Stop Me (2 page)

When he’d walked out of Chevalier’s Bar without Laura, Leo’s life changed beyond recognition and his job as project manager at TechFlex Industrial Design was the first casualty.

His firm of architects were as supportive as they could have been during the months following Laura’s disappearance but there was only a certain amount of leave that could be compassionate. And with the possibility that Laura was still alive, Leo was surprised that his sporadic attendance due to the early police interrogations and his own intensive search didn’t lead to a suspended then terminated contract sooner.

He’d played out every conceivable scenario in his head, knew the geography of the area where she’d vanished within a mile radius. Security footage from
Opallios hadn’t revealed a glimpse of her after she’d left the building and street cameras from the adjacent high street hadn’t captured anything significant either. If she’d been taken in a car he’d projected the route that would be impeded by the least traffic, the motorway it would eventually lead to and the possible destinations afterwards. He’d calculated that, even at lunchtime, she could have been out of London in less than
forty-five
minutes. He’d still have been sitting in the bar.

Hektor and his Chevalier’s staff had been grilled – first by the police and then by Leo. The bar had only just opened for lunch and everyone had been getting ready for the midday rush. Nobody had even noticed Laura and Leo enter the premises.

Hektor had been angry with Leo because the investigation led to the exposure of several illegal immigrants working on his premises. But he’d known Laura long before Leo had, and she’d been drinking in Chevalier’s years before she started at Opallios. So he’d softened enough to show Leo to the fire exit beyond the inner door to the ladies toilet. There was a small yard at the back of the premises but it was difficult to imagine someone gaining access, let alone taking Laura over the shards of glass cemented into the top of the wall.

The backdrop to that day seemed so commonplace but the idea of there being somebody, a face and a personality lurking within it that had orchestrated her
sudden absence from his life forced him to consider every person he passed in the street, searching their eyes and wondering if they’d seen Laura since he had.

How and where had they lured her? What possible deception would she have fallen for? That was what he found harder to accept than anything else. They’d both occupied the same sensible reality that didn’t allow for anything like this to happen.

And so the circuit of thought went unbroken and Leo envisaged a faceless observer in every crevice of every moment of that day. It was exhausting.

The couple had only just moved into a Victorian, mid-terrace house in Pimlico which they had planned to renovate together. After all they’d gone through to secure the place Leo was determined not to let it go; losing their home would have been unforgivable.

So he found a new job as security guard at Sable Electronics and although it barely paid the bills, his other living overheads were negligible. Working seven days of night shifts just about clawed in the monthly payment. He couldn’t bear thinking about Laura’s life insurance. As she was still missing, her assets were frozen for seven years. Seven years before she could be pronounced dead. Leo didn’t even want to consider the implications of ever claiming.

Months passed. Months of waiting, of nurturing germs of hope. But even though the idea that Laura was still living and breathing somewhere became less
likely, it still jabbed at his core with the same sickening urgency. It triggered him at any point of the day or night, a surge of adrenaline that almost brought him to his feet but at the same time left him feeling powerless to implement anything that he hadn’t done a hundred times already.

Waiting was his illness but at least his new job allowed his non-participation in the life he had to carry on in the meantime. It also gave some order to his waking hours and a place to go – away from the leftover props of his museum home life – somewhere he could at least try to think.

As months dragged past, as the phone calls from the police ebbed, Leo looked for any way to maintain the urgency he felt to keep on looking.

Earlier in the year John Bookwalter had become the third American citizen to claim responsibility for the murders of the Vacation Killer. He’d given himself up to the New Orleans Police Department a couple of days after Louis Allan-Carlin’s jawbone had been mailed to UK authorities and had been dismissed as a crank less than twenty-four hours later. Having never left the state of Louisiana during any of his thirty-eight years, he was the least likely candidate of the other cranks that had preceded him. The fact that none of the victims had been murdered in the state of Louisiana was also a detail that he treated as immaterial. He was the most vociferous of the would-be Vacation Killers though, protesting
his guilt on his MySpace page before its popularity necessitated him registering a domain name.

The internet community, ever fond of embracing eccentrics and lunatics accorded him cult status and, at its peak, his website was generating twenty-three thousand hits a day.

It was Laura’s older sister, Ashley, who told Leo about John Bookwalter. She was making her customary Thursday evening visit while he got ready to start his evening shift.

‘I’m only telling you so you know what’s out there. Don’t go near his site.’ She undid her black raincoat, releasing her anise scent into the room and leant against the kitchen dresser. The persistent rain had flattened her matte black hair, her usually perfectly coiffed curls hanging untidily around her face. In the glare of the kitchen lights, though, even the physical similarities couldn’t approximate Laura. It was the playful vibrancy about the eyes that was missing. ‘Promise me.’ She picked up the steaming mug of coffee that he’d made her. He’d overfilled it and it slopped over the sides as she lifted it from the counter.

