The Tower Hill Terror

by Dane Cobain

  “Leipfold speaking,” he said. “What’s up, Jack?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Jack Cholmondeley took a deep breath before saying, “Hi, James. I have bad news, I’m afraid.”

  “What is it?”

  “She’s dead,” Cholmondeley said. “Jane Doe. Meg Jackson. Whatever the hell she’s called.”

  “You still don’t have a hit on who she is?”

  “Was,” Cholmondeley said. He sounded wretched, miserable. “Not yet. We’re still working on it. We’ve had the lab boys run prints but they didn’t find a match. Whoever she was, she wasn’t in the database. She’s either not a criminal, or she’s so good at what she does that she’s never been caught.”

  “Anyone reported missing?”

  “Nope,” Cholmondeley said. “At least, no one that matches her description. But we’ve had our tech boys crunching some data or whatever the hell they do and they’ve given us a few possibilities. The most likely suspect is Jennifer Megan Jackson, one of the names on our shortlist from the census. Constable Groves is on her way over as we speak. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”

  “Understood,” Leipfold said. He paused, thinking back to Maile’s analysis of the footage of the crime scene. He took a gamble and asked, “Did you find the letter?”

  There was silence on the other end of the call again. It sounded like Cholmondeley was still at the station. Leipfold could hear the distant, shrill call of a telephone and a background murmur of voices, as well as the telltale sound of Jack Cholmondeley rapping his knuckles thoughtfully against his desk.

  “How did you know about the letter?” he asked.

  Leipfold laughed. “It’s a long story,” he said.

  “I’ve got time,” Cholmondeley replied. And so Leipfold told him about Maile’s suspicions when she saw the cameras and her subsequent discovery of the live stream, the password and the biblical verse that it referred to. Then he told him how Maile had sharpened the feed until they were able to make out the details and how he’d made an educated guess from there.

  “So you see,” he finished, lamely. “That’s how we figured it out. What did the letter say?”

  “Nothing useful,” Cholmondeley said. “Sounded like the ravings of a madman.”

  “Interesting,” Leipfold murmured.

  “It is?”

  “Of course, it is,” Leipfold replied. “In the other notes, the Tower Hill Terror sounded as sane as you or I. Angry, perhaps, but still sane. So what’s changed?”

  “Perhaps the pressure is starting to get to him,” Cholmondeley said.

  “I doubt it,” Leipfold replied. “Can I get a look at the letter?”

  “It’s with forensics. They won’t let anyone go near it.”

  Leipfold paused. “If you haven’t got access to it,” he asked, “then how do you know what it said?”

  “I have a scan of it,” Cholmondeley said. “I’ll send it over. Strictly confidential, you understand. But you already know far too much about the case for your own good. What harm can one more document do? Besides, who knows? Perhaps you’ll be able to make some sense of it.”

  Leipfold laughed, nervously. “I doubt that,” he said. “Not without the original. But send it over and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “It’s a deal,” Cholmondeley said. “And James?”

  “What?”

  “Work quickly, okay?” Cholmondeley paused again and a gloomy lack of optimism weighed heavily on the dead air between them. “This guy just doesn’t stop. I don’t think he could stop even if he wanted to.”

  “Got it.”

  “I’m serious,” Cholmondeley said. “He’ll only stop if we make him stop.”

  Leipfold grimaced, all alone in his dimly-lit office with the remnants of the day’s papers scattered before him across his desk. He’d seen plenty of cases throughout his career, but this was the first with such a serious and bloody history. Most of the time, he was hired by jealous spouses or sketchy businessmen who wanted a leg up on the competition. Half of the time, no crime had been committed. This time it was different.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “We’ll make him stop all right. You leave it with me, Jack. Go and get some sleep.”

  * * *

  A bleak sun rose on an indifferent city on the morning of Thursday 4th March, but it wasn’t indifferent for long. A special edition of The Tribune was out and it was already making its way across the city to be delivered by kids on pushbikes and stocked by little shops and off-licenses.

  The entire front cover was dedicated to the murders, illustrated by a rerun of the sketch that Maile had made with Lukas White. It felt like an aeon ago, but Leipfold realised with a start that it had only been a week or two, if that. But a hell of a lot had happened since then.

  And now the story was front-page news again, but Leipfold suspected that the police hadn’t had a hand in it. This wasn’t off the back of some press release from the station, asking for the public’s help to track down a criminal before they had a chance to commit a crime. This was full-blown fearmongering.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Leipfold murmured as he cast his eyes over the story. “Cholmondeley isn’t going to be happy about this.”

  Ironically, Leipfold noticed, the article itself was well-written, well-researched and almost entirely factual. True, The Tribune had somehow got its hands on some information that had never been made public, but they hadn’t resorted to making things up to sell their papers. Every inch of the article was true, but seeing it down in black and white somehow gave it more gravitas, reflecting exactly how important it was for the killer to be caught.

  Unfortunately, Siobhan Dent, the woman whose name was attached to the byline, had used her column inches to criticise the police and to ask for answers. Why is the killer still on the loose? What’s the police force doing to stop him? When will our streets be safe again?

