by Mosby, Steve
Keeping my body to one side, I kicked open the door to the front room. It banged backwards against the radiator, and the curtains over the back window wafted out. The sudden light in here was harsh, and I allowed myself a couple of blinks before stepping into the room, holding the hammer close to the head, so that it could be used for short, sharp punches if someone was standing close by.
Nobody was, which was a good thing, because I was momentarily shocked by how wrong the room looked. Whoever was here had already taken a fair amount of stuff, most noticeably the TV – there was too much wall showing directly opposite me. Beside it, my bookcase of DVDs had been hurriedly ransacked, and a splay of plastic cases lay in front of it. The rest of the room was in a similar state of chaos, my myriad possessions pulled from drawers and scattered about, and there were streaks of liquid over everything – wrong, wrong, wrong – that didn’t make any immediate sense.
And then the burglars themselves.
A couple of them were a cluster of fluttering shadows out of sight in the kitchen, but the last one had only just got to the doorway. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans and a grey hoodie, white trainers, black gloves. No mask, though, the idiot.
‘Hey, what about the hedge?’ I called to him.
And he hesitated. It was a trick I’d learned as a teenager, when I’d been smaller than most of the children who thought they could bully me. When you say something totally incongruous, it short-circuits someone’s brain for a second, just long enough to distract them as you land that crucial first punch. The burglar was too far away for that, of course, but it was enough to stall him – to make him turn to look at me for a moment, so that I got a clear view of his face.
Click.
And then he was gone, pelting outside after his friends.
I went after them, but more half-heartedly now. However pissed off I was, I knew that, legal issues aside, I’d have trouble dealing with more than one of them in an open space. Besides, they were quick: the car engine was already revving as I reached the front door and stepped out into the cold night air. A door slammed, tyres screeched, and I saw lights flashing away down the street. By the time I’d got to the end of the path – more a token gesture now than anything else – the car was out of sight.
I stood in the middle of the road, patting the solid head of the hammer against the tendons of my palm. The silence was almost eerie now: just moths pattering against the nearby street light. It didn’t matter that they’d got away. I’d managed a good enough look at the last one out, and I’d recognised him. It was just a flicker of memory for the moment, but I knew him from somewhere.
Borrowed time, you little shit.
I stared down the empty street for a few moments, trying to remember – and then realised how much I was shivering. Despite the almost insufferable heat of the past weeks, it was cold out at night, and adrenalin could only add so much cover to a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms.
I headed back inside. Time to inspect the damage.
And phone the police, of course.
‘Christ.’
Half past nine in the morning, and Detective Inspector Chris Sands – my partner – was standing beside me amidst the wreckage of my front room. He looked like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Chris is always like that, though. I like him, but he seems to approach every crime scene as some kind of psychic assault on his worldview, whereas for me, it’s more like confirmation: this is the way the world works. If Chris isn’t careful, by the time he’s forty he’s going to have a face like a perpetually disappointed puppy.
Around the corner, in the kitchen, the drilling started up again. The locksmith had arrived just after Chris and was getting straight to work, no messing about: replacing the locks and installing a set of sash jams. He had special instructions to keep the barrel of the old lock, in case SOCO could collect any fingerprints. There wouldn’t be any, of course, but still. Procedure.
Chris shook his head as he looked around. ‘A messy burglary.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It is that.’
The shattering noise I’d heard last night had been the television, dropped in a panic at the far end of the room as the intruders had scrambled out. I’d also lost handfuls of DVDs, scooped from the shelves like they’d been on some kind of fucking supermarket sweep, and my PlayStation and laptop were also missing.
But the financial damage was only part of it, and Chris was right: this hadn’t been a straightforward case of breaking and taking. The burglars had found a tube of sun cream on the table and proceeded to squirt the contents around the room with gleeful abandon. The stains and crusts from it were all over the settee and walls. As if that wasn’t enough, they’d also taken a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen and sloshed that everywhere. Finally, in a particularly disgusting touch, one of them had helped himself to a banana from my fruit bowl, chewed it up and spat it on the floor. The contempt they’d felt for me – a total stranger – was more than evident, and I’d spent a good portion of the night wanting to go back in time and chase the bastards a little harder.
‘Scumbags.’ Chris gestured around as though the damage was inexplicable, or caused by a tornado or something. ‘You can sort of understand it – the burglary, I mean. There’s a point to that. They’re junkies or whatever. They need the money. But why not just take the stuff and get out, you know? It never makes sense to me. Why do this?’
‘It makes sense to me. It’s all there in the word scumbag.’
‘I guess.’
He sounded doubtful, but I was right. These people wouldn’t have known who was upstairs – whether it was a single woman like me, or an entire family – and they wouldn’t have cared. It didn’t matter. In their deluded heads, they probably weren’t just helping themselves to other people’s things, but teaching them a lesson as well. Dare to own a home and have possessions? Stupid enough to work hard and build a life? Well, look what we think of you. Imagine us laughing as we take the fruits of your efforts, trash what we don’t want, and spit on what’s left.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the muffled laughter I’d heard. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been as angry as this in my whole life.
