by Michael Kerr
Feeling unrestricted in just blouse, bra and panties, Laura went into the lounge and curled up on the settee, feet tucked under her, glass in one hand and cigarette in the other. She closed her eyes and let her brain put the events of the day into perspective, mentally filing them away.
Damn! Another five hours and she would be up and getting ready to face another barrage of slings and arrows.
The cottage was her bolt hole; a refuge from the turmoil and frantic pace of her work of late. Situated in splendid isolation on the outskirts of Sand Hutton, – a village east of the Scarborough road – it stood alone, its backdrop thick forest, which was a perfect foil to the city.
The small dwelling had been a tied cottage for the first century of its existence, tenanted by workers of the estate that it had belonged to. Now, it was a cosy home, sympathetically modernised yet still retaining many of the original beams that were, as the house, over two hundred years old. The ground floor comprised a breakfast kitchen and lounge, with a black wrought iron spiral staircase that led up to a landing with two small bedrooms and a bathroom off it. Laura found the compact accommodation ideal, and valued its peaceful charm.
Now thirty-nine, Laura had married at twenty-two, and was divorced by the time she was thirty. There was no animosity or bitterness between herself and Douglas, her ex. In fact, the break-up had been a time of acute sadness, leaving a sorrow that in weak moments could still choke her with emotion and bring a lump to her throat that felt as though a piece of rock was lodged there.
Douglas had been worn down by her commitment to the force. He’d often said that if her affair had been with another man, then he may have been able to cope, fight; maybe win her back. But he could not battle against her obsession for police work. Laura admitted, much later and only to herself, that he had been right. She was dedicated to the job, at the expense of all else. Work had always seemed to come between them. She had reached a point where she could face the fact that she had loved her husband, but was not in love with him. There was a difference, though she had not really worked out what it was. After parting, they had put Kara first, not looking to score points off each other, only wanting what was best for their daughter. But that bond between them had come to an end after the accident three years ago.
Laura set the alarm for six a.m., and fell into a deep yet troubled sleep within two minutes of her head hitting the pillow, as the cogs in her tired brain seemed to whir to a stop like the workings of a pre quartz clock in need of winding up. In her dark dreams she saw the Holder girl, who metamorphosed, her face becoming elastic and reshaping itself into Kara’s. Now it was her daughter stretched out on the autopsy table; chest and stomach gaping open, her head shaking slowly from side to side as she tutted in annoyance at the mutilation that had been visited both on and in her body.
Laura was awake and in the shower before the strident blare of the alarm clock had chance to rouse her.
“We’ve spoken to the Holder girl’s mother and brother,” Hugh said as Laura slipped off her jacket and settled behind the desk with a cup of gritty, dark vending machine coffee in hand; a glutton for punishment and caffeine.
“And don’t tell me,” she said, lighting her first cigarette of the day (as per usual totally ignoring the no smoking policy that drove addicts outside the building to snatch a few furtive drags in the rear car park, or on the street). “You drew a blank. No psycho boyfriend or a father with a history of abuse. Nothing, eh?”
Hugh thumbed through the flimsy file that held a potted biography of the dead girl’s life and circumstances of her death on just a few sheets of A4 copy paper.
“I don’t think that our killer knew any of his victims,” Hugh said. “There’s nothing to tie them together, apart from the fact that they all had blonde hair and blue eyes.” He passed a recent school photograph across the desk as he spoke, and Laura took it and studied the sweet, unblemished face of the girl whom she had seen the day before, eyeless and with her Colgate-white teeth hidden behind seeping, bruised, stapled lips.
“I don’t even want to think that there’s no other connection, Hugh,” she said, frowning and letting her gaze drift through the begrimed second floor window to the tiles, chimney pots, and the shuffling line of pigeons that perched along the old cast-iron guttering of the building opposite. “There must be something else. We just have to find it.”
Hugh shrugged, almost apologetically. “They at no time attended the same schools or had mutual friends that we can find. So far, the only remote link is that all three visited the same city night-clubs at one time or another. But that goes for a large percentage of teenagers in the area.”
