Twelve Deaths of Christmas

by Jackson Sharp

  She didn’t rush her glass of vanilla-heavy pub red. A lot to think about. She wasn’t worried about DiMacedo – he’d come up with the goods, one way or another, and she was damn sure he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. Everyone else, though …

  She’d had an email from Media Liaison, briefing her on the Radley press coverage so far. It hadn’t made much of a splash in the mainstream press, thank Christ; the papers that had bothered covering the story had all run with the official line – tragic suicide of ex-Met chief – and none had given it more than a column or two. So Harrington had been good for something, after all.

  Even better, he’d succeeded in keeping her name out of it – no mention of DI Cox, even in Greg Wilson’s piece for one of the right-wing tabloids. That must have taken some doing, she thought. Again she felt a shiver of unease as she wondered exactly how ‘persuasive’ this Mr Harrington had been.

  The embarrassing little scene with Baroness Kent hadn’t helped her stress levels. She’d been doing her best not to think about the inquiry; told herself to focus, to do her damn job. But she was aware that, back at her flat, there was a fat briefing file that she hadn’t even got round to looking at yet. Partly that was bloody-mindedness: what could a bundle of paperwork tell her that she didn’t already know? Did they think she’d forgotten?

  But mainly it was fear. Of going over it all again, facing down things she just wanted to put behind her; and of what might lie ahead. An inquiry like this, press all over it, the public demanding someone’s head on a plate – it was every copper’s nightmare.

  You’ve been through worse, Cox reminded herself.

  She was finishing off the last of her wine when her phone buzzed again. DiMacedo.

  ‘Give me some good news, Don.’

  ‘Define “good”.’ DiMacedo chuckled down the line. ‘Death-threats in his email inbox? Suicide note in his drafts folder? No can do, Spook. Sorry.’

  ‘Anything at all I can use?’

  ‘Listen, this guy was almost offensively boring. I read through his emails and I can feel the life-force being drained out of me. He got newsletters from a hill-walking club. His search history is all art galleries and classical concerts. He recently ordered a guide-book for the Coast-to-Coast footpath.’

  Cox sighed. She had a feeling she knew well, and hated: the helpless feeling of a big case dying on her. Sources drying up, leads petering away to nothing. But at least it confirmed her previous suspicion. Radley wasn’t suicidal. He didn’t seem depressed. His life had been cut short.

  ‘Anything financial?’

  ‘Spook, I had, like, twenty minutes for this. You want me to hack his bank account, I’ll need at least another five.’ He laughed; Cox heard him take a slurp from a can. ‘But listen, there was one thing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The day before he jumped –’

  ‘Christmas Day.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Well, that day, he ordered some flowers, really pricey ones.’

  ‘Christmas present?’

  ‘Bit late for that. They were to be delivered to a funeral director’s. A place up in Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast.’

  ‘Can you send me the details?’

  ‘Already did.’

  Cox smiled as her phone hummed with a new-mail notification.

  ‘Thanks, Don.’

  ‘A pleasure. You need anything else, just shout. Oh, and hey – good luck at the inquiry, Spook.’

  And he was gone – back to his video games.

  The force had assigned her a six-strong legal team from one of the big London Chambers.

  For a fortnight they’d been bombarding her with emails, calls, voicemails, asking her – no, ordering her – to fill out their forms, make time for meetings, re-examine statements, compile reams of personal information …

  They didn’t seem to like her much, but then they didn’t seem to like anyone much. Anyway, the feeling was mutual.

  ‘Inspector. Do you need me to call the IT team for you?’

  Serena McAvoy QC was heading up the team. She had a manufactured RP accent and a glossy brunette up-do, a Cambridge Double First and a knack for pushing Cox’s buttons.

  Cox looked up from her computer. McAvoy was standing beside her desk, drumming her fingernails on the top of a box-file.

  ‘Sorry? An IT team?’

  ‘I just assumed that you must have a load of problems with your comms, as you don’t seem to be getting the emails we’ve been sending. Or the voicemails we’ve been leaving you.’ She smiled humourlessly.

  ‘Oh. Right. Yes. Sorry.’ Cox leaned back in her creaky office chair. ‘I’ve been meaning to get back to you, I’ve just been, you know … busy.’

