The Coop

  “There you go, Dad,” he whispered. “Up the blues, eh?”

  It was a tiny gesture but the first act of kindness that his son had shown him in over two years, and if he could Everton would have cried with joy. Instead, he sank into the warmth of the feeling and let himself be swallowed by the drama of the big match. And as he did so, the face of his attacker, the man who had abducted Laura Fell, formed like a video camera pulling focus deep in his subconscious…

  His name was not Kieron Allen.

  All of a sudden, the dove’s feather made perfect sense. It had been staring him right in the face. Why hadn’t he seen it before? He’d known every move they’d made. He’d been playing with them. Christ, he had to warn Helen. She was the only one who could save Laura now. But how? He couldn’t move. Not a finger. Not a muscle.

  Adam stood and gently inserted the other headphone in Everton’s ear, whispering, “Half-time. I’m going to check on Mum. Enjoy.”

  He turned and left the cubicle. Everton was alone. Beneath the numbing anaesthetic, panic began to gnaw at him. For the first time in his life, he felt fear, real fear. Not the nervous adrenaline rush of facing a drunk brandishing a bottle or a mouthy kid with a blade in his pocket and a braying gang behind him. But the certainty that an innocent person was going to die in a horrific way and he no longer had the power to stop it. It would be his ultimate failure. Worse than the loss of his job. Worse even than the self-inflicted loss of his son and his marriage. Then something extraordinary happened. His rage reached deep down into the barbiturate void, found him and began to haul him towards the surface. He lay there mute, in agony, ears howling with tinnitus, waiting, willing, praying for something to move.

  Finally, the index finger of his left hand did.

  Helen was wary of tripping a security light, but the floodlight over the white uPVC back door remained puzzlingly dormant. She tried the handle. It was locked. She drew a set of brass knuckles – illegal but useful – from her jeans pocket. She removed her scarf and wrapped it around her fist to deaden the sound when she punched out the kitchen window – but stopped as she saw the buckled frame.

  Someone had already been there, jemmied their way in. Probably some scrote thief who’d been checking the newspaper obituaries and read about Amy Tann’s murder. She blew in disgust, pulled the window open and climbed inside. The house was cold and smelt of bleach and pine disinfectant; disturbingly like the police morgue. And although Amy's body had been removed there were still faint blood spatters on the hall walls that the crime scene cleaners hadn’t been able to remove.

  Concerned about being seen, she shielded the glow from her iPhone light from the window, as she crept into the modernist through-lounge. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed, which was strange, but it was immediately obvious that the room was not being used as an office. She backed out, into the hall, and started slowly up the oak stairs.

  Nephilim stood motionless in the gloom, waiting with mounting excitement as he listened to her footsteps approaching, knowing that she would soon be helpless under his knife and that he would finally purge himself of her. She was getting closer now. He could almost taste her.

  Helen scanned the landing. Every door was open, apart from the front bedroom. She inched towards it, reached out and tested the chrome handle.

  Nephilim watched the tiny, almost imperceptible movement of the handle. It was time. Checking Amy’s laptop was secure under his sweater, he lifted the sliver of a blade above his head as if he were about to make a sacrifice, which in his mind he was. The door swung lazily open. He leapt forward to strike.

  “I am Nephilim the…!”

  The blade sliced through thin air. She wasn’t there! He couldn't believe it. She had to be; he’d heard her on the stairs, seen her light. Where the fuck was she?

  Helen was crouching in the bathroom behind him. She stepped out and aimed a chopping punch at his forearm. He screamed like a stuck pig and dropped the Stanley knife, clattering onto the floor.

  Helen grabbed him by the back of his hair, snarling, “Move and I’ll fucking brain you.”

  But as she dragged him around to get a view of his face, his hair literally came away in her hand. She stared down at the wig, stunned. Nephilim launched himself over the wooden banister, crashing down into the hallway below. Helen leapt down the stairs after him. But she was too late. He was already climbing out of the shattered window and by the time she got out and around to the front of the house he was nowhere to be seen.

