A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes)

by Michael Kerr

  His hand hurt. No, not his hand, just one finger. He got up and turned the light on. The flesh around the ring he wore was slightly swollen, and he surmised that the bone beneath was bruised. With growing dread, he went into the kitchen and took a pack of skinned chicken breasts out of the fridge. Ripped off the cellophane and punched the smooth, pink flesh with his fist, ignoring the pain it generated. And his worst fears were realised. There was a deep impression in the plump meat. He knew at once that each time he had struck a whore, he would have left his mark. What were the implications? The police had the means to enhance and identify the shape of the gold wolf’s head. He would not have left an impression, as he had done in the malleable chicken. It was not Plasticene he had struck, but resilient living flesh. And yet he knew that the embossed head would have broken capillaries and caused bruising. He twisted the ring off and tossed it aside as if it were a hot coal.

  Why had the police withheld any mention of this evidence? Sneaky, like snakes, and any poker player worth his salt, who would not show his hand. It was reasonable to assume that they would be trying to run down, interview and eliminate the clients of the dead whores. That should keep them busy for an indeterminable period. No need to panic. He may be overreacting, but better safe than sorry. It didn’t do to underestimate them. The fact was, he could not be tied to his victims. The ring had been an oversight on his part, but would not lead to his undoing; not now that he had realised the implications. He would hold fire for a while. Maybe abducting a replacement for Janice was the way to go. Having a new plaything in the loft was a lot safer than continually going out to hunt for fresh meat. Every so often, he could get rid of a used one and lift another. And there was still the outstanding matter of Villiers. He would have to give the safe collection of the money a great deal of thought.

  He picked up the ring and studied the lupine features. Strange how you could become attached to things. He was not material, had no ambition to own inanimate objects, and yet admired any good work of art, be it that which he produced, or as in this case, a finely sculpted trinket. But it would have to go. He had taken it as payment for a tattoo over three years ago, and knew for a fact that the previous owner had died in a motorbike accident, losing control of his machine on a wet road and melding with his bike and a brick wall at over ninety miles per hour.

  Everything was settled, then. He would find a new lodger. Ha! She would pay dearly for her bed and board. And he would make plans to relieve Villiers of the money. Time to grab a couple of hours’ sleep and have sweet dreams of a good time had and even better times to come. Through the suffering of childhood, he was now well able to appreciate the good things that life had on offer to those prepared to be brave and feed their innermost desires. He was fearful of nothing. His time was occupied with stimulating and rewarding pursuits.

  Matt stepped out of the Discovery to be met by Pete, who held a Styrofoam cup full of steaming coffee that he had purchased at a nearby petrol station shop.

  “The techies are sweeping the place, and the pathologist is on the way,” Pete said. “I took a look at the vic, and it is the same MO, boss. She was a redhead, and on the game. I talked to the old couple who live next door, and they say it was as busy as a bookmaker’s some days. The vic is one Pamela Clough. In her forties. The couple say that she was very pleasant, and that if the adjoining walls had been thicker they would not have had any reason to wish for a better neighbour. Seems her bed was up against the wall and moved a lot.”

  “Did they hear it banging last night?”

  “Yeah. And the old boy, Wilfred Green, states that the last bloke who went in never came out. Says he couldn’t sleep, so went downstairs for a cup of tea and sat at the window. The noise stopped, but no one left. He thought they must be asleep.”

  “Did he see a car outside?”

  “No, boss. But he thinks most of her clients’ park nearby and walk in. They don’t want their vehicles to be spotted outside the house.”

  “Any sighting of her last caller?”

  “Wilfred’s wife, Eunice, thinks it was a young man in a black car coat and baggy trousers. But it was dark and her eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

  Matt took the cup from Pete’s hand and sipped at the coffee. “That’s really crap,” he said, handing it back. “Dump it and let’s go in and see what we’ve got.”

  The woman was stretched like a human X on the bed, her wrists and ankles tied to the top and bottom of the metal bedstead that sported bronze finials atop each post.

  Matt and Pete stood in silence at the foot of the bed and studied the corpse of a woman who had been robbed of all dignity, hope and then life itself. That she had suffered prolonged and harrowing torment at her killer’s hands was blatantly obvious. Her body and face – and even the soles of her feet – were polka dotted with circular lesions that had without doubt been made by the red hot ends of cigarettes. An ashtray on the cabinet next to the bed was full of butts burned down to the filter tips, and specks of ash peppered the sheet and her grey-blue skin.

  Pete turned away. His mouth was bone dry, and he felt a coldness invade him. He had always been able to suppress compassion and view murder victims as little more than evidence. But it got harder, not easier. Nowadays, he found himself vulnerable and more affected by the aftermath of a human being’s painful and unjustified demise.

  Matt surveyed the scene, biting back the anger that was blossoming like black petals in his mind. The woman’s hands were clenched into fists, and dried blood spotted the pillows like red ink on blotting paper, having dripped from where her fingernails had dug into her palms. The eyes and face were covered by petechiae– the pinpoint haemorrhages that were common in victims who had expired as a result of asphyxia. And the body was naked, save for the stocking that was knotted at her throat, and a broad length of silver duct tape that covered her mouth.

