by Michael Kerr
“Don’t hurt her,” Hugh wailed, snatching the knife from between his teeth as he saw a vision of his mother squirming in the grip of the American, who held a blade to her tender, milk-white throat.
Jim’s right arm encircled the corpse’s shoulders, and with his uninjured hand he pressed the sharp tip of the knife against the creased and leathery-brown skin. “Drop the weapon and climb down, now, or I start cutting,” he said.
“You so much as graze her, and I’ll rip your fucking lungs out with my bare hands,” Hugh said as he obeyed and released the knife to let it tumble down onto the straw-covered floor of the barn.
Once that Hugh was back on the ground, he walked purposely towards Jim, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.
“That’s far enough,” Jim said, for a moment convinced that Hugh was too far gone to be able to hold back, even at what to him would be the certain death of his mother. “Stop right there and sit on the ground.” And to Laura, “Get down here, Laura, quick as you can.”
Laura almost collapsed with relief, at both Jim being alive and at what seemed a last minute reprieve from what she knew would have been the end of her. In the low light, it appeared as though Jim was holding a bewigged dummy in front of him, but the absurdity of the situation was outweighed by the still dangerous position they were in. She swung the trapdoor back all the way and scrambled down the ladder, giving Hugh a wide berth, even though he had now sat down and totally ignored her, his gaze and concentration firmly fixed on the mummified body that she could now see was what Jim held.
“In my pocket, left side,” Jim said as she reached him. “Get my keys. The car’s at the end of the drive, out on the road. Bring it back here.”
Laura did not argue, just found the keys and ran from the barn, down the muddy track, hardly aware that the rain had stopped, and that a watery sun was lightening the slate-grey sky.
“Now what, Yank?” Hugh said, almost spitting the words out; hatred as cold as permafrost radiating from his bulging blue eyes.
“You get up slow and easy and back off, all the way to the far wall, and then sit down again. When Laura gets back with the car, I let your mother go, and leave.”
“How do I know you won’t kill her?”
“Because you’re the sick bastard who gets off on killing helpless women.”
“Do what he says, son,” Jennifer Parfitt said, exclusively to Hugh. “He hasn’t got the balls to hurt a defenceless woman, unless he has to. He’ll keep his word.”
“Okay, Mummy,” Hugh said, slowly rising to his feet.
Jim felt a worm of revulsion and horror writhe in his brain. Knew that Parfitt believed he was communicating with the mummified corpse.
Hugh walked stiffly backwards, not stopping until his back came up against the bleached and warped boards of the wall, where he slid down, to sit forlorn-looking, but generating no pity from Jim, who knew him for the heartless scum that he was. Hugh Parfitt was the same as all the other countless serial killers that he’d profiled, back in the days when he had worked from a maze of offices sixty feet below the FBI Academy on the U.S. Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia. As so many times before, he had put himself into the mind of a repeater murderer; had journeyed into the dark world where evil dwells. Jim knew that they were all individuals; each and every one of them similarly twisted, but dancing to a different drum. What they did all have in common was the same insatiable need to inflict suffering, both mental and physical; to dominate their victims and punish them for some wrong that they most likely imagined had been meted out to them by parents or the world in general. This type lacked the capability to feel any compassion for humanity. They might as well be of another species. Jim had once again evaluated and analysed the specifics of the crimes, and had developed a near perfect profile on the killer who would forever be labelled the Tacker.
Jim heard the car approaching. He took three paces backwards to the partly open door, and as he did the bony feet of his inanimate hostage dragged along the ground, their long, curved, horny toenails parting straw and gouging furrows in the underlying soil.
Laura stopped outside the barn and opened the car window. “Jim, he stabbed Leo,” she shouted, to be heard above the noise of the engine. “He might still be alive.”
Jim looked across to where the PI lay almost hidden in the straw, unmoving, his body a rose madder hue from chest to thighs in the dim light. Moving forward, not taking his eyes from Hugh, or the knife from his ‘salvation’s’ throat, he reached the body. One glance was enough. Leo’s eyes were open and glazed with the pupils fixed. His mouth was gaping and slack, dripping blood. Across the front of his shirt, the bright red stain was still spreading like an animated Rorschach blot, which to Jim resembled an octopus, its tentacles unfurling over the slashed white cotton that covered the dead man’s chest.
