Running Girl

by Simon Mason

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other man.’ He paused and looked at her sadly. He swallowed. ‘The man who killed her. He should have been at work,’ he said. ‘But he was here.’

  She remained staring at him, her head cocked on one side, her eyes so small he could hardly see them, and before she could say anything else he went on, in the same quiet voice.

  ‘After he’d killed her he didn’t know what to do. I mean, here he was, in the house, in the middle of a Friday afternoon, with a dead girl and no excuse. But he saw the note that Chloe had thrown away on Monday lying in the bin and he had an idea. He smoothed it out as best he could and left it on the living-room table, to make it look like Chloe was out for a run. Then he went upstairs and got Chloe’s running kit and put it on her. But there was a problem.’

  Mrs Dow was looking at him now as if he were a person in a dream. The street outside was completely quiet and he cursed Singh’s slowness.

  ‘What problem?’ she asked.

  ‘The running shoes. She didn’t have any. He could have panicked then. But he didn’t. He hid Chloe’s body – in the garage is my guess – and went out to buy some new shoes from the sports shop in the centre. And later in the evening, when the coast was clear, he put the shoes on Chloe’s feet and drove her body out to Pike Pond and dumped her in the water.’

  She was so still, stood there staring at him, he couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She said, very quietly, ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘That when you got home on Friday and thought Chloe was out for a run, she wasn’t. She was here, in the house. Already dead.’

  ‘Already dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But ... who killed her?’

  He swallowed. ‘The other man. The man who’d been ... bothering Chloe.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Mrs Dow whispered.

  Garvie couldn’t delay any longer. He said, ‘Your husband. Mr Dow. I’m sorry.’

  She was perfectly calm. He watched her put the thought in her mind and test it out.

  ‘But he was at work,’ she said after a moment.

  Garvie shook his head.

  She continued to think, calmly, quietly, and there was a moment when he thought it was going to be OK. But only a moment. He’d never seen anyone have hysterics before. Her head began to shake from side to side. She made wild, dithering movements with her arms and moaned like a beast.

  Garvie tried to calm her but she shook him off.

  ‘Liar!’ she screamed. ‘Liar!’

  She staggered backwards onto the landing, screaming, and Garvie followed at a distance, pleading with her to be quiet. As he went he glanced at his watch, and again cursed Singh for taking so long. Mrs Dow threw her arms from side to side and rolled her eyes. She kicked off her slippers, and her dressing gown came undone and showed her nightdress, large and rucked, swinging around her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Garvie cried. ‘But it’s true. I can prove it. Look, Mrs Dow! This is the receipt for the running shoes he bought at the Centre. He filed it away, just as you said he always did.’

  She snatched the receipt from him and waved it in the air without looking at it. She screamed once, fell silent, and advanced on him, her face distorted with fury. And at that moment a car drew up on the driveway outside and they both stopped, listening.

  With a sigh of relief Garvie said, ‘That’s Inspector Singh, Mrs Dow. He can explain it to you.’

  ‘Inspector Singh?’

  ‘I phoned him. He can explain everything.’ He smiled at her reassuringly, and called down, ‘Singh! Door’s open! We’re up here!’

  There was the sound of the front door opening and closing and footsteps on the stairs.

  She was quiet now, waiting.

  ‘It’s going to be OK,’ Garvie said to her softly. ‘You’ll see. I’m so sorry about what happened. But the inspector will explain. Here he is. At last.’

  And they turned together to look towards the top of the stairs. The sound of footsteps came closer, and after a moment, round the corner of the banisters came Mr Dow. He stood at the end of the landing in his paint-spattered overalls and tool-belt, looking back at them silently.

  56

  ‘MICK!’ MRS DOW cried in ecstasy. ‘Mick!’

  Without hurrying, he came along the landing and she collapsed into his arms, and he held her up, looking at Garvie evenly over the top of her head.

  ‘It’s OK, love,’ he said to his wife. ‘Hush now.’

  ‘But Mick, you don’t understand, Mick.’

  ‘Don’t try to talk. You’re not well, you know you’re not. I came back to see how you were. I’m just on my way to another job.’

