Slice

by David Hodges

  There was no one in the briefing room when he poked his head round the door and the place was in darkness, but his torch soon picked out the row of ignition keys on the cork board just inside, each with a metal tag attached carrying the vehicle’s registration number. With a grim smile he remembered what Derringer had said to Phil Gilham about car keys being so easy to obtain. He made the mental observation that the station was a long time learning its lesson.

  The high level of police activity still appeared to be ongoing when he climbed out through the open window, but the river of blue light pulsing among the buildings was much further away this time, and the helicopter’s silhouette in the night sky had shrunk to the size of a child’s toy as it hovered over the east side of the town. It reminded Fulton of some nocturnal bird of prey about to swoop on its unsuspecting victim.

  The vehicle he was looking for turned out to be one of two marked area cars, parked alongside a couple of CID cars. He wasn’t too happy about using such a highly visible vehicle, but he couldn’t risk returning to the station to swop the keys for those of a plain CID car. He was behind the wheel and heading for the exit within seconds, feeling relieved that at least he had got away without detection.

  Unbeknown to him, however, his departure had not gone completely unnoticed and he would have been more than a little concerned had he been aware of the other car pulling out of a corner parking bay moments after he had driven away. Significantly, the vehicle not only paused for a moment in the wake of the exhaust plume he had left floating in the entranceway, but then headed off in the same direction, maintaining a discreet distance behind him and hugging the nearside kerb with its lights extinguished. He would have been very interested indeed to see who was behind the wheel.

  chapter 27

  RAFFERTY CLOSE WAS a cul-de-sac on the east side of town, adjoining a disused branch of the East Molten Canal and almost within spitting distance of the street where John Derringer had had his flat. Number 13 was at the end of a terrace of former Victorian workers’ cottages, which could not have been more unsympathetically renovated if the developers had tried. Like its neighbours, it scowled over a tiny unkempt garden into a potholed street, which had once echoed to the clop of horses’ hoofs, as the heavy drays had rumbled through the gates of the long since derelict Wimbles Wharf to meet the barges off-loading their cargos of black gold from the Midlands pits.

  Fulton parked the police car behind a beaten up VW camper van, left half-on and half-off the pavement under a broken streetlamp, and sat there for a moment, studying the target premises along the inside wing of the other vehicle, wondering why someone with the sort of money his man must be earning would choose to live in a rathole like this. The place was in darkness, which was to be expected at – and he consulted the luminous dial of his watch – 2.45 in the morning. But if he was right, this particular resident would not be found buried under a mound of bedclothes; he would already be closing in on his next victim – if he was not there already – and Fulton just prayed that by adding burglary to his own growing list of offences, he would be able to discover the identity of that victim before another life was lost.

  He took a deep breath, climbed out of the car into the frosty night and pushed the door to behind him. Then, keeping to the shadows, he followed the low walls of the neighbouring two houses along to the end – only to freeze into immobility beneath an overhanging tree when the thud of rotor blades announced the arrival of the police helicopter carrying out yet another low-level sweep of the area, with its powerful spotlight tracing a diagonal path across the street.

  A couple of minutes later it was gone. He slipped through the open gateway of Number 13 and mounted the three stone steps to the front door. He was quite certain that the doorbell would only ring in an empty house, but he pressed it all the same, just to make sure. Nothing stirred and he grunted his satisfaction. On returning to the small patch of garden, he discovered a sideway between the house and the corrugated iron fence of Wimbles Wharf and investigated further.

  The rear garden was as unkempt as the front, though slightly bigger, and through gaps in the rear fence he caught the gleam of the moonlight on the turgid water of the canal. The back door gave access to what many years ago would have been called a scullery and his elbow soon took out one of the small panes of glass to enable him to reach the key left in the lock.

  His torch picked out a Belfast sink and a pile of washing in a plastic basket on the draining board as he made his way through an internal door to the kitchen. He almost trod on a black cat, which shot out of a litter tray by his feet and disappeared through the back door with a blood-curdling cry that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Good or bad luck?

