Dead Silent (25 page)

I laughed at that, but I noticed that Joe seemed serious. We’d met before, and so I knew how he worked, that he was as interested in the criminal mind as he was in the forensic evidence, those almost invisible trails that killers leave behind. He was embedded into the murder squad to look behind the forensics and work out the thought processes, to second-guess the killer. A killer can wash away blood, but behaviour is harder to conceal, because it is behaviour that guides killers. So he studied psychopathy. It kept Joe up to date with the theories, and for the police it was like having a consultant on a cheap salary. So, was Joe right—that clichés are just worn-out truths, but true just the same?

‘How far have you been into the house?’ I asked.

‘I’ve just arrived,’ he said. ‘Rachel had the first look, and so she made the arrest.’

I sighed. ‘You need to go to the top floor, to the furthest door.’

He nodded, and then turned towards the stairs, inclining
his head to indicate that I should follow him. As I walked behind him, I wondered whether I had just caught a murderer, or whether I had ruined the life of a local man just so that I could add a shine to a story that would be lining cat litter trays the day after it went out.

But that was the game, and so I trudged slowly behind Joe Kinsella as he climbed higher.

Mike Dobson crunched his car to a halt on a patch of shale by an old farm gate. They’d driven into the countryside, away from the shadows of the viaduct and into the honeysuckle and sunshine of the Ribble Valley.

She looked across at him. ‘Are we here?’

She was reaching into her bag for the condom, putting the package of baby wipes on her knee as she rummaged. He reached out and put his hand on hers.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. He smiled and patted her hand, and then pointed at the wipes. ‘Leave those behind.’

She looked around, uncertain for a moment, and so he said, ‘It’s okay. It will make a change from some patch of concrete in Blackley.’ He reached past her and opened his glove compartment. ‘Spray this on.’ He was holding a bottle of perfume. Chanel No. 5.

She looked uncertain but took it anyway. She sprayed it into the air, and then, once she was sure that it was perfume, and not some spray that would hurt her, she put some on her neck. ‘It’s nice,’ she said.

He moved in towards her and inhaled deeply. He closed his eyes. The perfume took him back to a different time, and he felt soft fingers on his face and heard a giggle. He opened his eyes. She hadn’t moved. He reached out and traced along her breastbone with his finger, just a feather touch, and then brought it to his nose and took a deep
breath. He looked at her. She was young, just like Nancy was all those years ago, with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and lips that were full and seductive.

He stepped out of the car and went to the boot. When she stepped out, he passed her a plastic bag.

‘What’s this?’ she asked, swaying slightly, her hand reaching out to the car roof to steady herself.

‘Put it on,’ he said. When she looked doubtful, he added a ‘please’ and then turned away, not wanting her to refuse. He heard a rustle as she looked in the bag, and then there was a pause. He smiled as he heard her unclip her skirt, and he continued to look the other way as she stepped out of her own clothes. He could feel his excitement rising and he took some deep breaths to calm himself.

‘Like this?’ she asked eventually, and when he looked round, he gasped.

She was just how he remembered Nancy. The sun behind her shone through her hair, the light breeze blowing stray ones so that they caught the sunlight, and her legs were visible through the flowered dress, the one that he had bought for Nancy all those years ago but never had the chance to give to her. The pattern was faded now, but his memory wasn’t, and it seemed like the last twenty-two years had hardly happened.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and he stepped away from the car, another bag in his hand.

Joe went into Frankie’s attic room ahead of me. He turned around, tried to take in all the photographs pasted across the four walls. A uniformed officer came in behind me and whistled. Joe looked at me, and I saw an excitement in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in him before. Joe was always the quiet man, the thinker, but Frankie’s room seemed to make him agitated.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

He didn’t say anything. He moved close to the walls to examine the pictures, and soon spotted the Nancy Gilbert ones. The window was open, and so the old newspaper clippings fluttered in the light breeze over the computer screen, the screensaver a slideshow of photographs. Joe moved over to the window and looked down towards the care home, at Claude Gilbert’s old house. He thrust his hands into his pockets and chewed on his lip. When I joined him at the window, he turned to me.

