Plot reminder: In previous chapters Kubič has been trying to make contact with a house burglar called Clive Bone who has recently been released from prison. His son Danny has taken his step-sister out of town to stay with their aunt in Birmingham. The last chapter ended with Kubič about to greet a mysterious female visitor to his flat late in the evening...
~~~~~
Tuesday 9th March
As DCI Yardley drove into the station that next morning, Ravensby felt a different place somehow from the one he'd driven through the previous morning. Along West Road, for example, a boarded up shopfront was being unnailed; a few metres further on a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds jostled and joked as they made their unaccompanied way to school. He could feel it in the air - a sense of new beginnings, that the long dark winter was finally at an end.
Oh, he couldn't really take any personal credit for this of course, not in an investigative sense. Yet maybe in some small way, he liked to think, the mere fact of his presence had borne a positive effect - as if on some cosmic level he were a harbinger of peace, the man with the midas touch.
It had certainly felt that way the previous evening as he'd basked in the glow of the assembled media outside the station steps.
Does the inspector believe that Mark Cosgrove was behind the murders of Catherine Butterfield and Sophie Markham?
It had felt almost as if he'd been sucked down a multitude of electrical wires, evaporated into the airwaves, his reassuring smile warming several million living rooms up and down the country.
It is certainly a hypothesis I feel is worth exploring, yes.
And explore he would. Yet even if nothing concrete were to be unearthed, there was still a way of testing if the hypothesis were the correct one, was there not? All it needed was the third recipient to come forward and a certain successive period of time to pass - two, three weeks perhaps - with no further bloodshed. Guilt by inactivity. The signed confession of the dead.
Now turning right onto Croxley Street, he smirked up at the flat above the fish 'n' chip shop which Wye had pointed out to him the previous afternoon as they'd driven out to arrest the Holloway boy. Kubič's sad little divorcee's pad.
Yardley imagined him up there, baggy eyed and groaning back a hangover. A little hair-of-the-dog splash of vodka into his morning coffee no doubt, start the day the same hazy way as it would carry on. Alcoholics made him sick. Drug addicts too. Symtom of a lack of backbone and self discipline, that was all.
It came as a shock when, at that exact same moment he passed it, the ground floor entrance door shuddered open and spilled the wistfully smiling figure of Detective Sergeant Wye out onto the street.
*
DCS Yardley wasn't the only person to become aware of the sergeant's overnight stay at Kubic's flat that morning. Turning right onto Croxley Street from Duxton Terrace at that precise moment was Giles Hancock. An undiguised Giles Hancock dressed in school uniform, albeit with those requisite adjustments and re-stylings which helped him retain a modicum of individuality in the midst of such grey facist-state homogeneity. Shirt untucked, collar turned up, the thinner rather than thicker end of tie running down the button line. Instead of shoes, his footwear consisted of Doc Marten boots embellished with tippexed renditions of the human skull beneath ankle. It was an overall look completed by chain-link belt and the unruly nest of dyed jet black hair.
The petite blonde figure which emerged onto the street fifty metres ahead was a familiar one; they'd been keeping an eye on her, yes. She turned in his direction, stride springy, a smile slanted across face - one which as she drew closer he was able to read as a sort of incredulous reflection on her actions. As she passed, their eyes momentarily meeting, he could almost smell it. *Sin, primal carnality*. He had a nose for these things.
Once she had passed a safe distance behind him, he pulled a surgically gloved hand from blazer pocket, slipped the envelope through the letterbox in one swift, fluid motion.
Oh, there was no doubt about it now. Should Kubič bottle it, blondie would be their target.
*
When Danny's phone rang it was in Summer's hands on the backseat beside him. Amongst the social media apps, car racing and football games he'd downloaded, there was also a princess colouring activity precisely for occasions such as this - when it was better to sacrifice his own personal entertainment during a long car journey in exchange for a blessed break from her constant whining.
She passed the phone across to him with frowned reluctance.
"Danny," came the familiar voice.
"Dad," he replied without enthusiasm. He'd been made aware of his father's appearance on the front page of yesterday's Express via a text message and accompanying photo from Deepak Chowdury, whose own father ran the general grocery store/newsagents' on the corner of West Road and Aspnell Lane. It was kind of weird and above all immensely embarrassing to be the son of a man currently recognisible to half the country as both a professional and personal failure.
