Pete grinned and nodded.
“It’s a delicate matter,” Dave said. “Let’s just say that Paul Usher will probably be withdrawing his complaint anytime today.”
“You’ve sorted it?”
“Consider it sorted.”
“Good. Well done. I suppose I’d better do some work, too. How’s that letter to Madame LeStrang coming along?”
“Done it once,” Pete replied, “but I’ve changed my mind and decided to use the Outdoor Leisure maps. The Landrangers are a bit too small and it looked as if we were being deliberately obstructionist. I’m just working the references out more accurately so she won’t be able to say we were unhelpful.”
Easter is a poor time for news, so there’d been a full-page spread about us in one of the Sunday tabloids. Police Enlist Psychic, it screamed out, and explained how we’d called upon the assistance, once again, of the extraordinary powers of Madame LeStrang.
“Try to get it off today, please.”
“No problem.”
A DCI had been bumped up to take over Superintendent Isles’ workload, and he needed to know where the enquiry was heading. He knew the score, wasn’t interfering, but he might have to field a few awkward questions. And he was hoping that the appointment might become permanent and didn’t want to make a balls-up. I took Dave with me. On the way I asked what the hold was he had over Paul Usher.
“Not him, her,” he replied. “Maria-Helena.”
“Anything you can tell me?”
“Sure. I went round to the Smith’s about three years ago, with a court warrant for Gary, the eldest of the sons. I’d hardly knocked on the door when it burst open and one of the younger ones stormed out, nearly knocking me over. I yelled: ‘Is Gary in?’ after him and he shouted back: ‘Yeah, he’s in bed.’ Well, the door was open and the stairs were beckoning, so in I went. He was in bed all right, and his arse was going like a fiddler’s elbow. Peeking out from under him was the lovely, if slightly embarrassed countenance of Maria-Helena. I said: ‘Downstairs, both of you, in thirty seconds,’ and they were.”
“His sister?” I said.
“Half-sister, actually. Different mothers.”
“It’s still illegal.”
“It’s how they live, Charlie. Surprising thing is that they are all so well balanced when you talk to them. Totally immoral, but well balanced. Mrs Smith is an intelligent woman, lots of down-to-earth common sense. I brought him in on the warrant and forgot about the other.”
“Until now.”
“That’s right. She’s still playing home and away with her half-brother but Paul doesn’t suspect a thing, so she’s kindly offered to withdraw her witness statement about the Pakistanis who attacked her husband.”
“Was it her who attacked him?”
“Mmm. They had a row and she thought he was going to hit her, so she grabbed the knife. Don’t worry about her safety, Charlie, he’s the one living dangerously.”
“Right.”
We brought the acting super up to speed, telling him about the assault on Neville Ferriby and our enquiries in America. He shook his head in disbelief when I laid it on about the ACC’s intervention and the involvement of the mad Madame, and we parted the best of mates. Apart from that, it was another waste of time. As we drove into Heckley on the way back I stopped at a traffic light. It was showing red, so it was a wise action.
“There’s a sandwich shop just round this corner,” I said.
“Want me to leap out and get you one?”
“Please.” The lights changed. I coasted round the corner and pulled into the kerb. The driver of the following car swung round me and glared as he passed.
“What do you want?” Dave asked, one leg out of the door.
“Um, something fast.”
“Gazelle?”
“No, clot-head! Cheese, salad, whatever. Something that’s ready made. Something where she doesn’t have to defrost the prawns, or carve the ham, or cut the bread and slice her thumb and have to find a flippin’ plaster, while I wait here and gridlock half of Heckley.”
“OK, keep your ’air on.”
It was cheese and pickle. Fine. I carried it into the nick and Dave drove off with Jeff Caton, who was just leaving to see if Paul Usher was having second thoughts about his complaint.
“Just the man!” the desk sergeant called as I walked through the doorway. He grabbed his phone and said: “I’ve found him, he’s here, now,” into it.
“Who is it?” I asked, taking the instrument from him.
“America,” he replied in a confidential whisper, as if we were discussing his medical condition. “A woman.”
I heard our operator say: “We’ve found Mr Priest, I’m putting you through,” followed by the usual clicks and silences. After a couple of seconds I said: “Inspector Priest here.”
“Inspector Priest?” The voice was straight out of Central Casting.
“That’s right. Who am I speaking to, please?”
“This is Agent Gladys Jewel, Inspector. Good morning.”
“Good morning to you, Gladys. Charlie Priest here, do you have some information for me?”
“Gladys!” I heard the desk sergeant hiss.
“Not what you were hoping for, I’m afraid, Charlie. Agent Kaprowski apprised me of the situation and we’ve approached the problem in a variety of ways. It’s been the Easter weekend over here, so first of all I’d like to apologise for the delay in replying.”
“Yes, we have the same festival this side of the Atlantic,” I told her.
