by Guy N Smith
Three rings the other end and now it was ringing out again.
Still ringing out.
Sandra could be in the bath. Or on the loo. He let it ring on.
“She’s maybe got fed up waiting in, night after night, Jason, and gone out. Wives won’t stop home forever, you know.”
Serena, Ford’s first wife, hadn’t. He didn’t want to think about her, it was too painful. Right now he only had thoughts for Sandra Corms.
Shit, she wasn’t going to answer! Finally, he dropped the receiver back on to its cradle.
“You’d better hurry home, Jason.”
He left the office at a fast walk, oblivious of the laughter that followed him. Out in the station car park he gunned the Fiat’s engine and squealed the tyres. He screeched them to a halt in Dam Street, two minutes, twenty seconds later. The traffic lights at the top of Tamworth Street had not been in his favour otherwise he could have made it twenty seconds sooner. He dared not shoot the lights.
Drinkwater’s shop and flat were in darkness. Ford debated briefly with himself, got out of the car and tried the street door.
It was unlocked.
The shop smelled of musty books. The untidy living quarters reeked of stale sweat.
He saw the slivers of wood on the bare floorboards, the gouged pieces of pine that had once been varnished and painted. The girl’s face on it was barely recognisable, just wide eyes that stared up in terror at him.
Oh, Jesus Ford, just look what he did to me!
His keen eyes saw the bloodstains on the dark boards; the wood had absorbed them but he knew only too well what they were. He was certain that the lighter stains were semen that had dried.
Ford’s blood ran cold. He should have played his hunch earlier. It was too late now.
He hesitated for one moment, thought about radioing for backup, changed his mind. This was his show, he owed it to himself. Reinforcements would be no help, it was one against one from now on. He had a personal score to settle, he had something to prove yet again.
He ran down the stairs and out into the street, ran all the way to the Close. He wished that he had drawn a pistol from the armoury but that would have entailed explanations to which Borman wouldn’t have listened. The Chief Inspector played everything by the rulebook.
Lights were showing in Sandra’s house. And for the second time within a space of ten minutes Ford found a door unlocked.
Drinkwater had been here. And gone. And he had taken Sandra with him.
He searched the house. He knew he wouldn’t find her but his training was instinctive. Running up the stairs, throwing open bedroom doors. A mean machine that refused to panic.
Nothing. Just like he had expected. Downstairs he checked the lounge again. There were no signs of a struggle; Sandra had gone meekly with her captor. Doubtless at knifepoint. Theknife.
Ford went back outside, stood on the steps. A dilemma, whether or not to call for backup. Self-recrimination because he should have confided in Borman, raised the alarm. It was too late now. Time was running out, he could not afford to wait for reinforcements.
‘Abducted women and children are usually dead within the hour.’ One of Chief Dawson’s sayings, spoken with a lifetime’s experience. Oh, please God, let this be the exception.
Ford took a deep breath, held it, put himself inside the killer’s mind. A victim, still alive. He needed a place to do what he had to do to her, somewhere not too far away, somewhere where he would not be disturbed.
Stowe Pool? Corms had died there, nobody had heard his screams. It was a possibility. The Detective turned his head, saw the cathedral illuminated by the floodlights. Majestic, it humbled you, was representative of the Almighty in all His grandeur. A holy shrine.
A sacrificial altar?
He did not hesitate, made straightway for the west doors. He knew they would be locked, his intuition told him that before he tried them. It also told him to check out the north transept entrance, the one that the clergy and choir used. The one that Homer locked and unlocked like some sinister guardian of the gates of doom.
The door creaked slightly, swung inwards to his touch. Inside, the nave and choir stall lights burned softly, the aisles were in blackness. Ford’s fingers closed over the torch in his pocket. There must be a duty Verger somewhere; surely the cathedral would not have been left unsupervised at this hour.
It had been that time when Frame had been killed.
