Eye Contact

by Fergus McNeill

  Fifty-seven . . . fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . . sixty! Sixty-one . . .

  He opened his eyes briefly and focused on the watch. He was counting in perfect time. Satisfied, he shut them again and began the long journey to the next sixty.

  Steady rhythm, fingers on the ground, just keep it going . . .

  In the past he’d vaguely wondered what would happen if he found a target he couldn’t pursue. Not one that eluded him – that had happened before and would probably happen again – but one that just shouldn’t be part of the game. For some reason he’d never considered the possibility that it might be a child. Now, as he stared into the abyss, he suddenly began to remember why.

  Don’t think about that now!

  A sudden breeze passed through the bushes along the embankment, rustling the leaves, but he didn’t look up.

  Concentrate. Finish the forfeit.

  He continued to tap out the seconds, rocking slightly as he counted.

  Fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . . Two minutes.

  His eyes flickered open, checking his watch once more. His counting was slightly behind – already the second hand was pointing downwards and he stared at it as it inched round towards the bottom of the dial.

  Nearly halfway . . .

  He willed it past the six, closing his eyes as he picked up the count for this, the third minute.

  Thirty-one . . . thirty-two . . . thirty-three . . .

  Softly, very softly, the rails began to sing.

  At first it was vague – a distant ringing sound that he felt as much as heard. His count faltered and he strained to listen, but now there could be no doubt. Something was coming.

  Shit.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes, staring down at his watch, refusing the terrible urge to look up.

  Fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . . Three minutes!

  He would not move. His heart rate had spiked and he suddenly felt cold, but he would not move. If fate wanted to play, he would play.

  Come on!

  The two-tone blare of a train horn echoed along the cutting and reverberated under the bridge. All around him now the noise from the rails was growing, the vibration flowing up through his feet and into the pit of his stomach.

  Come the fuck on!

  He could hear the train itself now, feel its approach. The horn blared out again, closer this time, much closer. But he wouldn’t look up. He wouldn’t move.

  The second hand seemed almost stationary. It crawled agonisingly towards the four-minute mark but somehow Naysmith knew he didn’t have enough time.

  Fifty-eight . . . fifty-nine . . . Last minute.

  He was counting down now. The oncoming rumble was getting louder and louder, and the horn blared out a third time, deafeningly close. His hand was clammy, shaking so hard that he could hardly read the watch. There was a sudden piercing screech as the train applied its brakes, but it was too late.

  Naysmith stopped counting and bowed his head.

  A gale swept up and over him, the noise surging to a terrifying crescendo as the train roared through the bridge arch, passing only a few feet away from him on the adjacent track.

  Buffeted by the wind, Naysmith braced himself to avoid being sucked under, eyes screwed shut against the dust and debris that swirled in its wake. The sound, deafening for a moment, suddenly relented as the last coach clattered by.

  He hadn’t moved.

  He opened his eyes, struggling to make out the watch face, smiling as he saw the second hand slide up and past the twelve.

  Five minutes.

  The forfeit was done. Shaking, he got to his feet and looked round, seeing the train for the first time as it slowed a little way further along the track.

  He was alive. Perhaps more alive than he’d ever felt before. It was like that first time – the power of absolute control, surging through him. He let out a howl of triumph as he stepped across the rail and down to the side of the cutting, his body strangely light and agile. The hex was broken, fate defeated. Eagerly, he began to pick his way up the slope, climbing back to the top of the high embankment, leaving the last of his fear on the track below.

  14

  Monday, 18 June

  Light flickered in between the trees as the train cut across country. Harland spread his hands on the small table, feeling the warmth of the sun on his skin. He gazed out at the fields and villages slipping by, and frowned.

  Linking the Severn Beach murder with this killing in Oxford had shifted everyone’s view of the case – even Pope had gone quiet with his idiotic theories. Urged on by Blake, there had been an enthusiastic burst of activity, with a wave of checks done to try and turn up anything that would link the two deaths.

