Brothers in Blood

by David Stuart Davies

  He walked aimlessly, not noticing where was going, the world a soft blur before him while his mind tumbled with awful thoughts. He knew that if he had managed to recognise Alex from the drawing on the television, dozens of others would. Perhaps Alex had made a run for it. If he had, that was only delaying the inevitable. It was possible he was already in the hands of the police. At this thought, his stomach reverberated violently again, but it was too empty for him to be sick this time. Instead he felt a strong, salty bile surge upwards into his mouth.

  How long had he got? How long would it be before the police came knocking on his door? How long before they discovered his dark history? He suddenly remembered the journal, the one in which he’d recorded those early days in Huddersfield with Laurence. He needed to destroy that, without a doubt. It was in the garage.

  The early days in Huddersfield with Laurence.

  His own phrase came back to him. If only Laurence were here now, he thought, to comfort him or joke him out of his dark malaise. He would have ideas of how they could get out of this mess.

  If only he could talk to Laurence, but he knew that was impossible.

  Suddenly he realised that he was crying. This awareness of the tears trickling down his face seemed to upset him even further and he gave a gasp of agony and his shoulders shook with emotion. He turned down a quiet side street to avoid attracting attention and while not really wanting to master his feelings, he did try to pull himself together.

  He stepped into a telephone box and dragged his handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mopped his face. A bleary-eyed, blotchy featured face that stared back at him from the small rectangular cracked mirror in front of him.

  It was, he thought, the face of a sad and doomed killer.

  THIRTY

  Paul Snow sat quietly staring into space. His mind was a blank. He had deliberately made it a blank. He didn’t want any thoughts to bother him in any way. He was seated at his desk in the growing gloom, like a thin Buddha, the only sign of movement was the revolving of his fountain pen between the fingers of both hands. It was a signature nervous tic developed from those early days when he had tried to give up smoking and he had needed something to occupy his hands.

  Armitage had been gone for nearly an hour and yet Snow was not ready to let the real world and hurtful thoughts seep back into to his consciousness and so he remained still and silent, turning the pen over and over between his fingers, contemplating nothing.

  Raised voices in the room beyond his office broke his trance. Reluctantly, he dragged himself back into the present. With a deep sigh, he hauled his slim frame from his chair and wandered into the incident room. There were four officers there, including Bob Fellows who gave him a friendly wave.

  ‘I think we may have struck oil, guv,’ he said cheerily.

  ‘Yes, sir. We’ve had quite a few responses to the TV appeal,’ chirped in WPC Sally Morgan, a tall, plump but sexy woman heading towards her forties. ‘Some weirdos as usual, but one name keeps cropping up. An Alex Marshall. And I’ve just got an address for him. It’s local.’

  Snow took the printed sheet from Sally and studied it. ‘Good,’ he said at length, but his voice registered no emotion. ‘Let’s you and I take a ride out there, Bob, and take a shufty before we send the posse in.’

  ‘Could be dangerous on your own, sir,’ said Sally.

  ‘What d’you think, Bob?’

  Bob Fellows allowed himself a grin. ‘You know me sir: I’m always in favour of the softly, softly approach.’

  ‘Me too. Right, let’s go.’

  They found Alex Marshall in the front room of his tidy townhouse. He was lying on the sofa with his throat cut. Blood had seeped from the wound on to the cushion and down on to the cream carpet where it looked like a rather nasty red wine stain. An empty whisky bottle lay a few feet away from the body. There was no sign of the weapon.

  ‘Well, this is a turn up for the book,’ said Bob Fellows, bending over the body and peering at the savage wound.

  Snow peered closely at the dead face. ‘Well, it looks like this is our man all right. He matches the drawing perfectly.’

  Fellows nodded. ‘No sign of a struggle.’

  ‘Looks like he was slashed while under the influence.’ Snow indicated the empty bottle and the packet of pills on the coffee table. ‘Some kind of ritual killing perhaps? Victim puts himself in a dopey state and then his mate cuts his throat.’

