Cold Kill (25 page)

Someone had stuck cotton-wool balls to the squad-room windows and draped some streamers over the doors. The ashtrays were full and there were coffee cups and cola cans on the desks, chocolate-bar wrappers and doughnut boxes. You would have thought the party had moved on, except everyone was there, including Mike Sorley, standing in the doorway, the party-pooper with the hacking cough.

There was tinsel round the whiteboard that displayed all-ways-up SOC shots of the corpses of Valerie Blake, Sophie Simms and Kate Reilly. Stella sat on a desk and faced the room and repeated what she'd said to Harriman. ‘It's him. It's our man.'

‘Which killed her: the blunt instrument or the ligature?' Sorley coughed through his words.

‘We're waiting on that. Also waiting to hear whether she was sexually assaulted.'

‘Also waiting on forensics,' Maxine supposed.

‘Yes. In the meantime, it's door-to-door coverage in the streets close to the scene, field any responses to the yellow board, circulate and sift the crime reports, the usual desk-work, okay? You spoke to the family...' This last was to Maxine.

‘Normal girl, normal life, normal boyfriend. The parents are out of it: both sedated. It's what you'd expect.'

‘Talk to the boyfriend,' Stella said. ‘There's normal and there's normal.'

‘He could be our man?' Silano was sceptical.

Stella shrugged. ‘Someone is.'

When the meeting broke up, Marilyn Hayes handed her a ‘while you were away' note. She said, ‘Dentist at two, apparently,' and smiled a flawless smile.

Sorley hacked phlegm all the way back to his office, where he took three paracetamol, drank some Benylin straight from the bottle and lit a cigarette.

‘Andy Greegan and Sue Chapman are both still on sick-leave with it,' Stella told him.

‘Which is why you need me.'

‘I don't need you. Your wife does.'

‘She's in Dubai.'

‘She's where?'

‘Pre-Christmas treat. Her brother lives there.'

‘So you'd be home alone.'

‘Which is why I'd prefer to die here.' He took a lungful of smoke and hung on to it until the impulse to cough faded a little. ‘I'd been told to close you down. Now this...' He meant Kate Reilly's death.

Stella understood: fresh murder, fresh case, fresh funding. Kate had given her a new lease of life. She handed Sorley the morning update, but said nothing about the second man, about Angel. There was no real evidence of his involvement beyond the emails; however, opportunities had been lost and holding it back made her feel edgy.

Delaney, you jerk
.

Sorley had stood in the squad-room doorway in the hope of keeping his bacteria to himself. For just the same reason, Stella was talking to him from the corridor.

She said, ‘You could stop smoking; that might help.'

‘Only thing keeping me going.' As she turned to leave, he added, ‘Why the blunt instrument
and
the garrotte?'

*

Sam Burgess asked the same question. He was handling Kate as if she might fall apart at his touch. Stella was watching and, at the same time, trying not to see too much. Kate's empty eye-sockets were crusty and dark. Her face was lopsided and oddly ragged; it looked as if no one had ever lived there.

‘You tell me,' Stella said.

‘I hate to pun, but it's overkill. The garrotte would have killed her if the hammer hadn't.'

‘Hammer?'

‘Almost certainly.'

‘And it was the hammer that did the job.'

‘More or less. There's some evidence to show that she might not have been quite dead when he garrotted her, but she would have died shortly whatever he did next.'

‘Valerie Blake was hit with a hammer or something similar, but that's not what killed her. The garrotte killed her.'

‘Right.'

‘And Sophie Simms was killed with a hammer and not garrotted, though there was a garrotte at the scene.'

‘Correct.'

‘Now Kate Reilly is killed with a hammer but garrotted for good measure.'

‘Don't ask me how his mind works,' Sam said, ‘I just deal with the wreckage.'

The preliminary examination had been done. Kate had been combed and probed and swabbed. Giovanni had trepanned Kate and was lifting out the brain. Stella could see the damage from where she was standing, and she was standing a good way back.

‘Any evidence of rape?' Stella asked.

‘I don't think so.'

