A Good Way to Go

by Peter Helton

  SOCOs were now swarming all over the place, there was a fingertip search in progress all along this side of the road and Denkhaus had just turned up and added his Range Rover to the long line of police vehicles.

  Denkhaus entered the tent that now enclosed the entire bus stop. He looked fully recovered from his food poisoning and sounded it. But he looked exasperated and after a short exchange with Coulthart nodded his head towards the exit. ‘A word, DI McLusky.’

  Outside they strolled away from the tent and the uniforms towards the DSI’s car. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve fully recovered, sir,’ offered McLusky.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. How’s your head?’

  ‘Fine, sir.’

  ‘You were extremely lucky. He’s obviously highly unstable and could have killed you.’

  Walking and talking required too much breathing for McLusky so he stopped walking. ‘Could have. Didn’t.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘It’s just my ribs. Shallow breathing is best.’

  ‘This attack on you was exactly what I feared might happen. I wish you had found somewhere else to stay for the duration of the investigation. I blame myself, I should have insisted on it.’

  ‘It was my decision. I’m alive. And we may have a good DNA sample. If we do then it was worth it.’

  ‘It’s generous of you to say so. There will be compensation, of course. And the moment our man’s in custody I want you to take some leave.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ McLusky was impatient to get back to the deposition site.

  ‘We’ll have to find you some accommodation before tonight.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ McLusky said. ‘I have something in mind.’

  ‘As long as you’re sure. I’ll leave it with you then. The ACC was very pleased you apprehended the sexual deviant who stole his wife’s underwear. Good job.’

  ‘We only picked him up, it was Kat Fairfield’s work.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. But it’s your name he’ll remember, and for the right reasons for once. I can see you’re impatient to get back to work. Carry on.’

  McLusky lit a cigarette and walked back to the tent, smoking carefully, mindful of his cracked ribs. He could not afford to cough.

  Four hours later he found himself in the observation area of the autopsy suite at Flax Broughton, wearing not one but two nicotine patches. A coughing fit in his car on the way back from the deposition site had convinced him that it was time to stop smoking while his ribs healed. And who knew? Perhaps he would give up for good.

  Neil Shand’s corpse, now naked on the examination table, had retained its peevish facial expression. ‘I think our killer is having a bit of fun here,’ Coulthart said when McLusky mentioned it. ‘I think he initially tied his jaw shut so it might set like that and he’d look more convincingly like a rough sleeper.’

  ‘Exquisite sense of humour. But again he has gone to great lengths and risked a lot, too, by displaying Shand like that. He wanted him to look like a rough sleeper. We are looking into all Shand’s affairs, especially anyone he may have evicted.’

  ‘There must be hundreds,’ Coulthart said.

  ‘Yes, slightly fewer though that are van drivers and scooter riders.’

  ‘Does he ride a scooter?’

  ‘I believe he does, when he is not using his van. Rode off in one after he clouted me over the head, I think.’

  ‘You look better than this morning, I must say. Let us proceed, then.’

  Shand had been overweight by about five stone and his white midriff reminded McLusky of a bloated, dead dolphin he had once seen washed up on a beach in Devon. How Coulthart lived with the smell of people’s insides every day he could not understand. As the pathologist made the initial incision he thought he could smell it even through the glass.

  ‘Cause of death?’ he asked.

  Coulthart smiled; he had waited for the inspector to show a flicker of interest. ‘What’s it to you?’ He flashed him a look over his glasses and turned to his young yet practically bald assistant. ‘Daniel, would you put the X-rays up for the inspector?’ A large monitor flicked on and a couple of chest X-rays, one frontal, the other side on, glowed blue and grey. ‘Can you make that out? Every one of his ribs is broken.’

  McLusky breathed in more deeply and his side ached and burned. ‘It looks a mess.’

  ‘Yes. Complete smashed-in ribcage, both lungs punctured in several places. I think we can safely say that he was trampled to death. From the looks of it he did not just kick him, he jumped around on him. The victim died of a heart attack soon after that.’

