The Advent Killer (21 page)

Hawkins pressed the buzzer and turned back to face the group of boys. They hadn’t ventured up the path behind her, but they had followed her around the building from where she’d left the unmarked Golf.

There were six of them, all unnaturally tall for their age, which she estimated to be around eleven or twelve. The housing estate itself didn’t appear run-down, but the afternoon light was fading fast, and there was a biting chill in the air, which was probably why the streets were empty. Except for these kids.

The boys huddled for a moment, apparently determining a nominee. Then one of them stepped forwards.

‘S’cuse me, miss,’ he said, a cheeky grin on his face. ‘My mates want to know … do you give
head
?’

She almost smiled with relief as the boys ran off crowing, amid much backslapping for their mouthy counterpart. Manners might have deteriorated, but apart from a few extreme exceptions, at least kids were still kids.

She turned back to the panel and pressed the backlit button for number 3 again. She hadn’t heard a response through the speaker, but this type of intercom system rarely worked.

She checked her watch. 4.15 p.m. She was due in Buckhurst Hill in half an hour to show the enhanced
video clip from Summer Easton’s place to Glenis Ward’s daughters. She could still just about make it – not that there was much chance of them recognizing the man on the tape, of course. They’d already shown the recording to just about every friend, relative and neighbour of the four victims during the last eighteen hours. Headshakes and frustrated apologies were all they’d received so far.

Obviously there was an outside chance that the Wards might surprise them, and if not, there was always
Crimewatch
later tonight, when the video would be seen by millions.

The intercom remained silent.

Hawkins checked the note she had made of John Barclay’s address. This was definitely the place.

The buzzer panel showed that the block contained only four flats. She peered through the security glass into the entrance hall, where two doors faced each other just inside, wearing numbers 1 and 2. A central staircase led to an upper landing, where the remaining flats must have shared a side each.

She stepped back and looked up at the two-storey building. Eighties-style grey stonework and red steel railings framed each of the front-facing windows. There were lights on in both upstairs flats, and she knew the TDC lived alone. Either John wasn’t bothered about his electricity bill, or he was in.

Communal intercoms were one thing, but Barclay’s non-compromising attitude at work told Hawkins his home phone would not be so neglected. Pulling her
mobile out of her bag and selecting his landline number, she hit dial.

As it began to ring, Hawkins looked up at the window, watching for signs of movement. Her concerns had been roused by his strange behaviour yesterday in the incident room. He hadn’t been eager to talk, but without Yasir’s interruption Hawkins suspected she’d have found out then and there what the problem was. And then there was his reaction to her and Mike. Perhaps the shocked expression was understandable if he was jealous, but a hug was hardly sufficient to merit storming off as he had. Something was definitely wrong. His actions were those of someone under pressure. But pressure from what?

Her anxiety hadn’t peaked, however, until Barclay had failed to appear at Becke House that morning. She hadn’t expected a great day’s work from him, or even an apology, but she had expected him to be there. But there had been no croaky phone call; no message to say he’d been delayed, and no answer when she’d tried any of his numbers periodically through the day.

With one team member in the mortuary, and the remainder as disheartened as she was, further disunity needed to be dealt with straight away. She had to rally her team; remind them they had the moral high ground here. Locking up twisted killers was something to be proud of, well worth the long hours and relatively meagre pay. So she’d taken this detour to Barclay’s Enfield flat, determined to get him back on side.

Yet there was still no evidence of movement, and
she became more concerned with every unanswered ring.

There was a good chance Barclay was simply ignoring her. Trainees exhibited high dropout rates once they realized the sacrifices police work demanded. And it wasn’t going to be easy convincing John, or anyone else for that matter, that
she
was completely behind the job at the moment.

Hawkins ended the call and stood, blowing into cupped hands and shifting her feet to fend off the cold. She could wait longer, but she was tired and there was nowhere to shelter from the icy wind. The garden was empty apart from some patchy grass and a Haart estate agent’s SOLD board. Plus it was starting to rain.

Best to force the issue.

She stepped back to the intercom and pressed the buzzer for number 1, the downstairs flat with a light on.

A short pause preceded a hiss.

‘Hello?’ An elderly woman’s voice.

‘Hi,’ Hawkins said. ‘I just bought the flat that was for sale here, but my husband has the only outside door key, and he’s at work. Could you let me in, please?’

It sounded as if the old lady tutted, but a few seconds later a buzzing sound signalled that Hawkins’ sham had worked.

‘Thanks,’ she called towards the speaker as she pulled the security door open.

She stepped inside and waited in case the old lady wanted to meet her new neighbour.

The entrance hall was lined with cheap beige carpet,
but it was clean, and smelled far better than some. Lino-faced stairs led up to her left, flanked by black iron railings

Once she was certain that the door to number 1 would remain closed, Hawkins moved towards the steps. She pressed the timer switch to light the upstairs landing and climbed slowly, keen to minimize the echo of her heeled boots on the metal kick plates. There was no point announcing her arrival until she was ready.

