by Luke Delaney
‘They won’t give us access,’ Bannan warned him.
‘But they must know there a decent chance they got the wrong man?’
‘From what I know they’ve convinced themselves McCaig was their man.’
‘How?’ Sean asked, still confused how anyone would not want to remove the doubt – to remove any lingering possibilities.
‘They’ve got some criminologist or what does she call herself – a forensic historical criminologist – looks at cases from history to help solve current crimes. She’s quite the expert on Jack the Ripper by all accounts. She gave them a profile of what they should look for in the man who’d killed Rebecca Fordham and apparently McCaig fits the profile to a tee.’
‘Then the profile’s wrong,’ Sean replied angrily, ‘and why the hell is the investigation team listening to a damn historian?’
‘Because they were told to.’
‘Who by?’
‘The powers-that-be, son.’
‘That’s a heap of shit.’
‘No son, that’s politics.’
‘They need to understand they’re wrong,’ Sean insisted.
‘They don’t want to hear that.’
‘Then we need to go and see them – speak to them and explain what’s happening.’
‘Don’t you think I haven’t already tried? Furthest I’ve got is a chat on the phone. They ain’t budging, son. They have McCaig and as far as they’re concerned, that’s that.’
‘Then we try again – tell them we have something new. Lie to them if we have to.’
Bannan smiled and even laughed a little. ‘It’s not going to happen, son.’
‘Then I need to see the scene,’ Sean told him.
‘That scene’s more than a year old now. There’s nothing there for us anymore.’
‘I need to see it,’ Sean insisted, his boyish face made old by his haunting seriousness, ‘with the crime scene photographs. That’ll be enough.’
Bannan had used Sean’s type before, but he’d never met one with such intensity or clarity – such insightfulness. ‘Very well,’ Bannan relented. ‘Keep the file and the photos from the scene, for a while at least. The flat’s still unoccupied, but there’s a caretaker on site who’ll let you in if you flash your badge and sweet talk him.’
‘I’ll go there tomorrow,’ Sean reassured him.
‘Of course you will,’ Bannan told him. ‘Of course you will.’
Sean stood to leave before turning back towards Bannan. ‘By the way, how did you know?’ he asked.
‘How did I know what?’ Bannan replied.
‘If you weren’t on the case yourself, how did you know about the caretaker?’
‘Well, let’s just say I never was very good at keeping my nose out of other people’s business. Trick is – don’t get caught doing it.’
Chapter Three
It was a little before nine a.m. when the caretaker opened the door to the flat where more than a year earlier Rebecca Fordham had been brutally murdered. He stepped aside to let Sean enter the dimness inside, half the windows long since smashed by local youths with nothing better to do, and replaced with hastily nailed-up wooden boards.
‘Here we are then,’ he told Sean in a thick London accent, although his voice was surprisingly high-pitched for such a big, threatening looking man; his shaved hair and do-it-yourself tattoos making him look like an ageing football hooligan. Sean had found him pleasant enough and decided his appearance was probably deliberately crafted to keep the local yobs and criminals at bay. ‘Last bloke that came snooping around here was a detective superintendent or something, but I guess she’s not a priority anymore, eh?’
‘What?’ Sean asked, suddenly realizing he’d not been listening.
‘I said your lot used to send superintendents, now they send constables – since the bastard who killed her done himself in, and may his soul rot in hell by the way.’
‘If it was him,’ Sean said without thinking.
‘Sorry. I don’t follow.’
Sean cleared his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Whatever,’ the caretaker said with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Take as long as you want. Just remember to drop the keys back when you’re done, although I don’t know what you expect to find – police and council cleared everything out months ago – to keep the ghouls and press away they told me. Anyway, I’ll leave you in peace – place gives me the bloody creeps.’
Sean watched him shuffling away, huffing and puffing under his own weight, before he turned back to the flat, the darkness inside almost warning him not to go any further – warning him he would be consumed with the horror that still permeated the very walls of the interior. He’d covered a couple of sudden deaths as a probationary constable and one had even been a murder – a semi-vagrant kicked to death by his drinking friends. But this felt different – completely different, as if a pure evil had left its mark there. He felt the same presence he’d felt back in the park in Hither Green. The same malevolent force. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The caretaker had been right – the inside was nothing more than a shell now. Everything that had made it a home was long gone. All that remained were the fixtures and fittings that were too big to remove: the built-in cupboards, kitchen cabinets, bath, sinks and toilet. Everything else was gone – even the carpets. But Sean could see them nonetheless, and he could see the blood – see the blood on the floor, the sofa, the table and surrounding chairs, the crime-scene photographs turning his mind into a projector for the images from the past.
