The Alice Murders Read online

  The ALICE Murders

  By

  James Arklie

  Text copyright 2020 James Arklie

  All Rights Reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living of dead, events of localities is entirely coincidental.

  This one’s for Maisie.

  For loving me, putting up with me and encouraging me.

  Years of fun and laughter to go yet, babe!

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Audrey Water’s death was waiting in her bedroom long before she rolled heavily across her mattress and dragged the duvet to her chin. It rested silent in the dusty darkness beneath her bed where all nightmares lurk. It hid amongst the forgotten and discarded detritus of a life gone by. It nestled against her secrets. It knew her secrets.

  Fear creates memories. Memories create a fear that they will return. Sweep them under the carpet or hide them under the bed, but they are your history and will never leave. They will always creep back to claim their moment of retribution.

  Audrey’s killer had waited twenty, long, delicious years for the sweetness of this moment. Knowing that he would do it one day. Seeing her on the street. Brushing passed her in a shop. Resisting and resisting, letting the delight of knowing dance in his belly until it was the right moment.

  There had been no rush. Until now. Now her death would be useful, she would be useful. A thing that he could use to make a point and to renew old fears. To resurrect the darkness.

  Above him, Audrey shifted gently on the mattress. The quilt rustled and her killer softened his breathing, closed his eyes, saw his own memories. The face of a man. We have unfinished business, Joseph Kline. I’ve whispered your name to the wind every day. This is a message for you, Joe, if you’re clever enough to read it. We have one last game to play.

  Audrey’s killer eased back the cuff of his black boiler suit and checked his watch. Three a.m. He listened intently to Audrey’s breathing. Easy, slow and regular. Deep sleep. Now was the time. He rolled himself silently into the open. Seeing himself as a nightmare born from the pit of Hell. He smiled. Dressed all in black. I am Death itself.

  He looked down at Audrey’s face, lit silver grey by an icy shard of moonlight that cut through the curtains and in which dust motes danced lazily. Fifty years old. My how time had flown. Her features were calm and serene, she was pretty in the relaxation of sleep. She would be prettier still in the somnolent silence of death.

  One of her hands rested on the pillow beside her head. He could see the lifeline across the palm, broken. He eased two syringes from his pocket, selected the smaller of the two and placed the other on the bed at her side.

  The power of the moment sent a delightful shiver snaking across his skin. It only takes a second to kill and become a killer, he thought, but it takes a lifetime to create a legend. And he’d had that lifetime and he’d created that legend. Only no one knew, not yet. But they soon would. Very soon DI Joseph Kline would know and understand.

  He leaned in closer to her. Her neck lay open and exposed to him, thrown back on the pillow, the dark lines of her carotid arteries inviting the needle. He slipped the tip into her skin, felt the slide of the plunger.

  Her eyes sprang open, she gasped once, fear washed across her face and then in one beat of her heart the drug reached her brain and the rigidity in her body died.

  Her killer stepped back and looked, tilting his head to one side, watching her slow breaths. She wasn’t dead yet, but there was no escape for her now.

  He’d stood beside slaughter-men on the fields of Australia and New Zealand as they casually killed bullocks and lambs. You did it once, twice and then it was easy. You no longer thought about the life or the death or smelled the blood or were bothered by the flies.

  He found this just as easy and he knew that one day he would be judged badly. But the psychopathic killer lives inside everyone and once released it can never be stilled. It waits, latent and unseen, inert until bidden to rise.

  Find a person you can control, create the right circumstances, twist them round, create a little moral ambiguity in the mind, throw in the pain that love creates, add a pinch of trauma and the psychopath that hides inside will awake and slither into view.

  And that’s what’s coming your way, Joe Kline.

  I’m about to unleash the killer in you.

  *

  Joe Kline’s eye’s rested lovingly on the woman laid out in front of him. He sighed and fussed with her bed covers in a useless, male way as he studied her face. Round him the machinery that maintained life hissed and wheezed. A ventilator announced the beat and rhythm of her life with a steady, pusshht – pahh.

  Like a Pavlovian cat, he was passed hearing it. All he ever saw in his visits was the calmness and serenity in her beautiful face. And memories, a lifetime of memories. He moved to the edge of his chair and took one of her hands in his. He raised it to his lips kissing the eternity ring.

  He whispered. ‘Do I kill you, love? Or do I let you live?’

  The words were heavy in his mouth, weighed down by the implication of their meaning. He knew he was really asking himself the question, but he was running from the answer. Every action carries a burden that can last for a lifetime. Every shot carries an echo.

  Kline held his head to one side, watching her as he waited for an answer he knew would never come. Not from her, not from him.

  ‘If you die, love, then I die with you.’ He kissed the ring again. ‘So, why would I do it? Kill you.’ The exasperation from the conflict in his head gave his voice bitterness.

  ‘It’s them who want me to do it. They want me to watch the light go out of your eyes. To let your spirit fly free.’ He shook his head and leaned in closer, lowering his voice to a breath.

