by Michael Kerr
Marci said, “When Mark had been attacked and you opened your eyes, you saw the face of the man that did this, Janice. Can you describe him for me?”
Janice squeezed her eyes shut and began to cry even more as the face of the man materialised. “He had really dark, staring eyes, and he was grinning at me. But that was all I had time to see. He hit me in the mouth, and I didn’t see his face again.”
“What colour was he, Janice?” Marci asked.
“White.”
“Did you have an impression of his age?”
“Old. Well, not old, but in his thirties, or maybe his early forties.”
“Was he short or tall?”
Janice actually raised her head, as if she was standing and looking up at the man in the alley. “He was about Mark’s height; maybe an inch shorter,” she said. “I’d say about five-eleven. And he was broader than Mark. Not fat, but solid.”
Marci had let go of Janice’s hand and was taking notes. “Is there anything else that you remember about him?” she asked.
Janice shook her head. “It happened so fast. And it was very dark.”
Matt returned with coffee for Marci and a can of Coke for Janice, plus a straw that he’d had to go to the staff restaurant for. He set them down on the top of the cupboard next to the bed and told Marci that he had to go and make a phone call, and that he would meet her back at the car. He gave the injured girl a small smile and nodded before leaving. Outside the room he bent down and picked his own cup of coffee up from the floor next to the door and headed for the lifts. He had lied about the phone call. He knew that Marci would obtain everything possible from the girl, and would rather leave her to it. He cared about victims of violent crime, but didn’t know what to say to them. He felt awkward making nice noises to strangers, especially if they were in a bad place. And like many coppers, his most dreaded job was telling loved ones that one of the most precious people in their particular universe was dead. As the DI heading up the case, he would personally face the parents of the young man, Mark Collins, and find the best words he could to break news that no words could in any way soften the blow that he would be delivering.
Marci waited until a uniformed police constable arrived to take up guard outside the room. However remote the chance, they had to consider that the killer would know he could now be identified by a girl who he had intended to leave dead in a skip. Janice was a loose end, and could potentially put him behind bars for life if he was ever arrested. Until further notice she would be under protection 24/7.
“You’ve got a very soft centre, boss” Marci said as she walked out of the hospital to where Matt was sitting on a bench with an unlit cigarette between his lips.
“Not true, Marci,” Matt said. “I’m just piss poor at talking to people like Janice. There’s nothing I can think of meaningful to say to them.”
“You feel for them,” Marci said. “You could tell them that.”
“And why would they give a shit what some cop they’ve never met before says?” Matt said. “That girl is in a world of physical and mental pain. The only thing that we can do is collar the bastard that did it. What did she remember?”
Marci ran through it. There was nothing too positive. Hopefully Janice would be able to sit down with Dick Curtis, a police artist, and give him enough to come up with a decent likeness. Dick was brilliant at coaxing facial details from a witness, even if they’d only seen their attacker for an instant.
“Okay, go home and get some shuteye,” Matt said to Marci.
“What are you going to do, boss?”
“Stop by the Yard and interview the kitchen worker who unwittingly saved Janice’s life.”
Mickey Fu was a little pissed off at having been held for so long. He had saved a girl from being murdered, and was now kicking his heels in an interview room. He had told the police what he had witnessed, but had been advised that a Detective Inspector Barnes wanted to talk to him, and that he wouldn’t be long. But that had been two hours ago.
When Matt got back to the Yard he went to his own office and brewed a decent cup of coffee before going down to where a suite of interview rooms were situated on the ground floor at the rear of the building.
He smiled as he entered the room where Mickey was pacing up and down. “You saved a young woman’s life tonight Mr. Fu,” Matt said, placing the mug on the table and holding his hand out in greeting. “I’m Detective Inspector Barnes.”
Mickey shook Matt’s hand. “Was just luck,” he said. “I open gate and disturb bad man.”
“Life is all about timing,” Matt said. “Sometimes the actions of a single second can alter the future in many ways, for better or worse.”
“You sound like Confucius, DI Barnes.”
“I’m not a fraction as wise as him, Mr. Fu.”
“Please, call me Mickey. No one call me Mr. Fu.”
“Okay, Mickey,” Matt said. “Let’s get down to business. The man that you scared off tonight has, to date, murdered three women, and the man in the alley, and you are the only person to have got a good look at him.”
“No get good look,” Mickey said. “He was in darkness, and run off when I opened gate.”
“I appreciate that, but you’re the best lead we’ve got, and we need to find him before he kills someone else. What exactly did you see?”
Mickey looked down at the scarred tabletop with a thousand yard stare, seeing nothing, concentrating on the incident that he had been witness to. As he had opened the six-foot high gate, that was constructed of planks butted together, the shaft of bright light from the kitchen door behind him had illuminated the people in the alley like a tableau in a waxwork museum. It was as if the world stopped for a moment, and he held on to the motionless vision that met him – like a frozen scene from a Matrix movie – and studied it, to allow the details to become a picture in his mind.
