Witness X: ‘Silence of the Lambs meets Blade Runner’ Stephen Baxter

by SE Moorhead

  Kyra’s breath quickened, the bees were stirring again. ‘If you didn’t do it—’

  ‘I never,’ he jumped in.

  ‘Well then.’ She tried to make her voice sound as steady as possible. ‘We want to catch whoever did. So, here’s how we can help each other – you help us to find out who did it, and we’ll help you to get out of here. We’ll speak up for you in court. Hold our hands up, say we made a mistake.’

  She watched Lomax mull this over for a moment. Was she getting to him?

  ‘And how are you going to make up for all the years I spent in here?’

  She ignored this again. ‘Can you think of anyone who would have framed you?’ she asked.

  ‘Like a copper, you mean?’ he snarled, looking over at Tom.

  Tom had said that only someone who knew the intimate details of the case could have replicated it. Could it have been a police officer?

  ‘Can you think of anyone who would want to get you locked up?’

  ‘Lots of people.’ His voice had lost all levity now. His face had darkened.

  ‘What about someone who could get hold of your DNA to plant on the bodies? Your hair, blood, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Anyone who came into contact with me, I suppose. Some fucker from here might have done it when they got out.’

  ‘We’re going to look into that and look at your visitors. Did you ever tell anyone in prison about the details of the crime, a detail that no one else knew about?’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘How could I have if I never did it?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He was too smart for her to be able to trip him up. But there was something in his eyes. What was that?

  She didn’t speak for a moment, giving him time and space to let an idea or a memory come to the fore. She had watched Tom do it so often in an interview, giving them enough rope to hang themselves with he said sometimes. But this time it was different. Could Lomax give them the key to who was doing these terrible things?

  A heat rose in Kyra. If the real killer was still out there, and he was going to follow the pattern, then they only had four days to catch him before he did it again. Another young innocent woman would die horribly.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Tom twitch.

  Lomax was thinking; his pupils darting around, was he going to give them a lead?

  She held her breath.

  He opened his mouth to speak.

  ‘Considering your DNA was on the bodies …’ Tom said from the other side of the room.

  Lomax snapped his head round to face Tom.

  Bloody hell, Tom! Kyra was furious, the moment had gone.

  Lomax had wanted to talk to her, hadn’t he? Not Tom.

  ‘I’ll get out anyway. I don’t need you,’ Lomax said.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who framed you?’ asked Tom. ‘Don’t you want us to find the man who put you in here for the last fourteen years, possibly even for the rest of your life?’

  ‘I think I’m looking at him already.’ Lomax’s nostrils flared.

  After a moment, he turned back to Kyra. ‘Nah,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t need your help. I’m going to find out who done this myself. We’ve got business, me and him, and you lot can stay out of it.’

  ‘If you’re thinking about taking the law into your own hands, Lomax, then I strongly advise you …’ Tom began.

  ‘You strongly advise me!’ laughed Lomax, but then his face fell. He stood up, as far as he could with his hands restrained, and leaned over the table towards Tom, the veins in his thick neck popping. ‘I got life for a crime I didn’t commit, because you’re a bent copper,’ he spat. ‘When I get out of here, Tommy boy, I’m gonna come and find you and I’m gonna finish off the job I started on the steps back at my place. And, this time, you won’t be getting back up again. It’s gonna be tick tock for you then, Tommy.’

  A shiver ran down Kyra’s spine. Tom rubbed his temple near the scar then locked eyes with Lomax, but it was Lomax who finally looked away.

  ‘Okay,’ said Tom finally, ‘you take your chances in the court. Don’t say I didn’t offer to make things right.’ He banged on the canteen door and Danielsson’s face appeared. There was a heavy mechanical clunk as the door opened.

  Kyra stood up. ‘Never mind, Lomax. We could have helped each other out. We don’t need you. We’ll figure this out ourselves.’ She tried to look unconcerned, even though that was the last thing she felt.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Lomax spat at her. ‘And fuck you,’ he said to Tom. ‘You two better watch yourselves. I’ll be out of here before you know it. And guess who I’ll be paying a visit to?’

