Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Has she told you what she’s going to do about it?’

  ‘A termination, you mean?’ Vicky asked sharply. ‘I don’t think she wants that.’

  ‘I just thought…she’s not come home…’

  ‘You thought she might be in hospital? Without telling you?’ Vicky sounded incredulous.

  ‘I just don’t know what to think. She said she’d be here, at the flat, tonight, so we could talk…’

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ Vicky said. ‘I really am. But I don’t know where she is, or what she’s planning to do. I haven’t seen her for a couple of days, and this is something you have to sort out between you. You know what I think. But I’m sure she wouldn’t have arranged anything drastic without a word.’

  ‘No, I’m sure she wouldn’t,’ Thackeray said, trying to sound confident and failing miserably. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I hope Naomi’s better soon.’ And he cut the connection abruptly. He did not have Joyce Ackroyd’s number in his phone so he looked it up in the phone book, not remembering until he had listened to the number ringing unanswered for several minutes that Laura’s grandmother was away on a visit to Laura’s parents in Portugal.

  ‘Damnation,’ he said, as he cut the connection again. He flung himself back onto the sofa and considered his options. He could call Ted Grant to ask whether Laura had been sent unexpectedly on some assignment. Mobile phone signals could be intermittent in the hills of Yorkshire and that might explain why she had failed to reach him to tell him she would be late. But to do that meant exposing himself and Laura to the no doubt intrusive inquiries of her boss. Or he could pull rank and ask his own colleagues to try to trace her which, as she was only a couple of hours late, would expose him to some derision down at the station and longer-term gossip about his private life. Or he could just wait. He glanced at his watch with a sigh. It was ten past eight. He went into the kitchen and made himself a sandwich and a cup of coffee, but he found it almost impossible to eat. He switched the TV on again and flicked from channel to channel in a vain attempt to find something that would occupy his mind but there was nothing there that remotely overcame his growing conviction that he had forced Laura into doing something desperate. He glanced towards the cupboard where Laura kept her drinks, but he knew that if he set hands on her vodka he would empty the bottle and compound every problem that was already tormenting him. But as he gritted his teeth for a long wait, his mobile rang and he grabbed it with shaking hands, only to find that it was not Laura, but Sergeant Kevin Mower, at the other end. He could hardly bring himself to respond coherently, but what Mower was saying eventually got through to him, if dimly.

  ‘We picked up Sanderson heading down the M1, guv,’ Mower said. ‘Suitcases packed in the back of the car. He says he wants to make a statement. I thought you might like to come in.’

  ‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ Thackeray said, his mind jerking into full consciousness, in spite of himself, as if it had been whipped back to life. ‘I’ll be there.’

  Winston Sanderson was sitting in an interview room with a uniformed constable in attendance when Thackeray and Mower came in. He glanced up at them with a half smile which looked almost rueful.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said. ‘I thought you were keen to get this case sorted.’

  ‘Has he been cautioned?’ Thackeray asked Mower, who nodded.

  ‘Says he doesn’t want a solicitor,’ Mower said.

  ‘Are you quite sure about that?’ Thackeray asked Sanderson.

  ‘Quite sure,’ Sanderson said, looking almost at ease in his bleak surroundings.

  ‘And you’ve volunteered to make a statement about the death of Karen Bastable?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Thackeray settled himself into one of the chairs opposite Sanderson and watched him closely while Mower switched on the tape recorder, slotted two tapes into it, and recorded the identities of those present.

  ‘Let’s get this quite clear,’ Thackeray said, when the sergeant had finished the preliminaries. ‘Do you confirm that, although you are known as Winston Sanderson, your real name is Leroy Jason Green, formerly of the Notting Hill area of London.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sanderson said, again with a slight smile. ‘Seems I couldn’t get away from him after all.’

  ‘So what exactly do you want to tell us, Mr Green?’ Thackeray asked. ‘Take your time. And think carefully about what you are saying.’

