Cold Kill (18 page)

Laura straightened and looked over at Jack’s computer. He saw the look in her eyes and knew what it meant: that this was Jack’s fault.

She pointed upstairs. ‘We need to get Bobby away from here. This person must know where we live, and so Bobby cannot be in the house if he comes back.’

Jack nodded. He understood. He went to put his arms round her again, but she brushed him away.

‘I’ve got to go in,’ Laura said, but as she moved, her knee gave way, making her take all her weight on one leg. She looked at Jack, angry now. ‘Bobby needs to go somewhere tonight.’

Jack agreed and watched as Laura hobbled upstairs.

He didn’t do anything at first, except look towards the window and wonder what danger his article had brought to them as he listened to the sound of drawers opening, of her showering quickly, and then the sound of chatter as she spoke to Bobby, cajoling him, making out like it was an adventure, not wanting to frighten him.

Jack went to the window again and looked out. There was nothing but darkness. Was someone else looking in?

He turned around at the shuffle of feet. Laura was in a suit, Bobby in pyjamas and a dressing gown. Laura was holding a small suitcase.

‘He’s staying at Martha’s tonight,’ Laura said, and Jack nodded his approval. She was an old family friend. Laura ruffled Bobby’s hair, making him smile. ‘And your daddy is going to collect you from school. Isn’t that exciting?’

Bobby’s smile faltered, and Jack could tell that Bobby sensed that something was wrong. His father didn’t often travel all the way north to collect him. The handover normally took place at a motorway service station on the M6.

Jack went to Bobby and wrapped him up in his arms. ‘Have fun with Martha,’ he said. ‘Remember she’s an old lady. Don’t be a rascal.’

Bobby giggled at that, and as Jack straightened himself Laura grabbed Bobby’s hand.

‘I’ll be back later,’ she said, and then she was gone. The peace of the night was broken by her car engine, the dark fields briefly illuminated, and he watched as her car disappeared out of sight. Then it was quiet again.

He stepped back inside and closed the door, checking the locks. It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Thirty-One

Jack looked out of the window. He was standing a few feet away from the glass, hoping to sink into the shadows.

It was nearly eleven now and Laura had been gone for a couple of hours. All the lights were off in the house. He wanted to see out without anyone else seeing in. He didn’t know what to expect, but if whoever was in the van was going to come calling, he was going to be the one with the surprise.

What if they had got it wrong though? Perhaps it was just a bad driver, or someone who wanted to scare Laura for kicks.

The answer came sooner than he expected.

The only source of brightness in the room was Jack’s laptop. It displayed a screensaver of family pictures. He went to it and idly tapped a key. When the screen returned to normal he saw that he had a new email from the same sender as before. The message title was just one word:
Why?

Jack clicked on the message.

Why the fuck didn’t you speak to Emma? If you want to know the full story, that’s where you need to go. Find her. Go there. I know you can. Or is it because you’re too busy with the police? I told you not to go to them, and now Laura has had a little accident, but it could have been so much worse.

It’s not part of the story, just a random frustration, but someone else took the brunt.

Jack sat down to read it again.

There were no doubts now, or else how would the sender know that Laura had almost been run over by a van, and that he had been to the police? Was he watching?

He looked at the screen again, and the words seemed to swim in front of him. He had to calm down though. Just because it had been the person who sent the emails, it didn’t mean that he was a killer. Carson might be right, that it was just a leak, someone in the force spilling secrets, and that he was just trying to frighten Laura, to let Jack realise that he knew the messages had been passed on to the police. After all, if he had wanted to run her over, he could have done.

Jack typed quickly.
Have you been watching? And what do you mean that it could have been worse for Laura? Who are you?

His eyes didn’t leave the screen as he waited for a response, his head filled with thoughts of Laura alone on a country lane, an anonymous van stalking her.

When the message came through, its title was:
Just a hint, Jack. A little present.

There was an attachment. A photograph.

