Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘But I’m not a whore,’ she said, with as much firmness as she could muster. ‘Whatever your mother did, or the rest of them, that’s not me. I am loved and wanted, and so is my baby. Are you going to kill us both just because of a casual resemblance? Is that what God wants? Another innocent death like your sister’s? That can’t be right.’

  Murgatroyd looked at her, his expression inscrutable, and then opened the scissors and held the sharp blades against her throat as she flinched and turned her head away so as not to let him see the fear in her eyes or the tears that slipped down her cheeks.

  ‘It’s a strange God who murders unborn babies,’ she whispered as she felt one of the blades slice into her neck.

  And suddenly, as suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone, and she was in darkness again as the door closed behind him. She took a deep breath, sure that he soon would be back, and aware of a trickle of blood beginning to soak into her shirt collar. She might have shaken his resolve for a moment, she thought, but he would not dare let her live now that she could identify him. His only realistic choice was to continue what he had begun.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Michael Thackeray had hardly slept, and felt the gritty-eyed and fuzzy-brained results when he went back to police HQ the next morning. He had waited until after midnight for Laura, trying her phone at intervals and finally calling anyone he could think of who might know where she was, spreading anxiety he did not want to spread and to absolutely no avail. No one, friend or colleague, knew where she was heading after she left the Gazette’s offices the previous afternoon. Finally, exhausted, he had flung himself onto the bed fully clothed and slept fitfully until the first streaks of dawn woke him through the curtains Laura had carefully chosen for their bedroom. His first thought was Laura, but she still wasn’t answering her phone. He got up, swallowed a scalding black coffee and set off for work before seven.

  To his surprise, he found Sergeant Kevin Mower already in the CID office, hunched in front of his computer screen.

  ‘I’ve firmed up these other disappearances,’ Mower said, over his shoulder. ‘Dates, places, circumstances and, as far as possible, sexual history. There are six that happened close to Murgatroyd’s academies, all around the time that Sanderson would have had reason to be in the area concerned. All the places seem to have had some dogging activities going on at around the same time. There’s more than enough here to start questioning him about exactly when he was where. Then, I reckon we need to start looking at his computer. He had a laptop with him. If he accessed dogging sites, or even set them up himself, it’ll all be in there on the hard disk. As we said early on, it’s a brilliant way for a predator to pick up women in a totally anonymous environment where no one will want to come forward as a witness.’

  Mower swung round towards the DCI and tried not to look as horrified as he felt when he took in his dishevelled, unshaven appearance.

  ‘Are you all right, guv?’ he asked. ‘You look as if you had a rough night.’

  Thackeray’s first instinct was to rebuff this incursion into his private life but he was suddenly overwhelmed with immense weariness and knew he had to tell someone what was going on in his life or he would go mad.

  ‘Laura’s disappeared,’ he said. ‘I’ve hardly slept. I need to file a missing person report.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Mower said. ‘When did this happen?’

  He listened without comment as Thackeray spelt out what had happened the previous day.

  ‘I thought she looked very stressed when I saw her the other day,’ was his only comment when the DCI had finished.

  ‘My fault,’ Thackeray said. ‘If she’s gone off somewhere voluntarily, it’s all my bloody fault, as usual. She’s pregnant. And I was giving her a hard time about it.’

  ‘And if she hasn’t gone voluntarily?’ Mower said sharply, an appalling thought striking him. ‘Look at this, guv.’ He turned back to the computer and brought up a page of photographs of six women.

  ‘They all have red hair,’ he said quietly. ‘If that bastard Sanderson’s a serial killer, he picks out women with red hair. Maybe he had more reason than we imagined to be haring down the M1 with all his luggage in the boot of his car yesterday.’

  Thackeray sat down at the desk next to Mower’s and buried his face in his hands. Mower glanced around the CID room, to make sure that they were still alone.

  ‘Let’s take this a step at a time, guv,’ he said. ‘Take your coat off and tidy up a bit and then go down to uniform and report her missing. There’s no reason to think she hasn’t just taken some time off to sort her head out.’

