Deadly Dance

by Hilary Bonner

  The last two sentences were shouted at the top of the caller’s voice. It was filled with menace. Then Willis continued, softer, quieter and even more threateningly.

  ‘If you hinder my progress in any way, you and your people will never see Saslow alive again. I have her safe, but you will never find her without me and, if you hinder me, I will never tell you where she is. But if you allow my safe passage to another place and another life, then I will contact you. Only when I know that I am free again, will I tell you where she is.’

  ‘Look, Willis, I will do everything in my power to assist you, you must know that …’ Vogel began.

  ‘I am Aeolus,’ the voice boomed. ‘Willis is my servant. Willis is nothing, Aeolus is everything, all-seeing and all-powerful. All you have to do is obey the orders of Aeolus. If you do not do so, then Dawn Saslow will die and it will be a terrible death. A death decreed by the Gods. So you will obey. You must obey. Aeolus has spoken.’

  Vogel’s heart now felt as if was no longer ticking. This was his worst nightmare.

  An all out operation was launched to search for Saslow and Willis, with a warning that Willis, must not on any account be approached, apprehended or alerted in any way. The CCTV team pulled out all the stops. They scoured, as a matter of urgency, footage within a five-mile radius of the cul-de-sac where Saslow’s phone had been found. One camera had picked up Willis’s vehicle proceeding north up the B4057 along King’s Weston Road. The shot was such that it was unclear whether or not there was a passenger in the car.

  It was Hemmings, who knew Bristol like the back of his hand, who spotted something Vogel never would have done.

  ‘Hang on a minute, doesn’t Willis live out that way?’ he asked.

  Vogel had Willis’s address to hand. A team had already been sent to the detective sergeant’s home, as a matter of routine.

  ‘Henbury, BS10,’ said Vogel, who had little idea exactly where that was.

  ‘And his vehicle hasn’t been picked up since?’

  ‘Not yet, boss,’ said Vogel.

  ‘The bastard was heading home!’ said Hemmings. ‘If he plans to leave the country, whether we do his bidding or not, he needs a passport, doesn’t he? Does he carry his passport? I don’t know. Most of us don’t, not that he’s most of us. He probably has a selection of passports, I shouldn’t wonder, one for each of his many identities. Well, whatever identity he has chosen for his great escape he’ll need a passport and money. We already know he has at least two bank accounts, his own, and one in the name of Richard Perry. He quite likely has more. If he’s capable of murder as he appears to be so casually then he’s surely capable of embezzlement and theft on a massive scale. He told you he had a master plan, Vogel, and no doubt he does. It makes sense that he headed home to sort himself out, before taking off.’

  ‘It makes total sense sir,’ said Vogel. ‘But the team already at his house have found no sign of him or Saslow. They’re searching the place as we speak, but so far they’ve discovered nothing untoward.’

  ‘When did they get there?’

  ‘About five minutes ago,’

  ‘So Willis would have had time to do whatever he wanted to do there and leave.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s he done with Saslow? He said he’d hidden her somewhere we’d never find her. Surely not at his home?’

  ‘Just make sure the place is torn apart, Vogel.’

  ‘I will, boss.’

  ‘And keep checking Willis out. I want to know how we’ve missed this. It just doesn’t seem possible.’

  No, thought Vogel, but we damned well have missed it. We’ve been working alongside a crazed murderer for years and we didn’t have a clue.

  AEOLUS

  I knew exactly what would be happening within MCIT. I had specialist knowledge of similar investigations. Nothing on this scale, of course, nothing like the havoc I, Aeolus, have wreaked. But I knew I could second-guess the lot of them.

  There would already be a call out for Willis’s vehicle. They had probably already spotted me at least once or twice. Sooner or later, they would pick up on the direction in which I was now travelling. They would have already sent a team to search Willis’s home.

  That didn’t matter. They would find nothing there that would lead them to be able to apprehend me. Nothing which would shed any light on what I had done in order to protect myself. I was Aeolus and I could not be harmed. I must not be harmed. I still had another life awaiting me in another land.

