Deadly Obsession

by Michael Kerr

  “Who owns it?” Lisa said.

  Peter ran a finger down the list. “Some guy by the name of Robert Corby bought it three years ago. That’s all I have. And the other property overlooks the bay. A busier area, especially in season. It’s only a few hundred yards from a popular pub.” He referred to the list again. “It’s owned by Ethel Sweetman. She lives over in Exeter with her sister these days, since her husband died. The cottage is rented out May through September, as are a great many in the area.”

  “He’ll have bought, not rented,” Jack said. “We need details of sale on the first one. The estate agent concerned will have a previous address for the buyer.”

  “It’s Christmas,” Peter said. “Nobody is there to ask.”

  “Get the private numbers of all the local agents. Give them a bell at home. We need information, and we need it now.”

  “I think I know which firm handled the sale. But it’s five in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

  Jack’s eyes narrowed and his face darkened. “We’re talking about life and death here, Inspector. This is a seasoned cop who happens to also be a fucking killing machine, and he’s getting closer to Padstow by the second. So don’t tell me the time and date, just get on it.”

  Peter stiffened. He wanted to protest. This was his house on his patch. He didn’t need to be carpeted and talked down to by some plainclothes city detective who carried a gun, wore jeans and cowboy boots, and had probably watched too many action movies back when he was a snot-nosed school kid. He swallowed hard. Just nodded and went out into the hallway for the phone book. He wasn’t happy at being bollocked, but deep down he knew that Ryder was right.

  Jack phoned Ken.

  “I need background on some guy who goes by the name of Robert Corby, Ken. If it’s Eddie, then Corby will supposedly live in the London area, and only exist on paper. He owns a cottage down here.”

  “I’ll get back to you, soonest,” Ken said. “And if it does turn out to be him, don’t go it alone, Jack. I’ll arrange for a team to fly out and handle things.”

  “No problem,” Jack said. He pressed END. There would be no problem. He had every intention of disobeying Ken and making his move the second he was sure that Robert Corby was Eddie McBride. He was not going to let this end up in a shoot-out, because if he did, Dawn would most likely become collateral damage if the cavalry showed up in force.

  “You know a local locksmith who can get me inside Bay View Cottage, and be relied on to keep his mouth shut?” Jack said to Peter when he came back into the room.

  Peter nodded.

  “We don’t even know it’s unoccupied, or that Corby and McBride are one and the same person,” Lisa said.

  “Until I know different, I’m going with the probability that they are, and will act on that premise.”

  “What do you intend to do?” Lisa said, even though she knew what the answer was going to be.

  “To be a one-man welcome committee. When Eddie gets here, I’ll be inside and waiting for him. He’ll be given one chance to walk out; a chance he didn’t give Mike or any of his other victims.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  EDDIE left Dawn cuffed to the pipe in the bathroom and went downstairs holding the old guy’s bunch of keys. He went outside to the garage, and one of the keys unlocked the doors. The Mercedes inside was at least ten years old; a metallic charcoal grey C180 Elegance in immaculate condition, that probably only got driven to the supermarket or the doctors’ surgery and back these days. He was liberating it. This was a car that needed to be driven. He got in, settled into the soft leather-upholstered seat and appreciated his surroundings as he inserted the ignition key and turned it. The engine started with an assured promise of power and reliability that demanded respect. He eased the big car out, left the highly polished beast purring, and drove the 4x4 into the garage. Its roof scraped the underside of the steel door frame as the paint was taken down to bare metal. It was a tight fit.

  He searched the garage, found some old plates on a shelf, and quickly fitted them to the Merc.

  Thirty minutes later he was heading back to the M4. Dawn was in the boot. It was safer. She was cuffed, but not gagged, and had a cushion under her head and a blanket over her. The Merc’s boot was roomy. He could have kept her up front with him, but wanted to be alone to think. She was a distraction.

