Laughing Boy (19 page)

Saturday I finished at about four and went shopping. I bought the shoes and two chicken breasts. At home I seared the breasts in hot oil and put them in a casserole dish with sliced peppers, chilli beans, peas, string beans, sweetcorn, carrots, new potatoes and a tin of condensed mushroom soup. Five minutes in the microwave on
max
to heat it up, then ninety minutes on
de-frost
should do it, I thought. I changed into jogging bottoms and T-shirt and went out for a run while it cooked.

I walked to the edge of the estate, bouncing on my toes, stretching the tendons, feeling good. Once clear of the houses I did a few more stretches, rotating my shoulders and
pushing against a telegraph post to stretch my hamstrings until I couldn’t put it off any longer. It’s about a mile and a half to the top of the hill, the road twisting and undulating all the way upward. Like they say, the first step is the
hardest
. I turned to face the slope and set off.

There are two schools of thought amongst distance
runners
. The first, favoured by the hard men, is that you listen to your body. Every stride, every breath, you feel the pain, watch out for trouble and meet it head on. If you find you are running easy, you step up the pace. Too hard, you slow down. In a race you put the pressure on when the other
fellow
is hurting. How do you know when he’s hurting? Because that’s when you’re hurting. It’s a savage sport, strictly for masochists.

School Two likes to think about something else. You chase dinosaurs, make love to Elizabeth Taylor, concentrate on anything but running, and hopefully next time you look up the miles have sped by under your feet and the finishing line beckons. Except it’s not that easy.

I put my head down and saw the new shoes stabbing
forward
, the tarmac a grey blur unrolling beneath them. My breathing synchronised itself with the short strides at four strides breathing in, three out: in-two-three-four,
out-two-three
, in-two-three-four, out-two-three; and slowly the tiredness crept up my legs.

We’d catch him, that was for sure. But we wouldn’t
detect
him. We never detect anybody. Jeff Caton had left the book on my desk, for me to read.
The Beast Must Die
, by Nicholas Blake. He said it was escapism, would take my mind off the case. I’d brought it home and left it handy. Our man
wouldn’t
be caught by a slip of the tongue, like the narrator of the story said most villains were. We’d catch him by default, for something else, and realise who he was after the event.

My legs were wobbling and the length of my strides reduced to a shamble. I looked up and saw a short level stretch of road approaching. Thank God for that. Laddo –
ought I to be calling him the Property Developer? – had arranged the first three bodies in the XYZ formations, so that he could prove afterwards that they were his handiwork. No doubt he was making some link between the latest four murders, but what was it and would it help us if we knew? Probably not. The flat stretch soon passed under my feet and the next part was steep. I was almost running on the spot. Maybe mental arithmetic would help. There are sixty million people in the country, which we could reduce by a half by assuming he lived north of the Thames and south of the border. Thirty million. Assume he was male, fifteen
million
, and between twenty and forty. Five million. Chuck in all the assumptions made by Dr Foulkes and we were down to about three million. Nothing to it. All we needed was their names, a few thousand extra officers and some time.

The road levelled out and my strides lengthened. After the steep bits the long gradual slope near the top felt almost downhill. It’s exposed up there, with nothing between you and the Urals. The wind was from the north-east and had an edge to it, chilling the sweat on my back. I kept going, right to the beacon at the very top, where they used to light a
bonfire
to warn of approaching armies, or the coronation of a new king, or, more recently, the turning of the millennium. Twenty miles to the north, on a similar hill, the peasants would see the blaze and say: “Hey, we’re being invaded, or maybe we have a new king, or else it’s a new millenium,” and they’d hastily start to rub two sticks together to pass on the tidings, whatever they were.

Trouble was, someone was out there, someone with an aberrant brain, and fate had decreed that it was my job to find him. Millions of words have been expended on proving who Jack the Ripper was, but they were all wasted. Jack the Ripper wasn’t somebody out of the history books, he was John Doe, Mr Nobody or Mr Everyman. Take your pick. Mark Twain said that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by William Shakespeare, they were written by somebody else
with the same name. That’s how this case felt. The Property Developer didn’t do the murders, it was someone else with the same name.

