Authors: A.J. Waines
‘Tomorrow night? To look at more evidence?’
‘No. Not exactly.’ DCI Madison rubbed his nose. ‘I was thinking of something…off-duty…my way of saying thanks, I suppose.’
He’d caught me entirely off guard, but suddenly my chest felt warm, as if a hot-water bottle had found its way inside my jacket.
‘Oh. Is that protocol?’
‘Not strictly, but you’re giving us such a lot of your time and…’
‘Yes, that would be lovely,’ I said, before he could change his mind. ‘Is Derek coming?’ I tried to hide a smile.
He grinned, his hands in his pockets. ‘Er, no. I forgot to ask.’
‘Right, then.’ I stood fiddling with the buckle on my bag, feeling like a school girl.
‘Is dinner, okay?’ he said, toying with some papers on the desk.
‘Perfect. One thing, though. I can’t go for dinner with you and keep calling you Detective Chief Inspector Madison.’
‘No, you can’t.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Brad - Bradley Madison.’
Great name. That would do nicely.
‘Pleased to meet you, Brad - I’m Juliet.’
The smile stayed on my face until I’d left the police station. Until I remembered how I’d come to meet DCI Madison in the first place. No matter how distracted I might be by his banter and good looks, it was something evil that had brought us together. Something evil that was going to be lurking in the shadows behind us every step of the way.
Lynn Jessop had started sessions a few weeks ago. I was surprised when she told me she was forty-nine; the deep furrows in her forehead made her look ten years older. Her hair was drab and thin and her chin stood out from her face like a half-opened drawer. She must have been around five feet seven, with a broad frame, but years of suffering or low self-worth had bowed her shoulders, making her look like she was in a permanent state of apologising for herself.
It was a difficult case: she was the mother of a teenage boy who was being bullied at school. The boy was coming home bruised, but didn’t want to involve the teachers. There appeared to be no father on the scene and Lynn was feeling powerless to stop her son being picked on. In some ways, I wondered if counselling was going to make much difference. Proper intervention at the school seemed the obvious solution; the offenders needed to be identified; the teachers needed to nip it in the bud, but the boy didn’t want to tell anyone and Lynn was abiding by her son’s wishes for the time being.
‘Do you know what it’s like to wake up every day knowing your son is being traumatised and not be able to do anything about it?’ said Lynn. She was pulling strands of hair from behind her ear as she rocked backwards and forwards. It occurred to me she might be self-harming.
‘It must be awful for you. Not being able to do anything about it.’ Tread carefully, I thought. Build trust.
‘I’ve been following him to school - he’s thirteen and refuses to let me walk with him - but nothing’s happened to him on those days.’
‘When do you think the bullying is taking place?’
‘He won’t talk about it. He comes home with cuts and bruises. Or his rucksack is scorched or soaking wet. Every week there’s something - but I can’t be there all the time to watch over him.’ Lynn buried her face in an already wet tissue.
‘No, of course, you can’t. Have you reported it to the school?’
‘He won’t let me tell the school. I told the police, but they won’t do anything.’
‘What would
you
like to do?’
‘Go to the headmistress and find out who is doing this. Make the teachers put a stop to it. Get the boys punished.’ She sat back, looking exhausted.
I managed to check the clock as I took a sip of water. Only twenty minutes had gone. How was it that time could race past like a Bugatti one moment and then crawl by like a bicycle with a flat tyre, the next?
Lynn looked how I felt: wrung out with worry and lack of sleep. I found myself being distracted by images of the bodies again; daytime replays of the nightmares I’d been trying to forget. I realised Lynn was speaking.
‘…don’t you think?’
‘Sorry, Lynn, I missed that last bit.’ Damn. Unprofessional.
Lynn looked at the floor.
‘Now, not even
you
are listening.’ There was a quiver of anger in her voice.
‘Lynn? Does it hurt when you pull on your hair like that? I’ve noticed…’
Lynn looked at the small clump of grey hair tangled around her fingers, as if she had no idea how it had got there.
‘I didn’t realise…’ She wiped her hands on her skirt sending the clump on to the carpet.
‘This is difficult to ask, Lynn, but have you been hurting yourself at all?’
Silence. Enough time for me to realise I’d pushed too hard, too soon.
‘I think I’d better go, now.’
Lynn stood up, her bag clutched over her stomach. I stood too. ‘We still have time left…’ I said. Lynn ignored me and opened the door, leaving it open as she went to the stairs.
I heard the front door snap shut and sat down. I kicked off my shoes, pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. Maybe my therapist was right. Maybe there was too much going on in my own life for me to be able to offer emotional support for my clients; I certainly wasn’t doing enough for Lynn.
