by Mosby, Steve
Aside from a pair of white trainers, he was dressed entirely in black: jeans and a rainproof jacket. A wool balaclava. Ski gloves. It was difficult to tell, but he appeared to be of medium height and build. Nothing exceptional. Without the mask and gloves, he wouldn’t have looked out of place on any street in the city.
Anybody. Nobody.
He was holding a white carrier bag in one hand. You couldn’t really tell what was inside, but I knew from the previous murders that it would be a hammer, and that something awful was about to happen.
And then it did.
Standing astride the prostrate man, the killer smacked him five times straight in the face with the bag. Mercifully, the detail was obscured by the quality of the footage. All you could really see was the man’s head bouncing repeatedly and his face turning steadily crimson. But the audio captured each wet collision.
‘Okay,’ Garretty said. ‘I’ll just take a walk now.’
‘You do that.’
I wished I could join him. We were only two minutes into the footage. There was—somehow—another five for us to sit through.
And we did.
We watched the killer use a screwdriver on the man’s lower stomach, stabbing at him like a sewing machine, and then we watched him standing on the wounds. He used the screwdriver on the remains of the victim’s face, avoiding his feeble attempts to hold his arm in front. The whole time, the soundtrack recorded an awful gargling as the man failed to breathe and scream properly through a nose and mouth that were no longer where or what they should have been.
Finally, the killer beat the man about the head with the hammer until his whole body had gone floppy. Even then, it was difficult to be certain he was dead.
The killer disappeared from view again, retreating behind the camera. The view held the unmoving body for a few more seconds, and then juddered as he lifted the camera from the tripod.
‘He’s made a snuff film,’ Laura said.
Her voice sounded odd.
I nodded. ‘Are you okay?’
‘No.’
‘No. Me neither.’
There was nothing else to say. But we watched for the final minute as he carried the camera over by hand, zooming in to create a full, horrific record of the injuries he’d inflicted. What was left of the man’s head wasn’t even recognisable as a human being any more: just something red staining the bright green grass.
‘Where is this?’ Laura said quietly.
‘I don’t know. We need to find it, though—’
But then the killer moved the camera away from the dead man in the grass and panned carefully across the land around him. And my skin, already shivery, became even colder.
Because there were other bodies lying nearby.
He panned over one, two, three …
Four.
Oh my God.
Five.
After pausing on the fifth additional body, the camera juddered again slightly and the file stopped, leaving us in silence.
‘Fuck,’ Laura said.
It was so soft, I barely heard it. I didn’t register how unlike her it was to swear. My thoughts were standing too still to let new ones through. The first one that made it was the realisation that our man had a killing spot. One that we hadn’t found.
One that, for all we knew, he was adding to right now.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We really need to find that.’
Twenty-Eight
‘WELCOME TO THE DARK room.’
‘The what?’ I said.
DS Renton closed the door to his ‘office’ behind us. Suddenly he looked a little embarrassed.
‘The dark room. It’s just what we call it, off the record. No windows, you see, and we always keep the blinds down on the door. Plus, you know, because of what we deal with in here.’
I looked around. ‘Good name.’
It was a small room, probably five metres by three. The only free wall space was to allow for the single door behind me; the rest was lined with shelves of computer equipment, reference books, files and binders, above a handful of desks and gently humming monitors. Cables snaked across the fuzzy, buzz-cut carpet.
This was the fabled LG15, then—the dark room—which everyone in the department knew of and hated the idea of visiting. Few ever had need to. It was the home of the specialised ‘live IT’ unit, dedicated to dealing with the murkier end of online investigations.
On the nearest wall there was something that looked like a CD rack, except the slots were slightly larger. Each one contained a naked metal hard drive with a label scrawled on in ballpoint pen. All names. Emily. Adam. Sally. Will. Every single one of the names represented a ‘child’—a false identity, routed separately, that could be used by DS Renton and his small, hand-picked team of officers in chat rooms and online discussions to infiltrate paedophile groups.
There were also rows of disks used to store conversations and—worse—back up the confidential data from investigations: photos and videos. In this room, images of all types were analysed, categorised, catalogued.
Important work, but difficult and hideous—and done down here, behind closed doors, in a basement room without windows. Officers who worked here were screened more strenuously than those licensed to carry automatic weapons, and underwent more frequent psychological reviews.
Renton sat down at a desk and motioned for me to join him on a chair beside him. As I sat, he tapped a few keys and brought the monitor to life.
‘I’ve received the file,’ he said. ‘Not had a chance to view it yet. Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead.’
There didn’t seem to be any point warning him, given the things he must have seen in his time.
He watched the video clip in silence. My own instinct was to look away, but instead, I watched it again, hoping to spot something I’d missed on first viewing. Some clue.
It was marginally easier to watch now I’d seen it once and knew what it contained, but still tough. What played out on the screen hit you in the heart as much as the head, or perhaps even somewhere deeper. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my time, but watching someone being killed was very different. The act was alien. How could someone do that? How could someone be so vicious and empty as to cause another human being such suffering?
