by Ed O'Connor
Max found the thought arousing. He sat up and watched the women’s boat crew. They had pulled up opposite him on the other side of the river and were leaning forward, releasing their feet from the strapping that fixed them to the boat. Max liked their light-blue Lycra body suits and the way their hair had become damp with sweat. He started with surprise as he felt a hand inside his jogging bottoms. It took him a minute of ecstatic confusion to clarify that the hand was his own.
The crew hauled the fibreglass rowing eight from the water and carried it inside the boathouse. The large wooden door clanked shut behind them. Max cursed his frustration. He became irritated with the cold grass and the exposure. He decided to walk back to his Land Cruiser. He had parked close to the river, next to a tea shop. An old Labrador retriever lay on the pavement in front of the entrance. He noticed its eyes tracing his movements.
Max froze when he arrived back at the car. He sensed a powerful but familiar smell emanating from inside. He looked through the glass and saw four grain sacks: two on the back seat, one in the passenger seat and one rammed up at the rear window.
‘Whaddafuck?’
He looked at the Labrador. It had the face of an old man: some inbred old fool.
‘What did you say, you wanker?’ Max called out to it.
The Labrador’s ears twitched at the cry. It stood and sauntered over.
‘I don’t have time for a conversation, pal,’ Max insisted, ‘someone’s filled up my car with shit.’
The smell was strong and nauseating. Max looked around him.
‘Did you do this? Is this your idea of a joke?’ he asked the dog which had sat down directly in front of him. ‘I’m laughing. Ho – Ho – Ho.’
The dog had picked up the smell too. It was scratching at the rear door of the Land Cruiser, becoming agitated. Max climbed inside and fiddled with the grain sack in the passenger seat. He peered inside.
‘Oh hello, Liz,’ he said as recognition and awareness began to trickle back into his brain. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’ He retied the bag.
Now he remembered. He had driven the car up to the fens to dispose of the bodies he had collected. He had developed them already and so had no use for the remains. Besides, he had reasoned, it was important to keep the house tidy for Rowena and the baby.
‘Woof!’ shouted the dog, suddenly disturbed at the terrible aroma.
‘What?’ Max replied confused. ‘What are you talking about?’ The lights were stretching around his eyeballs the way tired limbs are stretched after waking.
The dog growled, contorting the features of its old man face, and backed away from the jeep as Max slammed the door and started the engine. ‘Woof!’
‘You’re not making any sense, mate,’ Max shouted at the golden shape. ‘You old missing-link country cousins should spend a bit less time playing banjos and take some fucking elocution lessons.’
‘Woof!’ The Labrador turned sharply and ran into the tea shop.
‘The rain in Spain stains mainly on the brain,’ Max called out in his plummiest accent. The shape had gone. Max was irritated. ‘Fucking inbreds.’
He drove around Ely’s tight, narrow streets for twenty minutes passing the cathedral twice before arriving back at the car park. He peered through his windscreen at the river in frustration and felt a sudden rush of panic: the town was enclosing him, its exits shutting around him. Even the tea shop had closed.
It took him another fifteen minutes to break free of Ely and he found himself racing south towards Cambridge and New Bolden through the bleak and desolate fens. He tried to remember how he had planned to dispose of the bodies. Max was certain that he had constructed a plan. He could recall reading a guidebook and consulting a map of Cambridgeshire.
Arriving at Ely had disorientated him. Had he planned to drop the bodies into the river? Or sink them into some soggy fen? The idea was tempting now as he cut through the watery fields of North Cambridgeshire but somehow it didn’t ring true. He had chosen somewhere secluded. He was sure of that. It had been somewhere private that he had read about and for some peculiar reason he had missed the location and ended up watching the river in Ely. His memory was fragmented. It threw up distorted images rather than information.
Max tried hard to concentrate as the bodies shifted restlessly in their seats.
‘Don’t blame me,’ he muttered at them, sensing their irritation. ‘I don’t hear you bastards making any helpful suggestions.’
