The Stranger You Know (20 page)

Probably.

The stairs made me breathless but the reason I ground to a halt on the landing by my front door was not so I could catch my breath. Leaning against the door was a fat bunch of red roses, a tied bouquet with a little reservoir of water inside the cellophane to keep them alive while they waited for me to return.

It was all kinds of sad that my first reaction was fear. My second reaction was anger.
Not this again
. Flowers by the front door made me think instantly of Chris Swain. It was just the sort of romantic gesture he knew would terrify me.

I pulled on the blue latex gloves I carried in my bag and approached the flowers as warily as if they were hiding a fully grown tiger. There was a little white envelope taped to the plastic and I ripped it off carefully to preserve the tape. SOCOs loved tape. It was good for trace evidence and fingerprints and matching the ends to a roll if you ever tracked down a suspect. The envelope wasn’t stuck down and I edged the card out, trying not to touch it. A hastily written message in biro, presumably dictated over the phone to the florist who’d made up the bunch, because I didn’t recognise the writing.

‘I’ll miss you. Be good while I’m gone. Love, Rob.’

Relief made me irritable. ‘Be good’? That was unusually patronising of him. And having flowers delivered to the flat was against the rules, especially when they were addressed to me by name. I picked them up and sniffed the one nearest me. They’d been bred for looks, not scent, but it was still faintly sweet, and my irritation faded. He missed me. I missed him. He must have known coming back to the empty flat was going to be hard. I was smiling as I carried them in and ripped off the cellophane, then shoved them in a vase, still tied with the straw-like twine. It was good that he’d chosen an arrangement that didn’t need much input from me because I was not the type to spend hours fluffing a flower arrangement. But then, he knew that.

I made toast and a pot of coffee, then set my phone to ring at three thirty to remind me to go to bed. Already in pyjamas, I sat down on the sofa with the file and spread out its contents on the table in front of me. I put the news on to check the headlines: we were still the lead story. They had found some file footage of Anna Melville presenting a bunch of flowers to Princess Anne. It was strange to see a younger version of the victim walking and smiling – strange and unsettling. Godley looked as film-star perfect as ever in his press conference. And of course, the Gentleman Killer name got full play. After the report was over, the newsreader went through the morning editions of the papers: front page after front page featured the case. We didn’t know if the publicity would encourage our man or put him off, but there was nothing we could do about it anyway.

The second story after Anna Melville’s death was a Dads Matter demonstration in Liverpool where a police officer had been hit over the head and concussed. Philip Pace gave a smooth statement managing not to apologise and suggesting it was the officer’s fault. I switched the television off rather than listen to any more of it and turned my attention to the file.

First up was the MG5, the summary of the case written by the officer in charge, the OIC for short. Inspector Lionel Orpen was his name. I set the pages to one side, looking for witness statements and piling them up. Stuart Sinclair would be Fat Stu’s real name. His statement matched Derwent’s story, as I glanced through it, and the timings did rule Derwent out. Charles Poole’s statement, complete with an alibi for Derwent. Josh Derwent’s own statement where I found the story he’d told me but in official language. ‘I last saw the victim at 11.39 p.m. on AUDERLY Road, proceeding in the direction of KIMLETT Road.’ Disappearing from him for ever. The Orpheus and Eurydice of Bromley. It was the statement agreed after hours of interviews, after all the suggestions and insinuations and repeated questions had battered their way to the truth. The tale was told without emotion, without comment. I was glad I’d heard Derwent’s story first. I could read exhaustion in every line of the statement. Broken was the word he’d used himself. And he’d rebuilt himself in the army, in an environment that was comfortably intolerant of difference, whether it was difference of race, sexuality or gender. Why was I surprised he was a twat?

