Paradise City (42 page)

‘In his last interview before she was found,’ Dave is saying. He is leaning forwards now, his hands on the back of her chair and she can smell him – a ferric scent like an open tin of soup. ‘Then put in loads of colour about his house, the pictures of his daughter, the bedroom that’s never been touched . . .’

‘The bedroom has been touched.’

‘I’m improvising, Es.’

They look at each other. She thinks of that pint in the pub, of how much she’d wanted him and how swiftly that intensity had dissolved. Part of her feels guilty for it and surprised at how instant the change had been. She reassures herself it wasn’t that her emotions had been insincere or fraudulent. It was more that they didn’t exist in a realistic space. Dave, for her, was attractive only in context – in the newsroom, like this, knowing exactly what to do, exercising power and earning respect. Outside, he was a middle-aged man with dry skin and a tendency to practice swings with an imaginary golf club. It was that simple. She can’t believe it has taken her this long to come to the obvious conclusion and, now that she has, it is a relief. She isn’t going to throw her life away pursuing disastrously unrequited love with a married man who shags around. She isn’t going to jeopardise her career by sleeping with the boss. Her mother will not have cause to be even more disappointed with her. She can breathe again.

‘OK,’ Esme says. ‘I’ll bash this out and then I’ll get started on the Clithero timeline.’

‘Great. I want the whole lot: where he was born, what his parents did, the name of his fucking favourite childhood teddy.’

She grins.

‘Yes, boss.’

Without thinking, Dave reaches out and rests his hand lightly on Esme’s shoulder. She can see him notice what he has done and then he takes it back quickly, almost as if it never happened. But the imprint of his palm is still there.

On the other side of the desk, Sanjay is staring at her.

‘You want to be careful there,’ he says archly.

‘Oh please,’ Esme counters. ‘He’s old enough to be my . . .’

‘Brother?’ Sanjay says. They giggle and then can’t stop. Sanjay starts snorting with mirth which only makes it worse. The clock on the wall says it’s almost one in the morning. At this stage of the working day, a bit of light hysteria is to be expected.

In the end, she gets home just before 2 a.m. and rolls into bed in her pyjamas, forgetting to brush her teeth or turn off the kitchen light. Dave had insisted she get a taxi and expense it, even though she’d said she was perfectly fine getting the night bus. In truth, she was going to get a taxi anyway but she knew that in a climate of repeated redundancy rounds and cut-backs, it was always wise to show budgetary awareness.

Esme was up again at 6 a.m. and in the office half an hour later. It was a Saturday and the roads were clear. There were lots of disadvantages to working Saturdays (the friends’ weddings you missed, the fact you could never go away last-minute for the weekend, the knowledge that no one else with a normal life wanted to have a big night out on a Sunday) but one of the upsides, Esme always thought, was how quiet the office was.

In the early morning light, it felt curiously calm. And there was an unspoken camaraderie among the reporters that you didn’t get on a daily. On a Saturday, everyone wore casual clothes which brought out their most vulnerable selves, the ones you could imagine pushing a child on a swing or going for a pub lunch with friends rather than the ones who, in suits and shirts and gelled-back hair, would doorstep a grieving mother for hours in the rain or write a hatchet job on a politician who’d cheated on his wife or make bad-taste jokes about a glamour model’s disabled child. It wasn’t just clothes, it was armour.

‘Morning Cathy,’ Esme calls out as she walks through the door, clasping a large latte in one hand and the Saturday edition of the
Tribune
in the other. Cathy and Dave are the only other people already in. Cathy, who seems not to possess casual clothes, is still in the neat sleeveless silk blouse she was wearing yesterday. She has headphones on and is transcribing, peering at the lit-up computer screen over half-moon spectacles. She doesn’t look up when Esme comes in but raises a hand. Esme wonders briefly if Cathy’s been here all night. She wouldn’t put it past her.

Dave is in his office, leaning back with his feet on the desk, talking on the phone. He is wearing a blue fleece and bad jeans and Timberland boots. He is one of those people who has never entirely got the hang of how to dress as grown man.

