Oleander Soul

by James Arklie

  Ollie watched the black vans as she worked, wondered if she should try and get a look inside, but then looked at the men hanging round and knew it was a bad idea.

  Then she thought about Amal. Jo had met Stockton-Marston minutes after he’d visited Amal to persuade him to throw her onto the streets. Thoughts, facts and events swirled in her brain, all tangled and twisted like a clump of rope on the seashore. She tried to pick at it with imaginary fingers, find the ends and tease out the threads.

  Jo was linked to Marston, was linked to Amal and she was thrown out. She shook her head to clear it and quickly called her mother. She had to stay on top of everything and everyone.

  ‘Everything okay, Mum? No callers?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Is Lils there’

  ‘Went out with her friend, love.’

  ‘Which friend was it, Mum?’

  There was a pause. ‘Sorry, love.’

  Ollie felt a stir of panic. She had no idea where her daughter was.

  ‘No worries, Mum. If you remember write it down. Get her to call when she gets in. I should be back early.’

  ‘There’s an Amazon parcel, love. I made them leave it downstairs.’

  Ollie frowned as she disconnected. She hadn’t ordered anything from Amazon. George again?

  She finished up the order for the Japanese tourists and started on two more breakfasts. Stay on top of things, she’d just told herself. What she meant was, take control. Stop letting events drive her. Stop being a brown and dead Autumn leaf tossed and blown around the streets by random gusts of wind.

  Take control, Oleander. Talk to your dysfunctional brain.

  She called Amanda Southern. Ollie had run out with Amanda calling after her, ‘you haven’t finished’. She was going to go back, take control, face it down. It was time to finish it. The earliest space was tomorrow afternoon. Ollie took it.

  She felt someone at her side and glanced round. It was one of the men from the vans. He was close enough for her to smell sweat mixed with deodorant and cigarette and mint from the gum he chewed.

  His English was broken. ‘Jo say you make breakfast.’ He held up eight fingers. ‘All.’ He pointed outside.

  Ollie looked into the unsmiling face, saw a sleeve of indecipherable tattoos down one arm. Sensed the aura of natural muscular power, the void behind the eyes.

  ‘Sure. And your name is?’

  He just gave a curt nod and turned away. Ollie held on to the edge of the sink and took one of the deep quivering, stabilising breaths that your body demands when it has just been threatened.

  Nothing was said, but the male didn’t need to. He carried the aura of immoral violence that Ollie knew from the streets. The gang enforcers had it. They were a rare breed and they were priceless, because they didn’t care about consequences.

  They hurt, they maimed, they killed, they walked away laughing.

  Ollie looked out at the vans.

  And out there, lurking and waiting, were eight of them.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Donna Small knocked on the door of Ollie’s apartment. Andy waited beside her. A minute later Alesha opened the door. She was in her wheelchair and looked up at them.

  ‘Alesha Soul?’ They held out their ID’s.

  ‘If you say so, love.’

  ‘Oleander at home?’

  ‘No. At work.’

  ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘No. Because I have dementia and I won’t remember who you are or that you were here. So, I’m not allowed to let anyone in. Ollie will be home later.’

  Andy held out the Amazon parcel. ‘I brought this upstairs for you. Addressed to Oleander. She been spending again?’

  ‘No idea. Can’t remember.’

  ‘What time’s later?’

  Alesha shrugged. ‘When she gets in.’

  Andy reached in and placed the parcel on the floor inside the door. He smiled. ‘We’ll see you later, then.’

  He put himself in front of his Boss, knowing that she wanted to take advantage, force her way in, have a look round. Break the rules.

  On the way to interview Amal, Donna Small gave him thirty minutes of shit.

  ‘She wouldn’t have remembered.’

  ‘That’s not good policing, Boss. And what if she had remembered? Case up in smoke. Caboom.’

  They knocked on Amal’s front door. His wife answered, they showed their IDs and she closed the door. They knocked again, she opened it a crack.