  ‘With her phone off?’ Thackeray asked, desperately trying to find a glimmer of hope somewhere.

  ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you just now.’

  Thackeray nodded gloomily, accepting the justice of that.

  ‘While you sort all that out, I’ll get Sanderson back up to an interview room and we can press him really hard this morning on all this other stuff. And ask him about Laura, just in case he’s broken the pattern. Which I don’t honestly think is very likely, guv. You know what these bastards are like. If they go out looking for tarts, amateur or professional, that’s generally what they find. And if that’s what’s happened to this lot, I can’t see that Laura could be at risk. Why should she be?’

  ‘You know she’s had some contact with Sanderson. She’s been chasing an interview with his boss for a week. She knows the bastard.’

  ‘Sure, we’ll push him then, won’t we? We’ve got enough already to charge him with something on the basis of the fingerprint alone. We can afford to press him now on the rest. And ask him about Laura as well.’

  Thackeray sighed heavily and ran a hand across his greying hair. Mower, he thought, had taken control and he half resented, half felt grateful for that.

  ‘I’ll see you downstairs in ten,’ he said.

  Sanderson turned out to be much more subdued after his night in the cells. His face was drawn and there were dark circles under his eyes. Thackeray guessed that he had had as little sleep as he had had himself, and if he had been high on drugs the day before he certainly was not high now. But when they asked him again whether or not he wanted a solicitor he shook his head.

  ‘Let’s get on with it,’ he said dully. ‘I’ve told you what you wanted to know about Karen. You’ve got your confession. Why don’t you just charge me, for God’s sake? Let’s get it over with.’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ve only just begun, Mr Sanderson,’ Mower said, after acknowledging a nod from Thackeray. He put a bulging file of computer printouts on the desk in front of him. ‘Let’s start with Linda O’Hear, twenty-six years old, missing from her home in Peterborough since she vanished five years ago. Do you remember her?’

  Sanderson stared at the two detectives with a blank expression.

  ‘I’ve never heard of her,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘How long have you worked with David Murgatroyd on his schools programme?’ Thackeray asked.

  Sanderson shrugged.

  ‘Eight, nine years,’ he said. ‘He advertised the job just as I finished on his training scheme. I knew his name, of course, though I’d never met him again, after the church, that is, and thought it would be a laugh to work for him. I think he fancied a black PA. Reckoned it did something for his street cred. Not that he ever guessed how much street cred I actually had back in Notting Hill. It was only later that I got my head round the sort of man he really was. How much good he was doing, you know? And making no fuss about it. All that. I never planned to stay with him so long. It just happened. I was hooked. He became my religion.’

  ‘So you stayed, and if we asked you if you’ve ever been to Peterborough, or Swindon, or Leeds, or Derby or Oldham, you’d agree you had.’ Mower consulted his file ostentatiously.

  ‘I suppose,’ Sanderson said. ‘I generally go where the boss goes. What’s that got to do with Karen Bastable?’

  ‘So if
we ask your boss where you were on which dates over the last few years, there’ll be a record somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, yes, you can ask him, but he’s away at the moment. He’s abroad.’

  ‘And we already know you’re familiar with Preston. You said you’d been there the day Karen disappeared,’ Mower pressed on.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, so what?’ Sanderson asked, looking genuinely bemused. Could he be that good an actor, Thackeray wondered?

  ‘So tell us all about the red-headed women you picked up at sex parties in those places, Leroy,’ Mower snapped. ‘Just like the party you claim you stumbled on accidentally in Bently Forest.’

  ‘What?’ Sanderson said, looking amazed now. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘There’s always a pattern to serial killings,’ Thackeray said. ‘It’s a great pity it sometimes takes a long time to emerge. But in this case, we’ve got there in the end. You’ve told us about Karen and how you picked her up at the dogging meeting. You’ve told us you cut her hair off because you hated redheads. So now tell us about the six other women who disappeared in similar circumstances, every one of them a redhead, every one of them a dogger. Linda O’Hear, Kelly Smith, Jan Wooldridge…do I need to go on?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of any of them,’ Sanderson said. ‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘We’ve started looking at your computer, Leroy,’ Mower said. ‘If you found those doggers’ parties online we’ll find a record of it, believe me. You’ve coughed to Karen’s killing. What’s the point of not telling us about the rest? You’re going down for life anyway. You must know that.’

