Chapter Seven
"I've let him go," she's saying, and Gene can't help but feel a moment of panic, because it sounds like she's cut Tyler adrift somehow, like she gave him the permission to just leave them all.
But DI Roy is looking pretty upset herself, turning a file over and over to shake the pages neatly together more times than can be necessary.
"I went and saw him again – not been in weeks, barely ever went, I couldn't face it, I just felt so..." She grips the file tightly now with her neat, short, unpainted nails and sighs. "I was leaving him, you see, the day it happened. I was leaving him and he wasn't really caring, and then to go and be the other half and have nurses hug you, it's just... And if I hadn't..."
They're sitting in her cubicle at CID – she'd emailed to ask how things were going and it had wound up as a working lunch meeting, sandwich packaging splayed around her desk and two posh coffees in cardboard cups from the chain near the high-street. Now Gene leans forward in his chair, not sure if he's sympathetic or furious.
She straightens her shoulders, taking a deep breath. "I don't think he can hear anything, you know. I think he's gone, I think they killed him and one day this is going to be a murder inquiry and then you might actually swing some decent resources." She gives bitter half-laugh. "I went and spoke to him and as I was talking I thought 'if there's even half a sign he might hear me, I'll stop, I owe him that, I'll promise to stay' but there was nothing at all."
It's a punch in Gene's gut, but he can't hit back and he can't run, not without exposing himself, not without showing his hand far too clearly, and she'd laugh at him, she'd have to, because it's all so stupid, but if he never says it aloud he doesn't have to think about that too much.
And she's upset and she's a good person, one he admires, even if right now he hates her.
As quickly as he can, he opens the file and starts talking about the post-mortem reports, about nylon fibres and potential ways Raimes might have managed to commit the crimes despite the evidence against it; at this point Gene's all but given up on the Kramer lead, there's no sense to it and probably the car passed through more hands between whoever that was and the day it hit Tyler.
They have a good discussion; she's quick to make connections and more importantly recalls Tyler's reasoning and can read his handwriting.
At the end, though, she's obviously also still thinking about it.
"Thing is, he wasn't ever really here," she says, sitting back on the table, staring ahead of her. "He wouldn't feel anything when he could rationalise it. He needed to be right, to be validated and approved. I know he never told his mother about me – I think he knew that it wouldn't last, and that that's not how he was supposed to behave."
Gene can't answer that, and gets up to leave.
"I remember that he talked about you, you know, after that course last year."
Gene turns, his mouth suddenly dry.
"He said you were insane. Gave me some long diatribe about the purpose of the road user protection directives. I've never seen him so worked up about anything." She fiddles with a pen. "Never seen him so alive."
"I'll get those to the recycling bin," Gene says, inane as fuck so as not to say anything else, picking up the cardboard cups and going to the cubicle exit.
Then he pauses, turning back to her, because a part of his brain is and always will be a policeman's, not matter what.
"But what did you think?" he asks, slowly.
She sits up in her chair at once, tense again. "What do you mean?"
"You keep telling me what Tyler thought, what Tyler was pursuing. And then this lecture about how repressed he was. So what did you think? What hunch were you following up, the day it all happened?"
She's already shaking her head. "It was a bad call, bad idea..."
He's coming back towards her now, some sixth sense blaring like a siren in his mind. Funny how guilt affects different people different ways.
"Look, even if you feel you owe him not to prove him wrong - which you bloody well don't - you owe a heck of a lot more to these women."
Gazing up at him, she sighs, and he sits down again, drawing closer.
"I just thought," she says slowly, wearily, pressing her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "That maybe there might be someone Raimes was trying to impress..."
In the end, as with just about every murder case not dreamed up for television, the solution – once seen – seems stupidly simple.
Gene stands next to DI Roy; both of them under his umbrella in a pouring spring shower, watching two houses get stripped to the brick by forensics.
Colin Raimes and Edward Kramer have lived next door to each other for years, since Raimes was a little boy. And maybe if it hadn't been for that impact Raimes would have been just another growling, unhappy adult, but as it turned out he grew up worshipping a man who used him like a hunter uses a dog, to pick up and retrieve his prey, all in the hope of one kind word and a pat on the back.
Was Raimes ever actually present when the killings took place? Was he active in them? There's going to be a long messy court case over that one, Gene can already predict. For his own gut, he doesn't think Tyler had it all that wrong; Raimes is almost certainly going to turn out to be a killer, somewhere along the evidence road.