A dark green smudge suddenly stretched across the horizon to his right. Max frowned, trying to identify it. It was a line of hedgerows enclosing a sprawling area of undulating marshland, pockmarked here and there with thick clumps of pine trees and entangling bracken.
‘That’s it!’ he cried, smacking the steering wheel in delight. ‘It’s all right,’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘You can stop moaning. I remember now. That is why I am a director and you are monkeys. There are leaders and followers. There are gods and mortals. Some people make a plan and implement it. Others just come along for the ride. You lot are just passengers. I’ve been carrying you for too long.’
The Land Cruiser accelerated, overtaking a dawdling tractor and roaring through the twilight. In the near distance, terrible shadows stretched across Fulford Heath.
40
Rowena Harvey lay blindfolded, gagged and terrified in darkness. Her forehead still bled gently from the accident despite the presence of a crassly tied bandage. She was aware that she was unable to move. In her first moments of consciousness she wondered if she had been paralysed in the car crash. Then, gradually as her senses began to orientate themselves, she realised that she could flex the muscles in her arms and legs although she seemed to be restrained, tethered to a bed. Cold air nibbled at her skin and she realized, in a sudden flash of terror, that she was naked.
She strained at her ties, uncertain of whether she was alone in the room. She tried to push the cloth gag out of her mouth with her dry tongue. The sensation made her feel sick. After a minute of exhausting effort she sank back and considered the hopelessness of her situation. She was naked and trapped. Her husband was dead. No one was coming to save her.
Rowena Harvey tried to remain calm and gather her thoughts. She tried to draw moisture into her mouth and began to work again on pushing out her gag.
41
Dexter’s telephone rang at 8.30 that evening. Underwood had been reading the post-mortem reports on Stark and Harvey, allowing his mind to wander in realms of terrible possibilities. The shrill cry of the phone in the dimly-lit office had made him jump.
‘CID,’ Underwood said after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Is John Underwood there?’ It was a male voice: loud, confident and vaguely familiar.
‘Speaking.’
‘John, it’s Paddy McInally down at Leyton CID.’
Underwood was taken by surprise. ‘Hello, Paddy.’
‘How have you been, mate?’
‘I’m fine. I’ve been off ill for a while. Just started back. Your star student has been running the show in my absence.’
‘It’s Dexy I wanted to talk with you about, John,’ McInally said.
For a terrible gut-wrenching moment Underwood thought Dexter was heading back to London and that DCI McInally was reclaiming the prize he had lost four years ago. ‘What’s the matter?’
McInally seemed uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘This is between us, mate. It doesn’t get back to her.’
‘Understood.’
‘She called me today. Asking questions about one Mark Willis. You heard of him?’
‘No,’ Underwood replied.
‘Good for you. He’s a toe-rag. Used to be my Detective Sergeant when Dexy was down here. He went bad. Started dealing the drugs he was supposed to be fucking confiscating. We chucked him out in ’ninety-five.’
‘That’s when Alison made Detective Sergeant.’ Underwood remembered from her file.
‘You always were sharp, John. Willis got the boot and Dexy got upped.�
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‘So what’s the problem?’
‘He’s a proper villain now. Big time drugs right across East London. Dexy is interested in him. I’m wondering if he’s turned up on your patch.’
‘Not that I’ve heard,’ Underwood admitted. ‘I still don’t quite understand your concern.’
‘They were an item once, John, for a year or so before Willis got fired.’
Underwood felt a sudden inexplicable twist of jealousy. He was disappointed he hadn’t outgrown himself. ‘Oh.’
‘She caught a lot of flak when she started in CID. He sort of adopted her. They got close and it all kicked off. You know how these things happen?’
‘Of course,’ said Underwood, still feeling horribly let down.
‘Willis, being the toe-rag that he is, started jerking her around. We found out he was shagging a couple of WPCs on the quiet. The station got to hear of it before Dexy. Took the piss. It tore her up, mate. Worse than I thought it would. She talks tough but she’s soft as shit underneath.’
