Dead Like You (13 page)

34

Friday 9 January

For the second time in just over a week, the Sexual Offences Liaison Officer, DC Claire Westmore, was back at the Saturn Centre, the Sexual Assault Referral Centre attached to Crawley Hospital.

She knew from experience that no two victims ever reacted the same way, and nor did their conditions remain static. One of the difficult tasks facing her right now was to keep abreast of the changing state of mind of the woman she was with. But while treating her sensitively and sympathetically, and trying to make her feel as safe as possible, she could not lose sight of the cruel fact that Roxy Pearce, like it or not, was a crime scene from whom every possible scrap of forensic evidence needed to be obtained.

When that was completed, she would let the woman rest – safe here in this suite – and with the help of medication get some sleep. Tomorrow, when hopefully the woman would be in a better state, the interview process could start. For Roxy Pearce, as with most victims, that was likely to mean three gruelling days of reliving what had happened, with Westmore extracting from her a harrowing narrative that would eventually fill thirty pages of her A4 notebook.

At this moment she was going through the most distressing part of all for the victim – and for herself. They were alone with a female Forensic Medical Examiner, or FME, as Police Surgeons were now called, in the sterile Forensic Room. Roxy Pearce was wearing only the white towelling dressing gown and pink slippers in which she had travelled here. She’d had a blanket wrapped around her for warmth in the police car, but now that had been removed. She sat, hunched and silent and forlorn, on the blue examining couch, her head bowed, eyes staring blankly at nothing, her long black hair matted and partially obscuring her face. From being hyper-talkative when the police had first arrived at her house, she had now become almost catatonic.

Claire Westmore had heard victims say that being raped was like having their souls murdered. Just as with murder, there was no going back. No amount of therapy would restore Roxy Pearce to the person she had previously been. Yes, in time she would recover a little, enough to function, to live a seemingly normal life. But it would be a life constantly stalked by the shadow of fear. A life in which she would find it hard ever to trust anyone or any situation.

‘You’re safe here, Roxy,’ Claire said to her with a bright smile. ‘You’re in the safest possible place. He can’t get to you here.’

She smiled again. But there was no response. It was like talking to a waxwork.

‘Your friend Amanda is here,’ she went on. ‘She just went out for a ciggie. She’s going to stay with you all day.’ Again she smiled.

Again the blank expression. The dead eyes. Blank. As blank as everything in here around her. As blank and numb as her insides.

Roxy Pearce’s eyes registered the magnolia-coloured walls of the small room. Recently painted. The round, institutional clock showing the time as 12.35. A rack of boxes containing blue latex gloves. Another rack of blue and red crates containing syringes, swabs and vials, all sealed in sterile wrappers. A pink chair. Weighing scales. A basin with a moisturizer dispenser on one side and sterile handwash on the other. A telephone sitting on a bare white work-surface like some unused lifeline in a television quiz game. A foldaway screen on castors.

Tears welled in her eyes. She wished Dermot was here. She wished, in her addled mind, that she hadn’t been unfaithful to him, hadn’t had this crazy thing with Iannis.

Then suddenly she blurted out, ‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’

‘Why do you think that, Roxy?’ the SOLO asked, jotting down her words in the log she was keeping in her notepad. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself at all. That’s not right.’

But the woman lapsed back into silence.

‘OK, my love. Don’t worry. You don’t have to say anything to me. We don’t have to talk today if you don’t want to, but what I do need to do is obtain forensic evidence from you, to help us try to catch the man who did this to you. Is that all right with you?’

After some moments, Roxy said, ‘I feel dirty. I want to take a shower. Can I do that?’

‘Of course, Roxy,’ the Forensic Medical Examiner said. ‘But not just yet. We don’t want to wash away any evidence, do we?’ She had a slightly bossy tone, Claire Westmore thought, a little too officious for the victim’s fragile state.

Silence again. Roxy’s mind went off on a tangent. She had taken out two of Dermot’s best bottles. Left them somewhere. One open on the kitchen table, the other in the fridge. She would have to buy a bottle somewhere to replace the opened one, and go to the house before Dermot came back and replace them in the cellar. He’d go loopy otherwise.

