M. Arlidge - Pop Goes the Weasel

‘How long will this… night work go on for?’

‘Not long, I hope.’

Another evasive answer.

‘Well, I’m happy to help for as long as is necessary, but you know how I feel about it. I hate the idea of Nicola waking up and finding a stranger at her bedside.’

Violet’s voice faltered, her underlying sense of loss suddenly ambushing her. Tony nodded sympathetically, but would never engage on this point. Had he given up on Nicola? Violet strongly suspected he had. Did he have other women? Violet suddenly wasn’t sure and it hurt her.

‘Is it dangerous? What you’re doing?’

A longer pause this time, and then an unnecessarily long reassurance. So it was dangerous. Was she being unfair, hating him for being so cavalier? He was a policeman and had a job to do – she understood that. But couldn’t he have got moved off the front line to something safer? What if something happened to him? Violet’s own husband – useless bastard that he was – had scarpered years ago. He was now living with his second wife and three children in Maidstone and never visited them. If anything happened to Tony, it would just be Nicola and Violet, locked together, waiting and hoping.

Suddenly Violet found herself crossing the room. She laid her hand on Tony’s arm and, softening her tone, said:

‘Well, take care, Tony. Take care of yourself.’

And for once, he seemed to understand. This was a difficult moment for both of them – a shift in the status quo away from intensive care to a more expansive life for Tony – and for once they were in accord.

‘You get on, Tony. Nicola and I will be fine here.’

‘Thank you, Violet.’

Tony left the room to continue his preparations, leaving Violet alone with her daughter. Pulling her lipstick from her handbag, Violet applied it to Nicola’s lips. It cheered her momentarily, but inside her nerves were still jangling. She had a nasty feeling that forces beyond her control were gathering and preparing to shake her world.

As the team congregated in the briefing room, Helen tried to gather her thoughts. She’d never felt so isolated on an investigation before. Charlie was keen to prove herself by nailing McEwan for the murders and Harwood seemed intent on backing her. Her superior did not want to credit Helen’s growing conviction that they were dealing with a serial killer. Harwood was a politician, a protocol copper, and had never encountered this sort of individual before. Helen, because of her history and her training, had. Which is why she had to take the lead, to focus the team’s investigation where it mattered.

‘Let’s assume for now,’ Helen began, ‘that our killer is a prostitute, murdering men who pay for sex. This is not something that’s happened by accident – there’s no evidence they tried to rape her or that there was a struggle – so she deliberately lured these men to out-of-the-way places and then killed them. This is something that’s been brewing inside her, that she’s been planning. There’s nothing to suggest that she works in a team, so we are looking for a highly disturbed, highly dangerous individual who’s probably been the victim of violence or rape, who may have a history of mental health problems and who clearly has a violent hatred of men. We should check out the hospitals, drop-in clinics, refuges, hostels, and see if anyone’s presented there in the last twelve months who fits the bill. Also let’s go through HOLMES2 to see if there are any unsolved rapes or sexual assaults recently. Something must have set her off. However prone to violence she is, something must have triggered this terrible rage. Check also for crimes that she may have committed – assaults, stabbings that may have been her flexing her muscles before she decided to kill. DC Sanderson, can you run this, please?’

‘On it, boss.’

‘So who are we looking for?’ Helen continued. ‘She obviously knows her way around the scene – Empress Road, Eling Great Marsh – so she’s probably been an active prostitute recently. Her misspellings of both the word “Evill” and the Matthewses’ postal address suggest she may be ill-educated, even dyslexic, but she is clearly not stupid. She leaves virtually no trace wherever she goes – forensics pulled a black hair from Reid’s car, but it is synthetic, probably from a wig – and she possesses plenty of courage. She walked in and out of Zenith Solutions without anyone noticing anything about her. To risk capture in that way suggests that she is a woman on a mission. Someone with a point to prove.’

Silence from the team, as Helen’s words sank in.

‘So our prime focus is current or recent prostitutes. We should check out every rung on the ladder – high-class prostitutes, student escorts, illegals, the junkies giving it away at the docks – but with special focus on the lower end of the market. Matthews’ and Reid’s tastes seem to have been for the grubbier, nastier, cheaper girls. We need to cover the whole city, but I’m going to focus most of our manpower in the north. Bevois Valley, Portswood, Highfield, Hampton Park. Our killer picks up her clients in areas not covered by CCTV, but we have managed to track Matthews’ and Reid’s cars via traffic cameras. It looks like she picked up Matthews on the Empress Road and Reid somewhere near the Common. She’s probably picking these places because they are close to home, because she knows them, because they are “safe”. So let’s not rule anything out, but my guess is that she lives or works in the north of the city. DC McAndrew will lead our efforts in this area.’

‘I’ve got a team assembled, boss,’ DC McAndrew responded, ‘and we’ve broken down the area into sectors. We’ll be onto it this afternoon.’

‘The next question is why did she choose Matthews and Reid? Were they picked at random or deliberately selected? The killer might have seen Matthews around and learned his habits and peccadilloes. But Reid was much younger and appears to have been relatively new to the scene. If he was selected deliberately, it would have to have been done by more subtle means. They were both family men, which could be an important link, but they moved in very different circles and were at very different stages of their family lives – Matthews had four kids of teen age and up, Reid had one baby daughter.’

‘They must have found her online. These days if you want a blowjob, you just Google it, right?’ chipped in DC Sanderson to muted chuckles.

‘Probably, so let’s check out Reid’s and Matthews’ digital footprint. DC Grounds, perhaps you could coordinate? Let’s find out if these guys were deliberately targeted or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everybody clear?’

Helen was on her feet, marching back into the incident room. She was filled with energy and determination – a real sense of purpose. But as she crossed the office floor, she suddenly stopped dead, her newfound optimism dissipating in an instant. Somebody had left the TV on mute, the set playing silently to itself in the corner, but now Helen hurriedly grabbed the remote control and turned up the volume. It was the lunchtime news bulletin on BBC South. Graham Wilson, the regular anchor, was conducting an in-depth interview. And his studio guest today was Eileen Matthews.

Helen burned with anger and frustration as she raced to the Matthews residence. Eileen was desperate with grief – Helen understood that – but her direct intervention into the investigation risked sabotaging everything. Eileen had made up her mind that Alan was not involved with prostitutes and, convinced that the police were barking up the wrong tree, had decided to instigate her own hunt for her husband’s killer. ‘Please help me find the man who did this to Alan’ was a phrase she had repeated several times during the interview. Man, man, man. Five minutes of lunchtime TV had now set the public hunting for a killer that didn’t exist.