by Michael Kerr
Matt was a light sleeper. He was already half awake as he heard Beth call his name, and was up and running in a second, to almost fall down the stairs as he took them two at a time.
Standing in the middle of the kitchen, Beth just pointed at the door as he reached her.
“What?” he said.
“A man on the deck. He’s got a razor in his hand,” Beth said.
Matt hadn’t thought to take his gun out of the drawer of the unit next to the bed. He went to a counter and pulled a large carving knife from the wooden block on it and approached the door. Drew back the curtain and stared at the figure that faced him.
Unlocking and opening the door, the breeze brought a smell to him that he recognised from too many previous crime scenes. The naked man propped in the chair was dead, and had been so for long enough to emit the stink of decomposition.
“Lock the door and phone the squad room,” Matt called to Beth, looking left and right before approaching the corpse.
He knew who it was, or had been. There was a piece of notepaper pinned under a stone on the tabletop. He moved around the table to read it. Written in black marker pen was, I DEDICATE THIS ONE TO YOU BARNES. BE SAFE.
He was only wearing boxer shorts that he had slept in, and the gory sight of the body taped to the chair and the low temperature combined to tighten his skin and raise goose bumps. There was a large sheet of plastic at the bottom of the deck steps, and he could see a trail of flattened grass leading to the side gate of the garden. The Clown had obviously parked outside the gate and dragged the body across the lawn.
Looking around, but not contaminating the scene by investigating it, Matt noticed the white cables at the corner of the cottage, which had been severed at roughly chest height. The ends below the cut were hanging out from the brickwork. It was obvious that the killer had been watching the cottage and had probably been in the lane when he had arrived home, to wait until they had gone to bed before disabling the outside lights and dumping the body.
A little fear and a great deal of anger united within his mind. The vigilante could have taken him out as he had arrived home at midnight and got out of his car. They knew that he had a handgun. He had felt safe at Orchard Cottage, which was obviously a very unwise thing to do. No one was really safe. He and Beth could have been murdered, should the killer have decided to do that. Fortunately he had just wanted to invade their privacy, to let Matt know that he knew where they lived, and to cause shock and horror by leaving Dewey Marvin’s body for them to find.
Turning to inspect the corpse, Matt realised that the face of Marvin was not real. It was a mask of his likeness: a death mask? Matt wasn’t sure. He saw that Marvin’s throat had been cut, and that a ligature had been tied around his penis, and that the word guilty had been etched across his back.
Beth opened the door and said, “Come in, now, it’s freezing out there.”
Matt went back into the kitchen, and Beth drew the curtains to hide the gruesome sight from view.
“Why do you think he brought the body here?” Matt said.
“Go and get a hot shower and then I’ll tell you what I think. “You’re almost blue.”
Matt didn’t argue. He showered, dressed and slipped on his shoulder rig and gun. He was on duty 24/7 and his downtime was just official breaks. Although by rights he should always keep his firearm in the gun safe that was bolted to the wall at the back of the wardrobe in their bedroom when he was on standby.
“He’s engaging with you,” Beth said when Matt returned to the kitchen. “This is his way of demonstrating that it’s his game and that you’re just a spectator to what he does.”
“Does that mean we’re at risk?”
Beth shook her head as she poured two cups of coffee and took them over to the nook and set them down on the table. “If he’d meant us harm, then we’d probably both be dead now. This is just a sideshow. He’s basically showing off, and letting you know how clever he has been by being able to locate you. He doesn’t seem stupid, so wouldn’t risk a second visit. He’ll assume that you’ll arrange protection, and that the cottage will be under surveillance.”
“But he could follow either one of us,” Matt said.
“It would be risky, and it isn’t his objective. I daresay he already has another prospective victim in his sights.”
“That sounds logical, but these flakes don’t always stick to their game plan. We both know that they can evolve and change direction. You’ve told me that several times.”
Beth couldn’t argue with that. Criminals with psychological disorders could be as unpredictable as the weather. The dark tides in their damaged minds did not ebb and flow with the predictability of the oceans. They had patterns, but could always adapt them if changing events deemed it necessary.
