The Coop

  “Wow. The newspapers would die for a story like this.”

  “I know. I’m writing it.”

  “Not yet.” Everton picked up the hacked files, knelt and began laying them out on the floor, like a screenwriter trying to find the narrative thread in his story. “This gives us a motive for the Lewis’ taking Gina's laptop and mobile. There may have been something incriminating on them – photos or texts – but we still don’t know who was actually in the house on the night Gina died.”

  “You said it was a man, so it would have had to have been her father.”

  “It couldn’t have been Gordon Lewis. He’s wheelchair bound.” He began rifling in Pauline’s bag and pulled out a pen.

  “Feel free. Help yourself.”

  Everton wasn’t listening. The investigation was opening up, he could feel it. He just didn’t know how to slot into place the pieces of information yet. “I need you to find out everything you can about this man,” he said, scribbling a name onto a scrap of paper ripped from one of the files and handing it to Pauline. “His name’s Brian Hoffman. He’s ex-Met, a DCI. He now works as security for Celia Lewis. But be careful, he’s still very connected.”

  “Hey. I’ve done my bit. You’re the cop, do it yourself.”

  “I can’t. I may not be a cop for much longer.”

  Pauline was stopped in her tracks. “Don’t tell me they’re going to offer you early retirement on medical grounds?”

  “It’s more of an ultimatum than an offer. I’ve got seven days to accept it or it’s a disciplinary hearing and dismissal.”

  “What? Why?”

  “My blood tests revealed drugs in my system. Someone informed DCI Teal.”

  “Detective Constable Helen Lake?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, as you’re aware, I’m not his favourite person.”

  “Everton. For once in your life, don’t be stupid. Forget the case. Forget the lousy job. Take early retirement and the cash and get on with the rest of your life.”

  “Are you making tea?”

  “Is that a way of telling me to mind my own business?”

  “We’re getting divorced, Pauline.”

  “You’re right. It’s your life. Ruin it.” She disappeared into the kitchen, biting back her frustration.

  Everton eased off his jacket and sat on the floor, lost in thought, as he perused the innocuous-looking printed papers that charted the wreckage of three other lives.

  Epiphany

  Colin Gould’s first day back at St. Mary’s University turned out to be eventful. The Victorian central-heating system had grumbled to a halt and he was forced to hold his lectures in an overcoat and gloves, whilst his students huddled around two industrial blow-heaters for warmth.

  Colin hated the cold. He suffered from pneumonia as a child, the result of an ex-army father who never settled into civilian life and expected his family to embrace his military values, which included having the windows wide open even in the winter. He’d subsequently got a job as a prison officer in a Young Offender Institution which allowed him to express his beliefs even more rigorously and with impunity. But, on the plus side, it meant he worked long hours and was seldom at home.

  They were forty minutes into the class and Colin was finding it hard to make himself heard above the roar of the heaters. “Alright. Can anyone give me the classic definition of mise en scène? Anyone? Come on, you should know this.”

  A hand went up from amongst the huddled throng. “Is it a scene that’s missing? Like, you know, been edited out?”

  Colin fixed the youth with a baleful stare and said, “No. And if that’s intended to be a joke, it’s not funny.”

  Since no one was laughing, he assumed that it wasn’t and turned away to the wipe board.

  “Mise en scène, from the French, refers to everything that appears in the camera lens. That is not only the sets, props and actors but also includes the lighting, cinematography and editing…”

  He was finding it difficult to write in his woollen gloves so gave up and turned back towards the class. He caught sight of one of the faculty secretaries beckoning to him from the doorway, mouthing, “The police. For you.”

  There was barely enough room for Helen, Clarke and Colin in his freezing shoebox of an office. He offered them a “warming cup of tea” from a vending machine in the hallway, but Helen refused, obliging Clarke to do likewise.

  “So how can I help you, Detective?”

  “We’re investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Gina Lewis. I’m told you were engaged to be married?”

