by Ali Gunn
He stared at the top of Tara’s head, his jaw set, his sneer more pronounced than ever. Hate and lust, two sides of one coin, and James was spinning between the two.
‘Perhaps,’ Elsie said reasonably, ‘she just needed a bit more time to realise what a wonderful man you are, James. Look at you, you’re in incredible shape.’
It was the first thing that Elsie had said to him which was true. He was in almost as good shape as Inspector Stryker.
As he spoke, Elsie’s ears prickled. She could hear engines outside. Was backup here? Would they burst in before she could talk him down and cause him to draw the knife across Tara’s throat? As much as the thought turned Elsie’s stomach queasy, she needed time to build rapport with James.
‘I’m a personal trainer,’ James said proudly.
‘And it shows,’ Elsie said. ‘How about I make us all a cup of tea and we sit down and talk about this? You can tell Tara how you feel without scaring her. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tara?’
‘Y-yes,’ Tara stuttered. ‘James... I... I’d like to talk about us. How can we move forward from this?’
Elsie wasn’t convinced by Tara’s abysmal acting skills but James was. It was if he believed it because it was what he needed to hear. The knife quivered again, his hand dropping a tiny bit as if he were about to acquiesce. At just the wrong moment, blue lights flashed outside the window.
‘What the hell?’ he yelled, his arm tightening up. The knife pressed against Tara’s neck, too close this time, drawing a trickle of blood.
‘Stop!’ Elsie yelled. If his hand moved even half a centimetre, he’d cut Tara’s carotid artery and she’d bleed out in less than a minute. ‘James, those are my colleagues outside. I called them. You’re getting angry at me, but you’re hurting Tara. Look at her, James. Look at the woman you love. You’re hurting her right now. That’s not what a good man does, is it? Don’t you want to protect her? Put down the knife, James.’
His eyes flicked to the window and then back again to Elsie. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll arrest me.’
Had he only just realised that? There wasn’t any point trying to lie to him. He wasn’t thick enough to believe that everything was going to be fine and that he’d get to go home.
‘I will, yes.’
His hand tightened again.
‘If I don’t arrest you, my colleagues will. Or worse, they’ll shoot you and they’ll aim to kill. That’s what we’re ordered to do in these situations. If you want to live, I’m your ticket out of here. Think about it. There’s hope for you and Tara as long as you’re both still breathing. You can call a lawyer the moment you’re outside, tell them your side of the story. Isn’t your brother a hotshot lawyer?’
He could even call a shrink. Elsie was willing to believe he was insane. Right now, she didn’t care if he spent the next twenty years in HMP Belmarsh or locked up in a straitjacket in Broadmoor.
‘No!’ he said. ‘I’d rather die.’
Despite his words, Elsie knew it wasn’t true. He didn’t want to die. Nor did he want to kill Tara. He couldn’t. He needed to strike without the blow being expected. That was how he’d killed the other three. Why would he break that pattern now? If he was as compulsive as Uncle Bertie thought, he was much less likely to kill in a different way.
‘No, James, you wouldn’t. Look at Tara. Really look at Tara. She loves you, James. Don’t you Tara?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she murmured.
Elsie’s shot her a glowering look. Play along, woman! She turned her attention back to James.
‘If you’re dead, you can’t be together. But if you surrender, Tara can visit you in jail, wait for you to get out. Isn’t that better than a bullet, James?’
Footsteps sounded outside. An Armed Response Unit was about to descend on the scene.
‘Stop!’ Elsie yelled. ‘DCI Mabey! I’m in here with Mr Robertson and one hostage. Do not come in. Repeat, do not come in.’
After a moment’s pause, the sound of footsteps receded as the Armed Response Unit beat a retreat. They wouldn’t have gone far, and they wouldn’t be gone for long.
‘James, I’m going to reach into my pocket and get out my phone. I need to tell them not to shoot you. Do you understand me? I’m not going for a gun. I’m unarmed.’
He nodded so she slowly delved into her pocket, pulled out her phone, held it aloft so James could see that she was telling the truth, and then called Stryker.
‘Boss!’ he said. ‘I’m outside. What’s going on?’
