“Two of the girls are students but at different colleges,” he said as he put a piece of onion bhaji into his mouth. “The second girl, Natalie, went straight into shop work from school, though. And she doesn’t know the other two socially in any way that I can see.”
“The police haven’t been able to establish any connection between the three, either,” Jake confirmed. “There’s something, though…something we’re missing. We need a wall.”
“A wall?”
“A case wall. Pictures of the victims, facts, maps… That kind of thing. It helps to have a visual overall picture.”
“Like the map I made of Helen March and her phone trails?” Mari nodded to himself, recalling how mapping the movement of the woman’s GPS signals had led to the discovery that she was not where they’d believed her to be when the lover she’d shared with her husband had been murdered. It had been their first case and he was still proud of that success. “That’s a good idea.”
He opened a screen on his tablet and made some notes, then saw that Jake was watching him curiously.
“What?”
“You know, you use that thing for everything. It’s like a comfort blanket,” Jake said, reaching out and taking it from his hands firmly. “We can make a real wall, here, in the flat.”
“But we can’t take it with us,” Mari protested, trying to retrieve his tablet. Jake held it just out of reach.
“Put it down. You look tired. Just let me do things the old-fashioned way for once. Trust me. We can do it together. I don’t have to sit and watch you all the time, not that I don’t like watching you.”
Mari tamped down on his frustration and flopped onto the sofa, tucking his bare feet under him. Jake was not wrong about him being tired. It took a lot out of him to interface and when he was using his ability at work as well, it just compounded the situation. Lately he seemed to have a low-grade headache all the time, not that he would admit as much to Jake. He stole a samosa from Jake’s plate and took a large bite. When he had swallowed the mouthful, he said, “Okay, Detective. Show me your way.”
There was only one good place to set up, and it happened to be right across from them, where the small kitchen table was tucked up against one wall. Jake opened the apartment door, pushing the tiny bistro-style table and two chairs that went with it out onto the landing.
Mari watched him with a bemused expression.
“We hardly ever use it anyway,” Jake told him.
With most of the furniture gone, they had a blank wall to work on. Jake went around the counter that was the only separation from the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer, eventually finding a roll of masking tape.
For the next fifteen minutes or so, he took the copied pages of the police files and worked on taping them up in a fairly organized way while Mari observed from the sofa.
“I love how focused you are when you’re working,” Mari said, picking up a piece of naan and nibbling at the edges of it as he sent things to Jake’s printer on the kitchen counter.
Jake took a step away and surveyed the wall with his hands on his hips. Mari wasn’t sure how this was supposed to help, considering that Jake’s backside was the only thing his eye kept being drawn to. After another few minutes of Jake studying the wall in silence, he turned around.
“Let’s see if the first victim, Emily Redbridge, is home. See if she has anything more to say when she’s not talking to the police.”
Chapter Eleven
Emily Redbridge was not only the first victim, but she also lived the closest to Jake. Her apartment block was on the other side of the college, on Harrison Street, within easy walking distance. She lived with two flatmates in a cramped one-bedroom apartment that was just as small as the one Jake inhabited. After Jake explained who he and Mari were and how they were working with the police, she let them inside. Her flatmates were a couple and both eyed Jake and Mari warily, but Jake thought that had more to do with the lingering smell of pot smoke than suspicion.
Jake laid photos on the coffee table of the second and third victims, Natalie Craig and Tamara Leyton-Skipp. “Take your time, Emily. Are you sure you don’t recognize them? Never seen them before?”
Emily played with her hair and studied the pictures while Mari watched her quietly from the doorway. Jake sat at the opposite end of the bed-settee from the girl, deliberately not crowding her and giving her as much time as she needed to make up her mind.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last, touching the picture of Tamara. “I don’t think so. Maybe she came in the shop but a lot of people do.” She looked up at Mari shyly. “He does. He has a sweet tooth.”
Mari’s lips twitched, but the answering smile reached his eyes.
“You wouldn’t guess it to look at him, would you?” Jake remarked to lighten the mood.
Emily sighed, though. “I’m sorry. I’m not much help.”
“You are plenty of help, Emily,” Jake assured her. “It was a very long shot that you’d know each other somehow. It’s much more likely that your attacker stalked each of you separately. You’ve just confirmed that.”
“Who sells you the weed?” Mari asked, making Emily’s eyes widen. She started to shake her head but he held up a hand to forestall her. “Don’t worry. I’m not interested in what you do in the privacy of your own home. We’re just looking for a common denominator to you and the other two girls. All of you were doped in some way before he attacked you. This guy has access to drugs. We’re not about to bust your dealer, Emily. We might need to talk to him, though.”
It was one of her flatmates that answered the question, eventually. The other two girls had been looking at each other warily since Jake and Mari had come in and it was Tess, initially the more vocal of the couple, who volunteered the information. She picked up the weed, and anything else they might need, from a guy called Faze who hung out at the Good Mixer sometimes.
Mari rolled his eyes. “That figures. Does Faze have another name?”
Bex, her smaller, shyer partner murmured something that sounded like Faisal. When Mari looked a question at her, she shrugged.
