Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Should I have done?’

  ‘I thought poets were meant to be observant,’ I told him. ‘You know, viewing their surroundings and commenting on what they see.’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you talking about?’

  ‘She was a prostitute, Mr Drayer. Didn’t you know that?’

  It turned out he didn’t, which was probably because there hadn’t been any other male visitors that he recalled. She’d clearly kept her business and personal life separate. I showed him the photo-me images and asked him if he recognized the blonde girl. He said he did. He’d seen her a number of times coming and going with Miriam. ‘They seemed like good friends. They used to laugh together a lot. Like schoolgirls.’

  ‘That’s what they should have been,’ I said.

  We asked him a few more questions about his own background and what he knew about the other people in the flats, but didn’t get any information of significance. If anything, Norman knew even less about his other neighbours than he’d known about Miriam.

  It was just after a quarter to six when we finally got back to the station and reported to Welland, who’d taken up residence in a small office next to the incident room, from where he could control his end of the inquiry. He was pissed off because one of his witnesses in another case, a girl testifying against her ex-boyfriend who’d knifed someone in a pub fight, had decided to pull the plug and keep her mouth shut. Apparently someone had persuaded her to change her mind with a small threat of violence, leaving Welland’s case in tatters.

  ‘I’ve had the CPS on the phone all afternoon,’ he moaned between vacuum-cleaner-like drags on his cigarette. ‘Making a fucking fuss like they’re fucking whiter than white.’

  Malik made the mistake of asking if she’d had protection.

  Welland glared at him. ‘That fucking knifing happened three months ago and the trial doesn’t start until February. I can’t have a man with her all that time. Where the fuck am I going to get him from? Magic him up out of thin air?’

  Malik backed off, knowing better than to get involved in one of Welland’s rants. Welland finished his cigarette in three angry drags and used the butt to light another one. ‘Anyway, what happened to your face?’ he asked me eventually. I told him, and he shook his head angrily. ‘We’ll put a warrant out on him as soon as we’ve got his name. He might be able to throw some light on this. Did you find anything of interest there?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not a lot. There was no address book or mobile phone or anything, nothing that would give us any idea of her client list.’

  ‘We’re just going to have to ask around among the King’s Cross girls tonight. See if they can throw up any names.’

  ‘She’s bound to have had a mobile,’ I said. ‘Have we got anyone checking whether there was one registered in her name?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got Hunsdon on it at the moment, but it’ll take time.’

  I told him about the girl in the photographs and suggested it would be a good idea to try to trace her.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. She might be able to help. There’s a meeting tomorrow at eight thirty sharp. We’ll be getting the preliminary autopsy findings, so make sure you’re there. No fucking oversleeping. It’s important we get momentum on this one,’ he said by way of conclusion. ‘You know what they say about the first forty-eight hours.’

  I did indeed, but my momentum had gone for the day. The right side of my face still ached, and since I was going to have to be in early again, I decided it was time to knock off. I asked Malik if he fancied joining me for a drink, more out of politeness than anything else, since I didn’t think he’d say yes. He looked at his watch for at least two seconds too long, then smiled and said why not, which was unusual for him. He generally liked to get away at the end of the shift back to his family, which was fair enough, although he wasn’t averse to socializing with the bosses if he thought it would do him some good.

  We adjourned to a pub called the Roving Wolf, which was a haunt for CID and some of the uniforms. It was busy with the after-work office crowd, a few of whom I knew by sight, and I said hello to a couple of people as I pushed my way to the bar and ordered the drinks – a pint of Pride for me, a large orange juice for Malik. We found a table in the corner away from the scrum, and I lit a cigarette.

  ‘So, who killed Miriam Fox, then?’ he asked, sipping his drink.

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s early days yet, and a lot depends on the result of the autopsy, but I suppose my first thought’s the obvious one, and that’s because the obvious one’s usually the right one.’

  ‘A pervert?’

  ‘I think so. You’ve got to say, it points that way. She died at the scene, there’s no doubt about that. The area round the body was too bloodstained for her to have been taken there after death. And the location suggests she wasn’t killed by someone who knew her. It’s the sort of place she might well have gone for privacy with a punter, and the sort of place a killer might have gone for privacy with his victim.’

  ‘So what do you reckon our chances of a result are, then?’

  ‘Too early to say. If the killer’s been careless like a lot of these guys can be, then we’re sorted. Forensics’ll have him in no time.’

  ‘Unless, of course, he’s not known to us.’

  I didn’t like to think of that scenario. ‘True. But someone who can do that … you know, grab a young girl from behind and cut her throat from ear to ear. Even in this day and age, I don’t think there are many who could. Someone like that is likely to have done something that’s brought him to the attention of the police before. But if he’s planned it, and he’s been careful, and he’s picked someone who doesn’t know him from Adam—’

  ‘Like a prostitute.’

  ‘Like a prostitute, then he could be miles away by now.’

  ‘And what do you think? Do you think he’s a planner or someone who just can’t control his urges?’