‘Stryker,’ she said cautiously. ‘You’re on speaker. Everything is okay in here. We’re just having a chat, James, Tara and I. I need you to tell them to stand down.’
‘Right. I’ll do that,’ Stryker said. ‘Our good friend DCI Fairbanks is out here giving orders. I’ll go speak to him now.’
Elsie hung up. Fairbanks. If he was the one calling the shots, James Robertson would be dead in five minutes flat. Fairbanks would shoot right through Tara before he let James get away.
‘James, you have to listen to me. My colleagues will have snipers with them. You see that window at the front of the house?’
She gestured to the windows where curtains were tightly drawn.
‘Those curtains won’t protect us,’ she said. ‘They’ll be using thermal imaging technology to search for body heat. They can aim through the curtains just fine. We need to go out there, okay?’
He bit his lip. ‘I... I can’t. I can’t live without Tara.’
His left arm – the one which wasn’t holding the knife – pulled Tara tighter against him, a human shield.
‘James, no one is asking you to live without Tara. But Tara’s bleeding. She needs to see a doctor, okay? If you put the knife down, we can walk out of here together.’
‘Will you still love me, Tara?’ he whispered.
She looked at Elsie, terrified. Elsie wanted to yell at her. For fuck’s sake woman, say yes. Instead, she gave her an imperceptible nod, her eyebrows arching just a touch.
‘Yes, James, I’ll still love you.’
‘Will you... will you marry me?’
If ever a man had picked a worse time and place, Elsie had never heard of it. James had a knife to her throat and yet he was proposing marriage.
All went silent. Tara’s eyes went wide, her expression meek. Finally, she said ‘Yes.’
The knife fell to the floor with a clang. Elsie sprang into action, running forward to kick it out of the way. James spun Tara around and then leant in as if to kiss her.
Just as his beard had come into contact with her cheeks, her knee had come into contact with his balls.
He doubled over, howling in pain.
‘James Robertson, you do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’
She slapped her cuffs on him as she cautioned him. Before Elsie could stop her, Tara kicked him.
‘Enough!’ Elsie said. ‘Before I have to arrest you too.’
She hauled James to his feet, yelled to her colleagues outside that they were coming out, and emerged into the night to find floodlights pointing in her direction. The unmistakable red glow of sniper rifles fell on them the moment they appeared in the doorway.
‘Don’t shoot! He’s in custody!’
Chapter 64: The Career Killer
The next morning, thanks to the mountain of DNA and other evidence as well as having been caught in the middle of an attempted murder, James Robertson confessed everything.
A press conference was hastily arranged, and by midday, conference room one was full again, this time filled to the brim with London’s finest journalists and newscasters, all desperate to find out if it were really all over. The whole team had come to bask in the glory of having caught the Lady Killer. Annie sat at the back where she cast a beady eye at DCI Fairbanks. She looked as if she hated his guts.
Just behind Fairbanks sat Hamish Porter. He grinned at Elsie, flashing two thumbs-up. Elsie smiled back. Without Hamish, she wouldn’t have found Vito and so might never have broken the case.
As she passed journalist after journalist, she wondered which of these people had managed to secure pictures of her incident room and who they’d bribed to get them. Had Matthews fallen prey to the lure of money? With her gone, it was possible that they’d never know who the leak was.
Stryker sat on the left. He was scowling when she glanced over but began to smile when their eyes met. He too had been invaluable throughout the investigation. Without him, she’d have given up and thrown in the towel.
She made it almost to the front before Ian appeared in front of her. One minute to the hour. The press conference would start at any moment. Ian miked her up so that she could talk to the whole auditorium. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Fairbanks had a microphone on too.
‘What’s that about?’ she asked Ian.
He shrugged. ‘Dunno. Just do as I’m told, don’t I?’ Fairbanks stood as Ian was talking, shuffling past Hamish Porter.
Once miked up, she approached the lectern. Fairbanks beat her to it. Cameras flashed in his direction as he began to talk.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming today,’ he said. ‘It is with great pride that I can tell you the Lady Killer has been brought to justice. Thanks to my team’s valiant efforts, aided and abetted by the lovely Detective Chief Inspector Mabey,’ he nodded in her direction, the cameras turning on her as he did, ‘we managed to prevent a fourth murder late last night.’
