Sacrifice

by Paul Finch

  The former resembled the bottom of a well. Its geometry was circular, its walls constructed from damp, mildewed brick and rising into opaque shadow. There were no windows and no apparent handholds or footholds by which she could climb out. Its floor was hard-packed earth covered in straw. She also saw where the stench came from: one side of the cell – and it was close at hand, because the entire place was probably only ten feet in diameter – had been used as a toilet. Numerous human droppings were scattered there, indicating the length of time her fellow prisoners had been confined. One of these sat against the opposite wall, his knees drawn up to his chest; the other was kneeling about three yards away on her left.

  Kate quickly backed away, though both were scrawny and dirty, and pop-eyed in the unexpected light; they looked as fazed by her arrival as she was.

  The one on the left wore a grubby white vest and khaki pants, a military-training-type ensemble, which somehow contrived to make him look even more emaciated than his bony frame actually was, as did his tattoos – of which he had plenty, though all looked cheap and homemade. His face was rodent-thin, his hair a greasy, ginger mat. The one against the wall wore a light blue shell-suit, though this too was ragged and exceedingly dirty. His hair was an unwashed mop. Like his mate, he had gaunt, pock-marked features, and was hollow-eyed with fear and pain.

  Fearing that her lighter fuel would run out, Kate flicked it off, plunging them into blackness again. She stayed where she was, back firmly to the wall. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘I’m Carl,’ said a voice on her left; that was the guy in the khaki pants.

  ‘And I’m Lee,’ said another voice.

  They were flat-toned, whiney. Kate was reassured that she was not in imminent danger, though she still had to struggle to contain her emotions.

  ‘Okay … Carl, Lee. Why are we here? What is this place?’

  ‘We’re underground,’ Carl said.

  ‘I think I realise that!’ she replied, more sharply than she’d intended. ‘Just … what’s going on?’

  ‘Dunno.’ That was Lee. ‘Bastard just grabbed us and chucked us down here.’

  ‘We don’t know why,’ Carl added. ‘We don’t know who.’

  Their accents were thin, nasal. By the sounds of it, they came from Manchester, but one of the poorer districts.

  ‘Where are you from, Carl?’ Kate asked, sensing that he was the less beaten-down of the two.

  ‘Salford,’ he said, confirming her suspicion.

  ‘Me too,’ came Lee’s voice.

  ‘You were together when this happened?’

  ‘Never met each other before last week.’

  She shuddered. ‘You’ve been in here a whole week?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ Carl said. ‘Difficult keeping track. Can you put your lighter on again?’

  ‘I’d better not. We should save it. But you think it’s been a whole week? Seriously?’

  ‘Could be longer.’

  ‘What actually happened?’

  Carl hesitated before saying: ‘I was screwing cars on the Weaste.’

  ‘You mean stealing?’

  ‘Riding round in them.’ He sounded briefly defensive. ‘I always left them after. The owners got them back, or got the insurance. No one ever got hurt.’ He sniffed. ‘I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Just summat I could take for a spin, you know. Maybe whip the CD and sat-nav as well. I’d fixed on this Renault Scenic in a side-street, when this big bleeder stands up in front of me – right in front of me, like he’s been crouching down, waiting – and punches my fucking lights out. I woke up in here. Thought maybe it was his cellar, or something. Then, a couple of days later, he drops Lee down as well. It’s like he’s collecting people.’

  ‘Who is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Didn’t see him properly. Too dark.’

  ‘I didn’t see him either,’ Lee said. ‘I’d been doing houses up Clifton … I know that sounds bad. But I’ve got a habit, haven’t I? I’ve got to get money somehow. It’s not like I want to do it …’

  ‘Oh, can it for fuck’s sake!’ Carl blurted. ‘Just admit you’re a thieving little scrote. Maybe if this bastard’s listening, that’s what he’s waiting for. Maybe he’ll let us out when we finally ’fess up to all the fucking shit we cause.’

