The Rules of Murder

by The Rules of Murder (epub)

  Is she asleep or unconscious or just ignoring me?

  ‘You need to eat,’ I say again.

  Hunched down in the van, I take a tentative step closer to her, holding out one of the sandwiches I’ve bought from the pack of two.

  Still nothing. Not even a murmur from her.

  It’s a strange connection, but I have a sudden flash of a memory from many years ago. When I was a young child, maybe only three or four years old. We were at a petting zoo; I was holding out some pellets in my hand for the goats, through the gaps between the slats of a wooden fence. The little bastards on the other side all scrambled towards me, bashing the fence and shaking it trying to get to my hand. My tiny brain was terrified. I thought the little beasts were going to snatch my arm off. I whipped my hand back to safety just in time. My dad thought it was hilarious. My mum was shouting at me for being so stupid. She grabbed my wrist and dragged me back to the fence and forced my hand into position. I screamed and grimaced and looked away and imagined my fingers being chewed off and the blood and the pain and the anguish and the life of torment without my hand…

  When mum let go and I pulled back and saw my hand entirely intact but covered in thick greasy goat slobber, I really didn’t know what to think. Relief? Embarrassment? Satisfaction?

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make a man of you yet, son,’ my dad said to me.

  To this day I still don’t understand his intention in those words. Were they supposed to be confidence-boosting, or was it his way of showing his disappointment in me?

  ‘Sophie, you need to eat this.’

  I take another step forwards, outstretch my hand a little more. The edge of the sandwich is only about a foot from her lips now. She must be able to smell it. She must be hungry. Since I brought her here on Saturday night, all she’s had from me are dribbles of water. She needs to eat to live.

  As I wait for movement, I stare at her face. At her lips. Not so red now as they were two days ago, and the skin looks dry and cracked. She was so pretty on Sunday, now she’s changing. It’s almost as though she’s falling apart, her natural prettiness disintegrating. I guess beneath the skin of any human being, whatever shape or size or colour, we’re all just the same ugly mass of flesh and blood and bone.

  As I stare, a nagging worry begins to take hold…

  Is she breathing at all?

  So what if she isn’t? She needs to die anyway.

  ‘Sophie? Can you hear me? Sophie?’

  I pull back the sandwich. I put my free hand onto her shoulder and gently shake her. Her head slumps further forwards.

  ‘No, no, no.’

  I drop the sandwich now. I kneel down and lift up her head.

  ‘Sophie?’

  I didn’t want her to die. She didn’t deserve it.

  What did I do wrong?

  Then her eyelids spring open suddenly. She launches herself forwards, thrusts her head up. Her skull cracks into my chin and sends my head snapping back. Before I know it she’s snarling like a dog and she comes at me and opens her mouth and I see what’s coming just in time. I lift my arm up and cower back and she gnashes down. Her jaw clenches onto my bare upper arm and her teeth sink into my flesh.

  ‘Fuck! You stupid—’

  I ball my other fist and slam it down on the top of her head. It does nothing. She doesn’t release the grip on my arm at all. She’s a crazed beast all of a sudden. It’s amazing what a human can do when running on adrenaline and survival instinct.

  I know that only too well…

  I raise my elbow and slam that down on the same spot at the top of her head.

  Look what happens when you don’t listen to me.

  Her voice, her condemnation of me, is all I need to summon an inner hate and strength. I roar and push up from my heels and rise to my feet, and I easily take Sophie’s weight as I lurch forwards and slam her against the side wall. Sophie groans as the van rocks on its suspension. I slam her against the metal a second time and hear the burst of air squeezed from her lungs. Finally her teeth release from my flesh and she crumples onto the bench.

  I don’t give her the chance to come back at me.

  I lift my foot back and drive it into her stomach, and she groans in pain again. I kick her again. And again. I’m seething now. I’m growling. I lift my heel and hammer it down onto her face, and her nose and mouth erupt with blood.

