The Watcher

by Kate Medina

  Workman nodded. ‘I saw his self-harm scars,’ she said plainly. ‘It was hard to wear long sleeves all summer, though he did try. I’ve seen it before, with some of the damaged kids around here, but never so bad. I was shocked.’

  Jessie thought of the boy sitting motionless in the high-backed chair, the sleeves of his iron-grey sweatshirt draping each heavily scarred arm. In truth, she had been shocked too.

  ‘Self-harming is very typical in cases of bullying,’ she said. Though actually, that statement wasn’t entirely true, not with boys. ‘Is he aggressive towards his father?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s not something Allan has ever mentioned, but I don’t know him particularly well. I know Robbie much better as I see him every week at the lunch club. Allan doesn’t seem to have anyone to speak with and I think the police thing made him want to confide in me.’ She sighed in a self-deprecating way. ‘He probably thought I could help.’

  ‘You are helping.’

  There was something about Workman that encouraged confidences; even for Jessie, who never confided in anyone. She could see why Allan Parker had felt comfortable turning to Workman, irrespective of her job title. ‘The charity work, helping old people, suggests to me that Robbie’s just not the aggressive type,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never seen Robbie be aggressive,’ Workman said. ‘And old people can be very trying at times. He just seems like a kind, caring kid. It maddens me that nice kids are targeted by bullies.’

  ‘Robbie was targeted simply because he’s an easy target. If he had a cleft palate, but was a total shit, he would have been spared, but the combination of disability and niceness is too tempting for bullies to resist.’

  Workman straightened, clearly surprised at the venom in Jessie’s voice. Jessie smoothed over her unprofessional lapse with a brief smile. She held the coffee cup aloft.

  ‘Anyway, I’d do anything for a latte and it is my job, after all. My proper job.’

  ‘Not this … not for free. And you took Lupo in too.’

  She had taken in Lupo. She wasn’t sure why, wasn’t sure of much these days; it was becoming a nasty habit. ‘Is that another of your charities? Dogs?’

  Workman shook her head. ‘I’m confining myself to people at the moment.’

  Jessie laughed. ‘Perhaps Lupo is my first step in trying to get away from people.’

  41

  Jessie’s cottage was silent, but lights blared from the sitting room downstairs – five a.m. and she had been expecting the first. But the second? When she opened the front door, she found Callan asleep on the sofa again, an arm thrown over his eyes, legs bent at an angle that looked hideously uncomfortable, though clearly not enough to have prevented him from crashing out. At his feet was a large dent in the sofa cushion, peppered with snow-white hairs that caught the ceiling light and cast it back at her in spangles. Lupo. Callan had let him up on her spotless, cream sofa. Staring at the patch, Jessie tensed against the tingle of the electric suit – her OCD raising its demanding head – but it didn’t come. The only sensation was the dull ache of regret: that she hadn’t been here to see her two men chillaxing together on the sofa.

  Grabbing her trusty argyle throw, she draped it over Callan. His skin was pasty, his eye sockets pronounced dark hollows in the paleness of his face, and underneath their lids his eyes were as agitated as they had been a few nights ago. Nothing in his mind resolved, then. She needed to make time to speak with him about the letter.

  Despite leaving his hair all over her sofa, Lupo wasn’t in evidence, so she padded in socked feet through to the kitchen, where she found him lying on the back doormat, head resting on his paws, as silent and motionless as Callan. Awake though, his coal-black nose pressed to the coal-black glass of the door, eyes focused intently on the night outside, as if he could see into the curtain of darkness. Perhaps he can. It was only when she lowered herself down next to him on the cold tiles that she realized he was whining, low-pitched, forlorn.

  ‘Lupo,’ she called his name softly.

  One ear twitched – a blink-and-you’d-miss-it twitch – but apart from that, he didn’t move, not a muscle, didn’t look over to acknowledge her presence. He had been curled up with Callan, but he ignored her. Was this what it was like being a parent? Competing against your partner for the attention and love of your child, feeling the pain of losing out?

  ‘What’s going on inside that head of yours, boy?’

