The Burning (14 page)

I had a shower, hoping it would revive me. I must have taken longer about it than I’d thought because the doorbell rang before I could get dressed. I wrapped a towel around me and padded down the stairs to answer it, wishing that the towel was a little bit longer.

It was fair to say that Rob didn’t mind. He pursed his lips in a soundless whistle when I opened the door to find him balancing two pizza boxes on one hand. He had the folders under one arm, and a bag containing two six-packs of beer in the other hand. It was strange to see him out of context, and I found myself staring at him as if I didn’t know him for a second, at the wide shoulders and the clear blue eyes that were scanning me from head to toe.

As soon as he spoke, the spell was broken. ‘Nice outfit. That is not going to help me to concentrate on the case, though.’

‘Drop dead.’ The pizza boxes were in serious danger so I rescued them and led the way back up the stairs, hoping that the view he was getting wasn’t too revealing.

‘Huh.’ He stopped at the door to the sitting room and looked in with frank interest. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of you as the interior-design type, Maeve.’

It was the sort of room that Ian’s friends adored – big, full of statement furniture and what Ian’s interior designer called found objects on the walls, which to my mother (and to a lesser extent, me) looked like junk. I looked around, trying to see how it looked to Rob. Pretentious, probably. The purple suede sofa looked especially gaudy.

‘Nothing to do with me. It’s all Ian’s.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Mmm. He got some designer to choose all the furniture and decorate it. You’re supposed to think wow.’

‘Wow,’ Rob deadpanned, sounding anything but impressed. ‘What belongs to you in here?’

Just for a moment, I couldn’t see anything. ‘This and that,’ I said lightly, though, because I didn’t want to examine the ramifications of not actually having any possessions in the main room of the flat where I lived.

‘What about that?’ He pointed up at an African mask that hung on one wall. It was about eighteen inches long and brutally ugly.

‘It cost a fortune. The designer found it in a flea market in Paris.’

‘I think it’s looking at me.’

I was getting bored and my towel was slipping. ‘Do you want to sit down or what? I’ve got to get dressed.’

He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m sort of scared to. What if I drop my pizza or knock over my beer?’

‘Then Ian will kill you and there’s nothing I can do to protect you.’

‘Where is Ian anyway?’ He looked around as if he expected him to materialise from behind the curtains.

‘Out. Cinema. Not due back for ages yet.’ I blushed as I said it, realising that it sounded as if I was calculating the time I would have alone with him. And my towel had slipped again. I hauled it back into place firmly. ‘Look, put down the files. We’ll eat in the kitchen first.’

‘Good idea.’ Rob propped them up against the doorframe and followed me to the kitchen. I put the beer on an empty shelf in the fridge.

‘See if you can detect plates and napkins while I’m getting dressed.’

‘Will do.’ He was prowling around the room, looking at everything, probably missing nothing. Feeling exposed in a way that had nothing to do with being almost naked, I hurried off to get dressed, putting on jeans and a T-shirt in record time.

He was still standing when I came back, but he had opened one of the boxes and was chewing as he looked around. He surveyed me briefly. ‘I preferred the other look, but that’ll do.’

‘Glad to hear it. Can you sit down at the table? You’re dropping crumbs.’

‘Mmph.’ He headed to the fridge and pulled out two beers instead, handing me one of them. ‘Did you call your mum?’

‘What? Oh. No.’ I reached over and ripped the note off the door, balling it up. ‘It wasn’t important.’

‘Bad daughter.’ He wandered around the room. ‘What’s with the mugs? Does this place double as a kindergarten?’

I didn’t bother to look; I knew what he meant. One wall of the kitchen was covered in shelves where twenty-six brightly coloured mugs were arranged, each decorated with a letter of the alphabet. The kitchen units were bright red. The walls were cream. The effect was, Ian’s friends thought, stunning, but then they didn’t mind sitting on the vilely uncomfortable wire chairs that were ‘genuine mid-century antiques’ around the 1950s diner table that took up the middle of the room. If you weren’t into that sort of thing, it was all a bit bright. I would have preferred something cosier myself. But, as Ian had informed me on more than one occasion, I didn’t know anything about style.

‘Do you ever use the mugs to leave each other messages?’