  As the guard at the exit locked the final gate behind them and they made their way back to Tom’s car, Kyra mind turned back to CASNDRA. Could she use her technology on Lomax? Would she be able to cope going into a mind such as his, to face what she might see, experience? Even the thought of it terrified her. There would be consequences – how could there not be – going into a mind like Lomax’s? Even the idea of being in the same room as him threaded fear into her blood.

  No.

  There was no way she could do it.

  Not without losing her mind.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SATURDAY 3 FEBRUARY 2035

  5.13 p.m.

  ‘Sewage treatment works, recycling centre, rubbish tip, illegal dump.’

  Kyra was talking to herself more than anyone else as she studied at the screens in the Hub. The unknown woman, Skylar, Jennifer, Madelyn, Emma, Amelia, and the new addition, Caylee. The pictures stabbed at Kyra’s heart; Jennifer cuddling a pet cat, Madelyn smiling in front of a Christmas tree, Caylee at a party, others less jarring, but still showing life taken too early – Amelia, a passport photo, serious; Jennifer, a high school photograph; Skylar, a graduation picture.

  Kyra didn’t look at her sister’s photograph – she knew it by heart from the wall at her mother’s house, from the newspops. Emma’s expression was vague, impersonal. It wasn’t a smile exactly, and therefore Emma’s dimples weren’t visible. It took the sting out, somehow. But she couldn’t look because every time she saw it the last words she said to her sister rang in her ears, You’re a terrible mother!

  ‘I’m trying to find a connection,’ Kyra said when Alex came closer. ‘He treats the Type A victim with such contempt, and yet the Type B victim, there’s almost a reverence,’ she continued. ‘Her body is intact, no mutilation. There’s no injuries prior to death or afterwards. She’s killed by an injection of a high dose of morphine. She won’t have felt a thing, like going to sleep. She’s posed in a beautiful place. Two very different approaches to the victims. Why take the heart and hands from one and leave them with the other victim?’ Kyra shook her head. Then she asked Alex, ‘What’s missing here, something that is usually seen in a serial killer’s work?’

  ‘No sexual assault,’ Alex answered immediately. Will and Harry had been discussing a document nearby, and Harry looked up at them with interest, chewing gum as usual.

  ‘Exactly. There’s rage, anger, resentment, for the first victim, but nothing sexual.’

  ‘The white dress – it could be a symbol of purity?’ suggested Alex.

  Harry had moved closer; the smacking of his lips as he chewed irritated Kyra.

  ‘These women represent a non-sexual relationship to him,’ surmised Kyra. ‘His mother, maybe?’

  ‘Bloody psychologists and their mothers,’ Harry said.

  Alex gave him a hard stare.

  ‘The Type B victims were found in water, why?’

  ‘To wash away evidence?’ Alex suggested. If she was still annoyed that Tom had taken Kyra instead of her to speak to Chloe and Lomax, then she didn’t show it.

  ‘Possibly, but then why leave the first set of victims with so much evidence on them?’ Kyra scanned the screens again. ‘What other patterns do you see, Alex?’

  She watched as the young officer’s eyes scanned the screens. ‘The second victims – they’re all young wo
men, blonde, all physically fairly small, mainly living at home with parents, one was a church youth worker, one was a trainee social worker, one was a primary school teacher, they seem to be just ordinary young women.’ Alex’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘So we can assume if, when, he takes a second victim then she will follow the pattern – under twenty-five, Caucasian, fair-haired, a “nice” girl who will be in a caring profession or office work,’ said Kyra.

  Alex pointed to the other screen. ‘The Type A vics, however, it’s not as clear what the pattern is. Divorced, single, married, on the game, an eco-campaigner, a factory worker – we can’t see to find anything to link them, beyond them all being female and Caucasian. They’re not from the same area, they don’t seem to know each other, they have different hair colours …’ She faced Kyra. ‘I can’t see a pattern.’

  ‘Neither can I. Not yet.’

  Relief on Alex’s face. ‘And you seem to really know the case.’