  Perhaps they would work it out in the end, but that’s probably giving them too much credit. Anyway, by then, I would be clean away. After all, how would they dare stop me, when my freedom was the price they must pay to allow poor, little Dawn Saslow the chance to survive?

  Not that the chance was all that great, fifty-fifty probably. Sure, I’d left her food and drink, but she probably needed medical attention from the blows I dealt her.

  I wouldn’t expect her to last long. Her only real hope for surviving was if nobody got in my way and I reached my destination safely and quickly. Otherwise, she would die.

  I felt no animosity towards Saslow. Indeed, she had been probably the least annoying of my alleged colleagues within the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

  But neither did I feel anything else for her. No affection. Not even professional regard. It is impossible to feel such things, when her abilities were so much more inferior than mine.

  I wished her no harm. But if she died, then she died. I did not care. I was Aeolus. I had to protect myself.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Vogel was on his way back to his office when Willis’s ex-wife arrived. So much had happened since his phone conversation with her, that he’d practically forgotten that Vera Court had agreed to come in.

  Vogel had never met Vera. He’d transferred to the Avon and Somerset only relatively recently, long after Willis and his wife had parted. In any case, he doubted that Willis would have ever included his wife much in his working life. Vogel, being a private man himself, hadn’t even considered that there was anything odd in Willis’s reticence concerning anything personal. He kicked himself now. Willis was right, he thought, he was supposed to be so damned clever and yet he’d spotted nothing amiss. He chastised himself. Another, more outgoing officer might have been so much more aware. Although, of course, Willis had somehow or other kept up his front within the force for many years. And nobody came close to guessing what lay beneath his calm exterior.

  Vera Court was a surprise. Vogel didn’t know why she should be, but she was.

  She was tall and thin, with spiky blonde hair. She was dressed young and streetwise, sporting stonewashed jeans, boots and a funky, leather jacket. She appeared to be neither mumsy nor downtrodden ex – nothing like the rather cliché-ridden image he had imagined.

  She and Vogel walked together through the incident room, en route to his office. Vogel could see her looking around at the photographs and charts lining the walls. She no doubt watched the news on TV and read newspapers. Vera Court had already made it clear on the phone that she was no fool.

  ‘Is this about these murders?’ she asked. ‘The serial killer with different identities?’

  Vogel dodged the question as he gestured for her to take a seat.

  ‘Look, please bear with me,’ he said. ‘I just need to ask you some more questions. First of all, can I ask you if John was ever violent towards you when you were together?’

  Vera Court looked stricken.

  ‘Why are you asking that?’

  ‘Please, Mrs Court, I know this must be very disconcerting, but could you just answer my question. Was John ever violent towards you?’

  Vera Court answered quickly then.

  ‘Once,’ she said.

  Vogel was mildly surprised. Not that Willis had been violent towards his ex-wife, but that it had only been once. He studied the woman carefully. Was she telling the truth? He was almost sure she wouldn’t lie. She’d already worked out how serious this all was.

  I
t was just that, in his experience, if a man was violent towards his wife once, he almost always was again. And again. This was unusual. But then, everything was unusual in this case. John Willis thought he was a figure out of Greek mythology. No. He didn’t think he was, Vogel corrected himself, he became a figure out of Greek mythology in his own head. Freda Heath had told him that people with DID actually did become their alter egos.

  ‘It was the beginning of the end really, Mr Vogel,’ Vera Court continued. ‘In more ways than one. He nearly killed me.’

  She paused. Vogel waited in silence for her to begin again.

