Friends to Die For

by Hilary Bonner

  Perhaps because he was afraid, he allowed his temper to get the better of him again.

  ‘Oh go fuck yourself,’ he said.

  Vogel conducted the interview with George himself, backed up by Parlow, who sat to his left in the small, windowless interview room. George sat opposite Vogel, alongside his lawyer, Christopher Margolia, who’d arrived at the station within half an hour of his presence being requested by George.

  Vogel stared hard at George while Parlow went through the preliminary formalities of stating the names of those present, and the time of the start of the interview, for the video record.

  Could this be their murderer? Vogel thought George still looked more bewildered than anything else. From the moment of his second arrest he had proclaimed his total bafflement, insisting he had done nothing to warrant further questioning, and that he had no idea what could have led Vogel and his team to re-arrest him. At least he appeared to have shed his earlier arrogance.

  Now he sat in his recycled paper suit looking around the interview room, waiting for the interview to begin. He did not appear unduly distressed. He certainly wasn’t in a panic. Indeed, he seemed quite calm.

  Vogel once more placed the photograph found in George’s wallet in front of him.

  ‘Would you please tell me again, Mr Kristos, who this young woman is?’

  A flicker of annoyance passed over George’s face, but when he replied his voice was level and conversational. ‘My girlfriend, Carla,’ he said.

  Vogel then placed in front of George a piece of paper bearing the printed phone number George had earlier pointed out on his impounded phone.

  ‘And do you recognize this phone number, Mr Kristos?’

  George nodded.

  ‘So would you like to tell me whose number it is?’

  ‘I told you already, it’s my Carla’s.’

  Was it Vogel’s imagination or was Kristos blinking more rapidly than was normal? He wasn’t sure.

  ‘Mr Kristos, we have managed to trace that number, and presumably you will not be surprised to learn that it is the number of a pay-as-you-go mobile phone which you bought last year with your Visa credit card, the last four digits of which are 5006. We have also traced a later payment you made for that phone from the same card.’

  George shrugged. Vogel noticed that he was frowning.

  ‘Would you like to comment on that, Mr Kristos?’

  George seemed to be making an enormous effort to look nonchalant.

  ‘So what?’ he asked eventually.

  Vogel kept his manner easy.

  ‘Mr Kristos, it would seem that this phone does not belong to the woman you say is your girlfriend. Moreover, we have reason to believe that Carla Karbusky does not exist. We have made extensive enquiries and been unable to trace the young woman whose picture you keep in your wallet. Perhaps you would like to clear this matter up for us?’

  George’s frown deepened. He remained silent.

  ‘My client does not wish to answer that question at this stage,’ said Margolia.

  Vogel ignored him. It was his turn to frown.

  ‘Mr Kristos,’ he persisted. ‘I do not believe that this photograph is of your girlfriend. Perhaps you do not have a girlfriend. And perhaps you would like to tell us who the woman in this picture really is? Would you do that for me, Mr Kristos?’

  George leaned forward in his chair and looked down at the photograph on the desk before him. It was almost as if he were seeking inspiration from it.

  Margolia seemed about to interject again, but George suddenly looked up at Vogel and said, ‘OK, I suppose I’d better tell you. I don’t have much choice, do I? Carla doesn’t exist. And I don’t have a girlfriend. People tell me I’m a good-looking bloke, but I never seem to be able to keep a girl for more than five minutes. All the Sunday Clubbers, my mates, they tease me rotten about it. Have done for ages. So last year I thought I’d put a stop to it. I invented Carla. I bought the pay-as-you-go and programmed the number into my own phone so I could be seen to be calling my girlfriend, leaving her messages and so on. It wasn’t as if I could bring her to meet ’em, could I?’

  George’s cheeks had turned pink. He looked flustered. But then, he was an extremely proud young man. Indeed, Vogel had found him arrogant. Perhaps, having gone to such lengths to create a fictional girlfriend, Kristos was simply embarrassed at being caught out.

