by Michael Kerr
She said to Lucas, “I want the picture of a dog on my groin. Can you do that?”
Lucas nodded. “Why a dog?”
“You should know. You do Celtic stuff.”
Lucas grinned. He knew that in Celtic Christianity dogs were an important and almost sacred animal, denoting obedience to duty, prowess at hunting, and faithfulness. Talents and qualities that were the cornerstones of that bygone culture.
He locked the door and showed the woman to the curtained area at the rear of the studio. She removed her Nikes and jeans – no panties – and lay down on the cushioned surface of the table.
Shani Singleton might have been visiting her gynaecologist. She was without any trace of embarrassment.
“Just there,” she said, placing a purple-nailed finger on the shaven fatty pad of tissue above her vagina. “Make it an Alsatian bitch.”
“How about a wolf?” Lucas said. “An alpha female.”
Shani smiled. “Sounds fitting,” she said. “Do you tattoo labia?”
“I tattoo anywhere that I can reach with a needle,” Lucas said.
He worked for over two hours on Shani, with a short break for coffee, and for her to take a leak. When he had finished, and she had inspected the work with a mirror, she reached for his zipper, tugged it down and slipped her hand inside to extricate his penis. She gasped at the sight of the dark blue bands of knotwork on it.
This was almost as good as it got, he thought, climbing atop Shani and treating her and himself to a little of what makes the world go round.
“I’ll be back for some more,” Shani said after dressing, and paying him. “I want something really special on my undercarriage.”
“No problem, hot lips. Give me a call and I can book you an appointment.”
Finished for the day, Lucas was suddenly overtaken by a bleak mood. His mother was wittering in his head, condemning him and calling him degenerate and not worth the labour pains she had suffered before finally ejecting him out into a cruel world. His frame of mind deteriorated as the evening turned to night. He needed to shut her up. And there was only one remedy. He took food up to Julie, but did not linger. If he had, then he would have killed her. That was what he had to do: kill.
Dressed in dark clothing he went out in the van. He was like a junkie without a fix. He needed so badly that it was giving him cramps and making him shake from head to foot. There was no time to be selective. The craving would not abate. The stalking and planning was usually all part of the pleasure. But his need was quickening.
His mother’s phantom voice cajoled him. She was still alive after all this time, if only in his mind. ‘You pathetic little mutant,’ she said. ‘Killing a hundred sluts won’t rid you of me. I’ll be with you until you do everyone a favour and die’.
Why couldn’t he dismiss the bitch’s grating voice? He knew that it was only a projection that his subconscious was producing. It was not real. But knowing that did not stop the tirade of insults.
He was desperate. Pulled into a wooded lane where lovers parked up and made out in their vehicles. There was one car nose-in to dense shrubs. The rear window of the car was misted. He stopped thirty yards past it. Got out and furtively made his way back. There was rain in the air. Low cloud made it almost too dark to see where he was going. He let the faint sound of music lead him to the car. Bent down and stealthily made his way to the front passenger door.
Cheryl and Jamie were both married, though not to each other. They could not have picked a worse time, place or date to cheat on their respective partners.
Cheryl Smith was no longer in love with her husband, Lorne. After ten years of wedded sorrow, she wanted more out of life than a semi in Stanwell. She wanted a jet-style life, not to just watch and hear them roar into Heathrow over her roof. If it hadn’t been for her son, Neil, then she would have got out years ago. Lorne – named by a father who had been an avid fan of the old TV series; Bonanza, and of the star of the show, Lorne Green, who had played Ben Cartwright – was a bus driver with no future worth talking about, and no ambition to better himself. When he wasn’t working, he was either watching Sky sports, seeing how many cans of lager he could sink, or out in the garage tinkering with an old Yank car that he had bought four years ago and was still working on. And the annual holiday in a caravan at Southend was not something she ever wanted to do again. Cooking and sitting around alone for most of the time while Lorne and Neil went off beach fishing did not press the right buttons.
