Stop Dead (33 page)

The problem with narrow alleys was that, once one of the gang pushed past him, he was trapped. They had caught him like that a couple of times. Since then he tended to go the long way round, walking along Hornsey Road until he could turn right and double back to Birnam Road where he lived. It was raining and he deliberated over whether to risk it. As he hesitated, a woman approached. He seized his chance and entered the estate right behind her. He had no idea if they were in there, skulking in the shadows, but he couldn’t smell cigarette smoke or hear their voices. Even if they were there, waiting silently, they would probably leave him alone with the woman walking in front of him. Safety in numbers, he thought. He began to hum under his breath.

It was very quiet on the estate. Charlie’s trainers padded softly and the woman moved silently ahead of him. Her pace quickened as she entered an alley between the blocks. It crossed his mind that she might be afraid of him. The idea made him smile and he walked faster to keep up with her. In the half light he saw the woman glance anxiously over her shoulder and he felt a slight thrill. There was no longer any doubt about it. She was frightened of him. That could only mean one thing. She was expecting him to mug her. He glanced around. There was no one else in sight. Grinning, he trotted closer, eyeing the bag slung across her shoulder. If his mother refused to replace his phone, he would sort it himself. He should have thought of this before, it was so obvious.

Catching up with her half way along the alley, he looked back over his shoulder. The place was deserted. With one short stride he reached her, grabbed hold of her bag and yanked it. It was unexpectedly heavy. The wide leather strap slipped off her shoulder and down her arm. But instead of letting go, the stupid cow clutched at the bag with both hands, jerking it out of his grasp. She didn’t turn round. He couldn’t see past her hunched shoulders but she seemed to be fumbling inside the bag. Close up he could see she was wearing a smart coat and her hair smelled of some poncy perfume that probably cost a bomb. With renewed vigour he grabbed at the strap of her bag. She must have a few quid in there, a decent phone and some feminine stuff he could wrap up and give his mother for Christmas.

He tugged harder at the strap with one hand, at the same time giving her a smart shove between her shoulder blades to make her lose her footing. It wouldn’t be difficult to whip the strap from her shoulder as she struggled to keep her balance, and by the time she found her feet he would have vanished. It was that simple. He hung on. Instead of letting go, the woman spun round. He caught a glimpse of her eyes, staring maniacally as she raised her arm above her head. He was so startled that for a fraction of a second he didn’t realise what she was doing. In the nick of time he dodged back and the hammer she was wielding hit him only a glancing blow on the side of his head. The pain was excruciating. If he hadn’t darted back out of reach, she would have killed him.

For a second he was dazed. He was vaguely aware that his back was pressed against the wall. His legs were too weak to support him and he was sliding slowly down the wall to the ground. A movement alerted him to his assailant, still there in the alley. With difficulty he opened his eyes. Her arm was raised, her face a mask of loathing. He tried to stammer an apology, but his mouth wouldn’t work. All at once she stopped, her arm above her head, turned and fled. As he slumped to the ground, he became aware of voices echoing along the alley.

A moment later two women hurried past. He thought they hadn’t noticed him lying against the wall, but as they scurried by he heard them muttering. One of them said something about a tramp, and how it shouldn’t be allowed. Her voice floated back to him, sour and disapproving.

‘There must be places for them to go.’

He didn’t care what they were saying. Those women had probably saved his life.

He heard hoarse moaning and realised the noise was coming from his own throat. He pressed his lips together and sat up. Feeling the side of his head gingerly, his fingers slid in wetness. He was bleeding. With a groan he staggered to his feet, blinking. Everything looked strangely fuzzy and he felt dizzy. Without warning he threw up. Sitting on the ground, stinking of sick and bleeding, he began to cry. Regularly mugged by other boys, he hadn’t even managed to mug a lone woman.

Thankfully the house was empty when he finally staggered home. In the bathroom he studied his face in the cloudy mirror. A layer of skin had been scraped off the side of his face, the deep graze bordered down one side by a nasty bruise. He touched the surface of his damaged skin and winced. With trembling fingers he stroked his hair sideways across his temple to cover the bruise as well as he could, resolving to tell no one how a woman had bettered him in a fight. It was lucky his straggly hair was so overgrown. He would tell his mother he had fallen over, scraping the side of his head. At school he would have to spin a yarn about how he had fought off three muggers, all by himself. He could just imagine what his classmates would say if they found out he had been beaten up by a woman. He smiled grimly at his reflection and flinched when the movement made the side of his head smart.