  Was that a compliment or an insult?

  ‘Unless he considers them somehow … immoral,’ said Alex looking at the screen. The first woman was a prostitute, Madelyn had a drug problem. Maybe Emma Sullivan was on the game or an illegal activity, something to make him think she was somehow … impure.’

  Kyra’s body reacted to the comment before her brain could override her feelings. Alex had seen her facial expression, she was sure of it.

  ‘They were all people, they all deserved better than this,’ Kyra began, her voice a little higher-pitched than usual.

  Alex’s eyebrows twitched slightly as she scanned Kyra’s face. She opened her mouth to speak, but Harry barged in between them and she closed it again. Kyra’s heart was pounding. Did Alex suspect she knew more than she was letting on?

  ‘What do you think the Mizpah pendant means?’ asked Alex, finally. Kyra was relieved she had changed the subject. ‘When I first heard it, I thought it was MISPER – as in slang for Missing Person. I mean, I know it’s a love or friendship token, very popular in Victorian times. But what does it mean to him?’

  ‘Mizpah coin,’ Kyra commanded and up on the screen appeared various images: pendants, some silver, some gold, some heart-shaped, but most circular, all split in two halves by a zigzag. When joined together they read MIZPAH The Lord watch between me and thee whilst we are absent one from another.

  ‘Each of the three of the B Type victims found in water was wearing one half of a Mizpah. We haven’t been able to trace the pendants’ origins as they are mainly sold second-hand so they could be from the hypernet, flea markets, antique fairs, or he could have had them for years,’ Alex added.

  ‘Many serial killers take an item from a kill, a trophy. In this case the killer leaves something behind,’ Kyra said. ‘Mizpah is Hebrew meaning “watch tower”. It was used to mark an agreement between two people with God as witness. It represents an emotional bond between two people who are separated.’

  ‘I wonder what sort of agreement?’ mused Alex.

  ‘We’re not sure what significance this has, but it will have some meaning for him.’ Kyra was sure of it. ‘If we could figure out what that might be it could lead to some answers. In the past, theories have been that the killer might have lost someone very close to him, or else he can’t find the sort of relationship he wants.’

  ‘So where is the other half of the pendant?’ asked Alex.

  Kyra felt a blooming admiration.

  Alex turned back to the timeline and said, ‘Will, anything on a vehicle yet?’

  ‘One of our big problems is lack of CCTV footage,’ Will replied. ‘In a city this size, with the amount of surveillance we have, you’d think by now we’d have a vehicle registration at least to go on, but nothing. This fella’s a ghost. In and out, nothing to be seen. Even the recycling plant security drones captured nothing.’

  ‘So how is he placing the bodies?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Somehow, he’s hiding in plain sight,’ Kyra said.

  ‘I think Lomax did it and now he’s in the nick this is all over, no one else will get hurt,’ said Harry.

  As if to contradict that, Tom came through the door.

  ‘Right, everyone, listen up. We’ve got a MISPER. Isabel Marsden, aged twenty-two, student nurse, lives at home with her dad who has reported her missing. She went out with friends last night to a local pub, he assumed she was in bed this morning when he left for work and when he came home he realised that she was gone.’

  Kyra’s hive-chest tightened making it harder to take in oxygen.

  ‘The friends she was out with have come in to talk to us. They’re in the interview rooms now.’

  The women on the board, Jennifer, Madelyn, Amelia, Skylar, Emma … their names never left Kyra, but her brain repeated them over and over at times, like a mantra.

  She had to do something, to stop these women crying out to her in her dreams at night, to finally lay Emma to rest, to help herself heal from the guilt. It didn’t matter how afraid she might be, what Carter might say, what the MOD might do. Kyra knew she had to take action. It was the only way to put the police on the right track and get justice for the women, for their families. She just had to get Lomax to agree to it.

  5.23 p.m.

  ISABEL

  Time doesn’t exist in the silence of the mortuary fridge. She has no idea how long she has lain there, accompanied only by her own terrified thoughts, which kaleidoscope around her in the sensory deprivation.

