by David Hodges
The powerful black saloon car which had followed Kate from the police station swung quickly into a convenient open gateway when the Mazda’s right-hand indicator came on to indicate it was turning off the main Wedmore to Glastonbury road, but as soon as the sports car had disappeared, the black saloon car pulled out again and crept to the junction with its lights extinguished.
Nosing slowly into the mouth of the lane, the driver was just in time to see the Mazda turn off again into the entrance to the twitcher’s house a few hundred yards further on. For a moment the driver of the car sat there, as if waiting to see if the Mazda would come out again. When it didn’t, the big black saloon drove right into the lane, still with its lights out and mist curling around the windscreen like streamers at a mediaeval tournament.
The car made no effort to turn into the entrance to the house, but drove very slowly past, the figure behind the wheel casting a keen eye over the open gates and along the perimeter hedge. A few yards further on the lane took a sharp left and the driver seemed to hesitate before swinging into the mouth of a drove just beyond the bend. Making very little engine noise, the car reversed out again, turning in the direction from which it had come, then reversed back into the drove until it was concealed behind a low hedge. A moment later the engine was cut and the driver, muffled in a woollen coat and carrying something in a long canvas bag, climbed awkwardly out of the vehicle and pushed the door closed.
A crane – one of the new arrivals on the Levels – rose from the adjoining rhyne with a weird cry and a flapping of giant wings. The figure started, then relaxed, watching the bird disappear into the mist like a wraith. From the adjoining field a cow released a loud choking cough and, in the stillness which then descended, it could be heard tugging at the long grass with its tongue. On the main road lights heralded the approach of a heavy-goods lorry which thundered past in the direction of Wedmore.
Seemingly satisfied that the Mazda’s headlights were not about to emerge from the grounds of the property, the figure moved off very slowly, heading back up the lane, but keeping close to the nearside hedge. At the gated entrance it paused to listen, but, hearing nothing, stepped through and picked its way with great care along the gravel driveway towards the house. Twister was about to have company.
Kate’s reflexes had always been quicker than most, and her recovery this time was only fractionally slower than usual, but she was still not quick enough. Even as she stumbled back from the chair, falling over on to her behind in the process, Twister was on his feet and standing over her.
‘You bastard,’ she jerked out through clenched teeth, ‘you filthy bastard!’
He smiled and held a finger up to his lips, motioning her to silence. Then, kneeling on one knee beside her, he undid the buttons on the short woollen coat she was wearing, followed by the buttons on her blouse. Mentally recoiling from his touch, she felt his fingers release the studs on her front-fastening bra and a second later winced as he tore the electronic wire free, brutally parting the tapes holding it in place. At the same time he snapped the connection to the tiny transmitter and removed it with similar brute force, drawing a sharp cry from her as the tapes were ripped from her stomach.
‘That’s better,’ he said and stood up again, dropping the transmitter on the floor at his feet and crushing it under his heel. ‘After all, we don’t want anyone eavesdropping on our little tête-á-tête, do we?’ He smiled. ‘At least your police radio is still in your car. It’s all worked out quite well really, hasn’t it?’
Kate said nothing, but simply stared up at him, breathing heavily, her eyes burning with hatred as she forgot even to refasten her bra and blouse.
With a heavy manufactured sigh, he leaned over her again and, almost tenderly, did the job for her, making no attempt to caress her breasts, but acting like a doctor concluding the examination of a mentally retarded patient. ‘There, there,’ he said, ‘all done now. Can’t have you catching cold, can we?’
Reaching down, he offered her his hand. ‘May I?’ he said in the manner of a gentleman assisting a lady to her feet after she has accidentally tripped over at a society ball.
Without taking her eyes off him, she obediently accepted the offer, but the moment she was on her feet, she suddenly went for him, bringing her knee up savagely towards his crutch.
