The Murder Code

by Mosby, Steve

  ‘You’ve got the wrong office then. This is Laura Fellowes and some jerk called Hicks.’

  ‘Lame.’ I closed the door behind me. ‘That’s the name of our John Doe. Derek Evans.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She began typing. As she pulled the name from our files, I told her what I’d found out in Troll East.

  According to the guy I’d spoken to, Evans was somewhere in his fifties and had been a squaddie when he was younger. After leaving the service, he’d wandered for a bit, never landed fully on his feet. Dragged a troubled history underground with him and found some kind of god to help salve it with. He was a big guy that nobody messed with.

  ‘Nothing on the files for him.’

  ‘No convictions,’ I said. There were a dozen other databases we could check. Evans was bound to show up somewhere, especially having served. And despite my unease about the man I’d spoken to in the tunnels, the details all fitted. ‘He hadn’t been seen around for a few days, but that’s not unusual. Evans liked the open air, apparently—liked to sleep outside when the weather was good enough. So that seems right.’

  Laura nodded.

  ‘Where does this leave us?’

  ‘We’ll need to check for connections to Vicki Gibson. Seems unlikely, but you never know. What did we get from the postmortems? You still look a bit green, by the way.’

  ‘Mmm. I think you got the better deal after all.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  She told me what the autopsies had revealed, although a lot of the information remained provisional and tests still needed to be run. The upshot so far was that Dale was convinced the same weapon had been used in both attacks—or, at least, the same type of weapon.

  ‘A hammer, he guesses.’

  ‘That fits.’

  ‘Time of death is also roughly what we were expecting. Sometime between two and three in the morning, although it’s hard to be totally sure. He can’t say what order they were killed in. Well, not from that, anyway.’

  I frowned. ‘Not from that. Explain.’

  ‘There’re two things. The first is the ferocity of the attacks. It’s not conclusive, but a lot more damage was meted out on Evans. That might indicate that after Gibson, the killer wasn’t …’ she grimaced, ‘spent.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘That’s Dale’s choice of words.’

  ‘Dale needs to see a psychiatrist,’ I said. It didn’t seem all that conclusive to me, not necessarily. ‘What’s the other thing?’

  ‘The other thing is what makes it almost certain that we’re dealing with the same killer. Dale found traces of polythene in both bodies.’

  ‘Polythene?’

  ‘Traces of it,’ she said. ‘In their wounds, to be precise. And there was much more of it in Evans’s skull than in Gibson’s.’

  She let that sink in.

  ‘A carrier bag?’ I said.

  Laura nodded. That’s Dale’s guess. Still to be confirmed. But it looks like the hammer was in a bag when the killer hit the victims with it. It must have got slightly damaged while he used it on Gibson, so he left a lot more behind during the assault on Evans.’

  I blew out slowly.

  The horror of it was one thing—the imagery it conjured up—but I tried to concentrate on what it meant. Had the killer been attempting not to leave evidence behind? That didn’t make much sense.

  ‘He wanted to keep the weapon clean?’

  ‘Could be,’ Laura said. ‘Or else he wanted to carry it around without arousing suspicion. Beforehand, obviously. Not much chance of that afterwards, I’m guessing.’

  ‘Unless he turned the bag inside out.’

  Laura grimaced again. ‘You have a sick mind, Hicks. But that’s also true. The river search has turned up lots of old bags, so that’ll keep us busy. I’ve also ramped up the search of bins in the vicinity. It’s possible he abandoned the bag when he was done with it, especially if it had ripped that badly.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I didn’t think we’d get that lucky, though. I leaned back in my chair, thinking it all over. Our killer had come prepared to attack Vicki Gibson; he’d been successful enough in that—but then he’d wandered a reasonably short distance, found Evans asleep on a bench, and killed him too, even more viciously.

  I said, ‘We need to find the connection between them.’

  ‘If there is one.’

  ‘There must be something. If not, it means we’ve got a guy who attacks people at random. And that doesn’t make any sense to me. None. At. All.’

  ‘Maybe not entirely at random,’ Laura said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She sighed, then gestured vaguely at the piles of paperwork on the desk. The witness reports—the interviews that had got us nowhere because, for some inexplicable reason, nobody had seen anything at all.

  ‘Explain?’

  ‘Maybe she was just the first available person, and Evans the second.’

  I looked at the statements. And thought about it. A killer carrying his hammer out of sight in a carrier bag. Just wandering. Innocuous. Someone who didn’t stand out.

  Laura said, ‘We were wondering how he’d managed to catch Vicki Gibson at a time when nobody was around and nobody was looking. But maybe that’s not what happened at all.’

  ‘He didn’t find her deliberately,’ I said. ‘He just happened to be in a place without witnesses when they crossed paths.’

  Laura nodded. ‘I think that’s what might have happened.’

  ‘That would mean it could have been …’

  ‘Anyone,’ she said. ‘Yes. I think it could have been anyone. Anyone at all.’

  Eleven

  KRAMER’S HEART IS THUMPING hard as he walks.

  His breath clouds in front of him. The night is cold, the sky overhead clear of clouds. You can’t usually see the stars here in the city, not with the light pollution, but a few have prickled through. The moon is bright and full, a worn silver coin hanging over the city.

