Bright City Deep Shadows Read online

  There were bay windows at either side of the door. I moved to one of them and peered in. I couldn’t see much but there was no sign of Anning. I went to the other window. Still nothing. I followed a path that led around the side of the house to the back. I suddenly realised that the house was surrounded by neat flower beds full of bright blooms. Anning was a gardener? How could he be a gardener? At the back was a lawn and a little Colorbond tool shed. A patio with garden furniture extended across the whole of the rear of the house. At one side was a free-standing trellis with a dozen pots of orchids hanging from it. The orchids were healthy and lush but not in bloom.

  I found a glass double door standing open and stepped through it from the brilliant light outside to the gloom within. And there he was, lying on the kitchen floor, staring at the ceiling, with a bullet hole in his chest.

  There was very little blood, which meant, I supposed, that he had died quickly, Shot through the heart. His heart had died and stopped pumping blood. But how could his heart die when it was already dead? Only someone with a dead heart could have sat for ninety minutes chatting and laughing with Chelsea and then stabbed her in an alley. My eyes moved to his face. Clean shaven, of course. A young man. Not bad looking. Perhaps he had a twisted, ugly picture of himself in the attic. I wanted to kick his face, stomp on it and make it look the way it should.

  My phone ringing snapped me out of my bloody reverie. It was Ronnie. I stepped away from the body and took the call.

  “Luke? What’s going on?”

  I told him.

  “Jeez, mate, get out of there now. Right now. Get in your car and drive home. If anyone asks, you’ve been home all day, hey? No, no! I mean, since you left the police station. Wait a minute! Did you touch anything? Have you touched the body? The doors? Windows?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The front door.”

  “Wipe it. Christ, you’re a pillock! What the hell made you go over there?”

  “I thought he might be injured.”

  “You—?” He was actually speechless. “Fuck me! Just get out of there. Are you moving?”

  “Maybe...” The thought came to me out of nowhere. “Maybe I should search the place, look for evidence.”

  “Are you out of your tiny fucking mind? You want to leave your bloody prints and DNA all over the dead man’s house? The dead man you have the best motive in the world to have killed? The dead man you didn’t tell the police was a suspect this morning? The dead man whose house you were parked outside of with a pair of binoculars? Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

  “I won’t get another chance?”

  “Leave it. Get out. The police will search his house. Just wipe the door and go.”

  “OK,” I said and hung up.

  But I didn’t go. I looked around the kitchen. I picked up a tea towel and used it to cover my fingers so I could open a drawer. It contained cutlery. I opened another. It contained more domestic stuff. What was I looking for? A folder full of incriminating notes? A diary? A laptop? A phone? None of these would be in kitchen drawers. I looked again at the body. It was dressed in cargo shorts and a T-shirt. No socks. No shoes. The phone was in the left-hand side pocket of the shorts. I hesitated to get so close to the dead man on the floor.

  My phone rang again. I answered it. “Where are you?” Ronnie asked. “You’re not driving.”

  “I’m still here. At the house.”

  He swore, long and hard. “Have you touched anything else?”

  “A tea towel.” There was a long silence, so I said, “His phone’s in his pocket.”

  Another long silence. “Listen to me, you fucking drongo, if you nick his phone, the cops will trace it. If you disable it so they can’t trace it, it’s as useful as tits on a bull. So just leave the fucker alone, hey? Listen, mate, you remember all the preparation this bloke made for the murder. You don’t think he’s going to have left evidence around in his own home do you? Just give it away, mate. There’s nothing you can do there that won’t just make things worse. Do you hear what I’m saying?” I nodded. “Luke?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’m going.”

  “Good. Take the tea towel with you. Wipe the door with it. Keep it. Don’t stand in any blood.”

  I looked at the floor. There was no blood except on the body. “Right-o.” I hung up again.

