by Dan Waddell
He replaced the lid. ‘What makes you think they’re your sister’s?’
‘The colour.’
‘I couldn’t make out much colour, to be honest…’
‘She suffers from albinism.’
‘She’s an albino?’
Perry’s vacant eyes just continued to stare as if he had failed to hear.
Heather spoke. ‘What does her albinism involve?’
The change of voice appeared to reawaken him from his stupor.
‘Fair skin, fair hair, but mainly her eyes; they are the lightest blue. She’s the first one in generations. It’s a recessive gene. Dammy is a throwback.’
‘Dammy?’
‘As in Damson.’
‘That’s her name?’
‘No. Her name is Nella. Damson is her nickname because our elder sister is known as Plum, though her real name is Victoria. Family joke.’
The joyous wit of the English upper classes, thought Foster. Nella was one of the names Barnes had suggested might tally.
‘Does your sister have any tattoos that you are aware of?’ he asked.
Again the pause while the words penetrated. ‘Not that I recall. Can’t say I’ve ever studied her that closely. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she had.’
‘Sorry to be as bold as this, Mr Perry, but does your sister have breast implants?’
Perry looked at him; Foster could see he was only just managing to hold it together.
‘Yes, she does. Her unusual looks get her a lot of attention. She doesn’t exactly run away from that attention. Makes the most of it, in fact. Hence the implants. She has a newspaper column, dates men in the public eye.’
Great, thought Foster. If the body in the morgue was hers, every reptile in London would be crawling all over the case within hours of this getting out. Serial killer, socialite and journalist, police missing the chance to catch her murderer: he could see the fall-out already.
‘Are you a journalist, too?’ he asked.
‘No. An MP.’
As if the story was not sensational enough. He wondered whether the Perrys had risen to the top of the social and professional tree through hard work or a network of old school pals and family friends. Smart money was on the latter.
‘Can I ask when was the last time you heard from Nella?’
He couldn’t bring himself to use her nickname.
‘Friday afternoon. She and her latest boyfriend, a painter, were due to come to dinner last night. She rang to say it would be only her; they’d had a tiff. She never arrived. I thought perhaps they’d made up, that sort of thing. I called her mobile, but it was off. Assumed she’d get in touch with one of her apologies at some point. She’s very good at them; she’ll make you forgive her anything.’
Foster was making notes. It was only when he looked up that he saw tears streaming down the man’s face.
‘Sorry,’ Perry said, pulling a handkerchief from his trouser pocket.
‘No need to be. Don’t bottle it up on our behalf.’
Heather left the room and returned with a glass of water. She put it on the table and Perry gave her a thankful grimace.
‘Do you have her boyfriend’s details?’
Perry passed on what he knew. ‘You think he might be responsible?’
Foster shrugged. ‘We can’t say.’
‘I’ve never thought much of him,’ Perry added, face reddening. ‘Bit of a poseur, but never thought he was violent.’
‘When did you notice the package?’ Foster asked.
‘Not until this lunchtime. It was on our back doorstep. I took the rubbish out and there it was.’
‘We need to take this box and the eyes for further examination. We’ll also need to go and have a look around your garden, speak to some of your neighbours, see if they saw anyone or anything last night or this morning.’ There was only one more question Foster needed to raise. ‘If you feel up to it, we’ll need you to identify the body of a young woman we found murdered last night.’
Perry nodded slowly, as if in a trance, pulling absent-mindedly at the loose skin under his chin.
‘Of course,’ he said faintly. ‘Look, I need to make a phone call. Could you leave me alone for a few minutes?’
Foster and Heather left the room.
‘The killer’s getting more elaborate,’ Foster hissed. ‘More and more confident. Maybe too confident; they always make a mistake when they start to play too many games.’
Heather nodded. ‘I know Dammy Perry,’ she whispered. ‘Well, not personally, but I’ve seen her column. It’s in the Telegraph.’
‘Really?’ Foster said. He got whatever news he needed online. He despised newspapers, their spin, lies and wilful deceit. ‘I never had you down as the broadsheet type.’
She flashed back a sardonic smile. ‘It’s one of those diary columns. Except, rather than pop stars and footballers, it gossips about wealthy families, particularly the misbehaviour of their scions.’
‘Serious stuff, then.’
Inside they could hear Perry murmuring on the phone.
‘Don’t suppose he’s a member of the Socialist Worker Party either,’ Foster said.
Heather ignored him. ‘It sounds like it’s her. Bit of a new departure, if it is; sending the body parts to another member of the family.’
Foster sighed. ‘The pattern is all over the place. First victim looks like he was kidnapped two months before he was killed; the second barely two hours before he was killed. The second and third have had body parts removed, the first didn’t. The second’s hands are still missing, the third’s eyes turn up the same morning as the body. The only thing that’s constant is the reference and the fact that the place and time accord with the murders of 1879.’
The door handle turned. Perry emerged from the room. ‘Let’s get on with this,’ he said.
15
Nigel had done all he could do to occupy himself that day, but no matter what he did – opened a book, retreated into the past as his usual method of escape – he was unable to expunge the image of the dead woman, her sightless eye sockets, her alabaster skin punctured with holes like black moons.
