by Giles Ekins
Fiona Helen Reid did not arrive home. She had lived on her own in a small apartment (apart from her cat ‘Duchess’) for three years ever since her husband Tom died and the children had left home and so she was not missed until the following morning when she did not turn up for work as a teaching assistant at her local school.
By which time her headless body had been found, hanging by her feet from the cross, identified by her handbag which had been carefully laid at the foot of the cross, together with her shoes.
The discovery of a fourth headless body coming so soon after the murder of Miriam Adebayo, predictably caused outrage. Questions were raised in Parliament and the government and the Home Secretary came under heavy fire, criticised for inaction, indecision, and a failure to assign adequate resources to the investigation and the inadequacy of policing on the streets due the cuts to the police budget. The Home Secretary was grilled as to the progress of ‘Task Force Salford’ and what efforts had been made to identify and apprehend the killer. He could not give satisfactory answers and was subsequently savaged by the press for his evasiveness and lack of clear direction. In typical politician style he blamed the police for their lack of progress, particularly the head of the investigating team.
The police subsequently came in for severe censure from the press, especially from the ‘Times’ and the ‘Daily Mail’ for their inability to keep the streets of the country safe and cast doubts as to the effectiveness of Task Force Salford, asserting that its creation was a publicity stunt designed by the Home Office to deflect criticism of the Government’s response to the murders and the handling of the Investigation.
Questions were also raised as to whether DCS Kellick was the right officer to be handling such a major enquiry since he had never before undertaken a murder enquiry on such a scale.
DCS Kellick was now fully aware he had picked up the poison chalice and hardly more than a week into his appointment he could already see his dreams of promotion and knighthood disappearing under a welter of, to his mind, undeserved blame and obloquy.
Additional serious crime detectives from the Derbyshire police headquarters in Ripley together with officers from B Division Buxton were assigned to ‘Task Force Salford’ in Manchester and additional resources allocated from within the GMP.
The seed sown by DC Ted Lawson that the perpetrator could be a lorry driver took root and much of the investigation concentrated on that aspect, Kellick almost paranoid, desperate to avoid making the same mistakes as the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation and every haulage and delivery company in the country was asked to provide details of all their drivers and routes taken, trying to track any driver who had made deliveries to Manchester, Skegness, Llandudno and Buxton on the dates in question. An appeal on BBC and in the newspapers for information about anyone, lorry drivers, sales representatives, businessmen, travellers, anyone who had been at or near the murder sites on the relevant dates to come forward produced a flood of calls into the incident room, every one of which had to be logged and followed up but little useful information came to light.
One such call came from a Mrs Liz Cattermole in Leeds who said her husband Barry must be the killer as he had been in all four locations on the night of the murders. When questioned Barry Cattermole could prove from the tachometer on his lorry that he could not have travelled to Llandudno and had never been to Skegness. It turned out that his wife suspected him –rightly- of having an affair and this was her way of getting revenge. She was cautioned about wasting police.
Surprisingly, nobody had yet made the connection between the Billy Boy Boston tour and the murder sites. After leaving Buxton the tour moved on to Blackburn and as they passed the town sign, Alyson Wonder’s backing girls, Sara Asakura and Norah Littlehampton began to sing, ‘Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire, And though the holes were rather small, They had to count them all, Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall’ a verse from the Beatles song, ‘A Day in the Life,’ on the ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club’ album.
The Blackburn show went well enough, not as near perfection as the shows in Skegness and Milton Keynes had been when the audience had been well and truly hooked but well enough except for one unexplained, seemingly minor incident. At the triumphant end of the act as Charlie stood at the front of the stage, arms spread to receive the cheers, a red spotlight from below suddenly shone up onto his face, sharpening his now gaunt features and sunken skeletal cheeks, the dark pitted sleepless eye sockets and the angle of the red light shining on his ears produced sharp pointed shadows and making it look as though he had horns, he was suddenly the blood-red visaged Devil incarnate on stage and several women let out an involuntary scream. The Devil incarnate on Blackburn’s stage captured by a press photographer and printed on the third page of the Lancashire Telegraph under the heading ‘The Devil Comes to Blackburn.’
