27
Grace took her seat between Superintendent Pitman and Larry Nixon at the table set up in front of a large panel bearing the Essex Police crest and the logo ‘Protecting and Serving Essex’. Scanning the gathering of reporters, she saw at least one cameraman, and crossed her fingers that this would not become one of those media events endlessly played and replayed once the supposedly grieving relative appealing for help had been unmasked as the scheming perpetrator.
She also couldn’t fail to notice Ivo sitting in the front row. He smiled at her, but, with so many eyes upon her, she could only give a polite nod in return. Beside him, perched right on the edge of his chair and looking around expectantly, sat a much younger man whom she didn’t recognise. Was this Freddie Craig? Hilary had told them that Freddie’s podcast interview with Larry Nixon was already going viral and, while Grace had no real right to condemn Ivo for doing his job, she couldn’t help being annoyed that he had assisted this novice to torpedo her investigation. Larry’s revelations in the podcast interview had placed the police and the media firmly back on opposing sides. However much she longed to ask Ivo if he could shed any light on what Melanie Riggs had said about DI Jason Jupp, she’d have to maintain clear and solid boundaries.
Hilary introduced everyone and then Colin made a brief statement that Grace knew had taken nearly an hour to get exactly right. His primary concern had been damage limitation for the force’s reputation (by which he meant his own), while hers had been to appeal directly to anyone who might have information. Hilary had managed to steer a delicate line between the two, as well as including a tribute to the courage of Heather Bowyer’s family.
The beauty of having Larry there in person – thanks to Blake’s inspired suggestion – was that his account of Reece’s confession could be reprised without the police needing to confirm or deny it themselves. Their explanation that, while new DNA evidence connecting Reece Nixon to the scene was a genuine breakthrough in the case, it was not conclusive, tacitly suggested that Larry’s evidence, too, remained questionable.
It immediately became clear that the media were only interested in Larry, besieging him with questions about what Reece had been like, whether he had suffered remorse, about Larry’s earliest suspicions, and whether he thought his brother had ever told anyone the truth.
‘How do you feel now that the truth is out?’ was Ivo’s question.
‘Gutted,’ Larry replied. ‘Most of all that I couldn’t save him, and that I hadn’t been able to help him when he clearly felt so cornered, so desperate. I was too slow to react, too shocked by what he’d told me on the phone.’
‘And if he was here now,’ Ivo continued, ‘what would you say to him?’
‘That, whatever he’d done, his family would stand by him. That it’s never too late to be sorry and ask forgiveness.’
Grace was sitting beside Larry, his knee almost touching hers. She fought to remain still, not to shift further away or allow her face to reveal her turmoil. Was it possible that a man who had cold-bloodedly murdered his own brother in order to evade justice could really look so calmly into a camera and talk such cant about forgiveness? What level of wickedness did that require? She strove to hear some ring of inauthenticity in his voice, but, if this man was a liar, then he was one of the best she’d ever encountered. Or he was innocent, and it was she who should be condemned for her dark suspicions.
The young man whom Grace assumed was Freddie Craig raised a hand. Larry nodded and waited for his question.
‘You were hurt in your attempt to save your brother and sister-in-law from the fire at their house. Can you show us the extent of your injuries?’
Until now Larry had kept his bandaged hands and arms more or less out of sight beneath the table, but now he raised them in response to the question. Several people lifted cameras and smartphones to take photographs, and Larry remained with his arms up, twisting his head slowly from one side of the room to the other until everyone had their picture. Grace found the composure of his gestures troubling. In the footage she’d seen of those media interviews in which a killer had trembled and wept and pleaded for their missing stepchild to come home or for the public to help catch a monster, it had seemed clear, in hindsight, that those criminals were shedding crocodile tears. Maybe Larry had seen the same footage and knew better than to overdo his performance. It was impossible to tell.
As Hilary took over, thanking Larry and preparing the way for Grace to make her request for information, he turned to Grace and gave a helpless little shrug, as if to say, What else could I do ? Could this really be the same man who, wearing a balaclava, had dragged Cara Chalkley out of his taxi at knifepoint? She shuddered, and could only hope that he didn’t notice her reaction.
Hilary had finished speaking, and it was time for Grace to look into the camera lens and make the little speech that Colin had reluctantly agreed to include.
‘Thanks to modern forensic science,’ she said, ‘we are closer than we have ever been to closing this case. However, there is one other avenue of investigation that may help bring this inquiry to a conclusion. Heather Bowyer was raped before she was killed. We believe that there may be other women who suffered a sexual assault in Southend in the years around 1990 to 1992, who, for whatever reason, did not report it to the police at the time. I appeal to them to come forward and speak to us now. We’d also like to hear from women who did report it, but who perhaps feel that more could have been done. I realise how difficult this may be, but you can talk to a female officer and, should you wish, any contact with us can remain confidential. Thank you.’
Was it her imagination or, as she was speaking, had she sensed Larry stiffen beside her like an animal sensing danger?
