Good Samaritans, page 25
He is their Samaritan.
Ant is so excited by his apparent entrepreneurial spirit that he is not choosy.
Quantity over quality.
He uses the sticky notes to write down the details of everybody that calls in that night. Their names, numbers, problems and confidential secrets they have entrusted to him.
Who would have ever thought that he would have so much in common with a single mother or a closet homosexual or a suicidal preschool helper?
In truth, Ant is not doing his job any differently. He is still there, being present and attentive and comforting, he’s just taking notes as he goes.
He’s still helping a tonne of isolated individuals, he just plans on skimming the odd kilogram off the top for himself sometimes.
If he likes what happens on Sunday night, if he gets a taste for it, he has a fountain of despair at his disposal.
He is young and impetuous.
A mistake waiting to happen.
146
The interview commenced and Charlie Sanders spilled everything.
He told Pace how he always loved that club because the girls there were so desperate, he was guaranteed to get laid. He explained how he had met Hadley Serf, that she was with a few of her friends and they had obviously been drinking.
‘They were all pretty decent but you could tell which were up for it.’
Pace clenched his fist beneath the desk; his expression did not change, though.
‘Look, we left, I don’t really know what time it was, probably about midnight-ish. We walked for a couple of minutes, looking for a cab. She dragged me into a side street and started kissing me and grabbing me. We went back to her house and had sex.’ He stopped and took a breath at this point, realising that his girlfriend was aware of that part, at least, and that she had probably already moved her things out or thrown his into the street.
‘Then what happened, Mr Sanders?’
‘Then nothing. We came, we got dressed and I left. I didn’t even go as far as the front room because we did it in the hallway. It was just like she needed to get something out her system.’
‘That was it? You had sex, rolled up your socks and walked out? No talking? No coffee? No disagreement?’ Pace didn’t believe him.
‘No. Nothing like that. Not every woman wants you to stay around and hug afterwards. Look, I left and went back to the club to see if my friends were still there. She was very much alive when I walked out of the door. I started making my way back to the club and got jumped from behind. Some fucking guy, I didn’t even see him. Told me to leave her alone. That she was his, or something?’
‘She was his? Were those his words?’
‘I can’t remember. He knocked me to the floor. Punched me in the face a few times and kicked me in the ribs. I had a black eye for days. You can ask anyone about that.’
It all seemed too convenient to Pace but if this guy was telling the truth, it was new information that could blow the case wide open.
‘And you didn’t think to report this assault to the police?’
‘I didn’t want my girlfriend to find out about what I had been doing. I told her I fell over when I was drunk.’
‘Quite the convincing liar, Mr Sanders.’
‘I’m telling you the truth. What have I got to lose, now? I swear, I didn’t even know her name until I saw her face come up on the news the other day.’
Pace suspended the interview and turned off the recording.
Sanders sat back in his chair.
And the second detective in the room, who had remained quiet throughout the interview, remained quite still as Pace grabbed the suspect by the throat, pinned him to the floor and started shouting at him.
‘You sat on potentially pertinent evidence because you were worried your girlfriend would find out that you are a two-timing sack of shit? God help me if another body turns up and we could have stopped it had we been given this information sooner.’
Charlie Sanders’ face had turned pink and there were tears running from his eyes.
Pace let go.
‘Get this idiot back into a cell while I look into his claims.’
Detective Sergeant Pace was so close to finding out the truth.
He didn’t have his man, but he had enough information to move forward. He could take footage from the club. He could locate the cab that was used that night. He could see whether any cameras picked up the alleged assault.
It would lead him to the Samaritan.
SATURDAY
147
The day before the kill. Seth hasn’t slept. He’s adding anxiety to insomnia.
It’s a nothing day.
Everything is set up; it’s just a case of waiting.
When you have insomnia, all you are doing is waiting. Waiting for night. Waiting for complete quiet, for peace. Waiting for that everyday tiredness that you feel, that never-ending weight – heavy limbs, heavy eyelids, heavy heart – to wash over you and leave you with no choice but to sleep.
And you hear people at work or in cafés saying that they are exhausted. Maybe their kid was up in the night, they wet the bed or they jumped on their parents at five-thirty. Or maybe they have been travelling a lot over the last week. You listen and they say things like, ‘I don’t have the time,’ and you know that time isn’t real, because what they consider to be a day is only two-thirds of your day. Because they have already been asleep for four hours when you are just getting to that point where you are so frustrated that you can’t drop off, you know you have another hour of irritation left.
There’s always time.
You can make time.
Adding waiting on top of waiting elongates time for Seth. Like it would for anyone, but more for him. His days are already twenty hours long. Every hour on this Saturday morning feels longer to Seth than it does to anybody else. And he knows he has so many more to endure.
Later tonight, when Maeve is resting peacefully in their bed, he will be in the lounge seeing that flat screen in extreme close-up. Or he’ll be lying next to his wife staring at the ceiling.
