The Murder Diaries_Seven Times Over

by David Carter

  Walter remained quiet for a moment, thinking things through, then said, ‘Tell me everything you know about MI7?’

  ‘Desiree told me it was reactivated soon after it was decommissioned. They had special responsibility for chemical warfare secrecy, weapons of mass destruction in the modern vernacular, hence their huge interest in Eden Leys. They were interested in everything that went down there, you must know that, and they weren’t happy when the plant was semi-privatised, I can tell you that. For a short while they were replaced with contracted in security. That feeble lot couldn’t detect an ant in an ant hill. Not surprisingly they soon got pushed. Desi became very tense. I couldn’t get her to open up to me. I knew something was wrong. She said the whole place was subject to new American secrecy orders, she was bound to silence. It was too dangerous for me to know anything. She had this spare bedroom full of stuff, data, samples; you name it, a huge amount of gear. She said we had to move it, and quick, so we switched it from her place by the river, down to mine at Iona House. We always kept on both properties and it was a good job we did. It took us three car rides to move everything, that’ll give you some idea how much gear was involved. We did it on the Friday night. On the Saturday night we went out to celebrate, got dressed up, kissing cousins she called us, Desiree and Samantha, took a cab down to that fancy hotel in Cheshire where they do the ballooning, enjoyed a fab meal, danced for hours, curled up in bed together, made love, got up late on the Sunday morning, fab breakfast, cab back to Chester...’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Desi’s place had been ransacked. Made a hell of a mess. We called the cops round. It wasn’t you, was it? Don’t answer that, I know it wasn’t. They said there had been a spate of opportunistic burglaries in the area, oh yeah, I’ll bet, the ransackers, whoever they were, made it look realistic too; by breaking in and turning over the two neighbouring gaffs for good measure, but Desi knew immediately that it was MI7. That’s what she said as soon as the regular cops had gone, and I believed her. She also said the Aussie bastard had tipped them off.’

  ‘Why did they do that? Break in and ransack the place.’

  ‘Looking for evidence of course!’

  ‘Evidence of what?’

  ‘Oh come on, Walter, keep up, man! They were trying to find evidence that she was leaking stuff outside, taking stuff off prem, they thought she was feeding info to a third party, but the only third party was me. If we hadn’t moved everything, Desi would have been arrested. They would have thrown the book at her; thrown the key away. God knows what she would have been charged with. That night she told me if she ever had an accident, ever disappeared without warning, leaving a letter saying that she’d gone away, or ever died suddenly, it would be the work of MI7.’

  ‘Where’s the stuff now?’

  Sam thought about that for a moment.

  ‘There’s no harm in you knowing. The knowledge you have will be extinguished when you go,’ and he glanced at his petite, almost girlish wristwatch and said, ‘I’d say, Walter, you have just entered your final hour.’

  Walter needed to pee, but didn’t say. He wanted to keep talking. There were still things he didn’t understand.

  ‘What exactly is going on at Eden Leys?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Course not. You tell me.’

  ‘They are experimenting on live human beings.’

  Walter laughed again.

  ‘Don’t laugh like that! They are! I’ve got the proof. Some of it is in my spare room, but most of it, the most juicy bits, including photographs and ID’s, are locked away in a solicitor’s office miles from here.’

  A picture of the offices of Lambourn, Harcourt and Snapes flooded into Sam’s mind, and their luxurious suite on the sixth floor of the Royal Liver Building, Liverpool. Those fab rooms that stared out across the wide and murky river, and the huge storeroom in the basement that housed the gigantic safe, that was too heavy to be set up anywhere, but on the very ground itself. In that vast safe lay the evidence, Desi’s life work, Desiree’s masterpiece. Proof of what was going on. Proof of why she had been murdered. Sam paused, switched off.

  Walter switched him on again.

  ‘Tell me about the experiments on living human beings?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything you do.’