With a faraway look still fixed on his face, Mickey said, “Murderer was behind girl, hunched, with hands around her neck. Faces looked pale. Girl’s mouth was open wide. Man behind stared at me. His eyes were very dark; looked black. He had prominent cheekbones and thin nose. Not young, not old.”
Matt waited. Mickey had gone silent, but was still looking inward. “He had something on his face,” Mickey said. “Could have just been trick of light, but looked like scar on left cheek.”
There was no more. Mickey looked up at Matt and hiked his shoulders. “That is all I saw,” he said.
“You’ve done well, Mickey,” Matt said. “You have a picture of the guy in your head, and I need to see it. Will you please wait and see one of our police artists. He can do a drawing from your description.”
Mickey sighed. Knew that he couldn’t refuse. He nodded and said, “I have to phone home and let wife know where I am.”
Matt took his mobile from his pocket and handed it to Mickey, and then used the phone on the desk to call the squad room upstairs to get Dick Curtis’s number. This was too urgent to wait till later in the morning.
“Yeah?” Dick said.
“It’s Matt Barnes, Dick. Sorry to wake you, but I’ve got an emergency that you can help with. Time really is of the essence.”
“Who’s dead?”
Matt told him what had happened. Of how the girl had survived the attack, and that both she and Mickey could give him a description.
“I’ll be with you in forty-five minutes,” Dick said.
Mickey handed the mobile back to Matt.
“You thirsty or hungry?” Matt said.
“Would enjoy cup of tea, no milk or sugar,” Mickey said. “And cheeseburger if possible.”
“You got it,” Matt said. “Sit tight while I arrange it.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
He sat next to the bed and held his mother’s hand and talked to her for over an hour, although she never uttered a word, spending much of the time looking absently out of the window at the frontage of a factory that had been closed down for more than a decade.
He hated
this place. It was a council care home, and was underfunded, understaffed, and smelled of old people and decay, and vomit, shit and piss, all supposedly masked by copious amounts of cheap disinfectant that hung in the air and invaded the nostrils, but was not powerful enough to overwhelm the underlying stink.
For the first few months, Billy had determined to move his mum to a private home, but had not fathomed out how to pay for it without drawing attention to his having money that he could not readily explain away. People were suspicious of large amounts of cash in hand, and paying by cheque or card was out of the question. Time had passed, and now it didn’t really matter where his mum spent her final days. She was only fifty-three, but had become a victim of early-onset dementia and was now living in a separate universe from the one she had frequented as a mentally well individual. The lucid moments she had were becoming less as every month went by. Most of the time she didn’t know who he was: Jesus, most of the time she didn’t know who she was.
Gwen Foster had at first become a little absentminded, and then found it harder to cope with simple daily activities, such as being able to dress properly or even remember to eat. And her personality changed. She could not control her emotions and had become increasingly agitated, and even begun to see things that were not there.
Billy was worried, but not for his mum. She was on the last straight of life’s racecourse and had no meaningful qualities left to stop her from collapsing over the finishing line. No, Billy was troubled by the thought of his own mental stability failing as he grew older, for he knew that the condition was in many instances hereditary. Maybe one day there would be tests to evaluate all the faults that were hidden in peoples’ genes, and those predestined to contract incurable diseases, that could be passed on to their progeny, would hopefully have the sense to refrain from having children.
“Go to hell, you evil man,” Gwen shouted, spraying spittle from her toothless mouth as she rose up to sit facing Billy. “You hurt Billy and me. I don’t want you here.”
Billy jerked his hand away from hers and backed up. She was staring at him with malevolence in her rheumy eyes, and her bony hands were now clenched on the top of the faded green blanket. He knew that she thought he was his father, Stephen.
Billy decided not to visit her again. He was there only out of a sense of duty, not because he loved the woman. He had never really forgiven her for being too weak to intervene and stop his dad from hurting him and locking him in that fucking cellar. And being a little bipolar, episodes like this blackened his mood.
He waited until she had fallen asleep, and then straightened the bedclothes, wiped the drool from her chin with a wad of tissues, and finally replaced the chair he had sat on back against the wall of the small room, with its feet placed exactly where they had been in the indentations of the almost threadbare carpet.
“Billy, are you there, baby?” Gwen said in a raspy whisper as he opened the door to leave.
He went back to stand by her side and said, “Yes, Mum. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, son. But I feel so tired. Will you phone the Colonel for me and tell him that I won’t be able to make it in today.”
Without a direct line to hell, Billy couldn’t phone her now late employer, who had died four years ago. “Yes, Mum, I’ll do that now,” Billy said. “Go back to sleep.”
Gwen sighed and closed her eyes, and Billy left the room and walked at a fast pace along the corridor, to leave the building and take a deep lungful of fresh air, and then another. He would have to wash his clothes when he got home to rid them of what he thought of as the stench of death-in-waiting.
Mickey finally left the Yard at eight a.m. He declined a lift, not wanting to be dropped at his door by a police car. And he needed to move; to walk after spending so much time sitting in a room.
Dick Curtis stretched, yawned and studied the second rendering of the likeness he had made from the description Mickey Fu had given to him. He went up to the squad room and found Matt discussing the case with two of his team.
