Stop Dead (32 page)

‘Can
you
tell us about her then?’

‘Me? No. She’d left home long before I came to live here.’

Geraldine turned back to Mrs Jones.

‘We need to find Lynn urgently. It will help her if we can talk to her,’ she lied.

‘You can’t help Lynn,’ her mother said in a flat voice.

‘I think you’ll find we can –’

‘No one can help Lynn. She’s dead. She died eighteen months ago.’

‘Are you sure?’ Geraldine asked.

She regretted the question straight away. As though a mother would make a mistake about such a matter.

‘That’s that then,’ Geraldine said tetchily as she climbed into the driving seat. ‘Lynn Jones isn’t our murderer because she’s dead.’

‘Funny we didn’t find any record of her death.’

‘That’s because we were looking under the wrong name.’

Geraldine thought about her own fruitless efforts to trace Emily Tennant, and wondered if she too was looking under the wrong name. She sighed. They were scratching around for leads, and every time they thought they were onto something, they ended up going nowhere.

‘Where are we off to now?’ Sam asked, glancing at her watch.

Geraldine thought aloud.

‘Why was hair from two different women found on the bodies? They can’t both be killers, because one type of hair belonged to Lynn, and she’s dead. Did Lynn sell her hair to be made into a wig that was worn by the killer? If we can trace whoever bought Lynn’s hair –’

Geraldine didn’t finish the sentence. She knew it was an impossible task. To begin with, they had no idea when Lynn had sold her hair. Even if Rowena could help them to pin down a time, she was unlikely to know where the hair had gone. And if they found the wig-maker who had purchased it, the hair would most likely have been bought for cash, or sold on, or lost, and picked up by the murderer without any trace. Realistically, there was no chance they would find a record of the transaction, or that anyone would remember that one wig and its owner after so long; just another junkie desperate for money.

‘I know, leave no stone unturned,’ Sam muttered.

‘Sooner or later something has to go in our favour,’ Geraldine responded, but she no longer believed what she was saying.

Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to work in a job that lacked any kind of moral responsibility, a job where failure was acceptable. First the DNA found at the scene of Henshaw’s murder had been a match with a woman in prison, and now the DNA found on Bradshaw’s body turned out to be that of a dead woman. Nothing about this case seemed to make any sense. She was beginning to think they would never find the person who had killed four men – so far.

‘Failure is not an option,’ she muttered fiercely as they drew up outside the hostel and left the car on a double yellow line again.

Rowena greeted them indifferently, as though their visit was nothing unusual. Geraldine asked her straight away when Lynn had cut her long hair. Rowena frowned with the effort of remembering.

‘She had long hair,’ she offered at last.

‘Yes, but then she had it cut off. We need to know when that was.’

Rowena stared blankly at a black smear on the floor and didn’t answer.

‘Rowena, when did Lynn get her hair cut?’

‘We called her Lolita.’

‘All right, but you know who I mean. When did Lolita get her hair cut off?’

Rowena looked troubled.

‘Lolita had long hair,’ she repeated.

‘Did she ever have it cut in all the time you knew her?’

She shook her head.

If Rowena’s testimony was reliable, Lynn must have sold her hair after leaving the hostel. On the streets and desperate to feed her habit, she would have been making what money she could by any means possible. She might have been finding it difficult to earn money from soliciting without the protection of her pimp, with her looks no doubt fading as a result of her habit. A wig seemed the only possible explanation for Lynn’s hair turning up like that, but they had no way of finding out who had bought the wig and presumably worn it while killing Bradshaw.

‘Well, that’ll be a nice little job for you tomorrow,’ Geraldine said to Sam as they drove away, ‘checking the records of every wig-maker in striking distance of London.’

‘I know it’s got to be done, but you don’t really think there’ll be an official record in writing somewhere of blonde hair bought from Lynn Jones, or Lolita, do you?’

Geraldine ignored the question.

‘Let’s get some chips on the way back,’ she said instead.

