Bright City Deep Shadows

by Graham Storrs

  By the time we left Tea For Two, we had a full description of Mr. X and the events of his dinner with Chelsea. He was an Anglo-European male (“No bugger just says ‘white’ any more,” Ronnie had grumbled as we compared notes), average height, average build, mid-to-late twenties, black hair, black suit, pink shirt, red tie, black shoes, and the astonishing black overcoat.

  “How did you know about the coat?” I asked as soon as it came up.

  “Trade secret,” he said, looking away.

  “Why are you being evasive. What made you think he had a coat?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “All right, then.” He fixed me with his pallid eyes. “If he’d planned to stab her, he was going to get blood all over his clothes. It’s why he wore a pink shirt and a red tie – in this bloody heat. To a dinner date. Since he also planned to walk about a kilometre afterwards, a coat would be handy for hiding his blood-soaked clothes.” The image it conjured was so vivid I felt puke rising in my throat. I looked away quickly and he said, “Told you.”

  Mr. X had arrived before Chelsea. The table was reserved in the name of Jones. When Chelsea arrived, she didn’t give any name, Mr. X was easy to spot from the entrance and he waved her over before she’d had the chance to ask. They seemed to know each other well. Jase thought they might be “relatives or something” because they were friendly but “not all dopey and smiley like people who come in on dates.” I couldn’t help feeling a surge of relief. I trusted Chelsea completely but Ronnie’s insinuation last night had scared me more than I wanted to admit. It was a mystery to everyone why a woman like Chelsea would take up with a bloke like me. I suppose a part of me had always been waiting for her to wake up to the idea that she could do so much better for herself.

  They’d chatted and ordered, laughed even. Jase seemed to have been watching them closely. (“Yeah, watching Chelsea, I reckon,” was Ronnie’s verdict.)

  “How did you know he’d ordered a steak?” I asked Ronnie, remembering him asking the owner.

  “Lucky guess,” he said. And there was that evasiveness again.

  This time, I worked it out. “It saved him bringing a knife with him,” I said, weakly.

  Ronnie nodded and was silent for a while. “It tells us something about our man,” he said. “The guy is the kind of yuppie who has a matched set of good knives in his kitchen – and probably never uses them. If he’d used one of those, the burned remains in the dumpster would have matched the empty slot in his display case. So he needed a different knife. He’s a yuppie so he doesn’t have camping knives or anything like that lying about, so he’d have to buy one. He daren’t go to a shop and do it in case the police can trace it to him. Same with an Internet purchase. Slipping a steak knife up his sleeve was an easy, untraceable solution.” He shook his head. “Our Mr. X is one seriously cautious bloke. He’s been to that restaurant before, too, to case it, and he’s walked these streets, to make sure there are no CCTV cameras and not too many people. A smart guy, a planner, probably with a good dose of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Someone Chelsea knew well. Similar age to her—”

  “Older,” I said.

  “Mate, to seventeen-year-old Jase, you probably look like an old geezer. We need to explore the possibility that she was at school, or uni, with this bloke – as well as all the other possibilities.”

  After they’d eaten, the conversation had seemed to become more intense. “No, not a blue,” Jase had said, “more like they were excited about something. Probably whatever was in the envelope.”

  “What envelope?” Ronnie and Luke had asked in unison.

  “He took it out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table. The girl – Chelsea – wanted to take it but he kept his hand on it and kept saying no but not in an angry or mean way, just kind of all secret squirrelly. You know what I mean? Like she couldn’t look in a busy restaurant but he’d show her later, in private.” Later, he’d put it back in his pocket.

  Mr. X paid cash. They’d left together. And that was all the Tea For Two staff could tell them.

  “Should we tell the police about the coat?” the owner had asked as they were leaving.

