by Andy Maslen
‘I want to know if she was working on the following four dates. Got a pen?’
Garry heard Karlsson open a drawer. He remembered the immaculate desk.
‘Go ahead,’ Karlsson said, all business now.
‘August thirteen, seventeen, eighteen, twenty-three. September fifth.’
‘Right. I’ll have to get onto HR about this. They’ll probably take a few hours and then—’
‘No!’ Garry said, louder than he meant to. ‘No. I need to know right now. I’ll hold on. Tell them it’s urgent police business.’
‘Is everything all right? Where’s Mim?’
‘Just call HR for me, please.’
The clunk as Karlsson put his phone down was loud in Garry’s ear. As he waited he tried Stella again. Voicemail. He didn’t bother leaving a message. He had a bad feeling in his gut. He stared across the room at the murder wall. Tried to keep his mind free of the image that kept bullying and shoving its way in. A fifth woman’s face on the board. Stella’s face.
Karlsson’s voice broke into his thoughts.
‘Hello? Garry?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘No.’
‘No, what?’
‘Sorry. No, Mim wasn’t working on any of those days. It was always Anjali.’
‘Thanks. Bye, Peter.’
‘But what—’
Garry didn’t give him time to finish his question. He walked the length of the incident room and knocked on Callie’s door, then entered. She looked up.
‘What is it, Garry? I’m drowning in paperwork here. Look,’ she flapped a sheet of paper at him, ‘I’ve got a bill from that idiot Trimmets that the other idiot, Morgan, somehow forgot to pay.’
‘OK, you know we went to see Professor Karlsson? The martyrdom guy?’
‘Yes. Robey’s following his book.’
‘Yeah, but the first draft. Which means he must have had access to it. So, the secretary at Monksfield called me a few minutes ago and told me Robey had a sister called Miriam. The same as Karlsson’s secretary. I just spoke to the professor. She wasn’t working on any of the days that the murders took place. She must be the accomplice. The boss was right.’
‘That’s excellent news. Well done. Who’s going to arrest her?’
‘That’s the whole point, ma’am. It’s the boss. She’s gone over to Beckton to collect Miriam. She told her she was Robey’s wife. Stella’s walking into a trap.’
Callie’s eyes flashed and her lips set in a determined line.
‘Right. Find Miriam Robey’s address and get over there pronto with a TSG team. Keep me posted.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
He nodded and left at the double, visualising the men and women of a Territorial Support Group team, in their all-black gear and assault rifles.
Back at his desk, he tried Stella’s number.
‘Hi. This is DCI Stella Cole. Please leave a message.’
‘Boss, it’s Garry. Mim isn’t Robey’s wife. She’s his sister. Her name’s Miriam Judith Robey. The initials: MJ? She would have had access to the early draft. It could all be coincidence, but I think she’s been helping him all along. She’s the one setting up the meetings with the victims. I’m coming over with a TSG team. Don’t go into the house, boss.’
He texted her a shorter version of his message:
Mim = Robey’s sister. Miriam Judith. MJ! Same initials as killer. She’s helping him. Stay back. On way with TSG.
‘What’s going on?’ Def asked him.
He frowned and tightened his lips, then blew out the breath he realised he’d been holding.
‘I think the boss is in trouble. OK, listen up!’ he shouted. ‘We need to find out where Miriam Judith Robey lives.’
Having set them to work, Garry ran for the door, heading for the TSG office.
It took fifteen minutes to sort out a TSG team, and get them on standby for the moment someone ran Miriam Robey to ground.
There are plenty of ways to find out someone’s address. If the person looking has the right access. The DVLA has a database. So does the Land Registry. The Department of Work and Pensions. And HM Revenue and Customs.
Then there’s the credit rating agencies like Equifax. Even pizza delivery companies have lists of customer names, addresses and mobile numbers. That’s before you start hitting the PNC, HOMLES2, CRIMINT, and the databases maintained by the various intelligence agencies.
But sometimes the fastest way is the common sense way. So Garry simply called the HR department at UCL.