  Vogel looked down at the photograph on the desk. He’d been frustrated by it from the start. He still had a feeling that he knew the young woman, but he was no nearer to recalling who she was.

  ‘So who is this woman in the photograph, Mr Kristos?’ he asked.

  George held out both hands, palms upwards. ‘I’ve no idea. I cut it out of some magazine, scanned it into my computer and reprinted it. That’s all.’

  ‘Which magazine did you find the picture in?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t buy magazines, so it must have been one I found somewhere. Probably someone left it lying on a seat on the tube, or a bus.’

  ‘I see. Why this particular picture?’

  ‘No reason. I thought she looked nice, that’s all.’

  ‘So you gave her the name of Carla and built up all this pretence around her, even to the extent of buying a second telephone so you could call this non-existent person. All because you wanted your friends to believe that you had a girlfriend when you didn’t. Is that so, Mr Kristos?’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’

  ‘Mr Kristos, could you tell me please where you were in 1998?’

  Vogel had changed tack without warning and he watched the reaction of his interviewee extremely closely.

  ‘What?’ asked George. He just looked puzzled.

  Vogel repeated the question.

  ‘Uh, 1998.’ George did some counting on his fingers.

  ‘I was in college, studying drama,’ he said eventually. ‘I left in 2000.’

  ‘Could you tell me the name of this college?’

  ‘The Willesden Academy of Performing Arts,’ he said. ‘Manchester.’

  Manchester, thought Vogel, getting on for three hours away from London’s King’s Cross in 1998. Those kind of logistics obviously did not mean that Kristos couldn’t have been responsible for the earlier murders, but it did make it more unlikely. Vogel continued to study George carefully. The other man continued to look merely puzzled. Vogel would get it checked out, of course, but he suspected George was telling the truth.

  ‘I think you’ll find the place has closed down,’ said George, almost as if he were reading Vogel’s mind.

  ‘You haven’t asked why I wanted to know where you were in 1998,’ said Vogel.

  George shrugged. He did quite a lot of shrugging. ‘I assumed you’d tell me when you were good and ready,’ he said.

  He has not totally lost his arrogance, thought Vogel.

  ‘Two young women were murdered in the King’s Cross district of London in October and November 1998,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe that their killer may also have murdered Marleen McTavish, and perhaps Michelle Monahan.’

  George raised both eyebrows.

  ‘So you thought you might try to pin that on me too, did you?’ he asked. ‘Just because I claimed to have a girlfriend when I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s a bit more than that, Mr Kristos,’ said Vogel, unsure whether it was or not.

  ‘I think you are clutching at straws, Detective Inspector,’ said George.

  You really are an arrogant little bastard, thought Vogel. But unfortunately you’re not far wrong.

  You should realize that everything you have told us concerning your fabrication of the fictional Carla Karbusky will be fully investigated,’ said Vogel, trying to ensure that neither the tone of his voice nor his facial expression gave any indication of his inner frustration.

  ‘I don’t see what the big deal is. OK, so I invented a girlfriend to get my mates off my back. I know it was daft, but it made me feel better about myself. But, it’s
not a crime to say you have a girlfriend when you haven’t. It’s not illegal, is it Mr Vogel?’

  George seemed ingenuous enough. But there was something unnerving about him, as if, even when under arrest, he was playing a game. Vogel didn’t know what to make of it all.

  ‘No, it’s not illegal,’ he replied evenly.

  ‘No. And it doesn’t make me a murderer, either, does it?’

  ‘No,’ said Vogel again. And with that he got up from his chair and walked out of the interview room, leaving Parlow to complete the formalities.

  Kristos was dead right. The man’s behaviour was curious. A little weird even. But that didn’t make him a murderer. And Vogel had no real evidence against him. Not yet anyway.

  He marched resolutely into the large office which had been designated for the use of MIT. Vogel had a feeling about George Kristos. His gut instinct told him they could very well have found their man. But his gut instinct wasn’t going to persuade a judge and jury.

