by Luke Delaney
She didn’t want to stay in Karen Green’s house a second longer than she had to and had absolutely no intention of snooping around, something she wouldn’t have been able to resist in the old days. Sean said she’d find the things she was looking for in the bathroom, so that’s where she would go and nowhere else. Grab the things he wanted and get the bloody hell out of this mausoleum. She’d bag and tag them properly as evidence once she was safely back outside or in her car. Sally shivered, feeling accusing eyes watching her, asking her why she hadn’t stopped the man who did this to her. She couldn’t stand the silence any longer. ‘Hello,’ she called out, but her throat was dry, her voice coarse and quiet. ‘I’m a police officer.’ She waited for a reply she knew would never come.
After more than a minute of waiting she pushed herself forward, working hard to keep her legs striding one in front of the other. With each step her pace quickened, until she was at the foot of the stairs, then walking up them, looking straight ahead only, focusing on the space above. When she reached the top she was relieved to see the bathroom door was ajar, saving her from having to search around for it. She slowed down again, crossing the upstairs hallway inches at a time, resting the palm of her hand on the door and pushing it open gently and quietly, craning her neck to peer inside bit by bit, prepared for any would-be ambusher. Only once the door rested fully open did she accept she was alone and the room empty.
Stepping inside, she made her way to the cabinet Sean had mentioned, all the time thinking of the excuses she would give if she was disturbed while searching through a dead woman’s cosmetics before forensics had examined them. She pulled on a pair of latex gloves, then opened the cabinet door – and was confronted by shelves crammed with bottles and jars. There were far more than she’d expected, and she immediately regretted not having brought a large evidence bag from her car. She began moving the contents to one side and was relieved to find what she was looking for – a scrunched-up plastic bag, the sort people saved to transport bottles that might leak when travelling. She shook the bag back in to shape and began to pluck items from the shelves and place them in it as carefully as she could. As the cabinet emptied the bag grew heavy until she was satisfied she’d taken anything that could pass as a cream, lotion, moisturizer or perfume.
She closed the cabinet door, anxious to flee the lifeless house before it shrank in on her even further, but the reflection of her own image in the mirror made her hesitate. Her face suddenly looked old and worn way beyond her thirty-four years, her eyes hollow and haunted – joyless. She tried to pull herself away from the troubling picture in the glass, but couldn’t, her hand sliding inside her jacket and almost unconsciously unfastening a single button on her blouse, moving across soft, smooth skin, then suddenly recoiling as it touched the thick raised scar tissue of her upper wound before moving under the material again until it rested on the lower scar under her breast. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, her world suddenly merging with Karen Green’s – two victims of violent men – one who survived and one who didn’t. She felt Karen’s fear and pain, her desperate wish to live another day, her willingness to do anything if he’d only let her live, just as she herself would have done anything for Sebastian Gibran if he’d promised to spare her. She had survived – Karen had not.
Sally pulled her hand from under her blouse and fastened the button self-consciously. Clutching the plastic bag of cosmetics she walked from the bathroom and then the house. She locked the front door and walked to her car without looking back.
Donnelly had remained at the scene where Karen Green had been found. Following the removal of the body the forensic team were busy in the woods, searching for evidence hidden between the trees and under the fallen foliage, gathering as much as they could before the weather turned against them. They might be here for days, but Donnelly had no intention of sticking around that long. He yawned widely and decided to head back to the access road and his car for a smoke. As he sat on the bonnet he saw the familiar figure of DC Zukov walk towards him. ‘All right, son?’ Donnelly acknowledged him. ‘What you doing here?’
‘Thought I’d have a look for myself, see if there was anything I could help with.’
‘You’ve got your actions to complete, haven’t you, same as everyone else?’
‘Yeah,’ Zukov answered, barely disguising his contempt for the routine course of an investigation, the day-to-day mundane tasks that had to be completed, ‘but the guv’nor’s got me wasting my time doing personal inquiries for him, trying to trace the source of a tattoo on the victim’s body that he now tells me isn’t a tattoo after all, it’s just a bloody transfer. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?’
