Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  She said, ‘I know where the stuff is.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s a burglary, right? Someone has to burgle.’ A little flush had come to her cheeks and she was smiling. ‘What are you going to do to him?’

  ‘Go,’ Bloss told her. ‘Take what you like.’

  He opened the rucksack and removed a plastic envelope, inside of which was a green contamination suit. The overalls, the rubber shoes, the beanie, the gloves – they were fine first protection against shedding DNA. Wet work was a different issue.

  He put the suit on over his overalls and snapped the press-stud fasteners. The legs ended in plastic foot-pods that went over his shoes and there was a hood with a draw-string. He removed his cotton gloves, put those into the rucksack, and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, working his fingers into the latex. He was a workman getting ready for the night-shift.

  The blonde said, ‘Jesus. Jesus Christ.’

  Bloss told her to go and this time she went.

  Oscar was speaking from behind the duct-tape gag. Bloss knew what he was saying even though the words were faint and distorted. He was saying, ‘Please.’ He was using a lot of words but they all added up to ‘Please.’

  Bloss opened the lock-knife and stabbed Oscar a few times in the fat of his thighs. Oscar arched and tried to backpedal but there was nowhere to go. He wanted to scream, but that’s difficult to do breathing through your nose and choking on your own saliva. Bloss held his man down with one hand and a knee. He stabbed his biceps. When Oscar turned over to protect himself, Bloss stabbed his buttocks. Oscar flipped like a fish and fell on to the floor.

  Bloss stepped back and caught his breath. In the same moment, the floodlights came on in the driveway and the doorbell rang. Oscar’s eyes bulged and thin, thready sounds emerged from behind the duct tape. Bloss hit him across the temple with the gun and Oscar’s eyes rolled to show the whites.

  There was a moment when everything seemed to be held on a drawn breath, then Bloss left the room and went upstairs, moving fast but silently. The blonde was standing by a back-bedroom door: the master bedroom. She said, ‘Who?’ He waved a hand to shut her up. Then he went into a bedroom that overlooked the front of the house and made a curving approach to the window so that he could see without being seen. Out in the street, people were singing carols, barely audible thanks to Oscar’s double-glazing, a well-organized charity group with their accordion-player, their Santa hats and their antique lanterns. The doorbell rang for a second time. As he watched, a man and a woman, with lantern and collecting box, moved back from the front door of Oscar’s house, pausing in the hope of getting a response, then turned and set off back towards the street. Bloss watched them down the drive and out on to the street. His laugh was almost silent, huh-huh-huh-huh. The blonde was behind him at the door. She said, ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve gone,’ Bloss told her, and she moved away, heading for the master bedroom and whatever she could find there.

  When Bloss got back to the living room, Oscar Gribbin was on his feet, leaning heavily against a roll-top desk on the far side of the room. His trousers and shirtsleeves were dripping blood and he was shaking like a man with a fever. The handcuffs had restricted him and he’d worked hard to get the desk open and pull out the drawer above the writing-space in order to get the gun, a neat Smith & Wesson .38. He was holding it with his handcuffed hands, trying to support the barrel with his left while going for the trigger with his right, but his fingers were tangling.

  There was no time to get across the room. Bloss shot Oscar, taking him lower and more to the side than he’d intended, putting the bullet between rib and hip. The force of the shot half turned Oscar and brought him to his knees, but he held on to the gun. Bloss got off a second shot as he crossed the room; it went to the side of the throat. Oscar was down now and fighting for breath; he heaved himself up on knuckles and knees like a sprinter taking to the blocks. Bloss stood over him and shot him in the back of the head. Oscar came unstrung; everything left him and he seemed to sink into himself.

  Bloss kicked Oscar in the side, then in the thigh. He said, ‘Bastard!’ Oscar was supposed to die that night, yes, but the weapon should have been the hammer. A gun broke the pattern. Bloss had needed the gun in order to be able to control the situation when he first walked in behind the blonde, but that was all. Now he’d had to use it and that made a mess of things.

