Steven Dunne - The Reaper

‘I almost forgot, Vicky,’ said Brook, raising his glass. ‘Congratulations. I assume.’ She smiled vacantly for a moment, unclear as to his meaning. ‘I’m assuming you’ve been offered a place…at the university.’

Light dawned. ‘Oh…yes. Thank you. I was but I turned it down.’ She smiled thinly. After a moment’s hesitation she added, ‘I didn’t like the campus.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ nodded Brook. ‘All that red brick.’

‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ she replied. She’d failed the simplest bluff.

Brook smiled. ‘Truly horrible.’ Now he was curious. What was the girl doing in Derby? She hadn’t been to the university that much was clear. ‘Where will you try now?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll go home first. Think about my options.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘London.’

‘Whereabouts in London?’ Brook tried to sound interested and not pushy.

She hesitated, appearing to realise Brook was trying to hurry her, stop her thinking up more lies. ‘Fulham.’

‘Fulham. That’s North London, isn’t it?’

‘South-west-though north of the river.’

‘Is it? I don’t know London very well, I’m afraid.’

Brook didn’t quite know where he was hoping to go with this. He only knew there was now a tension about her which was making the atmosphere awkward. Perhaps she knew he was lying. After all, she claimed to have seen him on TV, at the press briefing, and Brian Burton had mentioned Brook’s link to the Reaper’s London killings. Had she remembered? Had she made the connection?

And Fulham. How big a coincidence was that? Not very, he surmised. The Brooks had left Fulham a few months after the slaughter in Harlesden. She couldn’t have been very old in 1990, even assuming she was lying about her age now. There was nothing to tie her to any of the Reaper murders. Except that she was here now-in Derby. Why?

Brook yawned. Leave it. ‘Well. Thank you for a lovely meal.’

‘You’re welcome. Thanks for letting me stay.’ She drained her glass once more and reached for a refill, the awkward moment passed.

‘I have to be up early for work tomorrow.’ He stood with an air of finality, gathering crockery.

‘Would you wake me up? There’s an early train I’d like to be on.’

‘No problem.’ Brook pondered offering Vicky a lift back to London but decided against it. He wanted to brief Wendy Jones about the case and about the first Reaper killings in London, before they arrived. He might also have to tell her about his intention to visit Brighton to see his daughter and it would be difficult with a stranger in the back seat.

‘Are you sure you won’t let me wash up?’ After the best part of two bottles of wine, she was beginning to slur her words. She gave Brook a very sexy and submissive smile, which he managed to ignore. Just.

‘A deal’s a deal,’ he smiled back and trotted off to the kitchen.

Brook took his time with the washing up. He was determined to finish only when all the pre-sleep bathroom noises had finished.

Twenty minutes later, all was quiet. Having dried and put away the dishes for the first time in years, he brushed his teeth and went to bed. As he opened the door to his bedroom, he was drawn by a crack of light from the living room. That door had never been easy to close. He reached for the handle softly but before he could pull it closed, a movement caught his eye and he lifted his gaze, just for a second. It was a second too long.

His trained eye took in all there was to see. The sleeping bag lay on the plastic sofa but Vicky wasn’t in it. She sat naked on the edge of the sofa, her back to him, framed against the light, brushing her long blonde hair, which fell between chiselled shoulder blades. Brook could hear the rush of the hair through the bristles as she stroked. This Venus de Milo had arms.

He gazed for what could only have been seconds but felt like hours. If the chronometer timing the ache in his chest were anything to go by, he could have been watching this girl, performing her centuries-old ritual, since the beginning of time.

Brook wanted to break away but couldn’t. Life stood before him. Life as it should be. Naked, innocent, just being, acting not thinking, not wasting a second on anything other than its own glorification. No worries, no problems, no artifice, no past, no future. Life, her life, bathed in cheap light and burnished it, allowed it to caress her, rejoiced in it as though it were the light of Heaven.

Brook watched, out of himself, as though watching himself watch her. It seemed he was part of her performance and she knew he was there. As God needs the Devil, she needed him. There could be no light without shadow. She was life. He was death, waiting in the dark, outside looking in, an observer not a player, wanting, yearning to sully, to corrupt, to kill innocence and feed guilt.

Brook exhaled a querulous sigh from the depths of his soul. Suddenly he felt his misery deeply. He could taste the stale breath of unhappiness leaving his lungs. If only it were that easy to expel. But it could never be. Were he to exhale his pain, he knew he couldn’t survive for he breathed little else. It was the only fuel his body knew.

A second, a minute, a day, a year, a lifetime later Brook felt a tear roll down his face. It caught the upturn of his upper lip and meandered toward his cheek before turning into his Rioja-stained mouth. His hand still held the doorknob but lightly. The sweat was loosening his hold so he let go ready to move away. A draught cooled his hot palm.

Where he prepared, she acted and a single alabaster breast turned its proud profile to Brook, its peach-fuzz curve trapped against the luminescence beyond.

He could stand it no more.

He wiped the rivulet from his face and turned. Time to return to his sarcophagus. He summoned a ‘Goodnight’ from somewhere, trying to sound bland over the spluttering, and pushed into his room without switching on the light. He tore off his clothes down to vest and underpants and jumped into bed, clamping his eyes firmly shut as his mum had taught him in his sun-kissed infancy, lest the Bogey Man came to call. Within seconds he was asleep, or what approximated sleep for Damen Brook, a twilight existence of mumbled nightmares tearing at the fabric of his brain.

But even unconscious, Brook could still dredge a measure of solace from the case. His case. Nobody else could have it. It was up to him now.

Detective Sergeant Brook checked the address in his pad-12 Queensdale Road-and nodded. Very smart. And not divided into flats either. Whoever owned this pile was sitting on a small fortune.

Brook counted four storeys. Below stairs a small front garden gave way to a neat basement room. It had a freshly painted grill over the window and Brook could make out polished wooden floors through the glass. To his right, at ground level, a tiny balcony, home to dozens of pot plants. It guarded a large bay with lace-curtained French windows. Ivy clung to the stone above, hanging down to obscure Brook’s view through the lace. He could just make out the folding screen, which further cocooned the occupants from the outside world.

Two large sash windows looked out from the floor above. Again, both seemed freshly painted and were surrounded by ivy.

The top floor was harder to see but he could make out a circular window, rather like a porthole, only larger. The top half of the window had been opened into the room beyond.

Brook raised a hand to the old-fashioned brass bell-pull but hesitated a moment for no reason he could think of and stepped back. This was a big house in a pricey area, just off Holland Park Avenue. It didn’t make sense. This sort of house had never been on Sammy Elphick’s CV. He was seriously small time and this was way off his turf. All the stolen goods recovered from Elphick’s flat had been traced, where possible, to small properties in Harlesden and Willesden Green.