"How's it going?" His father's question was voiced with an absurd level of hopefulness, as if the answer might be a simple and genuine 'Okay'.
"Okay," Danny replied anyway, for the want of any other ideas.
"Aunt Stefi and Uncle Mike treating you okay?"
"We're on our way back as it happens."
There was a kind of sucked-in suspenseful silence for a moment. Then, his father's voice resembling an exploding bomb: "What do you mean you're on your way back?"
"Mum came to get us. We're on the motorway."
Glancing up into the rearview he could see his mother following the conversation with interest.
"Tell her to turn straight back around."
"But dad-"
"Just tell her to turn straight back around damn it."
Danny wondered if his father had been drinking. He thought he could detect a slight slur to the voice, and his dad rarely became so agitated about things when he was a hundred per cent sober.
Distancing the phone from his mouth, Danny did as he'd been asked. The response was unambiguous and laced with the sort of colourful language which Summer shouldn't really have been exposed to.
"She says she can't," he translated back into the phone.
His father's tone now took on a striking sense of urgency "It's not safe here Danny. This Cosgrove guy, it's not him. You understand? Turn back around."
Had Danny himself been driving, his father's pleas would have been persuasive enough for him to have U-turned back to Birmingham. It was his mother who was driving however, that most stubborn of creatures, and no U-turn was made.
*
Julie had barely stopped crying since she'd heard; was crying again now as she entered the custody room alongside the female officer who'd introduced herself as WPC Hargreaves. Though the scene which awaited her wasn't quite as bad as she'd feared - there was no striped uniform, no chains, not even a pair of handcuffs - to see him there sad-eyed and head-bowed like that was heartbreaking just the same.
As she took a seat on the other side of the table, his gaze remained elusive, fixed on the top of the desk. WPC Hargreaves meanwhile hovered discreetly in the doorway.
"They feeding you well?" It seemed the sort of thing the girlfriends of convicted felons should ask.
He flitted an upward glance at her. Nodded.
The silence which followed was awkward and oppressive. She thought about asking if his bunk was comfortable, but realised it was useless to try and reduce this to banalities. The fact was that just twenty-four hours earlier he'd plunged a knife, twice, into another man's stomach. There was no getting around it. No shaking the image from her head.
"Why didn't you tell me Vince?"
She thought she already knew the answer, but needed to hear him say it aloud.
He was looking at her now, those dreamy eyes she'd fallen in love with never more earnest.
"Because if I'd told you you wouldn't have been safe."
She wondered if he were right; wondered if, had he chosen a different course of action, she might have been another Sophie Markham.
"Am I still your superhero?"
There was no cheeky accompanying smirk to the question today however, just a desolate kind of hopefulness, a nascent flood of tears in his eyes. And although it was hard to envisage that she would ever want to become intimate with a murderer or that as a couple they had any kind of future, given everything he had been through, everything he would continue to go through, it would have taken a mercilessly cold heart not to have forced a brave smile.
"Yes Vince, you're still my superhero."
*
As the riders of the 1.50 from Kempton Park hurtled past the finishing post, Clive Bone banged a frustrated fist onto the slip-strewn ledge of the bookmaker's where he was perched. The booty from the previous day's break-in had already been blown. One hundred and sixty-five pounds in cash found in a biscuit tin under the old woman's bed, this plus another hundred from the contents of her jewellery case which he'd flogged to his usual fence. He needed another input of cash. Desperately.
Best act quickly, he decided, sloping out of the door. If what they were saying was true and the guy who'd got murdered yesterday was the mastermind behind all this threatening letter business, then that fifth of the population who'd upped and offed would soon be flocking back to town. If he hoped to find more easy pickings - another ground floor window left on the latch - it would have to be that very same evening. He would wait for darkness to fall, then slip out.
Was that Kubič in the Audi parked on the other side the street, he wondered? It wasn't the first time he'd spotted his old nemesis over the last couple of days. There'd been a house call too, his mother had said.
What the hell did the sod want?