She

by Pete Brassett

  ‘I’m not… Clock Court. Cameras. Of course, CCTV. It’s a private complex, they must have…’

  ‘Off you go.’

  Sergeant Cole, as subtle as the battering ram he employed so efficiently, knocked once and flew through the door without waiting for a response.

  ‘Guv,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Tommy! As gentle as Katrina on the banks of the Mississippi. You’re looking pleased with yourself.’

  ‘It’s the lads at Inta, Guv, don’t how they do it.’

  ‘Take a seat,’ said Munro. ‘And you Charlie, you should hear this before you go. What have you got?’

  ‘Hunger pangs,’ said Cole.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Not eaten, Guv, feeling a bit, you know.’

  Munro smiled and gently pushed the sandwich across his desk.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said.

  ‘You sure?’ said Cole, ripping the cellophane off the pack. ‘Very kind, ta.’

  ‘Charlie,’ said Munro, ‘let’s have a brew. I’m sure Tommy could use one to stop that culinary delight from sticking to his throat.’

  ‘Sir,’ said West, as she reluctantly filled the kettle.

  ‘So, come on, Tommy, we’re all ears.’

  ‘Right, Guv. Well, this Harry geezer, so far as his phone’s concerned, he wasn’t a hefty user, I mean, he didn’t download data, didn’t browse the internet, didn’t do Facebook or any of that stuff.’

  ‘A man after my own heart.’

  ‘Seems he pretty much used the phone, as a phone. And a camera.’

  Sergeant Cole pulled a memory stick from his pocket and gestured towards West’s laptop.

  ‘Miss, could we…’

  ‘Of course,’ said West, passing it over.

  ‘Here,’ said Cole, as the images cascaded down the screen, ‘look at these. This one’s of a bar, they Googled it, it’s his place in Shoreditch, then there’s this girl, half a dozen shots of her. Pretty thing, younger sister, maybe?’

  West peered over Munro’s shoulder.

  ‘Short. Slightly built,’ she said. ‘I’d say that’s his girlfriend, and could well be the girl we’re looking for, Sir.’

  ‘No “might be” about it, Charlie,’ said Munro. ‘Look at her feet. Left ankle. Blue star. Converse.’

  ‘God, you don’t miss a trick, do you?’

  ‘No. I do not. Tommy?’

  ‘Guv. Here’s where it gets a bit, odd. Look, four pics here, all of a bloke sleeping, I’m assuming it’s Farnsworth-Brown, cos it looks like his bedroom.’

  ‘Yes,’ said West, assertively. ‘That’s him. Selfies. What’s odd about that?’

  Sergeant Cole glanced at Munro.

  ‘With all due respect, Miss,’ he said, hesitating. ‘They can’t be selfies, he’s asleep.’

  West winced.

  ‘And they were taken on consecutive days, between 3 and 4am.’

  Munro stared at the screen, frowning as he scrutinised the photos.

  ‘So,’ he mumbled, ‘why would someone want to take his picture while he slept?’

  ‘Easy,’ said West. ‘Girlfriend, again. Men look cute when they’re sleeping, it’s a girly thing to do. A keepsake.’

  ‘Then why did she not take them on her own phone, so she could keep them?’ said Munro, shaking his head. ‘And why take them at 3 in the morning? Are they recent?’

  ‘No, Guv,’ said Sergeant Cole. ‘They were taken yonks ago, I mean, couple of years, at least.’

  ‘I see. In that case, they may have no bearing on this investigation at all. Nothing like a red herring to make things a wee bit interesting, eh? Is that it Tommy?’

  ‘No Guv,’ said Cole, reaching for his notebook. ‘Not by a long chalk. Numbers. For someone who ran a bar he wasn’t what you might call, sociable. Practical, more like. Dull, even. Dentist, doctor, locksmith, Tiffin Tin, that’s the Indian takeaway, Oriental Chef, that’s the Chinese, garage in Woodford, bloke called Chris, turns out he’s the manager at the bar, and half a dozen numbers for someone called Sheba.’

  ‘Sheba?’ said Munro. ‘Either royalty or a cat. Why six numbers? Why not the one?’

  ‘Who knows, but I can tell you this, we tried all the numbers on the phone, see, and they’re all legit, they all work, except for the ones attributed to Sheba. They’re all dead.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘They’re mobiles. Pay as you go. Every one of them. Each one, a different network.’

