Deadly Obsession

by Michael Kerr

  Imran Chandra nodded, turned and made for the stairs, to climb them and unlock the first door he came to.

  “I am still being owed three weeks rent,” he said in a singsong voice, addressing them both in turn. “The nurse who lived here with the now sadly departed Ms Wallace left without settling up with me. And I also had to arrange for a company to clean up the mess before I redecorated.”

  Jack scowled at the man: “It was very thoughtless of Ms Wallace to be attacked, strangled, raped and mutilated on your property, Mr Chandra,” he said in a tone of voice he usually reserved for child molesters. “Maybe if the overall security, and in particular the Mickey Mouse locks on the flat doors had been better, then she would still be alive. In part, your negligence as a landlord resulted in her violent death.”

  “You have no right―”

  Jack lowered his face to within an inch of the other man’s. Imran instinctively took a step backwards, only to be brought to a jarring stop as the back of his skull connected with the door jamb.

  “I have every right to advise you over your abysmal lack of security, sir. Now please go back downstairs, we don’t need a chaperone,” Jack said, wanting rid of the sour sweat and curry breath smell of the penny-pinching little cheapskate.

  “How to win friends and influence people, eh?” Lisa said when the cause of Jack’s consternation scurried off down the stairs, to slam his door hard enough to shake the many plasterboard walls that divided the house into the maximum number of flats possible.

  “He was influenced,” Jack said. “And as for winning friends, that’s one of my lesser goals in life. He’s a slum landlord who overcharges and under provides. My first job when I get back to the office is to arrange for Health and Safety to make a house call and give him some serious grief.”

  “You can’t put the whole world to rights, Ryder.”

  “I’m not trying to. I do what I can, when I can. It isn’t enough, but the alternative is to do nothing, pull your head in like a fucking tortoise and hope that all the bad shit goes away. But it doesn’t.”

  “You’ve got a way with words,” Lisa said as they entered the flat.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he countered.

  Lisa had brought the crime scene photographs with her. She went from room to room using the shots to give her a fix on exactly how the scene had looked on the night when Emily Wallace had met her fate.

  “He forced the lock on the door,” Lisa stated.

  “Yeah, jemmied it. He apparently used the blade of a knife to prise the bolt back. There were fresh scratch marks on it. And there were also older scratches. One theory we have is that he’d been in before, while the flat was empty. What I don’t understand is why he selected Emily. She had a flatmate.”

  “If he stalked her, then he would have known what shifts both girls worked, and when Emily was home alone. If the other nurse had shown up unexpectedly, then you would no doubt have had two victims.”

  Jack pulled a rolled-up sheaf of stapled together sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “We came up with this stuff last night,” he said, handing the photocopies to her. “An artist by the name of Bosch painted a lot of weird shit, among other things. Much of it was of his visions of hell, or his drug-induced hallucinations of how he chose to see it.

  “In one painting a pair of freakish women are roasting a guy on a spit and frying up a pan of body parts. The messages the killer left, led us to it. That explains the girl’s feet being removed and partly cooked. We’ve got a maniac who needs to be symbolic.” Jack pointed out the enlarged detail of the painting.

  Lisa scrutinised the horrific scene. It was macabre.

  “Look at the next page, there’s a blow up of a body riding a giant knife blade,” Jack said. “That and the message he left confirms the link between the two murders, and the killer’s fascination with this crazy painter.”

  “You think Hieronymus Bosch was crazy?” Lisa said.

  “I don’t believe a well-balanced person could think up the sadistic and depraved stuff that he painted. To me it shows that he was a seriously disturbed individual. No doubt great, or in this case unstable minds think alike, and we have a killer who is getting his ideas from hundreds of years’ old pictures.”

  They left the flat after fifteen minutes. The environs had not given Lisa any additional insight. Someone else had stamped their own individuality on the flat with ornaments and potted plants, and posters of wildlife – mainly dolphins and elephants – on the walls to brighten the place up.

