The Sandman

by steve higgs

  The penalty for that was to suffer every day with the pain of his crime against her. Karen and the others were part of that penance. Valerie’s pain demanded it. The women were sent to him, that was what he believed.

  Valerie’s voice would whisper in his ear, ‘Look how much alike she is to me.’ She demanded they die, so he would sing them gently to sleep, doing as Valerie insisted, but in a gentle, caring way.

  The police were an annoyance, but one he could accept. Ramsey’s issue was with Tempest Michaels and the annoying Blue Moon team. Jane Butterworth had no just cause to poke her nose into his business in the first place, and in taking her so he could find his way to Karen, he triggered the rest of them.

  That Tempest came to his house last night had been a total shock, but one he played well. Looking back, it filled him with joy to have been so close to being caught only to slip through the hands of his nemesis.

  Ha! His nemesis! Ramsey hadn’t thought of Tempest Michaels as such before, but it was fitting. Certainly, no one had ever come closer and now he got to demonstrate to his followers and the world just how superior he was by killing the man and his entire team.

  They would walk willingly into his trap in their desperate bid to save their friend. All he needed to do was give them a final nudge.

  Tempest. The Blue Moon Office. Saturday, December 24th 1336hrs

  I phoned Jagjit from the taxi, three of us guys crammed in the back because Amanda was swift enough to snag the front seat before the rest of us reacted. So far as we were concerned, that meant she had to pay for the fare plus tip.

  ‘Tempest, where the heck have you been?’ Jagjit babbled excitedly. ‘No, nevermind, it’s not important. You’re never going to believe what we found out.’

  It turned out that while they did as we insisted last night and went home, they did not crack open the champagne and relax. Following my call from Harry Hengist’s house, they got straight back into the research using a copy of Jane’s file Alice made at the office.

  I gave him a brief breakdown of our evening and how boring it had been, and he understood why he hadn’t heard from any of us. Rather than brief me on his discoveries over the phone, he was coming to the office again.

  On Christmas Eve, Rochester High Street was as bustling and busy as it ever gets. Street sellers touted their wares, the smells of mulled wine and frying onions filled the air. We all needed to eat, and boy did I need coffee, so en route to the office on foot because we got the cab to let us out at the far end of the High Street, we split up.

  Big Ben went for coffee, probably because he wanted to chat up the girls in there and prove he hadn’t lost his touch, and Amanda stopped to snag us some sausages in buns.

  Basic came with me to the office. My feet stopped moving the moment I could see the front façade.

  There was police tape all over the front door listing the place as a crime scene. Caused to stop walking by the shock of it, I was running the next second. Driven by fury, I tore at the tape, ripping it from the door in a frenzy.

  I could see over the frosted panel to the office interior and the mess inside. I was so desperate to get through the door, I almost snapped the key in the lock in my haste.

  Throwing the ball of crime scene tape to the floor, I looked around my office. What last night had been a tidy organised space, was now a wreck. The police had come looking for evidence after they arrested us. It was yet another reason why Quinn wanted me locked up last night. With me under arrest, he could legitimately raid my office and take my files.

  Now there was nothing we knew about the Sandman case that he didn’t also know. The computer tower from the reception desk was missing. Leaving Basic hovering by the door, I ran through the office to confirm they had taken the computers from both my office and Amanda’s. Then, getting more incensed with every heartbeat, I ran to the back store. They hadn’t just taken the files from the cabinets, the cabinets were gone too.

  I heard Amanda swearing and ran back out to find her just inside the front door. She’d charmed the sausage seller into giving her a cardboard box to carry our food in and was holding it in front of her body as she stared wide-eyed at the desolation of our once-tidy office.

  A fresh thought hit my chest like a thunderclap, stopping my heart and restarting it. Yanking out my phone, the battery of which was almost dead after a night in a box at the police station, I called my neighbour.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ Mrs Comerforth’s answered the phone. ‘Will you be home soon? My daughter is coming to take me to her house for Christmas.’

