The Tower Hill Terror

by Dane Cobain

  Leipfold finished his search of the wardrobe and made his way over to the chest of drawers, but he only gave them a cursory search.

  “Looks like your housemate likes lingerie,” Leipfold observed, sliding the last drawer shut and looking around the room for anything he might have missed. He wandered over to the windowsill and checked that, then shifted the furniture forward so he could look beneath it.

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Maile said.

  Leipfold shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “We’re done here. I’ve got nothing.”

  She sighed and nodded across at him and an awkward silence descended. They walked back into the kitchen and leaned against the counters. Leipfold finished his coffee and dropped the mug into the sink.

  “So where do we go from here?” Maile asked.

  Leipfold shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “I need to take the night to think about it.”

  “Then take it,” Maile replied. “I’ll stay here in case Kat comes back.”

  Leipfold left shortly afterwards. Maile watched from the window as he hopped on to Camilla and rode her away into the night.

  Then she walked into Kat’s room to put the vibrator back in the drawer.

  * * *

  The following day was a Saturday. Cholmondeley and Mogford were hosting another of their impromptu press conferences. The crowd was larger now than at their last one, and Cholmondeley’s coppers had been forced to arrange for a PA system as well as, ironically, hired security. They had a couple of men in uniform, but only enough for a token presence. The rest of the team was on the beat, keeping the streets clean and following up minor leads for Operation Aftershock.

  “I always hated doing these,” Cholmondeley murmured to Gary Mogford, although he still smiled benignly for the benefit of the media. “But it came down from above.”

  “Superintendent Richards?” Mogford guessed.

  “You got it,” Cholmondeley replied. Then he stepped up to the podium and leaned towards the microphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Thank you, as always, for coming. I’d like to take a little of your time today to tell you about a couple of updates in our investigation into the murders of Jayne Lipton, Abu Adewali, Calvin Myatt, Jennifer ‘Meg’ Jackson and Carina Merin.”

  As he spoke, Sergeant Mogford held up photos of each of the victims. Each photograph had the victim’s name as a watermark, and Cholmondeley explained that the information was available from the press area of the force’s website.

  “We’re also looking for an individual who may or may not be related to the case,” Cholmondeley said. “A young lady called Kat Cotteril has been reported missing. At this stage, we have no reason to believe that foul play is involved. However, we can’t rule out the possibility entirely. We’d like to speak to her and we’re hopeful that the public will help us to find her.”

  Cholmondeley paused while Mogford held the photograph up for the journalists to look at. He took a gulp of water from a plastic bottle and glanced down at his notes.

  “I’d also like to talk about Carina Merin,” Cholmondeley continued. “Most of you are probably unfamiliar with her name, so allow me to elaborate.”

  He turned to look at Sergeant Mogford and nodded. The copper flipped back through the photos he was holding and switched to one of the ex-hippie.

  “Ms. Merin was found dead in similar circumstances to the other victims,” Cholmondeley explained. “We were able to detain her husband, Pete Merin, at the scene of the crime. Mr. Merin confessed to the murder of his wife, as well as to the murders of Jayne Lipton, Abu Adewali, Calvin Myatt and Jennifer Jackson.”

  An audible murmur passed through the milling journalists and one man, styling himself as the group’s unelected representative, stood forward and shouted, “So you’ve got him? You’ve made an arrest.”

  The crowd launched into a spontaneous round of applause. Some of the journalists were holding their phones up, live-streaming the whole thing across the web. Cholmondeley swallowed nervously and lowered his voice.

  “We made an arrest,” he said. “But we don’t believe he’s the Tower Hill Terror.”

  * * *

  Cholmondeley was in a bind. He was tongue-tied, sweating buckets despite the cold weather, and for a moment he wasn’t sure how to continue. The applause had stopped, the journalists were watching silently with their mouths hanging open and Gary Mogford was looking nervously across at him with his eyes shouting, “I told you so.”

  Cholmondeley fiddled with the microphone and said, “Let me explain. We’ve arrested a fifty-six-year-old male called Pete Merin, Carina Merin’s husband. We believe that he killed his wife and tried to make it look like she’d been murdered by the Tower Hill Terror. Unfortunately, for Mr. Merin at least, the murder was overheard by his neighbours, who called the police.”

  “But why did he confess to the others?” This came from one of the journalists, who fell silent when Cholmondeley turned his eye on him.

  “I’ll take questions at the end,” Cholmondeley said. “As it goes, the suspect is refusing to answer. He still stands by his original story. But there are too many inconsistencies. He told us about things that didn’t happen and didn’t mention things that did. We believe that he panicked when our officers arrived and, knowing that we’d caught him red-handed, decided to change his plan. Instead of pretending that the Tower Hill Terror had murdered his wife, he pretended that he was the Terror. If you’re going to go down, you might as well go down in style.”

