A Deadly Compulsion

by Michael Kerr

  “Call me a pleb,” Jim said, grinning back at her. “But my idea of a concert is Willie Nelson or maybe Eric Clapton, not Bach’s Mass in B minor, although the broad playing the penny whistle had a nice pair of jugs.”

  “That was a flute, you moron,” Pamela said through a fresh snort of laughter at his comments. “And she was old enough to be your mother.”

  Jim leant his head back, smiling, happy to be with Pamela, looking forward to opening a bottle of Californian red when they reached her place, then maybe showering together before making love, and...

  …The front side window imploded, resulting in a shower of glass cubes peppering Jim’s face and neck. He turned, squinted out into the night and saw the Plymouth; a grinning face at the open window, and the flash of another bullet leaving the muzzle of a gun that was aimed at him.

  Pamela had spun the wheel and braked hard, over-steering, losing control, causing the car to leave the concrete roadway and smash into the wall of a furniture store. The Honda stalled, and only the insistent pattering of raindrops on metal broke the otherwise sudden silence.

  Jim saw the spray of water at either side of the assailant’s car as it accelerated away from them; the Plymouth’s speeding, whitewall tyres parting the dark pools as it raced off into the night.

  Pamela had slid down as far as her seat belt would allow. She was slumped forward with her head resting on the steering wheel. The second slug had also missed its intended mark, but had found Pamela, entering her temple, to blow bone, brains and blood out of a fist-sized exit wound.

  Jim had left the bureau with a scarred throat, damaged mind, and a small invalidity pension as souvenirs of his career as a federal agent. And now he was allowing himself to be sucked in again, back into the quagmire that he had crawled out from. He had taken a giant step backwards, into the domain of what was a race apart from humanity; the serial killer. Couldn’t live with it, can’t live without it, he thought. Some dark part of him – that scared and sickened him – needed the rush and the challenge; was happiest existing between a rock and a hard place.

  After Pamela’s death, Jim had been trapped in a strange time warp, in a state of almost suspended animation, unable to function in the present or contemplate a future, but also unable to go back to the past, to a time before his life was broken and twisted to leave him empty and with no sense of meaning left to the chaos of existence. Eventually, he had found the strength to move forward and once more participate in life; to not dwell on the certainty of death, which reaped at random with no preferential treatment afforded to the talented or good above the inept or wicked. His short time with Laura had refurbished his spirit and given him a new-found quality of appreciation for all things great and small. Parting with her had to an extent extinguished that.

  Shaking off the doleful state of reverie as he neared York, his pulse quickened and he became agitated. He was impatient to see Laura again, with every second now stretching interminably before him, and each mile a seemingly endless journey to a far-off horizon. More than one door had been flung wide open before him with Laura’s phone call, and he imagined the trip would take him away from the doldrums of his safe harbour, out to a stormy, raging sea. He was entering yet another new chapter of life, and it both petrified and exhilarated him. A side of him, like the cricket that had been a puppet’s conscience, berated him: ‘You were doing just fine without this shit’, it chided. ‘Why couldn’t you just leave it the hell alone? Laura metaphorically clicks her fingers and you jump like a dumb mutt cosying up to a bitch in heat. It’s not too late to bail out, pal. Just turn around and go back home, for Chrissake! Send her what you’ve worked up and close that fucking door again. Slam it shut and save your sanity’.

