Out of the Dark Read online

  ‘He was seen leaving the flat that night, when I was zonked out on the sleeping pills. He got into the car and he won’t say why or where he went. But they’ve said something about seeing the car on lots of different CCTV cameras, going towards the victim’s flat.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’ Deal with it later, Trish, she told herself. ‘Look, don’t worry too much. I’ll get over there now.’

  ‘But Trish, what about your work?’

  ‘It’s fine. I’m not in court today. I’ve got time. I’ll go over there and I’ll let you know what happens.’

  Lakeshaw was re-reading the scientific evidence, waiting for Sergeant Baker to report the result of her first formal interview with Paddy Maguire. He’d asked her to start because she was good at getting suspects to trust her and talk. He’d go in later, if they needed a heavy mob, but for now all he could do was wait.

  He wished Jeannie Nest’s killer had been less skilled and allowed her to fight back just long enough to scratch the bastard. There was nothing useful under her nails, and the pathologist had said the killer had never touched her with his hands. He’d looped the fabric ligature round her neck from behind and twisted it with some implement, which he’d probably taken away with him. It might have been a long spoon; there was one missing from the set in the kitchen. Then he’d beaten her with the chair that used to stand in front of her desk. It had broken under the assault, and he’d ended up using one of the legs. He’d never touched her himself, and so there were no fluids, prints, or anything else to prove who he’d been.

  The only evidence the pathologist hoped would come in useful were the few fibres they’d collected. There were some from Frances Mason’s long cerise cotton skirt and some from the plod’s uniform, obviously deposited when they’d found the body and Mason had fainted. But among the rest were some brown polyester fibres, which had no counterpart in anything either had been wearing, or in anything else in the flat.

  The killer had brushed against the body as he left, the forensic boys thought, and some fibres from his trousers had stuck to the bloody mess he’d made of her face. It was a pity that nothing they’d found in Paddy Maguire’s wardrobe or flat had produced fibres that were anything like these. But of course he could’ve got rid of whatever he’d been wearing at the time. It was exasperating, if not surprising, that nothing had emerged from the search of bins and skips in the vicinity.

  ‘It’ll be in the river, probably,’ Lakeshaw muttered.

  A moment’s doubt about Maguire’s guilt was soothed by his memory of Frances Mason’s description of the victim’s terror of her old boyfriend, and of the CCTV footage of Maguire’s car speeding through the empty streets towards Hoxton.

  ‘I wasn’t going anywhere special,’ Maguire had said when Lakeshaw had confronted him with news of the footage and forced him to admit that the sparklingly clear film did indeed show him ‘in the driving seat. ‘I was just moseying about. I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to disturb my companion, who was very tired after several bad nights, so I got up and went for a drive. I can’t even remember where I went.’

  He’d been lying. Lakeshaw was certain of that. He’d gone somewhere deliberately and felt guilty about it. It was a bugger that the CCTV cameras had only tracked him driving towards Hoxton, then given out before they could have nailed him at the scene of the crime.

  One day, thought Lakeshaw, there’d be cameras at every junction – and film in the lot of them – so that anyone and everyone could be tracked from the beginning of every journey to the end, but it hadn’t happened yet. They’d caught Paddy Maguire on two garage forecourt cameras, a speed camera that had flashed as he’d bombed past it at fifty-five miles an hour, and that was it, until he’d been filmed driving back towards Kensington an hour later and even faster.

  ‘Sir?’

  Lakeshaw looked up and saw DC Martin Waylant looking like a man on his way to the result of an AIDS test. He’d been cleared now of all suspicion that he’d sold Jeannie Nest’s new name and address to the Handsome family, but there was no doubting the fact that he’d let her die because he hadn’t taken her fears seriously enough. And the gossip that Sergeant Lyalt had belatedly seen fit to pass on might explain why. Waylant already knew how guilty he was, but Lakeshaw had it in mind to rub it in hard enough to leave a permanent reminder so that he would never do anything so fucking irresponsible ever again.

  ‘You sent for me, sir.’

