by Michael Kerr
Throughout his whole adult life, Sidney had believed he was on borrowed time. As a child he had lost his parents, two sisters and an aunt, uncle and their three children in the Holocaust. An SS captain had taken a shine to him, saved him from the gas chamber, and abused him for the duration. A part of him had never left that death camp. He led a life expecting nothing, and though successful in business, had always felt guilty for being alive to prosper and breathe the sweet air that was denied to his family. Maybe that was why he was so frugal. He had never come to terms with survival and material wealth. Why had he lived? There were so many questions that had no answers.
Standing up, he went to the open door and dropped the cigarette end outside on the concrete, to grind it out with the sole of his shoe. He was about to close up when the young man approached him. It looked as though he had suffered an accident. His hands were covered in blood.
“Can I help?” Sidney said to the man who intended to kill him.
There was no one else around. Out of Sight Services was an apt name for the company that let space for all manner of secrets to be locked away.
He pushed the old man into the shadow-filled unit that would be his temporary resting place.
Sidney staggered back on his heels, to fall across a squat Jacobean occasional table the colour of dark oak. He tried to catch his breath, attempted to push himself up, even as the stranger switched on the light and pulled the door down.
“Give me the van keys,” Eddie said, showing Sidney the knife.
Outrage flooded every fibre of Sidney’s being. He had not survived the worst atrocity in living memory to be intimidated by some common car thief.
Eddie was momentarily startled as the feeble-looking old man came up off the table and leapt at him, crossing the few feet with his arms outstretched and hands fisted.
Sidney unwittingly impaled himself on the keen blade.
Eddie embraced his attacker with his left arm. They could have been lovers. Sidney was clinging to him, eyes screwed shut against the tearing pain of penetration.
Eddie could smell the old age in the man’s sweat, and the sour odour of dentures that mint toothpaste could not mask, and tobacco. And then he caught the coppery scent of blood as it escaped from quivering lips.
He moved the blade, probed with it, and was rewarded by jumping muscles and the low, whining outcry of death in progress.
When the body went slack and became a dead weight, he withdrew the blade, let the corpse drop to the ground, and then knelt down and rifled through the pockets until he found both the van’s ignition key and the key to the unit’s door.
He took the time to pose his victim, and then locked the door and drove the van up to his own unit and went inside to collect Dawn.
Barry heard the toot of the horn, glanced up from the dust-covered computer screen and pushed back in the swivel chair to see the van that the old man had driven in earlier. He hit the button that opened the gate, and watched as the Ford drove out fast, its exhaust pumping out a noxious cloud of exhaust fumes.
Something was wrong. It was not the skinny, white-haired man at the wheel. He only caught a glimpse of a baseball cap, but knew that its owner was the much younger guy who wore glasses and had a sullen and slightly menacing attitude. And where was the copper? What the fuck was happening? It wasn’t his business, but he couldn’t let it go. Had to know. He went out into the yard, walked along the end of the rows. No sign of anyone.
“Hello,” he shouted, expecting the copper to appear. He didn’t. No one did.
There were spots of blood on the ground outside the locked door of number fourteen on row C. He followed the red trail up to where it stopped. The old man’s unit. It was also locked. Shit! Something very bad had gone down. He ran back to the office, unlocked the wall safe and snatched the master keys from their respective hooks. He also picked up his mobile from the desk. He knew that he would soon be phoning the emergency services.
Mike was acutely aware that he was dying. Maybe because the pain had diminished to a dull ache. He also now knew that imminent death had a presence. It could be felt, and was creeping through him like the icy tendrils of a living, growing entity. He was certain that within minutes, or even seconds, he would be beyond further pain. Fear had almost been negated, replaced by a state of increasing apathy. But Eddie had to pay for all the lives he had taken. The fellow detective he had considered a friend was in reality a fiend. He spoke with the woman in the chair, and then drifted. When he surfaced again he could smell ether. Eddie had left the unit, but was now back. There was a muffled cry. He knew that the monster who had masqueraded as a Serious Crimes Squad officer was anaesthetising his female captive.