  ‘Amal is not here.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Probably out with his whore. She was here last night.’

  ‘What time did he go out?’

  ‘Come back later, when he is in.’ She closed the door.

  Small stalked down the steps to their car. She slapped the roof of the car and glared back up at the house. ‘Everyone is hiding something.’ She glanced at her watch and wrenched open the car door.

  ‘And where the hell are my DNA results.’

  * * *

  At 11.45 Jo handed Ollie the keys to the café and asked her to lock up and leave the keys in the fridge in the storeroom. Ollie started tidying the kitchen. Megan cleared the tables. Through the window she watched them loading the vans. She saw a crate of bottles go in.

  They were all dressed differently but the same. Tight jeans, Doc Marten boots. Black vest tops, black tee shirts, all tight fitting. Then she saw masks go in, caricatures, but ID concealing. No placards went in, but the poles did. This was not going to be peaceful. They were about to start a battle.

  Megan left at 12.15. Ollie locked and headed for the storeroom. For the last two hours she’d been thinking about the body in the suitcase. There was something she was missing. She tugged at threads, saw the skull again, the hair, the darkness of the eye socket speaking to her, drawing her back, the dry skin, stretched taut.

  She’d taken a roll of food bags and scissors from the storeroom with the crazy idea that she would take a sample of hair and skin and somehow get them tested to find out who it was.

  She carefully let herself down through the gap using the chair she’d placed there to escape. The case was still cracked open, just as she’d left it. The mask of red material still covered the head. She ran the torchlight of her mobile over the case, then pulled it towards her. It fell flat open under the weight of the body.

  The rest of the figure was curled, had been curled, into the foetal position, knees crammed up to the chest, arms stuffed by its side. She took a picture, then crouched closer. In her brain one of the threads was shaking itself loose from the ball. She focused on it, gave it a colour. Red. The colour of the tee-shirt. Shake it. Shake a tail feather, baby. Shake it. Shake, shake.

  It came free and she jumped back from the case. There was no way. It couldn’t be. She leaned in and with her fingers eased and teased at the red cloth. Tugging a piece free. It disintegrated, so she eased another piece towards her, exposing the whole skull. She saw the start of the lettering on the tee-shirt, then shone the torchlight on the whole word. Gasped.

  Soul.

  Black letters across the front of a red tee shirt. Bought from one of those surf shops, Fat Face may be, on a day trip to Newquay. The laughter when he bought it. Sticking out his muscular chest.

  ‘I’m wearing your name, baby. Across my heart.’

  Ollie felt the tears in her eyes as she spoke his name so, so quietly. Her partner. The father of her child. It was him.

  ‘Stephan.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Donna Small was watching the second hand of the clock on the wall. It was red and it tick, tick, ticked its way slowly around the face to one o’clock. She had her jacket on ready and told Andy to do the same. Her fingers were drumming the desktop.

  She snatched up the phone on the first ring and stood up. Here we go, she thought. At last.

  She listened. Andy watched triumph fade from her face to be replaced with annoyance and then outright astonishment.

 
‘You are kidding me?’

  She listened again and then dropped the phone into the cradle.

  Andy was standing as well. ‘Boss?’

  ‘They have a match for the blood. Not Mark Anderson but WPC Jane Morgan.’

  She was still shaking her head, not believing what she’d been told.

  There was a silence between them for a few seconds then Small’s disappointment exploded. ‘How can that bloody well be? Get me that grunt who checked the tapes. Check them all again. Every angle. Every bloody nanosecond. Follow Soul through that crowd.’

  Mann made a couple of calls. Then, ‘Boss, I looked at those tapes myself. Soul didn’t go near enough to be the killer.’

  ‘Your point?’

  ‘That she was the courier. Knife in. Knife out. Female with a young kid. Perhaps even gave it to her daughter to carry. Ideal cover.’

