Cold Kill

by David Lawrence

  A street light was shedding an orange glow into the living space. He walked around it, as if claiming possession, then sat on the sofa for a moment, just where he’d seen her sit, but it wasn’t really where he wanted to be. He helped himself from the fridge, a little snack; he helped himself from the vodka bottle, a little nip. Then he went back to the bedroom.

  He opened jars and tubes, sniffing, sampling. He stripped off and opened the closet. Her clothes were his. He put on a sparkly top and a short skirt, a pair of black silk trousers, a backless dress. None of it fitted: he had to leave zips unzipped and buttons unbuttoned, but he turned this way and that in front of the long mirror, in the dim light, feeling the material against his skin just as she had. He opened the drawers and put on her underwear. He applied some body lotion and a little flourish of lipstick.

  He smiled at his image, the blond hair flopping to the side, the grey-green eyes, the lips a little too pink.

  It was okay to switch on the bathroom light, because there was no window. He breathed deeply, wanting to get all there was of her: the hot, perfumed smells, but most of all he wanted some taint, some earthy scent of Stella herself. The odour of her faeces or her menstrual blood. He took a shower, using her gels, her sponge, taking it into his crotch, over his buttocks. He washed his hair with her shampoo and rubbed in some of her conditioner.

  After a while he went back to the bedroom, walking naked. He’d brought with him the clipping of her hair, a photo of her approaching the AMIP-5 offices, and a little story he’d written about himself and Stella, silver pen on black paper. He pinned them all to the wall. The story included everything he’d done so far but also mentioned that he climbed naked into Stella’s bed, smelling the lingering perfume on the covers and on her pillow, so that was what he did next.

  With the cover pulled up to his chin, he waited for Stella to come home so the story could end.

  The London streets were nothing but headlights and snow-light. The sky had come down to a point just six feet above the heads of the home-going crowds and if you looked up from Notting Hill Gate towards Bayswater, you saw what seemed to be a tunnel with white, flowing walls, lit by beams racked back for miles. On roundabouts and at junctions, there were pile-ups and broadsides and sideswipes. Drivers stood bare-headed in the blizzard, exchanging insurance details. A chorus of horns was sounding across the city.

  Jamie held the crucifix up for the drivers to see and the metal seemed to shed droplets of white light. He held it up to passers-by as they walked into the near-horizontal snow; they dodged and sidestepped. He held it up to anguished shoppers crowding the stores in search of that post-last-minute gift; security men hustled him back on to the street. He held it up in the cafés and fast-food facilities; the customers studied their plates with unusual interest until he went away.

  And he was shouting – to be heard over the traffic, the muzak, the indifference – He is coming the Lord is coming Jesus is coming...

  The car drivers and the shoppers and the diners had him down as a crazy, another of the looney-toons bastards who made life uncomfortable for a moment or two, but if Jamie was deranged, he was also strung-out, angry, half starved, abandoned and desperate. He knew that Christ’s appearance on earth would change everything; it would salve the wretched of the earth. It was something he had to believe in because there was nothing else to hand.

  On the snow-covered streets, he ran back and forth, slipping and stumbling, crossing roads, weaving between cars as they nosed forward, showing the crucifix and its dangling man to everyone he met. On Christmas Eve, for a man like Jamie, it was a last hope. Why shouldn’t it be true?

  Even in that weather, even at six in the evening on the day before Christmas, AMIP-5’s complement of extra officers were going door-to-door on Harefield, making follow-up calls and calls to doors that hadn’t opened first time round. They showed pictures of Robert Adrian Kimber and Leon Bloss. Sometimes people shook their heads, sometimes they invited the officers to fuck off.

  The weather was having an effect on business. Just as the Strip was clear of hookers and dealers, so the bull ring and the Harefield approach roads were white waste lands. Out on the DMZ, the shapes of abandoned hardware were muffled under snow. Business was being done indoors, and the presence of cops on the estate was making everyone jumpy. Triple locks were being thrown and lights were being switched off. The high walkways were swept by the winter-wind and the cops tramped round cursing their luck.

  Marilyn Hayes was going home for Christmas, which was the last thing she wanted to do – and the last thing she’d expected to do. Pete Harriman had tried to intercept her; he wanted to say something, but he had no real idea what. Sorry, perhaps, or I didn’t get it, or I never promised you a rose garden. Marilyn had brushed him off with a look. Now she got into her car and gunned the engine.

  I thought it was something special. I thought it was something different.

  She jabbed the accelerator, shimmied, turned to line up with the exit, floated sideways and hit another car with a slam-crash sound that allowed her to know that real damage had been done.

  She wasn’t going back into the squad room now. She made a call on her mobile and said, ‘I’ve just hit your car. I think it’s a bad one.’

  Stella stood side by side with Marilyn and looked things over. She said, ‘You’re right. It’s a bad one.’ The driver’s-side window was smashed; there was glass all over the interior of the car; the door itself was buckled and jammed, a flat scissor-blade of metal protruding into the driver’s space.

