‘There,’ he managed to say. ‘There. Oh God, there.’
He was still on the floor. He was trying to speak but he couldn’t do it, not properly. Frustrated, he held out a shaking hand in front of him, pointing towards the bins he’d gone out to. They were heavy plastic, surrounded by tall grass and weeds. Behind them a badly kept wall just higher than they were separated them from the pavement behind. I stepped forward slowly. The bins weren’t flush with the wall. I could see that. There was a gap of eight or nine inches between. Not much of a gap. But it was enough. Using the toe of my left boot I inched the bins apart.
And saw a face. A very small face. More than a face. A child. A small child. A baby lying there.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
My throat went through a swallowing motion, and then another. My hand came up to my face and I bit down on my knuckles. The baby was wrapped in clingfilm. Through the plastic I could see that it was covered in blood. My eyes were stuck to it, my mind needing to be absolutely sure. There was no doubt about it. It was a white baby. Denise had been white but Jared wasn’t, his skin was a deep black. So. So this was Ally’s baby I was looking at. This was Sophia. The beautiful little girl with the curly black hair, running through my office door, who had just learned to call me Uncle Billy.
I tilted my head back. I was taking breaths, trying to hold on. My eyes fell again on the words, my name, writ large on the overpass above.
* * *
It wasn’t long before Alfred Road was looking pretty much the same as it had seven and a half years ago. Police, photographers, forensics, medics, a cordon set way back, a huddle of press behind it. This time, however, they’d got up a huge scene tarp that covered most of the middle section of the street. I was under it, with Andy, shielding my eyes against the glare of the halogen lamps they’d set up. Clay was part of a group standing ten yards away around the bins, watching while a cameraman videoed the scene. The man in the heavy-metal T-shirt was inside his house. He wouldn’t come out, not until the nightmare image he’d seen had been removed.
I stood watching the group of men, my arms folded. My face felt like it was made of stone. Andy was talking to me but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then I realized he was asking me for the A-Z page I’d told him about when I’d called him. It was in my back pocket. I handed it to him and he bagged it. I told him that the envelope was at home. It had a London postmark. Central London. He was keen to get his hands on it but I couldn’t see the point. It would be covered in prints but I didn’t think any of them would be significant.
The tent was a big one with perhaps twenty people beneath it. I could hear cars pulling up to it, sirens sounding and then cutting out. I felt like a lone cyclist in the Tour being overwhelmed by the peloton. I pictured the press at the far end, could almost feel their interest pushing in. They’d be looking this way, not back up at the flyover. They wouldn’t see what was written there. Clay hadn’t released the little messages we’d been getting to the press anyway so, even if they did see it, it would probably pass them by. If it didn’t, if one of them remembered my name, I’d be in every paper in the country by the morning.
There was movement at the door to the tent and I saw two men walk in. I’d seen them before, at the Rotherhithe Tunnel. One of them carried a small bag in his hands. It was a body bag, but tiny. The fact that they even made them that size hit me like a kick in the stomach. I watched as they approached the house, the bins, as the more senior of the men bent down. Ten minutes later he had the child in his arms. With his long white coat and breathing mask, it looked like he had just delivered it. Gently he lowered the child into the bag, held open by his colleague, who then held it himself while the bag was zipped up. Everybody beneath the tarp stopped what they were doing and watched as the two men walked slowly to the door flap and out of it.
Andy told me that he’d been about to go in to Jared Denton when he’d been called down here. He asked me what had happened to my face. I told him that I’d got into a fight, told him how the joke I’d heard had set me off. He nodded, accepting my explanation. He’d probably already been informed about the state I arrived home in. He told me that I had to hold on, to keep it together. He was being very sympathetic towards me, something that always made me wary where Andy was concerned. I wondered for a second but then I knew what it was. Andy was relieved and he didn’t want to show it. Relieved because this had nothing to do with him. The writing above our heads told us both that. Andy could relax. He could look at me with the same measure of curiosity and disgust most of his colleagues were showing.
Andy radioed for a car to be brought right up to the door of the tent and we got into it. We drove through the cordon, past the press, and then up to my flat to get the envelope. I felt dull and heavy. When we pulled off Rosebery Avenue towards the Market Andy stopped the car dead, but then sped up. The street door to my flat was open. The doors to the blue Transit were open too and there were detectives climbing out of the back of it. I saw them as if in a dream. Andy gunned the car forward and then skidded to a halt and we both jumped out. I could see my neighbour, the film maker, standing on the street. He was rubbing his wrists, talking to a sandy-haired DC I’d seen in the station the day before. I ran up to them, Andy at my side. The DC stood with his hands on his hips.
‘You left your bath on,’ he said. ‘This guy came running out onto the street as if the place was on fire. Scared the shit out of us. When we bagged him he said it was coming through his ceiling. Didn’t know what he was on about. Had to kick your door in, I’m afraid.’
‘My sofa’s bloody soaked, mate. Woke up, couldn’t understand what the noise was, banged on your door for ages, then thought you might be in the cafe. Came out, nearly had a heart attack. What are these coppers doing here? Six of them just bloody well grabbed me and those handcuffs really hurt, actually.’
