by Mark Sennen
‘Charlotte!’ Hardin wagged a finger. ‘We’ve got him. We just need to do the legwork to tie everything up.’
Hardin came round the car and approached the front door. A photographer was kneeling in one corner of the hall, trying to get the whole of the vertical fall of the rope in shot. The parquet flooring was a mess, the contents of the plastic boxes scattered across it. Hardin looked up at the rope, down at the rubbish and then across at Savage.
‘You do realise this is the second time someone has died when you were supposed to be taking them into custody?’
‘Sir, Wilson killed himself. I can hardly be blamed for his death.’
‘Before I left the station I received an email from Professional Standards. Your old friend Assistant Chief Commissioner Maria Heldon. Hatchet Heldon.’ Hardin paused. Let the words sink in. ‘She’s keen to get to the bottom of this. You’re to have a report on my desk first thing.’
Savage opened her mouth to say something but Hardin strode inside the house, waving her protest away.
‘First thing, Charlotte. And break the bloody Manchester alibi, OK?’
Savage turned and trudged back to her car, wondering if the DSupt would like her to end world hunger while she was at it.
‘Go home,’ DCI Garrett said to Savage, when he found her slumped over a pad trying to write up the events of the afternoon. ‘You look all-in.’
She was.
The rollercoaster ride of the last few days had taken it out of her; Wilson’s dramatic suicide the final downward swoop.
Back home, Pete and Stefan sat in front of the TV in the living room. Not football though. Not tonight. The screen showed the continuing coverage of the case and there, cut in amongst a montage of images, was a picture of Savage standing in the driveway of Wilson’s house as a body bag came out on a gurney.
Pete rose from the sofa and was hugging her even as she felt all the strength go from her legs.
‘Well done,’ he whispered to her as he placed his face in her hair. ‘You did it.’
‘Not just me,’ Savage said. ‘The whole team.’
‘I’m off,’ Stefan said, standing and making excuses about needing an early night.
Alone with her husband, Savage collapsed on the sofa. Pete flicked the TV off.
‘All-in,’ she said, repeating Garrett’s words because they were the only ones which came to her. ‘The last few days …’
‘Shush,’ Pete said. ‘I’ll run you a bath and then get something together for a late dinner. Jamie’s asleep, but Samantha’s still awake, she’s only just gone to bed. Why don’t you pop up and see her?’
Savage nodded, hugged Pete for a moment, and then struggled to her feet.
‘Dad said you got him, Mum,’ Samantha said, closing her book and sitting up in bed as Savage entered her room. ‘That he died resisting arrest.’
‘Yes, he won’t be hurting anyone ever again.’
‘I’m glad he’s dead, Mum. Is that wrong?’
‘No, sweetheart. It’s not wrong.’ Savage went over and knelt by the bed. Put her hand out and touched her daughter on the cheek. ‘Don’t ever feel guilty for wanting to prevent someone from doing evil.’
‘It’s what you do, isn’t it? Stop the bad guys from doing bad things?’
‘Simply put, yes. But it doesn’t always work that way.’
‘It does, Mum, as long as you’re out there.’ Samantha handed Savage the book and wriggled down under the duvet. Then she smiled. ‘And if you need a little help you can always ask Dad to open up with his cannons, right?’
Samantha reached for the little black and white dog she’d had since she was a baby and snuggled it under her chin. Savage leant across and kissed her and then pulled the duvet up a little. Samantha closed her eyes and Savage turned off the bedside light. At the door she stopped and looked back at her daughter. Security was something you took for granted when you were a child. No question in Samantha’s mind that Mum and Dad would keep her safe. That Mummy would always manage to catch the bad guys.
Savage turned away. Hoped her daughter’s faith in her was justified.
Chapter Thirty-Six
He’s dead then. You saw it on the TV while you were in Currys checking out dishwashers. When they cut to his house the chill started to rise, washing up from your legs and engulfing your whole body. The reporter said his name and it was like your insides were being sucked out of you. Blind panic. You tried to walk away but Peter’s face was on every television, a wall of hell stretching halfway down the shop.
