The Yeare's Midnight

by Ed O'Connor

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Jimmy Jarrett scrambled down the gully, slipping and cursing in the mud until his feet were underwater. He was breathless. Getting old, Jim. ‘Is anyone there?’ He bent down and looked through the driver’s open door, stretching into the car. What he saw would haunt him.

  Suzie Hunt slammed her phone down. She had agreed with June Riley to keep trying Katie’s mobile until six. Then June would call the hospitals and Suzie would call the police. Time crawled by and Suzie became increasingly agitated. She chewed her fingernails and sucked the last molecules of smoke out of a packet of ten. At half-past five, her house phone rang.

  44

  New Bolden’s scene-of-crime officers were stretched: four murders in under a week had put their meagre resources under strain. Extra officers had been seconded from the Area Major Incident team at Huntington after the news of the murdered couple broke. He stood amongst the mêlée in the darkening field with a growing sense of frustration. He had now examined four bodies – all young and healthy people – in a matter of days and felt no closer to the killer. There was some trace DNA from the Drury woman but even though it might give them a preliminary match if they actually caught the killer, he shuddered to think what a good defence lawyer would do to it in court.

  Leach stepped back as a crane began to haul Steve Riley’s Fiesta from its muddy resting place. The chain creaked and groaned as it grappled with the car’s inertia. Slowly and awkwardly, the car edged up until it juddered to a halt at the top of the bank. Not for the first time, Leach glumly considered the banality of death. We exist is inexplicable complexities, the crest of the evolutionary wave, imbued with insecurities and aspirations, preconceptions and knowledge, affectations and delusions. And yet, we leave the world in lumpen, ugly banality. Car crashes, heart attacks, cancer, hypothermia: attached to a machine in a hospital corridor or lying in a puddle of glass on tarmac. Or sometimes brutally ripped from the world, like Kate Hunt and Steven Riley. He held their personal effects in two evidence bags: a purse containing twenty pounds and a Connect card, a wallet holding ten pounds, a couple of credit cards and two unused condoms, and two mobile phones. What could be more banal than caving someone’s skull in with a hammer?

  Leach needed a smoke. He watched Sergeant Dexter walking towards him from the recovered car. Her face looked softer under the light of the SOC’s halogen lamps; the harsh lights of the police station made her look like she was carved from granite. He realized that was an illusion. More like marble, really, Leach mused.

  ‘What do you think, Doctor? Is it our man?’ Dexter stumbled slightly on the uneven ground.

  ‘Almost certainly. Similar pattern of blows to the back of the head, within two miles of the Drury woman, approximate time of death between ten and midnight yesterday. No obvious signs that they fought him. I’d say he surprised them.’

  ‘Or maybe they surprised him?’

  Leach nodded. ‘Very possibly. There doesn’t seem to be any damage to the eyes of either victim.’

  ‘Poor bastards.’ Dexter looked back at the car. ‘Harrison’s with the parents at the station. Common as muck, he reckons; they’re already blaming each other. We can do the formal IDs whenever it suits you.’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll need to look them both over tonight, then we’ll clean them up a bit. We can’t let the parents see them like this.’

  ‘Understood. I can’t believe this is happening, Doc. I thought it was supposed to be quiet country up here. It’s worse than London.’ She looked tired and tried to stifle a yawn.

  ‘A long day,’ Leach observed as he placed the possessions of Katie Hunt and Steve Riley in a secure evidence box. ‘Where’s your guv’nor, by the way? No offence, I’m sure you are at least as capable as he is, but shouldn’t he be here? It’s his disco, after all.’

  ‘He’s chasing up a possible suspect.’ Dexter wanted to believe that. ‘I tried to call him but his mobile’s switched off.’

  ‘A difficult character, is Underwood. An enigma wrapped inside a monumental pain in the arse.’

  ‘Impossible bloke.’ Dexter let her guard drop. ‘God, I’m knackered. Have you got time for a drink?’

  Dexter updated Harrison over the phone and left the scene with Leach an hour later. They drove in a two-car convoy to the edge of New Bolden where they parked outside The Plume of Feathers and went in. It was warm and welcoming. Dexter suddenly felt exhausted.

