by Neil White
He pulled himself to his feet and groaned as his knees froze for a few seconds, age catching up with him, sixty-six the following month. He shuffled towards the window, but he felt scared, exposed. He was in a room at the back of the house, the curtains open, and he knew that whoever was out there would be able to see in. When he reached the window, he pressed his face against the glass to blot out the glare from the fire and tried to see into the garden. He could see only shadows and the silhouette of the church tower, a square Norman block with the iron finger of the weather vane creaking in the breeze, a dark outline against the clear sky, the stars emerging as dots in the blanket.
He cupped his hands around his eyes. There wasn’t much to the garden, just a square patch of grass surrounded by plants and trees, a bird-feeder hanging from a branch. A laurel bush in one corner took all the water from the ground, so that the grass was threadbare underneath, and some bamboos he had planted a couple of years earlier swayed in front of the fence. But there was no one there.
He stepped away from the window, told himself that it must have been a cat, or maybe kids playing in the church yard. But then he thought he saw some movement from the side of the laurel bush, something large and fast. He went to the window again. There was something there, and he shouted out when he saw it turn and rush at the glass.
Rupert stepped back, scared, and tumbled over the chair he had been sitting in. He was falling, flailing at the air, the flicker of the hearth turning sideways as he headed to the ground.
He landed heavily, searing pain coming from his wrist, but then he heard the back door open and heavy footsteps came into the house.
Rupert looked up and saw the outline of a man, tall and broad, his clothes dark, black trousers tucked into his boots and with a woollen hat hiding his hair. A hand was outstretched.
‘Are you all right?’ the voice said.
Rupert looked up and then shuffled quickly along the floor, moving away from the intruder until he felt his back hit the wall. ‘Who are you, and why are you in my house?’
‘I’m sorry, Doctor Barker, I didn’t mean to scare you, but I had to come and see you,’ the voice said. He sounded scared, the words coming out with a tremble. ‘You’re the only one who can help me.’
Rupert felt his stomach turn over. Doctor Barker. It was a patient, it had to be, thirty years as a child psychologist giving him a hit-list of the frightened and vulnerable across Lancashire, helping children who showed worrying signs that they were heading the wrong way.
‘I can’t help you,’ Rupert said. ‘I’m retired. Look at me. I’m just an old man now.’
The man stepped closer to Rupert, and his face came within the light of the fire. The flames danced around his features, so that his eyes seemed to glimmer menacingly. Rupert smelled stale beer and cigarettes and sweat. Then Rupert recognised something, just in the way that he tilted his head as he took in what Rupert had said.
‘No, no, it’s you I need,’ the intruder said, his voice breaking. ‘It’s happening again.’
‘What’s happening again?’ Rupert said.
‘The need,’ the intruder said.
‘What need?’
‘Don’t talk like you don’t know, doctor,’ the intruder said, his voice breaking. ‘We talked about it, you taught me how to control it, but I can’t do that any more.’
Rupert closed his eyes for a moment and tried to remember where he had seen that stare before. The tilted head, the wide eyes. But the man in front of him looked nearly forty, and so it meant going back too many years.
‘When does it come, this need?’ Rupert said.
‘All the time now,’ the man said. ‘Before, it would come mainly at night, when I was alone, feeling, you know, wound up, but now it’s there when I wake up, like an itch, an urge.’ He paused, and Rupert thought he was trying not to cry. ‘It’s all I think about, Doctor Barker. I want to hurt someone.’
Rupert closed his eyes for a moment.
‘I follow people,’ the man continued.
‘What do you mean?’ Rupert said, his eyes open, alarmed.
‘Just that,’ was the reply. ‘I see someone, and I start to imagine what they would be like naked, and then I think of how they would be if I was hurting them, how scared they would be.’
‘Have you hurt anyone yet?’
The man shook his head.
‘You need help,’ Rupert said quietly. ‘It can’t come from me. I’m too old now, retired, out of touch. But you must get help. Speak to your doctor. Trust them like you trusted me.’
