by Dane Cobain
Richards talked about public perception and the press, and how there was pressure on them to solve the case without further casualties. As part of that, one of the teams had been tasked with building a scientific profile of the suspect, using statistics and data from other cases and other countries to make educated guesses on who exactly it was that they were looking for.
Sergeant Riggs, the man who’d been in charge of the profiling, took the lead, attempting to condense two weeks of research into a thirty second elevator pitch.
“For a start,” Riggs said, “the killer is probably male. Most serial killers are. Since we’re operating on the basis that it’s a repeat offender, that had to serve as our starting point. Then there’s the nature of the attacks.”
Riggs paused for a moment to shuffle through the briefing notes. He stifled a cough and said, “If you’ll turn to page seventeen, you’ll see some photographs of what this man is capable of. We’re not just looking for a serial killer. We’re looking for a monster, someone who mutilated the bodies of his victims.”
“Another reason to believe that the culprit is a man,” Superintendent Richards said, gesturing for Riggs to continue.
“Exactly,” Riggs said. “But unfortunately, we have no real proof when it comes to the gender. And there’s more. Despite the fact that the victims appear to have been alive when they were mutilated, our suspect shows no real sign of medical skill. At a push, they could be a butcher, but it looks like a brute force job with a sharp knife and a hell of a lot of determination. They didn’t make it easy on themselves. It would have been simpler to kill but not to mutilate, or to mutilate after the victims were already dead. They seem to have gone to a hell of a lot of effort to make a statement.”
“And what statement is that?” Cholmondeley asked. Heads turned to look at him, but he was respected by most and hated by few and so the majority wore expressions of indeterminate goodwill.
“We’re still working on it,” Riggs said. “We’ll keep you posted.”
“Yeah,” Cholmondeley murmured. “Fine. It’s not like there are lives at stake.”
* * *
Leipfold was bored, so bored. When Jack Cholmondeley invited him to the briefing, he’d hoped to be inundated with new information. He’d been raised to fear the police and not to respect them, but over the years he’d arrived at the conclusion that policemen weren’t bad; they were just usually incompetent. So far, the meeting had done nothing to change that perception.
They’d been in the room for an hour and a half with no break. They hadn’t even been given a fresh batch of coffee, and his throat was drier than a camel’s mouth. He’d resorted to chewing nicotine gum because it was the only gum he had, but it didn’t help. If anything, it made his mouth feel drier, sandier, and much, much more mammalian. And there was still no sign of water, coffee or orange juice.
Cholmondeley’s team was the last to speak, and the old man had a surprising amount of information when compared to the heads of the other departments. Privately, Leipfold felt sorry for him. He couldn’t believe how empty the conversation was and how useless it made him feel. It seemed like the cops were more interested in ticking boxes than getting anything done, and Leipfold knew that Jack Cholmondeley was a man of action. Waiting for something to happen must have been killing him.
But at the end of the meeting, when he was given the floor and allowed to speak about his findings, Leipfold realised that there was life in the old dog yet.
“First off,” Cholmondeley said, “I’d like to extend my thanks to Superintendent Richards for arranging this meeting and for inviting my team and I to attend. I’m not sure about everyone else, but I’ve found it to be extremely useful.”
Liar, Leipfold thought.
“Now, I appreciate we’re all busy,” Cholmondeley continued, “and so I’m going to keep this as short as possible. As you know, the killer has been taking trophies from his victims and sending them with notes to a number of agencies that are close to the case, including both the press office at The Tribune and to my own team at the station.”
“We’re all very aware of that, Detective Inspector,” Richards said. “You’ve done an excellent job so far of keeping the rest of us up-to-date with the latest developments.”
“So far,” Cholmondeley said. “But there’s another one, a new note with a new message and a new chunk of meat for forensics to take a look at.”
Cholmondeley paused for a moment. He consulted his notebook and flipped through until he found the relevant pages.
“Let me see,” he said. “Ah, yes. Now, as Superintendent Richards explained, it appears from the latest packages that the Terror has a fourth victim within their power. We’ll need forensic results to prove that, and the package has already been shipped to the laboratory.”
“My team is working on it as we speak,” the man with the moustache replied.
“Good,” Cholmondeley said. “We’ll need results as quickly as possible. We’re working on the assumption that the sample is from a fourth victim, but we’ll need independent verification.”
“If it’s unverified, where did the intel come from?”
“Good question,” Cholmondeley replied. “The package contained another note in which the Tower Hill Terror asserted that he had a fourth victim in his power. He even gave us a name: Meg Jackson. My team is already following up with missing persons and checking the census to find an ID. If we can find out who Jackson is and where she lives, we can check up on her. If he’s telling the truth, and I don’t see why he wouldn’t be, then we might have a chance to save her before another body is found.”
Leipfold sighed and folded visibly, but none of the coppers noticed. Inside, he was wondering: If there’s another victim out there, what the hell are we doing in this room?
Superintendent Richards, meanwhile, looked like she was choking on a lemon. “Put a rush on it, Jack,” she said. “If this woman exists, we need to find her.”
