The Killing Season (5 page)

When three older boys had cornered him one day, he had tried to walk away. He had no wish to hurt others and he knew how brutal the beating would be if one of the men in rough cloth caught him fighting. But they had left him no option. And by the time the boys had come to regret their decision to corner him and taunt him, it was too late. Two of the boys managed to get away with little more than bloodied noses. But one of them lay on his back, unmoving. His nose had been broken, two ribs fractured and his jaw dislocated. As the red mist cleared William realised he had wet himself. But not from fear.

He looked down at his disproportionately large hands, at the blood already beginning to dry on them, and then he looked up as he saw two men running angrily towards him.

The red mist came down again. In the end it took three of them to restrain him. His body was battered and bruised before they took him into the room. There his trousers had been taken down and his bared backside had been strapped with cruel leather until blood was drawn.

He was eight years old.

Shortly after the incident he had been sent to a special school. A boarding school for troubled youth. Where discipline and exercise and moral guidance were supposed to forge a virtuous man from a miscreant youth. He was forged, sure enough. But into something hard, and brutal and vengeful.

They had kept him locked in an empty room for over three hours. When the key turned in the lock he looked across at the door and swallowed hard as it scraped open. He didn’t regret what he had done to the boys – they had brought the fire down on their own heads – but he was aware that there would be consequences. One thing he knew now, though, was that although he had not wished to inflict pain on them, when his hand had been forced he’d found that he enjoyed it. He could have stopped but hadn’t wanted to. It was as though something had been released within him, something that had defined him through blood. Whatever happened to him in the future, he decided, he’d make a pact with himself to repay it with interest. He looked down at the front of his urine-stained jeans and felt not shame but anger. A red flush rose in his cheeks as he clenched his fist and dug unclean and ragged nails into his palm.

The man who entered the room was Luke Carlow. A forty-five-year-old unrepentant sodomiser of children. He had a degree in sociology and was the person in charge of the home for delinquent youth that William had been placed in. ‘Delinquent’, Carlow often thought, was such a quaint and ridiculous term for the criminal scum he had to deal with. Too young to be sent to a proper prison, they were kept segregated from the public to whom they were a threat. But they themselves were not protected from other men who might do them harm – men like Luke Carlow.

William was allowed to shower first before Carlow buggered him. Cleanliness is next to godliness, after all, and one thing Carlow couldn’t abide was a filthy boy.

Later, curled up on his bed, William didn’t cry. The bleeding was staining his sheets but he forced himself not to shed a single tear. Later still, when the older boy that he was forced to share a room with came in, he could see the look of appetite squirming in the other boy’s eyes and knew that the ordeal was far from over.

Eight years on, Luke Carlow would be discovered dead inside a damp cubicle in a filthy public lavatory in King’s Lynn. He was found with a pair of filth-stained underpants stuffed in his mouth. His penis had been severed with a pair of secateurs and he had been stabbed repeatedly in his throat.

The older boy who had shared that cell with the eight-year-old William would disappear and would never be found. Even if he had been, his own mother would not have been able to recognise him from the mass of mangled flesh to which he had been reduced.

I WAS LYING
on the doctor’s examination couch.

My shirt had been unbuttoned, exposing my – if I say so myself – finely toned torso. I expected the lady doctor to be more impressed with my physique than she seemed to be, judging by the expression on her face as she probed my musculature with cool, slender fingers, her perfectly trimmed nails immaculately painted in postbox red.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ she asked. ‘You look like someone took a baseball bat to your stomach!’

She had a point. I looked down at the bruising which was already beginning to turn a very unpleasant colour. ‘Something very similar.’

I winced as her skilled hands probed and examined the area. ‘Can you go a bit more gently with that?’ I said.

‘Go gently!’ she said. ‘You’re lucky I don’t kick your sorry Irish backside. What the hell happened?’

‘There was a conflict of interest in a financial situation. Seemed that words were not sufficient to bring the other party to a negotiated settlement.’

I winced even more violently as she probed deliberately harder this time. ‘OK! I was doing a favour for a friend.’

‘What friend?’