Laura shook her head. “Then it’s our worst nightmare. Random killings, no witnesses, and no known motive. He could kill another three or thirty girls without us getting lucky and nailing the bastard.”
“You want some more coffee, boss?” Hugh said, rising from the chair. “You’re empty.”
“Please,” Laura said, nodding to the top of a grey metal file cabinet in the corner of the small office. “But use the kettle and my gear. That machine crap is worse than British Rail’s.”
“What we need,” Hugh said, stirring two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into his mug, “is a lead on his vehicle. He attacks them outdoors, before taking them to what he considers is a safe location to...er, do his thing. Then afterwards, sometimes days later, he transports them to where he wants them to be found. This creep takes the girls home and does them at his leisure.”
“That’s better,” Laura said, taking the mug from him and sipping the Nescafe, relishing the strong roasted flavour. “Okay, Hugh. The other two girls were almost certainly abducted from outside their homes. The first one, Cheryl Blake, had been fooling around with her boyfriend in his car at the end of the street where she lived. She set off walking from the car and didn’t make it to her front door, which was only fifty yards away. The second victim, Gillian Bentley, was dropped off at the top of a cul-de-sac just four doors from her house, and was lifted. I want you to have all the neighbours interviewed again. Let’s really rattle their cages this time. Someone must have noticed a van or car, or a stranger hanging about.”
Two weeks passed with no further killings. What became a daily slagging from ‘Barbie Doll’ Pearson on the TV was beginning to piss Laura and her team off, big-time. But the investigation was getting nowhere fast. They had talked to everyone that had known the three girls, but had no leads. Odontology had come back with graphics and a computer model that gave them heart. The killer had apparently bitten down hard on Sharon Holder’s breasts, and then shook his head like a Jack Russell with a rat in its mouth, ripping the nipples free with a scything action. The initial deep bites had left enough impression of individual teeth to almost guarantee a match, if they ever picked up a suspect. It was a step in the right direction, and showed that their quarry was not infallible. He had left a clue as definitive as a fingerprint or DNA.
It was on the third of July that number four turned up.
Heather Cullen had been missing from home for five days. Her parents had made an official report, and had been phoning and calling in at the station incessantly. The beleaguered desk sergeant had become sick of both the sight and sound of them. Truth was, Heather was not considered a priority to anyone but her family and friends, who knew beyond doubt that she would not just go missing without a word. She had been happy at home, and had taken no extra clothing or personal items. The people who knew her best were almost ignored as they tried to impress on the authorities that foul play or an accident was the only possible, rational explanation for her sudden disappearance.
Heather was twenty-one, which did not give her the same status that a missing minor would rate. She was an adult; just one of a vast number whose whereabouts were unknown. The fact that she was a blue-eyed blonde would have sounded alarm bells, had any of the officers dealing with the ‘Tacker’ murders – as they had become informally tagged – been aware of the details. Unfortunately,
the attention was focused exclusively on teenagers. It had been wrongly assumed that they were the killer’s targeted section of the community. The sad truth was, that even had they been suspicious, it would not have saved Heather, or prevented the further considerable and undeserved lampooning of the police, especially from Trish Pearson, who seemed to take a perverse delight in twisting the knife.
Eric Yates was nothing if not a man of habit. Just shy of eighty, and retired for nearly twenty years, he had fallen into a way of life that kept him as active and fit as most men many years his junior. He had no intention of just sitting back and fading away, as the majority of his peers had done. His wife, Audrey, had passed on sixteen years ago. She had made them both a cup of tea on that warm summer morning, then sitting in her favourite armchair, sighed once and closed her eyes. It had been that sudden and simple. One second she was there with him, as she had been throughout forty years of marriage. And then in the blink of an eye she was gone, taken stealthily and with no warning. The week after the funeral, Eric’s middle-aged daughter had given him Jess.
