Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  He followed her back. The agency was glass-fronted and only partially masked by property details. He went to a fast-food place across the street and bought a cup of coffee so that he could watch her at her desk making and taking phone calls. She wasn’t wearing her coat and he could see more of her figure. She had good high breasts and her Armani trousers tucked up nicely under her rump.

  He watched as they left, one by one. There were five of them and she was the fourth to leave, saying goodnight, putting on the long black coat. When she walked to the bus stop, he joined the waiting group but stayed well back. When the bus came, he waited until he saw her sit downstairs, then jumped on as the doors were closing and went to the top deck.

  He was breathing quickly and smiling a secret smile.

  He could feel an erection starting. That often happened. He looked out at the streets and the people, all of them going about their business without any understanding of who he was or what he did. He was special, but no one could see that, which was just the way he liked it. He slipped a hand into his coat pocket and felt the steel, cool against his palm.

  Ten or more people got off at her stop. He stayed back, putting five bodies between them. He knew where she was going, so there was no need to hurry just yet, but he needed to be close when she got to the churchyard. He measured his pace: fast enough to be gaining on her; not so fast that she might get a sense of him. Stare at someone long enough and you nudge their instinct – make them look up. People who are followed sometimes feel the same close, intimate attention and look round for its source. He didn’t make those mistakes. The pro. The hunter. The Invisible Man.

  When she opened the gate of the churchyard, he was twenty feet back. The path went directly towards the porch, then curved off to the left. As she went out of sight, he quickened his pace, losing her for a moment, but finding her again as they both walked alongside the church. This was the tricky bit. If she turned now, she would see him. Of course, he was just another person taking the same short cut, no one to fear, but that wasn’t the point. To be seen was to lose the game.

  The path went between gravestones and leafless trees towards a gate on the far side that would bring her back to the street and within a hundred feet of her door. He hurried now, needing to close the distance. At his back, the lit windows of the church glowed; a choir was singing, clear on the icy air.

  Now she was within ten feet of the gate. People were visible in the street, but the churchyard was full of shadows. He came close enough to touch and reached out, lifting a skein of hair with his left hand, using the scissors with his right, then turned immediately and walked off between the gravestones and the trees.

  She opened the gate and stepped into the street. She was humming along with the choir.

  *

  Mike Sorley’s cigarette packet read SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND OTHERS AROUND YOU. Sellotaped underneath that was a strip of paper on which someone had written: This means us! He shook out the last cigarette and crushed the pack one-handed before lobbing it into the trash. When he lit up, he coughed for half a minute.

  He said, ‘We had incident boards up in the parks –’

  ‘At all exits and entrances,’ Stella said.

  ‘– but no useful responses.’

  ‘Mostly time-wasters. A few genuine sightings, but they weren’t any help.’

  ‘Is this looking like a hopeless case?’

  ‘You mean an unsolved?’

  ‘I mean an unsolvable. Thrill-killing is a nightmare. Somebody who’s anybody goes out and kills somebody who’s nobody. Finding him is all down to luck. He has to be caught in the act, or make some mistake, or take a risk too many.’ He gestured at the files on his desk, on the floor. ‘This adds up to precisely fuck all.’ He coughed again, his face reddening, and grabbed a fistful of tissues from a man-sized box.

  ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky, then.’

  ‘It’s what you’re hoping for, is it?’

  ‘We’re making some progress.’

  Sorley laughed. ‘Don’t tell me that – it’s what I’m telling them.’ He killed his cigarette but took out a back-up pack. ‘This guy Cotter has just made things more difficult. He’s definitely in the frame for the others, is he? Before Blake?’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘So we’re out on a limb.’

  ‘Paddington have agreed to wait on a press release.’

  ‘The purpose being?’

  ‘That if we’ve got two killers here – Cotter and our man but with similar MOs – it would help us if our man doesn’t know about Cotter’s arrest.’

