Hope to Die: A gripping new serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series)

by David Jackson

  ‘I think that what DC Ferguson was trying to get at,’ says Cody, anxious to defuse the situation, ‘is whether Mary might have inadvertently upset someone. Even the nicest people in the world can sometimes irritate others.’

  Demidov drags his gaze from Ferguson and focuses it on Cody instead. His mood softens, and there is a glint of wetness in his eyes. ‘She make apples pies for me,’ he says, as though that’s all the eulogy she needs.

  *

  Cody obtains the phone number of the landlady from Demidov, then gives her a call. As she is currently entertaining a male friend, she is reluctant to bring the key over, but quickly changes her mind when Cody tells her not to worry, he’ll use his own key – a massive red one that will take the door off its hinges.

  He also calls in some CSIs, most of whom come directly from the cathedral. This isn’t a crime scene – at least as far as anyone is aware – but if the attack on Mary was planned, then there is the possibility that the murderer may have at some point been in this apartment. Cody wants to make sure they gather any forensic clues to identity that may have been deposited here.

  While the CSI team do their thing, Cody and Ferguson carry out some snooping of their own. Unlike Demidov’s flat, Mary Cowper’s place is spick and span to the point of obsession. In the kitchen there is not a spot of grease to be found, even on the oven. No plates or cups have been placed in the sink unwashed, or abandoned to dry on the rack. Grocery items in the cupboards are arranged neatly in categories rather than thrown in at random. It’s not so extreme as to be classed as OCD – it’s not as if the tins have all the labels facing outwards and sorted into alphabetical order – but Mary Cowper did like to be neat. Even the dog’s bed looks to have been recently vacuumed.

  It’s a similar story in the living room. No dog hair or coffee-mug stains or films of dust here, thank you very much.

  Cody is drawn immediately to the bookcase in one of the alcoves. He’s a bibliophile, and believes he can tell a lot about people from the contents of their bookcases.

  Mary Cowper was a woman after his own heart. She liked the classics – Dickens, Hardy, Brontë – but whereas Cody will admit to reading the occasional pulp thriller, there is no evidence of that here. Certainly nothing racy, either: not so much as a single Shade of Grey.

  On the lower shelves are her reference books. Some are concerned with the various world religions, although those on Christianity dominate. There are also tomes on history and art. Next to those is a stack of school notebooks, presumably waiting to be marked or returned to her pupils. Cody picks up the top one and flicks through its pages. Finds that the most recent essay is on the importance of religious leaders.

  Cody moves to the television stand in the other alcove, then crouches to study the row of DVDs. He finds Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Les Misérables, Fiddler on the Roof, and a number of recordings of ballet performances and other musical shows. Nothing from the Saw franchise, nor anything by Tarantino.

  There is only one book on the coffee table, its edges square with those of the wooden surface below it. It’s a copy of the Bible, big surprise. Cody picks it up in his latex-gloved hands, notices that it contains a bookmark. He flips the book open.

  Romans 1. Cody’s eyes scan quickly down the page. They alight on verse 18: ‘For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness.’

  Is that what happened? he wonders. An act of vengeance, in payment for some perceived ‘unrighteousness’ by Mary?

  Cody returns the Bible to its position, then resumes his search of the flat. On the bedside cabinet in Mary’s bedroom he finds another Bible, without a bookmark this time. A carved crucifix hangs above her bed. On the chest of drawers are two framed photographs. The first shows a woman – presumably Mary – accompanied by a small group of pupils at Oakdale School. In her hands is a large cheque (both physically and financially) made out to the Children in Need appeal. More evidence of her good works, thinks Cody.

  He spends some time staring at the image. It’s the first time he has seen what Mary looked like when alive – when her head wasn’t spread across an area of several square feet. He guesses this is a very recent photograph: the birth certificate in her desk drawer puts her age at forty-two, which looks about right here. She was fair-haired, with twinkling blue eyes and an attractive smile. He tries to remember whether he has ever seen that face in the area, but no occasions come to mind.

  He turns to the second photograph on the chest of drawers. He thinks at first that it shows a smiling Mary standing next to a similar-looking younger woman – similar enough to be her own daughter. But then he looks closer and realises that Mary is the daughter in the picture. She must have been in her early twenties when it was taken. The mother looks much older – at least sixty.

  Cody wonders why Mary hasn’t put on display a more recent photograph of the pair of them together. Did her mother pass away? If not, she would be in her eighties now. The news of her daughter’s tragic death could break her heart.

  He takes a step backwards to look again at the first photograph. Thinks to himself, Who are you, Mary Cowper?

  You are profoundly religious. You love animals. You give money to charity. You bake pies for your neighbour. You keep your home spotless. You attend church services regularly. You love your mother. You are well educated. You avoid trash in what you read and what you watch. You are in the noble profession of teaching.

  And yet the violence used to end your life spoke of hatred as pronounced as any I have ever encountered.

  Are you too good to be true, Mary?

  4

  Cody walks home. His car is still at the station on Stanley Road, but he decides there’s no point in going all the way over there just to drive it back again. He’ll get a taxi to work in the morning.

