Deadly Obsession

by Michael Kerr

  Ken did believe him. “Who will you take with you?”

  Jack shook his head. “If I need help, I’ll ask for it.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Lisa said.

  Jack shook his head and said, “No way.”

  “I know how he thinks, Ryder. And a couple would attract less attention than a man alone. Plus, he might not have even gone there. What if he has another place in the city? He could try to find your son, or decide to target me before he goes west.”

  “Danny is safe. I called Sharon. They’re moving out of the hotel in York.”

  “That leaves me in his firing line. I’ll be safer with you, and you know it.”

  Jack looked to Ken for moral support.

  “Don’t look at me,” Ken said, only now realising that there was more than a professional relationship between his DI and the attractive psychologist. “I think Lisa has a point.”

  Jack scowled at both of them. But he was not prepared to take the risk of anything happening to Lisa. “Okay, you get to go,” he said. “But remember who’s in charge here. You do what I tell you. Same as if you were one of my officers. Right?”

  “Right, boss,” Lisa said. “Do I have time to go home and pick up my toothbrush and stuff?”

  “No, you’ll have to rough it.”

  Due to the case being so high profile, Ken pulled strings. Within the hour Jack and Lisa were in a police chopper, speeding west. Only Ken knew what was happening. He was uneasy, but had a lot of faith in Jack Ryder. Jack was one of those guys who, if your life depended on it, you would choose without hesitation to be at your shoulder. He was probably Dawn’s best chance of making it through her ordeal. And Ken’s best chance of closing the case.

  “Police, sir,” Eddie said, holding his warrant card up to the two-inch gap that the taut security chain afforded between door and jamb. “We have a report of an armed burglar in the neighbourhood. Have you heard anything? Or has anyone tried to gain entry?”

  “I’ve heard nothing,” Gavin Tremayne said, looking closely at the ID through his gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles.

  Eddie stepped back and glanced along to where a large double garage was integral to the house. “I notice your garage doors are open, sir. Do you usually leave―?”

  Gavin reacted exactly as Eddie expected him to. He pushed the door to, removed the chain and opened it again. He was dressed in a well worn plaid dressing gown over striped pyjamas, with old-fashioned bootie style slippers on his feet, and he held a silver-handled hardwood walking cane in his gnarled right hand.

  “If any thieving bastard has touched my car, I’ll...I’ll…”

  Eddie stepped forward, gripped the old man by his scrawny throat and walked him back into the house, kicking the door shut behind him. The force of his grip made the balding octogenarian go purple in the face. He went rigid, the cane fell from his grasp, and Eddie knew that he would have no problem.

  He manoeuvred the man across the hall to a telephone seat and guided him down onto it. He relaxed his grip, but did not release it.

  “Who else is in the house?” Eddie said.

  “My wife,” Gavin wheezed. “She’s in bed, asleep.”

  “Who else?”

  “No one.”

  “All right. What’s your name?”

  “Gavin Tremayne.”

  “Well, Gav, you need to know that I have no intention of hurting you or your good lady. I want all the money you have in the house, and your car keys. If you behave and don’t hold out on me, then I’ll be gone before you know it,” Eddie said, releasing the man and drawing his pistol. “But if you do anything stupid, then it’s goodnight Vienna. Get the idea?”

  Gavin nodded.

  “So far, so good. Now, pay attention you old prick. I don’t want to play games or waste time. Where’s the money?”

  “In the study. I have a safe.”

  “Just lead the way, nice ‘n’ easy. Keep in mind that if you try anything stupid I’ll butcher your wife. Now move your arse.”

  Gavin pushed himself up, walked slowly across the hall, opened the door to his study and came to a stop in the centre of the room.

  “You’re doing just fine,” Eddie said, keeping several feet behind him, not wanting to give the man any reason to think that he might just be able to turn the situation round to his advantage. “Switch on that desk light and open the safe.”

