Death Row

by Mark Pearson

  Bennett jogged up to Kate, ignoring a loud horn being hooted for his benefit. ‘What was that all about?’ he asked.

  ‘You got me.’ She frowned and looked back to where the girl had gone, out of sight now.

  ‘Something?’ Bennett asked her.

  Kate frowned slightly and then shook her head. Whatever it was she’d remember it sooner or later. She looked down at the pavement, where a purse had been dropped. She picked it up and opened it. Inside, together with some condoms, were a couple of credit cards and a small plastic bag with some white powder in it. She held up the purse to Bennett and he lifted out the smaller bag inside, holding it at one corner between gloved fingers.

  ‘Something to do with this, maybe?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘I’ll process it back at the factory. And well done, by the way.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For the way you tackled that woman. Jonah Lumu has got nothing on you.’

  ‘Just don’t mention it to Jack.’

  Bennett flicked her a mock salute.

  Across the road, and unobserved by either of them, a grey-haired man in a leather bomber jacket, sitting in the back of a Lexus with dark-tinted windows held up an iPhone and pointed it at Kate and Bennett.

  He wasn’t making a call.

  Overhead, a low rumbling roll of thunder sounded in the distance, and the rain that had been threatening to pour out of the swollen sky at any minute began to fall in earnest.

  *

  Delaney got out of the passenger side of Sally’s car, zipped up his leather jacket and put a police baseball cap on his head before throwing another one across to his sergeant.

  ‘Where did you get these, sir?’

  ‘I nicked them. Don’t tell Napier, he’d probably fire me for it.’

  Sally chuckled as they walked away from the parked car towards the footpath some fifty or so yards ahead. A couple of police cars were blocking the entrance to the allotment, their blue lights flashing. A pair of soaked-looking uniforms were guarding the entrance.

  ‘I don’t think so, sir,’ said Sally. ‘Not with all this going on. I think he can smell promotion and you’ll be at the heart of it.’

  Delaney shook his head angrily. ‘I’m not at the heart of anything, Sally. Trust me, whatever is going on here is nothing to do with me. I didn’t even find that girl all those years ago – a bleeding traffic warden did!’

  ‘Yeah, but it was your picture in the papers, sir.’

  ‘Don’t remind me, constable.’

  ‘And you are going to find the missing boy. I know you are.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You promised Gloria you would.’

  Delaney nodded at the two uniforms as they started along the footpath leading down to the bridge but he didn’t reply to Sally Cartwright. Across the track a wall of trees shielded the view of the allotment but bright lights were shining through and Delaney could make out the white-suited shapes of scene-of-crime officers as they went about processing the site.

  At the other end of the bridge they clattered down the iron stairs and turned left where the allotments started. The ground underfoot was wet and slippery now, the heavy rain turning the once hard-packed earth boglike. They walked a few yards further on to where SOCO were erecting, as quickly as they could, a protective marquee around a large green-coloured tent that had already been set up in the middle of Graham Harper’s allotment.

  DI Duncton ducked out of the tent as Delaney and Sally approached, his tall sergeant appearing behind him. Duncton’s face had the pale cast of a man who had seen things he’d rather not have looked at, and his breathing was a little ragged.

  ‘You still reckon it’s not devil worshippers?’ he asked Delaney as the Irishman crouched down and looked in the tent himself.

  The naked body of a woman had been spread out in cruciform fashion. Large nails had been hammered through her hands and feet to fix her to the ground. She was on her back. Her breasts were flaccid, her pubic hair grey – and she was missing her head.

  ‘Maureen Gallagher,’ said Delaney as he stood up again outside the tent.

  ‘We certainly hope so,’ replied Sergeant Emma Halliday, smiling grimly. ‘Otherwise we have a head with a missing body somewhere and a body with a missing head somewhere else.’

  ‘Who put the tent up?’ asked Sally.

