Chloe- Never Forget

by Dan Laughey

  The wine had gone to Mia’s head. She wilted a little, raising her hand to her perspiring forehead.

  ‘Mia? You okay?’

  ‘I’m feeling – a little dizzy to tell the truth,’ she garbled.

  He ordered mineral water and sat beside her, his arm around her shoulders. She gulped the water and felt better.

  ‘Let me take you home,’ he said. ‘I’ll book a taxi.’

  They arrived outside her flat ten minutes later at some unearthly hour.

  ‘Will you come in?’ she slurred. ‘I’d like your company while I… sober up.’

  She sat him on a sofa and showed him her Facebook photos from a recent hen night. Not her own hen do, she hastened to add. They talked until the early hours and gradually came closer together, knees touching, shoulders, then heads inclined. Soon she nestled her head in his chest, her breathing deeper than before, and next she was snoring, and not long after, so was he.

  They woke in a tangle an hour later, and she asked if he wanted to sleep with her.

  He looked long and hard into those arresting emerald eyes, waiting for any signal of hesitation. Not receiving any, it was time for some home truths.

  ‘Mia.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-three,’ she said without batting an eyelid.

  ‘I’m nearly fifty.’

  She giggled. ‘That means you’re forty-nine.’

  ‘Yes, but when you’re forty-nine, I’ll be seventy-five – if not dead.’

  ‘Who says I want long-term commitment?’ she grinned.

  He returned the grin and their lips touched, their warmth gently pressing each to the other, before Sant lightly lifted Mia from the sofa and carried her to her room.

  And there, for a wonderful hour or two, they made slow and unadulterated love.

  4

  Your name is… Nigel Fleming.

  You are seventy years old.

  But in your dreams… you’re a young man.

  A man of wit, a man of power, a man’s man, a man about town.

  Back then you feared nothing. And no-one. Cock of the North, you were.

  You felt like a hero. You fought like a hero.

  Like a fresh-faced cowboy in a Western. The one astride the wonder horse. The one calling the shots, killing the baddies, grabbing the prettiest girl, riding off into… endless radiance.

  A true hero. Where have you gone? You lost the plot. When? You cannot say. The years mean nothing to you now. The decades. The centuries.

  The last century. That was it! The world you knew. You sensed.

  It was a watershed moment. For you. For sure.

  You walked straight into it. How were you to know?

  It’s time they invented a crystal ball. Or a cure for deafness.

  Your ears still ring. Still crack. Still crackle. They’ve never stopped. Is it your hearing aid? You doubt it. You hear it all the time.

  Like a tune stuck in your head. Your soft head. Your shrinking head.

  It’s time they invented a time machine.

  TICK TOCK TICK TOCK… BANG!

  You cannot get to sleep.

  The moon offered little resistance against the misty blackness of night as the white Transit van-cum-Hearse slithered down Rodley Lane. Suddenly it turned sharply onto a rough side-road leading to a swing bridge over the Leeds-Liverpool Canal.

  Jim the dogsbody doused the headlights as he approached the canal. Broken windows dotted the worn corrugated exterior of an engineering works that had seen better days. Overhead, parallel to the bridge, stood an old iron structure straddling the water: the remnants of a pulley mechanism that had once hauled raw materials from barge to mill.

  He parked his van as close to the canal as he could. There was nothing natural, he thought, about dumping a woman in a man-made waterway. But those were his instructions. Fill the black bag with a dozen bricks, drag it over the side, let things settle, wave an eternal goodbye.

  It was a task he’d carried out numerous times before – in the River Aire, the Wharfe, the Nidd – and no prominent frogman or upturned canoeist had yet made an unpleasant discovery on his account. All was not simple this time, however. The canal posed a problem compared to previous dumping grounds. The spot was more exposed than he’d been forewarned about. Jim cursed the idiots for bringing him down here. The windmill-like glare of street lamps and lighted windows snaking up cul-de-sacs south of the bridge were recipes for disaster.

  He drew the bag out of the back of his van and lugged it across the swing bridge to the accompaniment of a rocking motion that did his nerves no good. Then he braced himself for a backwards tug, took a deep breath, tensed his bloated biceps and heaved his load fifty yards along the towpath, out of sight of nearby homes and night owls. After that he got to work, lodging bricks on either side of the corpse, taking care not to drop them for fear of doing the poor soul more damage.

  That final sight of her was soul-jerking. Jim paid his own private tribute, wishing he could have known her in life – not merely at death’s door – before kneeling forward and drawing out his finger to trace a one-word epitaph on her imaginary headstone: SUPERWOMAN.

  Then he zipped up the body bag and pulled it over the stone bank of the canal. But as he steadied himself for the final heave-o, Jim’s conscience pricked at him. What kind of hypocrisy was this? Here he was, sole mourner of a woman who’d deserved better, kicking her cold remains into a watery grave.

