by Neil Cross
‘Attach the parcel to the rope.’
He did not recognize the voice.
He looked round, then up. A rope was uncoiling in loops from the bridge above him. Its end dangled at face height. It looked like a climbing rope. Difficult to trace, of course; paid for in cash at Millet’s. To the end was attached a climber’s D clip: the kind of fastener a mountaineer or an abseiler might secure himself to.
There is something to do with trains and water. She is in a shed or a hut.
The handset crackled again.
‘Attach the loop at the top of the parcel to the D clip and secure it.’
Holloway stuck the handset in his pocket and set the parcel on the footpath. He took hold of the rope—
She is in a shed or a hut.
—and began to unscrew the restraining arm of the D clip.
The rope hung like a plumb line. It ascended into darkness. He could not imagine who stood at its end.
He yearned for the security of the Capri, to which he had developed a fond attachment. He longed for it, abandoned and unlocked near the allotments.
She is in a shed or a hut.
‘Attach the loop at the top of the parcel to the D clip and secure it.’
The sheds on the allotment overlooked the steep embankment. From one of their small windows, it might be possible to see the embankment, the river, even the railway line on the far bank.
There is something to do with trains and water. She is in a shed or a hut.
‘Attach the loop at the top of the parcel to the D clip and secure it.’
He pressed the TALK button.
He whispered: ‘Derek? Derek, is that you? Is that who this is?’
‘Attach the fucking loop at the top of the parcel to the D clip and secure it.’
Although the embankment was muddy and steep, Holloway thought he could get to the allotments quicker than whoever stood in the darkness above him.
‘Is that you, Derek?’ he said. ‘Are you up there?’
‘I’ll ask once more. Remember your warnings. Attach the loop at the top of the parcel to the D clip and secure it.’
Holloway cupped the D clip in his hand and held it there, feeling its weight, the slack loop of rope.
Stranger things had happened. You couldn’t spend twenty years as a copper and not hear stories.
There is something to do with trains and water. She is in a shed or a hut.
Men he respected, thoughtful, hunched over pints, sharing strange anecdotes about people who knew things they could not have. Cases solved. Bodies located.
People saved.
If he could recover Joanne, he could make everything all right. At worst, he could buy her silence with his own.
She is in a shed. She is alive.
He closed the D ring in his fist and jerked down. He was rewarded with a surprised grunt and the sound of feet scrabbling for purchase on gravel above him.
‘Fuck you, Derek,’ he said. He picked up the parcel and ran.
The embankment was no easier to climb than it had been to descend, but at least he was able to use both hands, slipping his wrist through the loop at the top of the parcel. Tufts of grass and scrub bore his weight: his feet slipped this way and that. His breath wheezed and rattled. He saw erupting spirals of colour.
He heard a small engine being kicked into life on the railway bridge, probably a motor scooter. But by then he stood on the crest of the embankment. Briefly, he became snared and disorientated in a bramble bush, on the other side of which he found a muddy path leading back to the road. Once there, he took another few seconds to orientate himself. Then he ran at speed to the allotments.
He clambered over a collapsed chainlink fence. There were eighteen plots, two rows of nine. Each terminated in a decrepit hut big enough to keep a few tools in, some packet seeds, perhaps a kettle and a mug or two. Peas climbed bamboo poles. There were neat rows of cabbages and potatoes, plants he could not identify. Wet soil clegged up the soles of his shoes as he ran to the door of the first shed, calling her name. The rotten door ripped easily from its hinges. The shed smelled pleasantly of soil, dampness, old wood and paraffin. But there was nobody inside.
He swore, ran to the next shed, wrenched its flimsy door aside. Then a third. A fourth.
The Motorola handset buzzed. A stitch pierced Holloway’s ribs. He bent double, one hand resting on his knee, and put the handset to his ear.
Holloway could hear the moped’s engine, idling in the background.
The man on the line said: ‘I hope you know you’ve killed her.’
He wanted to answer, to say something, but his breath was too laboured.
‘I’m going to rip out her windpipe with my fingers.’
Holloway looked at the sky. Through a clearing in the clouds he saw the glinting of an aeroplane’s lights. He wondered where it was headed. Gravity seemed to have weakened around him.
He pressed the SPEAK button.
‘Please, Derek,’ he said. But there was no reply.
He heard the moped’s engine straining as it droned away.
Holloway watched the movement of clouds across the moon.
He wondered if it might be possible to explain what he had done.
Some part of the kidnapper’s purpose—Derek Bliss’s purpose—had been to enact a contest. To taunt and humiliate. The police. Holloway.
Perhaps the psychic who called him had been an accomplice. Perhaps this is simply what Bliss sought to prove: that a desperate man will believe anything.
Holloway took a last look round. He thought about what Bliss knew.
Then he began to run.
Part Two
The Road to Ruin
At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them.
At core, women are afraid men will kill them.
Gavin De Becker, ‘The Gift of Fear’
12
Not long after James Ireland picked up the phone and told his superiors that DS William Holloway might not be coming back, an anonymous tip-off to the Evening Post led the police to Joanne Grayling’s body. She was in a hut alongside a disused railway siding just outside Keynsham, a small town between Bristol and Bath.
