by David Wilson
“It’s just one man,” he replied. This was not what Wooldridge had been led to believe at all.
The man thrust the knife in a swift practised arc into the right side of Wooldridge’s chest, killing him instantly as the knife penetrated his heart but for good measure he twisted the blade viciously a couple of times before he removed it. The bleeding was massive as he knew it would be but there were contingencies. He hated seeing the likes of this old man involuntarily convulsing, his whole body in spasm; it was ugly. There was never a dignified way to die in his experience. Life is only ever on loan, and then it’s taken back, and we kick and we scream.
After everything had calmed down, he prized open Wooldridge’s mouth and drew out his tongue as far as it would extend. The blade cut through the muscle as easily as knifing through a tender steak. He dropped the severed tongue into a transparent evidence bag. “All talk,” he’d overheard his client say, in an unguarded moment. Silence is so… accurate.
Chapter Eighteen
Kate began to relax a little after her third glass of Chardonnay. Knight wasn’t unattractive, but she was careful in her assessment of men. She’d made a few wrong choices. She could theorize and abstract to her heart’s content in her professional life, the structure of analysis was comforting, but when she drew closer the lines became blurred. There was something not quite at ease about Knight. He was driving, and so had stuck with his first glass of wine. He seemed eager to please and had opened up a bit about himself. Kate discovered that despite “DI” being universally known in the force as “divorce impending”, Knight had never been married. He was thirty-five and single, although a long-term relationship had ended badly, and Kate sensed that he was still pretty hurt by that. She had sighed inwardly, men and their broken hearts were such yawning clichés, but his vulnerability touched her. At first he didn’t open up about the relationship, other than that they had lived together for seven years, and he couldn’t even bring himself to say her name, although he did reveal that his ex-girlfriend had been slightly older, and career minded. Kate had asked what he meant by this, and Knight had mumbled something about him, but not her, wanting children.
“Isn’t that what we’re conditioned to want – you know, the woman, biological clock, social pressure, family pressure? What about a woman’s right to choose?” she said.
“Maybe,” said Knight, “but I’ve always wanted kids. Three of them – one of each!”
They both laughed. Someone dropped a glass, the shatter was piercing, and a few people in the bar cheered. The barman clapped to the crowd like Rooney after scoring a penalty and then he took a long bow.
“So what’s she doing now? This ex.”
“She’s a lawyer.”
“Raking it in?”
“Correct.”
“Married? Children?”
“Neither.”
“Happy?”
“I doubt it.”
Kate smiled. “So what is it about having children that guarantees happiness, would you say?”
Kate was shocked that she thought she saw Knight well up, his eyes suddenly glistening as if a shaft of light had struck them. He turned away. When he turned back she peered closely at him, but he seemed to have recovered quickly.
“They will always leave you,” she said. “Eventually.”
“Everyone I know. Goes away in the end,” said Knight.
“The old familiar sting,” said Kate. “Hurt.”
“Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails from The Downward Spiral album,” said Knight. “Covered by Johnny Cash just before he died.”
Kate knew all that but she let him take the credit.
“Do you think you can ever be happy?” she asked.
Knight looked at his watch and then rummaged in his jacket for his wallet. He took out a twenty and offered it to her.
“All I’ve got, I’m afraid, but pretty good value for ten minutes of expert psychotherapy.” He smiled but Kate sensed an edge. Breaking down defences could be painful, and his were unusually well guarded.
“I don’t come cheap,” she said.
“I don’t expect a discount.”
“I don’t give them.”
Knight felt a strange mixture of unease and appreciation. She was watching him, weighing him up, he’d never met a woman who did that to him before.
“The prisoners at Greenbank,” he said. “They’re responsible for brutality beyond the imagination, off-the-scale stuff. Why are you people giving them a second chance?”
“You’ve answered your own question. We’re trying to rebuild, not tear down.”
“Dead children don’t get a second chance,” said Knight.
Kate took another mouthful of Chardonnay, and as Knight refilled her glass she asked him why he was so hostile towards psychotherapy and offender profiling.
Knight looked around the room, checking to see if anyone was eavesdropping. The barman knew he was police, Knight had interviewed him about the Danny murder. The barman hadn’t heard a thing, most likely an out-of-towner he suggested, couldn’t be any of the regulars. Stonewalled.
“It goes back a bit,” said Knight.
Kate listened as Knight described a murder in Manchester. “A lady, Mrs Hardy, a widow in her seventies, was found by her next-door neighbour who had a key to the house, and had come in to check why she hadn’t been seen for a while. Mrs Hardy was in the back bedroom, not her own, she had been moved there by the killer, and the curtains were drawn.”
Kate noted that he could still recall precise details, given that this was a while back. He continued to tell the story.
“As you walk up the stairs there’s a small landing on the left, which you turn into, and then immediately face the bedroom where we found Mrs Hardy. The door was open, the neighbour said that it had been open when he had gone in, and Mrs Hardy was on the bed. It was like a film set. She was naked, and she had her hands tied behind her back. Her feet were tied too with what turned out to be her own underpants. The killer had forced a towel into her mouth, partly as a gag, but we discovered it was wet, she had been tortured by the killer slowly dripping water into her mouth and lungs. Then there were the knives.”