  She stood in the middle of the road, staring down at the chestnut-brown wig. It was made of real hair and was clearly expensive. She never heard the grey VW Golf powering up the road behind her until it was twenty metres away. Turning into the blinding headlights, she thought she caught a glimpse of the implacable face of the driver, before she was forced to dive aside. She lay on the cold tarmac, catching her breath, staring up at the starless sky, trying to place the features of her bald attacker. A face that was both similar but somehow different.

  The sound of breaking glass reverberated around the ward like a gunshot. Hearing it, the IC nurse came running towards Everton’s bed and was confronted by a scene of carnage. A tangle of weeping intravenous lines lay beside their shattered monitors, and beneath them sprawled Everton, face down in a slurry of saline, IV drugs and his own blood. She hit the crash team button and began yelling for help. The ward sister and the emergency resus team came racing onto the ward, struggling to digest what they found. How could a patient in a medically induced coma haul himself to the edge of the bed and fall/throw himself off?

  Pauline panicked, seeing the curtains drawn around Everton’s bed. The IC nurse tried in vain to keep her outside but she was having none of it and pushed her aside. Everton was back in his bed, re-medicated, eyes taped shut, as if nothing had happened.

  The sister reassured Pauline that he was fine, that one of the monitors had come loose from a faulty stand, toppled over and broken an IV lead. But the shards of glass and blood on the floor indicated a different story. Sensing Pauline’s disquiet, she grabbed a handful of paper towels and began to mop the floor. Pauline reluctantly stepped aside to allow her to work and was stunned – beneath her feet she appeared to be standing on the remains of a word written in Everton’s blood. It read:

  Ki noona

  Before she could question the sister further, the lino and Everton’s message had been mopped clean.

  James Noonan was in agony. Not just physically – he could barely grip the steering wheel – but mentally, wondering if Helen had seen his face. If she had, would she even recognise him, from the forensic lab, without his wig? He’d no way of knowing but knew he had to plan for the worst and that would mean disappearing. But in doing so he’d immediately draw attention to himself?

  His mind was reeling with the possible ramifications as he pulled in and parked on the forecourt of the Tesco Express on the Upper Richmond Road. Biting down on the back of his hand sent shards of pain searing up his injured forearm, but finally his head began to clear.

  Nursing his arm, he made his way inside the gaudily lit shop and bought a packet of Nurofen and a half-bottle of Bells using a twenty-pound note. Head down, away from the security camera, he hurried into the unisex lavatory. The fluorescent light flared on automatically and he caught sight of his stark reflection in the mirror above the moulded plastic washbasin. He looked haunted, furtive, nothing like Nephilim, a demigod. More like a fox caught in a chicken coop, he thought, bleakly.

  It took three Nurofen and a couple of huge belts of Scotch to stop him screaming as he eased off his jacket and – worse – his sweater. A four-centimetre bruise puckered his left forearm and purple swelling flowered around it. He feared his radial bone was fractured but he knew he couldn’t risk going to A&E. If the police were looking for him it would be the first place they’d check. He fashioned a sling out of his sweater by tying the two arms together and slipped the loop over his head. He took another hit of the Scotch and gingerly eas
ed his left arm inside the crude woollen cradle.

  “Hello… Hello?”

  Someone began rattling at the lavatory door.

  “Hello? There are other people waiting, you know. Hello?”

  “Sorry. I won’t be a minute,” he replied through gritted teeth.

  He slipped his jacket over his shoulders, hiding the sling, pocketed the Scotch and tablets and slid the bolt open. The paunchy guy threw him a dirty look and hurried his kid inside. Nephilim wanted to kick the door down and smash him and his mewling progeny to a pulp. But Noonan was forced to swallow his anger like a piece of rancid meat and walk out.

  Forty minutes later he’d cleared his rented studio flat of anything compromising and was on his way down the A3 to the coop and his dove. The pain in his arm was easing and he’d regained some mobility in his fingers, which thankfully meant that it hadn’t been broken. But he knew he could still be in danger. He calculated it would take twenty-four hours at least for anyone to connect him to the farm. If he worked through the night he should have more than enough time to complete his angels. Even if he had to leave Gina behind, she would be his legacy and Laura, her best friend, his gift to her.

