Requiem

by David Hodges

  ‘If you’re buying,’ he said and lurched in the direction she indicated.

  She watched him slump into a wooden bench seat with his back to the window and smiled encouragingly from the bar as she ordered him another double.

  ‘So, why is the inquiry falling apart?’ she said, setting the drink in front of him and staring almost too casually around the room.

  ‘Lost the plot, haven’t they?’ he said, belching again. ‘Whole thing’s a total cock-up.’

  The glint of the wolf surfaced in Naomi’s blue eyes and they fastened almost hungrily on his thin sweating face.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she breathed, fearful that her continuing questions might make him clam up, but Sharp was too far gone to care.

  He gulped some more whisky. ‘Obvious, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘SIO is a prat – Ethelred the Unready they call him – and the DCI is like a bloody android.’

  ‘That’s a bit unkind.’

  He shrugged. ‘Only speaking the truth.’ He leaned towards her and tapped her arm with one finger, almost toppling over in the process. ‘Bleedin’ psycho’s running rings around ’em. Like he did two years ago – Op … Operation Firetrap thing.’

  Thinking of the connection between the two cases that her editor had already suggested, Naomi couldn’t contain her excitement any more. ‘So it is the same killer then?’

  Sharp’s face twisted into a cunning leer and he leaned towards her. ‘Not so fast, love – what’s it worth first?’

  She made an irritable grimace. Pissed, but not so far gone as to miss an opportunity for a nice little earner. ‘Depends what you’ve got,’ she retorted, the irritation in her tone as sharp as a wasp sting.

  He set his glass down unsteadily on the table once more and sat back in his seat, tilting over slightly on one side like a sinking ship. ‘Let’s not play around, sweetness,’ he said. ‘This thing’s bloody big and if you want the whole SP, it’ll cost you a grand.’

  She emitted an incredulous laugh, her eyes widening in disbelief. ‘A grand? You’ve got to be joking. The Clarion couldn’t come up with that sort of money – even for an exclusive.’

  He shrugged again. ‘Your loss. I can always try somewhere else.’

  She snorted. ‘Like where, for instance? Anyway, you’ve already told me enough. I can soon find out the rest from your guv’nor.’

  Sharp grunted. ‘Think he’ll talk to you? I doubt it.’

  Her eyes glittered. So the little shit wanted to play hardball, did he? ‘He might if I agreed to tell him where I got my info,’ she said.

  The cocky expression on his face died instantly. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Try me.’

  The DS studied her for a moment, his face twitching uneasily. ‘There’s a lot more to this than you realize,’ he said, leaning forward again and lowering his voice after quickly glancing around him. ‘There’s why Jennifer Malone and Eugene Taylor were topped, for instance, the reason the Bridgwater flat was fire-bombed and why we were searching the wildlife reserve. It’s worth a grand, easy.’

  She didn’t answer and he hesitated before her hard uncompromising stare. ‘OK, five hundred,’ he said sullenly, then grinned again, ‘plus an extra.’

  Naomi looked puzzled. ‘What sort of extra?’

  His grin widened. ‘You – in the sack.’

  She glared at him. ‘In your dreams.’

  He sat back again, finishing his drink and wiping the back of one hand across his thin lips. ‘That’s the deal. Final offer.’

  She stared at him with absolute incredulity. She could hardly believe what he had just come out with. No virgin, but a hard cynical woman with a bisexual appetite and few moral scruples if she wanted something badly enough, she nevertheless found the idea of sleeping with Sharp utterly abhorrent, even for an exclusive that could set her on the road to stardom.

  ‘No way, José,’ she said tightly.

  He levered himself upright. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, ‘but if you do go to my guv’nor, remember one thing, bribing a police officer is a criminal offence. So, do you worst.’

  For a moment she hesitated, gnawing at her lip as she watched him clumsily negotiate his way round the table on his way to the door. Then, abruptly draining her glass, she reached out to grab his arm. ‘I think I’d better drive, don’t you?’ she said drily.

  chapter 15

  ‘SO WHAT THE hell is eating you?’

