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‘Who’s Calvert?’

  Whisky, piss and gunpowder. And freshly washed nightdresses. Oh, fuck, no . . .

  ‘Tom, who’s Calvert?’

  Then the tears came. And he dredged it all up, every heartstopping, malodorous moment of it. For the first time in fifteen years he took himself back completely. Jan never had the time or the stomach for all of it but now he was going to skip nothing. No edited highlights with a warning for those of a sensitive nature.

  Thorne fought to bring the sobbing under control.

  Then he told her.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Friday, 15 June 1985. Nearly going-home time.

  It’s a big one. The biggest since the Ripper. Fifteen thousand interviews in eighteen months and they’ve got nothing. The press are going mental, but not that mental, obviously. It’s not like he’s killing women or straight blokes, after all. Just the right amount of moral outrage with a smattering of self-righteousness and occasional comments about ‘the risks inherent in choosing that kind of lifestyle’.

  No lurid nicknames, though if the Sun could have got away with ‘Poof Killer’ they would certainly have used it.

  Just ‘Johnny Boy’.

  The fourth victim had told a friend he was meeting a man called John for a drink. This was an hour or so before his heart was cut out and his genitals were removed. An approximation of what might be Johnny Boy’s face stares down from the wall of every nick in the country. He’s got dirty-blond hair and a sallow complexion. His eyes are blue and very, very cold.

  It’s a big one.

  Detective Constable Thomas Thorne leans against the wall of the interview room at Paddington station and stares at a man with dirty-blond hair and blue eyes.

  Francis John Calvert. Thirty-four. Self-employed builder from North London.

  ‘Any chance of a fag? I’m fucking gasping . . .’ Calvert smiles. A winning smile. Perfect teeth.

  Thorne says nothing. Just watching him until DI Duffy comes back.

  ‘Surely I’m allowed one poxy fag?’ The film-star smile fading just a little.

  ‘Shut up.’

  Then the door opens and Duffy comes back in. The inter­view resumes and Tom Thorne doesn’t say another word.

  None of it is riveting stuff. Duffy is way past his best. It’s purely routine anyway. Calvert is only there because of what he does.

  A week before he died, the third victim told a flatmate that he’d met a man in a club. The man had said he was a builder. The flatmate made a joke about tool-kits and builders’ bumcrack. Seven days and one body later, the joke wasn’t funny any more but the flatmate remembered what his dead friend had said.

  Thousands and thousands of builders to be interviewed. Some are seen at their home. Some are questioned at their place of work. Calvert gets a phone call and comes into Paddington for a chat.

  Later, of course, it will emerge that he’d been chatted to before.

  Duffy and Calvert get on like a house on fire. Duffy gives Calvert his fag.

  He wants to get home.

  Thorne wants to get home too, he’s been married less than a year. He’s only got one ear on the answers Calvert reels off.

  At home with his wife . . . three little girls are a right handful . . . wishes he could go out at night gallivanting about . . . not to those sort of places obviously. Another flash of that smile. He’s helpful, ­concerned. Wife only too happy to talk to you if you want. He hopes they find this nutter and string him up. It doesn’t matter what these pervs get up to in their private lives, what this killer’s doing’s disgusting . . .

  Duffy hands Calvert the short statement to sign and that’s that. Another one crossed off the list. He thanks him.

  One of these days they’ll strike it lucky.

  Duffy stands and heads for the door. ‘Show Mr Calvert out, would you, Thorne?’ The DI leaves to begin the tedious process of writing it all up. The investigation is awash with paperwork. There are distant rumblings about the arrival of computers that, one day, will simplify all this. But that’s all they are. Distant rumblings.

  Thorne holds open the door and Calvert steps out into the corridor. He strolls casually past more interview rooms, hands in pockets, whistling. Thorne follows. He can hear a distant radio, probably in the locker room, playing one of his favourite songs – ‘There Must Be An Angel’ by the Eurythmics. Jan bought the record for him last week. He wonders what she’ll have organised for dinner. Maybe he can go and get a takeaway.