  Gavin stepped over to his desk and turned on the banker’s lamp. The hand-blown, green glass shade produced a soft and eerie glow, only partially holding the surrounding darkness at bay. He then shuffled over to a large display cabinet that stood against the wall and raised his hand.

  “Careful,” Eddie cautioned. “No sudden moves.”

  Anger surged through Gavin. He was a retired high court judge, and would see this bastard behind bars, and use a lot of influence to ensure that he served the maximum sentence. No common thief was going to terrorise and rob him and get away with it.

  Fingers shaking, Gavin thumbed a hidden catch and a section of the rear of the cabinet sprung open to reveal a small safe fitted into the wall behind it.

  “Open it and stand aside,” Eddie said, gun trained on Gavin’s back, steady as a rock.

  Gavin spun the dial, first right, then left and right again, and once more to the left, his hand sweating as he pulled the handle down and swung the steel door open.

  “Good man. Now lie on the floor, face down, and don’t even twitch,” Eddie said, going to the safe, to reach inside it and remove three thick, banded bundles of notes and place them on the mahogany surface of the desk.

  “How much?” he said to the prone pensioner.

  “Fifteen thousand pounds,” Gavin said, stifling a sneeze as he spoke. The carpet fibres and dust were aggravating his asthma.

  “Any more cash in the house?” Eddie said.

  “Just a few pounds in my wallet. It’s on the dressing table, upstairs in the bedroom.”

  “Where are your car keys?”

  “Next to my wallet on the dressing table.”

  “Well, that seems to take care of business, Gav,” Eddie said, stepping over and bringing the butt of the gun down on the back of his head three times in rapid succession. The force of the blows shattered the frail old man’s brittle skull and pulped his brain, killing him almost instantly.

  Eddie knelt, used the material of the dead man’s dressing gown to clean off the bloody gun, and then slid the weapon back into its holster.

  It was going well. He had never intended to let the man live. He would deal with the wife and then bring Dawn in. He needed a shower. After that, he would wipe any prints he might have left. He had touched very few surfaces, and remembered each one.

  Leaving the study, he made his way back out into the hall, drawing his knife as he mounted the stairs. He reached the landing and could hear loud snoring emanating from the partly open first door on his left. This was turning out to be a special day. He walked across to the bed and prodded the old bitch awake, and let her gather her senses before starting in with the knife. She made noises that were music to his ears.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE chopper hovered and slowly set down on a deserted school playing field. Inspector Peter Bryant flashed the main beams of his Carlton, but did not leave the car. He was less than happy to be summoned out in wind and rain, having been ordered by some faceless tosser at Scotland Yard in London to meet a plainclothes detective inspector and afford him all the assistance he asked for, and not to involve anyone else. Cloak and dagger stuff was not his cup of tea. His patch was blessed with a very low crime rate, and that was just how he liked it. He could count the instances of rape and murder in the area on his fingers. The last significant wrongdoing had taken place the previous summer. Ned Jarman, a local farmer, had strangled his wife and subsequently strung himself up in his cow shed. The couple had not been found for six days, and he would never, ever forget the smell that greeted him when he attended the scene. But it had been a do
mestic; a nice neat murder/suicide with no loose ends. It transpired that Angela Jarman had been having an affair with Tom Carver, a local councillor, and when Ned found out he overreacted, to put it mildly.

  By the time Lisa and Jack had reached the car and got in, the helicopter was airborne again, angling away to east.

  Peter introduced himself by rank and full name.

  “Pleased to meet you, Pete,” Jack said, dispensing with formalities. “I’m DI Jack Ryder, and this is Dr Lisa Norton. Have you been told what this is all about?”

  “No. I was ordered to keep my mouth shut, and to help you in any way I can. Where do you want to go, the station?”

  “No. Let’s go to your house,” Jack said. “I’ll tell you everything on the way. We need to keep a low profile. In brief, what we have is a serial killer with a female hostage heading towards your neck of the woods. He also happens to be a police detective.”