  McLusky had come closer and closer to the glass, now he rested his forehead on it; behind the reality of Coulthart’s systematic disembowelling of the corpse he saw images of a demonic fairy-tale creature jumping about on Neil Shand’s chest. He felt the burning of his own chest intensify and felt a similar sensation on his left, where the mobile reserved for the demonic killer waited silently in his jacket.

  McLusky had tried Laura’s number several times during the day but not found the composure to leave a message. He tried again at the end of the day in his office, staring at an unopened packet of Extra Lights on his desk. A split second before he decided to give up, Laura answered.

  ‘I was so busy all day,’ she explained, ‘and hadn’t even noticed the phone wasn’t in my bag. Anyway, it’s only the second time you’ve called me since I gave you my number. Want to arrest another of my friends, is that it?’

  ‘Laura, Ethan Gray was a …’

  ‘I know, I know, just teasing. I’m glad you got rid of the creep. I was more shocked by what a bad judge of character I am. So, are you just calling to gloat a bit?’

  ‘I have a favour to ask.’

  ‘Well, it seems I owe you one.’

  ‘I need somewhere to stay.’ He heard Laura draw breath and quickly added: ‘Just for a few days. The killer we are hunting, he knows where I live. Attacked me last night outside my place.’

  ‘Jesus! Are you OK? Attacked how?’

  McLusky gave a quick, sanitized account of the ordeal. ‘I’m improving rapidly. My head’s fine, it’s my ribs that bother me most.’

  ‘Of course you can stay here, Liam. Just pack some things and come up. Sounds like you need looking after.’

  Having thrown a few essentials like underwear, toothbrush and mobile chargers into a small holdall, he drove to Laura’s house by a nonsensical, circuitous route, eyeing all scooter riders with suspicion and keeping a careful watch on his rear-view mirrors. When he found a large enough parking space and shoehorned his car into it he felt sure he had not been followed. As he arrived at the front door a girl opened it and nosed a bicycle past him, allowing him to enter the house unchallenged. She just raised one eyebrow, presumably as a kind of greeting.

  ‘You don’t even know me yet you just let me into the house,’ he complained.

  She gave him a sarcastic look. ‘We’ve met, I’m Val and you’re Laura’s friend Liam. You arrested that weirdo Ethan. So you’re welcome.’ She swung into the saddle and pedalled away.

  ‘Another satisfied customer,’ McLusky muttered and went inside.

  McLusky spent the evening talking. He talked to Laura at the kitchen table, he chatted to her housemates who came and went, he talked while they ate their enormous Chinese take-away and talked through the better part of two bottles of wine. It seemed to him that he had not enjoyed a normal conversation for months and if it had not been for the stiffness of his neck and shoulder and the burning of his rib cage he would have said he felt almost fine, nearly normal.

  ‘Everything OK, Liam?’ Laura asked.

  He realized he had looked at her during a long pause in the conversation. ‘Yes. Very OK. I’ve just noticed something. I’ve just noticed I was enjoying myself. For the first time in bloody ages.’

  ‘Well, good.’

  ‘And we managed not to drag up any crap from our past, which makes a change.’

  ‘I noticed that too. Are we about
to spoil it all?’

  McLusky drained his glass. ‘Try not to.’

  ‘Good.’ She stood up with a smile and her eyebrows at maximum elevation. ‘Unfortunately Ethan’s room has already been let again, so I’ll make you up a bed in the sitting room. The sofa is huge and quite comfortable, apparently.’

  Pauline Leslie hated her garden. It was large. It was full of features. It had everything she ever wanted, which was precisely the problem. She had always known it but her infuriating brother-in-law Michael had found it necessary to point it out: too much money and no taste. The house was the same, she had often suspected it. She would find things she liked the look of in magazines, then track them down and buy them for the house. They always looked out of place. Nothing fitted. She had no coherent vision. Sometimes she wished she could buy someone else’s house with the garden finished and the house furnished and full of history, their history, not her own, God forbid. Pauline sipped at her vodka and coke as she toured her garden. This gazebo? No one ever went near it since from inside it all you could see was the house. She had loved the house when they bought it, now it looked drab to her, too modern. It wasn’t modern, of course, it was merely quite new. It would never mellow, never grow old gracefully. And this island bed? She had seen it in a magazine and told the gardener she wanted one like it. She had drawn the shape of it on a piece of paper for him. Today, the shape of the island bed made her sick; it was a stupid shape, it looked infantile and she had no one to blame but herself. Pampas grass, what had she been thinking? Rick always called it Pampers grass and of course he was right, it looked like shit in her garden. The naked girl with the jug that used to spout water had been Rick’s idea; she knew it was tasteless tat but she hated it far less than her own attempts at being sophisticated. She sipped at her drink. This really needed another shot of vodka in it. Now that Michael had gone and stopped telling her that she was wasting her life with too much money and not enough God she thought she probably hated the bible-bashing twit less than she hated herself.