Jamie had been just what Cheryl needed. He was the owner of Judd’s Carpet Warehouse, where Cheryl worked in the office. He had been coming on strong for six months, and she had weakened and let him have his way with her in the stock room, on a partly unrolled carpet that cost fifty quid a square metre. Not a shag pile, that would have been more appropriate, but a high-grade felt backed broadloom. Good job it was stain resistant, she had thought when they had christened it. But screwing around at work was too risky. Jamie’s wife, Alana, called in two or three times a day, in between horse riding with her pals and spending Jamie’s money on anything that took her fancy. The old cow had a too bright sun bed tan to better show off her gold trinkets, and her eyes were drawn up as a result of too much cosmetic surgery, not epicanthus. It wouldn’t do to have Alana find them thrashing about in the altogether.
Jamie was in love with Cheryl. He wanted to wake up next to her each and every morning, take her on trips to romantic and faraway places, and maybe have the son that Alana was past bearing. Greed was stopping him from pulling the rug – very apt – from beneath Alana’s feet. He wanted out from the clutches of a woman whose mission in life seemed to be to spend money almost as fast as he could make it. She was a parasite, attached to him like a tic to a sheep, sucking the very life from him. Cheryl was his ideal woman. He felt so alive and optimistic in her company. At first it had been a very pleasant aside; a diversion from a dull world that consisted of floor coverings and paperwork.
Jamie had been strongly attracted to Cheryl from the moment she had walked in the warehouse to apply for the clerical vacancy. She had worn a body-hugging striped top, a short, black pencil skirt and high heels. Her ash-blonde hair was loose and styled in a carefree manner. And her smile turned him to jelly.
Having to make love in the car was fucking ludicrous. Sod it! He would tell Alana that it was over. He had siphoned off a large chunk of money over the past few months, to transfer to an offshore account. She would take at least half of everything he’d got, but it would be worth it. He determined to ask Cheryl to leave her slob of a husband. She could even bring her son, if she wanted to.
The spell was broken. It occurred to Jamie that the police must have crept up on them. He was suddenly being pulled off Cheryl and dragged backwards.
The adrenaline rush was so powerful that he shuddered and gasped aloud. He felt the same expansion throughout his entire body that he remembered experiencing in his biceps when his blood pressure had once been taken at school; a swelling sensation, as though he were a tyre’s inner tube being inflated to bursting point.
Without hesitation he jerked open the car door and surveyed the scene. Yes! Could have been two queers getting it on. But it wasn’t. The passenger seat was as far back as it would go, reclined all the way. The guy was on top, trousers down around his knees. And the bare feet of the woman beneath him were up in the air, almost touching the roof. He reached in and grasped the man by the collar of his shirt, to haul him out of the car, cast him to the ground and stamp on his face and throat until he became still.
Cheryl almost made it out of the car. She did not know what was happening, but sensed that she was in danger.
“Jamie! Jamie!” Cheryl called out, to be answered by a detonation in her head as a heavy blow violently jarred her brain and rendered her unconscious.
No lights approaching. He took the time to drag the inert body of the man into the undergrowth, out of sight from prying eyes, and then slung the scantily clad woman over his shoulder and shut th
e car door, after first pausing to retrieve her handbag from the foot well.
This was to be a quickie. He drove until he found a derelict petrol station. Cut the lights and parked the van at the rear of the building in a stripped-out service bay.
When Cheryl came to, she threw up. It took her a couple of minutes to become aware of the situation she was in. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she could see a blurry double image of a man knelt by her side.
“This is what you get for being a no-good whore and even worse mother,” Lucas said to the helpless woman. He had forced the cheap red wig over her blonde tresses. She looked the part now. For a few minutes she would be the late Brenda Downey.
“You could have loved and cared for me, you bitch. I gave you no reason to hurt and mutilate me. Well now it’s your turn, again.”
“I...I d...don’t understand,” Cheryl sobbed, unaware of the strings of bile swinging from her chin, or of the bubbles forming and popping from her nostrils.
