by Michael Kerr
Eddie went back to the DVD and played the disc again. Watched as he entered Ogilvy House, and then hit fast forward to where he had left with Dawn. Awesome. He allowed himself a small smile.
CHAPTER FORTY
JACK took a deep breath, picked up the phone, then cradled it and reached for his mobile. He didn’t feel safe using an extension. Anyone could be listening in. He called the hotel in York. Was given options, pressed one and waited. Asked the receptionist – when she eventually picked up – to put him through to Sharon’s room.
“It’s Jack,” he said when she said hello.
“And you’ve called to say you won’t be coming up. Right?”
Damn her. She still knew every nuance in his voice. “That’s right,” he said. “We’ve had more murders. I can’t get away.”
“How come I’m not surprised?”
“I’m sorry, Sharon. I―”
“Sorry doesn’t alter the fact that you’re a shit, Jack. We’re stuck up here because of you. Danny’s been getting excited, asking when you’ll be here. You shouldn’t make arrangements that you aren’t prepared to honour. I’ll put him on, and you can explain it to him yourself.” The phone went silent for a second.
“Daddy?”
A lump formed in his throat. “Yes, Danny. I just wanted to wish you Happy Christmas. I can’t get away from work today, but I’ll see you real soon.”
“But, Daddy...”
Damn it! He could hear the hitch in his son’s voice. The line was still open, but silent again. Sharon came back on the line. “Well done, Detective Inspector. You just ruined his day. You’d think he’d be used to being let down by now.”
“I’ll―”
“Don’t, Jack. I’m not interested. Just do what you have to and make it all right for us to go back to our home.”
She slammed down the phone.
He went for broke and phoned Susan. Didn’t know why. Just did it.
“Yes?”
“Hi, sis. You okay?”
“No, Jack. Can you come round?”
“What’s happened?”
“Gordon has gone. Told me he wasn’t happy and moved out. Just pissed off and left me and the kids on Christmas Eve. Can you believe that?”
“Sorry, Sue. Maybe he’ll be back. Did you two have a row?”
“He won’t be back. I don’t want the bastard back in the house. He’s been screwing around with some bitch at his office. She rang him at home. I was in the shower, but I heard the phone, so I went into the bedroom and picked up the extension. When I told them I was listening to every word, they both hung up. He just packed a case, told me it was over, and left.”
“How are the kids?”
“Melanie says good riddance to him. Patricia is crying all the time. It sucks, Jack. First dad died, then mum, and now this. It’s a fucking shambles.”
“It all works out, Sue. Try to be strong for the kids. If I can I’ll get over there sometime today.”
The tone of her reply was as acerbic as Sharon’s had been. “Don’t do us any favours, Jack. We’re only family. You’ve always put strangers first, so why change the habit of a lifetime?” She hung up.
Lisa said nothing. Just waited for Jack to speak.
“I’m about as popular as a paedophile in a school playground.” he said.
“Like you just told your sister, it all works out. Let’s go to Starbucks and get a coffee with attitude.”
“It’s Christmas Day, remember? We’ll have to make do with the canteen. And I want to be here if we get a break.”
Mike had looked over to where Eddie was watching the DVD. He could see the reflection of his DC’s face in the screen. Was it a trick of the light, or was Eddie smiling?
Eddie hit the stop button and turned to face the room. If he had been smiling, he wasn’t now.
“What do you want me to do, Mike?” Eddie said.
“Uniforms’ talked to neighbours in the apartment building and the surrounding area and came up with nothing. Why don’t you go and ferret about? See if you can jog somebody’s memory. I find it hard to believe that nobody heard or saw anything.”
Eddie nodded. Walked out into the corridor. Mike went to the door and watched him make his way to the lift.
He thought fast. Forget that it’s Eddie and just consider him as a potential suspect. Forget that the killer was limping when he left Ogilvy House with Dawn Turner. And he was disguised, wearing a baseball cap, and maybe a wig. He knew that he was on CCTV, so had made sure that he wouldn’t be recognised. And Eddie had been off duty, whereabouts unknown. As for the other dates, they were just so much paperwork. Being officially on duty would be a good alibi, if you happened to be a killer. The bottom line was, did he believe Eddie’s story of a fall down icy steps? No. And the way the DC had smiled at the sight of the woman being abducted did not compute. And yet what was there to go to Jack with? He didn’t feel confident enough to make a big deal of it. It was off-the-wall conjecture at best. Eddie McBride was a first class detective.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
EDDIE drove east. He wanted to check on Dawn. She would be awake now, totally disoriented and without any idea of where she was. The thought of the fear she must be enduring was a little discomfiting. He knew that his personality blew hot and cold. He was obsessed with her, but in a way that wavered between adoration and loathing. Because of her he was acting rashly, taking risks that would have been out of the question until quite recently. He was on the verge of losing control. Maybe he’d already lost it. Some of his recent actions had been way out on the edge. He had never contemplated killing fellow officers. The separate components of his life were merging together uneasily, like flesh and steel in a motorway pileup.
