by Mo Hayder
The smell is nauseating. He’s smelled death and decay before, but this smell has got an extra sweet edge to it. He goes back into the kitchen and chucks away the coffee. He washes the cup then goes around the kitchen, opening drawers, sniffing inside the fridge for the hundredth time. He goes to the coal cellar door and stands there, shining a torch down the wooden steps. Ian the Geek is shuffling about below, checking there are no vents that could carry the smell from the scullery into the cellar, then up through the floorboards. And failing that, no dead dog corpses down there among the coal.
‘Hey!’ Honig puts a hand on the doorpost and leans into the cellar. ‘Geek? You there?’
There’s a muffled noise of coal falling somewhere under the kitchen floor. The sound of Ian the Geek swearing. A moment or two later he appears at the bottom of the steps, shining his own torch up at Honig. His face is covered in coal dust.
‘Well?’ hisses Honig. ‘What’s there?’
Ian the Geek shakes his head. ‘Coal.’ He clicks off the torch, wipes his forehead, and climbs wearily up the steps. He is completely covered in coal dust. He goes to the fireplace and starts batting at the dust, trying to get it off his clothes.
Honig watches him in silence. He’s deeply uneasy. That same unease he’s had since last night. There’s something about the smell he can’t put his finger on. Why hasn’t something – some rat or badger or other – crept in through the open scullery door and eaten the insides of that deer? Suddenly, out of nowhere, he wants to know exactly where Ian the Geek found the dead animal.
‘Right,’ he says, tipping away the remains of his coffee. ‘You’re going to move those disgusting things out of the scullery. And then we’re going to get in the car.’
‘We’re going somewhere?’
‘Yeah. You’re going to show me where you found that damned animal.’
Hugo and Sophie
BY FIVE P.M. Caffery finds himself in a pub. It’s one of those gastropubs that looks like it’s been set up ten years ago and left to run itself into the ground. It must once have had high aspirations, but now it’s scruffy – wooden floors with black streams running down the centre where people have walked. The kickboard below the bar, where the punters would rest their feet, is splintered in places, and once smart furniture in bold, primary colours has gone tatty and stained. On a wall between the bar and the window is a blackboard on which have been drawn dog footprints, with names chalked under them – all the loved animals who have been regulars over the years, by the looks of it.
Caffery sits next to the unlit fire on one of the lime-green sofas with Bear, who delicately takes crisps from his fingers. Johnny Patel was right – it was a wasted journey, coming to Dorset. The staff at the Royal Corps of Signals want to help but the historic records from the eighties aren’t kept here but in Glasgow, of all places. And to find an individual with nothing to go on but the name of a spouse would take months. ‘Jimmy’, or whatever his real name is, may have left the Signallers Corps before the wedding; he could, conceivably, still be with the unit, but divorced, remarried. The computations are infinite, it’s a dead end.
Caffery has come straight from regimental HQ and stopped here, at the first pub he saw. There’s a half-empty beer glass in front of him. If he drinks any more he won’t be able to drive, but he doesn’t know what else to do with himself at this point.
He pulls out his phone and opens his messages, combing through the spam and the work-related mass-circulation emails. There’s one from DS Paluzzi. He opens it and his first thought is that she must really like him. She can’t send direct from the database so she’s transcribed all the information she can find about the BMX course into a pdf file and emailed him. ‘Must’ve taken hours,’ he tells Bear as he pulls on his glasses and scrolls through the document. ‘Hours.’
What he reads is an instant slap in the face. The BMX course is close to the house, but not quite close enough for shouts to be heard. Fifteen years ago there was a double murder there; the victims were the Frinks’ grandson Hugo and his girlfriend. No wonder the colonel is so disjointed and numb, why the nurse stares at the place as if it’s cursed.
