Erika Foster 04 - Last Breath

by Robert Bryndza

  ‘Was it salty or sweet?’

  ‘Salty… but I think now I fancy sweet,’ she said, swallowing again. ‘And can you get me something to drink?’

  Darryl grinned and went off to the snack bar downstairs.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  After lunch with Marsh, Erika returned to West End Central. She’d been working with the team for the rest of the afternoon and early evening on the information Marsh had given her. At eight thirty, Melanie came back to the station, and she and Erika had a meeting in her office.

  ‘I’m going to request specific data on the employees who live around Greater London, on the borders,’ said Erika. ‘Specifically, males aged between twenty-one and thirty-five.’

  ‘And this is from the waste management company, Genesis?’ asked Melanie, looking over the document Erika had prepared. ‘What evidence do you have to back up a request like this?’

  ‘We’ve spent a long time looking at the locations where the bodies were dumped, trying to find patterns, repeat behaviours. We know he goes for the same type of girl. The only other similarity is that they have all been dumped in general waste recycling bins specific to the Genesis recycling company.’

  ‘Erika, do you think this can be classed as a similarity? Do you know how many households there are in Central London?’

  ‘I would hazard a guess at—’

  ‘This afternoon I sat through three meetings discussing crime statistics and burglaries. There are 886,000 people in Greater London who own their household but have a mortgage; some 862,000 people rent privately from a landlord; social housing accounts for 786,000 homes, and 690,000 people own their home outright.’

  ‘You remembered those figures?’

  ‘They were drummed into us repeatedly,’ she said. ‘But my point is, they have one thing in common. Their refuse needs, or should I say rubbish collection, is done by Genesis. That’s 2.6 million homes. Add to that the millions of businesses that operate in London. And Genesis is one of the largest waste management companies in Europe with 400,000 employees. You think we can just go in there and request data on their staff?’

  ‘We know that he drives a Citroën C3,’ added Erika desperately.

  ‘Oh, well, that narrows it down even more. It’s only one of the most popular cars bought in the past five years. Do you think that Genesis would keep records of the cars their employees drive? Or shall we also go ahead and put in a general request from the DVLA for every driver of a Citroën C3 in the Greater London area?’

  Erika paused.

  ‘I’ve already done that, and we’re working through a colossal list of names. We’re first working through males who have previous criminal records.’

  ‘But as far as we know, this guy isn’t in the system?’ said Melanie. ‘We have his DNA but he’s never been sampled, which leads me to think he’s never been arrested.’

  Erika sighed. ‘Melanie. I have to start somewhere. We’ve tried tracing the car from the CCTV footage, following its progress through the CCTV network, but without a number plate and the amount of Citroën C3s there are on the roads, it’s impossible.’

  Melanie sat back and took a swig of her coffee.

  ‘I know, Erika…Anything you do would have to stand up in court. There are data protection issues, manpower issues. Are you aware that, as well as our issues with the Gadd family who are shareholders in Genesis, two major shareholders sit on the board of the IPCC, who are already dealing with a complaint from the parents of Ella Wilkinson?’

  Erika nodded. ‘But it might lead to a breakthrough; we may have something in all that data that cracks this before he takes another young woman.’

  ‘We don’t know he’s—,’ started Melanie.

  ‘He’s taken three, and the gaps between the abduction and murders are getting shorter. Melanie, I work on my gut instinct.’

  ‘So do dictators, and megalomaniacs,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Look, come to me with something more concrete, tailored and specific. Narrow down who you are looking for, a location where they might work. Genesis has seventeen offices in Central London. Another forty-six nationwide. I will, of course, turn over every resource I have at my disposal, but I can’t write a blank cheque for you to cast a wide net and see what you can catch.’

  Erika stared at her despondently, and then nodded. ‘Keep me in the loop. Close the door on your way out.’

