“He’ll have nipped out on a convenient errand the second we arrived,” Brough explained. “No point even asking. I don’t think even he is mental enough to start anything now he knows we’re on to him.”
“Are we, sir?”
“What?”
“On to him.”
“At this stage, Miller,” Brough gave the Ash Tree one last look as the car pulled away, “your guess is as good as mine.”
Miller grinned. Brough realised she had taken that remark as a compliment. Bloody hell.
Raid
It’s all right for him, Melanie Miller grumbled to herself. Single bloke, no responsibilities. He can work late at the drop of a police helmet. Others - by which I mean me - ain’t so privileged.
She chewed a fingernail while she waited for her mother to pick up the phone. There’d be no point booking a manicure with this investigation going on. She’d only end up cancelling. She could imagine the arched, sculptured eyebrows of Sheba, her manicurist, curving upwards in some inscrutable expression, the rest of her face hidden by her white cloth mask.
Miller calculated the number of rings it would take for her mother to realise the landline phone was ringing, haul herself from the armchair, cross the living room, open the door, launch herself into the hall with her walking frame rebounding from the door jamb, reach the telephone on the hall table and perform the balancing act that allowed her to support herself on the Zimmer and pick up the receiver.
“Hello,” her mother spoke in what she imagined was a posh accent and then recited the telephone number as though it identified her.
“Mum, it’s me,” Miller began.
“Mel’s not here; she’s out,” said her mum.
“WAIT!” Mel panicked, hoping to avert being cut off. It was one thing to be connected and yet another to actually get through to her mother. “It’s me. This is Mel.”
“Hello, Mel,” said her mother, in that impatient tone that suggested she was keen to hobble back to her quiz show.
“I’m working late tonight, Mum. So I’ll get my own tea. And if you could give Jerry his tuna - there’s some open in the fridge so you won’t have to mess about with the tin opener. You won’t forget, will you, Mum? I don’t want to find he’s done another dirty protest on my duvet.”
“Mel’s not here,” said her mother. The line went dead.
D.S. Miller sighed and slipped her mobile into her handbag. She dared to linger a moment or two longer in the Ladies in order to primp in the mirror. Not that the new detective inspector would notice. Not that anyone ever noticed. She could smear her faces with the contents of Jerry’s litter tray and no one would blink.
“Come on, Melanie love,” she looked her reflection in the eye. “Professional face, professional head space. Let’s catch this bugger.”
She clicked her tongue as though geeing a horse and left to join Brough in the incident room. It was going to be a long night.
***
Brough walked through Reception, wishing they’d hurry up and give him his access code for the door at the back. He was clutching a paper bag already developing shiny patches where the grease of his cheese and onion pasty was coming through. Not the best thing for him to be putting into his body, he was well aware of that. He resolved to do a few extra turns of the park near his flat at the earliest opportunity.
“Sir!” Trevor Dobley called from behind the desk. He was pulling on a padded anorak. Brough cringed.
“Still here, Dibley?”
“Dobley, sir. And yes, sir. Still here. It’s attention to detail what makes you the detective, sir.”
“Bit late, isn’t it? Long shift?”
“Young Colin didn’t turn up, sir. Taken his Shereena for a scan. Twins, they reckon.”
Brough emitted a hum that signified his lack of interest. “Just buzz me through, will you?”
“Right you are, sir.” Dobley cheerily pressed the appropriate button. The lock flashed green. Brough opened the door but turned back.
“While I’m here,” he sounded as if he was resigning himself to impromptu dental treatment, “I’d like to have a word.”
“With me, sir?” Dobley looked pleasantly, delightedly, surprised. “Is it the flowers, sir? Bit too much?”
“No, no -“ Brough hadn’t even noticed the vase. He glanced across at the windowsill. “Very nice. No, it’s about something that happened a long time ago.”
Dobley looked suddenly apprehensive.
“Nothing you’ve done!” Brough assured him, although he wondered what can of worms this annoying man’s past might be. “But you were here, at work, when it was all going on.”
“Sir?” Dobley transmuted his look of concern to the kind of look he imagined a professional consultant might adopt.
“Bertie Box,” said Brough. He watched Dobley’s eyebrows leap and his mouth pucker.
“I don’t know, sir,” Dobley was apologetic. “I mean, I don’t know any more than I did then. I gave a statement and that still stands as is.”
“Hmm.” Brough looked at the red-face with its eager expression. It was the kind of expression you’d like in a setter not a desk officer. “But now I’ve mentioned it, perhaps you could mull it over and see if anything floats to the surface.”
“Happy to, sir.”
“Thank you, Dibley.”
“Dobley, sir.”
Brough turned away and was about to go through to the business side of the police station when Dobley called him back. “Oh, sir?”
“Hmm?”
“Your post, sir?”
“What? Oh, um, just leave it in my pigeonhole, would you?”
“No, sir. There ain’t none come for you, sir. Not yet. But I wanted to ask you, you see. Only D.I. Sharples, the old D.I. who was here before you, he always liked me to bring it up to his office, you see, sir.”