The intruder paused, and then he said, ‘You said you would be there for me, and now I need you, you’re sending me away.’
‘No,’ Rupert said, his voice steady now, trying to keep the intruder calm. ‘I’m telling you where to get help. Speak to your doctor. Please. It’s for the best.’ Rupert sat up. ‘I don’t remember you. What’s your name?’
The intruder shook his head. ‘I thought I mattered. I see people all the time, you see. On the street, in their homes, and I want them, and I know that I will take it. I want to stop myself, but it never ceases. All day. All night. You have to stop it, Doctor Barker.’
Rupert shook his head. ‘No, you have to stop it,’ he said. ‘Don’t make it my fault. You have the power now.’
The intruder took a deep breath and put his head back. Rupert closed his eyes and waited for the blow, for his life to be squeezed away, but there was nothing. He opened his eyes slowly, and he saw that he was alone again, just the orange flickers around the walls, the back door swinging open, letting the heat out from the fire.
Chapter Two
Laura McGanity looked around the scene in front of her and tried not to smile. She had earned her sergeant stripes, nine months in uniform, working in the community, but now she was back where she wanted to be, on the murder squad. And even though this was a tragedy, someone’s death, she felt that familiar flutter of excitement as she took in the blue and white police tape stretched tight around the trees and the huddle of police in boiler suits holding sticks, ready for the slow crawl through the undergrowth, looking for scraps of evidence. A footprint, a dropped piece of paper, maybe a snag of cloth on the thorns and branches. This was it, the start of the investigation, the human drama yet to unfold.
She had pulled on her paper coveralls, put paper bootees over her shoes, and now her breaths were hot against her cheeks behind the face mask. But Laura knew the excitement wouldn’t last long, because in a moment she would face the dead, the lifeless body lying in a small copse of trees behind the new brick of a housing estate, just visible as a flash of pink in the green. Then the tragedy would hit her, the life snuffed out, but for now, all that held her attention was fascination.
Joe Kinsella came up behind her, poised and still, his face hidden, the hood pulled over his hair. His eyes flickered a smile, soft brown, and then he said, ‘C’mon, detective sergeant,’ his voice muffled. ‘Let’s see what there is.’
Laura smiled back, invisible behind the mask. The title still felt new, but as Joe set off walking she realised that the back-patting had to go on hold for the moment.
The ground sloped down to a small ribbon of dirty brown water that ran into underground pipes that carried it under the nearby estate, birch and willow filling the scene with shadows. Ivy trailed across the floor like tripwire, but Joe strode quickly through it, the crunch underfoot in contrast to the soft rustles of Laura’s suit as she trotted to catch up. Laura was grateful that it had been dry, spring starting with sunshine, or else she imagined she would have found herself skidding towards the small patch of pink by the edge of the stream.
The body had been found by teenagers looking for somewhere to do whatever teenagers get up to in the woods, and since then the area had swarmed with police and crime scene investigators, the ghoulish and idly curious hovering on the street. There was a policeman in plain clothes mingling with those craning their necks to get a view, posing as a journalist, snapping pictures of th
e onlookers, hoping that the killer had come back to revel at his work. That had been Joe’s idea.
As Laura reached the body, she saw that her inspector was there, Karl Carson, large and bombastic, shiny bald, no eyebrows, so that his forensic hood highlighted a band of scrubbed pink and glaring blue eyes.
‘Looks like we’ve got another one, McGanity,’ he said, his eyes watching her, waiting for her opening remark.
Laura sighed. That word, another. It made everything harder, reduced the chances of it being a family thing, or maybe a violent boyfriend faking it as a stranger attack.
