Killing Time

by Mark Roberts

  ‘I’m sorry, no. She went up to the bar and ordered a glass of Chianti which she paid for with a handful of ten- and twenty-pence pieces. Tom, my head barman, caught my eye when she was busy sorting out the money and mouthed, She’s already had a few. She wasn’t pissed but she wasn’t sober. OK, lady, said Tom. One drink and then that’s it, off you go. Tom reckons she understood exactly what she’d been told, but started acting like she’d just got off the boat.

  ‘So, she sits at the bar on this swivel chair, kind of half-turning it and eyeing up the territory, picking out which bloke or blokes looked likely. But that was the joke of it. Every man in there last night was with his wife or girlfriend, and there were no pairs or groups of lads in the place.

  ‘Terry Jackson, one of our regulars, a real gent, goes to the bar and she says, Excuse me. Your aftershave. I like it a lot. He thanked her for the compliment and she looked over her shoulder at Terry’s missus, smirking at her, Like I can have him off you in a flash. She started rattling the bottom of her glass against the bar and Terry, being the gent he is, bought her a drink. She stands up and kisses Terry on the cheek. Tension was sparking off from table to table by this point.’

  ‘Let me get this straight, Gino. She didn’t ask Terry to buy her a drink? He offered?’

  ‘Yeah, he offered, but she drew attention to herself.’

  ‘So, it’d be wrong to state that she deliberately hit on a married man?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far but, you know, it was all in the eyes. Another couple are sitting there minding their own business and the lady gets up and goes to the toilet. Her bloke gets up and goes to the bar. He starts talking to her while Tom’s pouring their drinks and they get laughing together and he offered to buy her a drink and she accepted but Tom said, No, I said one drink, you’ve had two, you’re taking the piss, love. The bloke’s girlfriend comes out of the toilet, sees her man rubbing shoulders with this woman and arguing the toss with Tom, so she walks straight out. He runs out of the bar after her. I said to Tom, Ten more minutes with this bitch here and we might as well close up for the night.

  ‘I confronted her. Get out! Don’t come back! You’re barred for life! At this point, she suddenly loses her ability to understand or speak the English language which she’d just used so well. So I pointed at the door. I looked around. All the women looked a lot happier. And she says to me, One phone call, then I go.

  ‘I walked to the door to let her out. She makes this really short call...’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Someone called Jay or Ray. According to Tom who listened in, she was pissed off with him because he was supposed to have met up with her in my bar. She asked him to pick her up and give her a ride home. When she closed the call down, I opened the door and she marched straight out. When I closed it after her, it was like the whole bar gave this massive sigh of relief.’ Gino fell silent and then muttered, ‘Otterspool Park? The poor cow.’

  ‘Did you see the car that she was picked up in?’ asked Cole.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any internal CCTV?’

  ‘I don’t need it. This is a classy bar. We don’t get trouble – well, hardly ever.’

  ‘Is Tom around?’

  ‘No, it’s his day off.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Gino. Call him up and pass him on to me.’

  ‘Happy to help,’ said Gino, dialling Tom’s number on the landline phone on his desk. ‘Tom, sorry to bother you, mate. I’ve got a copper called DC Cole with me in the office. He wants to talk to you about that floozie who rocked up last night.’

  Gino handed the phone to Cole.

  ‘Hi, Tom, thanks for your time,’ said Cole. ‘The woman in the white mini-skirt.’

  ‘Cougar, bit of a hottie.’

  ‘Did you catch her name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about when she spoke with the two men at the bar?’

  ‘It was all very flirty. I’d say they were coming on to her rather than the other way round. A lot of the regulars come into the bar with their wives and girlfriends playing the happily-ever-afters card. They like Gino’s because it’s local, convenient and you don’t get any out-and-out scallies. But I’ve seen the same men in city centre bars with other women.’

  ‘She definitely didn’t give anything away about who she was and where she lives or where she was from?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about the phone call she made before Gino showed her the door?’

  ‘I can remember it word for word because it was so short. I’ll be outside Gino’s on Aigburth Road. Come and pick me up, Ray. You were supposed to meet me there. What do you mean, you forgot?’

  ‘Ray?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, definitely Ray. What’s up?’

