The Watcher

by Kate Medina

  It was at times like this that she questioned her own sanity at ever having got involved with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes and Detective Inspector Bobby ‘Marilyn’ Simmons. Though, to be fair, it hadn’t been a well-deliberated choice, far more the employment equivalent of boiling a frog. A couple of the cases she had worked on while a clinical psychologist with the Defence Psychology Service had overlapped with civilian cases that Marilyn had been working on, and she had ended up helping him, proving herself far more adept at understanding criminals’ psychology than she had ever expected to be.

  The second of those cases, last November, had been the one which had abruptly ended her army career. She glanced down at the scar that ran across her left palm from the knife attack, still raised and ugly, but faded to a deep brown, no longer the furious purple that had goaded her for so many months. And though her fingers would never be dexterous, her repaired extensor tendons were functioning now, more or less, and her hand no longer felt like the grotesque hand of a mannequin. Her dismissal from the army had pretty much coincided with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes’ last criminal psychologist, Dr Butter, retiring, and the rest, as they say, was history. It filled a gap for both her and Marilyn and, like the scar on her hand, her hankering for her old job was fading, the only connection she now had with the military the man currently asleep in her bed.

  The ping of a text arriving shook her back to the present. Double murder. Shit, she needed to switch her brain on and get moving.

  In the dark, she fumbled some clothes from the cupboard and took them into the bathroom where she splashed warm water on her face, cleaned her teeth, and shucked on jeans and a navy V-neck jumper, the latter fraying at the sleeves where she’d chewed it in a misguided attempt to stop chewing her nails. Never mind, she didn’t imagine that Marilyn’s invitation required a designer ensemble.

  Downstairs, she pulled on her trainers and reached to the key rack for her Mini keys, finding an empty space. Callan’s car was in the garage for its annual service, and he’d borrowed her Mini yesterday. He had learnt to line his shoes on the shoe rack, almost as precisely as she lined up her own, even though she knew that if it was his own house, he’d kick them off in a muddy heap on the doormat. The shoes he managed, to assuage her OCD; the keys were a bridge too far. Shoving her hand in his coat pocket, her fingers closed around a folded envelope which she pulled out so that she could reach back in for the keys tucked beneath it.

  The thick white hallmarked envelope sprang open in her hand revealing the crest of the Ministry of Defence Hospital Unit, Frimley Park Hospital. Callan had told her that his only contact with his neurologist was now six-monthly check-ups and he’d last been a couple of months ago. His brain, the bullet, all fine – he’d told her – so why the letter? Her gaze flicked to the stairs: no sound, the landing in darkness. She could read the letter, shove it back and he’d be none the wiser.

  Her fingers itched as she felt the rough edge of the torn envelope. He hadn’t been honest with her, so she had a right to read it, didn’t she? But then an image rose in her mind, watching her mother standing in the dark hallway of her family home, glancing furtively over her shoulder to check that she was alone – as she had just done – then searching her father’s coat pockets, the two outside, the one inside, finding nothing, sagging, physically sagging with thwarted frustration, ducking down and rifling through his briefcase, more frustration, more repressed, suppressed fury. Watching again, months later, as her mother frantically, blatantly, right in front of her, searched his pockets and briefcase again, knowing in her heart that her husband was having an affair, being stonewalled, told she was delusional, unhinged.

  Her mother had been right of course. Jessie’s father had been sneaking around behind her back for more than two years by the time she had found irrevocable proof, stoking his affair with Diane while his wife cared for their desperately sick eight-year-old son. Living with suspicion had destroyed the remaining soft parts of her that hadn’t already been destroyed by her son’s illness. And seeing her mother, Jessie had promised herself that she would never live that way herself. But here she was, standing in a darkened hallway, Callan asleep upstairs, being suspicious, furtive. She couldn’t read his letter in secret, had to ask him about it. Her own intense obsession with privacy wouldn’t let her invade Callan’s, because she would be furious with him if he invaded hers. Stuffing the envelope back in a vague semblance of the way she had found it, she grabbed the keys, snatched her navy puffa from the coat rack and pulled open the door.

