Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  Sadie and Jamie crossed the road by Notting Hill tube and found a sheltered patch outside a newsagent’s. People were going in for papers and cigarettes and chocolate. The Christmas spirit was beginning to kick in because Sadie had made enough the previous evening to get off her face, which had made the cold less of a problem for a while. Jamie didn’t bother with drugs; he was high on the love of God. Well, he’d smoke a little draw perhaps, but then that was in keeping with spiritual experiences. Jamie had read a book called Inward Jesus in which the author demonstrated convincingly that Our Saviour was the Magic Mushroom Man from Galilee. They sat on their bags and Sadie played ‘Silent Night’.

  Maxine Hewitt went into the newsagent’s and bought a pack of B & H.

  Pete Harriman stopped for a red light and glanced across at Maxine as she smoked. They were on their way to Harefield to talk to Sophie Simms’s boyfriend, who hadn’t been hard to ID. Not Scuzz or Buzz but Jaz: Harriman had simply talked to the Drugs Squad and they’d made the connection straight away. Harriman asked whether Sophie had been part of the Harefield drug scene and was told no. ‘No’ didn’t mean she stayed clear of drugs. She took drugs, sure, they all did; it meant that she wasn’t connected, that she didn’t have anything to do with the importation or distribution of drugs.

  The same couldn’t be said of Jaz.

  Harriman said, ‘What do you do when you’re not coppering, Max?’

  ‘Very few people call me Max.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘I do what most people do.’

  Harriman hopped the light on amber, pulling towards the kerb in case someone on the right-hand junction was running the red. Someone was: a small Peugeot braked hard and stalled across the grid. A chorus of horns went up. It was London driving, no question.

  ‘You mean go to the movies, go to the pub.’

  ‘Sort of thing.’

  ‘Me too.’

  He looked at her and there was a hint of a smile on her lips. He didn’t know what kind of a hint it was.

  At that time in the morning, Harefield was asleep. There were people on the estate who had jobs and families and lived unexceptional lives, but they went about their business quietly and at night stayed indoors.

  Harriman and Maxine were watched as they crossed the DMZ, but this was 9.50 a.m. and daylight and there were two of them. Harefield went on alert when drugs officers came in with dogs and an so19 gun squad was abseiling down from the tops of the towers to get to the sky-high crack dens. Two cops didn’t require an operational response. But they were still an irritant.

  A girl came to the door smelling of dope and sex. Maxine showed her a warrant card and she sighed in disgust, then walked back into the flat. Jaz took his time. First he had to climb into some clothes, then he had to visit the bathroom. Harriman wondered how much coke was going down the pan, how much blow.

  The living room was furnished with two beaten-up armchairs and a table. When Jaz finally showed up, he took one of the armchairs. His skin was dusky gold and he had sixty-rep biceps.

  He said, ‘What?’

  Harriman asked him about Sophie and Jaz shrugged. ‘I knew her.’

  ‘You were seeing her.’

  ‘I see lots of women, yeah?’

  ‘She died,’ Maxine said. ‘Did you hear about that?’

  Jaz glanced up at her. He saw the look in her eye. He said, ‘Out in the park. Bad shit.’

  ‘She told her sisters you were special to her. You were together.’

  ‘Nah, man. Why would she say that?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harriman said, ‘she believed it was true.’

  Jaz held up his hands. ‘What do I know?’

  ‘You let her think it?’

  ‘Let her think? I don’t let people think. They think what they think. Listen, she wanted to hang out, that was okay, and she liked to fuck. She was good at it.’ He laughed. ‘They could put it on her gravestone.’

  Maxine said, ‘What’s your real name, Jaz?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you’ve ever been arrested we might have your DNA on the database. In which case, I need your name. And, in case we haven’t, I’m asking you to give a sample now.’

  Jaz said he was Jason LeGuinnec. He spelled it for them. Yes, he’d been busted. Yes, he’d given a swab. And he wanted them to know that he was on the other side of London when Sophie had been attacked, okay? He was there with people.

