The Death of Jessica Ripley

by Andrew Barrett

  Jess caught herself smiling. Anger tapped on the floor, and asked her what the fuck she was doing. Had she forgotten why she was here, had she forgotten the missing years, the pain, the tears? You don’t give an animal a name when you know you have to kill it.

  “It’s a beautiful house. What do you do for a living?” she asked, eyes on the knife block by the sink.

  Anger smacked its forehead with a sweating palm.

  “Oh, I don’t, any more. These days I enjoy getting up late, and doing as little as possible. I intend to enjoy my remaining time. You never know when you’ll take your final breath.”

  You are fucking kidding! Is he doing this on purpose?

  “I used to be a Home Office pathologist. Did it all my life, right from university. I suppose that’s made me quite pragmatic.” He shuffled to the kettle, groaning, “Tea? Or coffee, perhaps? I make a splendid Americano.”

  I can’t do this. I can’t. “No, thanks. I’m okay.”

  He checked his watch. “I have pizza coming soon.” He smiled at her. “You’re more than welcome to share it with me; I like to indulge in a meal with a film. I’d be grateful of the company.”

  Was it a ruse?

  Pizza will be here soon? Jesus, he knows! “I already ate, but thanks. You must have seen some horrific sights in your time.”

  “Came with the territory.”

  “Shootings? Stabbings?”

  “Oh, yes; with a certain inevitability. Several a month. Fascinating, though.” He grinned. “If you like that kind of thing. It’s not for everyone.”

  “So can you tell, say, what angle a knife goes into a body?”

  He paused for a second before answering. “Indeed you can. When I had a homicide, I’d work quite closely with the Crime Investigator people, and the police. We used…” he clicked his fingers, trying to remember the term “…trajectory rods to determine angles of penetration. And then they’d photograph them in the three axes. It’s quite interesting, really.” He shut the tap off and put the kettle on its base.

  “Fascinating. So I guess that means you could determine if a stabbing was murder, or if it was self-inflicted?”

  He turned the kettle on. “Well, yes, if…” He stopped, seemed to reappraise her, to see her anew. Eventually, he smiled at her, cocked his head slightly to the left, and then rested a shrivelled hand on the granite worktop to steady himself.

  Jessica’s heart kicked, and Anger slapped her in the face. She smiled back, eyes sharp, ready.

  “Is this to be my last evening?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  She bit her bottom lip and pulled a pair of clear plastic gloves from her jeans pocket.

  “I mean, I don’t want it to be.” He winked, hoping to provoke a smile. None came. “Is there anything I can do to… I really would do anything. Just to die a natural death,” he said. “Not keen on the thought of a forensic post mortem. If you see what I mean.”

  Jess looked at him. She shook her head.

  He held onto the worktop tighter. “Ah well,” he whispered, watching her thread her hands inside the gloves. “The phone thing… it was just a ruse?”

  She nodded.

  He nodded in reply. “You certainly got me. I thought my luck had changed,” he said. “At least I’ll get to see my wife again. She’ll be nagging me again in no time.” His eyes watered. “I thought I recognised you. You stood just like that in the box at Leeds Crown if I remember correctly. Proud. Straight. How long has it been?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “Twelve years,” he echoed, lost in thought.

  She walked to the back counter by the sink and pulled out a knife. “It’s time.”

  “Yes, of course.” His voice cracked slightly, but he held his composure. “Don’t suppose I have a last request?”

  Jessica took a long breath in. She’d named the fucking puppy, and now it was looking at her with those eyes, whimpering. “What is it?” Her mouth was dry, but her hands were clammy inside the gloves.

  “I’d rather like a glass of whisky. And if I might, just a few puffs on a Cuban? Mildred would never let me smoke in the house, and I more or less let go of the habit. But I still have a box of them; beautiful aroma. If I might?”

  Jessica nodded, stood aside to let him through, and then said, “Why did you lie?”

  He paused and rested against the worktop again. “I didn’t lie. I was sure. The trajectory rods were in a position where the wound might have been self-inflicted, but he could also have been stabbed if the offender was at his right side, the arc of the… Well, we considered the options, and on the basis of what we knew, we decided it was more likely that he had been stabbed.”

  “You were sure?”

  He nodded, paused. “Yes. Fairly.”

  “Fairly? You jailed me because you were ‘fairly sure’?”

  “My dear—”

  “You’ve got a good memory.”

  He nodded again. “Your case stood out. We believed the account you gave the police – but at the same time… I thought you’d stabbed him. Conundrum. You don’t forget those easily.”

  “We?”

  “The SIO and myself.”

  “SIO?”

  “Senior Investigating Officer.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Who?”

  Bolton sighed. “It hardly matters now, does it, dear?”

  She took a step forward. “Quick or slow?” She blinked. “It matters to me, so I’ll make it matter to you.”

  He licked his lips, eyes fixed on the blade, hands trembling. “Detective Superintendent Masters.”

  “Your decision cost me twelve years. Cost me my son. Ruined my life.”

