By Midnight

by Mia James

  The policeman didn’t arrest her. He didn’t even tell her off. Instead he took April to the headmaster’s office and made her sit outside while he spoke to Mr Sheldon. Whatever was said, Reece obviously managed to persuade him that the fight was simply youthful high spirits between two high-strung students and that he would take her home. There were some advantages to being in mourning, she supposed. Besides, all the fight had gone out of her. At this point she barely cared what happened now, so she simply shrugged when DI Reece explained and then led her down to his car. Why bother kicking and screaming? April knew full well that even as they buckled up, Layla was already spreading her version of events: that the awful new girl had attacked her and threatened to kill her and now the police were taking her away.

  ‘Good job I came in to speak to you today,’ said Reece as he started the engine. ‘If I’d left it until tomorrow, you might have strangled that girl.’ His tone was light, but April could tell he was worried.

  What the hell came over me? she wondered. One minute we were talking, the next I was trying to kill her.

  ‘So what was it all about, April?’

  April sighed. She was sick of keeping things to herself, trying to remember what she was or wasn’t supposed to know. It was too much of a tangle and she suddenly felt very tired.

  ‘Layla - that’s the girl you pulled me off- thinks I’m trying to steal her boyfriend.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Not really. He hit on me, but he didn’t mention that he had a girlfriend.’

  ‘Ah.’ DI Reece nodded. ‘I see.’

  He backed the car up and they slowly drove through the gates and up towards the village.

  ‘I heard the coroner released your dad’s body,’ said the policeman, glancing across at her, ‘so I guess you’ll be glad to get the funeral over, to start picking up the pieces?’

  April just shrugged again and looked out of the window.

  ‘But I don’t suppose you actually want to go home right now, do you?’

  April glanced at him. ‘I s’pose not.’

  ‘Well, how about I treat you to lunch?’

  April lifted her hands in a gesture of complete indifference. ‘Whatever,’ she said. Then, after a pause. ‘No McDonald’s, though.’

  Reece laughed. ‘Okay, no McDonald’s.’

  He drove them out of Highgate, past the big houses on Hampstead Lane and then Kenwood House on the left. April had been wanting to see the big Georgian stately home on the hill ever since Hugh Grant had his heart broken there in Notting Hill, but somehow since arriving in Highgate she’d never had the chance to go. Now she thought about it, apart from the visits to her grandpa’s place, she had hardly strayed from the village at all since they’d left Edinburgh, as if Pond Square had a giant magnet hidden beneath it and she had a metal plate in her head. That would explain a lot, she thought ruefully. They were approaching a bottleneck in the road - a strange white cottage seemed to have been plonked in the middle of the street. To April’s surprise Reece didn’t drive past; instead he turned off the road and into a car park next to a large white building opposite the cottage.

  ‘A pub?’ she said, with a little too much eagerness in her voice.

  Reece smiled. ‘I’m getting you a Diet Coke, young lady. But they do make an amazing goat’s cheese lasagne.’

  The Spaniards Inn was ancient and rambling, with low beams, dark wood panelling and creaky floors. It even had a fire popping and crackling away beneath a polished copper chimney breast. It was the sort of pub American tourists believe lies at the end of every road in England. As Reece went to the bar to order their food, April wandered over to a chalkboard where someone had written up a few snippets of the pub’s history. Apparently Charles Dickens, Lord Byron and the highwayman Dick Turpin had all spent time drinking here. According to the board, John Keats had composed ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in the garden.

  She heard a laugh behind her. ‘It’s probably a lot of old tosh,’ said Reece, leading April to an alcove and putting the promised Diet Coke in front of her, ‘but it’s sort of nice to keep up the legends, isn’t it?’

  He settled into a squashy leather chair next to a window which looked out towards the strange white cottage in the middle of the road.

  ‘It reminds me of that little white house by the cemetery gates,’ said April. ‘Is it true you couldn’t get inside?’

  Reece looked at her, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘I went on a tour. The guide told me.’

  ‘She’s right, as it happens,’ said Reece, rubbing his chin. ‘It obviously hadn’t been opened in years - door and windows painted shut, nothing inside - so we figured we’d leave it as it was.’

  April thought of the tall man who had come out of the house - she was sure he had - and the tour guide’s insistence that no one of that description worked there. She wished she knew what it all meant, but there was so much about this whole business that she couldn’t grasp. It was like trying to juggle with one hand tied behind her back.

  ‘So what is it?’ asked April, nodding at the white house in the road.

  ‘That’s the old gatehouse where travellers had to pay a toll to use the road, and it’s where Dick Turpin is supposed to have spotted his victims.’

  ‘I bet you’d like to have caught him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No need,’ said Reece. ‘Contrary to popular belief, Dick Turpin was caught and hanged by a member of his own gang. But no, I’m not sure I’d like to be involved with that sort of thing. I’m more a rehabilitation than a hanging kind of guy.’