  Just a quick look around. I went through to a hallway that connected all the rooms. I knew already what was at the front. Next to the kitchen, with a view onto the garden, I found Anning’s home office. No little laptop there! A big metal rack contained six or eight large slabs of computing equipment. Lights flickered on their front panels and wires criss-crossed and tumbled in thick bundles. On a plain desk stood three huge screens with two keyboards, half-a-dozen game controllers and other weird input devices. I sat in the high-backed, winged office chair and sank into its deep upholstery. There were filing cabinets and other tables and cupboards, every surface was littered with electronic gadgets – including at least three tablets, two pairs of VR goggles and some high-tech gauntlets. Games, I thought. A man who plays games.

  Scanning the desk, I finally found a sculpted, multi-coloured puck that I correctly guessed was a super-fancy mouse and gave it a nudge. The three screens sprang into life. Anning must have been here when his own murderers came knocking. And he’d left himself logged on.

  A first person shooter game was running on one screen. The ray-gun toting space commando ran through a post-apocalyptic terrain while alien creatures with terrible aim leapt out from behind half-demolished buildings and fired at him. I watched until he was hit and fell down. Other space soldiers gathered round him.

  “What the fuck, man?” one of them asked, clearly put out.

  “Yeah, not cool,” said another. “You’re supposed to body swap if you’re having a crap or whatever. Now we’re a man down for the raid.”

  On a whim, I reached out to a microphone on the table and pushed the button to speak. “Help me, I’m dead,” I said in a croaky voice.

  One of them swore and walked away.

  “You need to take this more seriously,” said another, “or you’re off the squad, man. There’s a lot of people got money on this.”

  I left them to their grumbling and looked at the other screens. There were windows full of code, windows full of stats, windows full of stuff I couldn’t make any sense of, but nothing that looked like a diary or a contacts list. I clicked on a few things but I was hopelessly out of my depth.

  The game screen changed and drew my attention. It was now some kind of scoreboard, with a list of teams, their rankings, various stats, and the current betting odds. At the bottom of the screen was an archer logo and the slogan, “Powered by Archerfield. Gamble securely. Win big.”

  Well, I hope they didn’t pay their corporate branding company much for that, I thought and got up again. There was nothing to find here. Nothing a useless, technically illiterate, unemployed bum like me could find, anyway. I reached the hallway before I remembered I’d left my tea towel behind. I went back in and retrieved it, wiped the microphone and the chair arms, giggling as I remembered the Hitchhiker’s Guide. All I needed to be Arthur Dent was three pints of beer, a packet of crisps and an electronic thumb. I already had the towel.

  In the hallway, near the front door, I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror hanging there. It was amazing how pale my face looked, as if all my blood had drained out, like I should be lying dead on the kitchen floor alongside Anning. Shrugging, I left. I wiped the door, like Ronnie had said, and walked back to my car. I got in, started the engine and sat there with the engine running.

  My hands were gripping the wheel so tightly my arms were trembling. My breathing was fast and shallow. Shock, a voice said in my head. It’s only shock. But that was silly. Just because Anning was dead and I’d seen the body lying there with its eyes open and a hole in its chest and looking like it was asleep but all the life had gone and it was really dead. A dead thing. Just meat. Meat on the
floor. A pile of meat that looked like a person. Like Chelsea had been. Like Chelsea had been. Like—

  The police siren cut through my fugue like a jolt of electricity to the brain. The white saloon, decked out in blue checks and black writing rushed to a halt outside Anning’s house, headlights on, red and blue lights flashing. Two cops in peaked caps got out in a hurry and ran to Anning’s door. They knocked and waited. Then one ran around the back. Seconds ticked slowly past, then the other got a call on his radio and also ran to the back. I put the car in gear and drove up the road, passing the police car and its epileptic light show and carried on up the road, round a corner, then another, then another until I was far, far away.

  Chapter Eleven

  I went home. I sat on my sofa and stared at my shaking hands until the tremors passed. Ronnie called about ten times but I didn’t answer and he gave up. I lay down on the sofa. Later, I curled up and fell asleep.

