by Michael Kerr
“I’d think that rummaging through a stranger’s underwear and everything that they own is pretty personal, wouldn’t you? Can you put yourself in my position and imagine how you would feel?”
“We just follow leads, Ms Gould. The objective is to find and arrest a murderer, and if that means bruising a few egos or irritating people during an ongoing investigation, then it’s unavoidable but necessary.”
Matt entered the kitchen as the kettle boiled. Don and the other officers had decided on a search pattern of the house and split up into teams.
“I was just asking your colleague what motivates you, Inspector Barnes,” Rhonda said as she made three mugs of coffee.
“Victims,” Matt said, surprising Marci by his answer. “My squad spend most of their working hours hunting for serial killers. The longer it takes us to find and arrest them, the more murders they commit. So I guess we’re like a pack of hungry wolves. We keep on the scent of a quarry, and then bring it down.”
“That sounds dramatic,” Rhonda said.
“It’s just police work.”
“But you don’t solve every murder, do you?”
“Most. And those that we don’t are never closed. I don’t have a lot of patience, but sometimes that’s what it takes.”
Matt took his coffee and left the room, to go out the front door, stand in the fresh air and wonder what direction the inquiry would go in if Rhonda Gould was not the killer.
As Matt sipped the coffee, a dark blue Jag entered the drive and parked opposite the Mondeo and the transit van. A stocky man dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a slim leather briefcase got out and approached Matt.
“Help you?” Matt asked.
“I very much doubt it. Who are you?”
“Detective Inspector Barnes,” Matt said, withdrawing his wallet from the inside pocket of an old brown leather blouson that he had owned for at least eighteen years, and had resurrected when he binned the fleece that had been ruined by the dog bite and his blood. His left arm was still sore. He showed the man his ID and waited.
“I’m Roland Trice, Ms Gould’s solicitor. I would appreciate seeing the warrants that you are enforcing.”
“Show me some ID and I will,” Matt said.
Roland put the briefcase down on the drive and produced a driving licence from his wallet. “Satisfied,” he asked with a touch of derision in his voice.
Matt led the way through to the kitchen, and after Roland had embraced Rhonda and pecked her fleetingly on both cheeks, they both went through to a ground floor office that had been searched and given the all clear.
It was an hour later when PC Ray Chandler found a bright red jacket in the bottom of an ottoman in the smallest of the four bedrooms on the first floor.
Ray reported the find to Don, who made his way downstairs and found Matt to tell him that they may have found vital evidence.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
GABRIEL saw the fear in Dewey’s eyes, which were wide open and staring at the blade of the razor. He chuckled and went over to a wall unit with crowded shelves and placed it on top of a box that held various coloured glass eyes for not only the rocking horses that he made, but for wooden ducks that had hinged wings that flapped as the birds were pulled along on wheels instead of webbed feet. He also made jack-in-boxes, dolls, and hand puppets with wooden heads. They all needed eyes.
Switching on the radio he was soothed by a little Mozart as he made up a quantity of plaster of Paris in a large plastic bowl. When it was mixed to the right consistency he put it down on the chair and went to stand at the side of his prisoner, to rip the tape off his face and pull the saliva-soaked duster from his mouth.
Dewey was in a cold sweat as Gabriel wiped his face with a wet wipe and patted it dry with a towel, before using his fingers to apply a film of neutral shoe polish to the skin.
“You need to stay very still while I apply this,” Gabriel said. “If you move it will ruin the cast, so don’t pull any faces while its setting. It won’t take long.”
“Can we talk about this?” Dewey said. “I can pay anything you want to let me go, just name your price.”
“Okay, my price is ten…no, make that twenty years.”
Dewey looked confused. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
“That money is no longer of any particular value to me.”
“It’s what makes the world go round,” Dewey said. “You could go anywhere in the fucking world and never want for anything again.”
