“No,” she said gruffly. “What was the point? They were never going to find it.”
Robin guessed that Lorraine had not wanted to draw official attention to her humiliation, and sympathized.
“Was he ever violent?” Robin asked gently.
Lorraine looked surprised.
“No. Is that why you’re here? Has he hurt someone?”
“We don’t know,” said Strike.
“I don’t think he’d hurt anyone,” she said. “He wasn’t that kind of man. I said that to the police.”
“Sorry,” said Robin, stroking the now-dozing Jack Russell’s head. “I thought you didn’t report the robbery?”
“This was later,” said Lorraine. “Month or so after he’d gone. Somebody broke into Mrs. Williams’s place, knocked her out and robbed the house. The police wanted to know where Donnie was. I said, ‘He’s long gone, moved out.’ Anyway, he wouldn’t do that, I told them. He’d been good to her. He wouldn’t punch an old lady.”
They had once held hands in a beer garden. He had mowed the old lady’s lawn. She refused to believe Laing had been all bad.
“I assume your neighbor couldn’t give the police a description?” Strike asked.
Lorraine shook her head.
“She never came back, after. Died in a home. Got a family in Northfield now,” said Lorraine. “Three little kids. You should hear the noise — and they’ve got the bloody cheek to complain about the dog!”
They had hit a complete dead end. Lorraine had no idea where Laing had gone next. She could not remember him mentioning any place to which he was connected other than Melrose and she had never met any of his friends. Once she had realized that he was never coming back, she had deleted his mobile number from her phone. She agreed to let them take the two photographs of Laing, but other than that, had no more help to offer.
The Jack Russell protested loudly at Robin withdrawing her warm lap and showed every sign of wishing to take his displeasure out on Strike as the detective rose from his chair.
“Stop it, Tigger,” said Lorraine crossly, holding the struggling dog on the sofa with difficulty.
“We’ll see ourselves out,” Robin shouted over the dog’s frenzied barking. “Thanks so much for all your help!”
They left her there in her cluttered, smoky sitting room, bandaged ankle raised, probably a little sadder and more uncomfortable for their visit. The sound of the hysterical dog followed them all the way up the garden path.
“I feel like we could at least have made her a cup of tea or something,” said Robin guiltily as they got back into the Land Rover.
“She doesn’t know what a lucky escape she’s had,” said Strike bracingly. “Think about the poor old dear in there,” he pointed at Northfield, “beaten to shit for a couple of extra quid.”
“You think that was Laing?”
“Of course it was bloody Laing,” said Strike as Robin turned on the engine. “He’d cased the joint while he was supposedly helping her out, hadn’t he? And you notice that, for all he was supposed to be so ill with his arthritis, he was still capable of mowing lawns and half killing old women.”
Hungry and tired, her head aching from the stale cigarette smoke, Robin nodded and said that she supposed so. It had been a depressing interview and the prospect of a further two and a half hours’ drive to get back home was not appealing.
“D’you mind if we get going?” said Strike, checking his watch. “I told Elin I’ll be over tonight.”
“No problem,” said Robin.
Yet for some reason — perhaps due to her headache, perhaps because of the lonely woman sitting in Summerfield among the memories of loved ones who had left her — Robin could easily have wept all over again.
29
I Just Like to Be Bad
Sometimes he found it hard to be with the people who thought themselves his friends: the men with whom he associated when he needed money. Theft was their main occupation, tomming of a Saturday night their recreation; he was popular among them, a mate, so they thought, a fellow, an equal. An equal!
The day the police had found her, all he had wanted was to be alone to savor the coverage. The stories in the paper made good reading. He felt proud: this was the first time he’d been able to kill in private, to take his time, to organize things as he’d wanted. He intended to do the same with The Secretary; to have time to enjoy her alive before he killed her.
His one frustration was there was no mention of the letters that were supposed to point the police to Strike, to make them interrogate and badger the fucker, drag his name through the mud in the papers, make the dumb public think he’d had something to do with it.
However, there were columns and columns of coverage, photographs of the flat where he’d done her, interviews with the pretty-boy police officer. He saved the stories: they were souvenirs, just like the bits of her he had taken for his private collection.
Of course, his pride and enjoyment had to be hidden from It, because It required very careful handling at the moment. It wasn’t happy, not happy at all. Life wasn’t panning out the way It had expected and he had to pretend to give a flying fuck, to be concerned, be a nice guy, because It was useful to him: It brought in money and It might have to give him alibis. You never knew whether they might be needed. He’d had a close call once before.
That had been the second time he had killed, in Milton Keynes. You didn’t shit on your own doorstep: that had always been one of his guiding principles. He had never been to Milton Keynes before or since and had no connection with the place. He had stolen a car, away from the boys, a solo job. He had had fake plates ready for a while. Then he had simply driven, wondering whether he would get lucky. There had been a couple of failed attempts since his first murder: trying to chat up girls in pubs, in clubs, trying to isolate them, was not working as well as it had in the past. He didn’t look as good as he once had, he knew that, but he didn’t want to establish a pattern of doing prostitutes. The police started to put two and two together if you went for the same type every time. Once he had managed to track a tipsy girl down an alleyway, but before he’d even drawn his knife out a pack of giggling kids had burst into view and he had taken off. After that he had given up on trying to pick up a girl in the usual way. It would have to be force.
He had driven for hours in increasing frustration; not a whiff of a victim in Milton Keynes. At ten to midnight he was on the verge of caving and sniffing out a hooker when he’d spotted her. She was arguing with her boyfriend on a roundabout in the middle of the road, a short-haired brunette in jeans. As he passed he kept an eye on the couple in his rearview mirror. He watched her storm away, as good as intoxicated by her own anger and tears. The infuriated man she had left behind shouted after her, then, with a gesture of disgust, stumbled off in the opposite direction.
He did a U-turn and drove back up the road towards her. She was sobbing as she walked, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
He had wound down the window.
“You all right, love?”
“Piss off!”
She sealed her fate by plunging angrily into bushes beside the road to get away from his crawling car. Another hundred yards would have taken her to a well-lit stretch of road.
All he had to do was turn off the road and park. He pulled on the balaclava before getting out of the car, the knife ready in his hand, and walked calmly back to the place where she had disappeared. He could hear her trying to fight her way back out of the dense patch of trees and shrubs, placed there by town planners to soften the contours of the wide gray dual carriageway. There was no streetlamp here. He was invisible to passing drivers as he skirted the dark foliage. As she beat her way back onto the pavement, he was standing ready to force her back in at knifepoint.