  ‘We’re all busy, inspector. In our case, we’re busy working on your case. I know these requests can be tiresome, but this is for your own good.’

  And you’re doing it out of the goodness of your heart, right? Cox thought. She’d seen how much the force was paying for the legal team’s services. Eye-watering. Money like that, she’d thought guiltily, could’ve kept a patrol of coppers on the beat for a decade.

  Once this inquiry had buried her, they’d have to have another one into the wastage of tax-payers’ funds on police advocacy, she thought wryly.

  ‘I know,’ she muttered. ‘I’ll try and –’

  ‘Shall we say tomorrow?’ McAvoy was already tapping an appointment into her tablet. ‘Three o’clock. Unless you’re – busy?’

  ‘I – I don’t think so. I’m not sure. Let’s pencil it in and –’

  ‘Three o’clock it is. If you could find time to look over the briefing file we compiled for you before then, we’d be ever so grateful.’ She flashed her teeth again. ‘See you tomorrow, inspector.’

  Cox watched her walk away, the noise of her heels brisk on the carpet tiles.

  Thirty seconds later, an appointment popped up on Cox’s PC desktop. The woman was lethally efficient, she had to give her that.

  She ignored it for the moment, went back to the file DiMacedo had sent over. It was an order confirmation from a high-end florist in the West End for a lavish bouquet of lilies to be sent to the Whitby address. Radley had specified that it should arrive on the twenty-eighth – the next day. That could be helpful, Cox thought.

  Even better, he’d asked for a card to be delivered with the flowers – and he’d written the message himself.

  Farewell, Verity, she read. From your dear friend Bill x.

  Old flame, maybe? Or a friend from the hill-walking club, or an old colleague? Who knew? Whatever – it was a lead. She hadn’t told Naysmith yet, for the simple reason that, on the face of it, the flowers weakened the likelihood of Radley’s death being suspicious. No doubt Harrington would say Radley, grieving some former acquaintance, had topped himself.

  She ran a quick search for the name of the Whitby funeral director, came up with a number. Dialled from her mobile.

  ‘Cartwright & Sons Funeral Parlour,’ a soft Yorkshire voice answered. Male.

  ‘Ah – hello. I was wondering if you could tell me what time Verity’s funeral is tomorrow? I had a card, but I seem to have mislaid it –’

  ‘Of course, madam.’ She heard a faint rustling of papers. ‘Are you a relative of Miss Halcombe’s?’

  ‘No, just – a friend.’

  ‘Well, the funeral is at ten. It’s at St Andrew’s, here in town – do you know it?’

  She said she didn’t, and took down the directions the man gave her.

  ‘There’ll be a big turn-out, I expect,’ she hazarded. Worth a shot.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure,’ the man said. ‘A lovely lady.’

  Well, what else was he going to say? ‘She was a right old bag, and to be honest I can’t see anyone being bothered with it’? Cox thanked him and hung up.

  It didn’t feel great, taking advantage of a death like that, but in a case like this she knew she was going to get nothing for free; she had to squeeze every lead for all it was worth.

&n
bsp; She closed her browser and opened the appointment notification from Serena McAvoy, QC. She ignored it, with an enjoyable thrill of guilt. She already knew she wasn’t going to be at the meeting; she wasn’t even going to be in London. She was going to be in Whitby, North Yorkshire, paying her respects to Verity Halcombe.

  The Third Day of Christmas, 1986

  Stan’s pissed the bed.

  ‘Those were clean on,’ Miss Halcombe moans as she bundles up the damp sheets. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered, should I?’

  He didn’t do it on purpose, I want to say. But I don’t want to get in trouble, not after yesterday. At least she’s putting new sheets on. In that last place where we was, a lad wet the bed, and they made him sleep in it till the end of the week. Teach him a lesson, they said.

  Some lesson.

  Why did Stan do it? I dunno. He’s not done it before, not since he was properly little.

  He’s not crying, at least. Just standing here, next to the bed. Face is pale, and there’s blue shadows under his eyes. Nightmares, I s’pose. Hardly bloody surprising.

