Death Watch

by Sally Spencer

  ‘That would be very kind of you,’ Rutter replied, laying on the consideration and respect with a trowel.

  As he followed her into the living room, the first thing that caught his eye was two brightly wrapped packages.

  ‘How did these get here?’ he asked.

  ‘They were delivered earlier, by private messenger,’ Janet told him, as she headed for the kitchen.

  Rutter tore the wrapping paper off the nearest, and when he opened the box he found an expensive-looking teddy bear staring up at him through dark glass eyes. He opened the second, and found a doll which appeared, at first glance, to be made of a plastic which looked like imitation china, but, on closer examination, turned out to be the real thing.

  A china doll! Rutter thought. Who, in this day and age, could afford a china doll?

  ‘You seem to have some rich friends,’ Janet said, seeing the toys when she returned with the tea.

  ‘Yes, I do, don’t I?’ Rutter agreed.

  The Invisible Man was back in the crumbling terraced house – positioned at his peephole and watching the girl.

  She had been filled with fear when she’d first regained consciousness, he thought.

  But not with fear alone. Oh no! Disbelief and hope had been present, too.

  Disbelief because she still could not quite bring herself to accept that this was anything more than a bad dream.

  Hope because, like a bad dream, there had to be an end to it eventually, an end which would see her safely back home with her loved ones.

  That had been then. That had been before she’d gained some inkling of just what was in store for her.

  Now, the disbelief and hope had gone.

  Now, all that was left was the fear.

  And it would get worse, that fear. Soon it would no longer concern itself with what was happening to her at that moment, but would focus on what would happen next.

  And even that would only be one more stage in her journey. Another step would come when she ceased to fear death – when she began to welcome it as a release.

  As an escape from the sheer hell she found herself in.

  And when she reached that stage, she would no longer be any fun to play with, and it would be all over.

  No, that was not quite true, the Invisible Man corrected himself. She would die, certainly, but not in the swift and merciful way she sought. Instead, her death would be the final stage in the game – an exquisitely agonizing end, which would leave her as no more than an empty vessel. And standing over this shell would be the man who had brought about her end, feeling as powerful as any god that had ever held sway over the fate of mankind.

  This feeling would not last. The Invisible Man knew that. Soon the cravings would start again, and another victim would have to be found. And another. And another. On and on, until the end of time. Or until he was caught.

  Monika Paniatowski sat alone in her bland, impersonal flat, her gaze alternating between the blank television screen and the vodka glass that she held tightly in her hand.

  There was no doubt that Mainwearing’s comments about child abuse that afternoon had unnerved her and transported her back to one of the blackest periods in her life. But she could have shrugged all that off by now – if she’d had the mental space to do so. The problem was that such mental space had not been available, because of the other thing which had knocked her off balance – spending the early evening with little Louisa.

  She was such an open and affectionate child. Paniatowski thought she could see some of her dead mother in her, but also something of her father. Yet mostly she was simply herself – a perfect little girl in her own right. Anyone would have found it hard to resist her, but resisting was even more difficult when you were a thirty-year-old unmarried police sergeant, who had been told by any number of doctors that you could never have any children of your own.

  There was no point in brooding about what you couldn’t have, Paniatowski told herself. Far better to count your blessings.

  She had a job she adored. She had a boss who, while he could be tough and demanding, was nurturing and understanding. And if she never knew true love again, she had at least known it once, which probably put her well ahead of the game.

  So she really did have a lot to be thankful for.

  She raised her glass to her mouth, and knocked back the vodka in a single gulp. And even as the fiery liquid was making its way burningly down her throat, she was already using her free hand to reach for the bottle.

  Despite the fact that she was physically exhausted, Sergeant Rosemary Stevenson’s eyes were alight with excitement when she walked into her living room, stripped off her blue serge jacket, and flung it onto the nearest chair.

  Her husband looked up from the book he’d been reading. ‘You could have hung your uniform up,’ he said mildly. ‘It wouldn’t have taken a second.’

  ‘They haven’t caught him yet,’ his wife said. ‘More to the point, they’ve no idea how to go about catching him.’

  Stevenson shook his head. ‘The poor girl,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you see what a fantastic opportunity this is for me – for both of us?’ Rosemary asked.

  ‘I’m not sure this Chief Inspector Woodend of yours would even listen to me,’ Stevenson told her.

  ‘Haven’t you been hearing a word I’ve said?’ Rosemary demanded. ‘He’s so desperate that he’d listen to a talking duck if he thought it might help. Do you think you can help?’

  ‘I’ve certainly been giving the matter some thought,’ Stevenson said cautiously.

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a great deal of difference between the theoretical and the practical, which is a point that I think you sometimes miss. I can stand up in front of my students, confident that they’ll believe everything I tell them, because there’s nothing to challenge what I say. But to put my beliefs to the acid test – and to such an immediate acid test …’

  ‘You’re scared!’ Rosemary Stevenson.

  ‘Perhaps a little,’ her husband conceded.

  ‘You’re shitting your pants, in case all the studies that you’ve built your reputation on turn out to be a load of crap.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that,’ Stevenson said.

