No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2) (54 page)

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Stockley wrestled with the coat that he’d found in the back of the Transit van. He wasn’t a large man, but the previous owner had clearly been small, maybe even a woman or child. It didn’t help that he could barely feel his fingers and he was shivering so violently that he thought his teeth would break.

Barely a dozen metres away, concealed by the trees, sat his salvation, its keys already dangling from the ignition, the doors unlocked. A pretty safe gamble, he’d decided, out here in the middle of nowhere. He wanted to get in, start the engine and race down the dirt track that led to freedom, but he knew that he was close to hypothermia. He needed the jacket.

All of a sudden he heard the thrum of a helicopter above and a bright light shone down upon him.

“It’s over, Stockley. You’re surrounded by armed police. The helicopter above has thermal imaging. There’s no escape. Come quietly, nobody needs to get hurt.” Warren stepped out of the tree-line, barely twenty feet from Stockley.

The appearance of the helicopter had surprised Warren almost as much as it had Stockley; he hadn’t thought the helicopter flew in this sort of weather. Regardless, he decided to capitalise on the moment. The most important question was — had it been dispatched to supply support for the armed response units? Or was it here because the ARUs were still delayed?

Either way, Warren had seen no evidence yet of any armed back-up, so it would seem that, even with the helicopter hovering above, he was still on his own. Nevertheless, there was no need for Stockley to know that…

“Give it up, Michael. There are trained snipers surrounding the area — you know you can’t escape.”

He was right, Stockley realised. It was over. Unless he did something about it, the next step was his arrest and then that was it. Prison. He shuddered at the memory. Visiting his father in there had left him with nightmares. The cold grey walls and solid steel doors. The smell of disinfectant everywhere that still couldn’t quite overcome the smell of fear, of hatred, of despair. Every time he’d left the prison, he’d thrown away the clothes he was wearing and stood underneath a scalding shower until the hot water ran out.

He’d made his vow long ago. What would it take to make them shoot him? If he attacked that bastard Jones, would they put a bullet in his head? End it for him in a millisecond?

No, probably not, he realised. They’d aim for the body, the centre-mass. Maybe he’d be dead, maybe not. Maybe he’d be paralysed, incarcerated not just in prison, but in his own body as well. And maybe they’d not even shoot him. Weren’t they encouraged to use non-lethal weapons like TASERs these days? Fifty-thousand volts of excruciating agony, then on with the cuffs.

No, it would have to be by his own hand. He reached into his trouser pocket, surprised to find the bottle intact. Pulling it out, he gripped it numbly between thumb and forefinger and started to unscrew the lid.

Warren stood in the tree-line, waiting for Stockley to make his move. Where the hell was the armed response team? he asked himself for the thousandth time. He cast his gaze around the woods surrounding him, desperately searching for his back-up. Nothing. But then would he see them anyway? Dressed in matt-black, like some sort of twenty-first-century ninja, they could be standing three metres from him, with Stockley square in their infra-red sights, and he would be none the wiser.

Stockley was also looking around, like a rabbit caught in headlights — or a deer for that matter, thought Warren ruefully. The man reached inside his trouser pocket and Warren tensed. Expecting a knife or other weapon, he was not expecting to see a small bottle.

Warren watched as he struggled to unscrew the cap. What was he doing? The cyanide he realised; the man was going to kill himself. A surge of anger ran through Warren’s blood. Not on my watch, Warren vowed.

The man was a killer; he had to answer for his crimes. He had to stand in the dock and face his victims’ families as justice was handed down. Then he had to spend the rest of his life in prison. No way was he going to take the easy way out.

Without really formulating a plan, Warren raced forward. Concentrating on getting his numbed fingers to unscrew the bottle’s cap, Stockley didn’t notice Warren’s movement until it was too late. Warren rammed into him, knocking him to one side. The bottle flew out of his grip, landing in a pile of snow a few feet away. Warren was holding onto Stockley’s lower body with all of his might, trying to stop the man from scrambling free to retrieve the bottle. Not for the first time in his police career, Warren wished he’d extended his self-defence training beyond the required courses. A working knowledge of judo would come in useful right about now.