  An engine noise approached the house, yes, definitely coming up the drive. Not Richard, she was not expecting him back until late afternoon. Not an expensive engine sound either. Sounded more like a delivery. She fervently hoped it was not the police again, she had seen enough of police officers to last her for the rest of her life. She could hear no doorbell; perhaps they would just go away and leave her in peace. But it didn’t seem likely. Someone was calling.

  ‘Mrs Leslie?’

  ‘I’m in the garden.’ She took another sip from her far-too-weak drink and walked towards the house.

  He was already there, just standing on her stone-flagged path with his silver gun and his sack and a carpenter’s belt as though he had come to fix something. She did not recognize him at first but then it came to her: it was the delivery man from Dauphin’s, the deli people. There was fear raging in her insides and a million thoughts whirred through her brain but her voice sounded calm. ‘What do you want? You promised. You made a pact with Michael. You promised my brother-in-law not to harm my husband.’

  The man advanced on her, the gun levelled at her head. ‘Don’t worry about your husband, Mrs Leslie, he is quite safe. It is you I have come for.’

  McLusky could barely focus on the broken glass on the stone-flagged path and appeared not to hear what Dearlove was telling him, so the DC said it again. ‘If it really is the last victim, like the graffiti in the house says, then perhaps we’ll get a bit of breathing space.’

  The sun had risen at last. McLusky looked up at the thin-haired DC. ‘On the contrary, we might be completely buggered.’

  Undaunted by the inspector’s mood Dearlove said: ‘We’ve got footprints now.’

  ‘Yes and we have his DNA, too, probably enough to get a conviction. Have to find him before you can convict him, Deedee, and if he kills Pauline Leslie and then moves to Bangor to retire we might never find him.’

  ‘Have they not analyzed his DNA sample yet?’

  McLusky looked across at Austin who was standing on the veranda talking into a mobile and waving his free hand around. ‘Austin is just giving them hell about it.’ McLusky watched Austin stop gesticulating, the phone still pressed against his ear. ‘Any second now, Deedee.’

  Dearlove, too, looked across at the DS who was now listening motionlessly. Austin’s shoulders slumped; he put away his mobile, scratched the tip of his nose and looked up at McLusky. He made his way past the SOCOs who were about to pack up and shook his head when McLusky raised questioning eyebrows. ‘Not on file. IC1 male, but we sort of knew that. They’re still working on it, might be able to tell us his eye colour eventually.’

  ‘Marvellous. Naturally we are all happily convinced that it is our killer who abducted Mrs Leslie?’

  Austin frowned at him. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m just saying that Mr Leslie has no alibi and has had plenty of time to bury her under a rose bush and conveniently blame it on the man who abducted his brother.’

  Dearlove looked devastated. ‘Are you serious, sir?’

  ‘No. But I am suggesting that you’ll never make inspector unless you stop taking things for granted. Or make DS, for that matter. And why has that broken glass not been bagged up yet? His bloody fingerprints could be on it for all you know.’

  McLusky left them standing either side of the smashed drinks glass on the path and went inside the house to take a last look at the legend spray-painted on to the carpet in the Leslies’ sitting room: END OF THE LIST.

  ‘Where is Mr Leslie?’ he asked a PC standing guard in the hall.

  ‘Sitting in his Jaguar on the drive.’

  ‘Not about to drive off, is he?’

  ‘Don’t think so, sir. Just keeping out of the way. Been sitting there for ages.’

