Standing there awkwardly in the middle of the room, he still did not speak, his hands thrust in the pockets of his black coat as she gestured about her, trying to maintain some illusion of civility between them.
“See those walls, I had them painted up quite nicely recently, got a man in from the local decorators, gave me quite a good discount” she added, reaching for something to say to make conversation. She might as well have been talking to empty air, he wasn’t listening to her, not really, all he could hear was the tremendous rush of blood in his eardrums.
Somewhere in his consciousness he was aware she was speaking since he could see her mouth moving but for some reason he couldn’t seem to hear what it was she was saying. Balling his fists in his coat pocket, the knuckles of his right hand closed tightly around the blades handle and he felt a strange sensation of pressure in his ears, like the hissing of a kettle that was about to boil over. The feeling was so odd and so intense, that he wondered if it were possibly an aneurysm, a blood clot in his brain about to burst fatally.
For a moment he wondered if he could actually go through with what he had come to do. He didn’t feel angry like he usually did, he felt rather strange, out of body almost. Eyeing the redbrick fireplace, he saw the logs stacked up in the grate, the little wood axe hanging up on one side of the chimney, and the photographs poised all along it, a blonde haired boy playing with spade and bucket, then later older, a graduation picture in cap and gown. His left eye began to twitch uncontrollably.
“Well what’s the matter with you now?” she said, staring at him crossly, her lips pursed tightly in disapproval. She knew something certainly wasn’t right now, though she didn’t know what exactly, and it was clear the uncertainty irritated her.
“Why do you have to be so bloody difficult and perverse, you’ve always been difficult to deal with haven’t you, not like… not like he was.” She looked at the mantelpiece pointedly, before turning away in frustration to walk out of the room.
It all seemed to happen so swiftly. Before she reached the doorway he was across the room somehow, the axe in his hands. Bringing it down hard on the back of her neck, it made a horrible crunching sound as she shrieked in pain, the deep wound spreading rapidly as the blood seeped down on to the pale green silk of her blouse.
He hacked at her as she fell to her knees screaming, her arms flying above her head, trying to shield herself from his blows. Her screams were horrible, awful wails that sounded like a wounded animal but he kept hacking, grasping the axe between his hands tightly as he swung it towards her over and over again.
A blow landed deep in the side of her neck, the blade sticking as it hit muscle, severing a tendon and making her stumble on her knees in the doorway, her head hitting the frame as a horrible noise escaped her lips. He wasn’t seeing now, his movements coming automatically, as he hacked again at her scalp, the axe blade taking off a chunk of it, the flesh cleaving away. Strands of bloodied blonde hair were still attached to the scalp as it fell to the ground, revealing a bloody hole in her head.
He swung again, faster, the blow almost splitting the top of her skull down the middle as he buried it deep. The screaming stopped as her body fell heavily to one side, but he didn’t notice, drawing the blade back again as she slumped to the floor. The axe buried itself in her neck repeatedly, each time going deeper, he had to ensure she was dead; he didn’t want her playing sneaky tricks on him. He needed to make sure she had really gone. Silence the voice screaming inside his skull once and for all.
Frenzied he continued to hack, chunks of bloody flesh and muscle flying off the axes blade as he repeatedly bludgeoned her. He couldn’t stop chopping at her body even as it lay slumped and still in the doorway between lounge and hallway, didn’t stop until the head had severed from its neck entirely, and rolled away limply, the bloodshot eyes still open terrifyingly.
Only then did he cease, releasing his grip on the axe, the blade falling to the ground as he stood there, his arms by his side, heart beating fast out of his chest, unmoving, and staring ahead as if hypnotized.
He didn’t feel calm exactly, it wasn’t like the other times he’d killed someone. Peculiarly he didn’t feel anything at all as he stared at the head which lolled to one side freakishly in a pool of blood. Bending down, he tilted his head as if he wished to see that he’d really finished the job, reaching a hand forward to it, an odd smile playing over his lips.
