The 50/50 Killer Page 19

  ‘Promise me,’ she said.

  ‘I promise. We’re following up on a home invasion. It’s very nasty, but it’s nothing to do with that.’

  The panic settled a little, but not totally.

  ‘If it’s “very nasty” you should leave it for someone else.’

  ‘Well, it’s certainly been a long day. But I’m fine.’

  ‘But I’m not! ’ she wanted to scream at him. ‘It’s not about you.’

  Instead, she kept quiet. The truth was that she could shout and rage and cry, and perhaps if she did he’d relent and come home. But that wouldn’t achieve anything, not really. If she had to make him come back, it wasn’t worth it.

  The truth, despite what she’d said to Debra, was that this call had taken Eileen two hours to work up to. Instead of picking up the phone just yet, she’d kept telling herself that he’d be home soon, or if he wasn’t that he would call. I’ll give him ten minutes, she’d thought; I’ll give him until one o’clock; then half past. In reality, she’d been dreading this conversation. Not because he might choose his job over her - he’d already done that, after all - but because of the way she knew he’d do it: by acting as though he was simply a normal man doing a normal job; by treating her like she was an over-protective wife, nagging him and interfering.

  It was always going to come down to this. Could she throw the truth in his face and spell it out for him? Confront her husband with his own weakness, the way he was making her feel, and force him to acknowledge it? Concern and anger brought the words as far as her lips, but then love held them back. The resulting frustration and confusion seemed close to tearing her apart inside.

  ‘I’ll be home as soon as I can.’

  ‘Here’s what’s going to happen, John. You come home as soon as you can. That’s what I want. But in the meantime, you phone me. Every two hours.’

  ‘Phone you?’

  She was aware even as she said it that there was something almost childish about the request. Call me. Check in. But to hell with that; it was the least he could do, wasn’t it? A compromise. A small gesture he could make for her, even if he refused to do everything that he should.

  ‘Every two hours. To let me know you’re okay.’

  ‘I’ll try, but—’

  Before he could say anything else, Eileen hung up.

  For a moment, the silence in the room was stunning. Trembling slightly, she stared at her reflection in the window, emptying her head of thought. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to do so. There was a hard knot of emotion in her throat - a combination of anger and hurt, fear and love - and experience had taught her that throwing a cover over it would do nothing to resolve the problem. You could hide those feelings; you could wash them down with alcohol. But sooner or later you had to untangle them and straighten out the threads.

  Tonight, her mind wasn’t going to be nimble enough to pick at her feelings; attempting to do so would probably only make everything worse. There was no point working herself up any more than she already had. Morning, a clear head ... Her hand shook as she finished the remaining wine with a single swallow.

  It’s going to be okay. He’ll be okay, and so will you.

  Then she stood up and made her way downstairs.

  Drinking more probably wasn’t wise, either, but she could live with that. Just another glass - or however many she wanted, in fact - and then she’d go to bed, taking the phone with her. God help him if he didn’t call. Just see. In the meantime, she needed to calm down. She needed medicine to settle her thoughts.

  They had a lot of wine. Over the years, they’d amassed a respectable cellar, bringing out the finer bottles on special days or for occasional dinner parties, and then picking out additions from the places they visited on quiet holidays. As Eileen opened the door in the kitchen that led to the cellar, she knew that out of the forty or fifty bottles down there, she could probably remember the when and where of buying at least half of them. There was comfort in that. In some ways, the wine was a record of their history together as a couple. It seemed appropriate that, tonight, she should find some consolation there.

  4 DECEMBER

  4 HOURS, 50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  2.30 A.M.

  Mark

  Decompression.

  Two-thirty in the morning and, once again, I was negotiating the hospital’s corridors. More precisely, I was trying to reverse the series of rights and lefts I’d stored away in my head and find the lift to the ground floor, and failing miserably. The place was a maze. What I actually felt most like doing was lying down on a gurney and going to sleep. Either that or kicking one around the corridor until the fucking thing fell apart.

  I found a crowded lift that was heading down, squeezed inside and breathed deeply as the doors slid shut.

  I was pissed off with myself, but I was calming down: I understood what had happened with Scott. My job was to build rapport and empathise with how he felt - get into his head a little. I’d done that; I’d just done it too well. And I’d got bitten as a result.

  Somewhere deep down, even more than usual, Lise was on my mind. Partly it was the day itself: my first day as a detective. But it was more than that; it was this investigation, too. When I’d watched the interview with Daniel Roseneil earlier, I’d not blamed him for not remembering. And how could I? When I looked at Scott, when I saw the survivor left behind, I was in danger of seeing myself.

  I had to guard against that. Because while I was in the room I had to convince myself that Jodie was still alive, though deep down I knew she probably wasn’t. If I allowed too much empathy, too many thoughts of Lise ... I had to guard against it. Not only for Scott’s sake, but for mine.

  So: decompression. I treated the lift as an airlock, imagining those feelings being left behind at the level above. I’d pick some of them up on my way back to the next interview.

  Ground floor.

  I stepped out with the throng, turned right, and then reversed and turned left instead.

