by Mosby, Steve
‘Connelly.’
Chris indicated and pulled in beside him. I leaned out of the window.
‘Mr Connelly?’
‘Yes. Thank you so much for coming.’
‘That’s okay.’ I got out of the car. ‘What’s the problem?’
The old man filled in the details, some of which we’d already had from Dispatch. He was concerned about his neighbour, a woman named Sally Vickers. Her daytime routine was like clockwork, he informed us several times, but she hadn’t left the house for work this morning. Apparently they always had a chat, which I imagined was more at his instigation than hers. Her car was still in the drive. He’d tried knocking, and then rung her house number, but there was no reply. Having been following the news, he’d called the police.
It was the kind of report that under different circumstances would likely have been brushed off by Dispatch. But in the current climate, we were encouraging everyone to be careful and check on their neighbours, and we had to take calls like this seriously. Especially because Sally Vickers was in her mid-twenties and lived alone.
‘I’m sure she’s fine, Mr Connelly. But we’ll check it out.’
It was a double driveway, shared with the other, unattached neighbour. Sally Vickers’ side of that deal was noticeably better maintained than next door’s, smothered in a layer of fresh black tarmac rather than the pitted concrete beside it. I walked around her car, then moved to the rear of the house. Behind me, I heard Chris banging on the front door.
The garden back here was as well kept as the drive: buzz-cut grass, with elegant flower beds edging the fence, the velvety reds, purples and yellows bright in the swathe of morning sun that caught them. She’s normally so reliable. Such a good neighbour. I told myself there was probably nothing to worry about – that even the most predictable and responsible of people forget to put their bin out sometimes, or oversleep, or neglect to tell their slightly annoying neighbour that they’re going away.
The drive had sloped down as it went, so I found the kitchen door at the top of a set of stone steps, level with a raised wooden deck that stretched along the back of the property, all the way to the dividing fence with Connelly’s garden. I banged on the glass door first, not expecting a reply. Vickers would have responded to Chris by now if she was inside and able to. Then I slipped on a pair of gloves as a precaution, and tried the handle. As expected, it didn’t turn.
I stepped on to the decking. The wood felt soft and giving beneath my feet, as though the planks there had absorbed long-ago rain and never fully dried out. The house had two large windows at ground level. Glancing up, I saw four smaller ones on the floor above.
I moved to the nearest one, cupping my hands over my eyes and pressing my face close to the glass. There was no blind, and it was obvious that this was the kitchen. Metal taps looped up over the sink, close to the window, and I could see a counter and cabinets a short distance across the room. The kitchen was small – skinny, like a galley in a narrowboat – and even in the relative gloom, I could see how clean everything was. I didn’t know her, but I was already imagining Sally Vickers washing up and wiping down meticulously after every meal; scrupulous about it.
The window opened along the top, and was far too thin for anyone to fit through. Even so, I reached up on tiptoes and tried it. Shut tight.
The second window was close to the far corner of the house. A tree was overflowing the fence from Connelly’s side, and it brushed against my shoulder as I peered through the glass. Sally Vickers’ living room ran the entire depth of the house, so that I could see the closed cream curtains on the front window at the far end. Again, the room looked polished and spare. No obvious clutter …
But the fact that I could see it at all meant that the curtains back here had been left open.
Despite the heaviness of the mid-morning heat, a chill ran through me as I realised that. It had taken a second to register; it’s always easier to notice what is there as opposed to what isn’t. Why open only one set of curtains in the morning? Or why close only one set at night? Especially if you’re going away.
This window was side-hinged, and currently flush with the frame. But it was large enough, just about, to fit through. I stared at it for a moment, my ears ringing slightly, then gathered myself together and reached out to test it. I got my fingers into the join and pulled.
It won’t open.
But it did.
A flare of panic went up in my chest. Easy, Zoe. While it was still possible that there was an innocent explanation, I knew in my heart that we had another scene here. That we’d stumbled on it fresh.
