Don't Look Now

by Max Manning

  Fenton and Blake found themselves looking at a copy of a standard British passport opened at the photo page.

  “That’s right. I remember now,” the manager said. “Peter Friel. That’s his name. He was a real sweetie.”

  Fenton and Blake weren’t listening. They were fully focused on the photo. The image was grainy and a few years old, but they were looking at a face they’d both seen before.

  Sixty-Six

  Am I mad or bad? Some would say both. Others would argue that if I’m mad, I can’t be bad, because I’m not in my right mind. If I don’t know the difference between right and wrong, I can’t be held responsible for my actions. Bullshit.

  I am not mad. I am not bad. I am dangerous.

  I’ve been playing a dangerous game. It’s been interesting, but it’s getting to that time when I have to complete my mission.

  The time is near for me to do what I did all those years ago. I need to shed my skin again and slide into the undergrowth.

  The problem is, so far, nothing has matched the joy of my first kill. The lovely Lauren still dominates my thoughts. I’ve tried so hard to re-create that feeling. Maybe it’s like first love syndrome. I wouldn’t know.

  I don’t like having to accept that I can’t do something. If I need to kill Lauren Bishop again, then I’ll find some way to do it. My brain is already working on it. I feel something stirring, deep inside.

  Sixty-Seven

  Discovering the identity of a serial killer is no mean feat. Blake wasn’t expecting a financial reward, to be hailed a hero, or even a pat on the back, but a thank-you would have been nice.

  Instead, he found himself sitting in the same police interview room where he’d been questioned twice about Lauren’s murder, under the watchful gaze of a red-haired female police constable.

  He’d spent the past two hours with Detective Sergeant Daly, detailing the events leading up to the moment he and Fenton found the photograph of Ray Partington. Throughout the interview, the detective ignored Blake’s questions about the press officer, then left without comment.

  Blake understood that the police wouldn’t be overjoyed that he’d beaten them at their own game. In the end, all that mattered was that Partington had been exposed, flushed out like a spider forced from the darkness of its den.

  The door opened, and Fenton walked in carrying a coffee in a paper cup. He was followed by a gray-haired woman wearing a uniform similar to the constable’s except for the crown and commander badges on the epaulettes.

  Fenton gave Blake a nod and handed him the coffee. “Thought you might need a drink,” he said.

  Blake took the coffee and placed it on the table. He said nothing. He was pissed off, and he wanted them to know it.

  The older officer sat down opposite Blake. She wore a rigid expression, her nose wrinkled as if she had a bad smell under it.

  “This is Assistant Commissioner Hall,” Fenton said. “She’s in command of the investigation.”

  Blake didn’t look impressed. That’s because he wasn’t. “I’ve been wondering when someone was going to thank me. Now I know why it’s taken so long. You’ve been waiting for an officer of suitable superiority to become available. How nice.”

  Fenton opened his mouth to speak again, but Hall twitched her thin lips and raised a hand to silence him. “I assure you, Mr. Blake, that I’m grateful that you have discovered the identity of the killer. However, I’m afraid to say that knowledge came to us a bit late. Partington must have known you were getting close. He’s vanished. Gone to ground. So you see why we’ve been too busy to congratulate you on your amateur detective work.”

  Blake glanced up at Fenton. “He’s disappeared?”

  The detective nodded. “He’s been off work sick for a couple of days. An armed response unit was sent to his apartment in Shoreditch to bring him in, but there was no sign of him. The place was spotless. Sparsely furnished. You wouldn’t think anyone’s been living there. The neighbors say Partington didn’t interact much, but those he did speak to say he told them he was a police officer. A detective.”

  Blake picked up his coffee and sipped. It was weak and tepid. He made a disgusted face and took another sip. “What happens now?” he asked. “Yeah, he’s bolted, but he can’t hide forever. We know who he is. What he looks like.”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” Hall said. “In the next hour or so, the newspapers and television stations will have a photograph of him. The whole country will know his face. We’ve also put airports, ferry terminals, and the Channel Tunnel on alert. Of course, if you’d come to us sooner, we’d have him behind bars now.”

  Blake suppressed an urge to hurl his half-full cup of coffee at the wall. Not because of what Hall had said, but because she had a point. Instead, he directed his anger at Fenton. “What have you been doing while I was being interrogated as if I’m some sort of suspect?”

  Fenton didn’t react. He simply stared at Blake as if he were an errant child throwing a tantrum.

  “Like you, DCI Fenton has been questioned thoroughly,” Hall said. “Your statements have been compared, and they appear to match. He has a lot more to lose than you. Clearly, you broke the law entering Ince’s home, but you’re unlikely to be charged. DCI Fenton’s role in your unofficial investigation will certainly lead to serious disciplinary proceedings. He’s still advising me at the moment, but once we have Partington, he’ll have to face up to what he’s done.”

  Blake didn’t like her use of the phrase unlikely to be charged. But he knew it was probably not a good idea to argue the point.

  He downed the rest of his coffee and tried to refocus his thoughts on the hunt for Partington. “Are you telling me that you’re pinning everything on Partington’s photograph and a public appeal? That’s all you’ve got?”