  As soon as you can, Marilyn had said. What the hell was she going to face when she got there?

  8

  ‘Can I go in alone?’

  ‘Alone?’

  Jessie clocked the undercurrent of hurt in Marilyn’s tone and suppressed a smile. ‘You can accompany me, if you don’t speak. If one of your senses is occupied, by noise—’ A pause, the ghost of another smile. ‘Chatter, the other senses don’t work properly. And I need to focus so that I can—’

  ‘Get a sense?’ Marilyn cut in.

  She met his gaze and grinned. ‘No flies on you, DI Simmons.’

  Marilyn rolled his eyes. He was becoming acclimatized to her foibles, her need to immerse herself in the scene alone, or, at a minimum, in silence, to get a sense. In truth, he operated pretty much the same way himself, alone, in silence, trusting his intuition, usually just DS Sarah Workman, his quiet, dependable, supportive crutch, omnipresent. The last case he and Jessie had worked on together, only six short weeks ago – six weeks that felt a lifetime of disturbed sleep and self-recrimination long – she had operated the same way, frustrating him at times by how self-contained she was. The child murder – double child murder – had battered his emotions like no other case he had worked on in his twenty-five years with Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, had dumped his confidence, his self-belief, in the garbage can. He had screwed up unforgivably, blamed himself, rightly in his opinion, for the death of that second child; a little girl he was sure could have been saved if he hadn’t missed the hole, that gaping black sinkhole, in his logic. Her death, that sinkhole, was the reason for his new-found teetotalism. He had felt compelled to offer his resignation, which had been turned down, his exemplary record deemed to have more than made up for that one mistake, however unforgivable a mistake he considered it to have been. But he had been grateful, as he was a walking cliché: the detective inspector with no life outside his job; he would have been rudderless without it.

  ‘Ready?’ Jessie asked.

  She had hurriedly climbed into the forensic overalls and overshoes that one of Tony Burrows’ CSI team had handed her. Now she pulled her waist-length black hair into a messy bun, securing it with the band she habitually wore around her wrist for just such occasions and tucked the bun and stray strands into the overall’s elasticated hood.

  Marilyn nodded. ‘I’m steeling myself for round two.’ He glanced behind him at Cara, who still looked paler than the Fullers’ shiny Dulux Pure Brilliant White painted front door. ‘DC Cara?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Marilyn ignored the waver in Cara’s voice, was happy to give the kid a break. He didn’t have a strong stomach himself at the best of times and was surprised, given the horror show awaiting them downstairs, that his own voice wasn’t wavering.

  ‘Listen and learn, Cara,’ he said, laying a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. ‘Listen and learn from the maestro.’

  Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Could you be any more patronizing?’ she cast quietly over her shoulder as she turned and crossed the pillared porch, Marilyn a step behind her, Cara following a few paces behind him.

  ‘Patronization is the glue in any successful hierarchy,’ he muttered back, with a wink. ‘When he’s an aged DI himself, I expect him to adopt the same condescending attitude, keep the minions from getting above their station.’

  ‘To me, I meant, DI Simmons, not to him.’

  ‘You can handle it, Dr Flynn,’ he muttered, as he followed her
over the threshold, into the Sussex house of horrors. ‘Oh, and just for the record, I don’t chatter.’

  9

  The house was a monument to opulence, an Aladdin’s cave of gilded gold everywhere – staircase, mirror frames, bowls and statuettes – that caught the light cast from the elephantine chandelier’s myriad dangling crystals and threw it around in diamond spangles. Should have brought my sunglasses.

  ‘Walk down the length of the hall and take the stairs, dead ahead, to the level below,’ Marilyn called out.

  Jessie moved gingerly down the hallway as instructed – the combination of overshoes and polished marble life-and-death slippery – past a determinedly masculine study lined with leather-bound volumes (for show, she found herself thinking), a lavishly decorated sitting room, gold photographs adorning a marble mantelpiece (most featuring a stunning white dog with ice-blue eyes, no children visible), then finally a massive kitchen doubtless designed and constructed by some high-end designer she’d never heard of and had no interest in ever hearing of.