The DC turned to him. ‘Sorry about that, sir, no offence meant. You can go now. But, oh, who is your father, by the way? You asked me several times if I knew, and I must confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.’
* * *
Before the police had arrived at Alfred Road I’d called Sharon again and once more got her voicemail. This time I did leave a message, figuring she’d listen to it even if she didn’t want to take my calls. I apologized profusely for not going round, more for not phoning. I told her that I’d been freaked, terrified for her, afraid she’d talk me into something dangerous if I did call. But I said that events had justified my fears. This person knew everything about me. I wondered out loud whether we should tell the police about Sharon after all and I urged her to call me to talk about it. In the meantime stay at home, I said. And don’t call anyone except for me.
I spent the next three hours in the incident room sitting next to Andy, going through CCTV stills from the Lindauer Building, looking at the grainy indistinct faces of delivery men, visitors, people attending classes in the building and numerous others, all no doubt with perfectly legitimate reasons for visiting the place. Andy had told me to keep it together but it was hard, difficult to keep my mind from the bins on Alfred Road. Without even knowing it, I’d been hoping that somewhere, in a bedsit or a flat, a house maybe, Ally’s baby was living on throughout all this. It was a stupid, vain hope, which was why I’d never consciously thought about it, but nonetheless I’d entertained it somewhere inside me ever since the night I’d seen what had happened to Ally. I wondered if Mike had entertained it too, whether he still did. I wondered if he knew that he could feel even worse than he was feeling now. Andy said that a DNA test on the child would take three or four days but I didn’t see what it could tell us. Ally’s baby was dead and so must Denise Denton’s have been. Ally had been close to term but Denise had only been pregnant six months. Enough time to give her child a chance of survival if it had been delivered in a hospital, but not if it was torn out of her in a flat somewhere. Both the children were dead.
My mind also drifted to Sharon. Would she agree to go into a s
afe house? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if Clay would offer her one or whether he’d see her as some kind of chance, bait to catch the killer with. I felt hemmed in, not knowing what was right, not knowing how I could decide. And as I continued to go through the stills I felt further trapped. This thing, bearing down upon me, which I had no control over, which I just seemed to have to wait for. The powerlessness was almost physical, sitting in the centre of my muscles, paralysing me. I wanted to do something, to get out there. Not sit at a screen. But I knew this might be the most fruitful thing of all and so I made myself concentrate, forced myself to stare at the images in front of me.
Stills had been taken from tapes dating back six months. I looked intently at each and every one, but out of the clear shots none stood out, no face I recognized from past cases or from the public gallery of courtrooms where I’d been testifying. I always used to check out the gallery for future reference. I was frustrated but not surprised and moved on to the rest of the images. There were a number of indistinct ones, men in baseball caps, a woman wrapped in a huge scarf, her head hidden beneath a giant fur hat. It seemed logical to conclude that the killer was one of them. If that was the case then the killer had been just as careful as I thought he’d been. There was no way you could get an ID from them. The problem was that the cameras at the Lindauer were set too high. They looked down on people not at them. You couldn’t blame the security firm, though, because it was standard practice. Set them any lower and they’re far too easy to tamper with.
I went through all the images again, every one. It was depressing, tiring work but I stuck at it. Apart from the hooker in Loughborough Junction, this was the main lead, the mistake we’d thought the killer had made. Getting caught on film. Except he hadn’t. Andy was as depressed as I was. Beneath his who cares slouch he was beginning to look strained. I could see the panic beginning to build, the nervousness in his eyes. The papers had already begun to ask when the police were going to do something to protect London’s women and this morning’s find would only add to the noise. He told me that the girl would be picked up soon, trying to convince himself as much as me. He asked me to go through the stills a third time and I nodded. Nothing. Andy sat back and his whole body seemed to deflate as he let a breath out. I knew what he was thinking. Someone else had to die before he could get moving again.
Andy continued to look defeated. It was only when I was about to leave that he snapped out of it. An earnest young DC called Chamberlain interrupted to tell us that forensics had identified some prints from the flat Denise Denton had been using in Brixton. Given Denise’s profession there had been scores of different ones and Andy hadn’t held out hope of tracing any. But the latest, and most numerous, were easy to pick out.
‘Well, whose were they?’ Andy sat up.
‘They were Denton’s, sir,’ the kid said.
‘Great. The clowns found the victim’s own prints in her pad. What a bunch of geniuses.’
‘No, sir. Not the girl’s. The husband’s.’
‘The husband’s?’
‘Yes, sir. Jared Denton’s prints were all over the place.’