G
eraldine sat down at her desk with a takeaway and logged on. She hadn’t gone to the canteen for lunch because she wanted to be alone to check through all the files stored on the internal data system. Details of everyone interviewed or questioned in connection with the victims had been entered and there were a lot of documents to look at. It promised to be a tedious job. What made it even more time-consuming was that she didn’t yet know what she was looking for. All she could do was hope she might stumble upon some piece of information that would point her in the right direction. It was going to take her days to read through everything again, and would probably prove pointless in the end, but she had to do something. Every time she closed her eyes she saw Mrs Birch’s scrawny figure sitting alone in her untidy front room.

Picking at her lunch, she left most of it to grow cold while she scanned through all the earlier suspects’ statements, starting with Amy. As she read, she remembered the widow’s expensive clothes and immaculate hair, and wondered what she was doing right now. Not grieving over her dead husband, that was for sure. She turned her attention to Guy. Since Amy and her lover had first been suspects, the case had become far more complex. There was no way they could be responsible for all four murders that had taken place.

It seemed like months since they had started the investigation and there were still many unanswered questions, like Stella’s role in Henshaw’s life, but beyond curiosity there was no reason to investigate those early suspects. Nothing they had said helped establish who had killed Henshaw, Corless, Bradshaw and now Birch. And if the police didn’t find the killer soon, there might be other victims before long. It wasn’t her fault the killer remained at large, but Geraldine couldn’t help feeling accountable. She focused on her reading with renewed determination. She had access to all the information so far gathered. If there was any hint of a clue that had been overlooked, she had to find it. That she had done her best wouldn’t exonerate her.

‘Hey, you look miles away.’

Nick’s desk was placed at right angles to hers; he must have walked right past her without her noticing. She gave him a cursory glance. His features softened into a smile, inviting conversation.

‘I’m thinking,’ she answered tersely, not wanting her train of thought to be further interrupted.

She turned away, signalling that she wanted to be left alone. To her annoyance, he stood up and came over to perch on the edge of her desk. Resisting an impulse to snap at him, she kept her eyes fixed on her screen.

‘Must be interesting,’ he ventured.

He smiled warmly as though he was perfectly comfortable twisting round to look at her. She didn’t answer.

‘Still working on the Hammer Horror?’

She looked up on hearing him use the term coined by some idiot reporter.

‘The Hammer Horror?’ she snorted. ‘That’s what the bloody tabloids are calling him.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t pay attention to anything those hangers-on say. You just get on with the job.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to do right now.’

‘Well, don’t let me stop you. ’

He waited for a few seconds but she didn’t look up from her screen so he retreated to his own desk where he sat shuffling papers.

Geraldine scowled. Her attempt to pre-empt distraction had failed, because now she was bothered by the possibility that she had offended her colleague. She had nothing against Nick and besides, they had to share an office.

‘I’m sorry to be unsociable, it’s just that I’m bogged down in all this.’

‘Can I help?’

‘Hardly. I mean, you don’t know the case from the inside, and it’s really a matter of going over details again. If I had to start explaining, it would – well, it would waste time …’

He was back on her desk, smiling in his relaxed way that really wound her up in her present state of agitation. It was hard to believe he could be so dense as to ignore the obvious fact that she wanted to be left alone to get on with her work.

‘I’m very experienced,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I can be of assistance, and I can easily spare half an hour to help reduce the load on an overworked colleague.’

Now Geraldine felt irritated with herself for resenting his tone. She knew he didn’t intend to come across as patronising, but genuinely wanted to help. All the same, she began to understand how he could have riled Sam.

‘Thanks, but I really need to get on.’

No longer caring if Nick took her abrupt dismissal the wrong way, she settled back to work.

She went over what Corless and his girlfriend had said. Closing the last document, she turned her attention to witnesses and studied Keith Apsley’s statement. It was growing late and she was nowhere near finished.

