Knife After Death: A chilling crime thriller

by Irvine, Ian C. P.

  As they finished their tea, Peter asked some questions about the local area, and then also about missing people. "Is there a national database of missing people, or unsolved murders?"

  "Yes, any policeman can enter all the information about someone missing onto a computer at the police station, which is then circulated on the Police National Computer, so that any police officer in the UK can access details. We can also make searches of unsolved murders, but details are more strictly controlled and only accessible to the Police. We have to make sure no details get out that could later be used in evidence or to convict someone."

  "So, there is nothing that I can search myself, to help me look for anything that the clairvoyant might claim to have seen."

  "Nothing that I can give you access to at least..." Alex replied, as they started to walk up the hill towards the street where No. 8 was.

  A few minutes later, they got to the front door.

  "The place has been swept clean for evidence already, and in theory the flat could be rented out again now, but the owner can't face it yet, so she hasn't redecorated or anything. Even though forensics are finished with the place, I would ask that you put on these little blue plastic shoes, and wear these plastic gloves. And don't touch anything, just in case," said Alex as he handed him a little bag."And absolutely no photographs."

  They both took a moment to put on the protective forensic shoes and gloves, and then Alex stepped forward and put the key in the lock.

  Peter started to get really nervous. His heart rate shot up, and for a second he felt a little giddy.

  "Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do this?"

  "Yes...I have to..." Peter replied, and together they both went in.

  Immediately inside the hallway, just as Peter had visualised yesterday, between the front door and the inside door on the other side of the vestibule, was a wooden floor and a large blue bowl full of some long dead, dried Irises.

  The inside door was made of panels of square glass set in white frames. Again, exactly as he had seen in his dream.

  Alex opened up the vestibule door and immediately behind was a set of stairs going up.

  Again, another quick flashback to yesterday's vision of seeing a woman climbing the stairs in front of him, laughing.

  Peter took the first step up, following Alex.

  Immediately the vision came again.

  The woman was in front of him. Laughing. She said something to KK, turned and then hurried up the stairs. Peter realised with a flash that the girl had just spoken a language that Peter did not understand. But obviously KK did.

  At the top of the stairs, the woman turned, facing KK.

  KK was still standing at the bottom of the steps, looking up.

  The woman laughed again, reached behind her back and undid the zip on her dress...her green dress... She let it fall to the ground. Underneath she was wearing lingerie. The same lingerie that Peter had seen in his dreams before.

  KK laughed, and chased up the stairs after her.

  She ran in front of him, into the bedroom, and then into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

  KK swooped up the dress from the floor as he passed, following her into the bedroom.

  The vision passed. It only lasted a second, and Alex did not notice that Peter had hesitated at the bottom of the stairs. Peter shook his head clear and hurried up after him.

  At the top of the stairs, just outside the bedroom door, was a framed photograph of lavender fields, just as Peter had visualised yesterday. He stopped and looked at it for a second.

  Alex was standing at the doorway to the bedroom, holding it open for him. Peter walked in. The window to their left was barred and covered over with a metal shutter. The room was in darkness.

  Alex stepped in behind him, flicking a light-switch on the wall.

  There was a bed directly in front of him, the wall above it and some of the ceiling covered in dark red stains. Dried blood. Lots of it.

  It was everywhere.

  Peter stared at it, his hands beginning to shake. A shiver ran through his body, and an instant later, the original dream sequence ran through his mind's eye, and Peter was forced to again witness the brutal, sickening murder for the hundredth time in the past month. As it finished, he felt suddenly weak, and that he was going to faint.

  He reached forward, and found support on the edge of the foot of the bed.

  "Fuck...it's just like the clairvoyant described. Exactly like I had imagined to be. But far, far worse since I can see that it's real. Shit... who would do something like this? Who could kill a woman by slitting her throat wide open? What a sick weirdo!"

  Peter shivered again. Violently.

  "I'm going to be sick..."

  "It's over there..."

  "I know...," Peter replied, rushing for the bathroom and vomiting.

  .

  When Peter came out of the bathroom, his face dripping with cold water from the tap, Alex was watching him intently.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Yes...sorry...I just felt a little weird there for a second..."

  "No problem." Alex replied. "I spoke to my colleague in forensics again first thing this morning... She's brilliant at her job. One of the best. I told her about your idea of a woman getting her throat slashed in the bed. Her report had already confirmed to us that this was probably how she died, but she wanted to know how you knew that. Forensics have seen all this sort of stuff before. The experts had looked at the pattern of the blood stains in the bedroom. The distribution pattern made as blood pulses or sprays out of a wound can tell them an awful lot. They factor in everything they know about blood pressure in a vein or an artery, how often it pulses, how much blood comes out, and how as the person dies, the blood pressure decreases and the pulsing blood doesn’t project as far as it did before. With that information they can calculate from the blood distribution patterns where a person was killed and pretty much how they were killed. From all of that they can build up a pretty accurate picture of what happens in a murder, even without a body."

