The Watcher (24 page)

‘Christ!’

‘I . . . let loose with a really hateful rant against the guy. In my notes. Because . . . I was annoyed by him just before Christmas.’

‘Why were you annoyed?’

‘Because he . . . was so rude to me. I had taken his twelve-year-old daughter home and—’

Bartek looked at him in horror. ‘What?’

Put with everything else, it sounded terrible, thought Samson, absolutely terrible. But his friend could not think that he . . . God, why did everyone immediately see him as a paedophile?

‘No,’ he said, despairingly. ‘It was an emergency. She was locked out of her house, both her parents were away, and I was just coming past when I—’

‘You were hanging around outside the family’s house again,’ stated Bartek. The expression on his face said it all.
Why did I have to befriend this idiot, and why am I standing here and letting myself get drawn into this miserable mess?

‘I couldn’t leave her outside in the snow. But when her parents fetched her, her dad acted as if . . . as if he thought . . .’

Bartek sighed.

‘I wrote that I hate him. And now he’s dead and . . . well, the police are going to find it odd that I was watching the family.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Bartek. ‘I just can’t believe it! God, I told you that you had a screw loose doing all that. No wonder you got yourself in hot water! You’re sure that your sister-in-law went to the police with your notes?’

‘Gavin told me this lunchtime. He was in a state, both because he had not been able to stop her and because of the whole situation.’

‘I can understand that,’ murmured Bartek.

‘Then I drove off in my car in a panic. I drove around aimlessly all afternoon. In the end it occurred to me that it could be dangerous to carry on. I mean, they must have my registration number by now. I left the car over at Gunners Park and walked back into town, taking a hundred different detours. Bartek, I’ve been walking for hours. I’m exhausted. Can I stay here?’

‘No way,’ said Bartek. Seeing his friend’s shocked expression, he added, ‘I mean, that would be stupid. The police will want to know the names and addresses of your friends, and your sister-in-law will give them my name. They’ll work out that you’re hiding here.’

‘But I have to stay somewhere!’

‘Do you have some money?’

‘One hundred pounds in cash. That was all I had in my account.’

‘OK,’ said Bartek. ‘OK.’ It was clear that he had only one objective right now: to get rid of his friend for now and then think what to do next.

‘Listen, that’s enough for tonight. For an inexpensive B and B. Find yourself a room and call me tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have thought of what to do by then.’

‘A B and B? Isn’t that dangerous?’

‘I’d say it’s not half as dangerous as my flat,’ said Bartek.

Samson nodded. He realised that Bartek was right.

Bartek glanced back through the door, where they could hear music, laughter and the clinking of glasses continuing unabated. ‘Samson, I have guests. I have to go in. We’ll speak tomorrow.’

‘Will you help me?’

‘Of course,’ said Bartek, but Samson had the impression that Bartek would say anything to him at that moment. He wanted nothing so much as to end the wretched scene.

‘Bartek,’ said Samson pleadingly. ‘Please believe me: I had nothing to do with all of that. I didn’t kill Mr Ward. I could never kill anyone. Nor attack or hurt them. I’m innocent.’

‘Of course I believe you,’ said Bartek soothingly. He sounded like a doctor speaking to a patient who was not compos mentis.

Samson closed his eyes for a second in exhaustion. ‘I really didn’t do it.’

‘Till tomorrow,’ said Bartek, and disappeared into his flat, closing the door firmly behind him.

Samson turned to go. His feet were like lead weights. Gavin had advised him to go to the police. ‘You’ll only make it worse if you run away. If you haven’t done anything, you’ll be able to tell them that. Hiding won’t help. At some point they’ll find you and then it’ll look really bad.’

Gavin was undoubtedly right, and yet . . . He was not brave enough. He was afraid. He was petrified and only able to follow his first instinct to find somewhere safe.

But where would he be safe?

Slowly he crept down the stairs. Eleven o’clock. Another hour and then the new year would begin.

From its first second it promised him nothing but a nightmare.

