Die Twice

by Simon Kernick

  ‘She was blackmailing Dr Roberts,’ he said eventually.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘He was interested in little kids.’ Was. That was interesting. I’d pick him up on that later. ‘She found out about it.’

  ‘How? I’d have thought she was a little bit old for a child molester.’

  ‘She was. But he was diddling one of her mates from the home. Her mate must have told her about it and she started putting the squeeze on. Told Dr Roberts he’d have to pay her to keep quiet.’

  ‘So she had to die?’

  He nodded, looking away. I took a drink from my beer and watched him closely.

  Roberts’s number must have appeared on Miriam’s phone record too, but in my shock at seeing Carla’s name there I’d overlooked it. Perhaps if I’d been concentrating harder I could have wrapped this whole thing up a lot sooner. And Carla would still have been alive.

  ‘And that’s it, then?’

  He looked up at me, his face asking to be believed. ‘That’s it. That’s how it was. You know, I didn’t mean to get involved. I wish I hadn’t. I really do. I just want to be left alone now; you know, to get on with my life.’

  I sighed. ‘Two people dead just because some crack-addicted street girl threatens to make accusations.’

  ‘That’s how it was,’ he said, an irritatingly earnest look on his face. ‘I honestly wish I’d never got involved.’

  ‘I bet you do.’ I lit another cigarette. ‘That Miriam Fox must have been some blackmailer.’

  ‘She was. She really knew how to turn the screws.’

  I sighed, then walked over to Kover. I leaned down close to his face and lit the flame on the lighter. He cowered back in the seat again. ‘You’re lying,’ I told him. ‘It was more than just a case of a doctor abusing his patient, wasn’t it? Tell me the truth. What was going on between you and Roberts, and why did Miriam have to die?’

  I kept the flame inches from his petrol-soaked face, determined that I would get the whole truth out of him. It wasn’t that his story wasn’t plausible, although it still didn’t explain his relationship with Roberts; it was more that he was too keen to get me to swallow it. I’ve seen that sort of behaviour before from criminals. They want you to believe a certain series of events, even if it incriminates them. The reason’s simple: they’re usually hiding something worse.

  ‘I’m telling you the truth,’ he spluttered desperately. ‘I swear it.’

  I took a punt. ‘What about those girls who went missing from Coleman House, Kover? What about them?’

  ‘Look, I don’t know—’

  ‘You’ve got ten seconds to start talking. Otherwise you burn.’

  ‘Look, please—’

  ‘Ten, nine, eight, sev—’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll tell you!’

  I flicked off the lighter and stood up. ‘It had better be the truth this time. Because otherwise I start the counting again at seven. Maybe even five. I’m tired of being fucked around.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ He paused for a moment to compose himself, then opened his mouth to say something. Then stopped. I think I knew then that it was going to be very bad. ‘Me and Dr Roberts … we had a little business going.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Girls. Young girls.’

  I dragged hard on my cigarette, feeling full of dread. ‘Tell me how this business worked.’

  There was another pause while he thought about answering. In the end, though, he knew, like I knew, that he had no choice. ‘I had a client, a bloke who wanted young girls. Except, the thing was … he wanted them permanently.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He wanted girls who weren’t going to be missed.’

  ‘What was he doing with them?’

  ‘Well, you know…’

  ‘No, I don’t know. Tell me.’

  ‘I think he was killing them.’

  ‘Why? For kicks?’

  ‘I think so, yeah.’

  In my time as a copper, I’d come across cases where paedophiles had murdered their victims. Sometimes to make sure they couldn’t tell anyone what had happened, but more often than not because the act of murder served to heighten the pleasure of the sexual act. Killing while coming. There are some people in this world for whom that’s the ultimate thrill.

  ‘Jesus.’ I shook my head, trying to take it all in. ‘So how did it work?’

