Cold Kill (2 page)

Stella hadn't spoken a word; there was no right word to say.

The bookies had shortened the odds on a white Christmas to three-to-one. The Notting Hill stores had fairy lights and pint-sized Santas and seasonal two-for-one offers. The all-glass frontage of the Ocean Diner had been sprayed with fake snow. The Notting Hill late-shoppers weren't smiling, though. It was too cold for a smile. They were wondering what the fuck had happened to global warming.

Stella stood on the far side of the road from the Light of India, waiting to beat the traffic. She could see John Delaney at a window table, pouring the Cobra beer that a waiter had just brought and reading through a sheaf of manuscript: the work he'd done that day. He was a features-writer and his current project was winter and the homeless. Like holly and tinsel and cheap perfume, it was a seasonal bestseller.

She liked the way he ran his fingers into his hair, then rested his head on his hand to read. She liked the way he looked: the narrow planes of his face, the slightly uneven
mouth. She liked his wry humour. She liked the way he held on to her after they had made love. All this was new. Until a couple of months back, she had lived with a man called George Paterson, though her relationship with Delaney had started a while before George had discovered it and left home.

Stella and Delaney had first knocked into each other when Stella was involved in a murder inquiry where Delaney had an interest. And ‘knocked into each other' about summed it up: their attitudes had been somewhere between confrontational and outright aggressive. The aggression was the flip-side of sexual attraction, though they had kept sex out of things for quite a while, and Stella had thought that she and George might make it after all. Then sex had become the issue and there was too much heat between Stella and Delaney for George not to notice.

Now Delaney sat at the window table, reading and waiting for her, and she looked across, catching glimpses of him between the passing cars, and thought that she was in love with him and that he was definitely trouble.

‘Attacks on women in London,' he said. ‘It's an old story that keeps coming up new. Five in the last twelve weeks. Was she raped?'

‘Not sure yet. Looks like it.'

‘So not thrill-kill.'

‘You know all the tags, Delaney.'

‘I read the papers.'

She still called him Delaney sometimes, as if it were a sardonic reference to the days when they were at loggerheads, or as if she half expected those days to return.

Harriman and Stella had taken Valerie Blake's parents to the morgue. The father sat in the car, back straight, hands
in lap, like a stone statue. From time to time he said, ‘She's an only child.' The remark seemed to come at evenly spaced intervals, as if the man were counting. He was sitting directly behind Harriman, and each time he spoke the hair rose on Harriman's forearms.

‘She's an only child.'

The morgue was bright and cold, light coming back off steel tables, steel bowls, steel doors. Both parents went in to make the ID. A morgue assistant rolled the body out of its steel cabinet and for a long time no one said a word. The father swayed slightly, but never took his eyes off his daughter and never made a sound and never blinked. Stella looked at the mother; a nod of the head would have been enough.

Finally she spoke breathless, dry-eyed: ‘She's an only child.'

After the attendant rolled the body back, the mother turned to leave, but the father remained, his eyes fixed on the space where his daughter's face had been, as if it had left a ghostly print on the air. It was Pete Harriman who took his arm and led him out.

In an ante-room to that hall of death, Stella sat with Valerie Blake's mother and father and asked questions. Valerie's mother gave the answers. Her husband's name was Howard, hers was Mary. Valerie had a boyfriend called Duncan Palmer. She lived alone. She worked in a gym: as a PA, not an instructor, but that's where the keep-fit culture came from. She had no enemies. She hadn't been acting strangely. She hadn't seemed worried recently.

Rows with friends? No.

Money worries? No.

Relationship with Duncan seem okay? Seemed fine.

Easy questions. Mary Blake gave her answers like someone ticking the box. Howard Blake said nothing; Howard
had gone somewhere. Not that he'd left the room, but he had made a trip inside his head and either he'd found a place that seemed safe and had decided to stay there, or he'd got hopelessly lost. You couldn't have told which by looking at his eyes; his eyes were as hard and reflective as the steel trim on the chairs they sat in.

