by David Hodges
Losing his taste for oxygen, he lit another cigarette and headed for his car on the other side of the car park, unsure what his next move should be and thinking he might be able to decide that over a glass of whisky when he got home. But that luxury was to be denied him.
The white envelope had been left on the windscreen of Abbey’s Honda, pinned behind one of the windscreen wipers, and his heart began to thud wildly again as he carefully extracted it. The envelope, which was not addressed, was unsealed with the flap tucked inside and it contained a single sheet of note paper. As usual, the message was short, but the chilling content made up for that.
CONGRATUALATIONS, JACK. KNEW YOU’D SUSS THINGS OUT IN THE END BUT IT BOUGHT ME SOME TIME FOR A BIT MORE SOCIAL CLEANSING. NEXT ONE WILL BE AN OLD REPROBATE NO ONE WILL MISS. HOPE YOU APPROVE. WE’LL GET TOGETHER AFTERWARDS FOR A PINT. GIVE MY LOVE TO ABBEY.
Fulton didn’t need clarification as to who the old reprobate might be and he wrenched open the door of the four-by-four in a panic, ramming the key in the ignition even before he was fully in his seat. He had fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book, he realized that now. Abbey had been nothing more than a diversion – an unwitting participant in the killer’s sick game – and through his own preoccupation with her welfare, he had forgotten all about the last surviving member of the Drew House syndicate. Carlo Vansetti might have been in the final stages of terminal cancer, but if the Slicer had his way, his end would come, not in a painless morphine-induced coma, but with the slow agonizing slice of a cut-throat razor. As the big man sent the Honda careering off across the car park towards the service road, he knew in his gut that he hadn’t a hope in hell of getting to the hospice in time, but he owed it to his guilt-ridden conscience to at least try.
chapter 24
FULTON CAME UPON Derryman Hospice without warning when the lane he had been following ended abruptly before twin stone pillars surmounted by huge lions, rampant and ghostly white in his headlights. He braked beneath the jaws of the sculptured guardians, extinguished his headlights and slipped into second gear, half-expecting the beasts to leap on to the car from their crumbling stone pillars and tear their way through the metal to get to the soft flesh inside. That they didn’t was no small surprise to him in his almost surreal state of mind. He pulled away again at a crawl, nosed through the open gateway and bumped off the driveway into some trees.
For a few moments he just sat there with his window down, listening to the ticking of the hot engine. He was taking one hell of a personal risk, he realized that only too well. Alone, unarmed and tracking a psychopathic killer in wooded grounds at night, he couldn’t have been more vulnerable. He knew the rules – had spent enough time in his service telling his staff to comply with them (even if he himself often failed to practise what he preached) – but with the killer already en route, there had been no time for phone calls or rules. This was his shout. He had let Carlo Vansetti down, just as he had let Abbey down, and he had no choice but to deal with it.
Buttoning up his coat against the cold, he grabbed Abbey’s torch from the front seat and climbed out of the car, carefully pushing the door shut behind him before picking his way through the trees towards the house. Wide lawns, silvered in the moonlight by a light frost, encompassed the turreted mansion and the grass crunched underfoot like fine shingle as he took a chance on being spotted by night-duty staff or a resident insomniac and headed for the ornate porch at the front of the building.
The main doors were locked from the inside; Fulton could hear the bolts rattling when he gently tested the large brass knobs that served as handles. So it was a case of looking for another way in, then – and he completed nearly a full circuit of the building before he found it.
The ground-floor transom window had apparently been forced open and not too expertly either. The killer? Probably, and he was no doubt in a hurry. Directing his torch inside, he saw the beam bounce off rows of book spines. The hospice library? Must be.
He ducked through the open window, swung a leg over the sill and felt thick carpet beneath his foot. Somewhere above his head a clock provided a discordant version of the Westminster chimes. Swinging his other leg over the sill, he dropped into the musty darkness of a long, galleried room with stuffed bookcases and a heavy panelled door at each end. Fortunately the nearest door proved to be unlocked and he was able to make his way without difficulty along the corridor that lay beyond – only to freeze in the archway giving access to the front foyer.
