It began to sink in: what had happened. His own predicament didn't matter, he knew. It would work itself out, he was certain of that.
But Jerry was dead—something like that could never be sorted out, made better. She was gone. Over.
He knew that for a fact. He had seen the body. He had seen Mandy Kemp trying pathetically to revive her.
Jerry was Jerry no more.
But somehow it did not seem to have the impact he would have expected. How could he truly grieve for a woman who had, in truth, been a virtual stranger? He was beginning to feel inadequate, that he could not feel more. This was the first death he had been involved with since his mother's. Had he lost the ability to mourn?
He stretched out and made himself relax. He focused on his breathing—long, deep inhalation, hold it, then let go, slowly, and hold it—until his heart rate had slowed down to normal. Then he flipped over onto his belly and started press-ups.
It was an escape, he knew. The physical exertion. While his body worked his mind was moving on, gathering itself, preparing for whatever was to come.
He thought, again, of the previous night. It seemed such a long time ago, already. He should never have left her alone. If he had stayed with her, then none of this would have happened. He had known what sort of state she was in—he should have made sure she could get back to her chalet.
But he had abandoned her, running off into the night, hoping to escape from her temptations and contradictions. Had the killer been listening to them, drawn through the woods by the sound of their voices? Maybe a tramp, maybe teenagers camping out in the woods. Maybe someone from a nearby cottage or farmhouse—there were a number scattered around the area, he knew.
But he was aware that the killer didn't have to be an outsider. He knew for certain that there were five other people there on that night. One of them might have followed Nick and Jerry into the woods and then struck—for whatever reason—when Nick had run away.
He remembered Jerry's hands on his cheeks, her mad questions about the trees losing their leaves. He remembered the dizziness her kiss had triggered, the sudden swamping of his senses.
She was a stranger to him, nothing more.
He rolled over onto his side, drew his knees up to his chest. Her words: Then love me again. The sudden desperation in her tone.
He began to cry.
~
The interview room. Detective Inspector Langley and Detective Sergeant Cooper on one side of the desk, Nick on the other, with Dougal Banks, his solicitor, merging anonymously into the background. Standing behind the two officers was a man who had introduced himself as Detective Superintendent Marsh. He was a thin man, attentive to everything, but he spoke very little. Somehow that made his presence even more intimidating.
"Didn't drink much last night, did you?" said Cooper. "Considering you were at a party."
"I know that," said Nick. He vaguely recalled being examined in the doctor's room, being asked to blow into an Intoximeter.
"But we have statements that you had been drinking wine and lager and that you appeared intoxicated." Cooper's arrogant smile pulled at one side of his mouth, a row of yellow teeth showing under a thick black moustache.
"I drank less than anyone else," said Nick, determined to stay calm. Show any weakness and they'll seize on it without hesitation. "I poured most of it away—it makes me sick."
"So you were pretending?"
Nick didn't answer. Cooper's games were so transparent.
Now Langley spoke for the first time since identifying himself for the recording. "Tell me, Nick. Why did you come back to Bathside after all this time? Twelve years, is it?"
Nick nodded.
Langley nodded towards the tape machine. "Please speak your answers aloud," he said. "Twelve years?"
"Yes."
"So what made you come back?"
"Look," said Nick. "I was born here. I grew up here. It's no crime to come back, okay?" His thoughts were beginning to race and he swallowed hard, trying to clamp down. "You're wasting your time," he said. "There's a nutter out there. He tried to rip her clothes off, for God's sake. He'll probably do it again. You're wasting your time with me."
"Some advice," said Langley, in his carefully controlled neutral tone. "I've been in this business almost exactly as long as you've been alive. Please don't try to tell me my job. Okay?"
Nick shrugged. What was he supposed to do? He glanced across at the Detective Superintendent, who was leaning against a wall, but there was no response. "I only want to help," said Nick.
"Good," said Langley. "Common ground at last. Now. Just tell me exactly what happened."
