Hide and Seek

by Denver Murphy

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Brandt was annoyed. He was annoyed at many things but, most of all, he was annoyed at being annoyed. He knew he should be satisfied with the events of the previous day, but he had never been one for living in the moment. He was always looking towards the future. One of his mother’s favourite sayings to him as a child was, if I gave you the moon, you’d want the stars as well, and it was only now that he accepted there may have been some truth in her words.

  The fact was he was staying in a dingy bed-sit whose sole view was over-looking some industrial bins behind a restaurant. He had retired early, to keep a low profile whilst the police were searching the area following their unsuccessful storming of his, much larger and vastly superior, villa. But he had barely got any sleep, with the increasingly noisy revellers who had frequented the bars around him shouting and singing until the first rays of dawn were in the sky.

  Even Johnson’s email, which seemed to confirm the perception that he had long fled Benidorm, had failed to cheer him up. He had hoped his exchange with her last night, where he had revealed he knew her identity, would lead to her begging for her life. That would have gone some way to combating the deep regret he had felt walking away from her on the beach. He knew he couldn’t put his inability to wait for her to leave down to bad luck, because she wouldn’t have been there in the first place had it not been for his actions linking him to Benidorm. Johnson may have made the connection sooner than the police, but the two were inextricably linked. Yet that hadn’t stopped him fantasising about following her back to whichever hotel she was staying at and finishing the job from Nottingham.

  The email exchange that had followed that night, where he could sense her desperate refusal to accept her plan went wrong and almost feel the pain with which she typed her efforts to placate him, had provided a little comfort. But now she just seemed to be goading him. He wanted to respond and tell her he hadn’t fled and was still in Benidorm but, even if she believed him, it could cause him problems in the long run. Although she had been acting alone, it only highlighted her desperation to catch him; one that could see her turn back to the police if she now thought it the best way. Therefore, to reveal he was still in Benidorm could place him in danger.

  In many respects he wished he had run away. His ability to turn the bad situation of the caravan site around into that magical evening he had spent at the cabaret now seemed a distant memory. That should have been the thing he held on to when he thought of Benidorm, but it would be sullied by his current existence. It wasn’t just his accommodation; even though the police believed him to be elsewhere, he knew he would have to be warier when he did finally go out. Worse than that, all hopes of him finding a companion here were gone. In a twist of irony considering the fear he had sought to spread in England, he knew that middle-aged women in the ex-pat community would be more cautious of strange men talking to them. Naturally things would eventually die down, as the complacency that blighted society set in once more, but whatever hopes he had held for being happy there had evaporated.

  The alternative would be to simply leave. He would need to wait a couple of days for the dust to settle and the police to stop monitoring the various routes out. But to do so would be to add credence to Johnson’s taunt. It disturbed him that he cared so much about what she thought. Surely his humiliation of her yesterday, added to the knowledge of what he did to her in her own home, should be enough to not feel threatened by her. But just as he didn’t like the way her icy blue eyes had seemed to be boring into him when he had first seen her on television at the press conference, he resented how she was able to get so close to him. She had been the one who had seen through his email to the Belgian police and, more disturbingly, she must have known it was him who was responsible for Trish’s death the moment the news was broken. It didn’t worry him that the police came to the same conclusion because he knew how they worked. He had known that he had left DNA at the scene that they would trace back to him, and his understanding of their processes made him confident that, even if he continued to make mistakes, he would always manage to stay one step ahead of them. The trouble with Johnson was that he didn’t know how she worked and that made her a danger to him. He had been lying in last night’s message when he claimed she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was. It may have been true in the context of her plan to lure him into the open under the pretence of a newspaper article that would somehow absolve him of his sins, but she possessed a rare and unique ability; he recognised that she had the same sixth sense that he did when investigating crimes. He had been able to get into the mind of the murderers he was hunting and used that, not only to better understand why they had done those terrible things, but to predict what they were going to do next. Johnson hadn’t relied on science to establish the link between him and the killings here; she had done so on instinct. Moreover, she must have been actively looking for that link, which meant she had already suspected he may have been in Benidorm.

  Which was why yesterday seemed like a hollow victory to Brandt. Johnson may not have got quite as close to him as she thought she had, but it had been close nonetheless. That she had been willing to put her career, perhaps her liberty, and even her life on the line to do so worried Brandt. He had never gone to anything like such lengths when he had been chasing someone. He understood that, clearly, he was somewhat responsible for this situation, because of what he had done to her, but the fact was she was the one who had made it personal. He would never have tracked her down had she not orchestrated that salacious newspaper article. If that wasn’t bad enough, to then, not only have the temerity to pose as its author, but to use it as a way to lure him back in, demonstrated she would do anything, no matter how distasteful, to win.