We? Elsie’s jaw dropped. Fairbanks was claiming credit for the bust? What on earth had he done?
‘The killer,’ he continued, ‘is a mentally ill young man. He was one of the so-called “incels”, driven by rage against women and society. He felt it was his right to have any woman of his choosing. Now he will spend the rest of his life behind bars with only men for company.’
He laughed, his belly jiggling.
Elsie was going to kill him. She wanted to wrap her hands around his pudgy little throat and squeeze the life out of him. How dare he take credit for her investigation? He hadn’t even bothered to properly investigate Leonella Boileau’s death and now he was taking credit for the lot?
Knox beat her to it. She appeared like a blur from the side of the conference room, all eyes turning on her as she leapt at Fairbanks, her hand colliding with his face so firmly that the slap reverberated throughout the room.
‘You bastard!’ she screamed. She yanked his microphone from him, held it up to her mouth and walked right on past him.
‘This piece of shit,’ Knox gesticulated in his direction, ‘has never investigated a case properly in his life. He has had nothing to do with the investigation. Every bit of success we’ve had is down to DCI Mabey.’
Elsie flashed her a grateful smile.
‘And while I’ve got your attention,’ Knox continued. ‘I need to get something off my chest. This useless fat fuck demanded sexual favours from me. In return, he promised me the promotion to DCI that he held me back from for years. When I wouldn’t sleep with him for the promotion that I earned, he trumped up disciplinary charges against me and had me demoted to sergeant.’
At the sight of the shocked, yet delighted, journalists, she added, ‘The first of you to come up with fifty grand can have an exclusive. Boss, the floor is yours.’
Knox stormed out, several journos running after her to try and strike a deal. They’d come for one morning’s news reports and scooped a much more scintillating and scandalous story.
Elsie took centre stage, ‘Well, that was eventful.’
A chuckle went around the room.
She wanted to pay tribute to Knox for her work rescuing Sumiko and breaking the back of a trafficking ring but the encrypted records from the accountant were still being deciphered and so it all had to stay hush-hush for now.
‘As Sergeant Knox said, this was nothing to do with Chief Inspector Fairbanks. This was a team effort. I’d like to pay tribute to all those involved but especially my own team. Stryker, Annie, Ian, I’m proud to work with you. I’d also like to thank Doctor Burton Leigh for coming out of retirement to assist with this case. Finally, I’d like to thank all our colleagues who joined us for yesterday’s operation, especially Ozzy Calder and his team who were an integral part of coordinating the efforts. I’d like to pay tribute to my father, the now-retired Chief Inspector Peter Mabey, without whom I’d never have joined the force.’
It was odd. Despite the crowds, she couldn’t see any sign of dear old Dad. Perhaps he didn’t want to steal the limelight. She did spot a teary-eyed Beya Boileau hiding at the back of the auditorium.
‘I also want to pay particular tribute to the late Georgia Matthews. In the short time that she was part of my team, she proved herself an enormous asset. Her loss will be felt for some time to come. My heart and sympathy go out to her family at this difficult time.’
She paused for breath and looked around the room, seeking out the eyes of those who’d previously doubted her. Today wasn’t about her, it was about her team, and so she kept it short and sweet. She resisted the urge to pre-empt the inevitable questions about whether she deserved to lead her team. She knew she did. She’d caught the bastard, and she’d saved a life into the bargain.
‘Thank you all. I’ll take your questions now.’
As the cameras flashed, the crowd applauded.
I’m proud to be a detective, Elsie thought, but I’m prouder still to be my father’s daughter.
From the Author
The biggest challenge in writing this novel was depicting ME/CFS fairly. Ultimately, Elsie’s symptoms are relatively minor when compared to many real-life sufferers, a necessity borne out of the need to solve murders.
Elsie can’t represent every person with ME/CFS and so she is only intended to represent the one woman who she is (loosely) based upon. I’d like to thank that person for helping to craft a unique, plausible and relatable character.
I’d also like to thank my team of ‘Advance Readers’ who gave me feedback along the way: Alyson, Tina, Laura, Cinta, Felice, and Martha. You rock, ladies!
Elsie and the team will return in 2020 for another case. To find out more, visit GunnCrime.com or search Ali Gunn online.