by David Hodges
Finally, pouring a black coffee from the flask she had brought with her, she set the plastic cup on the edge of the desk, switched on the computer and waited. The screen flashed into life, within a couple of seconds, accompanied by a faint ‘fizz’ and, tapping in her password to access the company’s intranet, she waited for the list of options to appear on the light blue screen. When they finally jerked into place, she selected the appropriate icon, then typed in the necessary subject information request in the browser and clicked on.
The system seemed to hold its breath, then abruptly the front page of a two-year old edition of the Clarion appeared on the screen, bearing the headline ‘Murder Mayhem’ and a photograph embedded in the text of an apparently burned-out Transit van on a rutted marshland track. She scrolled down and stiffened as a man’s bearded face stared back at her from a centre page. Even without reading the caption underneath, she knew instinctively that the picture was that of Larry Wadman and for several moments she simply froze in her chair.
She had not joined the Clarion from university until well after the Operation Firetrap inquiry had finished, so this was the first time she had seen a close-up of the psychopath Sharp had referred to as Twister. But her heart began making strange sucking noises as her gaze became riveted on that cold, hard face and the empty soulless eyes – eyes that lacked even the slightest hint of emotion or humanity and bore a macabre resemblance to those of a corpse.
And as she stared into them, something clicked in her brain, an incredible realization that made her skin crawl and sent her thoughts careering off into cyberspace. Her intention had been to access the newspaper’s archives for background information on the old Firetrap investigation, but instead, by pure accident, she had stumbled upon something far more significant, something so mind-blowing that she could hardly believe it. And on top of that, she could now also remember with startling clarity what it was about her assailant that she had been trying to recall after he had attacked her in the derelict house – in itself a very small detail, but one which, together with the revelations provided by the computer’s archived newspaper report, had assumed major significance.
Returning to terra firma, she took a gulp of her coffee and sat back in the chair to think things out. She would have to inform the police inquiry team immediately; it was her moral duty – and, of course, she mused with a grim tightening of her mouth, it would also earn her the recognition she craved. This time, however, she was going to call the shots; this time Ansell and his crew would have to play by her rules, whether they liked it or not.
She heard the door open at the top of the stairs as she reached for the telephone and cursed under her breath. The last thing she wanted to do was to share her information with Sharp and she wished now she hadn’t arranged the meet in the first place.
‘Be with you in a minute, Phil,’ she called as she quickly exited the digital archives. ‘Take a seat somewhere.’
But the figure now standing behind her, his face reflected in the dying screen, was definitely not who she was expecting.
Phil Sharp had the mother of a hangover and the last thing he wanted to do was go out. But the prospect of retrieving the four hundred he was owed overcame his natural inclination to go back to bed and continue to sleep it off.
Just before eight in the evening, without bothering to shower or shave and pulling on an old tracksuit and trainers, he dosed up on a couple of mugs of black coffee and a handful of painkillers before ringing for a taxi to take him to the pub where he had left his car.
His flashy unaffordable Subaru was exactly where he had left it – surprising with all the villains there were about in the area – and it started with the usual satisfying roar that gave the poser in him so much satisfaction.
He knew he should never have been driving in his condition. With the number of double whiskies he had poured down his throat that morning, he had to be well over the limit, even after several hours sleep, but he didn’t see that he had a choice if he wanted his money and, hopefully, his uniformed colleagues would be too busy hunting a serial killer to bother too much about drinking and driving offences.
To avoid drawing attention to himself, he drove with particular care, but if there was one thing Detective Sergeant Sharp should have learned after several years’ police experience was that, however careful one driver is, there are always others who are not.
The supermarket van driver was in a hurry; he was late with a delivery and it was the third time in as many days. Sacked from his previous job because of poor performance and already on a verbal warning with his present employers, he couldn’t afford another slip up. Nevertheless, he made one – and in the most public way possible.
He didn’t see the silver Subaru when he pulled out of the turning on to the main Bridgwater Road and by the time the headlights blazed in his side window, it was already too late.
Had Sharp not been suffering from the effects of alcohol, he might have avoided a collision, but on this occasion he was a fraction slower than usual and that was all that was necessary. Although he hit the brake pedal hard and swerved to his nearside, he ploughed into the driver’s door of the van at a little over 40 mph, sending it careering across the road into the path of an articulated lorry, which braked hard, and jackknifed across both lanes.
The thud of more collisions followed in quick succession, but Sharp hardly heard them and he was still sitting in the driving seat of his wrecked Subaru, shocked, bruised but otherwise uninjured, when the police traffic officer finally approached him.
‘You OK sir?’ she queried and he nodded vaguely as she helped him out of the car.
‘Your car is it? You driving at the time? Good, then I must require you to take a breath test. I realize the accident probably wasn’t your fault, but each driver will have to be tested.’
He stared at her, uncomprehending, and she added, ‘Nothing to worry about. It’s just routine.’
chapter 22
TWISTER KNEW FROM bitter experience that Naomi Betjeman was a handful. What he didn’t anticipate was that she would see his reflection in the computer screen before he got to her and react with the speed that she did.