But she was out of her league. His knee deflected hers with bruising force and, bending her wrist downwards and sideways, he spun her round and forced her back on to the floor on her knees, with her arm now twisted up behind her back. ‘Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it?’ he murmured, bending close to her ear, heedless of her moans at the stabbing pain in her constricted muscles. ‘Now, I’m going to let you up. Try that again and I’ll actually break your arm, OK?’
She nodded quickly, knowing full well that he would do precisely what he had threatened. At once his grip slackened and she allowed herself to be helped back on her feet.
‘Sit down, Kate,’ he said softly and indicated a two-seater settee opposite the desk. ‘Then we can have our little chat in comfort.’
She sat down carefully, rubbing the circulation back in to her arm. ‘So you’ve been leading us by the nose right from the start?’ she said.
He dropped into the swivel chair again with a soft chuckle and poured himself a large whisky from a half-empty bottle of Talisker single malt. ‘All the way,’ he gloated, ‘and it has been really ace.’ He shook his head with another sigh. ‘I am surprised that you didn’t see through me, though, Kate – you of all people. But I did go to a lot of trouble to change my appearance – shaved off the beard, changed the colour and style of my hair and everything. Nature helped too. I lost a couple of stone after I was stabbed all that time ago and I made sure I kept the weight off for the part I had to play.’
‘And I suppose the body at the reserve will turn out to be Norton’s?’ she went on bitterly. ‘Another innocent victim.’
He nodded several times. ‘Been watching him for weeks,’ he explained. ‘Knew where he lived, what he looked like, what car he drove – even his twitching habits. Had to be him, you see. As a notable criminal psychologist and profiler, he was my “in” as far as the police murder inquiry was concerned, so I couldn’t afford any mistakes. Presenting myself as an arty effeminate wasn’t easy, but I made sure I adopted all the right mannerisms – even down to that awful lisp he had—’
‘But you couldn’t hide your smell,’ she cut in viciously, ‘and you certainly stink!’
He tutted. ‘Now that isn’t very nice, Kate,’ he said and smiled again. ‘But, yes, I do have a personal problem, which made the strong perfume essential and, of course, my rather unique eyes are a real giveaway, so I was pleased that poor old Norton wore those fancy specs. All I had to do was snuff him out, take over his identity and ring your gullible boss to offer my expert services. Simple really. Just a pity I left that flask of his behind in the hide – nearly scuppered me, that did.’
‘And all those killings, just to get at me,’ Kate choked, her sudden surge of distress quite genuine.
He shook his head. ‘Oh you mustn’t think that,’ he corrected. ‘It wasn’t done to get at you. It was just part of a little game I’d put together and I had hoped you would accept it for what it was and get into the spirit of things. See, I always regarded you as a bit of unfinished business, and it hurt my pride to think that I hadn’t tidied up properly after Operation Firetrap.’
‘So now you’re going to murder me, like the others?’ she said, but, even as she spoke, her eyes were flicking round the room, looking for an escape route.
‘Oh no,’ he said, almost beaming at her. ‘Nothing so mundane. I have a much more spectacular demise reserved for you.’
‘So why go to all the trouble of setting up the sting operation if you were going to snatch me like this anyway?’ she queried.
There was a smug expression on his face now. ‘An essential part of the game, Kate,’ he said. ‘You see, I knew I would have to get your boyfriend ou
t of the way on the big day in order to isolate you. Wasting him would simply have sent the balloon up and resulted in an even tighter protective net being put around you, so I hit on the idea of making a series of passes at you. The intention was to provoke an angry and very public reaction from him, which would plant the idea in everyone’s mind that you and I could be having an affair and enable me to suggest at the crucial time that this be used as the foundation for the sting operation, with Hayden banged up to give it authenticity—’
‘And we all fell for it,’ she cut in, deliberately pandering to his ego in an effort to distract him – and for a very good reason.
With a sudden rush of adrenalin, she had glimpsed the figure at the window peering in at them. She couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman from where she sat – the face was just a blob inside a hood – but for the first time she felt a stab of hope.
