Hurt (The Hurt Series) (19 page)

‘Hey me, wassup?’

‘How’re you feeling?’

‘Birds are singing, words are flowing…never better.’

She felt a tear prick the corner of her eye. ‘I…’

‘Doing spag’bol’ tonight. You up for it?’

Ray’s spaghetti bolognaise was her favourite dish, made with a secret ingredient that he’d take to the grave. Through a tight throat, she said, ‘Sounds perfect.’

‘Excellent. Listen, honey, I gotta go…’

‘
Why? What’s wrong?’

‘The mince is burning. You okay?’

Jessop rubbed her moist eyes. ‘Fine.’

‘Cool. See you tonight.’ The connection broke.

She sat and seethed. How dare he be so fucking chirpy? Unlike Ray, who spent his days immersed in a fictional word where the hero never died, she spent her days in the real world where everyone died. And most, undeservedly. Yes, she knew with the chemotherapy there was a chance he would beat this, but pessimism was in her genes. Yet the support leaflets all preached that stoic optimism and a strong mental attitude were invaluable during the ordeal. She’d not met anyone as mentally strong as Ray, especially when it came to his writing. The man was a prisoner of his commitment to the craft he loved so much. That was why he was so good at what he did.

Something cold ran down her spine.

‘Prisoner of his commitment,’ she mumbled, looking down at the question she had written earlier.

Snatching a new biro she flipped over the page and began scribbling.

First victim, Tanya Adams. No one saw the killer enter Tanya’s block that morning. Yet he knew Tanya and Keisha had gone out shopping, meaning he must’ve been watching the block from somewhere, and in daylight. Risky in such a confined estate with so many young mothers up so early with their kids.

But he had Tanya’s key, didn’t he? He could’ve let himself into the block whenever he wanted. And what better time than in the dead of night, under the cover of darkness? Then wait hidden in the stairwell until his targets left for town before letting himself into Tanya’s flat.

Unblinking she stared at what she had written. Began scribbling again: Second victim: Darren Spencer. No CCTV footage of a car or person following the lovers into the park. Yet the killer knew where they’d be that night, and had struck at precisely the right moment when he knew neither Rebecca nor Darren would see him approach.

But he hadn’t
approached
, had he? He’d magically appeared from nowhere.

Flesh prickling with anticipation, she reached in her draw and fished out Darren’s file. Thumbed the pages until she found the photo of his Peugeot 406 four door saloon with the independent boot.

‘Oh Christ.’

A minute later she was on the phone to Darren’s girlfriend and hearing exactly what she’d wanted to hear. According to Rebecca, Darren had mislaid his car key a fortnight prior to his death.

Third victim, she wrote frantically. Paul Bromley. No witnesses reported seeing the killer arrive at the scene. That was because he’d approached under the cover of darkness. Yet unlike Tanya’s block’s communal area he had nowhere to wait and hide, especially with the likes of Cynthia Truman twitching the curtains.

She reached for the phone. A moment later a shaken Stewart Nichols was denying either he or Paul had lost their house keys prior to today.’

‘You sure?’ she pushed.

‘Positive. Why do you ask?’

Not wanting to distress the poor man any further with her theory of his partner’s killer hiding in their house whilst they slept, she thanked Stewart and hung up.

So why hadn’t the killer lifted Paul or Stewart’s keys as he had Tanya’s and Darren’s?

She wrote: Because unlike Tanya’s block of six flats with its communal door exposed to the surrounding flats, and Darren’s car parked on a tight, busy terraced street, Paul and Stewart lived
in
a three bedroom semi in the heart of quiet suburbia. Their house had a back and a side door, both secluded from the neighbours, giving the killer ample time and cover in which to pick one of their locks and sneak in and hide until his morning ambush.

Blood pumping fast with adrenaline, she looked down at her notepad where she had finished her brainstorming with another question: So where in the house had he hidden?

Chapter
Forty-seven

News vans and reporters still lingered at the entrance to Yew Tree Close. Two weary uniformed officers made sure any resident wishing to come and go could do so without a microphone or notebook shoved in their face.

