Career of Evil

61

The bulb was out in the only bedroom. Strike turned on the small torch he had brought with him and advanced slowly towards the only piece of furniture, a cheap pine wardrobe. The door creaked as he opened it.

The interior was plastered with articles from the newspapers about the Shacklewell Ripper. Taped above all of them was a picture that had been printed on a piece of A4 paper, possibly from the internet. Strike’s young mother, naked, arms over her head, her long cloud of dark hair not quite covering her breasts proudly displayed, an arch of curly script clearly visible over the dark triangle of pubic hair: Mistress of the Salmon Salt.

He looked down at the floor of the wardrobe where a pile of hard-core pornography sat beside a black bin bag. Putting the torch under his arm, Strike opened the latter with his latex-gloved hands. Inside was a small selection of women’s underclothing, some of it stiff with old brown blood. At the very bottom of the bag his fingers closed on a fine chain and a hoop earring. A heart-shaped harp charm glinted in the light of his torch. There was a trace of dry blood on the hoop.

Strike replaced everything in the black bin bag, closed the wardrobe door and continued to the kitchenette, which was clearly the source of the rotting smell that pervaded the entire place.

Somebody had turned up the TV next door. An echoing tirade of gunshots sounded through the thin wall. Strike heard faint, stoned laughter.

Beside the kettle sat a jar of instant coffee, a bottle of Bell’s, a magnifying mirror and a razor. The oven was thick with grease and dust, and looked as though it had not been used for a long time. The fridge door had been wiped down with a dirty cloth that had left behind it sweeping arcs of a pinkish residue. Strike had just reached for the handle when his mobile vibrated in his pocket.

Shanker was calling him. They had agreed not to phone each other, but only to text.

“Fucking hell, Shanker,” said Strike, raising the mobile to his ear. “I thought I said—”

He heard the breathing behind him a bare second before a machete came swinging through the air at his neck. Strike dived sideways, the mobile flying out of his hand, and slipped on the dirty floor. As he fell, the slashing blade sliced into his ear. The hulking shadow raised the machete again to attack Strike as he landed on the floor; Strike kicked out at its crotch and the killer grunted in pain, backed off a couple of paces, then raised the machete once more.

Scrambling to his knees, Strike punched his assailant hard in the balls. The machete slid out of Laing’s fingers and fell onto Strike’s back, causing him to shout out in pain even as he put his arms around Laing’s knees and toppled him. Laing’s head collided with the cooker door but his thick fingers were scrabbling for Strike’s throat. Strike tried to land a punch but was pinned down by Laing’s considerable weight. The man’s large, powerful hands were closing on his windpipe. With a gigantic effort Strike mustered enough force to headbutt Laing, whose skull again clanged off the oven door—

They rolled over, Strike now on top. He tried to punch Laing in the face but the other’s reactions were as quick as they had been in the ring: one hand deflected the blow and his other was under Strike’s chin, forcing his face upwards — Strike swung again, unable to see where he was aiming, hit bone and heard it crack—

Then Laing’s large fist came out of nowhere, bang into the middle of Strike’s face, and he felt his nose shatter; blood spurted everywhere as he rocked backwards with the force of the punch, his eyes watering so that everything blurred: groaning and panting, Laing threw him off — from nowhere, like a conjuror, he produced a carving knife—

Half blinded, blood pouring into his mouth, Strike saw it glimmer in the moonlight and kicked out with his prosthetic leg — there was a muffled chink of metal on metal as the knife hit the steel rod of his ankle and was raised again—

“No, you don’t, you fucker!”

Shanker had Laing in a headlock from behind. Ill-advisedly, Strike grabbed for the carving knife and got his palm sliced open. Shanker and Laing were wrestling, the Scot by far the larger of the two and rapidly getting the better of it. Strike took another powerful kick at the carving knife with his prosthetic foot and this time knocked it clean out of Laing’s hand. Now he could help Shanker wrestle him to the ground.

“Give it up or I’ll fuckin’ knife ya!” bellowed Shanker, arms around Laing’s neck as the Scot writhed and swore, his heavy fists still clenched, his broken jaw sagging. “You ain’t the only one with a fucking blade, you fat piece of shit!”

Strike tugged out the handcuffs that were the most expensive piece of equipment he had taken away with him from the SIB. It took the combined force of both Strike and Shanker to force Laing into a position where he could be cuffed, securing the thick wrists behind his back while Laing struggled and swore nonstop.

Freed of the necessity to hold Laing down, Shanker kicked him so hard in the diaphragm that the killer emitted a long faint wheeze and was rendered temporarily speechless.

“You all right, Bunsen? Bunsen, where’d he get you?”

Strike had slumped back against the oven. The cut to his ear was bleeding copiously, as was his slashed right palm, but his rapidly swelling nose troubled him most, because the blood pouring out of it into his mouth was making it difficult to breathe.

“There y’go, Bunsen,” said Shanker, returning from a brief search of the small flat with a roll of toilet paper.

“Cheers,” said Strike thickly. He stuffed his nostrils with as much paper as they would hold, then looked down at Laing. “Nice to see you again, Ray.”

The still-winded Laing said nothing. His bald pate was shining faintly in the moonlight that had illuminated his knife.

“Fort you said ’is name was Donald?” asked Shanker curiously as Laing shifted on the ground. Shanker kicked him in the stomach again.

“It is,” said Strike, “and stop bloody kicking him; if you rupture anything I’ll have to answer for it in court.”

“So why you callin’ ’im—?”

“Because,” said Strike, “—and don’t touch anything, either, Shanker, I don’t want your fingerprints in here — because Donnie’s been using a borrowed identity. When he’s not here,” Strike said, approaching the fridge and putting his left hand, with its still-intact latex glove, on the handle, “he’s heroic retired firefighter Ray Williams, who lives in Finchley with Hazel Furley.”

