by Michael Kerr
“Thanks, Jim. I’ll get on it. Unfortunately it’s not just confined to the team. Quite a few others have been involved in the investigation and know a lot of the case details. It could take a while.”
“It shouldn’t. His address will point him out.”
“I’ll keep you informed of―”
“I’m coming back up,” Jim interrupted. “I don’t intend to sit down here like a spare prick at a wedding, wondering if he’s cottoned on to what you’re doing. Remember, if it is a cop we’re looking for, he thinks like you and is without doubt monitoring every move that you make. Don’t lose sight of the fact that this guy is a killing machine. Trust no one who has any knowledge of the profile, or could feasibly be who you’re after.”
“Go straight to the cottage, Jim. I’ll leave a key in the woodshed out back, above the door on a nail.”
“I’ll be there by noon tomorrow...I love you.”
There was a pause. “Good. We need to talk.”
“Take care.”
“And you. Bye.”
He felt like the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. He’d declared himself by saying ‘I love you’ and disclosing the depth of his feelings. He hadn’t planned on saying it. The words had just tumbled out unbidden. With the exception of Pamela, Laura was the only other person he had ever truly loved, apart from his parents. Images and memories of his mum, dad and Pamela assailed him. All three were now gone. His parents had died together in the twisted remains of his father’s Ford pickup. A local drunk had passed-out at the wheel of his old Mercury and perished with them in the resulting head-on collision. They had been driving back from church along a quiet country road on a bright spring day in ninety-nine when it happened. God, how the years flew by. It seemed like only yesterday he had got the call. You never get over life experiences like that, just accommodate them somehow and let time do the rest. And Pamela, dear sweet Pamela, who had been gunned down during the attempt on his life. That had been the hardest cut of all. Guilt was cruelly endurable. He had come to accept it would always be on his shoulder berating him interminably like a fucking parrot with a bad attitude. But there was absolutely nothing he could do to change one second of what had gone down. Life isn’t like the movies; you only get one take. And that one rainy night in D.C. had left him thinking of how things might have been. Pamela should still be alive, and wasn’t because of what he had been. And now he was going back to it. He was obviously one of those people they talk about that never seem to learn from their mistakes.
Shaking off his relentless demons, Jim made a phone call and cleared the decks yet again, relaying his intentions to Diane, his long-suffering secretary, who he thought he should make a junior partner for the way she ran the office and kept everything together, gliding as smoothly as ball bearings in a tray of engine oil.
“Di, I’ll be away for a few days, York again. Call me if anything comes up that you can’t deal with. And give some thought as to whether you’d like to be a partner in this circus we run. We’ll discuss a new inflated salary and details when I get back. Okay?”
“Shit, boss, are you in love or something?”
“Or something. Now hang up, Di.”
“Be good. And if you can’t―”
“I’ll be bad and careful. Now get back to earning us some money, while I spend it.”
It was past one a.m. when he hit the sack. He’d showered, packed, and set the alarm for six, already impatient to be with Laura again. Jesus! Had he really lost control and told her that he loved her. It had just come out, as the actress said to the bishop. But he was glad that it was now in the open. Just the intonation and pitch of her voice when she had said: ‘Good. We need to talk’, had implied that she was contemplating a future with him in it, unless he was being presumptuous in reading more into it than there was.
Laying in the darkness and allowing a modicum of optimism to rear its head, he had no sense of impending doom; could not foresee the disaster that would strike within hours and threaten to erase all that he now cared for in life.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
APART from Jim, there was only Hugh that she could fully trust without reservation. He was her sidekick; Lewis to her Morse, a loyal colleague and friend who was above suspicion. It flashed through her mind that he was tall, with fair hair and bluish eyes. Thank Christ he lived in the city. He had a swank, top-floor bachelor pad that looked out on The Lord Mayor’s Walk and across to the east side of York Minster, which rose like a Gothic leviathan, defiant against the centuries that ebbed and flowed around it. Laura had stood at the flat’s lounge window and looked up at the cathedral’s twin towers, fancying that she could hear the bells ring, their clappers striking discordantly as the hunchback, Quasimodo – on loan from Notre Dame – swung from rim to rim of the hollow, cast metal cups to impress a horrified Esmeralda.
Laura had been to Hugh’s gaff several times, seen framed photographs of an elderly couple; his parents, now both retired and living in Bournemouth. There had also been a shot of a pretty young woman in mortar-board and gown, proudly clutching a rolled, ribbon-wrapped scroll: his sister Deborah, he had said with pride, who now worked for NASA and was based across the pond in Houston, Texas.
“Car park, Hugh,” Laura said, motioning with her head for him to follow as she rushed out of her office and made off down the corridor to the stairs at the rear of the station, clutching her cigarettes and lighter.
“So what’s with all the cloak and dagger stuff, boss?” Hugh said after Laura lit up and casually looked about her, to assure herself that no eavesdropper was sitting in a car nearby with a window wound down. Welcome to the wonderful world of paranoia.
“It looks as though it could be one of us,” Laura said, staring off towards a stand of tall poplars that towered high above the wall of the car park, wavering, their leaves rustling in a gentle breeze.
