Lost Souls

by Chris Merritt

  ‘Didn’t know he was gonna go like that, though, did we?’

  ‘No.’ Lockhart turned his glass in both hands. ‘We didn’t.’

  He briefly wondered whether, if he or Mum had been there when the acute heart attack happened, they could’ve got him some help in time… But there was no point speculating about that. Lockhart reached out, laid a hand on top of his mum’s and squeezed very gently. He could feel the gnarled bones of her swollen finger joints against his palm. She had bowed her head, and they were both silent for a minute.

  Eventually, his mum raised her eyes to him, and Lockhart could see they were moist.

  ‘I miss him, love,’ she said. ‘Every day.’

  ‘I know, Mum. Me too.’ He drank some beer.

  His mum sniffed. ‘I still talk to him sometimes, you know. Is that odd?’

  ‘Nope,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think so. I still talk to Jess. Just cos someone’s not there, doesn’t mean they’re not with us.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Iris took a sip of her drink. ‘Don’t suppose there’s anything new with her, is there?’

  ‘Actually, yeah, there might be.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Lockhart knew he could share anything about his search for Jess with his mum. Apart from him, she was probably the only person who still thought his wife was alive.

  ‘Well, Nick’s got this warehouse, and—’

  ‘Hang about,’ she interjected. ‘You don’t think Nick had anything to do with her disappearance, do you, love?’

  ‘I told you, Mum, the bloke at the harbour in Whitstable told me he saw Jess there with a man who could’ve been her brother. That’s what he said. Could’ve been her brother.’

  ‘But Nick said it wasn’t him.’

  ‘Of course he’s gonna say that, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, it might not’ve been, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Eh?’

  She gave a small sigh. ‘You two boys never got on, did you? You’ve got to keep that in mind.’

  ‘I know. Just… listen to what I have to say, then you can give me an earful if you still think I’m barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘All right, I’m listening.’

  ‘OK. So, he’s got this warehouse in the Darent Industrial Park, out Erith way,’ he began. Lockhart went on to explain about the early morning visit the previous week by the fishermen from Whitstable, and how it was strange that they seemed to be collecting rather than delivering. When he’d finished, Iris pursed her lips together.

  ‘Could be something,’ she acknowledged.

  ‘There’s too many links for it to be a coincidence. The sighting there, Nick still connected to the place…’

  Now it was her turn to lay a hand on his. ‘I know you want that to be right, love. But just because you believe something, doesn’t make it true.’

  He recalled briefly how Lexi Green had told him much the same thing in one of their therapy sessions. And again, when she’d been profiling for his MIT. Magical thinking, she called it.

  ‘You’re right,’ he conceded. ‘But I’m following it up, first chance I get.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot on at the moment,’ she pointed out.

  ‘This is important, Mum.’

  ‘Of course, it is,’ she said softly.

  Lockhart had a deep swig of Stella. ‘Problem is, I don’t have much time. The hearing’s less than a month from now.’ He didn’t need to remind his mum which hearing that was. Declaration of presumed death.

  ‘Well, do what you have to do, love.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Just remember to look after yourself. You’re the same as your father.’ She nodded to the pint of Courage, the empty seat at the table. ‘Don’t know the meaning of give up, do you?’

  ‘Well, if that’s anything like Dad was, then I’m proud of it.’

  His mum’s eyes sparkled. ‘So you should be.’

  Thirty-Two

  The beam of his head torch was the only light inside the church. He directed it onto her face, illuminating the contours of bone and skin. He’d already closed her eyes and she looked so peaceful, he thought, now that he’d brought her into the silence of the church.

  It’d been easy enough to get her inside the building; just like Donovan, she was slim and light. Nothing to her, really. No resistance in life or in death. Same as with the boy, it fascinated him how readily he could manipulate her limbs, like a doll, now that two days had passed, and all that stiffness and tension was gone from her body.

