Death Bed (21 page)

G
eraldine arrived at Hendon early on Monday morning and reviewed the day that lay ahead of her. She had to write her decision log plus she had expenses claims and other paperwork to sort through, but she couldn’t face starting her week with tedious tasks that wouldn’t move the investigation forward. There was more important work to be done. Kilburn wasn’t far away and it was still early enough to drive there before the traffic built up, so she decided to go and question Eddy Hart before he went into work. Once he was out driving they probably wouldn’t be able to catch up with him until the end of the day, and she was keen to wrap up that line of enquiry so they could focus their resources on finding another possible lead, instead of wasting man hours checking out Robert Stafford’s alibi. Geraldine was convinced he hadn’t killed Jessica Palmer, and the sooner they could eliminate him from the enquiry the better.

She drove to the rundown estate in Kilburn where Eddy Hart lived. The door to his block of flats wasn’t locked and she entered the dingy hall and went up a narrow flight of stone stairs to the second floor. Hart’s flat had no bell so she rapped as loudly as she could, and after a few minutes a young man opened the door.

‘Are you Edward Hart?’

‘Yeah. That’s me.’

His mouth hung slightly slack giving him a vacant expression. ‘Who are you then?’

‘Detective Inspector Steel.’

She held up her warrant card, slightly surprised to see that he was barely thirty.

‘I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr Hart.’

‘Yeah?’

He didn’t seem curious.

‘I’m just having breakfast.’

He waved a spoon he was holding.

‘Can I come in for a moment? It’s just a formality, only we’re hoping you might be able to help us with an investigation.’

He hesitated.

‘Alright, come on in then, if you must,’ he said at last, ‘but I hope you don’t mind talking while I eat.’

Geraldine followed him into a tiny kitchen where he sat down on the only stool and began scooping baked beans out of a tin. ‘I’ve been away,’ he said as though that explained his rudimentary eating arrangements. ‘Sorry, did you want to sit down? We can go in the other room if you like.’

‘That’s OK,’ Geraldine replied.

He looked at his watch.

‘I’ve got to get off to work soon.’

‘I won’t keep you long. I’m interested in a friend of yours, Robert Stafford.’

‘Yeah, I know Robert, but he’s not exactly a friend. He’s my cousin.’

‘When did you last see him?’

Eddy sucked on his spoon for a moment.

‘I don’t know. I was away last week.’

He shoved the spoon in his mouth and looked up at Geraldine. ‘Is that it then? Only I’ve got to get off to work soon.’

‘Robert said he saw you on his birthday?’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Only it was my birthday, not his.’ Geraldine nodded. Stafford’s story checked out so far.

‘You’ll remember the date then.’

‘My birthday was on Friday but I saw Robert on the Saturday. He was working on the Friday or something, and anyway, I was out with some mates on my birthday. So I saw Robert the next evening. I was a bit hung over.’

A grin transformed his slightly gormless look into a mischievous expression.

‘Where did you and Robert Stafford go on Saturday night?’

Eddy gave her the name of the pub.

‘After that we got a takeaway and went back to his place and I crashed there because it was late. I do that sometimes, stay over, when neither of us has got work the next day. He’s got a spare mattress and he does a great fry-up for breakfast.’ He glanced miserably at the empty baked bean can in his hand.

‘So you were with Robert Stafford all night?’

‘Yeah. That’s right. On the mattress. I told you, he’s my cousin.’

‘Mr Hart, have you ever been a member of the National Front?’

‘The who?’

‘The National Front.’

‘They’re the ones who want to send all the immigrants packing?’

‘Yes.’

He sucked on his spoon again before replying.

‘Well, I can’t say I totally disagree with them. Not that I’ve got anything against anyone, but there are just too many of them. I mean, we let anyone and everyone in and well, what about the rest of us?’

‘Have you ever joined the National Front or the BNP? Or attended any of their meetings?’

‘Me? No way. What would I want to do that for? I mean, I can’t see the point. Life’s complicated enough as it is. Poncing about on the telly, telling the rest of us what to do. What about all the money they waste? That’s our money, that is.’

He stood up, tossed his empty can in the bin and dropped the spoon in among the dirty crockery in the sink.