  Small looked up at her white board where all the lines led so carefully, clearly and logically to Soul. She swore again. This was meant to be a straight and clear run down the home straight, no one on her shoulder. But now a niggle sat there for the first time. Could she be wrong?

  She walked over to the board and gave the investigation one last, long stare, then angrily ripped the whole lot down.

  * * *

  Ollie stepped away from the case. Away from Stephan. It couldn’t be him. How could she randomly fall through a floor, onto a suitcase and expose the body of her missing partner? Things like that don’t happen.

  She shone the light on the dried, grey skin of his face again, peered closer and shuddered. She could see a slash across the skin of his neck, the dried skin had pulled back, exaggerating the opening. She looked at the hair, some still attached, but long, dark brown, rich and thick. She could see what was left of the ponytail he always wore, even though she preferred it down. What am I seeing? What the hell does all this mean?

  This is the body of Stephan. Coincidences like this don’t happen so there had to be a link. There had to be a reason his body was down here, in a sub-basement of the Café. Where had she been working when he disappeared? She knew immediately. Here. Joanna had given her work to keep her away from the drugs she’d started taking again.

  Something moved in a dark corner of her brain. Something horrible she didn’t want to confront. Then it spoke to her and she flicked the light beyond Stephan. Two other cases, same size, covered in dust, dirty, been there for a long time, lying flat as tombs.

  She stared at them for a long minute, knowing she had to do it, but not wanting to. Eventually, she reached for a piece of broken floorboard, went to the nearest case. They were old enough to have catches, not zips. She used the wood under the catches, one flipped up with a crack, the other ripped from the rotten fabric.

  She raised the lid, threw it back, stood back, as the dust motes flew like messengers through her torchlight, dancing and swirling in the air above a second corpse. What she saw took the life from her legs and thought from her brain.

  Dark skin. Foetal position. Face turned away from her. Scraps of clothing still covered most of the bones. But that wasn’t what took her to her knees.

  She reached in and tugged it free. Held it up, turned it round. It was dirty, rotted, but there was no doubt.

  It was a child’s dress.

  And it was yellow. Her dress.

  * * *

  Donna Small was directing Andy as he reconstructed the white board. Sitting away from it gave her a better overview. A couple of times Andy offered a tentative, ‘what if’, but they didn’t point to Soul, so she waved them away.

  ‘She sits at the centre of all this. Everything that happens has her name associated with it.’

  Andy went and perched on the edge of his desk. ‘What worries me, Boss, is that there is nothing concrete in any of them. Yes, she was seen arguing with Anderson. Yes, Stephan was her partner when he disappeared. Yes, her father was killed and a body never found. Yes, she was at the demo and there are blood splatters. Yes, Stockton-Marston took pictures of her. But if you look at them in isolation they are not enough to arrest and charge her. And every time we try and tie them together the knot falls open.’

  When Small didn’t reply he went on. ‘What if we put someone else at the centre and see what happens?’

  Small said slowly. ‘There is another common thread. A knife. All the killings have been done with a knife.’

  Andy’s desk phone rang and he twisted behind him to pick it up. He listened for two seconds, then sprang forward to standing.

  ‘No bloody way. We were only there….’ He dropped the phone to the cradle.

  ‘Amal’s wife thought he was out whoring? Well, she’s just found him dead in what used to be Oleander Soul’s room.’

  * * *

  Ollie reached forward and touched the forehead of the skull. Was she in some kind of hell? Had she taken drugs again and this was all playing out in her damaged, disfigured brain? Was she lying in some dark, squalid, squat room somewhere with a syringe hanging from a vein in her arm? Eyes staring at the ceiling, the smell of piss, vomit and shit oozing from the mattress she was lying on?

  She shone the light away and around her. This basement was real. The dust motes still drifted lazily in the still air. Everything she was touching, seeing, smelling, was in her living world. This is real, Ollie. A claw of fear clenched itself tightly round her gut.

