by David Hodges
Gilham’s expression was incredulous. ‘He did what? Then why the devil didn’t someone go after him? He’s still a damned fugitive, isn’t he?’
The inspector shrugged a little uncertainly. ‘I suppose so, sir, but when you called in from Rafferty Close to say Mr Skellet was at risk, control instructed all units to head here as a priority – including Hotel X-ray 19 – so any pursuit would have been abandoned.’
Gilham seemed to sag under an invisible weight. ‘Gordon Bennett,’ he breathed. ‘So it’s all down to Jack now, is it – wherever he’s off to? I just hope he knows what he’s doing.’
Fulton left the area car in a lay-by and headed up the long driveway of Drew House on foot, keeping close to the adjacent shrubbery and directing anxious glances at the moon which, though clearly visible, was beginning to lose some of its brilliance with the approach of first light. He fully anticipated the police helicopter’s reappearance overhead at any second and was surprised that it wasn’t actually there already. But the flying bug did not materialize and after a few minutes it dawned on him that the chopper had either lost track of him, which was pretty unlikely, or had actually abandoned its initial pursuit – maybe to provide aerial back-up for the troops en route to Norman Skellet’s house instead. Whatever the reason, however, the absence of Hotel X-ray 19 could not have been more welcome as far as he was concerned. The last thing he needed was his quarry to be alerted by the clatter of rotor blades before he could find him.
He was convinced that Drew House – or more specifically, the church at Drew House – was where the Slicer would be heading to carry out his final bloody execution. The fact that those sinister ruins had now become an active police crime scene would be no deterrent to him either. The murderous psychopath had already shown himself to be an arrogant risk-taker and, as the church crypt and what had taken place there all those years ago was central to the pursuit of his bloody vendetta, it was logical to assume that he would seek to end his killing spree in the place where it had all started.
But logical or not, the big man knew his hypothesis relied heavily on what really amounted to nothing more than a hunch. As he slipped down the side of the sprawling carcass that had once been Drew House, he was unable to shake off a growing sense of unease, with the little doubting voice in his brain starting to dissect that hypothesis and ask some challenging questions that he preferred not to think about. What if his hunch was actually false and his own arrogance had led him to entirely the wrong conclusion? What if the killer was nowhere near Drew House, but miles away on the other side of the police area? What if, even as he wasted his time searching an empty ruin, Norman Skellet was being forced to stare into a mirror somewhere else and watch his throat being cut?
‘What if, what if, what if?’ he snarled, trying hard to ignore the negative whispers in his brain and concentrate instead on the task in hand – and it was then that he caught the glitter of moonlight on glass and knew, with a sense of relief, that his gut instinct had not played him false after all.
The old black Transit van had been reversed into a break among the trees a few yards ahead of him. It was so far in that he might have passed it by altogether had the headlamp glass not given the vehicle away. Taking a closer look, he found the back doors had been left half-open and a familiar strong, sickly smell hit him as soon as he stuck his head inside. The van contained little of interest, except a pile of blankets in one corner, but the chloroform smell was enough of a giveaway on its own and there were dark smears, like blood, on the outside of one door. He returned to the front of the vehicle and placed his hand against the radiator grille. He found it was still warm, suggesting the vehicle had only recently arrived. He felt a new sense of optimism. Maybe there was still time. He paused only long enough to immobilize the Transit by removing the rotor arm from the distributor, which he slipped it into his pocket and returned to the track, following a thin trickle of moonlight towards the back of the house.
Then the ruined church was there, directly in front of him, cold and hostile. He studied the place for a few moments, looking for any sign of movement, listening for the slightest sound, but there was nothing; just a heavy threatening stillness as if the building itself were holding its breath in some sort of gleeful anticipation. He made straight for the front porch, his feet kicking up clods of earth from the derelict kitchen garden as he cut a diagonal path through the overgrown plot and his eyes narrowed when he reached the double doors. The blue-and-white ‘Police Crime Scene. Do Not Cross’ tape, which had been strung across the entrance, had been ripped from the corner posts to which it had been fixed. Moving into the shadows of the porch, his torch picked out dark spots on the flagstones, which glistened like droplets of melted wax in the light. He remembered the smears on the Ford Transit’s door and grimaced. Someone had been injured, that was for sure, but the question was who?
