by Michael Kerr
A PASSION TO KILL
A DI Matt Barnes Thriller
-5-
By
Michael Kerr
Copyright © 2015 Michael Kerr
Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org
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Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Also By Michael Kerr
DI Matt Barnes Series
A REASON TO KILL
LETHAL INTENT
A NEED TO KILL
CHOSEN TO KILL
The Joe Logan Series
AFTERMATH
ATONEMENT
ABSOLUTION
ALLEGIANCE
Other Crime Thrillers
DEADLY REPRISAL
DEADLY REQUITAL
BLACK ROCK BAY
A HUNGER WITHIN
THE SNAKE PIT
A DEADLY STATE OF MIND
TAKEN BY FORCE
DARK NEEDS AND EVIL DEEDS
Science Fiction / Horror
WAITING
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE STRANGE KIND
RE-EMERGENCE
Children’s Fiction
Adventures in Otherworld
PART ONE – THE CHALICE OF HOPE
PART TWO – THE FAIRY CROWN
It was initially the rape and murder of a close friend’s daughter that triggered what may be fairly described as a vigilante mindset. The justice system is grievously flawed. Far too many sexual predators and murderers walk free, or are imprisoned but eventually released and in many instances offend again. Rightly or wrongly I choose to view their sins unpardonable. I ensure that they pay the ultimate price for their deplorable crimes.
~ Anon
You like my fancy masks? They hide the underlying faces of now dead flesh that could, when living, be manipulated and stretched this way and that to induce trust by projecting false honesty, and worse, conceal an intention to commit evil deeds as they manufactured pleasant smiles and phony sincerity, which was designed to lull others into believing that they were safe: completely unaware of the creatures that hid behind them in damaged minds.
~ The Clown
PROLOGUE
IT was eight a.m. on a grey and cold March morning. A narrow raft of fog hung over the surface of the estuary; a damp and heavy blanket that hardly moved in the still air.
Two figures walked along the shore, not far from the Barking Creek tidal barrier. They had left River Road and were exploring; not looking for anything in particular, just roaming the way that boys will, like a modern day Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
Jason found a dead seagull lying on its back, its wings spread out on the sludge; clawed feet curled up like clenched fists and its head twisted towards him, displaying a large yellow beak that was wide open, as though it had died after emitting a final raucous screech of denial. The one pale-eye that he could see was wide open and staring heavenward.
Ronnie Parker and Jason Tuttle were both thirteen, and had for the umpteenth time decided to bunk off school. They had walked from the high-rise block of flats, which they both lived in, to make their way under the A13 into the huge industrial estate, to finally reach the north bank of the Thames Estuary.
The tide was out, to disclose sundry items: beer and Coke cans, bottles, Polystyrene food trays, a large mooring buoy trailing a twenty-foot-long length of blue nylon rope that lay serpentine like a long, dead snake set in the vast carpet of brown mud. Farther along, Ronnie spotted what appeared to be a large, pale, muck-spattered object.
“Whadya reckon that is, Jace?” Ronnie said.
“Looks like a big plastic bag,” Jason said as he lit one of the two cigarettes he’d nicked from a pack his mum had left on the coffee table at home. “Just some shit from a factory, or dumped from a tanker.”
Ronnie angled out across the mud flats towards it, and Jason ambled after him. They had once found a case of Scotch washed up not far from here. It was amazing what fetched up, that they could turn to profit. Beachcombing was fun. Not that this was what you could call a real beach.
“There’s somethin’ inside it,” Ronnie said as he used the now mud-covered sole of his trainer to press against the large bundle, which was wrapped in plastic and sealed with silver duct tape.
Jason flicked his cigarette away and withdrew an old penknife from a pocket of his fleece, to pull a blade out of the groove in the bone handle and lean forward to slit the plastic open.
The top half of a figure spilled out, and Jason and Ronnie jumped back.
“Jesus! I thought it was a body,” Ronnie said, staring at the pink, resin face.
“It bleedin’ well is,” Jason said. “Look at the rest of it.”
Ronnie had believed it to be a mannequin, like the ones in a million shop windows, until he took a couple of steps forward and the smell of death hit him. It stank like rotting meat, which in reality it was. And the shoulders and chest he could see beneath the masked head were bloated and had purple and green blotches on them.
“What should we do?” Jason asked.
“Call the police, I suppose,” Ronnie said as he looked up and down the stretch of coast to see if anyone was watching them. “Someone topped him, stuck a mask on his face, and then wrapped him up like a fish supper. And look at the trail in the mud. Whoever did it dragged him out here from the road.”
“I’m not usin’ my phone,” Jason said. “No point in us gettin’ involved.”
“We’d better get back to the main road and find a phone box that hasn’t been smashed up, then.”
“Or just forget that we ever found it.”