The restaurant was dimly lit and crowded and I hovered inside the door, scanning the tables for Brad. A hand fell on my shoulder from behind and I jumped.
‘Sorry…’ said Brad, ‘shouldn’t have done that…’
‘Probably not,’ I said, turning around. He was wearing low-rise jeans, an open-necked shirt and a zip-up brown leather jacket. Very Starsky, I thought, although, personally, I’d always preferred Hutch. The waiter showed us to a table in the corner by the window.
‘Hope this is okay…by the river…’ he said, as he shuffled his chair forward.
I looked out over the stretch of thick black water, sprinkled with lights that rocked and dipped with the flow of the river. Behind me was Tower Bridge, lit up like a golden gate to a fairy-tale castle. As I took in the view, it sent me straight to another time. Luke’s sixteenth birthday - he’d wanted us all to go to London to celebrate. We’d done the usual tourist spots - living in Norwich, it was hardly our first time - but the memory that sticks most wasn’t the glittering crown jewels or the changing of the guards. It was the moment when Tower Bridge started to open and I saw Luke’s face. Never have I seen such rapture sweep across someone’s features. I wish I’d had a photograph of that moment, although it would never have matched the quality of the one inside my head.
‘I love the Thames,’ I said, defiantly. ‘Nothing’s going to change that.’ My eyes swept the room. ‘Lovely place.’
‘I can recommend the lobster.’
I shuddered. ‘Too fine a line for me, I’m afraid…alive one minute and dead the next.’ I winced. ‘Sorry, I’m not usually this morbid.’
He nodded. ‘I know. Cases like this,’ he waved his menu towards the river, ‘They can get under your skin.’
‘Isn’t this against the rules?’ I said.
‘What? Talking about the case?’
‘No, taking me out to dinner.’
‘You’re helping us with our enquiries.’ He said it with a wry smile on his face.
‘And you’re helping yourself to my garlic bread,’ I said.
I liked the way his eyes went sideways, like a young boy pulling off a coin trick he’s been practising for weeks.
‘I want to ask one question and then I don’t want to talk shop after that,’ I said.
‘Fire away.’
‘Any leads on the latest woman you found at Battersea Bridge?’
He put down his knife. ‘She’s been identified by her parents. Another strangulation, but, the post-mortem showed she hadn’t had a termination.’
‘Oh. Nothing to do with me, this time?’
‘Let’s hope not.’
I felt my shoulders drop.
‘What was her name?’ I ground my teeth, hoping it wouldn’t be familiar.
‘Lindsey Peel. White woman, in her mid-twenties. Ring any bells?’ I ran the name through my brain’s data-bank. Nothing. ‘PM showed she’d been in the water only about an hour, but was killed several hours before that. Strangled. So, it’s pretty much the same MO, but no pregnancy or termination, so she wasn’t a client at Fairways. We know that much.’
‘I’ll check my list of private clients, just in case.’
Brad’s starter arrived: chargrilled baby squid in tomato and chilli sauce. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry.
‘It might be useful, if you can bear it, to see the body…’ He took a mouthful of squid. His stomach was obviously made of stronger stuff than mine.
‘Yes, of course.’ I stabbed an olive in the dish with a cocktail stick. ‘I’m getting used to dead bodies by now.’
‘It’s just that…we hope not, but the way things have been going, you might know her, there might be some connection.’
‘Yes. I understand.’ I put the stone on my side-plate and watched it roll into the middle. ‘So, let me get this straight. There have been three women murdered, strangled, so far, each one under a different bridge, all found in the water?’ Brad nodded with his mouth full. He looked like he hadn’t eaten for days. ‘Pamela Mendosa, twenty-eight, white American, had a termination at Fairways, although I never met her. Then poor Aysha Turner, black girl, only fourteen…she’d also had a termination and I’d met her.’ I toyed with a chunk of meat, but left it on the plate. ‘Then, this third woman, Lindsey Peel, white, mid-twenties, no termination.’
‘All the same MO,’ said Brad, helping himself to more salad.
‘And the only other link, so far…apart from the bridges…is me. My clothes on the first, a handkerchief with my initials on the second and of course getting messages beforehand for all three.’
‘I’m afraid so…and beyond that, we’re struggling. I have to admit, we have no suspects. Forensics hasn’t come up with much. We’re in the dark on this one.’ He hesitated, dabbing the napkin over his lips. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
It was like trying to prise terriers from a fox, but we eventually managed to talk about something else. Tentative personal questions did indeed make it feel like a first date. He told me he was divorced and regretted having no children. He liked motor-racing and playing cards; rummy was his favourite - and anything Mediterranean. I was right about him having the look of an Italian waiter: his mother was from Puglia in the boot-heel of Italy. ‘My father’s not Italian,’ he said.