‘Something isn’t right here,’ he said quietly.

‘Frankie?’ I said. ‘As a witness, or a suspect?’

Joe took a deep breath. He stepped away from the window and returned to his scrutiny of the pictures, taking them in methodically, a couple of seconds with each one before moving on to the next.

I turned round when I heard someone else come into the room. It was Rachel.

‘Frankie safely locked up?’ I said pointedly.

‘For now,’ she said, and she pointed at the photographs. ‘Those will keep him in a cell for a while.’

‘It will be worth all the effort then,’ I said. I didn’t feel like sharing in Rachel’s victorious mood.

‘We need to know about his mother,’ Joe said, interrupting us.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

He turned to look at me. ‘Obsessive loners don’t function well in the wider world because their upbringings are too strict, too restrictive,’ Joe said, and pointed at the pictures. ‘Look at those. Frankie is an obsessive, and he’s sexually repressed. He takes pictures of pretty women because he wants to get close to them but can’t; he captures them artificially, pastes them on the wall, so that it feels like he’s with them, that he’s surrounded by them.’

‘And you think that it is his mother’s fault?’

Joe nodded. ‘Nearly always. Fathers affect behaviour with cruelty or brutality, give their children warped ideas about how to treat people, but mothers can do it by suffocation, by too much love, so that the son finds it impossible to love other women.’

‘So, if that’s applied to Frankie, how would he think of his mother?’ I asked.

Joe sighed. ‘It’s a real paradox. Some part of him will feel hatred or resentment over the fact that she has harmed him psychologically, but at the same time it will become impossible to break out of his mother’s hold. He will worship her, and no woman he ever meets will live up to her, and so he hates his mother even more. That hatred can be transferred to other women.’

I took a deep breath and wished a silent apology to Frankie. ‘Follow me,’ I said, and started to walk out of the door.

‘Where are we going?’

‘You said you had only got as far as the ground floor,’ I said, leading Joe down the stairs to the floor below, until we arrived at the door to Frankie’s mother’s room.

I put my hand on the door handle. ‘You’ll want to see this then,’ I said, and gave the door a push.

As it swung open, casting Joe’s face in a pink light, his mouth moved but no sounds came out. When he looked at me, I saw shock in his eyes.

Then I heard a shout from above.

‘Joe, you might want to come up here. And you, Mr Garrett.’ It was Rachel.

I went back up the stairs behind Joe and, when I went into the attic room, I saw that Rachel was pointing at the computer, a smile on her face. It was still running the slideshow screensaver, but now it was showing pictures that I recognised. It was my house, I could see my car at the front, and it was showing views of a window. Then some zoomed-in shots came up, and I felt my stomach turn over as I saw Laura, getting undressed.

I looked at Joe, who looked embarrassed, and then Rachel smirked and said, ‘She really needs to learn to close the curtains.’

I slammed the door on the way out.

Mike Dobson jumped over the farm gate and held out his hand to help her over. Her touch was light, and he had to reach out to stop her from falling.

As they walked, he kept hold of her hand. Her fingers were soft and warm, and her dress brushed against his leg, the breeze wafting the perfume past his nose. He looked
down at his own clothes and wished he’d got changed out of his shirt and tie, but it felt more real like this, because it was how it was back then, stolen moments between appointments, or escapist afternoons when they knew no one was around. He kept his gaze down towards the floor, so that it still felt like Nancy, her fingers warm in his hand.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘Towards the river,’ he said, pointing ahead.

‘You’re not going to hurt me, are you?’ she said. ‘You seem like a nice man, but we’re a long way from anywhere.’

He stopped and looked at her. She seemed embarrassed, reluctant, and he worried that she was going to bolt back towards the car.

‘I told you, I just want to spend some time with you.’

She looked down as if considering her options, but then she looked up and nodded her agreement.

The track followed the line of a low wall, sloping downwards, with long grass in the field that shifted in the breeze like the swell of the tide. Ahead, the long valley stretched away, the view broken by hedgerows and the occasional car roof as it travelled along the lanes that snaked between the farm tracks.

