It wasn’t a shock, at all. I’d known it. But it was an irreversible event, a door closing and a door opening, into areas I’d never really thought I’d enter. Not actually. I thought I’d talk about it and plan it but it would never be the right time.
How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.
I wrapped the test kit in newspaper and put it inside a plastic bag. I knotted the plastic bag and put it inside another plastic bag and knotted that, and put the package into a black bin liner and went outside and stuffed the whole thing in the litter bin a few yards up the Grove, outside the chippy.
Then I went back in to my office. I’d tell Barty on Monday. Or rather I’d set about telling Barty on Monday – I had a telephone contact number of an aid organization somewhere in Africa, not, I didn’t think, in Zaire itself. I’d get him to call me back. Which might take days. And until that was done, I couldn’t tell anyone else.
Which meant, I thought perking up, that my clear duty was to get on with business as usual. Which meant I was putting it off. Which meant I was running away. Which meant that I was being unfair to Barty. I made myself pick up the phone and make the call.
It was a good line and the person who answered – she sounded Scandanavian – knew who Barty was, but her manner was strange. ‘You wish him to telephone you? Of course, yes, if – but it might not be so easy, you understand? We are not sure . . .’
‘Whenever he has a minute. Not urgent,’ I said.
‘But – And you are, please?’ I told her I said ‘fiancée’ for the first time, to hear how it sounded. It sounded silly. Pregnant partner it would be from now until delivery.
‘But conditions are difficult, you understand. Do you understand?’ She sounded even odder now, with the local-conditions arrogance you often get from people who work in uncivilized areas and assume that anyone not familiar with them thinks it’s just like being in London.
I assured her I understood to shut her up, and rang off.
Then I listened to my telephone messages. Only one. ‘Er . . . Arthur Fishburn here for Alex Tanner. Please could you get back to me as soon as possible, that’s utmost urgency, please, as soon as you receive this message. I’m leaving this message at noon on Saturday, repeat noon on Saturday, please telephone me as soon as you receive this message. I’ll wait for your call.’ He added his telephone number. Then there was a pause, when all I could hear was his heavy breathing. I imagined him going through the convolutions of his tic. Then, almost shouted – ‘For your own safety! Please!’ Another rasping pause. ‘Er . . . this is Arthur Fishburn, ex-detective constable, Metropolitan Police’, then a crash as he replaced the phone.
He’d sounded sincere. A bit self-dramatizing, that was his style. But sincere, and possibly even frightened.
I dialled his number. The phone rang and rang. I left it ringing until it was obvious that no one would answer, then I let it ring some more.
He’d left the message two hours ago. Maybe he’d got tired of sitting about waiting for my call and gone out. That was most likely. If he thought it was really urgent he might come to the office. He was probably on his way to me now.
I rang Nick’s mobile number. Still out of service. I tried her friend the ex-maths professor’s number, in Oxford, and waited out the ringing even longer than I’d done for Fishburn. No answer Barbara Gottlieb next. Answering machine, with lots of pips to show she hadn’t picked up her messages yet. Fishburn again, in case he’d been in the loo the first time I rang. Still no answer.
So I put on my jacket, locked up the office and headed north to his place.
I turned left off the Grove and into Fishburn’s narrow, empty street. Nobody was out and about, and I didn’t blame them. Half past two on a November afternoon; there should have been some natural light. But above the fog the sun seemed very far away and indifferent. There was a glow from the street lamps and a little dispirited artificial light leaking from an occasional window, but the fog was blanketing that too and seeping, acrid, down my throat.
I stopped outside Fishburn’s house. There was a light in his front room, and the curtains were open today, and the little gate leading to his front path was swinging wide.
I went up the path and rang the bell. No answer.
I stepped onto his handkerchief lawn to look in the front window. The light came from a low-wattage bulb in a heavily redlampshaded standard lamp in the far corner, so the whole room was red-tinted and the front area, near the window, not very bright at all. It was just bright enough for me to see that the walls were covered by pin-boards. On the pin-boards were clippings from newspapers and magazines, none of them legible at first glance.
