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  ‘Christmas,’ he told Sadie, ‘the birth of Our Lord. The time is surely approaching when we will see Him again.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sadie said. ‘I’m counting on it.’

  ‘In all His glory.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Come to separate the sheep from the goats.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘The Son of God come to send sinners to hell and the righteous to Paradise.’

  A sous-chef came out for a smoke and to catch half a minute of the frost-laden air. When he exhaled, the smoke billowed with his breath and seemed to go on for ever. He went back, then re-emerged with the remnants of unfinished meals and a two-thirds-full bottle of Tŷ Nant.

  After they had eaten, Sadie turned in her bag and pulled the flap over her head. She’d been trying half the night to make a connection, but she hadn’t raised enough money, and her regular dealer, who might have extended a credit deal, wasn’t on the street or at home.

  ‘The Son of God,’ Jamie asserted, ‘born in a stable and risen in glory.’

  ‘Okay,’ Sadie said. Neither spoke for a full five minutes, then Sadie added: ‘You know what, Jamie? Fuck the Son of God.’

  7

  Duncan Palmer was raw-eyed and looked a little ragged round the edges. You might have put it down to jet-lag, were it not for the fact that his girlfriend had been murdered. Sue Chapman had phoned to let him know that Stella and Harriman would be arriving at ten; even so, he took a long time to get to the door. He was wearing grey sweats – like Valerie’s, Stella thought – and his hair was up in a coxcomb: not a fashionable cut but the result of having just climbed out of bed.

  Stella’s thoughts extended to: So you slept well. And, as if answering her, he said, ‘America: the flight out’s no problem; coming back’s a killer.’ He took them into the kitchen, switched on the kettle and put coffee into a big cafetière. As if it were an afterthought, he said, ‘Okay to talk in here?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Stella said. ‘Wherever you like.’

  ‘In here, then… get some coffee.’

  They sat on metal café chairs round a metal fretwork table. The kitchen was yellow and green, and there were occasional Italian tiles with fruit and vegetable paintings. It looked as if it had been copied from a lifestyle magazine.

  Stella said, ‘We want to say how sorry we are about Valerie.’ It was textbook and often brought tears. Even if it did, you still watched them; you tried to look through the grief.

  Palmer didn’t cry. He nodded as if in agreement. He said, ‘I can’t take it in. It doesn’t seem real.’ Also textbook.

  Harriman said, ‘We know you were in the States. It’s just elimination: same for everyone that was close to her. Don’t worry.’

  Palmer got up and left the room.

  Harriman looked at Stella and shrugged. She got up and took a tour of the kitchen. Palmer lived in a Kensington redbrick; the windows looked straight down a narrow road to the big high street stores, the crowds, the inch-by-inch traffic. The intersection allowed just a cut of the action: fifty feet maybe. Stella could see a panhandling Santa outside a designer clothes store, offering his good-cause box to the passers-by. She watched until Palmer came back, and Santa hadn’t made a single hit.

  Palmer put a small appointments diary down on the table in front of Harriman, then crossed the room to add hot water to the coffee. ‘My time in New York,’ he said. ‘Breakfasts, lunches, dinners, office and boardroom meetings. It was a full schedule. Will you catch him?’

  ‘We’ll try,’ Stella said. ‘We hope to.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘We expect to.’

  ‘But you don’t always.’

  ‘Not always.’

  Harriman asked about arguments, enemies, resentments, grudges: the textbook coming out again. Palmer crossed all the boxes: none of these. ‘It’s a random killing, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘A crazy person.’

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Harriman told him. ‘We’re looking at that.’

  ‘All the attacks on women recently.’

  ‘I know. We are looking at that.’

  Stella said, ‘Did Valerie wear a chain, or a chain with something on it? I mean something she always wore: in bed, in the shower, when she was jogging?’

  ‘A cross.’

  ‘Can you describe it to me?’

  ‘A plain gold cross on a gold chain.’

  ‘Was it a religious thing?’

  ‘No. Well, only in the sense that it was a cross. But Valerie wasn’t religious. I think she’d always had it: from when she was a kid, I expect.’