  He had moved the bodies before leaving. Carried the old man upstairs and dumped him in a wardrobe, then wrapped the bloody remains of his wife in the saturated bedding and stuffed her in with him. The mattress had been badly stained. He’d turned it over, found fresh sheets and blankets, and remade the bed. To all intents and purposes the house was empty. It could well be days before the couple were missed and the property was visited and searched by the police. Without heating on, the low temperature would slow down decomposition and inhibit the smell. He had bought more time. There would be absolutely no reason for him to be suspected. And the Mercedes would be got rid of within twenty-four hours, so there would be no trail to follow.

  He opened the ashtray, lit a cigarette and turned on the radio. Found a station that churned out middle of the road stuff and settled back to enjoy the drive. Phil Collins was singing Against All Odds, and against all odds was how he felt, but in a good way, because he was in full control of his destiny, and Dawn’s.

  Peter got lucky. He had been sure that Simon Stamp, an agent on The Strand in town had handled the sale of Bay View Cottage. He knew the man well.

  “Do you know what the bloody time is?” Simon griped through a yawn.

  Peter sighed. “Yes, Simon, but this is police business, and urgent. I believe that you sold Bay View Cottage, out on Trevose Head?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I need to know all you do about the bloke who purchased it.”

  “Offhand, I remember he was called Corbin, no, Corby. I only met him once. It was a cash sale. He was some yuppy type from London. All the details will be on the computer. I’d have to go to the office to get them for you.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Smart. No more than thirty. He was medium height, had fair hair and wore glasses. I really can’t be more precise. I don’t recall his features clearly. Like I said, I only met him the once for maybe an hour, and that was approximately three years ago.”

  “I’d appreciate you digging out the paperwork, Simon. I need his solicitor’s details. Everything.”

  “What has he done to have you waking people up at this time in the morning, stolen the crown jewels?”

  “Maybe nothing, but we need to locate him.” Peter said before ending the call.

  Jack gave him a questioning look.

  “Looks like we picked the winner,” Peter said. “Corby ticks all the boxes.”

  Jack nodded, just as his mobile rang.

  “Yeah, Ken.”

  “We struck gold, Jack. We narrowed it down to one Robert Corby who fits the bill. His address turns out to be a flat rented by a hooker; Jill Carlisle. She said that a punter paid her to hold his mail. And get this. He called himself Bob Corby, but she ID’d him as Eddie from the photo in his personnel file.”

  Adrenaline pricked Jack’s muscles. The substantiation that he had figured it right was uplifting. Ken had just confirmed what he had been sure of.

  “Okay, Ken. I’m going to be watching for him.”

  “And I’m heading out there with a team. Keep me posted. Anything that happens, I want to know ten seconds after you do. Copy?”

  “Yeah, copy. But let’s keep it very low profile. If we make one mistake, Dawn won’t walk away from this.”

  “We’ll do our best for her. See you soon.”

  Jack tossed the mobile onto the tabletop. Ken doing his best might not be good enough. He could see it going pear-shaped. But he had time on his side. Ken would have to get clearance from the brass to organise an armed response unit and the chopper. It would take quite a while for them to get here. He’d be inside the cottage long before t
hen. The only danger was that they would try to lift Eddie as he approached the cottage. Maybe if a sniper took him out with a head shot as he climbed out of whatever transport he’d stolen, then it would work. But if they were going to try and talk to him, it was odds on that Dawn would end up being the first casualty.

  “What is it?” Lisa said.

  “Good and bad news,” Jack said. “Verification that Eddie and Robert Corby are one and the same person. The bad news is that Ken is jacking up a unit to fly out here and oversee the situation.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best. You’re too involved, personally. You probably won’t admit it, but you want revenge for what he did to Mike.”

  “That might be a part of it, Lisa. But it’s not why I intend to deal with this without Ken and the posse. You know what McBride is like. Do you think he would give Dawn up and face spending the rest of his life in prison?”

  Lisa shook her head.

  “So let’s go,” Jack said to Peter.