‘Prompt response?’ Chris said.
‘The uniforms? Oh, yes. Ten minutes, maybe. They stayed around for about half an hour, as well. One of them even went into the back garden with a torch. Which was useless, obviously, but nice of him.’
‘At least they’re taking it seriously.’
‘That’s true.’
Being police probably helped in that regard, but it wasn’t just down to that. There’s a common public misconception that burglaries aren’t high on our list of concerns. It’s simply not true; they’re taken very seriously indeed, especially when the homeowner is present. It’s just difficult to get a result from them. There are usually no prints, and anything stolen tends to get sold on quickly. The result is that a significant proportion of burglaries are solved by being ticked off the list when an offender gets caught for one and owns up to a handful of others, so that his cooperation can be taken into account during sentencing. Everyone’s basically a winner.
But that’s most burglaries – the ones where the offender just gets in and gets out again. This behaviour, though – the trashing – was closer to an engagement. There was a sense of escalation to it. A few incidents down the line, you could imagine that the individuals involved might take things further: venture upstairs; maybe even hurt people. So they needed catching before we ended up with something far more serious than theft on our hands.
Especially in the current climate.
‘You came downstairs, didn’t you?’ Chris said.
‘Yes. Of course I did.’
‘Right.’
And there he was again with the kicked-puppy face. We’d worked together for years, he knew full well how capable I was, and yet he still found it impossible not to engage his protective side. Often when it surfaced I did my best to hide how patronising I found it, but I didn’t have
the patience for that today.
‘What did you expect me to do? I was very angry, Chris. There were people trashing my house and taking my fucking things.’
‘Yeah, but you should be careful.’
‘Fortunately, a floorboard keeps coming loose in the bedroom, so I have a hammer nearby.’
‘Even so.’ He shrugged awkwardly. ‘You never know, do you? It could have been our creeper knocking around down here.’
Our creeper. As a title, it hardly went far enough. But even though it was the force’s major case right now, a few officers had taken to calling him that, as though minimising him by name might make the details of the attacks somehow easier to deal with.
‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ I said. ‘We’d have him now.’
‘Or he’d have you.’ But he caught the look on my face, and finally, my mood filtered through the veneer of masculinity. ‘No, you’re right.’
‘And our creeper’s not in the habit of drilling out door locks.’ I nodded in the direction of the kitchen, where the locksmith was still working. ‘Or stomping around people’s front rooms like an amateur. Maybe if he was, the women would have had more of a chance.’
‘You’re okay. That’s the important thing.’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘And I bet the uniforms were pleased.’
‘What? That I’d solved the crime for them? Yeah, they were thrilled.’
The name of the man whose face I’d seen had come to me while I was waiting for them to arrive. It would have come more quickly, but I didn’t know him that well, and it had been a long time since I’d seen him. The kind of people I used to run with, back when I was a teenager growing up on the Thornton estate, were very different from the people I worked with now. I’d done my best to distance myself from all that, and I’d hardly thought about them since dragging myself up and out of the place. But here it was now – a small part of my past breaking into my present.
Drew MacKenzie was the little brother of one of the girls in the same gang as me. I remembered meeting him a few times at his sister’s place. He’d been a cute kid – must have only been about ten at the time, and I remembered that he’d seemed clever. He had the attitude already, of course: the one children get when they grow up in that type of world, as inevitable a wrapping as the cheap second-hand clothes. Presumably the attitude had won out over the smarts, and he’d followed his sister into the family business.
Chris said, ‘You’re going to leave him to the rat-catchers, though, right?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Zoe?’
‘Yes. All right? Do you want me to write it in blood? I’m going to leave him to the rat-catchers.’
Chris was about to say something else, but he was interrupted by the locksmith, looming in the doorway holding a box of keys and a handful of paperwork.
‘Excuse me. All done. I’ve left the old barrel on the counter. Just need a couple of signatures and then I’ll get out of your hair.’
‘Thanks. Be right there.’
‘When are SOCO due?’ Chris said.
‘Any time now. I’ll be in afterwards.’
‘You don’t have to. Maybe you should—’
‘Be in afterwards.’
I gave him a look. If anything, the puppy-dog expression seemed to intensify in the face of it, but we both knew why I had to be. It was now two days since Julie Kennedy had been attacked and raped in her own home. The latest victim of our creeper. She’d been in hospital ever since, and it looked like the doctors might finally allow us in this afternoon to interview her.
I looked around my front room again. It was just mess and missing things, and that could all be cleaned and replaced. More than that, it could wait. In the face of what had been done to Julie, the damage here was utterly insignificant.
‘I’ll be in afterwards,’ I said again quietly. ‘That’s what I should do.’
Three
You can’t do this.
Jane sat down in the partially enclosed booth and waited for the button on the telephone to light up, indicating that she had a call. Thinking:
You can’t do this.