  ‘Dr Roberts would pick the girls, the ones he thought could disappear without it getting noticed, ones he was treating. He’d give me the rundown on their movements, tell me the best time and place to snatch them, then I’d do the rest.’

  I stared at him, feeling sick. ‘And how many times did you do this? How many girls disappeared?’

  ‘We didn’t do it much.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Four altogether.’

  I dragged hard on the cigarette. ‘Over how long a period?’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘I don’t know, about eighteen months. Something like that. The girl – the whore – she got a sniff of what was going on. Dr Roberts chose one of her mates for taking, and somehow she rumbled it. That’s when she started blackmailing him, saying she’d expose him to the cops unless he paid her.’

  ‘Did you know the name of Fox’s friend? The girl Roberts … picked?’ I found the last word difficult to say.

  He shook his head. ‘No, no. I never knew their names.’

  ‘It was Molly Hagger.’ He looked back at me blankly. ‘Her name was Molly Hagger, and she was thirteen.’ He looked down at his hands again, not saying anything. ‘And Miriam Fox had to go because she was threatening to go to the cops?’

  ‘Yeah. I picked her up pretending to be a punter. Then I did her.’

  ‘I know. I saw the body.’

  I stood there for a long moment, trying to digest what I’d heard, wanting at the same time to throw my guts up until there was nothing left. I have never felt so sick and depressed, so weary of it all, as I did standing there in that cramped little room with this fucking monster.

  ‘And who was the last one you took? Was it a girl with black hair about the same age?’

  ‘No. That girl, Fox’s mate…’

  ‘Molly. Her name was Molly.’

  ‘She was the last one. The client didn’t like us doing it too often. Otherwise it raised suspicions.’

  Which left another mystery. What had happened to Anne Taylor? Although that one at least would have to wait for another day.

  ‘And this client of yours, what’s his name?’

  Kover looked me right in the eye.

  ‘Keen,’ he said. ‘Raymond Keen.’

  38

  I tried hard to hold in the shock that smacked me right between the eyes. Raymond Keen, a man I’d known for seven years, a man I’d killed for, involved in something so terrible that just the birefest thought of it made my skin crawl.

  ‘I know Raymond Keen,’ I told him. ‘It doesn’t seem his style to kill kids in some sort of sex game.’

  ‘Why would I lie?’ he answered, which at this juncture was a fair point. ‘He’s the client. I don’t know if he’s getting the girls on behalf of someone else.’

  I thought about it for a moment. Raymond, after all, was a businessman. It was difficult to believe that he could be involved in a business quite so base and sick as the planned murder of children, but in the end no more difficult to believe than the involvement of Roberts, whose job it was to look after the mental welfare of children, and I had no doubt that Kover was telling the truth about his part in all this. There was, I suppose, a ruthless logic in it all. Somewhere out there there were people – hopefully few, but who could tell – who got their sexual thrills from killing kids. Perhaps Kover was right, and Raymond was simply tapping into this vile market, using kids whose disappearance wasn’t going to attract much attention. And like all his ventures he was keeping as far away from the action as possible. It was easy to see why and
how he’d recruited someone like Kover, who was never going to have any sort of moral problem in sending kids to their deaths. But Roberts? That was far more difficult to swallow.

  ‘So, where’s Roberts now?’

  ‘I had to tell Mr Keen about what happened with the other woman, that I’d had to kill her. He was worried about Dr Roberts letting stuff slip and giving the game away, so he got me to do Roberts as well. Just to stay on the safe side.’

  ‘How did you kill him?’

  ‘I asked to meet him last night to discuss things. I picked him up outside his flat. When he got in the car, I just leaned over and stuck a knife in his guts, then locked the doors. Then I drove up to Mr Keen’s place. He said he’d take it from there.’

  ‘You have been busy these past few days. So, Mark Wells—’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man who’s been charged with the murder you committed. Or one of them, anyway.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the pimp.’

  ‘Was he involved in any way?’

  Kover shook his head. ‘No. He had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘So how did you manage to set him up?’