  I’d forgotten about that. She told me a few days ago when we were chatting on her doorstep. Being neighbourly, I’d politely enquired as to her plans for the holiday and was pleased to hear she had somewhere to go and people to share it with.

  ‘I’m afraid I will not be home for a while at least, Mrs Comerforth. I’m terribly sorry. When it comes time for you to go, please deposit the dogs back in my house. I will get there as soon as I am able.’

  ‘Very good, dear. I heard your name on the news a little while ago. Did you get arrested again?’

  I sighed and hung my head. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. I am no longer in custody though. I will be home as soon as I can.’ I repeated.

  I was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, I needed a shower, I was hungry, and we were no closer to catching the Sandman and rescuing Jane than we had ever been. With a heartfelt thank you to Mrs Comerforth and a wish that she would have a happy Christmas, I got off the phone.

  Amanda had placed the tray of sausages in buns on the reception desk and was holding her head as she looked around.

  ‘They took everything,’ I let her know. ‘Even the filing cabinets out back.’

  ‘Hey, folks … Wow!’ Big Ben came through the door with four coffees in a cardboard holder. Like the rest of us, he was shocked at the change from the tidy office we left behind.

  ‘How are we even going to do the research now?’ Amanda gasped, pulling at her hair in frustration.

  Hampering us probably hadn’t been Quinn’s primary intention, just a happy side effect. He had all the data, and at some point, he would catch the Sandman.

  I took a few breaths to steady myself while I thought.

  ‘Jagjit and Alice are on their way here right now. They have information to share and will have a laptop with them. They also have a car,’ Jagjit owns a double cab utility vehicle, ‘so if we need to go anywhere, we can.’ I was going to need to do something about the dogs and probably wanted to go home to get my own laptop.

  Big Ben put the coffees down and grabbed a sausage. Taking a bite, he spoke around the gob of bread and meat in his mouth.

  ‘We have a white board still,’ he nodded his head across the room. ‘Until Jagjit turns up, why don’t we put our heads together and see what we know?’

  Big Ben acting as the calm voice of reason was like waking up from a coma to discover ducks had taken over the world and everyone now spoke Belgian. He was right though. Grabbing a bun full of sausage with one hand and a coffee with the other, I went to the board.

  We started adding names and notes. The Sandman had three captives that we knew of. He was clearly not at any of the addresses listed under his name because the police would have caught him already. We focused on the probability that he was somewhere not listed against any of his names.

  He’d been one step ahead of me since the start, but when we started to talk about that, I had to question what I’d seen when I met him as Harry Hengist.

  ‘I scared him,’ I nodded to myself when I said it. The thought had occurred to me before but now I was more certain. ‘My arrival at his house was a shock.’ I explained my thoughts aloud. ‘He could have accused me of attacking him though and be sure I would waste a chunk of my evening keeping the police company.’

  ‘Why didn’t he?’ asked Amanda, in a tone that acknowledged there had to be a good reason for it.

  I thought for a second before concluding, ‘Because he believed I wou
ld lead him to Karen Gilbert.’

  ‘Which you did,’ she agreed, with an apologetic grimace.

  I frowned deeply, running the events in Harrietsham through my head. ‘No one tailed me there,’ I stated confidently.

  Big Ben asked, ‘How sure are you?’

  I puffed out my cheeks and argued with myself. There had been no car following me on the road into the small village. I would have seen it, and there was no one visible in the street when I arrived. They would have needed to be there in advance of my arrival or how could they have seen where I went if they were also not following me. Did the Sandman have a helicopter at his disposal?’

  While pondering that question, something the reporters said outside the station came back to me. ‘They said there were men in robes,’ I murmured, replaying their words in my head.

  Amanda said, ‘What? Who said what?’

  ‘Men in robes attacked Marion and Buck in their home and dragged Karen Gilbert from it,’ I repeated. I doubted that was verbatim what was said but it was close enough.

  ‘Men in robes,’ repeated Big Ben, his face taking on a concerned look. ‘Basic and me were attacked by a bunch of dickheads in robes when we went to Jane’s grans. I told you about that.’

