It Was You

by It Was You (retail) (epub)

  ‘He didn’t want it,’ I said eventually. ‘The baby. It made him feel trapped, he said he wasn’t ready. It was supposed to be a mistake but he suspected Ally had done it on purpose in some way. He was freaked out. He was on the point of leaving her.’

  ‘Thanks, Billy. Thanks. You could have told us that yesterday but thanks anyway.’

  I hung up and then searched myself for traces of guilt for having helped Andy’s case against my friend. I found quite a few but ignored them straight away. Mike wasn’t my friend, not if he’d done that. A last flash of certainty rose up, outshining the logic, telling me it wasn’t him. I turned from it. The clock on my kitchen wall told me it was nine forty-five. I drank two cups of coffee and showered. I dressed quickly and then packed my bag before walking down the stairs to the street. It was ten-thirty by the time I’d tricked my car into starting. By eleven I was standing outside the estate that Josephine Thomas lived on and where she had died, a quarter of a mile south of Dalston Junction.

  * * *

  Thirty-six hours ago I’d let shock, horror and friendship blind me to what was standing right in front of my eyes, while Andy Gold and Ken Clay had behaved like policemen. They’d used judgement and experience to assess what was most likely and then looked for motive, opportunity, proof. Simple police work. But there was another side to investigating something thoroughly. It was never allowing the obvious to make you lose sight of the hidden, the maybe, even the seemingly impossible. Two women from the same building had been killed in the space of ten days. The killer of one had been found, and the crimes seemed totally different from one another, but the fact remained. Two women from the Lindauer Building had been murdered.

  I didn’t have any illusions as to why I was chasing it down, though. I didn’t think they were wrong to go full steam for Mike, not now. But even if they were wrong, the idea that someone was stalking women from the Lindauer Building was a hell of a long shot. It might have been plausible if both women had been attacked in the same way. Or if they had anything else to link them. But, as Andy had just confirmed to me, Josephine Thomas had been stabbed only once and then left to bleed to death. Her purse had been taken. There were no obvious links with Ally, and the kid the police had looked perfect for Jo’s death anyway. The kid had been pinched in the morning of the day Ally was killed, which meant that there was no way he could have killed Jo before going on to her. I just couldn’t sit in my flat any longer. I needed something to do while I waited for forensics. Even though Josephine Thomas was a near-certain dead end, her murder was an alley I could walk down. Somewhere for my mind to visit instead of the nightmare it kept returning to.

  I drove along Upper Street and then through elegant, Georgian Canonbury, until the delis and the gastro pubs and the four-by-fours began to give way to Chinese takeaways and minicab offices. Structurally, Islington and Hackney are very similar, but I’ve always felt that to move between the two is like spending time with two middle-aged sisters, one of whom married an enthusiastic plastic surgeon while the other hit the gin bottle. Neither seems to look the way it was intended.

  After twenty-five minutes I locked up the Mazda and stood, looking at the red-brick estate in front of me. The Kirkland is bang in the middle of Dalston. Josephine Thomas lived there because it was affordable, subletting a small council flat on the ground floor of the estate. Unlike the surrounding area the estate itself looked well maintained, a Peabody project built at the turn of the century, only four storeys high in attractive, ageing brick. The kind of place that now brings top whack if it’s located a mile or so west, the way I’d come. I turned from the building and walked in the direction of Dalston Lane, noticing that the hat and scarf count had gone down a little. It was another beautiful day, herds of huge white cloud migrating slowly overheard.

  Andy had told me that Josephine had taken the 277 home. When I got to the nearest bus stop, where Josephine would have got off, I turned round and retraced my steps, following the route she must have taken home from there. I passed a tyre refit place and an empty greasy spoon, trying all the time to imagine the place at night. Dalston is different when the sun isn’t shining. In the daytime it looks scruffy, tatty, neglected, but it doesn’t make your pulse beat faster. At night the threat rises up through the pavements like dew. There should be a sign: Dalston Junction – twinned with Compton.

