by David Hodges
He heard the faint barking of the dogs as he emerged from the shrubbery a few minutes later and felt his stomach jolt. Before him stretched another vast expanse of lawn, but it was dotted with copses and as far as he could see, it was clear of police patrols. Gritting his teeth, he broke cover and hauled himself across the open ground to the first clump of trees, where he was forced to pause to get his breath back. The barking of the dogs was louder now and he guessed their handlers had them on short leashes, probably heading for the front of the house to report their arrival to the officer in charge. Making a sudden decision, he went for the next clump of trees, but only reached it in the nick of time as a heavy thudding sound preceded the sinister shadow of a giant flying bug that suddenly skimmed across the moonlit lawn, to freeze into immobility just yards from the trees sheltering him. The force chopper. Talk about piling on the pressure.
It was tempting – almost a compulsive reaction – to try and focus on the helicopter as it hovered directly overhead, but he knew that would be fatal and instead he dropped into a crouched position in some scrub, waiting for the inevitable. It came a second later – a shaft of brilliant light that seemed to erupt from nowhere, lasering the trees and holding for a few frightening seconds before leaping away to traverse the open ground he had just crossed. Then the shadow was moving again, racing away across the grass towards the other side of the house. Glancing upward, he watched the flashing red navigation light disappear into the night. How the hell had they missed him? He knew the chopper was equipped with every conceivable electronic aid, including thermal imaging, so they should have picked him out easily. But he had no time to ponder the point and, risking all, he went for the last few yards of open ground until he was through a broken perimeter fence into the belt of woodland enclosing the grounds.
A few yards of ferns, tangled roots and wet dripping trees and he broke out on to a hard road surface. He was in a lane of some sort, chippings in the surface glittering like polished glass in the moonlight.
Which way, that was the point? He chose left, his feet crunching on loose gravel at the road edges – only to stumble back into the woods almost immediately when he glimpsed headlights approaching round a shallow bend ahead of him, accompanied by the throbbing note of a slow-running engine.
The police traffic car was lit up like a carnival float, the driver scanning the woodland bordering the lane with a powerful roof-mounted spotlight, which Fulton knew only too well would have no difficulty in penetrating the sparse autumn foliage to pick him out when it reached where he was hiding. And to add to his woes, as the car drew closer to his hiding-place, he became aware of the distinctive thud of approaching rotor blades, accompanied by the excited barking of several dogs. Jerking round to peer through the trees behind him, he saw the helicopter silhouetted against the face of the moon as it narrowly cleared the tall chimneys of the hospice and homed in on the belt of woodland in which he sheltered, quickly overtaking a ragged line of torches that bobbed across the wide expanse of open ground towards the lane.
He was trapped! The realization hit him with a numbing sense of finality, but as he straightened up to await the inevitability of discovery, there was a totally unexpected reprieve. For no apparent reason, the patrol car suddenly lurched to a stop just feet away from where he stood and almost at the same moment, the uniformed officer at the wheel threw open the door and leaped out. Leaving the headlights blazing and the engine running, he dashed into the trees with the panic of a man in acute physical distress. His groans of satisfaction as he relieved himself in the bracken brought a sympathetic smile to Fulton’s tightly compressed lips, but he recognized an opportunity when he saw one and was behind the wheel of the car and pulling away in a shower of gravel even as his ‘saviour’ was shaking off the last few drops.
In fairness, the patrolman reacted pretty quickly and he obviously didn’t wait to do up his trousers, for he was out in the road and futilely giving chase on foot before the car had gone more than a hundred yards. But the powerful 3.5 litre engine soon reduced him to a speck in the moonlight and Fulton noted with a feeling of relief that in addition to the radio fitted to the car, there was a mobile phone lying on the front passenger seat, which meant that, unless his dispossessed traffic man had a second mobile or a portable radio pack-set in his pocket, he was not in a position to report what had happened to anyone.
The test came when the helicopter thudded overhead, forcing Fulton to brake right down to avoid attracting attention. The traffic car was supposed to be looking for a fugitive – a difficult thing to do when travelling at fifty miles per hour – and he waited for the call he knew was bound to come.
He was not disappointed. ‘Tango Two-five,’ the car’s built-in radio suddenly blasted, apparently on the open channel ‘talk-through’ facility. ‘This is Hotel X-ray 19. What’s the hurry? Do you have a sighting?’
Fulton made a grimace. The flying bug was now pacing him, the curiosity of the crew evidently aroused. He had to assume Tango Two-five was actually the call-sign of the car he was driving, which meant coming up with an answer straight away – silence would only create suspicion – but he prayed no one who knew the regular patrolman’s voice was listening in and that the observer in the chopper failed to spot the bobby he had just left in the woods.
‘From Tango Two-five,’ he responded. ‘Thought I saw something up ahead. False alarm. Just a fox.’
A pregnant pause and then, to his relief, a throaty laugh. ‘Copied, Tango Two-five. Suggest you change your optician.’
