Know No Evil

by Hampton Graeme

  ‘But not with something specific like a cross,’ added Denning.

  ‘Do we know for sure our killer is doing that?’ she asked.

  Denning waited before he answered. ‘I’ve just spoken to the pathologist who did the post-mortem on Leanne Wyatt. He says that on first inspection, and bearing in mind the mess her face was in, it looked as though the marks on her forehead could have been caused by a fox, or some other wild animal, but after she’d been cleaned up, a more detailed inspection suggested they were deliberate. They’re deeper, more pronounced. He reckoned they were caused by a knife or similar bladed instrument. He agrees that the marks do resemble a cross.’ He paused, giving McKenna a chance to digest the information before he continued. ‘We haven’t got the post-mortem results back for Sandra Blake, but there were marks on her forehead too. It was difficult to be certain because of the state the body was in after more than a week in the canal, but I’d say it looked like a cross.’

  ‘Shit.’ McKenna clasped the hair until her scalp started to strain. ‘The Chief Super wants this whole thing dealt with before the press start running wild. At the moment we’ve managed to contain the worst of it, but we’re firefighting here. As soon as the media get a whiff of anything about possible serial killers, they’ll be all over this story as if their Christmases had come early.’

  She didn’t need to spell it out. He knew the pressure they were under… the pressure he was under. ‘One more thing – and I know this is slightly against procedure – but there’s a DS in CID who seems to know quite a bit about the Ferguson case – Molly Fisher. To be honest, she was the one who put me onto this. Apparently she’s keen to join MIT. OK, it might all come to nothing, but God knows we’re short-handed and could do with a bit of extra support right now.’ He looked at McKenna. ‘I wondered if we could ask CID if she could be seconded to the case.’

  McKenna released her hair from its vice-like grip. ‘You do seem convinced there might be something in this Ferguson story.’ She folded her arms across her chest and sighed. ‘OK, it’s a bit unorthodox, and we don’t want to give the impression we’re a bunch of amateurs in MIT, but I’ll get on to CID, see if they can spare her.’ She wrote the name on the notepad on her desk. ‘One more thing, Matt: it might be worth speaking to Ferguson himself, see if he can, even indirectly, offer up anything that might be useful.’

  Denning smiled and nodded. Right now, any options were worth grabbing with both hands.

  * * *

  Molly was about to pack up for the day. It was Friday evening and it was late.

  She looked up from her desk to see DI Broomfield approaching. She tried to read his face to see if he was the bearer of good or bad news, but it was hard to tell.

  ‘Gregor Kane is pleading guilty to possession. He claims any drugs he had on him were purely for personal use and that, being a generous and gullible kind of person, he was happy to share them with friends.’

  ‘Adam Sloane was no friend of Kane’s,’ Molly said. ‘Nor Leanne Wyatt for that matter.’

  ‘That’s for a jury to decide. We’ve done all we can at this end. The CPS thinks that at best we’ll get a fine for possession, but the manslaughter charge is dead in the water. It’s not the result we wanted, but it’s something.’

  ‘So the bad guys win again.’

  He placed a hand on her shoulder in an almost paternal way. Molly knew the gesture was well meant, even though she found it slightly patronising. ‘It’s the way it goes, Molly. Sooner or later Kane will slip up and we’ll get him.’

  She tried to smile; clock it up to experience and move on, but it rankled with her. All that work for nothing. All that sweat and grief and Kane would likely get off with little more than a caution. She could feel hope and optimism trickle away into a great void of nothingness.

  ‘On a more positive note,’ Broomfield said, his lips offering a smile, ‘I’ve just had DCI McKenna on the blower.’ His smile grew into a broad grin. ‘She’s asked if you’d like to be seconded onto an ongoing murder inquiry. It would only be until this investigation is completed, and obviously if anything serious comes up down here we’d need you back pronto, but this could be your chance, Molly.’ His hand still resting on her shoulder. ‘If you play your cards right, this could turn out to be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.’

