The Facts of Life and Death (25 page)

IOU One Birthday Pressie (when I get my student loan). Kiss Kiss Kiss.

She’d thought it was cute.
He’d
thought it was cute. It wasn’t cute, she realized now; it was selfish. She had money for cigarettes, didn’t she? She had money for a bus to Barnstaple to see the latest Johnny Depp film. But she didn’t have money for a birthday present for her own father.

Where was the logic in
that
? There was none. She sobbed harder.

He made Steffi sit down.

He made her call her mother.

It was a blur. A numb blur of horror. Her mother was
so close.
If Steffi hadn’t been crying so hard, she could have picked out the porch light from the electric kaleidoscope that Instow had become. Steffi could barely speak; she was one big shake. Her teeth chattered and her hands trembled so badly that the man had to hold the phone.

‘Say goodbye now,’ he said.

Steffi’s mother was pixellated by hysterics. Steffi tried to calm her. Tried to calm herself. Still thinking there would be a way out. Still not believing.

But then the man gripped her hair in his left hand and started to force her face down towards the sand.

Frannie Hatton had been
suffocated.
It came back to Steffi in a jagged flash. The word conjured a pillow, but it could have been anything; it could have been sand.

This
was
the man. This
was
the killer.

She stuck out her arms and tried to brace herself away from the beach, but the man kicked the inside of her elbow and it collapsed like a hinge.

He bent her almost double, pressing her nose and mouth into the choking sand, his knee in her back, one relentless hand in her hair, the other holding the phone so her mother could see what she’d done.

‘You see?’ he kept saying. ‘You see?’

Steffi finally believed it was possible for her to die here in the dunes, with the beach in her teeth, not a hundred yards from her home.

Her bladder surrendered, and so did she.

With the last strength she had left, she twisted her head so that her mouth could draw one final breath …

‘Tell Daddy I’m sorry about the present.’

Then she drowned in the sand.

And nobody would ever find her.

STEFFI COLE WAS
lighter than Jody Reeves, but not as light as Frannie Hatton.

For the hundredth time, John Trick was grateful that he hadn’t killed that first girl on the beach. He’d never been a big man, and the thought of picking his way across the precarious pebbles with Kelly Bradley’s fat arse slung over his shoulder was comical to him now.

A stone shifted under his left foot and he stopped and adjusted his balance. It was hard enough to walk across the beach in the daylight. At night and with a weight, it required great care and patience.

He’d learned patience. His lack of it had almost blown it for him right at the start …

He’d stopped the car beside Frannie Hatton on the road between Bideford and Westward Ho! At first she’d been grateful to him for the offer of a ride. And then, for some reason he couldn’t work out, she’d changed her mind. Just straightened up and backed away and said, ‘Actually, thanks, but I think I’ll walk.’

Cheeky little slut. With her stringy junkie arms and her nose ring and her tattoos. Saying no – like she was better than him.

Like
she
was calling the shots.

So he’d got out to show her who was really in charge. Right there under the streetlights that made everything orange and weird.

Frannie Hatton had just stood there, watching him come around the front of the car, with her mouth open like a fish. She couldn’t believe what was happening. He could hardly believe it himself.

Too late, she’d turned to run . . . And he’d grabbed her arm.

The moment his fingers had closed on her bicep, John Trick had known he was going to kill her. There was no going back, even if he’d wanted to go back. Which he didn’t.

So he’d gone on.

He’d gone too far and it had felt so good.

She had fought him, mind. She was only a skinny little thing, but Frannie had fought like two rats in a bag. She’d even bitten his hand as he’d bundled her into the car. If another car had passed it would all have been over. He’d just got lucky. He’d learn from that, too.

He’d driven erratically to the Burrows. He’d forced her out of the car at gunpoint. What choice did she have? And then he’d led her away from the car and over the golf course to a shallow bunker of mud.

It hadn’t stopped raining all summer and mud was easy to come by.

She’d had a phone, of course. Everybody had a phone nowadays, even if they didn’t have a job.

‘Call your mother.’

Her mother had hung up the phone before he’d got started, which was gutting, and then had ignored the second call – the uncaring whore. But when he’d finally got Frannie Hatton facedown, and his fingers had got a good grip on her hair, and he’d pressed down, down, down …

He’d felt all the control leave her body and pass up his arm to his own. Filling him with power, making him
mighty.