Gently easing one of the double doors open, he was immediately greeted by the flutter of wings in the gloom beyond, but otherwise there was not a sound. He switched on his torch, masking the beam with one cupped hand, and negotiated his way through the dismembered pews towards the north-east corner, where the stairs to the crypt were. He heard the muffled cry before he had gone more than a few feet and stopped dead, dispensing with caution by removing his cupped hand from his torch and directing the full beam into the blackness in front of him.
Something erupted from a niche in the stonework to his left and skimmed over his head, stirring his thinning hair – another bat, just like before – but he saw nothing else and was about to direct his torch elsewhere when he heard another cry, apparently coming from the far end of the church. He moved forward again, picking his way round fallen debris and trying to avoid walking into anything likely to cause injury, conscious all the time of an uncomfortable prickling sensation at the base of his neck as if he were being watched from somewhere in the gloom close by. Twice he actually turned to direct his torch back down the nave, convinced he had detected stealthy movement among the pews, but he saw nothing and in the end he put it all down to the mischievous action of a newly arisen wind, which seemed determined to restore the ruins to life and awaken the ghosts that had slept there for centuries.
Reaching the north-east corner, he was surprised to find that the hole in the bricked-up archway leading to the crypt had been sealed with a steel plate – no doubt by the SOCO team in an effort to preserve the scene – and closer inspection revealed that the plate was still intact, secured to the wall with businesslike bolts. The discovery certainly threw him, for it meant that no one could possibly have visited the crypt since the thing had been fitted. So where the hell had his quarry disappeared to?
His answer was not long in coming. The high-pitched scream seemed to issue from directly above his head, cutting through the suffocating gloom with the surgical precision of a laser and sending the bats into a panic-stricken frenzy as his torch flashed wildly among them in the ruins of the vaulted roof. The sound lasted for no more than a couple of seconds before it was abruptly cut off, but that was long enough to tell him exactly what he wanted to know. The tower! The bastard was up in the tower.
There had once been a padlock on the half-open tower door, but it now lay on the floor with the buckled remains of the hasp. The notice on the wall beside it was faded, but still legible:
DANGER. KEEP OUT. TOWER STRUCTURE AND BELL MOUNTINGS UNSAFE
Fulton bared his teeth in a fierce grimace as he jerked the door wide. Obviously health-and-safety issues did not feature prominently in the killer’s mind at the present time – and neither did they in his.
The stone staircase that started up the shoulder-width gullet inside the doorway curled away sharply to his left, disappearing behind the curve of the wall, and his torch picked out what looked like more blood spots on the lower steps. The steps themselves were chipped at the edge and worn away into hollows in the centre from centuries of heavy use, and there was no handrail or guide-rope in evidence. He decided that the easiest meth
od of tackling the steep climb was to revert to his childhood days and lean on each rising step with both hands, then grope for the next as he went up in a semi-crouched position. He switched off his torch and pushed it through the belt of his trousers, his straining eyes making as much use as they could of the weakened moonlight stealing in through the long narrow windows.
The feel of the cold stone beneath his palms and the taste of the damp mortar at the back of his throat evoked poignant memories of another time and place when, as a boy, he had climbed similar steps in his father’s own church in exactly the same way. Then his mission had been to help with the ringing of the eight huge bells secured to their equally massive A-frame high up in the bell chamber, his legs shaking with trepidation at the thought of having to mount the wooden box waiting for him in the bell-ringing room above, where he would have to grip the thick rough rope under the glare of the fanatical bell captain, Harry Duncan.