  * * *

  Peterson was waiting downstairs in the station foyer when Erika emerged from the lift. She relayed the conversation she’d just had with Melanie.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I need to think. I need to work out a way to find a needle in a haystack.’

  ‘Would pizza and beer at my place help?’ he said as they walked out and into the cold air.

  ‘Yes,’ she grinned. ‘Yes it would.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  When Darryl had returned with fresh popcorn, Bryony had been very clingy and had insisted they held hands throughout the rest of the film, which had creeped him out far more than the other thing she’d done to him.

  As soon as the film ended, Darryl had leapt up and insisted on leaving. While they were waiting with a big group of people for the lift down to the foyer, he’d overheard one of the ushers, a pretty young girl with a cloud of Afro hair, talking excitedly about how she was meeting a casting director for a drink. From her conversation with another usher, it was clear she was an actress, didn’t know the man she was meeting, and was prepared to flirt quite hard to get on his radar.

  Darryl barely noticed what Bryony was saying as they rode down in the lift. When they emerged from the IMAX, Bryony stopped and turned to him.

  ‘Let’s go and have a drink, or walk together along the river,’ she said.

  ‘I better go, I have to get the train home,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. We could go back to my place,’ she said. Her eyes shone hungrily.

  ‘Sorry, I have to get home, to feed Grendel…’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, barely able to hide her disappointment. ‘I’ll see you at work though? We’ve got the conference tomorrow. It’ll get us out of the office. Should be fun.’

  ‘Yeah. See you then.’

  Bryony leaned in to give him a hug, but he gave her a nod and moved off towards the underpass, leaving her standing under the coloured lights coming from the IMAX.

  * * *

  The next morning all the employees of the company Darryl and Bryony worked for were attending the annual staff conference. It was a big corporation, so lots of money had been spent on hiring the auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall. The staff from Darryl’s building had first been bussed over to the South Bank.

  Darryl avoided Bryony, walking past the seat she’d saved him on the coach. When they arrived at the Royal Festival Hall, he darted off the coach through the side door, then hung around in the toilets, only going through to the auditorium when the address was about to begin.

  He found the dark wooden splendour of the 3,000 seat auditorium, with its high ceiling insulated and studded with lights, captivating. Almost three thousand employees from the twelve London offices of the Genesis corporation had convened to hear a series of presentations and an address from one of the CEOs.

  Darryl sat on the end of a long row, next to a group of men and women he didn’t know from another floor in his building. At lunchtime, he avoided the huge cafeteria and took a sandwich outside and ate it looking out over the river.

  He realised he’d made a big mistake going on the date with Bryony. She was interested in him. She’d watch his every move. He had to nip things in the bud.

  When it came to the afternoon address, Bryony wasn’t having any of it. Back in the auditorium, she appeared out of nowhere and dashed to fill the seat next to him before he had a chance to move.

  The lights went down and then the CEO, a tall bald man, started to speak.

  ‘Hey. You okay?’ whispered Bryony.

  Her large thi
gh pressed against his, despite him trying to angle himself away from her.

  ‘Fine,’ he nodded, looking ahead.

  The CEO droned on, under the misapprehension that their low-level employees actually gave a shit about quarterly results and write-downs. He talked of how every family in the UK used one of their products, and how the company had made an impact on renewable energy. As he droned on through the long list of company achievements, Darryl resisted the urge to stand up and announce at least three families had had their young daughters stuffed unceremoniously into a Genesis branded dumpster. He stifled a girlish giggle which had crawled up his throat.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Bryony. She reached out and put her hand on his.

  ‘No reason,’ he said, pulling his hand away.

  ‘Did he say something funny?’

  ‘No,’ said Darryl. She was annoying him now, making him angry as she pawed at his arm and pressed herself against him.

  ‘Why were you laughing?’ she said coyly. ‘I want you to tell me. I want to laugh too.’

