20
‘This can’t be right,’ said Erika as they pulled up at an end of terrace house. The small front garden was an overgrown mess, and a greying coat of paint was peeling from the sash windows. The street was quiet, and it had just started to rain.
‘Should we have called ahead? She is one of us, or was,’ started Peterson as they opened the gate.
‘She stopped being one of us when she took the law into her own hands with Trevor Marksman,’ said Erika grabbed an old rusting knocker and rapping on the door. They waited, but there was no answer, she knocked again, and after a moment went to the grimy front window and peered into the living room. She could make out a television in the corner of the room, which was on, and showing one of those auction shows. She jumped when a pair of hooded eyes appeared, framed by long greying hair. The woman inside jumped also, and shooed her away with a hand half covered in a long woollen sleeve.
‘Hi, I’m DCI Foster,’ said Erika quickly retrieving her ID from her coat and pressing it open against the window. ‘I’m here with two colleagues, DI Moss and DI Peterson. We need to ask your advice about the Jessica Collins case…’
The face leaned in a peered at their ID.
‘Do I have to speak to you?’ she shouted through the closed window.
‘No. But we’d like to talk to you about the case, it would help us to hear your thoughts…’
The face moved back, thought for a moment,
‘Go round and I’ll let you in,’ she said.
They came back out through the front gate and walked alongside a mildewing fence, which curved around the end terrace. They saw the hand over the top at the far end and then one of the panels swung inwards.
Former DCI Amanda Baker was a large woman; she had on black crocs with thick woollen socks, and black leggings. She had a bloated red face, and a large double chin. Her grey hair was long and greasy and tied at the nape of her neck with an elastic band. She nodded at them and turned as they followed her down a dank little alleyway, past a bathroom window where a small vent twirled lazily, puffing out the aroma of urine and toilet cleaner. The back garden was overgrown and sacks of rubbish were piled up in one corner.
They came to the back door and Amanda wiped her crocs on a thin scrap of mat, which Erika thought ironical, as it was the kind of house where you wiped your feet on the way out. The kitchen had once been quite smart, but it was filthy and crammed with dirty dishes, and old newspapers. There was a dog bed by a washing machine on spin cycle, but no dog.
‘Go through to the front room. Do you want tea?’ she said with a gravelly smokers voice.
‘Er, yes,’ said Erika seeing Moss and Peterson’s faces at the mess. They moved through a hallway, past a steep wooden staircase leading up to a gloomy landing. The hallway was crammed with old newspapers, and they were piled chest-high against the front door.
As they came into the living room there was a knock at the front window. Erika went over and the postman was outside holding up a sheaf of letters. Erika opened the window and took them from him.
‘That answers my question about the front door,’ said Peterson. The living room was crammed with two saggy sofas, a dining table and chairs. The television sat in a large shelving unit dominating one wall, and crammed with books and paperwork; there was one picture on the wall which stood out. It was in a cheap gold frame with a braid pattern. The colour photo was a little spoiled and faded at the bottom where the damp had got inside. A thin young version of Amanda Baker wore the old uniform of the WPC; thick black tights, a skirt, jacket and peaked cap. Her black hair shone from underneath and she stood outside Hendon Police College with a young male officer in uniform, he wasn’t wearing his cap, but had it under his arm. They held up their badge’s and were grinning at the camera.
‘I thought you’d make a beeline for that,’ said Amanda, shuffling in with a tray full of steaming cups of tea.
‘I recognise him,’ said Erika taking a cup from the tray and peering back at the photo.
‘PC Gareth Oakley, as was. We worked in vice back in the seventies. Me and Oakley were the same rank then. You now know him as retired Assistant Commissioner Oakley.’
‘That must have been interesting, being a woman in vice, in the seventies?’ said Moss. Amanda just raised her eyebrows.
‘Looks like Oakley he had less hair then, than he does now! How old was he?’’ asked Erika peering closer at the picture at his thinning hair.
