Mimic

by Daniel Cole

  ‘I did it,’ blurted Jimmy.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’m just saying I did it. There’s no “allegedly” about it. I did it, and I confessed. End of story.’

  ‘Of course,’ smiled Marshall. She glanced over one of the piles of paperwork in front of her. ‘I see from your file that you’ve been in and out of prison since the age of eighteen, juvenile detention centres before that. All for non-violent offences: theft, burglary, trespassing.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And you made an attempt on your life back in eighty-six?’

  ‘Just a cry for help,’ Jimmy replied dismissively.

  ‘You jumped off a bridge.’

  ‘But not a very high one.’

  ‘According to this, you were in hospital for the best part of five months.’

  He simply shrugged, so Marshall moved on:

  ‘Your longest stint back out in the real world was from January eighty-seven until the October of that year. What was different?’

  ‘For the first time ever, I had someone looking out for me.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘He didn’t look out for himself.’ Jimmy looked crushed, the memory still too raw. ‘But that’s the streets for you,’ he continued, his guard back up. ‘One way or another, you lose everybody.’ He picked up the bottle of water and broke the seal, clearing the frog in his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marshall genuinely, before appearing a little distracted. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you’re not at all what I was expecting.’

  ‘And what were you expecting?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. That wild-eyed, half-starved, dirt-encrusted drug addict in the arrest file. But you don’t look anything like that man, quite the opposite actually. It would seem prison suits you,’ she complimented him with just a hint of flirtation, but enough to make an incarcerated man crack a smile.

  ‘They say it’s supposed to be like purgatory in here, but they look after us.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Marshall. ‘Why did you give yourself up?’ she asked bluntly, changing pace to throw him off guard.

  ‘I ummm. Guilt … I suppose.’

  ‘The same guilt that failed to materialise the entire twelve hours you knew Dolan was up on that podium slowly freezing to death?’

  ‘I guess,’ he replied, folding his arms defensively.

  ‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Marshall, placing her papers down and moving a little closer to him. She lowered her voice: ‘Could you maybe do something for me? You know, on the quiet.’ He looked wary. ‘An old friend of mine got himself locked up in here a while back. I can’t really be seen coming to visit him, for obvious reasons. So, I just thought you might be able to pass on a message. Just that his mum and Sammy are doing fine.’

  ‘Mum and Sammy?’

  ‘Yeah. Would you mind?’

  ‘Sure. What’s his name?’ asked Jimmy, uncrossing his arms.

  ‘You’ll probably know him as “Roady” … Auguste Rodin?’

  She watched him very closely as a blank expression formed on his face on mention of the celebrated French artist.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Jimmy. ‘But I’ll ask about.’

  Marshall smiled sweetly: ‘Where’d you get the paralytic from?’

  ‘I told the police when they arrested me – a guy I knew who used to work the park.’

  ‘Oh, right. Was that Big Tony or Micky D again?’

  ‘Big Tony.’

  ‘Otherwise known as Anthony Stuart Baker,’ she said, picking up another file, ‘who just so happened to get busted a week after your arrest for pushing pills to schoolkids.’ She flicked through to a bookmarked page. ‘Now, I’m looking at a list of his entire seized inventory, and while I’m seeing an impressive array of different drugs, there’s no mention of pancuronium bromide. That’s weird, right?’

  ‘… I guess.’ Jimmy held a hand to his stomach. ‘You know what? I’m not feeling so good. I think I might need to go lie down.’

  ‘Last question.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve really got to go.’ He went to get up.

  ‘One final question,’ said Marshall, ‘and you’ll never have to hear from me again. I swear.’

  ‘… One question,’ nodded Jimmy, sitting back down and recrossing his arms.

  ‘OK. So, Jimmy, do you actually think I’d have had the guard remove your handcuffs and then gone on to send him out of the room if I believed for even one moment you’d really murdered someone?’ Now Jimmy looked legitimately unwell. ‘Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me. I get it. It’s tough out there. And I bet if you spend enough time in hell, purgatory’s going to start looking mighty tempting.’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he said unconvincingly, taking another sip of water to cover his poor poker face.

