The Night Stalker: A chilling serial killer thriller (Detective Erika Foster Book 2)

by Robert Bryndza

  On the afternoon of the 15th of July, the atmosphere in the incident room was subdued. The previous day, six members of Erika’s team had been reassigned to a drug-trafficking case, and she had just finished a call with an angry man with three children whose wife had killed herself, and whose small daughter had been the one to find her body with the plastic bag over her head.

  It was a Friday, and Erika could tell that the rest of her team was itching to get home and enjoy the weekend. She couldn’t blame them; they had been working flat out. They had little to show for all their hard work, and the newspapers were full of pictures of people crowding to the beach and local parks.

  Moss and Peterson sat at their desks, along with Crane and Singh. Erika looked over at the whiteboards for what seemed the thousandth time, at the pictures of Gregory Munro and Jack Hart. There was now also an image taken from one of the suicide websites, of a tanned, bald shop mannequin lying in a dingy bedroom with a suicide bag rigged up with a pipe and gas canister. Its eyelids were shaded with purple and long eyelashes were painted on.

  ‘Boss, I’ve got Marsh on the phone,’ said Moss, covering the handset.

  ‘Can you tell him I’m out?’ Erika replied. She figured that more of her team was about to be reassigned and she couldn’t face another heated meeting.

  ‘He’d like to see you in his office. Says it’s important.’

  ‘Maybe he’s going to tell you we’re getting decent air-con,’ grinned Peterson.

  ‘I live in hope,’ said Erika. She tucked in her blouse, pulled on her jacket and left the incident room, climbing the four flights of stairs up to Marsh’s office.

  She knocked and he shouted for her to enter. She was surprised to see that he’d tidied the office: gone was the mess of discarded files and clothes, and the dismantled coat stand. There was a bottle of eighteen-year-old Chivas Regal on the table.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay. Seeing as it’s Friday.’

  Marsh went to the corner of the office, and Erika saw that where the pile of coats and paperwork had been, there was now a small fridge. Marsh opened the fridge and retrieved an ice cube tray from the freezer compartment. She watched as he added ice to two plastic cups, and then poured a generous measure of whisky into both.

  ‘You do take ice?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  He put the cork back in the bottle, placed it down on the desk, then handed her one of the cups.

  ‘I know tomorrow is the second anniversary,’ he said quietly. ‘I just wanted to have drink with you. To let you know I hadn’t forgotten. To toast Mark.’

  He raised his cup and she bumped hers against it. They both took a sip.

  ‘Do sit down, please.’

  They both sat, and Erika looked down at the amber liquid clinging to the rapidly melting ice. She was touched, but determined not to cry.

  ‘He was a good man, Erika.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s been two years,’ she said. ‘For the first year, I’d wake up most mornings and I’d often forget that he was gone. But now I’ve got used to him not being here, to a certain extent, which is almost worse.’

  ‘Marcie asked me to send her regards too.’

  ‘Thanks…’ Erika wiped her eyes with her sleeve and changed the subject. ‘We had the e-fits back. They’ve all given us a reproduction of the actress from Crimewatch.’

  Marsh nodded. ‘Yes, I saw.’

  She went on, ‘I fear our only breakthrough will be when she kills again. We’re going to stay on it, though. Next week I’m going to get the team to revisit all the evidence. We’ll start from scratch. There’s always something, however small…’

  Marsh sat back in his chair. He looked pained.

  ‘You know how this works, Erika. She could strike again in the next few weeks, or days… Or it could be months. I worked on Operation Minstead. At one point, the attacker stopped for seven years.’

  ‘Is this you letting me down softly?’

  ‘No, I’m happy to give you more time, but I have to remind you that resources are not infinite.’

  ‘So what’s the whisky for?’

  ‘It’s a genuine gesture. Nothing to do with work.’

