Cold Kill (11 page)

Stella moved closer to the place where Sophie had lain. Forensics officers in white coveralls were going over the ground, moving slowly, sampling and bagging among the spikes and the dog turds. She could see where the grass was matted and sticky. When she stepped back to the path, Harriman was walking towards her, a little silver point-and-push camera in his hand.

Stella said, ‘Get someone down to the hospital.'

‘DC Hewitt's on the way.'

‘Is that the camera?'

‘This is it. Be good, I should think: you can't go wrong with these things, self-focusing, automatic flash.'

‘Did you get a verbal report?'

‘The uniforms say she was propped against a tree. There was a ligature round her neck, she was naked from the waist down, the rest of her clothing had been pushed up under her chin. No sign of the missing clothing as yet. The police doctor went with her in the ambulance. According to the
uniforms, the doctor gave it as multiple blows to the head with a blunt instrument.'

‘It's the Valerie Blake MO.'

‘Identical,' Harriman said.

There were streetlights and shop-window neon and headlights, but there were no lights in the park. Stella looked up the path towards the exit that led off to the Harefield Estate. She could see the tops of the tower blocks, a more solid grey against the darkening sky. She remembered walking back across the park with bags from the mini-mart: nine, maybe ten years old; she remembered the man who had opened his coat to her; she remembered the gangs of kids steaming through on stolen bikes. How many of those kids had survived, she wondered; how many had escaped?

Stella Mooney, Detective Sergeant, AMIP-5 murder squad. Most Harefield kids went the other route: druggies, crooks, hookers, dealers. Maybe you don't make the choice, she thought, maybe it's all down to chance, a decision so small you can't remember it, a choice based on next to nothing.

A figure was standing at the top of the path. Stella didn't see him at first because his silhouette was muddled with the railings that ringed the park; then he shifted his weight and, for a moment, came clear.

Without looking away from that shadow, Stella said, ‘The guys in that response vehicle will know the patch. Tell them to drive to the north side of the park. The path we're on now leads to a side street, then there's an alley, then a main road, then you get into Harefield. Tell them to park across the alley.'

Harriman followed her eyeline. He said, ‘Where?', then the shadow moved again. ‘Okay, I see.'

‘I won't move until he does. Go with them. Leave the
driver in the car and take the other guy with you. Call me when you're in position, then start down the alley. I'll move up from here.'

‘Not without some help.'

‘I'll take this guy, Silano. He looks handy.'

Harriman started back to the road, walking quickly, resisting the urge to run. Stella moved a little way into the tree-cover, keeping to the tape-lines set out to protect the site. She wanted to maintain a fix on the shadow, but she had the light from the street behind her, so she was a silhouette too. She moved further into the trees, wanting to be inconspicuous. It was a good thought, though others weren't thinking as fast. The guy driving the response vehicle came off the verge fast, saw a gap between a panel truck and a toy sports, and hit the siren. Harriman yelled at him, but by the time the driver killed the noise they had hit the main road intersection and the shadow was peeling away from the railings, now a lower, sleeker shape – that of a man starting to run.

Stella said, ‘Oh, shit!' She was wearing jeans and trainers but the guy had a good forty yards start. As she started to run, she called to Silano. He was mapping the progress of the forensic search and half heard his name, but when he looked round Stella had gone.

The guy was clear of the path, clear of the alley, out of sight, and the response vehicle wasn't even close when Stella emerged on to the road. Harefield was a grid if you looked at it from a planner's point of view; it was a maze if you knew it well. Straight roads all converging on the bull ring like spokes in a wheel, with circular roads intersecting, but those plain-and-simple routes were overlaid with rat-runs that took you past lock-ups and maintenance buildings,
across the DMZ, back into the surrounding side streets, or underneath the raised tower blocks themselves. Stella knew them all. She didn't think she could overtake the guy by following him, so when she hit the first estate road she ran down it for twenty yards or so, then turned off into a rat-run that would take her straight to Block C,
his
walkway,
his
door. She had no doubt that she was chasing Robert Kimber.