  Sam pursed his lips, sorted his thoughts into some kind of order, and began again.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Karen tossed and turned. She couldn’t sleep. She slipped from the bed and went through to the kitchen. Poured another glass of ice-cold cranberry juice. Sipped and swallowed. Sipped and swallowed. Her throat felt as if a piece of barbed wire was jammed down there. Her eyes hurt and her hands shook. She expected him to return, the killer, maybe tonight. He had tried and failed to murder her, and he now knew it too. He’d tried to kill her for a reason, the seventh death in his reign of terror. Maybe there was some significance to the number seven.

  Seven was a very strange number, she knew that well enough. When a group of people are asked to name a number between one and ten a huge majority will say seven. Why is that? Some people say it is a lucky number. Racing car drivers fight to have it on their cars. Others say it is dreadfully unlucky.

  Seven days in the week, the seventh day is the Sabbath, the holy day, seven deadly sins, seven sisters, seven dwarfs, seventh son of a seventh son, perhaps Sam was a seventh son of a seventh son, seven wonders of the world, seven sacraments, seven heavenly virtues, seven stations of the cross, seven years bad luck if you break a mirror, seven year itch, seven murders, or at least six killings plus one attempted, and an old rhyme came back to her from when she was a little girl:

  One means anger

  Two means mirth

  Three, a wedding

  Four, a birth

  Five is heaven

  Six is hell

  But seven’s the very devil himself.

  A strange thing to teach a kid she thought now, and amongst it all were seven murders... but he’d only completed six. He was coming back; of course he was coming back. She went through to the spare bedroom. The door was ajar. Eased it open. Rays of light fed in from the hallway. Gibbons was asleep, lying on his back, snoring gently like a child. He’d said he was dog tired. He certainly looked it. The duvet cover had slipped down revealing his chest. He was surprisingly muscular; she would never have guessed it from the grubby and worn flappy shirts he liked to wear to work. Perhaps they were a fashion statement, like ripped jeans, though she doubted it. She wanted to wake him and talk some more, but he looked serene and peaceful. It would be wicked to wake him, a sin. Never wake a sleeping person, her mother always used to say, it’s a sin, unless it’s an emergency. Was this an emergency? Maybe, maybe not. He’d surely think her crazy, his neurotic female sergeant. She didn’t want that. She pulled the door closed and went back to bed.

  Sam took a deep breath, thinking carefully of his words, and then he began again.

  ‘Desi said she was on the cusp of a breakthrough in the quest to find a cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s, and yes, I know Alzheimer’s is a type of dementia, but some people think of them as separate diseases. She was working on producing a pill that could reverse the process of aging in the human brain. The idea was that it would protect the brain. It had worked on rats and apes and she was sure with more tests it could work on humans. The opportunity to experiment on live human beings was one she could not turn down. She said one final push and she’d crack it. She had been experimenting on apes for at least a year before that. It’s not such a big step up from apes to humans. The people were carefully selected. They all had no known relatives. They were all terminally ill. They were not expected to survive much longer.’

  ‘So what happened to these people?’

  ‘They all died, according to Desi. Every single one of them. Cremated on site. She always went to the funeral services. Most times she was the only one there.’

  ‘And their deaths wer
e covered up?’

  ‘Well you tell me, Walter. You’re the fucking policeman.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. Did she make any progress?’

  ‘Progress yes, a cure? I’m not sure.’

  ‘How many people are we talking about?’

  Sam pulled a face.

  ‘Don’t know for sure, in total, maybe twelve, maybe twenty.’

  Walter’s turn to pull a face. Between twelve and twenty deaths, if the guy was to be believed. Legal deaths? Or Illegal? Murders or mercy killings? He didn’t know, but he wanted to find out more.

  Sam was talking again.

