Son of a Serial Killer (3 page)

9

Summers sat in her office, the seventeen unsolved murder cases attributed to The Phantom piled up in front of her. She took the top file, the most recent, from the pile and opened it up on the desk.

Staring up at her was a picture of Frederic Clark. The sight of his bloody and soaked face and clothing sent a chill down her spine. She gave the file the once over. She already knew most of the details by squeezing information from the detective who had just retired and from the endless press articles
, but ran through all the information again hoping that something might jump out at her.

The file detailed all the people that were in the pub that day and evening. Every single person had a good alibi and no clear motive, other than maybe being offended by the victim’s crude language. He had no wife, girlfriend, or recent ex. His boss was moderately happy with Freddy’s work. His phone records had nothing out of the ordinary.

Freddy was found around forty-five minutes after he left the pub, by a young couple who had just had a meal there as their first date. Apparently the food wasn’t great and the service was poor. Finding the corpse had likely ended any chance of romance in that relationship.

The rain had started again by that time and washed away any forensic evidence, if any was left in the first place.
There was no CCTV in or around the car-park. The closest video footage was from nearly a mile away and was no help at all. As with all the murders attributed to The Phantom, clues were lacking.

Detective Constable Kite entered Summers’ office with two cups of coffee. He placed one in front of his boss.

‘Thanks.’

‘
So…’ said Kite, as he took a seat, ‘what have we got?’

‘
Well,’ Summers took a deep breath and sighed as she closed the Freddy Clark file, ‘we know that our guy lives in or around the city, has done for a long time and knows how to get to and from places without being seen by anyone or any cameras.’

‘
Ok.’

‘
And he is right-handed,’ she added.

‘
I know why you wanted this case, it’s understandable…’ said Kite, staring into his coffee, ‘but where the hell do we start with this thing?’

Summers took out her hip-flask, added some to her coffee and stirred. Kite rolled his eyes.

‘Well, that’s not gonna help,’ he said.

Summers stood and dropped the Freddy Clark file in front of
Kite. She then sorted through the other sixteen files, dropping eleven more in front of Kite and leaving five to the side.

‘
So what does this mean?’ he asked.

Summers sat back down, finished
her drink in one go and threw the polystyrene cup in the bin.

‘
The twelve files in front of you happened within three square miles of each other. Autopsy reports show the use of a weapon, usually a knife but twice a screwdriver. These killings are all carried out by a right-hander.’

She pointed to the five cases she had out-sorted.
‘And these… I don’t know.’

‘
You don’t know?’

‘
The bodies had been moved, or they were strangled or beaten as well as stabbed. One had been robbed as well,’ she stated.

‘
So you’re saying,’ said Kite, ‘that these five cases are not down to The Phantom?’

‘
I’m saying,’ Summers replied, ‘that in the twelve cases in front of you we can determine at least a slight pattern, in method and location. The other five just don’t fit.

‘
Other than the lack of evidence,’ Kite pointed out.

10

Ben closed the front door behind him, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the coat-stand.

‘
Nat?’ he called. No reply.

He felt the stubble on his chin and made his way to the bathroom. As he reached out to open the bathroom door, he heard a noise come from the bedroom.

‘Don’t tell me you’re back…’ he said as he opened the bedroom door ‘... in bed.’

He couldn’t breathe. It
felt like he had been punched in the stomach and his heart ripped from his chest, but he couldn’t stop staring.

David, who once used to work with Ben at CEM,
over a year ago, looked up from Natalie’s groin and jumped to his feet. If Natalie felt any guilt, she didn’t show it.

‘
I’m so sorry, Ben,’ said David.

‘
You’re meant to be my mate, Dave,’ said Ben as his stomach got the better of him.

Ben
vomited on his own bedroom floor. He stared at the vomit, at Natalie, at David, and then he turned and ran out of the flat, grabbing his jacket on the way and slamming the door shut behind him.

‘
Shit,’ said David.

‘
You’re still paying me, David,’ said Natalie, lying on the bed, wearing only a bra, ‘so get back here and finish what you started.’

‘
You really are a heartless cow,’ said David, before climbing back on the bed and sucking gently on her clitoris.

11

Ben had run for more than a mile. Ran along the streets, ran blindly across roads, nearly ending his life just like his father not so long ago, ran towards the fields and finally stopped when he reached the canal.

He thought about jumping into the water.
Could you force yourself to drown? Maybe he’d get lucky and get pulled down by the current, if they existed in canals, or get his legs tangled up in the reeds under the surface and couldn’t escape even if he lost his nerve.

He thought about jumping from one of the bridges along the canal, but none were very high, and with his luck recently, he would probably just end up disabled, with only his
mother to look after him, who he was sure, was getting madder by the day.

