Requiem

by David Hodges

  ‘Something suspicious here, I can feel it in my water,’ Lewis commented.

  ‘Feel what you like,’ the pilot replied, switching off the searchlight, ‘but I’m taking her up anyway.’

  The machine had only just begun its ascent when the radio call came through from the police control room with the stunning news about Norton and directing the chopper to the deceased’s home near Wedmore, just a stone’s throw from their present position.

  ‘I’ll put you down in that field behind the house,’ the pilot told Lewis seconds later. ‘Hope you’re good at climbing gates.’

  The convoy of flashing blue lights was already converging on the house as the helicopter began its descent and Lewis had only just sprinted across the field to the five-barred gate, when the first of the police cars raced past and swung into the driveway of Norton’s isolated property on the opposite side of the adjacent lane.

  Lewis trotted into a cacophony of slamming doors, blasting radios and barking dogs – temporarily blinded by a surreal blaze of pulsing red and blue strobes – as he pushed through the confusion of uniformed bodies and parked patrol cars to the front door of the house.

  He heard the door go in under the swing of the police ram before he got there and he followed the armed team into the now lighted hallway, brushing aside a couple of his colleagues who tried to stop him. But it was all too late; after a thorough search of the house and grounds, the place proved to be completely empty.

  It was only when he was stumbling back out into the driveway that he heard the loud yell. ‘Hayden, over here.’ The doors to the garage stood wide open and the interior lights came on even before he got to them.

  ‘Is this hers?’ Roscoe demanded, his pork-pie hat askew on his bullet head and his heavy jowls working hard on his chewing gum.

  Lewis clutched at the door frame for support. The blue Mazda was parked inside – nose first – and he recognized the number immediately.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Ansell rapped from the other end of the garage, ‘Kate’s not here. ’ He paused. ‘But unfortunately something else is.’

  Lewis walked slowly, hesitantly towards his boss, dreading what he might find, then froze just a few feet from him.

  The woman was obviously dead, and her body had been strung up by the ankles from a cross member of the roof frame like a stuck pig, a savage gash in her throat and the pool of blood beneath indicating that her throat had been cut. Just feet away, a discarded shotgun lay beside a bale of straw, broken open like a snapped leg, sinister, but useless. Roz Callow may have had the upper hand when she had confronted Twister, but she had still ended up dead!

  Twister had seen the police helicopter seconds before it zoomed in on him, shaking the Land Rover violently and causing him to over-steer briefly. He was not that concerned about being spotted. He knew the crew wouldn’t be able to identify him from overhead and Kate was well out of sight already trussed up and insensible in the back.

  He had employed his usual pressure point technique on her straight after killing Roz Callow and a quick injection while she was unconscious had made sure she would stay that way – at least for a few hours anyway. He couldn’t have felt more confident about passing police scrutiny and it was in a surge of exuberance that he had made his obscene gesture to the chopper overhead, reasoning that they would not expect a fugitive to be so brazen as to do that.

  It worked too and, as the helicopter rose into the darkening heavens again before thudding away across the Levels, he grinned to himself. Everything was going so well, despite Roz Callow’s brief intervention, and he relived her last moments in his mind with a deep sense of satisfaction, while he negotiated the labyrinth of droves and tracks towards his ultimate destination just a few miles away.

  The silly cow had obviously not known much about shotguns. Fancy trying to fire the thing using one arm and with the stock resting against her hip of all places. The recoil itself must have done her some real mischief. It had literally blown her off her feet, piling the shot into the roof of the barn instead of into him. He hadn’t given her the opportunity to reload, but had been on to her even before she could regain her feet, snapping her neck in a second. He had only slit her throat and strung her up from the roof of the barn for effect – she was already dead by then.

  Yeah, he was on course for a really brilliant finale to his endgame. Nothing could stop him now and by the early hours he would be en route to the safe house in Manchester that he had already organized, with the prospect of a flight out of the country to look forward to in a month. OK, so it was tempting to blow immediately after the job, but that would have been stupid. Patience was always his watchword. People got nicked because they rushed into things. The trick was to lie low and wait for the heat of the police hunt to dissipate and the imposition of the inevitable ‘all ports’ warning to be relaxed. Then it was a case of ‘Rio, here I come’, he mused. Brilliant.

