The Facts of Life and Death (21 page)

Somehow he had imagined that getting married would mean more of the same, but it was turning into
none
of the same. In fact it seemed to be a process of
chucking out
the same, and filling the same’s space with a whole bunch of new stuff that wasn’t the same at all. Stuff he really had no interest in. Organization. Commitment. Babies.

Swatches.

How had it happened? Was he overreacting? Was this just the way things went? And was it temporary? After the trauma of the wedding, would he have the old Shirley back? Or was the Shirley that was morphing into a completely different person in front of his very eyes the
real
Shirley? The one he’d be married to for the
rest of his life.

Calvin actually shivered at the thought.

He longed for drink, drugs and debt. He longed for a Korean gangster flick and a meat-feast pizza all to himself.

He longed for another life. But, between them, Shirley and the Devon and Cornwall Police had him running through
this
life like a hamster in a wheel.

As well as trying to catch a serial killer, on Tuesday night Calvin had held Shirley’s hand through a tablecloth crisis. The choices were Ivory, Buttermilk and Vanilla. They were all the same, but it had taken three hours hunched over the huge and hideous books of swatches, and two long, weepy interludes, to reach a decision.

And the swatches were only part of it. Shirley had turned Calvin’s flat into her own little incident room, swirling with a thousand paper samples and cloth samples and cake samples and favours and flavours, and infinite lists that Calvin was supposed to have memorized. It was a glittery tide of wedding porn – all of which cost a thousand times more than
real
porn. The invitations were impregnated with bits of lavender and had edges that were ‘hand-torn’ – presumably by experts, given the price. And the centrepieces – which were only made of
flowers
– were each the same price as a crate of reasonable beer. The cake was costing more than Calvin’s first car.

‘Is it made of
gold
?’ he’d said, and Shirley had cried for the four millionth time since the Italian Grand Prix.

‘Do you know what I’m thinking?’ said Kirsty King.

‘No,’ sighed Calvin. ‘I don’t know what
any
woman’s thinking. Ever.’

DCI King gave him a quizzical look. They were eating lunch in the incident room, which doubled as the staffroom. There were vending machines containing curly sandwiches and warm chocolate bars, and a frieze of evidence around the wall. Photos of Jody Reeves and the Burrows and the lay-by, and of Frannie Hatton’s body – still the only one they had.

Most of the major-incident team had gone out for chips, but Calvin was eating a sandwich from the machine that was so tasteless he had to keep looking at it to make sure it was still prawn. DCI King brought the same lunch from home every day – a pork pie and olives, which she fished out of their tall glass jar with Dr Shortland’s gall-stone scoop.

It was perfect for the job.

Now DCI King popped one in her mouth, ignored his lament, and carried on where she left off. ‘I’m thinking, maybe the women weren’t the targets.’

Calvin raised an eyebrow. ‘Frannie Hatton would probably disagree with you.’

‘Touché,’ said King. ‘They were targeted, of course, but what if they weren’t the people he was really aiming to
hurt?’

Calvin wasn’t quite sure what King was getting at, but he was happy to go along with her, if only because she wasn’t talking about renting an owl as a ring-bearer.

‘We have so little to go on,’ King continued. ‘But, taking the assaults on Kelly and Katie into account, what we
do
have to go on is a consistent m.o.’

She started to count the modi operandi off on her fingers, using the gall-stone scoop as an aid. ‘One: he covers his face. Two: he makes them take their clothes off, but he doesn’t sexually assault them. Three: he makes them phone their mothers.’

She paused and Calvin looked at her expectantly for ‘four’. ‘That’s it,’ said King. ‘Those are the only three things we know for sure. Everything else is just extrapolation or assumption.’

‘OK,’ he agreed.

‘So, covering his face is obvious. But you tell me, Calvin, why does he make them strip and then not touch them?’

Calvin did try to think, but it seemed counter-intuitive. Once a woman took her clothes off, the whole
point
was to touch them. Otherwise you might as well just read a magazine. He had to admit, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Neither do I,’ said King. ‘I mean, I know it’s going to turn out to be some weird screwed-up reason because of some sexual dysfunction or some shit that happened when he was a kid or something. But what it does do is speak to
motive
, and it tells us that – for the first three assaults at the very least – the motive was
not
to sexually assault these women. Even if he’d been working up to it, then I reckon he would have got there by Frannie Hatton, don’t you? I mean, if you can murder someone, you can sexually assault them, surely?’

