Destroy Unopened

by Anabel Donald

  A train went past as I spoke. We waited for the noise to pass. I was trying to work out what was odd about his clothes. He was wearing cavalry twill trousers, a beige check flannel shirt, an old but well-cut tweed jacket and probably hand-made brown leather lace-up shoes. Perfectly ordinary, really. The kind of thing Barty wore when he was going to the country –

  That was the oddity. Barty was in his mid-forties, and very posh, and when he went to the country he often stayed with the kind of people who owned Range Rovers not because they were pretentious but because they needed them, to drive off-road on their estates. For Barty it was a sort of uniform. But for Richard Fairfax, an ex-minor public schoolboy who sounded lower-upper-middleclass and who lived within kebab-sniffing distance of Ladbroke Grove, it was a costume, a dress-up. Unless . . . ‘Are you going away this weekend?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I like London,’ he said. ‘Plenty going on, don’t you find?’

  ‘What do you do?’ I asked, deliberately open-ended, hardly expecting him to reply ‘I’m a serial killer’ but not about to look a gift,’ horse in the molars if he did.

  No such luck. ‘I’m a civil servant,’ he said. ‘As civil as I can manage.’ He smiled at me. Very regular teeth, like his features. Civil servant could be anything, from a high-flyer in the Treasury to a clerk in the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority. It was more likely to be the latter than the former, otherwise he’d have specified. ‘But I don’t have to live on my salary, fortunately. I had a doting great-aunt who left me her property portfolio, useful stuff, bits here and bits there. Nice to have the money of course but it’s also time-consuming. Accountants, managers, brokers, you know how it is.’

  I made no effort to look like someone who knew how it was.

  ‘About the noise of trains,’ he said, his smile dimming.

  He was losing patience. I wasn’t being impressed enough. I smiled. His smile recovered wattage. ‘About the noise,’ he repeated. ‘I got the impression from the agent that the purchaser, Polly Straker, is it? was considering an investment. Building, in fact. If the new building was soundproofed, it wouldn’t matter, would it?’

  ‘There’s that, of course,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I could see the workshops, this morning.’

  ‘It’s not convenient at the moment,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Of course your surveyor will be able to. He’s coming next week, I think?’

  ‘Monday or Tuesday,’ I said, knowing the survey would never happen. A train was passing and I looked around under cover of the noise, hoping I’d missed something I could use as a lead-in to identifying him as Boy. Family photographs, ideally, with a mother and a sister so I could find out if she was called Girl or if she had a learning disability or had died a few years back. But there were no family photographs. Just clothes. Different clothes, I realized. Some as deliberately country-gentleman as the ones he was wearing: others quite different, more Italian Eurotrash smart.

  ‘Hi,’ said a voice. Another young man was in the room: I hadn’t heard him come in.

  ‘Hi, Russell. Meet Alex Tanner, the detective. Alex, Russell Jacobs, the other tenant.’

  Jacobs was the tallest of the three, over six foot, and the thinnest: gangly with prominent wrists and a massive Adam’s apple bobbing distractingly up and down a long neck topped off by a too-small head. He had cropped dark hair, small dark currant eyes set deep under a bony forehead and a shadowed jaw. He was in jeans, a thick dark sweater, and trainers. He grinned at me, revealing widely-spaced teeth, said, ‘Russell Jacobs, the other tenant,’ and flopped down on the sofa beside me. Involuntarily, I moved away, feeling crowded and outnumbered, especially since he and Fairfax were exchanging a conspiratorial glance. Or maybe just an intimate glance. Were they gay?

  ‘You’re the smallest detective I’ve ever met,’ said Jacobs in a flat Essex whine.

  Annoyance came to my rescue, banishing neurotic pregnant-woman fear. I wasn’t going to take that from anyone, no matter if he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. ‘How many detectives have you met, then?’

  ‘You’re the first.’

  ‘Then I’m also the largest detective you’ve met,’ I snapped, taking out a notebook and flipping it open in a businesslike, verging on aggressive, way.

  ‘Largest detective I’ve met,’ he said.