  Too late was the cry, he thought as he ran his thumb along the thin white line on his throat. He had known madness and folly, but could not employ the hard-earned wisdom that it had given him to good effect. He didn’t like his motives. Didn’t like who he was much, either, but knew that he couldn’t run away from his personal demon. Time had not banished it, and now the little imp was back on his shoulder, alive and well, urging and prodding him ever nearer the edge of the pit. What was it about touching evil that fuelled him? Did he need to be associated with the unthinkable to realise a modicum of fulfilment? They were questions that, as always, he pushed back into the murky depths from which they had risen. His rationale bit back, happier to keep things simple. His motives were far less honourable than they had been when he was young and full of noble notions and grandiose intentions. Truth being, he was a dumb mutt, and did want to cosy up to Laura. He had been in a morass, wallowing, entangled and using avoidance techniques that left him feeling little more than an empty vessel. His dark side would not be denied, and Laura was the catalyst that had liberated it. Maybe it all came down to an unfinished affair of the heart. Everyone had needs. His were just a lot more complex than he cared to even try and comprehend. It didn’t do to look too deeply into yourself. You might not like what you find.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LAURA was back in her office at the station, sifting through the files that were scattered across her desktop. She was becoming more dispirited by the second as she searched in vain for a clue that had been overlooked. No revelation was forthcoming, and she discounted the possibility of one occurring any time soon. What she needed was a bloody miracle; a golden finger of fate to appear from above and enlighten her by pointing out a key piece of information that she and the team had, up until now, been blind to. At the moment she had far more chance of winning the lottery, which would be impossible, due to the fact that she had never bought a ticket. The facts were that they had been through every word and detail of every report furnished on the murders with a fine-tooth comb, and had nothing to show for it. The daily meetings had become almost pointless; a repetition of what they already knew, which was zilch. In most murder investigations there were leads. In many instances, the victim knew the killer. Or blood, hair, fibre or semen samples were left at the scene. Fingerprints, shoe prints, tyre prints, a weapon or a witness proved the eventual undoing of most criminals. The processing of almost every scene gave up forensic evidence. But this killer was both clever and lucky. He left them up shit creek without a paddle. There was no reason to believe he knew his victims, and as far as they knew to date he had never been seen by a third party. The bodies had been thoroughly cleaned, and the sites offered up no clues whatsoever. The locations had been dumping grounds; just secondary crime scenes.

  Laura reached into the drawer for a cigarette, but pulled her hand back. She felt nauseous, sick to her stomach as a result of eating too little, drinking too much coffee, and virtually chain-smoking. The continual, gut-wrenching knowledge that a girl was at that precise moment being held by a sadistic madman was almost too much to bear. The image of Shelley Stroud’s ear pinned to a velvet cushion in a box was burned into her mind, searing deep into her brain tissue to cause an unrelenting headache that could have been generated by a red-hot branding iron. This psycho was reaching out, taunting and sneering at them as they careered about with all the vision of blind mice, impotent against him. They had checked the address in Strensall, only to find that it was a vacant, weed-filled lot where a butcher’s shop had once stood. And the name that he had signed the letter with and given to Shelley’s father over the phone – Mark Chapman – was the name of the American nutter who’d gunned down John Lennon, way back in nineteen-eighty.

  Laura had eventually lit a cigarette and nearly finished it before realising that she was smoking. Stubbing it out in the hidden ashtray, – that everyone from her team to the cleaning lady knew about – she rose and headed for the door. It was almost twelve-thirty. She needed time out: preferably a year on a Greek island. Christ, she needed a brandy, and would break her own rule of not drinking on duty to preserve her weak grip on the reality of what was happening. It was depressing to think that most people were apparently unaffected by anything less than terrorist attacks or the death
of a high-profile celebrity like Cilla Black. It was a strange but undeniable fact that even as at that moment a young girl was suffering almost unimaginable torture, that no one should have to endure, birds still sang, the sun shone in a clear blue sky, and life was enjoyed as though all was well with the world. The ability of the human mind to disregard the plight of others and shut out all that did not affect it personally was an invisible suit of armour, worn as a shield against the unwholesome reality of misfortune that was too scary to confront. It was a quality that enabled optimism to flourish, and so promoted the continuance of the species. That all around her, fellow human beings could be more concerned and addicted to fictional characters in TV soaps than be touched by real suffering and cruelty, was an enigma that she found disheartening. It said little for mankind. Didn’t they realise that they would never see another century in? That there was more to life than TV, football, material wealth and all the trivialities that preoccupied their sad little lives. How could they assimilate and filter out ninety-nine percent of all that was disagreeable to them, as though it was not relevant?