  ‘Do you think you can help Cloggin’-it Charlie or not?’ his wife asked.

  ‘Yes, I think I can help him,’ Stevenson said. ‘I really do.’

  ‘So you’ll go and see him in the morning?’

  Stevenson nodded. ‘Yes.’

  A broad grin spread rapidly across Rosemary’s face. ‘That’s my boy,’ she said.

  When Elizabeth Driver was forced to venture out into what she thought of as ‘the uncivilized provinces’, she liked to compensate herself for the inconvenience by never settling for anything but the best of what was available, and because she was her newspaper’s most successful crime reporter, her editor was normally willing to indulge her.

  That night she was in York, where she’d gone to cover a double murder so thin on facts that she’d been forced to make up several of her own. She was staying at the Grand Hotel, and as she picked up her bedside phone, she was – most unusually for her – completely alone.

  She dialled a Whitebridge number, and when the phone was picked up at the other end, she said, ‘Hello, darling, it’s me.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Bob Rutter.

  Elizabeth Driver frowned. Though Rutter did sometimes call her ‘darling’, it was by no means automatic, and she would have to work on that.

  ‘Did you get the presents I had delivered?’ she asked. ‘The ones I sent for little …’ She paused. What the bloody hell was the kid’s name? she wondered.

  ‘For Louisa?’ Rutter supplied.

  ‘For Louisa,’ Elizabeth Driver agreed.

  ‘They must have cost a small fortune,’ Rutter said.

  They bloody had, Elizabeth Driver confirmed silently. That china doll had been so expensive that she’d only been able to use her expense account for hal
f the purchase price, and the rest had come out of her own pocket.

  ‘Who’s counting the cost?’ she asked aloud. ‘I just wanted to do something that would help her to settle in to her new home.’

  ‘That was very kind of you,’ Rutter said.

  Kindness had nothing to do with it, Driver thought. Absolutely nothing at all! Rutter was helping her to write the book which – though he didn’t know it – was going to expose the Whitebridge Police for all its failings (both real and imaginary), make her own reputation and her fortune, and quite destroy the career of one Detective Inspector Bob Rutter. And if, in order to get that book written, she had to cosy up to Rutter’s snotty-nosed brat, then she was perfectly willing to do it.

  ‘I can’t wait to meet little Louisa,’ she gushed. ‘The story I’m covering should be wrapped up in a day or so, and the moment it is, I’ll jump into my Jag and drive straight down to Whitebridge.’

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. ‘That … er … may not be very convenient,’ Rutter said finally.

  Elizabeth Driver pouted. ‘Not convenient? Don’t you want to see me? Don’t you want me to meet Louisa?’

  ‘Well, I think it might be better to leave it a week or two before I start introducing her to new people,’ Rutter said cautiously. ‘But that’s not really the main problem.’

  ‘Then what is?’

  ‘We’re handling a sod of a case at the moment. A thirteen-year-old girl’s gone missing. We think she’s been kidnapped by some pervert.’

  ‘How terrible!’ Elizabeth Driver said, mustering all the sincerity she could. ‘Do you think you’ll get her back unharmed?’

  ‘We’re praying that we will, but I can’t honestly say that we’re holding out too much hope.’

  ‘Who’s covering the story for my paper?’ Elizabeth Driver asked, suddenly starting to feel resentful that she was stuck in York while some other lucky bastard was covering such a juicy story.

  ‘What was that?’ Rutter asked, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he’d just heard.

  ‘Who’s the Gazette sent to Whitebridge?’

  ‘I don’t know. And to tell the truth, I’m far too wrapped up in the investigation to care.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Driver said soothingly. ‘It was thoughtless of me to even ask.’

  ‘I could find out, if you want me to,’ Rutter said.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it. You’ve already got far too much on your plate as it is,’ Driver assured him. Besides, she thought, I’ve only to pick up tomorrow morning’s Gazette to get the information for myself. ‘When this case is over …’ she said tentatively.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can I come and see you and little Louisa then?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘I miss you,’ Elizabeth Driver said, and after another slight pause, Rutter said, ‘I miss you, too.’

  Driver hung up and checked her watch, wondering if she’d left it too late to pick up a man for the night.

  Beside him, his wife, Joan, was snoring peacefully, but sleep would not come to Charlie Woodend. His mind was travelling back in time. To London, shortly after the War – and to the Ellie Taylor abduction in Southwark.

  She’d been just twelve years old.

  ‘We’ll get her back,’ the newly promoted Sergeant Woodend had assured her grandfather, George, who’d lost a leg fighting for Queen Victoria’s now-vanished Empire. ‘Don’t you worry – we’ll get her back.’

  It hadn’t worked out like that at all, and from the moment an unidentified girl’s body had been spotted floating in the Thames, Woodend had known that it wouldn’t.

  He and the old man had stood side by side on the wharf where George had once worked, and watched as poor Ellie Taylor’s naked body was retrieved from the river.

  When she was alive, she probably considered herself to be a young woman, Woodend had thought, but looking at her at that moment – her breasts just beginning to develop, her legs still almost matchstick thin – it had been blatantly obvious to him that she’d been no more than a child.