  ‘We’re going to find something,’ the Superintendent had insisted. ‘We’re going to put it together and get a conviction.’

  It could be quite the feather in Blake’s cap, especially as Thames Valley seemed to be no further along than they were, and Harland suddenly found himself being pushed into a lead role. He wondered how long it would last.

  Diagonally opposite him, a smartly dressed woman in her thirties was tapping out a message on her phone. Fine light-brown hair framed a delicate face, and her lips parted slightly as she concentrated. He smiled to himself and turned his head towards the window, ignoring the blur of passing greenery to study her reflection in the glass. Her left hand toyed with a simple gold pendant that glinted as she turned it, and below it her smooth skin glowed in the sunlight. He wondered where she was going, how long she’d be sitting opposite him, what he might say. It couldn’t hurt just to speak to her.

  In her hand, the phone began to ring, a thin little tune that was abruptly silenced as she quickly answered the call.

  ‘Hello?’

  In the glass, Harland saw her face melt into a smile, watched her head tilt to one side and her fingers touch her chest.

  ‘Yeah, I was just thinking about you . . .’ The bashful expression, the inviting tone of voice. She was already taken, and he suddenly hated himself for looking.

  He slumped back in his seat and sighed to himself, allowing his eyes to focus on the distant horizon. It was less than an hour to Oxford but the journey seemed to be taking a long time.

  Detective Inspector King was an athletic-looking man in his forties. Tall, with dark cropped hair and a quick smile, he’d been waiting to meet Harland off the train. They’d shaken hands warily, but King’s easy manner seemed to cut through all the awkward formalities.

  ‘It seems we have a common problem,’ he noted as they walked out of the station. ‘Months of dead ends and all the fun associated with turning up nothing. And now the whole thing’s kicking off again.’

  ‘There’s certainly a lot of interest in it.’

  ‘Such is life,’ King observed. ‘I just hope I can spare you some of the grief that we’ve been getting.’

  He spoke – and dressed – like someone who didn’t have any political aspirations. Harland found him immediately likeable.

  They made their way past several long lines of parked bicycles and down towards the road. King paused at the kerb and looked at Harland.

  ‘Did you want to see where it happened first? It’s close enough to walk . . .’

  The bridge was quite short, rising only slightly as it carried the main road across a meandering stretch of river. An old brown-brick pub sat at one corner, and foliage from trees on the riverbank shone in the sunlight.

  ‘The body was found down there,’ King explained, leaning over the metal railings and indicating the dark green water that swirled silently below. ‘You’ve seen the photos I assume?’

  ‘Yes.’ Harland stared down at the rippling reflections. He remembered the glistening grey skin, the sodden clothing, the misshapen head . . . ‘But I always like to get a feel for the place, see the geography for real.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ King straightened up and pointed along the pavement. ‘Anyway, it’s fairly clear what happened. Ronald Erskine was
walking home from a bar in the city centre, a little before midnight. As he came down here towards the bridge, someone smashed in the side of his skull with a metal bar – we found the weapon when we dragged the riverbed. Not much sign of a struggle – first blow probably put him down – but there were several strikes to the head before he was moved down there to the bank.’

  They made their way across to the north side of the bridge, where there was an opening in the railings. A paved footpath led down to the grassy riverbank and on along the water’s edge.

  ‘Where does this lead?’ Harland asked, peering along the path that curved away into the distance, overhung with trees.

  ‘It’s the old canal towpath. There’s nothing much down there, except a few barges and some playing fields.’

  ‘Anyone live on those barges?’

  ‘There’s a few people, yes.’

  ‘And nobody saw anything, or heard anything?’

  ‘Nobody ever does.’

  They stood for a moment in the shadow of the bridge, gazing out at the water where the body had been dumped. Some ducks swam slowly towards them before passing on along the bank.

  ‘It’s a good spot for it,’ Harland said thoughtfully.