  Through the first set of swing doors and a left turn along another corridor, which sweeps round towards main reception. Calvert waits, allowing Thorne to catch up. He holds the doors for him. ‘Bet you lot are making a fucking mint in overtime.’

  Thorne says nothing. He can’t wait to see the back of the cocky little fucker. Past another Johnny Boy poster. Somebody’s drawn a speech bubble. It says, ‘Hello, sailor.’ Thorne’s humming the Eurythmics song as he walks.

  Then the final set of doors. The desk sergeant gives Thorne a nod. Thorne steps ahead of Calvert, pushes open the doors and stops. This is as far as he goes. This isn’t a hotel and he isn’t a fucking concierge. Calvert steps through the doors, stops and turns. ‘Cheers, then . . .’

  ‘Thanks for your help, Mr Calvert. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’

  Thorne holds out his hand without thinking about it. He’s looking towards the desk sergeant, who’s trying to catch his eye and mouthing something about a party for one of the secretaries who’s leaving. Thorne feels the large, callused hand take his and turns to look at Francis John Calvert.

  And everything changes.

  It isn’t the resemblance to the photofit. He’d registered that the instant he’d clapped eyes on Calvert and forgotten it again moments later. It isn’t the resemblance but it is the face.

  Thorne looks at Calvert’s face and knows.

  He knows.

  It lasts no more than a second or two but it’s enough. He can see through to what lies behind those deep, blue eyes, and what he sees terrifies him.

  He sees boozing, yes, and football on a Saturday and wolf-whistles with the lads and an incandescent rage that is barely kept in check inside the cosy conformity of a loveless, sexless marriage.

  He sees something deep and dark and rotting. Something fetid. Something spilling into the earth and bubbling with blood.

  He cannot explain it but he knows beyond a shadow of the smallest doubt that Francis John Calvert is Johnny Boy. He knows that the man in front of him, the man shaking his hand, is responsible for stalking and slaughtering half a dozen gay men in the last year and a half.

  Thorne is all but frozen to the spot, not sure how he will ever be able to move. He is rigid with fear. He is going to piss in his trousers any second. Then he sees the most terrifying thing of all.

  Calvert knows that he knows.

  Thorne thinks his face is frozen, expressionless. Dead. Obviously he’s wrong. He can see the change in Calvert’s eyes as they meet his own. Just a slight flicker. The tiniest twitch . . .

  And the smile that is beginning to die a little.

  Then it’s over. The grip is released and Calvert is moving away through the lobby towards the main station doors. He stops for a second and turns, and now the smile is gone completely. The sergeant is wittering at him about this party but Thorne is watching Calvert walk out of the doors. The look he sees on his face is something like fear. Or perhaps hate.

  And, somewhere in the distance, a sweet, high voice is still singing about imaginary angels.

  He tells nobody. Not Duffy. None of his mates or fellow officers. What’s he supposed to tell them? Certainly not Jan. Her mind’s on other things, anyway. They’re trying for a baby.

  At home with her that weekend, he knows he’s distant. On Saturday afternoon as they
stroll around Chapel Market she asks if there’s anything wrong. He says nothing.

  On Sunday night she’s keen to make love, but every time he shuts his eyes he sees Francis Calvert, one arm round the neck of the young boy he’s kissing deeply, pulling at him, holding the soft mouth against his own. As he groans, and comes inside his young wife, he sees Calvert’s other hand, strong and callused, reaching for the eight-inch serrated knife in his pocket.

  While Jan sleeps soundly next to him, he lies awake all night. By morning he’s convinced himself that he’s being stupid and within an hour he’s sitting in his car in a small street off Kilburn High Road. Watching Francis Calvert’s flat.

  Monday 18 June 1985.