With the news about Nathan Randal hitting the lunchtime news, followed by this latest murder, Jessop was prime fodder for the ravenous reporters. On seeing her car pull into the close, the mob swarmed. As tempted as she was to mow them down, she braked hard and waited for the uniforms to clear the way.

‘Bastards,’ she hissed.

‘Excuse me?’ came Knowles’ voice down the phone.

‘Reporters. Hang on a minute, Mike.’ Finally with clear passage, she drove on and pulled up outside Paul and Stewart’s house in which she was certain the killer had hidden.

‘Sorry, Mike. You were saying?’

‘I was saying it was lucky Darren owned a saloon,’ Knowles said. ‘The bastard would’ve struggled to sneak out from a hatchback unnoticed. How long do you think he was in there?’

‘CCTV at the mall’s car park doesn’t show anyone climbing into the boot. That means our boy was in there before Darren and Rebecca went out that night,’

‘Which means he knew they were going out that night,’ Knowles deduced.

‘Right, but that was no secret. According to friends they’d been planning to see the movie all week. What they hadn’t planned, though, and what was a secret was their little excursion afterwards. That wasn’t confirmed until the last minute.’

‘So the bastard took a chance and got lucky?’

‘Maybe not,’ she mused. ‘Maybe that wasn’t the first time he’d snuck into Darren’s boot. Maybe all the previous times Darren had taken Rebecca out he’d driven her straight home to her folks’ house, where he knew an attack would be implausible.’ She pictured the killer curled up in the car’s boot, patiently waiting for the right time. The time when the car would stop upon crunching gravel with no other sounds in the vicinity. The time when, instead of muffled goodnights and a single door slamming, he heard the muffled groans of carnal pleasure and the squeaking of the backseat.

Knowles said, ‘If that’s the case, and our boy had the key, he could sneak in at his leisure.’

Jessop agreed. ‘Darren worked that day and didn’t drive to work. Our boy would’ve known that. He also knew Darren lived in a cramped street with no off-road parking, meaning sneaking into the boot unseen in daylight would be highly risky.’

‘Gets dark around 4.30pm,’ Knowles said.

‘Right. And Darren didn’t get home from work until 5.30, giving our boy an hour to make his entrance.’ Jessop consulted her notes on the case. ‘That means the bastard was holed up in there for the best part of seven hours.’

‘That’s nothing. You remember the Burton case?’

She did. Two years ago nineteen-year-old Theresa Burton was reported missing by her mother. Ten days later she was found alive in the boot of an old Mondeo saloon after a passer-by had reported sounds coming from the seemingly unoccupied car. Theresa was severely dehydrated and had muscle damage due to the cramped conditions. Her abductor, an ex-boyfriend who couldn’t handle the rejection, would feed her if and when he felt like it with crumbs of crisps and dregs from the many cans of lager he consumed. Yet Theresa had survived
a
miraculous ten days.

‘The body’s a lot more resilient than we give it credit for, Cathy,’ Knowles said.

Jessop strode down the Paul and Stewart’s driveway and peered through the window in the side door which led from the drive into the kitchen. She established there was no bolt lock on the door, just as she suspected the killer had during his recognisance. ‘You know, there’s only one type of killer I hate more than the meticulous ones.’

‘Yeah, who?’

‘The patient ones.’

She hung up, slid Stewart’s key into the lock and turned. The door opened easily and silently.

Had the killer’s entrance been so stealthy with the hindrance of having to pick the lock?

She stepped into the cool kitchen, surveyed the granite work surfaces on which sat the usual kitchen paraphernalia of kitchen roll, microwave, kettle, tea caddies and toaster. She noted the breakfast dishes stacked next to the sink and, upon a glass breadboard, a loaf of granary bread and a tub of olive spread which was to be Paul Bromley’s last meal.

Shaking off a chill she refocused and turned toward the door that led into the living room/dining room. To its left, another door led into the hallway.

Paul had gone to bed at midnight that night, Stewart half an hour later after his stomach had settled from the chilli prawn curry he had prepared from the new Jamie Oliver book Paul had bought him.

Dawn broke at 6.30am this time of the year. That gave the killer a realistic 4 hour window between 1.30am - after he was certain the occupants were asleep - and 5.30am to make his entrance and find a suitable hiding place.

