Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  6

  Robert said his full name was Robert Adrian Kimber. He wasn’t eager to give an address, but he was very eager to tell Stella and Harriman and Sorley exactly how it had felt to kill Valerie Blake. It had felt good. It had felt thrilling. In fact, it had felt so special that he wished he could do it all over again.

  He smiled when he said this and the smile seemed genuine and open. Stella could see how he would be attractive to women: mid thirties, fair hair parted to flop on the side, a longish face but with regular features, green-grey eyes; perhaps the lips were a little too feminine, pink with a slight pout. No one else was in the squad room at that time, so Harriman had logged on to the national police computer and run Kimber’s name through the database – and come up empty.

  ‘So that was why you killed her,’ Stella said. ‘Because it felt good.’

  Kimber nodded; the smile came back. ‘Same as before.’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘Same as with the others.’

  ‘Let’s talk about the others.’ Stella avoided his eyes and kept her voice low: it said, Tell me anything, tell me everything; I’m here to listen and believe.

  ‘I like that way of doing it,’ Kimber said. ‘I reckon that’s the best way of doing it.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘So you’re close. Close up. With a gun or a knife… well, no, I’ve never thought about that way. You stand off, don’t you? No contact. Bit closer with the knife, perhaps, but it’s not that personal, is it? Think of a gun, now. You point, like pointing your finger, and you’re way back, aren’t you? Think of a knife. You’ve probably got to stab any number of times and so you’re busy, aren’t you? Busy. My way, you’re able to see what’s going on. You can feel things; you’re using your hands. Close up.’

  ‘How did you pick her?’

  ‘Valerie? My Valerie? Well, there she was. You see someone, you take a shine –’

  ‘Tell me how you happened to find her.’

  ‘On the tube.’

  Stella paused. It wasn’t what she’d been expecting.

  She and Harriman were at the interview table with Kimber. Sorley was sitting in but saying nothing. Inspectors don’t make good interrogators: too much time spent pushing paper and balancing budgets. You lose the nose for it; a good liar can hold you off for hours.

  Harriman said, ‘When was that – on the tube?’

  ‘A while back.’

  ‘You’ve been following her.’ Kimber spread his hands and smiled, confirming the obvious. ‘Answer for the tape,’ Harriman told him.

  ‘Followed her, yes. Of course.’

  ‘That day? That week?’

  ‘For a while.’

  Stella took over. She asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘I used to have a place,’ Kimber said, ‘a place with a big window that looked down on to a street. Busy street. Shops and pubs and so forth. People coming and going most of the time. To and fro. Back and forth. Couples and friends and people on their own. I used to sit there and watch. Yashica seven by thirty-five with a six-point-five degree field.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Binoculars,’ Harriman told her.

  ‘Binoculars. I was about thirty feet up from the street and the glasses brought people right up close. Next to you. As if you could touch. Couples and friends, they’re not what you’re after. Not really. They’re talking to each other, looking at each other, laughing and joking and you’re shut out. People on their own, that’s different. That’s what you’re looking for. Singletons. You’re beside them. They’re walking along and you’re there, looking into their faces, reading their expressions, reading their thoughts. They’re inside themselves and you can see that. And, if you think about it, there’s no other time you can do that, is there? Not even with people you know well.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Study them. Study their faces. Imagine someone walking down the street and you’re there – really there – on the street with them, and they’re walking forwards and you’re walking backwards but just in front of them.’ He paused. ‘Got the picture?’ Stella nodded. ‘Just in front of them and looking directly at them. You couldn’t do it; they wouldn’t let you. Or on the tube and you get up and go to the person opposite and you crouch down and look them right in the face.’ He smiled at the self-evident silliness of the idea. ‘I shouldn’t think anyone’s done it ever; I mean, however well you know someone you couldn’t just decide to get close, get really close, and look into their face, could you? Anyway, they’d know: they’d react; they wouldn’t be themselves. But with the glasses, there you are. Your face next to her face – like nose to nose. The invisible man. And she doesn’t know. She hasn’t got the slightest idea. Except –’

  ‘Is it –’

  Stella started to speak, then tried to check herself when she realized he hadn’t finished. Kimber looked at her, waiting. She looked at him. Face to face, if not quite nose to nose.

