‘Whoa. Shh.’
She’d scared him. He had his arms round her, doing the only thing he could think of. It was his holding her like that that made her cry rather than the dream or the fear for her sanity. Or she thought it was – she didn’t know anything any more. The tears came thick and fast.
He held her till they stopped. Only then did he let her go enough that he could look her in the eye.
‘You’re not crazy. Let’s get that straight first of all.’
‘I’ve been coming close.’
‘Yeah, well that’s close enough. If doing something stops you from stressing more and losing it more, then fine. You can do something. But you’re not doing it on your own. I’m with you. And I’m watching you.’
‘Okay. But this guy that was killed and left on the mattress . . .’
He ignored her. ‘I don’t like it and I don’t think it’s a good idea, but, as long as you only go online and make sure you tell me what you’re doing, then okay. God help me, okay.’
‘I love you. And maybe I need you to save me from this.’
‘Yeah, maybe you do. But the guy on the mattress? Calvin Brownlie? We’re going to have to talk about him.’
She heard something in his voice and it made her skin tighten.
‘Why? What do you know?’
He told her everything about Calvin and she told him everything about Martin.
‘Jesus Christ . . .’
CHAPTER 33
Nathan didn’t have a way, a method. There was no signature style, no identifiable pattern.
Any cop or profiler or psychologist looking for some modus operandi would be wasting their time. Nathan didn’t work that way. He went with the wind.
Maybe that was why he’d never been caught. They didn’t know there was a him, they didn’t know there were links. They didn’t even know some of them had happened.
Sometimes it was just opportunity and means; there wasn’t necessarily a need for motive. Like the time he’d travelled up north, to the Aberdeenshire coast. He’d an idea what he might do but no idea who might be there to do it to. He was happy to go and see, wait his chance.
It was a place near Stonehaven. A beauty spot but cold and windy, even in May. The wind howled off the sea and swirled round your back, especially three hundred feet up on the cliffs. There was a path along the top that people walked, sometimes with their dogs. There was a great view over the sea, so he understood that. Dangerous, though, you’d think.
This woman was walking along the path and Nathan was coming from the other direction. She was attractive, or so he supposed, in her forties, brown hair streaming behind her in the wind. Nathan went to go to his left, towards the sea, at the same time as she went to her right. They both laughed and both changed to go to the other side and they laughed again. Nathan stepped back towards the hillside like a gentleman to let her pass.
She nodded her thanks and began to walk past him. Nathan simply leaned into her with his shoulder and she was gone. The look of astonishment on her face was quite funny. It was open-mouthed confusion more than fear. The fear came soon enough, though, a scream that curdled in the swirl and disappeared with her.
Nathan didn’t bother looking over the edge. No point unless the woman had discovered the power of flight half-way down. He knew where she’d be and how she’d be. On the rocks below. Broken.
The newspapers said her name was Rosaleen Burke. Or was it Rosalind? Anyway, she was a mum of two girls, left them and her husband grieving when she jumped from the cliff top without even a suicide note. She was always so friendly and helpful, her neighbours told the press, but she’d been having a difficult time at work. It was agreed her death was a tragedy.
Nathan killed people. It was what he did.
He did his first when he was just seventeen years old. This kid named Brian Horsburgh had been at him for months, hassling him, making fun, pushing his buttons in a way he really shouldn’t have. He’d call Nathan weird. Weirdo. Mongo. Ripping him in front of the crowd. Nathan hated him. Hated him big time.
One day Brian Horsburgh fell in front of a train. People say he was pushed or knocked out and left there, but no one knew. Train destroyed him. Nothing much left for anyone to check. Some of the kids thought Nathan might have done it, but after what happened to Horsburgh they were too scared to come out and say so. That felt good. Felt better than Nathan had ever done before.
Once he started, he couldn’t and didn’t want to stop.
He’d strangled and he’d stabbed. He’d bludgeoned. On a number of occasions, he’d burned people alive. He had poisoned, he’d drowned and he’d cut throats. He’d gone through the book and he’d started again.
He’d killed through anger. He’d killed in cold blood. He’d done it for revenge, for money and for sexual thrills, out of curiosity, and sometimes just because. People had annoyed him, mocked him, got in his way. Maybe more than anything, he’d found a taste for it. Nothing, but nothing, had given him the thrill that did. Nothing else came close.
Once you’d done it, you wanted to do it again. You could try to fight it but it was your nature and you could never fight that for too long. It itched and itched until you ached to scratch it. And, once you did, it felt so damn good.
There was a taste. A physical taste. Your mouth watered for it. Once you knew, and once you accepted it, you found yourself hungering to taste it again. It was like blood in your mouth, like that taste of iron, or something else metallic and raw and alive. But it was more than just a taste. It was a sensation. Something your entire body felt.
Nathan had done this for a long time. And no one knew. No one even suspected. Few people even seemed to notice him. He’d worked out how to get away with things. When to do it and when to stop, when to move away, when to stay at home and hide.
