‘Identity will have to be obtained forensically,’ he was saying as Handley approached. ‘No one is going to be able to ID him by sight.’
As he was finishing, Pearson turned and looked at Handley who mutely handed over the note. Pearson read it quickly and then said into his phone: ‘Almost certainly suicide, I’ve a note here that seems to say he’s guilty of it all, whatever “it all” is.’ With that he hung up.
‘Well sir, what do you think?’ Handley asked.
‘I think we got the bastard, Handley. And I think we’ll now have more than enough to say he killed Julia Metcalfe and link him to plenty more Charmer murders too. After all these years I think we have him. And just as he knew we were closing in he goes and tops himself, fucking coward.’
Handley simply nodded and moved past his boss, walking up the path and out the gate to stand on the verge of the road, looking out across the surrounding countryside.
He still felt nauseated by the sight inside the house and saddened for Charlotte Travers and the news he would have to bring to her. But he also felt a swelling of pride and satisfaction at his part in this whole investigation. He had played a major role in capturing one of the most prolific serial killers in British history. He had not just been a cog in the investigative wheel but he had been instrumental in the tracing of Marcus Travers and linking him to the Charmer crimes. For the first time since he had joined the force he felt pivotal.
He had made it onto the ‘one to watch’ list.
‘81
Ailsa was coming over! After several months of lukewarm relations with her and no more visits to the Manse, she was finally coming again. Her family had been invited by his parents to a prayer meeting with several church elders. They would be along within half an hour. He felt his excitement grow at the prospect of seeing her outside of school again. He would have a chance to renew her interest in him away from all the other competition. They would have a chance to reignite and strengthen the bond that he knew they had. He could rekindle her love for him – a love he knew for certain she held deep inside. This was his chance to kick-start his dreams of love and romance.
There was an old armchair in his room that he could relax in and so he sat there trying his best to ease the nerves that fluttered in the pit of his stomach. He lay back a little and slowed his breathing, closing his eyes as he tried to imagine how the afternoon would go. They would be sitting next to each other and he would make her laugh with wry comments on his father’s diatribe. And when in prayer, with eyes closed, she would reach out her hand and lightly brush his arm or, even better, his thigh.
His mind focused on that single, imagined act – her hand softly and lightly running up his thigh, continuing further and further up, risking a brush against his penis and testicles. He started to become aroused at the thought, rubbing his own hands up and down his inner thighs and enacting the daydream that played, clear as a movie, inside his head.
Suddenly, they were alone in the room. All the others had simply melted away. They turned to each other and kissed – a long, deep kiss. He held her close to him and let his hands roam over her perfect body. She responded with small shifts in her position and small, low sighs as his hands continued touching. Moving further up her torso he risked cupping one breast. She inhaled sharply but didn’t object.
He was fully hard now. Opening his eyes, he listened carefully for any noises upstairs – all was quiet. Feeling safe and free from the danger of being caught, he undid his trouser button and slid the zip down. Closing his eyes again, he relaxed back into the world of his fantasy.
They were half-undressed now, he in boxer shorts and she in bra and knickers. He could feel her warm, smooth skin against his body. The soft material of her bra was now stretched taut against her nipples which brushed against his chest as they continued to kiss and move together. Each touch of her nipple against his own sent tingles of pure pleasure down his spine. He could wait no longer. Reaching round he unclasped her bra effortlessly – no fumbling, clumsy fighting with the catches – as though he had done it a million times before. Her breasts, when freed, were small, pert and perfectly formed – it took his breath away just to look at them. His hands moved to run over her silken skin and already erect and receptive nipples. Her breathing became sharper and more rapid as he began to play his hands over them.
He opened his eyes, checking again for sounds of nearby movement – still safe. He slid his hand into the opening in the front of his shorts and freed himself. He stroked gently along the shaft, not wanting to rush but instead savouring his dream as long as possible. His penis was so hard by now that it almost hurt.
Eyes closed again – they were fully naked now and the sight of her made him inhale sharply, both in his dream and in reality. He slid his hands along the inside of her smooth, firm thighs, then reached between her legs to feel the moist warmth there. Slowly at first and then with more and more vigour he explored with his fingers, making her gasp and moan. Occasionally she would let out a high-pitched squeak of a sound as his fingers delved deeper inside her.
He could contain himself no longer. His hand moved over his erection, gripping tighter and tighter, his legs involuntarily stiffening and lifting his feet off the floor as his strokes increased in tempo.
He was inside her now and their bodies were moving more and more rapidly – both feeling they had become one body, one soul, joined forever.
He could feel the climax rising from the base of his penis, beginning to warm the shaft, the head becoming more swollen and sensitive to his touch.
The door opened then and slammed against the wall. He ejaculated instantly with the shock.
His father roared incomprehensibly as he strode across the room towards him. He was desperately trying to pull up his trousers and cover himself but his father reached him before he could get very far. His arm was grabbed in a brutally strong grip and he was hauled to his feet.