“I went to school with ’im.”
“What school?” Jake asked her.
“And how long ago?” Mari added.
Bex turned nervous eyes on her partner but Tess just nodded. “It was The Grove Academy in Kentish Town, but it was a few years ago, five or six.”
“Is Faze a friend of yours, Emily?” Jake asked her.
“He comes to the club sometimes, at the White Horse. We go to a music thing there at the weekends, but I don’t know him well,” she said, too carefully.
“No one is judging you, Emily,” Mari told her, his tone surprisingly gentle. “We just need to establish who might have been in a situation to take advantage of you and the other girls.”
She looked at him gratefully, though Tess, her flatmate, muttered, “Like blokes that come round our flat making out they work for the bizzies, you mean?”
“We’re not taking advantage of anyone,” Jake said calmly. “I used to be a detective. I want to be sure that whoever did this to Emily is locked up. The DI working on this has other cases, too. We don’t. We can devote all our resources to finding him.” He did not add that, since the man who had attacked her had taken her purse and ID, he knew where she lived. It was a fact, and a damn good reason to find him fast, besides preventing him from doing this to someone else, but he didn’t want to scare her any more than she already was.
“Do you think it’s someone that we know?” Emily asked, some of the color leaching from her face.
“It’s a possibility, but since you’re not aware of the other victims, it makes it less likely,” Jake said. “We still have more work to do before we have a good suspect in mind.”
“We’ll talk to the other girls as well, if we can,” Mari assured her. “Once we’ve got a clearer picture of the patterns of your lives, it will help us to look for the man who is doing this. If anything occurs to you in the meantime, yo
u can contact one of us. I’ll leave our details. Feel free to check up on us, if it helps set your minds at rest.” He hesitated, then added, “You use a couple of dating sites… Are you…? You are being careful when you meet with strangers, aren’t you?”
“Are you blaming her for what happened?” Tess said at once.
“No, he’s not,” Jake answered before Mari could.
Mari sighed but he didn’t argue. Tess glared at him, though. “You reckon she was asking for it?”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t say that and I didn’t mean that. But Emily is putting her personal information out there where men, like that animal that attacked and buried her, can find it. And if she can do that, so can a lot of other ‘potential’ victims. It’s one avenue of inquiry. That’s all. Do you use the—?”
“Stop asking her stuff like that! It’s creepy,” Bex interrupted.
“You’re her manager?” Mari narrowed his eyes at her.
“Okay, easy… Take it easy, everyone,” Jake said, standing. “He’s not creeping on her Bex. I promise,” he soothed. “It’s a legitimate question. Scum like that often use dating sites to stalk people. Mari’s just trying to determine if that’s possibly what happened to Emily.”
“I’d not been on a date the night it…happened,” Emily said hesitantly. “I was just out with the girls. They went on to a club but I had work in the morning, so I went home early.”
“On your own?” Mari asked, which earned him another double-pronged glare from Tess and Bex.
“Obviously,” Emily replied in a weary tone.
Jake sat down and ignored the glares Mari was receiving from the other women. “You told the police that you hadn’t been approached by anyone that you could remember. Since you’ve had more time to think on it, is there anything else you can tell us from earlier in the evening on the night of the assault? Anyone you might have talked to or that seemed odd to you?”
“I told the police lady everything—everything I could remember properly. It was weird, like I said. There were a lot of people at the pub that we knew. I had a Cherry Coke because I was working. I didn’t leave it anywhere. I left on my own and started walking home and I started to feel weird. After that, I don’t remember anything until waking up and it was dark. There was something over my face. Then I realized there was dirt on me…like…I was underground.”
“Did you buy your own drink?” Mari asked, sensing that she was beginning to get edgy about the memories of that night and wanting to take things back a way.
“Yeah…no. Bex got them in. She’d just got her giro so she was flush.” Mari noted that he and Emily turned their gazes on her flatmate at the same moment.
“What you suggesting?” Tess, the more bolshie of the pair, demanded when Bex said nothing.
“Emily was probably drugged at the pub,” Mari said evenly. “It makes sense that someone put something in her drink. If it was Rohypnol or GHB, it acts fast, so she was either drugged at the bar or very shortly after leaving. She says she didn’t stop anywhere else on the way home or talk to anyone, which implies someone at the pub roofied her, Tessa. That’s what I’m suggesting. Do you want to think about that again and tell me if you noticed anything suspicious, or do we have to start looking closer to home?”
“Fuck you, you lanky piece of shit! Em is our friend. Why the fuck would I give her anything, huh? Fucking tosser, you can get the fuck out.” Bex gestured angrily toward the door.
He held his hands up again, looking at Jake quickly, though it was not a helpless look by any means. There was a flicker of annoyance in his eyes.
“Anyone would think you didn’t want her attacker to be caught, Rebecca,” he said icily, making a point of using Bex’s proper name, as listed in the police report. “Because that’s what this looks like to me. Someone in your group of friends put something into Emily’s drink between the bar and your table. That drug—which was only useful for one thing, incapacitating the person drinking it—could have been meant for any one of you. Think about that for a while. Tell us, or the cops, if you’ve remembered anything useful.”
