Stations of the Soul

by Chris Lewando

  He did find a reference to a Professor Waterman, erstwhile of Cambridge University, who had written papers on cell regeneration. It was too long ago to have any bearing on Sarah or her mentally challenged brother, but it made him smile. There was a single, barbed comment, positing that the professor’s continued absence was possibly an indication of death, suggesting he hadn’t achieved his ambition – of discovering eternal life.

  He still would have been working before the internet changed the diaspora of information. Maybe Professor Thompson’s research had simply been washed away beneath the incoming tide of younger researchers.

  Robin’s underlying concern about his abnormal ability to heal – which he was sure hadn’t raised its head during childhood scrapes – continued to niggle. He thought about the statements from the crash which the DCI had inadvertently provided him with. A couple of weeks back he would have attacked the challenge in the certain expectation of discovering something others had missed. But that need was buried beneath the new one: had he been infected with something? If so, what?

  He was distressed at his own misgivings. He wished he could forget all the stuff that bothered him. Start from scratch. Sarah was hugely attractive, and though Robin liked to think he was not that shallow, somehow it mattered. Being seen with someone so beautiful had lent him, for an evening at least, that self-value he’d once had, in his looks, his career, his place in the world.

  If she was different – what did that mean, even? – did that account for why she chose to work the twilight shift. He groaned at the direction of his thoughts: bloodsucking vampires, phantoms and demons that preyed on the dead and the dying. Did he truly believe in all that crap? Not at all, but his folk memory was intact. If things went bump in the night, it made him jump.

  He wanted to laugh at himself, at his own flights of fantasy, but something stopped him. Somewhere in this manic confusion lay a fear of the unknown. He believed he’d seen something other than human, so did the priest, and Helen believed it had killed her child. Had it then killed Helen? There had been a long gap between Rachel dying, and Helen’s death, though, so it seemed unlikely.

  He paced. He couldn’t even run it past that detective. He imagined Redwall’s brows raised with cynicism. His belated admission to Redwall that the youth he had described was something inhuman, would seem like an afterthought, a grasp at sensationalising the moment. The only witness he could call upon, now that Helen was dead, was the priest, who was lost in his own religious fanaticism. Robin inwardly winced as he envisaged the derision that such a revelation would cause. If word got out, he would open himself to the ridicule of the press, and unlike the Priest, he had no faith to prop him. It was the kind of ordeal that had made Helen Speakman renege on her own story. Robin was not about to pillory himself because of some vague and unsubstantiated concept.

  Chapter 21

  Freman had plenty else to do in a day, but in the early evening, he backed quietly onto the drive of one of Robin’s neighbours, an old guy who must be deaf, judging from the volume on the TV. The dividing hedge meant he wouldn’t be seen unless the owner came outside. If that happened there were plenty of excuses that could roll off his tongue.

  He’d been following Redwall, hoping for a scoop on the prossy stranglings, and his reporter’s instinct went into overdrive seeing Redwall’s slow chump of a colleague also turn up to watch Robin’s house. Why Robin? His nose had twitched when he discovered Robin had a connection to Helen Speakman. Sarah’s arrival that evening had added fuel to his spark of intuition. She might have met Robin in the hospital, but she was the nurse Helen had attacked when her daughter died. You couldn’t mistake that hair. He’d never seen anything that more resembled old gold. Freman’s radar was pinging, and, sooner or later, if he gave it some cerebral space, he was sure that undefined niggle would solidify into a concept.

  He followed Jim following them to Charley’s. He’d eaten at Charley’s once, but never again. It was a pretentious place, cluttered with junk, with a bland menu and cheap wine. He drove back to Robin’s place at that point, which would be much better use of his time. The guy rarely left the house, after all.

  He slid in through the front door. Strange how many people still just had Yale locks, when any crook with half a brain could spring one in a second. As he opened the door, a cat burst past him with a yowl of fright. He jumped and swore. The curtains in the living area were pulled, which was good, and a light had been left on, which was useful. He slid open the patio door, ready for a quick exit, and after a whistle-stop tour of the tiny house, made for the computer in the bedroom at the back, sitting amidst stacked, tidy piles of printouts.

