Michael Robotham

by Suspect

  "We're still looking into them."

  He leans against the open door, studying me thoughtfully. The glint of sunlight off the canal picks up the Tower of Pisa pin in his tie. His distant blue eyes have fixed on the ambulance parked a hun�dred feet away, framed against the factory wall.

  The pain in my chest and throat is making me feel light-headed. I wince as I pull a rough gray blanket around my shoulders. Ruiz tells me how he spent all night checking the details from the child pro�tection file. He ran the names through the computer and pulled up the unsolved deaths.

  Bobby had worked in Hatchmere as a council gardener up until a few weeks before Rupert Erskine died. He and Catherine McBride attended the same group therapy sessions for self-mutilators at an outpatient clinic in West Kirkby in the mid-nineties.

  "What about Sonia Button?" I ask.

  "Nothing. He doesn't match the description of the pusher who sold her the drug."

  "He worked at her swimming club."

  "I'll check it out."

  "How did he get Catherine to come to London?"

  "She came for the job interview. You wrote her a letter."

  "No I didn't."

  "Bobby wrote it for you. He stole stationery from your office."

  "How? When?"

  Ruiz can see I'm struggling. "You mentioned the word /Nevaspring/ sewn into Bobby's shirt. It's a French company that delivers water coolers to offices. We're checking the CCTV footage from the med�ical center."

  "He made deliveries..."

  "Walked right past security with a bottle over his shoulder."

  "That explains how he managed to get into the building when he arrived so late for some of his appointments. He must have stolen the stationery and then written to Catherine, inviting her to apply for the secretarial job. What about the letter?the one that arrived at the house?"

  "She wrote dozens of them to your friend Dr. Owen. Bobby must have come across one of them and changed the address."

  Across the waste ground, visible above the broken fence, Bobby is lying on a stretcher. A paramedic holds a transfusion bottle above his head.

  "Is he going to be OK?" I ask.

  "You haven't saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, if that's what you're asking."

  "No."

  "You're not feeling sorry for him, are you?"

  I shake my head. Maybe one day?a long while from now?I'll look back at Bobby and see a damaged child who grew into a defec�tive adult. Right now, after what he did to Elisa and the others, I'm happy to have half killed the bastard.

  Ruiz watches as two detectives climb into the back of the am�bulance and sit on either side of Bobby. "You told me that Cather�ine's killer was going to be older ... more practiced."

  "I thought he would be."

  "And you said it was sexual."

  "I said her pain aroused him, but the motive wasn't clear. Re�venge was one of the possibilities. You know it's strange but even when I was sure it was Bobby, I still couldn't picture him being there, making her cut herself. It was too sophisticated a form of sadism. But then again, he infiltrated all those lives?my life. He was like a piece of scenery that nobody notices because we concentrate on the fore�ground."

  "You saw him before anyone else did."

  "I tripped over him in the dark."

  The ambulance pulls away. Waterbirds lift out of the reeds. They twist and turn across the pale sky. Skeletal trees stretch upward as if trying to pluck the birds from the air.

  Ruiz gives me a ride to the hospital. He wants to be there when Bobby gets out of surgery. We follow the ambulance along St. Pancras Way and turn into the accident and emergency bay. My legs have seized up almost completely now that the adrenalin has drained out of them. I struggle to get out of the car. Ruiz commandeers a wheelchair and pushes me into a familiar white-tiled public hospital waiting room.

  As usual the Detective Inspector gets off on the wrong foot by calling the triage nurse "sweetheart" and telling her to get her "prior�ities sorted." She takes her annoyance out on me, shoving her fingers between my ribs with unnecessary zeal. I feel like I'm going to pass out.

  The young doctor who stitches up my lip has bleached hair, an old-fashioned feather cut and a necklace of crushed shells. She has been on holiday somewhere warm and the skin on her nose is pink and peeling.

  Ruiz has gone upstairs to keep tabs on Bobby. Not even an armed guard outside the surgery and a general anesthetic is insur�ance enough for him to relax. Maybe he's trying to make amends for not believing me sooner. I doubt it.

