by Jill McGown
“A small executive team,” muttered Lloyd, when Yardley had left, and they were alone in the office. “It makes us sound like car salesmen.” But it did mean that all the people he liked working with would be back together again, so that was good. “What’s that all about, anyway? Why have we got a small executive team?”
“I don’t know. It’ll be some managerial notion. But you’re getting much better. You didn’t growl at him when he said that. And you didn’t tell him that you don’t say ‘comprised of,’ which you never tire of telling me.”
“Well, if you know you shouldn’t say it, why do you?”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” said Judy.
Of course it mattered. But not, Lloyd supposed, as much as catching someone who had just confirmed in the most emphatic manner possible that he was on a mission to kill.
Gary and Sergeant Hitchin were on their way to the incident room in Barton, having just been to Stoke Weston to interview Stephen Halliday again, because he had been working at the Stansfield bingo club last night. He didn’t usually work in Stansfield, but he worked there often enough for this to be simply a coincidence. He didn’t have a checkable alibi, however, having said that he was on his way home at half past ten, so once again they had tried to find out where he was when Mrs. Fenton was killed, and once again he had refused to tell them.
The DI was right—it was handy having all the suspects in the one village, because Tony Baker had been there as well, and Gary had asked him where he was when Lewis was killed.
And it turned out that he had been working in his office in Stansfield town center, just a few minutes’ walk away from the bank. Gary wasn’t at all sure what to make of that.
Stephen was in his room, having been questioned yet again. Where was he at half past ten last night, they’d wanted to know.
Going home from work, he’d told them, but he could see that they didn’t really believe him. Maybe he should ring Ben, tell him what was happening. But he didn’t want to worry him with it, not now—he was studying really hard for his exams. And he still didn’t want to tell the police, because Mr. Waterman would surely find out. And since they wouldn’t find anything linking him to this murder in Stansfield, it would be really stupid to run that risk.
Tony Baker had been there when the police came, and they’d asked him where he was, too, so Stephen hadn’t felt so bad. And his mum had been out shopping, thank goodness. He had been surprised when he had come home from Jack’s to find Tony there on his own—his mother would never normally leave a guest alone in the pub. But she’d left Tony the keys, so he could lock up if he went out. She’d literally given him the key to the door, Stephen thought. That was serious. And she was in danger of making a fool of herself, because it was obvious—sometimes embarrassingly so—that Tony Baker didn’t feel that way about her.
Because of that, Stephen was confident that Tony wouldn’t tell his mother about the visit from the police, because Tony had had more than enough of his mum wringing her hands the last time. She had already been bending his ear, apparently, after she’d heard about the second murder on the radio, because, Tony said, she was still worried about what Stephen had been up to the night Mrs. Fenton died.
Stephen thought about that, and decided that he was going to tell her where he’d been that night, because it wasn’t right, letting her worry like that. She wouldn’t tell anyone if he asked her not to. And he wouldn’t ring Ben. He didn’t want to get him involved. It wouldn’t be fair. He could handle this himself, and he would.
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
Thursday morning. Tom looked up from his desk, and sighed. The small executive team, as Lloyd always called it, had settled into the rooms that had been found for it at Malworth. Lloyd and Judy had a tiny office off a larger room that housed Tom, John Hitchin, Alan Marshall, and Gary Sims. Next door to that was the large, purpose-built incident room, where the large, presumably nonexecutive team was being accommodated, and where the daily briefings, taken by DCS Yardley, were held.
But Tom didn’t feel much like an executive, however small. Executives were by definition people who got things done, and despite a great deal of work he was getting nothing done. They had thought that the murder of Robert Lewis would at least be easier to investigate than that of Mrs. Fenton, especially now that the red herring of Keith Scopes had been removed, but they had been wrong.
Lewis didn’t seem to gamble at all—as far as they could ascertain, he hadn’t even bought lottery tickets, so they had been wrong about gambling being the target. It wasn’t impossible therefore that the murderer had hoped to mask his more substantial motive for one of the murders by making it look as though they were the work of a serial killer. Mrs. Fenton’s murder might simply have been expedient, because they had found nothing in her background to suggest that anyone would want her dead.
On this premise, they had started out with reasonable hopes of finding something in Lewis’s life that would give them a lead to his killer. But four days on it seemed to Tom that they had spoken to everyone who had ever so much as nodded to Robert Lewis in the street, and they could find nothing at all that explained his death in terms of anyone specifically having a grievance against him.
The discovery that Tony Baker had been in his office in Stansfield town center when the murder took place had caused a lot of speculation, but with no evidence to either implicate or clear him, speculation was what it had to remain. His proximity to both murders could simply be coincidence, though no one really thought that it was, and Alan Marshall, naturally, had been set on the task of going into the backgrounds of the victims in case they had a common connection with Baker or, indeed, anyone else so far involved in the inquiry. He had drawn a blank.
But had they themselves attended the same college or school, or worked for the same company, however many years apart? No, of course they hadn’t. They had been born in different towns, they had lived in different towns, and they had gone on holiday to different places. If they had an acquaintance or a tradesman in common, no one at all had been able to find him or her.
