‘I’m sorry,’ Jack whispered, his own tears now beginning to flow. These feeble words were meant for Mandy but also to himself for being unable to do the one thing that might yet save him. He dropped the knife and lunged for the door in one desperate movement.
Moments later, he was gone.
Chapter Forty-six
‘I think we’ve got something!’
Johnson had been downstairs in the police station since the news of another attack had come through. It wasn’t just because of what she had found out from DCI Marlowe in Canterbury, this time their guy had made a mistake. He had been disturbed in the act and, although it had been too late to save his victim, who died from multiple stab wounds before the paramedics arrived, they had been provided with a more than passable description.
‘What is it?’ Johnson demanded, pushing her way past two men in uniform to get to the radio controller.
‘We’ve got reports coming of a disturbance up at the university.’
‘So what?’
‘It was picked up by the officers you sent up there. A woman is claiming she was threatened by a man with a knife.’
‘Description?’
‘Fits the one from the attack. She also has blood on her that she claims is neither hers nor the man’s.’
Johnson worked hard to keep her emotions in check and remain professional. But that was not how she felt inside. She wasn’t one for counting her chickens until they’d hatched, but surely this was it?
‘Where is he now?’ she demanded.
‘Fled on foot but it sounds like he’s only had a few minutes’ head start.’
‘Right, I want all available units over there now. I want him cuffed within the hour!’
Johnson marched upstairs to inform Potter. As she passed her own office she paused, wondering why she also felt an urge to tell Brandt. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. She shook her head vigorously. Whatever he was, he was certainly no friend. And yet when she had needed him to cut all the bullshit and help, irrespective of the games he seemed to enjoy so much, he did. So, was it a sense that she owed him? It couldn’t be that and, as she had told him when she first responded to his contact, there was no chance of redemption coming.
Moving inside to sit at her desk she realised what it was. Although the hunt for Brandt resumed the moment the dental records were checked on the exhumed body, the only person who had got close to catching him, Johnson, would continue to be otherwise engaged whilst the new killer in Nottingham remained at large. Therefore, by choosing to help her he was speeding up the point at which he would consider himself in danger. For that reason alone, she would tell him. In the context of what he had done to assist her, he deserved to know that the chase would soon be back on and that their current state of peaceful co-existence was over.
Johnson had already worked out what she was going to type as she entered her password for the email account she had set up specifically for communicating with Brandt. She would merely inform him that a positive ID had been made and an arrest was imminent.
As she clicked on her inbox, there was an unread message. She smirked to think he was offering further instruction that was not needed and started to revise what she would send to him. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to sound a little smug.
But the message wasn’t from him and it didn’t look like some random spam either.
– Whoever you are, keep away from my man!
‘What the actual fuck?’ Johnson murmured to herself, barely able to comprehend what she had just read.
Chapter Forty-seven
Kath Hardcastle had always tried to live her life as a woman of virtue and believed that telling the truth was the best course to take. But when you’d lived as long as she had, no matter how sincere your intentions were, there are inevitable exceptions.
Kath had thought she had found contentment, if not happiness, in the years that had followed the death of her husband, Mike. Her childhood may have been in the swinging sixties but her conservative upbringing allowed her few boyfriends before she finally settled down and got married. She had been apprehensive prior to the wedding and had confessed to her mother that she wasn’t sure whether she loved Mike. Kath had not been prepared for the reaction that followed her uncharacteristic baring of her most closely guarded secret. Laughter. It hadn’t been meant cruelly. Her mother had always been kind but was a product of an earlier time. Marriage isn’t about love, it’s about security, she had explained to Kath.
But Kath had grown to love Mike. It may never have been the whirlwind romance she had secretly read about on her trips to the library as a curious teen, but if she needed any indication of how much he had come to mean to her, then his death provided it. It had been entirely unexpected, and Kath had spent the following two years lost. And yet slowly she had begun to rebuild her life and found purpose for it by keeping to a schedule that saw her venture out each day and make new friends.
But then the mysterious guy from Eastern Europe arrived, Gregori. She realised early on that Greggy wasn’t the correct pronunciation, but she had grown to like it. For all his good manners and keenness to serve, his face took on a brooding look whenever he didn’t think he was being observed and the nickname helped to soften the darkness she sensed behind his eyes.
Not that she felt intimidated by him; she knew as well as the next person that everyone has a history, and he must have gone through some difficulties for a man of his age to find himself serving coffee and cake to well-off retired people in a far-flung part of the country. And that was before he hinted at the problems facing people in his native country since the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Even when fate conspired to bring them closer together, she had not sought to challenge his obvious reluctance to talk about the past, not least because the sense of betrayal she felt towards Mike meant that she didn’t want to be pressed on her own.
Indeed, she had not allowed herself to get too carried away with the speed at which their relationship was developing. She just wanted to enjoy the moment and not be caught up in where it might lead. And there was much to enjoy. Kath found him handsome, perhaps not conventionally, but the obvious intelligence with which his mind worked was alluring. Not least were his linguistic skills and she was staggered how far his command of the English language had come on in such a relatively short space of time. His accent was all but gone and he had picked up the sorts of phrases and expressions that could now enable him to pass as a native to these shores.
