A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  He looked at the clock and saw that Clay was well into her treatment for the three punches that she’d received on the back of her head and the wound on her forehead.

  Stone walked to the doors leading into the treatment area, opened them and took in the bustle between the curtained-off bays.

  A young nurse walked towards him and he showed her his warrant card.

  ‘How is DCI Clay?’

  ‘Ask her yourself in a minute.’

  Halfway down the room, Clay emerged from behind a pair of curtains.

  Her head was bandaged and, as she walked towards Stone, she looked as if she was fighting a huge internal battle.

  ‘She’s all yours,’ said the nurse, walking past him into the reception area.

  ‘Eve, what’s happening?’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Aren’t you staying in for observation?’

  ‘No, Karl. The CAT scan’s clear and I’m discharging myself.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He looked into her eyes and tried to read absence but all he could see was grim determination.

  ‘I’m sure. As you drive me back to Trinity Road, fill me in on anything I’ve missed.’

  92

  10.43 pm

  ‘I’ve sifted through some depressing crap in my time but Edgar McKee’s worldly goods are out there in a league of their own.’

  Detective Sergeant Terry Mason eyed the contents of Edgar McKee’s living room, separated into sections on the long central table that dominated the room he shared with his assistant, Sergeant Paul Price.

  On the floor, starting at Price’s feet and rising to the level of the tabletop, was a tower of evidence bags. He picked up the top bag and carefully took out a blue denim jacket. He placed the jacket down on a clear plastic sheet on the table and unpeeled a sheet from a lint roller.

  ‘Have you noticed the way the smell from his flat has carried over into our room?’ said Price, pressing the sticky sheet on the fabric of the collar.

  There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Enter the cesspit,’ said Mason.

  Poppy Waters, civilian IT expert, entered the room and the normally ever-present smile on her face dissolved instantly as she saw the vast collection of pornographic DVDs on the table.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ she said. ‘The joy of things to come.’ She looked away and a deep blush climbed across her cheekbones.

  Mason pointed at two evidence bags at the centre of the table.

  ‘We pulled the laptop from McKee’s flat. Sergeant Harris took his iPhone from him before Riley took him into the interview suite.’

  ‘Is he in the cells now?’

  ‘Yeah. We’re going to have to motor on this one. What’s your brief from Eve?’

  ‘Find anything at all on his devices that link him to the dead women and the missing, abducted woman, Francesca Christie.’

  ‘Then we’re singing from the same hymn sheet, which is good.’

  Poppy picked up the two evidence bags.

  ‘We worked super-fast,’ said Price, ‘once we had the laptop and the phone. They’re both sticky because we used sellotape to pull any fingerprints, palm prints and fabric fibres.’

  ‘I’ll be wearing a double layer of latex gloves,’ she said, reaching the door.

  ‘If you come up with anything, Poppy, as soon as you’ve spoken to Eve, let us know. It could influence the complexion of our search.’

  As she closed the door after herself, Mason took in a slow in-breath, his nose wrinkling.

  ‘Raw meat, sweat disguised by too much cheap body spray. McKee’s obviously neat and tidy but some smells you just can’t wash away or mask. He must have worked out a lot in his flat.’

  Price looked at the sheet of lint roller in his hand and showed the tiny blue fibres lifted from Edgar McKee’s jacket to Mason.

  ‘OK, Paul, just keep going. All we need is one stroke of luck and that’ll leave him needing a million.’

  Mason took the next evidence bag from the pile, removed a blue check brushed cotton shirt and laid it down on the table.

  He checked the clock on the wall. Since Edgar McKee had been booked in to custody, the passage of time in his head seemed to have accelerated to double fast. The clock told a similar story.

  ‘I wonder how Winters is getting on with Marlene Black?’

  ‘Who?’ Price seemed miles away, engrossed in the task at hand as he opened the front of the jacket and pressed the sticky sheet of lint roller on the inside of the garment.