  She laid her hand gently between the peaked, snow-capped mountaintops of his ears. His fur was silky soft, his skin warm. Did he experience the same feelings as humans? Did he know hope, anxiety, fear, happiness, depression, regret, longing? She had spent her whole life focusing on humans and this creature was a total mystery to her. Though she was sure, from his statue-still body to that soft, barely there whine, that he was pining for Claudine Fuller, for the life he had lost. The love that he had lost.

  ‘Who took you, Lupo? Who took you and tied you up to that lamp post?’

  If she could just reach her fingers inside his skull, pull out the images stored there, this case would be over, a killer would be caught and she could return to her clinical patients, to her mundane day-to-day existence – an existence that she would kill for right now – until Marilyn came calling the next time.

  ‘We’ll love you, Lupo,’ she said softly, sliding her hand down his neck, stroking along his back. ‘I promise that we will love you as much as Claudine did. It may take a while, but you’ll be happy with us, I promise.’

  42

  Sitting as anonymously as she could in the far corner of the incident room, facing the backs of a row of heads, Jessie tried to ignore the bloodthirsty hum emanating from the crowd of journalists occupying the station’s car park two storeys below, the Venetian blinds that had been lowered over the windows behind her doing little to muffle the noise.

  This second murder is going to create a shit storm.

  It hadn’t taken long for Marilyn’s prophesy to be proven correct. He’d be furious, Jessie knew. He hated having to pander to the press vultures, as he called them, at the best of times, had hoped that his carefully curated press conference had fed them enough titbits to keep them happy. And he might have been right, but for this second murder which had thrown big-cat fresh kill among the vultures. And as the investigation had, as yet, made no appreciable progress, Marilyn would also be humming with defensiveness.

  Her gaze flicked from the back of the crew cut in front of her to the walls, where the Whiteheads’ crime-scene photographs had joined those of the Fullers’, and were even more determinedly brutal, if that was possible, illuminated in unforgiving detail as they were by the yachtsman’s residence’s aluminium ceiling spots and aided by the CSI photographer’s flash. Perhaps because the Fullers’ murders had been the first – the only, they’d assumed at the time – the team had spent hours at the crime scene absorbing every gut-churning nuance, and the details had played back in Jessie’s head ever since, seeping through her brain’s defences in quiet moments: Hugo Fuller’s blank, eyeless sockets; the treacle of blood coating his bloated stomach; the halo of Claudine Fuller’s blonde hair in the pool, making her look like a prone angel; the bloody damage to the back of her head. Jessie had seen it all, and so the photographs had been less impactful. The Whiteheads’ crime scene had been almost shadow puppet in comparison: Daniel Whitehead’s injuries masked by the darkness of the bedroom, his wife, Eleanor, floating on her back in the bath beyond, drowned, but with no other visible injuries. Jessie had taken it all in, visual snatch by visual snatch, seeing just what she had needed to form an impression – get a sense – determinedly refusing to engage with more than that.

  Marilyn had texted her this morning to say that Dr Ghoshal’s autopsy findings refuted her hypothesis that Claudine Fuller had died first and that the murderer had forced Hugo to watch. Hugo Fuller had died first – Claudine second. That casts significant doubt on your watching theory.

  Jessie hadn’t bothered to repl
y. Despite the undermining of her theory, she was still sure that watching featured heavily in these murders, she just didn’t know why. Watching … and … Her mind filled with an image of Lupo. Who had died first at the Whiteheads’ house? She was sure, from the theatre of the display in the bathroom, that it would have been Eleanor, and was waiting for the results of the second autopsy to confirm or refute.

  Her gaze snapped from the final photograph in the series, Eleanor Whitehead’s water-bloated body, to the door. Marilyn was striding into the incident room, wearing a crumpled black suit and looking, despite the steaming mug of coffee that Jessie assumed Workman had thrust into his hand a moment ago, as if he hadn’t slept for six months. She knew how he felt. There was no need for him to call for silence this time, as he had needed to with the Fullers’ murders. The room was graveyard-hushed, eight months pregnant with expectation.

