C.T. Brown - Second Time Lucky?

  Second Time Lucky?

  By

  C T Brown

  Published in 2013 by C T Brown

  Copyright © C T Brown 2013

  C T Brown asserts his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All Rights Reserved

  Part One

  Staring down at the badly carved mess that had once been her throat and the dark, glistening pool of blood she lay in, there was no point checking for a pulse. I bent to retrieve my knife from where it lay, the knife that had hacked open her neck and let the life drain from her. Sticky with arterial blood, dark crimson and still steaming slightly in the cold air, it felt heavy, as if weighed down by the life it had taken. No point leaving solid evidence for the Police, I'd be their first and most obvious suspect anyway so why leave them a trail - a knife they could easily link to me as it was undoubtedly covered with my fingerprints. Avoiding leaving a trail of bloody footprints wouldn't be a problem thanks to the dirty grey slush which was all that remained of the snow from the previous night. I stood a good chance of getting away without leaving any obvious evidence they could use to connect me to this. As dawn wouldn't break for another hour and a half no-one would find the body anytime soon, even in London most people avoided alleys like this in the dark. Even the dumbest of the city's night denizens feared that if they didn't they would end up exactly like her, dead in a truly messy and painful way.

  Moving at a nicely nonchalant looking speed I walked out of the alley and emerged into Soho at its quietest, during that brief interlude between the end of the night-time glamour and the beginning of the daytime sleaze. Not to say that it wasn't sleazy at night, it was just obvious what with the darkness and the copious amounts of alcohol and narcotics necessary to convince people that ending their evening in Soho was a good idea. Heading away from here by tube would be an easy getaway, most of the trains would be empty as they'd only just started running again after the usual ludicrous break in service during the night, but the CCTV would freeze my image in some digital archive and give me something else to explain away once PC Plod came calling. Soon enough they'd check my mobile phone records and know she had called me earlier, no way they could know what she'd said but it would look better if I was found heading toward where she was found than if I were seen fleeing the scene. To waste a little time I headed for the sickeningly brightly coloured neon of Shaftesbury Avenue and a cafe I knew, better to head back toward the alley after breakfast and be found arriving for a meeting I could say was set for an hour later than it actually had been. Along the way my knife made its way between the rust pitted bars of a drain cover that I spotted between the empty spirit bottles in the gutter of Frith Street, I thought the coat would be more of a problem but fortunately the homeless of old London town know not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Explaining why I was out in freezing weather without a coat would be easy, I'm a university student and most detectives in the Metropolitan Police will believe that "scrounging bloody students" are capable of just about anything, no matter how stupid it may seem.

  Leaving the small, squalid doorways of Soho's thriving trade in overpriced naked flesh, I emerged onto Shaftesbury Avenue to be bleached and dazzled by the headlights of grimy minicabs and even grimier kebab emporiums. Once in the cafe I was at least warm and, over my tea and full English breakfast, I could let myself think about the events of the last half hour. Firstly I guess I should clarify something, I didn't murder Emily Parker. Spiriting away the murder weapon may look a touch suspicious, I will grant you, but when it was clearly the folding knife from my toolkit that I hadn't even noticed was missing and so was likely to still be covered in my fingerprints I don't feel I had a lot of choice. Admittedly I could have tried to explain it away but the Police don't tend to be understanding about these things, generally they operate on the principal that if the murder weapon is there, you own it and your prints are all over it there really isn't much else to look into. They might also get funny ideas because Emily was my girlfriend, not something suspicious in, and of, itself you might think but as my previous girlfriend had also been murdered in murky and, as yet, unexplained circumstances and I was still the prime suspect they might make a connection. Terrible how people can jump to conclusions isn't it?