  He knew this was the best means to dispose of a body. Dead people were awkward to get rid of at the best of times. There was no surer method of expunction. This stretch of canal flowed two metres deep and blacker than the millstone grit of the surrounding factories. She’d never be found.

  But did he want her to be found? Did he want for her a respectful funeral, so all the people who knew this good woman in life could pay their respects at her death?

  Jim wasn’t a man of sentiment. Indeed, what he was now weighing up was no exercise in heartstring-pulling. This was risk assessment. Could he afford to let this woman be traced?

  In short, no. Get rid, forget, move on. Dump the body and the nagging guilt with it.

  The bagged corpse now teetering over the edge, he lifted his big foot and let his body weight do the rest, effortlessly rolling it forward to the cusp of oblivion. Then he took a sharp intake of breath, closed his eyes, brought his boot back, and kicked out… at fresh air.

  Without looking down or back he ran to his van and spun the key in the ignition. Reversed with his foot flat to the accelerator and roared onto the main road. As he wiped the iodine sweat dripping from his forehead, a car travelling in the opposite direction flashed him.

  Jim realised his error. Headlights!

  His right hand reached for the switch. The beams sprayed out like old miners’ lamps. Then came another flash of light. A flash he never saw.

  Whether seeing it would have made any difference to his fortunes was, on reflection, a moot point.

  Sant scowled at the helicopter gliding like an obese dragonfly above him. It wasn’t a police issue. Big, bad, disastrous news was what this dragonfly lived off – the more the better.

  ‘Who tipped off the media?’ he asked a scenes-of-crime officer decked out in overalls of spotless white at the front, steel blue behind.

  The officer shrugged, replaced a pair of blue gloves to match his back, then ambled in astronaut fashion to a low tent housing the mainstay of his vocation. The rope-bound cadaver, much to his annoyance, had had to be transposed one point five metres from its final resting place on the brink of the canal to enable the tent to be pegged firmly into the rubbly ground.

  A biting wind flung around hard rain, forcing a couple of uniforms to lean their full weight on the pegs to prevent the structure from blowing away.

  Some of the men at work glanced pointedly at Sant, curious about his hasty appearance on the scene. They knew he was part of the CID team hunting down the killer of one of their o
wn, but where a connection could be drawn between Dryden’s murder and this latest violent crime was unclear.

  Sant recognised several forensic officers who’d worked that blood-soaked bus just five days ago, picking their way through fragments of glass jammed into bits of loose limb – although four of their colleagues were on sick leave. These men still standing are as tough as old boots, the inspector said to himself.

  ‘You’re certainly keeping me busy, my boy,’ spoke a commanding voice from behind. ‘Next time you appear on TV, tell the people to stop killing each other, will you?’

  Sant marvelled at the way the doctor didn’t break his stride as he marched relentlessly towards the white tent. Just another day at the office for Wisdom and Co.

  Mouth still dry from a night of wine-drinking and love-making, he sipped his lukewarm tea gratefully and nibbled at a Kitkat, checking his watch every minute, making a show of how he wasn’t there for the fun of it. Holdsworth was running late. He’d phoned an hour earlier to give her the name printed in the pocket diary found on the victim. Find out what you can, he’d told her.

  A trio of grey tits fluttered through clear sky, their effortless flight making a mockery of the mechanical dragonfly jerking above them. Sant liked birds. He was no ornithologist, but Kes was one of his favourite films.

  At last he saw Holdsworth, her permed hair wafting in the wind and concealing most of her face. Not for the first time he was struck by that Mediterranean poise to the bronzed cheekbones and jawline.

  ‘What’s the score, Holdsworth?’

  She paused to catch breath. ‘Well, Marie Jagger is – ’

  ‘Was,’ he interrupted.

  ‘Marie Jagger was a social housing resident living at 66a Thorpe Towers, Bramley. The council folk tell me she’s lived at the flat for the last seven years.’

  Sant juggled the years. He was better at maths than ornithology. ‘So Chloe Lee was twelve or thirteen years old when she moved there.’

  The two detectives eyed each other.

  ‘It adds up,’ said Holdsworth, ‘but here’s the crux. Council records of the dates of birth of Marie Jagger and our elusive Sheila Morrison living on Stanks Lane South in 1984 show a match – both women gave their birth date as April the 23rd 1961. However, those ever so efficient council folk (I don’t think!) can’t find a birth date for the Susan Smith who once lived on Dufton Approach, a few doors down from the Lees.’

  Sant nodded. ‘She kept switching names and addresses, but changing your date of birth is nothing short of fraudulent, and this woman’s age tallies with what we know about Susan Smith. More to the point, she’s the right kind of mystery.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  He lifted the small diary out of the pocket of his black Mackintosh. ‘Almost blank apart from the name Marie Jagger, which we can safely say bears no resemblance to her birth name.’

  ‘Why carry the diary then?’