  He looked round and the blonde appeared as if on cue. She was wearing a full-length ranch mink and holding a diamond bracelet. She put the aquarium between herself and Oscar like a child peeking at a scary TV show from behind a sofa. Trickles of blood seeped round the glass pillars.

  Bloss joined her, still wearing the transparent contamination suit, which was slick with blood. He looked like something newborn. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ he asked.

  She held up the bracelet. ‘Wifey must have taken the rest of the good stuff with her.’ She was speaking to Bloss but looking at Oscar, who was on the floor, legs spread, body arched. He looked like a skydiver braced against the wind. She said, ‘I have to get to the West End. There’s a cabbie going to say he took me straight from the restaurant to a club. The doorman saw me go in an hour ago. Him and some friends.’

  Bloss nodded. He said, ‘Billy set it up.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to mess the place up a bit.’ He took the hammer from his bag of tricks and moved a step or two away from her as if making for a further room, then swung round and hit her on the turn, laying the hammer sideways against her temple. She walked a pace or two, her knees buckling like a drunk’s, and he hit her again. When she went down, he pulled her back to the aquarium and propped her against one of the glass stilts, then put the garrotte round both her neck and the stilt before taking up the slack with the steel bar. She seemed to leap as he put both hands to use on the bar. Her body shook and her heels rattled the floor. Her eyes popped and there was a sound in her throat like the sea dragging stones.

  Bloss worked on her until he was sure, then sat back heavily, shoulders slumped. His fingers ached. After a moment, he got up and went round to face her.

  He flipped open the mink coat, pushed her dress up and stripped her below the waist.

  He stood over her and let a little of the hair from Kimber’s brush fall on the fork of her legs. Then he trashed the place.

  The blonde had been right: there didn’t seem to be much to take that was portable. Cufflinks, some costume jewellery, three or four hundred in cash, some silver. Oscar had been carrying a wallet stuffed with notes and credit cards, which Bloss had already lifted. He put everything into his rucksack, along with the document case, the hammer, the knife, the gun and the spare clip.

  When he left, the blonde was still sitting upright against the glass stilt, her smile a rictus, her teeth grouted with red.

  Luminous fish were shoaling towards the light.

  He took a bus and then walked, anonymous among the happy, the sad, the bored, the bereft. Among the drunks and the jokers, the pickups and the bustups.

  He strolled to the centre of Hammersmith Bridge and stopped to admire the view. Reflections of the lights from riverside pubs flexed and danced in the water. Aviation lights of planes chased each other down the flightpath to Heathrow. The rucksack went in with a small splash: the contamination suit, the overalls, the knife, the hammer, the cufflinks, the silver… everything but the cash. The cash was okay to keep. And he kept the gun.

  He walked to a street phone and called Billy Souza.

  Billy said, ‘How did it go off?’

  ‘Just fine,’ Bloss told him.

  ‘Our friend?’

  ‘He left. He won’t be back.’

  ‘The lady?’

  ‘She went with him.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Billy said. ‘And the tape?’

  ‘There was no tape, Billy.’

  A pause, then, ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘He wou
ld have told me.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I know he would have told me. Also, I searched the place.’

  ‘It was a con.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Billy sighed. ‘Stupid to bluff on an empty hand.’

  There was activity all around, kids going by in search of another party, arguments on the run, someone throwing up in a McDonald’s doorway. A couple of beggars were working the late crowd: a girl with a penny whistle and a skinny guy with red hair, wrapped in a quilted coat.

  Bloss said, ‘I’m thinking I might go away for a bit.’

  ‘Okay,’ Billy said. ‘Call by for what I owe.’

  ‘That would be cash, right?’

  ‘Sure. Cash.’ Just before Bloss hung up, Billy added, ‘Listen – good job.’

  Bloss called into a bar for a drink. The music was loud enough to paralyse small mammals. It was good to be lost in that noise and the bar-lights and the lives going on round him as if nothing had happened. The barman brought him a large Scotch and pointed to the tariff chalked up on a board.

