Black Heart: A totally gripping serial-killer thriller

by Anna-Lou Weatherley

  She audibly exhales. ‘Well, I hope to God you’re wrong is all I can say.’

  ‘Well, it’s been known.’ But we both know that it’s something I try not to make a habit of. ‘I guess there’s only one way to be sure,’ Fiona says, which is exactly what I’m afraid of.

  ‘I don’t know, Fi, I don’t like it. Got a bad feeling about this one…’

  She slides her hand across the table and touches mine. I’m not expecting this, but I don’t pull away. It feels strangely good and reminds me how much I miss human contact. Touching. I think of Florence then, her eyes as she’d said that word. Perhaps we’d be in bed right now if it wasn’t for Touchy here. I don’t know whether I’m grateful or pissed off. ‘Dan…’ She’s looking at me nervously; her pupils are dilating.

  ‘So, out with it then,’ I say, sensing her apprehension. ‘You said “partly” before, that you were here to talk about the Baxter murder, partly.’ I glance at her hand on mine. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been harbouring impure thoughts about me all these years?’ I’m joking because I don’t like the look on her face. Although to be honest if she did tell me that I wouldn’t be too upset.

  She’s looking down at her lap again now, she pulls her hand away and tucks her black shiny hair behind her ears. I get a waft of her perfume. Spicy. Oriental.

  ‘Craig Mathers,’ she says.

  My blood runs icy. His name does that to me. Instinctively I pull away and fold my arms across my chest.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s been released… good behaviour apparently.’

  I nod. I’ve been expecting it I suppose, knew it was coming. Good behaviour. Joke really isn’t it? Released after serving half your sentence for ‘good behaviour’. I’m sure most people can see the irony in that statement. The words ‘murderer’ and ‘good behaviour’ don’t really belong together in the same sentence. You commit a crime, get sent down for let’s say two years, as in Mathers’ case, and because you keep your nose clean behind the door you’re let out after serving less than half your sentence. You’re actually rewarded for being good while you’re serving time for doing something bad. Like I’ve said before: I believe in the justice system, but hey, I didn’t say it isn’t flawed.

  ‘So, the bastard’s going to get out and get his life back. Lucky him. Shame Rachel can’t do the same isn’t it?’

  She casts me a downward look.

  ‘I know,’ she says, softly, ‘I thought you should be aware… I got a tip-off from someone at the parole board.’

  I don’t really know much about Craig Mathers, just the basics, and that’s deliberate on my part. I don’t want to know anything about him: his family background; his friendships or relationships; whether his mates and colleagues thought him to be of good character, which incidentally they seemed to at the trial. And I’ll tell you why. I didn’t and I don’t want to humanise him because then I might not hate him as much as I do. Because if I didn’t hate him I would have to put that hatred somewhere else, and where would it go? Who was it who said, ‘let no man take me so low as to hate him?’ Was it Martin Luther King Jr.? One of them great people anyway. I’d like to think I could live by that statement, and I think I used to once, but when you lose the love of your life to a jumped-up little prick who gets behind the wheel of a car after ten pints and kills someone, it changes you. It knocked me sick to hear his family and friends gushing on about what a ‘decent’ and ‘reliable’ bloke he was in court, and how he’d never been in any real trouble before and was a ‘responsible adult’ previously of good character. I remember his father, who he worked with as a painter decorator and seemed like a credible, normal bloke – and he probably is – he had nothing but praises to sing about his ‘hardworking’ son. And yet I just didn’t buy it; there was something in his eyes, it’s always in their eyes. Eyes tell you everything you need to know about a person, it’s a cliché but it’s true. In Mathers’ case they were small and black with nothing behind them. Evil little black holes. I wondered if I could love a son with eyes like that? But I never got the chance to find out, and maybe I never will now. So yeah, it pissed me off to hear about what a ‘likeable’ bloke he was, because he killed my girl. He changed my future.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dan,’ Fi says, ‘apparently he’s going back to live at his mother’s address with his girlfriend. I just wanted to warn you, I don’t want to upset you, I just thought… well, I just thought you’d want to know… that I’d want to know.’