  “Jesus!”

  “You read or see the stuff on the Mimic?”

  “You mean it’s him?”

  “The one and only. He’s on the run, and we have every reason to believe he’s coming here. He has a cottage in the area. I need you to single it out for me.”

  “How?”

  “Local knowledge. This will be a property that stands empty most of the time, away from the town. It’ll be owned by a single man. He needs privacy.”

  Peter frowned. “There are a lot of holiday homes in the vicinity. And many of them are owned by faceless out-of-towners. Young couples can’t afford to buy a property in the area that they were born and raised in.”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy, Pete, but with your help we’ll find him.”

  Dawn tried to yank the thick, padded hand hold from the door, but couldn’t. She spat on her right hand and wiped it around the cuff, and then made her left hand as narrow as possible by folding her thumb and fingers in and attempting to work the steel manacle over it. All she succeeded to do was abrade the skin on her wrist, leaving a red weal where the metal bit in. She was going nowhere. And there was no point in shouting for help. He would hear her and come back to shut her up before anyone could respond. Plus, any Good Samaritan who might hear her would end up shot to death for his trouble. She began to cry with frustration.

  After less than fifteen minutes the passenger door opened, dragging her sideways by the arm, half out of the vehicle. She fell and landed on sharp gravel that dug into her knees. Her arm was nearly wrenched from its socket. Even as she yelped like a kicked dog, she was released from the Explorer and lifted to her feet.

  “Inside the house,” Eddie said, standing to one side and aiming the gun at her.

  He directed her upstairs to the bathroom. Told her to cuff herself to a water pipe that ran along the back wall above the skirting board, and when she had done it he checked that she was secured to it, then put the gun out of her reach on the windowsill, stripped and stepped into the small shower cubicle.

  She noticed the spots of blood on his face and was in no doubt whatsoever that whoever had lived in this house was now dead. He stole people’s lives; erased them without a second thought. How could he be obsessed with her, when the existence of others counted for so little to him? It was not love. No one so evil could know what real love was and be capable of feeling it in any accepted sense of the emotion.

  Finished, he stepped out of the shower and opened the door of the large, old-fashioned medicine cabinet on the wall. There was an array of sundry items. He ran his fingers over tubes of ointment, bottles, a pack of corn plasters, and containers of all manner of remedies for various ailments. Next to a rust-stained tin of Andrews liver salts, he found what he wanted. He had noticed that the old man was going bald, and that what hair he had left was unnaturally dark for his pallid complexion.

  The hair colour restorer for men – as the box advertised it – was simple to use. He shampooed it into his hair and left it on for a few minutes, then rinsed it off. Wiping the steam from the mirror he smiled at his reflection. The darker hair seemed to change his appearance completely. With the dead man’s gold-rimmed glasses on, he would look more like a solicitor or city dealer than a copper. And with a few days of near fasting he would lose a little weight and the transformation would be complete. He would be unrecognisable as the man they would be searching for. Eddie McBride no longer existed. He was now Robert Corby...Bob; a man of independent means who was relocating to his holiday cottage by the sea. Given time, if Dawn measured up after a suitable period of reprogramming, he would have to fix her up with a new identity. He would call her Maggie, in memory of his mother. It would be like giving the dead woman a chance to redeem herself through a new incarnation.

  After towelling himself dry and dressing, he smiled down at Dawn. “How do I look?” he said to her.

  “You look fine, Eddie,” she said, resigned to being compliant and doing nothing to make her lot worse than it already was.

  “Call me Bob from now on. And you shall be Maggie. Jerry Aken, Eddie, and Dawn no longer exist. We’re two brand new people embarking on a great adventure. And it will be up to you whether it works out. I want it to with all my heart, so try to put all that you were behind you. Look forward. The past is as dead as the old couple that lived here.”