All those wires. Peter in there somehow. Swirling around and mixed up with the dead girls.
‘Off,’ you shouted. ‘Turn them bloody off!’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ a nearby sales assistant said. Spots, nylon shirt, hair sticky with gel. ‘What size screen are you interested in?’
You punched the sales assistant in the face and ran.
Back at the farm and you’re scared. You, singular. Before, ‘you’ always meant the two of you. You shared everything, shared the pain and misery. Shared the joyous moments too. The two of you thought the same, almost like telepathy or something magical. Maybe something demonic. If Peter felt hungry you did too. If he got a hard-on looking at a girl, you’d feel yourself stiffen as well. Duality. We think therefore we kill. But no longer.
You cast your mind back to the store.
Peter on the news. An old picture and then the shots of him talking to camera about the Candle Cake Killer. Footage of him after he’d been released from the arrest. On screen Peter looked grey, ill. It is hard to see him like that. And of course now he’s even greyer.
Who’s going to look after you now? Who is going to keep you on the straight and narrow? Peter always said everything would be alright, would turn out OK. It didn’t for him, and it didn’t for your mother and father. The Big Knife up to its handle for her, a length of electrical cord tied to the top bunk in his cell for him. Strange how Peter decided to re-enact your father’s death.
You go to the window and stare out, hoping against hope the whole thing is a dream and Peter’s car will come driving up the track. But no, there’s just Mikey out there, kicking a ball around the yard. Black and white plastic from the pound shop. Rain or shine, he’ll play out there until you tell him to come in. One quid goes a long way with Mikey.
Mikey can’t help you though. In fact he’ll only make matters worse, encouraging you, spurring you on. With Peter around the horror was restricted to just the one day a year and you always did as he instructed. Waited until he said. Waited for the Special Day. Even when Peter went away to the States you waited. All those years, Peter on the phone several times a week, that voice in your ear. The constant nagging – yes – but love too.
‘Won’t be long, Ronald. I’ll be back soon. Until then you must promise me you’ll be good. Can you do that?’
‘Yes, Peter, I can.’
Mikey scores a goal between two upturned buckets and rushes to the corner of the yard, fist raised in triumph to the home fans. Wayne Rooney. With issues.
You and Mikey, could it work?
Peter was methodical, could weigh the options, make the correct choices. You’re a bit more spontaneous and Mikey …? Mikey is fucking crazy. Still …
That last one. Paula. The way she squirmed and squealed and bled. The more uncomfortable she became, the happier you were. She made things better.
For a while.
Peter’s pleasure was different from yours though. It came from the anticipation, as much part of the fun as the actual event. Deferring gratification gave him control, made him the one in charge. Him, not the joker up above, not a butterfly flapping its wings half a world away, not a piece of his brain gone sour. Every day without a killing proved it. Which was why he enjoyed the waiting. Even for the five years he was away. But now Peter’s killed himself to protect you and Mikey. He’s history, gone, dead. No longer telling you what to do. And his death has fuelled the anger building inside. You don’t want to w
ait for release. And why should you?
Mikey’s taking a break now. He’s turned one of the buckets the right way up. His trousers and Y-fronts are round his ankles and he is pissing in the bucket, chuckling at some joke only he would understand. Then you see the ball is in the bucket and he is pissing on that, spray splashing out, Mikey howling with laughter.
You should go out there and tell him off. Reinforce good behaviour and punish bad. Otherwise actions can become habits. And habits are hard to break.
Paula. Lovely. Nice. Fucking her felt good. Killing her, even better.
There’s a list with names on, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates. Peter kept it locked in a drawer in the sideboard beneath the Big Knife. Came out only when he said. A month or so ago he showed you the sheet and pointed to Paula’s name, told you to memorise the information and then he put the paper back in the drawer. Locked it. You’re thinking you ought to go and crack the drawer open. Take a look at the list. Maybe have a word with Mikey and see what he thinks of your idea.