  Worse than the darkness and the unknowing, is the utter torment of listening, making every second endless, straining to hear any movement outside her metal sarcophagus, to tell her if her captor is returning.

  Finally, the light comes again. He pulls out the tray. His hands are sheathed in blue gloves, like the ones she wears in the hospital. She feels like a rare butterfly pinned in a museum drawer. His face is hidden still behind the mask. She wonders if that is a good sign. Maybe it means he doesn’t want her to be able to identify him. Maybe that means he won’t kill her.

  After her cleansing last time, she is incredibly thirsty. Her tongue is dry, her mouth sticky, bitter. He unbuckles her straps and sits her up. He holds a bottle in front of her – it looks like water – and hands it to her. She pauses, momentarily – what if he has put more drugs or even poison in it? But she is so parched she gulps the water down until it is all gone.

  He takes the bottle from her grasp and puts a plastic food tray in front of her, the type a child might use, with bright pictures of zoo animals hiding under the food. Chicken nuggets, baked beans, apple slices, a tube of yoghurt with a cartoon character strawberry on the front. She is hesitant at first, and then, the overwhelming smell, the growling of her stomach – when was the last time she ate? – overwhelms her and she shovels it into her mouth with her hands. From less than a metre away he stands watching, motionless, his mismatched blue eyes unblinking behind the mask.

  ‘You always loved the chicken bites,’ he says.

  She stops halfway through a mouthful, regards him, and then begins chewing again, slowly.

  ‘I miss you, Elise.’

  Why is his voice trembling? Why is he calling her Elise?

  She knows he is staring but she focuses on the food. If he is feeding her, then he might want her to live. When she finishes, he takes the tray and turns to place it to one side.

  She wipes her hands on her white shroud and the tomato sauce from the beans smears across the cotton like blood seeping through a bandage.

  He turns back, holding a muslin cloth, and sees what she has done.

  His eyes narrow, and she grows afraid again.

  ‘Look what you did, Elise!’ he hisses. ‘He’ll beat you for that. He will, if he sees you, you’ll be in for it.’ He becomes distressed, wringing the muslin cloth between his hands. ‘What will we do? What will we do?’ he cries, his alarm inflaming her own fears. What the hell is he talking about? She feels her heart kick into overdrive, the food feels like concrete in her stomach.

  ‘He’ll be back
soon,’ he whispers. ‘Then we’re in for it.’ His odd eyes widen behind the plastic. Is he afraid? ‘Let me think. Let me think.’

  He straps her arms back down and ties the muslin cloth around her arm like a tourniquet. He turns around to a metal tray behind him and brings back a syringe. A globule of liquid drips from the tip before he jabs it in her arm. When the barrel is empty he takes it out. He turns away again, briefly, and when he faces her again he holds a scalpel.

  The drug immobilises her almost immediately. What has he given her? She tries to think of the medications that she has learned about in the hospital, but she can’t concentrate. She stares helplessly at the sharp metal blade. He moves closer to her, pointing the scalpel at her chest, then her belly, then up to her neck. Isabel thinks she is screaming, but there is no sound at all, except the high-pitched zipping sound as the scalpel slits her garment from the neck to the hem. He cuts down the arms and somehow pulls the cloth from underneath her, leaving her naked, exposed.

  But he averts his eyes, not even looking at her face.

  Then he leaves her alone, shutting the door behind him.

  Her body feels heavy, a prison for her petrified mind. The room is cold and, without any covering, she feels the temperature drop. Is she shaking? In her peripheral vision, to her left, she recognises the metal tray like the ones in surgery, the flat grey lines of terrifying steel instruments laid out in preparation. The drug doesn’t take the edge off her fear of what they could do to her body. She listens to the gurgling in her stomach as the water and food digest, wondering why he has fed her if he is going to kill her, trying to read into every little thing he says or does to make sense of what is happening, what might be about to happen.

  In front of her, near the door, there is an ancient rusted red generator chugging away. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling above her. To her right, high up, a frosted-glass window lets in a dull light. Is it a garage, an outhouse?