  ‘Double Scotch?’ asked Leach, with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘For starters …’

  They sat in a quiet corner of the dark-timbered pub, the open fire licking at their heels. Dexter stared into the bottom of her drink and blinked away the bloody eyeball that stared back at her.

  ‘How long have you been doing this, Doc?’

  ‘Drinking, or my Dr Frankenstein bit?’ Leach grinned. ‘Actually, the answer is roughly the same either way: about twenty years.’

  Dexter took a swig of Scotch: it seared straight to the centre of her brain. Fantastic.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’

  ‘Like this? No. The organization of the killer and the post-mortem mutilations on the body are extraordinary, in my experience.’ He looked up at a framed certficate of beer-worthiness on the wall of the pub. ‘We still haven’t got any real idea why he’s doing it. That’s the most troubling thing, as far as I can see.’

  ‘He’s trying to recreate these poems, isn’t he? Dazzle us with his wit, Dr Stussman reckons.’

  ‘OK, so why the eyes of Drury and Harrington but not those of the Hunt girl?’

  Dexter thought. ‘The names are important to him. They are the names of people in Donne’s intellectual circle, whatever that might be. His merry bleedin’ men, I suppose.’

  ‘But when he killed Riley and Hunt he broke his pattern anyway. So why not take their eyes and have done with it? Why kill them, then hang around in the area for another seven or eight hours risking detection just to get hold of Elizabeth Drury? As Underwood said, it’s a massive risk.’

  ‘Like I said, the names matter to him.’

  ‘I think it’s more than that. Harrington and Drury both had blue eyes, Riley and Hunt both had brown eyes.’

  ‘Come on, Doc! You don’t think this lunatic has a thing about blue-eyed girls, do you?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Then again, why should he be any different to the rest of the male population?’

  ‘What I am saying is that serial killers have highly specific fantasies that they act out. Now, if blue eyes are central to your killer’s fantasy that is something specific that doesn’t, on the face of it, have anything to do with the poetry.’

  Dexter saw the point. ‘The poems refer to eyes but not to blue eyes. It’s more general stuff about tears and oceans.’

  ‘Right. But in the two murders where the poetry was left behind, both the victims had blue eyes. Riley and Hunt both had brown eyes that he left alone.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘Why would someone specifically want blue eyes as opposed to brown or green?’

  Dexter got it. ‘Maybe he thinks that the eyes refer to a specific person. Some fantasy woman he’s created.’

  ‘Problem is –’ Leach paused for a sip of his whisky, half for effect ‘– he took the left eye in both cases. If you were creating a fantasy woman – you know, eyes that you could stare longingly into on those cold winter evenings – wouldn’t you take a right eye and a left eye?’

  ‘I would have taken both of Lucy Harrington’s eyes,’ Dexter replied. ‘I had her all to myself, no chance of interruption.’

  ‘Exactly. And she was an attractive girl: a fantasy figure, if you like.’

  ‘But he didn’t do that.’ Dexter felt a twinge of excitement as pennies began to drop. ‘He took double the risk to get Elizabeth Drury’s left eye. Then, when he bumps into Riley and Hunt and knocks them off too, he multiplies the risks again.’

  ‘And still hangs around for eight hours to get what he really wants,’ Leach emph
asized. ‘Imagine staying near to a spot – a spot where you’ve just battered two people to death – for eight or nine hours: that takes incredible will-power. He must have really wanted that left eye.’

  Will-power. The power of the rational will. Dexter remembered Stussman’s phrase. She frowned. ‘Why would anyone want two left eyes?’

  Leach scratched his head languidly. ‘You’re the detective.’

  45

  Harrison was pissed off. It had been the worst day he could remember in his eight years in the CID. Three bodies, the local and national press baying for blood, a serial killer at large, distraught parents and no decent leads. He and Jensen had spent two hours trying to console Suzie Hunt and June and Duncan Riley before the counsellors from Huntington had turned up. Arguments, tears, recriminations: two hours of wasted time.

  What did they have to go on after a week of legwork? No fingerprints, some scratchy DNA evidence, a phantom white van, African violets and a list of eighteen housebreakers that nobody believed would be of the slightest value. It was demoralizing. As was being ordered about by little Miss Bossy-Dexter. He would love to stick it to her. He would give it to her hard – across the desk, maybe. That would shut her up. He would make her squeak in her stupid cockney accent. Strike a light with that, darlin’.

