by Michael Kerr
After taking several Polaroids of his work, he left Kirstie alone with the corpse. It was lunchtime already. He showered, hurried to the kitchen, switched on the portable television and took eggs from the fridge, with the intention of making an omelette. He would eat, then feed Hannibal. He sighed. It was a shame that Anita would not now be the star of his first snuff video, but there was still Kirstie, and an inexhaustible supply of itinerant pussy to predate on and keep him amused.
“Paul, if you are watching this, I need you to listen to me, son.”
He froze, and then slowly turned to face his mother, whose gaunt features almost filled the TV screen.
“You have to stop what you’re doing, now. I know how much you must be hurting, but harming innocent people isn’t the answer. You need help, Paul. Please telephone the police. Don’t make things any worse than they are. I want you to know that I’ll stand by you, and...”
He dropped the spatula he had been mixing the eggs with and took two strides over to the portable, to wrench it from the work top and hurl it at the wall. It exploded and fell to the floor, smoking and silenced. Even his whore of a mother was against him, working with the police to bring about his downfall. She had just made a very stupid mistake, and should have known that he would not let such a serious breach of faith go unpunished.
Hugging himself with both arms, fingers digging into his flesh, he screamed. Felt the blood rise in his face and the veins throb at his temples and neck. It was Barnes, the smarmy cop, who had turned his mother against him. The detective inspector’s meddling ways were well out of order. Barnes would not expect to be elevated to public enemy number one status on his list, but that was now what he was. While the cop was busy protecting the less than important jurors and trying to find him, he would make plans to eradicate Barnes. All other considerations would be put on hold.
Appetite lost, he turned off the hot plate and dumped the runny mess of eggs into the waste bin. He then went upstairs and dressed, tucked one of the Polaroids into an envelope and left the house.
As he climbed into the Rover he heard the chop of rotor blades in the distance and looked up to see a police helicopter approach, then fly directly overhead at low level. Full of apprehension, he waited for over five minutes, but it did not return. Pure coincidence. Nobody knew his whereabouts or his new identity. He had absolutely nothing to fear but fear itself. He would not allow himself to be panicked.
Driving out through Goff’s Oak, he was surprised to see a police car parked outside the local pub. And when another passed him on the B198 he felt a fleeting sense of danger. Could they have any inkling as to his location? No. He used a different vehicle every time he went out to abduct or kill, and then destroyed it.
He drove to Stoke Newington, parked up and used a stolen mobile to phone the Yard. Within seconds he was put through to Barnes.
“It’s Paul. Was it your idea to put my mother on the box?”
“Yeah. I’ll try anything once.”
“You’re fucking pathetic, Barnes. Do you think I can be talked into walking in with my hands up, to face a life behind bars?”
“No. I just thought you should know that even your own mum has faced up to what you are. Personally, I’d hate for you to spoil everything and quit on us. I want to have the pleasure of putting a bullet in your twisted little brain.”
“Dream on, cop.”
“I will. Now, was there something important you wanted to tell me? I was just about to go for a pint and a sandwich.”
“Yes, Barnes, I’ve been busy again. I’ll call you from a public phone in a few minutes and leave something in it to put you off your lunch.”
“You need to―” The line went dead.
Matt waited for the word, but was not surprised to be told that the call had been made from a mobile phone that had been reported stolen, and was now switched off.
Paul drove another half mile, parked outside a small park and used a phone box to ring the Yard again. “Her name’s Anita,” he said when connected to Matt. He then left the receiver off the hook.
The nearest patrol car arrived at the call box five minutes later. The two officers ensured that nobody else used it until Matt and Pete arrived. Matt put on a pair of cellophane gloves and went inside the box. There were very few places to hide anything, and he quickly found the envelope taped to the underside of the directory shelf. It was a red greeting card envelope with just one word, ‘Barnes’, written on the front in familiar gold handwriting.
“What is it, boss,” Pete said, holding the door open as Matt withdrew the photograph from the envelope by its edges.