Fortunately, Michael Stockley was no martial artist either and the best he could do was batter away at his opponent’s body, trying to find a spot where the coat’s padding was thinner.

For his part, Warren simply hunkered down and took the blows; where the hell was his back-up? He’d be black and blue in the morning, but his attacker couldn’t get enough of a swing to do any real damage. The coat that Stockley had tried to force himself into was restricting his movement, whilst the biting cold and lingering effects of the chloroform robbed him of his strength.

Finally, Warren decided to seize his chance. Relaxing his tight grip on his assailant’s ribcage, he pushed back, lifting his head. He felt the crown of his head connect solidly with Stockley’s chin and he fancied he could hear the clack as his teeth snapped together. Warren let his grip go completely now and Stockley reared backward, widening the gap between them as Warren had hoped he would.

Reversing direction, Warren snapped his head forward, slamming his forehead into Stockley’s nose full force.

The satisfying, crunching, squidging noise was definitely worth the bruise Warren would no doubt be wearing in the middle of his forehead for the next fortnight. As Stockley collapsed back, with a deep groan, Warren scrambled over and grabbed the bottle of cyanide. Without pausing, he threw it overarm into the rushing river below.

“No!” shouted Stockley, watching his last chance to control his own fate spinning end over end into the void below. He knelt, covering his face with his hands. A quiet sob racked his body.

“It’s done, Michael. It’s all over. Come quietly — there’s no need to make any more of a fuss.” Warren fought down his revulsion for the man in front of him and tried to sound sympathetic.

It wasn’t easy. The man before him was a monster of the worst kind. A sick predator who had ended the lives of a string of young women for nothing but his own sexual gratification. Unbidden, the faces of five young women swam before his eyes: Sally Evans, Carolyn Patterson, Gemma Allen, Saskia Williams and last of all poor Melanie Clearwater. She’d survived, but at what cost? And then there was Jemima Duer; Warren hadn’t seen a photo of her, had no idea what she looked like. He prayed that he could say hello to her in person, now that it was all over — to know that they’d saved at least one of this animal’s victims.

But what about Stockley? Warren had been acting instinctively when he’d tried to stop him from taking the cyanide, but what had he accomplished, really? The man had destroyed so many lives, not only those he’d killed, but their loved ones as well — yet he would survive and live out the rest of his days. He would almost certainly spend those days in prison or a secure institute, but so what? He’d have access to TV, books, probably even the Internet eventually. Every day he’d wake up and live that day until he went to bed, ready to do it all over again. How was that fair? Warren thought back to the tear-stained face of Gemma Allen’s mother. “How is that right?” she’d asked through her tears. Warren hadn’t been able to answer her then — he still couldn’t answer her now.

Reaching behind him, he was relieved to find the plasti-cuffs he kept in his back pocket still there. He tossed them to Stockley.

“Put those on, Michael, then let’s get you some warm clothes and hot coffee.”

Stockley stared at the cuffs lying on the snow before him.

Suddenly, in a burst of speed that Warren would have thought beyond him, he leapt to his feet.

“Never!” And with that he hurled himself past a frozen Warren, towards the rushing river below.

Epilogue

Warren sipped gratefully at the freshly brewed coffee poured for him by Assistant Chief Constable Mohammed Naseem. It was barely forty-eight hours after the climactic events in the forest and, despite technically being on sick leave, Warren had been writing up report after report. More than once he’d considered switching the sling from his left arm to his right arm and claiming that he couldn’t write properly. Unfortunately, the paperwork wasn’t going to go away and he might as well get it done with.

Now, with most of the administration completed, he had been summoned to the ACC’s office to give his side of the story. No police investigation ever went completely smoothly and the fact that Stockley had managed to kill so many victims was guaranteed to provoke condemnation from some quarters, so the force was determined to rebut any allegations of poor detective work immediately.

