by Stav Sherez
As the food got cold, Forsyth told Carrigan about the Eliot investigation, the hours and days and hundreds of dead ends and played-out leads. ‘It’s like she vanished the minute she walked up those stairs. There’s been no trace of her since. What happened to her? I’d like to think she met a man and they ran away together and she’s on a beach somewhere enjoying her life but when I close my eyes I see cellars, basements and shallow graves. Unlike Anna, we never found Katrina. And that keeps bugging me. Is she still alive? Is he keeping her captive somewhere?’
Carrigan had been asking himself the same questions. ‘Her parents still come to see you?’
Forsyth looked up sharply. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘Know what?’
‘Shit. They both died in a car crash, middle of January.’
Carrigan looked down at his plate. ‘Our killer?’
‘Don’t think so. At least not directly. Her father had been drinking steadily since her disappearance. That day he came into the station pissed out of his mind, causing a scene, shouting and assaulting the duty sergeant. Security had to escort him out.’ Forsyth clenched his fist and ground it into the table. ‘I had no fucking idea he had his car and wife waiting for him outside. Or that he would drive straight into a bus on Lancaster Gate.’
‘Suicide?’
Forsyth shrugged. ‘Or bad luck, or booze, or all three. Take your pick.’
Carrigan flicked through his notes. Geneva had told them about the Twitter trolling at the morning briefing. ‘Do you know if Katrina was being harassed on social media?’
Forsyth’s eyes dropped to the table. ‘We didn’t even think about it at the time. We only checked for updates, any recent activity. We were short-staffed. It didn’t seem . . . fuck.’ He clenched his right fist again and Carrigan knew he would now have a new reckoning on which to assign his failure.
‘It’s impossible for you to have known its significance with so little context. You can’t blame yourself,’ Carrigan said, knowing Forsyth would, just as he knew he would were he in the same position. ‘I was wondering if there was anything else? Anything you didn’t put in the report? You know – you feel something, are almost sure of it, but don’t want to put it on paper so it doesn’t come back to bite you?’
Forsyth avoided Carrigan’s eyes. ‘I talked to her friends quite a bit,’ he replied. ‘There was no evidence to back this up so it never went into the file but there was one thing – it seemed so ridiculous I never wrote it up but, as I mentioned, I spoke to the other members of her band and they said she’d been getting increasingly weird during rehearsals.’
Carrigan gripped his pencil a little tighter. ‘Weird, how?’
‘The bass player was an old friend of hers from Leeds. He said she’d grown withdrawn and sullen recently. She’d stopped taking care of herself. Rehearsals fell apart. They couldn’t even get one song recorded the whole way through.’
‘He say what happened?’
‘She would just lose it, he said. She’d be in the middle of a song and suddenly she’d be screaming and ripping off her headphones. She told them she heard voices whispering to her inside the music. Telling her to do things. They tried different headphones, changing frequencies in case they were picking up mobile signals, but it kept happening until Katrina was such a wreck they had to abandon the sessions.’
‘He ask her what the voices said?’
‘He did. Some rubbish about coming to claim her. I didn’t put it in because it didn’t seem relevant. I just assumed she’d flipped from too much skunk.’
Carrigan scraped his chair forward. ‘She said those exact words? Claim her?’
Forsyth nodded.
‘That’s him. That’s his phrase.’ Carrigan looked down at his plate. ‘I think he’s done it again.’
Forsyth let out a dry snort. ‘It’s not whether he’s done it again you should be asking yourself. It’s how many times he’s done it between Katrina and Anna.’
25
‘This is a complete waste of time.’
Brown files covered the only table in the room. Carrigan had come back from lunch buzzing with the Katrina information. He’d tried to find Geneva but Geneva was out. He got stuck with Hoffmann instead. Now he wished he hadn’t told the profiler about Forsyth’s suspicion that there were more victims.
