Mimic

by Daniel Cole

  ‘On what grounds?’ asked Chambers, not making any effort to hide his frustration, having requested additional resources be posted at Eloise’s building.

  ‘On the grounds that the press are tearing us apart out there! That we still have more officers than we can spare sitting about at four different locations around the city, one constantly with Ms Brown, one with Detective Marshall now, and are yet to make any tangible progress towards actually capturing Coates!’ she bit back, her own desk-centric pressures getting the better of her.

  ‘Robert wouldn’t hurt me,’ insisted Eloise for the umpteenth time, the words starting to feel like a catchphrase at this point. ‘He even told you as much.’

  ‘This whole thing is about you!’ argued Chambers, sounding more accusatory than concerned.

  ‘Detective,’ said Wainwright firmly while nursing the beginnings of a headache, ‘if you’re that concerned about Ms Brown’s safety, you are welcome to reassign some of the surveillance team.’

  ‘I need them where they are!’

  She raised her hands, giving up.

  ‘I’ll stay with her,’ offered Winter. ‘The whole time.’

  ‘No. I want you with me,’ said Chambers.

  ‘You could let me help,’ suggested Marshall as pleasantly as she could, not wanting to alienate the man who had come to her rescue twice already that day.

  ‘Don’t start,’ he warned her before turning to Eloise: ‘Why not come in? You’re safe here. Just until this is over.’

  ‘What, live here?’ she scoffed. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Can I suggest a compromise?’ Marshall interjected. ‘Are we agreed, based on all that’s come before, that all signs are pointing towards Coates’s mother’s grave as the location of this next statue? It is, without doubt, the most fitting setting to display his vanquished monster. Coates has made a credible threat against me by going to such lengths to leave my blood where it was bound to be discovered, and we know he already has his giant. Therefore, it seems highly unlikely that this penultimate statue involves Eloise in any way.’

  She met Chambers’ eye, a whole separate discussion occurring in the subtext:

  ‘So … how about if Eloise remains at home with her one officer protection detail for now, but if we can’t stop him, if he somehow manages to complete The Bronze David and escape, she comes in immediately and doesn’t leave until he’s in custody?’

  There was a pause in which they each took a moment to consider her logical plan of action.

  ‘I’d be prepared to go along with that,’ said Eloise.

  Winter smiled at her.

  ‘Chambers?’ asked Wainwright. He gave her a reluctant nod. ‘Fantastic. The assistant commissioner will be happy,’ she said dryly, looking up at the clock. ‘… Bit past your bedtime, isn’t it?’

  ‘Way past,’ agreed Chambers despite the early-afternoon sun warming the room. ‘I’m going to drive over to Margravine Cemetery and check in with the day shift, make any changes we might need for tonight, then head home for a few hours’ kip. Marshall, mind finishing off the paperwork from last night?’

  ‘Love to,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘Eloise, you should probably get an emergency bag packed as soon as you get home. Winter, drive her back. Update whoever’s looking after her on what to do if we call to say she needs to come in.’

  ‘Will do,’ he said cheerily.

  Chambers let out an exhausted sigh: ‘Suppose I’ll see you in the graveyard then.’

  By no more than mere coincidence, Chambers’ route out to Hammersmith and Margravine Cemetery had taken him through South Kensington and the museum district, where immense faux-palaces clustered together while the rest of the world transformed around them.

  Switching off the engine when he hadn’t moved in over five minutes, he glanced across the street to the Victoria and Albert Museum, recalling with almost no interest whatsoever Eloise’s presentation and her excitement that a life-size replica of The Bronze David resided somewhere within its labyrinthine halls.

  Turning back to the stationary traffic and the unpromising wail of sirens up ahead, he swore under his breath, turned the ignition on, and made a dubiously legal right-hand turn towards the car park on Prince Consort Road in search of coffee and toilets.