  “You want to go over to the house in Finchley?” Jack said. “It’s exactly as we found it, minus the corpse.”

  “Yes. I’ll follow you,” Lisa said.

  Keeping close, Lisa drove in the wake of the old Sierra’s blue-grey exhaust fumes. Jack Ryder intrigued her. He dressed casual and cheap, and wore an old Timex wristwatch with a cracked glass. He’d shaved that morning and she had caught the scent of something spicy. And it looked as though he’d combed his hair back with his fingers. The only dichotomy in his appearance was a pair of expensive-looking black western-style boots that he wore under fray-bottomed jeans. He was not a man who sought to impress others, which in itself was impressive. She could not read any vanity in his personality, just a well-grounded and complete individual; the type that women were attracted to, and that many men would perhaps attempt to emulate, and fail to. He was someone she would not be averse to knowing better, but thought that he might be unknowable, for she recognised exclusivity about him that she likened in her mind to the private quarters of a stately home, roped-off to the public at large and therefore alluring.

  Jack signalled left, slowed, and came to a stop outside a row of shops. He got out of the car and jogged back to where Lisa had pulled in a few yards behind him. She opened the window six inches.

  “What’s the problem?” she said.

  “I need a cup of coffee,” he said, pointing behind him to where a small Italian café was sandwiched between an estate agent’s and dry cleaners.

  As he ran for the cover of the green and white striped awning, Lisa gritted her teeth. His presumption that she would join him was galling. On second thoughts, maybe he didn’t care whether she went inside or not. He had informed her of his intent, nothing more. She got out of the car, locked it with the remote and followed him into the café.

  A young waiter showed them to a window table and took their order for one cup of flat black and another of cappuccino. There was only one other customer, an old man in a black suit. He had a pallid face and a bushy, nicotine-stained moustache that grew down over his top lip. His hand shook as he raised a forkful of pasta smothered in Bolognese to his mouth.

  “Why the stop?” Lisa said.

  “Caffeine deprivation. I get shaky if the level drops below a certain point.”

  “You sound like a junkie in need of a fix.”

  “It’s my only vice.”

  “You smoke.”

  “And drink. But they’re both necessary tools to battle stress.”

  “You don’t come across as the type who suffers from stress.”

  “I don’t, much. But I would if I didn’t booze, smoke and consume vast quantities of java. Prevention is always better than cure.”

  “I give up. Why do you wear cowboy boots?”

  “To protect my feet from the elements. Isn’t that why you wear shoes?”

  “Comedian. I mean why the boots in particular, rather than loafers or whatever?”

  The waiter brought the coffee, offered them both a menu, which they declined, and went back through the door marked Staff Only.

  Jack sipped noisily at the red-hot black beverage. “Now that makes a day worth getting out of bed for,” he said. “And I wear boots because I found myself at a loose end a few years back. So I hopped a silver bird to the City of Angels, rented a classic Corvette coupe and took off across the Mojave Desert to Vegas. I treated myself to a pair of boots for the hell of it,
and now I wouldn’t wear anything else. Must be a ‘Clint Eastwood’ complex. Maybe you could analyse it and tell me where I’m coming from.”

  He had opened up, and although the tale of his trip to the West Coast was not an in-depth exposé‚ it gave Lisa some insight as to his personality. He was comfortable in his own company, and not confined by a need to keep the status quo. She had the impression that he could uproot and adapt to whatever lay around the next bend in the river. He had come to understand that life was an unpredictable and rocky journey. All you could do was strap yourself in, hold on tight and ride it out.

  There was a patrol car outside the semidetached house in Finchley. And drops of rain beaded the lower edge of the crime scene tape behind it.

  Jack knew one of the uniforms sitting in the car. He was holding the lid of a vacuum flask cupped in both hands. Jack tapped on the window. “Is this an official tea break, Vince, or can you spare a minute to let us into the house?” he said.