Certainly, Fishburn wasn’t in there.
I stepped back from the window and looked up and down the street, to see if a watchful neighbour was studying me. No sign of any movement, no twitching curtains that I could see. Dead quiet, suddenly broken by the half-familiar roar of a revving engine from the end of the street. Then, soon, quiet again.
I rang the bell again to establish my good intentions, just in case. Still no answer I peered into the window again, squinting at the nearest wall. At first the newsprint just blurred, then it swam into focus and I could make out the headlines at least. They were all about the Notting Hill Killer. Every one I could read. And when I knew what I was reading, I could make out more of them. On the back wall, I recognized the magazine article Lil had brought me.
The shock was so great that I backtracked and was away down the road towards the comparative crowds of Ladbroke Grove before I knew what I was doing.
It was classic serial killer stuff to keep clippings, to gloat over your handiwork.
Then I slowed down. Fishburn was too old to be the Killer, surely. I already knew he was obsessive and I’d guessed that he was fantasizing about catching the Killer.
I stopped. He’d said he wanted to speak to me urgently. He wasn’t answering his phone. Maybe something had happened to him. He was an old man. Maybe he’d had a heart attack from excitement, and was even now lying in his bleak kitchen, dead. Or not dead yet, but very ill, possibly dying, in which case I could help him. I should help him.
I turned and ran back, in through the gate. I tried the front door, pushing it hard. It held solid at top and bottom – probably bolted. Round the back. Down the narrow concreted path by the side of the house, into the tiny concreted yard. The yard was bordered by a fence. There were no tubs of flowers, no shrubs, not even boxes or garden tools. There was absolutely nothing.
The back door was half open. There was no light in the kitchen. I stepped cautiously towards the door, listening. No sound. Faintly I could hear a dog barking and the steady hum of traffic on the Grove, but nothing from inside the kitchen or the house.
There was no point in waiting. The longer I hesitated, the more reluctant I got. I forced myself through the door in a jumping-into-a-cold-swimming-bath rush and was inside, by the table, before I realized my trainers were squelching and sticking. Looking down through the dimness my once-white Air Nikes were two spattered islets in a lake of blood. I opened my mouth to scream and shut it again as the deep pre-scream breath sucked the sweet, stomach-turning smell into my nose and throat.
I looked for the source of the blood, at first distinguishing nothing in the shadowed kitchen. Then, wedged between the table and the door, I saw a hump of clothes, someone’s kneeling back . . .
Fishburn.
I shifted from squelchy foot to squelchy foot. I didn’t want to look closer, and he couldn’t still be alive, but if he was, I’d kill him by being squeamish.
I moved towards the kneeling hump. As I got nearer, I saw the angle of the head, wedged sideways against the wall, hardly attached to the body, only held in place by the wedging – his throat had been cut, right back to the bone. No blood was pumping from where his neck had been.
So he was dead. Thank God, I thought, feeling guilty even as I thought it, thank God he’s dead, so I can get out of here.
I went back, in the same footprints as far as I could manage it, to the door. Then I untied the laces on my trainers and stepped out of them, leaving them on the back step. That procedure took much longer than I wanted, much longer than I could have imagined because my fingers were shaking and slippery with sweat.
Then I walked back to the road, the fog-damp concrete making my socks sticky in a dreadful mimicry of blood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I was nearly home before I could stop walking. My feet were walking but I was running in my head, and my mouth was silent but I was screaming in my head.
I had no answers or explanations for what had happened. But I knew, at least, that the police had to be told, so I stopped at a phone box and dialled 999, and in a raspy voice as close to baritone as I could manage, I reported Arthur’s death, gave them the address, told them not to waste time on my trainers, and rang off when they asked my name. I was going to keep out of it until I’d spoken to Hilary Lucas. She’d wanted confidentiality and although after this she couldn’t have it, I wanted to warn her first. Plus I wanted time to think and freedom of movement. Once the police knew I’d discovered the body, chances were I’d spend the rest of the afternoon, if not the entire evening, sitting round in a police station.
