PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES: a gripping crime thriller (Camden Noir Crime Thrillers Trilogy Book 1)

by JOHN YORVIK

  “You’re fucking with my head!” she screamed.

  Then seconds later she pulled me back towards her and we kissed. I pushed her up against the wall and rucked up her pinstriped skirt. She hung her arms around my neck and lifted up her legs and wrapped them around my waist. I felt her hot breath in my ear.

  “Do it,” she said. “Hurt me again.”

  * * *

  Amy said I was the last person she’d expected to be in the hotel room. When she’d asked why I had been so secretive, I showed her the newspaper photofit and began to tell her what had happened over the last ten days. When I’d told my story, rather than eliciting pity or empathy, it became apparent that Amy was more worried about herself. If the press connected her to the ‘Pentonville Strangler’, it would destroy her legal career. I promised I wouldn’t involve her. That I would have her airbrushed from my and Marty’s history. I just needed some answers.

  She calmed down, and helped herself to a large whisky.

  “Did anyone see you with Natasha Rokitzky?”

  “Just some drunken yobs outside her block of flats, possibly some guys in a pub. And Marty, of course.”

  “Can you be placed at the crime scene at her time of death?”

  “The police haven’t confirmed her time of death in the papers.”

  She was thoughtful for a while.

  “You need to get an alibi for your blackouts on Friday and Saturday night. Someone who doesn’t go out much and lives alone.”

  “That’s taken care of.”

  “Good. Anything at all connecting you to the crime scene.”

  “A few cigarette butts and a glass I used. But the place has been cleaned since I was there.”

  “That would make most DNA evidence inadmissible. Chances are the police haven’t got anything but a description that resembles you. And a few coincidences. Like when you visited her place of work to interview someone. Not forgetting the fact she was in a relationship with your best friend, which means you moved in the same circles. In my opinion, you’ve still got plausible deniability.”

  “Plausible deniability?”

  “Yes, I think you have reasonable grounds to deny your involvement in her death despite the fact that you may be guilty.”

  “Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”

  “Well, if you have to ask,” she joked. “One potential problem I foresee is if you’re the only suspect in the investigation. In that case things might begin to conspire against you. Two suspects are always better than one.”

  “Lucky I have access to one of London’s best legal brains.”

  “Look, if you invited me here to get me involved in...” and she tried to get out of bed, but I held her back.

  “No, that’s not why. Stay,” I said. And I held her until she stopped struggling.

  “I love it when you act tough,” she said, suddenly returning to form.

  “Actually, I’m investigating the murder myself.”

  On hearing that Amy started laughing.

  “Well, God help you,” she said, pinching some flesh on my chest and giving it a painful twist. “I mean, it’s not the first occasion you and Marty have been involved with the same woman. But this time she ended up dead, huh? Should I be worried? Did you get me here to finish off the job?”

  I took her arms and pinned them down by her sides.

  “Maybe I’ll write my memoirs,” I said. “My Life as the Pentonville Strangler. You’d have a starring role.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Wouldn’t I?”

  She started struggling again, inviting me to play. So I lay on top of her as she bucked and twisted with her hips until I couldn’t resist her any longer. She bit hard on my bottom lip causing me to let her arms free. Then she drew blood with her nails on my back. She was always such a fucking handful...

  An hour or so later, I woke her with a coffee and she sat up in bed to drink it. I lit a cigarette and sat beside her with the ashtray on my knee. It was time to get what I’d really come here for.

  “What happened after I moved out of the flat that day?” I asked. “Did you stay together afterwards?”

  “We didn’t speak for weeks and slept in separate rooms. I really thought it was over, until one night he came back from one of his trips up North. He was in a real state.”

  “What kind of state?”

  “He was in a mess like I’d never seen him before. He was delirious, muttering something about his mother. Then he took off his top and showed me his body. He was covered in burns, said he’d helped someone escape from a car wreck on the A1. He refused to go to the hospital. I had to go to the pharmacist and buy ointments and bandages and treat him myself. He was in bed for a week before he emerged. And from that day on, we acted as if you, the affair, hadn’t happened.”

  “So it brought you back together? His brush with death by the roadside?”

  “It did and it didn’t. You see the Marty that came back after that trip was a different Marty. His attitude had changed towards many things, monogamy in particular. The old Marty was clearly heartbroken by our betrayal, but the new Marty was keen to carry out some kind of free love experiment. He wanted to play games.”

  “What kind of games?”

  “Manoeuvring me into positions where I was likely to have sex with other men... or women. One night we took ecstasy at a dinner party. Then he got a phone call and had to leave early. He left me there on my own. And guess what, it turned out to be a swingers evening. He swore he didn’t know.”

  “He was trying to give you what you wanted.”

  “What he thought I wanted. That’s what I thought at first, but later I changed my mind. He’d come to see exclusive love relationships as a potential chink in his armour. He was seeking to master his emotions by turning them on their head. Sending me out to sleep with anyone and everyone.”

  “So what happened? You had what you wanted. Marty, plus a little variety on the side. Why did you finally split up?”

