by S W Kane
He woke up in a cold sweat during the early hours, his father’s words churning about in his mind. There’s something she needs to tell you. He’d call Livia again later today and get to the bottom of it. Perhaps she was thinking of moving back to Italy, where she was born and raised, and was worried what he’d say. He’d miss her, obviously, but on the other hand it would be lovely to have an excuse to visit Italy on a regular basis.
Kirby drifted back to sleep with thoughts of long Italian lunches and the sparkling sea; however, like a dark shadow, the dead woman from Blackwater was never far behind.
CHAPTER 10
As soon as Kirby walked into the office at MIT29 the following morning, he knew something had happened. He was late; the bastard Corsa didn’t like the cold and had to be coaxed awake. And then, when he’d finally got the car going, an accident at Vauxhall had brought the already crawling traffic to a standstill.
Anderson was eating a bacon sandwich, while listening to someone on the phone, and trying to put his coat on at the same time. He was doing a remarkably good job and motioned with his eyes towards Hamer’s office. Kirby didn’t have time to reach the door before his boss came out.
‘We’ve got an ID for our Blackwater victim,’ said Hamer. ‘Ena Massey, 79 Chartwell Road. This is next of kin.’ He handed Kirby a piece of paper. ‘Go and break the news.’
Kirby read the name – Karen McBride, née Massey – and an address on Downchurch Road: the victim’s daughter. He hated these visits – they all did. ‘How was she identified?’ he asked.
‘Through a neighbour. Apparently our victim volunteered at a hospice, only she didn’t turn up for a home visit yesterday afternoon. The neighbour was known to the hospice – she has a relative there – so they called her and asked if she could check on Ena, to make sure she was all right. When the neighbour got no answer yesterday she didn’t worry too much, but when it happened again this morning she called it in.’
‘And it’s definitely her?’
Hamer nodded. ‘Hospice website. There’s a page about volunteering and she’s on it.’
‘Bloody hell, she must be the same age as the patients,’ said Kirby, wondering if there was any age limit on volunteering.
‘Older, in some cases – she was eighty-four. The hospice is sending us a list of people Ena Massey dealt with directly. It could be that she fell out with a relative. You do hear about elderly people who change their will without telling anyone, so perhaps Ena became a beneficiary and pissed off the family.’ Hamer didn’t sound convinced, but he was right; Ena could easily have been left something valuable, and a family member with a grievance might have decided to take matters into their own hands. It wouldn’t be the first time, although it didn’t explain what she was doing at Blackwater on the coldest night of the year.
‘And,’ Hamer went on, ‘Edward Blake didn’t go back to his flat last night, and his grandfather, who he’s very close to, was expecting a visit. Blake never showed up.’
‘Shit,’ said Kirby. ‘You think he could be our man and has done a runner?’
‘It’s certainly possible. Or he could be a witness.’
‘When was he last seen?’ asked Kirby.
‘Tuesday afternoon. He went back to his flat around 4 p.m., which is usual, then his upstairs neighbour saw him go out at about 7 p.m.’
‘Okay. We’ll need to check CCTV, see if we can trace his movements. Are his phone records back yet?’
Hamer nodded. ‘There’s a name that keeps cropping up: Connie Darke. Looks like Blake was going to meet her on Tuesday night. She’s called and texted him several times, and she’s also the last person he called from that phone. Go and talk to her once you’ve seen Ena Massey’s daughter. Pete’s going to speak to the school – finding Blake is a priority. So far, he’s all we’ve got.’
‘What about the hospice?’
‘Send Kobrak after he’s been to see Blake’s grandfather,’ said Hamer, checking his watch. ‘The post-mortem’s in an hour, and I need to see the pathologist about another case, so I’ll cover that. I’ll let you know when we have something.’ Then he turned and disappeared into his office.
