by Steve Mosby
Through the speakers, I could hear the man with the mobile phone taking those quick, sharp breaths. Was it panic? Fear?
The small figure extended its arms sideways and tipped its head back. She was staring at the sky. Despite what I had told myself, I wanted to reach into the screen.
Marie, I thought. Please don't.
I love you.
She rocked forward. The way she toppled, it was like she was moving in slow motion. But then she was tumbling through the air. The mobile followed her carefully.
'Oh my God. Oh Jesus.'
Even from this distance, the collision registered in the speakers. It was a small, sharp sound, like a stone cracking a windscreen. I knew Marie was gone. That had been her last second in the world. There had been a blur of free-fall, and then she had landed on the back of her head and died instantly. Her body, lying in the road, was crumpled and still.
'Oh fuck-'
The man was drowned out by a screeching noise, as the truck shot out from under the bridge, smoke billowing back from the rows of locked tyres. The driver never had a chance. Both sets of wheels went fully across Marie's body, dragging it along. What emerged out behind made no sense. It looked like three bags of tattered red clothes, flopping across the tarmac.
The truck skidded to a halt and everything settled very slowly. There was a moment of silence that made me think of dust falling gently in the aftermath of an explosion. The second before people start screaming, when everything is absolutely quiet.
All except the man holding the camera. He was still breathing those short, jagged breaths.
I thought I recognised the tone of them now. It wasn't fear or panic. It was exhilaration.
Ellis's video link was the first post in the thread. After that, there were three pages of comments: twenty-seven in total. Twenty-seven people who thought they had something to say about what Marie had done.
The first just had an animated smiling face, nodding, lifting a coffee cup to its lips and sipping. Content with itself.
The next: 'Someone get down there. I think she'll be OK.'
'Selfish fucking skank. What's wrong with pills and a bag?'
I wished an extremely painful death on that user, then scrolled down the screen.
'Wow new to me. Where did you get this Helly?'
Helly. I tapped the mouse button again.
Cute little nickname.
His reply came a few posts below.
'I got it on my mobile,' Hell_is said. 'Just happened to be nearby at the time and saw her up there. Pulled up on the off chance and couldn't believe what was happening. I couldn't wait to share this! Once in a lifetime, I'll tell ya.'
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.
Then tried to rub some life into them.
Psyching myself up to watch the video had sent jags of emotion and adrenalin through me, and now the fall-out was starting to kick in. There was a tightness in my throat, and my hands were trembling. After a while, I stopped rubbing my face and poured myself another vodka. It seemed a more sensible course of action.
It's only a video, I told myself.
A bunch of fucking idiots on the Internet who don't matter.
That was true. Although I was angry with them, I knew the real target for that was probably closer to home - and also that none of it was particularly useful at the moment. Since finding the photograph at James's house, I'd been in a kind of emotional free-fall. Now I needed to work out what had happened and what to do about it.
Some of the former was obvious enough. While investigating an article, Sarah had stumbled across this clip of my wife's - her friend's - death, and it had led to this research of hers, perhaps the same way a jolt of radiation might awaken a cancer and cause it to grow. As she became more and more obsessed, she dropped away from her friends, her work, and her relationship with James. It had consumed her.
And it really was my fault.
It was a harsh realisation, but there was no escaping it. People are more than happy to make their own mistakes, of course, without any encouragement from others. Sarah and James had both made their own choices along the way. But the fact remained that none of it would have happened if I'd been here. When Sarah had seen the footage of Marie, she would have come to me, because that was the way her mind worked; she would have seen it as 'mine'. But she couldn't do that, because I'd abandoned my post.
I poured myself another vodka, then stared at the screen and rolled the drink around my mouth. Death has ripples. I'd failed Marie for the last two years of her life, and then, for two years afterwards, I'd failed Sarah as well. It was like a wavelength.
But that wasn't all.
I looked at what Ellis had written.
Just happened to be nearby at the time and saw her up there.
It was only the image of Marie that he'd stolen on here - I knew that deep down - but someone in the real world had taken Sarah's body. When I'd seen the most recent thread Ellis had posted, I'd thought there might be a connection to this place, and the idea returned to me now. Sarah had interviewed thirty-seven of these fuckers. It wasn't too outlandish to imagine one of them reciprocating that level of interest. Maybe starting to follow her. Maybe even seeing what James did that night and deciding to take advantage of it.
Maybe someone like Ellis. Someone who lived close enough.
That would be a little like a wavelength as well.
So I should go to the police. No doubt they'd already searched the house, but even if they'd seen these folders, they might not have understood the relevance. That was what I should do.
I should go right now, in fact.
But instead of getting up, I sipped my drink in the slowly darkening hotel room, and kept staring at the computer screen. Perhaps it was the alcohol - or maybe just the confusion of anger and guilt in my head. Those two emotions shift easily if you let them, one into the other, until you're no longer sure which of them you're feeling, or who's to blame. And like sadness, they too have a way of blurring things, so that should begin to look simply like could.
