by Dane Cobain
Chapter Seven:
The Visitor
CHOLMONDELEY AND MOGFORD offered Leipfold a lift back to the office once the scene had been secured, but he refused, not wanting to leave Camilla behind. Mogford was keen to start processing the corridor, but Cholmondeley had insisted on alerting the other teams, and it was out of their hands almost as quickly as he finished the call. Only the crime scene investigators were allowed on site, and Cholmondeley was promised an informal report within the next ninety minutes. He used the respite as an opportunity to talk to James Leipfold.
The conversation was tense and to the point. Mogford kept looking at his watch and hinting that they ought to return to the station and update the rest of the team, but both Jack Cholmondeley and James Leipfold just ignored him.
“Remember to track down the people who posted the photographs,” Cholmondeley said. “I’ll need some answers when I’m asked why we were first on the scene.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Leipfold said.
“You do that,” Cholmondeley replied. “And James…” He paused for a moment, laying a hand on Leipfold’s arm to stop him before he walked over to Camilla. “Look after yourself,” he said. “Okay? I’m worried. This isn’t your average murderer. This is something different.”
“A serial killer?” Leipfold suggested.
Cholmondeley shushed him and looked around nervously before wrapping an arm around his shoulders and leaning in a little closer. “It’s possible,” he said. “I hope I’m wrong, but it seems like the most likely option.”
“I agree,” Leipfold said. “Forget about the victim being male. The attack pattern looks the same, at least at first glance. You’re going to want to get your autopsy team to fast track the results on this one. If the slash patterns match, you could confirm if the same blade was used.”
“Believe it or not,” Cholmondeley said, “I do this for a living. I’ve got this. Just keep your nose clean and hold up your end of the bargain. I need those names.”
“I’ll do my best,” Leipfold said.
“And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this,” he added, “but keep your mouth shut. Officially, you’re not on the case. Security’s going to be tight.”
“Even tighter now,” Mogford supplied. “Once the press gets hold of this, and they will if it’s out there on the internet, the shit will hit the fan.”
“Mogford’s right,” Cholmondeley said. “You need to keep the details under wraps. We all do. Information is like a license to print money to those vultures at The Tribune. Don’t feed them so much as a scrap. The last thing we want is to cause panic.”
“Agreed,” Leipfold said. “Although…”
“What?” Mogford asked.
“The press,” Leipfold murmured. “They can be a useful tool when you need them.”
Then he winked at them and walked over to Camilla.
* * *
That evening, back at the office, Leipfold was replaying the crime scenes over and over in his head. His memory was damn near eidetic, but it could always use a helping hand. Cholmondeley had sent him a couple of photos from each of the scenes and they helped to bring the blood to life. It was so real he could almost smell it.
Leipfold turned the radio on and tuned into a late-night talk show, but he wasn’t paying any attention. He needed the voices for company so that he didn’t lose his mind in the night. There was no question of him heading home. Leipfold lived in a little bedsit apartment that could barely contain him. He went there to sleep, and he occasionally tried to cook a meal in the communal kitchen, but it was no place to work from and even less of a place to get away from things.
He rooted through his desk until he reached the bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer. He took it out and looked at it, then poured a generous shot from it into a grim-looking cardboard cup, which he’d been refilling with coffee for the last two days to avoid washing up. He held the cup to his mouth and inhaled deeply through his nostrils, savouring both the tang of the alcohol and the specific, smoky smell that still crept into his dreams from time to time.
But Leipfold didn’t drink anymore, not since the accident. He just liked to savour the smell. Maile had asked him about it once, and he’d told her, “Eighty percent of what we taste is derived from our sense of smell. That’s why vegetarians sometimes like the smell of meat and why ex-smokers struggle to keep their shit together if someone sparks one up beside them.”
Leipfold sighed and poured the whiskey out of the cup and back into the bottle. He put the bottle in the drawer and locked it, then nipped out to the off-license on the corner. He was back in eight minutes—a respectable time, but still as long as it took him to finish a crossword—with a bagful of non-alcoholic lager. It was a vice, and he knew it. He set himself a reminder to take the cans out before the morning and to tidy the place up so that Maile didn’t know he was sleeping there.
Then he popped one of the cans and took a long, deep chug from it. He had another and another, followed by a third and then a fourth. He’d bought six of the things from the corner shop, but he found himself nipping out to get six more before they closed for the night.
“It’s psychological,” he murmured as he cracked open his fifth and started to swig from it. He took an A3 sketch pad and attached it to a wooden easel, then started hunting around for his marker pens. “Purely psychological.”
He’d been telling himself the same thing for the last four years. Mrs. Bachman, the woman who ran the weekly meetings, told him that if you replaced one fix with another, you were still an addict. But then, she’d hardly touched a drop in her life, even after losing her husband to the bottle and becoming a widow nine days before her fortieth birthday. Leipfold didn’t trust her. If he’d replaced a crippled life behind the bottle with the occasional binge on non-alcoholic lager, he didn’t see the issue.