“Oh God, here we go,” said Kate.
“The killer had placed a knife into each of her eyes. He hadn’t stabbed her eyes, there was little or no blood, but he’d pushed them beneath the sockets so that as you entered the room all you saw was this poor old dear trussed up like a turkey, with two knives popping out of her head.”
“Nice,” said Kate, putting her hand to her mouth. She’d never quite lost her squeamishness about forensic detail.
“We used two profilers in the end. The best that money could buy, with the biggest reputations in the country.”
Kate knew immediately to whom he was referring.
“The first told us we were dealing with someone who was mentally ill, that he had been disorganized – he didn’t have rope to tie Mrs Hardy with – and that he would live locally. He would be between the ages of twenty-one and fifty, he would be white and unskilled.”
“I bet that narrowed things down for you,” said Kate.
“He was as helpful as a broken zip, and we spent every waking day doing door-to-door enquiries, but no one had seen anything suspicious.”
“And the second profile?”
“ Apart from also concluding that this man was mentally ill and in the same age group, he gave us almost the exact opposite to the first. That he had been very organized. He had left no clues you see. No fingerprints, no semen. And she hadn’t been abused. He was probably in the same age group as that identified by the first profiler. The profiler got caught up in the whole eye symbolism thing.”
“That old ‘windows to the soul’ routine?” said Kate.
“You don’t seem to have much respect for your profession,” suggested Knight.
“It’s hardly a profession, and remember I’m a criminal psychologist, not a profiler.” She sat up straight and pushed her hair
back behind her ears. She noticed a middle-aged man sitting at the bar, his pint glass had been personalized with the Manchester United crest. She had seen him before, he was always on his own. He was staring at her. Kate crossed her legs.
“Look,” she continued. “There are no ethical standards for profilers, no formal training. Anyone can call themselves a profiler, and off they go. The Silence of the Lambs and Cracker have done us a great disservice. Read a couple of books, watch a few movies and everybody thinks they can do it. Often the sheer force of their personality – their ego – can get them access to murder scenes that they should never be allowed anywhere near. Sometimes the profile is almost indivisible from the personality of the profiler, which is why your two were such poles apart. But go on. Tell me how your story ends.”
“Why don’t you take it from here?” said Knight.
Kate watched the Manchester United fan, his face was doughy and full like an overstuffed sandwich, but his eyes were suggesting that enough was never enough. Kate glared at him. He turned away.
“You game?” asked Knight.
She ignored his comment. “You said it was like a film set. In other words it was staged. This hadn’t started out as a murder, but as something else. A burglary?”
Knighted nodded.
“This was a distraction theft of an old lady that went wrong,” said Kate. “He knocks on the door and perhaps she invites him in – I’m guessing that there were no signs of forced entry, and suddenly an Aladdin’s cave is opened up. He moves her upstairs probably to prevent them from being observed from the road, and that’s why of course the curtains were drawn. The gag. Was he torturing her to get some details out of her? What did he want – her credit card number? She wouldn’t give it, or she couldn’t remember it, and everything started to get out of hand.”
Knight looked around, hoping no one was too close to hear what Kate was saying.
“He was supposed to be in charge, to be in control,” she continued, “but he couldn’t even get her card number. The murderer didn’t know how to cope with that, and then one thing led to another. Soon she was dead. What was he going to do now? What better way of hiding his crime – his petty, dirty little theft of a dear old lady that went wrong, than by pretending that it had been something much grander, something much more sinister, by someone far more scary. Everyone will think this had been done by a monster, and how he’d smile at his secret when he read about Mrs Hardy in the news.” She shook her head.
“Spot on. You got almost everything right. That is truly impressive,” said Knight.
“Thanks,” she said. “You sound like Noel Edmonds on Deal or No Deal.”
“He has better facial hair,” he said.
“But that’s not all to the case is it?” asked Kate. “There’s something else, and you haven’t told me how he was caught, although it clearly wasn’t from the profile.”
“He tried to claim the reward that the family had put up, and provided too much information about how Mrs Hardy had been found – information that we hadn’t released to the media. It took a few days, but eventually he coughed.”
“And the knives?” queried Kate.
“His exact words were, ‘I did that to throw the profiler off the track’.”
“Ok,” she said. “I get why you have no faith in profiling. This killer made you realize that in the right circumstances murderers could change their behaviour, the way that they kill, which renders the profile useless. They could stage the crime scene so that the profiler would be thrown off track. But I have been refining how we profile, trying to make it more scientific, and you have to remember that this is still a very young discipline. You also have to accept that Mrs Hardy’s killer wasn’t a serial killer. She was the first person he’d killed, and he killed almost by accident.”
“So do serial killers change their modus operandi?” asked Knight.
“Bundy claimed that he used to, but Bundy was always claiming something or other. He couldn’t be trusted. That’s why my work at Greenbank is so important. This is the only place that I know where you can get close to these killers and observe them on a day-to-day basis. I can talk to them over time, and get to know them well. Ok sometimes they lie, but it is difficult to lie all the time. You see them eat, argue, interact. Greenbank is like a lab filled with killers. And, let me tell you this; if I had profiled Mrs. Hardy’s killer I would have come up with something better than you were given.”
