Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  ‘In the early hours of the morning,’ Burgess said, ‘Clough was coming out of a nightclub in Arenys de Mar, just up the coast from Barcelona, and somebody shot him. Dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Girl named Amanda Khan. Supposed to be some kind of pop star – that’s why it’s going to be a big story – but I can’t say as I’ve ever heard of her. Sounds like an A-rab to me.’

  ‘She’s half Pakistani,’ said Banks. Amanda Khan. Clough’s new girlfriend. Emily’s replacement.

  ‘Whatever. Anyway, it sounds like the classic love triangle from what I’ve managed to pick up so far. Seems that Clough jilted her for some dago bimbo, and this Amanda was a few stops closer to Barking than he realized. Funny old world, innit?’

  ‘You can say that again.’ Banks didn’t usually smoke in the mornings, but he reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘What makes it even funnier,’ Burgess went on, ‘is that she used one of Clough’s own guns. Fine irony, that. She was staying at his villa, and apparently he was carrying on with this Dolores Somebody-or-other right under her eyes and trying to palm Amanda off on one of the servants. She picked up one of Clough’s guns and waited for them until they came out of the club. Shades of Ruth Ellis.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England; she had shot her lover outside a London pub. ‘Was the girl hurt?’

  ‘Winged. One bullet in her upper arm. Flesh wound. Nothing serious. According to my Spanish sources, the Khan woman fired six shots. Two of them hit Clough: one in his ugly mug and one in his miserable bloody heart. Wonder it didn’t just bounce off, but he was dead before he hit the ground. Two hit Jamie Gilbert: one in the chest and one in the groin. He’s not dead, but they say he’ll never be quite the same again and his voice has gone up a few octaves. One shot hit the girl, and the last hit an innocent bystander in the hand, a local teenager. He lost two fingers.’

  ‘So,’ said Banks, ‘justice of a kind.’

  ‘Best we’ll get.’

  ‘Thanks for calling. The girl, how is she?’

  ‘Amanda Khan? Why? Don’t tell me you know her, too?’

  ‘No. I was just wondering.’

  ‘As well as anyone in the custody of the Spanish police can expect to be. Bye-bye, Banks. Have a good Christmas.’

  ‘You, too.’

  Banks put the phone down slowly. Clough dead. He could only feel a sense of relief that something had finally gone wrong for the bastard. For a while, Clough had seemed able to get away with anything and everything and thumb his nose at the rest of the world while he was doing it. No more. It probably wasn’t very Christian to celebrate another man’s death, especially on Christmas Day, but Banks would have been a hypocrite if he hadn’t admitted to himself that he was glad Clough wouldn’t be around to wreak his peculiar brand of havoc on the world any more.

  He also imagined the pain and confusion that must have driven Amanda Khan to such an extreme act, how those six shots had probably destroyed her life, too: her future, her career. But if any death was worth celebrating, it was Barry Clough’s.

  Banks stubbed out the half cigarette that remained, then went back into the kitchen and washed his hands before he started working the sausage meat into the sage-and-onion mixture. He looked at the chicken, not entirely certain which end was which.

  Rubén González’s delicate, joyous piano playing on ‘Pueblos Nuevo’ drifted through from the living room. A little sunlight spilled over the long anvil-shaped top of Low Fell into the kitchen and glinted on the copper bottoms of the pans hanging from the wall. Banks heard stirrings from upstairs, old floorboards creaking. Probably Tracy. Brian liked to sleep all morning.

  Banks remembered how, when they were kids, they got up before dawn to open their presents. Once, as he had been creeping around their rooms at one o’clock in the morning filling pillowcases with presents, he was certain he had felt Brian’s eyes on him, awake to see if there really was a Santa Claus. Neither of them had ever referred to the incident, and Brian had acted as he always did when he opened his presents, but Banks suspected from that Christmas on, his son had lost a little of his innocence.