‘That’s the first sensible thing anyone’s said to me since we started on this crazy case with people committing murders from behind bars, and beyond the grave,’ Sam answered cheerfully. ‘I know where there’s a great chippy not far from here.’

‘I was counting on it.’

G
eraldine knocked at a dirty white door and waited patiently. She could have delegated the visit to a local constable but preferred to carry out the task herself, her judgement coloured by an experience in her early years as a sergeant. She had despatched an inexperienced constable to break the news of a fatality to the parents of a youth who had been knifed in a pub brawl. Geraldine still wondered if she was responsible for his crass performance. Her instruction had seemed innocuous enough: ‘Deliver the message and come back here straight away.’

Years later she still felt cold when she remembered questioning the young constable. With hindsight she suspected his rapid return to the station had alerted her to the fact that something was wrong. If she hadn’t been there on his return she would never have discovered what had happened, and the outcome could have been dreadful. Finding the house empty, the young constable had put a note through the door informing the parents of their loss. Shocked, Geraldine had rushed to the house. Fortunately the family had not yet come home. She had waited in the car for five hours to intercept them and tell them in person that their son had been stabbed to death, before they saw the note that had been posted through their letter box.

The latest victim to be bludgeoned to death by ‘The Hammer Horror’ had lived in Wealdstone, not far from the bus garage. Geraldine caught the overground from Kings Cross and walked for about a mile along the High Street past small dilapidated shops. Turning off the noisy main road, she found the small terraced property where John Birch had lived with his wife. This time she only had to wait a few minutes before the door was opened by a tall lanky woman. Dark hair streaked with grey hung in a straight fringe, through which her eyes gleamed anxiously from a narrow face with a small pointed nose.

‘Where –’ she began in a screechy whine.

Seeing Geraldine, she pressed her thin lips together and stood poised, one hand on the door, while the other hand wandered absent-mindedly to her face. Long bony fingers cupped her chin.

‘Mrs Birch?’

The woman nodded without speaking. Behind her fringe, Geraldine saw her eyes narrow with suspicion.

‘May I come in?’

Mrs Birch’s eyes widened in sudden apprehension when Geraldine held up her warrant card, and her grip on the door tightened visibly, bony knuckles whitening under the pressure. Without another word, she ducked her head and led Geraldine into a cluttered front room. Tattered magazines covered a coffee table, women’s magazines and car periodicals jumbled together as though they had fallen on the floor and then been thrown together on the surface of the table without any care.

A fat ginger cat strolled into the room and scrutinised Geraldine before leaping onto Mrs Birch’s lap with surprising agility as soon as she sat down. She scooped the animal up in her thin arms and dropped it on the floor. Offended, it raised its tail in the air and stalked out of the room.

‘Where is he?’

‘Mrs Birch, I’m afraid your husband’s dead.’

The widow looked confused.

‘What are you talking about? Who are you?’

Geraldine took out her warrant card again and held it up.

‘I’m here to tell you that your husband is dead. I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she said softly.

Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Mrs Birch dropped her head into her hands. Geraldine waited. The cat reappeared and rubbed itself against the bereaved woman’s legs, purring loudly. She moved her leg, shifting the cat away from her. It settled down on the carpet, wrapping its tail around its body. After a moment it rose to its feet and leaned against her shins again, mewing plaintively.

‘He knows,’ Mrs Birch said dully.

‘What?’

‘Ginger. The cat. He knows what’s happened. He can tell. That’s why he’s not purring.’

She began stroking the cat, while tears slipped down her gaunt cheeks.

‘So he’s dead?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What happened?’ She turned her tear streaked face to Geraldine. ‘Was it his fault?’

‘His fault?’

‘The accident. It was the other driver’s fault, wasn’t it? John was a safe driver. He’d been driving the buses for ten years without an accident. He – he was a good driver –’

‘This wasn’t an accident, Mrs Birch.’

‘But – the bus –’

Gently Geraldine explained that her husband hadn’t died in a traffic accident.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Your husband was murdered.’

‘How?’