Hugh’s brow knitted in a frown. “What might be one of us?”
“The Tacker. He could be a copper. Jim is almost positive that he is.”
“Bollocks! I don’t want to go there, boss. Or even think that it could be a possibility. I’m beginning to really dislike Elliott. I know he’s your uh...friend, but his theories suck. He sounds as though he’s fishing without a net. He’ll have us chasing our own tails while the Tacker carries on killing with impunity.”
“Hugh, there was nothing at Cox’s place but that piece of rope hung where we couldn’t help but find it. If the man is guilty, how come he was so meticulous in not leaving any other shred of evidence, but stupid enough to overlook the bloody rope?
“And his teeth impression doesn’t match the wounds. So without grasping at straws in the wind and inventing an accomplice, he was just a patsy.”
Hugh shook his head. “So humour me. Why does that point to one of us, for Christ’s sake?”
“Because Jim targeted the area that Cox lives in. The killer couldn’t have known where to plant the rope without inside information of that fact. There’s no credible possibility of it being coincidence.”
“I still prefer to think that Cox is involved. It makes a lot more sense than a bloody maniac copper on the loose.”
“But you can see that if Cox isn’t involved, then it has to be someone who has access to the investigation. Can’t you?”
“Yeah,” Hugh said, reluctantly accepting the premise. “I don’t like it, although I can grasp the logic. But for the record, I think that this line of inquiry is going to prove a complete waste of valuable time.”
“Hugh, I―”
“You don’t have to say anything else, boss. I’ll pull the team’s files. Shit, I’ll pull all male personnel’s files,” Hugh said, hiking his shoulders and holding his palms up in resignation. “We should be able to narrow it down through duty rosters and addresses. Anyone living in the target area that was off duty when the girls were lifted will be red-flagged.”
“Don’t forget the SOCO’s, and every other department that has been involved with the case.�
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“I’ll even screen the civvies, right down to the messengers and the car park attendant.”
“Thanks, Hugh. And try to have a little more faith in Jim. He didn’t want to be involved with this in the first place. I asked him to come on board. That he has contributed is a bonus. We deal with crime in general, and most murders we get are domestic, drink/drug related, or carried out during a robbery. Jim was a specialist. He dealt almost exclusively with pattern murderers like this one. He knows how to hunt them down. The Met has a behavioural science unit of sorts. But they don’t have the practical experience; it’s mostly theory. Fortunately, we don’t have the same problem with these psychos as the States do. Out there it’s rife.”
“You really think that he can nail this guy, don’t you, boss?”
“No, Hugh. I know that he can, and will.”
It was midday when Hugh walked into Laura’s office with a printout of thirty-two names. “What do you say we look at this lot over a beer, boss?” he said.
“I didn’t drink on duty till this case was dumped on me, Hugh. I still don’t approve of it, so I’ll let you buy me a Coke. And you can make do with a shandy,” Laura said, slipping on her jacket, glad of the excuse to stretch her aching back, and making a mental note to indent for a new and more comfortable office chair. “Have you got anything promising there?”
“I can’t believe that any of these might be our man. But any one of them could be. They all live in outlying locations, and some even fit the description that Elliott dreamed up. You’ll have to decide how to proceed from here. What do you propose? How the hell are you going to check out over thirty serving officers, ranging in rank from a DCI down to PCs, without causing a shitstorm of hitherto unseen proportions?”
“Jim will be back on the patch tomorrow. He can look at the list and go though the descriptions and addresses, before I decide on anything.”
“You do realise that if Cottrell gets wind of him still being around, then your next job will be mopping out the holding cells and changing bog rolls?”
“So don’t mention him again in front of the team or anybody else, Hugh. You fucked up the other day in the incident room. That’s the only way Cottrell could have got to learn Jim was involved in the first place.”
“That means one of the squad is in the old goat’s pocket, reporting back to him. I won’t slip up again. Scouts honour.”
They walked down the road to the Royal Oak. It was only a two minute stroll away from the station, but brought them both out in a sweat as the heat bounced off the pavement; the soaring temperature unabated by what was now only the whisper of a breeze.
Laura sat in a quiet corner of the lounge bar, away from the shaft of sunlight that shone through a large window to cut a hot path across the faded, paisley-patterned carpet. And while Hugh went to the bar for the drinks, she ran through the list he had given her, to provisionally mentally delete some names as belonging to officers who she deemed too old, too short, or who she knew to be married with families, and therefore outsiders in the field that should throw up a likely candidate. Only one of the team directly involved with the case was on the list: Clem Nash. Clem was twenty-seven, single, and a solid five-eleven, with mousy hair and blue/grey eyes. He had only been a DC for six months, but had been an outstanding uniformed constable with a high arrest rate and above average intelligence. He was taciturn by nature, and didn’t get close to anyone. She had mentioned this to him at an interim interview, pointing out that although a good copper, he was not getting into the spirit of being a team player, and that she was monitoring him, hoping that he would come out of his shell a little before she had to do his ASR. If there was one aspect of the job she hated, it was doing annual staff reports on the junior officers under her command. It was human nature to be antagonised or dispirited by criticism (however constructive the comments) so she went to great lengths to forewarn anyone of what she would be writing, making them aware of any shortcomings or areas that she considered needed working on. She recalled that Clem had said that he wasn’t concerned with developing relationships, just doing the job to the best of his ability.