  They agreed that another DS would take over her caseload for the time being and she could join MIT straightaway. She thanked him and waited until he removed his hand from her shoulder.

  Molly could feel her heart thumping in her chest with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. If Denning had actually believed her, then perhaps the past few days hadn’t counted for nothing after all. Perhaps her dream of finally joining MIT was about to be realised.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Molly wanted to head straight to the pub and celebrate her news over a couple of pints of lager. Instead, she headed to Cricklewood. She turned left as soon as she exited the tube station, carefully following the directions she’d been given.

  The house was about a five-minute walk from the station, along a street consisting mostly of terraced houses and larger, post-Victorian villas, most of which had now been converted into flats and bedsits. It didn’t take her long to find number 24. She pressed the buzzer for Flat C and after a moment a voice crackled over the entry phone. ‘Yes…?’

  She paused before she answered: she still wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing, and after the day she’d had, this could potentially turn out to be the icing on the turd.

  ‘It’s Molly,’ she said after a gap. ‘I emailed you earlier.’

  There was another brief pause, as though the occupant of the flat was having the same reservations as she was, but then the door buzzed. She pushed it open and headed up the tatty staircase to Flat C on the second floor.

  There was a figure standing in the doorway of Flat C, partially silhouetted against the light that was coming from inside the flat. It was a woman, probably the same age as herself, with hair loose around her shoulders and a tired look on her face.

  Molly reached the top of the stairs and shoved a hand in the figure’s direction. ‘Hi. Thanks for agreeing to meet me.’

  The figure gave an indifferent smile and stepped back from the doorway, allowing Molly to enter.

  The flat hadn’t been decorated for a while. It had the same grey woodchip wallpaper as the communal hallway, and a faded chintz patterned carpet, though the pattern was mostly worn away.

  Melanie Harris wasn’t as she’d expected. Not that she was sure what she had expected. Taller than average and painfully thin – whether through anorexia or drugs, Molly couldn’t be sure – she was dressed in a pair of men’s pyjamas, a belt of thin orange rope tied round the waist.

  She showed Molly into the living room. A brown three-piece suite from the 1970s took up most of the space, with a cane and glass coffee table taking up the remainder. Molly waited until Melanie asked her to sit down. There was no offer of a drink, for which Molly was grateful.

  ‘You want to know about Jon Cavanagh,’ Melanie said. She stood by the narrow fireplace with its chipped tiles and observed Molly with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. Her voice had a faint trace of an Irish accent.

  ‘I understand you had some problems with him,’ Molly said. ‘When you worked at the London Echo.’ She could feel her mouth growing uncomfortably dry. Already she was regretting coming round here asking questions about her boyfriend to a woman she didn’t know, all on the word of someone she didn’t trust.

  Melanie Harris gave a dry laugh. ‘I wouldn’t exactly say I worked there. No, not worked exactly.’ She sat down on the brown sofa and crossed one skinny leg over the other. ‘I was there on a placement from college. I’d told them I wanted to be a journalist, and someone knew someone who worked there. He got me an eight-week placement there one summer.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I decided journalism wasn’t for me. I became a secretary instead.’r />
  Molly gently bit the inside of her lip. ‘I meant with Jon.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, yeah, Jon. Well, he was sweet at first: helped me out. Quite a few of them were really up their own backsides – I’m sure you know the sort: thought I was just there as an unpaid skivvy to make the coffee and fetch their sandwiches and massage their oversized egos. Jon was nice, at first. He actually took an interest. Encouraged me to learn about how a tabloid newspaper works. He asked me out for a drink one evening, and I agreed.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He knew I’d recently split up from my boyfriend – office gossip, I expect. He told me he was in the middle of getting a divorce, something about his wife being a bit of a harridan. Naturally I took all that with a pinch of salt. I mean, I was young but I wasn’t naïve, I knew that men could lie easily when it came to women.’