  Munro stood suddenly, turned towards the window and gazed pensively down towards the green.

  ‘This Sheba,’ he said, ‘does not want to be traced. She’s clever.’

  ‘She?’ said Cole.

  ‘Aye. She. The Queen of Sheba. I’m beginning to think Farnsworth-Brown was her Solomon.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Guv.’

  ‘The Queen of Sheba, Tommy, had everything a girl could want, not just power and a country to rule over, no, she was clever, too, clever, beautiful and, above all, mysterious, a bit of an enigma, you might say. She was drawn to Solomon, not for his wealth, but for his mind. He was wise beyond his years, a gift bestowed upon him by God himself. He had the answer to everything.’

  ‘Right,’ said Cole, shrugging his shoulders. ‘So, you’re saying this Farnsworth-Brown was a bit of an intellectual?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘And this Sheba, she was his, kind of, muse?’

  ‘Other way round, I think, Tommy. What was the last call he made?’

  Sergeant Cole glanced at his notebook.

  ‘Er, last call he made was to… Oriental Chef. Takeaway.’

  ‘What?’ said Munro, turning on his heels. ‘Not her? Not Sheba?’

  ‘Nope. All the calls logged as Sheba were incoming. And the last time she called him was six days ago, last Thursday, at 6:22pm.’

  ‘Charlie,’ said Munro, excitedly, ‘when did that nice Scottish gentleman say he saw him last?’

  ‘Erm…’

  ‘Quick, Charlie, come on, I’ve no time for dawdlers.’

  ‘Checking,’ said West, frantically flicking through her notebook. ‘I’m checking, here it is, according to the chimp...’

  ‘Detective Sergeant West,’ said Munro, raising his voice, ‘the term is PCSO. I’ll not have derogatory slang in my office, do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Sir,’ said West, recoiling. ‘According to the PCSO, they passed on the stairs… oh, last Thursday. About half six, he said, quarter to seven.’

  ‘Tommy. GPS. Did he have his phone with him last Thursday?’

  ‘No, Guv. It was at his place.’

  ‘Damn. Did they find any other locations on the phone, any residential addresses?’

  ‘Nope. He was about as adventurous as his social life. Creature of habit. Flitted between his house and Shoreditch.’

  ‘Maybe he turned his phone off a lot,’ ventured West. ‘Save batteries, that’s why there’s nothing from the GPS?’

  ‘Nice try Charlie,’ said Munro. ‘but here’s another nugget for you to squirrel away. Your smartphone, even when it’s switched off and the GPS isn’t active, ‘pings’ the phone masts every seven seconds, or thereabouts, which means we can tell, roughly, where you are, or where you’ve been. However, with the phone on and the GPS enabled, we can pinpoint you, track you, even, to within a couple a metres.’

  ‘You are joking? But that’s invasion of privacy, why isn’t this public knowledge?’

  ‘Oh, but it is, lassie. You just have to know where to find it.’

  ‘So,’ said West. ‘What do we do now? Appeal, posters, that kind of thing?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Munro, agitated. ‘It’s too soon. No, we’ll wait. 48 hours. We’ll wait.’

  He turned to the window, hands clasped behind his back, and stared blankly into space.

  ‘There has to be someone else,’ he muttered. ‘A fellow doesn’t run a bar and live like a hermit, it’s a sociable occupation. There must be someone else we should be talking to. Char
lie, when are his folks due back?’

  ‘Today, no yesterday, or was it tomorrow, I can check, hold on.’

  ‘Och, Charlie, you’re trying my patience, you know that? Give Sergeant Cole the number. Tommy, wee favour please, find out when they’re back, quick as you can.’

  ‘Guv.’

  ‘Now, Charlie, where do they live?’

  ‘Erm, Abingdon. I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I know,’ said West, cringing. ‘I mean, I know. Abingdon. Near Oxford.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Munro. ‘It’s not far. Wee trip up the A40, be there in no time.’

  ‘They’re home, Guv,’ said Tommy. ‘Landed this morning.’

  ‘Good. Right, lassie, get going, it’s late.’

  West grabbed her coat and bag.

  ‘Sir. Clock Court,’ she said. ‘Is it worth coming back once I’ve had a look?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Munro. ‘You take yourself off home, and get some rest. I want you here early, we’re away to Abingdon, first thing.’

