The Sandman

by steve higgs

  ‘No,’ Karen confirmed. ‘I am not. Like Buck said, it is time for you to leave now.’

  I didn’t move straight away. I wanted to ask her how she was going to feel when Jane’s body was found and she could have helped us save her, but to do so would be both cruel and unfair. Instead, I asked, ‘Can I send you some pictures? My team are working to identify the man. When they think they have him, will you tell me if he is the same man you saw in your bedroom?’

  Karen Gilbert cast her eyes down, looking at the floor rather than meeting my eyes. After a second or so, she nodded her head; a small unhappy movement. ‘Yes. I still don’t think I will be able to identify him though.’

  It was as good as I was going to get, and it was time to accept defeat.

  Leaving the house with Hilary on my shoulder, I prayed Amanda was having better luck than me.

  Amanda. Aliases. Friday, December 23rd 1956hrs

  Jagjit hadn’t found another one or, at least, he hadn’t found another house owned by Toby Carter nearby to one of Jane’s suspiciously missing women. What he had found was another example of two different houses owned by a man bearing the same name.

  A little more trawling showed that Toby Carter only lived in the two houses under his name for a total of four years and three months and only eighteen months of that was in the first house.

  The second name that cropped up twice was Alexander Banks. He lived in Sittingbourne near to a woman called Jennifer Metcalf in 1995 but moved away before she went missing and cropped up again in 2016 in the seaside resort of Sandwich. That’s where a woman called Elise Dupont vanished. According to Land Registry he still owned the house.

  We were onto something, I just didn’t know what.

  The file from Simon and Steven came with a picture. Apart from the name – Ramsey Mitchell - that was the only part I was interested in. The fifteen-year-old version of the man might look vastly different to the current model, but it was all I had to go on. His date of birth made him sixty-three today so he might have no hair or white hair or a wig. Glasses would change the angles of his face and his nose might have changed shape, been broken, or even have been subjected to surgery.

  Until I found an up-to-date picture, I wouldn’t know, and just like with Toby Carter, there were dozens of people out there by the same name.

  While Jagjit continued to plug away at the neighbours’ conundrum, I jumped into LinkedIn to search for each man, starting with Ramsey Mitchell since his fingerprints were on Jane’s phone.

  I got seventeen hits. Some were easy to dismiss because I was looking for a white guy in his sixties, but as I binned more and more of the options, a creeping sensation that he wasn’t going to be there at all soon proved to be accurate.

  Resetting, I searched for Toby Carter. This time I found thirteen Toby’s and two hits that could be the right man. They were London based which wasn’t so far away as to be unrealistic, and they looked more or less the right age. LinkedIn doesn’t show ages which left me to guess how old each man might be. If, like everyone else, they used a good photograph and failed to update it ever, the pictures I was looking at could be at least five years old.

  This was hardly an exact science.

  I copied each picture and sent it to the printer, keeping the size small so the image wouldn’t pixelate.

  I met Alice there, ‘I think I found someone,’ she told me without sounding confident.

  ‘We got a hit on the fingerprint,’ I shared with her, handing her a copy of the email with the picture of the teenage Ramsey on.

  ‘He looks like a criminal,’ she commented.

  It was an easy thing to say but rarely true. As a former police officer I knew some of the biggest crooks wore suits. Besides, everyone looks guilty in their mug shots.

  What I said was, ‘Can you try to find him on social media? He doesn’t show up on LinkedIn.’

  ‘Not everyone does,’ she pointed out.

  That was true enough, but scrutinising the pictures I printed, I was still standing next to the printer when her images popped out.

  ‘This is Toby Carter,’ she held a picture up for me to see and my eyes almost popped out of my head. ‘At least, it’s the only Toby Carter the right age and race and stuff.’

  Unthinkingly, I snatched the sheet of A4 from her hands, ran to the coffee table, and fell to my knees to place it side by side with the picture of Ramsey Mitchell as a teenager.

