The Ringmaster

by Vanda Symon

  ‘Maybe he felt backed into a corner and he couldn’t think of any other way out. Some people don’t cope with stress or confrontation well and make dumb decisions.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re defending his actions, are you? Is that what you’d do, run away from your responsibilities?’

  ‘No,’ he said and smiled at me. ‘I would take my responsibilities very seriously.’

  I dropped my eyes and, feeling a blush start to sneak up my face, I got to my feet with a big scrape of chair legs on the floor and made to refill the kettle with water. Not that we needed any more.

  ‘Well, I think running away from your problems is gutless, but hardly the actions of a cold-blooded killer. And someone who would risk their life for some dumb animal would hardly be the type to murder.’

  ‘There are plenty of examples out there of people who value their pets more than their own family, so don’t be fooled by some apparently kind-hearted or even spur-of-the-moment gesture.’ I gestured to Paul to see if he wanted another cuppa. He shook his head and continued. ‘And you’d said you’d had a run-in with some people the other day who seem to value animals over humans.’

  ‘The activists?’ I said.

  ‘The activists.’

  ‘Yeah, they made quite a spectacle. Their leader fit the description of rabid quite nicely, I thought. But even the most rabid animal-rights activists wouldn’t stoop to murder humans to protect animals. And most certainly not in this country; we’re all a bit too laid-back for mass-protest civil disobedience. They might get a bit heated – there was certainly plenty of vitriol over those native giant snails being moved because of that coal mine on the West Coast – but sanctity of life and all that. Unless someone had well and truly lost their marbles, they wouldn’t kill a human over it.’

  ‘It has happened before, Sam, and you of all people should know that. Sometimes I think you have too much faith in human nature.’

  ‘Better that than being cynical and suspecting everyone who breathes.’

  ‘I’m not meaning it as a criticism. I prefer your view on people too, but they aren’t always what they seem, and, newsflash, some even lie.’ He did the newsflash with hand actions that made me laugh.

  ‘Other than speculate, I can’t investigate the activists as DI Johns is following up that line of inquiry and I’m not about to step on his toes.’

  ‘Strange, that. So why am I here? Other than you were desperate to see me and couldn’t think of any other way to lure me here and save face…’ I reached over and thumped him on the arm. ‘Ow. Hit a raw spot, did I?’ he said, with a laugh.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself, sunshine. You’re not that appealing.’

  ‘That’s not what I’ve been told.’

  ‘They say nice things to your face, then get real behind your back.’

  ‘That’s what you say. Go on, admit it, you think I’m charming.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. You’re so damned persistent. You must have a titanium hide. Don’t you know when you’re being spurned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Duh,’ I said and threw a teaspoon at him. ‘Okay, I’ll make it perfectly clear for you, then, in words of one syllable. No, I didn’t invite you here so I could sleep with you just because I’ve had a hard time and was a bit upset, so you can tuck your ego away. I invited you here to help with the case, so let’s get back to the point, shall we?’

  At this, he opened up with the kind of laugh that originated from the depths of his boots and resonated off the walls. Even the cat lifted her dreamy head to see what caused the hilarity. ‘Not even a birthday bonk?’

  ‘No,’ I said, searching for something on the bench to throw. ‘As I just said, can we get back to the point, please?’

  ‘Alright then, enlighten me on your theories, oh great one. Where do you think we need to look? And yes please, I’ve changed my mind, I will have another coffee.’

  I could have reacted to the goading, but wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction, so instead fussed around with making the drinks and trying to compose myself. I hated the way he could bait me and I always rose to it. I resolved to be a grown up and not play his silly little games.

  ‘I think we need to get back to basics and look at each of the murders and victims, similarities, commonalities. Find out how they are linked, other than the obvious, and work from there.’

  ‘Yes, well a five-year-old would realise this.’

  ‘No need to be sarky.’

  ‘Okay, truce,’ he said, hands up. ‘Fire away, one by one with the murders. Who was first?’

