Stop Me (4 page)

Without changing out of his uniform, Leo drove straight to the Allan-Carlins. Their palatial house was on the border of Shere, a small commuter-belt village outside London. His normal daily drive necessitated covering under a mile from Sable Electronics to his home on mainly empty roads so he’d been nervous about driving such a distance after a shift.

Far from puncturing his exhaustion the news had left him as detached as he had been at the end of Bonsignore’s trial and, as the rain on the windscreen of the Saab got heavier, he resisted the temptation to turn on the wipers. Their rhythm had almost been fatal in the past – for him and other road users. He checked his rear-view mirror for a car but couldn’t remember what the colour of the last police surveillance vehicle had been.

He speculated as to who would be sitting on the low leather sofa at the back of Chevalier’s at that very moment and then realised that probably nobody would at this hour of the morning. How many people would sit in that spot today though, the seat where he’d waited? How many would use the ladies restroom? A familiar treadmill of thought cranked to life.

As the A3 took him through Epsom and he hadn’t identified any car as having accompanied him all the way, Leo realised that the last journey he’d made of any length was to the same location. He’d visited the Allan-Carlins at their home on a handful of significant occasions. A visit to Maggie and Joe was always a reminder of a shared loss but it was patently clear that it was only Maggie who willingly entertained his presence.

She’d told him to come at once so they could watch things unfold on the news and if he wasn’t so indebted to them he certainly wouldn’t have been driving barely conscious along the wet and hazardous roads. He swung the car sharply into the turning that led off the A3 and zigzagged up the forest track that led to their impressive, Georgian home. To an outsider, it appeared that life had been very kind to the
Allan-Carlins
.

Lights were on in every window and the door to their garage glided open as he pulled in front of the house. He parked the car and Maggie appeared through the
side door. There was another marked decline in her appearance and it shocked even Leo. How long had it been since his last visit? It could only have been a matter of months. Now, her usually meticulously applied make-up was absent and her dark hair lay in uncombed disarray around her shoulders. Her complexion was as bloodless as his and served to highlight any blemishes. She wore loose-fitting, turquoise, fleece leisurewear and a pair of bright green crocs – he noticed her left hand was bandaged. She gave him a fragile smile as he got out of the car.

If Maggie hugs me it means Laura is still breathing.

Maggie put her good arm around him. She held him there without saying anything like she always did and he could smell the stale sweetness of alcohol – it wasn’t yet 9 a.m. Finally, she released him so he could follow her indoors.

The door from the garage led directly into a brightly lit, tiled kitchen where Joe was scraping up broken fragments of crockery with a dustpan and brush. He looked up through his bushy grey eyebrows and nodded once at Leo. A ring of white hair clung to the sides of his head and a sprig under his nose sheltered from the rest of his patent baldness, but the only change Leo noted in Joe’s appearance was that he appeared to have shrunk a little more. He didn’t know if this was his imagination though because Joe’s presence was usually peripheral, circling Leo’s visits from
a distance or standing in adjoining rooms with a tumbler of brandy until he left. His head was bright red, and Leo suspected he’d interrupted an argument. He was dressed more crisply then Maggie – polo shirt, chinos and canvas shoes and it was obvious from his previous visits that Joe was the designated
stay-in-control
party of the relationship. Joe still ran Opallios but Leo assumed he now held it together on his own.

‘Sorry about the mess. I seem to be getting clumsier,’ Maggie rasped as she breezed past her husband. Joe rolled his eyes at her as she passed and it was obvious that she had given him a look. ‘Coffee?’

‘Please.’ It seemed like a good idea if he was to attempt the drive back.

‘Futile for me to offer you something stronger…’ Maggie put the spout of the kettle under the tap.

‘Coffee’s fine.’

Joe dumped the shards of crockery in the bin but didn’t beat his customary retreat.

‘We’ve got Fox News on in the lounge. They’re giving it more coverage.’ She clumsily plugged in the kettle and flicked the switch, then picked up a large tumbler of amber liquid and ice. She’d never drunk alcohol in front of him before. ‘Have you seen any of it yet?’

‘I came straight here.’

‘Come on then.’ The words scratched at her throat as Maggie chinked into the lounge. Leo followed and was surprised to hear Joe behind him.

The Allan-Carlins’ lounge was decorated with impractical coral carpets and white showroom furniture showing inevitable signs of neglect. Surely they had people coming in to clean? To his right the
floor-to-ceiling
windows showcased the acres of land that lay beyond the covered swimming pool, now coated by a crust of dead leaves. But as always their attention was focused on the enormous flat-screen TV that hung on the back wall; it was permanently turned on during his visits.

The three of them stood in front of it and waited, watching a report about Egyptian troops being deployed along the Gaza-Egypt border and eyeing the crawler at the bottom of the screen. Although he’d only just got out of the car, Leo’s knees sagged from exhaustion and he had to keep snapping them straight to prevent him from tipping forward.