If it doesn’t drip on the floor, Laura is still alive.

Most daily events, large or small, were yardsticks for Laura’s well being. It was a compulsion that had begun eleven days after Laura had vanished and no parcel had been delivered to the police.

Leo’s eyes darted between the bottom of the mug and
the circle of coffee it had left on the counter. Should he clean it up now? He’d become obsessive about keeping the house clean in anticipation of Laura’s return.

‘Leo?’

‘I promise.’ He straightened the security cap on his head. Leo never doubted that Ashley had been a woman since the age of eight and her no-nonsense intensity had always made Laura seem much younger than the three years that separated them. Ashley was a divorcee with a recent and obscenely generous settlement and the three of them had spent an uncharacteristic amount of time together just before Laura’s disappearance, trying to rekindle Ashley’s self-esteem as well as a dormant but promising sense of humour.

‘So, it’s still Christmas then?’ Ashley nodded towards the hallway where the streamers that Leo had hung as a surprise for Laura on their return home from their shopping trip still remained. However consumed he had become by domestic cleanliness he still couldn’t bring himself to remove the decorations or the Christmas tree, even after he’d hoovered up every one of the pine needles that it had shed onto the carpet. She softened. ‘The place is still more spotless than mine though…and I have a cleaner.’

Leo and Ashley both knew that Laura had never cared for housework. It kept Leo busy though, on the rare occasions he wasn’t using temazepam to sleep through the day.

Ashley opened a kitchen cupboard and surveyed the tins neatly stacked inside. ‘You
are
eating?’

Leo ignored the questions. ‘So what sort of things is this Bookwalter saying about Laura?’

Ashley’s jaw tightened and she used the action of replacing her mug to avoid his eye.

Leo was relieved nothing had spilt from the mug to the tiles.

‘He’s a grubby little scumbag. Don’t subject yourself to it.’

Leo had been surprised at how calmly Ashley had dealt with Laura’s disappearance. She’d been midway through her divorce when Laura had been taken, however, and already reliant on tranquillisers. With so much to deal with, Leo had doubted that the
self-confidence
that he and Laura had been cultivating while she waited for her divorce settlement would return. It had, however, and he was glad for his sake as well as Laura’s. He wondered how much of it was a performance for his benefit though.

‘Anyway, you’ve promised me now.’ She wiped the edges of her purple-glossed lips with her purple-glossed nails.

Leo had never been particularly close to Ashley, even after he married Laura. However, they both now shared an excruciating and open cavity in their lives that most other people couldn’t understand. Both his parents were dead and the rest of Laura’s family had
distanced themselves when he had become a suspect. His brother, Matty, was absent when he really needed him but that was customary.

Ashley pumped him for more reassurances that he wouldn’t go near the internet and then kissed him goodbye. After he’d seen her off he wondered if he took her regular visits for granted now and thought about how much he’d miss them if they stopped. He returned to the kitchen, washed his mug, dried it and returned it to its place before wiping the ring off the counter.

Leo sat on his bed, his laptop booted and resting on his crossed legs. He entered Laura’s name into a Google search. With his life devoid of her for so long he was stunned when he hit ‘Images’. Her face was suddenly smiling back at him from a page full of thumbnails. He felt emotions he’d kept carefully in check stabbing the back of his throat and then trickling down into his stomach.

Most of the pictures he recognised as the ones he and her parents had pulled out of boxes and albums and printed off discs to supply to the police – private captured moments now used for consumption by the public domain. But one of them he didn’t recognise at all.

It was this picture that led him to Bookwalter’s site – a photo of Laura when she was about seventeen,
wearing an oversized T-shirt tugged over her legs and pulling her hair across her mouth.

And when he found the photo of Laura’s youth, the strand of henna hair held under her nose like a moustache and the eyes of a Laura who had yet to look upon him, he felt for the first time that she was no longer his.

The void that had been gradually swelling inside him expanded further and compacted the hopelessness and guilt.

In the months that followed Laura’s disappearance the mere thought of subjecting himself to what the internet customarily threw up out of human misery was inconceivable.

But he couldn’t forget the Vacation Killer’s email, the one that had described Vicky Cordingley before police had received the parcel containing her jawbone. He’d reported it to IT but he hadn’t forwarded it. Would Vicky Cordingley have died if he hadn’t broken the chain? If she hadn’t did that mean that Laura would still be with him? He doubted it but despite statistical probability it continued to afflict him.

