Kennedy 01 - Into the Shadows

by Shirley Wells

  She hoped not. In the midst of her thoughts, mostly bad, was that she still found Max very attractive. In anyone else, the drinking, the long working days, the lack of regular meals and the way he constantly drove himself would have taken their toll. Nothing had though. He wasn’t handsome in the accepted sense of the word; his nose was a little crooked, he had a tiny scar beneath his right eye, and his mouth had a cynical twist to it. Dark hair, swept back from a face that could look arrogant and aloof one moment and as gentle as a playful puppy the next, was greying rapidly, she noticed.

  ‘You’re not prepared to spare a couple of hours?’

  ‘No.’ If it were only a couple of hours of her time, she might consider it. It wouldn’t be, though. She would get involved, not through choice but through necessity. She always had.

  His plate empty, Max looked at his watch, refilled his glass and topped up Jill’s.

  ‘OK.’ He was thoughtful. ‘So why do you reckon he’s not saying anything?’

  “I can’t answer that, Max. Shock perhaps. Who knows?

  Has he asked for a lawyer?’

  ‘He hasn’t even bloody coughed.’

  ‘What’s his father said?’

  ‘Precious little. About as much as anyone would say if they’d come home to find that their son had slit their wife’s throat.’

  Jill swallowed hard.

  ‘He seems torn between weeping at the injustice of it all/

  Max told her, ‘and praying for all our souls. Other than that, he’s just said over and over that he can’t believe it.

  Jill, you know how things are. We need to get Michael talking - and quick.’

  ‘And I’m sure you will.’ She smiled. ‘You find me an eighteenyear-old who can’t talk the balls off a buffalo.’

  Max returned the smile. “I just have.’

  ‘No.’

  With a heavy sigh, Max drained his glass and got to his feet.

  ‘Lock that bloody door,’ he said as he kissed her cheek.

  “I will.’

  She almost had the door closed behind him when his phone rang and he stepped back inside to answer it.

  ‘How come you horrors are still up?’ he asked the caller, his voice warm and loving enough for tears to spring to Jill’s eyes. She glanced across at the mantelpiece where a framed photograph showed Max’s sons, Harry and Ben, smiling into the camera. God, she missed them.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Max was saying, ‘I’ll get the tickets tomorrow.

  Promise. Now, go to sleep and I’ll see you later … well, no, probably not tonight … er, no, probably not in the morning either … yes, OK … love you, too.’

  He ended the call and looked at Jill, his expression saying more than words ever could.

  ‘How are they?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.

  ‘Missing you.’

  ‘Missing you more like,’ she replied briskly, ‘and missing their mum.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to believe.’ He stared at her.

  ‘One of these days, you’ve got to offload all this guilt, Jill.

  Yes, we fell in love while I was still married. It happens.

  And yes, Rodney Hill committed suicide. Sadly, that happens, too. It’s a tough world, kiddo.’

  She refused to discuss it. ‘You smell like a distillery, Max.

  I trust you’re not driving.’

  ‘Jesus, you’ve got a nose like a bloodhound. I’ve had the smallest Scotch you’ve ever seen, just enough to make the glass damp, and a glass, two glasses, of that stuff you call wine. And as it happens, I’m not driving.’

  Was he drinking less these days? She had to admit he looked relaxed and very much in control. He was good at his job, and it wasn’t an easy role. As senior investigating officer, he needed to be the strategist and the tactician, responsible for every aspect of the inquiry. Also, because of the emotive nature of this crime, he would be working in the full glare of publicity.

  ‘Jill, you can blame everything that went wrong between us on what you like - the fact I was drinking heavily, Rodney Hill committing suicide, me shagging that -‘ He broke off. ‘There’s only one thing that screwed us up, screwed both of us up, and that’s Valentine.’

  She shuddered at the mention of the animal’s name.

  ‘We’ll get Valentine,’ he went on.

  ‘You were pulled off the case,’ she reminded him, but he simply shrugged that off as a mere technicality.

  ‘Dead or alive, and preferably the former, we’ll get him/

  he vowed. ‘Off the case or not, with me it’s personal.’