THIRTY-FOUR
Kingston upon Hull, the next leg of the Billy Boy Boston tour
‘Somebody catch this monster before he kills any more girls, what are the police doing? They don’t seem to have a clue.’
TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD LAUREN SCHOLES, an un-married mother with two young children by different fathers and an alcohol problem did not return home that night. At first her mother Hazel, who looked after Laruen’s children, twelve year old Wayne and seven year old Chardonnay did not worry, it was not the first time that Lauren had stayed out all night, by no means the first. She was a party girl and often slept over with boyfriends (or men she met at the party) but she did usually call and let her mother know. Hazel might not much like her daughter’s lifestyle but she had hardly led a blameless life herself and so whatever her thoughts she kept them to herself.
Hazel’s first moments of anxiety, the first pangs of disquiet began whilst giving the children their breakfast, (baked beans for Wayne, which is all he seemed to live on, that and chip shop chips, and a bowl of Cheerios cereal with milk for Chardonnay who ate anything put before her) when the newsreader on the BBC Radio Humberside Breakfast show announced that an unidentified headless female body had been found floating in amongst the fishing fleet in Albert Dock.
The anxiety grew as the morning wore on. Lauren had never been this late without telephoning, normally she was hardly ever off her mobile phone and Hazel’s stomach began to roil and twist with dread, Several times she tried to phone Lauren’s mobile phone but the phone was either switched off. Or dead.
She scanned through the contacts list on her mobile to see if she had the number of Colin, Lauren’s latest boyfriend, or was he the latest, she seemed to change boyfriends as often as she changed her underwear.
However, she did phone Colin who told her, yes, he had been with Lauren last night at a party but they had had a blazing row when she found him talking to another girl (from the tone of his voice she suspected something other than talking was involved) and she had stormed out, ‘bout midnight, I’d say, or p’raps earlier, couldn’t really say but as far as I’m concerned she can go to hell,’ and at that he disconnected the call.
And when the BBC news gave out more details as released by the police, that the body was that of a young woman, aged between 25 and 35, was fully clothed wearing a red skirt, black stockings, white top and a short pale blue mohair cardigan, Hazel screamed and almost fainted. She knew, she now knew for certain that the body in the dock was that of her daughter Lauren for that was exactly the outfit she was wearing when she left home. Too upset to make the call, she asked her neighbor Beryl to call the police for her. Then she collapsed.
The following morning she made a tearful identification of her daughter’s body as it laid in Hull Royal Infirmary Mortuary, identified by her tattoos and body piercings: a yellow butterfly on her left breast, a circle of thorns about her right upper arm, a naked angel on her right shoulder blade and a red rose at the base of her spine with a curving thorny stem leading down between her buttocks to her anus. She had a ring through her navel and a tongue stud. The
autopsy also revealed that Lauren Scholes was HIV Positive, something Hazel had not known…
‘Don’t worry Mum,’ she said, ‘Them’s the last words she said to me as she left the house,’ Hazel later told a reporter from the Hull Daily Mail. ‘She were a good girl, OK, she had her problems like we all do but that’s no reason for somebody to cut off her head, is it, what kind of monster does that to a young girl? Lauren was a good hearted lass, she tried her best, you know, but it’s not easy bringing up two children on your own, and she doted on those kiddies, absolutely loved them to death, she did. How do I tell them kiddies that their Mam’s got no head? Wayne will get teased at school about it for sure. Somebody’s got to catch this monster before he kills any more girls, what are the police doing? They don’t seem to have a clue.’
What are the police doing?
Over one hundred police were now assigned to the ‘Headhunter’ enquiry, the press had quickly latched onto that name, it made for good headlines and despite DCS Kellick admonitions against the use of that term it quickly came into common usage.
