‘Can you be specific?’
‘Look, George wants them linked. I’m not going to touch that.’
‘OK. So how’s George linked them?’
‘Off the record?’
‘Off the record.’
‘Blood group, life-style of the victim, head injuries, and some positioning of the body, some arrangement that we’re not publicising.’
‘Blood group?’
‘Same.’
‘Which group?’
‘B.’
‘B. That’s rare.’
‘Ish. Nine per cent.’
‘I’d call that rare.’
‘I’d call it inconclusive.’
‘So what makes you so conclusively against it?’
‘Clare Strachan was penetrated, sodomised twice, once postmortem, hit on the head with a blunt instrument, but not fatally, throttled, but not fatally, and after all that she was finally killed, finally killed by a punctured lung which was caused by someone jumping up and down on her chest until one of her ribs snapped off and speared her lung, flooding it with blood so she choked, drowned.’
Again we sat in our silences, our desperate little silences, our nails down the window panes, our faces to the glass, wanting out out out.
‘Can I ask you one more question then?’
He folded up the handkerchief again and nodded.
‘You interviewed the people from the hostel?’
‘St Mary’s? Yes. Had them all in.’
I paused, my lips dry, a terrible vision on the hills out the window, above the room, a vision of the drunk and the mental, the drunk and the mental howling at a moon glimpsed through cell bars, bars high on a dark cell wall.
Eventually I said, ‘And what did they tell you? What did they say?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did you speak to a Walter Kendall?’
He rolled his eyes. ‘The blind man? Repeatedly’
‘And what did he say?’
Alfred Hill, Detective Chief Superintendent Alfred Hill, he looked me dead for the first time and he said:
‘Mr Whitehead, you have an extremely high reputation among the men of the West Yorkshire force, a high reputation as a diligent crime reporter who assists investigations and I’m prepared to give a lot of rope on that account, a lot of rope, but I must say I object to the insinuation.’
‘What insinuation?’
‘I am well, well aware of the things Mr Kendall has said, has said repeatedly, and I’m surprised that a journalist, a man of your reputation, surprised you would even credit such nonsense with a question.’
I smiled. ‘So I’ll take it that it’s not a line of inquiry you are presently pursuing, shall I?’
Alfred Hill said nothing.
‘One last question?’
He sighed.
‘You said that Clare Strachan was a prostitute?’ He nodded.
‘Did she have convictions?’
He was tired, wanted me gone and said, ‘See for yourself,’ and pushed an open file towards me.
I leant forward.
On a typed sheet, two dates:
23/08/74 .
22/12/74 .
Next to each date, letters and numbers:
‘What do they refer to?’
‘One’s a caution for soliciting, one a statement.’
‘WKFD?’
‘Wakefield.’
In the car, on the Moors, in tears, on my cheeks.
Laughing:
Big fucking howling gales of laughter, foot down through another bucket of Jubilee piss.
Laughing:
Thinking,
Looking in the rearview, asking myself:
‘Do I look like a violin?’
Laughing:
Hell’s teeth he was thick, thicker than I could have ever dreamt.
Laughing:
Because he was thick and he was mine.
Laughing:
Foot down, window open, head out in the rain, shouting:
‘So fucking play me.’
Laughing:
‘Go on cunt, play me!’
I pulled up just past a red box, put my jacket up over my ears and ran for it.
I dialled.
‘I want to come over.’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ she half-laughed.
It had stopped raining just as it started to get dark, just to give them their street parties, just to let them light their stupid beacons.
Ka Su Peng was waiting at the corner of Manningham and Queens, short black hair and dirty skin, in a black dress and tights, a bag and a jacket over her arm.
I pulled up and she got in.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘How are you?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘You don’t want to use the flat?’
‘No, not if you don’t mind.’
‘It’s your money,’ she said and I wished she hadn’t, really wished she hadn’t said that.
So I turned left and left again until we were going down Whetley Hill and she said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘I want to do it here,’ I said, turning on to the playing fields off White Abbey Road.
‘But this is…’
I could feel her heart beating inside the car, feel her fear, but said, ‘I know and I want you to show me where.’
