The Ladykiller

by Martina Cole

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Kate was losing patience now.

  ‘How was she brought here? By ambulance, in a car . . .’

  Kelly pushed Kate out of the way. He peered into the glasses that separated him from the receptionist.

  ‘She came by fucking bus. There was her, with her head smashed in. Two ambulance men and a fucking dirty great stretcher. Even you couldn’t have missed them walking through here. Now shut your trap and tell me where my daughter is or you’ll be going in to see the doctor yourself !’

  The woman’s mouth puckered into a small O and a nurse, hearing the exchange, hurried out from the cubicle area.

  ‘Mr Kelly?’

  Patrick nodded. Kate could see the tension in his shoulders and back. It was as if someone had stuffed a metal pole inside his coat to hold him up.

  ‘Where’s my daughter? I want to see my daughter.’

  ‘She’s still in theatre. If you’d like to follow me, I’ll take you to the waiting room.’

  Kelly and Kate followed the young girl.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Kelly, I really don’t know, a doctor will see you soon.’

  Kate followed Kelly up two flights of stairs and into a tiny waiting room off the ITU. She thanked the nurse, who offered to bring them coffee.

  ‘I knew this had happened, I knew it. I had a feeling in me bones.’

  Kate didn’t answer. Amanda Dawkins walked into the tiny room and Kate motioned with her head that they should go outside, closing the door quietly on Kelly.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Bad, Kate. Really bad. Half her head’s gone. It’s obvious it’s the same man who attacked Geraldine O’Leary. She’s been raped. Buggered as well I think. She’s in a terrible state. Even the doctors were amazed at how she’s hanging on to life.’

  Kate pursed her lips. Kelly would go berserk if anything happened to his daughter. He was wound up like a watch spring now. She nodded at Amanda.

  ‘Look, do me a favour. Keep everyone away from Kelly for a while. I’ll stay with him. Get someone out to interview Kevin Cosgrove. He’s at Kelly’s house. OK?’

  ‘Will do. Anything else?’

  ‘Not until we know more.’

  As Amanda walked away Kate called after her. ‘There is one more thing: ring my house and leave a message on the answerphone. Tell them I’ll be there as soon as possible, OK?’

  Amanda nodded and Kate went back in to Kelly.

  ‘What’s happening?’ His voice was flat, dead.

  ‘Nothing at the moment.’

  ‘Is Flowers here?’

  Kate was startled.

  ‘Of course not.’

  Kelly got up and began pacing the room. ‘Then get him here, tell him I personally request his presence. You can also find out who’s the quack on my daughter’s case and then find out who’s the best quack for her kind of complaint. I don’t care who the man is or how much he costs, just get him.’

  Kate felt her mettle rise again. All her sympathy for Kelly evaporated out of the little window and she pulled herself up to her full height.

  ‘With respect, Mr Kelly, I am not a secretary. If you want Frederick Flowers, or another doctor, I suggest you get them yourself.’

  Kelly looked at her with a stunned expression on his face. He was used to people jumping when he told them to jump. He was used to pure unadulterated agreement with everything he said and did. He stared into Kate’s face and she could see the battle raging inside him. His hand clenched into a fist and Kate knew it was taking all his willpower not to slap her a stinging blow.

  What she’d said was tantamount to mutiny.

  He bit his lip, his chest heaving. He pointed a finger at her, waving it up and down in front of her face.

  ‘If I don’t do something I’ll explode, and if I explode here you will never see the like again as long as you live. I just can’t sit here and wait. I have to do something.’

  It was said simply and sincerely and Kate felt the power of him then, knew the depth of fear inside him and felt petty. Petty and nasty and childish. The man was trying to cope with his grief as best he could. He needed to be moving, doing, as if the act of movement would take away his fears. Would at least postpone them. If he was doing something he wouldn’t feel so useless. Kate swallowed hard.

  ‘I’ll arrange for a phone for you.’

  As she walked past him he grabbed her arm. She looked first at his hand, the fingers digging into her arm, and then up into his face. She saw the terrible knowledge in his eyes and then he crumpled. It was as if someone had punctured him - he just crumpled before her eyes and instinctively she put her arm around him. He clung to her.

