Twelve Deaths of Christmas

by Jackson Sharp

  Without looking at her, the barrister shrugged, shook her head quickly. It might’ve meant: no problem, don’t worry about it, but Cox guessed otherwise. It meant, she thought: this isn’t our problem any more – it’s yours.

  Baroness Kent’s voice rang out sharply over the hubbub. They were adjourning for the day, she declared; the inquiry would sit again in the morning.

  Cox stood. She was half-aware of her legal team filing out in stony silence behind her, of Baroness Kent watching her carefully, of the back-bencher Ridley rocking back in his chair and chuckling to himself – but her real focus was on Sam Harrington, who had left the press benches and, walking quickly, had slipped out of a fire exit at the back of the chamber.

  Scotland Yard had sent a car; it was waiting, engine running, outside a rear exit of the warren-like Westminster complex. The inquiry stewards had told her that this was the best way to avoid the scrum of photographers and journalists – but still, there were maybe a dozen waiting for her in the London drizzle as she hurried down the steps, jerking up a grey umbrella, keeping her eyes on the ground.

  She’d thought this kind of thing was behind her, that the media had long ago had its fill of DCI Kerry Cox, the copper who let an eight-year-old boy starve to death.

  Well, she’d just piqued their appetite again.

  She pushed her way past the snapping cameras, the shouted, provocative questions (aimed at getting a reaction, not an answer), dived into the welcoming dark of the back of the car, banged the door shut. She knew the driver slightly: Dipesh, his name was. He gave her a sympathetic half-smile over his shoulder and hit the gas. Westminster, a muted grey through the windows’ blackout glass, dissolved away into the rain.

  Cox closed her eyes. Sighed. God, she could use some sleep – but there were things that couldn’t wait. Stevie Butcher, for one thing, was suffering Christ-knew-what in a Pentonville prison cell.

  She took out her phone and called DCI Naysmith.

  ‘Cox. Fucking hell, I’m sorry.’

  He sounded wretched; his voice was weak, ragged. She knew he’d have been giving himself hell ever since he sobered up, sometime in mid-afternoon – it was no more than the stupid bastard deserved, she thought, but she couldn’t see any point in twisting the knife.

  ‘What’s done is done, guv.’

  ‘I know what that means. It means you’ll pretend to forget all about it, until such a time as you need to use it against me in future. Something to look forward to.’ He cleared his throat noisily. ‘I fucked up, Cox. Badly. And I’m sorry. End of. Now – how’d the inquiry go?’

  ‘You’ll be able to read all about it in the papers tomorrow.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘No. No, it wasn’t good. But guv, that’s not what I’m calling about.’

  ‘Oh?’ He sounded wary.

  ‘Yesterday, guv. Steven Butcher, the guy we pulled in for the Allis murder. We struck a deal with him – he gave us some useful info, we promised the Parole Board would overlook the bag of weed we found at his flat. But he just called me – from Pentonville Prison.’

  ‘Tough break.’

  ‘Did you know about this?’

  ‘We didn’t need him any more, did we?’ Naysmith’s tone was querulous, defensive. ‘I thought he’d told us everything he knew.’

  Cox wanted to scream at him. She forced down the lid on her anger.

  ‘Well, maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the point, is it? I made the guy a promise.’

  ‘Then you should consider this a lesson,’ Naysmith said, ‘in not making promises you can’t keep.’

  The line went dead.

  Christ. When Naysmith was drunk, he was an irresponsible mess; when he had a hangover, he could be a nasty piece of work.

  This seemed worse than usual, though. It wasn’t like Naysmith to be heartless – when the subject of Butcher had come up, he sounded downright callous. That, Cox guessed, was a defence mechanism; the DCI’s default response to having his hand forced, to being made to act against his own inclinations.

  Naysmith was backed into a corner. Cox didn’t know how, or who by – but she needed him to come out fighting.

  She leaned forward, tapped the driver on the shoulder.

  ‘Change of plan, Dipesh,’ she said. ‘We’re not going back to the station.’

  ‘No problem, ma’am,’ he said without looking round. ‘Where to, then?’