Laura watched as Joe walked closer to the body and knelt down. She knew that he wasn’t looking for forensic evidence, but for other things, those little signs, hidden clues that reveal motivation. Joe was the squad star at that. Laura was still new to the team, but she had worked with him before, and so he had eased her into the murder squad. It was good to be back doing the serious stuff. She had moved north a few years earlier, away from her detective role in the London Met, and had done the rounds of routine case mop-ups and a short spell in uniform, learning the community role to help grease the push for promotion, but this was where she felt most at home.
Laura knelt down alongside Joe, and as she looked, she saw that Karl Carson was right, that it confirmed everyone’s worst fear, that the murder a month earlier wasn’t a one-off. There were two now.
The victim was a young woman, Laura guessed in her early twenties, more there than the skinny hips and ribs of a teenager but with none of the sag of the later years. The body had been hidden under bark ripped from a nearby tree, and when it had been disturbed, the kids who found her had been swamped by bluebottles. Laure gritted her teeth at the smell. Even outdoors, with her nose shielded by a mask, the smells made it through. A mix of vomit and off-meat, it made the air around the body busy with flies. As she looked at the floor, she could see the shifting blanket of woodlice and maggots spilling onto the ivy leaves, disturbed by the movement of the bark, their work interrupted, of turning the corpse into mush and then bones. The body’s stomach was distended by the gases brewing inside, and Laura knew that she didn’t want to be around when it was rolled onto plastic sheeting to be taken from the scene, because whatever was inside her stomach was going to come spewing out of her mouth.
Laura peered closer to try and see the face, so that she could see more of the person and less of the corpse, but it was dirty and distorted, and so they wouldn’t get a better idea until the post mortem clean-up later. Laura tried to be scientific and dispassionate, but she knew that the sight of a healthy young woman mutilated by a stream was something that would come back to her in quieter moments.
Laura took a deep breath, more heat through the mask, and tried to take in what she could.
The woman was naked, the clothes taken away, no sign of them torn up and thrown to one side. Just like with the other one. There were bruises on her body, grazes and scrapes that might have come from a struggle, but it wasn’t those that drew her eye. It was her mouth, stretched, soil and leaves jammed in so that it looked like the dead woman had gorged herself on the ground, the cheeks puffed out. There were bruises around the neck, so Laura guessed that it was another strangulation case, just like the other girl. Laura looked down towards the woman’s hips, and she didn’t need to have a close examination in order to see the dirt trails and scratches where soil and leaves had been jammed in between her thighs.
It was the tears that made her angry though. The woman’s face was dirty, but there were streaks, where her tears had run through the dirt as she choked on the leaves and looked up at the man who ended her life.
‘What do you think?’ Carson said.
Laura saw that his eyes were fixed on her, and she knew that it was a test, Carson checking whether Joe had been right to ask for her to be on the team.
She took a deep breath and had another look along the body.
‘She was alive when all of that was jammed in there,’ Laura said, and pointed to the woman’s genitals.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Those scratches and scrapes along the woman’s legs have drawn blood,’ she said, and pointed towards trails of ragged skin that had since dried brown. ‘They will have been caused when he jammed the leaves and dirt up there, inside her, and so it must have happened when the woman was alive. The dead don’t bleed.’
Carson gave a nod and a flick of what should have been eyebrows. ‘Why is that important?’
‘It makes it more likely that she was killed here rather than just dumped,’ she said. ‘And we might get some of his DNA from her thighs or face.’
‘Provided he wasn’t wearing gloves.’
Laura smiled behind her mask. ‘That goes without saying.’
Carson nodded. ‘What about the clothes?’ he said. ‘She didn’t walk down here naked.’
‘He’s got some forensic awareness,’ Laura said, ‘because his DNA will be all over her, and so he took them away to stop him being identified, which makes it more likely that he wore gloves. And he’s cool.’
‘What do you mean?’ Carson asked.
‘Look around,’ Laura said, and she pointed towards the houses that overlooked the scene. ‘All it would take is for someone to look out of their bedroom window, or even hear the struggle, and we would be down here. An eyewitness is the best we can hope for right now, unless he’s slipped up.’
