Harte

by Robert Innes

  Harte

  The Blake Harte Mysteries - Book 10

  Robert Innes

  Contents

  Also by Robert Innes

  Newsletter

  Manchester

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Back In Harmschapel

  Thank You!

  Also by Robert Innes

  Newsletter

  Also by Robert Innes

  The Blake Harte Mystery Series

  Untouchable

  Confessional

  Ripples

  Reach

  Spotlight

  Flatline

  Skeletons

  Touch

  Atmosphere

  Harte

  The Gold & Silver Mystery Series

  The Hung Jury

  The Poison Pen

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  Manchester

  2010

  “All units in position?”

  Sergeant Blake Harte grimaced slightly at the volume of his radio in the otherwise silent and dark street. “In position.”

  Behind him, Sergeant Sally Ann Matthews tapped him on the shoulder. “Are we sure about this?”

  Blake glanced around to the places where he knew the other officers were secluded. They were all trained to make themselves appear as inconspicuous as possible, though it was at moments like this that Blake wished they had taken some sort of refresher course the day before.

  “No, of course not,” Blake muttered, staring at the house opposite them. “This could all be complete crap.”

  “One woman who rings up and says that there’s a suspicious figure in someone’s garden,” Sally replied, nodding. “It’s Manchester on a Saturday night. There’s probably more suspicious figures around than normal ones.”

  “Then we use this as a dress rehearsal,” Blake replied, aware that his mouth had become incredibly dry. “And then we keep rehearsing and we keep answering these sorts of calls until we catch this guy and stop him and protect this city from what he’s doing.”

  Sally exhaled. “Ready?”

  Blake lifted his radio up to his lips to request to his boss, Inspector Gresham, that they make the move towards the house, but before he uttered a single word, a scream suddenly shattered the silence around them.

  Sally’s eyes widened. “That came from the house.”

  Blake’s insides turned cold. “It’s him.”

  “All units go, go, go!” ordered Gresham’s voice from the radio.

  Immediately, adrenaline rushed through Blake’s veins and he knew that his best friend was feeling the same. Together, he and Sally exchanged the briefest of looks, one that they always shared when they were side by side in situations like this. It was an unspoken moment of wishing the other ‘good luck,’ as they both knew that when they kicked their way into the house, it was impossible to predict what they would find on the other side of the door.

  Forgetting all pretence, they ran towards the house.

  On the very outskirts of Blake’s mind, he was aware that various upstairs lights and twitching curtains had come alive in the surrounding houses in the street. The sight of an array of officers, some armed, making their way quickly across the street that the neighbours would have had at this moment must have been quite startling.

  When Blake and Sally arrived at the front door, the battering ram was already in position. Gresham glared at his two sergeants.

  “Ready?” he snapped, in his usual unnecessarily shirty manner.

  He did not wait for an answer. Instead, he nodded at the two officers holding the battering ram and they immediately began hammering the large metal cylinder into the door.

  “It’s him,” Blake said firmly to Gresham. “It’s got to be.”

  “Hollow optimism isn’t going to catch us a serial killer, Harte,” Gresham replied sharply as the front door to the house clattered to the floor around them. “Just focus on stopping that scream.”

  “If someone else hasn’t already stopped it first,” Sally murmured as the officers around them began pouring into the hole where the door of the house used to be. She pulled her taser gun out of her pocket and held it tightly as they ventured into the house.

  Inside was dark, as most houses are at one in the morning. For a moment, Blake wondered if they were even in the right building. Everything just looked so normal and unlike the sort of place that required immediate police intervention. It was homely, and warm, and comforting.

  He picked up an unopened letter from the shelf near the door and held it up so that he could see the name upon it from the street light outside.

  “Kerry Nightingale,” he muttered. “The politician?”

  “Not exactly a common name,” Sally mused, peering at the envelope. She bit her lip, looking around nervously. “I hate to say it, Blake, but she would fit the pattern.”

  Blake watched from below the stairs as the other officers kicked the doors of the living room, kitchen, and downstairs toilet open.

  “Clear!”

  “Clear.”

  “Clear!”

  “Upstairs,” Sally said, pushing past Blake. “I heard something.”

  Before Blake could react, Gresham had shoved him out of the way and was taking the stairs two at a time.

  “Police!” he shouted. “Show yourselves!”

  Blake nearly bit his tongue in two in an attempt to not hurl some form of angry insult at Gresham’s back and then followed his boss up the stairs.

  The upper floor of the house seemed larger than the bottom. There were several doors scattered around the wide corridor, all of which were closed, any one of them capable of hiding any sort of unknown horror from their immediate sight.