“Gee, I guess you do. OK. How to unlock the secrets of Shiralee Weston’s computer, that was the problem. So first of all we hacked into it. No sweat, but we found nothing there and we couldn’t discover any alternative sites operating from her address. That could mean that we were not clever enough or that there was nothing to find. We read all her emails and there was nothing to indicate she was running a Tim Roper fan club, no bulletin board, no nuthin’. So, plan two: I put on the funny voice and ring her. Say I’ve just discovered the works of Tim Roper and it was a revelation. This was what I’d been looking for all my life. Boy, did we have an animated conversation? That chick is one strange lady, Charlie, believe me. She told me how to download all his stuff but guess what? There’s no fan club. All the world are Tim’s fans, she says, or they will be, once they’ve heard him. Which brings us to plan three: send a couple of agents round in the hope that she has a filing cabinet with it all in. Zilch. She doesn’t have a filing cabinet with it all in. From what they said about her there’s no room in the trailer for a filing cabinet. She’s a mess, Charlie, a pitiful mess.”
“I hope they weren’t too hard on her.”
“No. They told her what it was about and she cooperated. So the bottom line, Charlie, is that we haven’t been much help to you.”
A big stone was sitting somewhere at the bottom of my stomach. I’d been sure that the Tim Roper avenue would take us to the murderer, but it was a dead end, a false trail, a blind canyon. He could just as easily have used the lyrics of Abba or Brotherhood of Man to taunt us.
“Gladys…” I began, “you’ve obviously put a lot of effort into this, and I’m grateful.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but I think that’s about all we can offer.”
“I, well, I felt sure this was going to lead us to the killer.”
“You sound desolate.”
“I feel it.”
“Don’t take it to heart, Charlie. Do you know how many unexplained deaths we have in LA County?”
“No.”
“About twenty-five a day.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Who did he kill?”
“Seven. He’s killed seven.”
“Gee, I didn’t know that. What are they, recreational killings?”
“It looks like it.”
“They’re the worst sort. Have you had a word with our people at Quantico?”
“I
’m preparing a file for them.”
“They’re good, Charlie, believe me. Meanwhile, we’ll have a think about things and keep looking for that fan club. How does that sound?”
“You’re a treasure, Gladys. Many thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome. Take care, Charlie, and good hunting.”
Quantico is the FBI training college, and that’s where they invented criminal profiling. Pete Goodfellow didn’t know it yet but his next job would be to prepare that file and submit it to them. I wasn’t expecting any results, but when lives are being lost and failure is staring you in the face, an important part of the job is covering your back. One day they’d be baying for a scapegoat, and I was the prime contender.
The offences were committed early in the evening. The implication from that was that the murderer lived miles away, outside the area. He’d be able to do the deed and then drive home while it was still early, without attracting attention. If he’d killed late at night he’d have to be on the roads when they were quiet and he’d be at risk of being picked up. That’s what a profiler would tell us. Except that… Except that I didn’t believe it. The killings were not opportunistic. He knew who his victims were in advance, of that I was sure. He’d known exactly where they’d be and at what time, and that took planning. Robin was doing his paper round. He wasn’t going home after staying on late at school or after playing computer games at a friend’s – he was following his routine. Similarly with Mrs Heeley and Colinette. They didn’t just happen to be there, they were doing what they always did at that time on that day. Driving a hundred or even thirty miles trawling for likely victims would be a chore, and most criminals have a lazy streak in them. No, he lived and killed locally, first down south, and now here in West Yorkshire. As sure as my name was…Guiseppe Fatorini.
The team would be disappointed. We felt sure that our luck was changing, that the website would put us on the trail, but now I’d have to tell them we were back where we started. We wouldn’t catch our killer. He wouldn’t be detected. Some fresh-faced PC would take a car number for driving without lights or parking carelessly, near where a future murder was committed, or a CCTV camera would pick him up at a couple of locations. He’d confess to everything, proud to have led us such a dance, enjoying the limelight. Then the celebrations would start. The chief constable would modestly tell the world that it was all down to good policing and he’d invite his favourite reporters and acolytes to drinky-poos in the office. Meanwhile, we’d quietly wipe the computer of the twenty thousand names and addresses we’d accrued and start thinking about burglaries again.
Pete was sitting at his desk when I entered the office, sleeves rolled up, an Ordnance Survey map spread out under his elbows. He looked up when he heard me, saying: “Hi Boss, the FBI’s just been after you.”
“I know, they caught me at the front desk.”
“Any joy?”
“Sod all.” I checked the weight of the kettle and switched it on, then shut myself in my little office. I’d completed my diary and was sitting with my knuckles pressed into my eyes when Pete opened the door and poked his head round it.
“So they couldn’t find the fan club?” he asked.
My office has windows on three sides, and I can see my reflection in them. I raise my head without moving my hands, pulling my bottom eyelids down, followed by my cheeks and the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“There isn’t one,” I said as my face sprang back to its normal shape.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing at all.”
“No names and addresses?”
“No names. No addresses.”
“That’s a blow.”
“Putting it mildly.”
“You sound pissed off.”
I shook my head, lost for words. “I thought…I thought… Oh, what’s the use. It looks as if Madame LeStrang is our best bet again.”
“Uh!” Pete exclaimed. “I think you’d better come and see what I’ve discovered. I don’t think you’ll like this, either.”
“What is it? What have you found?”
“The links, Charlie. I’ve found the links.”
