Sabbathman

by Hurley, Graham

  Kingdom went to the dresser. In one of the drawers, Annie kept her CDs. She had a sizable collection but when he knelt to inspect the bits and pieces on the floor he knew at once that they’d gone. He glanced round. The television usually stood on a small table in the far corner, but that had gone, too. Kingdom got up and peered at the books again, stirring the pile with one foot, not touching anything with his hands. Superficially, it looked like a standard B and E. The intruder had been through all the books just like any half-decent thief. Paperbacks were where most people hid their spare cash, and their building society accounts, and other stuff like savings certificates. If you knew what you were after, that’s exactly where you’d look first.

  Kingdom returned to the hall and checked the two bedrooms. Annie’s was a mess. The bed had been stripped and the built-in wardrobe had been emptied. There was a small mountain of clothes beside the open door and both drawers in the dressing table had been torn from their runners and upturned over the bare mattress.

  Kingdom sat on the bed for a moment, looking at the contents of the drawers. The cap was off the bottle of L’Air du Temps and most of the perfume had spilled over a corner of the mattress. Kingdom closed his eyes, smelling Annie in the room, imagining her sprawled on the bed, that mischievous half-smile she reserved for the wilder nights. Half of him wanted to know where she was, what she was up to, who she was with. But the other half of him knew it was better that he’d been the one to find the flat in this state. At least, before she returned, he could get the place tidied up. No one deserved to walk back into this.

  Kingdom quickly checked the rest of the flat. The spare bedroom, bare of furniture, seemed untouched. Ditto, for some reason, the kitchen. He returned to the living room. On the kitchen window-sill he’d found an old cassette, an Andy Shepperd recording that Annie had treasured, and when he’d carefully opened the cupboard beside the fridge, there was the ancient Sony radio-cassette recorder she often listened to when she was cooking. He put the radio on the Welsh dresser and loaded the cassette. It was Annie who’d introduced him to Andy Shepperd and there was a particular track on this album – sax, piano, double bass – that still haunted him. He played it now, circling that flat, a glass of Rioja in his hand from the bottle he’d been saving for her return. The bottle, out in the kitchen in plain view, was something else that hadn’t gone, and the more he thought about it, the odder the break-in began to seem. Alcohol was usually a prime target, easy to carry, nice to celebrate with afterwards. So why hadn’t they taken that?

  Kingdom chased the questions around his head for nearly an hour. When the bottle was empty, he picked his way across the living room and up the hall. Tonight, he’d kip in the spare bedroom. Tomorrow, before he drove south again, he’d get Allder to sort something out about the flat. The local boys would botch it. The place needed a thorough going-over, a real seeing-to. At the door, he remembered the file he’d read a couple of days back, the one Annie had left on the table beside the sofa. It had been there yesterday, too. He knew because he’d seen it.

  He stepped back into the room, knowing already that it had gone but quartering the carpet again, just in case. Not finding it, he went to Annie’s bedroom. He’d need some bedding for the room next door and he was in the process of gathering up the big double duvet when he saw the photographs. There were a handful of them, colour prints, sticking out of an air mail envelope.

  He sank onto the mattress. The wine had made him less fussy about disturbing the evidence and he held up the envelope by one corner, letting the prints fall onto the bed. There were four in all. Three of them showed a man in his middle thirties. He was on a boat of some kind, leaning against a rail. He was tall and good-looking with a strong open face and a quiet smile. He carried a jacket, looped on one finger over his shoulder, and the sleeves on the crisp white shirt were rolled up. In the background, beyond the river bank, there were mountains, summer-green. Kingdom looked at the fourth photo. It showed the same man – an almost identical pose – but this time he had a companion, smaller, slighter, tucked in beside him. Her head was on his shoulder. She had the same cropped blonde hair, the same tight white singlet, but it was the smile on her face that Kingdom found hardest to take. Annie Meredith. Looking pleased with herself.

  Kingdom turned the photo over. There was a line or two in German that he didn’t understand, and a name. He peered at the name. It might have been Bernd. He couldn’t tell. He reached for the envelope. The stamp was German and the town on the postmark was smudged, but the date was still legible: 8/86, it said. August, 1986.