  “I found out that wasn’t what I wanted at all. I wanted to be unfaithful inside a monogamous relationship. It’s no fun if you get your boyfriend’s permission first. I mostly wanted to be unfaithful with you. His best friend. I wanted both of you. So now you know,” she smiled with mock coyness.

  “You’re so fucked up.”

  She raised her eyebrows as if to say that I wasn’t complaining earlier.

  “Seeing anyone?” I said.

  She smiled in a way that said yes and showed me an engagement ring. She got up and checked to see if she had any messages on her phone.

  “You mentioned that he’d changed in other ways,” I said.

  “He began to read a lot of books about chess. The Master Player was one of them. I’d always thought chess would be too geeky for him,” she said, making a nerdy face. “Oh, and he started to trace his father round about the same time,” she said almost as an afterthought. “Directly against his mother’s wishes.”

  “Did he ever find him?”

  “Yes but he was dead. Some boxer back in the 60s. He had a boxer’s name too. Jack Lewis I think it was. There you go, the memory of a fine legal brain.”

  She came over to the bed and kissed me long and hard. I broke off and told her I had to leave and that I was going to take a shower. She looked miffed. And I half expected her to interrupt my shower to get what she wanted but it didn’t happen and I was left in peace. When I left the bathroom, she’d gone. On the bedside table was a card.

  Amelia Wetherall

  Barrister-at-Law

  ‘Available for trysts and assignations’ was written on the back in biro. I filed it in my jacket pocket and was getting ready to go when there was a knock on the door. She must have forgotten something, so I went to open it. Standing at the door were two men in suits flanked by two policemen in uniform.

  “Mr Jay Lishman?” asked one of the men, holding up his ID.

  I tried to close the door in their faces, but one of them had placed
his shoe inside the doorjamb. I ran towards the bathroom grabbing my pay-as-you-go mobile off the bed as I went. I got in the bathroom and locked the door behind me. I sat against the door and frantically set about sending an SMS.

  “Mr Lishman, let us in. You’ve nowhere left to run to. We don’t want to have to knock the door down,” said one of the men.

  I pressed send. Then I smashed the phone open on the floor. I retrieved the SIM card and flushed it down the toilet. Then I threw the rest of the mobile out the bathroom window. I opened the door and was immediately dragged out of the bathroom and forced onto the floor by the uniformed officers. I felt a knee heavy on my spine as my wrists were cuffed behind me. Then the voice of officialdom came crashing down upon me:

  “Mr Jay Lishman, we are arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Natasha Rokitzky. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Is there anything you’d like to say, Mr Lishman?”

  “I’ve done nothing wrong,” I said in a growl, knowing that if this was repeated in court it could only count in my favour.

  Part Two: The Changing

  Chapter Ten

  Francis Bacon said: “A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.” Ten years after reading that quotation at university, it was not by chance that it came back to me now. A message sent from my unconscious. Were Marty’s wounds still green?

  “Not now, but sometime when you think that all this is forgotten. I’ll wake you up from your sleep with a knife to your throat.”

  He retracted that threat. But that retraction didn’t rule out revenge, just one method. Amy claimed Marty had become obsessed with chess. Obsessed with becoming a ‘master player’. At the core he was a violent, yet ruthlessly intelligent individual. If he’d trained himself to control his emotions and think further and further ahead, it was an evolution. A great leap forward. But into what had he evolved? Just then I relived the memory of the man in the gorilla mask turning up at the backroom bar. Was he going from monkey to man or man to monkey? Or was the key to marry the two sides? The primitive with the master player?

  I began to remember something else he’d said. Something about not travelling the path of least resistance. In translation: take charge of your own destiny. Take your place at the board and play. If I was to match Marty, I would need to evolve too.

  I thought back to that night in the AmBar when Marty tricked me into leaving with Natasha Rok.

  “She’s going to finish up with her friends and wait for you outside. It’s your move,” he’d said.

  A normal person might have been suspicious, but I saw sex and nothing else. It blinded me to danger. Marty had identified my weakness and exploited it.

  “It’s your move,” he’d said.

  Was that a little joke to himself as he manoeuvred his pieces across the board? Across the chequered floor of the AmBar to the square of Natasha’s death?

  Check!

  Then there was the door key, which moved me once more to the scene of the crime. And the police turning up at the flat.

  Check!

  But I escaped through the bathroom window. He hadn’t counted on that.

  Manoeuvring Amy into the hotel room had been the first move that I hadn’t been tricked or forced into making. My first real move. But Marty had seen it and sent the police to arrest me.

  “Check!” I heard someone say.

  But it must have been an aural hallucination. I was alone. Very alone and becoming convinced that my oldest friend might also be my worst enemy.

  It was six pm according to the clock on the wall. I’d been there two hours. I knew from researching terrorist laws for Free Press that if they didn’t charge me within the next 22 hours they’d have to release me. Of course, the superintendent could extend it to 36 hours and a judge to 48, but unless the police had something solid they wouldn’t risk charging me. Not if they couldn’t make it stick.

