The Watcher

by Kate Medina

  Fishing his mobile from his inside jacket pocket, he glanced at the name flashing on its face: DC Cara. Much as Marilyn liked the kid and rated him, he had a tendency to overshare.

  ‘There needs to be a significantly better than good reason for this call.’ His tone left no room for misunderstanding. If he was expecting a nervous stutter in response, he was disappointed.

  ‘There’s been another one, sir.’

  His dulled brain took a moment. He was about to ask, Another what?

  ‘Fuck,’ he said with feeling. The police car. NMP. Not my problem. Fate was a comedian. ‘What’s the address?’

  He memorized it near enough, an estate of mid-range Stepford-Wife-type houses in Birdham. His idea of dying and being transported straight to hell without passing ‘Go’. The wash of blue from the marked cars and the ambulance would guide him to the exact street.

  ‘I’ll be there in ten. Hold them off until I get there. Call Flynn.’

  He contemplated, for a brief millisecond, dashing upstairs and changing his shirt and suit. Hold them off until I get there. He didn’t have time to change. Cara was in a tense stand-off with the paramedics regarding a potential witness – the daughter, he’d said. Marilyn hoped the girl was of coherent speaking age.

  As he stepped back into the street and pulled the door closed, an unsavoury whiff filled his nostrils. The drains – they’d had problems with them in the summer. Something to do with people pouring the hot fat from their frying pans down the sink, causing a clogging ‘fatberg’. The mind boggled.

  Another step, another whiff. Wave, actually a wave. A whiffy wave.

  Not the drains. Him. Me. The smell of sweat, of stress leaking from his pores, of an autopsy suite, the smell of death and viscera hanging in every molecule of oxygen in the air. The only consolation, that everyone else on the job would smell in varying degrees of the same.

  37

  ‘Sorry, mate, you’re too late.’

  ‘My detective constable told me that he asked you to wait,’ Marilyn snapped.

  The paramedic shrugged, Marilyn’s barely contained fury water off a duck’s back to him. He was of a similar age to Marilyn, late forties, skinny and rangy, with the same no-nonsense air of ‘seen it all, done it all’ that Marilyn wore like a second skin. He also looked as if he’d had a long night – nights – and had as few reserves of patience left as his detective inspector alter ego.

  ‘You wouldn’t have got any sense out of the poor kid anyway. She was jabbering, and who could blame her? She got back from a fun night on the town to find her parents butchered.’

  ‘My job is to stop that happening to anyone else,’ Marilyn said. ‘Which is why I needed to speak with her urgently.’

  ‘And my job is to look after my patient. Tomorrow … today,’ the paramedic corrected, glancing at his watch. ‘Mid-morning. You should be able to speak with her then.’ Stretching out two wiry arms, he clasped an ambulance door in each hand and slammed them in Marilyn’s face.

  As the ambulance pulled away, bathing them in electric blue, Marilyn swung around to Cara. ‘Get to St Richard’s and stick to that girl like glue. Call me the second, and I mean the absolute millisecond, she wakes up.’ He turned back to Jessie. ‘You got here quickly.’

  She lifted her shoulders. ‘There wasn’t any traffic.’

  Marilyn nodded. ‘You look as well dressed as I do, though hopefully you smell better.’

  ‘I hope I smell better too.’

  ‘Is it that obv—’

  Her smile cut him off.

  ‘Can you not tell that I’m not in the mood for jokes?’

  Jessie raised an eyebrow and smiled again, the smile as much effort as the first. ‘Do two negatives make a positive?’

  Why was she bothering to try to lighten the atmosphere? Neither of them were in the mood for lame banter, though she had some vague idea that joking might lessen the negative impact of what they were about to see behind the bland facade of this modern house. Wishful thinking. Her gaze moved past Marilyn, to the neighbours lined along the ‘Police! Do Not Cross!’ tape, some in nightclothes – pastel-coloured nighties or striped pyjamas in various shades of blue under thrown-over-the-shoulder coats – others hastily dressed; everyone, irrespective of their state of attire, saucer-eyed and flap-eared. She knew that Marilyn’s gaze, focused thirty metres beyond her left shoulder, was taking in an identical line of neighbours manning the tape barring the other end of the street. A press van was there too, she knew. It had pulled into the road as she’d climbed out of her Mini.