That wasn’t the only reason, of course, that Jones found himself face to face with his boss. The rumours were that Naseem fancied himself as something of a novelist and that one day he would parlay some of the more interesting cases to have come across his desk into fiction. Whether it was true or not, Naseem was known to be an appreciative audience and Jones was actually rather looking forward to telling the tale.

“Thanks for coming in, Warren. Of course, I’d have completely understood if you had felt you needed more time to deal with what happened.” He gestured at Warren’s bruised and battered face and his sling. Warren smiled at the white lie.

“Hell of an ending, Warren. Of course, the circumstances were horrendous and I don’t think anyone could have expected you to stop him.”

Warren nodded; in his mind’s eye he again saw the mother of Gemma Allen as she asked how it was fair that Stockley would live, when her daughter was gone.

Naseem shook his head in sympathy. “Between you, me and these four walls, I think a hell of a lot of us believe that an ice-cold, watery grave is a fitting end for a bastard like Michael Stockley. There is nothing else in our system that will ever adequately punish him enough or bring justice for his victims.”

Warren nodded. Tony Sutton had suggested much the same as he had wrapped his shivering boss in a blanket and awaited the arrival of the ambulance, that fateful night.

However, forty-eight hours after the event, Warren wasn’t so sure. Who was he to pass sentence out in the woods, with nobody else to argue his decision with? To horribly misquote Churchill, the adversarial justice system was the worst type of system, except for all the others. Deep in his heart, below the moral certainty that all policemen needed to do the job, Warren knew that he was only a facilitator of justice, not its arbiter. Morally, Warren knew that allowing Stockley to kill himself through inaction was no different from pushing him into that river himself. It was up to a jury of twelve peers to be swayed by arguments both in favour of and against the defendant. He had no right to make life or death decisions. Did anyone? Not even the family of those victims had that right, he felt. Perhaps one might argue that the killer’s victims might have that privilege, but, until somebody figured out how to communicate with the dead, that remained nothing more than a philosophical debating point.

For him to assume that responsibility, out in the woods on his own, would place him on the same moral plane as Michael Stockley and that wasn’t somewhere that Warren wanted to be. He didn’t feel that he could cope with the burden of guilt that passing such a sentence would leave him with. Would he ever sleep again?

For that reason, Warren was glad that Sutton had arrived when he did. His desperate lunge to grab a falling Stockley had strained and torn ligaments in his shoulder and the pain had threatened to overwhelm him. A few more seconds and he would have had to let go whether he wanted to or not. As it was, his saving of the twisted killer and rapist had garnered him a mixture of admiration from those who were impressed by the lengths he went to or dismay from those who regarded it as an opportunity lost.

“So why don’t you take us through the whole story, Warren? I hear that Stockley is admitting everything.” Naseem had settled himself down, cradling his cup of coffee, and was clearly looking forward to the tale.

Warren grunted. “You could say that. We can’t get him to shut up. Of course, he claims no personal responsibility and that we aren’t the ones who should be judging him.”

Naseem raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“As far as Stockley’s concerned, it was the fault of his father; he claims that his father passed on something in his genes that meant he was wired wrong — claims it’s all his dad’s fault and had he not been so wicked et cetera et cetera. He also claims that as it’s not his fault, he won’t be punished for his actions by God.”

Naseem rolled his eyes, clearly expressing what he thought of that. “Then I guess we’ll just have to punish him on God’s behalf. Leaving that aside, what sort of influence did his father have on him?”

“Pretty significant, it would seem. He found out a lot about his father’s crimes during the court case and later through his own research. He emulated his father’s methods, not only to implicate him but because they were so effective.”

“And this wasn’t the first time he’s done this?”

“No, he says it started when he raped a jogger in a park in Bristol back when he was at university. He learned from his father’s mistakes and nearly killed the woman with an overdose of chloroform to stop her coming around. Nevertheless he pulled it off and the crime remained unsolved.

“It seems that this episode woke him up and he voluntarily committed himself to drug rehabilitation and counselling. He admitted whilst he was in therapy that he had strong, inappropriate sexual urges and blamed them on his father, but claims to have been sufficiently vague that the therapist didn’t make the connection with any crime, assuming that he was talking hypothetically.