Keep calm and think.
I turned to one side and shouted – ‘Chris! Round here, now!’ – then back to the window. I eased it as wide on the hinges as it would go, and leaned inside carefully, looking around. There was a round glass table close by, clear apart from some paperwork piled neatly at one side. Further in, a long brown leather settee was backed up against one wall, opposite a large flat-screen television mounted over the fireplace, with a coffee table in between. At the far end, by the opposite window, a closed door. Presumably that led to the hall and the stairs.
I leaned further in and checked to my immediate right. The door that led into the kitchen was closed too. Now that my head and shoulders were inside, I realised that the air in here was strange: warmer and less fresh than outside. There was an odd kind of silk to it, like a glass of stale, misty water. The house itself was thuddingly silent, but felt like it shouldn’t be.
‘Sally?’ I shouted. ‘It’s the police? Are you here?’
The words didn’t seem to go anywhere.
A fresh scene. There was additional weight to that, of course, and the thought burrowed down uncomfortably. All the victims so far – even Julie Kennedy – had at least managed to self-report. But if Sally Vickers was in here, she was not responding.
I leaned back out, just as Chris stepped on to the far end of the deck.
‘What have we—’
He froze when he saw me by the open window. Because it was obvious enough what we had. If not from the window, then from the look on my face.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Seriously?’
Under different circumstances, he’d have got a sarcastic response to that. But I just nodded, feeling grim. I pressed my fingers together, warming up the muscles in my forearms.
‘I’m going in.’
‘Wait. Hang on.’
He started towards me, but I had no intention of waiting. Partly because I knew he was on the verge of hiccuping up some bullshit chivalry, but mostly because we needed to move quickly here. I didn’t know for sure that Sally Vickers was inside, but if she was, she was badly hurt, or worse.
I eyed the window, then reached in and took a fingertip grip on the top of the frame inside. Steadied myself.
‘Zoe—’
‘Fuck off, Chris. If he was here, he’s long gone now.’
‘But how are you even going to— Oh.’
I hoisted myself up, hanging from my fingertips with my knees against the wall, feeling the tension in my forearms, shoulders and back. I used my feet to climb up the outside wall, bringing my knees up to my chest and slipping my feet through the open window, then sat down on the ledge.
‘Like that,’ I said. ‘Make yourself useful, Chris. Call backup and an ambulance.’
‘We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.’
‘Yes we do.’
I ducked under the top of the window, put my feet down, and stood up in Sally Vickers’ front room.
Now that I was properly inside, that brief spurt of bravado disappeared entirely. There was definitely something wrong here. The air had a bruised quality, one I sometimes recognised at a crime scene. It was bullshit, but it often felt that way – as though the space in which something awful had taken place was stunned somehow by what had happened.
I checked the kitchen first, moving through to a small utility room by the back door. The boiler was o
n the wall above an expensive-looking washing machine; the enormous fridge-freezer had a juice dispenser in the top door. Everything was humming slightly. Through the blurred glass of the back door I could make out Chris’s silhouette on the steps.
His voice came through muffled.
‘Any way of opening it from in there?’
‘No.’
Sally Vickers had two sash jams on the back door, both in the locked position. I could undo them, of course, but there was no sign of any keys nearby, so there was no point. Better to leave the scene as untouched as possible.
Chris started to say something else, but I was already heading back through the kitchen and then the front room. Opening the door at the far end, I found myself in a small entrance area. There was the front door, a staircase going up to the right, a box room straight ahead.
The front door – sash jams again, and a chain here as well. Vickers was security-conscious; everything had been locked up tight. Which made it unlikely that she’d left her back window open by mistake.
‘Sally?’ I shouted up the stairs. ‘Sally Vickers? It’s the police. Are you here, please?’
Nothing.
The box room was empty, so I went straight up to the next floor, taking the stairs quickly but quietly. There were two spare rooms to the left, their doors ajar, and the bathroom and main bedroom to the right. All the attacks so far had taken place in the early hours, the woman woken while sleeping. I headed to the right.
