by Dane Cobain
Leipfold finished his drink and fetched another round. Most ex-drinkers preferred to stay away from alcohol, but Cholmondeley had known Leipfold long enough to know he was different.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, Cholmondeley thought.
Cholmondeley checked his watch as Leipfold steered the conversation artfully back towards the case and to Operation Aftershock.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Cholmondeley said. “There’s still a question that you haven’t asked me.”
Leipfold paused for a moment and then said, “Tell me about it, Jack. Tell me about the latest package.”
“It’s funny you should mention it,” Cholmondeley replied. He was smiling, but it was the smile of a crocodile when a hunter’s pointing the barrel of a rifle at its underbelly. “Genitals.”
“Genitals?”
“Genitals,” Cholmondeley confirmed. “Another set for the collection. Male genitals, the full cock and balls.”
Leipfold laughed. Then he tried to turn it into a cough.
“Sorry,” Leipfold said. “I was thinking about something else. That’s terrible.”
“There’s more,” Cholmondeley said. “There was a note as well. Written in blood.”
“The victim’s blood?”
“That’s the assumption,” Cholmondeley said. “It looks like a match, but I’ll need more time to say so for sure.”
“What did the note say?”
“It didn’t say anything,” Cholmondeley replied. “It was a map. We followed it to a shallow grave in a plot of land just off the M25. There was a body.”
Leipfold paused. He didn’t look good, and neither did Jack Cholmondeley.
“Who was it?” Leipfold asked, at last.
“Some slick city type,” Cholmondeley said. “A guy called Calvin Myatt. Get used to his name. It’ll be all over the papers tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirteen:
The Oyster Club
“I LOOK FUCKING RIDICULOUS,” Maile said. She was examining herself in the full-length dress mirror in Kat’s bedroom and trying not to scowl at her own reflection.
“You look fine,” Kat said, suppressing a laugh by taking a sip from the glass of wine she’d been nursing for the last half hour.
“No, I don’t,” Maile insisted. She examined herself in the mirror again. She was wearing a low-cut, deep scarlet dress that revealed too much and concealed too little. It cut off three inches above the knee and even in leggings, she didn’t like the way it showed her legs off. “I look like I was dressed by a randy teenager playing The Sims with a nudity patch. I feel like a piece of meat, Kat. How do you wear this stuff?”
Kat shrugged. “It’s what I like,” she said. “At least I don’t go to bed in a Slipknot hoodie.”
“Hey!” Maile protested. “It’s comfortable. Not like this stuff.”
“Look,” Kat said, “I just want you to look your best. You never know. You might meet someone.”
“I’ve already met someone.”
“What? That salesman dude? Screw that guy. You can do better.”
“Not in this dress,” Maile said. She was starting to wonder why she’d agreed to this in the first place. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, an excuse for a couple of drinks and a night out. But then the big night rolled around, and she’d forgotten all about it. She’d been looking forward to spending the night playing Halo and unwinding after work. Instead she’d unlocked the door and almost immediately found herself accepting a glass of wine and being led into Kat’s bedroom to start getting ready.
The plan was pretty simple. Kat had spotted an ad in The Tribune for The Oyster Club, a speed dating group that met once a week in a swanky cocktail bar just off Covent Garden, and she’d signed them both up on the spot. The bottle of wine was to get them good and drunk before they left home so they could save money on the overpriced drinks that helped those swanky bars to make their rent.
Kat was dressed in her best as she always was when she left the house in the evening. She was wearing a black dress and her favourite pair of heels, accessorising with a little gold handbag and her favourite necklace, which hung down and banged against her skin an inch or so above her cleavage.
“Can’t I just wear jeans?” Maile had asked.
“Not on my watch,” Kat replied. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”
And so she’d acquiesced, and before she knew it she was sitting in the back of an Uber as it wound its way through the streets into the inner city.
* * *
The Oyster Club was packed to the rafters, and the air inside had taken on that dry, stilted quality it gets when there’s too much aftershave and not enough ventilation. The heat inside the place flushed Maile’s cheeks a deep, embarrassing crimson. She already hated the place.
The two girls were welcomed at the door by a woman called Lucy Fforde, who introduced herself as the hostess and took their names and email addresses down for her newsletter. She was a redhead, but not in the same way as James Leipfold. The private investigator’s short crop of ginger was a far cry from Lucy Fforde’s reddish brown locks, which hung down to her shoulders and lit up beneath the club’s lights as though her head was on fire.
“Is this your first time?” Lucy asked. Kat nodded. “Excellent,” she said. “Well, thanks for coming. Grab yourself a sticker and write your name on it, then stick it somewhere people can see it. We’ll be getting started in a couple of minutes.”
“Great,” Kat said. Then she turned to her housemate and grabbed her by the arm. “Come on, let’s get a drink.”
