A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  She got up from the dressing table, sat on the mattress and ran the flat of her hand over the surface of the cotton pillowslip where Annie’s head had once reclined and felt nothing hidden beneath. She turned the pillow over and caressed the back. As her palm crossed the pillowslip, Riley felt a rectangle of paper.

  Riley touched the edge of the rectangle and, pinching it as carefully as she could, pulled out a white envelope. She looked at the back of it, the seal carefully pressed down, a letter that had no doubt been another secret from her parents.

  In the hall downstairs, the landline rang out and when the receiver was picked up, fresh silence thickened the stony atmosphere.

  Riley turned the envelope over and read the name and address carefully printed on the front.

  MS ANNIE BOYD

  ST JEROME’S RC PRIMARY SCHOOL

  DINGLE STREET

  LIVERPOOL

  L8 3XX

  She explored the other information on the front of the envelope, saw the place of postage was Liverpool and the smudged date, 14.11.21.

  Riley felt the envelope and the contents were thicker than paper, stiffer, but thinner than card.

  Gathering all Annie’s bagged possessions together and leaving the bedroom, Riley was hit by the powerful notion that she was somehow leading a funeral procession, taking the young woman’s things away not for examination but as material offerings for the grave.

  She walked down the stairs into the blighted silence and paused at the living room door.

  ‘Mrs Boyd, I’m taking some of Annie’s belongings with me. When we’ve finished with them we will return them.’

  Mrs Boyd didn’t look up or appear to hear.

  Opening the front door as quietly as she could, Riley was stopped by Mrs Boyd’s voice.

  ‘What’s the point of bringing them back? Can you bring her back from the dead? Can you? She’s not coming back, is she?’

  ‘I’m sorry. No, I can’t,’ said Riley.

  She headed to the front door with the weight of Annie Boyd’s possessions in her hands and a wall of indescribable grief at her back.

  13

  Noon

  Norma Maguire wheeled herself towards the lift door outside her office on the first floor of her estate agency, pressed the call button and felt the mechanical action of the lift through the fabric of the building as it rose from the ground. As she waited, she looked at the inverted writing on the window – Maguire Holdings – and wondered if Fran had used her lift when there was only one flight of fourteen steps down to the ground floor.

  Wouldn’t it be better if you had your office on the ground floor?

  Over the years, she had been asked the same question in dozens of ways by as many people and had countered it with the same fudge.

  I prefer a room with a view.

  The truth was simple. She didn’t want to overhear people talking about her when they thought her back was turned, pitying the cripple in one breath, laughing at her funny little ways, then criticising the over-demanding but caring boss in the next.

  Norma looked at her blurred reflection in the silver surface of the lift door and was relieved that the image was unclear. She saw the darkness of her curly hair and her face as a pink blob, human but featureless. In the shape of the wheelchair, she saw the dark approximation of the blue trouser suit she wore for work.

  As the lift arrived, she pictured the row of trouser suits in her wardrobe at home.

  Monday to Friday, one suit, the same suit she always faced the world with; Saturday, suit to the dry cleaners, and then slacks and a jacket as she put in an appearance at the office until lunchtime; Sunday, jeans, a jumper and much solitude.

  The lift doors opened and she wheeled herself into the narrow space.

  Pressing ‘G’, she looked down at her legs and was grateful that her fleshy thighs were concealed by the fabric of her trousers.

  The doors closed and the short descent began in a confined wood-panelled space that reminded her of the interior of the coffin in which her mother had been laid to rest in their front room in the days between her sudden death and her funeral all those years ago.

  The lift sighed to a halt as it reached the ground floor, and the bell that accompanied the end of a short descent announced the arrival of the boss. Beyond the lift, in the open-plan office at the front of the building, there was some laughter in the chorus of animated voices.

  Good, she thought. Happy agents sell houses.

  She wheeled herself out of the lift and into the office at the front of the premises where five people were busily employed on telephones and at laptops, and Francesca Christie was engaged in a meeting with a young couple at her desk near the window.

