The Death Collector

by Neil White

  Joe raised his glass in agreement. He planned to do that.

  Twenty-seven

  The cellar door opened and the sound of footsteps on the stairs filled the dark space. Carl stood away from the wall, fear pushing back the threat of sleep. If he slumped, the noose would tighten around his throat. He grimaced and closed his eyes as he waited for the lamp to switch on, opening them slowly when his eyelids turned bright red. He turned his face away until he got used to the glare.

  The man moved in front of the lamp and stepped close to him again, so that his silhouette blocked out the light. He was breathing heavily through his nose, as if his jaw was clenched in anger.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ Carl said, blinking.

  There was a pause before the man said, ‘You could attack me. Bite me or headbutt me. Don’t. No one knows you’re here. No one will hear you outside. You’ll die from lack of water within three days if you annoy me. I will leave you down here for a week if you even try, so be very careful. That’s if you can stay awake. You could weaken and then it would all be over. One slip, one sag of your knees, and you’ll end your days spinning on the spot in here.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Carl said, a sob choking his voice.

  ‘Because you lied to me.’

  ‘Don’t hit me again,’ Carl said. ‘Please. I’m scared.’

  ‘Why? You can leave whenever you want.’

  Carl was confused. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He laughed, his breath warm on Carl’s cheeks. ‘But you’ll be dead when you do. It’s a simple choice: either you stay here or you die. There is no middle way. All you’ve got to do is relax those knees and feel that noose go tight. It will feel like a release.’

  Carl put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  ‘Why?’ he said, his voice breaking.

  ‘I’m a collector,’ the man said. ‘I choose, usually, but it looks like something has just washed up for me this time. So let’s talk some more. We could try the truth for a change. I want to know why you’ve chosen me. Why did you come into my house?’

  Carl didn’t respond.

  ‘You know you’re going to die here, don’t you?’ the man said.

  Carl nodded slowly.

  ‘So talk, and make it easy on yourself.’

  Carl felt a small burst of hope. The man wanted to find out what he knew, and whether anyone else knew. He put his head back and wondered what he could say. He guessed that his survival was still only as good for as long as he held onto his secrets.

  ‘Like I said, I’m just a kid who wanted a look round your house.’

  There was the swish of movement before Carl gasped at the sharp prick of metal under his chin. He tried to move his head away but he couldn’t.

  ‘Don’t tell me lies,’ the man said. ‘One more and this blade will go so deep you’ll be grateful for the noose, just to stop the pain.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry,’ Carl said, a stammer in his voice. ‘I’m looking for my dad, and I think he came looking for you, and now he’s gone missing.’

  ‘Why would he come looking for me?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s a policeman and he was looking into one of his old cases. He had a list of addresses, and your house was on it. So I was looking at you when the police caught me.’

  ‘So what do you know about me?’

  ‘Nothing, I swear. Nothing at all.’

  ‘What about my name?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about you. It’s just an address. Let me go and I won’t say anything.’

  There was no response for a few minutes. Carl waited for another blow or a deeper push with the knife, but the man said, ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘I’ve told you. It was just a list my father was looking at. I’ve looked at other houses too.’

  ‘But you came back for me.’

  ‘You seemed different from the people in the other houses I looked at, that’s all.’

  The knife left Carl’s neck and the man stepped away. His hand went to his forehead, and he seemed to be grimacing.

  The man turned back. ‘Do you want to know about me?’

  Carl swallowed and then shook his head. ‘Not any more. I just want to go home.’

  ‘Why? You might learn something.’

  ‘Why would it matter, if I’m going to die?’

  A pause. ‘I can see your point.’ A few more minutes passed before the man said, ‘Like I said, I’m a collector.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Beautiful things. You’re too young to understand.’

  Carl looked towards the floor. ‘So what about the woman who was in here, the dead one? Did you collect her too?’

  The man pushed the knife into Carl’s neck, the tip just breaking the skin, making Carl cry out.

  ‘Don’t make it sound so cheap,’ the man said, anger in his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Carl said desperately. ‘I don’t understand, that’s all. When you say collect, you mean that the woman on the floor was someone you just wanted to have?’

  ‘I’d already had her,’ the man said, and then he laughed, moving the blade from Carl’s neck. ‘Her problem was that she wanted to leave, to get away.’ He shook his head. ‘No one ever gets away.’ He paused before he said quietly, ‘I’ve got someone coming round later. Whatever happens now is your fault. You’ve accelerated this. I need to act quickly. I want you to know that everything that happens is down to you.’

  ‘What do you mean, that it’s my fault?’

  ‘The end is getting closer. So I’ve just got some loose ends to tie up.’