Joanne’s naked cadaver was propped against the wall in a sitting position. Her arms had been hacked off at the elbows and placed upright in two mock-crystal vases that had been placed on a low table in the far corner. She had been decapitated and her head placed in her lap. The officer who found her screeched like a child when his torch beam passed across her eyes.
In lipstick, the word KATE had been written on her body in words that ran from pubis to breastbone.
In the weeks that followed, Shepherd barely left his attic room. In his stripy cotton pyjamas, he looked like a cartoon hippopotamus.
Every morning Lenny brought him a pile of newspapers. It was the Sun which first named the police officer assigned to deliver the ransom as the prime suspect. A predictable and ferocious uproar followed. James Ireland’s judgement was called publicly into question. Questions were asked in the Commons. The home secretary and the chief constable reiterated their absolute support.
With the newspapers Lenny brought a pack of Rich Tea biscuits and a chipped, bone-china mug of tea on a stained tray commemorating the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.
Shepherd scanned the headlines.
The Avon and Somerset Constabulary commenced a damage-limitation exercise whose effect was limited by the collective furore. The public was reminded that nobody had yet been charged with the murder of Joanne Grayling, and that several lines of investigation were currently being pursued. But the assembled media were not in the mood to doubt. When a costly manhunt failed to locate Holloway (leading to the widely-voiced accusation that it had been organized solely for its public relations value), the media’s carnivorous attentions
turned to his estranged wife and daughter, who moved first into protective custody, then hiding.
Since Holloway continued to be nowhere, the police announced their wish to interview two members of the public who might have information helpful to the inquiry. They were particularly keen to speak to the caller who tipped them off to Joanne’s whereabouts. Additionally, they wanted to speak to the clairvoyant who had called Holloway at the station. This anonymous caller had described Joanne’s location in some detail. It was intimated that the two might be the same man—perhaps somebody who knew something about the killing, but was afraid to come forward. Possibly the calls were made by an innocent witness, or witnesses. Either way, the police wanted to speak to the man, or men in question. He was assured repeatedly, in the press and on television, that he was in no legal trouble and his anonymity was guaranteed. But in the hope that somebody might recognize and identify his voice, a recording of the clairvoyant’s call was to be played on that month’s BBC Crimewatch.
The programme went out the following Thursday.
Rachel Taylor settled down on the sofa and prepared to watch. She’d taken an interest in the case when first she realized that, not long ago, the prime suspect had sat on that very sofa, sipping a glass of water. It seemed absurd that William Holloway, whom she had taken to be a temperate man, had done something so bestial.
At night she dreamed of testifying on his behalf.
That Holloway had disappeared with a bag of money connected him to Andrew. In the moments before going to sleep, or mesmerized at her computer, she sometimes wondered if there might not be some deeper interdependence, something that rippled through time and linked their two souls. Perhaps Holloway had looked too hard for Andrew, had shuffled through those photographs too often; had tapped Andrew’s mind and understood too readily whatever it was he found there. Andrew’s suicide and the murder of Joanne Grayling resonated with a muttered implication, a tremor like the drowsy shudder of the earth beneath her feet. At night the house seemed to rustle with the movement of spirits. For the first time in many years, she slept with the light on.
Alone of her three children, Steven joined her to watch the programme. He was so unlike his more robust, non-identical twin: to his brother Adam the notion that something might be wrong with mum was inconceivable and not to be borne. Annie was sleeping over at a friend’s. She saw her father’s death as a kind of mendacity. She had not yet acknowledged that Andrew’s suicide cast complex new shadows in their family history. Because there was nobody else to blame for this sudden, unlatched vertigo, she blamed her mother. Rachel was baffled by the ill-tempered reticence of her daughter’s grief, which was complicated further by the hormonal el Niño her adolescence was turning into.
So Rachel and Steven Taylor watched Crimewatch curled up alone together on the big, red sofa. They had Coke and wine and Doritos with guacamole dip.
The presenter reminded them that they were to hear the tape of a phone call made by a self-professed psychic to DS William Holloway, shortly before the murder of Joanne Grayling. Anyone who recognized the voice could phone Crimewatch free of charge.
Against the visual clue of rotating tape spool in close-up, Holloway said his name against the background hiss.
(‘Is that him, mum?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Shhh,’ and nudged him in the ribs with her elbow.)
How can I help?
Is this the officer with red hair?
This is Detective Sergeant William Holloway.
Please. Do you have red hair?
Well. Auburn, possibly.
[Laughter in the background]
Sir, I am about to replace the handset.
Please. Don’t … Joanne is alive.
Who is this?
Please listen. I know how this sounds.
Sir. Do you have information pertaining to the whereabouts of Joanne Grayling?
She’s alive. She’s … in a shed or a hut. It’s dark and she’s afraid. But he hasn’t hurt her.
I see.
Please. I know how this must sound. But please listen to me. There is something to do with trains. There is something to do with trains and water.
Rachel leaned towards the television. She watched through narrowed eyes. She indicated with her hand that Steven should keep quiet. He lay an uncrunched Dorito silently on the arm of the sofa.
