Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  19

  The squad room was decorated with a little tree-chart of progression points and a paper-chain of SOC shots. The point-and-push camera had a hard flash and Sophie looked chalk-white, her features lacking definition. People were smoking and drinking and eating: some were doing all three. The air in the room was thick and blue, but there was nothing else to breathe. Stella wafted her hand in front of her face: a novice non-smoker eating secondary-soup.

  ‘It looks like a replica of the Valerie Blake attack,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t quite. The post-mortem’s being done this afternoon, but the doctor at the scene was certain that she hadn’t been strangled. The blows to the head killed her.’

  ‘The configuration of clothing,’ Maxine asked. ‘Do we know whether she was raped?’

  ‘No. I’ll be asking Sam Burgess about that.’

  ‘It ties in with the earlier attacks in some ways,’ Harriman observed. ‘So did Blake: the blows to the head, the attack taking place in an open space, in the street or a park.’

  Maxine said, ‘Except we spent a day with the team that are looking at those other incidents and the similarities are superficial. Copy cat, maybe. More likely to be men hating women. Nothing new there.’

  ‘And no DNA matches,’ Stella observed.

  ‘DNA, yes. Matches, no.’

  Frank Silano was breaking the filter off a B & H; Harriman gave him a light. Silano said, ‘We’ve put up an incident board. Exhibits have been listed; they’re with Forensics now. Uniform found her clothes in a skip. The earlier attacks might not fit, but this MO’s identical.’

  ‘Two strikes in short order,’ Harriman said. ‘This guy’s going to keep at it, isn’t he?’

  Stella said, ‘I think he is.’

  Sam Burgess was working to the Sibelius violin concerto, the allegro moderato finding almost the same pitch as the electric saw he was using to trepan Sophie Simms. Giovanni was alongside; he reached in and lifted out the brain. Stella thought of pickled walnuts. Sam took a scalpel and cut a thin slice for forensic examination, as if that sliver might contain Sophie’s last thought.

  Easy. I’ll never let him out of bed.

  ‘She wasn’t strangled,’ Sam said. ‘The garrotte might have been round her neck, but he didn’t apply it. No time, perhaps.’

  ‘He didn’t kill her either, not immediately.’

  ‘No, but he meant to. The hammer blows were more than enough to do the job. God knows how she survived as long as she did.’

  ‘You’re sure it was a hammer?’

  ‘Pretty sure; can’t think what else would fit the configuration and blow pattern. But Forensics will have a better take on it.’

  ‘And there’s the question of whether she was sexually assaulted.’

  ‘Well, she’d had sex in the last twenty-four hours. Whether it was willingly or not is another matter. No trauma.’

  ‘Clear DNA, though.’

  ‘There will be.’

  Sam stood back to allow Giovanni to take the brain to the scales: the sum total of all Sophie Simms had known or thought or felt. Love doesn’t live in the heart, Stella thought; why do people think that? It lives in the brain along with doubt and displeasure.

  ‘The hospital wanted her organs,’ Stella said.

  ‘It’s a waste,’ Sam agreed. ‘I don’t think we’re going to find anything significant.’ His plastic apron and eye-shields carried tiny red polka-dots. Stella looked towards the dissecting table, where Giovanni was waiting for Sam to make the Y-incision. Sophie had a butterfly-tattoo on her thigh just under the hip bone: something only a lover would see. As Sam made the first cut, Stella half expected to see it lift and fly off.

  She pushed through the slap-flaps, going from room to room in that subterranean city of the dead, and emerged to a bright day and cold that bit the bone. Her phone rang as if it had been waiting to find the signal.

  Harriman said, ‘Two things. Kimber confessed to a crime a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Murder-abduction.’

  ‘No chance he actually did it?’

  ‘No. They caught the guy with the body in the boot of his car.’

  ‘Jesus. What else?’

  ‘Valerie Blake’s flat was burgled two days before she died.’

  As Stella walked in to the squad room, Sue Chapman was walking out.

  Stella said, ‘You look like hell.’