  ‘The working girl who McKee claimed was entertaining him on the night Francesca Christie went missing.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Marlene Black. I heard he wasn’t a bit embarrassed when he told Riley about it. I’d feel like somehow my whole life was a failure if I had to pay a woman to have sex with me.’

  Mason indicated the DVDs. ‘It was clearly a way of life for him. Goes into the newsagents for a paper, then pops into the nearest knocking shop for a shag. Equally weighted financial exchanges.’

  ‘I wonder if he was ever married? My tenner says he was,’ said Price.

  ‘My tenner says he was never married. He doesn’t like women. That’s what his DVD collection’s telling me. We’ll sort through it after we’ve been through his clothes.’

  ‘Do you think Marlene Black’s going to be a reliable witness?’

  Mason carried on lifting fibres from Edgar McKee’s brushed cotton shirt and thought about the consequences for her if she wasn’t.

  ‘She’ll be in a whole lot of shit if she doesn’t tell the truth. She’d be looking at jail time. Perverting the course of justice.’

  As Mason worked on Edgar McKee’s shirt, he offered up a prayer of thanks to the god of forensics. The thought of directly touching anything that had come into contact with Edgar McKee’s skin made him want to puke.

  Outside, the wind rumbled and rain lashed down.

  ‘OK with you if I open a window, Paul?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the same question.’

  The central heating in the room was drawing the sour smells from Edgar McKee’s possessions.

  As he opened the window, Mason said, ‘I tell you who I feel sorry for. Poppy Waters. I can only guess at the shit on his laptop and iPhone.’

  93

  11.05 pm

  The naked arrogance that had defined Edgar McKee during his first visit to Interview Suite 1 was replaced by a calm neutrality that Clay guessed had been prompted and strongly advised by his solicitor, Monica Davis.

  McKee stared at the digital clock on the audio recorder to his left as Clay formally opened the interview; he appeared to neither listen nor care.

  Monica Davis chipped in, ‘Before you start questioning Mr McKee, he’s asked me to read a statement on his behalf. He wants it to be formally reiterated and recorded that he walked into Trinity Road police station with the express purpose of supporting Robin Wren, who should not be here under any circumstances whatsoever. Edgar McKee and Robin Wren are innocent of any criminal charges relating to the abduction, murder and mutilation of young women in the north-west of England, namely Warrington and Liverpool.’

  Clay eyeballed McKee. ‘I hear you.’ She looked at his fists bunched on the table in front of her and they were massive. ‘Let’s start with your van, Edgar, your Ford Transit van. Problem number one.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘You. Just before I came downstairs to interview you, I received a phone call from Detective Sergeant Stone, the officer I assigned to go to your lock-up. The van wasn’t there. The lock-up was completely empty.’

  Clay took out her iPhone and pulled up the roll of images Stone had sent to her. She showed the screen to Edgar McKee, who frowned.

  ‘Is that the door of your lock-up?’ asked Clay, pointing to a dark door with a number 7 painted crudely in thick strokes of white paint.

  ‘Yes.’

  She scrolled. ‘Is this the interior of your lock-up?’

  ‘It looks like.’
/>   ‘There was nothing there, Edgar. Certainly no white van. Nothing. What do you say to that?’

  ‘Was there any sign of tampering to the lock or damage to the door?’ asked Edgar McKee.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s the van, Edgar?’ Hendricks waded in.

  ‘I really don’t know.’ He looked thoughtful as his fists tightened on the table. ‘I can only assume two things here. One. Someone’s managed to open the lock-up and steal the van. Two. Your colleagues have removed the van in an attempt to stitch me up.’

  ‘Do you really believe that we’re living in the year 1973, Edgar?’ Hendricks sounded in a place between disbelief and amusement. ‘We’ve got a lot of people out there looking for your van. Why don’t you cut yourself some slack and tell us where it is?’

  ‘If I knew where it was I’d tell you, because of the complete lack of forensic evidence linking me to these murders.’

  ‘The way it looks at the moment, Edgar, you’re concealing a massive piece of evidence linking you to multiple murders. What were you doing on the footpath between Allerton Towers and Allerton Manor Golf Course late in the afternoon on Wednesday 1st December?’

