by Max Manning
The knife flashes like molten silver. Big Ted tries to shout, but the only sound that comes out of his mouth is a wet gurgle. He crumples to the floor, gasping for breath. Strong hands roll him on to his back. Fingers grasp a handful of hair, yanking his head back. A thick wetness spurts on to his shoulders and chest.
The pain kicks in, blurring his vision, but he sees the man pull something else from his pocket and hold it in front of his face. ‘Let them see,’ the man says.
13
Blake rarely watched television. He preferred to switch on the treadmill and run. He particularly avoided news programmes. They reminded him of too many things he was trying to blank out.
After falling out with Leah over the funeral, he’d been surprised when she had phoned to let him know she’d been asked by the police to make an appeal for information about Lauren’s murder at a live press conference. She sounded nervous and Blake suspected she’d been hoping he would offer to attend the event with her. He didn’t. Over the years he’d taken part in hundreds of press conferences. He didn’t want anything to do with that world any more.
Wearing baggy shorts and a running vest, Blake perched on the sofa and fiddled with the remote control. It took him a few seconds to find the right channel. Leah Bishop sat in the centre at a long table, her shoulders hunched, her face pale. The sight of her, so vulnerable but at the same time resolute, twisted his insides.
Sitting on Leah’s left an overweight, grey-haired detective pulled a tissue from his pocket and wiped beads of sweat from his brow.
Journalists who arrived too late to get a seat pressed against the side and back walls. To the far right of the table, a dark-haired man in a suit whispered into the ear of a woman in police uniform.
A barrage of camera flashes signalled the start of the conference. In unison, Leah Bishop and the detective raised a hand to shield their eyes. Clearing his throat, the detective lowered his head to his microphone. ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘My name is Detective Superintendent Bob Bell. This press conference has been arranged to assist the investigation into the murder of Lauren Bishop, who was stabbed to death in Victoria Park, Hackney. We will start with the victim’s sister. She will be making a simple appeal for witnesses, not answering questions. Any questions you have should be directed at me. Of course, there will be some operational details that I cannot disclose.’
He waved towards the younger man in the suit. ‘When we have finished, additional material and assistance will be provided by our press officer, Ray Partington.’
Clearing his throat again, Bell wiped his top lip with his sleeve and turned with a nod to Leah. Blake knew well the pressure of being in the spotlight and couldn’t help but admire her courage.
She glanced down at her script. ‘My sister Lauren was murdered as she walked in Victoria Park on the evening of September twenty-eighth. She was a kind and gentle person who didn’t have a bad bone in her body. The police are working hard to find her killer and I am making this appeal today in the hope that someone out there can help.’
She paused for a moment and, her eyes brimming with tears, raised her head to look, as instructed, straight down the lens of the television camera. ‘If you saw anyone or anything strange in the park that evening, or if you know anything or have suspicions about who might have killed Lauren, please, please, please, contact the police. We need to catch the person who killed my sister. My innocent sister. Even the smallest, seemingly insignificant piece of information could prove crucial, so please, please, don’t be afraid about coming forward if you think you can help.’
The end of her statement brought another barrage of camera flashes, followed by a flurry of questions. Flustered, she turned to the detective for help. He raised a hand to try to bring order to the room, but ended up having to shout over the clamour.
‘As I said earlier, all questions must be directed at me. I’ll answer them if I can. As usual, please give your name and the media organisation you are working for. Who wants to go first?’
Every journalist in the room stuck up a hand. Bell pointed at a woman in the third row.
‘Yvonne Dixon, BBC London. How exactly was Lauren Bishop killed?’
‘She was killed with a knife. I can’t give you more detail than that.’
‘It’s true that the killer slashed her throat, isn’t it? Everybody has seen the pictures on the internet.’
Bell blanked her and jabbed a finger at a reporter in the front row.
‘David Jackman, Evening Standard. The killer must be lapping up all the attention and laughing at the police investigation. He’s committed murder and put it on the internet for everyone to see.’