It was a short walk to Delaney's flat and Stella had found a parking space. It was the kind of combination that made an automatic choice of ‘your place or mine'. Stella was still living in the basement flat in Vigo Street that she had shared with George Paterson. It wasn't a good arrangement: even though George had been back and taken everything he owned, he hadn't taken everything of himself. But some kind of inertia that Stella couldn't properly explain kept her there. The idea that she and Delaney might live together was one of the great unspokens. Stella needed her own space; she also needed to keep her own company from time to time; and she assumed that Delaney felt the same. She told herself that any sane person would.

He made them a drink and, when she reached for it, drew her in, sliding his hand under the waistband of her jeans at the back. His touch never failed. Hadn't failed yet. They made love whenever they were together.

Stella woke in the middle of the night; a sound had disturbed her. She walked naked out of the bedroom and into the living space: stripped floorboards, rugs, a galley kitchen, Delaney's desk, a circular table where they ate, a big area sectioned off by two large sofas, an open fireplace, a television he only ever switched on to get the news. Good for one person; good to visit.

The sound that had woken her came back: someone
playing electric guitar in another apartment, a bluesy sound, long, weeping lines. She went to the tall casement window and the light from streetlamps seemed brittle, as if it had hardened as the temperature dropped. You could almost see the frost taking hold.

Stella leaned against the window-frame, her naked body half in shadow, half in lamplight, a sketchy blue crosshatching by the underside of her breast, the crease of her thigh, the bevels of her cheekbones. She had dark hair and blue eyes, a combination that you noticed at once. She was in her early thirties and still slim enough and pretty enough to catch glances from men who passed her in the street, though when she looked in a mirror, she saw someone who could benefit by dropping a few pounds, fixing her hair and calling by at the gym. Someone had told her that, after forty, women became invisible. Three storeys below, some party-goers went into the All Nite to buy breakfast, or maybe for something to keep the party going.

London is never dark – there's always that luminous glow: the light-mix from storefronts, from cars, from streetlamps, from the windows of the city's raw-eyed insomniacs. Over the rooftops, less than a mile away, Stella could make out a smudge against the skyline: the trees in Holland Park. She saw Valerie Blake's pale body, down and lifeless; saw her own pale, naked reflection in the long window.

The guitar wailed and rose, then bottomed out. A police siren took on the note and modified it. Stella went back to bed, shifting into Delaney's warmth. He stirred and rested a hand on her flank.

‘So am I,' she said, as if he could hear. ‘So am I – an only child.'

‘It's just another day,' Stella was saying, ‘and you've done this before: put on your DKNY T-shirt and your sweats and your running shoes. You've probably got a few different circuits according to how good you feel or when you last went for a run. Do you always go out at the same time? Probably. Different at weekends, maybe. How often do you go? That depends on whether you get home from work early, whether you have a date, whether you think you need a drink more than you need exercise. Today, you'll run. You put your mobile phone and your house key into a zipper pocket. You've already decided that you've got time to run through the park – time before it closes, that is. It closes at dusk: that's what the sign at the gate says. So it's still light when you set out. How much time do you allow? That depends on how fast you run. A slow jog – you'll leave twenty minutes or even half an hour; if you're an experienced runner, you could make it in ten to fifteen. These are things we'll be asking about: how often she ran; what routes; how fast.'

The team briefing was being videotaped: Stella's idea. All briefings would be taped so they could be used to chart the investigation, the way it progressed. The essential factors in any briefing were clarity, shared information, inspired speculation, coffee, chocolate bars, salt and vinegar crisps and a thick, hanging pall of cigarette smoke. Stella had quit smoking some while back, which meant that, given the rough calculation that applies to secondary inhalation, she was down to a pack a day.

In addition to Andy Greegan, Pete Harriman, Maxine Hewitt and Sue Chapman, the team had acquired an exhibitions officer in DC Nick Robson and a gofer in DS Jack Cuddon. Cuddon's job was to act as Sorley's bagman: an information officer, in effect, and a link between AMIP-5 and the people who controlled the budget. Stella thought he'd be good at that; he had the look of a bureaucrat about him – thinning hair, a narrow face, almost prim, a subdued tie. A couple of civilian computer operators would join the team in a day or so, though they would be doubling up on other jobs.