  “Not formally, but we’d talked about it.”

  “But you were in a physical relationship?”

  Colin paused, uncomfortable with being questioned about his sex life, especially by an attractive young woman. “Look, I think I’m owed the courtesy of being told what this is all about. I mean, am I some sort of suspect in something?”

  “And why would you feel that, Mr Gould?” interjected Clarke.

  “Because it’s the natural conclusion to draw from the tone of your questioning,” Colin bridled, resenting being patronised by someone he felt of inferior intellect.

  Helen nodded to Clarke, who removed a number of photographs from an envelope he was carrying, made a space on Colin’s cluttered desk, and laid them out in front of him.

  “These are all missing women that we presume are dead, Mr Gould,” said Helen. “My colleague, Sergeant Clarke, is going to run through a list of their names, addresses and the dates they disappeared. I’d like you to tell him where you were on each of the dates.”

  Echoes of his times at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs stirred in Colin, only he knew that now he was the one being hunted. And not just for poisoning Megan Howell’s dog. This was potentially much more dangerous.

  “Look, I have no idea who these women are. I’ve never met them–”

  “I ask,” interrupted Helen, tapping one of the photos, “because Tessa Hayes was abducted and assaulted on the eighth of November – the night your fiancée committed suicide – and you were supposed to be meeting Gina Lewis at The Telegraph Pub that evening but didn’t turn up. Can you tell me why?”

  “I had a flu bug. I picked it up from one of my students.”

  “You were at home? Can anyone confirm that?” said Clarke, very deliberately taking out a pad and pen and laying them on the desk.

  “No. I watched television and had an early night.”

  “Can you remember what you saw?”

  “No, can you?” Colin snapped… “Look, I wasn’t feeling well–”

  “Yet you went to work the next morning as usual.”

  Colin was unnerved, realising that Clarke must have been checking on his movements. “I view my teaching as a vocation. I take it very seriously.”

  “You must do, considering your fiancée had just died.”

  “I didn’t know she’d just died!” Colin barked, rising to his feet. “And I resent your condescending tone. Now, if you’ve quite finished…”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t, sir. Have you ever used online dating sites?”

  “What? No. They’re just cattle markets.”

  “Yet you were happy to join Chill Out, a group of predominantly middle-aged women looking for companionship?”

  “That’s hardly a dating club. It’s an offshoot of FrontRow, a group of mature people who meet to share and discuss their interest in the cinema, theatre and the arts.”

  “And you never met Tessa Hayes online or at any dating club?”

  It took Colin a moment to readjust to Helen’s abrupt segue. “I told you. I don’t know who she is. I’ve never seen her before.”

  “Have you ever been to Gina Lewis’ Wimbledon house?”

  Colin could feel himself beginning to wilt under the barrage of questions. He poured himself some water from a litre bottle on the windowsill, into the plastic cup on the desk.

  “You’ve already got tea in that one, sir.”

&nb
sp; He wanted to slap Helen. Shove her smartarse comments back down her throat. “Thank you. I have a habit of doing that.” But he merely emptied the plastic cup into the brown metal bin below the desk and refilled it.

  Helen’s interview of Iris Costa should have been more straightforward, since she was primarily just gathering background information on Don Hart. It wasn’t.

  They were sitting in Iris’s office, a tiny room full of Greek memorabilia, that doubled as her occasional dining room. But today there was no fire in the Victorian grate and little cheer to be had around the pine table. Helen quickly began to suspect from her evasive answers that Iris may have had affairs with not only Hart but also Colin Gould. She fervently denied it, but was eventually forced to come clean, explaining that she was concerned about her friend’s reaction if it became public knowledge. Helen told her bluntly that she could care less about her problems, she was investigating the possible murder of three women and needed some honest answers.

  Iris admitted to having a “liaison” with Colin Gould and sleeping with Don Hart on a few occasions. But she claimed to have no knowledge of either of their whereabouts on the night of Gina’s suicide, and insisted she knew nothing about their relationships with other women. Apart, of course, from Laura Fell, who she now deeply regretted letting down.