‘Right,’ Calvin assumed. ‘That makes sense.’

Did it? He wondered. What made sense to a killer might not be what made sense to DCI King and him, eating their lunch in Bideford police station.

King went on, ‘But
call your mother.
That’s bizarre and it’s consistent and it’s very specific. And he’s been saying it right from the start, so it must be an important element in whatever sick game he’s playing. It makes me think, why are they all
young
? And that makes me think – they’re all young enough to have mothers to call, so maybe the mothers are the key.’

‘But there are no links between the families,’ said Calvin. ‘The mothers don’t know each other, they don’t share the same interests or incomes or lifestyles, they don’t go to the same places or know the same people.’

‘Right,’ said King. ‘And that’s why I started thinking, maybe the mothers have been the targets all along. Not because of
who
they are, but because of
what
they are.’

‘And what
are
they?’ said Calvin.

King stared at him. ‘They’re mothers, Calvin.’

Calvin frowned. ‘But how can
they
be the targets if he’s killing someone else?’

‘Think about it,’ said King. ‘Who suffers more – the victims or their mothers?’

‘The victims,’ shrugged Calvin. ‘They die.’

King tapped her teeth with the scoop. ‘You don’t have children, right?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Nor me,’ said King. She drummed the scoop on the table a few times, thinking, and then looked over her shoulder to the desk sergeant, Tony Coral, who was eating a cheese and onion pasty at the table behind her. ‘Tony, you have kids, don’t you?’

‘Two boys,’ nodded Sergeant Coral, with flaky pastry down his front.

‘What are their names?’

‘Ivor and Martin.’

‘Would you rather die yourself or watch Ivor and Martin die?’

‘Bloody hell!’ He coughed, but King just kept waiting for an answer, so he croaked, ‘How are they dying?’

‘Horribly,’ said King.

Coral brushed flaky pastry off his tunic and shook his head. ‘Jesus, I couldn’t watch that. Don’t even like thinking about it.’

‘So you’d rather be dead yourself than watch your children die?’

‘Yup,’ he said, and put his pasty down with a look that said he wouldn’t be picking it up again.

‘Cheers,’ said King, and turned back to Calvin. ‘See? What if the killing’s just part of the whole
thing?
The stripping and the calling the mothers, and forcing them to witness the murder? The girls suffer and die, but the mothers have to suffer and go on
living.’

Calvin frowned. ‘It seems a bit of a roundabout way of hurting someone.’

‘Maybe he can’t hurt his own mother – or maybe he doesn’t even know he
wants
to – and so he’s taking it out on other people’s mothers.’

‘Acting out,’ said Calvin. ‘I think that’s what Americans call it. Shirley watches those shows where people blame their parents for everything. Acting out. Or is it acting up?’

‘No, that’s the kids on
Supernanny
,’ said King. ‘But whatever the Americans call it, it makes sense, don’t you think?’

Calvin shrugged. ‘As much sense as any other bloody thing.’ DCI King nodded and sat back in her chair. Then she said, ‘You’re shedding cherubs.’

‘Huh?’ Calvin followed her gaze under the table to his feet, where a light sprinkling of tiny silver and gold foil cherubs had escaped his turn-ups.

That
fucking wedding.

EXTREME FISHING
WAS
on TV because Daddy liked to tell the men on there where they were going wrong. A fat man in a red baseball cap was up to his hips in a river. He looked like a marker buoy.

Daddy was busy checking Mummy’s phone while she was in the shower. The shower always made the whole back wall of the house shudder like someone driving over a cattle grid.

Daddy thumbed through the messages and Ruby watched, glazed, as the words on the little screen rolled by in time to clicks from his thumb. Now and then he would stop and open a message and then close it again and keep clicking.

It was boring. He never found anything good.

The man in the red cap didn’t catch a thing, just like Daddy said he wouldn’t.

‘He didn’t catch one,’ said Ruby.

Daddy said nothing.

Mummy came downstairs. She was dressed for work, but her hair was still wet.