  I get back down onto my knees and grab a handful of hair and yank back so I’m looking into her bleary and panicked eyes.

  I want to say something to her. I want to warn her that she shouldn’t fight with me, that I was only trying to be nice.

  Instead I’m thinking about punching her in the face. Over and over.

  Do it.

  In my head I’m hitting her again and again. Blood is pouring out of her. Her mouth is a dark mess of broken teeth and open wounds. Her eyes sink into her skull; her nose all but disappears as her face caves in from the relentless attack…

  Do it!

  I roar with rage and ball my fists and get ready to strike.

  Kill her. Then we move on to the next.

  But Sophie isn’t one of them. She isn’t part of this.

  The strength of her voice grows in my head, but I try to push it away. It doesn’t really work. All that happens is that I open the door to the blaring noise of the rats. Now it’s all there, inside my head, at the same time. Her voice, the rats. The scratching, the screaming, the shouting, the nagging, the criticising. It’s unbearable. The walls close in, my head spins, it feels like it’s about to explode.

  Kill her!

  ‘NO!’

  I throw my fist forwards, but it doesn’t hit Sophie. Instead it slams into the wall of the van. I let go of Sophie and I fall back, panting, chest heaving.

  Silence.

  Except for the throbbing of my heart. And the suck and splutter of blood as Sophie breathes through her bloodied nose and mouth. But she is still breathing.

  I look down at my shaking hands. My knuckles are on fire and covered in blood from ramming the van wall. The sandwich lies between me and Sophie, squashed almost beyond recognition from the ruckus.

  ‘I only… wanted you… to eat,’ I say through laboured breaths.

  Sophie says nothing now. Just like before. She doesn’t even attempt to. She’s slumped in a pathetic heap on the floor, her arms still dangling above her. I was thinking of releasing one of her hands so she could eat the sandwich herself. More dignified than me passing her food mouthful by mouthful. But she blew it.

  The food is right there for her; she can bend down and eat it face down to the floor like an animal whenever she wants. This was her choice.

  ‘You need to eat,’ I say.

  I get to my feet and open the van doors. I step down to the warehouse floor and take one last look at Sophie, blood pouring from her once pretty face, the small pool of red reaching out to the flattened sandwich in front of her.

  I slam the doors shut and walk away.

  Chapter Twenty

  Dani knew that somewhere outside the windowless interview room it was yet another hot and gloriously sunny summer’s day in Worcestershire, and across pretty much every inch of the country too. Deep inside Long Lartin prison, it may as well have been bleakest winter. The mood in the room – or was it just in Dani’s head? – certainly felt like that would have been more appropriate.

  Dani simply couldn’t shake her irritability and feeling of despair as her brother pulled her deeper and deeper back into his dark mind, opening up the space for her own demons to come to the fore at the same time – which certainly hadn’t been helped by her nonstop thoughts about Larissa Clarkson and what she was now going through so soon into her own recovery. Dani really thought – hoped – she’d moved on from this, but was now beginning to wonder if she ever could, despite her words to Larissa. The fact she’d had to delve even deeper into her stash of antidepressants that morning was evidence enough of how far Ben had already got under her skin these last few day
s.

  ‘How long did you share a cell with Damian Curtis?’ Easton asked. At least Easton was focussed this morning, despite the fact that his sister was still causing him problems and he’d had barely any sleep because of the house full of restless kids.

  Join the club on that one, Dani thought – she’d barely slept for three hours.

  Ben looked to Gregory Daley who gave a slight nod.

  ‘About ten months,’ Ben said.

  Dani did her best to ride over the little exchange between client and lawyer, though she remained irritated by whatever play the two of them were concocting. The interview had only been going for ten minutes, though Ben hadn’t answered even the simplest of questions without first looking for assurance from his hired help. So far Easton had taken the lead, at Dani’s request, and she was simply fighting to stay focussed.