  Lying on a gurney, I try to keep my head still as I feel the needle slide into my lip and the thread tug at the skin. Scissors snip the ends and the doctor takes a step back, appraising her handiwork. "And my mother told me I'd never be able to sew."

  "How does it look?"

  "You should have waited for the plastic surgeon but I've done OK. You'll have a slight scar, just there." She points to the hollow be�neath her bottom lip. "Guess it'll match your ear." She tosses her la�tex gloves into a bin. "You still need an X-ray. I'm sending you upstairs. Do you need someone to push you or can you walk?"

  "I'll walk."

  She points to the lift and tells me to follow the green line to ra�diology on the fourth floor. Half an hour later Ruiz finds me in the waiting room. I'm hanging around for the radiologist to confirm what I already know from viewing the X-rays: two fractured ribs, but no internal bleeding.

  "When can you make a statement?"

  "When they strap me up."

  "It can wait till tomorrow. Come on, I'll give you a lift home."

  A twinge of regret elevates me above the pain. Where is home? I haven't had time to contemplate where I'll spend tonight and the night after that. Sensing my quandary, Ruiz murmurs, "Why don't you go and listen to her? You're supposed to be good at that sort of thing." In the same breath he adds, "There's no frigging room at my place!"

  Downstairs, he continues bossing people around until my chest is strapped and my stomach is rattling with painkillers and anti-inflammatories. I float along the corridor, following Ruiz to his car.

  "There is one thing that puzzles me," I say, as we drive north toward Camden. "Bobby could have killed me. He had the blade at my throat, yet he hesitated. It was as though he couldn't cross that line."

  "You said he couldn't kill his mother."

  "That's different. He was scared of her. He had no trouble with the others."

  "Well, he doesn't have to worry about Bridget anymore. She died at eight o'clock this morning."

  "So, that's it. He has no one left."

  "Not quite. We found his half brother. I left a message for him, telling him Bobby was in hospital."

  Uneasiness washes over me, inching upward, like an incoming tide.

  "Where did you find him?"

  "He's a plumber in north London. Dafyyd John Morgan."

  Ruiz is shouting into the two-way radio. He wants cars sent to the house. I'm shouting too?trying to reach Julianne on a mobile, but the line is engaged. We're five minutes away, but the traffic is mur�der. A truck has run a red light at a five-way intersection, blocking Camden Road.

  Ruiz is weaving onto the pavement, forcing pedestrians to scat�ter. He leans out of the window. "Dumbassfuck! Dickhead! Go, go! Just fucking move!"

  This is taking way too long. He has been inside my house?inside my walls. I can see him standing in my basement, laughing at me. And I remember his eyes when he watched the police digging up the garden, the lazy insolence and his half smile.

  Now it makes sense. The white van that followed me in Liver�pool; it was a plumber's van. The magnetic mats had been taken off the doors, making it look nondescript. The fingerprint on the stolen four-wheel drive didn't belong to Bobby. And the drug dealer who gave Sonia Dutton the adulterated Ecstasy matched the description of D.J.?Dafyyd?one in the same.

  At the narrow boat, Bobby knocked on the deck before opening the hatch. It wasn't his boat. The workr
oom was full of tools and plumbing equipment. They were D.J.'s diaries and notes. Bobby torched the boat to destroy the evidence.

  I can't sit here waiting. The house is less than a quarter of a mile away. Ruiz tells me to wait, but I'm already out of the door, running along the street, dodging between pedestrians, joggers, mothers with toddlers, nannies with prams. Traffic is backed up in both directions as far as I can see. I hit "redial" on the mobile. The line is still engaged.

  There had to be two of them. How could one person have done it all? Bobby was too easy to recognize. He stood out in a crowd. D.J. had the intensity and the power to control people. He didn't look away.

  When it came to the moment of truth, Bobby couldn't kill me. He couldn't make that leap, because he'd never done it before. Bobby could do the planning, but D.J. was the foot soldier. He was older, more practiced, more ruthless.

