The Blood Detective (16 page)

‘I’m not saying anything,’ Nigel said, preparing to put the receiver back in its cradle.

‘What, got another student in your bed, have you?’

Nigel froze. Unable to react.

‘Two hours on a university campus can teach you many things. Hardly national news, but I’m sure I could get it placed somewhere.’

‘Are you blackmailing me?’

Kent ignored his question. ‘What’s this about the cops getting the wrong tube station?’

How did he know that?

‘Goodbye, Gary.’

He put the phone down, then picked it up and

laid it off the hook. His hand trembled; Kent had shaken him. Dammy Perry, he had said the name was. At least Nigel now had a name to go with the face. He did not know what to think about Kent’s revelation that he knew what had happened at the university. Should he tell Foster and Jenkins? He decided against it.

He dressed. He needed to go out, to walk and

expend some energy. In the back of his mind he

knew where he was going, but didn’t yet want to ask himself why. Something was drawing him back there.

The early-evening air was fresh; it was still light and the streets around the Bush were crowded. He headed straight past the Green towards Holland Park, under the roundabout gridlocked by traffic even at the weekend. From there he headed up Holland Park Avenue, turning left into Princedale Road, past the silent garden squares overlooked by enormous stucco townhouses. Soon he was in the warren-like streets of Notting Dale. It was as if the air was different, less clear. He passed the old brick kiln on Walmer Road, the only relic of the time when the Dale was famous for three things: remorseless poverty, brick-making and pigs. Once, when the police came in to settle an altercation, the locals rose up against them, forming bricks out of the dried pig shit that covered the ground and hurling them at the cops. Dickens had written about this area, describing it as one of the most deprived in London, amazed that such squalor existed in the middle of such elegance.

The brick kiln was now a converted flat. Worth

half a million pounds.

At the top of Walmer Road he cut through the

corner of a council estate, arriving at Lancaster Road.

He could feel his throat tighten as he neared the scene. What he expected to find when he got there, he didn’t know. He walked to Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, following the same route as the previous night. There were fewer people but still the same throb of energy and life; it felt strange to him, as if the whole area should be in shock and mourning.

At the opening to the alleyway a solitary policeman stood sentinel. Behind him Nigel could see tape flapping in the wind; the scene was still closed. There was no way through. He walked up Ladbroke Grove, taking the first left down Cambridge Gardens, then a left on to St Mark’s Road. As he turned he saw a police car blocking the entry, behind it more tape fluttering forlornly. Part of him was relieved; he wasn’t sure what his reaction would have been if he’d been able to visit the scene.

He looked around: it was an anonymous part of

town, nestling in the lea of the overhead motorway and a raised railway line. A light under the Westway glowed in the half-light, illuminating three recycling bins with broken glass scattered on the floor around one bin. He decided to make his way back home, perhaps stop off for a recuperative pint.

He passed under both the Westway and the tube

line. A train rattled overhead, shaking the structure.

He crossed over, past a newly built close of houses.

And stopped.

He walked a few steps back. He read the name of the street once more: Bartle Road. It was not much of a street; on one side were beige-bricked bungalows, on the other were private parking spaces bordered by an old stone wall that backed on to the arches of the railway, where a garage had made its home. Nigel felt his heartbeat quicken. So this is where it was.

He walked down the street, counting off the

houses. One, two, each of them identical. After number nine he stopped: between it and the next building was an incongruous gap. Visible over the top of the wall was a tangled bush, little else. The next house after the gap was number 11. It was true, he thought; there is no number 10. When Rillington Place was bulldozed in the 1970s, it was rebuilt and renamed Bartle Road. But, obviously, the developers had decided to take no chances and had left a hole where number 10 should have been.

These sordid stories of London’s past delighted him; dark secrets that offered a glimpse behind the city’s net curtains. Ten Rillington Place was the home of John Christie, a post-war serial killer who strangled a string of young women he had lured back to his rotting, soot-soaked little Victorian terraced house.