Ford moved forward, walked on the balls of his feet, he remembered how the echoes gave you away. Again, he regretted the absence of backup. There were a thousand places in which the killer could have hidden, in which a mutilated body could lie undiscovered. It might take hours of searching. Man hours. He was only one man.
Time was running out fast for Sandra Corms.
He would check on the Verger’s office first, perhaps the duty man worked there with bowed head, oblivious of all else.
Ford resisted the temptation to shine his torch, if the one he was seeking was in here then he must not reveal his presence. He crept stealthily down the north aisle.
Suddenly he stumbled; almost fell, as his foot caught against something lying in his path. Even in his stagger, he whirled, flicked the torch switch. God Almighty!
He had sensed by the brief contact that the obstacle was human. Unconscious. Possibly dead.
The inert body was most certainly dead, smiled up at him with its gashed throat, dribbled fresh blood.Legs drawn up in a final agonised writhe, slippery, scarlet fingers clawing at the wound in one last futile attempt to staunch the flow. The features were awash with blood, eyes bulging, threatening to burst.
Possibly the open mouth had screamed once prior to the attack, a shriek that had been drowned in a torrent of arterial blood. Recognition was not easy, Ford had to bend over the corpse to be sure. At first he had presumed that it was Drinkwater. It wasn’t.
It was Charles Homer.
The policeman caught his breath. Clearly the Head Verger had come to investigate an intruder and had paid for his curiosity, his devotion to duty, with his life.
Which meant that the killer and his victim were inside the cathedral.
Ford moved swiftly, stealthily, flitted from pillar to pillar. In the reflected glow from the choir stalls he saw the organ loft above, a cluster of pipes that gave it an altar-like appearance in the half-light. A sacrificial altar.
He moved at a half crouch, made it to the steps, mounted them. The balcony was a river of blackness, a miniature Styx in this place of death. His nostrils flared, he thought he scented blood. It was his imagination; his life, Sandra’s, depended upon realism.
The loft was empty.
He turned back in disappointment but not for a second was his vigilance relaxed. The hunt must continue.
Back down in the nave he hesitated briefly. He must check out the small chapels, the Lady Chapel and the Chapter House, St. Chad’s and St. Stephen’s. For tonight there would be no holiness in any of them.
A noise, a movement. Ford froze, tensed, his eyes searching the gloom and shadows. It had come from over there, across in the south transept.
It creaked again.
He glided on the soles of his shoes, recalled again how Homer had died, a crooked arm aloft to protect his throat. It was icy cold in here, outside the wind had risen as if to mask any sound which an ambusher might make.
Ford followed the wall around until he reached the south door. It was locked, nobody had passed through it. He felt on with an outstretched hand until he came to the corner, slid his flattened body round it.
That was when he almost fell through the low, small doorway, his weight pushing the heavy studded door back, iron hinges creaked their protest. The frame barely reached his shoulders, it would be necessary to stoop low in order to pass through. Like the entrance to the domain of some evil dwarf.
In his mind Ford envisaged a pit or dungeon, a deep hole where Cromwell had cast his Royalist prisoners after the siege, a damp and airless place
where they had died and decomposed, now only their whitened bones littering the floor. A feeling of vertigo, clutching at the woodwork in case he, too, fell down there.
Cautiously, he flashed his torch, an on-off movement, a split second of pencil beam that revealed all he needed to know. Fresh air wafted his face, came down the spiral staircase that wound on up into the blackness above.
And Ford knew, without any doubt, that that was where James Drinkwater had taken Sandra Corms. That somewhere up there was the altar of his perverted fantasies upon which he intended to sacrifice her.
27
Sandra was having difficulty breathing. It was a combination of shock and the physically exhausting, seemingly never-ending climb up this spiral staircase inside the great central spire.
It was all a terrible nightmare, it had to be. She had fallen asleep on the settee in the lounge and the bad dream originated from that awful lusting visit of Drinkwater’s that time when he had called on the pretext of congratulating Michael upon his appointment as organist. Her husband’s murder hadn’t helped. She hadn’t grieved, you only did that when you loved somebody, but she had been devastated by the sheer horror of it.