Towards the end of the afternoon, as he lay wide awake in bed seeking sleep he would never get, he heard the sound of his telephone. Thinking, hoping, it might be Foster and Jenkins, he scrambled out from the tangle of sheets and found it. The voice on the other end was familiar but unwelcome.
‘Hello, Nigel.’
Gary Kent.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped. Knowing exactly what.
‘Dammy Perry.’
‘What?’
‘The young woman whose body you stumbled across, if that’s the right phrase, this morning. Was wondering if there’s anything more you can tell me?’
‘I’m not saying anything,’ Nigel said, preparing to put the receiver back in its cradle.
‘What, got another student in your bed, have you?’
Nigel froze. Unable to react.
‘Two hours on a university campus can teach you many things. Hardly national news, but I’m sure I could get it placed somewhere.’
‘Are you blackmailing me?’
Kent ignored his question. ‘What’s this about the cops getting the wrong tube station?’
How did he know that?
‘Goodbye, Gary.’
He put the phone down, then picked it up and laid it off the hook. His hand trembled; Kent had shaken him. Dammy Perry, he had said the name was. At least Nigel now had a name to go with the face. He did not know what to think about Kent’s revelation that he knew what had happened at the university. Should he tell Foster and Jenkins? He decided against it.
He dressed. He needed to go out, to walk and expend some energy. In the back of his mind he knew where he was going, but didn’t yet want to ask himself why. Something was drawing him back there.
The early-evening air was fresh; it was still light and the streets around the Bush were crowded. He headed straight past the Gree
n towards Holland Park, under the roundabout gridlocked by traffic even at the weekend. From there he headed up Holland Park Avenue, turning left into Princedale Road, past the silent garden squares overlooked by enormous stucco townhouses. Soon he was in the warren-like streets of Notting Dale. It was as if the air was different, less clear. He passed the old brick kiln on Walmer Road, the only relic of the time when the Dale was famous for three things: remorseless poverty, brick-making and pigs. Once, when the police came in to settle an altercation, the locals rose up against them, forming bricks out of the dried pig shit that covered the ground and hurling them at the cops. Dickens had written about this area, describing it as one of the most deprived in London, amazed that such squalor existed in the middle of such elegance.
The brick kiln was now a converted flat. Worth half a million pounds.
At the top of Walmer Road he cut through the corner of a council estate, arriving at Lancaster Road. He could feel his throat tighten as he neared the scene. What he expected to find when he got there, he didn’t know. He walked to Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, following the same route as the previous night. There were fewer people but still the same throb of energy and life; it felt strange to him, as if the whole area should be in shock and mourning.
At the opening to the alleyway a solitary policeman stood sentinel. Behind him Nigel could see tape flapping in the wind; the scene was still closed. There was no way through. He walked up Ladbroke Grove, taking the first left down Cambridge Gardens, then a left on to St Mark’s Road. As he turned he saw a police car blocking the entry, behind it more tape fluttering forlornly. Part of him was relieved; he wasn’t sure what his reaction would have been if he’d been able to visit the scene.
He looked around: it was an anonymous part of town, nestling in the lea of the overhead motorway and a raised railway line. A light under the Westway glowed in the half-light, illuminating three recycling bins with broken glass scattered on the floor around one bin. He decided to make his way back home, perhaps stop off for a recuperative pint.
He passed under both the Westway and the tube line. A train rattled overhead, shaking the structure. He crossed over, past a newly built close of houses. And stopped.
He walked a few steps back. He read the name of the street once more: Bartle Road. It was not much of a street; on one side were beige-bricked bungalows, on the other were private parking spaces bordered by an old stone wall that backed on to the arches of the railway, where a garage had made its home. Nigel felt his heartbeat quicken. So this is where it was.
He walked down the street, counting off the houses. One, two, each of them identical. After number nine he stopped: between it and the next building was an incongruous gap. Visible over the top of the wall was a tangled bush, little else. The next house after the gap was number 11. It was true, he thought; there is no number 10. When Rillington Place was bulldozed in the 1970s, it was rebuilt and renamed Bartle Road. But, obviously, the developers had decided to take no chances and had left a hole where number 10 should have been.
These sordid stories of London’s past delighted him; dark secrets that offered a glimpse behind the city’s net curtains. Ten Rillington Place was the home of John Christie, a post-war serial killer who strangled a string of young women he had lured back to his rotting, soot-soaked little Victorian terraced house. He had sex with their lifeless corpses before either burying them in the garden or, as he did with his wife’s remains, stowing them in a cupboard. He was hanged for his crimes, though only after Timothy Evans, a barely literate neighbour of Christie’s, had been wrongly executed for murdering his wife and child. The real culprit, Christie, had been chief prosecution witness at Evans’s trial.
Nigel stood staring at the gap. He had come to revisit one murder scene, only to encounter another. Little more than a hundred yards away from this scene of horror, another serial killer was writing his name into London legend. When he was eventually brought to justice, would they bulldoze any of the buildings in which this killer had struck? Nigel knew such efforts were futile. The past cannot be erased so easily. You can knock something down; you can change names; you can try all you want to wipe these acts from history, he thought. But the past seeps back through the soil, like blood through sand. Or lingers in the air. Always there.
