Laughing Boy (25 page)

The offences were committed early in the evening. The implication from that was that the murderer lived miles away, outside the area. He’d be able to do the deed and then drive home while it was still early, without attracting
attention
. If he’d killed late at night he’d have to be on the roads when they were quiet and he’d be at risk of being picked up. That’s what a profiler would tell us. Except that… Except that I didn’t believe it. The killings were not opportunistic. He knew who his victims were in advance, of that I was sure. He’d known exactly where they’d be and at what time, and that took planning. Robin was doing his paper round. He wasn’t going home after staying on late at school or after playing computer games at a friend’s – he was following his routine. Similarly with Mrs Heeley and Colinette. They
didn’t
just happen to be there, they were doing what they always did at that time on that day. Driving a hundred or even thirty miles trawling for likely victims would be a chore, and most criminals have a lazy streak in them. No, he lived and killed locally, first down south, and now here in West Yorkshire. As sure as my name was…Guiseppe Fatorini.

The team would be disappointed. We felt sure that our
luck was changing, that the website would put us on the trail, but now I’d have to tell them we were back where we started. We wouldn’t catch our killer. He wouldn’t be
detected
. Some fresh-faced PC would take a car number for
driving
without lights or parking carelessly, near where a future murder was committed, or a CCTV camera would pick him up at a couple of locations. He’d confess to everything, proud to have led us such a dance, enjoying the limelight. Then the celebrations would start. The chief constable would modestly tell the world that it was all down to good policing and he’d invite his favourite reporters and acolytes to drinky-poos in the office. Meanwhile, we’d quietly wipe the computer of the twenty thousand names and addresses we’d accrued and start thinking about burglaries again.

Pete was sitting at his desk when I entered the office, sleeves rolled up, an Ordnance Survey map spread out under his elbows. He looked up when he heard me, saying: “Hi Boss, the FBI’s just been after you.”

“I know, they caught me at the front desk.”

“Any joy?”

“Sod all.” I checked the weight of the kettle and switched it on, then shut myself in my little office. I’d completed my diary and was sitting with my knuckles pressed into my eyes when Pete opened the door and poked his head round it.

“So they couldn’t find the fan club?” he asked.

My office has windows on three sides, and I can see my reflection in them. I raise my head without moving my hands, pulling my bottom eyelids down, followed by my cheeks and the corners of my mouth. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

“There isn’t one,” I said as my face sprang back to its
normal
shape.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all.”

“No names and addresses?”

“No names. No addresses.”

“That’s a blow.”

“Putting it mildly.”

“You sound pissed off.”

I shook my head, lost for words. “I thought…I thought… Oh, what’s the use. It looks as if Madame LeStrang is our best bet again.”

“Uh!” Pete exclaimed. “I think you’d better come and see what I’ve discovered. I don’t think you’ll like this, either.”

“What is it? What have you found?”

“The links, Charlie. I’ve found the links.”

There were two Ordnance Survey maps on his desk, one on top of the other. He lifted a corner of the top one to show me the area around Nelson, where young Robin Gillespie’s body had been found. Pete had marked the exact spot with a cross inside a circle. He folded the local map back, saying: “…and these are where Colinette, Mrs Heeley and Norma Holborn were found.”

“Go on,” I said. I’d seen the shape the pins made on the big map down in the incident room. Three of them in an irregular triangle, with Robin’s pin way off to the west. We’d considered constellations, ley lines and mathematical ratios, all to no avail.

“The scale is one to 25,000,” he told me, “and I’ve worked out six-figure references for all the places where the bodies were found. Three figures for the easting, three for the
northing
, as you well know.”

“I’m with you.”

“OK. So the first figure of the three represents a ten
kilometre
square, the second brings it down to one kilometre, and the third figure is my estimate of the number of tenths of a kilometre to where each body was found.”

“And what does it show?”

“Here’s the list.” He pulled a pad from under the maps, with columns of numbers written on it. “If you ignore the first figure, the ten kilometre square, we find that the
reference
for Robin is one two, two three. That for Mrs Heeley is three four, four five; Colinette is five six, seven eight and Norma is eight nine, nine zero. It’s the words of the song, Charlie –
One two, buckle my shoe. Two three, he’ll never get
free
.”