After a threat to arrest him for obstruction, the young guy who answered the phone decided that Miriam Robey’s privacy wasn’t his main concern and coughed up the address.
Ten minutes later a three-vehicle convoy tore out of the carpark beneath Paddington Green, blues and twos clearing a path through the morning traffic. Garry led, with Will beside him.
Cam was driving her own car with Arran beside her. The twelve-member method of entry team from the TSG plus their equipment were packed into a couple of Mercedes Sprinter vans.
Switching to the broadcast channel on his Airwave, Garry addressed the officers in the other vehicles.
‘The address is 47 Charlotte Road, Watford, WP2 7YT. No sirens once we’re within half a mile. Confirm?’
‘TSG team confirms.’
‘Team two confirms.’
This was Arran, riding shotgun with Cam behind the wheel.
It took the convoy a further twenty-nine minutes to reach Miriam Robey’s address in Watford, having hit the M1 at ninety and accelerated from there.
Garry’s heart was thumping as he slowed to a stop outside the house, a dismal-looking terrace with browning plants in green plastic troughs in the ground-floor bay window. Behind him, the other three vehicles drew up and disgorged their occupants.
Arran took charge.
‘Garry, you and Will head round the back. Take half the TSG guys with you. I checked the street plan on the way. The house backs onto another street. They’ve got back-to-back gardens. I don’t see her as a fence-jumper, but belt and braces, eh?’
Garry nodded to Will and they sprinted to the end of the road and disappeared around the corner.
‘Cam. You wait with me. The TSG guys’ll do their thing then we go in, yes?’
‘Yes, boss.’
He turned to the sergeant in charge of the TSG team. He carried a red steel battering ram known officially as an Enforcer and by everyone who actually used it as the ‘big red key’.
‘Ready, sarge?’
The man nodded. Burly, shaved head, stab vest. No nonsense.
‘Let’s do this.’
Arran and Cam stood back as the method of entry team approached the front door. Behind the sergeant, five uniformed male and female officers stood ready to charge in and subdue anyone thinking of getting violent. The sergeant braced his legs and swung the ram. The door was cheap and splintered on the first impact.
The sergeant kicked it open and stood back long enough for his five colleagues to rush through, yelling at the tops of their voices, ‘Armed police! Get down, get down!’
Arran and Cam went in after them.
95
FRIDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER 9.09 A.M.
BECKTON, EAST LONDON
Stella opened her eyes. She had a fearsome headache and her vision was blurred. Something foul-smelling was tied over her mouth. She sat perfectly still for fifteen minutes, as the pain at the back of her skull dissipated and the two of everything she was seeing resolved into unity.
The proportions of her surroundings told her she was inside the Portakabin. If it had ever really been an office, it wasn’t one anymore. Bare of furniture, except for an empty steel rack in a corner and a single chair facing her across four feet of dusty floor, it had the flyblown look of the derelict houses she’d raided in her early years putting crack dealers away. She was lying on her side, hands tied behind her. She looked down. Her ankles were fastened with thick black cable ties. The room smelled of mildew.
Miriam pooched out her lips in a little moue of shame.
‘Now, where are my manners? Here I am eating, while you have nothing.’
She pulled the gag down over Stella’s chin.
The sandwich, one perfectly semi-circular bite taken out of it, advanced towards Stella’s mouth.
‘Want a bite?’
The thought of placing her mouth on something those teeth had touched, that tongue had touched, brought back the nausea that had largely disappeared. She shook her head.
‘No thanks. I’m good.’
‘Well, I think we both know that’s not true, but so be it. Now I can tell you what’s been going on. Please try to pay attention.’ Her eyes widened. ‘By the way, did you get my little message in my letter to the Sun?’
‘The capitalised words. Malachi Robey lives. Very clever.’
Miriam smiled.
‘Oh, I was cleverer than that. I left the last three words uncapitalised. You should have realised I wouldn’t spoon-feed you. The full message was “Malachi Robey lives on in me”. D’you see? Because he does. And, as a nice little dig, it’s sort of God-y in a way. I was rather pleased with it, to be honest.’