“Let’s start with Danny’s killer then,” said Knight. He sensed that they were being observed. He looked over to the barman. He was leaning with his elbows on the bar watching them. Knight was sure he was nodding, some indefinable affirmation to a question he was asking himself, but perhaps it was the minute regular drumbeat of his heart causing his head to bob ever so slightly. Then the barman winked at him and said a few words to the United fan who stifled a noise that could have been a laugh.
“Random assault on a weaker member of the community by a man whose rage got the better of him? We’re assuming it’s a male who attacked him?” said Kate, lowering her voice.
“The blows were delivered with some considerable force,” said Knight. “The injuries sustained suggest the attacker knew how to inflict pain. Harm yes, pre-meditated murder? I don’t know; it seemed spontaneous, outside the pub here, there’s blood on the walls, then the poor guy legs it as far away as he can run. Doesn’t suggest the attacker had any kind of strategy.”
“So we have uncontrolled anger, what triggered it I wonder?” said Kate. “An argument here in the pub? You’ve questioned the barman?”
“He’s being uncooperative, and the others we’ve talked to who were in the pub that night are the same. Fallible thing memory, breaks down when it’s most convenient. Forgetfulness: the safest haven for a bad conscience.”
“Do you think this is the beginning of a group thing?” suggested Kate. She looked around the bar, “A form of revenge by pissed members of the community who’ve had enough of austerity and cutbacks, plunging wages, job insecurity but are then witnessing Greenbank cossetting violent criminals? Danny was a former inmate of Greenbank. You stay clean you lose, you murder you get art therapy? But why now?”
“Speculation Kate, but then you’re part of the problem if you look at it that way. I hope your windows are barred.”
“Thanks, for nothing. I’ll put you out the front of my house with a scary big stick like a giant garden gnome. I’ll throw in breakfast.”
“Me, I’m just a lawnmower…”
“Oh please, Genesis, no one listens to that anymore. Maybe you’ll be better off dressed as a dinosaur.”
Knight smiled. “So, Bobby Lomas escapes, then Danny is murdered, Ian Clark is murdered, McCabe commits suicide. McCabe was obsessed with the Manson murders. Connections? Someone’s pulling strings here? As you say maybe collective retribution, a ringleader identifies targets and then encourages his followers to take them out? Like Charles Manson did with the Tate-LaBianca spree killings. You know Lomas probably better than he knows himself, do you think he’s at the centre of all this?”
Kate thought hard. She felt the walls of the pub closing in on her, her small space contracting. She realized the pub had gone silent, everyone else had left. She noticed a baseball bat leaning against the wall at far end of the bar, near the escape hatch.
“It’s possible,” she said eventually. “He has some crazy ideas and he can articulate them with blinding persuasiveness. But I know of no one that Bobby had a problem with in Greenbank. I didn’t think it was still in him, the hatred; that’s a lot of hatred. Unless there was a trigger. It comes down to that.” She nodded towards the bar.
“I think we should go,” she said.
Chapter Nineteen
Knight led the way out of The White Hart, Kate followed, glancing behind her. At the front of the pub, patches of yellow sand covered the blood spillage of Danny’s assault. Someone had placed a wreath of bright flowers against the wall and a message in black f
elt tip was pinned to it: The Guilty Will Die Hard, RIP. Strange, she thought, Danny didn’t die at this spot so why was someone marking it? Did the message mean Danny’s killer will die or that Danny was guilty and deserved to die?
Knight opened the passenger door of his red Alfa Romeo Spider. Everything was chrome, walnut, and smelled slightly musty. Knight got into the driver’s seat and slipped on a pair of black, open-back, leather driving gloves.
“Get a move on,” said Kate. She was spooked, the atmosphere in the pub had become threatening, but was she imagining it?
Knight pressed down hard on the accelerator. “Don’t worry, I’ve done every advanced police driving course you can name.”
“Yes, but did you pass?”
Driving gloves creeped her out. Susan Sontag, one of Kate’s favourite philosophers, suggested gloves indicated a desire for order and control. SS troopers wore gloves.
She looked at Knight, he was utterly at ease at the wheel of his car, it fitted him like a smooth second skin. She wondered what he thought of her: a jagged edge, an uneven surface, a tight bend in the road to negotiate?
“That wreath for Danny,” she said. “Seems odd. Who could have placed it?”
“Family, friend, a fellow Greenbank con, a sympathetic prison officer, the Queen, who knows, the world is full of the unexplained.”
“But the message, it could be read as a warning, a threat.”
“We’ll look into it,” said Knight.
Kate stared out of the passenger side window, the hedgerows and trees, everything looked blurred close up.
“If Bobby Lomas had a problem, he would have told me about it,” said Kate. “I’ve been at Greenbank for four years, Bobby was in his tenth year, and Greenbank opened in 1963 – the same year as the Lady Chatterley ban…”
“…and the Beatle’s first LP,” said Knight.
“But why now? Why did he run away now?”
“Somebody new?” suggested Knight. “Someone who’s just come to the prison?”