  Keith Henderson smiled at the cheap two lever lock. Gave it a spurt of graphite spray to remove any grease and impediments, picked it in under fifteen seconds, opened the door and stepped back.

  “Thanks, Keith,” Peter said to the freckle-faced young locksmith. “I’ll be paying you in cash. And remember, you were never here.”

  Jack stepped inside the cottage, and as planned, Keith relocked the door behind him, before walking off down the edge of the track with Peter, back to the B road almost half a mile distant. They had not driven to the cottage, so as not to leave fresh tyre prints on the damp earth.

  The plan was simple. After Keith had driven away in his van, Peter and Lisa parked off-road in thick bracken, out of sight but with a view of the track leading to the cottage. If a vehicle entered it, they would ring Jack and tell him.

  Jack went from room to room, familiarised himself with the layout, then considered where the best place would be to hide and wait. There was a large combined living room/kitchen on the right side of the short hall on the ground floor, and a small lounge to the left. Upstairs were two bedrooms, separated by a bathroom. Looking up from where he stood on the landing, Jack saw that the large trapdoor to the loft was relatively new. It was out of keeping with the rest of the property. Why? The ceiling was low. He reached up, turned the catch and eased the trap open, so that it hung down vertically. There was an aluminium ladder. He grabbed hold of it, tipped and extended it until it locked in place, and climbed up and shone his torch into the blackness. What he saw was not a regular loft or attic. Within the limited space he was faced by a false wall with a door set into it. He went up, opened the door, and was in a room within a room; four solid walls, ceiling and floor, constructed of what looked to be thick marine plywood sheets butted smoothly together against a sturdy outer frame. There was a stainless steel toilet and washbasin plumbed in, and a single mattress on the floor. Next to the mattress was a metal ring with a length of chain attached to it. An open handcuff was welded to the loose end. Ten pence piece-sized holes had been drilled into the ceiling as a crude form of ventilation. And high up in one corner was a translucent square of thick plastic material. Behind it, Jack could see the lens of a camera. This was a cell. Eddie had constructed a holding pen, no doubt purpose-built to keep Dawn or other women imprisoned within.

  Backing out, Jack closed the door, descended the short ladder, pushed it back up and secured the trapdoor, and then took a minute to decide where best to hide. When the time came to deal with Eddie, he would have to move fast and make it effective. He knew that if he fouled-up, it would in all probability cost him his life and serve as a warning to the killer. There should be no problem. He would have the element of surprise on his side. So how come he was sweating and his heart was racing, thudding in his ears? Because he took nothing for granted. Fate had the capricious capacity to ruin the best laid plans. He slipped his gun out of its holster, released the mag and checked that it was full, then snapped it back into the butt and jacked a bullet into the chamber. The weight of the lethal weapon made him feel more confident. He kept it gripped in his hand. The space above the stump where his little finger had been began to itch. The mind was a funny thing. Once again it amazed him to acknowledge that his finger had been bitten off and eaten years ago, and yet a part of his brain just wouldn’t accept the fact. He rubbed the smooth end of the digit against his jeans, but the itching just got worse. It put him in mind of a DS he had worked alongside before he got the move to SCS.

  Detective Sergeant Luke Lister had always been big on instinct. Whenever unforeseen danger was in the offing, he was forewarned by an intuitive sense of foreboding, and a persistent itch in his left earlobe. It was something that anyone working for any length of time with Luke didn’t mock. It never failed him. If he started pulling at his ear and feeling nervous, it was time to circle the wagons and get ready for the worst. Jack wondered if Luke’s early warning system had deserted him. The DS had gone skiing near Aviemore, off piste, hit a tree and impaled himself on a wrist-thick branch. Maybe it was for the best that he’d been pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. The tree limb had severed his spinal cord as it punched through his guts and shattered his backbone. Had he lived he would, at best, have been in a wheelchair for the rest of his days, and Jack knew Luke well enough to be pretty sure he would not have wanted to survive and have to adapt. Some folk could adjust to all manner of extreme and life-changing injuries or debilitation, but Luke would have found it impossible to do that.