I went back home. As soon as I got inside the hall door I removed my sopping, disgusting socks, and as soon as I was inside the flat I put them in the rubbish. Then I noticed that the bottom few inches of my jeans were soaked with blood, so I stripped them off and put them in the washing machine, on cold rinse, and fetched a pair of clean jeans from upstairs.
I turned on the central heating and the hot water, ground beans, made myself a decent cup of coffee, wrapped myself in a duvet and sat on the sofa with the telephone. I needed to work things out. Badly. And I didn’t know where to start.
I called Hilary Lucas.
Answering machine. I left an urgent call-back message. If she didn’t get back to me quickly I’d tell the police the whole story anyway, with everything I knew. Which actually amounted to very little.
Fishburn’s death might be related to his dealings with me. If so, it’d be connected with the Killer and Bartlett Close, because those were his dealings with me. Plus his urgent message to me suggested that I was involved. On the other hand, he probably wasn’t Mr Popularity in his own neighbourhood, waging as he did a single-handed war against the local criminals.
But he had clearly been pursuing the Killer on his own account long before he met me. I shuddered at the memory of the Killer Shrine Room, which was somehow more scary even than the Kitchen of Blood. Those clippings were the work of months, not days. He might have stumbled on an unrelated lead.
Philip Gein had been stabbed to death and Fishburn’s was a stabbing death too. It involved a knife anyway. I resolutely blocked the mental picture of what the knife had done. Similar m.o. I’d been pretty sure that Gein had died because he’d accused his illegitimate son of being the Killer, and it looked as if that was Richard Fairfax.
It was all guesswork.
Fishburn had left the message for me at noon, so he was still alive then. I’d found him at two forty-fiveish. How long had he been dead? I should know, roughly, from the blood, surely. How congealed had it been? I forced myself to remember Squelch, squelch. I imagined picking up my feet. The blood had been sticky, almost solid. And the spatters at the bottom of my jeans had been globs rather than splashes. So, he wasn’t all that freshly dead. It would help, of course, if I knew anything accurate about congealing blood.
Between noon and twoish was my best guess. And I’d been with Fairfax for a lot of that. On the other hand the whole procedure needn’t have taken long. Less than five minutes in a car from Bartlett Close to Fishburn’s house, a quick murder, less than five minutes back.
He’d have been covered with blood, though –
The doorbell rang.
I went to the kitchen and squinted down through the window, but whoever had rung was standing too close to the front door to be seen.
I opened the window, shouted, ‘Hang on a sec,’ scrambled into clean socks and a pair of DMs and grabbed my bag and keys. In my present state of mind there were very few people I’d have been happy to let in, and no strangers.
I opened the front door to a stranger, but an instantly classifiable one. An average height, square-built, cheap-suited beige-macked man in his late thirties who showed me his warrant card but who might as well have had CID tattooed across his forehead.
‘Alex Tanner? Sergeant Cairncross. I’m working on a murder investigation and I’ve heard from Superintendent Barstow that you may have some information. Can I have a word?’
It wasn’t a question. He was moving forward as he spoke. ‘Sure,’ I said, slipping past him onto the steps and closing the door behind me. ‘We’ll go to my office. Just along here, come with me.’
Looking rather disappointed, he followed me. ‘Not convenient for me to come in, is that it?’
That was precisely it, I thought, bearing in mind my jeans, still slurping around in a pink-tinted rinse, and the fact that the Killer might be a policeman with a perfectly valid warrant card. ‘I’m expecting someone to meet me at the office,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.’
He made an noise expressive of impatience, distrust and an intention to intimidate. Quite a lot to pack into one grunt. ‘I’m a busy man,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’ I said, ‘but the office isn’t far and you can have a cuppa in the warm. You look cold.’
