Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  It didn’t surprise me that she was a crack addict. Most of the girls are, especially the young ones. It’s either that or heroin. It’s what keeps them tied to their pimps, and it’s why the money they earn is never quite enough.

  I lit a cigarette, figuring it wasn’t going to make any difference. Malik gave me the briefest of disapproving glances as he put on his gloves but, like Danny the previous night, he didn’t say anything.

  We got to work without speaking. Malik started on the chest of drawers on which the TV sat. We both knew what we were looking for: little clues, things that in themselves might seem irrelevant to the untrained eye but which, taken together with what else the investigation threw up, could be used to build up a basic picture of the life and ultimately the death of Ms Miriam Fox.

  She must have been quite a pretty girl once. There was a photograph of her pinned to the wall at a slightly uneven angle. In the picture, she was standing in the room we were in now, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sky-blue halter top that exposed a pale midriff. She didn’t have any shoes on and her bare feet were long and thin. One hand was on her hip while she ran the other through her thick black hair. She was pouting mockingly at the cameraman. I think the pose was supposed to be sexy, but the overall impression was that of a young girl trying hard to be a woman. I didn’t know her, and would never know her, but at that moment I felt sorry for her.

  The drugs had taken their toll. Her face was gaunt and bony, the eyes sunken and tired. It looked like it had been months since a decent meal passed her lips, which was probably true. But there was hope in the photograph too, or should have been. The damage didn’t look permanent. Given time, some sleep and a healthy diet, she could have turned things around and become pretty again. Youth, if not luck, had been on her side.

  There was a mirror shaped like a smiling moon next to the photograph. I saw my reflection in it and I couldn’t help feeling that I was also beginning to look ravaged by the wrong sort of living. My cheekbones were protruding too much. So pronounced were they that it looked as if they were trying to escape from the rest of my face. To add to my misery, tiny webs of burst blood vessels I hadn’t noticed before had popped up on either side of my nose. They were still pretty small, three of them altogether the size and shape of money spiders, but they worried me because now they were there, they were going to be there for ever. Youth, unfortunately, was not on my side.

  There’s nothing worse for a vain man than seeing reality catch up and hit him. I’ve always thought of myself as quite a good-looking guy and, to be honest, that’s what more than a few women have told me over the years. No-one looking at the face I was looking at would have said that now.

  There were two passport-type photos, still attached to each other, tucked into the mirror between the plastic coating and the glass. I removed them as carefully as I could and took a closer look. They’d obviously been taken one after another in one of those photo-me booths you get in railway stations and the occasional department store, because they were essentially the same picture. Two laughing girls, arms round each other, faces pressed together. One of the girls was Miriam Fox, the other was younger and prettier. The younger girl had blonde curly hair cut into a bob and, in contrast to Miriam, a round cherubic face with a cute smattering of freckles. Only the eyes, nothing like as bright as the rest of her, trying to look happy but not quite making it, told you that maybe she too was a street girl. I put her at about fourteen, but she could have been as young as twelve. They were both dressed in thick coats and the girl had a winter scarf round her neck, so I guessed the photo was fairly recent.

  They looked like good friends. Maybe this girl, whoever she was, could fill in some of the gaps in Miriam Fox’s life. We’d have to try to locate her, if she was still around. I put the photos in my notebook and moved over to a battered-looking wardrobe next to the bathroom door.

  We went over everything bit by bit. Malik discovered a wad of notes: eight twenties, a fifty (how often do you see one of those?) and a ten. He appeared quite pleased with the find, although I wasn’t sure why. A prostitute keeping cash in her flat was hardly a revelation.

  ‘It means she definitely planned on coming back here,’ he told me.

  I told him that that’s what I would have assumed anyway. ‘If she picked up a punter and he just turned out to be the wrong sort of guy, then there’s no question that she went out intending to come back here. Why wouldn’t she?’

