by A D Davies
He imagined that tent going up, a little impenetrable wigwam, Freddie ruing his time battling this stupid tree. The police and those scientist types would quote squatters’ rights and he’d be stuck with them as neighbours forever. And here he was dangling from a branch like Garfield the cat.
So he let go.
The ground came up fast. He intended to land softly, possibly tuck his right arm under himself, roll, and end up back on his feet, dusting himself off and looking up proudly at the branch from where he’d dropped. But that was in Freddie-World. Right now, the laws of Freddie-World were absent, the rules of reality prevalent, and it was one of these rules that somehow prevented Freddie from rolling and landing unharmed.
Instead, a bolt of pain shot from his left ankle straight up his leg. He fell, crashed sideways into the mulch and leaves, and didn’t get up for several minutes. He held the injured ankle in the air, could feel it swelling, pushing against the Hush Puppies he bought last month.
And it wasn’t getting better lying there.
Using the tree to lean on, he stood, and tried his ankle; it would not support his weight. He eventually found a branch sturdy enough to act as a walking stick. Then he set off to explain that he no longer required police assistance, but thanks a bunch anyway.
PC Wayne Dobson was cold. The sun shone high and bright, but the wind dropped the temperature by a good few degrees. It didn’t help that he happened to be tramping up an incline to guard the highest point of the crime scene, unable to hear even mutters of what was going on.
Probies always get the crap jobs.
He was partnered with the constable who found the body, or rather the constable who responded to the call, smelled the vague hint of rotting flesh emanating from that old well (all Dobson could detect was excrement—human or animal, he wasn’t sure), then called in the experts.
Gary Webster would still get the credit though.
And because of this, Gary was allowed on-scene. In the scene. While Wayne Dobson guarded a dirt road.
Four SOCOs staffed the scene, under the command of DCI Chambers, who Wayne’s colleagues called “a wet dream for teenage boys”, like the gift of a slender teacher or best friend with a young mother. He heard regular use of the term MILF, but only one officer had survived Chambers hearing it; the others were ground up and fed to her pigs, or so the rumours went. Besides, Dobson hated the way his colleagues referred to her like that, as if her physical mien were of any relevance to her work. No, Dobson had sat in on briefings she led, talks she gave on modern investigative techniques, and lessons in crime-scene protocol. And each time, because she was so damn good at this, he paid complete attention, even shushing Rick Davies one time when he whispered that he could see Chambers’ bra through a gap in her blouse. Now he was missing out on watching her in action first hand.
Webster now conversed with the chap from the council, a planner, someone on the team which analysed this land, passed the structure as safe. Chambers spoke on her mobile, meaning little filtered through Dobson’s radio. All he knew was what he’d heard in the initial build up, before Chambers arrived. Two women, dead. One recent, the other reduced to bones and gnawed flesh. Lovely image.
One of the SOCOs emerged from the well, pulled up via the winch they’d brought with them. He’d left another scene of crime office down below, and to another colleague he handed a plastic bag containing what looked like—from Dobson’s distance—a human hand. What remained of it, anyway. Webster bent over to have a look before they tagged it and sealed it into the forensics container. From Dobson’s days at the academy, not more than a month ago, he could not remember them removing body parts so quickly in any given scenario.
When Wayne Dobson faced the way he was supposed to be, a man approached, halfway between him and the gate covered in police “Do Not Enter” signage. He was dressed in a suit and a shirt and tie, and aside from a few smears of dirt, it appeared to be a nice wool blend. Not inexpensive either. The man, however, bore a shock of wild hair, as if he had recently been electrocuted. He limped forward, his grey beard a lop-sided triangle pointing down. He used a long stick like a crutch and flailed his free arm toward the crime scene.
“Sir,” Dobson said in the firm voice his training demanded. “Sir, you can’t come in here. Didn’t you see the signs?”
