A Date With Death

by Mark Roberts

  ‘Edgar? Edgar McKee? Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes, I’m serious, Susan.’

  ‘What on earth’s he done?’

  ‘You sound surprised.’

  ‘Edgar’s a regular. He’s kinky but he’s gentle. And he told me from the word go that he wasn’t going to hide anything from me. When he told me his name, he showed me his driving licence. I didn’t tell him my real name. This was his choice. That was mine. I’ve spent time with him this week.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night. Thursday, 2nd December. The Travelodge.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Eight o’clock until ten at night.’

  Shit, thought Winters, the CCTV footage of Francesca Christie walking away from the Albert Dock just after half past eight replaying in his mind, the last time she was seen.

  ‘Are you absolutely certain about this, Susan?’

  ‘It was last night, for heaven’s sake. Of course I’m certain.’

  ‘What room did you use?’

  ‘The room we always use if it’s available. Room 1002.’

  ‘Whereabouts in the building?’

  ‘Top floor. Do you know what?’

  She walked to the freezer in the corner of the kitchen, opened the door and pulled out a frozen leg of lamb.

  ‘Whenever I service him, he always brings me a gift from the abattoir where he works. Last night it was this leg of lamb. The time before that…’ She thought about it as she placed the leg of lamb back in the freezer and shut the door. ‘It was a load of top-end T-bone steaks. He doesn’t have to do that. Hardly any of them do express gratitude or give me gifts. With most of them it’s like, I’ve paid for it now so suck my dick or kiss my snatch and act like you’re grateful. Not Edgar. He’s a gentleman. What’s he up for?’

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘Oh, fuck right off, pardon my French. Some of the punters are rough. He’s not one of them.’

  She fell silent, listened hard to a noise in the house that Winters couldn’t make out.

  ‘OK, change the subject. I never quite know what she hears or understands.’

  The kitchen door opened and an elderly woman peered in as if looking through a dense fog. Winters worked out she was well advanced in her dementia.

  ‘Who? Who is this, Susan?’

  ‘It’s Clive, the manager of the Philharmonic pub. We’re having a business meeting.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s your dad, Susan.’

  ‘I’m not your husband, sorry, Mrs Hurst,’ said Winters.

  ‘Mum, go and watch the ending of Silver Linings Playbook. I’ll come and join you soon.’ Susan’s mother nodded even though she looked a thousand miles from certain. ‘Go on, Mum. See you soon.’

  She stood up, gave her mother a gentle push on the shoulder and closed the door. From the baby monitor came the sound of a young child smacking its lips as it turned over in its sleep. It sounded exactly like Winters’ son when he was two years old, and an unfathomable sadness filled his being.

  ‘Mind if I take a picture of you, Susan?’

  ‘OK, but why?’

  ‘To show Edgar McKee we aren’t bluffing when we say we went to see you. He’s questioning just about everything.’

  Susan sat back down and Winters took a picture of her on his iPhone.

  ‘My mother’s got Alzheimer’s. I don’t know how much longer I can keep her at home. I don’t want to put her into care but the periods of clarity are diminishing and the confused times are getting longer and more severe.’

  ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ said Winters. ‘Why are we having this conversation here?’

  ‘I couldn’t work tonight because my regular babysitter…’ She rolled her eyes. ‘And mother sitter couldn’t make it. Like I was going to meet you somewhere else and leave my mother in charge of Charlie and David.’

  ‘I did wonder.’

  Her face lit up as if she’d had a moment of pure inspiration. Susan walked to the pad of shopping lists on the wall unit next to the oven, tore off the top sheet and removed the pen that was held next to the paper by a magnet. She placed the paper on top of the nearest unit and, briefly, wrote down a few words.

  Walking towards Winters, she folded the paper into

  four.

  ‘Ask the person interviewing him to ask him what he got up to in the Travelodge with Marlene Black. The answer’s on this piece of paper.’