Matt inspected the ghastly scene. It was the same cellar, of that he was certain. Kirstie Marshall could be seen laying on a camp bed in the background. The slightly out of focus expression on her face was one of abject terror, and her naked body was covered in blotches of what appeared to be blood. In the foreground was another naked female, taped to a wooden chair. At a guess she was a teenager. Her expression was slack, eyes unseeing and not even reflecting the glare of the camera’s flash. She was without doubt dead, her throat gaping open, and other wounds visible on her bloody body.
Matt held out the photo in the same way he would present his warrant card for scrutiny. Pete took in the details and handed Matt a transparent evidence bag to put the envelope and Polaroid in.
“He’s more than a few bricks short of a hod, boss,” Pete said.
Matt nodded his agreement. “That about sums him up. Tell the uniforms to stay here until Forensics arrive.” He looked about him. There were a few rundown shops and a pub across the road from the park. “Let’s see if anybody saw him in the call box, or noticed a car parked close to it.”
They got nothing but blank looks and a lot of shoulder shucking. Nobody took any notice of something so mundane as who used a public phone. The box would’ve had to have been blown-up to register. It was just a piece of cityscape that blended with the ordinariness of its surroundings. As they walked back to the car, a young black kid of about twelve swerved around them on a skateboard.
Matt had seen him when they first arrived. “Hey!” he shouted.
The kid swivelled on the board, stepped off and stamped on its rear end to bring it up vertically into his hand, all in one smooth move. “You talkin’ to me, man?” he said.
Matt grinned. “Yeah. I could use some help.”
“What’s it worth, Mr Pole-eeceman?”
The kid was sharp. This was his ’hood, and he would miss nothing that went down, though would be tight-lipped over most of it.
“We just want to know if you noticed some guy in the call box a few minutes before the uniforms turned up. And if he parked-up near it.”
The kid grinned and flashed a gold cap. “A donation towards ma new board might jog ma memory.”
“What’s your name, son?” Matt said.
“They calls me Skater. We gotta deal?”
“Yeah, Skater.”
“A skinny white dude ’bout five-ten, in ’is twennies wid a beard an’ thinnin’ barnet was in there before the filth turned up.”
Pete pulled a photocopy of the youthful Paul Sutton from his pocket and unfolded it. “Could that have been him?” he said, showing it to the lad.
Skater gave it a long look. “Yeah, dat’s ’im.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. ’Is eyes is freaky, man. ’E look like a crazy dog I once ’ad. I never knew whether dat mudder was goin’ to lick me or take a lump outta me.”
Matt said, “What about a vehicle?”
“A green Rover. Four door. I din’t catch de plates.”
Matt pulled out his wallet and peeled off a twenty. “How was he dressed, Skater?”
“Navy fleece, black jeans an’ black work boots,” Skater said with his eyes fastened on the bank note. “We all done now?”
“Yeah. We’ll find you again if we need to.”
Skater plucked the twenty from Matt’s hand and was boarding away from them in a split se
cond. He was a street-wise kid who could go either way in life, depending on the breaks he got. Matt hoped he would make it through the minefield of drugs, gangs and violence that it would be all too easy for him to enter.
“He made his first mistake, boss,” Pete said. “We now have an up-to-date description of him, and know what make and colour of car he drives.”
Matt allowed himself a slow smile. “Yeah. He’s running out of time, but doesn’t know it. We’ll keep what we just got away from the media. I don’t want him to know we’re closing in on him. I’ll get Tom to pull the chopper and extra cars out of the target area. The last thing we want now is for him to panic, change his appearance, ditch the Rover and go to earth. We have all we need to home in on him.”
“You make it sound like a done deal, boss. Are you that confidant?”
“I’m a pragmatist. I evaluate what I’ve got and look at the practical consequences.”