  Halcombe’s in a strop because she’s already busy getting Hackett ready for his move. Gordon Hackett’s off to Wolvesley. Some of the other lads know about Wolvesley, but we’ve not been there, me and Stan, we only know here and that other place. The other lads reckon Gordo’s struck it proper lucky.

  ‘It’s first division, Wolvesley,’ said Judd, one of the oldest kids, when they was talking about it. Judd’s been around more’n most. ‘Proper top class. You get puddings, every meal. And electric blankets.’

  ‘If that’s first division, what’s this place?’ Duffy, smirking, cracking his knuckles. ‘Third division?’

  ‘Vauxhall bloody Conference, you mean.’

  Everyone laughed.

  Then Judd said: ‘Tell you what. There’s girls at Wolvesley, too.’

  That was something to think about. Girls. Bloody hell.

  I asked them where it was, this Wolvesley place. Over in Shirley, they said. That’s the other side of Birmingham – miles away.

  Don’t suppose we’ll be seeing Gordo again. We all crowd around the dorm windows to see him off. He gives us a wave as he gets into the back of Dr Merton’s car.

  ‘He must’ve done something pretty bloody special to get moved to Wolvesley,’ says Stevie.

  6

  Cox stirred a third spoonful of sugar into her tea and rubbed a hand across her eyes. It’d been a hell of a drive up to this fishing town on the Yorkshire coast; a six-hour slog of London traffic, light-smeared motorways, winding A-roads and sleet-swept moorland. She’d dropped into her B&B bed just before eleven; been woken at 4.30 by seagulls on the roof and fishermen passing under her window. She’d got up at six, brewed a cup of tea in the pitch dark to the sound of wind-stirred masts chiming in the harbour. Dressed herself in respectable funeral black.

  Now, at nearly 9.30, she sat drinking yet another cuppa – this one so strong it made her shudder – in a greasy spoon on the north edge of town. She’d spent an hour – and chilled herself to the bone – checking out the layout of the district; St Andrew’s, a squat late-Norman church, stood facing the sea on the hillside a half-mile away.

  At about 9.45 she left her table and, parking her car at the café (she’d be less conspicuous, she figured, if she arrived on foot), headed up the sloping road towards the church.

  There was a rust-pitted railing enclosing the churchyard. Stone gateposts, yellow with lichen, stood either side of a grit path to the church door. Cox hovered by the railing, the collar of her coat turned up and her dark wool beret pulled low over her brow. She pretended to be doing something with her phone as the mourners began to arrive; the main thing she noticed was that there weren’t many of them. They were mainly pensioners, arriving by car in ones and twos. By 9.55, when the hearse pulled up with a low growl outside the gate, there were barely more than half a dozen cars parked up along the roadside.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected to find, but something about the whole scene struck her as odd. She knew people moved about, but this windswept corner seemed a million miles from Radley’s urbane London life. It just didn’t fit.

  As the undertaker lifted the tailgate of the hearse and his staff bent awkwardly to manhandle the pale-pine coffin on to their shoulders, Cox made her way down the path and into the church. It was smaller, she found, than it had looked from the outside; the air was clammy, and there was a smell of damp and floor-wax. She slipped into a pew near the back. Pulled off her beret as, step by solemn step, the coffin was carried in.

  No one, she noted, seemed especially upset. No stifled sobs, no tears; no one moved to put a comforting arm around a grieving widower, sister, daughter, son. The faces she could see were grim but composed. An old policing cliché rose up in Cox’s mind: follow the money. Who, she wondered, had paid for this funeral?

  The vicar, a blotchy middle-aged man with a wheeze in his voice, worked steadily through the usual platitudes; there was no mention of the dead woman’s personality, family, values, how she’d lived, how she’d died – no sense that he’d even known Verity Halcombe. No one else spoke. A prayer was said, and then it was done. A popular classical piece played tinnily from a portable CD player as the mourners filed silently from their pews, out into the blustery churchyard.

  Seagulls mewled overhead, bobbing on the updrafts. Tall stinging nettles nodded by the railing. The mourners, picking their way across the unkempt grass, gathered around the grave that was to be Verity’s last resting place. There was no gravestone in place yet, of course; just a hole, and a heap of earth.