  A poky dining room and sitting room opened off the hallway that lay beyond, but they contained nothing of interest, save shabby furniture and photographs of military vehicles and helicopters in various locations around the world.

  The stairs creaked like arthritic joints as he headed for the upper floor and he felt a bit like the private detective in the cult horror film, Psycho, when he reached the landing, half-expecting a nightmare figure to suddenly rush out of one of the adjacent rooms wielding a long-bladed knife.

  To his relief no such apparition appeared, but he felt a definite sense of unease as he strode towards a half-open door, unable to shake off the feeling that he was not alone. He checked a sparsely furnished bedroom, finding little of interest there, and was about to move back out on to the landing when he stiffened to what sounded like stealthy movement in the hallway below. He strained his ears to listen, but the sound was not repeated and a few moments later the returning helicopter put paid to any chance he had of hearing anything.

  With the room temporarily caught in the beam of the chopper’s spotlight as it raked the street, he instinctively flattened himself against the wall as much as his bulk would allow and waited. Eventually the beam passed on – jerked away as if on a length of elastic. In the darkness, he strained his ears again and this time he heard a series of familiar creaking sounds. His face hardened. Someone was coming up the stairs.

  Shuffling sounds on the landing. Fulton held himself in check, resisting the urge to charge out of the bedroom to confront whoever had followed him into the house. But instinct urged caution and he waited, heart pounding and fists clenched tightly by his sides.

  A light blossomed in the gloom and he edged closer to the door, inwardly cursing when his knee caught a projecting handle on a chest of drawers, shaking the glass ornaments on top and producing a tinkling sound.

  ‘Jack, you in there?’

  Fulton jumped. The last thing he expected was to hear his name called, but the familiar voice drew him out of his hiding-place. Phil Gilham’s flashlight blazed in his eyes and he jerked the other’s hand away irritably. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he snarled.

  ‘Following you,’ Gilham retorted, his tone cold and hostile.

  Fulton snorted. ‘I thought you’d be dealing with the intruder at Derryman Hospice.’

  ‘I would be if I hadn’t seen you borrowing an area car from the nick as I was about to drive out of the car park.’

  Fulton pushed past him and flashed his torch around a second bedroom. ‘So how come you weren’t already tucked up with the missus tonight?’ he said without any real interest. ‘Lover’s tiff?’

  Gilham took a deep breath, stepping quickly to one side as the big man came back out of the room. ‘Worse than that. Helen and I had a massive row. She’d stumbled on one of Abbey’s old letters in my study and when I got back from seeing Abbey at the hospital, she went totally ballistic.’

  ‘Serves you right.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I spent the rest of the evening at my local and when they closed, I decided to head for the nick and kip in the office rather than return home for round two.’

  Fulton nodded. ‘Brave of you,’ he said, rattling the handle of another door. ‘Damned thing’s locked,’ he muttered.

  Gilham wat
ched him bunch his shoulder and, realizing what was in his mind, quickly grabbed his arm. ‘Jack, I can’t be privy to something like this.’

  The big man shook himself free. ‘Then piss off!’ he retorted and, slamming his shoulder into the thin panelling, whooped his satisfaction as the lock burst open and the door flew back against the wall with a splintering crash.

  Gilham groaned. ‘For heaven’s sake, Jack, what do you think you’re doing? You’ve already got half the force out looking for you as it is?’

  Fulton gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, I seem to have become quite the celebrity, don’t I?’ he said, brushing against the shattered door as he flashed his torch around the room.

  Gilham followed him with obvious reluctance, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder towards the blacked-out staircase. ‘Jack, you’re right out of order. I mean, whose house is this anyway – and what the devil are you looking for?’

  Fulton’s sharp intake of breath was like the ‘phut’ of a bullet discharged from a silenced pistol. ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ he said grimly as he threw caution aside and switched on the main light.