  I brought the drinks over, and then spread the files out on the table, out of spill range. DI Johns had allowed me to bring the copies home, but I had to admit to feeling suspicious about his sudden change of heart, and the cynical part of me wondered when it would come back to bite me. Prejudice aside, I was determined to make the most of the situation. Under normal circumstances, my practice was that work life stayed at work, home life at home, all things in their rightful place, but I was way too involved here, and it felt personal. This case had intruded into my life on too many levels.

  ‘First victim, Christchurch, first of March, Erica Jane Moorhouse, twenty-four years old.’ I handed Paul a photo of a fresh-faced, ponytailed brunette wearing waders and holding a sizeable trout. My heart gave a lurch, water again, although this young woman hadn’t died in it.

  ‘Pretty girl, nice fish.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘She died as a result of an overdose.’

  ‘Not self-inflicted, I take it?’

  ‘No. Damned scary, actually. She was out at a bar-cum-nightclubby place with a group of girlfriends for their usual Saturday night out. They believe her drink was spiked while they were up dancing.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember that one now. Police were putting out extra warnings to people to never leave their drinks unattended. What do they say? Victims make mistakes that put them in danger, make them targets. We’d been running a safety-education campaign anyway with pub patrons because of concerns over drinks being spiked with date-rape drugs, but this was something else – spiked to kill.’

  ‘Yeah, massive dose of GHB. They never caught the killer. By the time she died in hospital, and people realised the most likely source, the nightclub had closed for the night, patrons gone home to bed and the glassware had been cleaned. Nothing in the way of evidence other than some grainy security video which wasn’t of much use.’

  ‘Sad. Bring on victim number two.’

  ‘This one was thought to be an unfortunate hunting accident that no one ever owned up to. William James Brody, aged fifty-one, was angling on the Ashburton river when he was shot, in the back with a .303.’ I handed Paul a photograph of a solid, slightly balding and jovial-looking man. He reminded me a bit of Dad with his standard farming uniform of checked shirt, shorts and floppy hat. He didn’t have a fish. ‘A nearby angler saw him drop and ran over thinking he’d had a heart attack or something. He pulled him out of the river, but Mr Brody died before medical help could arrive. No weapon was found, and there was no obvious motive for foul play, so it was thought perhaps to be a stray shot from a hunter who never owned up, or never made the connection between the death and their activities.’

  ‘Didn’t the other guy hear the shot?’

  ‘No, it was pretty noisy because there were trail-bike riders nearby.’

  ‘And they didn’t see anything unusual or anyone with a gun?’

  ‘The riders were on the opposite side of the river and obscured from view. They’re there most weekends apparently, some form of club. So with all the din they were making, they didn’t hear or see a thing. The shot appears to have come from behind the anglers, where the terrain varied from paddocks, to stands of bush, to flood-protection willows. They couldn’t determine the angle the shot came from because the victim fell and floated a bit before his waders filled up. It was pure guesswork. The police speculated it could have come from someone potting rabbits or something.’
>
  ‘And you think this is linked to the other murders?’

  ‘Only because it occurred when the Darling Brothers Circus was in town, on the sixteenth of March, and was an unexplained death. It seems too coincidental to leave out.’

  ‘Fair enough. Who’s next?’

  ‘Timaru, Monday, the twenty-fourth of March, exact date of death unknown. This is another in that didn’t-look-like-a-murder, but-now-I-wonder category. Michael George Anderson, AKA Mick, a well-known drunk and bum. A bit of a local icon for all the wrong reasons. Found drowned off the wharf at the port. People assumed he got himself pissed and fell in. His blood alcohol was high enough to start the embalming process prior to death. His was one of those sad lives, made sadder by the fact it would now appear he had been murdered and people didn’t take much note of his death other than to think the local bum fell in the drink.’

  ‘I suppose he’d be an easy target.’

