Lawless (27 page)

He positioned himself at the main window of the apartment, faced west and waited. He knew the postman would appear at the far end of the Esplanade between 8.15 and 8.30 and arrive at his house about seven minutes after that. McBride also knew beyond doubt that he would carry a plain white envelope with his computer-generated name and address on it. Inside there would be only a single sheet of white paper containing a short message. It would be anonymous and, like the envelope, bear no fingerprints or traces of DNA.

McBride was right. He was also wrong. The postman delivered the letter at 8.22. It was white, without a signature and with a brief pronouncement. But, in addition, it included a page from the previous day’s
Courier
. The communication was concise and unambiguous. ‘Last message,’ it read. ‘No need to stake out the library.’

Page three of
The Courier
carried Richard Richardson and Kate Nightingale’s sparkling prose about the background surrounding the killing of Lynne Ireland. The page was intact except for a small passage which had been painstakingly extracted with a sharp instrument. The precise handiwork was only too familiar.

McBride found the jacket he had worn the day before and removed the copy of that day’s
Courier
from the pocket. He opened it at page three and scanned it quickly to locate the missing words. They were from the closing paragraph of Double Dick’s report. He had been expounding his views about the consequences of a murder and its effects on a community. The entire paragraph read:

It may have seemed like just one more killing. A big one. It will be all over the front pages for a few days then the circus will move on, another town, another corpse.

The sharp blade had extracted twelve words from the middle section – ‘just one more killing. A big one. It will be all over’.

McBride scanned it several times but it was an unnecessary exercise. Its meaning was quite unambiguous.
Another murder was promised. It would be significant. Then there would be no more.
All that troubled him was what made a death ‘big’ in the eyes of the executioner.
Big in size? A fat person? A tall one? A big name. The Queen? Don’t be ridiculous
, he told himself,
her father wasn’t a cop
.

He was starting to lose it.

Whatever way he figured it, McBride had hit a brick wall – at speed.

Four dead bodies. All females in their thirties. All murdered in their own homes. All after sex and having shared a drink with their killer. All the daughters of policemen. All despatched to the next world by a piece of police equipment. All with clean records. So many similarities but also so many differences. None of them acquainted with the others. None who looked remotely like the others. None with any friends or colleagues in common. None of them with any grudge against the law. None of them put to death in the same way. None of them with the same sexual partner. Yet the last face they looked at on earth appeared to have belonged to the same person.

McBride knew a lot about killing. He’d seen plenty of it. Sat often enough in the Old Bailey listening to the extraordinary evil that apparently ordinary men were capable of. Knew there was no kind of wickedness that could go unexplored by people who considered themselves members of the human race. He’d seen other kinds of killings in places in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe. The exterminators called themselves freedom fighters but they were still butchers. Whatever the act, the outcome was always the same. Someone died. And there was always a reason, however obscure.

So, what was the link between Alison Brown, Ginny Williams, Claire Bowman and Lynne Ireland?
McBride asked himself for the twentieth time that day.
If they had never met, what or who did they have in common? What was the hellish bond that united them in their violent and untimely demise? Why was another cadaver promised? And why would there be no more after that?

He was still agonising over the answers when a knock sounded on the door of the apartment. Like bell-ringers, McBride was a skilled profiler of door-knockers. This was not a stranger but someone he knew. It was that kind of knock. Not formal. Not heavy, demanding entrance. Not the uncertain tap of a salesman. It was cheery, familiar. An acquaintance. Someone who felt they had a right to be standing on the doorstep.

McBride opened the door to find Richard Richardson facing him. He was smiling, waiting to be invited inside. McBride threw the door wide, beckoned him to enter and led the way to the upstairs sitting room.

‘So, this is chez McBride, is it?’ Double Dick’s eyes swept round the room, taking in the newspapers scattered on the floor, the white envelope and its single sheet of paper, a half-finished bottle of Budweiser from the night before. Without being asked, he sat down on the sofa positioned against the back wall. He could have taken either of the seats beside the window and its wide panorama of the estuary, which most folk would have done. The sofa seemed a defensive move.

