Jack in the box, p.22
Jack in the Box, page 22
Slater clicked his fingers. ‘What’s that thing where you wear the big leather glove, and it’s like in Kes, and you train falcons? What’s that again?’
‘That would be falconry,’ Tait said slowly.
‘Not bad,’ Lomond said, scribbling a note. ‘Bear it in mind. But Finch could be havering. That’s the simplest answer: he’s stalking people with his drones, people living in houses he sold to them. Nicole Kingsley’s been targeted, and she’s his ex-wife – that’s a line to draw. Now there’s this stuff with the rats and cockroaches. Someone up to no good. Trying to affect property prices? Any other reason?’
‘Seems the obvious one,’ Smythe said. The others nodded agreement.
‘So he’s on the list. He’s using the drones to check calendars. Our second victim, they had a very similar wall calendar, easy to see from the top of the garden fence. The partner went for timed runs at specific times of the day – he was a keen runner, very precise, got his spare time for running almost down to the second. Did Celtman, fell-running, that kind of thing. So this guy stalked them with a drone, maybe to check their habits, but also to check when they would be alone.’ Lomond noted this all down; the others followed suit. ‘Next. What’s the score with the killer? How’s he getting around unnoticed?’
Smythe tapped her pen on the pad. ‘I think there’s something in what the two wee girls said. That they had a friend who was a ghost. Someone who spoke to them from the trees. They thought it was funny.’
‘Good chance that’s him,’ Lomond said. ‘It stood up?’
‘Apparently. Both said the same thing. Backed each other up. Think their friendship caused a bit of a stooshie in both houses, which is an awful shame.’
‘No description, though?’
‘No. But I’m thinking Laybourn. His record. Para reg, possibly SAS. Trained in jungle warfare.’
Tait nodded. ‘Yes. Spot on. Which one’s the trained killer – him or Vincent Finch?’
‘I don’t know about trained,’ Slater said, ‘but if you believe the hype, and I do, the Kingsleys are practised killers. This rats and roaches carry-on affected both Finch and Kingsley’s properties – there’s some kind of turf war going on. Maybe it extends to dumping bodies.’
Tait’s mouth twisted as it formed a retort, but he paused before uttering it. ‘That’s not the worst shout. One other thing about Laybourn – he’s for hire. Maybe for serious dirty work. A lot of former special forces guys make a living like that abroad. Mercenaries, assassins. So, yeah, that ties in with Laybourn. As everything does, eventually. Regarding his alibis, all people have seen is a van, and parcels and packages delivered from a depot. Laybourn might have got a ringer in and hidden out in the woods. There are trees at the back of both houses.’
Lomond was scribbling everything down. ‘This all makes sense, but the thing that’s driving me mental is: how’s he getting in? I thought there must be some flaw in the houses, something in the designs to exploit, but there’s nothing. Ideas?’
To Lomond’s dismay, there were none. They were reluctant students posed a tricky and possibly embarrassing question. Slater didn’t even have a stupid comment for the rest to parry. Smythe came close to one, though seeing as it was Smythe no one took it that way. ‘It’s like he’s the invisible man. Apart from the two wee girls, no one saw him get in, no one saw him get out.’
‘And the security cameras weren’t tampered with,’ Lomond said. ‘Front and back of the house. Full gardens. Nothing. If he managed to sneak in during a split second when the camera was turned away from the fences, then we are talking the supernatural. Or science fiction. It just doesn’t look possible.’
The silence grew too heavy.
‘Best we knock off for a bit. Tait, you’re holding the fort. Let me know if forensics pick up anything we can use from the shipping containers. I’ll be on call. I’d better check I’ve still got a wife.’ Lomond reached for his coat.
48
He was pacing up and down the garden. Listening to the grass fracture, the coolest green under frost. It was close to midnight, and Lomond was cold and fed up. He used his own footsteps as a guide, his own Wenceslas path, so as not to ruin any more of his lawn.
Maureen coughed from the patio door, trying not to startle him. ‘It’s freezing out here,’ she said.
