For a moment I stare at him, crumpled on the ground. Then, crablike, I scuttle across the courtyard. Once I get my legs moving, they still do the job. It might not be pretty, but I’ve never been Roger Bannister.
A police-dog handler is searching for a scent along the canal bank. He sees me coming and takes a step back. I keep going. It takes two of them to hold me. Even then I want to keep running.
Ruiz has me by the shoulders. “Where is he?” he yells. “Where’s Bobby?”
9
My mother made the best milky tea. She would always put an extra scoop of tea leaves in the pot and another slurp of milk in my cup. I don’t know where Ruiz managed to find such a brew, but it helps to wash the taste of blood and petrol from my mouth.
Sitting in the front seat of a squad car, I hold the cup with both hands in a vain attempt to stop them from trembling.
“You should really get that seen to,” Ruiz says. My bottom lip is still bleeding. I touch it gingerly with my tongue.
Ruiz takes the cellophane off a packet of cigarettes and offers me one.
I shake my head. “I thought you’d given up cigarettes.”
“I blame you. We chased that stolen bloody hire car for near on fifty miles. Found two fourteen-year-olds and a kid of eleven inside it. We also staked out the railway stations, airports, bus terminals… I had every officer in the northwest looking for you.”
“Wait till you get my invoice.”
He regards his cigarette with a mixture of affection and distaste. “Your confession was a nice touch. Very creative. I had the press hyenas sniffing everything except my ass— asking questions, talking to relatives, stirring up the silt. You gave me no choice.”
“You found the red edge?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the other names on the list?”
“We’re still looking into them.”
He leans against the open door, studying me thoughtfully. The glint of sunlight off the canal picks up the Tower of Pisa pin in his tie. His distant blue eyes have fixed on the ambulance parked a hundred feet away, framed against the factory wall.
The pain in my chest and throat is making me feel light-headed. I wince as I pull a rough gray blanket around my shoulders. Ruiz tells me how he spent all night checking the details from the child protection file. He ran the names through the computer and pulled up the unsolved deaths.
Bobby had worked in Hatchmere as a council gardener up until a few weeks before Rupert Erskine died. He and Catherine McBride attended the same group therapy sessions for self-mutilators at an outpatient clinic in West Kirkby in the mid-nineties.
“What about Sonia Dutton?” I ask.
“Nothing. He doesn’t match the description of the pusher who sold her the drug.”
“He worked at her swimming club.”
“I’ll check it out.”
“How did he get Catherine to come to London?”
“She came for the job interview. You wrote her a letter.”
“No I didn’t.”
“Bobby wrote it for you. He stole stationery from your office.”
“How? When?”
Ruiz can see I’m struggling. “You mentioned the word Nevaspring sewn into Bobby’s shirt. It’s a French company that delivers water coolers to offices. We’re checking the CCTV footage from the medical center.”
“He made deliveries…”
“Walked right past security with a bottle over his shoulder.”
“That explains how he managed to get into the building when he arrived so late for some of his appointments. He must have stolen the stationery and then written to Catherine, inviting her to apply for the secretarial job. What about the letter— the one that arrived at the house?”
“She wrote dozens of them to your friend Dr. Owen. Bobby must have come across one of them and changed the address.”
Across the waste ground, visible above the broken fence, Bobby is lying on a stretcher. A paramedic holds a transfusion bottle above his head.
“Is he going to be OK?” I ask.
“You haven’t saved the taxpayers the cost of a trial, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No.”
“You’re not feeling sorry for him, are you?”
I shake my head. Maybe one day— a long while from now— I’ll look back at Bobby and see a damaged child who grew into a defective adult. Right now, after what he did to Elisa and the others, I’m happy to have half killed the bastard.
Ruiz watches as two detectives climb into the back of the ambulance and sit on either side of Bobby. “You told me that Catherine’s killer was going to be older… more practiced.”
“I thought he would be.”
“And you said it was sexual.”
“I said her pain aroused him, but the motive wasn’t clear. Revenge was one of the possibilities. You know it’s strange but even when I was sure it was Bobby, I still couldn’t picture him being there, making her cut herself. It was too sophisticated a form of sadism. But then again, he infiltrated all those lives— my life. He was like a piece of scenery that nobody notices because we concentrate on the foreground.”
“You saw him before anyone else did.”
“I tripped over him in the dark.”
The ambulance pulls away. Waterbirds lift out of the reeds. They twist and turn across the pale sky. Skeletal trees stretch upward as if trying to pluck the birds from the air.
Ruiz gives me a ride to the hospital. He wants to be there when Bobby gets out of surgery. We follow the ambulance along St. Pancras Way and turn into the accident and emergency bay. My legs have seized up almost completely now that the adrenalin has drained out of them. I struggle to get out of the car. Ruiz commandeers a wheelchair and pushes me into a familiar white-tiled public hospital waiting room.
As usual the Detective Inspector gets off on the wrong foot by calling the triage nurse “sweetheart” and telling her to get her “priorities sorted.” She takes her annoyance out on me, shoving her fingers between my ribs with unnecessary zeal. I feel like I’m going to pass out.
The young doctor who stitches up my lip has bleached hair, an old-fashioned feather cut and a necklace of crushed shells. She has been on holiday somewhere warm and the skin on her nose is pink and peeling.
Ruiz has gone upstairs to keep tabs on Bobby. Not even an armed guard outside the surgery and a general anesthetic is insurance enough for him to relax. Maybe he’s trying to make amends for not believing me sooner. I doubt it.
Lying on a gurney, I try to keep my head still as I feel the needle slide into my lip and the thread tug at the skin. Scissors snip the ends and the doctor takes a step back, appraising her handiwork.
“And my mother told me I’d never be able to sew.”
“How does it look?”
“You should have waited for the plastic surgeon but I’ve done OK. You’ll have a slight scar, just there.” She points to the hollow beneath her bottom lip. “Guess it’ll match your ear.” She tosses her latex gloves into a bin. “You still need an X-ray. I’m sending you upstairs. Do you need someone to push you or can you walk?”
“I’ll walk.”
She points to the lift and tells me to follow the green line to radiology on the fourth floor. Half an hour later Ruiz finds me in the waiting room. I’m hanging around for the radiologist to confirm what I already know from viewing the X-rays: two fractured ribs, but no internal bleeding.
“When can you make a statement?”
“When they strap me up.”
“It can wait till tomorrow. Come on, I’ll give you a lift home.”