The One a Month Man (12 page)

Sarah’s face told me that she didn’t fancy a whole day
doorstepping
.

‘We don’t have to stay here all day,’ I said, mind reading. ‘We could always take in Manhattan for a few hours.’ This cheered up Sarah and she switched on the radio, tuning it to an all-day music station, but keeping down the volume.

At 8.45 the garage door, electrically operated, lifted and a black Lincoln Town Car backed out. A woman was driving and a girl was belted in the front passenger-seat.

‘They’re coming this way,’ said Sarah, as the Lincoln swung into the road, its flat, silver-grid nose pointing towards us.

Instinctively, we turned to one another, as if in intense
conversation
, so that the occupants of a passing car would catch only a partial snapshot of our faces. Also, hopefully, no suspicion would be aroused.

The Lincoln swept past us gracefully, but in a hurry.

‘Running late,’ Sarah commented.

‘The big question is whether she’ll return or will she go straight on to the refuge?’ I said.

‘Fifty-fifty.’

We had less than fifteen minutes to wait for an answer.

‘Here she comes,’ I reported, softly, my eyes focused on the driving mirror. ‘Only one person in the car.’

The driver of the Lincoln didn’t even give us a casual glance in passing.

‘Now what?’ said Sarah.

‘Let’s give her five.’

The Lincoln was parked in the driveway and not returned to the garage, indicating that Tina would probably be going out again soon.

‘Did you notice if there was another car in the garage when it was open for those few seconds earlier?’ Sarah asked.

‘I did notice and there wasn’t a second car.’

‘So the odds are she’s now alone in the house.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ I said. ‘A couple more minutes and we’ll make our move.’

Between us, there was a buoyancy that the journey’s end could be in sight.

‘F
ingers crossed,’ said Sarah, as we climbed from our car and strolled, as nonchalantly as possible, towards Tina’s house.

The doorbell chimed musically somewhere deep in the bowels. No movement inside; no sound of approaching
footsteps
. Just a strange, hollow, cathedral silence.

I stepped backwards from the front door and gazed up, like a plane-spotter. A curtain shifted at the edges. Could have been caused by air-conditioning eddies, but I doubted it.

‘I think we might just have been taken for Jehovah’s Witnesses,’ I said.

‘God forbid!’ said Sarah, any flippancy unintentional.

Sarah pressed the doorbell again, but wisely didn’t maintain the pressure. Irking Tina would have been counter-productive.

Another wait.

More inert silence.

Another single ring of the bell, of longer duration this time, courtesy of Sarah.

Patience and reserved persistence were at last rewarded.

The intercom crackled. An articulate, transatlantic voice said, curtly, ‘Yes?’

I introduced myself via the intercom, which was as
disconcerting
as talking to an answer-machine. For a moment, I feared she’d been shocked into a faint. Then, piercingly, ‘What do you want?’

‘We’re here about crimes committed long ago in the UK,’ I said, deliberately vague and low-key.

More waiting. More crackling, mixed with stressed breathing.

‘Who’s
we
?’

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Cable,’ said Sarah, our English accents no doubt helping to establish our credibility.

‘Do you have ID?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘In that case, walk away from the front door, take out your ID and hold it above your head.’

‘Anything to oblige,’ I said, amused, before doing as asked.

A woman appeared framed in an upstairs window, the net curtains now around her, like a flimsy shawl. Large,
military-styled
binoculars were held to her eyes. After a few seconds she disappeared and, not long afterwards, the front door was opened tentatively.

‘Come in,’ said Tina. ‘You can’t be too careful, especially in my work.’

‘And what is that?’ I said, not wanting her to know we’d already run a comprehensive check on her.

‘I help desperate women,’ she said, synoptically. ‘There are lots of husbands, ex-husbands,
lovers
– what a cruel misnomer – and ex-
lovers
who’d kill, literally, to get their hands around my throat.’

As soon as we were inside, she bolted the front door. Despite the house seeming to resemble all other domestic residences in the same road, this clearly was a fortress.

‘Mind if we go into the kitchen?’

‘Fine,’ I said, following, with Sarah bringing up the rear.

‘I was just having a toast-and-coffee breakfast.’

