Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  ‘And without blood being spilled,’ Honor agreed, warming to her own theme. ‘The suspect may possibly be squeamish around blood, and certainly isn’t up to being a slasher–killer in the Ripper’s style. Only the first victim was murdered conventionally, via strangulation, and we think that only occurred because the victim recovered consciousness too soon, quite literally forcing the killer’s hand. All of the victims were members of the same phobia forum, known as Face Fear, and all were drugged using GHB. We’re encouraging users of the forum to take extra precautions: don’t travel alone, especially at night, and don’t think for a moment that you’re safe inside your own home. We suspect that Amber Carson might have been abducted from within her own apartment, which was well secured, yet there is no evidence that she knew her abductor and killer.’

  The journalists were writing furiously now, some holding hand–held recorders and hanging on Honor’s every word. Things were going better than Honor could have hoped, and she was almost used to the cameras now. Another journalist raised a hand. ‘Detective, I understand that you have only recently returned to work after six months off for a stress–related illness. Is it wise to have somebody suffering from such afflictions in charge of such a high–profile case?’

  The air in the room vanished. Honor opened her mouth to reply but it seemed as though her lungs had been evacuated and now hung limp inside her chest. She gaped for a moment, a hundred pairs of eyes all staring at her in shock. Honor glanced to one side and saw DC Hansen standing with his arms folded, watching her intently. Son of a bitch.

  ‘All detectives have to take time off for stress,’ DCI Mitchell took to her defence. ‘How many dead or mutilated bodies, murders, drug–overdoses and fatal automobile crashes do you think could you look at, before you realised that you needed time out?’

  The journalist stood his ground.

  ‘The question is a valid one,’ he replied, ‘and I’m not a detective.’

  ‘I can tell,’ Mitchell growled, and the borough commander stepped in.

  ‘I think that what Detective Chief Inspector Mitchell is trying to say is that when a detective is assigned cases, they put their entire lives into them. Our detectives have been working through the night to solve this investigation, often sleeping on the office floor and not seeing their families for days. That’s the side of policing that nobody sees. We’re permanently under–staffed, yet forced to perform more work in less time than ever before. I think the question that you should be asking is; what kind of person does it take to perform this arduous work, despite the terrible stresses that they have suffered?’

  Honor stared ahead over the heads of the journalists, unable to speak as tiny needles of pain lanced the corners of her eyes, her vision blurring. At once appalled and elated, ashamed and overjoyed, she didn’t know where to go and neither did her emotions. The towers of ice melted, the steel fractured, and she felt her grief swell up inside of her.

  ‘Terrible stresses?’ a journalist echoed the borough commander’s words. ‘What kind of terrible stresses?’

  Honor opened her mouth to reply, suddenly deciding to just hit them with the truth and have them cringe as she bared her soul, when a voice caught her attention.

  ‘Detective McVey?’ The voice came from the back of the room, and Honor looked up to see Danny Green beckoning her. ‘We’ve got something.’

  Honor stood up as though an electric current had been fired through her backside, grabbed her bag and hurried from the dais, aware of several cameras following her as DI Harper finished the briefing.

  ‘Please broadcast this number as far and wide as you can, to help us locate Jayden Nixx before it’s too late. Any piece of information could be of use, no matter how big or small and…’

  Honor rushed from the room and straight past Danny, gasping for air as she walked as fast as her heels would carry her back to the sanctuary of the Incident Room.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Danny asked as he hurried to keep up.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Honor blurted without looking back. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Nothing. I could see you were getting it in the face, so I thought I’d give you an out.’

  Honor’s grief teetered on the brink as tears spilled from the corners of her eyes, and suddenly she whirled and threw her arms around Danny’s shoulders, buried her face in his chest and held onto him, her legs trembling beneath her.

  She felt Danny tense up for a moment, and then his hands were on her back, gentle, nervous even. She stood for a moment, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

  ‘Easy,’ Danny said in a surprisingly soft voice. ‘They ain’t got nothing on you, okay?’

  Honor sucked in a lungful of air and whirled away from him, before he could see her face and the tears staining it.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ she managed to utter, leaving him standing there in the corridor. Honor got to her office and slammed the door shut. Her chest heaved and her vision blurred as she staggered to her desk and slumped into her seat. One hand slipped of its own accord down to her belly, cradling it, and she shivered in the gloom. Her office light was off, and she heard rain splatter in ferocious waves against the window as the storm battered the city. She turned her head, too lethargic to get up and close the blinds, and saw veils of torrential rain tumbling from the darkened heavens. On the roads below, headlights slashed through rivers of rain, traffic lights blinking, their colours reflecting off the rain–soaked tarmac.

  Jayden.

  Honor drew in a ragged breath and with a monumental effort she switched on her computer and accessed the live footage of Jayden beneath the city’s sewers, desperate for some last–ditch, last–minute way to identify her location before it was too late. She knew that she was just doing it to avoid confrontation, to avoid explanation, to avoid the whole fucking world, but she couldn’t help herself.

  The monitor lit up, the footage switched on, and Honor’s morale sank even lower as she witnessed Jayden’s terrible state.

