Cold Sacrifice

by Leigh Russell

  Ian shook his head. The prospect of starting out all over again was depressing, just when they had thought they were getting somewhere. He knew he wouldn’t be able to go home and forget about the investigation. Instead, he decided to go back to the club in Margate and see if he could find out more about Henry’s connection with the young prostitute.

  The stocky doorman responded to Ian’s greeting with dour monosyllables. ‘Have you seen this man?’

  The other man barely glanced at the mug shot of Henry before turning away with an incoherent grunt. Ian leaned forward to hear more clearly.

  ‘What did you say?’

  The bouncer shrugged. Realising the other man wasn’t going to give anything away, Ian dropped his amiable facade.

  ‘If it turns out you’ve been withholding information, you’ll be in serious trouble.’

  The bouncer ignored him.

  ‘Is this worth risking a prison sentence over?’

  For the first time the bouncer turned to face Ian full on as he responded with a question of his own, while his colour rose until his cheeks were flushed.

  ‘Is that a threat?’ he asked softly.

  The bouncer was clearly used to fending off awkward customers. Ian abandoned any effort to worm information out of him. Instead he went inside, breathing in the sweet stale smells of perfume, tobacco, alcohol and sweat. He didn’t recognise the woman in the entrance hall but she seemed to know exactly who he was.

  ‘You again, Inspector.’

  He didn’t correct her. The decision could already have been made. He might be an inspector, without yet knowing it.

  ‘Don’t you people ever give up?’ she went on.

  ‘Don’t you people ever stop giving up?’ he retorted.

  The place irritated him, from the defiant bouncer, to the stale odours of the place, and the insolence of the girls who worked there. He was too tired to cope with their contempt.

  ‘You’re not the first one who can’t keep away,’ the woman added with a sly grin. ‘Some of our girls don’t mind what you do for a living.’

  Ian had heard enough.

  ‘I’m not here to see your slappers displaying themselves. I’m a married man.’

  He was afraid the young woman would despise his pompous words, but she lowered her eyes and was silent.

  ‘I want to see Jimmy Randall.’

  Without meeting his eye again, she led him to the office. Muffled music and cheering were audible as she tapped on the door.

  The manager looked up and grimaced.

  ‘What do you want now?’ he asked, shifting awkwardly in his chair.

  His bloated face grew red. Ian went straight to the point, asking how far back the CCTV film in the entrance hall went.

  ‘What CCTV? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your security cameras in the entrance hall. I need to see the footage, as far back as it goes.’

  ‘You are joking.’

  Jimmy did his best to convince Ian that it simply wasn’t possible to view the film but Ian insisted. He had to resort to threats before the manager finally caved in.

  ‘Go on then, take the whole bloody lot. Take the cameras. Take the bloody furniture. Take everything. You want the shirt off my back?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not my size. I’ll just take the film. For now.’

  Having sorted out access to the security cameras, Ian set about asking the staff and the performers whether they recognised Henry, and how often they had seen him visit the club. It was quickly apparent he was wasting his time. If anyone had seen Henry at the club they weren’t admitting to it.

  ‘We know he was in contact with Della. It’s important we discover how they met.’

  The manager shrugged.

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a club to run.’

  Ian made arrangements to download the CCTV footage to enable a team back at the station to start checking customers who had entered and left the club over the past week, looking for visits from Henry. If they could establish that he had frequented the club, they might discover a pressing reason for his wanting to kill his wife.

  Henry might have been having an affair, perhaps with Della. It was possible he had killed his wife in order to be with his mistress. Then, if Della had rejected him after he killed his wife, he might have had a motive for murdering her too. In order to turn this hazy speculation in to a genuine lead, they had to find evidence that Henry had been seeing Della. The club was as good a place as any to look for indications that they had known one another for a while. But although Ian quizzed all the girls who had known Della, apparently none of them had seen Henry in the club or anywhere else.

  He tried asking them about Della herself, hoping to discover she had been seeing a man they didn’t know by name.

  ‘Della was OK,’ they all said vaguely, one after another. ‘She was all right.’

  None of them was able or willing to reveal anything specific or personal about their dead co-worker. Even the girl who had lived with Della didn’t seem to know much about her.

  ‘I’ll have to find another flatmate now,’ she grumbled, as though Della was somehow responsible for her own murder.

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have done this?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, how many times are you going to ask me that?’

  ‘I thought you might have remembered something new since we last spoke.’

  ‘Well, you thought wrong.’

  ‘Did she have any enemies? Any disgruntled customers? A boyfriend?’

  ‘No. None that I knew of.’

  ‘Would she have told you?’

  ‘I don’t know what was going on with her that she didn’t tell me about.’