There was no hint of self-protection in his demeanour. Double Dick was flippant, chiding, easy. He took control, pointing his toe in the direction of the Bud. ‘Any more of those?’ he asked. It did not matter that it was still morning – he could drink at any time of day.

McBride moved round the room, rearranging the mess and lifting the papers and the single item of that morning’s mail. When he had done that, he brought his caller a chilled beer from the kitchen.

‘To what do I owe the honour of this royal visit?’ McBride asked.

‘Nothing in particular – just passing,’ Richardson lied. ‘Thought I’d take a look at the place that’s staged a hundred shag-fests.’

McBride laughed – genuinely. It never took Double Dick long to steer the conversation round to sex, usually the kind he imagined McBride was having.

‘Had Katie Nightingale round yet?’ Richardson asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he added, ‘Fantastic backside, eh? Missionary job, I reckon.’

McBride said nothing. Shook his head slowly. Smiled. Double Dick was not the sort who required encouragement.

They exchanged banter while the
Courier
’s chief reporter emptied his bottle. The swallowing of the last drop seemed to be the signal for Richardson to move on to the purpose of his visit.

‘Read your piece in the
Mail
,’ he said. ‘Insightful – even if it was over the top, as usual.’

McBride inclined his head in mock acceptance of the half-compliment. ‘Yours too,’ he told his guest. ‘Over the top, I mean – not insightful.’

‘So, that’s why you were reading it before I came in,’ Richardson said. He was eager to let McBride know he’d noted the page from
The Courier
which had been lying on the floor. Richardson spoke again. ‘Are you doing a piece for tomorrow?’

‘Haven’t decided. Not much is happening. Unless you know something I don’t,’ McBride said, throwing the question back.

Richardson shook his head. ‘Not a dickie bird.’ He wasn’t aware of what he’d said.

‘Still without a woman in your life, then?’

Richardson looked blank.

McBride persisted. ‘Not a Dickie’s bird!’

‘Very funny.’ The penny had dropped. He moved on, becoming serious. ‘So, if you’re stuck for a new line on the story, do you need help?’

McBride lifted an eyebrow but said nothing.

‘Maybe you want to collaborate? Share? You tell me what you know and I’ll do the same? Could work for both of us,’ Richardson said.

Jesus. How can someone be so subtle when he writes but so obvious when he speaks
, McBride thought. But he said nothing, trying to make it seem as though he was weighing up the offer.

After a few moments he responded. ‘Thanks but no thanks. I’m not under any pressure from any news desks – meantime. When I am I’ll let you know.’

Richardson shrugged. ‘Up to you. You know my number.’ He rose from the sofa. ‘Thanks for the beer. Once this settles we’ll get together in The Fort. Might even have Kate in tow.’

McBride accompanied Richardson downstairs. They said their farewells and Richardson started to walk towards his car when he turned and with a parting shot said, ‘By the way, if you think it was a cop who did it, you can forget it.’ He did not wait for McBride to reply before driving off.

Back inside, McBride nursed a coffee and sat at the window, gazing out over the river. Two bottle-nosed dolphins suddenly surfaced, hung suspended in a lazy arc, then dropped gently back into the water in perfect symmetry.

He thought about Richardson’s final comment and nodded his head.
God knows how he knows but he’s absolutely right
, he said to himself.
Whoever’s out there slaughtering women, it isn’t a police officer.
It had suddenly become obvious.
It’s someone who hates the police – someone with a grudge. The bits of uniform weren’t used as a smokescreen. They were used out of contempt for the people who wore them.

That thought had not yet occurred to Superintendent John Hackett who was briefing his detective teams in the incident room of Operation Tribune on the upper floor of Tayside Police headquarters.

Behind him was a picture gallery of death. Photographs of four young women when they were alive and even more of them lying open-eyed but seeing nothing after their lives had been extinguished. In front of him were weary officers waiting for instructions on how they might work their way out of all the blind alleys they were lurching into.

Hackett was unable to illuminate them. Even when he was at his best, he was never burdened by inspiration. He was also charisma free and would not smile at another man in case it was misunderstood. His most distinguishing feature was a fish-and-chip-supper stomach which hung over a belt straining on its last notch.

