Blind Date (22 page)

“Had to come home, boy, lock myself in, before it got worse. Wish I hadn't now. Why did I do it? Why, after all this time?”

“You tell me,” Joe invited, filling the kettle, finding the impedimenta of coffee and filling in the gap of the man's self-recrimination with the noises of the cure.

“Thought you were going to bring your camera?”

“Must have guessed you wouldn't be at your best,” Joe said mildly. Cigarette smoke curled up towards the yellow patch on the ceiling.

“It's all a matter of deceit,” Jenkins announced, with the coffee beside him. “Deceit compounding deceit. No-one being able to tell anyone the total truth. So that everyone's version of the truth, however honestly held, is ever so slightly wrong, if you see what I mean.”

“I don't, really.”

Hell. If the only advantage of finding Jenkins half-cut was to have him speak in riddles, there was less purpose than ever in his being here. Joe waited. Jenkins glared at him.

“Look,
” Joe said. “Cut it out, will you? It's me doing you the favour. You aren't doing me any. Elisabeth's getting better. I'm doing a reasonable caretaker job, but I can't do it any more. Not as long as you won't tell me the whole story. Unedited. I can't go on pretending. Not when there's been another murder. Just like Emma. Are you listening?”

Jenkins had attempted to light the filter end of the cigarette. The smell was disgusting. He threw it away.

“Oh, all right. I'll give you the whole report then. The one into the complaints against me. That's what you wanted, isn't it? Give it to you, like I'm not supposed to do, and see if you can make more sense of what we did, and why, than those fuckers. Then you'll see what she was told and not told. Why she was such a bad choice for the job, because she couldn't be told everything.”

It was the partially sighted leading the blind. Jenkins presumed too much. He assumed that everyone else spent as long thinking about Lizzie as he did. It had been a kind of love, Joe guessed, which lingered into wistful, haunting regret. How would someone like Jenkins ever make someone love him? He was so oblique in whatever he said. If he loved, the subject of his affections would have to guess.

Joe felt in his pocket for the newspaper report, and then stopped. A longer report, same subject and same photograph, an awful photo, he thought, lay on the coffee table. Three differing versions of the same murder; one he had from the day before yesterday, then Owl's, then Jenkins, from a national paper. Is that what Jenks meant by deceit? Each report would give a different slant on Angela Collier's life, omit, out of ignorance or misinformation, some detail of her death.

“Are you working
on this murder?” Joe asked, pointing. Jenkins snorted.

“Naa. I'll never be let near a murder again. Or any serious crime for that matter. I put in my two penn'orth and was told to fuck off. Not before I found out more than this newspaper would ever tell me. It's him: I know in my waters, it's him. Or his brother, or his twin, raised from the same gene pool, with the same fucking fantasies. It's him, all right. Mr. Hygiene Conscious, putting the boot in.”

“Emma's murderer? But Jack's dead. As in doornail.”

Jenkins raised his head, with his most cunning smile.
“Dead?
Did I ever say so? The
suspect's
dead. Not the fucking culprit.” He paused. “Naa, that's wrong. He doesn't fuck. Seems to get excited and forget about that side of it. Gets his rocks off by kicking. Varies it a bit with a knife.”

Joe shook his head. “I don't believe you. He's dead. Only prophets rise from the dead. The suspect, Jack, was seduced, exposed and even when there was no case against him, utterly humiliated. Kills himself … He dies of shame.”

Jenkins wagged a finger in front of bloodshot eyes.

“Jack might be dead, but ah no, not this one. The real culprit toughs it out because he doesn't have a conscience. What would humiliation mean to a character like him? This one may not have stopped. Whoever said he stopped? Who'd connect him to this new killing, since we were all so convinced that our suicide was the man? The culprit isn't a fool; he can change his method; he can control himself. He can read in newspapers, just like anyone else, about the debacle of the case. He can have a sudden fit of pique that no-one's taking any notice and repeat the old sport with the old hallmarks. Even if he's varied them in the meantime.”

“Hallmarks
?”

Jenkins was getting drowsy, despite the coffee. He had retreated from the chronic need for a drink: Joe could see him slump with relief as the worm inside him resigned itself to abstinence, and slept.

