The Various Haunts of Men (Simon Serrailler 1)

He filled the electric kettle and set out coffee mug and milk. He drank, and ate bread and cheese and an apple from his bag. Everywhere around him was silent. He lifted up a corner of the blind. The road outside was still deserted.

He went out of the office and into the workroom. Everything was as he had last left it. No one had been here. Why would they? They might track him down here eventually but for now this was his refuge and his home, the place where he felt safe and where he felt most himself, most alive.

He unbolted the door in the back wall. In here, the machinery hummed softly, soothingly, reassuring him. He checked the dials. They were all correct, all as usual.

He could begin. He would have to work hard but that was never a difficulty for him here. He took off his jacket and hung it up, got a fresh gown from the shelf and slipped his arms into it. He smiled slightly, imagining everything that would be going on by now in the world beyond.

An hour later, he stood in the centre of the main workroom. They were all here, all round him, on trolleys. His friends. He went to each of them and touched them gently. He spoke to them. He needed them now. They were no longer just the things he worked with, they had changed. They had a value to him far beyond the original.

‘Debbie,’ he said, and touched her cold, stiff face, before moving to each of the others in turn. Then he fetched a stool and simply sat peacefully, surrounded by those he loved.

Just after nine thirty, DCI Simon Serrailler’s car turned into the drive of Aidan Sharpe’s house. As he got out, the front door opened and a middle-aged woman came quickly towards him.

‘Have you come to tell me bad news?’

Serrailler flicked his ID card.

‘I knew it, I knew … please tell me what’s happened.’

‘I’m sorry, you are …?’

‘Julie Cooper, I’m Mr Sharpe’s practice manager … please tell me what has happened.’

‘Can we go inside, Mrs Cooper?’

She hesitated, then turned, still talking, slightly hysterically, as she led him into the reception area.

‘Please just tell me.’

‘I’ve come to see Mr Aidan Sharpe. I gather he isn’t here?’

‘Well, no, of course, that’s what I mean.’

‘I don’t come with any news. I want to interview Mr Sharpe.’

‘When I got here, everything was just normal … only he’s always in first, always getting ready, and he wasn’t, so I went through to the house … he isn’t there either, I don’t think he’s been in all night and his car isn’t here. Something’s wrong, he has never done anything like this.’

‘When did you last see Mr Sharpe?’

‘Yesterday afternoon. I left at five as usual. He was here then.’

‘Did he say he was going anywhere?’

‘No. Of course he didn’t, I’d have remembered, wouldn’t I?’

‘Did he behave normally? Was there anything unusual about him that you noticed?’

‘No. Nothing at all. Nothing … I hope you’re going to find out what’s happened, where Mr Sharpe is, I –’

‘I’d like you to stay here please, in case Mr Sharpe comes back. I imagine you’ve work you can do?’

‘I have to let his patients for the day know … I’ve been trying to make a start.’

‘Fine, if you could get on with that. There’ll be an officer here, in case Mr Sharpe returns. Don’t worry about that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We need to interview him, Mrs Cooper.’

*

By the time Simon arrived, the teams who had been crawling over every inch of Freya’s house were still working, turning what had been a home into a crime scene, invading, scouring, prying, fingerprinting, photographing. What the pathologist did to a body the forensic team did to a house, violating everything – it always seemed to him like this, in spite of the respectful way in which the professions were taught to go about their business.

He walked slowly into Freya Graffham’s house, and at once her image was there in front of him, as it had not been until this moment. He saw her slight figure, her cap of hair, her sharp profile. The house was her, exactly her, he saw it at once. Comfortable, easy, tidy … he looked at the books, the sheaf of choral music left on the table – last night’s concert, in which his mother had taken part too; he liked it at once here, the atmosphere was welcoming and agreeable, quite informal, very distinctive.

‘Morning, sir.’

The white-overalled officer glanced up from the section of carpet beneath a low table, from which he was extracting small tufts with tweezers and dropping them into a polythene bag.

‘Anything yet?’

‘Lots of prints. Not necessarily his though. Some dark hairs on the back of that chair, shoe print out in the garden … You should have enough to go on. As long as there’s a comparison of course.’