Mrs. Fenton lived alone, and had no dependants—Robert Lewis had had a wife and two children. Mrs. Fenton was sixty-two, Lewis was forty. They didn’t belong to the same church, the same club, the same bank, they didn’t shop at the same places, go to the same pub . . . in short, their lives had nothing at all in common. Yet they had both been murdered, both had been carrying a sum of money, and in each case the banknotes had been removed, from an envelope in the first instance and a bag in the second, and laid out on the body. To what end? The victims were far from rich—it could hardly be a statement about greed.
The letters received by Tony Baker and the newspaper had been through the forensic mill, and had revealed precisely nothing. The paper was available everywhere, the letter used a font that was in virtually every word-processing program in the world, the envelope was self-seal, the address label was self-seal, and, the forensic report had concluded, since it wasn’t even necessary to lick the stamps anymore, DNA would not be forthcoming. The envelopes had been handled by too many people to be worth fingerprinting, and there were no prints on the letters other than those of the people known to have handled them, being Tony Baker and the newspaper staff. It was someone literate, that was all they knew. All the apostrophes were in the right places, according to Lloyd—Tom wouldn’t know for certain whether they were or they weren’t, not without looking up the crib sheet that he’d written out years ago, after a lecture on the subject from Lloyd.
The postmortem examination had provided nothing new, other than Freddie’s belief that only a man, or a woman with unusual strength, could have strangled Lewis without his having the chance to fight back. But they already knew they were looking for a man, so that didn’t really help. Nothing found at the scene of either crime had proved to be of the slightest use, or at least, no use that they had been able to determine, and while the press office and DCS Yardley were manfully keeping the
press supplied with progress bulletins, the truth was that six weeks after Wilma Fenton’s murder, and almost a week after Lewis’s, the inquiry was all but at a standstill.
Lloyd, never a great believer in experts, was, despite his reservations, and the fact that Tony Baker was still a suspect, on his way to see Baker on the grounds that he knew more about the workings of a serial killer’s mind than did the average man. And perhaps Baker could make some sense of what seemed to be entirely random murders, except for the amount of cash that was so ostentatiously not stolen. Tom certainly hoped he could, because the small executive team was at a loss.
The pub was open for business, and Lloyd went into the small lounge bar, introducing himself to the lady he discovered to be Grace Halliday. She went off to fetch Tony Baker, leaving Lloyd with the barmaid, and the food. Lloyd’s habit of not breakfasting didn’t often bother him, but there was a delicious smell permeating the little pub, and Lloyd saw the small batch of sliced pork sausage under the glass of a hot food display cabinet, and the pile of thickly buttered rolls. His stomach gave a less-than-discreet rumble, and he smiled. “I think I’m going to be very unprofessional, and have one of these in a buttered roll,” he said to the barmaid.
“Ah, pork burgers are Grace’s specialty, aren’t they, Rosie?” said Baker, as he joined him in the lounge bar. “People come here for their elevenses just because of them.”
“Pork burgers!” said Grace, following him in. “It’s just some fried sausage in a bun.”
Three people came into the pub, to prove Tony Baker right about their popularity; Lloyd watched the little batch disappear before his very eyes.
“Don’t worry,” said Grace Halliday, with a smile. “I’ve got more on.”
“Oh, good. Then I’ll have one, please,” said Lloyd, taking out some change.
“Have it on me, Chief Inspector,” said Tony. “And I think I’ll have one, too, Grace—it’s been a while since breakfast.”
“Just take Mr. Lloyd through to the dining room,” said Grace. “I’ll bring them in. About ten minutes—will that be all right?”
“Perfect.”
Once they were in the dining room, Lloyd got round to the reason for his visit. “I’d like to pick your brains about serial killers,” he said. “I’ve never had any dealings with one before. Can you give me any pointers about what sort of man we’re dealing with?”
Baker sat back. “In my experience,” he said, “serial killers come in a number of varieties—at least the ones I’ve met and talked to in any depth.” He thought for a moment before continuing. “There are the ones who think they have been commanded by someone—often God—to rid the world of some class of person—often prostitutes. Jack the Ripper was probably one such. They don’t want to be caught, but are often relieved when they are, because they don’t particularly want to kill. They simply feel compelled to.”
“I think we can rule that out. There’s no class into which both Mrs. Fenton and Mr. Lewis can be slotted.”
“Okay. So then there are those who kill for gain, like John Joseph Smith, the brides-in-the-bath murderer.” He shook his head, almost indulgently. “God knows how he got away with it three times. It seems that everyone who met him found him repugnant, except the women he targeted—they would marry him within days of meeting him and sign over their life savings to him. The odd doctor has gone in for that line of serial murder too, persuading elderly women to put him in their wills before quietly ending their lives. They, of course, have no desire whatever to be caught. They are far and away the least interesting to converse with.”
“It doesn’t seem possible that there’s any sort of gain,” said Lloyd.
“No, so I expect you can rule that out too. Then there’s someone like Challenger, who hated women and wanted the world to know it. He wanted to be caught all along, otherwise how would anyone know what he’d done? But he had hoped to finish the job first, I expect. I never got the opportunity to talk to him.”