  I was woken by Ronnie placing a large rum on the coffee table beside me. I looked around, confused, and sat up.

  “Get that in you, mate,” he said, taking a chair opposite me. He also had a drink.

  It was still light. Early evening. How did Ronnie get into my home?

  “I remember my first time,” Ronnie said. “I wasn’t even your age. Northern Ireland, during the Troubles. We were… But that’s all classified. I ended up in a ditch in the dark with a dead bloody Mick on top of me. I still see that face in my dreams, even though I’ve seen a lot more since, some of them mates.” He looked down at his drink. “Best thing for it, the only thing that does any bloody good, is to get completely fucking hammered.”

  The smell of the drink was making me feel queasy. “I didn’t think it would be so...”

  “Yeah, well. You live and learn.”

  “Do other people… you know…?”

  “Flip out like you did? Some. Everyone’s different. What happened after you stopped taking my calls?”

  I told him. It was like recalling a dream. I wasn’t always sure that it had all really happened and in what order.

  “Bloody hell,” was his only comment but I caught the undertones. I had been lucky. Incredibly lucky.

  “I wiped everything down, like you said.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He picked up his glass and looked into the brown liquid. “Well, the cops are going to work out that Anning was the man in the restaurant – the one they think is your accomplice.”

  “How? How could they possibly link him?”

  He frowned, like I was being stupid. “Same way we did. Even if they don’t use the class lists and electoral rolls, the coincidence of a body turning up just a block away from where the evidence was burned is going to make a cop like Bertolissio take his picture to our friend Jase to get an ID. Once they connect Anning to Chelsea, they’ll be round here like a shot to get your prints and DNA, your clothes and your alibi. They’ll scour Anning’s place for anything and everything that might connect you to him.”

  My clothes? Even if I’d shed fibres like a dog in moult, my shorts and shirt were common brands. It would only be a weak link. But what about skin flakes and hairs? Was my DNA all over the dead man’s house?

  “Shit.”

  “Shit, indeed,” he said. “You don’t have an alibi and I bet half a dozen traffic cameras – if not nosy neighbours – put you at the scene at the right time. Worse still, the cop car will have had a camera and the two cops might have had their body cameras running. If they think to check the footage, which they will, they’ll see your car right there in the street where the murder took place. Worse than all that, you didn’t report the crime when you discovered it. You ponced around in his house, played with his toys, and snuck away past the cops.”

  Now I really felt sick. “Oh God. What should I do?”

  “Mate, there’s not much you can do. You’ve probably got a day at the most before they put it all together and come for you. Give Terry a call.”

  “Terry?”

  “Your lawyer. He’ll probably recommend surrendering.”

  I did not want to do that. Sitting in a police cell while Reid stacked up evidence against me seemed like the worst thing I could do. I couldn’t deny I was there with the body and I had such a great motive for killing him.

  “What about the gun?” I said. “I don’t own a gun. I wouldn’t even know how to get one. How could I have shot him without a gun?”

  “Yeah, the gun. What do you suppose Reid’s going to say about that? Why don’t you tell us where you dumped it, Kelly? Is that why you were so keen to sneak past the cops at the crime scene, so you could dump the murder weapon?”

  “Jesus.”

  He picked up my glass and his and took them to the kitchenette where he started pouring the booze back into the bottle. “Looks like this wasn’t such a good idea after all.” He stopped and looked straight at me. “Seriously, you should call Terry, try to get out ahead of all this. The kinds of things I can do for you right now would only make things worse.”

  “Like what?” Surely, anything was better than being arrested?

  “Oh, like showing you how to go underground, getting you a new identity, that kind of thing.” Maybe that was worse, maybe it wasn’t. “Go on, call him.”

  So I did. Marchant’s first reaction was, “You need to turn yourself in, right away. I’ll meet you at the station in one hour. Is Ronnie with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, tell him to keep out of it and to make sure his alibi for the murder is rock solid.”