The next instant the helicopter had banked sharply to the right and disappeared into the night sky, its flashing red navigation light soon becoming just an acne spot on the face of the moon.
Fulton took a deep breath. So far so good, he mused, but it would only be a matter of time before the bobby he had left in the woods got to a phone or attracted the attention of one of the search teams. Then that would be it, with the clearly marked and highly visible traffic car suddenly becoming a liability instead of an asset, drawing all the other police units to it like flies round a jampot and shouting its identity to the force helicopter through its radio call-sign, which, like the rest of the police fleet, was certain to be printed in giant black letters on the roof.
Almost as a reflex action, he hit the accelerator pedal hard and felt the powerful vehicle respond instantly, leaping away into the night with a snarl of pure class, as if it actually sensed his urgency. He all but lost it on the next bend, chopping a sizeable chunk out of the nearside verge, but slackened only briefly when the lane then ended in a T-junction, before he swung hard left on to an empty dual carriageway with a squeal of tortured tyres.
A speed camera flashed as he passed it at over ninety miles an hour, but he hardly noticed. The demon on his shoulder held him possessed and his focus was far removed from the strictures of road traffic regulations, his thoughts concentrated instead on the daunting task he had set himself.
OK, so he now knew who the Slicer was – or at least he thought he did – but it was one thing knowing his identity and quite another proving it. He needed hard evidence, but there was no time for that. Search warrants, forensic analysis and the rest of the official trappings of the criminal justice system would only get in the way and make it all too late for the killer’s next victim. The old-fashioned ‘Ways & Means Act’ (traditionally resorted to by bobbies seeking a practical, though not strictly legal solution) was the only realistic course open to him in the circumstances and he would worry about the consequences of that later. After all, he had enough criminal charges to look forward to already – murder, withholding evidence, breaking and entering, taking and driving away a police car and excess speed – which meant that whatever he did from now on was pretty academic anyway.
Yeah, but what if he was wrong about the identity of the killer and it was actually someone else, what then? His teeth clenched tightly for a second in an involuntary spasm. Well, in that case it would be the end of Plan A, wouldn’t it? A
nd the only problem he had then was that he didn’t have a Plan B.
chapter 26
THE MAN IN the red silk dressing-gown had been pacing his bedroom for the best part of two hours, throwing searching glances out of the window as he gradually emptied his half-bottle of brandy into the lead crystal glass he was gripping tighter than a baby grips a favourite toy. His cadaverous features were even more drawn than usual and his eyes had an unnaturally bright glint to them which suggested a heightened state of anxiety. In fact, he was right on the edge: stressed, exhausted, but most of all, very frightened – and he had every reason to be.
His Nemesis would come, of course – if not tonight, then tomorrow – and though he had prepared his security as well as he could, with all the doors and windows of the house locked or bolted and his pet Dobermann left to wander the half-acre garden at will, he had his doubts as to whether this would be enough. The creature they called the Slicer seemed to be able to kill with impunity and even a team of experienced detectives had failed to put a stop to the catalogue of atrocities that had already been committed.
But what else could he do to protect himself? Enlisting the help of the police was out of the question, for they would want to know why he considered himself to be at risk in the first place. That would mean revealing the guilty secret he had nursed for fifteen long years and destroying himself and everything he had worked for in the process.
Ironically, it had not occurred to him when the first two murders had been committed that he might later become a target himself. He had naturally assumed Lyall’s death was something to do with his previous position as a crown court judge – a revenge killing by an ex-con maybe – and that Lenny Baker had probably been a key informant in the same case. Even with the murder of the Reverend Cotter, he had tried to convince himself that he was looking at nothing more than a coincidence. It was only when the link with Drew House had been established, that he was finally forced to face reality and scurry for cover.
Now his only hope was that he could stay out of harm’s way until the Slicer was caught – with his departure for Malta in six hours on a last minute holiday his best chance of doing just that – but, as a gambling man, he knew that the odds in his favour were not great.
Emptying his glass, he set both it and the bottle on the bedside table and stretched out on the coverlet, the pillows banked against the headboard behind his head. In a few hours it would be light. Time enough to think about the sleep he so desperately needed once he was on the plane. For the present he would have to remain vigilant. The dog should warn him if he had any visitors, and anyway he was confident that his own sharp ears would pick up the sounds of anyone trying to force an entry. His hand closed on the bayonet lying beside the brandy bottle – a Second World War relic he had inherited from his deceased father years ago – and his mouth set into a hard uncompromising line. Were they to try it, he would certainly be ready for them – at least, that’s what he told himself.
He was wearing the same determined expression as he drifted off to sleep and despite his sharp ears, he failed to pick up the soft ‘crunch’ of an expertly taped-up window breaking downstairs or, shortly afterwards, the squeak of a loose floorboard in the corridor outside his room.