  Fellows grimaced. ‘That’s a bit far fetched isn’t it, sir?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. But there’s a great deal that is far fetched about this affair. It seems to me that we’re following an unpleasant chain of murders, each one linked to the next. I believe that Ronnie Fraser was killed in order to keep him quiet. He shouldn’t have survived the attack at Matt Wilkinson’s house and when he did he posed a threat...’

  ‘…the threat of identification.’

  ‘That’s how I see it, yes.’

  ‘And this guy?’

  ‘Well there were two others involved in the Wilkinson killings. It could be that one of them is snuffing out anyone who could provide a link with him. He’s just protecting his own back, eliminating traces.’

  ‘If that is the case, then there’s going to be at least one other murder.’

  Snow nodded grimly. The phrase ‘watch this space’ came to mind, but he kept it to himself.

  ‘We’d better get the SOCOs in here and get this turned into a proper crime scene.’

  ‘Not just yet, Bob. I’d like to do a little poking around myself first. I have some idea what I want to find.’

  ‘Sir, you can’t mess about in here before the forensic boys have had their turn.’

  Snow took out a pair of plastic gloves from his jacket pocket and started pulling them on. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be neat and tidy, Sergeant. No one will know a thing. Besides, I don’t intend to do anything in here. This isn’t the room where this fellow’s secrets are. They’ll be upstairs. Come on and join me. You have your own gloves I know.’

  Despite himself, Fellows grinned.

  ‘You look in the spare bedroom. I’ll tackle the master suite. There is so little space in these modern rabbit hutches, if there is anything of significance we’ll soon root it out.’

  Alex Marshall’s bedroom was, like the rest of the house, tidy, pristine and minimalist. Snow rifled through the chest of drawers, all neatly set out with underwear, socks, T-shirts, jumpers, carefully folded shirts in separate compartments. The wardrobe was similarly organised. Mr Marshall was quite a precise person, thought Snow, as he dragged over a chair and clambered up on to it in order to examine the contents of the top shelf. Towards the back, covered up by a couple of wool scarves he found a rectangular tin box. He pulled it out and examined it. It was the sort used as a cash box. It was locked. He shook it. The contents rattled dully but Snow was certain it contained no coins. He tried without success to prise it open.

  Dumping the box on the bed, he continued his search but failed to discover anything else which he considered significant. There were no diaries, letters or photograph albums. Maybe Fellows was having better luck.

  But he wasn’t. ‘All I can tell you is that Marshall has a penchant for Monty Python – he has some of their records along with The Jam in there. In general the house is holding its secrets,’ he said, as he wandered into the bedroom.

  ‘Well, there’s this.’ Snow picked up the tin box. ‘But it’s locked. We need to find the key.’

  ‘Keyring?’

  Snow nodded. ‘Let’s check downstairs.’

  A further search produced nothing.

  ‘Where do you put your keys when you come home?’ Snow asked Fellows as they stood in the tiny kitchen area.

  Fellows crumpled his face. ‘I just sling ‘em on the hall table or put them in a jar on the kitchen window sill.’

  ‘Well, we’ve looked in all those places.’

  ‘I suppose sometimes I just slip them in my trouser pocket.’
/>   Snow’s eyes brightened. ‘Right you are.’

  Moving into the sitting room they stared at the bloodied corpse which lay frozen like an exhibit in a gruesome waxworks show, the glassy eyes wide with surprise and the rubicund mouth agape. The poor sod probably knew little about his murder until the last few moments when he realised all was not well. He would be puzzled rather than anxious as darkness descended. He was probably too far gone to feel the pain, thought Snow. He supposed that was some kind of consolation. And then he reprimanded himself for thinking of this man as a ‘poor sod’. He was a killer after all.

  Snow knelt down by the corpse.

  ‘You’re not intending to … er, well to interfere with the dead man, are you, sir?’

  Snow was aware of the rather bizarre farcical element of the situation and also amused at Fellows’ failure to find a word other than ‘interfere’.