  ‘She was murdered approximately three hundred metres away from Gino’s Bar after she left. Absolutely and utterly beyond doubt, she said Ray?’

  ‘On my daughter’s life. Ray, it was Ray she asked to pick her up.’

  64

  9.25 pm

  ‘Take me for a walk. Take me for a walk.’

  Jasmine’s voice entered Raymond’s brain through the bone-dead centre of his forehead.

  ‘I can hear you loud and clear,’ said Raymond, finding it hard to walk down the stairs, with one hand on the rail and the other clutching the almost-empty bottle of vodka.

  ‘Take me for a walk. Take me for a walk now.’

  ‘I’ll take you for a walk now, just shut up, you’ve been nagging me for an hour.’

  ‘What was it like last night? Did you feel like a really big man? Did you laugh? Did she cry? Did you feel pumped up after shagging that foreign slag?’

  Raymond sat on the bottom stair and swigged back the last of the vodka.

  A purple light flashed to the left of his vision and when he turned his head to look at it, it turned red and was dripping from thin air onto the laminate flooring, a crimson pool growing wider and wider as each drop fell onto the wood with a drip, drip, drip, drip that he believed would never end.

  He stuck the index finger of his right hand into the pool and sticking it into his mouth tasted sweet, sticky blood that quelled the sourness of the vodka.

  ‘Stop sitting on your arse on the bottom of the stairs like a fucking loser and take me for a walk now.’

  He pictured Jasmine standing at the closed kitchen door, sharp teeth bared with two ropes of saliva hanging from each corner of her mouth, and the image sparked a wave of revulsion and terror, on a par with the grim emotions Jack provoked in him.

  In pure and utter dizziness, Raymond fell forwards onto his hands and knees and, turning to the widening pool, lapped the blood to give him the strength he needed to face Jasmine.

  ‘I am white, pure white,’ said Jasmine. ‘And my whiteness is supreme. How is your whiteness, Raymond?’

  ‘My whiteness is supreme also,’ said Raymond, through lips coated with dark red blood.

  ‘I am as white as the white cliffs of Dover. We cannot have any more of these foreign scumbags coming here and taking over our white and pleasant land, even if we do want to shag them.’

  He could feel the vibrations from the constant growl in Jasmine’s throat in his spine.

  ‘Take me for a walk. Not now. I am hungry. Feed me. Nothing from a can. Fresh meat. Carmel, I want to eat Carmel, the one who smells of cooking fat and sings like an alley cat. The one who claims to worry about you but she is just like Jack. She doesn’t care. For you. Raymond. Raymond. Raymond, stop acting like a beast of the field and stand up like a white man on two legs, back straight, salute the sky, Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!’

  Raymond hung onto the wall as he made it to his feet and, once upright, felt a bolt of steel piercing the length of his spine and Jasmine’s voice being drowned in a rising sea of human voices.

  ‘Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!’ The music of Nuremberg cascaded over him and for a moment, he was shoulder to shoulder with the massed ranks of Nazis and the Führer himself was wit
hin touching distance, making eye contact with Raymond, who filled up with emotion, with love, with a certainty that everything he had done, everything he was doing, and everything he would do was completely righteous.

  The sound of the crowd faded into a background hum as Hitler pointed at Raymond and Raymond said, ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. They must be punished next and you must punish them. The Russians lied about the Holocaust. It was nothing to do with me,’ said Hitler. ‘They lied and made propaganda films about the treatment and murder of the Jews to make me look bad and themselves look good. Your next target is a Russian, the more the merrier.’

  Hitler exploded into a million points of blinding light and as his vision cleared, Raymond saw everything in the hall as if a film of grit had been peeled from his eyes and the whole world was available to him in the brightest detail.

  ‘Feed me! Feed me now!’

  Jasmine’s voice poured through the kitchen door, but it wasn’t Jasmine’s voice anymore, it was Jack’s.

  ‘Feed me! What about your art? Feed me now!’

  And Raymond was astonished that the sound of Jack’s voice did not deliver the usual sharp blow to his core, and the fear that filled his whole being like toxic water did not happen.