  He knew her spirit would’ve been released the moment he’d ended her life and would, very likely, be on its way to heaven. She was still a child, and that was what happened with children. That’s what he’d been told, all those years ago, and he believed it just as strongly now. But this was his way of making sure.

  Carrying her carefully across to the altar, he lay her gently on her back while he bent her legs at the knees, drawing them up and rolling her slowly onto her side. She had trusted him too much, he reflected, as he gently lifted her under the arms, up and into a kneeling position. Just as he’d been too trusting at her age, too. He wished that he’d had someone to save him like this, back then.

  It had started with the free hit. The second, a few days later, came with the warning that it would cost him. He hadn’t thought about that at the time, though, so desperate was he to recapture the feeling of freedom, the sense of floating out of his body and away. He’d stolen two mobile phones to pay for that hit. And it went from there.

  Pretty soon, he was into a routine, not caring as the price went up every week or two, or just when the grown-up felt like it. He roamed train stations and cafés, scouring bags, pockets and tables for any phone that someone had left out. No one seemed to pay attention to a kid, and he breezed through, helping himself, as if he was invisible. He suspected that, for most people, that’s exactly what he was. Same as Donovan had been, and as Charley would be, once her star had burned itself out and the predators had had their fill.

  He reached into his bag and extracted a length of white ribbon. Delicately looped it around her left hand, hanging limp at her side. It was in moments like this that he felt the most intense spiritual connection, the clearest sense of—

  The noise came from behind him and he whipped around, his torch beam sweeping over pews and picking out a figure at the back. But it was just a statue. Christ on the cross.

  He held his breath, heart pounding. Was someone here, at eleven thirty at night? He quickly made sure she was resting against the altar and stood. Under his latex gloves, he could feel his palms getting clammy. He clicked off his head torch and walked slowly towards the back of the church, from where the sound had come.

  Was this the moment it ended for him, so soon after it had begun? The thought provoked two feelings. First, a deep sadness that he wouldn’t be able to save more children like Donovan and Charley, that so many others would have to endure their lives without his intervention. But this was mixed with relief that he’d be able to stop, that he wouldn’t need to push himself to keep doing it. What did that mean? He took a few more steps forward into the darkness.

  Then the sound came again, louder and clearer this time.

  His first instinct was to freeze, but then he registered what it was.

  A fox. Scavenging outside, no doubt, perhaps in the church bins. Seeing what it could get from the trash others had discarded, grabbing anything to help it stay alive. He knew what that was like. Relaxing, he smiled to himself as he clicked his torch back on and returned to the altar.

  Monday

  11th January

  Thirty-Three

  The news was so bad that Smith didn’t believe it at first. Her initial reaction to Lockhart’s call was that joking about a dead kid was in pretty poor taste. She liked a laugh as much as the next woman, but even the gallows humour of The Met didn’t stretch that far. Then she realised the guvnor was serious.

  A second child had been found in a church, and
this time it was just a couple of miles from their MIT base at Jubilee House. Lockhart wanted her there on the hurry up, to secure the scene and preserve evidence until they could get a Crime Scene Manager and forensic team down. Smith didn’t need to be asked twice.

  She’d grabbed a set of keys for a pool car and, ten minutes later, she and Khan were driving through the gates of St Margaret’s, Putney. This was slap bang in the middle of their patch, and Smith wasn’t having it. If the desire to catch Donovan Blair’s killer had already stoked her fire, this was as good as chucking petrol on the flames. But she needed to keep a lid on her anger, stay calm. Make sure she didn’t miss anything.

  Nearing the building, Smith was struck by the similarities to St Mary the Virgin in Mortlake. Both were old, isolated structures of rough grey stone, shielded by greenery from the quiet residential roads and dark footpaths that surrounded them. A quick glance told her they were unlikely to find cameras on the premises. And she’d bet that no one nearby had seen or heard a thing, either.