  ‘I suppose. Not many people come down here at night.’

  ‘And there’s water to dump the body into.’

  Harland made his way to the water’s edge and looked up as the muted sound of a motorbike engine echoed from above.

  ‘It’s also well hidden from any traffic passing over the bridge, which is important if you need to spend any time doing things to your victim . . .’

  ‘Doing things?’ King walked over to stand beside him. ‘There was no sign of anything sexual.’

  ‘No, I meant searching his pockets, taking one of his keys,’ Harland suggested. ‘That all takes time and you wouldn’t want to do it up there where you could be seen.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ King agreed. He stared down at the water and sighed. ‘Strange about that key though.’

  ‘Strange?’ Harland glanced across at him.

  ‘The victim lived alone,’ King explained. ‘He’d been out for the evening, and was on his way home. But although he had five or six keys on a key ring, he didn’t have the one for the deadlock on his front door.’

  ‘Which the killer took.’

  ‘Yes. But there were two locks on that door, and the key to the second one was still on the victim when we found him.’ King paused. ‘It doesn’t make sense. One key’s not much use without the other. So why did he take it?’

  Harland looked at him for a long moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can only think that there has to be some connection between the two victims, something we haven’t spotted yet.’

  They made their way back up onto the bridge. Harland paused as he reached the top of the slope, turning to look over his shoulder at the towpath. Then, waiting to let a car pass, he stalked across the road and peered over the low wall at the broad, open-air car park on the other side.

  ‘There’s a lot of ways to get out of here,’ he noted. ‘It really is a very good spot.’

  ‘You’re thinking this was planned?’ King asked.

  Harland stared into the distance.

  ‘No witnesses, no evidence, no mistakes . . .’ he said slowly. ‘I think this was planned extremely carefully.’

  15

  Tuesday, 19 June

  The meeting-room table was strewn with photographs and papers burning bright in the rays of morning sun that streamed in from the windows. On one side, Mendel sat quietly thinking, his face in shadow, one large hand absently stroking his chin. Sitting opposite him, Pope was hunched forward, scribbling something down in a notebook. Harland rubbed his eyes and turned back to the whiteboard.

  ‘So we’ve got two victims,’ he mused, tapping the board with his pen, ‘one in Oxford and one in Severn Beach. Nothing to link them except a key that we now know was lifted during the Oxford murder and planted during the Severn Beach one.’

  He paused again, staring at the two names in front of him. Ronald Erskine. Vicky Sutherland. Two people with nothing in common.

  ‘What about a link between the two places?’ Mendel asked. ‘At first we thought the killer might be from somewhere round here – Bristol area or maybe from the other side of the Severn. But now we know there’s a link with Oxford, it suggests we look further afield. Our guy might be from Oxford itself, or perhaps somewhere between the two places, like Swindon.’

  Pope nodded. ‘It’s right on the M4, less than an hour from here and roughly the same distance from Oxford. There’s also Gloucester. Or Cheltenham. They’re all conveniently between the two sites.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harland said slowly. ‘Let’s check for any similar cases along the M4 corridor and see if anything turns up.’

  He picked up his mug and took a bitter sip of cold coffee.

  ‘I’m not sure we’re going to find our killer sitting in the middle of the map, though.’

  ‘How’s that?’ Pope asked.

  ‘Well, he’s not made many mistakes yet, has he?’ Harland said, taking a photo of the Oxford crime scene from the table and sliding it across to Pope. ‘Look at the location he chose there – and I do believe it was chosen, not random. The more we learn about him, the more things seem carefully planned out.’

  ‘So he’s probably too smart to live in a dump like Swindon then,’ Mendel grinned ruefully.

  Harland smiled. ‘I’m not trying to burst your bubble. I just don’t believe our man would do something as obvious as that. He dumped both bodies in water and managed to avoid being spotted or leaving anything of himself at the scenes . . . I think he’s probably quite clever.’

