No Help For The Dying
( Riley Gavin and Frank Palmer - 2 )
Adrian Magson
Adrian Magson
No Help For The Dying
PROLOGUE
The white van made two measured circuits of the block, drifting like a shabby ghost beneath the street lights. A curtain of rain rippled down the windscreen and out across the tarmac, lending the road the sheen of molten liquorice. A digital clock in a shop window read 01.45.
The vehicle’s bodywork looked tired and scuffed beneath a layer of dirt, in sharp contrast to the precision sound of the engine. While this and the heavily tinted windows might have seemed unusual, to a casual onlooker it was simply another white van, doing what white vans do. On the third circuit, the vehicle slowed, swinging sharply into a side street. The tyres crunched through the nightly debris of fast-food cartons, discarded cigarette packets and greasy chip wrappers. A plastic water bottle resisted briefly before spinning away into the darkness.
‘Anywhere here.’ The man in the passenger seat took a bible from the dashboard, held it against his chest and caressed it absent-mindedly with his thumb.
The driver stopped across from a travel shop and a photo boutique. Wedged between them was a narrow alleyway like a gap in a row of teeth. No light reached into this recess, and whatever lay inside had been swallowed in a dark soup of shadow.
After a few moments the passenger door clicked open and the man with the bible stepped lightly to the ground. He stood for a moment, his breath vaporising in the cold air and quickly snatched away by the bitter March wind. The colourful glitter of Piccadilly, with its bright lights and electronic advertising panels, a relentless flow of people and noise, lay a short walk away. But none of that reached here.
The man was tall and thin, with rimless spectacles perched on a pale, bony face. His shoulders were loosely wrapped in a long coat covering dark pants and a black silk shirt with a mandarin collar, and on his feet he wore black, rubber-soled boots. He reached back into the van and lifted a silver metal flask from a box on the floor, then nodded to the driver and moved away. Seconds later he was swallowed by the dark.
He paused for his vision to adjust before stepping forward. He passed the windows of a pub, long shuttered and dead, and a network of scaffolding interlaced with ladders and boards. A row of wheelie bins waited with their accumulation of refuse. The smell was sharp and strong, a mix of old food, stale water and something unidentifiable. He ignored it and continued into the gloom, favouring the wall to his right where the darkness gathered like molasses. There were stirrings from the shadows and an empty can clattered away from his foot. Something drummed against cardboard, and further on someone coughed, a brief bark of sound quickly stifled. Another voice cursed in a soft protest, blurred by the effects of alcohol or drugs or the bitter cold.
The man stopped alongside a battered skip, its solid presence indicated by the glow-worm speck of a warning lamp. He transferred the bible to one coat pocket and the flask to the other, and took out a slim, black Maglite torch. Bending easily, he reached out with his free hand, finding the slippery texture of a sleeping bag, the fabric stiff with ingrained grease and dirt. He ran his fingers along the top and located the zip pull. It snagged briefly before running free with a faint purr. The smell from inside was sharp and feral. He flicked on the Maglite.
The bag’s occupant came awake with a cry of alarm. The man was ready; placing one knee on the sleeper’s torso, he clamped a strong hand over the mouth, choking off any further sounds. When the struggles ceased, he shone the torch on the white face and fearful, blinking eyes.
It was the right one.
He put the torch down and withdrew the silver flask. As he unscrewed the cup one-handed, a heady aroma of tomato filled the air around him. He bent close to the sleeping bag.
‘I’ve got some soup for you, kid,’ he whispered softly. ‘Nice hot soup.’ He squeezed the occupant’s face, cupping the mouth into an elongated ‘O’. The skin was soft to the touch, as yet untainted by dirt or infection. He tipped the flask in one movement, using his body’s weight to stifle the sudden eruption of movement beneath him, a hideous parody of a lover’s embrace. He ignored the choking sounds and what might have been the beginning of an agonised scream and placed his hand back over the mouth. A spot of soup forced its way between his fingers and stung his cheek, but he ignored that, too. He continued pouring until the flask was empty and the body lay still.
