The Burning

by Jane Casey

  ‘Should we go? I don’t want us to be late.’

  Gil drove along the river as far as Chelsea, where he parked in a back street outside a grey, unpromising door. He opened the car door for me and waited for me to get out. I looked up at him warily.

  ‘Is this where we’re going?’

  ‘Certainly is.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like a restaurant.’

  ‘That’s part of the charm.’ He took my hand and pulled me out of the car, holding me against him for a moment with his nose in my hair. ‘Mmm. Nice scent.’

  ‘Favourite of yours, is it?’

  ‘I thought it would suit you.’

  ‘Funny. I always associate it with Rebecca.’

  ‘I don’t.’ He moved back a couple of inches, his hands by his side, and I felt cold all of a sudden, the wind cutting through the fine silk shawl as if it wasn’t there.

  ‘She always wore it.’ I knew I should drop it but some devil made me go on. ‘Or she did after she met you.’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’ I felt suddenly nervous.

  ‘Jealous, I suppose.’ He was looking down at me with a remote expression on his face. ‘I can’t stand that sort of thing. You know better than to act that way. And I shouldn’t have to pretend that you’re the first girl I’ve ever taken out to dinner.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I began, and he shook his head.

  ‘Don’t be sorry. Just – I just want to be honest with you. I don’t want to bother with the usual rubbish that you get into when you start seeing someone. Let’s agree now that if we’re going to do this, we’re not going to mess each other about.’

  ‘I only agreed to have dinner with you,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s not a lifelong commitment. It’s just a meal.’

  ‘It was just dinner, but then you opened the door looking like that.’ He stared down at me. ‘I’m not going to let you go, Louise.’

  I followed him into the restaurant with a feeling of unreality that grew stronger when the grey door proved to have been hiding a small room with just eight tables, all with a tiny spotlight overhead that threw the diners’ faces into shadow. The tables were immaculate, the maître d’, who recognised Gil and welcomed him as an old friend, attentive without being obsequious. With an enquiring look to me, Gil ordered champagne and it came quickly, creamy pale in tall flutes. I popped bubbles on my tongue as I read through the menu.

  ‘Is there anything you don’t eat?’

  ‘My words.’ I relented. ‘Not really. Tripe, I suppose. And I’m not keen on oysters.’

  ‘I love them. You’ll have to get to like them.’

  ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘We’ll see.’ He returned to studying the menu and I frowned at him.

  ‘You never accept a no if it’s not the answer you want to hear, do you?’

  ‘Not often. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because oysters aren’t on the chef’s menu, and that’s what I think we should have. Six courses. Are you up for it?’

  I didn’t even look at it. I recognised the question as the challenge it was, and the only possible answer was yes.

  It may have been six courses but the portions were mercifully small. Tiny plates appeared in front of us, introduced by the waiter, little works of art. Plump white scallops, round and sweet, on a bed of pale-green courgette purée. A scoop of pearl-coloured mushroom risotto. A wince-making grapefruit sorbet in a frosted cup. Tender beef, rose-pink in a rich dark sauce, nestling against a cloud of mashed potato. A swirl of vanilla mousse in a sea of bitter chocolate. Sunshine-yellow lemon tart with fat raspberries.

  I ate with true enjoyment, forgetting to be nervous, forgetting that I had always been wary around Gil, and why that had been the case. He was quiet much of the time, and when I looked up I often found his eyes on me. I felt he was trying to work something out, something about me, and I left him to it.

  We had got as far as coffee, tiny cups of night-black espresso frothed with mink-coloured foam, when I said, ‘Did you ever come here with Rebecca?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve obviously been here a few times. I was just wondering if you’d been here with her.’

  ‘No, as it happens.’ He leaned back in his chair, playing with his coffee spoon. ‘Why? Would that matter?’

  I laughed. ‘There’s no point in pretending she’s not on my mind. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be sitting here together.’

  ‘People meet in lots of different ways. I wouldn’t place too much importance on her role in bringing us together.’ He looked away from me, scanning the room as if he had lost interest in the conversation.

  ‘I can’t let you get away with that. It’s not like she introduced us at a party. Besides, I want to talk about her.’

  ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘You could tell me what you meant when you said you were intrigued by me, which was why, according to you, you were horrible to me.’ I could feel my pulse beating in my neck. I took a sip of water, concentrating on not letting my hands shake.

  ‘Horrible isn’t the right word,’ he protested. ‘I just didn’t spend that much time talking to you. There’s no mystery about it. You weren’t exactly available. I couldn’t switch from Bex to you. You’d never have considered it for a second.’

  ‘But now that she’s dead …’

  ‘It gave me an excuse to get in touch with you. That’s all.’

  I shook my head. ‘I just don’t believe you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because no one ever noticed me when Rebecca was in the room.’ I said it simply, without self-pity.

  ‘More fool them.’ His eyes swept over me again. ‘They obviously didn’t see what I saw.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Your promise.’ He leaned forward. ‘You are beautiful, Louise. Really, truly beautiful. Especially now that you’re not hiding behind your friend any more. Rebecca was pretty, and fun to be around, but she was basically boring. You worshipped her so you didn’t notice it, but I had run out of patience by the time we split up.’