  ‘So now what?’ Lewis said bitterly, watching two uniformed police officers fixing the blue and white ‘police crime scene’ tapes across the garage doorway as he digested Roscoe’s information about Norton. He was trembling slightly and his eyes had the wide-eyed look of someone very close to the edge.

  Roscoe made a face. ‘We’ve called out SOCO, so they should be here within the hour—’ he began.

  ‘SOCO?’ Lewis stormed. ‘I don’t give a damn about SOCO. What about Kate? She’s out there somewhere in the clutches of a madman.’

  ‘We’re doing everything we can,’ Willoughby joined in hesitantly. ‘Half the district is out looking for her. She’s bound to be located before long.’

  Lewis laughed, a cracked unnatural sound. ‘Yes, but in what condition?’ he retorted. ‘She’s probably already lying dead in a ditch somewhere.’

  ‘I doubt that very much,’ Ansell spoke at his elbow. ‘Midnight is several hours away yet.’

  ‘Midnight?’ Lewis exclaimed. ‘You don’t seriously believe all that the nonsense Twister fed us in his guise as Doctor Norton is still relevant, do you? It was all a con to put us off the scent.’

  Ansell shook his head. ‘I disagree. Twister may have been leading us up the garden path as our so-called adviser throughout much of the inquiry, but I reckon his claim that Kate will be executed at midnight – the exact moment when the surveillance van was blown apart two years ago – was legit.’

  ‘And why the devil would he reveal something so critical to his own sick plan?’

  Ansell studied him fixedly in the light streaming out of the garage. ‘For the same reason that he was so keen to provide us with what I think was such a candid profile of himself,’ he said. ‘He sees all this as a contest – and it bolsters his ego to drip-feed us with the necessary information all the way through, with the intention of pulling the rug out from under us at the final moment, thus proving his superiority. But, as he himself revealed at one of the briefings in a rather stupid Freudian slip, arrogance is his Achilles heel and that’s what we will use against him now.’

  Lewis snorted. ‘And exactly how will that work?’ he blazed, heedless of rank or anything else in his impotent fury. ‘We don’t have the slightest idea where he has taken Kate or even what vehicle he is using.’

  ‘I might be able to help there, Hayden,’ another voice cut in. Jimmy Noble had obviously overheard what Lewis was saying – along with half the officers at the scene, in fact – and he steered the detective by the elbow to the garage doors.

  ‘See that,’ he said and pointed. Two wheels with thick heavy tyres stood against one wall, alongside a badly dented metal wing. ‘Norton had two vehicles – the Merc that Twister left at the nick, and another motor, which was obviously parked there,’ and he pointed at a heavy oil stain on the concrete floor. ‘And, looking at those wheels and the shape and colour of that damaged wing, I’m willing to bet that the other vehicle was an old green Land Rover.’

  For a moment Lewis simply stared at the oil stain as if Noble had drawn his attention to another corpse, his mind in s
hocked paralysis, as he remembered the green Land Rover he had spotted from the police helicopter. ‘Hell’s bells!’ he choked, finally shaking off his numbing mental blanket, ‘I let it go – I let the damned thing go!’

  Grabbing Noble by the shoulders, he shook him fiercely. ‘Where’s your car?’ he shouted. ‘We must get after them. There may still be time.’

  Noble looked bewildered. ‘I … I’m boxed in,’ he said, his gaze roving quickly around the jam of police cars, ‘I can’t go anywhere.’

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Ansell demanded, striding over to them.

  But Lewis was in no mood for explanations. Pushing his boss roughly aside, he sprinted between the vehicles to a traffic car, parked, with its engine running, in the mouth of the driveway. Flinging the driver’s door wide and ignoring the shouts of the crew as they ran back towards him from the house, he engaged gear and reversed at speed out through the gateway of the property, clipped the far verge, then pulled away like a madman along the lane towards the main road, fish-tailing dangerously as he went.

