by David Carter
Oh yes. Sooner the better!
Her mobile began bleating. She didn’t recognise the number.
‘Hello.’
‘Have you found it yet?’
It was Walter, and he sounded even more impatient than usual.
‘I haven’t found it,’ she said, but in the way she said it, he guessed there was more to come.
‘Well? What?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Seventeen what? Diaries?’
‘Yes, page a day, crammed full, some days with added extras.’
‘You haven’t read them?’
‘Nope. Course not. When do I have the time to do that? How are you anyway? Where are you?’
‘I’m still in bed, still all plugged up. The docs said if it had been a few minutes longer I’d have been dead. I had to play merry hell to get the phone wheeled down here. I hope to be back in the morning.’
‘Is that wise?’
‘That’s rich coming from someone who’s just suffered a hanging!’
‘I was just thinking about that.’
‘Well don’t.’
‘I can handle it, I’m twenty-five.’
‘Yeah, and I’m not, so what, big deal. I’ll see you in the morning, and don’t read them, and make sure fussy britches doesn’t see them either, not before I do. Lock them in the cupboard in the spare room.’
‘You’re asking a lot.’
‘I know. It’s what I’m paid for; it’s why you like me so much. Did you find any solicitor’s stuff?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Keep looking. I’ll have to go; the medical mafia are back, curtaining me off. God knows what torture they’re going to do to me now. I wish I was down there with you. Ta ta... and well done.’
She’d wanted to ask him advice as to what to do with the bottles and jars. Never mind, Mrs West could rule on that one. Another job for HAZCHEM, most likely, the hazardous chemicals division. Locally, they’d had a busy twenty-four hours, ended up with a couple of bemused boffins from Eden Leys perched on their shoulders. She took out a tin of throat lozenges and slipped one into her mouth. Offered them round. The pair of them shook their heads.
‘The computer stuff’s in the car, sarge,’ said Gibbons.
‘Well you’d better go and join it because Guv would have our guts for garters if someone stole it now.’
Gibbons nodded, realising how right she was, waved at Mrs Hymas through the window on his way out. No tea and cakes for him.
‘You’ll have to stay here,’ Karen said to Jenny. ‘No one is to enter the flat under any circumstances. Understand?’
‘Yes, sarge.’
‘I may come back myself, depends on what ma’am says, they’ll probably send some brass down, but I won’t forget you. See if you can find any details of papers lodged at a solicitor’s. I’ll get more people down here as soon as I can.’
‘Thanks, sarge.’
‘Go and talk to Mrs Hymas if you like, have some tea and cakes, perhaps collect some for Walter, but don’t let her in here, and don’t tell her anything. I don’t need to remind you this is a major crime scene. Put some tape across the door. No one enters.’
‘Got you, sarge.’
‘We’ll go and see if we can break into the computer.’
‘Good luck with that. See you later.’
‘Yeah, you will.’
Chapter Fifty-Two
Walter was a man of his word. He was back in the office first thing the next day. He looked dreadful, as if he’d had the lifeblood sucked from him, which was pretty close to what had happened. Karen was there too, and she didn’t look much better. She slipped him the key to the metal cupboard as Mrs West came in. She barked a shrill Good morning, everybody, as she glanced at Walter, thought about saying You look terrible, thought better of it, and mumbled something about Good to see you back, and hurried toward her office, went inside, and closed the door. Walter and Karen shared a look.
‘You’re going to have to tell her,’ Karen said.
‘I know. I’ll do it now, before she’s wide awake.’
He stood up and limped toward her office door, knocked once, loudly, so that he wouldn’t have to do it again.
‘Come!’ came the distant voice.
Walter went inside.
‘Ah, Walter,’ she said, ‘sit down, I wanted a word with you. How are you anyway?’
He puffed out his cheeks. ‘They tell me I’ll live, which is good enough for me, and more than the unlucky six have to look forward to.’
‘True, but at least, thanks to you and the team’s efforts, there won’t be a seventh.’
It seemed a small compensation, though not much, and certainly not for the relatives of the dead.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you’re wrapping everything up?’
‘Busy on it now, ma’am.’
‘And the general debriefing?’
‘Arranged for this afternoon, ma’am, half past two.’
‘Good. Is Cresta in?’
‘Not yet, due in any minute.’
‘So what can I do for you?’
Walter took a deep breath.
‘The killer left a diary, ma’am.’
‘A diary? Really?’
‘Yes, seventeen volumes.’
‘And where are they?’
‘Locked in the cupboard, ma’am.’
‘And why wasn’t I told?’
‘With everything going on, I don’t think they wanted to bother you with it.’
Mrs West sniffed. She didn’t believe that. She grabbed her bag and took out an embroidered handkerchief and blew her pink nose. Walter glanced away. For some reason he found it funny, and had to fight himself not to laugh.
