‘What? What were you going to say?’
The sigh this time is heavier. More of a low moan.
‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now. She spoke about it openly anyway. She told everyone how being born again stopped her doing it.’
‘Stopped her doing what?’
‘She stole stuff,’ says Halligan. ‘She became a kleptomaniac. She was ill. She didn’t know what she was doing. But on her really dark days she would sometimes pick things up in a shop and walk out without paying. Often, she didn’t even remember doing it.’
Cody exchanges glances with Webley. A PNC check on Sue Halligan had not thrown up a criminal record.
‘Was she ever caught?’
‘A couple of times. She apologised, told them that she wasn’t well, and offered to pay. She got lucky, I suppose. They let her go.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘Me? I knew nothing about it. The things she pinched weren’t particularly expensive, so I had no reason to get suspicious. All this only came out afterwards.’
‘Afterwards?’
‘After she got all religious. She couldn’t shut up about it then. Kept going on about how she used to be lost, but then she was found. She was always talking about repentance and forgiveness and seeing the error of her ways. To be honest, it got a bit much sometimes. Like I said, she became a different woman then. But at least she was happy.’ His face creases in sorrow again. ‘I’d put up with any amount of preaching now if I could have her back.’
They allow him some time to pull himself together. Cody sees Webley pick up the folder in front of her, in preparation to move on to the next topic. But for some unidentifiable reason, he’s not ready to do that just yet. There is something in what Halligan has just told them – something that makes Cody want to follow this thread just a little more.
There are parallels here. Not with Mary Cowper – or at least not that he can see – but certainly with Cassie Harris. They were both committing wrongs. Both sinning, to put it in religious terms. And each of them turned to God for their salvation.
Is that important? Cody wonders. Or am I just making tenuous connections out of sheer desperation?
Says Webley, ‘If you’re okay, Mr Halligan, I’d like to ask you—’
Cody touches her arm. ‘Just a second.’ He turns to Halligan. ‘What you were saying about your wife’s kleptomania – did it simply stop when she found religion?’
Halligan stares at him as if the question was in a foreign tongue.
‘Mr Halligan?’
‘Yes,’ he answers finally. ‘Mostly.’
‘Mostly? But not completely?’
‘She had an occasional relapse. A couple of times – that’s all.’ Halligan suddenly finds his anger again. ‘Look, Sue wasn’t a bad person, okay? She had a few problems. The bad guy is the one who killed her, and he’s still out there, and you need—’
‘All right, Mr Halligan. Point taken.’
Cody lapses into silence then. Allows Webley to pick up where she left off. He’s not sure why he asked the last question, or what he can do with the information contained in the reply. He just knows it felt important to ask it.
Webley opens her folder. Takes out a couple of photographs. She places one in front of Halligan.
‘Do you recognise this man?’ she asks.
It’s a still frame from the video of the killer outside the Anglican cathedral. Halligan blinks away his tears and moves his face closer to the picture.
‘No. Why? Who is he?’
‘Here’s another picture,’ says Webley. This one at the Metropolitan cathedral.
‘I still don’t know who he is. Am I supposed to?’
Webley puts down a printout of the website displaying the killer’s coat.
‘What about this coat?’ she asks. ‘Look familiar?’
‘No. It’s just a coat. I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t own a coat like this, then?’
‘No. What are you getting at?’
‘Mr Halligan, can you account for your whereabouts last Saturday afternoon, from about three o’clock onwards?’
‘Last Saturday? I don’t know. I was . . . yeah, I was with Sue. We went to the cinema with a couple of friends.’
‘Which cinema?’
‘The Odeon, in town. We watched that new Spielberg film. Then we went to Jamie Oliver’s for a bite to eat.’
‘What about the Saturday before that?’
‘The week before? Christ, I don’t know. We . . . London! We were down in London for the weekend, staying with friends. Look, what’s this about?’
