‘I can give you details of the robbery I was involved in, if you like.’
He reeled off times and places, including details of the robbery, and the exact spot where he had been sitting in a parked car, waiting for his accomplices.
‘We need to know who you were with, or this won’t stand up as an alibi.’
After a momentary hesitation, Eddy shook his head. ‘I can’t say any more. If I tell you his name, he’ll kill me.’
‘Who’s going to kill you, Eddy? Tell me his name. You’re going to have to, sooner or later. Unless you want to be sent down for a long time.’
‘At least I’ll be safe in prison.’
54
She lay perfectly still, listening. A car revved outside, and far away a siren wailed. Rigid with fear, she tried to block out all the noise from the street below so she could hear if there was any sound in the house. Apart from occasional creaking and groaning in the pipes, all seemed to be silent. She wished she had thought to check the cellar door was closed before he’d gone out, but she was too scared to go into the living room now, knowing there was no one else in the house – no other humans, at least. This was getting too much for her to cope with. If she had anywhere else to go, she’d be out of there in a flash.
Telling herself that the animal wasn’t loose in the house, and couldn’t get through the door to the bedroom if it was, she sat up and reached for her cigarette papers. Her fingers trembled as she rolled a clumsy spliff. It didn’t matter that shreds of weed were spilling out of one end, or that the papers hadn’t stuck together evenly. Her mother used to say life was a competition so she should always try to do things well, but that was bullshit, just like everything else her mother had said. Maybe winning was important to some, but for people like her it was just a question of survival. It didn’t matter if the spliff was a mess. Once she’d smoked it, the untidy reefer would no longer exist. He would slap her face if he found out she was smoking in bed, but he wasn’t there. She scraped her tangled hair off her face and took a long drag.
By the time she finished her smoke, her brain had woken from its icy fear and she had worked out that her best course of action was to drag the chest of drawers along the wall until it blocked the door from opening. That way, even if the dog somehow managed to get loose, it wouldn’t be able to force its way into the room. After pinching the end of the roach to make sure it was extinguished, she clambered off the bed and crouched down beside the chest. It was surprisingly heavy. Only after she had removed all the drawers was she able to propel it along the floor. The carpet puckered as she pushed the chest along, making it even more difficult to budge, but at last she had it in place across the door. When her boyfriend returned, she would have to push it back across the room, so she wasn’t sure what to do about the drawers in the meantime, but she decided to replace them. The dog was a powerful beast. The heavier the chest was, the safer she would feel.
It was exhausting work, and when she had finished she fell on to the bed, ready to fall asleep. Then she realised she needed the toilet. She glared miserably at the chest of drawers that she had laboured so hard to move, but there was nothing for it. Removing the drawers, she pulled the chest aside far enough to allow the door to open sufficiently for her to slip out, and raced to the bathroom, almost tripping over in her haste. By the time she returned to bed, with the chest of drawers securely in position again, her back was aching. She rolled another joint to calm herself down and relax her muscles, and dropped a moggie to help her sleep through the pain.
She was woken by a loud banging. In her confusion, she thought the dog must have escaped from the cellar. It was a few seconds before she registered a voice was yelling her name. The curtain was open, and it was still dark outside. Glancing at her phone she saw that it was five in the morning. He had been out for most of the night, leaving her alone in the house with the animal. She could have been torn to shreds if she hadn’t taken steps to keep herself safe.
‘What the fuck are you doing? Open this door before I kick it in!’
She couldn’t help sniggering. He’d have a tough job forcing that door open. The chest jolted and shifted. There was another loud thud and it jerked forward another inch. Eventually he would push it far enough to get in. Alarm galvanised her.
‘Hang on!’ she shrieked, leaping from the bed. ‘I’m coming!’
‘What the fuck are you doing? Open this door!’
In a panic, she tugged all the drawers out, spilling underwear and stained T-shirts on the floor. Kicking the clothes out of the way, she crouched down and heaved the chest away from the door. It burst open and he came in, his face red with exertion, or rage. Probably both. She retreated to the other side of the chest and they faced one another across it.
‘What are you playing at, shutting me out like that?’ he fumed.
He wasn’t sober, but there was no way she could dart past him while he was standing in the doorway.
‘I wasn’t shutting you out. I was protecting myself from that bloody monster you’re keeping in the cellar.’
‘You know perfectly well the dog’s chained up and the cellar door’s shut. How do you think it’s going to get out? Huh?’
He glared at her, his face still red with fury, and shoved the chest, forcing her to take a step backwards.
‘But what if it got out? I’m scared, I’m really scared. You go out all the time, leaving me alone here in the house with a beast that could tear my throat out with one snap of its jaws –’
‘You stupid cow.’ He pushed the chest another inch towards her. ‘I’ll teach you not to shut me out.’
‘No, no! I wasn’t shutting you out.’
He lowered his head and pushed the chest until she was trapped, pinned against the wall.
‘Stop it! You’re hurting me!’
With a loud burst of laughter he leapt on to the bed and bounded towards her. For a moment everything seemed to happen in slow motion. A bead of sweat crawled down his forehead towards eyes blazing with fury, as his fist came crashing down.