  ‘And he was targeted, frequently. The local skinheads used to take particular pleasure in tormenting him. For someone determined to finish him off, all they’d need to do was feed him a big bottle of grog and give him a bit of a push – no worries. The world’s easiest killing, all for the price of some cheap whisky.’

  ‘He probably even thanked his murderer.’

  ‘Probably toasted his good health.’ Mick’s picture was of a scrawny, bearded, stooped-looking creature in an oversized coat, with too-long trousers draping over sandalled feet with scary toenails. The officer holding him up looked dressed for Arctic conditions. My eyes kept pulling back to Mick’s exposed feet.

  In contrast, the next photo got me all teary again. Sparkling eyes shining out of a slightly acned face, braced teeth showing no signs of self-consciousness and bared in a huge grin. The school uniform another telling giveaway as to this victim’s youth. I handed the picture to Paul and watched as his expression too, darkened.

  ‘God, how?’ He asked.

  ‘Yeah, a waste, eh?’

  ‘I’ll say. A sure murder?’

  ‘Unfortunately. This one shocked the community and there was a great hue and cry. Levi Edward Jones, aged fourteen. Two weeks shy of his fifteenth birthday. He appears to have been clubbed from behind with some kind of bat or pole. He dropped and was then clubbed again while on the ground. Post-mortem shows the first hit would have been enough to mortally wound him. The killer took no chances and finished him off.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. I remember it now. Where did this happen?’

  ‘In Oamaru, the historic precinct, early morning, Sunday the sixth of April. Most of the light industrial places around there were closed, so the area would have been fairly quiet. He was found by a tourist. His parents owned a business in the area, which is why he was hanging around there on a Sunday morning. No sign of a struggle and no murder weapon.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

  ‘Not a hope in hell.’

  ‘Which leads us down the road to Dunedin.’

  ‘To Dunedin, and Rose-Marie Bateman, Friday the eleventh of April, and what was an obviously premeditated murder.’

  Paul had placed the photographs in a row and was looking from one to the other.

  ‘What’s the first thing that strikes you about these deaths?’ he asked.

  ‘Apart from the circus being in town, they have absolutely nothing in common.’

  ‘Exactly. There’s a mix of male and female victims, different ages, different cause of death for each. Did the victims know each other at all?’

  ‘So far into investigations, it appears not. Smithy, actually, the one I introduced you to…’

  ‘The one who fancies you.’

  ‘He does not, and don’t be so gross.’

  ‘Whatever you choose to believe, Sam.’ I gave him a boot under the table. ‘Ow! Is that how you deal with everything challenging? Resorting to violence?’

  ‘Only towards those who are too thick to respond to reason.’

  ‘It’s just an observation, stating what I saw.’

  A bit too late, I remembered my resolution not to bite. ‘Well, keep those astute observations to yourself. So as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Smithy has been looking into possible connections between the victims and has come up blank. In fact, they seem pretty random.’

  ‘Purposefully random?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Yes, my thoughts exactly. They don’t draw attention to each other, so unless you were specifically looking for the circus connection, you’d never realise they could be related. And no one in their right mind would now turn around and say it was pure coincidence that these people died when the circus was in town.’

  ‘Some geeky statistician would probably try. Which brings us back to the circus. Five different murders, five different killers?’

  ‘Or five different murders, one killer trying to make it look like five different killers.’ A big hand grasped onto my knee, gave me a hell of a fright. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re jiggling.’

  ‘Oh, sorry.’ When my brain is going, I need to be moving. Normally I’d be pacing around the room. I didn’t even realise I’d been doing the old jiggly thing. I stood up and took to the floor. Paul watched with a bemused expression on his face.

  ‘Do you want me to join you up there?’

  I shot him a look and continued on my way. ‘There is no single obvious suspect on the circus crew. Their timetabling, the nature of their close proximity to each other all of the time and the sheer menace of Terry Bennett meant almost everyone had an alibi and those that didn’t, didn’t count – children, a few of the women and a dwarf.’

