Cross and Burn (30 page)

‘Did you go anywhere near the pharmacy?’ As usual, Scott was straight to the point.

‘I don’t think so. I was pissed off and I wanted to vent my energy so I walked home. I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings. I don’t think I passed the pharmacy but I don’t know whether I passed Bev.’

Scott sat back in her chair and contemplated him. ‘Please tell me that’s all?’

‘Well, the other things are circumstantial.’ He spread his hands. ‘Nothing I’ve done. The sort of thing that could happen to anyone.’

‘But only do happen to you,’ Carol pointed out. ‘You said, “things”. Plural. What are we talking about here?’

‘I was trying to be helpful,’ he said. ‘After Paula told me about Bev, but before we knew she was dead, I thought I’d take a look at the supermarket where she’d supposedly been shopping. I needed some bits and pieces and I fancied the walk, so I went over to Freshco at Kenton Vale.’

‘It says on the custody record you live on a boat in Minster Basin. So you walked from the basin to Kenton Vale Road to pick up a few bits and pieces at the supermarket? That must be, what? Two miles?’ Bronwen’s deadpan delivery did nothing to hide her scepticism.

‘He likes to walk. It helps him think.’

‘She’s right. I do. And it does. And what it made me think is that this is a careful killer. Because the CCTV in the car park at Freshco isn’t great. There’s plenty of holes in the coverage. According to Paula, the body dump for Nadia was in Gartonside, where it’s scheduled for demolition and there are no cameras. And from what I can gather, Bev was found up on the moors in the middle of nowhere. So again, no cameras.’

‘And? There has to be an “and”, right? There generally is with you,’ Carol said, bitterness still evident in her voice. She wasn’t loosening up, he thought. He’d hoped they’d slip into old rhythms without realising it, but she was too watchful of herself for that. Time appeared not to have done much healing of her hurt.

‘There is. I bought more shopping than I’d intended
and
I got the bus home. And that’s when I realised buses have CCTV that films outside the bus as well as inside. Bradfield buses have fourteen cameras on each double-decker bus, did you know that? So I suggested to Paula that they take a look at the footage. Which they did.’

‘Was it helpful?’ Scott asked.

‘Oh yes. They got a bit of Bev on one camera. And they caught a few seconds of the bloke who was following her. It wasn’t much use for ID. Medium height, medium build, though he could have been a slim guy wearing bulky clothing. He was wearing a hoodie and he kept his head down. You can see he’s wearing glasses, but that’s about all. They told me they had footage of the man who abducted Nadia, and it was pretty much the same. There’s only one distinguishing feature.’ Tony looked down at the table. He hated this piece of information. In his head, it was the one that made him look guilty. ‘He’s got a noticeable limp. He limps with his left leg.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ Carol said. With feeling.

‘You have a limp?’

Sometimes it was tempting to go for the crass one-liner. This probably wasn’t one of those times. ‘I had major knee surgery a couple of years ago. A patient attacked me with a fire axe. Someone else’s patient, I always like to point out.’

‘And you were supposed to have a second surgery to deal with the limp,’ Carol said. ‘I take it you’re still dodging Mrs Chakrabarti?’ She half-turned to Bronwen. ‘He does have a limp. It’s worse when he’s tired. Such as, when he’s tramped two miles across town to shop in a non-local branch of Freshco.’

Scott gave him a sharp, assessing look. ‘I don’t like the limp,’ she said. ‘That’s the sort of circumstantial that the CPS gets very hot and horny over.’

‘Lots of people have a limp,’ Tony protested.

‘No, actually, they don’t,’ Carol said. ‘And if you’d done what you were supposed to, neither would you. Doing nothing just gets you into trouble, Tony. And not for the first time.’

She’d never held back. He’d always admired that in her. But it was hard to take when he was the target of her sharpest assaults. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Can we put the thrust and parry on the back burner for now, please?’ Scott sounded almost as pissed off as Carol. ‘What’s the other circumstantial?’

Tony looked at Carol and gave a wry smile. ‘Before I say this, in the interests of not getting my face slapped, I want to be clear that this is DCI Fielding’s journey into absurdity. Not mine.’

‘Fielding thinks the victims both look like me,’ Carol said heavily. ‘She’s got a bee in her bonnet about it. She thinks Tony’s killing women who look like me because I walked away from him.’

There was a long sticky pause. Then Scott said chattily, ‘And are you, Tony?’

P
atience was a virtue he’d learned young. His father had never tolerated tantrums or whining, so he’d understood at an early age that keeping his mouth shut and learning to wait was the key to minimising the pain of his existence. Therefore it was no hardship to him to extend the time she would spend in the freezer before he let her out to play.

But that didn’t mean he had to sit around twiddling his thumbs. By now, her husband must be starting to panic. It was almost midnight – five hours later than she should have been home, given when she’d left work. At first, the husband would have assumed a hold-up in the transport system – a delay on the tram. An accident throwing the city centre into gridlock. Something relatively benign. But as the minutes ticked by and no text or phone call arrived, he’d have started to feel anxious.

