Cold Kill (12 page)

Jamie watched the movie in Videoland. He liked the snow because it looked clean. He liked the look of the big room with its ceiling-high tree decked with trinkets and lights. The people sang and kissed each other. He wanted to be someone like that. After a while he went to sit next to Sadie. She had learned the first few bars of ‘Silent Night'. He put his head in his hands and muttered to himself as she played.

And the angel said, ‘Fear not, for I bring you glad tidings of great joy
...'

The hospital was a sky-high stack of Chinese boxes sleeved in glass. The big windows blanked the outside world. By day, they reflected the 747s bellying down through the high white winter clouds to Heathrow; at night, they reflected the city lights. A system of elevators and a labyrinth of corridors took you to numbered floors and numbered wards. The intensive care unit was 15D. In a curtained cubicle, Retro Man was trying to make a comeback. He wasn't aware of it, because he wasn't aware of anything, but he was about on the brink.

Sophie Simms was in a side ward. She was beyond the brink: she had stepped off and was free-falling.

Stella had taken Maxine Hewitt with her. Maxine sat with Sophie's family and asked questions that no one wanted to answer about friends, enemies, lovers; about bad habits and bad blood. No one mentioned bad luck. The Simms family consisted entirely of women: Sophie's mother, her grandmother, her two sisters. They were blonde. Even the grandmother was blonde, though she needed a little more help with it than the others.

The grandmother and the sisters said nothing. The sisters sat close to one another but at a remove from the others and flicked through the pile of magazines that lay on a low table. They favoured
Sugar
and
Miz
. The grandmother was shredding an empty cigarette pack. The mother told Maxine that her name was Tanya. She had cried her make-up into a thick tideline round her jaw, but now she was stony-faced.

She didn't know who Sophie's friends were.

She didn't know whether Sophie had enemies.

She didn't know where Sophie went at night.

She didn't know whether Sophie had a boyfriend.

She didn't know why anyone would want to kill her beautiful daughter.

She asked whether she could go now; she wanted to sit by Sophie's bed. She thought that Sophie could hear what she was saying even though she wasn't able to respond. There was a special communication, she said, between a mother and her daughter.

Maxine said that would be a good idea. After Tanya had left, Maxine offered her cigarettes to the grandmother, who took three and headed for the street. The sisters put down their magazines and ticked off some boxes.

Did Sophie do drugs? Sure, who doesn't? Nothing heavy. Just Es and dope.

Did Sophie hang out with a bad crew? Just some fit boys.

Did Sophie have a boyfriend? Yeah, someone new. Scuzz? Buzz?

Did Sophie have any enemies? No.

Maxine asked the questions because it was required, but she didn't think Sophie's murder had anything to do with drugs or love or revenge, and neither did the sisters.

One of them said, ‘It's that crazy guy, right?'

‘We don't have any theories just yet,' Maxine told her.

‘The crazy guy. Attacking women.'

‘We don't know.'

The other sister had an afterthought. She said, ‘We live on Harefield, yeah? It's not a matter of enemies. You don't have enemies, not as such. You have crews, yeah? You have territories. We're not in a crew. We don't have
enemies
, we have
other people
.' She went back to reading
Sugar
.

Stella was talking to Dr Shah, who had flawless skin, regular features and a catwalk figure. Since the woman was also a senior registrar, Stella decided to think of this as overload.

‘It's an issue we're going to have to raise with the family,' Dr Shah said, ‘and pretty soon.'

‘You want to switch her off?'

‘Sophie Simms is alive mechanically, but she's brain-stem dead. We have to approach her relatives about harvesting her organs.'

Stella shook her head. ‘She's a murder victim. We've ordered an autopsy and a forensic investigation.'

Dr Shah sighed. ‘It's a young heart. A young renal system.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Don't apologize to me. Pop into dialysis on your way out.'

‘There's no possibility of a reversal?' Stella asked.

