The Calling (20 page)

Diving into the water cleared his head and purged that dirty feeling that had increasingly infected him during the previous twenty-four hours. Goodhew thought as he swam, but it was not focused thinking. Disconnected thoughts followed their own drifting course around his consciousness.

The woods, the lake, the rape-seed.

What was the motive?

The case had changed gears, accelerating from missing persons through abduction and ending in murder. With each new scenario, the stakes had been raised, and now the race appeared to be on with a serial killer.

But, however distorted the motive had become, there had to be a reason and a trigger.

Goodhew executed a swift turn in the water, propelling himself back towards the deep end.
Why would I kill?
he asked himself. He swam the length with his head down and his eyes open, watching the little mosaic tiles on the bottom of the pool flash by in a liquid blur.

Love and greed were the commonest motivators.
Love, greed and madness,
he corrected himself.
Maybe I’d kill for revenge, if someone I loved was hurt. Do I have anyone I love that much?
he mused.
And I wouldn’t murder for passion or money,
he was sure.
I’d have to be mad
. He surfaced and took long steady breaths of chlorine-filled air that he slowly exhaled through several determined strokes. But then he spotted Shelly watching from the viewing gallery.
Now, there’s someone I could kill,
he thought,
and I could definitely plead insanity.
He immediately scolded himself. It was a bad joke.

But she didn’t let it rest.

So he pretended he hadn’t seen her.

Shelly was leaning over the railing in a short skirt and a stretchy blue crop-top. The same shade of blue that Stephanie Palmer had worn. The colour took on the shape of that rotting torso, and his irritation at Shelly swelled into anger.

He swam several more lengths, pounding the water with ruthless efficiency. His anger spurred him on.

Where are the clues?

The bodies, the locations, the dates, the anonymous caller.

Find the pattern, find the killer.

He left the pool quickly, glanced at the spectators’ stand to find Shelly had gone.

Home, he hoped.

His car was parked in the last bay on the third floor of the adjoining multi-storey; unfortunately so was Shelly. She’d
positioned
herself with her dainty bottom, in its daintier skirt, perching on the edge of his bonnet. One bare leg extended to the tarmac, while the other was curled barefoot around it. Her missing shoe dangled from her crooked right index finger by its thin ankle strap. The moment he saw her, Goodhew rushed towards his car.

‘Surprise.’ She beamed.

‘Yes, I can see that.’ Goodhew scowled.

‘Do you want to give me a …’ she flicked her tongue out from behind straight white teeth ‘… lift?’

‘No, but I will.’ He pressed the remote to release the central locking and left a safety zone of several feet between them as he strode past her to yank open the passenger door. ‘Get in and stop flirting.’

‘I’m not,’ she cooed indignantly, and slid from the bonnet to the ground. ‘Why can’t you be more fun, Gary?’

Goodhew held the passenger door open until the second she’d folded her legs inside. He slammed it shut and marched around to his side of the car, swung himself inside and slammed that one too.

Shelly stared at him, astonished and bewildered. ‘What’s your problem, Gary?’

‘You have a dangerous combination of assets, Shelly. Good looks
and stupidity.’ He poked an angry finger at her. ‘What do you think you look like?’

‘Shit, you sound like my fucking mother, Gary.’ Shelly unclipped her seatbelt and reached for the door. He thumped the
central-locking
control switch and she slouched back into her seat. “‘You can’t go out looking like that!”’ she mimicked her parent.

‘No, I sound like a fucking policeman who’s just spent the last two fucking days picking over the remains of a girl who didn’t have enough sense to care about who she was screwing. Seatbelt.’

‘Fuck off, Gary.’

Shelly glared in defiance from her position leaning against the side window. He reached across and tugged the seatbelt back round her, started the car and pulled forward, towards the exit.

‘What do you actually know about me, Shelly?’ he demanded, but she didn’t reply. ‘Well, I’ll tell you then,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing, that’s what. And at what point do you stop and ask yourself who you’re really with?’

‘Stop it!’ Shelly spat. She grabbed the door handle and released her seatbelt again. ‘Let me out. I’m going to walk.’

Goodhew ignored her.

‘At what point, Shelly? Before sex, after sex, or when you suddenly realize you’re staring a killer in the face?’

Goodhew slowed as he approached a junction. Shelly tugged at the door release. ‘Let me out now, Gary,’ she screamed.

Goodhew slapped his foot down hard on the brake and they lurched to a halt. He released the central locking.

‘Why are you such a bastard?’ she yelled, spluttering back tears, before she slammed the door behind her and strode away.

Goodhew lowered the electric window. ‘Don’t trust anyone, Shelly,’ he shouted after her.

A splinter of guilt tumbled over and over inside Goodhew’s stomach. Every few minutes it gave him a little prod until he picked up the phone and left a message on Bryn’s answering machine.

Bryn responded soon after by appearing on Goodhew’s doorstep. He followed Goodhew up to his flat.

