by William Shaw
‘How do you know? You always think the worst of everyone.’
Zoë had always been exasperating; she had an answer for everything. ‘I’m a police officer. We see the worst of everyone.’
Finally Alex took the phone out of the bag. Three messages all saying the same thing:
Call me!!!!!
Fourteen
‘How did you actually know that?’ demanded Jill.
Alex had waited until they were back home from the beach and standing in the kitchen, stepping sand onto the clean floor, and then she had called Jill back.
‘Know what?’ But Jill’s phone had been cut off by the time she answered.
She dialled again. It took a minute to connect.
‘Phone connection is ultra-shit out here,’ said Jill. ‘Let me try and find a better signal.’
Alex heard her walking over gravel. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m at the house.’ She didn’t have to explain which house. ‘You said to call you if Mrs Younis died at around seven minutes past ten.’
Zoë had removed the swimming towels from the beach bag and put them on the kitchen counter.
‘Her pacemaker stopped at just after four minutes past. I mean . . . that’s a bit too close for comfort. Is that, like, a fluky guess?’
‘The strangest thing,’ said Alex. ‘I can’t say.’
‘What do you mean, you can’t say? Don’t be like that, Alex.’
Alex checked the clock on the cooker. It was half past nine. ‘What are you doing still in that house?’
‘I’m not even sure myself now. Just came back. I wanted a second look.’
‘You wanted to be there at the time the murder happened.’
‘Yeah. I don’t know if I’ll learn anything from it, but it seemed worth a try. Nothing else is making any sense. The whole thing is nuts. Tell me, for God’s sake. What made you say seven minutes past ten?’
Alex watched Zoë unwrapping the beach towels carefully. ‘I’Il be there in fifteen minutes.’
‘No way, Alex. You’re not coming here. Just tell me why you said that particular time. Because it’s pretty much the exact same time she was—’
The call broke up for a second.
‘Are you there on your own?’
‘Tell me what you know, Alex.’
Buried safely in the middle of the towels was one of the starfish Zoë had found. Zoë picked it up and held it between finger and thumb.
‘It might just be a coincidence,’ said Alex.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.’
‘True. But I don’t believe in souls, either.’
‘What the hell are you on about?’
‘I’ll tell you.’ But the connection had dropped again. ‘Jill? . . . Can you hear me?’ The silence changed to a long tone. Redial went straight to voicemail.
She picked up her car keys again and noticed that Zoë had fetched a magnifying glass and was peering at the dead starfish. She watched her daughter put down the magnifier, open the kitchen drawer and pull out the kitchen scissors, putting them next to the dead starfish on a chopping board.
‘No, Zoë,’ said Alex, taking the scissors off her on her way out of the door. ‘Definitely not.’
Alex parked outside the open gates. The house was dark; no lights were on, inside or out. Jill’s Fiat was in the driveway, but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘Jill?’
As Alex stepped out of the car, the lock screen on her phone told her it was two minutes past ten. She approached the house. ‘Where are you?’ she called, louder this time.
Two metres from the front door, she was blinded by a security light blasting on. Blinking, she stepped up and knocked. ‘Jill?’
The door was locked.
She turned. To her right, the garage was lit up. Jill’s car was parked in front of it and beyond the car was the small dense copse that had grown up between the house and the neighbouring field.
A flicker of light in the wood caught her eye.
‘Jill? That you?’
She called Jill’s number. It rang unanswered.
From the darkness of the copse came the unmistakable crack of a dry stick.
‘Hello?’
She walked forwards towards the trees, listening for any other sign of movement.
It could have been a deer or a badger that she had heard, she thought. A reflection of a creature’s eye caught in the light.
The security light behind her switched itself off and the copse became impenetrably dark. Switching the torch on on her phone, she pointed it into the branches.
An old wire fence, low enough to step over, held back the lower branches of a laurel. Alex shone her torch up and down; on the ground, something caught the light. She stepped closer, peering at it.
It was flat and round, like the lid of a jar, only darker; a black disc of some kind, several millimetres thick, newly enough discarded to be lying on top of a tussock of herb-robert. There was something sinister about the simple geometry of the shape.
She dialled Jill again. No answer. She checked the time. Four minutes past ten now.
Pushing down on the wire, she lifted one leg over the fence and then the next, steadying herself, then stopped to listen again.
The copse was silent. She had frightened away whatever creature had been in there, she guessed, or it was still somewhere in there, frozen in fear. Taking a step deeper into the thick wood, she pushed her way around the thin trunk of an ash sapling and tried to find the disc she had seen from the driveway. Though she was closer, she couldn’t see it. She leaned from side to side, trying to get a fresh angle.
Again, an unnatural shape caught her eye, but it was not the disc. A couple of metres away, in the scrub of undergrowth, was something else that was out of place, she realised. It took a while to understand the shape she was seeing.
