Bye Bye Baby (33 page)

‘Until you can prove that, be careful, Dad. If I find out that my mother did not give me up willingly . . .’ Peter didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The alarm in his father’s face was enough to stop him making any further threat.

‘What are you going to do?’ Garvan asked.

‘Find her!’

‘Peter, no! It will kill your mother.’

‘Listen to me. Last night I was the happiest person alive. Today, I’m shattered. I can’t think straight. Last night I didn’t care who had given birth to me — I knew only two parents and loved them blindly.
Today I must know who carried me in her belly. I must!’

‘Why?’ his father begged.

‘To set things straight. To be sure that she gave me away willingly and didn’t have me stolen from her.’

‘I beg you, son.’ Garvan reached for the boy he had loved since that day he’d handed the infant Peter to the woman now staring out of the upstairs window at them, weeping uncontrollably. ‘Don’t open this box that has been sealed shut for all these years. Please.’

Although it pained him to do so, Peter pushed his father’s hands aside. ‘I have to, Dad. I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. And, frankly, I don’t know how you and Mum have done so for my whole life.’

34

Kate leaned against the wall next to where Jack was crouched before a door, staring at its lock.

‘Sir, this is illegal!’

‘Have you ordered the warrant?’

She let out an angry breath. ‘Yes, while you fetched your gear.’ She glanced down at the roll of miniature tools Jack had unfurled minutes earlier.

‘Then you’ll know that on a weekend we’re hours away at best from having a legal search warrant.’

‘But —’

‘Sssh!’ he ordered, trying to concentrate. Then he stopped, looked back at her. ‘You set this in motion. Now, either you’re right and congratulations, or you’re wrong and you’ll never be able to look me in the eye again, let alone feel comfortable at the Yard.’

‘Threats aren’t going to help —’

‘I’m not threatening you, Kate, I’m simply telling you how it is. You’ve gone too far now with this theory to back off. You’ve meddled in my life and you’ve presented a scenario that you believed in enough half an hour ago to blackmail me over. So don’t baulk now that I’m taking it seriously.’

‘Blackmail?’

‘What else do you call it when you threaten to go to the Super unless I explore this crazy notion fully?’

‘I wouldn’t call it blackmail,’ she shot back. ‘I’d call it good policing.’

‘Then trust your hunch, Kate. I have to, but then I have no choice, do I?’

Nothing was said for a few moments as Jack worked.

‘Where did you learn to do this?’ Kate asked eventually. ‘Not cadet school, I’m guessing.’

‘I know a couple of guys on the Ghost Squad.’

‘You look like a pro.’

He gave a humourless smile. ‘This is my first time for real.’

Again, a silence fell between them until Jack gripped the doorknob, twisted and it clicked open. He looked up at Kate and she could see the loathing in his eyes for what he had just done.

‘Wait!’ she said.

He paused while she gathered her thoughts, then said, ‘Well, Sherlock?’

‘I just don’t think you’d do this if you thought it was as crazy as you’re making out.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

She nodded. ‘Listen, before we both break the law, can I just say something?’

He wrapped up his tools, put the roll in his pocket and straightened. He gave her a hard, unblinking stare. Kate swallowed, realising suddenly how tight and dry her throat was.

‘Jack, I just want you to know how sorry I am that you’re in this position and I’m still hoping I’m wrong.
If I am, I’ll resign immediately and you can reassign me to parking attendant, but unless I’ve never read you right, then I think you also have some doubts. Tell me you do.’

Jack’s hand gripped the doorknob. ‘Let’s go in.’

‘No, please, tell me first that you are harbouring some sort of suspicion.’

He sighed and a bleak pause reigned in the corridor before he finally answered her. ‘Apart from the fact that Sophie claimed she was on a train to Exeter this morning that I now know never existed, something’s been nagging at me.’

‘What is it?’

Jack shrugged. ‘She’s much too toned, her body’s too heavy with muscle to be wheelchair-ridden. Her limbs should be more wasted. She hides her arms. And now that I really think on it, I reckon she’s wearing coloured lenses. I’ve always thought her eyes to be curiously dark. Perhaps beneath they are blue . . . intense blue, as Moss once described.’

He lowered his head and Kate felt a strong urge to step forward and put her arms around him. Instead she said, ‘Go on.’

‘Well, I’m guessing that if Sophie is Anne then she must have found out I was going to be heading up Operation Danube before I did. Sharpe appointed me on my birthday but she’d moved into this apartment a couple of months earlier.’

‘So what does that mean?’ Kate frowned.

