Grave Doubts (12 page)

‘What would that signify?’

‘Just tell me.’

‘Neither. It hasn’t been returned. In fact I had forgotten about it until now.’

Claire raised an eyebrow disapprovingly. She seemed annoyed and rinsed her cup under the tap in silence. Her kitchen was immaculate in its stark modernity. The cup was dried and put away.

‘What?’

‘What do you mean, what?’

‘What have I said to offend you?’ Fenwick washed his cup, surreptitiously tipping away half its contents under the running tap. He turned around for the tea towel only to have the crockery pulled from his hand.

‘Nothing. I’m not offended. If you have to go, make it soon. I need my sleep. I have a busy day tomorrow.’

‘Claire…’ Fenwick paused, baffled. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s nothing to understand, though you should be asking for that jumper back. Not a good habit to get into, giving your clothes away to waifs and strays.’

Confused he kissed her cheek and bade her goodnight. Claire went back to bed but didn’t fall asleep for a long time.

For a second time he was summoned to the visitors’ room but this time he went with a sense of impatience.

‘You’ve taken your time coming back.’

The belligerence in Griffiths’ tone was new and not to the liking of his visitor. He made as if to leave, a small gesture but it provoked the desired reaction.

‘No, I’m sorry. Don’t go. You have no idea what it’s like in here. Stay, please.’

There was enough supplication in Griffiths’ tone for his visitor to sit down again.

‘But life’s better without Saunders isn’t it?’

‘Yes, he was the worst.’ The prisoner hesitated, knowing what was expected of him but unusually reluctant to oblige. At last he said. ‘Thank you…thank you very much.’

‘Anything for an old friend.’

‘And can you do anything more for this old friend?’

‘Oh I haven’t finished yet, I still have your nemesis to deal with.’

‘My what?’

‘Artemesia, do keep up. You could at least read and improve your mind while you’re in here. I think you’d approve of the little scenario I have going with her. Obviously I can’t go into detail but let’s just say that I have engaged her in a game of my own devising, one that she’s losing even as we speak. I have one last trick to play on her and then I shall finish it. I’m starting to grow bored.’

‘It’s not like you to hesitate. You usually go straight for the k—’ Griffiths stopped himself in time.

‘This way is better, trust me. My usual approach wouldn’t have worked as she’s far too suspicious but you won’t have to wait for long now. You must be patient.’

‘That’s fine for you to say, you’re not stuck in here.’ He lowered his head and hissed. ‘I need to get out; please you have to help me.’

‘You’re going to have to resign yourself to some more time in here but I have a plan. It may not be as rapid as you might like but it will work.’

‘What do you mean?’

His visitor shifted in his seat. In someone else Griffiths would have taken it for a sign of discomfort. He knew that the man opposite didn’t like enclosed spaces though it was not a subject that was talked about.

‘I am going to work on giving you grounds for an appeal.’

‘I told you, my solicitor says I have no chance.’

‘Well, we need to create that chance. Think about it. What is the simplest way to convince the authorities that they have the wrong man?’

Griffiths scratched his head with the effort of original thought.

‘I don’t know.’

His visitor sighed with impatience and leant forward so that he could whisper.

‘The way to convince them is for the, ah, incidents that put you in here to continue whilst you’re inside. Of course, it will mean that I won’t be able to visit as you’ll come under renewed scrutiny. Just remember to keep quiet about me.’

‘I always have.’ Griffiths reached out for the man’s hand but it was pulled back and he changed the subject to cover up the rejection.

‘The books have arrived. I’ve already deciphered the message.’

‘Excellent, then we’re done. I must go. Remember, be patient and be smart.’

The person who had been Griffiths’ only friend walked away. If the plan didn’t work he would never see him again and the thought made him even more depressed. Back in his cell he looked again at the letter he had received and at his carefully concealed deciphering, of which he was inordinately proud. The original ran:

Dear Friend,

I have been thinking about
your request
for suitable reading materials. The enclosed book is one of my favourites. It tells the story of a remarkable seaman who pioneered sailing around our coasts in the twenties.
Pages 2, 12, 46, 33, 18 and 15
are particularly interesting. The author shares a
birthday with me; month and day,
and by coincidence lived in a house with the same street number,
125
. Of course we shouldn’t forget
your birthday
, nor how important
Christmas
is to us all. Now in the other books the pages to note are…

The letter continued with the same strange sequence of pages and references to apparently random numbers until it ended abruptly with:
I’ll write again soon, yours, Agnes.