‘What tattoo?’ Donnelly kept his tone casual, hiding the concern he felt about not being kept informed about every aspect of the investigation.
‘Like I said,’ Zukov replied, ‘the tattoo of a phoenix on the victim’s arm, only now we know it’s not a tattoo it’s a—’
‘A transfer,’ Donnelly finished for him, ‘yeah, yeah, you already told me that. But why’s the boss interested in her tattoo, transfer, whatever the fuck it is?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.’
But Donnelly knew – Sean thought the killer put it there, and the fact it was a transfer and not a tattoo made that all the more likely.
‘He’s got me checking on scumbags with previous for using artifice too, particularly those with previous for sex offences and residential burglary.’
Donnelly had to admire Sean, he was an insightful bastard, always two steps ahead of the rest of them. He didn’t like it, but he respected it. ‘That makes sense,’ he told Zukov. ‘No forced entry into either victim’s home, no reason to believe either knew their attacker. There’s a better than fair chance our boy tricked his way in.’
‘Maybe the guv’nor’s trying to be too clever?’ Zukov argued. ‘Maybe whoever took them just knocked on their doors and they opened them? There’s no artifice there.’
‘Whatever,’ Donnelly said dismissively. ‘I’m off back to the office. You stay here and liaise with forensics, then you’d better get on with the inquiries the boss has given you, or you’re going to be Mr Unpopular. And by the way, if and when you find out anything, any suspects flag-up, tell me first and I’ll let the guv’nor know, understand?’
Zukov was on the verge of putting another question but decided against it. Best to keep his suspicions to himself. Instead he just said, ‘Fair enough, guv.’
‘Good,’ said Donnelly, climbing into his car, the suspension creaking as he sat heavily in the seat. Zukov had to step clear as he pulled the door shut with a slam. The engine roared to life and he pulled away with a wheel spin along the last road Karen Green had ever seen.
It was almost three p.m. on Friday afternoon and Sean was in Lambeth, sitting in the second-floor Forensic Laboratory reception area, clutching his numbered ticket and the body swab samples he’d brought directly from the post-mortem. He glanced at his ticket, the kind they handed out at a supermarket delicatessen counter, and muttered an obscenity under his breath – if Sally didn’t arrive soon he’d miss his turn and would have to take another ticket and start from the back of the queue all over again. Back in the days when the lab was run by the Home Office, it was manned by fellow public servants who were all too ready to impose harsh words and on-the-spot fines for any incorrectly labelled exhibits or ill-prepared laboratory submissions forms. Though he wasn’t entirely in favour of the lab being placed in private sector hands, there was one big advantage from Sean’s point of view. Its employees treated him as a paying customer, entitled to make demands that would previously have been met with howls of derision from the lowly paid scientists running the show.
His not so fond memories were wiped away the second he saw Sally step through the automatic double swing-doors, the items she’d grabbed from Karen Green’s bathroom safe inside plastic evidence tubes that were in turn neatly sealed inside evidence bags. The number counter m
ounted on the wall clicked around to show 126 – the number on Sean’s blue ticket. He took Sally by the arm and steered her towards the submissions counter. ‘We’re up,’ he told her.
‘It would be nice to know what the hell’s going on,’ she replied. ‘Why you wanted the stuff from her bathroom, for example, and why I had to drop everything and rush to the lab with it.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t have time to explain, but you’ll understand why once you’ve listened to me explaining it to the lab people.’
They completed the short walk from the waiting room to the exhibit reception desk, where a slim bespectacled man in his forties was waiting for them with a private sector smile.
‘Afternoon,’ he greeted them, ‘and what have you got for us today?’
