Running Girl (39 page)

‘I see,' Garvie said.

He backed away again, and Mr Dow took another step forward, still staring at him in silence.

‘Well,' Garvie said conversationally, ‘I know this is a cliché, but in fact the police are on their way. The house will be surrounded. You can't escape. You shouldn't do anything rash. I needn't go on.' He paused. ‘Need I?'

Mr Dow stepped forward again and Garvie took another step back.

‘Though I should probably try to keep you talking at this point. If you could ramble on about how you killed her it would help.'

Saying nothing, Mr Dow advanced heavily, and Garvie went slowly further backwards.

‘Actually, I've got a question. About that job you were doing Friday. You must have left the property straight after the sparks and chippie went at four, with the painting still half done. But it was all finished by start of work Monday morning. So did you go back at the weekend to—'

The man caught him mid-sentence by the throat and heaved him wriggling against the wall and hung him there, choking. He drew his arm so far back Garvie couldn't see it any more, and punched him suddenly in the eyes with a loud crunch. Falling sideways out of his grip, Garvie staggered down the narrow hallway, blind and gasping, as far as the Dows' bedroom, where he stopped and turned, just as Mr Dow lunged at him again. He ducked to the side of the blow and caught the man off-balance with a hack to the leg, and scrambled through the bedroom door and slammed it behind him. Bracing himself, he gulped for air. He couldn't see out of one eye. Wiping blood from the other, he blinked and flinched with pain.

The bedroom door, which had no lock, burst open almost immediately, flinging him forward, and Mr Dow came into the room behind him, breathing hard. There was no doubting the man's brute strength. Garvie retreated limping round the far side of the bed, watching out of his one good eye as Mr Dow came after him again, methodically. Even now, as if in useless self-mockery, his brain registered the fine detail of the room. It was all pink and cream, very neat. There were built-in ivory-coloured wardrobes and a double bed with an ivory-coloured duvet, and bedside chairs upholstered in pink velvet. On a dressing table stood a jewellery box, hairbrush set and two large china vases, both hideous. Mr Dow took the claw hammer out of his tool-belt. Garvie saw that in detail too. The sticky end of it was bristly with hairs.

Garvie spat blood. ‘This is your last chance,' he said in a gargle, ‘to give yourself up quietly.'

As Dow came after him, hammer raised, he leaped up onto the bed and staggered bouncing across it, but Dow was quicker than he thought and caught him meatily on the point of his shoulder with another blow of his hammer, sending him crashing face-first into the wooden panelling of the headboard. He fell over the side of the bed, flailing. Dow appeared above him, and he flung a pair of pyjama bottoms which he found in his hand upwards into the man's face, and scrambled into the ensuite bathroom, where he slammed the door and turned the key.

His legs gave way then, and he fell against the tiled wall, panting. His shoulder glowed fiercely with a burning pain and his right arm hung down numb and useless. There was no fight left in him, he knew. The flimsy door shook as he looked, one-eyed, around the tiny bathroom. There was nothing in it to save him; nothing of use in the washbasin, toilet, shower cubicle, free-standing rack of toiletries. Not even a monkey could have escaped through the scrap of frosted glass in the window.

For a moment there was complete silence except for the small wet gasps of his own breathing.

With a noise like a gunshot, the hammer crashed through the flimsy panelling.

Garvie tried to pull himself together. ‘Toilet's occupied,' he called out. ‘You'll have to wait a minute.'

The hammer crashed through the door a second time and a jagged piece of panelling fell out, revealing Mr Dow on the other side lifting the hammer again.

‘Think of the mess,' Garvie croaked. ‘Not to mention the expense.'

With his left hand he squirted shower gel through the gap in the door, and Mr Dow wiped his face and lunged forward with his hammer a third time.

There was nothing left now for Garvie to do. He stood up with the sinking feeling that all his gambles had failed, and quietly faced the door. The hammer crashed through it a final time, the last of the panelling flew apart and Mr Dow stood there in front of him.

Garvie looked at him through his one eye.
This is how he must have looked to Chloe in the end
, he thought.
A big, silent man with empty eyes and violent hands
.