“The pigeonhole is fine.”
“Right you are, sir.”
“Goodnight, um, Dobley.”
“Goodnight, sir!” The man couldn’t have been more overjoyed if the new D.I. had awarded him a fifty pound note.
Brough went up to his office. The exchange with the desk officer was already fading from his thoughts. He contemplated the cold and congealing pasty that was threatening to ooze through the grease-soaked paper. He tossed it into the bin.
***
Across town, Cassidy was at the table in her room, working. Or trying to. She picked up book after book, finding them each unsatisfactory in turn. The thesis waited patiently on her laptop. The cursor blinked in place.
FUCK YOU
Cassidy deleted these two words as soon as she’d typed them. The cursor was back where it was. Blinking and waiting.
A window opened on screen. An incoming call from the States. Oh, the wonders of technology! There is no hiding place!
She let the little arrow hover between the ‘accept’ and ‘decline’ options before finally selecting the former. May as well get this out of the way. The connection was made. A bearded, balding head appeared in the window. It was lunchtime back home and the Professor was enjoying a sub.
“Hi, Professor,” Cassidy waved at the cyclopean eye of her laptop’s webcam.
“Hey, Cass,” the Professor responded through a mouthful of Bermuda onion. At least technology had yet to perfect the transmission of bad breath across the continents. “Just checking in with you. So, how’s it going?”
“Oh, it’s okay...” Cassidy avoided eye contact by scooching closer to the camera. The top half of her face disappeared out of the frame. “You know...”
“Well, you know you can call me any time. Leave a message. Send me a smiley face or otherwise as the case may be. You know that.”
“Yes, yes!”
“And you ought to come s
ee me as soon as you’re back.”
“I will. First stop from the airport.”
“Good.”
She watched him take a slurp of milkshake. Some of it hung in his beard and she wondered how long it would stay there. The Professor was a good man who knew his stuff but he was a bit of a mess. At least, from this angle, Cassidy was spared the sight of his enormous feet in their odd socks and desert sandals.
“So,” the Professor prompted, “is there anything you can tell me? About your progress I mean. I don’t need a British weather report.”
“Well, um, I think it’s coming along... I’ve discovered some things. Still sorting through, getting my head around them, you know.”
“Good, good! That sounds promising. Vague but promising. I’m encouraged.”
“I’m pleased you’re encouraged.”
“Well, I gotta go. Great to see you, Cass. Great to catch up. You keep in touch, yes?”
“Yes!”
“And have yourself a nice day.”
“It’s the middle of the night here.”
“Then sweet dreams, Cass. I mean that.”
“You too, Professor.”
“It’s like, what, noon here.”
“Then,” Jesus, “have yourself a nice day.”
“Gee, thanks, Cass. I surely will.”
She clicked him off. These little chats were always disconcerting. It served her right for accepting the call, she supposed, but she hoped he would now leave her alone for a good long while. Just checking in... My ass! It was as though he didn’t trust her. Like he didn’t think she was capable of operating by herself. And how could she cope by herself if he didn’t leave her alone?
Cassidy controlled her breathing to dispel her anger. After all, she had work to get on with and there’d be no chance of that if she was all worked up.
Maybe the poor sap just wanted to feel needed. Maybe that was why he kept calling.
Sublimating her angry annoyance to pity calmed her down. She stretched in her chair before drawing her attention back to the blinking cursor.
It was still there. Ever-present to a more annoying extent than the goddamn Professor, taunting her with its patient, mocking, unchanging rhythm.
She became somewhat hypnotised by its blinking. Blinking and waiting, blinking and waiting...
Cassidy didn’t often think of that other boy. She had talked about him at length with the Professor and she always spoke of that time as if she was telling someone what had happened in a film she hadn’t been concentrating on. She had written about him a great deal in the first draft of her thesis and that seemed to have got him out of her system. Like writing a diary - you record the events of life in a book so you don’t have to carry them around in your head.
While he had provided lots of raw material for her thesis, once he had been caught, that was that. They wouldn’t let her talk to him, of course. She was a witness in the case after all. It had taken all her energy and her lawyer’s to convince them she wasn’t also a suspect, despite what Olaf’s defence team had implied.
Olaf.
Yes, that was his name. He was an exchange student doing his MBA - before he flipped out and turned his hand to butchery.
He was declared insane and criminally so, and then they shipped him back to Scandinavia and she never saw him again. Oh, interviewing victims and survivors gave you some meaty stuff but it wasn’t the same as an exclusive with the killer himself.
And so most of the Olaf stuff had been highlighted and cut and then zapped across to the recycle bin. He disappeared from her writing and from her mind in one easy click.
But how funny she should meet another young man from the same part of the world just as another spree seemed to be getting under way...
Part of her considered this was fortunate. She would be able to gather information first hand - Well, perhaps she was jumping the murder weapon to think that this Anfred was responsible for all the gruesome deaths. A killer smile was about the best he could muster.
