by LJ Ross
“What have you eliminated so far?” Ryan prodded.
“Um, well, we’ve been studying the footage covering the B6530 into Corbridge during the hours of 12:30 and 02:30 last Tuesday morning and we’re pretty certain that Edwards didn’t take that route. There was a total of forty-four vehicles captured by the CCTV as you enter Corbridge during those hours and all of them have been accounted for.”
Ryan nodded thoughtfully.
“I agree that Edwards is unlikely to have waited any longer before continuing his journey; he knew that we would find MacKenzie’s Fiesta fairly quickly, therefore he wouldn’t hang around the area. No need to extend the search timescale,” he concluded. “What else?”
Lowerson flicked a dubious glance towards Phillips, who watched him like a hawk.
“Unfortunately, sir, that’s about it. There is no roadside CCTV coverage along any of the other three roads until you reach a major town and we’ve already checked the cameras outside Hexham. We also looked at the speed cameras along the A69 and the A68 for completeness. No hits for speeding vehicles during the relevant timeframes, I’m sorry to say, just a stream of ordinary vehicles passing by various civilian CCTV cameras, which we are slowly analysing. It’s a long process,” he added, with a note of apology.
Ryan scrubbed a palm across his face.
“Alright. What about further along the major roads? We could pick up the vehicle…” he trailed off as his brain caught up with his mouth. “And that would be a pointless task, considering we have no idea what Edwards’ replacement vehicle looks like. Might as well stop every single vehicle using the national road network in the early hours.”
Lowerson nodded miserably and sat down again.
“Alright, so he didn’t leave a nice little trail of breadcrumbs,” Ryan shrugged. “We’ll do this the conventional way. Faulkner? What can you tell us about forensics?”
Like a meerkat, the senior CSI popped his head up from a line of police staff, adjusted his glasses and moved cautiously to the front of the room.
“Ah, yes, well. We went over MacKenzie’s home and car with a fine-toothed comb days ago and I doubt we will find anything new there. There is no evidence that Edwards moved beyond the hallway of MacKenzie’s home and judging by a small pattern of blood spatter on the inner left-hand wall…” he looked up from his sheaf of papers, caught Phillips’ eye and began to stutter. “Ah, that is, it’s fairly certain—”
“Spit it out, Tom,” Ryan ordered. “We all need to know the facts.”
“Well, we’re pretty sure he hit her as soon as she opened the front door, taking her by surprise. That’s probably how she was disabled.”
Phillips remembered his last conversation with Denise before she was taken. They had both worried for Ryan and his fiancée, Anna, mistakenly thinking that she would be The Hacker’s first target.
How wrong they had been.
“Denise was hurrying to get ready and come down to the station, to help out,” he said dully, and heads swivelled towards him. “She was distracted, worrying about Anna. That’s probably why she didn’t check before she opened the door.”
Ryan stiffened. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel guilty that his fiancée was safe at home, much as it churned him up to know that his friend was suffering instead.
“MacKenzie is a good woman,” he said quietly. “But remember, Frank. No matter how distracted she was, no matter how well trained, Edwards came to her home intending to take her. Whether she opened the door or he kicked it down, that was always his goal. It’s unlikely she could have prevented him—he had the element of surprise.”
Phillips flinched as the words hit home but something clicked in his brain. When he looked up again, his eyes were clear.
“You’re right,” he said, decisively. “Tom? You said there was spatter? How about inside the Fiesta?”
Faulkner’s throat bobbed up and down.
“Only a few spots of blood in there, crusted onto the felt lining of the boot. We didn’t find any significant blood spill,” he said, understanding what they all really wanted to know. “We took our time looking at the driver’s seat and compared the skin samples with existing DNA records we have on file for Edwards. There was a positive match.”
“So, he disabled her, put her in the boot and then got into the driver’s seat,” Ryan surmised.
“Yes. We went over the area around the abandoned Fiesta beside Styford Roundabout but I’m afraid we weren’t quick enough to beat the weather. It was raining heavily last Monday night, just as it is today.”
They all followed the direction of his myopic gaze and watched the rain battering against the dirty window panes outside, the dim light doing nothing to motivate their spirits. Ryan muttered something unintelligible and moved to flick on the heavy strip lighting in the centre of the room. Immediately, they were bathed in garish yellow light from the industrial fluorescent bulbs.
“That’s better,” he said. “Faulkner? You’re saying there were no tracks or traces found whatsoever?”
Faulkner pushed his glasses further back on his nose.
“I didn’t quite say that. It’s true, there were no tyre or foot prints around the site where we found the car. However, we pushed our search further back into the shrubbery on the outskirts of the roundabout and we noticed something. There was a fresh gap in the bushes, large enough to have been made by a vehicle entering or reversing. We also found a partial tyre track, but not enough to draw any meaningful conclusions at this stage. When we find the other vehicle, we should be able to match it.”