28
Ivo awoke from a nightmare in which the walls of a prison cell were closing in around him. Or was it one of the spartan dormitories of his prep school where he’d slept for four years from the age of nine? A wave of regret engulfed him. He had plenty to choose from – his mother, who died when he was ten; his distant father, also dead; two failed marriages; a grown-up daughter he hadn’t spoken to in years and countless other nameless griefs and fuck-ups. Yet most immediately upsetting, if he was honest, was the fact that Grace Fisher had pretty much blanked him at yesterday’s presser.
Of course he understood why. Officially, they were barely supposed to know one another. And, with Freddie stuck to him like glue, he wouldn’t have approached her anyway. But it had been good to see her again. Somehow he always felt like he was a slightly better person when he was around her. When they’d first met, he’d dubbed her the Ice Maiden, but, after witnessing her dogged passion for justice, he’d changed his mind. All the same, watching her walk off at the end of the media conference without any kind of personal acknowledgement had been like waving to his parents as they drove away and left him at the start of term. He simply hadn’t expected to feel so bereft.
It was still dark, but not so early that he couldn’t get up and start the day rather than lie sleepless in bed. He put the kettle on for coffee and stared out across damp autumnal gardens to the patchwork of windows spread across the back of the Victorian terrace opposite. There were always one or two lights left burning – to reassure young children, he assumed – plus, in some, the tiny, eerie red or green glow of LED standby indicators. It would be another hour or so before daylight, but there was enough murky light in the sky to make out the movement of a wood pigeon huffing up its feathers in the branches of an ivy-clad sycamore.
Ivo knew very well what had provoked his bad dream, so depressingly banal in its use of stock nightmare imagery. He’d been genuinely delighted that Freddie had got his scoop – the best way for the kid to make a name for himself was to stir up trouble – but maybe it had been a mistake to give him so much of a helping hand. Ivo hoped it wasn’t merely because of the flattery that he’d taken a liking to the kid. OK, so sometimes Freddie had laid it on a bit thick, begging for more and more tall tales of Ivo’s youth, but
schmoozing the punter was a vital part of the job and it was quite nice to be on the receiving end for a change. All the same, telling those stories had churned up old memories and disturbed one or two of the slimier bottom-feeders that were now enjoying a good thrash around in his subconscious.
To distract himself, he wondered if he had been like Freddie at that age. The kid was eager and appreciative, sharp-witted and enterprising, but with a spiky chip on his shoulder that accentuated his immaturity. Although Ivo had been equally immature, there’d been no chip on his shoulder – or not towards the world he’d wormed his way into, anyway. A motherless only child, he’d had his issues, but nothing a few beers followed by a double gin wouldn’t dispel. No, he’d been thrilled to be accepted into the newsroom, first on a local paper and then in Fleet Street. Too thrilled, perhaps. He could see now how his own youthful eagerness had made him an easy mark for an old hand like DI Jason Jupp.
To begin with, like Freddie, he’d simply wanted to be part of the club, hanging out with the veteran reporters and listening to their yarns. And later, by the time the last national paper had left Fleet Street and the tabloid world had become more vicious, his drinking was occupying most of his time and ingenuity.
As the kettle boiled he tried to think how his younger self would pass judgement on the shipwreck he’d become . . . Shit happens, get over it, probably. But then that had been the joy of being twenty-five. You believed you were rust-proof, that the slow corrosion of shame and regret would never catch up with you. He couldn’t remember when he’d last allowed himself to revisit any memory in which he’d felt hopeful and optimistic. Those were the memories he took the most care to avoid.
He poured water over the granules and stirred them into a semblance of coffee. No good feeling sorry for himself. Each of the blank windows staring back across the autumnal gardens hid a story. His was no different. Being an alcoholic didn’t make him special.
Freddie still imagined that taking a life had made Heather Bowyer’s killer different, had singled him out and marked him as forever damned. But Ivo wasn’t so sure. Freddie had asked him about all the murderers he’d watched as they sat in the dock day after day. Truth was that, during long trials full of dull legal arguments, even the worst of them had nearly dozed off. Like them, Reece Nixon was more likely to have simply shrugged off what he’d done and carried on, preoccupied not with the dark reaches of his soul, but with the same daily chores as everybody else.
All that Ivo had so far managed to discover about Reece Nixon’s life seemed to support that: a business just managing to stay afloat; a wife and two veg; looking forward to getting his mortgage paid off. Maybe he’d atoned in whatever way he could, reinvented himself as a boy scout who helped old ladies across the road. After all, there was no shortage of stories about lifers who appeared genuinely changed, filled with special sweetness and wisdom. In the end, most murderers were like everybody else, both good and bad.
So why the dramatic exit after the police came calling? Maybe Reece had been one step away from topping himself for years, and the knock on his door had finally freed him to check out. Most people would assume it was from fear of exposure or of the punishment to follow, but Ivo had a different theory. He knew a thing or two about punishment – about doling it out to the hapless miscreants he wrote about, and his own visceral need to feel punished. Not that it alleviated the pain for long, at best tipping the scales and balancing the books for a while, but it offered some meaning to his existence. It was probably why he’d so ferociously embraced the merciless front-page deluge of blame and shame, because deep down he knew that such a scourging was what he himself deserved. Handing out such inhumanity to others in order to feed his readers’ desire for justice of the flogging and hanging kind helped to cut off any retreat into accepting kindness or forgiveness for himself.
