Cold Kill (6 page)

Stella drove back to Delaney's flat, past houses that marketed at three million and stood just on the fringe of high-rise estates where the jobless, penniless and hopeless lived in their three-room hutches.

The rich had window-bars and gated estates and direct-link alarms.

The poor had nothing to lose.

When she got in, Delaney was awake, sitting at his laptop, playing old-style jazz, drinking whisky, eating ice-cream. Stella stole his drink and read a couple of the notes he was making for his article.

‘Have you got him?' he asked.

‘Not sure. Could be. Who are Sadie and Jamie?'

‘Street-people.'

Stella tapped him on the arm, then pointed at the window: a view of rooftops and a quarter moon in a cold sky. ‘They're out there now.'

‘Bound to be.'

‘Panhandling the late-nighters, looking for a warm spot over a kitchen-grating.'

‘I expect so.'

‘Low-tog sleeping-bags in sub-zero temperatures.'

He retrieved his glass and took a sip. ‘And here am I in the warm with my single malt getting a series of articles out of it. Well-paid articles. What a shit.'

Stella got a drink of her own: vodka-rocks. Their journo/cop routine wasn't a new thing, nor was it particularly adversarial. Well, a bit, maybe. Just a little edge to it: Hands On vs Hands Off. In life, cops needed journalists, and vice-versa. Cops wanted to manipulate journalists, and vice-versa. Cops went eyeball to eyeball with journalists, and...

Stella and Delaney were not blind to the ironies and parallels in all this.

‘Maybe you ought to be down there with them,' she said. ‘Sleeping out, jacking up, pissing into your bag.'

‘I've done all that,' he told her. ‘Didn't you notice I'd gone?'

She drank her vodka, pushed his computer across the desk, sat on his lap and kissed him open-mouthed. She said, ‘I can't get enough of you.'

Sadie sacked-out over the hotspot by the back door of the Ocean Diner. Jamie was tagging along for the kitchen leftovers, but he wasn't bedding down. He seemed to be always on the move.

‘Christmas,' he told Sadie, ‘the birth of Our Lord. The time is surely approaching when we will see Him again.'

‘Yeah,' Sadie said. ‘I'm counting on it.'

‘In all His glory.'

‘Absolutely.'

‘Come to separate the sheep from the goats.'

‘Good idea.'

‘The Son of God come to send sinners to hell and the righteous to Paradise.'

A sous-chef came out for a smoke and to catch half a minute of the frost-laden air. When he exhaled, the smoke billowed with his breath and seemed to go on for ever. He went back, then re-emerged with the remnants of unfinished meals and a two-thirds-full bottle of TÅ· Nant.

After they had eaten, Sadie turned in her bag and pulled the flap over her head. She'd been trying half the night to make a connection, but she hadn't raised enough money, and her regular dealer, who might have extended a credit deal, wasn't on the street or at home.

‘The Son of God,' Jamie asserted, ‘born in a stable and risen in glory.'

‘Okay,' Sadie said. Neither spoke for a full five minutes, then Sadie added: ‘You know what, Jamie? Fuck the Son of God.'

Duncan Palmer was raw-eyed and looked a little ragged round the edges. You might have put it down to jet-lag, were it not for the fact that his girlfriend had been murdered. Sue Chapman had phoned to let him know that Stella and Harriman would be arriving at ten; even so, he took a long time to get to the door. He was wearing grey sweats – like Valerie's, Stella thought – and his hair was up in a coxcomb: not a fashionable cut but the result of having just climbed out of bed.

Stella's thoughts extended to:
So you slept well
. And, as if answering her, he said, ‘America: the flight out's no problem; coming back's a killer.' He took them into the kitchen, switched on the kettle and put coffee into a big cafetière. As if it were an afterthought, he said, ‘Okay to talk in here?'

‘It's fine,' Stella said. ‘Wherever you like.'

‘In here, then… get some coffee.'

They sat on metal café chairs round a metal fretwork table. The kitchen was yellow and green, and there were occasional Italian tiles with fruit and vegetable paintings. It looked as if it had been copied from a lifestyle magazine.

Stella said, ‘We want to say how sorry we are about Valerie.' It was textbook and often brought tears. Even if it did, you still watched them; you tried to look through the grief.

