They didn’t understand what time, and pain, could do to a person. Time and pain.
But why now?
Why thirty years later?
Perhaps the Hampton Hall theory was wrong. Maybe she was in danger of imagining the dots connecting, when really they didn’t at all. If this did go all the way back to Hampton Hall, the killer had waited a hell of a long time. What, nearly thirty years? That made no sense. If he’d wanted to hurt Radley and Allis and all the rest, surely he could have done it decades ago, when the pain was fresh. The people who’d caused all that hurt at HHUC had gone on to live successful, happy lives – and God only knew how many others they’d harmed along the way. Why had he stood by and watched, all this time?
The simple answer was, he hadn’t. Because she was wrong.
She took another drink, feeling lost. The harsh flavour of the vodka didn’t shock her any more. Soon, she knew, she’d barely taste it at all. Not long after that, all being well, she wouldn’t feel anything at all.
I’ll drink to that, she thought. Lifted the glass again, but this time she paused with the glass on her lips; on the edge of the angry fog a thought of clarity.
Unless he hadn’t had a choice.
She took a slow, thoughtful gulp.
She’d been fixating on the idea that the killer had deliberately waited three decades to take his revenge on the people who tormented him. But what if he’d only waited because he had to wait – because there was nothing else he could do.
Cox set down her glass. Her mind was racing. Suffering abuse as a kid could screw you up, she knew, but throw in thirty-plus years in prison, and … Christ. What would the world look like to you, when you came out?
How would you feel, about yourself, about your life?
And how would you feel about the people you held responsible?
She took up her phone; dialled Don DiMacedo. It was late, but she wasn’t going to let go of this. Naysmith and his bosses might think she was off the case. Let them. She knew, deep down, she’d never walk away from this one – not till it was done with.
DiMacedo answered sleepily.
‘Don. It’s Kerry Cox.’
‘Bloody hell. It’s – it’s gone one o’clock, Spook. Are you drunk?’
‘A bit. But that’s beside the point. Don, I need some data.’
‘Data? What sort of data do you need at this time of night?’
‘The law never sleeps, Don, you know that. I need to know who got released from prison in November.’
‘Oh, is that all?’
‘Only long stretches, say twenty years or more. It’s to do with the murder of Euan Merritt – and Christ knows what else.’
There was only dull silence in reply. He wasn’t biting.
‘Don?’
He sighed.
‘This isn’t my business, Cox. I don’t mind helping you out when I can – but this, this is a million miles away from my world now. It’s not what I do.’
In the background she heard a murmur, a man’s voice, not DiMacedo’s. DiMacedo muffled the handset; she heard him say, ‘Nothing – you go back to sleep.’
Came back on the line with a crackle.
‘Sorry, Spook. I’m out.’
‘Don, you don’t understand. You can’t back out now. Everything we worked on, back then – everything we went through –’
‘Don’t get sentimental on me now, Spook.’
‘– it’s all tied in with this. You can’t just forget about it, pretend it didn’t happen.’
There was a pause. Then DiMacedo said quietly: ‘I think you’ll find I can. I think you’ll find I have.’
‘Don, I –’
‘I heard a whisper,’ he interrupted her. ‘I hear a lot of whispers, whispers are my job, but this one had the ring of truth to it. I heard you’d been suspended. Is that right?’
She hesitated. What did it matter, really? All her work with DiMacedo was off the books, anyway.
‘Yep,’ she said.
‘Good. It could be the best thing that’s happened to you in years.’
‘Come on, Don.’
‘I’m serious, Kerry. The shit you do takes a lot out of you – trust me, I know this. When was the last time you had a break, I mean a real break? I bet you can’t even remember.’
Fair point. But the idea of taking a break now …
‘Don,’ she said. ‘It’s the guy in the mask. He’s back.’
A silence. Got him. Don had seen the footage too, during Lerna. He was the one who brought it to her attention. Perhaps ten seconds went past. She heard Don moving about, and when he spoke again his voice had a different quality. Sounded like he was outside.