  ‘You said “she”. Was it always women? When you looked down on the street – always women you watched?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Women, always. Of course.’ Stella waited, not wanting to offer a prompt. Finally he said, ‘Except… yes… I was explaining, wasn’t I? She doesn’t know, the woman in the street, except, sometimes, she can feel you. And she looks round. Like when you stare at someone and eventually they start to look round to see where it’s coming from. She does that because she can feel you in the air. She can feel your eyes. And sometimes she looks up, and even though you’re really a long way off and she could never find you, your heart leaps because she seems to be looking straight at you.’

  He was talking to himself now. Stella and Harriman were sitting very still so as not to break the moment. Sorley was a statue in the corner of the room.

  ‘Then she goes out of sight. She’s walking towards you and, at first, you get everything, the way her body moves, the way her breasts move and her hips move and her hair floats a bit in the breeze; then she’s just head and shoulders; then it’s just her face… the binoculars make a circle like a cut-out – a circle of light – and you can’t see anything outside of that and her face fills it, and then she’s gone. And you can wait for another, I mean, you can probably already see another, especially if the shops are open and it’s a weekend or something, but then she’ll be gone, and so will the next one, and the next and you wonder what they’re doing and where they’ve gone and what their lives are like when you’re not there.’

  He closed his eyes, as if picturing the circle of light and the woman walking towards him, then disappearing. After a moment he opened them and asked for a drink of water. Harriman went to fetch it and Stella announced to the tape that DC Harriman had left the room. She also announced that she was switching off the tape and that it was 12.03 a.m. She and Kimber sat opposite one another, silent and strangely edgy, like actors waiting in the wings, their lines on hold. Sorley shifted on his chair and Kimber looked across as if registering him for the first time. The lights in the room hummed slightly and a phone rang in the outer office, fifteen rings or more before it cut off. Harriman brought water for everyone: a large bottle and four paper cups.

  Stella said, ‘Twelve fourteen, DC Harriman has entered the room, you saw her on the tube?’ It sounded seamless, as if the question had been too long backed-up.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘And you followed her.’

  ‘I followed lots. You want to know more about them, that’s the point. Watching them through the glasses, that’s fine and good. That’s one thing. It’s great because of the nearness, but then you lose them.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Lots.’

  ‘Ten?’

  ‘Oh, yes. More.’

  ‘And did you kill them?’

  Kimber shook his head, but it wasn’t denial. ‘I’m not talking about that. Not about them.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s talk about when you saw her on the tube. Valerie.’

  ‘Valerie,’ Kimber agreed. ‘I followed her t
o her office. So I could go back there any time, any weekday, and wait for her to come out. Then follow her home.’

  ‘Where was that?’ Harriman asked.

  Kimber gave an address in Penzance Place; it was the right address.

  ‘You followed her when she went jogging,’ Harriman observed. ‘You jogged along behind her, did you?’

  Stella detected the edge in Harriman’s voice: irritation or disbelief. She said, ‘You knew her routes.’

  ‘Short run: Holland Park. Long run: Hyde Park. I didn’t need to go. I could wait until she got back.’

  ‘But you were in the park. She died in the park.’

  ‘Well, I always walked that way to get to her flat. Sometimes I saw her running through. That was wonderful. As if she was coming to find me, you know? Putting herself in my way.’

  ‘You wanted to be up close when you killed her: is that what you said?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Tell me about that.’

  ‘Why not kill her in her flat?’ Harriman asked. ‘Break in, kill her there.’ Stella dropped her head and turned it a fraction to the side, as if Harriman’s interruption had arrived on a cloud of bad breath.

  Kimber was looking at Stella. He said, ‘She had alarms.’ Then, ‘Up close in the circle of light; up close when she died. How could it be any other way?’