  Bloss patted his pockets. In one, his wallet, in another, the video-tape and the diamond bracelet.

  60

  The blonde and Oscar, Oscar and the blonde, side by side on the squad-room whiteboard, his sky-diving-in-death pose, her big red-and-white grin. The blonde’s name was Ellen Clarke and she’d been identified by a credit card and a driving licence. Apart from the name, she might as well have been a Jane Doe. A set of house keys were still waiting to find a lock and there was no ‘home’ among her mobile phone contacts. Frank Silano was working through the numbers that did appear and getting a lot of hang-ups.

  A small crowd of rubberneckers had gathered: the AMIP-5 team, with their Twix bars and crisps and cartons of coffee. Marilyn Hayes looked for a moment, then walked back to her desk, giving a little hiccough. Stella sat on her desk to talk. She asked for any ideas.

  ‘He follows the girl,’ Maxine said, ‘intending to kill her as he’d killed the others, but something goes wrong, maybe the street’s too busy, she doesn’t walk though any parks, whatever, so he follows her home and kills her there.’

  ‘Not home,’ Silano reminded her. ‘She didn’t live there. The sorrowing wife lives there.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Sorley asked. He was standing in the doorway, trying to keep his bacteria to himself. ‘The sorrowing wife?’

  ‘On a plane home from Meribel,’ Stella told him. ‘And what’ – she turned to Maxine – ‘he has to kill the boyfriend too?’

  ‘Seems logical to me.’

  ‘Why not choose someone else? Someone who does walk through parks, someone who isn’t making things difficult? Why go into a house where it’s likely there’ll be another person around? It’s not the MO.’

  ‘He works off obsession,’ Harriman offered. ‘Isn’t that what we think? He targets women. We saw the photos in his Hare-field flat. He chooses them, singles them out. Something had to go wrong for him sometime. So he kills them both.’

  ‘Him? There are two of them,’ Sorley offered, ‘we’ve established that. Kimber and Mister Mystery.’

  ‘We don’t know that they were both there,’ Stella said. ‘We have to wait for Forensics. But let’s assume they were. Okay, they torture the man – multiple stab wounds to the thighs, the biceps, the buttocks. What does that say?’

  ‘They want something – hiding place for the valuables, combination of the safe, that sort of thing,’ Maxine said. ‘It’s a common pattern.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But it doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Or maybe it was nothing more than opportunity,’ Maxine suggested. ‘They follow the blonde’ – she glanced at the crime report – ‘Ellen Clarke, she goes to the house and they haven’t had their chance yet, maybe she changed her route, maybe she doesn’t usually go to this house –’

  ‘Maybe she’s usually Tuesday and Thursdays,’ Silano said, ‘but the wife’s away, so –’

  Maxine nodded. ‘Right, yes, so they catch up to Ellen at the door, grab her, go in with her, he’s there –’

  ‘Oscar Gribbin,’ Stella said.

  ‘Right, and so he’s got to be killed too. And while they’re there, hey, it’s a big house, this is a rich guy, why not rip him off? So they hurt him to make him tell them where the money is.’

  ‘And is the girl dead?’ Stella asked. ‘Have they killed her yet, or is she watching all this? And why did they use a gun on him but garrotte her?’

  No one had an answer for that.

  Side by side on the whiteboard, side by side on the slab. Sam Burgess was also looking for answers. He worked on Oscar and the blonde together because they were related in death; they were part of the same problem.

  ‘There are things here you already know,’ he told Stella. ‘He was tortured – fifteen wounds in all, none of them lethal, none deep, all to fleshy parts of the body.’

  ‘It’s a means to an end,’ Stella said.

  ‘I know that. I’ve seen it before. The torturer wants information – where do you keep the money, where do you keep the valuables? – and eventually the victim tells him. Some probably tell him almost immediately, but torturers like to have their fun, also they like to be sure, so the treatment continues for a while. Then the torturer makes the victim open the safe or whatever, and leaves. The victim’s tied up, combination of shock and blood-loss results in death. There’s a difference here.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He was stabbed, then shot very soon afterwards.’

