The Tower Hill Terror

by Dane Cobain

  Maile nodded, but she didn’t smile. “Boss,” she said, hesitantly. “If you’re worried about money, why take on cases like the Thompson case? And why bother investigating Jayne Lipton and Abu Adewali?”

  “I like the challenge,” Leipfold replied.

  “Yeah,” Maile said. “And I bet the publicity helps, too.”

  Leipfold snorted into his bowl of porridge, choked a little on the mush in his mouth and sprayed oats across his brand-new keyboard. Then he pulled himself together and said, “Speaking of Adewali, what’s the latest? Did you follow up the lead with the kid who took the photo of the body?”

  “I did,” Maile replied. “And get this. He didn’t take the photo. He says a stranger paid him to post it, and I believe him.”

  “Did he get a good look at the stranger?”

  “Not really,” Maile admitted. “But he did have an iPad, which meant I could get him to make a decent composition. Check this out.”

  She beckoned Leipfold over as she pulled up an image on the screen. It showed a man with a slight stubble and short, cropped hair, two narrow eyes and a nose that might once have been broken. The face looked familiar and yet anonymous, like the faces of the shelf stackers at a supermarket. It left Leipfold feeling ambivalent, like he was looking at an old friend in the face of a man he’d never met.

  “Ugly bloke, isn’t he?” Leipfold said.

  “I’m sure he has a lovely personality,” Maile replied. “Do you think this guy’s the killer? It’d make sense. Bribe the kid to take the heat away.”

  Leipfold shook his head. “Whoever is behind this, they’re smarter than that,” he said. “They knew that the kid would be tracked down eventually. If they were smart, which I’m pretty sure they were, they would’ve paid a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay a guy to pay the kid. We’ll never track them down.”

  “We could try,” Maile said.

  “You can try,” Leipfold replied. “I’ve got other things to do. If you can fit it around the rest of your work, go ahead.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I do best,” Leipfold replied. “I’m going to follow my nose, dig up a little dirt and sell my soul to pay the rent. Like you said, if I’m worried about money, why bother investigating Abu Adewali?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I know,” Leipfold said. “Don’t worry, I’m still investigating. But in the meantime, we have a business to run.”

  * * *

  Maile and Leipfold spent the rest of the morning running the business, but their plan for the afternoon took a back seat at around 1:35PM, when Maile spotted the news and relayed it back to Leipfold.

  “Boss,” she said, “you need to look at this.”

  Leipfold was on the phone to his accountant, a man called Postlethwaite who’d somehow held the company together and was finally facing the prospect of a bonus after three or four years in the financial equivalent of Dante’s second circle. Maile waited patiently for him to finish the call. He hung up and looked across at her.

  “What?” he said.

  “You need to go online,” Maile said. “The Tribune pushed out an article. You need to read it.”

  “Why?” Leipfold asked.

  “Because it’s an interview with a man who claims he killed Jayne Lipton and Abu Adewali.”

  Leipfold swore softly under his breath and raced over to Maile’s desk. She had the article up on her screen, and Leipfold leaned over her to take her mouse and to scroll slowly through it.

  The piece in The Tribune was an “exclusive interview” with a man who claimed to have killed Jayne Lipton and Abu Adewali. Whether genuine or not, the paper seemed to have nailed most of the details, and Leipfold suspected that if their killer interview was a fake, they must have had someone on the inside of the investigation. It even mentioned the mutilated genitals and breasts.

  Leipfold read through the piece for a second time, then rushed back over to his desk to grab the backup phone, his own personal hotline to Jack Cholmondeley. He didn’t answer, even after Leipfold redialled and redialled, signalling that the call was an emergency. Leipfold suspected that he already knew about the coverage and that he was busy following up with it. He left the phone on the desk beside him and continued to redial periodically while pulling up the coverage on his own machine.

  “Maile,” he barked, “I need a favour. Work a little bit of your magic and see what you can find out. Track down the journalist and get me a meeting. Then find out everything you can about their career to date and try to find a link back to Lipton and Adewali.”

  “Sure thing,” Maile said. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to reread the article,” Leipfold said. “And then I’m going to think.”

  * * *

  Leipfold was worried. The article in The Tribune was disturbingly accurate, and it had set his mind racing with possibilities. He remembered the strange case of Wallace Souza, the Brazilian crime show host who’d been accused of hiring hitmen to kill people so his crew could be the first on the scene. But he doubted that The Tribune was following in Souza’s footsteps. They just didn’t have the brains or the initiative.

  According to the article, a parcel was delivered to the paper’s offices in Clapham. It had arrived by courier, like the delivery to the police office, and the driver was wearing leathers and a visor. The Tribune explained how a visitor had stumbled across the parcel, which had been left on the pavement outside the entrance, and handed it in at reception.

  Leipfold continued to read through the article, noting that it was three times the normal length. There was a lot for The Tribune to cover. According to the paper, the parcel contained a cassette tape, a small, handwritten note and some chunks of human flesh, which were described as “both unconvincingly artificial and horribly, brutally real.”

