Personal

by S Thomas Thompson

  “I’ll get them for you,” Adam told Gary in a way that gave away the fact he didn’t believe the detective stood in his back garden with him. Adam had been around long enough to spot a lie and even someone as well-versed in it as Gary wasn’t going to fool him. Now he wanted the papers out of his possession and the detective out of his house. Adam had some thinking to do. He wanted to catch the man from the end of the street himself. He felt as though he should make things up to the people of the city that had lived in fear because he let a man slip through on his watch, let alone those people who were killed. He handed over the notes he had made and showed the detective the door.

  34

  Ash and Electra had been to several places that their research told them might have been previous addresses for Alaaldin Hussein. They were all in run down parts of Washington – Sulgrave, Barmston, Concord - and all drew a blank. It was as though the lack of trust in the police from people in the poorest parts of town had also transferred to their buildings. Secrets were absorbed into the walls and ceilings of each address. If only they had a way of extracting them. Each of the properties that had been linked to his name in tenancy agreements or on the voters’ roll were left abandoned and there were few neighbours in the adjacent properties, let alone anyone who knew him. Alaaldin was a ghost. He existed on the very margins of society.

  There was one more place to visit and Ash drove the pair of them there. During the downtime between properties, Electra made calls to the landlords to see if they remembered him. Most were landlords that operated on either side of the line of the law so either accepted tenants cash in hand or didn’t keep any kind of records. Electra got into policing to protect the kind of people who ended up in these situations with unscrupulous landlords who would throw them out with no notice if they found another tenant willing to pay a bit more money. She was appalled at the conditions one of her friends found herself in while she was at university and vowed to wipe this kind of landlord off the face of the earth. During her time in the police, she also found that landlords and employers who didn’t keep records stood in the way of them getting a result. They really had no idea whether the tenant was Alaaldin Hussein or whether it was someone else completely, and that was partly down to the fact these people wanted to operate out of sight of the law. As far as she could make out, this was all in an attempt to save a few pounds here and there in tax.

  But she wasn’t chasing the landlords for their under-the-table deals, and was prepared to look the other way to get as much information as she could about the killer who was at large on the streets of their town. He was a bigger menace. But even when she told the landlords that they were not under investigation or suspicion, they had been through so many tenants that one in particular couldn’t be pulled out from the scores of names and faces of the past. Some of the properties were in multiple occupation and the landlords may not have even met him. That was a fruitless part of the investigation as far as she was concerned. They would have to concentrate on the people who live there now, on the off chance that they met their man.

  “It’s the next right, I think,” Electra offered. Ash already knew where he was going, but Electra didn’t like handing control over to anyone else. This was a lead she had found and she wanted to ask all the questions and give direction to the enquiry. This started with leading Ash to the right address. He was happy to let her tell him the moves. He was thinking back to the last person they questioned and couldn’t help but think he was hiding something. Most people when the police knock on the door will invite them in, particularly when the investigation doesn’t involve them at all. But the guy at the last flat, Barry Garside, had walked out into the street and closed his front door behind him to talk. Nobody likes to be seen talking to the police in the small neighbourhoods that produce a large amount of crime in the area, but Barry was happier with that than he was in letting Ash and Electra through the door. They couldn’t invite themselves in, but Ash wondered what he had to hide behind that door.

  The right turn was negotiated without incident, much to the pleasure of Electra, and Ash slowed to look at the numbers on the doors of the houses to the right-hand side of the road. The first few had no number at all. They had doors that were facing each other rather than the street and looked to have been converted into flats by the same developer. The same red doors, the same tarmacked drive and the same cheap replacement windows were a real giveaway. Ash looked for something different in a property to break the monotony of cheap conversions, but there was none in sight and he had to return his attention to the road. He imagined magnolia walls, poorly-fitted internal window fixtures and the cheapest kitchen that IKEA could supply in flat after flat. He had seen it all before.

  Electra was looking to the properties on the left of the car. She was looking for number 26, and had started with 148, so knew there was a little while to go. She looked dead ahead to assess the parking situation further up the road. If she reached the end of the road and couldn’t find a parking space then she feared that the journey back round would be a bit of a pain. It was reaching mid-afternoon and the commute traffic was starting to build. It could add twenty minutes to her day, which wouldn’t cause them any undue pain, but she would rather not drive around any longer than needed.