“Will do,” Cholmondeley said.
“Did the note say anything else?” Richards asked. “Anything that might have a bearing on the case?”
Cholmondeley nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He said he’ll deliver her sexual organs within forty-eight hours.”
“What were the demands?” Richards asked.
Cholmondeley shook his head. “That’s just it,” he replied. “There weren’t any.”
Chapter Fifteen:
A Needle in a Haystack
THE MEETING LASTED for two more hours, and it was the middle of the afternoon by the time that the room was vacated and each of the teams went their separate ways. Leipfold was asked to stay back so that Superintendent Richards could have a word with him, but Cholmondeley didn’t stick around to see what it was all about. That was more than his job was worth.
At the end of their shift, he summoned Yates and asked her to report on the search for Meg Jackson. Most of the cops were heading home, but Cholmondeley, Mogford, Yates and Cohen were working late to follow up with a couple of leads.
“I haven’t got much so far,” Yates explained apologetically. “It’s not an easy job. If I find Meg Jackson, it could lead us to the killer. But I can’t.”
“Why not?” Mogford asked. His face was red and swollen from the stress, combined with a bad diet, a lack of sleep and too many nights on white wine. His voice was gravelly, grumpy, like it cost him something to speak to them.
“I just can’t find a likely suspect,” Yates said. “It’s like she doesn’t exist.”
“Maybe she doesn’t,” Cholmondeley replied, thoughtfully.
“I found a couple of hits on the census,” Yates continued. “Constable Cohen helped me to process them, but there’s no sign of anything suspicious. We managed to speak to all of them eventually, although a couple of them were hard to track down. We pulled off a
report for you guys to take a look at, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“I told you it was a waste of time,” Mogford said, turning to look at Jack Cholmondeley. But his boss shook his head and disagreed.
“No lead is a waste of time,” Cholmondeley replied. “You never know what you might find. This time, I guess we’re out of luck. Maybe the killer lied about his victim’s identity.”
“A lying serial killer?” Mogford scoffed. “Who would have thought of such a thing?”
Constable Yates cleared her throat and leaned on Cohen for a little support. “We’re going to work late tonight,” she said. “There must be something else we can do. I want to get the tech team to take a look for us. I still think we’re missing something.”
“I agree,” Cohen said. “We can look at different variations of the name. Perhaps Meg is her middle name. Perhaps it’s a nickname or a reference to something else. Who knows?”
“Well, you two bloody don’t,” Mogford grumbled. “That’s for sure.”
“Take it easy,” Cholmondeley warned. “Morale’s bad enough at the moment without you making things worse.”
Mogford grunted an apology and gestured for Yates to continue. She didn’t look bothered by the interruption, but Cohen was an unconfident copper and his usually pallid face took on an embarrassed red hue. Yates glared at Mogford and put a hand on her colleague’s shoulder.
“Leave it with us,” Yates said. “If there’s something out there for us to find, we’ll find it.”
“May I suggest looking into the missing persons reports?” Cholmondeley asked. “We have a database of the latest cases. Look through the reports and see if you can find any leads that might point us to Meg Jackson’s true identity.”
Yates laughed and picked up a stack of papers from the desk in front of her. It was well-worn and dog-eared, punctuated by multicoloured Post-it Notes poking out from between the pages. Jack Cholmondeley could see the spidery scrawl of her handwriting, as well as the occasional note in Cohen’s cursive.
She held up the papers and said, “Already on it, boss.”
* * *
It was the following morning, a Thursday, and Leipfold and Maile were sitting together in the reception area and talking about the day ahead. They’d already finished off the crossword, a particularly fiendish puzzle from Alan Phelps at The Tribune. It took them ten minutes, a typical time, but a good result for a tricky puzzle. It filled the two of them with confidence for the day ahead.
“So what’s the plan for today, boss?” Maile asked.
Leipfold grinned at her and started flicking through his notebook. “First things first,” he said. “I need to bring you up to speed with what happened at the cop shop.”
“I thought you said you weren’t allowed to talk about it,” Maile reminded him.
“I’m not,” Leipfold said. He tipped her a conspiratorial wink which made her laugh because it looked clumsy and felt incongruous with his rocky personality. “But since when has that ever stopped me?”
And so Leipfold told Maile what had happened at the police briefing, successfully cutting the mammoth session down into a twenty-minute recap. Even though he offered to give her a photocopy, Maile took notes of her own because she said it helped her to remember things. By the time that he’d finished, they were ready for another coffee, so Maile did the honours while Leipfold started to jot down a couple of tasks for her to spend the day on.
“I want you to listen out on social media,” Leipfold explained. “I want to know about anything unusual.”
“Have you ever even been on the internet?” Maile asked, still clattering away in the kitchen and trying to find a spoon she could wash to stir their drinks with. “Everything is unusual. Could you be a little more specific?”
Leipfold grinned and said, “This is your area, not mine.”
“Yeah,” Maile replied, “but I still need to know what I’m looking for.”
