by Peter James
She heard the assailant’s voice shouting. “Get off me, lemme go, you sodding bloody thing!”
She sprinted, oblivious to the pain and cold in her feet, along the lane, and out onto deserted Hove Park Road. Behind her she could hear footsteps, gaining.
She made a snap decision, turned left, and ran as fast as she could down toward the busy thoroughfare of Goldstone Crescent, with the darkness of Hove Park beyond. She could see headlights approaching. Oblivious to any danger of being run over, she tore straight out into the middle of the road, stark naked, blinded by the lights. Heard the squeal of brakes.
The car stopped. A woman jumped out of the driver’s side. “What—?”
Stark naked and sobbing, Freya threw her arms around her. “Help me, please help me.”
Freya was vaguely aware of more headlights, behind the car. The sound of a horn.
“Someone just tried to kill me,” she gasped. “Please help me.”
She turned and stared, in terror, at the deserted street behind her.
Somewhere, not far away, a car engine started and tires squealed as it accelerated away.
75
Thursday 18 December
No one ever gave you training for delivering a death message. You just learned as you went along. As a rookie cop you picked it up from your seniors. Some took a gentle approach but others came straight out with it.
It was the part of the job that, almost without exception, every police officer hated.
The sergeant Roy Grace had learned from told him always to say, straight out and bluntly, that the person was dead. That way it presented no possible ambiguity.
PC Linda Buckley had delivered the sad news earlier and was staying to support the family as the Family Liaison Officer while they came to terms with it. Emma Johnson’s mother still refused to believe it. Even though Emma’s sister had identified her body in the mortuary. She was drunk, angry and bitter. It had been one hell of a twenty minutes in the house and he was relieved to be outside and back in his car.
He was in the process of programming the address of Ashleigh Stanford’s parents into his satnav when the call came through, from Panicking Anakin at Brighton police station.
A woman had been attacked in her home near Hove Park.
She had fought off her assailant, helped by a dog. Two officers were with her now.
“Where are they, Andy?”
“In the back of a police car outside her house. She was naked.”
“Don’t let them go back inside.”
“I haven’t, Roy. I’ve got a scene guard outside the front of the house.”
Grace reached forward, switched on his blue lights and said, “I’m on my way.”
76
Thursday 18 December
“Boy, you really screwed up big time!” Felix said. “You were driven by sheer hubris.”
“You’ve put us all in danger,” Harrison added, sternly. “You allowed that detective Roy Grace to rile you into making a mistake. Despite what he said, you’ve not put a foot wrong before, in all these years. We’re all under threat now.”
“We’re doomed,” said Marcus, gloomily. “We don’t want things to change, not at this stage of our lives. Now we all face rotting in jail for being accessories to murder.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’re the ridiculous one,” Marcus replied. “BTK would have got clean away with his murders if he hadn’t risen to the bait—the tauntings by the FBI. We warned you to keep calm, lie doggo, do nothing. But no, you and your bloody ego!”
“Surely you knew she had a dog?” Felix quizzed.
“I’m telling you she did not have a sodding dog!”
“Oh,” Harrison said, “so you were bitten by an imaginary dog?”
“Very funny.”
“Which might give you imaginary rabies,” Marcus said pensively. He said it slowly, as if testing this hypothesis on himself, introspectively. “Psychosomatic.”
“The way when someone loses a limb they can still feel it for years afterward,” Harrison said.
Marcus and Felix chortled. “Oh yes, absolutely!”
“It’s not funny, boys. I’ve been bitten, there’s blood on my trousers, which means I might have left blood at the scene.”
“Remember Tony Hancock, the comedian?” Felix said. “Hancock’s Half Hour on television? One of the best was The Blood Donor. He went to give blood and then asked how much they would be taking. When they replied it was a pint, he worked out that a normal male human being has nine to ten pints, so he calculated that one pint equated to an entire armful. ‘I’m not walking around with an empty arm,’ he said!”
“I know what he meant! At least we don’t have to worry about that, eh?” Harrison said.
Felix and Marcus laughed, sourly. Then Marcus said, “Well, look on the bright side!”
Felix began singing the song from Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “Always look on the bright side of life!”
“Shuddup all three of you!” he screamed.
“The thing is,” Felix said, “how could you have missed that there was a dog in the house?”
“I did a bloody recce. There was no dog bowl—neither for water nor food. I’d have bloody seen it, wouldn’t I?”
“Well,” Marcus said. “Obviously not.”
He rounded on Marcus, glaring. “I’m warning you.”
“Ooooh, I’m so scared! Mummy, help me, I’m scared. Mr. Big has been bitten by a rabid dog and is close to foaming at the mouth!”
“I’m warning you! I won’t warn you again.”
There was a moment of sullen silence, then he added, “There was no sodding dog in the house. She must have brought it with her.”
“And now we’re doomed,” Felix said. “DOOMED!”
“Do you want a smack in the mouth, Felix?”
“If it helps dislodge my aching tooth, yes please!”
