Mark Pearson - Death Row

‘Can we get the footage anyway?’

‘No worries, I’ll do you a copy.’ Michael turned and called to a woman sitting at one of the tables by the window, drinking a cup coffee. ‘Karin, do you reckon you could give Sean a hand behind the bar while I nip upstairs for five?’

The woman nodded.

Kate pointed at the note. ‘It’s not the same person’s handwriting, is it?

‘As in the book?’ said Bennett.

‘Yes.’

‘Could be. These are block capitals. Hard to tell.’

‘Maybe that’s the idea.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that whoever arranged to meet him here that Friday night didn’t want anybody else knowing about it.’

‘For personal or professional reasons.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So how does Matt Henson factor in?’

‘He’d seen him in the college. A neo-Nazi made to sweep up leaves and pick up litter. While some foreigner gets to be a student in an English university. There’s an awful lot of resentment there. We know Matt’s violent. Friday night with a skinful of lager in him and he sees the same student and it all boils up for him. He lashes out. He has a knife in his hand. He stabs him.’

Bennett nodded thoughtfully. ‘I can see that happening. So you don’t think it was premeditated?’

Kate shook her head. ‘You saw him on the CCTV footage. He was worked up.’

‘Makes sense.’

A short while later the manager returned with a DVD which he handed to Kate. ‘There you go. I burned you a copy of the night shift — nine o’clock through to one o’clock.’

Kate passed the disc over to Bennett and smiled at the barman. ‘Thanks.’

‘No worries. Come back and see us any time. First one’s on the house.’ He flashed his surfer’s smile again.

‘Cheers,’ said Bennett as they walked to the door.

Outside he held open the passenger door of his car and smiled at Kate. ‘I think you made a new conquest there.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Kate. ‘Maybe it was you he was interested in.’

‘I’m spoken for,’ said Bennett without a hint of a smile.

‘Really?’ said Kate, surprised. ‘You said you weren’t married.’

‘Like I told you … to the job.’

Kate got into the car and pulled her seat belt across as Bennett climbed in. ‘A telescopic truncheon might be very reassuring to carry down a dark alley but it’s not very nice to snuggle up with at night,’ she said.

Bennett smiled and opened his mouth to say something but Kate silenced him with a raised finger. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

‘I was going to say I’m blue-beret-trained. I have access to far more interesting weapons.’

‘Blue beret?’

‘What you might think of as SO19. Specialist firearms command. More likely to wear combat helmets nowadays, mind.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been with SO19.’

Bennett turned and looked at her. His eyes were unreadable. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Doctor Walker,’ he said.

*

Delaney stood beside the window looking out at the rain and the cars crawling slowly along Western Avenue, heading into London. Their headlights and braking lights splashing some colour into the drab awfulness of the surrounding architecture and urban infrastructure. Paddington Green police station was the grown-up version of Delaney’s nick, where the shiny-suited supercops and the serious crime units were based. The sort of station that if you had ambition you would want to be working at. Ambition for yourself, that was. Jack Delaney’s only ambition was to solve crimes. To find the rapists and the arsonists and the murderers and the drug dealers and the paedophiles and the rest of the scum that were increasingly allowed to wreak their misery on the world — to find them and stop them. To turn the tide. He was no King Canute, mind, he didn’t fool himself that what he did made a whole hell of a lot of difference. But just trying to do so mattered to him. And if what he did made the world even the slightest bit less toxic for his daughter then he was going to continue doing what he did. And that wouldn’t happen pushing pens in some supervisory role — he’d leave that to the likes of his Chief Super, who was standing at the front of the packed briefing room, looking on enviously as the serious crimes unit updated the various task forces.

Delaney hadn’t been paying attention to what they were saying. He knew most of it anyway but he started listening when Doctor Bowman was summoned forward to stand in front of a display of photographs.

Photographs of Maureen Gallagher’s severed head, her cruciform corpse. Her lacerated back, her punctured hands and feet. The letters H O R carved into her forehead.

‘Firstly, as we all suspected, I can confirm that the head and the body both belong to the same person. A woman we believe to be Maureen Gallagher, as identified by the parish priest at the church where her head was discovered. It’s hard to place time of death as her body was partially frozen, that is to say it was chilled before her head was separated. There were puncture and burn marks to the chest consistent with a taser-style stun gun. The head was removed postmortem and I would speculate that the cause of death was due to a massive heart attack caused by the tasering. I am waiting for lab results to confirm.’

Bowman walked to the next board and pointed at the scarring on the woman’s back. ‘Her back has been whipped. Some of the scarring is recent, some goes back a while. In her ear I found a small particle that appears to be from the carapace of a crustacean. Probably from a crab shell. And in her mouth the killer had placed a watch. A Mickey Mouse watch that would appear to match the description given of the watch that Samuel Ramirez was wearing on the day he went missing.’

Delaney looked at the montage of photos mounted on the various boards. Photos of the murdered woman, of Peter Garnier, of the murdered children. Someone had obviously helped Garnier. Had kept the watch as a trophy. As a grisly souvenir. But why start killing again now? Why kill the church cleaner and why place the watch in the mouth of her severed head? The killer was sending a message, that much was clear. But why now? And what was the message?

Delaney looked again at the various photos, trying to make sense of them. It was like spot the ball, he thought: maybe all the pieces were there if he could just link them somehow, follow the lines of their stares, see what they could see but what was obscure to him.

He looked at the photo of Maureen Gallagher’s headless body on the cold ground of Graham Harper’s allotment, and a thought came to him.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said.

Delaney became aware that people were looking at him. His boss, her face impassive, and beside her the Chief Super goggling at him in disbelief.

‘Something to add, detective inspector?’ he barked angrily.

‘We need to get back to the allotment and dig, sir.’ Delaney pointed at the photograph of the headless Maureen Gallagher, her arms and legs outspread in cruciform pose.

‘I think X marks the spot.’

*

Gloria looked down at her hands, which were entwined together and clasped in her lap. She shivered with the cold and put her hand behind her on the sofa to test the radiator. It was on but she didn’t feel any warmer. She pulled her bath gown tight around herself and looked back at the television, humming a melody to herself in a low voice. The Sky News crew were back at the allotments in Harrow and the pretty blonde reporter was looking earnestly into the lens of the camera, pointing at her. She could see the woman’s lips moving but she couldn’t hear what she was saying as she had the sound turned off. A song was playing in her own head, but the melody kept dancing away like a butterfly, like a sea mist slipping through spread fingers, like a dream that didn’t want to be caught however hard she tipped her head and tried to catch it.