Keeping (2 page)

The more sense it made.

It’s been with me for years.

That chick with the Yorkshire Terrier. She’s long gone. It’s funny, but it doesn’t freak me out, the thought of getting rid of them. I mean, it ought to, me living in a flat where anyone could see me out of their windows. But I usually wait until about three in the morning, when most are in bed—and those who aren’t probably wouldn’t dig staring outside at an empty street anyway. Except on the nights I do a dump—ha ha! A dump. Not that kind. Jesus—the street isn’t empty, is it. No, I’m there, dragging some
BitcH’s
sorry arse along behind me to the garages, or carrying them over my shoulder. Putting her in the car boot, shutting the lid on her dead-as-fuck face.

Another funny thing. Their eyes. They go like those old gits you see who are getting gyp from their cataracts going dodgy on them. Cloudy. Yeah, that’s it, gray clouds over blue moons. And they’re always blue. Not into brown-eyed birds.

Useless to me in the end, those women. All of them have been. None of them have liked what I do. I just need to keep going until I find the one who does. And they’ve been missed by people, those birds. I kinda like that, you know. Them being missed, no fucker knowing where they are, everyone frantic as to where they’ve gone. The newspaper reports—Jesus, anyone would think I’d done something wrong. But how can my PeRsoNal JouRnEy be wrong? How can discovering shit about myself be wrong? You hear about it all the time, don’t you? Discover yourself! If you can’t love you, no one else will! If there’s something deep in your heart that you’ve always wanted to do—do it!

That’s all I’m doing. What I’m told.

Some of the scenarios crack me the fuck up, though. Like one of them—a while back it was—they all think she pissed off abroad, even though her passport wasn’t used. Her passport was at
home.
Man, how dumb is that? Mind you, they might have thought someone else took her, what with the strange people about these days. You can’t trust anyone, can you?

It’s time to sort out the Morrison’s girl. Feed her a bit, give her some water. She’s started to get on my nerves, which is a shame but it can’t be
helped
. There’s only so long I can keep them before I get bored of waiting for The Time. The initial rush wears off, and that’s a total bitch, something the voice didn’t warn me about, but hey, I’ll learn to deal with it.

But she’s started drifting off to sleep when she shouldn’t, like, not at night the same as normal people, and sometimes I can’t wake her. Like she’s in some coma or whatever. I’ve had to splash her face with water, because kicking her in the kidney didn’t work, and that’s a puzzle I have to sort out because usually it does. The needle seems to be stronger with this one.

She’s the one from the supermarket. That’s why I haven’t written in here for a while, see. Been getting the final plans laid. And you know how I don’t like to write those down until after I’m done.

Didn’t take much to lure her here. Recognized me, didn’t she, and she thought I gave a flying fuck about her dog. That mutt gave me pause, though, I’ll admit that much. Big bastard, and I was prepared to take it with us an’ all. The voice wouldn’t let me, though. Said it was better off out of the way, one less body to dump, one less thing to deal with when the time came.

I wonder how long I’ll get to keep her?

Reminds me to keep a tally of them. Wouldn’t want to forget now, would I?

#1. Bird with the scraggly black hair and the yappy dog—its hair matched hers. JoAnNe. Came home with me last year. Remained a day or two until she outstayed her welcome. I couldn’t handle her whingeing. February…yep, beginning of Feb. Remember that because I wanted to bury her and the ground was too fucking frozen. Ended up in the stream down behind the dog-walking field. Discovered in March. Small news, just this shitty little section at the bottom of the first page, like she didn’t deserve a big mention. She didn’t, but
I
did.

#2. Slag. Smelled funny. No dog, just happened to be taking a short cut. Good for me, crap for her. She stayed about a week that one, because she did as she was told and didn’t give me any hassle when I stroked her cheek. That was…June. The month. Wasn’t her name or anything. That was LorRaiNe. Bit of a bigger mention in the local paper, but not what I was after. Not what the voice wanted. A long slim column right down the side of the front page. Murmurings of them being connected because she was found in the same stream. Well, it’s more like a river, but who’s going to quibble? I was chuffed my clue had been noticed. Made me nod and smile a lot, that did.

