Cold Kill (20 page)

‘So there's another one nailed.'

‘It's not my case,' Stella told him, ‘and this guy's tricky. What about the other scenes of crime?'

‘Blake and Simms? Nothing. He wasn't there.'

‘How much does it mean?' Stella asked. ‘DNA at the scene, DNA not at the scene?'

‘It's the Bible,' Davison said. ‘It's the word of God. Also, it's how I make a living.'

‘You could be somewhere without leaving a DNA trace.'

‘It's feasible, but very unlikely.'

‘How unlikely?'

‘Full cling-film body-wrap unlikely.'

‘But your DNA could be found in a place where you'd never been.'

‘Tell me how.'

‘Someone plants it.'

‘That's an interesting notion; we could discuss it over a drink.'

‘Let's discuss it now.'

‘And keep the drink social?' There was a pause before he said, ‘Look, this guy Cotter wasn't at your scenes of crime and the mystery man whose DNA
was
at the scenes
wasn't
present at the five previous attacks. Separate events, different guys. That's the testimony I'd give in court. You're not married, are you?'

‘No.'

‘That's right.'

‘What do mean – “That's right”?'

‘I asked around. People said you weren't married.'

‘Are you?'

‘Oh, sure, of course. Almost everyone is.'

Marilyn Hayes put some progress stats down on Stella's desk, then walked across to the drinks dispenser and bought herself a coffee. Something that looked like coffee. On her way, she passed Pete Harriman's desk and brushed his hair with her fingertips. Harriman smiled without looking up.

Stella had noticed lately that there was a lightness in Marilyn's step and a glint in her eye. She wondered about Mr Hayes: whether he'd noticed those giveaway signs. Perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps he'd noticed but didn't care. Perhaps he'd noticed and was biding his time, building a head of anger, working out what to do. She imagined him parked outside Harriman's flat, stranded between tears and fury, watching for silhouettes on the shade. She wondered whether George had ever done that and whether, when he had found out about her affair with Delaney, he had wept or cursed her or wished her dead.

Patricia is local. She works for an estate agent near Holland Park Avenue and her flat is in Blanveld Road. She gets a bus to the crossroads then takes a shortcut through the churchyard. Shes tall and she wears that long black coat most of the time and her hair doesnt look natural to me but I dont mind. In places its too red or else theres too much black in it. Shes very pretty you might say beutiful and she has great legs the boots really suit her. I follow her most nights but sometimes another. Or her and another. Sometimes she goes to meet a friend sometimes a man calls at her flat but I dont think hes special to her. He stays the night but then sometimes its a different man. Shes playing the field. If I get close I can smell her perfume – its flowers but with a tang. I like her neck. Ive got seven of her up on the wall and Ive written a story about her. About me and her and how things end. She doesnt know how things will end but I know.

He picked her up as she crossed the road from her workplace in the first flush of dusk, going to meet a client in Queensdale Road: walking distance. They went into a ground-floor flat and spent half an hour. He watched lights coming on as they went from room to room.

He followed her back. The agency was glass-fronted and only partially masked by property details. He went to a fast-food place across the street and bought a cup of coffee so that he could watch her at her desk making and taking phone calls. She wasn't wearing her coat and he could see more of her figure. She had good high breasts and her Armani trousers tucked up nicely under her rump.

He watched as they left, one by one. There were five of them and she was the fourth to leave, saying goodnight, putting on the long black coat. When she walked to the bus stop, he joined the waiting group but stayed well back. When the bus came, he waited until he saw her sit downstairs, then jumped on as the doors were closing and went to the top deck.

He was breathing quickly and smiling a secret smile.

He could feel an erection starting. That often happened. He looked out at the streets and the people, all of them going about their business without any understanding of who he was or what he did. He was special, but no one could see that, which was just the way he liked it. He slipped a hand into his coat pocket and felt the steel, cool against his palm.