It worked, I was at the top. I stopped and rested, bent over with my hands on my knees, the cold air searing my throat as my lungs dragged it in. I was knackered, but I’d done it. The track to the beacon was closed so I had to be satisfied with the lay-by and a brief rest in the shelter of the wall. There was nobody else up there, picnicking in the warmth of their Renault Megane, and for once I wished there had been. “Have you run all the way up?” they’d have asked, and I’d have smiled modestly and admitted that I had, but there was nobody at all to witness my righteousness, not even a sheep.

I spent a few moments taking in the view and letting my heart settle down to its normal rhythm. We were a
five-minute
drive out of Heckley, but it could have been the North Pole. The summit of the fell is a plateau, and all you can see in any direction is brown moorland for about half a mile, until it drops out of sight. It’s the roof of the world, if you have a decent imagination and modest ambitions. “C’mon, legs,” I said, “let’s go,” and started on the gentle jog back home.

The casserole was cold and uncooked when I checked it. Bugger! It looked as if I’d put it on for ninety seconds instead of ninety minutes. I gave it twenty minutes at
high
and went for a shower. This time it was done to perfection and there was enough left for Sunday lunch.

The nationals, even the Sundays, latched on to the killings with varying degrees of sensationalism but we were kept off the front pages of the tabloids by the foot-and-mouth, which topped a thousand cases that weekend.
Prostitute
is victim number four
was the general tenor of the reports, and they called her Naomi Huntley because we hadn’t made a positive identification of her as Norma Holborn. Nor had
we released the information that three other murders were attributable to the killer, making his real tally seven. Monday morning, after troop deployment and morning prayers, I had a meeting with Dave and Maggie to discuss progress.

“No sussies over the weekend,” Maggie stated.

“Thank God for that,” I replied. Control had been instructed to let me know of any suspicious death anywhere in the region, but no call had disturbed my weekend.

“Either he couldn’t find a suitable victim or he’s gone into retirement for a while,” Dave suggested.

“Dr Foulkes says he’s out of control,” I told them. “This time he won’t stop until he’s stopped, by us or someone else. We’re just in a lull while he finds his next victim.”

“The eye of the storm,” Maggie said.

“Precisely.” I turned to Dave, saying: “So what did you learn at Leeds University about the letters, if anything?”

He shook his head. “I spoke to a professor in the English department who’s worked with the police before. Well, he said he has. He found the notes very interesting –
fascinating
, even – and said he’ll let us have his conclusions as soon as possible.”

“Jesus!” I cursed. “There’s only about fifteen words for him to consider. Did you tell him that it was a murder hunt?”

“All the more reason for him to do it properly,” Dave replied.

“And he wouldn’t want somebody doing time because he’d condemned them for using the past pluperfect where it should have been the present bloody indicative, would he? What about the quotation, if it is one? Did he recognise that?”

“No.”

“I thought not. Let’s have a look at them ourselves.” I pulled a photocopy of the two notes out of my drawer and Maggie unpinned one from the office wall. “Right, Mags,” I said. “What do you see?”

She held the page between her fingertips as she studied it. “Done on a computer,” she informed us, after a few seconds. “Set to centralise the printing.”

“Good. What else?”

“The spelling is correct, which is probably unusual in notes from psychopaths, but his punctuation is erratic and he uses capital letters in some places and not in others.” She paused for a while, and started seeing pieces of information in the note that had not been immediately visible to her. “He’s computer literate,” she continued, “and has that
tendency
to use small case letters that most nerds have, but he uses capitals when he calls himself the Property Developer. Maybe there’s a deep psychological reason for that, or maybe it’s just his inconsistency.”

“OK,” I said. “Well done, but let’s leave the deep
psychological
stuff for Dr Foulkes. Does anything leap off the page?”

Dave said: “He uses capitals for Eye Of The Storm, as if it’s the title of something. Maybe the line about property developers is a quote from something called ‘Eye Of The Storm’.”

“It does have a certain scansion about it.”

