It Was You

by It Was You (retail) (epub)

  I managed to close my eyes in time, but I couldn’t shut out the sound that ended the boy’s screams.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the mouth of the tunnel I stood, letting the city static fill my head, waiting for Andy to finish talking to Burg, the pathologist. The tunnel mouth was relatively calm. Few people knew what was really going on in there. I watched the traffic being directed away, saw a man with a shoulder-mounted camera at his feet warming his hands round a polystyrene cup. Next to him stood a petulant-looking woman in her mid-twenties, obviously wondering how long she’d have to spend on traffic stories before she got anything juicy. She didn’t know it but it wouldn’t be long. I couldn’t see anyone else covering what appeared to be just another pile-up. She didn’t know she would be the first to report that a serial killer’s third victim had just been found. That someone living amongst the people of London was stalking pregnant women. Stalking them not like a lovesick, nuisance fan, but like an animal. I saw that a strand of hair had escaped from the reporter’s Alice band and was blowing against her cheek. She’d be pissed off to see that on the news later, if she didn’t fix it.

  I kept my eyes on Andy as the cogs inside me clicked and turned. A serial killer. I nodded to myself. It was shocking, appalling, so much grief had been caused to so many people. But I wasn’t bothered by that. I wasn’t bothered by Josephine Thomas or this girl here. In fact I felt cheated by them. Ally had only been dead two days and there was so much other stuff crowding in. I wanted to give myself to Ally, if not yet in sorrow then in action. I wanted to find the person who had killed her. That Ally’s killer had clearly murdered two other women also seemed irrelevant. Any other murders were just clues, serving initially to prove that Ally’s killer wasn’t my friend. Again I felt that certainty. Mike, he hadn’t murdered his wife. Once again I felt the relief. It was bigger by far than the shock. Bigger even than that, though, was the shame I felt. I could hardly believe it. I’d let Clay and Andy get inside my head. I’d let them pull me back eight years. Made me think like them: a copper, a professional cynic. Not a friend, with faith to beat down any arguments put forward. I felt dirty and cheap. I told myself that I had to get to Mike, to stand up with him now.

  I looked across at Andy, his tie snapping in the wind like a rattlesnake. When Burg turned to his car I walked over, wanting to get out of there, but before I got to Andy he hit some keys on his phone. Andy told Clay that the pathologist had confirmed that another heavily pregnant woman had been murdered, possibly strangled, and then mutilated. Just as in the previous case the baby she’d been carrying had been removed. It was his opinion that the victim was fairly young. He also thought that the perpetrator probably had some medical knowledge, from the incisions made, and that there was no doubt that the person responsible had done the same thing to the victim found at the Lindauer Building. More than that, he needed to get the corpse on his table, and wouldn’t even guess at time of death until then. What he did say, when Andy pushed him, was the same as he had apparently said in the first case. It was something I hadn’t entertained for a second. Burg had told Andy that, depending on the stage of pregnancy, depending on the medical knowledge of the perpetrator, on their intentions and on many, many other variables, there was one possibility that could not be categorically ruled out. In both cases it was just conceivable that the foetus had survived.

  Andy held the tape for me and we walked through the melee to the Mazda. Andy was leaving the car he’d come in for the officer he was posting there and had asked for a lift. I backed away from the tape into all-but stationary traffic, clogged with vehicles that would have taken the tunnel. I drummed the wheel, frustrated, wanting to get to Mike. Andy, in contrast, looked thoughtful, his eyes straight ahead, happy to watch the world not going by. His eyes looked a little weak for a second and I thought he was going to say something, but he didn’t. What was there to say? Shaking his head, he reached into his jacket pocket and then lit up a fag before chucking the rest of the pack onto the dash. I leaned across and cracked his window, which made him bark out a laugh. He took a deep drag then blew a cherub of smoke towards the gap, most of it curling back on the inside of the windscreen.

  ‘Just like old times,’ Andy smiled. ‘And earlier. You getting in the way, as per.’