‘I didn’t think Madison sounded like it was from that part of the world.’
‘He’s from Hartlepool.’
Ouch. ‘Not quite so…idyllic.’
He smiled. ‘They run an olive grove now near Mum’s home town.’
I found the way he struggled to find the right words compelling, likewise, the way his eyes were always a single crease away from laughter. It made everything else blissfully recede for a while.
I told him about Andrew and my work. I told him my chicken ragu was delicious, even though I barely touched it. What I didn’t tell him was that butterflies were playing havoc with my digestion all evening. It was partly to do with the case, but more to do with being close to him.
I still wasn’t sure if this was the beginning of something personal or a one-off thank you from the Metropolitan police for the contribution I’d made. I knew which one I wanted it to be.
He asked for the bill and I willed the waiter to get seriously side-tracked.
‘So – if you hadn’t become a psychotherapist, what then?’ he said, sliding the mint from its wrapper.
‘I was keen on the idea of forensics, as it happens, but I failed chemistry GCSE, so that put paid to that.’
‘What were you good at, at school?’
‘I loved the trampoline – those few seconds when you’re in the air, thinking you can defy gravity - sublimely free.’ He looked at me wistfully as if he knew what I meant.
‘What else?’
I felt honoured. No one had taken this much interest in me in a long while. ‘I was a bit of a whizz at synchronised swimming – don’t laugh – a real natural, apparently. I had a hip injury when I was seventeen, so that had to go.’
‘I can’t imagine you at seventeen,’ he said enigmatically.
Afterwards we walked along the riverbank until we reached the underground station.
‘My nearest Tube station is Putney Bridge,’ I said. ‘District line.’
‘I live near Elephant and Castle. The other way. Northern Line.’
I hooked a strand of hair behind my ear. ‘Right then.’
He looked down at his boots. ‘I forgot to mention. Can you bear one last thing about the case?’ he said.
‘I think I can just about manage it.’
‘Our SIO told me there was something found on the woman at Battersea Bridge, but it wasn’t anything personal.’
‘What was it?’
‘She had a book in her pocket.’
‘A book?’
‘Yes. A children’s book,
The Secret Garden
, ever heard of it?’
I felt a wave of vertigo wash up my body and thought my legs were going to fold away underneath me. Brad grabbed both my arms.
My voice was a hoarse whisper. ‘This person, this killer really
knows
me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That book…as a child…it was…’ I leant into him, unable to make my legs straighten.
‘What?’
‘It was my favourite book…’
He guided me into an upright position against the wall, but didn’t quite let go.
‘It’s a popular book. It could simply be —’
‘Don’t tell me it’s a coincidence.’ I hugged myself. The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees. Suddenly I didn’t want to have anything to do with Bradley Madison, this case, London - any of it, anymore. I wished I’d stayed in Norwich. Or gone to Spain with my parents. ‘Someone knows that book held a special place in my life. When Luke, my brother…died…I was twelve…that book saved my life… it was…’
I couldn’t stay coherent any longer. I let go and fell into him allowing my tears to soak into his shirt. His arms were strong and safe and I sobbed; full-body sobs as he stood firm and didn’t say a word. I was grateful for his silence. No attempts at comfort, no flinching with embarrassment. Then he put his arm around me and led me to the main road. We caught a cab and the next thing I knew, we were in my kitchen.
‘I’m so sorry about this,’ I said, clutching a batch of wet tissues.
He reached across the table with another hankie. ‘Don’t be. Someone out there is taunting you. And the police. Someone has chosen specific ways to make a connection with you, not just the messages you’ve been sent, but also the link with Fairways - the terminations, the clothes, the handkerchief and now the book.’
I pressed my fingers into my scalp. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out.’
‘We need to run through a kind of potted history. Look into everything in your background.’ He took out a notepad from his jacket pocket. ‘I know we’ve asked you about this already, but we’re going to need to rake over your past in even more detail.’
‘You’re a policeman again, then?’
‘And also a friend.’ He started drawing a smiley doodle on his pad. ‘I can be both.’
In my current situation, having a friend who was also a policeman was no bad thing. He turned to a fresh page and I was suddenly aware of the disparity between his levels of vitality and mine.
‘Listen,’ I said, putting out my arm. ‘I don’t think I can do this now.’
My body felt like it had been through an assault course and my mind was scattered all over the place, like a jigsaw someone had dropped. I was finding it hard simply to get my eyes to stay open. ‘Can we possibly do this tomorrow? You could come back for breakfast…’
He folded the book away.