The Tangled Lock (The National Crime Agency Series Book 3)

by Bill Rogers

  The heavy police presence surprised him. On a single pass through the area he had counted three marked area cars, a video surveillance transit van, a dog patrol car, and at least a dozen uniformed and plain-clothes officers on foot. To have committed this number of officers eight miles away from the scene of his last two kills meant one of two things. Either they were taking no chances or they had guessed where he was going to strike next.

  Guessed or worked out? If the latter, then he would have to move on. That would be a pity. But as far as tonight was concerned their strategy had played into his hands. The usual punters had been warned off, and so the girls were beginning to leave, hoping to find a client or two outside this tight police cordon. Away from their normal habitat they were more likely to work alone. To become easy prey.

  He glimpsed her first as she crossed the Metrolink tramlines by the fire station, and began to stride past the Church of St John the Baptist. They made an incongruous pairing. The short busty redhead in knee-length boots, denim pelmet skirt, and short denim jacket over a thin cotton blouse beside the cathedral-like red-brick church, whose enormous dome seemed more in keeping with one of the burgeoning mosques around here. He waited to see which way she would go when she emerged from behind the tram stop, and reached the junction with Station Road. He smiled as she turned right, and, pulling his gloves tight, flexed his fingers, released them, and set off.

  He felt exposed here, lit sporadically by the headlights of passing vehicles. He crossed over to the far side of the road to lessen the likelihood of her spotting him or of an onlooker believing that he was following the lone female forty yards ahead. After less than two hundred yards, she also crossed over, suddenly turned left into a side road, and disappeared from sight.

  He paused to read the street name. Milkstone Road. It was a name he vaguely recognised but could not yet place. To his relief he caught sight of smudged glimpses of blue and red as she passed through shallow pools of light from street lamps. The last eye-catching flight of a firefly.

  He smiled again, and nodded as he followed her across the stone bridge over the Rochdale Canal. It had not been a false memory. He had been here before. On she marched, picking up speed, her heels slapping the pavement. Now they were heading down Well I’ Th’ Lane. The streets were deserted and so, as he reached the Horse & Jockey public house, he hung back, allowing the distance between them to grow.

  She was moving with purpose now, a familiar destination in mind. This was the kind of area where he envisaged her living. In the melting pot of the urban corridor that stretched across the western edge of Greater Manchester. He watched her bob of auburn hair sway in rhythm with her hips. Imagined his fingers stroking those locks. Twisting them into a curl. The blades slicing through them. Given the time and effort he had invested already tonight, he hoped she was not going to suddenly vanish down an alley, and enter a house unseen.

  He realised too late that she was approaching the busy Queensway roundabout, where there would be multiple choices that she could make, and he speeded up as she disappeared around the corner.

  There was no sign of her at the roundabout. He cursed. Worse still, she could have gone in any one of five directions. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes and waited for the hunter’s instinct to kick in. In the time elapsed since he lost sight of her, he calculated that the most likely route was straight ahead. He jogged across the dual carriageway against the stoplights, and darted down a street replete with cheap booze emporiums, charity shops, and suntan salons. And there she was, close to a hundred yards ahead, moving with such purpose that he wondered if she had realised she was being followed. Determined not to lose her again, he speeded up, careful to stay in the shadows, confident in the knowledge that if he had to swiftly close the distance between them, he could.

  Genna glanced right and left and withdrew her phone. It was 2.27am. She quickly shoved it back in her bag. It didn’t do to advertise your mobile around here, or any device for that matter. The rats’d come out of a doorway, snatch it off you, and have it away on their toes before you realised what was happening. The little buggers on their mountain bikes were the worst. When they weren’t keeping watch or delivering drugs for the dealers, they’d be perfecting the art of street robbery. She stopped outside the drop-in centre. There was a decision to be made.

