by David Hodges
‘Yeah, but she’s not “job”,’ responded a plainclothes officer standing behind him.
Roscoe wheeled on him. ‘Is that so, Phil?’ he barked. ‘So exactly what is she then?’
Detective Sergeant Philip Sharp cleared his throat. ‘Bridgwater tom, Guv,’ he replied simply.
‘A tom? And how do we know that?’
Sharp shrugged. ‘We found a bundle of clothes and a handbag dumped in the corner of the room. Picture on the driving licence in the handbag matches her exactly. Seems her name is Jennifer Malone and a CRO check reveals she has a whole string of convictions for importuning.’
Roscoe chewed furiously again. ‘Great. So we have a killer who picks up a prossie from Bridgwater and brings her all the way to a derelict Highbridge undertakers just to stiff her. Then he strips her and puts her in a police uniform – which, I suppose, he just happened to find hanging on a peg in Marks and Sparks – before sticking her in a conveniently abandoned coffin?’ He snorted, adding with heavy sarcasm, ‘What could be more straightforward?’
‘It’s probably not that complicated when you think about it, Guv,’ Sharp suggested airily. ‘For a start, it’s easy enough to get hold of a police uniform these days. Plenty of military surplus stores have them in stock. And this place was once an undertaker’s, so there’s likely to be a coffin or three knocking around somewhere.’
Roscoe glared at him. ‘Tell me something I don’t already know,’ he snarled. ‘Like maybe why our friendly neighbourhood psycho chose tonight of all nights to shit on my winning poker hand?’
Sharp smiled faintly in the gloom. ‘If you ask me,’ he replied, ‘we’re dealing with some kind of authority freak who’s into a bit of necrophilia on the side.’
Roscoe studied him. ‘Is that right?’ he retorted, in a tone of feigned amazement. ‘Well, Sherlock, help me with one more thing, will you? Seeing as there are no obvious marks on the body and the Home Office pathologist is still en route, perhaps you could use your wonderful deductive powers to tell me,’ and he raised his voice, ‘how the little tart died?’
‘Her neck will have been broken,’ another voice cut in before the embarrassed DS could think of a suitable answer. ‘Just like before.’
Roscoe switched his gaze to the young woman in uniform standing beside Sharp, his body stiffening. ‘What the hell are you saying, Kate?’ he breathed, plainly shaken by her words.
Sergeant Kate Hamblin returned his stare without flinching, her eyes unnaturally bright in the candlelight. ‘It’s Twister,’ she replied. ‘He’s come back for me and this is his way of letting me know.’
‘Twister?’ Sharp put in. ‘And who the hell is Twister?’
‘Larry Wadman,’ Roscoe grated, his gaze remaining fixed on the policewoman. ‘Used to be the funeral director here until he started doing the terminations himself – and she’s talking bollocks.’
‘Am I, sir?’ Kate retorted grimly and, moving closer to the table, she held up some strands of her own shoulder-length auburn hair in the candlelight as she stared down at the coffin. ‘Just think about it,’ she said. ‘She’s the same build and has the same hair colour and style as me, she’s been dumped in a coffin in Twister’s old funeral parlour and she’s been kitted out in a police sergeant’s uniform. Furthermore, if you look closely at the epaulettes on her tunic, you’ll see that she has the same shoulder numbers as me.’
‘Meaning?’ Roscoe snapped, angry with himself for not noticing the shoulder numbers and knowing what was now coming.
Kate took a deep breath. ‘That this poor girl was specifically chosen because she looks like me,’ she said, ‘and she was dumped here like this to warn me that my days are numbered.’ She shuddered. ‘Twister’s back all right and this is his calling card.’
Roscoe couldn’t contain himself. ‘Bloody Nora, Kate,’ he threw back at her, ‘it’s almost two years since that Operation Firetrap business. Larry Wadman either finished up in a ditch somewhere or he simply scarpered abroad – end of.’
She shook her head. ‘But we never found his corpse, did we, sir? And he could hardly have bought a ticket to Barbados after being stuck in the guts with a blade, could he?’