  That was probably how it happened, he mused – innocence was something you lost a bit at a time, over the years; it didn’t just happen overnight. But there were intense experiences, epiphanies of a kind, that brought about quantum leaps.

  Banks remembered standing by the riverbank that day, rain pitting the water, smiling like an idiot, being polite, clutching the big stone to his chest so as not to wet the gentleman passing by. Then the struggle, the hot beery breath, his heels slipping on the muddy bank, the terror, the punch. The world had changed for him that day, and even now, as he leaned against the kitchen counter, he could still taste the dirty, sweaty cloth of the man’s sleeve.

  He thought of Emily Riddle, of Rosalind, of Ruth Walker and Amanda Khan. When he heard Tracy’s footsteps on the staircase, he had a sudden image of Dr Glendenning’s scalpel bisecting the spider tattoo on Emily’s midriff, and he realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

  AFTERMATH

  by Peter Robinson

  No. 35 The Hill is about to become infamous.

  For when PCs Janet Taylor and Dennis Morrisey arrive there to sort out an alleged domestic dispute they stumble on a truly horrific scene. A scene which leaves one of them dead and one fighting for her life . . .

  Inspector Alan Banks, currently Acting Superintendent, has been leading the hunt for a serial killer dubbed the Chameleon. He is immediately called to the house – where, it seems, the Chameleon’s identity has finally been revealed.

  But this is only the beginning of a shocking investigation that will test everyone to the absolute limit . . .

  The opening scenes follow here.

  Prologue

  February 1990

  They locked her in the cage when she started to bleed. Tom was already there. He’d been there for three days and had stopped crying now. He was still shivering, though. It was February, there was no heat in the cellar, and both of them were naked. There would be no food, either, she knew, not for a long time, not until her tummy got so hungry it felt as if it were eating her up from the inside.

  It wasn’t the first time she had been locked in the cage, but this time was different from the others. Before, it had always been because she’d done something wrong or hadn’t done what they wanted her to do. This time . . . well, it was different, just because of what she was, and she was really scared. They had no use for her now. They wouldn’t let her join in their games any more. Maybe they would even sacrifice her on the altar, as they had threatened so often recently.

  As soon as they had shut the door at the top of the stairs, the darkness wrapped itself around her like fur. She could feel it rubbing against her skin the way a cat rubs against your legs. She began to shiver. More than anything she hated the cage, more than the blows, more than the humiliations. But she wouldn’t cry. She never cried. She didn’t know how.

  The smell was terrible; they didn’t have a toilet to go to, only the bucket in the corner, which they would only be allowed to empty when they were let out. And who knew when that would be?

  But worse even than the smell were the little scratching sounds that started when she had been locked up for only a few minutes. Soon, she knew, it would come, the tickle of sharp little feet across her legs or her tummy if she dared lie down. The first time, she had tried to keep moving and making noise all the time to keep them away, but in the end she had become exhausted and fallen asleep, not caring how many there were or what they did. She could tell in the dark, by the way they moved and their weight, whether they were rats or mice. The rats were the worst. One had even bitten her once.

  She held Tom and tried to comfort him, making them both a little warmer. If truth be told,
she could have done with a little comforting herself, but there was nobody to comfort her. She was the oldest.

  She drifted in and out of sleep, becoming oblivious to the mice and rats. She didn’t know how long she’d been there before she heard noises upstairs. Different noises. The music had ended a long time ago and everything was silent apart from the scratching and Tom’s breathing. She thought she heard a car pull up outside. Voices. Another car. Then she heard someone walking across the floor upstairs. A curse.

  Suddenly, all hell broke loose upstairs. It sounded as if someone was battering at the door with a tree trunk, then was a crunching sound and a loud bang as the front door caved in. Tom was awake now, whimpering in her arms.

