Down into Darkness

by David Lawrence

  ‘Yes,’ she said brightly. ‘Two birds with one stone.’

  People were walking their dogs in Norland Square Gardens. Woolf walked the same circuit, a man taking some exercise, a man lost in thought. Each time he passed Neil Morgan’s house, he glanced towards it. He saw the Honda and knew what it meant; he saw Candice leaving for Madrid; he saw that it would be impossible to kill Morgan there, in his own house, then transport the body to some public place where all could see it. But not impossible to kill him, perhaps.

  He walked head down, his nails digging into his palms. It ought to be over, but he’d made a mistake. He’d been led astray. Not the house by the river, this house. Not that other man, this man. They had been fooling someone, and they’d fooled him too. In following the car, he thought he was following the man. The meeting at the hotel, Woolf watching the man being greeted by two Americans. The house by the river – Woolf watching the man as he dismissed his driver and went indoors. Woolf seeing the night out, waking with the sun, watching as the man re-emerged to take a walk by the river.

  Woolf tried to remember whether the other man had looked quite so much like Morgan. He thought he had; thought he must have done. But close up? He couldn’t be sure. He’d marked the man, he’d been sure of his target, he’d locked on. After that, he hadn’t looked too closely.

  He left the gardens, going out as he’d gone in: behind a resident with a key to the gate. In the street that ran parallel to Morgan’s he found a house that was being renovated. The place had been gutted. People in that neighbourhood could afford to buy a house for a million or more, then spend as much again to have things just as they wanted them. Scaffolding rose from the basement area to the roof.

  Woolf counted down from the end of the street. The house was three doors from Morgan’s. A sign on the scaffolding warned that it carried an alarm system.

  He would wait a day or two, think things through, look at patterns. He’d seen Candice’s luggage being loaded into the boot of the limo: cases, not overnight bags. Morgan would be on his own in the place for a few days, that was obvious.

  Wait a day. Look at patterns. Know your terrain, your killing ground.

  64

  The lights were hot, but the morgue, as ever, was cool. Stella recognized the music, but couldn’t identify it. A boy soprano, sweet and pure.

  Sam said, ‘You have to get through the trachea and the thyroid cartilage. Muscle’s not that easy to sever, though a strong man with a sharp knife would do the job quite quickly. He’d already have gone through the carotid sheath – through the artery and the jugular vein. Most likely, he would stand behind his victim, make the man kneel down, that way he could pull the head back by the hair and lift at the same time to expose the throat and make it taut.’ Sam’s voice was flat and neutral. ‘After that, he would definitely encounter some difficulty.’

  ‘How much difficulty?’

  ‘To decapitate his victim, he’d have to get between the cervical vertebrae – between the atlas and the axis in this case. Hacking away wouldn’t do it. Well’ – Sam shrugged – ‘no, it would eventually, of course, but you’d need time.’

  ‘Did this man hack?’

  ‘No. He found the gap. Or, rather, he created it. He would have manipulated the head, held it two-handed and rocked it to and fro, while, at the same time, pulling upwards to open a gap, maybe even partially dislocate the neck. That way, he would only be cutting connective tissue.’

  ‘He knew what he was doing.’

  ‘Possibly. Though it’s easy enough to work out if you think about it.’

  ‘Yes? Who would think about it?’

  George Nelms’s body had been reduced to its constituents, exposed and emptied out, stripped down like a machine, but Stella still thought it looked odd without its head.

  ‘What I am saying,’ Sam told her, ‘is he would have needed time.’

  Aimée said, ‘It won’t be long. I won’t be gone for long.’

  Peter was working at his computer. He said, ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘Just overnight.’

  ‘It’s your mother,’ Peter said. ‘Of course you must go.’

  Aimée’s time out had been arranged before the incident at the sports field, before Ben’s nightmares. She didn’t know what to do. She stood in the room, dressed for work, knowing that passion would certainly overcome guilt.