It was dark now, the estate part lit by the orange glow from streetlamps on the main routes. The freezing air hit her lungs and left an ache. She went past a row of garages and came out at the back of the block. Her route would be under the building to the entrance and up the exterior stairs to 16/31. It was a better than evens bet that someone would have kicked the lift doors crooked, so she was trying to pace herself for the climb.

There was light at the perimeter but the walk-space under Block C was a blank. She ran into the deeper darkness, slowing to a jog because she couldn't tell what was in her path. There was a stench: the ripe stew of an inner-city midden. The whoop and wail of a siren was coming at her from the street, but she couldn't tell how close it was. She was looking straight ahead at the far side of the block when she saw the ghost coming towards her.

Pale and skinny and seeming to drift in the near-dark, arms extended to draw you in, just the way ghosts are supposed to look.

Stella stopped twenty feet away. Suddenly, the walk-space under Block C was no place to be. The figure seemed to shimmer, coming and going, as if the darkness were washing over it. For a full ten seconds, neither spoke or moved, then Stella said, ‘Police officer.'

The ghost came a step closer and Stella caught a little gust of rank breath and piss and beer; then the apparition backed off and faded. Stella continued towards the faint rim of light on the far side, the skin on her back crawling.

The walk-space was a reception black spot. When she came clear, she called Harriman, who was already on his way up to Kimber's flat. She said, ‘You thought Kimber too.'

‘Who else? There's a response car and driver in the bull ring.'

‘Okay,' Stella said. ‘Kimber – is he in?'

‘I can hear the TV.'

She met Harriman on the walkway. Robert Kimber came to the door with a beer in his hand. He asked them whether they happened to have a warrant that would entitle them to enter his premises.

They didn't.

He asked them how he might help, but he kept them at
the door. He pointed out that he was halfway through a meal and halfway through a television show. It was a cop movie, he told them.

Stella said, ‘You can't. You can't help.'

Kimber smiled and nodded agreement. ‘I didn't think I could.'

‘Okay,' Harriman said. ‘What odds it was him?'

‘My view? Pretty short.'

‘Because he'd have heard the call-in on his scanner.

Because he likes to watch. Like an ambulance-chaser except he's a scene of crime freak.'

‘Or because he did it.'

‘So we get a warrant, go back, toss his place again.'

‘And count on finding the murder weapon and some bloodstained clothes?'

‘No. Well, toss it anyway.'

‘What for?' Stella asked.

‘Fun.'

‘I've had enough fun on this fucking estate tonight.'

They were making the long trip down the exterior stairway. If you looked out beyond the DMZ, you could see lights from surrounding streets, like the lights from the camp of a besieging army.

The response car was in the bull ring. The driver was sitting very still and watching some kids. The kids were watching him. They were leaning up against the steel window-shutters of a bookie's, a launderette, a KFC carry-out. The shutters bore bright red and green aerosol tags. The only place open was the off-licence, which had a permanent steel-mesh guard up over the plate-glass. The kids had been in and bought some cans.

All boys, early to mid teens. Six of them, maybe eight.

Stella and Harriman walked past the KFC and turned towards the car. One of the boys said, ‘Hey, bitch.'

Stella turned, stepped up and backhanded him in the mouth. It was a good, fast hit and the boy had been smiling at her. She'd shut his mouth with the slap and a tooth had cut his lip.

Harriman closed his eyes for a moment; he said, ‘Oh, good,' and looked towards the response driver, who had taken a baton out from the door-clip and was getting out of the car.

The boy touched his lip with his finger and brought it away bloody. Stella said, ‘Hey yourself.' She walked to the car and got in and waited for Harriman and the driver to join her.

They cleared the DMZ and came out on to the road a little too fast. Stella saw a car she thought she knew: a red Audi with a clutter of books and papers on the parcel-shelf. She looked over her shoulder but couldn't catch the licence-plate. Harriman was looking at her, a smile on his face. He was still thinking of the boy she'd slapped.

