The First Cut

by Knight, Ali

  ‘Did he go willingly?’

  ‘Apparently so. Stunned, was the word I heard.’

  Jenny leaned in closer to Sondra. ‘Why are you whispering?’

  Sondra looked around guiltily. ‘I didn’t realize I was.’

  Jenny smiled. ‘Don’t be intimidated by this lot.’

  Sondra nodded and finished her water. ‘Do you think she did it?’ She was still whispering.

  ‘I think she’s capable, but there’s still no reason as to why. Struan could have been lured to the house, but Louise?’ She shook her head and pointed at the water cooler. ‘Can I have some of that?’ Sondra extracted a half beaker of water from the partially blocked machine and gave it to Jenny. She drank it as she watched Martin walk down the corridor humming an R&B tune. He handed Jenny several bits of paper and began rocking from side to side and circling his arms slightly as if dancing to a tune only he could hear.

  ‘I’ve got the details from Louise’s flat.’

  ‘OK, what have we got?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Nothing, so far. We know the necklace was wiped clean, and we found no fingerprints we could identify apart from Struan’s, Louise’s and the mother’s. The bullet hasn’t given us anything either. We’ll have to wait for fibre samples. Either they’ve been watching a lot of CSI—’

  ‘Or they weren’t there.’ Jenny scanned the papers and handed them back to Martin.

  ‘Two steps forward, one step back.’ Martin smiled as he moved his feet forward and back. ‘We’ve got a warrant to search her house so we’ll see if we find anything interesting there.’

  ‘Let us know what turns up,’ Jenny replied. ‘It’s been a long day.’ She turned to Sondra. ‘I think we need to be getting back.’

  ‘The later you leave it the better,’ Martin added kindly. ‘The bank holiday traffic will be murder.’

  They watched him dance up the corridor, his papers flapping as he went.

  41

  It was six a.m. when Greg woke up, his heart beating double quick with a sickening anxiety. Jet lag and a vicious hangover had pulled him from oblivion. The room wouldn’t straighten. He was so thirsty his tongue seemed cemented to the top of his mouth. The worst thing was that he had nothing to do. No work to keep him occupied, no audience to keep him in line. The abyss beckoned again.

  An hour and a half later, when he pulled up in a taxi outside his house, he saw so many people he thought Nicky had already called the removal men and was on her way to a new life without him.

  He was halfway through the front door before anyone thought to confront him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ a man on a mobile asked him.

  ‘This was my house, last time I looked,’ Greg snapped. He knew instantly it was the police. The manner, the practised ease with which they moved through the rooms – he’d seen it all before.

  The policeman ended his call. ‘Husband’s here!’ he shouted down to the kitchen, then he turned back to Greg. ‘Step in here, please, sir,’ the man said, inviting him into his own living room.

  Greg’s headache was pounding but no amount of ibuprofen and aspirin and something else the pharmacist had given him would make it go away. He was quick to anger today. ‘This is my bloody house!’

  ‘Just a minute, sir, if you would.’

  ‘Where’s Nicky? Where’s my wife?’

  ‘We’re undertaking a search of your house. We have a warrant.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake don’t you let ever let it go? What have I done now?’

  The policeman looked surprised. ‘Nothing, as far as I know.’ He handed him a piece of paper on which floated words he couldn’t read, as another man came into the room.

  ‘Mind if I ask you a few questions?’ Greg waved his hand as it was easier than talking and watched a notebook being produced and flipped to a blank page. ‘Recognize this necklace?’

  ‘That’s Nicky’s. I gave it to her as a present.’

  ‘Where was your wife on Thursday, twenty-fifth of August?’

  Greg shrugged. ‘At work, I’d guess. I was in LA.’ He heard the sound of footsteps in his bedroom above him. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Do you own a shotgun, Mr Peterson?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does your wife?’

  ‘Of course not. Where is she?’

  ‘She’s been taken in for questioning over the murder of Louise Bell.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ The policeman didn’t answer. ‘What the fuck is going on? I have to see her right away.’

  ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. She’s still being questioned.’

  Greg reeled through into the kitchen to see a policewoman pointing a long needle into the earth round the pot plants. ‘Who’s representing my wife? Why wasn’t I called?’

  ‘Sir, it would be best to go down to the station to get an answer to those questions. Do you know Struan Clarke?’

  ‘Who?’

  Greg had had his personal possessions searched before. They’d crawled all over his flat the last time, insinuating, pulling apart his relationship with Grace, hunting for the murder weapon, asking their friends if their love was real. And like everything else in Greg’s life, the bad bits just got repeated, over and over again, like some terrible loop film on the aeroplanes he travelled on.

  He felt nausea rising in his gut and raced for the downstairs toilet, barging past a man hunting through the medicine cabinet.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ the man snapped as Greg retched and heaved. He’d kept so much from Nicky, but maybe his fear at revealing things meant he hadn’t noticed how much she was keeping from him. Jet lag pulled at him from every side. Maybe he’d met his match; maybe this was a great cosmic joke at his expense. He staggered back into the front room. When the police team left three hours later Greg was still fast asleep on the living-room sofa.

  Nicky held out her hand for a taxi in a daze. The police had finally let her go as there was no evidence with which to keep her in any longer. She’d walked straight out of the front of the police station. She saw a taxi pull over and begin to coast to a stop, but she waved it away. She leaned back against a shop front and almost laughed. Where did she have to go? She realized she didn’t know whether to walk left or right, to home or away; she didn’t know whether home was a hazard or a haven. She put her head in her hands to stifle a scream. She hadn’t slept all night, she felt stiff and grubby and scared, and the rock in her throat wouldn’t be dislodged. She gulped down some fresh air and tried to control herself. She got into the next taxi.

  42

  Troy pulled up in his car and stared at the house. Sunlight bounced off the white stucco. The houses opposite and either side had drawn curtains. Bank holiday weekend and just as he had hoped, no one was home. He locked the car and walked up the front steps.

  Troy liked the harsh sound the doorbell made. It was a sound that was difficult to ignore. A bit like himself, he liked to imagine. He was about to ring again when the door opened a few inches and strained against the chain. He glimpsed a man with bleary eyes and a five o’clock shadow. Someone who was afraid of who came calling, Troy decided. His heart beat quicker. He held up his fake police ID.

  ‘What do you want now?’ the man asked.

  ‘Are you Mr Peterson?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  Troy smiled. ‘I’m sorry, have some of my colleagues been here recently?’

  ‘For Chrissake,’ the man said and closed the door to open it. He leaned on the door frame rubbing his cheeks as if trying to warm himself up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Peterson, can I come in? What I’m going to explain might take a while.’

  Greg put his hands in his pockets and stood defiantly in his doorway. ‘No. Let’s do it here.’

  Troy glanced up and down the street. There was no one anywhere. Hell, if he wanted to do it here, Troy didn’t mind. He had a gun with a silencer on it in the back of his trousers, if things got out of hand. He watched Greg cross his arms and take up a wide stanc
e on his doorstep, his chin jutting defensively. He looked suspicious and awkward and Troy took this as a good sign. ‘I’m not a policeman as such,’ he began, watching Greg for a reaction. ‘I’m more a technical analyst working on behalf of the Met. You may have heard in recent years that the police can solve old crimes by finding new DNA traces on evidence that can be up to twenty years old, in some cases even older than that.’ Troy could see that Greg wasn’t really paying attention, that nothing he was saying was having an impact yet. ‘My job is to look at old technical data around major crimes, data such as telephone or fax numbers, and see if they can throw up emerging patterns.’ Troy’s heart began beating more quickly. The guy’s eyes! They were like saucers.

  ‘Old crimes?’ asked Greg.

  Troy saw Greg’s right eyelid begin to twitch. His eyes slid to the ID badge on Troy’s chest.

