The Reaper (19 page)

‘I almost forgot, Vicky,’ said Brook, raising his glass. ‘Congratulations. I assume.’ She smiled vacantly for a moment, unclear as to his meaning. ‘I’m assuming you’ve been offered a place…at the university.’

Light dawned. ‘Oh…yes. Thank you. I was but I turned it down.’ She smiled thinly. After a moment’s hesitation she added, ‘I didn’t like the campus.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ nodded Brook. ‘All that red brick.’

‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ she replied. She’d failed the simplest bluff.

Brook smiled. ‘Truly horrible.’ Now he was curious. What was the girl doing in Derby? She hadn’t been to the university that much was clear. ‘Where will you try now?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll go home first. Think about my options.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘London.’

‘Whereabouts in London?’ Brook tried to sound interested and not pushy.

She hesitated, appearing to realise Brook was trying to hurry her, stop her thinking up more lies. ‘Fulham.’

‘Fulham. That’s North London, isn’t it?’

‘South-west–though north of the river.’

‘Is it? I don’t know London very well, I’m afraid.’

Brook didn’t quite know where he was hoping to go with this. He only knew there was now a tension about her which was making the atmosphere awkward. Perhaps she knew he was lying. After all, she claimed to have seen him on TV, at the press briefing, and Brian Burton had mentioned Brook’s link to the Reaper’s London killings. Had she remembered? Had she made the connection?

And Fulham. How big a coincidence was that? Not very, he surmised. The Brooks had left Fulham a few months after the slaughter in Harlesden. She couldn’t have been very old in 1990, even assuming she was lying about her age now. There was nothing to tie her to any of the Reaper murders. Except that she was here now–in Derby. Why?

Brook yawned. Leave it. ‘Well. Thank you for a lovely meal.’

‘You’re welcome. Thanks for letting me stay.’ She drained her glass once more and reached for a refill, the awkward moment passed.

‘I have to be up early for work tomorrow.’ He stood with an air of finality, gathering crockery.

‘Would you wake me up? There’s an early train I’d like to be on.’

‘No problem.’ Brook pondered offering Vicky a lift back to London but decided against it. He wanted to brief Wendy Jones about the case and about the first
Reaper killings in London, before they arrived. He might also have to tell her about his intention to visit Brighton to see his daughter and it would be difficult with a stranger in the back seat.

‘Are you sure you won’t let me wash up?’ After the best part of two bottles of wine, she was beginning to slur her words. She gave Brook a very sexy and submissive smile, which he managed to ignore. Just.

‘A deal’s a deal,’ he smiled back and trotted off to the kitchen.

Brook took his time with the washing up. He was determined to finish only when all the pre-sleep bathroom noises had finished.

Twenty minutes later, all was quiet. Having dried and put away the dishes for the first time in years, he brushed his teeth and went to bed. As he opened the door to his bedroom, he was drawn by a crack of light from the living room. That door had never been easy to close. He reached for the handle softly but before he could pull it closed, a movement caught his eye and he lifted his gaze, just for a second. It was a second too long.

His trained eye took in all there was to see. The sleeping bag lay on the plastic sofa but Vicky wasn’t in it. She sat naked on the edge of the sofa, her back to him, framed against the light, brushing her long blonde hair, which fell between chiselled shoulder blades. Brook could hear the rush of the hair through the bristles as she stroked. This Venus de Milo had arms.

He gazed for what could only have been seconds but
felt like hours. If the chronometer timing the ache in his chest were anything to go by, he could have been watching this girl, performing her centuries-old ritual, since the beginning of time.

Brook wanted to break away but couldn’t. Life stood before him. Life as it should be. Naked, innocent, just being, acting not thinking, not wasting a second on anything other than its own glorification. No worries, no problems, no artifice, no past, no future. Life, her life, bathed in cheap light and burnished it, allowed it to caress her, rejoiced in it as though it were the light of Heaven.

Brook watched, out of himself, as though watching himself watch her. It seemed he was part of her performance and she knew he was there. As God needs the Devil, she needed him. There could be no light without shadow. She was life. He was death, waiting in the dark, outside looking in, an observer not a player, wanting, yearning to sully, to corrupt, to kill innocence and feed guilt.