  ‘You took a risk.’

  ‘It was almost dark.’

  ‘There were people about.’

  ‘The park was closing. It was dusk: everyone making for the exits.’

  ‘Other joggers.’

  ‘Joggers don’t see anything. They’re running. They hear their own breath, they think about the next step. Why do you think it was so easy to catch her?’

  ‘You strangled her.’

  ‘Up close. And you can see the life going. The light going from her eyes; a stillness coming over her.’

  Kimber’s eyelids drooped. He looked a little dazed.

  Stella’s voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘How did you do that?’

  For a moment, Kimber didn’t react; then he looked at her, eyes wide, as if startled. ‘Do what?’

  Stella could see the change. Lost him.

  ‘You strangled her.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me how you did that.’ Then, in the hope of finding her way back, ‘What was it like?’

  Kimber folded his arms and placed them on the table, then bent over and rested his head.

  He said, ‘I’m tired now.’

  ‘If I’m trying to sneak in through the window,’ Stella said, ‘I’d prefer you didn’t kick down the fucking door.’

  Harriman shrugged. ‘Sorry, Boss. It seemed like a good question at the time.’

  ‘I lost him.’

  ‘He’ll talk some more; he’s a sicko.’

  ‘You’ve got him down as a time-waster…’

  Harriman shrugged. ‘He’d been following her, so he’d know her hair colour, know she tied it back when she went jogging.’

  ‘But wouldn’t know she’d been stripped.’ As if she were reading his mind, she added, ‘I know it’s slim.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Call this his statutory rest period, talk to him in the morning.’

  ‘Not charge him?’

  ‘Not yet. We need to find out where he lives: internet search, listings CD, old-fashioned electoral register. Get down there, toss the place, find something helpful.’

  Sorley had gone to his office to sketch a report for the case-log: just the bare bones. They had taken DNA samples with the suspect’s permission: a mouth swab. They had suggested he might like to have a solicitor present and told him that they could provide him with one if necessary. The suspect had declined. He had smiled and declined. Sorley made a call to say he was on his way home. He was in a newish second marriage after a bad divorce and was still edgy about the hours he had to keep, since it was absence that had made his first wife’s heart grow colder.

  He was shrugging into his coat as he went through the squad room. ‘Think he did it?’ he asked. Before Stella could respond, he said, ‘I think he did it.’

  Pete Harriman lit one cigarette from the butt of another and hit the speed-dial on his mobile. Like Sorley, he needed to check in; unlike Sorley, he didn’t expect complaints. When his call was answered, he said, ‘Did I wake you?’ There was just enough of a pause for the woman on the other end to say ‘Yes’ before he added, ‘Good. It’s so much nicer when you’re awake.’

  Stella said, ‘Nine a.m. briefing. Text everyone.’ As Harriman made for the door, she said, ‘Sooner rather than later.’

  ‘I’ll do it in the cab.’

  ‘You came by cab?’

  He smiled. ‘You called me at nine thirty. I’d been drinking. In fact, I’m a bit pissed, to tell the truth.’

  Which is why you kicked down the door. I understand that.

  ‘Do you think he did it?’

  ‘He stalked her, he knew certain details, he’s fucking crazy, so why not?’

  ‘He mentioned others. He said, “Same as with the others.”’

  ‘I noticed. We could be closing a whole rack of case-files.’

  ‘Talk to people on the squads that handled those cases. More than that, talk to anyone who’s worked on anything like the same MO. Take DC Hewitt with you.’

  Harriman smiled. He said, ‘Maxine Hewitt. What is her story?’

  Maxine and Harriman had worked together before and he’d hit on her. No surprise there, but she’d fended him off and he wasn’t used to that. Not rejected him outright or turned him off like a tap; just deflected him – a smile, a joke. The joke lay in the fact that Maxine was gay and Harriman hadn’t spotted that yet. Stella knew: she’d seen Maxine one night, leaving the movies with a woman. They had kissed on the street: the kind of kiss that goes way beyond skin-deep. Maxine knew that Stella knew, and that was fine; but she didn’t go out of her way to tell people any more than Harriman walked into the squad room and said, ‘By the way, I fuck women.’ Though, in truth, it was a ploy he’d sometimes thought of using.

