by Max Manning
Blake hurried out of the takeout and followed, keeping a safe distance behind and staying on the opposite side of the road. Ince wore a dark-green puffer jacket, jeans, sneakers, and a black beanie. He wasn’t going to work. New Scotland Yard preferred its detectives suited and booted.
Fenton might well swear by old-fashioned legwork, but trailing Ince around the city could turn out to be one big waste of time, Blake thought. Maybe he was off to meet a friend, going out to eat, or simply planning to sink a few beers in his favorite pub. Having said that, there was always the possibility that he was on his way to remove victim number four’s head from his or her shoulders.
As they neared the Tube station, Blake darted across the road, squeezing between the front bumper of a black cab and the back of a double-decker bus. For a second, he lost sight of Ince, but soon picked up his beanie bobbing in the crowd.
Blake reached the staircase leading down into the station in time to see Ince walk through the ticket barrier. He stayed where he was and watched him step onto the escalator and descend to the District Line platform. There’s a time to be cautious and a time to be bold, Blake reminded himself. He turned and walked back the way he’d come, stopping outside Ince’s apartment. Darkness had settled like a stain, but the busy road was well lit.
A narrow, dimmer street ran along the side of building. Blake stayed close to the end wall until he reached the back. A high wooden fence sealed off a yard accessed by a high wooden gate. To the right of the gate stood two large green garbage cans. A root around in Ince’s rubbish would probably provide an interesting snapshot of his lifestyle. Blake had worked alongside more than one reporter who’d built a career on sifting through the garbage of celebrities and politicians, but his sights were set on richer pickings.
Standing with his back to the gate, he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and tried to look as if he was in the middle of a serious text conversation. Four youths in matching tracksuit bottoms and hoodies were coming his way, heading toward the bustle of the main street.
Blake kept his eyes glued to his phone and stepped back to give them room to pass. As the tallest of the youths drew level with him, he jabbed out an elbow, knocking the phone out of Blake’s hands. It hit the pavement with a crunch, a crack appearing across the screen.
“Sorry, mate,” the youth said. “Me arm slipped.” His friends high-fived each other, cackling like maniacs.
Blake said nothing. He dropped onto one knee and picked up the phone. They don’t know how lucky they are, he thought. He waited until the youths reached the main street before lifting the gate latch and stepping in.
The darkness was denser in the yard. He gave his eyes a few moments to adjust before examining the door. It was old and slightly too small for its frame. Perfect. Through the glass panel in the top half, he could see the narrow stairway leading to Ince’s apartment. Blake considered his choices. He could find a small rock or large stone, take off his coat, roll it up, and use it to muffle the sound of breaking glass. Simple, fast, and effective, but Fenton had stressed that it would be a mistake to give Ince any reason to suspect they were onto him. Blake crouched to examine the lock. A basic model and covered in rust. Basic and rusty were good.
He opened his wallet and took out a bank card. He’d been shown this method of opening a locked door by a burglar turned security adviser. The feature he’d written about how this repeat offender was a perfect example of a leopard changing his spots had sold well. Unfortunately, the change of career was temporary.
Blake pushed the plastic card into the gap above the lock and the doorjamb and slid it down. He felt the plastic slip in front of the bolt, twisted the handle, and pushed. The bank card buckled, and the bolt stayed in place. Blake swore. One more attempt, then I look for a rock, he told himself. He put the card in place again, felt the bolt give, twisted the handle harder, and he was in.
He closed the door behind him and put the damaged bank card in his pocket, making a mental note to order a replacement. His heart thudded. Fear or excitement? he wondered. Probably a bit of both.
At the top of the stairs, he found himself in a small, square living area. A gray brick archway led to a tiny kitchen. On the other side of the room were two brown wooden doors. Blake assumed they were a bedroom and bathroom. He reached for the light switch but changed his mind.