Hazel was correct, the one hundred police assigned to the Headhunter’ enquiry did not have a clue. Despite a mountain of varied information, Kellick and the ‘Task Force Salford’ were no closer to apprehending the ‘Headhunter’ than they were the day that Sheila Anne Dudley’s body was discovered in Merchant’s Quay in Salford and with the latest killing, Kellick could not only see his promotion disappearing but his entire career coming to an undignified halt, he was savvy enough to realise that when the heat from above got too hot, even Detective Chief Superintendents can became expendable. The poisoned chalice got more poisonous by the day, toxic, mephitic and lethal.
Meanwhile, the tour had moved on from Hull, down to the Black Country and to the Victoria Hall in Stoke on Trent.
Thereafter the tour, twisting and writhing like a viper turned eastwards and to the anticipated, triumphal return of Charlie Chilton, formally the Great Santini, to the Seville Theatre, Whitburn on Sea.
THIRTY-FIVE
Whitburn on Sea
Malign daemons, horned and cloven footed with fiery burning eyes that pierce his tormented brain like lasers cavort and grimace and there is blood, always blood, thick and congealing, fresh blood that spurts and spatters, old blood, dark and crimson, headless grave risen corpses point flesh peeling fingers at him.
CHARLIE WAS NOT EXACTLY WELCOMED WITH OPEN ARMS by Benny Marsden at the Seville Theatre but at least he made an attempt to be civil and came out to greet him and shake hands. ‘Good to see you again, Charlie, great new act, seen it on the telly, looking forward to seeing it live, see if I can work out how you manage it,’ but Charlie, dour and now thoroughly depressed and paranoid barely managed to acknowledge him, haunted as he was by his recurring nightmares and terrors and after a perfunctory handshake, Charlie scuttled away like started rat.
‘Fuck him then,’ thought Benny, ‘at least I tried but I should’ve known better, he’s always been an arrogant prick and always will be, even if he don’t call himself the Great Santini any more Prick! .Got to give him his due though, he knows how to pick his girlies, this Selene he’s got, she’s a cracker, don’t know where he finds them, ‘cos Clarrie was a stunner an’ all, could have done some serious mischief with her. Not this one though, looks too frigid and ice bound for me but Charlie, God, he looks like absolute shite. Christ, the poor fucker looks, what’s the word…haunted, the whisky demons at him again. I suppose. Dead eyes, he looks even worse than he did last year, and that’s saying summat, obviously hitting the bottle again big time, just hope he doesn’t fuck up on stage again, leastwise not on my stage.
After perfunctory sounds checks, Charlie left the rest of the set up to Keith and Jon and morosely left the theatre to make his way back to the hotel.
The old Imperial Hotel, located on the Whitburn seafront at the opposite arm of the bay to the theatre had once been one of the great LNER railway hotels. It was then taken over by the impresario Edmund de Vale when the railways were nationalised in 1948 and on his death came into the ownership of Elspeth and Edith, the de Vale sisters who closed it down when it no longer provided an income sufficient to cover costs and left it to genteelly rot into virtual dereliction, a prominent eyesore on the promenade. Then about two years ago, hopelessly optimistic developers (or money laundering developers) bought the Imperial from the de Vale sisters and spent a lot of money refurbishing it to become one of the better, more fashionable hotels in Whitburn, not that is saying a lot but the rooms are clean and comfortable well-furnished and there is an all-day coffee shop for breakfast and a bar for the rest of Charlie’s meals.
It was raining again in Whitburn, ‘It’s always fucking raining in Whitburn,’ Charlie thought sourly as he hurried along the promenade to the hotel where his best friend Jack was waiting for him. He was soaked by the time he got to the hotel and once in his room on the 4th floor stripped off his wet clothes, keeping on only his black and red striped Marks and Spencer boxer shorts, tossing his damp clothes into a soggy heap in the corner.
Desultorily he picks up the free morning newspaper and flips through the pages and finds that on page 3 the paper still carried the story of the Lauren Scholes murder in Hull. Under a photograph of Lauren and the headline ‘Headhunter Killers 5th Victim ‘ it reads: 27 years old Hull Lauren Scholes from Hull on Wednesday became the 5th victim of the killer now known as the Headhunter. Previous victims of the killer are… padding out the story with re-hashed details of Sheila Dudley, Sandra Worthington, Miriam Adebayo and Fiona Helen Reid, the words and names pounding into his brain with sledgehammer blows, guilt and torment raking his innards with iron talons.