  ‘This second murder is going to create a shit storm,’ Marilyn murmured.

  ‘Yes.’

  One couple’s murder was an isolated incident. Shocking, gruesome, fuel for dinner-party chat for weeks, but still an isolated incident. Two was a crazed serial killer, the stuff of nightmares. Of bogeymen hiding in every cupboard.

  ‘We need to find him, solve this, urgently. Pronto. Post-haste.’

  Jessie nodded. ‘Yes,’ she repeated.

  There was nothing else to say.

  38

  The house, white-painted, with battleship-grey window frames and a steeply pitched, grey-slate-tiled roof was stylish, minimalist, coastal. A yachtsman’s residence, it would probably be described, if it were being marketed by an estate agent.

  Soon, Jessie thought, grimly.

  Not that, despite its enviable position, a couple of streets back from the foreshore of Chichester Harbour, on a quiet executive estate of similar, three- to four-bedroom detached houses, it would be an easy one to sell. She’d happily bet they’d get a host of viewings though.

  ‘Gravel.’ Marilyn’s voice cut through her thoughts.

  ‘Loud gravel,’ she concurred.

  Even muffled by the horrified hum from the mirrored lines of neighbours and dulled by their forensic overshoes, her and Marilyn’s footsteps crunched audibly on the wide drive as they walked from the road to the front doorstep, their gazes sweeping from side to side, up and down, taking everything in.

  ‘And no way to get to the front door or any of the front windows without walking on the gravel,’ Marilyn continued.

  The gravel drive, shielded from the road and the neighbours on either side by a three-metre-high privet hedge, widened halfway down to span the whole width of the house to allow, Jessie presumed, in estate agent parlance, ample parking. At night, in silence – and it was silent out here, only the ping of metal yacht lanyards against masts, out in Birdham Pool and Chichester Yacht Basin, to mar it – anyone approaching the house from the front would have been audible.

  Would their man take that risk? Yes, if he’d known that the daughter was out, that the parents would most probably be in bed on a Wednesday night and perhaps they’d watched TV, had a few drinks at home, crashed out early and that anyone approaching the house would be assumed to be their daughter, Sophie. Perhaps they even left a spare key hidden somewhere. It would be typical, wouldn’t it, on a quiet, out-of-the-way executive estate like this to feel secure enough to hide a spare key. The door hadn’t been forced, so their man had either found a key, picked the lock, or perhaps he had been brazen enough just to walk up to the front door and knock, knowing that any knock would be assumed to be Sophie’s forgotten key.

  How much had he known? Enough, certainly.

  The grey and white theme was echoed inside the house: grey wood-veneer floors throughout, white walls, simple, elegant, too modern and soulless for Jessie’s taste. From the entrance hallway, they could see straight through to a vast lounge, the back wall, floor-to-ceiling glass bifold doors, the end one open. Tony Burrows and one of his CSI team were moving around in the garden, ghoulish in their white forensic overalls, under an arc light.

  Even inside the house, the front and back doors ajar, Jessie could hear those pinging lanyards and, overlaid, the rhythmic tap-tap-tapping of a tree branch on the roof. Away from built-up areas, sound carried. She knew that from her own cottage, from the bleat of new-born lambs
in spring – she could hear them even with the doors and windows closed.

  They checked the downstairs quickly, knowing that Burrows’ forensics team would crawl over it with a fine-tooth comb, that the only thing they were really doing, despite their overalls, was adding to the forensic footprint, making his job more difficult. By tacit, silent agreement, they moved to the bottom of the stairs, upwards, a thick carpet, the same slate grey as the flooring downstairs, silencing their twin footfalls. The upstairs of the house was lit only by the arc lights set up in the drive and the back garden, shining through the windows; Marilyn had demanded that the crime scene be left as it had been found, until he and Jessie had had a chance to see it.

  Their feet squelched as they reached the top of the stairs.

  ‘Water,’ Marilyn murmured unnecessarily.