Jim had an almost irrepressible urge to hack the head off the corpse he held, knowing that Hugh would hear his mother scream and see a phantom gout of blood rise from the stump of her neck as the head fell to the ground. He wanted the maniac to suffer the torment that he so readily inflicted upon others. And when Hugh then attacked him in an almost blind rage, he would stab the man repeatedly, not stopping until he collapsed with exhaustion, unable to raise his arm any more to plunge the knife into the psycho killer’s flesh. Instead, he backed away towards the door and the light, then threw the lifeless husk across the floor and darted outside. He fed the chain through the handles and secured the padlock, locking the one and only entrance and exit to the barn.
As Jim climbed into the passenger seat, Laura swung the wheel, reversed back across the farmyard past the black Mondeo and the front of the house, and then stopped a safe distance from the now imprisoned murderer. She picked up Jim’s mobile and phoned the incident room direct, to give DC Neil Abbott brief details of the situation, her location, and telling him to get an Armed Response Unit and a paramedic team rolling as soon as she rang off.
Jim heard Laura talking, and knowing that they were now safe, and that only the clean-up remained, he passed out, relinquishing his grasp on the willpower that had kept him going while there was a threat of danger. He acquiesced, allowing his multiple injuries – including a mild concussion – to overpower him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LEO was not dead. He was near to it, but still conscious, and had heard everything, but was unable to move as he had looked up into Jim Elliott’s face. He could not even blink, and knew that he must have appeared to be beyond help, which in fact – although still hanging on to life by a very slender and fraying thread – he was.
With supreme effort Leo moved his head a fraction to the left and let gravity take over, to pull his cheek down to rest on the ground. He saw Parfitt knelt next to something that he thought should have been hidden from sight, swathed in bandages and securely locked away in a sarcophagus in the bowels of a pyramid, or deeply entombed below the sandy earth in the Valley of the Kings. The naked killer cradled the shrunken head of the leathery figure; a bizarre and chilling sight, as the man stroked the blonde wig – that sat askew on its skull – and stared into the gleaming artificial eyes, before bobbing his head to kiss pinched lips, that appeared to be stitched or wired together.
Leo shuddered inwardly as Parfitt raised his head, nodded, and began a one-sided conversation with the abomination.
“Yes, Mummy, I will,” Hugh said. “They’ll both pay for what they’ve done to us. We’ll get away from here. And in a few weeks time when it’s safe, we’ll visit Laura and kill her. The Yank can live. Losing her will be his punishment.”
Leo concentrated. He now had reason to not just let go and drift into oblivion, but to live long enough to make a difference. He withdrew into himself, cleared his mind of every thought except for a determined intent to move his right hand. At first there was nothing. He had no control over his body, which was without sensation, somehow separate from him, beyond his ability to communicate with and direct with instructions from his brai
n. It was as though he were trying to employ psychic powers or telekinesis to move some inert, remote object. He reached into hidden depths that he had never before plumbed, and willed his limp, unresponsive, perfidious limb to obey direction. And with a hitherto unimaginable focus of thought, he broke through, felt a twinge, then a rush of warmth and feeling as blood was pumped back into his arm to prickle and tingle painfully, coursing down the length of it to the tips of his fingers. He fisted the hand in triumph, before slowly easing it into the side pocket of his jacket and carefully gripping the old, gold-plated Calibre lighter that Sheila had given him as an anniversary present, what now seemed like a lifetime ago. Withdrawing it, he wished that he could have one last fag, safe now in the knowledge that he would not survive this day to fall prey to lung cancer, heart disease, or any other warning made by EEC Council Directive on every pack of cigarettes.