Caffery hasn’t heard of Minnet Kable until now, probably because he’s only been in the local force for four years. Kable was a convicted sexual predator. He had raped three young girls just outside Yeovil and had done nine years in Ashworth high-security psychiatric hospital, from which he was released in 1991. In the summer of 1999 he attacked and killed the couple on the BMX course, which in those days was known as the Donkey Pitch.
Caffery lets out a long, low whistle as he reads the next part. A lot of this isn’t known to the public and it makes difficult reading.
Minnet Kable must have taken with him a holdall containing everything he needed for the night. An ice pick and a Stanley knife. Probably food and drink too – because the whole thing took over twelve hours.
When he ambushed them with an ice pick Hugo was semi-naked, face down on top of Sophie. In this initial attack Sophie sustained a relatively superficial wound caused from the pick exiting Hugo’s abdomen and entering hers. She was bleeding but was able to scramble out from under her boyfriend and run into the woods. However from the very first blow Hugo was doomed. The pick had penetrated the muscle of his buttock into the base of his spine and severed a vital nerve that serviced his legs. He became instantly unable to control himself from the waist down.
Kable didn’t inflict another wound on Hugo. He had no need. The boy was paralysed and Kable had the leisure of watching him die. It probably took about five hours. That’s why the murders became known locally as the Wolf murders, because the method was the way a dog or a wolf would kill its prey. Wounding, then stalking and containing – constantly corralling – until the victim was exhausted and died of blood loss.
Meanwhile Sophie Hurst-Lloyd was hiding in the woods.
Even fifteen years after the event, and with all he’s seen and done, Caffery still finds it hard to take in what happened to her.
Kable must have been enormously confident, because he appears to have allowed her to escape. Apart from the small wound to her abdomen, her body at autopsy showed no other injuries from the initial attack. There was every chance she would have survived if she’d escaped. The forensic fingertip-search team found her hiding place on the third day. The pile of leaves she’d burrowed herself into. They found the attempt she’d made to scratch out a message on a tree trunk.
Mum, Dad, I love you. I’m sorry. I want to come home …
There was more writing, maybe an attempt to identify Kable as her attacker, but the words had been rendered illegible with deep gouges that matched the profile of Kable’s Stanley knife. Bad luck, or some might call it fate, had led her to choose the most difficult place in the wood to escape from. She’d edged herself back into the angle at the foot of a steep cliff where the cliff formed a U shape. Caffery knows exactly where she was trapped: he and Bear have been there. It’s the same escarpment where the cave is. Sophie’s misfortune was that she didn’t see it. If she had, there would have been an outside chance that she could have survived.
In those days teenagers didn’t carry mobile phones. Her choices were to escape, which would have meant passing the place where Kable sat watching her boyfriend die, or to wait. Sensibly, she waited. She waited and she waited. While Venus and Mercury and the moon rose, crossed the heavens and dipped to the horizon, she inched herself deeper under the leaves, keeping her breathing light and steady. In all likelihood, she couldn’t see Kable and Hugo, but she did have a watch and she must have thought that twelve hours after the wood fell silent was a reasonable time to wait. She must have thought that by the time the first light of dawn filtered through the trees, when there hadn’t been any movement except for the occasional passing fox, the occasional bird, she’d be safe to move.
She didn’t reckon on the madness and perseverance of Minnet Kable. He was as good at waiting as she was. He came at her the moment she moved. He co
rnered her and attacked her repeatedly with the Stanley knife. The report says Minnet was ambidextrous – he’d demonstrated that in attacks before – and sure enough the wounds bore this out. The most vicious punctures were made with a right-handed blow, but some were made with the left – so he’d had time and leisure to switch hands. Sophie took forty minutes to die. Like Hugo, she died from blood loss. Maybe it was quicker in her case because she was already cold and weak from a night in the woods.
Incredible, Caffery thinks, the confidence Kable showed. To contain two fit and healthy teenagers in those relatively public woods – without any panic, for that length of time – knowing he could have been discovered at any moment. How one person could have had that self control – that persistence – is beyond Caffery.