First he’d marked pages 2, 12, 46, 33, 18 and 15 of the book. Then he counted to the words indicated. The birthday was 17
^th
July, which meant that he needed the 17
^th
word on page 2 and the 7
^th
on page 12; the 125
^th
word on page 46 came next, then the 1st on page 33, the 8
^th
on page 18 (his own birthday), and the 25
^th
and 12
^th
on page 15. At the end of fifteen minutes he had his first sentence and proof that he could decipher the code:

He cannot escape From confinement Better Plan.

Half an hour later he had the whole message:
He cannot escape From confinement Better Plan. to strike again, same tack As before while prisoner Inside. First finish bird then move on. London perhaps. Keep constant.

He flushed his work away, tucked the original letter into the back of one of the books and lay down on his bed. ‘Agnes’ was going to continue a spree of rape using his method. That would make the police look stupid and give him grounds for an appeal. But Agnes did not stop at rape these days. The thought warmed him like a good brandy. He drifted into a sweet sleep, the smile on his face cherubic.

‘Well, don’t hang around, the Superintendent wants to see you.’ Cooper shook his head in exasperation.

He watched her drag her feet through the door, his sympathy running out. As his dear mother had been known to say,
‘You can’t help those who won’t help themselves
.’

‘Never a truer word,’ he muttered to himself, ‘never a truer, bloody, word.’

She re-appeared ten minutes later, face pale as marble but composed.

‘A month. I transfer at the end of July.’

It was pronounced with the same enthusiasm as a death sentence. Cooper spoke some platitudes in an effort to sound encouraging but it was impossible to tell whether she heard him. With a shrug he returned his attention to the paperwork before him. One of his cases was due in court later. When he returned at three o’clock he looked automatically at Nightingale’s desk and was surprised to see it empty. He asked around and was told that she’d left early again. Cursing, he called her flat but couldn’t get through. When he checked, the operator told him that the phone was off the hook. The mobile was no better so he left a brief message with her answering service.

From time to time during the rest of the afternoon he tried both numbers without success. Eventually he decided to call at her flat on the way home. He told himself that it was because she had no business slipping off early like that without an explanation; it made him feel less of a fool.

The flat was too hot and the air stuffy. The windows would normally have been left open but Nightingale’s concern for security had meant that they remained shut. Now that she was home she risked pushing them wide. The breeze from outside started to stir the heavy air as she changed into baggy cut-off jeans and a white vest. Like her doors, the windows boasted new dead locks and individual bolts. The improved security had worked so far and her flat remained inviolate.

She had no appetite and no inclination to force herself to eat. There was a self-destructiveness within her that she held onto like a disturbed adolescent. She poured herself a large glass of chilled Sauvignon and nibbled on breadsticks as she listened to her messages.

Only four, but they were all hang-ups. She shrugged her shoulders and deleted them before disconnecting the phone and turning off her mobile. She had been determined to tell someone at the station about the calls and Emails but then the summons from Quinlan had come and she’d allowed herself to descend into a pit of self-pity.

On the computer she had a new Email from the server ID she’d come to dread. She pressed enter and waited for the screen to fill. A black box with white lettering appeared in the middle of the screen
‘warning explicit picture
’. She swallowed more wine and unconsciously clenched her hands into fists.

The picture took a long time to form. Blocks of abstract colour flashed onto her computer screen gradually building a coherent image. She gasped as she recognised an authentic-looking scene-of-crime photograph. The naked body of a woman lay at an angle, her feet to the top of the screen with the left arm lying across her naked abdomen. There was something disturbingly familiar about the hand. White blanks filled the rest of the picture.

The upper torso arrived in a sudden rush of colour, complete with bruises and lacerations, then the dead head, with a terrible throat wound. It took Nightingale fully thirty seconds to work out what was wrong. It wasn’t an anonymous mask of horror that stared back at her from the screen. It was her own face.