Amanda chuckled, ‘Twenty-three. He started wearing the syrup when he got promoted to the DCI rank.’
‘That’s Assistant Commissioner Oakley?’ said Moss, just catching on.
‘We trained together at Hendon, graduated in 1978,’ said Amanda. She cleared off some of the newspapers from the sofa and invited them to sit.
‘Oakley has only just retired, massive golden handshake,’ said Moss. It hung in the air for a moment. They all sat down.
‘Okay, so we’re just here informally to ask you about the Jessica Collins case. I’ve been assigned it,’ said Erika.
‘Who did you piss off?’ chuckled Amanda darkly. ‘It’s a poisoned chalice. I always thought they’d dump her in the quarry… although we searched it twice and there was nothing, so whether they kept her somewhere, or moved the body. That’s your job to find out.’
‘You were convinced it was Trevor Marksman?’
‘Yeah,’ she nodded holding Erika’s gaze. ‘He burned for it though. And you know what? I’d do it again.’
‘So you freely admit you tipped off the people who put the petrol bomb through his door.’
‘Yep.’ She looked at Erika, Moss and Peterson, adding, ‘don’t you ever want to take justice into your own hands?’
‘No.’
‘Come on, Erika. I’ve read about you. Your husband was gunned down by that druggie, plus four of your colleagues and he left you for dead. Wouldn’t you love to have an hour in a room with him, just the two of you and a baseball bat covered in nails?’ She blew on her tea and kept eye contact with Erika.
‘Yeah I would.’
‘There you go then.’
‘But I’d never do it. Our job as police officers is to uphold the law, and not to take it into our own hands. You also had an affair with Martin Collins?’
Amanda sighed and put her tea down on the coffee table. It was littered with rubbish.
‘I did. Him and Marianne were over, it was two years after Jessica went missing. We got close. I regret that more than Marksman, but I fell in love.’
‘Did he?’
‘No.’
She shrugged and pulled a pack of cigarettes from a pouch in the front of her jumper and lit up.
‘Did anyone in the MET know?’
‘They knew. But I was off the case. I often think it was the only good thing I did for that family. I couldn’t bring their daughter back, I made Martin forget, at least when he was with me.’
‘Now we’ve found Jessica. Do you still think Trevor Marksman did it?’ asked Erika.
Amanda took another drag of her cigarette. ‘I always think that if something is so bloody obvious then it has to be true… He had someone working with him though, and I think that when he took her. He her kept somewhere.’
‘You had him under surveillance?’ asked Peterson.
‘We did, but there was a week or so in between her going missing and us getting eyes on him… But then the first officers I had working on it were a couple of poofs. Turns out they used their night time watch to cop off a few times and fuck each other. I was never able to prove it, but they probably missed a few opportunities to catch him.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I confronted them, they were thrown off the case. They started gossiping about me. Spread a lot of shit about me…’ she took a drag on her cigarette drawing it right down to the filter, then lit it with another.
‘I had a look at your file,’ started Erika.
‘Oh you did, did you?’ said Amanda squinting throu
gh the smoke.
‘After the Jessica Collins case, you were moved to the drug squad, and you were charged with selling on cocaine.’
‘Everyone was doing it. It was the nineties. They threw the book at me, no one else got done for it… I was in debt.’ She sniffed and crossed her arms defiantly.
‘You know what the drug problems are like in London, I don’t know how you could do that?’
‘Oh stop bleating… I was a bloody good copper. I paved the way for women like you, feminist DCI’s and little dyke DI’s,’ she added indicating Moss. ‘and you, DI Peterson, you would have been the token black guy twenty years ago, now you’re accepted, taken seriously.’
‘So it’s all down to you is it? Are you the Rosa Parks of the MET?’ said Peterson.
‘And I can call myself a dyke, not you,’ added Moss.
‘There we go, you’ve arrived in the force, haven’t you?’
