The Domino Killer

by Neil White

  A few minutes passed. People were starting to notice him. A woman walking a small dog had crossed the bridge but turned back when she saw Joe. A teenage couple had walked through and headed across the green, where there was a steady stream of headlights heading towards the motorway.

  Joe looked round again. Proctor was still there.

  He pulled back, closed his eyes. He wondered whether he should go back to his car. What could he say if Proctor walked round the corner and saw him?

  But then he thought of something else: Ellie had been attacked along a quiet path. Was Proctor waiting to do the same? Had he come here to attack another young girl? This was Joe’s chance to make a difference and catch him in the act.

  There was a noise. A shout. Footsteps.

  As Joe looked round, someone was running across the green, footsteps thumping. Joe looked back towards the small stone structure. There was something on the floor.

  Joe tried to keep his footfall light, but the early evening was quiet and every footstep seemed to announce his arrival. When he got closer, he dodged behind a tree and moved a branch to one side to get a view. He scoured the area for movement. There was nothing.

  Then Joe gasped. Proctor’s hood was on the floor.

  He moved closer still, and there was the bright sheen of skin in the dim lighting. A face. It wasn’t just the hood. Proctor was down.

  Joe ran towards him. He skipped up the stone steps, his body tense, ready to run in case it was a trap. His foot slipped. There was something dark and wet on the floor, sticky like blood. He grimaced and looked back down again. It was hard to make out much in the dusk, but he could tell that it was a person on his back, his arms by his side.

  Joe gasped. It was the person he’d been following; he recognised the hooded top, but there was blood all over it now. There was a deep wound in his neck, just below his ear.

  The metallic smell of warm blood wafted towards him. He turned away, fighting the urge to vomit. Once he’d controlled his breathing, he bent down over the body and put his ear to the man’s chest. There was no heartbeat. He remembered something he’d seen in a film, so he grabbed his phone and held the glass screen over the man’s mouth. There was no misting.

  Joe clicked on the flashlight on his phone to turn it into a small torch. He shone it towards the man’s face, then immediately turned away, gasping.

  The wound in the neck was deep and wide. Blood soaked the ground beneath his head. There was more blood coming from under his back and there was a large red circle in his chest. The ground around him was awash with blood, splashes of it dripping from the side of the bench nearest to the body. Joe looked at his hands. There was blood on them.

  His mind swam with panic. He’d followed the person to this park. People had seen him loitering nearby, his footprints would be in the blood. How the hell could he explain all that?

  There was something else too: the dead person wasn’t Mark Proctor.

  Thirty-seven

  Mark Proctor looked down at his hands. They were steady. No trembles or shakes. It had been an interesting evening but not entirely a surprise.

  He fumbled with his keys and went into his house. There was music playing in a back room, some radio station turned up too loudly. Helena knew he hated that; the inane chatter, that Americanised drivel, the constant stream of badly written commercials.

  ‘I’m back,’ he shouted.

  The music carried on.

  ‘I said, I’m back,’ he shouted louder.

  There was a pause before the music was switched off. He preferred the silence, to let the sounds of the house take over. The tick of the clock, the clangs of the radiator, the hum of the fridge. They gave the house life and shouldn’t be drowned out by bad radio.

  He walked along the hallway, pausing only to straighten a picture that had become askew, and into the small room. Helena was there, her hand around a glass of wine, a scented candle burning on the hearth. She looked up at him, wide-eyed. ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  ‘I got held up,’ he said. ‘I went to see a new client and Greg borrowed my car to meet someone.’ He nodded towards the glass. ‘Wine?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was just something to do.’

  ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘I didn’t know what time you were due back, so I haven’t made any supper.’ She put her glass down with a heavy clink. ‘I can make you something, if you like.’

  ‘Yes, that would be nice,’ he said, and backed out of the room. She knew not to put the music back on.

  He threw his jacket over the banister and went upstairs to the small study. The door clicked closed and the room felt like a haven. He put his head back against the door and closed his eyes. He needed to work out what to do next. The computer was the obvious start.

  As the computer booted up, he took the camera out of his pocket, slipping out the memory card and putting it in the drawer on his oak desk. Once the screen was showing, he went to the email software. No emails.

  He opened the messaging app on his phone. He was angry, but he needed to keep that at bay; acting through anger leads to mistakes, and he didn’t make mistakes. He typed:

  I sent my assistant to collect my box, I was busy at the time, and he hasn’t returned yet. What’s going on?

  He clicked SEND and sat back. The noise of Helena in the kitchen drifted through the house: water filling a saucepan, some chopping of vegetables.