  ‘Sometimes, I think they want to watch as well. But don’t worry, I won’t let them. Not today. Not any day.’

  He took her hand in both of his, pressed it to the side of his face, feeling the warmth against the unshaved stubble of his cheek. ‘They say they can force me. Legally. But we can fight that too, can’t we? Unless you want to go, that is. Unless you want to leave me.’

  Kline leaned back in his chair. She would never betray him like that, not after all they’d been through. She would never just run away and leave him. He turned his head towards the door, listening as footsteps stopped in the corridor, the mumble of a hushed conversation.

  ‘If I’m honest, love, I think that really they are worried about me. About all of this. About me paying so much. But to me, you are alive, love. And if you’re alive there’s always a chance. They think I may be unravelling.’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘The last twelve months is more than any sane man could endure.’

  Kline turned her hand over, studying her nails. The manicurist must have visited earlie
r. The ends had been neatly trimmed and they were painted the shade of pink he’d chosen. It wasn’t Jenny’s favourite, but he liked it.

  ‘They told me I should hold you, kiss you and then let you go. That it will be quick. Painless. And it will be….for you. But isn’t that wrong? To destroy a lifetime of love in the blink of an eye when I can keep you here with me?’

  Kline rested her hand on the cover and started tucking and fiddling with a patterned quilt. Keeping his hands busy. He reached for her hand again, missing the contact already. Squeezing it, waiting for a response. Hoping.

  ‘Can you justify taking the life of another based on an argument of love? ‘I’m killing you because I love you’. He shook his head solemnly. ‘It doesn’t ring true to me. It’s not a reason, it’s an excuse to justify something else.’

  The voices were nearer the door, louder. They were becoming impatient.

  ‘I will admit it to you, love. This is slowly destroying me and it’s not fair. We have a wrecking ball swinging through our lives, to and fro, smashing our emotions until we can’t control it any longer, until we are broken into fragments of our true selves. There must be a way of coping with that.’

  He rested her limp hand by her side, palm up. ‘And then love brings us to this. Life versus death. Not your choice but mine.’

  He put his face close to hers, cheek touching cheek, breathed in her perfume like an animal taking a scent from the wind. There was no smell of fear or decay. She would go calmly. Slip silently into the darkness. Never to return.

  ‘I read it once, somewhere, that the saddest thing will be that never again will our spirits walk together in the same space and time.’

  The bitterness returned as he edged back. It wasn’t fair to ask him to do this. His whisper was harder, angrier. ‘Did you ever think that your death would rest in the hands of the man who loves you?’

  He held out his hands to her. Office hands, smooth and white. ‘These hands.’

  He looked at their matching gold bands, saw the trembling in his fingers. He eased his hands deep into his trouser pockets, locking away his weapons of murder. Oh, to have the twisted mind, the rewired brain of a psychopath. It would make this so, so easy.

  Kline glanced up as a shadow passed by the window. Outside the Spring sunshine was bright on the mown lawns of the Hospice. He eased an ache in his back and heard the familiar buzz in his brain as toxins filled his body, callously poisoning him cell by precious cell. Forget it, he told himself. Put up with it. Enjoy the pain of your penance.

  He slipped from his chair and knelt beside her bed. It was the closest he could get to fold himself across her body. She had that little smile on her lips, the one he loved so much. He leaned in and touched his lips to hers. They were warm. There was life there.

  My Jenny’s in there, Kline told himself.

  Relief flooded through him.

  ‘Not today, love,’ he breathed into her ear. ‘Today is not a good day to die.’

  *

  They were waiting for Kline in the corridor, Dr Alex Parr and two nurses. Angels or vultures, who knew, but waiting for death. Dr Parr had a clipboard tucked under one arm and a stethoscope hooked round his neck. The nurses had neatly folded towels draped across their arms.

  Their looks were expectant and when Kline shook his head they changed to disappointment. Something else flitted across the face of Dr , annoyance maybe. Bloody hell, thought Kline, I seem to be failing everyone these days, falling short of expected standards.

  Defiance flared inside him and he heard the anger in his voice. ‘Sorry, I couldn’t do it.’ He breathed deeply. ‘I won’t do it.’

  Why the hell am I apologising, he thought. Sorry, I didn’t kill my wife today even though you all wanted me to. Bugger that and them. Jenny was his wife of twenty-five years and his soulmate of thirty, you don’t just throw that to the wind like ashes from the crematorium.

  Kline knew that technically, they should have been present, but he’d persuaded them otherwise, raising their hopes that finally, at last, he would make that tiny motion that would flick the switch and it would be done. Light bulb on. Light bulb off.

  The nurses stepped past him and offered sympathetic smiles as they went into Jenny’s room, not to prepare a body as they’d expected, but to clean her and make her comfortable for the rest of the day. Dr allowed his suppressed annoyance to arrive on his face.

  ‘Joe. You have to face up to this. This is a private institution, if we were NHS….’

