My Bloody Valentine (Alastair Gunn) (33 page)

Their host turned to look at her. ‘Neither any more.’

‘But it was …’ The tremor in Amala’s voice might not have been detectable to Cain, but it told Hawkins she now regretted her attempt at small talk.

Cain sighed. ‘ … owned.’

Amala looked as if she was trying not to wince. ‘It’s insured, though?’

Cain ignored her, re-engaging with Hawkins instead. ‘Why are you here?’

‘We’ll come to that,’ she said lightly. ‘Staying with the car for a moment, do you have any idea who might have vandalized it?’

The doctor paused. ‘You look like an intelligent
woman, Detective, so I’ll assume you’re familiar with my past. Notoriety means that people don’t need to know me to wish me ill.’

‘What about John Travis’ family?’ Hawkins kept her tone approachable but firm, carefully watching Cain’s response.

A flicker that could have been a painful memory ghosted across the woman’s expression. ‘What about them?’

‘Have they contacted you since the court case?’

‘No.’

‘You understand we have to ask,’ Hawkins said. ‘We’ll be speaking to them about the car.’

Cain nodded.

There was a pause, into which Amala jumped as if to avenge her previous rebuff. ‘Is there anyone else who might have had reason to damage your vehicle?’

‘Like I said,’ Cain answered flatly, ‘the court case made everything public in the most damaging way. There are plenty of strangers out there who hate me, although it all becomes normal remarkably fast.’ She shrugged. ‘What’s another death threat when you’ve already had three?’

Hawkins eyed her. ‘Since the accident, have you been physically attacked, either in prison or outside?’

‘No.’ Cain’s expression clouded again, her eyes bouncing suspiciously between her two visitors.

‘And have you left the house after dark in the four nights since you’ve been home?’

Another
pause. ‘No. Your colleagues were pretty indifferent about my case at the time; why the sudden interest?’

‘The situation has changed,’ Hawkins acknowledged. ‘I take it you haven’t seen the news since leaving prison.’

The doctor frowned; shook her head.

‘Okay.’ Hawkins phrased her next statements with care. ‘We’re investigating a string of murders, all apparently by the same killer. We believe he’s targeting newly released convicts, specifically those who caused the deaths of
innocent
victims, a category into which you undoubtedly fall.’

Amanda Cain didn’t react straight away but, after a few seconds, she sat down on the arm of the sofa, her gaze drifting down towards the floor. ‘And you think –’

‘It’s possible,’ Hawkins conceded. ‘The papers are calling him the Judge.’

Their host continued to stare at her feet, blinking as if trying to wake herself from a daze. Her voice was quiet when she asked, ‘How many?’

‘Three so far, all within weeks of release. The first attack was four months ago; the most recent in the last few days.’

‘What happened to them?’ Cain whispered, her breath catching. ‘Actually, I don’t want to know.’ She stared into space for a moment longer before looking up, suddenly with steel in her eyes. ‘What are you proposing?’

‘We
can place you in protective custody, at a safe house not far from here. Just until the killer is caught.’

Cain recoiled. ‘I don’t want …’ She paused, breathing harder now. ‘I’m not leaving.’

‘Fair enough.’ Hawkins had expected some resistance. It was understandable, considering where this previously respectable woman had spent the last nine months. She met her halfway. ‘At least let us provide you some protection here.’

There was an almost imperceptible shake of the head. ‘I won’t have people in my house.’

‘I think you should consider it,’ Hawkins urged. ‘A safety net, just in case. You won’t even know they’re here.’

‘You’re right,’ the doctor stood, emotion flaring in her voice for the first time, ‘because they
won’t
be.’

There was a moment’s silence, as Hawkins hoped their subject would change her mind. She’d seen this reaction in recently released prisoners before. In newly granted liberty, privacy often became paramount, although if anything might challenge that it was the threat of death.

But no retraction came.

Hawkins took a step forwards. ‘Look, I know the last few days have been hard. Leaving prison is traumatic in itself, but returning home to find your property damaged, that others reject your right to freedom … well, I can understand why you didn’t want to answer the door.’