A rectangular workstation stood in a pool of light to one side of the main entrance doors, the swivel-chair behind it conspicuously empty, though a transistor radio on an adjacent filing cabinet played soft music. Obviously someone was around somewhere – a night nurse perhaps – but there was no sign of him or her, so it was likely that they were out and about on their rounds. Then he grimaced as another possibility occurred to him, prompting him to stride across the foyer and subject the area behind the desk to closer scrutiny.
But there was no body lying there, nor any dark pools glistening in the lamplight, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He had been presented with enough corpses during this hideous business to last him for the rest of his enforced retirement. He just hoped Carlo Vansetti would be as lucky as the hospice’s night nurse seemed to have been – though that depended on his finding the former gang boss before the Slicer did, which would not be easy in a building this size.
His break came when he happened to glance at the computer monitor on the desk top. The night nurse had not shut the system down before leaving his or her station and the menu was clearly visible. He grabbed the mouse and quickly clicked on to ‘Patient List’. There were some thirty names on the page that materialized on the screen, all in alphabetical order. He found Vansetti’s immediately. ‘Room Eighteen,’ he breathed and headed across the foyer towards an illuminated ‘Stairs’ sign, well aware of the fact that if he had been able to locate Carlo Vansetti so easily, his quarry would have been able to do exactly the same thing.
A security light fizzed into life the moment he went through the doorway, revealing a wide stone staircase in front of him marching up into a darkness pierced by shafts of moonlight from a high window. To his left a narrower iron staircase dropped away into its own black pit. A notice on the wall provided a list of the room numbers on each level and he saw that Room Eighteen was located on the top floor. ‘Just my luck,’ he muttered as he started up the staircase, wondering whether the Slicer had thought much the same thing a short time before.
The security lights activated all the way to the top floor, spookily sensing his presence a fraction of a second before he got to them and shutting down again the moment he passed by. When he eventually reached the upper landing, however, the light was forced to remain on a lot longer while his nicotine weakened lungs did their best to catch up after the climb. As he stood there gasping for air and holding on to the banister rail for support, he was struck by the unnatural silence that prevailed.
There was not a sound to disturb the stillness of the night; no footsteps from a patrolling night nurse, no snoring from sleeping patients, not even the creak or groan of expanding or contracting timbers. It evoked a weird sense of isolation within him and, staring down the staircase into the hostile blackness that cowered before the pool of light in which he now stood, he felt vulnerable and exposed.
Not surprisingly, he was relieved when his breathing returned to near normal and he was able to move on again, but straight away he encountered a different sort of problem. For some reason, the light sensor system did not extend beyond the stairs and when he jerked the landing door open, he found himself confronted by an even deeper brooding darkness. Despite the aid of Abbey’s torch, it took him a few seconds to find and operate the light switch and then it seemed like for ever before a row of strip lights flickered into life in uneasy succession along a wide yellow-painted corridor with white-panelled doors on both sides. A strong smell of antiseptic greeted him the moment he stepped thro
ugh from the landing, but the corridor itself was deserted.
Room Eighteen was halfway along on the right. The door stood ajar, a glimmer of light showing through the crack, but not a sound was audible from inside. He took a deep breath and pushed the door open, expecting the worst. Instead, he found himself staring into a smart well-appointed bedroom with the resident patient apparently soundly asleep in his bed, just the top of his head showing above the sheets. He frowned, an innate sixth sense telling him that something was wrong, though he was unable to put his finger on it.
Stepping into the room, he wheeled quickly to check behind the door, half-anticipating an ambush, but there was no one there. Next, he crossed to the en suite bathroom, pushing the door open on one finger and peering inside. The room was empty. Still that strange, uneasy gut feeling, but why?