  I hold her glassy-eyed gaze for a moment as I let the words sink in, before picking up the Jack and coke in front of me and downing the glass in one.

  ‘Thanks Touchy,’ I say, as thoughts of exacting revenge run like a marathon through my mind, ‘you’re a pal.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Florence entered her apartment, throwing her handbag onto the floor and kicking off her boots. She felt a little giddy, awash with endorphins; it reminded her of how she’d felt that afternoon in suite 206.

  Daniel. She said the name aloud, allowing it to roll provocatively off her tongue. It even sounded like a boyfriend’s name. In her mind, she replayed their brief meeting earlier that day with the eye of an observer looking in. Her body language, covertly sexual; his body language, hmm, more difficult to read, but that’s what had excited her. Most men were so transparent, like panes of glass, but he had got up and left! He’d actually left her sitting there in the pub nursing her drink, to head off to some crappy meeting. Perhaps it had been deliberate; treat them mean keep them keen, isn’t that what people said? Well, it had certainly worked because immediately she began fantasising about how life might be with Daniel in it. An architect’s wife! They would attend posh dinner parties together and she would fraternise with other wives, telling them about how they had first met. That’s what people do, isn’t it, talk nostalgically about their first encounter? ‘He stood me up in a pub – and now look at us!’ She visualised them selecting soft furnishings together, bickering over curtain fabric and mattress thickness. She imagined Sunday morning walks and movie nights and eating pizza in bed. Me and Daniel. Normal, lovely Daniel who had to leave because he had a meeting. A meeting that was more important than their meeting. And the way he had been so candid about his girlfriend, how he had opened up to her, showed his heartbreak. He seemed so lost and lonely when speaking of her that it had actually given Florence a pang of jealousy. She wanted a man to feel that deeply about her too. And she decided that Daniel was going to be the one who did. Lucky for her that girlfriend of his was killed, eh? She wondered what she had looked like, if she was prettier, sexier. Perhaps she would do some investigating, search for Rachel on the internet, after all, her untimely death would’ve made the news wouldn’t it?

  There was something in their brief encounter, something she couldn’t quite explain that made her want to laugh out loud. What was it? Whatever it was, it was the kind of feeling that made her want to listen to music and to hear herself speak – the kind where she wanted to dress up in front of the mirror and see herself as he would see her. She pressed the play button on her iTunes and began singing along to the Chris Brown track that blasted from the speakers. Then she ran herself a bath.

  She had a hook-up tonight, a wealthy older man she occasionally saw whenever he was in London on business. He was taking her to dinner at Nobu, no doubt with a little trip to Christian Louboutin first. He had a foot fetish, this one, and during both of their prior meetings he had purchased her expensive footwear, which he liked her to wear naked while walking over his back. She felt indifferent to the obvious infliction of pain this caused him, but it passed the time.

  Usually she would be looking forward to becoming ‘Lara’ for the evening: the sophisticated, bilingual, postgraduate Psychology student with shiny, black bobbed hair but tonight her heart wasn’t really in it; her thoughts were preoccupied with Mummy Bear and, now, Daniel. Undressing, she slipped into her kimono robe and poured some Jo Malone bath oil into the water, a sweet-smelling
memento, smiling as she watched it create an oily film on the water’s surface.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The sight of the two uniformed police officers momentarily throws her and she instinctively wraps her robe tightly around her frame.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Hello, I’m PC Burns and this is PC Choudrhi. Sorry if we’ve caught you at a bad time. Can we come in for a quick chat?’ The policewoman smiles but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Her male counterpart remains expressionless.

  ‘Yes, of course, please come in. I just need to turn the bath off, won’t be a moment… Has something happened?’

  They enter her apartment as she hurries into the bathroom reassuring herself that they’re not here to arrest her; she’d be in cuffs by now.

  ‘It’s Danni-Jo isn’t it?’ PC Burns asks.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Daniella, Danni-Jo to my friends, or DJ to the really lazy ones.’ She grins. ‘Can I get you both coffee, tea?’

  ‘No, no thank you,’ Burns says, ‘we won’t keep you long, Danni-Jo.’