Kirby went and sat at his desk and logged on to his computer; he wanted to look through Blake’s phone records before leaving. He scrolled through the information that Newlands had sent. Blake’s phone usage followed a regular pattern: on weekdays he rarely used his phone between roughly 8.15 a.m. and 3.30 p.m., presumably when he was at work, and at the weekend he made and received calls sporadically throughout the day and night. The calls were to a variety of numbers, including Connie Darke’s, and he called his grandfather, Harry Joyce, regularly – almost every other day.
Kirby looked through some of the texts, noting that a lot of them were late at night and appeared to be places to meet, although where those places were was a mystery, as Blake and his friends seemed to have a language all of their own. Blake was up to something, but what? He’d contacted Connie Darke frequently over the past month and, as Hamer had said, it appeared that they had arranged to meet on the night of the murder, but something had stopped them. He typed Connie Darke’s name into the system. Like Blake, she was clean, not even a parking ticket between them. However, there was something of interest there.
Anderson finished the call he’d been on and came over. ‘I swear to God that woman knows when I’m eating a bacon sandwich and need to leave the building.’
‘Not Mrs Star Witness again?’ said Kirby.
Anderson nodded. ‘Apparently, her neighbour was murdered – again – last night at 3.45 a.m., and the perpetrator legged it through her back garden, leaving footprints. Footprints she’d like me to come and take a look at with a view to having casts made. For fuck’s sake.’ Mrs Star Witness was a seventy-year-old woman who repeatedly reported serious crimes that had never been committed.
‘You’ve got to stop giving your number out to older women, Pete.’
‘Fuck you.’ Anderson smiled, then glanced at Kirby’s computer screen. ‘Are those Blake’s phone records?’
‘Yup. There’s not much to go on, except someone called Connie Darke. Says her address is the Four Sails – why do I know that name?’
‘It used to be a pub; the screws from Wandsworth nick used to drink there. Been empty for years. Strange place to live – maybe she’s a squatter. Look, I’m heading over to the school and then to the victim’s house. Meet you there later?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Kirby mumbled, busy looking up the Four Sails on Google images. Anderson was right; the place had been empty for five years. The pub was a small, weather-boarded building, and its old sign showed a windmill. It must have had a connection to the old windmill at Wandsworth Common, and was indeed a strange place to live. Kirby stood up and put his coat on, a fleeting sense of dread in his stomach at the thought of having to deliver bad news to Karen McBride. As he took the elevator down to the ground floor, he tried not to dwell on it and instead thought about Ed Blake and Connie Darke. Although neither had a police record, they were both in the police database for another reason: five years ago, they had both been questioned in relation to another suspicious death. The death had eventually been ruled as misadventure, but what had caught Kirby’s eye was the location: Blackwater Asylum.
CHAPTER 11
‘Well I’ll be buggered,’ said Ena Massey’s daughter.
Kirby was sitting on an overstuffed sofa at 14 Downchurch Road feeling extremely uncomfortable. On arrival, he’d been ushered into the front room, where every surface was cluttered with objects: mainly pink, and more often than not in the shape of a dog. The place reeked of air freshener, and he could hear whimpering noises off to the left, which he assumed were coming from the kitchen. Karen McBride sat opposite him and was wearing a tight, pink onesie. The years hadn’t been kind to her, and the onesie suited her about as much as it would have suited Kirby. He felt like he’d wandered on to the set of some crazy, late-night chat show, and to add to his misery the heating was on
full tilt – not just to a nice, cosy temperature to ward off the freezing temperature outside, but a full-on furnace of Mount Etna proportions. He could feel his face smarting and sweat starting to trickle down his back.
‘You have my condolences, Mrs McBride,’ said Kirby. ‘Can I get you something – a glass of water, some tea, perhaps?’
‘Tea?’ She looked at him aghast and reached for a packet of Silk Cut. ‘Water?’ She pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a poodle-shaped lighter, the flame shooting out of its mouth as she clicked on its ears with a nail-bitten thumb. ‘No, ta, but you can get me one of them blue things from behind there.’ She jerked her thumb towards an authentic 1950s cocktail bar.
