Black Heart: A totally gripping serial-killer thriller Read online

  ‘It’s okay Daniel,’ she says gently, ‘really.’

  I swallow back the tears that have formed in the corners of my eyes and hate myself.

  ‘Are you just not ready or is it me?’

  I want to look at her but don’t. I’m consumed by guilt, guilt that I almost let Rachel go by making love with another woman and guilt for not making love to Florence, naked Florence who is lying next to me on a hotel bed I have paid for. And it’s such a strange and alien experience, turning down a beautiful, naked woman, one who actually seems genuinely interested in and turned on by me. It’s a first for me and, I suspect, for her too.

  I want to tell her that it’s not her – that it’s me – but even in my head it sounds so corny that I inwardly cringe. And the truth is, I’m not entirely sure if it is her or me, or both of us, or everything, or the drink, or the case I’m working on…

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I finally say. I feel drained, exhausted, hit by a sudden and powerful malaise. ‘I should go.’

  I sit up but she gently touches my arm.

  ‘Don’t go Daniel,’ she says and the tone of her voice almost undoes me. ‘Stay here, lay with me, just lay with me.’

  And although I’m overcome by an urgent need to leave, I do as she asks because I can’t be that cruel. It’s not her fault.

  We’re both silent for a while and it’s not uncomfortable exactly, more resigned. It feels like an age before Florence says, ‘tell me about her, tell me about Rachel.’

  * * *

  The sun is rising as I make my way home; it’s a beautiful morning, clear and bright, the promise of a new day unfolding. I like this time of the morning, not least because London looks different without the traffic, almost serene.

  I switch the radio on; it’s playing Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’. I’m desperate to get home, to shower, to wash away some of the guilt and sadness that’s sticking to me like sweat. Coffee and a shower, that’s what I need. Then I’ll be okay…

  My phone rings. Immediately I think it’s her, but then I realise she doesn’t have my work number.

  ‘Are you awake Dan?’

  It’s Delaney. It irks me, the way he calls me ‘Dan’ in such an overfamiliar way, even though I know it probably shouldn’t. I think about berating him over the phone-record cock-up and for passing the buck to Davis, but I overlook it because there’s an urgency in his tone; it’s all over those few words, and it’s making me edgy.

  ‘Well I am now,’ I say, ‘why?’

  There’s a very slight pause before he says, ‘Because there’s been another one. We’ve got another body.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The smell is unholy: putrid, choking, cold and heavy. I’m trying not to gag before I even enter the room. It’s difficult to describe just how rancid it is to those who’re lucky enough never to have smelt the scent of death, or a decaying corpse. People ask me about dead bodies sometimes, whether I’ve seen any, what they look and smell like, and even Rach was curious. But it’s very difficult to put into words just how vile, how offensive and aggressive the smell is. It varies of course from body to body and in different circumstances: how long they’ve been dead, the temperature, that sort of thing. But it’s a smell you instantly recognise and never ever forget. Gasses and compounds in a decomposing human body that is liquefying from the inside out, emit an odour that is unmistakable, instantly recognizable and yet indescribable. I suppose if you took a full rubbish bin filled with leftovers and left it out in strong sun for a week, then added a gallon of diarrhoea, some rotting fish guts and entrails, and a thousand rotten eggs then you’d get something close – and that’s the best death could ever smell like. It really is that sickening.

  Forensics have sealed the apartment off and the photographers have just turned up. I put my sleeve over my mouth in a futile attempt to prevent myself from inhaling the stench.

  It’s like a scene from a horror film, like that flick Seven that Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in, where Kevin Spacey severs Gwyneth Paltrow’s head and puts it in a box at the end. The victim is sitting up in bed, slumped more than sitting really, and her head is hanging forwards, her chin resting on the left side of her chest like a marionette whose strings have been abruptly cut. Her skin is pallid grey and mottled. Blood is noticeable on the sheets, black, dried pools of it stain the floral duvet. Her exposed wrists are cut open vertically. I notice the pill bottle, a few tablets scattered on the bed. There’s a book, open, on the small bedside table next to her. The white venetian blinds are open and the sunlight streaming through them illuminates the scene like a film set, highlighting dust particles and Lord only knows what else that’s in the air, which incidentally I’m breathing in. Then I see the bear, lying at the end of the bed. It’s on its side as though it’s been randomly discarded, not strategically placed like it was with Baxter. It’s wearing a dress this time, an apron dress in a small floral Liberty print. I want to pick it up but the smell is like a barrier, preventing me.

