Kill Who You Want

Chapter Thirty

Plot reminder: In previous chapters Kubič has been trying to make contact with a house burglar called Clive Bone who has recently been released from prison. His son Danny has taken his step-sister out of town to stay with their aunt in Birmingham. The last chapter ended with Kubič about to greet a mysterious female visitor to his flat late in the evening...

~~~~~

Tuesday 9th March

As DCI Yardley drove into the station that next morning, Ravensby felt a different place somehow from the one he'd driven through the previous morning. Along West Road, for example, a boarded up shopfront was being unnailed; a few metres further on a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds jostled and joked as they made their unaccompanied way to school. He could feel it in the air - a sense of new beginnings, that the long dark winter was finally at an end.

Oh, he couldn't really take any personal credit for this of course, not in an investigative sense. Yet maybe in some small way, he liked to think, the mere fact of his presence had borne a positive effect - as if on some cosmic level he were a harbinger of peace, the man with the midas touch.

It had certainly felt that way the previous evening as he'd basked in the glow of the assembled media outside the station steps.

Does the inspector believe that Mark Cosgrove was behind the murders of Catherine Butterfield and Sophie Markham?

It had felt almost as if he'd been sucked down a multitude of electrical wires, evaporated into the airwaves, his reassuring smile warming several million living rooms up and down the country.

It is certainly a hypothesis I feel is worth exploring, yes.

And explore he would. Yet even if nothing concrete were to be unearthed, there was still a way of testing if the hypothesis were the correct one, was there not? All it needed was the third recipient to come forward and a certain successive period of time to pass - two, three weeks perhaps - with no further bloodshed. Guilt by inactivity. The signed confession of the dead.

Now turning right onto Croxley Street, he smirked up at the flat above the fish 'n' chip shop which Wye had pointed out to him the previous afternoon as they'd driven out to arrest the Holloway boy. Kubič's sad little divorcee's pad.

Yardley imagined him up there, baggy eyed and groaning back a hangover. A little hair-of-the-dog splash of vodka into his morning coffee no doubt, start the day the same hazy way as it would carry on. Alcoholics made him sick. Drug addicts too. Symtom of a lack of backbone and self discipline, that was all.

It came as a shock when, at that exact same moment he passed it, the ground floor entrance door shuddered open and spilled the wistfully smiling figure of Detective Sergeant Wye out onto the street.

*

DCS Yardley wasn't the only person to become aware of the sergeant's overnight stay at Kubic's flat that morning. Turning right onto Croxley Street from Duxton Terrace at that precise moment was Giles Hancock. An undiguised Giles Hancock dressed in school uniform, albeit with those requisite adjustments and re-stylings which helped him retain a modicum of individuality in the midst of such grey facist-state homogeneity. Shirt untucked, collar turned up, the thinner rather than thicker end of tie running down the button line. Instead of shoes, his footwear consisted of Doc Marten boots embellished with tippexed renditions of the human skull beneath ankle. It was an overall look completed by chain-link belt and the unruly nest of dyed jet black hair.

The petite blonde figure which emerged onto the street fifty metres ahead was a familiar one; they'd been keeping an eye on her, yes. She turned in his direction, stride springy, a smile slanted across face - one which as she drew closer he was able to read as a sort of incredulous reflection on her actions. As she passed, their eyes momentarily meeting, he could almost smell it. *Sin, primal carnality*. He had a nose for these things.