Ronnie thought about it. “Nah, we should phone it in. We don’t have to give our names.”
They trudged back through what a lot of people called a business park, and the second phone box they came to actually had a working phone in it.
Ronnie punched in 999 and said ‘police’ when the operator asked him which emergency service he wanted. Another woman came on the line and asked him for his name and the number he was calling from, but he just ignored her, told her where the body was and hung up. He had put on a gruff voice, because he knew that the call would have been recorded. He then took off his baseball cap and wiped the phone and the keypad.
“It’ll be on the telly later,” Jason said.
“Well don’t tell anybody that we reported it,” Ronnie said. “I don’t want the Old Bill at the door. My dad would beat the shit out of me for bein’ involved.”
“We aren’t involved, we just found it.”
“Just forget that we did. It’s not our business.”
CHAPTER ONE
IT was four p.m. when DCI Tom Bartlett took a call from Detective Inspector Tony Underwood, who was stationed at Barking. They had known each other for over twenty-five years.
“Long time no see, Tony,” Tom said. “I thought you would have hung your handcuffs up and be spending your winters in warmer climes.”
“Cheeky sod. I’m a couple of years younger than you,” Tony said. “And you’re
still at it.”
“Yeah, we must be gluttons for punishment. Why the call? You were never one for idle chitchat.”
“Remember The Clown killing just before last Christmas?”
“Hard to forget. The guy was found sitting on a park bench in Dagenham, bollock naked and wearing a clown’s mask, complete with a big red wig. And there was a bunch of balloons floating in the air, tied off to one of his hands.”
“And he’d had his throat cut from ear to ear.”
“Must have been someone that didn’t find him funny. Is it still unsolved?”
“Yeah. But we’ve just had another murder that was committed by the same nutcase.”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive. We’ve got the corpse of a guy that had been bagged up in plastic and dumped on the mudflats at Barking Creek, wearing a mask and with his throat cut. And the same word was carved into his back: GUILTY.”
“Could be a copycat.”
“You wish. We didn’t release all the gory details from the first case. It sounds like one for the SCU.”
“I’ll have Matt Barnes drive over in the morning and look at what you have. Okay?”
“Fine. What we don’t have are any clues. Just the ritual trademarks that tell me we have a serial up and running. And those psychos’ are what turns your DI’s wheels, aren’t they?”
“It’s what the Serious Crimes Unit specialises in, Tony. We, and in particular Matt, have a good track record with repeaters, but I wouldn’t say any of us relish it.”
A few minutes later Tom went downstairs to the squad room. Matt and two of the team were there, drinking coffee and clearing the whiteboards, having closed a case by arresting Grant Marshall, a serial rapist who’d got blasé and struck in the same park twice in a row, after getting away with six attacks on young women in Islington. He had resisted arrest and assaulted Tam Patel, to find out to his cost that the DC was an accomplished exponent of karate. Having his wrist and jaw fractured seemed – to Matt and the team – small price to pay for the rapes he had committed. And he would serve a lengthy sentence, to hopefully learn that taking women by force wasn’t worth the consequences.
Tom went over to the coffeemaker and poured himself a cup, then told Matt, Pete Deakin and Errol Chambers the details of the call he’d received from Tony Underwood.
“That’s novel,” Matt said. “He incapacitates them, cuts their throats, puts masks on them and carves the word guilty on their backs.”
“Yeah. It never ceases to amaze me what variety of crazies are running around out there. I told Tony that you’d go and take a look in the morning and confirm that it’s one for us. He can fill you in with the details of both cases.”
“Fine,” Matt said. “We need something meaty to run with.”
“You hate to see those boards wiped clean, don’t you?” Tom said.
Matt nodded. “Too true, it’s like having empty Scotch bottles. They serve no useful purpose when they’re empty.”
He was now home at the bungalow in Romford, relaxing and feeling a deep sense of wellbeing. What he had done was natural justice. Totally unlawful, but right. He had always believed that wrongdoers should be dealt with more harshly. The law had gone soft. Prisons were full to the gills with inmates that were treated better than pensioners. They had all mod cons and still demanded more; even wanted to have the right to vote. They had, to his way of thinking, forfeited all their rights by deciding to steal from or harm law-abiding people. There was no deterrents. The system couldn’t cope, and law enforcement was a fucking joke.
He showered, and then made himself a pastrami and cheese sandwich and a cup of tea. He determined to take Rascal, his black lab, out for a walk later. It was only lunchtime, and yet it seemed to have been a long and arduous day. He had been up since four a.m., to transfer the corpse to the boot of his car and drive to what he had selected as a safe location to dump it in the darkness. Removing it from the car had been no mean feat. Bodies really were dead weight. But it had been worth the effort. Parking as close to the weed riddled sloping bank as he could, he had hefted the wrapped body out onto it, then grasped the heavy-duty plastic package at the foot end, to grip the ankles through the smooth material and slowly drag it out onto the mud, to leave it where it would be in full view of River Road at dawn.