Bell shook his head. ‘We’re on top of this case. Let’s get back to the appeal for information.’
Without waiting to be invited, a female reporter in the front row jumped in. ‘Jo Forlong, Daily Express. Instagram say the pictures of Lauren Bishop were viewed by more than eight thousand people and given close to twelve hundred “likes” before the account was shut down. This killer is making the police look incompetent, and at the same time seems to be building a fan base.’
Bell wiped his brow again. ‘We’re working to try to solve the murder of Lauren Bishop and that’s why we called this conference today. The gentleman in the red tie.’
The Daily Express reporter ignored the brush-off. ‘What about urging the public to boycott these pictures and any new ones the killer might post?’
The detective chief superintendent squirmed in his seat and pointed again at the journalist wearing a red tie.
‘Nick Gordon, Press Association. Any fool can see that . . .’ He stopped in mid-sentence to pull his phone from his pocket. At the same time, a chorus of email alerts pinged, dinged and chimed around the room. Every journalist reached for their mobiles. The Press Association reporter had to shout to make himself heard over the growing babble of excitement. ‘My news editor says I, Killer is trending on Twitter. Pictures of a new victim posted.’
Bell threw his hands up. ‘That’s it. We’re done, conference over,’ he said.
The camera zoomed out, but Blake kept his eyes on Leah. She bowed her head to hide her face, but he could see her body trembling. The camera immediately zoomed back in for a close-up of her grief.
At that moment, the press officer walked over to Leah and knelt beside her. Blake leant closer to the screen as Partington offered her a tissue. She took it and dabbed at her eyes. Partington gently touched her elbow, helped her to her feet and led her away.
Blake snatched up the TV remote and pressed the off button. He felt a strange mixture of relief and stabbing envy that someone had realised how distressing the event had been for Leah. He stepped on the treadmill, started to run hard and think even harder. What kind of person kills for pleasure? Would you have to be insane or simply evil?
Evil existed. He knew that for a fact. He’d sensed it, stared it in the eye. He pressed the stop button and went in search of his laptop. He found it on the kitchen table and turned it on. Fenton’s words, ‘Don’t look’, rang in his ears, but he blocked them out. He found Google and typed in ‘Lauren Bishop I, Killer’.
The first half-dozen results were news reports on the police investigation, but the seventh was what he’d been looking for. Someone had shared the original Instagram post with a Reditt forum discussion on ‘Why People Kill.’
Blake’s forefinger hovered over the mouse, his heart racing. Why did he want to see Lauren’s final moments? He had no answer to that question. The sensible thing would be not to look, but he needed to. He took a long, deep breath and clicked.
14
Fenton let Ince drive so he could check out the I, Killer tweet. Reading on the screen of his mobile while in a car always made him nauseous and the photographs only made matters worse.
The account had been set up with the handle @ErikLil and a single tweet posted. Look into these eyes and know what it’s like to play God #IKiller.
In th
e photograph, Edward Deere’s mouth was twisted into a grotesque smile, the tip of his tongue resting on his lower lip. His eyes were open, the pupils dilated. Fenton had seen enough dead bodies to know that Deere had still been alive when the picture had been taken. Just.
The scent of the tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror reminded Fenton of the smell of a hospital ward, the smell of grief. No agony can match the final agony of death, he told himself.
Deere’s body had turned up within an hour of the tweet, found behind a pair of wheelie bins by a hungover Canadian tourist looking for a hidden corner to throw up in.
Fenton read the tweet again. This time out loud. Ince glanced his way and smiled. ‘Sounds pretty crazy to me boss. Why Erik Lil?’ Fenton responded with a non-committal grunt. Daly had seen it straightaway, but he was going to have to give Ince a helping hand. ‘It’s an anagram.’