Now, all these years later, his legs were shaking once again, but this time it was due to fatigue rather than trepidation as he was forced to draw on every ounce of energy he possessed to haul his ponderous bulk up what seemed like a never-ending spiral, while his heart threatened to explode under the strain and his lungs teetered on the edge of collapse. He should never have attempted such a climb in his poor physical condition, he knew that only too well. But what he lacked in natural stamina, he made up for in sheer dogged determination and that, coupled with the hatred that burned deep into his soul, drove him on regardless of the consequences.
As he climbed, the wind seemed to home in on him, buffeting the tower with increasing force, its moaning breath setting up unnerving vibrations that rippled through the ancient structure like mini seismic aftershocks, threatening to bring the whole lot down on top of him. Then, forty steps up – he could not help himself counting them one by one – the first glimmer of artificial light showed; a watery stain in the gloom that touched his fingers with a timid curiosity before strengthening appreciably as he rounded the curve of the wall. Now he was able to see the outline of a small wooden door on his right (the bell-ringing room?) past which the steps marched on, heading for the top of the tower and almost certainly the bell chamber itself.
At the same moment, as he stood there gasping on the residues of oxygen still left in his depleted lungs, he heard a muffled whimpering, like that of a child in distress. Gently pushing the door open, he peered round the edge into a small vaulted room, graced with long narrow windows. Strands of moonlight filtered through the shattered panes and, at floor level, strategically placed paraffin lamps which smothered the damp smell of the tower with a powerful sickly-sweet odour of their own, provided more substantial illumination.
The room was unfurnished, except for a couple of wooden chairs and several square boxes of varying heights, which he immediately recognized as similar to those he had been forced to stand on as a child when ringing the bells. To his surprise, the wooden spider, the hooks of which would normally have secured the bell ropes at ceiling level for reasons of safety, had been released and lowered on its pulley so that the noosed ends of the ropes now hung free, casting sinister shadows across the walls, like those of some early eighteenth-century scaffold rigged for a mass hanging.
Twenty feet up the wooden ceiling itself and part of the bell chamber floor above it had been stripped away from the massive supporting beams, with the lengths of timber and what he assumed to be soundproofing material piled up against the wall to his left, indicating that the renovation programme referred to in the write-up he had seen on the LIO’s computer a few days before had been very much in full swing before being halted by the legal wrangling over ownership of the building.
More significantly, the moonlight filtering through the slatted windows of the bell-ringing chamber revealed that at least two of the bells were still in situ – and that surprised him a whole lot more, even though the note on the tower door had already suggested as much. As far as he knew, it was the usual practice for bells to be removed to a safe place when a church was decommissioned, as those enormous crafted domes could be worth a small fortune – particularly the huge tenors, often weighing in excess of a ton – so someone seemed to have slipped up badly here.
A much more serious slip-up was evident, however. Though one of the bells appeared to be right side up – its mouth gaping at him through the gap and its uvula-like clapper clearly visible – another (a big tenor bell, Fulton thought) had been left in the upside-down position, with its mouth pointing upwards. This amounted to a dangerous and irresponsible lapse on someone’s part now that the bell ropes were so accessible, and he couldn’t help wondering whether the stay restricting the bell’s movement was still intact. He visualized with a shiver what was likely to happen if it had been removed or was broken and the rope was given a determined pull, for this would allow the bell to achieve a full revolution – with disastrous consequences for the person holding on to a ton of Whitechapel cast iron turning over on itself.
Then he saw the thin figure of Norman Skellet and realized in a flash that that was precisely the killer’s intention. The elderly ACC was in his dressing-gown and pyjamas, his hands secured in some way (probably cuffed) behind his back as he sat on a high three-legged stool with the noose of the tenor bell rope round his neck. A hard pull on the rope was all that was required to wrench him off the stool and up towards the gaping bell chamber, as if on the end of the recoiling rubber band of a macabre bungee jump, initiating a hanging in reverse and snapping his neck like a piece of crisp celery.