  ‘I was taking Wren home. He was going on about a fictional superhero of his own making. It was pouring down with rain. The traffic was a nightmare. I saw three near crashes. I told him to be quiet so I could concentrate on driving, but that I’d take him some place where I’d park up and he’d tell me about Captain Cyclone. The lad’s father is my line manager in the abattoir and had just thrust his son under my wing. I wanted to get the relationship off to a good start but I couldn’t drive safely and listen to him waffling on.’

  McKee looked sideways at his solicitor, who kept her head down and made notes in a spiral-bound book.

  ‘That’s not how Wren’s telling it,’ said Clay.

  ‘How’s he telling it?’

  ‘Wren’s version of events has you taking him there from the abattoir.’

  ‘The thing I don’t get is this,’ said Hendricks. ‘You work in Old Swan. Wren lives in Gateacre. Wouldn’t the most obvious route from the Swan to Gateacre be to go down Queens Drive and get into Gateacre through the Childwall district? The footpath in Allerton is nowhere near there, not even for a diversion as you call it. Especially on a day when you said you’d seen three near crashes.’

  ‘I just took him there because it was quiet and he told me he was enjoying the ride.’

  ‘You like watching films, don’t you, Edgar?’ asked Clay. ‘We’re going to show you a sequence of CCTV films that have been edited together of your journey from Old Swan to Allerton and then back to Gateacre. Before you watch it, I’m going to give you a potted account of that journey. You drove from the abattoir to Queens Drive. You proceeded to the footpath via Allerton Road. You drove to Heath Road and Mather Avenue after you’d stopped at the footpath. You made your way up to Menlove Avenue. Up to Woolton Park and down to Gateacre.’

  Clay turned her laptop round, pressed play and drilled her eyes into Edgar McKee’s face as he watched the CCTV footage of his van travelling around South Liverpool. He was deadpan but Clay noticed a sound under the table. A slow, heavy rhythm of a foot tapping against the floor of the interview suite.

  ‘You recognise your van? The journey you went on with Robin Wren?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You can say “no comment” at any point in the interview. I did advise you to do so,’ said his solicitor.

  ‘Only guilty people say “no comment”. I’ve got nothing to hide…’

  Seeing that he was giving nothing away in his face or eyes, Clay noticed his hands, the thickness of his fingers, the bulging veins and the network of faded freckles beneath the forest of stunted ginger hairs.

  ‘All done?’ Clay turned her laptop round. ‘Anything to say, Edgar?’

  ‘Yes. So what?’

  His solicitor ripped a piece of paper from her pad and slid it along the table to him. He read it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edgar. ‘It puts me at the place where a body was dumped. But how many vehicles go past the top of the footpath at the Menlove Avenue end and the Allerton Road end at the bottom? Get real, all of you. I was one of thousands.’ He pointed at Clay with a look of pure moral outrage, jabbed his index finger at her and said, ‘You’re clutching at straws and you know it.’

  ‘No, I’m not clutching at straws, Edgar. I’ve got you down to the last full stop. Put your finger down, it makes you look petulant.’

  ‘Go no comment, Mr McKee. Really.’ McKee looked at his solicitor. ‘You’ve gone above and beyond being co-operative in this situation and it’s not doing you any favours. You’ve made a salient point about the volume of traffic in and around the Allerton footpath. These two officers are gunning for you. Trust me. I’ve seen it many times in this police station.’

  ‘Bent coppers. No comment it is then.’

  ‘Thank you for that, Ms Davis. It’s advice for sure, but it’s bad advice,’ said Clay. ‘Edgar…’

  ‘It’s Mr McKee to you, Clay.’

  ‘Mr McKee, I’m not going to ask you any more questions because I don’t want to hear you saying no comment over and over like a parrot. I’m going to tell you what’s been going on.

