The Night Stalker (Detective Erika Foster 2)

She held back for a few minutes and then joined the end of the queue. She kept him in her peripheral vision and looked at the cakes and pastries through the glass. This was the closest she had been to him so far – just three people separated them.

Yes, he was young, and he worked out. He could be strong. Although he was thin – vainly so.

She watched as he reached the head of the queue and flirted with the handsome young black barista, leaning over and putting his hand on the young man’s arm, spelling out his name, making sure it was written correctly on the cup.

Soon that cock-sucking mouth will breathe its last breath, she thought. Then she smiled at the barista and ordered a nice piece of fruitcake and a cappuccino.

‘What’s the name, love?’ asked the Barista.

‘It’s Mary,’ said Simone. ‘It must be quite boring, compared to the exotic names you hear.’

‘I like the name Mary,’ said the barista.

‘I got it from my mother. She’s called Mary, too. She’s in hospital right now. She’s very ill. I’m all she’s got.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said the barista. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

‘I’ll just take a copy of the Independent. I’m planning on reading to her later. She loves hearing all about things going on in the world.’

Simone took her paper, coffee and cake, and moved over to a seat.

All the time watching her future victim.

50

The break in the weather was short-lived. Over the next few days the sun began to beat down relentlessly again and progress on the case seemed to grind to a halt.

The Crimewatch reconstruction had remained on BBC iPlayer for a week and as people watched it on catch-up there were more phone calls and emails to work through.

As the remaining residents of Laurel Road returned from their holidays, word spread that their street had been featured in a nationwide TV reconstruction. Several of them now remembered seeing a young, dark-haired woman going door-to-door delivering leaflets, and others recalled a young girl delivering fruit and vegetable boxes, and a young girl in a plumber’s van fixing a drain close to Gregory Munro’s house.

This outburst of sightings spread the resources of Erika’s team even thinner. They went as far as tracking down the plumber, who turned out to be a fresh-faced young man, and a dark-haired woman who delivered the ‘Nature’s Finest’ seasonal weekly vegetable boxes around the local area. They both came in voluntarily, answered questions and even provided DNA samples. After a nail-biting twelve hours of waiting, the results came back negative. Their DNA didn’t match the samples taken from Jack Hart’s back door and the suicide bag.

Two of the residents from Laurel Road and one of Jack Hart’s neighbours came to Lewisham Row and worked with an officer on e-fits of the woman they had seen delivering leaflets. Erika had high hopes that this would lead to a breakthrough, but the images all came back looking like Lottie, the actress who had appeared in the Crimewatch episode.

However, the most depressing job had been tracking down the London-based people who had bought suicide bags through the three websites. So many of the phone calls had been with grieving parents and spouses, who had informed the police that yes, one of the bags had been purchased, and that the suicide attempt had been successful.

On the afternoon of the 15th of July, the atmosphere in the incident room was subdued. The previous day, six members of Erika’s team had been reassigned to a drug-trafficking case, and she had just finished a call with an angry man with three children whose wife had killed herself, and whose small daughter had been the one to find her body with the plastic bag over her head.

It was a Friday, and Erika could tell that the rest of her team was itching to get home and enjoy the weekend. She couldn’t blame them; they had been working flat out. They had little to show for all their hard work, and the newspapers were full of pictures of people crowding to the beach and local parks.

Moss and Peterson sat at their desks, along with Crane and Singh. Erika looked over at the whiteboards for what seemed the thousandth time, at the pictures of Gregory Munro and Jack Hart. There was now also an image taken from one of the suicide websites, of a tanned, bald shop mannequin lying in a dingy bedroom with a suicide bag rigged up with a pipe and gas canister. Its eyelids were shaded with purple and long eyelashes were painted on.

‘Boss, I’ve got Marsh on the phone,’ said Moss, covering the handset.

‘Can you tell him I’m out?’ Erika replied. She figured that more of her team was about to be reassigned and she couldn’t face another heated meeting.