  He turned to her. ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I do,’ she grinned.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He leaned into her ear. ‘I was thinking fucking you might be a challenge. I’d probably have to roll you in flour… In fact, you disgust me. Last night was a mistake.’

  The auditorium then erupted in applause as the CEO took his bow. The audience rose to their feet, and Darryl joined them clapping enthusiastically. He glanced down at Bryony and she looked destroyed, staring out in front, almost in a trance. The applause went on, and she stood unsteadily and pushed past him, tripping as she fought her way out along the row of people, knocking some of them back into their seats.

  He followed her progress as she reached the end of the row and started down the steps. People looked after her, pulling faces, and he wondered if there would be consequences.

  He pushed it to the back of his mind and focused on the young girl he was going to pursue next. The out-of-work actress he’d friended online.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Beth Rose was in her second year of studying at the Drama Centre in West London. Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Suffolk, she had wanted to be an actress, and she’d decided if that didn’t pan out, she was certainly going to be famous. Beth had long dark hair, large brown eyes and a tall, slim, almost gangly body. But she was beautiful, with a clumsiness which endeared her to her friends and peers. Beth stayed with her aunt during term time, exchanging the bedroom she shared with two sisters in a small seaside town for a large bedroom at the top of a town house in Central London. Aunt Marie had been married three times, but was childless, by choice, she always said.

  ‘You’re so much more interesting now you’re an adult,’ Marie had told her when she arrived eighteen months previously to start her Drama course. Marie’s third marriage had been to an investment banker, and as part of her divorce settlement she now lived in Tyburn Road, in a gorgeous house in an exclusive row of terraces on New Oxford Street.

  On Thursday evening, Beth was relaxing upstairs in her bedroom after a long day at school, painting her fingernails Peacock Green. Aunt Marie was downstairs watching Poldark, again.

  The horny cow, Beth chuckled to herself. She was studying her nails, admiring her handiwork, when her phone pinged. She blew on them and picked it up, carefully swiping the screen. She saw she had a Facebook friend request from a casting director called Robert Baker. She quickly accepted, for fear that he’d done it by mistake. She hurriedly blew on her nails again, and then googled him.

  ‘Fuck a duck,’ she said, eyes wide as she scrolled through the search results. He was a known casting director. He was Robert Baker CDG. She couldn’t quite remember what the ‘CDG’ stood for; she wanted to say ‘Casting Director General’, but that wasn’t right. Either way he was part of some union; he was legit. She saw that he did casting for films and TV and he worked out of the Cochrane Street Studios near Tottenham Court Road.

  Beth’s Facebook profile clearly stated she was an actress; she’d uploaded showreel on there, several professional headshots, and it said that she was studying at one of the best drama schools in the country.

  Why else would he friend me?

  Beth believed her life was at the beginning of an exciting journey. A journey filled with infinite possibilities stretching ahead. Bad things happened to other people. She was destined for something life-changing. She always liked to remember where she was when something life-changing happened, and this had to be life-changing. Beth minimised the screen and placed a call to her friend, Heather.

  ‘You’ll never guess who I’m now friends with on Facebook,’ she said.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  The next day was Friday, and Darryl found himself in the evening rush hour traffic, driving slowly into Central London. He was astonished that Beth Rose had taken the bait so fast, and so enthusiastically.

  He’d had a Facebook profile he’d been working on for several months in the name of Robert Carter, and all it had taken was changing the name and photo, and he’d become Robert Baker CDG, a casting director. Robert Baker was real, and he even had his own Facebook profile, but his profile photo was of a black Labrador. As always, it was risky, but Darryl had downloaded Robert Baker’s headshot from the casting studios website, all the time covering his tracks with his VPN software.