  ‘You’re right-handed,’ noted Marshall, and Jimmy looked confused. ‘The bottle of water,’ she explained.

  ‘Yeah? … So?’

  ‘Forensic science has come a long way in the seven years since you’ve been locked up in here. Our killer was left-handed,’ she told him simply, risking everything on a weak bluff. ‘Left-footed too, according to the footprints on top of the podium. It’s all to do with weight distribution and all sorts of other clever stuff I don’t really care about.’ She picked up a file at random to read from a blank page:

  ‘“Considering the angle of injection and clear finger marks in the bruises around the neck, there is almost no physical way that the murder could have been carried out by a right-handed assailant.”’

  She closed the file conclusively and tossed it back onto the table. ‘Aside from the fact that I can prove your innocence and ruin this whole cushy little life you’ve set up for yourself in here, there’s a person who did do this to Henry Dolan, who then went on to murder a woman named Nicolette Cotillard and her son, Alphonse, who was someone very special to me. This person is still out there. Christ knows how many others he’s hurt over the years. We can stop him, but I need your help.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘The truth, off the record, of course. I need to know everything that happened that night: how you ended up with the needle and syringe covered in Dolan’s blood, how you knew it contained a paralytic.’

  Putting his face in his hands, Jimmy sighed heavily.

  ‘Jimmy, you’ve won. You got what you wanted; you escaped the streets for little more than a convincing lie and punching one police officer in the face. But you’re not blameless in this any more … not now. Not when you know he’s done this to other people.’

  He looked back up at her unsurely: ‘Off the record?’

  ‘Off the record … and this,’ she said, gesturing to the table of paperwork, ‘all goes away.’

  ‘You swear?’

  ‘I swear.’

  Taking a deep breath, he nodded: ‘… OK.’

  ‘Goth, aisle two. Repeat: goth, aisle two. Wants to speak with security.’

  Only partway through washing the mud off his face in the toilets, Winter picked up the walkie-talkie:

  ‘On my way.’

  Uniform ripped and caked in dirt, he headed back out onto the shop floor where the black-haired, leather-clad young woman was waiting for him at the end of the aisle, looking like something out of a horror movie.

  ‘Hi!’ Winter greeted her pleasantly, noticing her judgemental eyes take in his untidy appearance. ‘Yeah, sorry. It’s been a busy day. I had to chase down a shoplifter … twice.’ She didn’t look particularly interested. ‘People were pretty excited,’ he assured her, starting to babble. ‘Said I was very brave. One person even clapped!’

  ‘That person you, by any chance?’

  ‘What can I say? I was impressed … You wanted to talk to me?’

  Manager Dan poked his unpleasant head around the baked beans:

  ‘Dos minutos then back on the door!’

  Winter waved in acknowledgement.

/>   ‘I think there’s been crossed wires,’ Marshall told him. ‘I’m looking for Police Constable Adam Winter.’

  ‘To … put a spell on him?’ he asked, immediately regretting provoking the scary young woman when she fixed her dark eyes on him.

  ‘Detective Constable Jordan Marshall,’ she announced, holding up her ID, her thumb tactically positioned over the word Trainee.

  ‘Well, in that case, I am he … me … I mean, I’m Adam Winter.’

  She looked at him dubiously: ‘Oh … Oh! We need to talk.’

  ‘We are talking.’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ muttered Dan as he walked past, one of his larger zits actually popping when he scowled too vigorously.

  ‘I mean talk, talk,’ Marshall clarified.

  ‘You do know I’m not currently on active duty, right? Hence the … this.’

  ‘Yes. I gathered that.’

  ‘OK. I’ve got a break at two.’

  She checked her watch and went to leave: ‘I’ll see you then.’

