Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Done,’ Samir replied, glanced at his notes. ‘The driver’s name is Ian.’

  Honor made her way to the ambulances, where the cement truck driver was sitting with a coffee in one hand and a cigarette smouldering in the other. He looked to be about fifty, perhaps a little more, a yellow hard–hat perched on his head, his features ruddy, thick stubble foresting his jaw. Despite the drizzle he wore only a T–shirt beneath his Hi–Viz vest, his forearms thick, his boots and jeans encrusted with cement dust and grime.

  Honor could tell a lot about a person just by the way they looked. The driver was working class, salt–of–the–earth, not a man easily shaken. But she could see his hands trembling, the cigarette stub about to scorch the skin of his left hand. He was staring at his boots, eyes vacant.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked as she approached.

  The driver looked up at her and nodded. Tears wobbled precariously above dark sclera.

  ‘Is she…, she gonna be okay?’

  Honor took a breath. ‘I’m afraid she’s been pronounced dead at the scene.’

  The man stared into Honor’s eyes for a moment longer, and then she watched him start to come apart. The mug dropped from his hand and shattered on the pavement, his body shuddering as convulsive sobs began to wrack his big shoulders.

  ‘I heard her!’ he gasped, choking back his tears. ‘I heard her! Thought it was kids on the main road, I didn’t know she was…’

  ‘We know,’ Honor said, although instantly she realised that she didn’t actually know if the driver was telling the truth. Still, it was tough to put on an act like this and she didn’t doubt the driver would alibi out. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  The driver’s cigarette dropped from his hand and he crushed it with one angry boot. ‘Nothin’ unusual,’ he replied. ‘Site manager unlocked for me, and we set up to pour the concrete. Standard job. Didn’t know anything about somebody being in there until the police came tearing in here screaming at us to shut off the flow.’ The driver looked up at her again. ‘I had a hangover this morning, not a bad one but I wasn’t quite with it. If I’d have heard her then, I might have been able to stop the flow, might have been able to do something to…’

  ‘You didn’t put her there,’ Honor cut him off with a stern finger pointed at him, determined not to let an innocent man shoulder responsibility for the murder of Amber Carson. ‘Her death is down to whoever put her there, nobody else, is that clear?’

  ‘But if I’d just…’

  ‘If you’d been a lazy bastard and taken the day off you wouldn’t have saved her life, because somebody else would have come here and maybe they wouldn’t have heard Amber’s cries either. It’s not on you.’

  The man sat for a moment and whispered her name, tears streaming down his reddened cheeks. ‘Amber.’

  Shit. Honor reigned herself in. Her job wasn’t to console the innocent, it was to find the guilty. The FLO would have to take over here, before she got herself in too deep.

  ‘Ian, right?’ she asked, and was rewarded with a nod.

  ‘Okay, Ian, you’re going to be questioned about this morning’s events. You won’t be under caution, and as long as you have a secure alibi, everything will be fine. I just want to ask you whether you saw anyone or anything that might help us understand how this killing occurred? Was there anything at all that you thought was wrong or unusual about the site this morning?’

  Ian frowned, concentrating, but he shook his head.

  ‘I don’t remember anything unusual at all, other than it being a lousy day and me having a headache. I’m sorry, I want to help but I can’t think straight.’

  Honor nodded, and pulled from her pocket a card with her details on it. ‘Call me at any time, if you think of anything, okay?’

  Ian nodded, barely looking at the card as he took it. Honor turned and crossed to where Amber Carson was lying on her back on the grass, surrounded by cold concrete, her corpse laced with dirt and other debris that marred her once vibrant youth. Honor had seen many dead bodies, but none with such an expression of horror forged into their dying features, an eternal rictus that twisted the once–beautiful face into a stone gargoyle not dissimilar to the ones looking down upon the grisly scene from the heights of the cathedral walls. Amber’s features were now a skull–like shell, the weight of the compressed concrete having punctured her eyeballs, her mouth hanging open, her limp tongue coated with concrete mess.