Returning from a walk to the local park with Rascal, he went into his workshop at the bottom of the back garden and spent the remainder of the day working on a hand carved rocking horse that was nearly completed. Woodwork was his hobby, and the proceeds from the sale of all he made, less the cost of materials, went to the local children’s hospice. If he could help in some small way he would, and did. The creation of toys or furniture gave him almost as much pleasure as the donations he could make. It was on a par with his other pastime; ridding society of those that the law had failed to deal with.
The News at Ten came on, and after an item of another atrocity carried out by the Islamic terrorist group commonly referred to as ISIS, it was reported that a body had been found near Barking on the Thames Estuary, and that police were treating it as a murder inquiry. He chuckled. It would be hard for them to consider it as being anything else. With letters sliced into the bruised corpse’s back, its throat cut, and then being taped up in heavy duty plastic and dumped at the edge of the Thames, the likelihood of it being an accident or suicide was out of the question.
After waiting to see what the weather prospects were for the following day, he switched off the TV with the remote and then went over to a credenza he had made a decade earlier. It was solid oak, and had a false bottom that could only be removed by pressing a length of beading at the back of the cupboard, which released the spring-loaded catch that held the false base in place. Inside were two large manila envelopes. One held ten thousand pounds in twenty pound notes that he chose to keep at home, due in the main to the insignificant interest on savings. Banks were happy to use your money, but did not pay enough for the arrangement to be a satisfactory two-way deal. The other envelope held a list of names, addresses, photographs and newspaper cuttings. He spread them on top of the coffee table, which was also a piece he had made.
The next victim-in-waiting was Craig Danby, a forty-three year old paedophile who ‒ although on the sex offenders’ register ‒ had subsequently been arrested, suspected of sodomising a ten year-old boy. Danby had left no trace evidence, though and was therefore not prosecuted, even though the police and the CPS knew that he was guilty. Due to him having a record of abuse on minors, he was next up on the list. It would soon be time to become au fait with his habits, and to decide on the time, date and place to abduct and deal with him.
After returning the paperwork to the file and placing it back in the hidey-hole, he put fresh water down for Rascal and then went through to the bathroom, brushed his teeth and made ready for bed. He was almost at the end of a Wilbur Smith novel, and hoped that he could stay awake long enough to finish it.
CHAPTER TWO
BETH arrived home at six-thirty p.m. She made a pot of tea and settled to watch Channel 4 News, but switched off after twenty minutes and put an Eva Cassidy CD on. It struck her that she was becoming more and more disenchanted with the carte du jour of endless political bickering, war, crime and the repetitive fodder that generally disheartened the public. She seemed to have less and less time for the big picture, that was in the main mundane and downbeat. The brightest items had been Jon Snow’s gaudy necktie and socks.
It had been a good day. The counselling and talk therapy she was doing at the Morning Star Centre in Uxbridge was far more rewarding than the work she had done at Northfield. The decision for the career change had been made shortly after a patient had attacked her and she had subsequently begun to question the validity of spending her days psychoanalysing the criminally insane. In the main, her patients had been lost causes and would never be released back into society. Years of being involved with them had given her few new insights as to the already established fa
ctors, stressors and triggers that made them what they were. Matt’s reasoning had slowly converted her into believing that she could find more satisfaction in an area that produced positive results. Working with psychologically fragile children and helping them to get past the trauma of having been abused both physically and mentally, was truly gratifying.
Matt arrived home at just before eight p.m. Hung his thick fleece on an old-fashioned wood coat stand in the hall and walked into the kitchen. Beth went to him, and they held each other for two minutes in a loving embrace; kissed with the same ardour that they had the first time that their lips had met, and appreciated that at this moment in time they had everything that they wanted in life, and that being together was – to them – the most important thing in the universe.
“You look upbeat,” Beth said as they slowly relinquished their hold on each other. “Had a good day?”
“Cleared one case, and have another bizarre one to start in on tomorrow morning.”
“Tell me about it,” Beth said as she went over to switch the coffeemaker on.
Matt sat on a bench at the table in the nook. He wanted to shower and change clothes, but that could wait till he’d downed a mug of coffee.
“The body of a guy was found sealed up in plastic sheeting on the mudflats near the tidal barrier at Barking Creek,” he said. “His throat had been cut, and the word GUILTY had been etched on his back, presumably with a knife. The really weird thing is that whoever did it put a mask on his face.”
“Gruesome. Any leads?” Beth said as she put the mug of coffee in front of him and sat down.
“No, but we’ve got it to investigate because it looks like a repeater has started up. Same MO was used on another guy just before Christmas.”