by Daniel Cole
Contents
Title Page
The Day Death Came Visiting
Thursday 2 February 1989
CHAPTER 1
Friday
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
Tuesday
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
Thursday
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
Monday
CHAPTER 11
Tuesday
CHAPTER 12
Seven years later …
Friday 15 November 1996
CHAPTER 13
Saturday
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
Sunday
CHAPTER 16
Monday
CHAPTER 17
Wednesday
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
Thursday
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
Friday
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
Monday
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
Seven months later …
Thursday 3 July 1997
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
Acknowledgements
Extract from Ragdoll
About the Author
Also by Daniel Cole
Copyright
The Day Death Came Visiting
And so, the old man returned home to find Death slumbering in his chair, having come for him at last. But, thought the old man, is Death not merely another foe? A foe both weary and alone?
So, stepping lightly over the robes that spilled across his floor like rivers of tar, he searched his little house for a blade and then, with the stealth of Death himself, crept back over to his sleeping guest. Drunk on the desire to live forever, the old man raised his hands high and then drove them down hard, sinking the knife deep into the ashen insides. But he had done little more than awoken Death, who rose up to tower over the whimpering man, more vengeful and cruel than ever and unconcerned by the blade still embedded in the chair.
‘You mean to evade me?’ laughed Death. ‘You need but ask. Rest assured, you shall never feel my mercy. For only the living can suffer as you will.’
And with that, Death showed himself out.
He had much to do.
Almost seven years to the day, Death returned to the tiny cottage to find the old man slumbering in his chair, a familiar knife resting in his lap.
So, stepping lightly over the blood that spilled across his floor like crimson ribbons, Death took hold of his wrinkled arms. On feeling the chill of his grasp, the old man stirred, eyes flooding with tears as he regarded his healed wounds.
‘Please!’ he cried. ‘Have you not already taken everything from me? Have I not suffered enough?’
Amused, his visitor leaned over to whisper in his ear:
‘No, my old friend … Not yet.’
And with that, Death showed himself out.
For he still had much to do.
Thursday 2 February
1989
CHAPTER 1
The indicators clicked loudly, shapes illuminating and then being reclaimed by shadow, as though an unseen audience were sparking matches in the darkness. When a lanky silhouette waved him down, Detective Sergeant Benjamin Chambers turned the wheel into Hyde Park. The figure hurried over to open the gate, the dark green of the Parks Department jacket catching in the headlights as he struggled with the lock. Tackling the frozen metal barehanded, his guide gestured for him to follow as he jogged ahead on foot.
Chambers stifled a yawn, put the car in gear and set off along the untreated service road, hearing the change in pitch as wet concrete gave way to compacted ice.
‘Don’t run him over … Don’t run him over,’ he muttered under his breath, not at all confident the car would stop should his escort decide to, the wheels spinning more and more regularly, the deeper they ventured into the sprawling London park.
Suddenly, the man in front lost his footing, disappearing somewhere beneath the bonnet in time to a concerning thud. The brakes juddered underfoot as the car slid to a leisurely stop.
Chambers winced, leaning forward in his seat and watching the end of the bonnet anxiously …
But then a cheerful face popped up between the headlights, an illuminated name badge proudly declaring its owner: Deano.
‘Sorry!’ the man waved, getting back to his feet.
‘You’re sorry?!’ Chambers called back incredulously, shaking his head.
‘It’s just up past those trees!’ shouted Deano, not learning his lesson as he assumed his position three precarious steps ahead of the car.
Reluctantly, Chambers started the vehicle rolling again. Keeping his distance, he eventually parked up beside a patrol car, two uniformed officers inside sheltering from the cold wind that rushed in the moment he pulled on the handle. He gritted his teeth and climbed out, bundling his coat up around his neck as his Parks Department guide regarded him with surprise.
‘Never met a black detective before,’ he informed Chambers, who took the inane comment in his stride.
‘First time for everything. Although, if you ask me, I am in fact a very, very, very dark brown,’ he replied sarcastically, already scanning the vicinity for a body.
Deano chuckled: ‘So you are. Guess that’s why you’re the detective.’
‘Guess so,’ replied Chambers, frowning now, seeing only an assemblage of footprints encircling the stone base of a statue. ‘It’s all in the details … details like: where’s this dead body I’m meant to be looking at?’
At that moment, a car door slammed: one of the uniformed officers finally working up the nerve to head back outside. With dirty-blond slicked-back hair, he was a good decade younger than Chambers: twenty-one years old at most. Pocketing the remainder of a chocolate bar, he made his way over to shake the detective’s hand.
‘DS Chambers?’ he asked with a South London twang. ‘Adam Winter. And that …’ he gestured to his partner, a Viking-like tree trunk of a woman who had begrudgingly followed him out, ‘is Reilly.’ The other officer nodded curtly and then returned to the matter of not freezing to death. ‘We’ve actually met before,’ Winter told him, ‘on that jumper job.’
Chambers nodded: ‘With the …’
‘Thing.’