‘I wasn’t asking for your opinion.’ Hoffmann took a long unhurried swallow of cappuccino, the foam flecking his top lip, setting off the dandruff in his eyebrows. ‘The more data we can amass, the easier it will be to discern a pattern. You and I both know he’s done this before, and I don’t mean Katrina.’
Carrigan surveyed the table. Too much information could be as bad as too little. An investigation got weighed under by the profusion of leads as much as by their lack. Hoffmann had requested every female missing persons file from the Queensway area in the last five years. Carrigan had been staggered by the amount of paperwork they’d received – 4,268 files.
‘I’m not arguing with that. I agree. It’s highly likely he’s done this before. And I know what you’re looking for. But I don’t think digging up the past is going to help us catch him. We already have several strong leads. We need to focus on Anna – she was his most recent and we’re more likely to pick up a trace, electronic or otherwise, from his interactions with her.’
‘This is just as important.’ Hoffmann pointed to the files on the table. ‘Don’t you see? – Katrina changes everything. Previously we only had Anna to go by and we couldn’t tell if she was chosen at random or not. Katrina answers that question. It means he’s territorial. The hostel is the connection. There’s no point looking into these girls’ lives. It won’t tell us anything about him. Only the bodies of his victims can do that. He’s a hunter and they’ve strayed onto his territory. We need to widen the investigation.’
‘No, we need to narrow it down.’
‘How about we compromise and start by narrowing these down?’ Hoffmann picked up a file at random and opened it. The first page held a photo, clipped to the original missing persons report. The rest of the file contained additional information on the subsequent investigation. Most of the time there was no investigation, no leads, no hope.
‘We should begin by excluding all women that don’t conform to his type.’ Hoffmann skimmed pages. ‘They always have a type and Anna and Katrina give us plenty to go on.’
With each assumption they made, the probability of it being accurate diminished and yet without making assumptions they would be stalled and stranded in the forest of data. It was the central paradox on which any investigation hinged. Carrigan looked at the stacked mounds of missing lives, took a file, and began.
They scanned photos. They flicked open folders and came face to face with a legion of lost women. They weeded out brunettes and redheads. They excluded non-Caucasians. They looked for facial similarities. Things the killer might have picked up on. After forty-five minutes they had 568 files left from the original 4,268. Still way too much. Carrigan checked the time and popped pills. As he put the foil back in his pocket, he caught Hoffmann watching him. The profiler quickly looked away without saying a word.
‘It’s still far too many,’ Carrigan said, overwhelmed by the stories and testimonies he’d read. So many holes in so many people’s lives. ‘Besides, whatever we discover here isn’t going to help us find him.’
‘The more victims we can unearth and the more data sets we gather, the better chance we have of understanding him.’
‘I don’t need to understand him. I just need to catch him. God can do the rest.’
Hoffman crossed his arms and shook his head. ‘I don’t see how an intelligent man like you, with all you’ve seen, can still believe in God?’
‘Most of the time, I don’t understand it either.’
Hoffmann wrinkled his brow. ‘What did your God do for them? What kind of God would allow this and this and this . . .’ He pointed to each file in turn. ‘And this to happen? Religion’s just another cop
ing mechanism. There’s nothing beyond our world. It’s ludicrous to suppose any different.’
‘How can you live believing this is all there is?’
Hoffmann snorted. ‘How can you live believing God would allow such a world to happen? History disproves God. The senselessness and suffering and violence and hatred. There is only now and I intend to enjoy every moment of it expressly because it’s all there is.’
Carrigan wondered if there was another meaning behind the words. He examined the profiler, looking for any signs or tells, but you could read anything into almost any gesture or the lack thereof – yet, whenever Carrigan looked at him, he couldn’t help but assess him as a man, as she would have done, and though he realised this was getting in the way of the investigation, he couldn’t stop himself, not after so many years of wondering.