She is in a shed or a hut. She is alive.
‘That’s Andrew’s voice,’ she said. ‘That’s your dad.’
Steven reached out and touched her shoulder.
‘It just sounds like him, mum,’ he said.
Suddenly, savagely, her eyes welled. She hugged her boy fiercely. But she looked over his shoulder all the same, committing to memory the number on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
Shepherd, Lenny and Eloise watched the programme in a shared state of disbelief.
Eloise heard out the tape of her tenant’s voice and stood.
‘Well, that’s just great,’ she said. ‘Thank you both, very much.’
Lenny said: ‘If it’s all just coincidence, what are you so bothered about?’
‘Because you’ve made me feel involved,’ she said. ‘And I’m not.’ She paused in the doorway. ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘Go to the police.’
She left the room.
Lenny had no answer. He rolled a cigarette and looked at Shepherd, who sat with rigid spine, hands splayed on knees, staring at the muted television. He could not fully appreciate that the police were actually looking for him. The absurdity and the humiliation were more than he was able to reconcile. Something under the surface of things had spun wildly out of control, something whose shape seemed to change each time he caught a glimpse of it in the corner of his eye.
He said: ‘Do I really sound like that?’
‘Sorry?’ said Lenny.
‘My accent. Is it that strong?’
Lenny looked at him strangely.
‘Yes,’ he said, and left the room.
Lenny followed Eloise to the kitchen. She was uncorking a bottle of wine. She poured a glass and drained it; refilled the glass and drained it again. Then she drew the back of a hand across her upper lip.
‘It’s just so stupid,’ she said.
She set the glass on the scarred kitchen table.
‘Anyway,’ she said with obscure bitterness. ‘Fuck it. What does it really matter? What’s one more dead girl, in the grand scheme of things?’
Joanne Grayling was buried in a small Church of England cemetery in Cheltenham. The funeral was attended by her extended family, university friends, school teachers and neighbours. After consultation with the chief constable, it was decided that no representative of the Avon and Somerset Constabulary would attend.
The churchyard was girdled by an eagerly sombre throng of onlookers, news reporters and local police. Her interment was the third lead story on the television news.
Along with many hundreds of others, Jack Shepherd sent flowers. He looked for them on TV, stacked against the low wall of the graveyard, close to the metal railings. But he didn’t see them.
13
The following Monday, Shepherd caught an early train to Bristol.
It squatted on the skyline, lowering at its returning son. As the train bisected its raggedy suburban edges, it opened its maw to receive him.
He stepped from the train. Temple Meades reared above him. Its interior was like an industrial tabernacle. He imagined it filled with steam and smoke. Men and women in Victorian dress.
Hiking the Adidas bag over his shoulder, he saw himself in the window of W. H. Smith. The image was transparent. He looked prophetic and spectral, towering over passers-by. His eyes were piggy and squinting behind the wire-framed granny glasses. Head shaved bald and wild beard shot through with grey.
The bitter, powdered old women in the
taxi rank kept a twisted eye on him. The accent had become foreign.
He caught a taxi to the police station. He watched Bristol go past. The Hippodrome. College Green. Park Street. The banks on Whiteladies Road.
The taxi dropped him outside the station. He waited before going in. The televised news broadcasts had made the building familiar, but its proximity had no effect on him. It was too studiously neutral, like a municipal library. The news crews had long departed.
Inside, it smelled like school. The desk sergeant hunched over a mug of milky tea and a tabloid newspaper. Shepherd approached the desk. The officer obscured the newspaper with a meaty forearm.
He greeted Shepherd with the irked cordiality of all men who wore epaulets.
Shepherd set the Adidas bag on the floor. He said: ‘I’m here to see Detective Inspector Ireland.’
DI Ireland was not available. The desk sergeant offered to find someone else.
Shepherd told the desk sergeant why he was there. The officer didn’t change his expression or miss a beat. ‘One moment,’ he said, and lifted the receiver on his desk phone. As he spoke, he glanced from Shepherd to the phone, from the phone to Shepherd.
Shepherd retreated. He planted himself in a moulded plastic chair too small to properly accommodate his bulk. While he waited, he tried to read the Guardian. His teeth hurt.
A middle-aged officer with cropped, thinning hair had emerged from behind the reinforced doorway before Shepherd had unfolded the sports section. The officer introduced himself as Sergeant Graham Newell.
Newell led Shepherd to a stale and windowless interview room. He invited him to sit at a cigarette-burned Formica table. They were joined by a young WPC.
Newell asked if he would like a drink. He said no.
Newell broke the seal on a new cassette and loaded the tape deck. He pressed RECORD. Then he introduced himself again. He named the WPC as Constable Hadley.
He read out Shepherd’s name and the date and time. Shepherd was given a full caution, then reminded that he had not been arrested. Actually, he’d begun to wonder. He was free to leave the station at any time. He was entitled to free and independent legal advice. If he wished, he could speak to a solicitor, on the telephone if he preferred. Newell asked if he understood. Shepherd nodded. Newell asked him to speak aloud for the tape. Shepherd said: ‘Yes.’