A Deadly Compulsion

by Michael Kerr

  “So what have you got for me?” Trish asked, turning to face him, her dismay at the rain dripping off him onto her soft, leather upholstery subdued at the prospect of being given a titbit that she might turn into tomorrow’s lead story.

  “Not here,” he said. “I can’t afford to be seen with you. And I can’t be quoted. What I have to tell you is going to blow this case wide open. Drive me to my car. It’s parked out on the Fulford road.”

  As she drove, he told her that the police knew the identity of the killer, and even gave her details of the depraved acts of mutilation that the victims had suffered, which had not been disclosed to the media. “He bites their nipples off, cuts their throats, and hangs them up to bleed out. I can also tell you that he’s left-handed, and that he has killed at least a dozen more girls than you or the press know about.”

  “So who is he?” Trish said, following his directions and making a left into a lane adjacent to Fulford Golf Club, before parking behind his car.

  He smiled. “You’re talking to him, you stupid cow,” he said, smashing his fist into her temple with enough force to bounce her head off the side window, causing her to groan and sink forward, conscious but with no control over her body; as a boxer, whose limbs turn to mush after a punch rattles brain against skull and robs him of all cohesive functions.

  He hit her again and dispelled all thought. Bright colours fizzed behind her eyes, then dimmed to blackness.

  Reaching over her and turning off the lights and ignition, he pushed the release on the safety belt’s buckle and pulled her down across his lap, taking a reel of duct tape from his jacket pocket and quickly winding a length tightly around her head, once...twice...three times, covering her mouth, before biting through the tape and drawing her wrists behind her back to pinion them. He then pushed her sideways, unmindful of her head thudding into the door as he lifted her ankles up and bound them together.

  After opening the front side window, he climbed out of the car, walked the couple of yards to his Mondeo and opened the boot. Looking about him, he checked that the tree-lined lane was deserted before going back to lift his latest acquisition out of the Scorpio and transfer it. He then emptied the contents of a two gallon can of petrol into the Scorpio, soaking the seats and carpet in both front and rear. The entire operation had taken less than a minute.

  Reversing into a driveway, he headed back to the main road, but not before first pausing alongside Trish’s car to strike a bunch of matches on the sandpaper strip of the Swan Vestas box and throw them into the open window.

  Accelerating away, he was back on the Fulford road, heading for the A64 and well away from the scene when the Scorpio’s petrol tank exploded and briefly lit the night sky in his rearview mirror.

  As usual, Pam Garner had gone to bed early, to read a few pages of a paperback before becoming drowsy and putting the book on top of the small chest of drawers, to then switch off the lamp and go to sleep.

  The thunderous detonation jarred her awake as her bedroom window imploded, and Pam was only saved from being peppered by a thousand shards of flying glass by the heavyweight cotton canvas curtains that billowed in under the shockwave, now as punctured as the heavens were by twinkling points of light. She leapt out of bed befuddled and ran out onto the landing, not knowing what had happened. Stopping at the top of the stairs to assess the situation as her head cleared, she realised that there was no smell of smoke, or the roar and crackle of hungry flames in the house. She reasoned that whatever had happened was outside, and that she was in no immediate, life-threatening danger. Walking back into the bedroom, she smoothed her nightdress down, put her slippers on and slowly approached the window with her feet crunching on the fragments of glass that had ripped through the material to fall down onto the carpet. Pulling back one of the curtains, just an inch, she looked out and was met by the flickering orange glow that emanated from a burning car in the lane, just twenty yards away from her house. Relieved, yet concerned, Pam rushed down the stairs, to telephone the emergency services for only the second time in her life; the first being when her late husband, Graham, had collapsed and died six years ago from a ruptured aorta. She recalled punching in the wrong digits three times with a wayward and shaking finger before managing to hit 999, as Graham made whooping noises and vomited blood onto the fitted lounge carpet that had only been laid the week before.

