A Game of Minds

by Priscilla Masters

  She picked up her bag, feeling she didn’t quite know this new man. Maybe he sensed her distancing from him. His voice was resigned. ‘You going already?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  He didn’t try to stop her but as she slipped her coat on he put his hand on her arm. ‘At least think about what I’ve said, Claire. We both need to spend some time thinking about what we really want from life – and a relationship. You have your job and I need something too.’ She nodded and he walked her to the door.

  He brushed her cheek with his hand. ‘It’s a difficult job you do.’ She glanced back at the table. ‘Yours too,’ she said, ‘though mine isn’t exactly creative.’

  And that was that. He touched her lips with his own, but she drew back to look at him. His eyes were serious. ‘Think about what I’ve said.’

  And somehow she was back in her car, driving away.

  FOURTEEN

  Monday 23 September, 8.15 a.m.

  The visiting order had been on her desk as she’d arrived at work that morning.

  So he was asking to see her. What, she wondered, would be his stance this time around?

  The thought occupied her mind right through her morning’s work.

  3 p.m.

  The warder gave her a nod of recognition this time round. She had the feeling she would be seeing quite a bit of her and her colleagues before she was through.

  Kobi was already sitting down when she entered. He stood up, an unexpected gesture of politeness. But there was a gleam in his eye as though even the gesture was a mockery. His expression was guarded, his eyes watchful. And his lips were pressed tight together as though he wanted no words to escape accidentally. But there was an energy around him. He couldn’t hide his excitement at the encounter. And her compliance to his bidding. Kobi was capable of composing his body language, but he couldn’t hide the energy radiating out from him.

  She gave him a curt nod and opened her file, removed a photograph and placed it face down on the table between them. Kobi made no attempt to turn it over though he ran his eyes over the back of the picture and the labels the police had stuck there along with a date.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  The look he directed back at her had completely recovered its equilibrium. He was now cocksure. ‘Let me see,’ he said, finger theatrically placed on chin, a device she would learn to anticipate and loathe.

  ‘Is it a photograph?’ His tone was as light and teasing as though he was playing twenty questions.

  She didn’t respond but waited for him to continue.

  And he did. ‘Looking at the date it wouldn’t be a saucy picture of little Petra Gordano, would it?’ His eyes challenged her.

  Claire pasted a bland smile on to her face. ‘Clap, clap,’ she said, her tone ironic and her eyes cold as she turned it over. Her overriding thought was that she hoped Petra’s mother hadn’t ever seen this.

  The photograph was from the police files. Behind bus stations are generally seedy areas, places where drunks and drug abusers congregate with the homeless. A place where rubbish is dumped. The car must have pulled up for less than half a minute. Her body had been flung to the side, face down, hair rippling down her back, school skirt rucked up, the school tie clearly visible, knotted tight enough round the back of her neck to give an obvious cause of death. Claire had seen the post-mortem pictures too – congested face, tongue protruding, eyeballs bulging. From this picture alone no one could have said whether Petra Gordano had been a pretty girl, but one suspected she might have been. Around her was discarded detritus: fast food polystyrene trays, newspapers, the odd plastic bottle or two.

  According to the accompanying police report her body had been thrown from the car, the contusions all inflicted post-mortem. She had not been raped and there were no other injuries.

  Kobi’s eyes were cold and disdainful as he glanced down before looking up at Claire. ‘As I said,’ he said in his icy voice, ‘a silly … little … girl.’

  Claire folded her arms and leaned in across the table, knowing they were being watched by the electric eye that bulged in the ceiling. But, as psychiatrist to patient, the sound had been turned off to preserve confidentiality. ‘Tell me,’ she said idly, ‘how you picked Petra up. How you decided she was the one …’

  Kobi’s eyes flickered and he thought for a moment before responding.

  ‘I didn’t decide specifically on her. She wasn’t special. It could have been any one of them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘They were standing in the bus station, waiting for a bus to take them home. They were all laughing and flicking stuff on their mobile phones, hands over their mouths, giggling.’ For effect he opened his mouth, gave a few falsetto squeaks then smothered the sound with his hand, but not before Claire had seen his mouth simpering, like a teenager, wobbling his head and staring down into his palm as though it held a mobile phone.