  A draught at the bottom of the stairs she’d descended from the hallway to the level below pulled her attention to a door that gaped open, revealing a sunken patio area that segued, via a flight of wide curved stone steps, to the manicured lawn above. Woods hemmed the lawn on all sides, thick and dark, unpenetrated by the deep orange rays of the dawn light. The corpulent form of Tony Burrows, Marilyn’s lead CSI, clad in a white forensic onesie overall identical to the one she was wearing, just a good few sizes larger, squatted on the patio.

  ‘We believe that he approached the house through the woods,’ Marilyn said, as they stepped outside.

  ‘He?’

  ‘Burrows found a couple of muddy footprints on the patio. Men’s. They’re not Mr Fuller’s.’

  ‘What size are they?’

  ‘I’ll have that in a moment,’ Burrows called out. ‘But they’re definitely men’s, unless it was a “she” in clown shoes.’

  ‘Isn’t that possible?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ Burrows conceded.

  ‘The state of the victims, particularly Mr Fuller, concurs with it being a “he”,’ Marilyn cut in. ‘From a strength perspective.’

  Unless it’s a female body-builder wearing clown shoes. Jessie didn’t say it. Marilyn would take her through his first-cut reasoning now, as they surveyed the crime scene, and she would discuss it with him, challenge him. But she had worked with him enough times to know that he would never reach a conclusion without microscopically examining every angle and the nth degree multiple times first. There would be plenty of time to air her more outlandish ideas.

  ‘And he entered the house via this door?’ Jessie asked Burrows.

  ‘Yes. There are a couple of other faint footprints on the marble.’ He indicated two yellow numbered cones. ‘And there’s blood on the floor over there and a patch on the skirting.’

  ‘There’s no damage to the door,’ Jessie said. ‘It wasn’t forced.’

  ‘No,’ Marilyn confirmed. ‘It was unlocked and opened from the inside.’

  ‘That suggests that either they knew the man, were expecting him, or—’ she broke off. ‘Though why then approach through the woods?’

  ‘So as not to be seen,’ Cara ventured. ‘Even if they were expecting him, if he wanted to kill them, he wouldn’t want to be seen by anyone else as he came to the house.’

  ‘There almost certainly wouldn’t have been anyone to see him anyway,’ Jessie said. ‘It was night-time, dark. The drive opens onto a narrow country lane that doesn’t appear to go anywhere much. The nearest neighbours are, where?’

  ‘Those on the outskirts of the village of Walderton, over a kilometre away by road, about five hundred metres as the crow flies.’ Cara pointed. ‘That way, straight through the woods. The dog was found tied to a lamp post in the middle of the village at a quarter-past-one this morning.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘An old lady. She said that she was woken by the sound of a dog barking persistently and got out of bed to investigate.’

  Jessie nodded, gazing out across the flat expanse of lawn, frosty with dew, which reflected the dawn light, making the grass look as if it was scattered with orange diamonds, to the dense, dark wall of trees. No diamonds there, no light, no sparkle. Though she loved solitude, had chosen to live in a cottage down a quiet country lane precisely to avoid unwanted human contact, she also loved the fact that her cottage was small, cosy, just a lounge and kitchen downstairs, two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. If she was feeling nervous, if a case she’d worked on had lodged itself in her brain, she could search from top to bottom in sixty seconds, prove to herself that a serial killer hadn’t crammed himself into her laundry basket ready to rise and strike like a snake charmer’s adder when she was brushing her teeth. Despite her initial intention of living in splendid isolation, she also now loved Ahmose’s fatherly presence next door, loved his presence and loved him, her adopted parent, more even than her natural parents or certainly more than her father. The magnitude of this house, of its grandiose seclusion, made her shiver. She couldn’t imagine swimming in that pool, a goldfish in a bowl watched by – who? Anyone who had a mind to hike through those dense trees. It was the stuff of nightmares. Had Claudine Fuller felt secure here? Though the autumn sun was now rising above the treeline, those dense woods remained unpenetrated by its glow.

  ‘The dog was removed for a reason,’ she said.

  ‘Unless it ran away and someone found it and tied it to the lamp post,’ Cara ventured.