‘She wants to be taken seriously,’ Underwood observed. ‘It must have been a nightmare.’
‘It’s worse than you think. I found out from one of her so-called mates that she was pregnant.’
Underwood rubbed his eyes sadly. ‘Oh Christ. What did she do?’
‘Got shot of it and I don’t blame her.’
‘I’m beginning to see why you called now.’
‘We’ve all got an Achilles heel, John. Mark Willis is Alison Dexter’s. If he appears on the scene she’ll need help. He always had a way of getting at her. He’s a devious, dangerous little wanker. He also owes the Moules best part of a hundred grand. He’s cat food if he doesn’t turn up the dosh. Under that sort of pressure he’s capable of anything.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on her, Paddy. Thanks for letting me know.’
‘She’s the best copper I ever worked with, mate. If Dexter blows up there’s no bleeding hope for the rest of us.’
‘You got that right.’
Underwood felt alone and exhausted as he put the phone down. McInally was right. Dexter was the rock. If she crumbled he would have no foundation stone to build upon. It wasn’t even worth contemplating.
He felt a sudden, desperate longing for comfort.
42
Alison Dexter returned to the Morley Estate in darkness. This time she made sure that she hadn’t been followed. Ian Stark’s other garage was in the south-east corner of the estate. The lighting was poor and Dexter could see why Stark had chosen it: she felt comfortably invisible as she forced entry to the garage with her bolt-cutter. No dirt or leaves fell off the garage door as she opened it.
She shone her torch around the bare walls and checked her police radio was safely in her pocket. The garage was empty apart from a steel filing cabinet and some tools. Dexter picked up a hammer and a screwdriver and rested her torch on the ground next to the cabinet. She carefully placed the screwdriver under the lip of the locked top drawer and hammered it halfway inside. Then using all her weight she leant on the handle of the screwdriver, twisting back the lip of the drawer about an inch. She withdrew the screwdriver and shone her torch inside.
Bingo.
Dexter closed the garage door behind her to inhibit the noise she was creating. Next, she rummaged through Stark’s tools to find a piece of equipment likely to inflict greater damage on the filing cabinet’s locking system. She settled for a masonry chisel and went to work. The lock was resilient and it took Dexter an hour of furious industry to break through its mechanism. Eventually, a mixture of brute force and leverage forced the top drawer open fully.
Inside Dexter counted twenty separate kilo bags of cocaine. They were accompanied by dozens of plastic bags filled with pills; thousands of them. She sat back on her haunches, pouring with sweat. This was what Willis had coming looking for. At last she had the bastard by the balls. Working quickly, conscious that her endeavours might have attracted unwelcome attention, Dexter opened the garage door. A minute later, after checking she still alone, she reversed her Mondeo inside.
She loaded all the drugs into the car boot except for a single bag of cocaine. This she split open, spreading its contents across the garage floor. She withdrew a piece of paper from her inside jacket pocket and wrote a brief message on it. Dexter then left the message wedged under the burst bag of drugs. It was a calculated insult. She hoped it would sting.
After rolling her Mondeo forwards for a couple of yards, Dexter closed the garage door firmly then relocked it with a new padlock. Flushed with the effort and success of her operation Dexter then drove at speed across the Morley and around the New Bolden ring road. The journey took about fifteen minutes. Dexter parked up at the side of the Bolden Canal, a stagnant stretch of waterway behind a new industrial estate. She was careful to stay away from the CCTV cameras that some of the corporate residents had attached to their high metal fencing.