So yes, I told myself, I could go to the police. But that was an abdication of responsibility, once again, wasn't it? Sitting here now, I could see the strands of cause and effect and pick out the ones that were mine, which meant that handing that bundle over to someone else was just another method of running away. And perhaps that was even getting ahead of things, anyway. For the moment, the links were only in my head. I couldn't know for sure, because I hadn't been here.
Abandoned my post…
I poured myself another drink and stared at Ellis's last comment. I kept reading it, over and over, until my hands were trembling. Until, after a while, there wasn't any could or should, only what I knew was going to happen. What needed to.
Once in a lifetime, he'd written. I'll tell ya.
Yeah, I thought.
You will.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
The garage where Thomas Wells had 'stored' Rebecca Wingate was on the outskirts of the city, at the far end of a dirt track. The path disappeared between a broken-down cafe and a strangely angled, tobacco-coloured pub, and led to a courtyard beside an old, soot-black viaduct. There was little traffic on the main road itself, and most of the land here was industrial: disused, shadowy factories and grey storage depots. The police vans were parked back at the road to avoid damaging any tyre tracks in the dust of the path.
It was very quiet here, very still. Everything looked slightly bedraggled, as though it had once rained so long and hard that the world was still soaked and heavy with it.
The garage was built into one of the arches beneath the viaduct: a half moon of iron with a padlocked door and a corrugated shutter.
Inside, there was space for a van to park at one end. At the other, there was some kind of half-broken metal table, with leathered restraints sprouting from it in hard curls. Vents crisscrossed the floor, leading to an oily, puckered drain in the centre, which looked to have black
hair clogging the grilles. A cracked porcelain sink had been installed on the nearest wall, with a large rubber hose slipped over one of the taps.
Chains were hanging down the wall at the back, attached to a pulley system running on a beam overhead. It looked like something a mechanic would use to swing a car engine across a garage. Except that Kearney guessed most of the old machinery here had been salvaged from the abattoir where Wells had worked.
He and Todd were standing at the doorway while the forensic search team busied themselves within, ghosts in the gloom.
'It's a torture chamber,' Todd said.
He was chewing his lip again.
Kearney said, 'Yes.'
Although actually, he thought his partner was only half right. The conversion work had transformed the garage into a dungeon, and he couldn't begin to imagine the physical and emotional suffering that had been endured in here - but at the same time, that suffering had never been the motivation. This place was simply a way of processing meat for consumption. Human blood. Horrifically, the women and their pain meant nothing to Wells.
Did that make a difference?
A camera-flash illuminated the rusted machinery at the far side of the lock-up. Kearney supposed that it didn't; the result was still the same.
Where is she?
The question was like a steady pulse in his mind. And every time it beat, he felt a throb of panic.
Back at the department, after the blinds had been closed, Wells had changed his attitude and become far more forthcoming. He told them the victims had been kept in this old garage, which was either owned or rented - Wells wasn't sure - by a man named Roger Timms. This man had also helped him dispose of the bodies when he was finished with them. Rebecca Wingate was there right now. He had seen her there the night before last, and she was still alive then. Still in the garage, where he had 'stored' her.
So where was she now?
Todd started to say something, but Kearney turned and walked back outside, edging around the dusty courtyard where more SOCOs were studying the tracks in the dirt. Again, he was struck by how quiet it was here: a little pocket of built- down wilderness on the cusp of the city. On the other side of a fence, black birds were perched in the tree branches, watching him. Kearney stared them out for a moment, and then he felt Todd stand beside him.
'Are you OK, Paul?'
Kearney nodded. 'Yeah.'
'Don't lie to me.'
At forty-five, Todd was ten years older than Kearney, and he'd always had a paternalistic streak to him. Often a gruff one, admittedly, but his advice was usually meant well, and Kearney knew his partner's comments now were motivated by concern. Todd could be belligerent and pig-headed, but he wasn't stupid. Even if he hadn't noticed a change in Kearney's attitude over the past few months - an unravelling, he told himself - then his actions toward Thomas Wells had been so out of character it must surely have set off an alarm.
Don't lie to me. But he had no idea how to explain himself.
'I'm OK. Just tired.'
'It's important, Paul. You have to prepare yourself for the fact we might not find her alive.'
'I know that.'
'But we'll find him,' Todd said. They started back up the track, walking along the rocks at the edge. 'Timms, I mean.'
'Yes.'
Wells had been telling the truth about the name: the garage was indeed being rented to a 'Roger Timms'. The team back at the van was tracing the man now, and the door team were on standby, waiting. Even if Wells was lying about some aspects of the story, the facts spoke for themselves. The lock-up was registered to Timms, Wells had a key, and the girls had obviously been kept there. Roger Timms had a case to answer.
But that was troubling in itself. If Wells was telling the whole truth, the only explanation for Rebecca Wingate's absence now was that Timms had learned of his friend's arrest and tried to clear away the evidence. He wouldn't have had time to remove the heavy machinery in there, but he could at least attempt to explain that away. I had no idea what my friend Thomas was doing. The one thing he wouldn't be able to explain was the eyewitness testimony of Rebecca Wingate, but, unlike the machinery, there was a simple solution to that.