  ‘I’m just going to get the man’s keys out of his trouser pocket, Sergeant. Look away if you wish’, he said handing Fellows the metal box.

  Snow studied the two pockets of his trousers. One seemed bulkier than the other. He felt waves of Fellows’ disapproval as his hand reached inside the pocket. He knew that he should not be tampering with a murder victim in this fashion. He should wait for the SOCOS to complete their investigation and take the crumbs from their table but he’d never been one for the rules when his instinct told him that his way was better – that his way would lead to a result.

  Within seconds he had the key ring in his hand. A little skull with a circle of wire through its nose containing several keys. A house key, a car key and several others, including a miniature key that Snow knew instinctively would fit the lock of the metal cash box.

  He slipped the key from the ring and held it up in triumph for Fellows to see. His sergeant gave a wan smile.

  ‘Now let’s open the treasure chest and see what goodies are inside.’ Snow took the box from Fellows and led him into the kitchen. Placing the box on the work surface, he slipped the small key into the lock. Snow felt a tingle of pleasure as it turned easily releasing the lid.

  The box contained very little. There a few sheets of paper, a faded old letter, a brown manila envelope and one photograph. The photograph was of a bulky individual sitting astride a motorbike looking arrogant in a kind of moorland setting. The letter was on hotel headed notepaper – a place called The Sea Royal in Brighton – and dated eight years ago. The letter just had a date, time and location ‘August 6th 1976, 1.00 p.m.’, and a signature, simply ‘L’.

  He passed it to Fellows. ‘A few things to check up on here and there’s the handwriting, too.’

  The other sheet was a series of dates going back to the beginning of the seventies, each one followed by a red tick. The most recent date was less than a week ago. The tingle came again. It was the date of the murders at Matt Wilkinson’s house.

  ‘This is all very interesting,’ he murmured, more to himself than his companion. Then he turned his attention to the manila envelope. Gently, he tipped the contents out on to the work surface. There were a series of cuttings from various newspapers, some of them brown with age. He sorted them out into a neat pile and scrutinised a few for some moments.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Fellows.

  ‘They are all reports of murders. Some of them going back ten years’ He read a few more of the cuttings before continuing. ‘The murders took place all over the country. And they all seem to be without motive – or at least that’s what the press are saying. Fascinating stuff. This gives us quite a lot of material to sort out and follow up. We should be able to find about these killings and whether the culprits were caught.’ He shook his head in disbelief and held up the tin box as though it was exhibit A. ‘What have we stumbled on here, Bob? It’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box. Either Mr Marshall had a fascination with murder or… he was a keen participant.’

  ‘What, for ten years?’

  Snow raised his eyebrows. ‘The idea is fantastic, gruesome, I agree, but you know as well as I do in our job we encounter this sort of thing – and worse – on a regular basis. This affair is far more complex than it first seemed and there is something sinister and uniquely nasty about it.’

  He began scooping up the newspaper clippings and slipping them back into the envelope. ‘Right, you’d better ring HQ and tell them we have a body here – another homicide.’

  Fellows looked relieved. He wasn’t a maverick like his boss and was not happy with them tampering with the murder scene before the appropriate officers had dealt with things in the approved manner.

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘But at the moment, not a word about this little treasure chest.’

  Sergeant Fellows opened his mouth but Snow silenced him with a glance.

  ‘I need to give it my close attention. I don’t want it leaving my sight to be dusted, tested and photographed etc., etc. It’s timewasting. There’s likely to be another murder and I’d like to prevent it. I am sure I can extract all the relevant juice out of this particular lemon overnight.’ He held up the box and shook it. ‘This could provide us with all the answers we need.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  Laurence sat in the Boy and Barrel pub staring into space. He had returned to the hotel and once again ditched his disguise. He had been in two minds whether to try and make it back to London straight away but he was tired and he didn’t want to raise suspicions at the hotel by leaving without spending the night there having paid for the accommodation. Besides, he was emotionally and physically drained. To avoid thought and pain, he shut down various systems in his own mechanism to reduce himself to an automaton. He almost succeeded – but not quite.

