Little Bird: a serial killer thriller

by Sharon Dempsey

  The rumble of a car further up the lane, possibly Maude Briers returning, caused him to act quickly. He pulled Anna with his right hand, swung her round so that her back was pressed against his front and put the Glock to her head. She felt her legs unsteady beneath her, but before she could catch her breath, he was dragging her across the field towards a copse of trees. She could make out a dark coloured small van partially hidden by the dense foliage. He must have approached the property by another lane and rolled the van as close as he could without Anna hearing him. She felt vomit threaten to rise up from the depths of her stomach, as the pain in her side continued to spark and flare, from where he’d punched her. She could hear the car come closer; it could only be seconds away. She fought with every fibre of her body, arching against him, kicking backwards with all her strength, but before she had any chance of being heard or escaping, he used the Glock to strike her once on the left temple.

  48

  Declan had little else to do other than trawl through online academic journals trying to glean any information which could bring light to the case. He was well versed in broken home and attachment theories; it wasn’t a stretch to assume that the killer had come from some sort of dysfunctional background. The scope of psychoanalytic theories resting on the three major personality mechanisms: the id, ego and superego formed the basis of most criminality theories. The id containing the instinctual, unconscious desires both sexual and aggressive with which we were all born. The ego tried to achieve the desires of the id while respecting the perceived normal social conventions. Children would only develop a strong ego if they had a loving relationship with their parents. The superego contained two functions, the conscience and the ego ideal. The conscience acted to inhibit instinctual desires that violated social rules, and its formation depended on parental punishment arousing anger that children then turned against themselves. But research had moved on from Freud, there was much more to throw on to the fire.

  These were all notions and theories he had written about in papers submitted to journals as part of his academic life. The practicality of working in a crime field enabled him to see these theories tested, proved and disproved. Sometimes he would be aware of the workings of the moral development in a case study. He could see clearly how a young boy brought up in a home of violence, alcohol abuse and drug abuse could go on to become an offender. Others weren’t so obvious. Strangely he didn’t see the killer as psychotic. Instead he appeared to be a sociopath who has gestated a particular agenda and acted upon certain fantasies, to fulfil this agenda. The fact that the murdered women were all young, suggested sexual excitement was involved but yet, he did not sexually violate them. His fulfilment came from the murder.

  He was lost in thought when his phone beeped out a rattling buzz.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is she with you?’

  He couldn’t place the voice.

  ‘Who is it? Is who with me?’

  ‘Anna. Is Anna with you?’ Declan could hear the impatience, the worry in the voice.

  Thomas King.

  Anna’s partner. The messenger sent to tell him to stay away. He’d done as he was told, for Anna’s sake. He realised how their relationship would impact on her career if it got out. Part of him worried that she’d made up the press story as a ruse to end things between them but when he’d seen the thinly veiled coverage in the Belfast News he understood that she had no choice but to walk away. God, how he missed her.

  ‘Why would she be here? I’ve done as she asked, and kept my distance. Why would you think she was here?’ he stopped, a snake of dread coiled in his stomach.

  ‘She’s gone AWOL. She didn’t turn in to work this morning and there’s no sign of her at home,’ Thomas sighed down the line.

  ‘Shit, you think she’s in trouble?’ Declan could barely allow his mind to go there, to acknowledge that she might be in danger.

  ‘I know Anna probably told you stuff about the case, so if you can think of anything that can help to track her down, you have to tell me. Did she tell you about any angle she was working on alone? Anything she may not have told me?’

  Declan sighed, ‘No. Nothing. Sure, we talked about the case, but you know more than me. Do you have any inkling who you are looking for?’

  ‘Yeah, off the record, we think it’s Brogan.’

  ‘It can’t be Nelson Brogan.’

  ‘No, his son, Robert Brogan. Fits the profile, he was working as a security guard under a false name. He had the opportunity, if not a clear motive, to kill all the girls.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Declan asked, his T-shirt sticking to him with cold sweat.