He’d learned to change his car regularly, rarely keeping one for more than a year. No point in taking the risk of a particular make or model turning up at otherwise unrelated scenes. He had hobbies, bullshit ones, that explained absences to the few people who cared where he was. And he could lie like a politician, a banker and a teenager rolled into one.
What made it easier for him was that people didn’t care and that people were stupid. People were reckless, brainless, continually putting themselves in danger, thinking it could never happen to them. You know what? It did. All the time.
The world is full of missing people who aren’t missing at all. They’re dead. Dead because they took risks, stupid risks. Putting themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time – and it’s always the wrong time – just because they wanted sex or money or drugs or a thrill. You get the biggest, most short-lived thrill of them all that way.
Their families, who are at least equally stupid, just keep appealing for them to come home. As if a zombie were going to walk through the door one day, wanting dinner. They are long gone, most probably pushing up daisies in one of Nathan’s favourite places. One of those woods that are so dense and unvisited that they are ripe for his needs.
Even Nathan doesn’t know how many are in there. Dozens probably.
The central belt of Scotland pulls the whole country in, tight, in the middle. Like a belt. Like a noose. It squeezes it so tight that there’s only seventy miles from west to east. Nearly three million people live in that little space yet there’s also still room for a whole load of nothing in between.
Take a look at a map and see all the dark-green space that’s east of Glasgow and west of Edinburgh. There’s a whole load of forested mazes, country lanes and blink-and-you-miss-them villages. There are places where bodies will never be found, where it goes back so far and so dark that only deer or badgers or stray dogs ever bother to go.
There’s a big barren triangle, stretching between the two cities and going north as far as Falkirk, the sides of it formed by the M80, M9 and M8. There are places in there that most people have never heard of or couldn’t find on a map. Have you ever been to the Black Loch or to Nine Mile Burn?
Do you know the woods near Caldercruix or the fields round Slamannan? Course you don’t. Just like you don’t know the woods near Polbeth, the ones above Avonbridge or the deep stuff north of Blackridge near Drumtassie Burn.
That was Nathan’s country. His killing fields. His burial fields. There are places deep in there that he’d used like a potato patch. Come the harvest, the bodies would be coming up like prizewinners.
All these years he’d been hoping that day didn’t come. Suited him just fine to have them buried deep, buried shallow, unfound and unloved, sometimes even unmissed. Made it so much simpler to keep doing it, to serve his nature.
Things had changed, though. It didn’t matter now if the world knew. Instead, it would soon suit him for it to know. He’d done his thing without recognition for so long when so many others had their headlines. Now it was to be his time. And he’d make sure they remembered him for ever.
CHAPTER 34
It hadn’t taken long for the person desperate to buy the Martin Welsh newspaper page to respond to her email.
Yes, I still want to buy it. I am prepared to pay £300 as you asked. I see you have good feedback for paying so trust you will be the same at sending. Please send the newspaper, in good condition and with the necessary protection.
She’d smiled and spoken to the blue walls, liking them for the first time in an age. ‘Will you walk into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.’
The walls had not replied and for that she was grateful. Nor did she reply to the desperado. She made him wait.
She still had two packages from her KillingTime spree to open. She’d done her best to ignore them and had tried to just write them off as a bad idea born out of temporary insanity, but they kept calling to her.
From inside the hall cupboard and behind a box, they cried out. Open us, open us. In the middle of the night they whispered and during the day when Tony wasn’t there, they roared. Open us!
She gave in as she knew she would. Once you accept that the damage had been done by buying them, then the step to opening them and feasting on them is an easy one. Her will was weak, her craving strong.
Both packages sat on the bed and she weighed each in turn, like a fifteen-year-old trying to guess what was inside a Christmas present. In the end, like most teenagers, she gave up guessing and ripped the first one open.
Inside the brown envelope was a clear, plastic bag and inside that was a postcard, a written note, two photographs and an extra prized sealed in a plastic sheath. All from State Prison Corcoran in California, USA.
The words scribbled on the postcard said a lot about the sender. She didn’t know what any of it meant but it said a lot.
Tisket Tasket. The head man’s basket. The head man said, man you don’t need a head man, just accept the sum as a hole in your head as what you thought was your head man.
Scratched on a postcard in his own hand. And from his own crazy head. The head and hands of Charles Manson.
And that wasn’t all. It was his head, his hands and his hair.
Long, dark strands of Manson’s once-flowing locks were sealed in the plastic casing along with a handwritten note to confirm they’d been cut from his ponytail. She’d had to think hard about whether she really wanted to own that but, in the end, she decided to go for it. She wanted, needed, to know what it felt like. To get some sense of what these collectors were feeling and why they did it. She had to get inside their heads.
Tisket. Tasket. The head man’s basket.
Charles Manson. Serving nine life sentences, two for murder and seven for conspiracy to murder. The boogie man. Blood all over the hands that wrote the card she was holding. Something inside her flinched and, although her fingers itched to drop it, she forced herself to cling on.
What did she feel? Revulsion. That more than anything. Interest, sure. Interest both professional and salacious. She forgave herself that as being shameful but human. Manson she was disgusted by. Whether evil or insane or just bad to the bone, he orchestrated the murders of nine people. Now he was selling his hair, his signature, his art, the music that was droning in the background at that very minute. He was selling hatred by the dollar.