Then again, as you watch Mikey lift the ball from the bucket and give it first a sniff and then a lick, rational thinking has never been one of the boy’s strong points.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Crownhill Police Station, Plymouth. Tuesday 1st July. 11.14 a.m.
‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news,’ Davies said as he approached Riley in the canteen mid-morning Tuesday. ‘Which do you want first?’
Riley took a swig of his coffee and considered his doughnut.
‘Bad.’
‘You’re off the Corran case, back on Maynard’s sheep-shagging investigation. Ding dong. Cowbell.’
‘What!’ Riley’s raised voice caused a few people to turn in their direction. ‘Don’t wind me up, boss. Say it’s not true.’
‘’fraid so. Maynard says he needs you. You’ve got all the background. Besides he reckons you’ve done so much hard work on the case it’s only fair you should be there at the kill.’
‘I don’t want to be there at the kill. The thought of even one more hour out there in that bloody ditch …’
‘Tough.’ Davies eyed Riley’s doughnut and chuckled. ‘Personally I think Maynard appreciates your love of ornithology. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lets you play with his scope.’
‘What about Corran?’ Riley ignored the joke. Right now he wasn’t in the mood for laughing.
‘Corran’s going to be bundled up with the Wilson stuff. There’s no rush now he’s dead. Just a matter of squaring all the information for Corran’s inquest. Everything’s going to be coming under the auspices of Radial. We’ve just got to tidy our paperwork and hand the lot over to Hardin.’
‘Fuck.’ Riley tore a sachet of sugar open and stirred it into his coffee. ‘What about the good news, you said you had some?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’ Davies reached for the doughnut and grinned. ‘It’s good news for you, for me … well it fucking stinks.’
‘Go on.’
Davies bit down on the doughnut and mumbled through a trickle of jam. Wiped his mouth. Looked serious for a moment.
‘Maynard’s insisted on me coming back too.’
The report was on Hardin’s desk first thing, the ink hardly dry before the DSupt was ringing through to tell her the document looked fine but there appeared to be some discrepancy with the timing. Wilson had only been swinging for seconds surely? No need to lie, he said, just make sure we get this right the first time. They could escape a full complaints commission inquiry if everything panned out.
Savage made the amendments, fired through a new version and then went to the crime suite.
Monday had not only seen Layton produce the bullet evidence, he’d also received two results from the lab. One, Paula Rowland had been in the boot of Wilson’s SUV. Layton reckoned the girl had been wrapped in something but it hadn’t been enough to prevent some droplets of blood staining the carpet on the left-hand side of the rear space. Two, they had a DNA match from semen obtained at the woman’s post-mortem. The match was for Dr Wilson.
Which left the Manchester alibi. Cracking it was imperative.
‘Sounds like some airport novel, ma’am,’ Enders said as she briefed the team. ‘Cheap thrills in the grim North. Talking of airports, a helicopter is the only way I can see he can have done the crime if the alibi holds.’
They batted ideas back and forth, one of the dafter ones being the psychologist conducting some sort of mass hypnosis on the people he’d met. Savage also dispatched two detectives to drive up to Manchester to double check the sort of journey times possible. Enders was on to UK air traffic control, checking flight plans for helicopters.
That done, the rest of the team began the difficult work of tying up the historical murders. Statements from half a dozen years ago needed to be checked, people re-interviewed, the new evidence evaluated alongside the old.
The new evidence included information provided that morning by an anonymous female caller to the incident hotline. Calter recounted the woman’s story.
‘It happened about eight years ago, ma’am,’ the DC said. ‘The woman says Dr Wilson stalked her. He became obsessed. They’d met at an event at the uni – a Christmas party – and subsequently gone on a date. She says she was flattered at first and bowled over by the psychologist’s attentions. But then things turned darker, Wilson proposing marriage within days of their first night out.’
‘Creepy,’ Savage said. ‘And it fits with the harassment claim made against Wilson. He certainly wouldn’t take “no” for an answer when I was on the moor with him.’