  First, Smith instructed one of the lids standing guard outside to establish an outer cordon at the church perimeter. Next, she spoke briefly to the cleaner who’d discovered the body. Tearful and shaking, the older woman told Smith that she’d turned up for her usual Monday morning shift to find one of the back doors forced open. Smith left her with another uniformed officer to keep her company until the SOCOs arrived. Then she and Khan suited up and went inside to take a look. Smith could already taste bile at the back of her throat as she pushed open the large wooden doors.

  Even from the back of the cavernous interior, Smith could see that the victim was kneeling at the altar, head bowed and resting against it. She felt another flare of rage towards the bastard who would take a child’s life. But her fury was soon overtaken by a deeper sense of discomfort, its cold tentacles spreading through her belly as she got closer and the significance of the scene dawned on her.

  With the exception that the victim was female, it was exactly like the one they had been called to a week ago. The girl’s palms were pressed together as if in prayer, bound with a white ribbon that looped tight around her neck to suspend her hands in mid-air beneath her chin. None of those details had been made available to the public, nor had they leaked to the press, as far as Smith knew. Which confirmed the suspicion that had been gnawing at her since Lockhart’s phone call.

  They were dealing with a serial killer.

  She recalled that Dr Lexi Green had said as much, based on the word ‘children’ in the Bible verse displayed in front of Donovan’s body. Smith had been sceptical of the psychologist’s analysis on previous cases, even once referring to her theories as crystal ball gazing rather than science. But Smith knew that Green had been correct in the past. And it seemed her prediction had also been uncannily accurate here.

  Aside from the heart-breaking human cost, Smith knew that a serial offender made their job even harder. Once the press got hold of that fact, they’d milk it for everything they could. Stoking public hysteria, ratcheting up the pressure on their team to get a result. In over two decades of policework, Smith hadn’t known a single time when media obsession with a case had produced anything beyond crank calls, psychic readings and other bogus offers of help. They’d just have to keep their heads down and deal with it. She tried to push that out of her mind for now and focus on the victim in front of her.

  Smith didn’t want to get too close and risk disturbing the crime scene before the SOCOs got here with all their kit. She knew the lid who’d gone in first had, following protocol, confirmed that the victim was dead. The dark ligature mark at her neck bore grim testament to that fact. Smith’s plan now was to make some initial observations to feed back to the guvnor, then get out and put an inner cordon around the building itself.

  Khan was first to speak, and Smith realised they’d both been shocked into silence since entering the church.

  ‘It’s, like, perfectly arranged,’ he noted. ‘Nothing out of place.’

  ‘So, we guess she was killed somewhere else and brought here.’

  ‘Right. Just like with Donovan.’

  ‘Where the hell is that other crime scene?’ she said, thinking out loud. They had to locate it. But how?…

  ‘Find that, we find the killer,’ stated Khan. He was probably right.

  There were two things Smith wanted to check now. The first was easy enough: she’d already spotted the Bible lying open on the altar in front of the girl. Same as in Mortlake, a verse had been highlighted in garish yellow marker. Smith kept her hands off it; SOCOs might swab some touch DNA from it later, though she suspected that with a communal object like this, all they’d get would be a bunch of low-level mixed profiles. Almost impossible to match to a suspect, even if they had one. She read aloud from the page which had been displayed:

  ‘“Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Isaiah 49:15.’

  ‘It’s about kids, again.’

  ‘No shit.’ She turned to Khan, who shrugged.

  ‘Maybe we need to get Lexi on it,’ he said. ‘Tell us what it means.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She imagined Lockhart would be making that phone call pretty soon.

  Smith approached the body, squatted down next to the victim. She was so close she could smell the shampoo from the girl’s hair, the detergent on her top. As with the first murder, her clothes were clean, and the same care had obviously been taken with the hair and nails, too. Smith got a sinking feeling that this killer had been so thorough in their preparation of the body that there might not be any decent traces for them to find. But she had an idea where something may have been placed.

