The Killing Season (14 page)

‘You think I can’t handle him?’

‘I think that I am an officer of the law and I have just given you some good advice.’

Sergeant Coker walked up to them with his hands held wide in a placating gesture, but the expression on his face made his meaning clear enough. The groom was glaring at me, but the reverend took his hand and led him away.

‘Come on, down these and let’s get off to The Crown,’ he said, polishing off his shot. ‘There is a very unpleasant reek of the black Irish bog in this bar this evening.’

The unhappy bridegroom hesitated at the door and then pointed a finger at me.

‘You’ll keep,’ he said and left with the rest of the party.

The sergeant joined me at the bar. ‘You can’t go around just punching people, Jack’ he said.

‘Sure, it was just a tap.’

‘Get me a pint of Fosters and a pint of the black stuff for the fighting Irishman, please,’ he said to the blonde-bobbed barmaid behind the counter.

‘You going to behave yourself, Jack?’ she said to me.

‘I’ll do my best, darling. But I’ll just stick with this pint – I’m driving home in a wee while.’

She smiled and went off to the other bar where the Guinness and lager taps were.

The sergeant gave me a thoughtful look. ‘You boxed a bit?’

I nodded. ‘For the Met.’

‘Like I say, you can’t keep going around punching people, Jack. It’s frowned upon in some quarters.’

‘I noticed.’

‘And he’s a nasty piece of work, that Len Wright. I’d watch your back if I were you.’

‘Isn’t that what you’re here for?’

‘Next time I might not be.’

I nodded and sipped my beer. ‘I’ll try and be careful.’

Harry Coker laughed. ‘I guess you can take care of yourself.’

‘Sometimes.’

The sergeant pulled an A4 envelope out of his bag and laid it on the bar.

‘What’s this?’

‘Something you didn’t get from me.’

‘And what is it that you haven’t given me?’

‘The autopsy report from Norwich on our John Doe.’

‘Anything of interest?’

‘Not sure. Still don’t know how long he was in the ground. I figured you could run your eye over it. More your area.’

I nodded and pulled the envelope towards me. ‘Cheers, Harry.’

‘Figured you’d get hold of a copy through Kate sooner or later.’

I nodded again. It was exactly what I had planned on doing.

‘So I also figured sooner would be better than later,’ said the sergeant.

IT WAS A
cold night. Neither of them noticed. The blood in their veins was pumping with alcohol and excitement.

They were in a back alley which ran off a small passage that itself led from the high street past an amusement arcade and through to residential streets. It was relatively dark in the alley: the lights from the amusement arcade had been switched off, and the couple’s warm breath in the cold air was barely visible.

The woman had been positioned against a stone wall. The man behind her lifted her dress. She had a warm coat on but no knickers – as she had been instructed.

The man behind her unzipped his fly, his excitement all too obvious to her. She giggled.

‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘I hope you have a licence for that.’

The man slid his hand between her parted legs and whispered in her ear.

‘Somebody seems to be ready for it,’ he said.

‘Are you going to fuck me or talk me to death?’ she replied and then grunted as the man acted upon her question. ‘Jesus!’ she gasped when his stomach slammed against the top of her buttocks as he entered her.

‘No blasphemy,’ the man chuckled as the woman juddered against him, the heat from her bottom arousing him even more as he gripped her hips and pulled her towards him.

‘This is the last time,’ the woman gasped, breathing raggedly.

‘We’ll see about that,’ he replied. Her long hair fell over her face as she leaned further over the wall and he slapped hard into her in a regular rhythm.

It didn’t take him long and, spent, he sagged against her, both of them breathing deeply, gulping in deep draughts of the cold night air.

The man removed the L-plate sign that was pinned on the back of her coat and tossed it to the ground. ‘I guess you won’t be needing that now,’ he said.

‘Jesus!’ gasped the woman again.

Neither of them noticed the man in the dark shadows further down the alley, who was watching them with eyes as cold as the night air.

