Jasper
Somebody has painted a mural across the roller door of the carpet showroom.
A wave that was possibly meant to be hopeful and has weathered into something closer to sinister.
Four floors of apartments sit above it. The stairwell light on the second landing has been dead long enough for the glass to fill with insects, and the service road behind the building runs between two blind walls before it comes out on a stretch where the only camera points at a scrapyard gate.
It’s a good building for a man who doesn't want to be watched coming home.
I park across the road and turn off the engine.
The gray car isn't there.
Nine windows on the front elevation have lights behind them by half past seven.
The one I want stays dark, second floor, left of the stairwell, with a satellite dish bolted below the sill and a bedsheet where a curtain should be.
A woman on the ground floor puts her trash out and stands in the doorway smoking with her arms folded against the cold.
Two boys go past on one bike. The shop on the corner does steady work until nine and then stops entirely, and the man inside comes out to hose the pavement down with the resigned thoroughness of somebody who has been doing it for twenty years.
Waiting is most of this work. People imagine the other parts.
Natan arrives and gets into the passenger seat without a word. He's brought coffee from somewhere that shouldn't be allowed to sell it, and drinks both cups himself when I decline.
"Eduard says you found him."
"Demyan found him. I just made sure he was who I thought he was."
He looks at the building for a while. Natan has a way of assessing a place that involves almost no head movement at all, and when he's finished he settles lower in the seat.
"The one from the papers?" he asks.
"Yes."
I reach into my jeans pocket, take out what's been in there since I dressed in her bedroom, and put it in the glovebox on top of the registration documents. Natan doesn't open his eyes.
The gray car comes down the service road shortly after nine.
He does it without thinking, like he's probably done six hundred times, and I watch the primer stripe slide past under the one working light and feel the last of the doubt go out of me.
Ray Mosby gets out with a plastic bag from the shop on Anders Road hanging off two fingers.
Early thirties. Softer than he looked in the dark with my hand on his throat. He walks like a man whose back hurts.
He doesn't check the road. Not once.
Natan and I are out of the car before Mosby has even switched his engine off.
The stairwell smells of damp carpet and fried onions.
He has the key in the lock when Natan comes up behind him and I come down from the half landing above.
The bag drops to the floor and something inside it breaks.
Within nine seconds, the three of us are in his hallway with the door shut and the light off.
The apartment is worse than the building promised.
Plates on the arm of the sofa, leftover food cartons scattered over the countertops, and a wall of shelves holding boxed model aircraft, forty or fifty of them, dust-free and arranged by wingspan.
Somebody in this room has patience and takes care of the things he loves.
He just has no respect for anything else.
The bedroom holds a wardrobe with a false floor which I find in less than a minute.
A shoebox. Two more bottles of the same stuff he dropped last night. A tin with eleven syringes in it. A woman's earring. A hair tie. A library card belonging to somebody named Andrea Carrey, which is a name I remember from one of the articles.
And a phone. Which is not the one in his pocket.
I sit down on the end of his bed to go through it while Natan stands over Mosby who is currently on his knees with his hands behind his head, snivelling.
The photographs start in January. Four women. The towpath in February, taken from behind and low, the way you'd hold a phone at your hip. The park at Bellingfell. Two sets from the north path of Community Park in the weeks I was parked at the eastern gate telling myself I was there for security.
Then eighty-one photographs of Delilah.
Her at the lamp before the bend. Her stretching against the railing at the boat sheds with one heel up behind her, laughing at something in her headphones. Her going in through her own front door at night with the key already in her hand, taken from the opposite side of the road.
Her behind the counter at Purr & Pour, through the window, with Lucifer on the till.
I go through all of them. Every one, in order, with my thumb moving at the same speed the whole way. Then I go out into the hall and crouch down so my face is only an inch from his.
"Why her?"
He flinches.
"Who?" he asks, sounding nasally. I knew Natan would punch him too hard. His nose is probably broken.
"The woman at the café. Did someone send you to follow her?"
"I don’t know what you’re talking about," he says, lying.
I take a minute where I just breathe, because if I don’t, I know I’ll lose my temper and smash his head in.
"I’ll give you one more chance to explain yourself. And if you do, I’ll let you live. If you don’t, my cousin here will make sure you feel a fuck-ton of pain before you die."
I feel like that’s fair.
At first, I think he is going to hold out, and just as I’m about to gesture to Natan to get to work, Mosby’s shoulder sag and resignation blankets his features.
"She has pretty eyes," he says. "And that ass, man, you’ve seen her. Going around tempting men and laughing at them when they say ‘hi.’"
Laughing at men? That doesn’t sound like Delilah.
He saw her on the north path in November and she was always alone and always at the same time. He liked her hair, and he'd been building up to it for four months the way he builds the aircraft, slowly, carefully, taking pleasure in the preparation.
She was probably laughing at something she was listening to, and this sick prick decided she was laughing directly at him.
Fucker.
"What about the others?" I ask, dropping the library card in front of him.
"I didn’t hurt them," he is almost yelling. "They wanted it."
Right.
She was just there. She runs at the same time every night because she likes routine, and he watched her for weeks until the night he couldn’t wait any longer.
I stand up. My hands are perfectly steady, which they've been my whole life and which I've never once been grateful for until now.
"Make the call," I tell Natan.
Natan nods. He's not a man who requires explanations, and whatever he sees in my face he leaves where it is.
I know that the police will take exactly eight minutes to get here. Natan knows what to say to make sure they find the evidence.
I go home to my empty apartment and stand under the shower until the water runs cold.
Sleep isn't going to happen, not without her beside me. I have her panties in my hand like some sort of talisman and every time I inhale I swear I can smell her shampoo. At half past three in the morning I'm standing outside her building.
There have been more nights in this position than I'd care to write down, in the car, at the corner, waiting for her lights to go off.
Tonight I go up the stairs. Her hall light is off and I stand there in front of her door doing nothing at all for a while.
Then I knock so quietly that a woman who was actually asleep would never hear it.
The door opens two inches, the chain still in place. Her face appears in the gap, blurred with sleep, her hair is tied up, but falling from the hair tie in chunks of dark curls.
"You put the chain on," I say.
"You told me to." She shuts the door. There's a scrape and a rattle, and then it's open properly and she's standing there in a T-shirt that comes to the middle of her thighs, squinting at me. "It's the middle of the night."
"I couldn’t sleep."
She looks at me for a moment. Whatever's on my face, she reads more of it than I'd like, and she doesn't ask a single question about it. She steps back to let me in, and locks up behind me, chain included, before padding through to the kitchen with her feet slapping on the boards.
The apple loaf is on a rack under a tea towel with my name piped across the top in white icing in letters that get progressively smaller as they run out of room.
She cuts me an enormous slice and sits on the counter, her feet slapping against the cupboard door, while I eat it standing at the table. She is talking about Bill and the cats, and Kimmie eating the burnt end of the cake.
I put the plate down and step in between her knees. She winds her arms around my neck and rests her chin on my shoulder without being asked. The kitchen clock ticks, and I don't let go of her for a long time.
"Your loaf isn't burnt," I say eventually.
"I know." Her mouth is against my ear. "I'm as shocked as you are."
Then, "Take me to bed, Jasper."