  The sudden invasion of coppers had ruined her night. Put her right off her stride. Janice had been goin’ on and on, peckin’ her head about trying down Coldhurst, but word was it was even worse down there. So she had decided to call it a night, come back home, and get a decent night’s kip for the first time in weeks. But now that it came to it, she knew she’d be well down on what she needed to cover the rent this month. And even though she didn’t like to pee on her own doorstep, there was always a chance of picking up a couple of punters among the truck drivers kipping on the business park on the other side of the motorway. Better a turn in a nice warm cab than in the back of a cramped family saloon full of litter and dog’s hair or, worse still, up against a railway arch. Some of those truckers even had full-size beds behind the cabin. She smiled at the prospect. Why not? After all, she told herself, if I have to come back I’m only five minutes from home. I have nothing to lose.

  He watched her cross The Strand and begin to walk away from the precinct, with its freshly painted steel-shuttered shops. Next door to The Chippy he noticed one with a bold blue sign over the top. Police Post. Definitely not manned 24/7. Not around here. And the bookmaker’s on the next length were sure to give good odds against the bobby living over the shop, like they did in the old days.

  He waited until she had reached the far side of the narrow footbridge over the motorway before he climbed the steps himself. She was now on a wide sandy track that ran between brooding moorland, and two large steel warehouses that stood like silver sentinels in the moonlight. Her intent was clear. She was going to turn right into the heart of the business park, where there would be CCTV, night workers, even security. He hurried forward, calling out to attract her attention.

  Startled by the sound, Genna turned, her heart pounding in her chest. Her hand went instinctively to her bag. Phone in one hand as though ringing the police, the other curled around the pepper spray. There was no point in running. And she would only scream for help once she knew what she was dealing with.

  He was less than ten yards away, and closing. She put the phone to her mouth, the bright blue screen flagging her intent. He raised his left hand. He was holding up something for her to see.

  ‘Evening, love,’ he said. ‘Sorry I startled you.’

  Genna lowered the phone.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s you. What were you thinking? You nearly scared me to death.’

  Chapter 37

  TUESDAY, 16TH MAY

  Jo switched on the bedside light, and picked up the phone. It was 4.30am. Before she even picked up, she had that sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘Sorry, Jo,’ said Gordon. ‘What I said about it getting worse? It just has.’

  She threw back the duvet, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. ‘Where?’

  ‘Trows Lane, Castleton. Couple of miles south-west of Rochdale town centre. I’ll text you the postcode.’

  ‘I’ll call Max and Andy,’ she told him.

  ‘The more the merrier,’ Gordon said.

  Max wasn’t answering. Jo sent him a text and left him a voice message.

  Andy’s wife answered after just two rings. ‘He’s still asleep,’ she whispered. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Rachel,’ Jo replied, ‘but I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you if it wasn’t.’

  ‘It’s not as though he’s a police officer,’ Rachel complained. ‘He doesn’t even get overtime. Have you any idea how many unpaid hours he’s done this week? He’s hardly seen the children.’

  ‘Who’s that, darling?’ mumbled a sleepy voice in the background.

  ‘Go back to sleep, love,’ said Rac
hel. ‘I’m dealing with it.’

  ‘Mrs Swift, please tell your husband,’ said Jo, ‘that a young woman’s body has been found. Just like the others. Mr Swift told me that he needed to visit these crime scenes at the same time as the rest of us. Why don’t you let him decide? If he still wants to come, ask him to text me, and I’ll send him the postcode. If not, that’s fine by me. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

  She ended the call. The golden hour was ticking down. This was no time to be faffing around.

  It was a concrete-surfaced lane off the A664, just wide enough for two cars to pass one another. Deciduous trees crowded in on either side. A perfect place, she noted, from which to deal drugs from the back of a car. A quarter of a mile on, through a second police cordon, she was forced to stop by a small industrial unit, and park up behind a line of marked and unmarked vehicles.