  ‘You mean the story that doesn’t include you,’ Stella suggested. ‘Maybe she doesn’t get wet every time you smile at her.’

  ‘Difficult to believe.’

  ‘It’s a first.’

  They walked out to the car park. A frost had settled and they could feel the bite of the cold on their faces. There were alarms going off somewhere: the rolling note of a house alarm and a couple of two-tone car alarms. Just part of London’s background noise; Stella and Harriman barely registered them.

  ‘She’ll be asleep again by the time you get back,’ Stella advised him.

  ‘I know. I’ll try not to wake her as I go in.’

  Harriman laughed at his own double-entendre. He was lighting a cigarette as he walked away. He left black footprints in the frost.

  Stella used a credit card to take the worst of the rime off her windscreen and side windows, then sat in the car for a few minutes to give the heater time to work.

  Robert Adrian Kimber… If you didn’t do it, you certainly wanted to. Like a taste, like a smell, like something right at your fingertips.

  She gunned the car out of the AMIP-5 car park and the rear wheels took a little shimmy on a patch of black ice.

  It was just after 1 a.m. and the streets were busy. People were coming and going at drinking clubs, at casinos, at all-night supermarkets; parties were working up to full volume; there were still vestigial queues outside a couple of dance venues. It was Christmas, and the Christmas story was spend, drink, dance, spend, jack up, spend, enjoy, get down, go down, spend, face off, face down, get off your face and don’t forget to spend.

  The whores had hearts of gold, frankincense behind their ears and myrrh in the dinky flasks that they kept in their clutch purses next to a strip of condoms and a mobile phone. Snatch purses, they called them. At this time of night, in these temperatures, you could always get a deal: they were hap
py to get into anyone’s car.

  Stella drove back to Delaney’s flat, past houses that marketed at three million and stood just on the fringe of high-rise estates where the jobless, penniless and hopeless lived in their three-room hutches.

  The rich had window-bars and gated estates and direct-link alarms.

  The poor had nothing to lose.

  When she got in, Delaney was awake, sitting at his laptop, playing old-style jazz, drinking whisky, eating ice-cream. Stella stole his drink and read a couple of the notes he was making for his article.

  ‘Have you got him?’ he asked.

  ‘Not sure. Could be. Who are Sadie and Jamie?’

  ‘Street-people.’

  Stella tapped him on the arm, then pointed at the window: a view of rooftops and a quarter moon in a cold sky. ‘They’re out there now.’

  ‘Bound to be.’

  ‘Panhandling the late-nighters, looking for a warm spot over a kitchen-grating.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Low-tog sleeping-bags in sub-zero temperatures.’

  He retrieved his glass and took a sip. ‘And here am I in the warm with my single malt getting a series of articles out of it. Well-paid articles. What a shit.’

  Stella got a drink of her own: vodka-rocks. Their journo/cop routine wasn’t a new thing, nor was it particularly adversarial. Well, a bit, maybe. Just a little edge to it: Hands On vs Hands Off. In life, cops needed journalists, and vice-versa. Cops wanted to manipulate journalists, and vice-versa. Cops went eyeball to eyeball with journalists, and...

  Stella and Delaney were not blind to the ironies and parallels in all this.

  ‘Maybe you ought to be down there with them,’ she said. ‘Sleeping out, jacking up, pissing into your bag.’

  ‘I’ve done all that,’ he told her. ‘Didn’t you notice I’d gone?’

  She drank her vodka, pushed his computer across the desk, sat on his lap and kissed him open-mouthed. She said, ‘I can’t get enough of you.’

  Sadie sacked-out over the hotspot by the back door of the Ocean Diner. Jamie was tagging along for the kitchen leftovers, but he wasn’t bedding down. He seemed to be always on the move.