  She knew that, had known it for a long time. Never mind that hundreds of officers from three police forces were after Valentine, to Max it was personal. Which was exactly why they’d pulled him off the case.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘we have to put Alice Trueman’s killer behind bars. It’s budgets, resources, and all the rest of the crap. I don’t have time to piss about with Michael Trueman and I need all the help I can get.’

  He touched her chin in the lightest of gestures.

  ‘Meredith will be giving you a call, Jill, and I’d think long and hard about it if I were you. You want Valentine off the streets as much as anyone. He’s taken everything away from you - your work, your confidence, even the man you love.’

  ‘Loved. Past tense,’ she snapped back.

  ‘If you say so.’ Whistling tunelessly, he walked down her drive and headed back to the vicarage.

  Chapter Five

  Just after midnight, Jill padded downstairs and poured herself a large Scotch. She wasn’t a great lover of whisky, but it sometimes helped her sleep. That was something else she’d learned from Max.

  The wind had increased and it was rattling her bedroom window. She must get that fixed. Listening to it, and waiting for the loose roof tiles to crash to the ground was merely adding to her sense of unease.

  It wasn’t only the wind and wondering who might have wanted Alice Trueman dead that was keeping her awake.

  There was that photograph, too. She should have spoken to someone about it. Not Max necessarily, he’d be far too busy right now, but someone on the force. It was on the coffee table, wrapped in a plastic cover. There was probably no point in that as it was unlikely to have fingerprints on it. Nor was there any point in ignoring it and hoping it would go away.

  Perhaps she should have mentioned it to Max.

  What had he said? That she must stop living in the past?

  How was she supposed to do that when the past wouldn’t let go?

  He’d also said she must unload all her guilt and yes, she would admit to a fair amount of guilt. Who wouldn’t?

  There was her relationship with Max for a start. She could still remember meeting him for the first time, could remember his boss introducing them. There had been a stomach-clenching pull of attraction that had had her eyes darting to the third finger of his left hand to see if he wore a wedding ring. He did.

  Yet, later that day, they’d gone out for a drink. Three days later, Max had been in her bed. It was convenient to blame Max for that. In reality though, it had just happened.

  They’d both been powerless to stop it. And that, she thought as she took a swallow of whisky, sounded like something from the romance paperbacks her sister devoured.

  What she hadn’t known, what Max hadn’t told her, was that Linda was ill. To be fair, even Max hadn’t known just how ill.

  They’d been at Jill’s flat, sharing a bottle of wine, their arms wrapped tightly around each other, when the phone call came telling Max that Linda had been admitted to hospital.

  As far as Jill was concerned, that should have been the end of their relationship. Linda was his wife; she was the one who needed him. Max, however, could be very persuasive.

  He also lived by the premise that life was too short for hang-up s.

  A little over a year after Linda’s death, Jill moved in with him and the boys. It was the happiest time of her life.

  If
she’d given birth to the boys herself, she couldn’t have loved them more.

  Max had been working on the Valentine case, and the long hours had taken their toll. Jill had been working on the same case, but she’d been able to work more sociable hours. Max had worked through the night many times and the strain soon began to tell on their relationship.

  ‘We’ve got the bastard!’ Max had come home late one night and danced her around the kitchen. ‘We’ve got Valentine, Jill. It’s all over, sweetheart.’

  The relief was so great it was like finding a cure for cancer. Life was wonderful again. The sky was a deeper blue, the grass a lusher green. Birds sang again.

  Four weeks after his arrest, however, Rodney Hill was found hanging in his prison cell. Less than a month after that, Valentine struck again.

  The cancer was back and the birds were silent. Max started drinking heavily: Jill was plagued by nightmares.

  Valentine! Jill wished she’d never heard of him. Over the years, there had been seven murders. The attacks took place at intervals of anything from three months to a year apart, and the killer had struck in Blackburn, Manchester, Leeds, Blackpool, Preston, Nelson and Southport.