  Blinking in the harsh, unshaded glare, Gilham found himself in a cramped study, maybe seven feet square, furnished with a corner desk and a couple of drawer units. A laptop computer occupied the centre of the desk, connected to an adjacent printer, and both were switched on, with the computer displaying the photograph of a ruined mansion as a screen-saver.

  Gilham stared at the photograph for several seconds, then emitted a low whistle. ‘Gordon Bennett, that looks like Drew House.’

  Fulton followed his gaze. ‘It is Drew House,’ he said. ‘And the rest of what we have here speaks for itself.’

  It was not difficult to see what he meant by that either. The left-hand wall was occupied by bookshelves and what looked suspiciously like a hospital drugs cabinet, with rows of small bottles visible through the glass door. Part of the right-hand wall directly above the desk was covered by what appeared to be a map of the Maddington police area, peppered with coloured markers. Beside it, a large cork board carried photographs of several buildings, each one shot from a number of different angles, with the most distinctive being that of St Peter’s church where the Reverend Cotter had been preaching the night he died. Even more interesting was the whiteboard on the outer wall beside the window and the passport-size photographs that had been arranged in a vertical line down one side, with blocks of neat handwritten notes alongside each picture.

  ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Gilham gasped. ‘This place is set up like a mini version of one of our own incident rooms.’

  Fulton had pounced on a thick buff-coloured folder lying beside the computer. He didn’t look up as he leafed through the pages. ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ he said. ‘An incident room. Only, the intelligence that’s been gathered here was designed to facilitate murder rather than investigate it.’

  Gilham squeezed past him for a closer look at the whiteboard, curiosity overruling his initial objections to the illegal search operation. Peering at the top photograph, he whistled again. ‘That’s a picture of Judge Lyall,’ he exclaimed. ‘And there’s the Reverend Cotter’s too.’ He broke off, half-turning towards Fulton. ‘But there’s another old boy here and I certainly don’t recognize him.’

  ‘If it’s photo number three, it’s probably Carlo Vansetti.’

  ‘Vansetti? What, the gangster you introduced me to at Derringer’s flat?’

  Fulton gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘His father,’ he corrected, continuing to flick through the folder.

  ‘So how—’

  Fulton closed the folder and held it up in front of him. ‘Never mind that now,’ he cut in. ‘I’ve found the missing crime file on Drew House, which is what really matters. The bastard had it all the time and I can see why he didn’t want anyone else to see it.’

  But Gilham did not even look at the folder. His gaze had returned to the whiteboard and was now riveted on the last photograph. ‘Jack,’ he said and his voice was suddenly cracked and shaky. ‘You’ll never believe whose picture is up here with the others?’

  Fulton dropped the folder back on to the desk, his eyes stony. ‘Assistant Chief Constable Norman Skellet, no doubt,’ he said, more as a statement than a question.

  Gilham gaped. ‘How on earth did you know that?’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t even looked at the whiteboard.’

  ‘It’s in the crime file. Seems he was DCI when Drew House was torched and he and Halloran were the first officers on the scene.’

  ‘But if he was an IO on the Drew House job and his picture is up here with the rest, that means—’

  ‘He must be the Slicer’s next victim,’ the big man finished.

  Gilham lunged for the telephone on the corner of the desk. ‘Hell’s bells!’ he choked, ‘then we need to get some units over to Skellet’s place pdq.’

  But Fulton was already through the study door, heading for the stairs. Gilham dropped the telephone receiver with a loud curse to stumble after him, tugging at the mobile caught up in the lining of his coat pocket with one hand as he directed his own flashlight into the yawning shaft of the staircase with the other.

  ‘Jack, don’t be a damned fool,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t do this thing on your own.’

  Conscious of a sudden familiar and increasing clatter above the house and a blaze of white light sweeping across the glazed top panel of the front door as he reached the hall, Fulton struggled furiously with the door catch. ‘Thanks for the advice, Phil,’ he snarled. ‘But this is strictly personal.’

  The next moment he was hammering down the steps into the path of the helicopter’s spotlight.