  He just needs to look at him again, that’s all. Once he watches him step out of that front door he’ll see him for what he really is. A nasty piece of pondlife for sure, but that’s about all. A slimy little shit who’s probably been done for driving without insurance, almost certainly doesn’t have a TV licence and maybe slaps his wife around.

  Not a killer.

  One more look and Thorne will know he was being stupid. He’ll know that what happened in that corridor was an aberration. What Jan likes to call a mindfuck.

  He’s here in plenty of time. People in the street haven’t started leaving for work yet. Calvert’s white Astra van is parked outside his flat.

  For the next hour he sits and watches them leave. He watches front doors open up and down the street, spitting out men and women with bags and briefcases. They climb into cars or hop on to bikes or stride away towards buses and tubes.

  Calvert’s door stays resolutely shut.

  Thorne sits and stares at the dirty white van. Letters on the side: f. j. calvert. builder.

  Butcher . . .

  Stupid! He’s being so stupid. He needs to start his car and get himself to work, and have a laugh with some of the other lads and maybe help to organise this leaving party and forget he ever met Francis John Calvert, and instead he finds himself walking across the street.

  He finds himself knocking on a dirty green front door.

  He finds himself starting to sweat when he gets no answer.

  In the respectfully muted euphoria of the days to come, before the astonishing truth that Calvert had been interviewed on four separate occasions emerges, before the resignations, before the national scandal . . . there will be words of praise for Detective Constable Thomas Thorne. A young officer using his initiative. Doing his job. Putting any thoughts for his own safety out of his mind.

  Out of his mind . . .

  It is as if he is watching himself, like a nosy bystander. He has no idea why he tries the front door. Why he leans against it. Why he runs back to his car and takes a truncheon from the boot.

  Calvert’s wife looks surprised to see him. Her eyes are wide as he walks into her kitchen, breath held, heart thumping. She lies on the floor, her head against the dirty white door of the cupboard underneath the sink. The bruise around her neck is beginning to turn black. She still has a wooden spoon in her hand.

  She was the first to die. She had to be. The children would tell him that much.

  Denise Calvert. 32. Strangled.

  Thorne moves through the flat like a deep-sea diver exploring a wreck. The silence is pounding in his ears. His movements feel slow and oddly graceful, and there are ghosts in the water all around him . . .

  He finds them in the small bedroom at the back of the flat. They are laid out next to each other on the floor, between the bunk beds and the small, single mattress.

  He cannot take his eyes off the six tiny white feet.

  Unable to fill his lungs, he drops to his knees and crawls across the floor. He takes in what he is seeing but there is a blunt refusal to process the information correctly. Grabbing at a breath he lets out a scream. He screams at the dead girls. He pleads with them. Please . . . you’ll be late for school.

  He is actually begging them to save him.

  With that breath he smells the shampoo in their hair. He smells the freshly washed nightdresses and the urine that has soaked them. He sees the stain on the mattress on the floor where he must have taken each of them. The girls have been laid out side by side, their arms across their chest in some grotesque approximation of peacefulness.

  But they did not die peacefully.

  Lauren Calvert. 11. Samantha Calvert. 9. Anne-Marie Calvert. 5. Suffocated.

  Three little girls, who screamed and fought and kicked and ran to find their mummy and then screamed even louder – their mother already dead, the only state in which she will allow this horror to be visited upon her children – then the man they love and trust closed the bedroom door, and they fluttered around in a panic, like moths trapped inside a light fitting. They crashed into walls, and clutched each other and when he grabbed one and pulled her down to the mattress on the floor, they bit and scratched and cried, and went somewhere far better with their tiny fingers clawing at the flesh of those strong, callused hands.

  Thorne has to believe that. He cannot accept that they smiled at their daddy as he laid the pillow across their faces.

  He will not accept that.

  It might be thirty minutes later when he finds Calvert. He has no idea how long he’s spent in that tiny box room trying to understand. Thinking about Jan. The child they are desperate for.

  He pushes open the door to the living room and his senses are immediately bludgeoned. He smells whisky, so strong he almost chokes on it, and the pungent aroma of gunpowder, which until this moment he has only ever known on a firing range.