Usually Hackett followed rule number one of detective school – put your best officers on to the potentially most productive lines of inquiry. Give the donkey work to the domestiques, the foot soldiers who knocked on doors, scrabbled on hands and knees searching for evidence and fed the computers.

He invariably ignored the reality that the biggest crimes were frequently solved by the most lowly soldier. Sometimes a junior typist keyed the words into a PC that unlocked the mystery that had perplexed the ones with all the scrambled egg on their hats. A dumb piece of equipment that didn’t give a damn who had died or how, just clicked everything into place and extrapolated a name that had been hidden away.

With nothing else to go on, Hackett had ordered the soldiers to punch in every scrap of information they had and cross-reference it with the data held by the police forces in Fife and Grampian. They hooked up to HOLMES, the national investigations database for major inquiries that is based at Scotland Yard and which provides interaction between forces. It had been devised by IT anoraks to improve incident-room efficiency. The electronic genius could investigate, collate, analyse and interrogate quicker than some detectives could text for a pizza delivery. On good days, HOLMES solved more crimes than Sherlock ever did. On bad ones, it was an electronic irrelevance.

This was not one of its most memorable mornings. It was letting Hackett down. Badly.

He had asked it to search for someone with a pathological hatred of the police. Unsurprisingly, it had produced columns of names but none that connected with the Tribune victims. Then he demanded that it should consider if the fathers of the dead women may have made a common enemy among the criminal fraternity. Or was there someone psychologically flawed who committed crimes while dressed as a police officer? The soldiers flashed their fingers over the keys. They looked at the screens in expectation. The screens looked back, mute, indifferent, unhelpful. If Hackett could have disciplined them for insolence, he would have.

Detective Inspector Petra Novak entered the incident room and approached the morose superintendent to pass on the details of the telephone conversation she’d had with McBride ten minutes earlier. ‘It’s good news and bad news, sir,’ she said cautiously. ‘Campbell McBride has been notified that the killing spree is just about over. One more victim and that’s it.’

‘Asshole,’ Hackett spat at her.

He caught her astonished look. ‘Sorry. Not you, him – McBride,’ Hackett said by way of explanation. ‘What the hell has it got to do with him?’ He was willing to lash out at anyone better informed than him. That meant no one was safe.

‘He’s just trying to be helpful, sir,’ she said defensively, surprised by her rush of loyalty. ‘It’s not his fault. He’s only passing stuff on.’

‘Passing stuff on? How come he’s up to his neck in it? Have we checked him out?’ He started towards the computer terminals, thought better of it and returned to face Novak.

‘OK, OK, give him our thanks. Tell him we’re extremely grateful,’ Hackett said, trying sincerity but failing.

When she called McBride, he was having the same debate he had with himself every day at that time – would he lunch on a KitKat or be sensible and have something green? The chocolate always won and every day he convinced himself that the next day would be different.

Petra saved him from once more breaking his promise to himself. She suggested they meet at Café Buon Giorno in the centre of town to catch up over a coffee. It would also give him an opportunity to hand over the contents of that morning’s mail, she explained. ‘Unless, of course, you would rather have another visit from Detective Sergeant Gavin Rodger?’ she said mischievously.

‘Mr Siberia himself? No thanks,’ McBride said. ‘I’ll chill out with you over a bacon roll or something sensible, if you insist.’

They did not speak for long. Petra looked less strained than when he’d last seen her and was immaculately uncrumpled. But she was still under pressure. The relaxation she usually brought with her was absent. She drank two cups of Americano but couldn’t finish her sandwich. He recognised the symptoms. They were the same kind that overtook him when a deadline loomed and his laptop screen was blank.

‘Under the lash, then?’ McBride asked.

‘You could say that,’ Petra replied. ‘We’re ticking all the boxes with the inquiry – sometimes twice – but getting nowhere. Hackett, if you’ll pardon the pun, is hacking everybody off with his bad temper. He’s getting pressure from every direction and taking it out on us.’