by Steve Mosby
‘Not a huge leap, no. But not an established fact either.’ Sean sighed. ‘You understand that, don’t you, David? And there’s only the vaguest of circumstantial evidence that Leland or Thompson were ever involved. They were friends with Chadwick. That’s it.’
‘There’s the abuse angle too.’
‘Which is all buried in police files. Join-the-dots stuff. Which means that right now, you’re the only person with a motive to kill them who knew about that connection. There’s not a shred of evidence that anybody else does.’
I know who did it.
‘I got a card.’
Groves told him about the birthday card. As he did so, the disappointment on Sean’s face became more pronounced.
‘So? That doesn’t prove anything.’
‘Maybe not. But it’s something.’
‘It probably isn’t, David. And you know it.’ Sean leaned back in his chair. ‘Where is it now? At your house?’
‘Yes. I can get it for you, along with the phone.’
‘No, you really can’t. I think it’s better right now that you don’t go anywhere near your house. Give me the keys. I’ll get them.’
It rankled, but he was right. ‘Okay.’
‘Let’s talk alibis. Please tell me you’ve got one?’
‘Not for Leland, no; I was at home by myself all night. I don’t know when Thompson was killed.’
‘PM’s scheduled for this afternoon. Jesus Christ. Okay. Run me through your whereabouts before you found the body.’
Groves told him everywhere he’d been – the soup kitchen, the train station – and eventually Sean switched off the recorder and retrieved a consent-to-search form from his folder of papers.
‘Honestly, David. I don’t know what to think.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘You really believe someone out there is killing these people and trying to ... frame you somehow? None of it makes sense.’
‘No. But I can’t think of any other explanation right now.’
Groves began filling in details on the form, listing the exact places in his home that Sean was allowed to go through.
It has to be like this, he told himself. By the book.
The right thing to do.
Sean took the form off him, along with his house keys.
‘Are we done?’ Groves said.
‘We’re done.’ Sean left him to open the door. At least he was letting him leave by himself rather than escorting him out. ‘But David? Don’t go too far. And keep your phone on.’
Mark
The centre of the web
Half an hour later, after coordinating the door-to-door team outside, I walked back to my car. Enough time had passed for the media to begin to gather beyond the cordon. I held up a palm at the first reporter to approach me as I reached the vehicle, then tinted the windows dark when I got inside. All else aside, I didn’t want them seeing the look on my face.
With the tablet on my lap, I logged into the department’s computer system and loaded up the file on the 50/50 Killer.
I already knew I wouldn’t find Charlie Matheson or Paul Carlisle’s names in the file, but now I had a new one to search for. The dead man in the house up the street appeared to be Gordon Peters, the owner of the property. According to records, he had been a doctor for most of his life, retiring four years ago.
A doctor.
As I ran the search, I wondered if we might have found the mysterious man who had been in the back of Charlie’s ambulance. The one she had described as kind.
I suspected we had.
And yet the search came back blank. No obvious connection with the 50/50 case, then. I ran a general check on Peters, and that came back clean too. Never in trouble with the police for so much as a speeding ticket. Apparently, despite the track marks, and the paraphernalia that had been found in the medical cabinet upstairs, Dr Peters had managed to stay off our radar.
I looked up, watching my officers as they moved from house to house, talking to the dead man’s neighbours.
No connection in the 50/50 file – but there had to be one somewhere, didn’t there? The spiderwebs the killer drew had never been made public, but even if they had, the one on Peters’ wall was too similar to be a mere copycat. Anyone who vaguely knew about the webs might have attempted one, but whatever version they came up with would be some distance from the intricacy and eeriness of the real thing. No, I’d seen the originals a year and a half ago, and I recognised one when I saw it now.
Not drawn by the 50/50 Killer himself, though.
That much was certain. The man responsible for the crimes was dead. At the same time, the web back there had been drawn by someone who understood what they meant, and who had seen them before. It hadn’t been designed at random, but with careful thought and consideration ...
Just like Charlie’s scars.
The realisation brought my thoughts to a stop for a moment.
Whoever had inflicted those facial injuries on Charlie had also done so with intent and care. Like the spiderwebs, they were not random. They represented the wearing of sins, and everybody’s sins are specific to them; everybody has their own unique moral fingerprint. The similarities between the two things were obvious now.
What about Gordon Peters, then? What had his sins been? It was reasonable to assume that his injuries reflected some inner sins of his own, but what? It appeared that he had been a drug addict, and perhaps that would be enough in our perpetrators’ eyes to demand punishment. But then, assuming he was the man Charlie had described in the ambulance, and at the place she’d been held, it seemed they’d been happy enough to employ his services in some capacity over the years.
And how many people were we looking for now? From Charlie’s story, I’d been assuming at least two – the kind man and the old man who called himself the Devil. She’d also mentioned that others had held her while the Devil did the cutting. How did this murder change things? It was impossible to know, but the organisation behind all this felt larger with every fresh development.
