Suspect (45 page)

“She ripped up the letters he wrote to you. I bet she even found the photographs you kept and destroyed them. She wanted Lenny out of her life and out of yours. She hated hearing his name…”

Bobby is growing smal er, as if col apsing from the inside. His anger has turned to grief.

“Let me guess what happened. She was going to be the first. You went looking for her and found her easily enough. Bridget had never been the shy, retiring type. Her stilettos made big footprints.

“You watched her and waited. You had it al planned… every last detail. Now was the moment. The woman who had destroyed your life was just a few feet away, close enough for you to put those fingers around her throat. She was right there,
right there
, but you hesitated. You couldn’t do it. You were twice her size. She had no weapon. You could have crushed her so easily.”

I pause letting the memory live in his mind. “Nothing happened. You couldn’t do it. Do you know why? You were scared. When you saw her again you became that little boy, with his trembling bottom lip and his stutter. She terrified you then, and she terrifies you now.”

Bobby’s face is twisted in self-loathing. At the same time he wants to wipe me from his world.

“Someone had to be punished. So you found your child protection files and the list of names. And you set about punishing al those responsible, by taking away what each of them loved most. But you never lost the fear of your mother. Once a coward, always a coward. What did you think when you discovered she was dying? Has her cancer done the job for you, or has it robbed you?”

“Robbed me.”

“She’s dying a terrible death. I’ve seen her.”

He explodes. “It’s not enough. She is a MONSTER!”

He kicks at a metal drum, sending it spinning across the courtyard. “She destroyed my life. She
made
me into this.” Spittle hangs from his lips. He looks at me for validation. He wants me to say, “You poor bastard. It
is
al her fault. It’s no wonder you feel like this.” I can’t give him that. If I sanction his hatred there is no way back.

“I’m not going to give you any bul shit excuses, Bobby. Terrible things happened to you. I wish it could have been different. But look at the world around you— there are children starving in Africa; jets are being flown into buildings; bombs are being dropped on civilians; people are dying of disease; prisoners are being tortured; women are being raped… Some of these things we can change, but others we can’t. Sometimes we just have to accept what happened and get on with our lives.” He laughs bitterly. “How can you say that?”

“Because it’s true. You know it is.”

“I’l tel you what’s true.” He is staring at me, unblinkingly. His voice is a low rumble. “There is a lay-by on the coast road through Great Crosby— about eight miles north of Liverpool. It’s on the dual carriageway, set back from the road. If you drive in there after ten o’clock at night, you wil sometimes see another car parked up. You put on your indicator— either left or right, depending on what you want— and you wait for the car in front to respond with the same indicator. Then you fol ow it.” His voice is ragged. “I was six when she first took me to the lay-by. I just watched the first time. It was in a barn somewhere. She was laid out on a table like a smorgasbord. Naked.

There were dozens of hands on her. Anyone could do what they wanted. She had enough for al of them. Pain. Pleasure. It was al the same to her. And every time she opened her eyes she looked directly at me. ‘Don’t be selfish, Bobby,’ she said. ‘Learn to share.’ ”

He rocks slightly, back and forth, staring straight ahead, picturing the scene in his mind. “Private clubs and swingers bars were too middle class for my mother. She preferred her orgies to be anonymous and unsophisticated. I lost count of how many people shared her body. Women and men. That’s how I learned to share. At first they took from me, but later I took from them. Pain and pleasure— my mother’s legacy.”

His eyes are brimming with tears. I don’t know what to say. My tongue has grown thick and prickly. My peripheral vision has started to fail because I can’t get enough oxygen to my brain.

I want to say something. I want to tel him that he isn’t alone. That a lot of people fret through the same dreams, yel into the same emptiness and walk past the same open windows and wonder whether to jump. I know he’s lost. He’s damaged. But he stil has choices. Not every abused child turns out like this.

“Let me down, Bobby. I can’t breathe properly.”

I can see the back of his square neck and his badly trimmed hair. He turns in slow motion, never looking at my face. The blade sweeps above my head and I col apse forward, stil clutching the remnants of the scarf. The muscles in my legs go into spasm. I taste concrete dust, mingled with blood. There are more loose planks leaning against one wal and industrial sinks against another. Where is the canal from here? I have to get out.

Lifting myself onto my knees, I start crawling. Bobby has disappeared. Metal shavings dig into my hands. Broken concrete and rusting drums are like an obstacle course. As I reach the entrance I can see a fire engine beside the canal and the flashing lights of a police car. I try to shout but no sound emerges.

Something is wrong. I’ve stopped moving. I turn to see Bobby standing on my coat.

“Your fucking arrogance blows me away,” he says, grasping my col ar and lifting me to my feet. “You think I’d fal for your cereal-box psychology. I’ve seen more therapists, counselors and psychiatrists than you’ve had crappy birthday presents. I’ve been to Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians, Rogerians— you name it— and I wouldn’t give any of them the steam off my piss on a cold day.”

He puts his face close to mine once more. “You
don’t
know me. You think you’re inside my head. Shit! You’re not even close!” He places the blade under my ear. We’re breathing the same air.

A flick of his wrist and my throat wil open like a dropped melon. That’s what he’s going to do. I can feel the metal against my neck. He is going to end this now.

At that moment I picture Julianne looking at me across her pil ow, with her hair mussed up from sleep. And I see Charlie in her pajamas smel ing of shampoo and toothpaste. I wonder if it’s possible to count the freckles on her nose. Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing to die without trying?

Bobby’s breath is warm on my neck— the blade is cold. His tongue comes out, wetting his lips. There is a moment of hesitation— I don’t know why.

“I guess we both underestimated each other,” I say, inching my hand inside my coat pocket. “I knew you wouldn’t let me go. Your kind of vengeance isn’t negotiable. You’ve invested too much in it. It’s the reason you get up in the morning. That’s why I had to get off that wal .”