  ‘Hey, don’t discount the women, the fairer sex is quite capable of murder.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m glad you acknowledge we’re the fairer sex. If you met these ladies you’d understand. One was the size of one of their house buses, and the other very petite. Ditto, the dwarf. It would take height and strength to physically assault those last few, particularly the young man who … oh.’ A thought had sprung to mind and I moved around behind Paul to take another look at the victim photos. Of course. Why hadn’t I noticed it earlier? One of those nasty crawling sensations began to work its way up my spine and across my scalp.

  ‘What have you spotted?’

  ‘It’s a progression, they’re a progression,’ I said, tapping my finger from photo to photo. ‘Look at the victims, and the killings. No wonder they seem random. They’re not, they were quite carefully selected, I’d bet, except perhaps the first one. Look at them. Erica Moorhouse, poisoned. The killer spiked the drink, then probably left. Didn’t have to see it, didn’t have to watch his victim die. Killed anonymously, as it were. Next, William Brody. Shot. Killed from a distance. Shot in the back. If you think about it, the shooter didn’t even have to look him in the face as he pulled the trigger. Quite clever too, choosing a victim who was fishing. If his shot was off, and he only injured him, then there was still a high probability the victim would fall into the water and drown anyway.’

  Paul caught on to my train of thought. ‘The next one, drunk old bugger, a gentle push, no chance of a struggle, so no real risk for the killer. Murder for dummies.’

  ‘Fourth, Levi Jones, hit from behind. Much more personal, but although the victim was a male, he was physically small and young, so an easier target, and again, there was the element of surprise. Low risk. And then we get to Rose-Marie. Face to face, up close and personal, but incapacitated first with the wrist ties and the taped mouth, so again fairly low risk. It’s almost as though the killer was serving an apprenticeship, Practical Killing 101. A different technique each time, which is smart, because it would make them seem unrelated. We always think of a serial killer as having a MO or set patterns. That’s what the criminal profilers tell us. There aren’t any here, or if there are, we haven’t realised it yet. We’ll have to go back and check these cases for even the most trivial-seeming details. This is the work of someone who has planned and worked hard to fool the pol
ice.’

  ‘And each time they’ve killed, they’ve got closer, more personal and more confident. That’s one hell of a creepy learning curve. Then, of course, you have to ask yourself who is going to be next, and how? What is the whole point of this spree?’ It was a damned good question.

  ‘I would place a bet on the murders continuing on if we hadn’t made the circus connection here. Balclutha is the next scheduled stop. Then Invercargill. But yes, you have to ask why? What is the trigger and what is the goal? Revolting as it may appear, it’s almost like someone’s doing it to see if they can. Which is too simplistic a view, I know. But look at it. They’ve set it up for the murders to seem completely unrelated, then if someone does get curious, or make a connection or two, then it looks like the culprit has to be in the circus, so all attention on them. Short of a personal vendetta against the circus or someone in it – in which case you’d think they’d just deal to the person they were pissed off with – or animal-rights activists gone feral, which I doubt, someone has created one hell of a smokescreen for their activities.’

  ‘And with everything that’s happened to the circus,’ said Paul, ‘they’ve achieved that emphatically.’

  ‘Hell, yes.’ Didn’t I know it?

  45

  ‘Howdy, pardners,’ Maggie said as she breezed into the kitchen and dumped her backpack on to the floor. ‘Who’s for a cuppa?’

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks, if I had any more it would come out my ears.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Ditto.’

  Maggie headed over to the kettle and gave it a cursory water-level check before flicking the switch. I checked my watch. Shit, it was after 6 p.m. We must have been engrossed.

  ‘You two look like you’ve found the perfect way to spoil a beautiful afternoon.’

  ‘Sam’s company wasn’t quite that bad,’ Paul said, and shuffled his chair back out of kicking range.

  ‘You can hardly talk,’ I said and pointed to the abandoned bag. ‘I’d hazard a guess you’ve been a zot down at the library?’