  McNair’s words from the day before swam in Dani’s mind once more. Yes her boss had said she could still be on this case, had made it clear that it was OK for Dani to be interviewing – investigating? – her brother even, as long as she was accompanied to any meetings with him. But now that she was here with Ben, she wasn’t so sure she agreed with her boss. Which Dani really didn’t want to admit to anyone. Put simply, though, Dani was conflicted here, and she wasn’t sure she could keep her cool when she knew Ben was doing little more than toying with the police, and her in particular.

  ‘Tell me about him,’ Easton said, thankfully sounding way more calm than Dani was feeling.

  ‘Tell you about him?’ Ben said, rather smugly Dani thought. ‘That’s pretty open-ended.’

  ‘What was he like as a cellmate?’

  ‘I only have two others to compare him to,’ Ben said. ‘And I have to say none of them were exactly easy-going. You do realise this is a maximum-security prison, right? You’re a policeman, I’m sure you can imagine the characters we get in here.’

  ‘So he was violent? Aggressive?’

  Ben looked to Daley who gave the slightest shrug.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Ben said.

  ‘So that’s a no?’

  ‘He was never violent to me.’

  ‘OK,’ Easton said, sounding like that straight answer was something of a breakthrough, even if Ben hadn’t really fully answered the question at all. Perhaps Easton was being deliberately sarcastic. ‘So coming back to my first question then. What was Curtis like? Did you chat much? Did you fight, either verbally or physically? Was he tidy or messy? Did he fart a lot?’

  ‘You want me to answer all of those at once?’

  ‘Ben, stop being an idiot,’ Dani said. ‘You know fine well what DS Easton is asking for.’

  Ben gave a little snort of discontent, likely because Dani had used her tone of authority with him. He’d always hated her doing that.

  ‘Maybe you don’t know what life is like in a place like this,’ Ben said, looking from Dani and back to Easton.

  ‘Damn right we don’t,’ Dani said.

  Ben’s eyes narrowed now as he glared at her.

  ‘It’s not exactly a holiday club,’ he said. ‘And the men I’ve had to share a cell with aren’t exactly the type of blokes you’d want to have a beer with down the pub.’

  He paused as though waiting for another snide comment from Dani. She managed to hold back this time.

  ‘But Curtis…’ Another shared look between Ben and Daley. ‘Curtis is seriously damaged.’

  ‘Damaged?’ Dani said.

  ‘Messed up in the head. I’m not going to pretend to know the technical terms, but he’s crazy. Properly crazy.’

  Ben paused.

  ‘That’s it?’ Dani said. ‘He’s crazy? Crazy how?’

  ‘I think you’ll be well aware that my client is not trained in psychiatry or psychoanalysis or any related subject,’ Daley said.

  Dani glared at him now.

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ Easton said. ‘But what behaviours did he exhibit to lead you to think he was crazy?’

  ‘It was just… the way he talked. The way he acted. He’s got a few screws loose. Honestly, I don’t know how else to explain it to you.’

  ‘Did he rant?’ Easton said.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Talk to himself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he display anger or aggressiveness?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Towards you?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘But you said he was never violent to you.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Just angry?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About whatever. There wasn’t always a catalyst. But I have to say again, don’t forget where we are. This place is a pressure cooker. Everyone’s on edge, all the time. You’re more likely to be concerned about the people who aren’t angry and aggressive, who sit by themselves in a corner all quiet.’

  ‘What did you know about Curtis’s crimes?’ Easton asked. ‘His reason for being here?’

  Ben looked to Daley again. For the first time the lawyer shook his head.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Dani said, feeling her anger rising further. She realised Easton was looking at her now too, but she ignored whatever prompt he was trying to give her.

  ‘Sorry?’ Ben said.

  ‘What does that head shake mean?’ Dani said to Daley.

  ‘It means he doesn’t have to answer that question,’ Daley said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’m his lawyer and I advised him not to.’

