The Next to Die, page 28
“Not you,” the Snowman said.
Sam knew what he meant. He wanted to talk to Simon. In moments of crisis, the rest of the team didn’t count.
“I’ve got some good news, sir. A development.”
“So have I,” said Proust defensively, as if Sam’s report of progress might nullify his own. He slid the rest of his body out of his glass compartment. “Let’s hear it, then.”
Sam told him about Niall Greeves identifying himself from the police artist’s sketch. “Robbie Meakin directed him my way, and I’ve just got off the phone with him. He remembers giving the white book to Kim Tribbeck and where it happened: the Kennett Auditorium in Canterbury. Kim did a gig there on March 11 last year. Greeves was in the audience. He kept his ticket, so he was able to be exact about the date, and it squares with the list of tour dates Kim’s agent’s given us. Greeves is a fan of hers.”
“I don’t care. Is he Billy Dead Mates? I don’t care what else he is or isn’t.”
“I think it’s very unlikely he is,” said Sam. “We’ll check with his work, but that’s where he is every weekday afternoon apart from when he’s on holiday. He works for the British Cartographic Society in London, lives in Tunbridge Wells. I told him the Billy dates, and he wasn’t on leave for any of them, so with any luck his colleagues will be able to vouch for him.”
“In which case, Mr. Greeves would need a plausible explanation of why he gave the signature small white book of a serial killer to Kim Tribbeck that night in Canterbury. Did you ask him that?”
“I did, sir. And the good news is, his answer gives us a solid lead.”
The round face reddened. “Please stop proclaiming good news. It’s like talking to a TV evangelist.”
Sam wished he didn’t have to waste his progress report on an unappreciative audience. “After Kim did her show, Greeves said, she came down from the stage at one end into the main part of the room. The audience was sitting at tables below the stage. There was a man sitting at one right near the front, and Kim seemed to be with him. From Greeves’s description it sounds like Gabriel Kearns, whom we know was there that night. Greeves was there alone—”
“Why? Does he not have a wife?”
“No wife or girlfriend, no. He did have a wife, but she died in 2010 from complications relating to an ectopic pregnancy. Greeves was on his way out after the gig—just finishing his pint and about to head home—when he saw a petite woman with very short, medium brown hair approach Kim and her husband’s table. They were having a conversation and standing with their backs to the table. Kim had hung her bag over the back of a chair behind her, and the short-haired woman crept up and seemed to be rummaging in Kim’s bag. Greeves didn’t want to cause a scene, so instead of shouting ‘Hey!’ or anything, he approached the table, stood right next to the woman and gave her a pointed look. At the same time, another bloke from the audience apparently did the same, so there were two people homing in on her, about to yell, ‘Stop, thief!’ for all she knew. She panicked, as a thief would, as a killer would, stopped what she was doing and made a swift exit—unobserved, still, by Kim Tribbeck and Gabriel Kearns. On her way to the door, she dropped something. Guess what it was?”
“No.” The Snowman was a tough crowd.
“A small white book. Niall Greeves picked it up, had a look. It contained no words apart from ‘Every bed is narrow,’ which meant nothing to Greeves. He assumed the woman had taken it from Kim’s bag, then dropped it during her escape after she was caught in the act. Naturally, being a fan of Kim’s and an honest guy, Greeves wanted to return her property to her. But he didn’t want to interrupt her conversation, so he waited. He considered putting the little book back in her bag, but he didn’t want to look like a rummager himself. When Gabriel Kearns left and Kim was alone, Greeves approached her. He said he sort of froze because he’s such a huge fan, and he couldn’t think what to say. He was afraid he’d sound weird, and the other guy who’d spotted the woman fiddling with Kim’s bag was still hanging around, too. In the end, Greeves said, he just passed the book to Kim with an incoherent mumble. She looked at him as if he were a complete freak, apparently.”
“All right, so his account of the giving of the book matches Kim Tribbeck’s,” said Proust. “Do we assume this short-haired woman is Billy, then?”