  She looked back at the yellow dress. If this was hers then the body was that of her father. Her real, natural, genetic father. Billy Jones. The one she had seen herself sitting on, knife in hand. Like on a boat in a lake of blood.

  And now he was here.

  And Stephan was here.

  She stared through scared eyes at the third case, crawled across on all fours and used the wood to prise it open.

  A third skull glared at her. It had to be Emmanuel. This time her self-control gave out. Her head went back, her gut constricted, intercostal muscles engaged and she vomited her sadness, pain, anger, frustration and fear onto the ancient wooden floorboards.

  Two minutes later, panting and sweating from the exertion she climbed back through the gap to the storehouse, found a cloth and wiped her face and mouth. She took a bottle of water from a pack and used it to swill, spit bile from her mouth and then to drink.

  She didn’t know what to do. Her brain had frozen. Call the police? Take photographs? Take the hair samples? Run like hell? Close the cases and let someone else find them? Make it someone else’s hell?

  Or take control.

  Do what you were going to do when you came down here, take three hair samples. Find a way of getting them DNA tested. Prove that the bodies belonged to Billy, Emmanuel and Stephan. Then take it from there.

  Or call the police. Anonymously. But they would soon identify the bodies and she didn’t want to draw more attention herself. She drank more water and faced the real fear inside her. The reason why she would say nothing.

  What if I am an amoral killer who kills and forgets?

  What if I killed them?

  What if this my secret dumping ground?

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Donna Small and Andy Mann showed their IDs, ducked under the police tape and headed up the steps to the front door. Amal’s wife was sitting there. The sad contrast of a distraught woman wrapped in traditional, brightly coloured Pakistani dress was lost on Small. She was thinking of the way the door had been as good as slammed in her face only hours ago.

  Small stood over her, aggressive. ‘Did you know when we were here earlier?’

  She looked up, her face full of anger and pain. ‘No. I never go into that room. But with the whore gone…’

  Andy held out his mobile with a picture of Soul, then quickly removed it as she spat at the face. ‘That’s the cow. She did this.’

  An excited shout came from inside and a white suited technician came down the stairs with a huge grin on his face. DI Joe Tanner, assigned to the investigation, stepped from a downstairs room, glanced at Small’s presence
with surprise and suspicion, and then at the evidence bag held out by the technician.

  Small stepped in closer. Her eyes glowing. ‘Joe. May I?’

  She took the bag by a corner and held it up. It was kitchen knife. Nine-inch steel blade, black handle, covered in blood. She showed it to Andy and actually laughed. Now. Now, I’ve got you.

  ‘And your interest is?’ Joe eased the bag from her tight grasp.

  She told Joe in quick easy sentences. He looked at her, not believing his luck. ‘You’re bloody kidding me?’ He looked at Andy.

  ‘And this Oleander Soul was here last night?’

  ‘Two of us can confirm it.’ Andy pointed upstairs. ‘Time of death?’

  ‘Sometime in the early hours. He’s naked. Throat cut.’

  Small leaned in. ‘Make sure they swab his prick, she’ll be all over it.’

  Small stepped back, took a deep breath, risked interfering in another DI’s case. ‘Joe. This is big. More than just this murder. I need that knife tested fast. Priority. Mind if I call the Chief to make sure it happens?’

  He looked at her, heard the message. He got to solve a murder, perhaps even before the end of the day. And he got a mention in something bigger. Small got what she wanted. He nodded.

  Small dialed, filled in the Chief, then, ‘We’ve got a knife, Chief, possibly the murder weapon in multiple murders.’ She paused to give effect to her clincher.

  ‘Possibly the knife that killed WPC Jane Morgan.’

  That should bloody well do it.

  That should get her priority.

  That should get her Soul.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes after discovering the two new bodies Ollie arrived back at her apartment. She kissed the top of her mother’s head and dropped her bag to the floor by the table. Alesha muttered, ‘Hello, love’, but her eyes never left the television.