  ‘It’s just around the corner, Ma’am,’ the loggist told her. He pointed to a large plastic box beside him. ‘Help yourself to coveralls and a pair of overshoes. But don’t forget to bag them before you leave. And please keep to the marked area. That’s the common approach path.’

  Jo was tempted to ask him how many crime scenes he’d attended. She rooted around for a set that would fit, and put it on.

  The young policeman grimaced. ‘I’d brace yourself, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘It isn’t pretty.’

  When is it ever when someone’s life has been ripped from them? Jo reflected as she slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves. She set off beside the six-foot-high red-brick boundary wall of the foundry.

  After thirty yards she rounded a corner and stopped. The glass- and razor-wire-topped wall turned sharp right for five yards and then left for a further twelve, where it ended up against the side of a two-storey factory building. In the corner of this space, brightly lit by two LED Remote Area Lamps, six people stood with their backs to her. Gordon Holmes and Nick Carter, Dr Tompkins, Jack Benson, the crime scene manager, and a photographer. Three crime scene investigators were on their knees conducting an inch-by-inch search of the broken concrete floor.

  She went forward, and touched Gordon lightly on his shoulder. He turned and nodded.

  ‘Glad you could join us,’ he joked. It was a half-hearted attempt to defuse the tension. Nick moved to Gordon’s right to create a space for Jo. The scene that now confronted her was eerily familiar.

  ‘Another skip, another town, another body,’ Gordon muttered.

  It sounded callous, but he had a point. This skip was the twin of the one in Cheetham Hill in which Flora Novak’s body had been found. Except that it was red.

  ‘Her name is Genna Crowden,’ said Nick. ‘Her bag was in the skip beside her. So was her mobile phone. We think she lives . . . lived on the council estate on the other side of the motorway. There was a betting slip from the local bookie’s on The Strand, and she had an appointment at the medical centre on Friday that she won’t be keeping.’

  In the harsh white light the young woman’s body had the appearance of a retail dummy or a waxwork. An impression heightened by the CSI photographer snapping away on the far side of the skip to the left of Dr Tompkins.

  Genna Crowden lay on her back across a broken wooden palette, beneath which lay a muddle of assorted junk and metal shavings. Her right arm was twisted beneath her back; the left arm hung over the side of the skip. A trendily distressed blue denim jacket lay open. Despite the best efforts of gravity, her breasts strained against a white embroidered cotton vest that had ridden up, revealing a wide expanse of flesh between it and the waist of a matching denim pelmet-length skirt. She had a silver ring through her navel mounted with a diamond-cut stone, whose prism refracted a spectrum of vivid colours across her skin. She wore knee-length mahogany-coloured boots. Jo forced herself to look at the face.

  It was puffy and discoloured, with patches of purple and red. Uncomprehending eyes, open and bulging, stared skywards. The jaw had dropped, forcing crimson cupid lips apart, revealing a tangled lock of peroxide blonde hair protruding from the mouth. Her own hair was auburn, cut into a bob that so closely resembled Jo’s that she could almost have been staring into a mirror.

  Dr Tompkins lifted her voice recorder and began to speak.

  ‘The victim is prone. The face is distended and cyanosed. Both eyes are open, prominent, and display subconjunctival haemorrhages. The tongue lies within the oral cavity. It is swollen but has no other obvious injury. The oral cavity is partly obstructed by a foreign substance that has the appearance of human hair. There are two concentric circles of reddish-purple bruising, one on, and one immediately below, the laryngeal cartilage. The depth of the indentations appears to be consistent around the entire visible circumference of the neck. This is suggestive of the use of a ligature, although none is present. The mouth, ears, and nostrils are free of bodily fluids. Cyanosis is present in the earlobes, fingernail beds, and hands. There are no other visible signs of injury.’

  This cool, detached professional account gave little clue to the final moments of this poor young woman’s life. It protected them in some small way from the horror of it all.

  Jo, however, had a duty to imagine exactly how it must have been. To mentally reconstruct every tiny detail. To try to interpret what that might tell her about the perpetrator. His motivation. His state of mind. The artefacts he brought with him to the scene, and those he took away.

