If he took Janet’s tits off from behind, as he always took off the heads, the blood spurt would be away from him: probably wouldn’t get splashed at all. He undressed unhurriedly, folding everything neatly, edge to edge, on a chair by the door. His erection was enormous.
As he walked back to them he said to Janet, ‘See what you missed.’
Edith Hibbs said, ‘No! Don’t defile her. Don’t touch her!’
‘Wait until you see what your daughter does!’ he said. ‘She’s really very good.’ To Janet he said, ‘And I know just what you’re thinking …’ He took the ice pick from the satchel. ‘But I’ll have this an inch from your eye, all the time you are doing it. And the moment you bite I’ll blind you. So forget it.’
‘If I do it, will you let us go?’
‘Still brave enough to bargain!’ he said. ‘You really are remarkable!’
‘Will you?’
He made a rocking motion with his free hand. ‘Maybe I will. But then again, maybe I won’t.’
‘If you let us go I won’t tell anyone. About anything. I promise. Just get dressed and untie me and you can go away and we’ll forget anything ever happened.’
‘Don’t patronize me!’ he roared and they both shuddered, recoiling as far as they could.
‘I’m sorry. I’m really very sorry,’ blurted Janet.
He suddenly realized that if he was going to keep them alive he’d have to cut their clothes off: wouldn’t be able to fold everything up neatly, as he always did. The thought upset him. Should he bother? Just this once, he decided; see what it was like just this once.
He slid the scalpel blade steadily along the left arm seam of her blouse, with Janet transfixed, horrified as it came towards her throat.
‘Isn’t it fun, so many games?’ he said.
There was a near-collision between Basildon’s lead car and that following as the cavalcade braked almost too late to turn off the main road at Halfway Bridge. As the driver regained control Preston grabbed the ringing telephone. Holding it slightly away, but staying linked to the control room, he said, ‘The local man thinks he can partially see behind the Hibbses house from the churchyard. And that there’s a blue car there, although it’s too far away to make out the number.’
‘Shit!’ said Basildon. ‘Move the Midhurst people in but not through the village: around it to seal off every road. Lanes too, down as narrow as a footpath.’
‘What about the local constable?’ asked Preston, after relaying the message.
‘No-one answered the phone,’ reminded Basildon. ‘It’s too late for him to go in single-handed. We don’t know how many people are dead inside that house but they’re going to be the last the bastard kills.’
Almost at once the driver said, ‘Here’s the road block.’
He managed to get all Janet’s clothes off intact, apart from the blouse and the flimsy pants which he gently pulled away from her crotch to snip apart, relieved they weren’t stained. It reminded him he hadn’t taken a pair from the drawer upstairs, as an extra souvenir. Janet hadn’t made anything awkward, still hoping she could bargain. Even though they were cut he succeeded in neatly folding the pants with everything else to go on a chair next to his.
When Janet saw him moving towards her mother, she said: ‘No! Oh dear God no! Please!’
‘There isn’t a God. And I’m the one with the power of life or death,’ he said, beginning to cut the arms of the old woman’s thick coat.
Edith Hibbs looked up at him and said, ‘You’ll rot in hell. Suffer eternal damnation.’
‘You haven’t understood, have you? Neither of you.’ He grimaced, as her bony, skin-sagged body began to appear.
At that moment, at the top of the hill overlooking the village, the local constable finished explaining what George and Vera Potter had told him and said, ‘This is Vera’s key. She cleans. The gossip is that Janet and him have hit it off.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Lobonski.
‘You going to show your mother what a clever girl you are?’
‘Are you going to let us go?’
‘Do as you’re told.’
‘Please!’
‘Do as you’re told.’
‘You filthy, obscene pig!’ said Edith Hibbs.
‘Never did this with Walter, did you?’
‘Don’t do it, Janet! He’s going to kill us. He’s mad. Totally insane.’
Taylor turned away from the kneeling, tight-lipped girl, towards the old woman. ‘You’re going to be sorry for that. I’m not going to tell you how, not yet. But guess what? You’re going to do it for me, not Janet. You’re going to do something you’ve never done in your life before. Which face do you want, this one or that, this one or that …?’ He’d fucked whores unprotected. Could he put his cock into a vomit-stinking mouth? He didn’t think so. But it was a wonderful way to terrify Janet, make her beg even more.
‘NO!’ screamed Janet, realizing what he intended making her mother do.
The village had only two street lamps, neither close to the Hibbses house, and it was very dark. It was totally deserted, too, although there was distant sound from the pub whose windows gave no outside light. There was closer noise, though, hurrying overhead birds and flying things, insects scavenging, the rustle of small hunters and the hunted in the black hedges and unseen undergrowth.
The special squad were eerily froglike in their night goggles, able to move quietly, but without such help Basildon, Lobonski and Preston literally followed in their footsteps close to the straggled hedge to hide from the house any movement until the very last minute.
And then there was Janet’s scream.
The unit moved at once, without any apparent command from Roger Cooke, sprinting the last few yards careless of being seen, using the key because it was quicker and quieter than trying to batter down the door but Janet heard them and screamed again, ‘Here! In here!’