  ‘I could call in after work; before I go to –’

  ‘I’m writing it down,’ Peter said. He looked up from his two-finger typing. ‘I thought if I wrote down what happened, I might somehow make better sense of it.’

  ‘How can you make sense of a thing like that?’

  ‘No… It’s like… it’s the same as telling someone about it.’

  ‘You’ve told me. You’ve told the police.’

  ‘Writing it down is different, Aimée.’

  ‘How?’

  She noticed that his hands, poised above the keyboard, were trembling slightly. He said, ‘I can go back to it. I can go back over it. I can change things, make it more accurate. Not details the police would want, details for me.’ He paused; his voice became a whisper. ‘Like the smell. Like the way the head looked. The face…’

  Aimée said, ‘Look, I could stay, of course I could.’ But she knew she wouldn’t.

  Yellow-board feedback is random and time-consuming. You get time-wasters and glory-seekers; you get people who are simply confused; you get people who were in the right place at the wrong time. Sometimes, though, you get a piece of information that’s right on the money.

  A woman walking her dog had seen the Volvo parked in the grounds of the old hospital. Sue Chapman had taken the call and, yes, the woman was certain of the day and, yes, the time was right and, yes, it was a Volvo.

  Stella went in the same way Woolf and George Nelms had gone in: through the front door. It had once been padlocked against vagrants and vandals, but someone had kicked the lock off long ago.

  She didn’t have to search. The smell told her where to go: that, and the sound, much like a distant engine: the sound of flies. Andy Greegan paced her, setting up a line of approach. They were both wearing forensic coveralls, hoods up, shoes enclosed in blue plastic wraps that were taped above the ankle, a dab of decongestant gel on their upper lip.

  They reached the room, the side ward, and stood in the doorway. Greegan said, ‘Jesus Christ.’ Then he said, ‘Okay, I’ll bring them up.’ He speed-dialled on his phone, but was already walking back to supervise the forensics team as they came on site.

  Blood on the walls, on the floor, on the window-boards. It had puddled and soaked in. It had made long, looping patterns on the walls, thick parabolas, cascades of dribbles and droplets, a splatter-painting, an abstract masterpiece.

  It wasn’t difficult to find it, sketched on the window-boards in blood. Of course, in blood.

  The place had been used by tramps, by lovers, by addicts. There were a couple of mattresses thrown down, tattered and stained. There were cans and condoms and syringes and faeces. It was a bedroom, a lavatory, a shagpad, an abattoir. Stella closed her eyes. She could hear cries echoing in the room. A hospital. How many deaths in this place? How many lives ebbing away while relatives sat in an outer room, fearing and hoping?

  And now this new death. She imagined George Nelms, down on his knees amid this foul detritus, his head yanked back, the blade at his throat. She wondered what he could possibly have done to make his killer certain that he deserved to die like that.

  The forensics team arrived with their boxes and bags of gadgets. They’d seen worse.

  Aimée laid him down and undressed him. She took him into her mouth. She straddled him and lowered herself, so she could look down at his face. When he reached up and touched her, a shudder ran on her flanks and a blush came to her throat.

  She knew she was in love. She told him so, and he smiled at her.

  They cooked a meal together, just as she had hoped they might. He was a great commis-chef, chopping
and stirring. He made some salad dressing to her instruction. He poured two glasses of white wine. The early summer had coloured her skin very faintly, just enough to leave an almost invisible mark where her wedding ring would have been.

  She was aware of being happy. The term ‘light-hearted’ came to mind. Light-hearted or light-headed.

  London streets are never quiet, never dark. The thin curtains were backed by a street lamp’s reddish glow that leached into the room and made fire patterns on the walls. Gideon Woolf lay propped on one elbow, watching Aimée’s face as she slept. This business of sleep after sex was new to him; this business of waking next to her in the morning.

  She was lying face up, and the sheet was down past her waist, revealing the slight, soft swell to her belly; one breast lolled against her upper arm. She gave a little sigh, then bit her own lip, gently, and turned towards him. He felt a rush of tenderness, though he didn’t know its name.