  Jessie nodded silently. The armed response unit had been in first, cleared the house. She knew, logically, that she and Marilyn were alone upstairs, that no one was going to drop silently from the loft hatch, or slide out from under a bed the moment their backs were turned, but even so she could feel the beat of her heart in her chest, like the thump of a tribal drum. She glanced over at Marilyn. Was his heart beating as hard or did twenty-five years’ experience make even this horror mainstream? She was pretty sure that she never wanted to find out.

  They moved further down the landing, passing two other bedrooms, the one to their right used as an office, the one to the left the daughter’s room, to judge from the mess of clothes carpeting the floor and the posters of boy bands papering the walls. God, Jessie must be getting old when twenty-year-old boy band members looked prepubescent.

  A sudden slam, so loud. Jesus. She spun around, her heart rate rocketing. Where had it come from? Upstairs, with them?

  No – the back door, she realized, a millisecond later, her pulse still through the roof.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Tony,’ Marilyn yelled back over his shoulder towards the stairs.

  ‘Sorry guys.’ Burrows’ voice carrying from outside. ‘Will someone prop the bloody back door open and properly this time.’

  The husband and wife were in their bedroom and en-suite bathroom, they’d been told, at the back of the house. Water pooled around their overshoes as they stepped into the bedroom. Walking on water, Jessie thought stupidly, like Jesus. Water. Again. What has water got to do with it?

  Watching.

  Water.

  Too many ‘w’s, she thought randomly, stupidly.

  Scratching.

  Sniffing.

  Too many ‘s’s.

  The silhouette of a figure slumped in the doorway, his back to them.

  A man’s figure.

  Beyond him light.

  The only light left on in the house. Left on or switched on deliberately to illuminate a stage setting? Theatre.

  ‘Is his wife in the bath?’ Jessie murmured.

  ‘Yes.’ Marilyn’s voice was monotone, without colour.

  ‘His eyes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jessie inched sideways. She didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to, had to. How the hell had she arrived here, in this place, in this exact moment in time? One slash of a knife nine months ago and she was invalided out of the army, floating, struggling to find a purpose. Marilyn had given her one, but now, on the spot, she was pretty sure that she didn’t want it.

  When she and Marilyn had been walking up the stairs and along the dark landing, Jessie had been desperate to switch a light on, flood the house with light, with safety, but now, here in the Whiteheads’ minimalist bedroom, she was grateful for the darkness, for the cloak that it threw over Daniel Whitehead. The wild animal gouges just dark streaks down his cheeks, the blood pooled on the curve of his middle-age spread, a benign black patch, his sightless eyes, John Lennon sunglasses, small and round.

  Beyond him, under the stark bathroom theatre lights, Jessie’s gaze found his wife. Mrs Whitehead. Eleanor. Her long dark hair fanning out, as if her head had been caught in thick dark seaweed. Dark. Mrs Whitehead was dark, Claudine Fuller blonde. An irrelevant detail, another minor, irrelevant detail; her mind fumbling for the mundane to insulate itself from the horror.

  ‘I’ve seen enough,’ Marilyn said.

  She nodded. ‘More than.’

  What she hadn’t seen in real life, she would doubtless see in relentlessly unforgiving technicolour detail in the crime-scene photographs. It wouldn’t matter if she didn’t wallow in it now, masticate on every detail. She had most definitely ‘got a sense’.

  ‘Let’s get out of here and let Burrows get on with his job.’

  Jessie nodded. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d agreed with Marilyn so readily.

  39

  The red eye of the dummy CCTV camera surveying the Paws for Thought car park blinked in the darkness, the camera lens unseeing as a pale figure crossed the deserted tarmac and picked the front door lock. The red eye of a second dummy CCTV camera inside the reception area reflected off the toughened glass as the door swung open and the pale visitor stepped silently through, closing and locking the door carefully behind. Moving across the tatty lino, the visitor slipped out of a second door that led into the indoor kennel compound.

  The dogs, asleep in their baskets, woke and began to whine as the pale figure walked on softly padded feet, between the two lines of cages. At first, the dogs had leapt at their cage doors, barking and growling, but they were used to the visitor’s scent now, a scent that was so similar to their own, used to the noises he made as he walked, almost as silently as one of them would have walked, down the concrete walkway. His scent was their scent. The noises he made, their noises.

