The Beautiful Dead
Page 22
‘No.’
TrrrrrrT.
Rees gave an audible sigh of exasperation.
Aguda tried again. ‘Eve. Until now, he’s led and we’ve followed. Now we have to try to get ahead of him. We have to be proactive, not reactive. And the only way to do that is by understanding what he wants. To work out what he’s going to do next. To catch a killer, we have to think like a killer.’
Eve Singer fixed her with a cold stare. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.’
Eve was trying to think like the killer.
It wasn’t a good place to be.
She had long pushed the envelope of her work and her resilience, but she had never before pushed the envelope of her own imagination.
Now she lay in bed and stared at the dark ceiling, and started to explore. Once she did, it was disturbing what horrors lurked in the soft folds of her own grey brain. What tortures and cruelties might be inflicted. What fears might be imposed. What a killer’s cold, empty heart felt when it looked at a scared and vulnerable person in its care.
Which was … nothing.
41
19 December
‘EVE!’
Eve woke in the dark with no memory of having fallen asleep.
‘What?’
Emily Aguda was in the doorway, holding her phone.
‘They’ve ID’d the killer,’ she said. ‘They’re on their way to an address right now.’
On a bitter and foggy winter’s dawn, outside a cream-coloured Georgian terrace in west London, Detective Superintendent Huw Rees looked at his watch and said a short prayer for the first time since his daughter was born.
Holly had come out with the cord wrapped around her neck. Silent and blue in the face. Maureen had been exhausted, but desperate to hold her.
But Huw had seen that the frantic efforts going on in the corner of the labour room were not so that the baby could be presented neatly to her mother, but to save her life.
So Huw Rees had prayed – Please, please, please … Reminding the Lord – and himself – that he was only one generation away from God-fearing folk.
And all the time he had prayed, he had lied to his wife.
She’s beautiful.
Yes, all of her fingers and toes.
She’ll cry any minute. Then likely won’t stop!
Any minute now.
Here it comes.
Any minute …
And Holly had cried, and he had cried, and he had never told his wife – or anybody else – of the terror of those long, lonely moments …
The forty-pound chunk of concrete that had been dropped from the bridge and decapitated the driver of the News 24/7 crew car had turned out to be the counterweight of a front-loading washing machine.
A Hotpoint, to be exact, according to the serial number.
Huw Rees hadn’t known it was a counterweight. And if he had, he would never have known that a washing-machine counterweight had a serial number.
But Veronica Creed knew both those things.
Turned out Veronica Creed had quite the passion for concrete counterweights. Turned out she had a collection. ‘Not many, of course,’ she’d told him with a spine-chilling blink as she handed him her report. ‘Just the more interesting ones.’
Who the fuck thought that concrete counterweights were in any way interesting? What kind of friend-free lunatic? Seriously!
Huw Rees shivered.
‘Fucking frigid, innit?’ murmured Hamilton beside him, without taking his eye from the sights of his semi-automatic rifle.
The counterweight had broken into several pieces and been ghastly with blood. Concrete was notoriously difficult to work with. Concrete covered with blood was impossible. The chances of getting a fingerprint off it had been zero. Nobody could do it.
But Veronica Creed had done it.
And that print belonged to thirty-two-year-old William Stafford Vandenberg, who’d had a single caution nearly three years earlier for nicking four notebooks and a Bic ballpoint pen from WHSmith at King’s Cross station.
It seemed a puny rehearsal for serial murder.
Rees took out his phone and looked again at the mugshot of Vandenberg. He had to keep doing it. It was so bland that he couldn’t fix the man’s face in his head. It was a face the eyes would slide easily over, in a crowd or a line-up. Regular without being good-looking, dull brown hair. He looked like someone who worked in an office, at a job his wife didn’t understand and couldn’t be bothered to ask about, for money that would never make a difference.
So dull. So ordinary.
It was hard to imagine the man in this photo doing anything as risky as buying a scratch card, let alone committing murder.
‘Three, two, one—’
Huw Rees was jerked back to the now.
Beside him Hamilton gave the GO signal and suddenly a dozen heavily armed men were rushing at the front door.
And as he followed them, Huw Rees prayed in time to his footsteps.
Please … please … please …
Because the fingerprint had been the good news.
The bad news was the blood that Veronica Creed had analysed swiftly but thoroughly. Most of it had belonged to the News 24/7 driver, Richard Short.
But some of it was Duncan Singer’s.
Please … please … please …
Rees didn’t like his life being dictated by prayers and miracles, but in a case like this, he would take help anywhere he could find it.
While they waited, Eve and Emily Aguda watched How It’s Made.
Aguda was fascinated, but not in a good way. It reminded her of the Open University programmes her mother had watched when they were growing up. Men with sideburns and tank-tops drawing squeakily on blackboards and tipping liquids into test tubes to elicit repeatable results.
It was just as hypnotically dull.
Rollerblades and frying pans and sticky tape. A pinsticker’s guide to mass production. It went on for ever and the music was awful.