  As Gresham, Sally and a couple of other officers went off in one direction, Blake began with the door nearest to him. He kicked it opened and quickly felt around the wall for the light. The room, which looked like a guest bedroom, was empty.

  “Clear!” Blake called.

  Then, he heard a loud thud from the door at the end of the corridor. He quickly made his way towards it and tried to push it open, but the handle just turned in his hand. It was locked.

  Blake was just about to turn to call Gresham when he heard the unmistakable cry of someone from inside the room. It sounded urgent and scared.

  “Help!”

  The voice sounded like it had been quickly muffled.

  Blake immediately went into action.

  “In here!” he yelled down the corridor.

  As Blake began kicking the door in, the other officers ran towards the room.

  “Get it open, Harte!” shouted Gresham.

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” Blake snapped back, with one last huge kick at the door.

  It burst open.

  On the bathroom floor, staring up at them with wide eyes, tears streaming down her face, was a woman who had the most terrified expression on her face Blake had ever seen. And there, on top of her, his hands around her throat, squeezing the life out of his victim, was the man they had spent so many months looking for. The man who had already claimed five victims, well publicised in the local press. Finally, Blake
was standing before the man the papers had called ‘Jack Frost.’

  For a few fleeting seconds, Frost and Blake maintained eye contact, as if neither could quite believe that this moment had finally arrived. Then, perhaps because he realised that this was his final chance, Frost gritted his teeth and squeezed harder on his prey’s throat, desperately trying to claim his final victim.

  “Get him off!” Blake yelled.

  Immediately, the surrounding officers were on Frost, pulling him clean of the writhing woman beneath him, just as her eyes had slowly begun to close.

  Frost let out a wail of fury as he was pulled to his feet, still doing his utmost to break free so he could finish his task.

  “Don’t make me taser you,” Sally shouted, holding the taser gun at him. “It’s over now, don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

  Gresham, with his usual air of smug superiority, grabbed Frost’s wrists and cuffed them tightly.

  “Jack Frost,” he said, “we meet at last.”

  “I doubt his name is actually Jack,” Blake told him, as he watched Sally kneel down to help Kerry Nightingale.

  “Shut it, Harte,” Gresham snapped.

  Frost grinned as he continued his fruitless efforts to break free, nodding his head at Blake, an insane glee in his eye.

  “Oh, this one knows his stuff. Sergeant Harte, isn’t it? I’ve seen your various statements about me on the news. Quite the fluent speaker, aren’t you?”

  Gresham’s lips thinned, as if he were annoyed that Frost was giving Blake all the credit.

  “Move,” he said forcefully.

  As Frost was frogmarched out of the room, he maintained his eye contact with Blake. Although he tried to appear indifferent, there was something in Frost’s eyes that somehow terrified Blake. He was in no doubt that the man in front of him was anything other than pure evil.

  If it was even possible, Frost looked even creepier under the lights of the interview room.

  Blake leant against the wall with his arms crossed, watching Frost slowly pace around the room through the mirrored window, fully aware that the only reason he was hesitating was because he was trying to muster up the courage to step inside the interview room.

  The door to the side room opened and Sally walked in, her eyes immediately landing on Frost. For a few moments, neither of them spoke. Blake wondered if she was feeling as intimidated as he was, and, like him, was not about to admit it.

  “The psychologist reckons he’s showing all the classic signs of psychopathy,” Sally said at last. “I’d have thought the strangling of five innocent women would have been enough to work that out.”

  Blake exhaled as Frost sat back down at the desk and leant back in his chair, looking contentedly at the ceiling. He had all the casualness of someone waiting for a bus.

  “I’ve read that about one percent of the population are psychopaths,” he murmured. “Look at him. You’d think we’d got him in here for a driving offence. He murdered five people and if we hadn’t stopped him, it would have been six.” He shuddered slightly as the sight of Kerry’s face when he had kicked the bathroom door open, flashed into his mind briefly. “How is she, by the way?”

  Sally sighed. “Not great. She’s alive, which considering what this guy is apparently capable of, seems like a miracle, but she’s practically numb with shock.”

  The door opened again and Gresham walked in, glancing carelessly at Frost, before turning back to Blake.

  “Turns out his name is Thomas Frost,” he began, handing Blake the report he had been carrying. “God knows why he left a calling card signed by the name of a snowman by each victim, but there we are.”

  “Notoriety,” Blake replied, flicking through the folder. “Each of those bodies was his, and he wanted us to know that.”

  “He must have loved it when the papers got hold of it,” Sally added. “Right, are we ready?”

  “I shall be observing, Harte,” Gresham told him pompously. “I’ll give you any questions I have for him throughout the interview.”

  Blake glanced at the microphone attached to the table in front of him as he tightly attached his earpiece.

  “What would I do without you, Sir?”