  ‘This is about Kizzy, next door’ she says, ‘about her cat, Esmerelda?’

  ‘Yes,’ Burns replies, taking a notebook from the top pocket of her shirt and beginning to write.

  Bloody filth. Haven’t they got anything better to do than investigate the death of a fucking mangy old moggy? It was a good job she didn’t pay her taxes.

  ‘She told me she’d died. She was so upset, poor Kizzy,’ Danni-Jo explains, pouting.

  ‘Poor Esmerelda,’ Burns says.

  ‘She loved that cat like a baby,’ she says, ‘bloody evil thing to do… I mean, what psycho kills a cat for God’s sake?’

  PC Choudrhi is looking around Danni-Jo’s kitchen, just looking, but it’s still making her uncomfortable.

  ‘Karen has reason to believe that her cat was poisoned. Have you seen anyone unfamiliar in the building recently, anyone acting suspiciously, hanging around outside maybe?’

  Danni-Jo sighs, padding over to the kitchen, allowing her robe to briefly fall open and expose a little thigh as she passes PC Choudrhi. She’s not sure if he notices. ‘No, can’t say I have,’ she says. ‘But I’m not here that much anyway. I’m a student, I’m studying, and I sometimes work nights.’

  Burns writes in her notebook.

  ‘Where do you study, Danni-Jo?’

  ‘ECL… Performing Arts, Theatre Studies, ever since I was a little girl I wanted to be on the stage. It’s in the blood, my dad, he was an actor.’ Worthy of an Oscar. She’s oversharing and tells herself to stop.

  ‘Love a good musical myself, went to see Wicked recently – absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘Isn’t it!’ Danni-Jo agrees. Great. Burns is onside: panic over. ‘I loved Wicked too,’ she says. She’s never seen it. Never intends to. She despises musicals, all that… joy.

  ‘Did you see Esmerelda – the cat, often? I believe it was a house cat and it never left the building?’

  Danni-Jo lights a cigarette as she begins to make coffee. It’s what she’d normally do. Cigarette with coffee. ‘I don’t even think you’re supposed to have them here,’ she says, biting her bottom lip, ‘I hardly saw it myself, just a few times when I popped round to Kizzy’s for coffee and a quick chat, you know? Lovely little thing it was, very fluffy… We’ve become quite good friends since she moved in, me and Kizzy I mean, not the cat. It’s so nice to have friendly neighbours, rarer than rocking-horse shit in London. I mean, the couple who lived there before her never said more than a hello to me.’

  Burns smiles and nods. ‘Karen says you have a key to her apartment, is that correct?’

  ‘Yeah, she gave me a spare one when she got locked out once, had to get one of those emergency locksmiths out – cost her a fortune. That’s how we first got talking actually, she locked herself out one evening… daft as a brush she is, but she’s been so lovely to me, looks out for me, stops by every once in a while for a cup of tea, or a glass of wine.’ Danni-Jo tops up her coffee from the freshly brewed pot. ‘I don’t know her very well, but like I said, it’s nice, you know, to have friendly neighbours—’

  ‘Have you ever had cause to use it? The key?’

  She takes a sip of coffee, folds her legs up underneath her on the sofa and adopts a thoughtful look. ‘No, not yet, thankfully. It’s just for emergencies. In case she gets locked out again or something like that. She’s a bit, well, scatty you know… in the nicest way.’ She smiles affectionately.

  Burns continues to scribble in her pad. ‘Well, we’re going to ask security to check the CCTV in the communal staircase, see if anyone entered the building who shouldn’t have last Tuesday.’

  Danni-Jo feels a flutter in her lower intestine. CCTV. In the staircase?

  ‘Didn’t know we had it in the staircase?’ she says, genuinely surprised, ‘I thought it was just in the entrance downstairs.’

  ‘No, actually there’s a small camera, hidden behind the big painting, just on the stairwell outside. It captures both these apartments’ entrances. Didn’t you know?’

  No, she fucking well didn’t! ‘Really? Well, that’s good… good for safety.’

  ‘These are lovely apartments, Danni-Jo, and security is very important. The building’s management company had it fitted, only recently in fact, after a suspected burglary was reported.’