  Nicky swayed forward in the taxi as it slowed for the road hump. The air coming in the window she’d pulled down felt almost solid. A storm was coming, the pressure was falling, her headache increasing. She was two streets away from home and felt a panic attack building. She had to get out, get out and try to breathe in the sticky city air. She paid the cabbie and stood on the pavement, shaking. She started walking, trying to clear her head and think. Maria sometimes said that journalists and policemen were the same kind of people. It was about making connections, seeing people for what they were. It was about asking the right questions. The problem was that Nicky had too many questions; they floated round her head and refused to lie in any order. And at the base of it all was Grace, an image of her. What happened to her? Was Maria right, and there was no connection between this and Grace’s death? Were there no dots to join?

  Nicky weaved down the street, her head a swirl of unpleasant thoughts. DI Webster’s words rang over and over in her head as she mentally called out to Grace: It wasn’t like that; we hadn’t seen it coming. Greg and I fell in love only after you’d gone.

  Nicky was ten houses from home at a point where the road curved slightly, a broad sweep down a hill. Something she saw made her instinctively duck behind one of the thick trees on the pavement. A hot wind gusted up the street and deposited dust in her eyes, making the edges of her vision blur. Greg was talking to a man on the doorstep. Nicky was still some way away, but it was the shape of his shoulders, the height of him and the colour of his hair that made her sure. It was unmistakably the same man she had crashed into outside Hayersleigh. So what was he doing talking to Greg so amiably in front of her house?

  ‘It might be easier if I come in to explain, sir,’ Troy said.

  Greg said nothing. He stood his ground, but Troy could feel the tension in him. He seemed ready to pounce. Troy could feel the gun pressing into the small of his back. ‘One of the cases that we’re looking into might have a connection to a Francesca Connor. Does that name mean anything to you, sir?’

  Troy could have sworn Greg Peterson went white. The colour drained right out of him. ‘Computers now allow us to create patterns that it would be impossible to see when police officers are only looking through paperwork. In 1999 a drug dealer called Gary Obett was murdered in the West End. He was part of a large drugs ring and his murderer has never been caught. The police at the time made a log of all mobile phone numbers and calls made in the area around where he was killed, hoping that the killer might have actually made a call shortly after committing the crime or had a mobile with him. They came up with nothing, but we’ve now cross-referenced every number used in the vicinity of Obett’s murder with other crimes to see what gets thrown up.’ Troy paused. ‘And we’ve found that one of the numbers in the vicinity of Obett’s death was once called from the landline registered to this house, sir, where Francesca Connor stayed.’

  Nicky watched as the man talked to Greg. Greg was rapt. And then the most extraordinary thing happened: Greg seemed to pitch forward and give the man a hug. They were hugging on the doorstep, two giants leaning against one another, their bums stuck backwards in the awkward lean-and-emote stance.

  Her mind took her back to the dreadful moments in the road outside Hayersleigh, to the moment when she escaped her captor, and ended up crashing into that man now standing on her doorstep, then how she had finally got a mobile into her hands, her connection to—

  Nicky had a sensation of falling forward, as if the world and herself were suddenly moving at different speeds. She remembered grabbing the phone from the dashboard, dialling the police, feeling an unstoppable surge of elation that for the first time things were going her way, that there was an end in sight. She remembered that man unlocking the phone and handing it back to her; he was asking her questions and she couldn’t hear what they were; there was the sound of another car approaching as she dialled Greg’s number. She swallowed as she recalled that she was shaking so much from the adrenalin in her body she could hardly touch the right digits on his phone . . .

  Nicky thought very hard about that exact moment. It came to her clearly now. She had not been mistaken.

  Greg’s number was already in his phone.

  Their home phone number diverted automatically through to Greg’s mobile so he never missed any calls that came through while he was away filming. To call Greg she simply typed in their home phone number. That day outside Hayersleigh, and a second before she put the phone to her ear, a name had appeared on the screen, not simply the numbers she had just dialled. What was the name? She couldn’t recall it. She took a step out from behind the tree. She couldn’t conjure the name, but she knew it hadn’t been ‘Greg’, because she was sure she’d have noticed that. She started walking.

