Dowd shook his head and shrugged. ‘Not your day, Officer,’ before showing Spibey the 7-8-9 that Fowler had been holding.
Spibey slammed the flat of his hand on the table and Fowler had to lurch forward to stop his beer can toppling over.
‘Sorry,’ Spibey said. ‘But that’s just ridiculous.’
Dowd nodded. ‘It’s a bad beat.’
‘Bad?’
‘I need a piss,’ Fowler said, dragging the chips towards him.
Dowd pushed back his chair. ‘Who wants tea?’
Spibey had his back to the open window. The sun was warming his neck. Once Dowd had gone into the kitchen area and Fowler had blundered into the smal bathroom on the other side of the room, Spibey turned to take a few breaths of fresh air, the creamy fug of cigarette smoke drifting past him before being whipped away on the breeze.
He turned back into the room, reached for his wal et and dug out a twenty-pound note to buy his way back into the game. ‘Bol ocks,’ he said, quietly.
As he sat shuffling, waiting for Fowler and Dowd to return, Spibey thought about how quickly he had come to despise the two men he’d been forced to babysit. How a couple of hours’
harmless gambling could show people in their true light. Only a few days earlier, he had considered them both victims, rootless and terrified. But today, watching, listening to them whine and bray, he had come to realise that they were little more than spongers. Mental cases, the pair of them, taking the piss and living it up at the taxpayer’s expense, while the likes of him ran around after them like skivvies.
Christ, as though either of them copping it would be any great loss to society.
Dowd, who clearly thought he was a bloody comedian, had become unbearably smug; and Spibey wasn’t convinced that Fowler was half as drunk as he was pretending to be. What had he put away, four cans of supermarket-strength lager? It was an old card player’s trick, and Spibey was starting to wonder if Fowler was not quite the novice he’d claimed to be.
He smoothed out the twenty on the table in front of him, stared down at it. He’d start again, build it up nice and easy into forty, eighty, more. He’d clean the two of them out before the relief shift came on at six.
Arseholes.
He heard the footsteps and glanced up, waved his twenty pound note in the air, then reached for the cards again, focusing on them as he continued to shuffle. ‘Skil and strategy,’ he said.
What he felt, saw, heard - the sensations that assaulted his body and brain in the last thirty seconds of his life - did not come in the order that Spibey might have expected. He
saw
the blood first - or perhaps he had blacked out for a few moments and it was just the first thing there when he opened his eyes - spattered across the cards that had tumbled on to the table.
Red as diamonds and hearts. Then he
felt
it, soft against his scalp as his fingers fluttered to the wound on the back of his head, and then the pain as the second blow shattered his hand, and the wash of nausea after the third strike, and then the cool of the tabletop against his cheek.
He tried to raise his head and it began to get dark, and he thought that it was probably wooden, with spikes. The thing he had been hit with. Was stil being hit with. He heard someone say, ‘What the hel are you doing?’ and smel ed his own piss and felt the sun that was stil warm against the back of his neck.
Sunshine that was running, thick and sticky, beneath his col ar.
‘What the hel are you doing?’
There were a few seconds’ silence as the two men stil breathing in the room stared across at each another.
Then, Anthony Garvey walked briskly around the table and calmly pushed a chair to one side, the policeman’s blood flying from the weapon as he raised it once again.
‘You both ran out of luck,’ he said.
THIRTY-SIX
It was only when she heard the noise on the stairs that Chamberlain realised the music from the upper floor had stopped. She and Sandra Phipps both looked towards the door as the footsteps grew louder, listened to the sound of someone thundering downstairs and then the short silence before the front door slammed shut.
Sandra puffed out her cheeks and sat back in her chair. ‘She’s upset,’ she said.
‘About your nephew?’
Sandra nodded, half smiled. ‘Stupid real y. I mean, Nicola hasn’t even seen Simon since she was little. She’d be just as upset if someone in one of those bands she listens to died. It suits her, if I’m honest.’
‘What about you?’
Sandra stared at her, as though unsure whether to point out that it was something of an odd question. ‘I’m . . . sad. It’s horrible what was done to him. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t particularly close, does it?’
Chamberlain said nothing.
