Hope to Die: A gripping new serial killer thriller (The DS Nathan Cody series)

by David Jackson

  ‘You don’t look well. Are you sure you’re not in pain?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes. I’m not in pain. Do you know what time Simon’s coming in?’

  Helen checks her watch. ‘Well, he’s got a nine o’clock appointment, and it’s gone eight-thirty now, so—’

  The front door swings open again. A man walks in. Tall, smartly dressed, good hair, square jaw. Looks as though he has money. Which he has.

  On seeing Cody, Simon Teller raises an eyebrow in a Roger Moore-like expression of mild surprise. Then he flashes perfect teeth – his best advertisement for his services as one of the most sought-after orthodontists in the north-west.

  ‘Cody! Haven’t seen you in a while. You wouldn’t think we occupied the same building. How are you? Have to say I’ve seen you looking better.’

  Helen chips in: ‘I think he’s got toothache.’

  Cody sees the immediate concern on Teller’s face. ‘I haven’t got toothache. I just need to have a word.’

  ‘A word? Sure. Let’s go in here.’

  Teller starts moving towards a door on the other side of the hallway, then calls out, ‘Kettle on yet, Helen?’

  Cody follows Teller into his treatment room. Bright lights flicker on. The ultra-modern interior belies the age of the building containing it. Lots of shiny surfaces and computer screens and equipment that looks as though it belongs in a spaceship. Perish the thought that anything as primitive as pain could be permitted here.

  Teller waves Cody into a chair, then says, ‘Which tooth is it?’

  Cody sighs. ‘My teeth are fine. It’s not my teeth.’

  ‘Well, you still look like crap. What’s up?’

  Cody has mixed feelings about Teller. He was introduced to the man by Devon, Cody’s ex-fiancée, and never really warmed to him. Teller was married at the time, but even then he had a reputation as a woman-chaser. In fact, his only interests in life seem to be women, money, fast cars and golf. He has so little in common with Cody that conversations between them tend to fizzle out after a few perfunctory sentences.

  That said, he did Cody an enormous favour by allowing him to move into the flat upstairs on a pretty minimal rent. It’s a debt of gratitude that Cody wishes he didn’t owe the man, but sometimes beggars can’t be choosers. Another city-centre flat as spacious and as nice as this would be way beyond his price range.

  ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ Cody explains.

  Teller nods. ‘That could either be really good, in that there was a woman keeping you busy all night, or bad, in that there wasn’t.’

  It doesn’t surprise Cody that Teller sees the situation in such blatantly sex-related terms. Teller tends to boil most things in life down to that.

  ‘Bad,’ says Cody.

  ‘Okay, so . . .’ Teller seems to struggle to bring his mind above gutter level. A look of surprise springs to his face when his brain succeeds. ‘The flat. Is there something wrong with the flat?’

  ‘No. Well . . . maybe. I don’t know.’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘I thought I heard things last night. Weird noises.’

  ‘What kind of noises?’

  Cody doesn’t want to say. In the cold light of day, or at least the cold light of this treatment room, it seems ridiculous.

  ‘I’m not sure. But it sounded like . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It sounded like it was coming from one of your surgeries.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Upstairs. The one by the door to my flat.’

  ‘Okay. Can you be a bit more specific? What kind of noises? Do you mean like an intruder?’ Teller looks a little alarmed now.

  ‘No. Well, yes, that’s what I thought at first. But it wasn’t.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I—’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  There’s a rap on the door, and Helen the receptionist breezes in. She is carrying a bunch of keys in her fist, and seems to be out of breath.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Upstairs . . . I think we’ve had . . . a burglar.’

  Teller gets to his feet. ‘Shit. So someone did get in. We should call the police.’ He looks down at Cody. ‘Wait. You are the police. I thought you just said—’

  ‘I did. It was me.’

  Teller gives him a look of confusion. ‘What was you?’

  ‘I kicked your door open.’