‘I’ll need you to give us the names of your friends from both weekends, if you don’t mind.’
‘Yes. I mean, no. I mean . . .’ Halligan looks at the photos again, then at Webley, then at Cody. Cody can almost hear the tumblers in Halligan’s brain clicking into place.
‘Oh, my God.’ He stabs a finger onto one of the photos. ‘This is him, isn’t it? The two killings at the cathedrals. This is him. And you think . . . you think . . .’
‘Mr Halligan,’ says Cody, ‘let’s not jump to conclusions here—’
‘But you do. You think the same man killed my Sue.’ He looks at the image again. Much harder this time, as though willing more detail to jump out of it. ‘This is him.’
Halligan’s mouth drops open, his jaw dragged down by the weight of grief. In his pain and misery, his questions are like the moans of the eternally damned: ‘Why is he doing this? Why pick on Sue? Why her? Why?’
Cody’s own mouth opens to reply, but no answers come, because he has none.
33
Sunday. Not a day of rest for Cody. In fact this is going to be one stinker of a day. He knows this. At some point today the shit will hit the fan. He will be asked a certain question, and he will give a certain answer, and that will be it. The explosion will be heard on the other side of the Mersey.
For now, he’s trying to keep his head low and his mind focused on work. He has spent most of the morning interviewing those who were present at the Born Again Christian meeting the previous evening. He’s already sick of it.
Nothing against the people concerned. They seem perfectly nice, and not at all suspicious. But, well, they will keep bringing God into the conversation. They will keep reminding Cody that higher powers than him will deal with those responsible. They will keep telling him that Sue Halligan is now at peace, as though the fact that her face was pummelled into something resembling raw steak is of no consequence.
He doesn’t know why, but he would prefer more normal reactions. He would prefer them to get angry, to blaspheme, to swear vengeance. He would understand that.
Maybe it’s me, he thinks. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood. And maybe that’s not just because I know what’s coming later, but also because I don’t know what the hell is going on in this case.
Three victims. All blonde, and of similar build, appearance and apparent age. All religious. All killed at a site of worship. All killed on a Saturday, at around the same time of day. All killed in the same brutal way.
Is that it? Are those the only links?
Well, what are you expecting, Cody? Isn’t that enough? Many serial killings are carried out completely at random, with no connecting glue whatsoever. You’ve got lots here.
Yes, but . . .
He thinks there should be more. Something he’s not seeing. The missing link. But at the same time, he doesn’t know why he feels that way. He’d call it intuition, but that just seems a bullshit way of confirming that he doesn’t know.
Right now he’s at his desk, studying the post-mortem report on Sue Halligan. Nothing illuminating here. Blunt-force trauma, just like the other two. Dispatched with a lump hammer or similar, just like the other two.
He reads on. The cold, clinical findings are all very well, but Cody finds himself more affected emotionally by the unrelated details, the things that turn lifeless corpses back into living
, breathing people with hopes and fears and aspirations. He wants to know what she was wearing, what she carried with her, what scars she had, what earlier illnesses she may have suffered from. All the things that made Sue Halligan real.
To Cody, the list of Sue’s possessions make particularly sad reading. They seem so trivial, and yet so revealing of the minutiae of her life. There is a used bus ticket here; a tube of lipstick that is almost empty; a till receipt from Asda (the Asda, he thinks); a small ornamental stone; a plasterer’s business card; a keyring with a plastic Winnie-the-Pooh attached; a tube of sugar-free mints; a watch with a broken strap . . . The list goes on and on. Junk to most people, and yet of importance enough to Sue Halligan for her to hang on to them. It says a lot about who she was, and how her mind worked.
And yet it tells Cody nothing about the man who killed her.
*
Grace Meade sits quietly in her appointed spot at the back of the room, biding her time. She isn’t as confident as the others here. She doesn’t like to push herself into the conversation, to try to bend the thinking of the others while they are in full flow and perhaps defensive of the arguments they are making. She prefers to wait until the waters calm, and only then will she rise up from the depths and shake their boats.
