The Handshaker (31 page)

Shannon snorted. “Bloody students. Fooling around on my taxes.”

Debbie tried to speak, to break the kiss but she could not. Croft’s back was to the police, his ear tuned. There was the familiar chime of the lift arriving, the sigh of its doors opening, and the three men stepped in.

After another interminable delay, the doors closed, Croft broke the kiss and promptly apologised. “Sorry, Debbie, but you were just about to give me away to the police.”

Head bent low, he hurried off towards the exit, while Debbie delivered a girlish grin to his back.

Croft hurried outside and paused as he emerged from the doors. A young constable stood, facing away from the building, hands clasped lightly at his back. Croft tossed his options around. Walk past him? Knock him out? Too dangerous. Taking a deep breath, he marched up to the officer and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Helluva battle going on in there, son,” he grunted. “Your mates look as if they need help to keep the students back.”

The PC looked alarmed and stared Croft briefly in the eye. Croft simply walked on.

The officer turned, looked through the glass doors into the building, and making up his mind, ran for the interior.

Hurrying past the parked patrol cars, Croft noted that the keys were in the ignition of one. Without further ado, he climbed behind the wheel, fired the engine and took off out of the university, turning hard left and heading for the motorway.

As he drove along, flooded with relief, he wondered once more what he was supposed to do next. Eventually, he ceased worrying. He would dump the car, make his way back to the perfect hiding place and then work it out.

41

Within 10 minutes of its theft, a GPS track located the car on a motorway service station 6 miles from the university, but by the time a patrol car got to it, Croft was long gone.

Shannon was enraged and in the university reception area, with an audience of staff and students, he unleashed his fury on the young officer duped by Croft.

“He was right alongside you, you idiot, and you let him trick you into leaving your post and your car unattended.”

From one side, Debbie Austwick barked a short, sharp laugh. “That’s nothing,” she said with a Cheshire cat grin. “He was stood right behind you snogging me when you were waiting for the lift.”

Initially gobsmacked, Shannon turned apoplectic with rage. “And you never said anything?”

Debbie grinned. “Why should I? I’m not a cop.”

“He’s a murderer,” Shannon shouted.

She laughed aloud. “And I’m joining a nunnery.”

The Principal made half-hearted protests to Shannon, but was shouted down as quickly as anyone else while the superintendent organised both his thoughts and his manpower using his mobile phone.

“I want a unit in support of Begum out at Oaklands,” he barked at Millie over the phone, “and I want a uniformed constable out here, on permanent duty outside the main entrance. If we’re short of people, get onto Division and ask for more. And get onto that daily. I wanna know where he might have gone.”

***

Millie was waiting for the superintendent when he got back to the station.

“I spoke to the daily, Christine Hitchins, over the phone,” she reported, “and she gave me the full SP on Croft. He’s not native to Scarbeck, which we knew anyway. The only places she can think of where he might have gone are London, where his father and brother still live, or his ex-wife, who lives over Knutsford way. I’ve rung the local police, but they have the ex-Mrs Croft as being on holiday in Goa right now, but they’ve promised to keep an eye open for him. The Met will contact his father.”

“Good.” Shannon did not sound as if he were pleased. “I want that bastard back in custody before nightfall.”

“Ernie, stop being a dick. If we get him, we get him. And,” she pressed on as he opened his mouth to bite back, “don’t be laying it all on the uniformed kids. You sent him to the station with only Thurrock in the car, when we should have had two people with him, and according to reports, he was stood right behind you in the university and you didn’t spot him.”

Shannon fumed in silence.

“Anyway,” Millie went on, “there are other considerations.”

“Such as?”

“The pen.”

Shannon’s eyes lit. “Croft’s pen?”

Millie waved away the obstinacy. “Maybe, maybe not. We’ll never know for sure.”

Shannon was suddenly interested. He sat up in his chair, raising his eyebrows.

“There were no prints on it,” Millie told him.

“Impossible.”

She shook her head. “Not impossible, and you know it’s not. It had been wiped.”

The superintendent’s face coloured. He stared out of the window at the interminable rain, his brow furrowed. Millie waited patiently for him to knit the information into a complete pattern.

“Why the hell would he wipe the pen?” he asked, turning back to her.

“He wouldn’t,” she replied. “He wouldn’t have even left it there.”

“Unless he wiped it before he went to Joyce’s place,” Shannon speculated. “A precaution, just in case he dropped –”

“For god’s sake, Ernie.” Millie’s voice rang round the tiny office and for all she knew passed through the walls into the CID room. “You’re obsessed with him. Slide your brain into gear. Croft did not drop that pen at Joyce’s. He was never there. Someone else wiped it and planted it there to incriminate him. Someone else murdered Victoria Reid and left her in Allington Woods, and that same someone sent Croft the note telling him where he could find her. Like Croft has said all along, someone is pulling the strings and it isn’t him. He’s the patsy. I’ll tell you something else, too. That same someone has kidnapped Croft’s partner, and there’s only one candidate. The Handshaker.”

Shannon shook his head. “No. I won’t have it. The two are not related. If they are, why did Croft run for it this morning.”

Millie sighed. “I don’t know. I really don’t.” She sat opposite him and drummed her fingers on the desktop. “Tell you what, though. I haven’t followed up that Evelyn Kearns bird, yet. What say I get out there, now?”

“You really think it’ll help?” Shannon asked.

Millie stood up again. “You never know your luck in a big city.” She flounced out of the office followed by Shannon’s scowl.

