by M B Vincent
Chapter 9
LOVE ME TO DEATH
Saturday 21 May
Jess was electrified.
Up before the sun. Pacing the rag rug in her room. The constant reiteration of Eden’s mobile ringing out in her ear gave her a headache.
She pulled on some clothes. If everything you own is black, you’re coordinated without trying. She tried Eden again. Straight to voicemail.
Purpose hit her like adrenaline. Today would not unfold haphazardly like all the other days since Cambridge.
Beyond her bedroom window the green outskirts of Castle Kidbury were stock-still. Jess knew there was scurrying life in the hedges. Small mammals already halfway through their working day. She had to join them. She’d been asleep too long.
The rat-a-tat-tat of her boots on the stairs. The quiet kitchen. The jars and the pots and the utensils, all asleep. As was Moose. He woke immediately, staggered to his feet. Hopeful.
‘Sorry Moosie, not now.’
The bite of boot on gravel. Her car waiting. Jess smiled at the defiantly old-fashioned silhouette. The driver’s seat was uncomfortable, but her behind was accustomed to it. ‘Start,’ she begged, turning the key in the ignition. ‘Please.’
A bang on the window. Jess rolled it down and Mary inserted her wild-haired head. ‘Wait for me.’
Mary speed-shuffled to the passenger side in unlaced trainers.
She didn’t even ask where Jess was going. Mary was an excellent partner in crime. I should be more Mary, thought Jess.
Or not. She noticed what Mary was wearing. ‘Are they . . . they are! My dad’s pyjamas!’
Mary waggled her arms, hands invisible in the long striped sleeves. ‘Found ’em folded and ironed in the kitchen.’
The car showed willing. It flew along the Kidbury road, into the budding day.
The desk sergeant didn’t look up from his paperwork. He pencilled a word here and there. ‘Sorry, love,’ he repeated.
‘It’s urgent.’ Jess wished Mary had waited in the car. The pyjamas lacked gravitas. ‘I have information.’
‘Tell me, love, and I’ll pass it on.’
She wasn’t his love and she didn’t want him to pass it on. She wanted to be in the thick of it. An ignoble thought, but there you go.
The one fact the genial, unhelpful officer would confirm was that Eden was on duty. ‘Like the rest of us. Not much kip last night.’
Mary stretched. Her yawn was operatic. ‘Know how you feel.’
DC Karen Knott bustled out from what Jess thought of as backstage. Without noticing Jess – her demeanour suggested she was too important to take in mere civilians – she called over her shoulder, ‘Tell the boss I’m on my way to the crime scene. If anybody wants me, I’ll be at St Agatha’s.’
‘Will do.’ The desk sergeant rolled his eyes. He waved his pencil at Jess. ‘Go on then. Off you trot to St Agatha’s.’
Bless you, Karen, thought Jess, following the busy busy busy little woman through the revolving door.
‘Crime scene?’ Mary fizzed and popped and danced alongside her. ‘A murder? An actual murder!’
‘Don’t,’ said Jess, ‘do that when we get there.’
St Agatha’s was on the Richleigh road, on the edge of town. Its architectural style could be defined as Ugly Modern Catholic.
Very different to Castle Kidbury’s charmingly rustic Church of England chapel, it was a concrete wigwam. Sharp edges. Angles. A groovy mosaic – now hopelessly dated – of a Picassoesque St Agatha was embedded over wide double doors.
St Agatha’s martyrdom had been extra grisly, even by the standards of such events; her breasts were cleaved off with a sword. Jess hitched her bra strap as she parked the Morris Traveller.
‘This is my lot, isn’t it?’ said Mary, peering through the windscreen. ‘Catholics. Bells and smells.’
‘It’s different inside. Not so space-age. Nice and gloomy.’ Jess recalled the Masses she’d been frogmarched to as a schoolgirl, in the interests of inter-faith unity. There’d been an enormous crucifix behind the altar. She could still see the life-size Jesus. His eyes had rolled to the back of his head. His side dripped blood. His loincloth barely covered what her mother would call his ‘essentials’. To a child, it seemed more like a slasher film than a place of worship.
‘How’re you going to get past all those bods?’ asked Mary.
‘Wing it.’ Jess slammed the car door behind her and marched to the gate of the church. At this early hour, only a few local rubberneckers were on this side of the black and yellow tape that wrapped the church like a gift.