  Behind him he left pandemonium as other police cars, one with Roscoe and Ansell aboard, tried to extricate themselves from the mêlée of vehicles with a blaring of horns and the crunch of metal. Even when Roscoe finally found a way through and raced towards the open gateway into the lane, a big SOCO van swung in through the entrance, followed closely by a police dog van, blocking them in again. Roscoe was still remonstrating with the SOCO driver as the deep, misty dusk of the Levels swallowed Lewis whole.

  chapter 36

  KATE SURFACED THROUGH a clammy mist, conscious of a raging thirst, a splitting headache and an inability to see anything, save distorted white blobs that constantly expanded and shrank in front of her, like spectral amoeba. As the waves of nausea that had accompanied her awakening began to subside and her vision steadied, she began to focus on her surroundings – and immediately to doubt her own sanity.

  She was in a small room, held in the glare of powerful spotlights placed at one end, which prevented her seeing beyond their blazing orbs. Her wrists were secured by sticky black tape to the arms of what appeared to be a leather swivel chair, which was bolted to the floor. She frowned. No, it wasn’t a room, but the rear of some kind of van or lorry – she could now see that the walls, roof and floor were made of spray-painted grey steel and there were double doors at the opposite end to the spotlights, which were tightly closed, plus a further side door a few feet to the left of her chair. Directly in front of her, a laptop computer, fitted with an external camera pointing directly at her and linked to what looked like a DVR, occupied a square pedestal and there were two more swivel chairs, one fixed to the floor to the left of the pedestal and the other to the right – both just a few feet away. Each of the other two chairs was occupied by a sinister looking figure wearing a woollen coat and she had actually opened her mouth to speak to one of them before she realized that neither of them were people at all, but clothed shop mannequins.

  Then something else, something crazy and totally unbelievable, dawned on her. She was in the back of a Ford Transit van and she had been here before – not in this particular vehicle, but in one very much like it; one that had been similarly furnished and fitted with electronic equipment, much like the kit in front of her. The next moment her gaze focused on one of the mannequins, seated like some grotesque Frankenstein creation, to her right. ’Strewth, it had long blond hair, just like …

  She tried to get a grip on herself. What sort of sick joke was this? Someone had deliberately recreated the interior of the police surveillance van that had been blasted apart two years before – and that someone could only be one person.

  ‘Hello, Kate? Comfy then?’ The mocking voice issued from the computer and, staring at the screen, she suddenly saw it had illuminated under some form of remote activation and Twister’s cold expressionless face was staring straight at her. Meeting the gaze of those corpse-like fish eyes, she felt a chill spread through her body that deadened her limbs and seeped into her brain.

  ‘Bring back a few memories in there, does it?’ Twister went on and his chuckle had about as much warmth as that of a Dalek. ‘I have gone to an awful lot of trouble to try to set it up as you’d remember it – and I must admit, the old crime file I was given access to was a lot of help in that respect.’

  ‘What is all this?’ Kate said, her voice strangely hoarse. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  He shook his head and tutted. ‘Oh, but I think it makes perfect sense,’ he went on. ‘You see, you should have died in the incendiary blast all that time ago. It’s not right that your two colleagues, Detective Sergeant Andy Seldon and Detective Constable Alf Cross, should have been incinerated while you got off scot-free, not right at all. So I decided to rectify my previous faux pas by recreating the original scenario on the two year anniversary of the event – couldn’t get back here before, I’m afraid – to give you the opportunity of joining your old chums.’

  ‘You’re totally out of your tree,’ she blurted incredulously, desperately trying to control her shakes. ‘A … a complete nutter.’

  Twister smiled. ‘Depends what you mean by the term nutter, Kate,’ he said. ‘If you are suggesting that I am insane, I beg to disagree, for that description conjures up visions of a dribbling imbecile paddling in the toilet or eating his own faeces, and I do none of those things. I do accept, however, that I have a personality disorder – I have been told that by the best psychiatrists around, so it must be true. This gives rise to certain psychopathic tendencies, but such traits merely make me different to the normal run of society and insanity doesn’t enter into it.’

