by Zoe Sharp
I repeated what my mystery caller had said to me as closely as I could remember. It wasn't difficult. The words were acid-etched into my brain.
When I finished the Superintendent looked pensive. He came and perched on my sofa, rubbing his chin absently. I noticed he was old-fashioned enough to be wearing neat gold cuff-links.
“You do realise, of course,” he said, “that we have reason to believe the incident last night is linked to the serious assault on another young woman a few weeks ago, and a more recent rape and murder?”
My heart over-revved so hard it bumped painfully in my chest. My mouth was suddenly dry. “It's the same man who killed Susie Hollins?” I said faintly. “But she was raped, and so was the other girl. Does that mean – Joy – did he—?”
MacMillan's face was shuttered, giving absolutely nothing away. It wasn't difficult to imagine him sitting quietly behind a table in a darkened interview room somewhere, watching some villain sweat as he twisted on the hook of a confession. People would talk just to fill the silence in him.
I opened my mouth to ask, “If it's the same bloke, how does Terry fit in?”, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to know about that. There hadn't been much in the press about his death yet. Not enough for me to have a viable reason to believe they were linked, at any rate.
I glanced up and found MacMillan studying me, as though he'd been eavesdropping on my thoughts. Instead of my question about Terry, I swallowed and said, “So, what happens now?”
“Well, we could put a tap your phone and trace all your calls, intercept your mail, and put a watch on the place – if you really want us to go to those lengths, of course,” he said, his voice casual, even as he was studying me with a sudden intensity. “If someone really is threatening you, we can probably get them by one of those means.”
“What d'you mean, if?” I could feel my voice rising, and made an effort to control it. “You mean you don't believe me?”
He cocked his head on one side. “Well, let's look at the facts for a moment shall we, Miss Fox? We've got a rapist and murderer on the loose. A very dangerous man, but at the same time one who's shown himself to be both clever, and careful. So far, he's been selecting his victims apparently at random, probably because he knows how difficult that makes it for us to catch him.”
MacMillan started to pace again, measured steps, light on his feet. “But now,” he continued in an almost silky tone, “now, miraculously, he's made the seemingly ludicrous mistake of telegraphing his next move to us by ringing you up and nicely telling you that you're to be his next target.”
I felt the knife twist in my side. I'd been faced with this kind of suspicion before, and it had damned near finished me.
“Why would I lie?”
“Well now, Miss Fox,” he said quietly, “it wouldn't be the first time you've cried this particular brand of wolf, would it?”
I wanted to speak, but my tongue seemed to have stuck itself to the roof of my mouth.
“I have to ask,” he went on remorselessly, “why you think that claiming people have threatened to kill you would work any better in civilian life than it did four years ago when you were facing being thrown out of the armed forces? What do you hope to gain this time, Miss Fox?” There was something about the stress he put on my surname that alerted me to the dangers of this soft-spoken man. Much more than the actual words.
I met his eyes, and realised with a cold clutch of dread that he knew. He knew everything.
“I suppose I shouldn't really call you Miss Fox at all, should I?” MacMillan said, with the slow inevitability of a steam traction engine. “Seeing as it was only when you moved to Lancaster that you changed your name, wasn't it? To Fox from Foxcroft. Now, why was that, exactly?”
There was no point in prevarication, or lying. “You've obviously done your digging,” I said instead, feeling my face curling up like a salted slug. “Why don't you tell me?”
My words were empty bravado. I didn't need the Superintendent to remind me what had happened.
My case at the court martial had rested mainly on the testimony of another soldier, Kirk Salter. A man I barely knew, but one who'd saved my life.
Kirk had scraped onto the course mainly because of his physical prowess. His head might have been little more than a life support system for a beret, but he could carry a GPMG and two hundred rounds of belted ammunition over an assault course without breaking sweat. And his heart was firmly in the right place.