He already had. They were getting nowhere.
~
Later. Nick hadn't noticed the time when they'd started, but they were onto their second tape. Detective Superintendent Marsh had been called away some time earlier, leaving just Nick, Langley, Cooper and Dougal Banks.
"I've got your record here," said DI Langley, tapping a file on the table. Cooper was quiet for now. It seemed that his role was simply to sit there, tossing in the occasional comment or query, and all the time staring at Nick, trying to intimidate him.
"I've been making some inquiries," continued Langley. "A history of mental instability. A number of cautions for public order offences—you use a bit of muscle to make a living, don't you? Sometimes you go too far. A six month suspended prison sentence for possession of a class B drug with intent to supply. The judge was lenient because of your mental state at the time of the offence. We have reason to believe Mrs Wyse was under the influence of drugs at the time of her death.
"We know all about you, Nick. Why don't you tell us what really happened last night? You can get help then. Treatment."
He'd been nineteen when everything had come to a head. He'd been out on his own for over a year, working first in a supermarket, and then at a health club. But all the time the pressure had been sneaking up on him, slowly building, until one day he had simply stayed at home in his little studio flat off the Unthank Road. That day had stretched to two, to three, to a whole week. His excuses, whenever they called from work, soon lost all credibility, until they finally stopped calling.
He hadn't known what was happening to him. He could think of no single incident which might have triggered it.
He settled quickly into a new, reclusive routine. Early in the morning, with the city still groggy from the night before, he would rise, and run, and return before the rush hour snarl developed. The rest of the day simply passed. He couldn't recall how he had filled the long hours, but he suspected that he had simply sat on the floor, staring into an indeterminate distance, lost somewhere in the space inside his skull. Whenever he looked back at that long, empty period, he could only recall the hollowness, the frenzied pace of his morning runs, and the friends who dragged him through.
He didn't know where all these friends had come from, but it seemed that there was always someone to keep him going. They'd bring him food and drink, they'd sit with him in the long evenings, watching crap on the TV and every so often penetrating his shell. He knew he had resented their presence, a lot of the time, but he also knew that they pulled him through the worst. He couldn't recall how he had come to know these people—students, drop-outs, the sort of low-lifes most people would go to great lengths to avoid—but they had probably saved his life.
One of them had also been responsible for his sentence.
Emma Nicholls was a design student at the City College, a middle class rebel in her clothes from Oxfam and her meticulously roughened accent. The first thing he had noticed about her was the queue of seven earrings lined up around the lobe of one ear, and then her surprisingly delicate features beneath a shaggy peroxide quiff. She visited him more often than anyone else—it was her fault that he took his tea so sweet and weak; before her he had been a black coffee drinker. She had liked the Smiths, too, and all the old Fritz Lang films. She had also had a rather strong taste for amphetamines.
&
nbsp; Emma had bullied him into visiting a doctor, on one occasion. She had even taken him to the door of the room and pushed him inside. She had probably waited in the corridor, too, cutting off any escape. It seemed as if he was in there for hours, struggling to snatch the right words from the chaos inside his skull. "I feel bad," was the best he could eventually manage.
The doctor nodded. "Like the world's passing by your door and nobody cares a fig about you," he said. "Like your life is a vacuum. No purpose. No sense of direction. Am I right? Is that how you feel? I thought so. Life stinks, doesn't it? Life really stinks, eh?" The doctor sat there shaking his head for a long time, his gaze distant, chewing on his lower lip. "It gets better," he eventually concluded, tears filling his eyes. "They tell me it usually gets better."
At the time Nick had felt horribly betrayed: he had—with a little help—plucked up the courage to leave his flat and ask for help and this was all he received. But later, those words kept coming back to him, and it did begin, slowly, to get better.
