The Nightmare Place

by Mosby, Steve

  She expects him to see sense at that, but if anything, the expression on his face has hardened. He isn’t listening, she realises. In his mind, this isn’t a conversation. He has stated what he wants done, and that is not going to change, regardless of anything she has to say.

  ‘You need to get rid of them,’ he repeats. ‘You’ve not been stung. But it’s not just you. Do you really not understand that?’

  Margaret blinks. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It’s like with the state of the garden. You think you live in a bubble.’ He turns slightly, gesturing past Karen, who remains standing still, to his own well-kept lawn. ‘I mean, look. They’re down here too. Why should I have to put up with them? Why should my wife?’

  ‘I …’ But she doesn’t know how to answer. Does he really expect such total control and dominion over the world that he thinks he should be able to shut nature out of his property? That the potential danger of his wife being stung outweighs Margaret’s rights over her own home?

  ‘Karen—’ Margaret says, but Derek interrupts her.

  ‘Are you having trouble? Finding someone, I mean. I know you’re on your own. I can have someone come round if you don’t know how. I know people.’

  He sounds genuine, but even so, the insult lands. If you don’t know how. It hurts to have it confirmed – that he thinks of her as a feeble, incapable old woman. Karen remains silent. Perhaps she thinks that too. In some ways, of course, they are right, but she is coping. It’s not that she needs help getting rid of the bees. It’s that she doesn’t want to.

  And she surprises herself by saying so.

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘You don’t want to?’

  Her resolve hardens.

  ‘No. I don’t. They’re not bothering anyone.’

  ‘They’re bothering me. And they’re bothering my family. You need to get rid of them.’

  The final sentence is firm, not phrased as a command, but clearly intended as one. I have said it, and so it shall be done. And with that, Derek walks off down the path, brushing straight past his wife, heading for the car.

  For a moment, Margaret feels despondent. She likes the bees; they have made her house feel a little like a home again, and have, in some small way, given her back a piece of the outside world. He isn’t going to take that away from her.

  ‘I’m not going to.’

  He is too far away to hear her now, but the words reach Karen, at least, and she finally raises her head to look at Margaret. With the sunglasses on, it is hard to make out her expression, but she seems to be reappraising Margaret, and a moment later a slight smile appears on her face. There is something about it that seems conspiratorial. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him. It’s fine.

  Margaret nods at her, and then Karen turns and walks towards her husband. She moves a little oddly, and Margaret finds herself hoping that she’s all right.

  She takes one last look at the bumblebees meandering around the hedge, and then goes back inside.

  Twenty-Two

  For the day and a half that Drew MacKenzie had been in custody, he’d belonged to Burglary. They’d spent the time gently persuading him that he was totally fucked – basically – and then teasing out the details of the long list of crimes he was prepared to take off the books for us.

  It was standard procedure, and MacKenzie was not about to inject any originality into the process. He stonewalled at first, and then capitulated when it finally filtered through to him that copping to other offences wasn’t going to make his predicament dramatically worse. If anything, a sentencing judge was going to see him in a better light afterwards. It was dispiriting in some ways, but at least it gave the affected households a modicum of closure. The guy who did this to you, we got him. He hadn’t been overly forthcoming about his accomplices, or how he’d got rid of the goods he’d stolen, but again, not bucking any trends there.

  A day and a half with Burglary.

  And now he was ours.

  Nine thirty in the morning, and Chris and I were sitting across from him in an interview suite; one of the newer ones in the department, with polished steel surfaces, hi-tech recording equipment and a wall mirror that looked like it might have an observation suite on the other side. It didn’t. Anybody watching would be doing so via the video feed from the camera in the corner of the ceiling.

  A number of people upstairs would be glued to their monitors. The court order for Mayday had come through twenty minutes ago, and that was being pursued right now. In the meantime, MacKenzie had gone up in the world. Overnight, he’d become a person of interest to us.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  ‘You think this is a film?’ I said. ‘What do you think that even means, no comment? You want to spend this whole interview like a little kid with his fingers in his ears? It’s not going away, Drew.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘That is a comment. And it’s not one that’s making things look particularly good for you right now.’

  He stared at me, a sullen expression on his face. At the Packhorse, with his crew and in his sauce, he’d come across as strong and cocky, but a day in police custody has a way of diminishing the hardest of people. In an interview suite, everybody always looks significantly smaller. He was dressed in T-shirt and jeans, and was much skinnier than I remembered. His thin frame suggested that a great deal of his calories came from alcohol, and he had the pale, unhealthy pallor of an addict.

  I was fairly sure that he hadn’t recognised me. But I – at least – knew we’d both come from the same place, and it was odd to see him like this, on the opposite side of the polished steel desk. Our lives had diverged radically since childhood, and that distance was represented by the width of the metal between us.

  The more I looked at him, the more I saw traces of the cheeky little boy I remembered. But it was clear that an attitude that had been endearing when he was young had curdled badly with age, becoming something altogether more unpleasant. There was a sneer to his mouth now. A total blankness in his eyes as he stared right back at me. He could have done anything with his life, and he’d done this.