“Yes.”

“But your man at Leeds didn’t recognise it?” He shook his head. “No.”

“Perhaps it was too lowbrow for him. You’re the pub quiz whiz-kids, so this is your chance to put all that knowledge to use,” but now they both shook their heads. “OK,” I
continued
. “Let me tell you this. ‘Eye Of The Storm’ may be the title of a book or a poem or a song. We’re agreed on that?” They nodded. “Right. In England we would normally write a title like that with small case letters for the little words, like
of
and
the
. However, in America they usually use upper case letters for all the words in a title. I just thought I’d share that with you.”

“You mean, he’s an American?”

“Not necessarily. If you get used to seeing titles printed like that there’s a tendency to adopt the convention because there’s a logic in it. It makes sense. I think the book or
whatever
is probably American.”

Maggie looked puzzled, pursing her lips and pressing the end of a pencil into her chin. “How do you know something like that?” she asked.

“Um, it’s a long story,” I replied.

“We’d love to hear it.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Oh yes we would, wouldn’t we, Dave?”

“I’m falling off my chair with anticipation.”

“Right. OK. Well, long time ago, when I was very young – at Art College, actually – somebody bought me a guitar and the Bert Weedon instruction book for a birthday present.” I shrugged my shoulders, saying: “Everybody was doing it, those days.”

“I wasn’t,” Dave said.

“Nor me,” Maggie added.

“Well everybody with any talent. There were these books called
Sing Out!
which had all the words and music in them, and the titles were written like I said, with capital letters. They were considered terribly left wing and subversive, so when I joined the police my musical career went on hold. Otherwise, I might have been the next, um, Craig Douglas.”

“Is this when you went through your Dylan phase?” Maggie asked.

“He’s still in his Dylan phase,” Dave growled.

Jeff Caton’s face appeared at the window of my
partitioned-off
office and he made a knocking gesture, his knuckles not quite making contact with the glass. I waved for him to come in.

“Am I interrupting?” he asked, and I assured him that he was rescuing me from further embarrassing disclosures about my youth. Jeff was handling all the other crime while I was bogged down with the murders.

“We’re neglecting you, Jeff,” I told him. “I’ve wanted a word. What’s happening on the streets of Heckley that I should know about?”

“All fully under control, Chas. Nothing at all for you to concern yourself with. I came in to ask about the Three Peaks. Are we doing it up and down the steps, or what?”

“Depends on the foot-and-mouth,” Dave told him, “but it’s looking like the stairs to me. This lot’ll get worse before it gets better.”

“Big Geordie’s in charge,” I said.

“I know,” Jeff replied. “I’ve just been talking to him. Apparently he’s organised some corporate sponsorship from the supermarkets and they’ve offered to supply drinks and stuff. It’s looking good, if we can do it, but it’ll be tough up and down the stairs – a lot tougher than the real thing.”

“Which is why some of us are in strict training,” I told him. I slid the photocopy of the first letter towards him,
saying
:

“Have you ever heard of a song or book called that?”

“Eye of the Storm?”

“Mmm.”

“No.”

“Well thanks for trying.”

“There’s ‘Riders on the Storm’, by Jim Morrison.”

“This is ‘Eye of the Storm’.”

“’Fraid not.”

“Ne’er mind.”

“Have you tried the Internet?”

I looked at Maggie and Dave. “Why didn’t we think of that?” I asked.

Dave cleared his throat, saying: “I was just about to
mention
it.”

“I bet you were. Thanks, Jeff, you’ve saved the day. Now, what’s happening about the Pakistanis who attacked that youth? I see you’ve managed to keep it out of the papers.”

“Ah!” he responded. “That is one small piece of grit in the Vaseline of Mr Wood’s life. I went to the
Gazette
and asked
them not to print it because it was definitely dodgy, and they agreed. However, his solicitor has just called the front desk wanting to know the crime number and the name of the investigating officer, because the little scrote is making a claim for criminal injuries. Gilbert will have apoplexy when he hears.”

“Is this the youth who claims he was attacked by four Pakis?” Maggie asked.