The gloom couldn’t hide the fact that the inside of the apartment matched its exterior. The place was a dump. Clothes and newspapers lay scattered across the two-seater sofa. Four coffee-stained mugs stood in a line on the carpet next to a laptop. Blake smiled to himself. The apartment looked as if it had already been ransacked. Good news. It meant that he could have a thorough search without worrying about tidying up afterward. Unwashed plates and cutlery filled the kitchen sink. The yellow rubber gloves tucked behind the taps looked as if they’d never been used. Blake slipped them on. Time to get to work.
He opened the two cupboards mounted on the wall opposite the sink. One was full of cans of soup, baked beans, and tinned peaches, the other empty. The fridge contained an empty pizza box, three cans of cheap beer, and an unopened pack of mini pork pies.
Blake guessed Ince didn’t have many friends around for dinner. He pulled the fridge away from the wall. Nothing there except mold and dead insects.
Next stop, the bedroom. Behind the door, a pile of washed and unwashed clothes had been dumped on the floor. Blake looked under the mattress and examined the uncarpeted floor for a loose board. Beneath the bed, he found a digital radio and a shoebox full of DVDs, mainly crime movies. His initial excitement had been replaced by frustration. He’d found no evidence that Ince was guilty of anything—except being a slob.
Against the wall, opposite the foot of the bed, stood a single pine wardrobe. Blake opened it. It was empty. Empty except for the newspaper cuttings and photographs covering the inside of the door. Blake took a sharp breath. The cuttings were all stories about the I, Killer murders and the subsequent social media frenzy. Some of the headlines had been circled with a red marker.
Above the cuttings, arranged in a line, were headshots of Lauren Bishop, Edward Deere, and Marta Blagar. Beneath the victims, Ince had stuck full-length photographs of Belinda Vale on the steps leading to her Holborn consulting rooms and Blake apparently leaving the same building. Between the photographs, a large red question mark had been scribbled on the door.
Blake stared at the images and cuttings for a while before closing the door. He moved to leave the room but changed his mind. Pulling the wardrobe door open, he tore off the photograph Ince had taken of him and slipped it into his pocket.
Returning to the living area, he nudged a couple of newspapers to one side and sat on the sofa with the laptop balanced on his knees. The photographs and cuttings were damning, but they needed more to nail Ince for the murders. He pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. The battery was dead. He scanned the room but couldn’t see anything that resembled a charger.
Blake slid the laptop onto the sofa, stood up, and went to the window overlooking the main road. He parted the curtains a fraction in the hope that the streetlights would illuminate the room and caught sight of something that sent a chill through his bones: Ince walking back to the apartment. He ducked away from the window and stood in the center of the room, every muscle momentarily paralyzed by panic. The sound of his heart hammering against his ribs snapped him out of it. Picking up the laptop, he put it on the floor where he’d found it and ran to the kitchen. Except for the missing rubber gloves, it looked undisturbed.
He estimated he had about a minute before Ince arrived. He ran back into the bedroom and pressed his face against the windowpane. A sheer drop. No drainpipe to cling to. No way to clamber onto the roof. He heard the rattle of a key turning a lock. A single bead of sweat trickled down the left side of his face. He needed a weapon. Something heavy he could use to knock Ince out. Burglaries and violent crime were pre
tty common in Dagenham.
Blake left the bedroom and ducked into the bathroom, hoping to find a window that offered an escape route. There was no window, just a toilet, a grimy bathtub, and a sink. He heard footsteps on the stairs and shut the bathroom door. I’ve really screwed up this time, he told himself. He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes resting on what looked like an attic hatch.
No time to think. Blake clambered onto the edge of the bathtub, stepped onto the sink, pushed up on the hatch, and hauled himself into the attic. He quickly slid the panel back into place and rolled on top of it.
He could hear himself panting like a marathon runner. He tried to hold his breath, but after a second or two, he gasped for air. The sound of footsteps grew closer. People like to talk about two kinds of luck—good luck and bad luck. Blake didn’t believe in either of them, but lying facedown in a policeman’s attic, he was willing to accept some of the good stuff if it came along.