Roscoe blew a bubble with his gum and licked it back under his Stalin moustache, clearly out of his comfort zone. ‘Probably just a copycat job,’ he growled. ‘Some psycho’s idea of a sick joke.’
‘A joke?’ Kate released her breath in a sharp impatient hiss. ‘And who else would have bothered to set up an elaborate scenario like this and why now, after all this time?’
Roscoe scowled again. ‘How the hell should I know?’ he snapped, his uneasiness now palpable. ‘There are plenty of nutters around out there.’ Then, cutting short any further discussion, he gesticulated with his torch. ‘OK, people, everyone out. Time to let SOCO get on with their job.’
Leaving the uniformed patrolman just outside the doors to secure the crime scene, the DI accompanied Kate into the hallway.
‘Bad dreams still a problem?’ he asked bluntly.
Kate didn’t reply, her thoughts pulling her back to that dark place in her subconscious where she had tried so hard to bury the whole thing.
Two years – it had to be all of that – since the confrontation with the psychotic killer in the hallway of this house of death and, even after all that time, there were still some nights when she lay awake shivering in her own perspiration, fancying she could again smell the stench of the undertaker’s mortuary and hear the squeak of the gurney creeping towards her in the gloom as she waited for Twister’s powerful hands to close around her throat.
With hindsight, maybe she should not have accepted promotion to uniformed sergeant at her home station in the first place, but requested a posting to the other side of the force area, which was the usual policy on achieving a higher rank. At least then she would have had more chance of putting the business behind her, instead of enduring the constant reminders that living and working in the same environment brought with it. But it was too late for regrets now and, with this grisly killing, the whole nightmare had been resurrected, allowing the awful spectre of Larry Wadman to stalk back into her life again. And she had the strangest feeling that he was not that far away, watching and waiting.
‘I’d like you to take another look around,’ Roscoe said, lighting a cigarette and coughing over the smoke. ‘See if there’s anything your plods may have missed. I’ve got an incident-room team to sort out.’
Kate nodded. ‘Fine by me, sir. I’ll let you know if I find anything.’
The DI grunted, then stopped with one hand on the handle of the back door. ‘You sure you’re up to this after all that happened here before?’
Kate glared at him, ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, sir,’ she said tightly.
Roscoe jerked open the door. ‘I’ll leave DS Sharp here to manage the crime scene, until the official crime-scene manager arrives,’ he added. ‘Liaise with him if you make any startling discoveries.’
Then he was gone, a heavy lumbering shape disappearing into the mist.
chapter 3
FOR A MOMENT Kate stood there, listening to the creak of the building around her, her skin crawling, her stomach twisting.
Then, turning her back on the uniformed policeman left to secure the murder scene, she directed her torch along the hallway, noting the half-open door a few feet away and remembering with surprising clarity the mortuary and embalming room that lay on the other side.
Drawn by a kind of morbid curiosity, she crossed the hall and stepped into the room, her torch immediately picking out the gleam of the stainless steel dissecting table straddling the gulley and drain in the centre of the tiled floor and the matching sink in the corner, then focusing on the three big refrigerators still standing against the far wall, two with their doors hanging open.
The floor seemed strangely gritty underfoot and something crunched beneath her heel. Directing the beam of her torch upwards, she trailed it along a pair of glass-fronted cabine
ts standing against the adjacent wall and saw at once the jagged fragments leaning half out of the lower frames of the doors. So the local vandals had been in then, she thought grimly, wondering what use the scalpels and other lethal surgical instruments that she knew had once been inside would be put to – or had already been put to – on the local streets.
Returning to the hallway, she checked to make sure the uniformed constable was still in position outside the chapel of rest and made her way slowly towards the staircase, every ounce of her being rebelling against the prospect of penetrating any further into this nightmare house, but knowing she had no choice.
