by Andy Maslen
48
THURSDAY 23RD AUGUST 11.00 A.M.
BROCKWELL PARK
Sister Rose Macauley, Moira Lowney’s deputy, was talking to one of the novices when someone coughed politely beside her. She turned. It was the producer of the show, a young man called, fittingly she thought, John.
‘Yes, John?’
‘Excuse me, Rose, I’m sorry to interrupt. Would it be possible to ask Moira if we could bring the food bank segment forward?’
‘When to, John?’ she asked with a smile. Such kind eyes.
‘Well, sort of, now, if possible. I know it’s short notice, but it would really help with this afternoon’s filming schedule. I’m really sorry.’
She shook her head.
‘No need to apologise. I expect she’s in her office. She has an article I know she’s desperate to finish. It’s for The Times! I’ll go and find her for you. I’m sure she’ll be happy to come now.’
Arriving outside Moira’s office door, Rose paused to steady her breathing. Inside her habit she was dripping with perspiration and she could feel the heat as a physical presence. Lately, they’d been discussing their garb, wondering whether they perhaps could adopt a more contemporary style of habit as worn by some of their sisters in the US. She’d bring it up with Moira that evening.
She knocked firmly, then twisted the knob and entered the office, ready with an apology for interrupting Moira’s writing.
The sight that confronted her made so little sense that, as a reflex, she pulled the door to with a sharp little tug.
Sister Moira’s eyes were bleeding.
She didn’t understand.
Shaking her head, but already feeling a swell of revulsion flooding her chest, she opened the door again.
Then she did understand.
Sister Moira’s eye sockets were bleeding. The eyes themselves, glistening in some sort of clear fluid streaked with pink, regarded her from a plate set in front of her on the desk.
As Sister Rose’s screaming subsided, replaced by a coughing fit so violent she retched, half a dozen nuns, plus John and a sound woman, still carrying the long boom mike with its fluffy grey cover, raced up the stairs behind her and piled to a stop in the narrow hallway outside the office.
Clambering to her feet and supporting herself against the wall, she turned her tear-streaked face to the group.
‘Call the police. Sister Moira’s been murdered.’
49
THURSDAY 23RD AUGUST 11.20 A.M.
CROWTHORNE, BERKSHIRE
Stella knew that although most of the men living within its towering red-brick perimeter walls had been referred by the criminal justice system, Broadmoor was a hospital.That meant its residents were called ‘patients’ and not ‘prisoners’.
As she dismounted her bike and removed the helmet at the main gate, she felt the oppressive nature of the place, as forbidding as any high-security prison and full of some of the most dangerous men in the UK.
Although the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, had been transferred years earlier, there were enough serial killers, murderers, violent rapists and arsonists to keep the staff busy at every hour of the day and night, 365 days a year.
She showed the guard her warrant card, waited while he photographed her and printed a visitor pass, and then still more while he checked with Jamie Hooke’s secretary that the psychiatrist was expecting the visitor standing before him. He managed to make ‘Detective Chief Inspector’ sound like ‘Hells Angels Full Patch’ but Stella wasn’t surprised. She knew her unorthodox mode of personal transport didn’t fit with the preconceptions of officialdom, especially the jobsworths who comprised its lower echelons.
Finally, the uniformed guard hung up.
‘Know your way, do you?’ he asked, his pallid features impassive.
‘Has Mr Hooke changed offices in the last two years?’
‘Not as far as I’m aware.’
‘Then, yes, thanks, I do.’
She remounted the bike, stuck her helmet back on and trundled around the inner ring road to the main building housing the clinical and administrative staff.
After a second wait, this time in a clean, bright reception area furnished with nubbly woollen sofas and a wide-screen TV showing Sky News with the sound turned low, she heard her own name called.
‘Stella! How nice to see you again.’
She stood, and turned to see Jamie Hooke striding across the polished floor tiles towards her. The forty-year-old psychiatrist moved like a dancer, she thought, light on his feet, balanced and graceful.
He wore a brown leather jacket, the shoulders and elbows smooth and shiny, over a soft, white, open-necked shirt. His jeans were faded into pale stars at the sides of his knees and a similarly pale patch on the right front pocket indicated the presence of keys and coins. Brown lace-up boots completed the outfit that said, ‘I am a friend. Not a doctor. Not a threat. And definitely not a warder.’
She held out her hand but he ignored the gesture and held her lightly by the shoulders, kissing her on both cheeks. She could smell his aftershave, a light, woody aroma, and the underlying maleness she remembered from their last meeting. Then, he had helped her put a serial killer behind bars, not here at Broadmoor but at Frankland, a Category A prison in County Durham. Roger Cates had stabbed five young men to death and attempted to cook and eat their bodies.
He released her as swiftly as he had embraced her. He had a boyish smile that made her want to tousle his dark-brown curly hair.
‘Too much?’
Stella grinned.
‘Not at all. I enjoyed it. How have you been?’
‘Come along to my office, I’ll give you the quick version while we walk.’