  ‘In the way?’

  ‘I’d have chinned that Fireman Sam.’

  It was my turn to laugh. ‘And now be in intensive care.’

  ‘What? Those nancy boys? Gay as the vicar, every one of them. Couldn’t keep their hands off me, didn’t you see? They only join up for the hose.’

  ‘You’d still he in intensive care.’

  ‘Yeah, well, maybe. But it was a good job I did get to that kid, wasn’t it? Lewisham. How long would it have taken to find that out? Couldn’t they see that I had to speak to him? Square-jawed, sanctimonious cunts.’

  Andy rubbed the tops of his hands and then shut his window absentmindedly.

  ‘Didn’t want to be in Blue Watch then? Or weren’t you tall enough?’

  ‘Fuck off. This “Coppers are racists and firemen are saints” shit just winds me up, that’s all. You know how many of them are in on insurance scams? People think they’re brave but they’re just stupid, otherwise they wouldn’t run into burning buildings, would they? You know why they have poles?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They can’t work out stairs. Stairs are too complicated for the fuckers.’

  ‘They just wanted to get that boy out.’

  ‘Cunts. Fucking cunts. Fucking bum-bandit cunts. You get that guy’s phone number did you?’

  I shook my head and gave up speaking to Andy, while he lit up another fag, turned on the radio and changed the station. Just like old times. The sun was behind a cloud but the bright grey light still showed me the sandbags beneath his eyes, the creases crossing his forehead like the mark of Zorro. Andy looked old. His neck was beginning to spill over his collar like water from a paddling pool. The belly sitting in his lap seemed separate, not part of him. I wondered how he’d allowed it to happen. Why so many guys in their thirties seemed happy to let it all slip away like that. And why the toned, gym-obsessed women they went out with or married put up with it. Mike would have gone like that. He was already beginning to. He’d feel old now all right. Jesus. Andy asked me what I was thinking but I shook my head.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘All right.’ I shrugged. ‘I was thinking what a fat fuck you are. That you should slim down before it’s too late.’

  ‘No need to, mate, I rely on natural magnetism. Lauren from the pub the other night certainly responded to that.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Way. And a different way in the morning actually.’

  The traffic freed up a bit until we were caught at a light near the Angel that seemed to stay red longer than Russia had. I shifted in my seat and willed it to turn. It felt all too easy, being with Andy, heading back from a scene, chucking it back and forth. I remembered how much I used to like it, and how it had begun to turn and get to me. I thought about some of the cases we’d worked together and tried to identify the moment it had started to sour. It had been a gradual, incremental thing but one collar stood out.

  Andy and I had been trying to break the grip that the dealer pimps had on the young girls who decorated and still decorate the streets of King’s Cross like bright, cheap buttons on an old, stained mac. A grass had fingered one guy for us, a Turk who went by the name of Jolly for some reason. The marks we often saw on the girls he ran told us he was anything but. We knew what Jolly was doing but he was careful and we didn’t have anything on him. It seemed like a lost cause until Andy and I worked out a way to get to him. We got background on a couple of his girls and we chose one, and went to see her mother and younger sister in Southampton. We found out what kind of girl Vanessa was and the reason she had left home, why she was vulnerable to a guy like Jolly. Finally, we managed to get a tape of the two women, telling Vanessa how much they wanted her
to go back home. The plea her sister made might even have moved Jolly himself.

  One night I posed as a John and, in the moth-eaten hotel room Vanessa took me to, I told her who I was and I played the tape to her. It didn’t take long for her to break down. I told Vanessa that she could start again, that we’d help her kick her habit, that she wouldn’t have to suck any more cocks or take any more punches. Her sister had a nice home where she could stay. I played the tape to her one more time, paid her and left.

  Vanessa had told me she would think not only about testifying against Jolly but also giving us enough to catch him red-handed. I went back to the station and waited. I didn’t know how much hope to hold out – the station bookie was giving long odds – but two weeks later Andy told me he’d got a call from her. When, six months after that, Vanessa sent Jolly away for eight years, Andy and I got a lot of brownie points. They felt good, almost as good as seeing the disbelief on the guy’s face as they took him down.

