by Carl Goodman
For a split second she thought it might be backup, the armed officers she had threatened Odie with. Then somebody let out a scream, a yell like a karate kiai. Not the sound of fear or pain. The sound of an attack.
Odie screamed too. In the darkness she saw the blue-white crackle of the stun gun as he jabbed it at whoever had entered the room. She heard more shouts. Two figures fought in darkness. The sound of punches being thrown, bodies slamming into each other and hitting the wall. They tumbled past her. She shrank away from them as much as the ties would allow, terrified that in the darkness they might pull the catheter from her neck. She heard someone land a punch. A snarl, not Odie. Another sound. A dull noise followed by a sudden exhalation. Then the sound of someone falling down.
A single figure staggered in the darkness. She heard someone on the ground, groaning. It sounded like Odie. The figure that still stood left the room. After a few seconds, the lights came back on. She had been right. Jeremy Odie lay curled up in a ball on the floor. Someone shoved the door and all but jumped back into the room. The shock almost made her scream.
Mathew Harred.
Harred stood for a moment staring down at Odie. He clutched something in his right hand. When she saw it she did scream. A mallet, black, coated in rubber, the weapon used to kill Nicholson and Yu. Harred leapt forward at the sound of her voice and swung the mallet down on Odie’s right ankle. He too screamed as it broke, writhed and tried to crawl away, but Harred, snarling like a rabid animal, swung the mallet again. And again.
He kept pounding. Odie’s legs at first. He must have broken every bone in them. Eva tried to look away but she couldn’t turn her head. Harred pulverised Odie’s ribs. Odie’s eyes bulged. Blood started to froth from his lips. Harred made a sound like a laugh, then brought the mallet down on Odie’s skull. Five, six, seven times. Each time she heard the sound of bone breaking. Harred screamed again. Brought the mallet down one more time. Odie’s skull all but imploded.
He stood over Odie, eyes wild, pupils contracted almost to pinpoints. Eva couldn’t breathe. Her throat rasped as she tried to inhale. Harred stepped over Odie and walked towards her.
When he reached her though, he stopped, tossed the mallet on the floor, turned and leaned against the wall with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. He wore the same green T-shirt. He looked down at Odie’s corpse as though it were some object of curiosity.
‘I’ve been following you,’ Harred said after a moment. He sounded almost conversational. She couldn’t believe the sudden change in his demeanour. One second screaming like some demon from the deepest pits of hell while pulping Odie’s brains, the next calm, relaxed, almost discursive.
Eva choked when she tried to speak, but she managed to stammer out a question. ‘Why did you kill him?’
Harred shrugged. ‘Why not? It was him you were after, wasn’t it? He did it. I heard him say so, in as many words anyway. He dumped you in the boot of his car at the clinic. I suppose I could have killed him then but I wanted to hear what he had to say.’ He looked at her. ‘And what you had to say. You got him, didn’t you? You were arresting him. He was going to give himself up, but where would have been the justice in that? No,’ Harred shook his head dismissively, ‘this is better. Natural justice.’ He laughed. Almost giggled. ‘An eye for an eye. Well, sort of.’
She stared, not daring to even blink. Complete psychopath, Eva thought as she watched him. Could it have been Harred all along? She had believed she was being followed, that someone was watching her, but she had assumed it was someone working for Semion Razin’s fixer. Had it been Harred? She didn’t dare ask him. ‘You followed me here?’
‘From the church,’ he confirmed, ‘from New Thought. Did you see the fresco? What did you think?’
The sound of almost childish excitement in his voice made her stomach churn. Bile stung the back of her throat as she tried to avoid looking at Odie’s battered body. She forced herself to tell him because she knew her life depended on showing him her approval. ‘It’s incredible. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’ She saw the shadow cross his face, the look of disappointment and disapprobation, and she knew then what he had expected. ‘In this life,’ she added quickly.
His expression changed. ‘Is it like that?’
She did her best to lie. ‘My memory is imperfect,’ she stuttered. ‘I think it’s meant to be that way.’ He didn’t seem convinced. She needed to find something to persuade him. ‘Do you know what a naked singularity is?’