  I vomit into a trash can and keep running, passing the local liquor store, the betting shop, a pizzeria, discount store, pawnbroker, bak�ery and the Rag and Firkin Pub. Nothing is coming quickly enough. My legs are slowing down.

  I round the final corner and see the house ahead of me. There are no police cars. A white van is parked out front with the sliding side door open. Hessian sacks cover the floor...

  I fall through the front gate and up the steps. The phone is off the hook.

  I scream Charlie's name, but it comes out as a low moan. She is sitting in the living room, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. A yellow Post-it note is stuck to her forehead. Like a new puppy she throws herself at me, crushing her head to my chest. I almost black out with the pain.

  "We were playing a game of Who Am I?" she explains. "D.J. had to guess he was Homer Simpson. What did he choose for me?"

  She lifts her face to mine. The note is curling at the edges, but I recognize the small, neat block print.

  YOU'RE DEAD.

  I find enough air to speak. "Where's Mum?"

  The urgency in my voice frightens her. She takes a step back and sees the bloodstains on my shirt and the sheen of sweat. My bottom lip is swollen and the stitches are crusted with blood.

  "She's downstairs in the basement. D.J. told me to wait here."

  "Where is he?"

  "He's coming back in a minute, but he said that ages ago."

  I push her toward the front door. "Run, Charlie!"

  "Why?"

  "RUN! NOW! Keep running!"

  The basement door is shut and wet paper towels have been pushed into the doorjamb. There is no key in the lock. I turn the han�dle and gently pull it open.

  Dust is swirling in the air?the sign of leaking gas. I can't yell and hold my breath at the same time. Halfway down the steps, I stop to let my eyes adjust to the light. Julianne is slumped on the floor be�side the new boiler. She's lying on her side, with her right arm under her head and her left reaching out as though pointing to something. A dark fringe has fallen over one eye.

  Crouching next to her, I slip my hands under her arms and drag her backward. The pain in my chest is unbelievable. White dots dance in front of my eyes like angry insects. I still haven't taken a breath, but the time is close. I take the stairs one at a time, dragging Julianne upward and sitting down heavily after each exertion. One step, two steps, three steps...

  I hear Charlie coughing behind me. She takes hold of my collar, trying to help me, pulling when I pull.

  Four steps, five steps...

  We reach the kitchen and Julianne's head bounces off the floor as I set her down. I'll apologize later. Hauling her over my shoulder, I roar in pain, and totter down the hallway. Charlie is ahead of me.

  What is the trigger? A timer or a thermostat, the central heating, a refrigerator, the security lights?

  "Run, Charlie. Run!"

  When did it grow dark outside? Police cars fill the street with flashing lights. I don't stop this time. I scream one word, over and over. I cross the road, dodge the cars and get to the far end of the street before my knees buckle and Julianne falls onto the muddy grass. I kneel beside her.

  Her eyes are open. The blast begins as a tiny spark in the midst of her deep brown irises. The sound arrives a split second later, along with the shock wave. Charlie is thrown backward. I try to shield them both. There is no orange ball like you see in the movies, only a cloud of smoke and dust. Debris rains down and I feel the warm breath of fire drying the sweat on my neck.

  The blackened van lies upside down in the middle of the street. Chunks of roofing and ribbons of gutters are draped over trees. Rub�ble and splintered wood covers the road.

  Charlie sits up and looks at the desolation. The note is still stuck to her forehead, blackened at the edges, but still legible. I pull her against my chest, holding her close. At the same time, my fingers close around the yellow square of paper and crush it within my fist.

  *Epilogue*

  The nightmares of my recent past still see me running?escaping the same monsters and rabid dogs and Neanderthal second-row forward?but now they seem more real. Jock says it is a side effect of the levodopa, my new medication.

  The dosage has halved in the past two months. He says I must be under less stress. What a comedian!

  He phones me every day and asks if I fancy a game of tennis. I tell him no and he tells me a joke. "What's the difference between a nine-month pregnant woman and a /Playboy/ centerfold?"

  "I don't know."

  "Nothing, if her husband knows what's good for him."

  This is one of the cleaner ones and I risk telling Julianne. She laughs, but not as loudly as I do.