“Now you listen up one minute,” the man said, closer now, not stopping. “This has been my home for the last two years. I only called you in to get rid of the body. Don’t want it haunting up my place.”
Dobson held a hand out. “Body? What do you know about a body?”
“The body! The body in the waste pipe of course!” He stopped six feet from Dobson. “I called you—on the phone—but I didn’t think you’d disrupt everything like this. How long are you going to be here?”
“Sir, you need to give a statement.”
“Will that make you go away?”
“I can’t say.” Dobson looked around, at the well, the activity from which he was excluded, back to the wild-looking oddball. “Sir, if you’ll come with me, I’ll see someone takes your statement.”
The man rolled his eyes, and tutted. “Young man, my statement is this: a woman got herself killed, and the killer dumped her in my toilet. End of story.”
“A woman?” How did he know for sure?
“Yes indeed. A dead woman. In the pipe. Now get rid of her and go. Arrest whoever did this to me.”
Dobson thought about this man, what he said. His home. He knew it was a woman. Knew she was dead.
Dobson felt for his truncheon, checked his pepper spray and unhooked the clip. “Sir, you have to come with me.”
“I ain’t going anywhere, not until you people get that body out and bugger off.”
Dobson was close now, close enough to touch. “Sir…”
“Ah!” The man hefted his stick-cum-crutch, narrowly missing Dobson’s hand, and pointed it. “Don’t touch me.”
This man was a suspect. Aggressive. Ordering a police officer to desist in his duty. No choice.
Dobson whipped out his truncheon—a standard issue black Monadnock—and with a flick extended it to its full twenty-four inches. He knocked the branch to the side. The man dropped it and staggered, landed on his bad foot and fell. Dobson dropped the baton and slapped handcuffs on his first ever prisoner.
For a moment, he forgot how to read people their rights. Then it all came flooding back, as he’d practiced on his girlfriend, and arrested the man for trespassing on a crime scene, hopeful he could soon trump it up to murder.
Meanwhile, close to the well/pipe, with Webster and the council guy out of the way, senior Scene of Crime Officer, and crime scene manager, William Hopper was able to finish his over-long report relating to the initial crime scene. He logged the few surviving body parts, completed his initial findings, and he had bagged and removed the evidence to preserve it. Rats swarmed all over the place down there. That there was this much left showed there may be a God after all. Human waste also pervaded, which was a job for the junior officers—“good for their development,” he told them. The more intact body would be removed for closer examination. ETA at the Sheerton morgue was two p.m., three hours from now. He also added the suspected cause of death:
Body 1: unknown. Body 2: single stab wound to the chest.
After proofreading it twice, he rephrased the gruesome bits with less panache—a bad habit he’d developed since becoming addicted to Patricia Cornwell novels—and pressed “send”. He smiled, knowing the 4G satellite-capable laptop in front of him represented a mere fraction of the advancements made in this job over the years, that paperwork should soon be even easier.
He even knew how it worked: the information he compiled was disassembled by the newest software available, encoded by a chip far more expensive and well-tested than you get in civilian computers, and shot up into the atmosphere, through the ozone layer and into the cold clutches of space. The time it took to reach the satellite from the time he hit the “s
end” key was less than 0.5 seconds. From here, a satellite relayed the encoded data to a similar computer in the morgue, and also one at Sheerton police station, where DCI Chambers was based. Here, the computer decoded the data with similar speed, and presented it to anyone with high enough clearance.
William Hopper knew all this because he’d been on a course.
What Sergeant Hopper didn’t know, however, was that this same satellite interpreted several words, including “homicide” as in “two likely homicide victims”, and a clause in its programming came into effect, forwarding a second copy to a Home Office computer. This computer, thanks to Britain’s special relationship with the United States, shared the data with an even more powerful computer based at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. This machine then fed the information into a vast database known as ViCAP—the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, housed in the famed FBI stronghold at Quantico.