  ‘If she dies I have nothing, nothing.’

  She steered him back to the chair and he put his head into his hands. Harsh racking sobs burst from inside his chest, exploding as they hit the air.

  The nurse walked in with the coffee and Kate took the tray and hustled her out.

  She gave him his coffee and lit a cigarette for him, placing it between his lips.

  ‘It’s the bastard who murdered that barmaid, ain’t it?’

  Kate knew it had taken a lot for him to admit his real fears.

  She nodded. ‘We think so.’

  ‘Has she been raped?’

  Kate nodded again.

  He sipped his coffee and a calm descended on him. He knew the worst now. Nothing else could be this bad.

  ‘You realise he’s a dead man, don’t you? Even if she lives. He’s a dead man.’

  Kate sipped her own coffee.

  There was nothing to be said.

  Chapter Six

  Patrick Kelly drove home from the hospital at eight in the morning. He looked terrible and he knew it. His mouth tasted foul from instant coffee and cheap cigarettes. And he was fuming.

  His daughter was lying between life and death, raped and beaten nearly to death. He felt the tightening around his heart and for one horrible second thought he was going to have a heart attack. He tried to control his breathing.

  When he had seen her, his baby, lying in intensive care, full of tubes and drips and bandages, he had felt a red rage behind his eyes the like of which he had never experienced. Some piece of filth had taken his child - his child! - and forced himself on her.

  She had been buggered, that was the worst of it all. His child had been buggered by some piece of scum.

  Well, that piece of scum had better start saying his prayers, because Kelly was going to find him - find him and rip him to shreds.

  He screeched to a halt in his driveway and as he ran towards it the front door was opened by Willy Gabney. Without speaking to the man, he rushed through the entrance lobby, the large tiled hall, and up the curved staircase, taking the steps three at a time. By the time he got to the bedroom where Kevin Cosgrove lay asleep, his chest and lungs were burning with every breath.

  He threw open the bedroom door and it crashed against a bureau, sending an antique jug and bowl crashing to the floor. Before Kevin had even opened his eyes properly, Patrick Kelly was on him. Dragging the boy by the hair he pulled him from the bed, shaking him like a terrier with a bone. He began to rain punches on Kevin’s body, kicking him and screaming at him at the top of his voice.

  Kevin curled himself up into a tight ball, taking all that Patrick Kelly doled out to him. Frightened out of his life, he felt the savageness of the attack but was powerless to put a stop to it. Dragging him up by his shoulders, Patrick Kelly drew his head back and brought his forehead down on to Kevin’s face with all his might. The force of the blow stunned them both. Kelly let Kevin drop to the floor, the boy’s whimpering barely penetrating his rage.

  Gabney, who had followed his boss up the stairs, stood in the doorway, his face neutral. The violence of the attack affected him not one iota. He was only surprised that Kelly had acted out the whole thing himself. It was precisely what Gabney himself was paid to do.

  Kelly stared at the crumpled figur
e on the floor below him. He pointed, his finger shaking.

  ‘My Mandy was raped and half murdered last night, you fucking ponce! Some piece of shite buggered my baby! Do you hear what I’m telling you, wanker?’

  Kevin stared up, bemused. Mandy, raped?

  Kelly brought back his leg and kicked Kevin in the knees as hard as he could.

  ‘She’s in a coma. She could be a vegetable because of you. But I promise you this, dickhead, whatever happens to my baby, happens to you! Remember that. Keep it stamped in your mind.’

  He was so exhausted by his exertions he could barely talk, every few seconds gasping for breath. ‘You’re dead meat, boy. Dead meat.’

  He leant against the dressing table until his breathing returned to normal. Then he nodded at Willy. ‘Get all the lads here NOW. I don’t care if it is Christmas Eve, I don’t care if they’re at their mother’s death bed, get them here pronto!’

  Gabney hurried away. When Patrick Kelly was annoyed, it was best to do exactly what he said.

