A Murderous Mind

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Any reason you wouldn’t?’

  ‘Only the feeling that if he’d spoken out he might have stopped all this.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Naomi said. ‘Who would have believed him? You said yourself that the CPS would have chucked out the journal as hearsay. What else did you have?’

  ‘The possibility that someone would have looked deeper, joined a few of the dots, maybe just warned Reece off … I don’t know. As it is, we’ve still not moved off square one in terms of proof. All we’ve got is more bodies, more grieving families.’

  ‘Do the families know their people were part of a serial?’

  ‘God, no!’ Tess sounded horrified. ‘Each case is being dealt with separately. The teams are cooperating but treating the reopened investigations as though they were single events. We don’t want this getting out. The media would crucify every last one of us.’

  ‘It will come out. Eventually,’ Alec counselled.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’m trying not to think of it.’

  ‘Do you think Joe Jackson suspected the scale of this?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘How could he? But no, I get the feeling he knew it was bigger than he could see. I doubt anyone could have anticipated this.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll get part of your wish,’ Naomi said. ‘Maybe he will be scared off after this. Maybe this is at least an ending even if you can’t arrest the man and see him tried.’

  ‘Not much of a compensation,’ Tess said wearily ‘and, frankly, I don’t believe he can stop. He’ll come back. He’ll just change his MO, hide his tracks better, pick on someone no one will miss or simply choose to dispose of the body instead of laying it out like some grotesque kind of tableau and we’ll never know that he’s killed again.

  ‘People like him don’t stop. Why should they when people like us do fuck all about it.’

  ‘Something will break,’ Naomi said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Tess agreed but Naomi could tell she didn’t believe it.

  FIFTY-SIX

  For the past three weeks or so the police investigation seemed to have gone quiet and Tom Reece had stopped even thinking about what had passed. The days had reverted to familiar rhythms of teaching and consultations and precious family time and when he had driven past his old flat a few days before, it looked as though even the crime scene tape had disappeared. It would not be long, he thought, before the ‘to let’ signs went up.

  Everything moved on; whatever the drama it eventually diminished and people forgot or at least put the memories aside.

  That, Tom thought, was how the human race survived.

  The university campus was a confusing, hotchpotch place. It had grown organically as old buildings had been bought up and converted and new builds physically connected existing structures but didn’t always have a common entrance. It wasn’t unusual, therefore, to see someone peering at a campus map with a look of utter confusion written upon their faces.

  The young man stood on a street corner doing exactly that and looking up and down the road as though trying to get his bearings. Tom Reece, drawing close to where he’d parked his car, shifted the books in his arms and regarded the stranger with amused curiosity.

  ‘Are you lost?’ he asked as he estimated he must have done a dozen times that year. ‘It’s a confusing place and the map, frankly, isn’t a lot of help.’

  ‘No, it’s not and yes I am. I’m trying to get to here.’ The young man pointed at the applied arts building. ‘I thought I’d be able to cut through but …’

  Tom Reece was shaking his head. ‘No, the map makes it look like you can. Actually, you have to go down that road there, to the left and then—’

  But he never got past the ‘then’. His attention focussed on the man with the map and the approaching assailant near silent in soft shoes, Tom Reece had been caught utterly unaware. The blow came out of nowhere, accurate and hard and Tom Reece, killer, planner, man who prided himself on the control he had over life and death, his own and others, was gone before his body hit the ground.

  His killer paused for the few seconds it took for Nathan to kneel beside the body, satisfy himself that death had occurred and strip Tom Reece of his watch and wallet and mobile phone.

  Then Gregory strode away, back the way he had come and Nathan took the route that Tom Reece had suggested just before he had died. Turning left towards the main campus before getting into his car and driving away.

  There were no CCTV cameras in the street where Reece had parked his car. They had chosen it with care, knowing that and also taking the gamble that on Thursday afternoons, when Reece only had a late class and would therefore find it hard to park closer to his department, would choose, as he had many times before, to leave his car in this little street a few hundred yards from any major thoroughfare.

  It had taken two weeks for the plan to come to fruition but now, Nathan thought as he drove away, it was done.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Patrick was at Daniel’s place. They had finished the work they had assigned to that afternoon and were now channel-hopping on the television and chatting about nothing in particular but pausing when a news report featured a familiar name. They had heard the news about his death earlier that day, but it seemed there was little fresh to report.