  Sue nodded. ‘Feel the same way. I’m going home.’

  ‘I ought to say don’t come back till you’re feeling better.’

  ‘But –?’

  ‘Come back sooner than that.’

  Harriman showed her the message forms. The information about Kimber was from DS Reid at Paddington Green. The other came from DS Gerry Harris at Notting Hill.

  Her first call was to Harris, who’d been sharp enough to make the connection between the burglary and Valerie Blake’s murder. She asked, ‘Can I get a copy of the crime report?’

  ‘Give me a number. I’ll fax it to you while we’re talking.’

  Stella gave the number. ‘Anything special about it?’

  ‘Just another break-in. We get dozens a day. They work in teams. Kids mostly. You know – pre-teen and upwards. Valerie Blake’s place showed some familiar patterns: they’d raided the fridge, had a drink or two, made themselves at home; they’d taken a lot of street-market gear, clothes and shoes and so forth; they’ve obviously got a buyer for it. We drop in on the local street-markets from time to time, but it’s a lost cause, really. They’d been fairly comprehensive, so I reckon they knew her habits. Leave for work, get home from work. A working day would give them a lot of leeway. Most of these little shits go in and trash the place just because. This lot don’t. We call them the Clean Machine.’

  ‘How did they get in?’

  ‘Jacked a window. Took the whole thing out. It’s easy. People buy alarms and such like. They don’t know.’

  ‘You didn’t make an arrest, I suppose?’

  Harris laughed. ‘It’s a statistic. I expect she was insured. They only take easily disposable stuff and smallish items. I mean, it wasn’t the sort of job where they load the white goods on to a lorry. She gave us a list; it’s on the report.’

  Stella heard the fax machine on Sue Chapman’s desk kick in. She said, ‘It’s coming through now.’

  ‘Okay,’ Harris said. ‘I’m here if you think of something else.’

  DS Reid wasn’t as genial but then DS Reid knew he’d fucked up.

  ‘You didn’t log this,’ Stella said, ‘or it would have turned up as a cross-reference.’

  ‘He was a time-waster.’

  ‘You didn’t log it.’

  ‘He was in and out. I done it, no you didn’t, goodbye, end of story.’

  ‘You didn’t log it and we spent a lot of time with him. We could have been looking at other things.’

  ‘Let me ask you something, DS Mooney.’ Reid was talking rank to rank now. ‘Did you ever work a long day? Did you ever come in and find yesterday’s backlog still on your desk along with today’s pile of shite? We were looking for a nine-year-old boy, and the tabloids were running a story that started each morning with big headlines that told the world exactly how many days had passed since he went missing and suggesting that the police were a bunch of incompetent arseholes –’

  ‘You didn’t log it,’ Stella said, ‘you incompetent arsehole.’

  Andy Greegan sounded like a man drowning in a glue-pit.

  Stella said, ‘You were running the search team at her flat.’

  ‘There wasn’t any sign,’ Greegan said. ‘Two days before she died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So she’d tidied up. They hadn’t tagged the walls or kicked the doors down.’

  ‘They jacked a window.’

  ‘Easy to get out, easy to put back. Any builder – five-minute repair.’

  Stella was looking at the list on the crime report. ‘They took quite a lot of her clothes. S
he can’t have had time to replace them.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘No, I’m asking – wouldn’t someone on your team have spotted that?’

  ‘They were all men.’

  ‘Andy, they took ten pairs of shoes.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Greegan broke off to sneeze. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, ‘this is flu. This is really flu.’

  ‘How many pairs of shoes has your wife got?’

  ‘God knows. I’ve got two: one black, one brown. I’ll tell you what – I did wonder why she didn’t have a TV. But then I wish I didn’t have one.’

  20

  She had been waiting for Delaney to say something, but the time for waiting was past. He came in looking cold and tired and she hit him with it before he’d taken off his coat or poured a drink.

  ‘I saw you driving on to the Harefield Estate. Yesterday, some time after five.’

  ‘Is that right? What were you doing there?’

