The Watcher (38 page)

‘In your house? Who?’

‘I don’t know. Someone is there. And the lights suddenly went out.’

‘We just went into every single room. There wasn’t anyone there.’

‘I fed the birds. And the door was open. When I came back . . . there was a shadow in the kitchen . . .’ She realised that she sounded overexcited. Gradually her heartbeat was slowing down, as well as her breathing. She realised how bitterly cold it was, that her feet were two lumps of ice in the snow and that she was shivering all over with cold.

Palm could obviously see that too. ‘You’ve got almost nothing on. Come on, you have to go back inside.’

‘But there’s someone there,’ she insisted.

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Palm courageously.

She stumbled along beside him towards the door. The hall was completely dark. Palm felt for and found the switch, but the light did not come on. ‘It must be the fuse. Do you have a torch somewhere?’

After she had stopped quaking with fear, her teeth started to chatter with the cold. ‘Yes . . . in th-the dr-drawer . . . under the m-mirror . . . t-top drawer.’

Their eyes had grown accustomed to the dark now, and some light from the street lamps filtered inside through the falling snow. Luke Palm opened the drawer, found the torch and switched it on.

‘Where did you see the shadow?’

‘In the kitchen.’

He seemed less eager to head into the dark now. ‘Your fuse box is in the cellar, is it?’

‘Yes – but do you really want to go down there now?’

‘It will be easier if we have light.’

They went down the cellar steps together. At the fuse box, they found out that the main fuse had indeed blown. Palm reset it. Bright light immediately flooded down into the cellar from the hallway above.

‘How could that have happened?’ asked Gillian, confused.

‘No idea. Something overburdened the system. Come on, let’s go up again.’

Back up on the ground floor, they found all the lights on. They looked into the kitchen. It was empty.

‘I don’t think anyone is here,’ said Palm. He tried the door to the garden and squeaked with surprise when it swung open. ‘This door isn’t locked! Was it locked before?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted Gillian. ‘I mean, I always lock it, but I couldn’t swear that I did this time.’

Palm looked out. There were many footprints on the terrace and they were already starting to be filled in with fresh snow. That was no surprise. During the viewing, Gillian and he had been outside.

He felt braver now. Gillian suddenly felt foolish. They looked in the dining room and the living room, checked around the first floor rooms and the larder, but they did not find anyone.

‘I think I’ve acted like an idiot,’ Gillian said when they were back in the living room. ‘I really thought I saw something move, but I obviously imagined it. I think my nerves are all shot.’

‘Hardly surprising, considering what’s happened here. What you experienced . . . it would drive anyone almost crazy. Don’t be too hard on yourself.’

They stood there looking at each other. Gillian looked at Luke Palm’s split lip. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, feeling guilty.

Palm felt his lip with his index finger, jumped a little and then grinned. ‘You’re not a bad boxer.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about that, I’ll survive. Listen, don’t you think you should talk to the police? They could send someone over to have a good look around.’

Gillian shook her head. ‘I’ll just look ridiculous. It’s bad enough that I looked like an idiot in front of you.’

He looked seriously at her. ‘I think that’s the wrong way to think about this. You’re not a woman who just gets hysterical for no reason. There’s a killer on the loose, the police haven’t found him, and he’s been here once before. Do the police even know you are back here on your own?’

‘No. They don’t know yet.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘Mr Palm—’

He interrupted her. ‘You probably think that it’s none of my business, but now that I’ve turned up like a knight in shining armour for you, and searched the house for that shadow, I feel responsible. I’m not comfortable driving home and leaving you here on your own.’

‘I’ll bolt all the doors.’

‘You obviously left the kitchen door unlocked. That worries me. You shouldn’t be here on your own.’

She knew he was right. Whether or not the shadow she had seen was a flesh-and-blood being, it was not good to be here alone. She could already see what her night would be like, and every night from now on. She would not be able to sleep. She would leave all the lights on. She would listen out for every noise in the house, unable even to breathe. Every creak of a beam would make her sit bolt upright in bed.

