Stop Me (3 page)

On April 2
^nd
2008, Howard Bonsignore, a travelling sales rep for Gristex cattle feed products, already arrested for the murder of Tom Andrutti, admitted to all the Vacation Killer murders as well as the murders of two male prostitutes which he claimed to have committed in Montenegro. These were never confirmed and details of his sporadic American interstate movements were also sketchy. However, his Gristex company itinerary confirmed his presence in Montenegro but more importantly in Germany and the UK at the most relevant times and it seemed that was all that was necessary. Authorities buckling under pressure from all sides welcomed his timely candour. The murders ceased but then they had for nearly three months before Bonsignore opened his mouth.

And after that the case snapped shut, revealing little else of value to the victims’ families while Bonsignore revelled in the ongoing enigma. The locations of the bodies remaining unidentified.

The British police were as sceptical about Bonsignore’s confession as Leo, and even after the convict’s confession to all the murders including Laura’s, Leo still saw the cars in his street. He knew it was partly his own paranoia but he was positive that some of the time he was still being watched by the police. It was something that he’d grown accustomed to, however, and he convinced himself that their presence would eventually bear out his innocence.

Eleven months after his confession, Bonsignore awoke to the buzz of the motorised lock on his cell. He was always the last to eat and already it felt like the acid in his empty stomach was eating him alive. He was sure the guards made him wait longer and longer each day. As he swung his legs off the bunk, he wondered which scraps would be left for him this time. He hadn’t even been able to identify yesterday’s meal.

One of the new guards was waiting for him at the end of the corridor tonight. He’d only been working at Baraga for a couple of weeks. Hadn’t even started shaving. They were both pieces of white trash; only age and a uniform separated them. Bonsignore could tell that he frightened the new kid though and tried
to meet his eye as he passed. The boy looked at his shoes as he waited to lock the door again. Bonsignore took a long look at him and inhaled – cheap soap and popcorn – just enough to recharge the fantasy about him he’d been using at night. He dreamt more about the boy than he did about bloody doorsteps of rib-eye steak. The door was closed quickly behind him and he ambled slowly down to the canteen block, tugging on the growth of hair under his bottom lip.

When he reached the crossroads at the end of that corridor Bonsignore was suddenly aware that something wasn’t right. There was too much sound bouncing back at him and he realised that some of the other prisoners had still to return to their cells. There was a long line of them passing from his left to his right and he instinctively took a step backwards to allow them to pass. The guards knew better than to mix him with the others; what the fuck were they playing at? He liked them to believe that he hated taking his meals alone but it was actually something he looked on as a privilege. The brawls he’d instigated in the past had afforded him the isolation he wanted but they’d mis-timed the mealtimes tonight and he suddenly felt vulnerable.

For a moment Bonsignore was clutching the rusty wires of the tree swing he’d used to jump off of naked into the creek when he was seven, could feel the abrasion of the steel in his young palms and the smoothness of the
wooden seat as he let go. There was no splash though – just a pop sound as if someone had squeezed some bubble pack in his ear
.

Then the object that had been shoved into his eyeball released the clear aqueous fluid inside it before piercing further into his brain. His memory disconnected from his considerable weight and he folded to the floor like a paper lantern.

Leo heard Laura murmur something to him as if she was half asleep, then made that sound she always did with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. He felt her henna hair on his face and smelt and felt her breath about his top lip. Then the phone punched through the temazepam and he didn’t know if he’d been asleep for an hour or a minute. He looked at the telephone for a while and marvelled at how long the person on the other end was waiting for an answer. Whoever it was knew what it took.

If they ring off before I can reach it, Laura is alive.

He picked up.

‘Leo. It’s Matty…’ Small talk was no currency.

‘I was asleep.’ Leo said through his nostrils.

‘Thought I’d swing by.’

That woke Leo up. ‘When?’ He played for time while he tried to think of an excuse.

‘Today.’

‘I have to sleep today. I’m still on nights.’

‘I’m sitting in my car outside your house. Open up.’ Matty hung up to underline the victory.

Leo opened the curtain, peered at Matty’s Lexus parked at the end of the drive and did a customary scan for a police surveillance car. There were none parked in the street that looked familiar. He was sure the police regularly switched cars though. Then he caught his own thirty-year-old features in the glass and noticed how they coordinated with the grey morning outside. Although his newly grown dark moustache was neatly trimmed, his excavated expression jarred with the sharp symmetry of his closely shaved hair. He’d never worn it as short when Laura had been around. She’d always said she’d fancy him with a moustache and a number one but he’d never been keen.

He guessed that it was now some time within the hours of respectable nine to five and noticed he was still dressed in his security uniform from the night before. He padded down the stairs and opened the door to an expression of stifled exasperation that he was more than accustomed to finding on his younger brother’s face. Matty was about to insert a key into the lock and Leo chided himself for having given Matty the duplicate key when he and Laura had needed somebody to water the plants.