  ‘It was you –’

  ‘Some time after five. Yes, that would be me.’

  He went through to the bathroom and didn’t reappear for twenty minutes. Finally, he came back wearing a bathrobe and looking for that drink.

  ‘Same as you,’ she said, as if the conversation had never been broken.

  ‘Same as me –’

  ‘You asked me what I was doing. The answer is I was talking to Robert Kimber, same as you.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m a detective. I detect.’

  The drink was whisky and it was going down well. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It does to me. It’s a case I’m involved in and you’re working off privileged information.’

  ‘No, I’m not. The papers carried the story. Anyone could go after a follow-up piece.’

  ‘You’re not anyone. Not on this occasion. It’s complicated, John, surely you can see that.’

  ‘Sort of but not really. You mentioned the Judas Syndrome. Perfect headline. I just want a few words with the guy. He won’t be the only person I’ll talk to.’

  ‘It makes me uneasy. Go back to Yuletide street-people.’

  He walked over and caught her by the waist and kissed her mouth. He tasted of whisky, which made her want a drink of her own. ‘I’m doing that too,’ he said. ‘It’s where I’ve just been.’

  She pushed hair off his forehead and kissed him back, just lightly. She asked, ‘How are they doing?’

  ‘Freezing, filthy, impoverished, but hey, they’re free.’

  ‘Vagabonds,’ she suggested.

  ‘Bare-arsed philosophers.’

  ‘I’d prefer you stayed away from him. It would be better.’

  He freshened his drink. He said, ‘Better for me, for you, for him?’

  ‘Better all round.’

  In bed, things were just the same as ever. His look went through her like light through water.

  She woke in the night and he woke too, as if she’d called him. They lay quietly, the city still up and running at 3 a.m. but distant and dim.

  She said, ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was sounding him out. He wants money.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ He moved close and looped his arm round her. ‘You can listen to the tape. Whatever he says –’

  ‘I’ve listened to his tapes. I’ve had enough of that man’s tapes.’ After a moment she added, ‘He’s a watcher. He’s got a police scanner. He listens to the call-in, then he goes to the scene of crime and watches. I’m pretty certain he was in Rose Park.’

  ‘Sophie Simms.’

  ‘Good recall.’

  ‘I’m a journalist.’

  ‘He’s sick, John. His head’s full of… black stuff.’

  ‘That’s what makes him interesting.’

  21

  From: Angel@langfor.com

  Are you Robert or Rob or Bob or Bobby? I expect your mother had a special name for you, didn’t she? Bobby. Bobby Kimber.

  It was good to get your email, Bobby. Full of very interesting things. Of course, you got it wrong about the feeling, about how it felt, what it was like, but then you’ve never done it, have you, so how would you know?

  You were in the right area, though. You’d got the picture. In the ball park, as they always say. There were some things you missed out. Missed them because you weren’t there at the time. I expect you would like to know what they were. I could tell you, if you like.

  I could tell you if we met up. I sometimes go to a pub down on the river. I expect you know it. The Dove. It’s along from Hammersmith Bridge. Perhaps we could meet up there. How would I recognize you? There were no pictures in the paper. Send me an email and say what you look like. I expect you’ve got a piece of clothing you could wear that would help me to pick you out.

  I was very interested in your Bearcat. Do you only go to murders or do you go to accidents too? I expect you like accidents, don’t you?

  The thing is, Bobby, it’s the preparation as well as everything else. It’s the being busy. It’s the planning. Because that’s when you start to think about it. Sometimes you look back and you remember thinking about it being better than doing it – if things go wrong at the time, or you have to hurry, if something spoils it.

  The thing is, you get this fantastic buzz, it’s like a big tingle, it’s like bubbles in your blood. I think it’s the risk. It’s the risk and it’s being the powerful one, it’s having the power. Well, you said that yourself. You got that bit right, for sure.

  Some item of clothing I’ll recognize you by.

