by John Carson
‘There it is,’ Dunbar said, pointing. ‘On the left. And slow this fucking thing down, Robbie. I don’t want to be upside down, hanging from the seatbelt.’
‘My granny doesn’t panic like you. I’m barely doing the speed limit.’
‘Aye, well, this is not the autobahn. Just be bloody careful.’
Evans made it into the old driveway without incident and he looked in the mirror and made a face at Dunbar.
The driveway was overgrown and nature had assaulted the sign for the camp many years ago. One thing that everybody noticed was the tyre marks in the snow.
‘Sneaky bastard,’ Harry said. ‘How the hell did we not know about this place to begin with?’
Nobody had the answer.
Evans guided the car up the drive and they saw the first building appear in the distance.
‘It doesn’t show much on here,’ Muckle said, looking at his phone, ‘but there’s a small loch at the top. Buildings are scattered about.’
They approached a hut with a window in it, an old security office.
‘Fat lot of good that did,’ Dunbar observed. ‘Three lassies disappear and what were security doing, I wonder?’
‘The camp counsellors were probably the security people. It’s not as if they would have had proper patrols, just leaders,’ Harry said.
‘Whatever it was, they dropped the ball,’ Evans said.
The big car made it to the top of a hill, the tyres crunching through the snow. Over on the left was a small amphitheatre with wooden benches built into the side of the hill, looking down. Further up, cabins were lined up facing the small loch. Snow was coming down but not as hard.
‘The tracks in the snow go round to the left,’ Evans said, following them.
They followed the road round and saw more cabins and a couple of houses. Looking through the trees, they saw more houses back there, higher up on a hill. Then the tyre tracks became one big jumbled mess.
Sparky jumped up, growling.
‘Check those boards, boys,’ said Dunbar. ‘If any are loose, we’ll get inside. Otherwise, we’ll search those houses. I’ve got uniforms coming up.’
They got out and started pulling at the boards on the windows and the doors, but they were solid.
Harry looked around. He could see more cabins through the trees.
‘This place is a lot bigger than I thought,’ he said.
Muckle was looking at his phone. ‘It says here they added the houses when they turned it into a ski resort. They rented the houses out in the winter, but it was the scout camp in the summer.’
‘Alex could be anywhere,’ Harry said, feeling the tension in him about to explode. ‘She could have been taken anywhere.’
Sparky started growling and pulling on his lead. Muckle dropped his phone into the snow.
‘Fuck’s sake. Look at my phone, ya hoor. Just as well it fell in the snow.’
As Muckle bent down to pick it up, he looked up the hill. And something caught his eye between the snowfall and the trees.
‘Good boy,’ he said. Then he turned to the others. ‘I think we can narrow it down.’
He pointed up the hill and the others looked, moving their heads so they could see what he was pointing at.
‘Unless it’s a crashed UFO, I can see fuck all,’ Dunbar said.
‘I can,’ Harry replied. ‘Up there. Smoke.’
Forty
They both heard the footsteps thumping up the stairs. The creak of the floorboards as he walked along the landing towards the room they were in. Then the latch opening and the hinges screeching as the door swung inward.
‘Glad to see you’re both awake,’ said the man with the mask. ‘We have visitors.’
Alex sat bolt upright, her left hand catching the bedpost. She could see the man’s eyes but couldn’t tell if he was angry or disappointed or scared. Maybe all three?
Then he laughed and she knew they were fucked.
‘This is going to be fun. I’m going to deal with them, but first I have to deal with you.’
‘You don’t have to do this,’ Alex said.
‘Oh, but I do. This is the whole plan. I wanted to bring you here so your husband would come looking for you. I have to get rid of you first, before I can deal with him and his friends.’
‘You’re outnumbered. What makes you think you can deal with them?’
‘Lots of practice, dear. But I’m not that stupid that I think I can take on several men all by myself. That’s why I have you. You’re going to help me.’
Then she could smell it. The powerful smell of petrol.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve only poured a little bit. Just to get the fire going. I want them to come and try to get you before they all die.’
‘Why are you trying to kill us?’
‘Because you’re sticking your nose in. I’m almost done now anyway. I work in threes. You two are part of my trifecta.’
‘Who was the other one?’
‘The pathologist, Valerie Hamilton. It’s been fun, but I need to go.’
He left the room and they heard him thumping down the stairs.
Vern started pulling at the handcuffs holding her to the brass frame. ‘Alex, do you think you can reach over? I have a pouch with handcuffs in it. There’s a key in there too.’
Alex tried to stretch across, but she couldn’t reach. ‘Shit. I can’t reach it.’
It was impossible and they both knew it.
‘Oh fuck,’ Vern said and knew what she had to try. She banged her hand against the wall. She winced in agony, then banged it even harder, once, twice and again and again, until finally she’d dislocated her thumb.
She screamed, thinking that she was going to pass out, but she kept it together.
Then she slipped her hand out of the handcuff.
Forty-One
They got back in the Land Rover and Evans drove it the short distance up the hill, further into the woods. At the crest of the hill, they could see over to the loch, over the houses they had just been at.