  The water in each dog’s bowl was full, clean bedding and toys in each cage – the people who ran the shelter were fastidious in their attention to detail, unswerving in their love for the dogs they rescued – but he stopped by every cage to check anyway, making sure that each dog had everything he or she needed, taking care of his dog pack.

  The last cage on the right-hand side of the walkway was empty. The visitor knew that the cage was almost always left empty. Sliding the lock gently sideways, he opened the cage door and stepped through, closing it, locking himself in. The bedding smelt of his scent, the toys bore his claw and teeth marks. Curling into a tight doughnut, he laid his head on the soft fleece bedding and closed his eyes. He would sleep the light sleep of a dog for a couple of hours, surrounded by his kind, absorbing the love and security of the pack, and then, well before first light, he would be gone and no one would know that he had visited.

  40

  ‘Coffee, Marilyn.’

  Marilyn reached out and took the Costa cup that Workman was proffering. ‘Spot on, Sarah. Thank you.’

  Workman eased another cup from the cardboard four-cup holder and held it out.

  ‘Latte, Jessie, no sugar.’

  ‘Oh … thank you. That’s kind of you.’ Jessie smiled, genuinely, she realized for the first time in a good few hours. ‘And it’s just what I would have ordered myself.’

  ‘I have a great memory for coffee orders.’ Raising an eyebrow, Workman tilted her head towards Marilyn, who had already mentally moved on and was surveying the front of the Whiteheads’ house, his forehead creased, thinking, imagining, running through scenarios. ‘It’s one of the main reasons he keeps me around,’ Workman added.

  ‘There are many and varied reasons that he keeps you around, Sarah,’ Jessie said. ‘Coffee being a very good one, I agree.’

  She liked Workman. The first time they had met, Jessie had taken in the shapeless navy shift dress and blunt-toed, low-heeled matching navy courts and had assumed that Workman would be as solid and uninspiring as her clothing choices; great in a crisis, but not first choice when exploring creative ways to crack a case, or when it came to having fun. She had mentally chastised herself shortly after, realizing that she had jumped to a totally false first impression based purely on looks, and that, given her profession, she should have known bette
r. Her only defence was that she was human and therefore not immune to the cognitive biases that caused people to make snap judgements of others, shallow, baseless, first-impression conclusions. It took the average person the blink of an eye to form that first impression and only three seconds more to form a ‘complete’ conclusion.

  Now she knew better, she could see how valuable Workman was to Marilyn, beyond her uncanny memory for coffee formulas. She was his rock, to Jessie’s molten lava. His back-up to Jessie’s challenge, his support to Jessie’s goading. She realized also, until Workman had approached her about Robbie, that she knew nothing about her beyond the job. She took a sip of the coffee that Workman had brought. It hit the spot immediately: a hot, milky shot of adrenalin.

  ‘I saw Robbie,’ she said in a low voice, lowering the cup.

  Workman glanced over and met her gaze. ‘Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time. I know how busy you are.’

  ‘We’re all busy.’

  Workman gave a pensive nod. ‘Did you meet Allan? His father?’

  ‘Just briefly. He let me in and we had a quick chat. He was very grateful.’ Embarrassingly grateful.

  ‘He’s at the end of his tether.’ Workman ducked her gaze. ‘He thinks that Robbie will commit suicide. Do you …’ she let the sentence tail off.

  ‘Do I believe that he’s suicidal?’

  Workman nodded. Jessie shrugged, noticing the slump of Workman’s shoulders in response to the lift in her own, not in any way surprised by it. Her profession was often viewed as a quick-fixer, a plaster cast for the soul. Unfortunately, damaged minds were not an easy fix.

  ‘I don’t know, is the brutally honest answer. I didn’t see him for long enough to make that determination. He’s obviously very disturbed by what has happened … by his whole life basically, from the time his mother abandoned him, through the years of bullying. He clearly blames himself for his mother’s departure, for breaking up his family, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he blames himself for being bullied. Life hasn’t given him many good breaks.’ She waved a hand in the direction of the Whiteheads’ house. ‘I was planning to see him again today, but the Whiteheads’ murder has probably put the kibosh on that.’