“It’s over Mother” he said, his fingertips closing the eyelids, the severed head wobbling a little beneath his touch. He stood up again turning from the scene, it was almost finished now, not much longer. Not long until he would be with Sally again, they would be together and it would be just as it was all those years ago. Only this time nothing would part them, not even death.
He brought the carrier bag out of his pocket and began to unbutton his coat systematically, as he had done so many times before. Stuffing it in the bag and removing his leather gloves, he stepped over the head, careful to avoid the rapidly congealing pool of dark red, as he made his way to the front door.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN - DEACON
“What was your relationship with Mya Chamino Mr Kemp?” Vincent Kemp sat opposite him fiddling nervously with the cuff of his shirt. The man’s beady eyed gaze shifted left and right as if he were looking for a way out of the small, airless interview room.
“Mr Kemp,” he said, prompting the man for a reply.
“Nothing,” the man spoke reluctantly, his expression defiant.
“I don’t think that’s quite accurate is it Mr Kemp?”
“I didn’t know her.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Didn’t know her well,” Kemp added, correcting himself.
“But you had met her hadn’t you? She came round to your house quite a few times didn’t she? To see your wife?”
The man refused to meet his gaze, his fingers drumming on the top of the tabletop.
“Mr Kemp?”
“Look she was nothing to do with me. I don’t know anything, I can’t help you.”
“You do realise we’re going to have to talk to your wife about this don’t you?” The drumming quickened, Kemp’s jaw tightened.
“Unless…” Kemp looked up at him distrustfully, aha he had his interest now.
“Unless you tell me what you’re keeping from me about your relationship with Mya Chamino,” he added, fixing the man with a hard stare.
“I didn’t have a relationship with her. I barely met her,” Kemp replied, his tone sullen.
“Did she reject you?”
“No.”
“Did you come on to her?”
“No,” the man hesitated, “no.”
“So you did come on to her?”
“No, look I talked to her a couple of times. I might have been friendly to her, she was…I found her attractive. But nothing happened,” Kemp said, staring defiantly at him.
“Did she turn you down?”
“No. She never got the chance.” He sat forward.
“And why was that exactly Mr Kemp? Because you killed her before she got the chance?”
“I didn’t kill anyone.” Kemp was getting hot under the collar he could tell. Maybe he could push him, get him to break.
“Did she spurn your advances, tell you to get lost, tell you that you were a dirty old man?” Kemp’s face was beginning to turn a curious shade of red. The man was definitely becoming irate. He continued, his voice rising, “did she humiliate you, make you feel small, so small that you took a knife and slit her throat? Did it feel good Vincent, to get revenge like that?”
Kemp banged his fist on the desk, as he stood up suddenly.
“No! I didn’t touch her!” he yelled, spittle frothing at the corners of his mouth. Satisfied he sat back raising an eyebrow at the man.
“Nasty temper you’ve got there Vincent. You want to watch that.”
Back at his workstation desk, he sat thinking, his gaze fixed on nothing in particular. He’d had t
o let Kemp go since they had nothing on him that would stick. The friends he’d said had been visiting him and his wife had corroborated his alibi. But the man was guilty of something more than just visiting a strip club he was sure of it.
Rubbing at his eyes, he massaged his brow, trying to pull himself together. His temples throbbed painfully. He’d been drinking far too much recently he knew, to block out thoughts of Maria. Mrs Randall’s disdainful tones from the phone call earlier still rang in his ears. So it was an error after all, since the Randall boy was dead. He mentally chastised himself for allowing his dislike of Adam Jackson to raise his hopes. Still it would have been significant to link Jackson directly to the Brook’s murder case.
Would have connected him right to Sally Brooks, and given him the perfect opportunity too, since the Brook’s girl was a close friend of Louise Randall. Stop it. You’re becoming bloody obsessed with the man and he’s not even guilty of anything, certainly not anything you can prove anyhow.
