Dead Like You

by Peter James

  Down on the night she was attacked. The company was owned by their new prime suspect.

  The coincidence was too much.

  ‘Do these often go down?’

  Christmas shook his head and chewed on his nail again. ‘No. Very rarely. It’s a good system and there’s normally backup.’

  ‘But the backup wasn’t working on the night Mrs Pearce was attacked?’

  ‘That’s what I was told.’

  ‘What about that one there?’ Glenn Branson said, pointing at the blank screen numbered 20.

  Grace nodded his head. ‘Yes, I was going to ask the same.’

  ‘Yep, that’s down at the moment.’

  ‘What’s the property that’s being covered?’

  ‘The old cement works at Shoreham,’ Christmas replied.

  118

  Monday 19 January

  Jessie knew what she had to do, but as the moment approached her body went into panic mode and froze on her.

  He was getting closer. Each clang of the rung slow, steady, determined. She could hear his breathing now. Getting closer. Closer. Nearing the top.

  Above her she could hear a sound, like the clatter of that helicopter again. But she ignored it, not daring to be distracted. She turned, holding the knife in her hand, then finally dared to look down. And nearly dropped the knife in terror. He was only a few feet below her.

  His right eyeball was at a grotesque angle, almost as if it was peering back into its own socket, half sunken in a gunge of coagulated blood and grey fluid, the whole socket encircled inside a livid purple bruise. The massive spanner protruded from the top pocket of his anorak and he was holding the rung with one hand, the carving knife with the other, staring up at her with an expression of utter hatred.

  It was a long way down. Her brain was spinning. Trying to think clearly, to remember her instructions, but she’d never been taught how to kick in a situation like this. If she could plant both feet hard on his face she could dislodge him, she knew. It was her one chance.

  In a swift moment, she squatted, fighting off the vertigo as she stared down, trying to concentrate on him and not the long drop below. She took all her weight on her hands, braced herself, bent her knees, then kicked as hard as she could, clinging to the slats of the grid with her fingers.

  Instantly she felt a searing pain in the ball of her right foot.

  Then, crying out in pain, she felt a vice-like clamp around her left ankle. He was pulling her. Pulling her. Trying to dislodge her. And she realized in this instant she had made a terrible mistake. He had jammed his knife into her right foot, let go of the rung and was now holding both her ankles. He was much stronger than he had looked. He was pulling her. Trying to dislodge her. He was being suicidal, she suddenly understood. Taking a gamble. Either he dislodged her and they both plunged together, or she was going to have to pull him up.

  Then she felt another searing pain in the ball of her right foot, followed by an agonizing one in her right shin. And another. He was holding on with his left hand and slashing at her foot with the knife. Suddenly there was a terrible, terrible pain in the back of her right ankle and her foot felt powerless.

  He had sawn through her Achilles tendon, she realized.

  In desperation she jerked sharply backwards. And fell on to her back. He had let go.

  She scrambled to her feet and promptly fell over again. She heard a clatter as her knife skidded away from her and then, to her horror, it plunged through the railings. Moments later she heard a ping a long way below her. Her right foot, in terrible agony, would not longer support her.

  Oh, Jesus. Please help me.

  He was hauling himself up over the edge, on to the grid, the carving knife still in his hand.

  Trying desperately to think clearly despite her agony, she struggled to remember her training. This was a better position. Her left leg was still working.

  He was on the gridded platform now, only feet away from her, on his knees and getting to his feet.

  She lay still, watching him.

  Watching the leer on his face. He was smiling again. Back in control. Coming after her.

  Upright now, he towered over her, holding the knife, with blood on the blade, in his right hand and taking out the spanner from his top pocket with his left. He took a lurching step towards her, then raised the spanner.

  In less than a second, she calculated, he would bring that spanner down on her head.