He had sex with their lifeless corpses before either burying them in the garden or, as he did with his wife’s remains, stowing them in a cupboard. He was hanged for his crimes, though only after Timothy Evans, a barely literate neighbour of Christie’s, had been wrongly executed for murdering his wife and child. The real culprit, Christie, had been chief prosecution witness at Evans’s trial.

Nigel stood staring at the gap. He had come to

revisit one murder scene, only to encounter another.

Little more than a hundred yards away from this scene of horror, another serial killer was writing his name into London legend. When he was eventually brought to justice, would they bulldoze any of the buildings in which this killer had struck? Nigel knew such efforts were futile. The past cannot be erased so easily. You can knock something down; you can change names; you can try all you want to wipe these acts from history, he thought. But the past seeps back through the soil, like blood through sand. Or lingers in the air. Always there.

He pulled his brick of a mobile from his pocket and dialled Foster.

Seeing his sister’s mutilated corpse had broken Simon Perry. After nodding to indicate it was her, his legs had crumpled beneath him. Foster helped him to a side room and summoned a doctor. He was sedated and taken home. After making sure he was all right, Foster returned to the corpse. The cleaned, livid wounds across her breasts spelled out the reference.

Closer inspection of the body also revealed several track marks in her arm that suggested drug use. Her internal organs displayed no sign of damage from heavy use.

He and Heather returned to the incident room

in Kensington. Waiting for them was Nella Perry’s boyfriend, Jed Garvey. He turned out to be the sort of Trustafarian fool for whom Foster had nothing but disdain. With no need to make a living between dates, dealers and dinner parties, these people, he imagined, flitted from one job to another, alighting on something that would fill their time, give them a cachet, until it became financially unviable and they were either bailed out or moved on to a horse of a different colour.

Jed Garvey was a painter, so he said. Foster

guessed that Picasso and Pollock needn’t worry about their place in history just yet. He was beanpole skinny, over six feet in height. His face was long and cloaked in at least a week’s growth of stubble. His hair looked like it had fallen out of a tree and landed on his head.

He was wearing a battered suit jacket over a V-neck jumper, faded jeans and baseball boots.

His face was gaunt, drawn from hearing of his

girlfriend’s death. They got him a coffee and let him stew for a few seconds.

‘That is one good-looking bloke,’ Heather said.

‘You don’t mean you think that lanky streak of

piss is attractive, do you?’ Foster said, appalled.

‘There’s something about him.’

‘Yeah, a bundle in the bank courtesy of Daddy.’

‘Cynical or jealous — difficult to guess which.’

‘Jealous? Of him? The Bumfluff Kid?’

‘Word has it he’s dated some of the most beautiful young models, actresses and society beauties in London.’

‘He’s welcome to them. You spend a lot of time

reading those gossip columns, then?’

‘Light relief,’ she said. ‘Funny, Dammy Perry used to mention him a lot in her diary.’

‘Bet she did. That’s how it works for these people, isn’t it? There’s probably a thousand artists out there better than him, but they aren’t shagging society journalists.’ Foster sighed. ‘You handle this one. I’m worried there might be more severed parts by the end of the interview if I do it.’

They went back into the room. Garvey was seated, his arms wrapped around his chest, staring at the desk in front of him. Heather put the coffee down and gave him a comforting smile.

‘I realize this has come as a bit of a shock,’ she said.

Garvey just nodded, eyes vacant.

‘We need to go through a few things. Just routine.

It will help us catch whoever did this.’

Garvey nodded once more. ‘The last thing I

said to her was “Fuck off”,’ he said, then shook his head. ‘Do you know how awful that feels? To know that was the last thing you said to someone you loved?’

Heather nodded sympathetically. Foster felt an

unexpected twang of sympathy. The last thing he got to say to his father was that he loved him and respected him.

‘I can’t imagine,’ Heather said softly. ‘Tell us about the last time you saw her.’

He took a deep breath. ‘It was Friday lunchtime.