  At first it was assumed that the burnt-out car had been stolen, and that joy riders had torched it. It was registered as being owned by one Trish Pearson of Hadley Court; a chic riverside apartment complex that overlooked the river and the city centre. A uniform called at the address, but there was no one home. It would be a further twenty-four hours before Trish was reported missing by her employers. And neither friends – of whom there were very few – nor colleagues had any idea of her whereabouts. She had just vanished into thin air.

  She drifted slowly up from cold, black depths into shallower, greyer layers of awareness. Her lungs burned, aching in her chest, and in a panic-filled dream, as if she were a diver running short of life-sustaining oxygen, she kicked her feet and stretched her fingers for the surface, reaching for the effulgence and sweet air that was above her, almost within her grasp.

  Pain drilled into her head, and a bright shaft of light found her face, making her close her eyelids tightly against the dazzling glare. She was now conscious, and terror began to worm into her brain.

  “You’re not my mother,” a voice stated from the gloom beyond the cold sun of the torch’s beam. “You’re just the smug talking-head off the TV who thinks that I’m a sick piece of trash, a mad-dog killer and a cowardly, twisted little man.”

  The cone of light moved, circled her and blinked out to leave an afterimage blazing on her retinas; twin red planets hanging in a Delphic vacuum.

  Trish couldn’t talk, beg, scream or move. Her mouth was covered, and her hands and feet were bound.

  “You’re going to die, news lady,” he whispered in the darkness next to her face. And as she grunted in fear and pulled away from the words and the hot breath on her cheek, she caught the unmistakable scent of Aramis. She was encompassed in silence and lay rigid with her muscles tensed in readiness for a piercing pain or heavy blow; her ears straining for sound, unable to follow his movements. She expected to be knifed or bludgeoned at any second. A squeaking, metallic shriek made her cringe for a moment, before ice-cold water hit her, drumming against her; a powerful jet that pummelled her body and face, hurting where it hit, rolling her over on to her side.

  He hosed her down and then turned off the tap and lit a hurricane lamp. She was shivering, shaking uncontrollably as he cut through the tape at her wrists and replaced it with stock wire, using pliers to twist it tight, this time with her hands in front of her, and with one end of the thick wire wound and secured through a steel ring that was set into a large concrete block. On a whim he had decided to keep the bitch alive, for now. She would be there to use, to satisfy him; sex on tap. She was separate to his need, an added dimension to the game. It would be fun to have her watch when he worked on another with the knife and stapler. As a journalist, she would surely be only too pleased to gain such an insight to the Tacker; one that no one else had been privy to. He left her, suddenly ravenous, and locked the barn doors and headed for the house to relax and plan his next move. Having a minor celebrity of his own under lock and key gave him a rush. And he would be wanting much more from her than an autograph.

  It was a consideration that the Tacker may have abducted Trish Pearson, but as an outside possibility, not a likely probability.

  “She’s a blue-eyed blonde, boss,” Hugh said, stirring semi-skimmed milk into the brew he had made with Laura’s gear, before walking back across the room to place the mugs on the only patch of desk that was not piled high with papers and files. “And she slagged him off something rotten on TV a couple of nights back.”

  “I bad-mouthed him too, and so have other broadcasters and the press in general. I don’t see him
trying to take out everyone that has called him what he is. We don’t know that he took her, and she seems a little old for him.”

  “Meow.”

  “I’m not being catty, Hugh. He likes younger girls. Apart from one they were all teenagers. I think it’s a coincidence, unrelated. Have we checked out anyone that she might have been having an affair with?”

  “Her only affair seems to have been with her career. There was a rumour that she was screwing a producer at the station, but he seems to be in the clear. He says he tried it on but got nowhere; thinks she must be a dyke.”

  Laura glared. “It’s amazing how many men accuse women of being bloody gay when they can’t get their ends away. The chauvinist pigs need castrating with bricks.”

