Mason rushed in, tripping over the felled resident. Jessop followed, catching sight of another figure racing into the living room and yanking open the glass balcony doors. Mason reached the balcony and grabbed the figure’s shirt, and was nearly taken over the side of the balcony as the figure jumped.
Jessop’s heart skipped a beat as she grabbed for Mason hanging over the balcony and heard the splash from the river below. ‘Fuck it!’ Mason gasped, righting himself and sprinting back into the flat.
Outside, Jessop kicked off her shoes and chased after Mason sprinting along the river bankand into the dark. Her lungs screamed and her head pounded with the exertion. And then, suddenly, she could see her younger, fitter DI. He’d stopped running and had his hands on his knees, sucking in deep breaths.
‘Shit!’ Mason’s exclamation echoed along the river.
Jessop glanced downstream and spotted a figure scrambling out of the water up onto the opposite bank. It didn’t look back. She blinked, and it had disappeared into the shadows. Gone, just like that.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Nathan Randal’s door opened with a crack as the weight of the battering ram knocked it from its frame. With Mason quiet and seething beside her, she stepped over the door and into the apartment, its layout a mirror image of Mr. Kutani’s apartment across the hall.
Knowing there was no way out of the block without being seen, Randal had knocked on his neighbour’s door and sought refuge with the help of a kitchen knife and a threat to stab MrKutani if he didn’t do as he was instructed. There Randal would hide out until he had safe passage away from whatever it was he was running from. When the knock from the police came on MrKutani’s door, the smart move was to answer; not to would arouse even more suspicion. Unfortunately for Randal, his threatening behaviour had been his undoing when Jessop had seen the fear in MrKutani’s eyes and the perspiration on what was otherwise a dry head and face.
The short hallway led into a comfortable living area with neutral décor. The sparse furniture consisted of a chocolate leather corner sofa, state of the art music system, a laptop and portable DVD player, and a sizeable flat screen TV mounted on the East wall. Upon the other walls hung framed movie posters, all of the torture porn genre Jessop despised so much.
‘Charming,’ Mason sneered, veering off into the open-plan shaker style kitchen.
Jessop noticed an ornate steel DVD tower tucked next to the sofa. She thought of Nathan’s old man and his love of literary horror and courtroom thrillers. Nathan favoured movies about serial killers, chainsaw wielding maniacs, drug dealing gangsters, and a certain American TV series Mike Knowles loved to hate, of which Nathan possessed more than a dozen box-sets.
‘Forensic science may be the new rock and roll… but it hasn’t got the budget to turn all its graduates into the new Gill Grissom or Horatio Caine….My guess is your boy picked up the tools of his trade either from some online forensic course, of which there are hundreds, or just by watching too much TV and You Tube.’
‘Knife missing,’ Mason called from the kitchen. ‘Probably the one he used to threaten the neighbour. Other than that he’s one tidy son of a bitch.’
‘Yeah, too tidy,’ she agreed, running a latex gloved finger over the PC screen and finding no dust. ‘Obsessively so.’
She stepped back into the hallway, opened the door to the one and only bedroom.
Her entrance did not disturb the blonde girl on the bed.
Slim with petite features, pale skin, small breasts, and prominent ribs, the girl lay in a foetal position upon a crisp white duvet wearing nothing but a pair of three inch black heels.
Jessop reached the head of the bed and peered down at the heavily made-up face with rivers of mascara and eyeliner snaking down the girl’s hollow cheeks. She was reminded of Tanya Adams, albeit Tanya was a good five or six years older than this girl.
Nathan Randal, like his old man, liked them young.
‘Hey there,’ she whispered, but already knew by the absence of movement she would receive no reply. She checked for a pulse, surprised at how cold the girl’s flesh was and how stiff her arm had become. Looking closer, she noted the purplish bruising along the girl’s right side caused by the heart’s failure to circulate her blood and causing it to settle and pool.
Mason appeared at the door, hesitated at seeing the girl. ‘Dead?’