  I looked at him sharply. Was he sending me up? But Fairfax didn’t react, and that was the second time Jacobs had echoed me. A mild form of echolalia, perhaps; a nervous habit.

  Suddenly, poignantly, I was reminded of Nick. On the one occasion I’d agreed to play Scrabble with her she’d come down on me hard for making the word ‘echolalia’ when I could have made a much higher score by adding one high-value letter to an already existing word. I just liked words: she hardly saw the words, only the patterns and the scores. Which was why she was a mathematician, I supposed. Plus she’d been annoyed by not knowing ‘echolalia’, and she’d taken her annoyance out by denying such a condition existed . . . I was drifting off again.

  ‘Vacant possession won’t be a problem, will it?’ I said directly to Fairfax. ‘My client’s a bit concerned about that.’

  ‘Why should she be?’ said Fakfax. ‘Won’t her solicitor be dealing with those issues?’

  ‘In due course, if we proceed that far. But protected tenants can be a major problem, as you’ll appreciate. Let’s see: there are three, isn’t that right? Russell here –’ I indicated him, and he grinned placatingly – ‘Jack and – isn’t there a girl upstairs?’

  ‘A girl upstairs,’ said Jacobs. ‘Yeah, but she doesn’t have a lease. She just rents a room from Jack. An informal arrangement.’

  ‘And she is?’ I waited, pencil poised.

  ‘Samantha Eyre,’ said Fairfax.

  I wrote that down without a sign of recognition. ‘Is she in at present? Maybe I could talk to her.’

  ‘She’s out at work,’ said Jacobs.

  ‘Right. Another time. Now tell me, this was Rillington Place, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You went through all that with Jack,’ said Fairfax. He’d been interested enough to debrief Jack in some detail about our meeting, then. Could just be natural curiosity. Could be because he was genuinely interested in the sale to Polly. Could be because he was supicious of me. He seemed to be watching me warily now, but I didn’t trust my own judgement, the place spooked me so much.

  ‘Do you get any sightseers? Murder buffs, ghouls?’ I said.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Fairfax.

  ‘Never seen any,’ said Jacobs.

  ‘And you don’t feel the place is haunted?’

  ‘Haunted? Hardly,’ said Fairfax.

  ‘It never crossed my mind,’ said Jacobs.

  ‘That was years ago, right?’ said Fairfax. ‘Christie was years ago. Before the war.’

  ‘Before the war,’ said Jacobs. ‘Years ago. And I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I didn’t come away from Bartlett Close with much. I’d definitely located Sam Eyre, that was a plus, but as far as identifying the Boy of the letters I was no further than I’d been the night before. Richard Fairfax was still the best, indeed only, candidate: boarding-school educated with a sister. But the atmosphere hadn’t been conducive to the kind of chat that might have revealed anything about Fairfax’s sister, or his mother, or whether he knew Philip Gein, or if his mother had been on holiday in Rome in August 1970.

  Neither Fairfax nor Jacobs had seemed interested in Christie’s multiple murders. But they’d both been tense, I thought. Or maybe I was imagining it. My antennae kept overreacting: Fishburn spooked me, Jonno spooked me, Bartlett Close spooked me; Nick’s absence was spooking me, and even poor Alan Protheroe had given me a few chills down the spine.

  It must be hormones, I decided, and dropped into the local chemist where I bought the cheapest pregnancy test they had.

  As I turned the corner of Ladbroke Grove to my office, I was sure that Nick would be there. Irrationally sure: I just ha
d one of those pictures, much more vivid than reality, of the light being on and the door unlocked and me hearing the flat click-click of the computer keyboard as Nick caught up with the outstanding work and her sulky face when I bawled her out for skiving.

  From the corner I could see it was dark. From ten yards, I could see someone standing outside. From three yards I could see it was Lil, silent, without Benbow.

  I let her in, turned on the light to chase away the gloom, and put the kettle on.

  When we settled down, her with tea and me with coffee, she still hadn’t said anything. None of the earlier eagerness and bounce. She passed me some photocopied sheets. I glanced at them. A long feature article on the Killer, two weeks old, from the magazine section of a quality Sunday.