  He thought again about the memory card from the camera and then glanced across at the A4 binders on his desk, the public face of his business. They contained the accounts he showed if he visited an investor. That was his business, persuading people to forget about the banks and trust him, because his accounts showed his successes, five-yearly investment plans that paid out big.

  The sight of his accounts made an idea begin its slow journey to fruition, from a niggle to a growing realisation and then to an absolute certainty that it was the right thing to do.

  His real accounts were locked away in a small safe in the corner. He went to it and pulled out an old ledger, hard-backed. He slid the bolt on his study door and settled back into his chair. He opened it to reveal his spidery handwriting, a list of names and numbers, showing monies in and out, along with a running balance. It was the only number that mattered because his scheme was a simple one: people paid him money and he did his best to make sure he didn’t have to give it back.

  A smile was all it took. A shake of the hand, words spoken earnestly, promises that sounded plausible, with recommendations passing through whole families. They loved his balance sheets, those annual summaries of the progress of their investments that he used to get them to make another investment. Give him twenty thousand pounds, and after five years it’s grown to thirty-two thousand pounds. Give them back two thousand and they trust him to invest the remaining thirty for another five years. So it goes on, every five years, small sums given back and the rest reinvested. It was brilliant because they trusted him. He dropped off calendars at Christmas, held small parties for them, and their relatives couldn’t wait to join; he’d never let anyone down.

  It was all a sham. He paid out using the new investments and enjoyed a good life, fobbing them off with loose change every five years. It was laughable. They thought they had a couple of hundred grand in the bank, when all they had done was give him a chunk of their money many years ago and believed his promises ever since.

  The banking crash had made it difficult. People got scared and wanted their money back, but there wasn’t any left, so he’d relied on a lot of charm. But he’d ridden it out, putting off those who wanted their investments back by promising a decent return if they held firm. Less than before, but still better than the banks, because he knew where to look.

  That wasn’t the difficulty, though. The hard part was attracting new investors, because people just didn’t have the money like they used to. He needed a new surge of capital, and as he looked at the memory card from the camera, h
e knew that he had it.

  Thirty-eight

  Joe sat in his car, running his hands over his hair, panicking, looking around, wondering who was watching. He’d just left a dead man whose blood was still warm. His fingers were trembling. Should he have done more? The man could have been saved.

  No, the man was dead. His eyes were open, staring, and there’d been no breath coming from him. The man was beyond saving.

  He looked at his palms and his vision swam. There was blood dried into the ridges in his palms and fingers. It will be in his hair and his clothes, just small traces of the victim’s DNA on everything he touches.

  He slammed the steering wheel with his hand. Fuck! He shouldn’t have touched him, should have thought about evidence, but he’d reacted naturally. A man was on the ground and Joe had reached out to him, a human reaction.

  He had to get away. Where could he go? There was one person who might help him. It might be too late for that, but it was the only person he could turn to.

  Gina.

  He set off quickly, his mind trying to make sense of it all.

  The man had been alive just minutes before, Joe had seen him. So it could only mean one thing: that the killer had been waiting for him, striking as soon as he had the chance.

  So who was he? Joe had been certain it was Proctor. It was a hire car, like Proctor’s, the same make and model and colour. The man was wearing the same hoodie Proctor had been wearing earlier.

  Then he remembered the Trafford Centre. The car park. A switch? A pre-arranged meeting that Proctor had been suspicious about, so he’d got someone to go along on his behalf?

  But if it wasn’t Proctor, who was it, and why was he murdered?

  What about the body? It might not be discovered until the morning; the evening was setting in and midweek didn’t seem the right time for the green to attract the local teenagers. He had time to get rid of the traces.

  But where was his morality? There was a dead man and Joe had witnessed his last movements. He should help. Except he knew the answer straight away, that as soon as he said that he’d been following the victim, suspicion would fall straight on him. Everywhere the police looked, he would be the prime suspect. He’d been seen loitering nearby, conspicuous in his courtroom suit. If they asked his family, they would say that he’d rushed off after he’d found out that Mark Proctor had spoken to his little sister. Sam would tell them that he’d once vowed to kill Mark Proctor.

  Joe shook his head, gritted his teeth in frustration. What could he say? He thought he was following a man he’d once vowed to kill, right up until the point where he was murdered in a park by someone he couldn’t describe? He could see every investigative trail point back to him: he’d made a mistake, that in the gloom he’d mistaken the man for Proctor and carried out the promise he’d always made to himself. And there were traces of the man’s blood on him. It was a strong case, and he would become that cliché, the murderer who protests his innocence all the way through his life sentence.

  He punched the steering wheel in frustration, making his horn sound, and screeched out loud.