What would he have done then, this Marco Mather, this man whose annoyingly handsome face smiled out of the photo in her purse? He’d have tried to phone her, of course. But by then, her phone was not only turned off, it had its battery and SIM card removed. He’d put them back later, when it didn’t matter if she was traced or not. But for now, he was taking every available precaution.

So, Marco would get a dead phone. What would his next step be? He’d probably call her friends to see whether she was with them or if she’d confided any plans to them. He’d draw a blank, of course. He wouldn’t be able to phone anyone from work because she’d only just started her new job and she wouldn’t have built up a social network yet. He wouldn’t even know the names of her colleagues, never mind their phone numbers.

So he’d have to go to the Tellit Communications building, where the night security guard would explain there was nobody left in the office. If Marco Mather kicked off, the guard might even show him the computer record from when she’d swiped herself off the grid and into the lift.

He might think about the police then. But that would get him nowhere at all. Five hours late wouldn’t earn a mention in the incident log. Not even in the light of two female murder victims in the same week. Because there was nothing to connect Marco Mather’s wife to a Polish pharmaceutical sales rep or Bradfield Cross’s chief pharmacist. There couldn’t be because apart from the fact that they looked right, they were random selections. People said you couldn’t judge a book by its cover, and unfortunately that was true. But he’d had to go by the cover. They were replacements, not substitutes. So they had to look right. They had to fit the fantasy in his head, the dream that had grown from those images of Lauren Hutton up on the screen. It was an exhausting process, but eventually he would find the right one. The one to replace the one who had cheated him out of serving up her just deserts.

But he was wandering off the point. Which was, what would Marco Mather do? He was so tempted to go and see for himself. There would be a delicious pleasure in glimpsing him through a window, wringing his hands or crying on the phone.

Why not give in to temptation? There was no virtue in denying himself that pleasure, was there? So he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up her keys. Just in case Marco had gone out to drown his sorrows and he got the chance to pick over their pitiful married life.

Less than quarter of an hour later, he’d found a parking space in the next street and, sticking to the shadows, he walked briskly round the corner. In spite of the limp one of his father’s beatings had left him with, he could still move faster than most. At this time of night, the majority of the houses were in darkness, occasional slivers of light creeping through bedroom curtains, a few hall lights dimly seen through glass panels in front doors. This wasn’t the sort of area where people stayed up late and had fun, he thought. Solid suburbia to the core; either they had to get up for work in the morning or else they’d retired and acquired the old persons’ habit of early to bed and early to rise. Like they had something to get up for, he thought, imagining those unsatisfied lives where they’d settled for less than perfection. Not like him.

He wasn’t entirely surprised to see plenty of lights on at the Mather house. The front room curtains weren’t closed, and light leaked in from the bright hallway. He checked to make sure he was unobserved, then cut into their tiny front garden, slinking past the front door and peering in through the window. No sign of life. A couple of deserted sofas, a TV, shelves that seemed to contain DVDs and a few books. No clutter whatsoever. There were paintings, or prints, he supposed, all over the walls. He couldn’t make them out in the dim light, but they looked colourful.

He slipped past the front door and down the side of the garage. A small window cast a parallelogram of light on the ground, and he ducked low to avoid being seen. Then he turned and edged his head forward so he could look inside. The usual crap-filled garage, he thought. Lawnmower, gardening tools. A tall freezer. Shelves crammed with tins of paint, household chemicals, assorted car products. He inched forward to improve his field of vision and saw something completely unexpected.

The top of a man’s head, motionless on the floor.

Startled, he jerked back. When his heart stopped racing, he crept forward again, this time bolder than before. He could see the rest of the man’s head from behind. Unsurprisingly, it was attached to a body. A body that was sprawled on the floor beside an exercise bike, one leg still trailing over the frame.

Marco Mather wasn’t pacing the floor, panicking over his wife’s absence. Marco Mather was dead.

Either that or he was going to be dead very soon.

B
ronwen Scott enjoyed the moment then pushed her chair back. ‘I need a quick word with the custody sergeant,’ she said. ‘Five minutes, Carol, any more and he’ll start to get antsy.’

Tony and Carol stared at each other, stony-faced, waiting for her to leave. The door closed and they were alone for the first time in months. A scenario both had imagined but neither had expected. Tony cleared his throat. ‘How have you been?’

‘That’s really none of your business.’ The severity of her expression didn’t diminish. He’d seen her look at colleagues she despaired of and criminals she despised in the same way.

‘I think it is. You blamed me for what happened to Michael and Lucy.’ Most people would have missed the infinitesimal flinch in her eyes at the mention of their names, but he didn’t. Undeterred, he carried on. ‘You probably still do. That gives me a burden of responsibility and I think our history runs so deep that you owe me the chance to discharge it.’

She shook her head. ‘Even if I could translate that out of Tony-speak into something a normal person would understand, I suspect it would still be bollocks. I owe you nothing. No amount of twisted logic can change that.’

‘So why are you here?’

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘I told you. Paula feels the need to save you and she can’t do it the straight way.’

