Jack in the Box

by Blake Banner

  “You’re grasping at straws, Detective.”

  “Am I? How about if I tell you that I recognized you?”

  “What?”

  “You have very short eyelashes. Helena has quite long ones. Your eyes are blue, hers are a deep brown. You screwed up your doses of whatever it was you were feeding me, Peter. What was it, ketamine? I’m a big man. You needed a higher dose. Look at me, I am up and about just a few hours later! I told you at the time I recognized you, and you thought I had fallen for your dumb trick and recognized Helena. But I hadn’t, I had recognized you.”

  “That’s absurd. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I recognized you, Peter!”

  “That’s not possible!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because… Because I wasn’t there!”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever it was that you thought you recognized me!”

  “In your cellar.”

  He swallowed hard. I waited. He swallowed again.

  “How about it, Peter? Want to show me your cellar, and prove beyond any doubt that I was never there and it wasn’t you?”

  “You’re out of your mind. Go and get a court order if you think you can. And now I want you out of my house!”

  I stood. “Peter Heseltine, I am placing you under arrest for the murder of Jack Connors, the murder of Ebba, Helena’s maidservant, the kidnapping and attempted murder of Detective John Stone and the kidnapping and attempted murder of Helena Magnusson.”

  He screamed. He screamed like a cornered animal, a rat or a ferret, and he sprang at me with his fingers hooked like claws. Smashing my fist into his face was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. His legs turned to spaghetti and he dropped to the floor with a whoomph!

  EPILOGUE

  Helena was still alive, though she had been tied to the same table where I had been tied, and the cheese cutter was poised to sever her head at any time. She was taken away in an ambulance and Deputy Inspector John Newman assured us, with some enthusiasm, that he would happily take her statement himself, in person.

  After that, and after we had had a word with Joe, who was heading up the crime scene team, Dehan drove us home, set me up in a deck chair, gave me a large glass of Bushmills and set about lighting the charcoal in the barbeque. I watched her do it with an idiot grin on my face and listened to the birds preparing for bed in the trees.

  “You have to tell me, Stone, when did you realize it was Peter?”

  I sighed and thought about it.

  “Too late. He was right there on her list of pupils, and neither of us registered it until it was too late. He was always there in my mind, like a dull toothache. He was so insignificant, so non-descript, yet so eager to discredit Jack Connors and point the finger at Penelope.”

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  “It was a kind of drip, drip. I realized from the start that Jack had not been the real target. It had been Helena. There had been an attempt to communicate something to her. Of course it might have been Penelope telling her, ‘If I can’t have him, neither can you!’ But as it turned out, Penelope did have him, and it was Helena who had lost him. So it made no sense for her to kill him.

  “Then there were Grant, Lenny and Alornerk. They all had possible motives to kill Jack, but not to send that message to Helena. Grant’s motive for killing Jack would have been so that he could have Penelope for himself. So Helena would have been of absolutely no interest to him. He would be more likely to keep the head as a trophy than send it to her.

  “Again, Lenny would have had no reason to send her Jack’s head. If he had, what would the message have been? It was not a gesture, or a statement, that would mean anything to Lenny.

  “As for Alornerk, the statement might have had more meaning to his mind, but the act of killing Jack was a senseless one for him. They remained friends, but he made no attempt to get back together with her, and besides, as we later found out, he was in fact in bed with her at the time that Jack was killed, so his loss was not so great as to drive him to murder. And in the circumstances, sending her Jack’s head would have been pretty senseless if they had just been in bed together.

  “It began to seem that the most compelling theory was that Helena had done it herself, and your argument that sending herself the head provided a powerful defense on top of a double alibi was pretty persuasive. But there were problems. If she had killed him herself, it meant that Alornerk was in it with her, providing her with not one, but two false alibis: that they had gone to lunch with fictitious European friends and that they had been in bed together. So, if he was going to stick to the second alibi, why blow the first? Why tell us the European friends were fake if he was then going to tell us he was in bed with her?

  “Plus, every description of her supposed accomplice said he was average height and nondescript. Alornerk was tall and thin and had a face like an upside-down pear. So Alornerk was not her accomplice, which meant the second alibi was true.

  “And all the while I had this nagging in my mind. We kept saying it, remember? We have to take another look at the list of pupils. I had this nagging that said there was somebody manipulating the situation, making us see what he wanted us to see. It began to dawn on me when I left the station and went to see Penelope. Peter’s background was in computer graphics and special effects. The gesture of the head in the cool box inside a UPS package had all the hallmarks of a man trained in special effects.

  “I drove past his place on the way to Penelope’s and saw that he was at home—or at least somebody was—and it registered in my mind that his house was very close to Underhill College. But what hadn’t registered yet was that I had seen his name on the list of pupils at her class. And the one thing that stopped him being a prime suspect was that he had no real connection with her.

  “Then it hit me in the hospital. You used the word ‘disciples’ and it registered. His name. I saw it clear as day in my mind. Peter Heseltine, and I knew that he had let me go, not to redeem himself, but because he was placing Helena firmly in the frame because he planned to kill her.”

  “That’s what I don’t get.”