By the time that the event actually started, they were already on their second drinks, and Maile was feeling a little tipsy. It wasn’t that she wasn’t used to drinking; she just wasn’t used to drinking this much, and she’d always preferred her Red Bull without the vodka. The event got underway with each of the women directed to a small table, with two to a table so that they all got a fair chance to meet their suitors, and then the men were rotated from table to table every time Lucy rang a little bell that she held. She had to put some power behind it to make the noise heard above the hubbub of a couple dozen stilted conversations.
Maile and Kat were placed on a table together, and they spent more time talking to each other than to the men they were being introduced to. Maile had been expecting some Christian Grey type mega businessman with a penchant for a little bondage at the weekends, but so far all she’d seen were socially maladjusted mummy’s boys and damp-smelling weirdos who were destined to live alone. But she was actually enjoying herself. It wasn’t because she thought she might meet the love of her life, though. She’d just learned to love the art of people watching through her work with James Leipfold, and this was the sort of gold mine that could have fed the imagination of a hundred novelists. The Oyster Club was where the weirdos went, where the strange in society met their matches. And she was loving it.
The bell rang again and the potential suitors moved around.
Maile found herself sitting opposite a well-built man in his early thirties. He had brown eyes and short black hair that was swept across his forehead. His facial hair was spilling over from stubble into a full-blown beard, but it suited him and gave him a rugged, manly look. He wasn’t unattractive.
So while Kat was pretending to be interested in the guy who surveyed quantities, Maile held out her hand to the rugged man and said, “Hi, my name’s Maile O’Hara. Nice to meet you.”
He smiled at her, flashing a glimpse of pristine white teeth, and then took her hand. He shook it. “Hi, Maile,” he said. “That’s a nice name.”
“Thanks,” she replied. “Shame no one can ever spell it. And you’re…” She trailed off into silence as she checked his lapel for a name tag.
“Asif,” he said. “Asif Shaktar. No one can ever spell that, either.”
Maile la
ughed, but the laughter didn’t reach her eyes or mouth. The expression on her face had been wiped blank and her mind was running at a hundred miles a minute. She’d heard that name before, and she didn’t think it had been in a round of Call of Duty. She had a feeling it was important.
If only she could remember why.
* * *
The rest of the event went smoothly. While Maile still couldn’t remember where she’d heard Shaktar’s name before, she found him charming enough. She just couldn’t shake the feeling that he was somehow important. She caught up with him again at the end to exchange a few pleasantries and to bum a drink before heading home.
After that, she wandered over to join Kat, who was three sheets to the wind and talking up a storm with Lucy Fforde, who looked more than happy to chat to a new punter even though the event was over and everyone else had gone home.
“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” Lucy said. “These things take a lot of time and effort, and it’s not always easy going. Don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely to see when people meet at the Oyster Club and go on to spend their lives together, but it’s like our good friend Mr. Shakespeare said, ‘the course of true love never did run smooth.’”
“Love,” Kat slurred. “I don’t know if I even believe in it.”
Lucy laughed, and Maile noticed that it was a bitter kind of laugh, the laugh of a woman scorned who was still feeling the pain of a doomed affair.
Then Lucy started coughing, great whooping coughs that made her shake in a paroxysm of phlegm and mucus. It was gross, even with her hand over her mouth.
“Are you okay?” Maile asked.
“I’m fine,” Lucy insisted once she’d managed to get her breath back. She was doubled up with her hands on her knees, but once the coughing stopped, she straightened up as best as she could and took a couple of deep breaths like a yogi in the middle of a pose. “Don’t you worry about it. Where were we?”
“Love,” Kat slurred.
“Ah, yes,” Fforde said. “I don’t believe in love, either. Not anymore. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen since launching this thing.”
“Try us,” Maile said, spotting her chance to join the conversation and inserting herself into it with all the grace of a surgeon embedding a pacemaker. Lucy looked taken aback for a moment, as though she’d been caught off guard and she wasn’t sure whether she’d said something she shouldn’t have. But Maile smiled nervously at her and the tension broke.
“We get all sorts in here,” Lucy said. “A couple of weeks ago we had this little kid come along, must’ve been fourteen or fifteen. He looked it as well, a little white-haired runt of a thing. We kicked him out of here, of course. Now he’s got some sort of vendetta. He started up a blog about us and everything. Keeps saying he’s going to kill me. I’d be scared if I hadn’t met the kid.”
“Bloody ridiculous,” Kat murmured.
“Too right,” Lucy replied. “Our goal here is to create an environment for consenting adults to meet each other. We want people to fall in love and to spend their lives together. We want them to start families and to live happily ever after. But it doesn’t always work out like that.”
“What do you mean?” Maile asked.
The expression on Lucy’s face changed. Her eyes darkened, her brow furrowed and she took on the look of a woman who’s just tasted something unpleasant. She took a big swig out of her mojito.
“Cheaters,” Lucy said. “I hate cheaters. Always have. But you’ve got to have a good nose if you want to sniff them out.”
“I don’t follow you,” Maile replied. Beside her, Kat looked like she was ready for a long lie down, and Maile couldn’t blame her. It had been a long day.