  We're living in Jock's flat while we decide whether to rebuild or buy a new place. This is Jock's way of trying to make amends, but he hasn't been forgiven. In the meantime, he's moved in with a new girlfriend, Kelly, who hopes to be the next Mrs. Jock Owen. She will need a harpoon gun or a cast-iron prenup to get him anywhere near an altar.

  Julianne has thrown away all his gadgets and the out-of-date frozen meals in the freezer. Then she went out and bought fresh sheets for the beds and new towels.

  Her morning sickness is over, thankfully, and her body is getting bigger each day (everything except her bladder). She is convinced we're having a boy, because only a man could cause her so much grief. She always looks at me when she says this. Then she laughs, but not as loudly as I do.

  I know she's watching me closely. We watch each other. Maybe it's the disease she's looking for or perhaps she doesn't trust me en�tirely. We had an argument yesterday?our first since nursing things back together. We're going up to Wales for a week and she com�plained that I always leave my packing until the last possible minute.

  "I never forget anything."

  "That's not the point."

  "What is the point?"

  "You should do it earlier. It's less stressful."

  "For who?"

  "For you."

  "But I'm not the one who is getting stressed."

  After tiptoeing around her for five months, grateful for her for�giveness, I decided to draw a gentle line in the sand. I asked her, "Why do women fall in love with men and then try to change them?"

  "Because men need help," she replied, as if this were common knowledge.

  "But if I become the man you want, I won't be the man I am."

  She rolled her eyes and said nothing, but since then she's been less prickly. This morning she came and sat on my lap, putting her arms around my neck and kissing me with the sort of passion that marriage is supposed to kill. Charlie said "Yuck!" and hid her eyes.

  "What's wrong?"

  "You guys are French kissing."

  "What do you know about French kissing?"

  "It's when you slobber over each other."

  I rubbed my hand across Julianne's stomach and whispered, "I want our children never to grow up."

  Our architect has arranged to meet me at the hole in the ground. The only thing left standing is the staircase, which goes nowhere. The force of the blast sent the concrete floor of the kit
chen through the roof and blew the boiler into a yard two streets over. The shock wave shattered almost every window on the block and three houses have had to be demolished.

  Charlie says she saw someone at a first-floor window just before the blast. Anyone on that floor would have been vaporized, say the experts, which might explain why they didn't find so much as a fin�gernail or a fiber or a stray tooth. Then again, I keep asking myself, why would D.J. stick around once the gas had been turned on and the timer set to fire the boiler? He had plenty of time to get out, un�less he planned this as a final act in every sense of the word.

  Charlie doesn't understand that he could have done these things. She asked me the other day if I thought he was in heaven. I felt like saying, "I just hope he's dead."

  His bank accounts haven't been touched in two months and no�body has seen him. There is no record of him leaving the country, ap�plying for a job, renting a room, buying a car or cashing a check.

  Ruiz has pieced together the early facts. D.J. was born in Black�pool. His mother, a sewing machinist, married Lenny in the late six�ties. She died in a car accident when D.J. was seven. His grandparents (her parents) raised him until Lenny remarried. Then he fell under Bridget's spell.

  I suspect that he experienced everything Bobby did, although no two children react the same way to sexual abuse or to sadism. Lenny was the most important figure in both their lives and his death lay at the heart of everything.

  D.J. finished his apprenticeship in Liverpool, becoming a master plumber. He joined a local firm where people remember him more with apprehension than fondness. He smiled a lot, but there was nothing endearing or infectious about him. At a bar one night he drove a broken bottle into a woman's face because she didn't laugh at the punch line of his joke.

  He disappeared in the late eighties and reappeared in Thailand running a bar and a brothel. Two teenage junkies who tried to smug�gle a kilo of heroin out of Bangkok, told police they had met their supplier in D.J.'s bar, but he skipped the country before anyone could link him to the bust.

  He turned up in Australia, working his way down the east coast on building sites. In Melbourne he befriended an Anglican minister and became the manager of a homeless shelter. For a while he seemed to have mended his ways. No more sucker punches, broken noses or snapping ribs with his boots.