Stop Dead (DI Geraldine Steel)

and in the end Reg had to take over.
    ‘If anyone has any information, however unimportant it might seem, please contact us on this number.’

     
    ‘Why was Maurice Bradshaw a victim?’ Sam asked for the twentieth time, when the press briefing was over. ‘Who would even notice him, let alone want to kill and mutilate him?’
    Geraldine nodded without answering. She understood her colleague’s disquiet. It was certainly hard to understand how anyone could have been provoked to attack an inoffensive nonentity like Bradshaw. But without motive the murder was reduced to a senseless act of violence not only somehow more vile but also more worrying, since it suggested the killer was selecting victims at random. In the absence of any pattern, it became almost impossible to trace or predict the killer’s movements. And after four murders it was clear this killer would strike again and again, until he was stopped.

     
    It was drizzling when Geraldine and Sam arrived at Camden station. They hurried along the crowded pavements of Camden High Street past shop windows filled with bizarre shoes, boots and belts, to Gino’s Café. When she had lived in Kent, Geraldine had rarely travelled by public transport, but parking in London was so difficult, even with police parking privileges, that she was just as likely to use the tube.
    ‘Is it always like this?’ she had asked Sam the first time they had travelled on a packed train together.
    ‘No. It’s usually worse.’

     
    From the outside Gino’s wasn’t inviting, with its grimy glass front, a yellowing menu displayed in the window, and the ‘s’ from the tawdry red sign missing: Gino’ . It was decent enough inside with wooden chairs and formica-topped tables displaying white china cruet pots; a cramped space packed with dark-uniformed officers and white-clad scene of crime officers jostling one another in the aisles between tables. As soon as they entered the room the stuffy atmosphere hit them, airless and buzzing with voices.

     
    ‘It’s this way.’
    A young constable greeted them with a grin, as though he was throwing a party and showing them to the kitchen where the drinks were.
    ‘It’s all happening out in the alley.’
    He looked as though he wanted to jump up and down with excitement. Geraldine wondered if this was his first experience of a homicide investigation. She gave him a level stare. He might be enjoying the bustle and thrill of a murder case on his patch, perhaps on his first day on the job, but this was a serious investigation. All the same, she couldn’t help feeling a flicker of empathy for his zeal.

     
    They manoeuvred their way to the back exit, past a man seated at a corner table watching the melee. From his wretched expression Geraldine assumed he was the café proprietor. There would have been something heartening about the purposeful atmosphere in the place were it not for the fact that another victim had been discovered, making a total of four bodies in barely two weeks. And for all their hard work and investigation they were no closer to finding out who was responsible. Geraldine had an unpleasant feeling that they were running around like a bunch of unfocused amateurs.

     
    Outside the rear exit of the café the alleyway was narrow and dirty, spattered with shiny oily puddles, barely wide enough for one-way traffic to pass between the high kerbs on either side of the flat cobbled roadway. The rain had stopped but it was wet underfoot and everything gleamed: tall grey garbage cans, grey paving slabs and cobbles, brick buildings, one painted white, all looked grey in the weak sunlight. Only the forensic tent loomed white and spectral.

     
    Geraldine hoped her visit would turn out to be a mistake, an error of judgement on the part of an eager junior officer. It was still possible the café proprietor had stumbled upon a vagrant who had succumbed to an overdose of toxic drugs, or downed a few drinks more than his damaged liver could survive. Maybe this would turn out to be a death from natural causes. But a quick glance at the victim was enough to persuade her that she was viewing the fourth victim of the killer one newspaper had glibly called The Hammer Horror.

CHAPTER 56
     
    O n Monday morning, Geraldine tracked down the firm of solicitors who had defended Linda Harrison twenty years earlier. It didn’t take long to find them. When she telephoned, she learned that the solicitor who had dealt with the case had retired