“This will keep you busy and stop you moping about, Dad,” Patricia Yates had said, thrusting the cardboard box at him. The pup inside – now an ageing and arthritic cocker spaniel – had indeed kept him busy, probably adding years to his life with its need for exercise, and constant demand for his attention and affection.
Every morning at six-thirty, come rain or shine, Eric still walked Jess the mile into Milford, stopping at the small Norman church to sit on the bench beneath the thatched roof of its lychgate, where he would hand-roll a cigarette and rest for ten or fifteen minutes before making the return journey.
Eric knew that lychgates’ had once been where coffins would be laid to await the clergyman’s arrival; a now defunct practise. But that knowledge in no way prepared him for the presence of the young woman who occupied the bench that July morning. She was naked, with wide tape around her body just below her breasts to the back of the seat, presumably to prevent her from slipping down to the ground. She was a ghostly blue-white, staring down with sightless eyes at the bible that had been placed open in her lifeless hands.
Needless to say, Eric and Jess found a different path to tread from that day forth, turning left outside his gate to head towards Len Crowther’s farm, instead of right to Milford and the site of his morbid find.
“That’s north, south, east and west,” Hugh said as they waited for the Scene of Crime Officers to finish up.
“Uh. What did you say?” Laura said, taking a long draw on her Superking light, tempted to tear the filter tip from it; not getting a lot of satisfaction from the weaker cigarettes that she was enduring in an attempt to reduce her dependence on nicotine.
“Compass points. He’s now left a body at each principal point, all approximately six miles from the city centre. This guy is precise.”
“That’s a new one on me,” the SOCO said, easing the seated corpse slightly to one side.
“What’s new?” Laura said.
“A driving licence.”
Laura moved closer in the crowded space that was enclosed by tarpaulin sheets to hide the atrocity from the press and public. Sure enough, it was a driving licence, still in its transparent plastic wallet, stapled to the right cheek of the dead girl’s bottom.
“He’s gone out of his way to give us instant identification, again,” Hugh said.
“Yes, he’s involving us on purpose. He’s treating us as fellow players; adversaries in his sick game.” Laura stated.
“It’s almost a carbon copy of the last one, Laura,” the pathologist said over the phone the next day. “He kept this one alive for a longer period, and raped her repeatedly. The tissue damage is extensive. She had only been dead for a few hours when she was found. Rigor hadn’t fully set in. All other injuries and procedures fit the pattern. It’s definitely your serial killer. Sorry.”
“Thanks, Brian,” Laura said, and rang off.
Heather’s father came in to identify the body. He was in uniform, having come straight from Long Hutton; the dispersal prison twelve miles west of the city, where he worked. He looked the part, fiftyish, about five-eleven, a solid fourteen stone, with crew-cut steel-grey hair and a face all hard planes, from which flinty eyes stared in stony circumspection. He didn’t speak or even blink when the sheet was pulled back to reveal his late daughter’s face, just reached out slowly and ran a blocky index finger over the punctured lips, then nodded and turned away, his emotions locked behind a granite expression.
Hugh Parfitt didn’t like the prison officer’s reactions. Most people broke down when faced with irrefutable proof that someone near and dear to them was dead. Under such horrific circumstances, Hugh had expected the man to be on the point of collapse, or to at least show some sign of anger or grief. But this guy was implacable. The DS had seen the same purposeful resolve before, though not often. He decided that Ron Cullen was not the type to blithely accept what fate dealt out. He was a man who would do whatever he deemed necessary to exact rough justice for his daughter’s murder, and not give a toss if his actions were lawful or otherwise. Hugh made a mental note to ensure that the man was monitored. His interview with him had also been a negative experience, consisting of monosyllabic answers, grunts, and much head shaking. The bottom line was, that the screw claimed to have no idea who could or would have committed the callous crime, although Hugh felt that if he had, he would have said nothing; just gone off and dealt with it in the manner that Charles Bronson the late actor, in his role as Paul Kearsey in the Death Wish movies had.