  Leipfold called Cholmondeley to let him know about the article but had to satisfy himself with leaving a message. Then he switched to his main device and put in a call to Alan Phelps, his main contact at the local rag.

  Phelps answered quickly and sardonically told Leipfold that he wasn’t going to give him the answer to 14 across. “You’re going to have to wait for the next issue if you’re stuck on the answers, pal,” he said. “We’ve been through this before.”

  “I’m not calling you about the bloody crossword,” Leipfold growled. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t had a chance to look at it.”

  “You’ll like it,” Phelps said. “It’s a real humdinger. Some of my best work. I had to research this one. You have no idea how difficult it is to research—”

  “Alan,” Leipfold interrupted. “Shut up for a second, okay? This is important. I need a favour.”

  “I know you do,” the journalist replied. “You always do. That’s the only time you ever call me.”

  “Touché,” Leipfold said. “Well listen, this one’s an easy one. I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m asking you not to do something.”

  From the other end of the call, Phelps sighed. Leipfold always pictured the man in a garden shed, compiling his crosswords by hand on A3 paper while leaning on a cutting mat. In reality, the man worked in front of a computer screen in the grey, dead office that The Tribune shared with a sister publication. Leipfold knew that—he’d seen it with his own eyes—but that didn’t stop him from picturing Phelps as a hermit in a shed on a mountainside.

  “What do you want, Mr. Leipfold?” Phelps asked.

  “It’s easy,” Leipfold replied. “Stop talking about the Tower Hill Terror.”

  “The Tower Hill Terror?”

  “Don’t play the fool with me, Phelps,” Leipfold said. “I know you like to play silly buggers, but this isn’t a game you’re going to win. I need you to stop talking about the serial kill
er.”

  “So it’s true,” Phelps murmured. “I mean, that’s the word on the streets, but there’s no word from the police yet. So the cases are connected?”

  “It’s a serial killer,” Leipfold said. “And every time you write about him you give him what he wants. What the hell were you thinking? Why did you let that Dent woman run her mouth about the police on the front page of the biggest bloody paper in the city?”

  “Let her?” Phelps asked. He laughed into his handset, and the tinny sound was like sandpaper in Leipfold’s ear. “Mr. Leipfold, I’ll let her do anything she damn well pleases.”

  Something about the way he said it seemed to strike Leipfold between the eyes like the toothless bite of an elderly rattlesnake. “Why’s that?” he asked.

  “Siobhan Dent is in charge of the place while Pam’s on maternity leave,” Phelps said. “I can’t stop her. If you want her to stop running stories, you’re going to have to talk to her yourself.”

  * * *

  Maile O’Hara was worried. Her housemate had gone out for drinks the night before and she hadn’t come home. That in itself wasn’t unusual, but she also hadn’t heard from her and every time she dialled her phone number, it went straight to voicemail.

  It’s not like her at all, she thought. She hates it when her battery dies. It means her plants die on that stupid bloody game she plays.

  At first, she’d tried to push those nagging thoughts out of her head. She’d turned on the TV in the living room and gone to lie on her bed with her laptop so that the sound would leak through the walls and make it seem as though everything was normal. But everything wasn’t normal, and not even a couple of deathmatches on her Xbox could take her mind off it.

  After the second game, she said goodbye to Mayhem and removed her headset, and then she walked back out into the living room and wandered around it, looking for a note that she might have missed or some sort of clue that could tell her where her housemate was. She even had a cursory look around her bedroom, but there was nothing.

  Maile walked back into her bedroom and flopped down on her mattress, then grabbed her phone from the bedside table and put in another call to her housemate. It took a while to connect and for a second, she expected it to start ringing. She had a sudden mental image of the phone going off on the other side of the wall in Kat’s bedroom, but then the line clicked and Kat’s voicemail message started to play, the dull, robotic voice that came as default because she’d never bothered to change it.

  “Kat,” Maile said, “it’s me again. Listen, I’m starting to get worried so give me a call or a text as soon as you can, okay? I don’t want to hassle you and if you need some time and space I can dig that, but I need to know you’re okay before I go crazy and start calling people up and sending out a search party.”

  She paused for a moment and thought about what she’d said. Then she laughed sheepishly and added, “Look, come home soon, okay? It’s your turn to take the bins out.”

  Then she put the phone down.

  She didn’t sleep well that night. She kept having bad dreams about her housemate and awful thoughts about the ongoing investigation into the Tower Hill Terror. She was 99 percent sure that Kat was okay, but that left a little margin for error. She didn’t want to take the chance.

  At 4:30AM, Maile had given up. She pulled herself back out of bed and made herself a black coffee on the Tassimo machine, then settled down on the living room sofa with her laptop propped on top of her Pokémon pyjamas.

  If I haven’t heard from her by tomorrow lunchtime, she thought, I’m going to have to do something about it.

  * * *

  Cholmondeley’s team was in for a busy day. The Tribune story hit the ground running and it was trending across the country by 11AM. By lunchtime, a ragtag group of protestors had gathered outside the station to wave their signs and sing their songs as they demanded action from the police force.