He walked along the narrow hallway, within a few steps reaching the doorways on both his right and left, causing him to pause. He pulled a copy of the confidential case file from an innocuous looking envelope and thumbed through it to the photographs that showed the flat how it was when the murder had first been discovered. He checked his orientation and deduced that the room on his left would have been the son’s room and the one on the right the kitchen. He checked the case file report – the killer had come in through a window Rebecca had left open in the kitchen. Why had she done that? Was she trying to disperse the heat that had built up during the hot summer day, or was she trying to dispel the odours of cooking? It was a normal thing to do – something hundreds of thousands of others would have done on the very same day. ‘Only it cost her life.’ He suddenly found himself speaking out loud. He checked the file and the photographs again. She’d been attacked in the hallway initially, probably as she came across him as he walked from the kitchen. Blood spray patterns indicated he’d stabbed her in the stomach area and then dragged her to the lounge where he’d cut her throat with a large, extremely sharp-bladed instrument. It would have taken her only seconds to bleed to death. Why didn’t you kill her straight away? The shock of being stabbed in the stomach would stop her from crying out, but why not kill her as soon as she found you? What were you waiting for? Again he checked the file. After she’d bled to death he sexually assaulted the body in almost every way imaginable and then extensively mutilated her, paying particular attention to her breasts and sexual organs. You hate women, don’t you? You hate them so much it drove you to do this.
Sean walked deeper into the flat, past the bathroom and the bedroom that the victim used until he reached the lounge – the place where the final scene from hell unfolded. He stood in the middle of the room and used the photographs to put everything back into place in his mind, just as it had been when the victim was discovered – before a single thing had been moved. But the pictures were so vivid and terrible he found it hard to look at them for more than a few seconds at a time. He wondered what it must have been like for the first police at the scene – cops who’d been called by the childminder when the mother wouldn’t open the door, expecting to find her asleep or drunk or at the local shop, but to discover this. Surely they’d be haunted by it for the rest of their lives, even if they never admitted it. And what must have it been like for the forensic team, who would have had to work in th
e scene for hours before the body was removed? How could they have concentrated totally – not been distracted? Not missed something?
Again he flicked through the photographs until he found the one he was looking for – a picture of a doll that had been sitting on the chair opposite the sofa on which the victim had been mutilated and violated – as if it had been watching the killer – watching the killer perform. Sean looked closer, using the size of the chair for scale, speaking out loud so he could hear his own thoughts – hear if they made any sense. ‘You put the doll there. You put the doll there so it could watch you rage all over her. And you chose the largest doll you could find because it felt more lifelike – as if you were being watched – watched by a child – by her child. You dragged her in here and you cut her throat, but then you left her and went to find the boy, didn’t you? But he wasn’t here, and that made your rage burn all the brighter, until you saw the doll – large and ornate – something an adult might own, but not a young boy, so you knew it was probably the mother’s and not the child’s. And that made it even more real for you. So you brought the doll back in here and placed it where it could see everything. Only, did you forget yourself, for a few moments when you thought you were going to seek out the child, did you forget you’d taken you gloves off? Because you did take them off, once you were inside, didn’t you? You couldn’t bear to have a barrier between you and the victim. You needed to feel her skin and you knew you couldn’t leave your prints on skin, so you took your gloves off. But while your gloves were off, did you touch the doll? Did you touch its plastic face? Did you leave us your prints? Did we miss them – in all the hell you left behind – did we miss them? We did, didn’t we? Fuck,’ he suddenly punctuated his thoughts as he closed the file and slipped it back into the unmarked envelope.
He walked to an unboarded window, hoping the view of the heath might chase away the images that threatened to lock themselves away in his mind forever. But as he looked out over the common land and dense wood he could think of one thing and one thing only. This is our man. It has to be. Rebecca Fordham’s killer is the Parkside Rapist, and he’s going to kill again. As he stared at the heath, all he could see was the dark figure of a faceless man moving quietly and quickly through the trees. Waiting.
*
‘This is bollocks,’ Sean swore as he sat on the opposite side of the desk to Charlie Bannan. ‘It’s wrong, just like McCaig was the wrong man and they know it.’
‘It’s politics, son,’ Bannan tried to explain ‘and they don’t know they’ve got the wrong man. They may suspect it, but they don’t know it. As far as they’re concerned the criminologist told them McCaig’s the right man and the top-brass told them to listen to her.’
‘Then they should have told her to go fuck herself,’ Sean suggested.
‘Yes they should,’ Bannan agreed with a chuckle, ‘but they didn’t and they won’t. And there’s something for you to learn and never forget – don’t ever, ever, let outsiders tell you your business. We’re the police – we decide who is and who isn’t guilty – not some historian looking to make a name for herself, not some politician trying to make himself feel important. We put the guilty before the courts and if they fuck it up that’s not down to us and we move on. The Fordham Investigation team fucked up – they let an outsider tell them their business and somewhere down the line it’s going to cost them – it’s going to cost them big-time.’
‘I hope it does,’ Sean told him. ‘But right now it’s not going to help us, so what are we going to do next?’
‘Nothing,’ Bannan admitted.
‘Nothing? But there has to be a way of getting them to hand over their evidence, or at least get a look at the lab report about the blood spray pattern. I’m convinced he put the doll on the sofa after he cut the victim’s throat, but before he did the rest. He wanted a fucking audience and he was in a hurry, so much of a hurry he forgot to put his gloves back on. The doll had a plastic face. He could have left us his prints.’
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ Bannan told him, but there was no excitement in his voice. Sean noticed it.
