Doors Without Numbers (8 page)

“I know I don’t have to remind you that it is going to be practically impossible to justify spending resources on reviewing suicides. Do you want me to help in any way? We could do it in our free time. Galvin will help as well, you know he would do anything for you if you asked him.”

Hammond looked at Dunn sharply. He saw she wasn’t being sarcastic but was taken aback by her comment. He had noticed Galvin’s enthusiasm for the job but had never considered it was in any way related to himself. He waited for Dunn to explain her comment but instead she stood up from her chair.

“Just ask if you need me to check on anything or to help with the investigation in any way.”

Hammond thanked her, he was confident it would only be a matter of time before he took her up on her offer.

Hammond was convinced the car was on autopilot, he couldn’t remember driving to his house in Stanford yet he arrived outside his front door within twenty minutes after leaving Police Headquarters. He was annoyed to find a battered Volkswagen camper van parked in his usual place, leaving him with no choice but to park further up the road. As he walked toward his house, he noted that the curtains were drawn. He knew that the curtains had been open when he had left that morning. He paused outside his neighbour’s house, unsure whether to proceed, his eyes automatically scanning the road for his son’s car. It was possible that Paul had come home unexpectedly, but unlikely he would bother to draw the curtains. Hammond considered the possibility and thought again. If Paul didn’t have his car, he would have phoned to be collected from the train station and he hadn’t heard from Paul. His heart started beating fast in his chest. He crouched down by the wall and considered what to do. If there were burglars, it was likely there would be more than one. He focused on each car parked in close proximity in turn, looking for someone in a car that was a possible look-out. He saw no-one. Whoever was in the house were confident they wouldn’t be disturbed. He breathed slowly and crept across to his garden wall, waiting several seconds before skulking across the small front garden to underneath the living room window. He crouched low, confident he was hidden in the darkness. There was a gap in the curtains, he attempted to see through it by raising his head from his crouched position, but could only see the light from the table lamp nearest the window that had been switched on during his absence. For a moment he considered phoning the police, but pride got the better of him and he decided to approach the front door. He rang the doorbell and listened, expecting activity on the other side, there was nothing. Hammond took a deep breath and turned the key in the lock, slamming the door open, causing it to swing dramatically before it concluded its dance with a resounding thud against the wall. Still silence. The house was in darkness apart from the light that was showing from underneath the living room door. He stood with his back against the hallway wall and raised one leg until his foot rested on the door handle. With one push he depressed the door lever and spun into the room with a shout that resembled a tribal war cry. There was a yelp from behind one of the sofas. A black mass of hair slowly raised itself from the other side of the room, followed by two dark rimmed eyes. Hammond swallowed; he was being burgled by a monkey.

“Wally! You frightened the shit out of me!”

The reprimanding voice was accompanied by the petite figure of a young woman dressed in tightly fitted jeans and a black t-shirt with the slogan
“If you can afford me, I’m yours!
” Hammond’s face broke into a relieved smile.

“Jenny! I didn’t know you would be here.” He wasn’t sure how to continue. It wasn’t every day that his son’s best friend visited him uninvited. In fact, he had never officially invited her. Jenny had a habit of doing what she wanted when she wanted regardless of any unspoken protocol.

“It’s cool.” Jenny continued pulling at the sofa, speaking as if she were accepting an apology from him. “Paul said he had left a message for you. How do you get this sofa to turn into a bed?”

She didn’t look at him as she spoke, being so preoccupied with pulling his sofa apart. Her blasé attitude made Hammond feel as if it were he who was intruding into her private domain. He stood there, completely bewildered before walking across the room to assist her unfolding the metal sprung mattress base and rearranged the sofa cushions for her.

“It’s bloody freezing in here, Wally”

Jenny looked at him then, and reached her arms around his neck in a tight embrace. The gesture was so unexpected that Hammond, with some embarrassment returned the embrace, patting his hands on her upper back. Then he remembered the front door was still open and returned to the hallway, shutting the door firmly.

Jenny called to him as he returned along the hallway, kicking his shoes off as he passed the coat rack.

“I’ve made you some dinner, it’s in the oven.”