  Erika sipped at hers and they sat in silence for a moment. She looked out at the view behind Marsh: the blue sky, the houses receding in the distance, giving way to patches of green on the horizon.

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow? Will anyone be with you?’ asked Marsh.

  ‘Mark’s dad did offer to come down to London, but I thought, with the case…’ She trailed off.

  ‘Take the day off, Erika. You’ve been on for three weeks without a break.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  She drank the last of the whisky and placed the plastic cup back on the table.

  ‘I think she’s planning her next murder, sir. She’s not going into hibernation. I don’t think it will be seven weeks, let alone seven years.’

  51

  Simone followed the man on three more occasions. He liked to spend his afternoons in a gay sauna in Waterloo, tucked away behind the train station. Twice, she’d tailed him there, discreetly waiting in an Internet cafe further down the street. His visits had lasted several hours. On another morning, he’d taken the tube from the Barbican. She’d sat further down the carriage, tucked in amongst a row of commuters, pretending to read the Metro as the train trundled and lurched around the Circle line until it reached Gloucester Road underground station.

  She’d felt uneasy shadowing him in West London. It was alien to her. It reeked of money, with its mix of smart Georgian houses and exotic people drinking at pavement cafes. He had called in at a smart office on a residential street and vanished inside without looking back.

  She’d returned that day to watch the building where he lived. The Bowery Lane Estate was a large and rather bleak U-shaped six-storey block of flats, with an oblong of grass in the centre. It was a concrete brutalist design, built as council flats after the Second World War, when much of London had been a bomb site. Now, sixty years later, the flats had been hailed as a site of architectural importance. The concrete structure was a listed building, and each flat sold for several hundred grand or more – the newer, moneyed residents rubbing shoulders uncomfortably with the remaining council tenants.

  The main entrance and stairway had once been accessible from the street, but an armed raid in the late eighties had led to this being boxed in with reinforced glass, and the large plate-glass door could only be accessed via a secure video entry system.

  Observing from another Internet cafe on the opposite side of the road, Simone had tried to work out how to get inside. The obvious way would be to wait for someone who lived there to go in or out. This rarely worked for other people: on two separate occasions, she’d seen deliverymen being blocked from entering by elderly residents on their way inside. The residents had used a plastic key fob to open the door, pressing it onto a square contact pad under the grid of doorbells, releasing the lock.

  This had worried Simone. She was good with locks, but it would be hard to get one of the plastic key fobs without questions being asked. Or without a mess to clear up.

  Then, at 2 p.m., she’d observed a gaggle of old ladies emerging through the large glass doors, each holding a rolled-up bath towel. They’d waddled off across the grass courtyard and through a door at the back of the U-shaped building. An hour later, they’d returned with wet hair, chatting and ambling across the sunlit grass, pressing their key fobs to open the main door.

  Simone had Googled ‘Bowery Lane Estate’ and had seen that there was a small council-run swimming pool on the ground floor. Four days a week it held an ‘over-sixties’ swim.

  With this in mind, Simone waited until the timings worked. She followed the man to one of his regular sauna sessions in Waterloo and then doubled back to the Bowery Lane Estate in time for the old ladies to emerge for their swim.

  Simone found that the simple things work
ed the best, so, dressed in her nurses uniform, with a short, dark wig liberated from the locker of a recently deceased cancer patient, she approached the glass front door as the ladies emerged.

  All it took was a smile, an apology for losing her key, and the ladies let her pass. Sometimes it helped to be plain and unremarkable.

  His flat was number thirty-seven, on the second floor. Each floor was a long concrete corridor, open to the air, with doors dotted along it. Simone moved confidently, passing the front window of each flat, realising that each of these windows looked on to the kitchen. In one, an old lady stood washing up; in another, she glimpsed a view of the living room through a hatch in the kitchen, where two small children sat on the carpet playing with toys.