I took the pad from him, studying the numbers, looking at the map, working out the references for myself.

“Norma was found smack on the line,” Pete was saying. “Hence the zero. It explains why the bodies were found in
what appeared to be arbitrary places, except that there was nothing arbitrary about it. He’d worked the spots out on a map, like I’ve just done.”

The carpet tiles were coming up at me, pulsing and
throbbing
like something in a medical video. I stepped back, taking a deep breath, and stumbled against a waste paper basket. Something had to get in my way, and that was it. I spun round and toe-ended it across the office with all the venom that I once put into goal kicks. It clattered against a radiator and fell to the floor, rolling in a semi-circle before coming to rest.

“That’s no good!” I yelled at Peter, slamming my fist down on his desk. “What frigging good is that? That
doesn’t
help us at all!”

“He’s not doing it to help us, Charlie!” he shouted back. “He’s not doing it so we can catch him. He’s doing it to prove he’s the killer.”

“He’s mocking us,” I said. “He’s taunting us.”

“Precisely! That’s what he does.”

I flopped into a chair and felt my chest heaving as I
struggled
to breathe. I said: “Location, location, location.”

“What?”

“Somebody said that when I went down to N-CIS and told them he called himself the Property Developer. It’s the three golden rules of property development – location,
location
, location.”

“Which proves he’s been working to a plan, a grand design, all along.”

“Seven – nil to him.” I said.

“Seven?”

“Yeah, seven.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “You don’t know the full story. I’ll tell you all about it when Maggie and Dave are here. God knows, Peter, we need some fresh ideas with this one.”

The evenings are the worst time. Eight through to midnight. Go to the pub and have a few beers is the usual solution, but
it doesn’t work with me. I read, listen to music, maybe watch some TV or catch up with housework, trying not to fall asleep. Lately, there’d been the jogging, but mostly, I use the time to think.

It had been seventeen days since Norma Holborn’s
murder
but that one came only nine days after Colinette. He was overdue, unless a body was lying somewhere, undiscovered. I’d studied the maps, considering possible references where he could have left a body. There were a hundred of them in every ten kilometre square, but there was no need for him to stick to the rules anymore. He’d used up all the references in the song and proved his point. From now on he could leave the bodies anywhere.

Gladys Jewel had called it recreational killing, but there was more to it than that. Taunting us – the police – was a major part of how he got his kicks. We were a part of the equation, that was for sure. He was playing some deadly game with us, and so far he was winning hands down. I tried to remember words from the songs that might be relevant.
Who is the thief and who is the cop? Who is the judge and who is the whore?
There was something in his past that had turned him against us, and the words of Tim Roper had found the sweet spot, reinforced his feelings. But with the last two killings a new dimension had entered the equation. He’d discovered sex and the joy of inflicting pain, and he’d had the magnificent realisation that, for him, one was a
function
of the other. The game had entered a new phase.

Find the last victim, if there was one, and find the next victim before she became one. Those were the priorities. We were running out of white pickups and tyres to check, so I had a few more troops to play with. At the Wednesday morning briefing I set a team up to find all the locations on the map where there might be a body and then we had a brainstorming session. If we were the killer, where would we look for our next victim?

She had to be a person of habit, available in the evening.
Hospitals came top of the list. I gave someone the job of
finding
the shift times, not just for nurses but for the ancillary workers and anyone else who might work the twilight shift.

“And visitors,” someone suggested.

“Good one,” I agreed. “Regular visitors who come and go between times.”

After that it was filling station attendants, fast food
workers
, librarians, office cleaners, barmaids and waitresses. Laura Heeley had been to the bingo, so we added bingo halls to the list but rejected the cinema and theatre. Many shops in the town centre had late night opening, as did the supermarkets, so we included their staff. We’d talk to the management, see who arranged transport and who didn’t, warn vulnerable
people
to be aware of the situation and not to accept lifts.

Then we’d go looking ourselves.

I wasn’t happy with the subterfuge – some of the team knowing the full extent of the case, most of them not – so I told Jeff Caton and Pete Goodfellow to meet me and Dave and Maggie in my office, after I’d had my morning meeting with Mr Wood.