  Teller stares at him for a few seconds, then returns his gaze to Helen. ‘It’s all right,’ he says.

  Helen starts to back out of the room, but with reluctance, her eyes studying Cody as though she suspects he’s about to start murdering them all. Teller has to beam her a smile of reassurance to get her out of there.

  Teller sits down again. ‘Right. Let’s get to the bottom of this. You kicked my surgery door open?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you thought you heard someone in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But when you got into the room, there was nobody there.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Okay. I’m with you so far. The bit I don’t get is what kind of noises an empty room could possibly make in order for you to believe it was occupied.’

  Cody has to concede that this is an excellent point. What he’s less certain about is how open he wants to be about the state of his mind.

  ‘All right. Bear with me here, because this might sound a little crazy. I thought I heard a drill.’

  ‘A drill.’

  ‘Yes. One of your dentist drills. That’s what it sounded like to me. I don’t know, maybe I was dreaming it or something, but that’s what I thought I heard. Whatever. It was my mistake. I broke your door, and I’ll pay for the damage.’

  Teller wears the face of someone who hears what he’s being told and is trying to read between the lines. Cody would rather he didn’t. He would prefer Teller to say, ‘Fine, I’ll send you a bill,’ and leave it there.

  Instead, Teller says, ‘Show me.’

  ‘Sure,’ says Cody, knowing that some probing questions are about to come his way.

  They step into the hallway. Teller says, ‘Things going well at work?’

  Probing question number one, thinks Cody. The sort of question designed to assess stress levels.

  ‘Busy,’ says Cody, keeping it minimal.

  ‘You on those murders? The Bible Basher?’

  ‘The what? Is that what they’re calling him?’

  ‘According to the tabloids. Not the stuff I usually read, you understand, but it finds its way into our waiting room.’

  Cody isn’t too surprised at the aptness of the sobriquet being used by the newspapers. The police have played their cards close to their chests, but too many people will have heard that at least one of the victims had her head caved in. Word soon spreads, and journalists have sharp ears for that kind of salacious gossip.

  As they reach the staircase, Cody decides to change the topic. Ask some searching questions of his own.

  ‘Have you seen much of Devon recently?’

  He’s hoping for a ‘no’. He’s hoping that this tall, wealthy, good-looking and now single guy is not buzzing around the woman who once unhesitatingly agreed to be Cody’s wife.

  Teller looks upwards as he searches his memory banks. ‘Ooh, must have been at least a month ago. Maybe even six weeks.’

  Good, thinks Cody. One less thing to be concerned about.

  ‘Having a pre-Christmas drink with her next week, though,’ Teller adds.

  ‘Right,’ says Cody. ‘Great. Say hello to her for me, won’t you?’

  ‘Will do, mate,’ says Teller, displaying his exemplary teeth again. I wouldn’t have been in need of a torch if I had teeth like that, Cody thinks.

  They reach the landing. Teller bends at the waist to examine the lock on the surgery door. ‘Ah. See what you mean. Bit of a mess.’

  ‘Like I said, send me the bill.’
/>
  Teller dismisses the offer with a wave of his hand. ‘Let’s take a look at this drill.’

  Cody doesn’t want to examine the drill. He doesn’t want to stand there while Teller confirms that the only plausible explan-ation for the previous night is that Cody was off his rocker.

  ‘Weird,’ says Teller, fiddling with some switches.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The drill is locked in the on position, the power at the wall is on, and yet nothing’s happening.’

  ‘Right,’ says Cody, having no idea what this signifies.

  ‘Bear with me,’ says Teller.

  He walks out of the room, leaving Cody thinking he must have gone in search of some tools. He’d like that to be the case. He’d like a practical, rational solution to all this. Anything that doesn’t involve the spirit world or the loss of sanity would be most welcome right now.

  When the drill suddenly bursts into life, he almost craps himself.

  Teller jogs back into the room. Brings back merciful silence with a flick of the off switch.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Cody demands.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ Teller answers.