There was an awkward silence. Erika gave Moss and Peterson a look.
‘We’re not here to do anything more than get your side of things.’
‘My side?’
‘Yes, what it was like working on the case, your insight. I’m coming to this blind with reams and reams of case files.’
Amanda was quiet for a moment and lit another cigarette,
‘When I worked in vice I was the only woman and I was given every rape case, I looked after those women. I took samples, I cared for them. I never ignored their calls and I supported them through months of waiting whilst the fuckers who raped them were on remand. The I held their hand through the court cases… No one gave me any support. They say that you fall in love with the force but it doesn’t love you back and that’s true. The blokes who used to piss off down the pub early, who used to demand free fucks from the sex workers, they got the promotions. And then when I finally get the Jessica Collins case, I was made to feel like I’d overstepped the mark, had ideas above my station.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Erika.
‘Don’t be sorry. But don’t judge me. You get to the point when you find out playing by the rules gets you nowhere…’ she indicated the photo on the wall with the butt of her cigarette, ‘Look. That arsehole Oakley, ended up as Assistant Commissioner,’ she stubbed it out in an overflowing ashtray, grinding it down. ‘We were on the beat a lot together in the old days. One night we were on Catford High Street at three am, and this lad holds us up at knifepoint in one of the side roads. He was off his head on something… he grabs Oakley and presses the knife against his neck, and Oakley shits himself. I’m not talking metaphorically, he actually shits his pants. The kid with the knife, who’s paranoid and wired enough as it is, freaks out at the smell, thinks he’s shit himself and runs away… Oakley was saved by his own shit. It’s ironical that years later, he gets a bloody MBE for his work in the force bringing down knife crime… I helped him that night, got him cleaned up and I kept my mouth shut. We were tight back then. Years later when it all went wrong for me, he was Chief Superintendent I think. He did nothing, left me out to dry.’
They sat in silence for a moment. The clock ticked loudly, a car went past on the road outside and the sky seemed to have grown darker.
‘There is something,’ said Amanda. She paused and rubbed at her face. ‘Hayes Quarry. There’s an old cottage beside it. When we searched the area there was an old guy, a squatter living there. He let us search the place, twice. It’s tiny with a cellar. We found nothing. Of course. Then a few months later he hung himself…’
‘And?’ asked Erika.
‘ I dunno. I was gung-ho for Trevor Marksman’s scalp, but I’ve had time to think since you found Marianne in the quarry.’
‘It was Jessica who we found.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I meant, who I meant. There was just something odd about it. He didn’t seem to type to do that.’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘Um, no I forget.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘Course not. But he was just a bit simple, happy go lucky simple. That stood out for me. Then for him to go and drink poison and then hang himself.’
‘He drank poison too?’
‘Yeah, I just said that.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Peterson. They could see that Amanda’s hands were now shaking badly.
‘Fuck it, well he did. I need a drink,’ she said. ‘Anyone else?’
‘No, thank you, we won’t take up any more of your time,’ said Erika. ‘Is it okay if I call on you again. We’re working our way through all the evidence and there may be something I need to run by you, or clarify.’
‘Can you get me on the payroll?’ she joked with a wheeze. There was an awkward silence. ‘That’s fine. Call on me whenever you need to. As you can see, I’ve got all the time in the world.’
* * *
Amanda watched from her dingy front room window as the three detectives went back to their car and drove away. She thought the two women were a little annoying, but the black guy was pretty hot. She attempted to close the front window and keep out the cold. It didn’t shut properly, and she hadn’t bothered to do much about it. The only person who ever came with any regularity was the postman. She flicked through the letter, seeing it was all junk and a bill from the council.
She didn’t notice the old blue Ford parked a little way down the street, and the man inside who was watching her. He had dark hair and several days stubble. She hadn’t noticed him the day before either, when he’d parked further up the street and walked past her house, paying attention to the broken window. She took a gulp of the wine, moved back over to the sofa and settled down to drink herself into oblivion.