‘Tell me what you need.’
Swiftly she sketched out the parameters of the search: the man – it had to be a man – would be maybe forty to fifty years of age; he’d have served a long sentence (‘Let’s say anything more than ten, to be sure’), somewhere – anywhere – in the UK; he’d have been released at some point prior to Christmas last year (‘Go back as far as October if you need to’).
‘Can you do it, Don?’
‘It’ll take a while. Is it worth it? Sounds like a long shot to me, Spook.’
‘It is. I’m sure of it.’ She rubbed her eyes. God, it was good to have DiMacedo on board. It wasn’t much – but it was a glimmer of light. ‘I need you with me on this, Don. Naysmith’s bottled it. Dan Chalmers is a decent guy, but he won’t rock the boat. There’s evidence going missing, there’s strings being pulled higher up the chain, who knows how high …’ Paused to let out a breath. ‘Your help means a lot,’ she said. ‘I mean that.’
Another pause. DiMacedo’s voice, when he replied, was studiously stripped of emotion.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
‘G’night, Don.’
‘Nighty-night, Spook. Now go to fucking bed.’
He rang off.
Cox smiled. Sat back. Picked up her drink.
She woke up to a mild, muddy hangover and the noise of someone thumping on the door. Slid blearily from bed, pulling the duvet with her; peered carefully through the blinds. A smart-looking young man in a knotted grey scarf stood on the doorstep, flanked by a bald guy with a boom microphone and a woman wearing a waterproof coat and toting a camera on her shoulder.
Cox sighed, turned away from the window. Not today, thank you …
She sat down on the bed, still holding the duvet round her body, and checked her phone. Sure enough: voicemails, missed calls, texts from crime reporters, feature writers, TV news researchers … and a message from her mum. The bloody press had been after her, too. She quickly texted back: Sorry, Mum. I messed up. Don’t tell them anything, will you? Love K. x
She glanced at the clock: 9.15. Jumped in the shower.
When she came out, wrapped in a towel and – in spite of the vodka – feeling sharper than she had in days, there was an email waiting from Don DiMacedo. She prepped a pot of coffee, got quickly dressed while it brewed. Poured herself a cup and sat down at the table.
‘Good news and bad news,’ DiMacedo’s email began. He’d spent the early morning trawling the databases (‘you don’t want to know exactly which databases’), and come up with only two results.
Kerry’s heart sank a little. On the positive side, it was a narrow field; a thousand ‘maybes’ would have been a nightmare to check out, but two was easily doable. On the other hand, well, there were only two of them – what were the odds either of them had been at Hampton Hall?
She opened the files DiMacedo had attached. No picture; just a stark data sheet. Lawrence ‘Larry’ Eggers – career thief, looked like. Mid-fifties. Did time all over the place in the seventies, for burglary mostly, then made the step up to armed robbery in the early eighties. Got sent down for life after shooting a bank clerk in High Wycombe. Clerk survived. Released 8 December.
Seemed an unlikely match for the Merritt killing. Cox took a mouthful of coffee and opened the other
zip folder titled ‘R. Trevayne’. There were several files in various formats.
Robert Trevayne.
The hair on Kerry’s neck bristled, and she felt a little light in the chest. Hadn’t the childhood friend Butcher had talked about been called Robbie?
She sat back, conscious that her heart was pounding. The first file was actually a jpeg – a scan of a newspaper front page. Christ knew how DiMacedo had located it. ‘“Twisted” Drifter Jailed For Halesowen Slaying’. Express & Star, 12 February 1991.
Hadn’t she seen a sign on their way into Birmingham for Halesowen?
The police mugshot of Robert Trevayne filled fully half of the newspaper’s front page. He was thick-necked, shaven-headed; the file indicated that he would’ve been thirty-five at the time, but he looked older. He was staring into the camera with dark, dead-looking eyes. Cox could see why the Express editor had run the picture so prominently on the cover – it was a hell of an image.