  Fenton looked across at Hall. She gave him a go-ahead nod.

  “There is something else we’re working on,” he said. “A few hours ago, Partington posted online again. Another fake Twitter account.”

  Blake tensed in his seat. “He’s killed again?”

  “No. This is different from the others.” Fenton hesitated as he considered the best way to break the news. “It’s about Lauren.”

  Blake stood up, felt his head spin, and sat down again. “Can I see it?”

  Fenton turned and took a sheet of paper from the uniform. He glanced at it then placed it on the table.

  Partington had uploaded the headshot of Lauren the police had issued to the press at the start of the investigation. Blake looked down at the wide smile and blue eyes, and his throat tightened.

  The tweet read: Time to bring her back to life. Time to kill again. #IKiller

  Blake looked up at Fenton and frowned. “What the hell is this?”

  “We don’t know yet. We’re trying to work it out. We’ve got psychologists analyzing his background. Hopefully, they’ll come up with something. It seems he spent most of his childhood in foster care. His real dad, Peter Friel, was stabbed to death by his mother.”

  “My heart bleeds for him.”

  Fenton shrugged and carried on. “It seems he tried to join the Met four years ago but failed the psychological evaluation.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Blake screwed up the printout of the tweet and hurled it at the wall. “Is there any chance your experts can come up with a likely target?”

  Fenton hesitated for a moment and swapped glances with Hall. The assistant commissioner pursed her lips. “We were hoping that’s where you might be able to help, Mr. Blake,” she said. “DCI Fenton thinks you have a special talent for getting inside Partington’s mind. He’s persuaded me to allow you to have access to all our reports.”

  Blake wanted to take what he’d just heard as a compliment but wasn’t sure that’s how it was meant. “Are you suggesting I think like a psychopath?”

  “DCI
Fenton believes you can. It’s not something to be ashamed of. I wish more of my detectives possessed that ability. After all, you did work out how Partington framed Ince.”

  Blake turned to Fenton and gave him a long, hard stare. “Thanks a lot,” he said.

  Sixty-Eight

  Leah Bishop stood beside her sister’s grave, bowed her head, and wondered why she’d even bothered to make the journey. Lauren wasn’t there. Wherever she was, she wasn’t in the wooden box buried in front of the white marble headstone. That contained only decaying flesh and bone.

  She had wanted to speak to Lauren, to tell her she was sorry for not being the sister she should have been. They’d been close as little girls, but adolescence brought on a hormone-fueled sibling rivalry.

  Leah turned away from the memory and headed back toward the parking lot. A thick blanket of cloud draped over the city, the air still and moist. Rain was on the way, but around the cemetery, Leah could still see several people watering pots of flowers they’d placed around their loved ones’ graves.

  Approaching the entrance to the parking lot, she noticed a man standing in the middle of a row of gravestones about one hundred yards to her left. He wasn’t tending a grave or reading a headstone. He was looking directly at her. She stopped and returned his gaze. He was tall, with fair hair cropped close to his scalp, and despite the grayness of the day, his eyes were hidden behind a pair of wraparound sunglasses.

  Leah was the first to crack. She turned away and continued walking to her car. More than anything, the man’s stillness had disturbed her. It was only when she reached her car and slid behind the steering wheel that she realized she’d been holding her breath. She emptied her lungs with a loud sigh and looked through the passenger window. The man was still there. Still motionless. His hands tucked into the pockets of his black overcoat.

  She started the engine and drove off. The traffic was slow moving, but she was glad to be on her way. Driving north along the perimeter of the green expanse of Wanstead Flats, she found herself thinking about Blake, something she’d been doing more and more recently. He was good looking in a rough-around-the-edges kind of way. They had chemistry. That was undeniable. But chemistry wasn’t everything. Lauren had seen the good in him. She’d wanted to save him. When it had become clear he didn’t want to save himself, she gave up.

  Leah made a mental note that she needed to meet Blake and Fenton soon, to bring a formal end to their arrangement. They’d done what she’d asked them to do. Unmasked the killer. Now it was up to the police to hunt Ray Partington down.

  The farther west Leah drove, the more congested the traffic became. As she reached the outskirts of Stratford, the clouds opened and dumped their rain. Big, fat raindrops pummeled the windshield. Leah switched on the wipers, but for a split second, she was driving blind. The downpour slowed the traffic to a crawl.

  An image of Partington’s face slid into her mind, and she shivered. It was hard to believe that the man who’d treated her so sensitively at the press conference had killed Lauren and the others.

  Murderous hands had helped her to her feet. She’d been comforted by a deceiving smile. A wave of repulsion swept through her, and tears of anger coursed down her cheeks.

  Sixty-Nine

  Running in the rain isn’t a problem, as long as you run fast enough to generate the energy needed to keep warm. Slow down or stop when you’re soaked, and you’re in trouble, as evaporating water droplets steal the heat from your skin.

  The downpour had lasted no more than a few minutes, but its ferocity left Blake drenched to the bone. He slowed down as he approached Grove Road and crossed into the western section of Victoria Park. The route around the park’s perimeter was usually a big draw for runners, but that afternoon, Blake had it to himself. Everybody else had been warned off by the dark clouds shrouding the east of the city.