Palmer didn't cry. He nodded as if in agreement. He said, ‘I can't take it in. It doesn't seem real.' Also textbook.

Harriman said, ‘We know you were in the States. It's just
elimination: same for everyone that was close to her. Don't worry.'

Palmer got up and left the room.

Harriman looked at Stella and shrugged. She got up and took a tour of the kitchen. Palmer lived in a Kensington redbrick; the windows looked straight down a narrow road to the big high street stores, the crowds, the inch-by-inch traffic. The intersection allowed just a cut of the action: fifty feet maybe. Stella could see a panhandling Santa outside a designer clothes store, offering his good-cause box to the passers-by. She watched until Palmer came back, and Santa hadn't made a single hit.

Palmer put a small appointments diary down on the table in front of Harriman, then crossed the room to add hot water to the coffee. ‘My time in New York,' he said. ‘Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, office and boardroom meetings. It was a full schedule. Will you catch him?'

‘We'll try,' Stella said. ‘We hope to.' Then, as an afterthought, ‘We expect to.'

‘But you don't always.'

‘Not always.'

Harriman asked about arguments, enemies, resentments, grudges: the textbook coming out again. Palmer crossed all the boxes: none of these. ‘It's a random killing, isn't it?' he asked. ‘A crazy person.'

‘We're not sure,' Harriman told him. ‘We're looking at that.'

‘All the attacks on women recently.'

‘I know. We are looking at that.'

Stella said, ‘Did Valerie wear a chain, or a chain with something on it? I mean something she always wore: in bed, in the shower, when she was jogging?'

‘A cross.'

‘Can you describe it to me?'

‘A plain gold cross on a gold chain.'

‘Was it a religious thing?'

‘No. Well, only in the sense that it was a cross. But Valerie wasn't religious. I think she'd always had it: from when she was a kid, I expect.'

‘A confirmation present, perhaps.'

‘Sort of thing. It had her initials on the reverse – VB.' The line of questioning caught up with Palmer abruptly. ‘He stole it?'

‘Yes.'

‘How do you know?'

‘He… pulled it. Left a mark.'

The information seemed to bring Palmer suddenly closer to Valerie's death: its nature, its detail. He half turned and looked away. Then he said, ‘That would be after she died.'

‘I would think so,' Stella said.

‘Why would he do that? Not to sell it?'

‘No.'

Palmer thought for a moment, then said, ‘Keepsake.' When Stella didn't respond, he added, ‘Yes. That would be it.' Then he said the weirdest thing. ‘Something to remember her by.'

Palmer walked them back through the living room to the door. Harriman was out in the hall and Stella halfway there, when Palmer said, ‘Was she raped?' He asked it in a low voice, almost a whisper, as if it was something that might remain a confidence between them.

‘We're not sure,' Stella said. Then, ‘It's possible.' She didn't mention Valerie's near-nakedness, the sweats found a little way off. Palmer nodded. Stella stepped back into the room as she added, ‘There had to be a post-mortem. I don't think it'll be possible for you to see her.'

‘See her?'

‘To say goodbye.'

‘Oh, yes.' Palmer backed off a little: Stella's move back into the room had brought her close to him, inside his body-space. He said, ‘She's gone, though, hasn't she? Why say goodbye to someone who's already gone?'

Palmer's flat was five minutes from the park. As Stella and Harriman emerged, a string of joggers went by, then a woman on her own, pacy and stylish in Lycra leggings and a washed-out pink-and-grey top. Valerie Blake in another life. Harriman put the key into the ignition, but Stella motioned him to stop.

‘When you look out of his window,' she said, ‘there's a clear view front and left, but there's a plane tree off to the right. See?'

Harriman turned to look. ‘Okay. And –?'

‘Drive round the block and park on the blind side of the tree.' Harriman drove, waiting to be told why. When he parked, Stella bent down in her seat to check the eyelines. ‘I doubt he noticed the car, even so… he can't see you from the window, but you can see the street door. You might have a bit of a wait.'

‘Go on.'

‘There's a woman in his flat.'

Harriman was silent for a moment, thinking back to what he might have missed; finally he asked, ‘How do you know?'

‘He was wearing her perfume.'

‘What?'