Do you believe in evil?
Renton, meanwhile, was professional and detached, but even he wasn’t impervious. He was obviously troubled by what he was seeing—maybe the day you aren’t any more is the day you leave this place for your own sanity.
When the clip finished playing, he leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair.
‘Okay. Shit. Tell me more.’
‘What we have here is evidence from an ongoing investigation. This recording was made a few days ago—or at least that appears to be when the copy was created. We received it, with a letter, through the post. This man is still at large.’
‘This is … the guy?’
‘Yes, this is the guy. At present, we don’t know where this location is and we don’t know the identities of the six victims shown. Obviously, we very much want to.’
Renton blew out.
‘I can help you with that. Obviously we’ve done this sort of work before. The first thing we’ll do is pull out the helpful frames.’
Renton explained the process. What he and his colleagues would do was scan through the file meticulously, frame by frame, and make sure there was nothing we were missing. They would get the cleanest shots possible of the victims’ clothes. Coupled with missing persons data, that should enable us to identify them.
‘What about finding them?’ I said.
‘How much scope have we got?’
He meant money. ‘Given what we’re dealing with here,’ I said, ‘as much as we need.’
‘That’s what I figured. Okay. Well, the obvious stuff we can do is look for landmarks. At first glance, there’s nothing, but there might be something there that helps us pin down the areas to look at. For starters.’
‘This is the expensive part. We can recreate a map of the terrain from the video. It won’t be perfect, by any means, but you’ll basically end up with an overhead diagram that maps the layout of the trees and the land. Geographically precise, and possible to cross-check against existing satellite data.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Sadly, it’s not an automated process. You’ll need officers doing it by hand. And obviously, with tree cover, it won’t be exact.’
‘It’ll give us an idea, though: maybe rule out some areas at the least.’
‘Yep.’
It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.
I said, ‘I’m also interested in something a bit more … oblique. We have the what, and can work on the who and where. But why?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why make the video?’
‘That’s one for the psychologists, I think.’ Renton shook his head. ‘I mean, you do occasionally see this kind of thing. That’s a generic “you” by the way, as this is one of the most extreme things I’ve come across in my whole career. But serial killers, some serial rapists, they do take videos. To relive it, I guess. And child pornography rings, obviously.’
To relive it. If his letters were to be believed, that just didn’t seem like our man. He wasn’t interested in the murders themselves so much as using them as a test. Why video them, then? Was it just this one, so he could prove the letters really were from him?
Or was it something more?
I said, ‘Have you ever seen a snuff film?’
‘No.’ Renton was silent for a moment. ‘Not officially, anyway. Officially, they don’t exist.’
‘What do you mean, “officially”?’
He gestured at the frozen image on the screen.
‘Well, this is what many people would call a snuff movie. It’s a film of somebody being murdered. That’s rare, but not unheard of. And there are thousands of videos of people dying on film—beheadings, accidents, CCTV footage. But to be a snuff film officially, the footage has to have been filmed for distribution, for financial reasons.’
‘To be sold for profit?’
‘Yes. And nobody’s ever found one. It’s one of those myths that sounds macabre enough to be true, but obviously isn’t when you think about it. There’d be too much risk involved: killing somebody on camera and distributing it. And there’s no need to do it. You could create the same thing with actors and special effects. Hollywood does it all the time.’
‘That’s not real, though.’
‘No, but if you want real death on camera, it’s already there, risk-free. You’ve heard of Daniel Pearl? Or the Yellow Man? You just don’t go to the trouble—the vast trouble—of creating something new and trying to find a market for it.’
He was right, of course. Filming a murder is one thing. But how the hell do you then go about selling it? It’s not like you can advertise it in the back of the paper.
‘At the same time,’ Renton said, ‘something about it rings a bell.’
I frowned. ‘Pardon me?’
He frowned, then shook his head.
‘The clip. I don’t know what it is. It reminds me of something. I don’t know what.’
I leaned forward. ‘Another murder?’
‘No, no. Believe me, if I’d seen something like this before, I’d remember it. No. It’s something else. I’m not sure what.’
‘A movie?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’ He shook his head again, as though dismissing the idea, and I leaned back slightly, disappointed.
He sounded far away. ‘It’ll come to me.’
Twenty-Nine
IT TOOK ME A long time to fall asleep that night.
Beside me, Rachel slept fitfully, snoring gently, fidgeting, her bump resting on the maternity pillow. It was a warm night too, and even lying on top of the covers I was sweating. But it wasn’t really any of those things that kept me awake: it was the thought of those bodies, still lying out there somewhere, exposed to the wilds, waiting to be discovered.
That and the thought that there might be more of them now. If not yet, there would be soon. But then, maybe not. If the murders were random, there was no guarantee the dump site would be added to, and no guarantee that it wouldn’t.
