Unlucky For Some

by Jill McGown

  “But they were both carrying a lot of money. Is that significant, do you think?”

  “It might be significant, and it might not. Mrs. Fenton’s murder could have been for gain, and I could have frightened him off, making him drop the money. And now that he’s killing for the sake of it, he’s using that as his calling card. Or it could have tremendous significance. The problem is that you don’t have enough data on which to base a hypothesis, as Sherlock Holmes would have said. To be brutally honest, what you need is one more murder.”

  Lloyd had an argument with his waistline as he digested his last mouthful, then remembered that his snack was going on Tony Baker’s tab. Unlike Oliver Twist, he didn’t have the chutzpah to ask for more, so he was forced to curtail his carlie intake. “So,” he said, “you’re telling me that in your opinion I’ve got no hope of catching this man unless he murders again?”

  “Well . . .” Baker looked a little uncomfortable. “Yes, I suppose that is what I’m saying, but I think you knew that already, or you wouldn’t be here. You need to know if there’s any sort of pattern.”

  Lloyd nodded his agreement with that.

  “There is the fact that he wrote that letter,” said Baker encouragingly. “There’s no point in winning a challenge if no one knows who you are, so he might subconsciously want to get caught, like the tarot card brigade.”

  “But not by you, presumably, or he would have lost.”

  “Quite. I’m the one he wants to outwit, not the police. He could start taking risks. And that could mean that he’s caught before he does the deed, because he obviously did some homework on Lewis, and he might do that again. He could behave sufficiently suspiciously to attract attention. At the worst, it could mean that you at least have some witnesses if he does do it.”

  “Have you accepted the challenge?”

  Baker frowned slightly. “Sorry?”

  Lloyd was sure he knew perfectly well what he meant, but he reworded the question. “Are you actively trying to find him?”

  “Yes,” Baker said. “I am.”

  “How?”

  “To quote Sherlock again—I have my methods. They probably won’t work, but I will be happy to share anything I find out with you. I suspect, however, that we’ve all drawn a complete blank so far. I know I have.”

  Lloyd drove back to Barton, feeling that he had learned a great deal more about diabetes than he had about the psyche of the serial killer, but that was hardly Baker’s fault. There was clearly no such thing as a stereotypical serial killer, and only he knew what his next move was going to be.

  The next morning, Gary went into work eager to try out a theory. When he had found out that Tony Baker had been working in Stansfield town center the night Lewis died, he had what he thought was an idea, something no one else had considered. Jason Challenger had been sent to prison for life, with the recommendation that he serve at least twenty-five years, but no one had checked to see if he was really still in prison. People often appealed against minimum sentences, and there was a lot of talk about them even being unlawful, so perhaps he was out. And perhaps he was challenging Tony Baker again, because both murders had been carried out close to where Baker happened to be working. It had seemed promising, until he discovered that five years ago Challenger had had a heart attack and died in prison.

  But last night he had realized that he didn’t need to abandon the theory just because it wasn’t Challenger. “Alan?” he said, as he went into the office.

  “Mm?” Marshall raised his head and regarded Gary with the look of one whose mind was still on what he was doing before he was interrupted. “Good morning, Gary.”

  “Oh, yes—sorry. Morning, Alan. Do you think we should maybe be checking into who Tony Baker’s been involved with since he’s been here?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we haven’t been able to find a link between the victims, so everyone’s assuming that this man decided to challenge Baker just because he happened to witness him killing Mrs. Fenton. But what if he was meant to witness it? What if someone intended killing her just because he knew Baker was there?”

  Marshall frowned. “But how could the killer have known that Baker would go into the alley? He only went back through it because he wanted to ask Waterman something.”

  Gary knew that. But there was the missing half hour during which Wilma Fenton had not gone into her flat, and they had not had a single confirmed sighting of her anywhere else. Not one. So she had stayed in the alley, and something or someone had stopped her going into her flat. It seemed to him reasonable to suppose that it was the killer.