The FME snapped on a pair of latex gloves, walked over to the plastic crates and removed the first item from its sterile wrapping. A small, sharp implement for taking scrapings from underneath fingernails. It was possible the woman had scratched her attacker and that crucial skin cells containing his DNA might be trapped beneath her nails.

This was just the start of a long ordeal for Roxy Pearce in this room. Before she would be permitted to take a shower, the FME would have to take swabs from every part of her body where contact with her assailant might have occurred, looking for saliva, semen and skin cells. She would comb her pubic hair, take her blood alcohol and a urine sample for toxicology tests, and sketch in the Medical Examination Book any damage to the genital area.

As the FME worked her way through each of the woman’s nails, bagging the scrapings separately, the SOLO tried to reassure Roxy.

‘We’re going to get this man, Roxy. That’s why we’re doing this. With your cooperation, we’ll be able to stop him from doing this to anyone else. I know it must be hard for you, but try to hold on to that.’

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering,’ Roxy suddenly said. ‘Only 4 per cent of rapists ever get convicted. Right?’

Claire Westmore hesitated. She’d heard that nationwide it was actually only 2 per cent, because just 6 per cent of rapes were ever reported. But she didn’t want to make things worse for the poor woman.

‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ she answered. ‘But the figures are low, yes. That’s because so few victims have your guts, Roxy. They don’t have the courage to come forward like you are doing.’

‘Guts?’ she retorted bitterly. ‘I don’t have
guts
.’

‘Yes, you do. You really do have guts.’

Roxy Pearce shook her head bleakly. ‘It’s my fault. If I’d had guts, I’d have stopped him. Everyone’ll think I must have wanted him to do this, that I must have encouraged him somehow. Anyone else might have managed to stop him, knee him in the nuts or something, but I didn’t, did I? I just lay there.’

35

Friday 9 January

Darren Spicer’s morning was getting better. He’d recovered his things from Terry Biglow and now he had a place to store them, a tall, cream metal locker with a key of his own at St Patrick’s night shelter. And he hoped, in a few weeks, he’d get a MiPod there.

The big Neo-Norman church at the end of a quiet residential street in Hove had adapted to the changing world. With its shrinking congregation, much of St Patrick’s cavernous interior had been partitioned off and placed in the hands of a charity for the homeless. Part of it was a fourteen-bed dormitory where people could doss down for a maximum of three months. Another part, the MiPod Room, was a sanctuary. It was where people who showed real intentions of retraining could stay for a further ten weeks in the hope of giving them a stable base.

The MiPod Room was modelled on Japanese capsule hotels. It was a self-contained space, with six plastic pods, a kitchen area and a living area with television. Each of the pods was large enough to sleep in and to store a couple of suitcases.

To become eligible for one, first Spicer had to convince the management here that he was a model resident. He hadn’t thought beyond those ten weeks in the pod, but by then, with luck, he’d have plenty of cash to rent a flat or house again.

Being a model resident meant obeying the rules, such as having to be out by 8.30 a.m. and not returning until dinnertime at 7.30 p.m. During the hours in between he was meant to be retraining. Yeah, well, that’s what they would all think he was doing. He’d report to the retraining centre and sign on, and hopefully get a job in the maintenance department of one of Brighton’s posh hotels. There’d be some easy pickings in the rooms from that. Should be able to build himself a nice stash. And stumble across a willing woman or two, like he had last night.

Shortly after midday, dressed in a windcheater over a sweater, jeans and sneakers, he left the retraining centre. The interview had gone fine and he now possessed a stamped form and the address of the swanky Grand Hotel on the seafront, where he would start on Monday. He had the rest of today to kill.

As he mooched along Western Road, the wide shopping street connecting Brighton with Hove, his hands were dug into his pockets against the cold. He had just £7 in his pocket – all that was left from his £46 prison discharge allowance, plus the small amount of cash he’d had on him when he’d last been arrested. And he had his emergency stash in the suitcase he had retrieved from Terry Biglow.

In his head he was making out a shopping list of stuff he needed. He was given basic necessities here, like new razor blades, shaving cream, toothpaste. But he needed a few treats. He walked past a bookshop called City Books, then stopped, turned back and peered at the display in the window. Dozens of books, some by authors whose names he knew, others by authors he’d never heard of.