‘That she regains consciousness, that you talk to her, that
she identifies her assailant? No, none. She's already switched off, in effect. She's a shell. We're effecting a simulation of life, but all it amounts to is inflating the lungs and maintaining the circulatory system. Sophie left a while ago. All we're doing is keeping putrefaction at bay.'

That's one way of putting it, Stella thought. Dr Shah's bleeper sounded and she moved to a phone. While she was taking the call, she looked across at Stella as if to say
That's it; we're done
.

Maxine was coming into the ward as Stella was leaving. She said, ‘They're off the estate, just like a thousand others. There's nothing to distinguish her from the other victims.'

‘Unless she happened to know him.'

‘Why would she?'

‘Somebody does.'

They were almost at the door of the ward when two nurses drew the curtains on the last bed space and emerged with a trolley. Stella and Maxine glanced sideways, reflexively, and saw a figure rigged with tubes and drips and wearing a full-face oxygen mask. A monitor showed the sluggish blue blips of a troubled heartbeat. Stella thought he looked like a man who was too close to death to pull back.

She was right. Retro Man would die that night, a couple of hours after Tanya had given permission for Sophie's life-support system to be switched off.

From: [email protected]

Well, Robert, I picked up your message about poor Nero. I wonder – have you had any thoughts about me? About who I am? Now you can tell me. Now you can email me back. All that coverage in the papers about you – I expect you enjoyed it. I expect you enjoyed leading them a dance. DS Mooney, was that the name the papers gave? Did you enjoy your sessions with her?

They always hold something back, don't they? What did you do about that? I expect you stayed vague. I expect you did some ducking and diving. You must have been pretty good because it took them a while to work you out, didn't it? I expect you went in prepared. You must have known something. What did you know?

The thing I really want to ask – how did it feel pretending it was you – pretending you had killed Valerie? I expect it was thrilling. It was thrilling, wasn't it? Did you run through it in your mind? I expect you did. I wonder how close you got to the real thing. I could tell you how close. We could compare notes.

I would love to run through it with you. I would love to take you through it, step by step. I expect you can close your eyes and see the park in your mind's eye, the park that day, Valerie jogging through. I expect you make up a scenario, don't you? Except it's you there with her, you going after her, and it wasn't you, was it?

Do you know who it was?

Email me back and let me know how you feel. Let me know what you see in your mind's eye. The park, the weather, the single figure waiting, biding his time, the risks, the method. The feeling. The way it felt. I expect you thought a lot about the way it felt. I expect you told DS Mooney about that. Now tell me. You can be as detailed as you like. The Devil's in the detail, as they always say.

Let's speak soon.

The squad room was decorated with a little tree-chart of progression points and a paper-chain of SOC shots. The point-and-push camera had a hard flash and Sophie looked chalk-white, her features lacking definition. People were smoking and drinking and eating: some were doing all three. The air in the room was thick and blue, but there was nothing else to breathe. Stella wafted her hand in front of her face: a novice non-smoker eating secondary-soup.

‘It looks like a replica of the Valerie Blake attack,' she said. ‘But it isn't quite. The post-mortem's being done this afternoon, but the doctor at the scene was certain that she hadn't been strangled. The blows to the head killed her.'

‘The configuration of clothing,' Maxine asked. ‘Do we know whether she was raped?'

‘No. I'll be asking Sam Burgess about that.'

‘It ties in with the earlier attacks in some ways,' Harriman observed. ‘So did Blake: the blows to the head, the attack taking place in an open space, in the street or a park.'

Maxine said, ‘Except we spent a day with the team that are looking at those other incidents and the similarities are superficial. Copy cat, maybe. More likely to be men hating women. Nothing new there.'

‘And no DNA matches,' Stella observed.

‘DNA, yes. Matches, no.'

Frank Silano was breaking the filter off a B & H; Harriman gave him a light. Silano said, ‘We've put up an incident board. Exhibits have been listed; they're with Forensics now.
Uniform found her clothes in a skip. The earlier attacks might not fit, but this MO's identical.'

‘Two strikes in short order,' Harriman said. ‘This guy's going to keep at it, isn't he?'