  She was used to psychopaths, sociopaths, patients with personality disorders, narcissists and patients who tried their hardest to evoke fear, but something in Kobi’s acting skills chilled her. He had studied this group of girls enough to be able to convincingly morph into them. ‘How did you get her to go with you?’

  ‘Her friends all got on another bus,’ he said, speaking quietly and openly now in his normal voice. ‘She’d missed hers. I pulled up and said I was going to Biddulph if she wanted a lift. I said I was a friend of her parents.’ Again that smirk. ‘No one ever remembers their parents’ friends. She looked me up and down, decided she could trust me, and got in. Big mistake.’ He leaned back in his chair and flipped his hands out, palms up in the classic pose of disclosure. ‘Simple as that, Dr Roget.’

  So however many times a mother advises their daughter not to accept lifts from strangers, it really is as simple as that?

  ‘And then you pulled over and …?’

  ‘Look at it this way, Claire … I was planning on her being the first of many. You understand?’ He sneered. ‘I always knew I would reduce the number of these parasitic young women.’

  ‘You killed her and tossed her body out but you kept her school bag.’

  That inspired an unexpected flame of fury. ‘You think I killed her for a few pencils, some crappy books?’

  She tried to hide the fact that this was news to her. ‘You looked inside?’

  And for the first time since she’d met him, she could see Kobi had lost his lines. His mouth opened, fish-like. He shut it again and frowned.

  Without commenting, Claire made some notes and softly closed the buff folder. She waited a moment before opening the second folder. But instead of reading from it she searched that cold face and appealed to Kobi’s vanity.

  ‘There was increased police presence,’ she said. ‘And Jodie’s murder was only two months after Petra. It must have been hard to pick up that second girl.’

  Kobi saw right through it. ‘Not very subtle, Claire,’ he said disdainfully. ‘You’ll have to try better than that.’

  Oh, don’t you worry, she thought. I will.

  ‘I just changed area a bit,’ he said airily. ‘Went to the other side of Stoke. The police,’ he said, ‘have little imagination and are under resourced. All I had to do was move a little. It wasn’t hard. The police were hanging around Newcastle bus station. As if I’d go there again,’ he derided. ‘In fact, I drove right past them as I headed out to Fenton and hung around the school – or academy.’ He gave a mocking little chuckle at the word. ‘It was another rainy day in Stoke, another little girl who didn’t want to get wet.’ He leaned in so close she could see his yellow teeth. ‘Time to have another crack at the whip.’

  She schooled herself. Focus on what you need to achieve from this. Think about Marvel. Think about the fact that her body is lying somewhere. Think about her dying father.

  ‘Her school bag looked heavy. She was walking like a snail along the pavement, feet splashing in puddles.’ Kobi’s eyes were half closed as he revisited the scene. ‘She wasn’t wearing a mac
. I almost’ – he wagged a finger – ‘felt sorry for her.’

  Kobi was enjoying relating his tale. Serial killers need an audience; their victims are no good. They’re all dead.

  ‘I wound the window down and said she looked cold and sympathized with her. God, she was so bloody grateful to get in the warmth of the car. “June,” I said, “and it’s bloody freezing.” Rainwater dripped on to the seat and then to the floor. It took ages for my car to dry out.’ He gave her a bold stare. ‘She was grateful.’

  ‘And how did you feel when you dumped her body at the park?’

  ‘Ye-es,’ he mused. ‘A bit unimaginative of me, wasn’t it? Rainy day. Local park. But … it gave me an identity. The Rainy Day Killer.’ He giggled. ‘Or The Schoolgirl Killer.’ He giggled again. Of all the sounds that chilled Claire this was the one she found worst. That sharp, hysterical giggle.

  Inwardly she shuddered, trying not to link the pictures she had seen of Jodie Truss, well-developed for a fifteen-year-old, body dumped just as carelessly, propped up at the gates of the park. It had taken less than an hour to find Jodie’s body and the police had already linked this second murder of a schoolgirl to the same killer. Maybe Kobi was right. Maybe that simple change of area had enabled him to kill again.