  The phone rang as she gripped the door handle. She hesitated, wanting to ignore it, but turned back into the bleak utilitarian room, marched across to the desk and snatched up the handset.

  “DI Scott,” Laura said, her voice a flat monotone.

  “Outside call for you. It’s a Mr Elliott. He says it’s important,” Sue Jones – who they called ‘Jones the Switchboard’ – said, her lilting Welsh accent as strong as the day she had left Blaenau Ffestiniog thirty years ago.

  “Thanks, Sue. Put him through.”

  “Laura?”

  “Yes, Jim.”

  “I gave that stuff you sent me a look at. It may not be much, but I’ve put together a few notes that might give you some insight.”

  “I appreciate that more than you know, Jim. Could you send them to me as a PDF file?”

  “No can do.”

  “Eh!”

  “I can show them to you. I’m in York, sat in the Olde Starre Inne on Stonegate.”

  A moment’s stunned silence. “You’re in York?”

  “Yeah. I cleared my diary for a few days. Is that okay with you?”

  “That’s great, Jim. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Is it still brandy and ginger ale?”

  “Yes. A large one.”

  Although he was watching for her, it was lunchtime and the pub was heaving with office workers and tourists. He could hear conversations in Japanese, German, and a New York twang, as well as various English accents. Laura materialised at his side as if spirited there, to bob her head and lightly brush his cheek with her lips before sitting opposite him to smile at his expression of surprise.

  The smile was pinched, and the stress was manifest in her tired, concerned, yet still beautiful face. He felt a gangly, self-conscious teenager again. The touch of her soft mouth and the scent of her perfume sent ripples of near bliss through him, turning his limbs to jelly.

  “Still wearing Opium,” he said as an observation, not a question.

  “Yes, a creature of habit. It’s good to see you, Jim,” she replied before sipping the brandy that had been waiting for her.

  “So how’s life treating you out here in the boonies?”

  “It’s been good for me. What I needed...until this serial started up.”

  “Apart from the job. You sure that you’re okay?”

  “It doesn’t go away, Jim. You know that. It’s an accommodation. The space is still there where Kara should be, but I’ve got a handle on it, now. I live with it and function. I can even look back on the good times and watch the videos, listen to her voice and enjoy her smile and the way she moved. She just went on ahead, too early. But she’s safe, will never be hurt, disappointed or embittered by life. Overall I don’t think she’s missed too much. It’s the survivors that get to do all the missing.”

  Jim vividly remembered the phone call, the pell-mell dash to be with Laura at the hospital, and the crashing wall of grief that met him when he’d arrived.

  Kara had been the living image of her mother, just a younger version. Photographs of Laura at eleven could have been either of them at that age.

  That sudden, black, heinous day had been the first time he’d seen Laura vulnerable, with her air of self-confidence shredded; torn asunder as her world fell apart around her as instantly as an earthquake victim. She had become a dazed, disoriented and forlorn figure, unable to believe that the most important person in her life had been swallowed up and was gone, never to return. What made sense of chaos had been obliterated.

  Kara had kissed her mother goodbye just hours before, telling Laura that she would have spaghetti bolognese ready for the evening meal.

  Laura remembered the last words her daughter had said to her: “So don’t be late, Mum, or you’ll have to eat it all dried up and stuck together like cold dog barf.”

  “Get out of here. Go and get educated. I’ll be home on time…ish,” Laura had replied, grimacing, sure that she would not be able to eat the meal that evening without imagining tucking into a pile of puke.

  Kara went swimming. It was an organised weekly school trip to the local pool in Finsbury Park. She loved the water and rated herself almost as at home in it as Aerial, the Disney mermaid.