Danny was among them, on tiptoe. He caught Jess’s eye.
‘What’s going on?’ he called.
‘Why are you here, Dan?’ Jess made her way over.
His mother rushed up. ‘We have to get in.’ She was petulant. ‘Danny and me, we’re doing the flowers for my sister’s girl’s wedding. The police won’t tell me anything.’
‘It’s another murder,’ said Danny.
‘Let’s hope not,’ said Jess.
On the far side of the gate was an organised melee. Like worker ants, various professionals streamed in and out of the church. A man in a crinkly paper suit leant against a tombstone. Reflective tabards and an air of conviction.
Jess yearned to be on that side of the gate.
‘Morning,’ she said to the scrawny officer barring her way. There was power in his spotty face, the thin arms sticking out of his Daz-white shirt. The power to admit Jess or keep her out.
She flashed her library card, snapping its leather folder shut as he bent to examine it. ‘Professor Jessica Castle. Cambridge University. John Eden’s expecting me.’ She raised her eyebrows. Used her best studentscaring expression.
‘I dunno, I better . . .’ The young policeman looked vaguely around, searching for a higher authority.
One appeared. In a strikingly cut brown cashmere coat, Mary approached the gate, put her hand on it, and said, ‘I have that data you wanted, ma’am.’
They were through, in a flurry of power dressing and oestrogen.
‘Quick. Quick.’ Jess daren’t look back. High on their success, they bundled into the darkness of the church. The daylight shut off cleanly. They waited for their eyes to adjust.
The sense of industry was more intense inside St Agatha’s. Silent, determined people beetled through the pews. The hum of learned consultation. The occasional blaze of a camera flash. Yellow cards with black numbers on them lined the aisle.
As Jess looked up, the noise they made receded. The rushing in her ears was all she could hear.
It took shape in the darkness. The crucifix she remembered, caught by a shaft of red light from the stained glass that studded the angled ceiling. On the cross, a body. This Jesus was in jeans. Laid over the figure of Christ. A blasphemous spooning.
No shoes. A chest invisible beneath a vest of blood. Long muscled arms slung over the Redeemer’s outstretched ones. The wrists were lashed to the cross with rope. More rope secured his neck so that the face stared out at the busy congregation. The body, slightly on the slant, was a dark, dripping silhouette.
Jess swayed. She smelt the peculiar sweet tang of blood. Iron-rich. Wet.
So many times she’d read about sacrifices. The Viking blood offerings, known as Blot. Wicker men burning with real men trapped inside. Here was actual death. The real thing. So much blood, yet her own seemed to have deserted her legs.
Beside her, Mary sank to her knees. She vomited.
Heads turned.
‘Get her out of here!’ shouted somebody behind a protective white mask.
Mary’s words echoed in the sacred wigwam. ‘I did it! I did it!’
Jess tugged at Mary, who’d coiled into herself. ‘Shut up!’ she begged. ‘Mary, stop it!’
One of the figures running their way was Eden. When he saw Jess, he slowed. He turned, saying, ‘I’ve got this. Get back to what you were doing.’ He stood over the two women. ‘Explain. Now.’
‘I
shagged him to death!’ keened Mary, her hand reaching out to the figure on the cross.
The desecrated face was Gavin’s.
Jess closed her lips against a flood of bile. His eyes were two bloody cavities. His hair was a bouffant of gore. Still, he was recognisably Gavin.
She almost knelt in front of him. She understood in a new way the power of those sacrifices she’d studied. A body without a soul was a human’s worst nightmare.
Gavin was at last the superstar he’d dreamt of being.
‘Help me get her on her feet.’ Eden was thin-lipped. He put his hands under Mary’s armpits.
Jess had never seen Mary cry before.
A woman in blue environmental overalls left her sketch pad on a pew and rustled over. ‘Do you need a hand? What’s the matter with—’ She blinked beneath her elasticated hood. ‘That’s my coat!’
Impatiently, Mary tore off the chocolate-coloured cashmere she’d swiped through a car window. She seemed more angry than ashamed at being outed as a thief.
The woman staggered back as Mary thrust the coat at her. ‘It’s covered with . . . eeurgh.’
‘We’ll sort it out later, Linda.’ Eden staggered with Mary to a side door.