‘Stay as you are!’ yelled Cooke, crouched, legs splayed, the Smith and Wesson extended before him, left hand steadying his right. ‘You move, I’ll shoot.’
Two of his men circled towards Taylor, keeping out of their controller’s line of fire, their own weapons trained upon the man. When one was alongside Edith Hibbs’s chair, the commander said, ‘Now back off. Back off from both of them. Come towards me.’
Taylor did.
‘On the floor now! Drop the knife. Face down on the floor, arms and legs splayed.’
One of the men who’d approached Taylor was already cutting Janet free, his companion still concentrating on the naked man.
Taylor remained kneeling, smiling at the entry of the three detectives.
‘I said face down! Down!’
Taylor’s smile became an open laugh, not hysterical but genuine amusement. ‘This is better! This is how I’m going to do it! Cause the sensation!’
‘Mummy!’ wailed Janet. ‘Oh, Mummy!’
Everyone looked at her except the pistol-holding policeman.
Janet said, ‘She’s dead.’
It was Lobonski who went to Janet, with his coat to cover her nakedness.
Janet said, ‘Mummy first. Cover my mother.’
Chapter Twenty-four
The legal co-operation between Britain and America was at breaking point from the very outset because of Clarence Gale’s absolute determination to re-establish public confidence in the FBI – as well as to gain personal public recognition for himself – which totally alienated the unaware Wesley Powell from the British. It was more than a week before he realized what had happened.
Alerted by Lobonski within minutes of the seizure, the Bureau issued a media release almost three hours before any British confirmation. By the time that came Gale was already appearing, with Powell beside him, at a press conference that coincided with the main evening news of America’s three major TV channels. Gale remained strictly within the truth, but only by a hair’s breadth, by inference reducing British participation to little more than a formality, acting throughout to Washington’s ins
tructions. He planted the seeds of what very quickly developed into an international sensation by talking of factors in the investigation defying scientific or rational explanation and disclosed the connection between the serial killing and Myron Nolan, ‘which is also, at the moment, totally inexplicable’. He made Powell’s public identification as the task force leader appear a taunting, even life-risking, bait and called upon the media that had criticized Powell in their ignorance to put the record straight now that reasons were being given for the Bureau allowing Powell to be pilloried.
‘Wesley Powell is a brilliant agent who from the beginning has conducted an extraordinary investigation into an extraordinary case. I have today attached an official commendation to his record.’
Powell, embarrassed for several reasons by the exaggeration – particularly regretting that Amy Halliday was not being recognized in the praise – hedged the persistent demands about the science-defying factors, although, in trying to respond to three questions at the same time, he inadvertently used the phrase ‘previous existence’, which was instantly seized upon.
It was an irritated Malcolm Townsend, anxious to retrieve the promotionally useful publicity he feared being diverted, who more knowingly used the expression ‘back from the dead’ when he and Basildon appeared side by side at the British press conference. They also issued the Pittsburgh freeze frame of Myron Nolan, which within twenty-four hours was being published alongside faded but still visibly identical archive photographs of Nolan at the time of his 1949 trial. Words like ‘supernatural’ and ‘ghosts’ and ‘ghouls’ began to appear in headlines. Ironically, so did Walter Hibbs’s ‘inhuman monster’ description alongside lengthy extracts from the tribunal evidence of the children’s deaths and maiming.
Amy insisted she understood why she, technically still a researcher, could not have been included on the podium with the Director but Powell didn’t believe her. He urged her, that first day, officially to apply for a transfer and spent two hours on his own memorandum of support, itemizing every contribution she had made and stressing that had it not been for her Harold Taylor would have killed two more people and still been free to kill others.
The Director insisted Powell co-operate with the now eulogizing television, radio and newspaper requests that flooded in, for personal interviews. Powell doggedly refused to talk about anything he considered prejudicial to eventual trials, in whichever country they might be held, but confronted with the pictorial evidence he was forced openly to agree that with no other logical explanation it appeared that Myron Nolan, murdered forty-eight years before, had five weeks earlier been walking the streets outside the apartment of the murdered Marcus Carr, president of the military court that jailed the man for life. One of the possibly prejudicial facts he was withholding, along with Townsend, was that matching fingerprints which were, he knew, going to send the sensation into a fresh spiral.
‘No!’ he insisted to one question. ‘I do not believe in ghosts, the supernatural or the paranormal.’
‘No,’ he replied, equally emphatically to another. ‘I cannot explain it, any more than anyone else.’
For the first full day following the arrest and for several days afterwards, Powell tried to contact Townsend and Basildon, always to be told they were unavailable. From London Jeri Lobonski complained they were refusing his calls too, and finally Powell wrote as diplomatic a memorandum as possible to the Director, suggesting an approach be made at the earlier established political level to restore a relationship. He received a curt written reply from the Director that the matter was being resolved. The British detectives continued to refuse to take his calls.