  With the itch getting stronger, Jack gave it some credence. It didn’t hurt to open his mind to the possibility of it being a physical manifestation of some kind of sixth sense in action. Hell, he believed in the Chaos Theory, whereby there was no way to be certain that utter confusion wouldn’t result in the most unlikely places and at any time. Only a few weeks previously an elderly woman suffering with dementia had gone berserk at a party in a private nursing home in Golder’s Green, beaten a nurse to death with a crutch, and then set fire to the place. Seems she didn’t like the music they were playing, or the seating arrangements. It all went to show that logical thinking was not always the way to go. You had to look at stuff from unlikely angles: be ready for the unexpected, and expect it.

  There was a sea fog hugging the cliffs. It stretched out over five miles offshore, and Malcolm Gaskill knew that it would cling for most of the day. He had spent his life on or next to the sea, and had a certain affinity with it; respected its power and unpredictability, but more often than not could gauge its moods. He thought of it as a living creature, in the same way that many fire-fighters considered the conflagrations they fought to extinguish as being sentient.

  Standing out on the porch of his sea front, timber-built bungalow, Malcolm tasted the air, felt its density, and calculated the pressure. He was like a human barometer. He struck a match, sucked on his briar pipe and then eased himself into the rocking chair that he had made for his now late mother from driftwood, back in sixty-eight. He remembered when he’d finished working on it, due to the American Baptist minister and activist Martin Luther King Jr being assassinated on that selfsame April day. He reached for the Silver Jubilee mug that he had supped tea from every day since his daughter bought him it in seventy-seven, but paused with the rim almost touching his lips as the muffled sound of an engine drew his attention to where he could just make out the coast road that ran almost parallel to the cliff’s edge. The ghostly shape of a large car slid through the shifting veils of fog. It looked like a Mercedes. His rheumy eyes followed its passage, and he saw the hazy, ruby glow of brake lights as the vehicle slowed to turn down the track that led out on to Trevose Head. He sipped at the strong black tea. Mused that the driver was probably the city gent who had by all accounts bought the cottage that Jacob and Amelia Ferris had lived in for half a century, up until they were both too old and infirm to look after it, or each other any longer. Why anyone would choose to come out here in the middle of winter, he couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t any of his business,
but having never met his closest neighbour, it might be interesting to take Charlie, his collie, for a walk along the cliffs and knock and pass the time of day with the usually absentee owner of Bay View Cottage.

  Lisa and Peter saw the headlights appear and watched from cover as the Merc approached, indicated, and made a right on to the peninsula, to quickly be engulfed by fog that was thickening as it spread inland.

  Lisa punched Jack’s number into her mobile. He answered almost immediately.

  “There’s a dark Mercedes heading your way,” she said. “But we couldn’t see who was in it. It’s like pea soup out here.”

  “If it’s him, I’ll call you back and let it ring twice, I won’t be talking. You can then get patched through to Ken and let him know what’s happening.”

  “You want me to tell him that you’re inside?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want an ARU hitting the place if I’m still here. But with any luck it’ll be resolved in the next few minutes.”

  “Be careful, Ryder. If you get yourself killed I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said before ending the call.

  He stopped in front of the large outhouse that he had converted into a makeshift garage. Got out and took the split ring with the cottage keys on it from his pocket. The garage doors opened reluctantly. The wood was damp and swollen and the hinges had dropped a little. The whole place needed work done on it. And now he would have the time.

  The large saloon only just fitted inside, with its front bumper up tight against the rear wall. He opened the door and squeezed out. Tomorrow night he would take the Merc well away from Padstow to a disused tin mine he had earmarked, and torch it. He would soon have a legitimate set of wheels. Shame about the C180. It wasn’t called Elegance for nothing. He’d never driven anything as comfortable. Maybe he would have the garage extended and buy one. His life choices were now limitless. Once he had established Robert Corby as being much more than just a name, he would be in a position to spread his wings.