The police helicopter located Tango Two-five exactly twelve minutes after the displaced traffic patrolman ran into one of the search teams and reported his car stolen. Fulton could not have felt more relieved that he had acted on gut instinct and ditched the car when he had, rather than driving what would have been a fatal extra half-mile to his objective. As it was, after abandoning the vehicle on a patch of waste ground in the middle of town, he had only just managed to lose himself in the labyrinth of adjacent streets when the familiar thud of rotor blades announced the chopper’s arrival.
He had kept to the backstreets after that and, apart from one scare when he was forced to throw himself into a pile of rubbish to escape the powerful spotlight of the helicopter during a low-level sweep of the area, he had got to Saddler Street without any major problems. Once there, gaining access to the police station itself proved easier than he had anticipated. A transom window had been carelessly left open in the basement – the locker room, as it turned out – and a convenient external drainpipe enabled him to haul himself up on to the sill. The locker room was empty and in darkness, but a sheet of brilliant white light washed down the side of the building and flooded into the room like an advancing tide as he levered himself off the inside sill. He knew it was unlikely that the helicopter was directly targeting the police station – more likely that its probing beam was scanning streets much further away and had brushed the building in passing – but he couldn’t take the chance and he remained crouched on the floor below the window for several minutes until the light was suddenly withdrawn and the helicopter’s rotors faded.
The locker-room door made a cracking noise as he opened it, but there was no one around to hear; the corridor outside was empty. He glanced at his watch. It was just on two. There would only be a skeleton staff upstairs now anyway: the station duty officer, the team of communication operators sealed up in their control room and a replacement custody officer. The rest would be out on patrol – no doubt looking for him.
The station seemed dead and as usual was full of shadows. He made it to the first floor, which was unlit, then stopped abruptly in the darkness as a door closed somewhere along the corridor. He waited, listening intently. Soft footfalls sounded to his right, then another door opened with a groan and louder footsteps rang on what sounded like a bare stone surface (the back stairs?) as they faded away. He remained motionless until the walker had gone, then switched on his torch and moved off.
He found the office he was looking for – the words ‘Administration’ on the door – and carefully tried the handle. As he had expected, the door was locked, but it opened easily enough with the help of his Visa card, and he gave a critical shake of his head. He found it ironic that the very organization that liked to lecture the public on the importance of crime prevention failed to practise what it preached when it came down to fitting a modern thief-proof lock to the door of the office where, amongst other things, the police area’s imprest account cash was kept. Still, the lapse served his purpose well enough now and he slipped inside and closed the door gently behind him.
The office was large, accommodating three separate workstations in the centre and a row of three-drawer filing cabinets along one wall. He guessed that, unlike the door, the cabinets would be securely locked because of their contents, and he shone the torch round the room, looking for the key cabinet that he knew would be there. When he located it he was astonished to find that someone had actually left the flap of the metal box wide open, with the keys still in the lock. It seemed that security at Saddler Street nick needed a very big kick up the backside.
The keys on the row of hooks inside were all neatly tagged. He selected the one labelled ‘Area P/Fs’ (personal files) and crossed the room to unlock the relevant metal cabinet. He eased out one of the long drawers on its runners with great care, knowing full well what a racket they could sometimes make if handled roughly.
The suspended files inside were neatly positioned and in alphabetical order, with senior officers grouped in one section, followed by supervisory ranks and then constables. This made his search a lot easier; within seconds of finding the file he was looking for and opening it up on top of the cabinet, he knew he had struck oil.
Like every other P/F in the force, the bundle of papers inside the familiar blue folder comprised confidential memos, letters and reports. Among these were the multi-paged annual appraisal reports, giving not only supervisory assessments and grades for each calendar year, but the officer’s qualifications, achievements and personal details, including the information Fulton most wanted – his private address – which he quickly noted.
But there were other things in this particular personal file that were totally unexpected; things that made Fulton’s heart once more beat
twice as fast as he leafed through the documents, speed-reading as he went. ‘Former military service in Royal Marines (commando unit) …’ he murmured, his torch tracing a shaky path across the page. The bastard knew how to kill, then! ‘Previously employed as charge nurse at Braxton psychiatric hospital.’ A charge nurse? So his killer had medical qualifications too. No wonder he knew how to use chloroform and drugs like GHB effectively. Probably had an illicit stock stashed away somewhere.
And there was more, too. Thumbing through a clutch of papers near the back of the file, he came across something which really focused his mind. It was a three-year-old report notifying the headquarters personnel department of an impending medical operation. That in itself was not so startling, but it was the nature of the operation that gave Fulton a shock as he noted the contents: ‘… Specialist diagnosis – testicular cancer … No option but surgical removal … Necessity for several weeks’ sick leave …’
Before returning the file to the drawer, the big man leaned on the cabinet for a few moments, digesting the information. Testicular cancer? Surgical removal? It was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection between his suspect’s misfortune and the mutilations that had accompanied the murders of both Herbert Lyall and Andrew Cotter. Any lingering doubts he might have had as to whether he was going after the right man were now put to rest. It had to be him and all that remained now was to find the swine and nail him. To do that, though, he needed some wheels – and he knew exactly where to get them.