‘I’ll sit if that’s OK.’ He pulled out a high-backed chair from the dining table display and awkwardly spun it round so it faced the screen. It took more effort to sit in it than to stand.

Joe moved into his line of vision to close the curtains, then Bonsignore’s elongated features filled the screen. Fox were still using the same photograph of Bonsignore that every news station had throughout the trial; the one that had been taken of him with his fishing buddies, the face of the person standing next to him blurred out. A floppy blue denim hat sat at the top of his extended
forehead. His eyes were slits, squinted against the sun and he was grinning.

The picture changed to a circling helicopter’s view of Baraga.

Leo estimated Bonsignore to be nearly forty now. He’d confessed to killing twelve women and six men. His last victim had been Tom Andrutti, his own long-term boyfriend. Bonsignore still seemed like a fictional character – white, wannabe alpha male and the subject of an international manhunt that culminated in his confession to the Vacation Killer murders after
murdering Andrutti. The trial and the media hype surrounding it had unfolded from a place that Leo had felt entirely dislocated from.

The three of them watched the same report
book-ending
the rest of the day’s news stories before Joe switched off the TV with the remote. The crackling screen seemed to pick up the static in the room and even Maggie’s neurosis couldn’t fill the silence.

‘That’s it then,’ Joe said definitively, although he seemed to be waiting for a consensus.

Leo suddenly felt his wrist straining with the weight of the full coffee mug in his hand and he couldn’t remember when it had been placed there.

‘Thanks for coming to see Maggie.’ Joe left after he said it and Leo knew he wasn’t just thanking him for driving to their house that morning. He was thanking him for all his visits now that no more would be required.

Leo looked at Maggie but she didn’t make eye contact. ‘Is this enough for you?’

‘Of course not,’ she croaked eventually and then lubricated her throat with her glass. ‘It’s always been out of our hands, though. You know that don’t you.’ She still didn’t meet his gaze but fixed her eyes on the patch of wall beneath the TV.

‘There’s so much we never found out.’

‘And what more would we have learnt if he’d lived another twenty years? Or wanted to learn?’ She clicked
her wedding ring nervously against the side of the glass.

Of course, things were different for Maggie and Joe. There were more absolutes for them. It was obviously how Joe saw it but Maggie had been closer to Laura.

Maggie didn’t take his arm as she normally did when he left but led the way to the garage, striding as if she were trying to beat her own emotions.

‘I had another sitting last Friday. She’s in a comfortable place now,’ she said as she hugged his shirt collar again.

‘Maggie.’ Joe’s muffled remonstration came from the other side of the door. He must have followed them back into the kitchen.

Maggie touched Leo’s cheek, found his eyes and shuttered out her green tears. She nodded and returned to her husband.

‘Events have made her embrace things that normally she wouldn’t have got mixed up in.’

It was what Joe had once said about Maggie’s involvement with a local spiritualist. There was always a deluded message of reassurance for Leo when he left but, driving back, he realised how much he was going to miss them.

He knew that contact with the Allan-Carlins would be short-lived after Bonsignore had been convicted. He couldn’t blame them for wanting to move on and had noticed that the photographs of Louis about their home had slowly dwindled. Now there was only a single frame of photos in the hallway showing him growing up from a baby to the age of twenty-five. He wasn’t being forgotten but his school portraits and university achievements
had obviously become too much of a painful reminder to have hanging on display every day.

Did Leo really have an implicit connection to Bonsignore and the Allan-Carlin’s grief? Bonsignore’s confession to Laura’s disappearance suggested so. But now Joe had decided to sever his visits he’d shut down Leo’s last palpable connection to the Vacation Killer. He suddenly felt twice removed from ever finding out where Laura had been taken and why the police had never been sent her parcel.

The rain had eased and, after looking both ways, Leo pulled the car out of the junction that would take him along the usually quiet stretch that led back to the A3.

The bike impacted before he’d pulled into the left lane, clipping his rear wing and spinning its rider around the axis of its front wheel.

The front of the Saab was spun back into the left lane where it came to rest and Leo saw the rider and his bike sliding on the hissing tarmac until they hit the muddied bank of trees to the left of the junction. It felt as if his seat belt was holding his rib cage together but he quickly unfastened it and got out of the car, jogging halfway over to where the rider lay. Pain bear-hugged his chest but before he reached the rider, another car leaving the same junction as Leo broke hard, hitting the back of the Saab with enough impact to smash the headlights.

He turned from one to the other and then held up his hand to the car driver before continuing to where the bike rider lay. He was already sitting up and snapping up his visor.

If he’s not injured, Laura hasn’t been either.

‘Jesus, I’m so sorry. Anything broken?’