  ‘You never said they were wearing robes,’ I argued.

  He opened his mouth to argue, but Amanda said, ‘It doesn’t matter who said what. What does it mean?’

  ‘Do you remember when we left the hospital, I bumped into a chap wearing a black cassock? He was dressed like a monk but clearly wasn’t one.’

  She got exactly what I was saying. ‘This is all connected! They work for the Sandman!’

  Big Ben screwed up his face. ‘How is that even possible? How can a serial killer have a team of assistants?’

  ‘You said it yourself last night,’ I reminded him.

  ‘I did?’

  ‘You said they looked like they were in a cult of some kind. I was too busy to hear what you were saying or I might have connected the dots sooner.’ I was starting to feel sick with all the things I was finally working out. ‘I also know how they found Karen Gilbert.’

  Everyone watched me fish around in my pockets to find the odd little electronic gizmo.

  Holding it up, I mournfully told them, ‘I think this is a tracking device.’

  Amanda swore.

  Big Ben echoed it.

  In the silence that followed I doubted I was the only one reeling from the latest revelations. We were not up against one man; we had a force of unknown strength with which to contend. It explained several anomalies such as why the Sandman wasn’t wherever Jane and Jan were when I found him at his house last night, and how he managed to snatch three people in a short space of time and overpower Jan in his apartment.

  Until this very moment, I had not thought to question how Jan was taken. Big Ben said his apartment was trashed like there had been a fight in it.

  The enemy were resourceful, possibly numerous – Big Ben said he fought twelve of them – and had the upper hand in every category. If this were a game of Top Trumps we would lose hopelessly, but it wasn’t and now that we knew a little more, maybe we could use it to our advantage.

  Big Ben reached out an open hand to me. ‘Want to give me that thing? They can try tracking your movements after I turn it into dust.’

  I almost gave it to him but snatched it away at the last moment. Holding it aloft, I said, ‘This might come in handy yet.’

  He jinked an eyebrow at me. ‘How so?’

  Amanda answered for me. ‘They don’t know we know. If we can figure out where they are, we might be able to use it to confuse them.’

  Sounds coming from the back room of the office drew our eyes as Jagjit and Alice came in.

  ‘Where are your cars?’ Jagjit asked. ‘The carpark is empty.’

  ‘Still at the police impound yard,’ grumbled Big Ben.

  Straight down to business, I asked them, ‘What have you got for us?’

  Quinn. Dissection of a Serial Killer. Saturday, December 24th 1348hrs

  Chief Inspector Quinn had the attention of a room filled with police officers. That one of their own had been kidnapped got the attention of every police officer instantly, many returning to duty as volunteers despite their shifts ending. They were not just from Maidstone either. The demand to raid more than a dozen properties across Kent drew in teams from constabularies throughout the county, each of them sending a representative to act as liaison.

  A tactical team, the same one as earlier, were at his disposal and he was holding court over them all. This was going to be his crowning glory. All they had to do was work the case in a methodical manner, narrowing down the possible locations for the serial killer and his victims until they found them.

  Whether the victims were dead or alive would not impact greatly on the magnitude of his achievement, yet he knew he would be conferred hero status if he got to them in time.

  Addressing his audience, he clicked the mouse to bring up a new slide.

  ‘This is Valerie Mitchell. Born Valerie Babington, she is presumed to be his first victim. I will hand the floor now to Dr Richard Ventin, a criminal behaviouralist and profiler from Scotland Yard. Dr Ventin.’

  Standing back to allow the expert to step up to the microphone, Quinn stopped listening so he could watch to make sure everyone else was. The egghead droned on in a monotone voice, citing various papers on serial killers and their patterns of behaviour. None of it was going to get him any closer to the location of the Sandman but there were a lot of people working on it.

  The discovery that Ramsey Mitchell owned and ran a chain of successful locksmith franchises aligned with Jane Butterworth’s notes about entering locked properties without leaving anything to indicate someone had. That revelation led almost instantly to one that made his eyes pop out.

