Brothers in Blood (21 page)

Snow knew that he was trapped. In a corner. He had to protect himself. What alternative did he have?

‘How much do you want?’ he said.

TWENTY-NINE

Laurence had never been to Alex’s house before. None of the Brothers had trespassed on each other’s domestic scenes. That would have been a kind of contamination. Isolation had been a key feature of their arrangement. Contact was kept to a minimum. Of course, all that had been swept aside now by Alex’s desperate and ill-conceived actions.

Once more attired in his middle-aged countryman costume, complete with greying temples, moustache and flat cap, Laurence had travelled by cab to the district where Alex lived, only a few miles from Huddersfield town centre. He remembered a pub called The Albion which Alex had mentioned as his local and that was the destination he gave the cabbie. He’d find his own way from the pub. Circumspection was the name of the game. He stood on the threshold of The Albion, pretending to sort out his change after paying his fare, while the taxi reversed and disappeared. He had no intention of actually going inside the pub. Strangers in suburban hostelries were eyeballed to a great degree. It was as though you were an alien from the planet Zog, thought Laurence, and enough people had seen him today already.

He waited a while on the pavement and then caught sight of a young woman with a push chair. He enquired of her the whereabouts of Oak Tree Grove. With flailing arms and an almost impenetrable accent she sent him in the right direction.

On reaching Oak Tree Grove, a quiet street of newly built townhouses, he was relieved to see that there were no police cars and vans with flashing lights pulled up outside number eleven.

He was still in time.

After ringing the bell and receiving no response, he tried the door. To his surprise and delight it was unlocked. He entered. The hall, like Alex, was smart and tidy. There was no clutter. Few signs of habitation, in fact. He found Alex in the sitting room, or lounge, as he was sure the estate agent’s brochure would deem it. His friend was sprawled unconscious on the sofa like a dead body in a western movie, an empty whisky bottle by his side. But Laurence could see that he wasn’t a dead body. He was just drunk. Alex’s chest rose and fell in a gentle regular motion, the alcohol having taken the poor sod away from the real world and its trauma for a short time, but eventually he would wake up. The pain would be still there, along with a throbbing headache.

That’s if he did wake up. Was allowed to wake up.

Laurence sat in the chair opposite him and gazed for quite a while at his old friend. That word ‘friend’ flittered into his mind but it seemed odd. It was a strange way to consider Alex really. Was he a friend? They certainly went back some years and had shared a number of exhilarating moments together. They were Brothers in Blood, but was he really a friend? And more to the point – if so, could he kill a friend?

Suddenly Laurence felt an overwhelming sense of sadness seep into him. He shivered with the sensation. It was the brutal realisation that this was the end. Or at least, to be more precise, the start of the end: an irrevocable step that heralded the grand finale. He had known it would be, had accepted that fact, had come to terms with it – or so he thought. But now… now the moment had come to take the first step he felt close to tears. Not for the death of this ‘friend’ but for the death of a dream – a dream that had been conceived long ago and nurtured by him like a child. In the end, it was all as he had expected, allowed for, planned for even, but, of course, theory and strategy make no allowances for emotions.

He rose slowly and wandered into the kitchen – neat again, sparkling, Spartan, smelling of lemons – and found the cutlery drawer. From this he extracted a large carving knife. Its stainless steel blade shone and flashed as it caught the light.

This will do, thought Laurence. This will do.

Russell had gone to the lavatory to be sick. After catching the early evening news and seeing Alex’s face on the screen – albeit as a vague sketch – he had begun to retch. Leaning over the bowl, he felt as if the whole of his insides were pouring out of him.

When he had finished, he sat back on the edge of the bath and wiped his mouth on a towel. ‘My God,’ he said to himself and then repeated the phrase several times like a mantra, as though it would make things better. Of course it didn’t.

His stomach lurched again and he moved to the bowl once more where he deposited the rest of his lunch.

‘Are you all right?’ Sandra said when he came downstairs some time later. Patently he wasn’t. He had caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror and thought he looked dreadful. His face was suddenly haggard, dark circles ringed his watery eyes and his skin was pasty white with a fine sheen of perspiration.

