Stella said, ‘Oh, shit!’ She was wearing jeans and trainers but the guy had a good forty yards start. As she started to run, she called to Silano. He was mapping the progress of the forensic search and half heard his name, but when he looked round Stella had gone.
The guy was clear of the path, clear of the alley, out of sight, and the response vehicle wasn’t even close when Stella emerged on to the road. Harefield was a grid if you looked at it from a planner’s point of view; it was a maze if you knew it well. Straight roads all converging on the bull ring like spokes in a wheel, with circular roads intersecting, but those plain-and-simple routes were overlaid with rat-runs that took you past lock-ups and maintenance buildings, across the DMZ, back into the surrounding side streets, or underneath the raised tower blocks themselves. Stella knew them all. She didn’t think she could overtake the guy by following him, so when she hit the first estate road she ran down it for twenty yards or so, then turned off into a rat-run that would take her straight to Block C, his walkway, his door. She had no doubt that she was chasing Robert Kimber.
It was dark now, the estate part lit by the orange glow from streetlamps on the main routes. The freezing air hit her lungs and left an ache. She went past a row of garages and came out at the back of the block. Her route would be under the building to the entrance and up the exterior stairs to 16/31. It was a better than evens bet that someone would have kicked the lift doors crooked, so she was trying to pace herself for the climb.
There was light at the perimeter but the walk-space under Block C was a blank. She ran into the deeper darkness, slowing to a jog because she couldn’t tell what was in her path. There was a stench: the ripe stew of an inner-city midden. The whoop and wail of a siren was coming at her from the street, but she couldn’t tell how close it was. She was looking straight ahead at the far side of the block when she saw the ghost coming towards her.
16
Pale and skinny and seeming to drift in the near-dark, arms extended to draw you in, just the way ghosts are supposed to look.
Stella stopped twenty feet away. Suddenly, the walk-space under Block C was no place to be. The figure seemed to shimmer, coming and going, as if the darkness were washing over it. For a full ten seconds, neither spoke or moved, then Stella said, ‘Police officer.’
The ghost came a step closer and Stella caught a little gust of rank breath and piss and beer; then the apparition backed off and faded. Stella continued towards the faint rim of light on the far side, the skin on her back crawling.
The walk-space was a reception black spot. When she came clear, she called Harriman, who was already on his way up to Kimber’s flat. She said, ‘You thought Kimber too.’
‘Who else? There’s a response car and driver in the bull ring.’
‘Okay,’ Stella said. ‘Kimber – is he in?’
‘I can hear the TV.’
She met Harriman on the walkway. Robert Kimber came to the door with a beer in his hand. He asked them whether they happened to have a warrant that would entitle them to enter his premises.
They didn’t.
He asked them how he might help, but he kept them at the door. He pointed out that he was halfway through a meal and halfway through a television show. It was a cop movie, he told them.
Stella said, ‘You can’t. You can’t help.’
Kimber smiled and nodded agreement. ‘I didn’t think I could.’
‘Okay,’ Harriman said. ‘What odds it was him?’
‘My view? Pretty short.’
‘Because he’d have heard the call-in on his scanner.
Because he likes to watch. Like an ambulance-chaser except he’s a scene of crime freak.’
‘Or because he did it.’
‘So we get a warrant, go back, toss his place again.’
‘And count on finding the murder weapon and some bloodstained clothes?’
‘No. Well, toss it anyway.’
‘What for?’ Stella asked.
‘Fun.’
‘I’ve had enough fun on this fucking estate tonight.’
They were making the long trip down the exterior stairway. If you looked out beyond the DMZ, you could see lights from surrounding streets, like the lights from the camp of a besieging army.
The response car was in the bull ring. The driver was sitting very still and watching some kids. The kids were watching him. They were leaning up against the steel window-shutters of a bookie’s, a launderette, a KFC carry-out. The shutters bore bright red and green aerosol tags. The only place open was the off-licence, which had a permanent steel-mesh guard up over the plate-glass. The kids had been in and bought some cans.
All boys, early to mid teens. Six of them, maybe eight.
Stella and Harriman walked past the KFC and turned towards the car. One of the boys said, ‘Hey, bitch.’
Stella turned, stepped up and backhanded him in the mouth. It was a good, fast hit and the boy had been smiling at her. She’d shut his mouth with the slap and a tooth had cut his lip.
Harriman closed his eyes for a moment; he said, ‘Oh, good,’ and looked towards the response driver, who had taken a baton out from the door-clip and was getting out of the car.
The boy touched his lip with his finger and brought it away bloody. Stella said, ‘Hey yourself.’ She walked to the car and got in and waited for Harriman and the driver to join her.
They cleared the DMZ and came out on to the road a little too fast. Stella saw a car she thought she knew: a red Audi with a clutter of books and papers on the parcel-shelf. She looked over her shoulder but couldn’t catch the licence-plate. Harriman was looking at her, a smile on his face. He was still thinking of the boy she’d slapped.
She said, ‘I know.’ Then, ‘I’m sick of kids like that. They think nothing can touch them.’
‘You touched him. You touched him pretty hard.’