  She heard shouting and what sounded like dozens of pairs of grown-ups’ feet running around upstairs. After what seemed like an eternity, she heard someone prise open the lock to the cellar door. A little light spilled in, but not much, and there wasn’t a bulb down there. More voices. Then came the lances of bright torch light, coming closer, so close they hurt her eyes and she had to shield them with her hand. Then the beam held her and a strange voice cried. ‘Oh God! Oh, my God!’

  1

  Probationary Police Constable Janet Taylor stood by her patrol car and watched the silver BMW burn, shielding her eyes from its glare, standing upwind of the foul-smelling smoke. Her partner, PC Dennis Morrisey, stood beside her. One or two spectators were peeping out of their bedroom windows, but nobody else seemed very interested. Burning cars weren’t exactly a novelty on this estate. Even at four o’clock in the morning.

  Orange and red flames, with deep inner hues of blue and green and occasional tentacles of violet, twisted into the darkness, sending up palls of thick black smoke. Even upwind, Janet could smell the burning rubber and plastic. It was giving her a headache, and she knew her uniform and her hair would reek of it for days.

  The leading fire-fighter, Gary Cullen, walked over to join them. It was Dennis he spoke to, of course; he always did. They were mates.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Joy-riders.’ Dennis nodded towards the car. ‘We checked the number plate. Stolen from a nice middle-class residential street in Heaton Moor, Manchester, earlier this evening.’

  ‘Why here, then?’

  ‘Dunno. Could be a connection, a grudge or something. Someone giving a little demonstration of his feelings. Drugs, even. But that’s for the lads upstairs to work out. They’re the ones paid to have brains. We’re done for now. Everything safe?’

  ‘Under control. What if there’s a body in the boot?’

  Dennis laughed. ‘It’ll be well done by now, won’t it? Hang on a minute, that’s our radio, isn’t it?’

  Janet walked over to the car. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘Control to 354. Come in please, 354. Over.’

  Janet picked up the radio. ‘354 to Control. Over.’

  ‘Domestic dispute reported taking place at number thirty-five, The Hill. Repeat. Three-five. The Hill. Can you respond? Over.’

  Christ, thought Janet, a bloody domestic. No copper in her right mind liked domestics, especially at this time in the morning. ‘Will do.’ She sighed, looking at her watch. ‘ETA three minutes.’

  She called over to Dennis, who held up his hand and spoke a few more words to Gary Cullen before responding. They were both laughing when Dennis returned to the car.

  ‘Tell him that joke, did you?’ Janet asked, settling behind the wheel.

  ‘Which one’s that?’ Dennis asked, all innocence.

  Janet started the car and sped to the main road. ‘You know, the one about the blow job.”

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Only I heard you telling it to that new PC back at the station, the lad who hasn’t started shaving yet. You ought to give the poor lad a chance to make his own mind up about women, Den, instead of poisoning his mind right off the bat.’

  The centrifugal force almost threw them off the road as Janet took the roundabout at the top of The Hill too fast. Dennis grasped the dashboard and hung on for dear life. ‘Jesus Christ. Women drivers. It’s only a joke. Have you got no sense of humour?’

  Janet smiled to herself as she slowed and kerb-crawled down The Hill looking for number thirty-five.

  ‘Anyway, I’m getting sick of this,’ Dennis said.

  ‘Sick of what? My driving?’

  ‘That, too. Mostly, though, it’s your constant bitching. It’s got so a bloke can’t say what’s on his mind these days.’

  ‘Not if he’s got a mind like a sewer. That’s pollution. Anyway, it’s changing times, Den. And we have to change with them or we’ll end up like the dinosaurs. By the way, about that mole.’

  ‘What mole?’

  ‘You know, the one on your cheek. Next to your nose. The one with all the hairs growing out of it.’

  Dennis put his hand up to his cheek. ‘What about it?’

  ‘I’d get it seen to quick, if I were you. It looks cancerous to me. Ah, number thirty-five. Here we are.’

  She pulled over to the right-hand side of the road and came to a halt a few yards past the house. It was a small detached residence built of redbrick and sandstone, between a plot of allotments and a row of shops. It wasn’t much bigger than a cottage, with a slate roof, low-walled garden and a modern garage attached at the right. At the moment, all was quiet.