‘I’ve been sick. Something I ate, I reckon.’

‘Nasty. Well I was aiming to make a chilli for tea but…’

Russell shuddered at the thought. ‘I think I’ll skip on tea. Give my stomach a rest.’

‘Probably wise. In that case I’ll just rustle up an omelette for myself.’

‘Yeah. OK. Listen, love, I think I’ll go out for a walk. Get some fresh air.’

Sandra moved over to him and stroked his damp face. ‘You do look washed out. Perhaps you ought to go to bed.’

‘I just… I just need to get some air.’ The close proximity of his pregnant wife and her concern for his health brought the panic welling up inside him again. He was desperate to be on his own. He had to have time to think, focus on the disaster that was about to overwhelm him. He hadn’t the strength to play normal just now. With undignified haste, he grabbed his jacket and bolted from the house.

He walked aimlessly, not noticing where was going, the world a soft blur before him while his mind tumbled with awful thoughts. He knew that if he had managed to recognise Alex from the drawing on the television, dozens of others would. Perhaps Alex had made a run for it. If he had, that was only delaying the inevitable. It was possible he was already in the hands of the police. At this thought, his stomach reverberated violently again, but it was too empty for him to be sick this time. Instead he felt a strong, salty bile surge upwards into his mouth.

How long had he got? How long would it be before the police came knocking on his door? How long before they discovered his dark history? He suddenly remembered the journal, the one in which he’d recorded those early days in Huddersfield with Laurence. He needed to destroy that, without a doubt. It was in the garage.

The early days in Huddersfield with Laurence.

His own phrase came back to him. If only Laurence were here now, he thought, to comfort him or joke him out of his dark malaise. He would have ideas of how they could get out of this mess.

If only he could talk to Laurence, but he knew that was impossible.

Suddenly he realised that he was crying. This awareness of the tears trickling down his face seemed to upset him even further and he gave a gasp of agony and his shoulders shook with emotion. He turned down a quiet side street to avoid attracting attention and while not really wanting to master his feelings, he did try to pull himself together.

He stepped into a telephone box and dragged his handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped his face. A bleary-eyed, blotchy featured face that stared back at him from the small rectangular cracked mirror in front of him.

It was, he thought, the face of a sad and doomed killer.

THIRTY

Paul Snow sat quietly staring into space. His mind was a blank. He had deliberately made it a blank. He didn’t want any thoughts to bother him in any way. He was seated at his desk in the growing gloom, like a thin Buddha, the only sign of movement was the revolving of his fountain pen between the fingers of both hands. It was a signature nervous tic developed from those early days when he had tried to give up smoking and he had needed something to occupy his hands.

Armitage had been gone for nearly an hour and yet Snow was not ready to let the real world and hurtful thoughts seep back into to his consciousness and so he remained still and silent, turning the pen over and over between his fingers, contemplating nothing.

Raised voices in the room beyond his office broke his trance. Reluctantly, he dragged himself back into the present. With a deep sigh, he hauled his slim frame from his chair and wandered into the incident room. There were four officers there, including Bob Fellows who gave him a friendly wave.

‘I think we may have struck oil, guv,’ he said cheerily.

‘Yes, sir. We’ve had quite a few responses to the TV appeal,’ chirped in WPC Sally Morgan, a tall, plump but sexy woman heading towards her forties. ‘Some weirdos as usual, but one name keeps cropping up. An Alex Marshall. And I’ve just got an address for him. It’s local.’

Snow took the printed sheet from Sally and studied it. ‘Good,’ he said at length, but his voice registered no emotion. ‘Let’s you and I take a ride out there, Bob, and take a shufty before we send the posse in.’

‘Could be dangerous on your own, sir,’ said Sally.

‘What d’you think, Bob?’

Bob Fellows allowed himself a grin. ‘You know me sir: I’m always in favour of the softly, softly approach.’

‘Me too. Right, let’s go.’

They found Alex Marshall in the front room of his tidy townhouse. He was lying on the sofa with his throat cut. Blood had seeped from the wound on to the cushion and down on to the cream carpet where it looked like a rather nasty red wine stain. An empty whisky bottle lay a few feet away from the body. There was no sign of the weapon.