  ‘Can’t be arsed?’ It was the voice of the weak and paralysed Jack filtering through the head, heart and mouth of a dog.

  ‘You heard me.’

  Raymond’s feet tingled and the tingling rose up through his legs and into his hips and balls, tingling power into his gut and his heart through his windpipe and into his brain.

  ‘Feed me your art now, dot dash dot dash art, and take me for a walk.’

  ‘You can’t go for a walk, dickhead, because, because, don’t you remember when the bus mowed you down, because you’re a fucking cripple, big brother.’

  ‘It’s not Jack,’ said Jasmine. ‘It’s me, me, me, me, me taking the piss out of the fucker.’

  He felt his heart beating with immense power, the muscle squeezing between his ribs as each beat picked up strength. As he walked towards it, the kitchen door took on the surface of a coffin lid, something Raymond had never noticed before.

  Upstairs, metal hit metal over and over in Jack’s room as he pumped iron, grunted and raised the impossibly heavy bar up and down above his chest.

  Raymond opened the kitchen coffin door and ignored the ringing phone in the pocket of his jeans.

  ‘Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’

  Beep. Silence.

  ‘Feed me,’ said Jasmine. ‘I’m hungry. Feed me now.’

  Raymond pushed the coffin lid with the bottom of his empty vodka bottle and looked into the corner of the cemetery where Jasmine lay sleeping in her basket in the reeds where baby Moses of the Holy Land had once been hidden from the fu-fu-fucking ph-ph-pharaoh...

  Eyes shut and still as a corpse, Jasmine’s voice poured from the hard muscles of her back, flanks and limbs.

  ‘Go to the fridge, feed me now, go to the fridge, feed me now, Sieg Heil, feed me art...’

  Raymond walked past the sleeping dog and to the white marble door of the fridge, to the plinth on which a sculpture of a white avenging angel stood looking down with a bow and poised to send an arrow of desire into his beating breast.

  ‘Raymond,’ said the angel. ‘Tell them, tell them all, fuck off back to where you came from, all the foreign fuckers and the niggers as well, and do it now or else there’ll be more blood, much more blood!’

  The marble door opened to his touch.

  ‘Feed me art now.’

  At the front of the top shelf of the fridge was a brown paper bag and red fluid had leaked into the fabric of the paper. With both hands, Raymond lifted it from the fridge and felt the minced muscle within it. He squeezed the bag gently and felt a shimmer of blood on his fingers and palms.

  As he relaxed his grip, the cold lifeless matter in the bag seemed to move in his clutch and sent waves of energy into his hands and veins, locking into the beating of his heart.

  ‘Feed me, feed me now, feed me meat now.’

  He looked down on Jasmine, asleep and at peace in spite of the voice that drifted through her flesh from her dreaming brain and, prodding her with his toe, watched the bitch stir from slumber.

  Raymond crouched and dropped raw mince into her empty bowl.

  He took an ecstasy tablet from his pocket and made a hole in the mince, concealed the tablet in the hole and covered it up with raw meat.

  He placed the bowl near her nose and watched as Jasmine’s senses came to life.

  ‘Wakey-wakey, Jasmine...’

  She blinked and, as she got to her feet, sniffed the mincemeat in her bowl. She looked up at Raymond, silent now, stripped of the voice and words that she had poured into his head.

  Jasmine licked the meat and set about eating it in hungry gulps. Raymond walked towards the sink, to the drawer where sirens sang to him, ethereal music to come down to from the biggest high.

  He looked back and saw Jasmine eating raw, fatty mince, turned to the drawer and opened it.

  His eyes moved like table tennis balls. Jasmine. The open drawer. Jasmine. Jasmine. The things in the drawer. Jasmine. His hand. Jasmine. The carving knife in his hand. Jasmine.

  Jasmine.

  He stepped towards her.

  Jasmine...

  He looked at the whiteness of her neck and throat, and the redness of her eyes.

  Jasmine.

  He drew a line with his eyes as she wolfed down the last morsels of raw mincemeat, listened to her smacking her lips with satisfaction.

  Jasmine...

  She looked up at him and, for less than one second, she penetrated his head with one word made of three sounds, a blunt accusation.

  ‘Time for your walk now, Jasmine. Come for a walk in Sefton Park with the murderer.’