Her father’s voice, of course. Since his death, she’d spent a great deal of time trying to push that voice out of earshot, or drown it out with more positive thoughts. You can do this. You’re perfectly capable. Sometimes she even managed to believe those things. And yet he was always there in the background, and at stressful moments he came through loud and clear.
You can’t …
The light on the phone flashed red.
Jane picked up the receiver immediately. One thing she really couldn’t do was allow herself to hesitate, because when she did, her body had a habit of freezing up. School, and even university, had been a catalogue of awkward pauses that lengthened into embarrassing silences: moments when she knew everyone was watching and waiting, and all she could do was sit there, growing red under the spotlight of their attention. Act immediately, her therapist had told her since. Fear stems mostly from anticipation, so don’t give yourself time to think. If she’d let the phone ring any longer, it would have rung out.
‘Hello.’ Her voice was surprisingly strong. ‘This is Mayday. How can I help you today?’
There was no reply at first, but the line wasn’t empty. She could hear the man breathing – a slow, heavy sound that made her wonder if this was going to be a sex call. They’d been told about them during training, but nobody in her group had received one yet. She’d get one eventually, but God, she thought, please not now. That would be a baptism of fire.
Finally, the man spoke. ‘My name’s Gary.’
‘Hello, Gary.’ She didn’t have to give her real name, but she decided to. ‘My name’s Jane. What would you like to talk about?’
‘I don’t know really.’ He sniffed. ‘I’m not sure why I even bothered calling. I just took the number with me.’
‘You took our number with you?’
‘Uh-huh.’ The sound changed slightly, and it took her a moment to realise that he’d started crying. Or an approximation of it, at least. ‘I didn’t really bring anything else. I’m not going to need it. I’m in a hotel.’
I’m not going to need it. That was the moment when Jane recognised the nature of the call she was receiving. Her stomach dipped, and she looked around the small booth dividing her off from the rest of the room, fighting down the panic that was beginning to rise. Right now, she’d have given anything for a sex call. Instead, she was about to be faced with what the Mayday trainers called a ‘SIP’. A suicide in progress.
Keep calm, she told herself.
You can do this.
‘Please take your time, Gary. We can talk about anything you want. There’s no hurry.’
‘I want to talk about Amanda.’ He sniffed. ‘Sorry – that’s no use, is it? You don’t know Amanda. Or maybe you do, for all I know. No idea who you are, have I?’
‘Just take your time, Gary.’
‘I know her, though. Better than anyone. She just doesn’t realise it.’
‘That’s fine. We can talk about Amanda.’
‘I’ve known her for years. We worked together, and then we – you know. Hooked up. Christ, this time last year we were living with each other.’
That brought a fresh round of tears, and Jane felt a ghost of the man’s emotion mirrored inside her. It was just enough to bring on the familiar sliding sensation of empathy, that movement towards understanding another person. Jane had always been good at that – too good, perhaps – and she took hold of the connection now. This time last year. She had plenty of her own examples to draw on. Her father’s death. Peter.
You can do this.
‘It can feel strange, can’t it, looking back?’ she said. ‘You remember how different things were only a short time ago. It’s sometimes hard to believe.’
‘Yes. Exactly that.’
‘You just take your time, Gary.’
As the story came out, in stops
and starts, whatever Gary had taken – alcohol or drugs, or some combination of the two – began to cause him to slur his words. After a few minutes, Jane’s palm grew sweaty, and she had to swap the receiver between hands. Throughout, she did her best to stay calm: to put herself in his place and imagine what he was going through; to help him, as much as she could.
For most of the call, that seemed to involve remaining silent. The longer Gary spoke for, the more obviously superfluous her presence was. He just wanted to know that there was someone on the other end of the line, listening to him.
Amanda and Gary had been in a relationship for several months, and for a time, it had been wonderful – or so he claimed. But then things had cooled. Amanda had started going out by herself more, and Gary hadn’t trusted her. He’d check her text messages and emails, and find things: nothing directly incriminating at first, but enough to pass the baton from one suspicion to the next and send it running on towards another.
‘She was texting her ex. They’d always been in contact. I fucking hated it. Sorry. But she said I had to accept it, and I wanted to trust her. I tried to.’
Jane imagined this wasn’t the whole truth, but did her best to suppress the thought. It was important to resist the urge to judge, or even to interpret the story he was telling her. Instead, as Gary recounted the details of the break-up, and the way Amanda wouldn’t return his calls and texts, she concentrated on empathising with him: pulling similar feelings from her own experiences, emotional playing cards that she could match with Gary’s own. It wasn’t difficult. Breaking up with Peter had been an unhappy time. Even if she had known that it was right for both of them, the feeling of loss had seemed insurmountable at times. There had been genuine grief for the relationship, as though it had been a living thing, and the final few weeks a prolonged period of watching it suffer and die. Jane knew how much it hurt. As she listened to Gary now, she felt it again.