Unsurprisingly, the grandfather clock she remembered seeing in the alcove at the bottom of the stairs the last time she had been in the building was gone, no doubt removed to the hall of some enterprising villain’s home by now, and she guessed that anything else not securely fixed to the walls or bolted to the floor would also have ‘walked’ long ago.
The door at the top of the stairs was wide open and her torch beam touched a fire-damaged settee and a broken, overturned table as she stepped into the living-room of the little flat that occupied the upper floor. Then, crossing the room to another door on her left, she found herself in a narrow corridor with small windows on one side and more doors on the other.
A check revealed a galley kitchen, a bathroom and what seemed to be a study of some sort – all showing evidence of more vandalism, with wrecked furniture and crude slogans sprayed on walls that had had their fittings bodily ripped from them, but there was little else of real interest.
Approaching a door facing her at the very end of the corridor, she pushed it open on one finger, carefully probing the darkness beyond with her torch before entering. It appeared to have once served as a bedroom and again the room was a mess – the double bed had been ripped open to the springs; a dressing-table smashed and lying on its side and graffiti covering the walls, but there was plainly nothing of interest here either.
Returning to the corridor, she paused for a moment, listening to the groan of the old building’s arthritic joints and the occasional sound of heavy footsteps and muffled voices in the hallway below as the police forensics team went about their business. The first strands of fragile grey light were now beginning to steal into the corridor through the window beside her, heralding a murky dawn, and, peering down into the street, she noted the group of fuzzy onlookers standing at the mouth of the cul-de-sac.
People should have better things to do with their time, she mused, and was about to turn away from the window and make her way back to the living-room when she froze, the fizz of a match in the patchy greyness drawing her attention towards the main Bridgwater Road. Then as the eddies of mist parted, she saw him – a figure, dressed in what looked like a long hooded coat, standing on the opposite side of the road, apparently studying the building.
For a good few seconds she simply stared down at the sinister watcher, her mouth dry and her senses swimming. And as she stood there, unable to take her eyes off him, he slowly raised a hand in mock salute before vanishing again, swallowed up in the mist like a smoky wraith.
Tearing herself away from the window, she slammed back against the wall on one side, her body rigid and her eyes tightly closed in a state of total shock.
It was him – Twister – she was certain of it; the archetypical Freddie Kruger, Michael Myers bogeyman of every childhood fantasy, who had haunted her every conscious moment for two long years and had now returned to exact his revenge.
Pulling herself together, she lurched off along the corridor at a stumbling run.
The policeman guarding the crime scene jumped when she materialized from the gloom with the suddenness of a monster emerging from an anomaly in the Primeval television series. ‘Leave that,’ she shouted. ‘With me – now!’
The small crowd of onlookers shrank back as she raced from the yard into the cul-de-sac, picking up the bobby on the gates en route. But a few yards further on, she came to an abrupt halt, peering intently into the misty clouds drifting around her. ‘He was here,’ she exclaimed breathlessly.
‘Who was here, Skipper?’ one of the policemen queried, plainly bemused by it all.
She ignored him and strode back to the crowd of onlookers. ‘Did you see that man?’ she said to an elderly woman in a dressing-gown.
‘What man, dear?’ the woman replied.
‘The one with the hooded coat. He was over there,’ Kate said, waving an arm in the appropriate direction.
‘Not me, love,’ the woman replied. ‘Dunno what you’re on about.’
Suddenly Kate realized how it looked. Even her two colleagues were shuffling their feet uncomfortably in the background. Damn it, she was making a prize fool of herself. What if her bogeyman had been nothing more than a product of her own fertile imagination, induced by the atmosphere of the place and her previous association with it? What if there had been no one there at all and she was the victim of her own paranoia?
‘OK, thank you,’ she mumbled. ‘Just … just forget it.’
Her face burning with embarrassment, she swung on her heel and headed back to the house, leaving the policeman covering the yard gates to return to his post, while the other officer followed her at a discreet distance in awkward silence.
That wasn’t the end of her embarrassment either, for the moment she pushed through the back door she was confronted by an irate DS Sharp. ‘What the hell’s going on, Kate?’ he exploded. ‘And what do you mean by snatching my crime scene man to go careering off into the street, without so much as a word to anyone?’