  After the trial we went out to the Rising Sun to celebrate with some of the rest of the squad. When the others had left Andy and I carried on, knowing that, being a coppers’ pub, last orders wasn’t going to come at eleven. We were both pissed, but Andy was pissed off. It was because I had got most of the credit, something I didn’t actually mind because it had, really, been my idea. We ended up arguing. Soon we were on to the usual ends and means rubbish and Andy ended up laughing at the very plan we’d just been celebrating, which had sent down an evil fuck and made us local celebrities to boot.

  ’But it worked didn’t it?’ I thought that pretty much ended the argument.

  ‘Like fuck!’ Andy’s laughter was dirty, loud.

  ‘No? Then why is that evil bastard beginning eight then?’

  ‘You don’t want to know, St William.’

  ‘Bollocks. You just don’t have any answers.’

  ‘No? Try this question. What do junkies want?’

  ‘Er, smack. They want smack.’

  ‘Wrong. They want good smack. Better smack than they have.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You didn’t make Vanessa see the error of her ways. I made her see the error of Jolly’s smack.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got her some good stuff. Real good stuff. ‘Told her she didn’t have to swallow any jiz for it either. She’d get it for nothing. All she had to do was sing.’

  ‘This is bullshit.’

  ‘Is it? I’ve been seeing her three, four nights a week. Keeping her steady. Promised to keep her going after the trial too, though she might find her free supply has suddenly dried up, poor bitch.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No? Ask Clay. He’s the one got it for me. And before you go on about morals any more, Billy, just ask yourself this. Where is lovely Mr Jolly now? And where he would have been if I hadn’t sorted it?’

  I stood up from Andy as my hands curled into fists. I was stunned. I felt hollow. But as quickly as the anger rose, it wavered. I tried to hold onto it but I couldn’t. It had already changed into depression. Andy and I apologized for yelling at each other and I thought about it. He was right. I was glad Jolly was behind bars. The girl hadn’t lied in court, we hadn’t planted any evidence. I just couldn’t help feeling flat and beaten.

  ‘What about Vanessa, though?’ I said, suddenly a lot more drunk than I had been. ‘Where does that leave her?’

  ‘In the car park on the Pancras Road. On her knees.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘But we didn’t put her there.’

  ‘We just left her there.’

  ‘Which is why we’re coppers, Billy, and not social workers. Or did you not realize that? Fill in the wrong form, did you?’

  The lights changed but we didn’t manage to make it through. My eyes wandered to the old pawn shop, now a brightly lit estate agent’s full of men in shiny, cheap suits, as if a worm hole had opened up into the 1980s. I looked away, across the junction, and saw a woman standing at a bus stop, reaching down to hold the hand of a small child. The woman looked tired and the round ball of her belly told me why. After a few seconds she looked around, a little scared, scanning the traffic for the eyes that were touching her. When she spotted me she glared, and I felt her discomfort, but I couldn’t turn away. She just looked so precious. The most valuable thing in the entire world. And someone wanted to hurt her. She didn’t know it yet, but they did. For the first time I wondered why. The shock that Ally had been murdered by some kind of serial killer, and the relief that her husband had nothing to do with it, had both subsided, leaving that simple question. Why? What in God’s name could motivate a person to do something like that?

  I was also aware of the everyday frenzy surrounding this woman, the normal action of the city. The cars rushing by, mere feet from her. The people jostling, pushing past her on the pavement. The street was full of potential danger but the woman seemed blithely indifferent. That cyclist, mounting the pavement, he hits her and that’s it. Christ. I wanted to shout out, to warn her. Instead I blinked, suddenly amazed that we could leave the entire propagation of our species to the uncertain, shifting, delicate process the woman across the junction was going through.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘You just tipped him out onto the street? After what happened to him? How could you do that?’