  He told himself that he was with her, because it was safer that way. With her so, he could control things. With her so, he could kill her.

  And so he was.

  65

  The windows of Anne Beaumont’s consulting room overlooked the park. Stella was sitting in the clients’ chair, even though she no longer saw Anne for that reason. Her nightmares were still with her – the children hanging from the banister, her own child lost to her when it was barely formed – but she knew analysis was a journey and it was a journey she didn’t want to take.

  Anne came into the room with two glasses of wine. She said, ‘You sit in that chair looking out at the view, and what do you see? All the old problems.’

  Stella laughed. ‘Are you a shrink or a mind-reader?’

  ‘Same thing.’ Anne put down the wine and picked up a report file on the George Nelms killing. ‘This man,’ she said, ‘has something to prove. He displays his victims. He wants them to be seen. He takes risks by doing that: the girl in the tree, the man on the towpath… He could have left Martin Turner’s body out of sight by the trees in his garden, but he lifted the body out and roped it to the gate. Now he kills this man, Nelms, in a deserted building; takes him there to get the job done; but then puts him in the car and rolls it into the middle of a sports ground.’

  ‘He’s an exhibitionist,’ Stella offered.

  ‘He is, yes, but not the kind who takes pride in his work and wants to show it off. And he’s not taunting the authorities with it either – I’ve seen that sort of thing before, and this is different: no self-regarding letters, no threats to do it again, no “catch me if you can”. This man is accusing his victims – the writings on the bodies – and letting the world at large know what he thinks of them; or trying to, anyway. He’s exhibiting them; accusing them; and he wants the world to agree with him.’

  ‘This latest one,’ Stella said. ‘“Happy now?”’

  ‘It’s different, isn’t it? More in sorrow than in anger, perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, he was angry, all right. He cut the man’s head off.’

  Anne nodded. ‘The report suggests that he might have intended to do the same to his second victim.’

  ‘It seems possible – the depth of the cut, the possibility that he was interrupted.’

  ‘So beheading is an issue.’

  ‘But the girl was hanged. Turner was shot. And the victims themselves,’ Stella said. ‘Where’s the pattern there?’

  ‘A prostitute, a researcher –’

  ‘Possibly the wrong man,’ Stella reminded her.

  ‘Okay, a prostitute, a politician, a journalist, a retired schoolteacher. Under other circumstances, I’d think they were simply random: that the killer wanted notoriety, needed to kill, took his victims where he could – there have been such cases. In one recently the man admitted that he just wanted to be famous, wanted to be a serial killer. But the writings… There’s a reason for these victims being selected. They have a special significance in our man’s life.’

  ‘You mean he knew them?’

  ‘Or someone like them.’

  ‘We’ve looked –’

  ‘For possible connections. I’m sure you have. That’s the mystery. If this man was common to the lives of all his victims, it’s likely you’d have identified him by now. He’d almost certainly be a relative or a friend.’ Anne took a long sip of wine. ‘There’s some connection, though.’

  ‘We’ve been finding this, had you noticed?’ Stella reached over and took the file from Anne, found a series of SOC shots and spread them on the table.

  ‘A calling card,’ Anne said. ‘Yes, I had noticed.’

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘In terms of his psychopathology or the thing itself?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘It’s the hunter’s mark. Trophy-taking in reverse. Some killers of this sort will take a souvenir: a lock of hair, a body part, a photo of the victim alive or dead, or first alive, then dead. Jeffrey Dahmer used to keep the heads in his fridge. This is the same thinking but in reverse: the hunter leaves something of himself at the kill, he records his presence. The same impulse gave rise to cave drawings and hand-prints: the sign of the prefigured kill.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘If you first draw your mastodon, then put your hand-mark beside it, you’ve already killed it in some future encounter. He’s representing himself by this symbol: leaving his mark.’

  ‘And what is it, do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Female torso?’