  Back at the station, after comparing notes with DCI Teal, Helen asked Clarke to run an APNR (automatic number plate recognition) check on both Hart and Gould’s cars on the eighth of November, the date of Tessa Hayes’ abduction, but also going back chronologically to check their whereabouts on the dates the other missing women had disappeared. Clarke groaned, knowing it was going to be a long and tedious process, which didn’t guarantee success, but he couldn’t refuse.

  Later, when he bemoaned the fact to Helen, she scraped her nails across his hairless chest in response and said, “You want to moan, go home to your wife. You want to fuck me, stop whingeing and get on with it.”

  He knew he should get out of her bed there and then, and leave, demanding her respect, but he suspected that it would make no difference to her. He pulled her down to him and kissed her hard. Helen ground her hips into him and kissed him back even harder.

  A thought came into Nephilim’s head. A thought so radical, yet so beautiful in its simplicity, that at first, he dismissed it as too macabre. But each night as he slept, it rose again like a bubble to the surface of his REM sleep and burst into his limbic system and memory.

  It came to him during his evening class. He was working on the same bench as a wild-haired young guy who called himself, rather pretentiously, Ludo. He had a Masters degree in Twentieth-Century Interior Design from Westminster University and was setting up his own boutique company specialising in rare stuffed animals. Ludo prided himself on knowing the market price of each piece he’d ever worked on since, in his words, “Damien Hurst made dead animals fashionable”.

  Nephilim disliked him immediately. Ludo was a talented taxidermist and brilliant with his hands, able to remove the skin of a rabbit with a dexterity that he didn’t yet possess, but there was a calculated detachment to his works. Ultimately, there was no art in them because there was no art, no compulsion, no love inside him. He possessed all the accoutrements of an artist – the look, the unapologetic language – but beneath it all he was as hollow as the carcasses they worked on. He didn’t cherish his subject or the process. He cherished only the end product and the success it would bring him. He was a charlatan, an accountant pretending to be an artist, and Nephilim hated him for demeaning the purity of his own beliefs.

  But ironically it was Ludo’s very cynicism that sparked Nephilim’s idea, his epiphany.

  It was during their Wednesday evening class. The lecturer, who dressed like a farmer in baggy cords and Viyella check shirt, yet lived in Islington, was explaining the religious rituals that accompanied Egyptian mummification. Ludo couldn’t have cared less. He was simply there to hone his technique and had no interest in the religious, mythical or historical contexts of taxidermy.

  “The thing is, in its so-called purest form, it’s a dead art – no pun intended. We don’t need to mummify our loved ones to preserve their memory. We have HD video for that. The cloud is the twentieth-century version of heaven, mate. You got to move with the times, create new art forms, like Damien. Like him or loathe him, the man sells.”

  Nephilim loathed Damien Hurst, but he’d stopped listening anyway. An idea had exploded like shrapnel into his mind, a thought so pure it actually frightened him. He tossed his scalpel onto the brushed steel table and, without a word, walked out of the emergency door into the empty school playground. The clear winter sky was ablaze with stars. So was his mind. He’d received a message. Sent by Him. He should have seen it before; he’d been doing His work, prosecuting and purifying the diseased, setting them free and honouring their release. But ironically his calling had cost him the most beautiful and purest love of all, and no photograph or HD video could ever compensate for that.

  Unless…

  It was not in the nature of Laura Fell to bear grudges, but she hadn’t spoken to any of the group in over a week. Even though Iris had been leaving messages, clearly holding out an olive branch, Laura knew there would still be questions about Gina’s house and the will and that the Chinese whispers would only start again. She turned off her laptop, screened her calls and went for longer and longer walks in Kew Gardens whilst she waited for something to change.

