by James Carol
Hatcher sighed then frowned, his tired face folding in on itself like a black hole. ‘I’ll get the paperwork sorted,’ he said.
41
Rachel pressed a hand against the dog flap and felt it give. She pushed hard enough to open it an inch, then gently closed it again, guiding it back into place with both hands, convinced it was going to creak. She leant against the wall, her heart beating wildly. Her lungs felt too big for her chest and breathing was an effort. She closed her eyes to shut out the dark and told herself to calm down, whispered the words under her breath, over and over. Calm down, calm down, calm down. It worked. Her heart rate steadied and her breathing got easier.
She replayed the conversation she’d had with Eve in her head. Eve said Adam was out and would be back soon, but what did that mean? It was one of those vague terms that could be measured against a length of string.
Would he return in an hour or the next five minutes? Rachel had no idea. What she did know was that sitting here like this, talking herself around and around in circles, was wasting precious time. This could be her chance to escape. This might be her only chance. Whatever the consequences, she had to at least try because if she didn’t she’d just end up torturing herself with what-ifs the next time Adam strapped her to the dentist’s chair.
She pushed the dog flap open, all the way this time. She was aware the clock was ticking, but made herself wait so she could listen for any signs of Eve, or Adam. All she heard was the gurgle of the ancient heating system, and the occasional creak of old wood settling. Way in the distance, she thought she could hear the wind whistling around the outside of the house.
Rachel put her head through the flap, squeezed one shoulder in and then the other. She went through diagonally since there was more room that way, but it was still too tight. She tried to move forward, wriggling from side to side, but she was stuck. Images of the chair and the cane and the knife flashed through her head, one after the other. Bang, bang, bang. Adam would find her stuck here, half in and half out of the dog flap, and then he would punish her.
She didn’t want to think about what he might do because whatever he dreamt up was going to be so much worse than what he’d already done. Rachel wriggled harder, desperate to get free, the plastic scratching her arms and chest, fear driving her through the pain. Then suddenly she was all the way through and lying flat on the cold floor, breathing fast and hard, panic replaced by euphoria.
The corridor was as dark as the room, a degree or two warmer. Rachel crawled across the concrete floor until she found a wall, then stood and followed it along the corridor. The brickwork was rough beneath her hands. She moved as quickly as she dared because she had no idea what obstacles might be waiting to trip her up.
Twenty metres from the door there was a sharp ninety-degree left turn. Rachel stopped and listened for any signs of Eve or Adam before continuing. The flight of stairs a couple of metres on from the turn were cold and rough like the corridor floor. The glint of light that crept beneath the door at the top of them was the first daylight she’d seen since Wednesday afternoon, however long ago that was.
Rachel forced herself to climb the stairs slowly. It wasn’t easy. She just wanted out of here. She could see freedom in that thin glimmer of daylight, she could feel it in the gentle breeze blowing down the stairs. But it wouldn’t matter how close she was to freedom if she fell and broke her neck, so she made herself take it slow. She reached the door and even before she tried the handle she knew it would be locked. Luck had got her this far but it was only a matter of time before that luck ran out.
She tried the handle.
The door opened.
She stepped through the doorway into a narrow hallway with a high ceiling. The house was big and old, just like she’d imagined, that sense of space she’d experienced back in the basement more pronounced. Time seemed to crawl along much slower here than it did in the rest of the universe, reminding her of a museum. Muted daylight streamed in from a window she couldn’t see, and there was cold, shiny wood beneath her bare feet, the boards worn smooth over the years. The smell of furniture polish and oranges filled the air.
Rachel paused and listened for any signs of life, then walked towards the daylight. She turned a corner and found herself in a large, open hall. Off to her right was a wide staircase with a red carpet and ancestral portraits in gilt-edged frames. She did a double take at the painting that hung at the top of the first flight of stairs. The resemblance to Adam was uncanny.
Straight ahead was the front door.
Rachel paused again. Listened. Where was Eve? Upstairs? In one of the downstairs rooms? The kitchen, perhaps? Wherever she was, she wasn’t making a sound.
Perhaps she was hiding somewhere, watching her?
Rachel shook this last thought away. Her paranoia was creating fantasies, making her see ghosts in the shadows. That’s all that was happening here. Her imagination had gone into overdrive, fed by fear and anxiety. Rachel walked quickly towards the front door. She’d covered half the distance when something caught her eye and stopped her dead.
A telephone sat on the small antique occasional table opposite the stairs. The phone was a faded cream colour, old-fashioned but not obsolete. It had a push-button keypad and a springy coiled cable that attached the receiver to the base unit. The wire from the phone was attached to a socket in the skirting board.
Rachel ran over and ripped the receiver from the cradle. Her first thought was to call the police, her second thought was to call her father. She jammed the receiver against her ear. No dial tone, just static. Out of the static came a thin, crackly voice. Rachel recognised it straight away. Her blood froze, her legs gave way, and she slid to the floor with the telephone receiver still pressed to her ear, the words she’d just heard rattling around her head.
‘Hello Number Five.’