Stella wanted to say: The last time I hit a guy in the Harefield bull ring, I killed him. I killed the bastard. I killed the arsewipe. I killed him and I think I’m still having trouble with that. Instead, she took out her mobile and made a call to the locals to let them know that there were eight boys dealing class-A gear down on Harefield. The descriptions she gave would have fitted a hundred kids like that and the copper on the line let her know as much.
‘You’re right,’ Stella agreed. ‘So bust the first eight you come across.’
She leaned back and closed her eyes. John Delaney drove a car like that. But there were lots of red Audis in London, of course; and why wouldn’t you have a few books and papers on the parcel-shelf?
It had been driving on to the Harefield Estate.
17
You could visit Santa in his grotto. You could win a Christmas hamper. You could buy him/her the gift he/she had been dreaming of. You could stop off at the Ocean Diner for a snowball or sledbanger. You could stand outside Video-land and watch White Christmas. Or you could step up to the slick black BMW parked illegally in a residents’ bay just off the Saints, carrying a .45 Glock 21 automatic, standard trigger pull, thirteen-round magazine capacity, with the clear intention of killing its occupants.
There were three guys in the Beamer and they really shouldn’t have been there. Not because they were in a reserved bay but because that particular half of the postal district was operated by people who expected their drugs and their whores to get exclusivity. Glock Man was on a mission to let them know about that.
The car was throbbing to a low bass: techno-house music. Everyone in the car was bored and the two men in the front seats were reading. They often had to wait and knew to take magazines: they favoured boxing or snatch. As soon as the fourth man came downstairs to join them, they would start cruising the streets round the Strip, handing out street-cut gear to their distributors. The fourth man had hit a streak on the blackjack table just before ten the previous evening and the night had lit up for him after that. This morning, he was a little slow-moving.
The guy in the back of the car said, ‘Cou
ld you turn that the fuck down?’ He would have called himself more of a retro man: old-style R & B. And, in any case, he was making a phone call to a girl who didn’t want to listen.
He said, ‘We can work this out. We can make it work.’
She said she didn’t think so.
He said, ‘Listen, who’s been talking to you?’
She said she wasn’t naming names.
He said, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’
She said she only had to look at his lying bastard face.
He said, ‘Oh, fuck!’ but this wasn’t a response to her mistrust. He had seen Glock Man, walking directly towards the car, his hand down by his side to make the .45 a little less obvious. Retro Man dropped the phone and reached into his pocket for his own gun, yelling at the same time. The guys in the front had just enough time to look up before they were hit. Retro Man got off four shots. Two missed, one took the man in the passenger seat in the back of the head, raising a mist of red on the car window, the fourth hit Glock Man in the fat of his waist, spinning him round and dropping him.
Retro Man was halfway out of the car when Glock Man got up on one knee and shot him three times before pitching over on to his side. His gun clattered across the road and went under the Beamer. He levered himself off the road like a man doing the last press-up in a hundred-press routine, got to his knees, then to his feet. You wouldn’t call him nimble now; but a hopping lope took him down the street and out of sight in a couple of minutes.
This was around noon and broad daylight. People had taken to doorways or rushed into shops; some had ducked down behind wheelie bins or recycling units; some had hit the pavement and put their hands over their ears. Now, with sirens coming in from two directions, they hurried on.
The front-seat guys had taken ten bullets between them. They were dead. The windscreen was frosted in red. Retro Man had been shot through the arm, the shoulder and the throat. He lay belly-up across the street with the traffic backed up on either side. He was not quite dead.
The Glock .45 lay under the car.
Sadie had stayed absolutely still during the shooting. When it was over, she’d picked up her bag and found a new pitch two streets away where people were going about their business as normal. She sat down and started ‘Lord of the Dance’.
Jamie watched the movie in Videoland. He liked the snow because it looked clean. He liked the look of the big room with its ceiling-high tree decked with trinkets and lights. The people sang and kissed each other. He wanted to be someone like that. After a while he went to sit next to Sadie. She had learned the first few bars of ‘Silent Night’. He put his head in his hands and muttered to himself as she played.
And the angel said, ‘Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy...’
The hospital was a sky-high stack of Chinese boxes sleeved in glass. The big windows blanked the outside world. By day, they reflected the 747s bellying down through the high white winter clouds to Heathrow; at night, they reflected the city lights. A system of elevators and a labyrinth of corridors took you to numbered floors and numbered wards. The intensive care unit was 15D. In a curtained cubicle, Retro Man was trying to make a comeback. He wasn’t aware of it, because he wasn’t aware of anything, but he was about on the brink.
Sophie Simms was in a side ward. She was beyond the brink: she had stepped off and was free-falling.
Stella had taken Maxine Hewitt with her. Maxine sat with Sophie’s family and asked questions that no one wanted to answer about friends, enemies, lovers; about bad habits and bad blood. No one mentioned bad luck. The Simms family consisted entirely of women: Sophie’s mother, her grandmother, her two sisters. They were blonde. Even the grandmother was blonde, though she needed a little more help with it than the others.