Halfway through sticky tape, Eve Singer said, ‘Why haven’t they called?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Aguda honestly. ‘The whole operation could be over but confused, or been delayed and not even started. Anything I told you would be a guess.’
‘Are they armed?’ Eve said dully.
‘DS Rees was calling in a firearms unit.’
‘What if they shoot Dad by accident?’
‘They’re highly trained not to make that kind of mistake.’
‘It happens all the time!’
Not all the time, thought Aguda. Only now and then. But she knew that was unlikely to comfort anyone who had a loved one anywhere remotely near the line of fire. So instead she told her, ‘It’ll all be over soon. Nobody’s going to take any stupid risks.’
Aguda wasn’t in the lying business, but she was all for empty reassurances.
So she reassured Eve until Joe knocked on the front door.
Then she let him reassure Eve, while she made them all tea.
With the first blow of the battering ram, Superintendent Rees knew they had made a terrible mistake.
The house was Georgian, and the front door was three-inch oak. None of this modern MDF plywood-balsa bullshit.
The Specialist Firearms Command wasn’t equipped to batter down posh doors.
Another mighty blow, and another violent recoil that made one man stagger and tumble backwards down the steps. Somebody laughed and Hamilton barked furiously to Shut the fuck up! and there was a moment of panting silence.
The glossy black door was barely dented.
The element of surprise, however, was beyond repair.
Then they had to mill around like drunks outside a Portaloo, with their Armalites and Glocks and stab vests and riot helmets, while one of the squad took for ever to pick the lock and let them in.
The first thing that hit Huw Rees was the smell. Woodsmoke and oil, and something underneath that made his nose twitch with primitive caution.
Rees flicked on a light switch, but nothing happened.
Even in the semi-dark of dawn, he could tell that the house was enormous, and made more so by being free of furniture. The ceilings were high and the floors wooden, and the space in between them echoed with emptiness.
Everything was covered by a fine layer of dust that woke under the invading boots and rose to make the men cough.
Rees stood in the cavernous hallway and listened to Hamilton’s team move through the house. The only sound was of heavy footsteps, and shouts of ‘Clear!’ as they checked each room.
He was so tense he shook. Only when they had their man would the knot in his gut start to unravel. For now it was just about holding his breath and getting through to the other side.
The other side of what, he wasn’t sure. A madman was an unpredictable foe. He’d once seen a lunatic leap out of an Aga, still murderous, regardless of being on fire.
‘Sir. Over here …’
Rees joined Hamilton at a doorway off the hall and followed his pointing finger.
‘What the fuck is that?’
The room was huge, and in the middle of the floor was a square made up of small things. Small, misshapen things.
Hamilton ran a quick eye around the doorway for booby traps, then they stepped into the room.
Rees walked thirty feet before he reached the edge of the perfect square.
He walked slowly along its edges.
It was made of machine components. Nuts, bolts, plastic piping, elbows, washers, motor casings and – in the middle, like a prayer wheel – a large stainless-steel cylinder.
Perforated.
‘You think it’s a bomb?’ said Rees cautiously.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hamilton. ‘Careful where you step.’
The two men split at the corner of the array and walked cautiously away from each other along the perpendicular edges.
Hamilton stopped. ‘I think it’s a bloody washing machine.’
‘I think you’re right,’ laughed Rees.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Hamilton.
His words surprised Rees.
And then they didn’t.
Because it was beautiful.
Removed from their place in the machine and laid out precisely within the strict parameters of the square, the utilitarian components had taken on a new – more romantic – existence.
Every part had been mined from the machine and exposed, like a diamond dug out of the dirt. Each could now be appreciated in its own right, laid out in its own space – no longer a cog, but a gem.
There was an overwhelming sense of the parts having been freed from their dark and cramped confines and finally allowed to breathe.
As Rees carried on walking quietly around the square, the light from his torch threw long shadows beyond each piece, which pivoted away from him as he moved, each shadow rippling protectively over its neighbours as if they were all still somehow joined together, and all turning together warily to watch him circle them.
Huw Rees felt oddly emotional. Strangely connected.
Stupid, he told himself, stupid. But that didn’t stop a lump coming to his throat.
He would never look at a washing machine the same way again.
At one corner of the perfect square was something shiny. A single chrome-plastic word.
Rees touched it cautiously with the toe of his boot, then picked it up and held it out to show Hamilton, with a boyish smile on his face that spoke of gold and pirate treasure.
‘Hotpoint!’
‘Sir, we’ve got a body!’
The shout from somewhere above him jolted Rees out of his reverie and he felt his gut go heavy with prescience.
Shit.
Duncan Singer. Dead. Murdered. Eve Singer’s face as he broke the news and her heart …
He hated this part of his job.
With a deep sigh, he placed the Hotpoint badge back where he’d found it, then followed Hamilton up the stairs, sweating itchily under his unfamiliar helmet, even though the house was barely warmer inside than out.
‘Got a body, sir,’ said an officer on the third-floor landing, pointing through a doorway.