  Malik nodded in agreement. ‘But we’re still trying to discover a motive, aren’t we?’ he said evenly. ‘And at least this provides evidence that she wasn’t running away from something and got caught before she could escape. It gives more credence to our theory of a dodgy punter.’

  Credence. That was an interesting word. Malik was right of course. It did help to close off alternative theories, leaving us scope to focus our enquiries on certain areas, but I thought that maybe he was unnecessarily complicating matters. Malik was trying to look at it from the angle of Sherlock Holmes, and you didn’t need to do that. If a prostitute gets her throat slashed and her genitalia mutilated, and her body’s discovered on the edge of a notorious red light district with the clothing interfered with, it’s fairly obvious what’s happened.

  Or so I thought.

  There was nothing in the wardrobe that told us anything. There were a couple of drawers in there containing various knick-knacks; some books, including two by Jane Austen, which caused me to raise my eyebrows (how many whores read Jane Austen?); a bag of dope; an unopened carton of Marlboro Lights; a jewellery box filled with costume jewellery. Nothing unusual, but no address book or anything like that, which might have thrown up a few clues. The man who’d killed her may well have been one of her regulars, someone who could have been in love with her but whose love was not being reciprocated. Out of frustration, he kills her. Out of rage, he mutilates the corpse. An address book might have contained the details of this man, if he existed. But of course, these days things are a bit different. She might have kept details of her clients in a palmtop PC or on a mobile, rather than writing it down on paper. Obviously, in a block of flats like this you weren’t going to keep readily saleable items such as electronic goods on display for your neighbours to pinch, so I presumed if she owned anything like that, and it seemed highly likely that she had, she would have hidden it somewhere in the flat.

  ‘Did she have a mobile on her when they found her body?’ I asked Malik.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, shrugging. ‘But I’m not sure.’

  I thought about phoning and asking Welland, then decided it would probably be easier just to look for it. I couldn’t recall him saying anything about a mobile in the briefing. ‘Give me a hand lifting up this bed, will you?’

  Malik lifted it up while I peered underneath. Apart from a lot of dust, another book (which turned out to be another Jane Austen), and a pair of knickers, there was nothing there. I stood back up and Malik put the bed down again.

  I was wondering where to look next when there was a loud knock on the door. We both stopped and looked at each other. The knocking came again. Whoever was on the other side wasn’t particularly patient. I was keen to find out who it was, so I stepped over and opened it before he could knock again.

  A stocky black guy, late twenties, was glaring at me. He didn’t hang around. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he demanded, pushing past me into the flat. He stopped when he saw Malik in his rubber gloves standing by the bed, and immediately twigged. I closed the door to prevent any quick escape. ‘You’re Old Bill, aren’t you?’ he added, somewhat unnecessarily.

  ‘While you’re here, sir,’ I said, walking up behind him, ‘we’d just like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, whirling round to face me.

  I could see him calculating the possible reasons why we were there and whether it was worth him hanging about. It didn’t take him long to decide that it wasn’t. He shoved me once, very hard, in the chest and made fo
r the door. I stumbled but somehow managed to stay upright. He grabbed the handle, pulled the door open and tried to slam it in my face. He almost got me as well but my reflexes didn’t let me down and I managed to dodge it and run out after him, Malik hot on my heels.

  I used to be a sprinter when I was at school, and at the age of thirteen I did the hundred metres in 12.8 seconds, but thirteen was a long time and a lot of cigarettes ago.

  But I was still quick over short distances and as he rounded the corner and charged down the stairs, two at a time, I was only a few feet behind him. The door was slightly ajar and he pulled it open and kept running pretty much in one movement. But I was closing. As I reached the top of the steps I dived onto his back and grabbed him in a desperate bearhug. ‘All right, come on!’ I panted in as authoritative a voice as I could muster. But it didn’t seem to work. He kept running, at the same time shaking himself out of my grip, and managed to plant an elbow in my face. I yelped but continued chasing, one hand stretched out trying to grab him by the collar, wondering amid the pain in my lungs exactly how I was going to bring this guy to heel.