“I don’t want for anything now,” Gabriel said. “I’m dying. The only thing I need is something that your blood money can’t buy. I’ve got perhaps six months to live, maximum.”
Dewey was lost for words. He had always been able to negotiate for any commodity, but he didn’t know how to deal with a dying man.
“I could arrange―”
“Shut up, Dewey. Just keep still or I’ll be forced to use the ether again.”
Dewey lay and listened to his heart pounding in his ears as a thick layer of the white plaster was applied to his face from his hairline to his chin, with only the areas around his eyes and nostrils uncovered. Gabriel had incorporated a little salt into the mixture and used warm water to ensure that the plaster cured more rapidly. Within fifteen minutes it was hard enough to remove. He eased it free and used another wet wipe to clean Dewey’s face.
“There,” Gabriel said as he inspected the inside of the cast and was satisfied with the result, which showed up every line, blemish and other imperfections from Dewey’s face. It was truly a positive and negative: the chalk-white of the cast and the dark chocolate brown of the man on the bench. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”
Dewey said nothing. He was helpless and becoming more fearful by the second. He believed that he was now closer to a fate that he could not prevent from happening. “How do I make this stop?” he asked.
“You don’t,” Gabriel said. “But apologising for all the suffering that you’ve caused to others would go some way to my showing a little mercy.”
“I’m sorry for all I’ve done. Let me go and I’ll do whatever I can to make amends.”
“You can’t make amends for what has already taken place. The people that you’ve used and abused and had murdered cannot be brought back. It’s my duty to take vengeance for them; to ensure that you endure a fitting end for your sins. Walking out of the Old Bailey with a grin on your face and your middle finger up to the press sealed your fate. You had a young woman murdered to stop her bearing witness against you, and that crime alone warrants what I intend to do to you.”
“I’ll confess to everything,” Dewey said, his voice full of desperation. “I’ll write down all that I’ve done and sign it.”
“Nice try,” Gabriel said, patting him on the shoulder. “The problem being, the police take exception to my way of dealing with the likes of you. They would lock me up and throw the key away if they could identify and find me. And you would repudiate the confession and rightly contend that it was given under duress.”
Dewey guessed that repudiate meant deny that any admission he made was true. He was reduced to begging. “Please don’t kill me,” he snivelled. “I’m worth a lot of money. I’ll give it all away to good causes.”
“Too little and far too late for that, Dewey. You made a life choice and put what you wanted first at the expense of so many others. Mercy is a concept that you have never embraced.”
Gabriel gagged his detainee again and set to work on a smaller table at the rear of the workshop. He placed the plaster cast inverted in a box full of sawdust and once more used his fingers, this time to smear Vaseline in the cast, before mixing an amount of two-part resin compound, which he carefully applied over the separator. The resin heated up and quickly hardened, and with the tip of a screwdriver he prised the mask free, turned it to face him and nodded, content with the result.
The sudden pain in his side almost caused him to drop the mask. He set it down and gripped the edge of the table with both hands and to
ok deep breaths. The crippling ache was impossible to ignore. He needed some of the rose petal-pink gloopy crud that he had been prescribed. It tasted as he imagined bitter almonds mixed with rotting fish would, but it was a strong painkiller: an opiate that he believed to be a cocktail of methadone and morphine, that would dull the pain caused by the malignant tendrils that were proliferating and destroying the healthy tissue of his lungs and liver. He had been told by a consultant in the oncology department that it acted on specific receptors in the brain and spinal cord to ease pain and also reduce the emotional response to discomfort. So far it had. He stood still for a couple of minutes, then left the workshop and walked slowly back to the house.
It was almost an hour later that he felt well enough to move from the kitchen table. He had taken a double dose of the medication and just sat with his eyes closed and let his thoughts run free. The past rolled in like waves. He had wanted no payment to kill what had been his first victim, Neil Connolly. The man had supposedly served his time in the eyes of the law, but not in the eyes of those that still mourned the permanent loss of a loved one. He had been a willing executioner; eager to exact a more fitting sentence on Connolly. It flooded back. He was there. He relived it…
…It was just a few days before Christmas; mid afternoon, already becoming dark. He was parked, watching and waiting. Connolly came out of the police station and ambled along the road to a bus stop. One of his parole conditions was that he had to report to the station in person twice a week.