  Ignoring Gresham’s reply, he nodded to Sally that he was ready and then followed her into the interview room, mentally preparing himself for what he knew was going to be the toughest interrogation of his career.

  Frost looked up at the two officers as they entered the room, smiling darkly at them as they took their seats in front of him.

  Blake watched him for a few moments as he opened the folder.

  “Have you requested legal representation?” he asked.

  Frost shrugged. “No. Do you think I should?”

  “It is your right.”

  “I think we’re a little beyond the ‘no comment,’ stage, don’t you?”

  Blake narrowed his eyes then gave Sally the briefest of nods to turn the recorder on.

  “Interview commencing at 23:58 on November the third, 2010. Present in the room are Sergeants Blake Harte and Sally-Ann Matthews. Also present is Thomas Frost, who has waived the right for legal representation.”

  There was a long pause as the two officers stared at Frost, who merely smiled calmly back at them.

  At last, Blake cleared his throat.

  “So, the man the papers have named Jack Frost. I didn’t think we’d ever actually meet.”

  Frost chuckled. “Yes, yes. ‘Jack Frost.’ We must let the media have its little headlines, mustn’t we? I expect Thomas Frost doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.”

  “Let’s go through it,” Blake said slowly, aware that indulging Frost was probably his best option in order to extract all the information he needed. “All five women.”

  He opened his folder and laid out a series of forensic photographs on the desk in front of Frost. Each one was of a different woman after Frost had finished throttling the life out of them. They all stared back up at them, their eyes cold.

  “Julie Carlisle, Donna Atkins, Leanne Egan, Grace Hodgekiss, and Suzanne Meyer,” Blake said, pointing to each photograph. He was sickened to see Frost smile fondly at the pictures, immediately regretting placing them in front of him to revel over. “And tonight, we caught you with your fingers around the throat of a sixth woman, Kerry Nightingale.”

  Frost leant forward and smiled again. His teeth were yellowing and his eyes, in the dim light of the interview room appeared jet-black. It all made Blake’s blood turn to ice.

  “Just a few more seconds,” Frost whispered. “Maybe ten? Fifteen? You should have seen her, Sergeant. Out of all of these women, hers was my favourite.”

  “Her what?” Sally asked.

  Frost turned to her and narrowed his eyes. Blake felt Sally stiffen slightly next to him.

  “Her dying face,” Frost replied. “Perhaps you haven’t seen it, my dear. That look that someone has in their final few moments. That always drove me on, whenever it started to feel like I was going to bottle out at the last moment. Knowing that any second, I would be treated to that eye flickering, that final look of desperation, that moment that was probably the most genuine any of them had even exuded to anybody in their lives. It was almost a privilege, to witness that golden few seconds of sincerity that they could not help but display, no matter how much they were struggling.” He pointed to the photograph of Grace Hodgekiss. “That one struggled more than the others. But it was still there and worth every second of the battle.”

  For a few moments, both Blake and Sally were too repulsed to speak. Apparently, Gresham noticed their hesitation as his voice suddenly sounded in Blake’s ear.

  “Get on with it, Harte,” he snapped. “You’re indulging him too much.”

  Blake shook his head slightly and removed the photos from the table, shoving them back in the folder. He was somewhat gratified to see that Frost appeared disappointed.

  “Why, then?” he asked. “All these women. Five completely innocent women
that you murdered. What’s it all been about? What’s it all for?”

  “Oh, Sergeant, I know we haven’t exactly known each other long, but I consider myself to be an excellent judge of character,” Frost replied, “and I credited you with a smidgen more intelligence than that.”

  “Oh, you’re that much of a good judge?” Blake asked him. “I met and arrested you no more than an hour ago.”

  “You’re clearly forgetting your numerous appearances on television,” Frost said with a wry smile. “I confess I’m not exactly what one would call an avid watcher, but when the news is featuring nothing but my own work, how could I ignore it? And every report about each of these women, there you are. Giving statements, assuring the public. I wouldn’t be surprised if you find yourself on one of those reality shows soon. The white knight, trying to save all the damsels.”

  It was true that Blake had given more interviews to the press than he cared to remember. After it had become clear that Manchester had a serial killer on its hands, a media storm had soon escalated, and with Blake in charge of the investigation, he had started to be seen on the street as the man who would save them all from ‘Jack Frost.’ It had always been quietly at the back of his mind whenever he had given any form of interview with a camera present that the killer could, and most likely would, see every single one.

  “Ask him again!” Gresham’s voice snapped into Blake’s ear. “Stop letting him lead the interview, Harte, for God’s sake!”

  Blake was close to pulling the earpiece out of his ear and throwing it across the room, but Sally asked the next question.