by Peter James
‘So I understand.’
‘I had my researchers check the files on all mispers and cold cases five years either side of that date estimate, on females of that approximate age. This is what they found. Fill your boots.’ He took a large gulp of his drink.
‘I’m impressed, you’ve been moving fast.’
‘On it like a car bonnet, mate.’
‘Like a what?’ Grace looked at his friend quizzically, then picked up the unsealed envelope, which had a musty smell, and pulled out the contents. It contained a batch of documents, with several photographs at the back, held together by two large elastic bands. Handwritten in black marker pen on the outside was Operation Yorker.
The first document was a Home Office pathologist’s report, headed CATHERINE (KATY) JANE MARIE WESTERHAM. Aged nineteen, she was an English Literature student at Sussex University, residing in Elm Grove, Brighton. She had been reported missing in December 1984, and the young woman’s remains had been found in Ashdown Forest in April 1985 by a man walking his dog.
Roy Grace reflected, ironically, just how big a debt homicide detectives around the globe owed to people walking their dogs. He’d often thought, if he had the time, of one day doing some research on the percentage of bodies discovered in this manner.
He speed-read through the document. The body was decomposed at the time it was found, with some bones missing, presumed taken by animals. Fragments of lung tissue and the findings of the pathologist indicated death had been by asphyxiation. But there was insufficient material remaining to provide a conclusive cause of death.
Grace then removed the photographs from the paperclip holding them. The first one was a portrait photograph of an attractive girl with long brown hair, unrecognizable from the remains. He stared hard at it for some moments. There was a striking resemblance, more in the hair than anything else, but also the face itself, to Emma Johnson. And she was a dead ringer for Logan Somerville, who had disappeared yesterday.
He removed several more photographs, which showed her entire decomposed body, in situ, each with a ruler in the frame. Then various close-ups of her skull, her rib cage, and other bones that remained.
Then he pulled out the last photo and froze.
It was again a close-up, marked ‘forehead’. The pathologist’s ruler, included in the picture, showed the length, of just over two inches, of what looked like tattooed letters on a fragment of flesh.
They were considerably more distinct than on the remains that had been discovered at Hove Lagoon. But they read the same:
U R DEAD
35
Friday 12 December
‘You’re very quiet tonight, darling,’ Jacob Van Dam’s elegantly dressed wife, Rachel, said. Even when they dined alone they always dressed smartly. It was something they had done all their married life, to make it more of an occasion, and the time in the day when they caught up with each other.
The psychiatrist sat at the far end of the oval mahogany dining table, in the smart dining room of their Regent’s Park mansion, cradling his crystal goblet of claret, staring pensively at the light reflecting in its facets from the chandelier above. The grilled lamb cutlets on his bone-china plate lay untouched and growing cold, along with the petits pois and gratin potatoes Rachel had lovingly prepared.
‘Yes, well,’ he said pensively. ‘It’s been an interesting day.’
‘Would you like to share it with me?’ Then after some moments, she said, ‘Dreadful, the news about Logan, I just can’t believe it. No one has any idea where she might be. The police are doing everything they can, apparently. I spoke to Tina myself, earlier, she’s in a terrible mess. She said the police don’t think it’s kidnap, because there’s been no ransom demand – they say it’s more likely she’s been abducted. Apparently they’ve said if someone her age is abducted it is likely to be a sex offender – and the chances of her being alive lessen the longer she’s not found. I feel helpless.’
He barely heard her words he was so consumed by his thoughts about Dr Harrison Hunter.
Whoever Dr Harrison Hunter really was.
U R DEAD
The man had lied to him. His niece had no such tattoo – no tattoos at all. She had been missing, possibly abducted, since yesterday evening. So what was the connection with this man and Logan?
The proper course of action would be to call the police. But Hunter’s threat had felt very real. The only thing that mattered now was finding Logan and making sure she was safe. He needed the man to come back, then he would find a way of ensnaring him. Getting the truth out of him. But how long did he have? The rest of tonight? The weekend?
What if Harrison Hunter was just delusional? Someone who had read the Argus, and was imagining his involvement?
And had fallen at the first hurdle. U R DEAD. Logan had no tattoos.
He sipped some more wine, then sliced into the first cutlet. It was pink in the centre, just how he liked it. ‘Beautifully cooked, my dear,’ he said.
She gave him one of her penetrating stares. ‘Is it something you can tell me about?’ she asked.
‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘No.’
‘It is so terrible. I mean, what on earth can have happened to her? She’d broken off her engagement – do you think her boyfriend might be behind this? Or involved in some way?’
He continued to stare at the light dancing off the glass. Then he dipped his fork, with a morsel of cutlet, into the mint jelly on the side of his plate and began to chew. When he had swallowed he said, ‘Rachel, have you ever in your life had to make a decision that you don’t feel equipped to make?’
‘You’re talking in riddles again, my love. Like you so often do.’
‘I apologize. This is delicious, by the way.’
‘Good.’