  Cox was taking up a position towards the back of the meagre crowd when she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. Glanced at the screen: Naysmith. Christ. She thought about leaving it, but she knew there were some things he would never forgive.

  The seaward gatepost gave her a bit of shelter from the bitter wind.

  ‘Yes, guv?’

  The DCI’s mood hadn’t improved.

  ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’

  ‘I’m –’ Well, what was the point in lying? ‘I’m in Whitby, guv.’

  ‘What? What are you doing in fucking Whitby?’

  ‘I’m following up a lead. Could be important.’

  Naysmith sighed.

  ‘I don’t want to hear about this, do I?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘And what the hell am I supposed to tell this McAvoy harpy? She’s been chewing my ear off about your meeting this afternoon. She’s expecting you to be there, with your homework all done and your hair in a braid.’

  ‘She’s going to be disappointed, guv. I’m sorry – but this is something that couldn’t wait.’

  There was a pause, and then another sigh, pissed-off and bone-deep weary.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Do what you have to. But be back here as soon as you can, Cox, you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, guv.’

  ‘Bring me back a stick of fucking rock.’

  Cox grinned as she rang off. Was Naysmith the most supportive boss in the world? Christ, no. But he backed her when it mattered. She appreciated that; sometimes, she thought it was more than she deserved.

  She turned back to the grave, and the knot of black-clad mourners. The coffin had been carried from the church and was being lowered into the hole. Cox rejoined the group, standing a little way off to one side, beside an elderly couple. It didn’t take long: the vicar again droned his way through the formalities, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and with a murmured ‘amen’ the ceremony was concluded. Kerry remembered her dad’s funeral – the pack of grizzled old coppers – a couple of ex-cons too – all offering their heartfelts to her mum, just waiting for the drinking to get started.

  The crowd began to break up. Two burly lads who’d been sitting a discreet distance away, smoking fags in the lee of a stone angel, stood and took up their shovels.

  Cox fell in with the old couple she’d been standing beside during the burial. The woman, her
steel-grey hair cut in a neat bob, walked slowly, with a stick, holding on to her husband’s arm with her free hand. She introduced herself as Barbara Hopson; her husband, a portly man in a black blazer and high-waisted charcoal slacks, was Eric.

  ‘I’m Kerry,’ said Cox. Tell as few lies as you can get away with – she’d learned that a long time ago.

  It turned out that Barbara and Eric had been Verity’s neighbours.

  ‘She was there when we moved in, ooh, ten, eleven years ago,’ Barbara remembered, stepping unsteadily around a neglected grave. ‘Hers was the bungalow just across the road.’ She pursed her lips and shook her head. ‘It’s terrible, what happened.’

  ‘Awful,’ Cox agreed.

  ‘I mean, it could happen to any one of us, couldn’t it? It could have been me or Eric, just as easily. And it could still. That’s the frightening thing, isn’t it?’ She patted her husband’s arm. ‘At least we’ve got each other though.’

  Cox said nothing, just nodded vaguely – waited for the silence to do its work.

  Eventually Eric began: ‘The funny thing was –’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it funny,’ Barbara snapped.

  ‘Well, no – peculiar, I suppose I mean. The peculiar thing was, Verity, towards the end, had the idea that someone was after her – following her, she reckoned. Poor thing.’

  ‘It got to so she wouldn’t go out, wouldn’t even open her curtains,’ put in Barbara. ‘When she didn’t put her Christmas lights up this year – and she usually put up such a lovely display, didn’t she, Eric? – we thought that was why. Too scared.’

  ‘But then –’

  ‘Yes, then we found out the real reason why. She’d – she’d passed on.’ Barbara sighed. ‘Poor Verity.’

  Cox probed gently: ‘How do you mean “after her”? Like – a stalker? Someone she knew?’

  ‘She talked about a feller in a donkey jacket,’ Eric shrugged. ‘Always on about him, seeing him here, there and everywhere. Told us to watch out for him, didn’t she, love?’

  ‘She did. A wrong ’un, she said.’ Barbara looked at Cox; her eyes were fearful behind her thick spectacles. ‘And who’s to say she was wrong? That’s the thing, Kerry.’