A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  She looked at the map, the network of roads inside the rectangular grid.

  ‘I hope you’re right, Barney.’

  ‘So do I. All that time and effort. I’m going to look like dick of the year if I’m wrong.’

  49

  7.01 pm

  Doors away from the junction of North Road and West Road, Hendricks pressed a musical bell for the fourth time and, stepping back from the ramp that rested on the steps in front of the double-fronted house, looked at the garage at the side.

  The mid-Victorian house and the late-twentieth-century garage were unlikely neighbours. The 1970s’ metal-doored garage was wedged between the side wall of the house and the wall that fenced in the grounds. The security light above the garage went out and he waved his arms above his head to turn it back on.

  On the other side of the door, there was no sound of anyone approaching but, behind a stained-glass oval, the light went on in the hall.

  ‘Who is it?’ A woman’s voice came through the front door.

  ‘Police. It’s nothing to worry about,’ said Hendricks, hoping he was wrong.

  The search had started at the north end of the grid and the hastily assembled team of constables and community officers was working systematically down to the river.

  Hendricks looked down and saw a woman peeping through the gap at waist height. He saw her right foot resting on the metal plate of her wheelchair.

  He held his warrant card at a level where she could read it. Her face was partially hidden behind the door and his first impression was that she was extremely shy.

  ‘I need to look in your garage, Mrs…?’

  ‘Ms Norma Maguire. What are you looking for, DS Hendricks?’

  ‘A white Ford Transit van.’

  ‘I don’t have a white van.’

  ‘Fair enough, but I need to look in your garage.’

  She pulled an expensive-looking bag from the handle of her wheelchair and on to her lap, and unfastened the chain.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Norma Maguire, opening the front door and wheeling herself down the ramp and ahead of Hendricks without looking at him. She took out her car key and pressed the fob. Without making any noise, the garage door rose up.

  She wheeled herself under the rising door and turned the light on in the garage, revealing a red Vauxhall Combo and a folded-down wheelchair propped against the interior wall.

  Hendricks weighed up the interior of the garage. The back wall was solid brick and there was no way of driving a vehicle to the rear of the property.

  The garage was a dead end.

  ‘No white van, just my red Vauxhall Combo WAV.’

  ‘WAV, Miss Maguire?’

  ‘Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle. I need it to get to work and back. So, what’s the big deal with the white van?’ asked Ms Maguire.

  Hendricks moved to look at Ms Maguire directly. She shifted her wheelchair a little to the right and looked away from Hendricks.

  ‘Are you all right, Ms Maguire?’

  ‘I’m extremely shy and I’m not used to having people call to the house. If you could give me my personal space, I’d be grateful.’

  ‘I apologise for making you feel awkward. It certainly wasn’t my intention, Ms Maguire.’

  There was something desolate in the air and Hendricks wondered if it was Ms Maguire or the large garage that radiated negativity.

  ‘Just as a matter of interest, do you own the house?’ asked Hendricks.

  ‘What kind of a question’s that?’

  ‘You might be a tenant. Your landlord might have a white van. I may need to talk to your landlord.’

  ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I own the house outright.’

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  ‘Yes. The house is customised for my needs. I know what you’re thinking, DS Hendricks. That’s an awfully big house for one woman.’

  ‘It’s none of my business. I was wondering if there was anyone else in the house because I’ve got questions to ask.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Have you seen a white van driving past your house, or on any of the streets around here?’

  ‘I’ve seen several white vans. People in the houses around here have workmen call to repair and decorate.’

  Hendricks showed her the CCTV picture of the white van.

  ‘Have you seen this one?’

  ‘No. All the white vans round here have their owner’s name, trade and contact details advertising their services. There are no such distinguishing marks on the van you’re showing me. Can I close my garage up now, please?’

  ‘Sure. Thank you for your help, Ms Maguire.’

  As she reversed herself out of the garage, Hendricks got the clearest sight of Norma Maguire’s face and her eyes were bloodshot and cloudy.

  Hendricks walked down the path and felt sorry for her because it looked like she’d been crying for hours.

  50

  7.05 pm

  Alone in the incident room, Clay looked closely at the first messages that Annie Boyd had sent to Richard Ezra, and the initial exchanges between Amanda Winton and Thomas Saddler.

  Richard Ezra wrote: Hi, Annie. Thank you for winking at me. I love your profile.

  Annie had replied: Hello, Richard. Great to hear from you. I love your profile too. You come over as a really fun guy.

  Clay skipped over the short, initial exchanges, the polite yet probing messages, and came to Richard Ezra’s first substantial volley of words. She held the page under her desk light and read out loud, Hi Annie I’d be most grateful if we could have an initial dialogue with a view to getting to know each other better. Hopefully, you’ll be comfortable with…

  She took the transcript supplied by Warrington, the exchange between Sandra O’Day and a man claiming to be Michael Towers, and picked out his first major line of attack.

  Clay skimmed and scanned Ezra’s and Towers’ words, eyes flicking left and right, staying right and back to left, and read, ‘Ezra, initial dialogue; Towers, initial dialogue. Ezra, getting to know each other a little better; Towers, getting to know each other a little better. Both of them, if you don’t feel comfortable with this… wishing you all the best in finding a man… worship the ground you walk on…’

  Clay looked up as Poppy Waters entered the incident room.

