‘You just tipped him out onto the street? After what happened to him? How could you do that?’
‘He was innocent,’ Clay said. ‘That’s what we’re supposed to do, unfortunately. I’d like a change in the law, of course, but as it stands now innocent people are allowed to walk the streets. We’re not a babysitting service, Billy.’
It wasn’t Clay I was angry with, it was myself. I was playing catch up with Mike and every second that passed took me further away from him. I had a visceral desire to be near Mike, to grip hold of him. I tried him at home and then dialled his mobile. I left messages on both, kicking myself for not getting Andy to ask Clay to keep Mike there until I arrived. I wanted to get straight out and find him but Clay insisted I go over my theory concerning Josephine Thomas. As quickly as I could, I told them how I’d gone there to scope the route, how I’d seen her mother standing opposite the alley. Clay didn’t look too impressed but then he never had: until the guilty came back.
‘It doesn’t change a whole lot one way or another, though,’ he said. ‘Two women or three, we’ve still got a Champions League sicko on our hands.’
We were standing in the incident room. The office behind Clay was busy. Additional desk units were being assembled down the side and more computer equipment was being installed. This wasn’t a murder case any more. The police weren’t looking for someone who had killed someone else, full stop. The verb was present tense, not killed but killing, an ongoing process. The additional urgency was almost palpable. Every second mattered, every minute that passed without the perp being collared put another woman in danger, brought the guy closer to her. It was a race now and while the police had resources, manpower and technical equipment at their disposal there were two things they didn’t have. They didn’t know who the killer was. They didn’t know when he’d strike again.
The fact that Calshot Street was being used as base HQ surprised me, but Clay told me that the commissioner had been persuaded to use the station rather than Scotland Yard, way over in Victoria. Clay looked psyched as a general the night before a big scrap. He told me that forty plain clothes had been signed over to him, as well as his usual team.
‘They’re also sending me a profiler,’ he said. ‘Some university don who’s going to charge us a grand a day to tell me the fucker doesn’t like women very much.’
After pulling the plastic off a new office chair Clay told me that, as yet, the investigation into Ally’s death hadn’t yielded much. Unlike me, he wasn’t pleased to eliminate Mike. Without him the team had precious little to go on. The problem was the CCTV from the courtyard at the Lindauer. Ally had been murdered on a Saturday, so there hadn’t been many people in the building. The CCTV covers the forecourt and there’s no back entrance to the complex, which backs onto private gardens. Clay told me that everyone on the tape had checked out. All the people who were in the building when Ally was killed. There were only eighteen of them, including Mike and Ally, and they all had at least one other person to verify their movements. All but Mike. The police had been over their studios and their homes but hadn’t found anything. Clay told me that he had sent a team back to the Lindauer that morning to talk to people again. To tell everyone to be careful. To find out if any pregnant women with connections to the building had gone missing recently.
The last thing Clay told me was that no trace of Ally’s child had been found yet. Burg’s words came back to me but I didn’t say anything. It was just possible. I nodded to Clay and walked outside to the car park, passing a line of detectives coming the other way, all carrying cardboard boxes. The machine, the pistons starting to pump. I wondered whether it would be so thorough and extensive that a result would be guaranteed. Or whether it would be too big, too sluggish. Whether more women would have to die. Outside, in the Mazda, I breathed the remnants of Andy’s smoke and thought about the woman at the bus stop. Statistically she’d be very unlucky to be the next victim but if there was to be one it had to be somebody. She would probably be home by now. She’d be making her daughter some lunch, keeping half an eye on the TV news. Did they have it yet, the woman in the tunnel? What it meant? I didn’t know, but they would soon. I tried to imagine what it would be like to learn that someone was plucking pregnant women from the city like nuts from a tree. Discarding the shells. To know that the parcel of life growing inside you could very well be drawing someone to you, someone like that. I pictured the woman, feeding her little girl, the spoon stopping in midair as Anna Ford broke the news. Would she go and make sure the front door was locked? Would she call her husband at work, just to hear his voice? Would she tell him about me, the man staring at her through the traffic?