  Kingdom put the photos back in the envelope, half-wishing he’d never found them. Another cupboard Annie had never wanted him to open. Another part of her life that belonged to nobody but her. Kingdom hesitated a moment, looking down at the envelope. Should he ask her about it? When the time was right? When they were next together? Maybe in this flat? Maybe in this very bed? Should he bring it up, a chance comment, a joke maybe, smuggling himself into her previous life? Or should he simply forget it? Accept the relationship for what it was? No baggage? No ghosts? Every day a glad return to Year Zero?

  He shook his head, not knowing the answer. In these moods he knew he could be utterly self-indulgent. The best surrenders, he’d always told himself, were to your own emotions, your own bewilderment, your own despair. Annie, sharp as ever, had recognised this swampy part of him from the start, and when she thought it mattered she went along with it. Other times, though, she’d pull him up short, the rider on his horse, telling him it was all bollocks. Life was difficult. Life was complex. Life was very frequently unfair. But the last thing you ever did was moan. ‘Moan’ was Annie’s code for pausing, for reflecting, for letting yourself have doubts, three cardinal sins she simply never permitted herself to commit. They were, she’d always told him, the prelude to giving in. And once you’d done that, you were history.

  Next morning, Kingdom was on the phone to Allder the moment he got into the office. He explained about the break-in and the state of Annie’s flat and when Allder put the obvious question – anyone we know? – Kingdom said he wasn’t sure.

  ‘There’s a file gone, though,’ he said.

  ‘What file?’

  Kingdom told Allder about the Bairstow file. When he’d left the flat on Saturday, it had been there. Now it had disappeared.

  ‘What’s in it? You get a look?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  Kingdom hesitated a moment. Most of the material he’d seen before, documents sent down from Newcastle at his own request, but one piece of correspondence had been new to him.

  ‘There were a couple of letters from a bloke in Aberdeen,’ he said. ‘Runs an engineering business. The file contact was a copper called Gosling. DC Gosling.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I just wondered why they weren’t in the file I got.’

  ‘Where’s the file you got?’

  ‘In my desk. At the office.’

  ‘You want me to talk to them? Up in Newcastle?’

  Kingdom smiled. Doing favours wasn’t something Allder normally had much time for. Too matey. Too demeaning.

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said, ‘and I thought we might get someone half-decent to take a look at this place. They make mistakes sometimes, you never know …’

  ‘Who? Who make mistakes?’

  ‘The bad guys,’ Kingdom smiled, ‘who else?’

  He gave Allder details about where he’d leave the key to the flat. Then he said he was off to look for Ethne Feasey. He’d be in touch again when he had something to report. He paused. ‘Anything else, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Allder grunted, ‘get yourself a copy of The Citizen.’

  Kingdom read The Citizen on the last stage of his journey to the Isle of Wight. It was late morning. He’d driven down to Portsmouth and taken the Wolseley aboard the big slab-side car ferry that made the forty-minute crossing to Fishbourne. It was a beautiful day, still, sunny, windle
ss, and he found himself a corner on the upper deck as the ferry slipped out through the harbour mouth on a falling tide.

  The nation’s favourite serial killer had been in touch with The Citizen again and the paper had featured his latest communiqué on the second page. The note had evidently arrived in time for the Monday first editions which meant, by Kingdom’s calculations, that it must have been delivered some time Sunday evening, presumably by hand, possibly in person, a piece of brio somehow typical of the man who’d now increased his personal body count to five. ‘Marcus Wolfe,’ it ran, ‘offered 16,000 punters the earth. Greedy they might have been but how were they to judge a man licensed by the DTI? Turns out he robbed them all. Leaving little me to stick the knife in.’ The note had been signed, once again, ‘Sabbathman’, though everywhere else the paper had substituted its own invention, Mr Angry.

  Kingdom read the note for a second time, as intrigued as ever by the tone of voice this strange killer had chosen to adopt. The murders themselves signalled a certain icy professionalism, but added to this was an attitude of almost biblical contempt. What this man was doing, in note after note, was to redefine the crime he’d just committed. He wasn’t involved in murder but in punishment. The men he’d killed weren’t victims, but corrupt and greedy individuals who’d earned their just rewards. If Sabbathman didn’t do the dirty work, the notes seemed to be saying, then society would be somehow robbed of justice.