  It had been a freak accident; a bolt from the blue...or into it. Kara had mistimed a dive from the three metre board and landed flat – a belly flop – hitting the water with a loud smack, dazing herself and swallowing the chlorine-tainted cocktail as she sank to the bottom, winded and in pain. The echoing slap of her body was as profound as a gunshot in a cathedral. Her classmates swam out to where she had gone under, to dive down, lift her to the surface and quickly heave-pull-push her up onto the non-slip edge of the pool. The teacher and an attendant made every effort to resuscitate her until the paramedics arrived. But she had gone, just blinked out with the untimely finality of a spent light bulb.

  Laura had taken leave and begun her passage through the long and dark tunnel of grief. Her loss was an almost solid entity; a creature within her brain that ate at her reason, to compromise all former beliefs and erase healthy expectation. She had confronted death in many guises as a copper, and knew that it was as much a part of life as night following day. Death was as commonplace as birth, but was not the beginning of the journey, but the finality of all that has been: an end to all hopes and dreams and aspirations. Death is a door that slams closed and locks, never to be reopened.

  It had been Jim Elliott who’d helped her overcome the pills and brandy-dependant state that she had escaped into. He’d somehow led her gently into the light, having had personally been where madness dwelt. His firsthand experience of love lost to the grave helped him to guide her through the labyrinth of emotions that he recognised and had somehow found his way out of. Both metaphorically and physically he had held her hand and tiptoed through the minefield of her despondency, finally delivering her to safer, firmer ground.

  “It’ll never go away, Laura,” Jim said. “And it shouldn’t. If it did, you’d lose more than you could gain. You’ve found the resolve to live with the legacy of love that you and Kara shared, and move on. We’re the casualties, like amputees who have had our legs shot out from under us. We had to heal a lot, then strap prostheses on to tender stumps and get up off our asses and learn to walk again. It’s one faltering step at a time, and a lot of falling back down until you get the hang of it. Eventually you can walk unaided, but it’s never the same. You move forward, but the feeling has gone; the sense of warmth or cold, and blood flowing through arteries and veins and aching muscles is missing. It’s called adapting, and it sucks.”

  Laura smiled at Jim, more openly this time. She remembered feeding off his strength, using him as a support system until she had found the fortitude to pull free from the clinging embrace of melancholia. Her chief superintendent at the time, Alex Carter, had pulled strings, and her application for a sideways move had been expedited
. The post up to Yorkshire, and the distance from all that she had known, including Jim, had aided her recuperation. It had been a rebirth that helped to subdue much of the pain. Her new job had kept her distracted; the work a pivot around which all other aspects of her life revolved.

  Now, seated at the table of a crowded pub, Laura realised that she still loved Jim...had never stopped. She hoped that they could somehow find a way to bridge the ford that had risen and flowed between them since Kara’s death, to perhaps give them a second chance to pursue what had been a far too short-lived affair.

  “Another?” Jim said as Laura drained her glass.

  “I’ll get them,” she replied, taking his glass, standing up and heading for the bar.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her. They were locked on target; guided missiles that followed her every move. He appraised her slim figure, and his throat suddenly hurt as though filling with gravel. He remembered the happy moments that they had shared, along with the sad. He was a little ashamed to find himself mentally undressing her, imagining the firm body, pert breasts, and the small mole that graced the right cheek of her tight butt. He felt a healthy straining at the front of his jeans and was glad that he was sitting down with the table hiding his growing state of arousal.

  Their relationship had been mainly snatched moments and rare evenings, with only two full weekends together in all the time that they had been lovers. It had not been easy, with Laura’s career and Kara leaving little time for him or anything else in her life. And with the loss of her daughter, he had known that it was over between them. It had not been an abrupt ending, just a slow but sure separation, as sand through an hourglass; a gentle, insistent shifting.

  Since Laura’s move up north, Jim had enjoyed only one fleeting relationship that lasted less than a month, and several one night stands that he’d found to be shallow asides in the shadow of his deep feelings for Laura, that persisted, simmering on a back burner, contained but always threatening to boil up and bubble over. Sat now, studying her, he knew that he would always love her. That was why he was in York.