  ‘You’re going to blow me up in here?’ Kate said, her voice now little above a whisper.

  Another series of tuts. ‘Oh, that’s a rather crude way of putting it, my dear, but, in essence, I suppose you’re right. Just like before, I have assembled a powerful incendiary device to precipitate you into oblivion, although I have simplified things this time so that it can be inserted into the petrol filler pipe itself, rather than being magnetically attached to the vehicle – bit like a pipe bomb, actually. This one, though, is much more sophisticated and will be detonated by a remote wireless signal, which I can despatch myself from a safe distance by means of a micro transmitter.’

  He held up a narrow cylindrical object in front of the screen, which was about eight inches in length, with a wired attachment at one end, then put it down carefully and held up another item, not unlike an electronic pager.

  ‘Clever, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘And soon we will drive out to the very same drove you used two years ago. It will be quite a nostalgic experience for us both and the best part about it all is that, due to the technical expertise I gained in the army, I have been able to set up an equally sophisticated surveillance system that will allow me to watch the whole thing as it is actually happening inside the vehicle from my own ringside seat out here.’

  Kate raised her head and tried to swivel the chair, guessing that there were other cameras trained on her from the shadows, but the chair would not budge – it seemed to be fixed in some way – so she was unable to pick them out.

  ‘At least you’ll have some company in your final moments,’ Twister gloated, ‘and I did try to make my mannequins look as much like your old colleagues as possible. Detective Sergeant Seldon’s long fair hair was a particular characteristic and I went to a lot of trouble to obtain the right sort of wig. Good, isn’t it?’

  ‘You grotesque, sick bastard,’ she said in reply.

  He sighed, but ignored her insults and carried on with his summary. ‘Alf Cross? Well, I had to make do there with the same sort of silly woollen hat I gather he liked to wear, as he had no real distinguishing features like Seldon’s nice fair hair.’

  He smiled again. ‘You can see that I’ve dressed them both in woollen coats over the smart suits the mannequins had on when I stole them from a certain local warehouse and I hope that’s how you remember their being dressed at
the time. You should be impressed by my attention to detail anyway. I did do a lot of research on your team and on the interior layout of the Transit.

  ‘For instance, you can’t see it, but the van’s even got the same sign, “Water Monitoring Agency”, on the side. So, although I couldn’t swear that everything is one hundred percent accurate, I think it’s as near as damn it. Only thing I didn’t bother with was the surveillance camera you had on the roof, but, I think you’ll agree, there’s no point in wasting money when everything is soon going to go up in smoke anyway.’

  ‘They’ll hunt you down for this, you know that, don’t you?’

  She saw him shrug. ‘They will probably do their best, but they tried that before, didn’t they? Got them nowhere then either—’ He broke off. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, you’ll see a nice digital clock on the pedestal. Thought you might like to keep abreast of the time. Not long until it all happens now. Exciting, isn’t it?’

  Before she could think of anything else to say, the monitor went blank and his face disappeared. It was 8.00 pm.

  The blonde SOCO officer found Ansell in Norton’s study, watching one of the fingerprint officers dusting a glass and a nearby empty bottle of Talisker whisky and brooding over the futility of it all.

  The DCI was tired, hungry and frustrated after several long hours hanging around the house while the search and technical units did their stuff. At least Willoughby had managed to find an excuse to return to the comfort of the nick, on the pretext of directing the search operation from the control-room, he mused. As DCI, he seemed to have drawn the short straw – yet again.

  The daft thing was everyone knew full well who they were looking for and Twister wouldn’t care whether they found his dabs at the scene or not. He still had Kate Hamblin and they had absolutely no idea where he could have gone to ground – they didn’t even know where Hayden Lewis had disappeared to in the borrowed traffic car. What a bloody awful mess, and to think that the whole inquiry team had actually been hoodwinked into allowing the very psychopath they were looking for to lead them in the hunt for the man himself.