The door rattled down again. He had never felt so alone, or cold, or so utterly consumed by sadness. There was only one upside; knowing that he was blind made death a less fearsome enemy, because he didn’t want to live in what would be a world of perpetual darkness.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
LISA and Jack were back in the squad room when DC Phil Jennings got the call. He said, “Yeah,” three times, then rang off and looked across to where Jack was studying the white boards.
“Boss,” he said in a barely audible voice. “Mike just turned up at a lockup garage in the east end. He…he’s dead.”
Jack drove too fast. Lisa winced as he slammed a fist on the dash. His anger was finding an outlet. Though he did not speak, and his face was without any expression, she knew that he was on the outer limits of self-control, in a place that she could only guess at. She was observing a man possessed, needing to channel his rage, but having no target to direct it at. He was under intense pressure that could not be bled off.
“Ryder,” she said.
He ignored her; just looked ahead through the windscreen, working the gears and pedals with a mechanical, restrained ferocity.
“JACK!” A volatile shout.
The shrill tone, high volume, and the unaccustomed use of his Christian name brought him out of the trance-like state he had drifted into.
“Yeah,” he said, not even looking at her.
“You need to chill a bit. Having a stroke won’t help you deal with this. Let your mind back off a little.”
“Mike was like a brother, Lisa. Whoever did this isn’t going to be caught by a cop. He’s going to have to deal with the man behind the law. I know with the certainty that night follows day that I’m going to kill the son of a bitch who did this.”
He hit the kerb, bounced up on to it with the nearside front wheel, braked too hard and skidded into the rear of a patrol car. Jumping out, he was met by a uniform who was already reaching out to grasp hold of him.
“DI Ryder, SCS,” he hissed, moving forward. “Get out of my way, or I’ll rip your fucking head off.”
The young officer hesitated, and was almost knocked to the pavement as Jack elbowed past him.
Lisa followed in his wake. She had not seen this side of him. His potential for violence frightened her. Any thin layer of sophistication he might have had was now scoured away. The bare, hot rock beneath a coating of sand had been uncovered by a powerful hurricane force wind. The wild animal inside Jack Ryder had escaped and was roaming free, searching for live prey.
It seemed that half the Met had turned up. The small office was crowded, and in a corner of it a pale-faced young man was being bombarded with questions. He was agitated, and fresh blood rimmed raw finger ends, where his fingernails had now been gnawed down to beyond the quick.
Jack burrowed and barged his way through wall-to-wall coppers to reach the security man.
“You the kid who found him?” Jack said.
Barry nodded.
“Come with me. Show me.”
They walked out into the grey light.
“Was he dead when you reached him?” Jack said.
“No. He talked to me. I wrote it down. Here.” Barry pulled a piece of paper out of one of the breast pockets of his sweat and food stained khaki-coloured uniform shirt.
Jack took it, unfolded it. It read: ‘He knows where Danny is. Sorry, boss. Cottage near Padstow, Corn...’ That was all.
“What’s your name?” Jack said as they reached the open unit door.
“Barry. Barry Sumner.”
“Okay, Barry. Run through it for me. And don’t leave anything out.”
Barry told Jack that the only three people that had been on the premises were an old guy with a van, a younger man wearing a baseball cap and glasses, and the now dead copper, who had asked him about ‘Baseball’.
“The van sped off,” Barry said. “And it was the bloke who called himself Dexter drivin’ it. I wondered what the fuck was happenin’, so I came out here and had a look. Saw blood and opened up this unit, number fourteen. The copper was layin’ where he is now. I got down to see if he was still breathin’, and he grabbed my wrist. I nearly shit myself. That’s when he spoke to me.”
“Say what he said, the way he said it,” Jack instructed. “You know what I mean?”