  ‘Got to be a link here.’

  She turned to see that Danny Green had returned and was staring up at the cathedral. His eyes looked sore, and there was a slouch in his shoulders that reminded her of her father, when he had lost his mother to old age.

  ‘One church, one cathedral,’ Honor nodded, sensing his train of thought. ‘Could be the building sites, construction works on both premises.’

  ‘Gary Wheeler?’

  Honor shook her head, glancing at site boards mounted on the temporary walls surrounding the works site. ‘Different company, but they could be connected. Can you look into that, see if anybody works for both companies? Could be a useful place to start.’

  ‘What about the other guy, Cooper, the site manager?’ Danny asked.

  ‘He alibied out,’ Samir said. ‘CCTV’s got him going home when he said he did. Doesn’t appear again until the following morning. Same goes for Kieran O’Rourke and all other workers contracted on the site.’

  Danny nodded, but his eyes were still casting across the cathedral’s immense Gothic façade.

  ‘Kind of grim, when you think about it,’ he said, almost absent–mindedly. ‘Celebrated architecture, but it’s covered in carvings of demons and gargoyles and all that kind of stuff. Not exactly welcoming.’

  Honor nodded, but said nothing. Maybe Danny was just distracting himself. He hadn’t looked at Amber’s corpse since he’d returned.

  ‘Get onto Gary Wheeler,’ she repeated, sensing that he would be better employed elsewhere. ‘I’ll work with forensics here.’

  Danny nodded and walked away from the gruesome scene. Honor watched him go for a moment, then turned to Samir, who gestured to the scene.

  ‘Forensics are on the way, but with two tons of concrete on her, I don’t think we’re gonna get much.’

  Honor disagreed, although she didn’t say as such. The concrete would indeed have removed much physical and genetic traces of a second party, and their killer appeared to have an almost supernatural ability to conceal himself from detection, but they only needed a single hair.

  ‘She’s only got her bra and jeans on,’ Honor pointed out as she examined the body without straying too close. ‘Last footage we have of her, she had a blouse on.’

  ‘She made it home,’ Samir guessed as he looked down at the corpse. For a moment he was detached, clinical, but then he seemed to see Amber for who she had been and he turned away briefly. Honor said nothing, waited for a moment until Samir got himself back under control. A few deep breaths. A cough. She pretended not to notice the waver in his voice as he continued.

  ‘Either she undressed herself, or the killer dressed her this way, maybe as some ritualistic device.’

  ‘Could be either,’ Honor agreed. ‘Sebastian was found wearing the same suit he’d left work in, so it doesn’t quite fit the profile of a ritual killer.’

  Samir nodded, staring at Amber’s remains but thinking more clearly now. The hunt was on. She could see it in his eyes and in his posture – his back straightening, his chin rising. The anger was coming, the hunger was there, and despite the appalling scene they were witnessing she felt a little spark of joy to see the predator in Samir assert itself, the desire to catch a killer sparking into life like a pale flame in an immense darkness.

  ‘He has to be on CCTV somewhere around her home,’ he said. ‘The guy had to make his way there and either lay in wait for her outside the home, or break in and wait.’

  ‘Get back to the office, watch anything we have from the pub opposite Amber’s apartment or on any o
f the approaches. There’s an alleyway down the side of her home so he could have come in from another street to the east.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  One of the fire crews called for her, and Honor walked onto the grass, carefully avoiding the thick cement residue caking the ground as she picked her way toward where the fireman was standing in waders in the deep pit. He held something in his gloved hands, and as Honor got closer she realised that it was a mobile phone, connected to a thin wire, from which drooped globules of cement.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she snapped as she fumbled in her pocket for an evidence bag.

  She could see the forensic team arriving nearby, but she wanted the mobile phone inside an evidence bag and protected before it could be contaminated by anybody on the scene. The fireman dropped the phone into the bag, and then carefully began easing up the thin wire that led down into the grim grey mess in which he stood. Honor watched as he slowly brought the thin cable up, and it finally broke free from the surface of the concrete to reveal a small camera attached to one end.