Harred suddenly looked excited again. ‘Of course,’ he agreed, nodding his head enthusiastically. ‘It would be like looking onto the surface of a black hole, a logical impossibility in this domain. No wonder your memories are clouded.’
What the fuck was he talking about? Some sort of pseudo-science bullshit, some psychobabble drivel that justified killing women and slicing their eyes out. Was that what he was going to do to her? ‘This seat isn’t comfortable,’ she told him, as nonchalantly as she could manage. Inside she shook.
Harred frowned. ‘I don’t think I should let you go, not yet. I mean, you’re the destroyer. Who knows what you might get up to?’
What in God’s name did he mean? It was like some psychotic cosplay, Eva thought, some insane role-playing game. ‘If I’m the destroyer, what are you?’
‘The traveller,’ he said immediately. ‘I’m only here for a while. I’ll be moving on soon.’ At least that fitted with what she knew of his background. An itinerant artist seeking commissions. She knew he meant something else as well.
‘A watcher too,’ Eva said, clenching her jaw as she spoke. ‘An observer who documents what they see.’ Harred actually gave her the slightest of bows.
‘I can release one hand,’ he said after a moment. He picked up a scalpel from where Odie had dropped it and cut the ties on her left wrist. When it was free she immediately put her hand to the needle in her neck. He went back and leaned against the wall. ‘We’re not done here, you know,’ he told her as he lounged almost as if waiting for a bus, hands stuffed into pockets once more. ‘There’s more I need to understand.’ He smiled quizzically at her. ‘Who is that man you meet at the station?’
Alastair Hadley, Eva thought. Harred had been watching her for that long. ‘He’s the devil incarnate,’ she told him, using words she thought would register with him. ‘He’s the monster that haunts my dreams. He did me a great wrong. I’m going to deal with him, but he doesn’t know it yet.’
Harred grinned over bared teeth. ‘I could kill him for you.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ Eva spat before she considered how she should answer. ‘He’s mine. I’ll deal with him in my own way.’
He laughed. ‘Is your way better than this?’ He pointed at Odie’s corpse.
She forced herself not to look. ‘That only took a moment,’ she told him.
‘Ah, perhaps you really are the destroyer,’ Harred mused. He peeled himself away from the wall, stood over Odie and looked down. ‘I imagined he was copying me.’ She glanced at Odie but instantly regretted doing so. Blood seeped from his ears and eyes. ‘Perhaps I was mistaken.’
‘You killed the other women.’ She didn’t phrase it as a question.
‘I released them,’ Harred chided. ‘You must know that much. Freed them from the tedious plane. I didn’t do it because I despised them. I did it because I cared for them. They’re free now. You’ve seen them in the fresco.’
He seemed to want to talk. Eva told herself it was her duty to let him. ‘Why the eyes?’
Harred waved at Odie. ‘I mean look at him. When the soul departs these husks what’s left behind is so banal. The eyes are the most compelling, unique part of us. Once the soul has flown though, they become mockeries of themselves, fixated, poor reminders of the spirit that has crossed to a higher plane. I cherished them. How could I leave them tainted by such sadness?’
‘But you stopped. Four years ago.’
He raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘What could I do? I would have
loved to have freed more of them, but the work had begun in earnest by then and I came to realise I couldn’t jeopardise that. It’s so important. But then you understand, don’t you?’
A suspicion crept into her mind. ‘Was Kelly Gibson the first woman you freed?’
Harred smiled. ‘That’s a question for another day,’ he told her.
That smile seemed different, crueller and less indulgent. Eva moved on quickly. ‘But you freed Alicia Khan.’
‘He persuaded me,’ Harred said, swiping a hand towards Odie. ‘He gave me no choice. I saw what he had done and it just didn’t seem right. He obviously didn’t understand. I felt it was my duty to respond, to show the proper procedure, the correct process. But then I realised. I was so close to finishing I dare not risk the work. When you came to me I thought it was a sign, that you of all people would understand, but it became clear you had battles of your own to fight. The car crash, then the pub, then the fire. It was extraordinary to watch you. I know you still have secrets I’ve not come close to yet.’
‘Just one,’ Eva whispered.