‘I’ve stil not heard when I can go and have a look at him, get the funeral sorted, anything like that.’ She swil ed the wine around in her glass. ‘God only knows what kind of state he must be in.’
‘They’l let you know when they’re ready.’ Chamberlain said what she thought was necessary and no more. She had al the pieces now. She knew who the man cal ing himself Anthony Garvey was, and she knew what that
meant
. But she was stil struggling to make sense of any of it.
‘That’s why I got the wrong end of the stick on the doorstep,’ Sandra said. ‘I mean, that’s what I thought you’d come about.’
‘About Simon?’
‘I thought maybe they were releasing his body, whatever.’
Simon Walsh. The son of Raymond Garvey and his first victim. The man the police were looking for and who - Chamberlain now realised - they mistakenly believed had become a victim himself.
‘It’s why Ray kil ed her, you know.’
Chamberlain’s head snapped up. It were as though Sandra Phipps had been able to read her thoughts and she felt the blood rushing to her face. ‘Sorry?’
‘That’s what he said, anyway. Because Fran had never told him about the baby. Because he didn’t know he had a twelve-year-old son. I’m not sure how he found out, tel you the truth, but he said he just lost it. He went round there to have it out with her and lost control.’
‘Jesus
.
’
‘What?’
‘Why the hel didn’t you let the police know?’ Chamberlain said.
‘I didn’t know any of this until Ray had been arrested, did I? I didn’t know it was him.’ Sandra was reaching for the bottle again. ‘Al those women were already dead by then, so I kept my mouth shut. It wouldn’t have brought any of them back, would it?’
‘When did you find out?’
‘He wrote to me from prison,’ Sandra said. ‘Just the once. Wanted me to know why he’d kil ed Fran.’ There was hatred suddenly, glittering in the woman’s eyes. ‘Wanted my forgiveness, if you can believe that.’
Seven, Chamberlain thought. Seven women had been murdered because Frances Walsh had kept Garvey’s child a secret from him. It made the notion of a changed personality sound even more ridiculous than it had before. ‘So, why did he keep on kil ing?’ she asked. ‘After your sister?’
Sandra lifted the bottle on to her lap and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Christ knows. Maybe something had snapped. I don’t know how that mental stuff works. Maybe he was trying to hide the real reason he’d kil ed Fran . . . if not knowing about his son
was
the reason. Maybe he just did it once and liked it. Doesn’t real y matter now, does it?’ Chamberlain was finding the woman’s calm, water-under-the-bridge attitude hard to stomach, but she couldn’t, with her hand on her heart, say that it mattered at al . ‘So, you took Simon? After Frances had been murdered?’
‘It was either me or Social Services, so what was I supposed to do? I mean, things had never real y got back to normal between me and Fran, al that ancient history with her and Ray.
But she never deserved what that bastard did to her. And Simon was family, so I didn’t even have to think about it.’
‘What did you tel Simon about his father?’
‘Same as Fran had told him: his dad had died when he was very little, vague stuff about how he’d been an engineer. But what’s strange is that he never real y asked. Had enough on his plate with what had happened to his mum, I suppose, and he went through quite a tough time at school.’ She blinked slowly, remembering. ‘He got
angry
with her a bit later on, angry with everyone. But that happens to people sometimes, doesn’t it?’ She poured the last of the wine into her glass. ‘When they lose someone.’
Chamberlain waited for Sandra Phipps to continue, watching the woman’s chest rise and fal , listening to its soft wheeze and the gentle bubbling of the fish tank. She started slightly when a mobile phone began to ring, a loud and ludicrously cheery samba.
Sandra leaned across to a smal table and snatched up her phone. She stared at the screen for a moment or two and then switched it off. ‘The old man,’ she said. ‘Probably just ringing for a natter. I’l cal him back.’
‘You were saying about—’
‘Look, I just wanted things to be as normal for the kid as possible, OK? Last thing I wanted was for him to know who his dad was or what he’d done. I didn’t want him feeling like a freak.’
Chamberlain fought to keep her reaction from her face. ‘When did you last see him?’
‘He left when he was seventeen,’ Sandra said. ‘Ten years ago, that would be.’ She thought for a second or two. ‘Yeah, ten. It was pretty sudden, you know, he just told me he wanted to get his own place. I think he just wanted to strike out on his own, find his feet. Understandable.’ She nodded towards the door. ‘
She’ll
be off soon enough.’