  She pushed her face against the bib of his overalls and made soft weeping noises.

  ‘She’s not herself,’ he said to Garvie.

  ‘Mick,’ she said once more, and held him tightly.

  ‘Well,’ Garvie said, ‘I’ll leave you two love birds in peace. Thing is, I’ve got this maths exam, so I’ll just—’

  Mr Dow stepped across him and blocked his way. ‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ he said in his slow, flat voice.

  Before Garvie could speak Mrs Dow reared up out of her husband’s arms and said, ‘Lies! He’s been telling me lies.’

  Mr Dow tried to calm her, keeping his eyes on Garvie. ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Don’t be silly now.’

  ‘Lies about you,’ she insisted.

  He held her again, smoothing her disordered hair with one hand, and at last said, in the same flat, slow voice: ‘What lies?’

  Confusedly she talked – about Chloe, about the jacket she’d taken to the dry cleaner’s, and the note in the waste-paper basket, and the running shoes bought that evening at the centre. ‘He said there were three men,’ she said, gulping hard. ‘Three, Mick! Bothering her – and I know what that means!’

  He pressed her face down to his chest again and tried to quieten her. ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Lies about the running shoes!’ she shouted, rearing up again. She waved her hand holding a bit of paper in his face. ‘Lies about where you filed the receipt!’

  ‘Hush, love,’ he said again. ‘Please. You’ll only make yourself worse. It’s all nonsense, you know it is.’ He held her tightly, murmuring quietly to her, trying to calm her down, keeping his eyes all the time on Garvie – until, after a minute or more, in the middle of her confused talking, he made a sudden angry movement, as if he couldn’t bear her hysteria any more, and Mrs Dow fell forward onto the carpet and lay at their feet.

  He put the claw hammer neatly back in his tool-belt, and stood looking at Garvie.

  Garvie looked down at Mrs Dow and saw blood on the carpet by the back of her head. ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he said quietly, carefully keeping the horror out of his voice. ‘That’s going to be a really hard stain to get out,’ he added. But the horror remained.

  Mr Dow said nothing. He began to breathe heavily, the only sound in the hush of the house and the quietness of the deserted cul-de-sac around them. There was no way past him downstairs. In the silence there was a small intrusive noise, and Garvie took out his phone and just had time to see a text from Singh reading Stuck in traffic before Mr Dow stepped forward with unexpected speed and knocked it violently out of his hand.

  ‘Careful now,’ Garvie said, taking a step backwards. ‘You wouldn’t want to break it, would you?’

  Mr Dow looked down at the phone on the carpet and stamped on it heavily in his workman’s boots, and there was the smothered crunch of smashed plastic.

  ‘I see,’ Garvie said.

  He backed away again, and Mr Dow took another step forward, still staring at him in silence.

  ‘Well,’ Garvie said conversationally, ‘I know this is a cliché, but in fact the police are on their way. The house will be surrounded. You can’t escape. You shouldn’t do anything rash. I needn’t go on.’ He paused. ‘Need I?’

  Mr Dow stepped forward
again and Garvie took another step back.

  ‘Though I should probably try to keep you talking at this point. If you could ramble on about how you killed her it would help.’

  Saying nothing, Mr Dow advanced heavily, and Garvie went slowly further backwards.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got a question. About that job you were doing Friday. You must have left the property straight after the sparks and chippie went at four, with the painting still half done. But it was all finished by start of work Monday morning. So did you go back at the weekend to—’

  The man caught him mid-sentence by the throat and heaved him wriggling against the wall and hung him there, choking. He drew his arm so far back Garvie couldn’t see it any more, and punched him suddenly in the eyes with a loud crunch. Falling sideways out of his grip, Garvie staggered down the narrow hallway, blind and gasping, as far as the Dows’ bedroom, where he stopped and turned, just as Mr Dow lunged at him again. He ducked to the side of the blow and caught the man off-balance with a hack to the leg, and scrambled through the bedroom door and slammed it behind him. Bracing himself, he gulped for air. He couldn’t see out of one eye. Wiping blood from the other, he blinked and flinched with pain.