He dabbed his lips with the linen napkin. ‘Patient confidentiality.’ He picked up his glass and stared, forlornly, at it. ‘That’s the decision.’
‘What kind of a decision?’ she prompted.
‘Well, imagine for a moment you are me, in my office. A new patient comes in, who confesses to killing people. My assessment is that he’s delusional. But what if I’m wrong and he has killed? I may have to report this to the police. But if it’s merely his fantasy, then I would be failing in my duty of care if I report him. He will never again talk openly with confidence to anyone. He won’t trust anyone again.’
‘Is that what happened to you today?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does this have anything to do with Logan? Was he telling you he’s the man who abducted Logan?’
He sliced another morsel of lamb. ‘No, he didn’t claim that, he claimed he knew who had taken her.’
‘Can you tell me anything about him?’
He chewed slowly, then sipped his wine. ‘I can’t say too much, but this man told me something that he assured me would be proof of his bona fides. I checked it out after he left – part of the reason I was so late home tonight – and it wasn’t correct. Which leads me to believe he is – I’m not sure . . .’
‘A fantasist?’ his wife prompted.
‘That would be the easy conclusion,’ Van Dam said. ‘I’m foxed.’
‘Then you should call the police and tell them your thoughts.’
The psychiatrist sat silently for some moments, then drank another sip of his wine. ‘And risk Logan’s life?’
‘Why would that risk her life?’
‘Because this man told me categorically not to go to the police.’
‘That’s how seriously you take him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then somewhere inside that strange brain of yours, that I’ve never managed to penetrate fully in all the years we’ve been together, you must believe, deep down, he was telling you the truth.’
Van Dam smiled at his beloved and wise wife. ‘Yes, yes I do.’
36
Friday 12 December
After leaving the pub, Roy Grace returned to Sussex House, sat in his office and began to
look again at the file Glenn Branson had brought him. He pulled out a yellowing, black and white A4 printed sheet, headed, ‘SUSSEX CRIME INFORMATION – MURDER’.
At 8.35 a.m., Saturday, 3/4/85 the body of the after-described was found in Ashdown Forest, Sussex. Cause of death undetermined – but believed to be asphyxiation.
He looked again at the photograph of the pretty young woman, with poker-straight long brown hair, freckles and glasses, and wondered where the picture had been taken, because she was staring at the photographer with a warm, almost serene, expression of trust.
He read on down through the sheet.
The following property is missing from the body.
1) Pair of black shoes, size 6, label on sole ‘Made in U.K. Real leather. Leather uppers with man-made soles’.
2) Bunch of keys with a leather tag bearing the words ‘Chandlers of Brighton BMW’, containing one BMW key, one Yale-type key and possibly one other key.
3) Handbag, contents unknown.
The next sheet of paper looked like a blow-up of an Ordnance Survey map. Up in the top right-hand corner was a circle in red, marking the spot where the body had been found.
He turned to the next item, a faded orange book marked ‘MAJOR INCIDENT PROPERTY REGISTER’.
The next was a colour photograph showing a group of men in gumboots, sweaters and jeans, each holding a long pole, standing in a woodland clearing around a dark shadow. He shook his head.
God, what a difference! Today these same people would have been in oversuits to prevent them from contaminating the crime scene.
The next photograph showed a dark, human-shaped shadow in deep undergrowth.
In the next, he could make out a pair of blue jeans. Then, as he turned to the one after, he took a sharp intake of breath – as he always did when he saw a new dead body.
There was something so terribly sad about murder victims. He couldn’t help it, but for a few moments he always felt like a voyeur. As if he had gatecrashed some party that no one, ever, would have invited him to.
And always, he wondered, would he one day be turning up to the bones of his missing wife, Sandy?
The dead had no choice in who turned up at their deposition sites. It fell upon everyone present to be respectful. Even now, seated at his desk, with darkness pressing against the rain-spattered windowpanes, he felt just that, staring at the side-on photograph of the blotchy face, as if stage rouge had been applied, with the eyes missing, pecked away by birds, dark brown hair unkempt and straggly, in what looked like a home-knitted grey pullover.
Who had knitted it, he wondered? Her loving mother? Grandmother?
The sweater she had been murdered in.
Then another photograph, this time full-face, showing dark, marbled skin, and the empty eye sockets, like she was wearing a balaclava.
God, he thought. You were at Sussex University. Your dad had lent you his car for the night, because he trusted your driving and didn’t want some drunken student driving you home. But you never did come home.
He phoned a mobile number, thinking it unlikely that Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer, would still be here at this hour on a Friday night, but to his surprise he caught him just as he was leaving. Case said he had been working late, helping to reorganize the Major Incident rooms.
Five minutes later, he followed the stocky figure of Case down into the basement of Sussex House. Case had been a Traffic officer before retiring after thirty years’ service, and then rejoining the force as a civilian, as was common among many officers. He was holding a massive bunch of keys in his hand.
They walked along a corridor then stopped outside a steel-barred door. Case riffled through his keys, selected one and opened the door, then switched on the lights. Several dusty, bare bulbs, two of them with spiders’ webs, threw a weak light along the length of the vast storeroom, which was racked out on both sides and at the far end with floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, stacked tightly with green plastic crates filled with evidence bags, manila folders and piles of papers.