  Kline stopped him. ‘It’s not and I pay.’

  ‘It’s not so much that, Joe, it’s what she can do for you.’ He waited for a response, but Kline offered none. He carried on, ‘As for paying, but for how long, Joe? This can’t go on forever.’

  Perhaps until I die first, Kline thought. Then I won’t have the responsibility and have to face the destructive emotional aftermath.

  Dr Parr indicated a corridor leading into the depths of the Hospice, away from the main doors. Away from Kline’s escape. ‘Let’s talk. I can get a counsellor. We can…’

  Kline straightened and shook his head to free his mind from the web of depression that trapped him whenever he came here.

  ‘Sorry. I need to go. My colleague is waiting in a car and ….’ He shrugged. And nothing.

  ‘And workload permitting, I’ll have more time tomorrow.’

  Kline marched away from any response. Workload? Who was he kidding? He focused on the bright daylight of the double doors, trying to gather strength from every stride as he rushed towards them, trying to ignore the overwarm fug and overheated Hospice air. What was it loaded with? Disinfectant, cooking smells, old-age? Death?

  He broke free into the warm April sunshine. The cool fresh air hit his face and he sucked it deep into his lungs. It burnt the back of his throat. It shouldn’t be like this, why couldn’t they just leave the status quo? Instead, every visit brought an exit that was more like an escape, a running away.

  Kline paused halfway across the gravel car park, searching for DS Angie Tyler and their car. He noticed the lawns of the Hospice were dotted with clumps of daffodils and pods of purple and yellow crocuses. Spring, new beginnings. If only.

  Ten seconds later Angie swung the police Audi into the car park and straight into a space. Kline realised she hadn’t seen him so walked over to the car and opened the door.

  She looked across surprised and dropped her mobile to her lap. Kline could see her searching his eyes. Seeing nothing, her facial muscles rearranged. ‘Well? Have you done it?’

  It. Done ‘it’. Did no one understand?

  He ducked into the car and slumped into the black leather seat. He let his head fall back against the head rest with the weariness of a long-distance traveller just arrived home.

  ‘Bloody hell, Joe, how long have we been talking about this? How long have you been building up to today?’

  Kline closed his eyes and dry washed his face with his hands, scouring the rough stubble. He hadn’t shaved this morning. Or showered. And now even his partner was getting impatient with him. God, he was tired.

  He took a long, deep sigh and spoke into the dark anger behind his closed eyes. ‘That’s my wife in there, Angie. You and every son of bitch is asking me to kill my wife.’ He turned on her, eyes flaring and slashed back with his own, cutting comment.

  ‘And you’re not without your own fucking issues, so don’t keep preaching to me.’

  It took the light out of her eyes. When you’re hurting, he thought, you know the ways to hurt others.

  She turned away, reached into a bag and tossed a tuna sandwich into Kline’s lap. Then handed him a black Americano. He was about to apologise when his eye caught the pink bag on the back seat.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Angie. Is that where you snuck off to? To buy children’s clothes?’ He tossed the sandwich onto the dashboard, cracked the lid off the Americano and took a mouthful of the bitterness. The heat, the harshness and the caffeine hit him straight away.

  Angi
e had a sandwich in her hand. ‘Well, at least she’s probably still alive, Joe.’ She took a large mouthful of sandwich in anger. Chewing it furiously, staring out of the windscreen but seeing nothing.

  Kline realised the police radio was off, or the volume on zero. It shouldn’t be, but it didn’t really matter. They weren’t going to call him. Younger, more energetic, saner DI’s came before his experience now. Grey-haired, crew-cut, weather-beaten, Joe Kline no longer topped anyone’s list. There’s Joe Kline. Was good but now a has been. Tap-tap of the side of the head and a knowing nod.

  Angie’s anger still simmered. She finished her mouthful with the swallow of a seagull and went for Kline again. ‘It’s in the lines of your face, your toneless voice, and you walk with the slouch of an old man with sciatica or something. I’ve told you before, Joe. If you’re going to keep Jenny in there at least celebrate the fact. Don’t keep killing yourself day by bloody day. Don’t die with her, because that’s all you’re doing, letting your own life drain away. She’s sucking the sodding life out of you.’

  Angie swore and wound down her window to let in some air. Kline took another mouthful of coffee, feeling Angie’s words land on his skin to be absorbed through the pores and add to his feeling of helplessness. He closed his eyes again, hiding the way little children do, thinking they can’t be seen.

  But there was no hiding, she knew how to find him. ‘As for killing her, no one’s going to start a murder investigation. She’s brain-dead, Joe. Brain-dead. That means she’s dead already. She’s gone. Left the planet, left you. Face reality. Do what everyone else does, buy some photo frames, put them on the sideboard and remember the good times.’

  Harsh, hard and bitter words bite deep, but are always the couriers of truth. Kline took another sip of the bitter coffee and glanced back at the bag.

  ‘Have you been hanging round the park again?’