The bedroom door was pulled to, but not shut entirely. Through the crack I could make out a soft red glow – presumably the daylight smearing in through closed curtains.
I reached out to push the door fully open, then hesitated, suddenly nervous. It’s not like me to be on edge, but the air on the other side of the door felt packed with presence and sadness.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
A minute or so later, I was downstairs again, my body moving by itself back to the open window. It was a strange sensation: I felt as though I was outside of myself, acting almost on autopilot. Perhaps I was in the beginnings of shock – although I hated the thought and did my best to push it aside. Right now, I needed to be in control.
Chris wasn’t out back, but actually, that was fine. I leaned on the frame for a few moments, breathing in the fresh air from outside. In spite of the heat, it might as well have been ice compared to the stifling atmosphere in the house. It was thirst-quenching.
After a few deep breaths, I turned my head and inspected the window. There was no obvious damage to the frame, and nothing appeared to have been drilled. The handle was up on the inside, and I considered turning it – seeing if it worked, or whether it might have been interfered with in some way – but it was better to leave that to Forensics. This was certainly where he’d got out. Maybe it was where he’d got in as well, if we could only work out how. I didn’t want to remove any evidence that might throw light on that. Not now.
I heard footsteps scraping on the driveway, and a moment later, Chris appeared around the corner. He hurried over.
‘What have we got? Is she here?’
I looked at him and nodded.
‘He’s killed her, Chris. This time, he’s killed her.’
His face didn’t really change, but somehow it did. Something in his eyes fell away.
‘She’s upstairs.’ My voice was small, quiet; it didn’t really sound like me at all. ‘He’s jammed her between the far side of the bed and the wall.’
When I’d first stepped into the room, her body hadn’t been visible, but it was immediately clear that something had happened. The sheets were in disarray, and there were stains spattered on the duvet, and far more extensively on one of the pillows. The red light from the curtains made it difficult to make out, but it had still been obvious that it was blood.
Sally Vickers had appeared to me slowly as I moved gingerly around the base of the bed, a stretch of pale skin at a time, her body bathed in crimson light. The gap between the side of the bed and the wall was about half a metre wide. It was possible that she’d rolled off and died there, but it looked more like he’d stuffed her down – jammed her into the space, like used clothes pushed awkwardly into a suitcase. She was naked, and her limbs were tangled, with one forearm pointing up. As the sight of her had slowly resolved, I’d searched for her face; it had taken me a few seconds to realise that she was looking directly at me, and that I just hadn’t been able to tell.
I shook my head. ‘We need everyone here now.’
He was already getting his phone.
‘On it.’
While he made the call, I continued to breathe in the fresh air, but the image of Sally Vickers wouldn’t leave my head. I’d seen countless dead bodies before, of course, but there was something about the way he’d disposed of her that seemed to have wiped me out inside.
Part of it was that it had already been my investigation be-fore she’d died. My responsibility. No matter how hard we’d worked, we hadn’t caught him before he’d done this. But it was more than guilt: it was the sheer callousness of it all. The scale was different, but it reminded me of what Chris had said about my messy burglary: why not just take what you want and leave? You didn’t have to do that as well. The violence here was just so blatant, so pointless. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it, just blind hate.
Chris asked me something.
‘What?’
‘I said, can you find any keys? It would make it easier for you to get out.’
I shook my head. ‘Better not. Let’s leave everything as it is for Forensics. We want to keep it tight. We don’t want to miss a single thing this time.’
‘We didn’t any other time either.’
‘I know. But still.’
‘I’ll help you out, then.’
I glanced behind me, feeling the emptiness of the house again. Now that I knew for sure she was upstairs, the air felt less ominous than before. Just sadness now.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll wait in here, with her.’