  The jump-suits of the crime scene officers rustled as they collected up anything that could possibly identify the unknown subject. Hairs, fibres and the contents of the ashtray were bagged and labelled. The photographer had recorded the scene from every angle, and the processing of the cadaver and the room was ongoing.

  “Look at her right temple,” Lenny Newton – the officer in charge of the team – said to Matt.

  Matt walked around the bed and leant over to examine the side of the woman’s face. It was there; the faint but unmistakable mark of the killer. He was still wearing the wolf head ring. Matt nodded to Lenny.

  They waited until Nat Farley arrived.

  “This proves beyond all doubt that smoking can be harmful to your health,” Nat said with his usual stony expression and quirky pathologist’s dark humour, as he examined the multiple burns on the corpse.

  Matt and Pete said nothing, just kept out of the way and let Nat take temperature readings and make his on-scene notes.

  “She was strangled with the stocking, that I would think pinched the carotid arteries and cut off blood flow to the brain,” Nat said. “And this is novel. Take a look.”

  He had removed the tape from the mouth and was using forceps to withdraw something from it.

  The wet feathers were matted and dark yellow, and the small bird was twisted, its back arched and beak wide open.

  Nat slipped the dead canary into a zip lock bag and once more probed the open mouth, aided by a penlight torch. “There’s bird shit in there, Matt. It would appear that Tweety was still alive when the killer popped it into her mouth.”

  Pete went downstairs and found the empty cage with its door open.

  “Looks like it was the victim’s pet, boss,” he said to Matt, returning to stand at the bedroom door.

  Matt was satisfied that Pamela Clough had met her death in the same manner as Marsha Freeman and Kelly Lindon. He was ready to leave.

  “He’s a player, Pete,” Matt said. “He wants to impress us with what he does.”

  Pete grimaced. “He’s impressed me, boss. I’m shit-scared of the guy, and I’m not a pro
stitute with red hair. If I was, I’d quit the game, retrain to be something less risky, and have my hair dyed. Do you think the canary was significant?”

  “Maybe it was causing a racket, or he might have just thought it would be a fun thing to do; an added spur of the moment touch of madness”

  With the bindings to the wrists and ankles removed by a crime scene tech, Nat deftly turned the corpse over onto its stomach and parted the legs.

  “There is some tissue damage and blood around the anus,” he said as Matt made to leave.

  Matt walked back to the bedside and inspected the puckered orifice. “Is it from cigarette burns?”

  Nat shook his head. “No. I would say she has been sodomised.”

  “There’s an empty Durex packet floating in the loo,” Lenny – who had been listening to the conversation – called from the landing. “If we get a break and he flushed a tied-off sheath, it might have got snagged-up and be full of DNA-rich semen.”

  “And it could be miles away, floating down a main sewer amid a thousand others, racing shit, tampons and Christ knows what else to a filtration plant, the sea, or wherever the fuck it ends up,” Pete said.

  Lenny grinned. “Wow, a shithouse poet.”

  Pete hiked his shoulders. He was feeling as tense and as angry as Matt at the repugnant scene of another mutilated woman who had suffered so much at the hands of a fiend. A part of him was trying to comprehend how he would feel if it was Marci laying on the bed in that state. He couldn’t. And another part of his mind reneged against the tableau and dismissed it, but too late to stop him transposing Marci’s face onto that of Pamela Clough’s. No one was safe from these degenerates. They latched on to a chosen type of female who fitted their requirements, and kept killing until they were stopped. The body count would no doubt stack up, and without intervention could well reach double figures if whoever was doing it did not make a mistake that would lead them to him. The sense of impotency against the unknown subject knotted his stomach and soured his temper. Not too long ago, he had been able to distance himself from it all; just do the job and remain emotionally uninvolved. Not anymore. Must be getting soft to have actually begun to care about the fate of total strangers. Empathy he didn’t know he had an ounce of was kicking in to make him feel like he was suffering from food poisoning; sick to the stomach.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Matt said. “I want you to arrange for uniforms to go door-to-door. Someone might have driven past him or been out walking their dog and got a good look at his face.”

  And the world might be flat, and the moon made of cheese, Pete thought. He did not believe that the killer was stupid, and knew that Matt didn’t either. They were following procedure, hoping for a break that might not come in time to save more lives. The city was a fucking jungle, as dangerous to move through as any filled with wild and savage animals. Now that he had someone who he cared for more than he did for himself, his outlook had been modified. Hence his new-found feelings. What Matt must have gone through when Beth was twice placed in mortal danger, he could now fully appreciate. His cavalier attitude to life and death had disintegrated when comrades and friends had been murdered. And being gutshot and believing that he was going to die was an added element. When tragic circumstances were that personal, it was impossible not to reassess your outlook and be forever changed. The frangibility of life had in a way deepened his appreciation of it, and caused him to be fearful of all that could steal it away in the blink of an eye.