Sam made the Y-incision, the long fillet, and began to free up the lung-tree. Stella stayed a little longer to get the gist of it, but there wasn't much to tell. Kate had been healthy, like Valerie and Sophie; she'd had a good hold on life.

Stella said, ‘Report tomorrow?'

‘By noon,' Sam told her. As she was leaving, he said, ‘Merry Christmas.'

The dentist took the rough edges off her broken tooth and told her she needed a crown. She endured the needle and the drill and the fact that he hadn't noticed her swollen face and was putting pressure on her cheekbone as he drilled. She lay back while he worked on her and let her mind take its course.

Why the garrotte
and
the hammer? Why sometimes kill with one weapon and sometimes the other? Why strip his victims from the waist if he wasn't raping them? It was a pattern but a broken one. The only clear impulse was to kill.

Flat out in the chair with a hissy loop tape of Christmas songs playing, Stella suddenly felt a tremendous surge of anger: enough to lift her shoulders from the chair, enough to flex her jaw and make her catch her breath. The dentist felt it and let up with the drill for a moment, thinking he'd touched a nerve.

I'm coming after you, you bastard. I'm going to nail you to the fucking wall
.

She shuddered and closed her eyes and breathed out. The dentist put the hardware back in her mouth. The loop tape hissed on.

...
have yourself a merry little Christmas
...

Tom Davison said, ‘Do you make men nervous?'

Stella had the phone hooked under her chin. She was eating a sandwich and reading a series of yellow-board responses. ‘Why?'

‘You want everything in a hurry. It's not natural.'

‘Can we get out of the bedroom, please?'

‘And go where?'

‘The laboratory would be good.'

A man was seen entering the churchyard carrying a gun, a machete, a crossbow. He was twenty thirty forty fifty. He had black brown blond hair. He was following a prostitute a housewife a black woman a Chinese woman
.

‘There's a problem.'

‘Which is?'

‘I'm backed up.'

‘I said out of the bedroom, Davison.'

He laughed. ‘Look, there's a process. I get items from the scene, items from the morgue. They don't necessarily arrive together. I correlate them. I cross-reference. I go to lunch.'

‘You know –'

‘Do you ever go to lunch, DS Mooney?'

‘– what I'm looking for, don't you?'

‘A match with the DNA of whoever killed Blake and Simms.'

‘Exactly.'

‘But you're standing in line. I have other sergeants with black silk panels who are just as demanding as you.'

It was my husband father brother son. It was the guy next door the postman the builder the vicar. It was the man who sells the
Big Issue.

‘When will I get a result on this, Davison?'

‘Officially, three days from now.'

‘Unofficially.'

‘Sooner.'

A woman like that is filth sewage disease corruption. Luring men to a graveyard. She deserved all she got. She was struck down by the hand of justice the hand of righteousness the hand of God.

‘Any chance of sooner than that?'

‘Same MO, was it?'

‘He caved her head in with a hammer and throttled her with a ligature. She was on her way home from work: looking forward to an evening out with her boyfriend. She was twenty-three.'

‘Leave it with me.'

I saw two men coming out of the churchyard. It was about that time. It was dark and I didn't see their faces. They were average height not young not old not fat not thin. The choir was singing. I don't walk through there myself, it's spooky.

Her mobile had five voicemails and three texts, all from Delaney. She went out into the car park to find some privacy and called him to let him know she was all right. There was no moodiness in her or a desire to hurt. She told him about
the flat being burgled but not about the lads in hoodies or Panhandler Pete.

‘What are you going to do?' he asked.

‘Stay at the flat for a bit. It ought to be lived in. There's a danger of squatters.'

‘Okay.' She pictured him at his workstation, the mess of books and papers round his chair, and it pained her. ‘Call me,' he said. ‘Let me know what's happening.'

‘I'll be okay there. It's time I had a clear-out.'

Delaney knew enough to give her rope. Even so he couldn't help but say, ‘I love you.'

Harriman walked into the car park with a plastic-packed BLT, a tuna baguette, a coffee grande, two Twix bars, three packs of Marlboro Lights and a forbidden Budweiser. Stella said, ‘You read the yellow-board stuff?'

‘Not yet.'