A bus came and Connolly boarded it.
He followed the single-decker, and at the sixth stop the door hissed open and Connolly stepped down onto the pavement.
He pulled in at the kerb and watched as his intended prey walked next to the high palisade of railings that encircled the park. Connolly was wearing a dark-blue woollen beanie hat pulled down to almost cover his eyebrows, and a thick charcoal-grey car coat, and baggy jeans that were too long and concertinaed over his trainers. He looked both ways furtively as he reached the open gates, and then entered and vanished from view.
Gabriel got out of the car, quickly retrieved his walking cane from the rear seat and set off in pursuit. This was the perfect location to abduct someone. As he followed Connolly along the roadway that led to a boating lake and café, a lone figure ran towards him; a young, fit-looking man in a black, full body Spandex Lycra jog suit that showed off his muscles and his ample lunchbox. He also wore earbuds and was probably listening to noise that, to Gabriel, bore no resemblance to music as he knew it. The guy didn’t even seem to see Gabriel; just ran past him with a thousand yard stare.
Up ahead, the rapist sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette. Was he hoping that a young female would walk by? Did he still have the need to take a girl by force? Surely he knew that he would be the prime suspect if he did. But some people were unable to rein in the compulsions that drove them. He had probably fantasised what he would do when he regained his freedom.
Veering off the wide path, Gabriel made his way to where only a straggly stand of rhododendron separated him from Connolly. He could hear no sound of others approaching, so stepped forward through a gap in the greenery and brought the ram’s horn handle of his cane down with measured force on the top of Connolly’s head.
The cigarette end fell from Neil Connolly’s fingers and he fell forward off the bench onto his knees, dazed and not knowing why a sudden explosion had taken place in his skull.
Gabriel rounded the bench, grasped his quarry by the ankles and dragged him into the shrubbery and used duct tape to bind his arms behind him, his ankles together, and to wrap around his head to cover his mouth. He then hurried back to his car, and drove it into the park, to stop in front of the bench and open the boot. Connolly was semiconscious, but in no condition to walk. Having to use all of his strength, Gabriel somehow managed to haul Connolly up against a thick tree trunk, and then let the top half of the man’s body fall forward over his right shoulder, so that he could use a fireman’s lift to carry him to the car and dump him in the boot.
Back home, with his prize now naked and bound on the plastic sheet he had spread across the floor, he told the man why he was going to die, carved the letters deeply into his back, and left him to suffer for a while, before returning after he had taken Rascal for a walk, to slice Connolly’s throat open and absorb the terror in the choking rapist's eyes as he jerked and thrashed and then found uneasy escape into eternity.
He had not known how he would feel, but was pleased to find that the putting to death of Connolly produced what he decided was the satisfaction anyone would enjoy after carrying out a virtuous act. He was more of an ‘eye for an eye’ man than the type that could turn the other cheek. You had to be happy in your own skin and feel good about your actions…and he did. Morality was a concept that could be interpreted in several ways. He had his own take on it. Forgiving and forgetting was for the weak and the meek, and those that did not have the courage to set right a wrong. Everyone had singular beliefs on any given subject. All countries had their own laws and set of penalties for breaking them, and it was not a constant. Laws changed and practises were amended. He would go with his heart and choose not to observe what bewigged old men in the Royal Court of justice and politicians supposed was right for the masses.
The pain in his chest and side withdrew, temporarily blocked, to wait in abeyance until the effect of the drug wore off.