  ‘He tried to strangle me. He put his hands around my neck and squeezed. All the while, it was as if he were not seeing me. We were in bed. I was asleep. Can you imagine that, Mr Vogel? I woke up to find him on top of me. I was gasping for breath. I couldn’t speak and, in any case, I instinctively knew it would make no difference. There was a pair of scissors on the bedside table. I grabbed them and lashed out. I stabbed him in the shoulder. It wasn’t very deep, but then he went really crazy. He started to hit me in the face. He dragged me out onto the landing and pushed me down the stairs. All the while he didn’t speak. I fell awkwardly. I broke my ankle and my left wrist. He just walked casually down the stairs, stepped over me, opened the front door and left the house.

  ‘I didn’t hit my head thank God. I was in horrible pain, but I remained conscious. The children were in the house. The eldest, Sam, he was five and little Lucy just three. They both woke up. There’d been such a commotion. Sam came on to the landing. I told him I’d been a silly mummy and fallen down the stairs. I said would he go to the phone and bring it to me. I dialled 999. I also told the emergency services I’d fallen down the stairs. I don’t know if they believed me.

  ‘I’m sure they didn’t at the hospital. They kept asking me about the marks on my neck, then questions about my husband. I did what so many wives do, even nowadays. I told them nothing and made excuses. I said my husband locked up men who beat up their wives, that he was a police officer. They backed off a bit then.

  ‘I should have told the truth but, apart from anything else, I was in shock. John had never laid a finger on me before. Although sometimes, if we’d just had a silly row, only like husbands and wives do, he would look at me as if he hated me. Stare at me and not say anything. I’d sometimes thought he might attack me, but he just used to back off in silence and go to the spare room. Afterwards, he would seem to be perfectly normal again, in as much as John was ever normal. He always blamed his migraines.’ She glanced up at Vogel. ‘I expect you know about the migraines?’

  Vogel nodded. The times, albeit not that often, when Willis had simply said his head had gone and he had a migraine. Like on the day Melanie had been killed, he would always leave at once. Wherever they were, at Kenneth Steele or out on inquiries. Usually, he would drive himself home. Vogel had occasionally wondered about that. How could a man drive in that condition? Vogel had never suffered from migraines, but his mother had. During her brief yet severe bouts, she’d been incapable of functioning at all, let alone driving a car. Now it was all beginning to make sense.

  Willis hadn’t been battling migraines. He’d been battling the multiple personalities, which lurked within him and surfaced at times without him wishing them to. Freda Heath had called them ‘involuntary identity switches.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Vera continued, ‘John eventually turned up at the hospital full of concern. He actually asked me how it had happened and said he was so sorry he hadn’t been with me. Then muttered about that being the trouble with being a policeman. I just took it, but when the nurse had gone I turned on him. Told him he was a terrible hypocrite and a vicious bastard. He’d done this to me, he had tried to strangle me, then he had pushed me down the stairs. No, half thrown me down the stairs. I was lucky to be still alive.

  ‘He was so calm, eerily calm. He said I must have had a really bad knock on the head. I was confused. Surely I knew he would never hurt me, not with his history. I kept saying I hadn’t knocked my head and he bloody well knew what he’d done. He wasn’t kidding me, but he insisted that he hadn’t touched me. And you know, I found myself believing that he really didn’t know that he had attacked me. Let alone why and that was all the more frightening.’

  ‘What did he mean about his history?’

  ‘Oh, both his father and his stepfather used to knock his mother around. The stepfather used to hit him too. That’s what he said anyway. I never knew what to believe.’

  Vogel remembered then Willis’s remark on the day after Melanie Cooke’s death, concerning violence that he had experienced in his childhood.

  ‘His father was a philanderer too, apparently. He walked out when John was five or six, then his mother took up with another bastard. Or so he said. She was following a pattern like a lot of women do, he told me. Almost as soon as we met – it was a year or so after he came to Bristol – he told me that I could be sure he would never stray and that he would never hurt me. Because of his childhood. I believed it too and that’s part of the reason I stuck with him, even when he became so peculiar and distant.

  I thought, well, a lot of women have it worse. I had a husband who brought home a decent wage, provided a nice home, wasn’t violent – until that one awful time – and never strayed. Although he was absent from home so much, I did begin to wonder about that. But he always blamed police business, what a great excuse for a double life, eh?’