  She reached the door of number thirty-seven – the third flat before the end – with a key ready in her hand. She’d gambled on the front door having a pin tumbler lock. This was the most common type of lock, using a thin key. Duke had told her all about lock bumping. It was possible to force a pin tumbler lock with a special-shaped key with a jagged edge. The only problem was that it could be noisy. Once in the lock, they key had to be pulled out very slightly, then tapped sharply with a hammer or a blunt object. This forced up the five small pins that made up the mechanism of the lock, tricking it into thinking it was the correct key.

  Duke had ordered her a bump key online, along with the suicide bags. Simone had practised with the key on her back door, but her heart was lurching as she approached the man’s door. She was pleased to see that it did have a pin tumbler lock, and she inserted the key. In her other hand was a small, smooth stone and she tapped the key sharply –

  once, twice – and turned the handle.

  Triumph flooded through her when the door opened. If there had been a deadbolt, this would have been near-impossible, but the door opened and she slipped silently inside. She checked for an alarm and was glad to see there was none. It seemed that the video entry-phone system had lulled this man into thinking he didn’t need extra security.

  She stood for a moment with her back to the door, slowing down her breathing.

  She quickly moved through the flat. The first door on the left led to the kitchen – it was tiny but modern. The hallway opened out straight ahead onto a large living room. Through a large glass window, she could see the high-rise tower of the Lloyd’s building dwarfing several other tower blocks. Inside the room there was a flat-screen television, and a large L-shaped sofa. Above the sofa, a giant photo of a naked man stared at her malevolently. An entire wall was lined with books, and the bottom shelf was devoted exclusively to alcohol: fifty bottles, perhaps more.

  It was far too many bottles. Would she need to resort to using a syringe?

  In the back corner was a metal spiral staircase that vanished into the ceiling. Simone climbed the staircase and saw that the layout upstairs was also small: challenging.

  Her heart began to beat with excitement and anticipation. She was more excited by this than she had been with the others. She checked the location of the electricity box and phone lines, and when she was satisfied, she came back to the front door. On the wall beside the door there hung a vast array of coats: long, short, thick and thin. A small plaque was screwed to the wall, and several keys hung from it. She lifted them off one by one, trying them in the front door until she came to one that opened it.

  Sometimes things are just meant to be, she thought, leaving the flat and locking the door behind her.

  52

  For the anniversary of Mark’s death, Moss had invited Erika over for a barbecue at her house, saying she would invite Peterson too. Erika was grateful for their concern but said she wanted to spend the day alone.

  What surprised her was that she heard nothing from Isaac. He’d been fairly quiet for the last week or so, and she realised she had last seen him at the post-mortem for Jack Hart. Maybe her objection to Stephen had cooled his friendship with her.

  Erika woke early, and one of the first things she did was to take down her kitchen clock and the clock in her bedroom. She kept her TV, laptop and mobile phone switched off. Four-thirty in the afternoon was burned on her brain. This was the time, two years ago, when she had given the order to raid the house of Jerome Goodman.

  It was another hot day, but she went for a run, pushing herself in the humidity as she pounded the streets, then circumnavigating Hilly Fields park amongst the dog walkers, the people playing tennis on the free courts and the children playing. It was the children playing who got to her. She stopped after two circuits and came home.

  Once she was home, she started drinking, working her way through the bottle of Glenmorangie she’d opened for Peterson.

  She sat on the sofa, the heat circulating through the house, the drone of a lawnmower in the background. Despite everything she had told herself about moving on, about moving forward, she felt herself being pulled back to that baking hot day on that run-down street in Rochdale…

  She could feel the protective police gear sticking to her skin through her blouse. The stiff, sharp edges of the Kevlar bulletproof vest as it rode up, meeting her chin as she crouched against the low wall of the terraced house.

  There were six officers on her team and they also crouched against the wall, three each side with the gatepost between them. Next to her was DI Tom Bradbury, known as Brad – an officer she’d worked with since she’d joined the Greater Manchester Police as a new recruit. He was chewing gum, breathing slowly. The sweat poured down his face and he shifted anxiously.

