‘What is it?’
‘Weird.’ Jan held it out to her and Catherine’s heart dropped as she read the familiar scrawl.
Call the Police!
Detective Sergeant Reynolds was beginning to not like John Marvel.
Reynolds was not a judgemental man, so he’d given Marvel the benefit of the doubt at their first meeting. After all, the DCI was a stranger in a strange land, who had just fallen over a pink suitcase. Things were sure to be a little bumpy.
But a week later, and things were still bumpy.
And Reynolds had the distinct impression that they were only going to get bumpier.
For a start, Marvel looked awful. He was overweight and unkempt, with ears that jutted out at different angles, and although he wore a suit, it didn’t look like one that belonged to him. He also had hair in his nose. That alone would have been enough to make Reynolds shudder. He believed firmly that hair had no place on a civilized man except on his head. He himself had a Braun trimmer, which he ran obsessively around his nasal cavities every morning. But Marvel had nose hairs a-plenty, and sometimes pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger – in mid conversation – as if he suspected there might be something dangling from them.
Marvel also stank of cigarettes and drank too much. He wore scuffed brown shoes regardless of the colour of his trousers, and a tie that had not only not been dry-cleaned any time in recent history, but looked as though it had not even been untied since Marvel had first looped it over his big lopsided head.
Reynolds could hardly bear to look at its grubby little knot.
He flinched as Marvel snapped his fingers under his nose.
‘Wake up, Reynolds!’
Reynolds reddened and Elizabeth Rice winked at him.
Reynolds wasn’t sure he liked her either. She was pretty enough, but very unladylike. He’d once seen her run across a car park for no reason.
And a DC shouldn’t be winking at a DS unless it was in the line of duty.
He sighed. There were no boundaries any more. Everything was equality and first-name terms.
So Reynolds turned away from Rice without acknowledging the wink.
For her own good.
Marvel had unrolled a large map on the floor.
They were in the empty front room of a small house on a north Tiverton estate – not unlike the one Marvel himself was renting.
They all leaned over the map. There were dozens of red dots marked on the map in felt tip.
‘Each of these dots is a Goldilocks crime scene,’ said Marvel. ‘Most are around this area. So this is where we’re setting the trap.’
‘What trap?’ said Parrott.
Marvel swept an arm around the room like an estate agent. ‘Welcome to the capture house!’
‘What’s that?’ said Rice.
Marvel grinned a rare grin. ‘This is the house where we’re going to catch Goldilocks.’
‘How?’ said Parrott.
Marvel paused for dramatic effect.
‘By giving him everything he wants!’
His team looked at him blankly.
Well, not his team, but the team that had been imposed upon him. If he’d been choosing, he wouldn’t have chosen Reynolds, for a start – with his shiny shoes and red silk tie.
He also wouldn’t have chosen DC Rice. Marvel wasn’t in favour of women on the force. He’d only ever seen one good one in action, and was pretty sure she was a lesbian. Rice was too young and too pretty, and would only be a distraction. Not to him, of course – he had sworn off women – but to the rest of the team.
That was completed by Toby Parrott, who’d driven him down on the first day and who – it turned out – had been on the Goldilocks case for almost a year. He had been left on it as a bridge between the old Devon and Cornwall police team and the new one from Avon and Somerset. Parrott did not inspire confidence. He sat scrunched up on his chair with his hands jammed defensively between his knees and his skinny shoulders hunched like someone at his first AA meeting.
Marvel sighed. Team Goldilocks indeed. None of them was just right.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This bastard’s been running rings round the police for too bloody long! I don’t want to waste my life on a shitty little thief, when I’ve got killers to catch, so pull your fucking fingers out and tell me what he wants!’
He had no killers to catch, of course; however, this was not about truth, but about motivating the troops.
‘A bed for the night?’ said Rice cautiously.
‘Hence Goldilocks,’ said Reynolds helpfully, but won only a glare from Marvel.
