by Mosby, Steve
‘Let us just say,’ I ventured, ‘we have evidence suggesting there is a design behind the data you have there. I can’t tell you why we suspect that to be the case. But we are hoping that if there is a pattern, you might be able to spot it better than we can.’
‘Let’s see, then.’
She turned the first page. As she worked her way through, I did my best to explain the data we’d collated. One of the problems was that we weren’t even sure what kind of pattern we were looking for, so everything was potentially important. We’d included as much as we could think of.
The hardest thing had been to decide on identifying the victims. We didn’t want to do that, but while it was unlikely, it remained possible they had been individually targeted. In the end, we’d listed the initials. The sex of the victims was M or F. Then, obviously, there was age. A basic physical description. We’d listed the dates and approximate times of each attack, along with the period between murders. The numbers of victims on the same night. Location—for the victims we had found—was described in various ways, including GPS co-ordinates and standard map references.
Professor Joyce read through all of it, her face betraying nothing. After a couple of minutes, she looked up.
‘May I take this away with me?’
‘Of course.’
‘Because I can only give you my very basic first impressions from a brief look-through now. What I’d like to do, ideally, is feed the data into some of the programs we have in the department—code-breaking programs, essentially—and see what they come up with.’
‘That sounds fantastic,’ I said. ‘Does anything strike you at first glance?’
‘I’m not sure. You don’t have to answer this, but the evidence you have that there is a pattern—what is it?’
I glanced at Laura. She shrugged.
Your call, Hicks.
‘It’s not conclusive,’ I said. ‘We have some reason to believe the data isn’t random. It’s an attempt to look random. Like a computer algorithm. A … pseudo-random number generator?’
‘Yes, I’m familiar.’ Professor Joyce pursed her lips. The lines around them deepened. They looked a little like scars, formed by a lifetime of perusing problems. ‘What do you know about them?’
I felt a little helpless.
‘They’re complex computer programs that generate a string of data. You have one number, say, and you do something to it to generate the next. Add five, or whatever. And so on. If you know the “add five” rule, you can predict the next number.’
‘Basically, yes, though it’s not quite so simple. You have to bear in mind the code can be very complex. It’s not just “add five”—that’s obviously too predictable.’
‘Okay.’
‘Backtrack a little, though, and let’s deal with numbers. How do you form the first number in the sequence?’
I remembered the letter. ‘It’s usually something unique. The date and time setting, for example.’
Professor Joyce nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. If the sequence began at a different time, it would be very different, even though it followed the same rule. If you add five to one, you get six. If you add it to eight, you get thirteen. Same underlying rule, different sequence. You see?’
‘The numbers in the code aren’t set? They depend on the first … variable?’
‘That’s right.’
I rubbed my forehead.
Professor Joyce looked at me sympathetically.
‘What I’m really saying, Detective, is that whatever the code here might be, the first variable is probably the most interesting.’
‘Right.’
She was telling us we should concentrate on the first victim: Vicki Gibson. A pattern might explain where the next victims came from, but he needed a reason to have started where he did. So what was his secret? The problem was that we’d explored every corner of Gibson’s life and found nothing to go on. And then there were the letters.
I still don’t know quite when it will begin.
That is why it’s going to work.
Laura said, ‘Nothing leaps out at first glance, though?’
‘No. That’s why I asked what evidence you had to suggest there even was a pattern here to be found.’
My heart sank a little. Professor Joyce must have seen it on my face.
‘But I wouldn’t expect to see anything obvious. If I could spot a pattern in this in ten minutes, then you would have done too. And there is a great deal of data here: variables of different types. All I can really see immediately are the clusters.’
‘The clusters?’
She looked a little awkward. ‘The … well, the incidents that occur together.’ She gestured to the data representing the murders of Kramer, Peacock and Collins: victims three, four and five. ‘Here, for example. These variables are clustered.’
Same date, same location.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘My academic speciality is codes: the making and breaking of them. When you’re constructing a code, the aim is to make something as indecipherable as possible, and there are very sophisticated ways of doing that, involving prime numbers. It’s possible to encode a message, for example, in such a way that it’s practically impossible to break without the key.’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
‘No, but I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. A much simpler way of coding a pattern is to include static through it. Do you have a pen?’
I passed her one. She leaned over and, without standing on ceremony, scribbled a line of text across the top of the sheet in front of her.
‘There,’ she said. ‘What does that say?’
I turned the sheet round.
HITCICB5MK3X7S38P
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘It says “Hicks”. If I wanted to send that to someone for them to read, they’d need to know the following rule: start at the beginning, and whenever you encounter a consonant, completely disregard the next three symbols.’
I read it again, mentally crossing out.
‘I just did that off the top of my head,’ she said. ‘Obviously you could make it far more complicated. After a vertically symmetrical consonant, like “H”, ignore only the next two. And so on.’
‘Okay. So the clusters are … the bits you ignore?’