A pair of black leather boots. Funny, her first thought had been, that someone should leave two boots side by side like that in among these trees. Then came the realisation that the boots were not discarded. Two legs, clad in some kind of camouflage material, extended up from them.
A torso.
A person.
She shone her torch up to where the head should have been, but instead there was only blackness.
Confused, chest tight, she took a jerky step backwards.
Lit by her torch, two bright white eyes materialised from the darkness, then below the eyes appeared white teeth and a red mouth.
The mouth roared. There were no words, just an inchoate noise.
Alex stumbled backwards falling hard against the fence.
Light suddenly blazed all around them.
It was a man, dressed from head to foot in camouflage, his face completely blackened.
‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ he screamed, as she pushed herself upwards, trying to find her feet again.
Fifteen
The first thing Jill said when her car pulled up back at Alex’s house was: ‘You are out of your bloody mind.’
‘So they say.’
‘You were just going to chase after that man?’
‘Instinct kicked in,’ said Alex. ‘I would have done it if you hadn’t turned up. He just stood there screaming at me for a second, then he ran way out of the woods and into the field.’
The man in the Manic Street Preachers T-shirt was sitting at the back of his house in the dark, smoking a cigarette. Jill clocked him and lowered her voice.
‘Lucky I was there to stop you. What is wrong with you? You were on your own, as far as you knew.’
Jill, it turned out, had been a couple of hundred metres up the lane trying to get a decent signal on her phone when she’d heard Alex shout her name the first time. When she had approached the back of the house, she had triggered the security li
ght. ‘Man, approximately six foot tall, dressed in camouflage gear, black army-style boots with black greasepaint on his face,’ was the description Jill had called in. ‘Probably dangerous.’
‘My heart is still beating like the worst drill track you ever heard,’ Jill said.
Despite Zoë’s professed love of the environment, every light downstairs seemed to have been left on. They went into the kitchen, blinking in the glare of it. ‘Wine?’
‘How much have you got?’
‘That bad?’
‘I don’t know why you’re so calm. You were right next to him.’
It’s true. It was before she had seen the man that she had been anxious. In the aftermath she had just been strangely at ease and that had been a welcome feeling.
There was a half-empty bottle of white in the fridge door. She pulled it out, poured two glasses, thought for a moment, then put another bottle into the freezer because, knowing Jill, they’d be needing it soon enough.
Jill took an inch out of her glass and said, ‘And? So. Why did you say seven past ten?’
‘It’s a weird one.’
‘Nothing is going to get any weirder than tonight.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. A friend of Zoë’s said he saw souls,’ she said.
Alex explained how Kenny Abel had claimed to have seen souls rising up from the roof of The Nest at exactly that time on the night of the murder. ‘And he said he saw them at seven minutes past ten. He was very precise about it because he was on the phone at the time and he could check his phone records.’
‘Jesus. You’re not wrong. That’s ultra-weird.’
‘Did you see anything tonight when you were waiting?’
‘Apart from a lunatic in the woods? You seriously expected I was going to see a ghost or something?’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Oh. So just because Alex Cupidi doesn’t believe in them means they don’t exist? I believe in them, I tell you. That’s properly freaked me out.’
‘I was wondering whether it was just some trick of the light. Something that anyone would see around there at that time of night. Or that there might just be some simple explanation.’
They looked at each other for a while. ‘Souls?’ said Jill.
‘I know.’
‘That gives me the heebies.’
‘Me too, as a matter of fact,’ said Alex.
‘And you don’t even believe in them.’ Jill had emptied her glass and held it out. ‘Can I – you know – stay the night, then?’
They stepped outside the back of the house so Jill could smoke.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Jill. ‘One freaky case like this and I’m back on them worse than ever.’
Up on the bank, they sat with their backs to the lights of the house and the power station, looking into the darkness of the nature reserve, a low black horizon dotted with stars and the silhouettes of the delicate geometry of electricity pylons.
‘That was crazy tonight. Did you see his mad face? Was that black boot polish, or some Vietnam-era Rambo shit? He must have been hiding in there all the time I was on my own.’
‘The Unknown Male,’ said Alex.
‘Yeah. I wonder if he was.’
‘Promise not to tell Zoë. She’d freak out if she knew that happened to me.’
‘You’re scared of her, aren’t you?’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘I think she’s the most amazing girl in the world.’
‘But I’m still scared of her sometimes.’
Jill laughed, blew out smoke. ‘Fags are so horrible, aren’t they?’ She pulled out her phone and scrolled through her messages.
‘Anything?’
‘They haven’t found him yet. Not likely to in the dark.’
There wasn’t much point looking out there at this time of night. They would send officers to scour the area in the morning. Alex went back into the kitchen and pulled the second bottle out of the freezer, then picked up a blanket. Zoë appeared at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Is that Jill?’
‘Want to come and join us?’
‘Is she drunk?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’re OK.’ She turned and went back up to her bedroom.
Alex went back out into the darkness.