  Staring up at the onyx-black cast of Donatello’s masterpiece, Chambers felt the same sense of awe combined with his own inconsequentiality that he had back in Tobias Sleepe’s warehouse seven years earlier. Rendered in painted plaster, the sculpture was exactly as Eloise had described it on first inspection, but the longer he looked at it, the more intricate details began to reveal themselves: the broken sword – its blade no doubt snagging on some bone or cartilage on its path through its owner’s throat, or the care that had gone into carving each and every one of the laurel leaves atop the young victor’s hat.

  It was undeniably beautiful and violent and delicate and gruesome all at the same time: the way that Goliath’s long beard curled up around his slayer’s foot, suggesting that the boy had been standing there for some time, perhaps even running his toes through his felled foe’s hair – the darker side of God’s victory that the stories neglected to mention … the telltale signs of a psychopath in the making.

  Marshall shielded her tiny flame from the wind as she stood in the collective candlelight of Tamsin Fuller’s friends and relatives. The vigil, taking place on the banks of the river where her body had been discovered, was a private affair that she’d only learned of through the investigation. Armed with a time and place, she had wanted to pay her respects to their late Venus de Milo, feeling it the very least she could do for the woman she had failed.

  The grieving parents had accepted her vague explanation of being ‘a friend from work’, handed her a candle and a hot drink, and welcomed her in like family. After stuffing the collection bucket with her grocery money for the month, Marshall listened to those closest to Tamsin tell their stories, sharing in their frozen tears and sentimental laughter, not one of them aware of the blood on her hands – that it was she who had provoked Death.

  Once the final person had spoken and Mr Fuller had thanked them all for coming, the small crowd dispersed like fireflies disturbed from the grass.

  ‘Jordan?’ Pretending not to hear her name, Marshall continued up the hill. ‘Jordan!’ repeated Tamsin’s mother, who had remained a stoic presence at her tearful husband’s side throughout. ‘It is Jordan, isn’t it?’ she asked, finally catching up.

  ‘Yes. Sorry. I was miles away,’ said Marshall, the candle flickering in her hand only emphasising the mascara all over her face.

  ‘You said you work … worked with Tammy at the university?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘So, will you be seeing Ted on Monday?’

  Marshall hesitated: ‘I’m not sure.’

  The older woman’s look of suspicion was confirmation that it had been a trap:

  ‘Who are you? Really? … Press? … Some weirdo who heard about our tragedy and thought you’d come along for a nosy?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that.’ Marshall looked up at the gate, tempted to run away.

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘Just someone who needed to look you in the eye and tell you how truly sorry I am,’ she said, feeling more tears building. ‘Because I think what happened to Tamsin was my fault.’

  ‘Why on earth would you think that?’

  She took a deep breath:

  ‘I’m a police officer. And the person who did this to Tamsin did the same thing to someone I cared about very much seven years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Fuller, taking her hand, the gesture too much for Marshall, who started to babble, now on the verge of tears:

  ‘I just wanted to catch him so badly. I never stopped to think about … about what it might cost. And now she’s gone and we haven’t caught him and … I’m so sorry!’

  ‘Shhhh. Shhhh,’ whispered Tamsin’s mother, embracing her tightly. ‘Do you know what Ta
mmy was doing the night she went missing? … Returning a dress she’d bought me for my birthday,’ she revealed, releasing Marshall but taking her hands once more. ‘Would we be having this conversation now if I hadn’t stubbornly said I preferred the blue one?

  ‘And do you see that man over there talking with my husband? That’s her ex-boyfriend, Stephen. He broke up with her a month ago. Every Wednesday night, without fail, they went to the pub quiz with their friends. She’d have been safe with them …

  ‘And did you see her sister talking up there?’

  Marshall nodded, in awe of this woman who could remain so rational and composed while everybody else fell apart around her.

  ‘… They hadn’t spoken in over four months. The last thing she said to Tammy was that she hated her. She didn’t mean it, of course, but can’t ever take it back either. Worse, she ignored a call from her that night.

  ‘My point is: there is more than enough guilt to go around. Each and every one of these things led to Tammy’s death, and at the same time, none of them at all. Do you think it’s my fault that my daughter is dead?’