  Anne peered at the photo. ‘You mean breasts and pubis?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘I didn’t see it.’ Anne laughed. ‘And what does that tell us –’

  ‘A smiley face,’ Stella said. ‘These are offers from various police officers. DC Harriman was the tits and fanny man.’

  ‘You don’t surprise me.’

  ‘Two hills and a valley. A Cheshire cat. A dog. A stealth fighter.’

  ‘Stealth and fighter being significant words.’

  ‘Yes. A clown. A tarot card – the three of swords. Darth Vader. The number sixty-six.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘“V” is the twenty-second letter of the alphabet. Three times that is sixty-six.’

  ‘One six short of the mark of the beast.’

  ‘Or you add them and get twelve. Or then add the one and the two and get three.’

  ‘Which is a magical number.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘Who came up with the numerology?’

  ‘Maxine Hewitt.’

  ‘Did she now? Interesting psychology.’ Anne shrugged. ‘Could be any of those.’

  ‘People are thinking about it in their spare time, of which they have precious little,’ Stella said. ‘You’re the shrink. I thought you’d crack it, no problem.’

  ‘All I can tell you is he wants to be noticed. The mark is authorial: it means “I dunnit”.’

  ‘Craving attention.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘He sees himself as a victim, doesn’t he?’ The thought had come out of nowhere. ‘These people have offended him in some way.’ Stella paused. ‘Or hurt him.’

  ‘Maybe. Yes, you could be right.’ Anne looked at her. ‘What made you say that?’

  ‘I saw my mother. She came back and we met.’

  For a few moments, Anne said nothing; then: ‘How did it feel? I won’t charge you.’

  ‘She put her arms round me,’ Stella said. ‘She embraced me.’ Anne allowed a sneaky, professional silence: a prompt. ‘She smelled of cheap make-up and booze.’ Stella paused. ‘Same as ever… She’s hooked up with some off-the-peg villain who sells DVDs of cage fights.’ Another silence. ‘She kissed me…’ Stella raised a hand as if to a bruise and touched her cheek. ‘Just here. She kissed me as if that was the sort of thing… you know, the sort of usual… behaviour.’

  Anne didn’t speak. Stella leaned forward slightly in the chair, her head bowed, her hands clasped, like someone holding in a sudden pain. Tears f
ell straight from her eyes into her lap, salt rain, unquenchable.

  Neil Morgan’s car was in a residents’ parking zone outside the house. The Honda was two car-lengths down. When Morgan got into the driver’s seat and turned the key, two engines started simultaneously. He pulled out, watching the lights of the other car loom up in his rear-view mirror.

  His mobile phone rang. The voice managed to sound both accusatory and polite. It mentioned that Morgan was supposed to inform his security officers of his intended destination. He told them he was on his way to interview a new researcher: late, because the man had been in meetings. They were to meet at Soho House; it was an informal interview.

  He drove slowly up Holland Park Avenue, looking for an opportunity to get through a set of lights on amber. He did it twice. Twice the Honda ran the red, staying with him. At Notting Hill Gate he signalled one way and turned another. An Imola-red BMW putting out death-dealing music cut him up and left him stranded. He dropped over the hill towards Kensington and took a couple of unnecessary back doubles. The Honda was with him all the way. He broke the speed limit on the run to Knightsbridge, by which time he was fooling no one. The Honda tailgated him and flicked its lights. He pulled over and got out. The door of the other car opened, but no one appeared for a moment, then a tall man emerged and strolled towards Morgan. He was wearing a boxy leather jacket and jeans, the latest in stake-out fashion. He looked amused. Amused and bored.

  ‘We can’t use the siren, sir. We’re surveillance. So we just have to break the law, same as you.’

  Morgan shrugged. He said, ‘Look, it’s a girl. A girl I know… you understand?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A need to be discreet…’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘I’ll be back at about midnight. Midnight or soon after.’

  ‘You’re asking me to let you go alone. We go back to your house. You visit your friend.’

  ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not, sir. It’s our job to offer you protection. Not possible to do that unless we’re with you.’