  Ever pragmatic, Cholmondeley held another of his impromptu press conferences, meeting with the protestors on the steps of the station to answer their questions. The goal was to change the flow of the demo before all hell broke loose and he found himself so busy dealing with the protestors that he had no time left to investigate the case.

  “I’m going to keep this short,” Cholmondeley said. “Short and to the point.”

  At this point, he was interrupted by a tomato which hit him on the shoulder and splattered across his uniform. He looked down at it, reached into his pocket to grab a handkerchief and then did his best to wipe the juice and pips away.

  “Please,” he said, holding a hand up, “don’t do that. I just had this dry cleaned.”

  The crowd murmured. Cholmondeley wondered whether it was a laugh or a threat.

  Probably both, he mused.

  “Look,” he continued, “I’d love to stay and chat with you all. I really would. But there’s a killer on the streets and we intend to catch him.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” somebody shouted. That was followed by a round of jeering and an echo or two as the question passed from lip to lip and got repeated, like a perverse game of Chinese whispers but with higher stakes.

  “I can’t comment on an active investigation,” Cholmondeley said, stepping smartly to his right to dodge a flying banana. “Stop that. If I find out who’s throwing fruit at me, we’ll put them in a cell and throw the key away. We’re on the same side.”

  The shouts from the crowd redoubled. To Cholmondeley’s right, Gary Mogford unhooked his baton and tapped it in his hands.

  “Careful, boss,” he murmured. “This could turn nasty. We can get a riot team in here, but not on the double. We’d both be pulped before the shields arrived.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cholmondeley replied. “They’re not here because they want to hurt someone. They’re here because they want answers.”

  “Point taken,” Mogford said. “But the thing is, boss, we don’t have any answers to give to them. And I get the feeling that they’ll use force if they think it’ll help them to catch the Terror. The last thing we want is an angry mob of vigilantes.”

  “Sir!” The voice belonged to Constable Groves, who’d been ordered to stay inside the precinct. Cholmondeley had surmised that the more officers they sent to deal with the protest, the more likely it would be to turn into a melee. His face flashed red as his eyes rested upon her, but then they lost their colour like the rest of his face when he saw her grim expression.

  “What is it?” Cholmondeley asked. “It better be good. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’ve got a situation out here.”

  “It’s good,” Groves said. “In fact, it’s better than good. Although it’s bad, too. Worse than bad.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mogford growled. “Come on, spit it out.”

  Groves snapped off a smart salute and looked nervously across at the protestors, who’d quietened down a little to keep an eye on the new development. One guy, a Welshman with a megaphone, started a slow chant of, “The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  Groves raised her voice a little so she could make herself heard above the hubbub. “You need to come with me, boss,” she insisted. “There’s been a development in the case.”

  “What kind of development?”

  “The biggest development yet,” Groves said. “Come down and see for yourself. We’ve got a guy in custody.”

  * * *

  Cholmondeley, to his credit, asked Groves to wait for him to talk to the crowd so he could explain the situation. The crowd didn’t swallow it, but when he walked back inside they started to disperse until there were only a couple dozen of them left, including the Welshman with the megaphone, who was still trying (and failing) to lead the chant.

  Groves led Cholmondeley through the station to the cells, where the suspect had been locked up while they waited for legal rep
resentation. The cells always smelled of disinfectant, and Cholmondeley mentally winced at the idea of having to go in there. It was his least-favourite room in the station.

  While they walked, Groves explained what had happened. “We took a call from a neighbour who complained about the smell from the flat upstairs. Constable Cohen went out with Yates and called it in. You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Who was the victim?” Cholmondeley asked.

  “Carina Merin,” Groves said. “Fifty-nine years old. She’s about five foot eight, maybe nine stone tops, with long, white hair down to her elbows. Bit of a hippie if you ask me.”

  “And how did she die?”

  “It was the same MO,” Groves said, “right down to the mutilation. So much for peace and love. We found her body right there in the living room, surrounded by model unicorns, tie-dyed wall hangings and incense burners. Weird place.”

  “You said you have a man in custody,” Cholmondeley said, urging her on. “Who?”

  “It’s the husband, sir,” Groves said. “He gave his name as Pete Merin. He’s a big guy, looks like a pro wrestler.”

  Cholmondeley shuddered. “And Cohen and Yates took him down?” he asked. “How did they manage that? I can’t see them fighting their way out of a paper bag.”

  “He came of his own accord,” Groves said, grinning slightly. She grabbed Cholmondeley by the shoulder and slowed him to a halt outside the door to the cells. “Listen, boss. It’s a weird one. He got the details right and he confessed to the crimes, but he couldn’t give us any specifics. He says he killed his wife because she wouldn’t stop spending his money.”

  “And why did he kill the others?” Cholmondeley asked.

  Groves shrugged. “He didn’t say,” she said. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course,” Cholmondeley replied.

  “But he confessed to it.”

  “So what?” Cholmondeley frowned and looked towards the door. “Until we have some evidence that he did something, it’s better to hedge our bets.”