What they've now managed to conclude - with the aid of the CCTV at the corner shop on Kramer and Raimes' road - is that on the day of Raimes' interrogation, Kramer had waited outside the police station and then followed Tyler when he'd left, ultimately to run him down though whether that was a plan or just an impulse still isn't clear.
"He wouldn't have been interested in following DI Roy," the police psychologist had pronounced, looking at Gene and Maya as if she felt sorry they couldn't help being as thick as they were. "These are two men who view women as objects, as decoration, as a threat to – if anything - their libido, not to their intelligence."
Unlike Raimes' unprepossessing quarters, Kramer's house has a goldmine of evidence inside it and things are taking a long while; as the officers work through it, taking photographs, swabbing surfaces, making dark jokes the way you have to, sometimes, Gene stays standing outside with Maya, watching her look from one house to the next through the veil of water running off the umbrella.
"One door away," she's saying softly, shivering. "One door away and we would have had him and Sam would be safe."
"Why never tell him your theory?" Gene asks softly. "Why not till the day it happened? Because it's obvious you'd had it for a while."
She looks him square in the eye, not challenging the deduction. "We talked about it together, at our flat. We talked a lot about work at our flat. He discouraged it – well, we didn't know Raimes would have an alibi then – but he certainly didn't want that to be the right answer."
"Why not?"
"Because I thought it wasn't Raimes alone just because it didn't feel right. Just like I didn't think Sam and I would work because it felt wrong. He wanted to build his little house of evidence." Leaving the safety of the umbrella she walks along the street a few steps, arms folded, and he follows her to the car, where she opens a door and sits in the driving seat before continuing. "Sam wasn't like you and me. He thought he could make sense of the universe and it would obey, you know?"
"He ran after you, though, didn't he?" Gene is leaning into the gap between door and car roof, a detail coming to him all of a sudden that he'd barely noticed at the time – that when he'd found Tyler, his face had been streaked with tears. "Even though if you'd really been abducted there would have been nothing he could have done, he came anyway."
She sits back in her seat, raising a hand to her mouth, and he can't quite figure out what emotion she's concealing from him. Then the moment passes and she's looking up at him, calm, smiling a little. "I'm sick of the rain. Want a lift back to the station?"
Not like you and me...
There's a choice opening before him, Gene realises, still leaning on the car, looking down at her. You set out on one path in life and it bloody well leads anywhere but where it looks to be going, and suddenly there it is, a place you never expected.
"Thanks," he says now, slowly. "But I want to go to St James'. Tell Tyler we caught the bastard. Just in case..."
She takes a long look at him, confused. Then shrugs, face clean of emotion and reaches to get the door; he leaps quickly out of the way.
She waves through the window at him, and then disappears down the road.
"Ready to crack open the champagne?" Gene strides to Tyler's bedside, kneeling beside him, not bothering to fetch a chair, aware that he's grinning and holding onto Tyler's hand. "We've only gone and bloody well solved it!"
On the taxi ride over, leaving the crime scenes further and further behind, his mood has risen, gradually realising what he and Roy have truly achieved; justice not just for Tyler but for so many murdered women. For the first time in what feels like forever, his existence seems to have done some good in the world; it's a nice feeling.
He stays there a while, still holding Tyler's hand, watching the man sleep, until eventually his heart rate slows and his knees start to ache and he draws back, going out to retrieve a chair and getting some water on the way for his painkillers.
For a long while he sits by Tyler's bed, explaining what's happened slowly and carefully, giving all the detail he's sure Tyler would find interesting and important.
It's funny, although he knew, really, that Tyler couldn't possibly respond to what's happened, he's realising now that he'd half-expected it to be like a computer game, like once he'd figured out how Tyler had come to be in this coma he'd wake up again. Just like fucking sleeping beauty except in that case...
That case was not like this one.
He could leave, he knows. He could go back to the station and write the stack of paper-work he's going to have to, sooner or later. Call Maya Roy, even suggest a drink maybe. Go home, get some food down. All the sensible things, all the stupid things he could be doing right now; he's a sorry, sodding idiot, sat here with a man who isn't here himself.
There's no reason for him to stay. But who says anything has a fucking reason?
Drawing his chair closer, taking a deep breath, he keeps on talking.
