by Ian Mayfield
He blurted, ‘Eh up.’
‘Hi.’ Jasmin’s face bunched into a smile that transformed it into a second sun. His stomach churned. Pleasantries over, the smile disappeared and an expression of intense earnest transformed the coal-dark eyes. She said, ‘You remember Mrs Abernetty - the assault we worked a couple of months ago that turned out to be a domestic?’ Her English was measured, accented, American-taught.
After a brief guilty second’s recollection, he answered, ‘Aye.’
‘We maybe were right in the first place,’ Jasmin said. ‘I spoke with Nina in the canteen. I think she has something.’
‘Should see a doctor about it.’
‘Huh?’
‘Nothing.’ He mumbled, wishing his mouth would stay shut on these occasions when it, and he, knew he hadn’t the slightest chance of impressing her. It was impossible, anyway. In six months she’d be on her way back to Holland, and he would never see her again. He should drop it. But the knowledge only added to his sense of helpless urgency.
‘You are a twit,’ she said affectionately, in that way of hers which never gave away whether she’d understood or not. Balancing her briefcase on one raised knee, she scrabbled about inside and handed him some crumpled notes. From the state of them, they’d been scribbled over breakfast. He took them, adjusting his focus to Jasmin’s huge, unruly handwriting, and skimmed through her resumé of the attack on Violet McMinn. Into his mind came recollections of the other incident, recollections that were sketchy and would need to be confirmed by a look at his own notes. Maureen Abernetty, a housewife in her fifties, had complained to the police of being sexually assaulted by a burglar, a claim which, supported by her husband, she’d later withdrawn. The assault had supposedly been committed using an African statuette, a holiday souvenir, which the intruder had then stolen. Jeff and Jasmin had been forced to end their investigation after the Abernettys admitted the whole thing was the result of a domestic row, a fumbled attempt by Mrs Abernetty to get back at her husband for hitting her, and that the statuette had in fact been broken in the fight and then thrown away. It was a conclusion that had not felt right to either of them, but there was nothing they could do.
‘Mm-hmm,’ Jeff said, handing the notes back as the lift opened on their floor.
‘You think?’ Jasmin broke off eye contact, struggling to get the papers back in her case.
‘Means of entry in that other one,’ he pondered. ‘You remember?’
‘They told us ground floor window, just like here.’ She patted her case. ‘There were size twelve footprints found in the front garden, but the eldest son also was a size twelve.’
‘You remember a lot.’
‘I pulled the file,’ Jasmin said. She yawned.
He looked at her. There were dark rings round her eyes. ‘How long’ve you been in?’
But now they’d reached the office. Jeff pushed open the door to a cacophony of noise. He held it for Jasmin and followed her through. Work had apparently been suspended. Sophia wasn’t around, but the only other absentee was Brian Hunt, and that was because he was on leave. Advantage of the guv’nor’s non-arrival had been taken by Detective Constable Sandra Jones, who was holding court. Zoltan stood to one side and watched, arms folded, the glassy smile on his face suggesting he thought Sandra’s bridges were well overdue burning, and if Sophia walked in now he couldn’t care less what fate befell her.
Sandra sat behind her desk with her feet on it. She had on a short brown dress and blue tights, and her shoes, kicked off, were deployed at random angles across some half-finished work. The others sat on their desks and listened to her. Jeff booked in and went and parked his backside on his.
The issue under consideration was DC Anne White’s leaving do. Anne had just been promoted to Acting Sergeant and was transferring to the Met’s Film Unit at Southwark. Next week would be her last with the team. Sandra Jones had been opining for some time that the occasion needed to be marked in a fitting way. The organising of most of the team’s social functions was left to Sandra, as she was the only one who seemed to have the motivation. A date had been agreed, and now a heated discussion was taking place as to venue.
‘I still think the Casino,’ Marie Kirtland said.
‘I dunno, I don’t like casinos,’ Kim Oliver said.