The grandmother and the sisters said nothing. The sisters sat close to one another but at a remove from the others and flicked through the pile of magazines that lay on a low table. They favoured Sugar and Miz. The grandmother was shredding an empty cigarette pack. The mother told Maxine that her name was Tanya. She had cried her make-up into a thick tideline round her jaw, but now she was stony-faced.
She didn’t know who Sophie’s friends were.
She didn’t know whether Sophie had enemies.
She didn’t know where Sophie went at night.
She didn’t know whether Sophie had a boyfriend.
She didn’t know why anyone would want to kill her beautiful daughter.
She asked whether she could go now; she wanted to sit by Sophie’s bed. She thought that Sophie could hear what she was saying even though she wasn’t able to respond. There was a special communication, she said, between a mother and her daughter.
Maxine said that would be a good idea. After Tanya had left, Maxine offered her cigarettes to the grandmother, who took three and headed for the street. The sisters put down their magazines and ticked off some boxes.
Did Sophie do drugs? Sure, who doesn’t? Nothing heavy. Just Es and dope.
Did Sophie hang out with a bad crew? Just some fit boys.
Did Sophie have a boyfriend? Yeah, someone new. Scuzz? Buzz?
Did Sophie have any enemies? No.
Maxine asked the questions because it was required, but she didn’t think Sophie’s murder had anything to do with drugs or love or revenge, and neither did the sisters.
One of them said, ‘It’s that crazy guy, right?’
‘We don’t have any theories just yet,’ Maxine told her.
‘The crazy guy. Attacking women.’
‘We don’t know.’
The other sister had an afterthought. She said, ‘We live on Harefield, yeah? It’s not a matter of enemies. You don’t have enemies, not as such. You have crews, yeah? You have territories. We’re not in a crew. We don’t have enemies, we have other people.’ She went back to reading Sugar.
Stella was talking to Dr Shah, who had flawless skin, regular features and a catwalk figure. Since the woman was also a senior registrar, Stella decided to think of this as overload.
‘It’s an issue we’re going to have to raise with the family,’ Dr Shah said, ‘and pretty soon.’
‘You want to switch her off?’
‘Sophie Simms is alive mechanically, but she’s brain-stem dead. We have to approach her relatives about harvesting her organs.’
Stella shook her head. ‘She’s a murder victim. We’ve ordered an autopsy and a forensic investigation.’
Dr Shah sighed. ‘It’s a young heart. A young renal system.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize to me. Pop into dialysis on your way out.’
‘There’s no possibility of a reversal?’ Stella asked.
‘That she regains consciousness, that you talk to her, that she identifies her assailant? No, none. She’s already switched off, in effect. She’s a shell. We’re effecting a simulation of life, but all it amounts to is inflating the lungs and maintaining the circulatory system. Sophie left a while ago. All we’re doing is keeping putrefaction at bay.’
That’s one way of putting it, Stella thought. Dr Shah’s bleeper sounded and she moved to a phone. While she was taking the call, she looked across at Stella as if to say That’s it; we’re done.
Maxine was coming into the ward as Stella was leaving. She said, ‘They’re off the estate, just like a thousand others. There’s nothing to distinguish her from the other victims.’
‘Unless she happened to know him.’
‘Why would she?’
‘Somebody does.’
They were almost at the door of the ward when two nurses drew the curtains on the last bed space and emerged with a trolley. Stella and Maxine glanced sideways, reflexively, and saw a figure rigged with tubes and drips and wearing a full-face oxygen mask. A monitor showed the sluggish blue blips of a troubled heartbeat. Stella thought he looked like a man who was too close to death to pull back.
She was right. Retro Man would die that night, a couple of hours af
ter Tanya had given permission for Sophie’s life-support system to be switched off.
18
From: [email protected]
Well, Robert, I picked up your message about poor Nero. I wonder – have you had any thoughts about me? About who I am? Now you can tell me. Now you can email me back. All that coverage in the papers about you – I expect you enjoyed it. I expect you enjoyed leading them a dance. DS Mooney, was that the name the papers gave? Did you enjoy your sessions with her?
They always hold something back, don’t they? What did you do about that? I expect you stayed vague. I expect you did some ducking and diving. You must have been pretty good because it took them a while to work you out, didn’t it? I expect you went in prepared. You must have known something. What did you know?
The thing I really want to ask – how did it feel pretending it was you – pretending you had killed Valerie? I expect it was thrilling. It was thrilling, wasn’t it? Did you run through it in your mind? I expect you did. I wonder how close you got to the real thing. I could tell you how close. We could compare notes.
I would love to run through it with you. I would love to take you through it, step by step. I expect you can close your eyes and see the park in your mind’s eye, the park that day, Valerie jogging through. I expect you make up a scenario, don’t you? Except it’s you there with her, you going after her, and it wasn’t you, was it?
Do you know who it was?
Email me back and let me know how you feel. Let me know what you see in your mind’s eye. The park, the weather, the single figure waiting, biding his time, the risks, the method. The feeling. The way it felt. I expect you thought a lot about the way it felt. I expect you told DS Mooney about that. Now tell me. You can be as detailed as you like. The Devil’s in the detail, as they always say.
Let’s speak soon.
Cold Kill Page 9