Powell was at least able to devote some of the time forced upon him to his private life. He rigidly kept his promise to Beth – and by so doing maintained the threat to Ann and Beddows – to telephone her every day, relieved there was no suggestion of any pressure from Ann. The lawyer Powell engaged was sure that upon the facts there would be no difficulty getting custody – particularly if Ann didn’t oppose the transference – but that until a court hearing varying the conditions of the existing order Powell had to comply strictly with those that currently existed, which meant Beth had to continue living with her mother. He was to limit his contact with Ann and Beddows to the absolute minimum, make no threats nor get into any dispute with either or both of them.
It was when Powell was explaining to Beth the need for her to continue living at Arlington instead of moving at once to Crystal City on the first Friday – promising to talk more fully about it the following day – that Beth reminded him of another promise: to invite Amy to spend the Saturday with them.
A reason to do that came within thirty minutes of his replacing the telephone.
They were still using the incident room, not knowing what, if any, trial submission documents might have to be prepared for Britain, although the manning had been greatly reduced. John Price and Matt Hirst had already re-based and the extra support staff had been reassigned. Powell hadn’t been aware of Amy leaving that Friday but he was of her returning: hurrying across the main room towards the side office, she was smiling, visibly flushed.
‘I got the transfer! Just been told personally by the Director, who’s also given me a commendation for what I’ve done here. I automatically go up two grades with the appointment.’
‘You deserve every bit of it.’
More soberly she said, ‘Gale also told me what you wrote to him.’
‘Not a word of exaggeration in anything I said.’
‘Impressed the hell out of him.’
‘You impressed the hell out of me.’
‘Not a bad team.’
‘Very professional.’
‘That was the understanding, wasn’t it?’ she reminded him.
Seizing the opening, Powell said, ‘We didn’t rule out celebrating success. And now you’ve got a double reason.’
‘No, we didn’t rule it out. And I’m glad we didn’t.’
He chose the Four Seasons, because it really was a celebration, and let her excitement fuel the conversation, patiently enjoying and responding to all her gabbled questions. She wanted to know every detail about her training at Quantico and if there’d be resentment at how she’d become an agent and what to do about it if there was and if he’d mind her calling him if something came up she needed guidance about.
‘I guess I’m asking for an unfair advantage but that’s never held me back up to now,’ she said, with her customary ingenuous honesty.
‘That might complicate things,’ he said, seeing the further chance and deciding to take it. The investigation couldn’t be complicated so there was no reason why he shouldn’t. The only problem could be the embarrassment of rejection.
The lightness went at once from her face. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …’
‘It would be keeping things vaguely on a professional level,’ he interrupted, not allowing the misunderstanding. ‘And we banned personal intrusions into professional situations, didn’t we?’
Her smile came back. ‘I seem to remember we did.’
‘I was kind of hoping the ban might be lifted with the end of the case.’
She didn’t speak.
Quickly he tried to anticipate her dismissal and at least save the evening. ‘Now you say I’m out of order and that you’re sorry but it was great working together.’
‘Or that I’d begun to give up hope that you’d ever ask. And that I’m glad you did.’
‘So am I,’ said Powell.
They came together very relaxed, as if they were longtime lovers each knowing the pleasures of the other, neither failing the other, and they climaxed together and when they did she cried out in her excitement. He made love to her again and she was ready for him and it was as good as before and she screamed again, laughing in the darkness at their becoming professionals in something else.
In the darkness he said, ‘You’re going to think I’ve conned you but I haven’t. I wanted this to happen but I t
hink the sequence is wrong and now I’m nervous.’
‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’
He told her at last about applying for custody of Beth and for the child to live with him, which would need a bigger apartment or maybe a house, and perhaps a housekeeper when the job took him away.
‘I think I see where you’re coming from, as far as I am concerned, but maybe you’d better spell it out for me,’ said Amy.
‘Beth wants you to share Saturday with us. I said I’d ask you. But I don’t want you believing you’re being enmeshed or railroaded into any surrogate mother nonsense. You’re not, no way. My solemn word.’
‘I’ll need to go home to change in the morning,’ said Amy. ‘Guess it might be an idea to bring the laptop back with me.’
Which is what she did. She also arrived loaded with grocery sacks, having planned the day with Powell before she’d left, neither knowing that this Saturday Beth’s homework would include home economics. The moment they’d kissed, Beth asked if Amy knew she was coming to live with her father and Amy agreed it would be terrific. Computer theory was again a homework subject and Powell sat back, relaxed and forgotten with one of the previous week’s Coors while Amy played computer games until Beth became thoroughly comfortable with the keyboard and command keys. Then Amy took the child practically through the set course. Beth finished, declaring, ‘I understand it! I didn’t but now I do!’
The homework finished, the two disappeared into the kitchen to make lunch and afterwards they all drove to the river and hired a boat and sailed almost as far as Alexandria before turning back. Beth giggled, delighted, when Powell was recognized at the marina and asked for his autograph and said she wanted one too, for her best friend at school. Amy and Beth were ahead of Powell leaving the marina. Amy walked with her arm around Beth’s shoulders and Beth managed to get her arm somewhere close to Amy’s waist.
When Powell returned to the apartment from taking Beth home Amy said, ‘You didn’t tell me Ann was with Harry Beddows.’
‘But Beth did?’
‘Shouldn’t she have done?’
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