  The Citizen, way ahead of the rest of the press, had become part of this beguiling nonsense and was busy beating the drum that their own Mr Angry had supplied. The paper’s centre pages were devoted to a feature on the Marcus Wolfe scandal and an accompanying piece listed individual reactions from investors who’d suffered at his hands. Most of them were pensioners, some of them reduced to bankruptcy, and in every case they applauded what had happened. ‘THUMBS UP FOR MR ANGRY’, the headline read, ‘NO TEARS FOR MARCUS WOLFE’.

  Kingdom turned back to the front page. It was dominated by another headline and a huge, hand-drawn footprint. The headline, in a rich aside to a tabloid rival, screamed ‘GOTCHA!’ and underneath the footprint was a first-person account from ‘the man who could have been victim number six’. Peter Weymes wasn’t mentioned by name but reading the flurry of breathless paragraphs, Kingdom had no doubt that the piece was his. He’d been woken up in the middle of the night. He’d found himself looking at a stranger. He’d been forced back to bed at knife-point. He’d been tied and gagged. The account was strangely lacking in physical detail – ‘In the pitch darkness I couldn’t see him. But the voice was enough to tell me he meant business’ – a precaution, Kingdom assumed, to minimise any subsequent risks, but Weymes had obviously been clever enough to make a copy of the footprint on his lino before the cleaners got to work, and it was clearly this that had closed the deal. Kingdom studied the footprint now, wondering how much he’d asked, how much they’d settled for, and how – exactly – he’d smuggled the drawing out. With supervision so lax, he suspected it wouldn’t have been a major problem. Not if a few quid were involved.

  Kingdom flicked through the rest of the paper. With the inside track on the day’s biggest news story, everything else had been relegated to the barest details but a piece on page six caught his eye. Under a grainy photograph of a Ford Cortina, there were a couple of sentences about an incident in Northern Ireland. A Sinn Fein councillor had been lured to a meeting in a pub in Tandragee. Outside, in the car park, he’d been shot. Unusually, the loyalists had denied responsibility. So had the Provisional IRA. ‘WHO DUNNIT?’ ran the headline, ‘BOTH SIDES PLAY DUMB’.

  Kingdom’s eyes lingered on the photo a moment. The councillor’s body was half out of the car. Blood had pooled beneath his head. At first sight, it looked as if he was being sick but closer inspection revealed the bullet holes in the car door, and the fragments of broken glass on the muddy gravel. Kingdom shivered, his eyes drifting across to the paper’s editorial on the facing page, an abrupt return to the fairy-tale world of Mr Angry. ‘The spivs and the con men must be worried,’ thundered The Citizen, ‘and so must the thousands of guilty men who’ve betrayed the public’s trust. We can’t name them and we won’t. But Mr Angry has a list. You bet your life he does!’

  The car ferry docked at Fishbourne at ten past one. Kingdom eased the Wolseley off the landing ramp and followed the queue of traffic up through the car park. According to both Arthur Sperring, and the transcripts Annie had given him, Ethne Feasey lived in the middle of the island, near the village of Merstone. Her name and address had been neatly typed by the transcribing clerk beside the telephone number Jo Hubbard had dialled, back in March.

  As far as Kingdom could judge from the transcript of the conversation, Jo was responding to a letter that Ethne had written. She’d asked for contacts, some of the Twyford Down people, and on the phone Jo had obliged with the numbers of a couple of solicitors in Winchester who were helping organise opposition to the cutting through the hill. Ethne apparently had a son, Douglas, who wanted to enlist in the cause. He was at a loose end after university and he was keen to put his time to good use. He’d flirted with various left-wing organisations and he was, in Ethne’s phrase, ‘aggressively green’. This passage in the conversation had attracted the attention of the Gower Street analyst. ‘Transferred to master file TWYD006,’ read the terse note, ‘NFA.’