  The snow falls much more lightly now, but is still crisp underfoot. Rodney Street is eerily calm and still. Frozen in a past century. It is not hard to imagine this night as a Georgian Christmas Eve, or something straight from the pen of Dickens. To picture huge wreaths on each of these glossy doors. And, inside, wealthy parents drinking nightcaps as they joyfully fill their children’s stockings and prepare for the festivities and excesses of the following day.

  And then Cody gets to his own building, his own door. He stares at the brass knocker and sees it mutate into the angry, despairing face of Jacob Marley’s ghost. In Cody’s head the carol singing fades, and the mournful moaning starts up. And it’s with a heart as heavy as lead that he takes out his key and lets himself in.

  Inside, he listens to the whispers and the creaks and the tiny scrabbling noises of the building and its unseen inhabitants, and he wonders how much of it is real and how much is conjured up by his fevered brain.

  Because, yes, his mind isn’t as well as it should be. He’s got problems, and he accepts that. But there’s hope now. Light at the end of that long, sanity-constricting tunnel.

  He moves through the hallway. Past the doors to the dental reception area and the surgeries. They are closed now. Locked up tight. The doors keep hidden the instruments of torture, the memories of pain and decay. The smells linger, though. Those nauseating antiseptic odours that are always associated with places of healthcare.

  At the bottom of the stairs he pauses, as he often does. He considers going right to the end of the hallway, to that door behind the stairs. The door he fears most. It leads down to the cellar. It’s always locked at night, and he doesn’t know why it frightens him so much, but it does. Sometimes he stands with his ear against that door, listening for whatever might lurk on the other side. And sometimes he is convinced he hears things. Scratches and groans and possibly even murmurs. He tells himself that it is mice or the boiler or the wind finding its way through the grates. But he’s never fully convinced.

  Tonight he decides against that particular episode of self-amusement, and heads straight up the stairs. At the first turning he
glances out of the curtain-free window. The snow in the walled rear yard is pristine, untouched.

  Except . . . Are those footprints? There, leading towards the yard door. No. Can’t be. Just a trick of the light.

  On the first floor he passes more locked doors on to abandoned surgeries, then stops at his own. He finds his keys on the dimly lit landing, then unlocks the door with a clatter that reminds him of the chains shackling another of the ghosts that confronted Ebenezer Scrooge.

  ‘Bah, humbug,’ he mutters to himself, then smiles and pulls open the door, wincing as its hinges squeal in complaint.

  He locks the door behind him. Ascends another set of stairs to his flat on the top floor. Instantly he feels more relaxed. The world outside is closed off. He can be himself, with all the things both good and bad that it entails.

  It is late and he is exhausted and he needs sleep. But he also knows that sleep will elude him for a while yet. His mind is too occupied.

  For one thing, the current case has gripped the analytical centre of his brain and refuses to let go. The figure of Mary Cowper he has floating around in there seems a bit like Mary Poppins, drifting with the breeze as she clutches her umbrella. Was she really that goody-two-shoes? Or was there a much darker side to the woman, yet to be discovered?

  It occurs to Cody that well-meaning religious zeal is often only a stone’s throw from its flip side. Entering his living room, he walks over to one of several well-stocked bookcases there. He scans his own section of books with religious associations. Realises that they are so unlike Mary’s. Whereas hers are full of light and optimism and the joy of discovering God, his own are mostly questioning, damning, scornful and dark.

  He takes down his copy of Dante’s Inferno and flicks through its pages, wondering what Mary would have made of it. What would her reaction have been to the souls of the uncommitted, eternally stung by wasps while maggots and other foul insects drank the cocktail of their blood and tears? Or the gluttons, condemned to writhe for ever in vile icy sludge?

  Cody looks out of his window at the snow blowing past it. Thinks of it finding its way into the dark tunnel concealing Mary’s corpse. Thinks of her streams of blood flowing out of her tomb and melting the white carpet beyond into a pink slush.

  Were you gluttonous, Mary? Some other deadly sin, perhaps?

  He puts the book back into its position on his shelf. It’s a long time since he has read any of it, but one quote is not easily forgotten.

  Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

  The Anglican cathedral sits at one end of Hope Street. The street of hope.

  No hope for you, Mary. Not now.

  He flops onto his sofa. Tries to divert his mind to other things in an effort to relax.

  Megan Webley makes an entrance into his thoughts. It doesn’t help to calm him.

  They have worked one case together since she joined the team. One case. And yet they seemed to pack a lifetime of events into that short period. Didn’t help that they had prior history. They were an item many moons ago. Wasn’t easy to forget that, even though they have both forged other relationships since then.

  And tomorrow, Webley returns.

  That’s not going to be easy. Going to be bloody difficult, in fact.

  Why did it have to be Webley?

  And why did he have to go and tell her?

  He told her, see. About his problems. Not that she couldn’t grasp for herself what was happening to him. She turned up at the Major Incident Team just as he was entering his worst patch ever. She could see him disintegrating before her eyes.

  But still . . .

  Anyone else, and he wouldn’t have said a word. Only Devon, his ex-fiancée, knows how bad he’s been. He could have refused to say anything to Megan.