Fifty-Three
Blake breathed in slowly, the air heavy with the sweet, sickly smell of decay. He let his vision adapt to the blackness before lifting his head to look around.
Thick cobwebs hung from the rafters like strips of dirty lace, and a small water tank stood flush against a flimsy-looking wall separating Ince’s roof space from the neighboring apartment’s attic. Blake shifted his weight to one side to relieve the pressure on his chest. His torso was spread across the access panel, his legs splayed slightly apart and resting on wooden joists. He strained his neck to keep his face a few inches above a thick clump of insulation.
He froze at the sound of the bathroom door opening and choked back a sudden urge to cough. The stiffening muscles in his legs and lower back cried out for relief, and he willed himself to keep still. Blake held his breath and listened. After a few seconds, he heard a trickling and splashing. The sound of a tap running was followed by the bang of a door slamming shut.
Blake released the air from his lungs as slowly and quietly as he could. He put his hands on either side of the hatch, pushed himself up onto his knees, and stretched his back. He thought he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs, but he was reluctant to believe it. Maybe there was such a thing as good luck after all.
After five minutes, he stood up, crouching to avoid being draped in cobwebs. It occurred to Blake that the attic would be a pretty good hiding place. Positioning his feet carefully on the joists, he pulled up the insulation, one strip at a time. It wasn’t until he lifted the final strip that he found something. The corpse of a mouse, its skull crushed in a trap baited with a bit of chocolate biscuit. Blake edged toward the water tank. He stuck his hand in the narrow gap between the tank and the party wall, half expecting a mousetrap to snap his fingers. Nothing there. He could see the plasterboard wall had a long crack running from the joists to the roof.
Stepping back to the hatch, he squatted and slid the panel slowly to one side. He’d found nothing to incriminate Ince but had managed to avoid what at one point looked like almost certain discovery. Still, it’d be a good idea to keep this little escapade to myself, he thought. What Fenton doesn’t know won’t hurt him.
He gripped the edge of the hatch, lowered himself slowly, and pulled the panel back to allow it to fall into place as he dropped to the floor. He flexed his knees on touchdown to keep the noise to a minimum, stood up, arched his back, and stretched.
In the short moment between dropping and landing, he’d had one single thought in his head. Get out of the apartment as quickly as possible. But something held him back. He had a strange feeling he’d seen something important. Something that had gone astray on the journey from eyes to brain.
Blake replayed his search of the attic but drew a blank. Dropping back down into his landing position, he took a look around, his eyes level with the rim of the bathtub. The toilet needed cleaning badly, inside and out. The waste pipe under the sink had sprung a slow leak where it curved back to the wall. The wicker bin in the corner was full of scrunched-up tissues and toilet paper tubes, the vinyl flooring at the tap end of the bathtub badly scratched.
Blake prodded the plastic panel that formed the side of the bathtub with his fingers. It flexed. Kneeling down, he pushed the top of the panel with his right hand, worked a finger into the gap that appeared at the bottom, and yanked hard. There was a screech as the edge scored the flooring. Blake pulled again, and the panel slid out. Tucked between the bottom of the bathtub and the floorboards, wedged beneath the drainpipe, lay a cell phone. Behind it, pushed closer to the wall, something more sinister glinted in the darkness. He fought back an inexplicable urge to reach in and grab it. Instead, he pushed the bath panel back into place, making sure it didn’t split or buckle.
• • •
Outside, as Blake walked toward the main street, he pulled the crumpled photograph from his pocket, tore it into pieces, and dropped them into a litter bin. The rubber gloves followed. He took out his phone, dialed, and clamped it to his ear.
Fenton answered immediately. “It’s late,” he said.
“We’ve hit the jackpot.”
“What?”
“We’ve got him.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
Fifty-Four
The weak have a fascination with the strong. The powerless have a fascination with the powerful. My followers are demanding more. They hunger to learn, to gorge on my infamy.