  Kelly stared down at the crumpled heap on the floor. Crimson stains were appearing as if by magic on the Axminster carpet. Gathering up the spittle in his mouth, he bent over the prostrate form and spat into his face.

  ‘Get up, Cosgrove, and piss off out of my house. You get yourself a sherbet dab and all, because my Mandy’s car stays here. Get it?’

  Kate had been busy all day with the new development. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was the same man who had murdered Geraldine O’Leary. She had been shocked to see the severity of the beating the girl had taken. All the fingers of one hand were broken, as if stamped on, and a large chunk of her head had been literally hacked from the skull. Even the doctors agreed that the girl should by rights be dead. But she was a fighter, like her father.

  In spite of everything Kate knew about Patrick Kelly, she still could not help liking him. He was arrogant, self-opinionated and a bit of a male chauvinist. That much was evident even to an inexperienced observer. He had obviously ruled his daughter’s life. A life that she was hanging on to by a thread. But after he had calmed down, she had seen another side to him. Inside the hospital she had witnessed the depth of his grief. Even with his bombast and his violent temper, Kate had felt an affinity with him. Anyone who had to witness the destruction of a child would feel the same.

  She remembered when, years before, Lizzy had gone missing for an afternoon. Everyone had told her not to worry, that she was probably playing and had forgotten the time and Kate had felt the same rage inside her. Being a policewoman, she knew exactly what could have befallen her daughter. She had seen it enough times. She had wanted to slap the supercilious smiles off the faces around her. Lizzy had been found in the local woods setting up camp with a boy from two streets away. Kate had given her the one and only good hiding of her life. Not so much because she had gone missing but because of the fear she had caused her mother. Kate had sensed that same feeling in Kelly in the night.

  She had stayed with him until Mandy had come out of theatre. During the long vigil he had talked again about his daughter and his dead wife. As if the very action of talking about her would somehow keep Mandy alive. It was this gentleness that attracted Kate to him. His more sinister reputation was overshadowed by his grief for his child.

  Kelly had come up the hard way and Kate wondered if events in his childhood had made him what he was. Socialisation, the social workers called it. Kate had her own opinion. She thought that Kelly was a man who would have made something of himself whatever class he was born in: he had an inbred cunning, a need to achieve by whatever means he could. And she sensed that he wanted those achievements not so much for himself but for his wife and his child. He had worked to give Mandy everything, a fifty thousand pound car and a hairdressing salon and beauty parlour. She would love to be able to hand those to Lizzy on a plate. Wouldn’t all parents? No, Patrick Kelly’s reputation as a hard man was only true to an extent. Deep inside he was no different to anyone else; he just earned his money in unconventional ways.

  When he had finally been able to see his daughter Kate had felt his anguish. It was obvious that Mandy was not going to live; she was so badly brain damaged, it would be kinder to let her die. But she was hanging on and Kate knew that Kelly would find it very difficult to accept that she was going to die. He felt pure willpower could pull her through.

  Kate sighed. When she had finally left him to go home and grab a quick shower and a change of clothes before coming to work, she had felt as if she was abandoning him. As she’d walked from the ITU, she’d felt his eyes burning into her back. Now, at her desk, she admitted to herself that she found Patrick Kelly attractive. He was one hell of a good-looking man. She chastised herself. Your trouble, Kate Burrows, is you haven’t had a man for too long. You should get yourself laid. Do you the world of good.

  She smiled.

  She had only ever had one man in her life and she was divorced from him. Shows how much Kelly affected me, she thought. I haven’t thought about sex for years.

  No, that was a lie. She’d thought about it, just never done anything about it.

  She was glad when DS Spencer broke into her thoughts.

  ‘So, ma’am, what’s the next step?’

  Kate sighed.

  ‘Well, as far as I can see, we just keep interviewing. I want you to find out if any of the door-to-door had a dark-coloured Orion car. One was reported seen on the waste ground last night.’

  Spencer looked at the ceiling.

  ‘Look, ma’am, the man who reported that was not exactly a reliable witness . . . know what I mean . . .’

  Kate chewed the inside of her mouth for a few seconds before answering.