I put the rest of the witness statements to one side and found what I really wanted: the forensics from the scene and a sheaf of colour-photocopied pictures, recent copies of the originals, which had held up well enough themselves to the passage of time. A house, taken from the other side of the road: a small 1930s semi-detached one, four-square like a child’s drawing, with two windows above a door and a bay window on the ground floor, visible through the gate that made a gap in the hedge. The hedge, as Derwent had described it, towering ten feet. It was dense and spilled over the front wall. Moving forward, the path to the front door. The photographer had worked around the house, tracking along the path made in grass that was helpfully overlong and showed the dragging struggle that had taken Angela to her death. To the right of the front garden, by the hedge that ran between it and the Sinclair house next door, there was a small beech tree. Underneath it there was a sweep of greenery dotted with tiny white flowers on delicate stems. And in the middle of the flowers, under the tree, lay Angela Poole, in a denim mini and a white low-cut vest top. Her hair was tangled in the grass, blonde locks gleaming in the light of the flash. Her pale pink cardigan was balled up nearby. Her legs were apart, but as she had fallen rather than in a deliberate attempt to display her. What was deliberate was the removal of her eyes. This was gouging, I thought, staring at the gelatinous mess that had been left to one side of her head rather than in her palms. No knife. He improvised.

The photographer had included a few generous close-ups of Angela’s face. I had no personal involvement with her; I’d seen one picture of her and heard Derwent’s highly coloured account of how perfect she had been and neither had made me feel like I should care about her. But there was something unspeakably dreadful about the purple bruises on her throat, the red flecks on her skin caused by blood vessels bursting as she struggled for air. Her mouth was open, her teeth white. Her lips looked bruised but I thought of teenagers kissing for endless hours and remembered my own mouth tingling as I crept into the house, unable to stop smiling, after getting off with Brian O’Neill at the Krystal disco when I was fifteen. Without eyes, her eyelids sat oddly, puckered and deflated. The lashes were still clotted with mascara. I wished for the crime-scene pictures from Kirsty, Maxine and Anna so I could compare them, but I knew what I would see. There were differences – he worked inside, not in the open air. He had moved on from this death, making it his own with the candles, the dying flowers, the white sheet under the body. But Derwent was right. This was where it started. This was the beginning. And it demanded that someone take another look at Angela Poole’s murder.

The next pictures made me jump: seventeen-year-old Derwent looking back at me with the flawless skin and lean features of youth. His hair was ridiculous, hanging down on either side of his forehead like curtains, and he hadn’t mentioned the double line he’d shaved in one eyebrow.

‘Vanilla bloody Ice,’ I said aloud, grinning. If I had the nerve I’d give him a hard time about it when I saw him next.

In the first picture he stared down the camera like it was a gun. His eyes looked angry and wary, with the dangerous bewilderment of a cornered animal, and the skin around them was puffy, as if he had been crying. Next, the photographer had got in close with the camera to focus on a scuff on one cheek and I remembered what he’d said about bruising his face. Another shot was his neck, with a yellowing mark just under one ear: an old love bite, healing now. The next picture was of his back and a handful of long, deep scratches raked across his tanned skin. You could see where they were going with this. It was hard to tell, sometimes, if they were love marks or wounds made by the victim. In Derwent’s version, there was an innocent explanation for every injury. It was as if he’d tailored his story to account for them.

Or it was the truth. That was the other possible explanation.

The next picture was an A4 blow-up of Angela alive, unmade-up and very pretty in school uniform, posing for her picture as if butter wouldn’t melt. Innocent. Virginal. Reluctantly virginal, as it turned out. Assuming that the sex had been consensual, and I hadn’t seen anything yet to say it wasn’t. I flipped through the remainder of the shots: exhibits such as Derwent’s bag, the unused condoms, the cardigan spread out on a table with a close-up of a tear in one sleeve. There was a list of items removed from Derwent’s house: the bag and its contents, notes from victim, tape made by victim, pictures … the whole history of their relationship, everything that she had touched. They’d taken her away from him all over again. And a set of photocopied pages from Angela’s diary showed that she had been a typical teenage girl. She wrote a lot about Derwent, usually in the kind of code that takes no time at all to crack. She sounded very enthusiastic about what they’d got up to, I noticed.