I tried Mike’s mobile again but didn’t get anything. I started the car and backed up, thinking where he might have gone. If it was me I wouldn’t have cared, I’d have just walked around, collapsed on a park bench somewhere. I figured that Mike would be completely thrown, to be suddenly out in the world that used to contain Ally and didn’t any more. I drove round for half an hour, stopping to peer into Coram’s Fields, where you can only go if you have a child with you. I drove round Mecklenburg Square, past the American college, and then along Lamb’s Conduit Street and the cafe Mike went to, the one with the Portugese pudim cakes that Ally liked. I couldn’t see him. It was a useless task, really. I thought about going home, waiting for him to call back, but I wanted to find him. I wanted him to know I’d tried to find him and that I hadn’t stopped until I had.
I considered trying the Lindauer but the Sanctuary would be sealed and surely it was the last place he’d want to go anyway. I tried him at home again but just got his machine. After asking myself if I’d pick the phone up if I was in his place, I drove down there, to Borough, just the other side of London Bridge. Mike and Ally’s flat is on an estate much like Josephine Thomas’s: red-brick public housing turned private. Theirs was built in the Thirties, however, and so sports curved art deco balconies and glass bricks around the entrance door. When I first went to visit them the area hummed with old south London villainy. Today I was met by a plummy estate agent showing a young couple out, using the words ‘sought’ and ‘after’ as though he’d only that second thought of putting them in a sentence together.
I leaned on the bell for five minutes and then walked up the stairs and peered through the letter box. Mike wasn’t there. Back in the Mazda I sat, wondering where to try next. Several places suggested themselves but I knocked them all down until I was left with only one. I nodded. I’d been kidding myself before. The Lindauer Building was the most obvious place to look. I’d just wanted to avoid it, that was all. The Lindauer had been at the centre of my mind ever since I’d seen Ally’s body. I’d tried to turn away from it, telling myself there was nothing I could do there. I’d gone round and round it, tied to the place with a piece of string that had got shorter and shorter until it had run right out.
When I pulled in towards the barrier I was glad that it wasn’t Ron I saw in the booth, setting aside a copy of the Sun to reach for the lever. It was someone I didn’t recognize, a younger man. I didn’t want to see Ron. I didn’t blame him for what had happened: anyone is allowed in the Lindauer Building and CCTV seemed to show that Ron hadn’t missed anyone anyway. But the image of him, fast asleep, was still strong. He’d probably been asleep when Ally was being murdered. Had the cafe window been open? I couldn’t remember. Had she screamed, and if she had, would Ron have heard her if he’d been awake? Would he have been able to get to her in time? I didn’t know. I just didn’t want to look at him and I was glad I didn’t have to.
I parked in my usual spot and locked up. The building in front of me looked impassive, taciturn, as if it knew the reason two or perhaps three women with connections to it had died. As if the answer was written in the bricks, the mortar, under the roof tiles. I walked across the car park. In the lift it all came back and then down the corridor. All the time I stared straight ahead, walking through the pictures and images that were jumping out on me with every step I took. I walked past the cafe, hardly even looking at the closed door crossed with tape, and then stopped outside my office.
I stood for a second, listening. I couldn’t hear anything. I’d half expected Mike to have let himself into my office with the spare key he keeps but the place was empty except for another small hill of mail. I picked it up but there was nothing in it apart from a Visa bill and two application forms from newly opened fitness centres. It seemed to me that I was getting one of these a week now, at least. How many fitness centres did London need? Surely there had to be a limit to the world’s already depleted supply of Lycra. I dumped them in the bin on top of the last pile and shut the door. I was disappointed not to see Mike but relieved too. I walked round my desk. Sunlight was gushing through the wooden slats of my blinds. I thought I’d left them closed but I couldn’t have. Before I could get to the window to turn them the light dimmed on its own, as though someone had killed a switch. I pulled the blind up to see that the sun had made its last appearance that day, ranks of grey-bottomed cloud were marching in from the east.
The last time I’d looked out of the window I’d then gone down to the cafe and joked about football with Ally and Mike. I would never do that again. I saw the smile Ally had given Mike, her hand curling under her belly. The irony not quite strong enough to hide the genuine love. I blinked it away. Instead I stared through the stark branches of the oak tree at a bird scurrying off through the bare branches. I hadn’t pulled the blinds carefully, not like I usually did. The bird was about as big as a thrush, but the wrong colour. The shrike, the rare bird that had visited me last year? I didn’t know. I thought so but it was too far away, gliding down to sit on the fence of one of the gardens backing onto the building.