42
‘You’re going to do fine,’ I said.
Templeton just glared. If looks could kill I’d be lying on a mortuary slab right now. The brunette wig and brown contact lenses made her look like a different person and the uniform added an air of authority. The wig and lenses were for the benefit of the submissive unsub. When she looked at Templeton she’d think about her dolls. Hearing that one of them was dead would hit hard, and hearing this from someone who looked like one of her dolls would add more weight to the blow. The harder the blow, the more pressure this would place on the partnership. Apply enough pressure to exactly the right spot and you can break anything. Even diamonds break when hit right.
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said.
‘Easy for you to say. You’re not about to be fed to the lions.’ Templeton pulled at the collar of her jacket and shucked the sleeves. ‘This thing’s like a bloody straitjacket.’
Before she could say another word, I opened the door and shooed her through. ‘Break a leg,’ I whispered.
Templeton hit me with another death stare, then strode into the room like a pro, calm and confident, hiding her nerves well. She climbed the steps to the podium and the room fell silent. The place was packed with journalists, every seat taken.
I closed the door and sat down in front of a small monitor. There was only one camera in the room, and there was a twenty-second delay before the footage was filtered through to the news channels. The panic button would kill the feed dead if I didn’t like what I saw or heard. A ten-second delay would have been enough but we’d opted for overkill because there was no room for mistakes here. This was strictly a one-shot affair. For this to work we needed complete control over the information going out, and that meant controlling what went out to the TV channels. Nobody listened to the news on the radio, and by the time the stories appeared in tomorrow’s newspapers nobody cared. TV was all that mattered. If a photograph was worth a thousand words then a moving picture was worth ten thousand.
The press conference had been timed so it would hit the lunchtime news bulletins. As long as there were no major terrorist incidents or superstar deaths, it woul
d be the lead story at the top of the hour, and remain the lead story right the way through to the six o’clock news, and beyond. Maximum impact, maximum exposure.
‘She looks good up there,’ said Hatcher. He was in the chair next to mine, staring intently at the screen. ‘I should get her to do more of these. Particularly when we’ve got bad news to deliver. It’s always easier to hear bad news when it’s delivered by someone with a pretty face.’
‘Works for me,’ I agreed.
Templeton looked straight at the camera and introduced herself as Detective Inspector Sophie Templeton.
Hatcher groaned. ‘Your idea, I suppose.’
‘It adds more weight to the statement if it comes from a DI,’ I replied, eyes glued to the screen.
Templeton began reading from the statement I’d prepared. She ignored the journalists and talked to the camera like it was the only thing in the room. She appeared relaxed. No staring, eyes soft, breathing easy, just like we’d discussed.
The statement was short and to the point. Sarah Flight had died overnight as a result of the brain injuries she sustained while she was in captivity, and the police were now treating her case as murder.
Templeton then went on to talk about Rachel Morris. She gave a detailed breakdown of her last movements from the time she left work all the way through to the time she left Springers, and finished with a standard appeal for any members of the public to come forward with information.
This was the cue for the packed group of journalists to attack her with questions. They’d been told there would be no questions, but they couldn’t help themselves. Templeton handled the situation like she’d been doing this her whole life. She didn’t flinch, didn’t show fear. She just ignored the questions, offered a quick, clipped thank you, then walked off the podium, leaving the room as confidently as she’d entered.
The second she stepped through the door, she ripped off the wig and threw it on the floor, tore off the hairnet, shook her blonde hair free, then tied it back in the most severe ponytail I’d ever seen. She unbuttoned her jacket, shook herself out of it, then dumped it on a chair.
‘Give me a cigarette. Now!’
She snatched my pack from me, lit a cigarette, took a long drag. Her hand was shaking. For once Hatcher kept his mouth shut.
‘You did good,’ I said. ‘Real good.’
‘Don’t, Winter. I was awful. Worse than awful, I was useless.’
‘Winter’s right,’ said Hatcher. ‘You did a good job.’
Templeton opened her mouth to tell him to go to hell, but common sense kicked in and she closed it again. Telling your boss to go to hell did nothing to improve your career prospects. I knew all about that one. Templeton took another drag and when she exhaled all the stress she’d been holding on to drifted away on a cloud of smoke.
She glared at Hatcher. ‘Don’t ever make me do anything like that again.’
Templeton looked around for somewhere to lose her cigarette, but couldn’t see anywhere. She gave me a dirty look then dropped the butt into my coffee. The cigarette went out with a sizzle and a hiss. Without another word, she turned and stomped from the room.
‘She’ll calm down eventually,’ said Hatcher.
‘I hope so.’ I was staring down at the cigarette butt floating in my cup and wishing she hadn’t done that. The coffee had been really good. Just the right amount of bean, just the right strength, and it hadn’t been stewing in the pot too long.
‘You realise how many holes there are in this little illusion of yours, Winter? If anyone talks to Amanda Curtis then it’s game over.’
‘That’s why Amanda Curtis is currently staying at a luxury spa hotel under a fake name. You guys are paying, by the way.’