  She nods. She’s still thinking about the CCTV, what it might have captured. How did she not know about the bloody CCTV in the stairwell? She glanced over at the small table by the front door, at the pile of unopened letters and bills. There was probably a notification letter in there somewhere… stupid, stupid girl…

  Burns returns her notebook to her top pocket.

  ‘I hope Kizzy’s okay,’ Danni-Jo says, sensing the police officers’ imminent departure and standing to see them out, ‘she’s been through so much and this has been a real blow to her. And she was doing so well since her breakdown as well.’ She moves closer to Burns, lowers her voice. ‘Kizzy thinks her ex poisoned Esmerelda you know… she told me he was abusive, beat her up and all that, sounds like a right nasty piece of work, apparently he was always threatening to hurt the cat because he knew how much she loved it.’

  PC Choudrhi is already by the door. He looks disinterested, like he’s keen to leave. Makes two of us, Danni-Jo thought. ‘I just hope it doesn’t push her over the edge because, you know, Kizzy’s been really kind to me, motherly you know, but I sense she’s pretty fragile underneath it all.’

  Burns nods like she’s drawn the same conclusion herself.

  ‘Yes, she did mention an ex-husband. We’ll be looking into it. Thanks for your time, Danni-Jo, sorry again to have disturbed you.’

  She smiles earnestly. ‘Not at all… if I can help in any way whatsoever… like I said, Karen… Kizzy… she’s been, well, like a mother to me.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I don’t even have time to begin to process the conversation I’ve just had with Touchy before my phone rings. I answer and turn the radio off. The self-satisfied tone of Chris Moyles’s voice was getting to me anyway.

  ‘Riley.’

  It’s DS Davis, Lucy Davis. And I suddenly remember I need to haul her up on that phone-record oversight.

  ‘This had better be good news, Davis’ I say, which is unfair I know, but my head’s wrecked about Mathers’ release and I’m not in the mood for surprises, any more surprises. Her slight reticence tells me I’m not going to like this.

  ‘Tech have been in touch, boss. That IP address, the ISP says it comes from a coffee shop in West London. The geolocaters tracked it to a Coffee Bean place near Oxford Circus—’

  ‘And…?’ I close my eyes for a few seconds. ‘Been on to them for CCTV?’

  ‘Yes boss,’ she replies and I picture her deflated, hunched shoulders as she speaks, imagining more hours, possibly days, of trawling through endless, mundane images that’ll send her cross-eyed and losing the will to li
ve. ‘But…’

  I don’t like the ‘but’.

  ‘… But they’ve only had one camera working for the past few weeks, according to the manager. And I suspect when he said weeks he meant months.’

  ‘Fuck it!’ I exhale heavily. ‘Okay, well, you know the drill. Any trace on the Bear yet?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she says, her voice disappearing along with my optimism.

  ‘Keep on it.’

  ‘Yes Sir,’ she says.

  ‘And the website – the hook-up site – Sugarpops.com? Please tell me that’s thrown something up at least?’

  ‘Fake ID. She used a bogus name, Scarlett O’Hara.’

  I snort. ‘Inventive.’

  ‘Hmm, IP address traces back to the same coffee shop though, or thereabouts. So it seems we’re dealing with the same person at least.’

  ‘No shit on this one, eh?’ I say, unable to disguise my irritation. Whoever she is, she’s clearly been careful to cover her tracks and is savvy enough not to have used a home computer.

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘I want Baxter’s diary: his schedule, parties he went to, events he attended, all of it. Maybe the bitch bloody well knew him. Get Matthews on it,’ I say.

  ‘Okay, Gov. Oh, and the court order came through for the phone provider.’

  ‘That’s something at least.’

  ‘We’ll have a name and address soon.’

  ‘Yeah, um, get surveillance on the coffee shop, yeah. And make sure those cheap bastards get their cameras in working order. I want to know everyone who goes in and comes out of that place, you understand, whether they have vanilla syrup, five sugars or they like it black, okay? She could still be using it as a base to operate from, so my guess is that she works or lives nearby. Oh, and the handbag, that Kate thingy designer one…’