Just thinking of it now made him feel like a man.

John Trick put Steffi down with a grunt, and looked at the naked bodies already laid out at his feet. A rat ran out of the stinking darkness and between Jody Reeves’ small, firm breasts.

Trick hadn’t felt this good about himself since he’d started work at the shipyard when he was sixteen years old. Something inside him swelled a little. If he remembered correctly, it felt a lot like pride. Pride in himself and pride in Ruby. He’d been wary about taking her with him, but it had paid off in spades. Killing was much easier when his daughter was with him.

It was his little cowboy who’d shown him how it should be done in the first place. Picking up her teacher at the bus stop was a stroke of genius. The way the woman’s suspicion had changed to grateful acceptance as soon as she saw a little girl out for a drive with her daddy.

Who
wouldn’t
get into the car?

It’d be rude
not
to.

The wind snatched the laugh from John Trick’s mouth.

Ruby was the key. Sometimes he wondered whether she knew all along what she was doing. How she was teaching him, just as he taught her.

Like tonight – he should have made sure Steffi was dead in the dunes – but the terror in Ruby’s voice had been like an alarm going off inside him. She was in danger. His own flesh and blood needed him. He didn’t want to make excuses, but it was
biological.

As long as he learned from his mistakes – that was the important thing. It was like starting a new job. Nobody could be expected to know everything to begin with, but when you got it right – when it was
textbook
– the sense of achievement was overwhelming.

Addictive.

Murder was a learning curve. But he was getting better at it all the time.

MARK SPADE HAD
sworn off heroin the day his girlfriend Frannie had been found murdered, so it was no surprise to find him serenely high when Calvin and King arrived with a search warrant.

They didn’t even need to show him the warrant; he was totally cool with anything they wanted to do. He let them into the dingy, cluttered bedsit and then stood with his back to the door while Calvin and King stared around at the clothing and garbage, scattered knee-deep in places, and hoped they could avoid an actual search with a simple question.

‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ said DCI King. ‘Have you come across it?’

Mark Spade didn’t answer, and when Calvin looked more closely he realized why.

‘He’s asleep,’ he said.

‘You’re kidding,’ said King. ‘He’s standing up!’

‘Oi, Mark,’ said Calvin. He tapped the man’s shoulder and Spade opened his eyes and said, ‘Ask my probation officer if you don’t believe me.’

King and Calvin both laughed and Spade’s eyes cleared a tiny bit and he said, ‘What?’

‘We’re looking for Frannie’s nose ring, Mark,’ King tried again. ‘Remember? The ring she always had in her nose?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he nodded. ‘Her nose ring.’

‘That’s the one,’ said King. ‘Do you know where it is?’

‘In her nose.’

‘No it’s not, Mark. Remember? It wasn’t in her nose when we found her.’

‘She never takes it out.’

‘Well, she took it out this time, Mark. Or someone else did. Or maybe she took it out here, so that’s what we want to make sure of. If it’s not here then it might be a good clue for us, see? To try and find the man who killed her.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘So can we look around then?’

‘Her nose?’

‘The flat. Can we look round the flat?’

‘This flat?’

‘Yes, this one.’

‘OK.’

‘Thanks,’ said King. ‘Can you remember what it looks like, Mark?’

‘The flat?’

‘The nose ring.’

‘It’s a ring. In her nose.’

‘OK, good. What colour?’

‘Colour?’

‘Was it silver or gold?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which one?’

Mark Spade frowned and closed his eyes in an effort to recall the nose ring.

After a minute, Calvin nudged him again and he woke up and said, ‘Silver.’

‘Do you use needles, Mark?’

‘No needles,’ he said. ‘Spoons.’

‘So we’re not going to get stuck, are we? Because if DC Bridge or I get stuck, we’re going to be very pissed off.’

‘No no no,’ he insisted, shoving up his sleeves to show off his arms. ‘Only spoons.’

Calvin opened a drawer in the ramshackle area that looked most like a kitchen, and held up a bent and buckled spoon, scraps of foil and a selection of Bic lighters.

‘He’s a smoker, not a poker.’

‘Right then,’ sighed King, snapping on a latex glove. ‘I suppose we’ll get started.’