  Each of the victims, all small-time prostitutes working the streets, had been strangled. When they were dead, the killer - with a skill that was frighteningly impressive carefully removed a dozen heart-shaped pieces of skin

  from their breasts and abdomens. The hearts were uniform in size, about two inches at their widest point. They were neat, almost a work of art.

  Hundreds of men fitting Jill’s profile had been questioned, and then there was a breakthrough when traces of Hill’s semen were found on a murdered prostitute. Nothing had been discovered on any of the other bodies, and they had assumed he was getting careless. Hill admitted to having been with the prostitute, but he strongly denied murdering her or any of the others.

  For Rodney Hill, suicide was the only answer.

  Jill had dreaded going to sleep, terrified by the nightmares in which she would be running for miles, all exits barred by Rodney Hill’s body swinging wildly from a rope. She would wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, her heart racing, to see Max sitting in the chair by the bedroom window, a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.

  Between them, for their own different reasons, they had been unable to handle it and their relationship had started to disintegrate.

  One day in June, Max came home and told her he’d spent the previous night in a ‘sordid little hotel’ with someone else. For Jill, it had signalled the end.

  There was no point, she decided as she refilled her glass, going over and over it. It happened. It was over.

  Shortly after midnight, her phone rang. After the usual panic thought - one of her parents or her sister had been involved in an accident - she knew it was Max. A terrier with a bone had nothing on Max.

  ‘Michael Trueman/ he greeted her, ‘who was he with at the party?’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Max. I love being woken at this time of the morning.’

  ‘Oh, hell. Sorry. I’d forgotten it was - hell, is it midnight?’

  ‘It is.’ She sighed. ‘And as far as I know, he wasn’t with anyone. Well, his parents, I suppose. I don’t really know anything about him, I told you that. The first time I met him, I was struggling to get my fuel cap unlocked at the filling station. A couple of lads work inside on the tills and he came outside to see if he could help. I wasn’t holding anyone up - there were only two of us getting, or trying to get, petrol - so I put that down to him being helpful. The sort of lad who’d instinctively help out. He’ll give up his seat on a bus or train for women or the elderly. Anyway, he sprayed something on the lock - WD40?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘The next time I saw him was a couple of weeks later, the same place. I handed him my credit card, thanked him for his help, told him I’d had no problems with the lock since, cursed the weather and left.’

  She thought back to her third meeting with him, just three days ago.

  ‘At the party, I was chatting to his parents. It was all the usual inane stuff people say at these things. Alice spotted him across the room and waved him over to meet me. When I said we’d already met, his father quickly - too quickly, I thought - pointed out that it was only a Saturday job.’

  ‘Impressions?’ Max asked.

  ‘A normal eighteenyear-old - except I thought he looked closer to sixteen or seventeen. Polite. Friendly.

  Helpful. Very well mannered. Relaxed. Happy. There weren’t many young people at the party so he was stuck chatting to older people. I assume they were his parents’

  friends. Either way, it didn’t seem to bother him.’ She thought for a moment, but there was nothing else she could tell Max. Had she seen the future, she might have paid more attention, but she hadn’t. ‘Sorry, but there’s nothing else.’

  ‘How did he seem with his mother?’

  ‘Relaxed. At ease. As if they had a close mother-son relationship. He seemed the same with his father, too.’

  ‘He’s not very relaxed at the moment.’

  ‘Has he said anything yet?’

  ‘Not a word. Right,’ he went on briskly, ‘put that bottle of Scotch away and get to bed. Take it from me, kiddo, the drugs don’t work.’

  Before she could even deny having a bottle of Scotch in the house, he’d cut the connection.

  Why was Michael refusing to talk? Either he was guilty, and she’d already dismissed that, or suffering from shock, or protecting someone. So who could that someone be?

  Chapter Six

  Max didn’t know what he expected to find at the vicarage.

  If he hadn’t found anything yesterday, he was unlikely to find anything today. He knew something about this case didn’t add up, but he doubted he’d find the answer in this large, gloomy house. Perhaps he was passing time until Michael Trueman talked.

  He’d overheard Phil Meredith on the phone to Jill earlier.