  Lakeshaw wondered if he had the strength to keep control of his temper. He nodded, but he wasn’t going to ask Waylant to sit down, or shut the door.

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘No. I want to know if it’s true that you’d been having a sexual relationship with the victim.’

  Waylant stumbled and stuttered, flushed the colour of a rotten tomato, then eventually mumbled out an account of an affair that had started in pity, turned into something that mattered to him for a while, then become difficult, and finally made him itch to get away.

  ‘Which is why I thought her last call was a ploy, sir,’ he ended up.

  ‘She was old enough to be your mother. What the hell were you thinking of?’ As he spoke, Lakeshaw saw a whole new picture of what might have happened to Jeannie Nest, with Waylant himself battering her dead body with a broken chair. The picture grew in his mind, like an email photograph downloading pixel by pixel. Then it shrank back as he reminded himself that Waylant had been on duty on the night of her death, and the records showed exactly where he’d been throughout, and who’d been with him. He hadn’t had enough time alone to get to her flat, let alone kill her and mash her body to a pulp.

  ‘Sir, I don’t know. It kind of just happened.’ Waylant’s jaw clenched under the tension. ‘So when I heard she was demanding to see me, I thought it was a way of getting me to go back there to the flat so that she could get me into bed again. I …’ Now the red in his smooth cheeks was turning grey. ‘I didn’t know there really was someone after her. You have to believe me.’

  ‘Take me through it from the beginning. She called round, didn’t she, the night before she died?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The desk sergeant sent for me and I took her into an interview room. I listened for a bit to her stories about this bloke following her and phoning at all hours. I didn’t take notes or put on the tape because, like I said, I was sure it was just a ploy. But I did tell her I’d be round to check out the flat and the places where she was sure she’d seen him, as soon as I could. But I was busy and …’

  ‘Embarrassed by her? You’ve got a real problem here,’ Lakeshaw began as the phone rang. He grabbed it, hoping Baker had broken through to Maguire and got something useful.

  ‘Sir? DS Watkins from the front desk, sir. I’ve a Trish Maguire here, sir. She’s very anxious to speak to you, says she has essential information about your case.’

  ‘Tell her you couldn’t get hold of me.’

  ‘She says it’s really urgent, sir.’

  ‘Take a message. Tell her to go home; I’ll get back to her when I can. And if she starts bellowing about her father’s rights, remind her he has a solicitor with him.’

  Lakeshaw crashed down the phone and looked at Waylant, who was still standing obediently in front of him. Now he looked like a schoolboy awaiting a beating.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, sit down. Right. Now, do something useful for a change and tell me anything you can that will help us nail this bloke.’

  ‘But there isn’t anything. Otherwise, I’d have—’

  ‘There must be. Why exactly did you ignore her?’

  ‘Because I’d heard it all before and because after a bit she started to say things like: “I’m desperate, Martin. I don’t know what I’ll do if you won’t take me seriously. I can’t go on like this. It would be easier to be dead. I tell you, I’m desperate.” And I could see she was desperate, but I thought it was for …’

  ‘Sex, I suppose, you being such an irresistible stud.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Waylant looked and sou
nded defeated. ‘Nothing like that, but because she’d clung and cried and told me she couldn’t live without me often enough, and sounded just like this. If it hadn’t been for all that, we might still have been … OK.’

  ‘And she might still be alive,’ Lakeshaw said sourly, disliking everything he’d heard.

  ‘D’you think I don’t know that? D‘you think I’ll ever forget it, as long as I live?’

  ‘I hope not.’ Lakeshaw wondered when Sergeant Lyalt had first heard of the affair. She’d probably known for weeks. If so, he’d have her guts for garters. It was a crucial piece of evidence that could have saved them days and days of unproductive time.

  ‘So what exactly did the poor cow say that night? Before she started to show her desperation?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to remember. I’ve been going over and over it ever since. I think it went like this: “Martin, he’s back. I know it’s him. I keep seeing him in the garden now, as well as the street, waiting for when I open the back door to put the cat out. I know he’s going to do something soon. I have to put the cat out through the window now, so that he can’t force his way past me. Even when I can’t see him, I know he’s waiting out there somewhere. Please, Martin. I can’t go on like this. I know he’s going to hurt me soon. Please help. You must. There’s no one else.”