‘But that’s the most closely guarded of all, right? I dearly want to know it. I’m fascinated by you, destroyer. I want to know what it was that made you what you are.’
‘I feel the same way about you,’ she said. The tone of her voice sounded very different to his.
‘I know you won’t tell me,’ Harred laughed, ‘not without some incentive.’ He stood in front of her and faced her again. ‘You remember what you said about him? How he had thought every detail through? So have I. I want to know what it is you keep wrapped up inside your head, what that last secret is. So I’ve devised a conundrum for you. It’s just this: what will make you want to tell me? What will make you come to me of your own free will and give me what I want?’ He picked up the scalpel. For a moment she thought he was going to slash her with it, but instead he tossed it at her feet. ‘I’ll be waiting for you when you’ve worked it out,’ he said, a grin splitting his face from ear to ear. ‘Jusqu’à plus tard, ma chien Andalou.’
Then Harred turned his back on her and walked, almost sauntered, out of the apartment.
Chapter Thirty
For a while she couldn’t move. She shook. Between the stimulants Odie had injected into her and the sight of Harred pounding him to death, she couldn’t even begin to think clearly. How she had managed to carry on a conversation with Harred she could barely understand. Even then the irony of it didn’t escape her. Sheer terror had made her brave.
She retched, hacked up dry bile and spat it out. After a while she started to think more clearly. She wasn’t dead. Why was that?
The scalpel lay between her feet. She couldn’t reach it, not quite. For a few minutes she sat quite still, breath coming in short gasps, but then Eva realised she had to move. Harred had something else in mind. She had to know what it was.
How? How the fuck could she reach the sodding scalpel that Harred had tossed at her feet? Another stupid test from the mind of a psychopath. She had to be better than him. Surely she was smarter than him?
Eva rocked the chair. Twisted and turned it, rolled it from side to side. She could imagine Harred watching her, laughing at her efforts, but some instinct told her he was no longer nearby. He had been following her all that time. How the hell had she not known?
In the end she tipped the chair onto its side. The impact as she hit the floor took the wind from her, but it meant the scalpel was in reach of the arm he had cut loose. She held it awkwardly but managed to slice through the tie binding her right wrist. Then she freed her ankles, while all the time trying not to stare into Jeremy Odie’s vacant eyes.
The catheter came last. She knew she would bleed, but Odie had brought surgical tape and the approach she had tried with Nicola Milne had worked. After a few minutes she stood in the middle of the room, back to Odie, staring out of the window at the lights of the town.
What in God’s name had Mathew Harred meant?
The building was empty, as she had suspected. The light in the unfinished apartment was the only one lit, the elevators hadn’t yet been installed and there was no rail to guard the stairs. She edged down them with her hand, touching a rough concrete wall. Why had Odie picked that apartment? When she reached the ground though, she realised she had made a mistake. A construction hoist supported by a gantry stood at the side of the building; Odie must have used that to carry her up.
There was a car at the front of the building. Eva imagined it might have been one of the three she had seen outside the Chatham Centre, but at that point she couldn’t be certain. She had no way of calling. Odie would have tossed her phone so it couldn’t be used to trace him. She stood in the middle of a building site about half a mile from Kingston Bridge. The gate to the site was unlocked, a clear breach of health and safety regulations, but she didn’t feel inclined to complain. There was no sign of Harred.
What had he meant? Uncertainty gnawed at her. She broke into a trot as she headed towards the bridge. The fresco, the mutilations, they were all part of Harred’s twisted internal logic. She had no hope of really understanding them, but at least she could see the consistency. This though – what would he do next, what was the conundrum he had referred to? When she thought again it became obvious. This was the test. The conundrum was the conundrum. Like his infinite tunnel it was a painfully recursive question that asked itself. Fuck, Eva thought as she hurried towards the bridge. What else had she expected from a madman?
When she reached the roundabout at the foot of the bridge her luck finally changed. A police car had stopped for a moment at a zebra crossing. Eva ran straight towards it. The officer in the passenger seat recognised her, threw his door open and jumped out.
‘Half the station is out looking for you,’ he said when she reached him. One of Moresby’s men. She pulled open the back door of the car and climbed inside.