‘Coffee or tea?’ Goodhew shouted from the kitchen.

‘Tea, cheers,’ Bryn replied as he poked his head around the door. ‘What’s up?’

‘Shelly again, but my fault this time.’

Bryn rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘You haven’t!’

Goodhew tossed a teabag into each mug. ‘Be serious, Bryn. Of course I haven’t.’

Bryn opened the food cupboard and grabbed a packet of custard creams. ‘Shame really. I bet everyone else has.’

‘I bet they haven’t, actually, and that’s no way to talk about your own sister.’ Goodhew handed a mug of strong tea to Bryn. ‘You’re supposed to stand up for her.’

‘You can say that, because you don’t share a house with her. She’s a pain in the backside.’ Bryn took a sip, then put his mug back on the worktop. ‘Go on, then, what have you done?’

‘Well, I’ve had a go at her for flirting, for a start. And then I made her cry.’ Goodhew dunked a biscuit in his tea. ‘I’m sorry, Bryn. I know I should’ve handled it better, but I’m not going to apologize – except to you. She needed to be put straight.’

‘Don’t apologize. She’ll just think you like her after all.’ Bryn
smiled and took Goodhew’s mug from him and poured both drinks down the sink. ‘Come on, let’s have a pint and a game of pool.’

They walked to the Anchor pub and sat on the balcony with their first round of drinks. Goodhew rested his elbows on the railing and gazed down at the rows of punts tethered in the Mill Pond for the night. Further down the Cam, two students struggled with their craft, as the flow forced them back upriver towards Silver Street Bridge.

Punting had been seen on the Cam for the last hundred years. The colleges had been there for the last eight hundred, and Cambridge itself for two thousand. And, amidst it all, people lived and died trying to make their mark.

Or in this case, lived and killed.

Bryn bought them a second round and placed the two bottles next to the pool table while he racked the balls. Goodhew stepped back in through the French windows to watch Bryn potting a run of three yellows. His thoughts wandered back to Shelly.

‘Girls like Shelly think they’re smart, and that makes them really vulnerable. Every time I’m investigating an assault case, I notice how many girls wander around alone.’

The fourth yellow stopped short of the pocket, and settled against a cushion. Bryn straightened up. ‘Shelly would insist she’s got the right to walk around on her own.’ He rubbed more chalk on the cue. ‘I had two shots, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, and in theory she’s right, of course, but that’s not going to keep her safe, is it?’

Bryn hit the same yellow again with a relaxed shot that rolled it parallel to the cushion and left it hanging across the lip of the pocket. He returned to his bottle of lager. ‘This case is really getting to you, isn’t it?’

Goodhew chalked his cue. ‘Not getting anywhere with it is getting to me.’ He potted his last red and rolled the white smoothly into the black, toppling it into the middle pocket. ‘My round. Same again?’

‘Get two bottles each, if it suits you. I’ll set them up again.’

Bryn pushed another coin into the slot and waited until the balls had made their rumbling journey to the front of the table. He rattled
them into the triangle and gave the black a spin before replacing the triangle on the lip of the light shade.

Goodhew’s mobile rang as he waited at the bar to be served.

Bryn noticed that a commuter had left an
Evening Standard
lying on an empty chair. He took it over to the pool table and opened it out on the empty end, flicking over each page after a cursory glance.

On page eight he came face to face with Stephanie Palmer, under the headline ‘Police probe connection with earlier deaths’. Two smaller photos – of Helen Neill and Kaye Whiting – accompanied the article.

As Goodhew returned with the fresh bottles, Bryn folded the newspaper and dropped it back on its chair.

‘Cheers. Your break.’

Goodhew nodded and cracked open the pack.

Bryn wondered if Goodhew would still be able to concentrate if he knew his investigative work was slapped across the pages of a major newspaper. Bryn potted two reds and looked up just as Goodhew welcomed Sue Gully by passing her his second bottle of beer.

She grinned at Bryn and he raised his cue in greeting. She had turned her attention back to Goodhew before Bryn could line up his next shot. ‘It’s in the paper again,’ he heard her say.

‘I know. I saw it,’ Goodhew replied. ‘I wonder who else has.’

‘Yeah, me too. I just hope it stabs someone’s conscience.’ Sue pulled the cue away from Goodhew. ‘I’ll take your go this time. I shouldn’t have brought the subject up.’

Sue potted one yellow and left the cue ball safely behind another. ‘The problem is,’ she confided to Bryn, ‘we won’t get any conversation out of him at all now. He’ll be incapable of thinking about anything else.’

Gary Goodhew wasn’t the only one whose thoughts were focused on three dead girls.

Just over a mile away, in a silent unlit room, the BBC News Channel was currently displaying their photographs. Julie Wilson’s hand reached for the remote control and increased the volume enough to catch the newscaster’s broadcast. In her photo, Stephanie
Palmer wore a white T-shirt with turquoise sleeves and the slogan ‘I’m No Angel’ across the front.