  “OK.”

  “I thought this one was going to be easy but now… Ah well, I shall look at it as an opportunity to enhance my reputation. Will you put Ronnie on?”

  “OK.”

  I handed over the phone and Ronnie said things like, “I know,” and “Tell me about it!” They obviously made an agreement to meet up. Ronnie said goodbye and gave me an appraising look.

  “Right-o, mate,” he said. “Take your clothes off. Everything. Stick the lot in the washing machine. Shoes too.”

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “I’ve already thought about that. All my clothes are common brands. It won’t prove anything if they find fibres.”

  He sighed. “And what about any fibres or hairs or whatever they find on you that you picked up at the house?”

  “Ah. Right.”

  “Change into something that looks the same. Tell the cops you’ve had the same clothes on all day. It shouldn’t matter but, if this ever goes to court, the more doubt and uncertainty you can muster, the better.”

  I grabbed some clothes, went to the utility room and changed. The washing machine still had a load of damp washing in it that was beginning to smell musty. I dumped it on the floor, put my clothes and shoes in, and set the machine working. I went out to find Ronnie doing something with my phone.

  “I’m deleting your call logs,” he said. “And mine too. It won’t stop them finding out how often I called you while you were at the house but it will slow them down a bit. I’m going to need a bit of time. I want to find out who those guys were that killed Anning. It’s the only thing that will get you off now.”

  I sat down, feeling tired. “I thought it was all over when I saw Anning dead. I thought all this was finished.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not. Not for me, anyhow. You get to spend a short vacation at the ratepayer’s expense but I’ve now got two killers to track down.” He sounded almost happy about it.

  I checked the time. “I’d better get going.”

  “I’ve already called you a cab.”

  “Thanks. Is there, like, anything I should take with me?”

  He shook his head. “Nah, mate. They’ll supply all your needs.”

  He came with me in the taxi and I couldn’t help wondering if he thought I might chicken out. When I looked back from the police station doors, he was still there in the cab, watching me. Marchant was already in the foyer and greeted
me with a handshake.

  We were met by our old friend Julie. “Hi, I’m Julie,” she said. Neither of us bothered to remind her that we’d already met. “If you’d like to come this way.”

  She took us to the same room we had been in before. I went to look out of the window while Marchant unloaded his briefcase and made himself comfortable. I wondered how many times a week he went through that same ritual. A woman came in and said, “Hello, I’m—”

  “Detective Sergeant Alexandra Bertolissio,” I said.

  She smiled. “Fame at last.” It was a lovely smile and quite threw me. “I’m afraid Detective Inspector Reid is out of the office at the moment but if I can help in any way...”

  “He’s probably attending a crime scene not far from Torville Street,” Marchant said.

  She looked at Marchant with a keen eye. I could almost hear the pieces falling into place. Then she turned that intelligent gaze on me. “Won’t you sit down, Doctor Kelly?” I did and so did she. To Marchant, she said, “I gather you’re here with some important information.”

  I began to speak but Marchant put a hand on my arm to silence me. He then proceeded to explain how, “in the course of my client’s investigation into the murder of his girlfriend, Chelsea Campbell,” I had stumbled upon the body of Simon Anning and, “naturally, being shocked and disoriented,” had left the scene without reporting it. “However, as soon as my client came to his proper senses, he called me and, well, here we are.”

  The pretty little detective looked at me throughout Marchant’s spiel, not just looked at but studied with a deep, penetrating stare. After he’d finished, she asked me, “Is there anything you’d like to add?” I shook my head. “Mr. Marchant, you realise that I will have to detain your client. I note that he came in voluntarily and is co-operating.”

  “Thank you,” said Marchant. “Can I hear your grounds?”

  She sighed. “Well, the DI may want to arrest him on suspicion of murder but that’s up to him. For now, let’s just say it’s for leaving the scene of a crime.”