‘Not really.’ I didn’t dare to disturb them. And I didn’t think Ian would find it funny if I did. Not that I was going to say that to Rob. ‘It’s hard to think of sentences where you can only use each letter once.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t sound convinced, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew what I had been thinking. I busied myself with hunting through drawers for a bottle opener. I was sure we had one somewhere, but looking at the tangle of whisks, ladles, peelers and other odd bits of kitchen cutlery that had knotted themselves together, I gave up.

‘Have you got a bottle opener?’

‘On my key ring.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘Because I’m always prepared.’ He came over and took the beer out of my hand to open it for me.

‘Because you wouldn’t let anything stand between you and a nice cold beer.’

‘That too.’ He pulled out one of the chairs with a flourish. ‘Take a seat, madam, and dig in before I eat the lot.’

I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until I started eating, but after the first couple of mouthfuls my appetite kicked in. Forgetting about the murders – forgetting about Rob, even – I devoted myself to my pizza wholeheartedly. All that I managed to say was an occasional muffled, ‘Oh God. This is so good.’ I ran out of steam halfway through the last slice, putting it back into the box with a sigh.

‘I ate too much but it was worth it.’

‘It’s put a bit of colour in your cheeks, anyway.’ He had finished before me and was watching me across the table, turning his empty beer-bottle around and around in quarter-turns.

‘Right. I suppose we’d better get on with it,’ I said abruptly, feeling unsettled all of a sudden.
Back to business
.

He stood up and stretched. ‘Don’t sound so unenthusiastic. You’re the one who insisted on taking work home with you.’

‘Yes, but I can’t remember why.’

‘Because you want to be the best detective in the whole wide world,’ Rob singsonged. I ignored him and headed to the fridge for fresh beers, leaving the pizza boxes where they were. A little mess wouldn’t kill anyone. And I would probably have time to tidy it up before Ian got back.

In the sitting room, we sat side by side on the sofa and I opened the files, fanning them out on the coffee table like a deck of cards, open on the first page where there was a photograph of each of the women who had died. Four queens and it was still a losing hand. Five, if you included Rebecca Haworth. She didn’t have a file yet but the details were fresh enough in my mind to recall the little we knew. I looked at the victims’ faces and swallowed, trying to quell the panic that was rising in me. He was out there, feeding off the memories of killing young women, building up to his next attack. We would never catch him unless we got lucky or he got careless, and so far neither seemed likely to happen. And every second brought another death closer. We had no more time to waste.

‘We don’t know the first thing about our murderer, so we need to start with the victims,’ I said, trying to sound positive. ‘What have they got in common, aside from the obvious?’

‘Take them in order.’ Rob started off, checking the file now and then to be sure of the details. ‘Victim one is Nicola Fielding, twenty-seven, killed in the early hours of the eighteenth of September, a Friday. Her body was found in the south-west corner of Larkhall Park, less than half a mile from where she was living in Clapham. Blue eyes, long brown hair, dressed to kill, or be killed, in heels and a very short skirt. But Nicola was a good girl; she was out on her best friend’s hen night at a nightclub in Clerkenwell. It was unusual for her to be out late. She was originally from Sunderland. For the last year or so she had been working as a nanny for a couple named …’

‘Cope,’ I supplied. ‘Daniel and Sandra. She looked after their two children aged three and five.’

‘And the Copes were devastated, not unreasonably. We had a look at Mr Cope but he’s in the clear.’

I took over. ‘We know that Nicola didn’t catch the last tube, which she’d planned to do. She got the night bus instead and got off on the Wandsworth Road at two thirteen a.m. It was a ten-minute walk from there to the Copes’ house, where she lived in a self-contained apartment in the basement – one of the perks of the job.

‘All that we know about what happened next is that at some point between the bus stop and the Copes’ house, she encountered our murderer. Approximately forty-three minutes after she got off the bus, a passing motorist spotted a fire burning in Larkhall Park and phoned the fire brigade. The responding unit discovered Nicola’s body. She had been incapacitated with a stun gun and beaten to death with a blunt instrument, which the pathologist suggested was most likely to be a hammer.’