  He wished all female coppers were like Jensen. You could have a laugh with her and she didn’t mind putting it around a bit. He was planning to go round to her flat later: she only had a single bed but he didn’t plan on doing much sleeping. There was always the couch for that.

  Jensen walked back into the crime room, looking exasperated.

  ‘Have they gone?’ Harrison asked.

  ‘Yes. Thank Christ.’ She took a cigarette from Harrison’s pack and lit it hurriedly. ‘God, that was awful. The girl’s mother says that they went out for drinks in Afton. I made some calls. The landlord of The Farmer’s Boy says they were in there until after nine.’

  ‘The parents are coming in at ten tomorrow for the IDs,’ said Harrison. ‘Dexter can do that. I’m through being a bloody counsellor.’

  ‘Where is she, anyway?’ Jensen asked. ‘Shouldn’t she be back by now?’

  ‘Should be. Still cleaning up the crime scene, I guess. It always takes a bit longer when you have to use the AMIP team: different teams have different methods.’

  Jensen slumped in her chair and rustled the bewildering pile of paper in front of her. ‘This African-violet business is a waste of time.’

  ‘Of course it is. You don’t think that Dexter would have let you follow it up if it wasn’t, do you?’

  ‘I’ve called all the local flower shops and the nursery and none of them stock Saintpaulia-bleeding-Ionantha. Wrong time of year, apparently.’

  ‘Our man must grow his own. Nice relaxing hobby.’ Harrison laughed at the thought.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll start the house-to-house on the list of burglars. I’m tired of shuffling the list about. We might as well start interviewing them all: getting alibis and that.’ Jensen exhaled the blue cigarette smoke with a sigh of pleasure.

  ‘That’s gonna be another dead end. I tell you. This guy isn’t a burglar, he’s a cold-blooded fucking maniac. We won’t get this boy until he screws up or we get lucky like Dexter did this morning.’

  ‘Can we go? I fancy a beer. The pubs close in an hour.’

  ‘We should wait for her to get back really.’ Harrison thought for a moment. ‘Oh, sod it. The guv’nor’s not here. I’ll treat you to a Babycham.’ He stood and picked up his coat. ‘And after that I will take great delight in examining you for evidence.’

  ‘Returning to the scene of the crime, eh?’ Jensen smiled. ‘You’re very meticulous. Maybe I’ll pretend you’re Inspector Underwood.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll pretend you’re Sergeant Dexter.’

  ‘Don’t do that. I don’t want you to go all floppy on me.’

  ‘No danger of that, constable.’

  ‘Pulling rank?’

  ‘Whenever I can.’

  Harrison held the door open for her. Jensen brushed past him a little closer than she needed to.

  46

  Suzie Hunt closed her front door. The house was empty and quiet. The police squad car pulled away outside. Through the frosted glass she watched its lights disappear. She was shaking but had no tears left to cry. Her little girl had gone. Gone. She hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. She felt that Katie was standing behind her, shouting, screaming for her to help. Little Katie alone in a vast dark night: just like her mother. Calling her, calling her. She was so young, so pretty. Suzie Hunt collapsed, retching, onto her tired two-seater sofa and tried to think herself dead.

  47

  Underwood listened to Dexter’s voicemail message without emotion. Another two bodies, another Spaghetti Junction of directionless leads. He was almost past caring. He had visited the offices of Heyer Properties late that afternoon. Heyer’s secretary had given him her boss’s phone number in Norfolk and Underwood had decided not to push for the address: no point in alerting Heyer that he was coming. The prefix to the phone number was ‘01263’ and Underwood called Directory Enquiries to locate the area that the code covered. It was Blakeney in Norfolk: an hour up the A11, then the A1065 to Holt.

  The drive had been easier than he had expected. The early-evening traffic had been light and he arrived in Blakeney just after nine. The tiny old medieval port was quiet as he drove in and pulled up in a car park overlooking the estuary. Across the water were the salt marshes and the bird watchers’ sanctuary of Blakeney Point. It was a beautiful spot. Nice place to unwind and fuck someone else’s wife.