Strike pulled open the fridge door and, still using his left hand, opened the freezer compartment.

Kelsey Platt’s breasts lay inside, dried up now like figs, yellow and leathery. Beside them lay Lila Monkton’s fingers, the nails varnished purple, Laing’s teeth marks imprinted deeply upon them. At the back lay a pair of severed ears from which little plastic ice-cream cones still hung, and a mangled piece of flesh in which nostrils were still distinguishable.

“Holy shit,” said Shanker, who had also bent over to look, from behind him. “Holy shit, Bunsen, they’re bits—”

Strike closed both icebox and fridge door and turned to look at his captive.

Laing lay quiet now. Strike was sure that he was already using that devious fox-like brain to see how he could work this desperate situation to his advantage, how he would be able to argue that Strike had framed him, planted or contaminated evidence.

“Should’ve recognized you, shouldn’t I, Donnie?” said Strike, wrapping his right hand in toilet paper to stem the bleeding. Now, by the dim moonlight falling through the grubby window, Strike could just make out the features of Laing beneath the stones of extra weight that steroids and a lack of regular exercise had packed onto his once thickly muscled frame. His fatness, his dry, lined skin, the beard he had doubtless grown to hide his pockmarks, the carefully shaven head and the shuffling walk he had affected added up to a man at least ten years older than his real age. “Should’ve recognized you the moment you opened the front door to me at Hazel’s,” Strike said. “But you kept your face covered, dabbing away at your fucking tears, didn’t you? What had you done, rubbed something in them to make them swell up?”

Strike offered his pack to Shanker before lighting up.

“The Geordie accent was a bit overdone, now I think about it. You’ll have picked that up in Gateshead, did you? He’s always been a good mimic, our Donnie,” he told Shanker. “You should have heard his Corporal Oakley. Life and soul, Donnie was, apparently.”

Shanker was staring from Strike to Laing, apparently fascinated. Strike continued to smoke, looking down at Laing. His nose was stinging and throbbing so badly it was making his own eyes water. He wanted to hear the killer speak, once, before he rang the police.

“Beat up and robbed a demented old lady in Corby, didn’t you, Donnie? Poor old Mrs. Williams. You took her son’s award for bravery and I bet you got a good bit of old documentation of his as well. You knew he’d gone abroad. It’s not too hard to steal someone’s identity if you’ve got a bit of ID to start with. Easy to parlay that into enough current identification to hoodwink a lonely woman and a careless policeman or two.”

Laing lay silent on the dirty floor, but Strike could almost feel the frantic workings of his filthy, desperate mind.

“I found Accutane in the house,” Strike told Shanker. “It’s a drug for acne, but it’s for psoriatic arthritis too. I should’ve known then. He kept it hidden in Kelsey’s room. Ray Williams didn’t have arthritis.

“I bet you had lots of little secrets together, didn’t you, Donnie, you and Kelsey? Winding her up about me, getting her exactly where you wanted her? Taking her for motorbike rides to lurk near my office... pretending to post letters for her... bringing her my fake notes...”

“You sick bastard,” said the disgusted Shanker. He leaned over Laing with his cigarette tip close to Laing’s face, clearly yearning to hurt him.

“You’re not burning him either, Shanker,” said Strike, pulling out his mobile. “You’d better get out of here, I’m going to call the cops.”

He rang 999 and gave the address. His story would be that he had followed Laing to the club and back to his flat, that there had been an argument and that Laing had attacked him. Nobody needed to know that Shanker had been involved, nor that Strike had picked Laing’s locks. Of course, the stoned neighbor might talk, but Strike thought it likely that the young man might prefer to stay well out of it rather than have his sobriety and drug history assessed in a court of law.

“Take all this and get rid of it,” Strike told Shanker, peeling off the fluorescent jacket and handing it to him. “And the gas canister through there.”

“Right y’are, Bunsen. Sure you’re gonna be all right with him?” Shanker added, eyes on Strike’s broken nose, his bleeding ear and hand.

“Yeah, ’course I will,” said Strike, vaguely touched.

He heard Shanker picking up the metal canister in the next room and, shortly afterwards, saw him passing the kitchen window on the balcony outside.

“SHANKER!”

His old friend was back in the kitchen so fast that Strike knew he must have sprinted; the heavy gas canister was raised, but Laing still lay handcuffed and quiescent on the floor, and Strike stood smoking beside the cooker.

“Fuckin’ ’ell, Bunsen, I fort ’e’d jumped you!”

“Shanker, could you get hold of a car and drive me somewhere tomorrow morning? I’ll give you—”

Strike looked down at his bare wrist. He had sold his watch yesterday for the cash that had paid for Shanker’s help tonight. What else did he have to flog?

“Listen, Shanker, you know I’m going to make money out of this one. Give me a few months and I’ll have clients queuing up.”

“’S’all right, Bunsen,” said Shanker, after brief consideration. “You can owe me.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah,” said Shanker, turning to go. “Gimme a bell when you’re ready to leave. I’ll go get us a car.”

“Don’t nick one!” Strike called after him.

Mere seconds after Shanker had passed the window for the second time, Strike heard the distant sound of a police siren.

“Here they come, Donnie,” he said.

It was then that Donald Laing spoke in his true voice to Strike, for the first and last time.

“Your mother,” he said, in a deep Borders accent, “was a fucking whore.”

Strike laughed.

“Maybe so,” he said, bleeding and smoking in the darkness as the sirens grew louder, “but she loved me, Donnie. I heard yours didn’t give a shit about you, little policeman’s bastard that you were.”

Laing began to thrash around, trying fruitlessly to free himself, but he merely spun on his side, arms still pinned behind his back.