‘I want it yesterday.’

‘You always do.’

‘This one’s different.’

‘I know, sir. I didn’t know the sergeant myself but it’s always the worst, one of your own. Any idea what it was about?’

‘Yes.’

Simon went out of the open kitchen door and looked down the narrow garden. Grass, a lilac tree, a couple of rose bushes. Wall. Fence. She wasn’t a gardener then, just liked a bit of outdoor space.

He walked a few paces across the grass. Two white suits were working on their hands and knees in the soil at the far end. He left them to it. For the moment he would simply carry on, let the boys do their stuff, get Sharpe – and they would get Sharpe, that wouldn’t be hard. Tie it up. Then he could go home and close the door of his flat, and try to work out what he felt about Freya Graffham.

By five, the reports had come through.

‘Nathan?’

‘Sir?’

‘Sharpe left his car in Freya’s street. He won’t get far, we’ve got his description out. You’d better try his house. I’ve put a couple of uniform up there in case he turns up.’

‘Which he won’t.’

‘Probably not. But get a photo of him, will you? Put a picture out to the press with a description. When you’ve done that, you might as well go home.’

‘No chance. I’m here until we get him.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, it might be days.’

‘For tonight any road. I’m not budging, guv. I mean, are you off home to put your feet up?’

No one else but Nathan, Simon Serrailler thought as he put his phone away, could have got a smile out of him just now.

*

Aidan Sharpe had apparently been camera shy. They turned his house upside down, to the distress of Julie Cooper, and found nothing at all.

‘There ain’t no pictures of anyone,’ Nathan said as they trawled through. ‘You’d think the bleedin’ camera hadn’t been invented.’

‘I know there was one in the paper,’ the receptionist said suddenly, ‘it was a while ago, at a professional dinner. I don’t remember it as being much good. But if it would help you find him …’ No one had told her why her employer was wanted. ‘I hope it hasn’t anything to do with those others,’ she had said when Nathan had arrived. ‘Those missing women. Do you think it has?’

Nathan felt sorry for her.

‘Which paper was it?’

‘The Echo, but as I said, it was a while ago.’

‘Shouldn’t think he’s changed much.’

Nor had he. The paper scanned the image and e-mailed it through to Lafferton station. Aidan Sharpe stood, wearing a dinner jacket and holding a glass, looking faintly supercilious in a group of half a dozen other men.

Simon Serrailler stared down at the face, the small beard, the carefully combed-back hair, the black tie, the odd eyes. He had rarely felt like this. He couldn’t afford to. His job was detection, not vengeance, not judgement, not even punishment, but looking at the smug image of Aidan Sharpe he felt a desire for them all which was biblical in its intensity.

He picked up the phone and called Nathan in.

‘Get this copied, get them to do as good a job as they can of separating him out and making the image clearer. I want it in tomorrow morning’s papers and you can go up to the business park first thing and hawk it about, see if there’s anything …’

‘Right. I suppose it’s something to get on with.’ He glanced directly up at Simon, his monkey face bruised-looking, his eyes red with tiredness and distress. Serrailler understood him absolutely. He needed to clutch at any straw, go hard at anything at all, to convince himself that he was helping to pin down Freya Graffham’s killer. If Serrailler had told him to walk barefoot to Bevham and back again on the off chance that it might be useful, Nathan would have done it.

‘You can start as early as you want,’ he said now, ‘but when you’ve sorted out the pictures, go home, eat and get some sleep. Otherwise you’re no use to me and I’ll sign you off. Understood?’

‘Guv.’

Nathan took the print-out and left.

Half an hour later, Simon drove his own car out of the station and headed, not for Cathedral Close, but out on to the road, and his sister’s farmhouse.

Fifty-Three

He waited, sitting without moving as if in meditation, until just after midnight when he heard the security patrol go round, before putting the things he had brought with him back into the holdall and stowing it away in the front-office cupboard. They would find it easily of course – he was simply being tidy. He cleared the instrument table, folded it back against the wall and swept the floor.

