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  So, she would walk the streets or sit in her car and observe, hoping deep inside that the man she wanted would turn up. But instead, she saw them come and go without incident. She was always surprised at first by how low-key things were. How nondescript the flats were, perfect for that secret liaison. She could almost understand why the men seemed to feel relatively relaxed going there. It was like they were visiting a friend, the flats were in nice buildings, but not too nice, the streets were quiet and the neighbours were all workers. Most of them were out during the day, and too tired at night to be watching what was going on around them.

  But for all that, it didn’t change the fact that one of these girls was eventually going to entertain the wrong person. Kate desperately wanted to prevent that from happening, but she knew she couldn’t, there were too many girls and too many punters out there. It would be impossible to police the whole area.

  She started to walk back to her car and as she felt the rain on her face, and the cold seeping into her bones, she saw Patrick’s car coming towards her. It threw her, it was the first time she had encountered him in weeks. She stepped into the shadow of a garden and waited till he had passed her by, she didn’t want him to notice her.

  As he drove past the streetlight she caught a glimpse of him. He looked good, but then he always did. He was wearing his heavy overcoat, and she knew that meant he was going out somewhere nice for the evening. She knew him so well. But where was he going? And, more importantly, why wasn’t she going with him? Why had this happened to them? She opened her car and sat behind the steering wheel. She was suddenly freezing, and she sat for long moments, wondering how her life had come to this.

  Patrick was nervous, he felt like a schoolboy on his first big date. He was suited and booted, but then he had always been a man who liked to dress well. He believed that a man was judged on how well turned out he was. But as he stood in the bar he felt overdone, the younger men around him were dressed casually, all open-necked shirts, collar-length hair and Italian loafers.

  He saw Danny arrive and cursed him under his breath. It was his sister he was hoping to see tonight, not him. He felt almost ashamed about his feelings for her. As if he was doing something wrong, something out of order. But he knew that was stupid, he was in a world where men of his age sought youth, where younger women were part and parcel of their credo. Look at me, I can still get it up. Look at me, she could be me daughter, but she ain’t. It was like an unspoken rule among them all: I can still pull the birds.

  Kate had been different, she had been someone to respect, someone he had felt was on a par with him. Now though, he felt she was no more than a fucking albatross that had been hanging round his neck for far too long. She had voided him in a moment, so she could get fucked. He had a life to live, and he was determined to live it with or without her.

  Danny waved at him happily, and he nodded an acknowledgement. Then Peter Bates came over to him and said loudly, ‘Here, Patrick, have you heard about Kevin Daly? His wife died this morning. Only thirty-nine, she had food poisoning of all things. Three kids under ten, what the fuck is all that about?’

  Patrick was shocked. Kevin was a good bloke and his wife had been a nice girl. Quiet and well dressed, she had sat out a hefty prison sentence for Daly, had waited patiently for him to come home.

  ‘That’s terrible, how is he?’

  Peter was busy getting the barmaid’s attention for a refill. ‘How do you think? He’s in a right fucking two and eight. Do you want a refill?’

  Patrick nodded.

  ‘Just shows you though, Pat. Enjoy your life while you’ve got it, you never know when it’s going to be over. Three little kids. Girls and all, they need their mums, girls.’

  Patrick nodded. ‘I know that, Pete. Girls do need the female touch.’

  Peter turned to face him then and Patrick could see the sorrow on his face as he said, ‘I’m sorry, Patrick, you know better than anyone what it’s like to lose your wife, and your daughter. My fucking big trap, I say things without thinking them through . . .’

  Patrick smiled sadly. ‘You’re right though, Pete, you should enjoy your life. Take it from me, you don’t know when it’s all going to be snatched from under your nose. Let’s face it, I found that out a long time ago.’

  He picked up his drink and looked towards the door that led to the office. Peter grinned then, a mischievous glint in his eye. ‘Go on, my son, get in there, she’s fucking right up for it. I’ve noticed you two circling each other like a pair of bare-knuckle boxers. She’s a nice girl and you ain’t getting any younger, boy.’

  Patrick looked into Peter’s face and he saw the age that had crept up on them all. They had known each other for well over thirty years. He had been best man at Peter’s first wedding; seventeen years old and on remand for robbery with violence, he had married his longtime girlfriend of three years to get himself a reduced sentence. But Peter had loved her, and the sad thing was, he still loved her. But he had fucked her over once too often. Women weren’t like men, they couldn’t turn a blind eye unless it suited them. Women knew the score from the off, and their mates gave them the strength to put up with it, until they decided different. Then they moved heaven and earth to see the man concerned pay through every orifice he possessed. Men though, if they had a bird who put it about, they either nutted her on the quiet or, in extreme cases, they swallowed their knobs rather than confront the truth. If they still wanted her back after she had seen fit to stretch herself out for a stranger, then that was their prerogative. It even made sense in some ways. Pat understood how a deep love could overcome the humiliation and the shame that a woman out on the cock could bring to a man. Personally, he would rather die than be made a fool of by anyone, let alone a female. Females, to his mind, should be above reproach, and intelligent enough to know that without him having to point it out to them.