  ‘No comment.’

  I stared him out for a few seconds, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to look away. It was childish to continue, so I tried to convey yeah, well, only one of us will be going home tonight with a slight smile, then turned my attention to the document in front of me.

  ‘To repeat myself, what I have here is a list of burglaries you have admitted to carrying out. There are fourteen addresses on this sheet.’

  The last was mine, although I wasn’t going to mention that. Either he hadn’t committed an offence since, or he wasn’t copping to it, but that didn’t matter much to me. I was more interested in one a third of the way down. I tapped it now.

  ‘In the early hours of September the twelfth last year, you have admitted to breaking and entering an address with the motivation of theft. A semi-detached house on Wesley Street, Haydon.’

  I turned the sheet round for him to see. He only glanced at it for a second before looking at me again, so I turned it back.

  ‘That address belonged to a woman named Sally Vickers. Does that name mean anything to you, Drew?’

  Saying her name out loud made me a little angrier. My mind pulled out an image of her, covered in blood, stuffed down the side of a bed. And then as a still white form in a mortuary. This time, I held his stare.

  After a few moments, he shook his head.

  ‘Subject indicates no,’ I said. ‘Don’t you watch the news, Drew?’

  He shrugged, as though wondering why on earth he would do something like that.

  ‘Sally Vickers was murdered in her home a few days ago. Doesn’t ring any bells?’

  That got more of a reaction than I’d been expecting, but it took a couple of seconds for it to arrive. You could see the cogs turning, clicking into place. He still didn’t know who she was, but he understood where this might be going.

  �
�That’s got nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I didn’t say it did.’ I stared at him again, and this time he was the one who looked away first. ‘Why so quick to deny it?’

  ‘I know what you’re like. Always bothering us. I’ve told you everything, and that’s enough. You’re not pinning that on me as well.’

  I shot Chris a glance, and he rolled his eyes at me. As well as growing up sullen, it didn’t seem like Drew MacKenzie had ended up all that smart. He seemed to believe it was possible we were going to try to unload a murder on to his charge sheet as well.

  I leaned forward.

  ‘Drew. Listen. Right now, I don’t believe you raped and killed Sally Vickers. But here’s the thing. We still don’t know how her attacker gained access to her property. All we know is that he did, and that he was a bit cleverer about it than you. And you know what? It strikes me as a bit of an odd coincidence that you did it less than a year ago.’

  Which was true, although I still wasn’t sure what it meant. We had checked out priors on the properties from the very beginning, of course, but out of the six victims we had so far, Sally Vickers’ was only the second to suffer a breakin. The third victim, Mary Jones, had also been burgled, but that had been over three years ago. Ultimately, we’d discounted the connection.

  Now we had burglary number two. As thin as it was, I was willing to seize on anything – grab it and shake it, in fact, and not let go. Even if I couldn’t see the significance yet, there was something here. I was sure of it.

  But MacKenzie was shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say. I don’t know what you’re fucking getting at.’

  I pulled a sheet from my file.

  ‘This is a list of addresses, Drew. I’m going to read it to you, and you’re going to tell me if you magically missed some of these out.’

  I read out the addresses of the other victims. It was unlikely but possible that they’d suffered some kind of breakin without reporting it. But to each one MacKenzie just said no, obviously without thinking about it. As an afterthought, I asked about Jonathan Pearson, the suspect I’d visited on the estate.

  ‘What about Paydale Lane?’ I said.

  That at least got his attention.

  ‘In Thornton?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘That’s where I’m from,’ he said. ‘You don’t shit on your own.’

  From the way he looked at me, I wondered if he’d clocked me – if he’d remembered who I was. But he hadn’t. It was just bravado. Just pretending he had some kind of code when he didn’t. I could tell that in his own head he felt superior to me and Chris. Thought that we didn’t know what it was like. That we’d had things easy.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘What did you take?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Drew. From Sally Vickers’ house in Haydon. When you broke in that night, what did you take?’

  ‘I can’t remember. How the fuck am I supposed to remember that?’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Stuff. The usual.’

  I’d read the report before coming in here, and knew full well what had been taken; it was all there for the insurance claim. Not only had MacKenzie and his friends broken in using the same lock-drilling technique they’d employed at my house, they’d apparently taken much the same things. The TV, the Blu-ray player, a laptop. High-value items, basically, along with a scattering of movies and games. He hadn’t thrown stuff around the way he had at mine. A tidy burglary.

  ‘Stuff,’ I said. ‘But you can’t remember what.’

  ‘The TV, probably.’

  ‘Yeah, you love TVs, just not the news. What about the kitchen? You scoop out any drawers?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The kitchen drawers. Is that something you’d normally pay attention to?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. Why?’

  ‘Because that’s often where people keep a spare set of keys.’

  I allowed that one to settle in his head. For me, now that I’d said it out loud, the feeling that there was something here grew even stronger. If Sally’s killer had got the keys to her property from somewhere, the prime suspect was sitting in front of me right now.