  ‘It wasn’t just experiments on live humans that Desi did. She was obsessed with all aspects of progress in the field. Her father had been struck down with it. That made it personal. She wasn’t interested in much else. She’d developed a theory called Distant Consciousness. It’s an idea that in severe cases memories can be stimulated by documents and items from long ago, every day items, but objects dear to the heart, things associated with beautiful memories, precious events, such as a programme from the 1951 Festival of Britain, an occasion attended with a loved one, a fiancée, a life partner, or maybe an early Elvis Presley record, or tickets to an early Beatles concert when no one outside of Merseyside had ever heard of them, even football programmes from big games like the 1966 World Cup Final, that kind of thing, memory jolters, she called them. These people who’d not shown any sign of recognition of anything for years, recognised those items, she had real success with it. She was communicating with them.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘She’d visit country nursing homes, study the guys, and bring her research data and techniques back to Eden Leys. Adding that to the secret live experiments she told me she was this close to cracking it,’ and Sam held his forefinger and thumb half an inch apart and jabbed them into the air. ‘This close, Wally! And then you bastards murdered her.’

  ‘I didn’t murder anyone.’

  ‘You know what I mean!’

  ‘Why seven, Sam?’

  ‘MI7, it was just a number, it seemed fitting at the time, it stuck in my mind, seven times one is seven. You had to pay seven times over. They all had to pay.’ Sam glanced at his watch. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes left, Wally, fifteen minutes. Said your prayers yet?’

  ‘There are still things I don’t understand.’

  ‘Tough luck! Fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Tell me about the day Desi died.’

  ‘She was on the way to London to pick up some top scientific award. A train had been cancelled. The station was packed. She was desperate for a seat. She had work to do. Her speech to complete. She was standing right at the front. The train came in. A little nudge from behind. It could even have been accomplished with a muscular chest, thrust forward at an opportune moment; that would have been enough. Over she went, out of this world, out of my life forever, my darling Desiree, my other half, my soul mate, my reason for living... murdered in cold blood in broad daylight in a public place by some government assassin.’

  Sam looked away and stared at the wall.

  Walter gave him a moment, then asked, ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I studied all the police reports I could lay my hands on, had to bribe one guy in your department, there you are, one juicy titbit of gossip you can take with you. You’ve got a mole who will sell their soul, cost me three hundred nicker, worth every penny. Plus the coroner’s statement, everything I could find. It was obvious your mob were convinced it was suicide from day one. You never really looked at alternatives. You didn’t give Desi a chance. You’d made up your minds.’

  ‘I was on holiday.’

  ‘Gee bloody whiz! Well that’s you off the hook, isn’t it! I don’t think so!’

  For once Walter didn’t have an answer.

  Sam snarled and started again.

  ‘Along with what Desi told me about unexpected accidents, and how scared she was, I knew she had been murdered. I just knew.’

  ‘But didn’t you say she was upset about something in her past; that she woke from nightmares. Couldn’t that have had something to do with it? Couldn’t that have been preying on her mind?’

  Sam thought a beat and said, ‘She didn’t commit suicide if that’s what you think, but she did once tell me she was hearing voices.’

  ‘Voices?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, nasty voices in her head ordering her about. I think it went back to that Toby Malone character. I’d like to have met him. I’d like to have killed him, but thankfully someone else got there before me. Good and bad in everything. Good, that he’s long dead, bad, that I didn’t eradicate the bastard first.’

  ‘Could Desi have murdered Toby?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘Really? Are you so sure? She was used to death after all, and if he hurt her so much...’

  ‘She didn’t! But even if she did, he deserved it, and even if she did, it had nothing to do with her own demise.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I visited the cop shop seven times. Seven times, Walter. Seven fucking times! Pleading with your people to reopen their enquiries, pleading with them to start an investigation into everything that was going down at Eden Leys. And what did they do? Fuck all! That’s what. Fuck all!’

  ‘I guess your enquiries never made it past the station sergeant. I’d have a word about that.’

  ‘Too late now!’

  ‘They are overworked and underpaid and are snowed under with crazy people coming in and demanding all sorts. It’s not excusable, but it is understandable, that occasionally they may send the wrong people away.’

