by Val McDermid
That only reminded her of how thirsty she was. Hunger she wasn’t too sure about, but thirst was definitely a problem. She stood up and carried on along the wall for another few feet before the chain round her ankles brought her up short. The jerk sent a spasm of pain shooting from her arm into her neck and head, and she gasped. Slowly, bent like an old woman, she retraced her steps and moved past the other end of the mattress, her hand brushing the wall.
Within a few feet, the questions of food and drink were answered. A stiff metal tap produced a surge of icy water which she drank thirstily, falling to her knees to get her head right underneath the flow. As she did, she knocked something over beyond her. Her thirst slaked, she groped blindly for whatever she’d bumped into. Probing fingers found four boxes, all large and light. She shook them and heard the familiar rustle of cornflakes.
An hour of investigation later and she was forced to realize that was it. Four boxes of cornflakes—she’d tested each one—and as much freezing water as she could drink. She’d tried running the water over her shattered arm, but the pain had made her head reel. This was it. The bastard had left her chained up like a dog. Left her to die?
She sat back on her heels and keened like a bereft mother.
But that had been a couple of endless days ago. Now, delirious with pain, she moaned and gibbered, Occasionally passing out, occasionally drifting exhausted into tormented sleep. If she’d been able to comprehend the state she was in, Donna wouldn’t have wanted to live.
Chapter 15
The car stopped. Shaz slid irresistibly forward into the bulwark separating the narrow confines of the boot from the back seat, crushing her wrists and shoulders again. She tried to strain upwards to bang her head on the lid in a desperate bid to attract someone’s attention, but all she achieved was a fresh wave of pain. She tried not to sob, afraid that if mucus blocked her nose, she’d suffocate, unable to breathe through the gag that Vance had tied over the hood before he’d rolled her agonizingly across hard floors, over a carpeted area and down a short flight of steps, then hoisted her into the boot of the car. She had been horribly amazed at the strength and dexterity of this one-armed man.
Shaz breathed as deeply as she could; too far and her chest expansion made her stiff shoulder muscles protest. Only sheer willpower kept her from gagging at the stench of her own urine. Let’s see you get rid of that from your boot carpet, she thought triumphantly; she couldn’t do anything to save her life, but she was still determined to seize every opportunity to prevent Jacko Vance from walking away from his crimes. If SOCO ever got this far, a piss-stained carpet would make their day.
Abruptly the muffled music stopped. Ever since they’d set off, he’d listened to hits of the sixties. Shaz had forced herself to pay attention and had counted the tracks. At an average of three minutes a song, she reckoned they’d been driving for somewhere around three hours of what had felt like motorway after the first twenty minutes or so. That probably meant the north; heading west would have taken them on to the motorway more quickly. Of course, it was possible that he could have confused her by driving a circuit round the M25, orbiting London until he’d laid a completely false trail. Shaz didn’t think so; she doubted whether he felt any need to mislead her. She wasn’t going to be alive to tell anyone, after all.
It was probably dark by now; she’d lain bound in the house for what felt like several hours before Vance had returned to deal with her. If they were in the depths of the country, there would be no one to see or hear her. Somehow, she thought that was probably Vance’s plan. He must have taken his victims somewhere isolated to escape detection. She could think of no reason why he’d treat her differently.
A car door closed with a soft thud and a faint click. Then a metallic sound closer to hand and the soft hydraulic sigh of a boot opening. ‘God, you stink,’ Vance said contemptuously, dragging her carelessly forward.
‘Listen,’ he continued, sounding closer. ‘I’m going to free your feet. I’m going to cut them free. The knife is very, very sharp. Mostly I use it to joint meat. If you take my meaning.’ His voice was almost a whisper, his hot breath penetrating the hood next to her ear. Shaz felt another ripple of nausea. ‘If you try to run, I’ll gut you like a pig on a butcher’s hook. There’s nowhere to run to, see? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’
Shaz’s ears told her different. To her surprise, there was the rumble of traffic not far off, the underlying mutter of city life. If she had half a chance, she’d take it.