Ten or more people got off at her stop. He stayed back, putting five bodies between them. He knew where she was going, so there was no need to hurry just yet, but he needed to be close when she got to the churchyard. He measured his pace: fast enough to be gaining on her; not so fast that she might get a sense of him. Stare at someone long enough and you nudge their instinct – make them look up. People who are followed sometimes feel the same close, intimate attention and look round for its source. He didn't make those mistakes. The pro. The hunter. The Invisible Man.

When she opened the gate of the churchyard, he was twenty feet back. The path went directly towards the porch, then curved off to the left. As she went out of sight, he quickened his pace, losing her for a moment, but finding her again as they both walked alongside the church. This was the tricky bit. If she turned now, she would see him. Of course, he was just another person taking the same short cut, no one to fear, but that wasn't the point. To be seen was to lose the game.

The path went between gravestones and leafless trees towards a gate on the far side that would bring her back to the street and within a hundred feet of her door. He hurried now, needing to close the distance. At his back, the lit windows of the church glowed; a choir was singing, clear on the icy air.

Now she was within ten feet of the gate. People were visible in the street, but the churchyard was full of shadows. He came close enough to touch and reached out, lifting a skein of hair with his left hand, using the scissors with his right, then turned immediately and walked off between the gravestones and the trees.

She opened the gate and stepped into the street. She was humming along with the choir.

*

Mike Sorley's cigarette packet read
SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND OTHERS AROUND YOU
. Sellotaped underneath that was a strip of paper on which someone had written:
This means us!
He shook out the last cigarette and crushed the pack one-handed before lobbing it into the trash. When he lit up, he coughed for half a minute.

He said, ‘We had incident boards up in the parks –'

‘At all exits and entrances,' Stella said.

‘– but no useful responses.'

‘Mostly time-wasters. A few genuine sightings, but they weren't any help.'

‘Is this looking like a hopeless case?'

‘You mean an unsolved?'

‘I mean an unsolvable. Thrill-killing is a nightmare. Somebody who's anybody goes out and kills somebody who's nobody. Finding him is all down to luck. He has to be caught in the act, or make some mistake, or take a risk too many.' He gestured at the files on his desk, on the floor. ‘This adds up to precisely fuck all.' He coughed again, his face reddening, and grabbed a fistful of tissues from a man-sized box.

‘Maybe we'll get lucky, then.'

‘It's what you're hoping for, is it?'

‘We're making some progress.'

Sorley laughed. ‘Don't tell me that – it's what I'm telling
them
.' He killed his cigarette but took out a back-up pack. ‘This guy Cotter has just made things more difficult. He's definitely in the frame for the others, is he? Before Blake?'

‘Definitely.'

‘So we're out on a limb.'

‘Paddington have agreed to wait on a press release.'

‘The purpose being?'

‘That if we've got two killers here – Cotter and our man
but with similar MOs – it would help us if our man doesn't know about Cotter's arrest.'

‘You're thinking copy-cat.'

‘Something like that. I'm not sure.'

‘It's a long way off a result,' Sorley observed.

‘Another week,' Stella suggested. ‘Then a review.'

‘Another week, then we start to tot up the bills.'

Before she left, Stella said, ‘If it's flu, you ought to go home.'

Sorley snapped flame from a disposable lighter. He said, ‘Smoking kills germs, it's on all the packets.'

The squad room was empty apart from Frank Silano, who was compiling a statements file. He looked up as Stella came in. ‘There's a note here to revisit Duncan Palmer. Valerie Blake's boyfriend, right?'

‘There is,' Stella agreed. ‘You can delete it.'

‘No longer in the frame –'

‘Never was, really. He was in New York at the time. He was hiding something, but it turned out to be a woman.'

‘He was cheating on her – Blake?'

‘He was.'

Silano shook his head. ‘Lousy timing.'

‘Timing's important, is it?'

‘Yeah,' Silano nodded. ‘Timing's everything.'

‘Are you married?' Stella asked.

‘Sure.' He closed the file and got up to fetch his coat. Stella lifted her phone and fumbled for her wallet. She was looking for the case number that the man from Immigration had given her, along with his card. Stefan-just-make-it-Steve.

