Dead Silent (33 page)

‘Okay,’ he said, and then his phone clicked off.

I looked over at Bobby and wondered for a moment what I should do. I couldn’t take him with me, and the story had to go in. Then I realised that shielding Mike Dobson was very different to meeting someone who claimed to be Claude Gilbert. I remembered the girl from last night, her lifeless legs caught in the glare of the headlights, and I knew that there was only one thing I could do. The story wasn’t about Mike Dobson. It was about Claude Gilbert, it had always been about Claude Gilbert. I could write Mike Dobson’s story another day. I had promised Harry a front page, and I was going to give him one.

I dialled Laura’s number. When she answered, I faltered for a moment. Then I remembered how difficult I had made things for Laura by keeping information from her, but she
had still given up Mike Dobson to me. I could repay her with the arrest. I quickly told her where she could find Dobson and then I hung up.

I went back to my story, but it was to find that some of the polish had gone. I had betrayed Mike Dobson. I just hoped that Claude Gilbert was right about him.

Laura clicked off her phone and looked back at the crime scene. She had been there all day with Thomas, manning the blue and white tape while the scene was examined and the fingertip searches completed. The forensic team had gone, and the tape had been left stretched across the street, just to keep out the curious. It bounced in the wind as a television crew packed up its equipment—if you counted a cameraman and a young redhead who had spent most of her time checking herself in a mirror as a crew.

Laura tapped her chin with her phone, working out her next move. Thomas asked, ‘Do you think the guy with her last night might be the one we spoke to? Dobson?’

She didn’t want to answer the question. How would it look when it came out that she had spoken with Dobson the day before, just before Hazel was killed? She should have given his name to Joe the day before, but Rachel had got in the way of that.

But it
hadn’t
been Rachel. It had been her, Laura, who had got in the way, because of her stupid pride; she was jealous because Rachel was in the hot seat and she was confined to wearing the bloody uniform until she got through her sergeant’s exam.

Laura looked at Thomas and realised that he was still waiting for her answer. ‘Yes, maybe it was Mike Dobson,’ she said, and she knew that Thomas was thinking the same thing as her—that they could have stopped him.

She had to make it right.

‘I want you to stay here,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll collect you before the end of the shift. You know what to do. Just keep people away.’

Laura headed to the squad car she had been using. It was hardly the car to sneak up on anyone, with its fluorescent markings, but she could get to the park before anyone else, and she didn’t trust some of the more excitable cops not to do it with lights flashing and two-tones blaring.

As she pulled away, ready to drive around the piece of wasteland in front of her, she thought she saw something—a red flash, like a blink of light. The windows of the houses facing them across a patch of dust and grass had been like mirrors all day, reflecting back the bright sunshine. Now the afternoon sun had gone, they were turning into dark shadows, and Laura could see into the windows.

She drove slowly towards them, and then she saw it again, a definite red light.

Laura checked her watch. Jack had told Mike Dobson to wait there for twenty minutes, but she knew that Dobson was going to get twitchy; she didn’t have much time. She drove past the source of the light, the first-floor window of a redbrick terrace, and was about to put her foot down to get to Dobson when she saw that the light was next to the black wink of a camera lens.

Laura slammed on her brakes and looked up at the house. The camera was on the window sill, pointing into the street. She turned to see what it was pointing at. The detectives had been round to all the local businesses to look at their CCTV tapes, and she had heard the mutters that most were dummy boxes. She had watched them do the door-to-doors and had heard nothing about any footage from any of the houses.

What was the camera looking at? There was nothing there
except wasteland and derelict streets populated by prostitutes and their clients.

Then she got it, and she started to smile. It was the prostitutes that the camera was watching.

Laura jumped out of the car and banged on the front door of the house. There was no reply and so she banged again, louder this time, and heard footsteps shuffle along the hallway. When the door opened, Laura saw a short man with flaking skin peering at her through thick glasses, a small piece of tape holding the frames together. He was wearing a faded checked shirt and baggy stonewashed jeans that looked like they had jumped right out of the eighties.

‘I spoke to your people before,’ he said.