“Is that our killer, Dick?” Matt said, inclining his head to the A4 pad that Dick was holding.
“It’s a promising resemblance of him,” Dick said, opening the pad and holding it up for Matt and the others to see. “Mickey was happy with it. All I need to do now is repeat the exercise with the girl that was attacked. Between them we should end up with a good likeness of him.”
Matt studied the sketch. It showed the lean face of a man who could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty years of age. His hair was short; his eyes deep-set and dark under bushy brows, and his angular face distinctive, with high and prominent cheekbones, a longish straight nose and a slightly too-large chin jutting out below a thin-lipped mouth. The crescent-shaped scar on his left cheek was not pronounced in the sketch, due to Mickey not being entirely sure that it was no more than a trick of the light.
Dick left for Guy’s Hospital with a WPC, and Matt took the lift up to the canteen, ate a bacon sandwich and drank a mug of black coffee before deciding to take a few hours’ off and go home.
Beth was sitting out back at the table on the deck, working on her laptop. There was a half empty – or full – glass of grapefruit juice to hand.
Matt went to her, gently caressed the nape of her neck, and kissed her on the lips when she tilted her head back.
“I didn’t expect you to be home,” he said. “I sent you a text.”
“I replied, but you obviously didn’t read it.”
Matt took his mobile out and checked. “Sorry,” he said. “I was busy.”
“I thought sorry was a word that you didn’t approve of.”
“I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes we do things that need to be apologised for. What did you get up to when I took off?”
“I went back to bed, slept until nine, and then decided that I’d got nothing pressing at Northfield, so I’m working from home today.”
“That’s good,” Matt said. “You spend too much time in that nuthatch.”
Beth didn’t argue. She knew Matt’s views on the patients that he viewed as scum that had beaten the system by supposedly having mental illness that excluded them from facing a judge and jury. He was still very black and white in his outlook, and didn’t believe in shades of grey, be there fifty or more of them.
Finishing her grapefruit juice, Beth said, “What did you have to deal with?”
“The rapist struck again. He attacked a young couple this time. The lad was bludgeoned to death, but the girl had a lucky escape.” Matt explained what had gone down.
“Why do you believe that it’s the same offender?” Beth said. “It seems strange that he would assault a couple.”
“He was doing his rape/strangle combo when he was interrupted. And it was in an alley with a couple of dozen skips, so I hope it is the same guy. We don’t need two repeaters out there with a similar MO at the same time.”
“Any clues?”
“We have a very good description from the witness and from the girl that survived the attack, so Dick Curtis has come up with a likeness that you just can’t get with Photofit or E-fit. His ability to translate verbal details and turn them into portraits is amazing.”
“Sounds like you’re closing in. What about the other case?”
“Not much. We have some history on the gun used, and I’m going to interview a serving inmate who we believe used the weapon several years ago. He may be able to shed some light on what he did with it, but I don’t hold out much hope.”
As Matt parked the car on a side street next to the Yard and waited for Pete to join him, his mobile rang. He accepted the call but said nothing.
“You there, Barnes?”
“Yeah, Don. What do you want?”
“To meet for a pint and talk about the serial rapist that kills his victims.”
“I’m too busy. Contact the Media Office.”
“Give me a break, Barnes, they’ll stonewall me, and you know it.”
“I know that
you have some cop informant that you’ve probably given a hundred quid to for this nugget. And he or she hasn’t been able to give you enough for a story. Right?”
“Hey, chill Barnes. You know I don’t write fiction. I’m not a hack. I like to know that what I sell is the whole truth and nothing but. This is breaking news, so why not tell me what you can and we can keep it straight.”
Matt had expected the story to have hit the tabloids before now. Maybe talking to Don Goodwin was the way to go. Don had been an ace crime reporter for the News of the World, which had been a national red top newspaper until the phone-hacking scandal had brought about its closure back in oh-eleven. Don had been offered a post on the Sun on Sunday, which was a successor put out by the Murdoch Empire, but had decided that at almost sixty he would take a settlement and be an independent stringer and sell his pieces to the highest bidder. He had many contacts and was still one of the best in the business.
“I’ll meet you in the Punch Tavern at seven tonight,” Matt said. “Okay?”
“I might even buy you a pint, Barnes.”
“It’ll be a large malt whiskey,” Matt said and disconnected as Pete got in the passenger side and fastened his seat belt.
The drive down to Maidstone took just over an hour. The town was forty miles southeast of London, and the traffic had been light once they got through the snarl of the city.
Matt pulled in to the prison car park, and he and Pete made their way to the gate complex, showed their warrant cards and went through the security involved to enter a prison, before being escorted by an officer into the jail proper and the official visits area, where they were ushered into a small room to wait for twenty minutes before Alan Eltringham was led in to sit in a seat facing them across a table that was fixed to the floor.
Matt nodded at the inmate. “Thanks for seeing us Mr. Eltringham,” he said. “I expected you to refuse.”
“Drop the Mr,” Alan said. “It makes me nervous when a copper is so polite. Call me Al, like in the song. And I’m seein’ you out of curiosity, and to have a change of scenery from the wing.”