  April sucked her Coke through the straw and looked at Reece. She wasn’t so sure what kind of guy he was or what he was after, but she was glad to be out of school, and out of the house - and to be treated like an adult. Well, without the vodka, admittedly, but it was much better than the tea in the police station. Even so, she knew Reece hadn’t brought her here for her sparkling conversation - this was an interrogation with beer mats.

  ‘So do you think it’s a good idea to bring a sixteen-year-old girl to a pub?’ said April. ‘Is this standard interview technique?’

  ‘It’s not really a standard case, April,’ said Reece, his expression serious. ‘There’s far too much about it that’s confusing. I was hoping you might be able to shed a little light on a few things and—’ he indicated the empty bar ‘—I figured we might be free from eavesdroppers here.’

  ‘You think there might be people listening in at the police station?’

  Reece smiled. ‘You’re a sharp girl, April, but don’t go creating too many conspiracies where there are none. Leave that to your friend Caro.’

  It was April’s turn to smile. ‘Ah, you spoke to her?’

  Reece rolled his eyes. ‘Is there anything she doesn’t think is linked to a shadowy global conspiracy?’

  ‘Not much. Did she give you any ideas?’

  Reece paused before answering. ‘It’s funny,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes we get a bit blinkered in the way we investigate things, when we should think a little more laterally.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, most crimes are pretty straightforward, especially violent crimes. Someone gets angry and hits someone else, then leaves a trail of blood back to their car. You’d be surprised how often it happens. That’s why we have a better success rate solving murders than other crimes.’

  April looked away, trying to concentrate on a picture on the wall as she felt her eyes becoming watery.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Reece softly. ‘I often forget how hard it can be to talk about. It’s my day job, I’m afraid. I assume everyone wants to talk about murder.’

  ‘No, it’s not that,’ said April, blinking hard. ‘I just can’t think of my dad as a “murder”. It just seems so weird, so wrong, really.’

  ‘I understand. But we do need to talk about it, if you can. I think it’s the only way we’re going to catch whoever did this.’ He looked at her meaningfully. ‘Listen, April, I’
ll lay my cards on the table. We don’t have the hard evidence to back this up yet, but I’m convinced that the three murders - Alix Graves, Isabelle Davis and your dad - are all linked. You’ve been close to two of them and in my world … well, let’s just say I don’t believe in coincidences. So I think you may be the key to this case, whether you know it or not.’

  April glanced at Reece. What was he saying?

  ‘When you say you don’t have the evidence, don’t you have any leads? Like fingerprints and stuff?’

  He looked a little embarrassed. ‘No. Nothing. Which is why it’s so odd. You see these TV shows about highly intelligent serial killers who plan their crimes in detail, but in my experience that just doesn’t happen. There’s always evidence, witnesses, something.’

  ‘But not this time?’

  ‘You, April, are the closest thing we have. I’ll be honest, it’s as if the killer was invisible. They got in and out without being seen on CCTV or by passers-by and they didn’t leave the slightest trace behind, despite the destruction.’

  April didn’t want to think about the ‘destruction’. She didn’t want to think about someone coming into their house and attacking her dad, she didn’t want to think about how he crawled to the phone leaving a smeared trail of his blood behind him. She didn’t want any of it to have happened. But it had.

  ‘We have to get him,’ she said fiercely. ‘We have to catch this killer.’

  ‘We will,’ said Reece, meeting her gaze steadily. ‘We always do.’

  Their food arrived and they ate in silence for a few minutes. April still didn’t know what to make of the detective. He wasn’t like the hard-bitten, hard-drinking cynics you saw in TV dramas. He was drinking Appletiser, for a start. And the goat’s cheese lasagne was indeed delicious. Maybe he felt sorry for her, or thought she needed a friendly ear. More likely it was simply work for him: get the daughter off-guard and maybe she’ll tell you something useful. April didn’t mind that, especially if it got her free pasta. She would have been glad to help; she just didn’t know what she could tell him.

  ‘So what do you think? You must have some sort of theory?’

  Reece gave her a half-smile. ‘I’d rather hear what you think.’

  April paused before she spoke. ‘My dad is - was - a really nice man. I mean, of course you’d expect me to say that, but he was. My mum was always giving him a hard time and he put up with it, he didn’t get angry. They’d shout at each other, but he was … calm, I suppose. Which is the reason I can’t understand why someone would hate him enough to do that to him.’

  She stopped and took a sip of her drink, trying to swallow whatever had got stuck in her throat all of a sudden. She put down her knife and fork and pushed the plate away.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said the detective. ‘Actually, that’s what I’ve been thinking all this time: why? The most obvious idea is someone who has suffered because of something he wrote. An investigative reporter of his standing is always going to make enemies, but to be frank, retaliation almost never happens. You hear of journalists being killed in war zones, but not at home. Funnily enough, criminals can be quite moral about that sort of thing - they don’t usually bear grudges against people who catch them fair and square. But then … perhaps if he was getting too close to someone or something, it’s possible they would take action to shut him up.’