  As Susan handed Winters the folded paper, through the baby monitor there were the opening notes of a very young child waking up in the night.

  ‘I have baby monitors in every downstairs room in the house. You never quite know where you’re going to be when they need you most.’

  She opened the kitchen door and headed to the stairs.

  ‘Can you see yourself out, Clive. I’m not being rude.’ The sound of one of her sons crying floated down the stairs as she hurried up them. ‘I’m sorry, but you’ve completely got the wrong man.’

  95

  11. 15 pm

  Francesca Christie blinked.

  It seemed to take a whole minute for her eyelids to open and reconnect.

  She blinked again, felt the weight of her eyelids like a pair of wall-mounted tapestries.

  She counted slowly as she blinked again. Four seconds, not sixty.

  Francesca heard her own breath and listened for other clues in the building beyond the impenetrable darkness around her, but all that came back was silence.

  Pulling at the chains that bound her, there was no slack and no sign of weakness where the first metal link was buried in the wall.

  I cannot move. I cannot escape…

  Her flow of thought was interrupted by a sound from the next room.

  It was an in-breath, followed by a sigh of the deepest satisfaction.

  Someone, something, was moving behind the adjoining wall and door.

  A key turned in the lock and her heart overflowed with dread.

  The door opened and the hinge creaked like a pair of deaf people attempting song.

  Red light poured in through the open doorway and she tried not to think what was coming next.

  A human form appeared in the red glow, stepping into her cell as if on tiptoes.

  There was a click and she was astonished as a wall-mounted light flooded the space with steady and continuous white light.

  She blinked and blinked until the blinding light settled and the walls around her came into focus. She heard footsteps coming towards her and wished with all that she had left that they’d go away.

  The sound of a tuneless melody came towards her and she shut her eyes, wondering if she’d tripped over the edge of sanity and was on a rapidly shifting downward spiral.

  ‘Open your eyes, look at me!’

  She opened her eyes, made out a dark human form that could have been carved from stone.

  ‘Listen to this, Francesca!’

  She heard the recorded sound of a door opening and a woman’s voice announcing, ‘The Judge wants to see you in his chambers.’ Her voice became softer, quieter. ‘I think you’re going to be pleased.’

  ‘Thank you, Rhonda.’

  She heard the sound of a door closing and recalled the telephone conversation she’d had with a man she had thought was a barrister called James Griffiths.

  ‘Want to hear it again, Francesca?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fooled you. Look at me…’

  She blinked and the figure standing over her came more into focus. Making out the head, she noticed that it had long hair that hung over its shoulders. The face between the hair was pink but she couldn’t make out the features.

  ‘Look at me.’

  ‘I am looking at you but I can’t see you properly because I’ve been plagued with all kinds of broken light and pitch darkness and now this blinding white light.’

  Francesca felt as if her soul was rising from her body, lifting through each pore of her skin and floating to the ceiling above her head, forming a
cloud in the shape of her being.

  She felt a hand against her face, the fingers flowing over her cheek. The smell triggered a sharpening of her senses and she was able to make out a vividly painted mouth and two dark circles either side of the nose.

  The person sitting on the mattress next to her was lit from behind and Francesca could make out that the hair was blonde.

  ‘Help me!’ said Francesca, battling to get a much better impression of the thing before her.

  Moment by moment, breath by breath, the facial features became clearer to see, and it was her first impression that the person beside her was young and pretty.

  Another smell hit her, expensive and applied subtly.

  Under the fragrance came the edge of another smell, a sour chemical aroma that drifted from the face and the hair of the person sitting on the bed.

  Francesca looked into its eyes and, as they came alive, there was something very wrong about them and the way they sat within the skin around them.

  ‘Look at me…’

  Francesca looked at the nose, saw that the skin beneath the nostrils rose and fell slightly with each breath.

  ‘Look at me…’

  The skin around the mouth continued to move in the silence that followed the husky, whispered instruction.