  Duncton moved aside as the SOCO photographer and videographer turned on some bright lights and moved in to record the scene. ‘It was already here. We assume it was the killer. That’s why the body wasn’t discovered until now. The old man found her.’ Duncton nodded across to Graham Harper, who was standing on the stoop of his shed with a blanket around his shoulders, watching horrified as his onetime haven of solitude was overrun with men in uniforms and white plastic jumpsuits yet again.

  *

  Kate smiled and looked up at the clock. It was three o’clock in the afternoon now and already it was very dark outside. The black rain clouds overhead didn’t show any sign of letting up, neither did the rain which was hammering loudly against the large plate-glass windows of the pub as though they were in a tropical monsoon somewhere far more exotic than Camden Town. ‘You’re absolutely sure it’s him?’ she said to the handsome bar manager who was looking at the photo of Jamil that Kate had just given him.

  ‘Absolutely positive,’ he replied. ‘Hang on, I’ll get his jacket for you.’ His accent was central-casting Australian and Kate couldn’t help wondering how many of them were working in London pubs. He was cute, though, Kate admitted to herself, in his thirties with a surfer-boy physique, blond hair and a perfect tan. He reminded her of the young Robert Redford. If he had offered her his number she might well have had to think about it.

  She smiled to herself again and held a hand to her stomach. No, she wouldn’t. She’d take the rough Irishman and his gruff ways over a pretty-boy charmer any day.

  She pulled out her mobile and a scrap of paper with some numbers on it and tapped them into her phone. ‘Tony, it’s Kate. We’ve got a hit. I’m in The Outback pub. Okay, see you in a bit.’

  By the time DI Bennett made it across the road, the bar manager had given Kate Jamil’s coat. A dark woollen pea-jacket, good-quality wool at that. She rummaged through the pockets and took out a wallet as the detective headed up to the bar. She opened it.

  ‘What have we got?

  Kate handed it to him. Bennett opened it and took out a couple of credit cards with Jamil’s name on them. He opened the back section and removed a condom, five twenty-pound notes and a handwritten note. The letters were block capitals.

  ‘What does it say?’ asked Kate.

  ‘It says “Ten-thirty at The Outback”.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s all. Ten-thirty at The Outback.’

  ‘Which is here.’

  ‘Which is indeed here.’

  Kate turned to the bar manager. ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘It’s Michael.’

  ‘Did you see Jamil Azeez with anybody that evening?’

  ‘Sorry, no. It was rammed here on Friday night. Always is.’

  ‘But you recognise him?’ asked Bennett.

  ‘Oh yeah, like I told your colleague here. I served him but he was on his own at the bar.’

  ‘Can you remember what you served him?’

  ‘A Coke and a pint of lager.’

  ‘You seemed to remember that pretty quickly.’

  ‘He came up three or four times, always the same order.’

  ‘Anyone else order that?’

  ‘Not that I recall.’ Michael shrugged. ‘But like I say, mate, it’s pretty rammed on a Friday.’

  Bennett pointed to the CCTV camera mounted above the bar. ‘You got footage from the night?’

  ‘Yeah, but it only covers the till. We get a few jokers trying the short-change scam. Keeping the till on tape soon sorts them out.’

  ‘Can we get the footage anyway?’

  ‘No wo
rries, I’ll do you a copy.’ Michael turned and called to a woman sitting at one of the tables by the window, drinking a cup coffee. ‘Karin, do you reckon you could give Sean a hand behind the bar while I nip upstairs for five?’

  The woman nodded.

  Kate pointed at the note. ‘It’s not the same person’s handwriting, is it?

  ‘As in the book?’ said Bennett.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could be. These are block capitals. Hard to tell.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the idea.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning that whoever arranged to meet him here that Friday night didn’t want anybody else knowing about it.’

  ‘For personal or professional reasons.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So how does Matt Henson factor in?’

  ‘He’d seen him in the college. A neo-Nazi made to sweep up leaves and pick up litter. While some foreigner gets to be a student in an English university. There’s an awful lot of resentment there. We know Matt’s violent. Friday night with a skinful of lager in him and he sees the same student and it all boils up for him. He lashes out. He has a knife in his hand. He stabs him.’