“I believe it’s a strong possibility, sir.” Sam tried not to show his excitement. “Greeves describes the woman as having very short brown hair. Faith Kendell, the woman Kim Tribbeck chatted to outside the hospital while Marion Hopwood was dying, also had very short brown hair. Now that we know Marion was murdered and a white book left in her bed . . .”
“You don’t need to spell it out, Sergeant.” Proust perched on the edge of the nearest desk. His trouser legs rode up to reveal black socks with a pattern of purple fish. “I have an alternative hypothesis: Faith Kendell doesn’t exist.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“A woman with a different name was planning to kill Kim Tribbeck, but disaster struck: she was caught trying to put a white book in Kim’s handbag and realized that she could be identified if Kim were to turn up dead. So she didn’t kill Kim, but she did shoot four other people and she poisoned Marion Hopwood. She used a false name—Faith Kendell—to protect herself because she was at the RGI on January 6, not to visit a relative with bone cancer but to murder Granny Marion.”
“We agree, sir. I was calling her Faith Kendell because we don’t know her real name.”
“I do,” said the Snowman. “At the start of this conversation, I told you I had a development to report. You waved that aside to make way for your own progress bulletin—”
“Sir, that’s not quite—”
“This morning I decided to review all the paperwork—the archive of our ongoing shameful failure to catch Mr. Dead Mates. I spotted something that didn’t tally: the alibis of Isobel Sturridge, sister of Liam Sturridge.”
Isobel Sturridge. Sam let the name sink in. Once he had, he could think of no possible motive for her to commit Billy’s five murders. For the desire to murder Kim Tribbeck, maybe; Isobel could have been a jealous, overly possessive sister. But Kim was still alive. What could Isobel have had against Linzi Birrell, Rhian Douglas and the others?
“Isobel Sturridge can’t have been where she says she was when the first four murders were committed,” said Proust. “She told Sellers she was at work—at Rudolphy’s, Silsford’s famous bookshop.”
So famous that Sam had never heard of it. He felt immediately guilty. He and his wife, Kate, bought all their books from Amazon. They kept agreeing that they shouldn’t, but it was so much easier than making time to go to a physical shop.
“Do you know why she can’t have been there on those dates?”
Sam shook his head.
“I used to go to Rudolphy’s as a boy,” Proust said. “In those days, it occupied three different buildings on Guggle Lane, Silsford’s only remaining cobbled street. Two were side by side, with a door connecting them that was sometimes locked and sometimes not. The third was across the street. Two of the three buildings were unmanned—no till, no staff presence at all. Just rooms full of books, new and second-hand, piles of them everywhere. There was a noisy till in the corner of one room that looked and sounded like an old typewriter. Someone would always be behind it to sell books, but if you wanted something from Rudolphy’s mark two or three, you had to take it next door or over the road to buy it. Imagine that these days!”
Sam waited. This was the most personal thing Proust had ever said to him and it made him feel uneasy.
“The third shop, the one across the road, didn’t last. It closed, then reopened as a record shop. Later still, the two adjacent buildings were joined properly and became one big Rudolphy’s, though the ceilings were as low as they’d always been and the thick beams didn’t help. My brother Edward nearly knocked himself out more than once. There was a girl we’d see in there sometimes, the owners’ daughter. Elise, her name was. Elise Rudolphy. About my age, maybe a couple of years older. Once I was in there on my own flicking through a second-hand book and she came up behind me and said, ‘You want that, don’t you?’ It was Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There were three volumes—faded red hardbacks—and I was holding the first in my hands. ‘If you want it, take it,’ Elise told me. She had a terrible voice: a drawly half-English, half-American hybrid. The family was from America originally. Both parents had American accents. I said I couldn’t take the book, that it would be stealing, and Elise said, ‘I dare you. I won’t tell my parents.’ Do you know what I did, Sergeant? I took it.”
“Wow.” Sam laughed appreciatively.
“It wasn’t funny, it was a crime. I’d expect you of all people to know the difference, or else what are you doing here?”
“Well, I . . . I just thought—”
“I was sickened by what I’d done, as soon as I got home. Couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. The next day I took the book back to the shop and gave it to Mr. Rudolphy. I confessed all and told him that his daughter had encouraged me to defraud him.”