  ‘I want Kristos’s flat turned over again,’ he said. ‘Get the SOCOs there, and tell them to take the floorboards up, I want them over everything like a rash. And let’s dig into his background. Where are his parents? Are they alive? I want everyone in his life spoken to. Let’s go right back to his drama school days, and before.’

  Vogel surveyed his team. There was a palpable excitement in the air at the prospect they might just have their man in custody. But excitement could be dangerous in these circumstances. It could lead to some vital clue being overlooked. He was determined that no such mistakes would be made in this case.

  ‘If we don’t come up with some hard evidence, we will have no option but to release George Kristos. And I do not want to be responsible for putting a killer back out there on the streets.’

  twenty-three

  Two hours later, just as he was considering having another crack at George, Vogel heard that Karen Walker had been killed.

  The first report was that she’d thrown herself in front of a train at Leicester Square tube station and had died instantly.

  PC Jessica Harding in Command and Dispatch phoned Vogel with the news as soon as the response team first on the scene called in their report. Karen’s body had been identified by the contents of the wallet removed from her handbag. The body itself, Harding told Vogel, was in a condition which would have made any other immediate identification almost impossible.

  Vogel was stunned. He did not believe for one moment that Karen had committed suicide. His immediate reaction was that she too had been murdered, presumably by the same individual who killed Marlena and Michelle Monahan.

  ‘When did this happen?’ he asked PC Harding. ‘Presumably as Karen Walker went under a train, we have a precise time of death?’

  ‘Yes, guv,’ answered Jessica Harding. ‘Transport police have logged the incident at 10.25 a.m. this morning.’

  Vogel leaned over his desk and buried his face in his hands. Had he really got everything so wrong? He and Parlow had arrested George Kristos at 9 a.m., and he was still in custody. Kristos could not possibly have pushed Karen Walker under a train at 10.25 a.m. For the second time a suspect would have to be released because he was in police custody when a murder occurred. The investigation seemed to be going round in circles.

  Vogel reconsidered the possibility of suicide. Karen Walker had been extremely distressed by recent events, not least by her own and her husband’s arrest the previous day on suspicion of murder. Even so, she’d seemed so devoted to her children that he could not imagine her leaving them motherless. And in spite of the anger she was feeling towards her husband after discovering that he’d had dealings with Tony Kwan, Greg and Karen had previously enjoyed a good and solid marriage.

  No. The detective still did not believe that Karen Walker had committed suicide.

  As Vogel saw it, he’d failed once more. The killer had claimed a third victim. And that victim was female, like the previous two – or four, if you counted the 1998 murders. The removal of the reproductive organs certainly indicated that gender was a factor. Should he have arranged for Karen Walker to stay at a safe house instead of returning home?

  His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Nobby Clarke. She told him to get himself to the scene, leaving her to handle the deployment of the rest of her MIT. Vogel ordered Parlow to commandeer a CID car, for the second time that morning, in order to rush them both to Leicester Square.

  In the car he steeled himself for the task ahead. He had once before attended the scene of a train death, and the sight which had presented itself, that time on an over-ground line, remained with him still.

  As Vogel had expected, Karen Walker’s body was in a horrific state. Both legs had been removed from her body when the train hit her. Worse still, she had been decapitated.

  Her body had already been tented off by the time Vogel arrived at Leicester Square station, and the platform closed. It seemed that the British Transport Police were accustomed to such events and handled them with an efficiency born of tragic familiarity. Three BTP officers were on sentry duty stoically preserving the scene. The Home Office pathologist was not yet there, but the SOCOs, who had apparently arrived just before Vogel, were already beginning to go about their business.

  The first thing Vogel saw inside the tented area was Karen Walker’s head, distorted and discoloured, like a watermelon on a bloodied stem. It lay several feet from the torso to which it had once been attached. And its bulging eyes seemed to be staring at Vogel.