  The bedroom door, which had no lock, burst open almost immediately, flinging him forward, and Mr Dow came into the room behind him, breathing hard. There was no doubting the man’s brute strength. Garvie retreated limping round the far side of the bed, watching out of his one good eye as Mr Dow came after him again, methodically. Even now, as if in useless self-mockery, his brain registered the fine detail of the room. It was all pink and cream, very neat. There were built-in ivory-coloured wardrobes and a double bed with an ivory-coloured duvet, and bedside chairs upholstered in pink velvet. On a dressing table stood a jewellery box, hairbrush set and two large china vases, both hideous. Mr Dow took the claw hammer out of his tool-belt. Garvie saw that in detail too. The sticky end of it was bristly with hairs.

  Garvie spat blood. ‘This is your last chance,’ he said in a gargle, ‘to give yourself up quietly.’

  As Dow came after him, hammer raised, he leaped up onto the bed and staggered bouncing across it, but Dow was quicker than he thought and caught him meatily on the point of his shoulder with another blow of his hammer, sending him crashing face-first into the wooden panelling of the headboard. He fell over the side of the bed, flailing. Dow appeared above him, and he flung a pair of pyjama bottoms which he found in his hand upwards into the man’s face, and scrambled into the ensuite bathroom, where he slammed the door and turned the key.

  His legs gave way then, and he fell against the tiled wall, panting. His shoulder glowed fiercely with a burning pain and his right arm hung down numb and useless. There was no fight left in him, he knew. The flimsy door shook as he looked, one-eyed, around the tiny bathroom. There was nothing in it to save him; nothing of use in the washbasin, toilet, shower cubicle, free-standing rack of toiletries. Not even a monkey could have escaped through the scrap of frosted glass in the window.

  For a moment there was complete silence except for the small wet gasps of his own breathing.

  With a noise like a gunshot, the hammer crashed through the flimsy panelling.

  Garvie tried to pull himself together. ‘Toilet’s occupied,’ he called out. ‘You’ll have to wait a minute.’

  The hammer crashed through the door a second time and a jagged piece of panelling fell out, revealing Mr Dow on the other side lifting the hammer again.

  ‘Think of the mess,’ Garvie croaked. ‘Not to mention the expense.’

  With his left hand he squirted shower gel through the gap in the door, and Mr Dow wiped his face and lunged forward with his hammer a third time.

  There was nothing left now for Garvie to do. He stood up with the sinking feeling that all his gambles had failed, and quietly faced the door. The hammer crashed through it a final time, the last of the panelling flew apart and Mr Dow stood there in front of him.

  Garvie looked at him through his one eye. This is how he must have looked to Chloe in the end, he thought. A big, silent man with empty eyes and violent hands.

  He spoke up to say one final thing. ‘Your biggest mistake was not to understand your wife.’

  The incomprehension in the man’s face was replaced by a spasm of hatred, and at last he broke his silence.

  ‘That bitch,’ he said with a twisted leer, and lifted the hammer.

  There was a blur of movement behind him, and a noise like a dropped bottle. He fell forward heavily, and Mrs Dow appeared behind him, ragged and ghastly, with the remains of one of the hideous dressing-table china vases in her hands.

  She stood over him, bleeding. ‘You killed my daughter,’ she said thickly. ‘You bastard.’

  And as Garvie tottered through the shattered door to take the shard of vase from her, there was the sound outside of cars drawing up at speed and car doors slamming.

  They looked at each other.

  ‘Typical, isn’t it?’ Garvie said thickly. ‘They never arrive until you don’t need them any more.’

  57

  JUNE ARRIVED WET and cool. Rain fell onto the city out of numb grey skies; it dripped from trees, gurgled down drains and stood everywhere in puddles as dull as the sky overhead. On Bulwarks Lane the gutters overflowed, flooding the road outside Jamal’s. A smell of rot hung in the streets, and people’s houses filled with soaked shoes, dripping umbrellas and steaming coats.