  Sant thought hard. ‘She hid it in one of her shoes. It was an insurance policy. If anything happened to her, and sadly it did, her discoverers would have a name to work through.’

  ‘But why not carry proper ID? Or as a minimum, give her address?’

  He downed the last dregs of his cold tea. ‘That’s what most people would do. But we’re not dealing with an ordinary individual here. If this Marie Jagger aka Susan Smith aka Sheila Morrison really is Chloe’s one-time neighbour and Dryden’s informant on the Sergeant Gray murder, we’d expect her corpse to reveal as little as the living being it once contained.’

  ‘Just as secretive dead as alive,’ echoed Holdsworth.

  ‘And what’s more, we’ve a ready-made motive for her murder.’

  She stepped forward and approached the tent, latching onto Sant’s train of thought. ‘She was killed because of what she knew.’

  ‘Or more precisely,’ he added as he caught up with her, ‘because she’d told others about what she knew.’

  ‘Which explains the motive for Dryden’s murder too.’ She tied her hair back and stuck her head into the tent. ‘You don’t think we’re jumping to conclusions do you, Carl?’

  ‘What conclusions?’

  ‘You know, assuming this latest victim is who we think she is.’ Then she pulled her head out swiftly. ‘Hey! Check the diary entry for October the 31st.’

  Sant smiled. ‘I did have a head-start, but it was worth the wait.’

  ‘Stop testing my powers of detection,’ she cried, landing a friendly slap on his arm.

  He winced playfully and turned to the relevant page in the diary. ‘See what’s written here? The 31st of October. 11pm. Kirkstall Abbey.’

  ‘That’s what’s called an unfair advantage,’ she protested.

  They stared at each other. Words weren’t necessary. They knew what faced them. A serial killer. Simple as.

  Holdsworth finally broke the silence. ‘Why did her killer leave her beside the canal rather than in it?’

  ‘I’ve been chewing over that one. Whoever was tasked with disposing the body didn’t finish the job.’

  ‘Perhaps they were disturbed?’

  ‘Either that or they chose to leave their goods on show.’

  ‘Why do that?’

  Sant rubbed his ears as vibrations filled the air above. ‘Maybe they wanted us to find her. Though I doubt that was the original plan.’

  ‘So what next?’

  He only just heard Holdsworth’s question over the sudden din of helicopter propellers, but his reply was loud and clear as he pointed up at a TV cameraman bending himself backwards to secure the best angle.

  ‘There’s no two ways about it,’ he bellowed. ‘We’ve got to go public.’

  5

  Your name is…

  Your name is…

  Your name is Nigel Fleming.

  You think.

  Your visitors are few and far between.

  The consultant specialist or whatever she’s called pops her head around the door once in a while. The postman is a friendly chap too. The neighbours stick their noses into your business too often, but that can’t be helped.

  What you almost never get is a new visitor.

  You never answer the door to cold callers or charity beggars or meter readers. For all you know, the cretins might invite themselves in, raid your fridge, piss in your toilet.

  God forbid.

  And yet the other day, believe it or not, a new visitor did come your way. A young lady. Or was it two? One girl or two? Perhaps two was wishful thinking.

  Ha ha! Mrs Fleming will be jealous!

  Yes, you were flattered. Don’t deny it, Nigel.

  And they asked you so many questions. And showed you pictures of their lives. Other people’s lives any road. Stories of lives once lived.

  And they played music to you. Other people’s music any road. Not very good music. But music all the same. They even gave you an iPod thingy.

  And then they showed you a video. A home video. Their video. Not a very good video. But a video all the same. They didn’t give you that.

  The whole experience was exhausting quite frankly.

  Frankly, it was.

  Can you remember any of it? Not much, sadly.

  But you do remember one thing. They warned you to keep a low profile; not to speak to strange people; not to answer suspicious calls.

  They did have a way with words. And they were so sincere. So utterly fretful about your welfare.

  They’ve done something to your brain, Nigel. Those two young ladies, if you weren’t seeing double, have frazzled your senses something rotten.

  And now you’re sat up in bed and the nightmares have returned and you don’t know what’s hit you. Not yet.

  TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.

  Your body clock is ticking, but your brain-dead head is coming to life.

  Halloween, Nigel. Buses, Nigel. Police officers killed, Nigel. Police officers wounded…

  And now it’s on the radio. The news is playing tricks with your mind.

  TIC
K TOCK TICK TOCK.

  They’ve found a dead body, Nigel. A dead woman, Nigel. A dead woman called Marie Jagger, Susan Smith, Sheila Morrison.

  Sheila, Sheila, Sheila.

  Is that really her name? Her real name?

  What is your real name?

  Nigel Fleming? No.

  What is it?

  It’s time you remembered.

  ‘Got a problem with your memory, Inspector?’

  Sant had been summoned to Gilligan as soon as he’d set foot in HQ. Today the Old Man was wearing a sixties-inspired tweed jacket and brown leather clogs so antique they were impossible to date.