He let himself consider whether she might be speaking the truth. He wanted not to believe her, but he had to concede it made more sense to accept what she was saying. ‘But you agree with her, that I’m innocent?’

‘I can imagine situations where you might kill. But I don’t believe you’re this kind of killer. And I think if you were pissed off enough with me to want to kill me, you’d get on with it. Not fuck about with surrogates.’ There was a grim twist to her mouth that might almost have been a smile.

‘You think somebody’s really killing women who look like you?’ Tony was genuinely curious. He thought he knew her well enough to predict the answer but he wanted to hear what she had to say.

She shrugged one shoulder. ‘Other people seem to. Senior detectives with years of experience, some of them.’

‘But you,’ he persisted. ‘What do
you
think?’

‘I don’t think they look that much like me.’

‘There’s a generic similarity. Same blonde hair, blue eyes. Same haircut. Similar build. Professional women who go to work suited up. Has it occurred to you that it’s not them that look like you – it’s you that looks like them?’

Carol frowned. This was how it had always played out between them. He said something impenetrable that she couldn’t resist and she was hooked. It had been like that since the very first case they’d worked together, all those years ago. And here he was, doing it to her again. She wanted to get to her feet and walk out, but more than that she needed to understand what he was driving at. ‘What do you mean – it’s me that looks like them?’

‘That’s not quite right.’ He spoke absently, as if thinking aloud. ‘It’s more that you all look like her.’

‘Like who?’ She almost howled in frustration.

‘The one he wanted to kill.’

‘Don’t you mean “wants” to kill?’

Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘No. He’s clever, he’s organised and he’s resourceful. If she was available to be killed, he’d have killed her and that would be an end to it.’ He spread his arms wide as if trying to draw her in to embrace the idea. ‘I think she’s already dead. I think he was planning to kill her, working up to it. But somehow she thwarted him.’

‘She killed herself?’ Carol was intrigued now in spite of herself. She leaned forward, forearms on the table. He noticed the changes in her hands – scars, bruises, broken nails. What on earth had she been doing, this woman who he remembered barely being able to manage flat-pack furniture?

‘Either that or she just died,’ he said, distracted by his more private speculation.

‘And this helps us how?’

‘Find her, and you find him.’ He shrugged. ‘Obviously you’re going to have to find her.’

Before Carol could respond, the door opened and Scott stuck her head into the room. ‘Time to go, Carol. We’ll see you in the morning, Tony. Chin up. She’s never going to charge you.’

‘So what happens now?’ Carol asked Scott as soon as they were clear of Skenfrith Street police station.

‘I’m going home to catch some zeds before I have to get up and go head to head with DCI Fielding,’ the lawyer said. ‘I recommend that you not show up for that conversation. It’ll only get messy. Besides, you have plenty of other things to be getting on with. It’ll be bloody ages before Fielding gives us disclosure on Nadia Wilkowa’s work diaries. You’re going to need to pull your strings and find out when this alleged incident happened at Bradfield Moor and whether Nadia was in the building that day to bump into Captain Clumsy.’

‘You want me to go back to Paula?’

Scott broke her stride to give Carol an incredulous look. ‘Well, duh. I want you to do whatever it takes to get the information that will clear my client. You always had the knack of coming up with the goods when you were working the other side of the fence.’

Carol gave a snort of bitter laughter. ‘I did have one or two resources at my disposal.’

‘You still do. Human resources. You’ve got friends. So has he. Use them.’

Carol suppressed a sigh. After the reaction she’d had from Sinead, she wasn’t so sure how much reliance she could place on her old networks. How bitter would it be to have to rely on Tony’s name to open doors? Tony, who was even more crap at intimacy than she was. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said wearily.

‘And I’ll line up someone to demolish her thumbprint evidence. We’re going to leave her without a leg to stand on.’

They entered the dank car park and headed for their cars. Before they separated, Scott put a hand on Carol’s arm. ‘Did he say anything useful after I left you alone with him?’

Carol didn’t know where to begin to explain the way Tony’s mind worked to an outsider. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was private.’ The words were out before she had time to think. She walked to her car, thinking how hard it was to break the habit of mistrust.

She climbed into the Land Rover and took out her phone, keeping one eye on Scott, whose engine purred into life as soon as she’d settled herself into her seat. Carol waited till the solicitor had driven out of the car park, considering her options. It was late and she was tired, but the clock was ticking for Tony. There were strict limits on how long the police could hold him after arrest. If the defence couldn’t blow apart the evidence against him, Fielding would charge Tony when the time ran out – or before that, if she could build a stronger case – and everything would become much harder. The police would stop looking for an alternative suspect. Mud would stick, even if Tony was subsequently cleared.

It dawned on Carol that she minded the idea of his name being blackened. She tried to convince herself that it was simply because it offended her sense of justice. She wasn’t ready to accept that her history with Tony might mean there was a possible future for them. She was merely reacting as she would to the idea of any innocent person being unjustly imprisoned ahead of a trial for a crime they could never have committed. That was all it was. But that was enough to sanction any amount of unreasonable behaviour. Wasn’t it?