  ‘You have high standards, don’t you?’

  ‘I just got tired of her always trying to please me. What I like about you is your independence. You don’t need to be liked. You go your own way.’

  I laughed. ‘The cat that walked by herself.’

  ‘I’ve always liked cats.’ He reached across the table, and I let him take my hand.

  It was time to listen to the common-sense voice in the back of my mind that was warning me, with increasing urgency, that I had had my fun, that I should avoid seeing Gil Maddick again. And I think I might have managed it, too, if he hadn’t been holding my hand. The touch of his skin against mine made me shiver with wanting him, and common sense didn’t stand a chance.

  Chapter Ten

  MAEVE

  I sat at my desk like a cat at a mousehole, waiting for the superintendent to return from the daily press conference. Ideally, I would have spoken to him before it. The press conference now tended to consist of belligerent questions from journalists who’d learned all about murder investigation from re-runs of Prime Suspect and couldn’t understand why we hadn’t found the killer yet. Godley was committed to good communication and keeping the public well informed, so he went through with it. That didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

  He strode back into the incident room with Judd at his heels. Their matching expressions told me that things had not gone well. I hesitated for a second, then hurried over. Now or never.

  ‘Sir, can I have a word about Rebecca Haworth?’

  They had been looking at the big noticeboard that occupied one wall of his office, where a macabre gallery of victims hung beside a giant map of the city marked with black crosses where each girl had been discovered. Dates, names, places – all written out neatly, as if by bringing order to the events Godley could find the pattern that eluded all of us and use it to predict where and how the murderer migh
t be trapped. He turned and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Now, Maeve?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  Judd threw himself down in a chair by Godley’s desk, as if to make it absolutely clear that he wasn’t going to go anywhere. I cleared my throat.

  ‘It’s just that I think we were right to be concerned about this victim. There were some odd things going on in her life. I’ve found a few reasons why someone might have wanted her dead. Taking into account the differences in the murderer’s MO, I’m inclined to think that this is a copycat crime.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ Judd said, his voice harsh. ‘You’re trying to draw attention to yourself, DC Kerrigan, but you could end up jeopardising the whole case when we get to court.’

  I felt myself redden. ‘Believe me, I wanted more than anything to find out that she was a victim of the serial killer.’

  ‘We can’t ignore the evidence,’ Godley pointed out. ‘It might not suit us but we’ve got to play it out and see where it leads us.’

  Judd turned to his boss. ‘If she’s right and this is a separate case, at least hand it over to another SIO so you don’t have any distractions from the current investigation.’

  He shook his head. ‘I want to hold on to it. I don’t want to draw attention to it in case we get a shitstorm from the media. Besides, it might be useful to have this murder attributed to our guy. It might frustrate him into showing himself to prove he’s the one and only. Carry on as we were, please.’

  The inspector stood up abruptly. ‘I can’t agree.’ He looked at me. ‘But you might as well waste your time on this as on anything else.’

  I bit my lip, managing not to snap back at him before he left the room. His refusal to use me for anything else was a sore point. Preoccupied though I was with what had happened to Rebecca, I was not too absorbed to miss the preparations that were being made for the undercover operation that was to take place over the following two nights. I wanted to be in on it. And I knew very well that I had no chance whatsoever of being included if Tom Judd was left to allocate resources.

  ‘Try not to worry about Tom. The tension gets to him now and then. Especially when we aren’t making much progress.’

  Now that I had a chance to look at him at close range, I could see the superintendent was exhausted. His eyes were rimmed with red, and blue-grey shadows underneath them looked like bruises. He had lost weight – the collar of his shirt was loose. But opportunities to speak to him like this were vanishingly rare, especially since the entire squad knew we were on a countdown to the next murder.

  I gestured to the map. ‘Do you think we’re getting anywhere?’

  ‘Not really. I spent today listening to a criminal psychologist telling me our murderer hates women. Not exactly a stretch, is it? I think I might have guessed that myself.’

  ‘I heard we’re doing an undercover operation over the weekend. Is that the area the UCs are working?’ The map had been marked with a red line that cut through Lambeth and along the Walworth Road, down as far as Camberwell Green, then across Stockwell to Nine Elms and back up the river along the Albert Embankment.

  ‘That’s the one. According to the geographical profile, that’s the territory he’s likely to see as his own. The psychologist thinks he’s on foot because the bodies aren’t dumped far from where we know the victims were walking. That narrows the field a bit. And he obviously feels confident in this part of the world. Local, they think. We’ve borrowed officers from Clubs and Vice to be our bait.’

  They had the training for it; I was rather glad I didn’t. I had never been tempted to pursue that branch of policing, not when it meant standing around on street corners in revealing clothes trying to look enticing.

  Godley looked grim. ‘We’ve got to try it, but I can’t help thinking we’re unlikely to find him this way. We’ve just run out of alternatives.’

  ‘He’s very clever,’ I said softly, and flinched as the superintendent glared at me.