  ‘No. Of course not!’

  The older woman smiled sadly: ‘Then it isn’t yours either.’

  The graveyard was completely still – silent bar the rustle of wind-strewn leaves, the occasional hoot of an owl somewhere in the trees opposite, and the slurp of Winter sucking up the dregs of his Burger King fizzy brown water.

  ‘Could you not do that?’ whispered Chambers, missing Marshall’s company at only forty minutes in.

  Removing the straw from his mouth, Winter placed the paper cup on the floor with the rest of his rubbish:

  ‘Sorry.’

  They both turned to look back out over the sea of gravestones flickering in and out of the moonlight, bodies bedded down in the earth like fresh bulbs awaiting spring.

  Earlier in the day, Chambers had walked the entirety of the churchyard in search of any disturbed soil or fresh lawn, there being no better place to conceal a body ahead of its grand unveiling, his hour in the company of the dead still playing on his mind:

  ‘I found her grave,’ he mumbled, uncharacteristically sparking conversation. ‘… Coates’s mother’s,’ he clarified.

  ‘Wonder if we’d still be sitting here if she hadn’t been such a train wreck.’

  ‘I was wondering the same thing,’ said Chambers, leaning forward as if he’d spotted something, but then relaxing as a jogger passed the gates. ‘Know what the inscription said?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Elizabeth Marie Hallows. Nineteen forty-nine to nineteen seventy-seven.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. Nothing about being a degenerate junkie … even throughout her pregnancy, about almost killing her own baby by passing on her tainted blood along with her addictions, that because of her weaknesses nine innocent people are now dead.’

  ‘Yeah, they tend to leave those sorts of things off,’ said Winter.

  ‘Maybe they shouldn’t,’ mused Chambers. ‘Maybe if they started etching a list of each and every one of a person’s sins into the stone they were going to spend eternity under, people would stop and think twice before committing them in the first place, take some fucking responsibility for the horrible shit they do to each other.’

  Winter looked over at his morose colleague: ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Just tired, I guess.’

  ‘On a cheerier note, at least one positive has come out of this whole thing.’

  Chambers groaned, in no mood to have a discussion about Winter’s flourishing love life.

  ‘… I’ve been feeling for a while now like something’s been missing,’ he continued all the same.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘… Unsatisfied.’

  Chambers pulled a face.

  ‘Think that should go in the letter?’

  ‘Letter? Be a man. They like that,’ Chambers told him wisely, unsure himself why he was getting involved. ‘You should do it in person.’

  Winter picked at his fingernails nervously:

  ‘I’m just not sure I can handle the rejection face to face … and then, even if it’s a yes, what if I’m not as good as I used to be?’ Chambers looked outright appalled now. ‘… It’s been a while. And it’s not like I was even that good at it to begin with.’

  ‘Jesus!’ complained Chambers, who had shuffled as far away from him as he could in such close quarters.

  ‘… Either way. I think I’m ready,’ Winter nodded confidently. ‘And I’m not dreaming about your leg as much as I used to either.’

  ‘… What?!’ Chambers asked him, feeling partly confused, partly violated. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Transferring to Homicide,’ answered Winter.

  ‘Oh … Oh!’

  ‘Why? What were you talking about?’

  ‘Yeah, that. The job thing.’

  An awkward silence followed, in which both men replayed the previous couple of minutes’ conversation over in their heads.

  ‘You know,’ blurted Winter, swiftly moving on as a bank of mist rolled across the grass like the tide coming back in. ‘I still think about that time when we found Alphonse Cotillard and his mother, which was horrible, obviously, but that’s not what I remember about it. I remember you. You were so ridiculously good. You’d seen things in seconds that we hadn’t noticed in ten minutes. I think that’s why when what happened … happened, it affected me so badly. Not just because of your leg, which was gross by the way …’

  ‘Good to know.’

  ‘… but because if that could happen to you, when you were that good, what chance did I have?’