Barry nodded. Kept his eyes averted from the corpse: “He whispered it, man. He was dyin’ for Christ’s sake. He talked real slow. Said: ‘He knows where Danny is. Sorry, boss’. Then he went quiet for a few seconds. Jesus! He was cryin’ blood. He knew he was a goner. The last bit was hard work. One word, then a pause before the next. I had to put my ear right next to his mouth to catch it. ‘Cottage-near-Padstow-Corn...’ That’s it. That’s when he stopped breathin’.”
“Then what did you do?”
There’s a few blood spots leadin’ to the old man’s unit. I followed it and opened the door, but I didn’t go in. I could see that he was brown bread. Looks as though somethin’ chewed him up.”
Jack was standing in what he considered to be a concrete box with a roll up door at one end. He estimated that it was maybe seventeen feet by nine. There was a filing cabinet against one wall, a chair on its side near the far wall, and Mike’s body laying almost face down with his head turned slightly to one side. It was hard to be focused, but he had to be. You can’t back anything up and have a second run at it. There were a lot of questions. Why did Mike come here? He followed someone. Who? Another officer? Why didn’t he tell anybody, instead of going it alone? Because he had nothing but a hunch, so ran with it, and found to his everlasting cost that he’d been right.
Squatting down, Jack studied the physical damage. Mike’s eyes had been punctured. Lines painted his face like red mascara. And the pooling blood around him suggested that he had been stabbed in the stomach or chest, not shot. There was no smell of cordite in the air, just the scent of blood and some kind of solvent that was distinctive and alcohol based. He looked across at the chair. There were pieces of silver duct tape still adhered to the front legs. This was where Dawn Turner had been held captive.
Straightening up, Jack went to the filing cabinet. A stoppered glass bottle stood on top of it and was two thirds full of what he knew to be ether. Pulling a wad of crumpled paper serviettes from a pocket, he used it as a buffer and slid open the top drawer of the cabinet to disclose what appeared to be a stack of photograph albums. He opened the cover of the top one, to be faced with a Polaroid depicting a young brunette. She was naked and spread-eagled on a table. A lot of what should have been on her inside, unseen, was protruding from the Y-cut of a rudimentary autopsy. Flipping the pages, Jack saw that this was a pictorial record of torture and mutilation: the Mimic’s souvenir of past crimes. Under each photograph was the name and personal details of the dead victim. He closed the album, not needing to look at the others beneath it, knowing that they would contain more of the same. At the side of them was another much slimmer book. He withdrew and opened it. The first page carried a hand-written dedication: ‘In glorification of all free spirits who dared to walk the black road I now tread. This is a celebration of my own contribution to an undying art.’
Sick bastard! Jack flipped more pages. They were tightly packed with small writing. It was a diary, and no doubt gave a full and graphic account; the memoir of a murderer who was a monster.
He went back outside to where Lisa was now standing with her hands dug deep in the pockets of the sheepskin coat she wore. Her hair was being flattened by rain that had begun to fall heavily. He went to her. Held her. She stiffened slightly, and did not return his embrace. “What?” he said, and pulled back to see her face.
“You have a propensity for violence that puts me in mind of the people you hunt. It’s a little frightening,” Lisa said. “I don’t really know you, do I?”
“You know me well enough. I’m big on raw emotion. I don’t do finesse. I love or hate without frills. That goes for everything. Mr Black and White, that’s me. I wouldn’t be in this line of work or carry a gun if I wasn’t committed to using whatever it takes to get the job done. I thought you of all people would be able to see and know me for what I am.”
Lisa felt a little ashamed, as though she had lost faith in him for no good reason. He was right. Maybe it was the danger of his personality that had first attracted her to him. He was more honest than her. Being a psychologist was insular. She prompted and cajoled and in some ways verbally tricked others into divulging their innermost thoughts and fears and fantasies to her, but gave nothing back, save for measured responses to further her knowledge of the motivational forces that she sought to understand. It dawned on her that she considered her patients more as the disorders they suffered from than as people. With Ryder it was different. She had made herself accessible, and in so doing exposed herself to a level of vulnerability that was disarming to say the least.