Jack’s mind irrationally leapt to DCI Deegan as the villain, but he dismissed the thought as quickly as it arrived. ‘Well, probably that she’s infiltrated the Met.’

‘Oh, my god,’ Kate breathed.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s do this.’

They stepped inside the apartment and moved into the living area. His arrival into somewhere so recently familiar prompted a bittersweet sensation in Jack: memories of lovemaking and laughter were suddenly tarnished by doubts and dark thoughts of murder.

Kate broke the difficult silence. ‘She’s got great style.’

‘Mmm,’ he muttered. ‘When she’s not out murdering people, she’s an interior designer and property developer.’

‘Sorry, Jack, I —’

‘Don’t,’ he warned, his jaw working to keep his emotions in check. ‘Right, you do a search of the apartment. I’m going to fire up her computer.’

‘What are you going to look for?’

‘The history mainly. I’ll see what she’s been hunting on the net, check her email, perhaps see if she’s kept any files that might point to the victims. I’m no expert — we can take the computer in if we need the techno wizards to find out more.’

‘Unlikely that she’d be silly enough to leave that information so accessible.’

‘Unlikely also that her home would be broken into by her lover who is now under the impression that she’s a serial murder. But here I am.’

Jack watched Kate suck in a breath and whatever retort was coming back at him. He wanted to hold on to the anger and Kate was the easiest of targets because she was the cause of this pain. Although the worst part of this disturbing sitution was the vicious certainty that his colleague was right.

* * *

Anne looked at her watch. It was nearing five and the day was darkening swiftly. She didn’t want the headlights of the van to be noticed by any potential witnesses so had planned to leave the South Downs before darkness fell fully. That would mean she could leave Billy’s body at St Ann’s Well Gardens during the night. The location had a crisp symmetry for Anne. So far she’d dumped bodies in a public toilet and an alleyway, both symbolic of her own memories of her childhood trauma. It was fitting that she leave at least one corpse in a park. Hove Park would have been the ideal choice, but since the great storm of 1987 her childhood playground had lost virtually all of its woodland and was now a huge, open expanse with houses on all sides. The chance of someone seeing her there was too high. And so the pretty gardens at quiet St Ann’s Well would do instead. Her own name aside, it was still a park in Hove and also in very close proximity to the home of the policeman who had tried so hard to help her when she was in that hospital bed, still shaking from the birth and loss of her baby. She could remember Sergeant Moss as clearly as if it was yesterday — his eyes filled with regret and his kindly voice, the smell of tobacco that clung to him and the outrage she sensed he felt on her behalf. She had wanted to tell him everything and yet something prevented her. Whatever it was, it kept her throat closed and her voice silent. She had been in a deep state of shock and disbelief then, had built a shell around herself that she permitted no one to break through. Although she’d taken the time to hunt down where he lived these days, she held no grudge against Moss.
In fact, Billy was her gift to him. A response to all those questions she’d been unable to answer so many years ago.

Anne looked at Billy. She’d forced enough of the drugged water down his throat to kill him she was sure. She hoped so. Leaning across, she felt at his warm neck for a pulse, her fingertips scratching on the stubble of his chin and neck. Billy had borne out his promise of good looks. The lines of age added depth and interest to what had once been just boyishly handsome. Stray strands of his dark hair rested against her hand and Anne could imagine how today’s William Edward Fletcher could likely win almost any woman who caught his attention and was open to his charm. She wondered about his former wife and the present girlfriend and whether Billy could ever sustain a long-term, honest relationship after what she imagined was probably years of philandering. She herself had found it easy enough to lure him, which suggested that Edward the man wasn’t really so different from Billy the boy — easily led. She decided that was being harsh and she should give him the benefit of the doubt. Poor Billy. He really had sounded so remorseful. She believed he had genuinely wished he could turn back time and change the course of their individual histories. Perhaps what had happened to her had been eating away at him for years, which might explain why, against his instincts, he’d agreed to spend time with her. Perhaps Billy had been trying to atone for his sins.

‘Only one way to do that,’ she murmured softly, caressing his dead face. ‘Rest now, Billy, and I’ll take my own recompense.’ She was glad that the man’s
heart had finally stopped beating and his struggles were over.

Jack could hear Kate behind him moving systematically through the kitchen. Both of them had donned gloves, which he’d grabbed from his own apartment, and they worked in silence. Kate tiptoed around, even though Jack had assured her that no one could hear anything, especially as his was the apartment below this one. There was something niggling at him about Sophie’s living room but he hadn’t had time to think it through, needing to focus his attention on her computer, which was surely the best indication of his lover’s interaction with the outside world.