Fingering the long scar etched into his face, he remembered the Samia Downs case. If that case had taught him anything it was not to be complacent. He’d brought in a man for routine questioning during a nationwide manhunt for the perpetrator of five year old Samia’s kidnap and murder.
The man brought in for interview, Martin Anton, had simply been one of many men in the abducted child’s local neighbourhood. One of many who happened to fit the description given by the key witness, who’d been driving down Samia’s road, at the time the little girl had disappeared.
The witness recalled seeing a dark haired man who looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. The man had been seen leading a little girl by the hand, into a white van that was parked nearby. The tearful witness, who had assumed the man to be the little girl’s father at the time, was near hysterical when she realised what she had actually witnessed. The last sighting of Samia Downs alive by anyone, except her murderer.
And, out of the 30 or so men who fit the description the woman had given that he had questioned, plenty of whom had equal opportunity to take Samia Downs from where she played in her back garden. Plenty of opportunity to molest her, kill her, then dump her corpse, the little skull bashed in, in the middle of a nearby wooded copse.
But from the moment he had met him, his instincts had told him something just wasn’t right with Martin Anton. The man was pleasant enough on the face of things, didn’t appear to be acting strangely, nor was he obviously nervous when being questioned. He also seemed to have a fairly rock solid alibi.
Anton claimed he’d been talking on the phone to his mother between 5:00 PM, when Samia had gone into the garden to play, and 5:30 PM when her worried parents had first noticed with panic she was gone. A brief, albeit not completely official, look into Anton’s phone records seemed to confirm the man’s story. Unconvinced, he made up his mind to do a little more digging around. He decided to pay a visit to Anton on the pretext of asking some detail he’d forgotten when he’d interviewed the man down at the station.
As soon as Anton opened the door he saw that the man seemed more nervous than he had been at the police station. Down at the station Anton had sat opposite him palms downward, arms spread out on the desktop. Almost as if he had studied the textbook “experts definition” of what an honest interviewee should look like.
Asking Anton whether he might come inside to “discuss things” the man had smiled thinly, nodding.
“Uhhh you’ll have to excuse me Inspector I’m in the middle of decorating,” Anton said, gesturing inside, and ushering him through to the small hallway. Paint pots were stacked haphazardly on top of each other and half a dozen rolls of wallpaper leant against a rusty stepladder.
Anton did indeed look to be in the middle of decorating, which in itself wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. His claim was supported not only by the DIY paraphernalia scattered around but also by the strong smell of gloss paint that assaulted his senses almost as soon as he stepped into the house.
But there was something else too, permeating the air, underneath the gloss. A faint smell, almost overpowered by paint fumes, but unmistakeable all the same. His nose twitched as he recognised it. Bleach, the odour of the guilty in his experience. The smell was faint, but it was everywhere almost as if the small semi-detached house had been soaked in it.
Looking around the hallway, his keen eyes noted an unusual dent in the skirting board. Anton had probably thought he’d gotten away with it but he knew better. After some consultation with Doyle they decided it was time to pay Mrs Anton a visit. The woman seemed slightly worried at the sight of two police officers on her doorstep. But after they had insisted on coming inside, she had furtively looked around before showing them both in and offering them a pot of tea.
He let Doyle take centre stage, performing the kindly, concerned routine she did so well in these kinds of circumstances. The tactic seemed to work because after a couple of hours of gentle pressure Anton’s alibi had started to unravel.
Mrs Anton accidentally admitted that although Anton had called her, after talking for a while, he had told her to wait and hold the line. Apparently he had to take another more important phone call from a potential customer. She had waited patiently, chatting to her guests while waiting for him to return.
She might have had a doubt as to her son’s involvement for as soon as she confided this piece of information she looked from Doyle to him, insistent.
“Look I’m sure it can all be easily cleared up. My son would never be involved with anything untoward,” she said, but the expression in her eyes was uncertain. Doyle nodded, smiling kindly.
“I’m sure it can be Mrs Anton,” she said attempting to reassure the woman, but her face, when she turned to look at him, told a rather different story.
