Death Bed (24 page)

‘Y
ou look worn out,’ Jayne said, as Reg motioned her to sit down. ‘Do you really have to work such long hours?’

He didn’t answer.

‘What’s wrong? There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?’

He shook his head, the gesture belied by his gloomy expression.

‘It’s not like you, Reg. You look really down. You’re not sickening for something, are you? You haven’t seemed yourself at all for the past few days.’

Reg still made no reply.

‘Is there a problem?’

He put down the file he was holding and scowled.

‘Yes. You could say that.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’re doing your best. You know you always get results in the end. It’s not like you to let it get to you this way.’

‘There’s always a first time,’ he replied sullenly, ‘and it would have to be on a high profile case like this. It’s all over the media about these black girls. You’ve seen what they’re saying, that we haven’t got a clue, and the worst thing about it is they’re right. We’re getting absolutely bloody nowhere with it. Nowhere.’

Jayne nodded. She had seen the tabloids, who were calling the killer The Butcher because he dismembered his victims. ‘I’ve been thinking about what they’re saying, wondering why he carves them up - ’

‘He doesn’t carve them up, for Christ’s sake. Do you have to talk like a tabloid journalist? Yes, I know he inflicts injuries on the bodies, and I’m also aware that the longer it takes us to get him, the more chance there is he’s going to find another victim.’

‘You’ve only been on the case for two weeks, Reg. They can’t expect you to get results overnight.’

‘It’s closer to a month,’ he corrected her. ‘We’ve already got two bodies. Who knows when we’re going to turn up another one?’

‘Well, you can only do your best,’ Jayne repeated. ‘Why don’t you go home and make a fresh start in the morning. Making yourself ill isn’t going to help.’

Reg smiled weakly at her.

He picked up the file he had been studying, then threw it back down on the desk.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said.

They walked to the pub round the corner and sat down at a quiet table inside.

‘You’re overdoing it, Reg. You look knackered. What time did you go home last night?’

He shrugged, not meeting her eye.

‘You can’t keep driving yourself like this,’ she insisted.

‘The work still has to be done, even when we’re getting nowhere. We can’t let up for a moment. You know that as well as I do. I have to get a result, Jayne. I have to.’

‘Well you can’t do it all by yourself. If you ask me it’s seems all the responsibility is falling on you, and that’s not right.’

‘I’m the senior investigating officer. That’s how it is. I have to take responsibility. I knew that when I took the promotion, but honestly - ’ He heaved a sigh.

She waited, watching the droop of his shoulders and his worried expression.

‘I’m beginning to wonder if it was a mistake. I mean, I feel like I’m completely out of my depth. Morale on the team is rock bottom. It’s my job to psyche them all up, keep things moving, and I just don’t think I can do it any more.’

A couple of women sat down at the next table and he leaned forward, lowering his voice.

‘It turns out there may have been more victims than we thought. Blood samples from the victims suggest there were others – what if another body turns up? And another one after that - ’

‘You can’t go on winding yourself up like this,’ Jayne interrupted. ‘You don’t know there’ll be any more victims.’

‘There will be more. I know there will.’

‘Well, what about this new inspector you’ve got on your team? You told me she came highly recommended. Why can’t she take some of the load off your shoulders? It can’t all be down to you.’

He forced a smile and nodded at her empty glass.

‘Another one? Let me.’

‘No, no, it’s my round. One more and then I really have to go.’

Reg had worked with Detective Chief Inspector Kathryn Gordon of the Kent constabulary in the past and he trusted her judgement. She had not only written a glowing reference for Geraldine Steel, but had followed it up with a phone call singing her praises.

‘She’s exceptional. You won’t regret having her on your team.’

He had fast-tracked Geraldine through the transfer process, and now she was fumbling around with the rest of the team on an investigation that had so far drawn a blank.

‘Yes,’ he admitted to Jayne as she sat down again. ‘Geraldine Steel came highly recommended, by one of the sharpest DCIs I’ve ever worked with.’

‘Well there you are then, if she’s as good as they say she is, you can pass some of the responsibility on to her, can’t you?’

Reg frowned and took a gulp of his drink.

‘It doesn’t work like that. And even if it did, I can’t say I’ve been all that impressed by her so far. She’s doesn’t strike me as anything special, in spite of her reputation. But it’s early days, I suppose.’

He leaned back in his chair, stretching his long legs out in front of him.

‘Maybe you’re expecting too much of her.’

‘Yes, perhaps I am. To be honest, I’m not sure she’s making the transition all that well. Being in London’s very different to working in the home counties. She might have hacked it in Kent, but I’m not so sure she’s up to the pressures of working on the Met.’