“Somebody hid the vehicle there, in readiness for him to pick it up. Who?”
“His solicitor.”
Lowerson spoke the words without thinking and reddened as attention turned to him once again. Ryan pointed a finger as if to capture the thought.
“Yes, it’s possible. She’s currently being investigated for fraud.”
Edwards’ former solicitor was currently out on bail while the fraud team put together their case, following a tip-off from the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Apparently, the woman had accepted bribes from her client in exchange for performing a series of illegal acts. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that she might have provided Edwards with money or transportation.
“I want her questioned again. Lowerson? Liaise with the fraud team on this and set up an interview ASAP.”
Ryan leaned back against his desktop and crossed his ankles.
“Carry on, Tom.”
Faulkner paused to remove his glasses and rub at his eyes. It would be easy to reel off facts and figures but what everybody needed to hear, Phillips most of all, was not what his team of CSIs had found but what they hadn’t found.
He slipped his glasses back on and tucked his file under his arm.
“We made a full search of the ground around the Fiesta stretching back through the shrubbery and beyond. It was a fingertip search that went on until last Thursday. Although there were alterations to the landscape suggesting that one or more persons had walked through the grassland, at no time did we find any evidence suggesting foul play.”
Phillips looked up at that, eyes hopeful.
“There was no…no burial site or anything of that kind,” Faulkner added. “And no human blood or tissue matter.”
Silence dawned as the room wondered whether to be optimistic following that remark. Although MacKenzie had not been found dead at the side of a roundabout, there was every reason to suspect that she might be found elsewhere.
Sensing the change of mood, Ryan decided to nip it in the bud.
“If and until we are proven wrong, we will be working on the basis that Detective Inspector MacKenzie is still alive. I won’t sugar coat the fact that Keir Edwards is dangerous and severely disturbed. He has a history of extreme violence and a personal dislike of our department, for obvious reasons. But his previous MO has been to kill his victims relatively quickly and all of them have been brunettes in their twenties.”
“MacKenzie isn’t his usual physical type, being a woman in her forties with red hair. That gives us reason to hope that her kidnapper has an alternative motivation in mind.”
“Why does he usually go for brunettes?” Lowerson queried, curiosity getting the better of him.
Ryan frowned, thinking back.
“We never found out and he never told us.” It was a damn good question. “Why do anything? Maybe there was a girl at school who rejected him. Maybe he had an Electra complex but mummy said ‘no’. Maybe he just likes the way brunettes look dead. Who the hell cares?”
Ryan shoved away from his desk and paced around a bit to shake off the irritation. He didn’t want to think about why the man killed dark-haired women because it was an immediate reminder that Anna was one of them. Her safety was a constant worry and would be until Edwards was safely back behind bars.
He sucked in a long, calming breath.
“You’re right, though, Jack. We need to know how this arsehole thinks and try to understand what goes on inside his twisted mind. I’m going to re-open the old case files and go back over every statement we’ve ever had from him. Maybe something will turn up.”
Ryan turned to look at the board behind him and into the dark eyes of a smiling man that society deemed handsome. A man who, at first glance, looked uncomfortably like him. But that was where the similarity ended. Where he spent his days fighting to protect human life, Edwards was a former doctor who had rejected his Hippocratic Oath to inflict the worst possible abuse on another human being.
“Edwards has a driving need to be recognised,” Ryan murmured, rubbing a hand across his chest to stave off a sudden chill. “He needs everybody to know how clever he is.”
“He could be out of the country by now,” somebody chirped up.
Ryan laughed and gave a small shake of his head.
“And miss out on the opportunity to show off? No, he’s still in the region, festering somewhere. He’s so close, I can almost smell him.”
CHAPTER 4
Nothing moved inside the empty house, not even MacKenzie.
She sat on the extreme edge of a rickety single bed frame listening for any sound that might alert her to his presence, but the house had been quiet for almost half an hour without the usual noises coming from downstairs.
Normally, it was the radio. On a good day, he would tune into the classical station and Puccini or Mozart would fill the air. On other days, he brought the old transistor radio onto the landing outside her room and turned the volume so high that the sound of The Beatles became deafening. MacKenzie swore that if she survived—when she survived—she never wanted to hear anybody singing about the virtues of getting by with a little help from their friends so long as she lived.
The irony of his choice of music was not lost on her either.
Not content with the injuries he had already inflicted, Edwards went about the business of breaking her spirit, reminding her of how alone she really was. And, oh, he was masterful at the game, pouring poison into her ears as often as he could.
I don’t want to hurt you, Ruth.
Where are your friends? I’m your only friend, now.
He never used her real name. It was just another way to dehumanise her, to diminish everything she had ever been.
“I am Detective Inspector Denise Mary MacKenzie. I was born in County Kerry, Ireland—” she whispered.