  Kate tackled Lewis the moment they were clear of the police station and climbing into the CID car in the rear yard.

  He threw her a sour glance as he closed the driver’s door after him. ‘Leave it,’ he retorted morosely, starting the engine. ‘We’ve got inquiries to make.’

  ‘Bollocks to the inquiries,’ she exclaimed, turning sideways in the front passenger seat to face him. ‘Just answer the question, will you? What is wrong with you?’

  He scowled. ‘You know very well what. We’re supposed to be getting married in a few months, but that seems to have slipped your mind.’

  ‘Don’t talk crap!’ she grated. ‘Just because some loser sends me chocolates, doesn’t mean I’m over the side with him. Use your head, man – he’s doing it deliberately.’

  He looked unconvinced. ‘So why would he do that?’

  She sighed heavily. ‘To drive a wedge between us, you idiot. He fancies me and thinks if he can turn you against me, he might be in with a chance. Simple as that.’

  ‘And what about the business in the hide?’ he countered.

  She swore under her breath, her frustration breaking through. ‘There was no business in the hide. It was all in your bloody imagination. I’m not interested in this pillock and never will be, so will you get that into your thick public-school brain?’

  Roscoe appeared in the yard, walking briskly to his car, and they saw him stop and stare intently their way. Lewis started the engine and slipped the car into gear. ‘Better get mobile,’ he muttered, releasing the handbrake and lurching forward. ‘We’re in enough trouble already.’

  ‘You’re the one in trouble,’ she blazed as they drove out of the yard. ‘What you did in there was bloody stupid.’

  ‘Sharp’s an idiot,’ he threw back at her. ‘Deserved all he got.’

  She snorted. ‘Fat lot of good that would have done you at a court hearing for ABH,’ she retaliated. ‘Out of a job and maybe looking at three months inside or a heavy fine at the very least.’

  To her surprise, he grinned, his truculent mood suddenly evaporating.

  ‘Mind you, I did enjoy it,’ he chuckled. ‘Always wanted to thump the little tyke.’

  And as their eyes met across the car, they couldn’t help laughing uproariously, but they would not have been laughing if they had known who was tailing them.

  Twister had turned round quickly in the mouth of a small development, abandoning his original plan and giving a van driver a two-fingered salute when he pulled back across the road in front of him. He had seen Kate and her boyfriend swing out of the police station yard on his approach and his curiosity had been instantly aroused.

  ‘Now where are you two off to?’ he murmured and headed after them, keeping his speed down and staying well back to avoid being spotted in their rear-view mirrors.

  His whole body tingled with excitement as he thought about the auburn-haired cop sitting in the front passenger seat now a couple of hundred yards in front of him and the very special end he had planned for her in the not too distant future.

  Ironically, the feeling of excitement in itself surprised him, suggesting a subtle change in his personality he had not experienced before. He had always enjoyed taking life, of course. First it had been cats and dogs, but by puberty the growing compulsion to kill people had become impossible to resist. The fat boy at his school had been his first and he still remembered, with a sense of nostalgia, the day he had plunged the chisel into Jerome Cassidy’s throat in the local park, then sat and watched him die. The scantily clad jogger and the middle-aged nurse h
ad followed. Both had been pretty enough women to stir any normal man’s juices, but he had simply strangled them, without any attempt at sexual interference.

  The thing was, sex had never been what it was about. It was the act of killing itself that had always interested him. But even this had never really excited him or given him the merest semblance of a hard-on. He had simply killed out of a sense of compulsion and had gained his satisfaction from watching the light go out in his victims’ eyes.

  Joining the army and then the SAS had enabled him to extend his murderous activities and develop a much more varied skills portfolio. He mastered a variety of weapons and methods to kill silently and efficiently in operations all around the world – and in the end, earned himself the nickname, Twister, for his favoured method of executing targets by snapping their spinal cords with a sharp, powerful twist of the neck.