‘Well, you are now,’ she sniffed and pressed the
off
button. The picture vanished but the screen continued to glow in the dark. In the end she turned it on again, fed up with seeing the ghost of Stephanie’s photograph in her head. She flicked between the five channels; avoiding the news on BBC1, then sport on both BBC2 and ITV, and a documentary about American crime on Channel Five. She settled therefore for a ‘made for TV’ potboiler on Channel Four.

After another twenty minutes, she wished she owned a gun. She could then be like Elvis and shoot a hole in the TV set.

Julie fell asleep in her chair and awoke to the late news. Again the three images flashed across the screen.

‘Not my problem,’ she told herself.

But it was then that a cold, hard sabre of guilt unsheathed itself and sliced its steel blade into her conscience.

Pete Walsh eyed the time display in the bottom right-hand corner of his PC monitor; it was two minutes past twelve noon and he was counting the minutes until five past, when he knew that Donna would have already left Reception for lunch. Then he would be running only the Karen gauntlet.

It was still raining outside, and from his desk he could just see the grey sheen of the sky reflected in the beige pavements below. Only a week ago it had seemed like the middle of summer, but now the day couldn’t look more dismal if it were relayed back to him in black and white. Things had to brighten up soon, he assured himself.

He unhooked his jacket from the coat-stand and slipped it on as he waited for the lift. As the doors opened, he was pleased to find it full of other employees heading out to lunch.
Safety in numbers,
he thought wryly. As he headed towards the main doors, he noted Karen sitting alone at the main desk. He busied himself with his jacket zip, hoping she wouldn’t notice him – and, if she did, that she wouldn’t bother him.

‘Pete!’ her voice hissed at him.

He nodded, and gave a brief half-smile in her direction, but carried on walking.

‘Pete, where’s Donna?’

Pete’s glance flicked swiftly around. Two women waiting at the lifts were talking quietly. One watched him over her colleague’s shoulder, but the man waiting on the sofa continued to gaze rigidly out through the smoked glass.

Pete walked back over to Karen. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is she still off sick? She hasn’t phoned in or anything.’

He shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘I’m worried about her. She was off all last week, too.’ Karen’s gaze scanned his face.

‘We both were,’ he sighed.

‘And is she OK?’

God, she’s persistent
, he thought irritably. ‘Look, Karen, I don’t know, because we split up.’

Karen flushed. ‘Sorry, I had no idea.’

‘And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t announce the fact to everyone else in the building. I’m getting fed up with all the speculation that goes on about our private lives.’

‘I don’t know what—’ she began.

‘You
do
know. It wasn’t my decision for us to split up, but the sooner it’s all forgotten about the better, as far as I’m concerned.’

Karen watched him hurry across the pavement outside, bowing his head under the beating rain. She was glad that Donna had dumped him. She’d hadn’t been able to decide whether she liked him or not, until today, but he’d always been moody and she didn’t like people who were shitty with her. Still, she decided, turning back to answer the ringing phone, it would be a good bit of gossip to brighten the afternoon.

Once outside, Pete relaxed a little. He’d never warmed to Karen and wished their last conversation hadn’t happened. He needed time with his own thoughts.

He didn’t notice the few quickening footsteps that splashed behind him, but slowed as they approached him.

‘Hi!’ called a woman’s voice.

He scowled as he looked up, but regretted it at once as he recognized Fiona and saw her smile fade into a look of uncertainty.

‘How are you?’ she continued, with less enthusiasm now.

‘Sorry, I was miles away. I bet I looked really ratty just then.’ He laughed.

She wrinkled her nose. ‘A little bit.’

‘Now, I feel like I’ve been rude to you.’

‘No, really, not at all,’ she answered.

‘Monday at work and this weather, it’s a miserable combination, you know.’

‘It’s fine, really. Everyone’s rude to estate agents, anyway. I need to go inside, I’m getting soaked through.’

‘I know. Let’s get a coffee, then.’ And, before she could argue, he took her arm and they were dashing across the road and up the steps into the Flying Pig.

From her table by the window, Marlowe had observed their entire exchange. A new girl with Pete? He’d been taking lunch breaks on his own for weeks now, since his last outing with Paulette. And, as far as she knew, there had been no one since. Until today. From her viewpoint she could just make out his expressions through the rain. He was flirting.

Suddenly they turned and started to run towards her.

He’d never come in here
flashed through her mind, before her frantic reflexes sent her hurtling in an involuntary reeling motion towards the ladies’ toilet.

In her wake, her coffee cup teetered for a moment before crashing to the floor.

She slammed the cubicle door and snagged her nail as she fought with the lock.

She sat, balanced on the edge of the toilet bowl, and concentrated on taking slow, deep breaths. The thudding of her blood pulsated through her head, and she wondered how she had ever ended up in such a mess.