  “Ouch!” Hugh exclaimed, crossing his legs and grimacing. “I still believe that he took her. She was last seen leaving the studio at about eleven p.m., heading for the car park. I think she was snatched and driven, or forced to drive to where her car was found. It was a dark lane. He could have easily got her into another vehicle and then torched her car to destroy any evidence.”

  “You might be right, Hugh. But I think it’s a long shot.”

  “If this is a mother thing, like you and the Yank believe, then she fits the bill. Her verbal attack and having the right hair and eye colour would pull his chain.”

  “Maybe, and for the record, remember that Jim isn’t officially involved in this. We just go back awhile. We’re old friends. He’s helping us out on his own time with a few pointers.”

  “Hey, boss, it’s me, not the super’. The guy was reputedly one of the best profilers in the FBI, but that was years ago. Excuse me for thinking that he might be a little rusty and out of date in his methods. I still think that he could put us way off track and confuse the issue.”

  “I doubt that. What Jim does isn’t learned and forgotten, it’s a gift. His input will be valid, and I’ll feed anything that he gives me to you and the team. He happens to agree with you that Trish Pearson is in all probably the guy’s latest victim. He doesn’t believe in coincidences until all other alternatives have been ruled out. And then he still doesn’t believe in them. I don’t understand why you have a problem with him.”

  Hugh arched his eyebrows. “Call me a sceptic, boss, but I don’t rate instinct, hunches or sixth sense when it comes to solving a case. I think formal investigative procedure and forensic science are the only way to go. You always hear about the successes that these behavioural science blokes have, but not so much about the ones they get wrong. I’m not impressed with profilers or the FBI in general. They’re a legend in their own minds; overrated and full of bullshit.”

  “You shouldn’t judge Jim’s methods by what you’ve read in thrillers or seen on TV,” Laura said, realising that she was jumping to Jim’s defence, and that Hugh’s ridicule of him and his talent had got under her skin. She was a little rattled. “He believes in formalistic investigation. Any hunches, as you call them, are just a part of the whole package. He proved countless times that he could process raw information and interpret it better than most other profilers. He takes what evidence there is and builds a mental picture of the offender from it. He doesn’t pretend that he’s infallible, but only a fool would underestimate his capabilities.”

  Hugh put his hands up submissively. “Point taken. It can’t harm to consider every option. The only important thing is that we don’t ignore the possibility that he could be completely wrong on this.”

  “When you’re drowning, you grab hold of anything that floats by...right?”

  Hugh lightened up and smiled. “Right, boss. I’ll try to look at it that way.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE fluorescent tube hummed continuously within a grimy plastic housing laden with the hot and brittle corpses of flies and moths. The diffused light shone down thinly on to the top of the ancient table below it, which was scarred by scratches and brown, lozenge-shaped cigarette burns; a captive, its legs bolted by brackets to the cold concrete floor.

  Derek Cox was seated at one side of the table, slouched as nonchalantly as he was able to in the PVC bucket chair. He was wearing a black Adidas sweat suit, top of the range Reeboks, and was sipping bitter coffee from a polystyrene cup, wincing at the taste of the hot, acerbic brew that the station’s vending machine deemed suitable for human consumption.

  “Your coffee’s crap,” Derek said, grimacing and thumping the cup down on the tabletop and pushing it away with his fingertips as though it was a toxic concoction.

  When asked to accompany them to the station, ‘to help with their inquiries’, Derek had been only too happy to comply. From the outset of the taped interview, he stated that he had nothing to hide, and saw no reason or need to ask for legal representation.

  Laura and Hugh were sitting opposite him, trying to find a chink in his armour of affability and self-assurance. They couldn’t rock him, and he remained unfazed by the insinuation that he might be involved in the spate of recent killings. Laura had not encountered a guilty person this unconcerned or relaxed. The young man before her could have been a Zen Buddhist; he was so ‘together’ and serene...outwardly. Christ, the average person was more uptight queuing at a supermarket checkout. In fact most of Joe public acted guiltier than Cox appeared to be if they spotted a police car in their rearview mirrors.