‘Something’s bothering me,’ Dunbar said. ‘Gary Whitman’s theory about the women having a mark on their hands. You know, the letter C and the marks to make it look like an X. I looked at some photos on the tech’s camera.’
‘And there was nothing there,’ Evans said.
‘Was I finished? Bloody jumping in. I bet you shout out the punchline to a joke as well.’ Dunbar shook his head. ‘Anyway, I was going to say, he was right. There was a mark near Carol’s thumb.’
Harry was still in panic mode and he jumped out of the car, so Muckle got out with Sparky and Evans leaped out. Dunbar followed.
They had stopped in front of a house with smoke coming out of its chimney. There were two other houses further along. Harry could see the top half of them and realised that they had been built on the other side of a rise.
Dunbar turned to him. ‘Harry, we’re going in here. I need you to stay outside. Just in case.’
Harry nodded, knowing what Dunbar was getting at: in case Alex is dead.
He walked away to the other houses, not wanting to see Jimmy’s face when he came out with the news. He walked through the snow, heading up the rise, and crested it, not looking back. Never look back, his old man had said. The snow was coming down and he imagined how it would have felt if he had been here on holiday with Alex, sitting by a roaring fire, just him and her.
Then a thought hit him, something that Jimmy had just said.
Dunbar had looked at the photos of Carol’s hands and seen the mark of a letter C on one. How had Gary Whitman known about this? Carol was already hanging by her neck when he got to her.
Harry reached the front door of the first house and the killer known as Infinity stepped out to greet him.
Albert Renfrew, the pathologist.
Or, as Harry knew him, Gary Whitman.
‘Hello, Harry.’ Gone was the East London accent.
‘Time to give it up, Albert. We know all about you,’ Harry said.
‘I thought my impersonation of Gary Whitman was pretty good. But if you watch enough EastEnders, anybody can put on a fake accent.’
‘I’m assuming Whitman existed, since we had you checked out and you passed. The documents were real.’
‘I killed him and took his driving licence and his retired warrant card. He was getting too close. He and I talked one night over a few beers. All the things I said to you were the things he said to me. I couldn’t believe how close he was.’ Renfrew laughed.
‘Did you have to kill Valerie Harper and Anderson Birrell?’
‘Let’s not forget about Dr Carter. I killed them all.’
‘Why now?’
‘Believe it or not, Valerie Henderson killed Caitlin McGhee thirty years ago. In a drunken fight. Carter and Birrell were also camp counsellors. We all covered for her. Then those two had a party in one of the houses one night, had some girls there. They were getting blootered. I spiked their drinks, the four of them. I killed the women. When Carter and Birrell woke up, they saw the girls were dead. I helped them bury them. The story was, they were having a drink and then they left together.’
‘And nobody was any the wiser.’
‘Correct. I figured that they were my insurance policy if they ever found out about me being a killer.’
‘Why stop six years ago when Martin went to the psychiatric hospital?’ Harry said.
‘I didn’t stop. I just killed in different ways. But then six months ago, I retired. I thought it would be fun to kill the girl I attacked six years ago and play with Martin’s head.’
‘You just chose him at random?’
Renfrew laughed. ‘Of course not. I dated his mother thirty years ago. I wanted to marry her, but her father stopped me. Then she got pregnant by some arsehole, who skipped off when he found out. I just wanted the old man to think his grandson was a psycho killer. Worked, didn’t it? But now I’m retired and away from the pathology game, killing would be harder, since I won’t be working with the police. Time to move on. I just wanted to wrap things up. One last round of killing around Christmastime. Finally have them put Martin away for good. Then I would be off.’
‘You had it all figured out. Why kill the others? Valerie and Dr Carter and Birrell?’
‘Valerie moved away, then came back to take up my position. I was worried she would start talking with those other two idiots. If she’d only stayed away. Then you lot were supposed to think Gary Whitman was responsible. That he’d wormed his way in with you and had made a fool of you. Then he would have disappeared. I killed him so I could take his persona, put the police on his trail. They would never find him, of course, because I buried him. I’d be off, a free man.’
‘We got in your way, though. You let us catch you when you were pretending to be Whitman so you could manipulate us.’
‘Worked, didn’t it?’
‘For a little while,’ Harry said. ‘But where’s Alex? And Vern?’
‘Close. They’re not dead. I just used them to draw you here. And now you’ve caught me fair and square. But just one thing before you take me in.’
Renfrew brought his hand out from his inside pocket and Harry watched helplessly as he lit a rag that had been soaked in something flammable and threw it into the house, where it caught the petrol he’d poured.
‘Here I am, Harry. Arrest me. Then read about how they found the charred corpse of your wife and her friend upstairs.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
They both heard the screams from the upper floor.
‘Your choice, Harry. Fight with me and try to arrest me, or go try and save your wife. What’s it to be?’
‘You bastard.’
Renfrew looked him in the eyes. ‘Don’t worry; we’ll meet again, Harry.’ He turned and ran round the back.
Harry ran into the house.
Forty-Two
They searched the house, room by room, with Sparky itching to have a go. There was evidence of somebody having been here. Recent packages in the kitchen. The smell of cooking. But it was the fire dying out in the grate that was the big clue.