  Norma smiled into the room.

  ‘Norma…’ Daniel Ball, the office manager, stood up at his desk. ‘I’ve just finished the sums. We’ve hit our target for November and we have more on top of it. Twenty per cent, to be precise.’

  She threw a smattering of applause into the room and gave a double thumbs up, making eye contact with everyone except Fran, whose back was turned to her. Pleasure pulsed through Norma as she looked at her employees and she felt a strong sense of belonging.

  You’re like family to me, she thought. The sons and daughters I never had. Immediately there was a counter voice inside her head. Family is pain, Norma.

  ‘Norma?’ Daniel Ball looked and sounded surprised. She quizzed him silently with a look. ‘You just said to me Go away, Norma!’

  She smiled. ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t aimed at you, Daniel. I was thinking out loud. Same as usual then. Pick an evening when you’re all free, decide where you want to go and as soon as we shut up shop, I’ll take you all for a meal. All on me of course. As per usual.’

  ‘Norma,’ said the office manager, pointing at Francesca Christie.

  She recalled that Fran had closed down a deal on a three-bedroom terraced house in Newcastle Road. ‘It’s largely been down to her,’ said the office manager, quietly.

  ‘Maybe so, but Fran doesn’t live or work in a vacuum.’

  Norma pointed to the notice she’d had specially made for the office.

  IT’S THE TEAM THAT MAKES THINGS HAPPEN

  ‘Thank you,’ she said as she wheeled herself to the automated doors at the front of her estate agency. ‘You’ve made my day. Again. Pass it on.’

  ‘Norma?’ She heard a well-meaning note in Daniel’s voice and guessed what was coming next. He stepped in front of her. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier, better for you if you had an electric wheelchair?’

  ‘Daniel, I know you’re only thinking of me, which is why I’m not going to get cross, but I do recall we had this conversation around twelve months ago. What did I tell you back then? Do you remember?’

  ‘You told me that your arms were fully functional and that you weren’t going to give up the right to use the part of yourself that wasn’t disabled.’

  She smiled at him and tapped her own head. ‘Nothing’s changed in the past year.’

  Norma lifted her hand from the wheel rims and raised her arms.

  ‘This is my independence.’

  ‘Point taken, Norma. I won’t mention it again. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. We’re doing just great.’

  She turned the wheel rims, the automatic doors opened and winter blasted in her face, making her scrunch her features.

  On the pavement, she moved past the glass facade of the trading floor of her business and looked between the photographs of houses for sale in her shop window. She looked directly at Fran, smiling and confident with the young couple on the other side of her desk.

  Francesca Christie stood up and, after handing over the keys of 102 Newcastle Road, shook hands with the couple.

  I didn’t mean to make you cry, Fran, thought Norma as she passed the fruit and vegetables on the pavement outside the greengrocer’s next door. I was trying to protect you. I was trying to warn you. There are predators out there, very bad men…

&nb
sp; Outside the hairdressers, next door but one, at the back of a black van half parked on the narrow kerb, two workmen stepped on to the pavement carrying a large mirror. They stopped in the middle of the pavement, a metre away from Norma, and she froze.

  ‘Don’t drop it, Gary, for fuck’s sake.’

  Norma saw herself reflected perfectly in the surface of the mirror; her limbs, her body, her face.

  She closed her eyes tightly, dropped her head and felt the onset of the kind of nausea she knew would inhabit her for hours and a sound in her head like white noise.

  ‘Hey, lady, I’m sorry…’ He looked directly at her, fell silent and a look of morbid curiosity crossed his face. ‘…We’re blocking your way.’

  She curved the wheels of her chair and, turning an arc that used the whole width of the pavement, her back was completely turned to the mirror and the vile reflection on its surface.

  Norma wheeled herself away at speed.

  She felt the world fly past her in two continuous streams, either side of her throbbing head, cursed the ill-timing of her journey on to the middle of Allerton Road and knew that if she lived for two hundred years she would never come to terms with the sheer abomination of her face.