  ‘Well, my gut feeling is that he’s a planner. But I haven’t really got anything to back that up with, except for the fact that he picked a good spot to take her out, and he obviously knew what he was doing. What about you? What’s your take on it?’

  Malik smiled wearily. ‘I think it’s depressing that we learn all these investigative skills, yet how much do we actually ever need them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, unless the guy’s an idiot or we get a lucky break, then we’re not going to catch him, are we? No matter how clever we are.’

  ‘Policework’s all about lucky breaks, but you know what they say: in the end, you make your own luck.’

  ‘Well, I hope we get lucky, then, because otherwise it’s just a matter of waiting, isn’t it?’

  ‘He may not kill again,’ I said. ‘Sometimes they don’t.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t, then he may never be brought to justice.’

  ‘That’s the trade-off. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that. To successful forensics,’ I said, raising my glass.

  ‘To successful forensics,’ Malik intoned, not looking completely convinced.

  For a few moments we both sat in silence, mulling things over. I took a long sip of my drink, thinking that I was glad the day was over.

  ‘Did you hear about that shooting in Hertfordshire last night?’

  My mind immediately snapped to attention. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about last night’s activity since my meet with Raymond. It might sound callous, but I’d been too busy. I felt a short rush of regret when Malik mentioned it, but it was a lot weaker than it had been earlier. I felt bad at what had happened, but what was done was done. Time can sometimes be a rapid as well as a great healer.

  ‘Yeah, I did. I reckon there’s more to that one than meets the eye.’

  ‘So do I. I’ve got a friend, a guy I used to go to college with. He’s a DC up in Hertford. They’re handling the case. For the moment anywa
y.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. What’s he got to say about it so far?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to him yet. I expect he’s under the cosh a bit. Same as us. I thought I might try him this evening, that’s if they’re letting him home for the night.’

  I took an easy gulp of my pint, knowing that I was going to have to approach this carefully. ‘When you do speak to your mate, find out a bit more about this case. It intrigues me.’

  ‘And me. It’s an interesting one. Looks like a gangland hit. It makes you wonder what those customs men were investigating.’

  It did that, all right. ‘Whatever it was, it must have been pretty big.’

  ‘Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? I think the key lies in finding out whoever the guy with them was. The civilian. When you know what his involvement was, I think you’ll have the motive, and with something like this, once you’ve got the motive, you’re two thirds of the way there.’

  ‘It’s proving it, though, isn’t it? This was obviously well planned so you’d assume whoever was behind it has covered their tracks pretty well. You might find out who they are, but it’s building a case against them that matters.’

  Malik nodded. ‘You’ve got to get someone to talk, that’s always the key. Something like this, there’s got to be a fair few people involved, and one or two of them are bound to get cold feet.’

  I thought of Danny. Would he break? I doubted it. He’d known what we were going to do and had been happy enough to get involved. But Malik was right. There were a fair few people involved, some of whom I didn’t know from Adam. Any one of them could end up talking, although it was a bit late to worry about that now. I was glad that, through Malik, I at least had a means of finding out how well the investigation was going.

  ‘One way or another, it’s going to be a difficult one to crack,’ I added. ‘Time consuming.’

  ‘Perhaps. But definitely interesting. I’d love to talk to the man who did it. You know, the one who actually pulled the trigger.’

  ‘Why? What’ll he tell you? I expect he did it for money; something nice and mundane like that.’

  Malik smiled. ‘I’m sure he did – it’s almost certainly a professional hit – but it takes a special kind of man to shoot dead three people without a second’s thought. Just like that.’ He clicked his fingers to signify his point. ‘People he’s almost certainly never met before. People who’ve never done him any harm.’

  ‘You’d probably find that whoever did it was pretty normal underneath it all.’

  ‘Normal people don’t murder each other.’

  This time it was my turn to smile. ‘Normal people murder each other all the time.’

  ‘I don’t agree with that. Most murderers might look normal, but there’s always something rotten inside that makes them do what they do.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not always as cut and dried as that.’

  Malik stared at me intensely. ‘It is always that cut and dried. Murder’s murder, and the people who commit it are bad people. There’s no two ways about it. It’s a black-and-white issue. Some murders aren’t quite as horrific as others, but none of them are justifiable. Under any circumstances. They’re just different shades of black.’

  I could tell he felt passionately about what he was saying and thought it best not to say too much more on the matter. You never know when such conversations can be regurgitated and used against you somewhere down the line. So I conceded the point and the conversation drifted on through the awkward avenues of small talk before inevitably coming back to the case. After all, what else was there to talk about?

  We both concluded that Welland was right about momentum. If we didn’t turn up clues in the next few days, and it really did turn out to be someone unknown to the victim – which I have to say is what everything seemed to point to – then the bottom would fall out of this case very quickly and we’d be left with nothing. Either waiting for our mystery perpetrator to strike again (a worrying enough scenario in itself) or losing him for ever amid the vast ranks of the unsolveds, which somehow I felt would be even worse.

  Malik stayed for two drinks to give him the opportunity to buy me a brew back, then it was time for him to return to the family seat in Highgate where his pretty wife and two young children awaited him. He offered to share a taxi with me but I decided to stay put for a while. I was hungry, but I fancied one more drink before I headed back to the flat. I’d got the taste of beer now.

