The Moth Man (Alex Hastings Series)

by Jennie Finch

  It did mean some of them were struggling to meet their commitments at the day centre, however, and rather than have them turn down what was often the closest thing to a job they had ever been offered, Alex undertook some rescheduling, opening both the main centre and the workshop for a couple of evenings each week. Trading heavily on her colleagues’ good will, she had managed to cover all the groups without needing any additional staff but this was probably not really sustainable in the long term and she was especially concerned about what was likely to happen over the summer.

  She could see it all – officers off on holiday, new priorities flooding forth from headquarters in Taunton, larger case-loads for everyone and precious little money to attract someone who could contribute more than basic baby-sitting skills to the day-centre experiment. She set her notes aside with a sigh. There was nothing she could do until the new senior arrived and worrying would only take valuable time and energy. Think positively, she told herself sternly. The telephone on her desk rang and she picked it up, answering absently.

  ‘Alex? Hi, am I interrupting anything?’ said the voice of Dave Brown. Without waiting for her reply he hurried on, ‘I wonder if I might pick your brains a bit?’

  Alex wasn’t sure she had much in the way of brains to offer but gave him a non-committal grunt by way of encouragement. She was very fond of Dave and besides, he had come to her rescue out on the Levels earlier in the year, arriving in time to apprehend the nasty little drug dealer called Max who was threatening to drown her in the Avalon Marsh.

  ‘It’s about these incidents,’ said Dave. ‘The “Moth Man” – you know, the man who flings himself naked against some poor woman’s conservatory at night. I’m really struggling to make any sense out of the information we’ve got and I wondered if you …’ His voice trailed off as the silence from Alex’s end of the line seemed to push back at his eagerness. ‘Hello? Alex – are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, reluctantly.

  ‘Oh – good. So, could I come over and maybe go over a few things. It’s a bit unorthodox but …’

  Alex cut him off abruptly. ‘I don’t know why you think I could be any use. I’m a probation officer – that’s all. I run a day centre and try to get jobs for petty criminals with brains the size of a flea. That’s what I do, Dave. I don’t know anything about detective work so, sorry, I can’t help.’

  She hung up the phone and tried to turn her attention to the notes for the evening session but her thoughts kept returning to Dave’s request and all it entailed.

  ‘Damn!’ she muttered. ‘Double damn!’ She flung her pen across the room in disgust and stormed off to find a coffee from somewhere in the main building.

  First came the selection, then the planning, he thought. A lot of planning that involved travelling and studying his chosen one from afar. Working out every detail of the arrival, the act and the escape, because only fools with no patience, no sense of the occasion, acted on impulse. You had to know your special woman. Understand and anticipate how they would react when finally, finally you came calling for them. Every step was walked through in the mind before the actual event. All the options considered and all the choices made so it was one seamless, perfect moment.

  Only after all that came the watching – a time to anticipate the pleasure that was to come. Books and films were full of characters who knew they were being spied on. They stopped whatever they were doing, often giving a little shiver as if they could feel the observer’s eyes on them, twin pinpricks of laser light crawling across their bodies. They would look around, in these stories, turning abruptly just in time to catch a glimpse of their stalker. This never happened to him. Perhaps he was more careful than all those characters from fiction. Or the objects of his affections were particularly insensitive. Or maybe that just didn’t happen in real life, because he could watch, hidden in the shrubbery or behind a tree and the focus of his desire just carried on with whatever they were doing. There was no twitching of shoulders, no sudden stares or uncomfortable glances out of windows. It was just him watching, sharing a secret moment with the woman in the glass case who was posing and performing just for him, even if she didn’t know it yet.

  Yes, the watching was most pleasurable.

  In the detectives’ room at Taunton, Dave replaced the handset and sighed. It had been a rather long shot but worth a try, he thought. Lauren had let slip about Alex’s twin degrees a couple of weeks ago and Dave was most interested in her qualification in psychology. He’d done a bit of reading around the subject himself and knew enough to realise it wasn’t a magic key, opening up the personality for examination. Still, he also thought there were some interesting aspects of this offender’s behaviour that might bear closer scrutiny and Alex was the only person he knew who had the right background for the job.

  Chewing on his biro, he went back to the notes, searching for the one link that might help him track down the Moth Man. There had been no reports of any suspicious activity for several weeks but Dave suspected this was because the perpetrator was getting ready, preparing and perhaps following his intended victim. The lack of evidence, the care taken to leave as few traces as possible and the complete blank surrounding any form of transport convinced Dave of one thing. These were not random attacks and they were not committed on impulse. He was hunting a cunning, careful predator who was going to strike again.

  Chapter Eleven

  On the train down to Dartmoor, Iris sat and stared out of the window, her stomach twisting and clenching with anxiety. She had put it off so often, she scarcely knew how to broach the subject of Newt’s father now. When she had hinted at the fact that her husband, Derek, was not his biological father, Newt had listened but not pursued the topic. He had seemed more concerned about Biff, his younger brother. Despite being so different, Newt and Biff had been very close and Iris knew her son missed his little brother very much.