  But it was the tape that most interested Leipfold. The team at The Tribune had unearthed an old cassette player to listen to what was on it. They’d described the voice as “sounding like an ominous, computerised madman, like a cross between Stephen Hawking and Charles Manson.” And they explained the killer’s most shocking claim yet: that there was another victim and that the trophy he gave to The Tribune was the proof of that. The newspaper said that the police had been notified and had been given the gory package to take it away for analysis.

  And right there, at the top of the article, was the most stunning thing of all. Just a single reference, but that was all it took. The tape had been leaked, which meant that the audio was out there somewhere in the ether. He got Maile to find him a link and less than ten minutes later, thanks to the magic of the internet and Leipfold’s slow but reliable broadband connection, he was able to listen to the killer’s tape from the comfort of his office.

  It crossed his mind that so could the rest of the city and that there’d be panic on the streets before long unless the cops made an arrest. And whether he liked it or not, Leipfold knew he was just as involved in the investigation as Jack Cholmondeley, Gary Mogford and the others. So Leipfold asked Maile to work her magic on the audio.

  “The voice is distorted,” Leipfold said, “but the words are clear enough. I want you to find out what you can about the recording. When it was recorded, what it was recorded with, that sort of thing. See if you can find out what they used to modify their voice. If we can figure that out, maybe we can reverse the changes and get some cleaner audio.”

  Maile grinned. “Good plan,” she said. “You’re learning. I’ve got a couple of other ideas as well. But there’s a bit of a problem.”

  “What is it?” Leipfold asked.

  “I’ll need the original tape for the best results. I’ll do what I can with The Tribune’s mp3, but if you can get me the cassette, I’ll be able to dig a little deeper.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Leipfold said.
“In the meantime, get cracking on the rest of the research.”

  Maile grinned and offered up a mock salute. Then her expression altered and morphed into something a little more serious.

  “I can’t work late tonight,” she announced. “I would if I could, but I can’t. I hope you weren’t relying on me being here all night.”

  Leipfold, who hadn’t been relying on it but who was hoping for a bit of company, looked across at her. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “I’m meeting someone,” Maile said.

  Leipfold grinned. “Another date?” he asked. “Is this with the same guy or are you meeting up with somebody different?”

  “No comment,” Maile said.

  “Where are you even meeting these guys?”

  “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies,” Maile replied. “Like I said before, boss, I don’t like talking about this kind of stuff.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  An uncomfortable silence descended upon the two of them, but Leipfold didn’t notice. He was busy click-clacking away at his new computer keyboard. Maile scowled at him.

  “Fine,” she said. “If it’s gossip you want, we’ll gossip about it. But not today.”

  “Why not?” Leipfold asked.

  “Because we’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter Nine:

  The Tower Hill Terror

  MAILE WAS ALREADY AT HER DESK when Leipfold walked through the door. He was carrying two heavy shopping bags full of fresh supplies for the office, and Maile rushed over to help him.

  “That one’s from the stationery aisle,” Leipfold said by way of greeting. “I’ve got the fresh stuff.”

  “Of course,” Maile replied. She stashed the stationery away in a little cupboard beneath the office’s tiny printer before picking up the report she’d been working on and handing it to the boss.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s the information you asked for about The Tribune,” Maile explained. “Including a contact number and an email address. The journalist you’re looking for is called Siobhan Dent. Looks like she’s got some pedigree. She worked for a major tabloid before joining The Tribune. Said she wanted a job she could be proud of.”

  “And so she moved to The Tribune?” Leipfold scoffed.

  “Hey, there are worse places to work,” Maile said. “Do you want me to get in touch with her?”

  “No,” Leipfold said. “I’ll do it. Go grab me a coffee while I make the call.”

  Maile sighed but did as he asked of her. While she was waiting for the kettle to boil, Leipfold leaned back on his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He kept his desk tidy, but it wasn’t clean. The surface was stained with old tea and the grease from a decade of takeaways. He stared moodily into the distance for a moment and then put a call in to Siobhan Dent at The Tribune. Leipfold was in luck.

  “Sure,” she said. “I could meet you for a coffee or two. I’ve heard about you, Mr. Leipfold. I’d like to have a chat with you myself. Perhaps we could talk about some of your investigations. I’m sure our readers would like to hear some of your stories.”

  “There’ll be time for that later,” Leipfold said. “Right now, I’m hoping you might be able to help me with an active investigation.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then Siobhan said, “A tenner says I know what this is about. You want to speak to me about the Tower Hill Terror.”

  “The what?” Leipfold asked.

  “The Tower Hill Terror,” the journalist repeated. “Every serial killer needs a nickname. That’s what we’ve started to call him.”

  “Why are you making up names for him?” Leipfold asked. “You’re just going to spread more panic. Fear of a name increases the fear of a thing itself. Did you never read Harry Potter?”

  “Panic sells papers,” Siobhan replied. “It’s sad but it’s true.”