  Reaching carefully for the girl’s right trouser pocket, she probed gently inside with her fingertips. Sure enough, they made contact with a thin, rigid object. Smith clasped it as lightly as she could and withdrew it, turned it to the light.

  It was one of those PASS proof-of-age ID cards. The photograph showed a pretty girl, her head angled slightly, full lips pushed out. She looked sixteen, perhaps older, but Smith calculated from her date of birth that she was only thirteen. For some reason, she read the name last of all: Charlotte Mullins. Then she felt it.

  All of a sudden, it was as though something had broken inside her. A barrier that’d been keeping the horror of this at bay had crumbled the moment she’d put a name to the victim. Smith’s throat constricted and her eyes prickled. She fumbled for her phone, photographed the ID card and replaced it in Charlotte’s pocket.

  ‘What now?’ asked Khan.

  Smith stood and blinked away the tears, composed herself. When she spoke, her voice was low and steady again.

  ‘We find the fucker that did this.’

  Thirty-Four

  After discovering that no one called Charlotte Mullins was registered as missing, the MIT had checked Social Services’ records to see if the name was known to them locally. The enquiry had turned up this address on Hazlewell Road as her current residence. But the place where Charlotte Mullins had lived – ‘The Beacon’ – didn’t look like any children’s home Lockhart had ever seen.

  It was a grand Edwardian house, wide and deep, built over three floors. Like the wealthy family homes around it in West Putney, the exterior was well kept and recently painted. The only noticeable difference from its neighbours was the absence of a brand-new Range Rover or Mercedes-Benz in the driveway. Lockhart dropped his old Defender nearby, stuck a blue ‘Metropolitan Police’ sign on top of the dashboard, and walked up the front path.

  A ‘death knock’ was one of the hardest tasks in the job, and Lockhart was relieved he didn’t have to do it now. Perhaps part of that was his own fear of being on the receiving end of such a visit, one day…

  Here, though, the team’s Family Liaison Officer, PC Rhona MacLeod, had arrived half an hour ago and broken the news to the married couple who ran the home. Even though Charlotte’s guardians weren’t her family, it�
��d still be extremely traumatic for them to be told she was dead. And there would be at least one more such message to deliver when they’d tracked down Charlotte’s birth parents.

  He rang the bell and wasn’t surprised when PC MacLeod answered the door.

  ‘They seem OK,’ she whispered. ‘But maybe the shock hasnae hit them yet.’

  Lockhart caught a whiff of freshly baked bread as he followed her through a smart, clean hallway with dark wooden floorboards. They emerged into a large living room containing half a dozen long, deep sofas. On one of them, a striking middle-aged couple sat together.

  The man was trim and athletic looking, with a full head of short silver hair. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, jeans and soft leather moccasins. His eyes were bright blue behind tortoiseshell-rimmed designer glasses, and for a moment Lockhart was slightly unnerved by the intensity of his gaze. He had his arm around the woman, who was slim and elegant. Her long blonde hair was pulled back in a high ponytail. She had one of those Nordic-style patterned sweaters over black leggings and was barefoot. They both stood as he walked over to them.

  ‘Detective Inspector Dan Lockhart,’ he said.

  ‘Neil Morgan,’ said the man confidently.

  ‘Frida Olesen.’ Lockhart detected a slight Scandinavian accent and guessed she must’ve lived in the UK for many years.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he said.

  ‘We were so fond of Charley, weren’t we, darling?’ Morgan squeezed his wife’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied. ‘Such a wonderful girl. She brightened up our home.’

  ‘How long had she been living with you?’ asked Lockhart as they took their seats.

  ‘Coming up to four months,’ said Morgan.

  ‘And how was she settling in here?’

  ‘Quite well, I think.’ Olesen glanced at her husband before continuing. ‘We were trying to bring her into our family. That can take a little while, of course, depending on what a young person has been through… but we were making progress.’