Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  The tears came then, a tsunami of regret, hate, fear and a dozen other emotions she didn’t even fully recognise. She threw her hands to her face as the knife clattered to the stone floor, crouched over her grief as she heard someone climb off the plank beside her and throw arms around her shoulders, wrapping her up.

  Honor felt herself slipping away into a swirling maelstrom of repressed emotions. Police boots thundered into the belfry and then came to an abrupt halt as they saw the two figures clutching each other, sobbing in the darkness. The officers’ jaws dropped as one.

  ‘How in the name of arse…?’

  Natalie Delray’s hair was as heavy and soaked as Honor’s, her limbs trembling with cold and an infusion of adrenaline. She kept her grip on Honor and kept talking. ‘It’s okay, Honor, we’re going to be okay. I didn’t know about any of what you said, Zach never said a word. What baby?’

  Kieran O’Rourke hurried out onto Princelet Street and made his way down the street outside. The rain was falling, the skies dark, the streets deserted, and he smiled. Your time has come.

  He made his way down to the famous Brick Lane, then turned north. His destination was Dray Walk, a tiny side alley off Brick Lane and one of the oldest locations in the city. Now home to hip shops and boutiques, at this time of night it was deserted. The Brick Lane entrance was blocked by shutters after the close of business, but he knew that he could gain entry via Hanbury Street. There, near Quaker Street, conveniently placed out of sight, was a manhole cover used by Thames Water to maintain a watch on the Whitechapel sewers. From there, he could traverse Monument and travel north all the way up to Bank, where he had parked a Fiat that he’d bought for cash a month earlier.

  O’Rourke hurried through the narrow confines of Dray Walk until he saw Quaker Street ahead, and the two large manhole covers he needed to access. He would need to be quick, but he was conditioned to this now and had already checked to make sure that he could lift and access the sewer inspection sites easily.

  He would make for Scotland first, and from there he could find passage into Europe and start afresh, somewhere new, somewhere different, where he could live in peace and watch the furore that would erupt as the police strived and failed to bring him to justice, his name passing into legend.

  O’Rourke reached Quaker Street, looked left and right and found it empty, devoid of vehicles or pedestrians. Quickly, he slid the rucksack he carried from his shoulder and pulled out a metal hook designed specifically for the task of lifting the manhole cover.

  He hooked them into place and heaved on the cover.

  Two police cars surged into Quaker Street from opposite ends, their lights blazing, tires squealing as they converged upon his position.

  ‘No!’

  O’Rourke whirled to flee back down Dray Walk, in time to see a detective rush into view.

  ‘Game’s up, O’Rourke.’

  O’Rourke recognised him, Daniel Green, a detective constable, one of McVey’s people. O’Rourke reached for a knife in his jacket, and his hand began to quiver. He couldn’t run, couldn’t escape. The police vehicles screeched to a halt and officers flooded out. He could hear them yelling, warning him that they were armed with Tasers, ordering him to show them his hands.

  He pulled the knife out, and Danny Green slowed, raised a placating hand.

  ‘Easy,’ Danny murmured. ‘Ain’t no sense in taking yourself down or anybody else, Kieran. Take it easy and put the blade down.’

  O’Rourke put the blade to his own throat, the metal cold to the touch, callous, uncaring, savagely sharp. His arm began to shudder uncontrollably. No way out. He had to die. Put the blade through.

  An image of the blood spilling, hot and thick, down his throat turned his guts upside down and a bolt of nausea lodged in his throat. Cut, now! His arm shuddered as he tried to dredge up the will to face death, gritted his teeth, groaned with fury. An image of Emily Wilson’s blood spilling from her body as she was consumed by rats stayed his hand, but the police were almost upon him now. There was no longer any time. He should go as the Ripper would have chosen to go, swift but violent, a glorious escape from an impossible situation. He needed to die a man’s death. End it, now!

  ‘Armed officers, TASER equipped! Put the knife down, now!’