  Bennett nodded thoughtfully. ‘I can see that happening. So you don’t think it was premeditated?’

  Kate shook her head. ‘You saw him on the CCTV footage. He was worked up.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  A short while later the manager returned with a DVD which he handed to Kate. ‘There you go. I burned you a copy of the night shift – nine o’clock through to one o’clock.’

  Kate passed the disc over to Bennett and smiled at the barman. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No worries. Come back and see us any time. First one’s on the house.’ He flashed his surfer’s smile again.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Bennett as they walked to the door.

  Outside he held open the passenger door of his car and smiled at Kate. ‘I think you made a new conquest there.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Kate. ‘Maybe it was you he was interested in.’

  ‘I’m spoken for,’ said Bennett without a hint of a smile.

  ‘Really?’ said Kate, surprised. ‘You said you weren’t married.’

  ‘Like I told you … to the job.’

  Kate got into the car and pulled her seat belt across as Bennett climbed in. ‘A telescopic truncheon might be very reassuring to carry down a dark alley but it’s not very nice to snuggle up with at night,’ she said.

  Bennett smiled and opened his mouth to say something but Kate silenced him with a raised finger. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘I was going to say I’m blue-beret-trained. I have access to far more interesting weapons.’

  ‘Blue beret?’

  ‘What you might think of as SO19. Specialist firearms command. More likely to wear combat helmets nowadays, mind.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d been with SO19.’

  Bennett turned and looked at her. His eyes were unreadable. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Doctor Walker,’ he said.

  *

  Delaney stood beside the window looking out at the rain and the cars crawling slowly along Western Avenue, heading into London. Their headlights and braking lights splashing some colour into the drab awfulness of the surrounding architecture and urban infrastructure. Paddington Green police station was the grown-up version of Delaney’s nick, where the shiny-suited supercops and the serious crime units were based. The sort of station that if you had ambition you would want to be working at. Ambition for yourself, that was. Jack Delaney’s only ambition was to solve crimes. To find the rapists and the arsonists and the murderers and the drug dealers and the paedophiles and the rest of the scum that were increasingly allowed to wreak their misery on the world – to find them and stop them. To turn the tide. He was no King Canute, mind, he didn’t fool himself that what he did made a whole hell of a lot of difference. But just trying to do so mattered to him. And if what he did made the world even the slightest bit less toxic for his daughter then he was going to continue doing what he did. And that wouldn’t happen pushing pens in some supervisory role – he’d leave that to the likes of his Chief Super, who was standing at the front of the packed briefing room, looking on enviously as the serious crimes unit updated the various task forces.

  Delaney hadn’t been paying attention to what they were saying. He knew most of it anyway but he started listening when Doctor Bowman was summoned forward to stand in front of a display of photographs.

  Photographs of Maureen Gallagher’s severed head, her cruciform corpse. Her lacerated back, her punctured hands and feet. The letters H O R carved into her forehead.

  ‘Firstly, as we all suspected, I can confirm that the head and the body both belong to the same person. A woman we believe to be Maureen Gallagher, as identified by the parish priest at the church where her head was discovered. It’s hard to place time of death as her body was partially frozen, that is to say it was chilled before her head was separated. There were puncture and burn marks to the chest consistent with a taser-style stun gun. The head was removed postmortem and I would speculate that the cause of death was due to a massive heart attack caused by the tasering. I am waiting for lab results to confirm.’

  Bowman walked to the next board and pointed at the scarring on the woman’s back. ‘Her back has been whipped. Some of the scarring is recent, some goes back a while. In her ear I found a small particle that appears to be from the carapace of a crustacean. Probably from a crab shell. And in her mouth the killer had placed a watch. A Mickey Mouse watch that would appear to match the description given of the watch that Samuel Ramirez was wearing on the day he went missing.’

