Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  Pete Harriman lit a cigarette, having forgotten the one burning in his ashtray. He said, ‘Lethal injection.’

  Andy Greegan had the PM report in his hand. ‘Bullet in the brain,’ he suggested.

  Jack Cuddon was on his way to DI Sorley’s office with a sheaf of costings-sheets. He said, ‘Crucifixion. Have the bastards lining Oxford Street. Watch the murder rate drop.’

  When Stella spoke, other people’s tobacco smoke fluttered on her breath. ‘Let’s look at the patterns here. Five attacks on women, two of them fatal. That’s excluding Valerie Blake. We’ve all had a chance to look at the crime-sheets: where are the similarities? All the attacks were made out of doors; in a public place. Two in parks, two in the street, one on the towpath. That fits with the attack on Valerie. In one case, the victim’s clothing had been disturbed or partially removed. That was the towpath attack; the victim died without recovering consciousness. Murder weapons: a blunt instrument and a garrotte.’

  ‘The first incident,’ Maxine Hewitt remarked.

  ‘The first, yes. Then came an attack in a park. The victim recovered, but remembers nothing of what happened. Blunt instrument only. No attempt at rape.’

  ‘No apparent attempt,’ Sue Chapman remarked.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘How does anyone know what was in the bastard’s mind? He was disturbed.’

  ‘That’s an assumption,’ Stella said.

  ‘Stands to reason. No time to use the garrotte. Only reason she survived.’

  ‘Good point. Third attack was in the street, late at night, the victim was walking home from a local disco. Blunt instrument and garrotte. She’d said goodbye to friends just a few minutes earlier. Again, clothing disturbed but no certainty of rape. In fact, like the others, no motive that anyone can find.’

  ‘That’s when the tabloids started talking about thrill-kill,’ Harriman observed.

  ‘Same with the fourth and fifth attacks,’ Stella continued. ‘One in a park, midmorning, lots of people about, no one saw or heard a thing. The other in the early hours: a girl who’d gone out for milk from the Eight-til-Late and was taking an alleyway shortcut back. You get a picture of this guy walking up behind his mark, taking out the hammer, or whatever, striking to the head – what –?’

  ‘Usually twice,’ Greegan offered.

  ‘– okay, twice, then applying the garrotte.’

  ‘If he gets time,’ Harriman said.

  ‘And does he strangle them after the sexual assault or before?’ Maxine wondered.

  Greegan said, ‘Well, like the others, Valerie was strangled; she was also struck.’ He was reading Sam’s report. ‘The PM talks about “a clearly delineated depression twelve centimetres in diameter, possibly a hammer-blow”. That puts her alongside the others. I don’t think this guy is a rapist, not really. He’s a killer. He likes to display them: a way of saying I’ve been here; I did this. That’s why their clothing is removed or disturbed.’

  Harriman said, ‘Which makes it attack by stranger – thrill-kill – whatever you want to call it.’

  Stella said, ‘Garrotting takes time. A hammer-blow, a stabbing, it’s done and you’re gone. This keeps you on the scene for a while. Why?’

  ‘Certainty,’ Maxine offered. ‘Two victims survived the attack. Okay, one died without regaining consciousness and the second suffered memory loss, but –’

  ‘But it’s risk,’ Stella agreed. ‘Hit-and-run is a risk: his victim might survive and remember.’ She paused. ‘And there’s another possibility.’

  Pete Harriman’s remark tailended Stella’s, as if he had been anticipating her. ‘The guy was enjoying it.’

  How long for her to die?

  As long as you like, that’s what Sam Burgess had told her.

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said, ‘that’s what I had in mind.’

  ‘There’s another pattern,’ Maxine said. ‘Geography. They were all in west London.’

  Andy Greegan opened his mouth to speak and was ambushed by a sneeze. He turned his head aside and sneezed again.

  Stella said, ‘Don’t get sick.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Where’s the boyfriend?’

  ‘Was in America. Now on his way back. We got to him through his office. He’ll call in as soon as he lands.’