Once done with the hankie, she said, ‘Seventeen volumes, you say?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Well I can’t be spending all day reading that. I’ve staff assessments to complete, up to and including this case, on everyone, Walter, including yours, and God alone knows what else,’ and she glanced at him over the top of her pink framed specs. ‘They’re probably full of childish ramblings anyway. Could you read through them ASAP and report back?’
‘Of course, ma’am, if that’s what you want.’
‘Yes, Walter, it is, do that, and cull out anything important I need to know.’
‘Fine, ma’am, I’ll get on with it right now. When I have finished with them is it all right if Cresta sees them?’
She thought about that for a second, pulled a face, and then said, ‘Don’t see why not.’
‘Rightho, ma’am.’
‘And I don’t think you should be here all day either, you look bloody awful, go home and get some rest as soon as you can.’
‘Yes, ma’am, thank you, I will,’ though the thought of going home to a boarded up kitchen window, and an empty house full of all too recent memories of torture and near death, was not one to tempt him home early. He’d stay for as long as he could keep his eyes open. She nodded him away, and he was glad to be out of there.
‘Well?’ said Karen.
‘I’m assigned to read them all, starting now.’
‘Good. And am I in the clear?’
‘Course,’ he said, unable to keep a smile infiltrating over his drawn face. ‘Would I dump you in it?’
‘Don’t answer that,’ she grinned, as she watched him limping away toward the private office, key in hand.
They were maroon, all seventeen of them, made by the same manufacturer, and each one still had the price sticker affixed to the back cover, a seventeen-year record of inflation in the British stationery industry. He opened the earliest one and sat back and began reading and was immediately struck by the carefully constructed handwriting.
This wasn’t a hurried record; this was a detailed account of the guy’s life, a considered account, as if he had debated long into the night over every word. It soon became apparent that the entries were not always written on the day in question, but often some time afterwards, a
s if he’d left blank pages to be filled in later, as if he’d wanted to reflect on events before committing them to paper.
How many people could do that?
Keep a regular and detailed diary, but leave matters to mature before recording them. It was obvious he’d gone back, sometimes years later, to change and add material, perhaps recently recalled.
Walter had never seen anything like them before.
As in most diaries, Sam had recorded everyday events, met so and so in the pub, drank too much wine, Shirley was there too, really fancied her, but also detailed personal items that many people wouldn’t care to see written down. Intimate details of all the dirty little habits that everyone possesses, and everyone denies.
It didn’t make for easy reading.
It was soon clear that Sam hadn’t enjoyed an easy life, but Walter had expected that. No one goes out and murders six people at random, and tries desperately hard to complete the hand of seven, if they have enjoyed a comfortable and contented life.
Or do they?
Walter pondered on the point.
Had there ever been a random serial killer who had enjoyed a trouble free, stress free life, with nothing hidden in their background, to suggest at what was to come? He was struggling to name a case, and he had known more than enough.
The main point in studying the diaries, so far as Walter was concerned, was to see if there were any pointers or hints as to what he, Walter Darriteau, or his successors, could have done differently in the case, or do differently next time. Any tiny thing that might have enabled them to apprehend the killer earlier; any missed fact that might have saved lives. That was the point of the exercise. Nothing more. No doubt Cresta would think and say different, and in due course, she would have her chance, after he had finished.
If he couldn’t glean such intelligence, the time spent reading Sam’s neat, but tiny handwriting, a style that enabled the guy to cram a maximum amount of information and trivia into those tightly bound A4 pages, would be, in Walter’s eyes, wasted.
Cresta would probably end up writing some best-selling book based on the murder diaries, but Walter wasn’t jealous about that. If she had the time and tenacity to produce such a work, good luck to her. He certainly did not.
He ploughed on, pausing occasionally to scribble notes in not so neat handwriting on a foolscap pad. At eleven o’clock he needed a breather and went outside, headed for the cloakroom.
Cresta glanced up from her desk. She was still writing her final report that no doubt she would portray as groundbreaking. Walter had returned and interrupted her train of thought with a comment of his own.
‘Morning Cresty, how are you?’
Cresta glanced up.
‘Walter, there you are, it’s Crest-A, Walter, as you well know, Crest-A, and you do look somewhat pasty, if I may say, how are you, anyway?’
Pasty, he thought, she’d look bloody pasty if she’d had the lifeblood sucked from her, but he resisted the temptation to make a joke, and came to the point.
‘What would it be worth to the history of this case, and indeed to the whole subject of criminal profiling, if the killer had written a detailed account of his activities going back a number of years?’
‘A great deal, that goes without saying,’ and then the penny dropped. ‘He wrote a diary?’ she asked, almost breathlessly.
Walter grinned and nodded once.
‘Where is it?’
‘I’m reading it now.’
‘Really? Can I see it after you?’
‘I might be able to persuade ma’am to let me release it, on one small condition.’
‘What Walter, what?’
‘You buy me lunch at Pierre’s. I’ll be there at 12.30 if it’s a deal.’
Cresta smiled in purple. What a devious man he was.
‘I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘I’ll be there.’
‘Good. They do a wonderful quiche, and I’ll have chips with mine too, brilliant it is, see you later.’