ViCAP logs every murder in the United States—its circumstances, its victims, and even, in some cases, motive. Where possible, murders are shared from other countries too. After all, people who live for murder need not hunt exclusively on their home turf.
But monitoring this database would be more than a full-time job for one person. So it is only when you input relevant data that matches are spat back out. It is a secure system. Only law enforcement agencies—with permission from the guardians of this program, the FBI—are granted access. Some agents—senior agents—are allowed to view it from home, for those nights where they wake in a cold sweat, their subconscious disturbing something missed during the hours of daylight. And when they leave the agency, this access is taken away.
Unless, like Alfie Rhee, you hide a code in the remote networking software, a code that provides access even after you’ve been forced out of your job. Even six years after he cleared his desk for the final time, meaning it this time, really quitting, even now he’d be disturbed by some traffic noise, grow restless, and wander from his bed, power-up his laptop on the antique desk overlooking Manhattan, and surf through ViCAP as a teenager might shop for music.
Tonight, after twenty years of searching, he found what he needed.
Chapter Nine
Alicia had seen men’s faces turn grey before, but Murphy’s was a new shade. “Ashen” would have been healthy. And as they drove in silence through a wide, leafy street with wheelie bins awaiting collection and nice cars and well-kept hedges, Alicia wondered about the people living here, if one of them might be next, joining Katie in wherever murdered girls end up.
The wide street gave way to a main road, and the road led to an industrial estate called Evergreen. They followed the waving constable’s directions to the far end where two squad cars and a SOCO team were already on scene. The old railway tracks crisscrossing waste ground at the back of the estate used to serve the canal, transporting goods from the rag trade to the narrowboats that would then head to Bradford and Lancashire.
The SOCOs had enclosed Katie’s body in a white tent erected over the tracks, and now dozens of drafted-in officers sucked up overtime as they conducted a fingertip search of the surrounding area. Aside, two female police community support officers—PCSOs—shared coffees with a man and woman in office attire. Alicia and Murphy showed their IDs to the officers and received an abbreviated overview of what happened. Then they pressed the man and woman—Terry and Jean—to tell it again.
The two worked in an office overlooking the waste ground spanning beyond the railway tracks. They popped out on the roof for a smoke when they spotted a man—hard to discern his height—carrying a bulky package over one shoulder. Joking that it must be a body, they watched, though Terry thought it was probably building waste or something the council tip wouldn’t accept. The guy was dressed in a long coat and had a baseball cap pulled down over his face, and they seemed to think he was white but, when pushed, neither could say for sure they saw skin.
Alicia filed the image in a part of her brain that had many like it; the Hollywood vision of a serial killer—trench-coat, baseball cap, all dark colours.
Was this guy a fan of other murderers? Did he watch the movie version of John Wayne Gacy’s life or some made-up psychopath and try to emulate them this way?
When the two plucked up the courage to investigate, Terry maturely “dared” Jean to take a peek at the “body.” They were perhaps expecting a gardener’s leftovers.
“The face.” Jean dabbed her eyes. “That poor girl’s face.”
Terry curled an arm around her. Alicia wondered if this was an illicit office romance—he wore a wedding ring; she did not.
“Thank you,” Murphy said, already on his way to the SOCOs’ white tent.
Alicia caught up with him as he spoke to one of two white-clad women at the entrance flap.
“We’re a little short today, Inspector,” the SOCO said. “Got a double find over in Eccup.”
“Okay,” Murphy said. “Can I see her?”
“Not much to see. Nothing helpful at this point anyway.”
“Can I see her?”
The woman pulled the tent open enough for Murphy to stick his head inside. He wasn’t supposed to do that without a protective hood, but they allowed him a peek. He withdrew slowly.
“Not nice, is it,” the SOCO said.
Alicia was beginning to feel left out. “May I?” She poked her head into the tent and the SOCO peeling evidence off the corpse moved to one side.