  ‘You should leave now,’ he’d told George Taylor.

  ‘I want to stay,’ the old soldier had said firmly. ‘I want to see exactly what that monster did to her.’

  And Woodend had agreed to let him, because – whatever the regulations said – he thought the grandfather had a right to be there.

  It had been a gruelling experience for both of them. Trails of caked blood ran down the girl’s legs from both her anus and vagina. Her front teeth had been knocked out, too – for reasons that were only too clear to Woodend, but which he prayed the man standing next to him would not understand.

  ‘You promised you’d get her back for us, Sergeant,’ George Taylor had said bitterly.

  ‘And I thought there was a very good chance that I could,’ Woodend had replied.

  But that wasn’t quite the truth. What he’d meant when he’d made that promise was that he wanted to believe there was a good chance.

  It had been a young Woodend who had made the promise; a Woodend who, though he had been through all the horrors of war, had not quite yet abandoned the belief that there was a limit to human cruelty. It was a much older Woodend who had finally persuaded George Taylor to leave the scene and go with him to the nearest pub, where they had both knocked back stiff drinks, only stopping when they realized the alcohol was having no effect on them at all.

  For a while after that day, Woodend had hoped that he could cast out the image of what he had seen, and so leave some space for the young Woodend to return to. But it had never happened. The day Ellie Taylor had died, a little part of him had died, too.

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, do try and get some sleep, Charlie,’ Joan mumbled at him from the other side of the bed.

  ‘In a minute, love,’ Woodend replied. ‘As soon as I’ve got my thoughts in order.’

  Angela Jackson would be another Ellie Taylor, he told himself. He just knew she would.

  Seven

  The early morning of the day following the abduction was just about as depressing as any early morning at that time of year could be.

  There was no sign of the autumn sun, which should, by rights, have been beaming down its watery regrets that it could no longer warm the earth as much as it had done in the hazy days of summer. In its place, there were only heavy grey clouds, which hovered menacingly, seemingly unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there was not supposed to be any threat of snow at that time of year.

  Conditions were no better on the ground. Puddles had iced over, and a sheen of frost covered the roads. Plants were dying in gardens, weeds were withering in the cracks between paving stones. In trees and on bus-stop roofs, wild birds huddled and shivered.

  On his drive into Whitebridge, Woodend passed the aftermath of three crashes – and tried not to think of them as an omen.

  When the chief inspector finally arrived at his office, he found Bob Rutter already there, doggedly sifting through the piles of reports which had been written the previous evening.

  His inspector looked just about as bad as he himself felt, Woodend thought, lighting up a cigarette and slumping down in his chair.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Since six o’clock,’ Rutter replied, not looking up from the reports. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Me, neither,’ Woodend said. ‘How’s Louisa settlin’ in?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ Rutter told him. ‘If you’re really interested, you’ll have to ask her nanny.’

  It was a little early in the morning to have touched a nerve, Woodend thought. ‘Why don’t you slip home an’ see her now,’ he suggested.

  ‘Because somebody has to keep going through all this crap in the hope it will throw up a lead …’

  ‘True, but …’

  ‘… and I’m the best man for the job.’

  Rutter was right about that, Woodend thought. Watching him go through reports
was like watching a bloodhound follow a scent which was undetectable to anyone but him. Bob had a flair for reports, just as Monika had a flair for conducting investigations on the ground.

  ‘So have you found anythin’?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s some questions I’d like answering, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to get us anywhere,’ Rutter said bluntly.

  There was an unexpected knock on the open office door. Woodend looked up and saw a man standing in the doorway.

  At first sight, the visitor was not impressive. He had light sandy hair and pale eyes. He was dressed in a tweed jacket, cavalry-twill trousers, and brown suede shoes. He looked as if he thought he had no right to be there – and as far as Woodend was concerned, he was bloody spot on about that.

  ‘In case you didn’t realize it, sir, we happen to be involved in a very serious investigation at the moment,’ the chief inspector snapped. ‘An’ even if we weren’t, this part of the buildin’ is not open to the general public.’

  ‘It’s because of the investigation that I’m here,’ the man said hesitantly. ‘I’m Martin Stevenson. Doctor Martin Stevenson.’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re Genghis Khan an’ you’ve got your entire bloody Horde in tow,’ Woodend said. ‘You still have no right to be here.’ Then a vague bell rang in his head, and a connection was made. ‘Are you any relation to Sergeant Rosie Stevenson?’ he continued.

  ‘I’m her husband,’ Stevenson said. ‘She thought I might be of some use to you.’

  ‘What kind of doctor are you?’ Woodend asked.

  ‘I’m a psychologist, specializing in criminal psychology.’

  Rutter released a very audible sigh. ‘A shrink!’ he said in disgust. ‘That’s just what we bloody need right now.’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse my inspector,’ Woodend told Stevenson. ‘He’s what you might call “an old-fashioned” type of bobby.’

  The old-fashioned type of bobby? Me! Rutter thought. You’re the one who some people call a bit of a dinosaur. I’m the young one. The modern one. The up-to-date one.

  He searched the chief inspector’s face for any signs of sarcastic intent, and found none.