Hurt (The Hurt Series) (21 page)

She eased the door open and poked her head through the crack. Ray was sitting at his desk playing the PC keyboard like a pianist. She waited there a while watching him produce fluid word after fluid word, seemingly in time with the song, not once stopping to correct either
spelling
or grammar. He was in that mythical zone he’d often speak about where he was at the mercy of his muse, and could have done with another couple of dozen fingers to keep up.

She didn’t have to see his face to know he was smiling. Here, lost in his fictional world, among the immortal and heroic, he was safe and happy; immortal and heroic.

‘Hope you’re hungry, detective?’ Ray stopped typing, spun in his chair to face her. His silver hair was damp and slicked back from his brow, his eyes bagged, but there was colour in his sunken cheeks. She wondered if it was from the exertion of chucking up or the agonising chore of pissing.

She opened the door wider and stepped into the room. Cluttered with shelves of dog-eared paperback novels, packs of printing paper stacked in the corners, and with walls plastered with Iron Maiden posters, Ray, like herself, favoured working in chaos.

‘I take it you’re not after today,’ she said.

Ray grinned that grin of his. ‘Doesn’t bode well having a snitch for a daughter.’

‘She’s worried about you. And I don’t like lying to her.’

Ray looked down at his bare feet, wriggled his toes. ‘It’s only for a couple of days.’

‘But what if it happens again? You can’t blame another boozy stag night, and as I much as I love you and respect your decision, I can’t look her in the eye and lie to her again.’

Ray eased to his feet and met her in the centre of the small room. ‘This was the first time I’ve thrown up, and I reckon it really did have more to do with the booze than anything else.’ He took her hands and held them tight, pulled her close. ‘If it happens again before Sunday then I promise we’ll tell the girls, okay?’

Jessop nodded reluctantly. She wrapped her arms around his narrow waist and squeezed. Ray winced and groaned beneath his breath. She let go and stepped away briskly. ‘Christ, sorry. I −‘

A finger touched her lips. ‘You need never apologise to me. After all, we always hurt the ones we love, right?’ He attempted his famous sardonic grin.

Within his sunken face, the smile looked too big and reminded her of a skull mask more suited to yesterday’s celebrations.

Chapter
Fifty-two

Thursday, November 2
^nd

She stared wide eyed at the blinking alarm clock.

1.49am

Sleep was proving as elusive as the killer she sought. The bastard who slipped into people’s lives before slipping into their houses to hide in the shadows and wait.

Where was he now?

Who out of the city’s 280,000 residents had he chosen to teach about salvation with a lesson in loss? Which room was he holed up in? Was he excited? Anxious for dawn so as to get busy and bloody? Or did the task ahead daunt him, just as the task of facing Dodd yesterday had daunted her?

She hadn’t wanted to face the demon inside her but she’d had to. It needed exorcising once and for all. Her soul cleansing.

But what of the killer’s demons? What figure from his past needed expelling?

Who did he see writhing in blood upon the floor after he’d unleashed his frustration?

And whose dead eyes would she be looking into tomorrow morning because of him?

Ray stirred beside her, his eyelids flickering in the grip of REM sleep.

And then they were still, as if…

She bit down hard on her gums. The duvet was slung low exposing his sinewy torso in the cool sliver of moonlight through the crack in the curtains. Only now, knowing of his aliment did she notice the weight loss.

She eased the duvet up over his chest and swept his hair back from his face. Placed a hand on his forehead. It felt cold yet slick, as if a fever had just broken. Throat tightening, she wiped it gently with the back of her hand. Rolled over and hugged the duvet tight to her chest. Through moist eyes she looked at the alarm clock. 2.00am

The next time she looked at the clock it read 7.31am, one minute ahead of the time on her phone, on which she’d just finished listening to Mason.

She turned to Ray, still asleep and snoring gently. For this she was grateful, because she didn’t want to have to tell him whose dead eyes she was about to look into.

Chapter
Fifty-three

The front door of the Victorian styled terraced townhouse was open with the first attending officer standing guard. Jessop raced inside, ducked left into a spacious living room with blue carpet and magnolia walls.