He looked, more than anything, tired and unhealthy. His brown eyes, set deep behind a prominent forehead, were shadowed, and his greyish skin stretched tightly over a not unpleasant face. He had the kind of straight, fine mouse-brown hair that recedes early and always flops: it hadn’t been cut recently enough and it straggled down inside the collar of his shirt. He didn’t seem hostile but he did seem preoccupied and he didn’t seem actively interested in what I might tell him. This was nothing to do with Fishburn’s murder, for sure. This was the reluctant follow-up to the information I’d asked Eddy to pass on.
Maybe when I told him what I knew about Arthur it would cheer him up. It must be very demoralizing to work on a prolonged, important investigation which made you look more of a wally as every unsuccessful day went by, as every successive body was heaped up in reproach.
‘Tea’s just coming, unless you prefer coffee,’ I said unlocking the office door, putting the light on and waving him to the client chair. ‘Take your mac off, sit down, make yourself at home.’
He ignored what I’d said and began a tour of the room, inspecting Nick’s naïve attempts at office decoration. ‘Much work for you in Cambodia?’ he asked.
‘It’s been dropping off recently. Thailand’s looking good, though.’ This time, his grunt expressed mild impatience and even milder amusement.
‘The guv’nor says you’re all right,’ he said. ‘And the guv’nor’s a good copper. So I take his word for it.’
‘But?’
‘But what he told me you’d said about the Killer sounded like a load of bollocks, excuse my French. I don’t take kindly to members of the public taking up a little light detecting and starting work on a serial murderer to get their faces in the tabloids.’
‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘I have some information. I don’t know how big a load of bollocks it might be. That’s for you to decide. You’re better equipped for that than I am.’
He gave his mildly-amused grunt.
‘Now, Sergeant, do you want a drink, or not?’
He put his head on one side and considered. Could he afford the time? ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘Tea. Milk, two sugars. I’m not on duty. This is by way of a favour to Eddy. You’re off the record. And call me Andy.’ Then he smiled. He looked quite different when he smiled; years younger, for a start. He was probably my age or less.
I went into the little hallway at the back and put the kettle on, feeling relieved. I’d tell him everyth
ing I knew, including that I’d discovered Fishburn’s body, and then I’d be back on the record quicker than he could grunt. OK, so the rest of the afternoon and the whole evening might go down the tubes, but the police worked slowly and I was grateful I didn’t have their job. I didn’t want to see the mutilations on the dead bodies of the girls. I didn’t want to interview the nutters who might have done it. I didn’t want to trawl through mountains of tedious information looking for the speck that might be useful. The least I could do was be a cooperative member of the public.
‘Two sugars?’ I called.
‘Yeah. Actually, make it three.’
The sugar bowl was nearly empty. We kept stores in the battered cupboard under the sink. I opened the cupboard and nearly dropped the mug I was holding.
Inside the cupboard, its red charging light glowing like a warning of danger, was Nick’s mobile phone. The phone she never, ever left. The phone that was damaged if it was left charging for more than twelve hours, as she’d repeatedly told me. ‘You must read the instructions, Alex. It’s ridiculous to spend money on equipment and not read the instructions.’
She’d never have left it on charge. She’d never have left it at all. Not voluntarily.
So where the hell was Nick?
Chapter Twenty-Five
It took everything I had not to show Cairncross I was poleaxed. I hadn’t time to think, I had to make an immediate judgement call. Of course if I told him everything, even about the disappearance of Nick, the Met were much better placed than I was to intervene; with all the information I’d give them they could pile into Bartlett Close.
Eventually.
They’d want to dot the i’s and cross the t’s and do everything by the book first, because the Killer was the last person they’d want to wriggle away free on a technicality.
And I didn’t even know if Nick was in Bartlett Close or if she’d fallen foul of the young men of Bartlett Close. That was where Sam Eyre lived, sure, and she’d been on the Eyre case. That was where I’d pointed Fishburn to. But was it where Nick had gone?
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