by Will Carver
Months, maybe.
No longer than a year.
Walking round the block won’t help.
Dazed, I wander out through the doors, across the road and onto the Green. I’m aware of my surroundings but unaware of where I am heading. On one triangle of grass a red setter fights playfully with a Labrador. The woman walking with a pram stops and looks on nervously, protective. The man on the bench reading his tabloid newspaper doesn’t flinch.
I continue my dizzy jaunt, not veering off-line. I pass an oak tree on my right as I ease through the crossroads where I’ll eventually be found.
Emerging out the other side of the green I see a man fishing around in the parking meter chute for change. Behind him is a poster that says, ‘Does God exist?’ It has three possible boxes to tick. Yes, No and Maybe. Below, in blue, it states: ‘Explore the meaning of life.’
Before I realise I’ve even digested this, I’m sitting inside St Dionis Church, praying for a miracle.
So, when the person on the pew in front of me turns around and tells me that they can help, I don’t even ask how. I just agree to meet at the oak tree tonight at seven o’clock.
Hours maybe.
No longer than a day.
January
‘I’M SURE IT was just a coincidence, Jan.’
Back at the station, Paulson tries to rationalise what I saw, what I felt. I sense Murphy roll his eyes. Things are still sore between us since his disastrous lapse in allegiance during the Eames case, when he foolishly thought I might be the culprit. It’s better, but still not the same.
I feel like I have to lower the level of my voice so that Murphy can’t hear me. I don’t want him listening in and reporting back my misguidances and mistakes. I don’t want to make it easy for him to spy on me.
I tap Paulson’s shoulder with my right hand, urging him to turn his back on Murphy, who is over at a filing cabinet pretending to do something.
‘It wasn’t what I saw. It was just that something struck me as she fell. It was like a kick in the chest, like something pushed me backwards as I blew out the candle.’ I pause to note his reaction. He looks at me as if to say Go on. I feel a need to fill the silence but I can’t tell him about The Two that visited me last night. Not yet.
‘I can’t explain it just yet, but there is something more to this case, Paulson. We need to find out what it is.’
I recognise the look he gives me. He knows how uninterested I’ve been in my recent caseload; that I’m almost longing for another big case I can completely submerse myself in.
To distract me.
To stop me thinking about Audrey.
To prevent me from looking further into the journals.
I want to learn. But I don’t want to become my mother.
‘Well,’ he responds reluctantly, ‘we need to wait for the post-mortem results to come back. See if it can shed any light on what happened.’
But the only thing the autopsy will tell us is that she had stomach cancer at a stage that was completely inoperable and not even worth fighting. It will show that she took a sharp blow to the throat before she was stabbed, making it impossible to scream or draw breath.
It will not tell me why she was killed or who may have done it.
It will not explain what I felt as she keeled over. That this is something we have never encountered before. That we need to be looking at this in a way that will not please our superiors. That we cannot just rely on visual, tangible evidence; we cannot go simply by the book. Some things are not written in the book; some things cannot be seen.
‘What we need to do is be detectives.’ I raise my voice, suddenly angry, but Paulson keeps his cool. This type of thing has been happening more frequently of late, gradually loosening my grip on control, constantly testing Paulson’s allegiance.
‘We need to readdress the issue tomorrow, Jan. It’s late. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.’ He places a comforting hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off as if he’s patronising me, but he’s not; Paulson is genuine.
I don’t want to finish the conversation. I don’t want to enter into anything with Murphy. Increasingly it seems that he is deliberately trying to come up with the most outrageous solutions to cases; to show me that he is embracing the medium that gives me my edge; that has provided me with extra insight and information. Pretending he believes. Entrapping me.
I leave the office without another word. My partners are stunned into inactivity. Paulson just wants to help. Murphy debates going over my head for a second time.
With a half-empty bottle of Glenlivet, fifteen-year, between my legs, I drive out of the station heading for I don’t know where. I’m not going to drink it. It is there as my comfort blanket. My reward. My companion.
My mind tells me I should go home; maybe some sleep will do me good.
It’s the best option.
So I don’t take it.
Instead, I make my way back to Parsons Green. To the crime scene. Hoping I will pick up on something I missed earlier.
It’s dead now. The pubs are closed, the frivolities have ceased and the square is now plunged into darkness. The street lamps around the Green only illuminate the road. I find a space outside the church to squeeze my car into, between a Mercedes and a Porsche. In fact, all of the cars along this road appear to be of this calibre. My Ford Mondeo looks somewhat out of place.
With the church irradiating the sky behind me, I cross over the precipice into the black of the common ahead. It is dimly lit but I can make out the intersecting pathways. The area is taped off and a handful of officers are still hanging round the scene ensuring nothing gets disrupted. It’s cold but not the cold I felt before. This is more literal. I take a large gulp of my whisky before entering the park to keep me warm, taking me closer to the driving limit. Numbing me quicker than the air’s chill.