  There was only one thing Joe knew for certain, one thing that kept his anger under control: he hadn’t killed the man. He had no reason to feel guilty. But he had to keep on the move until he got to the bottom of everything.

  He drove to Gina’s but parked a few streets away. It was too soon for the police to be interested in him, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He walked the rest of the way, looking around as he went along the slow curve of a suburban street. If there was a threat, he wanted to see it coming, even though he knew he looked suspicious.

  Gina lived in a modern house on an estate, with wide lawns and cars parked on driveways rather than garages. It was nondescript and boxy, with the streets busy with children every weekend. He was relieved to see that her living-room light was on.

  Joe paused before he walked up her drive. Gina used to be a detective. If she suspected he’d done something murderous, would she help or turn him in? He wasn’t sure he could trust her. But he remembered her true nature from when she was a detective. She’d been almost a mother figure to him as the family grappled with Ellie’s murder. She wouldn’t turn her back on him now, he was sure of that.

  He took a deep breath and approached her door. He knocked and checked his watch: after nine. The curtain in the living-room window moved and then went back. At first, Joe thought she’d decided not to answer the door, but then there was the rattle of the security chain.

  When the door opened, Gina just let it swing and walked back into the house.

  Joe followed, closing the door behind him. When he went into the living room, there was no television on. There was a wine glass on the floor, as good as empty. From the way Gina slumped into her chair and pulled her knees up to her chest, Joe guessed that the glass wasn’t her first.

  ‘So that’s it,’ she said, raising her hands.

  Joe could hear the slow growl of anger in her voice, along with the drawl made by the wine. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m retired,’ she said, and bent down for her glass. She drained her wine and said, ‘At fifty-three, I’m all washed up, just thirty years alone in these walls to look forward to. Thank you, Joe Parker.’

  Joe didn’t sit down. ‘I’m not here about that.’

  ‘What, me leaving isn’t even worth talking about?’

  He looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath, tried to stay calm. ‘I’m sorry, Gina. What more can I say? I let you down.’

  ‘No, you let Ellie down.’

  Joe glared at her. Gina raised her hand in apology. ‘Yeah, a low blow, I know, but that’s how I’m feeling.’ She pushed herself out of her chair before weaving towards the kitchen. ‘So what is it then? Have you come here to apologise?’

  Joe listened to the opening of the fridge door and then the glug of the wine being poured. When she returned, she was carrying two glasses.

  ‘Too late for sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve quit.’ She handed him a glass. ‘But I don’t get drunk alone.’

  Joe sat down and took a drink. The wine was cold and fresh and just what he needed.

  ‘I’ve come here for your help,’ he said.

  Gina pointed with the hand that was holding the wine glass, so that the wine spilled onto the chair arm as she jabbed her finger towards him. ‘You had my help once before, but you weren’t being truthful to me, so it all came to nothing. You betrayed me, Joe. It feels like you cheated.’

  ‘This is different,’ he said. ‘Whatever’s happened in the past, you’re my friend, and I’ve come to you because I don’t know who else to turn to.’

  Gina took a drink and stared straight ahead. After a few seconds, she said, ‘Go on, tell me.’

  So he did. About Mark Proctor speaking to Ruby and about how he’d followed him to see where he went. When Joe got to the part where he found the man dead in the park, Gina’s mouth dropped open and she put her glass down.

  ‘What do I do?’ Joe said.

  She left her chair and kneeled beside him. ‘What the hell have you done, Joe?’

  ‘Nothing! I told you how it happened.’

  ‘What if I don’t believe you, because you have to admit it looks pretty coincidental? You wanted to kill Mark Proctor. You followed him, and someone you thought was Mark Proctor is dead. Show me your hands.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ he said.

  ‘Show me your hands!’

  Joe put his glass down and held them out. Gina turned them slowly, looking intently at his fingers. ‘There’s blood on them,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘And your shoes. I can see it on the edge of the sole.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said, jerking his hands away. ‘I went to the guy, to see if I could help. I trod in his blood.’

  Gina thought about that. ‘What would you tell a client to do?’

  ‘Not cooperate,’ he said. ‘Let them find me.’

  ‘So you’re not going to call the p
olice or hand yourself in?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘But how does that look?’ Gina said.

  ‘Guilty, that’s how it looks,’ he said, with resignation. ‘You’ve got to believe me. There’s no one else I can turn to. Yes, I made a mistake in the past, but I was hiding what someone else had done, not what I’d done.’

  ‘No, you were hiding what you’d seen,’ she said.

  Gina looked at his hands again and got to her feet. She went over to her phone, which had been charging on the table in the corner. She unplugged it and placed it on the chair arm.

  ‘Leave,’ she said.