‘That’s once he’s inside,’ said Marvel. ‘But I need to know what makes Goldilocks choose this house to break into and not the one next door.’
‘Detached house,’ said Parrott.
‘Good,’ said Marvel.
‘But the Passmores live in a terrace,’ said Reynolds.
‘That’s not a Goldilocks job,’ said Marvel.
Reynolds looked taken aback. ‘Bed slept in, food stolen, TV and family photographs smashed. It has all the hallmarks.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ said Marvel in a tone that did not invite debate.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he went on. ‘What this bastard wants is privacy. The detached house on an anonymous estate, the small, high bathroom window, the easy access via the kitchen roof, the back garden with trees for cover. All these crime scenes have these things in common, and this house has got them all.
‘Now all we have to do is dress it up and make it look lived in. We fill it with all the little easy-to-carry bits he likes to nick, and wait for him to find it.’
‘And then he comes in and steals all our stuff,’ frowned Parrott, as if Marvel had overlooked this critical flaw in his own plan.
‘That’s the whole point,’ snapped Marvel. ‘Because then … he trips a silent alarm and hidden CCTV cameras that we’re going to install, so we catch him red-handed and have him on film in glorious Technicolor into the bargain. Cue a nice quick guilty plea, God knows how many other offences taken into consideration, and Bob’s your uncle.’
Reynolds, Rice and Parrott looked around the empty room.
‘It could work,’ said Reynolds.
‘It does work!’ snapped Marvel. ‘I’ve seen it work.’
That wasn’t true, but he’d heard that it did.
‘Great,’ said Rice. ‘When do we start?’
‘You and Reynolds start right now.’
‘Me and DS Reynolds?’ she said in surprise.
‘DS Reynolds and me,’ corrected Reynolds, and they all looked at him blankly.
Marvel was talking again. ‘You two are going to play house here to make it look authentic. You can furnish the place with stuff from the warehouse in Exeter. Doesn’t have to be fancy, just real. Then you spend a week or so living here, chatting to neighbours, drinking in the local, coming and going, and then you go off’ – Marvel did air quotes – ‘on holiday, and we wait for Goldilocks to pay us a little visit.’
He rubbed his hands together and looked very pleased with himself.
Reynolds said, ‘Hmmm.’
Marvel turned to him. ‘Something wrong, Reynolds?’
DS Reynolds looked uncomfortable. ‘Sir, it’s just that I know DC Rice has a … partner … and I don’t want there to be any … awkwardness …’
Marvel snorted and Rice flapped an unconcerned hand. ‘Oh, Eric won’t mind.’
‘Don’t panic, Reynolds,’ quipped Marvel. ‘You don’t have to shag her.’
Toby Parrott laughed, but Rice said, ‘This is probably a stupid question, sir—’
‘Then don’t ask it,’ said Marvel, and he rolled up the map to show that the conversation was at an end.
‘Well, I will anyway,’ shrugged Rice, and Marvel thought, She’s trouble. ‘How is Goldilocks going to find the capture house?’
‘Leave that to me,’ he snapped, and Rice nodded and did just that.
Marvel brooded all
the way back to Taunton.
Bloody women! he thought. Always asking questions!
But it was a good question. And one for which he had no answer.
Yet.
On his dim and distant Cornish holiday, Marvel had gone fishing.
It was the only part of the holiday he remembered with any fondness. He and his father and brother. He recalled standing in the dark recesses of the local fishing shop – the Angling Man – dutifully not touching a jail cell of vertical rods, racks of camouflage waterproofs, and a whole wall pan-tiled with little plastic bags containing alien artefacts whose use he could no more fathom than the meaning of life. Bright baubles and feathers, silvery fake fish, little lead balls and big lead torpedoes, Day-Glo centipedes, a thousand variations on ball-bearings and loops and hooks, and dozens and dozens of reels of bright blue fishing line.