  She bent her left knee, then kicked forward with every ounce of strength that remained in her body, visualizing a point a yard behind his right kneecap, heard the snap as she connected, driving her foot into the kneecap, just as she had driven that hockey stick all those years before into the knee of the school bully.

  Saw the momentary shock in his face. Heard his hideous howl of pain as he fell over backwards, with an echoing clang, on to the grid. Then, hauling herself up with the help of the railings and holding on, began to hop, dragging her right foot, away from him.

  ‘Owwww! My knee! Owwwwww, you fucking, fucking, fucking bitch.’

  There was a vertical ladder she’d seen earlier at the far end of this walkway. She lunged at it, not looking down, ignoring the height. Gripping the edge with both hands she half-hopped, half-slipped, down, down, down, down.

  He still had not appeared above her.

  Then, as she reached the bottom, a pair of hands gripped her waist.

  She screamed in terror.

  A calm, gentle, unfamiliar voice said, ‘Jessie Sheldon?’

  She turned, quaking. And found herself staring at a tall man with silver wisps of hair either side of a black baseball cap. On the front of the cap was written the word police.

  She fell into his arms, sobbing.

  119

  Friday 23 January

  ‘You’re unbelievable! You know that? You are un-fucking-believable! You know how much evidence there is against you? It’s un-fucking-believable! You filthy pervert! You – you monster!’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he replied, in a subdued tone.

  Denise Starling stared at her husband, in his shapeless blue prison tracksuit, with the black patch over his right eye, sitting opposite her in the large, garishly furnished, open-plan visiting room. A camera watched them from the ceiling and a microphone was silently recording them. A blue plastic table separated them.

  Either side of them, other prisoners talked with their loved ones and their relatives.

  ‘Have you read the papers?’ she demanded. ‘They’re linking you with the Shoe Man rapes back in 1997. You did those too, didn’t you?’

  ‘Keep your bloody voice down.’

  ‘Why? Are you afraid of what they might do to you in the remand wing? They don’t like perverts, do they? Do they bugger you with ladies’ shoes in the showers? You’d probably enjoy that.’

  ‘Be quiet, woman. We’ve got things to discuss.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to discuss with you, Garry Starling. You’ve destroyed us. I always knew you were a sodding pervert. But I didn’t know you were a rapist and a murderer. Had a good time on the ghost train with her, did you? You took me on the ghost train on one of our first dates and jammed your finger up my fanny. Remember? Get your rocks off on the ghost train, do you?’

  ‘I didn’t go on any ghost train. It wasn’t me. Believe me!’

  ‘Yeah, right, believe you. Ha! Ha fucking ha!’

  ‘It wasn’t me. I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Sure, right, and it wasn’t you at the cement works, was it? Just someone who looked like you.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘All that tying me up shit. Making me do things with shoes while you watched and played with yourself.’

  ‘Denise!’

  ‘I don’t care. Let them all hear! You’ve ruined my life. Taken my best years. All that not wanting to have children because you had such an unhappy childhood shit. You’re a monster and you’re where you deserve to be. I hope you rot in hell. And you’d better get yo
urself a good solicitor, because I’m not standing by you. I’m going to take you for every penny I can.’

  Then she began to sob.

  He sat in silence. He had nothing to say. If it had been possible, he would have liked to lean over the table and strangle this bitch with his bare hands.

  ‘I thought you loved me,’ she sobbed. ‘I thought we could make a life together. I knew you were damaged, but I thought that if I loved you enough maybe I could change you. That I could offer you something that you never had.’

  ‘Give over!’

  ‘It’s true. You were honest with me once. Twelve years ago, when we married, you told me I was the only person who had given you peace in your life. Who understood you. You told me your mother made you screw her, because your father was impotent. That after that you were disgusted by women’s private parts, even my own. We went through all that psychology shit together.’

  ‘Denise, shut it!’

  ‘No, I won’t shut it. When we got to together I understood that shoes were the only things that turned you on. I accepted that because I loved you.’

  ‘Denise! Bitch! Shut it!’

