‘Are you fit, then?’ Foster urged him out of the car, eager, as ever, for the off.
They made their way down the street. The murder house was easy to spot: blue-and-white police tape was stretched across the front, out as far as the kerb, clearly marking a common approach path. Designed to reduce the contamination of the scene, the CAP would be monitored by the first officer attending, and everyone entering or leaving the building carefully logged. A ‘FOR SALE’ sign stood in the tiny front garden, a ‘SOLD’ strip tacked diagonally across the notice.
Rickman tried not to think of the victim’s excitement moving into the house — perhaps her first — of her anticipation of a life filled with promise.
The paramedics were leaving, the younger of the two almost as green as her uniform. They climbed into the ambulance and sat with the windows wound down and the lights flashing, as if there was still someone to save.
‘We goin’ in or what?’ Foster was at his elbow, clamouring for action, but the looks on the faces of the paramedics warned Rickman that this was not a situation to rush into.
‘Let Scientific Support do their job,’ he said. ‘There’ll be time enough for us when they’ve finished.’
Foster knew better than to argue. ‘I’ll have a chat with the paramedics, then, shall I?’ He headed off at a diagonal.
Rickman held up his warrant card for inspection as he approached the young PC guarding the entrance to the house.
The constable’s pallor and his inability to maintain eye contact were evidence of the fragile grip he had of himself. His fierce grasp of his clipboard only served to reinforce the impression. Rickman decided that sympathy might tip the lad into losing control. A businesslike approach might be easier for him to handle.
‘You’re the First Attending Officer?’ Rickman’s voice was deep and strong, with only a trace of a Liverpool accent. It held authority, but also compassion.
The young officer drew himself to attention. ‘Sir.’ He was a good half a foot shorter than Rickman.
‘You cleared the house?’
‘Me and the mobile patrol, sir,’ he said, lifting his chin in the direction of the marked car.
‘What can you tell me?’
‘Female. She’s young, sir.’ The young officer cleared his throat. Swallowed.
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Jasmine Elliott — got it from an envelope — there was a few on the kitchen worktop. Sir, she — she’s been . . .’ He blinked, couldn’t go on.
‘It’s all right,’ Rickman said. Bad enough that someone so new to the job had seen the body without him having to describe it. ‘The pathologist will deal with that — when he finally shows up.’
There were maybe half a dozen Home Office pathologists in the North West who were qualified for this kind of work, and the shootings during the drugs raid the previous night meant they had their hands full.
‘What’s his ETA?’ Rickman asked.
The lad gathered himself, checked the clipboard in his hand, then his watch. ‘He’ll be down in about hour.’
‘Who called it in?’
This time the PC didn’t need to check his clipboard. ‘Mr Bill Stott.’ He pointed to a house opposite. ‘Number twenty-three.’
The houses stood barely thirty feet apart. Mr Stott’s house was freshly painted in sober black. The narrow strip of garden inside the boundary wall was vibrant with red and bronze chrysanthemums that seemed to glow in the sunlight of this warm autumn afternoon.
Rickman glanced over at Foster. He was leaning in at the open window of the ambulance, chatting to the female paramedic. The sunlight glistened on Foster’s carefully groomed hair. It was almost black — softly spiked — and he had a tendency to ruffle it when he was flirting. He was ruffling it now, giving the woman the benefit of his famous smile, though on low output, out of respect for her current distress, and Rickman thought he saw the ghost of an answering smile flit across her face.
A CSI stumbled out of the house in full kit. He dragged the mask from his face and pulled down his hood, then bent forward, taking gasps of air. The young officer turned and stared, reliving, no doubt, the moment he had found the body of Jasmine Elliott.
‘Sir, I don’t think I can—’ the constable said, his voice panicky, cracking as his resolve cracked.
Rickman looked him in the eye. ‘What’s your name?’
The lad snapped to attention. ‘Watson, sir. Two-three-five-oh.’
‘Just the name is fine, Watson.’ Rickman held his gaze a moment longer, until Watson steadied himself, then glanced at the neatly corralled scene. ‘You’ve done a good job. Keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll be okay.’
Watson seemed uncertain, but after a moment he nodded. Satisfied, Rickman turned his back on the crime scene and crossed the road towards Mr Stott’s house.