‘Aye. Maybe it’ll kick my brain up a gear.’
‘I’ll kick your brain up a gear, love,’ she said kindly. ‘Please come back in. I’m a bit worried about your welfare, but, more importantly you’re doing my nut in.’
Lomond paced on. The trees at the back of the garden had long lost their plumage, knotted against the back of the shed as if for comfort, or protection. Beyond the treeline, a streetlight cast an orange glow through the cage of tight branches.
‘Say you had to sneak into someone’s house,’ he said, his back to his wife.
‘That what he’s doing?’
‘Let’s say aye, for talking’s sake. He’s getting in somehow, and there’s a good security system. We check – system hasn’t been re-recorded or had anything deleted. It’s picked up nothing. No sign of him getting in or out. Doesn’t make sense. So how’s he doing it?’
‘Not being daft – or maybe I am – but is he being delivered? In a box?’
Lomond spun on the ball of one foot, surprisingly athletic. ‘You know, I did think about that. How does a jack-in-thebox get in the house? He gets his box delivered, with him inside it. We did look into it, but door cameras from the other houses would have picked up on it. Delivery drivers coming in and out. Some folk set up their cameras just to catch delivery drivers out; complain about them reversing out the estate too fast, that kind of thing. But that’s not what happened.’
‘Maybe he was there for a while? Hiding? Like, days before?’
‘Thought about that too, but nothing in either house makes it look as if he was hiding out anywhere. And I should know – I had both of them pulled apart, down to the bloody nails in the carpet.’ Lomond had a peculiarly haunted look at that moment. That was a defeat. Something else for him to chew on. It drew her towards him, unconsciously. ‘That’s how they’ll probably bin me, you know. Going over the score on budget. Throwing money away. Workies were delighted, having to rip a place apart and not have to put it back together again. But the owners will want it put back together again. Better than before. They’ll want compensation, those people. No wonder.’
‘They’ll not sack you. And you’re trying to help those people. Get a murderer off the streets. Find out who did it.’
‘Not how they’ll see it. Imagine it. Trying to put together a funeral. Trying to deal with it. With everything. And then on top of that, some clown blunders in and turns your house into a cowp. That clown was me.’ He blinked, then snapped himself out of it. ‘But anyway . . . he hasn’t been posted. He hasn’t been hiding in the attic all that time. He’s sneaking past the cameras, through the back gardens, but it doesn’t make sense. Images of the gardens show nothing. We’ve used geolocation, we’ve looked at all the time stamps and signatures, metadata, the way the sun moves across the scene – everything tallies. There’s just no sign of the creep.’
‘OK, next daft question. Is he using a tunnel? Underground? In through the basement?’
‘No. It’s as good an idea as any, but he isn’t tunnelling in. There’s no basement in either house.’
‘Do they know him? Familiar face? Someone they’d just let in?’
‘Well, there’s not much of a connection between the victims. Different people, different circles. The connection is the bloody houses. All Avalon King.’
Maureen’s voice dropped, just a little. ‘Was the woman having an affair? Did she manage to switch off the door cameras? Reprogramme them?’
‘No sign of it. Been through her phone, her apps, social media . . . nothing like that. Not even a flirtation. Mother knew nothing, cos if she did she’d have bloody told us, all right. She’s high energy, high volume. And if she was having an affair, and he did kill her, what about the other two? You’ve got three completely different victims, three different profiles. It doesn’t fit. Psychology people will be going off their nut with this one. They like patterns, and there isn’t a pattern.’
‘Maybe there’s a personal motive?’
‘There’s nothing obvious. It’s not, strictly speaking, random, either. What is it about the houses? What’s with the bloody boxes? Why the bomb hoax?’
Detecting something in the rising pitch of his voice, Maureen steered him towards the back door, the rectangle of light. ‘I suggest bed. No more pacing. Even if you can’t sleep, just close your eyes. Let it all close down. All right?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I can sleep. That’s the thing. Could sleep in two minutes, if I wanted. I just can’t afford to. I can’t afford to have it happen again . . .’
