The Murder Code

by Mosby, Steve

  The boy hates him.

  A shadow drifts across the base of the door.

  Pauses.

  The boy, already not breathing, somehow holds his breath deeper still.

  BANG BANG BANG.

  His father’s fist, rapping on the door.

  From the corridor, there is a laugh, and then the shadow passes. He listens as, further along the hall, his father shoulders the wall again—or, as he will experience it, the wall shoulders him.

  The boy lies there in the darkness for a time, picturing him. Yes, he is Father, never Daddy. He cannot remember ever hugging him. He cannot picture his father smiling. His face is an ugly thing: red and weathered, like a troll in one of the storybooks on the shelf. His hair is brown and curly; he wears fluffy old paint-stained jumpers and brown cords. His body is small and slumped. The only big thing about him any more is his forearms and his knuckles, like an ape. All the failures and disappointments of his life are there to see.

  At the far end of the house, the bedroom door slams.

  The boy wants to lie there, but he can’t. He sits up in the dark and rests his bare feet on the carpet, clenching his toes against its wiry texture. And when the noises start—the other slamming, his father’s raised voice, his mother’s muted shouts and cries—the little boy pushes his fists into his eyes and rocks back and forth, concentrating on the sensations of his feet.

  He begins crying silently, the way he’s learned to cry over the years, limiting the inward breaths to hide the sniffles from his thick nose.

  After a while, he realises his older brother is sitting beside him. He had not even noticed him clamber down the red step-ladder. But John puts his arm round his shoulder, leans into him. They are both very small, hugging each other in the dark.

  The policeman listens carefully to this story, and although the boy’s face betrays no obvious emotion—no sign of either sincerity or guile—he finds himself believing that this much is the truth. Having met both boys, and seen the house itself, he can picture them sitting there like that together. He can imagine the desolation and fear.

  He says, ‘And then what happened?’

  For a long moment, the boy does not reply. But then he gathers himself. And once again there is something there in his expression. Something that seems older than the child.

  ‘And then what happened?’

  The boy begins to tell him.

  This is the point, looking back, when the policeman will be convinced the lies begin.

  DAY SIX

  Seventeen

  DAVID BARRETT IS SWEEPING his yard.

  For many people, this would be a mundane, boring task—but not for him. Behind him, lit bright by the sun, is the farm he has built over the years. It began life as a detached house, two up, two down, with a scratchy field and dirt land attached. Even back then, it was expensive to buy, but it had always been his dream to own a small farm, and the property was ideal. In the decade since he and Kate moved in, he has extended the house itself to one side and carefully cultivated the land around. They have chickens and sheep. They have rows of crops. For most things in life, they are self-sufficient.

  And it is lovely.

  Swish. Swish.

  The broom makes a comforting noise as he methodically pushes the dust from the front of the house. It billows across the quiet road outside the property, cast into gentle rolling swirls by the warm breeze. Swish. Swish. Other than that sound, the world is almost entirely silent.

  And then—

  ‘Mama!’

  He glances up to see that Robin is running across the field on the far side of the road, arms and legs working in what seems to David more of a controlled fall than a run. His son is a little bundle of energy, and it often threatens to overtake him. He is still discovering the bounds of his small body, and constantly testing them.

  ‘Robin,’ he calls. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Mama!’

  ‘Mama’s at the shop.’

  Robin keeps running, legs and arms pinwheeling.

  ‘Mama!’

  For a moment, David is not even sure if Robin means Kate or not. The little boy has been slow to walk and talk, and whereas he’s made up for the former since, his language remains underdeveloped for a child of three. ‘Mama’ was the first word he ever managed, and one he’s stubbornly clung to since. For a while, everything was ‘mama’, from the bookshelf to the chickens, and even now it’s still the first word to come to mind when the boy is excited. David supposes that’s natural enough. Kate certainly never minds.

  ‘Just be careful.’

  He doesn’t shout loud enough; the breeze takes the words. And anyway, Robin is already halfway across the field and showing no signs of slowing down or being remotely careful.

  David puts the broom down on the yard, his hands in his pockets, and sets off after the boy. The field is about a hundred metres long, where it meets another curl of the road he crosses now. There are bushes there, another field beyond the road. There is no real danger—it is too quiet here; there is rarely even any traffic—and Robin often plays there, but he doesn’t want him out of sight.

  ‘Robin,’ he calls.

  ‘Mama!’

  The word drifts back, as small as the little boy himself. David can see the bottoms of his tiny sneakers as he runs, like white balls being juggled in the patchy grass.

  He isn’t too far from the bushes now.

  David speeds up a little.

  ‘Robin,’ he shouts. ‘Come back!’

  If the boy hears him, he doesn’t show it. But now David can hear something else. The whine of a scooter: a constant nasal burr, growing gradually louder.

  Maybe the kid’s psychic, he thinks—because Kate is back after all; he can see her scooter puttering along a loop of the road in the distance. Her skirt is fluttering slightly, revealing rigid calves, and her hair and scarf are rolling out behind her. She is a stiff but careful driver, and takes the turning slowly that will bring her to the line of bushes Robin is still careering towards.

