LITMIR.BIZ

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might surprise you to know I’m quite popular in some circles.’ Kendwick strolled in. He stared down at the brown carpet. ‘But I’ll have to have words with sis about the state of the place.’

      Behind her, Enders and Riley clumped the bags down just inside the front door. Riley went upstairs and a minute or so later came back down.

      ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘Two bedrooms and micro bathroom. Regular cosy.’

      Kendwick wandered through to the kitchen and popped the fridge open.

      ‘Sweet,’ he said, reappearing with a bottle of white wine in one hand. ‘If I can just find a corkscrew we can have a moving-in drink. You guys take a seat while I fetch some glasses.’

      ‘I don’t think so, Malcolm.’ Savage tapped Riley on the shoulder and pointed outside. ‘We’ve got better things to do. I can just about stomach being a taxi service, but I draw the line at socialising.’

      ‘Shame.’ Kendwick frowned and then cocked his head on one side. ‘We’ll meet again though, won’t we? You and I?’

      ‘I’m sure we will.’ Savage followed Riley and Enders through the door. ‘Try to be good, Mr Kendwick.’

      ‘Oh, I intend to.’ Kendwick grinned. ‘Very good.’

      He peered out of the tiny window and watched as they drove off. The black guy, the annoying Irish git and the woman. Yes, the woman. Kendwick considered her for a moment. She was … interesting. Too old though. Not really his type. Still, he wouldn’t say no if he got the chance.

      He turned to where his luggage stood in a heap. A flight bag, two Samsonite cases and a rucksack. He had a few books and some other oddments coming by freight but, aside from them, this was the sum of his ten years in the United States. Almost everything he valued was here.

      What a waste. And all down to that bitch cop, Janey Horton. Kendwick shook his head. No good going over everything again. What was done was done.

      He reached for a carrier bag which contained a litre of duty free rum. He still had most of the bottle of Coke he’d bought at the services so he took that and the rum into the kitchen, found a glass, and mixed himself a large drink.

      Back in the living room he slumped down in one of the armchairs and sipped from the glass. His eyes were drawn to a map of Devon which hung above the mantelpiece. He found himself shaking his head once more. Strange to be back here. Where he’d grown up. Where it had all started.

      He’d been born in an anonymous suburb of Torquay to what, from a casual glance, must have seemed loving parents. In reality their relationship to him was always somewhat distant. Later in life, Kendwick put that down to him being an accident, a conclusion he drew from the fact that his siblings were over ten years older than him. He was an afterthought and the young Kendwick had got in the way of his parents’ lifestyle. As he grew up, he often found himself offloaded onto various relatives as they went about their lives or took long holidays. Inevitably, when he asked, he was fobbed off with excuses: ‘You can’t ski well enough, darling.’ ‘It would be much too hot for you, Malc. You know how you hate the heat.’ ‘We’ll be gone for four weeks and that would mean missing school. Best not, hey, love? Maybe next year.’

      Kendwick compensated for his parents’ behaviour by acting with a nonchalance intended to show an exterior face vastly different to the turmoil he felt within. He craved love, but didn’t know how to ask for it. The various relatives he stayed with thought him grown-up for his age, but he was an emotional retard, the sociopathic tendencies misread for maturity. He never cried, never seemed to anger or throw tantrums like other children did.

      Mostly, when his parents went off on their jaunts, he stayed with his uncle. His uncle lived on Dartmoor and Kendwick credited that fact as nurturing his love of wild spaces. Out on the moor you had to be self-reliant. Alone with nothing but the wind for company, your thoughts turned inward. He found when he was on the moor he became overly reflective, trying to find a reason for everything, trying to understand life and the cards he’d been dealt.

      As Kendwick entered his teenage years, his parents began to realise their son wasn’t like other boys. While adolescence had made his classmates go crazy, their bodies overladen with hormones, their minds stuffed with nonsense, Kendwick had passed the time more interested in chasing grades than chasing skirt. He didn’t appear to care a thing for anyone. He went for long walks on his own, disappearing for hours at a time. Yet he never stayed out late, never went to parties, never got even slightly tipsy.

      But then he began to adorn his bedroom with gothic imagery. Vampires and graveyards. Girls in black PVC dresses swooning in the moonlight, breasts full and white, tears of blood weeping from their eyes. Mist rising around some forsaken tor, another girl draped over the granite with her head arched back.

      His parents shook their heads, but at least this new behaviour was nothing out of the ordinary. Secretly they were glad about the girls appearing on the walls of his bedroom. The girls showed he wasn’t … wasn’t … well, they showed he was normal.

      However, even back then, Kendwick had known he was far, far from normal and had his parents bothered to pay a little attention, they might have been a good deal more concerned.

      He took another sip of his drink and then contemplated the glass for a moment. He knocked back the rest in one gulp and then stood. Time to unpack his life from his bags. Time to think about what the future might hold.

      ‘Thank fuck for that,’ Enders said as he steered the car through the narrow streets of Chagford. ‘Another minute in the company of Malcolm slimeball Kendwick and I’d have been committing murder myself. It’s only a shame he managed to get out of the US.’

      ‘You’d have liked him to face execution?’ Riley said. ‘With all the problems capital punishment brings?’

      ‘Such as?’

      ‘Miscarriages of justice for one. The fear of living on death row for years and years for another.’

      ‘Fear?’ Enders took his eyes off the road for several seconds and stared across at Riley. ‘I don’t think Kendwick bothered much about the fear his victims felt. He took them up into the mountains and did God-knows-what to them before killing them. If you want my view, a lethal injection would be letting him off lightly. I’d shave Kendwick’s head, plug old Sparky in and send a good jolt of electricity through him.’

      ‘Ma’am?’ Riley half turned to look into the rear of the car. ‘What’s your opinion?’

      ‘You don’t want to know, Darius.’ Savage stared out at the moorland now flashing past. ‘My answer might offend your delicate London sensibilities. But I don’t think what you said about miscarriage of justice applies to Kendwick. He killed those girls, I know he did.’

      ‘You can’t convict somebody on a hunch, ma’am. You need evidence.’

      ‘And Janey Horton found that evidence.’

      ‘As I understand US law, it wasn’t admissible. First, part was extracted by torture, second, Horton didn’t have probable cause to search Kendwick’s car. The rape kit she found could never be introduced at a trial. The hairband discovered in his apartment was circumstantial, and again, problems with probable cause to search. Anyway, aside from those issues, I don’t believe the threat of the death penalty is a deterrent.’

      Savage shook her head. She wasn’t going to get into an argument with Riley. She liked him, but his views on criminal justice were way too liberal for her. The law wasn’t something which should be inked down on a page leaving clauses which offered get-out-of-jail cards to the guilty. People had suffered at Kendwick’s hands. Real people. Young women and their families. Lives had been changed, people emotionally scarred for life. If executing Kendwick could make things better for them in some small way then she was all for it. Deterrent or not.

      ‘Passed a polygraph test too, didn’t he?’ Riley wasn’t giving up. ‘Too much doubt in my mind. There are no second chances with the death penalty.’

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