Chapter Nine
There were two Ordnance Survey maps on his desk, one on top of the other. He lifted a corner of the top one to show me the area around Nelson, where young Robin Gillespie’s body had been found. Pete had marked the exact spot with a cross inside a circle. He folded the local map back, saying: “…and these are where Colinette, Mrs Heeley and Norma Holborn were found.”
“Go on,” I said. I’d seen the shape the pins made on the big map down in the incident room. Three of them in an irregular triangle, with Robin’s pin way off to the west. We’d considered constellations, ley lines and mathematical ratios, all to no avail.
“The scale is one to 25,000,” he told me, “and I’ve worked out six-figure references for all the places where the bodies were found. Three figures for the easting, three for the northing, as you well know.”
“I’m with you.”
“OK. So the first figure of the three represents a ten kilometre square, the second brings it down to one kilometre, and the third figure is my estimate of the number of tenths of a kilometre to where each body was found.”
“And what does it show?”
“Here’s the list.” He pulled a pad from under the maps, with columns of numbers written on it. “If you ignore the first figure, the ten kilometre square, we find that the reference for Robin is one two, two three. That for Mrs Heeley is three four, four five; Colinette is five six, seven eight and Norma is eight nine, nine zero. It’s the words of the song, Charlie – One two, buckle my shoe. Two three, he’ll never get free.”
I took the pad from him, studying the numbers, looking at the map, working out the references for myself.
“Norma was found smack on the line,” Pete was saying. “Hence the zero. It explains why the bodies were found in what appeared to be arbitrary places, except that there was nothing arbitrary about it. He’d worked the spots out on a map, like I’ve just done.”
The carpet tiles were coming up at me, pulsing and throbbing like something in a medical video. I stepped back, taking a deep breath, and stumbled against a waste paper basket. Something had to get in my way, and that was it. I spun round and toe-ended it across the office with all the venom that I once put into goal kicks. It clattered against a radiator and fell to the floor, rolling in a semi-circle before coming to rest.
“That’s no good!” I yelled at Peter, slamming my fist down on his desk. “What frigging good is that? That doesn’t help us at all!”
“He’s not doing it to help us, Charlie!” he shouted back. “He’s not doing it so we can catch him. He’s doing it to prove he’s the killer.”
“He’s mocking us,” I said. “He’s taunting us.”
“Precisely! That’s what he does.”
I flopped into a chair and felt my chest heaving as I struggled to breathe. I said: “Location, location, location.”
“What?”
“Somebody said that when I went down to N-CIS and told them he called himself the Property Developer. It’s the three golden rules of property development – location, location, location.”
“Which proves he’s been working to a plan, a grand design, all along.”
“Seven – nil to him.” I said.
“Seven?”
“Yeah, seven.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “You don’t know the full story. I’ll tell you all about it when Maggie and Dave are here. God knows, Peter, we need some fresh ideas with this one.”
The evenings are the worst time. Eight through to midnight. Go to the pub and have a few beers is the usual solution, but it doesn’t work with me. I read, listen to music, maybe watch some TV or catch up with housework, trying not to fall asleep. Lately, there’d been the jogging, but mostly, I use the time to think.
It had been seventeen days since Norma Holborn’s murder but that one
came only nine days after Colinette. He was overdue, unless a body was lying somewhere, undiscovered. I’d studied the maps, considering possible references where he could have left a body. There were a hundred of them in every ten kilometre square, but there was no need for him to stick to the rules anymore. He’d used up all the references in the song and proved his point. From now on he could leave the bodies anywhere.
Gladys Jewel had called it recreational killing, but there was more to it than that. Taunting us – the police – was a major part of how he got his kicks. We were a part of the equation, that was for sure. He was playing some deadly game with us, and so far he was winning hands down. I tried to remember words from the songs that might be relevant. Who is the thief and who is the cop? Who is the judge and who is the whore? There was something in his past that had turned him against us, and the words of Tim Roper had found the sweet spot, reinforced his feelings. But with the last two killings a new dimension had entered the equation. He’d discovered sex and the joy of inflicting pain, and he’d had the magnificent realisation that, for him, one was a function of the other. The game had entered a new phase.
Find the last victim, if there was one, and find the next victim before she became one. Those were the priorities. We were running out of white pickups and tyres to check, so I had a few more troops to play with. At the Wednesday morning briefing I set a team up to find all the locations on the map where there might be a body and then we had a brainstorming session. If we were the killer, where would we look for our next victim?
She had to be a person of habit, available in the evening. Hospitals came top of the list. I gave someone the job of finding the shift times, not just for nurses but for the ancillary workers and anyone else who might work the twilight shift.
“And visitors,” someone suggested.
“Good one,” I agreed. “Regular visitors who come and go between times.”
After that it was filling station attendants, fast food workers, librarians, office cleaners, barmaids and waitresses. Laura Heeley had been to the bingo, so we added bingo halls to the list but rejected the cinema and theatre. Many shops in the town centre had late night opening, as did the supermarkets, so we included their staff. We’d talk to the management, see who arranged transport and who didn’t, warn vulnerable people to be aware of the situation and not to accept lifts.
Laughing Boy Page 19