  It was mid afternoon when Matt arrived at his maisonette. He had looked through statements that the team had procured to date from Marsha Freeman’s clients. So far, all of them could account for at least one of the dates that the murders had been committed on. No one interviewed had fitted the bill. There were still a few who had to be identified from the videos, who were no doubt listed on the three missing pages of the address book, but he was still absolutely certain in his own mind that the killer had not previously known any of his victims.

  Too tired to even make fresh coffee, Matt stretched out on the settee and let his thoughts drift where they chose, and soon floated on the cusp of sleep, to eventually sink into a soporific, altered state.

  The dream was vivid and nostalgic. He was a young boy in short trousers, holding his mother’s hand as they walked from sunshine into the cool and shadowy depths of Johnson’s corner shop, just a five minute walk from his childhood home. He could smell coffee and fruit and spices, and hear the whirring circular blade of the bacon slicer as it cut rashers to a predetermined thickness. This oasis in a world being overrun by supermarkets in the seventies was one of the last bastions of a way of life that was being obliterated to make way for a more concentrated consumerism. The small general store was becoming an incongruity; a displaced entity that belonged in the forties, fifties and sixties; where a regular customer could put groceries ‘on the slate’, and purchase cigarettes loose. It was a meeting place where locals gathered to pass the time of day and swap gossip; before the advent of lottery machines and the facilities enabling you to top-up your mobile phone or have passport photographs taken in a curtained-off booth.

  ‘Would you like some liquorice?’ Nancy Barnes asked her son, pointing to the tall glass jar full of black sticks on a crowded shelf.

  Even as Matt made to answer, the scene changed to one where he was laying on the floor of a bedroom at a bungalow in Finchley, with two bullets in him. He felt an awful, unnatural cold move through him like tendrils of freezing fog. Death was ready, poised to take him if the chance presented itself.

  He woke, still dog-tired and in no way refreshed. The dreams quickly evaporated, and yet the trace of them left him melancholy in mind and physically coated in already cooling perspiration.

  A hot shower and change of clothes made him feel a little better. He was still in reflective mode, but more accepting of what had gone before and brought him to this point in his life. He knew that, as with everyone, he was the sum of all that had gone before: no more, no less.

  He phoned Beth at Northfield and told her what they had found at the house in Wandsworth, so that she would have more information to work with. Arranged to see her that evening at his place, then sat and drank coffee before returning to the Yard. His determination to catch the serial killer was now diamond hard. He resented the fact that it was beginning to feel personal. But maybe that was what made him so effective. He could admit to himself that each case became a cause to champion.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was the morning of April the first, all fools day, when he made contact with Nigel Villiers again.

  Nigel was at his club in the Strand, contemplating the crossword in The Times and toying with a glass of malt whisky, trying to take his time over the liquor, not the crossword. He felt like a man strapped to a guillotine, waiting, breath held to hear the whoosh of the heavy blade that would rush down to behead him. Every passing day undermined his ability to function normally.

  “I was asked to give you this, sir,” Parkinson said, proffering a tray with a mobile phone on it.

  “By whom?” Nigel asked the elderly attendant.

  “A cabby, sir. He said you had left it on the seat.”

  He was about to wave it away, knowing that it was not his property, but a sudden realisation dawned. The blackmailer was making his move.

  “Thank you, Parkinson,” he said, taking the phone, surprised that his hand did not shake as he lifted it from the Irish linen cloth that protected the silver tray. “Perhaps I’ll have another Glenmorangie. Make it a large one, would you?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  Nigel just stared at the small instrument, not surprised when after a minute it rang. He accepted the call and held the phone to his ear.

  “Hi, Nige. Thought I’d forgotten about you? Or maybe that I’d had a fatal accident in answer to your dreams?”

  “No. I’m not that lucky.”

  “Well, the time has arrived to part with your ill-gotten money. But I have a bad
feeling about it. You will almost certainly be wired, and there might even be a tracker fitted to your car. And don’t tell me that you are not assisting the filth in their efforts to capture me. I won’t believe you.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to know that the implications of trying to dupe me would be catastrophic. Remember that it will not just be your reputation that is ruined if this goes wrong. I don’t bear grudges, Nige. I settle any outstanding grievances at the earliest possible opportunity. Don’t put a few quid before all that you have to lose. It’s only money, and I’m sure that you can afford it without having to change your lifestyle.”

  “I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “I hope you mean that, for your sake. Where is the cash?”

  “With me. I don’t let it out of my sight.”

  “Good. Now reach inside your shirt and rip off the wire if you have one.”

  Nigel carefully undid two shirt buttons, slipped his hand inside and tore the small receiver free.

  “I’ve done it,” he said.

  “Smart move. What I want you to do now is leave the club by the back door, after first calling in the toilet and dumping the monitoring equipment and your other mobile phone and the holdall into a waste bin. Put the money in your pockets, then make your way up Bedford Street, turn right on Henrietta Street and head for The Piazza. If you are followed, then it’s goodnight Vienna.”