  “Yeah, you can if you like,” Ronnie had said and then he’d become all conspiratorial. “But it would be best if you could avoid mentioning our visit. If they know we’re on the killer’s trail, they’ll try and stop us – even if they’re doing a pretty ordinary job of finding him themselves. They just hate relatives sniffing around. They’re as territorial as bloody magpies in the mating season.”

  “So what now?” I asked when we’d been over everything we’d got from the restaurant.

  “Now, me bucko, we go to that café over there, and get an overpriced coffee and a pie to set us up for a walking tour of the lovely suburb of Spring Hill.”

  * * * *

  We found the alley easily enough. The crime scene was almost directly behind the restaurant although Mr. X and Chelsea would have had to walk down two quite major city streets before turning off into it. It was obvious, even to me, that Chelsea had gone willingly. You could not have dragged someone all that way on such busy streets without someone noticing. I had expected police tape and maybe a constable on guard but all evidence that a woman had been brutally murdered had been removed from the alley. We went to the place where the stabbing had taken place. Neither of us had spoken since we set off. I stared at the ground, morbidly searching for a bloodstain that I could not see. Ronnie stood nearby, slowly turning as he examined the buildings all around us.

  “Nothing,” he said in a flat tone.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “Windows. Places people might have been sitting on balconies. But all we’ve got are the backs of shops and office buildings. The cops will have gone around and asked for witnesses but they won’t have got anything.”

  “Why here?” I asked. Even in the daytime, it was a forlorn and dismal place. In my imagination, Chelsea lay in a tangle on the pavement, blood all around her. I set off walking. I had to get away from there.

  “Oi!”

  I ignored Ronnie’s shout, didn’t really hear it. He shouted again. And again. I stopped.

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  I turned, trying to keep my eyes on him, not on the pavement. “What?” I could see as well as he could that the alley was a dead end. The road stopped not twenty metres behind him. “This is the only way out.”

  “No it’s not,” he said. “Think about it. He’s just walked in here with a woman. People on the main road might have seen them. Now she’s dead and he’s covered in blood. He puts on his coat to cover up the worst of it and puts the knife in his pocket. But a curious passer-by might easily spot the mess on his face and hands and they might remember the woman. He can’t risk it. If someone calls the police and he’s stopped, it’s all over. There must be another way out.”

  I looked past him to where the road ended. Beyond it was a brick wall – the back of another office building.

  “Come on,” he said and walked towards the wall. I followed, curiosity overcoming my horror for the moment.

  There was a door in the wall and several windows. The door looked solid. He tried the handle and it did not open. The windows at street level were barred. Then he spotted something in the corner. There was a gate. It was a metal grille, set in a frame that was about three metres high and topped with razor wire. It was locked with a chain and heavy padlock. Beyond it, a concrete path ran between two buildings, disappearing around a corner.

  “This is it,” he said. “Got to be.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  He reached in and grabbed the heavy padlock, pulling it and a length of chain out to show me, The lock looked brand new and so did the chain.

  “Our Mr. X came here earlier that day and cut the chain to give himself an escape route. When the police spotted it – I bet it was your friend Alexandra – the owners replaced it with this new, beefed-
up version.” He got his phone out and pulled up Google Maps. “Yep, this path leads to any number of places he could get out from. Some are practically on a direct route to the dumpsters in Torville Street. Come on.”

  We went back to the main road and walked in silence along the noisy streets to the front of the buildings Mr. X might have emerged from. The sight of that alley had laid a heavy hand on my mood and my mind was full of oppressive images of it, the litter she must have lain among as her life trickled away, the stark brutality of the buildings all around that were the last things she saw, and her murderer, putting on his coat, probably wiping his face and hands with a cloth he brought for just that purpose, feeling satisfied that his plan was working so well. Did she cry for help? Did she beg for mercy? Was it all so sudden and violent that she had no time to speak?

  “Focus on the case,” Ronnie said. “You’re a hunter now, looking for tracks. You’re going to find this man and you’re going to lock him up. His life is over. He just doesn’t know it yet. That’s what you should be thinking about.”

