PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - READ BETWEEN THE LIES

PAIN HAS A PERMANENT ADDRESS - EPISODE FOUR

Chapter Ten

I waited for Kira to come and collect me.  In that time I called Grahame and asked him if he could check the missing SIM card which I knew would be discovered quickly by the police investigation. 

  “Of course,” he said.  “You do realize your bill is mounting.”

  “You’ll know that I’ll see you’re okay.”

  “Where are you?”

  I told him.

  “I hope you’re not expecting me to collect it from there, are you?” he asked. 

“No, don’t worry.  Tell me when you’re coming, and I’ll meet you outside.”

  He was there in ten minutes, wearing a hooded sweatshirt to disguise his appearance, I assumed.

  I shook his hand and passed him the SIM card when our palms joined and continued walking down the street.

  Kira turned up about ninety minutes after I had phoned her.  I caught her at the local gym for her morning routine.  I asked her to go to my house and pick up some clothes for me.  Silver had lent me a pair of police-issue trousers and a training top while I waited.  When she arrived, she handed me a pair of jeans and the latest Arsenal football shirt. I changed in an empty locker room at the back of the station.  She waited next to the front desk, dressed in tracksuit trousers and a zip-up training top.

  “Are you okay?” she asked when I finally emerged again.

  I nodded.  “I’m fine.  Let’s get out of here.”

  There were fireworks in my head, hissing and wheeling.  I don’t know how I managed to walk out of the station with my chin up and my legs not giving way beneath me.  I even gave a nod to Higgins on duty at the front desk.  We walked to Kira’s Mercedes sitting in the corner of the station car park. My eyes stung as if they had grit in them.  I had to get out of there, to where nobody could see me.  I didn’t want anyone looking at me with compassion in their eyes.  Clients I'd had in what now seemed a different life received that same look from me. I felt I was now viewing my past through the wrong end of the telescope.   

  Inside, Kira turned on the air conditioning and handed me a takeaway coffee.  From the cardboard carton, steam rose out of a small hole in the plastic covering.

  “I popped into the petrol station on the way over.  Thought you might need this,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  For a minute, I laid my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes.  A nasty headache was screwing its way into my left temple.  Kira drove out of the car park, looking straight ahead.  I imagined Silver watching from his office window with a troubled expression.  How would I ever be able to face him again after what I had accused him of?

  “I really appreciate this, Kira.”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  I glanced at her.  She looked back.  She wore a dusting of makeup.  Maybe she hadn’t taken it off after work.  Either way, she looked good.  And, as her perfume filled the car, I felt a momentary connection to her.  A buzz.  I looked away and tried to imagine where the feeling had come from.  It had been a long day.  A traumatic one.  Perhaps it was guilt for the feelings I had felt towards Isabella.  Perhaps it was just the relief of going home.  Or perhaps, for a second, I realized how alone I could be if I mucked up this relationship.

  “John?”

  “I’ve been taken off the case.”

  Kira turned her head to gaze at me. “What?”

  “I’ve been taken off the case,” I repeated.

  “Why?”

  “Orders from on high.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Silver. And there’s something he’s not telling me.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, but he’s definitely hiding something.”

  She sighed. “Are these people stupid or something?  Don’t they realize you’re probably the only hope of solving this case?”

  Modesty forbid me to respond.

  “What are you going to do?” she pressed.

  “Continue with my investigation.”

  Kira smiled and nodded her head. "Of course you will." 

 “Are the wounds on the girl similar to the wounds on Buster Bill?”  I asked

  “I’ll know later on today when they eventually bring the body out of the forest. What did you see?”

  “I’m not certain.” 

  We stopped at a traffic light.  Red light reflected in her eyes as she glanced in my direction.  “John?”

  “I was scared.”

    Her eyes moved across my face.  “There’s nothing wrong with being scared.”

  “But I don’t get scared.  When whatever it was growled, you could almost feel it tremble through the earth.” There was a brief pause.  Something passed between us; something unspoken.  And then the feeling came again.  An ache in the pit of my stomach.