“No one does, Mam. It doesn’t matter. You get to die again…and again for what you did to me.”
He stuffed an oily rag in her mouth and wound tape around her head. Lit a cigarette and blew on the tip. The small red glow lit the inside of the van. He grinned down at the helpless bitch, then slowly and purposefully began to employ the first of four cigarettes to the creamy surface of her tender skin.
It was Marci that answered the phone as dawn broke over the city. The voice was breathless and unnatural. Clipped and muffled.
“Put Barnes on.”
“Give me your name and the number you are calling from and―”
“This is the Wolf, you dumb split-arse cop. Put him on, now.”
“No can do, shit-for-brains. He isn’t on duty,” Marci replied caustically.
“He’s always on call. Give me his number.”
“In your wet dreams. Leave a message or get off the line. I’m trying to finish a crossword puzzle.”
Marci was playing for time. Trying to anger him and keep him talking. There was an automatic trace on all the lines into the squad room.
“Don’t play games, you moron,” Lucas said. “I know that you’re tracing this call. It won’t help you. The mobile I’m on belongs to the late Cheryl Smith of Cranbourne Avenue in Stanwell. I’m knelt next to her body. And remember this, bitch, it could just as easily be you next.”
Ted Frampton coughed up a greasy wad of phlegm and aimed it at the head of the raggedy-eared Tomcat that was getting too long in the tooth to earn its keep. Ted couldn’t remember the last time it had dropped a bird, mouse or rat at his feet. It was like him, slowing down as age took its toll. Nicklaus – the cat – hissed, shook its now wet forehead and limped off towards the kitchen at the back of the main clubhouse.
Ted was a green keeper at Ashford Manor Golf Club. He was about his business at first light, making his way down the first fairway in an electric cart when he saw the patch of bright red in a bunker. He angled across to it and stopped as he recognised it for what it was. Exited the cart on the run and almost tripped over the lip of the bunker.
She was beyond his help. Her wide-open eyes were oblivious to the particles of sand adhered to them. She wore a garish wig; a stocking was tied tightly around her neck, and the indentations in the dew-dampened sand were poignant. Ted surmised, rightly, that they had been made by her heels drumming as she fought for life. The rest of the bunker had been raked. There were no footprints, other than the ones Ted had just made. He went back to the cart, to sit in it and catch his breath before taking his mobile out and punching in 999.
Matt and Pete showed their IDs to the uniform at the entrance and drove to the car park, where they were met by a sergeant who was the designated CCC―Crime Scene Coordinator.
“The crime scene techs are already here,” Sergeant Bruce Anderson said. “And the pathologist is on the way.”
“Let’s take a look,” Matt said.
They walked down the fairway to where they could see the canvas Incitent that had been erected over the bunker.
“Who found her?” Matt said.
“A green keeper,” Bruce replied. “The old boy is in mild shock. Says he didn’t see anyone about, or any stationary vehicle out on the road.”
Matt entered the tent and stepped down into the bunker when the forensic team leader nodded to him. They had examined and photographed the sand as a priority, knowing that it would be compromised by investigators and the pathologist.
Matt dropped to his haunches and took in the fine detail. Same MO. The stocking was knotted the same. And there were multiple cigarette burns visible. He could not begin to imagine the state of fear that the poor woman had suffered. The sight and smell of voided waste disturbed him. Had terror caused her bowels and bladder to release their contents? Or was it the relaxing of the organs after death that prompted the discharge?
She was wearing a wig. Same style as the one in the Polaroid of Julie Spencer. Was it the same one? He thought so. Wolfie was getting lazy, while at the same time being more inventive. He had obviously decided that natural redheads were not imperative. He could modify any woman to appear as he required them to be. Like a virus, he was capable of mutating, and that was bad news. It now broadened the playing field. He was not restricting himself to red-haired prostitutes. No female was safe from him. He had already told Marci that she could be next. Though that was probably just an idle threat.
Rita Mendoza was the duty forensic pathologist that turned up.