If he hadn't stumbled on my attackers before they'd put their cover-up plan into action, I'd have ended up as another tragic crime statistic. If my body had ever been found.
Donalson, Hackett, Morton, and Clay.
They'd been fully intending to snap my neck like a winged pheasant and bury me in shallow grave somewhere in the nearest woods. Kirk had stopped them going through with it, and I'd always be grateful to him for that.
Then he'd been pressured – bullied, cajoled – into denying, under oath, that such a plot had ever existed. I reckoned that just about cancelled out the debt.
“Was changing your name your idea, or your parents'?” MacMillan asked now. “It caused quite a scandal at the time, didn't it? First the court martial, then when you tried to pursue the matter in the civil courts.” He looked at me briefly and I thought I saw the pity in his face before he lowered his gaze to concentrate on adjusting his cuff-link. “The tabloids had a high old time of it with you, didn't they, Charlie?”
I swallowed. Oh yes, they had indeed.
There hadn't been anything in the papers to start with, of course. The army don't tend to wash their dirty linen in public if they can help it. Once I'd made the foolish mistake of bringing a civil action, though, then they really let rip.
To begin with, the headlines had just been sensational. Girl soldier gang-raped by fellow squaddies. As if the ordeal itself hadn't been enough to live through, I'd then had to face the vindictive clutches of the media. At first they'd overflowed with fake sympathy. My story should be told, they said. Make it a lesson that others could learn from. Stop it happening to some other poor girl.
Then, God knows how, some particular ferreting had brought out my relationship with Sean. Oh, he wasn't married, or anything like that. That would have been too straightforward. Instead, he was one of my training instructors, and that was a complete no-no as far as the top brass were concerned. Relieved to have so easy a get-out presented to them on a plate, the full might of the army had swung against me. I never stood a chance.
As for the press, in the space of a print-run I was transformed from an innocent victim into an immoral slut. If I was prepared to screw one soldier, why not a whole bunch of them? Maybe, they reasoned, the men's claims that I'd been a willing participant weren't so far-fetched?
My parents' house had been besieged. We had reporters and photographers creeping through the garden for weeks. By the time of the civil case, the twisted facts and outrageous stories they'd printed had hopelessly biased any chance of my getting a fair hearing. The media went into a frenzy over the Not Guilty verdict against my attackers. By the time they'd finished with it, it was me who was as guilty as hell.
“It must have been quite a shock that your mother refused to support your appeal,” MacMillan said now. “Especially with her being a magistrate herself.”
“She's a great believer in the criminal justice system in this country,” I said through gritted teeth. So great a believer that she'd refused to acknowledge the possibility that there might have been a miscarriage of justice. She'd shut her mind to it. And shut me out. It had been the final nail in my coffin.
The Superintendent made no comment as he came to his feet. He'd obviously gone over the reports from the time, and the scepticism was plain on his face. I'd been pilloried as a cold-blooded liar in a court of law. Why on earth should he take my word as gospel now?
“I don't suppose,” he said, although clearly not holding out much hope, “that you do have any idea of who might be
behind these attacks?”
I wasn't sure whether to be surprised that he'd bothered to ask my opinion, or insulted, but I remembered Joy, and gave it thought. “There's always Angelo – one of the doormen from the New Adelphi,” I suggested. “The girl who found Joy yesterday, Victoria, she's his girlfriend. He'd beaten her up pretty badly, and I'd say he probably enjoyed doing it.” When MacMillan didn't respond, I added, “And he could have picked both Susie and Joy when they were at the club.”
“That would be Angelo Zachary, would it?”
I nodded.
“We've already interviewed Mr Zachary after the death of Miss Hollins,” he said. “He had an alibi from the bar manager, Gary Bignold from the time Miss Hollins was ejected from the club, to well past the time we believe she was killed.”
If it had been Len who'd vouched for Angelo, I would have suspected it, but Gary had no special allegiances as far as I could tell. I shrugged. “I can't help you, then.”