When he removed his hand, there was a gloop-gloop sound as the last of the thick liquid found its way down, followed by a pop of an air bubble rising to the top. He checked the pulse.
Nothing.
He zipped the sleeping bag and replaced the top of the flask, then stood for a moment like a priest over a grave.
‘Tough luck, kid,’ he murmured softly. ‘Seems Daddy didn’t want you back badly enough.’ He flicked the spot of soup from his cheek, then turned and walked back the way he had come. He stopped at the mouth of the alleyway. His eyes moved across the dark recesses one last time, then he took out the bible, and clutching it to his chest, walked back to the waiting van.
Chapter 1
The telephone was insistent and annoying, jarring its way into Riley Gavin’s subconscious. She mumbled into the pillow and rolled over. One of these days, she thought, I’m going to invest in a machine that rings only in daylight. She opened her eyes and blinked. It was still dark, but with a faint blush of dawn sneaking across the ceiling. A car hissed by in the street below, heralding another day of dull, March weather. The clock radio flashed a blurred 05.00 onto the wall above her bedside cabinet in green gothic figures, a birthday present from her mother.
She kicked off the duvet and stumbled out of bed, stepping instinctively over a large tabby cat sprawled fast asleep in the living room doorway. ‘Fat lot of good, you are,’ she mumbled, and scooped up the handset.
‘Riley, sweetie.’ The syrupy tones of her agent, Donald Brask, slid down the line, and she forced herself to overcome the last few mental steps between sleep and wakefulness. Donald, God bless his mercenary heart, was all that stood between income and poverty. Whatever hour of the day or night, being nice to him guaranteed continued work.
‘Donald, don’t you know what time it is?’ she pleaded half-heartedly, and moved on auto-pilot into the kitchen, homing in on the kettle. She needed coffee. Donald only rang when he had an assignment for her, and he preferred her perky and wide awake, otherwise he got snarky and went into a camp sulk.
‘What’s up, dear heart? Did I drag you out of someone’s loving arms?’
‘I should be so lucky. What do you want?’ She watched as the cat wandered through and sat by the cupboard, cleaning itself with an air of casual patience as if time was of no consequence. It was all an act; the animal had once belonged to a former neighbour, but had assumed squatter’s rights and moved in once it knew where Riley kept the tins of food she’d bought in for its occasional visits. It was a subtle form of psychological bullying for which she had fallen big-time, and a habit that had stuck when she moved to Holland Park. Luckily the neighbour had given her the cat and her blessing. One day she might get as far as giving it a name.
‘Do you know a man called Henry Pearcy?’
‘Wait a second.’ She switched the handset onto loudspeaker and dropped it on the worktop, then busied herself with getting a tin out of the fridge and forking meat and jelly into a bowl. Amazing how a tin labelled rabbit could smell so much like a trawlerman’s armpits. The cat stopped licking and waited, its tail quivering like an antennae, then dived forward like a missile as she put the bowl on the floor. That was one problem solved.
‘Riley? Hello?’ Donald’s vo
ice ventured richly out of the handset.
‘I hear you. I’m thinking.’ She dumped ground coffee into a filter pot. The rich aroma pervaded the air of the small kitchen in seconds, making her shiver with an odd feeling of comfort. ‘Henry Pearcy… that’s going back a bit. He’s a journo — or was. How did his name come up?’
‘He called me yesterday evening. Said he had something to pass on to you, but didn’t know your number. The editor of Diaryline told him you worked through me.’ Donald sounded unusually patient, considering he was being used as a message service, and Riley wondered why. As a busy agent for a string of journalists, media slaves and a clutch of entertainment personalities, he rarely bothered wasting time on calls which didn’t promise a commission. And while he professed to have a soft spot for Riley, for whom he dredged up investigative assignments from contacts in the trade, as far as Donald Brask was concerned, time was money and favours were a costly intrusion.