That was the smell. Rees recognized it now, although it was faint, and different from the usual decay of a corpse.
More distant.
He went through a room where the ashes of a fire still glowed. Vaguely he registered a yellow chair and a television and a box and a cup and a saucer.
Notebooks piled high.
Into the next room, where half a dozen men had gathered at a bedside, like mourners paying their last respects. A magnesium lantern cast the only real light – a ghostly white glow – on the faces of the black-clad men.
Shit. Here we go.
The body was on the bed.
And in the bed.
‘What the shit …?’ said Hamilton.
Rees frowned and bent over to understand it more clearly.
It wasn’t Duncan Singer.
Thank you thank you thank you.
Whoever it was had died here, and stayed here, and had swollen with gas and then deflated here. And then had soaked right into the mattress, so that the body and the bed had become one homogenous mass – both mummified and pocket-sprung.
It was dry now, and dessicating, which was why the smell was so changed and old, and soaked up by the innards of the bed, the wadding of kapok.
It was the body of a woman, he thought, from the size of it. A denture fixed with silver wire in the corner of the grim grimace glimmered like a diamond in a coalmine.
Gingerly, Rees lifted the lacy counterpane. In places it stuck to the bed and to the rancid corpse; someone behind him gave a grunt of disgust, and then a short laugh of embarrassment.
It was impossible to say how the woman had died.
‘Sir, the house is clear, sir,’ said a man from the doorway.
Hamilton looked at Rees, and Rees stepped back and away from the bed.
‘Check again,’ he said. ‘The fire in the next room is still warm. He must be here. Check again.’
PC Dougie Trewell was having a shitty day.
He had been knocked down the stone steps with the recoil of the battering ram and as punishment Hamilton had left him outside to guard the door, instead of allowing him to storm the building with his unit and his gun.
Now he was standing on the doorstep like a fucking spare part.
This was only his second raid with SCO19 and on the first one he’d got his foot stuck in a drain. If he didn’t shine soon he’d be back in crap uniform and without a gun.
Early commuters were starting to pass, so Dougie straightened up and tried to look as if he meant business, and not as if he had been left outside the door like a kid wearing a dunce’s cap.
‘What’s going on here?’
A man peered around the door of the neighbouring house.
‘Police, sir,’ said Dougie gruffly.
‘You’re making a hell of a noise.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Dougie. ‘Bloke who lives here is a suspect in a murder case. Can’t go in light.’ He jerked his semi-automatic carbine to show just how light you couldn’t go in.
‘Murder?’ The man gave him a suspicious look. ‘Him?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Dougie. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Not really,’ said the man. ‘He’s an artist.’
‘Yeah?’ said Dougie, without interest. He reckoned art was just a trick played on people with more money than sense.
The man came out. He was dressed beyond his years in old-man slacks and a Pringle jumper. Pink-and-yellow argyle. Pale-cream loafers with little tassles.
He probably liked art, thought Dougie with an inner snort.
They stood for another moment, staring up at the cream house together, listening to the
muffled shouts and the thumping of boots coming from within.
‘They’ll be making a terrible mess of those floors,’ said the man. ‘They’re all cherry wood, you know. All these homes have cherry-wood floors.’
‘Yeah?’ said Dougie again. He’d never lived in a house where the floors were anything but carpet or lino. Cherry wood meant nothing to him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m sure they’ll put right any damage.’ That was a lie. Especially if they arrested a killer inside. Then Dougie was pretty sure they wouldn’t.
‘I hope so,’ said the man, then he turned and wheeled a box on a sack trolley from the house and started to tilt and tip it down the steps. The box was big and it was a precarious process. Dougie’s instinct was to help, but he had already screwed up once today and dared not abandon his post, even for a second, so he turned his back and pretended not to see how the man was struggling.
His ears burned a little at the grunts and the clunks, and he scowled up and down the street, hoping he looked harder than he felt.
‘You like art?’ said the man.
Dougie jumped a little. The man had left the box at the bottom of the steps. But instead of going back inside, he was standing out here making small talk.
About art.
‘Never really thought about it,’ Dougie said with a shrug.
The man smiled. ‘You’re not even one of those people who say, I know what I like?’
‘Nope,’ said Dougie.
He wished the man would go back inside. He should, because it was really cold and he was only in indoor clothes and silly shoes, as if he’d been interrupted while eating kippers for breakfast. Plus he was as bald as a coot.
He must be chilly as fuck.
‘I do know what I like, though.’ Dougie surprised himself with the afterthought. ‘Cars.’
‘Mm,’ said the man with a sniff. ‘Cars.’ As if he thought Dougie was a moron.
Dougie flushed and hurried to explain himself. He wasn’t sure why he felt the need; he just did.
‘Not just cars,’ he said, ‘but all the little bits in cars.’
‘Little bits?’ frowned the man.
‘Yeah,’ said Dougie dreamily. ‘All the little bits. I like to take an engine apart – every single jet and spring and washer – and see how it all went together to make the car run. Spreading it all out so that I understand it. It’s not, like, art – but that’s what I like.’