Stella said, ‘I think he is.'

Sam Burgess was working to the Sibelius violin concerto, the
allegro moderato
finding almost the same pitch as the electric saw he was using to trepan Sophie Simms. Giovanni was alongside; he reached in and lifted out the brain. Stella thought of pickled walnuts. Sam took a scalpel and cut a thin slice for forensic examination, as if that sliver might contain Sophie's last thought.

Easy. I'll never let him out of bed
.

‘She wasn't strangled,' Sam said. ‘The garrotte might have been round her neck, but he didn't apply it. No time, perhaps.'

‘He didn't kill her either, not immediately.'

‘No, but he meant to. The hammer blows were more than enough to do the job. God knows how she survived as long as she did.'

‘You're sure it was a hammer?'

‘Pretty sure; can't think what else would fit the configuration and blow pattern. But Forensics will have a better take on it.'

‘And there's the question of whether she was sexually assaulted.'

‘Well, she'd had sex in the last twenty-four hours. Whether it was willingly or not is another matter. No trauma.'

‘Clear DNA, though.'

‘There will be.'

Sam stood back to allow Giovanni to take the brain to the scales: the sum total of all Sophie Simms had known or
thought or felt. Love doesn't live in the heart, Stella thought; why do people think that? It lives in the brain along with doubt and displeasure.

‘The hospital wanted her organs,' Stella said.

‘It's a waste,' Sam agreed. ‘I don't think we're going to find anything significant.' His plastic apron and eye-shields carried tiny red polka-dots. Stella looked towards the dissecting table, where Giovanni was waiting for Sam to make the Y-incision. Sophie had a butterfly-tattoo on her thigh just under the hip bone: something only a lover would see. As Sam made the first cut, Stella half expected to see it lift and fly off.

She pushed through the slap-flaps, going from room to room in that subterranean city of the dead, and emerged to a bright day and cold that bit the bone. Her phone rang as if it had been waiting to find the signal.

Harriman said, ‘Two things. Kimber confessed to a crime a couple of years ago.'

‘Murder?'

‘Murder-abduction.'

‘No chance he actually did it?'

‘No. They caught the guy with the body in the boot of his car.'

‘Jesus. What else?'

‘Valerie Blake's flat was burgled two days before she died.'

As Stella walked in to the squad room, Sue Chapman was walking out.

Stella said, ‘You look like hell.'

Sue nodded. ‘Feel the same way. I'm going home.'

‘I ought to say don't come back till you're feeling better.'

‘But –?'

‘Come back sooner than that.'

Harriman showed her the message forms. The information about Kimber was from DS Reid at Paddington Green. The other came from DS Gerry Harris at Notting Hill.

Her first call was to Harris, who'd been sharp enough to make the connection between the burglary and Valerie Blake's murder. She asked, ‘Can I get a copy of the crime report?'

‘Give me a number. I'll fax it to you while we're talking.'

Stella gave the number. ‘Anything special about it?'

‘Just another break-in. We get dozens a day. They work in teams. Kids mostly. You know – pre-teen and upwards. Valerie Blake's place showed some familiar patterns: they'd raided the fridge, had a drink or two, made themselves at home; they'd taken a lot of street-market gear, clothes and shoes and so forth; they've obviously got a buyer for it. We drop in on the local street-markets from time to time, but it's a lost cause, really. They'd been fairly comprehensive, so I reckon they knew her habits. Leave for work, get home from work. A working day would give them a lot of leeway. Most of these little shits go in and trash the place just because. This lot don't. We call them the Clean Machine.'

‘How did they get in?'

‘Jacked a window. Took the whole thing out. It's easy. People buy alarms and such like. They don't know.'

‘You didn't make an arrest, I suppose?'

Harris laughed. ‘It's a statistic. I expect she was insured. They only take easily disposable stuff and smallish items. I mean, it wasn't the sort of job where they load the white goods on to a lorry. She gave us a list; it's on the report.'

Stella heard the fax machine on Sue Chapman's desk kick in. She said, ‘It's coming through now.'