Besides, Leipfold had a problem to solve. He had to find a serial killer in a city of nine million people with just his wits, his markers and a computer-literate assistant who carried pepper spray and wore too much eyeliner.
He had his work cut out for him.
* * *
Leipfold worked flat out until 6:28AM, then fell asleep at his desk with a marker pen in his hand. He woke up a couple of hours later with a big, black smudge on his forehead and his saliva forming little pools in the bottom of his keyboard. He lifted up his head, warily at first but with growing confidence, then nipped to the bathroom to freshen himself up.
Maile was already at her desk when he returned.
“Put the kettle on,” Leipfold said. His voice shook a little and he needed to cough a couple times, but he didn’t sound like a man who’d barely slept the night before.
“Check your desk, boss,” she replied, so Leipfold did. He found a plain, brown bag, propped up against his monitor. He opened it up and pulled out a breakfast bagel with ham and cheese, as well as a posh packet of crisps, two napkins, an unnecessary spork and a cup of coffee in a cardboard cup, which looked like it had started to leak. A little grease had leaked through the bag and onto the screen. Leipfold attacked it with the napkin, then removed the coffee and the bagel and threw the bag into the bin. He unwrapped the bagel, took a deep, satisfying bite from it and started chewing. He smiled.
“God, you’re good,” he said. He took another couple of bites and then looked up, arched an eyebrow and asked, “What are you after?”
“Nothing,” Maile protested.
“A likely story,” Leipfold replied. Maile worked in silence while he finished the bagel and swilled some coffee around his mouth. He sighed and sat back, letting his stomach relax. It had felt like a rubber band with a knot in it since a quarter to ten the night before. Medication hadn’t worked, but the bagel did.
Leipfold stared at Maile for a couple of seconds as she bashed away at her keyboard. He drummed his fingers absentmindedly and then
looked up at the gibberish he’d created. A couple of the keys were sticking together, and the jumble of words was interspersed with random characters and, for some reason, the number three. He tested it out, trying to type a Shakespeare quote he’d been forced to memorise in secondary school, but no dice. His keyboard was on the fritz, and he doubted the warranty covered accidental drooling.
“Hmm,” he murmured. “Bloody technology.”
Maile laughed and Leipfold turned to look at her. “Seriously,” he said. “You’re after something.”
She smiled without looking away from her monitor, tapped out the rest of her sentence and then saved the blog post she was working on about the benefits of hiring a private detective. She turned to look at Leipfold.
“You’re right, I am. I want to leave early again. Not that early,” she continued. “Relax. Let me leave at five and make the time up tomorrow if I have to.”
“Fine,” he said. “Take it. But first, I want to know where you’re going. What if I need to get hold of you?”
“You can use my mobile,” she said. “I’m not going to flee the country, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking,” Leipfold said. “And I’m not worried that you can’t look after yourself, either.”
“Good. You’re not my father.”
“Or your mother,” Leipfold said. “Truth is, it doesn’t hurt to get a second point of view. Some of your contributions to the business…well, I don’t know how I’d cope without you.”
“You’d cope,” Maile said. “You’d find a way.”
“Probably,” Leipfold replied. “But it wouldn’t be as much fun. Look, I just want to be able to get hold of you if I need you.”
“I’ll have my phone,” Maile said. “Just text me in case I can’t answer it. I’m going on a date.”
“A date?” Leipfold repeated, thoughtfully. He summoned up everything he knew about her, from her eclectic taste in music to her English inner-city tan, the makeup she wore, the books she read and the shows she watched. Underneath the freak show, she was a good-looking girl. But she was also Maile O’Hara. “Doesn’t sound like you,” he said, at last.
“It doesn’t,” Maile agreed. “And let’s keep it that way. I hate talking about stuff like that. It doesn’t suit me.”
“Fine,” Leipfold said. “Want to talk about work?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” he said. “Do me a favour, Maile. Nip out to the shops for me. I need a new keyboard for my computer.”
* * *
Maile headed straight back to the office after grabbing Leipfold a keyboard from the closest computer shop, but she didn’t stay there for long. She’d already picked up a lead on her mobile, and it was telling her to hop on the 170 bus from Victoria and to ride it all of the way south to Roehampton, a little shitheap of a suburb that looked like what Putney might have looked like if the Germans had won the second world war.
It took over an hour to get there. She fell asleep in Hammersmith and woke up in Roehampton at the end of the line when the dour-faced driver nudged her with his foot and told her he needed to leave so he could lock up and smoke a cigarette. She climbed to her feet, disoriented, then disembarked the bus and checked the maps on her phone to find out where she needed to go. She was looking for a place called Hersham Close where a swell of terraced housing overlooked a basketball court with no hoops in it. When Maile arrived, she saw five kids smoking weed outside the entrance. They heckled her as she walked past, but she flipped them the finger and walked on, her right hand gripping the pepper spray in her handbag.