  Marilyn said, ‘I’m really sorry, Stella.’ Her own car had damage to the entire side, but nothing that would render it undrivable.

  Stella smiled, meaning: forget it. She glanced at the mascara runs on the other woman’s cheeks, then looked away. She said, ‘It’s okay. Go home, Marilyn.’ She didn’t say Happy Christmas.

  Harriman looked at her. ‘What?’

  Stella shook her head. ‘Nothing. There’s ice in the car park. She hit my car.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Was she hurt? No. Is she all right? I don’t think so.’

  She made a call and told Delaney what had happened.

  ‘I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘No. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. We’ve charged someone, there’s the paperwork… I’ll get a cab or cadge a lift, go to Vigo Street, then come on to you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It could be really late.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t wait up.’

  85

  London was white.

  Things were freezing over and closing down. The elevated sections and motorway approaches were thick with accidents or abandoned vehicles. Emergency services were having emergencies of their own. This is what extreme weather could do. What it couldn’t do was stop the parties. There were parties in houses, in pubs, in clubs, in bars and – in back-ups that stretched from the city to the suburbs – there were parties in cars.

  Leon Bloss cruised the streets until he found the party he was looking for just off Kensington Church Street. It was a big house and you could hear the music through the double glazing. When Bloss looked up he could see something going on in every room: people dancing, people drinking, people finding ways of getting close to each other. He backtracked to a wine store and bought a bottle of champagne, then leaned on the bell until a girl in a green dress opened the door. He held up the bottle and laughed, she laughed back and let him in: everyone was someone’s friend. Bloss thought he would quite like to be hers, because of her strawberry-blonde hair and her wide smile. She wasn’t a terrific looker, but her smile knocked you out.

  He found the kitchen and opened his champagne, then found a glass and wandered through the party, pouring for other people now and then, laughing at people who nodded and laughed back at him. It was a big enough party for there to be degrees of separation; some people knew each other well, some a little, some not at all. He talked to a few people
on topics that no one knew much about, he danced on his own or in a little group, he circled, looking for the girl in the green dress.

  The black cabs had gone home early, already garaged and washed and spruced; minicabs were somewhere on the end of a phone that rang into oblivion.

  Maxine Hewitt stopped by Stella’s desk and said, ‘Forget it. They’ll never answer. I’ll give you a lift.’

  ‘It’s out of your way.’

  ‘A little. What are you going to do – ski?’

  Mike Sorley went through looking fit, smoking a cigar and carrying eight store bags with fancy handles. His paper was in order: Lauren Buchanan in police custody for three days, then in front of magistrates, then, for sure, on remand to Holloway. It was something. It wasn’t Bloss and Kimber in adjoining cells, but it was enough for a while.

  Stella and Maxine soft-footed it over the car-park ice and Maxine drove very slowly out on to the road, which had been partially cleared by the weight of traffic.

  ‘I’m going back-doubles,’ she said; ‘the main roads are solid.’

  They talked about anything but the Bloss–Kimber case because they were talked out on that. They talked about everything and nothing while Maxine inched through the rat-runs.

  When they arrived, Stella said, ‘Come in and have a drink.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’ll take me a while to get back.’

  ‘A coffee.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’

  ‘There might be a duty-call for tomorrow.’

  ‘I know, I’ve warned Jan. She understands.’

  Stella got her keys out. She said, ‘Have a good Christmas.’

  In her flat, the phone had just stopped ringing. As she crossed the street – the wind whipping her face, sirens whooping in the surrounding streets – her mobile was going off in her bag, but she couldn’t hear it.

  The girl in the green dress was called Dallas. Bloss said he hadn’t heard an American accent. Dallas said, no, she was born in Oxford, but her mother just liked the name. Bloss said he thought it was a terrific name. He thought Dallas was terrific.

  ‘Except,’ Dallas said, ‘for Kennedy being shot there. And the TV soap.’

  They laughed about that. Dallas thought Bloss was a strange-looking guy, with his bright blue eyes and his Slavic cheekbones and his high-pitched laugh, but there was something about him that she liked. She decided that he must be powerful in some way or another, a media mogul, perhaps, or a captain of industry. She had him down as a boardroom slugger. They danced and she liked the way he snaked his hips.

  He said, ‘You know them – the people giving the party.’

  ‘Yes. No, not really. I came with a friend. She knows them, but she had to leave. Do you know them?’

  Bloss shook his head. ‘Not really.’

  They stood by a window and watched the snow and sipped their drinks. Dallas was happy to get drunk; she wasn’t drunk yet, not very, but she was happy to get that way.

  ‘I ought to be in Oxford, with my parents. There aren’t any trains.’

  Bloss laughed. ‘Me too. I came down from Birmingham. I’m stranded.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Find a hotel,’ he said, and saw the look on her face, and knew he was home and dry.

  Kimber had been dreaming. He was flying over snow-swept London with his eagle-eye, and he could see them all, Valerie Blake and Sophie Simms, Kate Reilly, Jan, Stella, and all the others, all he’d ever followed or snapped or clipped. He could walk through walls, he could find them in their rooms.