“Right.” Sam was struggling. What was the point of this story? What was he, the audience, supposed to be thinking, and what was he actually thinking? He ought to know the answer at least to the last question, but he didn’t.
“Mr. Rudolphy thanked me for returning the book. My apology seemed to be enough for him, but it wasn’t for me. That day, I made up my mind to become a policeman. And I did.” Proust nodded vigorously. “You don’t see what any of this has to do with Billy and his victims. Only that Rudolphy’s is where Isobel Sturridge claims to work, and she doesn’t work there. She lied. Incidentally, I read the transcript of Sellers’s interview with her, and he describes her as having very short brown hair.”
“So you think she’s Faith Kendell?”
“You will too when I tell you this: Elise Rudolphy’s mother, who often sat behind the till, whose creation the bookshop was . . . Her Christian name was Faith. I’d often hear her husband’s disembodied voice calling her. If she was busy when he called, she’d smile at the customer and ignore him until she was good and ready.”
“But . . . for Isobel Sturridge to give us an alibi involving a job in a shop where she doesn’t work at all? Would she be so reckless?”
“She has been. So, yes, she would. My foray into the case files also told me that Kim Tribbeck believes Liam Sturridge’s sister works nights.”
“I think you’re right,” Sam murmured. Had he known that? It rang a bell. Trouble was, when you had five murders, the paperwork mounted up; it was impossible to keep all the details in mind at once.
“Bookshops aren’t open overnight; therefore Isobel Sturridge can’t possibly work in a bookshop,” Proust said, underlining his point.
“Sir, how did you find out she’d lied? Did you ask at Rudolphy’s?” Sam assumed he was still a regular customer.
“Sadly, that would have been impossible. Rudolphy’s closed down in September 2013. There are no other branches. It was a Silsford institution that traveled no farther. Rudolphy’s is no more.” Proust launched himself off the desk in the direction of his private cubicle. “Therefore Isobel Sturridge couldn’t have been working there in September 2014 when Linzi Birrell was murdered, or on any of Billy’s other kill dates. She gave as her alibi a shop that no longer exists.”
* * *
Sellers hadn’t wanted to risk following Sondra Halliday on Twitter under his own name in case she blocked him, so he’d called himself @howmanywomen. It sounded feminist enough to fool Halliday, and it was the first three words of the driving question of Sellers’s life: How many women could he bed before he died?
He’d stopped short of using a double-bladed axe as his avatar, as Halliday and many of her Twitter associates did; there was a limit to how deranged he was prepared to pretend to be. Instead, he’d picked a cartoon of a woman who looked a bit like Miss Scarlett from the board game Cluedo but wasn’t.
Halliday’s latest tweet was a response to someone called @ SterlingDervish. It read, “So you’d tar me with the brush of my oppressors? Fuck you.” Sterling Dervish, whoever they were, had replied, “Brush? Have you been oppressed by landscape painters, then? Why didn’t you say?” Sellers chuckled to himself and pressed the “favorite” button. On a whim, he clicked on the tweet to see who else had favorited it, seeing that one other person had.
His heart jolted when he saw the name. Isobel Sturridge: sister of Kim Tribbeck’s ex-lover, Liam.
Isobel Sturridge had favorited a tweet that mocked Sondra Halliday. It had to mean something.
Didn’t it?
Sellers put Isobel’s Twitter ID and Halliday’s into the search box together. They’d never communicated directly on Twitter. Though perhaps Halliday would target Isobel now and lay into her. It was something she’d done before: attacking those who’d favorited tweets she disapproved of.
Sellers had spent a couple of hours that day studying her Twitter timeline, and he’d found it genuinely terrifying. One poor person was accused of being “rape apologist scum” for politely putting forward the view that transgender women ought to be able to use women’s changing rooms. Hard as he tried, Sellers couldn’t see the connection between that and condoning rape. Transgender women could hardly use the men’s changing facilities; they’d be liable to get beaten up. Plus, they weren’t men anymore, were they? Wasn’t that the whole point? In fact, many of Halliday’s detractors on Twitter pointed out—every day, it seemed; did none of these people have jobs? Did they never feel in need of a day off from savaging one another?—that women born with male bodies had been women from the start. The problem was that their bodies hadn’t matched the people they knew themselves to be.