#3. Another slag, except she wasn’t a slag. Married this time—had been for three years, she’d said. Faithful. Loved her old fella. They’d wanted kids, were trying for one. Like I gave a toss about that. Tried to make me feel bad, I reckon. To make me let her go.

It didn’t work.

Her name was DebOraH. Or, at first—‘Oh hi, nice to meet you. Call me DeBbiE or DEb, everyone else does!’

When was she? November. It was cold again, I know that.

Much bigger coverage with her. She was the first bitch to get front-page news in the bottom half of the
nationals,
not just the local. Proud moment, that one. Stream dump again. Discovered in late December. And you’d think they’d have kept a better eye out down there, wouldn’t you? Saying that, the spaces in time between them being put there were kind of random—good idea from the voice—and no police force has the manpower to set a copper up down there twenty-four-seven, every day of the year.

If they did, my PeRsoNal JouRnEy would be interrupted.

#4. Brown hair—short, unusual for me—and she did my head in from day one. Should have gone with my gut in not inviting her home, but the voice had insisted. Now, she was around the July mark—July of this year. Bit of a gap, what with Christmas barging in and me getting that new job that fucked up when I could do my thing. EmMA. Bad girl, always complaining, saying her parents would be worrying. So? And that was my problem, because?

Excellent coverage, made the nationals again, but that fucking weird case was in the local news so she made it there as an afterthought. Page seven or something. The one about the queers—
that
made the front page. Bodies being found chained up.

Like I said earlier, there are
such
weird people around.

Funny thing about that investigation. The same detective working on that one has
this
one on his back as well. He wasn’t—and isn’t—doing very well on mine, is he. Langham, that’s what he’s called.

I wonder when he’ll start getting closer to finding me? The voice reckons it won’t be long and something will break. Hopefully it won’t be the case that will break but Langham’s neck. That would be nice.

Anyway, getting away from MySelF here.

#5. That bloody cow with the Yorkshire Terrier. MaRia. Irritating. Noisy. Didn’t stay long. Can’t even bear to write about her. The worst one yet.

#6. CherYL. The current bird. Now here’s another fucking funny thing. That Langham—he’s bent by the way, paper said so, and he lives with this bloke—he works with this fella, the one he lives with, who also works for the local newspaper. You following me? Well, CherYL only bloody works at the paper too! Receptionist, she said, doing a second job in the café, mornings and evenings. Oh my God. That is such a classic!

More on her as things progress. I have to go. She’s banging on the wall for a bit of
attention.
But as I said at the start, I am the man. Yes! The fucking man!

Chapter One

Langham stared around the incident room. It needed painting. The pea-soup green walls were peeling and scuff marks made them look shabby. A couple of posters—men wanted from God knew how long ago—had curling corners, the faces of the criminals going cream in places where they’d been on show since before the no-smoking-in-the-workplace law. Nicotine, it got everywhere. Like the scum of society. The bastards who kept him in a job.

The officers on shift stared back at him, expressions ranging from bored to weary to blank. All they had to deal with at the moment were on-going cases, small shit that shouldn’t take long to wrap up but did, or the big case involving the missing women that had gone stone cold. If he were honest, it had never even come close to being hot. The people sitting before him looked like they could do with an honest-to-goodness massive case to get their teeth into. He knew how they felt. It wasn’t that they waited for murder, longed for it, but when one cropped up everyone went into a different zone.

More alert. More focused. More on the sodding ball.

He’d saved the missing women’s case discussion until last. It was the biggest on their list, but they weren’t getting anywhere with it. Women went missing, were found dumped in the stream a few days later, and nothing he or his team had done had come up with anything to help them find the killer. No evidence of where they’d been prior to being killed and dumped—except the snippet Oliver had been given from one of them while she’d still been alive. Other than that? Sweet fuck all.

Langham turned from his officers and dragged across the largest board on wheels, which had several victims’ pictures pinned along with their information scrawled in marker underneath. He thought about what had happened that day a while ago—him and Oliver eating lunch in Langham’s office and some woman speaking to Oliver in his head. How the fuck Oliver dealt with that went beyond anything Langham could imagine. Dead people speaking to you all your life, then suddenly people who were alive? He couldn’t explain it, could find no rational explanation either, just that it happened and had provided crucial information on previous cases.