And sure enough after another, more detailed search on Anton’s mobile phone records, the hard evidence showed that his initial suspicions about the dark haired, benign looking, forty year IT repair technician, might be proving to be correct.
The phone records showed that though Anton had indeed called his mother at 4:45 PM, and stayed on the line until 5:35PM when he had hung up, there had been no other calls made in or out between that time period. They went back to Anton’s to speak with him, but the man wasn’t answering the door though he felt sure there was someone in the property. Forcing their way in, the house seemed empty at first but his instincts told him that Anton was still in the house.
Looking around carefully, he was checking the downstairs hallway when a noise up the stairs alerted him. Creeping up, he’d been just about to enter the second floor bathroom when Anton had leapt out at him with a knife. Slashing his face and nearly blinding him. That’s how he’d got the scar. The hospital told him he’d been lucky not to lose an eye.
Anton had escaped out of the bathroom window as he lay bleeding on the floor. Doyle found him there laying in a pool of his own blood and called for back-up and an ambulance. Five squad cars had eventually caught up with Anton as he tried to use his mother’s car to escape.
Things had moved fairly swiftly after that. A search warrant for the house had been issued, and, after forensics dusted the place down, Luminol had revealed splatter consistent with heavy blood loss. The crucial and most damming piece of evidence, a tiny fragment of Samia Downe’s skull, was retrieved from its position embedded in the skirting board in the hallway.
He remembered attending the court hearing; his eye bandaged heavily. After hearing all the evidence presented, the jury found Anton guilty by a unanimous verdict. Looking into the man’s eyes as two uniformed officers led him away in handcuffs, what he saw had disturbed him.
It wasn’t merely the fact the man was a convicted child killer, a fact which by itself was more than enough to disturb any normal human being. Not even the fact that Anton showed no discernible remorse. No, what had disquieted him the most when he stared into those eyes was that there was nothing there at all. Oh the pupils and irises had a normal construction, on the surface of
things they were fairly untypical. A bog standard blue, some might even say fairly attractive looking eyes. But the expression behind them was blank, dead, as if something other than a human being were inhabiting the space behind the sockets.
He had recoiled from it immediately, the sight making him shiver. In his long career he’d looked into the eyes of the innocent and the undeniably guilty alike, looked into the eyes of some who had committed the most violent crimes. This, though, was something he’d not come across before, something quite unfathomable. It chilled him.
That feeling he’d had about Anton, why did it remind him of Jackson somehow? The younger man had been pleasant enough. Irritating maybe but he’d not been rude. Perhaps that was it; Jackson had simply irritated him, with his swagger and his easy manner with Doyle, who had not seemed to mind his smooth, slick charm in the slightest.
The only logical reason that gave him cause to have any sort of suspicion at all about Jackson, was because the man had worked at the same firm Louise Wheeler had. Well that and the fact Vincent Kemp might well have been describing him, when he’d told them about the other man he’d seen watching Marilyn. But then Kemp wasn’t exactly to be trusted either was he?
Michelle Swan had certainly been able to corroborate Kemp’s story though, she had recalled seeing another man watching Marilyn dance as well. Though a man was allowed to eyeball a stripper wasn’t he? Sleazy though it might be, it wasn’t exactly a crime. And god knows there were millions of sharply dressed, young looking, dark haired men frequenting seedy strip bars and clubs running the length of the capital.
No, Jackson had just irritated him, and maybe, if he was completely honest with himself, had made him feel slightly jealous too. Though the feeling confused him, he’d felt a pang of envy at the way Doyle seemed to fawn all over the younger man.
Doyle had been good to him. He knew she cared about him but he also knew there was no way he could give her what she needed. Not when he still felt this way about Maria. It was probably some primordial territorial instinct that had reared its head when he’d seen Jackson flirt with her that had niggled him. An ugly, selfish, emotion; I don’t want her but I don’t want you to have her either.
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