  Perhaps yesterday had wounded her even more than the events in Nottingham, but Brandt knew that this was when a beast was at its most dangerous. He dreaded to think what she would make of the details of Trish’s murder. The police would make it public that they believed it to be sexually motivated but that would only spur her on to find out all the sordid details. Brandt wasn’t ashamed of what had happened; given the woman’s behaviour, it was perfectly understandable that she was unable to arouse him. If only he had taken advantage of how seeing her life slipping away from her had made him feel. Without having done anything to her post-mortem he could just imagine how Johnson would view it. The article from before may have just been a desperate shot in the dark to try and crack a case that was beyond her, but she would see the events in the caravan as legitimising her claims.

  With dawning horror Brandt came to understand what her next move would be. Johnson would think she had lost him for good. He had stated as much last night when he said she had taught him to be more careful in future. She wouldn’t just accept it was over and try and move on, as he had hoped she had done following their encounter at her house. She would be angry. She would refuse to accept her own culpability and, instead, seek to lash out. Knowing that she could no longer get to him by hunting him down, she would revert to the only way she had managed to hurt him in the past.

  It wouldn’t matter that he had proven to her that he wasn’t impotent or a homosexual. He might not have fucked her in Nottingham but there was no doubting she saw his erection as he straddled her on the bed. She would lie to the press about his virility and use the crime scene at the caravan to somehow prove it. No smoke without fire, and it would stick this time. What made it inextricably worse was how Susan would react. Despite being livid before, thoughts of his ex-wife hadn’t come into it, because at that point his identity had still been unknown. He hadn’t really considered it since, but deep down he hoped that she had simply been unaware of what had been going on until his name had been mentioned. But there would be no avoiding it this time. It would stir up a media frenzy and she would face questions about their sex life every time she opened her front door.

  This was the worst of it for Brandt, but not due to any sense of the huge discomfort it would cause Su
san. Indeed, quite the opposite. She had caused him to start doubting his ability to perform and, not only would these reports make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, but she would also see it as legitimising her leaving him and abandoning their sacred vows of marriage.

  This was all too much to bear. The suicidal thoughts that had been absent for so long came flashing back to him. He would leave now and head up to The Cross that Johnson had referred to yesterday. Up on the cliffs overlooking Benidorm he could fulfil his fantasy of plunging to his death and all this pain would go away.

  But he knew that it would stop nothing. Johnson would have won. She would resent him for taking away her chance at retribution and be all the more determined to spread her deceitful filth. With every possible option, even death, seeming to lead to the same inevitable outcome, Brandt broke down and cried. He sobbed until his voice became hoarse and no more tears would come. Lying on his bed, his mind fractured with despair, eventually the sleep that evaded him last night pulled him down into a few hours of blissful unconsciousness.

  With the starting up of the disco next door, he opened eyes still blurred from his earlier tears. Wiping away the snot which had not yet dried on his chin, he picked up his phone. He very much doubted that Johnson would choose to involve the police at this stage and, anyway, they would be bound to assume he sent it before making his final escape. Much more important was his need to reach out to her and for her to see it before it was too late.

  – Don’t you dare spread any more lies. You know what I am capable of.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Johnson whispered to herself. In the moment of reading that text, her dreadful experience in Benidorm and the desolate trip home, which had felt like retreating in defeat, instantly evaporated. With Brandt having failed to reply to her last, desperate email, she was sure her arrival back on British soil marked the end of her chances of encountering him again. Yet these two sentences were a potential game changer.

  She knew what they were designed to do, but the barely veiled threat only worked to convince her that all was not lost. She had no idea what had provoked him into such an outburst, but was determined to exploit any weakness. Gone was the calm smugness that had signalled his toying with her; he was genuinely scared of something. But what? Don’t you dare spread any more lies. That could only be a reference to the article that she had prompted Gail Trevelly to write. Though surely, if he had sought to hide this concern whilst he was still pretending to believe it was her who was emailing him, it would have come out during the exchange following the no-show. What had changed in those hours since, whilst she had been feeling like a virtual prisoner in her hotel room?

  Minutes passed without her being able to come up with a single plausible explanation. She then tried to distract herself by switching on the television in the hope that, in the same way as when she was unable to come up with a specific word, not thinking about it would reveal the answer. But it was all to no avail. The sudden hope that she had greeted his message with was rapidly fading, and she started to believe that, once again, her inability to successfully fathom what Brandt was up to signalled she could never expect to catch him.

  Nevertheless, she would not let go of this unexpected lifeline and focused on the notion of lies. It still made sense to her that if he was referring to anything that had been shared between them yesterday, then it would have come out in their conversation. Therefore, it had to be something different. It crossed her mind that it could be regarding her taunt about him running away but she couldn’t see how his evading the police once more would be such a source of embarrassment. Unquestionably, he would view it as the same kind of victory as tricking her into thinking he had fallen for her ruse. So, what could he have done that he was frightened about being made public?