Chapter Fifty-Three
After a good lunch Walter retrieved the diaries from the locked cupboard, burped, and sat back in the chair. Pierre’s quiche was the most expensive bacon and egg pie in the universe, but it was lovely, even if it did encourage indigestion. Blood making pie, was how he described it to Cresta, and that brought a grimace to her purple decorated face. She’d chosen the cold smoked trout with a sprinkling of green leaves, which said everything.
‘I need all the blood I can manufacture,’ he continued, before she suggested they talk of something else, and most particularly of the murder diaries.
She wasn’t bad company as it turned out, and hadn’t Karen once intimated they would make a handsome couple? He wouldn’t have gone that far, but away from the confines of the office and the competitiveness of that environment, she relaxed a little, and was bearable company. Perhaps she was being agreeable because she knew he had something she desperately wanted, and it certainly wasn’t his ravaged body. Walter sighed and shook those recent memories from his mind and began reading again.
The first time I remember feeling uncomfortable about myself was the day I discovered I possessed initials that spelt a mildly rude word. It could have been worse, I suppose. I could have been christened Steven Harold Ian Truman, or Freddy Umberto Chapman King, or even, God forbid, Colin Uriah Norman Trethowan.
My name, by comparison to those horrors, and no doubt there are poor unfortunates padding around out there with initials such as those, could even be considered comical, a joke. I didn’t see it that way, it wasn’t a joke to me, not back then, and I suspect most boys wouldn’t have thought so either. It was strange that I hadn’t noticed it before the day Billy Freeman yelled at me in the playground: ‘ASS by name ASS by nature, you’re a complete ASS!’
We were eight at the time, and even then I had to ask him to explain what he meant. It was a small and silly incident that shouldn’t have brought me discomfort, yet it did, and even now, looking back on it from years later, it makes me uncomfortable to think of it. You’re an ASS! Maybe I am, who knows, who cares? I dumped the problem as soon as I could by ditching my first name. Who wouldn’t have?
Walter flipped randomly through the pages. It was an easy thing to do, to dip in and out, because though they were written on dated pages, crazily they didn’t seem to come out in chronological order. It was all a little haphazard. The writer was either extremely gifted, or totally disorganised, and it was mighty difficult to decide which.
Karen knocked on the door and came in.
‘I’m going down to Iona to oversee the removal of the contents. Anything you want me to look out for?’
‘Yes, the solicitor’s name and address.’
‘Besides that?’
‘Nope, not that I can think of.’
‘How’s the reading going?’
‘Confusing.’
‘In what way?’
‘Jumps about all over the place.’
‘You’ve really got Cresta jumping up and down.’
‘Good. Well, she’s going to have to wait, and for quite some time too.’
Karen grinned. For some reason he enjoyed winding Cresta up. Fact was, Karen was surprised he’d told her about the diaries at all.
‘OK, I’ll see you later.’
‘Yep, see you, oh; some more of those fairies would be nice.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He turned over the page.
My life took a turn for the better the day I fell totally and utterly in love. It had been a slow burner. I’d known the girl for several years before I began to think of her in any way other than as the quiet but cute vicar’s daughter. Unlike my friend Dennis who the very first day I mentioned her, said Yeah, yeah. But would you fuck her?
At the time that notion had not permeated my confused head, though a few years later that idea was fixed in my mind from first thought in the morning till the last at night. The second or third time I saw her I caught a glimpse of her knicker
s, as she’d curled her legs beneath her at the vicarage tea party. I’d looked away and Dennis told me off about that too. It was an image framed in time that returned to me time and again. It still occasionally does. I know it shouldn’t, but it does, locked in my head, as if to tease me, as if to remind me of something I never had, something I could never attain, as if to say: You’ve wasted an opportunity there! You ass! You’re an ASS!
The ironic thing was that at one time she had a real crush on me. She’d bought me a rabbit’s foot especially for my big concert on the radio. I was too stupid or too embarrassed to notice her feelings, and it was a couple of years later when she returned from college during the summer holidays, that I finally asked her to the pictures. It wasn’t easy persuading her either. I had to ask her four times before she finally agreed. Later, I was to discover that she only consented because her father, the vicar, had encouraged her to do so. Imagine how I felt. The girl at my side was there because her father asked her to be, not because she wanted to be.
That night I made a complete and utter fool of myself.
I wasn’t the first young man to do so on their first meaningful date, and I surely won’t be the last, but that didn’t and doesn’t erase the hurt one feels when looking back on it some years later.
On the way home I pushed her up against the back of the bus shelter and kissed her. She didn’t resist, she didn’t cry out, she didn’t do a thing. Her response was spelt out through her icy lips. I imagine now that she must have grimaced through the whole experience, though I was far too smitten to realise that, and far too innocent to understand that it was any different to how it should have been. Maybe I had an inkling. If I did, I buried it in the outer reaches of my expanding mind. I didn’t want to know a thing, other than what I saw and felt and smelt in front of me.