“And if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then I revaluate. Come on, let’s get back to the Yard.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
MARGO Hewson used the tip of her nail-bitten forefinger to describe circles on the Formica top of the table. Her amber, wolfish eyes were unblinking, and to Beth the evaluation was little more than a perfunctory necessity.
Margo was a homicidal schizophrenic, who had now – at the age of forty-one – been confined at the facility for over ten years. She was obese, kept her head shaved, and was still regarded as potentially highly dangerous, though was of no significant threat to staff or other patients while taking the prescribed antipsychotic drugs.
“How do you feel, Margo?” Beth said.
There was a five second pause. “Like a wasp caught in a jam jar, Doc. I’m at the bottom of it, weak as a kitten and sinking into the sugary goo. The shit they keep me on is like a liquid cosh. I feel permanently on the brink of sleep, and everything is an effort.”
“Does that make you angry?”
“Wouldn’t it piss you off?”
“It’s to help you, Margo. Without the medication you become violent and start hearing the voices that tell you to be...disruptive.”
Margo’s finger paused, trembled, then began to draw wavy lines.
Beth could sense the wild animal that was caged within the invisible bars of the Olanzapine that reduced the delusions and hallucinations. “Do you have anything else you want to tell me?” she said to the woman who had once run amok in a supermarket, hacking at customers with a hand axe, killing an elderly man, a two-year-old girl in a pushchair, and seriously wounding several other shoppers.
Margo smiled and displayed small, crooked upper teeth and an inch of glistening pink gum above them. She said nothing more.
The phone rang as Beth returned from the residential area and entered her office. She tossed Margo’s file onto her desk and picked up the receiver.
“Beth?”
“Yes, Matt.”
“We’ve got another photo from Sutton. And he was seen at the location he left it at for us to find.”
“Kirstie? Is she dead?”
“No. She was still alive when he took it. But I need your input. There’s another girl in the shot, who is dead.”
“Where are you now?”
“On my way back to the squad room.”
“I’ll see you there, soonest.”
“Thanks.”
She spent all of thirty seconds confirming on paper that Margo Hewson was still – in her evaluation – a threat to herself and society. It was a view she knew was shared by the other members of the mental health team that assessed patients at regular intervals and made decisions pertaining to changes of care and treatment as and when necessary.
As Beth climbed into her Lexus, Henry Robinson a.k.a. Skater was boarding past a thick stand of rhododendron that ran the length of rusted railings in the small park in Stoke Newington. He was being watched.
Paul had exited the phone box, driven into a side street and parked in a space halfway down, then walked back to the acre of building-free land that he supposed was a magnet for junkies, clandestine alfresco sexual frolics and other unsavoury activities. He ambled along a path and took refuge in the evergreen foliage that bordered it, once certain that nobody was in the vicinity.
They were quick. A large Vauxhall with flashing roof lights sped up to the box. Two plods jumped out, and he hunkered down as they surveyed the surrounding area. It wasn’t too long before Barnes and another younger copper, his sidekick no doubt, turned up. He resented the DI on sight. The rangy detective looked like some Yank TV cop, with rugged features and a seemingly ‘hell or glory’ overconfident air. He was obviously used to success; to winning. But he was out of his league this time. Cops were basically reliant on the morons they were after making mistakes, or on being given information by witnesses. He didn’t leave witnesses, or make mistakes. Unless Barnes could know where he would strike next, then even knowing his real name was of no help. He was now a phantom; a man with a new identity who would remain at large to predate on whoever he chose to.
Barnes recovered the photograph he had planted, and then he and the other imbecile went walkabout, calling at the handful of shops and the public house that were in view of the phone box. It would be fun to call the cop again and let him know that he had been less than a hundred yards from his quarry. No, that was wrong. It was the other way round. Barnes was his quarry.
A problem. They had stopped a young kid as he skateboarded past them. There was a lengthy conversation and a lot of head nodding. And Barnes appeared to hand over some money. Maybe the brat had seen him.