Ince kept his eyes on the road, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel. ‘Right, got it,’ he said. ‘Makes sense. I, Killer has probably been put on Twitter’s list of banned usernames.’ The same thought had occurred to Fenton. The killer couldn’t resist playing to his growing army of admirers.
One thing Fenton felt sure about was that his team would find no connection between the homeless Edward Deere and Lauren Bishop. He’d been selected to die for no other reason than to excite morbid curiosity. Fenton still had his eyes on the screen of his mobile when the car pulled up sharply, jolting him forward in his seat. ‘This is it,’ Ince announced, his tone overly cheerful for a man about to attend a post-mortem examination.
Fenton looked down at Edward Deere’s feeble body, stretched out naked on a steel table, a wasted life cut short. The torso had been sliced down the middle, from sternum to belly, the flesh clamped back exposing the organs.
He regularly attended post mortems and the smell always got to him – a stomach-churning mixture of decaying flesh and antiseptic fluid. The whitewashed walls, harsh lighting and air conditioning made the City of London mortuary feel like the inside of a giant fridge. In the centre of the room stood an examination table and beside it a steel desk on which sat two computer screens.
Instinctively, Fenton raised a hand to cover his nose and mouth, but dropped it to his side when Ince caught his eye and grinned. He looked down at the body again and wondered why the killer had singled out Deere. The homeless man’s friends had admitted constantly teasing him about his lack of height. On the day of his murder he’d stormed off in a sulk threatening to never come back, a threat he’d made many times before.
They said Deere had claimed that he’d come down to London from the north-west, but so far his family, if he had any, hadn’t been traced. Fenton wondered if there was any point trying to find them. Would they give a damn? Probably not. All the checks had been done and nobody had been worried enough to report him missing.
Deere’s limbs and torso were thin and lacking muscle tissue. Fenton studied his face, the light-brown eyes fixed open, the nose small and slightly curved. Cleaned up and in his prime, Deere would have been good-looking in a boyish way. A strip of crisp white linen spanned the width of his shoulders, crossing under his chin, covering his neck. Both detectives turned towards the door as the pathologist, wearing white disposable overalls, entered the room, walked quickly to the desk and switched on one of the computers. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting. I know you probably want to get out of here as quickly as possible.’
Alice Drury, in her mid-thirties, was one of the city’s top forensic pathologists, with a tongue as sharp as her scalpel. She slipped on a pair of white latex gloves and positioned herself close to the cadaver, facing both Fenton and Ince.
‘As you might expect, this is not very complicated,’ she said, lifting the linen cloth covering the neck. Fenton turned away for a second, but forced himself to look back. Ince stepped closer to get a better view of the wound.
The pathologist gave Fenton a sympathetic look before turning her attention back to the body. ‘I know that, unlike your young colleague here, you’re a bit squeamish, so I’ll be gentle with you. Cause of death, of course, is this traumatic wound to the neck. Both carotid arteries were severed. The trachea was sliced. It’s a toss-up whether he bled to death or suffocated. Likely a combination of the two.’
Fenton suppressed a shudder. ‘How does the wound compare to Lauren Bishop’s?’
‘I’d say the initial cut, the killing cut, is more or less identical. The blade was dragged from right to left both times, suggesting the killer is left-handed. The big difference is that this time the killer sawed at the neck after the initial cut, right through to the cervical vertebrae. The muscle tissue and ligaments in the neck are pretty tough. Sawing through them takes a lot of force and effort.’
Fenton paused a moment to think. ‘Does this suggest anger?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. Just giving you the facts. The murder of Lauren Bishop seemed more clinical. One clean cut.’
‘How long would he have taken to die?’
‘I’d estimate thirty seconds to a minute, no longer.
Long enough to take a photograph, to capture the last agonies of a dying man, Fenton thought. He lifted his gaze from the body and stared out of the room’s single window. The day had turned grey and fat drops of rain ran down the glass like tears.
‘Anything else?’ he asked. ‘Any other wounds, or traces of the killer’s DNA? You said the head must have been held to allow the killer to saw through the neck tissue.’