  There were two or three small restaurants close to the small front. He would find the happy couple eventually. It was just a matter of being patient. The killer of Elizabeth Drury and Lucy Harrington is patient. He takes risks to achieve what he wants. He waits and wonders: grateful for the dark. Underwood wound down his car window: the salty air was cold and unwelcoming but it heightened his senses. I am the hunter. I will find you. I will bring you down. The air made him hungry and he reached into his bag for a sandwich.

  Time drifted by. Underwood became irritated. Sitting in a car park was pathetic. How else could he find them? The car. Underwood still had Heyer’s car registration in his notebook. He reached into his jacket pocket and found the relevant page: blue BMW, S245 QXY. Blakeney was a small village with only three or four restaurants and a couple of pubs. Underwood climbed out of his car and walked through the car park. There were only a dozen or so cars and none of them belonged to Paul Heyer.

  He began to walk along the front. Sea water slapped at the yachts to his left. A couple emerged laughing from a restaurant. Underwood felt exposed and pulled his collar up to shield his face. The village was well maintained, with a plush Georgian-style hotel as its architectural centrepiece. Were they staying there? It was the obvious place. Underwood found a telephone box and called the number Heyer’s secretary had given him. No reply. It was unlikely to be the hotel, then. Perhaps they were staying with some friends of Heyer’s – that fucker – or maybe they had got a cottage. A cottage seemed more likely, Underwood thought to himself: a bit of privacy for their sweaty little business.

  Half an hour swept by and Underwood found no sign of Heyer’s car. Maybe they had stayed in. It was the first night of their fuckfest, after all. Perhaps they couldn’t control themselves. Spoddy little Julia Cooper the sex goddess. The thought almost made him laugh out loud. The air was breaking up the muck in his lungs and Underwood was beginning to feel uncomfortable: the mild pain in his chest was threatening to become more acute. He crossed a narrow cobbled road and headed for an ancient-looking pub: The Jack Tar. A brandy would help. After all, didn’t doctors use alcohol to sterilize equipment? Equipment. Lines of scalpels and bloody forceps. Rip their eyes out. Does he keep the eyes in alcohol? Do they float and bob in a jar, like pickled eggs?

  Underwood was about to open the black oak door of The Jack Tar when a BMW tu
rned along the road ahead and parked. He paused for a second in the doorway of the pub, invisible. A hole in the night. The driver’s door opened and Paul Heyer stepped out. Underwood’s stomach clenched into a painfully tight ball and he edged closer, ducking into an alleyway. He could smell onions cooking. Heyer was about twenty yards ahead of him now, standing by the car, hands on hips. Musical ponce. Underwood caught his breath as Julia climbed out of the passenger seat. Her black hair was tied back into a neat bow. She dyes her hair, mate, Underwood thought darkly. I bet she hasn’t fucking told you that yet. You’ll find out, though. All her banal little secrets. Her smells and insecurities. She shut the car door and smiled at Paul. He walked to the front of the car and took her hand, kissing her gently on the lips.

  Underwood boiled with rage. He wished he had brought the hammer with him. He would have rushed out at that oh-so-perfect moment and smashed the back of Paul Heyer’s head in as the adulterer violated Underwood’s wife. Instead, he held back in the darkness of the alleyway and watched them walk slowly down the cobbles towards the tiny high street. Julia looked slimmer than he remembered. All that screwing must have helped her to shed a few pounds. She wore a dress he didn’t recognize and heels that didn’t suit her or the pavement. He recognized her perfume, though: same old same old. Dress it up like a lady and it still smells like a tart. He followed them at a distance until they entered the narrow doorway of a seafood restaurant.

  Paul Heyer was beginning to relax. With New Bolden behind them, the quaint isolation of his friend’s cottage seemed like an entirely different world. Julia had unwound visibly and looked beautiful in the outfit he had bought for her in Holt. The old worry lines still nagged at her brow but Paul was confident that a few days of fresh air and good food would iron those out. She had been through a lot, he reminded himself. He knew it would take time for her to shed her old skin of guilt and anxiety. He was prepared to wait. She was worth it.