Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  The driver would know the main-road routes, nothing else, so Stella sat in the front to indicate the back-doubles. The guy might have been a stranger, but there were some aspects of the neighbourhood that hadn’t escaped him, and when Stella took them through Harefield, he activated the door locks. They cruised through the bull ring. The LCD on the dashboard showed ‘ice alert’, but there were still ten or more kids hanging out by the offie and the KFC. They all wore baggies and hoodies and face-studs. She peered out at them and one flipped her the finger.

  She called the locals and asked them to check the kids. Maybe the alcopops and the big chicken buckets were courtesy of her two hundred cash. Somebody’s cash. These kids were the mules and dealers, the crimeline tyros, the team muggers, the teeny-hookers. Doing time was a matter of time, and they would emerge with their apprenticeships served.

  The driver didn’t react to her phone call because he didn’t know what was being said. Stella asked him where he came from and the question must have contained a phrase he’d heard before because he answered at once, ‘Afghan.’ She asked him how long he’d been in Britain and he smiled and shrugged. She asked him about the war and he smiled and shrugged. She didn’t ask him for his driving licence or his immigration documents or his work permit because she had already guessed how much paper that would generate.

  He dropped her at the Ocean Diner, where she started a tab with her credit card, ordered a vodka in a shot-glass with one cube of ice and listened to the friendly sound of the ice cracking as the vodka covered it.

  Robert Kimber saw Stella off in her cab, then walked the rest of the way to the tube.

  He had waited outside her flat, sometimes catching a glimpse of her as she went to and fro through the rubble in the living space. He’d walked off when the local cops called to take their notes, but stayed within sight of the flat. He was patient. He was used to waiting. The cold didn’t bother him at all.

  When Stella emerged, he was part of the shadow in a doorway. As she walked off, he was no more than just someone on his way to wherever. When she got to the main street, he was one in a crowd. He could tell her anger from the way she walked, finding the gap, angling between groups, leaning forwards slightly, elbows out. He tracked her, he dogged her. He got close enough to touch.

  The locals – the tall cop and the short – had been overjoyed when they got the call. The radio had been full of laughter.

  Mooney, a DS, her flat’s been turned over. Vigo Street.

  She’s the Filth?

  AMIP-5.

  And they’ve done her flat?

  You can’t wait to get down there, can you?

  Laughter. Voices overlapping. Then:

  Clean Machine, was it?

  She wasn’t that lucky. This lot wrecked the place, so she says.

  More laughter. The patrol cops talking to each other:

  You couldn’t make it up, could you?

  Just let me do the paper on this one.

  And more laughter. Then control coming back into the act:

  Be gentle with her.

  Kimber had been browsing on the Bearcat and there it was: Mooney. Vigo Street. It was just chance. A chance he couldn’t pass up. He’d smiled at his luck.

  Stella ordered another and considered her options. Go to Delaney’s. Let herself in. Sleep on the couch. Well, she didn’t like the sound of that husband and wife stuff.

  Go to a hotel, book in with no case, no change of clothes, show the warrant card perhaps, show the credit card. It looked like that was going to have to be the way, until the third option dropped into the diner: DC Maxine Hewitt and her pretty blonde girlfriend, looking for a post-movie meal and a glass of wine.

  They hadn’t seen her. Stella took her glass over to their table and sat down. She had forgotten about the way she must look two hours after taking a punch to the face. Maxine stared.

  Stella said, ‘I need a bed for the night. You’ll laugh when I tell you...’

  Maxine lived at the blowzy end of North Kensington, a new ‘town house’ row, all brown wood and dark brick, divided into flats. She showed Stella the spare room. ‘It’s really Jan’s workspace, but there’s a sofa-bed. Do you want some arnica for your face?’

  ‘You have arnica?’

  ‘Jan has arnica. All that alternative stuff.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ Stella told her. ‘The bastard broke my tooth – it scrapes the inside of my mouth when I talk.’

