Personal

by S Thomas Thompson

  Marie looked at the team of detectives stood in front of her. It was like training new recruits again. They all looked eager to learn. It was the type of response she wanted. She stepped to one side and let Augustine lead the way. He bounced the first few steps to stay at the front and walked through the front door, looking directly ahead all the time. The rest of the team followed with Marie at the back. It was a narrow staircase but opened out into a wider landing at the top of the stairs. There was a charcoal taste in every breath that made it an unpleasant place to be, but the further up the stairs they went, the more obvious it was that the fire damage was mainly contained to the ground floor and front of the building. The room they were about to enter on the instructions of Marie had largely escaped unscathed.

  The scene was one of confusion to begin with. The walls looked like they were randomly filled with pieces of paper, photographs, newspaper clippings and notes. But once the detectives were stood in the middle of the room, they could survey everything in one go and quickly realised that this was more organised than at first glance.

  Augustine was looking at the map on the left side of the room, as they entered. It was detailed and the red marking stood out above all else. Augustine knew the locations and pictured himself stood there after the murders. He could see himself with the body, like in his dreams, as he surveyed each of the red areas. The theatre, where he had felt dizzy and had to sit down. The Museum of Innocence where they worked around the side of the building to find the body. The headquarters of Britain Excelsior, where the politician Jeff Caine’s body was found and where he had to break into the building to look at Scott Sharpe’s computer. He felt cold that the murders had been plotted on a map as though they were tourist sites. There were always macabre people who went in for visiting mass graves or the sites of a serial killer, but this was the closest Augustine had ever got to this phenomenon.

  Gary was looking at the opposite wall, where he found images, notes and newspaper articles about the people who had already been killed. He recognised them from sight, but the details that the killer had left in his notes gave Gary more of an insight into their lives than he had ever imagined. There were comments about their habits, their supposed sins and a lot of information about their activities. No wonder the killer could slay them at will when he had their shift patterns and route to work studied and written down.

  Ash and Lou stood and stared at the array of people on the wall in front of them. It was a level of detail only matched by that on the wall in front of Gary. Each target had been noted for their sin, their lifestyle and their accessibility – Lou could put it no other way. Those people with a lifestyle that would expose them to danger were the easiest to select. Those were the people that were on this list of ‘sinners’ and chosen to be killed. Ash looked over at Lou and mouthed the words ‘fucking hell,’ at him. He didn’t know whether Lou was looking or not. He just needed to say it.

  All four turned around as Marie coughed. She was looking at the wall that contained the door they entered by. She was trying to take it all in and had wandered until she was back to back with Ash. The enormity of the message on the wall was too much to take in from close quarters. She counted 94 letters in the entire message after checking twice. They had five victims so far. There was one letter unaccounted for, the ‘N’ in the first word. This left 88 victims left before the killer completed his work. She took the deepest breath of her life. She sucked in air as though her life depended on it. By this point, the rest of the team were stood alongside her, all reading the message. These were light grey letters, not the black letters that had been left on the bodies of the victims they had so far found but the message was still stark and clear. He intended to kill a lot more people. They had a group of potential victims identified on the walls in front of them, but there were nowhere near 88 people there, maybe around 25. Others were at risk. The killer was not finished.

  29

  Al had another address on the opposite side of Washington, under the name of his brother who had returned to Pakistan a few years earlier. There was little to link the two brothers, they came to the UK at different times, had different surnames and didn’t see a great deal of each other. The alternative of sleeping rough or staying in a hotel were options Al had considered but they felt as though they carried even more risk than using a home that hadn’t been linked to him before. A hotel would want some ID and a nosy owner might call the police if he suspected Al of being linked to any criminality. Anyway, there were precious few of them in the town. There was a chance by now the police could have some information on him and possibly circulated his name to the press and there would be those looking to catch him. Sleeping rough had the frequent hazard of being in contact with the police. His description would definitely have been circulated there and this was a risk he was not willing to take.

  But Al knew that the whole exercise as fraught with risk. He couldn’t kill all those people without taking a risk or two. He had taunted the detective at the Museum after killing the banker. He had bumped into the detective after killing the gay entertainer. But his work was far from done and taking too many risks was going to lengthen the odds that he would prove his peers wrong and get all his work carried out before detection. He had listened to enough shit from people who wanted to become famous by driving a van into people and maybe cutting a few up before the police arrived and shot them. He had a message to get out there. They were just small-time idiots who wanted a bit of fame in their one community. The people who had blown up others and killed the odd bystander were known in the radical Muslim community as warriors. But Al had much bigger ideas. He wanted the name Alaaldin Hussein to be known away from his community. He wanted the name Alaaldin Hussein to strike fear into the people of the United Kingdom and the Western world. He wanted people to know that he was different to the rest of them. He wanted his name to be synonymous with Muslim terror. Most of all he wanted to be the poster child that inspired a new generation of extremists. Those that held political views against his people, those that lent money and exploited the poor, those that practiced homosexuality and those that sold their body should not sleep easily. Those were the first line of people that should live in fear of Alaaldin Hussein and those that followed him. All the other sinners of the western world should change their ways or face the same end.