  Suddenly he slowed abruptly, half turned so he was sideways on to me, and brought back his fist ready to throw an almighty punch. Momentum kept me going and, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen, I had no way of stopping it. His fist connected perfectly with my right cheek, sending me completely off balance. My head pounded with the shock of the blow and I bit my tongue as I fell against a wall. My legs wobbled precariously and then went from under me, and I fell backwards onto the pavement, hitting it arse first.

  Malik immediately screeched to a halt beside me. ‘Are you all right, Sarge?’ he yelled with more concern than I would have expected from him.

  ‘Get after him!’ I panted, waving him away. ‘Go on, I’m fine.’

  Which was bullshit, of course. I felt like death. My lungs were bursting and the whole right side of my face throbbed. I opened my eyes and my vision was partly blurred. Still sitting where I’d fallen, I watched as Malik disappeared up the street, all five feet eight of him, armed with nothing more than harsh words. Somehow I didn’t think an arrest was imminent.

  I was going to have to give up smoking. I couldn’t have run much over thirty yards all told and it felt like I’d done a mile at a sprint. The problem with not taking regular exercise, especially when you combine it with a shit lifestyle, is you don’t realize quite how unfit you really are. I was going to have start going back to the gym, even though my membership had lapsed close to two years ago. I couldn’t embarrass myself like that again. That cheap piece of dirt, who from the way he acted was no doubt Miriam Fox’s pimp, could have kicked the shit out of me if he’d wanted to, the contest was that one-sided.

  Across the street I could see a middle-aged woman staring out of her window in my direction. She looked like she felt sorry for me. When I caught her eye, though, she turned away and was gone.

  As I gingerly got to my feet, I found myself experiencing an impotent rage. He’d made me look a fool. I wished I’d had the gun I’d been using the previous night on me. I could have blown that fuck apart. I wouldn’t even have needed to tire myself out. I could have just strolled down the steps, taken aim at the middle of his back, and fired at leisure. He might have been a solid boy, but I’d yet to come across anyone whose skin deflected lead.

  Malik came back into view, walking without urgency, and the rage passed. We’d get him. It was just a matter of being patient. Maybe, just maybe, once he’d been released again, I’d track him down one evening and put him to sleep. The thought made me feel better.

  Malik looked pissed off. ‘I lost him,’ he said, stopping in front of me. ‘He was too fast.’

  ‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m sort of glad you didn’t corner him.’

  ‘I can handle myself, Sergeant. Anyway, you’re the one who took the pasting. Are you all right?’

  I rubbed my cheek and blinked a few times. My vision was still a little blurred but it seemed to be moving back towards normal. ‘Yeah, I think so. That bastard had a good punch on him, though.’

  ‘I saw. So who do you think he was?’

  I told him, and he nodded in agreement. ‘Yeah, I’d have thought so too. So what do we do about him?’

  ‘It won’t take long to find out his name. There’ll be plenty of uniforms on the streets tonight, talking to the other Toms. They’ll find out who he is. Then we’ll just reel him in.’

  It dawned on me that he might also be the pimp for the blonde girl in the photo with Miriam, and I suddenly felt protective towards her. She was too young to be selling herself on the street and too vulnerable to be under the thumb of someone like him. The sooner we picked him up the better.

  We went back to searching the flat but, though we spent close to another half an hour in there, we didn’t find anything else of note. I checked in with Welland and he told us to speak to the other occupants of the block, which turned out to be something of a fruitless exercise. Number 1, the one playing the techno music, steadfastly refused to answer the door, which was probably because he couldn’t hear us. A few more hours of that and he wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Number 2 wasn’t in. Number 3, a colourfully dressed Somalian lady with a young baby in her arms, couldn’t speak English. She recognized Miriam’s picture but I think she thought we were looking for her because she kept pointing upstairs. Without a Somali translator, there wasn’t a lot more we could do, so we thanked her and left.