  ‘You can’t blame yerself,’ she had insisted at their last meeting. ‘Was not your fault the police was waiting for you at the post office. And was nothing you could do once they’d separated you both. Biff made his own choices, though God knows, they was right stupid ones.’

  She stopped, unable to continue as she blinked back tears. Locked up alone in a custody cell, left to sweat it out in the hope he would give up the rest of the gang who were targeting local post offices, Biff had managed to hang himself with the blanket they’d given him for the night. In theory, someone should have checked on him every half-hour or so but somehow he was forgotten, left alone with his own thoughts and fears.

  There was the suspicion it was all a horrible accident and Biff had been trying to gain sympathy and attention, a play for leniency when he was up in court, but if so he had misjudged the whole situation badly. Newt still felt responsible for his brother’s death, she knew. He was the clever one, the leader who directed and moderated Biff’s undoubted talent for violence and intimidation. Newt was the one who devised the post office raids.

  He had the uncanny ability to shin up walls as if he had suckers on his hands and feet, a talent he put to good use when indulging his propensity for burglary. Together the brothers had wrought havoc across the Levels until they were betrayed, caught red-handed breaking into their fifth post office in a month. Sentenced to two years in Dartmoor, Newt had plenty of time to think about his future. With his father and brother gone, his view of the world changed dramatically. He watched his mother struggling with her grief, reflected on the events that had brought the remains of his family to their current sorry state and decided he needed to look for another line of work when he got out.

  As an ‘escapee’, he found his options severely limited for the first part of his sentence. The authorities took a dim view of his escapade and for a number of months showed no signs of restoring any but the most basic of privileges. Their suspicions were further raised when news of his father’s actions filtered through to the prison. In their eyes he was the son and sole heir to Derek Johns’ criminal em
pire, a little gang-lord in the making, and they kept a strict look out for any signs of the organisation within the walls of Dartmoor. Prison life was hazardous enough without allowing imported gang rivalries to flourish unchallenged.

  Newt resigned himself to a long, Spartan stretch inside, an hiatus in his young life made lonelier by his determination not to play leader to the men from the Levels who appeared and then vanished with depressing regularity. The Somerset inmates were hurt and angry at his rejection of their homage and many of the other prisoners were too scared by his family’s reputation to respond to any overture of friendship he might make. It was only when Alex Hastings, on one of her regular visits, raised the subject of post-release employment that the authorities agreed to let Newt attend the classes available to his cohort.

  Choices were limited, centring round basic educational skills and a very small range of manual jobs. Newt was never going to be allowed out into the gardens or farm again and he was already fully literate, so apart from maths there was little to attract him. Despite this, he greeted the chance with enthusiasm and proved to be a fast learner, attentive, eager and popular with his teacher. It was a sad day when he reached the end of the highest available curriculum, but as he was making his farewells at the end of the lesson the teacher put out a hand to stop him as leaving the room.

  ‘Perhaps I might have a word?’ he said, nodding to the guard.

  ‘I’ll need to lock you in,’ said the warder as he rounded up the other prisoners. ‘Be back when I’ve delivered this lot, right?’

  The teacher nodded his agreement, signalling to Newt who sat down at a table and waited.

  ‘You have done extremely well Johns,’ he said once they were alone. ‘I only wish we had time to enter you for the O level,’ he said. ‘Sadly, the last papers are in a couple of months and then a new exam is being introduced. Hopefully you will have left us by then.’ He smiled, a crooked little smile and Newt, despite himself, responded in kind.

  ‘Reckon,’ said Newt. ‘I figures I should be out round about September. Lost half my parole but still got three months left of ‘un.’ There was a pause and Newt shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Mr Norris …’ he hesitated. ‘If’n that’s all, I should go. Is dinner time and they don’t like latecomers.’

  Norris nodded but made no move to summon an escort. Instead he walked over to the corner of the room where a large, square shape stood on a bench, covered by a dark cover.

  ‘Come and have a look at this,’ he said and somewhat reluctantly Newt rose and crossed the room to join him.

  Norris slid the cover up and folded it carefully, placing it on a desk beside him.

  ‘What do you think of that then?’ he asked.

  Newt stared at the machine in front of him. It was big – about a foot square and standing about four inches high with an equally large television screen standing on the top. There was a long, grey keyboard attached by a wire and a strange little box with two buttons next to it. Newt, who had lived on the Levels all his life and left school seven years previously, had never seen anything like it.

  ‘Where’s that to then?’ he asked finally.

  Mr Norris was from Bath and has a reasonable grasp of the Somerset dialect. ‘It’s called a PC,’ he said. ‘A personal computer. They teach them in a lot of schools now and I put in for a machine a little while ago. We only got the one, but this is a good one.’ He laid his hand on the top of the television screen possessively. ‘This is IBM standard, it’s got a colour monitor and it runs a lot of the programs used in offices and businesses outside.’

  He stopped and looked at Newt thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s been sitting here for a few weeks now. To be honest, I’ve been almost afraid to use it. We’ll not get another one in a hurry. In fact, I’m astonished we got this one. Anyway,’ he realised he was possibly sharing a little too much with a prisoner, ‘I thought you might like to be my first student. You’ve a very good head for maths and a knowledge of simple programming would be most helpful to you when you leave. I think we can cover the basics – word processing, databases, spreadsheets and so on, in the time you have left. What do you think?’