Matt made calls. SOCO ‒ Scenes of Crime Officers – were the first to arrive. With their transit van parked on the verge outside the cottage, they donned their protective clothing to ensure that they did not contaminate nor disturb evidence that may be at the crime scene; or as in this case a secondary scene where the body had been dumped. Once suited up and also wearing gloves, head coverings and footwear protectors, they walked up to the front door.
“The snowmen are here,” Matt said as he went to let them in.
The team inspected the corpse, took a multitude of photographs from every imaginable angle, and while one was searching for prints on the sheet of plastic, the others did fingertip searches of the flattened grass trail, examined the gate, and looked for tyre and footprints outside on the lane.
The Home Office pathologist knocked at the door forty minutes later. Matt had expected it to be Nat Farley, but was mistaken. A young woman showed him her ID. She was Dr Roshana Anwar.
“Pleased to meet you,” Matt said. “I was expecting that old ghoul Farley.”
The pathologist frowned. “Are you a friend of his?” she asked.
“Just a professional acquaintance, but we’ve met over many a dead body for a long time now. I’m Detective Inspector Matt Barnes, but please call me Matt.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to break the news, Matt,” Roshana said. “Dr Farley died yesterday. He had left the mortuary at six p.m., and ten minutes later one of the technicians found him slumped over the steering wheel of his car. It would appear he’d suffered a fatal cardiac infarction…a heart attack.”
Matt was shaken by the news. Nat had been the kind of guy that he’d imagined would live to be a hundred. “Come in,” he said to the pathologist he had never seen before, who was probably a very recent addition to the Home Office list.
Matt introduced Beth to the pathologist by first name.
“Would you like a cup of tea or coffee before you make a start, Doctor?” Beth asked.
“I’d appreciate a cup of tea once I’ve finished my examination. And please call me Roz.”
Roz went out on the decking with a large aluminium case that held everything she needed to process the cadaver.
“Nat Farley died yesterday,” Matt said to Beth.
Beth sighed and said, “How?”
“They think his ticker gave out. He was found in his car in the mortuary car park. Now he’ll get to be sliced and diced on one of the tables he’s worked at for years.”
“That’s so sad,” Beth said.
“Yeah,” Matt agreed. “In the midst of life we are in death, like they say at funerals.”
“Will you go to Nat’s?”
Matt nodded. “We should both go. He was a cynical old bugger, but he had a heart of gold.”
Pete Deakin arrived. Beth made him coffee as he discussed the dumping of Marvin and took a look at the gangster’s corpse through the kitchen’s patio style doors.
“What point do you think The Clown was trying to make?” Pete asked Matt.
“That he’s in control, but he isn’t. He’s pushing his luck. Thinks that he’s too smart for us, and he needs to get more of a thrill from what he’s doing.”
“I’l
l arrange for Beth to be covered to and from work for awhile,” Pete said. “Just in case he plans on doing anything else, now that he knows where you live.”
“He must have followed me from the Yard,” Matt said. “We’re ex-directory.”
“You’ll be on the electoral register.”
“Without knowing where I live away from the city, he wouldn’t be able to find my address.”
“So he followed you or someone told him.”
“You mean a cop?”
“He could be a rogue cop for all we know.”
“Let’s hope not, Pete. They’re the hardest to nail.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“YOU have a real maniac out there,” Roz said when she had finished her examination of the late Dewey Marvin. “That mask appears to be super glued to his face. And the cause of death was the slicing of his trachea without compromising any major arteries. He didn’t bleed out, he suffocated.”
“The Clown takes his acts of vengeance very seriously,” Matt said. “I daresay his victims suffer a great deal of fear and pain before they die.”
“Time of death is a problem,” Roz said. “I would hazard an initial guess of forty-eight to seventy-two hours based on the post mortem lividity. The blood had settled to the front of the body and limbs, and so it was obviously moved much later.”
“Yeah it was hand delivered to me. Did you see the note on the table?”
“Are you and the killer pen pals?”