  ‘Dr Roberts did it. At first he wasn’t going to bother, but he got cold feet when you lot came knocking. He said you came to Coleman House asking questions. I think it spooked him a bit.’

  ‘How did he get hold of Wells’s shirt?’

  ‘It was in the girl … Molly’s possessions. She told him once that the shirt reminded her of him. I think she was in love with the bloke or something. The possessions were still at the home, so Dr Roberts just took it out and planted it. He was cunning like that. Then he phoned, put on a woman’s accent, and tipped off you lot.’

  I remembered his pleasant sing-song voice. If anyone could have impersonated a female, it would have been him. Bastard.

  ‘What about the knife?’

  ‘He’d heard from girls at the home that this Wells liked to threaten people with a big butcher’s knife, so that’s what I … that’s what I killed her with. I kept the weapon, and just to, you know, fix him up perfect, Dr Roberts planted it near his place.’

  ‘And that was that.’

  ‘That’s how it happened.’

  ‘Raymond supplies you with a mobile, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Why? What do you want it for?’

  ‘Don’t fuck me about, Kover. You’re the one who’s tied up and drenched with petrol. Where is it?’

  ‘In my pocket.’ He just about managed to pat the outer pocket of his coat.

  I stepped over and removed it, switching it on. ‘I’m going to dial Raymond’s private number now. When he picks it up, you’re going to tell him you want a meeting with him as soon as possible. Preferably tonight. I expect he’ll be reluctant. Don’t worry. Be aggressive. Insist. Get a time. Make sure you definitely get a time. And don’t give a fucking thing away. Understand? You fuck this up and you’ll burn like a piece of charcoal.’

  ‘Look, please. Just let me go. I’ve told you what you wanted to know.’

  I punched in the numbers and put the phone to his ear. Just to show I meant business, I flicked the lighter on again and waved it gently in front of his face.

  A minute passed. It didn’t look promising. Then Kover was talking.

  ‘Raymond, it’s Alan. I need a meet. It’s urgent.’ There was a pause, and I could just about make out Raymond’s booming tones at the other end, although I couldn’t hear what he was saying. ‘Something’s come up. Something I can’t talk about over the phone.’ I leaned forward so that my ear was close to the phone. I could smell Kover’s dry, sour breath. Raymond said something about being unavailable for a while. Kover kept trying, saying that he desperately needed to talk. I think Raymond asked him why again, and he tried to explain that it was confidential, that it was something that had to be discussed face to face. He carried on in this vein for maybe another minute, then he began to listen. Then he said OK a couple of times and the line went dead.

  I stood back up and lit yet another cigarette. ‘Well?’

  ‘He says he doesn’t want to meet anyone, but if it’s an emergency, then I should get up to his house tonight. Before midnight. He says it’s at—’

  ‘Yeah, I know where it is.’ Raymond’s main residence was a mansion on the Hertfordshire/Essex border. I’d never been there before, but I was aware of its location. I dragged on the cigarette. ‘Did he say he was going anywhere? After midnight?’

  ‘No, he didn’t say anything.’

  ‘One more question. How the hell did you and Roberts ever get involved with Keen?’

  ‘Dr Roberts knew him from somewhere. And I knew Dr Roberts.’

  I didn’t bother asking how Kover and Roberts knew each other. Doubtless it was down to their shared interest.

  Sighing, I turned and walked over to the window. The view was of a gloomy monolithic towerblock which was so close that it would have blocked out the sunlight, had there been any. Outside it was raining hard, and fog was obscuring the glow of the bright orange street lights. A man, his coat pulled up so it was almost completely covering his face, hurried past on the street below. He was half running, as if simply being outside was enough to put him in mortal danger.