  ‘What do you know about Curtis’s crimes?’ Dani asked again, now glaring at her brother. ‘Those he committed that led to his imprisonment here.’

  ‘No comment,’ Ben said.

  ‘No comment?’

  ‘I think you heard him just fine, Detective,’ Daley said.

  ‘I understand he was involved in a fatal car crash,’ Dani said, still holding Ben’s eye. ‘Two people died. Is that your understanding too?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘He was convicted of manslaughter, correct?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you about that night?’

  ‘No comment.’

  What the hell was Ben playing at now? What did he not want Dani and the police to know?

  ‘Did Curtis ever talk to you about the Redfearne family?’ Easton asked.

  Another silent exchange between client and lawyer.

  ‘No comment,’ Ben said.

  ‘Specifically Oscar Redfearne?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Or Sophie Blackwood.’

  ‘No comment.’

  Dani let out a long sigh. Was there even any point in carrying on if he was only going to do this?

  The meeting fell into an uneasy silence. Dani’s brain raced with conflicting thoughts. Could they steer Ben back to ground he’d talk about? But then, why wouldn’t he talk now? All Easton had asked about was the crime Curtis had committed that led to his imprisonment. That was public record.

  ‘On Monday night a woman by the name of Mary Deville was murdered in her home,’ Easton said. ‘She was a retired judge. In fact, she was the judge who presided over Curtis’s manslaughter trial. Did he ever mention her to you?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Do you have any knowledge of Curtis’s involvement in the murders of Oscar Redfearne or Mary Deville?’ Dani asked.

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Is Curtis going to kill again?’

  ‘I think you probably get the gist of my client’s position by now in relation to this line of questioning,’ Daley said.

  ‘Well, to be honest, not really,’ Dani said. ‘What exactly is his position?’

  ‘I can still help you,’ Ben said, fixing his gaze on Dani.

  ‘Me? Or the police? Or people out there who are potential murder victims?’

  ‘You do realise we could charge you as an accessory to murder,’ Easton said, for the first time sounding agita
ted. ‘If you were aware beforehand of Curtis’s planned actions and did nothing to help us, then that’s what you are.’

  ‘If you recall, it was actually at my client’s behest that we first asked DI Stephens here,’ Daley said. ‘So please don’t try to turn this onto him. He wants to help, but it has to be a reciprocal arrangement, and I really don’t understand why that is so hard for the police to understand.’

  ‘What do you want, Ben?’ Dani asked.

  ‘I believe he’s told you that already,’ Daley said.

  ‘I asked him, not you,’ Dani said to Daley before looking back to her brother again, who now looked amused by the whole thing.

  Dani hated him so much…

  Stay focussed.

  ‘Are more people going to die?’ she asked.

  No answer at all this time.

  ‘Is that actually what you want? What does that say about you, Ben?’

  ‘DI Stephens, please,’ Daley said. ‘Our position is clear. If we are given assurances over my client’s legal position in relation to the information he has, and if progress is made on his personal familial matters, then he will tell you everything he knows. Any questions you have around the subject of his knowledge of crimes, past or present, will not be answered until then.’

  ‘Mr Daley, you surely understand we’re not in a position to give you any kind of legal assurances,’ Easton said. ‘We’re conducting a murder inquiry. I’d strongly suggest you take your client’s legal demands through the appropriate channels, but to withhold information which could allow us to save lives—’

  ‘He is not withholding,’ Daley said. ‘It’s Wednesday today. It was two days ago, Monday, when my client advised DI Stephens of his position on this matter. And what progress has been made thus far in achieving what he has asked for? Any negative repercussions from here are not flowing from my client’s behaviour, but from the lack of action taken by the police and the CPS.’

  Now it was Dani’s turn to be silent. Of course, she’d met with McNair, Baxter and the CPS lawyer the very day Ben had first asked her here to discuss his messed-up deal. What actions had resulted subsequent to that meeting? Apparently nothing. Regardless, she had nothing to say to Daley about the steps she had taken.