‘Thank you, Eddy. You’ve been a great help.’

Geraldine put away her notebook.

‘I’ll see myself out.’

‘No worries. Robbie in some sort of trouble with the law then, is he?’

‘Would that surprise you?’

‘Yes, as it happens, it would. He makes such a fuss about rules. Not that I don’t agree with him but he can go a bit over the top. You try cheating him at cards and you’ll soon know what I mean. And don’t get him started on benefit scroungers.’

Not only because Sam would be disappointed that it was looking increasingly unlikely that Stafford was the killer, but also to satisfy her own misgivings, Geraldine went to the pub and the Indian restaurant Eddy had mentioned.

The landlord of the pub recognised Stafford but couldn’t confirm when he’d been there.

‘It could have been a Saturday. It was a few weeks ago anyhow. Sorry I can’t be more precise, but we get lots of people coming through here of an evening.’

The manager of the Indian restaurant was more helpful, because Stafford was a regular customer. It turned out that on the Saturday night in question, a transaction had gone through at half past midnight on Stafford’s credit card, confirming Eddy Hart’s account of the evening. Sam wouldn’t be happy. No one could seriously suggest that Stafford had sneaked out of his flat without his cousin noticing, dumped Jessica Palmer’s body in an alleyway near Tufnell Park station, and returned to Arsenal without his absence being noticed. Robert Stafford’s alibi had been confirmed for the night Jessica Palmer’s body was left in the alleyway in Tufnell Park, and they were back at square one.

‘W
e have to find something on him,’ Sam insisted, her face twisted in irritation. ‘Until we nail that racist bastard, we have to keep looking. There must be something, otherwise we’ve got nothing to go on.’

She wasn’t happy when Geraldine suggested they forget about Robert Stafford.

‘Forget about him? How can we forget about him? Come on, Geraldine, it must’ve been him. Who else could it have been? No smoke without fire and all that, and we know what he’s like. All we have to do is prove it. What if he was working with an accomplice?’

Geraldine felt sympathy for the sergeant’s desperation. It would certainly be a relief to find evidence that would put Robert Stafford back in the frame. The media were whipping up a storm of absurd allegations. Stafford was a bouncer from the North. To make matters worse, his former association with the National Front had been unearthed. Several papers had already cited that alone as evidence of his guilt. But apart from the fact that it wouldn’t be right, there was simply no point going after the wrong man because without proof there was no case against him. Even the few officers who had never believed Stafford was guilty were dejected at the confirmation of his innocence, the prospect of more dull hard work that lay ahead, and the unspoken worry that they might never find the killer who had taken such macabre trophies from his victims.

‘We must redouble our efforts,’ Reg Milton said.

Despite his upright carriage and manner of looking people straight in the eye he seemed uncertain.

‘Remember, the Met solves nearly all of its murder cases - ’

‘Ninety seven per cent,’ someone said.

‘And I’m not going to let this be one of the very few exceptions,’ the detective chief inspector went on. His words were positive but his voice had lost its characteristic vehemence.

‘So let’s put Robert Stafford out of our minds, get back to what we know and work from that.’

Empty words. They didn’t need a pep talk, they needed information. Most murderers were identified because the police were able to trace them through their connection to their victims. If this killer was attacking people at random, it would require an interminable amount of cross-referencing at the end of which they would probably come up with nothing. And while they were at a loss over where to look for the killer, he could be out on the streets eyeing up his next victim.

A young constable suggested sending a female officer out to walk the streets at night pretending to be drunk.

‘That way we could catch him at it. The WPC’s wired and under surveillance, and as soon as he bundles her into his car we follow.’

There was a brief discussion of the proposal before Reg Milton dismissed it.

‘We have no way of knowing when the killer is planning to abduct another victim, if ever. And if he does, we don’t know if he’s still going to be operating round here. And even if he is, it’s a vast area. We can’t afford to run a surveillance operation around every pub in North London. If we try this on a small scale, the chances are we’ll never be in the right place at the right time. It might sound like a good idea, but it would be a waste of resources.’

‘We’ve got to do something,’ the constable insisted.