The accompanying text was light on biographical detail; skimming the two-page spread, Cox learned only that Trevayne had been notorious in the west Birmingham area as a loner, a hard drinker and a man you didn’t want to cross. It alluded to his history of violent crime and incarceration and characterized the brutal killing of the newsagent – a Mr O’Brien – as just another random act of violence in a life strewn with similar incidents.
She moved to the other files.
Trevayne’s parole reports. Psychologist reports. Briefing notes – some typed, others informal and handwritten – passed from prison to prison whenever Trevayne was transferred.
This was the full works. People had written biographies with less.
She fixed more coffee, spread a knifeful of cream cheese on an out-of-date bagel and sat down to study.
By lunchtime, she felt she knew the guy inside-out.
As the Express journo had suggested, Trevayne’s early life in and around Birmingham was marked by violence and extreme anger issues. From his first spell inside, the people who worked with Trevayne noted his hair-trigger temper and frightening physical strength (in the margin of one of the official transfer briefings, someone – a prison guard, Cox supposed – had scribbled a brief heads-up: Watch yourselves, lads).
It was the same over the millennium. The initial tariff served, subsequent infractions and dangerous behaviour kept him inside. But after 2007, the tone of the reports changed. The subject of his fearsome aggression came up less and less often; psychologists and guidance counsellors wrote instead of a new side to Trevayne, thoughtful, introspective, even philosophical. They traced the alteration in his character to a period he spent at HMP Leeds in early 2009; it was there he’d grown close to a Christian prison chaplain, a Reverend Macaulay. By 2012 the reports were all in agreement: suddenly and sincerely, Robert Trevayne had found God.
He’d been released from HMP Northumberland in late October last year. Cox drained her coffee, suddenly buzzing with excitement. Born-again or not, she thought, this is our man.
She thought briefly about calling the Yard, putting out an urgent APB, but guessed Naysmith would have something to say about that. Instead she reopened Trevayne’s release form, signed by the newly ex-con in a surprisingly tidy hand. He’d also filled in a forwarding address: Cox grabbed a pen and started to jot it down – then stopped.
19 Azincourt Walk, Calais Buildings, Walworth.
No fucking way. Didn’t she know that address?
She pictured a grotty, graffitied pebbledash semi – dogshit smeared across a letterbox – an unwholesome smell of dirt, smoke and neglect.
It was Colin Carter’s address.
24
An overweight man and a blonde woman in a branded Range Rover. A paparazzo leaning on his moped, smoking a cigarette. Two guys looking bored at a window-seat in the café over the road. Maybe the news agenda had moved on; anyway, it wasn’t quite the slavering press-pack she’d feared.
She’d dug out her fold-up Brompton, a handy backup for journeys across town. She figured she could lose the handful of journos without too much effort; with any luck, she wasn’t even a big enough story to be worth chasing.
If she couldn’t lose them, well, then she’d have a problem: she’d arranged for Greg Wilson to pick her up three streets away. But then, the damage had already been done in that respect – how much worse could the coverage get?
She zipped up her black down gilet, pulled up her hood, swung her backpack – stuffed with the hastily printed-off Trevayne files – across her shoulders. Readied the bike by the door. A fast start was the key here.
Yanked open the door, hit the leading pedal hard, let the door swing shut and click locked behind her.
Kicked forward down the street. The pap with the moped shouted something after her; she heard a car start up – the Range Rover, she guessed. But by then she’d reached a turn-off, access restricted by bollards, and zipped through into a half-developed strip of brownfield. A path cut to the right between apartment blocks; after that, she just had to make a turn through two lanes of traffic to where she’d agreed to meet Wilson.
She stopped at the kerb, pulled back her hood, breathless and exhilarated.
And here came Wilson’s clapped-out car, bumping noisily into a layby. He popped the boot; she folded up her bike, stowed it carefully.
When she opened the passenger door she saw Wilson quickly reach across to snatch a newspaper, one of London’s evening tabloids, from the seat. But she had had time to read the headline – DISGRACED OFFICER ADMITS AFFAIR – and seen the front-page picture of her being splattered with red dye at the inquiry.