Fulton felt sick as he pushed through the doorway, but he immediately froze when a second figure, crouched behind Skellet, straightened up, something glinting in his right hand.
‘Jack,’ the killer greeted him softly. ‘How nice of you to join us.’
Fulton stared at him for a moment, his eyes drawn with a sort of horrible fascination to the cut-throat razor he was holding. Although the figure was still largely buried in shadow, Fulton did not need to see his face to know his identity. ‘Hello, George,’ he said at last. ‘It’s all over now, you know that, don’t you?’
George Oates stepped directly into the light, perspiration glistening on his domed forehead, blood dripping from the bandage wrapped round the hand holding the razor. ‘On the contrary, Jack,’ he replied, ‘the party has just started.’
chapter 29
NORMAN SKELLET COULD honestly claim never to have been frightened by anything – mainly because he had never been put in any frightening positions to start with. A few short years at university, then selection for the police service under the graduate entry scheme and speedy ascent through the ranks to chief-officer status, had ensured that the only scary moments he had had to face were in his disputes with his dominant wife, Eunice, who had finally walked out on him after ten years of matrimonial disharmony.
But all good things tend to come to an end eventually and Assistant Chief Constable Norman Skellet BA was frightened now – terrified, in fact – and his whole body shook fitfully as his bladder continued to empty sporadically on the floor at his feet. Even the gag held in place across his thin lips with sticky tape failed to suppress the whimpering of this former high-powered flier whose atomic escalator had suddenly collapsed beneath him.
Fulton felt no real sympathy for his boss – which was hardly surprising after the way the head of force operations had treated him in the last few days – but, however despicable Skellet was, he did not deserve the fate that had been reserved for him and the big man determined to do his utmost to try to save that scrawny neck, whether he wanted to or not.
Oates was ahead of him, however, and even as he tensed his huge frame, the moon-faced LIO brought the hand holding the razor to a point just below Skellet’s chin. ‘Steady, Jack,’ he warned. ‘You don’t want me to slip now, do you?’
Only a few feet separated them, but Fulton recognized the futility of trying to get to Skellet before the blade managed to slice through his windpipe. He relaxed his taut musc
les after just a moment’s hesitation.
‘So what put you on to me in the end?’ Oates continued, his tone surprisingly conversational despite the circumstances. ‘I must admit, I’m curious.’
A cautionary voice in Fulton’s head cut in on his chaotic thoughts.
Take it easy. Play him along while you figure out what to do.
‘I suddenly remembered something you said,’ he replied at length, clearing his throat.
Oates straightened. ‘Something I said?’
Fulton slipped a hand into his pocket, pausing when the other stiffened suspiciously. ‘Cigarette?’ he queried as blandly as he could manage. On receiving a curt assenting nod, he produced his packet of filter-tips and lighter, hoping Oates hadn’t noticed his trembling fingers.
‘Straight after Lenny Baker was stiffed, you suggested we were dealing with a serial killer,’ he continued, ‘but how would you have known that unless you were the killer himself? We hadn’t announced a link between Baker’s death and that of Judge Lyall, and the full SP on the snout’s murder had not been given out anyway – not even to the control room. As for Cotter, he was not even in the picture then.’
The big man leaned a shoulder against a supporting wooden pillar, lighting up and taking a long greedy pull on the cigarette (hell, he’d needed that). ‘But what really put you in the frame as far as I was concerned was your comment about the killer’s MO being “in the Sweeney Todd tradition”. At that time, no one, except the killer, knew enough about the crimes to be able to make that sort of analogy.’
Oates grinned. ‘Oops!’
‘And going on to claim you’d never heard of Drew House – even finding difficulty in spelling the name properly – was just plain stupid. You must have known the service record in your P/F would show you had been the local ABO for Little Culham on the night of the fire, which meant that Drew House would have been on your patch?’