  ‘Clever people make mistakes too,’ Mendel said.

  ‘We live in hope.’ Harland paused for a moment, then looked up. ‘I do think there might be something in the location of the murders, though. Let’s say for a moment that the two killings weren’t opportunistic – they were premeditated. If that’s true, then the killer probably knows both areas fairly well, or has spent a bit of time in each place, planning how he was going to do things.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they be opportunistic killings?’ Pope asked.

  ‘On its own, the Oxford one might have been,’ Mendel said, ‘but you wouldn’t choose a freezing cold morning on Severn Beach unless you knew someone was going to be there.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Harland walked over to the window and looked out at the bright blue sky over Portishead, wisps of silver cloud blowing in across the town. ‘DI King thought that Erskine’s killer was probably someone local to Oxford because they seemed to know the place. We thought the same about the murder here. Now we’ve connected both deaths, perhaps we need to change our thinking about how the killer knows the two sites.’

  ‘He might live near one, and work near the other,’ Mendel suggested.

  ‘Severn Beach is a small place,’ Pope said. ‘It’ll be easier to find someone there than somewhere like Oxford.’

  Harland considered this. They had to be seen to be doing something.

  ‘It’s somewhere to start,’ he said, walking slowly back to the whiteboard. ‘We certainly need to find something besides that house key to link the victims.’

  ‘Did Thames Valley have any theories about the key?’ Mendel asked.

  ‘No.’ Harland shook his head. ‘It was such an innocuous thing. With the other door key still on the body, King said they didn’t really attach too much importance to it, at least until we contacted them.’

  ‘Not exactly their finest hour,’ Pope muttered under his breath.

  Harland was suddenly angry, turning to say something, to put Pope in his fucking place, but a thought stopped him dead.

  ‘What is it?’ Mendel asked.

  ‘Something innocuous, something you wouldn’t spot unless you were looking for it.’ Harland frowned, leafing through his papers until he found what he was searchin
g for. He quickly scanned the list of personal effects, then turned to the others. ‘What if there was something on Erskine’s body that didn’t belong to him? Maybe not a key, but something small, ordinary . . .’

  ‘Something planted there by the killer,’ Mendel nodded.

  ‘That would mean there’s a third body out there somewhere,’ Pope said. ‘We need to call Thames Valley, get them to check through Erskine’s personal effects.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Harland picked up his papers, paused and looked at Mendel. ‘What about Vicky Sutherland?’

  Mendel sat back in his chair.

  ‘That could be tricky,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Pope asked.

  ‘Finding something that isn’t there,’ Mendel replied. ‘If we find something from a previous murder planted on Erskine, it follows that something may have been taken from Vicky.’

  ‘For the next victim,’ Harland explained. Adrenalin coursed through him, no longer driven by anger, but excitement. They were just scratching the surface, and what they were uncovering might be bigger than anyone thought.

  Blake beckoned Harland into his office, his expression a blend of determined optimism and unease.

  ‘Take a seat, Graham.’ He walked round the desk and slid into his own chair. There was an unpleasant eagerness about him at the moment. Ever the politician, he was always keen for news, for progress, for a chance to take credit, but just as ready to push the whole mess back onto Thames Valley if it looked like it was turning sour.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Harland said, keeping his voice and his body language neutral, difficult to read. He wasn’t going to make anything easy for the white-haired Superintendent.

  ‘I understand that DI King’s been assisting you with details of the Oxford murder.’ It wasn’t a question. Blake was keeping a close eye on this one. ‘I trust that’s proved useful . . .’

  He left it hanging, using the silence to underline the severity of the situation. It was a tiresome game, but Harland didn’t want to drag things out.

  ‘Any information is useful,’ he said. ‘This victim was male, so we know it’s not someone who simply hates women. There are certain similarities in the two attacks – both inflicting fatal injuries to the head, both disposing of the body in water. And we’re now convinced the killings are planned in advance.’