  ‘But you don’t think that.’

  Reece pointed at her with his fork. ‘I said you were a sharp girl. Well, it’s still the most likely motive as nothing was taken from the house as far as we could tell, although you saw the state of the place and it’s difficult to be sure. But we’ve been through all his notes and his computer and there’s nothing there to suggest any ongoing investigation of that kind. In fact, there was nothing much there of any use, but I’d like you to have a look at something anyway. It might jog a memory.’

  He opened his briefcase and pulled out a laptop, opening it on the table. As they waited for it to boot up, April thought about what Reece had said.

  ‘So if you didn’t find anything in the computer or at the house, maybe they did take something?’

  ‘Yes, but again I come back to why?’ said Reece. ‘If it was me and I wanted to get at whatever information your dad had, I’d break in while he was out, steal his computer and make it look like a burglary.’

  ‘So you think they planned to kill him?’

  ‘Sorry, April, I don’t want to worry you any more, but that seems the most likely conclusion. We just haven’t got a clue why.’

  He pulled the computer towards him and started opening files. ‘Now, these are all the files we copied from your dad’s computer,’ said Reece, swivelling the screen around to show her. ‘On the left-hand side is a rough draft of a story your dad was working on for the paper. It’s about the Isabelle Davis murder, all the background to the case and the history of the murder site, Highgate Cemetery and so on. On the other side, I’ve opened a file your dad wrote a few weeks ago. It’s a book proposal he was sending to his publisher. It was all about historic murders and violence in London, with particular reference to this area. Have a quick look: the similarities are superficial, but they are there.’

  Nervously, April scrolled down. Reece was right: the similarities were there if you looked for them, but sitting side by side like this, they did look rather shaky. On the one hand, the Isabelle Davis murder seemed straightforward - a young girl out on her own in a city, who tragically fell prey to a random killer. But when you compared it to William Dunne’s research for his book, particularly the Whitechapel murders of 1888, it suddenly didn’t look so random: Jack the Ripper’s first victims would have appeared to be senseless and unconnected tragedies as well. There were other strong themes running through both stories: the cemetery, the sudden apparently random upsurge in violence, even the idea of a unifying conspiracy behind it all. But as Reece had said, it wasn’t hard evidence, far from it. In fact, it all looked a bit silly.

  ‘Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that this case has links to Jack the Ripper or, God forbid, vampires or disease or whatever else your dad was writing about,’ said Reece, ‘but I have to consider all the possibilities, however strange they first appear. My job involves looking for patterns, hoping those patterns will eventually make a picture. But at the same time I have to ask: how can any of this be worth killing over?’

  April’s eye had been caught by one phrase on the screen and she frowned.

  ‘You said earlier,’ she began, ‘that the only people capable of planning a murder like this are serial killers. There have been three murders in one village - couldn’t that possibly be the work of a serial killer?’

  Reece looked grim. ‘Serial killers are incredibly rare in this country and they usually stick to the same type of victim: the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred West, Harold Shipman, they all did the same thing over and over again until they were caught.’

  ‘But is this like that? Come on, Mr Reece, you’ve got to tell me.’

  The detective looked at her for a while. ‘There are similarities in the murders, yes. They all died from similar wounds to the throat, they all had strong links to the local area, the killings all took place either in or within a stone’s throw of the cemetery. But beyond that, it falls apart. Different times of day, indoors and outdoors, male and female victims - it doesn’t have the usual patterns we associate with a serial killer.’

  ‘So how are you going to stop him?’

  ‘Not me, April, us,’ said Reece. ‘I can’t do this on my own - I need your help. I need to know what you know. I need to see what you saw, and that’s why we’re having this conversation. Take, for example, that night in Swain’s Lane - are you sure you didn’t see anyone else there?’

  If Reece was watching her face, he may have detected a slight twitch in her expression. If he had, it would have looked like a flicker of fear; fear of the killer, fear for herself, fear that he might strike again. It was all those things, but
in reality, April was afraid for Gabriel. April had been there, yes, but she had seen so little. Whereas Gabriel had stayed inside the gates with the killer. He could have seen the killer, which would make him a target. But … Oh no. April had a sudden and terrible thought, something she hadn’t considered before, and felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered to herself, bending forwards hugging her middle.

  ‘April? Are you okay?’

  ‘I feel a bit ill,’ she muttered and, pushing her chair back, ran for the toilet. Safely inside, she bent over the sink, dry-heaving. Why hadn’t she seen it before? God, I’m such an idiot! It was so obvious. Gabriel Swift had been screwing with her head from the start. Yes, he’d behaved strangely - at school, in Swain’s Lane, even the night of the party - but eventually he’d allayed her suspicions about his presence in the cemetery the night of Isabelle’s murder. But what if it was all a big fat lie? What if Gabriel had killed Isabelle and then killed her father?