Laura and Hugh attended the funeral. They had been present at those of the other girls. There was also an officer secretly videoing the proceedings from behind the tinted windows of an unmarked Ford Transit van. It was a fact that some murderers would attend the funeral of their victims, taking perverse pleasure in seeing first hand the aftermath of misery and suffering that they had been the direct cause of.
Walking back to the car, Laura decided that she would call Jim Elliott. It would be unofficial, unethical, and completely at odds with her superiors, should they find out. Tough shit! What they didn’t know wouldn’t harm them. She had not seen Jim in over a year, and only spoken to him on the phone infrequently. But they were soul mates, who had fleetingly been bed mates. He would not be happy at what she would ask of him, and may even just hang up on her. That as may be, it was worth a try. She needed the assistance of someone with a special kind of ability; an expertise that the average copper, however good, did not possess. She needed the insight of a rare breed of man; one who could look into the minds of human monsters with a propensity to understand what motivated repeat, ritual killers; a man who could see...feel the crimes from the offender’s twisted viewpoint. Jim Elliott was such an individual.
CHAPTER THREE
JIM stared out from the balcony of his top floor flat towards the large, round tower of Windsor Castle. It was bathed in warm light, as though etched from sandstone in relief against a Levi-blue, cloudless sky. He was sitting on a white-enamelled, cast-iron chair, sipping black coffee and savouring both the taste and aroma of the strong brew. Luxuriating in the mild summer breeze, that teased the scent from the ornamental, red-flowered japonica that grew in a large terracotta pot against the waist-high balustrade, Jim welcomed the new day.
A glint of sunlight on steel took his gaze higher, to settle on and follow the slow descent of a distant jet as it drifted into Heathrow in the manner of a raptor gliding down to its nest. Mug now empty, Jim rose and walked back into the lounge, pausing for the umpteenth time to look at the poster-size photograph of the castle, which was a stunning monochrome shot of the ninety-two fire; a greasy, black column of smoke rising above the royal residence. He had added the caption: ‘Shit Happens!’ in his own neat copperplate on a label at the bottom right corner of the gold-leafed frame. The old photo of the burning castle constantly reminded him not to take anything for granted. However seemingly permanent, anything could go up in smoke
without warning.
Jim enjoyed every day now, relishing each as it unrolled before him like a rich, multicoloured and complex-patterned Persian carpet. He had just reached forty the previous week, and his thick black hair was shot through with grey, and collar length. He stood six-two, and felt as fit as he looked. His face was even-featured, craggy, and was considered handsome by most people, especially women. His eyes were a striking grey, almost hypnotic in their intensity, to a degree that caused many to look away, unable to meet his direct gaze, feeling disconcerted by it, as though their very souls were being examined. They had every right to feel that way. Jim used his formidable stare to peel back the layers of insincerity and flimflam with the precision of a surgical laser.
Jim Elliott had been with the FBI, and had risen from field agent in his home state of Arizona – based at the Phoenix office – to the behavioural science unit at Quantico, where he had soon become recognised as being one of the most gifted and ingenious profilers in the bureau. His work had led directly to the capture of a dozen serial murderers, and his input had been the undoing of a great many more. Jim had a unique perception of repeat killers, which defied logic. He could somehow see past the reports and forensic evidence, to think himself into their minds. His gift, if that was what it was, had cost him dearly. He had lost the woman he loved, his sanity had been threatened, and ultimately his life had been drastically modified. At the time, he had thought that it had been the last case he had worked on that put him over the edge. But on reflection, later...much later, he had decided that it was the accumulation. The sickness he had steeped himself in finally backed up like effluent in a blocked sewer pipe, overflowing to envelop him, impregnating him with the stink of evil that he had willingly and voluntarily immersed himself in. Every time he looked in a mirror, he saw the thin, white line across his throat; the scar of a wound that had almost killed him and had made him question his motives. He was no paladin-style knight errant with a need to joust at windmills in quixotic fashion. In the end, he had been more practical and selfish than to put false honour and devotion to duty above his own life.