  ‘Most of it’s in there, I think,’ she said. ‘He’s a good journalist, that one, accurate and well in with the police. It’s reasonably up to date, and obviously there haven’t been any more murders since. I don’t know how much more you want. And these are my notes.’

  ‘This’ll probably be enough,’ I said glancing through them. ‘Why don’t you tell me the highlights?’

  ‘I’m surprised you haven’t kept up with this yourself,’ she said. ‘Most people seem enthralled by serial killers.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘But you’re not?’

  ‘No. I find it sad and frightening that one human being should do that to another, and that others should want to know about it.’ She looked at me almost defiantly. ‘I know I’m old-fashioned. That’s because I’m old.’

  ‘I’m sorry I asked you to research this, then,’ I said.

  ‘I like research,’ she said. ‘I’m good at it. But this – it reminds me of how much the world has changed for the worse.’

  ‘Lil, how old were you in 1947?’

  ‘None of your business,’ she said spiritedly.

  ‘OK, but remember the late 1940s?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘When the world was so much better?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was. We didn’t have so many possessions, of course, but—’

  ‘But Reginald Christie was living just round the corner in Rillington Place and quietly killing women and stashing them in his garden because he was sexually inadequate? And when it came out, in the fifties, the paper boys were shouting “Christie Murder”, and I bet the newspapers’ sales shot up?’

  ‘Well,’ she said. Then she smiled. ‘You’re right. I agree with you about that specific point, but I still feel—’

  ‘Not now, Lil, OK?’

  ‘Later, perhaps? That was almost a discussion, you see. Nobody ever discusses things with me any more.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, since you just stand in the streets yelling out Dickens.’

  ‘In the place where I live, I mean. The staff are too tired and the inmates are too senile.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I said dismissively. ‘Now, are you going to brief me on the Notting Hill Killer, or do you want to go and find a counsellor to complain to?’

  ‘You’re decidedly bossy,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘I’m also your boss,’ I said equally neutrally.

  We looked at each other. Then she unwound her scarves and took off her hat, revealing wiry, curly grey hair. ‘Tell me what you want to know.’

  There wasn’t much I hadn’t actually known already, I thought as I closed the door behind her, after I’d sent her up to check that Sam was actually working at the pizza place on Notting Hill.

  I sat back down at the desk and looked at the notes she’d given me. According to the article, they were short on forensic evidence. No sperm, no saliva, no blood. A careful murderer, or perhaps a deliberate campaign of misinformation by the police.

  Apart from that, now at least I had the dates of the murders so I could check and eliminate Alan Protheroe as a possibility. If I could be bothered: suspecting him was absurd.

  There were details I’d forgotten. In each case the girl had disappeared while out shopping on a Saturday, although not always from the Notting Hill area. I’d been wrong about that. The first was from Notting Hill proper, the second from the north end of Ladbroke Grove near where it met the Harrow Road – only Notting Hill if you were an estate agent or a journalist stretching a point. The last two were from different districts of London, one from Hampstead and one from Islington.

  The Saturday suggested the killer was someone who worked a Monday-Friday job. Or, since all four girls worked Monday to Friday jobs, someone who knew it would be easier to pick them up then.

  I made myself another mug of coffee and nibbled on a dry biscuit, not because I felt sick but in case I did. I ought to eat some proper food, with vitamins. In a minute I’d do the pregnancy test, and listen to my messages, and ring Barbara Gottlieb and probably Mrs Eyre, but right now I was beginning, despite myself, to be interested in the Killer. Not the man himself, but the puzzle. What, apart from their physical appearance, did the victims have in common?

  Victim one, from a house in Lansdowne Crescent, just up the Grove in the smart direction, was eighteen and had died in January. Her father was a merchant banker, her mother a graphic designer. She had an older sister. She was on a gap year, waiting to go up to university, and earning some money working locally as a receptionist in a cable television company. Her parents knew better than to co-operate with the media, but an unnamed friend described her as ‘jolly, with lots of friends, no special man’. She’d gone out shopping – not for any particular item, just browsing – and been due to meet her sister for lunch at one in an Italian restaurant near Harrods, but had never appeared. So presumably she’d been picked up in the morning.