  He had aged a lot over the prevailing five decades, but there was no way it wasn’t the same person.

  Alice leaned over my shoulder, a slight gasp escaping her lips when she saw the same thing that caught my attention. ‘Is that the same person? Did he change his name?’

  I shook my head. ‘Maybe. Or he used aliases. A sudden thought jolted me. ‘We need to get pictures of Alexander Banks!’

  Tempest. Getting Rubbed the Wrong Way. Friday, December 23rd 2001hrs

  I don’t know how many times I have phoned Chief Inspector Ian Quinn, but whatever the number is, not one time has it been a pleasant experience. A few times in the past, we had come close to seeing eye to eye. We even attended a stag party together once. Well, not exactly together, but we were both there and managed to remain civil for the sake of the other attendees.

  I tell myself that he is a good cop, someone who can be trusted, but the truth is I believe his self-interest threatens to overrule on doing what is decent a lot of the time. If he could snatch a victory from someone else and get away with it, he would do so. That applied doubly when it came to me, so it was with deep reservation that I placed a call to him now.

  I knew he would answer it, just as I knew he would act like a dick and pretend I was wasting his time. He knew I wouldn’t be calling him unless I needed something from him, and that I knew I wouldn’t get what I needed unless I had something worthwhile to offer him.

  ‘Mr Michaels,’ his irritating voice filled my car.

  ‘PC Jan Van Doorn has been taken by the Sandman.’ I didn’t bother with pleasantries.

  I heard what might have been a grinding of his teeth before he replied. ‘Is that supposed to jar me into motion, Mr Michaels?’

  Staying calm, I said, ‘One of your officers is in the hands of a serial killer, Quinn. If you fail to act, you will be held to account. I am recording this conversation, by the way,’ I lied.

  ‘I see. What evidence do you have to support your claim?’

  I didn’t have any. I was going off Big Ben’s judgement call and he could be wrong. Were that the case though, I doubted very much he would be wrong about Jan being taken. It might not be the Sandman who had him, but given the convenience of the timing, I was willing to bet my shirt.

  What I said was, ‘Go to his apartment and check for yourself, Quinn. He is missing. His partner, Jane Butterworth, is missing, and we know the Sandman has Jane.’ Feeling my ire rising, I changed tack so I could wrap the call up. ‘Listen, Chief Inspector, I don’t care which of us solves this crime, catches the bad guy, and gets the praise for it. I don’t care one bit, there is no promotion in it for me.’

  ‘You think that is what I care about?’ he snapped in my ear.

  ‘Ha! I know it is all you care about. Your public image is everything to you. So have the damned collar, I already said you could. But get your people moving and help me find Jane and Jan.’

  He growled out his next words. ‘Do not raise your voice to me, Mr Michaels, I will not tolerate it. You sail too close to the wind all too often and seem to forget how generous I am with your misdemeanours.’

  He kind of had a point. He knew I had been shooting a firearm in public yesterday and wouldn’t have too much trouble proving it if he chose to. That was the subtextual threat I heard anyway.

  Nevertheless, what I said next couldn’t be printed. In the passenger seat, Hilary blushed.

  Quinn was silent for a second, seething at the other end of the line. ‘Any more of that, Mr Michaels, and I shall arrest you on sight the next time we meet. My team
will investigate the alleged disappearance of Constable Van Doorn. If indeed he is missing, I will require a full statement from you.’

  ‘I’ll be at the Blue Moon office.’ I said the words and jabbed the red button to end the call. Then I began the task of berating myself for losing my cool. I knew better than to raise my voice and use profanity. Generally, I pride myself on my ability to remain calm and unflustered when those around me are starting to panic.

  There was something about Quinn that rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. He made me spit feathers more often than anyone I had ever met.

  It was done now and even if I could undo it, I wasn’t going to.