  ‘I knew it was nonsense, sir, but she was in such a state that I promised to go round as soon as we had a free moment here. Then when I said she’d have to go home and wait for me, she flung herself at me, clinging and crying about how Michael Handsome was going to kill her and no one cared.’

  ‘Who?’ Lakeshaw was on his feet, his hands bunched into fists again.

  Waylant stood, his jaw hanging open, making him look like an idiot. Lakeshaw fought his hands back to his sides.

  ‘Who did she say was going to kill her?’

  ‘Handsome. The bloke she was so scared of. Sir, what is this?’

  Lakeshaw watched Waylant’s face get even more blank and wondered which of them had lost it.

  ‘She actually told you it was one of the Handsomes?’ Waylant nodded. ‘Not Paddy Maguire?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Paddy Maguire. The man she told Frances Mason all about, who’d beaten her up when she was pregnant, and against whom she’d taken out an injunction.’

  ‘She never said anything about anyone called Maguire, sir. It was always the Handsomes.’

  ‘She must have told you about Maguire. According to this Mrs Mason, she was shit scared of him because he’d put her in hospital years ago and was now stalking her.’

  ‘She never said anything to me about any Maguire. She hated mentioning names. But it was the Handsomes she was so scared of. Everyone knows that.’

  Lakeshaw felt dizzy with rage that this idiot hadn’t had the guts to come clean in the beginning. ‘You’re absolutely sure, Waylant, that she never said anything to you about anyone called Maguire?’

  ‘Of course.’ Waylant had stopped looking scared; now he was all injured innocence, the little shit. ‘I’d have told you that at once if you’d let me speak to you. I’ve been trying to talk to you for days.’

  The phone rang. Lakeshaw picked it up and barked his name into it.

  ‘John Smith here, from Southwark. I think we might have your man for you, Lakeshaw. A pair of brown polyester trousers has come to light with a lot of blood on them.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Where?’

  ‘Well, they belong to Gary Handsome, but they’ve been found in his mother’s flat. He forced her to hide them for him in case we searched his place, as of course we did. I know it’ll screw up your time-of-death because he’s got that alibi for Tuesday night. But we all know pathologists make mistakes sometimes. He was probably sober enough to have gone round there in the early hours of Wednesday morning.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lakeshaw was looking across the desk at Waylant, but seeing only his own mistake.

  He was trying to remember if the name of the man who’d terrified Jeannie Nest had ever been mentioned in any of his conversations with Waylant. He was sure it hadn’t. He’d never have ignored that. They’d talked about the Handsomes, of course, but only because he’d been trying to get Waylant to confess that he’d taken their money to betray Jeannie Nest.

  Once it was clear that he hadn’t, Lakeshaw hadn’t bothered any more with Waylant, fobbed him off on to Sergeant Baker every time he tried to talk. Then had come the Handsomes’ alibis and Frankie Mason’s information about Paddy Maguire. Then the CCTV films showing Maguire roaring towards Jeannie Nest’s flat, which proved he’d been lying … Shit! All that wasted time.

  ‘That poor woman,’ Smith was saying down the phone into Lakeshaw’s half-attending ear. ‘She’s been so badly beaten and bullied first by her husband then her son until she’d do anything either of them told her. Even hide incriminating evidence for them. Though why she didn’t burn the trousers I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe the worm’s turned – or been thinking of turning – and she hung on to them to use against him.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Smith didn’t sound convinced. ‘But you’ll need to get the lab on to the bloodstains. Will you send someone for the trousers?’

  ‘Straight away. Have you picked up Handsome yet?’

  ‘No. We didn’t want to bugger up your plans. D’you want us to arrest him for you? We easily could. We’ve checked and he’s back from wherever he’s been hiding.’

  ‘Who knows about the trousers?’