  He leads Cody out of the room, along the landing, and into the kitchen. There, he points to an electrical supply box high on the wall.

  ‘The fuse that controls the power sockets in the surgery had tripped. All I did was to reset it. There must be a fault in the drill. A loose connection of some kind, causing it to go on and off. Eventually, it knocked out the fuse. I’ll get someone out to take a look at it.’ He laughs, and slaps Cody on the bicep. ‘At least you know you weren’t imagining things, eh?’

  Cody returns a weak smile. It would be nice to accept Teller’s version of events, comforting to disregard the things that don’t quite fit them. A faulty appliance that just happens to declare its abnormality in the middle of the night – wouldn’t that be a lovely coincidence?

  But Cody has another, much more unsettling, explanation.

  Someone was here last night. Someone with keys, or the ability to pick locks, got into the building. They went into the surgery and operated the drill until Cody woke up. And when Cody had finished checking the first floor and had gone downstairs, the intruder moved to the kitchen, waiting to operate the drill remotely from the fuse box. Then, once Cody had smashed his way into the surgery, the intruder slipped downstairs and out through the front door.

  It wasn’t a ghost, and it wasn’t a figment of Cody’s imagination.

  Waldo the clown invaded not only Cody’s dreams last night.

  He was also in the building.

  38

  Damn him!

  He’s good, thinks Cody. Bloody good. A genius.

  Waldo is here. In my head. Under my skin. I can feel him crawling around inside me, and I can’t get rid of him.

  It’s what he wants, of course. Persecuting me is how he gets his kicks. I thought I was winning. I thought I was becoming myself once more. But this monster is tipping the scales again. He’s determined to destroy me.

  Cody is at his desk, staring with unseeing eyes at his computer. His brain is frazzled through lack of sleep and an inability to focus on anything but clowns.

  Webley didn’t help his mood when he arrived for work. He tried smiling at her, but she didn’t want to know. And when he tried approaching her desk, she quickly stood up and went to talk to someone else.

  Well, sod her, he thinks. I’ve got bigger problems to deal with.

  One of those problems is solving the murders of three women, but even that has been relegated.

  The silent phone calls. Then the screams. The music box and the eerie voice. The visitor at the door. And now the latest – an incursion into the privacy of his own home!

  Jesus Christ, thinks Cody. Waldo was there. Actually there, in my house. If he’d wanted, he could have remained on the other side of that surgery door, just waiting for me to come in so that he could drill holes in my face.

  And even when there are pauses in the actual bombardment, Cody’s mind fills the gaps with its own cruel games. It creates the most fantastic and horrific nightmares, which don’t end with coming awake.

  He thinks back to how things were, a couple of months ago. He was at a crisis point then. The dreams and hallucinations were the worst they had ever been. He found himself losing control, lashing out at others. In that condition, he couldn’t have lasted much longer in the force.

  The clowns want him back in that state. He’s certain of that. They are playing at psychological warfare. They want to turn him into a gibbering, drooling wreck. And probably for no other reason than that they enjoy it.

  The problem is that they are succeeding.

  He can feel his control ebbing away. His reason is being steadily sucked out of his body.

  The only piece of driftwood left for him to cling to is the fact that the clowns have made contact. They say that, in a big city, you are never more than ten feet away from a rat. Well, maybe now he is never more than a few feet away from a clown. A terrifying thought to most people, but to Cody it brings hope. If they remain nearby, he might just have the chance of catching one. And then the tables might be turned.

  It doesn’t help that he has lost his only ally. Megan Webley played a vital role in dragging him back from the brink of insanity. Dragged him back from the brink of death, too. He owes her big time. He can’t afford to shut her out completely. And yet isn’t that the way things are going?

  He sneaks a peek towards Webley’s desk. Engrossed in something on her computer, she looks untroubled, and her beauty shines through. It seems to Cody that every time he crosses her path at the moment he causes that face to crease with lines of fury and sorrow. He isn’t being fair on her.