  Every single one of Ramsey’s employees was a criminal. They had all served time in prison and all had serious psychological issues. Many had committed crimes against women and could most likely be relied upon to do so again given the chance.

  That Ramsey Mitchell singled them out for training and employment as his locksmiths explained how it came to be men, not just a man, who broke into the home in Harrietsham to kidnap Karen Gilbert and terrorise the couple living there. That they both survived was amazing.

  Dr Ventin was explaining a theory he had about the Sandman trying to recreate an event in his life. In the doctor’s words, Ramsey Mitchell was locked into a period when his wife died and that was why he took only women who resembled her.

  There was no death record for Valerie Mitchell, but if her husband murdered her, he would not report her missing. She was his first victim, buried somewhere in the Kent countryside no doubt. When they caught him, would they spend years attempting to find the bodies of his victims? Would he have a map somewhere to tell them where each was hidden, or would Ramsey simply not remember?

  As a precaution, Chief Inspector Quinn had directed two plain-clothes officers to watch Tempest Michaels and his friends. How they could succeed when he had taken all their information and left them with nothing, he couldn’t fathom. He felt sure they couldn’t, yet it still felt like a sensible step to keep an eye on them.

  Impatient for a call from them, or a breakthrough from the officers trawling through the Blue Moon research, he turned his attention back to the boring profiler.

  Tempest. Locksmiths. Saturday, December 24th 1406hrs

  Jagjit and Alice had been busy, and if the bags under their eyes were anything to go by, they’d had less sleep than us last night.

  ‘It was when you left last night that we started talking about who the real person was,’ he explained.

  ‘We had all these different names,’ continued Alice. ‘But we didn’t know which was the real one or if any of them were.’

  Jagjit opened his laptop. ‘We figured it had to be Ramsey Mitchell because that was the name of the juvenile with the arrest record.’

  ‘Th
at’s almost certainly the case,’ agreed Amanda.

  Jagjit nodded. ‘Well, would you believe he’s a locksmith?’

  Big Ben cursed. ‘I knew it!’

  It explained the bit where he was getting into properties, but we guessed as much already.

  Jagjit got on with telling why that was important before I had to ask.

  ‘He owns a whole firm,’ he explained, ‘and it looks like all the people he employs are criminals.’ He spent the next ten minutes showing us what he meant.

  Jagjit used the laptop to show us what he had found and took us to the website for the locksmith business. ‘This is it,’ he announced.

  I stared slack-jawed at the logo. ‘Sleep Safe Locksmiths,’ I read aloud with a slightly hysterical stutter. ‘It’s like he’s bragging.’

  Amanda read the catchphrase beneath the firm’s symbol. ‘You’ll sleep safe with us.’

  It was genuinely hard to believe he was so blatant and obvious with it.

  Jagjit clicked into the next page which showed vans and smiling locksmiths holding up shiny new keys. Big Ben sputtered out his coffee, making us look his way. He had liquid dripping off his nose.

  ‘That’s Smiler,’ he jabbed a finger at the screen. Sensing that his comment required more explanation, he said, ‘I punched him in the head yesterday. He was one of the fake monks that attacked me in Aylesford. I’d rather like to meet him again, actually.’

  I sniffed in a slow deep breath and exhaled again. ‘He employs people with a criminal record and uses them to help him commit murder.’ It made my stomach turn. ‘He killed his wife and has been killing ever since. I’m no profiler but I would be willing to bet this is some kind of weird need to recreate the original act.’

  Jagjit said, ‘Um.’

  We all looked his way. All except Alice who said, ‘We couldn’t find any record of her death.’ When no one said anything, she added, ‘There’s no obituary for her. We couldn’t even find a story about her going missing.’

  Amanda scrunched up her face a little. ‘There wouldn’t be if he murdered her, and no one reported her missing. Given how many houses he has, he could have moved to a new place and no one would have ever noticed his wife was missing.’