‘The static, yes. The letters of “Hicks” are all there. They’re even in the right order, plain to see. What makes the sequence appear random and meaningless is the clusters of static in between the letters. I just picked those additional symbols at random. They mean nothing.’
They mean nothing …
Christ. I pictured our killer waiting by the estate that night for whoever came along. Had those murders been part of the pattern he was daring us to find? Or was it just static, obscuring the secret from us?
‘So it’s possible,’ I said slowly, ‘that not all this data is even relevant? That any pattern we’re looking for might only be part of it?’
Professor Joyce nodded her head once. And because she understood what we were talking about here—that these weren’t just strings of code, but people who had been murdered—her face betrayed open emotion for the first time. She looked grim at the underlying reality of what she was telling us.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s certainly possible.’
Thirty-Seven
‘I KNEW I RECOGNISED something about it,’ DS Renton said. ‘I’m still not sure, and it might be nothing. But this is what I was thinking of.’
We were sitting in LG15—the dark room—again. This time, rather than analysing our video clip, Renton was logging into a website. The screen was pitch black aside from grey bits of text and a header of devil’s hands clutching a row of bloody skulls.
‘What is this?’ I said.
‘It’s a shock site. A forum filled with extreme images. Footage of death and torture. Suicide, rape, murder …’
‘There are forums for that?’
The strip
light in the ceiling was humming ominously.
Renton shrugged as he typed in a username and password.
‘That kind of material is all over the internet,’ he said, ‘but this place is a bit of a hub for people. I mean, you don’t need to come here to watch a beheading video, say, because they’re everywhere, but this place sort of catalogues them. And the rest.’
‘Wow.’
‘Thousands of users online at any one time. Most new material of that nature gets posted here and commented on.’
Oh Christ, I thought.
‘Our video’s not …’
‘No, no. Don’t worry. But we scan these sites quite often—five minutes at the beginning of every day, just to keep an eye out for anything we might need to get involved with. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes someone’ll break the rules and post something they shouldn’t.’
I watched as the page changed to the forum listings. Still the same image at the top of the screen, now with rows of sub-forums underneath. True Gore Images. True Gore Video. The numbers to the right showed that each category contained thousands of postings.
‘This place has rules?’
‘Oh yeah. No kiddie stuff is what it mainly comes down to. Even nutters have their own conceptions of morality. But every now and then someone’ll figure the secrecy here means open season. So we keep an eye out.’
‘Secrecy?’
‘Yeah. It used to be open, but now you need to be a member to view or post, and they’re not allowing new members any more. It’s a closed community of weirdos, and that allows them a certain degree of freedom. Or the illusion of it anyway.’
‘Okay.’
‘Here we go.’ Renton clicked on a link on his profile marked ‘Favourites’. ‘I scanned through last night and found it again, saved the thread. It’s an interesting one. Not nice. Brace yourself.’
He opened the thread and clicked on the video link in the first post. After a moment, a new window opened and the file started playing.
It showed a static image of grassland: a short stretch that ended in a line of dark, shadowy trees. The day it had been recorded, the weather had been good: the grass itself was bright and inviting, untended and shimmering slightly in the faintest of breezes, as though under calm water. In the audio feed, I could hear birdsong—and then something else. A clatter.
A hissing.
A few seconds later, a figure entered the frame, walking a little distance ahead of the camera. He was wearing blue jeans, a black coat—and a black balaclava, with tufts of brown hair emerging from the back of the neckline. In one hand he was holding a hammer, turning it round and round in his grip. And in the other—by the scruff of its neck—a tabby cat. It was twisting, jerking in his grasp.
‘Oh God,’ I said.
Renton nodded. ‘Yep.’
The footage didn’t last long—just over a minute in total. The man pressed the cat down against the ground and struck it repeatedly in the head with the hammer. The hissing and fighting ended after the second blow, but that only allowed him to let go and concentrate on hitting it again and again.
When he was done, the man stayed crouched over the animal’s body for a few moments, tilting his head and peering down dispassionately at the damage he’d inflicted. For all the distress and emotion he showed, he might have been studying a butterfly on a leaf. Finally he stood up and walked back behind the camera. The screen went blank.
For the last few frames, I had been holding my breath.
‘When was this posted?’
‘Last year,’ Renton said. ‘It’s local, too, which is what originally caught my eye. He’s posted a few of them. This is the only video he took outside: the others look like interiors—a garage of some kind. There are photos too. Here.’
He opened a new window and loaded a different thread. This one contained static images. Cats pinned down like laboratory specimens and slit open. One had all its legs and its head cut off. Four or five were hanging from trees by their necks, all with a gloved hand intruding into the frame from the side to point at them.
I stared at the photographs with horror. Below, there were messages from other users congratulating him on the post. I read the first—Great work! Can’t wait to see more!—and felt sick.
But also, just barely, a tingle of something else.
You didn’t expect us to find these, did you?
I said, ‘How do you know he’s local?’