  ‘Same MO,’ Delaney says miserably. He looks puce.

  I nod, unable to answer him. I turn my back to him but I can sense the exasperation and regret coming off him in waves. We weren’t able to save this one. The toggies are moving around in their white suits like giant marshmallows as flashes go off and I ask if Vic Leyton is on her way. Delaney nods. I take a deep breath, largely for motivation, and walk towards the body, crouching down to take a look at her.

  ‘So who found her?’

  ‘Security bloke,’ Delaney says, flipping through his notebook, noticeably blinking – the acrid smell even gets in your eyes somehow. ‘A Simon Johns, he’s downstairs with the DS. He’s in a bad way, Dan.’

  ‘Get him up here,’ I say sharply. I can’t help it. I’m fucking furious, with myself, more than anyone.

  Delaney leaves and Vic Leyton arrives almost simultaneously. I can’t help but feel glad to see the back of him, rightly or wrongly his presence winds me up. I pick up the bear from the bed. ‘Mummy Bear,’ I say under my breath as I grapple with the nausea that’s rising up from my guts to my solar plexus, and threatening to spill itself out onto the duvet. This is as grim as it gets.

  ‘So, Dan,’ Vic says as she enters the crime scene, ‘we meet again. And so soon. People will talk.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  ‘She’s been dead about a week I’d say, maybe a day either side. Difficult to determine the exact cause of death. In usual circumstances I’d say it was blood loss as a result of self-inflicted wounds to the ventricular artery, but hazarding a guess, I’m sensing these aren’t usual circumstances, so we will have to wait until the post-mortem to be sure.’ Vic turns to me, ‘It’s another one, isn’t it Dan?’

  She’s using my forename again. It hints at the severity of the situation.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘the bear…’

  Vic nods. ‘The wounds are deep,’ she continues in that clinical, observational way of hers, yet I sense a slight humanity to them that I haven’t heard before.

  She goes straight up to the body, fearlessly, and I can’t help but think that she might be someone worth knowing on a personal level. The smell is overwhelming me now and I know that soon I’ll have to leave in case it stays with me forever.

  ‘Female, obviously, late forties or early fifties I’d say. Do we know who she is?’

  ‘We’re waiting on ID,’ I say, routed to the spot. ‘Building security discovered her – the smell…’ I explain.

  Vic nods. ‘Yes, well, Chanel wouldn’t want to bottle it. If the heating is on timer it will have helped speed things up a bit… and the sunlight… So, are we dealing with a serial killer?’

  ‘It’s a fairy tale, Vic. Goldilocks is acting out a fairy tale… Daddy Bear and now Mummy Bear…’

  Vic blinks at me and I actually see a flicker of horror cross her features, ‘… and Baby Bear,’ she finishes. But we both know she doesn’t need to.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  He looks ex
actly how you might expect someone to if they’d just unexpectedly found a ripe, rotting corpse sat up in bed. He’s running his hands through his hair and can’t seem to decide whether sitting down or getting up and pacing helps. I understand the conundrum. When Rach died I paced. I paced the apartment for days, weeks even, like a man waiting outside a hospital room for his child to be born, or for a life-changing operation to be over. Only there was never any outcome. There was no baby at the end of the pacing, no doctor who appeared and looked at me with gravitas to say, ‘she’ll be okay.’ Death is so final. Too final. How do you come to terms with such finality? The brain doesn’t factor in the end of something or someone. Only time reconciles this, or so they tell me. But time doesn’t heal. Time just passes.

  And yet I still find myself passing off clichés and platitudes to people, to victims of loss and crime, because who the fuck wants to hear the truth?

  I mentally pull myself together. I’m at work. ‘Simon, is it?’