  He must have done something he was ashamed of. But then it would be completely stupid to shoot himself in the foot by revealing to his nemesis the very chink in his armour that he was so desperate to conceal. This was, perhaps, unless he believed she already knew or, at the very least, soon would. She double checked the news feeds from the area to make sure nothing had broken in the time since she left the hotel. Whilst not discounting the possibility altogether, Johnson felt it unlikely he was referring to a crime that had yet to be discovered. It made sense that he would wait, like with St. Albans, in the hope that it wasn’t linked to him.

  Which just left one possibility; it was something he had done that was already known about. She looked back to the first murder, the one that had alerted her to the prospect he might be in Benidorm. The details were thin, but it seemed that the attack was swift and, albeit by a different method, similar to those characterising his random attacks in England. Finding nothing of any use, she switched to the one at the caravan park. She was frustrated to find that the original article, the one which had prompted her to head for the airport, had been replaced now that Brandt had been identified as the culprit. It offered plenty of speculation as to his specific motivation, but she knew she couldn’t trust it, as the author’s thoughts would have been heavily influenced by his knowledge of Brandt’s previous crimes.

  She desperately tried to think back to what she had read that night. Written for its English-speaking audience, it had contained the sort of stock phrases she had used so many times in her career. It wasn’t just their familiarity that had failed to cause her to pay much attention, but also her keenness at the time to act on it. She hunted around the internet, knowing there were plenty of piss poor so-called news sites that effectively just copied and pasted what they read elsewhere. She would need to locate one sufficiently useless that they hadn’t yet updated theirs with the latest version. It would seem that these were more of a phenomenon in Britain, but it didn’t take her too long to find what she was looking for.

  It was disappointingly bland, and Johnson was about to give this line of enquiry up as being a blind alley, when she found her eyes drawn back to a particular phrase. ‘It appears not to be motivated by financial gain.’ The announcement had come so soon after the body’s discovery that it seemed a little early to be ruling things out, even if the victim’s purse had been found and the place hadn’t been turned over. It may have been the case that her attacker had been looking for something of specific value, perhaps a piece of jewellery he had identified that had led to her becoming a target. Therefore, unless the Benidorm police were incompetent, which was always possible, that statement could only have come because they believed there had been a different motivation, one that they were not yet comfortable with revealing.

  In Johnson’s mind that could only be one thing. And that thing would explain, if not the timing, the reason behind Brandt’s text message outburst; especially as it directly related to what had caused him so much angst previously.

  She picked up her phone. She would require the specific details if she was going to exploit this situation to the full. The only people who would know were the people currently investigating it but contacting DSI Potter was out of the question. So too was DI Fisher because he would not want to do anything to endanger his current standing.

  ‘Who is it?’ The irritated tone was of someone being disturbed from their sleep. It was a risk Johnson had been willing to take because she knew she didn’t have the patience to wait until morning.

  ‘Hardy, it’s me.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  She wasn’t surprised by the confusion in his voice. DC Hardy was one of the more junior members of CID and she had never had cause for contacting him outside of working hours. But he had been the first person to spring to mind. He had always been loyal and, despite only ever having played with a straight bat, she sensed that he did what he thought was right rather than what would make him popular with his superiors. There were other detectives with whom she had worked for much longer, and had built up more of a rapport, but with the winds of favour against her, she couldn’t be sure any of them would be willing to do anything that would incur Fisher’s displ
easure.

  That didn’t mean Hardy would prove a push-over though. ‘I need some information and, before you say anything, none of it can get you into any trouble.’

  ‘What is it?’ He sounded far from convinced.

  ‘I need you to tell me everything you know about the crime scene at the caravan park in Benidorm.’

  ‘Look, ma’am, I really think you should be talking to someone else about this.’

  ‘I’m talking to you.’ Perhaps a little pressure would help. Despite what had happened, she remained his superior and she knew he was still trying to prove himself within the team.

  An awkward silence followed, one Johnson was determined she was not going to break first.

  ‘I’m really not sure I should be talking to you at all.’

  She smiled. Hardy was still protesting but, having won that little battle of who would speak, she knew he would crack eventually. A soft approach and reassurance that he wouldn’t be doing anything improper would take time and she had wasted enough of it already.

  ‘Look Hardy, this whole Brandt thing has turned into a complete fuck up. Remember I said all along he was abroad, whilst you lot were pissing about looking for him in England. And that was before you bought into the ridiculous notion that he was somehow an unfortunate pawn in Franklin’s game. He’s going to keep killing and someone’s going to have to take the fall for all the incompetence. Do you think that’s going to be Fisher? Or is it far more likely they’ll use the person newest to the team and with the least experience as their scapegoat?’ She stopped to allow everything to sink in and took his fast and heavy breathing as an indication that it had. ‘If you give me what I need, which is nothing more than I couldn’t find out myself if I came into my office tomorrow, you have my promise that I will fight to ensure that doesn’t happen.’

  ‘What is it you want to know?’