by Dane Cobain
“But why wait?” Cholmondeley asked. “Why start killing people now?”
“The first one is always the hardest,” Allman replied. “For the last twenty-something years, I’ve been honing my craft, biding my time. I killed birds at first, then cats and foxes. A few dogs and badgers here and there. I worked my way up until I was ready to chase the biggest game of all. People, eurgh. They’re all vermin. Except for Lucy, of course.”
Cholmondeley exchanged another look with the journalist and made a mental note to ask for a psych evaluation, just in case.
“Lucy was quite the woman,” Allman said. “I want you to make sure that you mention that in your article. She was supposed to be a victim, you know. She was supposed to be my first. But we started talking, and I decided to let her live, just for one more night, but then it turned into another and another and before I knew it, we were partners. I released her, convinced that she’d turn on me and I’d have to kill her after all, but instead we started hunting together.”
“What about the breasts and the genitals?” Cholmondeley asked. “What’s the deal with that?”
“Lucy hated sex,” Allman explained. “She never said what, but something happened. Something bad that hurt her, scarred her, even. The world hurt her, just like it hurt me.”
“But why take it out on other people? That hardly seems fair.”
“Life isn’t fair,” Allman said. “If it was, the rich wouldn’t be rich and the poor wouldn’t be poor. We wouldn’t be killing the planet for future generations or electing crooked politicians and dodgy businessmen to lead our countries into the brave new world. I kill people because I can. I want to. It’s fun. You should try it sometime.”
“I don’t think so,” Cholmondeley said. “Why did Lucy Fforde join you?”
“She didn’t,” Allman said. “Not at first. But she came around to my way of thinking, and she’s full of hatred too. She’s a liar and a thief, a murderess. But she has her own moral code, you know? Lucy wanted to only kill the unworthy, the people who cheat on other people as though they’re nothing. So we teamed up and started trawling the dating sites.”
“Kat Cotteril wasn’t unfaithful.”
Allman nodded. “She wasn’t Lucy’s choice. She was mine. We had different ideas about who to target and how we wanted them to die. She wanted them to suffer. I didn’t care how we did it, as long as I could get up close and personal. I liked to see it happen. So we took it in turns.”
“And why are you talking to me?” Phelps asked.
“Don’t you see?” Allman asked. “I want to be heard. I want to be remembered. I want my name to be passed from mouth to mouth. I want to go down in history.”
He turned slightly to look at Cholmondeley. “You can lock me up and throw away the key,” he said. “Do what you want. It’ll all work out the same in the end. Death is death, whether I die free or in jail. The only way to stay alive forever is to make sure that you’re remembered.”
“You speak like a dying man,” Cholmondeley said.
“I’m not dying, Detective Inspector,” Allman replied. “But I will die one day. And so will you. I wonder which of us will be remembered.”
* * *
The interview was over and Superintendent Jack Cholmondeley was treating himself to a bland cup of coffee from the machine. He was sitting opposite Alan Phelps in a private room with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.
“You say we’ll be even?” he said.
“Of course,” Phelps replied. “Although I’ll have to pull a few strings at the office.”
“What will you tell them?”
“I’ll tell them the file got corrupted.”
“And that’ll work?”
Phelps shrugged. “It’s worked before,” he said. “Trust me, it won’t be a problem.”
“What makes you think that?” Cholmondeley asked.
Phelps shrugged again. “You scratch my back and I scratch yours,” he said. “Besides, I’m BIB.”
“BIB?”
“You’ve never heard of the Boys in Blue?”
“Obviously not.”
Phelps chuckled and got up to leave.
“You might want to look into that,” Phelps said. “Maybe even apply for membership.”
“But what is it?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Phelps said. He grinned at Cholmondeley, and the detective inspector had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He knew that when a journalist grinned at a policeman it was never good news. It was like a shark grinning at a surfer.
“Give me something to go on,” Cholmondeley said. “Please.”
“Just speak to some of your officers,” Phelps replied. “The privately educated ones. The ones in charge.”
“What have the officers got to do with it?”
Phelps smirked and tipped Cholmondeley a wink that made his blood boil. “Who do you think leaked the tape?” he said. “Goodbye, Detective Inspector. And good luck with your investigations.”
* * *
Meanwhile, at Leipfold’s office, the detective and his assistant were attacking The Tribune’s daily crossword while munching their way through a packet of ginger biscuits. They were making good time, but they disagreed on the correct spelling of 14 down and Maile wasn’t convinced it was even the right answer.
Leipfold pulled rank, reminding her that he was the one who paid the bills, and they went with his answer. A couple of minutes later, when they solved 11 across, Maile was vindicated, and they crossed out Leipfold’s answer and wrote her solution in its place. They finished in just over seven minutes.
Leipfold flipped the kettle on, and Maile wandered over to perch on the counter beside him. She grinned at him until he looked up at her and offered to make her a coffee. Then she took him up on it and used the subsequent silence to ask him a question that was bothering her.
“So where did you get the gun from, boss?”
“Why do you want to know?”