  ‘Hey, wait! What’s this about?’

  With a huff, she turned back to him:

  ‘You don’t remember me, but we’ve met before – Bridge Street Leisure Centre, more than seven years ago. You were “investigating” the murder of someone, but I doubt you’d—’

  ‘Alphonse Cotillard,’ mumbled Winter, lost in thought, ‘and his mother Nicolette. And you … You were the girl with the cigarettes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marshall, trying to hide her surprise. ‘While you’re on a roll, does the name Jimmy Metcalf mean anything to you?’

  ‘It does. He admitted to the murder of Henry John Dolan, blowing our entire case out the water.’

  ‘That’s right. Well, I spoke with him this morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I needed to hear it from the horse’s mouth. I needed to hear him confess.’

  ‘Errrm. He already confessed.’

  Marshall shook her head:

  ‘Confess that he didn’t do it … because it means you and Detective Chambers were right all along: that they had the wrong man behind bars, about the murders being linked, the killer replicating famous works of art … You were right about all of it.’

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘You ready?’ asked Marshall as she stepped through the doors of the supermarket.

  Winter nodded, zipping a fleece top over his uniform:

  ‘There’s a café down the road, if you wanted to—’

  ‘Actually,’ she interrupted him, ‘I had somewhere a little further afield in mind. Got a ride?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Guess we’re taking mine then.’

  They stepped outside, Winter watching in confusion as Marshall made her way over to the motorcycle parked illegally in front of the store. She unhooked a helmet from the back of the bike and handed it to him.

  ‘Errrm. I don’t know how to …’

  ‘Hold on?’ she asked impatiently. ‘Get on.’

  Still limping from his disagreeable experience on two wheels earlier in the day, he unenthusiastically obeyed:

  ‘So, I like … hug you from behind?’ he asked her.

  Marshall looked at him as though he were a pervert:

  ‘You hold here and here,’ she showed him, eyeing him warily for several seconds afterwards.

  Winter had his arms wrapped so tightly around Marshall she could barely breathe as she turned them into Old Mortlake Burial Ground, the trees that marked the outer boundaries a thousand different shades of red and brown.

  The moment she stopped the bike, he leapt off, removing the helmet and gasping for air, collapsing to the ground with the elation of an astronaut returning to earth.

  ‘A graveyard?’ he asked angrily. ‘You put me through that to bring me to a graveyard?!’

  ‘It’s peaceful,’ reasoned Marshall. ‘And it’s private. Let’s go for a walk.’

  Getting back to his feet, they started ambling between the rows of gravestones.

  ‘How long have you been away from the force?’ Marshall asked conversationally.

  ‘Ummm. Five months … this time. It’s a medical thing,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh. Sorry. None of my business.’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m actually in the process of coming back. But until then, Sainsbury’s is a pretty good gig. I like my sleep, and now I never have to finish beyond nine o’clock. Life’s good! So … Jimmy Metcalf?’ Winter prompted her, changing the subject. He was also conscious that he’d already had a third of his lunch break and seen a big red cross next to his name in Dan’s office earlier on.

  Marshall hesitated.

  ‘I’ve literally got seventeen minutes,’ he reminded her.

  A gust of wind blew across the cemetery and the sound of death rustled through the trees, the corpses of countless leaves discoloured and petrified as if in rigor mortis above them.

  Marshall took a deep breath, feeling apprehensive now that it actually came to sharing her solitary venture with another person …

  Jimmy Metcalf couldn’t stop shaking. The cold no longer merely engulfed him – it had infected him.

  ‘Stanley?’

  He gave his friend a gentle shake, the elderly man slumping lifelessly against the doorway where he had unknowingly chosen to spend his final hours. The two of them had only spoken that afternoon, when the veteran rough sleeper had promised to check himself into a hostel, but the half-spent bottle on the step beside him suggested he had decided on another way of trying to make it through the night.