  Harriman said nothing. He knew that Jaz hadn’t killed Sophie. Maxine knew it too, but she decided to make Jaz give a second sample for the hell of it. Jaz rubbed the swab round his mouth and over his gums, then dropped it into a glassine envelope.

  Maxine smiled at him as they were leaving. She said, ‘Not this but something else. Take it from me. You’re on a list. It’s just a matter of time. We’ll fix you up.’

  Jaz went to the door with them like an attentive host. Good idea to show a little class. Good idea to let people know that the cops were there to mess you up.

  Jaz lived on Floor 16. He watched Harriman and Maxine walk away, watched Harriman hammer on Kimber’s door as he passed, then turn, twenty feet further on, as Kimber opened the door and looked out.

  ‘Robert Adrian Kimber,’ Harriman yelled. ‘Good morning, you sick fuck.’

  There was a market in the main street. Stallholders dressed in red pixie hats were offloading Christmas trees and strings of lights and rolls of Santa paper. You could get lookalike YSL and lookalike Rolex and lookalike Chanel. A sound system was playing carols loud enough to harrow Hell.

  Harriman nudged along in the tailback. There was only one tailback in London, but it went all the way. He said, ‘Movies, yes, definitely. I don’t go to the theatre.’ He pronounced it ‘theahtuh’ and waved an expressive hand.

  ‘You should give it a try.’

  ‘Shall we?’

  Maxine didn’t take his lead. She lit a cigarette and looked out at the laden stalls. ‘How much of this would be knock-off, do you think?’

  Harriman said, ‘You’re not queer, are you?’ – grinning, making a joke of it.

  She was exhaling smoke and a great laugh came with it, making her cough so that she had to wait, reaching for breath. Finally, she said, ‘Yes, I am. I am queer. I’ve been queer since I was seventeen. I’m definitely queer.’

  Harriman knew a rat-run. He swung the wheel and juiced the car into a maze of back streets. He made good time. He faced down drivers coming the other way.

  Finally, he said, ‘That would be it, then.’

  26

  As exhibitions officer it was Nick Robson’s job, after the warehouse raid, to bag, store, catalogue and keep every item that had relevance to the case. Valerie Blake’s clothes and shoes would go to Forensics in the hope of a happy match, but then they would come back to Nick. In the meantime he took the gleanings from the pockets of Valerie’s stolen dresses and jackets and entered them on the database.

  a tube ticket

  a ‘while you were out’ card from the Post Office

  a letter

  a tube of lip-balm

  a blister pack of Nurofen

  a hair-tie

  a receipt from a petrol station at Heathrow

  These items would go to Forensics too, but Stella wanted to look them over first. She was wearing latex gloves and using tweezers to turn the pages of the letter. It was written to Duncan Palmer but had never been posted. It said, I love you. It said, What’s wrong? It said, Are you having second thoughts? It said, Is it the workload, the wedding, the fuss, is it me?

  Stella turned to Robson. She said, ‘Get this to Forensics and ask them for a quick turnaround. There’s a guy down there called Tom Davison. Tell him I asked after his underwear.’ She indicated the Post Office card. ‘Someone sent her a parcel. Let’s find out what it is.’

  Mike Sorley had left a note on her desk: Call by. She walked down the corridor to wher
e he was elbow-deep in paper, a cigarette in his mouth, another forgotten in an ashtray. Someone had inked a message round the rim of the ashtray: SMOKING MAKES YOU IMPOTENT.

  He said, ‘Know why I became a copper?’

  ‘So you could pull people off the street, falsely accuse them and kick them round a cell. It’s what career coppers do. I read it in the papers.’

  ‘Yes. So why am I doing admin? Fucking admin. I’m Admin Man.’

  ‘And you don’t –’

  ‘And I don’t qualify for overtime because of rank. Exactly.’ He shoved some reports aside and washed his face with his hands. ‘I’m feeling a bit crap.’

  ‘Don’t get flu.’

  ‘I will if I fucking want. You had a lively time last night.’

  ‘We got what we went for.’