  The blade sliced into his flesh and unbearable white pain seared his skin, hot blood spilling down his throat, and he yanked the blade away.

  Danny Green lunged forward and grabbed O’Rourke’s wrist, twisted it upward and sideways. Pain ripped through O’Rourke’s shoulder as the blade clattered to the ground and he was forced to his knees. Within seconds, a constable was binding his wrists in metal handcuffs as Danny Green’s voice echoed up and down the narrow London street. ‘Kieran O’Rourke, you’re being arrested under the suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything, but anything that you do say…’

  Revelation and realisation reached into the depths of his mind, too late, as they so often were. In all things, justice came with time. It might be slow, painfully so at times, but it came none the less. Karma. What goes around, comes around.

  ‘Thanatophobia,’ Danny Green said as he hauled Kieran to his feet. ‘Honor was right, you didn’t have the spine to take your own life. Move!’

  O’Rourke said nothing, utterly compliant as he was forcibly cajoled toward a waiting patrol car, the rain falling silently all around him on one of Spitalfield’s oldest streets, every building standing at the time the Ripper had stalked London.

  Coffee, even from a Styrofoam cup, had never tasted so good.

  Honor sat on the back step of an ambulance, a blanket around her shoulders, the coffee clasped in her hands. Her legs were still shaking, her guts churning from a radical injection of adrenaline, but she was alive. Alive.

  ‘Christ, there you are.’

  Danny Green ran toward her, concern writ large on his features as he rushed to her side. He reached her, crouched down and wrapped her up in an embrace.

  ‘I’m okay, more or less,’ she said, her voice feeble. ‘Shit, Danny, I need a cigarette.’ Danny released her, pulled out a cigarette. He lit it for her, and one for himself, and she dragged down a lungful of nicotine that nearly sent her flat on her back. She blew

  out a billowing cloud of smoke and instantly felt mildly nauseous. ‘You’ve earned that one,’ Danny said, surprised but understanding. ‘Samir?’ she asked.

  ‘On his way to hospital with head injuries,’ Green replied. ‘O’Rourke stomped him out but didn’t finish the job. I don’t know his condition yet. Officers got to him based on your tip off, just after you’d killed…’

  Danny cut himself off, his features tortured, torn between relief and regret for what she had done.

  ‘Natalie is fine,’ Honor said.

  Danny stared at her for a moment, not getting it. Honor tilted her head toward another ambulance. Danny glanced across at it and almost choked on his cigarette as he saw Natalie Delray sitting on the back step. Danny looked back at Honor, who reached behind her and produced an evidence bag containing the camera that had been strapped to Natalie’s head. The strap had been hacked in two.

  ‘Told you the fucker would make a mistake eventually,’ she uttered with a grim smile. ‘If he’d suspended Natalie by her ankles, it’d be me in custody right now.’

  Danny Green shook his head in wonder, ran a hand down his face as though to wipe it free of weariness and pain.

  ‘You cut the camera, not the rope,’ he said. ‘How the hell did they ever put DS Hansen in your place?’

  Honor shrugged but said nothing. She took another drag on the cigarette, but as her jangling nerves continued to calm, she realised that she wasn’t really enjoying it at all. She tossed it and crushed it under her heel, blew the smoke out along with what felt like a lifetime of pain and watched it coil away into the damp, miserable night.

  ‘She helped me,’ Honor said. ‘Natalie helped me back inside the church.’

  Danny looked up at the planks, two hundre
d feet above them. ‘Bloody least she could do. But if you cut the camera strap, you’d have had to hang off the edge of the planks to reach her, right?’

  Honor nodded, said nothing.

  ‘Christ,’ Danny uttered. ‘That’s some brass balls, right there.’

  ‘She didn’t know, about the baby I lost, none of it. It was all kept from her. She said Zach told her he left me because the work made me too cold, unemotional. He couldn’t understand me anymore.’

  Danny watched her for a moment, chose his words carefully.