And then there was the sex. Kath had thought her days of physical union were behind her, long before Mike passed away. She had been terribly nervous the night she and Greggy had first made love. She had come close to backing out but the way he looked at her, with an almost primeval yearning, convinced her to put aside inhibitions based on the effects of time and the, now distant, menopause. His ability to be so tender and sensitive one minute and then animalistic, to the point of rough, the next, allowed her to experience sensations long since forgotten.
But it hadn’t all been plain sailing. That gnawing doubt that it was all too good to be true never went away and, worse still, had begun to grow. The seed that something was amiss was ironically planted on that magical day in Llandudno. She might have been able to dismiss that it had all seemed too familiar to Greggy had it not been for the obsession with the internet he had developed soon after.
His efforts to be considerate about it with things like getting up early, had only made her more suspicious. At first, she wondered whether he was using it to gamble. Given that he didn’t seem to have an issue with alcohol, appearing to be able to take it or leave it, an addiction to betting would help explain the state of near destitution she had found him in. However, when she had checked her bank accounts to make sure he wasn’t somehow stealing her money to fund his habits, she considered that he may be using the internet for other purposes.
Always an avid reader of the paper, the years since she became a widow saw her consume her favoured publicat
ion from cover to cover each day. From that, Kath was aware of sexting and revenge porn and the like from the numerous articles she had read on them, and believed Greggy when he claimed he wasn’t downloading inappropriate images.
But then she heard him typing, and more than could be expected for things like entering web addresses. The suspicion that he was communicating with someone was confirmed when she overheard bursts of him tapping away at a keyboard, followed by moments of silence, before it started up again. She had encouraged him to let his hair down at the pub afterwards, in the hope he might crash out when they returned, and she could try and work out from the laptop exactly what he was up to but, if anything, the alcohol had made him more amorous.
Therefore, Kath had got up early the next morning under the pretence of going to the shop to get the newspaper and, when he didn’t stir, she spent a frustrating hour finding nothing untoward on the computer. She knew when he did rise that she was doing a poor job of acting normally, but she was upset and fearful of what it was he was going to lengths to disguise. Any efforts to try and bury her concerns were lost when he changed his mind about them going out that morning – making excuses to keep going back inside from the garden. Even if he was contacting a family member, one of his children perhaps, that wouldn’t explain all the secrecy, much less the need to maintain such a constant dialogue.
Each time he would leave her in the garden, she would sneak up to the back door and crack it open to hear what he was up to. She didn’t hear him typing but she could tell by his footsteps that he was going into the dining room, where he now favoured setting up the computer. Knowing that eventually he would have to make good on one of his claims that he needed the toilet, she waited until she heard him go upstairs following a hasty flurry on the keyboard, and pounced.
Kath wasn’t cut out for deception and intrigue and, when she found that it took her longer than expected to remove her outdoor shoes, she nearly aborted. But then she reminded herself that it shouldn’t matter if he caught her. Not only was it her laptop he was obsessing over but, given his behaviour, she had every right to be suspicious. Nevertheless, she acted as quickly as possible, pausing only to scribble down the random letters and numbers that made up the email address of the person he was conversing with. Much as she would have loved to read through the messages and get a real sense of what he was up to, she figured this was enough to work with and was relieved to be back in the kitchen by the time he came back down the stairs.
She knew her iPhone had many more functions than she could possibly comprehend, but that one of them was the ability to email from it. It took her many minutes, whilst Greggy was thankfully still preoccupied in the dining room, for her to work out how to access her personal account on the phone but as soon as she did, she started typing her message to the mystery person.
It was only then that Kath realised that she hadn’t even considered what it was that she should write, but her blood was up, and she typed in the first thing that came into her head, hitting send before her natural inclination towards caution intervened.
– Whoever you are, keep away from my man!
Chapter Forty-eight
‘Guv!’ Johnson shouted, her bursting into his office now so much part of the routine that DSI Potter didn’t raise an eyebrow. The way he was feeling now, he wouldn’t mind if she entered by ploughing through the wall with a bulldozer.
‘Stella! I’ve been wanting to congratulate you. Where have you been?’
‘I’ve got him!’
‘I know, and well done. I’ve just been told he’s been picked up. The dog unit found him cowering in a bush. A suitably inauspicious end, I would suggest!’
The news that the man terrorising Nottingham over the past few weeks was finally under arrest barely registered with Johnson. She had already known the hunt was as good as over and recent developments had seen her focus shift elsewhere to the main prize.
‘I mean Brandt.’
Potter didn’t reply and, under other circumstances, she would have found the length of time for the smile on his face to waver amusing. ‘I’ve found Brandt,’ she said to try and offer some clarification.
‘I’m sorry?’
She could see him studying her as though he were trying to understand if this was a punchline to a joke that, in his excitement, he had failed to get.