‘Murder is murder wherever you are.’

‘That’s what she said.’

‘So what if the procedures are a bit different - ’

‘I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job,’ he snapped, suddenly irritated by her efforts to comfort him.

‘No, of course not. You don’t have to jump down my throat. I’m only trying to help.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. But I’m beginning to think that having a county DI on the team is more trouble than it’s worth.’

‘If you’re worried about this new woman, why don’t you just get rid of her?’

‘We’re in the middle of an investigation. You know very well I can’t push her off the team without good reason, and it’s not as if she’s doing any worse than everybody else. I can’t sack the whole bloody lot of them.’

He sighed.

‘Then I think you should talk to her, ask her how she’s settling in.’

Reg nodded.

‘Yes, maybe I will. Perhaps it’s time for a review anyway.’

He sat up and swilled the amber liquid slowly round and round the glass, thinking.

Reg watched Geraldine in the Incident Room the following morning. Seemingly wrapped up in her own thoughts, she took no part in the light-hearted banter flying around between the rest of her colleagues. One of the sergeants, recently returned from his honeymoon, was the butt of the jokes.

‘Must be a new experience, wearing a shirt that’s actually been washed,’ one of his colleagues was saying.

‘He didn’t realise you could wash shirts,’ someone else joked.

‘And I do believe it’s been ironed,’ a constable added.

‘I didn’t recognise you without the creases in your shirts, Jim,’ someone else said, clapping the newly-married officer on the back.

‘Have you brought a lunchbox with sandwiches?’

Reg turned his attention back to Geraldine. Catching her eye he smiled, but she turned away as though she hadn’t seen him. It was one thing to be self-contained but he was finding his new inspector positively unapproachable and now, having made the decision to speak with her, he wasn’t sure how to broach the subject of her fitting in. It wasn’t as if she had put a foot wrong. On the contrary, she was conscientious and thorough, and ready to take the initiative even though so far her ideas had led nowhere, like everyone else on the team. But she baffled him and that made him uncomfortable.

Not for the first time, he wished he had resisted pressure from his superiors to include more women on his team. Difficult men were so straightforward, compared to difficult women. He hoped he hadn’t made a blunder appointing a female inspector. She might have been promoted beyond her capability, thanks to the positive discrimination that had become so prevalent in the force. He had nothing against women as a rule, but he needed his officers to be professional. While he fully supported equality and political correctness, there was no doubt women were more likely to act irrationally than men.

‘How are you feeling, Reg?’ Jayne asked him later that morning when she came in to talk him through her detailed analysis of the killer’s possible motivation.

He shrugged. Jayne had nothing new to say but at least she was eager to help. He had worked with her on several occasions in the past, and there was nothing standoffish about
her
.

‘I was just thinking about what we were talking about yesterday, about Geraldine,’ he replied.

‘Yes, I’ve been giving her some thought. She does seem a bit hostile.’

‘Hostile?’

‘Well, defensive.’

‘I’ve seen it before with officers coming into the Met from outside, getting the idea everyone’s looking down on them. Some people take to it as though they’ve been here all their life, but for others there’s a period of adjustment. The trouble is, I can’t afford to let the transition distract her from the case.’ Reg looked worried. ‘She doesn’t seem to have settled in, does she?’

‘Maybe she’s just an unhappy person,’ Jayne replied.

‘Do you really think so?’

He frowned.

‘She came with such good references. I can’t work out if anything’s wrong or not because she’s so tight lipped. I don’t really know her at all.’

Jayne nodded.

‘Would you like me to talk to her? Woman to woman?’

Reg felt uncomfortable with the implication. He was perfectly capable of talking to Geraldine himself. At the same time, he was relieved to think he might not have to tackle the issue in person.

‘Yes. Perhaps that would be best. Find out if anything’s bothering her. You’ll be discreet, won’t you?’

‘Leave it with me.’

J
on was woken by a burning sensation in his wrists. His chest heaved with the effort to breathe. The sound of crying reached him in the darkness. With a sudden effort he tried to raise himself upright and was brought back to reality with a jolt by the fact that his arms and legs were firmly shackled. Distracted by excruciating pain, he struggled to focus on what was happening. He had drunk too much before a man had offered him a lift home. They had climbed up a lot of stairs and after that he thought he must have passed out because he had woken up from a nightmare about skulls to find himself chained in darkness.

The sobbing went on and on, coming to him in waves. He drifted into unconsciousness again for a short time, until he was woken by distant noises, banging and shuffling, a door being opened and closed. Muffled voices reached him, but he was too exhausted to call out into the darkness. Then the light came on and he was too frightened to speak, because he had glimpsed a face from his nightmares. The man was leaning over, gazing down, and someone was making a high-pitched whimpering noise. It sounded like a woman. Unintentionally, Jon groaned aloud.