Esme switches on her Anglepoise lamp, logs on and continues to stitch together the timeline of Alan Clithero’s strange and disturbing life. Ever since he was found by police yesterday, hiding out in a remote bothy in a windswept part of the Scottish Highlands, details have been emerging in dribs and drabs.

He was born in Renfrewshire, the youngest of four brothers and three sisters. Aged seven, he was sent to reform school. At fifteen, he was already in a young offenders’ institution. After that, there was a series of relatively minor convictions for burglary and assault and then Alan Clithero seemed to have straightened himself out. There was nothing for a few years. He finally re-emerged, aged twenty-five, getting married to a woman called Patricia who described herself as a librarian on the certificate.

A quick Google reveals that Patricia Clithero has already been bought up by the
Sun
who have splashed on their exclusive interview. The web piece is headlined: ‘The wife of the Southside Strangler speaks for the first time’. Esme scrolls through, culling each line for useful information.

‘When we first met he was such a gentleman,’ Patricia is quoted as saying. ‘He used to open doors for me and all sorts. Lovely manners. But it wasn’t long before he turned on me. He’d drink himself half to death and lash out . . . I’m not surprised he did something bad. He was a bomb waiting to go off.’

There is a photo of Patricia looking suitably grim-faced, wearing a lilac roll-neck and focusing at a point just beyond the camera, chin raised in defiance. Her skin is wrinkled and saggy. A smoker’s face, Esme thinks uncharitably. She finds herself furious that Patricia Clithero didn’t report her violent husband to the police when she had the chance.

Esme returns to the cuttings. Patricia and Alan lived together in Birmingham, the same city in which Ada Pink went to university. But the marriage didn’t last long and many of his acquaintances from that time have told various news agencies that they don’t remember him ever mentioning a wife. In fact, no one has a particularly clear recollection of what he was like.

On the Press Association wires, a man who used to play darts with Clithero in a Droitwich pub is quoted as saying, ‘He didn’t talk much about his past. I always thought he was nice enough but a bit slow, if you get my drift. There didn’t seem to be a whole lot going on up there.’

The BBC have got hold of an elderly woman who claims Clithero used to do odd jobs for her. ‘He fixed my sink once,’ she says. ‘He used to talk about Jesus and knew his Bible back to front. I felt a bit uneasy around him and now I know why.’

The difficulty was that, now Clithero was one of the country’s most notorious killers, everyone who had ever known him or claimed to know him would be reassessing their memories in that light. The newsroom would be inundated by phone calls from supposed former friends who ‘always thought there was something a bit funny about him’ and wanted payment for their startling new insight.

Esme sighs. It is a depressing business. The worst part was reading about what Clithero had done to Ada Pink. She’d been a troubled teenager. As a first-year English undergraduate at Birmingham, she’d got in with a bad crowd and started doing recreational drugs. She didn’t fit in with her fellow students and kept herself apart. At nights, she would wander the streets by herself.

There is an interview with a girl called Helen from this time, taken from the
Tribune
and written by someone whose byline she doesn’t recognise. Helen describes herself as Ada’s best friend. A murky black-and-white picture shows Helen with neat, shiny hair held back by an Alice band. Helen recalls Ada being ‘a lovely girl but a bit unstable’ who never took part in university social activities.

‘I was always trying to bring her out of her shell, to make her laugh,’ Helen says, her words still sounding with clarity through the years. ‘She said she couldn’t sleep so she used to walk a lot. I used to see her through my window, walking around in all kinds of weather. I think she was lonely. I wish now I’d tried harder to reach out.’

Esme imagines Ada Pink, unable to sleep in the cramped bedroom in the halls of residence, putting on her parka and roaming the streets: a slim figure with messily tied back hair, looking for something – anything that would make her feel she belonged.