He pulled his brick of a mobile from his pocket and dialled Foster.
Seeing his sister’s mutilated corpse had broken Simon Perry. After nodding to indicate it was her, his legs had crumpled beneath him. Foster helped him to a side room and summoned a doctor. He was sedated and taken home. After making sure he was all right, Foster returned to the corpse. The cleaned, livid wounds across her breasts spelled out the reference. Closer inspection of the body also revealed several track marks in her arm that suggested drug use. Her internal organs displayed no sign of damage from heavy use.
He and Heather returned to the incident room in Kensington. Waiting for them was Nella Perry’s boyfriend, Jed Garvey. He turned out to be the sort of Trustafarian fool for whom Foster had nothing but disdain. With no need to make a living between dates, dealers and dinner parties, these people, he imagined, flitted from one job to another, alighting on something that would fill their time, give them a cachet, until it became financially unviable and they were either bailed out or moved on to a horse of a different colour.
Jed Garvey was a painter, so he said. Foster guessed that Picasso and Pollock needn’t worry about their place in history just yet. He was beanpole skinny, over six feet in height. His face was long and cloaked in at least a week’s growth of stubble. His hair looked like it had fallen out of a tree and landed on his head. He was wearing a battered suit jacket over a V-neck jumper, faded jeans and baseball boots.
His face was gaunt, drawn from hearing of his girlfriend’s death. They got him a coffee and let him stew for a few seconds.
‘That is one good-looking bloke,’ Heather said.
‘You don’t mean you think that lanky streak of piss is attractive, do you?’ Foster said, appalled.
‘There’s something about him.’
‘Yeah, a bundle in the bank courtesy of Daddy.’
‘Cynical or jealous – difficult to guess which.’
‘Jealous? Of him? The Bumfluff Kid?’
‘Word has it he’s dated some of the most beautiful young models, actresses and society beauties in London.’
‘He’s welcome to them. You spend a lot of time reading those gossip columns, then?’
‘Light relief,’ she said. ‘Funny, Dammy Perry used to mention him a lot in her diary.’
‘Bet she did. That’s how it works for these people, isn’t it? There’s probably a thousand artists out there better than him, but they aren’t shagging society journalists.’ Foster sighed. ‘You handle this one. I’m worried there might be more severed parts by the end of the interview if I do it.’
They went back into the room. Garvey was seated, his arms wrapped around his chest, staring at the desk in front of him. Heather put the coffee down and gave him a comforting smile.
‘I realize this has come as a bit of a shock,’ she said.
Garvey just nodded, eyes vacant.
‘We need to go through a few things. Just routine. It will help us catch whoever did this.’
Garvey nodded once more. ‘The last thing I said to her was “Fuck off”,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘Do you know how awful that feels? To know that was the last thing you said to someone you loved?’
Heather nodded sympathetically. Foster felt an unexpected twang of sympathy. The last thing he got to say to his father was that he loved him and respected him.
‘I can’t imagine,’ Heather said softly. ‘Tell us about the last time you saw her.’
He took a deep breath. ‘It was Friday lunchtime. Dammy was in good spirits because her agent had got her a deal for a book idea she had. We went to the Electric on Portobello Road to celebrate. A few friends joined us; we ate, drank champagne, they left. Then, well you
know what it’s like, you’ve been in high spirits, you drink too much, you say the wrong thing.’
‘What did you say?’
‘She thought I was jealous. I’ve been struggling a bit lately, not showing or selling much. It was getting me down. After a few drinks I suppose I got a bit peeved that she’d got a deal for an idea she’d scribbled on the back of a fag packet, yet here was I, with a studio full of pictures that nobody wanted. I said something about good fortune smiling on her and she laid into me.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She called me a waster, a loser, said that I was lazy and expected the world to come to me. That’s when I told her to fuck off. She got her bag, got up and walked out. Didn’t say a word; didn’t even look at me.’
‘You didn’t try to follow her?’ Heather asked.
To Foster, this sounded suspiciously like criticism, but Garvey took it in his stride.
‘No. We rowed a bit but always made up. She’s feisty… was feisty. Best thing to do in those circumstances was call it a day, and apologize later.’
The fact that he would never get that chance was left hanging in the air.
‘Do you know where she went afterwards?’
‘I assumed she’d gone home. We’d just started living together. When I got back and she wasn’t there, I just thought she was at some friend’s. It had happened before. She’d put me in the cooler for a day or two.’
‘Surely, on Saturday, when she hadn’t come home, you got worried?’
‘To be honest, I got so wasted on Friday night that Saturday just drifted by. I tried to call her a million times on her mobile, but it was off. We were supposed to be going round her brother’s on Saturday night, but she just didn’t come back. I went out and got wasted again.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Foster interjected. ‘You have a row, she walks out and you don’t see her for two days and you don’t do anything other than leave a few messages on her mobile? You don’t try her friends, her brother or anyone else?’