Kirby was glad to get off the sofa, which itself seemed to emit heat – it had to be flammable. The cocktail bar was shaped like the hull of a boat with a red Formica top. Two portholes were cut in the sides, one of which was embellished with a gilt chain anchor, and despite himself Kirby could envisage it sitting very nicely on his houseboat next to Pete’s stuffed fox. Bottles of WKD Blue were neatly lined up on the shelves behind the bar, and he opened one with a bottle opener shaped like a bulldog’s head, then looked around for a glass and some ice.
‘I’ll have it as it comes,’ said Karen, taking a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘Have one yourself, if you like.’
Kirby would rather poke his own eyes out than drink a warm, blue alcopop – let alone at this hour of the day – and politely declined. He passed her the drink and sat down again. Karen raised the bottle and nodded upwards. ‘To Mum,’ she said, and took a long swig.
‘I’m afraid I do need to ask you some questions. Are you up to it?’
‘You can ask me what you like, but I doubt I can help you much,’ she replied, stifling a burp. ‘What happened to her anyhow?’
‘Your mother was found in the grounds of an old hospital in Battersea.’
‘What, that body what was on the news? That was my mum?’
Kirby nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’ Shit, he thought, as he remembered that he still hadn’t phoned his mother – he’d been on the go since abandoning trying to sleep at some ungodly hour, and hadn’t had a moment.
‘Ain’t your fault. What the effing hell was she playing at, at her age, poncing about an old hospital?’
‘That’s what I need to find out, Mrs McBride. When did you last see your mother?’
‘1978,’ she said without hesitating. ‘Same year Rod Stewart brought out “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”’
Bloody hell, that was before Kirby had even been born. He did the maths: according to the register of births, marriages and deaths, Karen had been born in 1962, which meant that she’d been sixteen in 1978. ‘And you never saw her again?’
‘No. And bloody glad I was too. Got out as soon as I could. We spoke on the phone over the years, but I never saw her again.’ She paused to take another swig of WKD. ‘To say we didn’t get on would be an understatement. She didn’t like Rod Stewart, for starters.’
Kirby smiled politely and half expected Mike Leigh to pop up and shout, ‘Cut!’
‘I need to build up a picture of what she was like, Mrs McBride, so anything that you can tell me about her would be useful. Do you know any of her friends? Where did she work? That type of thing.’ He paused. ‘Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm your mother?’
Karen snorted at his last question. ‘Like I said, I hadn’t seen her for almost forty years. She was a nurse up at that loony bin, Blackwater. Bleedin’ horrible place.’
Kirby’s ears pricked up at the mention of Blackwater – finally, something useful. ‘When did she work there?’
‘She was there when I was born and worked there until it shut.’
Which, thought Kirby, meant they needed to talk to Raymond Sweet again; he had to have known her.
‘No idea what she did after that,’ Karen continued. ‘Probably went on torturing poor sods somewhere else, knowing her.’
‘What do you mean, torturing?’ he asked.
‘Mr Kirby,’ she began, as though explaining something to a small child. ‘My mum weren’t very nice. Christ knows how she became a nurse, but she did. It was different back then, not so many checks and that. And if you had a bit of nous’ – she tapped the side of her head with a finger – ‘you could get away with murder. Fuck knows, she did.’
‘You mean, she wasn’t qualified?’
Karen shrugged. ‘Well, I never saw her studying, put it like that.’
‘Okay . . . Before you left home, where did you live?’
‘We lived in the hospital grounds. There was accommodation for the nurses, and them what had kids could go on a list for one of the chalets. Chalets, my arse; more like a frigging bunker. I wanted us to move, but oh no, we had to stay. All she cared about was herself and that sodding place.’
‘What was her role there?’
Karen shrugged. ‘Dunno, matron or something. She never talked about it, but I remember she worked weird hours. We didn’t see much of each other.’
‘And where did she go when it closed in 1993?’
‘Fuck knows. You’re the detective, you’ll have to crack that one.’
Karen drained the last of the WKD Blue and began looking for the lighter, which had slid down the back of the chair. Kirby could have sworn the zip on the onesie was now lower than it had been when he arrived, and he caught a glimpse of her bra strap as she wrestled the poodle lighter from the cushion behind her. He looked away quickly and concentrated on his notes. ‘What about your father?’