  PC Vincent Appleby gave Jack a toothy grin, passed the cup across to the younger officer sitting next to him, and opened the door.

  “You any the wiser who did this?” Vince said, giving Lisa a raised eyebrow as he spoke.

  “Give us a chance, Vince. This isn’t some episode of CSI or Law and Order. It sometimes takes more than fifty minutes to catch the bad guys. And this is Dr Norton, a consultant on the case.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Vince said to Lisa, but didn’t offer his hand. It just wasn’t something coppers did whilst in uniform.

  “Likewise,” Lisa said.

  Vince unbuttoned the breast pocket of his uniform jacket to withdraw a bunch of house keys and hand them to Jack.

  The smell hit Lisa as the door was opened. It was impossible for her not to put her hand up to her face to cover her mouth and nose. She felt invaded, impregnated by the rank stench.

  “You sure they removed the body?” she said to Jack, who had lit a cigarette, using it to dull the stink by exhaling the smoke through his nostrils.

  “Needs fumigating, doesn’t it? Central heating and death don’t make for an easy mix,” he said. “The thermostat was on maximum. I reckon the killer turned it up to give us an even more unpleasant surprise. Breathe through your mouth.”

  “And you think he had his own key?”

  “Yeah. All the other keys we found were on key rings. The key in the lock was newly cut. I’m sure he gained entry on a previous occasion when Christine was at work, tried the keys and made an impression of the one that was for the back door. The make and any serial number on the blank he’d used were filed off, deep enough so we couldn’t retrieve anything.”

  There were still blood stains on the floor, the toilet and the side panel of the bath. Lisa felt a little nauseous. The smell was worse in the small bathroom, and her mind superimposed the decomposing body from the photographs into the actual scene in front of her. Why the bathroom? Why not the bedroom? Had he entered the house under cover of darkness while she was asleep and just waited for her to go to the loo? It seemed doubtful. There would have been no need to wait. And yet the bed appeared to have been slept in. Maybe she’d heard something, went out onto the landing to investigate and was hustled into the bathroom. It was academic, a question that they would in all probability never get an answer to. Most serial killers that were caught kept their secrets, to maintain the belief that they still had power by refusing to divulge any information that would in any way assist the authorities.

  “Let’s go, I’ve seen enough,” Lisa said after looking in the bedroom.

  Being in the house was deeply unsettling. The paperwork and even the two-dimensional colour photographs could not properly capture the setting, or the abomination that had been carried out within these walls. It was the small things that brought it home; the cuddly Disney toys, a slightly worse-for-wear teddy bear that Christine had probably had since being a baby, and framed photos of family holidays, nights out, and even one of Christine in cap and gown with a rolled certificate clutched proudly in her hand. Her life had been prematurely stolen, snatched away by a ruthless, barbaric excuse for a fellow human being.

  “Are you okay?” Jack said.

  “No, not really. Just seeing Christine’s possessions and that framed photo of her looking so proud on her graduation day has got to me. I badly need to help put whoever did this away.”

  “It makes it personal in some way, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. A crime like this makes us all victims. It impacts on so many people. It demeans everything that we hold sacred. It’s an affront to society.”

  “You work among these crazy bastards every day, and yet you can be so deeply offended by what they do?” Jack said.

  “Strange, huh? I need to be part of a system that understands what breeds them, attempt to comprehend why they do what they do, and formulate a way to prevent dysfunctional, damaged kids from growing up to be monsters. It’s what we criminal psychologists do.”

  “That’s laudable, but straw in the wind. There’s good and evil. Always has been, always will be.”

  “So why do you fight it?”

  “I don’t, Lisa, I react against it; try to take one piece of it off the street at a time. It’s like extracting a bad tooth. Once it’s out, it isn’t going to cause any more toothache.”

  “You fancy another coffee?” Lisa said.