Maile shrugged. “Just curious,” she said. “I’ve never known a man who owns a gun before.”
“Owned,” Leipfold said. “Past tense. That was the only one I had. And this was the first time I ever had to use it.”
“But how did you get it?”
“I have my ways,” Leipfold said. “I’m ex-army.”
“Is it legal?”
“Hell no,” Leipfold said. “Which is why I want you to forget that I ever had it. Did you get rid of it?”
“Yeah,” Maile said.
“How?”
“I have my ways.” She smirked at him and gratefully accepted the cup of coffee that he’d made. She blew on it and took a small sip. “I’m not going to tell you what I did with it.”
“In case I go back for it?” Leipfold asked.
Maile shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “You’re not that stupid. But it’s better if you never know.”
“You didn’t take it, did you?” Leipfold asked. He wore the kind of expression that a father might wear on his daughter’s prom night.
“Of course not!” she protested. “What would I need a gun for?”
“You carry pepper spray in your purse,” Leipfold reminded her.
“That’s different,” Maile said. “I carry that around for the creeps and the weirdos. I’m not about to shoot someone in the head because they tried to grab my arse as I walked past.”
“But pepper spray is fine?”
“Precisely,” Maile said. “Don’t worry about it. The gun is gone and the cops won’t find it. And even if they do, I wiped it clean. There’s nothing to link it back to you.”
“I just wish you’d tell me what you did with it.”
But Maile shook her head. “Can’t,” she said. “If I tell you, you might let it slip to Jack Cholmondeley.”
Leipfold
chuckled and gestured for her to get back to work. Then he sat down at his desk.
She’s probably got a point, he thought.
* * *
Later that night, Leipfold let his ginger hair down and celebrated like only a reformed alcoholic knows how to. He bought a six-pack of non-alcoholic beers and shot-gunned them all in an hour, then watched repeats of Countdown with the volume on low while flicking through the pages of an old paperback.
He had a lot of questions about the case, but he was going to have to wait a while if he wanted answers. With the suspects stopped in their tracks, Kat Cotteril safely back above ground, and no new reports of missing people, he felt that his work was done. It was in the hands of the police force.
And he had work to do.
Chapter Twenty-Nine:
A Different Temptation
MAILE HAD PLANS for the evening.
She was alone in the flat again. Kat’s boss had given her a couple of weeks of compassionate leave, an offer that she’d almost rejected. On the outside, she seemed unaffected by her ordeal, but Maile knew her better than that. She always wanted to play the strong woman, the busy executive type that you can always rely on, but sometimes that worked against her.
“That’s not what this is about,” Maile had told her. “Kat, you don’t need to be strong all the time. You’ve been through a lot. Take the offer and get away for a while.”
“I can handle it,” Kat replied.
“It doesn’t matter,” Maile said. “You’ve got nothing to prove. You survived a situation I wouldn’t wish on anyone and now you’ve earned yourself a break from it all. Besides, the media is going to be all over this. We’ll have Siobhan Dent and Alan Phelps from The Tribune trying to knock our door down so they can talk to you. You don’t need that shit. Trust me, Kat. I know what it’s like.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” Maile said. “Remember Tom Townsend? You’re not the only one who’s been held somewhere against your will. I’m not saying it’s going to go away, but it gets better. Slowly but surely, day by day, it gets a little better. Here. I have something for you.”
Maile held out a hand and Kat took the object she was holding. She held it up to her eyes and took a closer look at it.
“Your pepper spray,” Kat said.
“Yeah,” Maile replied. “You never know when you might need it.”
“What about you?”
Maile shrugged. “I’ll get another,” she said.
Something about Kat’s posture had changed, and Maile knew that her point had hit home. She pressed her further.
“Look, take a laptop and work from home if you have to,” Maile said. “Just find yourself somewhere that no one can find you and take it easy until the shitstorm blows over. Then you can get back to work and move on with your life.”
Kat nodded and relented, and the two of them spent the next couple of hours making plans. Maile had insisted on not being told where she was going so that the information could never be somehow tricked out of her. Shortly after that, Kat had hopped on the train and headed off to parts unknown and Maile had been left alone in their living room.
Maile had always liked being alone, but something had started to change over the last few weeks as the Tower Hill Terror had taken over the streets. The Terror was no more, but that didn’t mean that she could sleep easily. The city had a deep, dark underbelly that she didn’t like to think about. But not thinking about something was almost impossible, especially without a housemate around to shoot the shit with.
She checked her bag and pulled out her pepper spray, smiling grimly as she hefted its familiar weight. Then she thought about Leipfold’s gun, and she wondered whether she’d done the right thing by disposing of it. Sure, it was an illegal firearm, but Kat’s pot stash was illegal and so was Maile’s habit of pirating American TV shows so she didn’t need to wait for them to air in the UK. And if Allman and Fforde could get away with multiple murders before being apprehended, she was pretty sure she could get away with keeping a gun that she’d never use.