“You tossers,” he said. “You trio of tossers! We have a possible crisis and all you can do is make fun of the situation. Get real!”
“Sorry,” Marcus said.
“Really sorry,” Felix said.
“I’m sorry, too,” added Harrison.
He glared at the three of them. “Like you all really mean it?”
“Temper, temper,” Felix said. “Take a deep breath and calm down. Remember what Nelson Mandela said. ‘Holding resentment is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.’”
“Go to hell!”
“Not possible.”
“Oh, why not?”
“Because that’s where all of us are already.”
77
Friday 19 December
Roy Grace finally got home at a few minutes past midnight. Humphrey sat amid a forest of packing boxes, with one eye open, looking very unsettled and, unusually, did not jump up to greet him. Both Noah and Cleo were fast asleep.
Utterly exhausted, he set his alarm for 3 a.m., and backed it up with his phone alarm, brushed his teeth, then stripped and crawled into bed, slipping an arm under Cleo’s pillow. She stirred, momentarily, then was still again. He kissed her naked shoulder.
It seemed only moments later that the alarm was buzzing. Following almost instantly was the ching-ching-ching of his phone alarm.
He snapped awake, leaden with tiredness—and with guilt. They were moving today and he wasn’t going to be around to help.
He sat on the edge of the bed, head bowed, gathering his thoughts. Had the offender struck again last night and failed?
A young woman, with long brown hair, who fitted his target profile exactly, had been attacked in the shower in her house. Several spots of fresh blood had been found at the scene, presumably from the assailant, and with luck they would have DNA results back later today.
Over one hundred people had turned up for the press conference. If there was one small mercy, it was that it was December, well out of the main tourism season. Six months earlier and the financial consequences to the city’s touris
t industry would have been even more catastrophic. But that didn’t cut him any slack. Brighton was turning into the modern equivalent of a leper colony. And all eyes were on him to return it to normality.
Which meant having a credible suspect under arrest as a starting point.
* * *
He was back at his desk in Sussex House at 4 a.m., with a steaming mug of coffee beside him and a banana that was going to have to suffice as his breakfast. The floor of his office was piled with documents from Operation Yorker, the original investigation into the death of Catherine Jane Marie Westerham.
Later this morning he would be holding yet another press conference, where he would be going through the details of the attack on Freya Northrop, and again asking for the public’s help. He would also need to brief the Gold group with the latest update, and everyone would have to consider the ongoing safety implications for young women in the city. Perhaps the failed attack could be the game-changer he needed—providing a good description of the offender and hopefully DNA.
He reached across the desk and pulled out the summary details of Unknown Female, now identified as Denise Patterson. She had come from a less privileged background than Katy Westerham, and had gone straight to work from school in the Cornelia James glove factory in Brighton.
And was just as dead.
He stared at her photograph, then laid one of Katy Westerham’s beside it. They could have been sisters. Just as Emma Johnson could have been, and Ashleigh Stanford.
He stood up, walked over to his round table, where he had more space, and laid out the photographs of the faces of all the women.
Then he sat down and stared at them. Thinking. Thinking.
Why these women?
Did they have anything in common beyond being young, attractive, and having long brown hair?
What was he missing?
In all the studies he had made of serial killers, and in his conversations with Tony Balazs, there was invariably a trigger. A bullying father. An abusive, alcoholic mother. Or, like Ted Bundy, rejection by a girlfriend.
What had triggered the offender?
Was that where it had all begun? Were they looking in the wrong place?
He yawned, then gulped down some coffee. His body was telling him he needed sleep badly. No chance.
Then he realized what he needed to do.
Moments later there was a knock on his door and Norman Potting came in and sat down in front of him.
“You’re up early, Norman!”
Potting shook his head. “No, chief, I haven’t gone to bed. Can’t sleep. Thought I’d come in and make myself useful.”
Grace smiled at him sympathetically. “Your timing is perfect!” He ushered him to sit at the table with him.
Potting stared down at the photographs. “Denise Patterson, Katy Westerham, Emma Johnson, Ashleigh Stanford, Logan Somerville and Freya Northrop,” he said.
“And who else?”
“Who else?”
“Who else in these past thirty years? Could it be that there is no one else, that the offender has experienced something recently that’s triggered this new spree?”
“There’s nothing that’s been found so far, boss.”
“Nothing that’s been found. But there are an awful lot of mispers in this country who’ve not turned up during these past thirty years. We know the offender is smart. And we’ve no idea how many others he has killed that we don’t know about—and may never know about.”
A sharp gust of wind hurtled rain that sounded like pebbles against the window.
“You look exhausted, boss,” Potting said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”
Grace gave him a thin smile. “Thanks, but I’m OK. I’ll look a lot less exhausted when we have a suspect behind bars. Something’s bothering me about one of the people you took a statement from, Norman. I know at the time he asked a lot of questions about the investigation, and he’s contacted you a few times since, asking about how it’s all going.”
“Who’s that, boss?”
Grace grabbed a sheet of paper from his desk, wrote the man’s name down and handed it to the Detective Sergeant.