  The detective felt his stomach lurch. His head began to spin and he felt sure that this time he would pass out and fall over onto the railway, or maybe onto a bit of the body. The more he tried to fight the disorientating giddiness rising within him, the more consuming it became.

  He decided he had no choice but to beat a fast retreat. He backed quickly out of the tent and hoisted himself up onto the platform, trying to breathe deeply and evenly. It was probably half a minute or so before his head stopped spinning, and only then did he become aware of Parlow standing alongside him. The detective constable had obviously taken the opportunity to emulate his superior officer’s exit. His skin was a sickly shade of green, and Vogel noticed that he was wiping his mouth with a paper tissue. He glanced down at the grey concrete. Parlow had been sick.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the DC.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Vogel told the embarrassed officer. ‘Could have been much worse. I knew a rookie PC once who, first time on a murder, threw up right over the corpse. SOCOs weren’t at all pleased.’

  ‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Parlow.

  Vogel smiled. ‘Right, let’s go back in and get this over with,’ he said, just as Dr Fitzwarren arrived.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen. Everything under control?’ she asked, glancing pointedly at the mess on the ground by Parlow’s feet.

  Vogel waited ’til she was out of earshot then told Parlow to take no notice.

  And it was with some satisfaction that, as they returned to the tented area, this time following the pathologist, he became aware that even her detachment and iron control seemed to falter when she took in the scattered parts of Karen Walker’s body spread across the track.

  ‘First impressions?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vogel,’ she replied.

  ‘Things are not always as they seem,’ said Vogel.

  ‘How very cryptic,’ responded Patricia Fitzwarren. ‘Have you ever considered compiling crosswords for a living?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Vogel.

  He didn’t know why they were indulging in banter in the face of such horror. But perhaps it was because of it. This kind of behaviour was a common reaction among police officers, doctors, and indeed the staff of all emergency services.

  ‘I bet you have, too,’ responded the pathologist. ‘Look, we don’t need to ponder too much on the cause of death, do we? It’s more a question of did she jump or was she pushed – and looking at the state of the poor woman I doubt we’ll be able to throw much l
ight on that. But I’ll do what I can here, then we’ll complete the post-mortem back at the morgue. D’you want to come?’

  ‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ responded Vogel, who found post-mortem examinations even more disturbing than crime scenes and preferred to avoid attending. ‘I’ll wait to hear.’

  He left then, Parlow at his heels, wondering why he’d rushed to Leicester Square tube station in the first place. He wasn’t sure he had learned anything, and he’d certainly been of no assistance at all.

  There was another even more unpleasant task to be performed for which he had absolutely no appetite. The one every copper dreads. The death call.

  ‘Right, Parlow, we’d better go see Greg Walker,’ he said. ‘Break the news.’

  Unless he already knows, Vogel pondered to himself but did not add. For he could not yet rule out the possibility that Greg Walker had been the one who’d killed her.

  Greg was in no danger of finding out anything. After his wife had left he’d gone back to his makeshift bed on the sofa and laid there, enveloped in misery. He supposed it was his own fault that she’d walked out on him and left him in this state. He should have entrusted Karen with the truth about his past when they’d first met. But he hadn’t been able to. And as the years had passed it had become more and more impossible to do so. He’d told her he’d messed about with gangs and been involved in the odd punch-up down the market, and that his pal Wiz had died following an accidental fall. The reality had been far worse. The punch-ups down the market had been knife fights. Wiz, another young Triad recruit, had been shot by a couple of Kwan’s henchmen after being caught out in some act of betrayal or disloyalty. Greg had never been told the details. But because it was known that he was Wiz’s friend, he had been ordered to help dispose of the body. Kwan’s heavies had stood over him giving orders as he dismembered Wiz’s corpse and placed the body parts in bin bags. He’d then delivered the remains to an East End pet-food factory run by Kwan’s uncle. As Kwan intended, the horrific experience had proved a most effective warning, one Greg had never forgotten. His participation had given Kwan a hold on him, and made him terrified of the consequences if he ever tried to break free.