The other part of her couldn’t help wondering if she, another common factor in the two situations, was in some way responsible. Was she a, what do you call ‘em? A jinx? Was there something about her that caused men - well, some men - to commit such atrocities? Olaf had claimed it had all been for her. She had told him about her research and he had sought to impress her so much she would write the whole thing about him. They would become famous together; he, the notorious college slayer and she, the writer who had brought his crimes to wider public attention and, what was more, had explained them.
Maybe that was it. Her desire for fame as a writer, a serious, investigative, deep and meaningful writer - had she infected him with it? Not deliberately, of course. Not consciously, no. Maybe it was like bees. Pheromones and what-not. Maybe she gave something off that a certain kind of crazy man could pick up on.
What if she changed her specialism? What if she turned her back on grisly murder and wrote about something else instead? Would that mean fewer people would lose their lives in such nightmarish ways?
But what could she choose instead? There was nothing that switched on the light bulb in her head like a good murder. Nothing else could get her blood racing or could give her more gooseflesh than a freshly plucked poultry farm.
What about her family history? Why didn’t she look into that?
She discounted this idea right away. It was all the rage at the moment, especially back home. Genealogy. As far as she was concerned it may as well refer to your skin breaking out every time Aladdin rubbed his magic lamp.
The fact was she had no other interests. Not even boys. She cringed to remember the insinuations flying around the courtroom that she and Olaf had been getting it on, as though they were some criminal double act, like Bonnie and Clyde, or the Smothers Brothers.
There had been boys. Of course, there had. But no one serious. She hadn’t time for serious. She hadn’t wanted to be tied down - which, coincidentally, was why the last one had dumped her. She had her career to focus on, her precious research, her sacred writing. The Olaf case had been a setback, a bump in the road and nothing more.
Now she was here, in the English Midlands, there was more to look into. The place had more history; it was as simple as that. And more history meant more murders to look into.
She shifted in her seat and opened a new document. Anything to shift that goddamn cursor, with its goddamn blinking and waiting and blinking and waiting...
And knocking!
No, wait. The knocking wasn’t coming from the laptop, dumb ass.
She crossed the room and opened the door. There was no one there. Cassidy shivered. She hoped the creepy and e-fucking-normous Mr Box wasn’t prowling around again. She closed the door and locked it.
The knocking started up again. The window!
She skirted around the bed and opened the curtains. She was startled to see Anfred’s face grinning in at her. He wiggled his eyebrows.
“Piss off,” Cassidy scowled. “Weirdo.”
Anfred asked to be let in, mouthing the words in an exaggerated fashion. He clasped his hands together, a caricature of an earnest beggar.
Cassidy shook her head and showed him her middle finger. This amused him a great deal. Then he pouted and scratched at the glass, giving her puppy-dog eyes.
Cassidy opened the window but just by a little. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she snapped.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?” Anfred dodged her question with one of his own.
Cassidy glanced out and down. They were five storeys up, whichever system you used to count them. “How did you -?”
“Fire escape,” Anfred shrugged. He laughed again, mockingly. “What, did you think I levitated? Come on; it’s cold.”
“Huh,” Cassidy suppos
ed she would have to buy the fire escape explanation but she stood her ground. “How do I know you’re not Count Dracula?”
“He was Romanian. And he didn’t feel the cold.” He added a few pantomime shivers and jutted his lower lip for added pathos.
“What do you want?”
“Sleep on your floor. Pretty please?”
“What?” She hadn’t been expecting this. Fangs to the neck had seemed more likely.
“Look,” Anfred dropped the comedy and spoke evenly, “there was an almighty cock-up.”
“With that guy?” Cassidy sneered bitterly. “Spare me the details.”
He ignored this. “A mistake. An oversight. I arrived in town to find everywhere all booked up. I had nowhere to lay my pretty head. I have been depending on the kindness of strange people.”
“Hmm,” Cassidy thought about it. It would explain the absence of his name from the register. Even so...
She faked a sigh. “Sorry I’m not allowed visitors. It says so in the rules.”
Anfred chuckled. “And you’re telling me you play by the rules? Wait!” He looked anxiously at the night sky and ducked. “Was that a raindrop?”
“Oh, for f-“ Cassidy began. With a genuine sigh, she opened the window as wide as it would go. Anfred, laughing triumphantly, stepped in. “I’m serious,” she warned him. “You can get warm and get lost.”
“You’re almost kind,” he bowed. He headed to the radiator and rubbed his hands across it. “Brr,” he added for good measure.
Cassidy closed the window and drew the curtains while he made a great show of warming himself. Her patience with this play-acting soon ran out.
“Okay, drop the act. What do you want? Really.”
Anfred shrugged again. He really was maddening. “The usual, you know. World peace. To work with children and animals...”
“You’re still not funny.” Cassidy marched to the door and unlocked it.
“I wanted to see you!” Anfred was suddenly urgent. “To talk!”
Cassidy stared at him. “What the hell for?”
He glanced from side to side before leaning towards her and breathing, “Murder!”
Blood & Breakfast, West Midlands Noir Page 10