  ‘Did you get a look at him, Lee?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Nah. It was half-one in the morning. Pitch black. I’d just gone over this back wall. Next thing I know, this big fucker’s waiting on the other side. At first I thought it was a copper. I was going to go quietly – bed for the night, you know, square meal. Even if it did mean I’d be strung out in the morning …’

  ‘Did he say anything?’ she interrupted.

  ‘Nothing. Cracked my head on the bricks. Don’t remember anything after that.’

  ‘He wouldn’t keep feeding us if he wanted to kill us, would he?’ Carl said, sounding faintly hopeful.

  ‘He feeds us, does he?’ Kate didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that revelation, or even more worried.

  ‘Every so often he drops a few slices of bread down,’ Carl said. She heard the scrunch of wrapping paper, and pictured him licking at it, trying to mop up every minuscule crumb. ‘Couple of chocolate biscuits as well, only a couple of them mind.’

  ‘What do you reckon, missus?’ Lee said.

  ‘If he’s feeding us, it means that he wants us alive,’ Kate agreed. She didn’t bother to add: for the time being. You didn’t kidnap someone and keep them in an underground cell with no light and no running water because you had something pleasant in mind.

  Chapter 11

  According to the piles of documentation they’d each been provided with, all bound in special folders and stencilled: ‘Operation Festival’, the withered corpse walled into the base of the old factory chimney had been a homeless man called Ernest Shapiro.

  ‘He was sixty-eight years old and so far down the pecking order that he was never even reported missing,’ Gemma told the thirty-five SCU personnel gathered in the DO.

  They gazed at the big screen in fascinated silence.

  ‘In case you were wondering, this was done to him while he was still alive,’ she added, ‘as evidenced by the loss of tissue from his wrists where he’d attempted to wriggle free of his manacles. The cause of death was slow dehydration – in other words, thirst – which meant he’d been imprisoned in his brick coffin at least a week before the lads in Yorkshire found him.’

  There was a similar astonished silence when she brought up images of the second crime; a double homicide in this case, a young male and female facing each other in the front seat of a parked motor vehicle, the female seated on the male’s lap. His head had slumped to the right, hers to the left. They were covered front and back with thickly clotted blood.

  ‘Todd Burling and Cheryl Mayers,’ Gemma said, ‘twenty and nineteen respectively – killed a month and a half after Shapiro, on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Believe it or not, they were transfixed together through their hearts by an arrow while having sex in Burling’s parked car.’

  ‘The Father Christmas victim was found on December 25?’ Shawna McCluskey asked. ‘And this happened on Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Someone has a sense of humour,’ Charlie Finnegan snorted.

  ‘It gets funnier.’ Gemma hit her remote control and brought various images of a third murder scene to their attention. These were the most graphic so far. They portrayed an elongated, only vaguely human form, blackened almost to a crisp and lying on leaf-strewn grass. ‘This was Barry Butterfield,’ she explained. ‘Male, aged forty-three, and a registered alcoholic. His body was found last autumn, late on the evening of November 5, on the outskirts of Preston, Lancashire.’

  ‘Not burning on a bonfire by any chance?’ Detective Inspector Ben Kane wondered.

  He was one of Gemma’s more bookish officers, a stout, bespectacled man of about forty, with neat, prematurely greying hair and a
neat line in corduroy jackets, checked shirts and dickie-bows.

  ‘However did you guess?’ she said, hitting the remote control several times more, presenting a number of grisly close-ups.

  Some fragments of clothing still adhered to the burnt carcass, but charred musculature and even bones were exposed. The face had melted beyond recognition – it resembled a wax mannequin after blowtorch treatment, yet somehow its look of horrific agony was still discernible.

  ‘It wasn’t initially treated as suspicious,’ Gemma added. ‘Apparently Butterfield went off on solo pub-crawls every night. The first assumption was that he’d got thoroughly intoxicated and found his way to some unofficial bonfire on wasteland outside the town, probably looking for more booze. Whether there were other people there at the time, or it was after everyone else had gone, there was no obvious indication … but it seemed possible that in his inebriated state he passed out and fell into the flames.’