But where?

Routine dictated Stewart would rise first at 7.00am. He would use the upstairs bathroom to wash and shave before waking his partner at 7.15am. Whilst Paul was in the bathroom, Stewart would be in the kitchen preparing breakfast. At 7.30am Paul would head downstairs, check the news headlines on the TV in the living room, then join Stewart in the kitchen where they’d eat at the breakfast bar. Stewart would then feed the rabbits while Paul gathered his things for work.

For the killer to have remained undetected during this morning ritual he would have had to have known the couple’s routine, come rain or shine.

How?

Jessop looked out of the window above the sink into the garden. The lawn stretched for roughly fifty yards before ending with a thick row of dense fir trees.

Was this where the bastard had hidden to perform his reconnaissance? From there you could not only see into the kitchen and living room, but also the upstairs bathroom window and the master bedroom window. These were the four rooms the couple would occupy during their morning ritual.

Encouraged, she made a note to have CSI forage the thicket, then turned to face the closed door which led into the hallway. This presented a blind spot for the killer, because when the door was closed he had no visual access to the rest of the house

She worked the handle and gently pushed the door ajar. Regarded the short carpeted hallway which led to the downstairs bathroom, foot of the stair case, entrance to the living room, and finally the front door.

Stewart was always first downstairs of a morning and straight into the kitchen. This was the route he would take, no doubt, leaving the hall door open behind him. And inadvertently, opening up the rest of the house for the killer to survey and choose his potential hiding place.

But why go through all the rigmarole of hiding and waiting when he could have struck
whilst
the couple slept?

Because people shocked out of sleep are often unpredictable and irrational. This would jeopardise the absolute control the killer needed in order to teach his lesson about salvation through suffering. The more alert a person is, the more likely they are to freeze in the face of fear and surprise, just as Stewart had done when the killer had stepped from the side of the house onto the decking. This hesitation may only last a second as the rational thought process decides between fight or flight, but that’s a second the killer had accounted for to gain the edge on his prey. And so far it hadn’t let him down.

She stepped into the hallway. The bastard was unlikely to venture upstairs to hide in one of the spare rooms for fear of meeting one of the guys nipping to the toilet. Then he would have been forced to act, sacrificing his control and risking a messy confrontation he wasn’t prepared for.

This left two only two possible hiding places: the cupboard beneath the stairs, and the downstairs toilet.

She opened the cupboard, big enough to hide a man, but stuffed full with a vacuum cleaner and the usual miscellaneous household crap. Not even she could fit in there. In contrast, the downstairs toilet was a haven of cleanliness, with polished chrome fixtures and fittings and gleaming white tiles.

From his many hours of reconnaissance the killer would have known a visit to this room was not part of the couple’s morning routine. But how had he planned to exit the room and execute a stealthy attack with both of the guys eating in the kitchen?

He hadn’t, because he knew Stewart would go out and feed the rabbits after breakfast. And so he’d waited until the voices became faint then snuck out, back through the kitchen and out of the side door by which he’d made his entrance. As quiet and invisible as the ghost after which the team had secretly nicknamed him.

They all knew she hated these monikers and so didn’t refer to the killer by it whilst in her company. The monsters they hunted were killers and should be addressed as such. To assign them titles and names gave them respect, and subconsciously, made them a more formidable adversary to hunt and capture. Yet as she surveyed the clinically clean room with all its polished services, she could not help but muse that not even a ghost could visit this room without leaving some evidence of it being here.

Chapter
Forty-eight

‘He was here.’ Jessop slid the photograph of Paul and Stewart’s downstairs toilet across The Undertaker’s tidy desk next to his note pad. The pad was turned to a fresh page, as white and crisp as the shirts he wore. Not for the first time did she ponder how the man could keep so organised in the job he did. How he remained so unruffled whether sitting behind his desk, pushing the top brass for more funding, or out on the street doing good old fashioned police work. She could not recall ever seeing the white shirt’s top bottom undone and the slim black tie any looser than a noose. Neither could she recall hearing any rumours of a new Mrs Travis after his second marriage ended four years ago. Maybe such meticulousness was hard to live with? Or maybe he hadn’t found a woman to live up to his exacting standards?