It was still a novelty being out. To smell the salty sea air. To walk freely among women. To hear the hum and buzz and roar of vehicles and occasional snatches of music. Yet although he felt free, he felt vulnerable and exposed too. Life
inside
, he realized, had become his comfort zone. He didn’t know this other world so well any more.

And this street seemed to have changed in the past three years. It was much more vibrant than he remembered. As if the world, three years on, was a party he had not yet been invited to.

It was lunchtime and the restaurants were starting to get busy. Filling up with strangers.

Just about everyone was a stranger to him.

Sure, there were a few friends he could contact, and would in time. But he didn’t have a lot to say to them at the moment. Same old same old. Yeah. He’d call them when he needed to score some coke. Or when he had some brown to sell.

A police car was coming past in the opposite direction and automatically he turned and peered in through an estate agent’s window, pretending to be interested.

Most of the police in this city knew his face. Half of them had nicked him at one time or another. He had to remind himself that he was permitted to walk down this street now. That he wasn’t a fugitive. He was a citizen of Brighton and Hove. He was like everyone else!

He stared at some of the houses on display. A nice one opposite Hove Park caught his eye. It looked familiar and he had a feeling he’d burgled it some years ago. Four bedrooms, conservatory, double garage. A nice price too: £750,000. Yeah, a bit above his bracket. Like £750,000 above his bracket.

The huge Tesco supermarket was a short distance ahead of him now. He crossed the road and walked in past the queue of waiting cars at the car-park barriers. Plenty of smart ones. A convertible Beemer, a nice Merc sports and several huge, in-your-face off-roader jobs – Brighton and Hove ladies doing their shopping. Yummy mummies with infants strapped smugly into their child seats in the rear.

People with folding money, with credit cards, debit cards, Tesco Club Cards.

How obliging some of them were!

He stopped outside the front entrance, watching the stream of people coming out with their bags or with laden trolleys. He ignored the ones holding just a couple of bags; they were of no interest to him. It was the laden trolleys he focused on. The mummies and daddies and rest-home proprietors doing their big shop for the weekend ahead. The ones who would have had £200 and more swiped from their MasterCards, or Barclaycards, or Amex.

Some had infants strapped into the buggy seats in their trolleys, but he wasn’t interested in those. Who the fuck wanted baby food?

Then he saw her coming out.

Oh yes! Perfect!

She looked rich. She looked arrogant. She had the kind of figure he’d lain on the top bunk of his cell dreaming about for three years. She had a trolley piled so high that the top layer defied gravity. And she was wearing really nice boots. Snakeskin, with five-inch heels, he guessed.

But it wasn’t the shoes that interested him at this moment. It was the fact that she paused by the dustbins, screwed up her receipt and tossed it in. He strolled nonchalantly over to the bin, keeping an eye on her, while she pushed her trolley towards a black Range Rover Sport.

Then he slipped his hand inside the top of the bin and pulled out a clutch of receipts. It only took a moment to find hers – it was a good two feet long, with a checkout time of just two minutes ago.

Well, well – £185! And, a real bonus, it was a cash receipt, which meant he would not have to produce any credit card or ID. He read down the items: wine, whiskey, prawn cocktail, moussaka, apples, bread, yoghurt. So much stuff. Razor blades! Some of the stuff he didn’t want, but hey, this was not the time to be fussy … Fantastic! He gave her a little wave, which she never saw. At the same time, he clocked her car’s registration number – well, she was a looker with nice shoes, you never knew! Then, grabbing a trolley, he entered the store.

*

It took Spicer half an hour to go through her list, item by item. He was aware of the checkout time printed at the bottom, but he had his story ready, that one of the eggs was broken so he’d gone to replace it, and then he’d stopped for a coffee.

There was some stuff, such as a dozen tins of cat food, that he really did not need, and two tins of smoked oysters he could have done without, but he decided it was better to match the items on the list exactly, in case he was challenged. Six frozen steak and kidney pies he truly blessed her for. His kind of grub! And the half a dozen tins of Heinz Baked Beans. He had no stomach for fancy stuff. He approved of her choice of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, but wished she had chosen something more to his taste than Baileys. She was big into organic eggs and fruit. He could live with that.

He would take his shopping home and chuck or maybe flog or barter for cigarettes the stuff he did not want. Then he would go out on the hunt.

Life was looking good. Only one thing could improve it for him at the moment. Another woman.