She felt the cold blade of the knife briefly against the skin of her ankle, then her feet were miraculously free. For a second, she thought she could kick out then make a run for it. Then her circulation reasserted itself and spasms of excruciating pins and needles squeezed a moan from the dry mouth behind the unyielding gag. Before the cramp could pass, Shaz felt herself hauled over the edge of the boot. She collapsed in an uncoordinated heap before he slammed the boot shut and yanked her to her feet. He half-dragged, half-carried her through a gap or a gateway where she bashed her shoulder on the wall, then down a path and up a couple of steps. Then he pushed her sharply and she crashed to a carpeted floor, her legs still useless rubbery handicaps.
Even through the haze of disorientation and pain, the closing of the door and the rattle of curtains being drawn sounded strangely familiar to Shaz. A fresh dread seized her and she began to shiver uncontrollably, losing control of her bladder for the second time in the past hour.
‘God, you’re a disgusting bitch,’ Vance sneered. Again she felt herself irresistibly hauled upwards. This time she was dumped unceremoniously in a hard, upright chair. Before she could adjust to the fresh pain in her shoulders and arms, she felt a new restraint being fastened to her leg, attaching it to the chair like a broken limb to a splint. In a desperate bid for freedom, she forced her other leg to kick out, rejoicing in the jarring connection with Vance’s body, exulting in his cry of surprised pain.
The blow to her jaw snapped her head back with a crack that sent waves of sick pain down her spine. ‘You fucking stupid cow,’ was all he said before he grabbed her other leg and forced it against the chair while he bound them tightly together.
She felt his legs between her knees. The warmth of his body was almost the worst suffering she’d had to endure so far. He raised her arms agonizingly and forced them back down over the back of the chair to hold her irresistibly upright. Then the hood was pulled away from her flesh and she heard the whisper of a razor-sharp blade through cloth. Blinking at the sudden appalling brightness, Shaz’s stomach was gripped with a cold cramp as she discovered her worst fear was a reality. She was sitting in her own living room, strapped to one of the four dining chairs she’d bought only ten days before in Ikea.
Vance pressed his body against hers as he cut the hood away just above the gag, leaving her able to see and hear properly, but incapable of any noise other than a muffled grunt. He stepped back, giving her breast a cruel tweak with his artificial hand as he went.
He stood staring at her, flicking the blade of the butcher’s filleting knife against the table edge. Shaz thought she had never seen a more arrogant human being. His pose, his expression, everything reeked of self-important righteousness. ‘You really fucked up my weekend,’ he said witheringly. ‘Believe me, this is not how I planned to spend Saturday night. Dressing up in fucking surgical greens and latex in some shitty flat in Leeds is not my idea of a good time, bitch.’ He shook his head pityingly. ‘You’re going to pay, Detective Bowman. You’re going to pay for being a stupid little fuck.’
He put the knife down and fumbled under his top. Shaz glimpsed a bum bag as he unzipped it and took out a CD-ROM. Without another word he walked out of the room. Shaz heard the familiar hum then clatter as first her computer then her printer were switched on. Straining her ears, she fancied she heard the clicking of the mouse and the sound of keys being struck. Then, unmistakably, the vibrating thrum of paper loading and printing.
When he returned, he carried a sin
gle sheet of paper which he held in front of her face. She recognized the print-out of an illustrated encyclopaedia article. She didn’t have to read the words to understand the symbolism of the line drawing at the top of the page. ‘You know what this is?’ he demanded.
Shaz just stared at him, her eyes bloodshot but still arresting. She was determined not to give in to him on any level.
‘It’s a teaching aid, student detective Bowman. It’s the three wise monkeys. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. You should have taken that as your class motto. You should have stayed away from me. You should have kept your nose out of my business. You won’t be doing that again.’
He let the paper flutter to the floor. Suddenly he lunged forward, hands pushing her head back. Then his prosthetic thumb was over her eyeball, pushing down and out, rending muscles, ripping the hollow globe free from its moorings. The scream was only inside Shaz’s head. But it was loud enough to carry her over into blessed unconsciousness.
