by Andrew Lowe
Keating nodded. ‘He might have been practising. We need to check any recent deaths or illnesses of hikers or campers. Maybe our man has been befriending people, dosing them, keeping records of their reactions.’
Shepherd made a note. ‘We can’t be certain we’re looking for a man yet.’
Sally snorted. ‘Female killers are rare. Female multiple killers rarer.’
‘Women do use poison, though.’
Keating closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the wall. ‘DI Sawyer?’
Most heads turned. DC Moran kept his eyes on Shepherd’s whiteboard.
‘He’ll be white, like both victims. Mid-thirties, early forties. Intelligent, meticulous. He’ll be tidy, organised. This isn’t the work of a chaotic mind, although there will be a history of mental illness and trauma.’ He shot a glance at Maggie. ‘He’ll be strong. He has to get those bodies from the cars to the grave sites. He’s almost certainly local. He’s familiar with the burial sites and is confident enough to come and go as he pleases, at the times he knows he’s unlikely to be spotted. Maybe the location means something to him?’
Shepherd scribbled another note on the board. ‘No sexual violence. So what’s motivating him?’
Sawyer walked between the desks and joined Shepherd at the front. ‘It’s all about the staging. Like I said before, to understand him, we need to look at his work.’
Moran shuffled in his seat as he sketched in the margins of a notebook. 'You keep going on about this “work” thing. This isn’t what I’d see as “work”.’
‘Me neither. But he does. And if we’re going to stop this happening again, we need to stop projecting our morality onto him and get a sense of what he sees through his eyes. Why these people? Is there even a why or is it just random and opportunistic? Why the elaborate staging? He’s careful and clever, but there’s still a lot of risk and complexity. If he wants the thrill of killing, he could just get it done and dump the bodies.’
Maggie spoke up. ‘There’s a great deal of mental suffering for them. It seems he wants them to be aware of what’s happening from beginning to end.’
‘And control.’ Eyes shifted to DC Walker, perched on the edge of his desk, looking up at Sawyer. ‘He wants them to die in a specific way. Apart from the initial attack to subdue them, he’s removed himself from their moment of death. Put it out of his hands.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘Good, yes. Why would he want to separate himself like that? Does he feel guilty about it? If he does, why? The camera tells us a lot.’
Walker gazed at the whiteboard. ‘About his MO?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘Signature.’
Sawyer shuffled over, still shoulder to shoulder with Shepherd, but closer to the board. ‘The way he acquires the victims, transports them, cleans the scene, leaves the scene... That’s MO. Logistics. The how. But what he’s personally getting out of the crime, the why, that’s the signature. Perhaps the camera, the filming of the death, is key to that. There’s no direct sexual violence, but he may be getting a sexual kick from the live observation of his victims’ final moments, the shared knowledge of their loss of hope. He wants that private connection. Only he and the victim know what’s happening in that moment.’
Moran glanced up from his sketch. ‘So why send the footage to the families? Doesn’t that kill the privacy? Why open it up to others? He could just stream it live for himself.’
‘Maybe he has a strange sense of pride about his work. Or he wants to show the families how they died because that also gives him something sexual. Again, there’s intimacy. He doesn’t see these people as meat. He cares about something.’
Maggie caught Sawyer’s eye. ‘Is it need-driven behaviour? There’s a lot of organisation, and that feels cold. But is there anger here, too?’
‘Hard to tell. It’s not really a clean signature. Not black and white. There’s a lot to analyse. As DC Walker points out, there’s a disconnect between the hands-off nature of the death moment and the intimacy of the observation, the camera. And the presentation, the marking of the grave sites... Maybe he wants to share in the victims’ suffering but doesn’t want the families to be left not knowing. It’s a mess. There may be an element of sadism in sending the death footage to the families, but if that’s true, it would be an odd choice of death. The victims’ suffering is internal, not cinematic. We need to focus on his refinement. What has changed from Toby to Georgina? Has he improved anything? Done anything differently? And ask yourselves a simple question. What sort of person could have done something like this?’