Renton nodded. ‘He filled his location information in. Maybe he was lying, but I don’t see why he would be. Plus we identified the location the first video was shot. Swaine Hill.’
Shit. Killer Hill. Where Billy Martin had entered the woods. Billy Martin, who’d talked about someone killing a cat. What had he said? My heart began beating faster.
First things first.
‘All right. Did you ever trace this guy’s account?’
‘That’s the down side, I’m afraid.’ Renton pulled a face. ‘The site’s totally anonymous. The server’s based abroad, and the registration shifts. That’s one of the things that makes it so appealing to the users. The lack of accountability.’
‘If we contact the admins?’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘Shit.’
I leaned back.
This was him. I knew it. He’d recorded these images last year and posted them online for some reason—to show off, maybe—and the whole time he’d been practising. Preparing for his work this year. A dry run of some kind.
The kids at school. They told me about someone who killed a cat.
Another realisation.
The guy hadn’t bothered to chase Billy Martin …
I stood up quickly and pulled out my mobile. Laura took an age to answer, then:
‘Hicks. What have we—’
‘Laura, listen to me. Get someone round to Billy Martin’s house. I think he might need protection. We’ve got to get him in here right now.’
I heard her typing. ‘I’m on it.’
‘Because I think he might have recognised Billy.’
‘What? Where from?’
‘I think …’ It was hard to bring myself to say it. ‘I think it might be a kid. An older teenager maybe.’
I reminded her about what Billy had said.
‘I’m on it,’ she said again.
‘I’ll be upstairs in a minute.’
I hung up. Shit, shit, shit. But there was hope now too—stronger than before. The guy might have hidden his identity online, but he couldn’t fucking hide in real life. Not for ever. No matter how fucking clever he thought he was.
Renton said, ‘Think it’s our guy? Jimmy?’
‘Jimmy?’
The username.’
He tapped the screen and I saw what he was referring to. The username for the posts was Jimmy82.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’
Thirty-Eight
THE DOOR WAS ANSWERED by an overweight woman in her forties with an unwashed tangle of brown hair. She was dressed in black leggings and a sprawling white crop top, and had an angry speckle of sunburn across the top of her chest. A cigarette in one hand, trailing smoke. I imagined that was more or less a permanent fixture.
‘Mrs Johnson?’
‘Yeah.’
I smiled and held up my warrant card.
‘Detective Hicks. This is Detective Fellowes. We’re looking for your son, Carl. Is he home?’
Mrs Johnson slumped against the door frame and folded her arms. Not so much a gesture of defiance as one of familiarity, perhaps even inevitability. ‘What’s he done now?’
It was a reasonable question. After we’d taken Billy Martin into protective custody, he’d given us Carl Johnson’s name as the boy at school who’d bragged about being present when a cat was killed on Swaine Hill. Carl had only just turned thirteen, but was already well on his way in the world. Where Billy seemed very much like a child still, Carl Johnson had lost any innocence a long time ago. Under-age drinking. An assaul
t charge against another child at school. Truancy. Shoplifting.
But then, looking at the run-down area and the parental concern on display here, it wasn’t so surprising. It was like Billy’s bow and arrow in a way—you twang the string and that’s it: the arrow flies, its trajectory set.
I said, ‘Is he home?’
She bellowed over her shoulder. ‘Carl!’
‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ I put my card away. ‘Can we come in, please?’
‘What’s he done?’ she asked again, taking a drag on the cigarette. ‘Nothing would surprise me, to be honest. Absolutely nothing.’
‘If we can come in, we can discuss it,’ I said. ‘To be honest, we’re hoping he can help us. If he can, he might not be in any trouble at all.’
‘Huh. That’d be a first.’ She relaxed away from the door frame. It seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Follow me. Carl!’
From upstairs: ‘What?’
‘Get your arse down here, you little shit. Now.’
Mrs Johnson was trudging ahead towards a doorway on the right, trailing smoke, but I gave Laura a look as I closed the front door behind us. The stairs led straight up ahead from the front door. Carl obviously wasn’t our man, but he was a streetwise kid who wouldn’t have much love for the police, and we needed to talk to him right now. So without us even having to discuss it, Laura stayed by the door just in case the little shit decided to elope on us.
I followed Mrs Johnson into what turned out to be the living room: a small, dismal space with a worn carpet and a threadbare three-piece suite. The curtains were open, but the weak light only emphasised the misty air; it felt like the windows in here hadn’t been open for a long time. The room smelled strongly of the overflowing ashtray on the small coffee table and the stale, lingering aroma of old sweat.
A moment later, Carl sauntered in, shadowed by Laura. As I’d suspected, he cut an entirely different figure to Billy Martin. He was still clearly a kid beneath his cheap T-shirt and jeans, and the hair on his upper lip was as thin as eyelashes, but he had an attitude way beyond his years. He kicked at the carpet as he walked past, head down, not looking at me but with a sly little smile on his face.
‘Carl,’ I said. ‘Have a seat.’