  Vogel smiled weakly. A double life, he thought. That, he feared, was something of an understatement.

  ‘What happened after he attacked you? What did you do?’

  ‘I had two young children. I did what so many women do. I just went home and got on with it, but it was eerie. Uncanny. I tried to talk to him about what had happened. He shut down. He said that I must try to forget about it, try to move on and be thankful I wasn’t more badly hurt. That he wished we knew what had caused me to fall down the stairs, then it would be easier for me. That I must stop this ridiculous thing of saying that he’d done it. He was my husband. He would never hurt me. I almost came to believe it in the end. Crazy, I know, but he was so certain and so calm, quite kind too, albeit distant. I told myself perhaps I really had imagined the whole thing …’

  Vogel felt as if his whole body were chilled. The picture emerging of John Willis fitted pretty damned exactly the profile of Aeolus provided by Freda Heath

  ‘You hadn’t imagined it, though, had you?’ he asked, although it wasn’t really a question.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And he really never did it again?’

  ‘Well, no.’ Vera Court hesitated. ‘But I carried on thinking he was going to, so I couldn’t sleep properly. I was sharing a bed with him. What if he attacked me again in my sleep? Then, one night, I woke up to find him looming over me, arms outstretched, as if he were preparing to put his hands around my neck again. I think I’d only been dozing, because I woke so quickly and I suppose I was half prepared this time. I slapped him hard across the face and he just rolled off me onto his side of the bed. I jumped up. I was terrified he was going to hurt me badly again. But there he was, lying there, looking every bit as if he’d just woken up or, actually, had been woken up by me. “What’s up love?” he asked. “Can’t you sleep?”

  I’d hardly been able to believe my ears. I didn’t challenge him. I was too afraid. I was beginning to think he was quite mad. The next day, he left for work early, as usual. I kept our Sam off school and just walked out with him and the little one. I went straight to my mum and dad’s place. I’d eventually told them the truth about what John called “my accident” and my mum had begged me to leave him then. But like I said, there were the children. Two lovely kids. Mind you, they were a miracle.’

  ‘Why?’ Vogel asked. ‘Why a miracle?’

  ‘John was virtually impotent. With me anyway. I read somewhere that impotent men often have a very high sperm count. God’s way of compensating. He could only … I’m sorry.
This is embarrassing. Do you really need to know?’

  ‘I would appreciate it,’ said Vogel. ‘It could be relevant.’

  ‘To what? To the profile of a serial killer?’

  Vogel tried to look non-committal.

  ‘I really would appreciate …’ he began.

  ‘All right. Well, I could coax him into an erection, but, uh, almost as soon as he tried to enter me he would lose it, sometimes ejaculating, sometimes not. Well, I suppose it only takes one of the little buggers,’ she said with a wry smile.

  ‘Have you met John’s mother, the father or the stepfather?’

  Vera Court shook her head. ‘His mother died when he was in his late teens, he said. He wasn’t in touch with either his father or his stepfather. He said he hated them both.’ Vera paused.

  ‘There’s something else?’ Vogel enquired.

  ‘John’s mother had another child with her second husband. John’s half sister was born when John was eleven or twelve I think. The girl died, drowned in the bath. Her father, John’s stepfather, was bathing the little girl, claimed he’d gone to answer the phone or something, and the child had slipped underwater and drowned. But there was some question of unexplained bruising on the child’s body and both parents were questioned. Her father several times, not just concerning the drowning, but also on suspicion of having abused the little girl.

  ‘There was no real evidence and John’s stepfather was never arrested or charged. But John said his mother always suspected the stepfather might have been abusing the little girl in the bath and then killed her, even if accidentally, when she struggled. Unsurprisingly, the marriage broke up. That was John’s story anyway, and he made it quite clear he was glad to see the back of his stepfather. Same with his father. He adored his mother, though. The only time I ever saw him show any real emotion was when he spoke about his mother.’