‘A psychotic.’ Moran sat back in his chair. ‘And that’s not tabloid speak. It’s a recognised psychological type.’
Shepherd cringed. ‘He’s not a psychotic. The crimes are way too organised and systematic. He might be a psychopath, though.’
The energy in the room stalled for a couple of seconds. Sawyer gave Shepherd an almost imperceptible nod and smile.
Shepherd stammered, struggling to regain his gravitas. ‘Myers, check for anything recent involving possible poisonings. Hospital admissions. Local news. How did we get on with the coffins? Walker?’
‘I scraped the records of the top five cardboard coffin suppliers. No significant purchases to local addresses. I checked out the origins and they’re all part of standard funeral arrangements. Some for families who can’t afford the standard type, some for unclaimeds. I found a few private orders locally, and they all check out for pets. Big dogs. One bloke had to bury three dogs in one go. House fire.’
Sawyer glanced down at Shepherd’s hand. Trembling. His grip on the board marker was so tight it had whitened his knuckles. ‘Are the boxes branded? Could the sellers identify them?’
Walker shook his head. ‘No branding. All cheap and generic. The sellers are just third-party online businesses. So even if there was something that marked them out, they wouldn’t recognise it as their stock if they saw it up close.’
Shepherd squeaked out a note on the board. ‘It’s hardly a spontaneous crime. He probably ordered the coffins over a longer period of time. EBay, maybe. The worrying question is, how many has he ordered? Keep looking. Find all the listings. Is there any buyer username that reoccurs?’
Keating sighed and pushed off the wall. ‘Sally, I want the walking routes away from those car parks combed and line-searched. Set up a couple of CROPs in the catchment area around both burial sites, near to any car parks he hasn’t used yet. That’s assuming he isn’t stupid enough to use the same one twice.’
Sally nodded. ‘What are they looking for, sir?’
Sawyer cut in. ‘They need to call in all sightings of people with shovels. Or anyone with a body over their shoulder.’
‘I mean, what are they hoping to deduce?’
Shepherd shook his head. ‘It’s more of an induction. Observing information and drawing larger conclusions.’
Sally smiled at Sawyer.
Keating continued. ‘They’re tracking any late night comings and goings. Some of the car parks will close, but a lot of them are just marked out open spaces with no gate.’ He moved off, towards his office. ‘Sawyer, work with the intel cell on victimology. Look into everything you can think of. Did Georgina and Toby secretly know each other? Any previous relationship connections. Jealous exes. He hasn’t just killed these poor people. He’s made them suffer as much as possible, and he wants their loved ones to see their suffering. You’re right. There’s a lot of depth here. Emotion. It’s more than just killing for kicks. Look into that sexual element, too.’
As Keating reached the door of his office, Stephen Bloom stood and blocked his way. ‘Press conference, sir? Good idea to get some public help? Particularly if the killer is local.’
Keating sighed. ‘It’s arranged for 3pm tomorrow. I’ll get you an approved script first thing.’ He raised his voice for the rest of the room. ‘We need to work hard and fast on this. It’s a rare case for the area, and there will be a lot of media glare. No loose comments. Everythi
ng through DS Shepherd and myself. Briefing at 9am.’
Sawyer followed Keating into his office. Maggie and Shepherd joined them.
‘A suggestion.’ Sawyer closed the door. ‘If we’re going public, we could try to bait him. Say we have a reliable witness who thinks he saw someone near the scene and can give a good description. It might spook him. Make him come forward to try and rule himself out or provide an explanation as to why he was there.’
Shepherd nodded. ‘I like it.’
Keating crashed down in his chair. ‘Work it into the script. Run it past Bloom. Don’t get too creative. We’re trying to catch a murderer, not plot a thriller.’
Sawyer looked out at the football ground. The floodlights sparkled above an unseen evening match. Pulses of applause. Oohs of anguish. Aahs of pleasure. ‘They’ll call him The Undertaker.’
He could feel Maggie’s eyes on him.
‘Who will?’