The coffee hit him full in the face as she whirled round, sending him staggering back with a cry of pain, and before he could recover, she was racing for the iron staircase leading to the street. But Twister could react with equal speed when he needed to and he got to her just as she reached the door at the top, grabbing her arm and pitching her into the opposite wall before swinging round to block her exit.
The only way Naomi could go was up, but she didn’t hesitate, stumbling away from him with blood dripping from a re-opened split eyebrow caused by the broken frame of her taped-up glasses. She just prayed that the door on the ground-floor landing above, giving access to editorial offices, was not locked – and she was in luck.
The heavy fire door took all her strength to pull open, and she was only just through when Twister got to the landing and made a grab for the handle as the door swung to behind her.
The moon was out and its brilliance flooded into the room through the large windows, providing enough light for Naomi to see by as she stumbled along a narrow aisle between two rows of work-stations, but the light also enabled her pursuer to follow her more easily and she sensed him just a couple of yards behind her, panting heavily.
Approaching the door to the front foyer at the other end of the room, she suddenly swung sideways, away from the reach of the moonlight, and, as the darkness folded around her, she dropped to her knees between two workstations and scrambled into a deep kneehole. She heard Twister jerk to a stop, still panting, and sensed his eyes – those frightening dead eyes – staring about him in the gloom, trying to pinpoint her position. She waited for him to switch on the main lights, but nothing happened and she breathed a sigh of relief when it dawned on her that he probably didn’t want to attract attention from outside the building by such a move.
But her relief was short-lived and the
next moment she froze as she heard him squeeze between two of the workstations just feet from where she crouched, groping for her in the gloom.
‘You might as well give it up, Naomi,’ he said suddenly. ‘I shall find you in the end, you know that, don’t you?’
The voice was low and confident, if slightly wheezy, but there was no trace of malice in the tone. In a weird kind of way, it was almost soothing, but his statement carried absolute conviction and she shuddered. The creature was a virtual automaton.
‘Naomi, where are you?’ she heard him call, this time in a sing-song voice, like a child playing a game, adding with a heavy sigh, ‘OK, coming, ready or not.’
It was all like some kind of nightmare and she screwed up her eyes and clenched her fists in an effort to hold back the panic that was threatening to engulf her in an irrational burst of hysteria.
‘Naomi? Naomi?’ he called again in the same sing-song voice. ‘Come out, come out wherever you are?’
Now he was standing directly in front of her hideaway, just his lower legs and feet visible in a shard of moonlight probing the gap.
Silence. She could feel her heart racing, like an engine with the clutch out, and felt sure its frantic beat could be heard all over the room. He gave no indication of this, however, and moved on. Still she remained where she was, suspecting that he was standing among the other workstations, just waiting for her to give herself away.
‘Naomi, sweetheart, give us a clue?’
The voice was now much further away, to her right. Dare she take the chance and make a run for it? Just as she was about to risk it, however, there was another development and she stiffened as heavy footsteps crunched in the gravel outside the row of windows through which the moonlight blazed. The beam of a powerful torch grazed the top of the desk beneath which she crouched and she heard the muffled rattle of heavy glass entrance doors being shaken in the front foyer towards which she had been fleeing.
Security! The paper’s bloody security patrol was checking the premises – due to a broken alarm system, it was the Clarion’s only defence against break-ins – and, stuck under a desk in the virtually blacked out office, she had no way of attracting the man’s attention before Twister got to her. Her only hope was that the security officer would now go down the steps to the lower car-park at the back of the building, find the basement door unlocked and investigate.
But even if he did, would he be a match for a creature like Twister? Pretty unlikely. Most of the security officers she had seen were either elderly retired coppers or spotty-faced university students trying to earn a crust while they decided on their future careers – a pushover for the psychopath – so she would still be dead at the end of any confrontation anyway. All she could do was to treat this distraction as an opportunity to effect her escape.
Creeping out of her hiding place on all fours, she carefully crawled between the rows of workstations. Heading back towards the door leading to the basement, she hoped that Twister would assume she would try to make for the front foyer instead – especially after hearing the security man checking the main entrance doors.
Peering round the last desk in the row, she could see the door clearly outlined in the moonlight, the aisle between it and the door to the foyer completely empty. Where the hell had the psychopath gone? She glanced over her shoulder between the workstations. Slivers of moonlight traced faint lines along the floor, but otherwise everything was in deep shadow.
Gritting her teeth, she raised herself on her haunches, gripped the edge of the desk for a second and then ran full tilt for the door. She expected firm resistance as she grabbed the handle, but to her surprise, the door opened easily, throwing her off-balance and pitching her forwards on to the landing. She caught a brief glimpse of Twister holding the door back on the other side, but before she could recover, he had released it and was reaching for her. In a desperate attempt to evade those deadly hands, she threw herself sideways, but lost her balance and pitched headfirst over the guard-rail, hitting the concrete floor thirty feet below with a sickening crunch of shattered bone.
