Down into Darkness (28 page)

Woolf said, ‘Drive the car.'

‘Where to?'

‘The usual place. The place you usually go to.'

The man stared at Woolf, the fog of fear lifting a moment.

Woolf said, ‘Drive the car.'

‘My God,' the man said.

‘Drive the car.'

‘My God, are you who I think you are?'

Aimée watched as her husband, Peter, and her son, Ben, got ready for the game. Ben was said to be a safe pair of hands. Peter's role was to stand on the touchline and cheer. They were having a good-natured disagreement about Ben's new goal-keeping gloves, which Peter thought too large. Ben, of course, was eager to wear them. Peter gave in easily, as he always did: not because he thought he was wrong, but because he knew that, in the end, it didn't matter. It was the same in all things. He would smile and nod and agree, because conflict over such issues was a waste of time and created bad feeling. Peter was in favour of good feeling. In favour of feeling good. When they made love, Aimée felt that the need was all hers, the giving all his.

After they'd gone, she went upstairs and lay on the bed. She hoped to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. It was hot in the room, and she took her clothes off. Being naked made
her think about Woolf. She walked round the room, feeling the air on her body, feeling the way her body moved when it was unconstrained.

She lay on the bed and closed her eyes, imagining him there with her. She wet her finger with her mouth, then rolled over, her hand between her thighs. She could feel him alongside. She knelt up, head on the pillow, her hand busy, offering herself to him, feeling a flush come to her throat. She said his name out loud and shivered, as if she had felt his touch, felt him moving up behind her.

It was over too soon. She lay flat out and tried to think things through. Peter would do whatever was for the best. She would see Ben often, of course. Maybe he would even come to live with them: with herself and Woolf. It would be easy, an easy transition to make.

She slept, after a while, and had dreams that were forgotten on waking.

A side road led up to a rise in the ground; the rise fell away to a large field. Woolf drove the old Volvo up to the crest and looked down, then backed off twenty feet to where some tall shrubbery bordered a wall. Beyond the wall was a disused hospital, its windows boarded up, its brickwork covered in graffiti from the ground to a height of about eight feet, which was as far as the local pre-teens could reach.

Before driving to the field, Woolf had spent some time in the old hospital together with the other man, the pair of them there in the half-light, the dim, echoing corridors, the empty wards. There was still some equipment lying about: a gurney or two, a wheelchair, half a dozen beds. Woolf had found a small room, what had once been a side ward, perhaps. It was on the western side, and the planks that boarded the windows weren't butted up that well. Lines of hard, white light fell in straight rows on the floor.

The man had said, ‘What do you want? What can you possibly want with me after all this time?'

Stella was taking her one-in-seven, her rest day. Delaney was covering the last two from his Rich List: a captain of industry who never slept and a self-made man who had recently acquired a knighthood and insisted on being addressed by his title. The man's given name was Naim, and Delaney had taken delight, throughout the interview, in calling him Sirnaim. He returned to the flat to find Stella constructing a temporary white-board on one wall, complete with scene-of-crime shots, abstracts of interviews, flow charts and a progress checker. The SOC photos brought back memories for Delaney: a street after sniper activity, stillness and blood; echoes of violence ringing in the air.

He said, ‘Isn't that a little obsessive?'

‘I
am
obsessed. We're getting nowhere with this. Random killings; it's the worst thing. Except nothing's random, really. There's a pattern, even if it's only in the mind of the killer. If I look long enough at the parts, I might catch a glimpse of the whole.'

She was adding wild cards to the known facts, a technique of her own devising. It involved swooping arrows drawn on to spreadsheets. One concerned the possible confusion between Leonard Pigeon and Neil Morgan.

Delaney saw the name and said, ‘An offshore bank account – maybe. It's all I could get.'

Stella looked baffled for a moment. Then: ‘Oh, sure, secret money, big surprise.' Out of nowhere, she said, ‘I went to see my mother.'

Delaney stopped in the act of uncapping a beer. Stella had her back to him, busy with the white-board. He poured the beer, waiting for more, but nothing came. Finally, he asked, ‘Why did you tell me?'

‘I had to tell someone.'