‘Yeah? Well good for you, you sick bitch.’
‘Stella! How rude! When I offered to share my sandwich with you, too. Anyway, I forgive you. Shall I tell you about Malachi?’
‘Why not? I’m not going anywhere and I could do with a good laugh.’
Miriam frowned. But she stayed in her chair.
‘Naughty girl, trying to provoke me. Are you hoping for a quick death? A painless one? I’m sorry to have to disappoint you but yours will be the worst so far. So, since you asked so nicely, from the moment of his birth, my sainted bitch of a mother began her crusade against him. Take his name, for instance. Malachi Jeremiah Robey.
‘I’ll say that again. Malachi. Jeremiah. Robey. Thanks, Mother! You named him after two Old Testament prophets. In Nineteen – Fucking – Eighty Five. To put all this into some sort of context, in his class at infant school, there were five Jacks, three Davids and two Jameses. Well, there were until James Davies fell under the wheels of the school bus on our trip to the Brecon Beacons, but, still.’
Stella heard the faint buzz of a phone’s vibration alert.
Miriam looked down at her jeans and frowned. Then she simply resumed speaking.
‘Mother. Where shall I start? How about this. She breastfed him until he was two and a half years old. He didn’t want it: her fat dug shoved into his mouth. But she was a very religious woman, you see. She believed that we are born with original sin baked in. And she took it upon herself to see it was purged from his body and mind at every available opportunity.
‘Solid food encouraged boys to grow and, according to Mother, that led to impure thoughts and deeds. Keeping him fastened to her tit would dilute the effects and weaken those desires to the point that prayer, and regular, vicious beatings, would triumph.
‘She worked as an upholsterer at the Ford factory in Dagenham. Dad was a taxi driver. Owned his own cab. But Mother only worked for the nobility of it. That and the money Ford paid her, I mean. Her real occupation. Her real passion, was her church. And, no, before you ask me which church, that’s not what I meant at all. I must practise being more precise so you don’t misunderstand me as I tell you the story.
‘She had anointed herself as a pastor and ran a church from the lounge, as she delighted in calling our front room. It was about the size of a rabbit hutch, and stuffed with pot plants and stupid statues of saints. She had about twelve congregants who used to shuffle into our terraced house on Sunday mornings and moan and mumble as Mother preached on the subject of sin and redemption.
‘The beatings started the same day he had his first erection. He told me all about it afterwards. She pulled him out of the bath by his wrist and commenced to smack his wet behind until he screamed for mercy. “You dirty little boy!” she screamed. “You dirty little boy!”
‘In the end Dad came in and told her to stop but she just carried on with the beating, and yelled at him. I heard every poisonous word. “You put your demon seed in me and your vileness is coming out in him now, can’t you see?” she screamed into his face. “You slink about with that slut down the road, don’t think I don’t know. You fornicate with that whore and half the street knows it.”
‘Mother wasn’t a large woman and, although he could have torn her head off her shoulders, Dad elected not to and left, shooting me a pitying glance. Like I said, the beatings started that night. And so did her constant attempts to undermine his self-confidence. Every chance the old sow got, she would belittle him.
‘My father moved out nine months after the “bathtime incident”, as I learned to think of it. Mother was right about one thing, though. Dad was screwing a woman down the road and they moved in together. “Shacked up in a house imbued with sin,” was how Mother put it at the time, showing a fine disregard for staying within a single style of speech.
‘As well as the beatings, Mal had to endure Mother’s ravings about how he was the embodiment of original sin, the continuing stain on her character, a wretched boy just waiting to become a fornicator like his father.
‘To be honest with you, looking back it’s fairly clear to me that Mother was suffering from a severe form of mental illness. A borderline personality disorder in all probability, mixed with paranoid delusions and religious mania. At the time I just hated her.
