Watching You (24 page)

R
uiz marches through the police cordon, ducking under the crime-scene tape as though it doesn’t apply to him. He surrendered his badge six years ago, but still has the countenance, if not the authority, of a detective. Reaching the police cars and ambulance, he pauses and seems to inhale the scene as though the air might provide him with answers.

“Who’s in charge?”

“The boss is inside,” says a sergeant.

Ruiz spies the professor in the back of a police car with a teenage girl. It must be Marnie’s daughter. DI Gennia emerges from the mansion block. He fixes his eyes on Ruiz. “Who gave this man permission to be here?”

Blank faces among the officers. Mumbles.

Gennia addresses Ruiz. “Go home, Vincent. This isn’t your concern.”

“What happened?”

“You can read about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

The detective is moving away. Suddenly, he stops and turns. “Do you know where Marnie Logan is?”

“No.”

He motions to the police car. “Friend of yours?”

“He’s Marnie’s psychologist: Joe O’Loughlin.”

Gennia seems to roll the name over his tongue before walking away.

“You’re making a mistake,” yells Ruiz.

“Won’t be the first time.”

“The professor can help you.”

“He’ll have plenty of time to talk. I can hold him for forty-eight hours. And if I find out he’s been withholding information from the police, I’ll charge him with obstructing justice or being an accessory to murder.”

“What murder?”

At that moment paramedics emerge from the house, carrying a stretcher down the stairs and setting the wheels onto the pavement with a rattling finality.

“The caretaker,” says Gennia. “And I’m betting we find Marnie Logan’s DNA all over the murder scene.”

The DI barks an order at one of the constables stringing crime-scene tape around a railing fence. A white marquee is being erected over the front steps to shield the entrance hall. Floodlights burst through the edges of the curtains on the ground floor.

“Answer me this,” he says, focusing again on Ruiz. “Is Marnie Logan dangerous?”

“What did the professor say?”

“I’m not asking him—I’m asking you.”

Ruiz lowers his head and looks at the toes of his leather shoes. Gennia’s eyes are fixed on his, and his face a mask of disgust.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Harrow Road police station is an elegant old building with Georgian windows and decorative moldings. It used to be Ruiz’s old stomping ground when he headed the Serious Crime Squad a decade ago. Little has changed, certainly not the décor, which is public service gray except for the occasional splashes of pastel in the interview suites to soothe the savage beasties who are dragged in off the streets and questioned.

DI Gennia keeps them waiting. Ruiz paces the room like he’s circling a cage, whereas Joe could be measuring for new carpet. He wants Ruiz to be quiet. He needs time to put the details into context and assign them a weight. Dissociative disorders. Malcolm. Marnie. The caretaker. Trevor threatened her. He lost his hands.

Ruiz is still pacing. “Did she do it?”

Joe looks up.

“Marnie—did she cut off his fucking hands?”

“I don’t know.”

Ruiz seems to react under his breath. “Is that the best you can do?”

Joe apologizes, knowing that Ruiz expects more. In the ten years the two men have known each other, Joe has never felt so lost or grasping helplessly for answers. Normally, almost instinctively, he understands human behavior—the good, the bad, the weird and monstrous; psychopaths and sociopaths, people on the fringes of sanity and society—but this time it’s different. It’s as though the entire process of human interaction is a farce of misperception. We get people wrong before we meet them, while we’re anticipating meeting them, when we’re with them, and when we go home and tell somebody else about the meeting. Yet Joe has based his career on getting people right, even if the more interesting path is getting them wrong.

DI Gennia shows up in the early hours. Transparent bubbles of exhaustion seem to be bursting in front of his eyes. He picks up a chair, spinning it around and straddling it backwards. Joe notices the freckles on his nose, which make him look younger, like a schoolboy caught unawares in a camera’s lens.

“How did you let a nutjob like Marnie Logan get past you?”

The question is deliberately provocative.

“I don’t believe she is a nutjob.”

“You say tomato, I say fuck you.”

Joe ignores the insult. “How is Zoe?”

“She’s being looked after.”

“You’re holding her?”

“Child protection will find her accommodation until we locate her mother or father. Tell me about Marnie Logan.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Where is she?”

“No idea.”

“Does she have family?”

“Her father is in a nursing home in Ealing.”

“Friends?”

“You can check her phone records,” says Ruiz, growing impatient.

“We’re doing that,” replies Gennia. “We’re also watching the airports, train stations, and bus terminals. She’s with her boy. How old is he?”

“Four.”

“Is he in any danger?”

Joe hesitates and glances at Ruiz.

“What was that?” asks the DI. “That look you gave each other. What aren’t you telling me?”

Joe makes a decision. “Two days ago I talked to a psychiatrist who treated Marnie Logan when she was a child. What he told me was confidential. It can’t be used in a court of law.”

