Kill Who You Want

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Plot reminder: DCI Yardley has now taken over investigations. Mark Cosgrove is the estranged husband of Madeleine, the best friend and lover of the first victim, Catherine Butterfield, and the man Vince saw fleeing from the scene of the shooting. In the last chapter Vince was heading towards Cosgrove's flat in St Frideswade's Lane...

~~~~~

For Desk Sergeant Bayliss it had been a long and somewhat stressful morning. Not only was DCI Yardley a highly demanding chief investigating officer - manpower deployments and timings were quite headspinningly precise - but he'd also had to deal with the hysterical imprecations of a women whose octogenarian mother had earlier that morning returned home from the County Royal Infirmary following a hip replacement operation to find her bungalow ransacked. Yes, he'd attempted to reassure the woman, foot patrols were still operating at three times normal capacity. She had however seemed unprepared to accept that even such probatory measures could ensure a universal surveillance of all the town's streets at all times, and that it was still inherent on householders to adequately secure their own properties. Following attendance at the scene, PC Davis would report that there were no signs of forced entry and that the intruder had only had to jimmy up the latch of the opened bathroom window. The jackals were gathering. Had been gathering for weeks. Such open invitations were unlikely to remain unexploited for more than a  few hours

And now, to top things off, Bayliss was also having to decipher the equally hysterical voice on the other end of the telephone line. Youngish, male. Chinese or something  he sounded like. He seemed barely to know a word of English, less still how to pronounce them.

"Better call a patrol car," he commanded PC Naylor at the front desk beside him. "St Frideswade's Lane I think the guy's trying to say."

*

As Vince Holloway made his way back along Croxley Road, he  was caught between two contrasting urges. The first not to run or look suspicious, not to constantly check up and down his clothing for any splashes or smears of blood. The second to do precisely all those things.

It was difficult to identify his feelings. They'd all become sort of mushed together like the play doh he'd used to play with as a kid. Each birthday or Christmas would bring a shiny new packet, a rainbow of virginal coloured stripes. By the day after, palmed and squashed together, all that remained was a ball of some nonedescript greeny-grey.
 
That there was a smudged vein of fear running through his play doh emotion ball was only to have been expected of course. No, in many ways more terrifying than the fear itself were those other entwined strata of emotions he thought he could glimpse. A certain sense of relief, for example. Pride, even. Accomplishment. Those exact same emotions which had been absent hours earlier as the examiner had signed his driving licence certificate.

Whatever might happen next, he told himself, he just needed to remember that one fundamental fact.

His parents, Julie, everyone he cared about.

They were all safe now.

*

As with Catherine Butterfield, Kubič found himself the final member of the CID team to arrive on the scene. That he was forced to initially to view the body over the shoulders of Yardley, Wye, Bert Ashcroft the coroner and the crime scene photographer seemed only to reinforce his own self-imposed sense of peripheral status. That he felt neither repulsion nor particular anger at the glimpsed bloody corpse in the hallway of Flat 6 meanwhile appeared to confirm his belief that the last six weeks had numbed him, sapped him of that capacity to empathise, to be shocked or outraged, which rendered him human.