‘Amy, the solicitor. You’ve met her.’

‘I hope she’s paying you well is all I can say.’

‘She puts a lot of work my way.’

‘Maybe she does. But this isn’t the sort of work that you, or I, or your family need,’ she said pointedly.

‘A couple of cowboy builders conned a sweet old lady out of some serious money and I asked them to return it.’

‘And they objected?’ she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

‘I am afraid they did, Kate darling.’ I looked up at her beautiful face, framed with silken dark tresses, saw the passion sparking in her big luminous eyes and felt myself drowning in them all over again.

‘Don’t “darling” me! We came up to Norfolk to get away from the violence, or don’t you remember that?’

‘I had to do something.’

‘It’s not a doctor you should be seeing, Jack. It’s a psychotherapist to help you with that white-knight syndrome of yours.’

I smiled and shrugged and the smile fell right off my face as my stomach muscles protested at the movement. That guy seriously had a punch like a mule’s kick. Lucky for me he didn’t know how to box. Often the way with big strong men who get their bulk from weightlifting or heavy manual labour. They’re not used to people standing up to them. And when they do it’s a strength contest, a war of attrition. They get knocked down, then they get up again. Only difference with me was that I knew how to punch and where. And I usually had the element of surprise on my side. I never wait to be asked to dance. If it’s going down then you get yours in first. First and hard. My dad had taught me that much.

‘She really is a dear old lady, quite a character. You’d like her,’ I said as Kate continued with her probing, a little more gently this time.

‘This “dear old lady” have a name?’

‘Helen Middleton, no relation.’

Kate stood up and nodded. ‘I know her. She’s a patient here. You better make sure she is taken care of!’ she said in her no-nonsense schoolteacher tone that I had become accustomed to.

I blinked at the volte-face. ‘That’s what I said!’

‘I mean it. She’s a lovely woman.’

Sometimes you have to just roll with the punches.

‘Yes, dear.’

‘Okay. You can take the shirt off now, Jack. Doesn’t seem to be anything broken. Just bruising and tissue damage. It will hurt for a while. Try not to laugh too much or cough.’

‘And how do I do that?’ I asked as I took off my shirt.

‘Force of will power.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘Bandage you up and give you some painkillers.’

‘You could always prescribe a bottle of Jameson’s – that’s quite effective in the painkilling area.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Co-codamol will be just fine.’

A few years back and I had what is technically called a drinking problem. Whiskey was my main poison of choice. I’d drink it till my brain and sensibilities had been anaesthetised, and the past and the future disappeared with every tumbler of the amber oblivion that I drank. Until, finally, all that was left was the cosy, hazy cotton-wool present. Laughter and noise and faces that I would never remember. Women I wouldn’t recall. One-night stands or prostitutes I would take up against a brick wall or a garden fence, or down some darkened alleyway. Fighting and fornicating my way round Soho and Shepherd’s Bush. A psychoanalyst would probably tell me it was guilt. A downwardly spiralling vicious circle of self-loathing and disgust. The whiskey didn’t just take away the pain of simply living, it took me away from myself. For a few hours I could forget who I was, and become something worse.

My pregnant wife had died when I had intervened in an armed robbery at a petrol station. Goodness knows what I was thinking of at the time. She took the shotgun blast which was aimed at me and she died a short while later in hospital, and my baby that she was carrying died with her. I had another child, a daughter. Siobhan. But rather than keeping it together and looking after her I carried on working and drinking and pretty much destroyed myself.

Another woman’s death was the catalyst for change, as they say. Not a woman I loved in the traditional sense of the word. A woman I had made love to, though, and more than once. An Irish woman, like me an exile from the land of her birth. Jackie Moiyne – she had dark curling locks as a gift from her marooned Spanish forebears who’d been washed up on the south shore of Ireland when their invading Armada fell foul of the English weather that saved Drake’s bacon. And she had flashing blue eyes that bespoke of the gypsy nature of her soul.