He wavers, trying to work out what he hasn’t prepared for. My fingers close around the handle of the chisel.

“I have a disease, Bobby. Sometimes I have difficulty walking. My right hand is OK, but see how my left arm trembles.” I hold up the limb that no longer feels as if it belongs to me. It draws his gaze like a birthmark on someone’s face or a disfiguring burn.

With my right hand I drive the chisel through my coat into Bobby’s abdomen. It strikes his pelvic bone and twists, puncturing the transverse colon. Three years at medical school are never wasted.

Stil holding my col ar, he fal s to his knees. I swing around and hit him as hard as I can with my fist, aiming for his jaw. He puts his arm up, but I stil manage to connect with the side of his head, throwing him backward. Everything has slowed down. Bobby tries to stand but I move forward a pace and catch him under the chin with a clumsy but effective kick that snaps his head back.

For a moment I stare at him, crumpled on the ground. Then, crablike, I scuttle across the courtyard. Once I get my legs moving, they stil do the job. It might not be pretty, but I’ve never been Roger Bannister.

A police-dog handler is searching for a scent along the canal bank. He sees me coming and takes a step back. I keep going. It takes two of them to hold me. Even then I want to keep running.

Ruiz has me by the shoulders. “Where is he?” he yel s. “Where’s Bobby?”

9

My mother made the best milky tea. She would always put an extra scoop of tea leaves in the pot and another slurp of milk in my cup. I don’t know where Ruiz managed to find such a brew, but it helps to wash the taste of blood and petrol from my mouth.

Sitting in the front seat of a squad car, I hold the cup with both hands in a vain attempt to stop them from trembling.

“You should real y get that seen to,” Ruiz says. My bottom lip is stil bleeding. I touch it gingerly with my tongue.

Ruiz takes the cel ophane off a packet of cigarettes and offers me one.

I shake my head. “I thought you’d given up cigarettes.”

“I blame you. We chased that stolen bloody hire car for near on fifty miles. Found two fourteen-year-olds and a kid of eleven inside it. We also staked out the railway stations, airports, bus terminals… I had every officer in the northwest looking for you.”

“Wait til you get my invoice.”

He regards his cigarette with a mixture of affection and distaste. “Your confession was a nice touch. Very creative. I had the press hyenas sniffing everything except my ass— asking questions, talking to relatives, stirring up the silt. You gave me no choice.”

“You found the red edge?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the other names on the list?”

“We’re stil looking into them.”

He leans against the open door, studying me thoughtful y. The glint of sunlight off the canal picks up the Tower of Pisa pin in his tie. His distant blue eyes have fixed on the ambulance parked a hundred feet away, framed against the factory wal .

The pain in my chest and throat is making me feel light-headed. I wince as I pul a rough gray blanket around my shoulders. Ruiz tel s me how he spent al night checking the details from the child protection file. He ran the names through the computer and pul ed up the unsolved deaths.

Bobby had worked in Hatchmere as a council gardener up until a few weeks before Rupert Erskine died. He and Catherine McBride attended the same group therapy sessions for self-mutilators at an outpatient clinic in West Kirkby in the mid-nineties.

“What about Sonia Dutton?” I ask.

“Nothing. He doesn’t match the description of the pusher who sold her the drug.”

“He worked at her swimming club.”

“I’l check it out.”

“How did he get Catherine to come to London?”

“She came for the job interview. You wrote her a letter.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Bobby wrote it for you. He stole stationery from your office.”

“How? When?”

Ruiz can see I’m struggling. “You mentioned the word
Nevaspring
sewn into Bobby’s shirt. It’s a French company that delivers water coolers to offices. We’re checking the CCTV

footage from the medical center.”

“He made deliveries…”

“Walked right past security with a bottle over his shoulder.”

“That explains how he managed to get into the building when he arrived so late for some of his appointments. He must have stolen the stationery and then written to Catherine, inviting her to apply for the secretarial job. What about the letter— the one that arrived at the house?”

“She wrote dozens of them to your friend Dr. Owen. Bobby must have come across one of them and changed the address.” Across the waste ground, visible above the broken fence, Bobby is lying on a stretcher. A paramedic holds a transfusion bottle above his head.

“Is he going to be OK?” I ask.

“You haven’t saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No.”

“You’re not feeling sorry for him, are you?”

I shake my head. Maybe one day— a long while from now— I’l look back at Bobby and see a damaged child who grew into a defective adult. Right now, after what he did to Elisa and the others, I’m happy to have half kil ed the bastard.

Ruiz watches as two detectives climb into the back of the ambulance and sit on either side of Bobby. “You told me that Catherine’s kil er was going to be older… more practiced.”

“I thought he would be.”

“And you said it was sexual.”

“I said her pain aroused him, but the motive wasn’t clear. Revenge was one of the possibilities. You know it’s strange but even when I was sure it was Bobby, I stil couldn’t picture him being there, making her cut herself. It was too sophisticated a form of sadism. But then again, he infiltrated al those lives— my life. He was like a piece of scenery that nobody notices because we concentrate on the foreground.”

“You saw him before anyone else did.”

“I tripped over him in the dark.”

The ambulance pul s away. Waterbirds lift out of the reeds. They twist and turn across the pale sky. Skeletal trees stretch upward as if trying to pluck the birds from the air.

Ruiz gives me a ride to the hospital. He wants to be there when Bobby gets out of surgery. We fol ow the ambulance along St. Pancras Way and turn into the accident and emergency bay. My legs have seized up almost completely now that the adrenalin has drained out of them. I struggle to get out of the car. Ruiz commandeers a wheelchair and pushes me into a familiar white-tiled public hospital waiting room.