  Helen was driving back to her flat and debating whether she should report the break-in and attack at the house. But how could she explain what she was doing there when she’d been removed from the case? The Met were looking for another scapegoat and would throw the book at her. Pauline’s phone call interrupted her gloomy deliberations. She pulled over, fearing it was more bad news, but Pauline informed her curtly that Everton was not dead; on the contrary he seemed to be trying to communicate with someone. She assumed it must be her, since she had no idea who “Ki” or “Noona” was.

  Helen listened in awed silence as Pauline relayed the story of the name Everton had written in his blood. Ki = Noona…? Ki could be Kieron. Kieron Allen. But who or what was Noon…? It sounded like Noonan, the forensic scientist. Surely Everton couldn’t mean James Noonan?

  She wracked her brain, trying to picture the hit-and-run driver. She’d only caught a glimpse of him, but she remembered thinking he seemed somehow familiar. Could Noonan be the killer she’d been hunting? Not just having changed his name and appearance when trawling the online dating sites, but in real life too? It was bizarre, but it would explain why Kieron Allen had been impossible to trace – he didn’t exist.

  She thanked Pauline for her help, cut the connection and picked up the brown wig from the passenger seat. Turning it over to examine it more closely, she noticed as small label stitched on the seam beneath it: RayRee M628. Could it be the name of the owner? Or maybe the manufacturer code? She began googling RayRee on her mobile.

  Reece Holloway had taken Raye, his over-glamorous wife, to dinner to celebrate the return of her driving license after her second drink-driving ban. It meant he no longer had to do the school run, which he dreaded because at his age he got some odd looks at the school gates. So, the wig-maker was not entirely happy to have his crab linguine interrupted by a phone call from some police woman he’d never heard of. Helen apologised and explained that she’d got his contact number from the RayRee website. He was adamant that he couldn’t meet until the following morning until she informed him bluntly that a woman might have been murdered by one of his clients.

  Half an hour later, she was waiting outside his office on the Upper Richmond Road when Reece and Raye emerged from a taxi clutching a doggy bag of linguine and the remains of an expensive bottle of Rioja. Reece unlocked the warehouse door and ushered Helen inside.

  The ground floor was the size of a tennis court. Eight equally spaced workstations were centrally situated, each with its own inbuilt sewing machine and extendable electric magnifier. Numerous bits of wig-making equipment littered the desks and one wall was taken up by a huge wooden filing cabinet with numbered drawers.

  “Each drawer has a three-digit code which breaks down the hair into the colour, ethnicity and style of the sample,” explained Reece. “The drawers are lined with linen and the samples individually wrapped in parchment paper and renumbered with the client’s ID code.”

  “So my wig can be traced back to its owner?” said Helen, cutting to the chase.

  “Yes. I’m assuming you have it with you?”

  Helen unzipped her leather jacket and dug the hairpiece out.

  “That’s one of mine,” said Raye, without evening check the code.

  “You made it?”

  “God, no, I wouldn’t have the patience. I’m a hair stylist. Once the wig’s been made, I cut and style it on the client. All our wigs are bespoke.”

  “Do you remember the client’s name? It’s very important.”

  “Not offhand. But it would be in our records. Reece, be a doll and bring down the laptop and a couple of glasses,” she said, deftly removing the bottle of Rioja from his hand.

  Reece did as he was ordered and laboured up the steel staircase and into the glass-fronted office that overlooked the workspace like a giant aquarium.

  “Can you remember anything about the man?”

  “I think Reece made a number of wigs of different colours and styles for him, which was unusual.”

  Helen felt her excitement rising; everything pointed to it being the same man.

  “His name was Moon. Joshua Moon,” Reece called from the office door. “I think I’ve still got his fitting photographs on my Nexus.”

  Helen met him at the bottom of the stairs and swiped through the series of photographs on his tablet. They were of the forensic scientist, James Noonan, trying out an assortment of wigs. Helen was stunned.