‘So what are you not telling me, Donald?’ said Riley. ‘You only remember my number in the middle of the night?’
‘Actually, sweetie, it’s nearly daytime. I wasn’t going to call until later, because I thought this was another one of your army of admirers trying to get back into your favours. Then something odd happened.’ He paused and added, ‘I must say, he sounded a bit… well, old for you, if you don’t mind me saying.’
Riley smiled at the deliberate ploy. One chink in Donald’s businesslike demeanour was his incurable thirst for gossip, whether about celebrities, politicians or even his own clients. Drop him a morsel of information and he’d damn near salivate over it, teasing out every last detail like meat from a crab’s claw. Now here he was trying to figure out her innermost secrets.
‘He’s old enough — although there’s nothing wrong with the more mature man, as you well know.’ She waited for a riposte but there was none, so she explained: ‘I worked with Henry for a short time a few years ago on a commercial radio station. He was their head newsman and was looking towards retirement even then. I was learning the broadcast ropes after a stint on a local rag. He taught me a lot.’
Henry, she recalled, had been a kindly, but unhappy man. She dredged up an image of him. More college professor than newsman, he wore old, expensive suits that had seen better days, and carried with him a palpable air of melancholy. It showed in his manner and his eyes, which rarely offered a full smile. Yet he had never allowed it to affect his work. She’d heard rumours about a dead wife but to a young reporter learning the ropes, it wasn’t a subject to broach. In the end, it was Henry’s love of the bottle that saw them part company as colleagues. Caught driving while three times over the legal limit, he had been sacked. The last Riley heard he was holding down a desk job on a tabloid on the Isle of Dogs, although she couldn’t recall the name.
‘You haven’t seen him lately, then?’
‘No. We shared office space occasionally, but that was it. He wasn’t into socialising much. What did he say?’
She heard paper rustling in the background and pictured Donald at his desk, ergonomic headphones on and a green night-light casting spooky shadows across his office. She’d been to his home a couple of times, and while the business part was a hum of activity, with an array of state-of-the-art technology, the home part was as clean as a pin, with the air of an Ideal Home show house; no mess, no drink rings on surfaces, no discarded magazines, no impressions on the cushions. Donald’s contacts in various branches of the police, the media and government were legion, but if he had any kind of love life, it didn’t appear to involve any overt signs of passion.
‘He told me he had some information for you. Something about a girl named Katie Pyle. He gave me his number then rang off. Somewhat abruptly, too.’ Donald made it sound like a deplorable breach of etiquette.
Riley put down her coffee and felt the atmosphere go cold around her neck. Katie Pyle? The name rang a distant bell. It had been years ago, back when she’d just started out on her first small newspaper. The Reader had been a local freebie on the rim of London, lasting about four years before it zoomed from stuttering start-up to terminal obscurity. Its problem, she recalled, was that it had been neither rural nor urban, hovering in limbo between city and Hicksville, a collection of cheap adverts and ‘Under-a Fiver’ columns, with a few grudging inches for news.
She closed her eyes, trying to re-assemble the details while Donald waited patiently. Then it came to her, slowly taking form as her memory kicked in through the residual fog of sleep. Ten years ago. A missing girl — a teenager — had walked out of her home one day and disappeared. She remembered feeling powerfully affected by it; it was one of her first stories as a twenty-year old wannabe reporter and the echoes of it had followed her for a long time afterwards. In fact, it had probably been the one thing which had driven her towards freelance investigative journalism, rather than a staff job. She had probably ditched the notes on it long ago, but something told her there had been no resolution to the story. Just another disappearance, unexpected and unexplained, in a long line of missing people who chose to walk away from what they had, with no explanation, no note… and often nothing in their family history to account for it. But then, as she had learned since then, most families kept a tighter hold on their darker secrets than the Bank of England.