  After fifty yards I turned right and once again the Kirkland Estate loomed up on my left. I was about to cross over towards it but I stopped. Josephine hadn’t walked through the estate, preferring to circumvent it and come in from the southern end, nearer to her flat. A safety precaution that hadn’t done any good. I walked on, took a left and came upon an alley, a concrete walkway with small rectangular lights fixed to the right-hand side about head height, twenty feet apart. On the night Josephine had died only one of them had been working. I’d have liked to bet someone that the rest of them had been fixed since then.

  I couldn’t see to the end of the alley because of a kink halfway. I took a look behind me at a row of Victorian houses on the other side of the road facing the estate. Most of them were pretty shabby, twenty-year-old paintwork peeling off in huge flakes, but a couple looked bright and cared for. Outside one of them a middle-aged woman was standing, waiting for a lift. I wondered if someone had stood in a similar place, out of sight maybe, until Josephine Thomas had walked by. I turned back to the cut-through, hesitated for a second, and then sent my feet down it.

  The pile of flowers was propped up against the left-hand wall, just after the kink in the alley, which is why I hadn’t been able to see it from the street. It wasn’t a big pile, seven bunches in all, most of which had wilted. Rain in the night hadn’t been too kind to the paper they were wrapped in, leaving the flowers looking bedraggled, the bunches practically merging into each other. Only a cluster of white roses was in pristine condition, the paper dry. They were set on the top of the pile and I bent down to them but there was no card. I looked through some of the other flowers and some did have messages included but I could only make two of them out. One said ‘To a dear friend, we’ll always miss you’, and the other read ‘Goodbye, lovely Josephine, from Brian and Sarah’. I pulled Andy’s notes back out of my jeans and wrote both messages down.

  I stuffed the notes back into my pocket as an arrow of guilt slammed into me. Had any flowers been laid for Ally? I bet they had. I hadn’t even thought. Where would they be? I told myself that I had to go and lay some, but then asked myself what the point was. Would it help her in some spiritual way? Or did people lay them in the hope that flowers would somehow clean the site of what had happened? If that was the hope it hadn’t worked here; in fact the opposite was true. The sad bedraggled pile just told me that something meaningless and miserable had taken place there.

  I turned from the pile and looked up at the tops of the walls, thinking about the possibility of someone climbing them. They were lined with criss-crosses of twisted metal like sharp, oversized jacks. No. Instead I wondered whether the killer had followed Josephine into the walkway or had been waiting for her halfway down. I figured the latter. If I was planning to jump someone there I’d have wanted to see both ways, to make sure no one else was coming. If the kid had followed her down he wouldn’t have been able to tell that, especially with both Josephine’s footsteps and his own confusing things. He’d waited for her, I was pretty sure. Which meant that Josephine was just unlucky, was just the first suitable victim to come along that night.

  Or maybe she wasn’t. Her attacker could have been waiting for her and her alone. If he knew where she lived, if he knew she’d be coming past that way. If he’d scoped the route and picked the most convenient spot to attack her. If he either knew when she’d be finished, or else had tagged her from the Lindauer Building or the bus stop and got ahead of her, knowing she’d walk home the way she did. It was possible. Josephine wouldn’t have been suspicious of a man striding ahead of her into the alley, looking like he was going all the way through, especial
ly if he was wearing trainers and she couldn’t hear his footsteps dying away.

  I thought about it. It was far more likely that whoever had killed her had simply waited in the alley for whatever the night brought by. To test my theory I stood very still. Soon I heard footsteps. I could tell there was only one person, even though the kink in the alley hid them from me. There was no way they could know I was there. I looked away as the person passed, a guy in his forties carrying a tennis racket. He jumped a little at the sight of me and then hurried by.