  He’s hovering outside the door of the apartment, beside himself. He’s just seen a putrid, rotting corpse. One for the pub I suppose.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry you had to see that,’ I say, like it’s somehow down to me. ‘Do you need some water?’

  He shakes his head, still pacing the small area. ‘They complained about the smell, the stench, you know? The couple below, especially. So I had to go up… I had to have a look.’ He’s understandably agitated.

  We’ve got an ID on the victim now, Karen Walker, forty-eight, though the poor bitch sure as shit looks a lot older in the (rotting) flesh. She owned the apartment, but hadn’t lived there too long by all accounts. Recently divorced. She’s known to us, a victim of domestic violence, her old man served a six-month stretch for kicking the living daylights out of her back in the early 2000s. I tell the boys to locate him immediately, but somehow I know this isn’t his handiwork. That gut instinct again.

  ‘Karen… did you know her?’

  His jumper looks like it’s shrunk in the wash. Bad material.

  ‘No, no… I didn’t… not really, not by name… I’d seen her a few times, coming and going, you know… like I do everyone here. You get to recognise people, you know, their faces. She was friendly enough, always said hello and smiled at me… polite… seemed normal, nice, you know? Normal…’ he says again, ‘she weren’t stuck-up like… well, not like some of them are here. More money than manners most of them. She seemed a bit timid, shy, or at least I got that impression – a bit jumpy you know? Nervous type…’

  He’s seen death for the first time and he’s blathering. It usually goes one of two ways: people either can’t shut up or they clam up. And he’s definitely the former. He needs a brandy. And yeah, before you think it, they ain’t paying him enough.

  ‘Okay, thanks Simon.’ I say.

  Davis is here now. Simon is continuing to mutter to himself. We’ll get fuck-all sense from him tonight and I make a mental note to try again tomorrow, once his initial shock has had a chance to dissipate into something more lucid and he’s had a little sleep, if he can get any, poor fucker.

  I nod at Davis and go to leave.

  ‘It’s been a weird couple of weeks… weird shit happening… first that bird… that girl last week and now this…’ Simon mumbles.

  I turn back around. ‘What girl is that Simon?’

  He’s shaking his head. ‘The girl who lives in the opposite apartment… the one opposite hers – the dead woman’s.’

  ‘Okay,’ I reply as calmly as possible, ‘what about her? What happened?

  ‘She wanted to see the CCTV. She bought me pizza and beer… she… she… Fuck!’ He’s pulling at his hair again, looking very distressed, embarrassed even.

  I’m silent.

  ‘Look,’ he says, ‘it may be nothing – probably fuck all – but this girl… I think she may have drugged me.’

  Chapter Forty

  ‘I need you to run a check on someone called Danni-Jo Nichols, female,’ I tell Harding. I give her the address and tell her to get back to me as soon as she can.

  ‘She’s not answering the door, Gov… she’s not in.’ Delaney looks at me.

  ‘We’ll come back later,’ I say. We need to talk to Danni-Jo, urgently. I’m inclined to kick her door in and worry about the consequences later, but I can’t afford a mistake at this point.

  Simon Johns tells me his story with a mix of acute embarrassment coupled with an intuitive nag that something is definitely amiss. He needs to get it off his chest. Danni-Jo, he tells me, is a real looker. So the fact she had showed an interest, a sexual interest no less, in a middle-aged, aesthetically challenged no-mark like him naturally set off some alarm bells. He doesn’t say this of course, because he doesn’t need to. Poor bloke has faced enough humiliation and upset. He’s cringing as he tells me what happened, and I can see he’s inwardly berating himself for being stupid enough to have allowed his ego – and dick – to fall for what was quite clearly one of the oldest ploys in the book.