On a battered freezer was a list of bait as long as his ten-year-old arm.
Back home in south London, he’d imagined only worms and a rock to throw them off, but his eyes had been opened that day to the sheer trickery of fish, as the Angling Man grilled his father as to where they were going to be, and what they wanted to catch, and how far the boys could cast a line … which had later turned out to be no further than ravenous crabs.
‘You’m don’t want to be chumming a river, see?’ the Angling Man had concluded with a smoker’s cackle. And although he’d not understood it at the time, the phrase had stuck in Marvel’s head like a West Country burr.
It came back to him now.
You’m don’t want to be chumming a river.
Marvel was convinced that the capture house was the right bait.
But they would have to cast that bait in the right place if they wanted to catch the right fish.
Jack looked down at Louis’s scrap of paper to check the name and address.
Tony and Sara Gomez.
It had been torn from an envelope and there was a Wine Club logo he’d seen before. More than once. Wine Club. P&O Cruises. Boden. Any number of equine catalogues. All selling stuff he’d never be able to afford.
But he knew people who could.
At least, he knew their houses …
Jack knocked on the door.
Nobody answered, of course, because the people in the Wine Club were in Thailand, but he was all ready to be confused, and then apologetic, about getting the wrong house.
Aww, sorry mate! This estate is so confusing!
But nobody answered the door, and Jack didn’t knock again. He glanced around once and then walked boldly down the side of the house and into the back garden, snapping on his latex gloves.
This was the only dodgy moment. If a neighbour saw him and came over, it would be much harder to say he was lost once he’d abandoned the front door.
Nonetheless, he had a lie, all ready to go: Tony’s son borrowed my bike. I’ve only come to get it back from the shed.
Jack hoped nobody would challenge him because he was not a liar by nature. Of course, he was not a thief by nature, but he was slim and fit and desperate, which made burglary a viable occupation for him. However, he did not have the gift of the gab like Smooth Louis did, and preferred not to talk if he didn’t have to.
He walked down the side of the house, knowing that the bathroom would be over the extended kitchen, which had only a slight slope to its roof. They were all similar, these new houses, and Jack knew them like the back of his hand. He liked knowing what to expect. In the summer the bathroom window was often open, and it if wasn’t, that didn’t mean he couldn’t get in – just that it would take longer. And taking longer was more risky, so he liked an open window.
And there it was …
Nobody believed someone could get through a window so small and so high.
Their lack of imagination was his house key.
There were Leylandii in the back garden too. That was always a plus. Thick green foliage hid him from almost any eye prying from the neighbouring homes, even in broad daylight. Which it wasn’t.
The guttering was brilliant.
Like any burglar worth his salt, Jack’s eyes ran naturally up the wall of any house, following the map of gutters and downpipes, sizing up the dwelling in a single flashbulb moment of forward-planning.
This downpipe ran straight up alongside the kitchen and the bathroom. Once he was on the kitchen roof, Jack only had to shin a few feet up the drainpipe and lean across to pull the window fully open. From there it was a stretch, a brief hang, a wriggle, and he was in.
From leaving the ground, the whole thing took him less than thirty seconds.
He’d have been very unlucky to have been seen. Even more unlucky to have been seen by anybody who was prepared to do anything about it.
Jack vaulted off the sill and over the basin like a Russian gymnast, making a perfect-ten landing on the bathmat. He took a deep breath and let the smell of the house fill him all the way to his fingertips.
Wright’s Coal Tar Soap over citrus Toilet Duck. It smelled like a fire in an orange grove.
Jack liked the smell of the houses. Some had chemical smells, of air fresheners and fake-flower washing powder, but Jack preferred the houses that smelled like a family. Shampoo in the bathroom, clean sheets in the bedrooms, food in the kitchen. Even mud in the utility room and socks in the laundry basket took him back to the way his house had been …
Before.