  ‘So he was in the States when she was killed?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Verifiable?’ Greegan asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘This isn’t a domestic,’ Harriman said. ‘This is some bastard with a hammer, a garrotte and a fucked-up brain.’

  Ask coppers what they like least about the job and they’ll say paperwork. Everything has to be down on paper. Paper comes first and last. There’s a form for everything, and everything needs its report. Paper’s your back-up. Paper’s your fail-safe. Paper is the all-purpose, cover-your-arse proof-positive.

  Stella was hacking out a report when Sue Chapman came over with some more paper: a folder holding that day’s confessions. On average, there were four confessions a day.

  I did it. I killed her. Bitch deserved to die. How good it felt. You can contact me at the above address/phone number/email/try and find me fuckwit copper.

  Sue had wild hair and a calm manner: methodical, organized, a coordinator’s brain. Stella could almost believe that Sue didn’t mind the paper; that maybe she had worked out some kind of a relationship with the paper. It gave a whole new meaning to the word ‘ream’. She put a note down on Stella’s desk.

  They were all followed up, the letters from crazies, the phone calls from crazies, most often by uniform because the local guys could check the usual names, the serial confessors, the eager inadequates. But they went to the SIO and the team leader first and the originals were all forensic-tested, copied for the handwriting experts and the profiler, then bagged in clear plastic folders. The note Sue had given to Stella was a copy, but she had the plastic-covered original in her hand. Stella looked first at the copy, then at the original.

  T-shirt… dark hair tied back in a pony-tail… I stripped her off… I threw the rest away… strangled her… got my hands round ...

  It was signed: ‘Robert’. Robert: as if Stella ought to know who that was; as if they might be less than close friends but more than mere acquaintances.

  The papers had reported a body in the park and named it as Valerie Georgina Blake. They added that she had been strangled. There had been no physical description, nor any mention of the fact that she had been jogging or that she was found almost naked. The crank letters and calls used what they had to hand and invented the rest. Sue Chapman had read and logged them all: some of the inventions were pretty banal; some had turned her stomach.

  ‘Hair colour,’ Sue said, ‘and the clothing.’

  Stella nodded. ‘This guy knows more than he should.’ She got up. ‘I’ll take it down to DI Sorley. In the meantime, copy and circulate, okay? Also, send a priority notification to every front office in the Met area. If this guy shows up at a nick, I don’t want some bored copper kicking his arse and showing him the door.’

  Sue nodded. She seemed a little distracted and Stella looked at her again, more closely. Her face seemed pale amid the cloud of hair. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ Sue assured her. Then: ‘Truth to tell, I feel very slightly off.’

  Stella grimaced. She said, ‘Don’t get sick.’

  5

  The sky was the colour of zinc with a livid purple underglow and you could smell snow in the air. Sadie had been out by the Notting Hill Gate arcade for two hours. She’d started by playing the three tunes she knew on the penny whistle. She had learned ‘While Shepherds Watched’ by trial and error because it was Christmas; it wasn’t a difficult tune to play, but maybe she’d made a bad choice, because it wasn’t earning her enough for a fix either. Sadie had a streak of pink in her hair and a streak of green. You might think they were reflections from the shopfront neon. She had a nose-ring and a lip-spike. She had a tat
too of a swallow on her neck, just under her left ear.

  A little later, after dark, she would move away from the shops and down to the Ocean Diner. She had staked out a patch by the alley door: it was where she bedded down when she was too tired or too cold to go on. Sometimes she would try for a hostel bed, but there was always the chance of getting busted and, anyway, she needed the money for scag. Now and then, the kitchen staff at the diner would come to the door for a smoke and maybe give her something to eat.

  Just recently, though, there had been another source of money. At first, the street-people had been wary of him: he could have been Drugs Squad, he could have been the Revenue, but he wasn’t; he was exactly who he claimed to be – a journalist writing a piece about street-people and Christmas. Tidings of comfort and joy.