Maureen cut him off. ‘He won’t try it again, love. Not tonight.’
49
April worked as a doctors’ receptionist, the kind who had time for the people worth bothering about. The old dears, the men who took a while to ease themselves into chairs in the waiting room, rusty knives in need of a whetstone. She knew some of them needed pastoral care. She’d reached the age where she hoped some would see sense and join a church group. By her own admission, April had been doing the job too long.
But that day she had a day in lieu, and she took pleasure in doing nothing. January was not a great time to work at a doctors’ surgery, but then, she reflected, in Glasgow January wasn’t a good time to be doing anything.
The flat was always tidy, a sorry contrast to her ex’s place. April had been in the building once, when she’d been picking up their daughter, Alice, just before Christmas. The smell of old grease wafting through George’s doorway had taken April back to a time she thought she’d forgotten. Tenement stairways, chip pans, pulleys in kitchens, cigarette smoke. George had always disgusted April – even when she’d agreed to marry him – and she took a cat’s-eye pleasure in seeing him living in relative squalor, to the far north of the city. George hadn’t come out to see her while she waited on the landing, staring out onto a back court that looked as if it had been hit by a ballistic missile – tin cans, burst bin bags, chromium sheen of takeaway trays. The latter were probably George’s, she’d reflected. She wondered if there was a problem with rats out there. She could hear George grunting as Alice zipped up her hold-all and bid him farewell.
‘He keeping well?’ she’d asked.
Alice shrugged. ‘Seems happy enough. Still working on the taxis.’
‘So I heard.’
And that was that for George. That was that for Alice too. She was in Edinburgh now, sharing a flat – paying a fortune for it – but she had a decent job in accountancy. She visited less and less. April made plans to go through to meet her for lunch, a nice afternoon’s shopping on Princes Street. She’d even talked about doing the festival one August, and her daughter’s slightly embarrassed look at this statement continued to haunt her.
Still. A day off was not to be sniffed at. April had started hers with coffee and BBC Sounds. She looked out onto her patio, her own little nook among the concrete boxes. No one else seemed to like it, but it suited April just fine. Her sometime partner, a butcher called Tommy who had been coming around less and less recently and had been telling anyone who would listen he was thinking of converting to veganism, had said he didn’t like it at all – it was an ivitation to burgle the house. But April was a fan of the green awning, the leaf-effect coverings along the side of the staircase and the fake grass that covered the balcony. Alice had actually shouted at her for this, bemoaning the environment, microplastics, the dearth of bees and tiny wee birdies and God knew what else. April just liked things to be clean, sheltered and, above, all her own. The balcony was even nice to look at. Otherwise, she was looking at the arse end of a takeaway and a tanning salon. Who wanted to look at that, even in the height of summer? Plus, it would take a major effort to get over the wall, open the gate, then creep up the stairs – especially with the security camera and light she’d had installed. Anyone breaking in, she reasoned, would have to be some kind of ninja.
After coffee and a not entirely serious attempt at yoga, April got dressed. A trip to the post office to send off her cousin Angus’s birthday card, first of all – the only living relative on her own side, really, at least in that family tier. A relationship that she clung to for pathetic reasons. They would never meet again. He lived in Gloucester, somewhere like that. The pictures he posted on Facebook always looked nice and leafy. She sometimes fantasised about being invited down, meeting his wife and their young daughter. She’d be about secondary school age, April reckoned. Still, the cards arrived for Christmas and birthdays. It was something.
The snow from earlier in the week had turned into a bitter wind, and the puddles were frozen in the gutter as she made her way to the shops. Wrapped up tight in a big coat, hat and scarf, boots on, April’s get-up made her look like a blundering dinosaur crashing through the streets, she thought. She kind of liked that. In the post office, she made a point of buying herself a newspaper. She had an aversion to online media, due to sitting in front of screens and trying to book online appointments and prescriptions all day. She’d had enough of it, although one of the girls in the office did have a fruitful time of it with the online dating. Should Tommy’s drift towards mycoprotein sausage rolls and ersatz chicken nuggets take a step further beyond comedy and into full ridicule, well, why not? She was fifty-three. Fifty-three was nothing these days.