‘Wait a minute – you’d already thought of it, hadn’t you?’
‘I’d considered it,’ he admitted.
‘And did you tell anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘It wouldn’t have changed anything. No one would have been interested in my theories. They had McCaig and that was enough.’
‘But what about checking the doll for blood spray patterns, to prove he put it there?’ Sean asked.
‘It wouldn’t change anything.’
‘But it could indicate he’d touched it – left his prints.’
‘The doll was dusted,’ Bannan crushed him. ‘There were no prints on it other than the mother’s and the boy’s. If the killer touched it at all he didn’t leave his prints.’
‘Something else then,’ Sean insisted. ‘Something else they missed.’
‘Forget it, son. There ain’t nothing I can do about it.’
‘There has to be,’ Sean insisted. ‘We can’t just let it slide.’
‘Yes, we can and yes, we will,’ Bannan told him. ‘This is a big boys’ game. You have to suck it up and move on. It’s what we do. When we catch the Parkside Rapist, and we will, we’ll know we’ve got the man who also killed Rebecca Fordham. Even if we never prove it in a court, at least we’ll know – you and me.’
‘That’s not enough.’
‘Sure it is. And for what he’s done to the other women he’ll get life anyway, so all things will work out equal.’
‘Not if he kills again,’ Sean reminded him, ‘and he will – I know he will.’
‘Then we’d better catch him fast, hadn’t we, son?’ Bannan told him. ‘Before he has a chance to.’
‘We can’t,’ Sean warned him, ‘not without access to the Fordham evidence. Do you have any friends at the Lab? Someone who owes you a favour?’
‘I know what you’re thinking and the answer’s no – I’m not going to sneak up the Lab and have a crafty look at what they may or may not have. You just don’t do that, son – not for anything.’
‘Why not? If you know they’re wrong.’
‘They’re Old Bill, son – more than that, they’re detectives. We don’t shaft each other – remember that.’
Sean tried to work the tension out of his neck by rolling his head around his shoulders.
‘Relax,’ Bannan told him, ‘we’ll get him and soon. This ain’t no master-criminal we’re after, it’s just another sick-nutter. He’s about due to fuck-up and when he does – we’ll be waiting for him.’
‘If you say so,’ he finally agreed, even though his heart told him differently.
Chapter Four
Two Weeks Later
Four thirty a.m. and Sean lay alone in the bed in his small flat, waiting for the alarm to break the silence in thirty minutes’ time. He’d been awake for a couple of hours, tossing and turning before giving in to the questions and fears that electrified his mind and made sleep impossible. He’d been this way since his visit to the flat where Rebecca Fordham had been killed, and he couldn’t help wondering whether Bannan was feeling the same or if he really could just blank it out and move on. Maybe one day he’d be able to push things to one side and forget about them, no matter how important they might appear to be. Maybe one day he’d be able to sleep like other people slept no matter what he’d had to deal with during the preceding day – but not yet – not now.
The oppressive silence of the dark, still, room was suddenly broken by the electronic shrill of a machine somewhere in the flat demanding his attention. In his tiredness he assumed it was his alarm clock, but soon realised it couldn’t be – He’d set it for five a.m., but it was still only four thirty. As his mind cleared he realized it was the phone ringing in the lounge. ‘Shit,’ he swore to himself. He jumped from his bed and jogged into lounge, composing himself for a second before answering. ‘Hello.’
‘PC Corrigan?’ the voice asked.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘It’s DS Melody. Jump through the shower and get yourself to work – there’s been a murder – a bad one.’
‘How bad?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Melody told him.
‘Is it linked to the Parkside attacks?’
‘Save the questions for when you’re here.’
‘What about Rebecca Fordham? Does it look like the same man?’
‘It’s too early to draw any conclusions,’ Melody warned him. ‘Just get yourself in to work.’ The line went dead just as Sean’s imagination came to life. He knew, somehow he just knew, the same man had committed both crimes. He dropped the phone and sprinted for the bathroom.
*
It was almost midday before Sean returned to the police station after hours of pounding the streets of Woolwich and hammering on council-flat-door after council-flat-door close to the scene where a young mother and her child had been murdered in their own flat. He’d been told almost nothing by DS Melody when he’d reported to the Enquiry Office just after six that morning. Any delusions he’d had of being taken into the heart of the investigation had been dashed as Melody handed him a pile of door-to-door enquiry forms and a list of streets he’d been designated to canvass. He’d spied Bannan deep in conversation with a huddle of real detectives, but he’d not even been able to catch his eye. He was back to being a very small cog in a very large machine. But he needed more – needed to see the scene and the victims who were still inside – needed to breathe it deep into his soul. Run-of-the-mill enquiries and tasks were no longer enough.
He slid into the Enquiry Office and dropped his paperwork off in the returns box before heading for the exit and the canteen. As he was leaving, he nearly walked straight into Bannan who was walking and talking with two other suited men. He looked at Sean almost as if he’d never seen him before, but when they locked eyes Sean sensed his sudden recognition. ‘Guv’nor,’ Sean greeted him.