Eight
That evening, I got out of work both late and frustrated. The afternoon had been spent beginning the investigation into Sally Vickers’ life – her friends and family; her movements over previous days – and canvassing the neighbours for anything untoward they might have spotted. If she’d been targeted, and perhaps even followed over time, then surely someone must have seen something? But so far, just as with the other victims, the answer seemed to be that nobody had.
It was Monday, so I did what I always do: I went to the gym. It wasn’t like I was going to get much sleep anyway. Even if I could get Sally Vickers out of my head for long enough, the dream of the waste ground would undoubtedly be there waiting for me. So, close to ten o’clock that night, I pulled up in the car park of the Workhouse.
It’s open twenty-four seven, but is largely unattended after hours, so I had to use my keycard to unlock the door. Normally, when I step inside, the warm, sweaty air and the thud of bags is familiar enough to be a genuine relief from the horrors of the day behind me. It was quieter at this hour, but the smell of the place was still vaguely comforting.
The Workhouse is a no-frills, spit-and-sawdust kind of establishment. There are nicer places closer to the centre – the air-conditioned chain gyms, where everything’s colour-coordinated and the sounds are of whirring and swooshing – and I could afford them easily enough. But I prefer the Workhouse for various reasons. The main thing is that it feels like I belong here, in the way that I don’t in any fancy establishment – whether it’s pubs, restaurants, or whatever. I always suspect the owners are looking me up and down and thinking I shouldn’t be there. Which is ridiculous, of course. I have money, I’m well presented and behaved, and I have about as socially responsible a job as it’s possible to have. But even so, a part of me is always going to feel like the scruffy gang kid: the one the store detective follows around and keeps his eye on.
After I’d got changed, I slung a towel over my sho
ulder and carried my water bottle across the open-plan gym, towards the free weights area. Black rubber mats were interlocked on the floor – tacky in places, like tyres that had driven over oil – and one wall was covered with smudged mirrors, framed by an old stack-and-pulley set-up. Benches were dotted around, along with slightly rusty bars and plates, the labels long worn off the latter, the numbers on them little more than raised ridges in the iron. There was also a rack of newer dumb-bells, with rubber handles and black hexagonal ends, and I walked over to those, selecting the ones I was going to use.
There was only one man using the equipment tonight: a guy in his mid-twenties with dark shaved hair, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a workout top that revealed the trapezius muscles on his neck and shoulders. I’d seen him a few times before. Right now, he was sitting facing the mirror, curling twenty-kilo dumb-bells – hammer raises. His arms were absurdly pumped, the veins standing out on his forearms as though the skin had been shrink-wrapped over them. As he finished his set, he placed the weights carefully on either side of his bench. Not a dropper, then. I liked that.
I dragged a bench into place a short distance to one side, dimly aware out of the corner of my eye of him tapping at his phone. Recording his set details: there’d be an app for that, for people who cared. I never bothered to count.
I lined the dumb-bells up, then shook my arms and twisted round at the waist to stretch my back. The weights I’d selected today were small. Sometimes I go for heavier ones – to test myself; to mix it up and keep things interesting – but I prefer to lift light, as there’s something about eight-rep sets that feels truncated to me. The sets I prefer have fifty repetitions or more, and I’m in pain for well over half of them. And that’s good, because it allows me to lose myself for longer.
It’s one of the main reasons I lift – to distract myself from dwelling on the day behind me: thoughts coming to life, whirling and dancing, like the mops and buckets in that Disney cartoon. Tonight, predictably, my head was all too full. A small part of it involved John; the day after tomorrow, he would be moving into the care home I’d found for him. The saddest aspect of the whole thing was that he hadn’t protested anything like as much as I’d anticipated – or perhaps even hoped – he would. He’d accepted the situation quickly, so it had felt as though he was already giving up the fight. On the surface, I was worried about how he was going to settle in; deep down, I was trying to ignore the fact that he was not going to be there for as long as I wanted. That given how fast he was deteriorating, he might not need to settle in at all.