‘Well, this is a turn up for the book,’ said Bob Fellows, bending over the body and peering at the savage wound.

Snow peered closely at the dead face. ‘Well, it looks like this is our man all right. He matches the drawing perfectly.’

Fellows nodded. ‘No sign of a struggle.’

‘Looks like he was slashed while under the influence.’ Snow indicated the empty bottle and the packet of pills on the coffee table. ‘Some kind of ritual killing perhaps? Victim puts himself in a dopey state and then his mate cuts his throat.’

Fellows grimaced. ‘That’s a bit far fetched isn’t it, sir?’

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. But there’s a great deal that is far fetched about this affair. It seems to me that we’re following an unpleasant chain of murders, each one linked to the next. I believe that Ronnie Fraser was killed in order to keep him quiet. He shouldn’t have survived the attack at Matt Wilkinson’s house and when he did he posed a threat...’

‘…the threat of identification.’

‘That’s how I see it, yes.’

‘And this guy?’

‘Well there were two others involved in the Wilkinson killings. It could be that one of them is snuffing out anyone who could provide a link with him. He’s just protecting his own back, eliminating traces.’

‘If that is the case, then there’s going to be at least one other murder.’

Snow nodded grimly. The phrase ‘watch this space’ came to mind, but he kept it to himself.

‘We’d better get the SOCOs in here and get this turned into a proper crime scene.’

‘Not just yet, Bob. I’d like to do a little poking around myself first. I have some idea what I want to find.’

‘Sir, you can’t mess about in here before the forensic boys have had their turn.’

Snow took out a pair of plastic gloves from his jacket pocket and started pulling them on. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be neat and tidy, Sergeant. No one will know a thing. Besides, I don’t intend to do anything in here. This isn’t the room where this fellow’s secrets are. They’ll be upstairs. Come on and join me. You have your own gloves I know.’

Despite himself, Fellows grinned.

‘You look in the spare bedroom. I’ll tackle the master suite. There is so little space in these modern rabbit hutches, if there is anything of significance we’ll soon root it out.’

Alex Marshall’s bedroom was, like the rest of the house, tidy, pristine and minimalist. Snow rifled through the chest of drawers, all neatly set out with underwear, socks, T-shirts, jumpers, carefully folded shirts in separate compartments. The wardrobe was similarly organised. Mr Marshall was quite a precise person, thought Snow, as he dragged over a chair and clambered up on to it in order to examine the contents of the top shelf. Towards the back, covered up by a couple of wool scarves he found a rectangular tin box. He pulled it out and examined it. It was the sort used as a cash box. It was locked. He shook it. The contents rattled dully but Snow was certain it contained no coins. He tried without success to prise it open.

Dumping the box on the bed, he continued his search but failed to discover anything else which he considered significant. There were no diaries, letters or photograph albums. Maybe Fellows was having better luck.

But he wasn’t. ‘All I can tell you is that Marshall has a penchant for Monty Python – he has some of their records along with The Jam in there. In general the house is holding its secrets,’ he said, as he wandered into the bedroom.

‘Well, there’s this.’ Snow picked up the tin box. ‘But it’s locked. We need to find the key.’

‘Keyring?’

Snow nodded. ‘Let’s check downstairs.’

A further search produced nothing.

‘Where do you put your keys when you come home?’ Snow asked Fellows as they stood in the tiny kitchen area.

Fellows crumpled his face. ‘I just sling ‘em on the hall table or put them in a jar on the kitchen window sill.’

‘Well, we’ve looked in all those places.’

‘I suppose sometimes I just slip them in my trouser pocket.’

Snow’s eyes brightened. ‘Right you are.’

Moving into the sitting room they stared at the bloodied corpse which lay frozen like an exhibit in a gruesome waxworks show, the glassy eyes wide with surprise and the rubicund mouth agape. The poor sod probably knew little about his murder until the last few moments when he realised all was not well. He would be puzzled rather than anxious as darkness descended. He was probably too far gone to feel the pain, thought Snow. He supposed that was some kind of consolation. And then he reprimanded himself for thinking of this man as a ‘poor sod’. He was a killer after all.