  14

  12.01 pm

  Detective Sergeant Gina Riley sat across Poppy Waters’ desk in her tiny office on the first floor of Trinity Road police station and placed the bagged evidence from Annie Boyd’s bedroom between them.

  ‘What have we got here, Gina?’ asked Clay, pulling up a chair and sitting next to Riley.

  The wind sobbed at the narrow window overlooking the car park at the back of the police station.

  ‘The dead woman’s laptops and two iPhones.’

  ‘What did you make of your visit to her home, Gina?’

  ‘Young adult living at home with her mother and father. I think she had a secretive side to her.’

  ‘How do you make that out?’ asked Poppy, a civilian IT expert.

  Riley produced a fourth small evidence bag and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. She took out the envelope and pointed out the school address.

  ‘She’s had her mail sent to her place of work, which says to me she was secretive around her parents.’

  Poppy and Clay slipped their hands into latex gloves.

  ‘Have you seen what’s inside yet?’ asked Clay.

  ‘No, but I’m about to.’

  Clay turned back the flap. ‘It’s not a letter. It looks like a photograph.’

  ‘Have you noticed anything about the handwriting on the envelope?’ asked Riley.

  ‘It’s plain block capitals. It’s disguised handwriting.’

  Riley smiled bitterly as Clay took the top edge of the photograph from the envelope with the tips of her thumb and index finger.

  ‘Annie’s friend Cathy confirmed that her best friend had been using Pebbles On The Beach, so I’m guessing this picture came from whoever she’s made contact with on the dating website.’

  Clay showed the photograph to Riley and Poppy.

  ‘Who or what do you see, girls?’ asked Clay.

  ‘I see a young man who couldn’t possibly have any need to get a girlfriend from an internet dating site,’ said Riley.

  Looking at the picture, Clay worked from the top down.

  ‘Mr Handsome. He’s standing at an angle, most of his face is visible. He’s not looking at the camera but at something or someone, not in the picture, with a great deal of affection. It looks natural and not posed for. It could have been taken without his knowledge and presented to him after the event.

  ‘Collar-length black hair, handsome enough for TV, smart white shirt and trousers, well-built, muscular but slim. Designer loafers.’

  ‘See the way his shirt’s turned back to the elbow,’ said Riley. ‘Look at the definition on his forearms. He’s a gym-head.’

  She examined the overall image, then focused on the empty space into which he smiled.

  ‘Someone or something’s been edited out of this image,’ said Clay. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked Riley.

  ‘We’ll send an electronic copy of the picture to Barney Cole. He can work on tracking down Mr Handsome. It’s on photographic paper so we’ll give the picture itself to Terry Mason and Paul Price, see if they can pull off any prints.’

  Poppy indicated the phones and laptops. ‘I’ll crack on with these then.’

  ‘Before you start, Poppy, do me a favour, please,’ said Clay. ‘I’d like to see Annie’s Pebbles On The Beach profile firstly. And then whatever passed between her and the man hiding behind the identity of the man in the photograph from Annie’s pillowslip.’

  15

  1.31 pm

  As Clay walked into the incident room at Trinity Road police station, she looked at the people sitting round in a circle and picked out the only stranger to her. Detective Chief Inspector Dave Ferguson from Warrington Constabulary, seated between Hendricks and Riley and facing Cole, Stone and Winters.

  Her iPhone buzzed and, seeing Poppy’s name on display, she spoke to the group. ‘Thank you, can you give me a few seconds? Poppy?’

  ‘Eve, I’ve just emailed you Annie Boyd’s Pebbles On The Beach profile.’

  ‘Anything standing out about it?’

  ‘It’s cliché-driven. She likes long walks in the countryside, stadium-level boy bands. Her profile picture’s nice but it’s static.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Poppy.’

  ‘Are you going to do something with it?’

  ‘I’m working on it. Good work. Let’s talk later.’

  Clay took her place facing DCI Ferguson.

  ‘Thank you very much indeed, Dave, for coming to see us so quickly. We appreciate your time and support,’ said Clay.