Out of habit I kept my eye on the bird and reached into my desk drawer for my binoculars. I lifted them to my face but as soon as I’d got them to my eyes I stopped. I discarded the bird. I moved the glasses instead to a man, standing in the garden beyond the fence the bird had perched on. I rolled my finger over the focus wheel until he was clear. Yes. As I thought, the man had something in his hand. He was standing at the side of his house, looking at the door that led out of the garden to the front, to the street. The man dropped whatever it was that he’d found before walking towards his back door and disappearing inside. I frowned. I refocused and studied the fence, a good five feet lower than the ones bordering the gardens on either side of it.
Ten seconds later I was running back down the hall.
‘You were quick.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Quick. I only just called. Five minutes ago. Just passing, were you? Anyway, come round this way. You can see the damage. Nothing taken as far as I can tell, they probably got frightened off. You fancy a cup of tea? I’ll get the wife to put the kettle on.’
He was in his fifties, small, with a deep, winter tan. He’d opened the front door of his house on Aberdeen Park, the road the Lindauer Building backs onto. His name was Stephen Sprake and he’d just got back from Tenerife, barely an hour ago he said, to find a note from the police asking him to give them a call. He’d assumed it was about the door to his back garden, which had been forced in his absence.
‘Though how you lot knew about it I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Only noticed myself when I tried to open it. The door was still shut but there was no lock in it. They just unscrewed the whole thing, you can see. Found the lock on the other side of the door.’
‘You touched it, right?’
‘Yes, how do you know that? Police instinct, I suppose. Anyway, why shouldn’t I have? You’re not going to fingerprint it, are you? I didn’t think you’d bother for just a break-in, especially when they didn’t even get into the house. Thought you’d just give me a note for the insurance. I’m impressed, I have to say.’
When I told Mr Sprake the reason the police would be fingerprinting the lock that had been removed from his garden door, as well as everything else on the outside of his house, his two-week tan faded in less than a second. He told me that he’d seen the story in the Standard, on his way back from Gatwick, but hadn’t thought that it had happened next door to him. His mention of the paper pulled me up. I hadn’t seen one since Saturday, even though I knew they’d all have run something. I hadn’t been able to face it. I didn’t want to think about what they might have written. Mr Sprake asked me if what the paper was saying was true. I said I didn’t know. I used my phone to call the station and then followed Mr Sprake into his garden, looking up at the Lindauer over his shoulder.
At the bottom of the thin green swathe my eyes rested on a compost heap piled up against a brown slatted fence. The fence was topped by three rows of barbed wire, not enough to cause much of a problem to anyone who was determined. Especially going that way: the wire was slanted backwards, Mr Sprake had been far more worried about people trying to get into his garden than out of it.
‘You haven’t touched anything else, anything down here?’
‘Only been back an hour. Grass needs raking but I guess it’ll have to wait, won’t it?’ I nodded. ‘You reckon they got over here then? And killed the woman in the building?’
‘Got in the back door, to avoid the cameras.’ I was talking to myself as much as to Mr Sprake. ‘Must have come back this way too. Might even have used that, pulled it over with them.’ I pointed at an old wooden ladder lying against the bottom of the fence. ‘That must be why they didn’t just jemmy your garden door open, why they took the lock out. Someone might have noticed if they’d just busted it, called the police while they were still in the building. They’d have been caught coming out.’
‘Sounds well planned. So who was she, this girl? The victim?’
‘She worked in the building.’
‘Tragic,’ Mr Sprake said, ‘just awful. I hope they catch the bugger. What’s the motive? Why would someone do something like that? To a pregnant lady?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘No idea at all.’
‘How are you involved then? If you’re not a policeman?’
‘I used to be one. Some old colleagues are on the case. I work in the building there.’
‘So you must have known her.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’m sorry. Knew her well, did you?’
‘That tea, Mr Sprake. If you really were offering.’
‘Yes, of course. Shall I get Norma to make a pot, with the police coming?’
‘I’m sure they’d appreciate that,’ I said.
As Mr Sprake made his way inside, I looked up towards my office window. I could see the outline of a bird sitting on a branch right outside, and thought I caught a flash of white. The bird wasn’t round enough to be a pigeon. A little small for a magpie or a jay. Had the shrike flown back up there? I strained to hear its song above the traffic but almost immediately it was lost among the sirens cutting through the streets towards me.