She had just seen it: her nerves would not cope with the situation.

‘I’ll work something out,’ she promised.

He was completely frozen when he arrived home, although he had had the heating on full blast in the car on the way. He had trudged around in the snow and stood in the icy cold outside too long. It felt like nothing could remove the cold from his bones. Maybe a long, hot shower. He hoped so.

Liza Stanford had been nowhere to be seen. John had sat in his car watching the school and its neighbouring sports hall, but in the end he had thought that what he saw was too narrow. He had got out and hung around all afternoon on the school grounds, especially around the sports facilities, taking care not to be too conspicuous. A grown man apparently hovering near minors could easily be the object of suspicion. That meant that he was constantly changing his position. At least he was moving around a little. Nevertheless, the cold and damp had crept through his boots and up his legs, spreading through his body and settling in his bones. There came the moment when he was utterly fed up with it. He began to question his own plan. Who was to say that Liza had any interest in her son? And if she did, who was to say that she would try to satisfy her interest by watching him on the way to an extracurricular activity? Who was to say that she was still alive? Maybe he was waiting for a ghost, while he crept around a school like some paedophile and shivered in the cold.

After he had seen Finley Stanford leave the gym at a late hour and disappear off towards the bus stop, without any trace of his mother anywhere, he decided to give up. For ever. This was not his problem. Let the police get to the bottom of it. He was calling it quits this afternoon.

It felt almost as if he were free of a burden when he opened his front door and climbed the steps to his flat, taking them two at a time to warm up. Quitting the case also meant freeing himself of Gillian. He had to do that. He was not the kind of man to spend years dreaming of an unattainable woman, like Peter Fielder with his ridiculous yearning for Christy McMarrow.

Over. Done. Finito.

He came to an abrupt stop when he saw a shape crouching on the stairs by his flat. Segal looked at him, wide-eyed and fearful.

‘Finally,’ he said.

He was the last person that John had expected to see here. He was also the last person John wanted to have to deal with now. Actually he did not want to see anyone that evening. He just wanted a hot shower, a double whisky and complete peace and quiet.

‘Samson!’ he said in amazement. ‘How did you get in?’

Samson got up unsteadily. John noticed how scrawny he looked. He had lost a lot of weight in the short time since their first meeting in the bed and breakfast. It was clear he was having a terrible time of it.

‘One of your neighbours in the house let me in. I was sitting downstairs, freezing to death, and he felt sorry for me. I said I was one of your colleagues and needed to talk to you.’

‘I see.’ John realised he had no choice but to invite Segal into his flat. ‘Come in. The stairwell isn’t exactly warm. You must be half frozen to death.’

Samson nodded. ‘I’m . . . not well,’ he struggled to say.

John unlocked the door and led Samson into his living room, where he forced him to sit in the room’s only armchair. It looked rather out of place on its own on the wooden floor. At least the room was nice and warm. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

‘A cup of tea would be lovely,’ said Samson.

John went into the kitchen, put the kettle on and rummaged around. He rarely drank tea and did not exactly have well-stocked cupboards, but in the end he found two peppermint tea bags and put them into mugs on a tray. He added a sugar bowl, and while he waited for the water to boil, he started to think. What had made Samson leave his safe hideaway on the building site and risk appearing here? He felt he knew the gist of the answer: Samson was in a bad way mentally, and his feeling of being lost had no doubt got worse on his own. He had not been able to bear it any longer.

I should have visited him more often. But I can’t blame myself.

He suddenly had a premonition that his desire to put an end to his involvement and return to normal life would not be as easy as all that. Samson was sticking to him, and now that he had hidden a man the police had been hunting for two weeks, he too was deeply implicated.

He cursed as he poured boiling water into the mugs. How could he have been so stupid! To shelter a man who was being hunted in connection with three murders and whose actions had made him a prime suspect.

You never learn to avoid problems, do you, Burton?

He carried the tray back to the living room. Samson was sitting just as he had left him. John put the tray on the floor, for lack of a table, and sat down next to it with his back to the wall. The hot shower would have to wait.