42

The Handshaker pulled one last time on the ligature, just to make sure, then released it. Evelyn Kearns’ body flopped to the carpet. He reached down and touched her neck, seeking a pulse. Nothing. She was dead.

He had first met her soon after moving to Scarbeck, when he was seeking introductions, “in order to establish myself as a counsellor,” he had explained.

They had had a long conversation about his background, experience, and his testimonials, all of which were websites and email addresses, all of which belonged to him. Three days later, sufficiently taken in by his dupe, she had invited him again, and there followed a further, lengthy discussion, this time concerning his skills.

“You understand,” she had said, “I cannot simply put your name forward on the basis of your testimonials, as good as they are.”

He had agreed, and gone into great detail on his methodology. “I concentrate mainly on hypnotism,” he had told her. “I find its efficacy, even with the client suffering from bereavement depression, to be without equal.”

Evelyn agreed, but with reservations, particular regarding working with a female client alone. The Handshaker concurred and assured her that he was the kind of man who took all necessary precautions, even down to having his wife act as a chaperone for such sessions. He regretted that his wife could not be with them, or he would have been happy to give Evelyn a demonstration of his hypnotic skills.

She fell right into the trap. So confident was she of her own skills, so certain that she could maintain control even during a hypnotic session that she decided to let him hypnotise her. Ultimately, it would not have mattered whether she did or not. One of the many counsellors he had on his list of prospects would eventually have done so. The fact that she was a woman rather than a man merely provided The Handshaker with entertainment between her legs. Not at the first session. That was simply designed to relax her sufficiently so that he could give her a small shot of Rohypnol and then install some deep-seated, post-hypnotic keywords.

He left her that first time with a measure of agreement to mention his name to contacts in the medical profession. She never would. During her drug-induced trance, he had ordered her to forget him when talking to anyone
but
him.

From there, it was a simple case of following up and hypnotising her each time they met. Within a matter of weeks he was fucking her, within three months she was sending women to him, and in 2008, she sent Pauline Brooks; Pauline Brooks whom he subsequently hypnotised, raped and murdered; the first of The Handshaker victims. But no one would ever question Evelyn Kearns. Or if they did, they would learn that Pauline Brooks never arrived for her appointment.

And the system had worked. Not all The Handshaker victims had come via Evelyn Kearns. He had a nurse under his spell, too, and she had sent him a couple, while yet more had come to him quite naturally through odd conversations in this bar or at that party, but Evelyn had ‘donated’ – the word made The Handshaker smile – three of the dead woman, and it was when Sinclair came to him that the grand plan finally began to take shape.

Croft, he reasoned, must have worked out that his girlfriend had been hypnotised and pursued the matter of her counselling via their GP, who would have sent him to Evelyn. Croft, he guessed, must then have talked to the police. It was Croft, therefore, who was responsible for Evelyn’s death.

The thought reminded him that time was pressing. That nigger detective had been calling in to ask for Evelyn’s address, and she would be due here at any time.

Leaving Evelyn’s dead body on the carpet, he switched on the computer, waited a minute for it to boot, then checked the file directories, seeking any reference to himself. Too many to go through. He took the machine back to its safe mode and ordered it to reformat the hard drive.

WARNING! Reformatting the hard disc will erase all data. Do you wish to go ahead? (Y/N)

He chuckled at the warning, hit ‘Y’ and turned his attention to the card index system alongside the desk. He looked into the drawers with dismay. Hundreds of cards in there and although he did not have time to go through them seeking references on The Handshaker victims’ files, the police would.

“Make it hard for them,” he said to the empty room, and dragged the drawers out, cascading their contents all over the carpet.

That done, he stroked Evelyn’s dead thigh one last time and hurried out of the house. He paused briefly at the front door, checking whether there was anyone on the street to notice him. There was not. He did not know whether anyone else was looking from behind the curtains of any on the houses opposite, but he was not worried. They must have known that Evelyn was a counsellor and they would be used to men and women, all strangers, turning up at her house.

He climbed into his car, fired the engine and pulled out of the street. Evelyn Kearns dealt with, next on the list was Kathleen Murphy.

“At this rate,” he said to himself as he pulled out onto Huddersfield Road, turning towards town, “I’ll get a place in
The Guinness World Records
for the most murders in one day.”

43

Installed in his secret location, Croft considered his next move.

He toyed briefly with the idea of calling his father for advice, but it was a non-starter. They had a poor relationship, largely thanks to Croft’s determination to go his own way and his father’s stubbornness in the face of that decision. That aside, his father was a High Court Judge, and his advice would be judicially staid. “Give yourself up, my boy. If you’re innocent, you have nothing to fear from the law.”

For the same reason he could not call any of Trish’s colleagues, and he had already dismissed the university staff as an option. Even without their antipathy for him, they were more concerned with keeping their jobs and were almost certain to react by distancing themselves from him and his problems. There were students who may be prepared to help – universities had as large a proportion of revolutionaries, radicals and dissidents now as they had in any other era – but the help they could give him was limited. Demonstrations would be of no use to him.

Obviously there was Christine Hitchins, but as an ally, while she may be prepared to cover for him, she would be little use as a confederate. Besides, the police had posted an officer at Oaklands to prevent him returning.

Finally, there was Millie, but she had other considerations. Much as he liked her, much as he had gained the impression that she liked him, she was nevertheless a professional police officer, and her duty would be to arrest him.

Setting up his laptop, hooking it into a mobile telephone so he could access the Internet, he came to the reluctant conclusion that he was more alone than he had ever been in his entire life.