  “You’re sure that was his name? Moon not James Noonan?”

  “Yes. I remember, because he was weird around women. Didn’t like being touched.”

  “Do you have any contact details for him?”

  Reece handed over a card with an Earlsfield address.

  She was risking everything to nail Noonan personally, but Helen calculated that DCI Teal would be reluctant to believe that the forensic officer had attacked her and tried to run her over. Besides, if she didn’t do something urgently he’d disappear and, in all probability, Laura Fell with him.

  “If he hasn’t already,” she muttered to herself as she pulled up outside a brutally ugly block of flats on Burntwood Lane in Earlsfield.

  Jake Oliver was in the habit of ignoring the caretaker’s buzzer after dark. The block had been plagued by local kids playing knock-knock and he was tired of being taken for a mug, especially when he was concentrating on his miniatures. He only reluctantly placed his sable brush aside, switched off his fluorescent magnifier and hauled himself over to the video entryphone. He was intrigued to see an attractive young woman holding up a warrant card to the security camera.

  Helen was right. She was too late. Apart from the furniture and a few prints on the walls, Noonan’s studio flat was virtually empty. There were no personal photographs, letters or bills in the drawers and few clothes in the wardrobe. Even the kitchen bin was minus its inner bag.

  Jake was impressed. “He’s very neat.”

  “Not neat. Careful,” corrected Helen. “When does your rubbish get collected?”

  “Tomorrow. Around 6am. Why?”

  The bin shed was dark and stank of fox, sour milk and soiled nappies. Worse, some of the bin liners had overflowed from the enormous containers and spilt onto the cement floor, making it unpleasantly sticky to walk on.

  “If there’s anything here it’ll be in a landfill bag. He’ll have tried to hide it.”

  Jake switched on his Magalite, hissed at a couple of truculent rats, forcing them to scurry for cover, and began sifting through the mush. Helen spotted a copy of Racing Pigeon UK jutting from a ripped bag and told Jake to dump the contents onto floor. Amongst the detritus were some scraps of a photograph. She began to reassemble them like a jigsaw and gasped as an image emerged of Gina Lewis standing beside a silver Golf – the same car that had earlier tried to run her down.

&
nbsp; “Can you make out the number plate?”

  “No. But that’s not a problem.” Jake grinned. “Follow me.”

  Helen stared in awe at the scale of the work. The whole lounge floor had been turned into a battlefield, a miniature version of Waterloo with the British, German, Belgian, Prussian and Dutch armies lined up in formation against Napoleon’s French Grande Armée.

  “Still got to do the French infantry and the Little Corporal. I’m saving him until last,” Jake explained as he scrutinised the reassembled segments under his magnifier. “Bingo. C102 LYT.”

  Helen almost decimated the Prussian army in her haste to retrieve the photo.

  Trotting back to her car, she called in requesting an urgent PNC check on the silver Golf and plate. But it was not Joshua Moon, James Noonan or Kieron Allen who came back as the registered owner. It was a woman. Her name was Penny Croft and she lived seventy miles away, in Winchester, Hampshire.

  The doves

  Laura screamed herself hoarse. But as the hours went by, slowly, inexorably, she began to realise that there was no one to hear her cries.

  She was lying in a large wooden shed with a metal workbench at one end, covered in anatomy and religious textbooks, and a small Calor Gas heater at the other. Her left wrist was shackled by a chain to a large iron ring on the wall. She had no idea where she was or how she’d got there or what time it was. The last thing she remembered clearly was having lunch with Kieron. Everything afterwards was just a montage of horrors; of ripping clothes, falling hair and dripping blood.

  She reached for the bottle of water and lifted it to her lips. But as she did so another flashback stopped her. An image of her gagging as someone squirted liquid into her mouth. She’d been drugged! That would explain how he’d got her here without a struggle and her nausea and her blinding headache. She sniffed the water. It smelt of nothing and she was desperately thirsty, but she knew she couldn’t trust it. She emptied the bottle between the wooden planks of the floor and began to weep, dabbing her parched lips with her own salty tears.