  By the time Ian left the club, he was worn out and thoroughly dejected. He might as well have gone home and spent the evening with his wife instead of driving all the way to Margate to waste his time among strangers. Miserably he drove back to Tunbridge Wells. He wondered if Bev was right after all. Maybe he was crazy not to pack it in and find himself a steady job with regular hours that would pay his mortgage and support his wife and a couple of kids, if that was what she wanted. Murder Investigation was a single man’s career. He was in his mid-thirties, married, mature enough to settle down to a regular lifestyle. But he couldn’t forget a simply dressed grey-haired woman who had been stabbed to death, or Della with her painted face, breast implants, dyed hair, false nails and fake identity, both relying on him to champion their cause. Bev would have to wait, at least until he had seen this killer behind bars.

  ‘I don’t care how long it takes,’ he said aloud, ‘I will hunt you down.’

  50

  IT WAS NEARLY TWO by the time he reached home. The house was silent. He made himself toast and peanut butter, and a mug of tea. Creeping upstairs, he undressed in the dark so as not to wake Bev who was lying on her back in bed, snoring softly. When he climbed in beside her, she let out a low moan and turned away from him without waking up. Some homecoming, he thought wretchedly. He might as well have been sleeping alone. He wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who understood his life, someone like Polly. He felt disloyal even thinking about another woman, but his visit to the club had unsettled him. Having started he couldn’t stop thinking about Polly, wondering what she was doing. At two in the morning, she must be fast asleep. He realised he didn’t even know if she had a boyfriend. Finally he drifted into disturbed dreams. Although he was tired, he was relieved when the alarm went off.

  Bev rolled over and sat up.

  ‘What time did you get in last night?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he lied as he pulled her towards him and embraced her. ‘Not too late.’

  Bev had the day off so Ian offered to bring her breakfast in bed. He grinned as she lay back on her pillow and smiled up at him. He threw on shorts and a T-shirt and pottered about in the kitchen, humming to himself. Carefully he laid out the tray with a pot of coffee, a jug
of milk, toast and marmalade, just as Bev liked it. He laid the tray across her legs and climbed carefully back into bed beside her, warm and comfortable.

  ‘Stay here today,’ she urged, munching toast. ‘We can spend the day together, do something –’

  ‘You know I can’t. I have to go to work.’

  ‘Why? One day won’t make any difference. I never see you any more.’

  He wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Nothing had changed. It was always the same when he was involved in an investigation. He resented having to apologise for going to work.

  ‘Phone in and say you don’t feel well, just this once. We don’t have to go out. No one will be any the wiser.’

  ‘You know I can’t. It’s not like other jobs –’

  It was the wrong thing to say. She jumped on him at once, accusing him of being self-important.

  Although she felt nervous about intruders, she didn’t support him in his work to make society safer for everyone. All she cared about was her own personal security. It seemed impossible for him to fulfil his duty to his wife and to society. Loving his wife as he did made it hard to bear, because it was impossible to ignore her complaints. Her wretchedness cut right through him. He tried to imagine how he would feel if he had stayed in a desperately unhappy marriage for thirty years to a wife who refused to divorce him. Thirty years was a long time. But having endured the relationship for so long, it made no sense for Henry to have snapped now, when his son was eighteen and old enough to cope with his parents splitting up. It wouldn’t have required a divorce for Henry to pack his bags and move out. There had been no need to kill his wife, except for the fact that her death made Henry a wealthy man. If Henry was responsible, Martha wouldn’t be the first person to have been murdered for money.

  As soon as he arrived at work, he forgot about Bev. She would be there when he got home. Right now he had more pressing matters to deal with. Confirmation had arrived from the lab that traces of Martha’s blood had been found on Ben’s knife. Yet after their initial excitement at finding the murder weapon, they were no further advanced. Eddy’s alibi was unassailable. Ian wondered how Ben was managing, now his mother’s boyfriend had been released. There was nothing Ian could do to protect the boy in his own home. Social services had been alerted and Ian could only hope they would keep a close eye on the family. At the very least, Eddy knew the authorities were aware of him. It was horrible to think that Ben’s dealings with the police might provoke Eddy to assault the boy. Ian could imagine the conversation.

  ‘What the fuck were you playing at, telling the police I gave you a knife that was used to stab some old woman?’

  It sickened him to think that one repercussion of the investigation might be a severe beating for the boy. The act of murder signified so much more than one terrible death; it triggered worlds of unseen suffering.

  There were no developments that morning, so he decided to investigate Henry further. The evidence – inconclusive though it was – all pointed to him. Although Ian wasn’t convinced Henry was guilty, they had no other suspects. It was clear the two deaths were linked. It would be too much of a coincidence for two women connected to Henry to have both been murdered by chance within the space of a week. Since they were dealing with a stabbing and a strangling, Rob was convinced they were looking for two culprits, the second possibly covering up for the first. Ian was inclined to think one killer was making use of whatever came to hand in attacks that were either poorly planned or else completely unpremeditated. There was nothing to indicate the two victims’ paths had ever crossed: Martha, a picture of bourgeois respectability, and Della, a sex worker with a history of drug abuse. There was nothing to link the two women, or their deaths, other than their connection to one man. Suspecting Henry made sense. All they needed now was proof.