Beyond it was a mossy passage, more of a slit, between an ancient, high wall and the concrete church. Jess could see sunlight warming up gravestones, but the alley was damp and chill.
‘I killed him.’
‘Will you stop saying that, Mary,’ snapped Jess. ‘Don’t listen to her, please.’
‘I’m not taking her seriously.’ Eden handed Mary a proper handkerchief. She blew her nose and calmed down a little. ‘This is the work of a serial killer.’
‘God.’ Jess wrapped her arms around herself. ‘In Castle Kidbury?’
‘Postcodes aren’t murder-proof.’ Eden pressed his hand through his immovably short hair. ‘Two deaths. Two crucifixions. I have to face facts.’
‘We all do.’ The wind was knocked out of Jess. She’d never before had use for the expression shit just got real, but it certainly did the trick here.
‘A serial killer means chaos.’ Eden was talking half to Jess, half to himself. ‘Police work, dogged detection, doesn’t cut it. I’m trained to search for motive, but serial killers do it for Looney Tune reasons.’
‘ “Next door’s dog told me to do it,” ’ suggested Jess. She’d read about the Son of Sam murder spree in 1970s New York. ‘Let me help.’ Gavin’s death was a game changer. The off-stage demise of a layabout drunkard was one thing, but Jess had seen Gavin alive just hours ago. They had history. However hard she tried to pretend otherwise. ‘I have new information.’ As Eden looked at her expectantly, Jess turned to Mary. ‘I can’t concentrate with you carrying on. You didn’t shag Gavin, remember? I didn’t let you.’
Eden looked puzzled. Impatient. Knackered.
‘I did sleep with him.’ Mary met Jess’s eye defiantly through her tears. ‘We cooked it up between us. He got the band to drop him off outside your place. I’d told him which window to climb up to.’
‘You said you were tired. You wanted to go straight to bed.’ Jess assimilated the story.
‘Half true.’ Mary blew her nose again.
Eden winced at his hanky’s ordeal.
‘I let him in. He had a bottle of Jack Daniels on him. We were quiet. I knew you’d come over all spinster aunt if you heard us.’
Jess looked at Mary. Just looked. She’d get her later, for saying that. Or try to; Mary was un-gettable.
Eden took out his notebook. ‘What time,’ he asked, ‘did Gavin Blake leave you?’
‘It was quite a night, I can tell you.’ Mary stopped sniffling. ‘He’s got amazing—’
‘Spare me.’ Eden closed his eyes.
‘Well, we snoozed for a bit and then, you know, again.’ Mary couldn’t entirely spare her audience, it would seem. ‘He went out through the window about, ooh, one a.m. Yeah. One o’clock. I remember looking at me watch.’
‘Was he planning to walk home?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t hear a vehicle?’
‘Nothing. Sorry.’
‘You’ve been very helpful.’ Eden turned to Jess. ‘You said you have fresh intel?’
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you since last night.’
‘I’m a little busy.’ Either Eden was brilliant at deadpanning or he felt this needed saying.
Jess produced the band’s flyer. ‘There’s your symbol.’
‘This is the band that poor bloke sang with?’
‘Yes. Baldur. Their logo was carved onto Keith Dike’s torso. That’s why I didn’t recognise it. It was made up to promote the band.’
‘Right.’ Eden frowned. He flicked back a couple of pages in his notepad. ‘Look, this is what the killer cut into Gavin. A line of symbols, this time.’
‘Is this another band, Jess? Or is there deeper significance? They’re not Christian, are they?’
‘No. They don’t “feel” Norse, either. They’re very simple.’ The shapes set off no pagan drumbeat in Jess’s head. ‘It’s round the corner of my mind. I can feel what it is, but . . . Listen, I’m tired. I’ll look into it.’
‘Good. Thanks.’ Eden and Jess regarded each other for a moment.
‘You look worn out,’ she said.
‘I’m fine.’ Eden rolled his neck. ‘I just hope forensics can give us something.’
‘DNA.’ Jess had watched CSI enough times to feel confident she’d said the right thing.
‘Trouble is, there’ll be too much of the stuff. There was Mass in this church yesterday evening and it hasn’t been cleaned. The lab will be knee-deep in old-lady DNA.’ He sighed. He looked older. ‘Can you really help, Jess? I need to catch whoever’s doing this.’