‘When were you going to tell me about this?’ said Daddy, tapping the phone.

‘What’s that?’

‘This meeting with Ruby’s teacher.’

‘Is that my phone?’ said Mummy.

‘What meeting?’ said Ruby.

‘Are you checking my phone?’ said Mummy.

‘Don’t you think I’d want to know about it?’

‘What
meeting?’ said Ruby again. Why did Miss Sharpe want a meeting? She’d been
going
to school, hadn’t she?

They both ignored her. ‘You never come to school things,’ said Mummy.

He shrugged. ‘I’m coming now.’

‘Good,’ said Mummy, and made a half-hearted grab for the phone, but Daddy laughed and snatched it away and held her wrist while he kept thumbing through the messages.

‘Why are you checking my phone?’

‘Is there any reason I shouldn’t?’

‘Maybe!’ Mummy tried to break free, but Ruby could tell she wasn’t trying too hard. She was half laughing, and so was Daddy. It made her feel like laughing too.

‘Who’s T?’ said Daddy.

‘Who?’

He read the text: ‘
Call you later. T.
Who’s T?’

Mummy stuck out her tongue. ‘None of your beeswax.’

But Ruby could tell Daddy had stopped playing. ‘Tim Braund?’ he said.

‘Don’t be daft. It’s Tina on reception. She told me about a book and said she’d call me later with the title.’

‘What book?’ said Daddy.

‘How should I know? She hasn’t
called
me yet.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. Ruby didn’t believe her either. ‘Don’t believe me then,’ laughed Mummy. ‘Let me
go.’

‘I won’t,’ said Daddy. ‘Not either of you.’

But he did let her go, and she rubbed the red mark on her wrist and said, ‘Ow. That hurt.’

‘Sorry,’ said Daddy. ‘You want me to kiss it better?’

Mummy just held out her hand for the phone. Daddy gave it to her, then he winked at Ruby and whispered against her ear, ‘Go upstairs and put Panda to bed.’

Ruby’s heart skipped a beat. She was going on another posse! She ran up the narrow stairs on her hands and feet for added speed.

She’d had Panda all her life – Granpa and Nanna had bought him for her as a nought-birthday present. For years Panda was bigger than she was, but he’d shrunk now, and one of his arms had fallen off from too much hugging. It was still somewhere in her sock drawer, but Mummy never had time to sew it back on. It didn’t make any difference to his latest role, which required him to lie in bed and pretend to be Ruby. Aided and abetted by a pillow, he did a grand job.

Ruby put Panda in her bed and arranged the covers over him so that just the tip of one ear was showing. Then she went to the window.

Outside the trees cut out all but a ragged strip of sky that she had to peer upwards to see. It was still getting dark, but it was already night in the forest – a dense, brooding wall of leaf and trunk that rose up to its full height barely twenty feet behind The Retreat. Now and then Ruby saw a squirrel or a bird in the trees, but mostly it was dead and silent.

She drew the curtains so that the room was even murkier than usual.

Mummy would never guess it was Panda and not her in the bed.

Alison Trick waited until they heard the creak of Ruby’s bedroom floor before she said quietly, ‘I don’t think you should take her out.’

‘What?’ John looked at his wife in surprise. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t think she should be driving all over the countryside on a school night.’

‘You’re the one who’s always going on about her watching too much TV.’

‘This is different.’

‘How is it different? We go fishing together. We watch telly together. We go driving together. How’s that different?’

Alison shrugged. ‘I just don’t think it’s healthy. She’s ten. She should be tucked up in bed, not gallivanting around with a bunch of idiots dressed as cowboys.’

‘She’s not with a bunch of idiots. She’s with me.’

Alison shrugged.

‘You’re just jealous,’ said John Trick.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are.’ He nodded. ‘She loves it. It’s a big adventure. We have a great time. We talk and we sing and we eat chips. We have fun together. We have fun without
you
, and you don’t like it.’ Alison shrugged. ‘I
am
a bit jealous. What mother wouldn’t be? I’m missing out on so much of her growing up. But this isn’t about me, John. I don’t want to stop her having fun – I just want her to get enough sleep. It’s not rocket science.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Alison sighed. ‘What?’

‘It’s not rocket science.
Are you saying I’m stupid?’