  It was still on, the fan whirring gently, and he breathed a sigh of relief to discover it wasn’t password protected. Breaking into houses was one thing, but locked computers were beyond him. Robin obviously felt he had nothing there that anyone would want to pinch – except for the laptop itself, which was fairly new. Quickly and efficiently he checked the recent activity, copied a load of stuff onto a USB drive, then, when Robin didn’t come straight home again, began to be more methodical in searching the clutter on the desk.

  When he was done, he leaned back in the chair and tapped his teeth with a fingernail. Why had Redwall given Robin all that stuff about the crash? Something he hadn’t given him, which was irritating. But Vanger had also been delving into Sarah’s past, and Helen’s, too. Was there a connection between them? He couldn’t see one, so what did Vanger and Redwall know that he didn’t? And why had he also been researching that nutjob of a priest who’d seen an angel? Was that just human curiosity? Robin didn’t strike him as being the sort to dwell on the unlikely, even though that story had been fun to write, there was no indication it had been any more than a bunch of crap.

  His sharp hearing finally clocked a car rolling into the cul-de-sac, so he switched the light off, and leapt down the stairs. He was in the garden, the door pulled quietly closed behind him, before the engine was cut. Robin would discover the patio door unlocked at some stage, and no doubt believe he’d forgotten to lock it.

  As he stood in the shadow by the back gate, he saw that Jim was still in tow – how come they didn’t notice? He was almost riding their bumper. Then Sarah left, and Jim followed. He was amused when Sarah didn’t stay the night, and wondered whether Robin’s expectations had been dashed. He made his way back to the chill of his car.

  When lights went on in Robin’s room at 3am, Freman was instantly alert. He shivered slightly and lit a cigarette, hauling the smoke into his lungs for warmth. He cracked the car window open, and blew towards the window. The smokes would probably kill him in the end, but he enjoyed smoking, and didn’t want to give it up. You could die of worse things. Besides, he might get lucky. His grandfather had smoked from the age of eleven and still lived to nearly eighty. The lights went off again. Just a pee break, then.

  When he arrived back the following night, he knew Robin hadn’t gone anywhere in the meantime. The chalk mark he’d put on the offside tyre was exactly as he’d left it, and the bonnet was chill to the touch. He settled down for another cold, probably fruitless night. He was startled awake the following morning as Robin’s front door closed. As Robin reversed from his drive, Freman sank further down into his seat. Where the hell was he going at this time?

  Chapter 22

  At the hospital, Robin discovered Sarah’s car in a staff carpark, and waited as her shift came to an end. There was a steady stream of activity, the arrival and departure of the ambulances accompanied by an efficient bustle of activity. The sliding doors in the emergency bay were rarely still. At one point a blond, strapping young orderly stepped out to assist. Was that Sarah’s brother? The young man straightened, looking around, as if searching for an elusive thought. Robin shrank down into the seat, trying to make himself invisible. The young man eventually turned back to his task, and the sliding doors closed behind him.

  Robin began to have grave doubts of his own sanity. When he finall
y saw Sarah exit, slumped in tiredness, he knew he was being stupid. She ran a hand through her hair, and stretched before climbing into the car, as if trying to wake herself long enough to face the drive home. He felt hideously guilty for suspecting her of anything. His previous thoughts were ludicrous. In the early morning, with a red sky lighting a new dawn, and with an almost childlike enjoyment of harmless transgression, he decided to follow her anyway.