‘You bloody filthy little wretch,’ his father screamed in his face. He felt spittle hit his eyes and cheeks.
With his trousers still undone, he was hauled roughly out of the room, all the while fighting to hold them up and not trip as the legs got caught up under his feet.
The stairs were even more perilous and he nearly fell twice on the way down, but his father’s vice of a grip held firm as he half-dragged, half-carried him the rest of the way. As they reached the hallway he realised with a growing sense of horror that he was being hauled to the front room – the room in which they received their guests.
His father had ranted and raved the whole way down and now his voice rose in pitch and volume. He couldn’t make out a word of the venomous tirade.
He struggled harder to get his trousers securely back on and to free himself from the painful, unrelenting grip on his arm. But his father held firm, his strength and resolve proving too much to resist.
His father flung open the door to the front room and dragged him inside. His growing sense of dread doubled as he was pushed inside the room.
They were all there already. The three elders were sitting on one couch and Ailsa, her father and mother on the other. His mother was sitting in one of the two armchairs. All seven of them turned and stared open-mouthed at the commotion – all of them staring at him.
And there, over the fire guard, hung the pulpit tabard from the kirk, its needlework image of the burning bush now blazing in his eyes. He tried to focus on that, desperate not to make eye contact with those in the room. But the image burned and glowed unnaturally, as accusing and disgusted as the people in the room.
He turned his eyes away from the image.
‘This filthy wretch of a boy was in his room committing a disgusting act of self-gratification with heathen abandon,’ his father shouted to the whole room. ‘Self-abusing in this house with you all here. I am ashamed to call him my son and sickened by his actions. It was a vile sight to behold and a vile act to commit at any time – but today, now, he chooses to defile my house. A house of God!’
The others in the room continued to stare with shocked, slack-jawed bewilderment and wide-eyed incredulity, their expressions turning to disgust and loathing as it dawned on them what his father was talking about.
He struggled again, feebly this time, knowing it would do him no good.
His father was screaming now. ‘Driven by his own lusts and perverted desires – heedless to our meeting here and its purpose – he has sullied his own hand with this….’
Before he could do anything his father moved his grip and grabbed his wrist, pulling away the hand that clutched, white-knuckled, to the top of his trousers. With his free hand his father grabbed his trousers and underwear and hauled them down so that they crumpled around his ankles.
He died inside.
He felt sick with embarrassment and shame. He was powerless and exposed and humiliated.
The room gasped collectively, with several of the women holding their hands over their mouths. His mother was sobbing with her face in her hands. But his focus was on Ailsa. She was sitting directly opposite him, staring – red-faced, mouth agape – directly at his groin.
He nearly collapsed when he looked down and saw his penis had shrivelled – with the adrenalin and shame – to a small pathetic stump, barely protruding through his pubic hair. Another wave of nausea struck him as he saw that there was semen clinging wetly to the hairs and around the tip of his penis. He knew without looking that there would be some on the hand his father was now holding up for all to see.
At that moment, like a sickening parody of his daydream, the room seemed to shrink, leaving only Ailsa and him standing alone.
She continued to stare, mouth still open, with an unreadable expression on her face and a spark of light in her eyes. Was that contempt? Pity? Or something else he saw there? He had no idea and no inclination to find out. He just wanted to run and keep running as far from there as possible. The crazed thought crossed his mind – if he ran far enough and fast enough, maybe he could undo this whole incident. Maybe he could simply make it disappear from existence and then return to find that all was well.
He couldn’t speak, could hardly breathe and couldn’t drag his eyes away from hers.
And then she laughed.
It started as a blurted ‘Ha’, and then turned into a babbling, hissing giggle that appeared to him to go on and on. He couldn’t tell if she were laughing through embarrassment, humour or disgust. But to his mind, she was laughing at his pitiable penis. And through his now near-insanity he convinced himself that she had somehow seen the images he had been fantasising about, and was laughing at his pathetic attempt at love-making and the woeful inadequacy of his manhood.
It was too much. His mind broke.
He finally ripped his arm from his father’s grip, pulling his trousers up as he ran from the room and the house. Blindly, he ran – terrified and shamed to his very core.
He knew what was to come. This was a small town and no one hesitated to gossip to anyone who would listen. It would be everywhere within hours and all over the school when he returned on Monday. He couldn’t face that – there was no force on Earth that would convince him to go back to school and stand the torment facing him there.
But he was powerless against his father’s will and knew he would have no choice. His father would drag him there personally if necessary and wouldn’t care about humiliating him further.
As he ran, the image of the burning bush glowed red-hot in his mind. The very symbol of wrath and disgust and humiliation, it seared a scar in his psyche – one he knew would burn there forever.
But even that paled in significance next to the one thing that echoed again and again in his mind.
Her laughter.
She had laughed.
And she would continue to laugh for the rest of his life.
Chapter 20
Handley stood in the now empty and clean Travers’ house, staring around the room where they had found Marcus Travers a week before. He had taken three days off, and early on the first morning of his leave had travelled back up to Scotland. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing there but something had been nagging at him since Marcus Travers had been officially declared as the Charmer and the case had been closed.