Jessop motioned to the bruising. ‘Liver mortis suggests she’s been that way for four to five hours.’ Only then did she notice the video camera perched on a tripod next to the door. And beneath it, a hardware carrier bag stuffed with what looked like heavy duty refuse sacks.
Mason followed her gaze, stepped over the bag and behind the camera on which he pressed a couple of buttons. Jessop watched her DI’s normally stony expression slip to something more human. ‘Death occurred approximately 1.33pm,’ he mumbled.
Picturing the torture porn posters in the next room, she asked. ‘A snuff movie?’
‘Uh-uh. Looks like an accidental drug overdose.’
She joined Mason behind the camera, peered at the small screen whereon the girl convulsed violently on the bed where she lay. Next to the bed, on the glass bedside table, which was now empty and gleaming, sat a clear plastic bag of white powder alongside a sizeable sex toy. Above the girl’s breathless screams a male voice mumbled ‘shit’, and the screen went blank.
Jessop surveyed the room, as tidy and spotless as the rest of the apartment. No sex toys and no trace of cocaine in sight, only the bag of refuse sacks at her feet in which, she guessed, he was going to dispose of the body. ‘He’s meticulous, all right.’
‘Sounds familiar,’ Mason said.
Jessop stepped toward the two built in wardrobes and slid back the mirrored doors. In one wardrobe hung half a dozen suits along with a collection of casual clothes, among them, she saw, were a couple of pairs of faded jeans and a dark hoody. She looked down at the shoe rack, noted a pair of grubby white trainers amongst the small collection of footwear, and made a mental note to get Knowles to bag the garments.
Hung from hangers in the second wardrobe was an assortment of women’s sexy outfits ranging from schoolgirl to dominatrix. Beneath was a chest of drawers.
She opened one of the drawers, surveyed the assortment of sex toys. Opened another drawer: more toys, and handcuffs. Another drawer: sexy lingerie. Another drawer: a collection of DVD discs in clear plastic sleeves. She estimated at least sixty of them.
Picking one at random she read the title written in black marker: Tracy: 6/10/11.
From behind her Mason said, ‘Could be how he’s subsidising his income to afford this place. Amateur porn’s big business this day and age.’
She agreed. What with the advent of digital cameras, smart phones and bloody YouTube, everyone was doing it. She replaced the disc and opened another drawer. Froze.
‘Jesus,’ Mason hissed from over her shoulder. ‘Cocaine, Rohypnol, Ketamine Cannabis…’
Feeling nauseous, Jessop stepped away from the wardrobe and sucked in a deep breath. Saw the girl on the bed and imagined it was her Chloe lying there drugged, naked, and dead. Her gorge rose, and it was all she could do to stop herself from throwing up.
‘Boss…’
She turned back to the wardrobe to see Mason offering her a photograph he’d found in the next draw. ‘Look familiar?’
The picture was of two good looking boys with tussled brown hair, both in their early teens, and both sitting on BMX bikes with arms over each other’s shoulders. Wide cheesy grins adorned their faces, although the happiness didn’t reach the eyes of the taller boy on the left.
He had his father’s eyes: dark, intense, troubled.
She’d seen those eyes before…Recently. But instead of swirling with dark chaos as they were in the picture, the eyes she’d seen earlier in the home movie Terence Randal had made were wide with horror and sodden with pain.
As no doubt they would be fourteen years later and 3500 miles away as Oliver Randal lay
dying in Afghanistan.
Chapter Thirty
Along with a bunch of other photos of the young brothers together during happier times, Jessop found an old newspaper clipping folded carefully. The article told of how Nathan and Oliver Randal’s mother had died whilst driving under the influence ten years ago. Friends who had talked to her prior to the accident said she was “suicidal” following the news of her husband’s conviction.
That was one way out of the nightmare, she thought. The other way out was to fight and take back control of your life, just as Oliver had done by joining the army.
Nathan had chosen neither of these paths.
She wondered at which point in his life Nathan had inherited his twisted father’s fetish for making porn. Before the conviction? Had he also been a victim of his father’s abuse? The youngest sibling was often the most influential, after all. Or had his father’s conviction and mother’s death been the catalyst for his change? Such traumas were known to shatter fragile psyches and give rise to another persona.