‘Yes.’ The puzzle was diverting. It kept her from wandering up and down the cul-de-sac of her thoughts. That was only part of it; she was zealous about the investigation now.
A murderer had targeted her home town. A life had been extinguished up on a hill, another in church. I can help.
It would be penance, of a sort.
Chapter 10
THE MASKS OF BABYLON
Still Saturday 21 May
DS Eden’s blue Ford Focus possessed neither the charm of Jess’s Morris Traveller nor the taupe luxe of Rupert’s Mercedes. It was, as Eden himself might have said, ‘a perfectly good car’.
‘You needn’t be concerned about your friend,’ said Eden. ‘Ms Spillane’s not implicated. Apart from anything, she wasn’t in town for Keith Dike’s murder. She mentioned something to Knott about a girl with black hair.’
Jess nodded. ‘Theresa. Theresa, um, Peake.’
‘I know her. Difficult woman.’
‘You could say that. Obsessed with Gavin.’ Jess glanced at Eden. ‘I can hear you thinking it; obsessed enough to kill him?’
‘More likely to kill Mary, surely? This isn’t a crime of passion, Jess. Unless you believe Theresa was also madly in love with Keith Dike.’
‘You should talk to her anyway.’
‘I’m the detective sergeant in charge of the investigation, Jess. Of course I’ll talk to her. It may just turn up something. For now, let’s focus on our friend Pan. He seems a good place to start.’
‘Do you think he’s the killer?’
‘I won’t have an opinion until I have all the information. Pan’s not on the level, I know that much. And he annoys the hell out of me. But I don’t have a hunch about him. I don’t have hunches full stop.’
‘Really?’ Jess was taken aback that a copper could be so non-judgemental. ‘Not like Columbo then?’
‘No, Jess, not like Columbo.’
Jess watched Eden as he drove along Kidbury Road at precisely sixty miles per hour. He should, by rights, have been an uninspiring character; everything about him was standard. Ford Focus. Department-store suit. Five foot ten and a half with man-shaped hair. He looked about forty, but then he probably always had. Despite his ordin
ariness, there was something about him she appreciated. Eden was good. He was careful. And he kept his temper; a talent she envied. It dawned on Jess, as they slowed at Pitt’s Field, that she admired him.
Which didn’t mean she agreed with him. When you’re tracking a serial killer, hunches are all you’ve got.
Three battered caravans and a tent sat in the middle of the field, the surrounding grass flattened. Bonfires had been lit and left. Camping chairs faced this way and that. Rags were strewn around the place. It was deathly quiet.
Eden gave the handbrake a precise tug. ‘When we get in there, I want to you to be observant. Any signs, any artefacts, I want to know about them. We need to be quiet. Catch him off guard. Got it?’
Jess got it.
They picked their way over to the caravans. As they drew closer, Jess could see a slight rocking motion to the largest one. Eden stopped and pressed his finger to his lips. In a split second, he’d yanked the door open and boarded the vehicle.
‘This is the police. Stay exactly where you are.’
A mattress took up most of the van. Bodies darted under the sheets like mice. Only Pan sat up. Chest hairy. Expression lairy.
‘Look who’s dropped in,’ he said.
Naked, arms out in a cruciform pose that held echoes for Jess, Pan was beatified by a beam of sunlight that slanted in through a tear in the roof. He lounged, resplendent, as if he were covered with silks and velvets rather than a jumble of nylon sheets and stained sleeping bags. The smell of sex had seeped into the soft furnishings.
‘Climb in, son.’ Pan’s smile was odious. ‘It’s naughty times in Babylon!’
‘Babylon?’ Jess was crisp. ‘Do you even know where Babylon was?’
When Pan turned his eyes to her, they glittered. ‘It’s in my bed, kochana.’
Jess wished later she hadn’t let her mouth drop open. His evil code was easy to read: I know things I shouldn’t know. As if Pan had bugged the safe kitchen in Harebell House. As if he’d scooped the word out of her brain. ‘Babylon was in modern-day Iraq,’ she said, clambering back to the dry land of certain fact.
‘Wherever it is, you’re welcome to it,’ barked Eden. He pointed to a fuzzy print of an old woodcut sellotaped above the mattress. ‘What’s the meaning behind that? The smutty picture?’