  Jack lightened up instantly: “I thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HE worked them in different ways, because he recognised that they were all individuals. Each one had to be manipulated according to their unique personality. Prey could be highly unpredictable. Some were as skittish as thoroughbred horses. Others dim-witted and cow like creatures, gullible and ultimately no challenge. And yet it was the infinite multifarious nature of them that made the game so endlessly stimulating and rewarding.

  He would have preferred the luxury of openly stalking Dawn Turner, but could not take the risk of attracting attention. He wasn’t some moron, totally out of control. He had a profession, security, and was not about to give it all up on account of some split-arse actress who persisted in denying her true feelings towards him. He had written to her once a week for two years, sent her flowers and gifts, and phoned her exactly two hundred and twenty-eight times. If she didn’t know that he adored her by now, then she might not be worthy of him.

  He was courting her, had never threatened or bad-mouthed her, and was getting a little tired of her less than favourable response. She should be flattered that he cared enough to be prepared to invest so much time in trying to win her affection. She had changed her phone number, even moved address to evade him, but he would not be thwarted. All good things come to those who wait. She would eventually realise that their lives were inextricably entwined. The bottom line was, that if he could not have her, then nobody else would. She now knew better than to date other men. He had seriously hurt one wimp – who she had had the temerity to start seeing on a regular basis – and warned him off. Why the fuck was she torturing him? What further test would he have to pass to prove his undying love?

  He opened the diary that lay on his knees, flipped through it to the last entry and read the notes from their most recent telephone conversation. She had started to cry, pleaded with him to let her be to live her life, and was yet again uncompromising in her denouncement of her true feelings towards him. After all this time she still didn’t seem to comprehend that her destiny was to be with him. As surely as night followed day they would be together. But he did not want to force the issue, yet. To take her against her will would not result in the desired conclusion. She had to acquiesce; to want him more than anything else, to come to love him more than life itself. And until she did, he would use look-alikes to vent his anger upon. They were an aside to Dawn.

  He sighed, closed the diary and traded it for one of the four leather-bound photograph albums that were stacked on the carpet next to his chair. He opened the maroon, padded cover to be met by a capt
ion penned in silver ink: ‘Dawn Turner, my one and only love’. That sentiment was not strictly true of course. He fell in love – to a greater or lesser extent – with all the beautiful women he chose to heap his affections upon. But they were not Dawn. It was her resistance to him that was the true challenge. What had first attracted him to her with such intensity was beyond his ability to fathom. She might have been a black hole sucking him into its very depths. It was impossible to break free from the irresistible gravitational pull she exerted over him.

  He had first seen Dawn at a time when he’d felt empty and without direction. Life was irreversibly slipping by, and he was unfulfilled, needing, but not knowing what. Something essential was missing; had always been missing. He felt that his existence was black and white, devoid of any texture and colour. It was – he imagined – in the same sort of way that a born-again Christian may well experience a revelation and find God. He had also found his path, and was therefore enlightened.

  He recalled the moment when Dawn had entered his life. The light emanating from the TV screen had made shadows dance in the otherwise darkened room. The sound had been turned down. He’d sipped Scotch and idly watched a pugnacious little copper question a suspect. It was an old episode of Frost, and he found David Jason unconvincing. Even with a moustache and wearing a trilby and hand-me-down Columbo coat, the actor’s characterisation of Del Boy in Only fools and Horses could not be wholly erased. But it had been to behind Jason that his eyes were drawn. A beautiful and very young woman, hardly more than a girl, with shoulder-length dark hair and umber eyes looked out from the screen, at him. A small, flirtatious smile uplifted her full lips, and he was instantly smitten. Who was she? He had to know. Seizing the remote control from the arm of the couch, he thumbed the volume up. Jason’s voice boomed, and the object of his affection vanished out of shot. He jumped up, rushed across the room, fumbled a cassette out of its cover, fed it into the old VCR and hit record/play.