  ‘Things in our heads often look different to the way they’re seen by others. How did you know where O’Rourke was?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘I cut Natalie’s gag right after the camera, and she told me where O’Rourke had taken her, along with an Asian guy she’d seen, which must have been Samir. I called it in right away, then I just froze up. The GHB in her system was wearing off, so Natalie guided me to help free her hands, and got us off the planks and into the belfry. Turns out she’s got a hell of a spine and isn’t afraid of heights. Where’s O’Rourke now?’

  ‘In custody,’ Green replied. ‘I got lucky, and caught him trying to use the sewer entrance off Brick Lane; seemed like his only way out of Whitechapel once we were on to him. He tried to cut his own throat, but lost his nerve.’

  Honor thought for a moment, and then smiled. ‘Thanatophobia,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t go through with it, right?’

  Danny nodded, puffed happily on his cigarette and blew the smoke away from her. ‘Meek as a lamb once I took the knife from him. And guess what – he had a bite mark on the left side of his jaw, and the pathologist said that at autopsy she discovered that Jayden Nixx had skin caught in her teeth. What’s the chances of that skin matching Kieran O’Rourke’s do you think?’

  Honor closed her eyes and leaned back against the step of the ambulance, suddenly weary beyond belief. ‘We’ve got him.’

  ‘Yeah, which means you’re on leave until further notice,’ Danny said. ‘I want O’Rourke in that interview room, first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Mitchell wants you to rest for a day or two, until this all dies down. So does Harper. The close nature of the case might mess up anything we put in front of CPS, if they conclude you were compromised or under stress during interview. We can’t risk blowing the prosecution on this one.’

  ‘Bollocks. I want O’Rourke,’ she growled.

  ‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ Danny said, hands in the air. ‘You’re alive. How about small mercies?’

  Alive. Honor realised that she’d never felt more alive than now, sitting here, shivering and exhausted after days in the presence of death and misery. The similarity with what she suspected O’Rourke experienced during his campaign wasn’t lost on her, and it made her shudder. Yet the delight and the relief that she now felt was not caused by death, provoked by suffering; rather, the catalyst was the end of the trauma. O’Rourke was in custody, and no more innocent lives would fall victim to his insane campaign.

  Honor stood up, face to face with Danny.

  ‘I want to see him, just once, behind bars where he belongs. Can we at least do that?’

  26

  Bishopsgate custody suite was strangely devoid of suspects as Honor walked back into the station and was buzzed through. The fifteen cells were often packed with a volatile collection of drunks, drug–abusers and other ne’er–do–wells swept up off the streets every day and night by city officers. Although she couldn’t be sure, she suspected that the ongoing campaign of murders had attracted the attention of more than just the general public, criminals themselves equally fascinated by the investigation.

  Honor walked past a series of lockers behind the custody bridge, atop which was a jaunty pile of constables’ helmets, their red and white check–flash and gold badges vivid against black.

  ‘He’s in five,’ the custody sergeant said to her, gestured to one of the cells. Honor stared at the door. ‘What do we know about him?’

  Danny spoke softly.

  ‘You were on the money. O’Rourke’s mother died aged thirty–two, cancer, left him alone and in the care of a father with a history of alcoholism and domestic abuse. Father drops off the radar when O’Rourke turns eighteen, maybe nineteen. Turns out he was still alive, but strapped to a bed in O’Rourke’s basement. He’s been there for over twenty years.’

  ‘Alive?’ Honor asked, horrified.

  ‘Forced entry team found him dead, smashed up with a baseball bat,’ Danny replied. ‘Murder was recent but the body was emaciated. They said it was like looking at archaeological remains. The autopsy will tell us more, but they’re thinking he was barely alive throughout that time, kept ticking over by his son.’

  The obsession, with the moment of death, Honor thought, played out in reverse upon an abusive father. O’Rourke had kept him barely alive for two decades, hovering on the verge of his own terminal demise, tortured for every single second of his existence at the hands of a psychotic son with nothing left to live for. The fact that O’Rourke had lost his mother at a young age, leaving him to face his father’s wrath, had probably been the trigger point – either that or O’Rourke coming of age and turning the tables. O’Rourke was no psychopath, merely a twisted, sickened man constantly seeking to avenge the loss of a mother, a grievance he’d never been able to get over.