  ‘He’s very lucky, that’s all. I thought I’d made it clear that no one was to think this serial killer is anything other than a selfish, perverted individual who acts impulsively and violently and has been exceptionally fortunate not to be spotted in the act of committing his crimes. If we knew how he was getting them to trust him, we’d have arrested him by now. But that’s the only remarkable thing about him. We aren’t hunting some master criminal.’

  I mumbled something, feeling stupid. Godley hated the fact that the media had given our killer a nickname. It turned him into a celebrity, it granted him notoriety, it let him join the select club of killers whose crimes had passed into infamy. It was what the killer wanted. And it was, according to the superintendent, highly dangerous.

  Godley had returned to contemplating the map. Almost to himself, he murmured, ‘We just need to know how he’s doing it. Whatever it is, he’s got it down to a fine art.’ He gave me a sidelong grin that made my heart flutter a little, because even if I swore blind to everyone else that it wasn’t true, I couldn’t deny to myself that I had a huge crush on my boss. ‘Maybe he is cleverer than us.’

  ‘I doubt that. We’ll get him,’ I said with total confidence, as if confidence alone would do it.

  ‘Did you want to tell me the details of what you’ve found out about Rebecca Haworth?’

  I wavered. ‘There’s a lot to say – it might take a while. If you want to go home I can tell you about it tomorrow.’

  ‘I want to hear it.’ He sat down and gestured to a chair opposite him. ‘Come on. Talk me through it. You must know the real Rebecca by now.’

  I thought about that for a moment before answering him. I’d spent days listening to people talk about Rebecca Haworth, but I was starting to accept that I would never understand her completely. What I had learned from those who had known and loved her was the shape of the space she’d occupied in their minds. Everyone had known a different version of Rebecca and believed it to be the real one.

  ‘I think the truth about Rebecca was that even she didn’t know who the real Rebecca was. She was lost. That’s the best way I can put it. She’d lost her way. And she was getting further and further away from where she should have been. I think it was only a matter of time before something went catastrophically wrong. And I still haven’t worked out exactly why she died.’

  Godley laced his fingers together and leaned back, the expression on his face thoughtful as I recounted the sad story of how Rebecca Haworth had lived through her twenty-eight years.

  ‘I think she was desperate,’ I said, as I got to the end of it. ‘The first major disaster was when she was upset by Adam Rowley’s drowning – she had what seems to have been a fairly major nervous breakdown, dropped out of university temporarily, developed an eating disorder and, from what her friend Tilly said, she seemed to think that she had to bear some responsibility for what happened to him. But she got it together again. She got a good job and did well at it. She was back to being the golden girl, a star, everything her parents wanted her to be. And then it all fell apart. First her relationship broke up in traumatic circumstances, then she lost her job, then the affair with Faraday happened, followed by a little bit of blackmail. She was addicted to drugs with no way to pay for them. She seemed to be trying everything she could to hang on to the illusion that her life was a success. And then she died.’

  ‘Not murdered by our man, you think.’

  ‘No. Someone dressed it up to look like his work, and even if I think I know who, I can’t prove it.’

  ‘Who do you think did it?’

  The question was asked in a casual way, but I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that Godley wasn’t taking me seriously. I hesitated before I answered, knowing that to get it wrong would be a critical mistake.

  ‘The ex-boyfriend, Gil Maddick.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t have any evidence, but that’s the feeling I have. I’m still
trying to work out how it all fits together.’

  ‘I’d take it chronologically and start ruling some of these things out. Right at the beginning, you’ve got the drowning. You need to know what she knew about it. You’ve talked to some of her friends from Oxford, haven’t you? Talk to them again and see what you can shake loose this time.’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to her best friend about it. She might know something.’ I hadn’t yet had a chance to pin Louise down.

  Godley made a note on the pad in front of him. ‘I think we need to put some pressure on the ex-boyfriend. I’ll get Tom to get a search warrant so we can send the forensics team around to look at his flat, check out his car – bother him, basically. You can re-interview him and see if he’s rattled by it. You might even get a confession.’

  ‘He’s pretty self-possessed. I doubt it.’

  ‘Well, at the very least he might make a mistake.’ The superintendent grinned at me. ‘I know I can count on you to spot it if he does.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  ‘You might have to wait and see what happens next. Sometimes the breaks don’t come where you think they will. But I’m sure they’ll come.’ He glanced up at the noticeboard again, almost as a reflex, then pushed back his chair in one quick movement. ‘Is that everything?’

  I hesitated, then rushed on. ‘Actually, I was wondering if I could get on one of the surveillance teams tomorrow night. I’ve done the course and I’d really like to be involved. I know I’m supposed to be concentrating on Rebecca, but I don’t want to lose touch with the main investigation completely. And DI Judd didn’t seem to be that interested in including me.’

  A tiny vertical line creased the skin between Godley’s eyes. He turned away and started to fiddle with a pen on his desk. ‘We’ll see.’

  I cringed inwardly, hoping I hadn’t offended him by complaining about the inspector. The audience was over anyway. I thanked him and scampered back to my desk to go over the conversations again in my mind. I tried to make myself invisible behind a heap of files as the superintendent left. His footsteps slowed, then stopped beside me.