‘And the …’
‘Thing.’
‘I remember.’
The conversation paused when a bitter gust of wind blew through the trees, both men needing a moment to compose themselves.
‘Jesus Christ,’ complained Winter, shaking off the chill.
‘So, I was told you’d found a body under a statue,’ said Chambers casually, pretty sure he’d had a wasted drive. ‘It’s like Chinese whispers that control room,’ he joked, in no way pointing blame at the young constable – he had enough enemies as it was.
‘No kidding,’ replied Winter, directing him over to add his footprints to the dozens already stamped into the grass. ‘Errrm … The body isn’t under the statue … The body is the statue.’
Chambers raised his eyebrows sceptically and then looked up to the ice-coated figure perched ten feet above them atop a stone pedestal.
‘First noticed by a jogger at about eleven-thirty.’
Chambers glanced down at his watch.
‘… a.m,’ Winter clarified. ‘Eleven-thirty a.m.’
Now even more confused, Chambers took a few steps back to better appreciate the
scene. He squinted up at what he was still reasonably confident was a weather-worn piece of art: completely naked upon a rough stone slab, a muscular male figure sat with his chin resting on his right knuckle, as if deep in thought. In the exposed areas, windswept icicles covered the skin like fur; in the more sheltered, it was an inhuman blueish hue.
Chambers looked unconvinced as Winter continued:
‘Said she’d passed these statues a hundred times without really noticing them, but this time something felt different. She let it play on her mind all day until coming back this evening and realising that, yeah, something wasn’t right: first and foremost – it was a frozen corpse.’
‘It’s meant to have been here all day?’ asked Chambers, moving around the base to find a better position. ‘And no one else noticed?’
‘Would you?’
‘… Still haven’t,’ he conceded, squinting up at it.
‘I’m thinking,’ piped up Winter’s intimidating colleague, whose name he’d already forgotten, ‘we can put this down as “bizarre way of committing suicide” number seven million and one. It’s pretty common in the parks. But then, what do I know? That’s for you to decide in your infinite wisdom.’
The woman clearly had an issue with him, but Chambers was both too cold and too tired to rise to it.
‘Sorry about her,’ said Winter, shaking his head at his partner. ‘She’s a delight when you get to know her though, aren’t you, Kim?’ he called, receiving a middle finger back in response.
‘Have you been up there?’ Chambers asked him.
‘Wouldn’t want to contaminate the scene,’ Winter smiled back, playing his get out of jail free card impeccably. ‘Plus, you know, we figured he wasn’t going anywhere.’
Chambers let out a frozen sigh: ‘Can’t do a lot without a lad—’
‘There’s one built into the base,’ an eavesdropping Deano informed him helpfully. ‘Round the back.’
Winter made no effort to conceal the smirk on his face. Chambers, meanwhile, looked as though he might cry.
‘… Great.’
The fifteen-rung ascension had felt far longer, the biting wind building strength with every inch he climbed as Chambers scrambled onto the pedestal’s flat summit, his pocket torch clamped between his teeth.
With its broad back facing him, the figure appeared as inanimate and perfect as it had from the ground. Carefully crawling across the ice to reach it, he removed the flashlight from his mouth, tracing the beam along the form’s opaque glaze, still uncertain as to what he was looking at … until he came across the crease in the statue’s elbow: a wrinkled area of blue skin – but unquestionably skin. Even though a part of him had been expecting it, Chambers was startled and dropped the torch, which rolled off the podium and twisted through the air like a falling star.
‘Shit,’ he whispered, a little embarrassed.
‘Everything OK up there?’ Winter shouted up.
‘Fine!’ he called back, tentatively getting up onto his knees to look at the frozen face by the light of the moon:
He was handsome – movie-star handsome – flawless. Perhaps he was an actor, thought Chambers. It would certainly align with the attention-craving mindset required to climb up naked onto a podium and strike a pose until one went solid.
Growing more confident in his footing, Chambers stood upright, leaning in close to see whether there were any identifying marks or features, his face mere inches from the statue’s, his misting breath reflecting off the shiny skin.
Something wasn’t right … Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on … Something about the eyes perhaps? Icy blue … Intense … Piercing … Not the glassy gaze of a vacant vessel.
He stared into them, transfixed … when a hand grasped out at him.
Instinctively staggering backwards, Chambers tore his arm from its grip and felt himself fall, the sharp intake of breath he took on the way down robbed from him the moment he hit the ground.
‘Detective!’ shouted Winter, the first to rush over.
‘He …’ Chambers wheezed, looking up at the night sky. ‘He …’
‘What? I can’t understand you. Just stay still!’ Winter turned to his partner: ‘Call an ambulance!’ Chambers attempted to sit up. ‘Please, sir. Stay still!’
‘He’s … He’s still … alive!’ gasped Chambers, lying back down and struggling to breathe as the others’ horrified expressions manifested into a frenzy of activity.