“Don’t lecture me on the law, Professor.”

Joe glances at Ruiz again, who nods. For the next fifteen minutes the professor explains his meeting with Dr. Sterne and the details the psychiatrist revealed about Marnie’s mental history. He describes the emergence of a second personality, who co-existed in Marnie’s mind until slowly becoming integrated and disappearing.

“And you think this Malcolm is back?” asks Gennia.

“It’s a remote possibility, yes.”

“And this
other
personality might have killed Niall Quinn and Patrick Hennessy and the caretaker?”

Joe doesn’t answer.

Gennia looks at Ruiz. “Do you buy into this bullshit?”

“I think you should listen.”

The detective stands up so suddenly his chair topples over. “This woman is playing you, Professor. She’s angling for a cushy stint in a secure psych unit with lots of colored pills and art classes. Then she’s out again, free as a bird. Three men are dead and we found Marnie Logan’s DNA at two of the crime scenes. I’ll bet you London to a house brick we find traces of her at the caretaker’s flat. That woman is a cold-blooded killer and I’m all over her like a fat kid on a Happy Meal.”

T
he floor of the car is littered with Styrofoam food containers, cups, chewing-gum wrappers, hamburger cartons, and old newspapers. Marnie’s wrists and forearms are taped behind her back, forcing her to sit sideways in the passenger seat or lose feeling in her hands. From side-on she can keep an eye on Elijah, who is sleeping across the back seat. Occasionally, she sneaks a glance at Owen’s profile as oncoming headlights sweep over his face, barely registering in his eyes. His eyelids, lips, and nostrils are tinged with pink as though inflamed and the corners of his mouth are dimpled.

“Is Owen your real name?”

“Yes.”

“Elijah called you Malcolm.”

“That’s a game we played.”

“Why did you choose that name?”

“You know the reason.”

Marnie narrows her eyes, trying to fathom how he could know the significance of the name. Only Dr. Sterne knew about Malcolm…and her father. Who else?

They are driving on the North Circular, near Wembley, past car yards and fast-food restaurants. The BMW has heavily tinted windows and a brightly lit display panel. His wrists are relaxed on the steering wheel.

“Why are you doing this?”

“You gave me no choice.”

“You could have left us behind. You could drop us off now. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“It’s too late for that.”

Marnie’s mind is so full of questions that she struggles to put them in order. The photographs. The ceiling. Zoe. Malcolm. She contemplates trying to kick the steering wheel, but fears killing them all in a fiery crash. Instead she tries to memorize the road signs.

“How long have you been watching me?”

“Longer than you think.”

He glances at her and grins, knowing she won’t believe him.

“When did you move next door?”

“Six years ago. It took me a while to get the flat. The previous tenants wouldn’t leave. I tried mice but they called in a pest controller. So I haunted them instead, making weird shit happen. They even organized an intervention, a proper séance. A priest came to the flat and said prayers, sprinkling holy water. Seriously.”

The memory amuses him.

“You were in our ceiling?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, not to me.” Marnie shifts her body, flexing her fingers, testing the strength of her restraints. “You rang the agency and hired me, what was that about?”

“I thought maybe…” He hesitates and begins again. “I was going to take you then. I couldn’t let you sell your body to strange men.”

“The suicide note…”

“Yours not mine.”

Marnie doesn’t understand.

“I wrote the note for you. I was going to leave it by the river, along with some of your clothes.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“You’ll see.”

He looks at the dashboard. The fuel is running low. Pulling into a lay-by, he parks away from the overhead lights and flips the interior latch that unlocks the boot. He walks around the car, opens Marnie’s door and pulls her out, dragging her to the rear of the vehicle.

“Get in.”

“No, please.”

“I have to get petrol. If you stay quiet I’ll let you out again afterwards.”

“What about Elijah?”

“He stays with me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Get in.”

Marnie rolls into the boot. He takes his belt and puts it between her teeth, buckling it around her head. The leather cuts into the corners of her mouth. The boot shuts. Darkness fills her world. Her cheek is pressed against a rough nylon floor mat. She smells the faint reek of unleaded petrol. Her hands are still bound behind her back. She squirms, trying to straighten, feeling the confines of her prison, touching the walls with her feet and forehead.

The car starts moving again. Minutes later it pulls into a petrol station and stops at the pump. Raising her head, she puts her eye to the boot latch and can see the forecourt. An eighteen-wheeler is parked nearby. The driver walks across her vision, heading back to his cab. Marnie kicks her feet against the inside of the boot. He stops, looking behind him.

Owen answers him, “You got a problem, pal?”

“Thought I heard something.”

“How long you been on the road?”

“Too long.”

A shadow steps in front of the latch. Owen whispers, “Another sound and you’ll never see your boy again.”