  Al walked the two miles to his brother’s place and opened the door with a key that had rested in his wallet for the past two years without ever being disturbed. He had some plans he could access from the laptop in his bag, but the rest would have to be started from scratch. He hoped that the fire had destroyed all the information he left on the walls in his study, but had to assume that the police might be able to gain some information from the charred remains. He would have to start again. But there was one target that Al could easily reach. He knew a little about the target and could add the rest of the data needed to make a clean kill soon. Al sat on the bed in the upstairs room of the apartment his brother still owned. It was the only piece of furniture in the place. Al closed his eyes in deep thought. He wanted to kill again before the week was out.

  30

  Lou was thinking about retirement. He had worked way past the age he was going to retire but hadn’t found anything else he wanted to do with his life. The passing of his wife left him with no direction and few ideas about what the future might hold. So, he just kept on doing what he knew. It was easier that way. A life where you don’t have to make any decisions always felt easier for Lou. As he sat, he wondered if this was one of the reasons he joined the police and stayed for as long as he had. At home, his wife would tell him what to do. It wasn’t that she was bossy, but that he would get home and she would tell him what they were going to have for dinner, she would let him know if they were going somewhere at the weekend and she would arrange the rest of his life too. It was to the degree that she would get his clothes out of the wardrobe and have them on the bed so he could just get dressed without having to make any form
of decision regarding what to wear. It felt the same at work. His daily work life was dictated to him by the criminals that had committed a crime the day before. He turned up, found out what was needed of him and then got on with it. He didn’t have the time to make decisions, just process information and then move on to the next one. Because of this he didn’t get emotionally attached to the work. He felt sorry for the people who had been the victim of crime and their family too, but didn’t lose sleep over it like many of the people he worked with. Lou wanted a change. He sat and thought about the different things he could be doing with his life instead of being a cop. None appealed that much that he jacked his job in straight away but there were a few options that might sound good enough if he put more thought into it. He parked these ideas for a while and got on with his work. It was a few hours since they had come back from the scene of the latest murder and the fire that accompanied it. Electra had given them all a briefing from the post mortem. Brief was the operative word. The police officer had been killed by a blow to the head and it appeared that the wounds on his thigh were carried out after he was already dead. That shone a light on the way that the others were cut. But that was the only light from the post mortem. There was little else to say.

  From that point on, the whole team threw themselves into finding out as much as they could about Alaaldin Hussein. They wanted to know where he had lived, where he had worked and if he had any family that they could contact. The idea was that they spent that day looking for as much information as they could and the day after would consist of following up on these leads. So far Lou had found 2 places where he might have possibly worked but nothing on the family side of things. Electra was working with Ash and they had a good idea about a couple of places Alaaldin might have lived so would follow that up with the current occupants and the landlords. All the information they could gather was getting them further ahead with an investigation that had seemed dead-end only the day before. Gary had the task that none of the rest of the team wanted. He was going to knock door to door and ask the neighbours all they knew about the man who they suspected of killing several people already and plotting the murder of many more. These conversations always ended up with phrases such as –

  ‘He kept himself to himself.’

  ‘He was quiet.’

  ‘I didn’t see much of him.’

  But someone had to have these conversations in case a gem came up. Every now and again someone might mention something that would change the course of an investigation. Gary had spoken to someone at the door once who just happened to mention that they had hidden CCTV cameras along the side of their home. This lead to the images being used to catch a rapist who had dragged two women into the bushes across the street and raped them systematically. The conversation about the crime didn’t bring out anything from the person who had these cameras. It was just a general chat about the state of society as Gary was breaking off the conversation when it came up. Gary could see the potential benefit of this way of gathering evidence, but he just wished that it was someone else that was given this task.

  The team worked diligently for hours without a break. The only time one of them came away from their desk was to come into Augustine’s office to check a detail or to add another person to his list of contacts. Augustine was in his element gathering all the information they had on a spreadsheet and making sure that it all tallied. He wanted to stay in touch with them all the following day and found that this was the best way to do it. He had several goes at getting the columns right, but had finally settled on the order of –

  Name

  Contact number if known

  Category of contact (colleague, landlord, family, friend, neighbour, new tenant)

  Town

  Who was going to speak to them

  This meant that Augustine was able to keep a record of what was going on and monitor it as the day went by. He could take the sheet with him and phone the rest of his team to ask questions and collate information. He would accompany Lou, Electra would work with Ash and Gary would do the house to house stuff on his own. Augustine worked with a renewed vigour, so much so that Marie left them to get on with their work. Her only insistence was that Augustine called her every 2 hours at least to let her know the progress that was being made. She could still feel the heat of her bosses on the back of her neck, but was more able to go back to them with reports that they were making a breakthrough. That would buy her and Augustine some time.