  Following Doctor Li’s instructions, I found Greg and Mercer secreted away in an old locker room at the back of the hospital. This end of the building was being cleared out and renovated, and many of the corridors were closed off: blocked by bleary polythene sheets smeared with dust. The overhead lights were flickering slightly, buzzing a little bit more. Almost immediately, they started to hurt my head.

  The locker room we’d been given was half ripped out. Old, six-foot lockers had been pulled away from the walls and stacked in sad piles at the far end. The strip-lights above were as harsh as crime-scene lamps.

  Mercer was sitting in the middle on an old plastic chair. He looked like something that had been discarded with the rest of the room’s contents. The light hollowed out his eyes and bleached his skin white, bringing out the imperfections of age and making him seem even older than he was. He was staring into space, a blank expression on his face. I found it impossible to tell whether he was concentrating very hard on something or thinking of nothing at all.

  Greg, however, had definitely been busy. An impressive amount of computer equipment had been unloaded from the van and set up on three long tables. There was a laptop on each, a printer that would double as a fax, and lots of recording equipment. The power came from a coil of extension cable running out of the room and down the corridor. There were no sockets at the base of the walls here, just old blue pipes that looked strong enough to stand on.

  The laptop in the centre was logged into the virtual briefing room. To the left, the screen was showing a live video feed that was mostly darkness; the screen to the right, which Greg was working at, was filled with programming script. From his expression, it was giving him difficulty.

  ‘Interview number one,’ I said, placing my recording equipment on the desk beside him.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘How’s it going?’

  He nodded at the screen. ‘Trying to get Pete on now. He’s at the woods but I’m having trouble getting a link-up. Fucking computers.’

>   ‘Well, let me run through what I’ve got.’

  While Greg focused his attention on the connection, I gave them both a summary of the interview with Scott: the attack at his home; the van ride; the bag over his head on the walk through the woods. Greg made a token effort at listening but was clearly preoccupied, while Mercer stared at me the whole time, not even blinking. It was unnerving. I wasn’t sure if what I was saying was sinking in or was just light bouncing off his windows.

  When I paused, uncertain whether to continue, he blinked and prompted me: ‘What about his girlfriend?’

  ‘He said she was in the van when the killer abducted him. If he’s right about the times, she was probably abducted from work.’

  Mercer nodded. ‘From the rental agreement for their flat, she works for SafeSide Insurance. We need to wake up someone there; see what’s what.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Because she might not have been at work today,’ he said. ‘Bear in mind, she spent yesterday at Simpson’s house.’

  ‘Of course, yeah.’

  I’d forgotten about that, or put it out of my mind, at least.

  Mercer held something out to me. A passport photograph.

  ‘From his wallet.’

  I studied it carefully.

  ‘Well, it matches the description we had from Simpson’s neighbour.’

  The girl in the photograph had brown hair and a slightly lopsided, appealing smile. Her expression said: I hate having my photograph taken. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was certainly something about her. Character, maybe. The photograph was only one still frame, but it seemed to have captured something of her personality.

  I imagined Scott waiting outside the booth, chatting to her through the curtain as the lights flashed. Maybe whispering stuff to make her smile. And then clipping off a spare picture for his wallet. Showing it to people. This is Jodie. Isn’t she gorgeous?

  If you looked in my wallet, you’d find a similar picture of Lise.

  ‘It’s scanned and loaded,’ Mercer said. ‘Jodie McNeice. This is the girl whose life we have about five hours left to save.’

  It was a loaded comment. Greg and I didn’t reply.

  I was distracted, though, still thinking about Kevin Simpson. Although I knew it was the case, I didn’t want it to be true that Jodie had been having an affair. From the interview, it was obvious how much Scott loved her. He’d kept this photo of her in his wallet as a reminder of their life together, and Jodie looked too happy in it to have been cheating on him. But I suppose everybody looks happy when there’s a camera pointed at them; it’s what people do. I thought back to the joyous portrait of the Roseneils on their wedding day. It was wrong to accept that kind of thing at face value. Beneath the smiles and the cheery anecdotes that people are prepared to share, there are always faultlines and cracks. Secrets. People only let you see what they want you to.

  ‘I’ll have someone get a copy to Yvonne Gregory, too,’ I said. ‘See if she can positively ID her from Simpson’s house.’

  ‘Good.’ Mercer rubbed some life into his cheeks - a man coming out of a light sleep - then stood up and began pacing. ‘Good. What else from the interview? What can Banks tell us about where he was held?’

  ‘Not much at the moment. He’s very confused. Tired, upset. He doesn’t remember a lot about what happened. It hurts him to try.’

  Mercer ran his hand through his hair.

  ‘Because of the torture?’

  ‘It’s partly that. But there’s more blocked out than the injuries. When he was talking about Jodie at the end, he became quite distressed. That was when I decided to break the interview for a while.’

  ‘He doesn’t remember escaping out of the woods?’

  ‘Not really, no. Those memories are especially sensitive for him. If he remembers running through the woods, he’s moving closer to remembering what happened just before that.’

  ‘That’s what we want, though, isn’t it?’ Mercer sounded surprised. ‘I know it’s not pleasant, but if he can remember some landmark from the woods, it’s going to help us find his girlfriend.’