‘Did you hear from him?’
‘Once or twice. Just to let me know he was al right. He wasn’t though, was he? The police told me he was living like a tramp when he died.’ She took a drink, closed her eyes as it went down. ‘I’ve been feeling guilty about that ever since I heard what happened.’
‘So, why now?’ Chamberlain asked. ‘You’ve kept al this to yourself for fifteen years.’
Sandra shrugged. ‘Truth doesn’t real y matter any more, does it? Not now Simon’s dead.’
For want of anything better to say, Chamberlain shook her head. Said, ‘I suppose not.’
Chamberlain knew very wel that Simon Walsh was not dead, but how could she possibly tel this woman?
I know your nephew is not the man they hauled out of that canal with a
shattered skull and a face like a squashed cantaloupe. I know because Simon is the one who killed him. Who has killed a great many more
. . .
As far as good news/bad news routines went, it was right up there with the best.
Sandra cleared her throat, sat forward in her chair. The wine she had drunk could be heard in her voice, which was suddenly brighter, louder. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me about Ray Garvey,’ she said. ‘When you got here. You never said why.’
‘Didn’t I?’ Chamberlain stood up. That was a conversation for someone else to suffer, someone who stil possessed a warrant card. Now she just needed to get out of Sandra Phipps’
house as quickly as possible.
She needed to cal Tom Thorne.
Detective Sergeant Rob Gibbons glanced up from his book, as he dutiful y did each time he turned a page, looked briefly at each of the three security monitors on the desk in front of him, then went happily back to reading.
To losing himself, and loving it.
The job he did, the stupid, shitty people he had to deal with day in day out, what else was he going to read but fantasy? The likes of that loser Thorne could take the piss al they wanted - dragons and hobbits, my arse - but to Gibbons’ way of thinking, the outlandish worlds created in fantasy novels, in the best ones anyway, made a lot more sense than the piss-poor one he lived in. They were pretty much the most popular books in prison libraries too, certainly the ones that got nicked most often, and you didn’t need to be a genius to figure out why. Fantasy, along with the true-crime stuff, obviously.
As a habit, reading was a damn sight safer than gambling, Gibbons knew that much, and he knew Brian Spibey had a problem. Hours on end trying to take a few quid off a pair like Dowd and Fowler, how sad was that? He’d been up there since lunchtime, for Christ’s sake. Gibbons was happy enough alone with his book, but they stil had a job to do, and he was starting to think he’d need to have a quiet word. Either with Spibey or, if he felt like being a real arsehole about it, with someone higher up. That was always a big step, but—
He heard a shout from upstairs and dropped his book; looked up in time to see a shadow cross the screen on one of the monitors, the camera at the end of the first-floor corridor.
He picked up his radio. ‘Brian, you on the way down?’
A hiss of static.
‘Brian?
Fuck!
’
It hadn’t looked like Spibey . . .
He got up and moved quickly around the desk, his shoes squeaking, stupidly loud as he walked across the lobby. Nobody would come down without Spibey’s say-so, would they?
They were supposed to stay in their rooms with the doors locked. Had the sil y bugger lost it completely and got pissed with them?
He turned on to the stairwel , then stopped and staggered back, the radio slipping from his fingers and clattering on to the marble floor.
‘Jesus!’
He stared up at the man walking slowly down the stairs towards him. The lost look in his eyes and the blood soaking the front of his shirt. ‘What happened?
Jesus
. . .’
‘He just went mental. I think you need to cal someone.’
Gibbons could only nod and swal ow, unable to move for those few seconds it took the man to descend the final few steps. Gawping at the blood and the look on the man’s face.
Seeing far too late the kitchen knife that had slipped from beneath a sleeve into Anthony Garvey’s hand.
‘Slow down, Carol.’
Thorne had only just finished talking to Phil Hendricks when the cal came through. He had been joking with Dave Hol and, describing some of the pathologist’s escapades in Sweden.
Now, hearing something in Thorne’s voice, Hol and hovered near his desk and listened, mouthed, ‘What?’
Thorne shook his head.
‘Are you listening to me, Tom?’ Chamberlain sounded annoyed, out of breath.