  He decides he needs to make it up to Webley. His mind rolls back to his thoughts of the previous night, before it was so violently disturbed.

  An early Christmas present – that’ll do it. He knows her well enough to find her something she will like. Something she will treasure. A piece of jewellery, perhaps. Earrings? No. Maybe a necklace, though. That would be—

  Wait.

  Why does that feel so wrong? Why does the idea of a gift like that stir up such uneasy feelings?

  ‘Cody!’

  He looks up at the sound of the bark from DCI Blunt. She is standing in the doorway to her office, beckoning him in. He gets up, crosses the incident room. Inches past Blunt’s substantial frame, anxious not to come into contact with any part of her as he does so.

  She follows him in, closing the door behind her. She comes around her desk and takes a seat. Invites Cody to sit down too.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘You look like death warmed up. Like you haven’t slept in a week.’

  ‘Oh. No. It’s okay. There was a problem in the flat last night. Something to do with the electrics. Kept me awake.’

  Blunt eyes him with suspicion. She has seen him like this before. She has suspected for a long time that he has been experiencing problems – of that he is sure. She never comes right out with it. Instead, she asks probing questions, or offers him opportunities to unload. He never takes her up on those offers. To do so would be the beginning of the end. Benevolent though Blunt might seem, her actions will be guided by the unchallengeable might of police procedure. The job he loves doing would be taken from him, to be substituted by months of psychiatric assessment and a role flying a desk in a dusty basement office. He’s not having that.

  ‘Is that all?’ says Blunt. ‘I’ve just been watching you. For the last five minutes all you’ve done is stare at your screen. You haven’t moved a muscle. That’s not just tiredness, Cody. Something’s up.’

  Here we go again, he thinks. Blunt playing the mother figure. She does this a lot with him, but not with any other member of the team. He often wonders why that is, but he won’t dare ask her. That would be such an awkward conversation.

  I could tell her, he t
hinks. Tell her what’s really bothering me. Tell her about the clowns knocking on my door, the ghosts operating machinery in the middle of the night, the possibility that I’m getting into a deadly game I don’t know how to play.

  Could you help me with that, DCI Blunt?

  ‘The case,’ he says. ‘It’s getting to me.’

  ‘It’s getting to all of us. What in particular?’

  Good question. Because actually there is something particular. He just doesn’t know what it is. He has a feeling it was about to come to him, right before Blunt called his name.

  ‘The lack of progress,’ he says. ‘I think I’m starting to take it personally.’

  He doesn’t mean this. He hates the fact that they seem to be making little progress in catching the killer, but he’s not blaming himself for that. It’s a plausible response to Blunt’s question, however.

  ‘Let me worry about that,’ she says. ‘It’s my squad. The buck stops with me.’ She pauses to allow her words of reassurance time to sink in, then says, ‘How’s our Megan getting on?’

  Megan. Yes, he was thinking about her earlier, wasn’t he? Just before Blunt’s interruption, he was thinking about how he might appease her. Why does that seem so important?

  ‘Fine,’ he answers. ‘She’s fitting in really well.’

  Except with me, he wants to add. Right now she hates my guts. Thinks I’m a total arsehole. Hence the idea of a small gift. Jewellery. A necklace. That’s where I got to in my thinking. That’s where my brain started to sound a gong. Why, damn it?

  ‘Good to hear,’ says Blunt. ‘Keep her under your wing. She’s been through a lot, but so have you. I’m sure you’ll know the warning signs if she starts to wobble.’

  Cody hears the latest unsubtle reference to his past history, but lets it pass straight through his head without interception. He needs to focus all his mental energy on—

  ‘Cody, are you listening to me? I said—’

  Cody raises a finger to stop her in mid-flow. He starts to rise from his chair, a smile forming on his face.

  ‘Cody?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am. Gotta go.’

  Blunt’s expression clouds over. ‘Cody!’