  In a modern detached house on a small private estate less than half a mile north of Padstow town centre, Peter Bryant worked his computer, while Jack told him the full story, culminating in how they had got here before the killer and the woman he’d abducted could possibly have arrived in the area by car.

  “Do you know what he intends to do?” Peter said to Jack.

  “Start over as someone else. He’ll believe that he can just abandon his old identity. And maybe he could have, if the officer had died before he could talk.”

  “Could he just turn off the killing, Jack?”

  “I’ll answer that for you,” Lisa said. “The destructive urges in his brain are too powerful to contain. They’re boiling under the surface, and he will have to find release for them. Dawn Turner is just a diversion. He may not even be aware of that, yet. But he will come to see her as a liability when he tires of her. Killing is like a bodily function to him. It has to be done.”

  “Are you saying that he can’t help himself? It sounds like an excuse.”

  Lisa shook her head. “No, Peter, it’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation to illustrate how driven he is. The biological, psychological and social reasons for any criminal’s behaviour are complicated at the best of times. With a perpetrator of violent crime, such as a serial killer, it’s even harder to comprehend and make proper sense of. Fundamentally, the law does not like to accept that a person is not responsible for his actions, or cannot consciously control them. But the truth is that some of these psychos are unable to grasp the moral implications of what they do. They have no conception of right and wrong. They’re genetically flawed, but instead of being colour blind, autistic or physically impaired, they kill.”

  “I don’t buy that,” Peter said. “Being a copper, he knows the difference between right and wrong.”

  Lisa nodded. “In theory, yes. But to him it’s the same as background music in a lift or restaurant. He isn’t listening to it, and even if he did, he would find it puerile. People in the main are just objects to him.”

  “So he can function as a detective, and then kill innocent people with no remorse. What’s that, some kind of split personality?”

  “Not in the sense of there being two separate individuals in one mind. That’s an extremely rare if not complete non-starter, reserved for all practical intent and purpose to the realms of fiction. You haven’t got a Jeckyll and Hyde here, which would be a dichotomy; a sharply defined division between two thought processes. This is one man, who is able to act out his fantasies while presenting an acceptable front to those around him. Many people enjoy secret vices or affairs, or leanings that are not condoned or tolerated by the majority of society. They become sophisticated in masking the side of
themselves that they do not want to be perceived.”

  Peter shook his head as he began printing out information that he had retrieved via the terminal at the police station. “These are lists of addresses and owners of outlying cottages and detached properties in the area,” he said as he squared the sheets off and passed them to Jack. “There are also blowups of pertinent ordnance survey maps. I can mark the locations on them for you.”

  Peter’s wife, Alison, kept out of the way, happy not to be involved. She knocked and entered her own dining room at regular intervals to freshen their coffee, and insisted that Jack and Lisa stay the night, not to know that they would be working till dawn, and that sleep was a luxury they could ill afford for the time being.

  The list of properties was initially lengthy. After three hours it was more manageable. Between them, Peter, Jack and Lisa dismissed many, deeming them unsuitable as a likely hideaway for a killer with a hostage.

  “What have we got left?” Jack said as he stood up and stretched. His back and neck were aching from being hunched over the table for so long.

  “Twelve likely places,” Lisa said.

  Jack closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That’s eleven too many. Let’s look at who owns them and get real picky,” he said. “And then you can describe the locale that each of them is in, Pete. We need to think which we would choose if we were McBride.”

  It came down to four that they all agreed were well off the beaten track and ideally placed for maximum privacy. Three were cottages, one a bungalow. Two were situated on or near the cliff edge, and two were farther afield and inland.

  “I think he would go for a property next to the sea.” Lisa said.

  Jack agreed. “Which one?”

  “Describe both of them, please,” Lisa said to Peter.

  “Bay View Cottage is out on Trevose Head. There’s just a single lane track leading to it. It’s the sort of place you don’t go unless you’ve reason to. It’s been there for so long that it looks as if it grows out of the cliff it sits on top of.”