‘The Casino’s not a casino, it’s a club, you brain-dead old witch,’ Sandra reprimanded her lightly.
‘The amount of dosh changes hands there of a night,’ Helen Wallace remarked, ‘it might as well be.’
‘Drug money?’ Larissa Stephenson asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Not when there’s a horde of plods there, surely?’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Casino’s the best club in town,’ Marie said.
‘No, it ain’t,’ Kim said.
‘All right, Barkeley’s, then.’
Jeff said diffidently, ‘Does it have to be a club?’ To his surprise there were a few murmurs of agreement. Fairly feeble, granted, but he could have sworn one of them came from Anne White herself.
‘Well, we’re not hiring a hall because it’s too expensive,’ Marie told him. ‘And a restaurant’s too civilised.’
‘Pub crawl?’ someone suggested.
‘Could do a pub crawl and a club.’
‘I just don’t want to wear a tie.’
Sandra said to Jeff, ‘We all know what you’d have given the choice. Fish and chips and a couple of DVDs round somebody’s house.’
‘You calling me boring?’ He said this rather forlornly, knowing he was no match for Sandra’s fire axe wit. But she’d already been distracted.
She was saying, in response to someone’s suggestion, ‘All right, votes for the Casino?’ She put an arm up and counted with the free one. ‘Barkeley’s?’ She looked around. ‘Fuck,’ she said.
There was a breathless pause.
‘That’s settled, then,’ Anne White said sarcastically, from her corner.
Five of them sat round Zoltan Schneider’s desk. A dozen or so files and notes were piled up in front of them, the result of Nina Tyminski’s airing of the possible link she and Jasmin had established between two aggravated burglary cases. They didn’t make pleasant reading. Zoltan still had his nose in a file. After a while he stopped reading and looked up.
‘So?’ He peered through the thickest part of his lenses at Nina and then at Jasmin. ‘Is someone making a habit of it?’
Nina glanced at the others. ‘We’ve found two other possibles.’
‘Which are the ones you’ve rejected?’
She pointed. There were two piles on the table. Zoltan dumped his folder on the larger one, leaned back and said, ‘I’m listening.’
‘These stretch back over quite a period of time; possibly why no-one’s made the connection before.’ Nina reached out and took the folder Larissa Stephenson was holding. She opened it. ‘Denise Cole,’ she said, ‘age at time of complaint twenty-four, single, address Flat 1, 60 Natal Road, Thornton Heath. Crime report’s dated the day after the incident. Victim lived alone, came home from the cinema to find two intruders in her living room.’
‘Two?’ Zoltan cradled his hands and tucked them behind his head.
‘They surprised her as she walked in. One of them, described as a very tall man, stood behind the door and grabbed her before she could put the light on.’ Nina’s eyes flicked back and forth as she skimmed through the witness statement. ‘The other man seemed more anxious to get the hell out of it. Said something like, “Come on, you stupid little basket.” He didn’t take any part in the assault.’
‘Stood and watched, though,’ Lucky said.
‘Yeah, but it was the other one who did the deed. Says here he forced her to strip by the expedient of beating the crap out of her, then penetrated her with a silver trophy she’d won for youth club drama.’ She looked up, paler even than usual. ‘Which he then nicked.’
‘Aggravated assault, then, not actual rape?’ Zoltan said.
Nina f
rowned. ‘By the legal definition, no.’
‘And no-one was ever found for it?’ Zoltan combed his beard with his fingers. ‘This accomplice.’
‘Apart from him,’ Jeff Wetherby spoke up, ‘it fits the MO.’
‘“You stupid little basket,”’ the DI repeated. ‘But Miss Cole described the rapist as tall?’
‘Very tall,’ Nina said. ‘She seems to’ve been emphatic.’
‘Funny way of putting it, then,’ Jeff said.
‘Figure of speech?’ Lucky suggested.
‘Possibly something else.’
All eyes turned to Jasmin Winter.
‘My English is not that great,’ Jasmin said modestly, ‘but if a person is very young, don’t you say also sometimes he is little?’