  ‘So the cause of death was burning?’ Shawna asked.

  ‘That’s the problem. The coroner ordered a post-mortem, which then revealed that Butterfield had died before he was put into the fire … as a result of neurogenic shock caused by massive internal tissue damage. Almost every joint in his body was either torn or dislocated.’

  ‘It was like he’d been stretched out on a rack.’ This came from Detective Chief Inspector Mike Garrickson, who had recently been seconded to the unit to act as Gemma’s DSIO and up until now had been sitting quietly to one side.

  ‘And if you remember your school history,’ Gemma said, ‘Guy Fawkes was stretched on a rack before he was executed. And we celebrate the anniversary of this event on November 5 by burning his effigy on bonfires.’

  ‘We’re dealing with some kind of calendar killer?’ Gary Quinnell said. He almost sounded amused by the notion, but the expression on his face told a different story – even to hardened homicide detectives like the Serial Crimes Unit, the graphic images of Barry Butterfield were stomach-turning.

  ‘It would seem that way,’ Gemma replied. ‘And he’s now struck three times.’

  ‘I take it there are no other connected homicides or assaults that we’re aware of?’ DI Kane asked.

  ‘Not according to the National Crime Faculty,’ Garrickson said.

  Standing in one of the corners, Heck pondered the documentation they’d been given, glancing again at the file from Lancashire and noting the Lancashire FME’s thesis that Barry Butterfield had been ‘racked’ by being stretched between a moving vehicle and some stationary object, like a tree or gatepost. That small detail ran his blood cold.

  ‘Worrying, isn’t it?’ Garrickson said. ‘That there’s a worse maniac out there than the M1 murderers.’

  Heck eyed him carefully, wondering if there’d been a hidden barb there.

  With Gemma’s two most experienced DIs unavailable – Des Palliser retired and Bob Hunter grounded – Garrickson had been brought in as her deputy for the duration of this enquiry. Whether Gemma was pleased about it, or irritated, nobody had dared ask, though they all knew that she’d been summoned upstairs the previous day, ostensibly for a meeting with NCG Director Joe Wullerton, only to find herself confronted by the entire Association of Chief Police Officers Crime Committee. As well as being allocated this case in its entirety – SCU were to provide the bulk of the investigation team – she was also given Garrickson … but as her number two or as her watchdog?

  Heck had seen Garrickson around the Yard, but had never spoken to him and, in truth, hadn’t known much about him except that he was one of those smooth operators from the Organised Crime Division; well-dressed, swaggering, supremely confident that the importance of his position meant he could spend any amount of time drinking with villains in shady London pubs and never be questioned about it. His brutish physique perfectly complemented this ‘diamond geezer’ attitude. He was of squat, powerful build, had broad cheekbones, a square jaw and mean eyes; his hair was a stiff red thatch. Even wearing his best Savile Row suit with a purple silk handkerchief poking from the breast pocket, he looked like a cheap gangster.

  ‘But what kind of motivation are we looking at here?’ Ben Kane asked. A naturally studious type, he was always the first in SCU to hit the analysis button.

  ‘He wants to create a sensation,’ someone suggested. ‘That’s all it can be … a macabre sensation.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s putting on a show,’ another voice agreed. ‘A big, sick show.’

  ‘There’s got to be more to it than that,’ Shawna said. ‘Are there hidden meanings behind these special days?’

  Gemma glanced towards Detective Sergeant Eric Fisher, who, as their main intelligence man, tended to be a mine of information on numerous subjects.

  Fisher shrugged his big shoulders. ‘Christmas and Valentine’s Day are complicated … at least their origins are. They’re not nearly as straightforward as the average bloke on the street may imagine.’

  ‘They were pagan festivals once, weren’t they?’ Gemma said.

  ‘In the dim and distant past, yeah. What’re you suggesting, ma’am? Human sacrifices?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘We obviously need to investigate the backgrounds of these events. See if there are any links.’