Their house used to smell that way. He was pretty sure it had, or he wouldn’t recognize the aromas he found in the houses he burgled. Once, he had sniffed out a bottle of watermelon shampoo they’d all used as children, and had stuffed it into his backpack with hands that shook as if he’d uncovered King Tut’s tomb on a Tiverton housing estate. Back home he had washed his hair over the basin because the bath was always full of newspapers, and then hidden the shampoo in the garden so that nobody else could use it.
Merry had found it, of course. Digging for worms. She hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t even needed to get close enough to smell her to know what had happened – her hair was that shiny. She’d tried running upstairs, but where was there to go? He’d caught her in a box canyon in the baby’s room, and slapped her for taking what wasn’t hers.
‘I hate you!’ she’d shouted over the bannister as he’d stormed downstairs again, sending sheaves of newspaper sliding ahead of his feet, nearly falling. ‘I hate you and I hope you get run over by a lorry!’
She’d cried then, and he’d felt bad, but that would teach her to take his shampoo …
Jack made dinner. He chose carefully from the fridge and cabinets stuffed with cans and packets. Some things he set down next to the back door to take home – dried pulses, oats, salad. There was a free-range chicken in the freezer. There was beer in the fridge, but he never drank. He was scared to drink in case he fell out of a window or something.
Then what would happen to Merry and Joy?
He made an omelette with vegetables, then helped himself to a little pot of trifle from the fridge. Jack rarely ate sweet things, and felt dizzy from the rush.
He put his feet on the coffee table and watched TV. He didn’t change the channel. Any channel was good when you couldn’t find your own TV. He watched until he caught himself nodding off, then dropped the empty trifle pot and spoon on the carpet and went upstairs.
He showered to get clean, then bathed for fun, floating like flying, as the hot water rose past his ears and then lifted him up off the porcelain as it lapped over the edge and started to gush on to the floor.
He let it run.
He washed his hair and rinsed and repeated well after it had squeaked, just to feel the foam between his fingers.
There were four big fluffy bath towels. He used them all.
In the master bedroom he found a hair dryer. He dried his hair and then just stood in the centre of the room, naked, running the dryer over his damp skin too. Taking his time, enjoying the feeling of warm air moving around him. The uninterrupted square footage of carpet, the s
oft clean wool under his feet, the view of one side of the room from the other.
The space.
He dressed, feeling warmer.
The kids’ names were on their doors in coloured jigsaw pieces. Dan and Sharona.
Sharona’s room was a shrine to a boy band called The Troublemakers, whose names were apparently Lance, Ade, Scotty and The Mighty Mick. Jack thought they didn’t look at all troublesome. Jack thought he could smash in their faces all by himself, and tore their posters off the walls in shiny strips.
In Dan’s room was a bed in the shape of a racing car. Jack had always wanted a racing-car bed. He put his backpack on the floor and laid his hammer on the bedside table, then got into bed without taking off his clothes or his shoes, in case he needed to make a quick getaway.
But the bed wasn’t the fun he’d thought it would be. Once he was in it, it just felt like any other bed. Still, the duvet cover was fresh and adorned with Transformers, and Optimus Prime pillowed Jack’s head in his soft iron lap.
Jack closed his eyes, and drifted cautiously towards the darkness.
And there – right at the threshold of sleep – he found a hairline moment when everything was OK.
After the weekend, Adam headed back out – this time to Cornwall.
His job on the road had never bothered Catherine before. He went away for three or four days at a time, selling horse feed to farm shops and stable yards, and she lived her life here and looked forward to welcoming him home. She’d always found their nightly phone chats and his funny postcards of crap places enough to feel connected and secure.
Not any more. Now that she knew how false that sense of security had been, she felt wobbly at the thought of Adam leaving, and of the long nights to come.
Of another phone call.
A message …
A visit …?
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said on the driveway.
‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said as he slung his bag on to the passenger seat. ‘Always.’
‘Have a nice time at the seaside.’
‘I’ll send you a postcard.’
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