  And women could manipulate, thought Molly. ‘Was it just the once?’ she asked. ‘Going for a drink?’

  Melanie Harris nodded. ‘He liked to drink. I mean, I suppose it goes with the job, doesn’t it? Journalists and booze. But even so, he couldn’t half knock them back. The drink didn’t do him any favours either: he became less likeable; not abusive, like, just a bit blunt. I think he thought he was trying to be funny but really he was just being obnoxious. I wanted to leave but I didn’t want him to think I was being rude.’

  ‘Did he try anything on with you?’

  ‘Not then, but I made it clear I wasn’t interested in anything more. Well…’ her voice trailed away. ‘I thought I’d made it clear. Maybe he misread the signals, maybe he just doesn’t like taking no for an answer… I don’t know.’

  Molly wondered if Melanie Harris was telling the truth. Perhaps this was all part of some elaborate conspiracy dreamed up by Magda Kilbride, but that was ridiculous. Why would she go to all this trouble? Perhaps Melanie was telling the truth, or as least her version of what she believed had happened to her.

  ‘When did the harassment start?’ she asked.

  A casual shrug. ‘After we went out for that drink. He kept pestering me to go out with him again. He had my mobile number so he would continually text me, asking me out. I started to ignore the texts and tried to avoid him at work. I asked if I could be transferred to the paper’s magazine in order to get away from him, but he would always find excuses to come and see me. After a while the texts became more and more aggressive: he accused me of leading him on, calling me all sorts of nasty names.’

  ‘Did you mention any of this to your boss at the paper?’

  She laughed. ‘Naturally, but it made no difference. He was one of their top journalists; I was just some silly little girl from an FE college. There was no way they were going to take my side over his.’

  ‘What happened in the end?’

  ‘I left the placement early; after just a month. I’d already decided journalism wasn’t my thing. Mind you, maybe if it hadn’t been for my experience with Jon Cavanagh I might have felt differently. Who knows?’

  ‘This just doesn’t sound like Jon.’

  She looked at Molly like she was a simpleton. ‘But it didn’t stop there. After I left he continued to bombard me with texts. He followed me home from college once, continually pestering me: claiming I’d lied about him, tried to poison people against him. There was a break-in at my flat. Nothing was taken, and I’m not saying it was him, but it freaked me out enough to make me move house. In the end I had no option but to go to the police. They took out a restraining order and had a word with the paper’s owners. It seemed to do the trick. He left me alone after that.’

  Molly left the stuffy flat and returned to the stuffier air of the street outside. She headed slowly back towards the Tube station, unsure how she felt about what she had just heard.

  The evening was humid and even though the sun was low in the sky, the pavement was throwing up all the heat from the day.

  She could feel a trickle of sweat make its way down her spine and gather in the small of her back where her blouse met her trousers.

  She desperately wanted to believe that the Jon she knew and loved wasn’t the same Jon Melanie Harris had described. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d recognised some of the characteristics: the way his personality changed when he was in one of his depressive cycles; his near-obsessiveness, or his inability to see when he was pissing someone off. She remembered how he’d endlessly texted her when they’d first met, after they quite literally bumped into one another at a music festival in Erith three and half years ago. At first, she’d thought it was charming. Jon was very old-fashioned, insisting on paying for everything; walking her home after a night out, or at least as far as her bus stop. The age gap between them had never been an issue: he always claimed she was mature for her age, while he was just a child at heart. She’d believed that too, and part of her still did.

  He’d told her about his previous marriages, all four of them. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign: if he couldn’t make a success of four serious relationships, then what were the chances of the two of them making a go of it? She so wanted to be wrong about what she was now thinking about him; blind herself to the growing mound of evidence that suggested the man she lived with was someone she didn’t really know. She could convince herself the evidence was circumstantial and Jon was guilty of nothing more than poor judgement, but did she really believe that?