  “And the name? The Tower Hill Terror?”

  “It’s the closest tube station to the second murder scene.”

  “Why didn’t you use the first?”

  “The Euston Terror doesn’t sound as good. But enough about that. Where would you like to meet?”

  * * *

  Siobhan Dent agreed to meet Leipfold in an East End coffee shop, explaining that she had a couple of other people to meet that afternoon and so she couldn’t stick around for long.

  With Maile behind at the office, catching up with some of the research on their other clients, Leipfold donned his leathers, hopped on Camilla and wound his way through the streets towards the coffee shop. He parked Camilla a couple of streets away and paid the minimum fee on the ticket machine. He had just enough change to pay for an hour.

  He could see Siobhan through the wide bay windows of the coffee shop. Leipfold had never met her before, but Maile had tracked down some photographs and he’d committed her face to memory before leaving. When Leipfold met her in person, he decided that the photographs didn’t do her justice. She was a striking woman.

  Siobhan was a grungy blonde with long hair down to her waist, a pretty face with a light touch of makeup and two piercings on the skin above her lips. She was wearing skinny jeans and a black top with a band’s logo blazing its way across the front of it and, like Maile, she had the tip of a tattoo poking out of her shirt on one shoulder.

  “You must be James Leipfold,” she said as he entered the cafeteria and made a beeline for her. “You look just how I’d imagined.”

  Leipfold shrugged. He was still in his leathers and had the bike helmet tucked under one of his arms. She stood up as he walked over to the table and put his helmet down, then grabbed a notebook and a pen from his back pocket. They shook hands and then sat down. Siobhan caught the eye of one of the waiters and ordered a drink, then took her phone from her pocket, placed it on the table and booted up one of her most-used applications.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, apologetically. “I’d like to record our conversation if that’s okay with you. I probably won’t use it, and it won’t go online without your prior approval, but I make a habit of recording my meetings.”

  “I don’t mind,” Leipfold replied. “As long as you don’t mind me doing the same.” He pulled out his own phone and laid it down beside hers. The journalist had a bland, transparent cover, while Leipfold’s case was decorated with camo and built for ruggedness and endurance. He smiled and supposed that they reflected their personalities.

  Leipfold started recording on his phone and said, “Tell me about the tape. The one you received from the Tower Hill Terror.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me that you didn’t mention in the paper,” Leipfold said.

  “You really think I would have missed a detail?” Siobhan scoffed. “We published everything, and I mean that. Murders help to sell papers.”

  Leipfold grinned and bit his tongue to stop himself from saying something that he might regret. Instead, he asked, “Do you still have the tape? I might be able to get some information from it.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “But we took a couple of copies. I could get hold of one.”

  “That’d be grand,” Leipfold said. “How quickly can you get hold of it?”

  “I’ll have someone drop it off at your office tomorrow morning.”

  “I owe you one,” Leipfold said. “One final thing. Can you remember anything about the courier who delivered the package?”

  Siobhan frowned and cast her mind back. “He was dressed a little bit like you are,” she said. “Wearing leathers and a helmet. There was a smiley face on his helmet and some sort of logo on the jacket. FunRunz. Or something like that.”

  Leipfold smiled appreciatively. “Perfect,” he said. “Thanks so much, Siobhan. How can I ever repay you?”

  The journalist smiled
, grabbed her notebook and pen and checked that her phone was still recording.

  “Well,” she said, “there is one thing. How about we switch things up and you answer a couple of questions for me?”

  * * *

  Leipfold was in a sour mood the following morning. His meeting with Siobhan Dent had dragged on for longer than either of them had expected, and Camilla had been ticketed by the time he got back to her. For her part, the journalist had to cancel one meeting and reschedule another.

  But his mood started to pick up once Maile arrived, and when a courier dropped off a package from The Tribune as the clock chimed eleven, it got even better. Leipfold signed for the package, then stared at the delivery man as he made his way out of the building and back across to his bike. The courier was dressed head to toe in motorcycle leathers, a forcible reminder of the case. Leipfold thought about chasing the courier down, but he managed to stop himself before he caused a scene. He reminded himself that it had been a cold February, one of the coldest that he remembered, and that it was hardly unusual for couriers to wear their leathers. There must have been at least a thousand of them working across the city, and maybe more.

  Leipfold took the box over to his desk, pulled his letter opener from the drawer and slit open the flaps, then reached inside and pulled out the contents from a sea of packing peanuts. It was a single cassette tape inside a plastic case and a handwritten note that read I hope this helps!

  “Check this out,” Leipfold said, holding the cassette up in his hands so that Maile could see it. “Looks like my new friend at The Tribune came through for me.”

  “Awesome!” Maile replied. “What is it?”

  “It’s the tape that the press received from the killer. Not the original, of course, because the police have that, but it is a true copy, not like the rubbish they put up on the website. I want you to digitise this thing and find out what you can.”

  “Will do,” Maile said. “It’s all about quality. The more accurate the conversion, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to figure out what software was used to create it.”