‘Anything else?’
Laura looked at the body, and as she felt Carson’s stare bore into her, she tried to think of something she might have missed. Or maybe he was just trying to make her spout wild guesses, to use against her later. She wasn’t the only woman on the team, but she still felt like she had to prove herself for spoiling the macho party, and she’d heard the little digs that she was Joe’s new favourite.
Then it struck her.
‘If she was alive when he was filling her with soil, it meant that she wasn’t being raped when she died,’ Laura said. ‘If all of that was in there, he wasn’t, and so if he raped her, whatever he did afterwards was just to degrade her.’
Carson titled his head and Laura saw the skin around his eyes crinkle. It looked like there was a smile there. Test passed.
Laura looked at Joe, and she saw that he was still staring intently at the corpse.
‘What is it, Joe?’ Carson asked.
Joe didn’t respond at first, it was just his way, quiet, contemplative, but then he rose to his feet, his knees crackling, and looked down.
‘This isn’t going to end,’ he said, his voice quiet.
‘Why do you say that?’ Laura said.
‘Because he has attacked before, and once you start, you don’t stop,’ he said.
‘We know he’s done this before,’ Carson said, his brow furrowed. ‘A month ago.’
‘No, even before then,’ Joe said, and gestured towards the body with a nod of his head. ‘The signature is so fixed. The debris and soil in the vagina, the mouth, the anus. Too much like the last one. But why does he do it? No one just chances on that, the perfect method. Signatures grow and develop. This one? It’s replicated on its first repeat.’
‘But we haven’t got any unsolved deaths like this,’ Carson said.
‘Maybe they aren’t deaths,’ Joe said. ‘We need to look for cases where the victim has fought back and won.’
Carson sighed behind his mask. ‘This is sounding like a long haul,’ he said, almost to himself.
Joe shot worried glances between Laura and Carson. ‘We haven’t got the time for that,’ he said. ‘We need to catch him quickly, because the gap will shorten.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
Joe nodded. ‘It is bound to. These murders are a month apart, but identical methods were used. He’s found his style and likes it.’
‘Why is all that dirt in there?’ Laura asked.
Joe looked down at the body, and then he looked at Carson, and then Laura.
‘I don’t know,’ he said slowl
y. ‘And we might need to know the answer to that to catch whoever did this, but I do know one thing: he’s going to want to do it again.’
Chapter Three
I turned away from the crime scene and put my camera away.
I had managed some shots of the white suits as they were bent over the body, and I knew one was Laura. I knew she wouldn’t tell me anything. Having a reporter as her squeeze had caused her enough trouble, and so far we had been able to rebuff any suggestions that we were swapping secrets over the pillow, but it would only take one lazy article by me, where I forgot what was official and what was secret, and she would struggle to keep herself in her job.
The crowd around the police tape had grown during the morning, from the simply curious passing on their way to work to the unemployed looking for a way to fill the day. Teenagers rode in tight circles on bikes, all in black, hoods drawn around their faces in spite of the warmth, laughing and talking too loudly. Young mothers smoked and gossiped, and two men at the end were drinking from a can of Tennents, which was passed between them as they watched the police activity.
I had taken some pictures of the crowd, wondering whether it would make a community in shock story, and then I checked my watch. I knew that no information would be released for a few hours, and even when it was, I knew the internet would provide all the news people wanted.
I checked my phone. Another text from Harry English, my former editor at the London Star, where I had worked when I first tried to escape from my small Lancashire town. I hadn’t lasted long, but Harry regarded me now as his northern correspondent.
As I guessed, the text was about Night Wire, an anonymous police blogger who had gained a public following, his posts an angry rant, much different from the weary moans of most secret bloggers. Harry wanted to unmask him, and he had this theory that Night Wire was from Lancashire. I had told him that I wasn’t interested. Whoever he was, discovery could cost him his job, and I wasn’t going to have that on my conscience for the sake of a sidebar story.