  As I stood there looking out, I remembered back to when I’d been a kid of thirteen. We’d had a field out the back of our house with a huge oak tree in it. We used to climb it during the summer. My dad used to come back from work every night at half past six, rarely earlier and never later, and me and him and my sister would go out into the field and play football. We did it every night, unless it was raining, and it was best in summer when the sun went down behind the tree and the neighbours’ kids came out and joined in. They’d been good days, probably even the best days of my life. Life’s good when you’re a kid; it should be, anyway. I pictured Molly Hagger, the little blonde girl with the curly hair. Thirteen years old. Her last hours must have been a confused, terrifying hell. Abducted from the grey, bleak streets of a wet, cold city – a city that had put her on to drugs and stolen any last scrap of innocence she had – and taken away to be used, beaten, destroyed, for the pleasure of men who dripped with the sickness of absolute corruption. Men who would steal a life just to create a better, more satisfying orgasm. She should have been playing football and having fun with parents who cared. Instead, her remains lay anonymous and forgotten, somewhere they’d never be found. Forgotten by everyone, even by her best friend, who’d tried to use the situation for her own selfish advantage.

  Forgotten by everyone except me.

  ‘Look, can you let me out of here? I need a doctor for these fucking burns. I’m in a lot of pain.’

  I continued to stare out of the window, puffing thoughtfully on my cigarette. I thought of Carla Graham and wondered if, had she lived, we’d have got anywhere together.

  ‘You know, Kover,’ I said, speaking without looking at him, ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life.’

  ‘Look, I’ve answered your quest—’

  ‘Some of them really bad.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid, please!.’

  ‘This, however, is not one of them.’

  I swung round, and before he could react the cigarette had left my hand. The funeral pyre began to burn, the roar of the flames drowned by his screams.

  39

  Raymond Keen. The instigator of it all. Like a fat, malevolent spider, he’d watched over this bloody web of murder, greed and corruption, unworried by who got caught up in it and how they met their ends. Only he could supply the final answers to my questions. And only by ending his life could I finally redeem myself in my own eyes, and the eyes of those who would sit and judge me.

  I drove across the rain-soaked city, my mind a wasteland of torn images. Somewhere inside I felt fear, a fear that I might die in my pursuit of justice and revenge, that my time on this earth might be only hours from completion. But hatred conquered it. It was
a hatred that seemed to rise right up from the unmarked graves of not only the children Raymond had murdered, but from every victim of every injustice in the world. In the end, this consuming hatred would only subside when my revenge was complete.

  I stopped at a phone box on a lonely back road in Enfield and put a call through to the number of a restaurant in Tottenham that Roy Shelley had given me. A foreign-sounding man answered and I asked to speak to Mehmet Illan. The man claimed not to know anyone of that name, which I’d half expected.

  ‘Look, this is urgent. Very urgent. Tell him it’s Dennis Milne and I must speak to him.’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know no Mehmet Illan.’

  I reeled out the number I was calling from. ‘He will want to speak to me, I promise you. Do you understand?’ I repeated the number, and I got the impression that he was writing it down.

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘I’m only going to be on this number for the next fifteen minutes. It’s a payphone. After fifteen minutes I’m gone, and he’ll regret the fact that he missed me.’

  I hung up, and lit a cigarette. Outside, the rain continued to tip down and the street was empty. There were lights on in the houses opposite and I watched them vaguely, looking for signs of life. But there was nothing. It was as if the whole world was asleep. Or dead.

  The phone rang. It was barely a minute since my call to the restaurant. I picked up on the second ring.

  ‘Dennis Milne.’

  ‘What is it you want?’ The voice was slow and confident, and the accent cultured. He sounded like he was from one of the higher social classes in his native land.

  ‘I want you to do something for me. And in return I’ll do something for you.’

  ‘Is your line secure?’

  ‘It’s a payphone. I’ve never used it before.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you, or some of your representatives, to get rid of Raymond Keen. Permanently.’

  There was a deep but not unpleasant chuckle at the other end. ‘I think you’re making some sort of mistake. I don’t even know a Raymond Keen.’