Marnie’s heart shrinks back into the bottom of her stomach.

It is past three in the morning when Ruiz and Joe leave the station. Zoe is with them. Despite the arguments of social services, she refused to go with a foster family or police liaison officer. She asked to stay with Joe because he was a known among the unknowns, a familiar face who understood what she’d endured in the previous eight hours.

Gennia agreed, too exhausted to argue, but demanded that Zoe be returned to the station by midday for further questioning.

Ruiz drives them home. “There’s more room at my place,” he says. “You should both come and stay until we sort this out.” Zoe says nothing. Joe isn’t sure if it will ever be sorted out.

When they reach the house in Fulham, Ruiz organizes the spare bedrooms and gives Zoe a shirt to use as a nightdress. After a shower, she comes downstairs and tries to listen to them talking, but falls asleep on the sofa with her head resting on the crook of her arm and her legs curled beneath a cushion.

“I keep forgetting how young she is,” says Ruiz.

Joe glances at the teenager. “She’s older than her years.”

“Should we wake her?”

“Let her sleep here.”

Ruiz unfurls a blanket and drapes it over Zoe, who inhales a ragged breath and mumbles something before settling down. He studies her for a moment, pondering her porcelain face, bouncy curls, and mouth like a scarlet rosebud. She’s an introspective young thing. Clear skinned. Blue-green eyed. Not as pretty as her mother, but that’s probably because she fights against it. Dressing down.

Another stray, he thinks. The professor has a habit of picking up waifs and lost souls. That’s why Julianne left him. That’s most likely why she fell in love with him. How’s that for one of life’s tragic absurdities?

Joe is sitting at the kitchen table, holding his left hand to stop it trembling. Ruiz pours another drink and takes a seat, rubbing at the nub of his missing finger. It’s an old injury—a high-velocity bullet tore through Ruiz’s upper thigh and another obliterated his wedding ring. Ruiz says it’s another reason not to remarry.

“What did I miss?” asks Joe.

“She had a second personality.”

“No.”

“But Dr. Sterne said…”

“I saw no trace of a second personality.”

“You said yourself that Malcolm could exist independently of Marnie. Dr. Sterne only met him sporadically. You saw her, what, twice a week?”

Joe rubs his eyes and tries to picture another face in Marnie’s mirror—a separate personality, isolated, caught between worlds, as though dropped from the heavens or rising from the underworld; an avenging angel, a killer who chose to protect her from anyone who had hurt or threatened or disappointed her.

The level of cruelty in each of the murders had bordered on sadism and included touches of macabre theater. Whoever did this enjoyed the act of punishing and killing. They were aware how others would react to finding the victims, their shock and revulsion. Hennessy had his head almost twisted off. The caretaker was partially dismembered. That takes a particularly deviant personality; someone driven by a certainty of purpose and a lust for revenge. Strength. Pitilessness. Anger.

The last killing was more compulsive, reckless, less in control. The caretaker didn’t die immediately. If Zoe had arrived earlier, Trevor might have still been alive. He could have talked. The killer was rushed. Something made him panic. What changed?

Joe is staring at a spot on the wall, but looking at the problem internally, rearranging the facts to support a different premise. “What if there is someone else?” he says out loud.

“What do you mean?”

“Someone avenging Marnie…protecting her.”

“Other than Malcolm?”

“I mean a real person.”

Ruiz blinks at him, not understanding.

“Somebody phoned you and warned you off. You said it was a male voice.”

“You said a split-personality often takes on a different voice.”

Joe remembers the tape he heard in Dr. Sterne’s office, but he’s still not convinced. His left arm jerks in a strange rhythm. Pressing his thumbs into his eye sockets, he searches for the words. “A dissociative disorder is rare. The chances of Malcolm sharing her mind and acting independently are infinitesimally small.”

“So she’s a freak.”

“Marnie sometimes talked about having a sense that she was being watched. I put it down to paranoia, but let’s accept for a moment that she was right and somebody was following her, someone close to her, a friend or a confidante, a neighbor or a colleague. It could be someone hiding in plain sight.”

Ruiz is staring across the table in that somber way he has when expecting a better explanation. “You’re always accusing people of ignoring the obvious answer, Professor. Now you’re bending over backwards to exonerate this woman.”

“I’m just saying there are too many questions.”

“So what? You think I knew every answer when I solved a crime and caught the perpetrator? It didn’t matter. I knew the answers that counted: who, what, where, when, and, if I was lucky, why. Usually, I didn’t give a shit about the motive as long as I had the rest. You can look at the nuances and white noise, I’ll stick to the facts.”

Ruiz lifts his glass and swallows the last of his Scotch, sucking air through his teeth. “Sleep.”

“And then what?”

“We see how things look in the morning.”