  I pressed harder on the accelerator and fired the sleek, white Lotus toward the dark horizon. I was keen to get back to the office.

  Jane. Electricity. Friday, December 23rd 2007hrs

  It took another hour, using the heel of my boot to smash away at the plaster around the door until I exposed the electrics inside. There was no handle on the inside of the cell, nothing for me to grab and pull, and the gap around the door where it fitted into the frame was no greater than a fraction of an inch.

  Once my hands were free and I could move on to tackle the door, I kicked it and shoved it and barged it with my shoulder just to see what it would do. All I got for my effort was some bruises. It was after I gave up kicking and shoulder barging it that I chose to attack the wall.

  I surmised that there had to be a lock keeping the door closed. Maybe it was electronic and maybe it was mechanical. Maybe I could do like Shawshank Redemption and chip right through the wall to the other side.

  I doubted there would be time for that, but luck chose to give me a break because I found the cable almost straight away.

  Well, actually, what I found was the plastic conduit it ran in, but its presence inside the wall made the plaster thin and when I whacked it, the conduit flexed a little and the plaster broke up.

  It still took what felt like an hour and I found myself questioning how long I had been working at getting free. Was it three hours? Was it four? More than that? Where was the Sandman? Why wasn’t he trying to stop me?

  These questions and more swirled endlessly around my head as powder and grit from the plaster coated my skin. I was damp with sweat and deeply uncomfortable, but the option of taking a break never occurred to me. I was fighting for my life.

  With almost a two-foot section of the conduit exposed, all the way from the mid-point of the door where I expected the lock to be, and upward to the top of the door almost, I started to yank at it.

  It was not my first attempt to get the cable out of the wall, but previous attempts had all failed because I had too little leverage and too much of the conduit was still trapped inside the wall.

  This time, losing a fingernail in the process, I was able to get enough purchase to rip it free.

  By about an inch.

  A fresh shower of plaster rained down to land at my stockinged feet. Sharp pieces were already digging in. My boots were ruined, the heels battered down to almost nothing, yet they were all I had and better for running and fighting in than forty denier nylon.

  I shuffled carefully to the bed to put them back on, dusting off the soles of my feet as best I could first. Taking a second to eye up my latest challenge, it was time to see if I could convince the door to open.

  As I said before, I am not an electrician. I can do stuff with computers but if you think those two things are somehow linked, you could not be more wrong. I never touch the electronics inside a computer, I simply manipulate the data available.

  So looking at three wires as they exited the conduit to go into a device mounted inside the wall, I really had no idea what I was looking at. I also didn’t have any tools, so stripping the wire, getting to the electricity inside and … what? Hotwiring it? Not only did I have no idea how to do that, I also wasn’t entirely sure what it meant.

  I clenched my jaw, grabbed all the wires and the conduit, placed my right foot against the wall for leverage and ripped the whole lot from the device they fed.

  Causing the wires to tear from their anchor points took only a fraction of the energy I applied, with the result that I flew backward, tripped, and slipped on the plaster detritus. I landed on the bed.

  The door popped open with an audible click.

  The Sandman. Listening. Friday, December 23rd 2011hrs

  Listening intently to the sounds coming from Jane’s cell, the Sandman stirred a small spoon around a china cup then set it delicately on the saucer. It was disappointing that he could not see her efforts; she was being thoroughly industrious if her grunting and straining were any indication.

  Normally, by now he would have sung her to sleep, but using her as bait was keeping the Blue Moon team in the game. They had led him to Karen Gilbert already, but it was clear they knew too much so now he needed to ensure what they had discovered died with them.

  His acolytes had a busy night ahead.

  Once or twice, it had been necessary to postpone his gift and keep his chosen lady safe for the night in one of his purpose-built rooms. He liked when they tried to escape though, it was most entertaining to watch their endeavours. That was what he was doing now or would be if Jane hadn’t found a way to black out the camera. None of the previous chosen had ever done that.