  65

  9.25 pm

  ‘This is the picture we’ll circulate for an identification on the Otterspool Park victim,’ said Clay, showing a printed-off image of the woman in a white denim mini-skirt blowing a kiss to Gino’s CCTV camera. ‘OK, are we ready to roll with the pick-up?’

  Clay stood next to Poppy Waters looking over Sergeant Carol White’s shoulders at the screen of her laptop.

  The door of Gino’s Bar opened and a few moments later the Otterspool Park victim emerged into the cold night. The door was closed from inside and the woman stepped away from it. Cars streamed past, and then a red Renault Mégane slowed down and stopped in front of her. She walked to the open window and had a brief exchange with the driver.

  ‘We need the license plate on the Mégane,’ said Clay.

  ‘We’ve already got it,’ said Poppy.

  The woman stepped back from the car and threw her right-hand middle finger up and shouted at the driver as the car sped away.

  The driver tried to pay you for sex, thought Clay, the cheeky bastard. However, she concluded with mounting bitterness, if you had taken him upon his offer...

  The woman wrapped her arms around herself against the cold and didn’t turn or react when the door of Gino’s Bar opened and a couple emerged, then walked away in the direction of Aigburth Vale.

  ‘It’s coming up now, Eve. After this bus,’ said Poppy.

  Clay’s iPhone vibrated in her hand with an incoming call from Cole.

  ‘Can you pause this for me, Carol.’ She put the phone to her ear. ‘Hello, Barney. Anything from Gino’s?’

  ‘I haven’t got a name for her but I do have a name. She turned up on her own and wasn’t in the bar for long. Caused a bit of consternation with women and their partners, which wasn’t really her fault or intention in my view. She left after a couple of drinks at Gino’s insistence and called up a Ray or Raymond for a lift.’

  ‘That’s all we have?’

  ‘She made a phone call and she was gone pretty soon after she hit Aigburth Road. No CCTV from indoors.’

  ‘Thanks for that, Barney. We’ve got the external CCTV footage.
I believe I’m about to see Raymond for the first time.’ But it won’t be his last, she told herself as she disconnected the call. ‘Let’s roll with it.’

  A red minibus passed the woman and then she waved at a car that wasn’t in shot, a car that slowed down and came to a halt.

  ‘Licence plate?’ asked Clay.

  ‘We’ve circulated it already and we’ve had some information back fast. It’s listed as stolen,’ said Poppy.

  On-screen, the woman got into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut.

  ‘It’s a ten-year-old white Fiat Uno and the owner’s Milly Graves, 48 years old and living in the Holy Land off Park Road in Moses Street.’

  Clay watched the stationary car and wondered what it was that the woman and the driver Raymond were talking about. She looked hard at the screen, could make out the woman in the passenger seat but not the man at the wheel. The back window was dark. ‘There could be two more people in the car – back seat, driver’s side and middle.’

  ‘The Holy Land?’ asked White.

  ‘There’s a cluster of streets running parallel to each other off Park Road. They’re all named after Biblical figures,’ explained Clay.

  ‘Her car went missing from outside her front door,’ Poppy concluded.

  The car drove off in the direction of Cressington Park and Garston. Clay looked at the scope of the CCTV camera and was disappointed to see that it went as far the central island that separated the lines of traffic travelling to either Garston or the edge of the Dingle and Toxteth. ‘Rerun it for me, please, Carol, from the point where the white Fiat Uno comes into shot.’

  As she watched the footage for a second time, Clay worked out the options in terms of time and directions to Gino’s Bar.

  ‘So this Raymond travels to pick up the woman from either Aigburth Road heading to Liverpool 8, from Jericho Lane turning right onto the dual carriageway or Ashfield Road turning left. The other option’s Sefton Park, running onto the dual carriageway from the slip road to the left of the subway. She made the call just before she was thrown out of the bar and she didn’t have to wait too long for him to pick her up. Can we get a precise timing on how long she waited from the door of the bar to the door of the stolen Fiat Uno? Add on half a minute for the call to Raymond. He doesn’t live that far away from Gino’s Bar and the crime scene over the road in Otterspool Park.’