It was
her
hair that was matted with congealed blood,
her
eyes that stared sightlessly into the photographer’s lens,
her
neck that had been strangled and then slashed.

The taste of bitter wine filled her throat and she nearly retched. Whoever had done this had taken a lot of care to create his victim. The work was painstaking and precise. She looked again at the hand flung across the naked belly. No wonder it was familiar – it was her hand. Her signet ring graced the little finger.

Nightingale closed her eyes and felt perspiration form along her brow and at the nape of her neck. It dribbled down her back. Who could hate her this much?

In the kitchen she drank a glass of tap water and it helped to settle her stomach. Shock had been replaced with anger more than fear. True it disturbed her profoundly to think of the stalker spending hours creating that picture but she refused to be victimised by it. There was no option now but to report the terror she had been living with and accept the consequences. She would take her PC into the station first thing in the morning.

At four o’clock she took tablets for a pounding headache. There was no sign of Blackie but that didn’t surprise her. He was an independent animal and rarely turned up unless he was hungry. She opened a packet of smoked salmon and divided the contents between a sandwich and his bowl, putting slightly more aside for the cat than for herself.

As she finished eating there was a ring from the doorbell, making her stiffen instinctively. When she looked through the peephole the landing and stairs were empty so she opened the door. There was a large parcel on her doormat wrapped in brown paper, with her name written in block capitals. It had been hand delivered and the hairs on her neck prickled as she immediately considered the worst. Would her stalker really send her a parcel bomb?

She took it inside and placed it on the floor in the hall, closing and bolting the door behind her. It would be very stupid to open the parcel, yet her mood of reckless fatalism was strong. The wounded adolescent in her that had never left, had only been concealed under layers of fragile self-assertion, whispered in her mind
‘it would serve them all right’.
After staring at the package for a long time she took a knife from the kitchen and sliced through the tape that bound it before lifting the paper away.

Inside there was a cardboard box wrapped in layers of sellotape. A bad sign, but she ignored it and applied the knife delicately until she could work out how to open the lid. At that point she paused and went to find her duvet cover and pillows, which she arranged as sandbags around the box. Behind them she piled the sofa cushions and long foam seat.

She noticed a strange smell as she came back into the hall. If the increasingly unpleasant odour was anything to go by the package was more likely to be unpleasant than dangerous. Even so, she tensed as she extended her left arm and the longest knife she could find through a gap in the improvised sandbags.

At first, the top held fast but she was patient and by levering it up in stages around each side she raised it sufficiently to flip the lid. The smell was overpowering. It made her gag as she pulled the cushions out of the way so that she could look inside.

‘Oh no.’

Nightingale went to find newspapers and placed them in a thick layer on the floor. Tears blurred her vision as she lifted out the contents carefully, as if she was afraid to inflict further pain on the creature inside, but Blackie was clearly dead. His killer had slit his belly so that some of the slippery grey intestines spilled out as Nightingale laid the matted fur bundle gently on the floor.

The overpowering stench helped to take her mind off her grief. He hadn’t deserved this. Whoever had indulged in such torture was a sadist of the worst sort. She forced her thoughts from sadness to practicalities as her anger towards the perpetrator grew.

When the doorbell rang for a second time she gripped the long kitchen knife in her hand and jerked it open, prepared to confront the bastard who had done this.

Cooper recoiled in horror from Nightingale and the smell that engulfed him.

In the circumstances they both reacted with remarkable calm.

‘You’d better come in.’ When he hesitated she reached out and pulled him over the threshold in a disconcertingly strong grip.

‘Don’t look, it’s Blackie. Someone has just sent me his body in a parcel.’

‘What?’ He looked at her baffled.

‘It’s my cat. Someone tortured and killed him, then left his carcass in a parcel on my doorstep. I thought when you rang the bell that you were them, coming back.’

He reached for the knife and she let it go passively. Once it was safely back in the kitchen he bent down and peered closely at the body.

‘It’s not a cat, look; it’s a furry Davey Crocket hat with a tail. Someone’s tipped offal and blood on top of it. Who would do such a thing?’

Nightingale had to struggle to control her sob of relief before replying.

‘The same person that’s been stalking me since the trial, leaving heavy-breathing messages on my phone and sending me obscene Emails.’