  ‘Like me, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. Like you.’

  ‘So you concede I might have a case?’

  ‘I’d like to look into it further.’

  ‘Too late, mate. Far too late!’

  ‘Tell me about the Chester Mollesters thing, and the bad spelling.’

  ‘Not much to tell, a futile attempt to mislead, I regretted it afterwards.’

  The landline telephone in the hall began ringing.

  They both jumped.

  A phone ringing in the small hours is always far louder than during the day. Walter glanced at the clock. Sam at his wrist. Five to one.

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’ said Sam. ‘Who’d be ringing at this time of night?’

  ‘No idea, probably a wrong number.’

  The phone rang for ages, maybe thirty, forty, double rings.

  Sam didn’t answer, just cursed it. It still kept ringing.

  ‘Whoever it is, they’re a persistent bastard!’

  The ringing finally stopped.

  Sam sighed. He looked nervous.

  Walter did too. He wanted to ask another probing question, preferably one that might produce a thirty-minute answer. For a moment his mind went blank. He really needed a pee.

  The mobile atop the television set began leaking sound. Karen had programmed it to chime that awful seven-note ringtone, the one that sounded like water splashing off the roof. God knows how she did it, he didn’t really care, didn’t really like it either, each note lower than the last, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, splash, stop. Then the same seven splashes again, and stop. Seven. And again. Seven, and again.

  Sam jumped from the chair. Went to the phone. Picked it up. Saw who was calling. Grinned.

  ‘It’s time, Walter, it’s time.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘The lucky bitch.’

  ‘Karen?’

  ‘Yeah! The very same. You’re only in this position because of her; you know that, don’t you? If you hadn’t saved her I’d have vanished. Mission accomplished. I’d have cleared off to Barcelona. Happy memories there, you understand. I would have enjoyed a second honeymoon, all alone, yet not alone at all, sometimes dressed as a lonely lady, a striking woman in
mourning, a woman with admirers. Wealthy old businessmen would have paid court to me, felt sorry for me, sent me flowers, dinner invitations, who knows, I might even have let them buy me jewellery... I might even have let them live. You would never have seen or heard from me again, except you couldn’t stop interfering, in your size eleven clodhoppers. Big mistake, Walter. Fatal mistake.’

  Walter fired off another question, ‘Why did you leave it so long afterwards, before you began killing people?’ He was desperate to keep Sam talking, encouraged in knowing that Karen was awake, and thinking.

  ‘I’d been considering it for ages, planning it, wondering how I might go about it. I guess I hoped you might see sense and reopen your enquiries. But you didn’t, and there was no sign you would, and then that guy came along on the highway. It was a spur of the moment thing, there he was, nodding at me, and there was my foot hovering above the accelerator; and something in my head was shouting: Don’t stop! Do it! Do it now! And I did, and I don’t regret it, not for a moment.’

  ‘He was an innocent family man.’

  ‘Tough shit!’

  ‘A decent person, don’t you have any regrets?’

  ‘Desi was a decent person! Devoted to searching for cures to save mankind, and look what happened to her!’

  Sam stood up and went to the sports bag, took out a large pair of gleaming scissors, held them in the air, practiced a few snips. ‘I still hoped you might reopen Desi’s case, that justice would prevail, that you might finally see sense, get it right for once, but no...’ and his voice trailed away.

  He was suddenly busy, scissors in hand, cutting into Walter’s right shirt cuff, clean through, up to the wrist, careful not to snip the plastic tie, and then all the way up to the shoulder, cut off the raggy bits, Walter’s flabby arm exposed all the way up, his wrist still firmly fixed to the arm of the chair.

  ‘I’ll reopen the case, you’ll get your justice; we’ll open the whole damned can of worms.’

  ‘Too little, too late, Wally! Time’s up. Here we go.’

  ‘And the different coloured eyes?’ he said, desperate to say anything to prolong the conversation.