  Why was their number in the man’s phone? Why was he here in Maida Vale? She’d made the call to Greg, he hadn’t been there and that man had gently, really quite gently, taken the phone from her and gathered her to him in the kindly gesture of passers-by called upon to help a woman in distress.

  The warm wind whipped along the street, tumbling crisp leaves with it. What had the man said? Platitudes, he’d murmured consoling platitudes at her, held her as she cried. She thought of what the policewoman had said: ‘You’re lucky he was driving so slowly, otherwise you could have been seriously hurt.’ She stopped in the street, staring at her doorstep. Why was he driving slowly? Because he had been waiting. Waiting to turn? Driving past?

  Greg knew where she had been. Greg knew what she had been through. And then for the first time a really horrible thought hit her. He didn’t come back because of what Liz had told him; he came back because he was told what had happened at Hayersleigh. There was a connection between Greg and Adam – she just didn’t know what it was yet.

  Nicky began to run.

  ‘Are you OK, sir?’ For a split second Troy believed Greg might faint. This mark was so soft he had reached out for a cuddle. Making up a bullshit story about a drug dealer and bringing up Francesca’s name had pitched this grown man right into his arms like a baby.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s a shock . . .’ He was casting around wildly, unable to settle his eyes on anything. ‘It’s been such a long time since I heard that name, and now in the last two days I’ve had to relive . . .’ He tailed off, running his hands through his hair. The man looked stricken, physically ill. ‘My God, Francesca . . .’

  ‘Indeed. Francesca.’ Troy bared his new teeth. He was closing in.

  Troy saw Greg stare at him. Now he seemed to be trying to recover what little was left of his manhood. ‘A phone call from this house?’ There was a pause. ‘But I moved in here three years ago. Francesca died just over twelve years ago.’

  ‘Well, to be exact, it was a phone call from this number. Did you transfer your number when you moved here?’ Greg looked blank. Troy tried again. ‘Did you live near here and transfer the number from your old home?’

  Greg seemed to be able to answer only the obvious questions. ‘I lived in Maida Vale. So, yes, I took the number.’

  Troy nodded. ‘What was your relationship to Francesca?’ He got out a no
tebook and started making notes. When he looked up Greg was staring at him with a look that made Troy take a step back.

  Greg spoke slowly, as if his mind was only now waking up to what had been said. ‘But Francesca’s death was an accident. She died in Morocco.’

  Troy remembered the evening well. She had been pregnant too. Troy shook his head slowly. They were getting to the bit he enjoyed: the confrontation, the action. He took a step towards the door and then saw that Greg’s pupils had dilated with shock at something over Troy’s right shoulder.

  Nicky’s rage increased with every stride. The terror she’d felt at Hayersleigh, her fear at the unfolding events that she had no control over – all these thoughts collided as she raced for her own front door. She’d show them. She bounded, three at a time on her long legs, up the steps of her house and shouted something incoherent as she shoved the man in the back.

  Troy felt himself pitch sharply onto Greg, who fell backwards into the corridor.

  ‘You little shit, you’ve been following me!’ she shouted. ‘And you –’ she pointed at Greg, who was trying to get up off the floor – ‘I know what you’re doing. How could you?’

  Nicky saw the look of complete surprise in Troy’s face but she didn’t stop her tirade against both of them.

  Troy tried to stand but Greg was clambering over him in a desperate bid to get to his wife. Sometimes clichés said it all. He literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The woman he had been hired to kill, here! With the bloke he was trying to extort money from for a previous kill! He wanted to lie back on the warm doorstep and laugh and laugh.

  Greg was shouting at Nicky, trying to grab her. ‘What’s going on? Who’s Louise Bell?’

  ‘Your number’s in his phone, Greg! You two don’t even bother to go in the house to talk about me. See how you like it!’ Nicky pulled out her phone and that’s when Troy really did try to get to his feet, fast.