  ‘It’s a fibre–optic cable,’ Samir said as he watched the fireman guide the cable into the evidence bag. ‘The video link we watched.’

  Honor sealed the bag as the forensics teams arrived, and she handed it promptly to the scene examiner with a brief about where it was found.

  ‘What about the video? He must have used some means of broadcasting it. There has to be a source, an IP address or whatever?’

  ‘I’ll contact the Cyber Griffin team and see what they can do for us,’ Honor said, referring to the City of London Police unit dedicated to digital crimes. ‘We’ve got people who can track IPs down, and the e–mails that he sent the family.’

  Samir hesitated, and Honor instantly realised that the duty to inform the family of their daughter’s horrific death would now fall upon her shoulders. Even with DI Katy Harper alongside her, it was a task that all officers dreaded. They had failed to protect Amber, had been unable to derail the plans of a killer deranged and sadistic enough to orchestrate both this murder and perhaps that of Sebastian Dukas. No matter how much she told herself and others that this was nobody’s fault but that of the perpetrator, it still felt as though they were letting people down.

  ‘I’ll take care of the family,’ Honor said, knowing what Samir was thinking. ‘You focus on spotting the perpetrator – hopefully we can identify him before he tries something like this again.’

  ‘You think he will?’ Samir asked. ‘Do you think this is the work of an actual serial killer?’

  Honor looked down at Amber’s pitiful remains, and she knew damned well that this wouldn’t be their quarry’s last kill.

  ‘I think he’s only just got started,’ she said softly, and then a new and worrisome thought crossed her mind. ‘These may not even have been his first.’

  9

  Honor made it back to Bishopsgate just after eleven, as City Police began mobilising in the wake of the double–killing, but her first port of call had been the custody suite and Amber Carson’s family. With DI Katy Harper, they had broken the news of Amber’s passing before questioning them as gently as they could in the presence of an FLO.

  Honor headed quickly past the commotion in the Incident Room and slipped into her office, closed the door behind her. She had to do this, or the events of the past few hours were going to overwhelm her and she’d be no damned good to anybody.

  Amber Carson’s parents had been utterly bereft, the mother hitting the verge of a nervous breakdown right there and then as Honor and DI Harper delivered the awful news. The father had worn the same blank stare his daughter had right before her grisly demise, as a part of him withered and died within. One brother, one sister, all four of them huddled together as grief spilled from their hearts, forever to shadow their futures. It had been all that Honor could do to maintain some degree of professional detachment from their pain.

  Then the anxiety attack had come, the first in months.

  The loss of balance got her first, the world seeming to become two dimensional around her. She realised that she had not taken a breath for some time, and sucked air in only to slump against the wall outside the suite. Her throat felt as though somebody was crushing it, air whistling through a narrow gap as steel bands squeezed her chest. She couldn’t get a full breath in, she just fucking couldn’t. Stars whorled in her eyes, her legs rubbery as the ground shifted beneath her feet. Get a grip.

  She had managed to get control of herself again before the FLO and DI Harper returned from the suite, but Honor said nothing, entrapped within a crucible of panic as the black chasm of anxiety threatened to rush up and consume her whole. She needed to get control of herself, right now.

  Just a few moments.

  The building opposite Bishopsgate Station was a tower block that she shut out with a twitch of her window blinds. Then she sat down at her desk, closed her eyes and began trying to control her breathing. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Nobody is looking at you. Nobody thinks the worst of you. People are only going about their business, just like you are. Honor began to control her breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, smooth, calm. Find your happy place.

  She couldn’t remember precisely where she had been, but an image of a beach flashed into her mind: white sand, blue water, laughter, happiness. Her parents close by, Billy splashing manically in the water, ice creams, the excitement of staying somewhere that wasn’t home. Focus in on it. Ignore the images, capture the feelings. Honor leaned back in her seat, breathing in slow rhythm to the waves of the tide washing onto the immaculate beach. Her mind began to clear, the tension in her shoulders leaking away, leaving her to roam blissfully alone in the darkened vault of her mind.