  Pausing to take a deep breath I decided that for ten seconds I'd let it in, let myself feel the loss of the only person who didn't treat me with suspicion, the woman who loved me and who I loved in a way I'd never thought possible. It was a good thing I was the cafe's only customer, a guy sitting down calmly and then bursting into tears and shaking uncontrollably for ten seconds can generate a lot of funny looks, fortunately only the owner was present and the owner of a twenty-four hour cafe in the West End soon learns not to notice anything his customers do. If they don't they tend to have unpleasant nightmares and messy mental breakdowns. Gradually the tears stopped and my hands stopped shaking long enough for me to scald my tongue and the roof of my mouth by taking a slurp of tea which had been heated to the point of near nuclear fusion. I looked around at the largely plastic cafe interior and wondered what the hell was going on? A panicked phone call at five in morning brings me to Soho and the dead body of the love of my life. Who would want to kill Emily? She was a student and, even though I loved her I had to admit, not exactly a star pupil either. What had she gotten into? Why hadn't she brought me in on it once it got dangerous? How would I cope without her? No, I couldn't think like that. A cathartic bout of depression and grief would do no long term good, last time it had just led to six months on remand for a murder I didn't commit. Two girlfriends murdered and only nineteen years old. Delayed entry into university because I was on remand. There was no way I was ever escaping this, things just couldn't get any worse. Just as I thought that, even more trouble walked in through the door.

  Dave 'Fingers' Mackeye. A middle aged weasel of a man in a suit that must have looked cheap when he'd bought it, somewhere over a decade ago by my guess. Nicknamed after what he collects if you can't pay the money you owe, a man with a deep seated hatred of me that I returned with gusto. Like most Scots settled in London his belief that all things Scottish were greater than all things English had only strengthened over the years, however unlike most he actually was genuinely homesick for Scotland. Unfortunately a youthful incident between himself and a Celtic fan that had resulted in serious injury for both and a fire which destroyed two streets in Glasgow, there was no homecoming likely in the near future. Unusually he was solo, normally he was accompanied by a couple of dark suits stuffed with muscle, and just about enough brain to tie their own shoelaces. Scraping back the orange plastic seat across the table from me he was brave enough to sit down without brushing it down, a serious risk in some of the greasier spoons in the area.

  "You need my help."

  "Thanks, but no thanks, Fingers."

  "I wasn't offering, just saying you need it. You ain't getting it."

  He looked smug, not a good sign. Dave collects grudges like rotten meat collects flies and he had a special place in his bile for me, anything that made him smile at me boded ill. "So why are you interrupting my breakfast?"

  "I like to gloat."

  "No, really?"

  "You might think you're smart you gobby little student but you're in deep this time, the fuzz have found your bit of skirt already. How long do you think you've got 'til they find you?"

  Taking his mobile phone from his jacket pocket he looked straight at me, no doubt he was hinting he could just tell the old bill where I was. 'Get lost, Dave, you aren't going to turn me in. Even a brain-dead idiot like you doesn't need that sort of reputation.'

  'I ain’t going t
o call the pigs on you, I just wanted you to know I could . . . and for you to know I picked up what you dropped on Frith Street. Stay out of my way or it'll be anonymously handed in to the boys in blue.'

  I grabbed for him but he jumped to his feet too quickly, by the time I'd come to my feet he was letting the aluminium and glass door swing shut behind him. Great. A psychopath with a grudge has my knife. Running from the cafe I spotted him disappearing round a corner and followed, another stellar idea as that's when I found out where the muscle was.

  A few minutes later I was alone in the street and, with a little support from the back wall of a theatre, was able to drag myself to a close approximation of a vertical position. A quick check revealed that I still had all my fingers but two on my left hand were intensely painful and bending too far in the wrong direction to be anything but broken. Various scrapes, cuts and bruises vied for my attention in between the throbs of pain from my left hand but were little more than background noise in comparison. Fingers must have been put in a really good mood by my misfortune, otherwise I'd be a digit or two down and bleeding to death quietly. You know you're having a bad day when a good kicking which results only in a couple of broken bones is a good thing.