Sean didn’t try to match his friendliness. ‘Two sets of exhibits from two different scenes,’ he said, pushing the swab tubes across the counter. ‘These exhibits are marked with RC, the initials of the pathologist who took them during a post-mortem of a woman whose murder we’re investigating.’ The smile dropped from the receptionist’s face like an Arctic sunset. ‘They’re swabs taken from her skin containing some type of cream and an unknown brand of perfume. These –’ he took Sally’s exhibits from her and pushed them across the counter, careful not to mix them with the others – ‘are cosmetics and perfumes taken from the murdered woman’s house. I’ll keep this simple: I want you to compare the exhibits taken from the house with the exhibits taken from the body and see if any of them match. If they do, which ones? And if they don’t, I need to know what brand the cream and perfume taken from her body are, and I need to know as a matter of urgency. Everything clear?’
‘Perfectly,’ said the receptionist, partially recovering his smile. ‘But it’ll take a few days to get the results, particularly if there’s no match between the two sets of exhibits. Our library of cosmetics isn’t vast. We might have to outsource it.’
‘Do the best you can, but make sure the urgency of the situation is understood.’
The receptionist made some notes on the lab submission form and stamped it with a red marker that said urgent. He handed Sean a copy of the form by way of receipt. ‘Good enough?’ he asked.
‘I hope so,’ replied Sean, taking the form and heading for the exit.
Thomas Keller left work shortly after four p.m., passing through the gates of the sorting office still dressed in his uniform, walking fast with his head down, praying he would not be recognized or accosted by any malevolent colleagues who would unwittingly ruin what for him was about to become a very special day. A day he’d been planning for months. He knew her name and where she lived. He knew she lived alone. He knew the shape of her house and that the front door could not be seen from the quiet road. He knew that she banked with NatWest and worked as a nurse at St George’s Hospital in Tooting. He knew she had electricity and gas from On Power, satellite television from Virgin, that her bins were collected on Thursdays, that she drove a red Honda Civic that she insured with the AA, that most months she was overdrawn, that she shopped at ASDA in Roehampton, that she’d been single for a long while but now had a boyfriend, that if she wasn’t working she went out most weekends with some of her apparently many friends. Above all, he knew she was the one. They’d poisoned her mind and made her forget, but still she was the one and soon he’d rescue her from her state of ignorance and make her alive once again and then, then they could be together as they were always supposed to be: he and Sam together for ever.
The journey to Tooting Common passed in a blur, making no impression on his memory at all until he realized he’d arrived at the small car park near the swimming pool. Surrounded by trees, it was quiet at this time of day, most people choosing the morning to walk their dogs through the woods. He noted there were a few cars parked close by, but was sure they would either be gone by the time he returned or abandoned for the night by owners now too inebriated to drive them.
Making sure his car was locked, he headed for the pathway that would take him across the common, keeping an eye out for CCTV cameras he might have failed to spot on the many occasions he’d walked this route in preparation for today. Passers-by also came under scrutiny, in case they might be a cop in plain clothes looking for prostitutes or small-time drug dealers. It hadn’t crossed his mind the police might be looking for him now.
It took him more than ten minutes to walk from the car park to the street – her street, Valleyfield Road. As he turned off the busy thoroughfares and into the narrower residential streets there were far fewer pedestrians around and the sounds of traffic fell away, the murmur of a big city mixing with the hypnotizing sound of the gentle, tentative spring breeze stirring virgin leaves on the largely barren trees.
He enjoyed the peaceful sounds and the warm air that surrounded him, still fresh from the cold of winter, unspoilt by the coming heat of a London summer. He breathed in deeply, reassured by the calmness he felt, his fears fading with every step. Occasionally he walked up to one of the houses that lined the street to post junk mail through the letterbox, just in case he was being watched by suspicious eyes. As he drew ever closer to number 6 he felt calm and in control, the experience of taking the other two helping him now as he began to mentally rehearse what would happen the minute he stepped inside the hallway of the newly built townhouse close to the end of the road.