  ‘You know how things are, Jill/ Meredith had said in the coaxing way he had. He was a hard-bitten individual, without an ounce of sentimentality, yet Max wouldn’t be surprised if she’d fallen for it. ‘I’ve got all my available officers on this case and I still don’t have enough. The last thing we need is a murder when we’ve still got Valentine on the loose.’

  Max had no idea what her response to that was, but Meredith was quick to argue.

  ‘Total bollocks. You’re a forensic psychologist with qualifications up to your neck and a lot of experience behind you.’

  Max couldn’t decide if Meredith was a great believer in offender profiling, or if it was a case of clutching at straws.

  It was difficult to get a straight answer from him, although it was true they needed all the help they could get. The public was growing impatient and edgy, comparing Valentine to the Yorkshire Ripper - or, more accurately, comparing the force’s lack of success with the well-documented mistakes in that case …

  After a few words with a forensic chap, Max stood in the hallway, gazing down at the bloodstains on the carpet, walls and even the ceiling. These forensic bods went into too much detail for his liking but, according to the preliminary report, Michael Trueman - or someone else - had grabbed Alice Trueman from behind and slit her throat.

  The trachea and carotid arteries had been severed and death would have been almost immediate.

  It was a cold house. The heating was switched off now, but it had been working when he’d arrived yesterday and the old radiators hadn’t had much effect on such large rooms. It certainly wasn’t the sort of house where you ambled around naked on November afternoons. So why had Alice Trueman been in the hallway naked?

  He walked upstairs to the bathroom, a big, white room, functional rather than tasteful or cosy, but tidy.

  Max knew he was a slob, but this was too neat for comfort. In his own bathroom, shelves were covered in dust, shampoo drips were visible, toothpaste lingered on the wash basin, and white spots marked
the wood beneath the toothbrush holder. Here, there was no dust, and no soap marks or toothpaste dregs.

  So Alice Trueman had climbed out of the bath, presumably in so much of a hurry that she’d thrown her towel on the floor, then run downstairs to her killer.

  What would make a vicar’s wife run downstairs naked?

  Fear? Panic?

  Or had Michael, or someone else, entered the bathroom, threatened her, and chased her down the stairs?

  Alice Trueman had been a neat, organized person, that much was obvious. Also obvious was the fact that she didn’t go in for creams, potions and lots of make-up. There wasn’t even a mirror in the bathroom. A crucifix hung above a wooden cabinet, but there was no mirror. Surely everyone needed a mirror in the bathroom. How did Jonathan Trueman shave without a mirror?

  Max had no answers, only questions, and he walked into the master bedroom where again there wasn’t a speck of dust to be seen or a single item out of place. It was a vicarage, where perhaps a simpler existence was led, but surely there ought to be some signs of life. There should be opened books, a radio, or shoes lying on the floor.

  The Truemans employed a cleaner, Molly Turnbull, but she’d been on holiday for the last four days, visiting her sister in the Lake District. Understandably, she’d been too shocked to help. She said she hardly ever saw Michael, or the vicar, but had been fond of Mrs Trueman.

  ‘A saint, she was,’ she’d sobbed.

  One would need to be a saint, Max decided, to live in this mausoleum.

  He moved on to Michael’s bedroom and was struck by the sadness of the room. At the same age, Max’s bedroom had been festooned with posters of semi-naked women.

  Old sporting trophies, busy gathering dust for years, had sat on shelves. Loose records, the sleeves lost long ago, had vied for space with half-empty bags of crisps, Mars bar wrappers and rotting apple cores. Admittedly, Max’s mother hadn’t employed a cleaner and, even if she had, she would never have lived with the shame of allowing her into her sons’ bedrooms. All the same, Michael’s room looked sad. Apart from a few books, all stored neatly in order of size on the bookcase, a brush, a comb and a can of deodorant on a set of drawers, there was nothing to say anyone used the room. There was no hi-fi, no CDs, no posters, and no mirror, either. Nothing. How did an eighteenyear-old practise his air guitar without a mirror?