Steven Dunne - The Reaper

Vicky.

P.S. Love the cat.

Now Brook saw the girl’s carpetbag on the sofa. He’d forgotten about his spur-of-the-moment offer that morning. Stupid! Or perhaps he’d been shrewd. Perhaps he’d invited her to share the lonely hours, deflect him from himself and thoughts of his daughter. And it wasn’t all bad. She loved Cat and she was intelligent. She could spell penicillin and use apostrophes. Most young people whose writing Brook encountered, petty criminals and fresh-faced coppers, ground out statements like they were pulling teeth. Even then Brook would have to skip through them and correct all the text message spellings. Apostrophes were something to sling on any word ending in s. Just in case. In a few years the English language would be dead. Ageing rappers would be the new English teachers. 4 shore.

Brook saw the folder on the floor next to the sofa and leapt over to it. A cursory check revealed nothing missing-as far as he could tell. There’d been a lot of loose stuff in there-he might have forgotten. At least Laura’s necklace was there. He took it out of the folder and put it in his trouser pocket, then slipped the address he’d jotted down into the front of the straining folder.

Brook felt ashamed. He was getting old. Paranoid. Of course she’d moved it. She’d shifted everything but the phone, ready for a meal. There were Brook’s two spoons and forks-from odd sets-two glasses, one with a stem, the other a tumbler, looking as though they’d been cleaned, of all things. She’d also brought in the salt and pepper, a cheap, if matching set he’d filched from the canteen.

Brook went to his room and threw the folder onto his bed then pulled a small suitcase from underneath. He opened it and tossed in sufficient clothes for a two-or three-night stay. For once he took a little more care over his selection without really understanding why. Finally he closed the case, took it out to the Mondeo and, with a guilty glance over at the Sprite, slipped it into the boot along with his bulging file. The old thing wouldn’t have made it down the M1. Not in a million years. He wasn’t betraying the old bucket, he was saving it.

He smiled at this justification. Only children attributed personality to inanimate objects-like a little girl with a doll. The image returned him to Terri but, just as quickly, he pushed her away again.

Before he closed the boot, Brook took out the two slim folders from Dr Habib and put them in his room-a little light reading for the early hours.

There was another folder from the Forensics lab. He left it where it was. He’d already had the potted version. The wine glasses were clean and too common to be traceable to a particular shop. Serology confirmed that there were no traces of saliva in the wine, other than the Wallis parents.

There were no fingerprints in the blood on the wall and no glove prints. The killer wore latex gloves, which on rare occasions can be identified by the microscopic imperfections built into them during manufacture. But, of course, they needed the gloves to obtain a match.

Minute traces of talcum powder, to stop hands becoming too sweaty, were found around the room and on the victims, confirming the use of gloves. If delivering food, nobody would notice the difference between those and looser, food-handling gloves.

The story was the same with other fibres and hair. There was an abundance of foreign samples and several hairs different to the victims, but without fibres or hairs from the killer, a match couldn’t be made. It would take weeks just to separate and identify the many different samples, with no telling how long ago they were deposited on the victims or in the house. Until a suspect was identified or an arrest made it was just a case of bureaucratic evidence collection and going through the motions.

Footprints were the same. There were dozens-so many marks across the film of blood particles on the carpet that they were almost indistinguishable. There were blood traces in the downstairs corridor and the path but these too had been compromised by other shoe patterns.

One of the SOCOs told Noble they were going to sort them out with an Electrostatic Mat borrowed from Nottinghamshire but although Brook didn’t say it, he didn’t see much point. Eventually they would find a usable footprint, but they had no suspect to match it to and Brook had no doubt that everything the killer wore at the Wallis house would have been destroyed by now. If they found the van they would be able to distinguish which set of footprints belonged to the killer more quickly but that would only get them a shoe size and just maybe some identifiable fibres, but to compare against what? No suspect, no comparison. And given the care and planning that had gone into this, Brook thought it highly unlikely there’d be fingerprints in the van.

The hospital report on Aktar and Jason’s stomach contents matched the forensic examination of the pizzas. Habib had been right. All the victims had Scopolamine poisoning with traces of morphine. It was all beginning to chime. A well-organised and sophisticated killer had struck in Derby. Apart from that they had nothing.

He looked at his watch-nearly seven. He decided to shower and shave quickly before Vicky returned from wherever she’d gone to pick up food. It was dark and cold and, in spite of himself, he worried about her being out alone in a strange city. Brook recognised the irony with a bitter narrowing of the eyes. He worried about other people’s daughters while not daring to think of his own.

Brook emerged from a tepid shower fifteen minutes later. Still no Vicky. Despite wet hair, he threw on a flimsy T-shirt and a pair of jogging pants and walked out to the main road, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. She strode into view almost at once, waving one of her shopping bags and smiling broadly. The taxi that had dropped her off screamed away. Brook caught a flash of baseball cap pulled low. He followed the car with his eyes as discreetly as he could. Most minicabs in central Derby were P-reg saloons, but this had a recent plate and looked shiny and powerful.

‘Are you mad?’ she said, catching sight of his attire.

Brook grabbed one of her bags, glancing inside. Pasta sauce, spaghetti, wine, breadsticks. There was a receipt in there, which he pocketed without her seeing. ‘I was born in Yorkshire which makes me a couple of notches tougher than anybody else,’ he beamed back at her. ‘Or just plain stupid.’

‘That’ll come in handy when you taste my cooking then.’ As she laughed she threw back her head and moved her jaw up and down as though she were attempting to sink a yard of ale. Her hair shimmered in the half-light thrown onto her from the street lamps and her teeth sparkled like distant galaxies. Brook found it a gladdening sight after the tensions of the last few days and, for a few seconds, he felt light-hearted, without a care in the world, like a teenager on a date, his sole worry, how to impress a beautiful girl.

Vicky pushed her fork to the side and let out a sigh. She was a very poor eater even compared to Brook, who’d finished five minutes before. She threw down her wine, however, and Brook recharged her glass for the third time and went to open the second bottle of Rioja.

He returned having quietly slipped the cash she’d spent at Sainsbury’s into her beaded purse. They talked for a while longer. Jones was picking him up to go to London at six in the morning but Brook found it hard to terminate pleasant human contact and he got the impression she felt the same way. She seemed to carry the same submerged pain as Brook, the same hunger for companionship. And thus far, she hadn’t tried to steer the conversation around to the case, which he’d half-expected. Perhaps she’d had a look through the file and that had been sufficient.