Emma came regularly. She would make him tea, turn on the TV, and talk. For whole evenings she would talk, sometimes getting no response from Nick, but sometimes they would debate and argue into the early hours. She told him of her family, of the lecturer who kept trying to seduce her because he had a thing about body-piercing. She told him of the house parties and the drugs, and of the man she lived with, only a few streets away. He was an easy-going giant of a man, she would tell Nick, but wherever she hid her drugs from him he could sniff them out better even than those Customs dogs at an airport and he would be high as the stars by the time she found him.
Nick hadn't worked out how Emma overcame this problem until one evening when the police followed her in through the door of his flat, with a warrant to search.
He'd been getting better by then, but the raid had almost tipped him back over the edge. He'd boiled up inside, and erupted. He'd resisted arrest and earned a hard time in the cell as a result. But his visit to the doctor ended up paying dividends in his defence: proof that he had been ill, and seeking help. Psychiatric reports confirmed his depression and won him a slight reprieve.
He never blamed Emma. She, more than anyone else, had pulled him through. She even left her boyfriend afterwards, and moved in with Nick. But a relationship founded on guilt and pity had no real chance of lasting, and she soon returned to her gentle junky and drifted away from Nick, probably in search of another lost cause to rescue.
But now Nick had a criminal record, and he had an official history of mental instability. And right now, that wasn't the greatest help.
~
Alone in his cell, trying to remain rational, but all he wanted was to be outside in the fresh air. To smell the salt on the bay breeze, to be out running on the beach for one last time before climbing into his old VW and getting as far away from this blighted corner of Essex as he could.
He was pitifully aware of the walls, pressing in around him. He should feel at home in yet another institution, but his memories of the Homes he had been in were mainly of plotting to escape. Everybody breaks out of a children's home, it's the unwritten rule. But in the ones of Nick's experience, you weren't usually locked up like this.
Late in the evening—after nine, by the clock on the wall—he was put in the interview room once again. He waited for over twenty minutes before Langley and Cooper came in. Mind games, he thought. They were hoping he would crack.
He was resigned to it now, sad that they should waste so much time and effort, but aware that he could do nothing. Who would explain it to the parents of the next victim, if the killer struck again while the police were wasting their time with Nick? Did they have consciences, these coppers? Or would they write it off when they found out they were wrong—they'd only been doing their best?
Cooper turned the tape machine on, then slouched back in his seat, fidgeting with a pen.
Everyone present identified themselves aloud, for the record. Langley sat with his elbows on the desk, hands together as if praying. He stared at Nick past his steepled fingers. "You visited Mrs Wyse's parents on Wednesday the 15th, didn't you?"
Nick nodded, said, "Yes." Then he added, "I did all the wrong things, didn't I?"
"Meaning?"
"When I was a schoolboy I fancied her. I came back to Bathside and bumped into her, so then I called on her family to try to track her down again. I went to a party that she went to. We went into the woods together, we had a disagreement, I appeared some time later with a scratch on my forehead, and then she's found dead. Like I say: I did all the wrong things, didn't I? Did you find traces of my skin under her finger nails?"
"You know we didn't," said Cooper. "She was taken by surprise, she didn't get a chance to fight, did she?"
"I know you didn't because I'm innocent. Has that occurred to you?"
"Had a bad time, didn't you," said Langley, interrupting. "When you were a teenager. You had a lot of potential—never much of an athlete, but you had the brains to compensate. Then it all went wrong for you. What were you going to do, when you got your exams, Nick? The school says you could have gone on to university, if you'd stuck at it."
"Landscape archaeology," said Nick. "Would you believe it? I wanted to study the effect of the physical environment on historical processes. Mum used to tell me how Bathside used to be no more than a few huts and marshes until the river changed its course about 800 years ago—suddenly it had become the tip of a peninsula, commanding the entrance to a huge estuary. It became one of the most important ports of the eighteenth century, all because of a bit too much rain and some coastal erosion. I wanted to be able to piece it all together. Understand it."