  ‘Welcome back, everyone, and thank you for coming,’ Marilyn said, projecting his voice over the hum rising up from the vultures below, now magnified by the room’s suspenseful hush. ‘I’m going to keep this brief, because myself and Dr Flynn are heading to St Richard’s Hospital as soon as we get the nod from DC Cara that Eleanor and Daniel Whitehead’s daughter, Sophie, is well enough to be interviewed, which I hope will be imminent.’

  A brief pause while he took a sip of coffee. ‘I was planning to say that it’s critical we keep a lid on the details of the Whiteheads’ murders for as long as we can, so that the press doesn’t make the link between them and the Fullers, but it appears as if that particular horse has already bolted.’ He jammed his index finger towards the window. ‘Though I would be very interested to know how they made the link so quickly.’

  His eyes grazed around the assembled faces. When it met Jessie’s she held it calmly. Who had told? Someone must have done. Someone in this room or one of Burrows’ team? Or perhaps one of the Whiteheads’ neighbours had put two and two together and, unfortunately for Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, arrived at four.

  ‘I am not accusing anyone in this room of talking out of turn, but I’m also sure that I do not need to remind you that we are not in this job to court fame and if you don’t share that view please feel free to hand me your P45 and skip off down the road to Chichester Festival Theatre.’

  A ripple of polite laughter. The team were clearly feeling the strain; usually no one bothered with ‘polite’. If it wasn’t funny, they didn’t laugh. From her observation post at the back of the room, Jessie noticed a few heads turn as their owners cast surreptitious glances at colleagues, wondering which, if any, had secured their fifteen minutes of fame as a journalist’s source.

  ‘The more attention we get from them—’ Marilyn continued, jabbing an index finger towards the window. ‘The harder our jobs will be, and I think everyone in this room will agree that we’re under enough pressure as it is, without our every move being forensically examined by Deidre from the Daily Mail or Tarquin from the Telegraph.’

  His gaze skipped from face to face, finally alighting, again, on Jessie, remaining there this time.

  ‘Our number one priority now is to identify if there is a connection between the Fullers and the Whiteheads, to determine whether we have a random nut job on our hands, or if there is a tiny bit of method to his madness. Are these murders personal or are they not? That is the question.’

  43

  Jessie caught up with Marilyn in the corridor. ‘Dr Ghoshal will find out that Eleanor Whitehead died first and that her husband …’ She paused, mentally fumbling for his name.

  ‘Mr Whitehead,’ Marilyn said, with a humourless half-smile, half-grimace.

  ‘Daniel,’ Workman said, skirting around them. ‘I’ve spoken to the doctor treating Sophie Whitehead, Anita Murawska, and you can go and interview Sophie now – briefly, she said. She sounds like a no-nonsense lady though, so watch your Ps and Qs when you’re there. DC Cara is still at the hospital and will wait there until you arrive.’

  ‘Thank you, Sarah. For both of those things.’ Marilyn turned back to Jessie.

  ‘And that Daniel Whitehead was made to watch,’ Jessie finished.

  ‘That’s what you said about the Fullers.’

  ‘I know, and I was wrong, but I’m sure there’s a reason that I was wrong.’

  ‘What if it’s not personal and not about watching, Jessie? What if it’s just some loony who has binge-watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and fancies himself as some kind of medieval torturer?’ He spread his hands, the movement frustrated. ‘Some … Christ if I can’t remember Pa bloody Whitehead’s name, I’ve got fuck-all chance of dredging the name of a famous medieval torturer from the annals of my memory. We’ve got a lot to do, Jessie. Sophie Whitehead to interview for starters, and then I have a second autopsy to attend. You’re most welcome to join me—’

  Jessie grimaced. ‘Once was enough, thanks—’

  ‘—And another press conference this evening.’ He started walking, waving her along with him.

  ‘I know. But—’

  ‘But – what?’

  But I’m still sure it’s about watching, despite Claudine Fuller.

  And I’m also still sure that it’s personal.