  It was more difficult to tail someone than Robin might have supposed. At first, he stayed a fair way back but, surprised at the amount of traffic around at that time in the morning, had to close the gap, to not lose her. Sarah was a careful driver, maybe through exhaustion. They traversed a few miles across the city to end up in a road lined with tall, old buildings set back from the road opposite a railed park where a brightly coloured children’s activity centre waited in dew-covered expectation. A once-select area, he decided, and probably still very expensive. She pulled in and parked on the road by a converted Victorian mansion, then walked up the path and disappeared from view. He watched the front of the building, but no lights went on. Assuming her flat was somewhere at the back of the house, he limped to the front door, which sported six individual buzzers. Her name wasn’t on any of them. He hoped she wasn’t living with a boyfriend.

  Robin loved knowing where she lived, though. He imagined her flat, with its tall sash windows, cluttered with second-hand furniture. She would love fabric, he was sure. She would have brightly coloured curtains, ethnic batik throws, and a riot of colourful glass night-light holders. He imagined her undressing, and falling into a bed under a handmade patchwork counterpane. She would shower, later, to face her new shift with a fresh-soap scent. As he drove home, the image of his fantasy solidified. He wondered if she would be happy living in a small house on an estate. He could get used to batik throws and ethnic lamps, if they were part of the overall package.

  But hell, where had that come from? They’d had one date, a pleasant, companionable evening that had ended with the unspoken knowledge that she wasn’t coming in for sex, and his imagination had taken a wild, but not unpleasant, leap towards marriage and children. Strange how he was afraid during the night, but in the morning his fantasies took a much different turn.

  Chapter 23

  ‘Vanger’s bought a car,’ Jim said.

  Redwall was startled. ‘Already? Damn. If it is him…’

  ‘He didn’t have a car when Helen died, and he couldn’t have walked to her house and back again.’

  ‘There are plenty of taxi drivers.’

  ‘What, just wait outside while I go in and strangle this woman, won’t take a minute?’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, he’s mobile again. Not that mobile, though. He bought a car with an automatic clutch.’

  ‘He’s still strong enough to strangle a woman.’

  ‘It’s all conjecture. I followed him to the hospital the other day, and he went to the emergency, so I wondered if there was a problem, but he came out again, and drove home. Then a few days later, one of the nurses came to his house, and they went out for dinner, at Charley’s.’

  ‘Did you see who it was?’

  Jim paused for effect. ‘Sarah Thompson. The one who was the first on the scene when Helen’s kid popped her clogs.’

  ‘Well, there’s one connection, though I can’t for the life of me imagine what it signifies. Did he take her home?’

  ‘He took her back to his house, I guess they had coffee, or something, then she left. Do you think she’s intended to be his next victim?’

  Redwall’s face hardened. ‘Who knows. Maybe he’s just doing a bit of sleuthing. He’s keen enough to find out everything about the Stinger Killer, that’s for sure. Maybe he’s just fishing. And he probably chatted her up in hospital.’

  ‘She’s a stunner. I wouldn’t blame him.’

  Nor could Redwall. Even he’d felt the faintest tug of interest when he’d met Sarah, which had embarrassed him, not that anyone else would have noticed. Now, he had a horrible mental image of Vanger choking the life out of her. But everything regarding Vanger was circumstantial and supposition. Could it really be him? Redwall threaded his fingers through his thinning hair, a habit he was trying to shake. In spite of himself, he didn’t want to believe it was Vanger. He had actually felt some kind of empathy with him. He liked the guy, for Chrissake.

  ‘Perhaps we should warn Sarah,’ Jim suggested.

  ‘About what? If it is him, we might alert Vanger, and if it isn’t, he could sue us from here to hell.’

  ‘We should keep an eye on her, though.’

  ‘We don’t have the manpower. As it is, you’ve been doing time keeping tabs on him. Where does she live?’

  ‘She’s got a room at one of the nursing staff hostels. She’s been there for eighteen months, now. She hasn’t got a regular boyfriend, as far as I could discover, and doesn’t mingle. No one said they don’t like her, but I get the feeling she’s not the chummy kind.’