“Funny. Nice to know you have a sense of humour.”
“It helps to have one. Most of what I see and do would depress mere mortals.”
Beth couldn’t help but smile. The petite pathologist was an antithesis to the horror that was slumped in a chair on the deck.
“Anything else?” Matt asked.
“You’ll have seen the word carved in his back.”
“Yeah, that and the masks are his signatures.”
“Another unusual touch is that he had tied off the penis and jammed or hammered a bung up the victim’s anus, no doubt to cut out the mess and smell that violent death and associated fear can induce.”
Matt pulled a face that showed his disgust.
“That cup of tea would go down a treat now,” Roz said to Beth.
Matt, Beth and Roz sat and talked about the case. Pete was outside with the techies, having scrounged a pair of latex gloves and plastic overshoes. He was worried for Matt and Beth. From past experience he knew that for some unfathomable reason Matt attracted the unwelcome attention of psychos. It was as if he led them to him like a bee to a flower. He somehow interrupted their original game plan and caused them to shift their concentration onto him. And he didn’t do it by choice these days. Past experiences had taught him not to set himself up as a target. Being with Beth had smoothed off some of the edges that had made him seem like a cop with a death wish in years gone by. And Pete knew why. It was because Matt wasn’t a lone wolf anymore; he had a mate to protect from predators.
He had wanted to stay to see Barnes’s reaction when he or the woman ‒ of whom he had caught a glimpse of earlier at the front door ‒ found the corpse. But he wasn’t sure just how quickly a phone call from the detective would result in the area being sealed off, and so he had driven home, knowing that his escapade would definitely unnerve Barnes. Everyone was territorial, and he had just walked into his enemy’s stronghold and dumped the body and left without being heard or seen.
It had been easier than he could have wished for. Pulling the corpse out of the boot onto the plastic sheet and dragging it over damp grass was a piece of cake. The only part that had taken him time and real effort was pulling it up the steps onto the decking and lifting it up onto the chair. The loose-limbed body had slipped off the chair twice as he’d attempted to secure it with black duct tape. But determination had paid off. He had set a scene with a nice touch, taping the razor in the right hand of what had been Dewey Marvin in life, but was now just decaying meat posed for chilling effect.
When he had parked the car in the garage and gone into the bungalow, he was actually feeling well, and starving. The fresh air and exercise had invigorated his mind and body. He made a pot of tea and a ham sandwich and switched on the radio. Life may be short, he thought, but it was definitely the quality of what you did with it that made it worthwhile. He dismissed Dewey Marvin completely from his mind and turned his attention to the next proposed victim, Ian Peterson.
He didn’t need to read the notes that he had made. Peterson was a burglar who had been challenged while inside the ground floor flat of Harold Bentley, an eighty-two year old pensioner who’d been the head teacher of a secondary school in Dalston.
Peterson had stabbed the old man to death before fleeing with a small amount of money and an inscribed gold pocket watch that had been presented to Harold on the day he had retired after being an educator for over forty-two years.
Due to Peterson suffering a minor cut, and having a criminal record, he was caught by the use of DNA profiling, only to maintain that Harold had attacked him with a knife, and that in the ensuing struggle had accidentally received a fatal wound as he fell on his own blade. He had been charged and found guilty of manslaughter, by reason of lack of intent, as the prosecution could not prove that he had intended to commit murder, and that the victim had apparently attacked Peterson with a knife, resulting in an unpremeditated act.
“Not fucking good enough,” Gabriel said to the empty room. Ian Peterson had served a relatively short sentence and was now back in Dalston, living in the same small terrace house off Southgate Road with a girlfriend who’d stuck by him, so was just as bad.
Come evening he would be calling on Peterson, to once more make the world a slightly better place to live in by ridding it of a man who was undeserving of its grace and favour. It was a little quick after Marvin, but death was curling its cold fingers around his shoulder, and so he needed to up the pace and do what he could while he could.