  ‘What is this? What are you doing, trying to set me up, trying to clear your books or something? I don’t know anything about any women in these other places. I don’t know what happened with Karen. Somehow I lost it. I was out of control. I can’t even remember exactly, I told you that. But it was a one-off, believe me.’

  ‘Were you stoned, like you were last night?’ Mower pressed.

  ‘No, no, I don’t remember.’ Sanderson buried his face in his hands. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s all a blur.’

  ‘And now we have another redhead missing,’ Mower said. ‘Another young woman you’ve met. Where is Laura Ackroyd, Leroy? What have you done with her?’

  ‘The reporter woman who’s been pestering the boss? She’s missing?’ Suddenly Sanderson’s demeanour changed, he looked suddenly sick and grey and began to tremble. To Mower’s alarm, Thackeray jumped to his feet and went around the table to take hold of Sanderson by the scruff of the neck, pulling his head back until their eyes were only inches apart.

  ‘Where is Laura, you bastard?’ he hissed. ‘Tell me what you’ve done with her.’

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ Sanderson whispered, hardly able to speak as his collar cut into his windpipe. ‘I don’t believe this. It can’t be right.’

  ‘Steady, guv,’ Mower said. Thackeray released his grip but still stood over the prisoner, waiting for an answer. There were tears in Sanderson’s eyes now.

  ‘Tell us,’ Mower snapped. ‘Tell us everything.’

  Sanderson slumped forward across the table and nodded but took a few seconds to find his voice again and when he spoke it was in a whisper.

  ‘I thought it was a one-off,’ he said.

  ‘Louder, for the tape,’ Thackeray snapped.

  ‘I thought it was a one-off,’ Sanderson said, slightly louder. ‘I found him with Karen…’

  ‘Who? Who did you find?’ Thackeray broke in again.

  ‘The boss, my boss. I got back and found him in the grounds at Sibden, at the side of the garage. She was dead and he was in a dreadful state, covered in blood, incoherent, kept rambling on that she was a whore and God hated whores… I got him indoors and put him under the shower and then into bed. Then I burnt his clothes and then got rid of the body, exactly as I told you. Wrapped it up and took it up onto the moors and buried it.’

  ‘You made yourself an accessory to a brutal murder, just like that?’ Thackeray’s expression was incredulous.

  ‘It didn’t seem like that at the time. It seemed like a nightmare that wasn’t connected to real life. He never mentioned it again. It was as if it had never happened. Maybe he couldn’t remember. But I thought I could watch him, make sure it never happened again. I thought it was an isolated thing, a sudden madness. But then, when you started looking for me it looked as if it was coming too close to home, and I reckoned I could vanish if I got back to London. I’d done it once, I could do it again. And you’d go on looking for someone who didn’t exist. You’d assume I’d killed her and keep on looking for me, not bother with anyone else.’

  ‘You reckoned without motorway cameras,’ Mower snapped. ‘You were doing ninety-five.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Stupid mistake,’ Sanderson said. ‘So when they stopped me, I had a choice, didn’t I? Grass him up or let you go on thinking I did it. You had the fingerprint, after all. I did bury the body. And I wanted him to go on doing what he was doing, not killing, of course, not that, but he does so much good stuff. I wanted him to go on doing that. He’s a good man. It was a no-brainer, really.’

  ‘You decided to take the blame?’ Mower asked. ‘You’d do a life sentence for this bastard?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Sanderson said, with total accuracy as far as the two detectives were concerned. ‘You don’t know him. You don’t know how he changes people’s lives. And I didn’t know there were others,’ Sanderson whispered. ‘I truly didn’t know that.’