Leaving the en suite, he stood for a moment by the door, his gaze travelling slowly round the bedroom, trying to spot anything that did not look quite right. The transom window was open at the bottom, the curtains stirring slightly in the draught, but otherwise everything appeared neat and tidy – only the oxygen cylinder, standing on a trolley beside the bed and the chart on its clipboard at the end indicating that this was a sick room, rather than a suite in a good-class hotel.
He moved closer to the bed, studying the motionless shape beneath the sheets and wondering whether he should waken the old man to see if he was OK. Somehow it didn’t seem right, but there again, Carlo Vansetti was the reason for his being at the hospice, so it was the logical thing to do.
Holding his breath, he bent over the bed to carefully peel back the sheets – then promptly recoiled with the shock. Carlo Vansetti was certainly the one lying in the bed, though it was not sleep that had claimed him, but something a lot more permanent. The pale skeletal features resembled those of some mummified pharaoh, with the lips drawn back over toothless gums in an obscene rictus grin. Death seemed to have amused him – probably because in the end, by succumbing to the cancer that had been eating away at him, he had cheated the Slicer of his prize.
Fulton’s mobile rang as he pulled the sheet back over the corpse and he guessed who the caller was even before he jerked the phone from his pocket.
‘Hello, Jack. Bit of a bummer this time, isn’t it? Old bastard snuffed it before I could get to him.’
Fulton crossed to the window and peered out, hoping to spot where his caller could be hiding, but his gaze met only moonlit lawns and purple tinted shrubbery. ‘Got yourself a new mobile then?’ he commented, keen to keep the conversation going while he worked out his next move.
There was a chuckle, embodying all the warmth of a death rattle. ‘Courtesy of the hospice team, Jack. Little night nurse on reception left it on her desk when she went walkabout. Very careless of her – oh, by the way, you’ll find her in the laundry cupboard next door, recovering from a chloroform hangover.’
Fulton’s involuntary sigh of relief was louder than he had intended and there was another chuckle. ‘What’s up, Jack? Did you think I’d stiffed her as well?’
‘It wouldn’t have surprised me.’
A loud sigh down the phone. ‘As if I’d slice a nice little girl like that – especially after she’d let me have her mobile to enable me to keep in touch with my old mate, Jack.’
Fulton grunted. ‘You’re really getting off on all this, aren’t you? You think you’re some kind of celebrity.’
‘Well, it’s gratifying to know I have earned a place in crime history – become a somebody at last – though I must admit I would have preferred a better nickname than the one that was picked. At least the Yorkshire Ripper received the accolade of being linked to his celebrated predecessor, whereas in my case Sweeney Todd has not even had a mention.’
But Fulton was no longer listening, for the psychopath had unwittingly triggered a reaction in the policeman’s weary brain that was little short of cataclysmic and he swayed drunkenly for a moment, his eyes widening and his whole being suddenly coming alive as understanding erupted from his subconscious with the force of a massive heroin fix. Sweeney Todd! But that was it; that was the missing link and it had been so obvious all along. Now he knew what had been bugging him all through the inquiry and as the last few bricks were swept from the wall that had been constructed between the conscious and subconscious parts of his reactivated brain, whirling strands of previously unconnected thought fused into one, providing a composite picture that was as unsavoury as it was illuminating.
‘Forget about your place in history,’ he said, a new confidence in his tone. ‘Just think about the place that’s been reserved for you with all the other nutters in Broadmoor.’
Another chuckle. ‘Why? Feeling lucky, are we, Jack?
‘Could be – now that I’ve finally sussed who you are.’
The killer seemed unperturbed. ‘What if you have? It won’t do you any good anyway. The last miscreant on my little list will have been chastised long before you have any idea who it might be.’
Fulton froze. ‘The last miscreant?’ he echoed and, caught off guard for a second, said a lot more than he intended. ‘But all the members of the syndicate are now dead.’