She hated James Drinkwater for what he had done. She also pitied him because he was mentally ill. Most of all, though, she feared for her own life.
She would wake up soon, find herself back in the lounge, surrounded by boxes packed in readiness for her leaving. She couldn’t wait to get away; from the Close, the city itself. It was all one awful bad dream.
It wasn’t. It was reality, the hand that stretched up from a couple of steps below, touched her bottom through her jeans, was flesh and blood. The very same hand that had wielded the knife which had cut out Homer’s throat in a single blow.
She knew that her captor carried that knife in his other hand, he would not hesitate to use it if the mood took him.
“I … can’t … go any … farther.” She leaned on the stone wall; her legs would not hold her up much longer.
“You can and you will!” He seemed scarcely out of breath. “We have some way to go yet. The spire is two hundred and fifty-two feet high; it commands unrivalled views of the city and its surroundings. I climbed it once before, when I was a chorister. I was fourteen then. It was a special treat to come up here and I’ve never forgotten it. You will be enthralled when you look out from the top window.”
The very thought brought on a sense of vertigo. Only the reminder of that bloodstained knife prevented her from sinking down on the steps. Somehow she remained standing. “Can’t … can’t we rest … just for a moment.”
“All right.” That hand came around her and she stiffened when the fingers squeezed her breasts through her jacket. “Just for a minute.” Because there wasn’t any hurry, nobody would think of looking for them up here. She probably would not be missed until tomorrow, and even then they’d think that she had just gone out somewhere. The alarm might not be raised for twenty-four hours.
By then it wouldn’t matter.
“Why me?” She couldn’t stand the silence, the sound of his regular breathing. A shaft of floodlight through one of the arched windows slanted on his face. Sandra shuddered; she had difficulty recognising the Vicar Choral. Gone was that vague expression, the musician’s absent-mindedness, his obsession with the great masters to the exclusion of all else; in its place was a much more intense look, one that terrified her.
“Because,” his thin lips stretched, his eyes seemed to burn in the reflected light, “you are beautiful.”
She trembled, feeling physically sick.
“I’ve never had a woman.” His voice seemed far away, like it whispered up from the stairwell down below. “They denied me that. Poppleton and what he stood for. Young boys are nice and safe; they don’t cause you problems. I never did anything to a boy, either. You believe me, don’t you?” He was insistent, pleading, seeking a positive answer.
“Yes, I believe you.”
“Clay is just like me, we pitied each other in our own way. You know Cecil, don’t you?”
She didn’t, but she said she did.
“His only real pleasure came from a girl in an oil painting, and he only found her a few months ago. I know how he felt—I had a painted girl for years, she was beautiful. Just a face on a piece of varnished wood, not just the face, the eyes, they saw and they understood. They seduced you. Tonight I killed her!”
Sandra started.
“I had to kill her to make way for you.” There was a sadness in his tone now. “I didn’t want to, but it was the only way. She haunted me; I could tell by the expression in her eyes that she knew I was going to find another woman. She tried to stop me. That was why I killed her. So that I could have you.”
Sandra did not answer this time.
“Cecil still has his woman. He killed a man to make room for her. A painting, a portrait. The chap bore a likeness to old Herbert Poppleton. Cecil hated Herbert, too. Herbert made him what he is today, just like he did me. But Cecil never had the guts to do anything about it. Idid!” His voice rose in pitch. “Not just Herbert—though he was the worst—but those who came after him. Because they’re all alike, and if they aren’t, they soon will be. I had to kill them to save other boys from suffering what I suffered, from becoming like me. You do understand, don’t you?”
She didn’t, but she said she did. It would be dangerous to argue with him.
“I’ve always liked you.” His tone was softer now, he shook as though he was nervous, embarrassed, a teenager on a first date. “I’ve watched you from a distance a lot lately. You’ve been unfaithful to your husband.”