She drew an arrow that looped down from Bryony Dean to Len Pigeon, another that looped up from Martin Turner to Bryony: death's dark connections. A skeleton map pinpointed locations and a line connected them: death's geography.

She worked systematically, annotating the board with dates, times and circumstances, as if there might be a hidden link. Delaney drank his beer. He knew she was crying.

There was activity down on the field, but none where Woolf had parked the car, a no man's land between the road and the field, sunless, the patch between the bushes and the wall strewn with cans and cigarette packets. He could hear distant voices and birdsong and a plane banking to find the Heathrow approach. He opened the driver's door, then unloaded the boot. It wasn't hard work and it didn't take long. He drove the car to the top of the rise and just a fraction further, then applied the handbrake but left the engine running while he set things up. Then he went to the passenger's side, opened the door, leaned in and released the handbrake.

The car went over the rise and out of sight. Woolf walked away without looking back, not hurrying, making for a nearby high street, the weekend shoppers, the anonymity of crowds. There was a tiny freckling of blood on his cheek, but only someone close enough to kiss would have found it.

No one saw the Volvo coming until it was fifty feet away. Parents screamed, kids ran in all directions. The car went through at speed, missing everything and everyone, until it ran into a play area on the far side, ploughing through swings and sideswiping a little wooden carousel before taking a climbing-frame full on, the engine racing for a moment, then cutting out. One of the first people to reach it was Peter the top-notch husband. He yanked open the driver's door, then
stared. He just stared. Other people arrived, and they stared too. After a moment Ben arrived at his father's side and peered in through the open door.

It was a terrible accident, Ben could see that, though his father pulled him away before he could tell exactly what had happened to the driver. Peter had seen more. A man in the driver's seat, his hands wired to the steering wheel. The neck-stump. The head on the passenger seat, wired in place.

What he hadn't seen was the neatly inked words across the brow of the decapitated head:

They taped off the entire field and, when Andy Greegan spotted the divot of turf the Volvo had kicked up as it went over the rise, they tracked back and found tyre prints in ground that was still soft from the storm, so they taped the bushes and the wall as well.

The SOC tent covered the car and body, intact and unmoved. Fly-swarm was a major problem, but there was nothing to be done: chemical sprays would have contaminated the site. The photographers had to hunker down to get shots of the head
in situ
. The garden wire that held it in place had cut a furrow into the forehead; a second strand went across the mouth, leaving it open in a tortured, noiseless cry. There was something bizarre about the headless torso: its rigid back, the wrists wired to the wheel in the approved ten-to-two position. Lacking a face, it seemed utilitarian: a damaged crash-dummy. Only the dark red, meaty neck-stump and the protruding stub of neck-bone pronounced it once human.

Peter and Ben told what they could. They were questioned separately, Maxine Hewitt sitting down with the boy, Sue Chapman as back-up. Pete Harriman and Frank Silano sat down with Peter. They told much the same story, except that Peter had more to tell, having had the longer look. Neither Maxine nor Harriman spent much time over the interviews. They had fifty other people to talk to.

Stella was in with Collier, who had been fielding seamlessly joined telephone calls. In order to be able to talk to her, he'd
taken the phone off the hook, and its klaxon was wailing at him.

He said, ‘I don't know what the fuck to do.' Stella said nothing. Collier reached round, took his jacket off the back of his chair and threw it over the phone. ‘Do you?' He looked at her as if she were holding out on him. ‘How do we nail this bastard?'

‘It's the toughest crime to solve, you know that.'

‘I'm getting it from all directions. The press. The SIO…' He lit a cigarette, cupping one hand round the lighter as if he were standing in a wind.

A man who can see the end of his tether, Stella thought. To her surprise, she felt almost sorry for him: out of his depth and signalling wildly for help.

He said, ‘Sometimes they just don't get caught, do they? Serials. Sometimes they just stop, and that's an end to it.'

‘Often,' Stella observed.

‘Yes, often.'

‘Or they make a mistake.' She shrugged. ‘Dennis Nilsen's drains. Peter Sutcliffe's false licence plates.'

‘This guy's not making mistakes.'