  Reaching around with my right hand I managed to pull my mobile from the left pocket of my jeans, scrolling through my contacts I found the number for Adrian 'First Ade' Doyle and called it. After a brief, bad tempered and unnecessarily complex discussion of prices and the discount that favours owed should bring I hung up and staggered along the litter strewn, neon lit streets to the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road, the kind of intersection you can only get in London - a brightly lit tourist area where no-one will look twice at you if you look like you've just had the crap kicked out of you, hell they wouldn't even notice if you were on fire unless you got too close and then most would only mutter about your lack of manners and try to walk around you.

  First Ade's van stopped just long enough for the sliding door on the side to open and one of his "nurses" to grab me and yank me inside, we were moving again before the door closed. Inside the van is something like the lovechild of an ambulance and a butcher's shop that had been dressed by Elton John in the seventies. Recognisable medical equipment shared space with some pretty gruesome looking tools that still give me nightmares, all in an interior covered in dark red velvet that had been attacked my an insane seamstress with a sequin obsession. Ade was the go to guy for medical help in the west end when hospitals might ask too many questions and a legitimate underworld legend. No-one knew how long he'd been at it, he appeared to be an eighty year old hippy but by all accounts he had looked exactly the same in the sixties when he'd been treating employees of the Kray twins, pop stars and other criminal types. How did I know him and what he did? Same way I knew Fingers, spending three months on remand and another six investigating the murder of a girlfriend whose father turned out to be less the local grocer and more the local mob boss got you a lot of contacts in London's thriving criminal classes, and believe me there really were different classes. When you're investigating a crime as the prime suspect, and even your family has disowned you because their suspicions closely mimic the Police's, you soon learn the value of good contacts. You also soon learn how to take care of yourself. The nurse, well over six foot and the most muscular woman I'd ever seen, swung me up onto a camp bed that did for a treatment table and Ade's long greasy hair and straggly beard swung into view. A wash of weed scented breath passed over me as First Ade looked me up and down. "You really pissed someone off this time didn't you?"

  "Just sort me out will you, First?"

  "Ok, quick or good?"

  "Quick, I ain't got time for good."

  "Fair enough, it’s gonna hurt though and them fingers might not heal perfect."

  "As long as they end up useable then we're good."

  "Ok, but remember, you asked for this."

  Sometimes I wonder what goes through the mind of other road users when the screams come from First's van as he passes them.

  A ten minute drive later the same nurse practically threw me out of the door as the van slowed and my tumble was only stopped by a conveniently placed collection of full dustbins. My wallet was empty of my emergency cash but at least my fingers had been cleaned, set and strapped up, some shaky stitching of my larger cuts and some nuclear-grade painkillers in my pocket completed Ade's work. Blinking in the halogen flicker of an electrical shop's window display I looked around. Tottenham Court Road, the southern end. All electrical shops, the northern end was mostly furniture shops but this end was the place to be if you wanted a stereo of uncertain provenance and had the used notes to pay for it.

  There was no choice now, no way I could turn up anywhere near the murder scene. I show up looking like I've been in a fight and it just opens up even more avenues of interrogation I'd rather not saunter down. Back to home then. If the halls of residence for London's Howard University could count as home that is. Ok, I know what you're thinking, you've never heard of it have you? London has a lot of small specialist universities and Howard's is one of them, with a hundred students in total and only two courses it’s hardly a surprise it isn't more well known. Emily had been taking their specialist criminal law and economics course while I was studying the forensics and criminal psychology course, oddly enough events over the last couple of years had caused me to rethink my plans for university. Going to a nice quiet university in a small city somewhere on the coast and studying history had somehow lost its appeal.

  Two buses later and I was walking down the back streets of St John’s Wood toward the small three storey, nineteen thirties block of flats that had been built as a hall of residence when the university first opened. The rich benefactors who'd founded the place had wanted to provide accommodation for all their students for all their years of study, to this end five of these blocks had been built in amongst the leafy avenues of nineteen thirties semis in the area, much to the chagrin of the enthusiastic social climbers living in them. Nearly all the students still lived in halls with only a few going for houses in their second year, almost none of those houses were in St John's Wood, cost being a big factor in student living.