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “That sound.  I can’t get it out of my head.  The echoes of it seemed to hang in the thickness of the forest.  It’s bizarre and unsettling, and the longer we were in there, the more exposed I felt.  I’m trying to be rational, Kira.  Trying to stay focused and logical, but that sound felt so out of place among the trees, so alien, it was impossible not to feel troubled by it.”

  I gazed at her.  She leant into me a little, her perfume coming with it.  The fingers of her hand brushed against my leg.  Her eyes were dark.

  “I don’t know what it was,” I said.  My voice wavered with emotion.  “It was like something from a nightmare.  I could sense it hunting us.  Stalking us.  Like some mythical beast. Yet, I couldn’t see it.”

  Kira leant in even closer.  My heart shifted in my chest, like an animal waking from hibernation.  I edged towards her.

  “I’ve seen some terrible things in my life, Kira.”  She was so close I could feel her breath on my skin.  “But I have never been so frightened before.”

The traffic light changed to green.  I glanced at it, then back to her.  The road was empty.  Behind us, there was nothing but the harbour and the North Sea.  Her eyes were still fixed on me.

  “And I don’t know how to deal with it,” I added.  “There were no real solid shapes, no hints of movement.  But that did nothing to calm my concerns.”

  She studied me – and something changed.  She nodded slowly before we moved on.

  “Where do you want to go, now?”  She asked.

  “At the moment I am not sure of what I believe and what I don’t.  I must focus on what matters.  The case, the truth, and what is really going on here.”  I paused, while I gathered my thoughts. “Would you mind dropping me off at the church?” 

  She glanced at me. “Of course not.”

  She dropped me off, kissed me on the lips and said gently.  “If you need me, you can call anytime.” 

  “I know.” She pulled away before I went into the triangular yard of the Oxmarket Church. 

  The church is on the coast, perched on the edge of the Oxmarket cliffs like a limpet clinging to a rock.  It looked down over the town, lost in a fine gossamer mist.  I remember the time my wife and I came here for the first time and how welcomed we were. A twinge of regret that it could only be a memory came over me. 

  I sat on the bench near my deceased wife’s grave, beneath a beautiful copper beech.  I came here quite often to talk to her, but I hadn’t done so far for a while.  It was still damp from last night’s rain and I felt the chill seeping into my bones.  A blackbird sang full throttle just above me.  I breathed in deeply.  In, out, in out; trying to get rid of the bubbles of panic.

  I stood up and headed to the church.

  The door was open.  Inside, I found ten benches, a stone altar at the front, and a stained-glass window above that.  Despite the changeable weather outside, the image in the glass was leaking a coloured reflection across the nave.  Against the cracks in the stone floor, a scene of the Last Supper moved like a puddle of oily water.

  Reverend Frances Ward sat in the second row on the left, her body pressed tightly against the end of the pew, her hands loosely together on the bench in front, as if she were about to say a prayer, or had just finished one.

  I was almost level with her by the time she saw me.  She turned on the pew and dropped her hands to her lap and looked at me with an expression of welcoming warmth.

  I took a moment to consider Reverend Ward.  She was slender, her hands elegant and long-fingered, her grey hair fixed behind her head with a plain hair-clip, and while her vestment was a beautiful claret colour and nearly touched the floor and she herself appeared quiet and demure.  Prim, even.  It was easy to see the beautiful young woman who had turned into this beautiful sixty-something-year-old woman.

  We shook hands.  Hers were small, just like her, and very soft.

  “You haven’t been for a while, Mr Handful.”

  “John, please.”  I said.  “God and I had a little falling out a few years ago, and we are still yet to make up.”

  “I will pray for the day you and God make peace with each other.”

  I looked back up to the window, to the vaulted ceiling. “That day, might be sooner than you think.”

  She smiled raising a quizzical eyebrow.  “May I ask what has brought about this sudden change?”

  I studied her, her eyes shifting from me, along the nave, to the front of the church.  Two wooden funeral biers had been collapsed and were leaning against the wall.  Her gaze lingered on them.

  “I understand I might be using them shortly.”

  “I am no longer assisting the police with their investigation.”

  “Oh?”  She attempted another smile, but it got lost halfway when she must have realized I was not willing to expand any further.

  I sat down beside her on the pew.

  “You look sad, John.  Weighed down.”

  “It isn’t unusual.  In my line of work, I feel it most of the time.  But this time it is different.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged without answering.