Detective Inspector Peter Fielder knew that his wife often had to be very patient with him, but the gruesome series of murders had taken a surprising turn on 31 December of all days, so there was no way he could spend New Year’s Day, which was to be followed by a weekend, at home in front of the fire. Even if it would have been better for his marriage.

He had arranged an extra meeting at the Yard for that morning. After taking much time and effort to scrape the ice off his windscreen, he had driven that bitterly cold, dark morning to the office. He was tired because he had seen in the new year with his wife and a couple they were friends with. But he knew Christy would make him a coffee that would bring him back to life. He did not know anyone who made coffee as perfectly as Detective Sergeant McMarrow. Apart from that, she was one of his most intelligent colleagues. Peter Fielder knew that Christy could be dangerous for him. He himself was shy in such matters and would never make the first move. He knew that. But it could be tricky if she ever tried to get closer to him.

The meeting was tough. Everyone was tired, hung-over and not particularly motivated. Detective Constable Kate Linville chipped in that they knew who the culprit was, they just had to find him.

‘Oh, right?’ asked Fielder. ‘And who
is
the culprit?’

The young woman looked at the others, unsure of herself.

‘Samson Segal. I thought that—’

‘I think we should be careful,’ Fielder interrupted her. ‘I admit that when you read Samson’s notes, you quickly work out he’s not quite right in the head. But at this point, that’s all we can say.’

‘He was aggressive about Thomas Ward,’ insisted Kate.

‘And said nothing about Carla Roberts or Dr Anne Westley.’

‘He wanders around all day and spies on strangers. Especially women. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was him going up and down in the lift in Hackney!’

‘We’ll check that,’ said Peter Fielder. ‘But as long as we have no results, let’s keep wild speculation in check, DC Linville!’

Kate Linville went pink. She was no longer one of the youngest. She should have been promoted long ago, but she remained a DC, as if she were something left to get dusty in the corner. She was a reliable and dutiful member of staff, but she did not have the slightest sense when it came to criminals, had little understanding of human motivation and rarely brought out a constructive suggestion. It was more typical that she would jump to conclusions about possible culprits. Possibly, Fielder suspected, in order to have something to say in meetings.

They had to take things one step at a time. A forensics team was out in Thorpe Bay and had collected a number of Samson Segal’s fingerprints. They were now being compared with the few unidentified fingerprints in Carla Roberts’s flat in Hackney and the multitude of prints in the lift, as well as with the prints in Anne Westley’s house. If there were any matches, that would be a great step forward.

At the end of the meeting, Peter Fielder sent DC Linville off to talk to Millie Segal once again. She was the woman who had turned up at Southend-on-Sea police station with her brother-in-law’s computer notes and claimed to have uncovered a dangerous killer.

‘It was him! He killed Thomas Ward. And who knows who else. Read this and you’ll see you are dealing with a psychopath.’

Fielder concentrated on the jottings strewn around on his desk. He had scribbled things on various pieces of paper, according to a system that no one apart from him could see or understand. The whole story was getting more and more complicated and he felt that he was light years away from a solution. No one had been able to give him any really good leads in the meeting, but perhaps he was asking too much of his team on 1 January. Christy was in the next room, on the phone. The others had either gone home or were working on the tasks he had given them.

He had time to brood on it. He had the whole long, cold day.

The name
Thomas Ward
jumped out at him from his notes. He had circled it in red pen and put a question mark next to it. How did Thomas Ward fit into this series of murders of old women who lived on their own? At first glance – and at second and third glance – he did not fit in at all. Thomas Ward was a man. He was anything but on his own; his young daughter had even been in the house when he was killed. He had been found within a few hours by his wife. He had not been suffocated with a cloth stuffed down his throat.

He had been shot. His murderer had fired two shots at him. One bullet had grazed his temple and caused a lot of blood loss, but he had not died of that. The second shot had destroyed his carotid artery. He had not had a chance. Nor would he have had even if he had been found sooner.

It was standard procedure that after the bullet had been analysed, a computer search would be carried out to ascertain if the weapon and ammunition had been used in other crimes. The Southend police had had an unexpected match. Thomas Ward had been killed with the same weapon that Anne Westley’s murderer had used to shoot his way into her bathroom.