He chuckled. ‘It worked even better than I had expected too,’ he went on, seemingly oblivious to the intruder just feet away from him on the other side of the thin pane of glass. ‘Poor old Hayden gave an excellent demonstration of jealous rage in front of half of his colleagues by thumping Phil Sharp. Then, as the expert criminal psychologist, it was easy to convince Ansell and Co not only to go along with my plan, but to assume nothing would happen to you until tonight. So, lulled into a false sense of security, the twats forgot all about the risk to you in the meantime. Pure genius on my part.’
The figure at the window had disappeared. Kate gnawed at her lip. Who the hell was it? What were they doing wandering about the garden? More importantly, how would they know she was being held captive by a homicidal maniac? And would they actually care anyway if they were up to no good? She had to keep him talking a bit longer to give the intruder the opportunity of taking another look, so she could attract their attention in some way.
‘But why snatch me from the nick like this?’ she blurted, casting another quick glance at the window. ‘You could have lain in wait for me at home.’
He emitted a hard laugh. ‘What, and risk the prospect of running into your tooled-up colleagues staking out your place? That would have been stupid. No, I had to do it before you got home and when everyone’s guard was down. Trouble is, this has presented me with a slight problem.’
To her alarm, he was on his feet again, draining his whisky glass as he did so. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’
She hesitated and his eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll say it one more time, Kate,’ he warned. ‘Up!’
Reluctantly, she obeyed, glancing once more at the window, but seeing no one. Damn!
He nodded towards the door. ‘You first,’ he ordered.
She could actually feel his breath on her neck as he nudged her out into the hallway and towards a small door under the stairs. ‘Open it,’ he said.
She obeyed and saw steps leading down. He prodded her forward and flicked a switch, flooding the stairway with light. There was a cellar at the bottom, glistening with moisture, and Kate saw racks of wine bottles stacked along one wall and an assortment of decrepit looking furniture in a corner, including a stained mattress.
‘Some good years down here,’ Twister joked, nodding towards the wine, and Kate flinched as he grabbed her right arm and snapped a handcuff over her wrist. ‘But don’t knock back too much, will you?’
Pushing her in the direction of the furniture, he told her to sit on the mattress and, when she had done so, he trailed a long steel chain looped around one of the thick iron legs of the wine rack across the floor and snapped the other half of the handcuffs to one of the links, preventing her moving more than four feet in any direction. Then he straightened up again. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, ‘but my problem is that we are left with a few hours to kill before the big event and I can’t chance moving you until after dark. Still, you’re nice and comfy down here and you can always have a little snooze.’
‘When my colleagues sus you out, this house will be the first place they’ll look,’ she threw back at him. ‘That will bugger up your so-called event, won’t it?’
He laughed again. ‘I doubt that very much, Kate,’ he said. ‘After the long night they’ve had, they’ll all be safely tucked up in bed until at least lunchtime and anyway, how can they possibly have worked out that their quarry is actually their own brilliant psychologist? After all, they’ve been clueless throughout the whole inquiry so far.’
Then she saw him climbing the stairs back up to the hallway and seconds later the lights went out and she was alone in the darkness, listening to the faint trickle of water down the walls.
chapter 33
TWISTER’S FIRST JOB after dumping Kate in the cellar was to head for the shower and he spent a good twenty minutes washing away the last traces of Doctor Norton’s identity, including the dyed blond hair, and dumping the hated clothes and shoes into a dirty linen basket. What did it matter if the police found them later? He felt sure he would be long gone before they managed to put two and two together anyway.
He nearly forgot the earring with its attached crucifix and made a face when he saw it in the mirror. ‘That’s certainly not you, my friend,’ he commented, unclipping it and dropping it down the toilet, but still, it had served its purpose and he was well satisfied with the way he had managed to impersonate Norton over such a protracted period.