  I opened my eyes.

  She had turned to look at me. “Why did he suddenly decide to kill her?”

  “I can only guess. He was a deeply inhibited young man who had obviously developed an obsession with her on the occasions she used to go into the office and charm their pants off. His obsession grew, partly because he had to endure Jack daily flaunting his affair with Penelope, and partly when he plucked up the courage to join her class.

  “He was so nondescript and so invisible that she didn’t even notice he was the same guy from her husband’s office, but he was in denial about that. We’ll know for sure when we interrogate him, but two gets you twenty he developed a fantasy in which she was secretly falling in love with him, and he was going to save her. Just like we said about Lenny, only in this case it was Peter sending her ‘messages’ through his stories, and taking her words of literary encouragement as words of encouragement in his fantasy. His stories were probably littered with phrases and situations about him and her, which she never saw for what they were. But all she had to do was scrawl ‘keep trying’ or ‘a very moving piece of work’ in the margin for him to believe that she was responding to his secret, coded messages and urging him on.

  “Yet, after he had killed Jack and sent her the very powerful message, ‘I have set you free’, she disappeared from his life. She never went back to class and she never returned to the office. His dream came crashing down overnight. And he was far too emotionally crippled and inhibited ever to go to her house to talk to her in person. He must have been devastated.”

  She nodded and cracked open a bottle of beer. “Then we came along, saying we had reopened the case, and he was suddenly looking at going to prison for the rest of his life for nothing. He had killed his boss for her, and she had just turned her back on him and walked away. His betraye
d love must have turned very quickly to hatred and vengeance.”

  “Exactly.”

  She went indoors and came out after a while with a plate of steaks and started dousing them with oil and pepper. After a moment, she stopped and frowned.

  “But what about the decapitated bodies that were found around Madison?”

  “Again, we’ll have to confirm it in interrogation, but he was at pains to deflect suspicion in many directions, and it seemed to me that the killer had gone to some lengths to make it look like the possible work of a serial killer. So I wondered if he had killed again afterwards.” I paused, frowning at the sky, just beginning to turn copper and pink overhead. “In fact, if I am honest, Dehan, what I really wondered was whether the killer wasn’t actually a homicidal psychopath, using his obsession with Helena as an excuse to kill, who had then got a taste for it. What struck me was that the other two bodies had not had their heads dispatched anywhere by UPS. And notice that he never dismantled his cheese cutter.”

  “Jesus, Stone.” She shook her head. “That would never have occurred to me.”

  “It didn’t really occur to me, Dehan. It was just one possible ramification. If the killer wanted us to believe he or she was a psychotic killer, he might kill again using a similar MO.”

  “But, secretly, it was because he was enjoying it.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think anyone kills in such an elaborate, inventive manner unless they are actually enjoying it.”

  She took a pull on her beer and turned to toss the steaks on the barbeque. They sizzled and tall flames leapt from the coals and licked and seared the meat. The smell of burning aromatic herbs and barbecued meat wafted on the evening air.

  I smiled. I watched her in silence, her slim legs and her elegant waist, and her long, black hair tied into a loose knot behind her neck, and felt myself healing inside.

  “I love you,” I said.

  She turned, surprised, and smiled, and her eyes shone.

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  What'd you think?

  First of all, thank you so much for giving my work a chance. If you enjoyed this adventure, then I would be extremely grateful if you would consider writing a short review for the book online. A good review means so much to every writer, but means even more for self-published writer like myself. As it allows new readers to find my books, and ultimately allows me to spend more time creating stories that I love! :)

  You can do so directly down below:

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  * * *

  Ready for the next mystery?

  If you are ready for the next mystery in the Dead Cold series, then you can purchase your copy of the next installment now! The links are down below:

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  That's it for now :)

  Take care,

  Blake Banner

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  ALSO BY BLAKE BANNER

  Up to date books can be found on my website: www.blakebanner.com

  DEAD COLD MYSTERY SERIES

  An Ace and a Pair (Book 1)

  Two Bare Arms (Book 2)

  Garden of the Damned (Book 3)

  Let Us Prey (Book 4)

  The Sins of the Father (Book 5)

  Strange and Sinister Path (Book 6)

  The Heart to Kill (Book 7)

  Unnatural Murder (Book 8)

  Fire from Heaven (Book 9)

  To Kill Upon A Kiss (Book 10)

  Murder Most Scottish (Book 11)

  The Butcher of Whitechapel (Book 12)

  Little Dead Riding Hood (Book 13)

  Trick or Treat (Book 14)

  Blood Into Wine (Book 15)

  THE OMEGA SERIES

  Dawn of the Hunter (Book 1)

  Double Edged Blade (Book 2)

  The Storm (Book 3)

  The Hand of War (Book 4)

  A Harvest of Blood (Book 5)

  To Rule in Hell (Book 6)

  Kill: One (Book 7)

  Powder Burn (Book 8)

  Kill: Two (Book 9)

  Unleashed (Book 10)

  The Omicron Kill (Book 11)

  * * *

  [1] See Two Bare Arms

  [2] See To Kill Upon a Kiss