‘And what about the staff at Dunscombe House? Are we going to send them all off to a luxury spa, too?’
‘The illusion doesn’t have to hold up for ever. It just has to hold up long enough for the submissive partner to think one of her dolls is dead.’
‘When the media work out we’ve been using them, they’re going to crucify me. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘Not if we catch the unsubs. Then you’re a hero.’ I grinned. ‘You know something, Hatcher, you worry too much.’
‘And you don’t worry enough. So what now?’
My grin disappeared and my face turned serious. ‘Now we wait.’
43
Nobody gave me a second look when I walked into the incident room because everyone was too busy with the telephones. One-sided conversations came at me from all sides. Lots of yes sirs and yes madams, interspersed with the occasional ‘can you tell me exactly what you saw?’ The downside of the press conference was that there were plenty of members of the public coming forward with information, and almost all of it would turn out to be useless.
At the front of the room was a gallery of photographs pinned to a board. Five women smiled happy carefree smiles on the top row, four stared blankly from the bottom row.
Someone had replaced the photographs I’d taken with identical copies of the originals. Everything was the same. The swollen eyes, the slack faces, the bleached look that had as much to do with the subjects as it had to do with the way the police photographer had shot them. My eye was drawn to the blank space beneath Rachel Morris’s picture. I could imagine what she was going through right now. The agony, the terror, the uncertainty. The uncertainty was the real killer, not knowing what was going to happen next.
People use patterns and routine and familiarity to help them get through the day and when those routines are removed the end result is chaos. Everything Rachel had held as solid and true had been taken away and replaced by a new world order she had no control over. Every aspect of her life would now be dictated by her captors. When she slept, when she ate, what she did, what she wore. The elements that made Rachel who she was would be stripped away until all that was left was a broken doll. It was the psychological equivalent of a lobotomy.
Sarah Flight, victim number one, had been held for four months.
Margaret Smith, victim two, had been held for two months.
Caroline Brant, victim three, had been held for three months.
And Patricia Maynard was held for three and a half months.
The amount of time the victims were held bothered me because it appeared random. When dealing with organised offenders, there was no such thing as random.
The first victim should have been held for the shortest length of time. There was a logical reason for this. With the first victim, the unsub would finally be acting out fantasies he’d been developing for years. He would be making things up as he went along and invariably things would get messy and mistakes would be made. It was common for an element of panic to come into play. He would hurry and dump the victim sooner than he’d like. He would do a lot of things wrong, and when he’d cooled down he would promise himself that next time he would get it right.
Because the one thing you could be certain of was that there would definitely be a next time. Now that he’d crossed the line there was no turning back. As the unsub gained in confidence, as the fantasies progressed and evolved, as techniques were perfected, the amount of time the victims were held for increased. The unsub would want to take his time, he would want to disappear into his fantasy and stay there for as long as possible.
In this case the first victim was held longest. Even factoring in my belief that there were earlier practice victims didn’t help. There was no pattern. But something needed to happen to make the unsub decide it was time to lobotomise his victims and dump them. There needed to be some sort of trigger. There was a reason behind everything an organised offender did, an underlying logic. The trick was understanding that logic.
Broken dolls.
I thought about this. It was possible the dominant unsub held on to his victims until he had broken their spirits. Once that had happened they would be no use to him. The dominant was a sadist and if he didn’t get the reaction he craved it would be time
to move on to the next victim. The theory was a good one. It didn’t explain why he lobotomised the victims, but it accounted for the variations in the amount of time he held his victims. Everyone had a different pain threshold. It also explained why Sarah Flight was kept the longest. The unsub wouldn’t have been so sure of himself back then. He would have held back. He would have pulled his punches.
I moved along the wall to the map of London and stared at it, trying to find patterns but not seeing any. The green pins indicated the last known location of the victims and the red pins indicated where they were dumped. The single red pin in St Albans stood out because it was an anomaly. My relationship with anomalies was a love/hate one. Love them because it means the unsub has stepped outside his comfort zone. Hate them for the same reason. That anomaly was only useful if you could figure out why the unsub had stepped outside his comfort zone.
One of the green pins had been moved since the profile meeting. Hatcher’s people had been visiting bars in London’s more upscale areas, showing pictures and talking to staff. They’d got one hit so far. Sarah Flight was last seen in a bar in Chelsea. The pictures had jogged the memory of a barman. He remembered she’d been on her own and his impression was that she’d been stood up. Just like Rachel Morris. This was good news since it meant the abduction MO was holding up. On the downside, there was still no sign of the unsubs’ practice victims, and, although there were plenty of people who’d been kicked out of med school, Hatcher’s people had yet to come across anyone who matched the profile.
I was so engrossed in the map I didn’t hear Templeton sneak up behind me. It was her perfume that gave her away. The uniform was gone and she was dressed casually in jeans and a blouse. Her expression was neutral. She had a great poker face. She intrigued me because I had no idea what she was thinking.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
Her voice was as neutral as her expression. There were no clues in her tone, no tells to indicate her mood. ‘We’ve hit the lull,’ I replied.