Dressing in his own crepe shoes, brown corduroy trousers and thick winter shirt, he headed downstairs with a spring in his step, checking Kate on the way and blowing her a kiss before shutting her in darkness again. His hooded woollen coat was hanging on a peg by the front door and, pulling it on, he left the house and crunched his way to Kate’s Mazda. Opening the garage doors wide, he drove the little sports car inside, parking next to the battered green Land Rover with the canvas hood that Norton had been using for his twitcher activities.
He smiled as he got out of the Mazda. The Land Rover was a crappy motor, as he had found out when he had driven it back from the wildlife reserve after killing Norton, but it had proved very useful to him and it had at least removed the need for him to hire – or steal – another vehicle for the final part of his little operation. All he had to do now was to finish up at Norton’s house, then collect Kate and be on his way – game, set and match. Couldn’t be easier – or so he thought – but unbeknown to him at that precise moment, a rather sticky problem was about to descend on him, which had the capacity to derail everything he had worked for, and it materialized with the crunch of feet in the gravel in front of the garage as he slammed the Mazda’s door shut.
Jerking his head in the direction of the sound, he found himself staring down the twin barrels of a twelve-bore shotgun, which was levelled at his stomach by another hooded figure standing in the open doorway.
‘Larry Wadman,’ Roz Callow gloated, shaking the hood off her head. ‘I knew if I kept on Hamblin’s tail, she’d lead me to you eventually.’
Twister treated her to a mirthless smile, seemingly unfazed by the formidable weapon in her grip, almost as if the whole thing was part of the same sort of perverse game he himself liked to play.
‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured, propping himself on the rear offside wing of the sports car. ‘The inimitable Rozalind Callow. How nice to see you again. Quite nostalgic actually.’
‘You think so, do you?’ Callow grated, leaning heavily on her stick with her other hand. ‘Maybe you’ll change your mind in a few minutes.’
‘Come to arrest me then, have you?’ Twister queried. ‘Bit late for that, isn’t it? After all, you’re no longer in the force, are you? No power of arrest and all that?’
Callow emitted a harsh laugh. ‘Arrest?’ she echoed. ‘I’m not here to arrest you, you bastard, I’m here to kill you.’
Twister tutted. ‘Kill me? That’s a bit out of order for an ex-DCI, isn’t it? Still smarting over the death of your girlfriend two years ago, are you?’
At first it seemed that he had lost his senses. It was patently obvious that Callow had
become seriously deranged and winding up a deranged woman armed with a shotgun is never the most sensible thing to do. As it was, Callow seemed to go rigid at the jibe and the shotgun jerked upwards, wandered slightly then steadied, with the stock pressed against her hip and the barrels levelled at his chest. She was obviously having difficulty holding the heavy weapon in one hand and for a second Twister really thought there was a danger of it going off involuntarily.
‘The pair of you ruined my life,’ she said, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘Once I had a career and a future.’ She tapped her leg awkwardly with the stick, swaying slightly. ‘But, thanks to you and that bitch, Pauline, I ended up a bloody cripple with nothing. So now it’s payback time.’
And before Twister could say anything else, the twin barrels of the shotgun erupted with a deafening roar.
DCI Ansell dragged himself out of bed at just after one in the afternoon – feeling a bit like death warmed up after barely five hours fitful sleep – and snatched a quick bite to eat and a shower before returning to Highbridge police station to prepare for the night’s ‘fun and games’. It was close on three before he finally pushed through the back door of the nick and he muttered an oath when he almost collided with the duty inspector, Taff Holland, who had come on late-turn duty at 2.00 pm.
Holland looked even more haggard than he did and his face wore an anxious frown as he acknowledged Ansell with a brief ‘Afternoon, sir,’ and a polite nod.
The DCI was actually halfway to the stairs when he called out after him. ‘Couldn’t have a word, could I, sir?’ he blurted.
Ansell turned with a characteristic frown. ‘If you must,’ he responded tightly.
Holland hesitated. ‘It’s Hayden Lewis, sir,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t bail him now, could we?’
Ansell raised an eyebrow. ‘Why?’