Fred Jarvis had only worked as a security officer for eight months and, if he was honest with himself, after thirty-eight years in the police force, eight as a civilian office manager on CID, he saw it as a bit of a come-down. Shaking the door-handles of factories and offices as a pseudo policeman left him cold, but he needed the job, both for the money and to make up his National Insurance contributions until he qualified for his state pension, which would then top up the small police pension he now received as a former detective constable.
As a fifty-nine year old, heavily built man suffering from gout, Jarvis moved only slowly and he often wondered how he would ever manage to detain a villain at his age and in his condition if he was to catch a fit, young toe-rag breaking into one of the properties on his rounds. He would have a go obviously – old habits died hard – but he didn’t rate his chances very high.
He moved slowly now as he approached the rear of the Clarion’s offices, after satisfying himself that the doors at the front of the building were secure, but jumped, his senses tingling, when he saw the basement door standing partially open and the lights on inside. Hearing a faint sound a few yards away, he flicked on his powerful torch and caught a glimpse of what he thought was a shadow moving swiftly away from him along the wall of the place towards a service road, but when he focused the torch on the spot, the beam met only bare brickwork and he relaxed with a sense of relief, putting his intruder down to nothing more than a trick of the moonlight.
Approaching the open door, still with some trepidation, he peered inside and immediately stiffened, hardly able to believe his eyes. The prostrate figure was lying motionless on the floor of the basement directly below him, a pool of blood spreading out from underneath her body like the contents of a broken wine bottle.
‘Bloody hell!’ he muttered and stumbled over to her.
He recognized the woman at once; she was the nice young reporter who had given him a cup of coffee a couple of times when he was on his evening rounds and it seemed she had been working late again. He glanced up at the staircase as he bent over her. Even from where he knelt, he could see that the handrail on the topmost landing was badly twisted. Poor little begger, he mused, thinking she must have tripped in some way and pitched over.
He felt her throat and, to his relief, detected a faint pulse. Then, to his surprise, her eyes flickered open and she muttered something he couldn’t quite make out. He shook his head sadly. ‘Now you just lie still, love,’ he said in an attempt at reassurance and depressed the transmit button of his radio to call for an ambulance.
On a piece of waste-ground on the other side of the service road, Twister started the engine of his stolen Mercedes and pulled away quietly without lights.
He knew he should have made sure that that reporter bitch was actually dead before he’d quit the building and he’d broken his own golden rule by not doing so – even though it was pretty unlikely that she would have survived a fall from around thirty feet on to solid concrete. OK, so the security patrol had been on his way, but he could easily have disposed of a Wally like that if the man had been foolish enough to turn up before he’d got clear. Trouble was, he’d had no means of knowing if the old duffer had called his control centre immediately he’d spotted the back door open, which meant the police could already be on their way, or whether he had had a partner with him and it wasn’t worth hanging around to find out.
In fact, it was probably best to leave the whole thing looking like an accident anyway, just in case Old Bill was persuaded to delve a little too deeply into what Betjeman had been doing in the building so late in the evening. Twister found it difficult to believe that she could have sussed out anything of any significance in their earlier confrontation at the derelict, but he couldn’t afford to take the risk – which is why he had decided to go after her again, just in case – and, although he didn’t think she had left any incriminating notes anywhere, he could
do without Ansell and his crew sniffing around on the outside chance that they might find something.
Turning from the service road on to the main drag, he switched on his lights and accelerated smoothly away, leaving the night to the ambulance and police patrol cars that flashed past him in quick succession as he headed for home.
Kate Hamblin pushed wearily through the doors of the deserted incident-room at just after ten and hung the ignition keys of her CID car on one of the hooks screwed into the edge of the big white board on its school-like easel leaning against one wall.
For a moment she stared at the gruesome SOCO photographs of Jennifer Malone and Eugene Taylor fixed to the board – each with black chinograph pencil scrawls underneath – and took a deep trembling breath. Both dead and all because of her. Now there was another one – still to be identified – that would soon be joining them. How many more were there yet to come? And how long before Twister tired of his sick game and came for her?
She stared at the enlarged photograph of the psychopath in the middle of the board. He was just as she remembered him – the hard wide face, bushy black beard and those awful corpse-like eyes. But would he be the same now? She doubted it. Ansell had engaged a forensic artist to come up with an image of what he might look like after two years, without the beard, but it was a tall order and, to her mind, likely to be very much hit and miss.
But what else had they to go on? The only people who had seen him recently were dead – with the exception of Del Shaylor, who was still in hospital with second degree burns and had only seen his silhouette in a car at night, and Naomi Betjeman, who claimed she had not seen much of him at all when he had grabbed her from behind in the derelict next door. They were literally fighting in the dark. All she did know was that Twister’s fingerprints had been found all over the coffin in which Jennifer Malone’s body had been dumped, as well as in Pauline Cross’s old house. The killer had obviously made no effort to conceal his identity. Why would he? As Doctor Norton had already pointed out, that was the main purpose of his killing spree – to let everyone know he was back, and with a vengeance.