  One of the regulars, an old guy with a raspy voice whom I knew vaguely, came and joined me and we chatted about this and that for a while. Normal shit: football results, the price of beer, what a fuck-up the government was making of everything. Sometimes it’s nice to talk to civilians. It doesn’t require you to rack your brains in case you missed something. Things just flow along nice and easy. But when the guy started going on about his wife’s pickled-onion-sized bunions, and I started thinking that I hoped I’d be dead by the time I got to his age, I knew it was time to go.

  It was eight o’clock when the cab dropped me off outside my front door. The iron-grey cloud cover that had sat above the city most of the morning had now broken up completely, you could even make out the odd star. The temperature had dropped accordingly and the night had a pleasant wintery feel about it.

  The first thing I did when I got inside was phone Danny, but he wasn’t at home. I tried him on his mobile but got diverted to the message service, so I left one telling him to be in at five p.m. the next day so that I could drop the money round to him. Then I showered, washing off the dirt of the day, and thought about food.

  I found a carton of something called creamy prawn risotto in the freezer. It said ‘ready in twenty minutes’ on the sleeve and the photo didn’t look too unappetizing so I defrosted it in the microwave. While it was cooking, I took my usual seat on the sofa and switched on the TV, turning straight to the news channel.

  Two passport-type photographs dominated the screen. They were of the Cherokee driver and his front-seat passenger. The driver looked different from the previous night. In the photo he was smiling broadly and there were laughter lines around his eyes. It gave you the impression that he’d probably been quite a nice bloke when he was alive. Old greasy face next to him looked better as well. He was still staring moodily at the camera, like he’d just been told off by someone twenty years his junior, but he’d lost the shiftiness he’d been exuding the previous night, and it looked like he’d washed his hair and given it a decent comb, which had improved his appearance no end.

  The report named the driver as Paul Furlong, a thirty-six-year-old father of two young children, and his passenger as forty-nine-year-old Terry Bayden-Smith, who’d been with customs since leaving school. Bayden-Smith was divorced and presumably had no kids because none were mentioned.

  Their faces disappeared from the screen to be replaced by a male reporter in a fleece coat standing outside the Traveller’s Rest. There was still police tape everywhere and the Cherokee remained where it had stopped beside me, but activity had dwindled. A uniformed officer stood in the background guarding the scene, but he was the only person I could see. The reporter said that there’d been more than sixty detectives assigned to this case and that the police were confident of finding the killer. There were apparently a number of ongoing lines of inquiry but the reporter quoted a senior police source as saying that a quick result was unlikely.

  I wondered if Raymond had been telling the truth when he’d said they’d been corrupt. Would it make what I’d done any better? Probably not. Once again I found myself wishing I hadn’t got involved. Corrupt or not, there was going to be a huge amount of pressure on the investigating officers. Unlike us, they’d get all the resources they needed as well, always the way in high-profile cases where the public are clamouring for arrests. Again, very little mention was made of the third victim of the shooting, and they still weren’t naming him, which surprised me. I was going to have to press Raymond to find out who he was. By now I was fairl
y certain he was more than just another piece of pondscum.

  The murder of Miriam Fox didn’t get a look-in, not even on Ceefax. I suppose a dead prostitute just doesn’t carry the same kind of glamour, although that would certainly change if another Tom went the same way. There’s nothing the public likes more than a serial killer, especially when he’s not targeting them.

  I ate my food while watching Family Fortunes. As always, Les Dennis did his best with only limited resources, kind of like the Metropolitan Police. Neither family was over-bright and the Dobbles from Glasgow had accents so thick that you had to wonder how they’d made it through the auditions. Les made a few jokes about needing a translator and laughed heartily as he tried to keep things going, but you could tell he was getting a bit tired of it. In the end they lost to the English family whose name I forget, and who went on to win the car.

  After that I watched a film. It was a romantic comedy and it would have been quite entertaining but I had difficulty concentrating. I kept imagining the family of Paul Furlong huddled together in their living room, their faces red and tearstained. In my mind, the kids were a boy and a girl and they had blond hair. The boy was the older, maybe five, and the girl was a pretty little thing, about three. The boy kept turning to his mother who had her arms round both of them and asking why their dad was gone and where he had gone to. The mother, her voice breaking with emotion, said that he’d gone to heaven because sometimes that’s where you have to go if God wants you for a particular reason. I thought of myself as a young kid and wondered how I would have felt if someone had snatched away my dad. My dad was dead now. He’d died five years ago, and it had been a blow even then, because I’d always held him in high esteem. When I was five, he’d been king of the world because he’d known everything there was to know about anything. It would have torn me apart if someone had taken him away then.

  In the end, I could torture myself no more. Sitting alone in a poky flat, wallowing in the guilt of depriving kids of their father, was always going to be a recipe for disaster. So when the film finished, and the couple who hadn’t been able to stand the sight of each other at first predictably got together and disappeared off into the sunset, I went to bed.