He paused for what seemed to Lloyd like dramatic effect. He supposed if you gave talks on the subject, you got used to delivering them to an audience. He knew how Queen Victoria had felt when she said that Gladstone addressed her as if she were a public meeting.
“And I imagine,” Baker continued, “that in effect, that’s what you’ve been looking for so far. Someone who had a reason to kill these two people, however bizarre.” He took out of his pocket what looked like a spectacle case but which proved to contain two little bottles of insulin and a hypodermic needle. “Do you mind if I do this here?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” said Lloyd, not sure if he minded or not, but it didn’t seem to be good etiquette to demand that your host take his insulin injection elsewhere. “Actually, I was wondering about that—I didn’t think you’d be able to have a snack just because you felt like it.”
“I couldn’t, before,” said Baker. “But I’m part of a clinical trial for a new way of taking insulin. It’s called DAFNE—the letters stand for Dosage Adjustment for Normal Eating, and that’s exactly what it is. If I fancy a snack, I just take an extra shot to cope with it.”
Lloyd smiled. “I suspect it isn’t as simple as you make it sound.”
“Well—you have to learn how to do it. And the drawback is that I have to have four or five injections a day rather than just two. I have to inject at lunchtime, for instance, which I never had to do before. But before, I had to have lunch at lunchtime, and believe me—that was more restrictive. Now, if I miss a meal, I just don’t take the insulin.”
“I doubt if I could be as sanguine about it as you seem to be,” said Lloyd.
“I’ve lived with it a long time. And if you spend your life worrying about what might be going to happen, you forget to live at all. But to get back to the subject at hand—there is another variety of serial killer.”
Their variety, presumably. Doubtless the variety you really don’t want to have to deal with at all.
“These are the ones who kill randomly, and without motive, and this could be one of them. It’s—if I might put it like this—the purest form of murder. Killing for the sake of it. No motive, no link, no pattern. They simply kill. And as I’m sure you know only too well, murderers like that can get away with it for years and years sometimes, because traditional investigative methods simply don’t work.”
Oh, that was what Lloyd really wanted to hear.
“And since this one seems now to be killing purely as some sort of challenge to me, I think perhaps that’s what you’ve got. Though in a way you’re lucky, because he’s made his intentions known. With killers like that, the connection is sometimes simply not made, not for decades sometimes.”
Despite himself, and rather impolitely, Lloyd watched, fascinated, as Baker expertly filled the hypodermic, and, through the polo shirt he wore, gave himself the injection.
“Is it all right to inject through your clothes like that?”
“It isn’t recommended, but there’s no reason why not. I find it a little more socially acceptable than baring my skin.”
“I think I always assumed that you would inject it into your arm,” said Lloyd.
“You can—but not into a vein. Or muscle. The upper arms, the thighs, the calves—they’re all acceptable injection sites, but the abdomen is more usual. The time the insulin takes to work varies with where you inject it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.” He put the needle in a container, and put the insulin back in its case. “I’ll tell you what does hurt, though—checking my blood sugar levels. You have to prick your finger to get the blood sample, and that can hurt like hell. With this new system I have to do it more than ever.” He smiled. “What were we saying?”
“That Lewis’s murder might be entirely without motive other than the desire to outwit you,” said Lloyd.
“Yes,” he said, his face growing somber. “And I’m very sorry if I precipitated this. But I don’t honestly believe that my presence at the scene of Mrs. Fen
ton’s murder caused him to kill again. I believe that serial killers are born, not made. I think it’s in them all along. Something will trigger it sooner or later. In this instance, my presence at the scene of the first murder.”
“But what about the money? Surely that means something?”
“Perhaps.” Baker elegantly scratched his coiffured head, then smoothed the hair down again. “But it could actually be quite meaningless.”
Lloyd was beginning to wish he hadn’t come at all. “Meaningless?” he repeated.
“Just something he does to let you know that it’s his handiwork.” He sat forward again, elbows on the table, his chin resting on intertwined fingers. “There have been cases where the murderer leaves something at the scene of the crime—a tarot card, let’s say. It’s an ego thing—the police, as I’m sure you know, often leave that sort of thing out of any information they give the public, as you have left out the detail of the notes being spread out on the body. The presence of that signature proves that the killer is still in business, and you haven’t got a copycat. That kind often want to get caught, whether they realize that or not.”
Well, that was good, thought Lloyd. But when did he want to get caught?
The pork burgers came, and Lloyd discovered that he agreed entirely with the locals, as he continued listening to Baker’s dissertation.
“However,” said Baker, in a warning tone, “today’s psychopaths are scientifically aware. They know that if they introduce anything to the scene of the crime, forensic examination can often trace it back to its source and the police can in that way narrow their search down. Once they’ve done that, the net will begin to close in. So if you don’t want to get caught, it’s much better to use something that the victim already has on him. Money is as good as anything else—everyone carries money.”
Now he was saying that he didn’t want to be caught. But then, wasn’t that what experts always did? Freddie did it. On the one hand this, on the other hand that.