  ‘So Gribbin caved in immediately, told him where the cash was, and the guy finished him.’

  ‘That’s what I’d say if it was just him. Rich man, big house, familiar pattern.’ He paused and looked across to where the blonde lay waiting her turn. ‘Except for her, of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stella said. ‘Except for her.’

  *

  Tom Davison had some more immediate answers, one of which was that Oscar Gribbin had been the first to die.

  Stella sat at her desk, her shoulder lifted to wedge the phone while she papered Sam Burgess’s early findings. She said, ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘It’s in the blood patterns. He lost a lot, she lost almost none. The house has a heavily varnished wood-block floor, no soak factor. His blood-flow crosses the room to the fish-tank thing and keeps going. When she dies, she’s sitting in his blood, it’s on the backs of her legs, it’s on the underside of the fur coat. Ergo, he’d been shot before she was backed up to the glass pillar and throttled.’ He paused. ‘Why was she wearing a fur coat indoors?’

  ‘Who knows? Early Christmas present, perhaps. I’ve never had a sugar daddy, so I wouldn’t know. He was stabbed fifteen times, so there would have been blood before he was whacked. You’re sure he was first to die?’

  ‘Viscosity of blood, amount shed from stab-wounds versus amount shed from major trauma like the head-wound; also size of room, positions of bodies. Trust me, DS Mooney. It may be gore to you, but it’s bread and butter to me.’

  ‘No DNA results yet, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

  ‘Anything on the bullets? Any fingerprints?’

  ‘Fingerprint elimination’s under way. The bullets are with a specialist unit.’

  ‘Okay. But how soon for the DNA?’

  ‘I’ll rush round with the results as soon as they turn up.’

  ‘Don’t fuck me about, Davison, I’ve got a weird situation here and I need some answers.’

  ‘About Kimber’s DNA and Mister Mystery’s DNA – you need to know if they’re both at the scene?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Look, I’m serious. When the results are in, I’ll bring them over. Do you ever eat Chinese food?’

  ‘You’re married.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Then it must be true.’

  The call that had come through on Stella’s mobile during the squad b
riefing had been from Delaney. She picked it up on voicemail as she walked across the car park.

  Hi, it’s me. Just wondering, trying to keep my distance, not making a very good job of it… so let’s meet up. I’d sort of thought we might go somewhere for Christmas, now I don’t know what to do. What to think. Give me a call. I love you, but I hope you know that.

  I do know that. And I don’t know what to do either. Or what to think.

  Her windscreen was frosted over, so she got in and ran the heater for a few minutes. The ice-melt and her own tears blurred her eyes.

  61

  Trixie Gribbin had a ski-tan, blonde streaks and a cleavage like wash-leather. The tan was tight over her cheekbones and her eyes had a little upwards slant. Trixie was being looked after by several friends in a house only slightly larger and more expensive than her own. The friends wore designer everything and sparkled when they moved. They brought coffee and cake, then settled into chairs to observe proceedings. When Stella told them to leave, they looked affronted and stayed put. Frank Silano was a little less polite. They left their coffees as if expecting to return before they cooled.

  If Trixie had been crying, she’d put her make-up on since the last tears flowed. Stella said she was sorry. Trixie said she was sorry too, and that she had an appointment with her lawyers in an hour, so maybe they could get through things quickly. It was tough talk, but there was a quiver in her voice.

  Stella was holding a copy of the crime report from the local cops. The housekeeper who had found Oscar and Ellen was still in recovery. Trixie had given an initial report of missing items that she had described as bits and pieces of silver and a bracelet. There was an existing photograph and full description of the bracelet taken for insurance purposes, though without the technical details it came down to four strands of diamonds on platinum with a snake-head clasp and was entered by the insurers at fifty thousand pounds.

  ‘It was the only thing not in the safe,’ Trixie said. ‘I’d meant to take it, but I forgot.’

  ‘And the safe is in the basement.’