  Maybe it was, but I couldn’t see it that way. It was my life that was over – at least, the life I once had with Chelsea. In a way, I didn’t care what happened to Mr. X. He was irrelevant. He’d hit my life like a runaway train. Smashed right through it. Why should I care what happened to the train afterwards?

  Ronnie stopped and consulted his phone. “He could have come out here and...” He pointed to a street across the road. It ran between a bunch of small businesses, a plumber, a tile shop, that kind of thing. They would all have been closed for the night when Mr. X came by. Beyond the shops were purpose-built blocks of apartments and a few large houses converted to units. It was all quite up-market and very impersonal. It was the kind of street a man in a black coat could walk along at night and never see another soul.

  We followed it and were soon in a suburban maze of rentals with low walls and arrays of post boxes stuffed with junk mail. It was depressing to think that people had come to a place like that and been pleased to find a couple of rooms to live in. Depressing, too, that I had been part of it. Still was, I supposed, when all this was over. Whatever this was. Until then, I hardly felt a part of anything.

  “What are we doing, Ronnie?”

  He looked at me and kept on walking. “I shouldn’t have brought you. Sorry. I didn’t expect you to… Anyway, I thought you might see something, have some kind of insight… I dunno.”

  “Yeah? Even so, what the hell are we doing?”

  He looked at me and frowned. “Tracing the killer’s route. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but why? The police will have done this, won’t they? They found the cut chain. They know which way he went. They probably had cops knocking on every door in these bloody awful streets, asking if anyone saw him.”

  “They talked to the people at Tea For Two as well. Does that mean we shouldn’t talk to them ourselves?”

  “Well… yes, probably.”

  He shook his head and we walked on in silence. When we turned a corner into Torville Street, he stopped and looked along its length. It was another commercial area, something like the alley we’d left a kilometre behind us, with shops and businesses backing onto it. There were dumpsters here – big metal ones. He started walking again until he found a dumpster-sized gap with black smoke marks running up the wall.

  “They took it off to Turbot Street for forensic examination,” he said.

  “So that’s it? A dead end?”

  He squinted at me as if trying to puzzle me out. “You need to engage that king size brain of yours, Luke. You’re not firing on all four cylinders by a very long way. Did you really think we’d come here to look at a burnt-out metal box and that, somehow, we’d find a clue in it that scene-of-crime and forensics managed to miss?” The exasperation in his voice turned to hardness. “Where are we? Right now, right here. Where are we?”

  I shrugged, feeling stupid. “In Torville Street.”

  “And?”

  “Where the murderer burned the evidence. Burned his clothes. Washed his face and hands. Put on other stuff.”

  “So?”

  It felt like one of those awkward scenes from school days where a teacher would keep badgering some unfortunate dummy who hadn’t read the book to come up with an answer he didn’t have a clue about. The rest of us would all know exactly what the teacher wanted – at least, I always did – but we had to sit there and squirm in sympathy as the dummy was tortured.

  “So… he knew the place, knew he wouldn’t be seen, knew he could take his time.”

  “Yeah, yeah. What else?”

  It was becoming irritating and I didn’t like feeling like the naughty schoolboy. “I don’t fucking know. Just tell me.” But, even as he opened his mouth to speak, I realised what he was getting at. “It’s where he left from to go home. There’s a route out of this street and out of this area that takes him to safety.”

  “At last! But where did he go? Did he walk another kilometre – or more – to get home? Risky. He could have been spotted. Did he have a car parked nearby? Or a long way away? Both risky. Or does he live here? In the next street, maybe, or just round the corner, or even over one of these shops?”

  I scanned the buildings around me as if I might see him at an upstairs window looking down at us. “Jesus. Do you suppose the police have thought of that?”