Dammy was in good spirits because her agent had got her a deal for a book idea she had. We went to the Electric on Portobello Road to celebrate. A few friends joined us; we ate, drank champagne, they left. Then, well you know what it’s like, you’ve been in high spirits, you drink too much, you say the wrong thing.’

‘What did you say?’

‘She thought I was jealous. I’ve been struggling a bit lately, not showing or selling much. It was getting me down. After a few drinks I suppose I got a bit peeved that she’d got a deal for an idea she’d scribbled on the back of a fag packet, yet here was I, with a studio full of pictures that nobody wanted. I said something about good fortune smiling on her and she laid into me.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She called me a waster, a loser, said that I was lazy and expected the world to come to me. That’s when I told her to fuck off. She got her bag, got up and walked out. Didn’t say a word; didn’t even look at me.’

‘You didn’t try to follow her?’ Heather asked.

To Foster, this sounded suspiciously like criticism, but Garvey took it in his stride.

‘No. We rowed a bit but always made up. She’s

feisty … was feisty. Best thing to do in those circumstances was call it a day, and apologize later.’

The fact that he would never get that chance was left hanging in the air.

‘Do you know where she went afterwards?’

‘I assumed she’d gone home. We’d just started

living together. When I got back and she wasn’t there, I just thought she was at some friend’s. It had happened before. She’d put me in the cooler for a day or two.’

‘Surely, on Saturday, when she hadn’t come home, you got worried?’

‘To be honest, I got so wasted on Friday night

that Saturday just drifted by. I tried to call her a million times on her mobile, but it was off. We were supposed to be going round to her brother’s on Saturday night, but she just didn’t come back. I went out and got wasted again.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Foster interjected. ‘You have a row, she walks out and you don’t see her for two days and you don’t do anything other than leave a few messages on her mobile? You don’t try her friends, her brother or anyone else?’

Garvey flicked his eyes from Heather to Foster.

‘With respect, you didn’t know Dammy; she was an independent spirit. She wouldn’t have appreciated me stalking her.’

She might have done, given that she had been

kidnapped and was then killed, thought Foster, but he said nothing.

‘Sorry, but I need to ask you some difficult questions,’

Heather said, stepping back in, waiting for

Garvey to indicate that would be OK. ‘When

you’d rowed before, did Dammy ever go off with

someone else? I’m thinking specifically of another man.’

‘Never. No way. She’d had her fair share of boyfriends but, as far as I know, she was faithful. She once told me she’d cut my balls off if she ever found out I’d cheated on her. I know where she went. She’d have gone to the Prince of Wales in Holland Park; it was her favourite pub. She knew people in there, the staff, the regulars. It was why I didn’t go there; didn’t fancy venturing into enemy territory during a state of conflict.’ He smiled weakly, though it vanished immediately. ‘Of course, now I wish I had done.’

Garvey’s head bowed and his eyes looked to the

floor.

And you always will, Foster thought.

He remembered the Prince of Wales on Princedale Road as an old man’s local boozer, all stained carpets and garish lights; now it was stripped wood bars, Belgian beers, and candles on each table. There were few traditional pubs left in the area. Foster wondered what happened to the regulars of gentrified pubs.

Did the brewery round them up and shoot them?

Checks had been made on Dammy Perry’s movements.

Garvey had been the last of her family and

close friends to see her; a scan of her credit card and bank-account history showed no activity since Friday morning.

It was early evening and the pub was still full from the Sunday-lunch trade, the bright young things of Holland Park and Notting Hill taking the edge off their weekend hangovers. Heather asked to see the manager, a fat, amiable-looking Geordie. He had not been at work on Friday, but called one of his bar staff across. Karl was a wiry, dark-eyed man in his thirties with a long face that wore the leathery imprint of a life lived in front of a bar.

Foster asked if there was somewhere quiet to speak and Karl led them out to the beer garden, which was empty save for two smokers gathered under an overhead burner. The familiar scent drifted under Foster’s nostrils and reminded him how much he missed the habit.

Foster asked if he knew Dammy Perry. He did.

‘Was she in here on Friday afternoon?’ he asked.