Then he said goodbye. He spent a few moments with each of them, touching their faces, putting his hand over theirs, speaking to them quietly. He said their names, as if giving them a blessing. He gave thanks to them and for them.

Earlier, he had read over the details of the way each of them had died, from their file.

Angela Randall – stab wounds causing fatal haemorrhage.

Debbie Parker – strangulation.

Tim Galloway – blunt trauma to the left temple.

Iris Chater – cardiac arrest.

Only the drowning of the dog was left unrecorded.

When his notes were found and the discoveries he had made understood and made public, what they had contributed would be recognised, at the same time as his own work would be hailed. People would understand then. If there was anything to forgive they would forgive him.

He hesitated before deciding to leave them here in repose together and not replace them in the inner room. It would not be for long. It would not take much cleverness to track the unit down and find them. They would come to no harm.

He glanced round, hitched on his jacket and stowed all he needed for the journey in one of the pockets. Then, for the last time, he went outside and locked the door behind him.

It was a cool night and there was a half-moon. He was surprised at how much he had enjoyed all the walking. He could have walked across England, had he needed to go so far. He counted his own paces, not striding, not going too fast, enjoying the smell of the night and the sight of the corn-coloured moon riding ahead of him, low in the sky.

Lafferton asleep. He was coming to know it almost as well as he knew it by day, though never as well as he had known it during those hours of first light. He liked to have the streets to himself, to see darkened windows, to see a mouse scuttle, a cat stare from a wall with hostile eyes.

He felt quite calm. He did not think, did not look back, did not let his mind hover over events either in triumph or regret. More than anything else, he was confident because matters had not been taken out of his hands, as he had feared. He was still his own master.

He came to the perimeter road and, for a moment, had to press himself quickly against the elephantine trunk of a tree as a car flashed by, its headlamps on, but then there was nothing but quietness and stillness, just as he had always known it here.

He stepped on to the grass and began to climb, steadily and with a calm purpose, up the Hill.

A little after six thirty, Netty Salmon, large and stout and dressed in her usual old sheepskin, marched her Dobermanns up the Hill. It was drizzling slightly and there was a crown of low misty cloud around the trees at the summit. But weather was of little interest to Ms Salmon and had no effect on her, she merely strode on, calf muscles flexing rhythmically, up the steep path behind the dogs.

The mountain bikers were not about yet, there were no other walkers, and she had not seen the pathetic little man looking for his Yorkshire terrier for weeks.

She was not a woman who analysed her own feelings but, if she had done so, she would have said she was content. She liked her own company perfectly well and that of the Dobermanns better. She paused at the usual spot to get her breath and as she did so, the dogs began to bark. But there was nothing for them to bark at. They would pursue a rabbit or a squirrel but they did not bark in this way at either. They barked at strangers. And at anything odd or alarming.

Netty Salmon looked up. The dogs had raced to the top of the Hill and were standing at the foot of one of the trees and now their barking was furious and urgent. She was short-sighted. She had to clamber nearer before she could see. It was pointless to try and silence them. Barking like that would not be quieted.

Then she saw it, swinging from the high branch of the tree – she peered into the drizzle. Something had been put up there, some sort of figure. An effigy. Netty Salmon was puzzled. She climbed the last stretch until she was beside the hysterical dogs, immediately beneath the oak tree, and then looked up again.

No. Not an effigy. She was not a nervous woman. She did not scream when she recognised a man’s body hanging from a rope. She merely turned and began to march back down the Hill, dragging the dogs, until she saw a pair of young men on mountain bikes riding towards her and held her arms out wide to stop them.

Three police cars, including that of DCI Simon Serrailler, swept up the avenue of the business park and turned left. Nathan Coates was waiting with two men outside a small green-painted unit at the far end.

‘Nathan.’

‘Morning, guv. This is Mr Connolly the site manager and Terry Putterby the security guard.’

‘OK, what have we got?’

‘Mr Connolly here recognised the press photo, like I said, only he called himself Dr Fentiman. But it’s him.’

‘Right.’ Serrailler looked at the site manager. ‘Do you have keys?’

‘I do, but these units are rented in good faith, I think I should –’

‘No one’s blaming you for anything. I do have a warrant.’