  Sadie switched to ‘Lord of the Dance’. She had on every piece of clothing she had scavenged or stolen. She would have liked to have wrapped her sleeping-bag round her shoulders, but she was sitting on it: folded three times as protection against the deep chill rising from the pavement. People went past, heads down against the wind, their hands in gloves, their money unreachable in pockets and bags.

  Come on, Sadie thought. Come on, for fuck’s sake. It’s Christmas. It’s Christmas and I need to jack up.

  She looked over to where Delaney was hunkered down and talking to a skinny, red-headed street-sleeper called Jamie. Talking, but getting little back. Jamie was lying full length, his head poking out of his bag like a turtle’s. Delaney handed the boy his business card as if he were trying to establish credentials; he also handed over some money. Jamie stowed both of them somewhere in one of his layers of clothing.

  That boy’s head is wrong, she thought. Not the look of it, but what’s inside. He’s living inside his head and things in there are a monster mess. Come and talk to me, Mr Writer-man. Give me some money, I’ll tell you whatever you think you want to know.

  From where she sat she could see the minimum-wage boys and girls in their paper hats and paper bow ties, working the queues in BurgerLand. For Christ’s sake, she thought, don’t anyone buy me a burger. People did that. It meant: if you’re hungry eat this; don’t expect money for drugs. A BMW four-track drew up right by her. The driver got out carrying a fistful of cash and thumbed most of it into a parking meter: enough to buy him ten minutes. He walked past Sadie, putting the spare cash in his pocket. The parking meter was earning more than the BurgerLand kids.

  Delaney squatted down, his rear just light of the pavement, his forearms hanging from his knees. He looked very uncomfortable. Sadie could see that he was holding a twenty-pound note.

  He said, ‘Hi, Sadie. We talked before, remember?’ Either Sadie had about her a faint tang of urine, or the pavement did.

  She nodded. I remember. Give me the twenty.

  On that earlier occasion she had told him that she had come to London from Scotland looking for work, waited tables, had some bad luck with bosses who wanted a side-order of sex, lost the jobs, started drinking, got in with a bad crew, experimented with drugs, moved from flat-share to squat to streets. She had told him that she was clean now, and was hoping to find a hostel bed for the night; maybe a job; then maybe a way back into the real world, wherever that was. None of it was true of her, but some of it was true of people she knew and it made a good story, the kind of story that his readers would enjoy. She particularly liked the phrase ‘experimented with drugs’. Her experiments made Glaxo look small time.

  Delaney told her he was just touching base and she nodded again, smiling at the note in his hand.

  He asked her where she was sleeping and she told him about the kitchen door of the Ocean Diner and the kindness of the sous-chefs.

  He asked her whether she’d had a good day, meaning money, and she told him that the citizens of Notting Hill Gate seemed not to be overburdened with Yuletide cheer or a seasonal spirit of generosity.

  He mentioned the weather and they agreed that it was cold.

  He wondered where she might be spending Christmas and she let him know that she hadn’t completely made up her mind on that one.

  He gave her the twenty pounds.

  She asked him what Jamie had said, and he told her that Jamie was expecting Christ to celebrate his birthday by descending to earth trailing clouds of glory and that this event would be clearly visible from the Portobello Road.

  It wasn’t an opinion Delaney had come across before, though he’d heard Sadie’s story several times and didn’t believe a word of it. It was street-people stock-in-trade.

  ‘Anything you give them, anything anyone gives them,’ Stella informed him, ‘they use to buy drugs.’

  Delaney was cooking. There were half a dozen things he could make and he was making one of them: grilled chicken and salad. He found cooking slightly irritating – its smug conventions, its plans and maps, its arrogant insistence that you could knock together ingredients costing fifty pence and ask twenty pounds. He paused to sip his seven o’clock whisky. Seven o’clock was when he stopped work for the day.

  He said, ‘I know that.’

  ‘They live on the fly.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  ‘Outside the law.’

  ‘I like outlaws.’ He smiled. ‘So do you.’