A tile slipped on the roof and she jumped, acutely aware of every creak and groan in the old house. Her eyes darted around the room but nothing had changed. The walls still bore the remnants of peeling wallpaper redolent of the seventies or eighties, darker shadows of varying rectangular shapes indicating where pictures had once hung. Aside from the single wooden bed with its grubby, stained mattress, the only other furniture in the room was a plastic bucket he had placed in the corner in lieu of a toilet.
He ran the place like a prison. It gave him a peculiar delight to inflict the monotony of his experience behind bars upon one of the detectives who had contributed to him being there in the first place. He never tired of opening the door to find her waiting to be led to the bathroom, or to be handed a measly plate of beans or tuna. Always canned goods, she noticed, and the water he sometimes gave her tasted raw. She had been violently ill during the first three days but now her stomach seemed to have accustomed itself to the change of circumstances.
She didn’t know whether to be pleased or not.
When the trembling in her hands stopped, she bent down to retie the makeshift bandage on her sprained ankle. Fluid pooled around the joint and it was painful to touch, but not as painful as bending over with a couple of cracked ribs. Sweating from the effort, she stared down at her bare feet with their dirty soles. Her boots had been one of the first things to go and her skin was covered in splinters from the old wooden floor.
Come on, Denise.
Transferring her weight onto her good foot, she stood up and hobbled across to the single square window to peer through the broken glass. It was far too small to squeeze through and the drop was too high for her to come out of it unscathed, in any case. The air was crisp and cold as it flooded into the room but she didn’t care about being too cold, or too hot for that matter.
Either was better than the alternative.
Her eyes scanned the farmland outside, drawing a mental diagram of the terrain. The front door was on this side of the house—which was east-facing, judging by the direction of the sun—and it led directly onto open fields which stretched as far as the eye could see. The mossy turf undulated down into the valley towards a forest or woodland of some kind, although only the tips of the tallest trees were visible. There were a couple of tumbledown outhouses nearby made of the same thick stone as the house but neither of them was large enough to hold more than a few chickens or some firewood.
Crucially, there was no sign of his car. She hadn’t seen it since the first day and she wondered where he had hidden it.
Come to think of it, there was no sign of a road either.
She squinted through the window from every angle, leaning out as far as she could, but she couldn’t see anything resembling a garage. There were no traffic sounds carrying on the air, only the whisper of the wind as it carried through the gaps in the walls.
Slowly, she made her way to the bedroom door, pressing her ear against the wooden frame to listen for any sound of life on the other side.
She wiped her clammy palm on the side of her jeans and then grasped the handle.
The door swung open.
MacKenzie stood there, staring through the open doorway into the empty hallway beyond, unable to believe her eyes. It was not possible that he had forgotten to lock the door. Edwards was a methodical psychopath; he never did anything without having a reason.
Knowing that it had to be a trap did nothing to dim the overwhelming sense of hope that fluttered in her chest but there were her injuries to consider and she was weak after six days of malnutrition and lack of sleep.
And yet, the door was open.
It was foolish to try but, then again, she would be a fool not to.
She took the first, careful step out of her room and onto the landing. The floorboards whined in protest and she stopped dead, blood thundering in her ears as she waited.
Still nothing.
MacKenzie took another tentative step, leaving a wide berth around a sizeable hole in the landing floor where the wood had collapsed entirely three days ago. On that occasion, when he unlocked her door she had taken a swing at him with one of the wooden slats from her bed, then tried to make a run for it. She hadn’t made it three feet before he caught her, throwing her body to the floor with enough force to break through the old wood.
That was how her ribs were fractured.
G
ritting her teeth, she hobbled further along, clutching the banister for support. She paused to look down through the gaping hole, into what passed for a living room. She could make out the edge of a ratty blue sofa, faded with age and covered with dust and fragments of wood.
Her fingers curled around the rail and she continued along the landing as quietly as she could. She passed three doors: the bathroom door was closed and the other two bedroom doors stood open on creaking hinges. One of them must belong to him and she braced herself for the sight of Edwards jumping out at her, but he didn’t appear.
She reached the top of the stairs and hesitated.
“You have to try,” she whispered.
The pressure on her ankle was intense, so she crouched down to sit on the top step and began to make her way downstairs on her rear end, like a child.
One, two, three, four…
She counted off the stairs in her head and stopped again when the front door came into view, straight ahead of her. Involuntary tears sprang to her eyes and she brushed them away impatiently with the heel of her hand.
…five, six, seven…
Her legs wobbled as she drew herself up again, gripping the newel post like a lifeline. She risked glances to either side and saw the living room to her left and an ancient kitchen to her right. And there, atop one of the worktops, was a large carving knife.
She looked between it and the front door, torn between expedience and good sense.
Sense won out and she limped into the kitchen, her panting breaths impossibly loud in the quiet space. The metal clattered against the counter as she grasped it by the handle. She spun around, eyes wide and poised for attack.