  And with that came a duty, on the one hand, not to let it become too personal, such that it might overwhelm her, and, on the other, not to become so jaded, and deadened to it all that she lost the anger that would strengthen her resolve, and drive her on. She had seen that happen to others. She resolved that it was never going to happen to her.

  Chapter 38

  ‘Sometime within the past three to six hours,’ said Dr Tompkins in response to a question from Gordon Holmes. ‘Nearer to four than to six.’

  ‘Jo!’

  She looked over her shoulder. Andy Swift was standing by the corner of the wall, uncertain as to whether he should join them unbidden. She waved him forward.

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you,’ she said while he took in the scene. ‘You did say to tell you if we had another one.’

  ‘No need to apologise,’ he replied. ‘Rachel’s a bit stressed out. The school has an Ofsted inspection starting today. It’s her first.’

  He adjusted the hood of his protective suit, pushed his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose, and focused on the corpse. ‘Same MO I take it?’

  ‘It looks that way.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘That makes five to date, and the second to have been dumped in a skip.’

  ‘Do you think that’s why he chose this place?’ Gordon asked.

  ‘That would assume he was aware that the skip was here. That he’d already scouted this area. Given that it’s off the beaten track, then it begs the question, why would the victim choose to come here with him? Or did he drive her here?’

  ‘Was the body moved post-mortem, Doctor?’ Jo said to Tompkins.

  Tompkins thought about it. ‘Difficult to tell without a full examination. The Home Office pathologist will be able to tell you. But if you’re pressing me . . .’

  ‘We are,’ said Gordon.

  ‘Then I’d say that, given what little post-mortem lividity I have been able to see without moving her, she was almost certainly placed here within a few minutes of meeting her death.’

  ‘There were light showers around midnight last night, followed by a heavy dew,’ Nick observed. ‘So far no fresh tyre tracks have been found.’

  ‘Then it was luck,’ said Andy. ‘And his decision to dump her body, and the one in Cheetham Hill, in a nearby skip is an expression of his contempt for his victims. He chooses these sex workers not only because they are vulnerable, and accessible, but also because he considers them worthless and therefore disposable.’

  ‘If that’s the case,’ said Jo, ‘how can he derive pleasure from the trophies he takes if they come from women he regards wit
h such contempt?’

  ‘Because the killing itself is the ultimate expression of power and control. And almost certainly connected with something in his formative years that affected him deeply. That is his primary source of gratification and release. The taking of a trophy, and his use of it to recapture the moment, almost certainly as a sexual act, prolongs what would otherwise be a fleeting experience.’

  ‘But not long enough to stop him needing to do it again,’ Nick Carter observed.

  ‘Because all pleasurable experiences, especially ones of a sexual nature, have two things in common: firstly, they are addictive; and secondly, the degree of excitement and pleasure experienced diminishes in inverse proportion to the rate of repetition. Put simply—’

  ‘The novelty wears off!’ Gordon growled.

  Andy nodded. ‘Exactly. I call it the serial killers’ law of diminishing returns. It explains why the interval shortens between each successive murder.’

  ‘There were three weeks between the first and second victims,’ said Gordon. ‘The same between the second and third. Then just a week between Mandy Madden and Flora Novak. So why has he waited another eight days before this one?’

  ‘He has almost certainly been out there,’ said Andy, ‘looking for opportunities to strike again. By flooding the red-light districts with officers, you’ve made it more difficult for him. Not to mention all the media attention.’

  ‘Which would explain why he’s moved further east,’ said Nick.

  ‘He will strike again,’ said Andy. ‘Sooner rather than later.’

  ‘If you’re done here,’ said Jack Benson, ‘could you move back on to the road to let my CSI get on?’

  ‘I’ll get back and file my report,’ said Carol Tompkins. ‘Mr Flatman will be here in an hour or so.’