  Cholmondeley paused again and the silence of the crowd was overwhelming. It was the awkward, stilted silence of an exam hall, the special type of silence that can only come from a group of people making an effort to keep quiet.

  “Besides,” he said. “Mr. Merin appears to have an alibi for two of the murders that he admitted to. Even if he was involved, he wasn’t working alone. That’s why we’d like to ask the public to continue be on their guard and to contact the police station if they have any relevant information. Despite Mr. Merin’s arrest, we’re still treating it as an ongoing, active case.”

  Cholmondeley paused again to consult his notes and then said, “I’m also pleased to reveal that we have some additional information. We believe we now know how the killer selects his victims. We suspect that the man we’re looking for has been using dating apps and hook-up websites to find his victims. We believe that he does this using false profiles to meet victims without leaving a trail for us to follow. We’re currently working with a number of different service providers to monitor their platforms for any unusual usage patterns. We’re hoping we’ll be able to identify the profiles that were used and to tie them back to the Tower Hill Terror’s true identity.”

  Several of the reporters raised their hands, but Cholmondeley cut them off with a gesture and Mogford continued to stare stony-faced and silent across at them. He was still holding up the photographs, only he’d switched back through to a shot of Kat Cotteril with the police force’s missing persons number emblazed across the bottom in a prominent font.

  “As such,” Cholmondeley concluded, “we’re asking—no, begging—the general public to avoid using dating apps and dating websites. This is just a temporary measure, but it’s a necessary one. Once we’ve tracked down the real Terror, we’ll be able to reveal more information. This is for your own safety and for the safety of the rest of the community.”

  Cholmondeley paused again. The crowd started to babble excitedly. He was lit up by flash photography and cursed under his breath, wishing he’d had time for a shave before kissing Mary goodbye and driving his Beemer to the station.

  “That’s all we’ve got for you right now,” Cholmondeley said. “If you have any further questions, now’s the time to ask them.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two:

  No Ordinary Sunday

  KAT COTTERIL’S EARS were burning, but
the rest of her felt like it had been sprayed with liquid nitrogen. She had a headache, the kind that seemed to split the skull apart, and her memory was like a boat with a hole in it. She tried to remember something, anything.

  There was something about a date and a restaurant, which explained why she was wearing what she was wearing. She’d been running late and she was out of breath by the time she arrived at the place, an Italian restaurant with a name like Giovanni’s or La Dolce Vita. Her date had been ready and waiting, already sitting at a table and sipping from a glass of wine. She’d hurried across to him, apologised, and they’d settled into the humdrum routine of a first date.

  The food was good and so was the company. They’d finished a bottle of wine between them and had made a good dent in a second by the time that they’d finished their desserts and settled the bill. Her date held her hand and walked her towards a nearby taxi rank and then…nothing.

  She tried again, but it was like trying to picture the face of someone she’d passed in the street several months ago. There were dim shadows and a fleeting, teasing sense that she was close to a discovery, but the harder she pushed, the flimsier the memories became until she realised the only way to get them back would be to wait until they returned to her.

  She tried to look around, but all was in darkness. It was a complete type of darkness. Unlike a regular room, which still let in light from the windows or the cracks beneath the doors, the room she was in was born from a lack of light itself. It was pitch black, the blackest of blacks, and too dark to see anything at all. She couldn’t even make out the contour of the walls. Her eyes were open, but all she could see was the darkness.

  She tried to move, but her hands and ankles were bound by chains. She realised she was standing upright, hanging from wall-mounted manacles and slumped forward slightly. She struggled, but they held tight and chafed against her skin, gouging red welts into her wrists and legs.

  The manacles rattled in the darkness, echoing spookily and leaving Kat with the impression that she was in some sort of cavern or perhaps a medieval dungeon, just waiting for the jailer to interrogate her with a red-hot poker. She struggled again and screamed for help, but there was no response except for the ghostly echoes of her own voice bouncing around and coming back to haunt her.

  Kat went silent again and let gravity drag her back into her previous, passed out position. She breathed slowly and deeply, trying to calm herself. She reached out for a memory again, some sort of sign that might explain how she got there. But there was still nothing except for the vague feeling that she’d hit her head. It hurt, but without checking her skull, it was hard to tell what was causing it.

  Either way, she needed to pull herself together. The trick was not to panic. She’d learned that from Douglas Adams and the countless crime docudramas she liked to binge on. She tried to bring her breathing back under control.

  I need to get out of here, she thought. Or at the very least, I need to find a way to communicate with the outside world. But how?

  She probed her memories again, but they still came up blank, so her thoughts started to drift to another question, an unpleasant one. One that she wasn’t sure if she wanted an answer to.

  Where the hell am I? she thought. And who brought me here?

  * * *

  Sundays were usually slow at the station, but this was no ordinary Sunday. Cholmondeley had cancelled his day off, Mogford was on call and Constable Cohen was working overtime to manage the information that was trickling in from the general public.

