by Michael Kerr
“Cases,” Matt said as he followed her back into the kitchen, handed her his mug and sat down on a bench in the nook, to gently push the troubling memories back and get on with living in the here and now. “Two repeat killers started up. Same old, same old. We got the files dumped on our desks yesterday, late, so today we’ll start in and see what we’ve got.”
Beth placed two fresh mugs of coffee on to cardboard beer mats that served as coasters on the tabletop and slid onto the bench facing Matt. “So give me a taster of what these two psychos have been up to,” she said.
“I didn’t say that they were psychos,” Matt said. “And as a criminal psychologist, that’s an unprofessional term for you to use.”
“An ex-criminal psychologist, remember?” Beth said. “I’m now a child psychologist. My days of working with homicidal nutjobs are behind me.”
Matt grinned and said, “Once a shrink, always a shrink. And if I give you the gruesome details, then I’ll expect some unofficial input, which you will get no credit or fee for.”
“Okay, you’ve got a deal.”
Matt took a mouthful of the strong, black coffee and thought that having Beth onside was always a bonus. She had a different way of looking at cases. He was a detective, and for the most part he followed leads and searched for clues in his hunt for perpetrators whereas, given enough information, Beth could usually get into their minds and see what made them tick and come up with proactive strategies.
“The first case appears to be some guy committing revenge killings,” Matt said. “There have been three victims so far. Once it was realised that a repeater was at work, we got it to run with.”
“What’s the link?”
“All the victims had sequential numerals carved into their foreheads post-mortem, 1, 2 and 3, and they had all worked at the same place, which was an orphanage near Epping Green.”
“Was?”
“That’s right. It was torched a couple of years ago, less than a week after it had been closed down.”
“Why was it closed down?”
“A sex abuse scandal that made big news. It was privately owned, and the company decided to pull the plug. After the Jimmy Savile revelations and the formation of Operation Yewtree, they wanted to distance themselves from it. Savile had allegedly been a friend of the orphanage’s director. Two of the staff were prosecuted and are doing time. The director, Victor Blake, did a Robin Williams number a few months later, by way of hanging himself from a wardrobe door handle with a belt.”
Beth got up and went to fetch the coffee pot. She refilled their mugs as she let the details of the case sink in, before sitting back down and saying, “So it could feasibly be a boy that was abused, attempted to get on with his life, but couldn’t let it rest.”
“I’d guess a young man who knows that some of the staff got away with it,” Matt said. “He needs to take care of what he sees as outstanding business.”
Beth nodded. “It seems the most likely scenario.”
“Problem being, if the killer was an orphan at Gladstone House, then he’s one of an unknown number of boys that passed through when the victims worked there. We’re talking about a needle in a haystack.”
“True, but at least there will be records. You’ll have to get a list, eliminate as many as you can, and see how many you’re left with.”
“Easier said than done.”
“It’s someone that will not have been able to get past his experiences and put them behind him. He will have no stability in his life. I doubt that he will be married or have children, or even be in regular employment. I think that he has become overwhelmed by feelings of hatred that he can’t let go of. There will be an undeniable desire to exact revenge that he cannot suppress. He’ll blame what happened in his past for his current inability to live a normal life, and may believe that killing those that abused him will relieve the pain and dispel the bitterness that is eating him away.”
“So we have a psychologically damaged killer on the loose, right?”
“I think so. He’ll target everyone that took advantage of him when he was too young or weak to defend himself. How did he murder his victims?”
Matt got up, massaged his still aching leg and went through to the lounge. He returned with his battered leather briefcase, opened it and withdrew a manila folder. He placed the briefcase on the floor, sat down again and took a sheaf of A4 size copy paper out of the folder.
“The first victim was a seventy-five year old by the name of Maurice Ashton,” he said as he studied the report. “He’d only been a care worker at Gladstone House for four years at the back end of the nineties, until he retired aged sixty. He was single, and a lot of child porn was found on his computer after he was murdered. The guy was a paedophile. Links to some of his contacts resulted in half a dozen other pervs being put away.”
Beth was sickened, not by the murders but in the knowledge that so many adults preyed upon children: depraved men and women that in many cases chose a career that would give them access and opportunity to abuse emotionally damaged youngsters that they were charged with caring for. Now that she worked at Morning Star, which was a rehab facility near Uxbridge for psychologically fragile children with a variety of mental health issues, Beth understood just how vulnerable a child could be. She felt absolutely no sorrow for the perverts that had been murdered, only anger at what they had done. If the killer was a young man that they had maltreated, then what he was doing was very wrong, but what they had done to him was unpardonable. Just desserts sprang to mind. Some people definitely deserved to pay the ultimate price for their sins.