“Get out! Both of you, get the fuck out!” she screamed at him.
Jake got up with a sigh. He didn’t bother telling Emily to call if she thought of anything. Out on the street again, he waited until they were a half block away before he conceded, “Well, that was a disaster.”
Mari chewed on his lips.
“I’m not good with people, I told you. One or both of those mouthy cows knows something,” he said. “If she’s such a good friend, why wouldn’t they tell us?”
Jake shrugged. “Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.”
Mari glanced at him. “How can you be so blasé about it?”
“Because there is no proof one way or the other. You’re assuming they knew the drink was drugged or that they did it. Granted you’re using the facts as you see them to make that deduction, but there are too many unknown factors to hang your hat on it and call it a done deal yet.”
“Is police work always this bloody frustrating?” his lover grumbled. “And how the blazes do you stay so calm if that’s true? She was only there for an hour, tops. Her drink must have been spiked in the last fifteen-to-thirty minutes or she’d have been on the floor in the pub, but nobody saw anything suspicious.”
“Yes, it is usually this ‘bloody frustrating’,” Jake mimicked him. “And I know how long it takes for a roofie to take effect. The thing you have to keep in mind is, people only think they have good memories. They think they remember what happened, but more often than not, eyewitnesses are completely wrong about what they recall. Questioning them is a starting point, not an end point.”
“Where do we go from here then, Sherlock? Talk to the others and get some more useless answers? I hope they’re friendlier than those two bitches back there.” Mari bristled. “Could have offered us a coffee, at least. Anyone would think we were working for the enemy.”
“Mari, you kinda accused them of playing a hand in the drugging and rape of their roommate. No matter how logical your conclusion might have seemed, telling them that wasn’t likely to earn you any points.” Jake heaved a sigh, though he wasn’t angry. “As to where we go from here…? Home. We’ll put up what we found with the rest of the stuff and take another look in the morning.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be any good at this.” Mari exhaled, looking glum. “Maybe I should stick to my strong points.”
“You will be good, if you remember to keep your cool and try not to wind people up.”
“I was asking reasonable questions, given the circumstances. Their friend had been horribly and violently assaulted and you’d think they’d want whoever did it to be brought to justice. Instead, it seemed to me they were happy to have another reason to hate all men. Pair of Rottweiler bitches!” Mari huffed.
“Maybe you brought out the Rottweiler in them?” Jake said.
“I can’t imagine why. I was perfectly polite.” He sniffed. “Would they have preferred it if I was insincere, do you think?”
“Yes. Probably. I’m pretty sure I would have preferred you just smiled and nodded at them,” Jake teased.
“Well, you’re no fun at all,” Mari said. “You’re supposed to be on my side, Detective Chivis.”
“I am on your side. I wouldn’t give you such great advice if I wasn’t on your side,” Jake told him.
“I won’t lie, not even for you,” Mari said, his lips twitching around a half-smile.
“I would never ask you to lie, Mari. But my grandmother used to tell me, just because something is the truth doesn’t mean you have to say it—which I think was her way of telling me to not be an asshole.”
“You think I’m an asshole?” Mari sounded wounded. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be.”
“I don’t think you’re an asshole. But I do think you speak too plainly for some people,” Jake responded. “I like your honesty. It’s a relief not to have to play passive-aggressive bullshit game
s all the damned time. But most people are just not prepared to handle that level of reality. Not about themselves, anyway.” Jake stopped walking for a moment and when Mari stopped beside him, he brushed his hair out of his eyes and kissed him. “You use your words like weapons sometimes, babe. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m just saying you need to be aware of it.”
Mari reached up for him and returned the kiss, stretching out that sweet touch of lips. “I’m used to having to fight for the things I want,” he said, and bumped his nose against Jake’s. “I am not above fighting dirty. But if you’re on my side, I promise I will try to tone down my dirty tactics, for you.”
Jake chuckled and nuzzled him. “Thank you. I will try and warn you in advance when it’s okay for the claws to come out.”
“Teamwork, huh?” Mari smiled up at him. “I think I like the sound of that.”
Jake put his arm around Mari’s waist and kissed his cheek. They started walking again. “You want to get to the bottom of things. You have a strong sense of justice and want to prevent people from hurting other people. The rest is all technique. You’ll learn.”
Mari’s sharp eyes met his own, sidelong. “You just don’t want to do this on your own. Don’t think I don’t realize.”
Chapter Twelve
Just over two weeks after their disastrous interview with Emily Redbridge, Mari was sitting in the day room, trying to eat his breakfast and watch the news while Mama was hustling around with the Dustbuster, tidying up in advance of Imogen coming in to clean during the afternoon. He hiked his feet up onto the sofa cushions and stuffed half a slice of toast into his mouth before she could take his plate away. Tonka sat at his feet, tongue out, begging shamelessly for leftovers.
“Why do you even have a maid if you clean before she arrives? And after she leaves?” he asked, putting a hand over his mouth so that he didn’t spit crumbs everywhere.
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