Seated on a cream leather corner sofa was a WPC. Beside her, huddled in a white towelling bathrobe lashed with crimson, sat a redheaded girl who bore a striking resemblance to her mother.

Jessop dismissed the WPC and took her place on the sofa.

Vicky did not notice.

Her gaze was focused on a framed photo perched above the fireplace. In the picture Vicky and her mother, Samantha, were on holiday in Vegas, posing with Elvis and wearing oversized sunglasses and stupid grins on their faces. It was the best holiday they’d ever had, Jessop recalled Vicky telling her.

She ventured an arm round Vicky’s narrow shoulders. Beneath the thick robe she could feel the girl trembling, and could see the red mark across her throat. ‘Vicky,’ she whispered. ‘It’s me, Cathy.’

Her touch, along with the words, were lost on the girl. Vicky was in shock, and after what she had been told on route about the murder, she was not surprised.

Jessop looked up from Vicky to see Brooke approaching from the dining room. She slipped her arm from Vicky and squatted down before her. ‘Sweetheart, listen to me. I’m going to leave you here with Brooke for a second, okay?’ She motioned to Brooke, who slid gently onto the sofa beside the girl with whom thirty-six hours ago she was downing tequila shots at Jessop’s hen night.

Jessop met Mason in the adjoining dining room, where sat a beach-wood dinner table and four chairs on which Samantha liked to host poker evenings. She recalled a time not so long ago when she’d been invited to sit in on a game. She’d declined politely, saying she was useless at cards. However, the truth was socializing with her fiancée’s ex-wife just felt too weird. She’d met Sam twice, and on both brief occasions when she’d dropped Vicky off at the house, the woman had been charming and gracious. Now, on seeing the table, she was overcome with regret for not accepting the mature invite.

‘CSI are on route,’ Mason said. ‘Five minutes.’

‘Good for them.’ She stepped passed Mason and pushed open the kitchen door.

Bloodbath. That was the first word to come to mind as she entered the kitchen. The room was narrow, white and clinical, enhancing the volume and colour of the blood that was pooled beneath the body and streaked across the appliances. Behind her she heard Mason suck up a breath and curse to himself.

Samantha lay with her head against the washing machine. A natural redhead, her flesh had always been pale, but now it was almost translucent. She wore a blue vest top beneath a belted white cotton dressing gown open at the waist to reveal black panties that on first impressions had not been tampered with. Her hips were slender as were her thighs and calves, tapering down to bare feet with toes painted blood red. At least that was the colour she thought they were painted. Such was the amount of blood that had escaped from the lacerations in her upper thighs it was difficult to say for sure.

She stepped closer to the body, zeroing in on the only signs of violence Samantha appeared
to
have endured. The cuts along her inner thighs were roughly eight inches long and drawn at an angle toward her knee with force and without precision.

Mason crouched down and leant closer to Samantha’s splayed, bloodied legs. ‘He cut the femoral arteries.’

‘Yep.’ The femoral arteries are among the body’s biggest veins. They ran down both legs supplying blood and oxygen to the lower half of the body. If opened, and without very urgent medical attention, the blood loss can be fatal. And the killer knew it.

‘How long you figure?’

‘She can’t weigh any more than hundred-twenty pounds. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes.’

Mason exhaled and stood back up. ‘Vicky say anything to you?’

Jessop shook her head.

‘CSI are here,’ came Brooke’s voice from the dining room.

‘They’re gonna be pissed we entered the scene without suiting up,’ Mason said.

Jessop peered down at the blood on her shoes. ‘Fuck ’em.’

Back in the living room Vicky was still perched on the sofa. Her face was blank as she stared unblinking at the Vegas photograph. She and her mother shared a strong bond where not only were they mother and daughter, but also best friends. They would share secrets and paint each others’ nails; talk boys and share a bottle of wine in front of the TV of an evening without pretence or wanting to be anywhere else or with anyone else. Jessop had always envied their relationship, and had secretly wished she and Chloe were as tight.

Just as the man she needed to call wished he’d been as tight with his daughter before she’d been taken from him.’

‘You got this one?’ she asked Mason.

Mason nodded. ‘Call him.’