  So. A smackhead with the yips, three days since his last bag. My eyes moved from the flowers to the street end of the alley. I saw Josephine crawling along, stopping, crawling along, her life slipping quietly out of her like a party leaking people until suddenly it’s over. Had she called out, like Jemma had said? Had someone on the street heard her, but hurried past? I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. I was wasting time on a case that was already closed, wondering about Josephine Thomas’s last moments because I couldn’t face thinking about Ally’s. What it must have been like for her. Whether she had called out. I bent down to the white roses and I took them in my hands and I squeezed until the heads were crushed. Then I stood and walked back the way I’d come.

  I was going to sit in Fred’s with a coffee and my phone, waiting for Andy to ring. I wasn’t going to hide from any more images, wasn’t going to try to keep out any of the feelings that were trying to break into me. I dug my hands into my coat pockets and made it to the mouth of the alley, where I turned right, back up to my car. Across the road from me the woman I’d seen before was still standing outside one of the Georgian houses. She was looking at me. I carried on walking but stopped. I shook my head and made to walk off but stopped again.

  The woman across the road was middle-aged, round, and just above short. She was wearing a cotton headscarf and both her hands were rammed into a mac, the bottom of which was being turned over by the wind like a page corner. I was puzzled. It was chilly: why didn’t she wait inside? I tried to shrug the woman off but couldn’t ignore the look she was giving me. Her face was fixed and expressionless, red from the cold. I lowered my eyes for a second. I pursed my lips and headed across the road towards her.

  ‘Mrs Thomas?’

  ‘Police? Newspapers?’ Her mother’s Welsh accent was far stronger than Jo’s had been, from the times I’d heard it. Mrs Thomas’s eyes stared straight past me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I just work in the building Josephine worked in, that’s all.’

  ‘Didn’t bring any flowers.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. I should have done. I just wanted…I just wanted to come. I’d like to say how…’

  ‘You could have brought some flowers.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I could.’

  ‘Lots of others have. Her friends. Just people. They keep clearing them away so folks can get past. What’s your name?’

  ‘William,’ I said. ‘Billy. Billy Rucker.’

  ‘No, she never mentioned that.’

  ‘I didn’t know her well. As I say I just came…’

  ‘Rucker. I’ll remember. I’ll tell the police that. All sorts of funny people come here. When I saw you I knew you didn’t live on the estate. I knew you came to look. Lots of lookers. I bet he’s come, or else he will.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘The one who did it.’

  The woman stopped, her face tightening, her eyes almost closing. She must have known about the arrest, surely? She’d have been the first person they told.

  ‘When you didn’t bring any flowers, and you came out again, I thought it might be you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What done it. It wasn’t you, was it?’

  ‘No.’

  For the first time the woman looked at me, her eyes dark and direct.

  ‘It wasn’t you.’ She turned back to the alley. ‘And it wasn’t that boy the police have got neither.’

  ‘Oh? No? What makes you think that? I understand the evidence is pretty clear.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Evidence. They’re good at that, the police.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sometimes. But why do you think so in this case? Why do you think it was someone else?’

  Mrs Thomas’s smile was full of scorn. ‘I asked them if I could see him and they let me,’ she explained. ‘Through this mirror thing. He was crying, he was. Only a baby, really. It wasn’t him. I’ll know when I see him. He won’t be able to hide it from me.’

  ‘And you’ve been here. Coming here? Waiting?’

  There was no answer. ‘Can I buy you a cup of tea? There’s a cafe just round the corner…’

  ‘No. Thank you all the same. So you knew Josephine, then?’

  ‘I’d met her. She was a friend of another girl in the building.’

  ‘She was a good girl, Josephine. I didn’t want her to stay in London but she said she had to, being an actress and all. We argued about it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It wasn’t much. We made up. I said I’d come to see her in the West End, in Cats or something. When she’d made it, like. You ever see her, Josephine, on the stage?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Mrs Thomas said. ‘And now I never will, will I?’

  Mrs Thomas’s mouth moved up towards her nose and stayed there. The wind picked up the back of her headscarf and set it down again quickly, like a car thief checking a handle. She didn’t say anything else, preferring to focus her energy on the alleyway in front of us.