  I shook my head. Mercer had a point, but Scott was a victim, too. I remembered him crying, the shutters coming down. Pushing him and getting a result would be bad enough. In all likelihood, pushing him wouldn’t even achieve that.

  ‘He needs to be treated carefully,’ I said. ‘If we move too fast we might lose him altogether.’

  ‘Yes, but if we move too slowly we certainly will lose her.’

  We probably already have.

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  Mercer nodded, as though I’d agreed with him.

  ‘I know it’s unpleasant,’ he said, ‘and probably the last thing he needs, but it’s necessary. You also need to ask him about Kevin Simpson. See if he knows who he is, or what his connection to Jodie is, beyond the obvious.’

  I nodded slowly. The way Scott was wired at the moment, if he suspected that Jodie had been having an affair on top of everything else, I didn’t know what his reaction would be. I imagined it would be very bad. But I couldn’t object any further without taking on the core of Mercer’s argument - that Jodie was still alive. Saving her was all that mattered to him right now.

  Greg took advantage of the break in conversation and coughed quietly. I looked across and saw that the third laptop was working.

  ‘We’re off to the woods,’ he said.

  One of the ways I’d prepared for this job was to read as much as I could about the city in advance. I bought a notepad, a guide book, several pamphlets with useful local information, and I studied maps until I could see the layout of the city when I closed my eyes. The woods ran for about ten miles along the top of the city, spreading north. If you walked straight into them from the ring road, you had about four miles of hills and trees to negotiate before you hit the mountains.

  Forty square miles of old land: designated as a nature reserve, although nowhere near as friendly and welcoming as the title might imply. The woods were thick, even impenetrable in places. A couple of nature walks curled through the edge, close to town, but none went more than a mile or so in.

  Some places on earth you go to escape into the quiet: to feel relaxed and get away from everything. But there are others that are dangerous for those exact same reasons, and the woods north of our city were generally felt to be the latter type of quiet place. There were people there who were attracted to the isolation for their own reasons: homeless people with nowhere else to go; criminals with private business to conduct. There were even rumours that, closer to the mountains, you’d find separatists, living in small bunches. Nobody a defenceless, civilised person would want to meet while out walking. It would be like heading a long way into a zoo and then realising there weren’t any bars on the cages.

  Not an easy place to search at noon on a sunny day. At two thirty in the morning, in weather like this, it was going to be more or less impossible.

  Live on the video feed, Pete looked like he was in the Arctic. The collar of his coat was turned up, his shoulders were hunched, and his cheeks and forehead converged as he squinted against the snow, as though he’d been grimacing and the wind had changed. In all my life, I’d never seen anyone look so cold and miserable.

  Greg had moved to a different screen, where he was cropping an image of what looked like a map. Mercer sat down at the desk in front of the webcam. I stood between and behind.

  ‘Hi, Pete,’ Mercer said. ‘You’ve got Greg here, too. And that’s Mark you can see in the background.’

  He grunted. ‘Right.’

  ‘How are things going?’

  Pete’s expression said that might be the stupidest question he’d ever heard.

  ‘Slow,’ he said. ‘And cold.’

  ‘Progress?’

  Pete looked around. ‘Well, I’m standing where our Mr Banks ran out onto the road. We’re setting up the cordon at the moment. One man every hundred metres or at bends in the road, in order to keep a lin
e of sight. If anyone comes out of the woods, we’ll see them.’

  ‘Good,’ Mercer said. ‘Have they found the van yet?’

  ‘We’ve got the van,’ Pete said. ‘Half a mile from here. Parked and covered in snow.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  Despite his obvious tiredness, I thought Mercer seemed a little brighter. The fact the van had remained at the scene supported his theory that the killer had, too.

  ‘Get the bomb squad to check it before forensics go in.’

  ‘Yes, John.’

  ‘In the meantime, let’s have a look at the search area. Greg, how are we doing?’

  Greg leaned back in his chair. He looked a little dissatisfied with the results of his labours.

  ‘Best I can do.’ He turned the laptop so we could see. ‘Not great.’

  A white line curled across the base of the monitor, which I guessed was meant to represent the ring road at the northern edge of the city. Each of the men forming the cordon along it was attached to the department’s satellite tracking system; they appeared as small yellow circles spreading out from the centre. Every few seconds, the screen updated and they moved further apart.

  A cluster in the middle of the screen was marked as Pete’s position, and also where Scott had come out of the woods. A cluster further to the left was where the van had been found.

  Above this, the bulk of the screen showed a rough map of the woods - light and dark patches of green separated by occasional bright lines representing the known paths. The main path led directly up from the cluster where the van had been abandoned, went north for a couple of miles and then curved round to the right, turning slowly until it came back south to the ring road. In effect, it formed a large, lower-case n, resting on the ring road. The van had been found at the base of the left leg; Scott had emerged slightly to the right of this.

  Above all this, the curling blue thread of a stream cut across, forming a lopsided smile towards the top of the screen. It didn’t quite touch the bridge of the n.

  Greg moved the mouse pointer over the screen.