Roy Grace always felt a strange sensation when he entered this storeroom, as if it were filled with ghosts. He knew it well from the days when he had been put in charge of cold cases – reviewing all the unsolved murders in the county of Sussex, to see if advances in fingerprint technology and DNA could help solve any of them. Sussex Police never closed the file on any unsolved murder. All of these green crates contained material dating back as far as the Second World War, and a few even further back than that. Each of the cases filled as many as twenty or more crates, and he had felt the burden of responsibility for each case that he re-examined, knowing he might well be the last chance the victims had for justice.
He walked along past the hand-written labelled sections. OPERATION GALBY. OPERATION DULWICH. OPERATION CORMORANT. Several of them he knew well. He could even recall the stomach contents of some of the victims, from the last things they had ever eaten or drunk.
Ghosts.
They stopped when they reached the section, with forty-three crates, labelled OPERATION YORKER. The unsolved murder of Katy Westerham.
Tony Case looked at him. ‘Which ones do you want up in your office, Roy?’
Grace ran his eyes along the crates. Each of them was filled with dusty folders, with a blue and white label, the serial number written in black ink and sealed with a tamper-proof cable tie.
‘All of them, please.’
Finally, close to 11.30 p.m., having done all he could that evening on the disappearance of Logan Somerville, Roy Grace went home. Cleo had left a cold platter for him on the table. But she heard him come in and came downstairs to join him.
‘Sounds like it’s been quite a day,’ she said.
Roy Grace smiled thinly across the dining table at her. ‘You’re right, it has been. One hell of a day. Sorry if I’m not being good company. You’re stuck home all day with the baby, and then I arrive and you’re looking forward to some conversation, and all I do is sit in silence and brood.’
‘So share it with me.’
‘I have a very bad feeling about the case I’m on.’ He shrugged and reached for the bottle of sparkling water that Cleo had set in the cooler in the middle of the table, and poured some into his glass.
‘Operation Haywain?’ she prompted.
He nodded.
‘Are you worried about Cassian Pewe?’
‘Right now he’s the least of my problems.’ He could have done with a couple of really stiff drinks, but he needed a clear head more than ever at this moment and, of course, he was on call. ‘We’ve had almost every imaginable kind of crime in this city, but so far we’ve had precious few – if any – of what could be defined as serial killers.’
‘What defines one?’ Cleo asked.
‘Someone who commits three or more murders on separate occasions. We had a young man, back in 1985, who murdered his father, stepmother and stepbrother with a baseball bat, at the Lighthouse Club in Shoreham. But that was all on the same night. It was a multiple homicide but he wasn’t a serial killer.’
‘Do you think you have one now?’
He fell silent, picked up his glass, then set it down. ‘I don’t know, yet. But it looks like we might have found a murder from thirty years ago. It’s too early to tell for sure.’
‘Could he still be around?’
He said nothing, thinking.
‘Come on, you’ve got to eat something, darling.’
He looked at his bowl of avocado and prawn, nodded, and picked up his fork. ‘Yes, I’m ravenous, thanks.’ But he only swallowed one mouthful before lapsing back into his thoughts.
U R DEAD
Thirty years ago. A double killing? More? Was there a third branded victim out there? A fourth? A fifth? Somewhere else in the UK? From all he had studied in the past on serial killers, they tended to operate in big landscape countries, like the US, Australia, Russia, where they could move vast distances without arousing suspicion. But on occasions they didn’t follow that patt
ern.
Time could be a distance, too.
Catherine Westerham, found dead in 1985, was nineteen and had long brown hair with a centre parting. Emma Johnson, who had disappeared two weeks ago, was twenty-one and also had similar features, and long brown hair. Logan Somerville, who was now missing, had long brown hair. Was he just being fanciful?
Unknown Female, whose skeletal remains had been found in Hove Lagoon, and was as yet unidentified, appeared to have had long brown hair.
He realized more and more urgently that he needed to find the Lagoon Unknown Female’s identity. Fast.
Thirty years was a long time. But he knew from case histories of serial killers that he had seen presented at the grandly titled International Homicide Investigators Association’s Annual Symposium in the US, which he attended most years, that there could be long gaps sometimes. Twenty years was not uncommon. Dennis Rader in Wichita, Kansas, self-styled BTK – Bind, Torture, Kill – had a hiatus of around fifteen years and had been about to strike again when he was finally caught. The end of Rader’s first killing spree had started when his first child had been born. Grace had worked on a case in Brighton, a while ago, a serial rapist who took his victims’ shoes – he had stopped for many years before starting to offend again. The reason he had stopped was that he had got married.
Thirty years. Was that too long?
37
Saturday 13 December
He called it hunting.
The word had a nice ring to it.
The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world’s oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it.
All the time as he hunted, walking along or sitting among the grockles, he was taking surreptitious photographs of those he considered had potential to be a project.