  She didn’t want to thread through the circumstances around the murder of all four girls but would change direction. It might disconcert Kobi, knock him off balance. ‘You were working as a teacher when Miranda Pullen made that allegation.’

  In spite of his self-control, Kobi blinked and missed his lines.

  ‘That must have had quite an impact on your career.’

  His mouth fell open. He was unprepared for this. She also picked up on his reluctance to talk about her. Because …? She’d beaten him, won that round. It took him a while to gather a response, find his lines and make a feeble attempt at regaining control.

  ‘Don’t you want to know about my childhood fetishes, Claire? Whether I kicked my father out of bed, slept with my mother, anally raped my brother?’

  ‘I know your family background from the police reports,’ she said, ice in her voice. ‘I hardly need to go through all that Freudian stuff with you.’

  Kobi blinked and although it was the tiniest of triumphs she returned to her analysis.

  ‘After Jodie you had the nickname The Umbrella Killer.’

  He snorted at that. ‘They couldn’t decide what to call me,’ he crowed. ‘The Rainy Day Killer, The Schoolgirl Killer or The Umbrella Killer. In the end, wisely, they settled on The Schoolgirl Killer.’

  He sat back, self-satisfied, arms folded.

  ‘And, of course, the day Marvel disappeared was another rainy day, wasn’t it?’

  He nodded, guarded now, uncertain where this was leading. ‘And so the police had put extra officers out on the beat on days when it was raining. But not at weekends.’

  He ignored her comment, continuing with his own version. ‘And then Teresa,’ he said. ‘What a lovely hot day. An Indian Summer. Don’t you just love those, Claire?’ He was in his element now. ‘Off her guard. Poor thing, boiling hot, struggling to walk the distance home. But of course our killer only strikes on rainy days so when that nice man comes along and offers her a lift and a nice cold Coke she’s only too glad to accept. Poor thing.’

  ‘They got you in the end.’ She hadn’t been able to resist it.

  ‘Ah’– he tapped the side of his nose again – ‘but not until after I’d dumped poor little Shelley in the lake. And by then, Claire, quite frankly, I was getting bored with the game anyway.’

  He folded his arms and pressed his lips together. Interview over.

  She stood up, pressed the buzzer and left, knowing he was silently reaching after her.

  Don’t you want to know about Marvel?

  He might not have said them aloud, but the tendrils of his words followed her down the corridor as, accompanied by one of the prison officers, she walked back out into the open fresh air.

  FIFTEEN

  Back at Greatbach, sitting in her office, chewing an apple and a piece of cheese, she poured again over the notes of all four girls Kobi had been convicted of killing, searching for something new, something that connected them to Marvel. But there were still missing facts that she couldn’t ignore. Apart from Shelley Cantor’s body, two of the other three girls’ bodies had been dumped by the side of the road. Carelessly tossed out of the car as though he wanted them found as soon as possible. Even Teresa Palmer’s body in the wheelie bin had been a half-hearted attempt at concealment.

  And Kobi must have known that, even in November, Westport Lake was a busy centre for fishermen, families and birdwatchers. Which led her along a different track. Had Kobi known the RSPB had set up concealed cameras around that area? Or, with his warped sense of fun, had he been edging nearer, seeing how close he could inch towards discovery without actually being caught? Identification from lens to car number plate was elementary policing. Particularly when they were searching for a man who had killed before, generally using the same MO. If Kobi was responsible for Marvel’s disappearance too, why would he have hidden Marvel’s body only to revert to type with Teresa Palmer in the following year?

  She wrote the questions down as she flicked through more of DS Willard’s notes, feeling some sympathy for the police. They must have had one hell of a job when they had failed to find Marvel, then another girl had been killed and only a month later Shelley had been reported missing. Searching for a body is bad enough without the press and the public baying for blood. The police had not been certain whether Marvel had been abducted from near her home, or from Hanley, where she had been heading. The details of her final shopping trip were unclear. The jeweller’s had a record of a silver charm – a pair of ballet shoes – having been bought on that Saturday, but the purchase had been made in cash and the store’s cameras badly placed. It had not been possible to identify Marvel as the shopper.