Matty hadn’t changed since they were kids and still sported the tight brown curls and the flaring nostrils
that had attracted a lot of unkind ribbing at school. There was only two years between them but there was nothing in their features to tie them by blood. So much so that, as a child, Leo had wondered if they’d been adopted.

Matty was clutching some brown paper take-out bags under his arm. ‘Like your hair that length.’ Matty must have read somewhere that you should always try to start every conversation by saying something positive even if it was untrue. His second statement pushed crabbily to the front of the queue, however. ‘What took you so long?’

‘I had to get dressed.’ Leo answered.

Matty didn’t wait to be invited in and ducked under the arm that Leo had deliberately left between his body and the door handle. Leo shut the door and scraped up some mail off the wooden tiles, turning to find him in the kitchen unpacking some wrapped food from the bag. Outwardly confident and take-control Matty. How quickly things had turned around. ‘You brought us breakfast?’ He followed him to exert some damage control.

‘Brunch. There’s dozens of wholefood places around here. Have you any idea how long it took me to find a café selling good old-fashioned filth?’ Matty dumped the grease-spotted bags on the counter and garnished them with a couple of sauce sachets and scrunched up napkins.

Leo quickly lifted them off the counter and felt his stomach muscles lock when he saw the shiny stains they’d left. He opened a cupboard and felt the same sensation as he pulled out two side plates from the neat stack inside. He dumped the bags on them. He could wash them up and return them to the stack immediately after Matty left.

‘Ciggy.’ Matty made for the back door and unlocked it so he could stand on the balcony overlooking the small, gravelled garden.

It irritated Leo that Matty never had a cigarette on his way over. It meant he had to stand out there with him in the cold.

‘How’s things?’ Matty exhaled smoke through it matter-of-factly, as if it weren’t as significant as everyone who asked it of Leo.

‘Working a lot.’

‘Too much maybe?’

Leo was in no mood for Matty’s new caring, sharing persona. ‘So, are you on your way somewhere?’

‘Got a few things to do in town. I did make the journey to see you though.’ He narrowed his eyes into the distance for effect. ‘Thought you’d like some company on your birthday.’ Another victory.

The mail was still in Leo’s hands. He’d wondered why there’d been a few more coloured envelopes than usual. ‘It’s very thoughtful of you, Matty. I’ve got plans already though,’ he lied.

‘Corresponding with your internet lunatic?’ He changed tack as soon as he registered Leo’s lips harden. ‘Why don’t you get some time off and come over to see us. We could book somewhere.’

‘Us’ meant Carla and the twins. Carla had a sparkling smile and intelligence that she seemed to have distributed evenly between her children. Leo missed playing with them. Missed improvising assault courses for them in the back garden. ‘Difficult to get the time off at the moment. Maybe we could arrange to do something over the next couple of weeks.’

Matty filled his chest with air as if girding himself for the usual date commitment tussle. ‘Molly and Greg haven’t seen you in ages.’

‘I know. I did call in for their birthdays.’ He recalled how they’d both clung to his legs as he’d left.

‘That was August.’ Matty jigged his foot between the bottom of the railing.

‘Let me have a look at the rota.’

‘Look, everyone’s concerned about you, OK?’ Matty turned and made significant eye contact with him. ‘Everyone.’

It was a good performance but Leo knew it was just Matty acting in a way he knew he was supposed to. He was learning and it was well intentioned, but Leo just couldn’t take it coming from him.

‘Let me have a look at the rota when I go in tonight.’

‘OK, but phone us tomorrow. I’m telling them you’re coming, OK?’

Leo was relieved that it was once again down to the vagaries of telephones and missed calls. He waved Matty off soon after.

If he doesn’t beep the horn then she’s not in pain.

Matty did.

Cleaves watched Matty pull away from the house and Leo closing the front door. He’d seen Matty visit him before but registered that it had been some time since his last social call. Now Leo was inside again he put the fan on to clear the condensation from the windscreen.

Leo’s existence seemed to follow the same pattern. Work, sleep, clean the house, interspersed with sporadic visits to the supermarket and the barber’s. It looked like another carbon-copy surveillance day. And as Cleaves tore off half a stick of breakfast gum and chewed it in the side of his jaw that didn’t ache, he didn’t suspect that the next twenty-four hours would compromise the position and identity he’d carefully maintained for all the months he’d been watching Leo.

Leo glanced around the seventies décor of the living room. It was now fifteen months since Laura had vanished and nothing had changed. The Christmas streamers were still up and the pea-green walls still sported blotches of test pot paint, the winning colour’s re-enforcements purchased and waiting unopened in tins under the stairs. Everything was now more pristine and polished than it had ever been when Laura had lived here but it wasn’t right that he should finish their colour scheme alone.