When I did sleep, I dreamed I was outside a house.
It was a two-storey building on a long, wide road that stretched far out ahead and behind. The homes here were all the same: wooden and rickety, hand-made almost, each one sitting in its own fenced-off square of dirty scrubland. Nothing grew out here. There was a slight breeze, and dust billowed across the tarmac around me, as though a car had dropped me off and then sped off spinning its tyres. Above me, in the sky, clouds sped past impossibly quickly.
The house was painted red, but the colour had faded. I walked up to the front door and pushed; it swung silently open and I stepped into a small hallway. To the right, there was a lounge, with threadbare settees and a wooden cabinet that seemed wrong, although I couldn’t work out why. To the left, a dirty kitchen, with ridges of solidified fat on the counter curled around absent cups and plates.
In front of me, a dark staircase led up to the first floor.
I stood there for a moment, listening. Feeling. At first, the house seemed silent, but it wasn’t. There was something. Not a sound so much as a heartbeat. A slow, thudding pressure, as though somewhere, behind a closed door, a drum was being sounded.
I started up the stairs, my skin itching.
On the landing, there was a corridor that ended in a bright, arched window that must have faced out over the rear of the property. Leading up to it was a long strip of frayed red carpet, not wide enough to meet the mouldy skirting boards on either side. In front of the window, motes of dust whirled impossibly quickly, like a cloud of midges, forming half-glimpsed fingerprint patterns in the air.
I started walking slowly along the corridor. As I did, the heartbeat grew louder.
There were three doors. The first was open on to a bathroom. Everything inside was blue and green and shimmering; it was like peering into an artificially lit underwater cave. I turned away and kept walking.
The second door, on the other side of the hall from the other two, was closed. As I reached it, I realised the heartbeat sound was coming from the room behind.
I stood there for a long time, facing it.
Then I reached out and pushed it open.
Immediately, the heartbeat stopped. Light from the corridor fell into a small, dark room that was little more than a cell. It was stripped down and empty—but only of fixtures and fittings. Sitting in one corner, hugging her knees, was a woman in a bright white nightdress. Her dark hair fell over her bare knees and thin shins.
She appeared to be sobbing, but making no sound at all, as though behind glass. When I breathed in, there was the faintest scent of honey in the air.
‘Hello?’ I said.
The motions of sobbing stopped. For a moment, she was very still.
‘Hello? Are you okay?’
She lifted her head very slowly, revealing her face.
‘Oh,’ I said.
She was a very beautiful young woman—or had been once. The skin of her face was bright white, framed with black hair. Her right eye was swollen shut so badly that it looked like her eyebrow had simply been underlined.
Emmeline Levchenko. A memory or a ghost, assuming there’s even a difference, finding its way into my nightmare. An image of her back when I could have—should have—saved her, and failed.
A still second later she came screaming at me.
DAY EIGHT
Thirty
AS THE COFFEE MACHINE begins rasping and spitting, Jake kicks Marie Wilkinson in the stomach.
She rubs her hand gently over her belly and whispers shush to him, but it doesn’t do any good. Quite the opposite. It feels like the little scamp starts doing cartwheels in there.
The image makes her smile.
Through her twenties, when she’d very adamantly not wanted children, it had been this aspect she’d always found the most terrifying to contemplate. The sensation of something growing inside her. It had made her shudder. There was childbirth itself to fear, of course, but the idea of becoming an incubator had always seemed far more alien. So it had surprised her how quickly she adjusted—how much, in fact, she’d come to like it. And although there is still the birth itself to be afraid of, she’s almost come to terms with that as well. A part of her is even looking forward to it.
As she rubs her stomach, smiling at Jake’s movements, she thinks: I can’t wait to meet you. He’s so active. It feels like he’s full of joy, doing pirouettes in there out of sheer excitement. When she dreams about him, he’s one big smile. The aches and pains of pregnancy are uncomfortable, but she pictures her body as already holding him—embracing him, just as it will when he arrives—and it feels like she can put up with the discomfort forever if needs be.
Fortunately not.
Not long now. It’s easy to imagine he can understand her thoughts. You get yourself ready, little man, because you’re going to love this world.
As the machine dribbles out the last few trickles of coffee, she senses Tony enter the kitchen behind her. He is busy, as always, rushing to get ready for work. Hair damp from the shower, shirt slightly untucked, still doing the tie he doesn’t really need for the work but wears anyway.
‘Hey, sweetie,’ she says over her shoulder.
‘Hiya. Coffee—thanks. You’re a star.’
‘Well, if you haven’t time for breakfast, you’ve got to have something.’
‘Tell me about it.’
She pours him a cup. There’s enough for a second in there; she might treat herself when he’s gone. At first she scrupulously avoided everything she was supposed to, but she’s relaxed a little as time has gone on. An occasional cup won’t hurt. The advice seems to change every few weeks anyway.