Tina had matured into a handsome, middle-aged woman, with slightly greying hair and a proud, upright bearing. She had learned to apply make-up cleverly to camouflage most of the physical scars. The kitchen was typical of an American
middle-class
,
suburban home, fitted with every conceivable modern gadget. Tina wore lightly tinted glasses, so it was impossible to tell in which eye she was blind.

We sat on high stools around a bar-type table in the centre of the room, lit by lamp-styled lights hung low from the ceiling. A slice of rye toast on a plate at the end of the table nearest the door had been nibbled. A half-drunk mug of black coffee beside the toast had a tepid appearance. Tina placed a mug in front of us both and poured coffee, assuming that we’d join her.

‘Help yourselves to cream and sugar,’ she said, pushing jug and jar towards us. Although the true mileage was recorded on her face, her classical features were still intact, but everything about her was melancholy. She could easily have been an
off-duty
funeral director, such was the sepulchral aura. In an about-the-house jumper, jeans and barefooted, she still looked as elegant as if dressed for a banquet. There was a quiet,
understated
dignity to her persona.

‘So what crimes are you looking into and how can I possibly be of assistance?’ Tina said, spreading herself cowgirl-fashion, as if in the saddle.

Could this be a genuine question or was she just playing a mind game? I pondered. She might have been thinking that it had something to do with her escort days and the shady
characters
running those kinds of agencies, but I doubted that. No, she knew. This was a charade; manoeuvring, making us earn our crust.

‘Oxford, thirty-odd years ago,’ I said, momentarily leaving the rest hanging elliptically in the air.

Tina blanched.

‘We have identified the perpetrator.’

‘You have him in custody?’ she said, astonishment etched over her face.

‘No. We know who he is, though. No room for doubt.’

‘Why do you need me, then?’

‘Because you’re a crucial witness. The one – and only one – who got away from the “One-A-Month Man”.’

‘I’m not interested,’ she said, peremptorily. This was a reflex, stony statement. Absolute.

Sarah was angered, as if a barrel of gunpowder in her soul had been ignited.

‘What do you mean you’re not
interested
?’ she flared.

Tina stared at Sarah as if firing poisoned arrows from her eyes. ‘Oxford and everything therein belonged to another life of mine, before I was reborn over here. I moved on, dumping my past in the Heathrow departure lounge. I erased my first twenty years from my memory. I don’t intend revisiting them – ever.’

Conveniently, she’d also erased her swinging Las Vegas days.

‘Young women, your peers, fellow students with hopes and dreams, were murdered,’ said Sarah, voice and face a fire of white, pinched heat. ‘They were going places in life. Going to the grave was not their choice; not why they were at Oxford. You’re in the business of saving and protecting abused women, and yet you’re telling us you’re not
interested
in bringing to justice one of the worst abusers of women, a serial killer. Don’t you feel shame?’

I flinched; Tina didn’t. This was developing into a verbal
skirmish
between two very strong female personalities. To have come between them would have been to chance ending up as a sandwich – eaten alive by both of them.

‘You’ve no right to sermonize to me about female
responsibilities
. I’ve paid my dues. Have you?’

Sarah eschewed being derailed. ‘
That
killer and abuser of women, a plunderer of futures, has been enjoying freedom for three decades, while his other victims – the bereaved families – have lived in perpetual mourning, emotionally barren, no sunshine in their lives.’

I had no idea how Tina would react. She’d be reminded of her
own parents and how she abandoned them. Sarah’s tirade could backfire, though it beat tacit surrender.

Tina showed signs of being winded and unbalanced by Sarah’s flurry of punches.

‘Tacky, mawkish sentimentality washes over me, Sergeant. You’ve no concept of what I’ve been through,’ Tina said,
resentfully
.

‘Oh, but I have. All the more reason why you should be doing somersaults at the prospect of seeing that bastard locked away for ever.’

We were trained not to show emotion. In an instant, Sarah had jettisoned all her training and conditioning; all that
bureaucratic
crap. She had
resorted
to behaving like a human being, like someone in the real world and not in a legislator’s isolated and cocooned bubble. I was proud of her.

‘I went through hell,’ said Tina.

‘All because of the sadism of one man, who got off on his cruel crimes.’

‘I’ve done many things of which I’m ashamed,’ Tina declared, absently.

‘We know all about that, too.’

‘At last I’ve found happiness.’

‘Bully for you!’