He put the dumping of Connolly’s body out of his mind. He had kept it for a couple of days, due to more pressing work on the rocking horse he had been making at the time. He had then taken the mortal remains back, to sit the corpse on the same bench in the park from where he had snatched it when it had been a living entity. The cheap plastic clown’s mask and balloons had been a stab at humour, and a joyous celebration of the act he had committed. The stink of the deceased murderer had lingered in the garage for a few days, clinging tenaciously to the fabric of the garage, probably suffused into the porous breezeblocks. It had taken time and plenty of fresh air through an open window to eventually dispel it.
He drank a glass of cold water and then went back out to the workshop. Reminiscing had been pleasurable, but now he had Dewey Marvin to send on his way.
He used a quick drying brown car colour from an aerosol to spray evenly on the mask to give it a lifelike look, and then turned his attention to Dewey. He said nothing, just removed the gag and once more anesthetised him.
Dewey woke up still on top of the bench but now face down with his head hanging over one end of it. The floor below it appeared to be covered in a thick layer of sawdust. He coughed until he retched, and watched the watery bile drip down from his mouth to land on the sawdust and be absorbed. For some reason his penis hurt. He would never know that Gabriel had used a leather lace to tie tightly round its base, to ensure that if he was to piss himself, then it would not find egress to soak the bench and run off onto the floor.
Dewey could only move his head, his fingers and his toes, and twisted his head to the left as he heard movement.
“What do you think?” Gabriel said, holding the mask out for him to see.
This was a nightmare. He could recognise his features on the resin facsimile of his face. “I don’t understand,” he said, his voice slurred, his mouth and nostrils burning again from the second application of ether.
“When they find your body, this will be on your face. As you know it’s a life mask, but will be overlaying death. They will see you as you were, and then remove this and see you as you very shortly will be.”
“No, please, stop this for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to die. Have mercy.”
“For Christ’s sake? Don’t you mean for your sake, Dewey? You don’t strike me as being someone who has allowed Christ into your life. And did anyone that you killed or had killed want to die? Did you show any of them any mercy?”
As he was gagged again, Dewey began to cry. It wasn’t something that he could remember ever having done before. He’d been sad at
family funerals, but to actually spill tears was something totally new and foreign to him.
Gabriel picked up a mallet and a four-inch long hardwood bung that he had fashioned himself. He wore rubber gloves, and used his left hand to separate Dewey’s buttocks, and his right hand to insert the tapered end of the bung an inch into his anus, before using the mallet to hammer it home.
Dewey yelled against the gag and began to tremble as Gabriel swapped the mallet for the opened straight razor and held it out for him to see. Before he started cutting, he slid a cassette in the front of his radio and raised the volume as the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth symphony rang out like hammer blows of fate; Da-Da-Da-Dum. To Gabriel those first notes symbolised war-time victory, which was apt, because what he did was no less than war: conflict against dark forces that had to be eliminated.
Through the damp duster and the tape that covered Dewey’s mouth emanated a shrill and spine-chilling sound which to Gabriel sounded inhuman, and was surreal to hear in combination with the majestic symphony.
The well-developed muscles on the black man’s back tensed and then began to twitch and ripple as the honed blade broke the skin and sank into the flesh beneath to carve a large G. Blood ran freely, and by the time Gabriel had reached the Y at the end of the word, Dewey’s back was crimson.
As he rinsed the blood away to admire the sharply edged upper case letters, Gabriel felt an overwhelming sense of satisfaction. He was in the process of righting a wrong; ensuring that this monster in some small way paid for all his appalling deeds against others.
He sat and studied Dewey Marvin and revelled in the man’s state of discomfort and pain for over fifteen minutes, and then removed the gag for the last time, before drawing the sharp blade across his throat to sever the windpipe.
At just thirty-four, Dewey had almost believed that he was immortal. He was still young, physically very fit, and in extremely good health. Now, as he desperately sucked for air that could no longer be transferred to his cramping lungs, he knew that he was dying, and the horror of it was the worst and last experience of his life.