  Tired and down-trodden, West stood alone in the car park, her enthusiasm for detecting on the wane. Clock Court, by the eerie glow of the yellow street lamps, had lost its appeal as a complex of over-priced apartments. It looked, instead, more like the mournful, haunting asylum it once was. She cast an eye around the building, no more than a cursory glance, and concluded, in the absence of any security cameras, that it was time to leave.

  The Duke was doing a brisk trade, packed with thirty-somethings sipping prosecco and deriding the opening of yet another supermarket on the High Street. A familiar figure, wearing a tweed jacket and college scarf, was leaning on the wrong side of the bar. He caught her eye, pushed through the crowd, and walked over.

  ‘This is a pleasant surprise,’ he said, with a grin. ‘Wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not.’

  ‘You are now,’ said West, brusquely. ‘You finished?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Come on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Shoreditch. I know a nice, cosy place we can go.’

  CHAPTER 7

  “DID YOU KNOW WHAT SHE’D DONE?”

  Yes. Of course I knew. Found out by accident, really. What I mean is, she didn’t give me this serious look one night and say ‘listen, there’s something you ought to know, something I need to tell you’. An opportunity presented itself and she welcomed it. She was positively beaming, in fact. Her face, full of excitement. It was like she’d been on some wonderfully exotic adventure and couldn’t wait to tell me all about it.

  We’d finished dinner and I, being the ever thankful guest, offered to clear away the dishes, as usual. An offer, based on my previous efforts, which she politely declined for no other reason that, in her eyes, I would never be able to do it right. It simply wasn’t in me to keep a count of how many wipes of the sponge I made, or whether I was doing it in a clockwise direction, let alone knowing exactly where in the cupboards everything lived, so I poured us some more wine, left her to it and went to the lounge.

  There’s a side table, just inside the door, where she kept an old anglepoise lamp and a box. I accidentally knocked it as I brushed by. No big deal, it hardly moved, but the box was out of true, didn’t line up with the edge of the table anymore, so I thought I’d better straighten it up before she came in. It was a cigar box, wooden, with ‘Cohiba’ on the top, ‘Cohiba Siglo No.1’. A Siglo’s a small cigar, not one of those ridiculously large things that Hollywood would have you believe everyone on Wall Street smokes. Anyway, I straightened the box, made sure it was square with the table, and that’s when I realised it wasn’t empty. Well, curiosity got the better of me. I had a feeling there wouldn’t be any cigars in it, if anything, I was expecting it to house all manner of knick-knacks, you know, cotton reels, loose change, matches, an old biro or a couple of theatre tickets, that sort of thing. So I released the little, brass catch and opened it up. I didn’t think they were real at first, I thought they were edible, sweets, made from sugar, the kind of thing you’d buy at the seaside, or something she’d bought from a joke shop, after all, with her sense of humour, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I mean, no-one keeps fingers in a cigar box, do they? I mean, real fingers? Human fingers? Eight of them, all individually wrapped in clear, airtight bags. I was transfixed, intrigued. I contemplated giving them a gentle nudge, a prod, to see what they felt like, when in she walked. She didn’t shout, or close the box, or even question why I had my nose in her personal belongings, she just grinned and said something like ‘oh, you’ve found my souvenirs, then’. Souvenirs? Must have been one hell of a holiday, I thought.

  She sat beside me on the floor. I knew what was coming. Another tingle. It was like listening to a fairy-tale, not a first-hand description of body disposal. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t… concerned, if I didn’t think that I might be next. Fact is, I was so engrossed, I really didn’t care.