55
‘She may drift off to sleep at any time,’ the nurse warned her. ‘She’s on a high dose of pain relief, and talking tires her out. We don’t know her name yet, so let us know if you manage to find out anything at all. You can have a few minutes with her. She looks worse than she is.’
If her condition had been worse than it looked, she would probably be dead, PC Jane Matthews thought, as she approached the patient. She leaned over the hospital bed and listened attentively, but it wasn’t easy to understand what the injured woman was trying to say. Her breath came in whistling gasps through broken teeth, and her jaw was strapped so tightly she could barely move her chin to talk. One of her eyes was concealed by a pad while the other one was so swollen it hardly opened as Jane addressed her.
‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m a police officer. We want to find out who did this to you. What’s your name?’
The woman’s eyelid flickered but she made no attempt to answer.
‘Do you know who did this to you?’
The woman shook her head and winced, mumbling incomprehensibly.
‘Can you describe your assailant?’
The woman muttered too softly for Jane to hear what she was saying.
‘Can you repeat that?’
As the nurse came over and tried to usher Jane away, all she could make out from the patient’s garbled message was something about a dangerous dog.
Jane nodded to the nurse. ‘One moment, please.’ She turned back to the injured woman. ‘Did you say your attacker had a dog? We need to be very clear about this. Is there a dog involved?’
‘Yes,’ the woman hissed, her lips hardly moving. ‘Savage dog. Could’ve killed me. That’s why I was scared. That’s why…’ her voice petered out and her swollen eye closed.
Jane turned back to the nurse. ‘Was she attacked by a dog?’
The nurse spoke quietly. ‘No. She’s co
nfused. Her injuries were inflicted by a person. She was punched repeatedly in the head and kicked in the abdomen, causing her spleen to rupture. From the bruising on her abdomen it looks as though someone may have stamped on her.’ She lowered her voice still further, until she was almost whispering. ‘She also has multiple cigarette burns, only some of which are recent, and her X-rays show several past fractures. She refuses to answer any questions about what happened.’
There was no need for the nurse to add that for some time the patient had been living with a violently abusive partner.
‘Piecing it together, we think on this occasion she suffered severe injuries in the course of an attack at home. This took place during the night and she was then carried out on to the street where a passerby found her, unconscious, the following morning. That was yesterday morning. If she’d been left there for a few more hours, she might not have survived her injuries.’
Jane nodded. ‘I’ll make a full report.’
She turned back to the patient to reassure her that her situation would be investigated by the police, but the woman was asleep. Thoughtfully, Jane returned to the police station. As soon as she had written up her report, she went to find the detective chief inspector, but she was in a meeting. Jane’s next thought was to speak to an inspector involved in the murder enquiry. She found Ian in his office, talking to the new sergeant.
‘Come in,’ he said, looking up with an encouraging smile. ‘What’s up?’
Jane smiled back. She liked the inspector, who was always ready to listen to her suggestions. She wasn’t so comfortable talking to the new sergeant from London. Geraldine struck her as very cool and distant, and Jane hesitated to share her discovery in front of her, not wanting to be dismissed as a fussing time waster.
‘I wasn’t sure if this could be significant,’ she concluded. ‘I know you’ve been looking for a dog that might have been cross-bred illegally, so I just thought maybe I ought to tell someone what the victim said. It’s all in my report so you’d have seen it anyway, but –’
‘You did the right thing bringing your concerns to our attention straight away,’ Geraldine interrupted her. ‘Are you sure she mentioned a dog?’
‘Yes. It was difficult to make out what she was saying, but she definitely mentioned a savage dog. She said it could’ve killed her, and she was scared of it.’
‘Where does the injured woman live?’ Geraldine went on urgently. ‘We need to go round there right away and see what’s what.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Ian said. ‘There’s no need to go rushing in blindly. Let’s speak to the victim first and see what she has to tell us.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Ian, that’s the last thing we want to do.’
Geraldine spoke so disrespectfully to the inspector that Jane was startled. They glared at one another, and seemed to have forgotten she was there.
‘This woman has a history of violent abuse,’ Geraldine went on. ‘If she hasn’t reported her assailant before, there’s no reason to assume she’ll do so now. Think about it, Ian. If we risk alerting her to our suspicions, we’ll give her a chance to warn her abuser. There could be an illegal dog on the premises, which could potentially be the one we’re looking for. We should go there first, before he learns we even know about it. And we don’t want to give him time to move it elsewhere.’
Ian frowned. ‘I think you’re jumping a few steps ahead,’ he said slowly. ‘Let’s speak to Eileen.’
Geraldine shook her head. ‘If the dog’s there now, and if it is the one we’re looking for, we should go round there right away before he discovers we’ve been told about it. You know I’m talking sense, Ian.’
Jane had the impression Geraldine was frustrated by Ian’s refusal to comply with her suggestion immediately. But she was only a sergeant, and he was an inspector. She shouldn’t be questioning his decisions so openly, or addressing him so rudely.