There were only seven other men sitting in the bar of the club. The youngest was sixty-three and the oldest eighty-four. They sat around two tables, sipping drinks and talking about the weather and politics, and who they knew that was dying or dead: the usual subjects of Victor Meldrew types with one foot in the grave.
Stan Hodges was behind the bar, generally tidying up and keeping an eye on the wall-mounted telly, watching the lunchtime news. As the pictures of two men suddenly stared out of the screen at him, he swallowed hard, stopped arranging glasses on a shelf and turned up the volume to hear a voice say... ‘both found murdered in a storage unit in Paddington’.
Stan was pleased to hear it. The pictures were of the two thugs that had assaulted him. His broken finger was swollen and throbbing in a metal splint, and his head was still a little tender from being struck with the phone when he’d attempted to pick it up and call the police.
What to do now? Should he contact the police, and then let Gabriel Harris know that the two men had been looking for him? He would think it over. Maybe it would be better to just let sleeping dogs lie.
Beth was still at the cottage at eleven a.m. Pete had stayed, and the SOCO team were still searching for trace. The only good thing was that the corpse had been bagged up and taken away.
“When the team leave I’ll follow you to work,” Pete said to Beth.
“Thanks, Pete. Do you think that this Clown character is a real threat to Matt or me?”
“What do I know, I’m just a cop? You’re the one that worked with these maniacs every day.”
Beth smiled. “You know more than you let on. You just don’t say a lot.”
“I must have got it from Matt,” Pete said. “He’s about the darkest horse I’ve ever met.”
“I’m not going to argue with you. There’s a part of him that even I can’t reach.”
“Everyone has, Beth. We all laugh and joke and make small talk, and to a degree we pretend to be more or sometimes less than we are. No one shares all their thoughts, or allows others
to see what makes them bleed inside. Matt is a great murder cop because he has the capacity to see more in people than they want him to.”
“You’ve just shown me a side of you that I didn’t know, Pete.”
Pete gave her an impish grin. “I’m only showing you what I choose to. And as for my take on The Clown, I don’t think he’ll bother you both again. He’s just made a statement, to let Matt know that there are no boundaries, but his main mission in life is to take revenge against people he has decided deserve his attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a list he’s working through. Someone else will already be being stalked or lifted as we speak.”
Pete followed Beth to Morning Star, and two uniformed officers in a patrol car got the boring shift of keeping an eye on the clinic, with instructions to tail Beth safely home at the end of her working day.
Beth had coffee with Sylvia. Explained to the director why she was late in, without too many details and no names.
“That’s totally gross,” Sylvia said. “Didn’t it freak you out finding a dead man outside your kitchen door?”
“It was something I could’ve done without. When I can I’ll give you more details, if you want to know things that will probably give you nightmares.”
“Maybe I’ll pass on that,” Sylvia said. “I can have bad dreams just watching a silly horror movie on TV.”
Beth was in the dayroom at four p.m. It was almost dark outside, but she was sitting in an easy chair near one of the picture windows, finishing a sketch of a barn owl flying along by the side of a hedgerow with trees in the background. Some of the children came up to her and talked, and they all looked at what she was drawing and liked it.
Martin Beatty stayed back a few feet, but looked over another boy’s shoulder and studied the pencil sketch of the owl. He thought that it was brilliant and wished that he could draw that well. He had a secret dream of being a wildlife artist, but didn’t suppose it would or could come true. His mother had told him repeatedly that he was a waste of space, and that he always would be. He didn’t really know how he felt, now that he was free of her and the nasty man that had come to live with them and enjoyed hurting him. That his feeling of self-worth was zero did not occur to him in that context. He was only eight and had known only pain and wretchedness. Now that he was at Morning Star, he felt a lot safer, and everyone was nice to him, but he still felt innately afraid of adults. They were far cleverer than children at hiding their true feelings and natures. He supposed that one day in the distant future he would be grown-up, but it was an abstract thing to imagine. Now was all that really concerned him, and simple things like the meals and warmth and the comfortable bed and nice room he had; and the fact that he no longer got locked in dark cupboards, although he sometimes dreamed that he had been, and woke up crying and scared.