When Kable was finished he extracted the intestines of the teenagers through their abdominal wounds. The pathologist was of the opinion that Sophie was still clinging to life at that point, and could have been conscious of what was happening. Kable draped the entrails in the tree branches, forming the shape of a heart. Then he posed the bodies in what the pathologist believed was the same position he’d first found them in when he attacked them with the ice pick: Hugo on top, Sophie’s legs wrapped round his waist. An unholy embrace among the wet leaves. With the intestines hanging above them, the crime-scene photos make the couple look like twins in the womb, attached to an umbilical cord.
The final touch was the strangest. After placing the couple face to face, as if they were kissing, Kable either repeatedly stamped on or battered their heads – the report’s not conclusive – but whatever method he used it was forceful enough to break their noses and cheekbones. When the police pulled the bodies apart, the report says, the teenagers’ faces were not recognizable as human.
Caffery lets out his breath in a long stream. He puts the phone face down on the table and rests his head back against the wall, mulling it all over. He wonders if jealousy was at work. Perhaps Kable was in love with one of the kids – the guy or the girl, who knows? – and what he did to their faces was his way of punishing them for their intimacy. Mash them together. If they were going to kiss, they had to really kiss. That would teach them. The mocking heart shape, and a ring Hugo gave to Sophie which has never been found: it all points to jealousy. And yet the detectives and the case workers at the time were never able to establish a personal connection between Kable and the couple.
Bear nuzzles his hand and Caffery opens one eye, squinting down at her. ‘You’re right. Interesting, but it doesn’t get me any nearer to finding out who you are.’
He swivels his eye to the beer glass. He doesn’t think he can face going home tonight. What he wants is to find the Walking Man. To make him talk. To throttle something out of him. But when he pictures it he knows he could strangle the guy, stop him breathing, and all he’d get from him would be a beatific smile – a serene certainty that this was exactly what he’d expected to happen. The Walking Man will never beg for mercy, will never tell his secrets, will never strike deals in desperation. He’ll only talk when he is ready.
Caffery closes his eyes and drops his head back against the wall, breathing steadily.
The Deer
IAN REMOVES THE bucket from the scullery and places it in the woods. The intestines stink, and as he walks the flies keep pace with him in a cloud like a cartoon smell, like the smell of gravy in the old Bisto kids adverts. Afterwards he has to bin the T-shirt he was wearing and take a shower. Then he joins Honig and together they get into the Chrysler.
Honig’s face is red and hard as he drives. He doesn’t speak. They go slowly down the driveway, out of the gates, and take a left turn. They keep going, Ian directing, until they come to a small lay-by.
‘Here,’ Ian says. ‘This is where I found it.’
Evening hasn’t reached The Turrets yet, but down here in the shadow of the hill the dark is gathering already. There’s a faint chill in the air as they lock the car and head off into the trees.
Ian stops where some rusted barbed wire is looped between trees. He waves his hands around vaguely. ‘It was in this area. Why?’
‘Here?’ Honig approaches thoughtfully, looking all around him. There is nothing. He walks in a big circle, kicking the grass, lifting branches. ‘You sure it was here?’
‘Yes. I mean, I think so.’
‘Tell me what happened. I mean, you find a deer – already shot, you said? What did you cut it with to get the innards out?’
‘A … a knife.’
‘A knife? From where?’
‘The kitchen. That knife block.’
‘You’re lying.’
Ian swallows. ‘No, I’m not lying – I …’
‘Exactly which knife? You’d need to be sure – to butcher a deer, you’d need to have the right knife. Can’t just use a butter knife, you know.’
‘I didn’t use a butter knife. I used one from the knife block.’
Honig narrows his eyes suspiciously. ‘Did you wash it afterwards? I didn’t see anything that had been washed.’
Ian pushes his glasses hard against his face and blinks. He hates being caught out in a lie. It was one of the things his mother used to love doing – catching him out in every lie she could. Even the small, white lies. How did you sleep last night? Oh OK. No, you’re lying, Ian, I know you didn’t sleep, I heard you up and moving around at two in the morning, why do you lie to me?