There was a faint murmur of assent.

The detective chief inspector frowned.

‘What we have to do is keep looking. We can start by returning to the pubs where Jessica Palmer and Donna Henry were last seen alive and asking more questions. Perhaps we can jog someone’s memory.’

‘Perhaps we can’t,’ someone muttered, expressing the general mood of dissatisfaction.

Geraldine went back to her office to check her messages. It wasn’t helpful for the boss to say work with what you know when they didn’t know anything. She felt as though she was standing on shifting ground. Supposedly skilled at understanding people, for more than three decades of her life she hadn’t known she was adopted, hadn’t even known her own name, and now despite all her training in listening to people, she had worked closely with Sam Haley for over two weeks without an inkling that the sergeant was a lesbian. At the end of the day she went to the Major Incident Room and found Sam tapping at a keyboard.

‘Let’s go for a coffee,’ Geraldine suggested.

Sam leapt to her feet.

‘Anything’s better than this.’

She nodded at the computer.

‘About Saturday evening,’ Geraldine began when they sat down with their drinks.

She hesitated, feeling self-conscious. If she said the wrong thing relations between them could become strained, which would be awkward as they had to work together. Besides, she liked Sam Haley and was worried she might hurt her feelings if she spoke clumsily. To say she had no problem with Sam’s sexual orientation sounded patronising. It might have been better to say nothing, but she had started now and had to carry on.

‘Sorry I left so early,’ Sam smiled, misunderstanding.

‘I didn’t do a very good job of taking you out. But you could have stayed, gone out with the girls. I was just wiped out.’

‘One of your friends said - ’

Sam put her head on one side and waited. Geraldine tried again.

‘Your friends seemed to think we might be - ’

‘What?’

‘I think they might have got the wrong idea about us. I don’t know what gave them that impression.’

‘About us? That was probably Liz. She’s always concocting some new piece of gossip. No one takes any notice of her.’

‘So you don’t - ‘ Geraldine hesitated.

‘Don’t worry, I don’t fancy you,’ Sam said, and burst out laughing.

Geraldine smiled.

‘Thanks for the compliment.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Anyway, you’re not a lesbian. I am. End of. This isn’t Bridget Jones. As far as I’m concerned work is work, and with all due respect, what I do in private is my business. My sexual orientation is nothing to do with you. And being a lesbian doesn’t mean I automatically want to jump on every woman I meet. For goodness sake, Geraldine - ‘

She broke off, exasperated.

‘I didn’t mean - ’

‘I know. No offence taken. Let’s just drop it, shall we?’

‘Right then, back to work,’ Geraldine said, relieved.

‘Let’s go over what we know.’

Sam nodded and bit into a slice of cake as she listened.

‘He’s tall, dark-haired, well-spoken and driving a dark car, probably black.’

‘A tall dark-haired stranger,’ Sam laughed, brushing crumbs from her lips with the back of her hand. ‘Do you think he’s handsome? If we believe what Douggie Hopkins told us,’ she added, serious again.

‘His statement was corroborated by William Kingsley,’ Geraldine reminded her.

It was so frustrating, knowing Douggie Hopkins and William Kingsley had both met the killer, yet were unable to give the police any useful clues about his identity.

‘How many tall, dark-haired, well-spoken men are there in London, do you suppose?’

Geraldine frowned at her mug of coffee.

‘I’ve reread Douggie Hopkins and William Kingsley’s statements so many times I know them off by heart, but I can’t see we’ve missed anything. Come on.’

She stood up, suddenly decisive.

‘Where to?’ asked Sam.

‘Let’s speak to those two again. Perhaps one of them will remember something.’

‘Anything’s better than being stuck here reading all those statements again.’

Sam stuffed the last mouthful of cake in her mouth, washed it down with a gulp of coffee and jumped to her feet.

‘And I think we should start putting a bit of pressure on our friend Mr Hopkins,’ Geraldine added.

‘About bloody time! Let’s make the little rat squeal.’

‘Do I detect a touch of sadism, Sergeant?’

‘A girl’s got to have a bit of fun, ma’am.’

Sam winked and Geraldine couldn’t help laughing.