The uniforms stayed, but Barnes and his minion drove off in a hurry. He stayed put and fortune smiled. The kid entered the park and headed straight towards where he was concealed. Being bold was not necessarily brash. Calculated risks went hand in hand with any worthwhile venture. He waited, breath held, then lunged forward through the screen of winter greenery to grasp the boy by the throat and jerk him back into deep cover. The skateboard sped away as if propelled by the stiff breeze that rustled leaves and whipped through the bare branches of nearby spindly trees.
Straddling the skinny youth, he placed one hand over his mouth, and with his other, reached for the lock knife he carried. The bulging eyes jiggled at the sight of the blade.
“I’m going to take my hand away from your mouth, boy,” he said. “And then I want you to tell me everything you told the filth. If I think you’re lying, you get Mr. Knife here rammed into your ear to the hilt. Do you understand?”
Skater nodded.
Less than five minutes later, Paul left the park by a side entrance and ambled back to his car. Throughout the drive home he was tense and very uneasy. Barnes had got lucky. The black kid had run off at the mouth and given the cop a description of him and the Rover. If he had not hung about to watch his nemesis show up, then he would still have felt totally secure, unaware of the danger he was in.
The journey proved uneventful. He made it back to the house, siphoned the petrol out of the tank and used the chain-driven winch to load the Rover into the crusher, but did not set it going. As darkness fell, he went down to the cellar.
After witnessing the outrage against Anita, Kirstie felt the optimism drain out of her. Despair as deep as any ocean trench replaced it to rob her of any belief that she would be given another chance to escape the madman’s clutches. He had gone berserk and howled like a crazed animal as he raped and slaughtered the helpless young girl, reducing her to a bloody carcass. It had been almost impossible to look away from the cooling corpse. The affront of it was too great to ignore. She wanted to live, but could not now envisage that as being a realistic prospect. She cried for Faye, for Dennis, and even for the girl who she did not know, but whose life had been so cruelly cut short. But most of all she cried for herself and the dire plight that she was in. Time became elastic and without meaning, ceasing to be a consideration. She dozed, woke to renewed shock at the obscenity just a few feet away fro
m her, and then let an ember of anger ignite and rekindle her flagging spirit. I will not be accepting of death, she thought. While I have a single breath left in my body I will fight for life. He was intent on killing her, and she was convinced that he would attempt to do it sooner rather than later.
In the presence of so much physical and mental oppression, Kirstie began to pray to God. She had a picture of Him as some Charlton Heston figure with flowing white hair and beard and matching robes. He was the only being she thought might hear her in these awful circumstances. It was hard. As a nine-year-old, when her grandfather had died, she had at first been angry with God for taking him from her, and then turned her back on a creator who, if existent and possessing divine power and influence over all things, was a cruel and pitiless entity. Now, as an adult, she tried to embrace her former belief, feeling a doubting Thomas who had shunned God but was now grovelling, trying to repair the dubiety that she had manufactured to stop her hating Him for allowing bad shit to happen and taint her life. She spoke aloud. “If you can hear me, God, then give me a break. I’m not asking for myself. I want my husband to have a wife, and my daughter to know her mother for as long as possible. I think most death is pointless, and for me to die here like this would be an affront to your good grace. Don’t let this devil in disguise get away with taking any more of your flock. Surely he needs to be stopped. Give me the means and the strength to survive this. What do you say? Am I reaching you, or are you too preoccupied to hear my plea?”
Her only answer was the sound of laughter echoing outside the door. It opened and the face of evil appeared to her in the guise of Anita’s killer.
“There is no God, Kirstie,” Paul said as he cut through the tape that held what had been Anita from the chair, to let the body keel over onto the floor. “I’m the only all-powerful being that you are ever going to come into contact with in this life. But I can be merciful. I’ve had a change of heart. You get to have my illustrious company for another day or two. So if you need to pray to anybody, then I’m your man. It’s me and me alone who has the power to decide how long your future might last.”