He spoke up to say one final thing. ‘Your biggest mistake was not to understand your wife.'

The incomprehension in the man's face was replaced by a spasm of hatred, and at last he broke his silence.

‘That bitch,' he said with a twisted leer, and lifted the hammer.

There was a blur of movement behind him, and a noise like a dropped bottle. He fell forward heavily, and Mrs Dow appeared behind him, ragged and ghastly, with the remains of one of the hideous dressing-table china vases in her hands.

She stood over him, bleeding. ‘You killed my daughter,' she said thickly. ‘You bastard.'

And as Garvie tottered through the shattered door to take the shard of vase from her, there was the sound outside of cars drawing up at speed and car doors slamming.

They looked at each other.

‘Typical, isn't it?' Garvie said thickly. ‘They never arrive until you don't need them any more.'

JUNE ARRIVED WET
and cool. Rain fell onto the city out of numb grey skies; it dripped from trees, gurgled down drains and stood everywhere in puddles as dull as the sky overhead. On Bulwarks Lane the gutters overflowed, flooding the road outside Jamal's. A smell of rot hung in the streets, and people's houses filled with soaked shoes, dripping umbrellas and steaming coats.

One rainy evening at about nine o'clock Detective Inspector Raminder Singh drove into Five Mile. It was the first time he'd been into the estate since his dash to Fox Walk a week earlier. He went past the turn to the Dows' house, along Old Ditch Road past the kiddies' playground, onto Pilkington Driftway, and drew up at last outside Eastwick Gardens. The first thing he saw was the For Sale sign for Flat 12 and he let out a small sigh. He couldn't blame Mrs Smith, but he knew what Garvie thought about a move to Barbados.

Carrying his briefcase, he left his car and walked with his usual self-possession through the downpour to the flats' entrance, and a few minutes later followed Mrs Smith into her flat. Voices met him: Leonard Johnson and his wife finishing dinner in the kitchen. Looking around, he saw Garvie brooding in the corner and nodded briefly, but the boy gave him no more than a blank stare before returning his attention to the floor.

In his briefcase were documents relating to Garvie's absence at his exams: they confirmed what the police referred to as ‘unavoidable involvement in police business'. Garvie's mother took the envelope from the inspector and went to find her glasses, and Leonard Johnson came over and shook hands with Singh and congratulated him on the outcome of the Dow investigation.

‘I can't think of it with satisfaction,' Singh said. ‘There were too many mistakes.'

‘You can say that again,' Garvie said, still staring at the floor.

Uncle Len frowned. ‘You might as well enjoy it, Raminder. They kick you when you're down and ignore you when you're up.'

He was referring to the media. All week the headlines had been about the ‘Beauty and the Beast' case. Most attention had gone as usual to the killer, the ‘Beast', a familiar journalistic farrago of astonished outrage and righteous fury. The police had received little more than a grudging acknowledgement that in the end they hadn't entirely failed to rise above their initial incompetence.

‘What's the chief's view?'

‘His homicidal urge has subsided. I am allowed to remain in position.'

‘I'm glad.'

‘The law-abiding world will be glad,' Garvie said to the floor. ‘Criminals everywhere will shake in terror.' His uncle rounded on him. ‘I don't see what you've got to complain about. You've been remarkably fortunate. You shouldn't have got involved, you were told not to get involved, and you got involved anyway. It was only by some fluke you managed to avoid serious danger. Look at you.'

They looked at him. He still wore an eye-patch, his face was swollen and there was a black scrawl of stitches across his lower lip. He wore a sling round his right arm. When he shifted his position under their gaze, he winced.

‘It's not me I'm thinking of,' he said quietly.

‘Well, your mother's thinking of you,' Uncle Len said. ‘You don't know what she's been through.'

‘I know,' Garvie said.

In fact it was Uncle Len who didn't know; he hadn't been told the exact nature of Garvie's involvement – it was thought it might unbalance him.

‘You've been lucky,' his uncle persisted. ‘You even get a mention in the press.'