  However, he couldn’t bear sitting in his bedroom alone and so he wandered up the road from the hotel and landed in this shabby but busy pub filled with rowdy teenagers and a pulsating juke box. The noise, the crowd and the atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke were a comfort to him as he sat in the corner, a silent, immobile character amidst the whirl and cacophony. He was still coming to terms with what he had just done. It had been necessary, he reasoned, and inevitable but that didn’t make it palatable. He was surprised how upset he felt. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t killed in cold blood before and, indeed, enjoyed the experience – but they had been strangers and losers. Not someone he knew. Not a ‘friend’. More importantly – not a Brother. Although he had known from the beginning that he would do it one day, he had not been prepared for the emotional turmoil it would unleash. He had thought it would bring an extra frisson of delight to the killing. That had been the whole point. He thought of all those years of climbing up the mountain to achieve the greatest thrill on reaching the peak, but this had not been the case. Perhaps he wasn’t as strong, as detached, as nihilistic as he imagined. Or was this just a blip, an irritating nervous reaction that would vanish with the morning light. It had to be – because it wasn’t over yet.

  And yet he could not shrug off this strange depressive mood which enveloped him. The weariness and futility of life, his life weighed him down with such heaviness that he could hardly move. Lifting the glass to his lips was a major effort. Perhaps he should top himself and have done with it all, the whole weary business of living.

  He growled in anger at his own weakness and with an effort, he finished the pint of beer in three gulps, the liquid dribbling down either side of his mouth in the process. He knew that alcohol was not the answer, not the permanent answer anyway, but it was a very effective anaesthetic: it softened pain, remorse, guilt and thoughts of the future. Just what he needed. With leaden limbs he made his way to the bar and ordered another pint.

  Oblivion tonight could not come quick enough.

  It was hot black coffee that Paul Snow was consuming with relish as he sat at his dining room table, studying the papers from the tin box he’d found in Alex Marshall’s house. He was able to correlate the press cuttings about a series of apparently unrelated unsolved murders with the dates and locations recorded on the sepa
rate sheet of paper. The last one on the list, before the Wilkinson killings, was less than two years ago, in Norwich. A small time drug dealer had been knifed to death and then his clothes set alight in the Tombland district of the city. Tombland. How ghoulishly appropriate, thought Snow wryly, taking another sip of coffee.

  It seemed that all the victims were some kind of ne’er do well. There was a prostitute, a mugger, a couple of drug addicts, a few tramps and other similar low life characters. In many ways – easy targets.

  Snow placed his hands around the mug, receiving a pleasurable warming sensation as his mind wandered. Was it some kind of game? A bizarre game? The murders were apparently motiveless and took place with such regularity. What had a prostitute in Glasgow got to do with a drug peddler in Doncaster? It would need a super Sherlock Holmes type genius to provide some kind of credible link between these victims. No, they had to be random killings which took place in different locations approximately a year apart. Like an annual game.

  What kind of person would do something like that? Treat murder as a sport. Had Alex Marshall carried out these crimes himself or were others involved, sharing the game? His pals at Matt Wilkinson’s house.

  Ah, but that was the fly in the ointment: the Matt Wilkinson murders. Alex Marshall had been a victim of Wilkinson and his cronies and this crime had all the hallmarks of revenge. Here there was a definite motive. That spoilt the pattern – but nevertheless there was a pattern. If forensics were correct, there were three men at Matt Wilkinson’s house the night of the killings: three murderers. One for each victim. One of these murderers was Mr Alex Marshall who had made sure that Ronnie Fraser, the surviving victim, did not recover sufficiently to talk to the police and help them to identify the perpetrators. Now Marshall had been eliminated also. No doubt for the same reason Ronnie Fraser was silenced. Presumably he was killed by the other two murderers, or one of them, in a desperate bid to protect their anonymity. Things had got messy and they had grown desperate. That was good. People make mistakes when they are desperate.