  Francesca closed her eyes, wanted the person on the mattress to disappear into thin air.

  ‘Look at me…’

  Francesca opened her eyes and drew in a breath to stop herself from crying out at the shock of the close proximity of the face to hers.

  She looked down at the line of the chin. There appeared to be a scar running along the jawline. The hair hung down on to Francesca’s face.

  The eyes were close enough now for the eyelashes to brush against hers.

  The eyes glinted and Francesca had a flashback to the eyes in the rear-view mirror of her car as she drove away from the Albert Dock with a blade at her throat and a maniac at her back.

  She felt its lips pressing against hers and a tongue sinking into her mouth, lapping against her taste buds.

  Francesca found a piece of herself on the ceiling and looked down at the scene below.

  She was being passionately kissed by a young blonde woman who sounded like an animal.

  Francesca sank down into her body and pressed a hand into its hair.

  Chemicals flooded her nose and throat as it snatched her hand away and sat up.

  The thing before her was wearing a mask. The mask shifted. It was made of skin and hair.

  Everything became crystal clear.

  The thing stood up.

  ‘Look at me!’

  It was wearing the scalp and face of a dead woman.

  Francesca held her breath.

  ‘Look at me…’

  It turned and walked towards the door, turned off the light and disappeared into the room next door.

  The eyes beneath the skin seared her mind.

  In pitch darkness, Francesca Christie screamed as the thing next door wept with joy.

  96

  11.18 pm

  ‘I just called you on the off chance you’d be free,’ said

  Thomas.

  Clay looked around the incident room, saw that Gina Riley was busy skipping between two laptops.

  ‘It’s lovely to hear from you, Thomas.’

  ‘I wanted to hear your voice before I go to bed.’ She could hear the relief in his voice.

  She made an involuntary noise, a sigh that could have passed for a solitary laugh. ‘I so wish I was going there with you, love. How’s Philip?’

  ‘He’s fine. He didn’t quite make it to the end of the second half of the match. I had to carry him to bed.’

  The tender image softened the sharp edges of the day’s disappointments, frustrations and fears.

  ‘How’s it going there?’

  ‘Not so well.’ She dropped the volume of her voice. ‘The evidence so far says our prime suspect’s the wrong man. Don’t quote me on that just yet. Every part of me says I should believe what I’ve just said is true, but at the same time every part of me says no, I don’t believe that.’

  ‘You’ve been here before. Trust your instinct. Go with your hunch. Is he a vile fucker?’

  ‘To quote Shakespeare, yes.’

  Across the room, Riley looked in Clay’s direction and held up her right thumb.

  ‘Thomas, I’m so sorry to cut this short. Something’s just come up.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘Go into Philip’s room. Kiss him for me. Tell him I love him, even if he is asleep. And I love you.’

  ‘I love you back.’

  ‘Goodnight, love.’

  Standing, she replaced the receiver and walked over to Riley.

  Clay looked at the two screens on Riley’s desk. On one screen was the Home Office computer system, information sharing for all constabularies across the UK, HOLMES. On the other was the National Police Computer.

  ‘Catriona West, 1940–2001,’ said Riley. ‘There’s not much. The bulk of what we have is from our investigation on Merseyside. She had no criminal convictions and the only references we have to her on both systems relate to her death in 2001. She was the victim of a hit and run, she died on Mather Avenue before the ambulance got there.’

  ‘Did we pull the driver?’

  Riley shook her head.

  ‘If it’d happened now, we’d have easily pulled the driver with the amount of CCTV out there. She died in the June of 2001. It was only after terrorists flew aeroplanes into the Twin Towers in New York in the September of that year that the West went ape shit about security. Hence, the dawn of the golden age of CCTV.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it. I’ve trawled through the systems for hours looking for some other crumbs. Let’s put it this way. It wasn’t an in-depth investigation because there were no witnesses and no evidence and no realistic chance of catching the driver.’