He loo
ked down at his shoes, now caked in mud, and sighed, then bent down and picked up a few pebbles that he caught his eye on the pathway. All three were smooth and flat with round edges, perfect for skimming, just like his father had taught him to do many years ago.

He threw the first stone and it sank without bouncing even once, the same with the second. He eyed the last pebble in his hand. The third throw was better, bouncing five times before disappearing below the surface, where it would rest until the end of days.
He managed a brief smile before it turned into a frown.

‘
I miss you, dad,’ he said.

He began a slow walk along the canal, towards the city centre. Recent events ran through his mind. He missed his
father so much, and was so lost in his own depression that he hadn’t stopped to think about his mother and how she was coping.

She lived close,
Mrs Green, but rarely left the house that Ben grew up in. Ben didn’t want to go there as seeing all his father’s possessions would sadden him further. But he knew, as an only child, he had a responsibility towards his mother, an only child herself.

He
vowed to go and see her later that day, even though he dreaded seeing how senile she had become. She had always been strange, angry for no reason at one moment and then happy the next. Since becoming a widower, she was free-falling into that dark and lonely hole called madness.

Tears began falling again
as his thoughts switched back to Natalie. He knew they didn’t have the perfect relationship, but her cheating had come as a shock. And with David as well! Why someone he knew? Why does that always hurt more?

Ben wasn’t surprised at David’s behaviour, they used to drink together after work and it was clear to everyone that he wasn’t the faithful
type. This was made worse by the fact that his wife of seven years absolutely adored him. They were lovers at university and wed soon after graduating.

David was like Charlie, in that when Ben gave less of his spare time to the boy’s club, to getting drunk, to bragging about money, he
’d lost all respect for him. That’s the thing with salesmen, always a shallow smile to your face, but the bottom line is the bottom line. You can never trust a salesman.

David had left CEM to start his own firm but stayed friends with Charlie thanks to their mutual love of boozy nights at strip clubs and cas
inos. Rumour had it that they’d even shared a prostitute once.

Ben wiped his eyes, red from crying, and blew his nose into a tissue as he entered under a bridge over the canal. He couldn’t believe how bad his day was getting when he noticed the teenage couple from earlier sat on a bench and smoking a joint.
Ben kept his head down and walked past them.

Alexia noticed it was the man from earlier and nudged the stoned Ricky, who looked up and laughed.

‘Are you crying?’ he asked, shamelessly. Ignored, he tried again, ‘Oi, paedo, you been crying?

Ben was a few yards away as Ricky bent down and grabbed
a stone from the ground.

‘
I’m talking to you,’ he called out, and then threw the stone at Ben, which struck him hard on the back of the head.

Ben’s knees wobbled and he buckled over. He steadied himself with his hands at the side of the canal,
just about preventing himself from falling in. On all fours, he gazed at his reflection in the water, and started mumbling to himself.

‘
And now he’s talking to ‘imself,’ laughed Ricky. ‘You’re mad, mate. You fucking paedo.’

‘
Ok,’ said Ben, to the man in the water. ‘Ok.’

Whilst lifting himself to his feet, Ben grabbed a half-brick that lay on the ground
beside him, then turned and quickly marched in Ricky’s direction, determination and anger written all over his face.

‘
Oh yeah, and what are you gonna do?’ said Ricky, sticking out his chest and dropping his shoulders as he stepped forward, looking brave in front of his girlfriend.

He should have run away.

Ben didn’t say a word. He just swung his straight arm around and crashed the corner of the brick into the side of Ricky’s skull.

Ricky’s eyes froze, then glazed, then rolled in their sockets. Two seconds later, blood was shooting
out from the wound at the side of Ricky’s head as he fell, lifeless, into the canal. The air trapped in his puffer jacket, and the reeds at the edge of the water under his feet, kept him afloat.

Ben watched, emotionless, until the screams and cries for help from Alexia snapped him out of his trance. He tossed the brick into the canal.

Alexia was frozen to the spot where she stood, fear and panic rooting her feet to the ground. Urine began to drip from the bottom of her school skirt.

She fe
ll silent as Ben covered her mouth with one hand and then grabbed the hair on the back of her head with the other. He yanked her head backwards and forced her to the ground.

Ben sat on her chest with his knees pin
ning down her shoulders and grabbed fistfuls of her hair, either side of her head. She managed to scream one more word, ‘Please,’ before Ben violently lifted her head then smashed it down onto the concrete floor, as hard as he possibly could.

She didn’t scream anymore, but Ben didn’t stop cracking her head until blood, hair and bits of skull formed a lumpy puddle beneath her.