It seemed to take an age to load, the image slowly unfurling itself along the screen, every pause revealing another tantalising glimpse. Except that when it had finished loading, Jack felt his heart pound. Laura needed to see this.

He called Laura. She answered on the second ring.

‘Tell me about Jane,’ Jack said. ‘Was she naked when she was found?’

‘You know she was,’ she said. ‘We released that information, and you’ve seen the photographs.’

‘But I know the police sometimes mislead the press, if it helps the investigation,’ he said. ‘Is that how she really was, or had someone removed the clothes for some forensic analysis?’

‘Jack, I’m not in the mood,’ she said, exasperated now.

‘I’ve had a new email,’ he said. ‘From the same person as last night. Except this time he’s sent a photograph.’

‘What!’

‘I’m no expert on forensics or decomposition,’ Jack continued, ‘but Jane looks pretty fresh in the picture.’

‘Tell me,’ she snapped.

Jack looked at the picture again, so he could describe it.

‘Pale skin, her blonde hair against the ground, but her face looks flushed. There are pinpricks of blood across her cheeks and a thin red trickle from her nose. And I can see the debris in her mouth.’ He peered closer. ‘Her cheeks look full, pushed out, with leaves and dirt sticking out, as if she had choked on it.’

‘You mentioned clothes,’ Laura said urgently.

Jack looked at the picture again.

‘I can see her torso,’ he said, ‘but her shirt is pulled open, her bra pushed up, so that her breasts are visible.’

‘We need that picture,’ Laura said.

‘So she
was
naked when you found her,’ Jack said.

‘Jack, the picture!’

He typed in Laura’s police email address and forwarded it to her. After a few seconds, he heard a ping down the phone as the email landed in Laura’s inbox, and then she gasped as she opened it.

‘He was the person in the van,’ she said, her voice quieter now. ‘He knows where we live. Bobby isn’t coming home until we catch this bastard.’

‘You’ll catch him,’ Jack said.

‘I hope so,’ she said, and he could hear the tension in her voice.

He was about to hang up when she said, ‘I love you, Jack. Protect yourself. Don’t let anyone near the house.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘And I love you too.’

He clicked off the phone, and as he put it back into his pocket, he became aware of the silence again.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The morning arrived as a stream of sunlight through the open curtains.

Jack squinted as he opened his eyes. He had slept downstairs, curled up under a blanket on the sofa so that he would hear the noise of anyone trying to break in. There was someone in front of him. Dark hair, dimples, a smile, holding a cup of coffee towards him.

He sat up and rubbed his face back to life. He took the coffee. ‘Thank you.’

‘You make a poor guard dog,’ Laura said. ‘I came in last night and you didn’t budge.’

Jack grunted. It still felt too early. He checked his watch. Nine o’clock.

‘How’s Bobby,’ he said, the coffee bringing him to life.

‘I’ve just been to Martha’s so that I could take him to school, and he’s fine, but we need to be careful. We don’t want him to be scared when he’s here.’

Jack nodded.

‘And I brought you a paper,’ she said, and handed him the
Blackley Telegraph
.

He looked at the headline, large and bold, next to a photograph of Jane Roberts.
Cop Flops Secrets
.

He threw it onto the coffee table. ‘Things have changed now,’ he said.

‘I know, but thank you for the photograph,’ Laura said. ‘He might have revealed too much of himself now, because we can focus on the emails. We can chase the IP addresses, see where he accessed the email account, and the photograph has been sent to the technical people. Digital photographs have hidden attributes. Time and date. Make and model of camera. If he registered the camera, it might even have his name.’

Jack smiled. At least some good might come out of the messages.

‘I’m going in now,’ Laura said, and she bent down to kiss him.

Her lips felt soft on his, and for a moment he wished that she didn’t have to go, so that they could do what they used to do before she went back onto the murder team: just relax, spend lazy days together when she was between shifts, with Bobby at school. It wasn’t like that anymore.

Then he remembered the photograph of Jane Roberts, and the ones he had seen pinned up in the Incident Room, and Laura’s near miss with the van.