He wished it would provide crucial information now. Before some other poor bitch got offed.

Langham sighed and faced the group again. Some of them had perked up a bit—a few pictures of dead, water-bloated bodies could do that to a copper—but the rest appeared as though they wanted to get up and go home. He didn’t blame them. He wanted to go home, and they’d only been here an hour. Go home to Oliver and fuck his arse, lay in bed all day then fuck him all over again.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, holding up a hand as if that might stop anyone walking the hell out. “We’ve been through this before, I know. But it’s Friday, recon time—same thing every week—and something we just have to get on with. Now, I’ll be honest with you. This case is pissing me the fuck off. As you know we have no new leads—none whatsoever. So we’re dealing with a man—yes, or a woman but highly unlikely, given the profile—who is meticulous. This is planned, all of it, right down to the last detail. Nothing is left to chance, like he has every avenue covered. With a man like that, we need to watch the hell out. He’ll get worse. Now, because he’s killed more than three women, we all know that levitates him to serial status. Not good for us but good for him. He’ll be feeling the power, might slip up. So, what else can we do here? Suggestions?”

Detective Wickes held up one hand then lowered it to cross both arms over his chest and tuck his fingers beneath his armpits. His brown hair needed a good cut but, like Langham, the man probably couldn’t find the time. “We could up the patrol at the stream. I said that from the start.”

Langham sniffed. “Yes, we could, but that stream is long, and as you know, the killer hasn’t established a secure pattern. The time between the women going missing is getting shorter—he’s getting braver, needs the thrill sooner, he needs less time to recover or go over the previous kill as a means of getting satisfaction. We could send men out every evening to check, but only certain points of the stream can be covered at any one time. While our men are patrolling the north end, he could be dumping a body at the other.”

Wickes sighed. He knew the drill. The excuses.

“So,” Langham went on, “as much as I’d like to put officers at strategic points along that stream every damn night until our killer gets spotted either abducting or dumping his victims, I can’t. It all boils down to costs too, you know that. While, say, four to six officers are at the stream, other officers are stretched to breaking point out on the streets. Give me some slack on that, yeah? I can’t make it happen.”

Wickes lifted one hand and pinched his chin between finger and thumb. “It’s a pisser, though. We just have to sit and wait for another body to show up. Fucking stinks.”

“It does,” Langham agreed, “but there is the other alternative. When a woman goes missing, we start acting right away. No more ‘let’s see if she returns after forty-eight hours’ crap. We look into it immediately. Granted, a lot of manpower will go into that, but it’s all we can do, and it’s easier to manage that into our schedules. A quick phone call here and there chasing up the women’s last whereabouts isn’t the same as taking a chunk of time using several officers to man the stream.”

He held back a sigh and went on with his usual speech. “As we know from experience—and I wish we didn’t—most of the women will turn up again—just some worried husband or mother calling in because she’s half an hour late—but at some point there’ll be those who
don’t
come home when it gets dark. Those are the red flags.”

Sergeant Villier raised her hand then lowered it to her lap. A leggy blonde, thirty-something, she looked weird in uniform. It didn’t suit her. She seemed the type who’d seem more at home in a basque and stockings. Anyone who had the guts to suggest such a thing would soon find she didn’t agree. She’d rip the balls off a man who came onto her at work—or anywhere else, Langham suspected.

“Yes, Villier?” Langham held his breath for her comment.

She was likely to go into one, pushing her opinion out there with such force that when he had to gently shoot down her ideas it would make everyone feel uncomfortable. She meant well, but shit, she was a pushy one.

“I think we’ve gone as far as we can go here.”

She stood and joined Langham up front. He bit back the urge to tell her to sit the fuck back down. She had a habit of doing this kind of thing, encroaching on his position, trying to get the others to see that her standing as the uniformed officers’ boss was just one step of her ladder. She intended to climb higher, that much was obvious.