by Mosby, Steve
‘All right,’ I said.
We were sitting in the comfort suite: the room on the department’s second floor that was reserved for the more fragile interviewees we encountered. Laura and I were stationed on a two-seater settee opposite Billy and his father. A child support officer was seated away to one side.
The room was set up more like a living room than an interview room; all the normal accoutrements were hidden as far out of sight as possible, so that the most ostentatious thing was the black-ball camera up in the corner. Billy didn’t seem to notice that anyway. His gaze kept darting between me, Laura and the floor, as though he didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes long enough for them to notice how scared his own were.
I felt sorry for the kid. He looked even younger than he was—just a skinny rake of a thing with messy brown hair and an old T-shirt that looked hand-me-down and two sizes too big for him. His jeans were ragged and tattered at the bottoms, where his cheap trainers had scuffed away the fabric, turning the denim there into muddy strings.
The pity was mainly because of his father, though, who didn’t seem concerned enough about his son’s ordeal to me. He was just sitting there, fat arms folded over a fat belly, his face reddened by annoyance—for all the world as though he’d been summoned here because his son had done something wrong. We were compelled by law to have the man present, but I think all of us—including Billy and his father—would have preferred to do it without.
‘All right,’ I said again. ‘Can you tell us why you were in the woods in the first place?’
He shuffled awkwardly. ‘I was playing.’
‘By yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you often go there?’
‘Sometimes.’
Beside him, his father snorted slightly.
I said, ‘You knew to take care though, didn’t you? With the things in the news recently?’
‘I guess.’ He shrugged slightly, embarrassed. ‘But I thought it would be okay.’
‘I know. What were you doing?’
He hesitated.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s fine, honestly.’
‘I wanted to build a bow and arrow.’
‘What?’ This time his father’s snort was actually angry. ‘A bow and arrow? What on earth did you want to do that for?’
Billy slumped further into the settee, as though wanting to disappear entirely inside it. Obviously at his age—on the cusp of adulthood—it was a humiliating thing to admit, and yet his father’s response was to compound that.
It was already entirely clear that Billy Martin was a kid without many friends or much in the way of confidence. It was now becoming obvious what the root cause of that was. Honestly, it might well be the single most depressing thing police work teaches you: some kids never have a fucking chance.
I said, ‘You wanted to play cowboys and Indians? Something like that?’
‘I guess.’
‘That’s okay. It’s a good game. I used to play that myself when I was your age. I didn’t have many friends, and I got picked on. So I used to imagine I was shooting the kids that picked on me.’
His father snorted again. I ignored him, because Billy looked up at me a little more hopefully. What I’d said was true, and it wasn’t hard to remember how I’d felt at his age: gawky and awkward and lonely. You never forget these things; you never forget how it feels. There’s nothing wrong with finding play wherever you can when you’re a kid …
Buxton.
I shook that thought out of my head.
‘So you were in the woods. We know whereabouts. We’ve just come from there.’ I nearly said the scene, but corrected myself just in time. We’d get to that soon enough. ‘What happened then?’
Billy took a big inward breath. ‘There was a horrible noise up ahead. I didn’t know what it was, and I went to look. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did.’
‘And what did you see?’
The upset finally surfaced properly.
‘Okay,’ I said quickly. ‘We know what happened, so I don’t need you to go through everything you saw. It must have been horrible.’
He nodded. Not crying, but almost.
‘How long were you watching?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to remember. Maybe … a minute?’
Christ. Given the way time expanded in horrific circumstances, I guessed it probably hadn’t been that long. But even so, it must have been more than enough.
We’d already identified the victim—a twenty-eight-year-old male named Paul Thatcher. That portion of the woods had a slight association with cruising, although we had no way of knowing whether he was out there for that or something else. I’d seen the body and what had been done to it, though, and I wasn’t sure I could have watched for more than a second or two. The poor kid must have been frozen in place. Out in the middle of nowhere, not knowing whether to run or hide or what.
‘This is going to be a difficult question,’ I said. ‘But was the man alive when you saw him? The man on the ground, I mean.’
Billy took another deep breath.
‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Sort of.’
Sort of. From what we’d found at the scene so far—and that was obviously ongoing—sort of made an awful kind of sense. Because, yes, Paul Thatcher was dead when we got there, but from his injuries he’d clearly been sort of alive for a considerable amount of time beforehand. Billy’s answer mattered because of what it implied. That even though he’d been observed torturing Paul Thatcher, our killer hadn’t panicked, hadn’t run, hadn’t even chased after the witness.
Instead, very calmly, he’d carried on with his work.
‘Can you describe him? Not the man on the ground. The other man.’
‘He was all in black and he had a mask on.’
‘What kind of mask?’
‘A balaclava? Like in the army. All black, just with the eyes showing.’
‘That’s good. Can you say how tall he was?’
‘No. He was … crouched over him, stabbing him in the stomach. Or doing something, anyway. When he stood up … I don’t know.’
‘He saw you?’