  The man reached into his pocket and pulled out some rags. Carl knew what was going to come and tried to pull away, but it was no good. One of the rags was jammed into his mouth and, before he had chance to spit it out, the other was wrapped around his head, keeping it in place, the knot tight behind him.

  And with that, his captor turned and left the cellar, the key louder in the lock this time.

  Carl put his head back against the wall, taking deep breaths through the gag. He needed to decide which put him in most danger: going along with the man, or against him. Hunger and fatigue weakened him though. His legs didn’t feel strong and his body swayed.

  He didn’t know how much longer he could last.

  Twenty-eight

  ‘So what are you expecting when we get there?’ Charlotte asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the road ahead.

  Sam had co-opted Charlotte after leaving Evans’s office under the pretence of speaking to some of Sarah’s friends, to build up a picture of her husband, but he had disclosed his true purpose on the drive away from the station. They were heading for the spot where Sarah’s body had been discovered to try to work out if there was anything special about it, anything that might indicate why the killer had chosen that place to leave her.

  ‘You can back out, you know,’ Sam said. ‘Hunter will be unhappy if he finds out, and Evans won’t back us up.’

  ‘But Evans knows what you’re doing?’

  ‘She’ll take the credit if I’ve got it right. Sell me out if I haven’t.’

  ‘That’s okay then,’ Charlotte said, smiling. ‘Hunter has only got a couple of years left in him. It’s people like Evans we should worry about. She’s got another decade in her, and even if she sells us out on this case, she’ll remember that we tried and be all right with us.’

  When Sam focused again on the road ahead, she repeated her question. ‘So, don’t keep me in suspense, what are you expecting when we get there?’

  ‘I just thought we would look at the scene with fresh eyes,’ Sam said.

  They were driving uphill in Charlotte’s car, leaving behind the late-afternoon Manchester rush hour.

  As they got closer, the moors flattening out and creating a barren plateau of browns and purples, Charlotte sat forward, her arms on the wheel. ‘It looks quiet,’ she said, confusion in her voice.

  Sam didn’t say any
thing but a sense of dread crept into him. He had expected to see some poor uniformed officer stationed behind fluttering crime scene tape, hunched up in a coat and questioning his career choice. Instead it was all back to normal, as if the discovery earlier hadn’t happened at all. There was only a small bunch of sunflowers attached to a post as a memorial.

  Charlotte parked her car where she believed the killer must have parked his, in a small bay closest to the obvious route to the body, and stepped out. The wind was cold, despite the season. It seemed to whistle across the surface, fluttering the heather and making the soft white heads of the hare’s tail grasses wave. The sharpness made Sam’s eyes water as he reached in for his coat before heading to where the soft soil and heather began.

  He looked at the spread of the moors, disbelief on his face.

  ‘Hunter has released the scene already,’ he said.

  Charlotte walked beside him, pulling on her own coat. ‘They did a sweep this morning, the usual lines, dog and stick thing. What else is there to do?’

  ‘It just seems too early. We’ll have all the ghouls up here later, once the details come out.’

  ‘It’s a public space. We can’t preserve it for ever.’

  She was right, he knew that, but it seemed that the horror from earlier in the day had been forgotten as the landscape returned to normal. There was a small group of walkers in dark fleeces and heavy boots. Cyclists in Lycra rode past. A couple held each other as they looked at the view, her long dark hair streaming back in the wind and over the shoulders of her denim jacket.

  ‘How far along was she?’ Sam asked. ‘It all looks the same once you get away from the road.’

  ‘There.’ Charlotte pointed to a cluster of grass a long way ahead. Sam could see where it had been flattened by the attentions of the crime scene investigators.

  They both walked in silence before Sam stopped. He turned around, his hands on his hips, and shook his head.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte said.

  ‘Look around.’

  Charlotte turned. The moors spread as far as they could see. There was the barely audible hum of the motorway a couple of miles away. There was nothing to block the sound, no trees or buildings, just the long roll and tumble of grass and heather, so the noise hovered over the landscape like a loud whisper. In the distance there was the glimmer of a reservoir, trees clustered along its banks, the view down the valley giving a hint of the urban sprawl at the foot of the hills, the tower blocks of a satellite town just visible.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ she said.

  ‘The view of the road is just the same here as it is where she was left. So why dump her there,’ and he pointed, ‘fifty yards further ahead? How long would it take him to get there? Legs, arms, a torso and a head. That’s three trips at least. A hundred yards extra with each run. It could add on a minute each time, meaning he opted to hang around for three minutes extra, arousing suspicion the whole time. It makes no sense.’

  ‘What if he used something to carry the body?’ Charlotte said. ‘A wheelbarrow or a sheet.’