She said, ‘I know.' Then, ‘I'm sick of kids like that. They think nothing can touch them.'

‘You touched him. You touched him pretty hard.'

Stella wanted to say:
The last time I hit a guy in the Harefield bull ring, I killed him. I killed the bastard. I killed the arsewipe. I killed him and I think I'm still having trouble with that
. Instead, she took out her mobile and made a call to the locals to let them know that there were eight boys dealing class-A gear down on Harefield. The descriptions she gave would have fitted a hundred kids like that and the copper on the line let her know as much.

‘You're right,' Stella agreed. ‘So bust the first eight you come across.'

She leaned back and closed her eyes. John Delaney drove a car like that. But there were lots of red Audis in London, of course; and why wouldn't you have a few books and papers on the parcel-shelf?

It had been driving on to the Harefield Estate.

You could visit Santa in his grotto. You could win a Christmas hamper. You could buy him/her the gift he/she had been dreaming of. You could stop off at the Ocean Diner for a snowball or sledbanger. You could stand outside Video-land and watch
White Christmas
. Or you could step up to the slick black BMW parked illegally in a residents' bay just off the Saints, carrying a .45 Glock 21 automatic, standard trigger pull, thirteen-round magazine capacity, with the clear intention of killing its occupants.

There were three guys in the Beamer and they really shouldn't have been there. Not because they were in a reserved bay but because that particular half of the postal district was operated by people who expected their drugs and their whores to get exclusivity. Glock Man was on a mission to let them know about that.

The car was throbbing to a low bass: techno-house music. Everyone in the car was bored and the two men in the front seats were reading. They often had to wait and knew to take magazines: they favoured boxing or snatch. As soon as the fourth man came downstairs to join them, they would start cruising the streets round the Strip, handing out street-cut gear to their distributors. The fourth man had hit a streak on the blackjack table just before ten the previous evening and the night had lit up for him after that. This morning, he was a little slow-moving.

The guy in the back of the car said, ‘Could you turn that the fuck down?' He would have called himself more of a
retro man: old-style R & B. And, in any case, he was making a phone call to a girl who didn't want to listen.

He said, ‘We can work this out. We can make it work.'

She said she didn't think so.

He said, ‘Listen, who's been talking to you?'

She said she wasn't naming names.

He said, ‘Don't believe everything you hear.'

She said she only had to look at his lying bastard face.

He said, ‘Oh,
fuck
!' but this wasn't a response to her mistrust. He had seen Glock Man, walking directly towards the car, his hand down by his side to make the .45 a little less obvious. Retro Man dropped the phone and reached into his pocket for his own gun, yelling at the same time. The guys in the front had just enough time to look up before they were hit. Retro Man got off four shots. Two missed, one took the man in the passenger seat in the back of the head, raising a mist of red on the car window, the fourth hit Glock Man in the fat of his waist, spinning him round and dropping him.

Retro Man was halfway out of the car when Glock Man got up on one knee and shot him three times before pitching over on to his side. His gun clattered across the road and went under the Beamer. He levered himself off the road like a man doing the last press-up in a hundred-press routine, got to his knees, then to his feet. You wouldn't call him nimble now; but a hopping lope took him down the street and out of sight in a couple of minutes.

This was around noon and broad daylight. People had taken to doorways or rushed into shops; some had ducked down behind wheelie bins or recycling units; some had hit the pavement and put their hands over their ears. Now, with sirens coming in from two directions, they hurried on.

The front-seat guys had taken ten bullets between them.
They were dead. The windscreen was frosted in red. Retro Man had been shot through the arm, the shoulder and the throat. He lay belly-up across the street with the traffic backed up on either side. He was not quite dead.

The Glock .45 lay under the car.

Sadie had stayed absolutely still during the shooting. When it was over, she'd picked up her bag and found a new pitch two streets away where people were going about their business as normal. She sat down and started ‘Lord of the Dance'.