was still nursing him. There had been some difficult moments. These matters were usually suppressed, emotions weren’t easy-their job had no use for them. They were a hindrance, an encumbrance to efficient function. Extreme events were often turned into humour to make them easier to deal with. Even Rowlands’ de rigueur divorce had been a source of thin amusement to Brook and his boss. But the death of a child…
Rowlands pushed a piece of paper towards Brook. ‘Here, take your mind off things. Go for a drive in the sunshine.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An address near Ravenscourt Park. Uniform have found us a body to check out. It’s probably just a derelict with an exploded liver…’
‘I’ll take a look.’
‘And stop worrying so much about Sammy Elphick and things you can’t change. It’s not good for your health.’
Brook glanced at the cigarette and the flask, then at Rowlands and raised his eyebrows. They grinned in unison.
‘Point taken.’ Rowlands broke into a tarry chuckle. ‘I’m serious though. It’ll cost you if you make it personal, Damen. That way lies madness. Take it from me. Besides,’ Rowlands searched for a justification and came up with one that guilt would only allow him to mutter under what passed for his breath, ‘it’s only Sammy Elphick. When all’s said and done, who’s bothered?’
Brook paused, mulling over something, then nodded. ‘You’re right, guv. It’s only Sammy Elphick. He won’t be missed.’ Then quieter, ‘You’re right.’
A sudden cloud glided over them, as though both men were confronted by something they’d rather not face. Save for the distant ringing of telephones there was nothing to disturb the moment.
Brook was the one to break it. ‘Do you remember that night, on the stairwell? When I asked you if it was a bad one and you said you didn’t know. I think I understand what you were saying.’
‘Do you? I hope not.’
Brook ignored the warning and stared at the wall, conjuring the scene. ‘I saw what you saw. I saw Sammy. I saw his wife. I saw the boy. This is a bad one, I thought. This is a brutal, heartless killing of man, woman and child, and every right-thinking person in this world should be appalled. And do you know what, guv? I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about those people. I looked into that boy’s face and all I saw was a case-a problem to solve. I didn’t see a family. I didn’t see a history-work, play, life, death. I saw three corpses and a challenge. I didn’t see a brutal killing and I wasn’t appalled.’ Brook looked hard at his boss. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Rowlands raised a bloodshot eye to Brook and nodded.
Brook missed the attempt at closure. ‘I thought it would hit me later. I’d have nightmares. But it hasn’t. And I know it won’t.’
‘No,’ agreed Rowlands. He took another pull on the flask and thought for a second. ‘How old are you, Brooky?’
‘Twenty-seven. Why?’
Rowlands nodded, a bemused look spreading across his countenance. ‘Christ. I was twenty-seven,’ he glanced up at Brook as though to reassure him of the relevance of this information, ‘when I stopped.’
‘Stopped what?’
‘Giving a shit.’
Chapter Fifteen
Wendy Jones closed the folder and turned to Brook. ‘I see your point. Bobby Wallis and Sammy Elphick could have been brothers.’
Brook looked straight ahead, focusing on the motorway. ‘They were both small-time villains, though there was never any evidence of child abuse in the Elphick case. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
Jones pondered for a moment. ‘You know, if it weren’t for the children being killed as well, I could almost imagine it was a policeman or somebody striking back…’
‘A vigilante?’
‘Right. I mean, who’s going to miss Bobby Wallis? Or Sammy Elphick?’
‘We went down the same road. If it weren’t for the children…’
Time gathered around them and Brook waited. He could sense Jones thinking hard, forming her ideas, identifying questions. He was pleased she didn’t feel the need to fill silence.
‘Why the name?’
‘What?’
‘The name. Why was he ever called The Reaper?’
‘That was my fault. I’d seen a lot of violent crime before Harlesden. Bad things. Killings, gangland executions, domestics, overdoses. You’ve seen corpses?’
‘Not many. My mother. In the hospital.’
‘Sorry.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Any violent deaths?’
‘I was first to that tramp a couple of years back. In Markeaton Park.’
‘Beaten to death?’ Brook remembered. Jones nodded. ‘What did you notice?’
‘Sir?’
‘When you stared at him longer than was necessary, hoping that no-one would think you were being ghoulish, what did you notice?’
Jones pondered for a moment. ‘Everything.’
‘In particular?’
‘The face, his face,’ she corrected herself, ‘it was all out of shape, his mouth was open but not like people open their mouths. It was like…a caricature of what the human face should look like.’
‘Anything else?’
‘The body. Every muscle, every joint seemed to be in the wrong position. It put me in mind of that game Twister people used to play at parties years ago.’
‘At Christmas,’ Brook smiled and looked away.
‘It was like a grotesque game of that, only worse. Think of the most difficult position to hold the human body and then freeze it. That’s what I noticed.’
‘Violent death does that-throws up all sorts of weird and wonderful positions. That’s what spawned The Reaper. When I looked at the Elphick family that first night, the violence was missing. The boy was hanging from the ceiling but he didn’t seem unduly troubled. The parents were tied and killed quickly. They’d suffered more from seeing their son die, they’d cried, same as Wallis and his wife. But in the end they were just sitting there, dead, their throats cut. They looked quite normal-apart from a look of surprise.
‘And talking about it later with Charlie Rowlands, I said it seemed less like a murder, and more like the Grim Reaper had just breezed in and removed their lives. No fuss, no bother, no struggle. Three less people in the world. Who’s next?’
‘And Brixton?’
Brook hesitated before saying, ‘Same.’ There was nothing to gain from elaborating further.
Jones nodded. ‘Brixton. December 1991. Dark evenings again. That’s why he does it round the turn of the year, isn’t it?’
‘And in bad weather, to discourage witnesses.’
‘Floyd Wrigley, West Indian origin,’ she read from the file, ‘his common law wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Tamara. Aged eleven.’ Her verbal tremor was not lost on Brook. She leafed through the file for the pictures and stumbled through them. ‘Did you see the scene?’
‘No. Yes. I mean, not really. It wasn’t my case but they asked me in on a consult. It was the same as Harlesden. Parents tied up, throats cut, watching their daughter die-all to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem.