  ‘Don’t talk.’

  ‘What I really need is a shower.’

  Maxine gave her a towel, a bathrobe and some underwear. She said, ‘So they really did a job.’

  ‘Tagged the walls and the furniture, smashed what they could, stole what they wanted, pissed in my bed.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. You saw the locals?’

  Stella gave her a look and Maxine laughed. ‘I know. Vodka, right?’ Stella agreed that it was, and Maxine said, ‘Okay, Boss.’

  Despite the favour of a bed, despite being under the same roof as Maxine and her pretty blonde lover, and despite Stella having spent all evening on the losing side, that ‘Boss’ put them back on an even keel.

  The shower was a clear glass cubicle with a jet that knocked you back. Stella stood under the hard flow of water for a long time before washing her hair. Her face throbbed and the lining of her mouth was raw. She thought back through the moments when she’d walked into the flat, although she knew that being wise after the event led only to anger and humiliation.

  Should have got out at once, should have called back-up, should have known better. Shouldn’t have followed them, shouldn’t have ventured on to Harefield, shouldn’t have been working off anger.

  She was soaping herself when the door opened and Jan came in. She was wearing a silk robe, pale blue with darker blue edgings. She sat on a wicker chair and applied body lotion to her legs, smoothing and stroking, the robe falling away to the side. She seemed lost in what she was doing. Stella might have thought herself invisible, except that Jan smiled at her as she left, the way an acquaintance might smile as she passed by in the street.

  The vodka had a sandwich on the side. Stella flopped on to the couch; she was a little dizzy from the hot water and the booze. She said, ‘What time do you get up?’ She was thinking of going round to Delaney’s, collecting some clothes, talking to Sorley about the new development, about Delaney’s withheld information. Except that she wouldn’t be able to reveal her source. Was pretty certain she wouldn’t...

  Maxine said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s Sunday.’

  Even murder squads take a day off.

  There was no pretending. Everyone knew about Delaney, Harriman had told her that. Everyone knew that Vigo Street was another life.

  She said, ‘There are some times when you can’t go back.’ She wasn’t saying anything about the second man, about Angel and the emails. Her story to Maxine simply concerned one of those rows.

  Maxine said, ‘We’ve all been there.’ Then she asked, ‘Can’t go back now, or can’t go back ever?’

  Stella said, ‘I love him.’ She hadn’t meant to, but one minute it was in her thoughts, the next on her tongue. She scraped the soft tissue of her mouth with her tooth when she said it: a warning come too late.

  She ate the sandwich. They sat in silence for a while. Maxine was pretty enough herself, with her even features and her brown hair in a bob; maybe her lips were a little on the thin side: not perfect for kissing, Stella thought. There were sirens in the street and late-night voices. Maxine said, ‘Where’s your husband now?’

  ‘Not my husband,’ Stella told her. ‘He’s in Seattle designing boats and making money.’

  ‘And making friends?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Stella said. She knew what Maxine meant by friends.

  ‘So things have worked out.’

  Stella agreed that they had. Things had worked out as well as could be expected. ‘Sometimes I think back to what it was like, living with George, and I remember...’ She thought
round it for a moment, then said, ‘…that there wasn’t much to remember.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Stella said, ‘but I know I didn’t have to think about it all the time. Think about him, about us, about the relationship.’

  ‘Love’s hard work,’ Maxine agreed.

  Jan went through with a face innocent of make-up, her blue robe floating as she walked. She waved to say goodnight.

  ‘Are you in love with her?’ Stella asked.

  Maxine smiled. She said, ‘I like her very much. I’m in love with her technique.’

  The spare room backed on to gardens. Stella switched off the light and looked out of the window. A fox was standing on a patch of frost-rimed grass, head down, searching for prey. The half-moon and the night-long city glow gave more than enough light. The fox’s concentration was intense. As Stella watched, it gave a little bound and nipped up whatever it was: a shrew, a house-mouse, a rat.