  ‘My boss let on that you were looking for me. You even asked him if he knew Leroy. He had no idea, of course. He never made the connection when I turned up on one of his training schemes with a different name.’ He laughed this time, as if he had pulled off some particularly piquant practical joke. ‘But I remembered him from seeing him once or twice with the old Rev Steve at that church I went to for a while. I couldn’t believe it when he offered me a job. Anyway, I guessed I must have made some sort of mistake when he said you were looking for Leroy Green and somehow you’d linked Karen with some long-ago bad boy and his criminal record. Couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d been so careful. But there you go.’

  Sanderson’s attitude set Thackeray’s teeth on edge when he remembered the mutilated body he had last seen on Amos Atherton’s table, tortured and mutilated into little more than a slab of raw meat. How could this well-dressed, self-assured young man, with his easy charm, have turned into the sort of monster who was capable of that level of depravity? Thackeray had never quite believed in the possibility of a real-life Jekyll and Hyde but it seemed as if he might just possibly be facing exactly that.

  ‘You don’t deny that you concealed Karen Bastable’s body on Staveley Moor?’ Thackeray asked.

  Sanderson shrugged, his face more serious now.

  ‘You obviously know I did, though I don’t know how you know. What was it? A fingerprint? I wore gloves but I think I took them off for a moment when I got some dirt in my eye. It was wild up there. Stupid mistake.’

  ‘So tell us everything that happened the night Karen disappeared,’ Thackeray said.

  Sanderson leant back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, as if rerunning a mental film of the events of that night.

  ‘I was driving up near the forest,’ he said. ‘I’d been over to Lancashire for the boss, to Preston—’

  ‘Preston?’ Mower broke in, recalling the painfully collated list of missing women who just might be this man’s other victims. ‘Why Preston?’

  ‘We have a new academy there,’ Sanderson said, with no sign that he regarded the place as of any particular significance. ‘Anyway, I decided to take the country route back, over the moors. When I started coming down it was dark but not very late and I noticed these cars going into the trees, one, two, three, after each other. I was curious, wasn’t I? I wondered where they were going. So I followed them. They parked up in a circle in a clearing, and I stopped just a little way back to watch, just to see what they were doing. They ended up with quite a few cars there, in a big circle, and people got out, and then it got quite exciting.’

  ‘You mean sexually exciting?’ Thackeray asked.

  Sanderson nodded with a little giggle.

  ‘You have to admit a no-holds-barred orgy’s a bit of a turnon. I’m not quite such a saint as my boss.’

  ‘So you joined in?’ Thackeray’s distaste was written all over his face and Mower could see the tension in his jaw and the clenched fists, which he had carefully hidden under the table.

  ‘Nah,’ Sanderson scoffed. ‘Not then. Later. Most of the guys made off pretty sharpish, but the girls stayed behind for a gossip. Like they do. Comparing notes, little slags. Karen was the last to leave. I stopped her before she got into her car and persuaded her to come with me for a bit more fun and games. She didn’t object. Quite liked the idea, I think. It’s not just a myth, you know.’

  ‘What isn’t?’ Thackeray asked sharply.

  ‘That some white women fancy black men,’ Sanderson said, almost as if talking to a five-year-old.


  ‘So, you picked her up. Where did you take her?’ Mower pressed.

  ‘I couldn’t really tell you,’ Sanderson said. ‘Just further back up onto the moors where I could park the car out of sight. I told her I was taking her to my place but that would never do. The boss wouldn’t put up with women visiting, would he? Not at his precious Sibden House. That place is sacred, a sort of mausoleum to his dead sister. Anyway we found somewhere quiet. But then she got a bit stroppy. Didn’t like some of the games I wanted to play. So I tied her up. And after that it’s all a bit of a blur. I came round lying beside her in the heather, or what was left of her. So then I did go back to Sibden and got hold of some stuff to wrap the body in. Bin bags and that. I reckoned I needed to dump her much further away. I was just too close to home.’

  ‘You took her with you in the car to Sibden House?’ Thackeray snapped, but Sanderson shook his head.