  Next to Brad was Jim Black, or Beamer. He had a serious face, which could be transformed by an enormous smile, hence the nickname. It always made Erika laugh that he could be so fierce and stern in his police work, yet crack a wide dazzling grin. She and Mark had become close friends with Beamer and his wife Michelle, who was a civilian support officer at their nick.

  On the other side of the front gate was Tim James, a rising star and new to her team. He was a brilliant officer. He was tall, slim and utterly gorgeous. He arrested rough-looking guys during the day, then went round the bars looking to hook up with them at night. Tim James had earned the nickname TJ when he’d joined her team, and when his fellow officers had heard he was into guys, he’d become BJ – but it was an affectionate nickname and he was sensible enough to realise that.

  Next to BJ was Sal, whose full name was Salman Dhumal: a fiercely intelligent British Indian man with jet-black hair and eyes. His family went back four generations in Bradford, but he still had to suffer the taunts of ‘go back where you came from’ doled out by scumbags on the beat. His wife, Meera, looked after their three children, as well as being one of the top Ann Summers reps in the north-west.

  And, finally, on the end was Mark. He was always just Mark. Not that he was boring, or uninteresting. He was everyone’s friend, so easy-going and fiercely loyal. Mark had time for everyone, and Erika knew he was the reason she had so many friends – he took the edge off her abrasive personality. He softened her hardness, and in turn she had taught him not to just let everything wash over him.

  So there they all were, at 4.25 p.m. on July 25th, sweating in a row outside the house of the drug dealer Jerome Goodman. He’d been on their radar for several years, and in the past eighteen months he had been involved in the bloody slaying of a major drug dealer in a pub in Moss Side. In the resulting power vacuum, Jerome had taken over the supply and manufacture of crystal meth and Ecstasy. And on this baking hot day on a run-down street in Rochdale, they were waiting to storm this large terraced house – one of his strongholds.

  A vast support network at the nick had backed up Erika and her team. The house had been under surveillance for weeks, and images of it were burned into her brain. Bare concrete out front, overflowing wheelie bins. A gas and electric meter on the wall, with its cover ripped off.

  An undercover officer had sought plans of the interior. They had planned their point of entry: straight through the front door, up the stairs. A door to the left of the landing led
through to a back bedroom, and that’s where they believed they were cooking the meth.

  In the past few days, covert surveillance had seen a woman going in and out with a little boy. It was a risk. They had to anticipate that Jerome could use the kid as a shield, a bargaining tool, or, at his worst, threaten to end the little boy’s life – but they were prepared. Erika had drilled the routine over and over to her team. They worked well together.

  Fear rolled over her as her watch reached 4.30 p.m. She looked up and gave the order. She watched as her colleagues moved past the gateposts and surged towards the front door. She brought up the rear, moving stealthily past the gateposts. Something bright caught her eye, dazzling her. She realised it was the sunlight glinting off the disc in the electricity meter as it spun. It glinted again, and again, almost matching the thunk of the battering ram. On the third attempt, the wood splintered and the front door burst inwards with a clatter.

  It was quickly apparent that Jerome had been tipped off. Within a few life-changing minutes, Brad, Beamer and Sal lay dead. Erika took a bullet to her vest, which knocked her back, and then a bullet passed through her neck, missing all the major arteries. Mark was close by as she clutched at her neck, the blood pouring between her fingers.

  He looked at her, horror in his eyes at the realisation of what was happening – and then he seemed to stop.

  It was then that Erika saw that the back of his head had been blown open.

  Erika and DI Tim James were airlifted from the scene, badly injured. She left her officers – her friends and her husband – dead.

  In reality, it had all been over within minutes, but since 4.30 p.m. on that fateful day, life had slowed down for Erika. From then on, she felt that she was walking through a nightmare from which she would never wake up.

  53