  “Of course – and several other possibilities. He could have called a cab. He might have left a bike here. He might have been picked up by a friend. He might have gone to ground in a pub and left the area two hours later. Loads of possibilities. And they will have thought of all of them and they will have had to check up on every single one of them, if it was plausible enough. Don’t let Reid fool you. He knows how to run an investigation and he’s as thorough and methodical as the next man. If knocking on doors and checking alibis can solve the case, he’ll solve it.”

  “But sometimes that’s not enough,” I said, making the inference from something in his tone of voice.

  “And that’s why he needs his little Italian sidekick.” He grinned. “And that’s why you need me.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Something I don’t understand,” I said as we sat in a hushed and almost empty Indian restaurant that evening, waiting for our meal to arrive.

  “What’s that, Grasshopper?”

  “This guy, Mr. X, has gone to enormous lengths to hide every scrap of physical evidence of his involvement in the murder, right? It’d be unusual for someone to plan a murder so meticulously, wouldn’t it?”

  Ronnie nodded. “I reckon. I’ve got to say, I’ve never seen it before. Murders are usually spur-of-the-moment things: crimes of passion, if you like.”

  “Right. So, given all that, why has he been completely relaxed about letting people see his face? I mean, he could have just jumped Chelsea in the street or gone to our unit or something. Why sit around in a restaurant with her for half the night, then walk down busy streets with her before… you know?”

  “That’s a good question.” He sat back in his chair, settling into the role of wise mentor. “Well, I can think of several reasons. The first, and most important, is that his plan went wrong. He knew Chelsea, and he was having a legitimate business or social meeting with her. He took pains not to go anywhere he was known, to pay cash, and all that but, if the cops had gotten onto him, he’d have just acted all innocent and said he left her in the street and walked home. He didn’t expect the police to connect the dumpster fire with the murder. If they hadn’t, it might have looked like she’d been attacked by some random psycho, or been in a mugging or an attempted rape that had gone wrong.

  “You see, all a murderer has to do to get away with it is to raise a reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. There was no CCTV of him and, without it, there’s only the evidence of young Jase at the restaurant that it was even him. That kind of thing is easily discredited in court. Besides, it’s almost impossible to find a suspect based only on a descripti
on of him, especially if he’s wearing a disguise.”

  “A disguise?”

  “Sure. He had ‘a bit of a beard’, Jase said. How long would it take you to grow ‘a bit of a beard’? Well, maybe not you, you probably haven’t started shaving yet. It would take me less than a week. So Mr. X just had to stay out of sight for a week – go on holiday, go to an overseas meeting, some plausible excuse – and he’s got his disguise. Then he shaves it off as soon as he gets home from doing the deed and, bingo, Jase is on the witness stand squinting at the accused and saying, ‘Well, I don’t know, I’m pretty sure it’s him but, without the beard, it’s hard to be sure.’ I bet you a million bucks Mr. X has been clean-shaven his whole life and can get a dozen intimate friends to swear to it.”

  “So, knowing what he looks like won’t help us.” I couldn’t keep the despair out of my voice. The description of the man with Chelsea in Tea For Two was the only solid lead we had. Every single thing else was guesswork and supposition.

  The meal arrived and we let the waiter put down the various pots and plates. I was paying, of course, so Ronnie had not stinted himself.

  Ronnie began stuffing chunks of meat and naan bread into his mouth. “Thing is,” he said as he chewed, “in an investigation, there is almost no fact that doesn’t bring us closer to the perpetrator.”

  I poked at my vegetarian curry listlessly, admiring his enthusiasm – for the meal as well as our hopeless case – but not feeling any of it rubbing off.

  “Look at what we know already,” he went on, using a fork to emphasise his points. “The killer was a young man who is normally clean shaven. He was planning the murder for at least a week – the time he needed to grow a beard. And he had to stay out of sight for at least the week before the crime. He has visited that restaurant before and walked those streets many times, working out his plan. He visited the alley the day of the crime to cut the chain on the gate he escaped through. We know he knew Chelsea: knew her well. He may have been in her class at uni or at high school even. We suspect he lives very close to Torville Street.”