“Most people join the Oyster Club because they’re looking for love,” Lucy said. “But some people join because they’re trapped in a loveless marriage and they’re looking for a little something on the side. Those people don’t last long here, but if they take their ring off and cover themselves with a clever backstory, they sometimes last long enough.”
“Does that happen often?” Kat asked
“More often than you might think,” Fforde replied. She looked suspiciously at the two of them. “You are both single, right? I’d hate to think—”
“Lady,” Kat interrupted, “you don’t know the half of it.”
“Ha!” Lucy said. “Yes, well. Excuse me while I get another drink.”
“Hold up,” Kat said, reaching automatically for the purse in her Louis Vuitton handbag. “We’re coming, too. Right, Maile?”
But Maile shook her head. She was tired, confused and convinced that she’d missed something, and there was an Xbox controller on her bedside table with her name on it.
“You’ve had enough,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Fourteen:
The Briefing
IT SEEMED LIKE half the station was there. After almost a month of miscommunication, Cholmondeley’s superiors finally had the bright idea of hosting a big briefing that brought all of the different task force teams together for the first time since Operation Aftershock had started.
It was a pointless meeting, like all meetings were. The superiors had insisted on a show of force, so instead of tailing Asif Shaktar or processing the body of Calvin Myatt, the police force’s finest were sitting in a board room. There were six different teams with four or five people on each. Cholmondeley’s team was there, of course, and so were the forensic team and the morticians. Top brass was there as well, three men and a woman in impeccable black suits and with eyes as dead as a pharaoh’s. Then there were the first responders, who’d been drafted in as consultants, and a final team of independent ombudsmen whose job was to make sure no one made a mistake.
Cholmondeley’s team was the largest. The boss sat in the middle with Sergeant Mogford to his right and Constable Groves to his left. Constable Hyneman was there as well, and so were Constables Yates and Cohen. Cohen was wearing new aftershave and taking notes in an efficient shorthand which no one else could read.
The meeting was headed by Superintendent Isabelle Richards, a woman whose notoriety preceded her. She’d been in the force for almost as long as Cholmondeley, but her ambition and her empathy had carried her higher up the ranks. Privately, Cholmondeley was glad of it. She was a good superintendent but a lousy cop, and her place at the top of the food chain suited everyone. But it didn’t make her any easier to deal with. She wasn’t a woman of honour, at least not in the sense that Cholmondeley knew. She’d support her officers, but if they made a mistake then she’d be the first to throw them under the bus. Her loyalty lay with the public, and not with the officers who served under her. That made her dangerous.
And Cholmondeley had another reason to worry. He’d convinced her to let Leipfold sit in on the meeting in the guise of a subject matter specialist. Officially, he was there as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the subject of serial killers. Unofficially, he was just plain old James Leipfold. Superintendent Richards was well aware of who he was, but she’d reluctantly agreed that his input might be useful, as long as he could be trusted. She’d already threatened criminal charges if any information was leaked outside the room.
The meeting started late, but that had always been inevitable when the invitations went out. It was standing room only, and the room was aglow with tablets and laptop computers. Constable Cohen, meanwhile, had opted for a large pad of paper and a couple of Sharpies. He surrounded his notes with sketches to bring them to life, which was one of the reasons why Cholmondeley had made him the investigation’s unofficial secretary. There was no telling when one of his sketches might spark an idea or a memory, or hint at a new connection or an underworked area of investigation.
Superintendent Richards stood up and waited for silence. It didn’t take long for her to get it.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, brusquely. Her voice w
as sharp and clipped, a well-spoken BBC English, and Leipfold, who was on his best behaviour, wondered whether she’d had elocution lessons. “I know we’re all busy, so let’s make this one as quick and productive as possible.”
“Here here,” one of the forensic guys grunted, a big man with a walrus moustache and a scar above his eye. “Let’s catch this bastard before he kills someone else.”
“Yes, well, that’s certainly the plan,” Richards said. “Now, as you all know, we’re here to talk about Operation Aftershock, the investigation into the Tower Hill Terror. The Terror, as I’m sure you’ll already know, is the nickname that the press has given to the serial killer that’s currently operating throughout the city.”
“No shit,” somebody murmured. Superintendent Richards glared around the room like an angry bullock and nobody dared to laugh.
“Gentlemen,” she said, aiming her gaze at the forensics boys. “When you’re done fannying around, we have a killer to catch.”
* * *
The briefing got off to a slow start. Superintendent Richards kicked it off by introducing each of the teams and asking them to summarise their work so far. With so many teams—and so many people, so many egos—in a single room, the process was long and arduous. But Cholmondeley saw the point of it. It would help to facilitate communication between the teams. For Leipfold, it was essential. He only knew Jack Cholmondeley.
After the introductions were out of the way, Richards went over the case to date, delegating occasional explanations to the heads of the teams in question. They started with Jayne Lipton, the first victim, and worked up through Abu Adewali and Calvin Myatt, covering their final movements and the results of their autopsies. Richards also explained that tests on the packages revealed that there was a fourth, as yet undiscovered victim, almost certainly another new female.