‘Take this case,’ Hoffmann continued. ‘What kind of God allows a man like this to prey on women? Is that the kind of God you really want to worship? Perhaps you believe justice will be served when you catch him and lock him up for good, but that’s not justice. The only justice would be the ability to bring the dead back to life and God hasn’t been in that business for nearly two thousand years.’
Carrigan stared at the files, fighting the urge to get side-tracked into the argument. He wasn’t sure if Hoffmann was goading him or if the profiler was always like this. He picked up a file, remembering Madison’s account of the abduction. ‘He spiked their drinks.’ Carrigan started opening folders. ‘And the two abductions we know of happened at night.’
They had to dig deeper this time, checking and corroborating timelines. They read until their eyeballs ached and the words swam off the page and across their hands, but after another hour and a half they had it down to forty-eight files. They split the files and began rereading them, a slow painstaking trawl through every badly typed sentence and scrawled note. Each spent an hour going through their own set then swapped to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.
‘How many do you think he’s killed?’
Hoffmann tapped the file against the back of his hand. ‘If I was guessing, I’d say four or five before Katrina. He would need roughly that level of practice to get this good at it.’
‘And he’s got away with it. That’s only going to make him more confident.’
‘It also means he’s going to take more risks.’
‘He’s enjoying this, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. Yes, he is. But not in the way you think. He’s not evil, he’s simply programmed to feel like this. We demand explanations for evil and, sadly, all too often people in my profession and yours provide them, the abusive histories and substance-abuse cycles, but we forget that for some people killing is like sex or swimming. It’s fun.’
‘Everybody has a choice.’
Hoffmann shook his head. ‘That’s your easy way out, believing that. Yet all the latest research suggests evil may be no more than a chemical reaction inside our brains, a misfiring synapse. One we have no hope of controlling. How does your God fit into that? A faulty bit of wiring in your skull and you’re Joseph Stalin or Jeffrey Dahmer.’
Was that all it really came down to? Carrigan wondered. A few defective neurons?
‘You look for clues in the world,’ Hoffmann said. ‘But you forget that the greatest mystery is our own lives and yet it’s the one mystery we can never hope to solve.’
Was that an admission?
Hoffmann couldn’t possibly know because Louise never knew. Carrigan never had the chance to confront her. It was all over so quickly. He felt a muscle twitch in his cheek as he saw the profiler’s manicured nails brush the top of a file and imagined those fingers . . . No. He had to stop thinking like that.
*
He’d discovered it by accident. Louise had been using his laptop that summer while waiting for hers to be repaired. He’d logged on to his email one morning but it wasn’t his email. Louise had forgotten to log out. There were only two things in his life he regretted – that was a lie; there were many, but only two which stood out – taking the short cut in Uganda that lost him his two best friends and opening Louise’s email.
It was wrong in every conceivable way. He’d known it at the time and he knew it now. But he’d been a cop too long to be able to resist, almost as if the job had snuck into his DNA and he resented it a little for changing him in this way.
They were lying in her inbox. There were so many of them. He would never have looked otherwise but Louise’s inbox consisted primarily of emails from Ed Hoffmann.
He’d spent the next couple of hours reading through Hoffmann’s emails and Louise’s subsequent replies, a love affair conducted through electronic signals, though they’d also used it to arrange meetings and assignations, Carrigan’s long hours on the job proving handy for once.
Louise’s aching declarations of love utterly undid him – yet, at the same time, he was surprised to find that they also moved him in a way he could not explain nor control. He loved Louise more than he remembered loving anyone and to see the untrammelled joy in her words made it impossible for him to hate her. Instead, he’d decided to leave. He made plans and arrangements. A few days later she came back from her doctor’s appointment and that was that.
Carrigan snapped out of the past to see Hoffmann scrutinising him, a thin smile playing on the profiler’s lips.
‘You bastard.’ Carrigan slammed the files down onto the table at the same time the door to the incident room flew open and Geneva burst in, breathless and dishevelled. She stopped suddenly, her eyes darting from Carrigan to the profiler and back.