  As she drives along, she glances his way, and David waves a big arm over his head once, pointing down to the bottom of the field to indicate that she has a reception committee. She waves back slightly hesitantly, then seems to understand, notices her son on the field and slows down gradually to meet him.

  She doesn’t get that far. Twenty metres away, someone stands up from behind the bushes just as she reaches them. David can’t quite see what happens, but the sound drifts across—horrifying on a subconscious level—and it’s like a gunshot followed by a screech of metal. He is walking, and he moves more quickly now, even as his mind is still registering the sight of the scooter on its side, careering down the road straight past his son, who has come to a halt at the bottom of the field.

  ‘Kate!’ he shouts.

  David starts running.

  He’s still trying to put it together in his head—the fragments of what just happened. She crashed. But she didn’t. There was the man. David can’t see him now. His vision of the field is juddering as he runs, but the man is out of sight anyway. Somewhere around where Kate had her accident.

  Those facts gradually come together, like two lenses clicking into place, revealing a clear view of the truth. The man knocked her off the scooter.

  ‘Robin!’ he shouts. ‘Get back! Get back up here now!’

  He sees his son’s small face turn to him, sees the look of confusion and shock. The boy is pale. He saw.

  ‘Robin! Back to the house!’

  The man reappears: standing back up, like a shadow appearing over the bush. He is dressed entirely in black and wearing a balaclava. He sees David running as fast as he can towards him, watches for a second, then turns and makes striking motions at the ground out of sight. He is holding something, David can’t see what.

  ‘No!’

  The noise of the impacts carries. David runs hard, feet pounding across the field, not noticing or caring where Robin is now. Because something has just snappe
d inside him: some twang of pain that leaves an empty kind of knowledge in its place. The man is hitting Kate, over and over. He doesn’t know why. He just knows he has to get there, and that he won’t get there in time, that he is chasing something he cannot catch, something that he has already missed.

  And now the man is running up the road, towards the fallen scooter. Carrying something. David adjusts his course slightly, aiming to meet him—to come charging through the bush and rugby-tackle him. But he misjudges: the man outpaces him. As David reaches the line of bushes, he has already righted the scooter and is kicking down at the pedals, revving the throttle. David barely notices the tearing thorns as he crashes through the foliage, stumbling slightly on the sudden hardness of the tarmac, turning to see the cough of smoke as the scooter accelerates away.

  He knows immediately that he has no chance of catching it. Within a moment, the man is already looping around, heading up to go straight past the front of David’s white-faced, sunlit farmhouse dream.

  Kate.

  He turns slowly. She is just lying there, twenty metres away. There seems to be a spill of petrol all around her head, and even though he knows it isn’t petrol, for a moment he still holds out hope as he runs.

  For the moment it takes him to reach her.

  Eighteen

  THERE WERE A COUPLE of things that surprised me about Vicki Gibson’s funeral. The first was that it was held at a non-denominational chapel: for some reason, I’d had Carla Gibson pegged as a religious woman. I was right about that, as it happens, but Vicki herself had not been, and her mother had chosen to respect her daughter’s wishes rather than her own.

  The second was the number of people that turned up.

  It was a quiet, warm morning. Gravel crunched softly beneath my shoes as I walked up the drive, which was lined on either side by luscious, perfectly trimmed green hedges. Funeral homes, even non-denominational ones, often seem to try to recreate a vision of heaven, of peace and rest. Outside the chapel itself, a crowd had already gathered in advance of the service.

  I looked around at everyone slightly wonderingly. Other people’s lives can be mysterious from the outside, and it’s wrong to rush to snap judgements. Vicki Gibson had never been the isolated outsider that her poverty and living circumstances had led me to believe.

  I circulated a little—carefully avoiding the officers who were attending more discreetly. It wasn’t unusual for serial murderers to turn up at the funerals of their victims, or observe them from a distance. In the immediate absence of other lines of enquiry, the funeral was a high priority for us.

  Nobody stood out.

  There were a few of the regular customers at the launderette: two women and an elderly man. Vicki’s co-workers from both jobs turned up, clustered together in two large bunches. Members of her extended family had travelled to be here. And there were countless friends from the community, dressed as sombrely and neatly as they could afford. Everybody present seemed to know somebody. Nobody appeared to be here alone.

  After a while, the hearse arrived and a silence settled on the assembled crowd, like a blanket falling.

  Six professional pall-bearers carried the coffin into the chapel, stepping forward in solemn, practised unison. Gradually the people followed in after. A few officers mingled with them, although most would remain stationed quietly in the grounds.

  I went in last of all.

  The chapel was a large hall with a peaked roof. It reminded me, bizarrely, of a holiday chalet: varnished wooden floorboards, clean white walls and small high windows framed with thick dark wood. Wedges of sunlight hung in the air above.

  There were few seats left. I found one at the back.