  ‘There are no obvious rituals here,’ Gary Quinnell pointed out. He was the only one among them who regularly attended Church services, so his opinion on this was likely to be valid. ‘These deaths look more like nasty jokes to me, ma’am. But if there is a kind of quasi-religious thing going on … could it be, I dunno, a satanic cult?’

  Garrickson snorted. ‘I can just hear the reaction of the trendy left if we start hassling Satanists. Even that lot have rights these days, you know.’

  ‘I reckon it’s just shock and awe,’ Charlie Finnegan said. He was a lean, efficient-looking character, always well suited, but with black, slicked-back hair and crafty, vaguely untrustworthy good looks. One positive aspect of his scornful personality was that he called things the way he saw them. ‘We got it right the first time. He’s just trying to blow our minds with the weirdness of it.’

  ‘Presumably lines of enquiry have already been generated, ma’am?’ Kane asked.

  ‘Several persons of interest were fingered before we realised these cases were linked,’ Gemma replied. ‘For various reasons all were eventually disregarded by the original investigation teams. However, DCI Garrickson and I will personally be re-evaluating each one of them. We’ll also be going through all existing witness statements with a fine-tooth comb. We have a few other possibilities – not exactly MLOEs, but half-formed leads, which we’ll need to assess carefully before they go into the policy file.’

  ‘Physical evidence?’ Finnegan asked.

  ‘Not so far,’ Gemma replied.

  ‘CCTV?’ Kane suggested.

  ‘There, we may have lucked in,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty apparent that at least two of the victims – the young couple murdered on the West Pennine Moors – were stalked beforehand. Maybe all of them were. I don’t believe Ernest Shapiro and Barry Butterfield were simply jumped on because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. While they may have been targets of convenience – a homeless tramp, a wino looking for a drink – I think they were selected first and then lured. The original investigation teams thought the same and were in the process of attempting to plot all the APs’ final movements with footage from various cameras – nightclubs, pubs, street-corners, bus shelters. Nothing obvious has come to light so far, but there’s still quite a bit to go through.’

  ‘And there’s absolutely no link between any of the APs?’ Gary Quinnell asked.

  ‘None that we’ve been able to establish to date,’ Garrickson said, climbing down from the table where he’d been perched. ‘And before we waste any more time visiting ground that’s already covered in the briefing notes, local informants have provided us with no leads as yet and no suspects have been identified purely on the basis of modus operandi, though that’s an a
rea we can keep looking at as we widen the net. Likewise, there’s nothing to suggest these offences have been disguised as something they aren’t. In no case is there indication of robbery or indecent assault …’

  ‘No, they’re thrill-kills,’ Heck said.

  Garrickson, perhaps not used to being interrupted, gave him a long, measured glance.

  ‘This is not routine criminality,’ Heck added. ‘Far from it. For some reason unknown, the perp is gaining immense satisfaction from staging these … elaborate celebrations.’

  ‘Celebrations?’ Shawna said.

  ‘That’s what he’s doing … he’s celebrating feast days. But he’s going to an awful lot of trouble to do it. In my opinion, the event is the main thing. The victims are almost incidental. From what we’re seeing so far, status is unimportant, age is unimportant, gender is unimportant. It’s like they’re just … well, stage-props.’

  Garrickson looked sceptical. ‘The centre-piece of each of these “events” … as you call them, sergeant, is a cold, premeditated murder. I think we can assume these victims mean a bit more to him than stage-props.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, sir,’ Heck replied. ‘It’s important to him that they bleed and scream. But there’s more going on here than cruelty for its own sake.’

  ‘Okay …’ Gemma put in. ‘We can theorise as much as we want in due course. In the meantime, let’s discuss practicalities. We have three separate murder scenes, so I propose to set up three Incident Rooms with the MIR at Bolton Police Station, as that’s our most central location. The other two will be at Preston and Leeds City Centre, though obviously we’ll stay in touch through video-conference and MIRWeb. Gold Command will operate from here at the Yard …’

  There were cheers. No one wanted some pompous OIOC with ivory tower notions about ‘budgetary constraints’ or ‘community trust’ getting in the way.