Jacko Vance studied his handiwork and saw that it was good. Because his usual killings were fuelled by a completely different set of needs, he’d never contemplated them in a purely aesthetic light before. But this was a work of art, laden with symbolism. He wondered if anyone would be smart enough to read the message he’d left and, having read it, to heed it. Somehow, he doubted it.
He leaned forward and made a slight adjustment to the angle of the sheet of paper in her lap. Then, satisfied, he allowed himself the luxury of a smile. All he had to do now was to make sure she’d left no messages behind. He began to search the flat methodically, inch by inch, including the waste bins. He was used to the company of corpses, so the presence of Shaz’s remains caused him no stress. He was so relaxed as he meticulously searched her kitchen that he actually caught himself singing softly as he worked.
In the room she’d made her office, he found more than he’d bargained for. A box of photocopies of newspapers, a pad of rough notes, files on the hard disk of her laptop and back-ups on floppy disk, print-outs of various drafts of the analysis he’d found earlier in the file she’d brought to his house. What was even worse was that much of the print-out didn’t seem to have any matching files on the computer. There were copies on floppy disk, but not on the hard disk. It was a nightmare. When he spotted the modem, he almost panicked. The reason the files weren’t on her hard disk was that they were somewhere else, presumably on some National Profiling Task Force computer. And there was no way he could access that. His only hope was that Shaz Bowman had been as paranoid with her computer files as she seemed to have been about sharing her showdown with a colleague. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it now. He’d get rid of every trace there was here and just have to hope that nobody would go looking in her computer files at work. If the Luddite cops he knew were anything to judge by, it would never occur to them that she might have techie tendencies. Besides, she wasn’t supposed to be working cases, was she? Not according to the contacts he’d so cautiously and entirely naturally exploited to find out what he had about her before their meeting. There was no reason why anyone should connect so bizarre a death to her profiling training.
But how was he going to deal with all this stuff? He couldn’t take the material with him in case a chance encounter with a traffic cop led to a search of his car. Equally, he couldn’t leave it behind, pointing a giant finger of blame in his direction. He wasn’t singing now.
He crouched in one corner of the office, thinking furiously. He couldn’t burn it. It would take too long and the smell would be bound to attract the attention of her neighbours. The last thing he needed was the fire brigade. He couldn’t flush it down the toilet; it would block the drains in no time at all unless he tore it into tiny fragments, and that would take till dawn and beyond. He couldn’t even dig a hole in the garden and bury it, since the discovery of the bitch’s body would only be the starting point for a massively thorough investigation, beginning with the immediate environs of the body.
In the end, the only solution he could come up with left no choice but to take all the incriminating evidence with him. It was a scary thought, but he kept telling himself that luck and the gods were with him, that he’d been untouchable up to now because he took every precaution humanly possible and left only a fraction of the risk to a benevolent fate.
Vance loaded a couple of bin liners with the material and staggered out to the car with them, every step an effort. He had been working on ditching Detective Constable Shaz Bowman for something like fifteen or sixteen hours, and he was running out of mental and physical energy. He never used drugs when he was working; the false sense of power and capability they induced were certain steps to fallibility and stupid mistakes. But just this once, he wished he had a neatly folded paper packet of cocaine in his pocket. A couple of lines of charlie and he’d be flying through the tasks that remained instead of dragging his weary body down this bloody gravel path through the arse end of Leeds.
With a small groan of relief, he dropped the second bin liner in the boot. He paused momentarily, wrinkling his nose in disgust. Leaning forward and sniffing, he confirmed his suspicion. The bitch had pissed in his car, soaking the carpet. One more item to dispose of, he thought, glad he had a ready solution to the problem. He stripped off his surgical greens and gloves and pushed them into the spare-tyre well then gently closed the lid with a soft snap of metal. ‘Goodbye, DC Bowman,’ he muttered as he lowered himself wearily into the driving seat. The clock on the dashboard told him it was nearly half past two. Provided he wasn’t stopped by the cops for being in possession of a smart motor in the small hours of the morning, he’d be at his destination by half past four. The only difficulty would be fighting his instinct to hammer the pedal to the metal so he could put as much distance between him and his achievement as possible. With one hand sweating and the other as cool as the night air, he drove out of the city and headed north.