He had trusted his instincts; he had been right to keep plugging away at Travers’ disappearance – after all, look where that had finally led. And now, standing in the echoing house where it had all come to a gruesome end, he knew something was amiss.
The past week had gone quickly. Samples taken at the scene and during the autopsy confirmed that Marcus Travers’ DNA did match the only sample found at Julia Metcalfe’s cottage. And matches were also found with two further Charmer murders. Detective Chief Superintendent Pearson had been ecstatic – they had finally found the man he had been chasing for over 10 years. The general consensus was that Julia Metcalfe’s murder could be filed in the Charmer case notes – as the final victim of a brutal murderer desperately trying to cover his tracks. They had never found anything among her notes to give a direct link to Marcus Travers but it seemed obvious that he had killed her to silence her.
The physical evidence and the grainy CCTV images were all Pearson seemed to need, and Marcus Travers’ suicide note was the final nail in his coffin. He had called an immediate press conference and proudly told the assembled media that they had found the killer of Julia Metcalfe and linked the man responsible to The Charmer murders. Case closed. It had been drinks all round and applause for Handley from Pearson, Tanner and the rest of the office. He had indeed made the ‘one to watch’ list and at the time felt on top of the world. Mission accomplished in every sense.
But as the week wore on, and Handley found himself with two muggings and an assault on his desk, his mind had wandered back to the last month or more. What was it that bothered him about The Charmer case? Why did he feel there was something more to it? Had something perhaps gone awry in the investigation? Or was he making mountains out of molehills?
The evidence had seemed to be fairly incontrovertible. They could link Travers to several Charmer murders and definitely to the murder of Julia Metcalfe. But Handley had been wondering – surely, they would have found more evidence matching Travers with The Charmer killings? But then, as DCI Tanner had said, it was clear that Travers was very forensically aware and clever in the way he apparently distorted and manipulated the evidence. Tanner also speculated that Travers had eventually begun wearing a fully-protective suit and gloves, which would explain the lack of physical evidence in the later cases.
All of this was very likely true. And yet Handley still had a nagging doubt. The CCTV images still bothered him. And then, five days after the case was closed, it occurred to him that they had found no trace of Travers having used any dating sites, or other dating services, to connect with his intended victims. The theory for some time had been that at least some of the victims had met the killer via online dating – or other equivalent services, for the older ‘pre-internet’ murders. And yet there was no evidence on Travers’ computer, or the laptop recovered at the scene of his death, that he had been anywhere near those types of sites. There was evidence from some of the later victims that they had indeed met someone on the night they were murdered, but the dating profiles of the men – or man – had been set up with a fake name and address, and later deleted. Handley had conceded that perhaps there was another computer they simply hadn’t found.
Then there was the suicide note. Only those few words to sum up over a decade of slaughter? This was one of the questions now running through his mind. And to Handley, the wording didn’t strike him as much of a confession. It seemed to him that a man about to blow half his face off with a shotgun might have made a more definite statement of guilt. But then both Tanner and Pearson seemed to be happy to accept it at face value.
But still it worried him and that niggling itching at the back of his mind would not go away. So, before the end of the week he had asked Tanner if he could take a few days
off – citing exhaustion after the hunt for Marcus Travers as his reason. And because he was the golden boy, Tanner had had no problem sanctioning the leave.
And so he now stood in the musty semi-darkness of the living room in the Travers’ old house. He had no idea what he was looking for but kept looking anyway. He examined the chair Marcus had been sitting in when they found him and the surrounding rug. He looked carefully along the wall where the shotgun had been found. Nothing.
With a sigh he began to concede defeat. He was giving the room one last look-over when his eyes fell on an old-fashioned-looking shotgun hanging on the wall. He recalled seeing it when he was last here but their focus had been on the weapon on the ground, and no one – including SOCO it seemed – had given it much attention. He moved back across the room towards the gun with a curious look on his face. He wasn’t sure what it was but something told him to take a closer look.
The gun was a very old single-barrelled shotgun – the sort that was seen in old photographs of gamekeepers and the like. It was long and very sturdy-looking, with scratches on the wooden stock and metal barrel. The gun was mounted to the wall by two brackets that looked purpose-made. He had no idea whether it was an old Travers heirloom, left behind after they died, or had been mounted there sometime after. Either way it didn’t really matter, he thought.
As he got nearer, he saw what had been bothering him. The gun wasn’t mounted properly on one of the brackets, with the barrel sitting a little proud of the niche it should have been slotted into. There was also a distinct lack of dust at the end of the barrel, whereas the rest of it had a fine but visible coating.
Lifting the gun clear he examined it carefully. There were marks in the wood of the stock where it had been slotted into the bracket and equivalent marks on the barrel. So it would seem that the gun had been sitting fully in the brackets at some point in the past, Handley thought. Aside from the marks and the lack of dust on the barrel there didn’t appear to be much else to see.
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