She reached the landing. A battered number 3 hung at a slight angle just below a peephole in John’s cream-coloured front door. A television audience clapped and cheered across the hall, but she could hear nothing from inside Barclay’s flat.

That wasn’t a good sign. She hadn’t known the trainee detective to go more than two minutes without a coughing fit in the last few months. Either this door was more soundproof than the neighbour’s or, if he was there, John wasn’t keen on company.

She waited until the rapid clicks of the timer had expired and the light flicked off. She’d look pretty conspicuous standing there in the dark should one of the other occupants of the building step into the hallway, but she wanted to check for shadows in the light escaping under the door.

Nothing.

Hawkins leaned back and pressed the plunger to relight the landing. She checked her watch again, aware that if Barclay did answer the door, he was likely to require a lot more than a five-minute pep talk.

She raised a hand and knocked, but as her knuckles made contact with the door, it moved. It didn’t open, but
neither was it secure. She looked around, senses suddenly razor sharp.

She checked the frame for signs of damage or forced entry. There were none.

Instinct told her to walk away, to return with some back-up at least. But then pride kicked in. Did she really want to throw away twelve years of the reputation that had brought her a DCI’s badge – at least temporarily – because she was scared of an unlocked door? The taunting didn’t bear contemplation.

Her heart rate leapt as she pushed the door. It resisted a little at first, but opened freely once it cleared the frame, to reveal a narrow hallway. The light she’d seen from outside came from what was probably the living room, straight ahead.

‘John? It’s Antonia.’

Silence.

She stepped over the threshold and switched on the hallway light, glancing through the archway to her left into a small kitchen. Everything looked normal. She checked the first room on her right. Bathroom. Nothing amiss.

‘Hello?’ Anyone home?’

She waited, still aware of the television noise drifting across the landing through the open front door, still hearing no reply. Only two rooms remained, judging from the size of the place.

Hawkins edged closer to the archway leading to the lounge, next to what had to be the bedroom door. But as she reached for the handle she froze, her eyes locked on the scene before her.

In the centre of the front room, the television lay
screen down on the carpet, surrounded by broken glass. A small dining table was on its side in one corner, and on its flat surface, there was no mistaking the most alarming element of all.

A smeared, bloody handprint.

Hawkins ended the call to Amala Yasir and glanced across the corridor for what must have been the hundredth time in twenty minutes. The door remained closed, its smart silver plaque engraved with the words: ‘DCS L. Kirby-Jones’.

Hawkins was the sole occupant of the glass-fronted waiting-cum-meeting room that had been installed opposite Kirby-Jones’ office as part of a recent refurbishment at Becke House. Visitors were treated to a view of the corridor wall, punctuated only by a large painting of a seventeenth-century warship, and the plain wooden door leading to somewhere infinitely worse.

‘Damnation’s waiting room’, as Hawkins called it, was silent except for the noisy wallpaper and the distant hum of air conditioning fans. A suspicion that the DCS had a button marked ‘Nerve gas’ in his office, to dispose of those inside had always amused her. But she wasn’t laughing today.

Kirby-Jones wanted to see her. He hadn’t said why, but it didn’t take a genius to guess. She continued pacing, as she had been since her arrival, too nervous to sit in any of the poor-quality leather armchairs surrounding the glass coffee table in the centre of the room.

She had to get things straight before he called her in,
but her thoughts were chaotic, jumbled, falling over themselves.

‘Get a grip, Antonia,’ she said to the empty room, reassuring herself as a man strode noiselessly along the corridor outside that the floor-to-ceiling plate glass was soundproof. The man was tall, which made him appear thinner than he was, and he walked with an elegant confidence possessed only by those with power. He wore a dark suit, and his auburn hair was fashionably styled. But Hawkins wouldn’t have noted these details, or the fact that his eyes were both sharp and blue, if he hadn’t been staring straight at her.

She stared back, unable to read his expression, hoping he wouldn’t enter the room as she tried desperately to place him. Instead of approaching the waiting room door, however, the man did something more worrying: he stopped outside Kirby-Jones’ office and knocked.

A second later he entered and the door closed, leaving Hawkins even more unnerved than before.
Who the hell was he, and what was he doing here?

Could he be a witness, or some sort of official come to take her badge and walk her off the premises? She shuddered as the three Ds flashed through her mind: discipline, demotion, dismissal. No, she had to be warned if it was any of those, so she would have time to arrange counsel.

She took a deep breath and blew out her cheeks as she exhaled.
Don’t go in there looking like a bag of nerves.

But that wouldn’t be easy. As the Nemesis case stood, she had four dead women, one dead sergeant and still no suspect. Now she had a missing trainee detective constable,
too; a situation made extremely concerning by the bloody handprint in his ransacked apartment.

She could think of no explanation other than that John Barclay had been abducted by Nemesis.

After finding the handprint, Hawkins had searched the rest of Barclay’s flat, establishing beyond doubt that the place was deserted. Then she’d called it in.