  ‘You sure you want to do this?’ Danny asked as he followed her in.

  Protocol demanded that another officer accompany her, to prevent any legal defence from claiming that she had interfered with the suspect. A personal connection to the victims could be used as reason for the Crown Prosecution Service to reject or alter the case against O’Rourke.

  ‘Yes,’ Honor replied. ‘Has legal counsel been assigned yet?’

  ‘He hasn’t even been interviewed yet, just processed,’ the sergeant replied. ‘They’re going to start work on him in the morning, although we’ve got him under suicide watch just in case.’

  Honor smiled softly. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that.’

  ‘I do,’ Danny said. ‘I don’t want him suddenly growing a spine and taking his own life. I want him behind bars for the rest of his life.’

  Something about the way Danny said that gave Honor an idea. ‘Put me in cuffs.’

  The sergeant raised an eyebrow. ‘Say what?’ ‘Do it,’ she said, ‘and lead me to the cell.’

  The sergeant glanced at Danny, who nodded. Reluctantly, the sergeant cuffed her, and then she walked to cell five, approached the door slowly. There was an open observation window in the door at head height, a female officer sitting on a chair beside the door. Although Honor knew who was sitting within the cell, it was as though she didn’t want to approach, as though somehow there was something waiting for her that was far more terrifying than just a man within.

  Danny hung back as Honor walked to the window, took a breath, and looked inside. Like all cells, the interior was spartan and well lit. A single, slab–like bed protruded from the back wall, and a sink adorned the wall to her right. There, on the bed, was a man laying with his back to her, his arms folded around himself. Big shoulders, a tall

  man, yet strangely seeming smaller in real life than she had come to imagine. ‘Kieran.’

  She said his name softly, almost as though it fell from her lips of its own accord. Slowly, the man rolled over and she saw the recognition in his eyes, the flare of surprise and then a deep veil of shame, the pall of the defeated. For a moment she thought that he would roll over again and turn his back to her, but curiosity got the better of him and he turned to sit on the edge of the bed, keeping his distance from the door.

  ‘I wondered when we would meet.’

  His voice sounded utterly unthreatening. Honor realised that there was no way on earth that she or anybody else, upon encountering this man on the street, would have had any idea of what he was capable of.

  ‘You kind of made our meeting inevitable.’

  Keiran glan
ced briefly past her, saw the duty sergeant behind her, the awkward set of her shoulders, and she saw him realise that she was in cuffs.

  ‘You were very brave,’ he said. ‘It was a shame that your colleague had to die, but five victims were what I needed, and I got them. You were all too late.’

  A smile. A pyrrhic victory for a narcissist. Honor kept her features composed. ‘None of it was worth it, Kieran. You think you’re the next Ripper, but you failed, in everything.’

  She saw a flame of defiance spark back into life as O’Rourke stood and paced toward the window. Now, she could see his formidable size, but again, somehow, she was no longer intimidated. She knew this man’s character, that of a coward, a man who had been unable to face up to the same fears that he had so cruelly inflicted upon others.

  ‘Five victims,’ he repeated, ‘all killed in spectacular ways, with you, the last victim, to suffer your crime for the rest of your life. You shouldn’t have gone up against me, Honor, you weren’t up to it.’

  The smile, again. O’Rourke was stooping slightly to see her through the window.

  Honor raised her chin.

  ‘You got what you wanted,’ she replied. ‘Why did you do it? Why kill like that, innocent people? What was the point?’

  ‘The point?’ Kieran echoed, as though surprised that she did not yet understand. ‘Why would there be a point? There’s no point to anything, Honor. We live only once, and then we’re all gone. Nothing matters, nobody matters. We’re all just dust and ashes once we’re gone, right? Why not leave a mark to be remembered by?’