"They still call the old course of the river the Fleets," said Langley. "The creeks and marshes around Felixstowe docks. There's often a lot hidden in place-names, isn't there, Nick? Do you know about Copperas Bay and Wood?"
Langley was trying to relax Nick's guard. Nick knew that, but he had nothing to hide. "They used to find blue copperas stones in the mud-flats," he said. "Boil them down and get copper sulphate for dyes and ink."
"Is that why the woods are called Copperas Wood, too? Did they find these stones in the woods? Did you find any nice stones in the woods, Nick? A nice lump of sandstone, big enough to cradle in both hands." He clutched his hands together to demonstrate. "Just right for smashing innocent people's heads in. Did you, Nick?"
"No." He kept it simple, so that Langley knew his digressions hadn't broken through any barriers. "You're wasting your time with me."
"Lets talk about your mother, Nick. Okay? Does that make you uncomfortable, Nick?"
It did, but he only shrugged.
"You were fourteen, weren't you? Just past puberty, just beginning to be interested in girls. Just starting the rocky road to manhood. Then mum gets cancer and you have to look after her. You have to watch her shrivel up and die, don't you? Not fair, is it? Such a formative time for a young chap: thirteen, fourteen, you're becoming the man you're going to be for the rest of your life. Then mum goes and ruins it all. Did you hate her for it, Nick? Did you resent the fact that she was ill and you couldn't get on with growing up?"
Nick stared at the spot between Langley's eyes and said nothing.
"Answer me, please."
Nick twisted in his seat and Banks shrank back as if scalded. "You... Er, my client does not have to say anything," the solicitor said awkwardly.
Langley gave a tight little smile. There were heavy dark pouches under his eyes now, but there was nothing in his air that hinted at tiredness. He believed he was on the scent. Nick recognised the signs of an adrenalin addict. Langley would keep going without flagging until suddenly, when the pieces were finally in place, it would rise up and hit him and he would feel like a drained shell, wanting to pack it all in and crawl back under a stone somewhere.
"Girls," said Langley, oblivious to Nick's thoughts. "Good looking chap like yourself must have them knocking your door down, right? But you didn't have anyone to inf
orm of your arrest—no family, no girlfriend. You have much luck with girls then, Nick?"
"I've had my moments." But they never lasted, he thought. He never gave as much as he took from a relationship. "Just nobody at the moment."
"You look after yourself, don't you? You need to for your work, I suppose. Do you work out at a gym? All those men, working out together, trying to stack more muscles on top of the ones they've already got. What's the term I'm looking for, Mark?"
"Male bonding, sir?" said Cooper.
"Male bonding. The macho thing: emphasise your strength, what makes you different. What makes you better than these pathetic, weak women. Women who can't take the pace, who buckle under, who're only good for one thing. Did you hate your mother for dying when she did, Nick? Do you hate them all?"
"You wear a wedding ring," said Nick, softly, gesturing at Langley's hand. "Poor woman."
Langley's stare didn't waver, hands steepled in front of his face again. "Do you hate them, Nick?" he said, again.
Nick leaned forward. "No," he said. "They're some of the finest people I know. I look after my body—so what? I went to a children's home as a bookish fourteen year-old. Pecking order's everything and that order is decided by who gets beaten up the most, who gets into the most trouble with the Law. You learn to look after yourself. It's called survival.
"I didn't get the chances in life I might have wanted. I had a breakdown. But I'd learnt how to survive. That's a lesson most people never learn because they never have to face the extremes. I understand why I'm here, but you're making a mistake. You're wasting your time with me."
Langley sat and stared at him for a long time. Then he stood, reached over to switch off the tape recorder, and left the room.
Chapter 7
When they came for him in the morning, things seemed to have subtly changed. Langley was waiting in the interview room before Nick and his solicitor got there. He was seated at the table, checking through some notes. No sign of Cooper.
"Morning," said Langley, as Nick was shown in. "Did you manage any sleep then?"
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