‘A witness saw two men coming out at about the right time. A local secretary, I think she was. Get her in.'

‘Two men?'

‘It was about the right time.'

‘But
two
men?'

‘I know. Get her in, all the same.'

She went back to the squad room with him. He gave the tuna baguette, the coffee, a Twix and a pack of Marlboro to Marilyn Hayes. They sat at her desk to eat. Marilyn reached out and took a crumb from the corner of his mouth.

Maybe that's the way to do things, Stella thought, home-life and love-life as separate events. George and Stella. Stella and Delaney.

Tom Davison came back to her just as she was about to go home.

He said, ‘You're right. It's him, whoever he is.'

‘For sure?'

‘Same traces as we found at the other two scenes of crime, Blake and Simms. No doubt. He didn't leave much but he left enough.'

‘Thanks, Tom.'

She would write a brief report and circulate it before she left. Her mind was on that and she was getting ready to put the phone down when she heard him say, ‘There's more.'

Something in his voice: an urgency. She said, ‘Go on.'

‘Your confessor, Robert Adrian Kimber. Him too.'

‘Him too meaning what?'

‘His DNA's all over the place. All over her. He was there. He was involved.'

She was silent for a moment; there was a faint ringing in her ears like distant voices. She said, ‘There's no chance of that being wrong?'

‘None,' Davison said. ‘Does it fuck things up at all?'

‘We had him,' Stella said, ‘but we let him go.'

‘You had no option: he hadn't done anything.' Anne Beaumont was making omelettes while Stella opened a bottle of red wine, which meant that they were neither cop and profiler nor shrink and patient, though Stella wasn't at all sure what the other option might be. Friends, perhaps, except that Stella felt that Anne knew a great deal more about her than a friend had a right to know.

‘He's done something now.'

‘And he didn't do it alone.'

Stella poured two drinks, took a sip, then sat on a stool by the counter. The wine seemed to go straight to her bloodstream but cleared her head rather than fogged it. ‘What have we got? A series of attacks on women, including the murders of Valerie Blake and Sophie Simms.'

‘And Kate Reilly,' Anne said.

‘Yes, I know, but leave that aside. Martin Cotter's definitely in the frame for the attacks before the one on Valerie Blake. So take those out of it. Blake and Simms were killed by a man we can't identify; we've got his DNA, but it's not on record. Call him Mister Mystery. Robert Kimber confesses to killing Valerie Blake but didn't. Now Kate Reilly is killed by Mister Mystery and Kimber is there at the time.'

‘Or Kimber killed her and Mister Mystery was there at the time.'

‘So Kimber confessed to a murder committed by Mister Mystery, now he and Mister Mystery are working together.'

Anne topped up their glasses. She said, ‘You think Mister Mystery and Angel are the same guy – the one who was emailing Kimber?'

‘I do.'

‘And Delaney didn't tell you about him. I can see why you moved out.'

‘I haven't moved out.'

‘No? Where are you living? And why am I cooking for two?'

‘I have to live at Vigo Street for a bit. They could come back if the place is empty.'

‘Good excuse,' Anne said. She added, ‘They could come back anyway. What would you do then?'

‘Shoot the little bastards.'

Anne looked up sharply. ‘Who's that talking? The thug beneath the skin?'

‘You forget,' Stella told her, ‘that I'm off Harefield. I'm off the estate.'

‘So, you're at Vigo Street, but you haven't dumped him.'

‘No.'

‘In fact, you still love him.'

‘Yes.'

‘Okay.'

‘Do you know how irritating that is – that
okay
?'

‘I'm a shrink. I'm not supposed to comment. Which is what “okay” means – no comment.'

‘But you're not my shrink any more, so say what a friend would say.'

‘Take your time,' Anne told her. She opened a bag-salad and cut some bread. When they were sitting at the table, she said, ‘That was a piece of advice. It comes free.'

*

Turbo-mop had done a great job. The place was clean and they'd swept out the crap, made the bed, collected the CDs, put books back on to shelves, boarded up the window, left a bill. The walls and furniture were still tagged in red and black, but with the debris gone you could almost take the flat for a Brit-art installation.