  ‘You’re thinking copy-cat.’

  ‘Something like that. I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s a long way off a result,’ Sorley observed.

  ‘Another week,’ Stella suggested. ‘Then a review.’

  ‘Another week, then we start to tot up the bills.’

  Before she left, Stella said, ‘If it’s flu, you ought to go home.’

  Sorley snapped flame from a disposable lighter. He said, ‘Smoking kills germs, it’s on all the packets.’

  The squad room was empty apart from Frank Silano, who was compiling a statements file. He looked up as Stella came in. ‘There’s a note here to revisit Duncan Palmer. Valerie Blake’s boyfriend, right?’

  ‘There is,’ Stella agreed. ‘You can delete it.’

  ‘No longer in the frame –’

  ‘Never was, really. He was in New York at the time. He was hiding something, but it turned out to be a woman.’

  ‘He was cheating on her – Blake?’

  ‘He was.’

  Silano shook his head. ‘Lousy timing.’

  ‘Timing’s important, is it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Silano nodded. ‘Timing’s everything.’

  ‘Are you married?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Sure.’ He closed the file and got up to fetch his coat. Stella lifted her phone and fumbled for her wallet. She was looking for the case number that the man from Immigration had given her, along with his card. Stefan-just-make-it-Steve.

  Silano passed her desk on his way to the door. He said, ‘Almost everyone is.’

  *

  ‘It’s DS Mooney. AMIP-5. Stella Mooney.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘I have to clear some paperwork.’

  ‘Tell me about it. I live my life in triplicate.’

  ‘The family we found at the warehouse. I need to sign that off.’

  ‘I gave you my details, right?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve logged all that. It’s fine. I suppose I’m just curious about what happened to them.’

  ‘Deported. It was pretty much a foregone –’

  ‘The mother,’ Stella said. ‘The mother with the dead child. Did she get some help – counselling, whatever?’

  ‘No. She killed herself.’ He had spoken quite quickly and without any hesitation and for a moment Stella wasn’t sure what he’d said. Because she didn’t speak, he filled the silence: ‘She went to hospital, the others went to Maidstone nick.’

  ‘Her husband –’

  ‘Husband and the others – brother, sister, aunt, whoever they were, and the other kid. They took the dead one. That wasn’t easy: taking it away from her, I mean. Then they sedated her and kept her in for observation. She got up in the night, took a scalpel from the contaminated waste, went to the toilet, cut her throat.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stella said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘She looked about fifty, didn’t she? I thought fifty or so. Turns out she was in her thirties.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Stella said. ‘Thanks. Thank you.’

  ‘The hard part was they wouldn’t let the husband see her. He’s at the airport, he asks for his wife, they say she topped herself, then they put him on the plane. He went berserk. Had to be put in restraints.’

  ‘Right,’ Stella said. ‘Thank you. Thanks very much.’

  *

  Robert Adrian Kimber stood outside the first-floor apartment of the girl he called
Patricia and watched her cross to the window to draw the blind. She glanced out briefly and saw a street full of people and traffic, just as always.

  She went to another room – the kitchen, because he could see pans on a rack. She made coffee. Those tiny domestic moments were precious to him.

  He guessed the layout and supposed that the bedroom and the bathroom would be at the back. He thought she would take a bath soon. In fact he was certain of it. He pictured the whole thing. She undressed, she stood at the mirror, she lay back in the bath, she soaped herself.

  He held the lock of her hair under his nose. Flowers with a tang.

  37

  The Cancer Santa outside McDonald’s was taking all the business. Jamie sat on his bag, wrapped in a blanket like a reservation Indian. His eyes were unfocused; or they were focused on something no one else could see. Sadie’s fingers were too cold to hit the stops, so she was piping a little three-note tootle. She looked up when Delaney arrived but continued to play.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked. She shook her head, still playing. ‘Have you got a place for tonight?’ She shook her head. Tootle-tootle-toot. ‘Where will you be on Christmas Day?’ It would be a featured sidebar to his piece, each of Delaney’s street-people and where they’d be on Christmas morning. It was a cheap shot but a selling-point.