  ‘What happened to the illegals?’

  ‘They’ll be in nick by now, along with a mixed bunch of killers, rapists, GBH specialists and psychos, most of whom will want to kill them on the grounds that they’re available.’

  Sorley looked at her. ‘What?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘It’s not their fault.’

  ‘It’s not yours,’ Sorley said. ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘Okay.’ Stella let it lie. It was politics. Don’t do politics. Leave it to the bent bastards in Westminster.

  ‘A view has been taken,’ Sorley told her, ‘that things aren’t going along all that fast. In fact, aren’t moving much at all. It’s been suggested that Valerie Blake and Sophie Simms get handed over to the team that caught the earlier attacks.’

  ‘And are they close to a result?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Exactly. We liaised with them. There are certain similarities, but the differences are striking.’

  ‘There’s a theory that it’s copy-cat. You suggested it yourself.’ Sorley started to fish through the piles on his desk, looking for the relevant report.

  ‘If it’s copy-cat, then we’re talking about different individuals, different thinking. The MO might look familiar, but one line of inquiry isn’t going to bring us two killers. Apart from that – DNA. No matches.’

  ‘There’s pressure,’ Sorley told her. ‘You’re going to have to give me something soon.’

  Jaz was feeling bad. Not ill but not good. It had to do with visits from the cops and Sophie dying and having sluiced some street-cut coke down the pan – and people, he thought, people getting in my fucking face.

  The girl who’d opened the door to Harriman and Maxine fished out some skins and a block of gold. She put the TV on and Jaz switched it off. She started to speak and he told her to shut up. When she sparked up, Jaz took the spliff for himself, then made a call on his mobile and went out.

  The girl said ‘Bastard’ to his retreating back, though not loud enough to be heard. She rolled another spliff and watched Bargain Hunt; it was the high-point of her day.

  Jaz picked up three guys in the bull ring. They smoked for a while and drank some high-percentage beers and talked deals. Then they went back up to the sixteenth floor and knocked at the door of Flat 31. When Kimber came to the door, Jaz explained their thinking.

  Harefield was a business address and the cops are bad for business.

  Kimber was a celebrity now. They’d seen him in the papers.

  Celebrities were okay in their place. This wasn’t the place.

  Now the cops were making regular visits.

  This had to stop. It was a problem.

  Kimber might think that a change of address would solve the problem.

  It was certainly what everyone else was thinking.

  They were pretty sure he’d agree.

  They were prepared to give him all of two days to agree.

  Kimber was dressed to go out. He was wearing a yellow, down-filled jacket and a blue baseball cap with a dark red peak: you’d spot him in a crowd for sure.

  Jaz said, ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Kimber agreed.

  As he made to leave, Jaz shouldered him back against the door and held him there a moment. Kimber’s expression blanked. He stared up past the circle of tower blocks to where a gull was sliding down the wind. It banked, stiff-winged, looking for easy pickings.

  Jaz laughed. He was feeling a little better.

  Kimber’s journey took him through Notting Hill Gate, where he stopped off to buy a pack of cigarettes. A girl with a penny whistle was playing Christmas carols, pinched with the cold, scarcely able to hold a tune. A boy with rank hair and a tangled beard was sitting close by and talking to her; or talking to himself.

  When Kimber emerged from the shop, Sadie said, ‘Spare some change?’ He didn’t look at her. As he started down Holland Park Avenue, she added, ‘You prick.’

  A girl went by in a leather coat and long scarf. Another was wearing a dark blue woollen coat. Kimber noted them. Either would have done: follow her, get close to her, find out about her, take a clipping of her hair. He watched them till they were out of sight, then forgot them. Something more important was happening. He felt alive in every nerve, his heart tapping hard, his fingers tingling with the cold.

  Some item of clothing I’ll recognize you by.

  27

  The Dove was busy, but no one was using the deck that overlooked the river, so they took their drinks out there. The river was high and flowing fast. Gull-cry, the sky slate blue, a wind off the water.

  ‘You’re not as I imagined you.’