  ‘I’ve got the full transcripts from Amanda Winton’s communication with Thomas Saddler. Like the others, Eve, the trail goes somewhat cold after he gets her mobile phone number and tells her he’s going to ring her.’

  ‘Let me guess. Michael Towers, just like Richard Ezra and Thomas Saddler after him, didn’t want to get hurt again because his wife had died. He didn’t tell her he was a childless widower because he didn’t want to make emotional capital out of his tragic misfortune. Did Amanda ask him if it was possible to die of a broken heart?’

  ‘No, he volunteered the information willingly.’

  ‘If this wasn’t so vile, there’d be a funny side to it. If he was just a guy playing fast and loose on the internet – I mean, think of it, Poppy. He comes over as a nice young widower wearing his heart on his sleeve. He could have wiped up. It could’ve been pussy galore for him.’

  ‘Under the name Thomas Saddler, did he say anything different, anything that stood out?’ asked Poppy.

  ‘No. Same guy. Different alias,’ said Clay.

  ‘Same old language?’

  ‘Same old shit,’ concluded Clay.

  51

  8.45 pm

  As she made her way from the Albert Dock and past the Marina, heading for her car, Francesca Christie felt completely stupid.

  Stupid cow, standing in the wind and the rain, waiting for a man who would never show up. Ha ha ha… Even the waves of the river seemed to laugh at her.

  Half an hour earlier, she’d called him but he was unable to take her call. Phone off. Try again later.

  She felt the rising storm of tears as humiliation sank its teeth into her heart, and wondered what was so terribly
wrong with her that the world, in the form of a solitary man, could treat her so very badly.

  Hand in hand, a couple laughed as they walked past her, their happiness and closeness drilling a nail into her head that sank down and spiked her heart.

  Hi, Francesca! Bryony’s voice. How did the big date go?

  He was OK, I guess. He asked me out on a second date. I’ll make excuses, let him down gently.

  As she manufactured the lie, she took a left turn towards the place where she’d parked her black Vauxhall Corsa. She walked towards her car, opening the doors with her fob.

  A vile thought assaulted her, triggering a string of humiliating possibilities.

  What if he’s got a Facebook page? What if he’s done it for a bet? What if he posts my picture? What if he tells the whole wide world what a fool I’ve been?

  She could see the pitying looks of her new colleagues in the office of Doherty Properties and Estates, hear the silence that greeted her in a thousand dismal places.

  Francesca opened the driver’s door of her car and made a decision.

  No more internet dating, ever. Loneliness, though brutal, was better than humiliation. First job, as she stepped over the doorway of home, take down her profile from Pebbles On The Beach. The bitter end.

  ‘Excuse me!’ The voice was insistent but polite, mechanical and androgynous.

  She turned, felt like she’d been hit in the face by a brick. Her legs gave way and the thing behind her held her up, turned her round and bundled her into the driver’s seat, closing the door after her as the back door opened.

  Lights went on and off in her head as she placed the key in the ignition, tried to get the car started, but it was too late.

  The back door of her car slammed shut.

  ‘I am The Ghoul.’

  Sitting right behind her, oozing into the pores at the back of her neck, she felt breath, hot and insistent.

  ‘Get the car started, Francesca.’ She turned the key in the ignition.

  In the rear-view mirror, two points of light danced immediately behind her, a pair of eyes lurking in the dark.

  She shuddered and her stomach turned when a large hand landed on her right shoulder and there was a sharpness against her throat, a lethal edge of a sharpened blade.

  ‘Hello, Francesca. Can you hear me?’

  She nodded, felt the roll of the edge of the blade pressing left to right and back again.

  ‘This is what you’re going to do. If you don’t do as you’re told, you will die.’

  She heard words and found herself driving down a straight stretch of road that ran parallel to the Mersey, Riverside Drive, and knew she was following instructions.

  As she came up to the Britannia pub, a marked police car came in her direction, heading towards the city centre, and as quickly as wild hope blossomed inside her, so did The Ghoul’s mounting rage, translated into harsh language spat into her neck as the blade came away from her throat.

  ‘Don’t even look sideways, don’t even think about trying to attract their attention. Look at me! Look at me! Lurrraaammmeeee…’

  Eternity passed in a handful of seconds.

  She pulled up at the roundabout at the bottom of Jericho Lane and watched a car turn off, heading in the direction of Aigburth.

  ‘Wait!’

  She watched the car travel further and further up Jericho Lane, its rear lights turning into illuminated pinpricks before dissolving into the dark.

  ‘Go!’

  Francesca took a long in-breath through her nose, tasted blood in her mouth and on her lips as she turned on to Jericho Lane and caught the edge of The Ghoul’s natural body odour.

  ‘When I tell you, when we get near the top of the road, you turn right and stop your car near the gateway into Otterspool Park.’

  She turned into the darkness at the gateway.

  ‘Turn your engine off. Get out of the car. Walk.’