He moved to the front door, paused on the threshold. “Not very loyal to your colleagues are you, Charlie?”
I just glared at him, and he sighed, reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket. He produced a rather plain-looking business card, enlivened only by the colouring of the Lancashire Police crest. “If you do have any further contact with this man,” he instructed, “call me.”
I took the card. It gave me a good reason to unclench my hands. “Will you let me know – if you make any progress?” I asked.
He nodded. “Of course.” There was a pause, then he said, “You’re not quite what I was expecting, Charlie.” He cocked his head on one side.
“Maybe I just don’t scare easily,” I said. But I was more scared than I would like to admit. Not to the Superintendent, and not to myself, either.
It was a nasty, insidious kind of fear, that eats away at you from the inside out, twists your guts into knots, beads sweat on your upper lip.
You only have to relax your guard for a second and it’s away and running, like a bolting horse. I concentrated on keeping a tight rein on mine.
MacMillan showed himself out, and I watched from the window as he climbed into a big dull-coloured Rover saloon parked next to the far kerb. Just before he drove away he glanced up and looked directly at me. It was too late to pull back without making it appear more suspicious, but the whole encounter left me feeling restless and uneasy.
***
It didn’t start out badly, the Special Forces course. I wasn’t training for the full-blown SAS, which is everybody’s first assumption. There are still no women allowed there, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other opportunities in the lesser-known covert units. Ones where females had proven far more effective at undercover surveillance work.
And I’d been good enough. Without conceit, I knew it.
The trouble had come when the others realised it, too.
To begin with, Sergeant Meyer kept his promise to push us all hard – harder than we’d ever experienced. By the time the course was halfway through, almost fifty percent of the trainees had chosen to go outside the wire and not return.
But after a while it seemed he was on my case far more than the others. I couldn’t turn around without encountering that brooding scrutiny. I refused to let it intimidate me, used it to drive myself to greater heights and plunder deeper internal resources than I’d ever known I possessed.
Looking back, the turning point was my ability to shoot. I was pretty good with a long gun, but when it came to pistol it was a whole different ball game. Even the range instructors couldn’t quite get their heads around the fact it soon emerged I could take the bull’s-eye out of a target with a 9mm handgun at the limit of the thirty-metre range. At first, they treated it almost as a joke, and then the prospect of using me as their secret weapon at the next Skill-At-Arms meeting went from canteen banter to an actual plan.
They started to coach me outside the confines of the normal training program. It wasn’t long before Sean Meyer got involved. He’d been teaching us unarmed combat and tactics, and the first time he turned up on the range to watch me practice, he made me so nervous my hands shook loading rounds into the magazine.
“Charlie, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, Sar’nt.”
“Relax, soldier, or the only thing you’re going to hit tonight is the sand berm at the back of the range.”
I kept my eyes firmly fixed on the task at hand, mumbled, “Yes, Sar’nt.”
I heard him sigh, saw him move towards me in my peripheral vision, and jerked my head up. Normally, the only time he came anywhere near me was to demonstrate a chokehold, strike or throw. And they always hurt, as they were designed to.
He saw my instinctive reaction and his mouth twitched into the ghost of a smile. He reached across for one of the empty magazines and started threading in rounds, hands moving automatically through a ritual as familiar to him as a rosary. The action was companionable, almost friendly. Ironically, it only served to make me even more wary of him.
“So, where’re you from, Charlie?” he asked.
“Just south of Manchester,” I said cautiously, knowing that telling him my parents lived in the stockbroker belt of Cheshire probably wouldn’t win me any respect.
“I’m from up north myself,” he said. “Arse-end of nowhere. Couldn’t wait to get out, to be honest.”
I glanced at him in surprise, at the conversational tone as much as the information. I hadn’t given any thought to his background. People like him were born with three stripes on their arm and a badged beret moulded to their head.