William

THE MOON WAS
in full sail in the clear night sky. A few clouds scudding across it, but certainly not enough to obscure the vision of the man who approached the wall of the grounds of All Saints Church in Beeston Regis.

It was a low wall, built many, many years ago. The man put a hand on top of its weathered stone and flint and clambered over it into the cemetery beyond.

He was carrying a torch in his pocket but in the bright moonlight he had no need of it. And he knew exactly where he wanted to go.

He moved quietly, stealthily. But in truth there was no need for him to do so. The nearby caravan was empty at this time of year, and the nearest houses were several hundred yards away back on the Beeston Bump. The church had no rectory and was unoccupied at night, and the people in the graveyard were unable to voice outrage at what the man had come to do.

He walked around the side of the church until he came to the grave that he was seeking. It was a decorative grave with a black granite headstone and stone borders. The top of the plot had been filled with white quartz.

The man read the engraving carved deep into the stone and he murmured, almost growled under his breath. Then he reached into the pockets of his thick warm overcoat for the other items that he had brought.

‘One down,’ he said, and smiled. His teeth, yellow in the moonlight, were as ragged as most of the headstones in the cemetery. There was a light in his eyes that came not just from the moon, a light as cold as that which fell from the dead rock in the sky above him and that illuminated his work.

THE REVEREND NIGEL
Holdsworth had what his mates at the golf club called a shit-eating grin spread broadly across his shiny face. He adjusted the zipper on his trousers once again, more from reflex than necessity, and buttoned up his overcoat – wool and cashmere mix and worth every penny of the hundreds of pounds it had cost him. He tightened his university scarf around his smooth-shaven and scented neck and walked back down the alley towards the lights. Maybe time for a few more in The Crown with the lads, before heading home for a glass of 18-year-old single malt and a very well earned night’s sleep.

A figure stepped out from the shadows and Holdsworth blinked, surprised for a moment. But before he had a chance to voice that surprise a fist slammed into his stomach and the air exploded from him as he collapsed backwards in a gurgling heap. He tried to suck in air but found that he couldn’t, the pain scaring him more than he had ever been scared in his life. His eyes watered and finally, thankfully, he was able to draw air into his tortured lungs. The tears springing from his eyes were as much from relief as from the agony in his stomach muscles. But he was to get a lot more scared – and soon.

The man leaned down and clapped a hand over his mouth. Then, holding him tight against a fence, he wound silver duct tape around Holdsworth’s mouth. The priest’s eyes flickered left and right. And then the man punched him on the side of his head and he fell to the ground like a sack of coal. The man lifted him over his shoulder as though he were more like a sack of feathers and headed back into the darkness of the alleyway towards his parked van, its back door open like a waiting mouth.

The priest opened his eyes slowly, closing them again as the pain in his head kicked in like a jolt of electricity.

He was bent over a church pew, he had seen that much. His mouth was taped tightly shut and he had to choke back the urge to vomit. His arms had been tied in front of him, and the cold draught told him that his trousers and underpants had been removed. God, no! He wanted to scream it out loud. He opened his eyes a crack – it was dark but the moon had sailed clear of the night clouds and shone pale through the coloured glass. He knew where he was. Tears pricked his eyes as a long thin blade was held against his neck.

The blade was removed and he hoped that his friend had forgiven him. It was only a shag, after all. Christ knew they had both shagged enough women. Had shared them. So she was getting married to him. It had just been a last farewell.

He felt large hands on his backside and tried to move his legs, but they had been tied too. He felt his buttocks being pulled apart. He looked up at the church’s large crucifix, at the face of his saviour, cold now in the chill of night, and prayed to him as he had never prayed before. Not even forming words, just a desperate, agonised, silent pleading.

And then the man entered him and the Reverend Nigel Holdsworth let the tears stream down. From the pain, the searing brutal agony of it. And from the humiliation. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

The man behind him grunted, slamming into him, pushing him hard against the pew, grunted as he himself had done some short while earlier as he had entered his best friend’s wife-to-be.