And all the while, he just lay there, unable to do anything more than stare up at the twinkling stars and the tragic, yet surreally beautiful, figure above him.
Winter had draped his jacket over the immovable man’s shoulders, an act of kindness akin to hurling a sponge at a tsunami. They’d attempted to move him but found the majority of his joints locked in place, the awkward positioning thwarting any aspiration of lifting him down unaided. And so, Winter had remained up there beside him, a muttered monologue of reassurances and insincere promises filling the time until a procession of blue lights followed Deano through the trees.
Chambers was back on his feet just in time to move out of the way. Using a cherry picker, two firefighters covered the frozen man in blankets before lifting him off his slab and onto a wheelchair, their patient’s pose barely altering. The moment they’d rattled back to earth, they handed him over to the paramedics, who rushed him straight into the ambulance.
‘Hope you weren’t planning on sleeping for the next six months,’ quipped Winter, joining Chambers to watch as the ambulance crew struggled to attach their equipment. ‘Think I royally screwed up tonight.’
Chambers didn’t respond. He actually quite liked the overtalkative officer, but it was difficult to argue with his accurate self-evaluation.
‘I mean, we were here a good hour before you,’ continued Winter. ‘I should’ve gone up there … shouldn’t I?’
Chambers turned to him. Being both older and wiser, it felt one of those perfect moments to bestow an invaluable pearl of wisdom for the young man to carry for years to come: ‘… Yep.’
Winter was clearly beating himself up over it but moved the conversation on nonetheless: ‘No sign of a struggle?’
‘Not that I could see.’
‘Who’d do something like that to themselves?’
Chambers opened his mouth to answer, when there was a commotion from the back of the ambulance:
‘Paddles!’
A monotonic tone rang out over the clearing as the crowd of emergency-service personnel watched helplessly.
‘Clear!’
‘Shocking!’
The body barely flinched, despite the surge of electricity coursing through it.
‘No pulse!’
‘Charging!’
While the others watched the inevitable events unfold, Chambers turned his back on the futile resuscitation efforts and returned to the empty podium.
‘So, what are you thinking?’ asked Winter, following him down, ‘… Detective Chambers?’
‘Who’d do something like that to themselves?’ he mumbled in reply, still lost in thought as he stalked the footprints around the large stone base. ‘It’s extreme. No doubt. And yet, feels a little …’ he struggled to find the correct word while the man they were discussing was dying just twenty metres away, ‘… non-committal.’
‘Non-committal?’ asked Winter, sounding only moderately appalled.
‘That jogger could’ve called it in twelve hours ago,’ reasoned Chambers, looking into the dark trees as if there might have been someone there. ‘Things could’ve been very different.’
‘True.’
‘And why here?’ he continued. ‘It’s on show, but it’s also shielded by trees on most sides and ten feet up in the air. If the idea was to go out in a blaze of glory, why not climb Nelson’s Column or do it somewhere a little more public at least?’
‘… Non-committal,’ said Winter, watching the detective in fascination.
‘Non-committal,’ Chambers nodded,
finally tearing himself away from the trees.
As the final token chest compressions slowed to a stop, Winter sighed: ‘Guess he got what he wanted regardless.’
‘Actually,’ said Chambers, kneeling down to more closely examine a set of footprints, ‘I’m not so sure he did.’
Friday
CHAPTER 2
‘Detective? … Detective?’ Chambers awoke with a start, grasping a fistful of the woman’s lab coat and staring up at her wild-eyed. ‘Woah! Woah!’ said Dr Sykes, New Scotland Yard’s Head Medical Examiner.
After taking a moment to absorb his insipid surroundings, he let go of the doctor and rubbed his face: ‘Sorry.’
‘No harm done,’ smiled Sykes, who was probably only a year or two from retirement and could do without being assaulted first thing in the morning. ‘Long night?’
‘You could say that,’ Chambers replied, habitually economical with his words.
‘Are you finishing soon?’
He glanced at his watch: ‘… Two hours ago.’
Sykes raised her eyebrows: ‘How about we get you some coffee?’
Having officially assumed responsibility of the patient, the ambulance crew had followed protocol and transported the thawing body back to St Mary’s Hospital, meaning that Chambers had wasted the remainder of his shift trying to get it moved to the forensic lab for testing. Eventually successful, he had fallen asleep in one of the plastic chairs out in the corridor until being woken by the very person he’d been waiting to see.
‘I’ve got a backlog already,’ said Sykes between sips of her coffee. ‘London’s been especially kill-y this past week.’
‘Take a look at the file. That’s all I ask.’
‘Detective, I—’
‘Just take a look.’
Clearly exasperated, the medical examiner placed her cup down to pick up the photocopied incident report and corresponding ambulance form, brow furrowing as she scanned the first page.
‘It’s a strange one. I’ll give you that,’ the doctor conceded after reading it in its entirety. ‘And you suspect foul play?’
‘Just a hunch.’
‘I can’t prioritise a hunch,’ Sykes told him, placing the documents in her lap while she awaited an explanation.