Cain
looked confused.

‘I’m just saying,’ Hawkins made to clarify, ‘it’s natural to be scared.’

The doctor shook her head, tears forming. ‘I just got out of one cage, Detective. I don’t intend to let you turn my home into another.’ She raised a hand towards the front door. ‘Please leave.’

Hawkins followed Yasir down the steps, turning to watch Amanda Cain’s front door close behind them with a bang. She told Amala to wait as they arrived on the pavement, hoping the doctor might change her mind about their offer of in-home protection. But the door stayed shut.

It wasn’t really a surprise. Hawkins was glad she’d taken the opportunity on the way out to suggest that Cain keep an eye on the news for updates about whether the Judge had been detained. And that, until it happened, she didn’t leave the house after dark.

At least Cain had agreed to that.

They began walking back towards the car, in silence. Hawkins glanced up at the front window as they passed, but no face was visible this time.

Amala’s comment didn’t help. ‘That didn’t go so well.’

‘I can see her point, if I’m honest. But …’ She stopped and turned to face the way they had just come.

‘Ma’am?’

Hawkins didn’t answer straight away. She stood,
scanning the street. The road was lined on both sides by parked cars, despite it being well after 10 a.m. Some were in designated spaces; the overspill lined the pavement on the opposite side, reducing the entire street to a single lane. Other cars threaded their way back and forth, diving into gaps to let one another pass.

She looked at the DS. ‘Do you think this road is always so busy?’

‘I suppose so.’ Amala studied the melee. ‘We are in the middle of London.’

‘Good.’ Hawkins went with her instinct. ‘Organize some round-the-clock surveillance on the good doctor’s house, will you? One car out here to cover the front, another in the next street watching the back. I’ll authorize overtime if needs be.’

‘Unmarked?’

‘Definitely. With instructions to notify me if Cain leaves the house after dark, and to be close enough to step in if she gets a visit from anyone that could be you-know-who.’

‘And if she leaves, you want her followed?’

‘Yes. It’s our job to protect her, whether she appreciates it or not.’

‘Are you sure, ma’am? She was pretty clear about not wanting us around.’

‘Exactly,’ Hawkins replied. ‘Which is why we aren’t going to tell her they’re here.’

57

He woke with a start.

Brightness. Heat. Dry air.

He lay for a moment … Where was he?

Then the agony arrived.

The pain in his leg was fierce, ripping through him like barbed wire grating on the bone. He tried to sit up, check his wounds. But his body wasn’t working, and he slumped back against the lumpy ground, turning his head to the side.

The truck was about fifty yards away on the dirt-track road.

Nobody near it.

The land around him was open and flat, the road they’d come in on snaking away towards some low hills far in the distance. He could feel shrapnel in his neck.

But his mind was blank.

He turned to look the other way, but the wind blew sand in his eyes. He screwed them shut, bringing his fists up to rub the grit away.

Where the fuck was he, and how long had he been lying here?

It was afternoon; he could tell that much, at least. The sun was beating down, the skin on his face cracked and dry.

Then it came back to him.

Cheshire.

‘Jim?’ he screamed. ‘You there, man?’

He waited, breathing hard, hearing nothing except tiny bits of dirt rolling around in the wind.

But
he knew no answer would come.

58

Hawkins leaned back, pinching the bridge of her nose, blinking to relieve the strain of looking at a computer screen from close range for too long. She couldn’t remember when she’d last been for an eye test. Perhaps it was time to get herself checked.

She looked up at her office ceiling. Polystyrene tiles filled square holes in the latticework of supports, clean apart from those that housed smoke detectors or sprinkler heads and were therefore more awkward to change. She tutted.

She also noted there were a couple of dead strip bulbs, which probably wasn’t helping her eyes, especially now daylight was gone. She glanced at the clock, surprised to find she’d been in front of her laptop for an hour and a half. More depressing was the fact that she’d completed less than a third of her task.