  ‘Pentonville Prison.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  Spray hissed up around the car as he pulled off the main road, swung deftly through a double-junction, merged into the traffic heading north.

  Stony faces on the black-clad guards at the main gate. A heavy, louring atmosphere in the entrance lobby. Cox showed her ID at the desk, said that she was there to see Steven Butcher; the officer on duty, a heavy-set woman with a West Indian accent, told her to take a seat and wait. Cox sensed a faint hostility in the woman’s tone; thought back, with a quiver of unease, to what Butcher had said on the phone: they think I’m a fucking nonce …

  Screws were no keener on sex offenders than prisoners were.

  She took a seat on a plastic chair marked with a black cigarette burn. There was no one else in the waiting area. Idly, she scanned the notices pinned to the walls: info about drugs, booze, mental health, sexual health, rehab programmes, support groups, back-to-work schemes for ex-cons …

  Life inside was bloody tough, Cox reflected – but once you’d done your time, making things work on the outside was no picnic, either. Stevie Butcher didn’t have a lot to fall back on; sooner or later, she thought, he’d have slipped up again and wound up back here anyway.

  It was no comfort. Fact was, Butcher was in here, right now, because of her; because she hadn’t kept her promise.

  ‘DI Cox?’

  She turned. She was expecting a prison guard – black uniform, bunch of silver keys – to take her to Butcher; standing in front of her, hand extended, was a middle-aged man in a suit, with neatly parted grey hair and silver-framed glasses.

  ‘I’m Richard Dovey,’ he said. His handshake was dry and firm. ‘I’m the governor here. I gather you’re here to see Steven Butcher?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s about the judgement of the Parole Board.’

  ‘I see.’ He folded his hands together. ‘I wondered,’ he said, ‘if I might have a word with you in private.’ Gestured to a side-door. ‘Just through here.’

  Cox, puzzled, stood and followed the urbane governor through to a corridor and to an empty office furnished sparely with a desk and two chairs.

  It was here, speaking slowly and with an expression of profound sadness, that the governor informed her of the unfortunate death of Steven Butcher. He had fashioned a blade from part of an iron bed-frame, the governor said, and opened his wrists in the shower that morning.

  The Eleventh Day of Christmas, 1986

  Used to knock around in Walsall a bit when I was a kid. Had a mate there. That sounds like it was a fucking hundred years ago – feels like it, too. What was I, nine, ten?

  Bus driver let me on for free. I’m piss-wet, covered in grime and blood – said I’d had an accident, had lost my bus-money. Showed him my broken hand – Christ, it’s a right sight.

  ‘I can call your mum and dad if you want, son,’ the bus-driver said.

  I told him no, it’d only worry them.

  Interfering old sod. But it was good of him to let me on his bus.

  Got off in the city somewhere, south-east side. Found a bus-shelter. No one about; must be pretty late.

  Felt mad, falling asleep in a Birmingham bus-shelter. But I huddled up in the corner and tucked my arms inside my T-shirt and in hardly any time I felt my eyes starting to close. Maybe it was the effects of that fucking sedative. Or maybe, once you’ve learned to fall asleep in Hampton Hall, you can fall asleep bloody anywhere.

  Proper crick in my neck now.

  Still drizzling. Still dark, too. God knows what time it is. There’s
a few people around, a few cars. It’s morning, anyway. Time I moved on. No one calls the cops on a teenager sleeping in a bus shelter – and that’s a bit mad, if you think about it – but I don’t want to risk it.

  Shirley’s out west somewhere – but what am I going to do, wander around west Birmingham till I find it by magic?

  A bit down the road there’s a WH Smith’s. It’s open – so it’s not that early, maybe half six, seven o’clock. Go in. There’s an old feller standing there looking at a porno mag, right in the middle of the shop. Dirty bastard.

  I keep behind him, proper shoplifter-shifty. I get to the shelf where they keep the A–Zs without the lad at the till seeing me. What’s he going to do, anyway? Looks about ten.

  Snatch a Birmingham street map and make a run for it, back out into the rain. Keep running; don’t look back. I know it’s only a 50p A–Z, they’re not going to send the Flying Squad after me – but running feels good, anyroad.