  My room was on the third storey of a block and was the only one in it that didn't have one of the traditional student living aromas of patchouli incense, stale kebab or unwashed student hanging around it. This was because, unlike most student rooms, my room was full of paper and inhabited by an obsessive murder suspect. Books, piles of paper (loose and in files) and newspapers covered everything except the bed and a narrow passage from the bed to the door, with a small tributary heading to the wardrobe. Immediately on entering I noticed the picture by my bed, Emily and I at the British Library, a picture from a day out three weeks ago, a picture she'd given me last week. I could feel tears waiting to come. I held them back, this wasn't the time. By the time I'd washed and changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a new shirt I could hear sirens, grabbing a new coat I took a glance through the front window and saw three Police cars pulling up outside. Time to face up to the suspicion, face the accusations, explain it all to a lawyer and hope I could find a way to not spend too long in custody. Well, either that or I could go down the fire escape at the back, over the garden wall and try to find out what had happened to Emily before the trail went too cold.

  No option really.

  The Police would never believe me, I had no choice. At least that's what I told myself as I clambered over the rough bricks of the five foot high garden wall.

  Part Two

  There was no doubt that within a couple of hours the Police would have checked the CCTV footage from buses and tube stations in the area, so they would see I'd got on the number ninety-eight bus at Maida Vale and headed back to the West End. Their biggest problem from there would be the sheer number of people and CCTV cameras, it might be possible to pick me out of a crowd if they studied the footage closely enough but that took time - even longer when you are in amongst prob
ably the highest concentration of cameras in the world. No way did the Met have the manpower to look at all that footage efficiently, sticking my picture on the TV was more likely to get a result and it would cost them nothing. So, I had some time. Most people wouldn't be watching the news until after work. Sure, plenty would check websites during the day for footie news and gossip about whichever chav princess the media were currently building up (so they could shoot her back down next week), but no-one looked at the local London news during the day when they could be laughing at some footballer wrapping his shiny Porsche round a tree while under the influence.

  Mid morning already and the shops of Oxford Street were opening their doors so tourists could pay over the odds for cheap tat and Londoners could rummage through the sale sections. Oxford Street is often a surprise to tourists who have heard of this retail pilgrimage site. There is a ground in, permanent griminess to all the buildings that shines in the reflections from all the glinting crisp packets and abandoned beer cans which often dampens even the most enthusiastic worshipper at the altar of capitalism. When you add in the ludicrous crush of humanity that marches along the street jostling, pushing and, occasionally, violently attacking each other, it can be an overwhelming experience.

  Turning off the main street I headed away from Soho, due to the likely arrest and imprisonment that would result from another visit, and instead headed north into Fitzrovia and a small Italian cafe just around the corner from the Fitzroy pub that gave the area it's name - a long time haunt of the more bohemian of the local crowd (in that area, that's really saying something) and that most feared of London's gangs, the Doctor Who fans.

  Inside the cafe it was clear that even were it to be lifted up and dropped into the middle of Rome it would not be any more Italian, the national flag hung from the wall alongside paintings of every tourist's checklist of things to see in Italy you can imagine (the leaning tower, the coliseum, the Pope and so on). Not to forget all the plastic gondolas, the pizza shaped novelty clock and, of course, the ridiculously over the top comedy Italian accent the owner used despite being born in Chiswick to parents originally from exotic Poplar. I'd come here because it was one of the few places I knew that still had a payphone, unlike many visitors to London I was not fooled by the red so-called telephone boxes - like every other Londoner I knew there hadn't been a working phone in one since nineteen eighty-two and they were not only used as urinals by the growing homeless population. Admittedly there was a rumour of a clean telephone box with a working phone hidden somewhere in Kensington but most right thinking people dismissed this as an urban legend.