“Hi, Matt...Pete,” she said to them, appearing through the flap in a white jumpsuit and carrying her ‘Portamorgue’ case. “How come I always get called out to these scenes in the middle of the bloody night and in bad weather, huh?”
“It’s morning, Rita, and the sun will be out soon,” Matt said with a smile.
“Yeah, well it’s usually three in the morning, bucketing down with rain, and as cold as a lawyer’s heart.”
“I didn’t know lawyers had hearts,” Matt continued, letting the frivolous repartee between them dull the fact that they were gathered before a corpse that only hours earlier had been a vital, living individual, and was now no more than the physical evidence of a crime.
“Believe me, they do, I’ve seen them firsthand,” Rita came back, opening her case, snapping on a pair of gloves and beginning her initial observations. She was now at the forefront of what was a murder investigation. What she found might determine the thrust of the subsequent enquiries. She was an area pathologist on the Home Office register, and a part of her work was to examine a body at the scene as soon as possible after its discovery. Her task was to ascertain the context of the crime, and to even give advice as to how the cadaver should be packed and transported to the mortuary.
After a seemingly cursory inspection, Rita recorded the ambient temperature before inserting a thermometer into the liver, to aid in determining an approximate time of death. The cooling rate of the body would be calculated later, and be dependent on the circumstances of where it was found. It went without saying that a fully clothed corpse found in a warm room would cool less rapidly than a naked one discovered outside. But there were other considerations. Certain types of poison could actually raise the body temperature by a few degrees. Each case was individual.
Rita worked quickly. Shook her head as she extricated a Vodaphone from the corpse’s rectum and bagged it. The depravity of some killers could still enrage her. She then carefully encased the head, hands and feet in plastic bags to help preserve any evidence.
“I’m all finished here,” Rita said to Matt. “Are you?”
Matt nodded. He’d seen all he needed and more than he wanted to.
Rita’s assistants got ready to move in and place the corpse in a heavy duty PVC body bag.
Matt waited until the petite pathologist had removed her gloves inside out and placed them in a snap lock bag before speaking again. “Looks to be the same MO as the others,” he said, starting up a dialogue.
“I coun
ted at least forty cigarette burns. Mainly to her breasts, vagina and rectum,” Rita said. “And death was almost certainly brought about by strangulation. The force employed has snapped the hyoid bone. I would say that this was an act of rage. Most hands-on killings are emotionally charged.”
“When can we expect to get hold of the mobile and the wig, Rita?” Matt said.
“Now, if you sign for them.” Rita knew that there may be valuable information in the phone, and that the wig might be traced to where it was purchased from. “But be aware that either item might have DNA or latents on them.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, Rita. Any idea when you’ll do the cut?”
“I can prioritise and put it to the top of my workload.” This was an active serial killer that they were after. Rita was not going to perform autopsies on other less urgent subjects and hinder the investigation.
“I appreciate that,” Matt said.
“So drop by the mortuary at three p.m. You can get a verbal report as I do the cut. Save you waiting for the longwinded written version.”
Matt sighed. He did not find anything attractive in seeing a human being dissected. And he found it hard to imagine why someone as feminine and bubbly as Rita would want to make a career out of slicing and dicing. Death might be an industry that he was affiliated to, but he could not entertain the thought of being a pathologist or undertaker. They dealt solely with death, not life. It was a grim world that they inhabited.
“See you there,” he said.
PCs Bill Skerritt and Len Aspinall were about to take a break. Bill pulled off the A4 at Cranford, skirted the park and reversed the patrol car into a space at the top of a short lane that ran up to a weed-riddled dead end at the side of the M4. With the windows open they could hear the whoosh of heavy traffic on the motorway.
Bill knew that the area was almost always deserted during the day. It came alive at night as a meeting place for all sorts of people in need of privacy to carry out their diverse practises. Behind the screen of trees on either side of the lane would be all manner of items. The bulk being used condoms and discarded tissues. It was a magnet for gays to meet, and for couples to park up and work off their frustration. It was known as a lovers’ lane.