  McLusky walked up to the car but if Richard Leslie noticed him he gave no sign of it. He tried the passenger door and, finding it unlocked, swung himself into the seat beside the grieving husband. Leslie gave him the briefest of sideways looks then returned to staring through the windscreen at the house. McLusky felt in dire need of a cigarette to occupy his hands. Instead he folded them in his lap and let his head sink back against the headrest. He knew he was tired enough to sleep, his whole body told him so but his mind was sharp and busy. ‘We are naturally doing all we can to find your wife.’

  Richard Leslie cleared his throat before answering. ‘You didn’t find the others until it was too late. What makes you think you can find Pauline?’

  ‘I won’t lie to you …’

  ‘That’s big of you,’ Leslie interrupted. ‘Don’t even talk to me. Get out there and find her. Find her, not her body. Whatever you do, don’t bring me her dead body.’ There was a long pause. ‘He had promised, Mike said he had promised. I suppose it’s his little joke.’

  ‘He wants to hurt you without breaking his promise.’

  ‘But who? We’ve been through them all, every employee we’ve ever had, everyone who ever got fired, and there weren’t that many, you looked at all of them.’ Another long pause. ‘Just go and do something. I can’t bear you sitting here.’

  McLusky got out and walked to his car while calling Austin on his plastic mobile. ‘Find me at the bus stop.’

  This time McLusky did not even detour to buy provisions. He did a half circuit of St Augustine’s parade, waited for a bus to leave the bus stop and parked up. Once he had called the CCTV hub to let them know he was back in place near the statue of Neptune he turned the pink mobile off and took out the other phone. It was charged and showed three bars. McLusky stared at it. The end of the list. Perhaps Pauline Leslie really had been his last victim and the killer had no need to call him again. Perhaps he had run out of stolen mobiles. Or left the city. It could all be over already.

  But McLusky shook off his doubts. It couldn’t be over. This kind of killing had no end. The list was never at an end because there would be another list. Those who killed out of some kind of grievance or for some other murderous gr
eed always carried on. It was addictive and just like drugs the effect wore off quickly. Nothing was achieved by the killings, the grievance remained, the need to feed the rage that burned inside them with another death returned. They were either caught or committed suicide or their mental state deteriorated even further and took them far down other dark roads where no one followed.

  Should have bought some food and drink. He checked his watch. For nearly three hours he had sat here now, staring at the mobile, staring out at the traffic. He shifted in his seat, winced at the flare-up of pain in his side but he noted that it was less fierce, less biting. Carefully he reached across to the glove box and let it fall open; somewhere in there had to be his emergency stash of cigarettes. Impatiently he pawed the content of the glove box into the passenger footwell: tapes, sweet wrappers, maps and crumpled bits of paper until he found the packet of Extra Lights with two emergency cigarettes. He put one gratefully to his lips and slid the packet into his jacket pocket. On top of the dashboard his phone rang and vibrated. He scrabbled frantically for it, spat his unlit cigarette at the steering wheel.

  ‘McLusky.’

  Three Harley Davidson bikes roared past so that he could barely make out the words. ‘I am not sure why the fuck I’m still talking to you.’

  McLusky’s eyes swept across the scene outside. It was mid-morning, there were many people, too many people. ‘Because you want to explain why you killed Pauline Leslie?’

  ‘I could, but I won’t. She’s still alive, you see? I’m just off to pay her a final visit.’ McLusky heard the growl of the motorcycles through the phone as they drove past the speaker. He could see them on the other side of the parade near the Hippodrome. And there stood a man by a scooter.

  McLusky started the engine. ‘Surely you will want to tell me afterwards, if your list is now empty.’ There was a tap on the passenger window and Austin’s grinning face appeared. He was urgently waving a piece of paper at him. McLusky, tempted to drive off without him, cursed.

  ‘Don’t swear at me,’ said the voice.

  Austin, noticing which phone the inspector was using swung himself quietly into the passenger seat and even before he managed to close the door McLusky drove off. With no hand free to point and no eyes free to watch the distant figure McLusky barged though the traffic like a drunk in a dodgem car but soon ran into a wall of traffic waiting at a red light. Without a blue beacon, which would have alerted his quarry, he had to wait but now managed to point across the central island at the distant figure, already climbing on to his scooter.