  Feelings and hunches, the DCI thought morosely, were the bane of a good cop. They could drive a man mad. You could follow hunches till you were blue in the face and sometimes you’d never know what crazy glitch in the old brain cells had put the half-thought there. And yet it was luck, hunches, and the hard slog of proving them that had led to many cases being solved. Cursing the vagaries of humanity that made nothing straightforward, he couldn’t lay a finger on what was bothering him. But there was something Vanger knew and he didn’t. Somewhere there was a connection between Vanger, Helen, and Sarah. When he found the connection, he’d have a thread to follow.

  ‘Are we barking up the wrong tree?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s squeaky clean, all right. But they say most serial killers turn out to be mother’s cute little boy next door.’

  ‘They said that about Bundy, but it actually turned out that everyone who knew him was scared of him, because he was off-the-wall nuts. The link to Vanger is tenuous, at best, but if we don’t follow it and this nurse turns up dead... I guess we have to follow our hunch, even if all we do is eliminate him from suspicion.’

  ‘And how’re we supposed to do that?’

  The DCI gave a grim smile. ‘The fibres found on the three prostitutes matched. All green, from a domestic carpet. It looks like the strangler takes his victims home to kill.’

  ‘No green fibres were found on Helen.’

  ‘No, she was done in her own home. But Robin’s carpet’s green. Different shades of green, mixed up.’ Redwall pulled his jacket from the back of his chair. ‘I think Helen knew her murderer.’

  ‘But the Strangler takes his victims home?’

  ‘Maybe Robin wasn’t up to taking Helen’s body anywhere to dump it, so went to her home instead?’

  ‘But why kill her? What was the motive?’

  ‘Maybe he just needed a fix, and just took what was on offer? Like you and sex.’ He grabbed a stapled report from a stack, and stuffed it into his briefcase.

  ‘Thanks. What’re you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to pay Robin another visit. Give him something else to look at, and get a sample of that carpet.’

  ‘You can’t give him that!’

  The DCI gave a mirthless smile. ‘Why not? It’s only a list of the cars involved, and he could get that from the rags.’

  Somehow Robin’s house looked different now, almost sinister. It was dark, the front surrounded by an encroaching hedge in need of trimming, and the back by a red-brick stone wall, lending a small amount of privacy. Redwall realised that his underlying suspicion was stoking his imagination, affecting his judgement.

  Robin must have seen him pull up, because he opened the door before the buzzer had been pressed. His smile of welcome seemed genuine.

  ‘Hello, Inspector. I doubt this is a social visit?’

  ‘If only I had the time. You’re looking a lot more sprightly than last time I came. Perhaps you took Helen’s advice and stopped feeling sorry for yourself.’

&n
bsp; Robin paused, humour draining. ‘Did you find out anything about her killer, yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said blandly.

  ‘Come on in.’

  The DCI sniffed as he walked through to the living room. ‘You been spilling bleach, or something?’

  ‘I’ve been cleaning. Since I came out of hospital the place smelled kind of old, but I couldn’t do much about it while I was on crutches.’

  The carpet was newly washed, and a new wet-and-dry vacuum cleaner stood in the kitchen. The DCI dumped his briefcase on the carpet, and allowed the catch to spring, sending papers dancing. He cursed, bent down, and began to retrieve them.

  ‘Damn case,’ he said, ‘It’s not my day. Been up since four. It started bad, and is getting worse.’

  ‘Would coffee help?’

  ‘That would be great. Thanks.’

  Redwall slammed his case shut on the carpet samples he’d managed to snag, and dumped a ream of paper on the coffee table. He sat down gingerly, a grim scene unfolding in his mind. Was this room where it had all happened? Had she sat on this very chair?

  Robin came back in almost immediately, carrying two mugs. ‘It’s just instant, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s probably better than the crap we get out of the machine,’ the DCI commented, noticing to his surprise that Robin could walk passably well without his sticks. Had he been pretending to be so immobile before? Robin sat down easily, his bad leg bent at the knee, which hadn’t been possible before.

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  Tell me why you strangled four women. ‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘I just came to bring you something to do. You said you wanted to help.’ He put the report on the coffee table.