He proceeded to the kitchen, questions popping into his thoughts as he did so but decided not to ask, not yet. He headed for the telephone that was mounted on the wall inside the kitchen and dialled 1571 to retrieve his phone messages.

“Hey Dad. I need a favour. Jen’s going through a bad time, I told her she could come and stay with you for a while, just until she gets her head sorted. I have given her my keys so don’t feel you have to get home early to let her in. I will phone soon.” The message ended. It was typical that his son had not thought to ring his mobile rather than the home phone to ensure his message would be retrieved before Jenny had arrived. The female call-minder voice instructed Hammond to save or delete the message by pressing three. He pressed three before replacing the handset and looked around the kitchen. It was unusually tidy despite the faint aroma of burnt toast. He felt un-nerved suddenly and strode back into the living room.

“Jenny, it’s lovely to see you of course. I haven’t seen you in a while and you look great.” He lied; she looked like a small child who had attacked the Halloween face paints. “Although, I have to ask...why the sudden visit? Paul’s message said you are going through a tough time. Are you alright?”

He perched on the arm of the chair nearest the door and waited for her to face him. When she did turn, he was taken aback by her response.

“No, Wally. I am not alright. No, I do not want to talk about it, and no, I don’t know how long I will be here, but it’s probably for a few days, unless you want to be like a typical misogynistic male and kick a vulnerable woman out on the street so you can stay here and be cosy with your smug self?!”

The words were shouted at him with childish aggression, but Hammond stayed where he was, concentrating on keeping his face as neutral as possible. He was unsure how to respond.

“Ok. Where did you say my dinner was?”

“
All human work, under natural conditions, is a kind of dance.”
Henry Havelock Ellis. The Dance of Life. 1923.

The temperature had dropped to several degrees above freezing. The cold air shocked Wallace Hammond awake as he blearily opened his front door. Ideally he would have stayed in bed an extra hour but wanted to get into the office before it got too busy. He stepped out into the cold air and then with second thoughts, returned indoors to retrieve his overcoat. He would have liked to have found his scarf, but the coat rack mountain refused to divulge any clues as to where his scarf could be so he gave up. Wrapping his coat around his shoulders he headed towards his usual parking space forgetting the Volkswagen van was parked there instead. He swore and in his annoyance got out his pen and notebook from his inside pocket and scribbled a hasty message for the car owner.
“To whoever owns this piece of junk. Please note this is residential parking only. Cars will be clamped if parked illegally
.”

He knew it was a childish act, but he admitted to himself that it was somewhat enjoyable too. It was unlikely the car owner would trace the message to him. Hammond chuckled quietly to himself as he strolled up to the road to his car, imagining the facial expression of the reader when the message was discovered. He hoped it would give him his car space back.

If there was such a thing as karma, it presented itself to Hammond immediately. The Peugeot’s windscreen was covered in a sheet of ice. Hammond remembered too late that he had lost the window scraper last winter and resigned himself to sitting in the front seat with the engine running and the heater on full blast. Minutes past and the windscreen showed no sign of defrosting. Deciding to make his house-guest earn her keep, he called his own home number from his mobile letting it ring repeatedly until he heard a groggy “Who and what?”

Using an encouraging tone, Hammond persuaded Jenny to fill a jug of warm water and bring it up the road to his car. She was not impressed but after reminders that it could be her way of returning a favour she put the phone down. It wasn’t long before he saw her unsmiling face, bare of make-up looking down at him through a shower of water. She followed his directions, pouring warmth over all the windows and then walked back towards the house with the empty jug and no word of farewell. As Hammond used his wipers to clear the windscreen of excess moisture, he saw Jenny stop at the Volkswagen van and read his message pinned under the campervan’s wipers. She pulled the note away and looked around at the row of neighbouring houses with a look of agitation. He put the car into first gear and withdrew from his parking space. As he passed his own house, he saw Jenny, seemingly unaware of the icy temperature, dressed only in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and shorts crouched down in the next door neighbour’s porch. It looked as if she was shouting through the letterbox.