It was true. Although details had not been released by the police, it was known that a boy – unidentified for legal reasons – had been in the Dows' house when the police arrived to apprehend Chloe's killer. It was speculated that he had been present during the violent altercation between the spouses in which Mr Dow had eventually been overcome. As yet no journalist had connected this boy with boys mentioned at various points earlier: in reports of the conflagration at the Tick Hill trailer park which had led to the arrest of the Winders, the events surrounding the suicide of Paul Johnson, aka Ben Naylor, in the woods at the end of Badger Lane, and the unfortunate arrest and detention of Alex Robinson, whose family was currently suing the police for mistreatment.

Uncle Len returned to Singh. ‘There are several things I don't understand, Raminder. It was announced early on that this man, Dow, had an alibi. He was at a house finishing a paint job.'

Singh nodded. ‘He said he stayed at the property where he was working till quarter to six and a neighbour corroborated it. He heard Dow working all afternoon and saw him drive off to meet his wife at the Centre.'

‘So what really happened?'

‘It turns out Dow has a marijuana habit. When his workmates left, he got the idea of sneaking home for a quick smoke. To give the impression he was still at work, he left the radio on and his van parked outside the house and rode back to Fox Walk on a bicycle he found at the property. It's only ten minutes away. He was in his back garden when Chloe came home earlier than expected. Usually at that time she was on the track. It seems he acted at once. But when he tried to force himself on her, she fought back, and it got out of hand. He's a powerful man. It was probably all over in a few minutes,'

There was silence.

‘What about the paint job he was meant to be finishing?'

‘He went back on Sunday to finish it while Mrs Dow was sedated with sleeping tablets.' He paused. ‘He was a good liar: he stuck close to the truth. He explained the marks on his face by a fall from his ladder which had been witnessed by his workmates. He guessed that someone might have spotted his van up at Pike Pond while he was dumping Chloe's body so he told us straight away he'd driven there that evening looking for her. It fitted.'

Aunt Maxie said, ‘How could he think so clearly? How could he think at all after what he'd done?'

‘He thought fast too. He didn't have much time. The idea with the note, for instance. And when he couldn't find her running shoes, he didn't panic. He just left the body in the garage and went out to buy a new pair.'

‘Right under the nose of his wife,' Aunt Maxie said.

Uncle Len nodded. ‘And dumping the body in the pond, that was smart. Water destroys so much forensic evidence. It made people think she'd been attacked up there.'

‘He remembered to throw her phone in too,' Singh said. ‘Some of the calls he'd made to her over the previous weeks were probably threatening. We know now that he'd been pestering her for some time. Mrs Dow reported arguments between him and Chloe: she thought they were motivated by Chloe's jealousy. The truth is, he's a sexual predator who was waiting only for the right moment. I think he knew that Chloe was being intimidated by other men. He knew about Alex, he'd seen the Porsche once before, perhaps he even guessed what was going on at school with the caretaker. That afternoon he must have sensed she was particularly vulnerable. He was a decisive man, and ruthless, and he didn't make mistakes.'

‘He made three mistakes,' Garvie said, and they all turned to look at him. ‘Three obvious mistakes a child of six could have spotted.'

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘Those shoes,' Garvie said. ‘Orange and lime green. Basically, Chloe wouldn't have been seen alive in them.'

‘All right. What was his second mistake?'

‘Filing the receipt. That's colossal. Being neat makes you stupid. Everyone should remember that. But his third mistake was the worst.'

‘What was that?'

‘The gambling chip. He must have been worrying about how stupid the police were being. That's understandable. He'd already supplied them with the clue about Winder's Porsche but they didn't follow it up as he hoped. So he took a risk to make the connection stronger, and slipped an Imperium chip into her jacket pocket. Dense. I'd tried on that jacket at the Dows' a couple of days after her death and there was nothing in the pocket.'

They all looked at him.

His mother said, ‘You tried on her jacket?'

‘Yeah.' He looked at them all looking at him. ‘It went pretty well with her grey jeggings and pink T-shirt. Felix thought so.'

There was a disapproving silence.

Aunt Maxie said, ‘It's strange to think about Chloe now. Don't you think? We didn't know her. She had so many secrets. There were so many people trying to use her, and nobody knew.'