Leipfold paused for a moment to check his notes again. Sometimes, he struggled to read his own handwriting.
It’s lucky I’ve got a good memory, he reflected. That was an understatement. Leipfold’s memory was better than 99.9 percent of the population. He could remember what he had for breakfast on St. David’s Day several years ago, what his best friend at primary school used to sound like and the winning lottery numbers for every draw in the last two years of the twentieth century. He remembered things as easily as other people forgot them. He swallowed up the little details, stored them somewhere in the overworked brain of his and then accessed them with the same confidence with which Maile searched the web.
“I want you to look for Meg Jackson,” he said. “At the moment, I’ve only got a name for you. Your job is to put a face to the name and then to put a person to the name and face. This is a woman that the killer claims is in his power. We need to find out all about her. Where she went to school, who her friends are and where she works, eats and sleeps. All that stuff. The more we know about her, the more likely we are to find out how the killer got hold of her.”
“Oh,” Maile said. “Is that it? That’ll be easy.”
“Good.”
“I was joking,” she said. “You’re asking me to look for a needle in a haystack.”
“If anyone can do it, you can,” Leipfold said. “A needle in a haystack, huh? I guess you’d better start looking for a magnet.”
* * *
Maile was working on her research, following every lead she could and dumping the results in a document so Leipfold could read her notes and draw his own conclusions if she missed something.
As far as the internet was concerned, Meg Jackson didn’t exist. Maile even hit up a few of her techie friends—Mayhem, ProfSyntax and Krypt0—but none of them were able to help her. Their specialties lay elsewhere, mostly in breaching websites or hacking email accounts.
Leipfold, meanwhile, wandered over to his corkboard, which was leaning against one wall and which was still covered with printouts, handwritten notes and lines of string connecting one lead to another. It was a relic of his last investigation, when he looked into the death of Donna Thompson. He frowned, remembering the depths of depression that he’d sunk into along the way. He’d solved the case, eventually, and he swore to himself that he’d solve this one, too.
He asked Maile to put her research on hold to come and give him a hand, and the two of them carefully removed the old case notes and packed them up into a lever arch folder, which Leipfold added to the collection he kept in the storage cupboard.
When they were done, Maile got back to work and Leipfold began the long, arduous task of pinning a map of central London to the corkboard. It was a big board, but even with the map spread across it, it didn’t stretch as far as the city’s outer edges. Hammersmith was there, just about, but he’d been forced to sacrifice Hackney, Dulwich and most of the Docklands. It didn’t matter to Leipfold. None of the victims had been found there.
Leipfold flicked through his notebook until he found the plan he’d made the night before, when he’d been lying in bed and staring at the low ceiling, trying to will himself to sleep. On a case like this, sleep was a luxury that he could rarely afford.
He was there for the best part of half an hour, consulting his notes and then picking up pins, which he pushed one-by-one into the map. He used red pins for Jayne Lipton, blue pins for Abu Adewali, green pins for Calvin Myatt and yellow pins for the as-yet-unidentified fourth victim, who the killer claimed was called Meg Jackson. He was precise—as precise as he could be with the scale of the map—and he was patient. A pattern was starting to form, but there just wasn’t enough data to draw any conclusions.
Maile wandered over from her desk and said, “It’s beautiful. What is it?”
“It’s the answer to our problems,” Leipfold replied.
“Uh-huh,” Maile said. She paused while Leipfold co
ntinued to stare at the map with a yellow pin in his hand. “Care to elaborate?”
Leipfold sighed. “It’s a map of the city,” he explained. “With colour-coded pins to show where our victims lived, where they worked and where their bodies were found. I’m looking for a pattern, something that might tell us how the killer chooses them.”
“Uh-huh,” Maile repeated. She stepped back so she could see the map in its entirety. Leipfold was still holding the pin, trying to figure out where to put it.
“This one’s for Meg Jackson,” he said, holding the yellow pin up towards the light. “I’ve got three of them ready to go, I just don’t know where to put them.”
“I’m working on it,” Maile said. “I’m doing my best.”
“I know,” Leipfold said. “Perhaps I can help you out with it.”
The detective grabbed a Sharpie and tied it to a length of string, which he measured against the map and cut to size with a pocket knife. He pinned the string in the centre of the city, right on top of Lambeth North tube station, then extended the string and took the lid off the Sharpie. With the string taut, he pulled the nib of the pen across the map to draw a near-perfect circle around the centre point.
“What are you doing, boss?” Maile asked.
“I’m making deductions,” he said. “See, look at this. All of our victims lived and worked within the circle. They were all found there, too.”
“So what does it mean?”
“It means that the killer is operating within a ten-kilometre radius of the centre of the city,” Leipfold said. “At least for now. I want you to take that supposition and run with it.”
Leipfold paused for a moment. Then he reached up and ran his fingers across the map.
“If you’re going to find Meg Jackson,” Leipfold murmured, “you’re going to find her somewhere in here.”
* * *
Suddenly, it all came together.