‘It was like one second he wasn’t looking at me and then he was. Staring right at me.’
Even second-hand, I felt a chill. At that point, the kid had been a good mile from any help, and he’d locked eyes with a grown man who’d tortured and killed several people. A monster armed with a hammer, a screwdriver and God only knew what else.
‘His eyes were just … empty.’
‘Empty?’
They reminded me of … this story. The kids at school. They told me about someone who killed a cat. I couldn’t imagine what sort of person could do that. But when I looked into his eyes, I realised …’
‘This type of man?’
Billy nodded.
‘So you ran?’
He nodded again, but then hesitated, perhaps realising that it didn’t sound as brave as he so obviously wanted to be.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘The kids at school, they would all have done the same. Hell, I probably would. You did the right thing.’
‘I fired at him first, though.’ Billy leaned forward, suddenly emphatic. ‘I fired at him.’
His father snorted again. ‘With your bow and arrow?’
‘Mr Martin,’ I said. ‘Do you want to shut the fuck up?’
The man stared at me, jaw falling slack.
‘No, seriously,’ I said. ‘Shut the fuck up.’
Laura tapped my knee. I leaned back, and let her take over for a moment.
‘Mr Martin,’ she said. ‘What my partner is trying to say is that we need Billy to feel free to give his own account of what happened.’
I was about to interrupt, because, no, I was trying to say that I wanted the man to shut the fuck up, but Laura tapped my knee again.
‘Personally, I think he’s been very brave.’ Laura smiled at Billy. ‘You ran. Like Detective Hicks said, that makes t
otal sense. Trust me, it’s fine. But then what?’
‘I ran for a long time. I didn’t dare look behind me until I got to the stream.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘Nothing.’ Billy looked miserable. ‘Just empty woods. He wasn’t chasing me or anything.’
It had apparently taken the last few seconds for my insolence to land in Billy’s father’s head. He unfolded his arms and leaned forward and was about to assert his authority on the situation.
‘Listen—’
‘All right then,’ Laura said, sounding breezy. ‘I think we’re done for now. Let’s leave it there. Thank you all for your time.’
She glanced up at the camera in the corner as we stood up. The child protection officer would deal with the additional details. Laura and I headed for the door.
But as I got there, I hesitated, and then returned to where Billy Martin was sitting and knelt down in front of him. Didn’t even glance at his father beside him.
‘Billy,’ I whispered. The interview was over, but I didn’t want the camera to pick up the lie I was about to tell him. ‘I want you to know something.’
He looked at me nervously. ‘What?’
‘I shouldn’t tell you this,’ I said. ‘But just between you and me. You hit him. Enough to slow him down.’
He stared at me.
‘I did?’
‘You hit him.’ I smiled. ‘Good job. That’s why you got away.’
Twenty-Six
DEAR DETECTIVE HICKS
I notice you have failed to acknowledge my previous letter. Obviously, I did not expect you to reply directly. I was far too careful to allow you to trace my message, as I’m sure you will have discovered. You will find similar efforts have been taken with this one, although no doubt you will be compelled to check. That is one of the reasons I will stay ahead of you. You have too much to do, while I have only one thing. So far, my code is unravelling exactly to plan.
But you told the press you have received no correspondence from me. If you are ‘holding back details’, I quite understand. However, it may be that you are unsure whether I am the man you are looking for. If that is the case, I am enclosing proof that should satisfy even you. I would hate to think you weren’t taking me seriously. I want to beat you fair and square.
So let me help you, as much as you deserve.
The people who have died mean nothing to me. By now you know that they are strangers to me, that they have done me no personal wrong, that they have no obvious connection to me. But I am telling you something else. Their deaths mean nothing. The murders are irrelevant to me. What I am interested in is the pattern below the surface. Can you break it? That’s what matters.
Why murders then? Because the stakes are very high, in ways you cannot possibly understand. And I want the finest minds concentrated on cracking my code. Challenging the police, on their own ground, is the ideal solution. After all, you are soldiers of a kind. You have enormous resources. If anyone can do it, it will be you. If not, I win, don’t I? I beat you. You don’t seem to be doing very well so far. But please keep trying. A hollow victory is no victory at all.
In the meantime, as mentioned above, I enclose proof that I am the man you are looking for. It should be incontrovertible. It will also reveal something that will surely be of interest to you, something it is only fair you know.
You haven’t found most of them yet.
Twenty-Seven
HALF AN HOUR AFTER reading the second letter, Laura and I were seated in a suite in the IT department.
It was a long, narrow room that reminded me of a university computer lab—rows of benches covered with terminals, interspersed with bulky printers, photocopiers and cabinets full of spare cables and hard drives. It was lit, dimly, by the thin remains of daylight coming through the open slatted blinds, and it smelled of carpet cleaner and electricity, like ozone in the air before it rains.
We were sitting at one of the terminals with a techie called Garretty, waiting as he took all the necessary precautions with the item the killer had sent along with his second letter.
A CD.