Katie’s jaw was smashed into a right angle and her teeth had caved in, many of them missing. Her nose and eyes were swollen beneath the dried blood. One ear was missing. Unlike the other victims to date, she was naked. Through the filth, Alicia discerned massive bruises and scratches to her forearms—defensive blows—and tell-tale binding welts around her ankles and wrists.
It wasn’t the worst thing Alicia had seen, but it didn’t mean she’d look at it longer than necessary.
She joined Murphy who sat cross-legged on the dusty gravel. He picked up a stone and lobbed it into the wasteland.
“Careful,” Alicia said. “Might be evidence.”
“What’s happening?” he asked.
“You’re throwing stones and a man is planning to kidnap another girl. Probably tonight, if he hasn’t taken her already.”
“And we can’t wait because it means we have another crack at him. Another three or four days for a body, maybe two since it looks like he’s speeding up. Interviewing useless bloody witnesses, and we still haven’t even spoken to Henry bloody Windsor, because this new clue has shown up. Katie. Katie is dead.”
Alicia sat next to Murphy and followed his eyes over the rocky black field, the route the man walked, to stand right here, where Murphy threw another stone.
“Not even making a tiny bit of effort to conceal her this time.”
“No.” Alicia recalled the maybe-lovers’ statements. “Almost the opposite. Like she’s on display.”
“But in black bags. Discarded rubbish. Could it be they’re losing their appeal?”
“Dehumanising her. It’s the natural progression.”
Murphy threw another stone.
Alicia found a bigger stone, half a house brick in fact, and hurled it after Murphy’s pebble.
She said, “Stuff like this comes up more often than you think. We estimate there are at least ten serial killers in Britain at this moment. People who kill maybe every two or three years. Start as rapists mostly, but women these days are more willing to go to court, look them in the eye and say ‘Yep, he did it, m’lud’.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that serial killers do not do this. They don’t kill every seven days then five days, then three. Except right at the end. In the spree phase.”
“Like Bundy.”
“Yes. Like Bundy. But we usually catch them before then.” Alicia found another rock to throw and aimed it at her first one. She missed.
Murphy rose with a creak to his knees and Alicia walked with him in silence to
her car. His face remained set. As Wellington had grown affectionate toward Tanya Windsor without having met her, Murphy clearly liked Katie, missed her as if it had been his duty to protect her. And he failed.
The worst part was yet to come. Alicia had vowed to fight for Katie Hague. She promised Katie’s father so much, given him such hope, hope she’d seen in him last night. Alicia’s next job was to rip that hope away, and inform Richard his daughter would never come home again.
Richard Hague was not numb. At first, when DS Friend delivered the news, yes, he felt nothing but a heavy lilt to his limbs. Only a moment of numbness. The sensation morphed into one of falling, falling a long way, through cold air, ice flakes stinging his body. Then the tingling behind his nose expanded, releasing tears. Soon, he was in the back of their car, the man—Murphy—driving. What was DS Friend’s first name? Alicia. That was it. The pretty name. She sat alongside him, holding his hand again.
Last night my hand was covered in blood. Soon, it will be again.
“Katie has been taken to Sheerton Station,” Alicia told him. “I have to tell you that she isn’t … she isn’t how you remember her. I’m afraid her face is quite…”
“I don’t care,” Richard said. “I need this.”
He squeezed her hand, knowing it hurt her, that she pretended it didn’t. She would keep up the pretence until serious damage threatened. Damage he could so easily inflict.
He added, “You said I don’t have to look, but I do. I really do.”
Richard stayed with Gillian for two hours after she died, holding her, kissing her, unable to believe the cold mass of flesh before him was the woman who bore him a beautiful baby girl. He staved off the urge for as long as he could before killing the hooker and dumping her in that well. He didn’t exactly do a lot of research, but he knew about the structure from a school trip years earlier, and when he recced the place he heard the faint trickle of water down below. The body could turn up somewhere, but in all likelihood it had been swept away for the animals to munch on, or to take up space in an unexplored cave system.