He turned. ‘The tabloids. Local press, maybe. We should talk to Lucy. Georgina’s friend.’
Maggie nodded. ‘I’ve arranged to meet her at The Farmyard Inn at 8am. Nothing in the mail to her husband yet, but Patricia is booked in to visit every morning for the next few days.’
Shepherd took a seat and dabbed at his brow. He was flushed and jittery, as if he’d just been cross examined. ‘Is her husband okay with that?’
‘He barely knows where he is. Who he is. Deep shock. His mother is with him. Uncle.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘I’ll come with you in the morning, Mags. We will need to talk to Danny Stoll tomorrow, too.’
Shepherd drew in a deep breath. ‘I’ll go.’
A roar from the football ground. Rising applause. The clatter of stomping feet.
Sawyer found Shepherd’s eye and jerked his head to the side. ‘Come on. Let’s watch some porn.’
22
Sawyer and Shepherd commandeered an intel cell and huddled around a decrepit desktop PC.
Sawyer shook the mouse. ‘Was Bill Gates even born when they made this?’
‘You’re too entitled. These are new. Well, five years old. That makes them new in computer terms. For our purposes.’
Sawyer gave him a look and opened a web browser. ‘Obsolescence ain’t what it used to be.’
He searched for live burial fetish and was rewarded with a lurid cascade of shock sites and clickbait. He read out loud from one of the search results. ‘This woman is buried for kicks. You won’t believe what she takes underground to keep her alive.’
‘Oxygen tank?’
Sawyer shook his head. ‘Probably a long straw.’
Shepherd leaned in and read from the screen. ‘New coffin technologies that protect you from being buried alive.’ He sat back. ‘Sign me up.’
Sawyer clicked through to the PornHub page for Most relevant results: buried alive.
Shepherd squinted as Sawyer hovered the mouse pointer over the thumbnails, triggering the preview footage. ‘This is bollocks.’
‘Not strong enough for your tastes?’
‘It’s just catching content tags that contain the word buried or burial.’
Sawyer nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s a lot of insight to be gained from a two-hour “face burying” compilation.’
‘Isn’t this just too obscure to be a thing?’
‘Nothing’s too obscure to be a thing. But it doesn’t exactly look like a well-served paraphilia.’
Shepherd sighed. ‘Maybe he’s filming the deaths because he can’t get something so specific from off-the-peg porn.’
‘Or maybe he’s tried it bespoke and it didn’t work for him.’
‘Bespoke?’
Sawyer turned. ‘Yeah. There are companies who will produce porn to order, these days. For people too jaded by the offerings on the likes of PornHub.’
‘Or who can’t get their specific kick served up in the way they want it.’
‘Exactly.’
They browsed through a few articles on bespoke porn and found repeated references to a Canadian-based husband and wife operation, Anatomik. The website was ugly and unconvincing but the offering seemed solid. Custom production options, performer directory, sample films.
Shepherd read from the screen. ‘“No request is too small or large or weird.”’ So this is where the porn stars are getting paid, these days.’
‘Yeah. I had a job last year, working with vice. Swingers. Had to research the production path of amateur porn.’
Shepherd whistled. ‘And now you’re permanently corrupted.’
‘I was focusing on the business model, not the content. It’s the usual internet story. Free sites like PornHub carry professionally produced films and wipe out the producers’ revenue. The bespoke business looks like a niche for now, but it’s a way for the directors and performers to get paid. Could well be the future of filth.’
Shepherd made a note of the site’s contact details. ‘I’ll get in touch. See if anyone has expressed an interest in a burial kink, or maybe even commissioned something.’ He sat back. ‘Tell me more about the Met. How was it?’
Sawyer smiled. ‘Hard work. Never stops. Keeps you distracted. I learned more in two months there than I would in two years here. Screwed up my relationship, though. I couldn’t switch it off. I remember one night my missus was chopping vegetables and the knife slipped. End of her finger was hanging off. Lot of blood. She was screaming for me to get an ambulance, but I was frozen, fascinated by the spatter pattern.’