  He looked down at the table.

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re going to have to give us some names, then, aren’t you? The people who were there with you. The people you passed the gear on to.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘You really can. And you’re going to.’

  He shook his head again, still looking down, his misery evident in what I could see of his face.

  There was enough of the kid there, in that expression, for me to remember him more vividly. One time round at Sylvie’s, before John’s influence made us drift apart. Drew had been sitting on a threadbare settee, his bright yellow hair home-cropped short, weaving a battered third-or fourth-hand toy aeroplane in figures of eight in front of his face. His legs were so short that his feet didn’t touch the floor. I concentrated on the image, trying to think about him like John would. Just an innocent little kid. Still too young to have an ounce of any real badness in him.

  I leaned further forward, trying to catch his eye, speaking more quietly now.

  ‘Drew. Listen to me. A woman is dead. Others have been hurt. And the man who did it, he’s going to do that again. This is more important.’

  I let it settle.

  Come on, Drew.

  But after a moment, he lifted his head and looked at me, and from the expression on his face I already knew what the answer was going to be.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  Out in the corridor, I was ready to start punching the walls. Not simply because MacKenzie wouldn’t give us the information we needed, but because I’d wanted him to on more than one level. Right now, I wished I could take that mental image of him as a child, hold it up and fucking burn it. The way he’d looked at me too, as though I couldn’t possibly understand the life he’d chosen to lead. Chosen.

  Instead of attacking the paintwork, I turned to Chris and prepared to vent, but I didn’t get the chance. We were met at the lifts by a sergeant from the incident room upstairs. His face was flushed, but he was beaming.

  ‘We’ve got him.’

  Twenty-Three

  Two hours later, Chris and I were parking up outside a battered old newsagent’s on the outskirts of the city.

  I was still quietly seething about Drew MacKenzie, but he mattered less to the investigation now. Fuck him, I thought. Because with the shadow of DCI Drake hanging over them, IT had moved quickly. Within an hour, having run a trace on the Mayday caller’s number and discovered it was turned off, we’d retrospectively pinpointed the locations the man had phoned from: two parks on opposite sides of the city. Two marks on his invisible map revealed. They were of little obvious use to us right now, but the trace on the number remained active, and we’d have him the moment it connected to the network.

  Given the severity of the situation, the phone company had been equally swift to comply, and a SIM card is far easier to track and trace than you’d imagine. It’s surprising, in fact, how much is recorded. From the number alone, we got the batch and shipment date, along with a specific manufacturer’s code. The distribution centre noted the SIM card in and out. There’s no such thing as an anonymous call any more; we could literally draw a detailed map of the card’s movements over time, from the moment of its production to its arrival at this shop here, on the edge of the city, two months ago. It was only what had happened to it afterwards, and precisely where it was now, that remained a mystery.

  ‘Doesn’t look great,’ I said.

  From the outside, it did indeed not look particularly auspicious. The sign along the shopfront was old and broken – faded lettering read NEWS – OFF-LICENCE – GROCERIES – COMMS – XXX – and the windows below were totally obscured by flyers and hand-written adverts, aside from a
square of dull neon lettering that spelled out ‘Phones Unlocked Here’. Through the glass door, the shop looked dismal and shadowy. If it hadn’t been for the hand-scrawled note pasted to the glass, I’d have guessed it was closed, and possibly had been for some time.

  ‘We’re not here to do our shopping,’ Chris said.

  ‘Yeah, that’s funny.’

  It wasn’t quite as bad inside as I’d been expecting, although the sign out front would have done well to put the XXX at the beginning: most of the magazine rack was taken up with pornography, and there were two dump bins full of similarly themed DVDs. The groceries consisted of a few shelves of basic jars and packets, and a single fridge containing milk and cheap, plasticky-looking sandwiches. Round the corner, I could see that the walls were taken up with an extensive selection of alcohol. Of the promised ‘COMMS’, there was no immediate sign.

  A desk fan was whirring away behind the counter, next to a bored-looking elderly man. He was sitting on a stool and watching a small black and white television, apparently with the sound turned off. He didn’t even look up as we approached him.

  ‘Afternoon.’ I showed him my badge, which at least caught his attention. ‘Detective Inspector Dolan. This is DI Sands.’

  ‘Oh God. What’s he done this time?’ The old man stared at me for a moment, then turned and shouted across the store: ‘Simon! Get out here now.’

  ‘Simon?’ I said.

  ‘The little bastard. It’s about the booze, isn’t it? I’ve told him to check for ID. Warned him about it. It was his fault I got in trouble last time. Simon! ’

  A gangly man in his early twenties emerged sheepishly from the door to a back room.

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  Before the old man could reply, I held up my hand to cut him short.

  ‘It’s okay, Simon. You can go back to … wherever you just came from.’ I looked back at the man behind the counter. ‘It’s not about the booze. Or the videos. Although we can certainly talk about those things if you like.’