  She was sitting at the circular table, hunched over reports and case notes, a drink of her own to hand. Since George had left, since Delaney had become a permanent part of her life, her secret drinking had almost stopped. At one time, she would hole up in the pub after work, glad to be on her own, a ritual vodka-rocks on the bar. She used to like it poured into a shot glass, one cube of ice only, and she would flirt with it for a few moments before taking the first hit, getting that first lift. She was never a drunk, but she’d had a clear view of what that would be like. Now, she had made a deal with herself: if she was with Delaney she drank only moderately.

  Of course, she wasn’t always with Delaney; that was the deal-breaker.

  He wandered across and looked over her shoulder. The note from ‘Robert’ lay on top of the pile. Stella was staring at it like a code-breaker whose decipherment system has just gone belly-up.

  ‘It’s privileged,’ she advised him.

  ‘I’ve stopped hacking for the day.’ He continued to read, then asked, ‘Did he do it?’ When she didn’t reply, he said, ‘It’s a loony letter, right?’

  ‘You’d think so.’

  ‘Which means it’s not.’

  ‘It looks as if he knows things he shouldn’t know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hair and the clothes.’

  ‘It’s not in the same class as a birthmark in the shape of an elephant above her right buttock, is it?’

  ‘Perhaps not; but it’s accurate.’

  ‘Could he be guessing? From press reports, or something – creative thinking?’

  ‘Just possible. There’s an outside chance that he could be lucky. Some of these nuts like to give detail in the hope that they’ll hit the jackpot. We had a confession letter once that mentioned a tattoo on the victim’s right shoulder.’

  ‘And she had one.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘And this was the killer.’

  ‘No, this was a quadriplegic with a voice-activated software programme and a dream of mayhem. The killer was the husband, as we so often find.’

  ‘Or the wife.’

  ‘Or the wife. Poor woman.’

  Delaney laughed and moved away to the worktop to open some bag-salad.

  ‘It’s an identification thing,’ Stella said. ‘He wants us to know that it really was him. Wants us to believe.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t he turn up in person?’

  ‘He could. The letter might be one step in a sequence. First step.’

  ‘Other steps being?’

  ‘More letters. Phone calls.’

  ‘Why not just keep quiet about it? Why the need to talk?’

  ‘It’s a big thing, killing someone. Big thing to keep to yourself
.’

  Delaney heard the catch in her voice. Stella had killed a man. She hadn’t meant to, but when he’d attacked her she’d lashed out with a wheel-nut crank and taken him in the neck. He’d been wearing a new pair of sneakers, bright white, and Stella had always thought of him as Nike Man. When the crank had connected, he’d gone down hard and she had been grateful for that, because another man had been closing fast, intent on hurting her badly.

  It was the vagus nerve, she learned later: she wasn’t sure of its function, but its location in the neck, apparently, gave it a direct route to the heart. The incident had taken place on the Harefield Estate, a place where you could get scag, flesh and guns; a place where you could get slammed, knifed and shot. Stella had grown up on the estate, but she was no longer at home there.

  She had hit the first guy, then run from the second. By the time she found out that her attacker had died, Harefield had taken care of its own: the body had been bagged up, shipped out and rendered down. No fuss. Stella had never reported the incident. Only Delaney knew it had happened.

  In the corner of his eye, he saw her empty her glass and look round for a refill. Bad memories bring on bad habits.

  They ate the chicken and salad, talking, touching hands now and then; afterwards, they went straight to bed: it was still that fresh between them, still that urgent. It wasn’t late, but, after a while, Delaney fell asleep.

  The sounds from the street were yells, sirens, parties relocating, the rev and roll of traffic. Stella dozed, slipping in and out of a dream in which Nike Man waved at her from one of the high, bleak walkways on Harefield. He was saying something, but the wind took his words.

  Phone me, she shouted up to him. Phone me. I need to speak to you.

  Her mobile rang and she picked it up, still carrying the dream in her head. It was Mike Sorley. He said, ‘Robert’s come to visit.’