  There could be far more productive things she could spend her time on. Comparing notes after a day in the field with the other members of the team was one. Double checking all the references that they established the day before was another. Quite frankly anything that was moving the case forward was more productive than driving around the block twice because she missed a parking space. The sheer number of occupants had made the parking situation almost impossible. Electra looked at the houses and wondered what lay inside. They were mostly converted into flats on her side of the street too and this meant that there was little or shared outside space. Through the summer the people who lived there had three choices. They could go into a shared garden and try to find their own oasis among the bins, overgrown weeds and uncut grass that was always the feature of a garden shared by three flats, four flats or more. They could stay indoors and cope with the heat in their own way. Fans just pushed warm air from one part of the room to another while making that annoying creaking sound. It was a reminder that they were actually on, for those that paid the electricity bill but felt no benefit. The fan itself didn’t produce chilly air but the constant groan that is made when moving backwards and forwards took your mind away from the heat and focused it on another annoyance instead. The third option was to go somewhere else to escape the heat. The pub or local park were always popular choices as far as Electra could see. She didn’t have children and wasn’t a big drinker so the appeal of either was lost on her, but from passing she always saw people gather there in droves. There must be something in it, she thought to herself. Electra contrasted this to the childhood she had. It was more free range than factory farming. Instead of the small flats that felt like cages in the summer heat, she was brought up in a garden, close to a wood where the days were filled with running. She didn’t think it was possible from the viewpoint of twenty-odd years later but she used to run for hours every day. There was only the rest for refreshments that stopped her from being on the move from just after breakfast until just before teatime. They say that in New York, Central Park is the back garden of everyone in the city because they don’t have one of their own. It offers a place to join others for a run, practice yoga or just have a picnic. In their city, Electra saw the pubs and parks of Washington serving the same role. It just didn’t have the same sense of style as New York. Little in their town did.

  She nudged Ash when she saw a space around number 44 on her side of the road. He looked at her as though she was stopping him early but then looked down the road to see cars on either side of the road like they were lined up for inspection and pulled in quickly before he had the chance to indicate. He could see nothing else in either direction, but Ash liked to indicate when he turned. It wasn’t something
to warn others of his movement as there were no others there at the time, but it felt right. He has always done it, even in the middle of the night on a road where no other car had been (or would be) for hours. It was a habit that wasn’t going to be broken now he had been driving for this long. The air was stifling as they stepped outside of the air conditioning of the car and out into the street. The sun had been beating down on this spot for almost ten hours by this point and the metal of the cars present was storing this heat and transferring it to anyone that walked past. The first signs of shade were edging across the far side of the road. It would be welcome relief on the return journey to the car if the conversation with the current occupant was going to take more than a few minutes. Electra wetted her lips with her tongue and contemplated the shade as they walked towards number 26, flat B.

  They arrived and looked the building up and down as though it would give up its secrets if interrogated in the right way. If this was possible, it would make my job a lot easier, thought Ash. They sized it up and walked through the space where a gate presumably once stood, towards the disorganised group of letterboxes that had been stuck to the inside wall of the sheltered porch at the front door. There was a set of doorbells and they each had a sticker with a flat number on, but the time they had been there combined with the weather had made these stickers illegible. Electra went for the logical choice that flat B would be the second one from the top and pressed long and hard. The light on the buzzer went out for the time she held her finger there before slowly coming back to life after she took the pressure away. There was no other indication that the bell worked so they waited to see if a response was forthcoming. Ash stepped back away from the door and looked at the windows on either side. He was trying to decide which one he thought was flat B. It looked from the array of letterboxes and bells that there were five flats in total in this Georgian property that would have housed one large family in the past. By the look of the windows in the roof, which he had spotted when walking from the car, this meant two on each floor and one in the roof space. His guess was that flat B was to the right as he looked, but, it could have been any of them. Some of Ash’s friends were property developers and he had been told all manner of stories about how they worked the system to get the most profit. Some properties were split into apartments and the surveyor would be shown the biggest apartment as ‘A’ so they could get the most value and biggest mortgage from their lender. As soon as the surveyor left, the letter ‘B’ would be attached to the same large flat before the visit of another surveyor so that another lender would give them the most money possible. This went on until all the valuations were in and the money was released. The property developer got the most they could for their money, while the lenders all lent on what was essentially the same flat. In this building, flat B could be any of them.

  As Ash looked up and wondered, the door opened slowly. Ash returned to the front door and saw a woman stood looking at Electra. He smiled and coughed to gain attention but the woman and Electra were locked in some sort of staring contest and he couldn’t break their concentration. He chuckled to himself as this went on for a few seconds more before kicking his feet against the step. Whether it was the noise he made, or that one of them blinked, he didn’t know but the silence and inactivity stopped from the two women and Electra spoke.

  “We are here to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Electra explained, “It is about the person who lived here before you. Did you meet them at all?”

  “You don’t remember me, do you? I have pictured your face every day for around 8 years. I thought that you would remember me. I suppose that you see a lot of people like me,” the woman spoke to Electra like they were long lost friends. Electra had seen something familiar in those eyes, but wasn’t able to place them. The woman was right, she did see a lot of people in her job and didn’t find it easy to remember them all.

  “I’m sorry. I am terrible with names and faces. I’m not quite sure how I ended up in this job!” Electra tried to make light of the situation and elicit some detail from the woman.