‘Gotcha, yer little blighter,’ she said, recapturing the lighter. ‘My dad? Never knew him.’ She lit another cigarette and leant forward to rest it in the ashtray. ‘I’m not being very helpful, am I?’
‘This must be difficult for you – I appreciate that – but you never knew who your father was?’
Karen shook her head. ‘Some doctor at the loony bin would be my bet. They were at it like bleedin’ rabbits up there.’
‘I have to ask this, Karen, but where were you on Tuesday night?’
‘What, you think I did it? Give me a break! Frankly, I wouldn’t waste my time.’ She studied Kirby for a few seconds before continuing. ‘As it happens, I was down at the Welcome. My mate runs the place and was short-staffed. I was pulling pints all night. Ask anyone who was there – I’m quite popular,’ she said, winking.
Kirby couldn’t help but like Karen, despite her apparent indifference to her mother’s death, and wondered what kind of child she had been. Had Ena really been that awful, or was she simply not suited to motherhood? Even when Kirby had been at his worst growing up – and he shuddered now at some of the things he’d done as a teenager – his mother had always forgiven him.
‘Can you tell me anything about your mother’s recent life – the volunteering at the hospice for example?’
‘You what?’
Karen’s expression was comedy gold, and Kirby had to remind himself why he was there. ‘She never mentioned that she volunteered at a hospice?’
‘No, she never bloody did. Probably knew what I’d say if she had. Bleedin’ hell, you’ve come with a right load of eye-openers, haven’t you?’
That was one way of putting it, thought Kirby, suppressing a smile. ‘You said that you talked to her on the phone. When was the last time you spoke?’
‘Christmas . . . No, hang on, she did call at Christmas – bloody miracle, nearly choked on my prawn cocktail – but she also called a couple of weeks ago. Timing wasn’t her strong point – always phoned up when I was in the middle of something.’
‘What did she want?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. I’d had a few drinks, like you do. Couldn’t wait to get rid of the old cow.’ She leant forward and retrieved the burning cigarette. ‘Is it hot in here, or is it just me?’ Karen lowered her zip another inch and sucked on the cigarette so hard that it glowed like a red-hot poker.
Kirby stood up before he’d even realised what he was doing, and
headed to the window. ‘I’ll open this for you, get some air in.’
Opening the window was easier said than done; the windowsill was covered in a herd of ceramic dogs, amongst which sat a pink Cadillac-shaped telephone, and it took all his powers of coordination not to knock them over. The last thing he needed was a tsunami of porcelain dogs in the mix. He couldn’t remember an interview like this in his entire career, and prayed that he wouldn’t get run over as he left the house, making it the last thing he ever did.
‘You want one of these blue things yet?’ he heard Karen say from the cocktail bar. ‘Only I can get you a glass if you like?’
‘No, I’m fine, Mrs McBride, thanks all the same.’ He stayed by the window, glad of the cool air that went some way to dissipating the stench of Silk Cut and air freshener, which on top of the heat was making him feel nauseous.
‘So, what did Ena say when she called? It might be important,’ he asked, trying to steer the conversation back into safer waters.
Karen was now doing a very good impression of a Blackpool B&B hostess by leaning on the cocktail bar, toying with the bottle opener in a way that made Kirby relieved there was a bar between them.
After giving it some thought, Karen replied. ‘Seemed to me that she’d rung to boast.’
‘About what?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the thing.’ Karen came out from behind the cocktail bar and sat down again. ‘I might have had a few bevvies, but I do remember her saying that she was coming into some money. Who in their right mind would leave that old cow anything, I don’t know.’
‘Did she say where this money was coming from, and how much?’ Money would certainly provide motive, and Kirby wondered if he was finally getting somewhere.
‘Nah, some old acquaintance or something. And before you ask, no, she didn’t say who. I just wanted her off the blower to be honest. Get back to my socialising.’
Kirby felt disappointed. ‘Did she say anything else?’