  ‘It’s just another day of the year,’ Sadie told him. ‘I’ll be here.’ She tootled a couple of times, then added, ‘Unless Jamie’s got it right, in which case, of course, I’ll be sitting on the right hand of God.’

  They talked for another ten minutes or so, Delaney crouching alongside her, getting a Sadie’s-eye-view of the world. With its fake snow and fairy lights and sour-faced shoppers, it didn’t seem that great a place. He gave her a twenty. He didn’t think she’d buy food with it, or a bed for the night; he thought she’d buy a wrap or a couple of rocks. But dues are dues.

  When he got back, the business card he’d given to Robert Kimber was out on the counter, a little blot on his escutcheon.

  Stella said, ‘It was at his flat when we searched.’

  ‘I see.’ There had been rain in the wind and Delaney’s clothes were wet. He walked through to the bedroom and found a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. When he emerged, she was watching the street. He said, ‘You took your time.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me.’

  Delaney shrugged. ‘Okay, I should have.’

  ‘But you didn’t. Because I’d told you to stay away from Kimber.’

  ‘There’s the problem, you see. You told me.’

  ‘How do I know it wasn’t you that made him run?’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Look, Stella, you have a job to do; me too. So it goes.’

  ‘An idea that works in your favour.’

  ‘Does it? How’s that?’

  ‘What would you say if I asked you to reveal a source?’

  Delaney was silent on that one. He felt like a man who had just swum out of his depth. Even so, he kept swimming. He said, ‘Now that you know, I’d better tell you this – he was talking to someone by email. Someone called Angel. He mentioned you.’

  She looked at him, her mouth open. ‘Kimber did?’

  ‘No, Angel. Whoever he is.’

  There was a silence to break rocks. Eventually, she asked, ‘What did he say – about me?’

  ‘No, it was just a mention. I only had a chance to look at the screen for a moment or two. A fantasist, like Kimber. He asked about Kimber pissing you around: “Leading them a dance,” he said. I remember that.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Well, he was offering his compliments. Telling Kimber what a good job he’d done. Wanting to compare notes.’ He remembered another sentence: ‘“I would like to go through it with you”; something like that.’

  Her stillness was the next thing to violence and her voice was just a whisper. She said, ‘You knew this and you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘You would have known I’d seen him. And I wanted to see him again.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And that’s all you can remember – of the emails?’

  ‘Stella, I only had a second to look. I saw your name, that was what stuck in my mind. It was just some crazy man; another crazy man; I bet Kimber’s address book is full of them.’

  ‘A harmless crazy-man ring, is that how you see it?’ He shrugged. She said, ‘We spend our time fine-combing. Forensics fine-comb the scene; we fine-comb the evidence; by and large we come up with something very close indeed to fuck all. This kind of case is the most difficult to get a grip of. Drugs, domestics, gang rivalries, turf wars, all of that – no problem. We either know who did it or we know someone who probably knows. Or else we can do a bit of detecting: of the two plus two makes four sort. We’re on home ground. This kind of killing’s different.’ She remembered what Sorley had said and repeated it to him. ‘Somebody who’s anybody goes out and kills somebody who’s nobody. We’re grubbing around. We’re looking for anything. And you had this.’

  ‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘Loonies anonymous.’

  ‘Who was it?’ she asked. ‘Who was this person and how did he make contact? And what else did he say? And what does he know, you fucking idiot? If you had told me straight away we’d’ve been down there within the hour and taken the hard disk and perhaps we’d’ve saved –’

  She stopped because she had never intended to stay to argue it with him; never intended to bat it to and fro, as if they were having a row about who did the laundry, or cut the lawn, as if they were in a marriage, for Christ’s sake. She was too angry for that sort of farce. Best to go. Best to get the hell out.