‘I don't mean intentionally. It was on him; he smelled of her. It was in the air, but when I got close to him, it was stronger… skin-contact made it more pungent.'

‘I didn't smell it.'

‘That's what forty a day will do for you.'

‘So where was she?'

‘In the bedroom. Where else?'

‘I haven't got a camera,' Harriman warned her.

‘Well, I think it'll be pretty easy to find out who she is.'

‘How?'

‘We'll ask the bastard – when we're ready.'

Robert Adrian Kimber was talking technique: how you picked your mark, how you stayed with her, close but discreet, how you paced things by having several in hand at the same time so you could switch and change if one of the sisterhood seemed to notice you. He used those terms:
in hand
;
sisterhood
. Stella was running the interview, with DS Jack Cuddon sitting in. She said, ‘We need an address, Robert. We need to know where you live.'

‘People often walk looking at the ground,' Kimber said; ‘have you ever noticed that? Looking at the ground or looking straight ahead. Getting where they're going. Sometimes a woman will stop, though: something catches her eye, something in a shop window, something she wants. It's tricky. Do I stop too? Do I walk past and wait?'

‘You say you killed Valerie Blake.'

‘That's it, you see. That's the culmination. That's the end of things: the first meeting.' He smiled at her, then at Cuddon, and the smile became a chuckle. Cuddon's eyes were dark with anger.

Stella said, ‘How did you do that? Kill her.'

‘She was strangled – you know that.'

‘Yes. So she was jogging… you were – what? – waiting for her?'

‘I knew where she went. I knew the route.'

‘What was she wearing? Do you remember that?'

‘Running clothes.'

‘What?'

‘Jogging gear.'

‘Can you tell me the colour?'

‘She always wore the same.'

‘Did she? What was it?'

‘The usual thing.'

Stella paused for a moment. She was biting the inside of her cheek. The tape spooled on. Kimber wore the trace of a smile; he looked at Stella and nodded, as if to encourage her.

‘What made it different, Robert? You follow her, you like doing that. Why kill her?'

‘There were others to follow.'

‘But why kill her?'

‘The first meeting,' Kimber said, as if she might not have heard the first time, ‘that's the end of everything.'

‘So you're waiting, you've picked your place, she comes by, she's running –'

‘Looking at the ground,' Kimber offered, ‘or straight ahead.'

‘Okay. Then what?'

‘You know what.'

‘Yes, but I need to hear it from you.'

‘She was strangled, wasn't she?'

‘Detail. I'm asking for detail.'

‘What sort of detail?'

‘How you killed her, how difficult was it, did she struggle?' Stella knew she was leading too strongly: this wouldn't be a good tape to take into court. ‘She was attractive, wasn't she?'

‘My Valerie? Oh, yes.'

‘The place where you killed her –'

‘Among trees. Trees and bushes.'

‘No one could see.'

‘No one.'

‘Did you rape her?'

A silence fell. The tape-spool gave a little creak. Cuddon closed his eyes. He could hear sounds in the silence, as if the air were chafing against the walls.

‘That's pretty personal, isn't it?' Kimber asked. He sounded affronted. ‘That's pretty personal stuff.'

They took a break. Cuddon punched the wall hard enough to make Stella wince. He said, ‘That prick. That shitehawk.'

‘You'd like to have him humanely destroyed.'

‘Well… destroyed.'

Cuddon went to the coffee machine. On the other side of the room, Maxine Hewitt was raiding the AMIP-5 chocolate hoard. The coffee was a cruel practical joke that everyone kept falling for. Andy Greegan was sitting at his workstation with his head in his hands; he'd been running through lists of names and addresses from the internet, from the register of voters, from a listings CD called Info-04. He said something indecipherable as Stella walked past his desk. Maxine lobbed her a Twix and raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘DC Robson's with him,' Stella said. ‘He's playing games.'

‘The same games?'

‘The same. As soon as you get to details, he starts sidestepping.' Stella shrugged. ‘I'm going to have to charge him or let him go.'

Andy Greegan spoke again but louder. He said, ‘I think I know where this guy lives.' He still had his head in his hands and he sounded like a man speaking from under a mudslide. ‘The name's right, including the middle name. Must be him. He's on Harefield.'