  Ian knew how dangerous it was to be seduced by a theory rather than focusing on gathering evidence. But it was impossible not to speculate. If Henry was the kind of man to lose his temper easily, he might have killed his wife in a fit of rage. Having persuaded Della to provide him with an alibi, possibly by means of a generous bribe, he might have strangled her if she had threatened to go back on her word. She had possibly attempted to blackmail him. Ian wanted to build a picture of the suspect. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was they must have known their killer all along. But they had to prove his guilt.

  Henry installed washing machines for a local branch of a nationwide chain that supplied and fitted kitchens and bathrooms. The receptionist in the showroom didn’t realise Ian was a police officer. When he enquired about washing machines, she began reeling off a list of pros and cons of various appliances, with a clear bias towards the more expensive models.

  ‘We can get a fitter out to you within a week,’ she assured him earnestly. ‘We’ve got a bit of a backlog right now. One of our fitters is off sick.’

  She didn’t seem surprised when Ian introduced himself, but she couldn’t tell him anything about Henry.

  ‘I don’t know the fitters. You need to ask the other men. I just work in the office.’

  Henry didn’t have a partner who regularly accompanied him on jobs. The fitters generally worked by themselves. Those of them who knew him considered him a ‘decent bloke’. If Henry’s bonhomie concealed a dark secret, Ian would have to discover it for himself.

  51

  NOW SHE HAD DELLA’S money safely stashed, Candy was keen to screw as much out of Henry as she could, and get the hell out of Margate before her rent was due. Lots of girls went to London, but when they arrived they were all desperate enough to take any work they could find. Most of them ended up on the streets. With thousands of pounds in her pocket, she could afford to rent a place and take her time finding employment. There must be plenty of well-paid jobs in London for girls like her. She would be able to look around and suit herself, while Joey settled in to a new school. Della had been given the money in an envelope addressed to Henry Martin. Candy had memorised the address before burying it. It wasn’t exactly blackmail, because he deserved whatever was coming to him. And as soon as Henry had paid up, Candy planned to go to the police and drop him right in it before she and Joey disappeared to London. That way he would never be able to come after her.

  Although it was February, and cold, she put on dark glasses and tucked her hair underneath a blonde wig so Henry wouldn’t be able to recognise her again. It would be to her advantage to catch him off guard. Besides, she knew better than to give the police a record of her movements on the CCTV cameras they had everywhere, spying on innocent and guilty alike. Joey was fast asleep on the settee. His duvet had slipped down, exposing a small arm in a yellow T-shirt as he lay on his side, snoring softly. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder before covering him up.

  ‘I’m going out,’ she said softly. ‘I won’t be long.’

  He opened one eye and grunted, half awake. He was used to her irregular hours.

  ‘Things are going to be very different soon,’ she whispered. ‘You won’t be left on your own at nights once we get away from here, I promise.’

  Joey didn’t stir again. This time when she left the flat there was no car parked outside in the street. She wondered if she ought to have told someone where she was going, but it would have been tricky without explaining what was happening, and she had made up her mind she was going to keep all the money for herself. She wasn’t soft in the head like Della.

  It was exciting setting off. She felt like a spy, skulking in the shadows on the platform dodging cameras. She kept her head down on the train to Herne Bay, and scuttled out of the station as quickly as she could. She might miss the last train back, but with what she had coming to her she could afford a taxi home. It took her almost half an hour to walk to Beltinge Road. As she drew near to Henry’s house her legs began to shake until she could barely walk. One of the street lights was flickering. Mesmerised by the trembling shadows on the pavement in front of her, she forced her feet to keep going. The scheme had be
en for her and Della to call on Henry together. Without her friend, Candy either had to abandon the idea, and give up the chance of a lifetime, or go and see him by herself. Driven by the prospect of getting her hands on thousands of pounds all at once, she hadn’t paused to consider the potential danger. Henry had murdered his wife, and then Della. Candy could be his next victim. Now she had arrived, she was terrified.

  She almost turned back, but the opportunity was irresistible. She would be able to go to London and start all over again with a proper life, where she wouldn’t be forced to go out leaving Joey alone at night. Trembling, she rang the bell. Her legs almost gave way when the door swung open. It wasn’t him. The man sitting next to the detective on the television had been middle-aged, with grey hair and a long, sad face. The man in the doorway was in his twenties, with black hair and piercing dark eyes. Her relief turned to disappointment.

  ‘I think I’ve got the wrong house,’ she stammered.

  She felt foolish in her blonde wig, chattering to a stranger. As she spluttered her apology, another figure appeared in the hallway behind the young man. She recognised the long, gloomy face at once.

  Her fear must have shown in her face.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the older man asked.

  The younger man stepped back and slipped away along the hallway, leaving Candy face to face with the man who had killed two women, maybe more for all she knew. Ignoring the temptation to turn and run, she stood her ground, reminding herself this was what she had come for. This was her ticket to a better life, not only for herself but for Joey too.

  ‘I want to speak to you, Henry.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’