  ‘You said Murgatroyd’s away,’ Thackeray said. ‘Is that true? Could Laura have gone up to Sibden to see him?’

  ‘I’ve tried and tried to keep them apart. I knew he was fascinated by redheads, but I never knew why.’

  ‘Is he away?’ Thackeray snapped.

  ‘No, he’s not away. He was at Sibden all day yesterday. He might have arranged to see her after I left, I suppose. I didn’t tell him I was taking off and not intending to come back. He doesn’t usually do that, make his own appointments, I mean, but he might have as it was her.’ He shrugged helplessly, his eyes full of horror as if he had only just begun to appreciate the depth of the pit he had fallen into. ‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘I hope he didn’t. He’s not safe, is he? He’s never going to be safe again.’

  ‘Come on,’ Thackeray said explosively to Mower. ‘Get this bastard back to the cells. We’ll find her, even if I have to take his house apart brick by bloody brick.’

  The police arrived at Sibden House mob-handed: a transit van full of uniformed officers, two carloads of detectives. There was no response when they tried the keypad on the electronic gates and Thackeray waved to a burly constable with a ram to force the lock before they roared up the drive and decanted twenty officers onto the gravel drive in front of the portico. There was no sign of life anywhere along the sunlit sandstone facade and again no response to the bell or a repeated hammering on the solid wooden double doors, and again Thackeray authorised a forced entry. Leaving half a dozen men to search the grounds, the rest made their way into the echoing entrance hall, where Mower dispatched half of them to search the upstairs floors and the rest to explore downstairs. There was not a sound to be heard before heavy boots began to tramp around the premises, and no shout that might indicate that anyone might have found anything of interest to the police.

  ‘It’s odd the alarm isn’t on,’ Mower said, glancing up at the flickering sensor in a corner of the hallway where they stood waiting for developments.

  ‘Maybe someone left in a hurry,’ Thackeray said. He resumed his nervous pacing up and down the tiled floor. ‘I can’t believe she would have come up here without telling anyone,’ he muttered, pulling out his mobile and thumbing in Laura’s number again. Somewhere not far away a telephone rang, and Thackeray glanced at Mower in wild surmise.

  ‘Find it,’ he snapped.

  Mower opened the door into an extensive sitting room where the sound of the call instantly b
ecame louder, although when they glanced around they could see no sign of a phone. Eventually Mower walked across the room to a sofa and pulled a mobile out from underneath the brocade pelmet where it had been lying completely concealed. He handed it to Thackeray, his mouth dry.

  ‘It’s hers,’ Thackeray said, his voice cracking. ‘Look, so many missed calls, all mine. So where the hell is she?’

  They went back into the hall and Thackeray strode out onto the steps at the front of the house, desperately scanning the rolling park and gardens for signs of anything to indicate that Laura might have been there, but within minutes a uniformed officer came running round the side of the house.

  ‘What sort of car did Miss Ackroyd drive, guv?’ he asked.

  ‘A black Golf,’ Thackeray snapped.

  ‘There’s one of those in the garage at the back. And we’ve found a locked door which looks as if it leads down into some sort of cellar or store. We thought you’d like to see before we smash the door down.’

  Thackeray and Mower raced down the steps and around the side of the house where they found the officer in charge of the ram and another couple standing outside an unobtrusive door close to the garages.

  ‘OK,’ Thackeray said, his heart thumping as the door splintered and gave way.

  ‘Let me, guv,’ Mower said, pushing his way in front of his boss and going through the doorway first. But inside there seemed to be only a cluttered storeroom, and it was not until they began to search more closely they found that the junk half hid another locked door, where the ram-wielding officer performed his function yet again. Beyond were stone stairs leading down into pitch darkness. Thackeray himself found a light switch and they made their way down the stairs in single file into another room, empty apart from a tall shape in one corner which swung gently in the draught from the door. Taking a sharp breath, Mower crossed the room and took the weight as one of the uniformed officers tried to unhook a rope from a hook in the ceiling. When he succeeded, Mower carefully lowered the body of a man to the floor and turned it over onto its back.