The man straightened up at once and turned to him, as if he had been waiting for a signal.

‘Hello. Are you feeling any better?’ he asked cheerfully, as though Jon had gone to bed with a touch of flu.

Jon shook his arms and the chains rattled.

‘Look at me!’ he cried out.

He barely recognised his own voice, it was so hoarse, and his throat felt raw.

‘Take these bloody things off!’

He paused to gulp for air and noticed that the whimpering had stopped. The woman must be listening to him – or else she was dead.

‘What’s happened to her?’ he asked as this new dread struck him. ‘Have you killed her?’

‘I never wanted to kill anyone,’ the man said, clearly taken aback. ‘Why won’t anyone listen to me? Those others who died so quickly, that wasn’t my fault. I wish someone would listen.’

He raised his arm and Jon saw he was holding out a chipped white mug. The man leaned forward and pressed the cold rim of the cup against Jon’s bottom lip, a dribble of water sliding down his chin and neck. He shivered with anticipation and closed his eyes as he took a sip of water and felt its icy smoothness on his tongue.

‘Isn’t this nice?’ the man said pleasantly. ‘All three of us here together.’

Jon scowled at him. The moaning had resumed, a ragged sound, as though the unseen woman was shaking with sobs.

‘It’s like a party!’ Jon’s captor giggled. ‘A pre launch party for the collection. I should have brought some champagne up with me.’

‘This is nothing to laugh about,’ Jon protested, shaking his chains again.

‘Please don’t keep me here!’ the woman shrieked suddenly and Jon heard an echoing rattle of chains.

As the man turned to look at her Jon twisted his head, raising it from the bed as far as it would go, but he still couldn’t see the woman lying on the floor.

‘Let me go!’ she repeated, her voice shrill with alarm.

‘Yes, let us both go! We’ve had enough of this,’ Jon joined in.

Without warning the man lunged forward and slapped Jon across the face with the back of his hand, a sudden blow that felt like an explosion on the side of his head. Jon yelped in surprise.

‘You’re not going anywhere until you understand the collection. You want to know about it, don’t you?’

‘No I bloody don’t,’ Jon muttered under his breath, scared to speak out loud in case the man hit him again. There was a salty taste on his lips; tears or blood.

‘Let me go! Please, let me go - ’ The woman broke off abruptly.

For a few seconds there was silence. The man walked over to the shelves of skulls and other macabre objects and began fiddling with them, humming to himself all the while. He picked up a long ivory coloured stick and brandished it above his head. Strands of leather hung down from it, like coarse hair.

‘They don’t understand yet. But they will.’

He was talking to himself.

‘What is that thing?’ Jon asked, intrigued in spite of his terror.

‘There. I knew you were interested!’

He turned to Jon with an eager smile.

‘This is my collection. It’s going to be renowned, celebrated throughout the world. One day it will draw the entire human race together, with a power that goes far beyond the misleading drivel of religion. There’s never been anything like it, not since the pyramids. It goes further than the ancient Egyptians ever did, a continuation of the work they began - ’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What has any of this got to do with the pyramids, for fuck’s sake? What work?’

The man shook his head sadly.

‘Such ignorance. The ancient Egyptians knew that every living body was inhabited by a spirit which didn’t die when mere physical breathing stopped. That’s why they built pyramids to preserve the flesh against decay, as a means to deathlessness.’

He waved his hand in the direction of the shelves and turned back to Jon, his eyes shining.

‘My collection is going to open the eyes of the world - ’

‘You’re insane!’ the woman’s voice shouted out hysterically.

‘No one wants to see that disgusting - ’

The man dashed across the room and kicked out. Jon watched his body jolt at the impact and heard the woman scream.

‘Stop that!’ Jon yelled, crying with frustration at his own helplessness. ‘Stop it at once!’

His captor turned to him, flushed with anger, and lashed out, hitting Jon squarely in the centre of his face. Pain made his eyes stream and blood filled his mouth, choking him. The man’s blurred face glared at him for a second, then vanished. The light snapped off, the door slammed, and the two prisoners were left alone once again in darkness.

Jon turned his head to one side to stop the blood from his nose dribbling into his mouth.

‘Are you alright?’ he asked.

His lips felt thick and his voice gurgled in his throat.

‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’ she replied. ‘We’re both going to die here and there’s nothing we can do about it. No one knows where we are.’

Fighting an urge to vomit, Jon closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain that had begun relentlessly stabbing his face.

Beside him, the woman began to cry.