* * *
Bill Stott had been watering his houseplants when Rickman arrived. He took a step back from the threshold, the water in the small can he held sloshing with the sudden movement.
‘I’m a police officer,’ Rickman said, warrant card already in hand. His height gave him a natural authority, but his somewhat battered appearance could give the wrong impression. His face was marked by childhood scars — a legacy of the beatings he had taken from his father — and some found it hard to see beyond the slightly crooked set of his nose to the kindness in his steady brown eyes.
Stott recovered quickly, waving Rickman ahead of him into the little sitting room at the front of the house. He wore a formal shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows. The sinewy strength of his forearms hinted at a former power, while the stubborn hunch of his shoulders suggested a resentment of the vulnerability of age.
‘Can you tell me how you found the young woman?’ Rickman asked, his tone quiet and courteous.
Stott didn’t answer immediately. Rickman felt his scrutiny, a quiver of uncertainty in his facial muscles, perhaps wondering whether Rickman’s broken nose and the fine, silvery scars on his face signified a good cop or a bad one.
‘I heard a noise,’ he said, his tone belligerent. ‘Car starting up. Revving the engine like a bloody rally driver, he was, trying to turn around. That’s what brought me to the window.’ He glanced across at the neat bay, and then swiftly away, as if the memory was alarming. ‘He practically drove into my front garden.’
‘What did he look like?’ Rickman asked.
‘Mad. He looked raving bloody mad. Blood all over him. His shirt, his hands.’ He shook his head, as if to shift the image.
‘I know this is difficult, Mr Stott.’
‘Difficult? “Difficult,” he says! This day will haunt me till I’m under the sod.’ Rickman waited, and the old man took a breath and let it out slowly.
‘He was scruffy,’ he said, more composed now. ‘Long black hair.’ His face crinkled in concentration. ‘Earrings. He had them little rings and studs in both ears. One in his eyebrow. Why do they mutilate themselves like—’ The realisation of what he’d said hit hard. The watering can, still in his hand, seemed suddenly too heavy for him and he swayed on his feet.
Rickman was there in a stride, easing him into a chair, coaxing the can from him. He went through to the tiny kitchen and ran a glass of water, handing it to Stott and faking an interest in his surroundings out of consideration for the old man’s pride. When he seemed sufficiently recovered, Rickman said, ‘Can you talk now?’
The old man looked up at him. His eyes were a faded grey. Rickman saw fear in them. A fear he had seen before, a fear that never quite went away once you experienced it.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions,’ he said. ‘But the smallest detail can—’
‘I know.’ The old man waved Rickman’s apologies away, recovering some of his irascibility. ‘You’ve got a job to do. The car was a red Ford Focus. Boy racer type with one of them spoilers on the back. Two thousand and eight reg — heap of rust. Last two letters RJ — didn’t get the rest. Sorry.’ Even his apology
sounded truculent.
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ Rickman reassured him.
Stott looked blindly towards the window. ‘I’ve seen it before — parked outside my front door.’
‘When?’ Rickman asked.
‘A few times since she moved in. Always at night. Most folk in the street close their doors and don’t stir after nine o’ clock. But I’ve seen him. One time he come with a bloody great teddy bear for the baby.’
‘Baby?’ Rickman felt a prickle of alarm.
Stott’s head came up. ‘She’s got a baby girl.’ He plucked at the open neck of his shirt as if it constricted him. ‘Dear God — tell me the baby’s all right.’
Rickman was out of the door and across the street before Stott could finish the sentence. Foster leaned off the ambulance door, alert. ‘Boss?’
Rickman only had to look at him. Foster reached his side at a run. PC Watson held up his hand, batting the air with the clipboard like a marshal on an airport runway. ‘Sir, you can’t go in there.’ He looked ready to tackle Rickman to the ground.
‘You told me the house was clear,’ Rickman said, only just keeping a lid on his anger.
A look of wild alarm flashed across the constable’s face. ‘It was — it is.’
‘Boss. What’s goin’ on?’ Foster demanded.
Rickman kept moving. ‘There’s a baby in the house, Lee.’
Watson looked stricken. ‘Mr Stott never said there was a baby.’