One final grunt and the man pulled back. The priest’s face purpled with pain, remorse and disgust.

He would never talk of it. That much was certain. The horror was over now and he would never speak of it to a living soul.

Except the horror wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

MORNING, AND I
was sitting at my desk, reading through the autopsy report.

Kate and I had gone through it the night before. She was handy that way – translating the scientific blah-blah-blah into comprehensible English. She made herself amenable in other ways, too. Of course, her enthusiasm the night before might have had something to do with her persuading me to stay in Norfolk and buy her cousin’s house. Call me Mister Cynical. Either way, like the man who didn’t care about the weatherman’s forecast, you didn’t hear me complaining.

Still, the report didn’t add much to what we already knew. I flicked through the photos, looking at a close-up of the label that was in the man’s suit. Sergeant Coker had told me that they had sent it off to be processed, to see if they could get the image any clearer, but it could take quite a while to get the info back.

I picked the photo up, slid it into a Manila envelope and put my coat on.

Ten minutes later Amy Leigh looked up in surprise as Laura Gomez showed me into her office.

‘Jack, just the man I want to talk to.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Helen Middleton informs me that your builder friend turned up to finish the job on her kitchen.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Moreover, he says he doesn’t need any further payment from her as you settled the bill.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Is this “manner of speaking” something I shouldn’t know about again?’

‘I think discretion is often the better part of valour, don’t you?’ I replied, fairly certain that she wouldn’t wish to know that the costs were being offset by the sale of a Lexus car that was already probably somewhere in Europe.

‘Least said, soonest mended,’ she replied.

‘Silence is golden,’ chipped in Laura Gomez.

‘As Thumper once famously remarked: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all,’ I said, but not doing the full impersonation. A man has his dignity.

Amy Leigh held her hands up. ‘OK, we’ve got the idea. Just so long as it doesn’t come back and bite us.’

‘I am pretty sure it won’t,’ I said.

‘So what can we do for you, handsome?’ said Laura, giving her eyebrows a touch of the gothic-vamp wiggle.

I pulled out the photo of the inside of the dead man’s jacket. ‘I need this scanning into a computer and e-mailing PDQ.’

‘What’s a PDQ? I know what a PDF is,’ asked Laura.

‘He means pretty damn quickly!’ said Amy.

Laura gave me an exaggerated salute and took the picture. ‘Yes, sir! Mister Detective, sir! I is right on it.’

She left the room.

‘So you haven’t got a scanner in that high-tech office of yours, Jack?’

‘I’ve got a printer but the scanner bit doesn’t want to scan.’

‘The room at the end here is available for rent. Just been speaking to Jane downstairs. Want to take it on?’

I considered it for a moment or two. A caravan in a farmyard, near the cliffs in the bleak midwinter. There was a view, certainly, and I wasn’t just thinking of the stable girl. But then again an office in a warm brick-and-flint building, in the heart of town, with facilities on hand and a phone signal was pretty tempting.

‘When can I move in?’

‘Soon as you like.’

‘I’ll get my stuff.’ Such as it was: files, a laptop, not much else. I figured I might leave the printer.

Amy looked at me, and there was amusement dancing in her eyes.

‘Kate will be pleased,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

‘Saw her last night at the hen do.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Oh, yes. We had a lovely chat.’

Women.

SERGEANT HARRY COKER
was manning the reception desk of the police station. He was contemplating strolling over the road and getting a bacon sandwich.

He had missed breakfast that morning, and breakfast to Harry Coker was like the wind unto a mariner stuck in the doldrums. He found it hard to get going without it. He sighed as the door opened and a woman entered. A woman he recognised.

Emily Skipton. Spinster of some fifty-five years, general busybody and a continuing source of discomfort in the fundament of Harry Coker and others of the parish.

‘Good morning, Miss Skipton,’ he said.

‘Is it?’ she replied with a disdainful sniff and walked up to the counter, laying her neatly rolled brolly on the counter much as a judge might have laid down his gavel. If judges in this country still had gavels. Which they didn’t.