Finally he reached the end of her driveway and paused, searching through his postal bag, apparently looking for the letters addressed to 6 Valleyfield Road. But his bag contained no such letters. The only contents were a squeezy bottle of chloroform, a clean fold of material to apply it to, a roll of masking tape and, most importantly, a stun-gun.
Deborah Thomson was tired after coming off a twelve-hour early shift at St George’s, but her mood was buoyant. The rest of her day was full of things she was looking forward to. First she needed to change out of her uniform and go for a quick run across the common, then home for a long, hot shower. After that she’d take her time getting ready for a night out with friends in a local gastro-pub. No men tonight, just the girls. She was looking forward to telling them all about her new boyfriend, who she’d be seeing tomorrow. A whole Saturday with her new love, and the entire weekend off. It didn’t get any better.
Humming to herself as she tugged off her sensible work shoes and tossed them to one side, she broke off when the sound of the doorbell ringing interrupted her preparations. ‘Bollocks,’ she swore, and set off downstairs vowing to be rid of the interloper as quickly as possible.
She bounced across the hallway to the front door, pausing to look through the spyhole. Having been brought up in New Cross, a south-east London neighbourhood where poverty went hand-in-hand with criminality, she never opened the door unthinkingly. There was a man in postman’s uniform on the doorstep. He stepped back a little so she could see almost all of his body, and reached into his bag, pulling out a parcel the size of a small shoebox, too large to fit through the letter slot.
Deborah opened the front door, the smile returning to her face. ‘Hi,’ she chirped, expecting him to confirm her name and hand over the parcel, but he said nothing. Too late she sensed danger as the hand not holding the parcel whipped out of the bag at lightning speed clutching a strange-looking object. As it moved towards her, she reacted, slamming the door into his shoulder, but the stun-gun had already made it through the gap between door and frame and buried itself in her stomach. She flew backwards as if hurled by an invisible force, what little air she had left in her chest knocked out of her lungs as she lay convulsing on the hallway floor.
The man staggered and dropped to his knees alongside her, then reached into his bag. She stared from her frozen state of purgatory as he took a squeezy bottle and a fold of material, followed by a roll of black heavy-duty tape. She tried to speak, to beg him to leave her alone, not to hurt her, but could make only unintelligible guttural noises. He placed one finger to his lips.
‘Ssssh,’ he urged her. ‘Everything’s going to be
all right now, Sam. I’ve come to take you home.’
Sean checked his watch as he pulled up outside the home of Douglas Levy, the Neighbourhood Watch coordinator for Louise Russell’s street. For a moment he sat looking across the road at her house, seeing DC Cahill’s car parked at the end of the drive. He knew he should look in on Cahill and John Russell, show his face and offer support and encouragement, but he couldn’t find it in himself. He’d come here in the mood for harassment, not empathy.
Breathing the cool air through his nose, he approached Levy’s front door and pressed the bell. He heard firm footsteps approaching from within, locks on the other side of the door turning and eventually the door opening, Levy standing tall and proud.
‘Me again,’ Sean announced before he could get a word in. ‘I have a few more questions for you if that’s OK.’
‘Well, yes, but I wasn’t expecting to have to speak to the police again.’
‘This won’t take long,’ Sean assured him. ‘May I come in?’
Levy hesitated for a second before stepping aside. ‘Of course.’
‘Thanks.’ Sean stepped past him and walked briskly into the neat interior. He still couldn’t sense a woman’s presence inside and couldn’t help wondering when and why Levy’s wife had left him. He began to wander around the downstairs of the house, deliberately making Levy feel uncomfortable and challenged. Sean wanted him off-balance, flustered, answering questions without stopping to think; that way he would give true answers, not the ones he thought he should or the ones he thought Sean wanted to hear.
‘It occurred to me,’ Sean began, ‘after the last time we talked, that whoever took her must have been here before, in this street. He would have wanted to watch, to study her movements so he could plan when and how to take her, don’t you think?’