What would the delectable Belinda Vale make of the real story, I wonder? She has no idea. She got the childhood trauma thing right. Good guess. The four-year-old me walked into the bedroom and found the bedsheets dripping blood. I found out later that the public gallery was packed at Mother’s trial. Female killers are a rare breed. The court ordered psychiatric reports, but whether Mother was sane, it didn’t matter in the end. They sent me some of her belongings, including family photographs, jewelry, and a leather-bound prayer book. I don’t remember ever seeing her pray.
My foster parents put them in an old shoebox, a memory box they called it, and let me keep it under my bed. The next day, I flushed the contents of the box down the toilet. Everything except for a newspaper cutting I found tucked in the prayer book.
Giving Fenton another fright was a masterstroke. It amused me no end. The caliber of these senior police officers is depressingly poor. I enjoyed the trip to the cemetery. I hadn’t planned to send her back unharmed. A graveyard would have been a great place to leave a body. But the girl and I have something in common.
What feeds the public’s appetite for blood and gore? The answer came to me this morning in bed. The instant I opened my eyes, it hit me, like a shaft of sunlight slicing through the clouds.
They want to be me. They want to do the things I can do, but they know they are incapable. They admire my strength, my brains, my ability to plan, hunt, and take life as casually as snuffing out a candle.
Fifty-Five
“We’ve got the bastard,” Norman Tobin said, rubbing his hands together. “Caved in and started blubbing like a baby as soon as we pulled him.”
Belinda Vale raised a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn. She’d been fast asleep when she’d gotten the call and uncertain whether she was awake or dreaming when they told her about the arrest. She took a shower but skipped breakfast before leaving for Westminster. As the investigation’s psychological profiler, she would be needed to offer guidance on the best approach to take during the long hours of interviewing ahead.
The identity of the killer had been a shock. She’d spent the twenty-minute drive trying to reconcile her knowledge of the man with the crimes he’d committed. “Detective Constable Ince has admitted the murders?” she asked. “He says he’s the killer? I, Killer?”
Tobin stopped rubbing his hands and laid them flat on the desk. “He hasn’t actually said that, but he’s coughed to a lot of other stuff, crumbled like a soggy biscuit. He knows what we found in his apartment. The evidence
is damning, and he knows there’s nowhere for him to go. Detective Sergeant Daly has been leading the initial questioning, but she’s going to need suggestions from you about the best way to coax the important stuff out of him.”
“What exactly has he admitted?” Vale asked.
“Illegal use of the Yard’s computer database, accessing the private details of fellow officers and witnesses. It also seems that when off duty, he’s been carrying out private surveillance on various subjects. Following them around, sitting outside their homes, making detailed notes about their movements. He had photos of all three victims and had cut out newspaper articles about the murders.”
Vale had met Ince once, in the station canteen, and that encounter had been brief. As far as she could recall, he didn’t fit her profile of the killer. Her first impression had been that he was a small-minded not particularly imposing young man. Sometime down the line, she was going to have to put her hands up and admit she’d got it wrong.
“Who are these people he’s been watching?”
Tobin shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, in addition to the victims, he had a photograph of you pinned to his wardrobe door.”
“A picture of me?” Vale was wide-awake now.
Tobin nodded. “It seems he’s been watching you for a while. Our computer guys say it looks like he illegally dipped into your personnel file on two occasions and later accessed DCI Fenton’s details a couple of days before killing Marta Blagar.”
“Ince was stalking me?”
“He says it’s all innocent. That he just likes observing people. It gives him a thrill. He claims he’s tried to stop, but it’s an addiction.”
Vale nodded. A classic voyeur, she thought. In layman’s terms, Ince was a Peeping Tom. Although she knew of a few cases where voyeuristic behavior had escalated to violent assaults, it was unusual. On the other hand, the collage of photographs and newspaper cuttings matched the obsessive nature of organized serial killers.