“OK sir, stay on the line. I’m putting you through—
“There is no time. If you hurry you may catch the person responsible, yes?”
“Where are you sir?”
“Don’t waste time. I am in a call box and the number will be on your screens. I have just seen a murder.”
He gave the address and rang off resisting all efforts to extract his name or keep him talking.
An exploded gas main and a minor coach crash had local resources tied up longer than they anticipated. It was not until seventeen minutes after the triple-nine call that a patrol was dispatched.
26
Kelly sat back on her heels, gazing down stupidly at the knife and the blood.
Part of her brain was screaming at her to move, to do something. Another part registered the characteristics of the weapon with an almost clinical detachment. A combat survival knife with an eight-inch blade partially serrated along the back edge. Small rips of flesh and skin from the victim still clung to those serrations.
And yet another part of her mind cried over and over No no. NO! Not again . . .
It took longer than it had any right to for Kelly to get her feet under her. Her balance was shot. Upright, swaying, she realised she was still clutching the knife tight in her right hand. She bent and put it down with ingrained care for the evidence it contained. The floor tilted crazily underneath her. She staggered and almost fell.
Oh God what have I done?
Fragments came back to her, a disconnected vision of blonde girls in college shirts performing high kicks on a sports field. Kelly frowned. What the hell did that have to do with anything? But a moment later the association of words clicked in one after another like the tumblers of a lock.
Cheerleaders. Football. Wrong football—soccer.
Tyrone.
“Ty?” she called, her voice rising raspily. “Tyrone! Where are you?”
She managed a couple of steps reaching for one of the pillars and leaving a bloody smear across its crumbling paintwork. She was, she recognised casting a trail of physical evidence that was a CSI’s dream.
“Tyrone?” she shouted again, fear making her tone sharper, more desperate. A couple of pigeons scattered in fright at the sound of it.
Across by another pillar she saw a blackened mess, making her heart bound into her throat and pump there ferociously. Something had burned with a fierce intense heat, greying at the centre and leaching out towards the edges so that tatters of material remained along with zippers and a belt buckle.
A man died here. It came back to her suddenly, a whole formed idea. And with it a partial sequence of events. Of her and Tyrone arriving in the van, just another job, of climbing the stairs.
We came through the doorway talking about football . . . What happened next?
And then she saw him.
Tyrone was lying on his back near the doorway to the stairwell. He was very still.
Kelly stumbled across to him weaving drunkenly. She didn’t need to drop to her knees alongside him to know for certain he was dead but she did it anyway.
What have I done?
Tears welled in her eyes blurring her vision but she would not allow them to fall. It had been a long time since Kelly had wept for anyone or anything. She had thought herself all cried out.
“No,” she said aloud her jaw bowstring taut. “No I did not do this. Not to Tyrone. No way.”
Why not? Do you think you could kill a stranger but not a friend? Who are you trying to convince?
She bit her lip, forced herself to look at Tyrone’s body. His Tyvek oversuit was slashed and torn in at least a dozen places across his torso and upper thighs. The placing and number of the wounds was horribly familiar. A frenzied attack by someone possibly out of their mind. Someone suffering a psychotic episode.
The blood had pooled and spread until the front of Tyrone’s suit had a solid dark red sheen already shading to black. It had haloed around his body, leaching into the dusty concrete particularly around his head.
There’s another injury there. The realisation came almost automatically. Blunt-force trauma? Tyrone was not the type to go down without a fight but he had fewer defensive wounds than she would have expected. So they’d hit him first—hard enough to put him down where they could do with him as they wished.
Just because he didn’t fight back might mean he didn’t want to not that he couldn’t whispered a vindictive voice inside her. Like maybe he didn’t believe someone he thought he knew—someone he worked alongside every day—would try to kill him.
“Concentrate dammit,” Kelly muttered.
She examined every inch of the floor surrounding Tyrone’s body noting the extent of the blood pool, the level of clotting.
She crouched and tentatively touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek. His skin was cool to the touch.
Too long. Too late . . .
She took a couple of attempts to rise again and made it only then because she clung to the wall by the doorway. Her hand slipped, snagging at her palm. When she looked she found it already grazed from—
A jagged image flashed into her mind of trying to grab at the rough surface and being dragged away by a fist wrapped in her hair. She reached up, found a tender patch on her scalp.
“I did not do this.”
The words echoed in the blank space, but this time—for the first time—they held conviction.
27
The patrol dispatched in response to the anonymous triple-nine call sat in traffic within sight of Tower Bridge.
Behind the wheel was a veteran called Ferris with an undistinguished twenty-three-year career behind him of quietly doing as little as he could get away with. He liked the uniform and the weight that came with it but had long abandoned any kind of ambitions for advancement.
Alongside him twitching in the passenger seat was an overly keen probationer called Jacobson who was still desperate to make a name for himself. Probably—as Ferris had commented cynically in the canteen only that morning—by doing something heroically daft that would read out in glowing terms at his memorial service.
“Come on mate. Use your blues and twos can’t you?” Jacobson protested now. “It’s an emergency isn’t it?”