  She even contemplated refusing Gina’s bequest. But Kieron, who sweetly phoned every couple of days to check she was okay, advised her against it, insisting that she’d done nothing wrong and she should honour Gina’s wishes. Besides, if she stood aside it might be read as guilt and make her look even more complicit to her friends.

  As the days dragged by, she found herself musing about him more and more, and was embarrassed by the intimate nature of her thoughts. She remembered taking notes at a child protection conference regarding a mother and her son. He’d been abandoned as a child and they’d met again twenty-five years later and started a sexual relationship. The psychologist had called it something like “genetic sexual attraction” and said it wasn’t uncommon for people to experience such feelings when they shared a deep emotional bond. Laura reasoned that it was what she must be feeling, because she and Kieron had both shared and loved someone they’d lost. She suspected he felt it too, even if he was too shy to openly admit it, otherwise why all the phone calls? God, she thought. I sound like a character out of a Barbara Cartland novel.

  She was wandering around the Queen’s Garden, situated at the rear of Kew Palace, the smallest of all the royal palaces and a place she never tired of visiting since its reopening in 2006. She’d spent the previous hour exploring the nearby Georgian kitchens of the house, marvelling at its original two hundred-year-old features. One of the guides, a middle-aged guy possessing an extraordinary amount of enthusiasm and knowledge, had trapped her for half an hour, explaining the intricacies of the four preparation rooms. Delighting in showing her the lead-lined sinks in which the scullery boys – girls not being allowed in the king’s kitchen – laboured for hours, scouring pots with a mixture of soap and sand, eventually tearing the flesh from their adolescent fingers.

  It was a relief to escape from his encyclopaedic zeal into the peace of the Queen’s Garden, with its formal arcades, sculptures and beds full of plants used for medicinal purposes in the seventeenth century. She sat on the large curved bench at the end of the parterre, eating an exorbitantly priced sandwich she’d brought from the White Peaks Cafe, whilst she admired a statue of a boy with a dolphin and wondered what its significance was.

  “Laura?”

  She wheeled around and saw Everton Bowe looking down at her from beside the gazebo. For a moment, she didn’t recognise him; his right eye was bruised, an ugly wound ran across the bridge of his swollen nose and his cheeks looked raw and inflamed. Hardly surprising, since an hour earlier it had taken him ten excruciating minutes t
o peel the micropore tape from his face and remove the plaster cast from his nose.

  “It looks worse than it is,” he said, seeing the startled look on her face and making his way down the steps towards her.

  Laura slid the remains of her sandwich into her shoulder bag and stood to greet him, wondering what he was doing there.

  “That was a stroke of luck,” he said, sensing her concern. “I was about to give up. Have you got a minute?”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “You weren’t answering your phone and you told me you liked to walk here. That day in The Botanist, remember?”

  Laura did, but still felt uncomfortable, embarrassed that she hadn’t contacted him after his accident, which from the look of his face appeared serious. “I’m sorry. I’m actually supposed to be meeting someone,” she lied.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes. It’s about the case.”

  “DC Lake said you weren’t on it anymore. That you’re retiring… for medical reasons?”

  Everton smiled grimly to himself, thinking how quickly Helen had written him off. “DC Lake may be a bit premature. Can I buy you a coffee?”

  “I’m sorry. I really don’t have the time.”

  “That’s okay. We can chat on the way out.”

  Laura could hardly refuse so merely nodded her head in acceptance. Everton fell into step beside her as they walked out of the garden and across the dew-soaked grass, the pair of them leaving tell-tale footprints in their wake.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t get a chance to come to the hospital,” Laura said, attempting to bridge the silence until he told her what he really wanted.

  “Don’t worry about it. You’ve had a lot on your plate.”

  “Actually, things are a bit clearer now.”

  “Good. Well, I’ve dug up some information that should help make it even clearer…”

  Laura listened patiently as Everton relayed the story of Gordon Lewis’ drunken crash and the subsequent discovery by Gina that she’d been adopted. And when he finally finished, she said simply, “I know.”