  “If he knew Baker would be working in his car, maybe he was going to get Mrs. Fenton to go with him and do it where Baker would see it happening. He goes into the alley and hides, waiting for Mrs. Fenton, because he knows that she’ll come home at about half past eight.”

  “So he’s been planning this for some time, has he?”

  “Why not? Baker had been doing this research for a while.”

  “All right.” Marshall smiled slowly. He did everything slowly. “But how was he going to get her to go with him?”

  “He must have been talking to her for about twenty minutes—maybe he was going to offer to walk the dog with her or something. But when that didn’t work, he started trying to make her go with him—Baker said he was hanging on to her arm. Then he realizes that Baker has come into the alley, and he can do it there, so he does.”

  Marshall thought about that, then shook his head. “If he wanted to kill someone purely for Baker’s benefit, why didn’t he just follow Halliday and kill him? That would be a lot easier than getting Mrs. Fenton to go with him.”

  “Because Halliday was running. Maybe he was too fast for him. And a lady of sixty would be an easier prospect than a boy of nineteen.”

  “But if whatever story he was giving Mrs. Fenton wasn’t working, why wouldn’t he just give up and wait for someone to come through that he could follow and take unawares?”

  “Because by the time anyone else wanted to use the alley, Baker would be gone.”

  Marshall didn’t seem impressed, but he wasn’t dismissing it out of hand just yet. “How did he know he’d find that money in her bag?”

  “Because she was talking about it to Halliday.”

  Marshall’s eyes had lost their look of utter disbelief, to be replaced by a look of what Gary liked to think was thoughtful disbelief. “Oh, what the hell,” he said, eventually. “It’s worth a try. We’ll run it past the DI when he comes in.”

  Judy listened to Tom as he told them the theory advanced by Gary Sims, and groaned. “Not another one,” she said, glancing at Lloyd, with whom she was once again sharing an office, something they hadn’t done for years. “One scenario-producer is enough for any small executive team.”

  Tom grinned.

  “That’s obviously why you asked for him,” Judy said to Lloyd. “You’re soulmates.”

  “Are there any immediate holes in it?” Lloyd asked.

  “Well, it was freezing that night—I can’t see Wilma standing chatting to someone in the alleyway for twenty minutes. And Tony Baker didn’t usually work in his car.” She had nevertheless jotted down the salient points. She didn’t know Gary Sims well enough yet to know how useful his scenarios were, but Lloyd’s usually had some grains of truth in them, and so might Gary's. “Plus, he only left at the interval because he’d won, and he wanted to record his feelings.”

  “But it could still have been done for his benefit, guv. If someone saw him working in his car, it could have happened more or less that way.”

  The phone rang, and Lloyd picked it up. “Send him up,” he said, and looked at them, his face grim. “Talk of the devil,” he said. “Baker’s here. And he says it’s urgent, so I imagine he’s brought us bad news.” He sighed. “Or good news, depending on how you look at it. We need another murder, according to him.”

  Tony Baker was shown in, and his apologetic glance took in all three of them
before he took out another long envelope, and removed the letter, placing it on Judy’s desk. He put the envelope beside it.

  Lloyd came over and perched on her desk. She had forgotten that particular irritation of sharing an office with him, as he took out his glasses and leaned over her in order to read the letter.

  ANOTHER ONE MURDERED RIGHT UNDER YOUR NOSE. I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE GOOD. BUT I'M GIVING YOU ANOTHER CHANCE TO CATCH ME, SO DO TRY HARDER THIS TIME. THE NEXT ONE WILL BE IN BARTON, IN APRIL. FROM YOUR NEW CHALLENGER.

  “As an expert,” she asked Baker, “how much faith can we place in what he writes in these letters?”

  Lloyd didn’t exactly tut out loud. He didn’t even produce a sharp intake of breath—indeed, Judy would be hard pressed to describe what it was he did do, because no one else in the room would know that he’d done anything. But she had committed some grammatical solecism, and he was letting her know that she had. Another drawback about working closely with Lloyd that had slipped her memory.