Jamie’s office, a large white-painted room, looked out over a tarmac courtyard where men were playing an energetic game of football despite the ferocious heat. On the short journey there, Stella had learned that his marriage had ended, amicably, six months after their previous meeting. He still saw his daughter regularly. And he had just been invited to give a speech at the American Academic of Forensic Sciences’ annual convention the following February.
‘And it’s going to be in New Orleans,’ he finished, his wet-slate eyes wide. ‘How about that? I’ll probably be late for my own session because I’m checking out some new blues bar.’
His combination of modesty and enthusiasm had attracted Stella the first time they’d met, and over the ensuing four years, nothing he’d done or said had diminished the feeling.
‘I doubt that, but congratulations anyway. Do they get many overseas speakers?’
‘Not sure. I wouldn’t imagine so but, anyway, enough about me, as they say. How are you?’
‘I’m good, thanks. Yes, really good.’
‘Are you still keeping up your journal? You told me last time it had really helped you get over losing Richard and Lola.’
‘Yup. Still do it every night. Just a few lines sometimes, especially when we’re on a tough one, but yes, and it still helps.’
He smiled, ushering her to one of a pair of armchairs flanking a coffee table.
‘Good. Coffee? Doctors and cops run on it and I just bought a new bag. It’s a new company I discovered in Mozambique. A workers’ cooperative. Fairtrade, the works. It even tastes good!’ he added, eyes crinkling as he grinned at her.
‘Sounds good, yes please.’
‘Biscuits?’
‘If you’ve got them. What are they, organic cranberry and Fairtrade macadamia nut cookies?’
He shook his head.
‘Chocolate Hob Nobs.’
Stella laughed.
‘Perfect! A copper’s breakfast.’
While Jamie busied himself making the coffee and sticking an opened packet of the chocolate biscuits in front of Stella, she looked around the office. The usual array of framed diplomas and certificates occupied much of one wall, and the one facing it held hundreds of books: textbooks and reference works, mainly. One title in particular cau
ght her eye.
‘Silence of the Lambs? What’s that, a teaching aid?’
He laughed without turning away from the coffee-making.
‘You’d be surprised. Most of our patients, well, the literate ones anyway, they’ve all read it. Sometimes more often than is good for them. It provides a useful frame of reference when I’m discussing their condition with them. Now, try this,’ he finished, turning with two mugs of coffee in his hands and handing one to Stella.
She sniffed experimentally. And smiled.
‘Mmm, that’s so good.’ She blew across the surface then took a sip. ‘I’m getting cigars, dried fruit and saddle leather.’
Jamie laughed.
‘That’s very good. Here, have a Hob Nob. I think you’ll find you’re getting milk chocolate, rolled oats and sugar.’
Stella hesitated.
‘Please tell me you’re not watching your figure?’ he said.
Stella smiled.
‘No!’
But being with you has made me think about it differently for the first time in a long time.
She took a biscuit, dunked it in her coffee and bit off half.
‘And just a hint of lecithin and palm oil.’
Jamie folded his six-foot frame into the armchair opposite, placed his mug on a magazine on the table and spread his hands.
‘So, tell me. What’s got you eating a copper’s breakfast with me on this fine August morning? Oh, and thanks for making the journey. Like I said, my schedule is particularly hectic at the moment.’
‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice.’
Jamie waved her remark away.
‘If I can help you prevent someone from causing harm, it’s never a problem, you know that.’
‘OK. Thanks. Here it is.’
Stella told Jamie the story from the discovery of Niamh Connolly’s body to that of Sarah Sharpe. She included details of the physical evidence, the mutilations, and of Isaac Holt’s arrest and subsequent release. Throughout, Jamie sat still, his left ankle crossed over his right knee, sipping his coffee from time to time and munching his way through half a dozen of the biscuits.
When Stella finished – ‘And I need to get inside his head, I need to figure out what motivates him, where he’s going to go next’ – Jamie rubbed his chin, his eyes staring at a point on the ceiling halfway between them.
He huffed out a sigh and lowered his gaze until he was looking directly at Stella.
‘You know it’s about religion, right?’
‘Yes. Religious women, at that.’
‘This is a man who is motivated by an intense hatred towards a certain kind of woman. I know at the beginning it’s going to sound like I’m stating the bleeding obvious but bear with me. Let’s feel our way into this. So, a very public opponent of abortion, a Catholic. Then a leading light in the Church of England. The editor of its house journal, no less. Despite its occasional handwringing over sexual politics, the Church of England tends not to excite people’s passions. They’d rather resolve things over a cup of tea and some home-made cake. Mrs Connolly was fifty-two and married, Ms Sharpe, sixty and single. Apart from their gender, their faith and their public profiles, they seem to have nothing in common. So I think we can conclude that all three need to be present for our killer to consider them a target.’
‘That’s pretty much where we’d got to. What about the mutilations, the removal of their pubic hair?’
Jamie narrowed his eyes.
‘It’s not unusual for a sexual sadist to mutilate his victims’ breasts, or their genitals, usually by cutting or biting. But you said the second victim, Sarah Sharpe, wasn’t mutilated.’