The computer was making too much noise for Hammond’s liking. He had intended to be discreet and use the empty office to search the names that Harris had given him on the list of suicides, but the way the computer was beeping every time it demanded a password, it was bound to draw attention. Hammond wasn’t entirely computer proficient, usually he would ask Emma to help him but he didn’t want anyone to know what he was doing. The wall clock told Hammond it was 8am, he had another hour before his presence would be noticed. He searched the list of names included on Harris’s note one at a time using the police search network. The first name Hammond searched was Salima Abitboul. She had been found strangled underneath a disused railway bridge near Orpington, and was identified by her flatmate Cheryl Bailey whom had reported her missing days earlier. A Pakistani man had been investigated by police after having been seen going to the site several times before Salima’s body was discovered. When he had been arrested, the suspect had a necklace belonging to Salima in his pocket. It wouldn’t been enough evidence to convict him had the man not confessed to using an electrical cord to strangle Salima and given police the location of where he had dumped it. This accurate information was enough to convince the jury that he was guilty. Hammond read the report again, he was perplexed as to why the killer had co-operated so fully, he had ultimately convicted himself. This was not the normal behaviour of an offender. In his experience, murderers would be prepared to do anything to escape being convicted. The report stated the man charged had no previous convictions but that didn’t mean the man hadn’t committed a crime before, just that he hadn’t been caught. A guilty conscience could have explained the confession, it wasn’t implausible Hammond reasoned. He ensured he had not missed anything in the report on Salima Abitboul’s death before referring to the first name on Harris’ list of fatalities. Theresa Davenport. The police report stated without doubt that she had killed herself. She had thrown herself off the roof of an apartment block near Cheriton. A neighbour whom had lived the floor below had seen Theresa standing on the edge of the roof several minutes before she had jumped. Despite the neighbour’s frantic attempts to talk Theresa off the roof, Theresa had been non-responsive. In desperation the neighbour, 60 year old Anne Walker had run indoors to call the emergency services during which time Theresa had jumped. The autopsy report attributed her shattered limbs as being consistent with concentrated impact force by jumping feet first. The visceral trauma inflicted on the kidneys, spleen and lungs indicated the effects of deceleration forces typical of falling three or more stories. Hammond skimmed the report. Jumping from a height of thirty-six feet would be terrifying, he was curious why Theresa had not been heard screaming before or during her fall. She had not responded to her neighbours attempt to counsel her. Both factors could suggest she had been sedated before her fall although toxicology reports showed there were no drugs in her system. Hammond skimmed the photographs of the scene. There had been trees on either side on the building yet Theresa had chosen an area that had nothing to break her fall. He was surprised to discover that Theresa had eaten a meal of pasta and chicken before she had died. It seemed odd to him that she had eaten a nourishing meal just before killing herself. Her last meal seemed quite simple. Hammond’s stomach rumbled at the thought. He imagined that most would choose an indulgent meal before their departure on earth. He knew he would. The police report did not contain much information on Theresa’s personal life, it appeared that she had no family. She had left a brief note.
“This is the only choice I have left”
. There was no explanation for her death, neither was the note addressed to anyone in particular which made Hammond wonder why she had written it at all. It was possible that Theresa had wanted to excuse her decision to those who would inevitably have to deal with her body and clear up after her. If so, it gave the impression that she had realised her decision would affect the lives of others. Witnessing a death was traumatic enough, but failing to prevent someone from taking their own lives would undoubtedly create a lifetime of grief, even if the deceased and the witness were strangers. Hammond scanned the rest of the report hoping to find images of her apartment and was disappointed to find none. He would have preferred to have seen what kind of life she had led before she died. The general search engine proved slightly more helpful, listing separate newspaper articles that had reported her death but again, the information on her character or livelihood was limited. Hammond understood the reason for this, having released a press release that included the minimum of information the day previously. An article from a regional newspaper, written in October 2009, described Theresa as a single woman of thirty three who had lived a private, almost reclusive life. She had been employed as a librarian. Hammond closed the tab and scrolled down the listings, eventually clicking on a link that directed him to a Kent Suicide Prevention Plan page. He couldn’t find any details about Theresa on the page so tried again, clicking on a link that directed him to a FFASL forum. Hammond scanned the page under Friends and Family Affected By The Suicides of Loved Ones. He skimmed the emotional content of people’s personal stories until he found his search entry. It was found under Cherry13’s entry to the forum dated March 2010.