The vibe is different.
I walk along each path in turn, hoping to glean information from feelings alone. Wanting to recreate the sensation I experienced as the first victim dropped to a place worse than death in front of my eyes only hours ago.
When I blew her over.
I walk from one end to the other several times. From the pub to the main road and back again. Diagonally from the health centre to the coffee shop two hundred yards opposite. From the all-girls’ school back to the church.
It’s over.
Whatever force was here earlier is not here now. At least, I can’t sense it.
I’m taking a top-down approach that only considers the intangible. I’m thinking of the vision of the two children, I’m dwelling on the victim’s body falling as I blew out the candle. I’m entrusting the part of me I resisted on the last case; putting too much faith in it. And I know that I shouldn’t.
I should be working a bottom-up technique, trying to profile the killer, asking what happened at this crime scene. What type of person could have committed such an act? What kind of personality would this killer possess? Was it planned? The other information, the things that only I see, they should be used to support the real police work. I realise that, but I’m too busy avoiding reality to implement what I know to be true.
There are no eyewitness testimonies, probably no CCTV. I’m falling back on the esoteric because I should have used it to crack the last case sooner. I can’t afford these mistakes.
I sit on a bench near the centre of the park, staring at the spot where Lily Kane’s life was taken, and think of nothing.
Dropping into a drowsy emptiness I concede that tomorrow I will have to revert back to regular police work to solve this. Interviewing work colleagues and questioning the drunkards who were nearby when she was slain. Obtaining CCTV footage. Looking into any crimes reported that may match this for the rest of the country; Europe, even. Has there been anything similar in the past?
The tension in my shoulders drops as I give in to my lack of power and my eyelids increase in weight. Like a drunk with nowhere to go, I spend the night on a bench. To me, it�
��s the same as going back to that empty house.
In the morning I can attempt to be a real detective again. A real person.
But it won’t get me anywhere. I’m not in the right frame of mind yet. I’m still heading downwards.
The only thing I feel can snap me out of this lull is for Celeste to take another life.
That’s her Christmas present to me.
My wake-up call.
V
TODAY IS THE same as any other.
I bound up the final four flights of stairs, expending the last ounce of energy after my regular five-mile morning run. Pushing myself.
I pass my neighbour in the corridor.
‘Morning, Gail.’ I smile at her.
She nods and smiles back in recognition but we both continue past each other.
The weekend newspaper is rolled up and resting on my doormat for when I return.
I don’t look at it straight away.
Once inside the sanctity of my own flat, I close my eyes and take three long inhalations, forcing the air back into my lungs. I feel healthy.
As I walk to the kitchen I roll the rubber band down the tube of newspaper so that I can open it out flat and lay it on the worktop. I gulp down the bottle of water I have stored in the fridge; two of my back teeth let me know I’ve neglected them, and I wince with the pain.
Resting my hands either side of the newspaper, I push my feet back to stretch out my calf muscles, and start to digest the morning news.
The front page is shocking.
A simple line graph depicts the increase in knife crime in the capital over the last ten years. Usually, in cases such as this, the paper shows a recent picture of the victim supplied by a family member, or even an old school photograph, but this girl, Lily Kane, gets a graph. Ten black dots joined by a blue line.
I read on.
I know the pub that is mentioned. And the church. There is a slight allusion to some kind of ritualism, but the authorities believe that the paraphernalia found near the victim was mostly likely left there as part of the Halloween celebrations in the area.
It angers me.
I stop reading. I stop stretching.
It just seems like another innocent victim of a random stabbing incident. Whatever emotions are starting to build within me are neutralised by the endorphins coursing through me from the exercise.
I pace into the living room and take a breath of the cold air out the window.
And calm myself.
This isn’t right but there is nothing I can do about it.
Not yet.
Not this time.
I have to leave it alone until the Lord tells me otherwise.
Yule
December 2008
Totty
THEY ALL THOUGHT I’d die of a broken heart.
I thank God I never brought the grandkids with me this time.
But maybe that would have saved me.
I might not have been chosen.
I’m here for my wife today. She is the reason I’ve made the trip from East to Central London.
My Pats loved the West End. Musicals, mainly, but she’d drag me here for plays or some jazz pianist she fancied seeing.
‘Most of the galleries are free, Reg,’ she’d say, her way of enticing me.
She was the only one who ever used my real name, Reginald. Reg. Everyone else called me Totty, on account of my job as a totter in the East End during the war.
Nobody has called me Reg for four years.
She made me promise I’d still come over this way when she was gone. And I have. Every month. Today is the last time, though.
I get out at Charing Cross because the stairs lead straight up to Trafalgar Square, which is right in the middle of where I want to be. The day is all mapped out. Start at the National Portrait Gallery. It’s free. Just as Pats would’ve wanted it. Then on to St Martin-in-the-Fields to hear some live music, and on to a place for lunch with a decent selection of whisky.