  The coffin rested on a series of rollers in front of a set of drawn red-velvet curtains at the far end of the room. The officiant, an old man in old-fashioned clothes, was standing on a small stage to the side of it. With his glasses and eyebrows, he looked a little like some kind of clockwork owl: bookish and well read. He kept glancing up, patient and serious, waiting for people to settle and the murmur of conversation to fade. Every now and then, he smiled gently at the front row. Through the sea of dark suits, I could make out the back of Carla Gibson’s head, all but lost beneath the frills of a black lace hat.

  My attention kept returning to the coffin.

  It was the unspoken focal point of the room: the ghost in a crowd that everyone could sense but nobody wanted to acknowledge. Inside it was Vicki Gibson as she was now. Reduced from the attractive, hard-working young woman who connected all these people together to nothing.

  For obvious reasons, it was a closed coffin, but when you see a dead body, nothing is clearer than the realisation that the person is gone. The absence hits you immediately. And it’s made more striking because the thing in front of you looks like a human being even though it palpably isn’t one any more. A dead human body is an awful thing to see. For a moment, it makes you as still and silent as it is.

  Once you get past that, though, there’s usually at least the affirmation that this is what we are: a piece of complex biological machinery that has stopped working—or been stopped. Unlike some officers I know, I’ve never had a problem being an atheist at a crime scene.

  Funerals are a different matter, though. It seems to me that when people are gathered together, with all their thoughts and memories, it can somehow rekindle the essence of the person lost—almost resurrecting them, but not quite. They’re not present, but it’s easy to believe they exist again as an odd kind of shadow, one cast not by a presence but an absence, and that they’ve come alive again just enough to hear everyone say goodbye.

  Rubbish, obviously—it’s just an illusion. When people are dead, they’re dead, and life for everyone else continues to unfold in its unpredictable manner. Nobody is paying attention apart from us. Nobody else is noticing or keeping score.

  The officiant looked up, over his glasses, and smiled gently at the room. It was the exact same expression he’d given Carla Gibson, as though our loss was equal to hers. When he started talking, he addressed the assembled people like friends.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Thank you for coming to this, one of the saddest occasions imaginable.’

  One of the saddest occasions imaginable.

  Difficult to quantify that, but in some ways the funeral of Derek Evans was worse. At least Vicki Gibson had the company of her family and friends as she was laid to rest; Evans only had me and Laura, who joined me for this. None of the ‘friends’ Evans had made below the city had come to bid him farewell. And the two of us weren’t enough to raise ghosts, shadows or anything else.

  ‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’

  Laura and I stood side by side with the priest in the graveyard, watching as Evans’s cheap coffin was lowered into a hole barely large enough to contain it.

  As the priest finished up the perfunctory service, I glanced around. The cemetery was open and sprawling, the flat ground interrupted only by occasional trees and gravestones—but not here, where the city-funded plots were adorned with nothing grander than a plywood cross and a name plate. There was nobody within fifty metres. Nobody watching. Despite the heat of the day, the breeze drifting across the grass and stone felt cold.

  After the service was over, and the coffin had been lowered into the ground, Laura and I wandered away from the grave.

  ‘He didn’t show,’ I said.

  ‘You weren’t really expecting him to.’

  I shrugged. Not expecting, maybe, but hoping. Because serial killers often did. It was a case of playing the odds again: working the statistics and probabilities. What else did we have right now?

  It had been three days since the murders at the Garth estate, and since then there had been no activity whatsoever. I didn’t know what to make of it: the initial flurry of killings, the alleged letter, then silence. It didn’t fit with my expectations based on the textbooks. Serial killers tend to accelerate. Spree killers continue. So there had to be some
reason for our murderer turning shy, but I couldn’t think what it might be. Was it deliberate—perhaps part of his supposedly uncrackable code—or was there another explanation?

  ‘What are you thinking, Hicks?’

  We sauntered along. I kicked at the gravel on the path.

  ‘I’m wondering when we’re going to hear from him again.’

  ‘You mean a letter?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that. He’s not stopped killing. That wouldn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Not unless he got stopped for some reason.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he was hit by a truck.’

  ‘We’re not that lucky.’

  ‘Right now, it feels like we need to be.’

  I nodded. Right now, hard work alone wasn’t getting us very far. The break in the killings had at least allowed us to catch our breath slightly and thoroughly investigate the victims we did have. Even without taking his letter at face value, every possible connection between the victims—every possible motivation—had to be followed up.

  Sandra Peacock, the working girl who’d died first on the waste ground, was thirty years old and a single parent to two little girls. As an intermittent drugs user and a prostitute, she clearly fell into a vulnerable category that separated her from Vicki Gibson. The only connection between the two women was their similar age. Beyond that, there were no obvious parallels at all.

  John Kramer was forty-three years old: a bouncer at Santiago’s nightclub in the Beeston area of the city. It seemed obvious that he’d been on his way to a different type of work entirely, but discreet enquiries at the club had failed to turn up what that might be. Regardless, it was clear that the number of people who might want to hurt him was substantially higher than the other victims. That was part of the problem we had. We might find a plethora of individual suspects for a single murder, but without an overarching explanation it meant little.