Parking the unmarked police car in the street, he put on the glasses with thick lenses, and his baseball cap, walked up to the door next to the main gate and entered the office. A couple of minutes later he standing next to the roll-up door to the storage unit. He looked both ways. An elderly man was unloading small items of furniture from the back of a van and carrying them into a unit at the end of the block. There was no one else in sight. He unlocked the padlock, pushed the door up and quickly entered and pulled it down after him. He stood in the dark and cold interior. Didn’t switch on the light, just reached into a pocket for his penlight torch.
If fear had a smell, then it filled the unit, stuck to the breeze block walls, concrete floor and cobwebbed ceiling. Its source was Dawn. He could hear her noisy, rapid breathing as she snorted the stale air up into her nostrils. She could have been a user with a straw, greedily sniffing up lines of glistening nose candy.
He thumbed on the torch. She was as he had left her, with her back to the door, unmoving, waiting, not knowing what he would do. Even he didn’t know what he would do next. The circle was closing. Warning bells chimed in his head. He had the urge to kill her and then simply vanish, to resurface with a new identity in a different part of the country. He owned a cottage in Cornwall, close to the cliff edge in a secluded spot outside Padstow. It was his bolt-hole. He had bought it under the name of Robert Corby, and had all the necessary documentation to allay suspicion from any quarter. Over considerable time he had established Corby as bona fide, paid council tax under that name, was in possession of major credit cards, and had also salted a large amount of cash in various bank accounts and building societies.
All you needed to become someone else was a birth certificate, and the rest was a piece of cake. A small inheritance and careful investment had now brought him to a juncture whereby he could probably buy a small pub or start up in some other business, should he choose to. God bless his unlamented cow of a mother. The sale of her terrace house in Romford had made all he had done possible.
Maggie McBride had been in the ground for nine years. He had killed her just a week after his eighteenth birthday, successfully staging a break in. The scene was set after he had taken a few hairs from a vagrant whom he’d found in a drunken stupor, sleeping und
er cardboard in a local park. He had also pressed the brass candlestick he would use to do the deed with in the loser’s hand, ensuring that latents would be found. There were perfect murders, and he was the perpetrator of many. If his mother had only been more loving and not treated him so badly throughout his childhood, then he may well have grown up to be a different person. He had loved her so much. He plucked a distant event to mind, turned off the torch and stood motionless in the darkness. If anyone had been able to see him, they would have thought he was severely retarded, or in some kind of catatonic state. His eyes were vacant, his mouth hung slightly open, tongue resting on his bottom lip, and a single trail of saliva crept down his chin.
He was ten again, reliving a Sunday outing to Southend:
“Don’t go out too deep,” Maggie McBride shouted as he braved the cold water that inched up his swimming trunks. “A shark might gobble you up.”
He turned, gave her a nervous grin and conjured up a sleek man-eater powering its way towards him through the murky water, its jaws agape and poised to bite him in half. She knew exactly what to say to exert control over him; knew that feeding his vivid imagination with the right pictures would have the desired effect. He backed up, no longer wanting to be in the sea. Cold, sharp sand was being drawn back from beneath his feet and between his toes. She had instilled fear, and taught him another small lesson in the art of gaining psychological supremacy over others. Even at the age of ten he was aware that beneath her beauty lay a badness that cheap rose-scented perfume and a dimpled-cheeked, even-toothed smile could not mask. No wonder she was single, and that he was legally a bastard. All the men in her life had been driven away by her innate resentment for them. They could not measure up to her expectations. If there was such a thing as the ideal man, then he had eluded her. It was as if Eddie was continually being punished for being born a male. He knew that she loved him, but that did not stop her hurting him when the frustration of her plight drove her to be particularly cruel in word or deed. He was her possession, delivered from her loins to be chastised and treated as a whipping-boy to alleviate the ‘black dog’ moods that would grip her at regular intervals.
The boy he had been ran to her, and she crushed him to her bosom.
“Who loves you more than anything else in the whooole universe?” she said, peppering his face with kisses.
“You do, Mum,” he replied, enjoying the softness and warmth of her body. Strange how even a cowed dog can love its master.
They ate ice-cream, went paddling together hand in hand at the water’s edge, and finally ate fish and chips from paper as they strolled along the promenade, giggling as seagulls swooped to snatch chips that they threw up into the air.
He missed her so much, and appreciated that Dawn and all the others were just poor substitutes, – saccharin, not sugar – not his mum. And yet he felt that he could be in control of her time and time again through the look-alikes he carefully chose and groomed. But they could not live up to Maggie McBride. She had been one of a kind; a beautiful, flawed individual, bedevilled and pulled by mental tidal forces that caused her moods to switch from desperation, rage or dejection, to manic joy and overt outpourings of affection. Bipolar was the current popular term that shrinks used to define people with such extreme mood swings. She had possessed him both mentally and physically, and as an adolescent already coping with tumultuous hormonal changes, an incestuous relationship with a disturbed mother – who sent out mixed messages in word and deed – created stressors that would make for a very complex and unique young man, who came to have the capacity to, among other things, depersonalise people.