‘Take me there, please,’ she told the driver. ‘Make it quick.’ Blue beacons lit the moment she had her seat belt on. They pulled away at speed. ‘Any word on Nicola Milne?’ she asked the officer in the passenger seat.
‘The woman from the clinic? She’s in A & E. They think she’ll live. Where’s the bloke who grabbed you?’
She told him about the building site. ‘He’s dead,’ she added. The officer swung around in his seat to stare at her. ‘Nothing to do with me,’ she insisted.
The car pulled into the station yard just a few minutes later. Sutton and Moresby stood waiting. ‘I’m alright, ma’am,’ Eva said when Sutton went to ask about the tape on her neck. ‘Can we get everyone available into the incident room, please?’
* * *
Ten minutes later forty officers, uniformed and plain-clothes, crammed into the room. Raj and Newton flanked her like bodyguards. ‘Where’s Becks?’ Eva asked.
‘Still in Virginia Water,’ Raj said. Eva wanted to know more, but Sutton clapped her hands then and nodded to her. The group fell silent. Eva stood in front of the whiteboards and faced them all.
‘Jeremy Odie was responsible for the murders of Stepanov, Swain, Markham and Liege,’ she told them. ‘Odie is dead. His body is in a building on the other side of the river. He was about to give himself up when he was clubbed to death by this man,’ she pointed to Harred’s picture, near the bottom of the whiteboard that held the suspects of the historic murders, ‘because Mathew Harred did not like his style. Harred killed Alicia Khan, Berta Nicholson and Lily Yu.’ She watched them to make certain they understood. Absolute silence filled the room. ‘Four years ago he killed Kelly Gibson, Olivia Russell and Grace Lloyd for reasons that frankly any normal human being would struggle to understand. Harred is psychotic. In his mind he was caring for them.’
Sutton broke the silence. ‘Where is Harred now, DI Harris?’
‘That’s the problem, ma’am. I don’t know. Harred had the opportunity to kill me. He chose not to.’ Eva stared into their faces. She had to tell them the rest. She owed it to them. She took a breath. ‘It m
ay have become personal. Harred said he had set a puzzle, a conundrum. He said I’m supposed to solve it. There aren’t any actual clues, though. He’s not giving anything away. He just said that a puzzle exists. Harred is terrifying,’ she admitted then, ‘because he is both very bright and completely delusional. I don’t think there’s any end to what he could do.’
Jamie Newton chose that moment to leave the room. Sutton took charge once more. ‘Mathew Harred then,’ she said, acknowledging Eva with a nod of her head. ‘We want him found. I don’t need to say that this takes priority over everything, just bear in mind it does. DI Harris’s team will coordinate. Ask them whatever you want, but get out there and get Harred. I’m authorising use of weapons if necessary,’ she said, pointing at a uniformed officer standing towards the back of the room. ‘Liaise with Sergeant Moresby, please, and make sure Armed Response Vehicles are ready to support.’ He nodded. Sutton turned to Eva. ‘Anything you’d like to add, DI Harris?’
She needed to say something. She owed that to them too. ‘Just to be careful, ma’am,’ Eva said as she looked again at the assembled group of officers. ‘Mathew Harred is the most dangerous and unpredictable individual I’ve ever come across.’
Sutton nodded again. ‘Keep that in mind,’ she told them. ‘Now let’s find Harred.’
The group started to break up, turning towards the doors to leave. Eva was about to go to her office when somebody shouted: ‘WAIT.’
Jamie Newton. ‘Everybody back in here now,’ he yelled. Newton’s face was grey. A vein pulsed in his neck.
Sutton stepped towards him. ‘What is it?’ she demanded. He ignored her.
‘Pay attention,’ Newton demanded, voice still raised. ‘In the past few hours, has anybody seen or spoken to DS Rebecca Flynn?’
* * *
She needed air. That, and somewhere to think. Sutton had taken control again. It wasn’t that Eva resented that, because the concern she felt for Flynn was obvious and genuine, but the sudden frenzy of activity that had engulfed the station made it impossible for her to clear her mind. And she needed to do that, Eva thought as she climbed the stairs to the roof of the building. It was the only way she could get ahead of Harred.