‘Just another day,' Stella said, ‘just another run. Except you never get through the park. Someone stops you and kills you.'

The stills of Valerie Blake were pinned to a whiteboard. She was dead from all angles. The DKNY T-shirt was pushed up and you could see that Valerie was still wearing her sports bra. Somehow, that detail made her near-nakedness all the more startling: the white torso, the thick pubic vee, long legs slightly bent at the knee. Her head was turned to one side, as if better to show off the line of bruising at her throat. Also on the whiteboard was the beginnings of a list of contacts and interviewees. Two carried a single tick: Valerie's parents. There was provision for many ticks: many repeat interviews.

‘We'll get uniform to put an incident board up in the park,' Stella said. ‘There'll have been other runners, walkers, people with kids, people taking a short cut either over the hill to the Avenue or down to Kensington. DC Harriman and I are going back to the parents. When we've got a list of the victim's contacts, we'll organize a division of work. In the meantime, someone had better organize a search team for Valerie's flat. I don't imagine they'll find much, but we'd better take a look. Andy?'

Greegan nodded. ‘Okay, Boss.'

Maxine Hewitt was looking at the stills. ‘Five attacks in twelve weeks,' she said.

Delaney had offered the same statistic. Each of the AMIP-5 officers had noted the earlier killings and had kept track of the resulting investigations. Different teams were involved, although a single term kept cropping up to describe the murders: ‘thrill-kill'. Mostly it cropped up in the tabloid press. Sue Chapman had liaised with other teams, obtained the crime-sheets for each case and distributed them to the members of AMIP-5.

‘Same method,' Harriman observed. ‘Attack with a blunt instrument, probably a hammer, then the garrotte.'

Maxine lobbed her coffee carton into a bin. ‘Wasn't one of the attacks also a rape… or an attempted rape?'

Sue Chapman said, ‘A girl on the towpath between Richmond and Kew. She'd been hit on the head too; then garrotted. And a couple of the others who died the same way were missing items of clothing.'

‘Okay,' Maxine said, ‘Valerie Blake was hit and strangled. Possibly raped. This is our man.'

‘The others were more hurried,' Harriman observed. ‘On one occasion, he was actually disturbed at the scene. No description, just the usual short, tall, fair, dark, twenty to fifty years old sort of thing. But he seems to be getting better at it.'

Maxine said, ‘If he wants to spend time with them – if rape's on his mind – he'd be thinking about how best to allow for that. He'd be doing a bit of forward-planning.'

Stella used the term in her first report: first layer in the colour-coded strata that would build to a mountain of paperwork. Someone sitting down to think about how best
to do the thing: someone choosing a time, choosing a method, choosing the killing-ground.

Forward-planning.

Harriman was smoking to keep warm and no one was going to persuade him that it was a lost cause. As they walked across the car park, Stella said, ‘If you smoke in the car, I'll have to open a window.'

‘You sound like an ex-smoker.'

‘I sound,' Stella advised him, ‘like your superior officer.'

Harriman said
fuck
under his breath, then took a massive last drag and sent out a long plume of smoke and frosted breath that clouded his face as he walked through it. He was wiry-thin, a narrow gypsy face and dark, curly hair; there was more than one woman in his life and each of them knew that, and expected it.

Stella drove, which gave Harriman nothing to do with his hands. She said, ‘Any worries about the parents?'

‘I don't think so. I think the parents are in the clear.'

‘Me too.'

Despite the growing fashion for thrill-kill and death-by-stranger, most murders are domestic issues: a row on the stairs, a row in bed. Rows in the kitchen always gave scope – there are knives in the kitchen.

‘Listen,' Stella said, ‘I don't need to come back with you. Talk to the mother: she's more or less functioning. Get a list of contacts. Did anyone locate the boyfriend?'

‘Not so far.'

Mary Blake had told them that Duncan Palmer worked as a headhunter. Stella had conjured a picture of a man with a loincloth and a nose-bone.