  Delaney looked at the montage of photos mounted on the various boards. Photos of the murdered woman, of Peter Garnier, of the murdered children. Someone had obviously helped Garnier. Had kept the watch as a trophy. As a grisly souvenir. But why start killing again now? Why kill the church cleaner and why place the watch in the mouth of her severed head? The killer was sending a message, that much was clear. But why now? And what was the message?

  Delaney looked again at the various photos, trying to make sense of them. It was like spot the ball, he thought: maybe all the pieces were there if he could just link them somehow, follow the lines of their stares, see what they could see but what was obscure to him.

  He looked at the photo of Maureen Gallagher’s headless body on the cold ground of Graham Harper’s allotment, and a thought came to him.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.

  Delaney became aware that people were looking at him. His boss, her face impassive, and beside her the Chief Super goggling at him in disbelief.

  ‘Something to add, detective inspector?’ he barked angrily.

  ‘We need to get back to the allotment and dig, sir.’ Delaney pointed at the photograph of the headless Maureen Gallagher, her arms and legs outspread in cruciform pose.

  ‘I think X marks the spot.’

  *

  Gloria looked down at her hands, which were entwined together and clasped in her lap. She shivered with the cold and put her hand behind her on the sofa to test the radiator. It was on but she didn’t feel any warmer. She pulled her bath gown tight around herself and looked back at the television, humming a melody to herself in a low voice. The Sky News crew were back at the allotments in Harrow and the pretty blonde reporter was looking earnestly into the lens of the camera, pointing at her. She could see the woman’s lips moving but she couldn’t hear what she was saying as she had the sound turned off. A song was playing in her own head, but the melody kept dancing away like a butterfly, like a sea mist slipping through spread fingers, like a dream that didn’t want to be caught however hard she tipped her head and tried to catch it.

  The shot on the television turned to a series of pictures: Peter Garnier, the murdered children, the church where the head of a woman had been discovered, her own photo as a little girl held in the arms of Jack Delaney. Gloria pi
cked up the Sky+ remote control and froze the picture, staring at herself and the Irishman when he was much younger than he was today, in so many ways, handsome in his uniform, his smile fit to break a thousand hearts.

  But Gloria wasn’t smiling and her eyes were unblinking at she stared at the television screen. The music in her head was swelling ever louder, like surf at high tide in the depths of winter.

  *

  Sally Cartwright and Jack Delaney were at the back of the large police marquee that had been erected to cover the whole of the allotment where Maureen Gallagher’s mutilated body had been discovered. Several floodlights had been mounted on poles, filling the space inside with a cold bright light. A small trench had been dug in the centre of the allotment and two suitably suited scene-of-crime officers were excavating the ground. They gestured for the photographer and videographer to come forward as they scraped the last few lumps of mud off a green tarpaulin that had been exposed in the base of the shallow trench. With the photographers in position one of the SOCO, took the corner of the tarpaulin and pulled it back.

  The first thing Delaney noticed was the feet. One was wearing a sock only and the other had on a small black and white trainer, a match to the one discovered earlier in the scrubland at the end of the allotments, which was now sitting in an evidence bag at the police station at Paddington Green. Delaney barely noticed the high-pitched scream of a woman as the tarpaulin was pulled fully open, or the slump as she fainted into the strong arms of her husband, who was standing beside her, his eyes filling with tears. Delaney was too focused, registering the jeans and the jumper with a picture of a large cartoon giraffe on the front of it. He didn’t need to look to know that beneath it there would be a new Chelsea-strip shirt with the word SAMSUNG emblazoned across the front. He looked at the curly hair on the top of the boy’s head, so brown that it was almost black, he looked at the closed eyes that would never sparkle with impish pleasure again. He looked at the smooth skin of the boy’s face, obscenely pale, and he heard his own words in his head, the promises he had made to another abducted child. One he had been in time to save. He felt the muscles in his heart harden and the hands that were thrust deep into his jacket pockets become fists, the pain of his nails, digging into his own flesh, against the tears that threatened to start in his eyes.