They became thoughtful.
‘So young but tall,’ Zoltan said.
‘An apprentice burglar with a sideline as a perv,’ Lucky said sharply.
In the next chair, Jeff glanced at her, his hazel eyes neutral. ‘Did CSI find any footprints?’
Nina flipped through the file to the scene of crime report. ‘First thing Denise did when they’d gone,’ she said, ‘was springclean the place from top to bottom. That includes hoovering the carpet and curtains, mopping the kitchen floor, wiping down all the surfaces and stuffing everything that would fit into the washing machine. The upshot of which,’ she snapped the file shut, ‘no forensic.’
There was silence for a moment, then Zoltan sighed. ‘No wonder they never got caught.’
‘Can’t blame her, though,’ Lucky said in a small voice.
‘No.’ He uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way. ‘Let’s hear about the other one.’
‘Before our time and all,’ Nina said. The file was on Jasmin’s lap and she passed it over. ‘Lisa Harkness, age thirty-three, divorced with a fourteen year old son, of 209 Alton Road, Waddon. Woken by an intruder who assaulted her using a foreign object she thought was a perfume bottle from her dresser, although none of the ones Forensic examined had traces.’
‘He took it again,’ Jeff said.
Zoltan said, ‘Method aside, what links it to the others?’
‘Size twelve footprints on the carpet and in the garden,’ Nina said, after a glance at Jasmin. ‘And means of entry. In all these cases, McMinn and Abernetty included, we’ve got B and E followed by sexual assault, which is very unusual in itself. Access was through a sash or drop catch window on the ground floor. Plus all the attacks took place in darkness, and all the victims describe a tall or very tall man.’
‘Tenuous.’ Zoltan lapsed for a few moments into silent thought. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to Records, see if any of this rings a bell. Lucky, stick around and listen in. We need to circulate a request for any knowledge of similar cases. On that note, Nina, Jasmin, start ringing round the women’s refuges and rape crisis centres. I know they’re confidential but it’s worth a try. When that’s done you can all have a go chasing up the investigating officers, see if they’ve anything promising to say.’
‘What about the victims?’ Jeff asked.
‘Only as a last resort,’ Zoltan said. ‘We don’t want to dredge up bad memories if we can avoid it.’ He paused. Taking it he’d finished, they started to get up. Over the scraping of chairs he added, ‘Let’s all keep our eyes open. Chances are there’ve been other attacks that either weren’t reported or haven’t been linked.’ He stopped and frowned. ‘Lucky?’
‘Sir?’ She was halfway to the corner of Helen’s desk where she worked.
‘That meant now.’
She stood and stared at him for an instant. She said, ‘My biro’s run out.’
Zoltan nodded acquiescence and stood. He gave the impression he could wait all day if necessary.
What had seemed the comparatively simple task of locating Luke Benton and informing him of what had happened to his family had proved, owing to the destruction by fire and water of much of the material evidence, to be anything but. There was no other close family, and house-to-house enquiries in Chapel View had failed to yield confirmation that Luke even existed, never mind where he was. It had fallen to a finally filthy Sandra Jones and Anne White to sift through the blackened remnants that had survived the blaze, contact what relatives and friends the search turned up, and confirm that Luke was in Greece, though not the resort nor which hotel he was actually staying at. Having bathed and changed, they’d then had to call every airline that flew there before they were able to track him down to Rhodes, and fax to the UK consulate there a request to put him on a flight home.
A sign of the times, as Sophia remarked, irritated at having to expend so much energy, time and manpower on a routine task - effort which should have gone towards finding the arsonists. The Bentons had lived in Chapel View for five years yet no-one, not even their next door neighbours, seemed to have paid them any more attention than it took to nod when passing in the street.
Sophia considered it her duty to take care of Luke Benton personally, and so it had been she and Sandra who’d met him at Stansted and driven him to Croydon University Hospital to confront the travesty of human dignity that was his younger brother. His college friend Nick, a muscular, quietly-spoken black man, had cut short his own trip to accompany him home, and now sat beside him in the living room of his parents’ house in Thornton Heath.