  ‘A confirmation present, perhaps.’

  ‘Sort of thing. It had her initials on the reverse – VB.’ The line of questioning caught up with Palmer abruptly. ‘He stole it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He… pulled it. Left a mark.’

  The information seemed to bring Palmer suddenly closer to Valerie’s death: its nature, its detail. He half turned and looked away. Then he said, ‘That would be after she died.’

  ‘I would think so,’ Stella said.

  ‘Why would he do that? Not to sell it?’

  ‘No.’

  Palmer thought for a moment, then said, ‘Keepsake.’ When Stella didn’t respond, he added, ‘Yes. That would be it.’ Then he said the weirdest thing. ‘Something to remember her by.’

  Palmer walked them back through the living room to the door. Harriman was out in the hall and Stella halfway there, when Palmer said, ‘Was she raped?’ He asked it in a low voice, almost a whisper, as if it was something that might remain a confidence between them.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Stella said. Then, ‘It’s possible.’ She didn’t mention Valerie’s near-nakedness, the sweats found a little way off. Palmer nodded. Stella stepped back into the room as she added, ‘There had to be a post-mortem. I don’t think it’ll be possible for you to see her.’

  ‘See her?’

  ‘To say goodbye.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Palmer backed off a little: Stella’s move back into the room had brought her close to him, inside his body-space. He said, ‘She’s gone, though, hasn’t she? Why say goodbye to someone who’s already gone?’

  Palmer’s flat was five minutes from the park. As Stella and Harriman emerged, a string of joggers went by, then a woman on her own, pacy and stylish in Lycra leggings and a washed-out pink-and-grey top. Valerie Blake in another life. Harriman put the key into the ignition, but Stella motioned him to stop.

  ‘When you look out of his window,’ she said, ‘there’s a clear view front and left, but there’s a plane tree off to the right. See?’

  Harriman turned to look. ‘Okay. And –?’

  ‘Drive round the block and park on the blind side of the tree.’ Harriman drove, waiting to be told why. When he parked, Stella bent down in her seat to check the eyelines. ‘I doubt he noticed the car, even so… he can’t see you from the window, but you can see the street door. You might have a bit of a wait.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s a woman in his flat.’

  Harriman was silent for a moment, thinking back to what he might have missed; finally he asked, ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He was wearing her perfume.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t mean intentionally. It was on him; he smelled of her. It was in the air, but when I got close to him, it was stronger… skin-contact made it more pungent.’

  ‘I didn’t smell it.’

  ‘That’s what forty a day will do for you.’

  ‘So where was she?’

  ‘In the bedroom. Where else?’

  ‘I haven’t got a camera,’ Harriman warned her.

  ‘Well, I think it’ll be pretty easy to find out who she is.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘We’ll ask the bastard – when we’re ready.’

  Robert Adrian Kimber was talking technique: how you picked your mark, how you stayed with her, close but discreet, how you p
aced things by having several in hand at the same time so you could switch and change if one of the sisterhood seemed to notice you. He used those terms: in hand; sisterhood. Stella was running the interview, with DS Jack Cuddon sitting in. She said, ‘We need an address, Robert. We need to know where you live.’

  ‘People often walk looking at the ground,’ Kimber said; ‘have you ever noticed that? Looking at the ground or looking straight ahead. Getting where they’re going. Sometimes a woman will stop, though: something catches her eye, something in a shop window, something she wants. It’s tricky. Do I stop too? Do I walk past and wait?’

  ‘You say you killed Valerie Blake.’

  ‘That’s it, you see. That’s the culmination. That’s the end of things: the first meeting.’ He smiled at her, then at Cuddon, and the smile became a chuckle. Cuddon’s eyes were dark with anger.

  Stella said, ‘How did you do that? Kill her.’

  ‘She was strangled – you know that.’

  ‘Yes. So she was jogging… you were – what? – waiting for her?’

  ‘I knew where she went. I knew the route.’

  ‘What was she wearing? Do you remember that?’

  ‘Running clothes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Jogging gear.’

  ‘Can you tell me the colour?’

  ‘She always wore the same.’