Brook exhaled a querulous sigh from the depths of his soul. Suddenly he felt his misery deeply. He could taste the stale breath of unhappiness leaving his lungs. If only it were that easy to expel. But it could never be. Were he to exhale his pain, he knew he couldn’t survive for he breathed little else. It was the only fuel his body knew.

A second, a minute, a day, a year, a lifetime later Brook felt a tear roll down his face. It caught the upturn of his upper lip and meandered toward his cheek before turning into his Rioja-stained mouth. His hand still held the doorknob but lightly. The sweat was loosening his hold
so he let go ready to move away. A draught cooled his hot palm.

Where he prepared, she acted and a single alabaster breast turned its proud profile to Brook, its peach-fuzz curve trapped against the luminescence beyond.

He could stand it no more.

He wiped the rivulet from his face and turned. Time to return to his sarcophagus. He summoned a ‘Goodnight’ from somewhere, trying to sound bland over the spluttering, and pushed into his room without switching on the light. He tore off his clothes down to vest and underpants and jumped into bed, clamping his eyes firmly shut as his mum had taught him in his sun-kissed infancy, lest the Bogey Man came to call. Within seconds he was asleep, or what approximated sleep for Damen Brook, a twilight existence of mumbled nightmares tearing at the fabric of his brain.

But even unconscious, Brook could still dredge a measure of solace from the case. His case. Nobody else could have it. It was up to him now.

Detective Sergeant Brook checked the address in his pad–12 Queensdale Road–and nodded. Very smart. And not divided into flats either. Whoever owned this pile was sitting on a small fortune.

Brook counted four storeys. Below stairs a small front garden gave way to a neat basement room. It had a freshly painted grill over the window and Brook could make out polished wooden floors through the glass. To his right, at ground level, a tiny balcony, home to dozens of pot plants. It guarded a large bay with lace-curtained French windows. Ivy clung to the stone above, hanging down to obscure Brook’s view through the lace. He could just make out the folding screen, which further cocooned the occupants from the outside world.

Two large sash windows looked out from the floor above. Again, both seemed freshly painted and were surrounded by ivy.

The top floor was harder to see but he could make out a circular window, rather like a porthole, only larger. The top half of the window had been opened into the room beyond.

Brook raised a hand to the old-fashioned brass bell-pull but hesitated a moment for no reason he could think of and stepped back. This was a big house in a pricey area, just off Holland Park Avenue. It didn’t make sense. This sort of house had never been on Sammy Elphick’s CV. He was seriously small time and this was way off his turf. All the stolen goods recovered from Elphick’s flat had been traced, where possible, to small properties in Harlesden and Willesden Green.

Brook shrugged. It was the last call on the list. After this, all the long shots were played out. The enquiry was dead. It had been running on fumes for weeks, as it was. They had no forensic, no witnesses, no motive and no suspects.

Suddenly Brook could hear faint strains of music coming from the circular window. He listened. Opera. He knew it. La Wally An aria, the famous one, where Wally refuses to marry her father’s choice and announces she’s leaving. He lost himself for a moment. It was so beautiful. He’d heard it first a couple of years before, in some pretentious French film–all neon lighting, obscure dialogue and designer violence. The song was the only thing memorable.

Brook waited for it to end. When it did, he held the bell pull but remained motionless, listening for what was to come. Nothing. He yanked down hard and heard a clanging within. No music before his arrival. One song in isolation. As though the song had been played especially for him. Ridiculous. Still, Brook couldn’t suppress a feeling that his visit was…anticipated. Because a place like this and a small time thief like Sammy Elphick. It was risible.

The solid oak door swung open unexpectedly. Brook had a good ear and had listened for the noise of footsteps
bounding down the stairs but there were none. A neat, middle-aged man–the records had said fifty-two–with receding red hair stood before Brook. He was medium height, about five-seven, Brook surmised, though his slight stature gave the impression of an even smaller man. He was slim to the point of being wiry, and wore the anonymous clothing commensurate with his generation: white cotton shirt with a thin check, woollen tie with a light tartan design, grey slacks and light brown suede brogues.