  Alex was staring at Peter.

  "I was wondering...can you tell me where you think the woman was when she was murdered?"

  Without thinking Peter pointed at the bed in front.

  "Just there. And he held her head from behind as he cut her throat."

  Alex looked where Peter had pointed.

  "Which is exactly what Forensics said. Peter, how did you know that?"

  "The clairvoyant told me." Peter said, breaking the gaze of the policeman and walking to the shuttered metal window.

  "Peter. I called your boss at the Evening News this morning. Just to check...nothing personal. Just doing my job. He speaks very highly of you. He said you were on holiday. That you were recovering from an operation. He didn't want to go into details. He suggested I should ask you myself. The point is, he seemed surprised to hear that you were down here. He didn't know anything about this investigation...I thought that was a bit curious..."

  Peter was not really surprised by what Alex was saying. He had expected any decent policeman to make some background checks. Sergeant Angus had warned him that things could get tough. Very tough. Especially if he ever found a body. Luckily, Sergeant Angus had offered to vouch for him, if and when help was needed.

  Without turning around and risking catching the gaze of the policeman, Peter tapped the window, standing beside it, visualising that part of the dream sequence where KK had stood by the window, looking out. And then, another image jumped into his mind, the vision he had seen briefly whilst standing at the back of the house in the rear garden, looking up at the window: a tall, broad shouldered man. Probably an imaginary picture of KK that his subconscious had built up.

  "My boss doesn't know anything about this, because I never told him. If I had wanted to do this for the Evening News, he would have said no. He wouldn’t have agreed to spending money, or allowing me to chase around Britain on a wild goose chase. I know his views on this sort of stuf
f. I don't always want to work at the News...it's a great paper, but one day I want to get a job in London for one of the big papers...if this story checks out, this could help me get noticed. It could be my ticket down South."

  It sounded convincing. Peter had thought long and hard about his cover story as he drove down from Edinburgh, and he was pretty sure it sounded real enough.

  Alex was silent.

  "Can we talk outside? Can you perhaps give me a few minutes now to just absorb the room...I need to memorise all of this...and think."

  "Sure. Memorise away." Alex offered, stepping back into the hallway, but hovering on the edge of Peter's sight.

  Peter closed his eyes.

  Instantly he heard a scream in his head: at first a loud piercing scream, but which became quickly muffled. It rang in his ears, and Peter immediately opened his eyes.

  Peter still felt sick, light-headed and faint.

  "No, on second thoughts. Let's get out of here...I don't think this is serving any purpose..."

  As they walked into the hallway, Peter saw an entrance to the attic above.

  "Have they been up there?"

  "Yes. They've been everywhere. Like I said yesterday, whoever was living here was a ghost. He left nothing. And I mean nothing. Whoever it was is a very cool customer. He kills someone, then takes as much time as he needs to to clean up, and then moves. He was living here under an alias, and there are no traceable links to anything he did beyond this house. The big question is, what did he do with the body?"

  .

  Peter looked at Alex. He didn't say anything, but after last night, he was pretty sure KK had shown him where the body was.

  .

  --------------------

  .

  They stepped outside the house and Alex locked up. Peter sat down on the wall at the bottom of the front garden and waited for the police constable. As he came down the path, Peter indicated for Alex to sit down beside him, then reached into his wallet and pulled out the piece of paper.

  "Here, fair's fair. You showed me the flat, and yesterday you asked me if I could try and get hold of a better description of the victim. Here's what I came up with...," and he handed Alex the paper.

  "Did you come up with this, or the clairvoyant?" Alex asked.

  "The clairvoyant, obviously. We spoke this morning..."

  Alex read the description.

  "Excellent. This could help. I'll get someone to look at the missing person's database again."

  "And, one last point,... I...we, the clairvoyant, think that the woman's name is Valentia. And she is foreign. She is not English. You might want to contact Interpol and start checking the missing persons databases from some other countries."

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  .

  .

  The Forest

  May 2nd

  2 p.m.

  .

  .

  Two hours spent searching the internet and talking to locals in the pubs and tea houses in Ironbridge did not reveal any new nuggets of information that could help Peter in his search.

  The events at No. 8 were still a hot topic of conversation, even though they had taken place almost over a year ago. No one seemed to have ever talked to the man who had lived there. A few people thought he was quite tall and broad shouldered, but then, at the other end of the scale, someone said that they thought he was small and wiry.

  Searching the internet had not flagged up any suspicious deaths or missing people. His local sleuthing had drawn a blank.

  After lunch in the gastro pub with the large courtyard just opposite the entrance to the bridge, he marched up the hill to investigate the forest.

  He was nervous. The dream from last night was still very vivid, and he knew, knew that this walk in the forest was going to be eventful.

  For a while he stood in front of No. 8. The second time he had been there that day. Then he turned and faced the forest, staring at the trees.