  “John, there is something hidden behind your anguish.  You seem confused.  Uncertain of yourself.  It’s anchored in your eyes, in the crescent of your mouth, and it has spread and thrived within you like the roots of a weed.”

  “There have been two murders in Oxmarket Woods, and I was nearly the third.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t think you do, Reverend.  You see, I think I stared into the eyes of the devil.”

  She looked shocked, and then composed herself.

  “The devil can take many forms, John.”

  “I know.  That’s what I mean.  I saw it in the shape of an animal.”

  She laid a hand on my forearm, as if to soothe the ramblings of a mad man.  But I wasn’t a mad man and we both knew it.

  “Let us pray.”  She said.

  We both slipped forward off the pew and onto the thick soft kneelers that signified different churches in the diocese, and then she recited a prayer without any prompt that I shall never forget.

  “Be sober, be vigilant: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walked about, seeking whom he may devour: whom resist, remain steadfast in their faith.” She paused.  “Amen.”

  I echoed my solemn ratification quietly, and then we remained silent for what seemed like an eternity but was in fact only about ten minutes.  I thanked her and started to walk back to my house.  My legs were no longer shaking, but they felt heavy.  My head throbbed.

  Once I got outside the church, the weather changed.  More clouds rolled in, coming fast over the North Sea.  After about ten minutes they started spit rain.  Twenty minutes later the roads and paths were flooded with rivers of water as big, gnarled storm clouds opened in the skies above.  Through the heavy rain it was hard to see where I was going, but, as the rooftops of Oxmarket came into view in the distance, my house emerged from behind a bank of trees that had already been stripped early of their leaves for winter.

  The road into town was like a derelict building: broken, pockmarked and in desperate need of repair.  I checked over my shoulder and ahead of me to make sure there was no oncoming traffic in either direction and continued along the side of the road where the path ended.

  The walk took me another fifteen minutes and as I fumbled the key in my lock, I was relieved to be finally home.

  Inside, the house felt different.  I couldn’t explain it, wasn’t even sure I was meant to.  But it felt more welcoming, as if something had changed.  I didn’t put the TV on like I always did when I got home.  I forgot about it.  And by the time I realized it, I was in the shower in the bathroom rinsing soap from my eyes. 

  Being busy brought me an adrenaline rush.  I was dog-tired but wide awake.  I went into the spare bedroom which doubled sometimes as an extra office for Handful Investigations.  I pulled the door shut and opened the window, which looked out over my garden, then the marshes and the North Sea beyond.  There were no papers in my out-tray, but a small mountain in the in-tray.  Clients I should see, cases I should deal with, correspondence I needed to reply to, forms to fill in, case references to read, invitations I would turn down.  I switched on my computer and found a dozen or so business-related e-mails.  I’d read somewhere that a busy executive can get up to two hundred e-mails a day.  It was so unfair.  Couldn’t they share out among all the people sitting alone in rooms to whom nobody wanted to send messages?

  Within an hour, the heap of paperwork had sunk and I’d refused invitations to solve cases in three different countries; I’d separated requests for me to see clients into the yes, no and don’t know piles; I’d filled up my diary with satisfying little blocks of allotted time.  There were crumpled balls all around my chair.  I could hear the traffic building up outside the front of my house.  I went down to my kitchen and made myself a coffee, then went quickly back to my office with the hot contents slopping against my fingers.

  Then, from behind my unused single wardrobe, I dragged an ancient whiteboard on its legs across to the centre of the room.

  I spent the next frustrating five minutes trying to find even a single whiteboard marker with enough ink to work.  I finally found one and started making notes on the board.  I wrote the names first, leaving plenty of space between them, so I could later annotate the board with evidence as I collected it.

  Not for the first time, I felt as though I was looking at the case the wrong way.  What was Buster Bill doing in the forest?  Who and what killed Sabrina Muller and then proceeded to chase me?

  My irritation spiked.  I could feel in my bones there was something important about the kennels. Or was there?  Something to do with Isabella, maybe?  At the very least, it offended my sense of the natural order of things.

  I finished writing on the whiteboard, and then I took a step back to view my handiwork.