The house was nothing more than a routinely maintained showroom but it reminded him that Laura was still unmistakably present. Not just in the photos of them together that hung from walls and stood on the cupboard and TV unit. Everything echoed her, from the layout of the room to the empty, handmade fruit bowl in the middle of the dining table that had her name kiln-fired into the bottom.

He felt a heaviness in his head and realised that his breathing had got louder. The prescription sleeping pills had waited patiently for his brother to leave but now the adrenaline had ebbed they were demanding his full attention.

He lingered though; feeling like he’d broken into someone else’s house, and Laura observed him from all angles. She wasn’t the most successful photographer’s subject; her dark brown eyes were slightly narrowed by a stagy, lopsided smile in all the pictures. However the
gentle mischief that played above the band of freckles that extended in a strip across the bridge of her nose was present in all of them. And when he looked at her laughing he could hear her peculiar way of not laughing, the sound trapping in her throat and her shoulders silently quaking.

He headed for bed but when he got there he swung the laptop onto this knees.

Doctor Mutatkar sat with his family at dinner but heard none of what was being said. It was a common state of affairs and he’d long learnt how to disguise it. It used to be easier. With such a workload his wife was quick to blame his preoccupation on the pressures of his job but lately she sat opposite and waited for him to emerge from his reveries with a look that probably mirrored his.

His mind was still in the other place, the place he’d much rather be right now. The TV news had rekindled a dread that he thought he’d got used to but which was still waiting for him as keenly and as undiluted as it had on those days directly after what had happened.

The room closed around the faces in his foreground and when he avoided their eyes he was looking at a plate of food that he knew he couldn’t force himself to eat.

He excused himself and, feeling his wife’s eyes on him, walked as calmly as he could out of the room and headed to the downstairs toilet – but his cheeks burnt even in the cool atmosphere there.

He caught himself in the mirror, something he’d been avoiding for some time. He wondered what his wife saw when she looked at him. She’d stopped telling him the lines on his fifty-five-year-old features were distinguished anymore but she was the last person to stop recognising him. He’d not been able to for years.

He felt the weight of the deception as if it hung in a heavy bag hooked to his stomach. He lifted the seat to vomit.

Leo ground another meal to paste and surveyed four corridors from eight different angles. He looked at the tortilla wrap in his hand to remind himself what he was eating and waited for the black and white images on the monitors in front of him to change. They did at the exact second he knew they would. He didn’t even have to count now; his brain was completely attuned to their rhythm.

The cleaners would be coming in soon. His body clock told him this because he felt suddenly alert and it was just at the end of his shift that he was the most awake. With the effects of the pills completely wearing off it lasted about half an hour before he could get home and swallow some more.

He wondered how pleased his employers would be to know that he dozed and hallucinated for the majority of his shift but woke up when there were other employees in the building.

The images on the screen changed again.

If a cleaner appears in the next five seconds it means Laura’s dead.

Leo held his breath but no figure appeared. He felt a slight relief as he breathed out. The darker perspective of the shadowy warehouse fire exits highlighted the reflection of his sun-starved features. Ashley said he lacked Vitamin D and had bought him a canister of supplements. Figuring his insides probably already resembled a chalk landscape, he’d never taken any.

Moments of clarity, that’s what he hated about the last half hour. He used to have a nightmare when he was a kid. It was about somebody breaking in through the back door. The frosted pane revealed only the dark shape of the intruder but the worst part was not only that he couldn’t move as the rattles of the handle became more aggressive, but that his eyes felt like they could only open a crack as he struggled to glimpse the figure as the door opened. He never did see the intruder but nowadays it was being able to open his eyes that brought him the closest to panic.

He pictured Matty talking to Carla while the twins dangled from him and him telling her about his visit to Leo and how he’d tried his best. He tried not to imagine
Molly and Greg’s disappointment. They were sweet kids but Leo didn’t trust himself not to disappoint them for real. The medication affected his moods but he knew it was more about trying to keep his patience in check with Matty rather than the kids. It annoyed Leo that Matty pretended to be their real father when actually he had only inherited the perfect family, refusing to acknowledge the spectre of Carla’s ex and the fact that she’d brought them up perfectly well before he’d sidled onto the scene.

He peered past his reflection and into the shadows of the warehouse and felt a familiar sensation of inertia – waiting for something that wasn’t about to happen. Then the phone rang. It rarely did and its strident sound kick-started his circulation.

‘Security?’

‘Leo?’

He recognised the dried out husk of her voice immediately. ‘Hello, Maggie.’

‘I’m so sorry. I tried your home number.’ Nowadays, Maggie Allan-Carlin always sounded apologetic. ‘Are you in the middle of something?’

‘No, what’s wrong?’ Something had to be.

‘It’s Bonsignore.’

Leo hadn’t heard the name for a good while but his brain had turned it over so many times that it still sounded threadbare. ‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead.’