Seth lies down on the sofa with his laptop resting on his thighs and clicks on one link that will take him on to another and another until he cannot remember where he started.
He fumbles around and scrolls through words and pictures and stumbles upon an article about sleep conditions and how to overcome them.
Apparently, sleeping on your side gives you shoulder pain. You can overcome this by lying on your back and cuddling a pillow.
Lying on your front with your head on the pillow can cause an unnatural curvature of the spine and cause back pain. Easily solved. Lie on your back with a pillow underneath your knees to force your lower back into the mattress and a more neutral position.
Too many pillows. Lying on your side. You’ve probably got neck pain. Best if you lie on your back with your elbows on a pillow either side of you.
It seems to Seth that most of these cures involve you changing position to lie on your back.
He reads on.
If you have trouble with snoring or perhaps you sleep next to somebody that snores, it’s because they are lying on their back. They should switch to their side.
Until they experience the inevitable shoulder pain.
To cap it all off, there was advice for people who can’t get to sleep. Don’t drink coffee or energy drinks before bed. Exercise in the morning and afternoon. Swap the laptop or phone for a book.
That was a waste of time, Seth thinks to himself.
But, when he looks at the clock in the corner of his laptop screen, only three minutes have passed. It felt like twelve.
And that’s how the rest of his day will go.
148
It’s in the newspapers this morning about both the recent women, and Daisy, who they now openly decree have a correlation.
One of the tabloids has obviously paid someone a lot of money to give up a picture of each of the girls in their crime-scene photo shoots. It’s nothing too gratuitous but it’s still two dead people. The headline says: ‘WRAPPED IN PLASTIC’.
Another sensationalist paper cites immigrants as an issue and reason for the rise in this kind of story.
The broadsheets handle it with a little more sensitivity. One has investigated so thoroughly that they can reveal both women were strangled. Another doesn’t even have the story on the front page because thirty-six people were killed in a suicide bombing the day before and they believe that is something worth hearing about, too.
In America they have already dubbed them as the SBW killings. (Strangled, Bleached and Wrapped in plastic.) Exactly the kind of notoriety some killers crave.
Not Seth, he just wants to fade into the background.
And certainly not Maeve, who just wants things back to normal. Not the normal they had, because that was unbearable, but a new normal that sees the connection they have forged over these circumstances to stick around for a lot longer than they did before.
But Ant smiles at the news because he is going to continue the legacy. At first, he will do it the way that Seth tells him. He wants to find his feet, get good. Then he can carve his own way into the history books, get his own name.
He hasn’t slept as well as he did in the motel but he did manage to toss and turn in his own bed rather than playing neck-breakers all night on the lounge windowsill. He believed that Seth wasn’t going to turn up in the night to strangle him, bleach him and wrap him in plastic.
One day left.
So much to do.
Ant throws a spoonful of butter into a hot pan then cracks three eggs and seasons with coarse black pepper and pink Himalayan salt. As the eggs start to solidify around the edges, he pours in a dash of milk and a tablespoon of cream cheese, and mixes it all together before pouring onto wholegrain toast. The last thing he needs is to feel hungry with all the work he has to do.
He makes a coffee and adds a couple of squirts of caramel syrup. The sugar is a short-term fix but it’s what his body is telling him that it needs.
Beneath the sink, Ant has nine bottles of bleach. Six that Seth told him to buy for Sunday night and three that he already had for cleaning. He hates that the labels don’t match.
He takes the kitchen spray and covers the hob in a lemon-scented abrasive foam. He disinfects the worktops and cupboard doors then throws that sponge away. He uses a new sponge for the bathroom. Scouring the inside of the sink and glass on the shower door until the fumes from the spray are too toxic for him to be in there any longer.
The rooms are gleaming. He takes some of his spare bleach and works it into the toilet basin and both the kitchen and bathroom sink.
And he changes the bed covers and puts the old ones straight into the washing machine and vacuums every fibre of every carpet, using the smallest attachment to get into the crevice between the carpet and skirting boards. And he dusts every surface. And he touches up any grubby paintwork where he has inadvertently grabbed a doorframe every time he has entered the room.
And when he finally sits down, it is lunchtime and he is hungry again. He makes a cheese sandwich. Crumbs drop on the kitchen worktop and grated cheese spills onto the floor tiles. He will reclean the kitchen once he has eaten.
He is doing exactly as he has been told.
All that is left is to take the light bulb out of the bedroom.
Ant sits at his desk, eating his sandwich and looking at some of the newspaper websites. The first link has a strap line of ‘News, Sport, Celebrities and Gossip’. Ant clicks the blue text, knowing full well that the publication has those things in order from least important to most.
When he sees a plastic-wrapped, pale Hadley Serf, it angers him. He remembers why he is in this situation.
Seth took Hadley from him.
And that still makes Ant want to kill Seth.