The darkness was a canvas. On it, he saw himself as the teenager he had been, standing behind his mother in the kitchen. He was naked, and held the candlestick behind his back, with only the chunky sharp-cornered bottom of it protruding from the paper towel he had wrapped around it to preserve the integrity of the vagrant’s fingerprints. He allowed himself to relive the incident: could smell the bacon that his mother was frying, and hear the rashers and eggs spitting and bubbling in a pan of hot, melted lard.
She turned her head. Small beads of sweat had formed above her top lip, and her dark hair was damp, limp, in need of washing.
“What the hell are you doing, Eddie? Why haven’t you got any clothes on?”
“The blood, Mum,” he explained. “I didn’t want them covered in it.”
“What blood? You’re not making sense.”
He brought the candlestick up in a savage underhand swing. It connected with her jaw, and he felt bone shatter. As she rocked back on her heels he hit her again, to rupture her left eye and compress it within its fractured orbit.
The plastic spatula that Maggie McBride was holding began to shake in her now palsied grip. Her head was whipped sideways, and sweat and blood laced the air. It reminded Eddie of boxing; of when a punch to the head produced a cut and released the blood and perspiration in a fine mist under the impact of a gloved fist. She should have fallen, but stayed upright, rocking on her feet. Only after the third blow did she crumple to the worn and faded linoleum. And she was still conscious, staring up at him with a distorted yet accusing look in her undamaged eye.
At that point, he wanted to back time up a minute, and not be doing this. But it was too late. He had inflicted too much damage. She was no more than a mortally wounded animal. The only kind thing to do was put her out of her misery.
“Whu? Whu? Whu?” Maggie mumbled in a high-pitched voice.
She was asking him why. He sat on his heels next to her and raised the candlestick high above his head. Her whole body was quivering, and blood was dribbling out of her left ear, as well as from the deep wounds to her head.
“Because you’re a burden, Mum. You treat me like a thing, not a person. I’m your son, for shit’s sake, not a pet fucking dog that you can beat or stroke, depending on the mood you’re in.”
“Na...Na...Na…” Maggie McBride uttered before the solid brass base caved in her forehead and sank into her brain.
He pulled the candlestick free and let it slip from the sodden paper towel, and then went upstairs and flushed the paper down the toilet, showered, dressed and set the scene, before going out to a nearby pub, where he was known. He even played darts with a steady hand, and thought it was awesome that he could appear so calm, when inside he was coming apart at the seams.
No one suspected him of being the killer. When the time came, his act as a grief-stricken son was played to perfection.
He emerged from the waking dream of yesteryear, switched on the torch and walked over to Dawn, to stand behind her and gently run his fingers through her hair. He felt her stiffen. This was what it was all about. It came down to some inborn and primeval need to instil extreme terror into other human beings. It was having supreme, incontestable power over another person that surpassed all other pleasures. But even that was not enough. A small but potent part of him desperately needed to be loved.
He used a lock knife. Inserted the blade between her hair and the duct tape he had wrapped around her head, to slice through it and rip it off, causing her to cry out and pull away from him.
“Shsssh,” he hissed. “If you scream, I’ll gag you again and leave. And I won’t come back, ever. You’ll die here, all alone and in the dark.”
Dawn took deep breaths. She had heard the door roll up. Could now see large shadows projected onto the breeze block wall in front of her, produced by the beam of the torch he held. She decided that she was in a garage, and also believed that he had gone to a lot of trouble to abduct her. He didn’t want to kill her. It wasn’t that simple. In his own warped way he probably did think that he loved her. She had to use his feelings as a foil, to somehow buy herself more time.
The torch was switched off. There was silence. She wanted to break it, but dare not speak. Something hard was pressed to her lips. She jerked backwards.
His disembodied voice pierced the murk again. “It’s just a container of water, Dawn. You must b
e thirsty.”
She was parched. Her mouth felt like old, cracked leather. When the pressure came again, she parted her lips. Sipped the liquid as it was gently poured between them.
Dependence. She now totally relied on him for everything. Without him she could not survive. Overwhelming. He had once kept a hamster. Its universe was a small cage with wood shavings on the floor, a squeaky wheel to exercise in, and bowls of food and water. He was its keeper, master, giver of continued life support. But he had tired of it quite quickly. There was little pleasure in being in control of a stupid rodent that was not aware of his power over it. He had not hurt it, though. Just released it in the small, walled back yard and watched as a neighbourhood cat moved in for the kill. Freedom could come at a high price, as Harvey the hamster had all too quickly discovered.
“You hurt me, you sneaky bitch.” A statement.
The water kept coming, choking her. She tried to detach her mouth from the top of the bottle, but couldn’t. She felt panic rise. He was drowning her. Not by holding her under water, but by forcing too much of it into her mouth. And then it was pulled away. She spluttered and coughed up the excess.
“Why did you attack me, Dawn?”
When she could, she answered. “Because I was being raped by a stranger who had threatened me, and who had just shot two policemen. What would you have done in my position?”