‘He was assaulted, hit on the head and knocked out.’

Mrs Birch shook her head.

‘I don’t understand. Why? Why would anyone kill John?’

Geraldine asked the bereaved woman if she could contact anyone. Mrs Birch shook her head.

‘There is no one else. There was only ever the two of us, me and John.’

‘Do you have any family you could call?’

Again she shook her head and her fringe quivered above her eyes.

‘We never had children.’

She explained she was an only child, and her husband’s only brother had gone abroad and died.

‘Do you have a neighbour who could be with you?’

Mrs Birch shook her head again.

‘Be with me?’ she repeated, bemused. ‘There’s only Ginger.’

As if rejecting her dependence, the cat arched its back and trotted lightly out of the room.

Back in her own flat, Geraldine slumped down on her sofa and scowled at an ink stain she had made with a biro the night before. The sofa was dark, so it wasn’t particularly noticeable, but she knew it was there. She made a mental note to ask her sister how to remove it, when they next spoke. It was the kind of domestic detail her sister would know about. With a bowl of pasta and a small glass of wine on a tray, she flipped through channels on the television but couldn’t settle to anything. The memory of John Birch’s widow wouldn’t leave her. It wasn’t as though it was the first time she had delivered news of a tragedy to an unsuspecting family, but there was something about the woman’s isolation that was unsettling. The detective chief inspector had considered it fortunate there were no children in the marriage, but children might have given the widow some support.

Usually efficient at detaching herself from homicide victims and those they left behind, for no obvious reason Mrs Birch perturbed her. Sitting disconsolately in front of the flickering television screen, she replayed the widow’s words in her mind, like a voice over. ‘There is no one else.’ Geraldine tried not to see parallels with her own situation. She had her work. But in twenty years’ time she would be retiring. What company would she have then? She thought of Sam as a friend. An intimacy had sprung up between them as they worked closely together. But either one of them might relocate at any time and even if they continued as a team for twenty years, their relationship would inevitably lose its immediacy once they no longer worked together.

Apart from her colleagues at work, there were very few people Geraldine felt close to. Even before she had learned about her adoption, she had never felt at ease with her adoptive family. Looking back on her early life, it was almost as though she had sensed that she didn’t belong with them. Now she went through the motions with her sister, pretending nothing had changed. Hannah was a loyal friend, but she had her own family to fill her life. It struck Geraldine that her birth mother might be in a similar situation to Mrs Birch, living an isolated and lonely existence. Perhaps she too had only a cat for company. For the first time Geraldine wondered whether she owed it to her mother, as much as to herself, to find the stranger who had given birth to her.

C
harlie hesitated as he reached the estate. It was already dark and he never knew when or where they might be waiting for him. His main advantages were that he was a sprinter, and he wasn’t worth the effort of chasing. There was nothing on him worth nicking. They already had his phone and he never had more than a couple of quid which they were happy to take off him, but only if it was no trouble. If he didn’t get too close before they noticed him, he could usually escape. If not, they would rough him up a bit, jeering and twisting his arms, spitting and throwing the odd punch. But they were too thick, or too carefree, to conceal their presence. As soon as he was aware of them, loitering on a street corner or hanging about in one of the alleys between the blocks of flats, he would be off.

His mum didn’t like it. She was always on at him, wanting to know who was in the gang that kept picking on him so she could complain to the school, or harangue the police about the violence on the streets. He assured her he had no idea who they were, so there was no point in reporting it. It was difficult enough keeping her out of it and she didn’t even know the extent of his problem. She thought he had lost his phone, as well as his new school bag. That had probably been a mistake, because she flatly refused to replace his phone, calling him irresponsible and a waste of space, and a host of other things besides.

‘You think I’m made of money?’ she’d screeched at him. ‘Do you know how much that phone cost?’

‘But Mum, I need a phone.’

‘Well life is full of disappointments, you little sod. Get your own phone.’

He nearly told her he’d been mugged, but the truth would only set her off again, doing his head in with her questions.