  ‘I am well aware that the man is a tinker, a pike, a gypo - whatever you want to call him, Spencer. I am also aware that they are camped not five hundred yards from the waste ground itself. Whether the man was drugged, drunk or both is not the issue here, Spencer. I want every lead followed up. And you can tell Willis that I’ll be down to interview Fred Barkis myself in about . . .’ she glanced at her watch . . . ‘fifteen minutes, OK?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Spencer failed to keep the irritation out of his voice.

  Kate studied the file in front of her. Fred Barkis was a known flasher. He had also acquired a dark green Mark One Cortina, and a dark car had been reported by three different people cruising around by Vauxhall Drive on the night that Geraldine O’Leary died.

  Kate stared at the wall opposite her and tapped her pen on her chin. Fred Barkis was harmless, she would lay money on it. For a start he was not violent-natured. All her years of policing had proved to her that the most mild-mannered men could be animals beneath the skin, but by the same token she had also learnt that ninety-five per cent of policing was working from hunches. And she had a hunch that Fred Barkis was not the man they were after. Still, he had to be eliminated.

  That was the trouble with Spencer and his ilk, she had seen it so many times: get a suspect and dress up the evidence to suit yourself. Well, she had never worked like that and she was not going to start now. How many times had she seen witnesses’ statements that had been doctored? Too many. She could understand that at times the job could be stressful - like now, when they had one woman dead and another fighting for her life and literally nothing to go on - but that did not excuse using a ‘live one’, as a pressured suspect was called. Barkis fit the bill, but in reality they could not tie him in to both cases and they now knew from the DNA samples that they were looking for one man. Anyway, Barkis had given samples of blood, urine and semen without a murmur. No, he was not their man, he was a common or garden sex pest which was a far cry from a fully fledged sex murderer.

  The most annoying thing was that the local paper had nicknamed the rapist the ‘Grantley Ripper’. Whoever he was, he was local, Kate was sure of that, very sure; and she was also sure that when he read his ‘nickname’ he would feel pleased. The criminal psychologist had already begun his profile of the man
, and certain things shone through. He was a misogynist. He also had a job or a home life that allowed him free rein to roam the streets.

  The misogynist part of it Kate had already worked out for herself; the ferocity of the attacks had told her as much. There seemed to be no motive of any kind; there rarely was in such cases. He was a sick man.

  What they had to try and find out now was something that tied the two attacks together in some way. Kate frowned. Could he have a job that had brought him into contact with the two women? But one worked in a wine bar and one in a beauty salon. No matter how hard she thought she could not tie them together.

  Even as all the evidence was being collated, there was nothing. Not one single thing that gave even a hint of who or what the murderer was. He had worn gloves on both occasions. The fibres from the body of Geraldine O’Leary had belonged to a family of wool that was used in literally hundreds of thousands of jumpers, coats, and other garments.

  Kate felt the steel band of a headache tighten over her eyes and rubbed them with her finger and thumb, pressing on the closed lids as if the action would conjure up something she or one of the other officers had missed.

  Finally she stood up and made her way to the interview room. Alongside the photos of Geraldine O’Leary there were now two more. In one Mandy Kelly was smiling, long blond hair framing her tiny heart-shaped face. In the other she was lying in a hospital bed, her lovely hair shaved from her head. Deep gouges showed up in burgundy and black where her skull had been smashed. Both eyes were swollen and her nose was broken beyond recognition. Kate sighed. All around her the incident room was a hive of activity. Amanda Dawkins had tapped into the DVLC’s computer and was finding out the name and address of every person in Grantley and the surrounding areas who owned either a dark green saloon car or a dark blue Orion.

  The tapping of the typewriters and the constant buzz of voices in the smoke-filled room had not given Kate the headache, it was the stress of this case.

  Picking up a file from Amanda’s desk, she walked from the room.

  Patrick Kelly lit a Dunhill cigarette with his gold lighter and exhaled noisily. By the time he had showered and changed, six men had arrived at his house. Now they were sitting in his morning room, uneasily awaiting their orders.