  ‘Oh, Stanley,’ Jimmy sighed sadly before kneeling down to rummage through the old man’s pockets, relieving him of £3.72 in small change, the bobble hat he would no longer be requiring and the remainder of the bottle of whisky.

  Taking a swig in honour of his friend, Jimmy squeezed his hand affectionately, got back up, and walked away without looking back.

  Two hours later and barely able to keep his eyes open, Jimmy forced himself to keep moving, intending to walk the city the entire night, knowing that to stop was to freeze. He turned the corner into Bayswater Road, familiar turf, and was surprised to hear voices, unsure why anybody would choose to be out so late in such bitter conditions.

  A little way up the street, two men were walking adjacent to the park – one large, muscular, the other slimmer and shorter. Clearly intoxicated, the larger man lost his footing on the ice, the other unsuccessfully attempting to catch him before they both landed in a heap on the pavement. Bursting into fits of laugher, the two figures made no effort to get back up, the slimmer man rolling on top of the other as they shared a kiss …

  ‘Woah. Woah. Woah,’ said Winter, who’d stopped walking. ‘I take it the larger man is Henry John Dolan? So, you’re saying there’s some gay lover out there that we knew nothing about?!’

  ‘Are you going to let me finish the story or not?’ Marshall asked him.

  ‘Sorry. Please continue.’

  Feeling uncomfortable interrupting the intimate moment, Jimmy slowly started making his way over, deciding that the desperate circumstances justified the intrusion and conscious that drunk people tended to be more generous than sober ones.

  As large snowflakes took it in turns to eclipse the street lights, Jimmy was still twenty feet away when the pair climbed back to their feet, the slimmer man leading Dolan through the entrance of the park.

  Oblivious to his presence, the two silhouettes staggered along the meandering path as Jimmy watched them from the gates. Reaching into his pocket, he wrapped his fingers around the handle of his knife, deliberating. He’d never use it, of course. He just needed to scare them a little. The one time he’d done it before had all been over in less than thirty seconds, the red-faced businessman handing over the wallet as if he’d been expecting him, no harm done and an exciting story to tell his colleagues the next morning. The guilt, however, still weighed in the pit of Jimmy’s stomach. He was a lot of things, and his life certainly hadn’t turned out as he planned, but he’d n
ever thought of himself as a bad person.

  Still undecided, he followed them down the path, keeping his distance, Dolan’s voice carrying in the silence:

  ‘I’m so glad you made me come out with you.’

  ‘And you thought you were going to have an early night!’ laughed the other man.

  Seeing his chance, Jimmy took the knife out and quickened his pace. But then the thin man took hold of Dolan’s hand, leading him off the path and into the trees.

  Curse words misting in front of his face, Jimmy glanced back the way he had come – the park still completely deserted. It was far too rare an opportunity to pass up, and if he’d ever needed a room for the night, it was tonight.

  He crunched over the fresh snow into the treeline. The two men entered a small clearing, where a large stone pedestal stood ominously vacant, as if its occupant might be off roaming the park somewhere under the cover of darkness. Squatting down to avoid being seen, Jimmy watched as the slim man scaled the empty podium.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Dolan called after him. ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘Come on,’ the other man told him. ‘I’ve got a surprise.’

  ‘No! There’s no way on earth you’re getting me up there!’

  ‘No way?’ he asked playfully, disappearing from view before returning with a picnic basket and blanket he must have stashed up there earlier in the day. He took out a bottle of champagne and popped the cork. ‘Suit yourself.’

  Dolan huffed, feigning irritation as he started to ascend the frozen ladder towards the safety of the stone summit.

  Chuckling at his own bad luck, Jimmy tucked the knife back into his pocket, feeling relieved more than anything else. He turned to leave, when an abrupt change in the slim man’s body language caught his attention; as Dolan continued to climb, he retrieved something from the basket, all trace of the debilitating alcohol gone as his steady hands assembled the apparatus.