Ben sat, looking down on his victim and laughed. He laughed at the blood on his hands and the stains on his jacket before snapping back to reality.

He was a killer, now suddenly in survival mode.
He stood and looked both directions along the canal. Nobody was in sight.

Ben
dragged Alexia’s corpse to the edge of the water and rolled her in. Again, the reeds played a big part in keeping the corpse from sinking, so he pushed down on her body with his foot until she was submerged, but as soon as he lifted it again, the reeds forced her back to the surface.

He stepped to the side and lowered
himself back down on his knees and washed the blood from his hands and face in the filthy water then stood and again checked for witnesses. He took off his jacket and folded it over his arm, planning to ditch it in some random rubbish bin, far from here.

He
took one more look at the bodies floating on the surface of the cold, canal water.

‘
Shit,’ he said, ‘you fucking kids had to push me.’

He
walked away from the ugly scene, guilt and joy wrestling for prominence in his mind.

12

Summers stood in front of a large whiteboard. The photos of her twelve selected victims along with their names and basic information and details of death were written up and taped to the board, in chronological order, earliest death on the left, numbered one.

Summers gently touched the photo of victim five, Dr Andrew Summers
, then stood back and took her hip-flask from her desk drawer, gulped from it and put it back just as Kite walked back into the office with more coffee. Summers acknowledged him as he placed one coffee in front of her and took a sip of his own.

‘
You drink too much of that crap,’ she said, ‘it’s not good for the body.’

Kite bit his tongue before making a rash comment about his superior’s drinking habit. It wasn’t quite midday and he had
already twice seen her with a hip-flask in hand. As a teetotaller, he didn’t know if it was Rum, Whiskey, Gin or what she had a taste for. He knew it was alcohol, and he didn’t approve. He also knew if he mentioned it to a colleague, or worse still, to Watts, she would be out of the door in a flash.

But he wouldn’t say anything. He’d keep a close eye on things, but figured that if Summers was half as good a detective as they say she is, then she’d be the one to
solve the riddle of who The Phantom is, regardless of a few sips of alcohol.

Besides,
The Phantom had killed her dad, victim number five. It was common knowledge within the establishment that she only joined the force to seek justice for her father and put his killer behind bars. She brought a passion to this case nobody else could match.

Of
course, there had been numerous arrests and charges against suspects, but none could stick. How could they? There was never any real evidence, only circumstantial, at best.

If
The Phantom took the time to hide or destroy the bodies, as he did to cover his tracks and destroy and legible evidence, then these files wouldn’t be murder cases, they would be Missing Person files.

Summers sat in her chair and gestured for Kite to go to the map of the city that was taped onto a wall of cork, to the side of the whiteboard. She told him to put yellow
pins on the map where the twelve Phantom case corpses were found and green pins where the other five bodies had shown up. He did so then took a seat.

The five green pins were randomly dotted on the map, whereas the yellow pins were grouped in the north-west of the city.

‘So there were some bodies found further away from the main cluster, it doesn’t mean they aren’t linked by the killer,’ said Kite, playing the devil’s advocate. ‘Maybe he drives, or uses the tube or buses.’

‘But he doesn’t,’ said Summers.
‘If he drove, we’d have him somewhere on camera. The same goes if he took the tube or a bus.’

She stood and gestured to the twelve yellow pins on the map.

‘He lives here. He kills here,’ she said. ‘There are housing estates, fields, parks, places without CCTV.’

‘
But the other five had no CCTV,’ Kite said.

‘
Irrelevant.’

‘
Irrelevant? How comes?’

‘
Because they don’t fit!’ exclaimed Summers.

She explained to Kite again that the methods of killing were
different in the five cases, that the places were too far apart, and that her hunch was the killer is a man who jogs or walks his dog, sees an opportunity to kill and quenches his thirst.

Kite nodded thoughtfully. He could
see she had reason in her thinking, and to narrow down the hunt for clues and witnesses would make things easier for them, even if it did still leave nearly three square miles hosting twelve different crime scenes, ranging from eight years to two months old.

Kite flicked through the dates of the five separated case file
s and noted that they were all at least two years old.

‘
If you’re right,’ he said, ‘we could probably ship these off to the Cold Case Department. Not that the governor’ll be pleased when you spring this on him.’

‘
I imagine he already knows,’ she said.

Speak of the devil. Watts stuck his head around the door.

‘Right, you two, a couple of bodies have been found in the canal by Old Town Road. Uniforms are there already. I think you want might want to get down there,’ said the DCI before leaving as quick as he came.
‘Two bodies?’ said Summers. She looked at the map. Old Town Road ran right through the middle of the killer’s territory. ‘Let’s go.’