Letting his hand rest on the tinder-dry covering of the barn floor, Leo summoned up the strength of both body and spirit to accomplish what he knew would be his final act. Flicking the lighter’s wheel with his thumb, he felt the heat from the flame, and offered it to the bed of straw, conscious of the fact that he was in essence putting a torch to his own funeral pyre. The initial crackle of igniting grain stalks became a greedy roar that was almost music to his ears. And then a wall of flame erupted next to him, taking hold of his wet clothes; steam coalescing with smoke as the searing heat swept over him and raced to all corners of the barn.
Leo had read many accounts of supposed out of body experiences that some people reported after being resurrected by medical intervention. And as the trial by fire became an almost exquisite sensation, he rose, drifted up to a far corner of the barn where the walls met the roof, and looked down at his own, charring body, that was twisting under the heat, fat dripping from it like tallow from a candle as it was consumed. He felt no pain now, only a feeling of well-being, and an overwhelming awe and sense of peace that he could not have previously imagined attainable. He saw the figure of the man who had released him from earthly bonds gather up the empty shell of what had once held the spirit of his mother, to retreat to the rear of the smoke and flame-filled inferno. And then, as if putting what were childish things behind him, and no longer a part of what had been mortal mayhem, Leo was absorbed by a light far brighter than the conflagration below him. He was imbued with the knowledge that he was about to embark on an enthralling journey of enlightenment, where Sheila would be his guide into a new phase of existence.
The smoke billowed out through a million cracks and gaps in the structure, finding every chink that offered it escape. And in what seemed a fiery rage, the barn exploded outwards, the blast exacerbated by the petrol tank of the Fiat as the highly flammable liquid detonated.
Laura watched spellbound, then started the car and reversed back farther from the blaze. With the engine idling, she waited, half expecting Hugh to emerge from the wall of smoke; a human torch, carrying his smouldering charge in his arms. But he did not appear, and as the seconds passed, she knew that it was over. Hugh had been cremated, burned alive, and was hopefully enduring an ordeal of the damned in the deepest abyss of hell for the acts that he had committed and the suffering he had caused others.
Putting the Sierra into gear and gunning the engine, Laura accelerated away; the car sliding sideways across the muddy ground as she over-steered. Spinning the wheel into the skid, she increased speed and shot down the bumpy quagmire of the drive, out onto the road, towards the sound of approaching sirens.
Elation and sadness welled up as a potent cocktail to overwhelm Laura in almost equal parts of intoxicating, dizzying relief and sorrow. She cried. The knowledge that Hugh was dead, and that she and Jim had somehow survived, was an intense and exhilarating feeling. But the cruel loss of the PI, and of a police detective who was probably one of her team, soured the tears that ran down her cheeks.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
JIM was floating on the edge of consciousness; dreams and reality fusing into a badly edited film. For a while he was back a dozen years, on a weekend yachting trip off Martha’s Vineyard, lying below decks on a narrow bunk with the sea-swell rocking him gently back and forth. For some reason Pamela was sitting next to him, a half-smile on her lips. Not possible. Pam was dead, he knew that. So how could this be? And as he returned the smile, her face slowly morphed, melting and reforming, until he was looking up at Laura; was aware that he was in an ambulance, and that the yacht’s bunk was in reality a gurney; the sensation of a heaving ocean being the vehicle’s suspension responding to the undulations of a country road.
He drifted again, to find himself in the bedroom of the farmhouse, struggling with an animated, eyeless corpse that straddled him, its claw-like hands around his throat, hooked fingernails piercing the skin as it tried to strangle him. The apparition opened its toothless mouth, scattering rusted staples from puckered lips, to emit a demented, bowel-loosening wail. The fetid stench of decayed breath in his face made him gag and turn his head away.
“Jim...Jim! Can you hear me?” Laura said, squeezing his uninjured hand.
“He’s concussed, love,” the paramedic said after examining Jim’s head wound and checking the pupils of his eyes. “He’ll be in and out of it for a while.”
“What’s this week’s word, huh?” Jim suddenly asked, his voice slightly slurred as though he’d been drinking.
“Uh, what?” Laura said.
“I said, what’s the word? I thought you picked an obscure one out of the dictionary every Sunday, and used it as much as possible for a week.”