  Marie was acutely aware of time in her job. She had worked in what she now regarded the lower levels of the police force for many years before working her way up. She no longer saw her role as that of someone in the police force but as a go-between. She stopped the pressure from those at the top who only wanted results quickly from reaching those at the bottom who had to work on a limited budget. This pressure, if not buffered, could crush the people at the bottom and cause them to leave the force. She would slow down the rate of change and deliver the highlights of the success to those above in order to keep the wheels in motion and everyone happy. For Marie, it wasn’t the role she thought she was applying for. If she had known at the time, then she would have stayed where she was. The extra few thousand a year were not worth the hassle. But as she jumped with her eyes closed and landed, Marie quickly grew into the role before she fully had the chance to realise what it was all about. She became an expert in diplomacy, which was the opposite of her time as a detective. When she worked directly on crime Marie had no patience at all. She wanted results the same day she was given a case. That was how hard she tried to work her team. But over the years she found out this wasn’t realistic. Once you are in a role and doing the same thing day after day it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to change. This isn’t always because of the people around you. Sometimes it is your own self-consciousness that stops you from changing your behaviour. The move to the next level of management allowed Marie to change without anyone really noticing.

  She looked across he office and wondered how it was different to any other in the building. If someone walked into the police station for the first time would they know that she was a higher rank than Augustine just by comparing offices? She looked at the dark mahogany of her desk and thought that this was a sign of quality that was easy for anyone to spot. She looked at the carpet on the floor and how this contrasted with the vinyl that ran into Augustine’s office from the rest of the room around him. She thought about the horrible strip lighting that was in Augustine’s office and was also a feature of hers until she had it replaced with subtler downlighters. The whole interior of her room looked and smelled like it was made for someone of a higher stature in her eyes. She had added little touches here and there from the potpourri in a bowl by the window to the photographs of famous Washington landmarks hung on the wall. Washington Old Hall.The F Pit Museum. The Galleries. Dame Margaret’s Hall. Marie was proud of her office. She spent far more time awake there than she did at home, so this was the place where her small inclination to interior design took hold. It wasn’t much but made Marie feel like she was marked as one of the ‘big bosses’ in her force in the future. She vowed that she would treat people with more patience than the bosses she was used to dealing with, but she also presumed that they had their own pressures from above and a demand for results that she didn’t comprehend at that time.

  She wondered who would take her place if she was promoted, not that it seemed likely at the time. She already knew that she could work well with Augustine and had all the secrets that made him tick. She knew what to say and when to say it to get him working longer hours and delivering better results. More importantly she knew when to say nothing at all. The motivation and communication courses that Marie had been booked on always failed to deal with that side of things. The course would let the people sat in the room know about body language, the use of words and how all of this worked together. But in her eyes these courses always failed to address the times when you should say nothing at all. This was an inc
redibly powerful way to deliver a message. The power of silence often trumped the power of the spoken word. Especially when so many words were spoken during the course of the average meeting.

  Marie had no idea what would happen over the next few days, but that was the time she estimated both her and Augustine had to make some major progress with this killer before the pressure became too great and he had to be shuffled off to an easier set of assignments. He got away with missing the odd case when it was a single killing of someone that didn’t have a public profile. But when he was unable to catch a killer that was bumping off people in the limelight and had been successful on several occasions, there was no wriggle room for Augustine this time. He had to get deep into this case, so deep that nobody else could rightly take over effectively. Marie could see that he was on the right tracks after the killing of a police officer, but the fact that ‘one of their own’ was killed before real progress was able to be made would alienate Augustine Boyle with many of the other people who worked for the police. They had a duty to protect each other. This was a duty that some might think Augustine had failed.

  31

  Al studied the notes he had made on his laptop and stored deep in the dark web. He had notes all over his walls back at his place, but they were either burned beyond recognition or in the hands of the police by that point. He would love to walk back in there and check the damage but that was only going to get him caught and thrown behind bars. He still had a lot of work to do and was in no mood to stop where he was. The message on his wall was long. He hadn’t really counted how many letters there was in the whole message but he knew that there was a long way to go if he was going to finish his work. He knew that it couldn’t be long before the police let the first few letters out. By the look of it they still had one body to find before they were up to speed. Al didn’t intend on letting them catch up at all. His next victim would be the high profile one that would force them to reveal his message. Al thought that maybe the politician would prompt them to reveal more information than they already had, but it hadn’t worked out that way. He would now up the ante and take the game to them. He was saving this particular victim until near the end of his masterpiece, but it would have to be accelerated.