  Although a keen, dedicated assassin, he had shown little emotion in carrying out these tasks. Like an alcoholic or drug addict, he had been driven solely by need, deriving satisfaction from extinguishing life in a cold clinical way that had both surprised and disturbed his comrades and had ultimately led to a court martial and dishonourable discharge when his well-known maverick approach and disobedience to orders was blamed for the death of a fellow soldier on a training exercise.

  The smothering of his own father some years later, in order to inherit his funeral business, had also been carried out with the same cold, unemotional efficiency and he’d felt no guilt or remorse for what he had done – or any sense of enjoyment either – merely satisfaction that once again he had got away with his crime.

  Now, though, after all these years, the prospect of wasting some nondescript woman cop had affected him in a way no previous target had ever managed to do, destroying his characteristic ambivalence and arousing in him a latent passion that was almost sexual and heightened his senses to fever pitch.

  He still couldn’t quite fathom why he had risked everything by coming back to the Levels to kill Kate Hamblin; why he had constructed this long drawn-out game as a lead-up to the final event, when he could so easily have snapped her neck at the start and been done with it. Ironically, he didn’t hate the woman, didn’t really feel vengeful towards her. In fact, in a way, as Doctor Norton had surmised at one of the police incident-room briefings, he actually liked and respected her. He just wanted – no, felt compelled – to destroy her. And now, on top of that, there was this emerging carnal desire to cloud the issue.

  It was an interesting novel feeling, but he had to regain control, and fast, or he would end up making mistakes and that would certainly not do at all.

  Patience, that was the watchword. His moment would come, but only when the game he was playing reached its planned finale and, although that day was not far off, they weren’t quite there yet. Still, he mused, the wait could only serve to sweeten what he now knew would be a truly orgasmic experience.

  Naomi Betjeman climbed out of bed naked and crossed to the chair opposite where she had left her clothes. She dressed quickly but quietly, throwing repeated glances at the rumpled bed and the naked, prostrate figure of Phil Sharp lying there on his back with his eyes closed and his mouth wide open.

  She treated him to a look of contempt. The skinny arms and legs, the faint smudge of blond hair on his narrow chest and his pathetic manhood poking above the pushed-down sheets, Sharp had about as much sexual appeal as a stick insect. She’d been dreading going to bed with him, but she need not have worried. He was so drunk by the time he had given up what he knew on the police operation, that he had promptly fallen asleep in an alcoholic stupor. It couldn’t have worked out better and she smiled faintly as she bent over the adjacent chest of drawers to scoop up Sharp’s five hundred notes she had just drawn out of her savings – well, the paper wouldn’t have paid that much for the information, would they?

  Peeling off a hundred, she tossed it on to the bed and slipped the rest into her handbag. ‘Don’t spend it all at once,’ she breathed at the insensible detective and turned for the door. ‘Now let’s see if I can stir up a hornet’s nest.’

  Albert Price was of little help to the police inquiry. Twister’s former administrator was in the first stages of dementia and was only a shadow of the man who had once been running things at the funeral parlour. His other half had died of a heart attack only weeks after the Operation Firetrap investigation had been mothballed and he could barely remember the case, let alone provide any useful information about Larry Wadman. After more than half an hour of gentle questioning in the living room of his one-bed bungalow, during which the old man constantly asked where his wife had gone for the afternoon, Kate and Hayden abandoned the interview leaving him to his confused ramblings and the imminent arrival of one of his regular carers.

  The experience had a sobering effect on Kate and she couldn’t help feeling a heel leaving him to his miserable surreal world with its whispering phantoms and half-assembled memories. But that was the nature of the job – ask the necessary questions, then move on – and above all, don’t get personally involved. And that’s exactly what she did. Yeah, she mused cynically, just like the good efficient police officer she had sworn to be.

  Their second visit could not have been more different and Kate had no difficulty in engaging her sympathy bypass. Roz Callow lived in a detached house bordered by large trees on the fringes of the picturesque village of Wedmore. She took a few moments to answer the door and when she did, Kate and Lewis saw why. She was leaning heavily on a steel walking stick.