  The room was ten foot by six foot. Sharing the space with me were three upright armless chairs, a small table and an intercom. There was a camera in the top corner of the room. It was pointing at me, a small red light was flashing on and off above the camera lens. An hour ago, the desk sergeant brought me a cup of strong tea and gave me a cigarette. I needed another. But in custody it wasn’t up to me. In custody I was unable to move.

  “Checkmate!” I heard someone say.

  * * *

  I rested my head on the desk in front of me, my arms protecting my face from the camera. It was at that moment of near relaxation that the door was thrown open and a large ruddy-faced man in a tweed jacket crashed into the room, nearly upsetting the table. He spun one of the chairs round and sat on it backwards. He was followed through the door by a tough-looking woman in her early thirties.

  The man pressed the button on the wall, which I’d wrongly assumed was the intercom, and said: “Detective Inspector James Finch and Detective Sergeant Lisa Mitchell interviewing murder suspect Jay Lishman.” He looked at me and said, “It is my duty to warn you that this interview is being recorded. Okay, Mr Lishman. Where were you between the hours of ten pm Friday 5th and two am on Saturday, April 6th?”

  It was an opening gambit of shock and awe designed to define themselves as predator and myself as prey. It had worked. I was struck dumb and close to losing my lunch with fear. I wanted to run, albeit metaphorically, but I knew that’s what prey would do. The only way to play this was to be as much like a predator as they were... Most battles were won in the head. If I let them intimidate me, it was over.

  I took a deep breath, rested my hands in my lap and thought about what they’d said: they’d told me the time of death. Dani had prepared me for this the night I returned to the scene of the crime. I smiled and began to speak.

  “On Saturday, I was with Martin Stewart, an old school friend, in a bar on Old Street until about 11.30 pm. Then I went to meet my colleague and friend Danielle Yorath in Camden. We spent the night together. In fact we spent the rest of the weekend together in my flat. And then at her flat in Hackney on Bank Holiday Monday.”

  I had finished speaking, but the two police detectives didn’t say anything. They just stared, expecting me to say more. This was a time-honoured police technique to create an awkward silence in the hope that social embarrassment would cause the accused to say something incriminating. But I’d read enough detective fiction to be aware of it and sat quietly, trying to enjoy the silence. I focused on slow deep breathing. It was working.

  “A bar in Old Street?” said Finch finally. “Which bar exactly?”

  “I could show you where it is on the map. It’s the one right next to the all-night garage.”

  “Do you know the whereabouts of Martin Stewart?” said Finch.

  “No, I’m a bit worried about him myself. He’s not answering his phone.”

  “We’re not worried about him, Mr Lishman,” said Finch. “We would like to verify your story.”

  “You might want to ask the bar staff in that Old Street pub. We were attacked by three Polish men. That’s where I got these scratches. They’d be sure to remember.”

  With that DI Finch whispered something in the ear of DS Mitchell and then she left the room.

  “Why did you resist arrest, Mr Lishman?” said Finch.

  “I thought I was being rolled.”

  “Aren’t you surprised we brought you in?”

  “When the photofit came out in the newspaper, everyone said it looked a bit like me. I guess someone put two and two together and got five.”

  “Did you know Natasha Rokitzky?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I tried to breathe deeply, but nicotine withdrawal was beginning to kick in and my hands were beginning to fidget. I had to focus. I was innocent and the only way I would be charged was if I incriminated myself. What was it that Amy had said?


  ... things might begin to conspire against you.

  If the police wanted to fit me up, there was little I could do to stop them. I had to give them something. Something to lead them away.

  “Not particularly? What does that mean, Lishman?” yelled Finch, slamming his hand on the table, causing the tea cup and ashtray to leap up in the air.

  I sighed and looked at Finch directly. I was about to speak but then paused. He seemed to hold his breath in anticipation.

  “Can I have a cigarette?”

  Finch frantically opened a packet and offered me one. I took it and placed it in my mouth for Finch to light. He fumbled with the lighter and lit my cigarette. I took a deep drag and exhaled in his direction.

  “I know her by name. I did a review at AmizFire on Saturday, April 6th. I saw her name on their website.”

  “You have a good memory for names.”

  “I knew her as Natasha Rok, which was the name she worked under. It’s a name that stays with you.”

  “Why didn’t you come forward and clear your name?”

  “I had no idea I was a suspect. I’ve had my own problems. Since the fight, I’ve been followed. I’ve had my flat broken into. I felt my life was in danger.”

  “From these Polish men?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you contact the police?”

  “I figured the police had enough on their plates.”

  “Quite. And this persecution, you think it’s connected to the fight you and Martin Stewart had in Old Street?”

  “The fight we had with three Polish neo-Nazis.”

  “And what makes you think these men were neo-Nazis? Or even Polish for that matter?”

  “They dressed like BNP activists. One of them insulted me in a foreign language. I believe it was Polish.”

  “Going back to your relationship with Natasha Rokitzky...”