  Baker sat down. “There would be little point in writing them if he was going to lie,” he said.

  That was what she’d said herself, but she had hoped, irrationally, that Baker would disagree. Because this was March 31, so the murder could take place tomorrow. What could they do in that time? But it hardly mattered. Throwing resources at Stansfield hadn’t worked, and she didn’t suppose that it would work in Barton either.

  “But it’s not much to go on, and Barton’s a fair-sized town.” He smiled. “Sorry—city.”

  “It’s been suggested,” said Lloyd, “that Mrs. Fenton’s murder might have been engineered for your benefit.”

  Baker frowned. “I don’t see how. I didn’t know myself that I was going to go back to the—”

  Judy held up a hand. “We’ve been all through that, Mr. Baker, and we know it’s very unlikely. But it is just feasible. Has anyone shown a particular interest in what you did in the South Coast murder business?”

  “No—in fact, I don’t honestly think anyone I met even remembered about it until it was all over the papers again, and that was after Mrs. Fenton’s murder, obviously. A few people know my face, but that’s from the TV programs, and even then they can’t very often place me. ‘You’re that bloke off the telly,’ that’s what they usually say if they recognize me at all. And they’re quite often mixing me up with someone else.”

  Tom pulled over Lloyd’s chair and sat down. “Have you noticed anyone taking a particular interest in you yourself?”

  There was a moment when Baker looked almost embarrassed, then he shook his head.

  “Are you sure?” Judy asked.

  “Quite sure.”

  “Only—that seemed to strike a chord with you.”

  This time he actually flushed a little. “Well, not unless you count my landlady,” he said. “But she isn’t interested in me as a catcher of serial murderers. Just as a catch.”

  Lloyd smiled. “She’s a good cook,” he said. “You could do a lot worse.”

  “She can fry sausage. I wouldn’t say that was an indication of her prowess in the kitchen. She’s not what you would call my type. And I don’t think she’s your killer,” he added, looking back at Judy.

  “No,” Judy agreed. Apart from anything else, Grace Halliday had been working in the pub at the time of both the murders. Her interest in Tony Baker was presumably purely romantic, whether he liked it or not. And he probably did like it, she thought, sure that his ego didn’t object to being massaged, even by Grace Halliday, whom he seemed to regard as beneath him.

  “Has anyone deliberately avoided you?” asked Lloyd. “Have you noticed anyone who goes out of his way not to talk to you—when you’re in the pub, say?”

  “Well, village people tend to regard any outsider with some suspicion,” said Baker. “I can’t say I’ve noticed one more than any other.”

  After he’d gone, Judy informed Yardley that they had a new letter, and it was borne away to the lab, doubtless to prove to be as uninformative as the first two.

  “I suppose he’ll be writing to the paper again,” Tom said.

  “Probably,” said Judy, gloomily, then turned an accusing eye on Lloyd. “Okay,” she said. “What did I do wrong this time?”

  For once, he didn’t feign innocent bewilderment at her question. He grinned at her. “A dangling participle,” he said.

  “What’s that when it’s at home?”

  Lloyd smiled. “Look it up.”

  Barton, Tony discovered, as he snapped yet another unlovely scene, was full of places where a murder could be carried out in comparative privacy. It didn’t have Malworth’s alleys, or Stansfield’s pedestrianized town center with its concealed service areas, but it did have back streets, where no one would choose to be if one could just as easily be on the main streets.

  The back streets tended to be lined with the yards of commercial properties, some walled off, with cast-iron gates leading down to basement entries, but some open to the street. It was here that the detritus of restaurants and food shops was thrown into bins and Dumpsters to be picked up by the refuse collection vans that worked the area during the night, something they could do because there were no residents to disturb, unless you counted the vagrants who huddled round the heating vents.