He lowers his eyes to his feet. Anything rather than look up. It occurs to him that if he does look up there’s no predicting what he might see. Maybe not Honig’s face – maybe his mother’s looking back at him. Accusing: You liar. Maybe something worse.
‘I am fucking speaking to you, Geek. Because I am standing here and I cannot see any evidence at all that there was a deer here. No signs of you dragging it to the car. So you’re lying to me.’
Ian grinds his teeth. He’s got to hold steady. Forty thousand dollars says he’s got to hold it together. That and much more – his honour, his pride. So much. ‘OK,’ he blurts, still not looking at Honig. ‘It’s true. There wasn’t any deer. Just its insides. Here – on the barbed wire.’
‘Its insides? You found its innards – here on the wire?’
Ian rubs his nose. He still hasn’t lifted his eyes. ‘Yes. I’d spoken to the housekeeper and I was walking back. I came up through the woods and I just found them. They were there next to the driveway and I assumed – I don’t know, I assumed they came from an animal that had been killed or hit by a car or something. Or shot, because someone had been shooting up here – I could hear them. But by the time I got here they must have field-dressed it – got rid of the intestines and carried the carcass. Or …’ At last he raises his eyes. Honig is staring at him, his face white in the purple half light. ‘Or that’s what I assumed.’
‘Assumed. ASSSS-umed? You fucking dickhead. You’re telling me you found the insides of an animal – but no animal?’
‘Yes. And I remembered what we heard from Havilland about Kable and I thought … what?’ He breaks off. Honig is shaking his head in disbelief. ‘What? It’s not that weird.’
‘You know what? I think it is weird. Just slightly fucking weird. In fact totally un-fucking-believable.’
‘Why’re you so upset?’
‘Well, let’s start with the fact you lied. Not once – twice.’
‘Yes, but not about anything important. Jesus, I had a lot to think about – the housekeeper, the phone, the alarm …’
He trails off. Honig has turned and is walking away, shaking his head.
‘Come on,’ he shouts. ‘Keep up. We’ve got calls to make.’
Breanne
‘DO YOU WANT some water?’
Caffery opens his eyes. A woman stands opposite him, an array of dirty glasses clasped between her fingers. She must be in her mid-forties, yet she’s dressed like a biker chick of twenty in black leather jeans and a tight black vest. Her long hair is dyed aubergine and tied in two plaits that hang to her waist
. But the thing which really sets her apart is the scar on her neck, face and cheek. From just under her nose, stretching down her neck on to her chest. She must have had several skin transplants because the bottom half of her face is a different texture to the top half: it is raised but smooth, white and unblemished, while the top half is tanned, with a spattering of freckles across the nose. It’s as if someone has cut her in half across the centre of her face and stitched on a different lower half.
‘It’s OK, you can blink now. I’m used to it.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He shakes his head. ‘I was staring. Rude.’
‘Human nature. Makes you normal, not rude. You stare when you’re not sure what you’re seeing – it’s like you’re checking to make sure I’m not a threat. That’s what pigeonholing is all about too – people do that to keep themselves safe. I’ve had it all explained to me by the psychiatrist. And trust me – you’re as normal as they come.’
‘Am I?’
She pauses for a minute, scrutinizing him. Then, at length, she gives a small, ironic smile. Puckered and painful though her face is, there’s something weirdly sexy about that smile.
‘Staring at me – that’s normal,’ she says, at length. ‘But the rest? Who knows? I couldn’t comment. Now,’ she nods at Bear, ‘does your dog want some water or not? We like to look after the pets in here – that’s what makes us the pub we are. That sort of friendliness.’
‘Thank you.’ Caffery sits up a little straighter and rubs his eyes, feeling suddenly as if he’s actually been asleep. ‘That would be kind.’