Alan Clithero had abducted her on a rainy night in February 2001. There is CCTV footage of his beaten-up white van slowing down and parking on a kerb on a dimly lit side-street just before Ada Pink walked past but he had taken the precaution of removing his number plates so the police at the time found it impossible to track him down. This single detail makes Esme’s stomach lurch. The premeditation of it. The knowledge that he set out that evening intending to do what he did.

The full details of how Ada died have not yet been released, but the police have confirmed that it was by strangulation. They think she was killed the same night she was abducted which is, Esme thinks, something. At least her terror would have been short-lived. At least he didn’t imprison her for months. At least any pain she experienced would have been over before the next morning.

She thinks of Sir Howard and wonders how you cope, as a parent, if these are the only crumbs of comfort afforded to you over your child’s death.

She wonders if he is picturing what Ada might have been through, whether he is able to stop himself, or whether the fatal gap between the facts he has been told and all that he doesn’t know will plague him for the rest of his life.

She wonders if there are others. More of Clithero’s victims, buried underground, waiting to be uncovered.

Esme shuts her eyes. Presses her fingers to her temple. Tells herself to stop thinking. Tells herself to do her job. Opens her eyes. Carries on reading.

After Ada’s murder, Clithero shifts around the country every few years. He lives all over the place: Colchester, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Warminster, Glasgow and then, finally, he moves to Lebanon Gardens, Wandsworth in Spring 2011. And the strange thing is that he takes Ada with him – or what remains of her. Every new town he settles in, his neighbours remember him being a keen gardener. He is good at DIY. He builds patios, decks and barbecues. He installs bird-baths and water features. He takes care of his plants. He waters them, prunes them, turns the soil when needed. He mows the lawn. Most of the time, he is a model citizen. He keeps himself to himself. He is friendly. He chats, but not too much. Sometimes he looks after things when a neighbour goes away on holiday. They entrust him with their keys. He doesn’t intrude.

And always, always, there is Ada. Lying underneath the ground. The secret waiting to be found.

At lunchtime, Esme has a raging hunger. She has filed the timeline and first-person piece about the day Sir Howard Pink invited her into his home to talk about the charitable foundation set up in his daughter’s name. The timing of it, she is aware, is horribly coincidental. Donations to the fund have poured in since the news of Clithero’s arrest. The website has crashed under the pressure. She thinks, for possibly the one hundredth time today, that it’s odd how things happen. If you invented this story, no one would believe it.

‘Do you want anything, Sanj?’ she asks. She gets up and feels a wash of dizziness. ‘I’m going to the canteen.’

Sanjay makes a face. ‘Ugh. No. Nothing from that hell-hole.’

‘Not even a Twix?’

His head snaps up.

‘Oh, well OK then. Twist my arm, why don’t you.’ He makes a big show of looking in his wallet for coins.

‘Don’t be silly,’ Esme says as he knew she would. ‘My treat.’

As she is walking downstairs to the canteen, rolling her shoulders backwards the way the lady from Occupational Health told her to, her phone beeps with a text message. It is from a number she doesn’t recognise.

‘Hi Esme. Thanks so much for meeting me on Sunday. Wondered if you’d let me take you out for a drink to say so in person? Dom xx.’

She feels a flash of surprise, then of pleasure. So she hadn’t been inventing it. There was something between them. She thinks of him at Daylesford: his smile, his curly hair, the way he kept looking at her even after she’d finished speaking. She slips her phone back into the pocket of her jeans while she picks up a stale-looking Niçoise salad and a Twix. She hesitates at the chocolate stand and then takes a KitKat as well. It’s going to be a long afternoon.

At the check-out, Esme thinks about the text. On the plus side: she likes the fact it has been written without a single abbreviation or emoticon. He had used two kisses. There is a definite undercurrent of flirtation. On the minus side: he could just be being friendly. Maybe he is buttering her up before asking for work experience. He has a girlfriend.

And perhaps it is because she’s tired or because she’s finally over Dave or perhaps it’s because, after everything she’s read today, every single gruesome detail, she doesn’t have time for bullshit and knows she has nothing to lose. Whatever the reason, she texts back being more forward than she would otherwise have been.