“Yes.” It made her feel guilty now, far worse than ever before.
“I wanted you. Badly.” His head dropped, she could no longer see his expression. “I knew this was the only way. I hate that writer, I’ve watched him mooching in the cathedral lately, I thought perhaps he suspected that I had feelings for you. I thought about killing him, too.”
Her legs wouldn’t hold her up much longer; she was fighting to stand upright.
“You have sex with him? Of course you do. Tell me about it, tell me what you do.”
“I … I …”
“You’re embarrassed.” His head came up and he smiled apologetically. “Never mind, you can tell me later.” His tone changed; there was an urgency in it. “We must press on.”
She climbed a step at a time, dragged one leg behind the other. His hand rested on her bottom as if he was afraid that she might fall back.
Her ears popped, the vertigo returned, spasms that came and went. They passed another window and she turned her head away so that she couldn’t see outside. Often in the past she had stood in the Close and gazed up at the main spire, watched the sunlight glinting on the golden ball. Even that used to make her dizzy. It was an awful long way from the ground.
She had to rest again. This time he did not complain, just stood behind her and smoothed his hands up and down her buttocks. Those fingers attempted to edge between her closed thighs, so she began to climb again.
Her heart was beating crazily, there was a roaring in her ears, and she had to breathe consciously. Far below, outside, she heard the hum of distant traffic. City nightlife continued; it would never stop. No matter what James Drinkwater did to her.
Another sound, so faint it was almost inaudible. She thought for a moment that Drinkwater had stumbled, maybe stubbed a toe. A careless footstep. Except that it seemed to come from the stairway down below.
A desperate hope was raised within her; it was all she had left, even if it was soon to be dashed. It was something to cling on to even if it was futile.
Sandra began to sob with relief. Somebody was following them up here.
28
Ford moved as fast and as silently as possible. He did not need to use his torch; the glow that filtered inside gave him all the light he needed. Through one of the lower windows the glare of the spotlights was dazzling.
He ran. Stopped. Listen
ed. Ran again. Oh God, they had to be up here somewhere!
Another landing; the stairs wound on into the gloom. He paused to listen again. Somebody was talking, a man’s voice. Then silence.
Now Ford knew that Drinkwater and his prisoner were not far away. The detective’s relief was overwhelming but he could not afford to relax. There was no way of knowing when the killer would strike; the only certainty was that he would, sooner or later. Ford prayed that it would be later.
On and on, Ford’s calves began to ache. He wondered how Sandra was faring. It was her mental ordeal that worried him most at this stage. The damage could be irreparable.
Suddenly, he saw them. They stood maybe fifteen or twenty steps above him on what must surely be the summit landing. He rounded a bend in the twisting staircase and quickly stepped back into the shadows. They had not seen him, and by the way Drinkwater was threatening Sandra with a knife, Ford could not afford to let his presence be known.
“Take your clothes off.” The command was spoken softly, a thousand times more menacing than if James Drinkwater had screamed it in a frenzy. So cold and calculated, like how a GP might ask a patient to prepare for an examination.
“I … I …” Sandra was shaking, leaned back against the wall; she looked as if she might slump to the floor at any second.
“Take … your … clothes … off.”
A slight movement of the killer’s outstretched hand, the point of the blade pricked her throat. She tried to scream, but it came out as a strangled gasp. In the half-light the watcher saw how her terror-stricken features were bathed in sweat.
Then she was pulling at the zip on her jacket with shaking fingers. It snagged, she tugged it free.
“Come on, hurry!” Drinkwater urged.
Ford eased around the corner, dropped to his hands and knees, hoping that the shadows would hide him if he kept low.
“I’ve never had a woman, you know. I think I told you that.” The Vicar Choral was shrugging out of his topcoat, passing the knife from his right hand to his left. He tore at his trouser belt. “They deprived me of that.”