  He shivers as he walks, his teeth chattering.

  It’s partly the cold, but most of it’s adrenalin.

  That’s okay. When he first started working the doors, Trevor told him it was natural to be scared. Everybody is scared of physical confrontation. On the door, you have to hide it, but only on the surface, only ever from your opponent. If you hide the fear from yourself, it fucks you over, but if you’re canny you can use the adrenalin. That’s what gives you the edge.

  Ideally, though, he wants to dampen it down a little before he reaches his destination, so he rolls saliva around in his mouth. That’s another piece of advice Trevor gave him: control the fear by rolling spit. It works too, although he doesn’t know why.

  So he walks, trying to stay calm but ready. Trying to keep everything coiled up for when he needs it.

  Not far now. Not long.

  Kramer checks the carrier bag he’s holding. If there was anyone around, to all appearances it would just look full of laundry. That will be his immediate explanation if he’s stopped by the police. It’s unlikely they’ll search the bag. If that happens, he’s in deep shit. Hidden beneath the clothes, there’s a ten-inch double-bladed machete, a luminous-green water pistol full of ammonia, and a hammer.

  Not that he’s spotted any police so far, mind, and he doesn’t really expect to round here. So he won’t see those items again until he reaches the house he’s heading to, on the edge of the Fairfield estate.

  Kramer leaves the main street and heads down a ginnel, lined on either side with tall wooden fences. It’s the quickest cut-through. A few bends and he’ll be out on to the edge of the waste ground, then just across to the estate beyond. He’s been there before, from time to time, calling up debts. It’s certainly the place for them: a maze of grey one-storey blocks, with lots of little alleyways in between; all feral kids, barking dogs, and bins lying in the middle of the streets. The whole place is one big fucking debt.

  He doesn’t think too much about what he’s
going to do when he gets there. It’s pointless to get ahead of yourself. Knock on the door. When it opens—or if it doesn’t, kick the fucking thing off its hinges—go in. A faceful of ammonia to put anyone down, then it’ll be hammer in one hand, machete in the other. That’s as far as he’s thinking, because when you get hung up on a plan, you get strung out when the plan goes wrong. He’s seen it with traditional martial artists on the door. In the dojo it’s all straight lines, but there aren’t any straight lines when you’re rolling around on the fucking pavement. You need to adapt.

  But he knows this: a message needs to be sent.

  The first time it happened on the doors, it was some dealers trying to muscle their way in, figuring they were fifteen strong and the door team were five. Trevor explained to Kramer what would happen and asked whether he was cool with it, and Kramer said he was. They picked out the main guy and, the next morning, staged a little home invasion: smashed his knees and elbows with a hammer and put the machete up his arse. He didn’t die. Didn’t tell the police either. But most importantly, he didn’t turn up at the club again. None of them did.

  The difference tonight is he’s doing it alone. But that’s okay—and even if it wasn’t, it’s the way it needs to be, because the slight was personal: the black bodybuilder, Connor, mugging him off in front of everyone last night. Making threats, fancying himself. Kramer isn’t the biggest guy, and probably looks like an easy mark to make for a guy on the up. Of course, anyone who’s anyone knows Kramer behaves badly out of hours. Maybe Connor has been told since, as he didn’t turn up at the club tonight. But that isn’t good enough.

  All it took was a few discreet enquiries to find the guy’s address.

  He steps out of the end of the ginnel.

  It’s four in the morning, so the wasteland looks deserted. The ground is pale and dead-looking; what isn’t open is just patches of shivery grass and larger clumps of night-black bushes. Even a dumping ground like the estate needs one of its own. The wasteland is the kind of place you find burnt-out cars and illegally tipped rubbish—piles of counterfeit CD cases and ragged bags of old torn clothes. Kramer picks his way carefully along one of the makeshift paths that leads across its heart. He can see the sprawl of the estate in the background, the houses as dull grey and dead as teeth in the dark.

  His breath still fogs, but he can hardly see it now. His trainers crunch softly on the gravel and dirt. At his side, the bag rustles.

  Kramer follows the path through a cluster of bushes. Up close, the leaves are almost invisible in the darkness. The branches are skeletal. In front of him, it’s difficult to see—

  He stops.

  There is someone a little way ahead of him.

  He starts swirling the saliva around his mouth again. The figure is about ten metres away, but it’s impossible to make out any details. Not big, not small. Little more than a silhouette of a human being against a silhouette of bushes.

  But facing him. And standing very still.

  For a moment, Kramer does the same. Neither of them moves.

  Then the figure turns around and walks away, disappearing off to the side, round the back of the bushes.

  Kramer remains standing in place, but a few seconds later, relief floods him, and he almost laughs at himself. It was just someone doing the same thing as him—taking a short cut across the waste ground, coming the opposite way. The guy saw Kramer, froze up, and decided it was sensible to back off and go a different way.

  Obviously he doesn’t look like someone to mess with. What’s that saying? Wouldn’t want to meet him down a dark alley. That’s what the guy is probably thinking about him right now.