I called up a driving licence photograph of Peters from the files and saved it to the tablet. At least I could show that to Charlie and see if she could confirm the man’s identity. Assuming she remembered his face well enough. And that she was allowed to tell me, of course.
I called the number for the officer stationed at the hospital.
‘Detective Mark Nelson,’ I told him. ‘Is Charlie Matheson still there?’
‘Yes, sir. Safe and fine.’
‘Right. Keep it that way. Nobody in or out. Okay?’
‘Understood, sir.’
‘And for the moment that means her too.’
‘Understood.’
I hung up, then swiped back through on the tablet to the 50/50 file. The killer was dead, yes, but I couldn’t get it out of my head. There was some connection between him and our present investigation. It was there in the spiderweb, and the connection to Mercer, and it was there in the precise designs of the scarring inflicted on Charlie – the visualisation of something intangible in the form of a complicated pattern. It was there in the Devil.
But it wasn’t there in the file ...
I stared at the screen.
Suddenly thinking: What else isn’t there in the file?
One simple fact. We had no idea who the 50/50 Killer had been. We had a handful of different aliases for him, but no clue as to his real identity. His last two known addresses were listed, but we’d never discovered where he came from before that. Despite the fact that he was dead and his murder spree at an end, the man himself remained a ghost to us, as ephemeral as the devil in the mask he’d worn. He could have been anybody. He could have been nobody.
But of course, he hadn’t been. He had been somebody.
Because people like him don’t simply emerge out of the ether, their personalities blinking into existence. They’re shaped by their environment and their upbringing, just as we all are. A confluence of factors conspires to create them.
So what kind of environment might the 50/50 Killer have been moulded by, with his devil mask and spiderwebs and hatred of love? What sort of upbringing might he have had? What sort of family?
He came from somewhere.
I put the tablet to one side and took out my phone.
You have to be careful with vulnerable people, Eileen had told me. She was right, of course. But it was late morning, and Eileen would likely be with a patient right now. Mercer himself would probably be working away on his new book, researching the 50/50 Killer and where he had come from. Obsessing over it. And despite his manner in the operations room yesterday, I was wondering if I could tempt him in with a key piece of information about that: a possible move towards an ending for the story that haunted him. I was betting I could.
You have to be careful with ...
But I was already dialling the house number as I started the car.
Groves
Do you want to see your son again?
Groves wasn’t allowed to go home, but he needed to go somewhere. Still seething a little, he sat in his car outside the department for a few minutes, and then, for reasons he was conflicted about, he drove to Caroline’s house.
Sean might never have understood why they had remained friends, but it was no mystery to Groves himself. It was similar to the way strangers who had been involved in the same traumatic incident often bonded and formed otherwise unlikely friendships. Damage, especially when it was sudden and incomprehensible, created a powerful glue between people. Despite the divorce, it had remained unspoken between them that if one of them was ever in trouble and needed the other’s support, they would have it.
Well, Groves thought. He was in trouble now.
The whole of the drive over, he couldn’t get his mind away from what Sean had said. The way his partner had doubted him. Even though he’d tried to do the right thing, and always had, they were still suspicious of him, and he had still been relieved of duty. Not that they had much of a choice, he supposed, but still: it angered him. He was going to be investigated now, and that also scared him, because the only real evidence he had for his story was Carl Thompson’s mobile phone ...
God, he thought suddenly.
You don’t actually know who it belonged to.
He’d just been assuming it belonged to Thompson, which was bad enough in itself, as there might be no proof he hadn’t just taken it off the boy’s body. But what if it was someone else’s?
What if it had been Edward Leland’s mobile phone?
The possibility made him go cold inside.
And who knew what else he’d missed? Because he still couldn’t get the slightest handle on what was happening here. Why had Thompson given him the phone in the first place? Out of fear, presumably. I’ve been through hell, sir. Groves remembered the boy’s scars, and also his absence from recent police files. Was it possible that someone had held him captive, tortured him, convinced him that if he performed this one last task then he’d be set free?
But why frame me?
Again the answer came quickly enough. He was increasingly sure of it. Because you’re a policeman. He’d saved Laila Buckingham, but not his own son, which gave him two stakes in the investigation. And yet he’d still failed to catch the people responsible. In the intervening time, he thought, someone else had lost a child, and they’d decided that Groves was at least partially to blame. Someone with the will and the means to do what Groves had proved unable to.
I know who did it.
The card again.
Addressed not to the grieving father, clinging to his beliefs, but to the murdered son.
Caroline’s house was in the middle of a long row of red-brick terraces that sloped down a steep hill to the main road at the bottom. Every second house was a storey lower than the one beside it, and the rooftops bristled with cables and antennae, like curls of metal shavings caught in the teeth of a rusty saw blade.
Her gate screeched slightly as he opened it, the old paint rough against his palm.