  He was, in her words, ‘no-one important’, just some chap she’d met by chance. They’d been out together a couple of times, he was okay at first, genial, polite, they got on well, he knew lots of stuff about everything, one of society’s intelligentsia, but it wasn’t long before he showed his true colours and things turned sour. He wasn’t violent, or abusive, not in the physical sense. He was stubborn, pig-headed. A control freak. He got on her nerves, telling her what she should eat, commenting on her wardrobe and berating her for being late, so she finished it. Don’t blame her, all that after a couple of dates, I’d have done the same. I know now, that what she said, wasn’t strictly true, it wasn’t just a couple of weeks, nor was it just a couple of dates, but it doesn’t matter now. I’m not going to hold it against her. Anyway, he must have had selective hearing because, despite being told to piss off, he kept hounding her, demanding to know why she wasn’t at his beck and call, so she relented. Agreed to see him one more time. Sort things out for good. They met at his place. As usual, he’d made no effort to smarten himself up, didn’t even bother to take her coat when she arrived. The first thing he said when he opened the door was ‘did you bring food? I’m hungry’. He was, what might call, a bit of a slob. A rich, lazy, misogynistic slob. Fortunately, she’d gone prepared, a couple of bottles of Rioja and some chorizo. They sat and talked, about him mainly, about how hard he worked and how she should show him a little more respect because he was so wealthy. Red rag. Bull. He turned his nose up at the wine, wasn’t used to drinking, apparently, but in the absence of anything else, she finally coaxed him into it, and he dived right in. She was laughing when she told me about it, said she’d never seen anyone so tipsy after a single glass, he was practically hammered. Didn’t stop him polishing off the second bottle, though. On his own, after which, he collapsed on the sofa and passed out, which was, conveniently, exactly what she had planned, had hoped, would happen.

  She unpacked her bag while he slept. Ground sheets, disposable decorator’s overalls, rubber gloves, airtight storage bags and the cigar box. She pulled on the overalls, spread the ground sheets over the floor and fetched a bucket from under the sink. She took a Vacutainer needle from the cigar box, it’s one of those needles they use when you give a blood sample, but instead of attaching a vial to collect a sample, she attached a plastic hose and stuck the other end in the bucket. He was out cold, didn’t even feel the needle go in. Brachial artery. Upper arm. Just above the elbow. Then out it flowed. Ten and a half pints of Type O. Took just over a minute. That’s all. Just over a minute to drain the very life from his body. He went peacefully, I mean, he was none the wiser. Just faded away, blissfully unaware that his trip to the land of nod was one-way only.

  The blood was flushed down the toilet bowl, followed by an entire bottle of bleach. Then out came the scalpel. I always thought you’d need something like a chainsaw to chop up a corpse, but not so. She borrowed a bread knife from the kitchen but apart from that, she did it all with that scalpel. Amazing really. He wasn’t all bad, she’d said, it wasn’t his fault he was
a complete arse. He’d had his good points. His hands. He had nice hands. Unfortunately, all they were good for, once she’d finished, was giving the thumbs-up. She was there for hours. Patiently, methodically, painstakingly taking him apart, joint by joint, bagging up the bits as she went. The feet, the lower legs, the knees, the thighs, his pelvis, his hands, what was left of them, lower arms, upper arms, his head, his big head, and his torso. That was the only bit which gave her grief, thanks to his 48” chest. She said it was like trying to stuff a duvet back in the bag it came in, but she managed, eventually. There was a look of smug satisfaction on her face, a naughty twinkle in her eye, when she told me he looked like a kit of parts, waiting to reassembled with a tube of glue and a couple of stitches. I don’t know what she did with him, unless she’s got some bloody big cigar boxes somewhere, I mean, what do you do with stuff like that? Everything else, the ground sheets, overalls, his clothes, even the bucket, she took to her allotment and burned them in the incinerator. Probably on the rhubarb now, I expect.

  CHAPTER 8

  ARNOLD CIRCUS, SHOREDITCH. 6:52am

  West, resisting the urge to open her eyes, moaned as a pneumatic drill pounded the back of her head. She rolled over, blocking the harsh, morning sun from her face and stretched out an arm. The sheets beside her were rumpled and bare. The pillow, hollowed out where a head had lain, reeked of pomade. She sat up and listened for the shower running, the toilet flushing or the tinkle of a spoon in a coffee cup. There was nothing. The flat was still. Relieved that she was alone, she fell from the bed, picked herself up and stumbled to the kitchen. Her stomach churned in disgust at the lingering stench of chilli sauce and raw onion and the sight of two, half-eaten kebabs, their contents smeared across the table. An empty bottle of Smirnoff Blue lay on the draining board. Beside it, a pair of knickers. She rubbed her eyes, searched half-heartedly for the packet of paracetamol and flicked the kettle on. The mirror did not do her any favours. She averted her eyes and almost gagged as she brushed her teeth. The phone whistled. Missed call. Time: 7:06am. ‘Oh, shit!’ she groaned, as she frantically searched for her jeans. ‘Shit! shit! shit!’ The kettle reached a bubbling crescendo as the door slammed behind her.