They spent all day in the bedsit. Mark Spade slept on the sofa throughout, and so they decided to simply pile everything they’d searched on one side of the room, and then move it all back again and do the same to the other half.

It was disgusting, even with the gloves.

Among the clothing and debris on the floor they uncovered a selection of paper plates covered in what looked like bean juice, dozens of unopened packets of supernoodles and the various scattered components of what looked like a hamster cage, including a broken plastic wheel and wood shavings. Everything in the room was sprinkled with small pellets of shit, as if someone had spilled a big carton of chocolate Tic-Tacs.

Around lunchtime, Mark Spade woke up and demanded spaghetti hoops on toast. There was no bread or spaghetti, or even a pan that Calvin could see, so he went out and got three portions of fish and chips. But by the time he got back, Mark was asleep again.

King and Calvin ate standing up. Mark was on the sofa, and the only other chair was piled high with egg cartons and three Jack Daniels bottles filled with urine.

After lunch, they put on new gloves and worked their way methodically through the mountains of stinking trash and unwashed clothing and droppings, and there was no nose ring, although nose
plugs
would not have gone amiss.

‘It’s all glamour,’ sighed King.

They searched the bathroom and toilet during an hour of overtime Calvin knew they wouldn’t get paid for, and they finally felt reasonably confident that there was no square inch of the filthy bedsit that hadn’t been checked.

Except the sofa, where Mark Spade was now snoring loudly.

‘We should look down the back of the sofa,’ said King. ‘In fact, when I think about it, we should really have looked there first.’

Calvin shuddered. ‘Can’t we just wake him up and tell
him
to do it?’

‘C’mon! Where’s your sense of adventure?’

‘My sense of adventure?’

‘Yes,’ said King. ‘Obviously I’m going to pull rank on you.’

‘Can’t we toss for it?’

‘No,’ said King. Then added more encouragingly, ‘Go on. Anything you find, you can keep.’

Calvin sighed and went over to the sofa and shook Mark Spade until it was clear he wasn’t going to wake up. Then he and King dragged the sleeping man carefully on to the poo-strewn carpet, and Calvin dug his hand down the side of the cushions. The sofa was corduroy, he noticed, and now he knew why Shirley wouldn’t have sex on hers. It was a smorgasbord of suspicious stains, flaky lumps and congealed spaghetti hoops.

He dug his hand down the first side and moved it carefully around, removing anything solid. He found three ballpoint pens, a Bourbon biscuit, eighty-eight pence in small change, countless salt sachets, and a ticket to a Killers concert.

He dived in again.

‘Ha!’ He held up a five-pound note, folded into a small, thick triangle. ‘Mine!’

‘You can’t keep anything
valuable
,’ King qualified.

Calvin muttered darkly and went back in.

He was almost done when he said, ‘What the
shit
?’ and withdrew his hand with a look of disgust on his face.

King came over and peered at the dark, sticky chunk of
something
impaled on the tips of Calvin’s fingers. At one end of it was a ragged piece of fuzzy string.

Calvin sniffed it and almost choked. ‘What. The fuck. Is that?’

‘Tampon!’

They both jumped and turned to look at Mark Spade, who was suddenly awake, alert and cheerful as hell.

‘A tampon?’ said King, aghast.

‘Not
a
tampon! Just Tampon. Frannie’s mouse. He went AWOL ages ago.’

Calvin’s fingers were in a dead mouse.

He cried out and flicked his hand in horror and the corpse arced across the room and stuck to the wall above the television.

‘Shit!’ he shouted. ‘ShitshitshitshitSHIT!’ He bounded off the sofa and rushed to the kitchen area, where he peeled off his glove and tossed it in the sink on top of the pile of mouldy dishes, then turned on the tap.

‘There’s no soap!’ he yelled while DCI King giggled like a schoolgirl.

‘Yeah, there is,’ said Mark Spade calmly, and got up and came over to the nearly weeping Calvin. He bent and opened the oven and took out a large cardboard box, still sealed with packing tape. He slit it open with one long, dirty fingernail, and Calvin could see that the box was filled with what must have been fifty bars of designer soap, each individually presented in its own upmarket paper wrapper with – he couldn’t help but notice – hand-torn edges.