  Most of it was useless, but it always was. The key, Cholmondeley knew, was to filter through the nonsense for the one little clue that would be useful. It was always difficult to find it, but it was the thrill of the chase that kept them going. It was like a drug addiction, and coppers got hooked because they could never beat the high of that first discovery.

  Most of all, it was the hunt for the missing woman that was causing all of the trouble. The police had received reports of over a hundred sightings, including one woman who thought she’d seen her working in a Liverpool McDonald’s and a man who claimed she’d bought a painting from him at a jumble sale. They’d even received a couple of foreign sightings through their social media team, thanks to a plea for information that went viral and caught the attention of the public far more effectively than any of the coverage from the news channels.

  Cholmondeley had plotted the reports against a map of the city on a wall-mounted board that looked almost identical to the one he’d seen in Leipfold’s office. He had officers working around the clock to follow up on each of the leads and to report back.

  And he was also working with James Leipfold.

  Officially, Leipfold had joined a team of civilian volunteers that Mogford had been tasked with assembling. He’d accepted Leipfold into the team in spite of his better judgement.

  “We don’t need him, boss,” Mogford had insisted.

  But Cholmondeley just laughed and said, “We’ll see about that. I know he’s a loose cannon, a dangerous man to have so close to the case. But he has his moments. And besides, he has a motorbike. He can canvass twice as many locations as Groves and Cohen and we don’t have to pay him for the privilege.”

  Between them, the impromptu task force was just about able to keep up with the intelligence that was flowing in, but it meant a lot of overtime and the ever-present threat that someone might actually find something. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Cholmondeley’s press conference had backfired and created an entirely different type of problem, one that they had no control over. People were downloading dating apps in droves, spurred on by the papers to see what the fuss was about. One of the companies involved had even responded with a marketing campaign, which was especially infuriating for the police force because they pulled it off overnight and took them by surprise.

  Cholmondeley had released another statement, this time via a press release on the force’s website, but it had been to no avail. It seemed like people were willing to put their lives at risk for the thrill of it, and Cholmondeley just hoped that they were doing their homework before they started sending dick pics or doing whatever the hell people did on dating apps. And he hoped that he hadn’t exacerbated the problem by taking the killer’s hunting grounds and filling it up with easy game.

  The old man sighed and paid a visit to the coffee machine. It was going to be a long, long day.

  * * *

  Kat was hungry, thirsty and disoriented. She thought that she’d slept, if it could be called sleep. At some point, she’d heard movement from somewhere above her. But nobody had come to feed her and she’d quickly lost track of time. There was still no light, no nothing. She couldn’t even hear the sounds of the city.

  She thought back to another documentary. This one had been about sensory deprivation tanks and some of the experimental work that was being carried out with them.

  This is what that must feel like, she thought. No light. No noise. No contact with the outside world.

  The panic hit her like a freight train, and she gasped aloud as her pupils contracted and her heartbeat sped up until it felt like a dove trying to break out from her ribcage. She swallowed and willed herself to calm down, but her spit tasted like blood and metal. She bit down on her lip until she broke through the skin.

  And then she screamed until she couldn’t scream any more, but her voice was muted by the darkness and nobody came. She was all alone.

  She twisted against the restraints again and tried to pull herself free. The wrist manacles were starting to loosen and she had to console herself with slowly testing her wrists against the chain and moving her body as much as possible to keep the circulation going.

  After the first eight hours or so—or was it eighty?—Kat had an idea. Ideas were in short supply in the darkness and so she latched on to it like a drowning sailor clutching at a floating hunk of his sinking ship.

&nbs
p; She reached behind her and touched the wall, then started filing away at the cement between the bricks. It was a long, painful process, but the wall was old and the cement had started to dry out and return to dust. She used her fingernails to begin with, switching between them when the pain was too great, but it didn’t take long until they were splintered and ragged, bleeding freely and unable to take any more of a beating. It was a long shot, but if she could weaken the wall then perhaps she could pull her manacled hands free from the brickwork and make a bid for freedom.

  But by the time she was forced to switch tack, she’d already made a dent, and the work got a little easier when she switched to using the ends of her fingers. It still hurt, and it was much, much slower, but the soft cement started to come away and the manacles began to feel a little looser. When she strained against them she could almost feel the walls creaking as the brick tried to pull itself free.

  Kat was a fighter, and so she kept clawing at the wall between bouts of unconsciousness. After a couple more hours (days?), she realised what she’d known all along. She was determined, resolute and unwilling to just roll over and give up. Someone had put her in this predicament and whoever they were, they were likely to return. Even if she couldn’t set herself free, she was determined to put up a fight.

  She strained at the manacles again, breaking her skin and sending a fresh stream of blood along her arm. She felt the wall crying out in pain and the tension in the metal as it strained against its moorings. It held, but it felt a little looser.

  Her right hand was clenched in a fist, the skin showing white as she tensed and strained again. In the darkness, she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but she could feel her little secret and she treasured it.