He was possibly the most unremarkable man Brook had ever come across. The sort of man guaranteed to sell large amounts of life assurance to the elderly. The sort not to be noticed entering or leaving a murder scene.

But one thing marked him out–the eyes, the windows to the soul. He had the blackest eyes Brook had ever seen. They were black as pitch, endless, all-enveloping black like the sea at night. So black that Brook felt himself lose his bearings in them. Their hypnotic quality held Brook. He stood gazing, locked into an absurd stupor, not knowing his purpose. For a moment he was transported back to his youth, sitting in front of the old black and white in his pyjamas, hot milk in a glass beside him, watching Bela Lugosi hamming it up as Dracula.

Whenever he looked back on this day, Brook realised that if he hadn’t known before, he knew now. The Reaper killings were not ordinary crimes and this man standing before him was no ordinary criminal. He had found his Moriarty.

Yes, Brook knew a great deal in those seconds. Not why someone like Victor Sorenson might feel the need to slaughter a family he couldn’t possibly have known but he knew with
absolute conviction that this man had murdered Sammy Elphick and his wife and son in a grubby flat in Harlesden. And he knew that he’d done it without a second thought.

Brook smiled politely, at last able to swim to the surface of those eyes. The man smiled back. His eyes didn’t join in.

‘Mr Victor Sorenson.’

‘Professor Sorenson, in fact. How can I help you?’

‘I’m a police officer, sir,’ said Brook, flashing his warrant card. Sorenson peered at it then looked back at Brook as if there’d been a mistake. ‘May I come in?’

Sorenson stared at Brook for a few moments, still unable to comprehend. ‘Of course,’ he gestured across the threshold, ‘Detective–Sergeant–Brook.’ Sorenson lingered over the middle word with distaste.

Brook stepped inside and followed Sorenson into the hall. It was dark and he had a little trouble adjusting to the gloom after the sharp winter light outside. He had to screw his eyes to see his host, who gestured for Brook to follow him up the stairs.

As he climbed he tried to take in as much as his senses would allow. He was aware of plush carpet beneath his feet and the presence of numerous pictures neatly fixed to the panelled wall.

‘It’s a couple of flights, Sergeant,’ Sorenson threw over his shoulder. For a fifty-two year old, he was remarkably sprightly and he bounded up the stairs two at a time, challenging Brook to keep up. At the top of the stairs, Sorenson strode through a bright threshold and waited, like a footman, for his guest to enter. He closed the lacquered door behind Brook and swept a regal arm at the room. ‘This is my study.’

Brook looked around the vast room, adjusting once again to the change of light. It was a festival of air and brilliance after the melancholy of the hall. The low sun streamed through the porthole window catching the orbit of dust in the atmosphere. ‘Lovely,’ said Brook before he could stop himself.

Sorenson smiled. The flattery touched off a hidden corner in his icy personality, as if he approved of Brook’s manner and, in spite of his rank, perhaps even his suitability for the task ahead.

‘That’s nice of you to say. May I offer you a drink, Sergeant? I don’t know if you indulge on duty but I’ve got a sublime Lagavulin. Double distilled. A monarch among malts.’ His manner had changed swiftly. He now seemed eager to please, attentive, as though Brook’s appreciation had ushered him into a secret brotherhood over which Sorenson presided.

‘Thank you. I’ll have a small one.’ Brook was shocked by his answer. It was out of character. He wasn’t a big drinker and never on duty. Something he couldn’t explain seemed to draw him into compliance with his host. Or perhaps he was just buying a little surveillance time, if that was what was being offered.

Brook looked around as Sorenson opened a polished walnut cabinet and cleaned two chunky glasses with a white cotton cloth. It was a beautiful room, large and airy, the longest wall of which was lined, ceiling to floor, with books. He stepped closer to gain some clue to his host’s mind.

Brook could see this wasn’t the library of an old fogey, there were no dust-encased leather tomes, no brimming ashtrays or chaotic desktops. This was the working room
of an academic, slightly dishevelled and lived in, but generally neat and ordered.