by LJ Ross
He knew what they were wondering, too.
They wanted to know if he was a killer, if he was capable of taking a life with his own bare hands. He could see it in their eyes as they spoke to him; wonder mingled with a measure of fear that hadn’t been there before. He recognised that look because he saw the same thing each time he looked in a mirror.
Let them look.
Let them wonder.
A golden effigy of Jesus on the cross looked down upon him from where it hung above the altar. He stared into the carved face, searching it for clues, to understand what he should do next.
But no otherworldly voice spoke to him. There was nothing but deafening silence punctuated by the whispers of the small-minded people around him. They couldn’t possibly understand. They had no conception of the great burden, the great gift which God had bestowed. They were like vermin, crawling all over the Earth, polluting it, despoiling it.
He felt hatred rise up in him, so strong and powerful that he nearly vomited. Sick and shivering, he retreated to his office and shut the door behind him. He leaned his forehead against it for a long moment while he tried to find his equilibrium.
When he turned around, she was sitting at the desk waiting for him.
“Grace!” he cried out, happy as a boy.
* * *
O’Byrne’s equilibrium did not last for long.
The telephone screamed around the walls of his office and shattered the brief peace he had found with Grace, leaving him alone once again. He sank into his desk chair wearily and picked up the telephone, hoping that it would not be another reporter seeking an interview.
But it was worse than that.
“Conor?”
“Bishop.” He sat up straighter in the chair. “It’s good to hear from you. Are you enjoying Italy?”
“Now is hardly the time to discuss my trip,” came the severe response. “I have just spoken with a Chief Inspector Ryan from Northumbria CID. He seems to think that we are obstructing his investigation.”
O’Byrne gripped the handset.
“I’ve been fully co-operative with the police,” he fought to keep the panic from his voice. “Just this morning, I attended the police station voluntarily to answer questions.”
“Yes, I heard,” there was a short pause while the Bishop glanced at the script in front of him. “The inspector is seeking my authorisation to conduct a search of church property.”
O’Byrne tried to swallow the constriction in his throat but his mouth was bone dry. He fumbled with the water jug on his desk.
“A—a search? Of what? Where?”
Panic rose again in fresh, nauseating waves. Thousands of miles away, the Bishop heard it and dropped his head into his hands. He had hoped that the police were wrong and that it would all be an awful mistake, something they could chalk up to experience. But he was a consummate professional and a principled man. No matter how much it hurt him, no matter how much it might cost him, he would see this through to the bitter end.
It was the least that he could do for all those women.
“It seems there was a discrepancy with one of the victims,” the Bishop explained. “Something about a missing earring…something like that. Anyway, if this man has been using church property to kill these poor women, they think he might have overlooked it when he tried to clear up afterwards. If the police can find the earring, they’re more likely to find the killer.”
O’Byrne’s mind whirled. An earring? Who had worn earrings?
His pupils flickered as he tried to bring the faces of the dead back to life. It was a great effort and he struggled to recall the details of each woman, seeing only Grace each time he tried. The prostitute? Had she worn earrings? He could barely remember.
“Where…ah, where do they want to search?”
“They think he might have used St Andrew’s after dark,” the Bishop was saying, and the relief was so great that O’Byrne could have cried. “So they would like to conduct a search of the premises this afternoon. Is that going to pose a problem?”
The Dean drew in a long, satisfying breath and when he spoke again his voice had returned to normal.
“It’s no problem at all,” he said, honestly. “They can search St Andrew’s for as long as they like.”
The police would find nothing there.
* * *
A couple of hundred miles away in a pretty village near Humberside Airport, Ludo parked his van outside a red-brick detached house with a bottle green door. He sat for a few minutes hunched over the steering wheel while he assessed the neighbourhood and was delighted to note that the house was not directly overlooked.
Anything for an easy life.
There was a light but persistent drizzle which encouraged pedestrians to stoop and study the pavement rather than anything else that might be happening around them, which was all to the good as well.
Ludo tugged a baseball cap over his wide forehead and checked his look in the wing mirror, admiring the embroidered logo on the rim of the hat—a nice touch to match the van. He kept his head down when he stepped onto the pavement and then unlocked the double doors at the back, leaving one wide open for ease of access. He would need to be quick but he had performed similar feats a dozen times before.
He ambled up to the front door and pressed the doorbell with a bulky, gloved finger. He painted a crooked smile on his face when he heard a woman’s voice.
“Just a minute!”
The door swung open and he found himself looking down into the flushed face of a young woman with cropped blonde hair and kind eyes.
“Can I help you?”
Before embracing a life of crime, Ludo had been a highly successful car salesman with a wardrobe full of natty suits and a shiny red convertible on the driveway of his five-bedroomed home. His success had ultimately been the cause of his descent into Quaaludes in the late eighties and the subsequent loss of his home, his job and his reputation. But the fact remained that, when called upon, he could still sell ice to an Inuit.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mrs…?”
“Ah, Hayworth,” she provided.