  ‘Not likely,’ he said. ‘Not in the state she was in. I went back for her, wrapped her up, snug as a bug, and then drove as far as I could in the opposite direction to bury her. I was mortified when she turned up so quickly. I thought it would be months, years maybe, before she was found up there. Like those kids on Saddleworth Moor. I suppose the papers will call me another Ian Brady, but I’m obviously not as good at hiding bodies as he was.’

  ‘This is not a bloody beauty contest,’ Mower said suddenly, surprising himself with his fury and banging his hand on the table between them until it shook in spite of its legs being bolted to the floor. ‘You sick bastard.’

  Sanderson shook slightly, though whether in amusement or fear it was difficult to tell. Thackeray put a restraining hand on Mower’s arm and waited until he had calmed down slightly.

  ‘And the weapons you used? You had those with you?’ Thackeray asked, his own voice like ice.

  ‘Old habits die hard. I had a knife.’ Sanderson shrugged. ‘I told you. I can’t remember the details. I must have lost it completely at some point.’

  ‘Can you recall why you cut off her hair?’ Thackeray asked.

  Sanderson looked at him blankly for a moment and then laughed.

  ‘I really don’t like red hair,’ he said. ‘I’d have taken the bottle-blond one for preference, but she went off in a car with her friend, didn’t she? Safety in numbers, they must have thought, I suppose. Dead right, as it turned out.’

  ‘And what did you do with Karen’s hair? It wasn’t with her body. Where did you hide it?’

  ‘It’s somewhere up on that blasted heath,’ he said. ‘Blown to the four winds I expect. What does it matter?’

  ‘Oh, it matters,’ Thackeray said. ‘We’ll take a break there, Mr Sanderson, as there are some other matters we want to talk to you about. Perhaps you can tell us where your car is. We’ll want that for forensic examination.’

  Sanderson told them where to find his parked car, and they left him, subsiding now in his seat, swaying slightly with his eyes shut, apparently oblivious to the uniformed constable who came back into the interview room to watch over him.

  ‘What do you make of that guy, guv?’ Mower said. ‘Apart from the fact that he’s seriously stoned, I mean. All that giggling. The custody sergeant who booked him in should have spotted that.’

  ‘You think so?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘You should have mentioned it sooner. If he’s under the influence of drugs the whole interview’s worthless as it stands.’

  ‘I reckon the whole interview’s worthless anyway,’ Mower said. ‘He’s told us nothing about Bently Forest that he couldn’t have picked up from the press. And he conveniently can’t remember where or how he killed her. It’s cobblers, isn’t it, guv?’

  ‘But his fingerprint was on the plastic bag,’ Thackeray said. ‘We have that. So we have him. He’s involved.’

  He suddenly spun on his heel and went back to the interview room where the PC looked up in surprise when the door opened again so soon.

  ‘I’ll resume our interview in the morning, Mr Sanderson,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, we can offer you a meal and a night in a cell until we’re ready for you again. See to it, Constable, will you, please?’

  Blackness, nothing but blackness. Laura drifted back to consciousness, aware first of all that she could not see and, gradually, that neither could she move. She blinked a couple of times, to make sure that her eyes were actually open, but it did nothing to reveal anything but utter darkness. Only gradually, as she flexed her arms and legs, did she realise that she was tied down in some way to a flat surface, arms to her sides, ankles fastened together. She felt a tide of panic beginning to engulf her and she moaned slightly, but as she heard her own gasping breath she realised that at least she had not been gagged. But that fact, when she’d caught her breath, offered no comfort at all. If she had been left here to scream for help, all that implied was that no one could possibly hear her.

  The silence was as profound as the darkness. Try as she might, she could hear absolutely nothing at all. There was no movement of air, although she gradually became aware of a sweet, slightly metallic smell which seemed familiar although she could not place it. As silent and dark as the grave, she thought, and another wave of panic swept over her, making her gasp and her heart thump uncontrollably, when she considered the possibility that she was actually in a coffin. But even though she could not reach out to feel the edges of her prison, she did not think she was anywhere as enclosed as that. The sense of suffocation which swept over her, she thought, was more in her own head than in any real inability to breathe, and gradually she made herself take small, regular breaths again and she felt a chill as the sweat which had soaked her began to dry.