She watches Blunt carefully as she draws out and gathers together the data from her subjects. The woman is masterful at that. Sometimes she has to tease the information out; other times she has to poke its hoarder with the sharp end of her tongue to release it. She knows precisely when to challenge, when to encourage, when to dismiss. She has skills that Grace could never hope to possess – an intelligence that goes beyond the mere cerebral kind.
And now there is Sergeant Cody. Clever little Cody. That enigma of a man who is addressed almost invariably by his surname. Like Inspector Morse, but without the crosswords.
Cody is telling everyone about Adam Halligan. Telling them that his alibis for the Saturdays on which Mary Cowper and Cassie Harris were murdered have been found to be as watertight as a duck’s rectum. Telling them that, furthermore, there is no evidence to contradict his account of what happened on the evening of his wife’s demise. In short, Cody concludes, there is no reason to suspect any wrongdoing on Halligan’s part.
Which they all knew, of course. Nobody ever thought at any point that Halligan killed his wife, let alone the other two women. The detectives were going through the motions. Ticking boxes. Closing doors.
It brings them no closer to finding the killer.
And now Cody is saying more about Mrs Halligan. Interesting stuff, this. Stuff that makes Grace sit even more upright than usual. Surely he’s not . . .
But he is. He is telling them all now. About Sue Halligan’s kleptomania. And then about how her religious epiphany was her salvation. Or at least almost so.
Damn!
Grace can sense the wave of depression forming on her mental horizon. This was meant to be her news, her moment. Cody has stolen her thunder. She has no drum to bang, no fanfare to sound. The tightly stretched balloon of her contribution has been deflated to a flaccid irrelevance.
It’s not Cody’s fault. He’s just good at his job. He got to the truth by other means, and kudos to him for doing so.
But still . . .
Grace’s shoulders slump. She wants to quit work and go home. Nobody will notice anyway, she thinks.
Blunt thanks Cody. Opens it up to the floor for comments. She gets a few responses. Nothing especially insightful.
But then a question from one of the younger detectives: ‘The stuff about Mrs Halligan’s kleptomania. Okay, it shows she wasn’t Mother Teresa, but other than that, do we think it’s important? I mean, how would our killer have found out about it? I don’t think her husband would have been shouting it all over the town.’
Cody seems stuck for an answer. Time for Grace to throw her hat into the ring.
‘He probably wouldn’t,’ she says. ‘But his wife wasn’t particularly secretive about it.’
The heads turn. The eyes refocus. Her existence is registered once more.
‘Grace!’ says Blunt. ‘I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on all this.’
Nice try, thinks Grace. But a false compliment. You haven’t looked my way even once this morning, DCI Blunt. You had forgotten about me, as had all the others. But it’s okay. I’m easily forgotten.
‘She wrote a blog. Mrs Halligan, I mean.’
Grace presses a key. As the large monitor at the front of the incident room flickers into life, she notices Blunt’s expression of surprise, and realises she probably should have asked for permission to take control of the display.
Sod it, she thinks.
The screen fills with a blog page carrying the title ‘Finding My Way’, and below that, in a smaller typeface: ‘Jottings Along the Path to Salvation’.
Says Grace, ‘Two things about these posts. First of all, she’s very clear about where and when the meetings she attends take place. Anyone reading these would know exactly where to find her on a Saturday evening. The other thing is how candid she is about her life. If we jump back to one from a few weeks ago . . .’
Grace rotates the scroll wheel of her mouse. Pages of text fly past on the screen.
‘Here, for example. I’ll read out the relevant paragraphs.’
She clears her throat. Ups her volume as she reads: ‘ “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you here, because I don’t think it’s possible to be true to God unless you are true to yourself. I’m not a saint. Quite the opposite, in fact. I’ve done bad things in my time. To be more specific, I have stolen things. That’s right – I have taken things that didn’t belong to me. I have picked things up in a shop, then walked out without paying for them. And I have done that not just once, but many times.