  Peter smiled to himself. He was beginning to get inside of the mind of the murderer: he knew now why the forest was significant. He also had an idea of why KK had rented the house at the top of the hill. Opposite the forest.

  But he was also worried. He knew that he had to fight the gradual encroachment of an alien personality into his psyche, and expose KK to the world: his crimes, his perversions, his death, and his name. Peter had to exorcise KK from his body and mind, and he knew that the only way to do this was to track him down.

  Peter had to go on the offensive.

  .

  He walked across the road, climbed over the fence and stepped into the trees. Closing his eyes, he tried to recall the exact spot in his dreams that KK had exited the forest, so that he could start to retrace KK's steps backwards into the trees.

  He glanced behind him at the houses, walked several metres further along the edge of the forest, but failed to find any spot that seemed to resonate with the picture in his head.

  Perhaps he didn't come out of the forest here.

  Peter closed his eyes, and tried to think like KK. Tried to think as a killer would, who was just about to dispose of a body...

  If he had been carrying the body from the house, it would have been natural to take the shortest path across the road from the house in the dead of night, carrying it as quickly as possible into the cover of the woods. But when leaving the forest on the way back, having disposed of the corpse, the prudent thing to do would have been to stay under cover of the trees for as long as possible and exit somewhere else completely. Doing that would minimise the risk of anyone who may have seen someone coming out of the trees later associating it with the place KK lived.

  "Yes," Peter thought to himself, "...if I was KK, I would come out the forest somewhere as far away as possible, and then walk home."

  .

  Happy with his thought process, Peter turned back to face into the trees. He took his first step forward.

  He felt a chill within him.

  Peter smiled.

  He was getting 'hotter'.

  Scanning the ground and the trees around him, he advanced slowly forward, the direct natural sunlight quickly disappearing and being replaced by a darker, colder, greenish hue.

  He was looking for something in particular: a branch...hanging from a tree by a piece of bark, or just in case it was no longer attached to its tree, a large branch lying on the forest floor.

  About a hundred metres in, about ten metres to his right, he found it.

  It was just like in his dream, a branch that had obviously been struck by lighting and split away from the tree, but which now lay on the ground and was still attached to the long dead tree stump by a sliver of twisted bark.

  He stood staring down at it.

  This was truly bizarre.

  So bloody weird.

  He had seen this in his mind, and now here it was, lying on the ground before him. This was the exact spot that KK had stumbled in the dark over the branch and dropped the body onto the ground. He tried to imagine it again in his mind, but couldn't.

  He stepped forward a metre, scanning the ground for the spot where the body would have fallen, perhaps in the hope of maybe finding something that might have fallen from the body and been left on the ground in the dark.

  Nothing.

  There was nothing.

  .

  Walking on, the forest got slightly darker, and scarier.

  He felt strange. Peter was excited, because he knew that he was hot on KK's heels. He was retracing his path through the forest that night, tracking him down. He was getting hotter with every step he took forward.

  At the same time, Peter was shit scared.

  This was the stuff of nightmares.

  .

  Peter had no idea how large this forest was. He had no idea how much further he had to go before he came to the next clue in the treasure hunt, but he knew it was somewhere in front of him.

  He was looking for the mobile phone mast at the top of the hill.

&nbs
p; Then a truly brilliant idea occurred to him.

  Quickly, he pulled out his Smartphone, and went to 'Maps'. Within seconds a little red arrow was pointing to the spot on the map of the forest where the GPS had tracked him down to. Increasing the scale, he touched the screen and dragged it down, so that he could see a map of the forest that was ahead of where he stood now. He switched to the photograph mode, so that he could see a real, bird's eye view of the forest taken from above.

  Bingo. There it was.

  Two hundred metres in front, slightly to his left there was a clearing, and in the middle of it was a mobile phone mast.

  Peter hurried forward, finding it within seconds. He stopped briefly to look at the mast, but then moved quickly past it and straight on for about fifty metres, until just like in his vision, he came to a small area of stones in the middle of which stood a large, thin, monolith: a standing stone which must have been standing there for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

  Turning immediately to his left, he walked forward five metres, pacing them out with his feet.

  One...two...three...four...five...

  He came to a stop, staring down at the ground.

  This was it. This was the place.

  Beneath his feet, underneath the ground, he knew he would find the body of an unknown, unmissed woman called Valentia.

  He shivered.

  The most violent shiver he had yet experienced.

  He was very hot. Almost boiling.

  .

  Peter was sitting on the ground, about two metres back from where he was sure the body would be found. He was staring at the ground, scanning it, looking for any possible signs that it had been dug over, or disturbed in anyway.

  He had walked slowly over and around the site, but there was no discernible signs that the ground had in any way been disturbed in the recent past.

  Recalling his dream, he remembered that KK had been standing in the hole, with the top of the hole coming up to shoulder height. The body was going to be deep, deep down.

  Peter was furious with himself. Stupidly, stupidly, such was his haste to get here that he had completely forgotten to bring anything with him: something useful, like a 'spade' for example!