  Winking saucily at Peter Bates, he made his way through to the office. As Pete said, life was too fucking short. He felt the excitement deep in the pit of his stomach, it had been years since he felt like this. He was almost breathless at the thought of her waiting for him.

  As he slipped through the doorway, he wondered what had kept him from approaching her for so long. After all, as he knew better than anyone, you really did only live once.

  Annie Carr was tired, and it showed. She looked at herself dispassionately in the toilet mirror and felt once more that she had long passed her sell-by date. She looked dishevelled, unkempt. Her skin was grey from lack of sleep and bad nutrition. Her hair needed a wash and a decent cut, her shoes were scuffed and worn for comfort and familiarity. At her age, she was in her prime if she believed the magazines she read in the canteen. She was also aware that she was letting life pass her by at an alarming rate. Turning from the mirror, she hurried away from her own reflection.

  As she walked into her office, she smiled sheepishly at Kate. Kate was very quiet, and Annie knew it was because of how she had been acting towards her, she knew she had been out of order. She’d taken out her frustrations on her friend, even going as far as to question Kate coming back to her own home. It was outrageous, because she knew that Kate would have welcomed her wholeheartedly if their positions had been reversed. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Kate. I’m sorry.’

  Kate looked at her friend, saw the stoop of her shoulders, the scruffiness of her attire, the sadness that enveloped her, and knew she was no different to her really. She had also taken out her frustrations on the person closest to her. And she’d also walked back into her house and taken it over without a thought for Annie, who had lived there for a long time and paid her for that privilege. But it went deeper than that, and they both knew it. She opened her own arms wide, and the two women hugged each other tightly.

  ‘I am so sorry, Kate . . .’

  ‘Listen, Annie, this is all part and parcel of being on a big case. You live, breathe and eat the fucker, and anyone who stands in your way gets the flak. If you want to stay in this g
ame you have to accept that no one else matters in the pursuit of a resolution. I’ve fallen out with everyone in my time, and so will you. But take my advice, Annie, don’t make the job your whole life. Leave something over for someone else. Don’t leave it until it’s too late, you’ll regret it.’

  Kate was genuinely sorry for Annie, because she knew that if she wasn’t careful she would end up not only alone, but achingly lonely. Annie reminded her so much of herself all those years ago. Still young enough to believe that there was time for a real life, but she would keep putting it off like Kate had. Then, one day, when you looked around, it was all gone, and the worst thing was, you never saw it happening until it was all too late.

  Annie smiled sadly. ‘I think it’s already too late for me, Kate. I stopped dating while I still had the looks. It didn’t seem to matter so much then, I just wanted a career. I wanted to be successful, wanted my life to make a difference somehow. But this has shown me how fucking futile it all is. We have all these dead girls, and nothing to go on. We have the papers and the public on our backs, wanting answers sooner rather than later. We have a man who has enough time to not only knock these girls out, but to torture them. After he makes them a cup of tea, of course. He then cleans up after himself, and wipes the whole place down. There is nothing for us to use, Kate, he has always pre-empted us. He has always made sure he is at least one step ahead. You’re right, I shouldn’t make my job my life, because I can’t even say with any certainty that I have any kind of life outside of work. All I ever wanted was this.’ She opened her arms wide, taking in the room and everything it encompassed.

  ‘This was all I needed. Now what I think about is the fact that I can’t work out how this man can bypass us on such a regular basis. It’s like we are outside looking in. This man knows more about crime scenes than I do. He leaves the girls dead and no trace at the scene. Nobody sees him, or hears him. We are chasing a ghost, Kate, a fucking ghost.’

  Kate knew that Annie was doing what everyone in their job did at some point, she was blaming herself for not stopping him. She was blaming herself because he had got the better of them.

  ‘He’s not a ghost, he’s a living, breathing person. We just need to get a break that’s all.’

  Annie looked at her as if she had never seen her before. ‘A break? Kate, he’s fucking laughing up his sleeve at us. We have nothing, do you get that? Nothing. He must think we are all complete idiots.’

  Kate hated the disillusionment in Annie’s voice, hated that she was already giving up, that she felt they wouldn’t be capable of finding this man.

  ‘Oh, Annie, you stupid girl, you stupid, stupid girl. Do you think we just wake up one day and know everything? This all takes time and experience, love. No one in the world can really understand why some people choose to do really terrible things to other people. Innocent people, people that end up dead. We have to try and find out who killed them, and why. That is our job, it’s what we do. Now there will always be someone who writes about it all, after the event. Psychiatrists who will try and explain away why this ponce felt the urge to kill these young girls. But listen to me, Annie, it’s crap. No one really knows why they do it. No one on God’s green earth can pinpoint what made that fucker decide to get up one day and go on a killing spree. It’s all conjecture, all shite.