She leaned forwards and switched on the lamp, lighting her desk. Beside her, the e-fit of the man seen following Matthew Hayes sat beside two KitKat wrappers and three empty vending-machine cups. In the centre, her laptop showed paused images from four of the ten CCTV cameras nearest to Amanda Cain’s
home. The footage from the different sites ran in parallel, synchronized to give an overview of the scene.

But the set-up was hardly ideal. First, the only camera situated within the doctor’s road was mounted at the far end of the street, putting Cain’s house sixty yards from the lens. Plus, the technology wasn’t exactly cutting edge. The low-res black-and-white images refreshed themselves once every second, so the action jerked along cartoon-style, making it difficult to follow a specific person, especially when you were watching at twice normal speed. It was also tricky to scan multiple images at once, but with so much footage to check it was the only logical way. At least the software helped, picking out pedestrians by highlighting each with a coloured box.

So far, Hawkins had watched all that was available of Monday, on the four cameras nearest the doctor’s home, from midnight just gone till the file had been saved at four o’clock that afternoon. She’d watched a few pedestrians meander this way and that during the night, seen herself and Amala visit at around 10 a.m. and sat through the mid-afternoon school run, as parents shepherded kids back and forth on the pavements while their SUV-owning compatriots clogged the roads. But none had yet resembled their man.

The other annoying factor was that none of the cameras in Cain’s vicinity offered sufficient resolution for number plates to be read. From this footage it was difficult even to determine the make of each car. As a
result, Hawkins was hoping their killer would turn up on foot, or at least leave whichever vehicle he had used.

Last time she’d checked, the rest of her team weren’t having much better luck. She had a contingent of four in the media suite, all watching similar tapes, with a night shift primed to take over at ten. But even then there was too much work to get the job done by morning, so the task would run into the next day. Everyone needed to be sharp, because even a fleeting glimpse of the killer was potentially vital, so they couldn’t afford to overlook a thing. Progress was necessarily slow.

Only one of the four new potential targets’ homes had no CCTV within a quarter-mile, the radius Hawkins had set for initial scrutiny. The guy from the pub brawl lived in a run-down part of Brixton where the council had given up repairing cameras that were vandalized again within days. But the other three homes were covered by between six and fourteen cameras each, and the parolees in question had been out of prison for up to three weeks. That meant hundreds of hours’ worth of footage, all of which had to be carefully scrutinized for the slightest glimpse of the Judge.

As soon as each CCTV record had become available earlier in the day, it had been scanned by video content analysis software, which carried out a high-speed check for any movement indicating violence or unusual activity. Unfortunately, the only incident it picked up was Amanda Cain’s car being vandalized on Wednesday night – hours before she returned home for the first
time in nine months. The two perpetrators weren’t identifiable from the low-res footage, but they bore a striking resemblance to John Travis’ two teenage kids. Hawkins had already despatched someone to question the pair.

The fact that nothing else had been found left them no choice but to carry out a painstaking manual search in case anyone of note had wandered into shot, their presence insufficient to trigger the VCA software’s alarms, but enough for the human eye.

Okay, so it was a long shot, but it was worth a go. Hawkins’ hope was that, if they
had
accurately identified the killer’s target demographic, it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility for him to be watching any one of these four already. All they needed was for him to appear on one of the cameras. Then it would be a case of setting a trap, maybe getting the target involved to draw him out, and picking him up before he killed again.

She’d allocated two detectives to analyse each set of available footage, having coerced Amala and Mike into staying late, along with two DCs unlucky enough to have been around at the time. Those four officers currently occupied the entire row of large-screen PCs in the media suite, leaving Hawkins on her laptop as the fifth pair of eyes.

She and Amala had the cameras outside Amanda Cain’s home, purely because they’d both been there, which made it easier to decode what was going on in
the grainy images. Amala had started with the Wednesday night before Cain’s release, while Hawkins was working her way back from today. But they were behind, mainly because Lambeth Council had been slowest in sending over their CCTV footage. The digital copies had finally arrived on the Becke House server just after 7 p.m., which at least meant somebody at the council offices had breached office hours to pull out footage from the relevant dates.