Jackie Moiyne was a prostitute and while I might not have loved her I liked her. I liked her a lot. When she was murdered it should have been enough to sober me up and sort out my life: she had deserved my full attention as lead detective on the case and I figured I had owed her that much. But I let her down – or I would have done if Kate Walker hadn’t also got involved. She was the forensic pathologist assigned to the case and we were thrown into a working relationship which, as sometimes happens, strayed into the personal. I had never thought I would love again, but I was wrong.

I discovered that Kate had skeletons in her closet, too. An uncle who was a senior member of the Metropolitan Police, and who had abused her in childhood, turned out to be linked to the murder. A group of men were taking runaway children off the street. Using them in a large house in Henley-on-Thames. Using, abusing, photographing them and filming it all. Jackie’s brother had also been involved and when her son went missing it was that that prompted her murder. Her brother was murdered too when he tried to blackmail Kate’s uncle.

When my own child had been taken, Kate’s help had been crucial in getting her back safely and putting her uncle and his associates behind bars for a very long time. I had rescued my daughter but in the process Dr Kate Walker had rescued me, too. I owed her my life. Everything.

It was Kate who saved me.

She spoke, snapping me out of my reverie, and I felt a chill pass over my heart as I registered her words.

‘We need to talk, Jack.’

WE NEED TO
talk.

Probably the most unpleasant arrangement of four simple words in the world.

‘Go on?’ I said, swinging my legs over the examination couch to the floor and buttoning my shirt back up over the bandage that Kate had applied.

‘The wedding, Jack! We need to talk about the wedding.’

I sighed with relief. ‘Plenty of time for that, darling. It’s not until next year. Let’s talk it through tonight at home. When you’re not so busy.’

‘I’ve tried talking to you at home, but you never sit still long enough to make any decisions.’

‘You know what my decision would be. We’d fly off to the Caribbean, just the four of us, and get married on the beach. Come home as Mr and Mrs Jack Delaney with none of the associated hullabaloo.’

‘We are not running off anywhere, Jack. I hope you’re not ashamed of me.’

‘Of course I’m not!’

‘Then you should be prepared to declare your love for me in front of the whole world! That’s what marriage is all about after all, isn’t it?’

Kate had a way of dancing me into corners with her words. Questions that I couldn’t answer without being in the wrong. ‘Are you sure you never trained as a lawyer?’

‘I’m being serious!’

I stood up and kissed her. But her lips remained closed tight and the glint in her eye was not one of mischief, but a warning of dark clouds gathering therein.

‘I’ve said I am happy to get married here, didn’t I? We’ve set the date and picked the church. Church of England at that!’

‘You don’t have to sound like you are doing me a favour!’

‘Well, we can’t get married in a Catholic church and you don’t want a registrar performing the ceremony.’

‘Don’t you play the Catholic card on me, Jack Delaney!’ she snapped. Seemed I was right about the gathering clouds.

‘Well, I was just saying.’

‘You are never “just saying” anything. I know you well enough by now for that.’

‘You know I love you and just want to make you happy.’

‘And that’s why you’re marrying me?’

I could see it was a loaded question because of the challenging look in her eyes. ‘Of course not,’ I said. Trying to work out quickly what trap she had set. ‘I’m marrying you because it would make me the happiest and luckiest man in Christendom.’

Her look softened. Perhaps I’d danced around the landmine this time.

‘And you really mean that?’

‘Sure, if I were to lie to you would not my tongue blacken and fall from my mouth?’

Kate laughed despite herself. ‘I must be all kinds of fool to be marrying you, Jack.’

‘It doesn’t matter what kind of fool – you’re
my
fool and that’s all that matters.’

She looked at me, considering for a moment, and then smiled again. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘OK. I’d better report back to Amy.’

‘You are going nowhere!’ Her voiced snapped back into schoolteacher mode. ‘I told Lesley to hold all appointments for the next half an hour.’ She pulled a fat folder out of a drawer. ‘There is plenty to arrange. Wedding music. Guest lists. The wedding-breakfast menu. Flowers for the church and the reception. Wedding invitations. Wedding stationery. Honeymoon destinations. I have booked the village hall in Upper Sheringham, but we need to talk about entertainment. Bridal car for me. Car for you and your party.’