  ‘Think of any possible connection, where he could have taken her. Anything at all.’ He could hear the desperation in Thomas’ voice. A cop that cared about his partner, who would lie down and take a bullet for her.

  49

  Anna woke to hear a car driving away. She found herself sitting upright, but in some sort of brace. She couldn’t move her neck or head and could only see straight ahead. Screws were embedded tightly against her skull, some sort of metal clamp held her neck while her arms were pulled behind the chair and bound together with cord. She tried to wriggle her hands to see if there was any give. None, it was secure. Her ankles were bound too. Even if she had freed her hands she didn’t know how she could get the brace off. The screws were boring into her temples making her head pound like the chug-chug of an oncoming train. She struggled to hold down a wave of panic. Breathe, think, stay clam she told herself like a mantra, thumping along with the pounding of her heartbeat. She listened; the silence was heavy, still and thick. She was alone. He hadn’t blindfolded her and he hadn’t gagged her mouth so she could assume he hadn’t feared her calling for help and being heard.

  A sliver of moonlight fell across the dirt floor, past the open mouth where the grate of a fire had once been. She could smell an earthy, mossy scent mixed with the acrid smell of her own sweat and fear. A rough wind was nipping at the roof, causing a low murmuring howl. Somewhere, far off, a gate was swinging, calling out to be oiled.

  She was cold, so cold that her teeth chattered incessantly. Fear pulsed through her body make her hyper alert, hearing far off noises that belonged to the night. Her breathing was ragged, short rapid breathes. She wanted to cough and clear her throat but her chest was constricted with some sort of binding. She barely had enough room to fill her lungs and the thought of it caused her to panic. With great will she tried to calm herself down, to focus on her breathing, counting the breaths in and out; in one out two in one out two. It was working. She could feel her heart begin to slow, so she focused on keeping herself under control. Panic wouldn’t serve her well.

  Her shoulder was hurting and she desperately needed to pee. She thought of her Dad, Declan and Kathleen. She wanted to tell them things, to let them know she loved them. To feel their warmth and care. In the weeks after Camille had died she had seriously considered leaving her job. She needed to feel like herself again. To stop the guilt, the anger, the sorrow. She had wanted to run away from it all. To be independent and free of expectations. She hadn’t exactly run far. Northern Ireland had seemed like a good compromise. Halfway between heaven and hell.

  She thought of her mother, Camille. To watch her suffer in the final throes of death had unhinged something in Anna. She hadn’t done the brave or courageous thing; she’d taken the only option open to her. How easy it had been to administer that fatal dose of morphine, to help Camille find death when life was causing so much pain. She had acted on instinct, but ever since, she had felt the ground beneath her feet was unsteady, that the axis of the world was off kilter. Somehow it all made sense that she would end up here. As if she deserved what was coming to her.

  Death is but a beat away. It is waiting for all of us, she thought. Some meet their end in an untimely, brutal fashion. Others die, no less violently in the clutches of disease, fighting against invasive tumours and the good intentions of medical science. Few get to
fall asleep and not wake up, slipping away peacefully. What Anna had done, felt right.

  Or was it righteous?

  What separated her from the likes of Robert Brogan? Did a pure motive, borne out of love, make her crime less deserving of justice? She recalled the cemetery where they had laid Camille, row upon row of granite headstones, some diminished by the battering rains and winds of the valley. Epitaphs engraved to commentate loved ones. She had wandered around the old cemetery, nestled between the grey stone chapel, and the rectory in the bowl of the valley. The majesty of the green fields rising up behind her, emphasising her insignificance. She took it as a sign that what she had done was of no consequence beyond her tiny, insignificant life. That the world was so much bigger than her, and what did it matter to take one life if it was done in love? A life nearing its own natural end, sentenced to spend the last days in agonies of pain more suited to something from a Faustian description of the depths of hell.

  One of the older headstones, a white and grey marble arched shaped stone, pock marked by the elements, carried the Welsh inscription:

  hedd perffaith hedd

  Peace, perfect peace

  That’s what Anna craved. Peace.