  I left Mrs Thomas and walked back up the street to my car, parked on the other side of the estate. The look on the bereaved woman’s face stayed with me. Righteousness oozed out of Mrs Thomas, but she couldn’t have been right, could she? The kid, innocent? It didn’t look like it, not with the prints Carpenter had. I wondered if Mrs Thomas really could tell, just by looking. It made me think about Mike. Would I be able to tell, looking through the two-way at the nick? Or staring up at him in the dock? As a police officer I’d often got it wrong, both ways, but this was someone I was close to, who I’d shared confidences with. And so was the victim. I decided that yes, actually, I would. Mike wouldn’t be able to keep it from me. I’d be able to tell and thinking about it, however it would make me feel, I wanted the chance.

  I was going to call Andy but I’d left my phone in the Mazda. When I got to the car I did call but only got a message. I put the phone on the passenger seat and pulled out into traffic. I wouldn’t go to Fred’s, I’d go to the station. Mike had to be there by now and I was pretty sure I could get Andy to let me into him. I wondered what I’d feel. If I knew. Or what if looking at Mike had the same effect on me as looking at the kid had on the woman I’d just been speaking to? I heard her voice again, the scorn: he didn’t do it. What if I knew it wasn’t Mike? How would I find out who’d really done it? Would I carry on looking into what happened to Josephine? I shook my head. With everything else so completely different the Lindauer had to be coincidence. If there was anything else to link the murders, anything at all, then maybe, but as it was…

  The traffic had moved me on twenty yards and left me at the top of Beechwood Road, the road I’d just walked up. Halfway down it I could see Mrs Thomas, still standing there. I found the idea of her vigil moving, dreadful even, but it wasn’t that that had caught me. I frowned. Mrs Thomas was a large woman. Not tall but big, especially wrapped up like she was. When I’d seen her I’d realized who she was because of her demeanour, but also because of her resemblance to her daughter. Josephine was big too. She was seen as such. I remembered the one conversation I’d had with her, in the lift, how she’d made me laugh telling me about a casting she’d just been to. It was for a lucrative TV commercial, thousands of pounds involved, and they’d wanted a really big girl.

  ‘It was probably the only room in the entire world where a bunch of women were sat around praying they were fatter than they were,’ Josephine had said.

  I didn’t bother pulling over. I just got o
ut and walked around to the other side of the car and stared down the road. From where I was standing I couldn’t tell much about Mrs Thomas. Not her age, her colour even. But there was something else. I couldn’t tell if being big was her natural state. My mind flashed to a party, years ago, a police party. I was talking to a woman I’d trained with, a woman who’d put on a lot of weight. Andy Gold turned, saw the woman and smiled. Then he asked when she was due.

  ‘Due to punch your bleeding lights out?’ the woman had asked. ‘You’re not so skinny yourself you know, Gold.’

  There were car horns behind me, a voice asking what the hell I thought I was doing. My eyes were glued to the distant figure opposite the alleyway. Out of my back pocket I once again pulled the notes I’d made. Josephine had been stabbed through her winter coat. Once. But the coat had been found open. Oh, Jesus. They’d thought the mugger had been looking for money but everyone knows that women keep their purses in their bags. How could they have missed that? How had I? Sweet Jesus. It wasn’t money they’d been searching for, not money at all.

  There was more shouting behind me. I turned from Mrs Thomas to the car and walked round it in a daze. I pulled over, up onto the pavement, unable to drive further. I reached for the phone and saw that my hand was shaking.

  ‘Billy. Where are you?’

  Andy was outside. He was at a scene, by the sound of things. A siren, shouting.

  ‘I’m in Dalston,’ I said. ‘I need to speak to you.’

  ‘OK, right. You know the Rotherhithe?’

  ‘The tunnel? Yes but, Andy, listen.’

  ‘I don’t have time. Billy, come over here. The north side of the tunnel? It won’t take long from Dalston. We can talk here.’

  ‘No. Just listen, Andy. For a second.’ Thoughts were swarming round my mind like flies trapped in a bait box. ‘Please?’