‘My partner knows nothing of my lurid past.’

‘No one’s concerned with what
you
did after leaving Oxford.’

‘Who are you kidding? The defence would present me as a scarlet woman, someone who would say anything for a buck.’

She was right, of course.

‘The prosecution would overcome that, affording you covering fire,’ said Sarah, now struggling a shade, momentum stalling.

‘What you’re asking me to do is gamble with the life I now have. This home.’ She spread her arms. ‘A child. A partner. Stability. Respect.’

‘If you don’t do the right, honourable thing, you’ll hate
yourself
for evermore,’ Sarah prophesied, really plugging the moral high ground.

‘Which pulpit did the police rescue you from?’ Tina retorted, acidly.

Good question, I thought.

‘Does your sanctimonious humbug really ever intimidate people?’ Tina went on.

Spunky stuff.

The time had arrived, I reckoned, to make a pitch for a
cease-fire
.

‘This man may kill again, Tina,’ I said. ‘For all we know, he may already have been responsible for other unsolved murders; maybe even here, in the USA.’

‘
Here
? What reason have you for saying that?’

‘Because he’s American,’ I said, ‘as you’ll recall.’

‘He could have been Canadian,’ Tina balked.

‘Well, he isn’t,’ said Sarah, frostily.

‘Does he live in the UK?’ This question was asked equably.

‘At present he’s working there,’ I explained, deliberately minimal.

‘Where? In the north-east, in oil?’

‘No, in London,’ I said. ‘He’s a sort of civil servant.’

Tina’s working eye widened behind the shades, her brain in top gear. ‘He works for the US government?’

‘Loosely,’ I said, evasively.

‘Then he must be based at the embassy.’

‘That’s something I won’t be contradicting,’ I said, in a
long-winded
way of confirming.

‘Does he know you’re on to him?’

‘No.’

‘How about his colleagues, his superiors? I assume he does have people above him and he’s not the ambassador?’

‘No and yes,’ I said, answering the two questions in the order they were asked.

‘So what does he do at the embassy?’

I hesitated. Tina didn’t even know the truth about her partner working for the CIA. The last thing I wanted was to induce a conflict of interest. If Tina did agree to testify, at some stage she would have to embark on a soul-bearing and cleansing heart-to-heart with her partner. And if she announced she was giving evidence against a CIA agent, well, who knows what the ramifications and consequences might be. There was a danger that the conflicting loyalties of Tina’s partner could be severely tested, turning into an emotional tug-of-war. ‘I don’t think I should say any more about
our man
until we’re sure of your co-operation.’

Tina sank into reverie. Her toast and coffee were cold. She dismounted from her stool and poured away the dregs of her drink and binned her toast.

‘Thanks for spoiling my breakfast,’ she said, simultaneously checking the time with an electric clock on the wall.

‘I won’t say sorry because I’m not,’ I said. ‘I really thought you’d be heartened by the news, although, naturally, at first a little unsettled.’

Tina returned to the table desultorily and poured herself more coffee, mellowing.

‘Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, not even bothering with a toothbrush before rushing with you to the airport. The only downside would have been that the UK had already abolished the death penalty. But now … now I have so much to lose. My appetite for retribution has waned. I could end up back at square one. Alone. Everything lost. I’m not sure I have the strength to begin all over again.’

‘You’re forgetting, Tina, that you’re the innocent party, that you’re the survivor, that you’ll be the heroine bringing the bad guy to his well-deserved nemesis; the woman who finally unmasked the notorious “One-A-Month Man”.’

‘I need time.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘If I agree to co-operate, I’ll have to work out a way of bringing my partner into the loop sensitively.’

Now I simply nodded.

‘Give me forty-eight hours.’

In the circumstances, it would have been unwise for us to have pushed for a tighter deadline.

‘OK if we return same time in two days?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, emphatically. ‘Give me a number and I’ll call you.’

As we departed, we shook hands cordially.

‘Well, what do you think?’ said Sarah, as we walked
purposefully
away from Tina’s house.

‘If we were canvassers for a candidate in an election, I’d mark her down as a floating voter,’ I said. ‘Right now she’s a pendulum, swinging to and fro.’

‘The very people who decide the outcome of every election,’ Sarah said.

A sobering observation. In one sense, the jury was already out on the case, long before we even had a trial.