  Anna’s neck ached. Her shoulder, already damaged, felt as if it had been dislocated again. Her arms drawn behind her and tied, had reached that numb state. She couldn’t move and trying to was a fruitless enterprise, which would only bring about further panic.

  It was funny how she could detach herself and think fairly rationally while being in such a state of desperation. Stillness washed over her as she allowed her mind to drift beyond the stone croft, to drift back to times she didn’t usually care to remember. Huge swaths of her memory had been stolen – blocked out by whatever mechanism her mind employed to enable her to function, to go on with life. She knew that they had held a wake of sorts for Camille, that many people had come to pay their respects, but she could remember none of it. The day of the funeral was gone from her too, stole in a haze of grief.

  But what she could remember, with great clarity, was that night at the end of September. The streets were washed with the early autumn rain. She noticed the tarmac road looked like it had seen an oil spill, for an iridescent shimmer caught her eye. There was a beauty in the blues and violets radiating outwards across the road in a shallow puddle catching the last rays of light before sun down. She parked in North Church Street near the Greek church of St Nicholas and made her way down the road, on towards Bute Street. She didn’t want her car license plates being picked up by CCTV so she had parked a few streets away. She wore a long dark hooded coat, her tight jeans and a battered pair of old trainers. Her hair, which was too long for her liking, was bundled in a low ponytail and tucked underneath an old beany hat.

  She had instructions, telling her where to go and now she stood outside the building, furtively glancing around, making sure she hadn’t been seen. Anyone passing by would think the red brick, former linen factory, was condemned, ready to be flattened and make way for offices or apartments to house young professionals, but Anna knew inside she would find a squat of sorts. It was still possible to find the odd building like this one – remnants from a past before Cardiff had reinvented itself with civic pride, fancy Assembly buildings, the Wharf and Dr Who film sets.

  She located the door buzzer, hidden behind a facade of old letterboxes, and as instructed, rang it twice. Within a moment the door opened. A tall skinny guy, with dreadlocks the tawny colour of a mouse, led her through the dark hallway. She could smell something cooking, reminding her of school dinners, mince, boiled carrots and potatoes. Without speaking he indicated that she should go on through to the door on the left at the end of the corridor. She could hear tinny music playing far of in the bowels of the building, something like Biffy Clyro, a jangle of guitars and a low thump, thump of a bass.

  The metal door was open slightly so she cleared her throat and pushed it wider. The inner room had been an office at one time; it’s ceilings high and crisscrossed with steel beams. A large flat screen television was on, showing a video of Beyoncé marching around in yellow swinging a baseball bat, with the sound turned down. A brown leather sofa sat in front of the television and on it lay a small girl-like woman, no older than Anna. She was smoking while scanning her phone.

  ‘You found it, then,’ she said, not taking her eyes of the phone, her accent suggesting a valleys upbringing, Merthyr or Abergavenny perhaps. One of those towns decimated when the pits closed, now mere satellites of Cardiff, where young people either stay and waste away into marriage, parenthood and middle age, or flee as soon as they can.

  ‘Yeah, easy enough.’

  ‘You parked far enough away?’

  ‘Yes, round by Maria Street.’

  ‘Right,’ she looked up from her phone, ‘I’m not to be hassled. You’ll make sure I’m given a by ball?’

  ‘I told you. I’ll do my best. I can tell them you’re giving me information.’

  ‘And I’ve told you, I’m no snitch, so don’t come looking for information afterwards,’ she blew out a plume of blue coloured smoke. ‘How much are you looking for?’

  ‘I’m not sure, I don’t think it would take much but I need to be certain it will be enough.’

  ‘I’ve midazolam, buprenorphine, oxytocin or oxycodone. Which do you want?’

  ‘Whichever is closest to regular morphine.’

  ‘Best go with oxytocin. 30 mg should do it. Grind it up and spoon it in with something. She’ll ride off into the sunset within half an hour, give or take.’