Maybe the pain he had experienced was the breaking of the shell of his understanding. And now he was no longer afraid, he could begin to live.
Crackpot or crusader?
Nathan was the former, but like most power seekers considered himself the latter. His father had unwittingly taught him life’s most valuable lesson and he wanted to share it with the world. And just as a little thanks to his old man, he chose to use his dad’s trusty Swiss Army knife to teach his lesson.
The pieces fit, yet as always with hypothesising and profiling, the evidence was circumstantial. She needed proof to glue the pieces together and make them stick.
With a scrum of officers and detectives gathered in the living room, she made her instructions clear. ‘Find him. Every resource we have. Brooke, make sure this bastard’s face is on the ten o’clock news. Tom, strip his laptop then stop his finances: credit cards, bank cards, fucking supermarket loyalty cards. The rest of you, tear this place and his pitiful life apart. Okay, people, move!’
The gathering dispersed, a hive of activity ensued. Jessop’s mobile rang. Not recognising the number, she answered with a blunt hello.
‘DCI Jessop?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘DS Gary Curtis, CO14. You asked for a favour.’
She had, from her old department The Clubs and Vice squad. She needed an experienced cop to help track down the source of Nathan’s stash of drugs, and also, the habits of one Suzanne Bell, the dead girl on Nathan’s bed. ID found in her handbag revealed she was only sixteen. Further checks revealed she was also a local prostitute and registered heroin addict.
Jessop filled Curtis in on the case. ‘I’ll have the names and details emailed to you shortly.’
‘Got it.’
‘Hold on a sec, Gary.’ She left the living room, entered the hallway where the coroner was wheeling Suzanne’s body out of the bedroom. She waited until the bedroom was empty and shut herself in. ‘2009,’ she said to Curtis. ‘You brought down Darius King, didn’t you?’
‘Yes ma’am.’
‘Four years undercover to do so, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Paid a price, I heard.’
‘I went a little off track for a while.’
‘You okay now?’
‘Fine.’
She’d heard about Curtis going “a little off track for a while.” Aside from having to immerse himself in a made-up persona for four years, which in itself could be psychologically damaging, to infiltrate Darius King’s circle Curtis had had to win King’s trust by sampling the cocaine for which King had made his fortune. A year later, while King was serving eighteen years thanks to Curtis’ work, Curtis was serving his own time, climbing the walls in rehab.
‘I’ve also heard you have a talent for getting information and cooperation,’ she said.
‘I’ve made a few contacts.’
‘Well use them, because I want Nathan Randal. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘Good.’
She hung up, turned to Nathan’s camera, on which he’d captured Suzanne Bell’s dignity and final breaths. The thought of trawling through the collection of DVD’s turned her stomach. But the girls needed her attention, and she needed the privacy they deserved to give them it.
Chapter Thirty-one
Since as far back as Jessop could remember she had never kept a tidy workspace. Even in childhood her bedroom was in a permanent state of disarray with used and new word search books littering every spare surface. Only once had her aunty tidied the mess, organising the books into neat piles when Jessop had been at school one day. Within a minute of returning home she would reorganise to the way her stuff should be. She was not a dirty child, neither was she scruffy or complacent, but since moving in with her aunty and uncle at the age of seven, she could only seem to find true contentment amongst mess and chaos. It was a place that would follow her into adulthood, and particularly, the box room next to the kitchen she’d made her home office.
With no window, and shelf upon shelf buckling under the weight of old case files and criminology books, the room appeared half its already small size. Chloe called it claustrophobic and depressing, yet she found such tight confines reassuring, and found it easier to focus on the work she often brought home with her.
It was here, seated in her black leather swivel chair at her desk, she watched the DVD entitled Michelle 22/7/10 on her PC.
This was the twelfth film she’d flicked through with each of the movies following the same theme of a girl or girls on Nathan’s bed using his toys on themselves. On one occasion one of the girls was handcuffed to the wrought iron bedstead while another girl raped her with a strap on dildo. Jessop hadn’t watched much more of that one.