The problem for her was that she had met, interviewed, comforted, and failed, far too many bereaved relatives to see this as anything other than sickening. Manson killed real people. Other real people had their lives ripped apart as a result. Many of those were still out there, nursing themselves through broken hearts while this kind of shit was bought and sold as memorabilia.
She was glad she’d bought it, though. For all that it turned her stomach, it helped her know what she was after. She’d touched it and she’d know its smell from now on.
The second package was torn open with less relish because she now knew what was inside. She slowly ripped the top and tipped the contents onto the bed. A sealed plastic bag with a cardboard sleeve, branded ‘Hellhouse of Hollywood’. Inside was a simple, broken piece of reddish stone that had once formed part of the fireplace in Cielo Drive. The Tate–Polanski residence. The Murder House.
The idea of collectibles is that they are worth what they are as long as they come in their original packaging. So toys are worth small fortunes as long as they haven’t been opened, haven’t been played with, haven’t been touched or enjoyed. Open them, just once, and their value shrinks with the air.
She tore into the sealed packaging and let the contents fall into the palm of her hand.
It was cool and rough at the edges. She turned it between her fingers, getting a sense of it, feeling every cut and broken border. She smelled it. A nostril full of brick and mortar, maybe smoke. Maybe blood.
She knew she was feeling more than there was. It was just a piece of old brick. Something that had once been something whole and now was broken. The fireplace had been a silent witness to a terrible event, but it had shed no tears, felt no pain. It was brick, not blood.
She told herself that and repeated it when the stone wouldn’t leave her hand. She felt more than the dust and the clay and the shale. She felt history and hurt and horror. The brick suddenly felt as hot as if the fireplace still burned, and she dropped it onto the bed, bundling it back into its envelope once it had cooled to the touch.
She put the lock of Manson’s hair back in its packaging too and she hid both again in the hall cupboard behind the box. Then she washed her hands.
Back on KillingTime, she returned to the message from RD. She’d made him wait long enough. She was the spider and she had a web waiting for him.
Okay, I’ll take your £300. I’ll sell you the page.
All I need is to know where to send it.
And to tell Tony where he has to go to find you.
CHAPTER 35
Robert Dalrymple opened the door warily, like someone expecting bad news.
Or maybe he’d received that already when Winter telephoned to say he’d be calling at his door to discuss the newspaper front page he’d bought to add to his Martin Welsh collection. He’d had to call back twice to make sure the man knew he was not going to give up and go away.
Winter got the distinct impression that the man was considering changing his mind now, though, and was about to close the door in his face. He held his front door ajar, one hand grasping it firmly so that he could quickly push it back towards Winter if needed.
He sized up both Winter and the situation, a nervous swallow confirming his uncertainty. He sighed deep and hard, then opened the door wide. ‘Come in.’
The house was a cottage, standing in isolation at one end of the village of Balerno, just eight miles southwest of Edinburgh city centre. It was a picturesque little place, its main street all cobbled slopes, handsome houses and independent shops.
The cottage’s whitewashed walls were woven with climbing plants while a neat window box sat on each sill, populated with happy yellow and purple flowers. The rear of the cottage seemed to lose itself in the woods, making for a back garden that went on for ever. Parked in front, tight up ag
ainst the sandstone walls, was an ageing Volvo.
The house’s owner was a tall, overweight man in his mid-sixties. His grey hair was confined to either side of his head, and he wore a fussy goatee. Silver spectacles added to the impression of a university professor, or maybe a historical novelist.
Whatever his role, Robert Dalrymple was not happy that he had company.
‘I don’t need to have this conversation, you do know that? I have done nothing illegal. This is just a hobby.’
‘It’s a rather strange hobby, don’t you think?’
‘That’s a matter of opinion. I don’t find anything strange about it, but I suppose I can appreciate why some people would. People who don’t understand it.’
Dalrymple was very defensive but trying not to be. It was there in his voice, though, unmistakeably so.
‘Perhaps you could tell me how you came to start collecting murderabilia. Or is that even what you call it?’
He shrugged, uneasy at letting Winter into his world.
‘It’s as good a name as any. A bit tacky, perhaps, but I didn’t invent it. I guess it covers what it is. As to how I got started . . . it just sort of grew. Look, Mr Winter, I really don’t want any sensational tabloid exposé here. I think that would be really unfair. It’s why I agreed to talk to you. To let you understand that it’s not like that.’
‘So what is it like? I’m keen to learn, Mr Dalrymple. To give your side of the story.’
The words sounded hollow to Winter, so God knows how unconvincing they were to Dalrymple. Lying for a living still didn’t come naturally, even after a year in the job.
‘It’s no different to any other hobby. No different to stamp collecting or butterflies or beer mats. It’s like anyone who collects movie memorabilia or old toys or antiques. People have interests, whatever sparks it, and they collect things they enjoy. Sometimes that can become a business, and then it’s a win–win situation.’
Murderabilia Page 14