But if it was still a live story, why would an old news-hound like Henry Pearcy be willing to pass on information to another reporter, especially after all this time? That would be like Donald inviting some grubby computer nerd to hack into his PCs and have their wicked way with his files.
‘Ok, sing it out.’
As Donald called out the number she snatched up a marker pen and scribbled it down. It looked like a mobile number. ‘Did he give an address?’
‘No, but I have a sweet bit of caller ID software which did,’ said Donald smugly. He was very proud of his gadgets, all of which were designed to allow communication with clients and contacts without ever leaving his office. It gave him the image of a giant spider, tugging away at the various strands of his convoluted web. ‘It confirms the subscriber as one Henry J Pearcy at 12, Eastcote Way, Pinner, Middlesex. Nothing else, though.’ He sounded faintly disappointed, as if the equipment had failed him in some way by not including a raft of juicy details.
‘Right.’ Riley wrote down the address. ‘I’ll try that number. If he comes on again, tell him I’ll be calling.’ She hesitated. ‘You said something odd happened. You mean connected with Henry?’
‘Yes. I got a call from a contact in the Met twenty minutes ago. The body of a young woman was found along the Embankment yesterday evening, in a memorial garden between the Albert Bridge and Cheyne Walk. She’d been dumped behind a statue called ‘The Boy David’. About mid-twenties, well-dressed, ordinary, she appears to have died of asphyxiation — or more accurately, of choking on her own vomit. No purse, no ID and no obvious signs of assault. Apart from a crucifix, the only item of value on the body was a bracelet. One of those cheap silver things on a chain, with her name on the inside.’
Riley didn’t want to ask. But the awful inevitability beckoned. ‘What was the name?’
Donald paused. ‘I know this is unusual, Riley,’ he warned her sombrely. ‘But I sense a story here. So, I think, will the editor at Diaryline. You don’t need to pursue it if you don’t want to, bearing in mind the personal angle. But I know I can sell it.’
Riley let a second or two tick by. This wasn’t their customary way of working; usually Donald secured an assignment from an editor and Riley either agreed or not — so far, always the former. This time things were different.
‘The name.’
‘Katie Pyle.’
Chapter 2
Riley switched off the phone. She sat down, the coffee forgotten. The cold feeling was back and she shivered slightly as if something had touched the back of her neck.
She wandered back into the bedroom and slid beneath the covers. The cat followed, curling up on the foot of the bed and flaring its claws with
pleasure.
Katie Pyle, Riley remembered, hugging the sheet to her neck, had been her baptism of fire. Pitched in at the deep end by an editor who was short of staff and impatient with mundane things like equal rights in the workplace, she had been assigned to cover a story way beyond the traditional newbie jobs of weddings, births, deaths, flower shows and local good works. As far as her boss was concerned, when news beckoned, a reporter reported and neither gender nor lack of experience was a barrier.
Armed with only the vaguest instructions and the police report to go on, Riley had dashed off with crusading zeal, anxious to put the world to rights and dig below the scummy surface to reveal The Truth. Her main problem — something her editor seemed to have had neither the time nor inclination to tell her — was trying to trace someone who either didn’t want to be found or was simply beyond reach.
She had begun by talking to the police, the most immediate experts. They had been by turn cautious, factual and professional. They had pointed out that, according to the available evidence, Katie, barely fifteen years old and a single child, had left home voluntarily, taking some money, a shoulder bag and a change of clothes, but little else of value. As a subsequent visit to her shell-shocked parents had shown, even her favourite teddy had been left behind, propped up on the bed-head and staring blankly at the opposite wall as if hiding all the girl’s secrets behind its frozen, glassy expression.
A helpful desk sergeant, perhaps sensing Riley’s inexperience, had acquainted her with the statistics of missing persons each year. It now stood, she knew, at a staggering 200,000-plus.
‘Most of them are back within days, weeks or months,’ the sergeant had informed her. ‘Usually none the worse for it other than needing a good wash, some grub and a kip.’
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