78
Friday 19 December
Shortly before 9 a.m., Red Westwood sat in her Mishon Mackay liveried Mini, at the top of the short, steep driveway that led up to the red-brick neo-Georgian mansion, with its columned portico, waiting for her clients to turn up. A strong wind shook the car, and the sky threatened rain again at any moment. Not a great day for showing a house, she thought.
A slim, attractive, red-headed woman in her thirties, she was feeling more than a slight sense of apprehension about being here. A little over six weeks ago, she had been abducted by a former boyfriend, posing as a client, from outside a house on this very street, just a few hundred yards to the east. Although he was no longer a threat, his presence hung around her like a ghost. She studied the particulars on the clipboard in front of her, which she had written herself.
Moments later she heard a roar, and a black Porsche pulled up just in front of her. A short man in his late forties, she guessed, wearing an expensive leather bomber jacket and a gold Rolex, climbed out of the driver’s side, and a much younger-looking, elegant woman, a good six months pregnant, climbed out of the other.
She opened her door and hurried over to greet them, arm outstretched, the wind tearing at her hair. “Mr. and Mrs. Middleton? I’m Red Westwood from Mishon Mackay. Very nice to meet you!”
She shook their hands. He introduced himself as Darren and his wife as Isabel.
Both of them stared up at the front facade.
“This is such a beautiful house,” Red said, enthusiastically.
“The windows are all wrong,” Darren said.
“Well, the thing is,” she went on, “this house is only twenty years old; it is in immaculate condition. And one major benefit is that it’s not a listed building, so if you were to buy it you could of course put in whatever windows you liked.”
“You ever put new windows in a house? You know the cost of doing that in a place this size?”
“Of course, cost is a consideration. Shall we start with the inside, then we’ll do a tour of the garden!” she said, brightly. “The garden really is quite spectacular. I love this area—I really do consider this the finest residential road in the whole city. Partly of course because there is so little traffic noise.”
“Apart from the learner drivers crawling around it like snails. We had to wait twice for learners to make U-turns to get here.”
“It’s a beautiful view,” his wife said, as if trying to pacify him.
“Oh, it is, Mrs. Middleton,” Red said. “And of course this side of the street, where the houses are elevated, gets the finest views.”
The three of them stared over the rooftops of the houses, right down toward the English Channel.
“On a clear day the views are really magnificent,” the estate agent said.
“How many clear days do we get a year?” Darren Middleton asked.
“Two hundred and seventy-two out of three hundred and sixty-five, Mr. Middleton,” Red replied.
“You’re having a laugh.”
“No, I assure you, I’m not. Lloyds actuarial statistics show that there are just ninety-three days a year here in Brighton in which there is some precipitation during the twenty-four hours of that day. This is one of the sunniest places in the British Isles!”
He looked up at the threatening sky. “Could have fooled me.”
Red led the way to the front door.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Red walked them through the huge conservatory, and unlocked the patio doors. The Middletons followed her around the edge of the infinity pool that abutted the house, with its electric retractable glass roof, and onto the terraced lawns beyond, with their wealth of statues and Romanesque follies.
While his wife gazed around in wonder—imagining the lavish parties she could throw here, Red hoped—Darren Middleton
went over to the east wall, mostly masked with plants, pushed aside the branches of a mature fig tree and hauled himself up.
Then he turned in horror. “Excuse me, what is that monstrosity?”
That was the one problem, Red knew. The derelict house next door, with its untamed jungle of a garden, was an eyesore. But the truth was, unless you jumped up on the wall, like Mr. Middleton was now doing, it was invisible. Except, of course, from a few upstairs windows of the house, which she had carefully kept them away from.
“Well,” she responded brightly, again. “The great thing is that the property has been unoccupied for very many years. The garden is simply wonderful for wildlife. All the nettles provide a haven for butterflies and birds.”
“And urban foxes,” he said, dubiously. “Who owns it?”
“The house is owned by an overseas company. The one next to it is owned by a doctor.” Then, as if realizing this was a plus factor, she added, “He’s a very respected figure in the local community.”
Middleton jumped down from the wall. “It’s a breeding ground for rats and other vermin!” He shook his head. “Presumably someone, at some point, is going to buy it and develop it? They might try to build a sodding high-rise there!”
Red, feeling increasingly gloomy about these people as prospects, said defensively, “I don’t think the planning officers would ever allow that in this residential area.”
“I’ve dealt with planning officers before. They can be somewhat unpredictable.”
“Well, that’s true, but I cannot see them ever allowing a high-rise development here. Now, would you both like to see indoors again?”
“We’ve seen enough, thanks, Ms. Westwood. We’ll need to have a think.”
79
Friday 19 December
Edward Crisp liked to get to his office early—he always had. Most people needed seven to eight hours of sleep, but he had always got by on five—and less on occasions, with a little help from his friends, as he was fond of calling the vials of drugs in his medicine chest. They’d help him stay up all night if he needed to. He was one of the few doctors who still liked to do house calls.