‘Whatever it is I’ve disturbed, you boys can go back to it later.’ She had a file clamped under her arm. ‘You both need to see this.’
26
‘The lab were able to fast track the trace evidence from the vial we found in the alley.’ Geneva opened the file and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. She read out the list of chemicals the lab had isolated, evil and suffering reduced to precise medical notation. She saw Carrigan’s face stiffen. It was obvious he and Hoffmann were avoiding each other, standing as far apart as they possibly could, stacks of files delineating a strict border between them. ‘The liquid in the vial was a cocktail of several drugs. The main ingredients were DMT and LSD with trace amounts of ketamine, crystal meth and mephedrone, as well as several unknown compounds.’
‘Jesus, that’s bad.’ Hoffmann scratched at the few hairs left on his skull and, for a brief moment, the air of indifferent authority surrounding him disappeared. ‘These drugs are all hallucinogens to a greater or lesser degree. They’re also known to cause severe time distortion. That’s when they’re ingested alone. God knows what combining them would do.’ Hoffmann paused. ‘You found this in the alley, right?’
Geneva nodded.
‘He wouldn’t have been that clumsy unless he wanted you to find it.’
‘Why would he want that?’
‘So we know how much Anna suffered before she died. Damn it.’ Hoffmann closed his eyes. ‘We’ve been looking at this the wrong way around. He’s not using the drugs to subdue them. He’s using the drugs to torture them.’
Geneva remembered Madison scratching at herself in the interview room, the girl’s eyes restless and flat, the sudden startling whimpers that had escaped her throat. ‘How? What effects would they produce?’
‘The DMT is particularly nasty. It was popular in the late sixties as a kind of beefed-up acid, a couple of hundred times more powerful. More importantly, of all the drugs we know about, DMT causes the greatest time distortion effects.’
‘Time distortion?’ Carrigan asked.
‘You smoke or pop some DMT and you go on an incredibly intense trip, colours streaking by you, everything speeding up and slowing down simultaneously, everything happening all at once. Total sensory overload. It’s like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope. You spend ten hours in this whirling chaos, unable to move, terrified out of your mind, holding on like you’re on a rollercoast
er ride from hell, and then the drugs wear off and you come back down to reality and look at your watch and only five minutes have passed.’
It took Carrigan a few seconds to fully comprehend this. ‘People do it for fun?’
Hoffmann nodded. ‘I’m guessing you’ve worked out the implications for our victims? He might have held Anna for only forty-eight hours but in her mind, under the influence of this, it would have felt like twenty years.’
‘Twenty years? But he only had her for two days?’ Geneva found the idea of it almost too vertiginous to accept.
‘Not in her mind. In her mind, she lived through twenty years inside those forty-eight hours. Remember – time is relative. Time doesn’t actually exist at all. It’s the same as watching a film – if it’s boring ninety minutes can seem like an eternity, but if it’s great it’ll go by in a flash. We know so little about time perception it’s embarrassing. But we know certain drugs exacerbate its ebb and flow and that a person can go mad inside their own head in five minutes.’
‘What about the other drugs?’ Geneva made sure she was getting this down, the words clear and solid and logical, unlike the feeling in her gut.
‘The LSD would enhance the visual side of the trip, maybe add some bad vibes to it. Ketamine’s another nasty one. Used to be a horse tranquiliser. Gives people out-of-body experiences. Don’t know if it worked like that for the horses but take enough K and you observe yourself from the other side of the room. The meth and mephedrone will induce feelings of dread, fear and terror. He might only have her for a few days but with these drugs he can torment her for years.’
There was silence as they made notes and stared into a sky cancelled by rain. Carrigan thought of his mother trapped inside her own skull – was she going through this kind of suffering? Like most things, it was better not to think about it. As you got older the unexamined life became the only one worth living.
Hoffmann gave the list of drugs back to Geneva. ‘This is great. It tells us a lot more about why he does what he does.’