@LukasWh1te, the person she wanted to speak to, lived at number ninety-three. As far as the internet was concerned, his father was a ghost, and the only information she’d been able to dig up on his mother—who sounded like a mean-spirited, evil bitch queen—had come from @LukasWh1te’s alias, @SnekBoi14.
It was the mother who answered the door, a raven-haired woman who could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty depending upon how many cigarettes she smoked. Maile told her who she was and what she wanted, and the woman turned around and shouted “Luke!” over her shoulder. “There’s someone at the door.”
Maile waited for the woman to either invite her inside or to slam the door in her face, which was what she was used to after four months of working with Leipfold. But Michelle White just folded her muscular arms, glared at Maile and waited.
Then her son came to the door. After swapping a few words with his mother, he took her place and adopted her posture. Maile didn’t like the look in his eye, the half-stoned lazy eye that teenage boys used to look at teenage girls or fuckable moms with their 32DDs.
Lukas White looked like a male, albino Maile. His paper-white hair was more Donald Trump than Draco Malfoy, and more Boris Johnson than either. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old.
He was a thin, scrawny kid with a cheeky smile and a debatable taste in fashion. Maile detected a hint of aftershave, probably stolen from his father or his grandfather. He grinned, nervously.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
Maile smiled right back at him, hoping the cut of her dress and a glimpse of her pearly whites would be enough to bring him on to her side. “Perhaps you can,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about something that you posted online the other night.”
“Oh, that,” Lukas said, cringing a little and checking over his shoulder to see if his mother was still there. “That was a joke, that’s all. I’m not actually going to kill him.”
“Huh,” Maile murmured. She looked him up and down again. “I think we got our wires crossed.”
Lukas White looked balefully across at her and said, “I think you’d better come in.”
Mrs. White kept an immaculate house, and Maile felt a little jealous of Lukas when he led her into the living room, through the kitchen and into a small conservatory overlooking a well-kept back garden where he said they were less likely to be interrupted. Maile had grown up in a cramped council flat, and the White house, while not quite presidential, certainly had an air of comfort and cosiness. It was nicer than the place she’d grown up in, and it was also nicer than the place she shared with Kat, although admittedly with a longer commute into the centre of the city.
Lukas waited for her to sink into one of the wicker sofas, then shouted something at his mother before locking the door to the conservatory and sitting opposite her in an armchair.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I’m not always nice on the internet. I thought you were here about something else.”
“Man,” Maile said, “you’re way too young for this shit. What did you do?”
“I got fragged,” he explained. “By some rookie called Mailstrom13 who had a lucky shot and got cocky. So I tracked down her profile and told her I knew where she lived. Said I was going to find her and kill her for real.”
Maile laughed. “That’s it?” she asked.
“That’s it.”
She laughed again. “Yeah, no,” she said. “That’s not what I’m here for. Listen closely, kid. Did you post a photo of a body? More specifically, the body of a black guy with blood all over him? A body in the lobby of the YMCA?”
“Oh shit,” Lukas said. “You mean that. Yeah, you got me. That was me.”
“I thought so,” Maile replied. “Okay, next question. Where did you get the photo? Did you take it? And why did you post it?”
“That’s three questions,” Lukas said. He smiled thinly and ran a pale hand through his hair. “But what the hell? I didn’t take it. I’ve never even been to the place.”
“So how did you get hold of the photo?”
“Some weirdo sent it to me,” Lukas replied. “The guy stopped me on the street and gave me twenty pounds to post it.”
“How did he send it to you?”
“He attached it to an emai
l,” the kid said. “But don’t waste your time trying to track it down. He sent it through some proxy in the Netherlands. I already looked into it. The whole thing seemed off somehow. I got curious.”
“And yet you still did as he asked,” Maile said. The kid nodded his head, so slowly that it looked like he was afraid it might fall off. “Interesting. What did he look like?”
Lukas White exhaled slowly. “That’s a tough one,” he said. “I mean, it’s hard to say. I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“You talked to him long enough to give him your email address,” Maile reminded him.
“Yeah,” Lukas replied. “And I didn’t look at him. He was definitely a guy, though. Maybe in his thirties or early forties. He had a black suit on with a white shirt.”
“Was he wearing a tie?”
“No,” Lukas said. “Does it matter?”
“No,” Maile replied. “What else can you tell me?”
“Not much,” Lukas admitted. “Just that he was forgettable. Average height, average build, that sort of thing.”
Maile paused for a moment and then smiled as an idea hit her like a self-driving car with a manual override. “You got a tablet?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Why?”
“Bring it here,” Maile said. “We’re going to need it. I’ve got an idea.”
Chapter Eight:
The Cassette Tape
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING DAY, and Maile and Leipfold were back in the office. They’d already finished off the crossword. Leipfold swore that Alan Phelps, The Tribune’s compiler, was losing his touch. And with nothing more pressing to keep them busy, it didn’t take long for the conversation to turn towards the investigation.
“This is the first proper break we’ve had since we cracked the Thompson case,” Maile said.
“Yeah,” Leipfold agreed. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. We could always use more work. More money would be even better.”