  ‘His nephew, young Michael, who found them and brought them straight in, his mother obviously, but she’s in hospital, and three officers.’

  Something sprang open in Lakeshaw’s mind and he clamped a hand over the phone.

  ‘Waylant, did you say just now that it was Michael Handsome who so spooked the victim?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lakeshaw thought of the mummy’s boy he’d seen when he’d been round to suss out the Handsome family with one of the local plods. Looking much younger than his almost twenty-one years, little and blond and rubbing his old granny’s back. Could he ever have been capable of doing what had been done to Jeannie Nest? Lakeshaw was determined not to let another stupid mistake make itself around him, so he kept his cool.

  ‘That’s more than enough,’ he said into the phone. ‘Yes, you’d better pick him up right away, and the nephew too, but don’t ask any questions yourselves. We don’t want the clock running before I’ve got them here.’

  ‘The nephew’s at the hospital, seeing to poor old Lil, who was badly beaten up this morning.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘He was collecting stuff for her when he found the trousers, brought them straight round. He’s a good lad, and told us all about his uncle and how he’d threatened the old girl. Mikey looks after her, you know.’

  Lakeshaw put down the phone without another word and ran, bellowing for Sergeant Baker as he went. He caught sight of Trish Maguire in the front hall, arguing with the desk sergeant, and took a moment to tell them both that she could see her father.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t stop to explain. Talk to your father. I’ll sort out the formalities later.’

  Mikey was sitting by his nan’s bed with the case under his feet. It had all gone well at the police station. They’d taken the trousers and practically wet themselves in gratitude. He knew they’d soon find that there was blood from two women on them, but that wouldn’t matter. It might even help the story. Gal’s Wanstead victim had probably reported the assault – or at least gone to hospital to get herself patched up – so once they really started looking they’d track her down. And unlike Miss Nest, she was still alive to identify her attacker. It would all fit. Gal had done her two days before the murder. They’d think it’d just got him feeling excited and brave enough to do what he’d always talked about: have his revenge on the woman who’d put his old man inside.

  Mikey’d had to waste quite a bit of time ‘ex
plaining’ how he’d found the trousers, but he was here now. And not before time, he could see. His nan was white as paper and her face was kind of sunk in, so that she looked even older than she was. Her eyes were closed and her mouth looked crumpled. Her body was all tied up to machines and there was a bag hanging beside the bed. He knew from the red in it that they had got her kidney. And he knew what that meant.

  The doctor had taken him on one side and warned him months ago that any more punishment and it’d give out. At first Mikey couldn’t think what he was talking about when he said that Mrs Handsome ought to stop riding the motorbike now and playing rugby. But eventually it had dawned on him that the bloke was making a feeble joke. Once that was out of the way, they’d had a serious talk about how dangerous it would be for her to risk any more damage to the kidney. It could be as little as a bad fall on her back, say, downstairs. If that was true, it meant that a kicking like this might be fatal.

  It didn’t need the nurses being so kind and telling him they’d made sure she wasn’t in pain, or keeping away from them to give him time alone with her, to tell him she was dying. He’d known that if her remaining kidney went she was done for.

  ‘Be careful what you ask for; you may get it,’ Miss Nest always used to say when they were talking after school. ‘You could do anything and go anywhere and be anyone, Michael, but be careful what you ask for; you may get it.’

  Well, he’d got the money now, and his uncle wouldn’t be troubling him for a long, long time. He could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone, just like she’d always said. But just like she’d said, he might not want it when he’d got it. With his nan dead he’d have lost everyone he’d ever cared about. A tear trickled down his face, like a fly walking down it. He pushed it off, but then another came and another.

  He wished his grandmother’s eyes would open. He picked up her hand and stroked it, but there was no movement from her. He wanted to hear her say, ‘You’re a good boy, Mikey,’ like she always did. But today her lips were lying thin and slack against her teeth. It was odd seeing her without her red lipstick. Her mouth looked pale purple, as though she was dead already, but he could hear her rattly breathing and see her chest rising under the thin blankets.