‘Available from all good DIY and hardware stores, and essentially untraceable.’ Rob leafed through the file until he found a map of the area. ‘The park isn’t on the most direct route from the bus stop to her home. But we don’t know if she walked there or if she was driven.’

‘It’s a CCTV black spot,’ I said, thinking without enthusiasm of the hours I had spent scrolling through footage we’d pulled in from local businesses. I had watched it until my eyes crossed, until I saw fuzzy black-and-white images of cars in my sleep. I could remember some of it literally frame by frame. ‘I didn’t pick her up on any of the cameras. And we’ve managed to trace the majority of the cars that were seen in the area. They’ve also been cross-referenced against the footage from the other crime scenes without finding any matches.’

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself.’ Rob tapped my knee. ‘We’re concentrating on Nicola first.’

The place where he’d touched me tingled. Without thinking about it, I covered it with my hand. When I looked up, Rob was frowning. Quickly, I went on.

‘This report from the psychologist suggests that the murderer might be on foot because the bodies are discovered so close to where the victims were last seen in very public places; highly risky for our killer. So either our murderer is impulsive and unwilling to remove them to a quieter location, or he gets a kick out of the risk involved in murdering them in the open, or he has no means of transport. Whether he was on foot or in a car, our best guess is that she didn’t know him – we’ve traced and spoken to practically everyone she’d known since she was at school, and no one rang any alarm bells.’ The file was fat with interviews with her friends, relatives, chance acquaintances, other passengers who had been on that night bus and had come forward. No one had seen anything. No one had heard anything. No one had noticed anything out of the ordinary. ‘Somehow, he persuaded her to trust him.’

‘She was a nice girl, by all accounts. Gentle.’

‘The ideal victim. No sign of a sexual assault but he did take a trophy – a heart-shaped locket. She always wore it and we know from the photos of the hen night that she had it around her neck that evening. It hasn’t been found.’ I flipped through the pictures from the crime scene. Establishing shots. Close-ups. A jigsaw puzzle of body parts, each injury carefully catalogued, measured, captured in colour for posterity. Something that had been a girl named Nicola, once. Before Nicola became prey.

Rob’s voice called me back to the conversation. ‘The accelerant used was common-or-garden petrol. Analysis of the chemical profile came back to BP. There’s about a million BP petrol stations in the greater London area, so that didn’t help much.’

‘Seventy-five, actually. And the nearest ones are here.’ I flattened out the map and pointed. ‘Kennington, Camberwell, Peckham Rye, Clapham Common. Further out, you’ve got Tooting, Balham, Wandsworth, Wimbledon Chase. And there’s nothing to say he bought the petrol in that area. It wouldn’t have been an exceptional amount, either. Not more than a can.’

‘No one is going to remember selling that,’ Rob agreed. ‘Besides, we don’t know what we’re looking for. There was no sign of a container at any of the crime scenes.’

‘Except the one this morning. They found a red can hidden in a front garden nearby.’

‘But we’re not sure it connects.’

‘We are not.’

I leaned back and tilted my beer to my mouth. Rob was watching me. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘If I was walking home on my own in the middle of the night, there’s no way I’d stop to chat. How is he getting them to trust him?’

‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation because we’d have found him by now,’ Rob said flatly. ‘He’s got to have some trick. Like Ted Bundy had the fake broken arm – you know, “Can you help me with my luggage?” And then next thing you know, lights out.’

‘Nicola was a nanny. Victoria Müller, victim number three, was a care assistant. Both of them were used to helping people. Maybe he’s making himself look vulnerable.’

‘Could be. See any cripples on the CCTV?’

I shook my head. ‘There were very few pedestrians at all. We traced a lot of them. The
Crimewatch
appeal was good from that point of view.’

‘Yeah, but that was the only way it was useful.’

It was after the third murder that Godley had gone on television to plead for the public’s help. We had got literally hundreds of phone calls but if there had been anything truly useful, we’d missed it in the welter of cranks and oddballs that a TV appeal always seemed to attract.

I flipped Nicola’s file closed and slid Alice Fallon’s out from under it. ‘Our youngest victim. Alice Emma Fallon, nineteen years old, murdered on Saturday the tenth of October. Her body was left in a recreation ground in Vauxhall, not far from the New Covent Garden market.’