“How was he murdered?” Beth asked.
“With duct tape wrapped around his face, over his mouth and nose,” Matt said. “He was suffocated after having first suffering several blows to his face. The autopsy report states that he was still alive when both of his eyes were then punctured with a knife. He’d been tied to a chair, his trousers and underpants were down to his knees, and his genitals had been slashed until they looked like raw mincemeat. There was no weapon found at the scene.”
“Christ, that’s extreme. It’s definitely personal and motivated by pure hate.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve got 8x10 colour photographs here that look like scenes from horror movies.”
“I’ll look at them later,” Beth said. “Were the other victims killed in the same way?”
“No. Three months after Ashton was murdered, a female social worker’s body was found at her maisonette in Harlow. Her name was Dawn Crouch and she was a fifty-eight year old spinster. There is no evidence that she mistreated the boys, but the killer no doubt thought he had good reason to torture and kill her.”
“What did he do?”
“She was found naked, gagged and trussed up in her bath. She had been manually strangled, after first having both breasts cut off. They were in the tub with her body.”
“He appears to be full of repressed rage, and now he’s on a mission,” Beth said. “Was the woman raped?”
“No. I imagine that performing the radical double mastectomy got him off, though.”
“That leaves number three.”
Matt thumbed through the sheets of paper and found the paperwork on the third victim. “He was the caretaker at the home. His name was Gerry Dixon, a fifty-three year old. He’d moved away from the area and was living in a one bedroom council flat in Hornsey. A neighbour found him. The door to the flat had been left open, and so the neighbour investigated. The TV was on and Dixon’s’ body was on the living room carpet. He’d been stabbed over eighty times, and his head had been cut off post mortem. The attending officers found it in the toilet bowl.”
Beth just shook her head and felt a growing tide of revulsion at the catalogue of violence that had been meted out. Even if the victims had been guilty of crimes against children, they should have been dealt with by the law. She did not condone vigilantism; no one had the right to be a self-appointed killer and summarily execute those that he or she adjudged to be g
uilty of wrongdoing, however serious. She had been wrong to even think that some people deserved what they got. Without adequate law enforcement and the due process of the justice system, civilisation would break down.
“What do you think?” Matt said.
“That it’s Friday and I’ve got to go to work. I’ll look at everything you’ve got tomorrow.”
Matt grinned: “Everything I’ve got?”
Beth smiled and said, “You know what I mean; all the police reports and the gory crime scene photos. What’s the second case?”
“Four victims to date. All of them were young women and had their throats cut, and three of them bled out. The last one survived, but the knife severed her larynx. The medical report states that she suffered laryngeal nerve damage. She may never be able to speak again. She had to write a statement. Her name is Javina Copeland, a thirty-year old black woman―”
“Is her colour relevant?” Beth asked.
“In this case, yes. All the victims were nonwhites.”
“Did the woman see who attacked her?”
“Not his face. He came up behind her, used the knife, and then pushed her to the ground. As he knelt down to go through the handbag she’d dropped and steal her purse, he called her a ‘dirty nigger bitch’. She said he had a deep voice. All she saw was his legs and feet, and then she fainted.”
“Where did it happen?”
“Westfield, the big shopping centre at Shepherd’s Bush. It was nine p.m. and she had just taken a lift down to the car park and was cutting through the aisles to her car when he struck.”
“Did they get it on CCTV?”
“No. Too many vehicles. The car park has four and a half thousand spaces. She was found by another shopper between a big 4x4 and one of those seven-seater people carriers.”
“So what’s your initial take on him?”
“That these are racist hate, or as we refer to them, bias-motivated crimes. The perpetrator is a man who chooses to murder the people he robs. Judging by what he said to Ms Copeland, and the fact that none of his victims have, so far, been white, then it’s a more or less safe bet that he gets off on murdering what he sees as inferior human beings. And he has a fetish. He took the victims’ panties.”
“That’s not something that you can easily narrow down,” Beth said.
“No. It’s a worst case scenario; a sexually motivated serial killer who selects his prey by the colour of their skin. Sometimes we have to rely on them making a mistake that will lead us to their door. The only plus in this case is that all four were attacked in a relatively small geographical area: one in Willesden, one in Brent Park, one in Wembley and the last in Shepherd’s Bush. Apart from the survivor they were all at home, alone. He could be stupid enough to feel safe working his own neck of the woods.”
“Which still means that the body count will go up.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it will,” Matt said as he stood up. “I’d better grab a shower and hit the road.”
Twenty minutes later he was leaving the cottage, after being told for the millionth time to be careful.
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