The Sister(51)

In time, the boy would redevelop and test the tightness of his angles before submitting them to his father, who by now realised that his boy, John junior, or Johnny as he affectionately called him, had a natural aptitude for the work.

Privately, he hoped that junior would follow in his footsteps, but chose not to reveal his wishes, preferring the boy to make his own decision when the time was right.





In his early teenage fantasies, Junior JFK, as he now imagined himself, had become an FBI Agent. Often, he’d wonder what the FBI Agents over there would have made of him.

He would smile as he imagined the headlines: New Agent 'Junior' JFK, solves 25-year-old mystery.





When the time came, it was inevitable that he’d enrol in the police force.

He quickly established a reputation as a tough, no nonsense workaholic, with no time for women, making his way with ease through the ranks to detective, solving many difficult cases, making enemies inside and outside the force. A few of these believed his father helped to smooth his passage through the ranks; others suggested he could be gay. Thickset and heavily built, no one repeated the suggestion to his face.

Although his police record was exemplary, something haunted him. One night, not long after he started as an officer on the beat, something had slipped by him. If he’d been more experienced, he might have realised something was wrong, if only he’d been more assertive, and if that fateful call hadn’t come through... Thirty seconds, that’s all it would have taken to run a check on him, but he didn’t and besides, she did seem to know him. The timing of the radio call, it all came down to that really, and the judgement on which was more important at the time. The girl disappeared without a trace.

For twenty-three years, it was the only blot on an otherwise spotless career record, until the arrival of a group of cases, all within a short space of time, which seemed unsolvable by conventional means.

The Midnight Man, the Stalker, the Gasman. Serial criminals. After two or three repeat crimes, the press would coin them a nickname.

He picked apart their operational methods, dissecting every known fact. There was never any forensic evidence. No witnesses, except in the case of the Stalker, he’d been seen looking in the windows of lone women in the dead of night. He dressed all in black, wearing a matching ski mask. Aside from his build, they did not have anything else to go on. No one had seen his face.

A burglar called the Midnight Man, and a rapist christened The Gasman. He admonished himself for thinking of them by their Press nicknames; he hated the way the press did that. It sensationalised their low lives, giving them a kind of infamy and glory in which to bask.

In trying to live up to their images, these people sometimes actually increased their activities and whilst inevitably most would get careless and then caught, there was something different about these particular characters and the way they continued to evade the law. There was a link between the Stalker and the other two. He just knew it. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been interested in a stalker at all, but he felt that if he could catch him, he’d get a lead on the others.

In the end, he concluded that the only way to do it was to catch them red-handed.

For now, they seemed just too clever for that.





Chapter 38



Friday 24 November 2006





Kennedy thought about the woman he’d spent Wednesday night with, and smiled. He’d have preferred to spend another night with her. Instead, at Tanner’s insistence, he was out belatedly celebrating his birthday with a dozen work colleagues.

He’d tried to call it off earlier in the week. Tanner wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Come on, sir. It’ll do you good.’

‘You’re only so keen, Tanner, because you think you can inveigle Theresa along.’

‘Sir, I have no interest in her whatsoever, I swear.’





The night turned into a pub-crawl. Of the original group, only he and Tanner remained, lurching through the half-lit back streets of Covent Garden.

Even when drunk, he always kept well clear of darkened doorways.

‘Y'know, Tanner, one of the first things learnt, learned?’ he hesitated. ‘Whichever, by me in the force…on the beat. On patrol, Tanner was to be wary in the streets and who could be hiding in the doorways. Walk in the middle, that’s the best thing,’ he said, almost walking into a cast iron bollard. ‘The f*ck, did that?’

Tanner grinned as he manoeuvred around it on legs that no longer obeyed him. Although he knew he should get him home, he was enjoying the spectacle Kennedy was making of himself.

They stopped. Kennedy perched his buttocks uncomfortably on top of the bollard and mumbled something about calling a taxi.

Tanner cocked his head, theatrically making a point of listening to the steady, muffled hum of a hundred people talking all at once. It was a human beehive.

Kennedy extricated himself from his temporary seat, steadied himself and shuffled to the doorway closely marked by Tanner. Drawn like moths to a flame, they hovered outside the pub.

‘Sounds busy in there tonight,’ Kennedy remarked. ‘Let’s have one last, one more for the road, eh?’ He opened the door; it released a blast of sound that made both of them wince. They walked inside.

Kennedy shouted above the noise, ‘I always said I'd retire when I reached fifty.’ Despite having nearly seven years to go, Kennedy said it as if he were fifty already, as if he were leaving the next day. ‘Before I go, I want to make a big effort to solve all the unsolved crime that happened during my watch. No, not all of it, one in particular and I’m not going to leave it until the last minute either.’