There was a small garden between the street and the house, but it was paved over and bare. Caroline had always been a fastidious gardener – a natural tidier, in and out of the house – and he suspected that the paving here was a quiet acknowledgement of how much she’d changed. She no longer had the energy to maintain a proper garden, but she preferred to hide that fact altogether, to cover it with concrete, rather than admit it.
He suspected that she’d be at work, but he knocked and waited anyway. No response. He had a spare key for her house, though, just as she had one for his. Opening the door created a whump, as though the air inside was being disturbed for the first time in days. It opened directly on to the front room, which was dim and gloomy. The dark-red curtains were closed and the air smelled stale.
‘Caroline?’
No response.
Groves flicked on the light switch.
It hadn’t been immediately obvious in the gloom, but the place was a tip. There were tangles of clothes on the settee, and the coffee table in the centre of the room was covered with old plates and glasses, along with a teetering pile of unsorted post. Empty vodka bottles were lined up on the floor against the side of one of the armchairs, while in front of it, there was a pint glass smeared with a mist of fingerprints, lipstick at the rim. Dust had collected along the skirting boards.
No wonder the place smelled stale. And now that he saw it, Groves felt guilty for letting himself in, even given the circumstances. This disarray was the opposite of the image Caroline liked to present to the rest of the world, including him. She was still proud, and would be upset to think he’d seen her home in this kind of state. The amount of alcohol, especially, confirmed how badly she was coping these days.
So his first instinct was to turn around and walk back out: to pretend he’d never been here at all. But the sight of the room worried him, and he felt an urge to see how bad things really were. Not that he would ever let her know he’d been in here and seen it like this, but perhaps there would be some more subtle way he could help.
He took the creaking stairs up to the first floor. As he poked his head quickly into each of the rooms, it became increasingly obvious that she hadn’t been looking after herself. The bathroom was filthy; the towels draped over the side of the bath stank of old water, and the mat scrunched up against the base of the sink was speckled with green and black mould. The spare room was full of boxes, some of them very old indeed, with the vacuum cleaner half buried at the far end. In the main bedroom, there were more glasses on the table and more clothes strewn carelessly on the floor. Her bed was unmade. The album containing photographs of Jamie was lying close to the pillows. She’d clearly been sleeping next to it.
Groves stared at that for a moment, feeling an immense sadness that was impossible to describe. A sensation of emptiness and loss that was profound, almost spiritual. The feeling that God shouldn’t allow decent people to endure such misery.
But there was guilt there too.
I’m sorry, Caroline. I should have noticed.
I should have realised you weren’t doing well.
Sean would have said there was no need for the guilt – that it wasn’t his responsibility. But Groves had never found it easy to stop caring for someone. Even though he wasn’t with Caroline any more, he should still have recognised how quickly she was heading downhill. It seemed the least he could have done; not just for her, but for Jamie as well. She had been Jamie’s mother, after all; for his son’s memory, he should have looked after her.
And I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you either, Jamie.
The grief rose in him, ending with a twist in his throat. His son had been murdered, and what had he done? Held on to the last vestiges of himself as a police officer, intent on doing the right thing, on bringing the perpetrators to justice. Carrying on as before, ultimately. Trusting that God had His reasons. Right now, Caroline’s reactions, from her loss of faith to her disintegration, seemed far healthier and more natural than hi
s own. Perhaps he really hadn’t cared as much as he should have done. Perhaps if there was a man murdering these predators in his place, that man was right.
Groves took out his phone as he went downstairs, unsure at that moment exactly what he was planning to do, but needing to talk to Caroline: wanting to apologise to her for everything he had done and everything he had not. He opened the front door, leaning on the frame, and just as he did, the phone buzzed in his hand.
He looked down at it. The screen display read: Unknown Number.
Someone at the department, he guessed, although he’d presumed that Sean would be in touch with him first. He answered the call and held the phone to his ear.
‘David Groves speaking.’
For a couple of seconds there was silence on the line. And then that familiar tinkling nursery rhyme began. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, with scratches and pops in the background. Groves stared out at the street through the rain, looking up and down the hill, wondering if he was being watched.
‘Who is this?’
There was no reply, just that scratchy recording, as though the simple tune were coming from a different era, across time itself.
‘Tell me who this is!’
Abruptly the music cut out, and the line was silent again. Except Groves could hear someone breathing softly.
He spoke more quietly now: ‘Who are you?’
It was a man’s voice that replied. Quiet and calm.
‘Mr Groves,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see your son again?’
For a moment, the world around Groves receded into the distance, and the sound of the rain diminished until it was softer and quieter than even his heartbeat. It felt like he was underwater. More than anything, he thought, even though he knew the man’s promise was a false one. Even though the only way he’d see Jamie again was in death. More than anything. He tried to speak – to say something, anything, in reply – but his voice wouldn’t work.