  It wasn’t that he needed to run. He needed to think. He’d spent the morning reading the stuff Partington had posted after killing Vale, and his mind was churning with questions.

  Delving into Partington’s darkness scared him. It made him wonder if he had the capacity for evil himself. Does evil fill the void in the absence of good? Blake shivered. He picked up his pace as he approached the north end of the boating lake. He was never going back to that place, he told himself. He was never going to leave a void again.

  Once he’d left the park, it took him ten minutes to run home. He spent another ten minutes in the shower, standing motionless as the hot water stung his skin. He dressed quickly, grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge, and sat down with his laptop at the kitchen table. Blake opened the file Fenton had sent him and started to read. Somewhere, there had to be a clue to Partington’s next move.

  After a few minutes, he stood up and walked to his bedroom, slid the wardrobe door open, and pulled out a cardboard box. It was full of reporter-style notebooks. Most of them had been used and were full of notes he’d made while researching assignments. He took one from the middle of the pile and flicked through it. The scrawl was a mixture of longhand and shorthand. Nobody else had ever been able to make sense of his notes. The memory made him smile.

  He rifled through the pile until he found a blank one, grabbed a ballpoint pen from the bottom of the box, and returned to his laptop. A copy of Partington’s last message was still on the screen. Blake flipped the notebook open. We were so close, and he sensed we were coming, Blake thought. He read the message again, this time aloud: “Time to bring her back to life. Time to kill again.” Plain crazy. But not to Partington.

  A knock at the door disrupted his train of thought. He considered ignoring it in the hope that whoever it was would go away, but the caller knocked again, louder and more urgently. On his way to the door, he checked his watch. It was early evening. He wasn’t expecting anyone and didn’t like surprise visits. The thought crossed his mind that a visit from Leah wouldn’t be an unpleasant surprise, but when he opened the door, Fenton stepped in without waiting for an invitation.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said.

  Blake led him into the kitchen without asking what the problem was. He opened the fridge, took out a beer, and offered it to his visitor.

  Fenton shook his head and waved a hand impatiently. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

  Blake put the bottle back and closed the fridge. “I heard you. I’m waiting for you to tell me what’s up.”

  “Someone’s sent me an email.”

  “Wow. You’re so popular. I’m jealous.”

  Fenton scowled. “It was from a generic address and said ‘Cubitt Town. The Dutton Hotel. Room 107. I, Killer.’”

  “And you believe it? You don’t think it’s some idiot winding you up?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  Blake sat at the kitchen table, nodding for Fenton to join him, but the detective stayed pacing around the room. Blake switched his laptop off and closed it.

  “Why would Partington hide in a hotel on the Isle of Dogs? Every police officer in the city, no, the country is looking for him. The Dutton Hotel is less than ten miles from his apartment.”

  Fenton shrugged. “It’s close to City Airport. There are daily flights to the continent.”

  “So let’s check it out. What’s the big problem?”

  Fenton stopped pacing and sat down opposite Blake. “The problem is I should call this in and let the Yard take care of it.”

  “Well. Do it then.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “I don’t want to call it in. I want to check it out myself. If Partington is there, I want him. I want him badly. My career’s shot anyway. I’m not coming back from this. I might as well go out in a blaze of glory.”

  Blake grinned. Fenton had fire in his belly after all. “Have you got your car?”

  Fenton nodded.

  �
�And what about your daughter?”

  “Sleeping over at a neighbor’s, but the uniforms know, and they’re guarding the house.”

  “What are we waiting for then?”

  • • •

  Darkness fell fast, each autumn day shorter than the last. Blake’s Mile End Road apartment was only five miles from the hotel, but the traffic was bumper to bumper. He looked out of the passenger window and watched the haphazard streets of East London slide slowly by.

  Fenton took his left hand off the steering wheel and switched on the radio. The lead item on BBC Radio 4’s eight o’clock news was an update on the I, Killer manhunt. It ended with Assistant Commissioner Patricia Hall insisting that Partington’s capture “was only a matter of time.” The second item was a story about Syrian refugees drowning off the coast of Turkey. Fenton turned the radio off.

  “Did you read the reports?” he asked.

  Blake nodded. “The man’s messed up. He’s not going to stop killing until he’s behind bars, and even then, he’ll be a danger to other prisoners unless he’s in solitary confinement.”

  “That passport he used to rent the apartment next to Ince’s was his father’s,” Fenton said. “He added his photo and doctored the birth date. By all accounts, he was a nightmare child but eventually managed to fool one foster couple. They adopted him. He took their name, changed his ways. They financed him through university to do guess what? A computer science degree.”

  Blake thought about what Fenton said. It had suited Partington to hide his evil, bury it deep for all those years, letting it multiply like a virus. He thinks he can do it again, but he’s not in control anymore.

  The traffic congestion eased as they turned left onto Commercial Road and Fenton accelerated. Blake stared at the headlights cutting through the darkness. They turned sharply onto Marsh Wall. They were ten minutes away from the hotel.