  ‘We had so many good years. I didn’t realize I was marrying a monster.’

  ‘We had good times,’ he said suddenly. ‘Good times until recently. Then you changed.’

  ‘Changed? What do you mean changed? You mean I got fed up fucking myself with shoes? Is that what you mean by changed?’

  He was silent again.

  ‘What’s my future?’ she said. ‘I’m now Mrs Shoe Man. Are you proud of that? That you’ve destroyed my life? You know our good friends, Maurice and Ulla? The ones we have dinner with every Saturday night at the China Garden? They’re not returning my calls.’

  ‘Maybe they never liked you,’ he replied. ‘Maybe it was me they liked and they just put up with you as my whingeing hag wife.’

  Sobbing again, she said, ‘Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go home and kill myself. Will you care?’

  ‘Just do it properly,’ he said.

  120

  Friday 23 January

  Denise Starling drove home recklessly in her black Mercedes convertible coupé. She stared at the wet road ahead through her mist of tears. The wipers clop-clopped on the windscreen. A chirrupy woman was wittering away on BBC Sussex Radio about disastrous holidays people had experienced, inviting listeners to call in.

  Yeah, every sodding holiday with Garry Starling had been a disaster. Life with Garry Starling had been a disaster. And now it was getting even worse.

  Shit, you bastard.

  Three years into their marriage she’d fallen pregnant. He’d made her abort. He didn’t want to bring children into the world. He’d quoted some poem at her, some poet whose name she could not remember, about your parents screwing you up.

  What had happened in Garry’s childhood had twisted him, that was for sure. Damaged him in ways that she could never understand.

  She drove, way over the limit, along the London Road, past Preston Park, and shouted, ‘Fuck you!’ when the speed camera there she had totally forgotten about flashed her. Then she turned into Edward Street, drove along past the law courts, and Brighton College and the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

  A few minutes later she made a right turn, opposite the East Brighton Golf Club, where Garry was a member – not for much longer, she thought, with some strange, grim satisfaction – let him be a sodding pariah too! Then she crested the hill, swung into Roedean Crescent and finally turned right, into the driveway of their large mock-Tudor house, passing the double garage doors, and pulled up in front of Garry’s grey Volvo.

  Then, her eyes still misted with tears, she unlocked the front door of her house. She had trouble, for some moments, unsetting the alarm. Typical! The one time we have trouble with the alarm, Garry’s not around to get it sorted!

  She slammed shut the front door, then slid the safety chain across. Sod you, world. You want to ignore me? Fine by me! I’m going to ignore you too. I’m going to open a bottle of Garry’s most expensive claret and get rip-roaring sodding pissed!

  Then a quiet voice right behind her said, ‘Shalimar! I like Shalimar! I smelt it the first time I met you!’

  An arm clamped around her neck. Something damp and sickly-sweet-smelling was pressed across her nose. She struggled, for a few seconds, as her brain began to go muzzy.

  As she lapsed into unconsciousness, the last words she heard were, ‘You’re like my mother. You do bad things to men. Bad things that make men do bad things. You’re disgusting. You are evil, like my mother. You were rude to me in my taxi. You destroyed your husband, you know that? Someone has to stop you before you destroy anyone else.’

  Her eyes were closed, so he whispered into her ear, ‘I’m going to do something to you that I once did to my mother. I left it a little late with her, so I had to do it a different way. But it felt good afterwards. I know I’m going to feel good after this too. Maybe even better. Uh-huh.’

  Yac pulled her limp body up the stairs, listening to the bump-bump, bump-bump of her black Christian Louboutins on each tread as he struggled with her weight.

  He stopped, perspiring, when he reached the landing. Then he bent down and picked up the blue tow rope he’d found in the garage, in his gloved hands, and knotted one end firmly around one of the mock-Tudor ceiling beams that was in easy reach of the stairs. He’d already prepared the other end into a hangman’s noose. And measured the distance.