  The area surrounding Biddulph was semi-rural with large areas of scrubland and there were numerous obsolete shafts from the nearby Chatterley Whitfield mine which had closed in 1977. The week before she had vanished, Marvel had been spotted heading for a disused railway track which led from Biddulph south towards the Potteries and north towards Congleton. It was muddy for most of the way, tangled with brambles and almost impassable, blocked in parts by branches and fallen logs and even in November on the day Marvel had been spotted she had been similarly dressed as the day she had vanished: short skirt, flimsy shoes, denim jacket. She would have slipped and slid her way along the track as for days before there had been heavy rain. But that day she had been identified by two independent witnesses, one a woman looking out of her window and the other a jogger who too had been heading that way. Wisely he’d decided against slithering around in the mud and had stuck to the road instead. This sighting had diverted and delayed the police investigation as they had wasted time battling their way along the entire track, in both directions, finding no sign of the missing girl. But it had raised the question: had she been meeting someone up there?

  To add to the difficulties, almost as deliberate as an obstacle race, near Biddulph there was a recycling plant which, in 2013, had been a council tip. It had been a filthy, smelly old place, a rich source of methane and carbon dioxide. Today it was sanitized and well monitored. But seven years ago, when Marvel had gone missing, a body could have been hidden on the site and so the police had wasted more time, practically tearing it to bits, wearing protective face masks against the smell.

  Reading through the documentation, the point that struck Claire was the story behind Marvel’s shopping trip. She’d wanted the charm because her sisters had one each. But it was more than that. What she had really wanted was the image of a graceful dancer. Claire sifted through her file and found a posed family photograph. Her two sisters, then eleven and twelve, had been standing at the front, feet in the ballet first position, turnout 180 degrees, hands beautifully placed. Both were elegant little dance
rs. Marvel, standing behind them, had pulled her hair across her face in the classic pose of not wanting to be there, not wanting to be seen. Her stance was awkward, her head hanging down, shoulders dropped – another classic pose. But of shame this one. Claire put her hand over her mouth and remembered what it had felt like to be an outsider. Somewhere there would be similar pictures to this of her mother, stepfather, half-brother and herself, wishing she was anywhere but there. Marvel would never look like her sisters. Acquiring the tiny piece of silver was simply a way she could fantasize.

  She turned her attention to Marvel’s brother, Shane, then a confident eighteen-year-old, staring into the camera with a challenging confidence. There was something cocky, self-assured about him. A tall, slim, good-looking boy with a straight, fearless gaze.

  Mother and father stood stiffly apart, as though even then they were not a happy, united couple. Tom was almost unrecognizable when compared to the sick shell of a man she had met. He was tall, quite handsome in a flashy sort of way. Marvel’s mother looked calm, facing the camera with a slight smile.

  Claire reverted to the police records and the missing girl. She unearthed the last point that had lain across the police’s guilt. As it had been a Saturday, they’d relaxed their presence, catching up with office work instead of patrolling the streets, watching schools, bus stations, shopping centres. Making the dangerous assumption that the schoolgirl killer was, like most of the population, sheltering indoors from the rain?

  Claire read on.

  In such wet weather in a short skirt, denim jacket and flimsy shoes, Marvel would have been soaked quickly and probably grateful for the warmth and shelter of a proffered car ride. Like Shelley.

  Was there a geographical clue in the fact that Kobi’s first victim and Marvel had lived within a couple of miles of each other though they went to different schools? Marvel lived in Biddulph and went to the local comprehensive, while Petra was from nearby Knypersley but attended an independent school in Newcastle-under-Lyme, ten miles away. Claire searched further. They had attended different primary schools too as Petra’s parents had only moved into the area when she was eleven. Their ages were close but in every other respect they couldn’t have been more different. Petra was an only child, living in a detached house in a more affluent area. Marvel’s home must have been cramped, a sold-off, ex-council house with three bedrooms for four children. The three sisters had shared a room while Shane would have had his own private space. Claire put the photographs of the two girls side by side and tried to divine anything else. Petra had an intelligent, animated face while Marvel looked different. Stolid, resigned. Claire peered at the picture and read deep unhappiness, a lack of self-esteem which did not appear to affect any of the other family members. She frowned. Why her? What was different about Marvel?