  ‘But you haven’t even said who we’re we looking for?’ Gilham shouted after him. ‘Or whose place this is?’

  Fulton threw a savage glance at the clattering monster hovering overhead and jerked the door of the area car wide. ‘You mean you really don’t know?’ he yelled back. ‘Think about it, Phil – there’s only one person it could be!’

  Then he had spun the car round in a tyre-screeching turn and, after mounting the pavement, careered out of Rafferty Close through a sea of pulsing blue light as a convoy of police cars swinging into the cul-de-sac was forced to swerve out of his way. By the time the mêlée of vehicles had sorted itself out, he was several miles away, hurtling through the leafy outskirts of town, and praying with every ounce of his being that the hunch he had chosen to follow would prove to be right.

  chapter 28

  THE BIG PSEUDO-Georgian house sat squarely in around half an acre of neat lawns and mixed laurel and rhododendron groves that screamed landscaping from every glossy moonlit leaf. The place was ablaze with light when Phil Gilham swung in through the open gateway at the head of the police convoy, and he spotted the Dobermann pinscher dog lying motionless beside the ornate stone fountain as he jumped out of his car. He approached the animal with caution, well aware of the breed’s nasty reputation, but a cursory examination was enough to confirm that the animal was dead. There was froth around its gaping jaws that suggested some kind of virulent poison, and a bloody wound was visible in its side.

  ‘Someone wasn’t much of a dog-lover then?’ the uniformed inspector commented at his elbow as he straightened up.

  ‘Well, the brute didn’t top itself, that’s for sure,’ Gilham retorted, his tone terse and strained as he added: ‘You’d better have your crews check the grounds.’ He threw an irritable glance at the police helicopter now hovering noisily overhead. ‘And get that dratted chopper doing something useful, will you?’

  The front door of the house stood wide open and there were ominous dark spots on the step, with a wet smear on the inside edge of the doorframe itself that looked suspiciously like part of a bloodstained handprint. Gilham was conscious of his heartbeat quickening as he stepped into the hallway and his narrowed gaze followed a trail of dark spots either leading to or from the foot of the staircase.

  ‘Hello?’ he called
automatically, wondering why he was bothering with such a pointless formality in the first place. ‘Anyone about?’

  Outside, car doors slammed and loud voices joined with the clatter of the helicopter to drown any response he might have received, but he didn’t try again, sensing that there was no one there to answer him anyway.

  He saw more blood spots on the stairs and further smears on the banister rail as he headed for the next floor. The trail finally led him across the landing to a luxuriously appointed bedroom.

  ‘Broken window round the side of the house,’ the inspector said, joining him again. He bent down to study a wicked-looking bayonet lying on the carpet, resisting the temptation to touch it. ‘Something nasty happened in here all right.’

  Gilham nodded. A table-lamp had been knocked over on its pedestal beside the double bed and telltale red spots dotted the badly rumpled coverlet and one pillow. ‘Someone certainly sprang a leak,’ he agreed, ‘but whoever owned the bayonet, it doesn’t look as though that was the culprit.’

  The inspector shook his head. ‘Blade seems to be completely clean,’ he confirmed. ‘Could be the dog had the intruder before he managed to get into the house.’

  ‘Gilham frowned. ‘Let’s hope that was it, but then how was he able to poison the brute afterwards?’ He sniffed loudly. ‘And what’s that awful stink?’

  His junior colleague also sniffed the air. ‘Smells like antiseptic, sir.’

  ‘Chloroform,’ Gilham exclaimed, wheeling on him, his eyes gleaming. ‘Quick, where’s Jack Fulton?’

  The uniformed man seemed taken aback. ‘Mr Fulton, sir? I haven’t seen him.’

  ‘But he must have been on his way here. He knew Mr Skellet was to be the killer’s next target.’

  The inspector thought a second. ‘Well, I know he left Rafferty Close pretty rapid – nearly caused a multiple as we drove in – but that’s all, and the chopper’s since radioed in to say he shot off in the opposite direction to us.’