  He sees the body on the floor in front of the hearth.

  The brain caked to the mirror above the tiled mantelpiece.

  Francis John Calvert. 37. Suicide by gunshot.

  Thorne walks across the grimy mushroom-coloured carpet like a sleepwalker. Not looking down as his foot sends an empty whisky bottle clattering into the skirting-board. Not taking his eyes off Calvert. The outstretched arm is still holding the gun. The underpants are brown with congealed blood. When had this happened? Last night or first thing this morning?

  The hands are unmarked by small fingers.

  Thorne stands above the body, his arms hanging heavy by his sides, his breathing deep and desperate. He leans forward, knowing what’s going to happen, amazed considering that he’s had no breakfast. The spasm, when it comes, moves swiftly from guts to chest and then throat, and he vomits, steaming, wet and bitter, across what’s left of Francis Calvert’s face.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Tom. I know it must have been horrible, but you can’t think it happened because of you.’

  Thorne lay on the settee and stared at his dull magnolia ceiling. Somewhere in the distance the siren of a fire engine or an ambulance was wailing desperately.

  Anne squeezed his hand, feeling like a doctor. She thought quickly of Alison. ‘You were right when you thought it was an aberration. You finding them was just a coincidence. A horrible coincidence . . .’

  Thorne had no more to say. The tiredness that had been clutching at him all day now had a firm grip and he didn’t feel like struggling any more. He craved unconsciousness, a blackness that would see everything he’d remembered and described put back where it belonged. The rusty bolts slammed back into place.

  He closed his eyes and let it come.

  Anne had kept it together while Thorne was telling his story, willing her face to show nothing, but now she let the tears come. Thinking about the little girls. Thinking about her own daughter’s tiny white feet.

  It was easy to see what drove this man. What had created this obsession with . . . knowing. She hoped in time that he would see his feelings for Jeremy as no more than phantoms. Distorted echoes of a past horror. She hoped they could all move on.

  She would be there to help him.

 
; She shivered slightly. The shadow was still moving across them and its chill gathered at her shoulder. She laid her head on Thorne’s chest which, within a few moments, began to rise and fall regularly, in sleep.

  The pictures are still fuzzy but the words are clearer now. Like watching a film I’ve seen before, but since the last time I saw it my eyesight’s gone funny and it’s all a bit jumpy.

  We’re in the kitchen. Me and him.

  I tell him to put his bag down anywhere and I’m still swigging the champagne and asking him if he wants a cup of coffee or a beer or something. He says nice things about the flat. I grab a can of beer that Tim’s left in the fridge. He opens it and I’m still talking about the party. About the wankers in the club. Blokes on the sniff. He’s sympathetic, saying he knows what men are like, and that I can hardly blame them, can I?

  Music comes in for a few seconds as I turn the radio on, and then some static as I try to tune it in to something good, and then I give up.

  He says he needs to make a phone call and he does, but I can’t hear him saying anything. He’s just muttering quietly. I’m still rabbiting on but I can barely make out what I’m saying now. Just gabbling. Something about starting to feel a bit sick but I don’t think he’s really listening.

  I’m apologising for being so out of it. He must think I’m really fucking sad, slumped on the kitchen floor, leaning against a cupboard, hardly able to speak. Not at all, he says, and I can hear him unzipping his bag. Rummaging inside. There’s nothing wrong with having a good time, he says. Going for it.

  Fucking right I tell him, but that’s not how it comes out of my mouth.

  I can hear my shoes squeak across the tiles as he drags me to the other side of the kitchen. My earrings and my necklace clinking as he drops them into a dish.

  The groaning noise is me.

  I sound like I can’t actually speak at all. Can’t. Like a baby. Or an old person with no teeth in, and half their brain gone. I’m trying to say something but it’s just a noise.

  He’s telling me to be quiet. Telling me not to bother trying.