  ‘Thank you for trying. Hit and run. Stolen in an instant.’

  Clay pulled up the image on her iPhone of Catriona West, taken from her grave.

  ‘At least we know what happened to you now, Catriona.’

  But what’s your link to The Ghoul? Clay asked herself.

  97

  11.30 pm

  Five minutes after Clay outlined her plan to Sergeant Harris, the custody sergeant opened the door of Robin Wren’s cell and Clay found the young man sitting on the bench staring ahead of himself, with a grey blanket over his head and shoulders.

  Clay stepped inside the cell and said, ‘Wren, take off your blanket and step this way with me, please.’ He didn’t move. She took the kindness out of her voice and replaced it with iron. ‘Now!’

  He stood up immediately and the blanket slipped from his head and shoulders on to the floor.

  ‘I want to go home right now.’

  ‘We’re working very hard to make that happen for you, Wren,’ said Clay. ‘But you’ve got to play your part too if you want to make it happen. Come with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked, as he followed Clay out of the cell and into the corridor.

  Clay allowed him to position himself behind Sergeant Harris and ahead of herself. She placed a hand gently between his shoulder blades and spoke softly. ‘Keep going, Wren. You’re doing just great.’

  They turned a corner and passed through automatic sliding doors.

  ‘Are you going to interview me again, DCI Clay?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  ‘Then where are you taking me?’

  ‘For a walk. OK, we can stop right here.’

  Wren read out loud the metal plate on the door. ‘Interview Suite 1. I don’t like this room, take me away from it.’

  Clay’s iPhone rang out in her bag. She took it out and saw WINTERS on the display.

  ‘Sergeant Harris, can you go on that message for me. Please go back to the cells and return as quickly as possible.’

  Clay connected the call.

&nb
sp; ‘What’s going on?’ asked Wren.

  ‘Wait a minute, Wren,’ said Clay. ‘Clive, how did you get on?’

  She walked away from Wren’s hearing.

  ‘Badly. She was with him last night during the time window in which Francesca Christie was snatched. They were in the Travelodge on the edge of Liverpool One. She genuinely seems to like him. Like he was her star trick. She told me to check the CCTV in the hotel. That would back up the alibi she was providing for him.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘She’s written down what they did together during that time. If you ask him about that and his version of events tallies up with hers, that’ll confirm that they were together.’

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Clay. ‘Hey, turn around, Wren, or else!’

  ‘Or else what?’ He turned his back on Clay. ‘What have I done wrong now?’

  ‘I’m on the edge of Garston Village, a minute away from Trinity Road.’

  ‘Put your foot down, get here as quickly as you can. Come directly to Interview Suite 1 with that piece of paper.’

  She closed the call down.

  ‘Can you hear that, Wren?’

  ‘What?’

  The corridor was completely quiet.

  ‘Listen…’

  Around the corner came the hiss of a pair of automatic doors opening and a voice talking softly to someone else.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Wren.

  ‘The man you just heard was Sergeant Harris.’

  His voice came closer.

  ‘Is he talking to himself?’

  ‘No.’

  A female voice blended into the mixture of muffled sound.

  ‘Then who is he talking to?’

  Clay turned her iPhone on to video, went to stand behind Wren and pointed it at the back of his head and the corridor in front of him.

  McKee turned the corner, in between his solicitor, Ms Davis, and Sergeant Harris. Wren’s hands flew to his mouth and Edgar stopped dead in his tracks.

  ‘Wren, I worked out you’d be here. I came to rescue you, to show the police that it was all a dreadful mistake you being in here. I’m so sorry you’re here,’ said McKee. ‘I blame myself but I am trying to save you and I will save you one way or another.’

  Wren seemed to grow over ten centimetres as he stood to attention and dropped his hands to his sides. With his right hand he gave McKee the stiffest, most formal of military salutes.