  22

  Back-up can come in the shape of an ARV team or the so 19 gun squad, or it’s forensic help, or it’s a five-foot four-inch carroty-haired grease-monkey working out of a lock-up in Shepherd’s Bush. Like every detective, Stella had a network of informants. The vocabulary changes: at one time, your contact might have been a grass, or a nark, or a face, or a voice. These days an informant is called a chis: that’s Covert Human Intelligence Source. Stella sometimes doubted the ‘intelligence’ factor when she was speaking to Mickey Wicks, but he was connected and that was what mattered.

  Mickey ran a workshop out of the lock-up. It wasn’t much of a space, so he was restricted to handling just one car at a time and that included the cars he handled in other ways, such as the executive limos that were lifted from some address on the north side of Holland Park Avenue and wound up on the south side of the English Channel half a day later. A Merc, a Jag or a Lexus would come down to him for a respray, a plate-change and a new chassis number on a fast turn-around basis that left Mickey in possession for no more than three hours, which was why he’d only once been arrested for conspiracy to rob and handling stolen goods.

  Stella knew about Mickey’s way with top-of-the-range autos, but it wasn’t really her business. She had found Mickey through a series of hand-ons from colleagues who were moving from the division or retiring or going back into uniform. She’d inherited him. His vehicle remakes were a fair means by which to threaten him, but way back in the chain someone must have had something really serious on Mickey Wicks, though everyone had forgotten what it was. The relationship continued out of habit. Habit and greed.

  She drove down to the Bush amid a clatter of airborne garbage. The wind was still coming in off the Arctic shelf, but now it had some muscle. There were reports of offshore gales and heavy seas. Mickey heard an engine die and looked up from his work to see Stella parking across the open doors of the lock-up. The doors were open to prevent Mickey succumbing to exhaust fumes and he was using three patio heaters to compensate. He was working on a midnight blue BMW seven series and, just at present, it wasn’t carrying licence-plates.

  Mickey said, ‘You couldn’t move your car down the mews a bit?’

  Stella stood close to the door, within reach of a patio heater. She said, ‘I won’t be long, Mickey.’

  ‘It’s not a good time, Mrs Mooney.’

&nb
sp; A number of her informants called her that. It seemed to fall easily to the tongue, probably because a man would have been addressed as mister. None of them called her Stella.

  ‘Someone coming for the car?’ Mickey was silent on that one. The gales, the big seas off the south coast, meant that ferries weren’t running and the supply lines had jammed, leaving Mickey stranded with a midnight blue BMW and a sick expression. Stella took another step into the lock-up. ‘Look, I just need something on a crew robbing over in Notting Hill. The police up there are calling them the Clean Machine. I expect the name’s got back to them.’

  Mickey shook his head. It didn’t mean, I don’t know; it meant, I can’t tell you.

  ‘I need to recover some property,’ Stella said. ‘It’s a murder inquiry.’

  ‘The person’s dead?’ Mickey asked. ‘Let it go. What good can it do?’ Mickey the philosopher.

  ‘We need to run some tests. DNA. It’s like’ – Stella nodded at the BMW – ‘let’s say that was stolen and we wanted to know who’d handled it. And let’s say we had your DNA sample. We’d test the car, we’d get a match, the jury wouldn’t hesitate. Say what you like about Stephen Hawking, science is a wonderful thing.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ Mickey said.

  ‘Clean Machine. If we know, you know.’

  ‘Stephen who?’

  Stella was prepared to be patient; prepared to explain. ‘Anything you come into contact with you mark,’ she informed him. ‘A hair will do, a fibre, microscopic stuff. I expect you know all this, though, don’t you?’ She ran a hand over the BMW’s bodywork.

  ‘Your car,’ Mickey said. ‘Could you move your car?’

  ‘I won’t be here long, will I? I hope not.’

  Mickey grimaced, showing his teeth. ‘Mrs Mooney...’

  She said nothing.

  The patio heaters hissed. ‘Five crews,’ he said. ‘Five altogether. Clean Machine – they’re just one of them. If I ever get named for this –’

  Stella said, ‘Tell me and you won’t. Don’t tell me and you will.’