social worker!’ Kiera had snapped, stomping off. Zara had come over to give her a hug when the boss was gone, but it was all very embarrassing.

  ‘At least if this old guy’s arrested it means one less nutter protesting at work,’ Jack says. ‘As far as I remember that was the demo when protestors dumped a load of dirty spuds outside reception. Some sort of ridiculous gesture against the pest-resistant potatoes we’re developing. Completely bonkers.’ He had been working at the John Innes last year, meaning Frankie hadn’t been allowed to cover the demonstration due to conflict of interest. ‘A bit of luck you caught them both on film that day, isn’t it?’