  ‘Our job is to try and make some sense of it, try and bring him to task. We have to trawl through the statements, and the evidence we have gathered, and somehow we are expected to make some kind of sense out of it. You can’t just assume you will work it out. You can only work with what you’ve got. So try and remember that all that is expected of you is that you do the best you can. It’s all any of us can ever do, Annie. Our best, and sometimes we have to admit that our best just isn’t good enough. So, do me a favour, will you? Fucking grow up.

  ‘This bloke has been planning this for a very long time, and he has the edge because of that. We have to try and understand his logic. Even though it makes no sense to us, it makes sense to him, and that is what you have to remember. He has a reason for what he does, and he has the added benefit of planning and forethought. We come in after the main event, love. We basically clean up after him. We are the ones who see them dead and bloody. We are the ones who tell the families. We are the ones who try and make it right for the people left behind. But don’t you dare think that you will always find the answers, because you won’t, Annie. You can only work with what you’ve got, and if that isn’t enough, then you have to accept it.’

  Annie held her hand across her mouth, as if to stop herself from being sick. Kate felt the pain she was in. It was hard the first time, not that it ever really got any easier. But murder was part and parcel of their job. Most murders had a weird logic to them. A reasoning of sorts. It was the serial murders that made you lose faith, not just in yourself, but in everyone around you. They made you realise that there really were people out there capable of such hate, such extreme violence, and that they lived amongst us. These people were capable of feigning a normality that hid their crimes from the people around them. These people were out there, and they would always be out there, no matter how hard you tried to bring them to justice.

  Annie had to understand that their job was like any other. You just do the best that you can, even though the difference was that, in their job, if you fucked up, there was often a high price to pay. Annie believed that she would always catch the bad guy; well, the reality was that all they could ever really do was try their hardest. It wasn’t a guaranteed result. That was the difficult part. Sometimes you also had to watch people walk, even though you knew they were as guilty as hell. You had to learn to let it go.

  ‘Are you all right now, Annie?’

  Annie laughed then, a hard little laugh with no humour in it. ‘How can we ever be all right, Kate? It’s so fucking pointless.’

  ‘Now you’re finally getting it, Annie. Everything is pointless in the end. No one really gives a toss about anything five years after the event. There’re new murders, new cases, and our job is about the here and now. But what you have to remember is, when everyone else has forgotten about it, when no one cares any more, you will. You’ll remember the kids left behind, the mothers whose hearts are broken, and you will still be determined to find out who was responsible for all that heartache years later, even though no one else is interested any more, even though it seems an impossible task. It’s what makes us get up in the mornings, and it’s also why we wake up one day and find that, somewhere along the line, we’ve lost everyone we cared for. And even then, knowing all that, we still can’t walk away. Look at me, I am still here, still in this shit-hole, and still more interested in my job than my personal life. Don’t make the mistakes I did. I can’t let this life go. I retired, but I still can’t function without this place somewhere in my life. It consumes me, and do you know why that is? It’s because it stops me from having to join the real world.’

  ‘Oh, Kate, you don’t mean that.’

  ‘But that’s the trouble, Annie. I mean every word of it. I’m trying to help you. I watch you, and I see myself. Don’t allow yourself to give up on the people who care about you. At the end of the day, it’s really not worth it. I should have put my family first, but I never did. Patrick always stepped aside, allowed me to do what I wanted, and I took him for granted. I always put my feelings first, put my needs before his, before everyone’s. I always believed that he would be there for me, if and when I needed him. I walked away from him for my job, just because he was implicated in all this crap. And he wouldn’t have me back in his life now if I lay down and sang “Swanee” for him. So don’t tell me I don’t mean it, Annie. This is all I have left now, and I am trying to make sure that this never happens to you. One day you will wake up and find you are getting old, love, and you didn’t notice it happening. It creeps up on you, and you ignore it, pretend it’s not important. But it is, Annie. We can’t control what’s happening, we can only control the course our lives will take
.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and see Patrick? Try to make amends? It’s not too late, but you have to be the one to make the first move, even I can see that.’

  ‘That’s the point I’m trying to make, Annie. I can’t do that. I can’t let this go. I walked away from him without a backward glance because my work, such as it is, still means more to me than anything. That’s what I am trying to tell you. If you’re not careful, one day you will find that the job really is all you have left.’

  Annie knew Kate was right, she saw she was trying to help her. But she still knew that, like Kate, she wouldn’t rest in her bed until she had found out who was responsible for those girls’ deaths. Like Kate, she understood it was already too late for her to change.

  Chapter Eight

  Patrick was impressed with Eve’s flat. It was large and well proportioned, with high ceilings and original wood floors. She had done a fantastic job of bringing the place together. He knew from experience that it would have cost her a small fortune to have the floors sanded, relaid where necessary, and brought back to their former glory. He also liked the subdued colour scheme and the carefully chosen pieces of furniture. None of the brand-new, DFS, pay-for-it-three-years-later rubbish. Each piece was a work of art in itself. Eve had a good eye for detail, and she obviously liked the comfort that handmade furniture guaranteed. The place looked warm, inviting, and it made Patrick relax. He liked that she was intelligent enough to live in such an environment. It had been a long time since he had visited a woman like this, seriously, with an eye to seeing her again.