  There was a sense of space, she told herself firmly, even without the evidence of her eyes to back it up, and wherever she was was cool but not bitterly cold. As far as she could tell she was still wearing the coat she had put on to go out into Murgatroyd’s garden and she was not physically uncomfortable, just immobile, and she knew that there must be a malign purpose behind that. She was being kept here for something, and when she allowed the thought of Karen Bastable’s fate to intrude, she moaned again.

  She licked her lips and realised she was very thirsty. Whatever Murgatroyd had used to knock her out had left her mouth dry and furry. She wondered how long it took to die of thirst, and she wondered how long she had been here, immobile and unconscious – hours, days? She did not think it could be long as, apart from her dry throat, she was not particularly hungry or even uncomfortable. But at the back of her mind she knew that there was something she should remember and it remained tantalisingly just out of reach in the fog of her brain. She flexed her muscles again against whatever was tying her down, but there was no give anywhere, and even if she managed to wriggle a limb free, she did not know what she would do next. In the complete darkness, even trying to step off whatever she was fastened to would require a leap of faith she did not think she could summon up.

  Michael must be looking for her by now, she thought. He would be at the flat, as arranged, wondering where she was. And then the crucial fact that she had not been able to recall filtered slowly back into her conscious mind. She had not told anyone where she was going, had she? She was bitterly sure she had not. Ted Grant had been busy and she had left the office without a word to anyone else. She groaned again. Michael might be looking for her but he had absolutely no idea where she had gone, and nor did anyone else. Murgatroyd had all the time in the world, she thought, to do whatever he wanted to do, and she had very little doubt what he intended.

  She had no idea how long she lay there trying not to let her imagination run riot amongst the horrors she might be facing, or their inevitable conclusion, but despair was never far away, and when she finally heard a sudden sharp noise, she shrank into the hard surface beneath her, as if she could minimise herself in the teeth of whatever was to come. She recognised the click of a key in a lock, and a dim light as a door close to her head opened, and then she was dazzled by a much stronger light as a switch was press
ed.

  ‘You’re awake. That’s good.’ She recognised David Murgatroyd’s voice although she had screwed her eyes shut against the glare and it was a minute before she could see him standing close to her at the side of what seemed to be a high bed. He said nothing, watching her with no obvious expression in his gold-flecked eyes. Then she realised that he was holding a knife in one hand and with a sick certainty she realised that the smell that had tantalised her with its familiarity was the meaty smell of a butcher’s shop.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ she whispered, her eyes fixed on the shining blade of the heavy kitchen knife. ‘What have I ever done to you?’ She glanced around what turned out to be a small windowless room, which she guessed was a cellar. Against a wall was a table with an array of tools and knives on it, and above a carefully arranged display of photographs which looked like blown-up family snapshots, some in black and white and some in colour. All of them featured a tall, beautiful young woman, with flaming red hair, sometimes with a small boy, sometimes with the boy and a young baby, and suddenly she understood where Murgatroyd’s claim that he had killed his mother had led him.

  Murgatroyd seemed to spot the comprehension in her eyes.

  ‘She was a whore,’ he said flatly.

  ‘And Karen?’

  ‘Another whore. They all were, all those women.’

  ‘But I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’m not one of those women. I’m not a whore.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Murgatroyd countered and Laura swallowed hard, trying to control her trembling limbs as she realised that she was to become just one more in what must be a grisly sequence of killings. He turned away, selected a large pair of scissors from the table behind him and grabbed hold of her hair.

  ‘No,’ she said faintly, but he was not to be deterred as he pulled her copper curls in hanks away from her head and began to hack them off. And this, Laura thought with certainty, catching the manic look in his eyes, would just be one of the preliminaries. When he had finished, he gathered up the bundle of hair carefully and put it in a box under the table which seemed to be already full of a red-gold cloud.