So the case had landed on DI Fielder’s desk. And to complicate matters further, when strange writings surfaced by a Samson Segal from Thorpe Bay, who lived near Thomas Ward and obviously had a bone to pick with him, they were also forwarded on to Scotland Yard.

That was the reason for the extra meeting today.

At the end of which they were all as confused as before.

What did Thomas Ward and the two murdered women have in common?

Christy McMarrow had expressed the key question. ‘What if Ward was not the target? What if the culprit actually meant to get his wife? And didn’t know that she wasn’t at home?’

Fielder nodded thoughtfully, while he drew another circle around the victim’s name. On 30 December, a day after Ward’s murder, he had talked to Ward’s wife. She had been able to answer his questions calmly. According to what he heard, it was indeed the case that Ward usually went out to his tennis club on Tuesday nights. Normally he never came home before ten or half past ten. Whoever knew a little bit about the Ward family’s habits would have assumed that Gillian Ward would be at home, not her husband.

If she had not tried to see her lover that evening. She had told him that too. It had not been easy for her to tell him, but he did not have the impression that she was withholding anything.

Gillian Ward
. He had noted her name too, and circled it a few times. And he had drawn an arrow from her name to another name that he had written in black and underlined repeatedly:
John Burton
.

That had really amazed him. Bumping into Burton unexpectedly like this. In connection with a murder case.

Detective Inspector Burton. His former colleague. Who had ruined his Met career in such idiotic fashion. Burton, who Fielder had never been able to stand, although he had found it difficult to justify his aversion. Sometimes he suspected that he did not like the man simply because he drifted through life footloose and fancy-free, just as Peter Fielder sometimes dreamt of living, but never dared to. Burton had found the young woman attractive and had rushed into a fling without thinking of the possible consequences. When the situation escalated, he had had almost no choice but to resign, but his colleagues had been left with the nasty feeling that he was leaving them behind with their monotonous daily grind and their career ambitions, while he was stepping out into freedom and independence. In a moment that was in fact the greatest failure of his life, he had acted like a winner, not a loser.

Maybe that’s what really got my goat, thought Fielder. He immediately pulled himself together: be careful, stay objective! You’d like to get your own back on Burton, of course, but don’t let that cloud your judgement.

And now Burton had got involved with Gillian Ward, whose husband had been found murdered. Fielder found it all extremely odd. Burton had, after all, the suspicion of sexual harassment hanging over him. Even if all the reports absolved him of any guilt and the Crown Prosecution Service had not pursued the case.

Christy entered the room. ‘Some news: Samson Segal’s car has been found. Gunners Park, out in Shoeburyness. No sign of Segal himself. And I talked to Forensics. No matches yet. The prints in Samson Segal’s room don’t match any in Roberts’s flat or in the lift. They’re still working on prints at Tunbridge Wells.’

‘In any case, I think we’d be rash to think of this Segal as the murderer, and—’

Christy interrupted him: ‘Sir, excuse me, but I know what you’re thinking. You think it’s Burton, so Samson and his odd notes are just in your way. But why would John Burton—’

‘Kill Thomas Ward? He was having an affair with his wife.’

‘And that’s why he’d kill the husband? If he wanted a future with Gillian Ward, she could have got a divorce!’

‘Maybe he wanted to kill Gillian. From what she said, he didn’t know that she was going to visit him that evening, or that she ended up hanging around in the Indian restaurant in Stratford. He thought she was home.’

‘What? And didn’t he think her daughter would be around?’

‘He coached her at tennis. It’s possible, isn’t it, that she had told him about the planned holiday with her grandparents.’

‘And why would he want to kill Gillian?’

Fielder stood up and stepped over to the window. Low clouds hung above the city. ‘Don’t forget, Sergeant, that Burton has already been accused of a sexual crime. What exactly do we know about him? Maybe he’s highly dangerous. Disturbed, perverted, what do I know? He got away relatively unscathed last time. But he still decided to leave the force pretty quickly. Why? To prevent any further investigation? To stop things surfacing that could have been awkward for him?’