When they got to the edge of the field, Mike jumped down over a gnarled tree root and then put his bag on the floor. He grabbed her by the waist to lift her down, noticing how light she was.

She looked around. They were at a bend in the river, the level so low that the water shimmered over the stones in the middle, and the grass on the other bank trailed lazily over its surface.

‘It’s nice down here,’ she said.

‘It is. We used to come here,’ he said, pointing towards an old stone folly a little further along the river bank. As her
gaze followed the line of his finger, he said, ‘We used to go in there when the weather was bad and watch the lightning flash over the cottages.’ He smiled, reflective and sad. ‘She used to like it in there. Nancy, that was her name. It was a special place for her.’

‘Nancy?’

He nodded. ‘Just someone I used to know.’

She walked along the river bank, towards the folly. ‘I used to go riding around here,’ she said.

‘Riding? You?’

‘Why are you surprised?’ she said. Then she looked down at herself, a hint of shame in her eyes. ‘I wasn’t born into my life. It just sort of turned out this way.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,’ Mike said, and he joined her in front of the folly.

It looked different to how it had been the last time he had been here. It was just a stone shelter, three-sided, and had become somewhere for ramblers to seek refuge from bad weather, built when the land formed part of a country estate that had long since been divided up and sold off to settle death duties. Now it stood derelict. The windows had been smashed and the back wall was supported now by a large metal plate, riveted in the middle, so that the interior was dark, allowing no view of the countryside behind it. Not like it had been back when it had been special to Nancy. There were empty bottles of vodka in one corner and a couple of damp cigarette packets littered the other.

‘Come back to the river,’ he said, and he turned away. He reached into his bag and pulled out a rug. He spread it on the ground, in the shadow of the tree whose root they had climbed over before. ‘Lie down with me.’

‘How long are we going to be here?’

He sighed, tried to bite back the irritation. He wanted her to enjoy it, but the moment was being spoiled.

‘I’ll pay you more, if you want.’

She thought about that, and then lay down on the rug next to him, her hair spreading out against the red tartan. Her arms were rigid, by her side, nervous. As Mike lay next to her, he put his face to her neck and took another deep breath of the perfume before reaching into the bag once more. He pulled out two plastic wine glasses and a bottle of merlot. Her eyes went hungrily to the bottle and, when he poured her a glass, her first mouthful seemed like it had broken a drought.

He lay back and looked up at the blue sky. Small white clouds threatened to spoil the view. He heard a bird rustle the leaves above him, and he could feel the warmth of the sun on his face.

‘Kiss me,’ he said.

‘I don’t do that,’ she replied.

He closed his eyes, felt his eyelashes get damp.

‘Please,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what I wanted from this.’

There was a moment’s pause, and he heard her put her glass on the floor. He opened his eyes and saw that the blue of the sky was blotted out by the silhouette of her hair, her face hardly visible, cast into shadow. When she leant down to kiss him, his nose was filled with the perfume. He ran his hand up her back as he felt her lips on his. He tasted cigarettes and stale booze. Her kiss was soft and nervy; his was needing. The ridges in her spine were sharp against his fingers and her ribs felt brittle against his chest. His fingers found the zip on her dress, and he pulled it down slowly before lifting it over her head. Her body was outlined against the sun, her arms skinny, the bones jagged in her shoulders.

He closed his eyes. He wanted to remember the woman
she was, not the stick-thin version in front of him. Nancy’s figure had been fuller, her hips rounder.

He gasped as he felt her hands on his belt. She seemed eager, excited, but then, as he opened his eyes, he saw only impatience. She pulled his trousers down and straddled him. He put his hands behind her back, and then ran his hands down to the sharpness of her hip bones. It wasn’t right, not quite the same.

‘No, you’re going too fast,’ he said, trying to pull away, but she found him, made him gasp as she started to move on him, backwards and forwards. There was no sound from her. She was efficient, passionless.

‘Please stop,’ he said. He could feel stones under his buttocks. They were distracting him. But he could smell the perfume and, as he looked at her, with her hair forward over her face, it could have been Nancy.