It hadn’t been long afterwards that Eleanor – Kirby-Jones’ personal assistant – had rung to inform Hawkins that the DCS had ‘requested’ her presence.

So here she was, charged with explaining a two-hour-old situation she could barely grasp, to a superior officer she could barely stand.

First he’d want to know what she had found at the flat, and how she came to find it. Then what subsequent progress had been made, and what she planned to do next.

She tried to concentrate on the facts. While she had waited for the SOCOs to arrive, she’d used the anti-contamination suit from the crime-scene kit in the pool car to search the place in more detail.

The clothes in the bedroom were undisturbed; there was an empty suitcase under the bed. Not even the toothbrush had gone from the bathroom. Even if you ignored the scene in the front room, it didn’t look like John had been planning to go anywhere.

She could explain her presence at Barclay’s flat as a result of his absence from work and her inability to contact him, but what would she say when asked about her most recent encounter with him? The fact that he’d stormed out of her office after finding her in Mike’s embrace was bound to come out once Barclay resurfaced.

And she had to hope that was still possible.

And what of his erratic behaviour? Was it simply the pressure of the case and the death of a friend, or had he been threatened somehow?

Scenes of Crime were still at the flat. They’d already collected samples, but it would take time to separate the jumbled who’s who of DNA typically found in short-term rented accommodation. John had moved in shortly after joining the team, just three months ago according to the building owners, so there would be plenty of residual traces from previous occupants, not to mention their visitors. In addition, she had four previous scenes that told her Nemesis was more than capable of keeping his DNA to himself.

And if Nemesis
had
taken John, it was a behavioural development she needed to discuss with Hunter as soon as possible. What did it mean if a serial killer started kidnapping people instead of murdering them? Or at least kidnapping them
first
.

Was he now targeting her team? The thought sent a chill through her.

Hawkins had spent the remaining time between leaving Barclay’s flat and now, speaking to every officer she could contact, unsuccessfully trying to defuse the situation by locating her missing TDC. Nobody had seen or heard from John since lunchtime yesterday.

Nor had Hawkins’ most recent conversation, with Amala Yasir, done anything to improve matters. Following her unexpected delay in Enfield, Hawkins had asked Yasir to take her place and show the tape of Sunday’s footage to Glenis Ward’s daughters. She’d had to blow
proverbial smoke up Yasir’s back end for several minutes in order to convince her she could handle it alone.

The sergeant had just left the home in Buckhurst Hill, where blank responses had extinguished that small glimmer of hope, too.

Plus, every development was still making headline news, so it looked very much like someone on the inside was continuing to leak information to the press.

Hawkins sighed again, resisting the temptation to turn exhalation into scream. She stared up at the ceiling, as if the answer might be hidden amongst its patterned tiles.

Think.

Her gaze settled on an innocuous grate on the wall just below ceiling level. She studied it for a second before shifting her stare, deceitfully scanning the room for the clock she knew to be on the opposite wall. If Kirby-Jones had a camera hidden in the room, there was no point winding him up by glaring at it.

She sank into the nearest armchair, conscious of every motion, unsure whether she cared any longer that her despondency would be apparent to anyone watching. The door across the hall remained closed.

Then her mobile rang.

She sat up and fumbled inside her jacket.
Please be John.

Her fingers found the phone and she pulled it free, hitting the answer key before she had time to read the caller display.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s me,’ Mike. ‘I got your messages.’

‘Oh.’ It took Hawkins a second to realize this was the
first contact between them since their terse conversation about work earlier in the day. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I had some stuff—’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter. Have you seen John since yesterday in my office?’

‘Barclay?’

‘Yes, have you seen or spoken to him?’ She paused, waiting for an answer. ‘Mike?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because he’s gone, Mike, he’s disappeared. Nobody knows where he is, there’s blood in his flat, and the place looks like a sodding war zone. That’s why.’

‘Shit.’ He paused, then, ‘Can we talk about this face-to-face, Toni? Where are you?’

Hawkins lowered her voice. ‘I’m in the bloody waiting room at Becke House. Kirby-Jones wants an explanation and I don’t have one, so, no, we can’t discuss it face-to-face.’

She heard Mike swear again under his breath before he answered, ‘I don’t know where he is, but’ – he drew a breath – ‘I went there last night, to John’s flat, after our argument. But nothing happened, Toni, the kid wasn’t even there. I would have told you.’

Hawkins found herself out of the chair, pacing.

‘Toni? You there?’

‘Why did you go?’

‘I was cranked, OK? Ready to knock the guy out. But on the way over there I calmed down. I just wanted to talk, smooth things over.’

‘You didn’t see him?’

‘No. I buzzed over and over. There were lights on, but
if he was there, he didn’t answer. I left. You believe me, Antonia – you trust me, right?’

Hawkins lowered the phone and ended the call.

Lawrence Kirby-Jones was standing in his office doorway.

She switched her phone to silent, swallowed hard, and stood.