She smiled. He was going to be okay. There was nothing wrong with his memory.
“Misanthrope,” she replied.
He frowned. “Is that like lycanthrope? Some sort of werewolf?”
“I suppose there’s a vague similarity. It’s a hater of mankind; one who avoids human society.”
“A fur-ball with attitude?”
“They’re not necessarily hairy. They just have an attitude.”
“Are you saying I’m one?”
“No. Although you aren’t short in the hair department.”
Jim smiled and passed out again, immediately dreaming of a figure that was a cross between Lon Chaney Jnr and the beast from the movie An American Werewolf in London. The setting of his vagary was Arizona, and the creature was loping from cactus to cactus, eyes glowing embers, reflecting the light of a blood-red moon.
Jim had suffered a mild concussion, and his back was a mess from the shotgun blast that had strafed him, but would heal, once all the lead shot was removed. It was his hand that was the main cause for concern.
A consultant strolled into Jim’s room the following morning; a gaunt-faced man who peered over gold half-frame spectacles, his hands deep in the pockets of his Versace trousers. He looked dressed to play golf at some swank private country club, not deal with the sick or injured. He proved to be droll, an antithesis of his outwardly morose persona.
“Do you play the piano, Mr Elliott?” Dr Nigel McMillan asked in a refined lowland Scottish accent.
“Er…No. Why?” Jim said.
“That’s good, because it’s going to be a wee while before your hand starts to pull its weight again.”
“What’s the damage, Doctor?”
“Severed and partially severed tendons. Your index finger may never serve as an efficient nose-picker again.”
“I don’t pick my nose.”
“Another plus. But seriously, I’ll be operating on your hand as soon as your shaken but not stirred too much brain has settled down. With physio and the possibility of further surgery down the line, you should regain maybe eighty percent mobility in it.”
As the consultant left, Laura arrived toting a carrier bag.
“Not fruit and flowers?” Jim said, hauling himself up into a sitting position.
“No, Coke, the ‘real thing’, not the nose-candy variety. I also brought you my MP3 player and headphones. There’s a terrific selection of music
on it; The Sound of Music, Des O’Connor’s Greatest Hits, and a Disney sing-a-long.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I am. There’s Springsteen, Chris Rea, Old Blue Eyes and quite a lot of country and western, which should make you feel at home.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be out of here in forty-eight hours.”
“Who says?”
“I do. I don’t like hospitals, and I’m fine apart from the hand.”
Laura leant over and kissed him on the mouth, easing her tongue between his lips and teeth as she ran her fingers lightly through his chest hair. He reached out to touch her breasts, but she pulled away, grinning, looking down between his legs at the now tented sheet. “Is that a gun, or―?”
“No. I’m just pleased to see you. Now, either strip off and climb in, or take a seat. No more prick-teasing, or I’ll soil the linen, and the nurse will probably spank me.”
“In your wet dreams, Elliott,” Laura said, sitting back on the uncomfortable plastic chair, which she thought was a less than subtle ploy to discourage lengthy visits.
“Bring me up to speed, then,” Jim said. “What happened after I passed out?”
Laura slipped off her jacket, thought about having a cigarette, and then remembered that she was in a no smoking area.
“The barn was gutted,” she said. “I hung around until I was sure that Hugh couldn’t have survived, and then drove out to the road. You were transferred to an ambulance, and I came to the hospital with you. The forensic team are picking through the remains. Clem is in surgery this morning. His foot is a mess, but thank God, he survived.”
“He should have waited for me to arrive. But I think he was too anxious about you, Laura.”
“He’s a good copper. A bit of a loner, but I like him.”
“I saw a newspaper earlier,” Jim said. “You’re almost a celebrity over this case. You should reassess your career. There’s got to be a book deal in the offing. I can see it now; The Tacker by Laura Scott. Then it’ll be a movie. Although they’d probably relocate it to Los Angeles instead of York, and cast someone like Mark Wahlberg in the role of Hugh. It would bear no resemblance to what you wrote, but it would pay big bucks.”