  He dreamed he was in Stella’s flat, lying in her bed, waiting for her to come home; he dreamed he heard the phone ringing and the call was to say she was on her way; he dreamed that he heard the front door open and close as she came in, then her voice on the telephone.

  And then he was awake and it was true.

  Stella sat on the sofa, her back to the bedroom door, and dialled Anne Beaumont’s number. The answerphone said she was away for a few days, but Anne lifted the phone before the message had finished.

  ‘Not away, then,’ Stella said.

  ‘I would have been. Look out of the window.’

  ‘I’m sorry to call. I shouldn’t be calling. I slept with someone.’

  Anne laughed. ‘Nothing like coming to the point.’

  ‘Delaney doesn’t know.’

  ‘But you’ve decided to tell him.’

  ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘Not tell him.’

  Kimber got out of bed. He could hear Stella’s voice but not what she was saying. He smoothed the covers and patted the shape of his head out of the pillow.

  ‘Would that be a good thing?’

  ‘Only you know that,’ Anne said. ‘The point is, people don’t necessarily have to know everything. Truth isn’t medicine.’

  ‘You don’t usually talk like this.’

  ‘I’m speaking as a friend.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘You mean what have I done in the past?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘It depended.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On the likely reaction of the person in question. Good reaction, own up; bad reaction, shut up.’

  ‘Is that your advice?’

  ‘Christ, no. You asked me what I did and I told you. I never give advice.’

  Kimber had slept with the Glock under the pillow. Now he lifted it out and turned towards the door, catching sight of himself in the mirror, a naked man with a gun and a sleepy smile. He was fine. He would wait for her to finish the call. There was all the time in the world. He put on his trousers and shirt because, naked, he felt at a strange disadvantage. He should see her naked first; he felt that was the right way.

  ‘I’m going to tell him,’ Stella said.

  ‘Okay. Did it make a difference – being with this other person?’

  ‘No. Nice guy, went to bed, not sure why, testing, I think… And nothing. Well, a bit of residual guilt. But no change in the way I felt about Delaney.’

  ‘Sounds okay.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Sounds fine. What do you think he’ll do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ And she realized that it was true: she hadn’t the first idea and wondered if she ought to know him better than that.

  Anne said, ‘You know something, Stella, over too many years of listening to people talk and trying not to tell them what to do or how to behave, I think I’ve reached the conclusion that the best bet is to do what you want.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re the only person who knows what that is.’

  Stella had been sitting in her coat. Kimber heard her get up and walk across the room. He waited, but there was a pause he couldn’t analyse. Stella was dropping her coat on to a chair, deciding whether to have a drink, try to book a cab or pack a few things immediately. In the end, she thought she would have a shower. She was unbuttoning her shirt as she walked into the bedroom.

  And there he was. And there she was.

  86

  Stella could feel herself beginning to faint, her vision narrowing and edged with black, a sound in her ears like a train coming down a track. She knocked the door-frame with her hand, but didn’t know how that had happened.

  Her first lucid thought was, Don’t faint because if you faint you’re dead. Her second was, You’re probably dead anyway. Kimber was pointing the gun at her, his hand trembling slightly. He stooped by bending at the knees so he wouldn’t have to take his eyes off her, picked up the bag and threw it on to the bed.

  ‘Open it, Stella.’

  She pulled the drawstring and upended the bag. He had brought some duct tape and lengths of cord, a pair of scissors and a camera.

  Make him talk. Make him talk it instead of doing it.

  ‘There’s a way out of this.’ She backed off a little, away from the bag of tricks. ‘Tell me where Leon Bloss is. Stop now, stop this now, and just tell me where Bloss is and we’ll pick hi
m up and you and I can cut a deal.’

  His name is Robert Adrian Kimber. Call him by his name. Is he Robert, Bob, Bobby...?

  ‘That’s the way, Robert. That’s the way out for you.’

  Kimber had brought his free hand up to cup the butt of the gun and the barrel wavered slightly. He said, ‘There’s no way out, Stella. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t make things worse. Don’t get any deeper. We know about Bloss but we don’t know where to find him. You do. You can tell us. Then we talk about a deal. That’s the way it works.’

  ‘I want to get deeper.’ Kimber was grinning. ‘That’s the point, I want to get as deep as I possibly can. You’ll see. You’ll know about that.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand – what’s the point of killing me?’

  He looked at her, frowning slightly, as if her question had puzzled him. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘It’s not a reason...’ Then, suddenly impatient, ‘Take your clothes off now, Stella.’

  He put out a hand to the duct tape and the cords, and the gun gave a little wobble, as if one hand wasn’t enough, and Stella realized that it wasn’t nervousness or excitement that was causing the unsteadiness, but that Kimber simply wasn’t used to guns: he was holding the weapon too tightly, his finger curled hard on the trigger. He shook the gun to make her hurry and she saw his knuckle was white. With that kind of pressure, the gun should have fired or, at least, he would have taken up the trigger-slack.

  ‘Get undressed now.’