  And I think that you’ll find dogs are involved somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea why.

  She didn’t say any of it. Much as Marilyn liked her – rated her, she’d venture to say – even he had his limits and he’d clearly lost faith in her theories.

  ‘Fräulein Backastowe isn’t letting you off the press conference, then,’ she said, as lightly as she could manage. ‘Wanting to steal the limelight?’

  ‘Unfortunately, she does not appear to be motivated by fame. Though she did inform me, by curt text, that she is very motivated to keep a lid on that shit-show burgeoning in the car park and doubtless she will be at the press conference in spirit, daring me to fuck up.’

  He stopped just inside the external door to the car park. ‘Are you ready?’

  Jessie raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘I don’t need to be. They don’t have a cat in hell’s idea of who I am.’ She laid a hand on his arm. ‘Good luck, though. I’ll see you at the hospital in an hour or two, when you’ve managed to extricate yourself! I’ll be the one in the corner of the coffee shop reading what Deidre and Tarquin have to say on the subject of murder.’

  44

  Marilyn was in a stinking mood when he arrived at St Richard’s Hospital, fifteen minutes after Jessie.

  ‘That was quick,’ she said, meeting him in the main reception and handing him a black coffee.

  ‘Quick and very painful. Like an injection in the backside with a horse needle,’ he muttered unsmilingly. ‘Thank you for the coffee.’

  ‘Pleasure. I thought you might need it.’

  ‘A bottle of whisky would have been even more appreciated.’

  ‘I’m sure, but unfortunately neither Costa Coffee nor the Friends of St Richard’s charitable corner shop run to alcoholic beverages.’

  ‘They know all the gory details,’ Marilyn said, as they walked towards the lifts and the stairs. ‘The torture, the eyes, the drowning.’

  ‘How the hell?’

  ‘I have no idea, yet, though clearly my murder investigation would make a teabag look watertight.’

  ‘What about the personal and the watching?’

  Marilyn shook his head. ‘Neither of those theories were mentioned,’ he said pointedly.

  Theories. But he was right. However much she believed in them, they were still only theories to him, to the team.

  ‘Are you happy to walk up the stairs instead of taking the lift?’ Marilyn asked. ‘The thought of being locked in a small metal box with someone in possession of a contagious disease is bringing me out in hives.’

  Jessie nodded. She was delighted to oblige with a trudge up the stairs if it avoided her being locked in a small metal box with anyone at all, diseased or not.

  ‘Jesus Christ, why do all hospitals smell the same?’ Marilyn muttered, with a
grimace, as they stepped from the stairwell onto the first floor.

  St Richard’s Hospital was a medium-sized low-rise that sprawled across countless acres of prime Chichester town centre real estate. Prinstead, the twee West Sussex village name for its adult high-dependency unit, was located along a spider’s web of identical, faceless corridors, all polished to a squeak. Uniformed staff in pastel shades – blue for doctors, green for porters, salmon pink for nurses – moved past them with smooth, automaton efficiency.

  Dr Anita Murawska, a beautiful black woman with a complicated plaited up-do and a huge pregnant belly, which made her look as if she’d smuggled a basketball into work under her pink-and-white-striped maternity shirt-dress, met them by Prinstead ward’s reception desk. They shook hands, then she led them down the central corridor, past private rooms on both sides, each one occupied by a supine patient attached to an array of tubes and devices that flashed and beeped.

  ‘Sophie Whitehead is fine physically, though obviously she is very far from fine mentally,’ she cast over her shoulder. Her comfortable slip-on shoes squeaked as if there was a mouse taped under each sole, as the rubber grasped and released the lino with each step.

  ‘We tried to put Sophie in a private room, but she wasn’t having any of it,’ Murawska continued. ‘She screamed her head off when the night nurse tried to leave her alone. Your young colleague offered to sit with her for the night, but that just sent her even more nutty. She can’t bear to be alone and she can’t bear to be with anyone else, unless it’s a crowd of people, which is why we ended up moving her onto the ward. Poor kid. She’ll be in therapy for years.’