‘Guv, I need you to listen to me, okay? I have been in contact with Brandt for a number of days now.’
‘But…’
‘Please, Steven, hear me out first. I don’t know why but, after the news about Sarah Donovan broke, he sent me a message.’
Already she could feel her mind start to tie itself in knots. At the inquest following the fire at her house she had said as little as possible, and had not mentioned that she had gone to Benidorm, never mind their email exchange where she had been posing as the reporter, Gail Trevelly. She knew that, if not now, at some point Potter would want to know how Brandt had managed to contact her but she would try and leave that for when she had more opportunity to think things through. Thankfully, it seemed he was going to respect her request not to interrupt because he hadn’t tried to punctuate her pause with comment.
‘He and I have been communicating since then.’
Again she hesitated. Even if she wouldn’t feel deeply uncomfortable sharing the extent of the co-operative relationship that had temporarily existed between her and Brandt, after everything she’d been through, she didn’t fancy having to share the credit for the success the station was currently enjoying.
Clearing her throat she continued: ‘He’s been disguising his IP address, but I maintained the connection with him in the hope that it might lead somewhere. And it has. It would seem that whoever he has got himself shacked up with has become suspicious and sent me a message. An unencrypted message,’ she added, unable to hide her triumph.
‘Jesus Christ, Stella. And where does it trace to?’
‘I haven’t had that run yet,’ she replied evenly.
‘You what?! Why the hell not?’ Potter exclaimed.
‘Because I needed to see if you were on side first.’
‘Go on…’
‘When this gets out, there are going to be inevitable… questions. Questions, guv, many of which I think are already on the tip of your tongue. I need to know that you will back me on this.’
She waited, watching Potter’s reaction. A few short weeks ago he would have baulked at the request. In the many years she had known him, Potter had always played things down the line and was wholly against anything that was ethically questionable. He also wasn’t one to like feeling he was being backed into a corner; but it was for this very reason that Johnson felt confident of success. No matter what a difficult position covering for her actions placed him in, it was nothing compared to the pressure he had been under from the top brass; in particular since Fisher started stirring things up. But today’s arrest would not only see that pressure evaporate, he was also being given the chance to add to that the biggest prize of all. Britain’s most notorious serial killer, former Detective Superintendent Jeffrey Brandt.
‘What do you need?’ he asked quietly.
‘I just need you to say that we both thought it was a possibility that Brandt might make contact once it was made known he was still alive; that you gave me permission to work undercover to lure him into making a mistake that would lead to his capture.’
Johnson knew that this stance may seem pretty thin but, as with before, she doubted there would be much of an appetite to dig deeper and turn what was a moment of celebration for the police into a witch hunt.
‘I agree on one condition…’
‘What’s that, guv?’
‘We play this now by the book. I’m sure I needn’t remind you of the perils of trying to arrest him yourself.’
‘Don’t worry, guv, I fully intend leaving it to the specialists. But…’
‘But nothing, Stella, I’m not having you anywhere near this. Not after what… what
happened to you before.’ The almost paternalistic way Potter said this would have been touching, were it not that the same desire to protect her had led him to refuse her going back on the Brandt case following McNeil’s funeral.
McNeil. He was never far from Johnson’s thoughts, but she had to admit everything else that had happened recently had seen her somewhat preoccupied. Not that it had stopped her wondering why Claire never made contact again since the news about Brandt had come out. Johnson liked to think that Claire had believed that she had been through enough already in her efforts to avenge her brother’s murder. But she suspected that it was just wishful thinking on her part, not least because she herself would never feel enough was done until Brandt was finally brought to justice.
And now was that time. Perhaps as soon as this was over, she would call Claire and share the good news herself. That way she would know that those three words she had spoken after the funeral, whatever it takes, had remained with her.
‘But I want to go there so I can ensure that he is brought back to us for questioning. There’s no way some other force is getting the credit for this. I might not be able to bring him down myself, but he’s still mine nonetheless.’ The firmness of her tone made it clear that this condition was not up for discussion.
‘Fine, but you take someone with you. You’re on official business now after all.’
Johnson nodded, with exactly the right person in mind.
‘And just one last thing. I feel a little uncomfortable asking this, but how do you know he’s not fucking with us again; fucking with you again?’
Potter’s question felt like a large stone had been placed on her chest. From the first moment she read the mystery email, she knew there was a chance this was just another of his tricks. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have a track record of outwitting her. It was the timing, more than anything, that convinced her this may be genuine. If it had happened mere hours later, once he knew that the guy they’d been hunting had been caught, then she would have smelled a rat. As Johnson had reflected before, Brandt’s success in helping her would only speed up the point at which she could concentrate on capturing him. Brandt’s brilliance, if she would call it that, is that his mind worked with cool, rational calculation. It would make no sense for him to spring a trap now, unless the whole point was that it was illogical. If nothing else, the past few days had given him a greater insight into how her mind worked. What if his offer to help had just been a charade to enable him to better plan how he was going to trick her this time?
Smoke and Mirrors Page 20