  He looked away, nodding slowly. “I understand that. Though it won’t help now, you have my sincere apologies. Despite your intentions, and if you can find it within yourself, I would ask that you forgive me.”

  Sweat ran down her back, and her chest felt tight, as though the air had become considerably thinner, but she kept her focus, remembered Michael screaming, remembered Michael telling her to fuck off. “Go get your cigar,” she whispered.

  His face was full of regret as he stepped forward.

  The blade sank into his chest with almost no resistance, stopped only when her fist collided with the fabric of his shirt. Face to face with him, much too close, she saw the shock in his old blue eyes, saw the pain in his twisted face, felt his body stiffen against her, and smelled the hot blood rushing across her gloved hand to drip onto the floor, pattering like the seconds from the grandmother clock.

  He watched her; and then he slowly took his hand from the worktop and sank to the floor on his knees. He fell backwards, his head hitting the marble with a crack.

  Jessica breathed hard as bile rose in her throat, set her chest on fire, and turned her legs so weak that she staggered backwards and fell on her backside. She almost threw up, but turned away from the body, taking long slow breaths until the room settled down.

  The colours were bright and the lights blinding, and her heart beat loud in her ears. She concentrated on one of the pleasant LED lights in the floor, marvelling as its light picked out an old dribble of coffee or tea down the immaculate drawers beneath the steaming kettle.

  Nothing is as perfect as it first appears. Another lie.

  A hot belch came out and Jessica almost passed out, but she watched the light, watched the dribble, and she came back at last. And when she did, her fury was vile.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The old man had been complicit in ruining her life and the lives of the people she loved. Him and the other arseholes. They were supposed to be professional; they were supposed to be above cockups of this magnitude. Their public image was golden, their ability unquestionable, and their honour beyond reproach.

  But it was all a fucking lie.

  Everything about the establishment and the people who made it up was a falsehood. They weren’t infallible at all. T
here was no overlord of unimpeachable sense – it was all so flawed and imperfect. It was too human, too easily corruptible; subjective, ad hoc. There was no safety net.

  She stared at him.

  Inside, her anger – not only at what he and his colleagues had done to her all those years ago, but at what they’d turned her into now – grew so hot and so fast that it blinded her. But not so much that she couldn’t see what else they and the grievous error had caused, what it had created.

  Their apathy had turned her into a murderer.

  And it wasn’t as though killing them one by one would incrementally return her old life in pristine condition, to be lived again a second time as it should have been lived the first.

  Ironically, his death made no difference. At all.

  And yet it did.

  If this was it – if this was the way things actually were now, and she couldn’t reclaim her old life – then this was how it had to be. She had to make sure that they weren’t a part of it. She had to be free of them if she were to live from this day on without forever pulling her hair out over the past she’d been denied. She swallowed, content that she was making progress at last.

  She had worn gloves, but already blood was running up the cuff, beneath the latex, working its way deeper along the fissures in her skin, spreading. She held out her hand, the one still holding the knife, and it shook badly. The blade quivered in the overhead lights and she could see the smear of red caught in its teeth. Across her right hand, up her wrist and coating her dark blue sweater was a gauntlet of deep red. Beneath her arm hung a quivering curtain of it that dripped onto her jeans and onto the floor. She could feel it cooling quickly until it became uncomfortable, until she could no longer bear it on her skin.

  And although her head wasn’t swimming any more, her breathing was fast, almost hyperventilating, and her vision was still colour-saturated with a grey vignette around the edges. Jess felt far from normal.

  She dropped the knife, reached up and swiped a tea towel from an orderly stack on a shelf. She scraped the blood from her arm and her gloved hand, scrubbed it from her jeans, and watched it smear into the fabric. For a moment or two, she concentrated not on the blood, not on the body lying a couple of yards away, but on her breathing. She closed her eyes and tried to make a grab for calm, tried to pull it towards her and bring herself and her tripping heart back to safety.

  And it worked; her eyes slid open again, and Jessica Ripley began the long walk back to a normality that had been torn from her more than a decade ago.

  She stood on legs that still trembled, bent again to retrieve the knife and tea towel and looked around to make sure—

  The doorbell chimed and Jess nearly fainted.

  Instead she dropped down just in case whoever was at the front door could see along the hallway and into the kitchen. She’d only been able to see the top of the old man’s head as he approached the door, but a taller person might see more.

  Standing at the end of the breakfast island, she scanned the kitchen, saw a doorway to her left and scooted towards it. She found herself in a large dining room with an eight-seater oval table in rosewood, complete with candelabra centrepiece. A pair of sideboards adorned with figurines along the right-hand wall, and in between them a heated food trolley. All this, she thought, and he orders a fucking pizza?

  The mantelpiece over the dark fireplace to her left bulged with more figurines and a silver clock the size of a head stood silently at its centre. Paintings covered ninety percent of the walls. It was like stepping back into Victorian England.

  Beyond the dining room, an open door led into the dimly lit lounge; an enormous wall-mounted TV was paused on a woman’s face halfway through a blink. Jess crept through the lounge and peered through the slightly open door to her right, out into the hallway. She couldn’t see the front door from here, so she crept past Bolton’s wingback chair, with its array of remote controls, tiny side table with teacup and saucer, footstool in front, and walking sticks to the rear.