‘Just write it up as you see it, boss. I’m not political, and I don’t want to play mind games to score points,’ Clem had said to her, giving one of his rare half smiles as the interview reached its conclusion. Laura noted that Clem lived on a converted barge on the river, out near Bishopthorpe. Surely there were far too many other boats and nearby caravan sites in the vicinity to give a killer the privacy he needed. The longer she looked at the list, the more she began to have doubts about everyone on it. But the most unlikely men could be closet killers. She recalled a spate of rapes that had been committed during the summer of oh-six, all carried out on Hampstead Heath. The rapist – when caught in the act – proved to be a fifty-year-old bank manager who lived out in the burbs. He’d been supposedly happily married for twenty-eight years, had two daughters, both at uni, and was on the surface a model citizen who had just reached whatever the male menopause is and gone berserk, raping a total of seven young women in as many weeks. As a copper, she knew not to take anyone at face value.
“One Coke with crushed ice, ma’am,” Hugh said, placing a large schooner in front of her.
“And what’s that?” Laura said, pointing at his pint.
“That’s a shandy. Or to be perfectly honest, a pint of best bitter with a lemonade top, which is as near to being a shandy as I can bring myself to ruin a good pint.”
Laura grinned as Hugh attempted to con her with his boyish charm, but then was suddenly disturbed as he took a sip from the glass, holding it left-handed. She had not previously noticed that he was a lefty. If it hadn’t been Hugh, she would have been convinced that she was sat opposite a leading contender for the title of ‘most wanted serial killer in recent British history’. Thank God that he had family and lived in the city.
“Are you all right, boss? You look as though you just got hit by a lorry,” Hugh said, a concerned edge to his voice.
“I...I’m fine, Hugh. I just feel a little light-headed. I think I might need some food on my stomach. I’ve been skipping meals.”
“They only do snacks and sandwiches and stuff like that in here. Would you rather go somewhere else and get a proper lunch?”
“No, a sandwich will be fine; roast beef if they have it,” Laura said, surprised at how steady her voice sounded.
“Back in a sec,” Hugh said, standing up and heading to the bar.
If I were Jim, I would be looking at Hugh as a suspect, she admitted to herself. Her DS at least merited being on the list that he had furnished her with. After all, it had been Hugh who’d come up with Derek Cox as a suspect. It was feasible that he had set the man up by planting the rope.
“There you go. One roast beef sarny and a packet of crisps for you, and a pork pie with mustard for me. Next time the meal’s on you,” Hugh said as Laura made room for him to put the plates down.
His cheeky grin and kind, laughing eyes smothered her suspicion. Christ, she had worked with Hugh for long enough to know that he was a straight copper; one that loved his job and had no time for criminals. He had made no secret of the fact that he would top rapists, paedophiles and murderers to protect society and make the world a safer place to live in. He had once beaten the shit out of a guy that had hospitalised his wife for the third time, and then arrested the wanker for assault. That, to her, wasn’t the actions of a monster that preyed on women and did what had been done to the victims. Jim had planted the seed in her mind that it was a copper, and now she was letting it propagate and grow out of control.
Hugh left half of the pie, pushed the plate away and took a large mouthful of his beer, which had not been tainted by even a single drop of lemonade.
“At least ninety percent fat and gristle,” he said, scowling at the pie as if it was road kill, and considering whether or not it was worth taking back to the bar to complain about.
“The beef’s fine,” Laura said, ave
rting her gaze away from the teeth marks he had left in both the crust and the unhealthy looking greyish meat.
Less than twenty minutes later they left the pub and began walking back through the growing crowds of office workers that had been let loose for lunch.
“Damn,” Laura said, stopping, turning. “I’ll catch up, Hugh. I took my cigarettes and lighter out of my bag and left them on the table.”
With her back to the bar, she wrapped the half-eaten pie in a paper napkin and secreted it in her shoulder bag with a dexterity that would have brought praise from a stage magician. Her furtive action was lost on the disinterested girl behind the counter, who was pulling a pint and suffering small talk from a punter who was leering at her ample and barely covered breasts, while plying an unoriginal chat up line to deaf ears.
Rejoining Hugh, the cigarettes and lighter in her hand, Laura felt as guilty as most of the criminals she interviewed looked when they’d been caught bang to rights. She felt as though Hugh could see through the black leather shoulder bag. As if with X-ray vision he had located the remains of his lunch and knew that she suspected him.
They both went off duty together that evening at six p.m. and walked across the car park to their vehicles, which were next to each other.
“See you bright and early in the morning,” Hugh said, climbing into his car.
“Early, yes but bright, doubtful,” Laura replied, opening the door and throwing her bag onto the front passenger seat.
“Not planning a night on the town, are you?”
“No, Hugh. Ten hours’ sleep seems more appealing at the moment. I’m knackered. I must be getting old.”