Another theme was the use of cocaine. There was always a bag on the bedside table alongside a razor blade or credit card. So far none of the girls she’d seen had refused the stuff. Neither had they appeared to be there under duress. They wanted to be there, and were enjoying every damn minute of the humiliating ordeal.
She wondered if they would feel the same sober, watching themselves back on the screen as she was doing now. Some of them, such as Suzanne, may not care too much, but others, such as the young brunette named Michelle, who she was watching now, may want to rethink her life once shown the degrading footage. Although Michelle certainly looked like she knew what she was doing for the camera, her slight, lithe body striking poses and working the doubled-ended dildo to maximum effect. Michelle was not shy. Jessop wondered if her confidence had anything to do with the cocaine, or if Nathan may have taken advantage of her youth and naivety and made slick promises of fame and fortune from behind the camera.
She swapped Michelle for Sara, filmed on 4/3/11. Sara was a true redhead with heavy breasts and full hips, and, Jessop noted, could be old enough to be Michelle’s mother. The next disc was of Petra, a twenty-something black girl with short, spiked hair and an athlete’s limber body. Once again she was alone on the bed except for one of Nathan’s toys.
She sped through the thirty minute film, ejected the disc, and took a sip from the sweet tea she’d made. Beside the cup sat a half eaten round of cheese on cold toast. With the prospect of having to sit through the degrading films, what appetite her body had after missing dinner last night soon waned when she’d loaded up the first film.
Yawning, she picked up her phone and called Mason. ‘Anything?’ she asked when he picked up.
‘Not much. Evening news is going to run his picture and we’ve stopped his bank account and credit cards. So unless he has a suitcase stuffed with cash hidden somewhere he’s going nowhere.’
‘Anything from Davies?’
‘Not yet. What about you?’
She glanced at the stack of disks on her desk. ‘He isn’t choosy who he picks up. Young, old, fat, thin, black, white…they’re all here. Doesn’t discriminate, just like our killer doesn’t with his choice of victims.’
‘If he’s selling the films he’ll have to cater for all tastes.’
‘Yeah, but there’s something else. Randal is in none of them.’
‘Come again?’
‘He doesn’t partake, just gets the girls to perform for him.’
A pause. Then, ‘Maybe he’s tapped into a masturbation niche in the market.’
‘Maybe. Or maybe he just likes to watch
‘Voyeurism?’ Mason offered.
Jessop sat back in her chair, considering this. ‘What does our killer make his victims’ loved ones do?’
‘Watch,’ Mason answered.
‘Uh-huh. And among other things Nathan’s old man was an English Literature teacher.’
‘And our boy likes to quote famous literary figures,’ Mason said. ‘I’m convinced. What about you?’
She fought back a yawn, checked the time and calculated she’d been up the best part of eighteen hours. ‘I think I need a bath and a good night sleep. Then I think I want to know Nathan’s whereabouts on the three kill dates.’ She eyed the pictures of the three murder scenes taped to the wall behind her desk. ‘Then I’ll be convinced.’
Chapter Thirty-two
Wrapped in a towelling robe after a well needed hot bath, Jessop padded into the living room in time to see Ray take off his reading glasses, yawn, and close his Marian Keyes novel. It always amused her seeing this gaunt ex-rocker and author of so many violent novels slouched in an armchair reading chick-lit. According to Ray chick-lit was the perfect way to unwind after a hard day scoring hot-lead justice with his fictional alter-ego. Like a warm, bubbly bath for the soul he’d say.
Maybe she should pick up one of the books, she mused, still feeling dirty from the films she’d endured.
‘You up for a night cap, detective?’ Ray stretched his arms above his head.
As tempting as it was, alcohol on an empty stomach would not be a good idea considering the workload she faced tomorrow hunting Nathan Randal. ‘Think I’m just gonna turn in again. Sorry.’ She planted a kiss on Ray’s forehead. ‘You okay?’ She placed a hand where her lips had been. ‘Feels like you got a temperature.’
Hurt (The Hurt Series) Page 10