The pathologist moved closer to the computer to scroll through her report. ‘It’s the same as the Lauren Bishop murder. The killer left no DNA behind. Probably wearing gloves. There were no defensive wounds on the victim’s hands or arms. Nothing under his fingernails except dirt.’
Fenton noticed his colleague trying to catch his eye. He nodded and Ince stepped closer to the body and peered at the mutilation. ‘Are you able to say anything about the knife that was used?’ Ince asked.
‘Good question,’ the pathologist said, raising her eyebrows at Fenton. ‘I was waiting for your boss to ask that one.’ Ince looked up and smiled. Fenton didn’t smile back.
‘We can tell from the span of the initial cut, before any sawing action, that it was a long blade, at least nine inches. A close examination of the skin and muscle tissue that was sawn through shows the blade was definitely serrated. That would have made the sawing action easier. I’d say the length of the blade and the cutting edge used in both killings would have been close to identical.’
Ince nodded and moved back. He glanced at his boss as if expecting a follow-up question. Fenton said nothing and the pathologist took the chance to press on. ‘As far as the victim’s general health goes, he was surprisingly well considering he was living on the streets. A little undernourished, yes, but all his organs were in good working order, even his liver, and his arteries are pretty clear of plaque.’
She paused for a moment and gave Fenton an appraising look. ‘You know, a couple of months living rough on a frugal diet would probably do your cardiovascular system the world of good.’
Fenton had known Drury for almost ten years. They were not quite old friends, but he was fond of her. He put on his best hurt face. He’d always kept himself in good shape.
‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘If you had to put your house on it, would you say Lauren Bishop and Edward Deere were killed by the same person?’
The pathologist stretched out a hand and tapped the computer’s keyboard, closing the report file and shutting down the computer. She pulled the thin latex gloves off her hands, dropped them into a surgical waste bin under the desk, and crossed her arms.
‘That call’s not my job, it’s yours,’ she said. ‘I’m here to give you the scientific facts only, but you’ve known me a long time and you know I’m not shy about voicing my opinion. In the absence of any forensic evidence left on the victim’s bodies it’s hard to say, scientifically, that they were definitely killed by th
e same person.’
She paused for a moment and gently placed the strip of linen back over the corpse’s neck. Fenton was unsure whether she had finished or not, but kept quiet to give her the opportunity to say more. She gave him a sideways look and took his silence as an invitation to carry on.
‘Having said all that, the method of killing was the same, the knives used must have been almost identical, and the sheer randomness of the murders tells you even more. If you want my honest opinion, and don’t tell me you’re surprised by this, both murders are the work of the same person.’
Fenton took a long, deep breath, compressed his lips and let the air out slowly through his nose. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not surprised.’
15
The drive back to New Scotland Yard was less than three miles, but the heavy rain slowed the mid-morning traffic on Victoria Embankment to a slow crawl. They had been travelling for twenty minutes and still hadn’t reached Parliament Square.
Whistling under his breath, Ince drummed the steering wheel with his fingers in time to the squeak of the windscreen wipers as he edged the car forward a few feet before applying the brakes. Fenton glanced across at the detective constable. ‘Do you have to do that?’ he said. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’
Ince raised his eyebrows and wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel to keep them still. ‘Sorry, boss.’
‘What are you so cheerful about anyway? You’ve just seen your second dead body, it’s pissing down with rain and we’re stuck in a traffic jam.’
The car ahead moved off slowly and Ince concentrated on following it until the traffic rolled to a halt again. ‘I enjoyed it, to be honest. Educational. You’ve probably been to dozens, hundreds maybe. Surely you’re used to them by now?’
Fenton raised a hand to his face and rubbed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. ‘I don’t like them. I’ll never get used to them. They’re people. I mean they were people. Sons and daughters, someone’s mother or father, brother or sister, wife or husband. I can’t see them any other way.’