  But he told her. Told her all about the clowns who mutilated his body and fractured his mind.

  Not clowns as in bumbling fools, but clowns as in terrifying pasty-faced insanely grinning perpetrators of evil. Four of them, there were. A leader, whom Cody christened Waldo, and his three hench-clowns.

  He told Megan what they did to him, back in the day when he was an undercover cop and the operation went tits up. Told her how the clowns tied him to a chair and took off his shoes and socks and . . .

  Yes, say it, Cody. Think it. They used a pair of garden loppers to cut off the two smallest toes from each foot, didn’t they? You still feel the agony of it, don’t you? You still hear the crunch of your bones and your screams filling that warehouse.

  And you remember what happened next, don’t you? You told Megan about this, too. You told her about what the clowns did to your partner. You told her about how they turned on him next. About how they cut off his . . .

  Say it.

  SAY IT!

  His face! All right? They cut off his fucking face!

  Cody jumps up from the sofa. Wipes the beads of sweat from his brow.

  It comes upon him like this sometimes. Usually when he’s least expecting it. Or at night, when he’s desperately trying to succumb to the sweet unconsciousness of sleep.

  And that’s the real secret he told Megan. The facts of his torture and his partner’s death are a matter of record. DCI Blunt knows all about the events of that night.

  But the extra piece of information he revealed to Webley was how he is still living that nightmare. He still hears the screams, still sees the clown faces, still smells the tang of blood on the air.

  Sometimes it gets so bad that he simply snaps. He loses control. He lashes out. Webley has seen that side of him. She knows what he is going through.

  But things have been better recently. Much better. Sleep hasn’t been great, but he hasn’t had a meltdown on the job since working on that last case with Webley. There have been occasions when he has come close – looking at the crushed face of Mary Cowper tonight was the most recent – but each time he has managed to keep it together.

  He believes it’s partly because of his admission of his illness to Webley. Credit where it’s due. She acted as his sounding board, his amateur psychotherapist. He would never tell all this to a real shrink, of course. The force would never let him carry on doing the same job in his mental state.

  It felt good to tell Webley, though. A massive weight off his shoulders. He’s still not sure it was the right thing to do – it could still go horribly wrong – but for now he’s grateful for the part she has played in keeping his sanity intact.

  But it’s only a part.

  Something else happened. Something totally unexpected. He’s still not sure what it means, but he clings to it for support like a baby monkey to its mother.

  The phone call.

  He’s been getting mysterious calls for months now. Usually in the middle of the night. No caller ID. Not even a voice. Just silence.

  Sometimes Cody speaks to his unknown caller. Asks a question or makes a joke. Sometimes he spits foul-mouthed abuse down the line.

  And then came the one call that was different from all the others. A voice, yes, but it was Cody’s own voice. It was the sound of him screaming and pleading and crying as he and his partner were tortured on that day that has been for ever seared into his memory.

  Which means that somebody recorded the whole thing.

  Which suggests in turn that the anonymous caller was there at the time, or else knows the person who made the recording.

  The caller knows something. Knows a lot, probably. And now that fact is being revealed to Cody.

  Why?

  He has been asking himself this for the past two months. Why is the caller showing his hand in this way? What’s he trying to prove? And what was the deal with all the silent calls prior to that?

  Cody sometimes thinks he imagined it. Not the silent calls – he’s had enough of those to know they’re real. But he’s aware that his mind is perfectly capable of playing tricks on him. He’s had bitter experience of that. What if that last call was another figment of his imagination – another undigested bit
of beef, as Scrooge put it?

  He shakes his head, dismissing the notion. It was real, he tells himself. I heard it. I wouldn’t have made that up.

  He needs to hold on to that. When he had his heart-to-heart with Webley, he told her of his belief that the one thing capable of bringing his mental torment to an end would be the capture of the gang who tortured him. Only justice would bring him closure.

  He still believes that. And the phone call brought him hope. A suggestion that the circus was back in town, and therefore within reach of the long arm of Cody’s law.

  Problem is, he hasn’t had another weird call since then. Not even one filled with silence. He’s beginning to worry that there will be no more – that the screaming he was forced to hear was a parting shot.

  He can’t accept that. Snatching away his hope would be an unbearable addition to the suffering he has already endured.

  And then Cody remembers the quote again.

  Abandon all hope . . .

  *

  When it happens, it is as he is lying in bed, thinking about religion and its hold on people, and about how people delude themselves into believing that their prayers are answered even when they are not.

  It’s only later, when he finally realises this, that the irony strikes him hard.

  The phone rings.

  This is the middle of the night, when only one person ever calls him.

  Well, unless it’s an emergency call to action by one of his superiors on the force.

  It’ll be that, he tells himself. Another murder. Or a significant break in the current case. Something far more mundane than my sanity.

  In which case, why am I not answering it?

  Cody continues to stare at the phone on his bedside cabinet. Continues to tell himself that it’s a call to duty. As if he doesn’t want to build up his hopes, for fear of having them dashed.

  Finally he snatches up the phone. Sees that the caller ID is unavailable.

  His heart is suddenly banging on his ribcage. As if it’s saying, Answer the fucking phone!