Before I knew it, though, we were chatting. There was no other word for it. And I realised I’d stopped flinching every time he came near me, and the tension had gone out of my shoulders.
He finished loading the final magazine, slapped it a couple of times against his palm to seat the rounds, and laid it on the firing point next to the others.
“OK, let’s see what you can do now,” he said, stepping back and reaching for his ear defenders.
I lifted mine into position, took a deep breath and slotted the first mag into the pistol grip of the 9mm Hi-Power. Then I pinched back the slide to chamber the first round, shifted into a stance, and began to shoot.
It was only later, when I’d got back to the female quarters, showered and scrubbed the mix of cordite and gun oil off my hands, that I discovered we’d been seen together. It didn’t take long before the rumours started.
And after rumours came jealousy, and betrayal.
***
After the Superintendent had gone I hadn't the will to go back to my clearing up. Instead I dug out Terry's code book and leafed through it again, half-heartedly. The sets of initials swam past my eyes.
I tried to remember people's surnames from the club. Gary's was Bignold, but there were several different GBs listed. Dave's was Clemmens. Hmm, not so many DCs.
“Oh this is hopeless!” I muttered, throwing the book down on the sofa. It landed open and something caught my eye. I stopped dead.
Angelo. Angelo Zachary. AZ. I grabbed the book again. Those initials were only listed with one number prefix, 168. I'd found the New Adelphi.
All I had to do now was find out which of the people listed in Terry's book had owed him big sums of money. That should lead me to his killer. A man who'd started getting his kicks out of raping and murdering women.
And now, it seemed, he was hoping to get a real thrill out of planning to kill me . . .
I jumped up. I had so many disconnected theories forming and I needed someone to bounce some ideas off. To see if I was way off base. Most of all, I needed to get away from the possibility that the phone was going to ring at any moment and scare me to death again.
I thought all too briefly of calling the number on the card the Superintendent had given me, but I had no desire to get back into the ring for another round. He didn't trust me, and I suppose I couldn't really blame him for that.
I went over to the phone and s
natched up the receiver, dialling Jacob and Clare's number. To my surprise Clare answered. I'd expected her to be at work, and I'd planned to run a few things past Jacob's cool, logical mind.
“No, I've got a day off,” she said. “Why, what's up, Charlie?”
“I can't really explain over the phone,” I hedged. “Look, are you in all morning? Can I come round?”
“Of course,” Clare said promptly. “I'll put the coffee on now. You sound very mysterious. I can't wait!”
I climbed into my gear, aware that I was still feeling stiff and inflexible as I struggled into my leather jeans. It was raining when I got outside. Miserable great grey blobs that made me blink when they splashed into my hair. By the looks of the darkened sky, this was as good as it was going to get all day. I was glad I'd put my waterproofs on.
The Suzuki, bless it, fired up first kick and it didn't take more than ten minutes before I was bumping down the drive to Jacob and Clare's place.
This time, with one eye on the downpour, the dogs made do with greeting me by way of excited barks from the shelter of the porch. Sensible animals. Clare came out, though, with Jacob's giant waxed cotton stockman's coat draped over her head.
“Come in and dry off by the Aga,” she instructed, grinning at me with button-bright eyes. “Jacob's all agog to know what you're being so secretive about!”
It didn't take long, once I'd got into my story, for the smile to leave Clare's face. We sat round the kitchen table to talk, warming our hands on mugs of hot cappuccino, sprinkled with real chocolate.
Having made sure there was no food on offer, Bonneville had retreated to her blanket pressed up against the front of the Aga. The room was soon permeated by the vague smell of hot dog. Beezer had made straight for Jacob's lap. She was now sprawled on her back there, delighting in his preoccupied scratching of her tummy.
I brought them up to speed on recent events, including the break-in at my flat, Terry's murder, and now Joy's death. They both listened in horrified fascination, and it took a while to satisfy them that I really was OK. I suppose it helped convince me at the same time.