  By the sounds of it, she was untied and trying to break out of the slumber room. It was an almost hopeless endeavour but not one he was going to attempt to stop. The more time she wasted the more tired she would be and thus the more she would welcome him singing her to sleep when the time came.

  Soon he would travel to Harrietsham. Karen was waiting for him. His acolytes were already there, poised but awaiting his instructions. The finesse he would usually apply was no longer tenable and that irked him. However, the mission was more important than his personal desire for artistry.

  Karen had to be saved.

  Lost inside his own head, he jerked forward in his seat when he heard the door to Jane’s room pop open. She’d been calling it a cell; a cruel term for what he regarded as a slumber zone. She, like all the others, could use the time to get some well-earned rest, yet he had come to accept that none ever would. They would fruitlessly try to escape the peace he promised them.

  Sitting forward with keen anticipation, he saw Jane emerge from her room. The corridor outside was dimly lit – enough light for her to see by and enough for him to be able to see her delicate features and the emotions crossing her face.

  A frown creased his forehead when he saw that she had not been crying. She was the first to ever escape the slumber zone, and she was the first to ever show such control over her fear. More often than not, when they awoke in the darkness, they curled into ball and sobbed until he came for them. Then they would beg and offer him things he didn’t want.

  Jane was doing neither thing, and appeared to have ripped a length of cable conduit from inside the wall. It wasn’t much of a weapon, not wielded by a woman, but yet again, hefting a weapon was a behaviour he hadn’t seen before.

  Perplexed, he watched her begin to explore the corridor. Beneath ground, she would never find the way out, but she might find her boyfriend.

  It was time to go, he decided, finishing his tea and placing the cup with its saucer to one side. Karen was more important. If Jane succeeded in rousing her boyfriend and freeing him from his slumber zone, they would face his acolytes and that would be the end of that.

  Amanda. Slipped Right Through our Fingers. Friday, December 23rd 2024hrs

  Try as we might, we could not find pictures of Alexander Banks. There were men by that name, of course, and several Alexandra Banks’s as well, which our search engine threw in for good measure. Having exhausted all the methods we could think of to find a picture of a man with that name who might match the photographs we already had, I took a moment to consider what it meant.

  Voicing my thoughts to the room, I said, ‘Toby Carter and Ramsey Mitchell are the same person. That much we can be
sure of and I don’t think many people, other than celebrities, have legitimate reasons for employing multiple aliases.’

  Alice was about to say something when the sound of the office back door opening caught everyone’s attention. The buzz of adrenalin hitting my bloodstream made my stomach tighten.

  That was until I caught the heavenly salt and vinegar laden scent of fish and chips.

  Big Ben burst through the inner door that leads to the back rooms and the carpark beyond. Hanging from one hand was a large white plastic bag, the contents of which could not be confused with anything else.

  Basic strolled in behind him, another bag hanging from his right hand.

  ‘Anyone hungry?’ asked Big Ben with a grin. ‘We have this bad habit of not stopping to eat and then suffering because of it. I don’t know what’s ahead, but we might as well face it with full bellies.’

  I could pose no argument, the tightening in my stomach easing as it began to grumble its emptiness.

  Rushing to clear a space on the coffee table, I told him, ‘We found something.’

  Big Ben put the bag down and shucked his outdoor jacket. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Someone, actually, I should say.’ I showed him the printed pictures of Toby Carter and Ramsey Mitchell.

  While Big Ben scrutinised the two pieces of paper, one in each hand with his head going back and forth like a person watching tennis, Alice and Jagjit started to share out the fish suppers. Each paper parcel contained a large fillet of white fish deep-fried in a crispy batter and a large mound of unctuously soggy chips. The pungent smell of vinegar filled the air, making me glad it was after hours and no customers would be coming by.

  ‘These are both the same person,’ observed Big Ben, bringing the pictures into one hand so he could steal a chip with the other. ‘This the guy then?’