“Mrs Hayworth,” he repeated, drawing out a business card. “I won’t keep you long. I’m in the area at the moment and my company is running an offer on steam cleans—carpet and upholstery are both fifty percent off the usual price.”
He gave her a friendly smile.
“As a parent myself, I understand how dirty sofas and carpets can get with little sticky fingers!”
She laughed along with him and began to think that the place could do with freshening up. “Anyway, here’s my card—have a think about it. We’re running the offer until the end of next week.”
She was happy to take his card and pleasantly surprised by the inoffensive, soft-sell manner coming from such an enormous, weathered man.
“Thanks, I will,” she smiled and he tipped his cap in an old-fashioned gesture, ready to turn away. Then, he hesitated and gave her an embarrassed look. “Ah, Mrs Hayworth, I wouldn’t normally ask but I wonder if I could use your cloakroom? I’ve been on the road for the past three hours.”
He remained a respectful distance away from the front door, so as not to intimidate her. Still, she hesitated.
“Um, well—”
Ludo could see that she was struggling to find a polite reason to refuse and he held both hands up, palms out in a classic, non-threatening gesture.
“Not to worry, I’ll see if I can find somewhere,” his voice trailed off and he cast his eyes around the area, across the empty fields and scattered houses on the edge of the village. “Perhaps one of your neighbours will be home.”
He turned away and had only taken three steps when she called him back.
“No, please, it’s fine. Follow me, this way.”
“I’ll be very quick, I promise,” he smiled again.
CHAPTER 21
MacKenzie set aside any niggling concerns for her personal safety and chose to immerse herself in work. She e
ntrusted the latest poisoned-pen note to Faulkner’s capable hands and hoped there would be a stray fingerprint that would lead them to a lonely person who wanted to bask in the reflected infamy of The Graveyard Killer. Until then, she was tasked with overseeing the excavation works at each of the twelve burial sites where Tanya Robertson was most likely to be found. There had been one small development that helped them to narrow down the search: Tanya’s car had been found abandoned in a supermarket car park near Newburn, an area to the west of the city where the River Tyne thinned out and wound its way through a quiet stretch of the countryside.
MacKenzie instructed the excavation team to concentrate their efforts on burials that had taken place within the remit of Northumberland County Council, the nearest county in that westerly direction. The search was reduced to three relevant burial sites and, by late afternoon, two excavations had been completed with due pomp and ceremony under her watchful eye without anything sinister being uncovered. The final excavation site within the Northumberland catchment area was Edgewell Cemetery in Prudhoe.
Consequently, MacKenzie and Lowerson found themselves dressed for inclement weather in dark green wellington boots and waterproof jackets while a team of grave diggers extracted a coffin from a freshly covered grave at Edgewell Cemetery. A sour-faced priest looked on with extreme disapproval and murmured prayers for the unfortunate soul who had been laid to rest the previous day. It was a dismal job, one they would not have wished upon any of their colleagues. Nor would they have wished to inflict further trauma upon a grieving family, but needs must.
In silence, they watched the coffin rise up from the ground. With careful handling, it was placed onto a wide sheet of tarpaulin to the side of the re-opened grave and the two detectives stepped forward to peer into the empty hole where the coffin had recently lain. Immediately, they could see the imprint of its weight against the soil beneath and, more importantly, they found what they had been searching for.
Tanya Robertson’s body was almost unrecognisable but the impact of six feet of earth and wood had partially removed the layers of soil that had hidden her from view the previous day. Now, they could see the emerging outline of a woman with her arms stretched above her head.
MacKenzie reached for her phone, intending to call Ryan straight away. But first, she looked across at the shocked, slightly bilious face of the priest who crept forward to stand next to her.
“Say a prayer for this woman and her family,” she appealed to him.
* * *
Detective Sergeant Frank Phillips prided himself on being an efficient man. He approached his work with subtlety and a smile which usually brought results. Failing that, a few veiled threats usually hurried things along. It was therefore an unusual departure from his ordinary methods to be overseeing a search of St Andrew’s Church with the primary objective that it should be drawn out for as long as possible. Ryan’s precise instructions had been to ensure that the search team closely resembled, ‘a cross between a Benny Hill sketch and Inspector Clouseau on a bad day’. Phillips had to say that they were certainly meeting those criteria.
He stifled a chuckle as he watched one of his constables bend to look behind one of the long, draped curtains, whipping it back as if he expected somebody to jump out from behind it.
“You’ll not find the killer behind there, lad,” he said, shaking his head apologetically towards the tall, stony-faced man standing a few feet away.
“We’ve been here for two hours already,” Father O’Byrne bit out. “How much longer is this going to take?”
Phillips hid a smile.
“Oh, could be a while longer yet,” he warned. “You know what it’s like, trying to find something that small. It’s like losing a contact lens.”
“Surely there has to be a more coordinated way you can search for this—what did you say you were looking for? An earring?”
Phillips made an expressive face and looked over his shoulder.
“Shh! Better keep our voices down. That’s not common knowledge,” he said.