  The lean figure and sour hatchet-face hadn’t changed a lot, although the former DCI looked much older than her forty-odd years. The pain lines were deeply etched into her pallid complexion, and her red woollen top and black trousers were stained and creased as though they had been slept in. There was an odour about her too – a stale morning-after smell that suggested she had been drinking heavily.

  She seemed unsurprised by the visit and treated Kate to a thin humourless smile, completely ignoring Lewis. ‘Well, well, well,’ she murmured, ‘if it isn’t Kate Hamblin, the new sergeant on the block. Congratulations.’

  Kate felt the muscles in her stomach knot as she faced the twisted lesbian woman who had made her life so much of a hell and had mounted a campaign of harassment against her during the Operation Firetrap inquiry, simply because she had rejected her sexual advances. For a moment she had difficulty finding her voice.

  In the end, after an awkward, pregnant pause, Lewis spoke for her. ‘Can we have a word, Roz?’ he said.

  Callow continued to ignore him, studying Kate keenly instead. ‘He’s back, isn’t he?’ she grated. ‘Twister’s come back?’

  Kate’s lips tightened. ‘Better if we talked in the house,’ she replied.

  Callow stepped to one side to allow them through and for the first time Kate saw the smoke trailing from a cigarette in her hand. All the vices now, it seemed. One day’s time it had been extra-strong peppermints, now it was booze and nicotine. Her old boss had certainly let herself go and she wondered whether she still lived alone or had shacked up with another lesbian lover.

  ‘So, to what do I owe this delightful visit?’ Callow said sarcastically, waving Kate and Hayden to adjoining armchairs in the shabby sitting-room. ‘Run out of experienced detectives, have they?’

  ‘Roz,’ Kate said quietly, ‘We need to know all you can remember about Larry Wadman.’

  Callow drew on her cigarette and smiled coldly through the smoke. ‘Everything I know?’ she murmured. ‘Well, isn’t that something? Inquiry at a standstill, is it?’

  Lewis emitted an impatient grunt. ‘We haven’t got time to play games, Roz,’ he snapped. ‘There’s a dangerous psycho out there and people’s lives are at risk.’

  Callow seemed unperturbed. ‘Like Kate Hamblin’s, you mean? Now, that is something to worry about, isn’t it? Especially as, according to the papers, he seems to be running rings around you.’

  ‘You should take no comfort from that,’
Kate pointed out. ‘You could be next on his list.’

  Callow emitted a hollow laugh. ‘I doubt it. I’m of no interest to him.’

  ‘Nor was PC Taylor, but Twister still snapped his neck,’ Lewis put in. ‘Depends what message he wants to send.’

  Callow’s humour faded and, despite her apparent self-confidence, Kate saw the quick glance she directed at the window.

  ‘So what can I possibly know about Wadman?’ she said, taking another pull on her cigarette, then lifting a half-filled glass to her lips from the adjacent coffee table. ‘I saw him for the first time on the night I was injured. Before that, I didn’t even know he existed.’

  ‘But you were pretty close to him at one stage. You must have formed some sort of impression of him.’

  Callow made a face. ‘Only that he had a very nasty B.O. problem.’

  ‘Pauline never mentioned him when you were – er – together then?’ Kate said as tactfully as she could manage.

  Callow’s thin lips curled in contempt. ‘You mean when we were having it off?’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you just say what you mean? And, as I told the police inquiry two years ago, the answer is “no”; we were too busy with each other.’

  ‘So you can’t tell us anything about him?’ Lewis cut in hastily, sensing the increasing hostility building between the two women.

  Callow shrugged and blew more smoke across the room. ‘Only what’s in his file.’

  Kate nodded and abruptly stood up. ‘Well, since you can’t help us with anything else, we’ll be on our way.’

  Callow stubbed out her cigarette and stood up. ‘There’s one thing you might like to know that I didn’t tell the inquiry,’ she said, studying her fixedly as she prepared her parting shot.

  ‘Oh? And what’s that?’

  ‘Pauline wasn’t dead when Twister sealed her up in Mary May’s coffin.’

  ‘What?’