I’ve picked up a ticket for the latest camp musical too, but, come the curtain call, my seat will be empty. And it will remain vacant. I’ll be slumped over in the middle of the square, the hole in my heart bigger than the day Pats passed on.
It should be easy for the kids to remember, though. The same day their mum died.
Well, the same date. It’s a few years apart.
It’s not like I could ruin Christmas any more.
January
I THOUGHT ABOUT getting a Christmas tree, brighten the place up a little, but what am I going to do, buy myself a present, wrap it up and put it under the tree to open on my own Christmas morning? I can’t even remember if I was still with Audrey last Christmas; time is somewhat blurred.
Things are starting to dry up in the Lily Kane case; no new evidence is coming to the fore. For a nation apparently under constant CCTV supervision, the cameras surrounding the area where Lily Kane was killed have proved as fruitless as all other lines of enquiry. Hours of footage of shop-fronts, pavements, tree-blocked views of the Green, not to mention the amount of cameras that aren’t even filming – their presence acting only as a deterrent.
And there’s only so many times you can ask her colleagues what kind of a person she was. Her upstairs neighbour was resistant, a possible suspect after we found pictures of him on her laptop, but his girlfriend provided a solid alibi for his whereabouts that night.
The team is stranded. Stagnated. We are at a point where it feels like waiting. Waiting for another murder instead of trying to solve this one. But that is not the case. And I know I’m being scrutinised from all directions. It’s like my success affords me a great deal of leniency while somehow putting me under even greater pressure.
It’s not always straightforward to profile a killer from one victim. I wonder whether Lily Kane is actually the start of something, or if it ends with her. I question whether this murderer has a plan to take another victim, so that I have something to do over the festive period, something to take my mind off my life. I want to work. I don’t want to sit in a leather snuggler chair, built for two, all by myself, drinking Scotch or wine or beer until I pass out. I don’t want to be that person.
I don’t want to be the person who wishes death on an innocent human either, but, occasionally, in moments of despair, it can seem like the only way I’m going to get any better.
Lily Kane was not a hedonistic killing. There was no sense of anything sexual and the ritualism points to a more mission-oriented murderer – the victim was targeted, chosen specifically as unworthy of the life they were leading. If I’m right, we can catch this person before they do too much damage.
But the ritualism, the links with faith, they scare me. The last thing we need is a visionary – someone acting on voices in their head instructing them to kill. At random.
At this moment, there is not enough to go on to err on either side of the psychopathic fence.
My eyes are heavy. I try to focus on the tumbler of whisky in my hand, but there seems to be a haze hovering above the glass, which confuses me. I try to open my eyes wider to stare through it but they close instead. My chin drops to my chest. I breathe in and out through my nose for a few seconds, trying to summon the strength to pull myself out of this habit I am forming.
I yawn. A dense, lengthy yawn that pushes my head away from my chest briefly as my chin presses down hard with the force of my fatigue. The saliva in my mouth thins out and I dribble over my crotch. Tears start to form in my eyes and drop onto my legs.
I can’t stop any of it.
The dribbling.
The tears.
I’m not sure I even want to any more.
Silently, I cry myself into something similar to sleep and my grip releases the glass of alcohol, spilling it into my already damp lap and jerking me back upright.
Into the darkness.
Onto the dust.
And I wait for the sound of shuffling feet.
But it doesn’t come.
I hear
the sound of a bell ringing.
The circle of candles ignites to my left. But the boy is not inside this time. Then, to my right, the girl’s flames switch on. But she is not inside either.
Where are they?
A small bell tinkles again and a new circle of burning wicks appears to my left, forming a triangle. It rings again and, to my right, another circle materialises, forming a large square in front of me.
Still, I am the only one here.
All is silent. Four circles flicker as I wait for The Two.
Suddenly, the flames bow down, pointing forwards in my direction as if somebody opened a giant door in front of me.
Like someone has just been let in.
They’re here.
A line starts to illuminate from all four clusters of light, moving diagonally towards the centre, slowly edging to a common meeting point where the boy shuffles from left foot to right, left foot to right.
I wait.
He stops moving, reaches into his pocket and produces a tiny bell on a blue ribbon. Holding his arm outstretched, perpendicular to his frail torso, he gives a sharp flick of the wrist to jingle the bell one more time.
And I start to rise.
Inside my protected tube, I lift off the floor, my legs still crossed. I levitate, higher and higher. The boy tilts his head upwards following me, his eyes now flashing through a range of colours. Higher and higher I climb; I don’t panic. I feel safe in here. Nothing can get in. Nothing can get out.
He rings the bell again and I stop.
Now that I am about a hundred feet in the air, the boy looks almost helpless.
In the distance, as before, a speck of light appears. This time growing quicker, like a white sun rising in the distance. A shadow appears in front of the growing semicircle.
The girl.
And she is running. She is running extremely quickly. As fast as she was spinning in my previous vision of her. Within seconds she seems to have covered miles of ground.