‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’
‘Mr Kristos, could you tell me please where you were in 1998?’
Vogel had changed tack without warning and he watched the reaction of his interviewee extremely closely.
‘What?’ asked George. He just looked puzzled.
Vogel repeated the question.
‘Uh, 1998.’ George did some counting on his fingers.
‘I was in college, studying drama,’ he said eventually. ‘I left in 2000.’
‘Could you tell me the name of this college?’
‘The Willesden Academy of Performing Arts,’ he said. ‘Manchester.’
Manchester, thought Vogel, getting on for three hours away from London’s King’s Cross in 1998. Those kind of logistics obviously did not mean that Kristos couldn’t have been responsible for the earlier murders, but it did make it more unlikely. Vogel continued to study George carefully. The other man continued to look merely puzzled. Vogel would get it checked out, of course, but he suspected George was telling the truth.
‘I think you’ll find the place has closed down,’ said George, almost as if he were reading Vogel’s mind.
‘You haven’t asked why I wanted to know where you were in 1998,’ said Vogel.
George shrugged. He did quite a lot of shrugging. ‘I assumed you’d tell me when you were good and ready,’ he said.
He has not totally lost his arrogance, thought Vogel.
‘Two young women were murdered in the King’s Cross district of London in October and November 1998,’ he said. ‘We have reason to believe that their killer may also have murdered Marleen McTavish, and perhaps Michelle Monahan.’
George raised both eyebrows.
‘So you thought you might try to pin that on me too, did you?’ he asked. ‘Just because I claimed to have a girlfriend when I didn’t.’
‘It’s a bit more than that, Mr Kristos,’ said Vogel, unsure whether it was or not.
‘I think you are clutching at straws, Detective Inspector,’ said George.
You really are an arrogant little bastard, thought Vogel. But unfortunately you’re not far wrong.
You should realize that everything you have told us concerning your fabrication of the fictional Carla Karbusky will be fully investigated,’ said Vogel, trying to ensure that neither the tone of his voice nor his facial expression gave any indication of his inner frustration.
‘I don’t see what the big deal is. OK, so I invented a girlfriend to get my mates off my back. I know it was daft, but it made me feel better about myself. But, it’s not a crime to say you have a girlfriend when you haven’t. It’s not illegal, is it Mr Vogel?’
George seemed ingenuous enough. But there was something unnerving about him, as if, even when under arrest, he was playing a game. Vogel didn’t know what to make of it all.
‘No, it’s not illegal,’ he replied evenly.
‘No. And it doesn’t make me a murderer, either, does it?’
‘No,’ said Vogel again. And with that he got up from his chair and walked out of the interview room, leaving Parlow to complete the formalities.
Kristos was dead right. The man’s behaviour was curious. A little weird even. But that didn’t make him a murderer. And Vogel had no real evidence against him. Not yet anyway.
He marched resolutely into the large office which had been designated for the use of MIT. Vogel had a feeling about George Kristos. His gut instinct told him they could very well have found their man. But his gut instinct wasn’t going to persuade a judge and jury.
‘I want Kristos’s flat turned over again,’ he said. ‘Get the SOCOs there, and tell them to take the floorboards up, I want them over everything like a rash. And let’s dig into his background. Where are his parents? Are they alive? I want everyone in his life spoken to. Let’s go right back to his drama school days, and before.’
Vogel surveyed his team. There was a palpable excitement in the air at the prospect they might just have their man in custody. But excitement could be dangerous in these circumstances. It could lead to some vital clue being overlooked. He was determined that no such mistakes would be made in this case.
‘If we don’t come up with some hard evidence, we will have no option but to release George Kristos. And I do not want to be responsible for putting a killer back out there on the streets.’
Twenty-three
Two hours later, just as he was considering having another crack at George, Vogel heard that Karen Walker had been killed.
The first report was that she’d thrown herself in front of a train at Leicester Square tube station and had died instantly.
PC Jessica Harding in Command and Dispatch phoned Vogel with the news as soon as the response team first on the scene called in their report. Karen’s body had been identified by the contents of the wallet removed from her handbag. The body itself, Harding told Vogel, was in a condition which would have made any other immediate identification almost impossible.
Vogel was stunned. He did not believe for one moment that Karen had committed suicide. His immediate reaction was that she too had been murdered, presumably by the same individual who killed Marlena and Michelle Monahan.
‘When did this happen?’ he asked PC Harding. ‘Presumably as Karen Walker went under a train, we have a precise time of death?’
‘Yes, guv,’ answered Jessica Harding. ‘Transport police have logged the incident at 10.25 a.m. this morning.’
Vogel leaned over his desk and buried his face in his hands. Had he really got everything so wrong? He and Parlow had arrested George Kristos at 9 a.m., and he was still in custody. Kristos could not possibly have pushed Karen Walker under a train at 10.25 a.m. For the second time a suspect would have to be released because he was in police custody when a murder occurred. The investigation seemed to be going round in circles.
Vogel reconsidered the possibility of suicide. Karen Walker had been extremely distressed by recent events, not least by her own and her husband’s arrest the previous day on suspicion of murder. Even so, she’d seemed so devoted to her children that he could not imagine her leaving them motherless. And in spite of the anger she was feeling towards her husband after discovering that he’d had dealings with Tony Kwan, Greg and Karen had previously enjoyed a good and solid marriage.
No. The detective still did not believe that Karen Walker had committed suicide.
As Vogel saw it, he’d failed once more. The killer had claimed a third victim. And that victim was female, like the previous two — or four, if you counted the 1998 murders. The removal of the reproductive organs certainly indicated that gender was a factor. Should he have arranged for Karen Walker to stay at a safe house instead of returning home?
His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Nobby Clarke. She told him to get himself to the scene, leaving her to handle the deployment of the rest of her MIT. Vogel ordered Parlow to commandeer a CID car, for the second time that morning, in order to rush them both to Leicester Square.
In the car he steeled himself for the task ahead. He had once before attended the scene of a train death, and the sight which had presented itself, that time on an over-ground line, remained with him still.
As Vogel had expected, Karen Walker’s body was in a horrific state. Both legs had been removed from her body when the train hit her. Worse still, she had been decapitated.
Her body had already been tented off by the time Vogel arrived at Leicester Square station, and the platform closed. It seemed that the British Transport Police were accustomed to such events and handled them with an efficiency born of tragic familiarity. Three BTP officers were on sentry duty stoically preserving the scene. The Home Office pathologist was not yet there, but the SOCOs, who had apparently arrived just before Vogel, were already beginning to go about their business.