‘Why are you here, Samson?’

Samson looked unhappy and guilty. ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer. Yesterday lunchtime I set off. I locked up the caravan. Here are the keys.’ He fished them out of his coat pocket and put them down on the floor too.

‘Yesterday lunchtime? Where did you spend the night?’

‘I was here yesterday evening. I found your address in a phone book. I took various buses before I got here. Then I waited around in front of your house for ages. But . . . you didn’t come.’

Of course. Yesterday evening he had let himself get bladdered in a pub to deal with the frustration of being rejected by the one he loved.

‘In the end I couldn’t stand the cold any longer,’ Samson continued. ‘I went to the station, where I hung around all night, changing my seat so I didn’t draw too much attention to myself. I was really scared the police would find me.’

‘That was damned risky, Samson. You were really lucky.’

‘I know, but what else could I have done? Frozen to death outside your house?’

‘You could have stayed in the caravan.’

‘I can’t stay there any more. Please try to understand. Sitting there, I was going mad. I don’t even know what’s going on. Am I still a suspect? Or have they got someone else now? Am I going to have to hide out for years or just for a short while? Those thoughts can drive a man crazy, John, seriously!’

‘I can believe that.’

‘So I came back here this morning,’ said Samson. ‘You still weren’t here. But at least the old gentleman let me in.’

‘So you’ve been outside my door for six or seven hours?’

Samson nodded.

John thought for a minute. ‘Where do you want to go now?’

Fear flashed across Samson’s face. ‘Can’t I stay here?’

‘It would be a hell of a risk for me to take.’

‘I know. But there’s no one else.’

‘I won’t just chuck you out. Don’t worry. We’ll think of something.’ John sipped at his tea as he thought about it. The hot drink was doing him a world of good, although he hated the taste of peppermint. The problem was that however long he thought about it, he would probably not come up with any other solution but to put Samson up in his flat and hope that the police did not decide to visit him. Samson could not go home to his brother and sister-in-law, and wild horses would not drag him back to the caravan, that much was clear.

I’m stuck with him until they’ve caught the murderer.

He asked himself if that would ever be the case. As he knew from Kate Linville, Fielder and his team were looking for Liza Stanford too – but would they manage to sniff her out? And how long would it take?

His resolve to withdraw from the whole affair started to wobble again. Perhaps he had an overly high opinion of himself, or maybe it was connected to his aversion to Fielder, but he had the feeling that he would get to the bottom of this murky, apparently hopeless case quicker than the police. The question was whether he felt like it.

But maybe it was no longer about what he felt like doing. Maybe the fact that he had harboured Samson Segal was forcing him to make the next move.

‘I’ve wondered about going to the police,’ said Samson. ‘At least it would all be over then. It’s terrible, being on the run. To have to hide. Without any end in sight. Sometimes I just want to give up.’

‘Please don’t do that just yet. Remember, I’m involved too!’

‘I wouldn’t tell anyone that you’d helped me,’ Samson immediately assured him.

John shook his head. Samson Segal did not have a clue how refined and stubborn the interrogations would be, if the investigating officer was at all skilled and experienced. In the blink of an eye Samson would have tied himself up in contradictions and would end up telling everything as it had happened, in every last detail.

‘I might be on to something . . .’ John began.

Hope immediately lit up Samson’s face. ‘Yes?’

John waved away his question. ‘Don’t get your hopes up yet. I’ve no idea if it will lead anywhere. It’s good to feel we’re getting somewhere. The police too. They no longer see you as the only possible suspect.’

‘But then—’

‘In your case I wouldn’t come out in the open yet. Like I said, the new lead could turn out to be completely irrelevant. What’s more, you’ve made yourself culpable by evading police questioning.’

‘But that’s not the same as being accused of three counts of murder,’ said Samson.

John could not deny that. ‘True.’

It was obvious to him that he would be back on the case in the morning. Finley Stanford was going to his piano lesson. Somewhere near Hampstead tube station. At least it would be easier and less conspicuous for him to watch the area around the station than the school’s grounds.