  “My name is Babs Harvey. You protected me after my husband beat me half to death. He was a heavy drinker and I just happened to be in the wrong place one night. He had hurt me before, but that time was something else. I was quite a mess and you helped me when I left the hospital. I couldn’t go back after that. You were the first person I saw that wasn’t a nurse or a doctor and I needed a friendly face to tell me everything would work out alright in the end. That was you. I was only with you for a few minutes, but you got my mind in a better place. I haven’t been able to thank you,” the woman explained. Electra looked he up and down. This was a skinny woman, maybe in her late fifties with thinning hair and red blotches under her eyes. It was as though she had been crying. Electra hoped that she was living a happier life than when they had last met.

  Electra felt bad. She loved her old role helping women who had faced domestic violence to break that cycle, but Babs was right, she literally only ever had a few minutes with people to assess their situation and get the relevant people to support the women. It was a fleeting moment in the lives of women who were thinking far more about what they were escaping and where they were fleeing to. Electra didn’t think that anyone would remember he role in all that turmoil. Obviously, some did.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t have a great memory, but I am so happy that I was able to help,” Electra replied sheepishly. It didn’t feel great.

  “I have always believed that we would bump into each other somewhere down the line. I thought that it was part of my destiny to see you again and say thank you. These last few years I have been fighting lung cancer, a fight that is almost over, and I was worried that you wouldn’t show up again. But here you are. Would the two of you like to come in and sit down? I’m afraid I can’t stand for much longer,” Babs looked over her shoulder towards the stairs as though they were the first step on the way to the top of Mount Everest. She climbed them first while the two detectives followed. They sat together in a small front room above the window in the left-hand side of the building on the first floor. Ash’s guess at which flat it might have been was on the wrong floor and the wrong side of the house, but he wouldn’t have been confident enough to put any money on his guess at any rate.

  “So, you want to know about the person who lived here before me?” Babs repeated the question back to the two detectives so the conversation was re-framed after what had been said downstairs. Babs had said what she wanted to Electra and wanted to help her out, but she didn’t have much energy.

  “Yes,” Electra responded, “Did you ever meet him?” She too sensed the need to get on with things and thought that her connection with Babs would work through the small talk and get to the point.

  “The place had been empty for over a month when I got here. The person who was here before left a lot of rubbish, which I had to deal with. The landlord wasn’t overly helpful,” Babs explained with a weariness in her voice that was as much to do with looking back at that time as it was her present lack of liveliness.

  “You never met. In those possessions you had to sort out, were there any items that you thought might have been unusual?” Electra asked while looking at Ash. She wanted to know if he thought she was heading in the right direction. He looked dead ahead. She took this as a signal that she was on the right track. If he wanted her to move on then he would have made a sign, she thought.

  “If you count someone leaving letters unsent and clothes unworn all over the place, then yes. And there were hundreds of disposable razors along with cans of shaving foam. The bath blocked a little while after I got here and the plumber took more hair out of the plug than you would normally see on a barber’s floor,” Babs could see that this was news the detectives wanted to hear. Electra’s eyes lit up for the first time since she had been there. Ash was making frantic notes.

  “Hair?” Ash spoke for the first time. He had been hooked by this revelation and was already linking it to
the fact that they had found no hairs at any of the murder scenes.

  “The plumber just kept on pulling it out of the sink,” Babs explained and the look on her face showed that she hadn’t found it a pleasant watch at all.

  “I’ll just have to make a call,” Ash told the two women present, as he stood up and walked towards the kitchen. “Is it OK if I speak in here?” he asked out loud and closed the door behind him without waiting for an answer. Babs looked at Electra to explain his behaviour but she had no explanation ready.

  “Sorry. Is there anything else?” Electra asked. She loved open questions, but could see that Babs was tired. If she had only a one-word negative answer then that was fine in the circumstances.

  “I could go on all day. There were boxes of latex gloves, paperwork left all over the place. I got rid of just about all of it. From some of the writing I thought that maybe he was an author, but that would have been some creepy stuff,” Babs closed her eyes as she spoke. Electra took this as an opportunity to look around the room. It looked like the home of someone who didn’t have the energy to maintain it. There were several scratches in the wallpaper that could have been replaced, two door handles that were broken and the lightbulb in the lamp by the sofa had blown some time ago by the looks of it. The corners of the room were in need of a duster and the hoover had obviously not seen the light of day for some time. Electra noted that these were all tasks that couldn’t be done easily for someone in Bab’s condition and wondered what help might be available for her. She resolved to take a look into it when she had a spare moment, if that ever came. Babs opened her eyes again and Electra realised that she didn’t have much time left. Ash strolled back into the room, mouthed ‘sorry’ at Babs before smiling at Electra and sitting back in the seat he had vacated a short while earlier.