  One rainy evening at about nine o’clock Detective Inspector Raminder Singh drove into Five Mile. It was the first time he’d been into the estate since his dash to Fox Walk a week earlier. He went past the turn to the Dows’ house, along Old Ditch Road past the kiddies’ playground, onto Pilkington Driftway, and drew up at last outside Eastwick Gardens. The first thing he saw was the For Sale sign for Flat 12 and he let out a small sigh. He couldn’t blame Mrs Smith, but he knew what Garvie thought about a move to Barbados.

  Carrying his briefcase, he left his car and walked with his usual self-possession through the downpour to the flats’ entrance, and a few minutes later followed Mrs Smith into her flat. Voices met him: Leonard Johnson and his wife finishing dinner in the kitchen. Looking around, he saw Garvie brooding in the corner and nodded briefly, but the boy gave him no more than a blank stare before returning his attention to the floor.

  In his briefcase were documents relating to Garvie’s absence at his exams: they confirmed what the police referred to as ‘unavoidable involvement in police business’. Garvie’s mother took the envelope from the inspector and went to find her glasses, and Leonard Johnson came over and shook hands with Singh and congratulated him on the outcome of the Dow investigation.

  ‘I can’t think of it with satisfaction,’ Singh said. ‘There were too many mistakes.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Garvie said, still staring at the floor.

  Uncle Len frowned. ‘You might as well enjoy it, Raminder. They kick you when you’re down and ignore you when you’re up.’

  He was referring to the media. All week the headlines had been about the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ case. Most attention had gone as usual to the killer, the ‘Beast’, a familiar journalistic farrago of astonished outrage and righteous fury. The police had received little more than a grudging acknowledgement that in the end they hadn’t entirely failed to rise above their initial incompetence.

  ‘What’s the chief’s view?’

  ‘His homicidal urge has subsided. I am allowed to remain in position.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘The law-abiding world will be glad,’ Garvie said to the floor. ‘Criminals everywhere will shake in terror.’ His uncle rounded on him. ‘I don’t see what you’ve got to complain about. You’ve been remarkably fortunate. You shouldn’t have got involved, you were told not to get involved, and you got involved anyway. It was only by some fluke you managed to avoid serious danger. Look at you.’

  They looked at him. He still wore an eye-patch, his face was swollen and there wa
s a black scrawl of stitches across his lower lip. He wore a sling round his right arm. When he shifted his position under their gaze, he winced.

  ‘It’s not me I’m thinking of,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Well, your mother’s thinking of you,’ Uncle Len said. ‘You don’t know what she’s been through.’

  ‘I know,’ Garvie said.

  In fact it was Uncle Len who didn’t know; he hadn’t been told the exact nature of Garvie’s involvement – it was thought it might unbalance him.

  ‘You’ve been lucky,’ his uncle persisted. ‘You even get a mention in the press.’

  It was true. Although details had not been released by the police, it was known that a boy – unidentified for legal reasons – had been in the Dows’ house when the police arrived to apprehend Chloe’s killer. It was speculated that he had been present during the violent altercation between the spouses in which Mr Dow had eventually been overcome. As yet no journalist had connected this boy with boys mentioned at various points earlier: in reports of the conflagration at the Tick Hill trailer park which had led to the arrest of the Winders, the events surrounding the suicide of Paul Johnson, aka Ben Naylor, in the woods at the end of Badger Lane, and the unfortunate arrest and detention of Alex Robinson, whose family was currently suing the police for mistreatment.

  Uncle Len returned to Singh. ‘There are several things I don’t understand, Raminder. It was announced early on that this man, Dow, had an alibi. He was at a house finishing a paint job.’

  Singh nodded. ‘He said he stayed at the property where he was working till quarter to six and a neighbour corroborated it. He heard Dow working all afternoon and saw him drive off to meet his wife at the Centre.’

  ‘So what really happened?’

  ‘It turns out Dow has a marijuana habit. When his workmates left, he got the idea of sneaking home for a quick smoke. To give the impression he was still at work, he left the radio on and his van parked outside the house and rode back to Fox Walk on a bicycle he found at the property. It’s only ten minutes away. He was in his back garden when Chloe came home earlier than expected. Usually at that time she was on the track. It seems he acted at once. But when he tried to force himself on her, she fought back, and it got out of hand. He’s a powerful man. It was probably all over in a few minutes,’