Stella said, ‘Or else he's already made one, and we haven't noticed.'

The squad-room detritus covered desks and spilled from bins. Sue Chapman informed everyone that the cleaners were on strike for better conditions. It wasn't clear what sort of conditions those were, though Pete Harriman offered the opinion that they might want things to be altogether… well…
cleaner
. Sue had brought in some black bin-bags.

Silano had pinned the new scene-of-crime shots to the white-board and used a magenta marker to fill in the stats. This time Stella was running the session. Collier stood a little
to one side, trying to look as if he might have something to say later.

‘Victim,' Stella said, ‘George Nelms. Sixty-one, retired schoolteacher, widowed, lived alone, no police record, no bad habits that we know of, not that we expected to find any. Mr Average. He lived quietly, he was liked by his neighbours. He employed someone to cook and clean for him. At weekends he was a volunteer helper at Green Lane Fields sports facility. He was killed by a single transverse cut to the throat. I haven't got the post-mortem findings yet, but, when I have them, they'll be circulated. His head was severed from his body: you'll have had all the details from the crime report by email.

‘There seems little doubt that this is the fourth in a series of apparently motiveless murders: the writing on the victim's forehead indicates as much.' She stopped as if the bald facts were all she had to offer – which was pretty much the case. ‘We'll just have to proceed with this as we have with the other deaths. Talk to your contacts, just in case something's trickled down to street level. We're putting a yellow-board up by the sports field. It'll carry Crimestoppers' number and our number' – she shrugged – ‘who knows?

‘We're giving the press everything except the writing: so, the make, year and number of the Volvo, the place, the exact time, victim ID, and the fact that he was decapitated. We've also said that we consider Nelms to be the most recent victim of a serial killer. This means that we'll have a press feeding frenzy to cope with, no question, and high levels of criticism, and more than the usual nutters phoning in to confess, but we've reached the stage where saturation looks like the only option. Anyway, it would be pointless to pretend. The press have been screaming “serial” for a week or more. Okay… any ideas?'

The floor fan in the corner ticked. Someone's phone played
its message tune. An ARV pulled out of Notting Dene, its siren picking up.

The
AMIP
-5 squad room declared itself an ideas-free zone.

Monica Hartley sat in an upright chair, her hands folded in her lap. She had applied a dab of lipstick for the occasion. A dab of lipstick, a blouse with a frill, her outdoor shoes. She said, ‘I went in every other day. On the days I went in, I made enough for the next day. He didn't mind eating the same thing twice, he wasn't fussy like that. They say his head was cut off. They say it was in the papers. He was in the car, but his head was off. Is it true?'

Stella said it was true.

Monica said, ‘I cleaned for him as well. I did two hours' cleaning and tidying and an hour cooking. I did three hours every other weekday. Does anyone know who'll get the house?'

Stella said she had no idea.

Monica said, ‘I think there are relatives. His wife died five years back, but I think there are relatives. I think he had cousins. First or second cousins. Where was his head, then? Where did that turn up?'

Harriman coughed, or else it was a smothered laugh. Stella said that George Nelms's head had been found in the car.

‘He had his routines, you know? He was regular in his habits. I can't think that anyone disliked him. I never saw anyone go to the house. I went regular, but I never saw anyone else. He helped out at the sports ground weekends. He was a teacher before he retired. He was history and sports, I think. The thing about the house, the reason I mentioned the house, I'm wondering if he left any sort of a will.'

Stella said she didn't know.

‘The reason I mention a will is because I wonder about what happens if he didn't. If there isn't a will to be had. I wonder about what sort of claim I could make.'

Stella wondered too. She asked about the nature of the claim Monica had in mind.

‘Common-law wife,' Monica explained. ‘I just wonder whether that gives me a right. I think it does. More than a cousin, you might say. More than a second cousin. Common
law
, isn't it? That's how it seems to me, because I used to give him sex. After his wife died, not before. I used to go in every other day, and it was what he wanted, he told me straight out. So giving him sex, giving him sex over five years, that's common-law wife in my book. Cleaning and cooking and giving sex, they're all wifely duties, no one could say any different, so who do I talk to about that?'