‘Yeah,’ Calter said. ‘The woman told me she hadn’t liked him that much. There was something not quite right about his eyes and his mannerisms. Besides there’d been someone else, so she spurned his affections. Five months later a chance encounter led to Wilson trying again and this time she flat-out rejected him. Apparently he got angry and flew into a rage. Professed undying love for the woman. There followed a string of abusive texts but eventually they stopped and he left her alone.’
‘So if the first incident was around Christmas, five months would take us to May or June.’ Savage looked across at the whiteboard where Gareth Collier was busy with a marker pen. Photographs of the victims had been incorporated into a timeline on one side of the board. ‘Wilson had killed Lara Bailey – his birth mother – in the June of the previous year, now we find Mandy Glastone went missing the following June, not long after he’d been rejected.’
‘So that was the trigger which caused him to start killing.’ Calter followed Savage’s gaze to photographs. ‘She was to blame?’
‘Of course not!’ Savage shook her head. ‘You know my philosophy: criminals make a choice when they commit a crime. In this case Wilson made his choice after being rejected again. Perhaps in his twisted mind he blamed his inadequacies where relationships were concerned on Lara Bailey, which led to his decision to enact some kind of vengeance on all women who’d given up children. Losing his new mother aged six must have been a shock, but no excuse.’
‘Allegedly losing her.’
‘Yes, for now we only have Wilson’s suicide note as evidence. It could be complete fiction. His story is another part of the jigsaw we need to try to fit together.’
Collier, on cue, turned from the whiteboard. The office manager was in his element now. With the killer caught, he could concentrate on the painstaking work to bring the case to a close.
‘You’re right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘A jigsaw. We’ll start by trying to validate Wilson’s story about his birth mother and his new parents,’ he said. ‘The rest is nothing more than a giant equation. X plus Y equals Wilson. We’ll get there in the end as long as the batteries in the calculator last.’
By calculator Collier meant the team. Shorn of the thrill of the chase, the monotonous work which the office manager enjoyed might well get the rest of them down. They’d be flagging in the summer heat as they trudged door to door, from witness to witness.
/> A couple of hours later and Collier was standing at the door to Savage’s office, shaking his head, looking a little flustered himself.
‘Got two problems,’ he said. ‘One minor, one off the bloody scale. Which do you want first?’
‘Let’s start small,’ Savage said. ‘And work up.’
‘OK, first, we have the motive with the adoption thing, but we don’t have any idea how Wilson was able to find these women. It’s possible my equation can’t be solved without the answer.’
‘And nothing fresh has turned up at Wilson’s house?’
‘Not so far.’
‘He wasn’t into computers. Not like Glastone. I doubt he could have managed to access the information he needed online.’
‘Some other way then. I’ll leave that to you.’
‘Sure. Number two?’
‘Number two, yes.’ Collier paused, bit his lip before continuing. ‘I’ve been going over this Manchester trip with some of the team. I don’t think we’re going to crack it.’
‘Not good, Gareth.’
‘No. Nothing doing on the alibi, so I decided to check Wilson’s movements for the killing a year ago and for the historical murders. It actually wasn’t that difficult. He’s attached to the university and there’s a list of papers and conferences on the staff page about him going way back. For every one of the historical killings Wilson was away at a conference. For last year’s – Katherine Mallory – he was in Rome. He didn’t arrive back in the UK until the day after she went missing.’
‘Shit,’ Savage said.
‘Yes.’ Collier reached up and ran his hand across the top of his head. ‘I don’t care what the DSupt says, we ain’t breaking that one.’
It was late Tuesday afternoon before Riley had a chance to head out on his own again. ‘Over Okehampton way’ Hegg had said. Tim Hamilton’s place turned out to be about five miles south of the town and a mile off the A386. A narrow lane twisted through a dense copse and ended at a ramshackle house with a corrugated iron workshop to one side. A number of cars in various states of repair lay around a yard. From inside the workshop there was banging and the whine of an angle grinder. To Riley, Hamilton’s business looked suspiciously like a cut and shut outfit. Cars which had been written off in front and rear end smashes would be bought cheaply and cobbled together to form a new vehicle.