‘I’m off,’ Nick announced. ‘If you’re sure I can’t help you out?’

Geraldine looked up. Maybe she should go home and forget about work for the evening, so she could return to it fresh in the morning. She was wasting her time, going over and over the same old documents.

‘I think I should pack this in too,’ she said, leaning back in her chair with a sigh.

Nick raised his eyebrows.

‘I mean for today,’ she added.

‘I thought you were saying you’d had enough of the job altogether.’

‘I do feel like that sometimes,’ she admitted.

‘Leave it for the evening and come for a drink then,’ he suggested.

She was tempted but shook her head.

‘I’ll take a rain check on that,’ she replied, turning back to her terminal. ‘I really should crack on for a bit longer.’

He wished her luck and left, whistling cheerily.

For a moment she was tempted to run after him. Instead, she turned her attention back to the screen and pressed on resolutely, knowing she would carry on until exhaustion forced her to stop for the night. Although that was hardly an efficient way to proceed, ideas often occurred to her when she was mentally exhausted, immersed in a case that was going nowhere, as though she found inspiration in despair. They suspected the killer was a woman, but that didn’t narrow the search down very much. She forced herself to keep her eyes open, fixed on the screen, but her concentration kept wavering.

She must have dozed off. Suddenly she opened her eyes, wide awake, and reopened Desiree’s file with fingers that fumbled at the keyboard in her hurry. After rereading the document, she fished in her bag to retrieve her notebook and flicked through the pages to check her original record of the meeting.

‘Desiree met GC while she was singing at restaurant – he offered a lift home.’

Setting the book down on the desk beside her half eaten takeaway she leaned back in her chair, frowning. Desiree was a singer. She met George Corless at the restaurant. He had given her a lift home. That was how they had met. The words revolved in her head, forming a possible new scenario which she examined from different angles. Whichever way she considered it the story made sense, apart from one glaring problem.

A singer called Ingrid had performed at Mireille on the evening of Henshaw’s murder. The records kept by the restaurant were incomplete, but the same singer could have been there on the evening Corless was killed. The two men might both have offered her a lift home, as Corless had done at least once, with Desiree. If the cleaner was to be believed, Henshaw had ‘an eye for the girls.’ Geraldine looked up what Ginny had said. ‘He was the one wanted those girl singers, and he’d have had them do more than sing, I daresay –’ Ignoring the conundrum of Linda Harrison’s DNA in the car, she speculated about a violent encounter in the car with a singer who had accepted a lift home, an encounter that ended with a brutal murder. Sam had spoken to Ingrid in Shepherds Bush. Was it possible that the singer was the killer? Sam had described her as slight and unprepossessing. At the time she hadn’t aroused their interest. Now Geraldine wanted to know more.

Sam hadn’t recorded Ingrid’s surname, which was irritating, but Geraldine understood that pressing someone for information could backfire. According to Sam’s notes, it had been hard to wheedle anything out of Ingrid. It didn’t matter. In a few seconds, Geraldine would be able to find out all she needed to know. The manager at Mireille hadn’t been able to help her but the information was available at the click of a ‘live music’ icon on the website of the café in Shepherds Bush. It couldn’t have been easier to find. With trembling fingers she looked up the singer who was listed only as ‘Ingrid’ and found a link to her website. Geraldine held her breath. Another click of a button revealed that the website was ‘under construction’. She was still no closer to finding the singer, but if Ingrid really was the killer, Geraldine couldn’t afford to wait nearly a week to find her singing in Shepherds Bush.

F
or once, Charlie didn’t oversleep. His night had been restless, disturbed by a pounding headache. When he had managed to doze off, his dreams had been troubled by images of a mad woman charging at him wielding a variety of weapons: an old-style police truncheon, a long gleaming sword, a snake that hissed by his ear before snapping crocodile jaws at the side of his head, hacking off chunks of flesh until his head had all but disappeared down its gullet. The snake withdrew and Charlie saw his own face staring back at him. He wondered how he could still see when his own eyes were gazing at him from the serpent head. The snake lunged forward. He tried to run but couldn’t see where he was going. In the darkness he tripped and woke with a jolt, muzzy and fretful from pain and lack of sleep.