  Chambers didn’t acknowledge the compliment, keeping his eyes on the clichéd scene beyond the windshield:

  ‘You’re a good officer, Winter. I mean that. And you give me too much credit. I was reckless, and I was stupid. And that’s what put me in that state, lying in the middle of the road. You can notice all the little details you want all day long, but none of it means anything if you can’t take a step back and see the bigger picture.’

  ‘And are we?’ Winter asked him. ‘Here? Now? With Coates?’

  This time, Chambers glanced over at him, sad eyes now filled with worry.

  He hesitated: ‘No. I don’t think we are. But let’s just hope we’re seeing enough.’

  Monday

  CHAPTER 31

  ‘Chambers? … Chambers?’

  He awoke with a start, aching all over, unsure where he was as the dirty light of an overcast sky stung his eyes.

  ‘Day shift will be here in ten minutes.’

  He gazed vacantly at Winter and then rubbed his face: ‘Shit. Sorry.’

  ‘Not to worry,’ he smiled back, which only emphasised the dark circles under his eyes. ‘Looks like you needed it.’

  Sitting up, Chambers looked out over the churchyard, the building wind causing the carpet of amber leaves to undulate like water around stone buoys.

  ‘No news?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Heard from the others?’

  ‘They would’ve radioed it in if there was anything to tell.’

  Still half-asleep, Chambers nodded while trying not to inhale too deeply, the smell of Winter’s fast-food packaging turning his stomach:

  ‘Is it just me or does it feel like he’s playing with us?’

  Winter shrugged: ‘It always did.’

  Stepping into her boots on her way out the door, Marshall jumped:

  ‘Christ!’ she gasped, holding a hand over her heart. ‘I forgot you were out here,’ she told the baby-faced officer.

  ‘Glad to hear I made such an impression,’ he joked.

  With the exception of a glass of water and two toilet breaks, she hadn’t heard a peep from the young man who had dutifully, and no doubt on pain of death from Chambers, remained outside her front door all night.

  ‘Are we off somewhere?’

  ‘I’m going to work.’

  He looked at
her patiently.

  ‘… We’re going to work,’ she sighed.

  Nodding, as if to say ‘that’s better’, he asked: ‘You’re not wearing that, are you?’

  Marshall peered down at her ensemble self-consciously: one of her more colourful numbers – the dark brown jeans really ‘popping’ against the black everything else:

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘You need a coat,’ he told her, sounding like a fussing grandparent. ‘It looks like the end of the world out there.’

  As soon as he said it, Marshall noticed the low drone of the wind rushing through the ventilation system. With a huff, she stomped back inside, pulling on her woolliest winter jacket before picking up the sketchbook she’d left out on the table.

  ‘Happy now?’ she asked him, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Outfit approved,’ he smiled. ‘Seriously, you haven’t caught a weather forecast this week?’

  ‘Been a bit busy,’ she replied snippily as they walked along the corridor.

  ‘Severe storms tonight,’ he recited, morphing from eighty-year-old to weatherman before her eyes. ‘Gusts of up to a hundred miles an hour.’ He appeared frustrated by her blatant disinterest. ‘They said by this evening there will be a significant risk of damage to property and danger to life.’

  Marshall pulled her hood up over her head:

  ‘Sounds like any other night in London then.’

  ‘That’s weird,’ said the officer drafted in to collate information on the long-expired victim from the allotments.

  ‘What?’ her overly preened colleague asked, jumping at any excuse to scoot his chair over to her desk. A cloud of aftershave accompanied him as he shuffled uncomfortably close to look at her screen.

  ‘He’s still got regular payments coming in and out,’ she explained.

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s been dead seven years.’

  ‘Oh. Then it’s one of two things: either the family never got round to cancelling his bank accounts … It happens.’

  ‘… Or?’

  ‘Or it’s identity fraud. Happens a lot with inactive accounts when people snuff it. Flag it up,’ he told her commandingly, despite them being the exact same rank.