  The point of the knife was in her back; she could feel its jagged tooth through her clothes and a ripple of electricity ran down her spine. Francesca made out the shape of another vehicle in the shadows at the gateway and, fifteen metres away on Aigburth Road, she heard streams of traffic heading in two directions.

  The parked car. She was marched round the back, her eyes almost blind with tears. The boot was thrown up.

  ‘Get in. Shut the fuck up with the tears.’

  She wiped her eyes and watched as The Ghoul opened a vial of liquid and noticed there was no smell as it was handed to her.

  ‘Drink it! All of it!’

  A fist formed high above her head.

  She swallowed the tasteless liquid and curled into the foetal position.

  ‘And, so, off she floats to nowhere.’

  The Ghoul slammed the boot down and condemned her to the darkness.

  Francesca heard the engine come to life, felt the motion of a moving vehicle, and had the urge to shut her eyes as the ropes that tied her to consciousness unknotted quickly. Within moments, she was no longer locked in the boot of a car.

  She was gone.

  52

  9.59 pm

  Norma Maguire sat at the wheel of her Vauxhall Combo WAV, driving down Regent Road on to Crosby Road South, her head full of Francesca Christie.

  She imagined her sitting in her bedroom communicating on her laptop with some creep or other, passing sick-making lovey-dovey notes and blithely turning her back on the real love that she had to offer.

  Norma opened her window and heard the sound of the Irish Sea as it lapped against the sands of Crosby Beach.

  She marvelled at the sudden and brutal manner in which Fran announced her departure.

  ‘If you can’t beat them, join them, Fran,’ she whispered into the darkness.

  She remembered the small but significant band of ungrateful defectors. They walked through her mind like restless ghosts, the expression on their faces as they told her they were leaving seared on to her brain.

  One, two, three, four and five and now a sixth. Fran.

  She pictured the two front bedroom windows of Fran’s house and imagined a light going on and Fran appearing, not looking out but closing both curtains, on the many nights she’d sat outside on Druid’s Cross Road, watching, watching.

  What are you smiling for, Fran?

  Norma revisited the same fantasy that played out in her head when she sat outside Fran’s house in every kind of weather. She pictured her sitting on the bed and taking her top off, the sound of bathwater running a few doors away. Fran slipping out of her skirt, both thumbs hooking on to the sides of her thong, standing and stepping out of her clothes on the carpet. Smiling in the mirror as she unclasped her bra, her rosebud nipples puckering on a cold winter’s night.

  Tears rolled down Norma’s face and she felt the weight of them pressing down on her bad skin and ugly, ugly face, the depth of the hurt Fran had caused her kicking in with full force, as the cruel music of her self-defeating fantasy cackled in her ears.

  ‘Why did you do it, Fran?’

  Norma heard brokenness in her voice where only moments earlier she had listened to the deep defiance and anger that burned inside her. The hurt Fran caused was deeper and harsher than all the others who had betrayed her put together.

  ‘If you only knew how much I totally love you, Fran. But you don’t. You’re a good person really, the best, but you’re young and you’ve been totally foolish.’

  Norma fell silent and remembered the nights she’d watched the front door of Fran’s house opening and Fran’s mother putting out an empty milk bottle, and the fear of being caught, wondering what would happen if her mother just marched over the road and confronted her, called for the police and sparked a scandal in which Norma would be cast as both central villain and laughing stock.

  Time dissolved.

  She was no longer driving. Instead, she stared ahead at the dark sands of Crosby Beach where Iron Men gazed at the water of the Irish Sea, but all was blurred by the haze of tears and the thr
obbing inside her head.

  ‘I love you, Fran. But you’re a bitch.’

  She turned the key in the ignition.

  ‘How could you?’

  Her tyres screeched as she performed a three-point turn and headed back towards Liverpool.

  ‘How could you?’ she screamed at the windscreen, her fists pounding the steering wheel.

  The Past

  1980

  It was the same routine every lunchtime during the holidays and the days she wasn’t well enough to escape the house and go to school.

  When the front doorbell rang, she was to stay in her bedroom and was told to remain there until a large chunk of time passed, the front door closed and the visitor hurried away at a speed between striding and sprinting through the gravel at the front of the house.

  She stood at her bedroom window, tall enough now to see the whole of the grounds before the front door.

  He walked through the open gateway – they all did – and she wondered why none of her mother’s visitors could drive or own a car or park it where her father’s Bentley went when he was home.

  As the visitor approached the front door, she looked closely at him. Like she did with all her mother’s visitors. And like all of them, this newest caller was totally unlike her father.

  She recalled watching her father that morning as he walked from the house to his fancy car. Wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and a purple tie, he was only slightly taller than he was wide. Unlike the man approaching the house, who was dressed in jeans and trainers and a brown leather coat that kissed his ankles as it flapped in the breeze at his feet.

  Tall and thin and much, much, much, much younger than her mother, he looked like an actor or an artist or one of those other men her mother constantly argued about with her father.

  He looked left and right, and then left and right again as if he was playing an extremely dangerous game of hide and seek. In his hand was a thin book.

  The man looked like… what were the words her father gave to men such as this on the street and the television set? Yes, yes. He looked like an arty-farty piece of shit.