  Kimber took off the baseball cap. He said, ‘No? How did you see me?’

  ‘More like me.’

  Heavy build, squat face, thin lips, high cheekbones, dark hair receding off his forehead, but the eyes a pale blue that seemed almost colourless in the winter sunlight. Not Oriental, not exactly Russian. Something that didn’t quite fit.

  ‘And you are?’ The man sipped his drink. Kimber asked again, ‘I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Leon Bloss.’ The man held out his hand, the last thing Kimber expected. He went to shake and found himself holding a gold cross on a thin gold chain. The clasp was broken. ‘Valerie’s,’ Bloss said. ‘Valerie’s crucifix.’ He had a high, thin laugh, like a bird’s cry.

  Kimber closed his hand over it and a shock, like voltage, travelled to his shoulder. He realized he was trembling.

  He said, ‘Why did you kill her?’

  Bloss was looking across the river to the far towpath. A flat-bed cargo vessel went by, lifting a silvery-green wake. He lit a cigarette and let the smoke flow from his mouth and nostrils. Kimber sat patiently, clutching the crucifix, the little cross-bar biting into the palm of his hand. He knew that a decision was being taken, something larger and more dangerous than whether Bloss simply answered his question, though answering the question was a part of it. Or maybe he was being offered an opportunity. Was it too late to walk away?

  ‘Well,’ Bloss said, ‘she made herself available to me.’

  Kimber sighed, relaxing his hand, and the cross caught a glint of the sun.

  It had always been too late.

  They walked on the towpath, hands deep in pockets, shoulders hunched against the upstream wind.

  Bloss asked, ‘Do you work? Have you got a job?’

  ‘Made redundant a year ago. I got a package… there’s that, and social security.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’

  ‘I have to move,’ Kimber said. ‘I have to find somewhere to live.’

  ‘There’s a problem?’

  ‘The police… they know where to find me. They come round from time to time. It makes people nervous. It makes me nervous.’

  ‘Still on the Harefield Estate?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Bloss said, ‘We’ll find you a new place. No problem.’

  ‘Tell me… what was it like? Valerie...’

  ‘How did you select them – the girls you followed?’ A question answered with a question.

  ‘If they were sexy. If they looked my way. If they got on my bus.’

  ‘Never anyone you
knew?’

  ‘No. Just one time. A girl I worked with. But it wasn’t any good.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I liked it that she was there in the office and chatted to me and didn’t know that we had, you know, a different connection. But I knew her and –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wasn’t the stranger. She knew my name, all sorts of things about me. It didn’t work.’

  ‘You cut their hair. You told me… you took a snip of their hair. Why did you do that?’

  ‘You took Valerie’s cross.’

  Bloss nodded. ‘Yes...’ He held out a hand and Kimber returned the crucifix. He’d been holding it all the time.

  The cross and the snippets of hair: tiny power-sources, as if they held a live charge.

  ‘We’ll go back and collect your things,’ Bloss said, ‘I know of a place. I don’t suppose you’ll have much to move.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve got a car. We’ll get you out of there. Don’t worry: it’s as good as done.’

  They found a bench and sat there: old friends out for the day.

  Bloss picked up a couple of pebbles from the path and lobbed them at the water. Droplets rose and glittered. He said, ‘Did you ever think of going further?’

  ‘I broke in a couple of times. Looked around. Touched their stuff.’ Kimber paused. ‘Smelled things. Thought I might wait for them to come home.’

  ‘Smell’s important,’ Bloss said. ‘I can vouch for that.’

  ‘I never did what you did.’

  ‘Wait for them, and –’

  ‘I wasn’t sure how to do it. Get it right.’

  ‘Wait for them and fuck them.’

  ‘I thought about that.’

  ‘Kill them.’

  ‘I thought about that.’

  ‘How did you feel, being in there, in her place, among her things, knowing she would come back, and even if you weren’t there, you’d been there?’

  ‘As good as following. Better, in some ways.’

  ‘What did you leave?’

  ‘How do you know I–’

  ‘What was it?’