  ‘No problem, Eve. You have all our electronic records, right?’

  ‘Your super, Kate Johnson, sent them to me this morning,’ replied Cole, handing Clay a set of images printed off from the materials sent from Warrington.

  ‘If it was Kate organising, then you will have everything.’ Ferguson looked at Clay, sitting directly opposite him in the circle. ‘You’ve got fresh eyes on this, you and your team. Maybe you’ll see something we didn’t quite see.’

  Ferguson took in the whole group with a shift of his eyes.

  ‘Do you want the bad news or the bad news?’ he asked. ‘When we took in Sandra O’Day’s laptop and mobile, and we found out they’d been communicating through Pebbles On The Beach, I thought we had the bastard in a box, through his IP address on her devices. Silly fucking me. He’d downloaded Virtual Private Network software that did him two big favours. One. It disguised his real IP address and generated him a fake one. Two. It bounced his signals into China, Australia and Russia, making it look like he was operating out of those countries. You’re going to find the same problem, only he might be more savvy and have used a TOR to bury himself on the dark web.’

  ‘Sly shit hides behind internet technology. I can see the headlines now,’ said Clay. The tension in the room dipped and Ferguson looked at Clay with more than a glimmer of thanks in his hangdog eyes. ‘How about we look at your pictures, Dave?’

  Clay took out the first photograph of Sandra O’Day’s body, beginning to look bloated and grey, captured in a bed of reeds at the water’s edge, skinned and scalped in exactly the same manner as Annie Boyd.

  ‘The handiwork of the bastard we refer to as The Ghoul. Sandra had been in the water for days before she was discovered by a man out walking in a beauty spot one early morning. It was a very hot day, and although it was in the cool of the morning, he was drawn to the body by the smell. He was on the verge of hysterics when he called emergency services.

  ‘We flooded the area with every available officer and officers were drafted in from Greater Manchester Police. We combed every blade of grass. Nothing.’ Colour rose in DCI Ferguson’s cheeks and throat.

  ‘How did you identify your victim?’ asked Clay.


  ‘We identified her because her mother had reported her as missing. It was a process of elimination. She had a birth mark on the inside of her left thigh. We brought Mrs O’Day into the mortuary, covered the body from the neck upwards. Jesus, I can still hear her screams.’

  ‘Dave,’ said Clay. ‘What date did she go missing? And when did you find her?’

  A look of pure regret passed through Ferguson’s eyes.

  ‘Her mother contacted us on August 1st. Our response, unfortunately, was a standard one. We listed it but did nothing about it. What could we do? She was an adult and her mother said she’d been missing for six hours, not picking up her phone, not calling home, which she did religiously. She was discovered on August 11th.’

  Clay did a mental sum and asked, ‘How long did the coroner say she’d been in the water?’

  ‘At least four days, five even.’

  ‘So Sandra was held captive for five to six days?’ said Clay.

  ‘If the coroner’s report’s worth the shit it’s supposed to, yeah. Her injuries and the state of her body. She’d been dead for days.’

  ‘Did you have any suspects?’

  ‘None. No CCTV. No Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras. One theory went that The Ghoul had dodged CCTV and carried the body to the water. Sandra O’Day wasn’t a big woman and we proposed that he was a bodybuilder or someone who dealt with heavy weights in their job, both even.’

  ‘Do you think he was local to the Warrington area?’

  Ferguson shook his head.

  ‘We looked at all the local men who had a history of violence towards women and none of them, not one, had a back story that could have reached to the depths of what that lunatic did to Sandra O’Day. They all had drop-dead alibis. We started winding the investigation down after two months. It’s still an open case but it’s the most frustrating investigation I’ve been involved in all down the years.’

  ‘Pebbles On The Beach?’ asked Clay. ‘You posted a note on the coroner’s file?’

  ‘Made-up name and bogus address.’

  Ferguson’s head dropped like a man who’d scored an own goal in a one-nil cup final defeat as the referee blew the final whistle.