‘ “I don’t tell you that because I’m proud of it. Actually, I believe I was quite ill at the time, and in a very dark place in my life. But I don’t want to make excuses for my actions, either. What I did was wrong. I see that now, but only because God chose to shine His light on the correct path for me. It hasn’t been easy. I still wobble now and again. I still fall prey to the demons that stalk me. But always God takes my hand and leads me back onto the path. He will do that for you, too, if you let Him.” ’
There are a few seconds of silence while everyone digests this.
Blunt says, ‘And this was a public post? Available to anyone to read?’
‘Yes. Like the newspaper article about Cassie Harris, anyone could have found out that she had committed criminal acts. And that bit about having a wobble now and again suggests she continued to do so even after becoming religious.’
‘Okay,’ says Blunt. ‘In that way, those two women were alike. But Mary Cowper still doesn’t fit that mould, does she? Not unless there’s something very big we’re missing. Something the killer could see but we can’t, despite all our digging.’
Blunt moves on to other things then, and Grace is left to feel she has just been dismissed. Cody’s revelations about the victim’s kleptomania removed the detonator from her bomb, so that instead of leaving a crater, she has barely disturbed the ground.
She sees only the backs of heads in the room now, as if their owners are sending her to Coventry.
She decides she needs to up her game if she is to get those heads to turn again.
And she has an idea as to how she might do that.
34
He bumps into Webley in the corridor. Nobody else around. An ideal moment for her to pose the question he’s been dreading all day.
And he knows it’s coming. He can see it on her face. She’s all smiley and bubbly and excited at seeing him. And so his stomach lurches.
‘Hiya!’ she says. She’s like a little kid. Happily innocent. Seems such a shame.
‘Hi, Megan,’ he answers. He tries to push the corners of his mouth up. An impersonation of a smile.
‘Hectic day,’ she says.
‘Mad.’
‘We’re still on for tonight, though, aren’t we?’
And there it is. The question. In a way it has helped him. If she hadn’t asked it, he would have needed to approach her. This has brought things to a head. Doesn’t help in the answering of it, though.
‘Tonight?’ he says. As if he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which is being rather cowardly, he thinks.
‘The meal. Sunday roast, with all the trimmings. Whatever trimmings are. I’ve never really understood why the veg and stuff are called trimmings, have you? Anyway, I’ve got them. In spades. Gravy, too, because I know how much you like your roasties swimming in gravy. Oh, and Yorkshire puds. Can’t have beef without Yorkshire puds, can you? And for dessert we’ve got— What’s the matter?’
‘About tonight,’ he says, and hates himself for the effect it has on Webley. He is stealing her joy. He can see it draining from her face.
‘What about it?’
‘You said it yourself. About how busy we are . . .’
‘Yes, we’re all busy, but, well, we’ve got to eat, haven’t we? We’re allowed to do that.’
‘I know, but . . . I’m really sorry, Megan. I’m not going to be able to make dinner tonight. Another time, maybe.’
‘I don’t understand. It was all fixed up. What’s changed?’
‘This case. The murders. I’m up to my eyes in it, and—’
‘Forget it,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to know.’ And then suddenly she’s pushing past him and marching down the hallway, and he’s left staring after her, and when he calls her name she refuses to respond, and when he starts to follow, her walk becomes a run. He chases after her, follows her trail of anger and disappointment, past staring coppers who should have better things to occupy their minds, and then he’s bursting through the exit, into the car park where there is cold fresh air and natural light and the sense that emotions can be set free.
‘Megan,’ he says again.
She has her back to him, her arms folded, hugging herself against the biting breeze. He can see clouds of her breath as she vents her frustration.
Hope to Die: A gripping new serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series) Page 20