  ‘Did she? What was it?’

  ‘The usual thing.’

  Stella paused for a moment. She was biting the inside of her cheek. The tape spooled on. Kimber wore the trace of a smile; he looked at Stella and nodded, as if to encourage her.

  ‘What made it different, Robert? You follow her, you like doing that. Why kill her?’

  ‘There were others to follow.’

  ‘But why kill her?’

  ‘The first meeting,’ Kimber said, as if she might not have heard the first time, ‘that’s the end of everything.’

  ‘So you’re waiting, you’ve picked your place, she comes by, she’s running –’

  ‘Looking at the ground,’ Kimber offered, ‘or straight ahead.’

  ‘Okay. Then what?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘Yes, but I need to hear it from you.’

  ‘She was strangled, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Detail. I’m asking for detail.’

  ‘What sort of detail?’

  ‘How you killed her, how difficult was it, did she struggle?’ Stella knew she was leading too strongly: this wouldn’t be a good tape to take into court. ‘She was attractive, wasn’t she?’

  ‘My Valerie? Oh, yes.’

  ‘The place where you killed her –’

  ‘Among trees. Trees and bushes.’

  ‘No one could see.’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Did you rape her?’

  A silence fell. The tape-spool gave a little creak. Cuddon closed his eyes. He could hear sounds in the silence, as if the air were chafing against the walls.

  ‘That’s pretty personal, isn’t it?’ Kimber asked. He sounded affronted. ‘That’s pretty personal stuff.’

  They took a break. Cuddon punched the wall hard enough to make Stella wince. He said, ‘That prick. That shitehawk.’

  ‘You’d like to have him humanely destroyed.’

  ‘Well… destroyed.’

  Cuddon went to the coffee machine. On the other side of the room, Maxine Hewitt was raiding the AMIP-5 chocolate hoard. The coffee was a cruel practical joke that everyone kept falling for. Andy Greegan was sitting at his workstation with his head in his hands; he’d been running through lists of names and addresses from the internet, from the register of voters, from a listings CD called Info-04. He said something indecipherable as Stella walked past his desk. Maxine lobbed her a Twix and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  ‘DC Robson’s with him,’ Stella said. ‘He’s playing games.’

  ‘The same games?’

  ‘The same. As soon as you get to details, he starts sidestepping.’ Stella shrugged. ‘I’m going to have to charge him or let him go.’

  Andy Greegan spoke again but louder. He said, ‘I think I know where this guy lives.’ He still had his head in his hands and he sounded like a man speaking from under a mudslide. ‘The name’s right, including the middle name. Must be him. He’s on Harefield.’

  Stella said, ‘How did you get him?’

  ‘Utilities. Electricity, to be specific. He doesn’t vote: not a good citizen.’ Even from a distance, the high flush in Greegan’s cheeks was noticeable.

  ‘Print it out and go home.’

  Greegan shook his head. ‘I’ll be all right, Boss.’

  ‘Go home,’ Stella told him, ‘you’ve got the flu.’

  Greegan clicked ‘print’. It took him a while to get the mouse-pointer settled because of the shivers chasing down from his shoulders. He said, ‘You’re right. I feel like shit. I’m really ill.’

  Stella flapped a hand at him. ‘Get out of here, Andy, for Christ’s sake; you’re a fucking germ factory.’

  Mike Sorley glanced through the interview transcripts, stopping briefly to read more carefully the passages that Stella had highlighted.

  He said, ‘He’s taking the piss.’

  ‘I know. Still think he did it?’

  ‘He had information not contained in any press release. I like him for it, yes.’

  ‘Okay, well, we’ve had him for fourteen hours. He’s due another rest period. It looks like I’ll be asking you for an extension. And a search warrant: we’ve got his address.’

  ‘There was a time,’ Sorley said dolefully, ‘when a confession would do it for you. The guy owned up: that was that; a couple of hours in court, then straight to the gallows. Case solved, on to the next.’

  ‘The good old days,’ Stella observed.

  ‘One less on the streets.’

  ‘And if he didn’t do it?’

  Sorley shrugged. ‘They’ve all done something.’