  ‘He was innocent,’ Clay said. ‘That’s what we’re supposed to do, unfortunately. I’d like a change in the law, of course, but as it stands now innocent people are allowed to walk the streets. We’re not a babysitting service, Billy.’

  It wasn’t Clay I was angry with, it was myself. I was playing catch up with Mike and every second that passed took me further away from him. I had a visceral desire to be near Mike, to grip hold of him. I tried him at home and then dialled his mobile. I left messages on both, kicking myself for not getting Andy to ask Clay to keep Mike there until I arrived. I wanted to get straight out and find him but Clay insisted I go over my theory concerning Josephine Thomas. As quickly as I could, I told them how I’d gone there to scope the route, how I’d seen her mother standing opposite the alley. Clay didn’t look too impressed but then he never had: until the guilty came back.

  ‘It doesn’t change a whole lot one way or another, though,’ he said. ‘Two women or three, we’ve still got a Champions League sicko on our hands.’

  We were standing in the incident room. The office behind Clay was busy. Additional desk units were being assembled down the side and more computer equipment was being installed. This wasn’t a murder case any more. The police weren’t looking for someone who had killed someone else, full stop. The verb was present tense, not killed but killing, an ongoing process. The additional urgency was almost palpable. Every second mattered, every minute that passed without the perp being collared put another woman in danger, brought the guy closer to her. It was a race now and while the police had resources, manpower and technical equipment at their disposal there were two things they didn’t have. They didn’t know who the killer was. They didn’t know when he’d strike again.

  The fact that Calshot Street was being used as base HQ surprised me, but Clay told me that the commissioner had been persuaded to use the station rather than Scotland Yard, way over in Victoria. Clay looked psyched as a general the night before a big scrap. He told me that forty plain clothes had been signed over to him, as well as his usual team.

  ‘They’re also sending me a profiler,’ he said. ‘Some university don who’s going to charge us a grand a day to tell me the fucker doesn’t like women very much.’

  After pulling the plastic off a new office chair Clay told me that, as yet, the investigation into Ally’s death hadn’t yielded much. Unlike me, he wasn’t pleased to eliminate Mike. Without him the team had precious little to go on. The problem was the CCTV from the courtyard at the Lindauer. Ally had been murdered on a Saturday, so there hadn’t been many people in the building. The CCTV covers the forecourt and there’s no back entrance to the complex, which back
s onto private gardens. Clay told me that everyone on the tape had checked out. All the people who were in the building when Ally was killed. There were only eighteen of them, including Mike and Ally, and they all had at least one other person to verify their movements. All but Mike. The police had been over their studios and their homes but hadn’t found anything. Clay told me that he had sent a team back to the Lindauer that morning to talk to people again. To tell everyone to be careful. To find out if any pregnant women with connections to the building had gone missing recently.

  The last thing Clay told me was that no trace of Ally’s child had been found yet. Burg’s words came back to me but I didn’t say anything. It was just possible. I nodded to Clay and walked outside to the car park, passing a line of detectives coming the other way, all carrying cardboard boxes. The machine, the pistons starting to pump. I wondered whether it would be so thorough and extensive that a result would be guaranteed. Or whether it would be too big, too sluggish. Whether more women would have to die. Outside, in the Mazda, I breathed the remnants of Andy’s smoke and thought about the woman at the bus stop. Statistically she’d be very unlucky to be the next victim but if there was to be one it had to be somebody. She would probably be home by now. She’d be making her daughter some lunch, keeping half an eye on the TV news. Did they have it yet, the woman in the tunnel? What it meant? I didn’t know, but they would soon. I tried to imagine what it would be like to learn that someone was plucking pregnant women from the city like nuts from a tree. Discarding the shells. To know that the parcel of life growing inside you could very well be drawing someone to you, someone like that. I pictured the woman, feeding her little girl, the spoon stopping in midair as Anna Ford broke the news. Would she go and make sure the front door was locked? Would she call her husband at work, just to hear his voice? Would she tell him about me, the man staring at her through the traffic?