Laura noticed the wariness in his voice. ‘Did you mention the camera?’ she asked.

He faltered at that and his eyes flickered upwards, as if he could see it through the ceiling.

‘That’s right, up there,’ she said, pointing. ‘I can see it in your window, right now.’

His tongue did a little dance between his lips and then he said, ‘It wasn’t turned on last night. There’s nothing to see.’

‘I want to look, just to check,’ she said, stepping forward, bluffing him.

He shook his head and barred her way.

Laura stepped back. ‘Okay, it’s like this,’ she said, her hands on her belt. ‘You get off on watching men having sex with drug addicts. If that’s your thing, fine, we all have needs, but I’m going to pass this on to the team working the murder. You can delete all your stuff if you want, but the experts will still be able to recover it. You can take a hammer to your hard drive, I suppose, but if another girl out there dies, I hope you can live with that.’

Laura saw that he had gone pale.

‘I’m going somewhere now, and I’ll be going off duty soon, but expect a knock on your door.’

He swallowed, and still seemed incapable of speech.

Laura smiled politely. ‘If it turns out that you did leave your camera on last night, try and find a gold Mercedes. Put it on a disk and bring it to the station. Ask for Joe Kinsella. It might stop someone from crawling over your computer, looking at all the stuff you’re not supposed to have.’

He nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and Laura thought his mouth sounded dry as she turned to walk back to the car.

Now she had to get to the park before Mike Dobson decided that he wasn’t in a waiting mood.

Mike Dobson clutched his phone to his chest. He’d made the call, but where was the reporter? What if Garrett didn’t come?

His thoughts spun around, as if they were trying to work their way out of his head. He had been in the park all afternoon, looking at the chimneys of Nancy’s house. It was never Claude’s house to him, but Nancy’s, the place where they had passed all those hours. Where he had spent Nancy’s last hours. He moaned and clutched his head. It was his last taste of freedom, he knew that, and so he had spent it with a bottle of vodka. The first mouthful had been sour and made his chest burn, but he had persisted with it. He had drunk less than half of it, but that didn’t mean that he could avoid squinting as the daylight assaulted him too quickly, his pupils sluggish. He should have drunk less; he realised now that he wanted to remember the day, the sun on his face in an open park, to feel it, not numb it.

His phone buzzed again. It would be his boss, wanting to know why he had missed three sales appointments, worried that some lucky punter had missed out on the chance to buy overpriced plastic guttering. He almost laughed. Is that what his life had amounted to, paying the bills by bullying people in their own homes to buy things they didn’t want? Fuck
him. None of it mattered any more. It never really had. He could tell his boss exactly where he was. He was at the end.

He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of wings fluttering in a bush behind him, and then the sound of engines from outside the park. He expected the wail of sirens, but there was just the noise of ordinary lives and the high-pitched laughter of college kids on the patch of grass a few yards away. Were they laughing about him, a middle-aged man on a park bench, a bottle of vodka next to him?

He opened his eyes quickly, sensing someone watching him. He looked around, but there was no one there. He tried to peer into the bushes—was someone there? But he couldn’t see anything.

He knew he had to keep moving, he had to keep his mind clear so that he could decide what best to do. He would tell the reporter his story, so that everyone would understand, but it wasn’t safe to sit in one place in the meantime. If he kept on walking round the park, he would still be able to see the reporter as he came through the gates. He creaked to his feet and set off walking along the tarmac path that would take him around a large pond, where the houses higher up the hill looked down over the park. He stole another glance at the chimneys of the Gilbert house. His head was filled with the clip of his leather soles on the tarmac.

He tried to think about the night before as he walked. Hazel, that was her name, he knew that now, but why had he never asked her? Was she only ever Nancy to him? He had kept quiet for more than twenty years now, and he saw how his life had meant nothing in the end—just one long memory of one awful night. And why would Hazel be dead? He could remember things now, like driving into Blackley, Hazel in the passenger seat, it was coming back to him. And she was Hazel to him now. Why not before?

But Nancy was dead, and he still heard her noises, the soft thumps, sometimes cries.