O’Byrne rolled his eyes.
“Your constables seem to have covered every inch of this floor,” he repeated. “The church is hardly large, either.”
“Aye, they’re diligent officers,” Phillips said proudly.
O’Byrne cast him a disbelieving glance and looked at his watch, for the fiftieth time. The day was slipping away and he had other, more important places to be.
And urgent business to take care of.
“Sergeant, I’m certain that the Bishop would be satisfied that your officers are conducting a careful search. There’s no further need for me to be in attendance—”
“Ah, now, the Bishop was very clear about wanting you to keep a careful eye on the search from start to finish. I don’t want anybody trying to say we planted evidence—”
“I’m sure he would do no such thing.”
“You say that,” Phillips scratched his nose and settled down for a long and boring conversation about police procedure. “But it wouldn’t be the first time CID has come in for some flak. Now, only last month, a mate of mine down in Teesside…”
O’Byrne snapped his mouth shut and resigned himself to a long wait.
* * *
The skies reflected the mood of the city. Thick grey clouds had gathered, blotting out the sunshine so that the transition from day into night went by almost unnoticed. Icy winds blasted through the streets and ushered the river towards the sea in surging waves that crashed against either side of the riverbank. As the water swelled and shifted, Sister Mary-Frances’s body moved with it, dragging and battering against the mossy stone walls. Her long skirt became entangled in some rubbish which had collected underneath the high level railway bridge, where a man and his dog had the misfortune of finding her.
Thirty minutes later, Ryan stood in the shadow of the bridge, bundled inside an all-weather jacket. The wind pummelled him from all sides and his eyes watered, but he remained there until Jeff Pinter rose from his inspection of Sister Mary-Frances’s body and made his way back to him.
“Well? Is it another strangulation?”
Pinter blew his nose heartily before speaking.
“No, not with this one. She drowned, although the fish have certainly done their work.”
Ryan experienced a moment of doubt.
“You’re saying it could be a suicide?”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know of many suicide victims with deep bruising on their upper arms, do you? It certainly doesn’t look as if she could have done that to herself.”
Perhaps, Ryan thought, her killer had changed his usual method and had forcibly thrown the old nun into the river.
But why?
Perhaps because Father Conor O’Byrne had hoped that her death would not be connected with that of Barbara Hewitt and Father Simon Healy. He had known that, if the police identified the victims as former staff members of Our Lady of Charity Orphanage in Rothbury, they would search for anybody else who might be connected and who might hold a grudge.
The strategy told Ryan something very interesting indeed. It told him that Father Conor O’Byrne was no frenzy killer; he was not at the mercy of uncontrollable impulses, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality as his ritual murders of redheaded women might suggest.
He was not insane.
* * *
Hundreds of miles away in Humberside, Mrs Hayworth left Ludo to use the downstairs cloakroom and stepped quickly into the kitchen to pour him a glass of water. Kind-heartedness was her failing but she couldn’t help thinking that if he hadn’t stopped in over three hours, he had probably encountered a lot of rude people who weren’t interested in steam cleaning. She ran the tap at the kitchen sink and watched the water bubble into the glass as it filled. Besides, he was a family man himself. He was just trying to earn a living.
That’s funny, she thought, suddenly. He assumed that she had children, but how did he know that?
She kept a tidy house and most o
f Alfie’s toys were kept in the playroom, not left around the hallway, so there were no obvious giveaways.
The thought preyed on her mind and water began to run over the top of the glass onto her hand.
He’s been in there a while, she worried. What if he won’t leave? What if he…?
Thoughts of rape and murder flooded her mind and she dropped the glass, which shattered against the sink. She ran back into the hallway and stopped dead, with a sob.
Ludo stood there, waiting for her.
But he was not alone.
In his arms, he held Alfie, whose chubby fingers clung around his wide neck with the kind of childish trust that brought tears to her eyes. She ran forward, intending to snatch him back, but sobbed again when Ludo drew out a flick knife. The blade glinted, inches away from her child’s face.
“Mama!” he gurgled. “Mama!”
He began to reach out his arms and she held them open to take him, her eyes pleading.
“Please,” she implored Ludo. “Don’t hurt him. What do you want? Tell me what you want!”
Ludo hitched the child onto his hip and gestured towards the door with his knife.
“I want you to pack a small bag. Do it now and make it quick. If you come quietly and don’t make a fuss, nobody has to get hurt.”
“Why? Where…?”
“Stop talking and do it.”
He followed her around the house while she grabbed nappies and clothing, shoving them into a holdall. She spied her mobile phone on the bedside table and tried to grab it but Ludo beat her to it, knocking it onto the floor where he stamped the heel of his foot against the screen until it was obliterated.
She cried, silently, while fear made her stomach cramp.
When it was done, he nodded.
“Good. You’re doing the smart thing. Now, we’re going to walk from the front door to my van. I want you to get into the back and I’ll hand the baby to you. If you try to run, or try anything at all, I’ll take him with me and you’ll never see him again. Do you understand?”