Dexter had a very clear objective. She removed the bags of cocaine and pills from her car boot and, one by one, poured their contents into the brown water. The process gave her enormous satisfaction. It was like blood letting. She was bleeding out the poison Mark Willis had injected into her system. Technically, she was destroying evidence. However, the thought no longer concerned her greatly. Ian Stark was dead and gone; his operations had ceased. There was no way that she could link the drugs directly to Willis: the only evidence she had was the appearance of Willis’s name and number in Stark’s diary. In any case, she had no desire to see Willis in prison. He knew too well how to play the system and beat it. Better to destroy the stuff completely and put it beyond temptation’s reach. She also wanted to see the look on his face when he found out she had liquidated his hundred grand investment.
Dexter knew that she had lost her focus. Willis had clouded her vision as he always had done. She had needed him once. He had seemed to be the protective force she had once craved and needed. She resolved to break from her past. After all, she reasoned, one of her motivations for transferring to New Bolden had been to escape the quicksand of bad memories that had once threatened to engulf her completely. It was time to make good on her bullshit. She needed closure.
New Bolden was a small town with a small town mentality. It had frustrated her when she had first arrived. Still, Dexter thought as she accelerated away from the industrial park, it was a blank canvas. She could paint on whatever life she wanted to. The yellow glare of the streetlights flashed past the car as she headed home to her little flat near the police station. To Alison Dexter it seemed every glowing lamp was a bad memory and she was determined to leave them all behind her.
43
Underwood felt himself sliding into the whirlpool. He was clawing for a handhold on walls of water. His conversation with Paddy McInally about Dexter had unsettled him. He knew McInally relatively well. They had met and spoken at great length about Dexter’s transfer from Leyton to New Bolden four years previously. The circumstances had been difficult and complex. Underwood had initially been hesitant about allowing Dexter to join him. However, McInally had convinced him. He had said losing Dexter would be like someone sawing his arms off. Underwood now understood what the Londoner had meant.
He tried to make sense of his feelings. He had spent months with Jack Harvey learning to isolate and control errant thoughts and emotions. Why had the conversation upset him? Alone, in the still unfamiliar silence of his bare flat, Underwood surprised himself. He was jealous. Jealous that DCI Paddy McInally knew Alison Dexter better than he did. Jealous that McInally still saw fit to extend a protective arm around his former detective sergeant.
That was the root of it. He wondered if it was some primordial instinct. Did he labour under the primitive misapprehension that Dexter was his emotional property? Underwood was frustrated at the absurdity of it. He knew he had no right to be possessive of someone he had never possessed. How could he possibly have upset himself over some incident in Dexter’s past that had happened eight years previously? He
looked at the photograph of Julia he had placed on the mantelpiece. He had felt fury at his wife’s betrayal: blind, white anger. Over time, that anger had melted into loneliness and a realization that he had created the problem himself.
Dexter hadn’t betrayed him. She had been more supportive of him than anyone, with the possible exception of Jack Harvey. Perhaps he had built an image of her in his mind that suited his own purposes. That Dexter was the flawless professional he had never been. That she had willingly plugged logic and electricity into his tired and scattered mind. That she looked up to him as some kind of patriarch. Maybe he had filled in the blanks in Dexter’s past to suit his own imagination; to make her into an idea he could control.
The realization made Underwood feel ashamed. He was tired of his imagination. It had driven him to the edge of madness. It had dropped him cruelly into an empty flat that he was frightened to decorate. It was now trying to twist Alison Dexter into a shape he could possess. Underwood remembered something Adam Miller had said to him: ‘reality is underrated.’ He didn’t need to make up anything about Alison.
He decided to risk a glass of whisky. His mind was a jumble. His conversation with McInally had distracted him from focusing on the murder investigation and the hunt for Jensen and Rowena Harvey. Mary Colson’s dream was beginning to tighten its grip on his thoughts. If, as Colson had suggested, there were potentially five or six victims awaiting discovery, the inquiry was at risk of becoming trapped in minutiae. Underwood knew that forensic and post mortem evidence was critically important but he also had an uneasy sense that time was short. The priority had to be locating Jensen and Rowena Harvey. To do that, Underwood knew that they had to look for some kind of logic underpinning the killer’s actions.