All this might be interesting, thought Sellers, if it weren’t so vicious. There was Sondra Halliday calling someone a “malevolent shitbag” further down her timeline. Her unfortunate victim had favorited a tweet addressed to Halliday from one of her opponents, exactly as Isobel Sturridge had. The tweet in question said, “So genitals shouldn’t be life-limiting at all until white m/c Aga feminists decide they’re all that matters, amirite?”
Sellers puzzled over that last word for a few seconds before realizing it was Twitter language for “Am I right?”
Many of Sondra Halliday’s Twitter friends had names that included “womon”—probably because some radical feminists objected to “man” being part of the word “woman” when spelled conventionally.
Sellers shook his head, mystified.
“Everything all right?” Gibbs had appeared beside him. “You look worried.”
“I am, about humanity.” Sellers closed Twitter with a sigh.
“I’ve got something.” Gibbs was trying not to smile and failing. “Two pretty fucking big somethings.”
“Go on.”
“Have you seen the sarge in the last hour?”
Sellers shook his head.
“So you don’t know the Snowman’s bookshop story?”
“No. What story?”
“Never mind. It can wait. Rudolphy’s, the bookshop where Isobel Sturridge told you she worked—”
“Funny you should mention her . . .”
“—but that in fact closed down in 2013—”
“What?”
“Yeah. Before it closed, its owner was an Elise Rudolphy. When I Googled her, pages and pages of results came up. She ran the family bookshop, but she was better known for being a widely published poet. Her stuff looks like dross to me, but what do I know? She was American, too. An American woman poet—”
“With a name that starts with E,” Sellers finished Gibbs’s sentence. “Like Edna St. Vincent Millay and the other two.”
“Right. She died in December 2013—heart failure, according to Wikipedia.”
“Then she’s not Billy,” Sellers stated the obvious. “His murders didn’t start till September 2014.”
“Oh, did I forget to say?” Gibbs grinned. “Before she died—long before—Elise got married and had a family. Guess who she married?”
“I can’t. Tell me.”
“A man called Norman Sturridge.”
“Sturridge? Then . . . ?”
“Yep. Liam and Isobel Sturridge are Elise Rudolphy’s children. And that’s not all I’ve got. The fake mobile number Faith Kendell gave Lane Baillie? I’ve just heard back from O2. That very same number, until 2013, belonged to guess who?”
“Isobel Sturridge?” Too easy, surely.
“Got it in one,” said Gibbs.
16
from Origami by Kim Tribbeck
Should I tell Charlie what I suspected: that Simon knew the truth about Liv and Gibbs? I kept asking myself the question and coming to the same conclusion: no, I shouldn’t. Unless you’re wise, don’t interfere—that’s my motto, and wisdom isn’t a quality I’ve ever possessed. I’ve met sticks of chalk that are capable of forming better judgments than I can. Instead, I told Charlie my theory about bad liars.
The worst liars imagine a lie must be the literal opposite of the truth. Like (forgive the comedy reference—I am a comedian, after all) in Blackadder Goes Forth, when Blackadder is on trial for his life, accused of shooting Speckled Jim, a carrier pigeon, and the thick soldier played by Hugh Laurie says in an attempt to defend him, “We didn’t receive any messages and Captain Blackadder definitely didn’t shoot that delicious, plump-breasted pigeon,” in a way that makes it apparent to anyone with a brain that he did precisely that.
What if Liv and Gibbs had told a childlike, literal-opposite lie?
I’d done it myself, I realized: told Liam that I couldn’t see him anymore because Gabe and I were renewing our vows, when in fact I’d dumped Gabe that same day and ordered him to move out.
What was the opposite of breaking up? Surely it was not breaking up. But that was the situation before Liv and Gibbs’s lie. That was the boring old status quo; everyone apart from the two deceived spouses had known about the affair for years, so why suddenly announce a change?