‘It’s been a tough few hours for you, Luke, I realise that,’ Sophia said. ‘Maybe you’d like to try and get some sleep before you answer any questions.’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
Sophia frowned at Luke. He was a tall youth, light-skinned, with the shadow of a goatee whose successful growth was compromised by his being too young. He slumped in an armchair, bare-chested under a white cricket sweater, red beach pants stained and crumpled from wear and travel. He hadn’t rested since being plucked from a nightclub dancefloor at midnight by a policeman who, Nick had told them, he was sure was going to plant something on him. Then the breaking of the news, the escort to the airport and the ten-hour wait for a flight. Finally the return home, to find the nightmare was true, that his mother was dead and that even if he survived, his brother would be disfigured beyond recognition, condemned to a life of helpless pain while Luke, unscathed, tried to get on with his. It was a situation Sophia, with all her experience of the horrors that went with the Job, had never had to face. As a young PC, and then sergeant, she’d sometimes handled something similar as the result of a house fire or a road accident; but never when the next of kin was this particular age, too old to be fostered or taken into care, too young, really, for the awful responsibility that had been thrown upon him; and certainly never when the whole family had been subjected to an attack of such barbarity and when only by chance, perhaps, was Luke not now lying alongside them in the burns unit or on a mortuary slab.
‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Let me know if you’re finding it a bit much, and we’ll stop. We can always come back to it after you’ve had some rest.’
Nick beckoned her to one side. ‘Can’t it wait anyway?’
‘I think we should get this out of the way as soon as possible,’ Sophia said. ‘As yet there’s no clear motive for the crime. Obviously Robin will be in no fit state to tell us anything for some time. It’s possible Luke might have some idea why they were picked on, or even who might have done it.’
Nick sat down beside his friend and said something softly into his ear. Luke nodded bleakly.
‘Thank you, Luke,’ Sophia said. ‘So far we’re in a bit of a bind. None of the neighbours seem to have seen anything, despite the fact that someone setting fire to a cross in your front garden would have been pretty hard to miss.’
‘I can tell you why,’ Luke said.
‘Oh?’
‘All shit scared, case they get put on the spot. I know who did it and I know why.’ He saw his listeners’ expressions change. He steepled his fingers and leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Robin’s babysitter knows about it. Debbie Clarke. Talk to her.’
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Concealing their surprise, Sophia and Sandra told him about the circumstances surrounding Debbie’s disappearance. With much prompting Luke, already distressed enough, was able to clarify why they’d found what they had.
Although Doreen Benton had been left adequately provided for by her late husband, her status as the family’s breadwinner had required her, for her own peace of mind, to return to the job market she’d abandoned when Robin was born. His starting school had finally given her the opportunity, and she’d been lucky enough to find a job that corresponded roughly with his school times, leaving only the hour or so afterwards unaccounted for. Debbie Clarke was the latest in a string of babysitters employed through cards put up in Mrs Blissett’s shop. She was also the prettiest, and Luke, despite some misgivings about her age, had asked her out.
‘She’s sixteen, though,’ Sandra remarked.
‘Yeah, but she acts younger sometimes. She’s sort of in the angry teenage phase. I never should’ve involved her but it’s difficult to take no for an answer with her.’
‘Involved her in what, Luke?’ Sophia said.
He sighed, struggling to marshal his thoughts. ‘Long story,’ he said. ‘I picked her up one night, she was in a right strop. Something on the news about a robbery, and her dad had been spewing his middle class crap about all black men being muggers and rapists. Then of course we got dragged into it ‘cause Debbie sits for us, and she flew off the handle.’
‘Do the Clarkes know about you and Debbie?’
‘You joking?’ Luke scoffed. ‘Bad enough their little girl even being associated with us - working for Sambo. Oh, they never say as much, least not in my hearing. But it’s plain enough.’