  8

  Between the street and the treble-racked, four-sided arrangement of high-rise blocks that made up the Harefield Estate was a no man’s land that Stella thought of as the demilitarized zone. The DMZ. It was a little waste land littered with waste objects that spoke of wasted lives: gutted cars; white goods leaking their CFCs; soft furnishings soaking up the weather; a ground-cover of fast-food cartons and used syringes and condoms and cola cans that had doubled as crack pipes. The tower blocks were arranged round a circular space known locally as the bull ring. When Stella had lived there, her mother would send her down eighteen storeys to the convenience store for groceries and a quarter of vodka. Nowadays, the shopfronts in the bull ring were boarded and graffitied, save for a KFC and a liquor store. You could still get the vodka.

  For some, Harefield was simply a place to live: they got by as best they could by hearing nothing, seeing nothing and saying less. They behaved as if they were under martial law; under curfew. For others, the place was a vast business-incentive scheme. The businesses in question included dealing drugs, dealing flesh, dealing cards. There were specialist outlets for passports and visas. Armourers were finding business so hot they were waging a price war. The dealers were on the landings, the whores were on a rota system, and the spirit of free enterprise, like the spirit of Christmas, was in the air, bringing the scent of money.

  Two vehicles stopped in the bull ring: the first a car carrying Stella, Pete Harriman and Jack Cuddon, who was doubling for Andy Greegan, the second a people carrier bringing a forensics team. Some spare uniforms would be along later to secure the flat. Stella got out and felt a little lurch of alarm, as if the ground had dipped beneath her. The bull ring was where Nike Man had died – Stella backed up against a car, a second man closing in, and a hot reflux of fear rising in her gullet. The wheel-nut crank had been in the well between the seats, and she had swung it without picking her target. A couple of inches higher and her man might have survived; and couple of inches lower, and he’d have shrugged it off for sure.<
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  She looked up and saw faces on the high walkways, the estate’s foot-soldiers in their uniform of estate chic: baggies, hoodies, beanies. They stood unmoving, watching, confident on home ground. Cops came to the estate often, but they would be Drugs Squad or Vice Squad or the SO19 gun team: and mostly they would be expected. The Harefield Estate operators understood that good business practice involved a little industrial espionage. A pay-off here in exchange for a phone call there and, overnight, product would be shifted. Product and livestock. These cops weren’t here to raid. The soldiers knew that. They were the wrong side of the DMZ for sure, but, as long as they kept their distance, things would be fine.

  You can name buildings after local dignitaries or poets or Cumbrian lakes. The man who’d designed Harefield was a realist. The blocks went from A to L. Stella and Harriman stepped out of the lift in Block C and on to the walkway of Floor 16; they were looking for Flat 31. Two dudes sat on the walkway rail, their backs to the sheer drop, sharing a spliff.

  They said, ‘Hey, motherfucker. Hey, bitch.’ That was as far as it went.

  The sound of a Hatton gun taking out the door-hinges of 16/31 went round the circle of tower blocks: sharp echoes hanging in the air. Kimber’s flat was stone cold. Everyone in the team was wearing white coveralls, and Jack Cuddon was doing Andy Greegan’s job of organizing an uncorrupted path from the door to the search site. The flats were basic clones: a passageway from the front door led to one or two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen. But you can customize any space – make it your own, make your mark.

  Pete Harriman walked into Kimber’s living room and stopped dead. He said, ‘Holy Christ.’

  Stella joined him; she said, ‘This guy’s a case. He’s a real case.’

  Harriman stood in the centre of the room and did a slow revolve. The walls were black and they were papered with ten by eight candid-camera shots: all women, all young, none of them posing or smiling for the camera because they weren’t aware that they were being photographed. A space had been left beneath each photo where Kimber had used a pen with silver ink to record the time, the date, and then to give to each an embellishment, a little story. His handwriting was small and fastidiously neat, the lines evenly spaced. If you stood a little way off, you might be persuaded that this was design: wallpaper that borrowed its ideas from the photograph album; a touch retro-chic for a sink estate, perhaps, but hey...