He began to follow them into the house, but Rickman stopped him. ‘Make sure the paramedics don’t leave,’ he said.
* * *
The sitting room was empty, newly painted, dust sheets still covering the carpet. Rickman took the stairs two at a time, past the open door of the murder room without a glance.
The door to the second bedroom stood ajar. Rickman took a breath and uttering a silent prayer to a god he’d long since lost faith in, he opened the door.
Boxes. The room was full of them, neatly stacked, all labelled in black marker pen: BOOKS, DVD’s, WINTER GEAR, CD’s, JUWLERY. The misspellings and misplaced apostrophes the more poignant because Jasmine had carefully matched the height of each letter. A teenager, striving to be organised, responsible, grown up.
Behind a box labelled TOWLS AND SHEETS, Rickman found a bin bag with a note tacked to it: VARIOUS. Next to it, a plastic box labelled TOYS. The handwriting was different, not so neat, but more confident, more assured, the spelling accurate.
Rickman tore the bin bag open. It was crammed with blankets, duvets and baby clothes. He heard Foster bounding up the stairs and hurried back to the small landing.
‘Baby bottles in the fridge,’ Foster said. ‘Sterilising equipment in the cupboard.’
Tony Mayle, Senior CSI and Crime Scene Coordinator, came to the door of the master bedroom, masked and wearing an all-in-one paper suit. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s your zoot-suits?’ His favourite term for the disposable suit he wore.
‘Jasmine has a baby,’ Rickman said.
Mayle looked over his shoulder. ‘Oh, God . . .’
Rickman could see little of the room: the end of the bed, a tangle of sheets and duvet, blood blooming on it like a sick rose. A small hump in the bedding. Please, let it not be the baby.
Mayle moved aside and Rickman gasped. The girl’s body had been posed on the bed, her legs splayed, knees bent. Her face was untouched, almost luminous white, but her torso was filmed with red — a gauze of blood.
Mayle and his colleague began to lift the bed linens, folding it inwards in an attempt to retain fibres, hairs, skin cells. Rickman held his breath, not knowing what to pray for. He couldn’t take his eyes off the body. There was so much blood, and yet he couldn’t see a major wound. Slowly, the hellish scene began to make an insane kind of sense. A lacing of fine cuts: parallel lines, curls, sunbursts, whorls and geometric patterns had been sliced through Jasmine’s skin, as though someone had taken a razor blade to her — not dozens, not scores, but hundreds of times. Her upper-left arm, tattooed with a twist of thorns, was free of cuts, for her killer had devised another exquisite torture: at the tip of each thorn was a bead of blood, as though he had pierced her flesh with a sharp point over and over and held her still until the blood congealed, stark against the white of her skin.
Rickman tasted bitter pennies, smelled the sharp coppery reek of blood. ‘Jesus,’ he murmured. ‘Jesus.’ For a second he was elsewhere: another small terraced house, another death scene — one that had shattered his life forever.
‘Boss.’ Foster gripped his shoulder. ‘Jeff.’
The use of his given name roused Rickman. He was seated on the stairs, not knowing how he got there. ‘The baby?’ he asked. ‘Is the baby all right?’
Chapter 5
Mark Davis screams away from the kerb, his car fishtailing down the road, burning rubber. He cuts the corner, coming head-on with a Fiesta. Braking hard, he swerves around it, just registering the shock on the driver’s face as they pass offside to offside. Then he is on the main road, weaving through traffic.
The lights change to red, and a pedestrian steps onto a pelican crossing.
‘Shit!’ Mark stands on the brake pedal, bracing himself for impact. She turns, and in that fraction of a second he sees the silver cross at her throat and her eyes, impossibly wide. Then someone grabs her from behind and yanks her so hard that she falls backwards. His car judders to a halt two feet beyond where she was standing.
For a second or two, Mark is frozen in shock, his breathing harsh, his heart knocking painfully at his ribs. The stench of burning rubber fills the car. Then the baby sets up a wail and he turns, horrified. She has slid forward, despite the seat belt and the layers of padding provided by the blankets he has wrapped around her.
A sharp rap at his window. The man who rescued the pedestrian.