What would he do next? The police were looking for him, and they would take samples from him. Blood, hair, fingerprints, DNA. What else would they find out when they ran him through the computers? What else would it match up with?

He rubbed the sweat out of his eyes and looked down. He watched his feet walk onwards, one shoe forward at a time, just the constant movement towards…what? His arrest? The end of his life? Every step was one step closer. And what about Mary? What would she do now?

He looked up at that thought. He couldn’t think about Mary. He had to think about himself now. He hadn’t killed Hazel, he was certain of that. But would it matter if he had? He had taken one life. Would one more make him worse, or just the same?

He blinked as the sunlight bounced off the pond and saw someone in the distance. A woman. She looked familiar, but she was just in silhouette. He thought back through his clients. Maybe she looked like one of them. Brunette hair over her shoulders, tall and shapely.

He looked down at his shirt as she came closer. He could see dirt trails on the white cotton. It shouldn’t be like that. As he looked up again, he saw that she was still there, on the path, watching him as he drew nearer. Maybe it was the bottle hanging loosely in his hand that made her stare. He looked up the hill and saw the Gilbert house again, and he heard something, like a soft laugh. He shook his head to get rid of the noise, but it echoed through his brain.

Something wasn’t right, he sensed it. The breeze blew the scent of summer towards him, cut grass and flower beds, and he thought of Nancy again. For every day of every year,
his life had always been about Nancy. Her cries, the bangs, and the images of her, glimpsed as movement at the edge of his vision.

He took one last deep breath and straightened himself. The woman was getting closer. She was definitely watching him, the sun behind her, her face in shadow. He felt dirty, his clothes wet from perspiration.

Then he stopped; he recognised her. The bottle slipped from his hand and smashed on the floor. She stepped closer, and he felt his chin tremble and beads of sweat burst onto his forehead.

It was her, the policewoman, the one who had warned him. She had waited for him to go to her. He looked down at his hands as he flexed and unflexed his fingers, and he thought they shimmered in the sunshine. When he looked up, he thought the horizon looked indistinct, paler than it had before.

He turned around to see people running towards him from the other end of the park.

He looked back to the policewoman and tried to suck in some air, just to stop the world from shifting under his feet. Then, as a tear rolled down his cheek, he stepped towards her and held out his hands. The cold metal of the handcuffs snapped tightly around his wrist, and he felt his knees give way as he slumped to the floor.

I was taking a break from the story when Harry rang. I was standing at the window, watching the fields acquire orange fringes as the sun slipped lower into the horizon.

‘Harry, don’t worry, it’s all under control,’ I said, before he had the chance to say anything.

He started with a cough and then said, ‘We’ve got the front page, with pages four and five on standby, so it better
be under control.’ His gravelly voice was loud in my ear. ‘You haven’t got long, Jack. I’ve got a conference room booked at the Lowry Hotel in Manchester for ten o’clock tomorrow. I’ll be on the first train, so don’t be late. Bring him in through the kitchens. I’ll clear it with the staff tomorrow.’

‘No tricks this time,’ I said.

Harry chuckled.

‘Are you sure you’ll be able to cope with the North, Harry?’ I asked.

‘I’ll bring my clogs,’ he said, and hung up.

I looked back at my laptop and realised that I had to finish the story, and soon. He would need it before eight, because Harry’s job was to fill the paper, and if the story came after the press conference, then it would be old news by the following morning. He wanted the news-stand shock factor, the commuters’ double-take.

That wasn’t my worry though. I knew the story would be sitting in Harry’s inbox within the next thirty minutes. I was onto the fine-tuning stage now, just taking a short coffee stop so that I could go back to it fresh. It was the silence from Claude that was worrying me.

I looked at my phone again, as if that would make it ring. It had been a few hours since I had spoken to Susie, and still Claude hadn’t called. I didn’t know where he was and if Claude decided to run away again the whole story paled. The rival papers for the next day would be filled with ridicule, and Harry would never forgive me. The scoop of my career could turn me into a laughing stock, and I wasn’t ready for that.