  ‘Wednesday 1st December was Wren’s first day at the abattoir, that was the first time you met him. You knew in advance that your line manager’s autistic son was coming to be apprenticed to you. You drove to work that day with the scalped and faceless corpse of Amanda Winton in the back of your white van. When you dumped her, you took Robin Wren along for the ride because no one would ever believe that a murderer disposing of a body would take along a young man with learning difficulties. You’d started grooming him and you cynically used him as a smokescreen. On TV, you saw Robin Wren on CCTV in your van at the scene of a body drop-off. You came here because you had nowhere else to go.

  ‘Later, you saw us crawling over the building you live in. You turned up protesting Robin Wren’s innocence, to further distance yourself from your crime. Mr McKee, you’re a misogynist, a murderer with the brain of a high stakes gambler.

  ‘In the abattoir, your job is to skin the corpses of cattle. According to Robin Wren’s dad, you’re the fastest skinner of corpses and the most talented skinner of corpses that he’s come across in over twenty years. You applied these skills post-mortem to Sandra O’Day, Annie Boyd and Amanda Winton.’

  Silence.

  ‘Question. Where is Francesca Christie?’

  Edgar McKee shook his head and, sitting back in his seat, looked across the table at Clay with his former show of arrogance.

  ‘See what I mean, Mr McKee. Me. You. Down to the last full stop.’

  94

  11.14 pm

  In Edgar McKee’s address book there was a contact card for Dream Girls and Marlene Black’s name was written on the back of it. All major credit cards accepted.

  As Winters pulled his car into Armitage Gardens, three sides of a square of semi-detached houses built around a large central green, he went over the process by which he had tracked down Marlene Black.

  A call through to Dream Girls had been met with suspicion by a woman who sounded like she had been a heavy smoker from the age of six. When he offered to send his warrant card through to the agency’s email address, the woman he’d spoken to on the phone had wanted to know why the Merseyside Constabulary were interested in Marlene Black.

  The words murder enquiry altered everything in the stop-start conversation.

  At his desk in the incident room at Trinity Road police station, he’d hung up and waited. Within two minutes, his landline rang out. Marlene.

  Winters got out of his car and looked for 97 Armitage Gardens, the address Marlene had given him when she called him.

  93. 95. 97 Armitage Gardens.

  Winters tapped the double-glazed front door as Marlene had politely asked him to. The hall light came on instantly and a woman’s form hurried to the door.

  ‘Is that
the police? DC Winters?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The front door opened without hesitation.

  Her face was clean, without any trace of lipstick, and her black hair was snatched back in a bunch.

  Winters showed Marlene his warrant card.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, in a voice made up of multiple whispers.

  She closed the front door and said, ‘Follow me.’

  Barefoot, she was dressed in a red check shirt with grey jeans, and she looked nothing like she’d sounded on the phone. As he passed the closed door of the front room, Winters heard a movie playing on the television set, and it sounded like a romantic comedy.

  As Winters sat at her kitchen table and she closed the door, he noticed a baby monitor plugged into the wall. She sat down and faced him, anxiety pouring from her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Listening to the quietness in her voice, he wondered how many other people were in the house and why she’d invited him to her home as opposed to meeting him in a neutral space, an option he’d given her up front.

  ‘Who’s in the house apart from you?’

  ‘My two small children and my mother.’

  ‘This is a sensitive matter. Where are they?’

  ‘My mother’s in the front room watching TV and my children are in bed. Can you please tell me why you’re here?’

  ‘It’s in relation to your work as an escort, Marlene. We have a man in custody at the moment in relation to a very serious offence…’

  ‘My mother has no idea of what I do,’ she interrupted. ‘She thinks I work in a pub in town.’

  ‘Marlene, I’m not here to upset your apple cart. I just need to know if you could confirm or deny his alibi.’

  ‘There’s probably going to be a huge problem here. I’d say most of my male clients are married, and so are many of my female clients. They don’t give me their real names. I certainly don’t give them mine. I’m not Marlene Black. My real name’s Susan Hurst. Who do you have in custody?’

  ‘Edgar McKee.’