Kate threw the constable a swift sidelong glance and, although she couldn’t read his expression in the gloom, she was relieved to see him slink quietly back to his post, obviously determined to stay out of a potential spat between two supervisors.
‘Sorry, Phil, false alarm,’ she replied and pre-empted any further questions with a question of her own, ‘Pathologist here yet?’
Sharp stiffened slightly, but the distraction tactic seemed to work, for he didn’t pursue his original gripe. Instead, he waved an arm towards the now spot-lit and taped off chapel of rest and grunted. ‘Doing his stuff in there as we speak.’ His voice tailed off and he appeared to study Kate for a few moments before continuing. ‘You were right, you know,’ he said. ‘Doc reckons she did die from a busted neck, just like you said – and if that doesn’t make you a bloody clairvoyant, I don’t know what else does.’
chapter 4
THE MIST WAS still rolling across The Levels when Kate Hamblin signed off on the duty sheet at Highbridge police station at the end of her tour of duty and drove home through the awakening countryside.
All in all, it had been a busy, testing night shift. Following her stand-down from the murder scene, she and her team of two had had to deal with a nasty accident on the edge of Burnham-on-Sea, two house burglaries in the village of Mark and the theft of a car in Blackford before she was able to return to the station to tackle the mountain of routine paperwork piled up in the in-tray on her desk. It was at times like this that she missed CID, as if it were a lost relative, and she vowed to get back on to the department as soon as possible and by virtually any means she could manage.
A grey heron rose with a silent beat of its huge wings from a hidden rhyne – or drainage ditch – to her left as she steered the nose of her blue Mazda MX5 into a sharp bend some distance beyond the crossroads on Mark Causeway, remembering with a shiver that this was the exact spot where Twister’s Land Rover had forced her off the road during that infamous Operation Firetrap investigation two years before, totalling her previous MX5 and nearly killing her.
Instinctively, she glanced in her rear-view mirror, half expecting to see a pair of powerful headlights bearing down on her, but there was nothing, just a shifting swirling greyness, like the inside of a smoky tomb. ‘Get a grip, girl,’ she muttered to herself. ‘It’s all in the mind.’
The Retreat was a ‘chocolate box’ thatched cottage in the li
ttle village of Burtle. It had been Kate’s home for the past six months, since she had moved in with her detective boyfriend, Hayden Lewis, from her dismal flat in Bridgwater, and ten minutes later the security light above the front door snapped on in greeting as she swung into the driveway at the side of the cottage behind Lewis’s prized MkII Jaguar.
‘Hayden?’ she called, as she turned her key in the front door and stepped into the empty living-room. There was no response. The dying fire glowed faintly in the grate and the bottle of wine they had both shared the previous night before she had gone on duty still stood on the coffee table beside two unwashed glasses, but there was no sign of her man.
She glanced at her wristwatch and frowned. Seven-fifteen? Hayden should have been up by now. He was rostered for early turn CID-cover this week, which for the detective branch meant being at work by 8.30 am instead of the 6.00 am start uniform had to put up with.
‘Hayden?’ she shouted again, but there was not so much as a grunt.
Tight-lipped, she slipped out of the anorak she was wearing over her uniform and dumped it on the settee, before heading for the stairs. Where was the lazy sod – not still in his pit surely?
The bedroom on the right of the landing was in darkness, but the landing globe had been left on and the spread of its light was sufficient to reveal that the double bed was unoccupied.
An icy finger traced a line down her backbone as she remembered that previous occasion when Twister had lain in wait for Hayden at the cottage.
She pushed the door open further and stepped into the room, fists clenched, heart pounding. ‘Hayden!’ she said in a hoarse whisper. There was still no answer, but the figure hiding behind the door moved swiftly – seizing her from behind in a bear hug. Then, as she thrashed wildly and futilely in her assailant’s powerful grip, a hand slipped inside her shirt and under her bra.