No, Ivo reckoned he understood Reece Nixon’s suicide better than most. Punishment was far easier to accept than understanding and compassion.
Especially if you hadn’t yet admitted to yourself what you’d done.
29
Welcome back to Stories from the Fire. I’m Freddie Craig, and I’m here in Southend retracing nineteen-year-old Heather Bowyer’s last steps – which means I’m also walking in the footsteps of Reece Nixon, the man whom even his own brother believes raped and killed her.
Reece Nixon was working as a taxi driver at the time of Heather’s murder, but we’re not sure whether that night he was in a car or on foot. Nor do we know if Heather’s abduction was a spur-of-the-moment decision or whether he had been watching her all evening. Was she his first victim? Or had he already stalked and raped other women before?
We do know that Heather arrived with friends by train from her home in Chelmsford and spent the evening drinking and dancing in various pubs and clubs along the seafront close to Southend’s famous pleasure pier – the longest in the world.
This wasn’t date-rape. Heather’s friends didn’t notice anyone paying her particular attention: no one bought her a drink and she didn’t flirt with anyone. She hadn’t been ‘asking for it’, hadn’t brushed Reece off and hurt his feelings, or left him thinking he was owed a shag. He was a stranger who came out of the darkness with a knife, a man who set out that night with the desire to hurt a woman.
Perhaps Reece had spent the evening cruising the streets, playing music on his car stereo and picking up fares while also waiting to spot the right victim. One of Heather’s friends said he caught the strains of this song you’re hearing from a passing car as they walked back to the station shortly before she disappeared.
We now also know that the police are widening their investigation of this cold case to include other sexual assaults. It seems that unlucky Heather might not have been his first victim, although she appears to have been his last.
What was it about Heather that made him pounce? Was he specifically looking for someone like her? Had she triggered something in him, or would any woman have served his purpose that early autumn night?
How do you decide to rape a woman? When I was at university, I’ll hold my hands up and admit there were times when I went on a night out thinking it would be nice to end up in bed with someone. Who doesn’t? But my aim was to hook up with a woman who also fancied having sex with me. To be honest, it’s how I first got together with my girlfriend, and we’ve been together for two years.
Right now, I’m in a phone box near the Kursaal casino and amusement arcade, close to where Heather and her friends would have walked. It’s plastered with tart-cards advertising the services of local prostitutes. Some have drawings or photographs of semi-naked women, nearly all with large breasts and many wearing black leather. Other cards are merely names and phone numbers. Calling one of these numbers is the nearest I can get to imagining having sex with a woman who hasn’t chosen whether or not it’s me she wants to have sex with.
I don’t find large breasts or black leather erotic. But maybe that doesn’t matter because they’re just shorthand, a semiotics of sex signalling that I can have whatever I want.
Is that how it starts? Having the power to choose, being in control, doing whatever I want regardless of what she might prefer? Even to do something to her that she actively doesn’t want or like but is prepared to go along with in return for cash? Something that hurts or humiliates her and makes me feel dominant? I can put a coin into this pay phone, punch out a number, end up in a bedroom with a woman where I can play out any fantasy I want. She’ll fall in love with me. She’ll beg me to do the thing my girlfriend doesn’t like. She’ll be in awe of my sexual prowess. I can make her afraid of me.
And afterwards? I think maybe the realisation that it was just business and I’d paid not to be rejected would make me angry and resentful. Next time I’d really want to show her who’s boss.
I’m not a rapist or a murderer but I’m trying hard to understand what it was like to drag Heather at knifepoint into Cliff Gardens. I’m trying to put myself inside Reece’s head. Yo
u were aroused not by lust, but by the excitement of power and absolute control. Planning your attack must have been an intellectual challenge worthy of your unrecognised abilities. You enjoyed it when she struggled, got off on her fear and her desperation to escape with her life. Lucky Heather, you thought, she’s the one who finally gets to understand who I really am.
And then you killed her.
And after that? Did you really just go home? How do you do that? Did you catch the football results and go to bed, with your secret still tingling inside you? And not just on that night but for the next twenty-five years?
They say Reece Nixon led a blameless life, but I think that his kind of secret, told to no one, suspected by no one, must have been empowering. You’re not who everybody thinks you are. You’re the killer next door, and they don’t even begin to have a clue. Only your brother, Larry, had his suspicions, and you avoided him.
RN Garden Services. All those times when you were putting up a fence or laying a patio or cutting back a hedge, and some nice woman brought you out a mug of tea with never a care in the world about what might be in your head. By way of thanks, were you watching her through windows, up a ladder peeping into her bathroom or bedroom? Fantasising about what you could do if only you chose, because you knew you could – you’d done it before. When you smiled and asked for two sugars, were you really picturing what you’d done to Heather that night in Cliff Gardens?
Twenty-five years is a long time, but I don’t believe you ever forgot a single detail.
RN Garden Services. If you have employed the services of Reece Nixon and have a story to tell, you can get in touch through the contact details on the webpage.
Wrong Way Home: Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month Page 13