  She arrived at the Tube station: a wave of roasting heat blasting out the entrance like opening an oven door. She tapped her Oyster card against the yellow pad on the gates, sidled through as they swung open, and headed towards the escalators. A line of sweating bodies rose up from below, standing on the escalator opposite like melting dummies in a shop window display.

  She knew she had to speak to Jon about Melanie Harris’s accusations – get his side of the story before she made any bold decisions.

  Just before the escalator reached the platform level, her phoned pinged with a text – another couple of seconds and she would have been out of range.

  The text was from Jon. It read: I need to talk to you.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  The French windows leading onto the narrow balcony were open when Denning returned home, allowing a welcome respite from the clammy mugginess of the hot summer’s evening.

  It had been a long day.

  He could hear Sarah in the shower in the en suite next to their bedroom in the mezzanine level above the living area.

  There was a copy of the evening edition of the London Echo on the coffee table. He picked it up and scanned the headline: *Body found in Hoxton canal*. The article was based on McKenna’s carefully crafted press release stating that the death was being treated as suspicious, while suggesting that it might even be accidental and deliberately not connecting it with the earlier murders, which weren’t even mentioned.

  He tossed the paper back onto the coffee table. He cast his mind over DS Fisher’s theory about the Bermondsey Ripper and her insistence that there was a connection with the current case. He wanted to dismiss her claims as laughable, but he couldn’t ignore the facts.

  He remembered the case. He was in his final year at King’s when the Bermondsey murders seemed to rise up out of nowhere and embrace the capital in a bear hug of fear and paranoia. He had been too busy playing rugby and courting Claire to pay much attention to the finer details, but it was impossible to avoid the wider implications. He already had a vague idea about wanting to join the police back then, but at the time it was simply one career option amongst many others.

  However, the sheer brutality of the killings had been hard to ignore. Claire had been reluctant to walk home by herself, nervous even of using taxis or public transport at night. Female friends at uni had been cautious about joining him and his mates for nights out amid the fear of becoming another grim statistic in a serial killer’s sick quest for notoriety.

  It was a sobering thought: the prospect of that killer still being out there killing people today.

 
; He was suddenly aware of Sarah standing beside him, wrapped in a white cotton robe; her dark hair still damp from the shower. She smelt of lavender body wash and coconut conditioner.

  ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she said. ‘You look shattered.’ She leant down and brushed his cheek with her lips.

  Denning watched her, standing next to him looking and smelling seductive. He tried not to think about Claire, looking and smelling seductive for someone else. ‘We found another body,’ he said, nodding at the newspaper on top of the coffee table.

  Sarah sat down next to him on the linen sofa, caressing his shoulder with one hand and rubbing his arm with the other. ‘I know. I read it. It must be taking its toll.’ The hand that had been rubbing his shoulder moved to hold his hand in a gesture that was tender and reassuring. ‘Why don’t we eat out tonight? It’s too hot to cook anything.’

  He couldn’t think about food right now. His mind was jammed with awkward thoughts, mostly the inexorable fact that there was a serial killer out there killing women. Just like there had been twelve years earlier…

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘I’ll phone Pablo’s and see if we can get a table.’

  Pablo’s was a pseudo-Spanish eatery that had ‘popped up’ somewhere along Shoreditch High Street a few months back and had quickly established a reputation as a magnet for hipsters and hedge-fund managers alike. Sarah liked it. Claire would have hated it.

  ‘I’ve booked a table for seven p.m.,’ she said.

  He smiled at her. ‘Good. I’ve just realised I skipped lunch.’

  * * *

  Jon was waiting in the kitchen when Molly got back. She could smell the remains of a roach lingering in the fuggy heat.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. His voice seemed laced with genuine concern, and for a moment it was like the old Jon was back in the room, the one who cared for her and wanted everything to be all right. ‘I expected you back ages ago.’