  London was full of predators and scavengers.

  Her face hurt and she felt too uneasy in her mind to sleep, but she lay down in the dark. She didn’t have a plan for her life and she didn’t have a plan for catching the killer of Valerie Blake and Sophie Simms.

  Her mobile rang and she knew who it was. She reached out and switched it off. In the next room, Jan and Maxine were talking, their voices low, barely audible. Then the talking stopped.

  John Delaney listened to Stella’s voice asking him to leave a message. He said, ‘Stella, come home.’

  He put the TV on and watched a few scenes from a made-for-TV movie, but he couldn’t settle. He went from room to room, as if he might find her there, still angry but ready to forgive, though he wasn’t completely sure that forgiveness was the issue.

  ‘Home’ was a loaded word and he knew it.

  Robert Adrian Kimber was writing. He was using a pen because he felt better connected to the words. Also he liked his handwriting: it was small and neat and unfussy. He liked to keep the lines close to one another, so the text appeared as a solid block of penmanship.

  Outside, the girls were still working. Some always moved down from the Strip to the main road at this time of night; they worked the crossroads. There were more police patrols, but there were more punters. The side gate to the cemetery was open, and it was a good place to take the head-jobs and the hand-jobs. The pimps moved down too, keeping an eye on their cash-crop.

  Kimber made a cup of coffee and watched them for a while. He remembered Nancy, the working girl he sometimes used, and almost followed an impulse to go out and find her, but he had his work to finish. He drank his coffee, then went back to the journal. He wrote about his luck, about DS Mooney, about how close he’d got.

  Close enough to touch.

  41

  It was late when Stella woke. She put on the bathrobe Maxine had given her and walked into the main room, which was full of light and music: a cold, blue light from the clear day outside; slow jazz, trumpet, guitar, drum-brushes. Jan sat at a table by the window drinking coffee. She went to the kitchen and brought a cup for Stella. In the cold morning light, she looked no less pretty, her blonde hair cut to just below the jaw, her nose small and straight, her features almost perfectly even.

  ‘Max has gone out for croissant and the papers. I have to leave in a moment.’

  Stella nodded. It was odd, this glimpse of another life, croissant, coffee, two women with their two-women ways. In the AMIP squad room, Maxine had a reputation for being hard-nosed and owning a sardonic sense of humour. No one really knows anyone, Stella thought – George Paterson, John Delaney… Stella Mooney. She smiled to herself and Jan noticed. She said, ‘That was a secret smile.’ It was an oddly intimate remark, but she spoke without any edge to her voice.

  ‘I was thinking that it’s impossible to second-guess people.’

  ‘You knew she was gay...’

  ‘Oh, God, I didn’t mean that. Just… people’s lives.’

  As if to illustrate the point, Jan said, ‘I see my daughter on Sundays. She’s three.’ After a moment, she added, ‘You never know what you’re looking for until you find it. Who said that?’

  ‘Someone who’d found it.’

  ‘Sounds right.’

  Jan went away and came back in a leather coat with a fur trim round the collar and cuffs. Stella asked, ‘When did you know?’

  ‘I’ve always known. The marriage was denial. Poor man.’

  ‘And the child?’

  ‘Heartbreak.’ She said it without a trace of self-pity.

  Stella thought that Jan was someone who lived life out in the open with no time for polite evasions. The notion drew her in. She said, ‘And how does it feel, the life you’ve got now?’

  She meant ‘changes’ and ‘no going back’, but Jan said, ‘The here and now or having sex with a woman?’

  Stella laughed. ‘Both, really.’

  Jan crossed to where Stella was sitting, dipped between the lapels of the bathrobe and passed her hand over Stella’s breast for a moment, a light touch, cupping her briefly, her thumb just grazing the nipple. Stella didn’t move; she was barely breathing.

  Jan walked to the door and opened it to leave. She said, ‘Well, how did that feel?’