‘Get out.’ He’s forty-ish, his face red with blood pressure or booze. He pounds on the window. ‘Get out the bloody car, you lunatic!’ He reaches for the door handle, but Mark hits the lock just in time.
‘Stay away from me!’
The man kicks the door and something inside Mark snaps. He beats the window with his fists. ‘Stay the fuck away from me! Stay away from my car! I’ll break your fucking legs, you touch my car again!’
The man takes a step back, and Mark crunches the gears, trying to find first. The baby’s screams become more urgent. He hears somebody say, ‘He’s got a baby in the car.’ And he takes the gear stick in both hands.
‘Do something for me, just once, will you?’ he says, addressing his god as he would an unreliable friend.
More people converge on the car, and he forces the gear stick left and forward, grinding metal on metal. Someone slams their palm on the car roof, and the car jolts, as if in response. Then the engine engages and he shoots off, driving fast, putting distance between him and the horror he has just fled.
Left, down Wellington Road, past Wavertree Playground, blasting his horn, funnelling a whirlwind of fallen leaves in his wake. He wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve, swerving, braking, accelerating. Traffic defers to him, though horns blare and lights flash. He has the unreasoning notion that if he drives fast enough, the sounds of his baby’s screams will somehow be left behind.
A few miles up the road, he turns off the main drag and takes it more slowly, trying to think. Bryony’s constant cries are deafening, drowning out thought.
‘Shush,’ he soothes, stretching out a hand to comfort her. ‘It’s okay . . . It’s okay, baby doll.’ The screams seem to rise in pitch and volume. ‘Shut up,’ he pleads. ‘Please, shut up.’ His voice rises. ‘Pleeease, let me think.’ He breathes heavily through his nose, trying to stay in control, but the noise — that fucking noise — like a road drill in his head. ‘Just let me fucking think!’ He slams his hand on the seat next to her, and Bryony’s body jerks in shock. For a second or two she is silent. Then she lets out a bellow of fear and rage, screaming louder than ever.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Mark sobs. ‘I didn’t mean it . . .’ The words are far more than an apology to his infant child. His whole life seems to stretch back in a litany of errors, omissions, bad choices, bad deeds. He tries to make shushing sounds, but something in his chest stops him breathing right.
A woman walks past the car and stops a few yards away. As she looks right, she stares towards the car way too long for it to be vigilance crossing the road. Spooked, Mark puts the car in gear and drives off again, keeping it slow, trying to stay in control, trying not to attract attention, trying to think past the awful picture that keeps flashing into his head.
‘Stop it,’ he says, whispering this time, so it doesn’t make the baby kick off worse. The image flashes again. Bright. Red. ‘Fucking stop it!’ He slaps himself in the middle of his forehead.
The baby’s cries have eased a little. Lulled by the throaty thrum of the engine, she continues to grizzle, but with less urgency, and he drives, just to quiet her. He pays no attention to direction or time, driving to stop himself thinking, to stop the noise of the baby’s cries. When, at last, he turns to check her at a set of traffic lights, her cheeks are red and glistening with tears, but her eyes are closed. For a second, he forgets everything, captivated by his daughter’s perfection. Her lips purse and make little sucking movements.
She needs a feed. The thought triggers the image again. This time he can’t will it away. He sees Jasmine. Jasmine, as he left her. It fills his mind like a blown-up snapshot — except snapshots don’t have a smell. His stomach does a flip and he takes a few breaths, which only makes things worse. He can smell it on him, the stench of blood, the reek of death. His mouth floods with saliva. Fuck. He pulls over to the kerb and yanks at the door handle. It’s jammed. Panicking, he slams his shoulder against it. Then he remembers — You locked it, dickhead. He lifts the snip, yanking frantically at the lever and the door swings wide, into the path of a following car.
The driver brakes and swerves, blaring his horn. Mark staggers to the front of the car and throws up in the gutter.
Trembling and weak, he leans on the bonnet, his T-shirt drenched with cold sweat and his shoes spattered with vomit. He doubles over again, dry-heaves, then spits, easing himself into an upright position. His hands are stained with blood. He wipes them on his chinos, and sees they’re already smeared with it. Jeez, it’s everywhere.
DON'T SCREAM an absolutely gripping killer thriller with a huge twist (Detective Jeff Rickman Book 3) Page 3