  18

  Jayden wrenched her head back as the churning, black effluent bubbled and swirled around her throat, then pulled hard on her wrist despite the pain it caused her. Her hands were marginally wider than her wrists and the falling water from above was cleaning them of the filth that the rats had left behind, making it harder to pull them through the iron hoops.

  She could do it. I can do it. Don’t give in! The water was high enough now that it was pulling at her all the time, balanced on tiptoe on the slippery floor of the sewer to keep her head out of the water. She was jerking spasmodically with the cold, her uncoordinated movements threatening to dunk her once more into the foul mess.

  The roar of the water was almost gone, the interceptor pipes completely submerged, but she could tell by the churning surface that they were still blasting more water into the chamber. She turned again, pulling at the manacle, gritted her teeth as she did so, and suddenly something gave not on her arm but in her mouth. The fabric of the gag wore through and suddenly, blissfully, it fell away from the sore corners of her mouth and she screeched in grim delight as it dropped into the water and slid away into the darkness.

  ‘Help!’

  Jayden screamed but her voice was hoarse, weary, and she was shocked to find out just how lethargic she was becoming. She had been down here for countless hours without food or water, not any that she could drink anyway, even the rainwater having first to run down the sewer’s slimy walls.

  ‘Help!’

  Jayden tilted her head back and cried out, looked up at the distant manhole cover and wondered whether anybody could hear her above the wind, the rain and the thundering traffic.

  ‘Help me! Can anybody hear me?!’

  Her voice was amplified by the confines of the chamber. Jayden kept yelling, kept pulling on her restraints, her head turned upward to the dwindling light as the water bubbled and churned around her chin. Sobs of terror racked her body but she kept fighting, unwilling to let her last moments be those of defeat and despondency.


  ‘Help! Somebody help me!’

  Honor picked up the phone the moment she saw Jayden bite through her gag. ‘She’s calling for help!’ Honor shouted down the phone to a constable in the Incident Room, as though she were living Jayden’s final moments alongside her. ‘Get people to open whatever manhole covers they can, anywhere!’

  Honor slammed the phone down as she turned to her screen, willing Jayden with all her might to break free and find her way out of the sewers before it was too late. She tried not to think about the Marine Policing officer’s story of the London man who’d taken three days to find his way out of a sewer during dry conditions.

  Black water roiled around Jayden’s hair, which snaked on the surface around her, rainwater crashing down onto her head as she tilted her head back to try to stay above the surface. She had only minutes left. Honor leaned closer to the screen, and then it seemed as though time stopped around her, the rest of the world lost as she stared at the footage. Jayden was thrashing in the water, frantically trying to break free while screaming for her life, but in the deep darkness around her Honor noticed something: the light was changing.

  She leaned closer. Jayden yanked her arms this way and that, the flotsam of sewage churning, rainwater cascading down upon her from above, but in the gloom Honor could see it. It was subtle, gentle, almost hypnotic, and for a moment she didn’t realise it for what it was.

  Red.

  Amber.

  Green.

  Honor almost cried out as she leaped out of her chair and ran for her office door. She plunged through it and ran into the Incident Room, yelling at the top of her lungs. ‘She’s near a set of traffic lights! Get the sequence and run it with traffic, find out where she is!’

  Too late now.

  He smiled, perched once more on the edge of the sofa, one hand caressing his crotch as he watched and waited. Jayden’s thrashing began to abate as the water rose too high and she feared splashing raw sewage onto her face. She was screwing up her features in disgust and terror, eyes wide like saucers in the darkness.

  He could see it now. That face. That realisation. The moment was upon her, the moment of no return, the moment of death. She would relax, resigned to her fate, unable to avoid it any longer. She had fought bravely – needlessly, but bravely none the less, and now she would be at peace.

  ‘Well done, Jayden,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t run from it any longer, it’s all over.’

  Jayden’s wide eyes quivered as the water rose up beneath her nose, her body still now, shivering but motionless as she tilted her head back. Her hair floated in the sewage, her ears consumed until only her face remained, a pale pool of soft skin amid an ocean of filth. The rainwater splattered her face, keeping it clean until the last possible moment.

  ‘Goodbye, Jayden,’ he smiled.

  The water rose up, and then suddenly Jayden yanked one arm with fearsome rage and her wrist shot through the manacle and broke free.

  ‘No!’

  Rage soared through him as he saw Jayden emit a grim howl of joy as she turned in the water, reached out for the other manacle, and pulled hard.

  ‘No, stay where you are!’

  Jayden’s right hand shot out of the manacle and she instantly slipped off the ledge and plunged into the flow of the water, flailing wildly as she scrambled to stay afloat, her body entirely beneath the black water and only her arms visible as they thrashed for something to hold on to.

  ‘Die! Die now!’

  Fury rushed through his bones as he stood, watched as Jayden’s hand caught on the very same manacles that had restrained her and she hauled herself out of the water, her face smeared with detritus, her hair matted and lank, her mouth open as she sucked in foul air and clung to the manacles that had almost killed her.

  ‘No!’