‘Why was he even there? I mean . . . it could be him, couldn’t it? He probably had guns.’
‘I didn’t see one.’
‘Someone like that . . . all ninja’d up. You think they could get in and out of a house without leaving prints?’
Alex picked up a stone and lobbed it into the blackness, listening to it land with a quiet chink.
‘Something else,’ said Jill. ‘Digging into the Younises’ accounts, turns out that in March, Ayman Younis paid out four hundred thousand pounds to invest in a green forestry scheme in Guatemala. It’s called Biosfera Reforestation.’
‘Jesus. Big money.’
‘Very big.’
‘Lucre, lechery or lunacy. The three great reasons for murder. You’re looking into it?’
‘That’s quite poetic,’ said Jill. Her glass was empty again. ‘Course we’re looking into it. It was one of them schemes where they plant trees for carbon offsetting. They’re supposed to be a good investment because they’re backed by local government and the UN and whatever. Put your money in, you can’t possibly lose.’
‘But you’re going to tell me different?’
‘Maybe. There are some web pages online but I couldn’t find a contact number anywhere. Turns out the Fraud Intelligence mob have a mega file on them.’
‘He put his money into some scam?’
‘They’re sending us some information tomorrow.’
‘He had a lot of money then?’
‘Yes. Looked like it. Gorgeous house. Everything kind of perfect, you know? She was all into animal charities and the Ramblers. He was Savile Row suits and Church’s brogues in the cupboard. New car every couple of years. They liked to keep up appearances, know what I mean? The only person who ever had a bad word for them complained about how they would outbid other people at the Rotary charity auction. Hardly the worst of sins. Ayman liked people to know he was well off.’
Alex thought of what Terry Neill had said: All he wanted was to be part of all this.
Jill stood. ‘I’m hungry, Alex. I was going to get a takeaway when I got home. All that running around in the dark and I’m starving. What have you got? I could eat anything, right now. Mind if I take a look in your fridge?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Want anything?’
Alex lay on her back looking up at a starless night sky. It was true what Jill had said. It would have been crazy for her to chase the Unknown Male into the darkness, when she had no idea if he was armed, or whether he was the murderer, but she would have done it had Jill not been there. It scared her to realise that. Nothing would have stopped her. Not following him deeper into the copse had left her feeling strangely empty.
Sixteen
‘A bloody starfish cut up into pieces in a Tupperware box,’ said Jill when she returned empty-handed. ‘That’ll give me nightmares.’
‘Sorry,’ said Alex. ‘I should have warned you.’
‘Why can’t she just look at a YouTube video of it like a normal child?’
After seeing Zoë’s cut-up starfish, Jill had lost her appetite. ‘Just one more before we go to bed?’ she said. ‘To settle my nerves.’
Alex still had a full glass.
‘How’s the counselling going?’
‘Good, I think. He just wants me to tell the stories about the things that happened to me that made me this way. I think he thinks if I tell them enough I’ll maybe get bored of them.’
‘Don’t. It’s serious.’
‘I met a biophysicis
t yesterday. He said you could see physical damage on the brains of traumatised people. Interesting, no?’
‘That’s a coincidence. I met a biophysicist too. One of Ayman Younis’s friends.’
‘Did he ask you out?’ She spoke without thinking.
‘No. Bit old for me.’ For a second Jill looked puzzled by the question. ‘I felt sorry for him, though. He was devastated by what had happened.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bogging hell.’ She put two and two together. ‘You’re talking about Terry Neill as well, aren’t you?’
Alex looked away. ‘Yes. I kind of bumped into him.’
‘You’re bloody following us around, aren’t you? Christ, Alex! Are you insane? What has got into you? You’re on sick leave.’
‘I don’t know what’s got into me.’
Jill seemed to mull this over for a while. ‘Why did you ask if he asked me out?’
Alex didn’t answer.
Jill grinned. ‘Oh, my giddy uncle! He asked you, didn’t he?’
‘He offered to show me some pictures of brains.’
‘I liked him,’ said Jill. ‘He had nice forearms. Maybe you should go and look at his brain pictures. Have a look at my delicious cerebellum.’
‘What happened to Are you insane? What has got into you?’
Jill lolled back in her chair. ‘You’ve never had a boyfriend since you’ve been here.’
‘No. And I’m happy that way, Jill, so don’t start.’
‘Are you?’
‘You’re the one who’s always after a boyfriend, not me.’
At twenty-five, Jill was at that age where she worried it might never happen. ‘I’m not always after a boyfriend,’ she complained. ‘Not, like, every second.’
Jill was up early, eating Zoë’s granola at the breakfast table, her appetite back in force. As always, she looked fresh and immaculate. ‘Is that a clean shirt?’ Alex asked.
‘I always keep one in a bag in the car. And clean knickers. Just in case.’
‘In case of what, exactly?’
‘Shut up,’ said Jill.
Alex looked in the sink. There was already a bowl in it. ‘Zoë up already?’