  He’d found Beth Rose almost at random, clicking through the Student Spotlight Directory. Actors subscribed to the Directory so that casting directors could look them up, and a typical directory entry gave you the actor’s headshot, their eye colour, weight, height, and vital statistics. With some of the entries there was even a voice sample and a short showreel. He’d liked Beth very much, and her showreel was a scene recorded with a tall dark lad where she’d played a battered wife. It wasn’t from a stage show or a television programme, it looked like it had been made by a showreel service for actors. The production values were low, and Beth was far too well-groomed to play a victim of domestic violence, but she gave it her best shot, and Darryl had enjoyed her fake screams and tears. It was something he could work with.

  She’d taken the bait so fast, responding to the friend request within two minutes. Messages had pinged back and forth all evening, and they’d even spoken on the phone. Now, this evening, he was due to meet her.

  After seeing footage of his red Citroën splashed across the news, Darryl had decided to take Morris’s car, a blue Ford. It had been sitting in the carport since Morris had been arrested and then bailed. His father said Morris was probably too embarrassed to come and get it, so he’d been taking care of it until he showed up, starting the engine each week, and checking the oil. He never did it with Darryl’s car, but then again, thought Darryl bitterly, Morris was a good milker.

  * * *

  He reached the outskirts of South London just after 7 p.m. The interior of Morris’s car had a whiff of horse and straw. It mingled in with the fresh scents of his shower gel and aftershave. Even though he knew this date wouldn’t end romantically, he still liked to pretend. He stuck to the speed limit. He could now drive into Central London without paying the congestion charge, but he tried not to think about the cameras which could scan each number plate, and wondered if they still scanned cars as they came into the capital during the evenings. He’d spent time poring over maps detailing the CCTV coverage, and whilst he couldn’t avoid them, he could certainly dodge the areas with the heaviest coverage.

  His phone rang on the dashboard and he saw it was Beth. He was just driving through Camberwell, and looked to see if he could pull over, but it was a busy road with no stopping points. He checked for police cars, and answered.

  ‘Hey you,’ he said, his voice almost curling around the receiver. He’d decided that Robert Baker CDG had a deep confident voice with a transatlantic twang; after all, he did do castings for American productions.

  ‘Hi. Sorry! I’m just calling
to say I might be a few minutes late,’ she said, flustered. But it was a confident flustered.

  He gritted his teeth and forced a smile. ‘No worries. So what’re we looking at, 8.15?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m having a bit of a hair crisis…’

  ‘Hair on your head?’

  There was silence. He cursed himself for using a bit of Darryl humour, and apologised. She laughed awkwardly and said she’d see him later, then rang off. He chucked the phone back on the dashboard.

  ‘Stupid, stupid IDIOT!’ he said, slapping the steering wheel. He glanced to one side and saw a man and a woman in a car on the opposite side, the woman in the passenger seat staring. He gave her the finger and put his foot down, accelerating past them.

  * * *

  He’d arranged to meet Beth outside the casting studio where the real Robert Baker worked. It was in Latimer Road, a quiet street in Southwark, next to a huge glass office block. Risky, but meeting her outside here was essential for her to buy into the lie.

  He made his way slowly into Central London, and he reached Latimer Road just after eight. He saw the large, long glass office block, which dwarfed the casting studio of smart red brick beside it. A few dribs and drabs of office workers were coming out of the office block, and when he looked up he could see that the offices were empty. He carried on and turned off into the next street, where he found a parking space in front of a boarded-up row of shops.

  Darryl breathed slowly in and out. As the minutes ticked by the inside windows of the car fogged up, his rhythmic breathing coming out in short bursts of vapour. He wiggled his toes and stretched, not wanting his muscles to seize up.

  He was glad she said she’d be late. He thought of her long hair, how her skin and body might feel. Images of what he was going to do to her flashed into his mind.

  At ten past eight he switched on the engine, and the hot air began to flow, clearing the condensation from the windows. He checked that he had his map and the leather sap in the glove compartment. He checked his reflection in the mirror. He was drooling. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and drove off around the block and back to Latimer Street. He passed the entrance to the office block, and saw Beth waiting outside the casting studio.