  ‘It’s sad about Doctor Reece,’ Daniel said. ‘I thought he was all right really?’

  Patrick nodded. ‘Tough on his family,’ he said. ‘I saw them on the news at lunchtime.’

  They had looked devastated. His widow at a press conference appealing for witnesses. Wondering who might have attacked her husband in what police were treating as a random mugging. He had been hit over the head and robbed. His wallet and mobile phone missing. His watch also gone.

  ‘My husband was a good man, a kind man, who always put others first. His patients thought highly of him and when he moved into teaching his students loved him. Whoever did this has …’

  She had broken down after that, turned to be comforted by the two young women who stood on either side of her.

  Patrick felt sorry for the family. He knew how hard it could be to lose the people you love, which was why he could not stand by when someone threatened those that Patrick cared about. Why he had made that call to Gregory and why Gregory and Nathan had taken matters into their own hands. Patrick now had to live with the knowledge that he had, in a very direct sense, caused Tom Reece’s death. Been responsible at a distance. Patrick probed at that thought. Presently, it was like a loose tooth or a missing filling; you knew you should leave it alone, but it was there and it was irresistible, even if it caused a momentary pain.

  He could live with what he had done, Patrick had realized. He could not have lived with the risk of doing nothing. Of waiting for Tom Reece to decide that enough time had passed, that police interest in him had died down, that he was ready to take yet another life and that life would be someone close to Patrick Jones.

  Yes, Patrick thought, he could live with his actions, accommodate them and eventually put them into a box alongside all of the other painful experiences in his life and leave them there.

  Daniel’s uncle came in and sat down on the sofa. ‘Are you actually watching anything or just wasting the batteries?’

  Daniel handed him the remote. ‘Not really. There’s nothing on.’

  ‘How many channels?’

  Patrick glanced at his watch. ‘I’d better get home,’ he said.

  ‘You want a lift?’

  ‘No, thanks. It’s only a few minutes away.’

  Ephraim nodded. ‘Go carefully,’ he said.

  ‘I will.’ But I’ll be fine, Patrick thought, and the strange thing was when he glanced back at Daniel and his uncle now arguing contentedly about what to watch was that he thought that Ephraim knew that too.

  EPILOGUE

  Dance class night. Harry followed Naomi and Napoleon up the dusty wooden stairs and into the ballroom. Long ago this building had been a tailor’s shop and this upper floor had housed the cutting rooms. Cl
eared out of the benches and storage it was a perfect space, with its smooth, worn wooden boards, polished by beeswax and years of leather shod feet. It echoed now to the clip of heels and the shuffle-slide of dance shoes as their classmate’s practised steps.

  Naomi parked Napoleon in his favourite corner and changed from her street shoes. ‘How’s Patrick?’ she asked. ‘I’ve not heard from him in a few days.’

  ‘Overwhelmed with coursework and reading a stack of old books Bob lent him. He’s been at Daniel’s place most days between classes and when he’s home he’s either in his room or spread out across the living room floor. He’s fine, though. I think he’s finally settling into his course and he’s chosen his module options for next year.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Naomi nodding. ‘I worried that all this would have unsettled him.’

  ‘I think it has,’ Harry said. ‘I think he’s anchoring himself in the things he can control. His coursework, the projects Bob is giving him.’

  ‘I heard from Nathan,’ Naomi said. ‘Gregory’s gone off somewhere and he’s back at the cottage in Yorkshire. He says he plans to redecorate, make it into a proper home.’

  ‘Good, I think that’s what our Nathan needs right now. A base, some normality, something that’s his. And Alec has a new job, too. All change, it seems.’

  Naomi nodded. From Monday Alec would be working three days a week for a local company that provided discreet security for high-end event planners. She couldn’t quite see her husband enjoying the society weddings and stately home music events that were the company’s speciality, but … Alec seemed happy about it all.

  ‘And what about you?’ she teased as the teacher called on them to prepare for a ‘warm up waltz’. ‘Harry the accountant? Any changes planned there?’

  Harry laughed. ‘As Patrick keeps telling me, accountancy is just my job. Harry Jones is far more than that.’

  He placed a hand on Naomi’s back and took her hand and Naomi surrendered to the music. The people she cared about were safe and happy and she was dancing with a much loved friend. What more could anyone possibly want?