  The woman got off the sofa and made her way over to a filing cabinet where she took out an envelope containing the pills. Anna handed over the money. Over the odds, but she wasn’t going to haggle. She shoved the envelope containing the small plastic bag of pills into her deep pocket and left.

  When she returned to her family home on Llandennis Avenue, the silence told her that Camille had received her seven o’clock syringe driver push. The hospice nurse, a middle-aged woman from Ponty, would return at eleven o’clock and stay with them until morning, allowing Anna and her dad to get some sleep.

  She had a few hours in which to crush up the tablets, and feed them to her mother before the nurse returned. It wasn’t unusual for Anna to sit with her mother in the evening, allowing her father time to mull around the house, watering his plants in the garden or take the opportunity to rest. He respected Anna’s need to have time with her mother alone.

  ‘There you are. Hard day at work?’ he asked as she hung her coat up in the cloakroom.

  ‘Oh, the usual, you know. Nothing too bad. How is she?’ she nodded toward the bedroom above them.

  The slump of his shoulders and the grim set of his mouth told her it had been yet another bad day. The cancer was eating Camille up. Metastases had spread to her spinal fluid and the cancer had wrapped itself around her thorax, slowly crushing her to death, one breath at a time. Anna barely recognised the woman who had brought her up. The shrunken shell of a woman was more like something dug up from a watery grave. Her skin was jaundice yellow and weeping in places, where the morphine itch had driven her to tear at her skin in distraction. Her hair, which had begun growing back in random clumps, was darker than it used to be, thicker too and made her look slightly demonic in the way it sat up like horns.

  Every time Anna entered the room she had to steady her nerve, to mentally prepare herself for what lay within. The curtains were partially closed but open enough for the streetlight to illuminate the room. Camille lay on the double bed, still, apart from the deep watery guttural breathing, like a gutter burbling over with too much rainwater. She was lying on her back, her face turned to one side, away from Anna. There was a scented candle burning in a thick glass jar, pertaining to emit a smell of clean cotton. It was a sweet, cloying smell that Anna disliked but tolerated, as she knew it was her father’s doing; his way of trying to cloak the strange bedfellow smell of death and medicine.

  ‘Mum, it’s me, Anna
. I’m back from work.’

  Her mother continued to sleep in the slumber of the morphine, enough to knock her out, but never enough to totally take away the pain. Anna was wracked at the thought of Camille suffering, but so incapacitated by the drugs, so as to not be able to cry out in her agony.

  Anna positioned herself on the bed, lying down at Camille’s side. She gently placed her arm around Camille’s delicate frame and whispered close into her ear, ‘Mum, it won’t be long now. I’ve done what you asked. I got the stuff.’ It had been early August when Camille had first mentioned her intentions, that if the pain became too much, she would need help to end it. Anna had told her to stop being ridiculous and that she was asking for the impossible, but as the weeks went on and Camille struggled to cope with the pain, Anna remembered her request. The how and the when were never discussed. Anna thought of the home life Camille had gave her, the love and care so carefully imparted. She owed her this.

  Anna lay like that for a few moments, feeling the rise and fall of her mother’s sunken chest against her arm, not knowing if she heard the words, or understood. A little after nine her father checked on them, bringing Anna a cup of coffee, always made exactly to her liking.

  ‘I’ll wake her up in a little while and try to give her some of that custard she likes,’ Anna said setting her mug on the bedside cupboard.

  Her father nodded, ‘Yes she needs to keep her strength up. The custard will do her good.’

  They were each preforming little rituals, dancing around the inevitable.

  The kitchen window looked out over the back garden, a strip of lawn bordered with shrubs. The shed light was on. Her father was out there, smoking his daily evening secret cigarette. Anna knew she had five, maybe seven minutes’ tops, to prepare the custard mixture. She looked out towards the shed but could only see her reflection looking back at her. Her eyes glassy, her face thinner than normal, and her hair lank over her shoulders. She’d have to get it cut before the funeral, she thought.