  She knew that she would only have a few minutes, so Honor sat in silence until she felt calm enough to consider something beyond her own state of mind. Slowly, furtively, she allowed an image of Sebastian Dukas to materialise within the serene blackness. She saw him from a clinical viewpoint, her emotions no longer a barrier to her perception. He was hanging from the rope. There was no camera watching him. No moment of death, nothing for the killer to take away. Why? Dukas had died from asphyxiation, had been throttled to death. Did the killer want to witness that death personally? Was that his normal MO, to kill while looking into his victim’s eyes? If so, why use the GHB drug on him? Was the killer a coward, afraid to take on a man without first incapacitating him? There was nothing sexual noted in either of the murders, so that was not his goal, or at least didn’t appear to be at this stage.

  Something nagged at her. She allowed herself to picture Amber Carson, not the grim visage of her death but vibrant in life. Amber was smaller, younger, more vulnerable that Sebastian Dukas had been. Both victims frequented a website, Face Fear, that allowed sufferers of extreme phobias to communicate. Beyond that they were unconnected, and had likely never heard of each other or met. Their phobias were the only connection. One male, one female.

  A killer like the one they sought would need to have found a way to drug both victims, assuming that Amber was also under the influence of GHB. The first thing that came into Honor’s mind was drink–spiking. The second thing that she thought of was the fact that both victims were present in bars or clubs before they disappeared, presenting an opportunity for the killer to spike their drinks at some point in the evening and make his attack as the victims headed home. But how would he know their mode of transport, or their plans? What if a victim got a lift, or had somebody at home waiting for them? The killer’s scheme would come to nothing if he was challenged or outnumbered, and his position would be considerably worse if he was identified and reported to the police. He would instantly become a person of interest.

  The answer came to her in an instant, a confirmation of her earlier instincts. He had to have planned this. Not just the first killing, not the second, but all of the killings. This wasn’t a random attack on anybody he could find, but a specifically targeted campai
gn. It wasn’t just the phobias. The killer would have to know the person in some way, would have researched how they moved, where they lived, who they knew, in order to coordinate his attacks to precisely locate and entrap the unwitting victim when they were both most vulnerable and had been successfully drugged.

  Honor sat for a moment in silence, basked in the aura of peace surrounding her. The black chasm receded, cringing away from the immense power of a focused mind. She opened her eyes. Danny Green stood on the other side of her desk.

  ‘Sorry, boss, I knocked but you didn’t answer.’

  Bugger. Honor stared at him blankly, her recently erected shield of karma–armour threatened with imminent collapse.

  ‘CBT,’ he said, and she nodded furtively in response. ‘Bloody love it, I should do it more often.’

  Honor blinked. ‘You did CBT?’

  Danny glanced over his shoulder at the office door, tapped it closed with his heel and then slipped into a seat opposite.

  ‘Time to time,’ he admitted. ‘I got help a few years back. There’s only so many car– crash victims covered in claret that you can see, y’know?’

  Honor felt her heart warm as though touched by the sun’s rays, and the yawning black chasm slipped away into obscurity. Honor realised that she was smiling, tried to stop it, and then wondered why.

  ‘Guess we’re all being frazzled by this one.’

  Danny nodded, his own eyes still haunted by grim shadows from the scene at the cathedral.

  ‘Forensics have got the phone, the coffin and a few other bits and pieces out of the pit,’ Danny said, changing the subject. ‘The pathologist is prioritising Amber Carson’s autopsy, but we won’t know until tomorrow about anything in her system.’

  ‘Ask Michelle to draw fluids now,’ Honor said. ‘GHB can disappear from a victim’s body within a few hours, we don’t want to risk losing a link with Sebastian Dukas’s killer. Being members of the same phobia website on its own isn’t going to be enough to convince CPS that this is a campaign.’