‘Come on, let’s find Eileen straight away and see what she has to say about it,’ was all he said.
Jane wondered how he might react if she spoke to him in the tone Geraldine had adopted. There was something slightly off-key about the conversation. She mentioned her impression to another constable later that day.
‘Oh, you’re talking about Sergeant Steel?’ her colleague replied. ‘Geraldine Steel?’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s the one who came to us from London where she was a DI. You do know she was demoted, don’t you?’ she added, lowering her voice.
‘Oh yes, that’s right, I remember now. I hadn’t realised it was her. I was just taken aback by the way she spoke to him. What was she demoted for?’
Her colleague shrugged. ‘Search me, but it must have been something bad. Insubordination perhaps?’ he added, with a sly smile.
56
Eileen listened carefully to what Ian was saying.
‘So we need to go round there and check whether the dog she was talking about is the same dog that attacked Charlotte,’ Geraldine added. ‘And we need to do it before the owner gets wind of our suspicions.’
Eileen nodded. ‘I see where you’re coming from, but what’s important now is that we’re not distracted from searching for evidence that Eddy could have been present when these murders were committed. We know he lied about being with his wife at the time of his stepmother’s murder. We can’t be sure he isn’t giving us another trumped-up alibi.’
Geraldine could hardly insist they forget about Eddy and focus on searching for the dog. Seemingly convinced Eddy was guilty, the detective chief inspector had been sceptical of the alibi he had given Geraldine.
‘Granted there was a robbery in town that evening, that’s still hardly conclusive. He could have seen it on the local news, or read about it in the paper. While his wife was out, he could have gone to visit his stepmother without anyone knowing. His aunt’s unlikely to have left her house with a stranger, in her slippers, so she was presumably killed by someone she knew. And the most compelling thing pointing to him having killed both his parents is that we know he’s in serious financial difficulty, and with them out of the way he stands to inherit a sizeable estate. Whichever way you look at it, everything points to Eddy.’
Even so, Eileen had agreed it was also important to pursue the new line of enquiry. Given that Charlotte had been killed by a dog, and that traces of faeces from the same animal had been discovered near Amanda’s corpse, it was clear that the killer either owned a dog, or else knew someone who did. After the meeting with Eileen, Geraldine drove straight back to the hospital. When she introduced herself and explained the purpose of her visit, the nurse she was speaking to shook her head.
‘I’m afraid she’s not regained consciousness since this morning,’ the nurse said. ‘We’d like to contact her family, but we don’t know who she is.’
‘Haven’t we checked her dental records?’
‘It looks as though she hasn’t had her teeth looked at for decades, if ever.’
Geraldine took a DNA sample from the patient so she could check for a match on the police database. ‘We’re also interested in discovering her identity.’
She didn’t add that the reason the police wanted to know the woman’s identity was that they were keen to search her home, hoping to find a dangerous dog and, hopefully, a killer. At last she was on her way back to the police station with the victim’s DNA sample. There was no match for it on the database, so that was no help. It was time to question Eddy again. He was adamant that when his stepmother had been killed he had been driving the getaway car after a theft. All the details he had given them tied in with an actual robbery but they needed something more conclusive than that if his alibi was to be believed.
Geraldine glanced at Ian who was sitting silently staring straight ahead. She was concerned about him. For a few days he hadn’t been looking like his usual cheerful self. He put on a jaunty show when other people were around, but Geraldine had known him for a long time, since he was a young sergeant, and she could tell he
was troubled. She wondered if he was ill. With a sideways glance at him, she stepped in and took control of the questioning.
She leaned forward and spoke firmly. ‘Eddy, you do understand that without any names your alibi’s useless?’
‘I told you his name. It’s Abe. That’s all I know.’ His voice rose in a whine. ‘I’m telling you the truth. I wasn’t on my own, so you can’t say I haven’t got an alibi because I have.’
It took her a while to worm out of him that Eddy had first met the man he called Abe in a betting shop, after which they had gone to a pub and then met on the street. A team was immediately set to work, checking CCTV, to try and piece together Eddy’s movements on the evening of his stepmother’s death, and to establish who he was with. They began by viewing the film from the evening when Eddy claimed he had first met the man he called Abe. No one by that name was known to the police. Vice, drugs squad, and borough intelligence had all checked their records and drawn a blank. No one by that name had even been given a parking ticket or speeding fine. By the following morning the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections team had scrutinised hours and hours of film footage. Eddy was recorded entering a betting shop, just as he had described. He left there just over two hours later in the company of a tall man. Even with image enhancement it proved impossible to make out any of his features hidden in shadow inside his black hood.
‘He’s keeping his back to the camera,’ one of the VIIDO officers told Geraldine, who was leaning forward looking at the screen. ‘We’ve been through this section of film again and again but there’s no sight of his face, and no other clue to his identity.’
The same thing happened when Eddy and his companion were picked up again about ten minutes later, entering a local pub. Eddy’s face was clear enough to recognise but the other man must either have been very lucky or else he knew the position of the security cameras, because he had his back to them the whole time. There was no other sighting of the two men on camera that they had been able to find yet.
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