  Number 4 eventually answered the door after we’d knocked at least three times. He was a tall, gangly bloke with John Lennon glasses and a badly trimmed goatee. He took one look at us and immediately clicked that we were police. In our trenchcoats and inexpensive suits, we were never going to be anything else. He didn’t look too pleased to see us, which was no great surprise since the unmistakable aroma of freshly exhaled dope smoke was easing out of the gap in the door.

  I did the introductions and asked if we could come in. He started to say that it wasn’t a good time right now, which is what they all say when they’ve got something to hide, but I wasn’t going to let this one go, not after drawing blanks everywhere else in the place. I told him that it was a murder inquiry, and that we weren’t interested if he’d been smoking blow in the privacy of his own home. Malik, who came more from the zero-tolerance school of policing (where it suited him, of course) gave me the standard disapproving look I was beginning to get used to from my subordinates, but I ignored him.

  The guy really didn’t have much choice so he let us in and turned the music down. He sat down on a large beanbag and, waving in the general direction of the other beanbags assembled around the cluttered room, let us know that we too could sit down.

  I told him we’d remain standing. He looked a mixture of nervous and confused, which was fine by me. I wanted to make him take this discussion seriously, to get him to rack his brains for information that could be of help.

  As it happens, I didn’t get a lot. His name was Drayer. He added that his first name was Zeke, but I told him I didn’t believe anyone would have called their kid Zeke, not at the time he was born, which had to have been at least forty years earlier. He insisted that it was. I asked him if that was the name on his birth certificate. He admitted it wasn’t. ‘And have you changed it by deed poll?’ He reluctantly conceded that he hadn’t.

  Eventually, I got it out of him that his real first name was Norman. ‘Norman’s an all right name,’ I told him. ‘It’s no worse than Dennis, which is mine.’

  ‘I know it’s no worse,’ he said, and left it at that. Cheeky bastard.

  It turned out that Norman was a poet by trade. He performed his poetry in some of the local pubs and clubs and had also had a few bits and pieces published in various anthologies. ‘It doesn’t pay much,’ he confided, ‘but it’s a clean life.’ Looking round his worn-out living room, I wasn’t sure I’d have used that description for it, but there you go. Everyone’s entitled to their own illusio
ns.

  Norman appeared genuinely upset when he found out it was Miriam who’d been murdered. He hadn’t really known her, he said, as she’d tended to keep herself to herself, but whenever he’d run into her in the hallway she had always smiled and said hello. ‘She was a nice girl, you know. Made the effort. There aren’t many like that in this city.’

  We both nodded in agreement. ‘It can be an unfriendly place,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘Did Miss Fox have many visitors? Particularly male ones?’

  ‘Er no, I don’t think so,’ he said, thinking about it. ‘I saw one man go up there a couple of times.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Malik asked.

  ‘He was muscular, well formed. Attractive, I would think, to women. And there was a fire about him, a passion. An anger almost. As if somewhere inside him was a volcano waiting to erupt.’

  ‘That’s a truly terrible description,’ I told him. ‘Try again. Was he tall, short? Black, white?’

  ‘He was black.’

  I described the guy who’d just clouted me and it quickly transpired that they were one and the same. Well, at least he’d been right about one thing. There’d certainly been an anger there.

  ‘How often did he come and go?’

  ‘I saw him maybe two or three times in the hall or on the stairs. He never spoke to me.’

  ‘Over how long a period?’

  He shrugged. I think he was pissed off that I’d mocked his descriptive skills. ‘I don’t know, maybe three months.’

  ‘And when was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago. Something like that.’

  ‘Not within the last two or three days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Malik asked.

  ‘About a year now.’

  ‘And was Miss Fox already here when you moved in?’

  ‘No, she wasn’t. She came … I don’t know, about six months ago.’

  ‘And you can’t remember any other male visitors?’