  ‘There’d be marks – a line of flattened heather or a wheel track. There’s nothing.’

  ‘So you’re saying that the specific spot is important?’

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense,’ Sam said. He set off again, the clumps of grass making his trousers wet, the ground soft underfoot.

  When they got to the spot where Sarah had been found, Sam looked down and shook his head. ‘It’s all gone. No trace left. Everything back to normal as if it meant nothing.’

  ‘They’ve done the sweep, the body has gone,’ Charlotte reiterated. ‘They can’t close off the moors.’

  Sam’s mind flashed back to when his own sister was killed. The path through the woods was closed overnight, but by the next morning it had been back to normal, apart from the few ghouls it attracted, who like to gawp at murder scenes under the pretence of laying flowers. By the following day, it was as if her death had meant nothing. The path became quieter, some parents warning their children away, but over time Ellie was just forgotten.

  When Sam looked at Charlotte, her brow was creased with concern.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Sam said.

  ‘You’re taking this too personally,’ she said. ‘Follow the orders, submit your paperwork, don’t make a hash of anything.’

  ‘Murder is important. It can’t be relegated to paper-turning.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know this?’ Charlotte said. ‘That you’re the only one who really knows what murder means because your sister was killed?’ When Sam flinched, she softened. ‘I don’t want to fall out with you about this, Sam, but you need to be careful. If you get it right, bravo, and you’ll get a reputation and some respect, but what if you don’t? What if Hunter’s hunch is right and the husband did it? You’ll just be the man who almost derailed things by thinking he knows best. Your career will be finished.’

  ‘And if I’m right and I don’t do anything, I should just be happy that I followed Hunter’s direction?’

  ‘They’ll blame Hunter, not you.’

  ‘I’ll blame me,’ Sam said, exasperated. He looked down and shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t be about me. It’s about the victim, making it right for her; I’ve got to go with how I feel.’

  ‘And you’re ready for the consequences if you’ve got it wrong?’

  Sam nodded. ‘I joined the police for emotional reasons. I’m not going to forget those.’

  ‘Your sister.’

  ‘Yes, my sister, and how the Force tried to look after us and make it right. When I approach a case, I think of how those detectives tried to do the right thing. I don’t blame them for not catching whoever murdered Ellie, but I want to do the same, follow my instincts.’

  ‘Not orders?’

  ‘We’ll do what Hunter says. I just think we should do a little extra too.’

  Charlotte rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. ‘All right, I can see you’re not going to change your mind.’ She smiled, despite herself. ‘Go on then, Sherlock, look around. What do you think?’

  Sam looked at the grass, flattened and muddied. The dumping ground.

  ‘Why didn’t he bury her?’ he said. ‘Think of those poor children murdered by Brady and Hindley. Keith Bennett is still under here somewhere. It’s as if the soil just swallowed him up.’

  ‘It moves,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just that. It’s peat, and it’s soft, so sometimes it shifts around. It means a body can move from its original location. Even if Brady was willing to point to the exact spot where he buried Keith Bennett, his body might have gone walkabout through the decades, shifted around by the moving peat.’

  ‘So all the more reason to bury her,’ Sam said. ‘She would never be found and go down as just another runaway. These moors could be a graveyard for a lot of people and no one would know. So, yes, the isolation makes sense, but why not bury her?’

  ‘X marks the spot,’ Charlotte said, a half-smile on her lips.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Think of how the body was set out,’ she said. ‘The arms and legs were splayed out like an X-marking. If the location is important, what better sign is there than a big cross spelled out by a dead body?’

  Sam’s smile spread as he thought about that. ‘You might have something there.’

  ‘So what now?’

  Sam checked his watch. ‘Now, we go home.’

  ‘And tonight?’

  ‘I do some research, see if I can discover anything about this location.’

  ‘And if you find something?’

  ‘I speak to Hunter. Hopefully he’ll listen if I do.’

  Twenty-nine

  His hand clenched the steering wheel tightly. Carl Jex was still in the cellar. It had been a couple of hours since he had been down there. It made everything riskier but he couldn’t stop now. Emma was next to him, sitting quietly.

  She
leaned forward and looked through the windscreen. They were outside his house. ‘You’ve never brought me here before.’

  ‘It feels like the right time,’ he said.

  He climbed out of the car and held out his arm for Emma to hold onto as they walked to his door. As they went inside, he reached for her coat to slip it from her shoulders. He hung it on a tall wooden coat stand as the light in the hallway flickered, as if the bulb was about to go. He glanced upwards and grimaced. The mood had to be right. He didn’t want to spoil it by searching for spare bulbs.