  This is Shirley, I reckon. Nice houses. Street after street of nice houses. The rain’s made a bloody mess of my A–Z, can’t make out the street names – but I’m not far off, I know that.

  In one front room I can see a family watching breakfast telly, eating breakfast.

  We were never like that. We weren’t a proper happy family, like off an advert. But we were a family. And any sort of family, I reckon, has to be better than no family.

  I’m hungry. If I keep walking I don’t feel it as bad, but every time I stop my belly thumps, and I think I might puke.

  Doesn’t help that every time I hear a police siren in the distance I nearly shit my pants.

  There’s a feller coming the other way, wheeling a racing bike. Middle-aged bloke in a cap. Nothing else for it.

  ‘ ’Scuse me, mister – I’m a bit lost. Where’s Wolvesley? Y’know, the children’s home?’

  He looks at me, does a stupid grin.

  ‘Runaway, are you?’ he says. Laughs. Yeah, very funny, mate.

  ‘D’you know where it is?’

  ‘I do.’ He points back the way I’ve come. ‘About two mile that way, son. Was a farmhouse when I was a lad.’

  So I turn around and I carry on walking.

  It’s up a lane, an unlit lane, part gravel, mostly mud. It’s just starting to get light; I can see the building from the road, a bloody big place, not a farmhouse any more, new brick extensions every which way.

  There’s a wooden sign: Wolvesley Grange Children’s Home.

  I trudge up the path. Should be trying to sneak up, trying to duck and dive, but I’m too tired. It’s not like they’ll be expecting me – bet those bastards at Hampton haven’t even noticed I’m gone.

  Christ, I’m knackered.

  There are some flash cars out the front, proper nice, a big Rover, a classic Jag – and one I know. A bottle-green Ford. We watched Gordo being driven off in that, never to be seen again. Merton’s car.

  I go round the back. There’s a door, but it’s locked. No glass in it, solid wood, so I can’t bust my way in. A window’ll have to do.

  The far end of the back wall is in the shadow of an overgrown hedge. That’s the best bet. There’s a window there. There are shutters over it, wood shutters like on a house you’d see in a bloody picture-book – been here since it was a farmhouse, I s’pose.

  The staff here are no better at maintenance than those lazy bastards back at Hampton. The screws holding the shutter-hinges in the wall are fucked. I force my good hand into the gap, levering it wider. And from here I can see the glass of the window – and what’s behind the window.

  There’s a light on, a sort of lamp-light. And there’s someone there. A woman in a dressing-gown, I think. No, it’s not a dressing-gown – it’s a robe, and I think it’s a bloke what’s wearing it. A monk or some bloody thing, I don’t know.

  Feel properly sick. And then the bloke turns round and I nearly wet myself.

  This is some fucking place, I think.

  The bloke’s wearing a mask, a mad mask with horns on. And I can only see him from the waist up but I can see he’s got nothing on under his robe.

  I duck, trying not to breathe, trying not to make a sound.

  He can’t have seen me, not with the light on in there and it being so gloomy out here. He can’t have.

  But what if he has?

  There was a phone-box back on the main road, I remember. And you don’t even need 10p to call 999. Even if I have to go back to Hampton, even if they pack me off to juvenile detention or prison or whatever – I can’t leave our Stan in there, can I?

  And the coppers might be bastards but once they know what’s going on in there, what sort of mad stuff I just seen, they’ll have to do something, won’t they? They can’t just ignore me …

  I find the phone-box. It stinks of piss inside, like they all do. Pull the door shut behind me.

  Grab the receiver, hammer the button like mad.

  I hear a voice answer, hello, emergency serv –

  And then I feel a cold gust, right up my back, and I turn round, and the door of the phone-box is open, and there’s a man there –

  He grabs the receiver from me, bangs it back on its hook.

  ‘You’re a long way from home, Robert,’ he says.

  It’s Radley. The copper.

  22

  She stared at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Our on-site medical team did their best,’ Dovey sighed, ‘but I’m afraid it was too late. He had already lost too much blood.’