‘When he was eight, he told me he’d started experiencing feelings towards girls. Exactly the feelings Mother was so terrified of, in fact. He told me he wanted to rape a girl. OK, fine, as we’re sharing all our secrets, he told me he wanted to rape a lot of girls. Possibly every girl. I reined him in, of course, I did. But what’s bred in the bone, as they say.
‘Anyway, killing. That was more my area than Mal’s. Our neighbour, old man Garbutt, had a cat. He doted on it. He called it Greta, you know, after the actress. Greta Garbo? Her catchphrase was “I want to be alone.” It sounds better if you do it in a cod-German accent. You know, “I vant to bee eh-loan.”
‘Old man Garbutt said the cat was like the actress. “Greta prefers her own company,” he used to say. “Just as well given what horrible things human beings do to animals.” Did I mention he was a vegetarian? He was a vegetarian.
‘One day in the summer holidays, when our contemporaries – you remember them? The Jacks, Davids and Jameses. The Chloes, Emmas and Sarahs – were off on their bikes or hanging around the swings, we stole a sandwich bag full of Rich Tea biscuits and a bottle of made-up orange squash and set off to track Greta.
‘I saw her first, outside Garbutt’s front door. She was sunning herself on the porch. Licking her fur. No wonder they get those disgusting fur balls in their guts. All that coughing and retching they do. Well, I could have told her why. It’s all that fur you ingest, you idiot cat! Why not, oh, I don’t know, stop licking your fur!’
Miriam screamed these final four words. Stella flinched at the naked display of such animalistic rage. Miriam seemed calm again. She smiled down at Stella.
‘Sorry, Stella, that was a bit OTT, wasn’t it? Where was I? Oh, yes! Greta’s belly sort of swung when she walked. I’d asked Mother about it and she said, and I quote, “There’s another painted whore who opened her legs. Now she’s carrying a brood in her belly like I was forced to.” Which, with a little effort, I translated to mean Greta was going to have kittens.
‘I walked up Garbutt’s front path, past all his stupid chrysanthemums in those unrealistic sweetshop shades fanciers of that particular flower like to look at, can’t think why but there you are, live and let live, I suppose – and I
crouched down and stuck out my fingers. “Hey, Greta,” I said softly. “Why don’t you show us where you like to be alone and we can play together?”
‘And Greta hissed at me and swiped a paw at my outstretched hand. Fascinating fact: cats’ claws are retractable. Imagine that! Sharp little stilettos they can shoot out at will like miniature flick-knives. Now there’s a great idea from Mother Nature.
‘I sucked the blood out of the scratches and hissed back. Greta got to her feet, turning herself practically inside out as she arched her back at me and then stalked past me down the path. Which is exactly what I wanted! Dumb cat.
‘Then it was a simple matter of dogging – Haha! Joke!– her footsteps as she tried her “I vant to be eh-loan” act on us. But, needless to say, it didn’t work. With her belly full of kittens she wasn’t really very fast and we were dedicated.
‘So after about ten or maybe fifteen minutes – I’m not sure, so we’ll call it fifteen to be on the safe side – she turned right and led us into the loading bay at the back of a shopping precinct near our house. She scooted in between two of the big old galvanised steel dustbins they used to have before everything went wheelie-bin and we followed her in. I was big for my age but I was good at squeezing into little tight spaces.
‘We’d found her lair. A scratty old blanket some shop-owner must have tossed out. She’d nested in it. There were scraps of food all around and even the back half of a dead mouse, which I picked up and examined. Now she was on her own territory and not old man Garbutt’s, she seemed to relax. She wasn’t hissing anymore, which was a good thing. And those retractable claws were, as the name suggests, retracted.
‘I’d stolen something else from home. I took it out of my pocket now. A tin of sardines in vegetable oil. I snapped off the key and pushed the little steel tab through the slot and started to twist the key over and over, rolling up the razor-sharp lid around it.
‘I deliberately let some of the fishy oil dribble onto the blanket and when Greta smelled what it was she was in like Flynn! Licking, purring all at once. And eyeing me at the same time.