  ‘Had it been seen in the village before?’

  Cara shook his head. ‘The dog teams said that the woman who called it in had never seen it before and it’s a small village and she’s nosy – their words not mine.’

  ‘We’ll question everyone in the village,’ Marilyn said. ‘Obviously. About the dog and about any suspicious people, movements, et cetera, they might have noticed in the past week or two.’

  Jessie nodded. ‘And that’s the closest village?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cara said. ‘It’s the only one within two kilometres of the house.’

  Jessie shuddered. Splendid isolation. ‘Then I think we can assume the dog doesn’t typically run away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bloody run away if I lived here,’ Marilyn muttered.

  ‘The woman … Mrs Fuller, was patron of a number of animal charities,’ Cara said in a resolutely professional tone. ‘I think she would have provided the dog, Lupo, he’s called with a good home. Cared for him, loved him.’

  Marilyn winked at Jessie, then spoke in a similarly professional tone. ‘So, can we assume that our perpetrator removed the dog so that it couldn’t guard? Couldn’t warn the owners of an intruder?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Jessie said. ‘But, if someone, a stranger, can just take the dog and tie it to a lamp post, I’d say that it wasn’t a great guard dog in the first place. What breed is it?’

  ‘A Siberian husky,’ Cara said. ‘They’re not great guard dogs evidently, as it’s not in their nature to be aggressive to people.’

  Jessie nodded. Stepping over to the door through which the Fullers’ killer had entered, she squatted down.

  ‘Don’t touch.’ Burrows’ voice boomed in the eerie silence. ‘Following instructions from Lord-God-on-High to leave everything inside the house as it was until you arrived, I am still to process the door, both inside and out.’

  Jessie placed her hands on her thighs, as much to balance herself in the crouch as to stop herself from involuntarily reaching out and fouling up Burrows’ crime scene. Though she was wearing gloves, she knew that he still viewed her as an amateur when it came to moving responsibly around crime scenes, and he was right to do so.

  ‘There are faint vertical marks on the paintwork near the bottom of the door,’ she addressed the comment to Marilyn – Lord-God-on-High – who was hovering over her.

  ‘From the dog?’ he asked.

  Without answering, she reached out, fi
ngers bent into claws.

  ‘DON’T TOUCH.’ From behind her. Burrows.

  ‘I’m not touching, I’m miming.’ Her gaze grazed from the bottom to the top of the white-gloss-painted door, tracking from left to right as it rose, searching every square centimetre. She looked across and met Marilyn’s questioning look. ‘There’s no glass in the door and no spyhole. And there are no other scratches on the door, not even minor ones, no wear and tear. It’s—’ She paused. ‘It’s as you would expect for a door that belongs to this house – pristine.’ She looked back to the base of the door. ‘Apart from the bottom.’

  The scratches in the paintwork were too far apart, surely, for a dog’s compact claws. So – what then?

  ‘What’s your theory, Jessie?’ Marilyn asked, lowering himself gingerly into a crouch next to her, with audible clicks from both knees and a heartfelt ‘ouf’.

  She didn’t answer. Was thinking, visualizing.

  Not claws. So – fingernails?

  The image made her deeply uneasy. The image of someone – a man – someone with big feet, squatting by the door raking his fingernails down the paintwork. But that image, disturbing as it was, didn’t quite fit either. Could fingernails really cleave these marks in paint? They were too weak, weren’t they, to tear paint from wood? They’d just glance off, leave dull streaks on the paint’s surface, or bend and break.

  A tight, claustrophobic feeling in her chest – So what on earth did make these marks …?

  She looked across, met Marilyn’s searching, disconcerting mismatched gaze. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have a theory. Not yet, anyway.’

  10

  Callan opened his eyes and lay still, staring up at the ceiling. He had been half-aware that Jessie had left, but it had been pitch-black then and he must have crashed straight back to sleep. Now, the dull grey light of morning was seeping through the curtains and his body clock was telling him that it was time to get up for work, even though it was a Sunday. If Jessie had been here, he would have slept in, found something more interesting to do than sleeping, but there was no point in staying in bed alone.