  Cox wondered if a Met DI outranked a prison governor; if she was allowed to give this guy – yet another grey middle-aged man, pulling strings, arranging the world to suit himself – a real piece of her mind.

  ‘How on earth could this have happened? He’d barely been here a day!’

  The governor pressed his hands together, palm to palm, as if in prayer.

  ‘Prison,’ he said, still talking like a vicar at a funeral, ‘can be a very stressful environment. Certain individuals find it simply impossible to cope – Steven Butcher, it seems, was one such individual.’

  ‘Wasn’t he supervised? How does a man just slit his wrists and bleed to death with no one noticing?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re aware of the staffing pressures we face in the prison service,’ Dovey said. ‘We simply don’t have the resources to watch everybody, all the time – and we had no reason to believe that Butcher was a suicide risk.’

  Cox glowered. That, at least, was a fair point – she hadn’t seen this coming. Butcher just didn’t seem the type.

  Cutting your wrists wasn’t always fatal, Cox knew. It was gruesome, dramatic, but bleeding out that way could take a long time. Only if the incisions were very deep – deep enough to fully sever the blood vessels – was death a guarantee.

  To put it another way, to die like that, you had to really mean it.

  ‘Besides,’ Dovey added, ‘Mr Butcher was only with us temporarily; he was due to be transferred to a Category C institution – much lower security – in a few days.’

  A few days could be a hell of a long time in Pentonville. Especially if you’d made enemies …

  ‘He told me that some people in here had the idea that he was a sex offender,’ Cox said. ‘Do you know anything about that?’

  The governor shook his head.

  ‘No. But you know how these places are. A rumour – even a misplaced one – doesn’t take long to become established fact.’

  Cox felt sick with exasperation. She stood up.

  The governor looked relieved. He rose too, and extended his hand.

  ‘Well, as I say, inspector, we’re all very sorry about this – if I can be of any help in future –’

  ‘I want to see the shower-room,’ Cox said flatly.

  Dovey lowered his hand. Frowned.

  ‘The shower-room?’

  ‘Where Steven Butcher died. I’d like to take a look at the scene.’

  The request seemed to fluster the governor.

  �
�That would be rather irregular,’ he stuttered, fidgeting with a button on his suit-jacket. ‘Besides, there isn’t a lot to see, I don’t know what you –’

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ Cox repeated.

  The governor opened and shut his mouth. She looked at him contemptuously: saw another ‘powerful’ man backed into a corner, another authority figure finding out how little their ‘power’ really meant.

  Two grainy, dark-pink spots at eye-level, missed by the cleaner’s sponge. All that was left of Steven Butcher.

  Dovey – his formal wear incongruous against the white tiles and stark steel showerheads – spread his hands.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘there was very little to see. We cleared the scene hours ago.’

  ‘Did you take pictures?’

  ‘Why would we?’ A small, condescending smile. ‘Suicide is an unfortunate but common part of prison life, inspector. We cannot afford to treat every incidence as a major crime.’

  ‘So you just cart off the carcass, wipe down the tiles, get on with your lives?’

  Dovey winced.

  ‘That’s a rather crude way of putting it,’ he said. ‘But, in effect – yes. What happened here this morning was a tragedy. I acknowledge that. But this is a prison, Inspector Cox. We are well accustomed to tragedy.’

  ‘So no forensics.’ She looked around the bleak shower-room, hands on hips. ‘No blood-spatter analysis, no dusting for prints …’

  ‘There’ll be an autopsy, of course,’ Dovey shrugged, ‘but I can already tell you what it will conclude. Steven Butcher took his own life.’

  His tone suggested that his patience was coming to an end.

  But Cox wasn’t done with him yet.

  ‘I want to speak with witnesses.’

  ‘I told you, there weren’t any.’

  ‘The last people to see him. The people who knew him, shared his cell. The person who found him.’

  ‘Really, inspector, this seems a gross overreaction …’ He caught Cox’s eye, clocked that she was in no mood for debate. He swallowed, straightened the sit of his jacket. ‘It’ll take time to arrange,’ he said. ‘At least a day or two. I can’t disrupt the routines of a high-security prison simply to satisfy your curiosity.’