  “You haven’t really been able to help us at all, have you, Derek?” Laura said after formally reopening the interview with fresh tapes that had been unwrapped in front of their suspect, after they’d taken a fifteen minute break and left him to hopefully sweat.

  “I’d love to be able to help you with this, DI Scott,” he replied, a slight twist to the smirk on his face giving him the look of a young Harrison Ford. “But without having the foresight to know that I might need alibis, I haven’t got any. I’ve told you, I don’t get out as much as I should. If I were your man, I would have made sure that I had plausible, bullet-proof answers for all your moronic questions. As it is, I really can’t remember the last time I murdered anyone.”

  “It’s not funny, Cox,” Laura said, feeling her cheeks prick with the heat of anger at the man’s attempt at childish, school yard humour.

  “I think it is,” he said, looking from Laura to Hugh, then back to her, his eyes now fixed and penetrating; a small, cruel smile replacing his previously mild expression. “Humour is subjective. I’ve told you, I don’t mind answering all your inane questions. That you don’t like the answers I’m giving is your problem, and tough shit. I don’t even know why I’m a suspect. Do I fit some description of your serial killer?”

  “Listen, Mr Cox,” Hugh said. “We want to eliminate you from our inquiries, and we’ll be able to do that a lot quicker if you start being more cooperative.”

  Derek thrust his chin out in defiance. “No. You listen, officer. I could be awkward. But up until now I’ve been happy to waste a lot of time that I could have spent more productively elsewhere. Your procedures are interesting, better than watching Sherlock on Telly, but you just happen to have the wrong man. Why not just take my prints and some blood, hair and semen samples? You won’t find anything to match them to, but it’ll save a lot of fucking about. You’ve searched my property, and there’s obviously nothing there, or you’d have charged me by now.”

  “I want an impression of your teeth, Derek,” Laura said. “Is there any problem with that?”

  “You can have an impression of my cock if you want,” he said with a broad grin on his face.

  “Maybe some other time,” Laura came back. “For now, one of your much bigger mouth will suffice.”

  Laura arrived home to the empty cottage and prowled through it as a stranger in a strange land. The warmth had deserted it, gone as surely as Jim had left that morning. She was down in a bad place, where memories and needs pulled in every direction; ephemeral fingernails raking the scabs off old wounds in her brain, opening them to release fresh torrents of pain that threatened to drown her in a deep, dark
well of melancholia. She was spinning ever inward and ever faster into a black hole that she had pulled free of once, only to now find herself back in its terrible gravitational clutch.

  Jim had stayed until they got the lead on Cox, and had then gone – as though his presence had been no more than a flight of fancy – back to his life and work down south. The days that she had spent with him had felt so right. It was as though they were meant to be together. As if fate had ordained it. Now, the cottage that she had loved was teasing her with his smell, and the strong image of his presence; where he had sat, and what he had touched. She had let her past and present come together, and the collision of the two worlds had rocked the foundations of her universe.

  Sitting in the kitchen, cradling a brandy-filled tumbler, Laura was unable to check the tears that ran freely from her now puffy eyes. It hit her like a freight train; a realisation that the cottage was no more than a retreat she had hidden herself away in. She was nothing but a runaway, using her career as a foil against the emotions that she kept smothered, cloistered in a mental convent that was detached from her true feelings. She loved Jim, wanted to be with him, but was scared to make the commitment. She had failed at marriage once, and was still, after all this time, low on self esteem.

  Only Kara had made sense of everything. Her daughter’s pointless accidental death had graphically illustrated that the journey between cradle and grave was just a haphazard and chaotic series of events. There was no such thing as security, and the future was of limited duration. Being a copper was no big deal. She had just made it one, to have some sense of continuity in a life that frightened her more with every passing day. Underneath the sham of being a hard-bitten DI, Laura now acknowledged the lonely, scared little girl that hid within, under the multi-layered persona that she had wrapped around her complex identity.