  Newt blinked at the machine, shaking his head slowly.

  ‘Being honest I ’ent sure,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I heard of computers, of course, but most of what you just said – I ’ent got a clue what it all means.’

  There was the sound of the door being unlocked behind them and Norris slid the cover back over his PC.

  ‘Think about it anyway and let me know what you decide,’ he said.

  Newt glanced at the warder who peered round the doorway, impatient to be off. ‘Reckon I’ll give it a go,’ he said. ‘’Ent nothing else they’s offering and is nice, getting off the landing and doing something new.’

  It was not quite the whole-hearted enthusiasm Norris had hoped for but he smiled encouragingly as Newt was led away to his late, cold dinner.

  There was some discussion between the prison officers on his wing as to whether he should be allowed through to the visiting room. Knowing any intervention on his part would only make things worse, Newt sat in his cell, listening to the voices outside the open door as he struggled to keep calm. He minded missing the visit for himself – of course he did. He still felt homesick, even after eighteen months in Dartmoor. In some ways, it was getting worse as he crept close to his release date. Most of all, however, he hated the thought of his mother travelling all this way, only to be turned away through no fault of her own – or of his.

  He’d not asked to be kept back by the teacher and it wasn’t his fault he was late for his meal but that didn’t count for much with some of the screws. He tried to make out who was winning the argument but just when it sounded as if they had come to a decision an angry voice interrupted and they went back to the beginning again. Resisting the urge to slam the cell door in their faces, Newt made himself lie down on his bunk, opening the library book he kept under his pillow. He presented a picture of serenity when one of the warders finally looked round the door and yelled.

  ‘Hey, Johns! On yer feet. Got a visitor and you’m been late already once today.’

  Keeping his face neutral, Newt marked his place in the book, put it neatly under his pillow and jumped to the ground. He followed the warder along the gantry to the stairs and down onto the main floor. Their footsteps rang on the metal steps, a constant, harsh cacophony that had formed the background to Newt’s days for the duration of his sentence. He thought sometimes he would never get the sound out of his ears, wondering in the long nights if he would be able to sleep without hearing the sound of steps advancing towards his door.

  Through a maze of corridors and gates, he progressed fitfully, standing, waiting, lifting his arms to be searched, turning round before the warders’ hard gazes, before finally donning a bright yellow tabard and being ushered through the door to the visitors’ room. Iris sat at a table near the far corner, her head held up as if refusing to show weakness in the midst of the surrounding misery. Family groups, huddled around larger tables, juggled with small children who wriggled and fretted at being held and bounced around by men who were strangers to them. Toddlers stood, wide-eyed and suspicious, leaning against their mothers for reassurance whilst their older siblings feigned indifference, attention held by a book or toy they guarded fiercely in this den of thieves.

  Newt picked his way around the tables, settling in to the chair opposite his mother.

  ‘Starting to think you wasn’t coming,’ she said with a quick smile to take away the implied criticism.

  ‘Starting to think the same thing,’ said Newt.

  Iris reached into her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes, handing one to her son and lighting it with a cheap disposable lighter. Newt nodded his thanks and took a single puff before putting it out carefully, hiding the scarcely-smoked tube in his hand. After a moment, he slid it behind his ear casually, teasing his hair down a bit. Cigarettes were precious,
an alternate currency in a place where only the most valued and industrious could earn more than a couple of pounds a week. Newt didn’t smoke but he knew a lot of men who did.

  Iris watched her son go through the same rituals as her husband had before him but the resemblance ended there. Newt was growing up and he neither looked nor acted anything like Derek. Not surprising, she thought. Not in the least surprising.

  ‘You’s getting more like your Dad every day,’ she said.

  Newt sat very still, aware that the topic, now raised so directly, could not be easily ignored.

  ‘Look at you and I can see ‘um, all them years ago.’ She scanned his face for any reaction but Newt sat mute before her.

  ‘Is three things you got from him,’ went on Iris doggedly. ‘Yer hair, yer name and seems you’s growing up real nice, thoughtful like he was.’

  A frown flitted across her son’s face.

  ‘Thought I got my hair from you,’ he said. ‘You was sort of red, before …’ He stopped, embarrassed by the direction the conversation was taking. ‘I mean, I reckon it looks fine now – just, well …’

  ‘Oh don’t be so soft boy,’ said Iris crossly. ‘Think I went grey overnight with the shock of Derek turning up like that, and him half dead and mad too? Been turnin’ for a while now but I never could let it grow in. Started to colour it a sort of red when I was carrying you and could never stop once you made yer appearance, you with that carrot-top.’

  Newt was thoroughly confused. Name – well, he was a Johns, like his mother and Derek. Regarding his hair, he was surprised to learn Iris wasn’t (and never had been) a redhead. He thought for a moment but could not recall anyone in his past with red hair and certainly no-one who might fit the role of absent father. As for growing up thoughtful, well there were a lot of ways he could describe the late Derek Johns but thoughtful was certainly not one of them.