‘Some carry-on, that,’ said Mrs Fahed, behind the reinforced glass, nodding towards the paper April had folded up and laid on the counter. April agreed. Truth be told, she had a ghoulish interest in these things, and often frightened herself into the early hours watching documentaries about serial killers. She did not know why she did this. She would lie awake at night. Don’t think about the murderers. Don’t think about the murderers. Listening for creaks, cracks and coughs in the night.
She read about the murders, read the opinion columns having a go at the police – felt a sympathetic pang there, seeing public servants openly and brutally criticised. Not their fault. Doing their best, most likely. Like at the surgery. People wanted bloody miracles. They thought they owned you.
Not today, April thought.
She rounded off her outing with a coffee at the Filling Station, a dodgy car-wash place that had been raided, or abandoned, a few months ago. Someone had taken over the premises with a nice but slightly expensive coffee shack, with home-made brownies. The coffee was good and strong, and April enjoyed her moments perched on a high stool, watching the world go by, away from the wind. She never felt lonely at these times. It never occurred to her.
Strange that whoever it was had murdered first a woman, then a young man, and what looked like a junkie before that. Weird mix. Seemed like a few murderers in one, there. Coming to a digital channel near you at half eleven at night. For those of you who live alone . . .
Back at the flat she watched the light fade on her little Eden, the black wicker table and chairs tucked into a corner, awaiting the spring. There was no question of seeing a sunset out there, on the world’s silliest balcony space, but you gained an impression of another winter day giving way to darkness.
The security light blinked on, startling her as she was washing up that morning’s breakfast things. It happened. Once, she’d been startled by a fox up there, and birds were sometimes visitors to the unlushness of the green carpeting. But no wild creatures could be seen. She had a quick glance at the garden space outside. The leafy wall hanging, the minty green carpeting, still beaded here and there with the odd yellow leaf. There was nothing. She checked the video monitor, with its minimalist framing of the austere space and the stairway. Nothing. No one.
She double-checked the patio door. To get through, you’d need to smash the glass, and that double glazing could take a volley of grapeshot. April turned away from the kitchen and returned to the living room. Although she had a decent music system – it was modern but took cassettes, which she loved, having hoarded them from when she was younger – April usually listened to the radio through the TV, taking comfort in the voices and jingles.
She’d picked up the remote when she heard the patio door open and close with a firm click.
She automatically shut down the thought that someone had opened it. No, she thought. Then she sobered herself up. Gave herself a talking to. I know what I heard. She got up to check, heart thudding, but resolute.
The sight of the shape standing in the hall punched the breath out of her. Just standing there. A nightmare. It yelped, like an animal, and sprinted forward with its fingers curled into claws.
April sank to one knee; something clicked inside it, and she had a weird out-of-body sensation that she’d torn something in there, something important. Indeed, her whole leg was in revolt, staging a protest as she got up, breath wheezing in something like a scream, but she was in her bedroom with the door slammed shut before the figure could reach her.
Laughing at her, outside the door, ‘I’m coming, coming, coming for you!’ April reached the en-suite, turned the lock and sat there, pissing herself, sagging against the basin, while he laughed outside.
All it took was a coin to turn the lock. You could even do it with a fingernail. Whatever he used he was doing it now. She had a grip of the brass lock with both hands, fingers white, but he was turning it effortlessly, giggling, and it slithered out of her hands and she turned to grab something from the shelf – the mirror, her deodorant, toothpaste, anything. It all fell from her grasp and landed on the floor as he yanked the door open.
She screamed. ‘Oh, Christ, help me! It’s him, it’s Jack-inthe-Box! Help me!’
Still giggling, the figure – the nightmare – leaned forward, placed a gloved finger against where she supposed its mouth was, and said, ‘Shh!’