Chapter
Fifty-four

Ray sat beside the bed, his hand firmly in Vicky’s as it had been for the last four hours since bringing her back to the house after Knowles had confiscated her clothes for examination. The conversation between him and his daughter had been one way, with Ray pledging reassurances and promises to look after her, and that the monster who did this to her mother was going to pay. Even if he had to catch the bastard himself.

Vicky’s expression had not changed. It was as if she was still staring at the Vegas photo instead of the spare room’s pastel green wall. Maybe she still saw the picture, Jessop thought, looking on from the doorway. Maybe that was her brain’s way of combating the horrific experience of being forced to watch her mother and best friend bleed to death.

Within her pocket Jessop felt her mobile vibrate. She checked the caller ID and saw Chloe’s name. ‘Back in a sec,’ she said softly. Ray neither looked up nor acknowledged her. Since she had broken the devastating news to him he had said only three words to her: ‘Where is she?’ She understood his concern, but his behaviour toward her was if he blamed her for his ex’s death and for putting Vicky in this catatonic state. If she had done her job properly and caught the bastard then none of this would have happened. Christ, what the hell had she been doing all this time, pulling all the late nights and early mornings? She was head of The Murder Investigation Team, for Christ’s sake. It was her job to catch killers, wasn’t it?

Out on the landing, Jessop answered her phone and was greeted with a ‘Wassup?’

She clenched her jaw, trying to find the right words. Death affected the young harder than the old. They were still discovering the world, making plans and looking ahead to a happy and prosperous future where they will live forever. News of death arrested that, spilling poison on the seeds of optimism they’d been cultivating, and hardening them too soon. In some, this poison would grow, spawning cynicism and bitterness. For they knew death was very real and very close, and that the world they had embraced thus far did not care if they had been good or bad, and would keep on turning whether they were alive or dead.

‘Mum?’

‘Something’s happened.’

She kept it short and to the point, not indulging in the manner in which Sam was killed. Chloe knew better than to push the issue, instead turning her concerns to Vicky’s wellbeing.

‘She’s still in shock,’ Jessop said, ‘but we’re at home. Familiar and comfortable surroundings will do her better than a hospital ward.’

‘I’m on my way.’

The line disconnected.

She pocketed the phone just as Ray stepped from the room scratching his beard. He leant against the wall beside her and sighed. She wanted to hold him and whisper words of reassurance in his ear, just as he had been doing to Vicky. But there was a dark aura around him that warned“ don’t touch”, and so she kept her distance and waited for him to break the awkward silence. When finally he did speak, she was surprised at the calmness within his voice.

‘You know, I spent a long, long time hating Sam. Years. Not that she had ever done me wrong, but because she got Vicky.’

Jessop knew their history. Sam was one of Ray’s groupies when he was in the band. They’d married on impulse because she fell pregnant with Vicky, and in those days it was the right thing to do. However, by then, what with the alcoholism and drugs, the band’s future was already
looking
bleak. Ray quit first. He was a father now, and taking the role seriously. Little Vicky soon became his muse for a different artistic outlet, writing. He would write stories to tell her at bedtime, and was surprised at how easily the words flowed onto the page. Meanwhile, Sam was beginning to regret marrying on such an impulse and for the wrong reason. Pregnancy was no substitute for love, an emotion she had confused with adulation for Love Rocket’s wild guitarist. She was not a shallow person but she could not help her feelings. Neither could she live a lie. Ray was a good man and didn’t deserve a woman who didn’t love him back. Telling him this was the hardest thing she had ever had to do. A week after Vicky’s fifth birthday, Ray moved out.

It was an amicable split with Ray appreciating Samantha’s honesty. They remained friends, with Sam putting no restrictions on Ray seeing their daughter. However, visits were not enough for the doting dad. Jessop remembered Ray telling her about the day he had left his precious little girl after his first visit. That night he went out and bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and a hundred cigarettes with the intention of consuming his purchases before sunrise. He poured his first shot and placed the first cigarette between his lips, lay back on his sofa and picked up the latest story he had penned for Vicky. An hour later, the story had changed somewhat, with the main character turning from heroic frog to embittered ex-rock star/vigilante. Seven hours later, the word count had grown from a thousand words to seven thousand words, giving birth to Rob “Rowdy” Bowman and cementing a career.