  She crept closer to the doorway and flattened herself against the wall, listening. The doorbell rang again, and her heart pinged in her hollow chest.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Only a few moments passed before they knocked again.

  She breathed out. It must be the pizza.

  All this for a stuffed crust.

  She held her breath again as the front door opened and someone called.

  “Mr Bolton?”

  Oh, fuck off. Put it down to a no-show, and eat it yourself!

  “Mr Bolton? It’s Rasine from Mikka’s Pizza and Kebab.” It was a thick, heavy accent loaded with back-of-the-throat consonants; Polish or Slovakian. Jess closed her eyes, dug her nails into the wallpaper, as the woman entered the hallway.

  In her mind’s eye, Jess saw the woman treading carefully; afraid of being labelled an intruder yet genuinely worried, perhaps, for one of her regular customers who seemed to be behaving oddly. She imagined her placing the pizza on the hallway table, imagined her taking more steps towards the lounge door – the one Jess cringed by. She held the knife aloft. Ready.

  “Mr Bolton?”

  Jess stiffened as a hand floated into the room and fingertips landed on the door, ready to push it all the way open. But the hand stopped, and Jess heard Rasine gasp. The hand fell away and there were hurried footsteps along the hallway towards the kitchen.

  Jess pulled the door open and quickly tiptoed into the hall and through the open front door without looking back.

  As she ran down the driveway, she heard a scream from behind her.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, she walked along Stonegate Road as casually as she could. She’d expected that by now her heart rate would have returned to normal, but it was still hammering away inside a chest that felt too constricted for it; her hands and feet tingled with a fearful anticipation, her eyes were wide and she trembled.

  Up on her right was a pathway from Stonegate Road that led into a wooded parkland. She left the relative safety of the streetlights behind and tumbled into the obscurity of a soothing darkness. Moments later, the trees flickered with a vibrant blue light that died as quickly as it had arrived. Several other police vehicles sped past before she could get deep enough into the trees to hear no more.

  Even though there were no streetlights in here, it wasn’t completely dark; there was enough light to see by. Jess took herself off the track and stalked deeper into the woodland. Stopping by a large tree with a mass of black bushes beneath it, she buried the knife in the thicket, and then sank against the tree, sweating and shivering.

  Silently, she cried. And it wasn’t until she began to feel cold that she remembered that her jacket was hanging in Bolton’s kitchen. In its pocket was a knife from her own.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The further Eddie drove, the angrier he became.

  He wanted to have just one evening to see whether his inner self was correct: that he was dating Moneypenny because he was jealous of his old man, and not because he’d suddenly matured enough to participate in a grown-up relationship again. But the chance to see which of his options – which of his personalities – was correct was snatched away from him, like so much in his life, by his bastard job.

  And what angered him still further, the icing on the shit cake, was that Nicki Murphy was in the office when the call came through, and so she’d be working the scene with him. “Deep joy,” he mumbled. He was too angry to wonder for very long why she was there at that hour; probably sucking someone’s dick to make her promotion run smoother.

  As usual, it was fairly easy to identify the scene of the crime because there was no room to park. The house was on a junction: busy road to the front, and quiet lane to the side. The quiet lane looked like the police station car park, and so did the footpath.

  He dumped the Discovery half on the footpath at the front of the house, cut the lights and engine, and sat in silence for a minute, feeling the car sway as vehic
les sped by. His eyes quickly grew accustomed to the semi-darkness; the streetlamp beneath which he’d parked puked bile-coloured light in a tight circle that wasn’t so much a pool as a puddle.

  Eddie took a moment, lit a cigarette and pondered on what was to come. He pondered lots more besides, but the scene sat on top of the slush pile in his mind and shouted the loudest. Sitting at the bottom, growing stale now, growing mouldy too, was the old question: what the hell am I doing this job for? There must be something better for me, something that doesn’t involve evening work, weekend work… work.

  And then Benson slapped a hand on the window and Eddie jumped hard enough to bang his knees on the dashboard. “Bastard!” he screamed as Benson walked off, laughing.

  * * *

  Eddie sought out Nicki’s van and was surprised to see her still sitting inside it, in total darkness, the same way he’d been sitting moments ago. He wondered if she was also in deep contemplation of her future too, and the temptation to smack her window, as Benson had smacked his, was almost too much to resist.

  But he didn’t want to pull himself out of his bad mood by inflicting sore knees on someone else and laughing about it; he wanted the bad mood to continue. You knew where you were with a bad mood, but a good mood… well, that could cause no end of unforeseen things to happen – dating a woman you barely knew, for example.

  He shook his head, dismissing thoughts of Moneypenny, and tried to shove aside all that human stuff and just concentrate on the job before him.

  He opened the van door and Nicki jumped anyway. “What have we got?”

  She looked nervous. “Erm, dead guy in the kitchen.”

  Eddie waited.

  “I haven’t been inside, actually. I was waiting for you.”

  “So who has been inside? Who found him?”