Sophie’s most recent internet history showed only ten hits — mainly train timetables, which was reassuring, and the telephone directory, which was also feasible for any wheelchair-bound person. It wasn’t enough to exonerate her though, and Jack knew it. He dug deeper, looking back over histories from previous days, and his dread deepened when he saw she had visited the Brighton and Hove Council sites. That in itself wasn’t damning considering her occupation, but she’d also visited other Hove sites, including a variety of bed and breakfast spots, some restaurants and, curiously, a park called St Ann’s Well Gardens.

Kate came up behind him. ‘Anything?’

‘She’s certainly interested in Hove.’ He took her through the various sites Sophie had visited.

‘Well,’ Kate began and then shrugged. ‘Sounds to me like she was planning a hot weekend for you both.’

He grimaced. ‘Yes, except this St Catherine’s Lodge,
which she seems to have hit several times, doesn’t sound at all logical considering she’s in a wheelchair and they make no mention of whether there’s invalid access. It sounds like an old place with lots of stairs.’

‘Lifts, surely?’

‘Yes, but no mention of any sort of ease of wheelchair use. Knowing Sophie as I do, she’s too practical to risk not being as independent as possible. She’d want wheelchair ramps and a lift at the very least.’

‘Well, perhaps she called to check. What are you saying anyway?’

Jack opened his palms. ‘I don’t know . . . simply that she’s been dwelling on sites in Hove, which possibly supports your theory.’

‘What about West Pier?’

Jack closed his eyes with realisation and swung around to where the photographs had been. ‘Ah,’ he said, a sigh in his tone, ‘they’re gone.’

‘Gone?’ She followed his line of sight.

‘The photos — they were over there. They looked brilliant, very haunting.’

‘Is that a clue to Sophie?’

‘Just more damning but inconclusive information to support your theory.’

‘Do you want to do the bedrooms with me?’ Kate asked.

‘Don’t want to intrude, eh?’ Jack said, an edge of bitterness in his tone.

‘Please don’t make this harder than it is.’

He sighed again. ‘Okay, let’s do it. I’ve never seen the bedroom myself.’

Surprised at the comment, Kate followed him silently towards the two rooms still left to search.

* * *

Anne unshackled her prey and stripped away his bindings, then released the lock on his seat until it reclined as far as possible. Entering the van from the back, she hauled his body into the main empty space of the vehicle. And then she waited, allowing his body to do what it must as its organs registered death. While she waited, she watched the sky lose most of its blue, becoming a fiery pink. ‘Shepherd’s delight,’ she whispered as she finally turned back to her gruesome task.

She pulled on the stocking mask and worked fast now, easing Billy from his trousers and shirt. A single stab wound punctured his trim, lightly muscled abdomen. It was seeping blood but very little. Anne’s early patience meant the blood pressure in Billy’s body had dropped sufficiently to prevent copious amounts of blood spurting forth during her work on the fresh corpse. Still, the van had plenty of blood traces to incriminate her. As careful as she was, and despite all the cleaning, Anne knew that if the van were found and traced to her it would reveal forensic evidence of Michael Sheriff, Clive Farrow, William Fletcher and herself, of course.

The police were closing in fast. She wondered, as she turned her knife to Billy’s crotch, whether Jack had begun to doubt her. She couldn’t imagine how he would connect Sophie with the serial killer he was hunting, but Jack was sharp and he surrounded himself with equally clever people. She’d made one mistake she knew of — mentioning the shirt. He hadn’t said anything, so she was hoping it might have gone over
his head, especially as it sounded as though plenty of people had teased him that day. Perhaps her comment had blended in with the rest. She couldn’t count on that, however. Then there was that Kate woman who had been decidedly aggressive towards her. She couldn’t imagine why at first, then she’d heard the tension in Jack’s voice when she’d quipped that Kate was probably in love with him.

She delicately placed Billy’s genitals into his hand. ‘That’s for the rape, Billy,’ she murmured before going to work on his lips.

Perhaps her remark had inadvertently awakened memories of an old office fling between Jack and Kate? There was no telling. But getting to know Hawksworth had surprised her. What had begun as a purely strategic move on her part had very quickly turned into a genuine romance. She hadn’t been ready to like him — despite his good looks and charm — and she certainly hadn’t been prepared for love again. She was sure Jack could have any woman he wanted and yet he hadn’t appeared to be involved with anyone when she came on the scene. If there ever had been a situation with Kate, that was behind him. And now that Anne knew him better, she could appreciate that Jack was the real deal.