  I felt another surge of frustration wash over me.  The idea of a wild beast roaming the local forest was ridiculous.

  Or was it?

  I missed something.  Something fundamental.  More than that, I believed a shadowy presence existed on the edges of the case.  Someone I couldn’t see, but who influenced events. 

 That person, the one manipulating me and the entire Oxmarket police force, would be the real killer.

  It felt like the killer had thrown down a challenge to me.  Was I clever enough to work it out?  I didn’t know.

  I continued looking at the board, my brow furrowing.  The coverage of Oxmarket forest explained why the killer had been confident enough to commit two murders.

  I diverted my gaze to the names of the victims.  Charles ‘Buster’ Bill and Sabrina Muller.  The philanderer and prostitute who were now both victims.

  A predator. Living in our very midst. One of our own, perhaps.  A neighbour, a colleague or that stranger a few houses down whose basement lights burn all night.

    Filled with frustration, I retired to my bed and after reading a few pages of a novel, I drifted off to sleep.

  I dreamed of a naked woman running as fast as she could, bursting through branches and low undergrowth, her bare feet frozen.  She had cuts on her face and body, the blood mingling with the beads of sweat on her naked skin.

  Snow changed the landscape, covering the paths, the rocks, the three stumps.  She wished she were running on tarmac, familiar streets.  She couldn’t find her bearings and moved blindly, the blizzard erasing her footsteps.  But the darkness could not conceal her.  Something followed, relentless in its pursuit.

  Stumbling onwards, she climbed fences and thrashed through the undergrowth, along farm tracks and through forests.  Knee-deep in snow.  Unable to quicken her pace because she could not feel her feet.

  The wind howled.  Trees lost in white static.  She slipped on a bank of snow, the powder folded around her like a duvet.  Her lungs drew icy feathers into her chest.

  She dragged herself up and ran, scrambling over another snow bank, trying to escape from the thing hunting her.

  In the corner of her eye she saw something moving, a dark shape.  An animal.  Bounding after her at great pace.  Growling.  Revealing yellow teeth, a red tongue, shining eyes.  I could almost smell the fierce reek of its breath.

  I woke up, my body covered in sweat. I knew where I would start my investigation.

Chapter Eleven

“I still can’t believe it.”  Goldie said.

 “No,” I said.

  “I mean that kind of thing doesn’t happen, does it?  Not to people you know.  I can’t get over it.”  She shook her head from side to side as if to clear it.  “Poor Sabrina.”

  “Mm,” I murmured in agreement.

  “Who would want to do a thing like that?”

  Since this wasn’t a real question, I didn’t answer.  I sipped the coffee she had made for me and waited.  Goldie was, a tanned, attractive German woman.  She sat curled up in a large easy chair at the Magic Touch Massage Parlour. She had burnished brown curls, flecked brown eyes, honey skin, huge breasts, long slender arms and legs, a small mouth, perfect white teeth, and pearly nails.  She said she was Sabrina’s best friend.  Her very, very best. 

  “We quickly became inseparable,” she spoke with only a slight hint of an accent. “Even more since we started working on the same shift.”

  “How long had you known each other?”

  “About four years.”  Her eyes widened.  “That means I’ve known her since I came over from Germany.  Knew, rather.  I can’t get used to saying that.”

  “It’s hard,” I agreed, thinking back for a few seconds about how difficult I had found it when Zoë had died.

  “We would go shopping together.”  She fingered the pastel folds of her cotton dress.  “We bought this together two weeks ago.  Her friend also came with us.”

  “Her friend?”

  “Buster.”  She sighed.  “Poor Buster.”

  “Goldie,” I said into the silence that followed, “the reason I am here is to ask you a few questions about Sabrina.”

  She nodded.  Her face took on a tragic cast.  “Yes, I know that.”

  “I am more interested in her moods and what was going on in her life.  And, as you said, you were her best friend.”

  “I knew everything about Sabrina.  We had no secrets.  For instance,” she lowered her voice and leant forward, “she told me almost straight away about her feelings for Buster.  Sabrina was a chatterbox, where I was more of an introvert.  Sometimes, I think that was why we were such good friends.”  She stopped and frowned at me.

  “Yes?”  I didn’t want Goldie to stop now that she’d finally worked her way round to Sabrina. 