‘Not unless you count being shot full of arrows.’
‘Which I don’t, not really. And even though he removed her pubic hair, that doesn’t sound like a sexual psychopath either. Given unfettered access to a woman’s genitals, a psychopath into mutilation would take his time and, well, you know what they’re capable of.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Then, prompted by Jamie’s input, a thought struck her. ‘What if he doesn’t think of what he’s doing as mutilating them? What if he thinks of it as torture? That would account for the different MO.’
Jamie nodded enthusiastically.
‘It would, absolutely. Tell me, does he have a signature?’
Yes, or more than one. Possibly you’d call them components. Firstly, there’s the cause of death. He strangles them with bell rope. And there’s the missing pubic hair. He seems to shave them post mortem. That would work as a signature, right?’
Jamie nodded again, then finished his coffee.
‘Yes. Yes it would. Have you found the hair or does he take it with him?’
‘No, we haven’t found it. We can work on the assumption that he takes it away, but that’s all it is, an assumption. For all we know he could be flushing it down the toilet, or chucking it over the back fence.’
‘In my experience, that would be unusual.’
Stella couldn’t help herself. A grin spread across her face.
‘You mean compared to all the crazy shit you deal with day in, day out, a serial killer who doesn’t keep a dead woman’s pubic hair on his person is unusual?’
Jamie returned the grin.
‘OK, fair enough. But you know what I mean.’
‘Yeah, yeah, sorry.’ She spread her hands. ‘That’s what we’ve got, anyway. Pretty much the whole story. Can you tell me what’s going on in his head, doc?’
‘Here’s what I think. Your killer is motivated by overwhelmingly powerful feelings of vengefulness. I would suggest that someone, almost certainly his mother, a female teacher or perhaps a family friend, humiliated him in some way when he was a child or possibly a teenager. Given the religious angle, I feel confident that this humiliation would also have been within a religious, specifically a Christian, context. Although it might sound contradictory I wouldn’t rule out the idea that the humiliation was sexual in some way. You know, something to do with his being sinful.’ Jamie paused. ‘I don’t think he’s going to stop. And I think he’s going to escalate.’
Feeling dread gathering inside her like black thunderheads boiling up over a landscape already riven with storms, Stella asked a question she only half-wanted him to answer.
‘How do you escalate from torturing women, strangling them to death and displaying their corpses in their own homes?’
Jamie shrugged.
‘I can think of lots of ways. He could take them somewhere only he knows about, and spend more time with them. He could increase the violence of the tortures. He could film himself with them. He could make family members watch. He could—’
Stella held her hand up.
‘OK, OK, I get the picture. He’s sick in the head and he’s only getting warmed up.’
Jamie flushed and looked down.
‘Sorry. I know I get carried away sometimes. I guess you want something practical from me. Something to help you catch him?’
‘That would be nice. You know, his home address, or his National Insurance number?’
Jamie smiled grimly.
‘No can do, I’m afraid. But how about this? I think he believes he’s making some kind of statement. A public statement. Killers driven by religion tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they believe they’re doing God’s work, or they believe they’re ridding the world of hypocrites. To me, it feels like your killer thinks he belongs in the second group. In his shoes I would be thinking in terms of higher-profile victims, the better to make my case. I am saying, “Hey, world! Wake up! These women are saying one thing and doing another. They preach faith and forgiveness but they’re just torturers. I am just giving them a taste of their own medicine.”’
Stella noticed the change in tense, from ‘I would’ to ‘I am’ and marvelled at Jamie’s ability, no, his willingness, to adopt the persona of a serial killer.
‘So we should try and think ahead, get to his next victim before he does.’
‘That would be a good idea, obviously. Failing that you could announce at a press conference that women who fit the victim profile should take extra care.’
Stella heard shouting from beyond Jamie’s office window. Male voices. She jumped to her feet and crossed to the window, heart racing. She had time to notice that Jamie was watching her from his chair, smiling. She looked down at the courtyard. Then she understood.
Half a dozen of the men playing football were jumping up and down, hugging each other. The opposing goalkeeper was bending to retrieve the ball from the back of his net.
She turned away and sat down again, feeling mildly shamefaced.
‘Does it make you wonder how a bunch of violent rapists, serial killers and cannibals, after all the heinous crimes they’ve committed, can just play footie and give each other man-hugs when one of them scores a goal?’ Jamie asked her.
She shrugged, not wanting to reveal how precisely he’d read her mind.
‘Surprise me.’
He took a sip of his coffee before answering.
‘Context. The men we treat here are almost constantly on guard in the outside world, often against the voices or inner demons that, as they see it, control their actions. Believe it or not, they feel safe in here. They can afford to drop their guard. We impose a strict routine, which many serial offenders feel comfortable inhabiting, given their own fondness for ritual. And although some of them selected male victims, the absence of women here lowers tension between them and with the staff. Finally, because we’re a hospital, not a prison, they see themselves as people in need of help, not punishment, which allows them to reach some sort of accommodation with what they’ve done.’