Andy hadn’t interviewed Jared yet, preferring to wait and see if he showed up anywhere on the CCTV stills, anywhere other than the one time he’d visited me. He hadn’t but that didn’t mean anything. He could have scoped it in one go, when he’d come to see me. As Andy had said, he was connected to his wife, obviously, and to me, but his presence in the building connected him to Ally and Josephine Thomas too. Andy was jubilant. His prints. He’d obviously found his wife before I had, something that didn’t surprise me. Because she was sixteen I wasn’t really looking for her, and if Joe 19 hadn’t called me I probably would never have gone down to Brixton. For Jared it was a full-time thing, though I didn’t know whether or not it meant he’d killed his wife and two other women. It was something for Andy to give the press, though, something to get the commissioner off Clay’s back, and Clay off his.
I left Andy as he was gathering up papers, telling the young DC to put a fresh tape in the room four’s video. He was so preoccupied he didn’t even ask me where I was going and I was glad. I walked out and saw that as well as Andy the whole room had changed, the whole nick even. The place was buzzing with the news, from the detectives on the case to the desk sergeant, who was being told about the find by a constable just leaving to go out on the beat. Everyone was waiting to hear about the outcome of Andy’s chat with Jared Denton and I thought about just sticking around to find out the result myself. But I had to see Sal again. If it was Denton, fine. If he broke down and confessed I’d be more than happy. I could understand why Andy was excited. It just looked way, way too easy. I was sure the answer still lay with the girl. The police still hadn’t found her and I had the feeling that Sal was right: I wouldn’t be able to either, not now. Not without help from the 22 Crew.
I stopped at the bank on the way down to the Pancras Road and then made my way to the gym. Sal was in her office, and she was expecting me. I put the money I’d withdrawn on the table; eight fifty-pound notes, bound with an elastic band. Sal ignored it. She told me that the 22 had heard her out and were going to get back to her, maybe as soon as today. She didn’t know if they’d spoken to the girl yet or if the girl had seen anything. She said she’d let me know as soon as, and then she reached over and rested her hand on the bundle of notes. Instead of picking it up, she looked at me.
‘You know I won’t be making anything on this, don’t you?’
I nodded.
‘I’d assumed that, and thank you, but I wouldn’t have minded if you were.’
‘I would have. But, Billy, are you sure about this?’
I nodded again.
‘Really? With the Bill all over you? Outside your drum? They’ve probably got a tail on you as well.’
‘I know. I haven’t made it yet, but they might well have.’
‘Then how’d you expect to keep it without them knowing?’
‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to keep it.’
‘No?’
‘It’s not for me.’
Sal leant back a little and then nodded herself. ‘I see. Which is why you wanted something fairly light. Easy to use.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Well, we can get you that all right. But you think she’ll actually agree?’
‘I don’t know. She won’t at first, I know that. I hope I can persuade her.’
‘And you’re sure you want to? Really? This isn’t going to buy you a toy, Billy.’
‘I know.’
‘But do you know what the consequences to her would be, to her career, etcetera, if she was caught with it?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Yes. But I know what the consequences would be if she was caught without it. I’ve seen them. I’ve seen them on Ally and I’ve seen them on Denise Denton and I’ve seen them on a little thing behind some bins, tossed out like rubbish. And I’m not going to see them on Sharon. Get me the gun.’
‘Give me a day,’ Sal said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was outside, back in the gym, that we ran into the girl. She was sitting astride the lats bench, pulling the handlebar down behind her shoulders, lean and muscular in a Lycra bra top and shorts. Her hair was scraped back and her plain, square face was taut with determination. The counterweight was moving upwards slowly and I was impressed: it was as much as I ever lifted. When she saw us her face relaxed and she let the bar up slowly until it clicked back into place.
I was surprised to see the girl, not having heard anyone come in. She was the only person there. Surprised also because she seemed to come from a different time, from before any of this had happened. It reminded me of the way my life had been.
‘This is Cherie,’ Sal said to me. ‘Our resident trainee masseur. She’s been making us all feel wonderful for a week and I’ve been letting her use the facilities in return.’
Cherie stood from the bench and smiled. She had the powerful, fra
nk aura of someone completely at ease with her body. She wasn’t as nervous as last time and seemed at home in the gym.
‘We’ve met,’ I said.
Cherie squinted. ‘Have we?’
‘Last week. My name’s Billy.’
‘Oh yes. You couldn’t make it but you were going to come back in on Sunday. I wrote your name down. But you didn’t show up.’
I wasn’t surprised I’d had to jog her memory. I felt like I was a completely different person from the one who’d cancelled on her.
‘I know, I’m sorry. Something…’
‘No, I wasn’t telling you off! There have been plenty of people to work on. But anyway, I’ve got exams next week. What about now?’
She’d asked that last time and again it backed me up.
‘Now?’
‘Unless you have something you need to do? Or we could make another time, but you look like you’re a busy person. I don’t want to seem pushy.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Just let me think for a second.’
I thought about the one thing I wanted to do. But I had to trust Sally. I didn’t like being at the whim of a bunch of hustlers like the 22 but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Loughborough Junction would be quiet as a morgue. There was nothing I could do about Sharon either until she got in touch. I felt the frustration again, sitting with Andy, trying to wring the answer out of my brain, knowing it was never going to come that way.
It Was You Page 18