  He tells me he woke up some hours later from what felt like the deepest sleep of his life, ‘almost like a coma’ as he puts it. And his penis is hanging out of his trousers, exposed. He says there was a porn film playing on repeat on his screen, but he has no recollection of owning it or ever having seen it before. He feels the need to express most vehemently that he isn’t into schoolgirls and never has been, except for when he was a schoolboy himself. I nod. I believe him. He says he can’t remember too much – what time of the day it was even, but that it was dark when he came round. He didn’t know how long he’d been out for, or much about what had happened before, only that the girl from apartment six, the fit one, had come to see him to ask about CCTV footage. Something about her brother and missing items… he can’t quite remember and I watch him struggle with frustration as he attempts to recall more details. They must’ve eaten pizza because when he woke up there was a half-eaten pepperoni in a box on his desk and a pack of Budweiser, two of which were empty. He assumes he drank them, or they drank one each. Simon tells me he knows it’s stupid and that most men would’ve counted their lucky stars that a girl like that wanted to, well, you know, but he doesn’t know what took place and he feels violated and used, like he’s been set up, which tells me he’s a fairly normal person with normal reactions. He explains that there was nothing missing from the room when he woke up, aside from Danni-Jo of course. But the CCTV footage had all been wiped. I ask him what was on it, if he can remember seeing anything unusual, anything different, or if this Danni-Jo’s ‘brother’ could be spotted on the footage? He shakes his head. He can’t remember.

  ‘I feel like such a twat,’ Simon says, ‘like this bitch has really taken the piss, tried to set me up, make me look like some kind of nonce or something…’

  I nod sympathetically. It could’ve been worse I think: she might’ve slit your wrists. But I don’t say that.

  My phone rings and I hold a finger up to Simon to excuse myself. He stops talking, but not pacing or running his fingers through his thinning hair.

  It’s Harding.

  ‘There is no Danni-Jo, Gov, it’s a bogus ID, another one. The apartment actually belongs to someone called Rebecca Harper. She’s thirty-one years old, from London, no previous…’

  I rub my temples and tell Harding to hold on while I ask Simon if he would recognise this woman, this femme fatale who allegedly drugged and violated him. He nods without hesitation and tell me he knows exactly what the bitch looks like and that, in fact, he’s got her on CCTV. I tell Harding to get some photo identification of this Miss Harper and that I’ll be back at the nick soon before hanging up.

  ‘Can you look back through the footage, past footage, and see if you can get her up on screen?’

  Simon nods. ‘Yeah, she’s in and out all the time you know… although I haven’t seen her all week.’ He looks at me sheepishly. ‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ he says and I brace myself as I nod encouragingly.

  ‘Okay—’


  ‘There was no couple complaining about any smell. The apartment below is vacant, has been for about six months… I went up to her apartment, Danni-Jo’s. I wanted to speak to her, have it out with her I suppose. I mean, she could’ve got me sacked, my reputation would’ve been in ruins if someone had found me like that. I was mad, you know… freaked out. But when I got up to the top floor… well, that’s when I noticed the smell. Fuck me,’ he pulls a face, ‘it was awful, the closer I got—’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell him.

  ‘I knocked on Danni-Jo’s door, rung the bell, even called out her name and said who it was, but there was no answer. It was silent, so I assumed she wasn’t in, guessed she was working or something. She told me she worked funny hours, was a student or something… can’t remember what she told me she was studying.’ He’s looking down at his cheap shoes. ‘Anyway, I put the smell down to the cat—’

  ‘The cat?’

  ‘Yeah, the dead lady’s… Karen’s cat. She wasn’t supposed to have one. You’re not allowed pets in the building. It’s an upmarket place, you know. But I knew she had one and turned a blind eye. Sort of felt sorry for the woman somehow. She always seemed a poor old soul, downtrodden, even though she lived in luxury… I thought maybe she’d not changed the litter or something and that was the reason for the hum.’

  ‘Some hum,’ I reply.

  ‘I knocked on Karen’s door and no one answered so I went back the next day, and the next until the stench really started kicking up and then… well, that’s when I sensed, when I knew, that something was really wrong. Danni-Jo hadn’t answered her door for ages and neither had Karen. Then some estate agent guy came round with some Japanese dude and he said something about the smell on the way out, asking me to get it sorted immediately or else he would complain to the management company. And so I went up there again, you know, with the spare key. She – Karen – had locked herself out of her apartment not so long ago and had to call the emergency locksmiths. I had a spare key she’d given me. So I go up there… and by the time I reach the second landing the smell is pretty fucking bad, like I’m gagging and everything and—’