The rider lifted his visor and examined the snagged leather palms of his blue driving gloves. Leo registered that the boy was barely old enough to hold a licence. ‘I don’t think so.’ His pale blue eyes shifted and he looked more embarrassed than anything else. He had to have been going full throttle but Leo wasn’t sure he would have seen him even if the boy had been driving at normal speed. He couldn’t trust his eyeballs and driving up he’d already experienced moments that felt like they were coming unglued from his frazzled brain cells. There was no way he should have been behind the wheel of a car and even though the impact had momentarily galvanised him he could already feel the shadows creeping back around the periphery of the accident scene.

‘I think I’m OK.’ It was looking more certain; the rider’s attention had already turned to the state of his bike.

‘Can you stand?’ Leo helped him to his feet but the boy disengaged himself from his grip to demonstrate that he was perfectly capable of limping over to where his machine lay. He pulled his bike upright and
examined the buckled front mudguard. Leo tried to ascertain the damage to the front of the other
mud-spattered
metallic olive car behind him. It looked OK…from the side anyway.

‘I don’t mind if you don’t want to make this official.’ There was a note of desperation in the rider’s voice and he was already climbing back into the seat.

Leo guessed he was probably uninsured, had a healthy amount of points on his licence or didn’t even possess one. ‘As long as you’re OK. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I call an ambulance or phone somebody to pick you up?’

The boy unsuccessfully kick-started the bike and a twinge registered on his face. ‘No, it’s cool.’

Leo knew the boy would be gone in a matter of seconds. ‘Look, take it easy. As long as you’re OK we can handle this however you want.’

The boy tried again but it was the car behind them that revved to life.

Leo turned in time to see the car that had come from behind him skid sideways and barrel down the road away from them. He squinted after the car but barely registered the model let alone the registration number.

Leo drove the rest of the way home in the slow lane, his gut shivering and rattling his bruised ribcage. He had all the windows open to keep him awake and had decided to stop at the first motel he came to. But as he
got closer and closer to home without spotting one it seemed pointless to stop a few miles from his own bed.

He drove into a curtain of rain and large droplets thudded off the car seats. He hadn’t even glimpsed the face of the driver in the metallic olive car, just a dark shape behind the windscreen’s reflection of grey clouds. Perhaps they’d wanted to leave the scene for similar reasons to the boy on the motorcycle but Leo doubted it. It was a saloon car, Passat or Volvo and even though the side of it had been caked in mud it looked to have been brand new. Although he kept an eye out, he didn’t glimpse it for the rest of the journey home but couldn’t shake the notion that, if it had ever ceased, the surveillance was certainly underway again.

Leo always tried to imagine a New Orleans drawl behind the words on his laptop. He’d been contemplating having this dialogue for the few hours he’d been home. He tried sleeping but could almost feel the pressure of the daylight against the curtains. Leo had finally given up and switched on the TV instead. But Bonsignore’s story had already been relegated from the mainstream channels. He’d sat up and lifted the laptop onto the bed but even as he hinged its lid open and then shut it the
customary number of times before logging on, he knew his dialogue with Bookwalter was inevitable. He’d promised Ashley he wouldn’t so many times but today had changed all that.

The words never rattled out at a fast pace; Bookwalter was clearly a one-fingered typist. But even though the construction of the sentences was painstaking to watch, there was never a pause before his responses started filling the screen. Leo always got the impression that Bookwalter’s impatience wasn’t helped by his inability to type his own words fast enough.

Leo’s keyboard expertise at least accelerated the pace of their exchanges. He crossed his legs tighter under the laptop and keyed in the first words he’d exchanged with him for over three weeks.

Leo’s mind went blank but soon he could sense his correspondent’s agitation. Sensing his time was up he stabbed quickly at one key:

Just like the emails that had been circulated by the Vacation Killer, Bookwalter didn’t use apostrophes. However, sometimes he slipped, as if his genuine grasp of punctuation got the better of him.

Leo had wondered if Bookwalter’s energies had shifted focus in the few weeks since he’d spoken to him but watching her name appearing on his screen
shrink-wrapped
everything to the space he occupied on the bed like it had the first time he’d discussed her with him.

Sensitively, Bookwalter had agreed to remove all photos of Laura from her profile page so the only image that remained was the one on the home page that had been used by the media during her initial disappearance. This was on the condition that Leo would continue to correspond although he wasn’t sure if Bookwalter would ever have offered to withdraw them if Laura hadn’t been the Vacation Killer victim with the biggest question mark. She seemed to muddy the water for him
and it seemed convenient to discard her. Or perhaps Bookwalter was worried about getting sued. However, judging by the increasing amount of banners and
pop-ups
on the site, he assumed that Bookwalter had to be making good on the revenue from the advertisers.

But although he’d been quick to remove the picture of Laura as a teenager, he would never be drawn on where he’d got it in the first place. Leo didn’t want to consider how many hard drives it had already been saved on. The idea of the image being in global circulation and that computer-bound sociopaths were using them as currency was something he gladly would have committed murder for himself.

Leo stabbed at the keys.