  Kramer shakes his head and starts walking again, slightly annoyed. Despite the fact that nothing really happened, the encounter has given the adrenalin a little kick and brought it to life: started it working before he wants it to. He feels invincible right now, but that’s—

  He stops again.

  Someone else is standing there, backed into the bushes where the stranger was. Kramer can see the red glow of a cigarette in the darkness.

  Two guys meeting up out here? Well, there’s certainly an explanation for that. Not one he cares for exactly, but not one he’s scared of either. He’ll just walk past—he starts doing so—and ignore the man …

  But it’s not a cigarette, he realises. The light from it doesn’t fluctuate. Doesn’t change.

  As he reaches the spot, Kramer peers into the bush and sees the red LED light burning small and intense between the leaves. Then the black circle of a lens. A camera, pointing into the bush on the opposite side of the path.

  He turns.

  There’s a small clearing. There is a chance—briefly—to see the woman lying on her back there, and to see there is something wrong with her. To realise, just, that she is far too still and that her face isn’t where it should be.

  But there is not time to put all the facts together in his head and make sense of what is happening. Because right then, he hears the quick, heartbeat punch of feet in the gravel behind him, and the whipping, wing-like sound of polythene cracking the night-time air.

  And then nothing.

  DAY THREE

  Twelve

  THE NEXT MORNING FELT colder than it should, even though the sun was as bright and warm as it had been when I’d driven up Mulberry Avenue two days earlier, listening to Carla Gibson’s screams.

  Nobody was screaming here on the wasteland. It felt like a pocket of silence: the eye of a storm, maybe. We’d set up a perimeter around the entire waste ground and a couple of the surrounding streets on the Garth estate—nobody in or out that didn’t need to be—so the area was still, disturbed only by the quiet, diligent work of the SOCOs as they moved between the bushes. But it also felt like there was a cold presence here, one that chilled the air simply by preventing the sunlight reaching the ground.

  Ridiculous, of course.

  But it felt that way all the same.

  ‘Our guy,’ Laura said.

  ‘Yes.’

  We were standing at the end of one of the paths that snaked across the waste ground. Next to it there was a tiny clearing, surrounded on three sides by prickly bushes, and just large enough for the three bodies we’d found, lying side by side. They had been laid out as if sleeping peacefully next to each other. They couldn’t have died peacefully; their killer must have arranged them the way they were for some reason.

  I glanced around, and then overhead. No tents had been erected so far. They’d be tough to construct in the undergrowth, but we’d need them shortly. It wouldn’t be long before the news ’copters started circling overhead—searching for a shot that would be of no use to them anyway, one that they would have to blur extensively if they even used it at all.

  What would they see? Two women and one man—although from high above, that might not immediately be obvious. You would be able to tell they were fully clothed, but above the neck there would be nothing but red smudges staining the dirt. You would be able to tell that something awful had happened to them, but it wouldn’t prepare you for what you’d see where Laura and I were, standing on the path itself and staring down at what was left of their faces and heads.

  Beyond the bushes, residents of the estate would be lined up against the cordon, craning their necks, trying to see. They’d been there when we arrived; they’d still be there now. They weren’t the types to be dissuaded by the police. Clusters of kids in too-small tracksuits stretched over thin shoulders, smoking roll-ups, strolling here and there. Older people remonstrating, wanting to know who we’d found—whether any of the bodies belonged to one of theirs. Getting the same answer each time: we can’t say right now.

  Not least because we couldn’t tell.

  Laura said, ‘Trying to show us how powerful he is?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come back to earth, Hicks. The way’s he’s left them.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ I looked at the three bodies, lying side by side, as though they’d all
lain down there and gone to sleep, and he’d killed each in turn without waking the others. As though it had been easy for him. ‘He’s made it look like he could kill three people without any resistance at all. Without them managing to fight back.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But?’ Laura said.

  ‘But they couldn’t have died like that. And he couldn’t have killed them all at once.’

  ‘Unless it’s more than one killer.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘We can’t say that for sure.’

  I didn’t reply. It was possible, but it didn’t make sense. It was rare—practically unheard of, in fact—for two people capable of this kind of horrific violence to find each other and work together. Not impossible, but … no. It was one person and we were missing something.

  Come back to earth, Hicks.

  It was difficult, though; my head was all over the place. Under normal circumstances—or as normal as it ever gets—I’d have been on top of things, but this was quickly moving far out the other side of normal, and it was unnerving me. The cold and the quiet were getting to me, when I wouldn’t normally have paid any attention to them, and certainly wouldn’t have put any stock by them even if I’d noticed. I wasn’t superstitious. Things didn’t get weird for me.

  And yet … this whole case felt different.

  ‘Hicks?’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Possibly more than one killer. But that would be unlikely, wouldn’t it? The probability is that it’s one guy, working alone.’

  ‘Go on then, Sherlock.’

  I glanced to either side, up and down the path, still feeling the atmosphere of the place. The waste ground had already been dead and barren, and somehow he’d left it feeling even more so …

  Already dead and barren.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘So this could be the same as the Gibson scene—what we were saying about it yesterday. It’s not the victims themselves, it’s the place. He picked an isolated place and waited.’