When I returned Dave was in full flow, relating a story about the time he went to Boots to buy a deodorant. “…so the girl behind the counter said: ‘Do you want the ball type, Sir?’ and I said: ‘No, it’s for under my arms.’”

Thanks, Dave, it was the first smile I’d had all week. I told Maggie why I’d invited Jeff and Pete, and asked her to fill them in with details of the other murders. They sat in silence until she’d finished, ten minutes later.

“So it’s seven?” Jeff said. “Not four, seven.”

“Christ!” Pete added.

“No wonder you’re so crotchety.”

“It doesn’t seem right, lumbering us with it.”

“Well, they’ve hardly lumbered us with it. He’s still murdered three on our patch.”

“All the same…”

That’s when the phone rang. Dave picked it up, listened
for a few seconds then handed it to me.

“It’s Arthur, Charlie,” the desk sergeant informed me. “There’s another letter. It’s addressed to you and it looks just like the first one.”

“Right,” I said. “Don’t touch it again, I’m on my way down.”

I drove straight to the Home Office lab at Wetherton with the unopened letter sealed in an evidence bag. What it said in words was irrelevant compared with what it might tell us in other ways. I had a coffee with my old buddy Professor van Rees who is senior scientist there, and told him all about it while his staff worked their alchemy on the envelope and its contents. If the sender had a recent criminal conviction they’d be able to convert a speck of spittle or a drop of sweat into a name and address. If he didn’t have a conviction they’d still be able to label him in such a way that if he ever came to our notice we’d have him.

The prof is a busy man but courteous to a fault. I finished my coffee and told him that I’d wait in the canteen rather than take up more of his time. I was sitting in there, reading a magazine article about exons, introns and codons that went completely over my head, when the same scientist who’d opened the first letter came through the door. She gave me a smile of recognition and came over, carrying a
single
sheet of A4 paper.

“This is a hand-written copy I made,” she said, placing it in front of me. “We didn’t want to put the original through the copier. Does it make any sense to you?”

“Presumably the original was typed,” I said.

“Yes, same as the other.”

She’d written:

“Does it make sense?”

I shook my head.

“It’s tobacco, isn’t it, Old Holborn?”

“Yes, and the last victim was called Norma Holborn. He seems to find that amusing.” I stared blankly at the paper for a few moments, then said: “I don’t think it’s pipe tobacco, though. I think it’s roll-your-own stuff. There was an advert for it on TV, long before your time. ‘Why do I smoke Old Holborn?’ or something. Can’t remember what the answer was. ‘Because I want to catch cancer,’ probably.” My father was a heavy smoker, and for a few days after every budget he would experiment with rolling his own, to try save a few pence.

“I smoke Old Holborn because…it keeps hands that do dishes as soft as your face?” She was blushing slightly from the compliment I’d paid her.

I gave her the weary smile. “Yes, that’s it. Well done.”

“I’d better do some work,” she said. “Sorry I can’t help you with the jingle. It will be a couple of days before we know if there’s anything on the letter, I’m afraid.”

“I know you’ll do your best, and thanks for this.” I tapped the note with my knuckle and watched her walk towards the exit, white-coated, her sensible shoes not
making
a sound on the tiled floor.

The M62 snakes across England like a blood vessel. If the M1 is the country’s aorta, then the M62 is the jugular vein. It stretches from Hull to Liverpool, dividing the country in half. Five miles south of Leeds it crosses the M1 at what must be a contender for the title Crossroads of England. In America it would have a name. In America two imaginary lines, state borders, cross at right angles at a spot they call Four Corners. It’s in the middle of a God-forsaken desert, miles from anywhere, but a whole industry has sprung up around a map-making curiosity. The place where the M62 crosses the M1 is known as just that – the place where the M62 crosses the M1, but the distribution companies, hard
nosed and unromantic, have not been slow to recognise the importance of the location. They’ve built their warehouses there, windowless, functional shelters that shadow the road like hyenas following a herd of wildebeest. I was driving fast but I could read their names out of the corner of my eye: Pioneer, Argos, Asda, Wicks, Royal Mail. Brand names, the new currency.