  Kimber was just cruising. Sunday was a day of broken routines, nothing reliable, nothing you could count on. He’d been to Patricia’s address, but had drawn a blank. The temperature was a couple of degrees below freezing and people were hibernating. He felt restless. He’d settle for anything, anyone, someone who caught his eye… but he’d come down here just in case, not too far from home, a café where he could be warm, drink tea, keep an eye on the place. And there she was, suddenly, the one he called Monica, wearing the leather coat with the fur collar and cuffs, her blonde hair almost hidden by a cherry-red beanie.

  He grinned as he left the café. He was on the opposite side of the road and walking easily because she was not far ahead. He glanced around, as he always did – at the street, to check on the other walkers, at the flat to check that no one was watching her leave – and a movement at the window caught his attention. He glanced towards it, wary now, and his breath went away for a moment.

  A panel van was parked ten feet further up the road. He stepped behind it and looked through from the driver’s window to the window of Monica’s flat. DS Mooney. Stella Mooney. As if he’d never left her; as if she’d never been away. She hadn’t seen him. All her attention seemed to be on ‘Monica’ as she reached the top of the road and went out of sight.

  She stood at the window for a while, her gaze unmoving. She was wearing a white towelling bathrobe, one hand out of sight beneath the lapel.

  42

  Leon Bloss was very slightly stoned. He knew how to do that, he knew exactly how far to go. It sharpened him up. It made smells and colours just a little keener, a little brighter. A line or two was all he needed. Not to go to the edge, but a step or two off centre.

  It was how he liked to be when the time came to kill.

  There was a hint of darkness in the sky and the cloud-cover that had come in during the day would make for an early dusk. He watched as Kimber paced back and forth by the window, now and then casting an eye towards the ply-and-veneer coffee table where Bloss had laid out a claw hammer, a whipcord garrotte with a steel bar, a packet of babywipes – tools of the trade, the gear, the kit. Kimber had bought a jacket with a red fleece lining that you could turn inside out.

  Bloss said, ‘It doesn’t have to be tonight.’ But he knew it did.

  Kimber said, ‘I followed her from Vigo Street, then I lost her, then she turned up again plain as day.’

  ‘You told me,’ Bloss said. ‘We’re not thinking about her.’

  ‘No, but she was with Monica. Does that make it difficult?’

  ‘Makes it riskier. Degrees of separation.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You narrow the distance between yourself and the police. There’s a connection, something personal. Monica knows M
ooney, you kill Monica, Mooney knows you. It’s a pattern; it looks like bad luck.’

  ‘But Patricia’s random.’

  ‘Yes, she is.’

  ‘You think that’s the way we should go?’

  ‘It’s my advice.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter much to me. I think I would have chosen Patricia anyway. I’ve been closer to her. I followed her ten times, maybe fifteen, on the bus, in the street, everywhere. She works in an estate agent’s in Notting Hill. She uses a Motorola and her boyfriend is called Ben and I know her routes.’

  There were a dozen photographs of her up on the wall – taken in the street, mostly, though there was a long-lens shot of her crossing a park and another taken as she bought something in a shop. A dozen photos and an incomplete story written in silver ink on dark paper. Kimber had pinned the lock of her hair at the very bottom of the unfinished page, the place where the story ended.

  ‘What time does she come past?’ Bloss asked.

  ‘Seven to seven thirty, but it’s easy to spot her. She walks down to the junction, waits for the traffic, crosses the road, then has a hundred metres before she gets to the church.’

  ‘It’s good to have a plan,’ Bloss said.

  He picked up the hammer and hit the veneer table. The hammer-head went through, buried to the claw. He wrestled it out, working the shaft from side to side, then handed it to Kimber.

  ‘Your turn, Bobby.’

  43

  Kimber watched her up to the junction, watched as she stood at the kerb waiting for the lights to change, then he went down to join her.