  He watched, mortified, as Jayden held her face to the clean water cascading down from above, ridding it of the filth, and then began pulling herself toward the gantry and out of shot. Directionless rage seethed like acid through his veins. He stormed up and down the living room, seeking a vent to his anger, and in a fit of fury he rushed down the stairs to the basement and lunged into the spare room.

  The stench hit him first, that of faeces and decay, and he was brought up short. He turned on the light and looked down at his father’s body where it lay on the thin, filth– ridden mattress. The face was at peace, devoid of suffering; mouth agape, rotting teeth bared between parched lips laced with sores, a purple tongue lolling down one cheek.

  In his obsession with Jayden’s suffering, he had left the old bastard alone for too long, long enough that he could die, and die without being watched. He cringed, folded over his own rage, screamed something unintelligible as he ran out of the room and grabbed a baseball bat that he kept in the basement. He rushed back into the foul– smelling room and swung it over his head. The bat smashed into his father’s emaciated skull and the feeble bones split like eggshells. Black blood splattered the walls around him as he swung again and again, smashing the peace from that hated face, sweat beading on his forehead and his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  The rage subsided and he hurled the bat aside, looked down upon the terrible damage that he had wrought. His father’s skull was a tattered mass of dark blood and bone, one orbit shattered, the eyeball dangling from damp tendons. He looked at the remains for a moment longer, and then his stomach summersaulted inside of him and he turned away as he hacked up a thin stream of bile. He staggered out of the room, lost, unfocused, enraged and yet unable to vent that rage, even on his own hated father who was now forever beyond his reach.

  He made his way back to the living room, looked at the television, and saw only water. The camera was now submerged, but the spot where Jayden Nixx had once been was empty. Whether she lived or died, he would no longer see it and had no control over it.

  He fought the urge to thrust his fist into the screen, and instead turned to his notebook. He opened it, and managed at least a wan smile as he crossed Jayden’s name off. She might yet die. You can still do it.

  There were five canonical murders committed by Jack the Ripper, all prostitutes, most of the others being only loosely connected to the original slayings, and disputed by many researchers as being the work of copy–cat killers. No, the brutal killing of five innocent victims was all that he needed, like the worthless whores that Jack slashed into bloodied gore centuries before. Five slayings, each as gruesome as the other, brought to the attention of a global audience with their unique nature, their undeniable attraction. Sebastian Dukas; Amber Carson; Jayden Nixx, if she died; his own father. That was three, as his father didn’t really count if he was being honest with himself.

  He looked at the remaining names on the list. There were several, but he ignored them, including his father’s, which had been at the very end of the list. His plans had to change now. There was no point in prolonging things, for the police would eventually identify him now that they had CCTV of him in the various pubs. He recalled the pretty girl behind the bar in the Hoop and Grapes, who would certainly recognise his face when the time came. The sewers were no longer a safe haven, so he would have to do things differently. He could kill the bar girl, but that might only draw closer attention to him. Jason, Jayden’s friend, would also be able to identify him in a photo parade. His only chance now was to finish the game and vanish long before that happened.

  His rage subsided into a cold, determined fury, and he added two fresh names to his list, focusing their images in his mind as a loose plan of action formed. He would end this the way that the Ripper would have ended it, the way that it should end: with all those involved brought to peace, liberated from their suffering.

  Jayden Nixx hauled herself up out of the foul water and onto a metal gantry that was slick with gloops of foul mess. She was shivering violently, and the water was now rising up onto the gantry, filling the oval chamber ever faster.

  She staggered to the ladder, cold water cascading down onto her head, a
nd managed to clamber up until she could reach the manhole cover. The sound of traffic thundering past on the road above was deafening, and although the water tumbling through the holes in its iron surface made it hard to see, she could make out the faintest hint of light off the clouds far above, flashes of light from headlamps, brake lights and what seemed to be traffic lights nearby. Weeping with joy, she reached up and pushed against the manhole cover.

  The cover remained stubbornly shut. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘Help!’

  She was exhausted, weeping, shaking and trying to control her trembling voice long enough to be heard.

  ‘Help!’

  Cars thundered by, and as she yelled so she felt something cold wash over her feet. Jayden looked down, and saw the filthy water rising rapidly up the ladder and into the shaft in which she was now trapped.

  Weary beyond belief, she cried out for help again.

  Honor stood in the Incident Room with Samir and Danny, anxiously clenching and unclenching her fists by her sides as she waited for a call from the traffic section. Every single set of lights inside the city of London was controlled by computer, and the sequence in which the lights controlled the flow of traffic was designed to alter depending on how much traffic there was and where it was heading. Sophisticated algorithms controlled that flow, and also provided a handy feedback loop that allowed technicians to monitor the light sequences of any junction in the entire city.

  A phone rang, and DI Harper picked it up instantly.

  ‘Fenchurch and Lime Street!’ she snapped, and in an instant, officers were picking up their phones as Honor dashed for the door.

  She hurtled down the stairwell outside with Danny and Samir close behind, and out of Bishopsgate station entrance, not even thinking about trying for a HAT car as she turned left and began running through the torrential rain pummelling the pavement around her. A forest of umbrellas parted like waves as commuters ducked out of her way, the wind buffeting her as she ran, ignoring the rain pouring in sheets around her.