  ‘There’s a light on in the hall,’ Janet said. ‘Shall we have a dekko?’

  Still fingering his mole, Dennis sighed and muttered something she took to be assent. Janet got out of the car first and walked up the path, aware of him dragging his feet behind her. The garden was overgrown and she had to push twigs and shrubbery aside as she walked. A little adrenalin had leaked into her system, put her on super alert, as it always did with domestics. The reason most cops hated them was that you never knew what was going to happen. As likely as not you’d pull the husband off the wife and then the wife would take his side and start bashing you with a rolling pin.

  Janet paused by the door. Still all quiet, apart from Dennis’s stertorous breathing behind her. It was too early yet for people to be going to work, and most of the late-night revellers had passed out by now. Somewhere in the distance the first birds began to chatter. Sparrows, most likely, Janet thought. Mice with wings.

  Seeing no doorbell, Janet knocked on the door.

  No response came from inside.

  She knocked harder. The hammering seemed to echo up and down the street. Still no response.

  Next, Janet went down on her knees and looked through the letterbox. She thought she could make out a figure sprawled on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. A woman’s figure. That was probably cause enough for forced entry.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ she said.

  Dennis tried the handle. Locked. Then, gesturing for Janet to stand out of the way, he charged it with his shoulder.

  Poor technique, she thought. She’d have reared back and used her foot. But Dennis was a second row rugby forward, she reminded herself, and his shoulders had been pushed up against so many arseholes in their time that they had to be strong.

  The door crashed open on first contact and Dennis cannonballed into the hallway, grabbing hold of the bottom of the banister to stop himself from tripping over the still figure that lay there.

  Janet was right behind him, but she had the advantage of walking in at a more dignified pace. She knelt beside the woman on the floor and felt for a pulse. Weak, but steady. One side of her face was bathed in blood.

  ‘My God,’ Janet muttered. ‘Den? You okay?’

  ‘Fine. You take care of her. I’ll have a look around.’ Dennis headed upstairs.

  For once, Janet didn’t mind being told what to do. Nor did she mind that Dennis automatically assumed it was a woman’s work to tend the injured while the man went in search of heroic glory. Well, she minded, but she felt a real concern for the victim here, so she didn’t want to make an
issue of it.

  Bastard, she thought. Whoever did this. ‘It’s okay, love,’ she said, even though she suspected the woman couldn’t hear her. ‘We’ll get you an ambulance. Just hold on.’

  Most of the blood seemed to be coming from one deep cut just above her left ear, Janet noticed, though there was also a little smeared around the nose and lips. Punches, by the looks of it. There were also broken glass and daffodils scattered all around her, along with a damp patch on the carpet. Janet took her personal radio from her belt-hook and called for an ambulance. She was lucky it worked on The Hill; personal UHF radios had much less range than the VHF models fitted in cars, and were notoriously subject to black spots of patchy reception.

  Dennis came downstairs shaking his head. ‘Bastard’s not hiding up there,’ he said. He handed Janet a blanket, pillow and towel, nodding to the woman. ‘For her.’

  Janet eased the pillow under the woman’s head, covered her gently with the blanket and applied the towel to the seeping wound on her temple. Well, I never, she thought, full of surprises, our Den. ‘Think he’s done a runner?’ she asked.

  ‘Dunno. I’ll have a look in the back. You stay with her till the ambulance arrives.’

  Before Janet could say anything, Dennis headed off towards the back of the house. He hadn’t been gone more than a minute or so when she heard him call out, ‘Janet, come here and have a look at this. Hurry up. It could be important.’

  Curious, Janet looked at the injured woman. The bleeding had stopped and there was nothing else she could do. Even so, she was reluctant to leave the poor woman alone.

  ‘Come on,’ Dennis called again. ‘Hurry up.’