  “She was always at the centre of things, where I am more on the outside of things.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m a steady kind of person.”  She uncurled her long shapely legs and wiggled her toes.  “She was like a pendulum.  Over the moon then down in the dumps, that was Sabrina.  She was always falling in love with the clients, but Buster was the special one. ‘Are you sure he’s the one?’  I used to ask her.  Used to.  Can’t get used to that.”  She blinked her brown eyes at me, and a single tear rolled down her cheek, then another.  I handed her a tissue from the box on the coffee table in front of me.  “Thanks.  Sorry.”

  “What was her relationship like with Buster?”

  “Loving.  Once she stopped charging him.  Their relationship changed when -” She stopped.

  “Yes?”  I said.

  “Oh, it’s probably nothing.”

  I waited.  She was aching to tell me.

  “I think someone was trying to frighten her.”

  “Oh?” I murmured.

  “I don’t know why, and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but I just sensed it in her behaviour.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She stopped turning up for work.  Missing appointments with clients.  She even missed a couple with Buster?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.  I had to see him a couple of times.”  She smiled at the memory.  “I could see why she fell in love with him.  The man was hung like a rhino and my God did he know how to use it.”

  I decided not to pursue that line of enquiry.

  “Do you know who might have been frightening her?”

  “I wish I did, then maybe I could help in getting the bastard locked up.”

  “Could it have been another client?”

  “No. They all liked her. I think it had something to do with her affair with Buster, but she kept a good relationship going with all her clients.  She was very popular.”  She came to a halt as if she’d said too much. 

  “Have you got any names or addresses of these clients?”

  She looked at me as if I had asked the most stupid question she had ever been asked, and she was right.  Places like this ran on discretion if nothing else.  It was illegal to pay for s*x and the men that paid were as guilty as the women who accepted the money.

  “Have you any idea who might have been wanted to harm her?”

  “I would never accuse that woman he was living with, but it could have been someone connected with her.”

  “Why do you say that?”

***

  I left the Magic Touch Massage Parlour half an hour later at midday and I felt drained.  From there, I went back to the Oxmarket Boarding Kennels and Cattery, not because I thought it was a particularly fruitful idea but because I had a nagging thought there was something odd about Cowan Carter.

  I have been a private detective long enough to know there is something odd about most people, but I felt Cowan hadn’t been upset enough at the news of Buster Bill’s death.

  I wondered why I doubted her level of grief.  Was there a right amount of grief to show, then?  How did you measure it?  Once again it was just a hunch and paying attention to my hunches had cost me my consultancy with the Suffolk Constabulary.

  I arrived at the main house and Isabella let me in.  Her face pale and weary, her stress so visible the deep lines on her face looked like grooves carved in stone.  Her mouth was a thin line and there were dark smudges under her opaque eyes.  When we had talked before, I had been touched by her dignity and how well she had conducted herself.  But now the identity of the body had been confirmed. I looked into her bleak face and saw how her hands trembled after she had shut the front door.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you again.  I just wondered if I may speak to your mother.”

  “Why?”

  “I would like to ask her a few more questions.”

  “She’s outside.” Isabella’s voice sounded cold and functional. The warmth I had sensed earlier had gone.   “She keeps doing her interminable crosswords and cries when she thinks no one can hear her.  I don’t know why she is crying. She didn’t love him any more.”

  “How are you coping?”  I asked.

  “Me?”  She gave a faint shrug.  “I get through the day.”  She stood abruptly.  “Would you like to follow me?”

  She took a deep breath, flinching as if there were a deep pain in her chest. I knew she must be toying with the idea of telling me to go away and never come back.  But she maintained her dignity as always, and using a thin white stick, she ushered me through the hall and into the kitchen.  There were flowers everywhere and the house was filled with their thick, oppressive fragrance.  As I passed the living room, I saw banks of condolence cards on the mantelpiece and the table.

  I looked out of the kitchen window.  Cowan sat on a wrought-iron bench in the garden with her back to the window, doing a crossword.  Something made her look round, and I raised a hand and made my way out into the small enclosed garden.  She gave a nod of recognition.  I had worried about blundering back in, but she didn’t seem displeased to see me.