‘Go catch the bastard,’ he said, and he watched as Laura left the house.

Once the sound of her car had faded into the distance, he picked up the copy of the newspaper and looked at the front page again. As he read the story, he saw Dolby had stuck to his part of the deal – that it would go in unaltered. Harry English will have made some alterations with the version in the
London Star
, and it will be tucked away inside somewhere, but anything might help.

Jack’s knees creaked as he got to his feet and he hobbled over to his laptop. He jabbed at the power button, frustrated, not in the mood to look through the online newspapers, but he wanted to know how far the article had spread onto the internet.

It seemed like a long wait, but eventually the whirring of the computer stopped and he skimmed through the usual sites. There was nothing new so far.

He clicked on the email software, and he saw that there was a new message. He took a deep breath as he leaned forward to read.

You’ve done some good work, Jack Garrett, but you know now that you’ve got it wrong. So wrong. And remember: I know your name. You don’t know mine. Knowledge is power. Remember Emma.

Jack slumped onto a chair and glanced towards the window. There were green hills and nothing else. And he knew that at night there was nothing but unrelenting darkness, easy shelter for anyone who wanted to approach.

Rupert Barker looked along the hallway when he heard his newspapers flop onto the mat.

He had taken
The Times
ever since university. It had changed over the years, with more celebrity and sports news, and the large sheets had shrunk to tabloid size, but he still enjoyed reading it with his morning coffee. Since his retirement though, he had added one of the red tops, just for fun, a bit of light relief. He would skim the headlines and smile, and then he would relax in his chair with
The Times
, and watch the morning slide away.

Retirement was hard. Thirty years as a child psychologist, speaking to the frightened and vulnerable all over Lancashire. But then it eventually caught up with him, the relentless plough through childhood problems, and so he gave it up, to spend his days reading or dozing in front of his fire.

He went into the kitchen and flicked on the coffee machine, almost tripping over his cat, a scruffy black-and-white thing with a gnarled right ear. The water started to gurgle through the ground beans and he took a deep breath and smiled. The smell of fresh coffee always signalled a good morning. The problem and the pleasure of retirement was this: so much time to fill, but so much enjoyment in trying to fill it.

He groaned as he picked up the papers from the mat and then shuffled back to his living room, a jumble of books and old memories, so dusty that it made the noses of visitors twitch. But it was his sanctuary, where he knew he would see out his life, reading and remembering in a high-backed chair in front of the fire. It had been a few weeks since he’d had to light it, the summer just starting now, but he still pointed his chair towards it. He glanced over to the garden, and saw that the cherry blossom from his neighbour’s tree was tumbling across the lawn and the flowerbeds were starting to explode with colour. The only sounds were the chirp of garden birds eating from a nut feeder hanging from one of his trees and the creak of the weather vane on the church tower behind his house.

He reached down for his glasses and lifted them onto his nose, and then started to flick through the red top.

He chuckled at the first few stories, footballers’ tales, massage parlours and mistresses, the press getting all vexed at overpaid young men enjoying themselves too much. He was flicking quickly, the pages making him smile, just as he’d hoped. Then he saw a headline,
Cop Flops Secrets
.

He started to read it, a story of an anonymous police officer sending emails to the press about a murder on the other side of the county. He shook his head. Someone was going to lose their job, and for what? Some work-place grievance?

Then he stopped. He felt a jolt in his chest, winded, and his fingers gripped the side of the newspaper. His mind flashed back through the years, like a video on fast rewind.

He put the paper down on his lap and looked out of the window again.

The story had taken him back to just one boy, the one who had always troubled him. The abuse-driven anger he had always understood, but it had seemed to be more than that in his case. It was his coldness that stuck with him, the matter-of-fact way he talked about what he had done. A direct stare, a tilt of the head.

He looked at the story again, and the memories from twenty years earlier became louder. The coffee machine bleeped that it had finished, but Rupert ignored it. He was thinking of something else now. Or rather, someone else. A quiet and withdrawn child, his hands on his lap, a flick of light hair, no emotions on his face.