‘Get upstairs, Muckle,’ said Dunbar. ‘Let the dug have the bastard if he’s there.’
‘Come on, boy.’ Muckle led the way up, knowing full well he’d step in front of the dog if the killer had a knife in his hand. Muckle had been in many a knife fight and would have a go himself before he’d risk his dog.
As it turned out, the only knife that was upstairs was a butter knife on the floor in one of the bedrooms.
‘Nobody here!’ he shouted after checking the other rooms.
Dunbar and Evans came up and had a look around.
‘Somebody’s been here,’ said Muckle. ‘The logs in the fire are still burning. They can’t be that far away.’
They went back downstairs and Dunbar’s phone rang.
‘Jimmy? It’s David.’
‘Hello, son. What’s up?’
‘I was going back over some things I’d researched and I was looking at Gary Whitman. I’d only peeked inside the Met’s database. And the DVLA’s. But I was doing more research for the book and I came across a little story you might find interesting.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Gary Whitman went missing six months ago. He’s never been found.’
‘But we know he’s here. Did he just drop off the radar or something?’
‘I don’t think so. When you told me about Albert Renfrew, I googled him and looked at images. He looks almost identical to Whitman. Dark hair, dark beard, almost the same build. If they were standing side by side, you’d notice a difference. But not if you looked at a crappy ID photo. I think Renfrew was masquerading as Whitman with you lot because you didn’t know Renfrew. Then if people who knew Renfrew saw him, well, it’s just Renfrew, isn’t it? They wouldn’t ask questions. As long as you didn’t see him at the same time as the others.’
‘Thanks, David. We’ll talk later.’ Dunbar hung up and looked at Muckle and Evans.
‘That bloke we were interviewing? Gary Whitman? He’s not Gary Whitman. He’s Albert Renfrew, the pathologist. That bastard’s been playing us.’
They ran downstairs and out of the house. Dunbar looked along the track.
One of the other houses was on fire.
Forty-Three
The fire spread in the open-plan living area, the petrol lighting up quickly. The flames spread towards the stairs over to one side of the big room, taking hold of the wood.
Harry knew this house was going to be engulfed in minutes. Maybe that was the real reason they’d shut the place down; it was a death trap.
He tried to run into in to the living room but Renfrew had poured the petrol strategically so the stairs would burn first, preventing escape.
‘Alex! Vern! Are you up there?’
He heard a scream again. Somebody was up there.
‘Help us! We’re up here! We’re trapped.’
Harry took his jacket off and started slapping at the flames, but it was no good. The fire was intense and growing more intense with every passing second. He looked at the stairs and knew he couldn’t get up that way.
He ran outside to see if there was a way to get up to the next level. A drainpipe to climb. Anything.
He saw Vern at a window, and then suddenly the glass exploded outwards. He covered his head as the glass rained down on him.
Then Robbie Evans came firing in, driving the Land Rover like he was on drugs.
‘They’re up there!’ Harry shouted, and Evans rammed the big car into the house sideways. He, Dunbar, Muckle and the dog jumped out and suddenly Evans was climbing on top of the big car.
Vern was knocking out the small shards of glass when Harry saw Alex appear at the window. Vern helped her get her leg over and get out. Evans got hold of her and then reached his hands up to grab Vern as she climbed out.
She screamed as he grabbed her hand. ‘Thumb dislocated,’ she said.
Alex slid down the windscreen onto
the bonnet and was helped off by Harry. Vern and Evans leaped off the side into the snow. Dunbar had got behind the wheel and he floored it away from the house, while the others made it across the track to safety, where they watched the house burn down.
‘Gary Whitman disappeared six months ago,’ Dunbar explained to Harry.
‘I know. Renfrew told me he killed Whitman.’
‘You spoke to him?’
Harry nodded, out of breath. ‘I could have arrested him, but he’d thrown the petrol-soaked rag in after he lit it. I had to try to get Alex.’
‘I understand. Fuck ’im. Alex and Vern are safe, that’s the main thing.’
Muckle came over and Sparky nuzzled Alex.
‘The fire brigade are on their way,’ he said. ‘Although I doubt there will be much left to put out. Maybe some burning bushes.’
‘Maybe the whole fucking forest, the way it’s going,’ Dunbar said. He turned to Robbie. ‘Good job there. I haven’t seen you move that fast in a long time.’
‘I had a broken ankle, remember?’
‘That excuse won’t wash now. Time you were taking us lads to the bar and putting your hand in your pocket.’
‘Aye, and the moon might be made of cheese.’
‘We could always go to the chippie.’ Dunbar turned to Muckle. ‘You ever been to the chippie along from our station?’
‘Aye. Many a time. The one where Linda Fry works?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘I don’t know why we’re talking about the chippie,’ Evans said. ‘Anybody fancy a pint?’
Forty-Four
The snow had stopped falling, as if it knew they were leaving.
‘The invitation’s open to all of you,’ Dunbar said. ‘Cathy’s pal has rented a hall and it’s going to be a belter of a Hogmanay. I’m just glad we’re getting to go instead of being stuck up here.’
They were in Shug’s living room.
‘We’ll be there,’ David said.