Todd was right. There was no avoiding it.
You have to be prepared.
Kearney pulled an air of detachment around him as they reached the open side of the comms van. Despite the early evening light, the interior was surprisingly dark. There were three officers, crammed in amongst the equipment: monitors, link-ups, recording devices. The men were little more than dark shadows, partly illuminated by the pale, sickly light of the monitors.
'Hendricks,' Kearney said. 'Anything?'
The nearest man didn't turn around. He was studying the screen in front of him.
'We've just got an ID through, sir.'
Roger Timms.
Kearney sat opposite Todd in the back of a van as it rattled through the streets. They both had small bulky laptops open on their knees. On a separate monitor, Roger Timms's home address was flagged in the centre of a satellite map. Two yellow arrows were converging on it. One was the van they were in. The other was DS Burrows, the sergeant in charge of the department's door team.
The bumps in the road kept jarring and rocking the speeding vehicle. Kearney tried to keep the laptop steady and scan through the data they had on their suspect.
A photograph of Timms stared out of the left-hand side of the screen. Beside it, the basic stats were listed. He was forty- two years old - the same age as Thomas Wells - and stood at six foot, with a medium build. Brown hair, brown eyes…
With a sinking feeling, Kearney realised it was a mug shot.
'He's done time.' He checked across. 'Christ. Murder.'
Todd didn't look up, but he raised an eyebrow.
'You mean you don't recognise the name?'
'We've not interviewed him before too, have we?'
'No. He's that artist. I knew I'd heard the name before. The one in the papers. That's all we need. A local celebrity.'
'If he's done time, his prints are in the index.' Kearney clicked through to the next screen. 'So he can't be the one who touched the victims' foreheads.'
Todd said nothing. Beneath them, the van rocked.
The next few screens had some press clippings the comms team had gathered together, and they jogged Kearney's memory a little. He recognised the man now. He'd read about him, but never slotted the name into place.
At the age of twenty-four, Timms had been involved in an armed robbery that went wrong, although 'armed robbery' was perhaps giving him too much credit. He'd tried to hold up a post office, but the gun had gone off, and he'd shot the female clerk in the head. By accident, he claimed. He did eight years. According to the article, the experience had turned Roger Timms's life around: inside prison, he took up painting. He achieved some notoriety, and became something of a cause celebre in the art world. Following his release, he'd pursued it as a career.
Popular amongst the canapé classes, Kearney imagined, for the frisson of danger he brought along to the parties.
'How the hell is this guy associated with Thomas Wells?'
'Same age,' Todd said. 'Same hometown.'
Kearney shook his head. It didn't seem enough.
'It's the wrong guy.'
'You've not seen the painting yet.'
'What? No, hang on.'
He clicked through until he found the screen Todd was referring to. It was another scanned-in press cutting, this time with two photographs attached on the right-hand side.
The top one was of Roger Timms: a reportage-style snap taken at a gallery. He'd dyed his hair since the police shot. It was bleached and gathered together in a spiky peak on the top of his head: the short, fashionable equivalent of a Mohican. Beneath it, Timms's face was tanned and healthy. He was smiling, holding a glass of champagne.
The second image was a small photograph of one of his paintings. With the low resolution of the image and the jostling of the van, Kear
ney couldn't make out much detail, but he could see the vivid colours. It looked like a woman's head, tilted to one side, with a bright red sunset behind. Her mouth was open. The painting was titled Distress. Below it, someone had quoted:
'Timms's Gehenna sequence has authenticity and bite; it transcends the narrative of his own experience whilst remaining entwined with and informed by it'
Kearney had almost no idea what that meant, but it didn't matter. The painting was the important thing. The portrait. Even with the exaggerated style and the poor quality of the image, it was clear who he was looking at. He said, 'That's Linda Holloway.'
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
Five minutes later, they were there. The two police vans were parked almost confrontationally, nose to nose, one street along from Roger Timms's home address. Kearney was standing by the side of their van with Todd, talking to DS Burrows, the sergeant in charge of the door team.
Burrows was dressed in black body armour, but he would have been solid enough without it. He had a crew-cut, a stocky body and an air of detached physicality. You always felt that, if he wanted to, he could hit you very hard, and in the meantime he was simply presuming you were aware of it.
But then, Burrows had spent most of his career kicking down the doors of drug-dealers, murderers, paedophiles and suspected terrorists. Now he worked in close conjunction with Operation Victor, part of the department's Child Protection Unit. Kearney had walked past it a few times. It was the room where the lights were kept on, and where a screen was often drawn down over the window on the door. Kearney disliked overtly physical men, and he always found Burrows intimidating, but it was the kind of work that would harden anyone.
Right now, the DS had a blueprint of Timms's house-type open on a wireless laptop and was talking them through the inbound.