“Covering the head, that's one hallmark,” he murmured. “A fascination with the neck. Probably the neck crushed with a foot, while covered, just like the face. Black plastic sack with Emma, big green towel with Angela, so that he couldn't see what he was doing and keep his feet and hands clean. Fastidious in brutality; the woman an object of hate, to be reduced to nothing. Kicked and stamped to death. Melted down. We never told Elisabeth about the bleach. We just weren't sure about the bleach.”

He got up and roused himself by walking in a circle. Small, precise steps which he counted under his breath, one, two, three, four as he paced round the furniture on an obviously familiar route. Three times round, leaving Joe looking for worn marks on the cheap carpet.

“Emma'd been spring cleaning, you see, on account of them planning to move house. Scraping together savings for something better. Her husband, Steven, wanted it more than she did. There'd been arguments about his determination to get a big house. Their friends said she'd have been happier with what she'd got and another baby, but he wanted her to go out to work. Not her style. Where was I? Cleaning fluid, bleach all over her clothes. Could have been thrown. Could have been an accident. Had to be dismissed.”

“You've lost me,” Joe said. Jenkins gave him a look of contemptuous scorn, lighting another cigarette although the first still burned in a heaped, foul-smelling ashtray. He seemed to notice, got up again and transferred the debris to a wastepaper basket. There was a slight smell of scorching hair.

“Angela
Collier. Bleach stains on her carpet. Could have been an accident, spilling something and using the wrong stuff to mop it up. Sort of thing a man would do, though, rather than a houseproud woman. Maybe a man trying to get blood out of his trousers.”

The beer Joe had drunk with Owl regurgitated into heartburn.

“Elisabeth was attacked by a man who threw caustic fluid all over her,” he murmured.

“So she was,” said Jenkins. “Amazing. Why did you think I asked you to look out for her in the first place? Didn't I say there was a connection? But no young-blood DI is going to listen to me. I made too much of a cock up the first time. Here, I'll get you the report.”

He shambled to an array of shelves made of bricks and builder's boards, where books and papers were arranged in pristine order. Like the rest of the flat, the equipment was makeshift, the sense of control complete.

“You can have the judgement in the case, too,” Jenkins said.

“No thanks,” said Joe. “I've already seen that.”

“You think,” Jenkins said, sneering, “that you can see whatever you want to see through the wrong end of a fucking lens.”

Suddenly, Joe was furious. So utterly furious, he could have strangled the man and shouted for joy. Smashed him to a pulp, to wipe away that half-smile on that sick face. Obliterate it.

“You knew all along that the suspect wasn't the one, didn't you? You knew poor Elisabeth was chasing a harmless hare whose only crimes were a few puerile fantasies learned from videos and a puppy love for a dead woman? Violent? Jack might have hit a woman who was pulling his plonker, that's all. Anyone might do that. You knew. You let the murderer get away. Put that poor bastard up for sacrifice. Not much of a man, but he was still a friend, once. And you knew exactly what you were doing.”

Jenkins
shrank, aware of danger, visualizing what Joe could do. Hands like hammers, face white with anger, blood pulsing. He was wide awake now.

“No,” he said softly. “No, I didn't know in the beginning. But I knew at some stage. When it was too late to stop. When it didn't matter who we got, as long as we got someone.”

Joe's face was level, like a man aiming to spit.

“Someone? Anyone? Did Elisabeth ever know she was forcing confessions out of the wrong man?”

Jenkins was shrinking like a pricked balloon. If Joe hit him once, he would hit a dozen times. Good men were dangerous.

“No. At least, I don't think so.” He was trembling, bracing his arms against the chair, the knuckles white and his face livid. “I couldn't bear to tell her. I thought she might work it out for herself. Oh SHIT!” He paused, kneading his knuckles into his eyes. The danger passed. “Instead, she pitied him. Suffered for his suicide not just because she was in disgrace, but because she pitied him. Almost had a nervous breakdown. ‘A life for a life is no answer,' she said, ‘it only punishes me.' How could I tell her it wasn't even that? That it was all for nothing and the murderer was still alive? She was in pieces. How could I tell her?”