  Victim two, twenty, March, the north Ladbroke Grove one, was much less upmarket. She lived in a council flat on a big estate with her single-parent mother, a checkout operator at the local Sainsbury’s, and three younger half-siblings. Her mother had sold her story to a tabloid so there was plenty of information about the girl, most of it sentimental rubbish, which boiled down to a harmless, aimless young woman who liked clothes and make-up and clubbing and her boyfriend. She worked as a Post Office counter clerk. She’d slept in that Saturday until noon and then gone out to the Portobello Market. At seven o’clock that evening she didn’t turn up to meet her boyfriend at the local pub to go clubbing, but the boyfriend thought he’d been stood up and her mother thought she was with the boyfriend and she wasn’t actually missed until her body turned up on Tuesday.

  By now perhaps the killer, assuming he was local, thought it was safer to move further out for victims. Victim three, eighteen, May, a dental hygienist, was the only child of elderly and careful parents. She’d disappeared between twelve and one: she’d popped out to the local electrical shop two streets away from their house in West Hampstead, to get some spotlight bulbs for her bedroom. Her father had gone out to look for her when she was late back for twelve thirty lunch. Her father was a dentist, her mother a housewife, and the girl sounded as respectable as you’d expect from her background. No boyfriend. Presumably Daddy Dentist would have threatened prowling youths with root canal work.

  Victim four, nineteen, July, had disappeared even further afield: in Islington. She’d come south from Liverpool, worked on the switchboard at a local computer components manufacturer and lived in a flat-share. She’d last been seen by one of her flatmates at ten o’clock when she set off to do the last-minute shopping for her cut-price package holiday to Tenerife. She was due to depart in the early hours of Sunday morning. Her flatmates had supposed she was in Tenerife until her body was found, on Wednesday. According to them she was ‘funloving,’ which being translated and considering she’d been murdered, probably meant ‘a right scrubber’.

  What connected them? I couldn’t see it – not surprisingly. It was ludicrous to hope that I would see at a glance what the police had failed to see in months.

  All that struck me were the differences. The girls came from utterly dissimilar backgrounds, assorted classes, educationa
l levels, temperaments, sexual experience, religions – January was Church of England, March Roman Catholic, May Jewish, July nothing. Three of them still lived at home, but at their ages, with their income levels and the cost of housing in London, that was normal.

  So the killer chose them for their looks, and nothing else. The four faces, in photocopied black and white, were equally pretty, equally ordinary. In the colour which would have shown their blonde hair and blue eyes they’d have looked not just like sisters but like quadruplets. And Sam Eyre’s photo added in made quintuplets.

  He picked them on looks. Blonde, pretty, young and small. But where had he seen them? Victim three, May, was perhaps the oddest from that point of view. The other three were all heading for busy shopping areas, which the killer could be patrolling, but May only intended to walk through two quiet streets in a backwater. Was it sheer luck that he’d seen her? Or had he known where she lived and waited for her? Spotted her in a more public place and followed her home, and then bided his time?

  And once he’d located them, how did he persuade them to go with him? And where did he keep them, for the three or four days before the body was dumped? For most of that time they’d have been alive, according to the article. Alive, and being tortured, so presumably noisy.

  In a very isolated area, perhaps – in which case, not Notting Hill. Or a soundproofed room. Which might be anywhere.

  Then he dumped them in Wormwood Scrubs. Which didn’t necessarily mean that he lived near Wormwood Scrubs, of course.

  So the Butcher of the Bella might have nothing whatever to do with the area.

  I put the article in my desk drawer, closed it, and took a deep breath.

  Pregnancy test time.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The test had been easy enough. Dip the little white plastic stick into the urine sample, and wait two minutes to see if two lines appeared in the display area. I deliberately spent the waiting time making coffee. When I looked again, there they were. Two distinct lines.