She returned his embrace. “You’re right, Ryder. I should know you. I’m sorry I let your anger freak me out. I can understand how you must feel.”
Jack looked into her eyes and saw the love, and that was all that mattered. He also knew that Lisa could not understand how he felt. He did not fully know what made him tick. He doubted anyone could truly perceive their real identity. The id was a slippery fish that wriggled a lot and was almost impossible to get a firm grip of. Whatever emotions and impulses made an individual what he or she was, could not – in his view –be neatly labelled. He tried a smile, but it came out all wrong, like a snarl. There was absolutely nothing to smile about.
They walked side by side to where police had gathered at the other unit. Inside was the body of an old man slumped in a chair. He had been badly mutilated. There was too much blood to know the exact cause of death. But dead was dead. It didn’t really matter. As Jack headed back to where Mike’s body lay, he took his mobile out and rang the hotel in York. Mike had done good; left a warning that had in all probability saved Danny and Sharon from being butchered. The killer would think it safe to go after them, and would hopefully be lifted if he did.
A Home Office pathologist arrived with two Crime Scene Unit transit vans following his Volvo into the yard.
Ian Winstone was a small, overweight man with body odour that cologne could not fully mask. He had a moon face and large, watery blue eyes that gave no insight to his thought processes. At forty-eight he was disgruntled, disillusioned, and just going through the motions. He was married to a permanently disconsolate woman of similar proportions to himself. And their three offspring – all girls – had been unfortunate enough to inherit the vertically challenged, stubby physiques of both parents. Ian bemoaned the world and all it comprised, having grown up on a nondescript estate in an industrial northern city, and also in having failed to realise his ambition to be a surgeon. There had been too many distractions at medical school, and he had finally dropped out due to a combination of not being able to tolerate living in seedy lodgings with other students – who called him stinky and ribbed him unmercifully – and the fact that his capabilities fell well short of his initial enthusiasm. It took a brave man to face his shortcomings head on, acknowledge them, and change direction. Being a pathologist had its benefits. In a world of rising litigation, he knew that none of his ‘patients’ would ever accuse him of malpractice. The dead w
ere much easier to deal with. They made no demands on him, and could not dispute his findings. Truth was, he had no compassion for the deceased. They weren’t human beings to him, just a hotchpotch of organs and fluids that he could examine, weigh and dissect to determine what causal factors precipitated their demise.
“He was my sergeant,” Jack said as Ian snapped on latex gloves and began an on-scene examination of the cadaver, after the photographer had finished up.
It was when Ian turned the body over that Jack saw the four wavery letters written on the dusty floor. E...D...D...I. They tailed off in the smear of blood that had been used as ink.
“Eddie,” he said aloud. “It’s McBride.”
The tip of Mike’s index finger was coated crimson. Even though he had been blinded and knew that he was dying, he’d somehow managed to write the damning letters on the concrete and name his killer. And then found the resolve to speak to the storage unit company’s employee before letting go.
Ian took the corpse’s temperature. Determined that the knife wounds had caused major trauma, resulting in the victim bleeding out. He told Jack his preliminary findings.
“Thanks, Ian,” Jack said, keeping back from the little man, whose glandular problem manifested in a smell almost strong enough to combat the stench of corrupting flesh that the pathologist worked with on a daily basis.
Ian nodded. He was done. The body could be bagged when the crime scene officers had finished up. He was happy to have been called out. Stuck at home on Christmas Day with a whinging wife and the two remaining daughters that had not yet flown the nest was a less agreeable option. He wandered off to examine the body of the old man.
“Let’s go,” Jack said to Lisa. And as they returned to the car he phoned Ken at home, brought him up to speed and asked him to send an armed unit to Eddie McBride’s flat in Muswell Hill.