  Now, on a bright, sunny afternoon, the backstreets were busy, being used by the cars and vans that knew how to avoid the endless traffic lights on their journey through the city. Too many pairs of eyes to add to the ever-vigilant cameras, so the murder would have to be carried out at night again.

  But even at night, even given the tawdry desolation of the backside of any city, it would be riskier to murder someone here than it had been in Stansfield, and the encouragement that he had given Lloyd had not been misplaced. There was no way to ensure that no one would see what was going on. Leaving out the information, given freely last time, about how the murder was going to be done, had been a wise decision; any plan would have to have a back-up, with so many variables to take into account.

  It could even be simply opportunistic, but that carried its own risks. What might seem like an opportunity could turn into someone raising the alarm, because people were on their mettle now. And the cameras might pick something up, if the murder wasn’t planned to exclude them.

  He had confined his research to the streets on either side of Mafeking Road, a long, wide road that had given a section of itself over to the very kinds of human activity that Tony investigated in his TV series. Gambling, drinking, drugs, sex. Mafeking Road itself would be busy, but passersby would tend to be otherwise engaged, either wrapped round a companion or in large groups, all under the influence of some intoxicant or other. They would have little reason to venture down the streets on either side. Streetwalkers would be abroad, but they would be borne away in their customer’s cars. And the victim wasn’t going to be a prostitute—cars were far too easy to trace. Not like in Jack the Ripper’s day, when his hansom could disappear into the London fog. A prostitute would be much too risky a proposition.

  Whoever was chosen as the victim, there was a risk to be run. The buildings would be active, all of them, unlike the shops and offices farther up. But while that area was much more secluded, it didn’t afford the opportunity that this one did. The victim would have to be lured to the quieter area, and that meant spending time with him or her, something to be avoided at all costs.

  But here, with the booming nightlife, there were other dangers. Someone could be looking out of a back window, or taking rubbish out to one of the bins, and the police were always around where there were drink and drugs to be had. The frequency of the patrols would be increased, no doubt. This murder had to be planned, he was sure of that, but the most careful planning wouldn’t by any means eliminate all the hazards.

  Barton wasn’t somewhere that Tony would choose to commit a murder, however easy it would be to get lost in the crowd moments later. It would be a riskier business altogether to commit a murder in a city that, like mo
st cities, never really slept.

  Stansfield could have been a coincidence—Stephen could have just happened to be working there on the night of Lewis’s murder. And that was surely the case, Tony told himself, because even his writer’s imagination couldn’t conceive of Stephen Halliday as a murderer. But always at the back of his mind was his first-hand knowledge of the breed, some of them the most mild-mannered people on earth.

  And in all the time Tony had been at the Tulliver Inn, Stephen had never worked in Barton, so if nothing else the Barton murder would prove if it really was Stephen who had written him those letters.

  It was unseasonably warm for the middle of April, in stark contrast to March, when sleet and snow had been the order of the day. Keith ran a finger round his stiff, starched collar, as he left the open fire doors at which he was posted, and moved farther into the room, casting a fleeting look at the perspiring boxers in the ring, glad that at least he wasn’t having to do that for the amusement of the Bartonshire nobs.

  He looked round the room, his glance taking in the top table, and caught Mr. Waterman’s eye. Waterman gave a nod that was really no more than a slow blink, and Keith wandered on toward the bar.

  “Can you get someone to cover me for fifteen minutes?” he asked the bar manager. “I’ve not had a break yet.”

  The manager looked at the clock. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Exactly. You’ll have to be back here by ten forty-five—no later. I’ll need you on the bar from then.”

  “I’ll be back,” said Keith. “Don’t worry.”

  Michael Waterman watched Keith as he walked from the bar to the big doors that stood open at the back of the hall.

  “Good little scrapper, that black lad,” said Jack Shaw, just as his opponent went down for the count. He grinned. “What did I tell you?” He looked at his watch. “Well—that’s it, for me. It was a good night, Mike. Thanks for inviting me.”