21
Erika had discussed what Amanda Baker had said with Moss and Peterson, and they had chewed over her confusion about some of the facts of the case. They’d presumed much of it was fuelled by anger, paranoia, and the booze. But what she had said about the cottage beside Hayes Quarry had stuck, so the next morning she came back with Peterson.
They parked at the Croydon Road entrance to Hayes Common in a small gravel car park. It was a cold morning and they buttoned their coats as they got out and started to walk toward a bank of trees at the top of a slope, following a gravel path. The path took them to the left side past the trees and then the path swerved to the right, blocking out the car park, the view of the houses and road, and it opened out to rolling common land.
‘Jeez, how quickly you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere,’ said Peterson as the trees muffled the sounds of the road. Their feet crunched on the gravel as they moved past tall bare trees on either side, set so close together that the woods inside were dark. ‘This is where I imagine eyes watching us from the depths of the wood,’ he added. The grass was coated with dew from the night before, and the sun hadn’t yet risen above the trees to evaporate it. A low mist hung in the air, and wisps floated past as they walked.
‘What if she was carried this way, Jessica?’ said Erika. They absorbed that thought as their feet crunched along the gravel path.
‘Was she wrapped in the plastic before she went in? Or did whoever it was, do it by the water?’
‘Whoever did it had a walk to get to the quarry. This Croydon Road entrance where we’ve parked is the closest and we’ve been walking for,’ Erika checked her watch, ‘five minutes.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t just one person,’ said Peterson plunging his hands in his pockets deep in thought.
The trees on either side seemed to part as the gravel path curved round, and slightly below them, sat the quarry. The still water reflected the grey of the sky, and the low mist hung over its surface. The gravel path finished a hundred yards from the water, and they walked across spongy uneven moss to reach its rocky banks.
‘Whoever did this would have needed a boat,’ said Erika. ‘She was found about a hundred yards out.’
Peterson picked up a small stone, crouched down and skimmed it across the water.
‘Six, that’s impr
essive,’ she said as they watched the row of ripples spreading across the water.
‘No one would have been able to throw a small child’s body that far from here on the shore,’ said Peterson. They moved off, their legs as well as their minds working in synch. The path around the quarry was thin in places, and in between there were rocks to clamber over and small gnarled trees, some with their branches hanging into the waters edge, to duck under.
‘Okay, I can’t see the cottage,’ said Erika. She pulled out a map she’d been emailed by the council.
‘In twenty six years trees would have grown up and…’ started Peterson.
‘Hang on,’ said Erika as they came level with a mass of overgrown brambles and reeds. ‘That’s a rooftop, isn’t it?’ she said pointing at a slice of red tile rising up through a mass of brambles and dried bindweed. They approached the mass, which as well as being sharp and thick in places, was slick with dew. Now they were closer, Erika could see broken glass glinting in the pale light. They started to make their way through, but the metres of brambles trees and dense undergrowth were impenetrable.
‘Jeez boss, we need to be better prepared for this; backup, some gloves,’ said Peterson, wincing as he pulled a large bramble from the soft skin on his thumb.
‘You’re right, we need this cut down,’ said Erika reluctantly. They came back out from the soggy undergrowth brushing themselves down, just as a yellow Labrador bounded up with a soggy tennis ball in its mouth. It stopped and sat, placing its paw on the ball.
Erika picked it up and threw it for the dog and it bounded away across the mossy grass. Just as it loped back with the ball, a woman appeared through the trees. She was dressed in an eccentric array of clothes; a saggy old green tracksuit, a Chelsea FC bobble hat, a Manchester united scarf, a pair of purple trainers, where one of the soles was detached and flapping. She had a carrier bag bursting with what looked like walnuts and her hands were stained black from the walnuts husks. From under her hat spilled tangled wiry grey hair, and her face was deeply lined.
Dark Water: A gripping serial killer thriller Page 9