A harder, more measured laugh. ‘Aha, so you know more than I thought, Mr Superintendent. But never mind, you’re still way off course and by the time you manage to extricate yourself from your current predicament my job will be done.’
The meaning behind his words suddenly became clear as, right on cue, a battery of blue beacons illuminated the night sky beyond the perimeter of the hospice grounds and, lurching to the window, Fulton was just in time to see a convoy of police cars sweep up the drive.
‘Thought I’d give the old three-nines a ring on behalf of the night nurse, Jack,’ the killer continued, ‘just to let them know there was an intruder on the premises. Could take a while explaining to your old colleagues why you broke in – and why you chloroformed that nice young nurse and stuffed her in a cupboard.’
As the phone went dead, Fulton saw maybe a dozen uniformed figures springing from their vehicles to fan out round the front of the building and, seconds later, he heard the inevitable heavy pounding on the front doors of the hospice as flashlights grazed the upstairs windows, neatly capturing his silhouette. Once again he had been expertly fitted up by his antagonist and as he lumbered out into the corridor, snarling a succession of choice curses, the question uppermost in his mind was how the hell was he going to get out of this one?
chapter 25
THE HOSPICE WAS already waking up, with doors banging and people shouting on the floors below, as Fulton lumbered from Carlo Vansetti’s room and made for the illuminated fire escape sign at the end of the corridor. But his luck was out. The door was securely padlocked. So much for fire regulations and health and safety, he mused grimly as he turned on his heel and headed back towards the main staircase.
Anxious faces peered at him round a couple of the doors when he reached the second floor and he glimpsed a short, thickset woman in a white dressing-gown hurrying towards him from the far end of the corridor with the look of ‘staff’ imprinted on her. ‘Just a minute,’ her authoritative voice boomed after him as he went for the next flight. ‘What the devil are you doing in here?’ But he had no intention of stopping to explain and he reached the ground floor well before she began her descent. The corridor below was miraculously empty, but the assault on the front door by the police was continuing with a vengeance and he glimpsed flashlights probing the shrubbery outside as he slipped into the library, closing the door tightly behind him.
‘Window open here, Sarge!’ a voice shouted above the now muffled banging and he breathed another curse. ‘Going to take a look.’
The next instant a powerful beam exploded in the gloom, just missing him as he slipped behind a convenient bookcase. The bobby stood there for a few seconds, sweeping the room with the flashlight before clambering inside, his heavy boots scraping on the sill in the process. Fulton tensed behind the bookcase, stepping quickly to
one side when a floorboard cracked a little too close for comfort and taking refuge behind a stout wooden pillar a second before the flashlight illuminated the spot where he had been standing. Silence. Even the banging on the front door had stopped. Maybe ‘Florence Nightingale’ had let the police in after giving up chasing her intruder down the stairs.
‘Where are you, Snell?’ Another flashlight probed the library from the window and Fulton heard sudden movement directly in front of the pillar sheltering him.
‘In here, Sarge. Thought I heard something.’
A loud snort. ‘You’re always hearing things. Get yourself round the front. Guv’nor wants to organize a proper search of the grounds.’
The flashlight traced an arc round the library one more time, then Fulton heard the unmistakable sounds of the policeman scrambling back over the windowsill. He was alone at last and he made the most of it.
There was no one outside the library window when he got to it and he was through and into the adjoining shrubbery without being challenged, pausing only briefly among a forest of rhododendron bushes to get his breath back and work out his next move.
Trying to reach Abbey’s parked Honda was out of the question. By now that would have been secured by the police units and before long a dog team or teams would be on the scene to sniff him out. He had to get clear of the grounds before that happened or he was finished, but in brilliant moonlight it would not be easy. Fumbling for the torch he had taken from Abbey’s car, he pushed his way through the shrubbery, trying to make as little noise as possible and taking a route that kept the lofty walls of the hospice immediately on his right.