The hands scrabbled like crabs towards the cigarettes.

“Go on, boy, hit me.”

O
h, God
, if only they would bury her. Take those people out of the office with their incessant, repetitive questions about Angela. Take away the voice of Mrs. Collier, breaking with tears, leaden with guilt, saying why, why, WHY? The police seemed so large, even the women: their questions a series of accusations. What was Angela like? I don't know. Tidy.

The red shirt was too aggressive, the cobalt blue calmer. Should she wear large earrings or small, the whole box tipped out on the bed to find the two which matched, a daily, time-wasting exercise which Patsy repeated and resented. She loathed the fact that they were never tidy, symptomatic of a wasted life. Why the fuss? Why come all the way home to change to meet a man for a drink, when the clothes she had worn for a shaky day at work would have been adequate? Why go anyway, when her mind was unhinged? One quick look out of the upstairs window, to see if the weather was still welcoming, suddenly reluctant to leave.

She felt a total bitch, doing this, when she should have been out on the streets with what seemed like dozens of others, hunting a murderer. She hoped he would understand, because she might have to talk about it.

Patsy, in front of the mirror by the door, positioned for the last minute check, examined her own face for signs of grief and could see none. Cobalt-blue shirt and white skirt, when she should be in mourning. Look, she told her reflection, if this was a business meeting you would go, Angela or no Angela, funeral or no funeral, police or no police. You'd go if you were half-dead, so why not a date? Tapping along the street to her car, (safe enough, she was not going to drink much, might only stay for one) she tried to grind the feeling of guilt under her heel. Fumbling for the key, she realized her hands were shaking. Stupid cow. Then she thought of how she would need more than one drink to steady her nerves, and still put the key in the lock and drove away with all the uncertainty of a learner to the tune of jumbled thoughts. A real bag of shredded paper. “Do not make any commitment on your first date … Always meet in a public place … early evening or lunch, so that both of you can go separate ways, without offence, after an hour …”

Mrs. Smythe's
sterling advice rang inside the ears which were, after all, wearing the wrong earrings; they should have been small and understated rather than large and far too white. Drop-dead gorgeous, Patsy, that's what you are; Lizzie's words echoed with less strength. She had so wanted to tell Lizzie about Angela: ask her advice on what to say; get her to intervene and tell them to
stop;
it had been an act of bravery to keep quiet in the days after, when she wanted to tell everyone, felt that she must have had a notice stamped on her forehead saying “My friend has been murdered, because I did not care for her enough.” But the one thing Lizzie did not need was bad news, even about a person she had never known, and the thing she had always done to Lizzie was dump on her, and let's face it, that was why she missed her. Yes, she had been restrained, for once.

So these are the choices, Patsy, old girl. Life over death.

The nights were darkening sooner and the long, hot summer taking a toll. Sticky air, low-lying fumes; a certain sense of the jaded, as if the city had run out of flimsy clothes and everything had been washed once too often. A frayed feeling to the awnings: café chairs in need of repair, a sense of nostalgia for a winter coat. Tired blooms going browner in baskets, beyond the redemption of mere water.

How many times? Patsy thought. How many times does one have to do this?

Outside
Café Bleue in the Convent Garden piazza, the crowds seemed thickest, and for a moment, Patsy panicked. However would she find him, or he her, but as the indeterminate, hunting tourists drifted and parted, bound for the market stalls and shops, they revealed only a scattering of custom under the dusty parasols. For a moment, she felt a total fool: a child on the edge of a crowd, searching for mother; a teenager, pretending nonchalance on the way to meet a new gang. She wanted to dive underground and find a place to brush the hair, retouch the eyes and remove the earrings.

“Excuse me … are you … ?”

The same height as herself, or maybe an inch taller, a discreet card with the Select Friends' logo peeking out of the top pocket of his shirt. Hair which managed to look windswept and controlled at the same time; a wide smile. The shirt was blue, the trousers pristine white.

“You have to be,” he laughed. “Look, even the colours match.”

“Not quite the same blue,” she stammered.

“Maybe not quite,” the lines crinkling round his eyes, scutinizing her, dipping his head in acknowledgement of approval. Nothing forced about the laugh, or hers.