149
I read somewhere that thinking about running can help you to lose weight. Not as much as physically running, but enough to raise your heart rate and burn some calories. It’s another one of those urban myths that flies around, making people lazier. Like the one about eating celery and how you use more energy by chewing it than the food actually contains.
These mistruths penetrate our rational thoughts because we want them to be true, we want a quick fix or an easy way out. Because the real truth is, if you want to lose weight, stop eating all that cake. You want to be fitter and healthier, stop thinking about exercise and get out there doing it.
And maybe you’d like to earn more money. Do your job. Do it well. Hit your numbers then exceed them. Quit the one you are in and start up your own company. Do the job you want to do. Nothing motivates people to do something extraordinary as much as fear.
And when your relationship changes with the person you once loved, the individual you promised yourself to, the one you told you would be with forever, you don’t go cold. You don’t push them away because it’s easier if they get rid of you or think it’s their decision. You don’t fool around with some other woman. Somebody you met on a work trip. Some girl you connected with over the phone.
You work at it. You work hard. Go to counselling. Support them when their father is taken by cancer. Help them clean and dispose of a mistake they have made.
I know what I want. I want this ordeal to be over with. I want the worry to disappear. I want to move on. I’m not going to get that by thinking positively about it. It won’t happen because I let myself daydream about a brighter future.
Success only comes from action.
So, while Seth lies on the sofa scrolling through online quizzes and avoiding any news developments, while he worries and stresses and does not sleep, while he thinks about things, I know that I am the do-er in this partnership.
I have certainty.
I know this has to end.
And it will, very soon.
150
Pace discovers that Sanders is telling the truth. He sees a video of him dancing with Hadley at the club. He has spoken to the doormen. He has the camera from the black cab they took home that night. This was a one-night thing; they didn’t know each other, there had been no grooming. It didn’t fit the killer’s profile.
Hadley had gone to work the day after their encounter but there was nothing saying that Sanders hadn’t returned a couple of days later to finish the job, so he was still being held. He had a lawyer, now. He never mentioned the nudge to the ribs or the choking.
More importantly, that cheating fuck had been assaulted and Pace is thankful he is living in a nation under constant surveillance because his attacker could be seen clearly from the CCTV camera outside the chemist.
And that means that Pace could scour the footage from the club. And that man could be seen watching Hadley Serf all night. Prowling. Preying.
And Pace could see that he left shortly after the amorous couple.
And his face, Ant’s face, would be all over the television on Sunday night along with a dramatic reconstruction of the evening.
There would be hundreds of phone calls leading to Ant and, eventually Seth.
Detective Sergeant Pace is closing in.
SUNDAY
151
Seth waves a hand in the air to beckon a waiter over. He points at a menu. Two minutes later, a bottle of red wine arrives with two glasses. Ant sees it all through the window of the restaurant.
Before that, Seth was drinking a pint of lager and his date had a glass of white wine, complete with those sexy beads of condensation on the glass.
Ant was watching that, too. But he was inside the pub with them.
Just as the plan said.
It was one of those gastro pubs. The ones where the beers have entertaining names. They’re pale or blonde or craft, too. And you pay five pounds for a portion of chips because they are double or triple cooked, like that’s something new, but you forget that every time you buy a packet of frozen oven chips from the supermarket for 99p, that’s exactly what you’re getting.
And a pie comes with a foam instead of a gravy and your fish arrives with a velouté rather than a sauce.
They could’ve stayed in there and eaten.
But that wasn’t the plan.
Ant sees Seth lift his large glass of red wine up and clink it against his date’s glass. He says something and smiles. Ant can’t read his lips. He sees the back of the woman’s head. Lustrous, blonde hair. She is wearing a black dress. Fitted. He can see the shape of her shoulders and imagines her pretty face. She does not look like Hadley Serf.
Before that, Seth was in the gastro pub doing the same thing, lifting a pint glass up and showing his teeth, tapping it against the woman’s wine glass. She was mixing her drinks. Ant didn’t know whether that was her idea or Seth’s.
It didn’t really matter, Ant told himself; they both knew where it was heading.
Her idea was Seth’s idea.
Ant couldn’t see her face in there, either. He wondered whether Seth knew it would be that way. Would he have drilled down to that level of detail? Perhaps it would be easier for Ant if he didn’t see her face until the last moment. The way that farmers shouldn’t name their animals because it makes them harder to kill if there is that familiarity, that attachment.
Maybe, Ant thinks, it’s because he wants to keep an eye on him. The way an assassin will never sit in a room with their back to the door, because they have to be facing anybody that comes in.
He sits at the bus stop. Travellers come and go. All ages and races. It’s too early for the drunks to be rolling around the paths, asking him questions. Most people have their eyes aimed at a mobile phone screen. Nobody talks to him.
He sits.
He waits.
He watches.
Ant’s concentration never wavers. He is focused firmly on Seth. And even more so on the woman he is with.
It’s true, when somebody knows that you are going to die, they give you their undivided attention.