I was grateful for a map of the area and returned to Derwent’s statement to plot his journey, and Angela’s. If there was time the next day I’d do them on an overlay so I could see where they had been together, and where they had parted.

More interesting still was the floor plan of the house and the one next door, with Stuart Sinclair’s room marked on it. I went back to the pictures which showed the side of the house with the hedge and tried to imagine what Stuart Sinclair could have seen. I’d have to go there and imagine the hedge was still at the height it had reached in the summer of 1992. It would be worth checking whether the Pooles still lived there. I didn’t want to disturb them unless I really had to.

I was too tired to plough through the fine detail of the post-mortem report though I did get the gist: manual strangulation. The removal of the eyes had taken place before she died, which made me stop reading for a moment. Her vaginal area was abraded and there was a trace of blood on the anterior vaginal wall. The pathologist noted the presence of a quantity of semen inside her and on her underwear, but her underwear had been in the correct position and it was the pathologist’s view that the injuries were consistent with consensual sexual activity. As usual, everything came with a hefty dose of prevarication.

My eyes were closing. The last pages got the quickest glance, just so I knew what I was skipping. A report on scrapings from under the victim’s fingernails. A statement from the bus passenger who had fallen. A statement from Shane Poole and one from his mother about when they’d last seen Angela. A statement from Derwent’s mother, who had washed his clothes early the following morning. It was her habit to get the wash on before breakfast, she had explained, outrage in every line of her statement. He hadn’t asked her. She’d picked his clothes off the bedroom floor, as usual.

It didn’t look good for him that she’d done the laundry but there was nothing to find on the clothes; his alibi was sound. So said Lionel Orpen in his summary, listing the many ways they’d tried and failed to prove Derwent’s guilt. They had looked for other suspects, of course. Sex offenders. Murderers on parole. Men the local prostitutes identified as liking to choke them during sex. They’d done the rounds looking for their man, and hadn’t found him.

My phone burst into life, playing the jaunty little tune that made me want to fling it against the wall most mornings. I flicked through the statements, seeing names I recognised, longing to keep reading. I was out on my feet, and tomorrow would be a big day. I shovelled everything back into the folder and headed for my cold, empty bed, glad that I was too tired to think, too tired to be aware of being alone.

In spite of my unsettling evening, or maybe because of it, I slept like the dead.

SATURDAY

Chapter 16

‘The killer does not see his victims as human beings. Their role is to assist him in creating a scene that has some personal significance, either a memory or a fantasy that he wants to make real.’ Dr Chen was sitting in a corner of Godley’s office, her legs crossed neatly at the ankle, her hands folded in her lap. She had a soft speaking voice and the three of us – Godley, Burt and I – were all leaning forward, trying not to miss anything. It created a strange atmosphere in the room, I thought. An intimacy, as if we were listening to a prophecy about our futures instead of a scientific analysis of a criminal’s likely background and status. Usually, she would have been addressing a larger group, but Godley’s policy of keeping the Derwent angle confidential meant that there were just the four of us in the room.

‘Is it likely to be something he’s experienced himself? Or could it be something he’s seen, like a photograph or a film?’ Una Burt, making sure that Derwent could still fit this profile, even if she couldn’t bend time to make him a suspect for Angela Poole’s murder.

‘It could be. It would be something of enormous importance to him though. This is an experience that has defined him. He wants to relive it, or recreate it.’ Dr Chen was wearing her usual red lipstick and a cherry-red cardigan over a white shirt; she looked immaculate. ‘You can look for similarities between the women but it’s possible that they are only connected by the fact that he was able to convince them to trust him.’

‘What if he’s pretending to be a police officer?’ I said. Emphasis on
pretending
.

‘That would work. It would fit in with how he presents himself too. Trustworthy but able to control their behaviour. I find it interesting that none of them seem to have mentioned him to their friends or family. He managed to persuade them to keep him a secret. Or they didn’t want to talk about him for other reasons. They were embarrassed, perhaps, or they didn’t want to jinx a potential romantic partner.’

‘They were all waiting for their happy ever after. Only it didn’t work out that way.’ Godley shook his head.