He unwrapped a yellow boiled sweet and popped it into his mouth.
Shepherd shook his head. ‘You quitting smoking?’
‘No. Sweet tooth.’
‘So why not go for the hard stuff? Montezuma’s. Reese’s.’
Sawyer rolled the sweet into his cheek. ‘I used to like complex tastes and flavours, but now I go for simple and soothing. Boring. My brain’s hectic enough. I try to simplify as much as I can.’
Shepherd watched him, nodding.
‘Plus, my dad would never let me eat sweets when I was a kid. Only my mum.’
Shepherd patted his belly. ‘My folks were more liberal.’
‘What did they do?’
‘Working class. Mum was a clerk. Stickler for admin and paperwork. Dad drove lorries. Not around much. Money went into the house, I think. We always had big Christmases, though. Presents on tick. Pay ’em off the next year.’
Sawyer turned his chair to face Shepherd. ‘They still around?’
‘Mum is. Dad smoked himself to death. Went a few years ago. Emphysema.’ He dropped his gaze.
‘Are you getting any help?’
Shepherd looked up. ‘With what?’
‘The anxiety.’
He flinched. ‘It’s not an issue. Bit overworked at the moment. Maybe I need a holiday.’
‘I can recommend Lanzarote,’ said Sawyer, his stare unwavering. ‘Gets a bad press, but it’s one of my favourite places. Barren but beautiful.’ He looked away. ‘Sometimes, though, you need to tackle the root cause.’
‘I know. It’s just… there was something about the body. The look on her face. It hit me. How she used to be a living thing. Complicated and loving. A big mess of potential. But there she was. Just…’
‘Meat?’
Shepherd nodded.
Sawyer got up. ‘It is an issue. It’s a warning sign. You should pay attention.’
He drove through the dark, the Mini’s wipers set at low frequency, swiping away the drizzle.
He drove to New Order’s Substance. The B-sides. ‘In A Lonely Place’, ‘Procession’, ‘Cries and Whispers’. He preferred them to the A-sides. It was the orchestral heft, the gauzy melancholy, the link with their Joy Division past.
At the outer cordon to the Padley Gorge crime scene, he showed his warrant card to the luckless duty officer and clambered up to a ridge which overlooked the clearing. The tent was down, the FSIs were done, and only a few detectives remained, co-ordinating the Covert Rural Observation Post ordered by Keating, in case the k
iller returned.
The last remaining Paladin light blasted out from behind, dazzling the scene, draining the colour. The branches shuffled, casting jittery shadows across Georgina Stoll’s murder site.
The rain, like static. The murmuring detectives.
Sawyer pictured the killer plunging the marker cross into the soil. Systematic. Not rushed. No panic. Planned. When did his planning begin? And why? He knew that nobody woke up one morning, after years of living a stable life, and decided to kill for kicks. There would be horror in his past. Abuse. Tragedy. Trauma. And love withheld, or withdrawn, or snatched away.
Again, he sensed a stage. Theatre. Something presented for the benefit of observers. Was there an authentic signature here, or was the killer’s true motivation buried behind a melodrama?
A raindrop slid down his nose and formed a drip that didn’t drop. He brushed it away and ran his fingers through his hair, clotted with water. He wasn’t the umbrella type.
He drove to the lane, parked in a lay-by and walked across a soggy field, into the trees.
The agony rose inside him; a whisper to a roar. Time had healed nothing.
He stood at the spot where his mother had fallen and looked across at the grass where he had grabbed at the ground, inhaled the soil, blacked out.
A swarm of ghosts, unspooling it all.
He pulled ahead with Henry. The dog snarled and dashed back, towards his mother and Michael.
He tried to turn but the impact fell on him, broad and blunt against the back of his head.
His mother’s voice. A shout of outrage. A flash of her orange jacket.
He squinted into the memory and, for the first time, heard her tone.
Questioning.
Not scared. Confused.
He saw the sequence. The man had hit him first, probably because he was the bigger of the two boys, despite being the youngest. Michael would catch up in their teens.
Then, he had attacked Michael.