Silano passed her desk on his way to the door. He said, ‘Almost everyone is.'

*

‘It's DS Mooney. AMIP-5. Stella Mooney.'

‘I remember.'

‘I have to clear some paperwork.'

‘Tell me about it. I live my life in triplicate.'

‘The family we found at the warehouse. I need to sign that off.'

‘I gave you my details, right?'

‘Yes, I've logged all that. It's fine. I suppose I'm just curious about what happened to them.'

‘Deported. It was pretty much a foregone –'

‘The mother,' Stella said. ‘The mother with the dead child. Did she get some help – counselling, whatever?'

‘No. She killed herself.' He had spoken quite quickly and without any hesitation and for a moment Stella wasn't sure what he'd said. Because she didn't speak, he filled the silence: ‘She went to hospital, the others went to Maidstone nick.'

‘Her husband –'

‘Husband and the others – brother, sister, aunt, whoever they were, and the other kid. They took the dead one. That wasn't easy: taking it away from her, I mean. Then they sedated her and kept her in for observation. She got up in the night, took a scalpel from the contaminated waste, went to the toilet, cut her throat.'

‘Okay,' Stella said. ‘Thank you.'

‘She looked about fifty, didn't she? I thought fifty or so. Turns out she was in her thirties.'

‘Yeah,' Stella said. ‘Thanks. Thank you.'

‘The hard part was they wouldn't let the husband see her. He's at the airport, he asks for his wife, they say she topped herself, then they put him on the plane. He went berserk. Had to be put in restraints.'

‘Right,' Stella said. ‘Thank you. Thanks very much.'

*

Robert Adrian Kimber stood outside the first-floor apartment of the girl he called Patricia and watched her cross to the window to draw the blind. She glanced out briefly and saw a street full of people and traffic, just as always.

She went to another room – the kitchen, because he could see pans on a rack. She made coffee. Those tiny domestic moments were precious to him.

He guessed the layout and supposed that the bedroom and the bathroom would be at the back. He thought she would take a bath soon. In fact he was certain of it. He pictured the whole thing. She undressed, she stood at the mirror, she lay back in the bath, she soaped herself.

He held the lock of her hair under his nose. Flowers with a tang.

The Cancer Santa outside McDonald's was taking all the business. Jamie sat on his bag, wrapped in a blanket like a reservation Indian. His eyes were unfocused; or they were focused on something no one else could see. Sadie's fingers were too cold to hit the stops, so she was piping a little three-note tootle. She looked up when Delaney arrived but continued to play.

‘Have you eaten?' he asked. She shook her head, still playing. ‘Have you got a place for tonight?' She shook her head.
Tootle-tootle-toot
. ‘Where will you be on Christmas Day?' It would be a featured sidebar to his piece, each of Delaney's street-people and where they'd be on Christmas morning. It was a cheap shot but a selling-point.

‘It's just another day of the year,' Sadie told him. ‘I'll be here.' She tootled a couple of times, then added, ‘Unless Jamie's got it right, in which case, of course, I'll be sitting on the right hand of God.'

They talked for another ten minutes or so, Delaney crouching alongside her, getting a Sadie's-eye-view of the world. With its fake snow and fairy lights and sour-faced shoppers, it didn't seem that great a place. He gave her a twenty. He didn't think she'd buy food with it, or a bed for the night; he thought she'd buy a wrap or a couple of rocks. But dues are dues.

When he got back, the business card he'd given to Robert Kimber was out on the counter, a little blot on his escutcheon.

Stella said, ‘It was at his flat when we searched.'

‘I see.' There had been rain in the wind and Delaney's clothes were wet. He walked through to the bedroom and found a fresh pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. When he emerged, she was watching the street. He said, ‘You took your time.'

‘I was hoping you'd tell me.'

Delaney shrugged. ‘Okay, I should have.'

‘But you didn't. Because I'd told you to stay away from Kimber.'