  He placed the noose around the limp woman’s neck and heaved her, with some difficulty, over the banister rail.

  He watched her fall, then jerk, then spinning around and around.

  It was some minutes before she was completely still.

  He stared at her shoes. He remembered her shoes the first time she had entered his taxi. Feeling a need to take them from her.

  Hanging limply, looking pretty dead so far as he could tell, she reminded him of his mother again now.

  No longer able to hurt anyone.

  Just like his mother hadn’t been.

  ‘I used a pillow on her,’ he called out to Denise. But she did not reply. He wasn’t really expecting her to.

  He decided to leave the shoes, although they were so tempting. After all, taking them was the Shoe Man’s style. Not his.

  121

  Sunday 25 January

  It was a good Sunday morning. The tide was in and the baby on the boat next door was not crying. Maybe it had died, Yac thought. He’d heard about cot death syndrome. Perhaps the baby had died from that. Perhaps not. But he hoped so.

  He had copies of all this week’s Argus newspapers laid out on the table in the saloon. Bosun, the cat, had walked over them. That was OK. They’d reached an understanding. Bosun did not walk over his lavatory chains any more. But if he wanted to walk over his newspapers, that was fine.

  He was happy with what he read.

  The Shoe Man’s wife had committed suicide. That was understandable. Her husband’s arrest was a big trauma for her. Garry Starling had been a major player in this city. A big socialite. The disgrace of his arrest would have been hard for any wife to bear. She’d been telling people she felt suicidal and then she had hanged herself.

  Perfectly reasonable.

  Uh-huh.

  He liked it best when the tide was in and the Tom Newbound was floating.

  Then he could pull his fishing lines up.

  He had two fishing lines out, each with weights on them so that they sank well into the mud at low tide. Of course he had been worried each time that the police had searched the boat. But he needn’t have been. They pulled every plank up from the floor of the bilges. Searched in every cavity there was. But none of them had ever thought to raise one of the fishing lines, like he was doing now.

  Just as well.

  The second line was tied, at the end, to a weighted waterproof bag. Inside were the shoes of Mandy Thorpe. Fake Jimmy Choos. He didn’t like those fake shoes. They deserved t
o be buried in mud.

  And she deserved the punishment he had given her for wearing them.

  But, he had to concede, it had been good punishing her. She’d reminded him so much of his mother. Fat like his mother. The smell of his mother. He’d waited a long time to do that to his mother, to see what it felt like. But he’d left it too late and she was too sick by the time he’d gathered the courage. But it had been good with Mandy Thorpe. It had felt like he was punishing his mother. Very good indeed.

  But not as good as punishing Denise Starling.

  He liked the way she had spun around and around, like a top.

  But he hadn’t liked being in custody. Hadn’t liked the way the police had removed so many of his things from the boat. Going through everything and messing up his collections. That was bad.

  At least he had everything back now. It felt like he had his life back.

  Best news of all, he’d had a call from the people who owned this boat, to say that they would be staying on at least two more years in Goa now. That made him very pleased.

  Life suddenly felt very good. Very peaceful.

  And it was a rising tide. Nothing like it.

  Uh-huh.

  122

  Friday 20 February

  Darren Spicer was feeling in a good mood. He stopped off at the pub, which had become his regular staging post on his way back home from work, for his now customary two pints with whisky chasers. He was becoming a creature of habit! You didn’t have to be in prison to have a routine; you could have one outside too.

  He was enjoying his new routine. Commuting to the Grand from the night shelter – always by foot, to save the pennies and to keep fit. There was a young lady who worked as a chambermaid at the hotel called Tia whom he was getting sweet on – and he reckoned she was getting sweet on him too. She was Filipina, pretty, in her early thirties, with a boyfriend she’d left because he beat her up. They were getting to know each other pretty well, although they hadn’t actually yet done it, so to speak. But that was just a matter of time now.