He wondered if it was his guilt about not forwarding the Vicky Cordingley email that made him go to Bookwalter’s site and send a message.

Skipping the home page he clicked straight on
Contact vk
. He explained who he was and asked not only that the picture of Laura be removed from the site but also demanded to know exactly where Bookwalter had obtained it. It seemed obscene that a complete stranger on the other side of the world possessed a personal photo of Laura – a photo Leo had never seen before – and was using her image like a character in an online game.

Moments later his inbox told him he had mail and he momentarily expected to find that the email had been undelivered. But it was an email from Bookwalter. It was chillingly familiar and only one new line had been added at the top.

Leo stared at the email for a long time, listening to his own breathing.

Bookwalter’s website (
stillonvacation.com
) was an accomplished and professional enterprise that obviously had the input of well-paid designers. His splash entry page was a mosaic of sensational front-page headlines that outlined the significant episodes of his supposed crimes. Between the visitor counter (1,112,158) and the revolving Enter button was one headline that Leo assumed Bookwalter had mocked up himself:

The fact that he’d been released into society after less than a day of police questioning was probably lost on many of his visitors and when you clicked through to his home page no mention of this fact was evident.

Bookwalter’s photograph was far more flattering than the media images circulated at the time of his surrender to the police. But it still couldn’t hide the left-handed squint which made it look as if he’d spent his entire life peering through a telescope. A flat black cloth cap covered his head and a few auburn fronds were evident around his ears. His appearance was that of an avuncular bachelor whom Leo could imagine owning a saxophone. He was far from serial killer material but he supposed that that was the one facet that made him convincing.

There was a regular blog page which was Bookwalter’s platform for sneering at the media and authorities, a forum
for his visitors to ask him questions and debate amongst themselves and a links page to countless other serial killer fan sites which all fed off each other’s morbidity.

At a glance Leo could tell that the visitors and forum regulars on Bookwalter’s site ran the gamut from the obsessive to the ghoulish. He guessed most of them were probably teenagers. To most, John Bookwalter appeared to be a figure of fun whom they enjoyed indulging and it was easy to see how their cult hero worship and
make-believe
had stoked the pseudo folklore even further.

A brief but inflated précis of the crimes he claimed as his own followed the photo and below this, separated by animated blood gushes, was a list of dates with photos of the victims. The photos could be clicked on so you could view a profile and more intimate details of their dispatch. Leo hovered the cursor over Laura’s photo but then clicked on Louis Allan-Carlin. The text was obviously lifted from media reports to which Bookwalter added his own haughty contributions in brackets.

As Leo clicked the photos of Teresa Strickland and Vicky Cordingley he noticed how elusive Bookwalter was about the UK murders. Bookwalter had admitted to both Laura and Louis’ disappearances but he seemed to take less delight in outlining the UK episodes – choosing to be cryptic and elusive and playing down his own interest. Leo wondered if it was because, having never left the US, Bookwalter didn’t have a handle on an environment he’d never visited.

When Leo eventually summoned up the courage to click through to Laura’s profile it merely re-stated the facts of her disappearance to which Bookwalter only added one comment.

The site told him that Bookwalter was online to do a Q&A forum and Leo registered and logged in. He threatened him with a suit he wasn’t even sure he could bring and was poleaxed by the reply that quickly followed.

The last thing he’d expected was for a delusional like Bookwalter to question
his
validity. Sharpe was his name, the one that Laura had gladly adopted. The idea that a faceless community had seized upon it and become protective of it purely in connection to Laura made him feel a worse isolation than he’d experienced during the police interrogations. His curiosity as to whether anyone else would know the answer to the question, however, overrode his reflex to slam the lid of his laptop.

He entered the numbers, hit return then unstuck his fingertips from the keyboard as quickly as he could.

He’d already felt like he was cheapening his own suspended grief, as well as that of Laura’s family, the instant he’d logged onto the site but this moment of justifying himself to John Bookwalter made him realise how desperate he’d become. Suddenly, inexplicably, every minute he’d lived and breathed with Laura, since they’d first met while helping move a mutual friend
into his new flat, felt like it hinged on Bookwalter’s approval. He waited and felt his circulation burning his ears.

He did.

Leo felt his stomach curling up into his ribcage but his finger was already clicking the cursor on the
left-hand
column and entering the password. Sat alone on his bed it seemed surreal that he was about to exchange dialogue about his wife with a stranger on the other side of the Atlantic. He tried to imagine Bookwalter sat at his own computer and fought the urge to yank the power cable from his laptop.

Leo imagined his correspondent waiting. He gripped the edges of his screen and felt the muscles in his wrist tauten as he prepared to close the lid. But Bookwalter was persistent and Leo watched his methodic letters fill the screen again.