She sighed as she sat down.
‘Looks like I’m a celebrity again.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ Wilson muttered, veering out into the lane of eastbound traffic. ‘They’re calling me to the inquiry, too.’ He gave her a sidelong look. ‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘Didn’t you actually used to write for that one?’ she said.
‘Touché.’
As they crawled towards the river, Cox filled him in on Trevayne’s background: the violence, the murder, the supposed transformation after finding God in prison.
‘You don’t buy the “reformed character” shtick?’
‘Not as a rule.’
Wilson laughed at her cynicism.
‘With an attitude like that,’ he said, ‘you’d fit right in on Fleet Street.’
They drove in silence for a few minutes; felt to Cox like Wilson was thinking something through.
Eventually he said: ‘Do we have any, uh, you know – backup?’
Cox smiled inwardly. But she couldn’t blame him for getting cold feet. She’d been doubting the wisdom of this plan ever since she’d sussed that Trevayne was at Carter’s place.
She lifted her chin in a show of bravado – for her own sake as much as Wilson’s.
‘Nope,’ she said.
‘Oh-kay.’ He swallowed nervously. ‘No problem. Fine. I eat murderous prison-hardened psychopaths for breakfast, me.’ Then he made a gesture towards the car’s glove compartment. ‘Bit of light reading for you in there, by the way. If you don’t fancy the newspaper.’
Cox looked at him questioningly, clicked open the compartment door. Found a sheaf of A4 paper fastened with a paperclip.
‘What’s this?’ She took it out, scanned the cover page. ‘“Pathways to Positive Outcomes: Intelligence and Internalization in Children Raised in Care”. Fascinating stuff, right up my street.’
‘It’s Allis and Merritt’s paper, written for CARE,’ Wilson explained. They were crossing the river now. Vauxhall Bridge was fogged with traffic fumes, and a low, dirty mist clung to the surface of the Thames.
Cox flipped through the paper. It was dry, academic stuff; seemed to be mostly concerned with IQ trends among care home kids. The pages were crowded with complex charts and statistical analyses in fine print.
‘Too early in the day for that,’ she concluded at last, dropping the paper into the footwell.
The mood in the car grew tense as they moved through Kennington, grew nearer to Carter’s run-down neighbourhood. Wilson whistled anxiously between his teeth as he drove. Cox felt a nervous ache in her stomach – felt empty, hollowed out.
It’s always like this before a raid, she told herself.
But on a raid you have stab-vests, batons, radio links, backup, put in a doubtful inner voice. This isn’t a raid – it’s a kamikaze mission.
They left the car on the edge of the estate. It was maybe half a mile to Carter’s place. The air here was damp, the light hazy and grey. Someone on the estate was having a fire: there was a drifting smell of burning rubber. They passed two kids kicking a twanging plastic football against a wall; an old guy asleep on a bench with a half-jug of corner-shop cider at his feet.
Carter’s house looked much the same as before. Still run-down and dirty; still a place you’d cross the street to avoid passing by.
They approached the door, Cox leading the way. They’d had to play games with Carter, last time, to get him to cooperate.
There’d be no games this time. Cox hammered on the door with her good hand.
‘Police,’ she yelled. ‘Open up.’
Hammered again – kept on hammering until she heard shuffling footsteps and the clatter of locks being unfastened.
‘Bloody hell,’ hissed Carter, pulling open the door, unlatching the iron gate. He was wearing a frayed beanie hat, stained white T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms; his right eye-socket looked darkly bruised. ‘Keep it down, can’t you? Do you need everyone on the fucking estate to hear you? I get enough grief as it is.’
‘You’re due a good deal more,’ said Cox.
Carter looked meanly at her, pale-faced and piggy-eyed.
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you to know that you’re going back to prison, Colin.’
He frowned, unfazed.
Twelve Deaths of Christmas Page 25