  She was putting her coat on, and he was watching her in disbelief, when she found herself saying, ‘A woman, an illegal immigrant, her child died, she was suckling it but it was dead, and they were getting ready to deport her but she cut her own throat with a dirty scalpel, and this was no day for me to be hearing what you just told me. And fuck you.’

  Delaney had thought that he might get between her and the door, but there was something desperate and wild-eyed about her that made him want to let her go. He looked out of the window and watched the hazard lights on her car flash as she blipped the lock. A moment later, she came into view. Her breath was a plume on the cold air, then she was a smudged silhouette on the side window, then just tail-lights snaking up towards Notting Hill Gate.

  38

  It was eight thirty; already the stats for the day were a little worse than average and the day was far from over.

  The Bank Hill Posse made a raid off-territory and lifted a member of the Random Crew. They took him to a park, nailed his hands to a tree and pistol-whipped him. It was a business issue. No one saw a thing.

  A Merc cabriolet was eased sideways by a Freelander. The Merc dipped in and out of the bus lane, came down a gear, and slid in front of the other vehicle as the lights went red. Cabriolet Man got out carrying a wheel-brace and hammered the Freelander’s lights. When Freelander Man emerged yelling, he was hammered in the self-same way. He went straight from the tarmac to ITU. Passers-by hadn’t noticed the incident.

  On Harefield, a local crack-distribution problem was solved when the poacher was stabbed five times in the head. He wasn’t dead, but his ability to match one thought with the next was never going to be the same. This caught no one’s attention.

  In a street just off the Strip, a whore had finished giving head in a car when the client showed her a Stanley knife and offered to leave her face intact if she handed over her earnings from the rest of the day’s blow-jobs. She gave him the money but called him an arsehole, so he cut her anyway. She ran down the Strip screaming, her lime-green fun-fur gouted with red. She was invisible and inaudible.

  You could call it a worse than average day.

  Someone pulled a Brocock makeover in a shebeen and wounded four punters; he couldn’t remember why. Four kids of a
bout ten mugged seven oldies in fifteen minutes – a numerical triumph. Stella Mooney walked into the Vigo Street flat and took a punch in the mouth that broke an incisor. People would tell her that she only had herself to blame.

  They weren’t the Clean Machine crew, that was for certain. They’d trashed the place; they’d had some fun. Anything breakable was broken, the surfaces were tagged, the living space looked as if it had caught the brunt of a small twister. Which is why Stella hadn’t stopped to wonder whether they might still be there; but they were. They’d heard her come in and had heard her shout of anger. Things were quiet for a while: a period of recovery. Then she’d lifted the phone and started to make a call and that’s when they came out of the bedroom, all threats and laughter and crotch-grabbing bravado. Three of them. Baggies, hoodies, big trainers, face-metal. Here’s how scared they were – one of them was on his mobile phone.

  Stella was on to the local uniforms. She broke the connection and had dialled triple nine before one of them stepped up and hit her. Just to keep her quiet. Just to give them some time. She sat down amid broken glass, books, CDs, the contents of cupboards and drawers, and backed off fast, using her heels and hands, but they weren’t coming after her. She had dropped her bag when she fell, so the guy who’d hit her picked it up, taking his time. The sleeve of his hoodie was decorated with a black serpent design like a tattoo. He lofted the bag as if to say thanks, then they collected a couple of bulging black bin-liners from beside the front door and sauntered out and on to the street, the Untouchables.

  They would have gone to the bedroom first, because that’s where everyone keeps the portable valuables. Stella didn’t have a lot of jewellery, but what she had they’d taken. The bin-liners had held her clothes and shoes: not all of them, just the saleable stuff. The sort of items Stella had seen at the warehouse. But these kids weren’t the Clean Machine. They were the Shit Spreaders.

  They’d checked out the living area and trashed it. Then they’d gone back into the bedroom and trashed that.