Charlie reads the story once more before tossing it aside in anguish and takes another drink, now drinking directly from the bottle again. He is disintegrating rapidly, both physically and mentally, sliding inexorably into a deepening slough of depression, despair, fears, gnawing anxieties and nameless terrors.
At night he dare not sleep but no matter how hard he strains to stay awake, knowing that the night horrors await him, sleep always eventually overcomes him and he tumbles into a malignant world of tortured nightmares. His night-horrors are infested with gargoyle goblins who sneer and leer, screaming obscenities and profanities at him in hell-born tongues he does not understand, malign daemons, horned and cloven footed with fiery burning eyes that pierce his tormented brain like lasers, cavort and grimace and there is blood, always blood, thick and congealing or fresh blood that spurts and spatters in steaming rivulets, old blood, dark and crimson, headless grave risen corpses point flesh peeling fingers at him in condemnation, foul slime-sleeked creatures crawl and infect his mouth, rot his gums, grotesque terrors stalk his endless nightmares, shadowed devils and imps cavort in flickering flames as severed heads stare malignly, maggot ridden mouths curse him, heads with staring accusatory worm crawling eyes ,his own bloody hands, malignancy and malevolence stab hateful screams in to his ears, ‘Only death can buy a life, only death can buy a life, one eye is taken for an eye, one eye is taken for an eye, one head is taken for a head, one head is taken for a head.ONE HEAD IS TAKEN FOR A HEAD. Other voices intrude, slithering like foul fork-tongued serpents into the nightmares, adding to his torments: a fallen angel is all I am, you’re one of us now Charlie, one of us forever, do you even have a soul to sell, you keep the faith, Charlie, you keep the faith, take her down onto the beach and then kill her You have to keep the faith as you swore in blood, strangle her, cut off her head, Tchort demands his tribute, the time has come to pay your dues. Remember, you are one of us forever, Charlie. Forever. Forever, forever, forever, forever, forever, FOREVER. Voices of the victims, Sandra and the others add to the cacophony raging within his bursting skull, voices he cannot recognise; No, No, please, screams, voices raised in terror before they are forever choked. And the visions of blood. Always the blood.
Waking from the night horrors offers no relief. vivid images of blood and headless corpses now plague eve
n his waking hours and sometimes, as he turns his head, in the corner of his reddened eyes, he sees severed heads, heads on top of lampposts, spiked on railings, on gate posts, children kicking about a head rather than a football, heads in shop windows, heads in bloody hands. His own bloody hands.
He takes another drink but can find no solace, Lauren Scholes’ photograph glares accusingly at him, ‘It’s not me,’ he mutters, ‘it’s not me. Not me.’ But he cannot escape it, deep inside his tormented soul he knows; viscerally he knows that he is the Headhunter Killer. And most damning of all is the black silk Hermès scarf that ripples like quicksilver in his hands which of their own volition twist the scarf into a strangling garrotte.
‘It’s not me, ‘ he mutters again, ‘Dear God, it’s not me, it’s that Tchort, Asmodeus fucking Tchort, he’s doing this., not me… TCHORT! Always it’s Tchort, fucking up my head. Can’t be me, it’s Satan, wait a fucking mo, Mr. Tchort. And that stuck up bitch Selene, egging me on. The time has come to pays your dues, she says. Prancing about bare-arse naked all day and night, sticking it in my face and then fancy dancing away, laughing, sneering, goading me, ‘Mr. Tchort says I can’t,’ he says in falsetto voice, ‘Mr. Tchort says I’ve got to remain a virgin, Mr. Tchort says this, Mr. Tchort says that’
‘Cock-teasing bitch,’ he snarls, back in his normal voice. ‘It’s not me. It’s not me, it’s not me,’ monotonically chanting the words as though they were a mystic mantra and that constant repetition would make them come true. He staggers over to the room window and opens it. ‘IT’S NOT ME. IT’S NOT ME,’ shouting to the winds and seagulls, his words snatched away unheard in the rain and squalls.