He made it ten minutes ahead of schedule. The maintenance area of the Royal Newcastle Infirmary was deserted, as he knew it would be until the Sunday morning skeleton shift arrived at six. Vance backed his car into a space in the service bay right next to the double doors that led through to the incinerators that dealt with the hospital’s surgical waste. Often when he’d finished his voluntary work with the patients, he’d come down here to have a brew and a gossip with the service staff. They were proud to count a celebrity like Jacko Vance as a friend, and they’d been more than honoured to provide him with his own smart card to admit him to the maintenance sectors so he could come and go at will. They’d even known him to come down on his own in the middle of the night when there was no one else around and help them out by getting stuck into the incineration work himself, stoking the furnace with the sealed bags of waste that came down from clinics, wards and operating theatres.
It never occurred to them that he added his own fuel to the flames.
That was one of the many reasons why Jacko Vance never feared discovery. He was no Fred West with bodies underpinning the foundations of his home. When he’d finished taking his pleasure with his victims, they disappeared forever in the fierce disintegrating heat of the RNI’s incinerator. For an appliance that routinely swallowed the waste of an entire city hospital, two bin bags full of Shaz Bowman’s research would be a mere amuse bouche. He’d be in and out in twenty minutes. Then the end would be in sight. He could fall into his favourite bed, the one at the heart of his killing floor, ignore all the other distractions and sleep the sleep of the just.
PART TWO
Chapter 16
‘Anybody know where Bowman is?’ Paul Bishop asked impatiently, looking at his watch for the fifth time in two minutes. Five blank faces stared back at him.
‘Gotta be dead, hasn’t she?’ Leon grinned. ‘Never late, not Shazza baby.’
‘Ha ha, Jackson,’ Bishop said sarcastically. ‘Be a good boy and call down to the front desk, see if they’ve taken a message from her.’
Leon tipped his chair forward on
to all four feet and slouched out of the door, the wide shoulders of his sharply tapering jacket managing to make his six feet of skinniness look challenging. Bishop started drumming his fingers on the edge of the video remote control. If he didn’t get this session kicked off soon, he’d be running late. He had a series of scene-of-crime videos to get through then a meeting with a Home Office minister scheduled for lunch. Bloody Bowman. Why did she have to be late today of all days? He’d give her till Jackson got back and then he was forging ahead with the session. Too bad if she missed something crucial.
Simon spoke softly to Kay. ‘Have you spoken to Shaz since Friday?’
Kay shook her head, her light brown hair falling like a curtain across one cheek to create the image of a fieldmouse peering through winter grasses. ‘I left a message when she didn’t turn up for the curry, but she didn’t get back to me. I was half-expecting to see her at the women’s swim last night, but she wasn’t there either. Mind, it wasn’t a firm arrangement or anything.’
Before Simon could say anything more, Leon returned. ‘Not a dicky bird from her,’ he announced. ‘She’s not rung in sick or anything.’
Bishop tutted. ‘Well, we’ll just have to manage without her.’ He briefed them on the morning’s programme, then pressed ‘play’ on the video.
The aftermath of uncontrolled violence and viciousness that unfolded before them made little impact on Simon. Nor did he have much to contribute to the discussion afterwards. He couldn’t get Shaz’s absence out of his head. He’d gone round to her flat to pick her up on Saturday night for their pre-curry drink, as they’d agreed. But when he’d rung the bell, there had been no reply. He’d been early, admittedly, so, thinking she might have been deafened by the shower or the hair dryer, he’d walked back to the main road and found a phone box. He’d let her number ring out until the call was automatically disconnected, then he’d tried twice more. Unable to believe she’d stood him up without a word, he’d walked back up the hill to the flat and tried the doorbell again.