But never is a powerful word, and Maile was forced to admit that if she had a gun in her house, she’d be tempted to use it. Maybe not maliciously, but in an act of random violence after an argument or in self-defence when some asshole tried to chat her up in a bar. God knows, she was trigger-happy enough with her pepper spray.
The gun, and its hiding place in the sewers beneath the city, was still on Maile’s mind as she hopped into the back of a cab and told the driver where to go. She scanned his face as she opened the door, satisfied that this was a new man, a man she’d never seen before, and not some sicko serial killer. But he looked fine, almost friendly. Just the average cabbie in a city that blended ethnicities in a metropolitan mixing bowl. He had a warm, inviting voice with a curious accent, which he told her was a conglomeration from three different continents. He didn’t try to attack her, which was probably a good thing. Maile still carried a canister, even if she wasn’t packing heat.
The cabbie dropped her off at the Grosvenor House Hotel, a place that she still saw in her dreams from time to time. It had featured prominently in her last two major investigations, and every time she thought she’d forgotten about it, it would resurface in her head like a cheap piece of imagery in an indie novel.
But the horror had happened in one of the hotel’s guest rooms, and not in the adjoining restaurant. Way back when she’d first started working with Leipfold, she’d followed the footsteps of a man called Tom Townsend, who’d listed a meal at the restaurant as his alibi. Maile had visited it on more than one occasion since then, but she’d never had a chance to eat.
But this night was different. She was there to meet a man about a date. A man she’d met on a social networking site.
It’s okay, though, Maile thought, as she was shown to the table at which he was already waiting. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. If we change the way we behave, the bad guys win. And besides. He’s picking up the bill.
* * *
Leipfold had tried to write a letter to Jack Cholmondeley three separate times, and each one had ended up crunched into a ball and tossed half-heartedly at the wastebasket. And then he remembered something. An old, handwritten letter in a dusty box file, in storage somewhere but still good. He dug it out, placed a strip of blank paper over the date and the address (which both needed updating), and then ran it through the copier at the corner shop.
It’s funny how life is like a circle, Leipfold thought.
Cholmondeley had been encouraging him to become a cop ever since they first met, joining forces momentarily to track down a group of crooks who were stealing wallets from the general public. Leipfold had helped him to track down the culprits—despite being a schoolkid at the time—and Cholmondeley had been in his debt to some extent ever since.
Police work had its advantages. Reasonably regular hours, a guaranteed workload, a regular pay cheque and a sense of structure that was conspicuously missing in his life. But they were outweighed by the disadvantages, most notably the need to work for a boss and to take on investigations that just didn’t catch his interest.
If the police are pigs, Leipfold thought, then perhaps I’m a wolf. Wolves don’t take orders. And they work better alone.
Cholmondeley met him at the food truck by the station, and the two sat and talked for a time about the good old days. The old cop was unusually circumspective, and with his tired eyes cast back over the years, the conversation turned to his early triumphs in the late seventies and early eighties. Leipfold had watched his career with interest, especially after his accident and the subsequent stint in Reading Jail. Cholmondeley had written to him once a week, delivering news from the outside world, new faces on the street, new crimes he needed help with. He’d sent clippings of The Tribune’s crossword, which Leipfold had eagerly filled out, usually blitzing through a week’s worth of puzzle
s in an hour or so. And he’d given Leipfold a reason to live, a reason to stay clean.
And just like that, the conversation turned to Cholmondeley’s offer.
“Thing is,” Leipfold explained, “this time I don’t need saving, Jack. I’m doing well, and so is the business. Okay, I might not have much of a pension, but there’s plenty of time for that. And Maile’s doing a good job, too. I think things might be taking off.”
“I’m happy for you, James,” Cholmondeley said. “Does this mean what I think it means?”
“Afraid so,” Leipfold said. “I can’t be a cop, Jack. I mean, look at me. Name a cop that looks like me.”
“Taggart?”
“Cheeky swine.” Leipfold reached for his drink, a vanilla milkshake, and the two men chuckled.
“Here,” Leipfold said. “I almost forgot.”
He reached into his bag and grabbed the letter he’d copied, then slid it across the narrow table to Jack Cholmondeley. While the old cop read it, Leipfold stared out of the window at the city, watching life go by from inside the converted school bus.
“The letter just confirms what I told you, Jack,” Leipfold said. “I’m sorry.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he replied, shaking his head. “But you can’t blame a man for trying. Give me a call if you change your mind.”
* * *
At home that night, Leipfold gave in to a different temptation entirely. He’d stopped to grab a bite to eat at a chicken shack on the way home, then parked Camilla and headed up to his tiny apartment. It was as he’d left it, cluttered, untidy and far too small for a fully grown man to comfortably live in. Exactly how he liked it.
When he got in, he left the overhead light off and flicked the switch on his bedside lamp, then kicked his shoes off and lay back to relax on the unmade bed. He tried to read his book for a while, but he couldn’t focus on the small print and his mind was racing with a thousand and one new possibilities, for himself, for his business and for the future. He put the book back down again, using a scrap of paper from his notebook as a bookmark. Then he pulled out his smartphone and used his fingerprint to unlock it.