  The conversation between the two women had gone on for a couple of minutes afterwards and there’d been various references to ‘hell on earth’ and ‘up there’. A number of Christian names had been mentioned and reading the transcripts, Kingdom got the impression that the friendship between the two women was recent and had probably been formed on some kind of holiday. Jo had done most of the talking and one or two of the phrases she’d used had reminded him of the Scottish adventure course she’d mentioned when he’d first met her at the hospital. Since then, he’d met her again at greater length but the conversation on that occasion had been devoted almost entirely to the battle for Twyford Down. If only for the purposes of elimination, Kingdom had still wanted to be sure that the Sabbathman murders weren’t the work of some radical green hit-team, and the fact that Jo herself was so obviously sceptical was one of the reasons he’d finally dismissed the theory. ‘These people just aren’t like that,’ she’d kept saying, ‘violence appals them. That’s what Twyford Down’s all about. That’s why they’re protesting in the first place. I know you want to find your Sabbathman, but they’re the last people you should be thinking about.’

  It took Kingdom less than twenty minutes to get down to Merstone. He’d never been to the Isle of Wight before and he liked it at once, keeping to the minor roads, marvelling at the absence of traffic. It was a landscape that was made for the Wolseley, a glimpse of a different age, and Kingdom sat back behind the wheel, the window down, the hedgerows thick with cow parsley and fuchsia, the pastures dotted with fat brown cows. The address he had for Ethne Feasey was Garland’s Nursery, and when he got to Merstone he stopped outside the village store which doubled as the Post Office. A plump woman was serving behind the counter. The place smelled of fresh flowers and cheese.

  ‘Garlands?’ she queried, peering at Kingdom’s scrap of paper. ‘Up the road. Less than a mile. Past the pub on the left.’ She paused. ‘Mrs Feasey’s gone, though. You won’t find her there.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  She shook her head. ‘No idea,’ she said. ‘Nice woman, though.’

  Kingdom drove on through the village. Past the pub, as promised, he found a gate. Beyond the gate was a rutted track and a levelled half-acre that must – once – have been a car park. Beside it was a long wooden glasshouse, perhaps thirty yards by fifteen. The paintwork on the window frames was peeling and several of the panes of glass were either broken or missing entirely. Inside, where there must once have been rows and rows of plants, the long slatted wooden tables were empty.

  Kingdom left the Wolseley and followed a path through knee-high grass around the end of the glas
shouse. Hidden from the car park by a line of spindly fir trees was a small bungalow. Like the glasshouse, the bungalow had seen better days. Tiles had begun to slip on the roof and there were damp stains on the brickwork beneath the eaves. Kingdom circled the bungalow, peering in through the windows. As far as he could judge, the place was empty. No furniture. No carpets. Just bare light bulbs hanging on twists of flex, and bare floorboards beneath. Out of curiosity, he rapped on the front door. A pair of rooks rose from the tallest of the fir trees and flapped away towards the road but there was no response from inside.

  Behind the bungalow, the land fell gently away towards the south and there was evidence of cultivation, long strips of turned soil, newly surrendered to the weeds. Every now and again there were plastic hoops in the soil, a foot or so in height, and he was about to explore further when he heard a diesel engine and the crunch of tyres.

  Kingdom returned to the car park. Beside the Wolseley was a small blue flat-bed truck. On the door, in white letters, it said ‘CHRIS WELLS, LANDSCAPE GARDENER’. On the back of the truck, amongst the litter of garden tools, was an electric concrete mixer and a stack of bricks. The van door opened and a man got out. He wore an ancient pink sweatshirt with ‘Newport Harriers’ across the chest and a pair of old shorts. The mud on his boots had dried where he’d obviously been working, and there were holes in the calf-length socks. He looked young, no more than twenty-five. He greeted Kingdom with a grin.

  ‘Yours?’ he said, nodding at the Wolseley.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Lovely.’ He walked across to the old car, running a finger along the line of the rear fin. ‘Wonderful.’

  Kingdom joined him beside the Wolseley. He said he was looking for Mrs Feasey.

  ‘Ethne?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No chance.’ He shook his head. ‘She went in April.’