I could sense Laura fidgeting beside me: biting her fingernails and shifting slightly on her office chair, rotating it back and forth with her heel. I was doing my best to keep still. Inside, though, I was doing the same.
‘Maybe it’ll be music,’ I tried. ‘We can get him for copyright infringement too.’
Laura gave me an awkward smile. I returned it.
Of course, both of us had a good idea of what we were going to find on the disc. There wasn’t much it could be other than a recording of some kind. Audio, photo or—God help us—video. Given the nature of the crime scenes so far, I imagined neither of us was looking forward to that. I certainly wasn’t.
At the same time, I kept telling myself, it was more evidence. He might have slipped up. However horrible it was, there might be some detail that would prove his undoing. That was the hope here. Pretty much the only thing to cling to.
‘We’ve got a single file,’ Garretty said.
‘Just one?’
‘There are the usual extraneous files you’d expect to find on a CD, but only one has been written to the disc by the user. It’s non-rewritable, so he couldn’t have deleted or added anything after recording it. MPEG encoding.’
‘MPEG?’ Laura said.
I nodded, feeling grim. ‘It’s a video.’
‘Christ.’
Under normal circumstances, you could just open the file and let it play. Under these, the techie was using various programs to deal with it. These machines were all secure environments, and the contents of the CD would be ghosted across into a virtual environment so as not to risk losing any data from the disc itself.
The internal safeguards would also take care of any malware the killer might have kindly thought to include—although I wasn’t expecting anything like that. Our man was clearly malicious, but for now, for some reason, I was prepared to take the letter at face value. He wanted us to know it was him. He wanted to give us some insight into what he was doing.
But could we take it at face value? Maybe it would be a mistake to do so—to believe a single word he’d written. The thing to remember was that ultimately he didn’t want to be caught, so whatever his claims, he wasn’t going to tell us anything that helped us.
That was what I’d normally think, anyway. But this guy felt different. Unless I was missing something, we weren’t particularly close to catching him: up until now, he’d been killing with relative impunity. Then there was the challenge implicit in his letters. And the crimes did seem to match what he was saying—that he was killing apparently at random, for some reason we couldn’t guess.
Or maybe I just wanted to believe there had to be something. Some reason for what he was doing.
He’s playing with you.
If so, he was doing it successfully.
‘Okay,’ Garretty said. ‘Let’s set it going.’
‘This is likely to be upsetting.’
It felt only fair to warn him, but he shrugged and clicked the mouse. ‘I’ll take a walk if I feel like it.’
The video began playing in a window that filled most of the computer screen. At the bottom, a bar tracked the time elapsed and remaining. It was clear from this that the file was just over seven minutes long.
‘Hand-held,’ Laura said.
I nodded. As the footage played, it was obvious the camera was in someone’s hand: the view was moving loosely and jerkily, tracking over blurred undergrowth, never settling long enough to make out any detail. The crunch of woodland underfoot came from the speakers. He was walking somewhere, dangling the camera by his side.
And then the sound fell away as the man drew to a halt and brought the camera up.
It showed a man lying on his back on the ground, surrounded by swirls of brambles and grass. The man wasn’t a derelict. He was wearing an old brown suit over a white shirt that had ridden up to reveal a pale stomach, heavi
ng slightly from the heaviness of his breathing. From his face—eyes closed, mouth working soundlessly—he was clearly disorientated, although there was no clue what had happened to him. His grey hair was in disarray, some of it plastered to his forehead with sweat.
The camera moved in to get a good view of his face, then swung quickly away, and there was the familiar crunch of undergrowth as the man stepped back.
The view steadied again, then moved from side to side, as though the camera was shaking its head. Then it tilted forward so that the display now showed the entire body of the man a short distance in front.
Laura said, ‘He’s mounted it on a tripod.’
‘Yes. That he has,’
‘A short introduction to show the victim. Then mounting the camera to leave his hands free.’
‘At least it suggests he’s working alone,’ I said. As grim as I felt, I was trying to be professional and detached. ‘If he had a partner, the other guy could film it for him. Or vice versa.’
‘Do you think he filmed the others?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where is this?’
‘I don’t know that either.’
The view remained still—the victim just lying on his back, his stomach undulating, as though he was trying to be sick but couldn’t.
‘I don’t think it’s the woodland where Billy Martin encountered him,’ Laura said. ‘Certainly rural, though.’
I nodded. ‘Maybe north-east of the city? Lots of winding country roads out that way. Patches of forest and woodland in between them. Miles and miles of them, in fact.’
Laura didn’t reply.
I knew what she was thinking, though—that the area was huge, and we desperately needed a way to narrow it down. Because what the man had written in the letter was true: the man on the floor was a victim we didn’t know about yet.
The killer stepped into view.
Here he was, then. Walking across to the man lying on the floor. Billy Martin had seen him and lived. Several others—we didn’t even know how many—had seen him and died. And somewhere on our board of images, we had a blurred image of him visiting a postbox. But this was a clear sighting.
