The Murder Code (7 page)

‘Not so much. But I’ve got these.’

I took out some photographs of the clothes and items we’d found on the second victim. A lot of them were generic, but I held out some hope for a necklace we’d found, wrapped away beneath his clothes. There was an old wedding ring on it.

The man took them one by one with gnarled fingers wrapped in wool gloves, shining his torch over each of them before passing them back. He paused at the ring.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s passed by, on and off, for years. Jesus nut. That’s all I know. Don’t know his name, but someone will.’

‘All right. Can I …?’

‘Go in?’ He moved to one side and shouted: ‘
Be my guest!
’

I walked a little way on, him following behind, muttering to himself. After a minute, he stepped into an alcove where a three-seater settee had been lodged, next to a packing crate with a candle burning. A battered old paperback was lying splayed out on the settee, and a sleeping bag was rolled up neatly at one end.

A little further on, I reached what had once been intended to become Foxton underground station. It was an echoing hexagonal space, every surface tiled, every wall filled with empty poster grids. Where the ticket machines should have been, there were racks of bunk beds. Graffiti covered the walls. There were a handful of rusted metal barrels that in winter would be full of burning wood, but now they were dark and dead. Everything was bathed in amber light from the countless candles.

People everywhere: hunched shadows, either slumped in place or meandering around erratically. There were also a number of corridors running off the central area. Doors that might once have been labelled ‘No Entry’ were now propped open with large chunks of rock. Every conceivable space down here had been colonised. Along all the corridors, I knew, there were fenced-off sleeping areas. Televisions flickered in the darkness, powered by the electrics that had been developed down here: snaking rubber cables that connected junction boxes and ended, occasionally, in rubber plugs in archaic boxes in the walls. There were toilets and shower stalls.

I worked my way through, showing my photos here and there to people whose faces I couldn’t see. Despite what the watchman had said, all I got was shakes of the head and shrugs.

I was beginning to despair slightly until I wandered down a stationary escalator and found a small church. It had been built in a storage area below one of the railway arches. Two metal bins were burning brightly on either side of the entrance, the flames crackling, the metal as thin and fragile as charred paper.

I peered inside. A number of benches had been arranged roughly in lines, and hooded figures were dotted here and there, elbows on knees, heads bowed, facing a wooden table at the far end. The stone wall above it was daubed with various religious symbols. The air was hot in here, and perhaps because of the silence of its small congregation, the room felt as though it was waiting for something—some boom or clank from the bowels of the surrounding tunnels.

A Jesus nut, the guard had said.

If anyone would know our John Doe, it was someone here.

I approached a man at the back of the room. He was dressed in jeans and an old black hoodie, but it was easy to tell he was fat and saggy beneath it.

‘Police,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to identify someone. You recognise any of these belongings?’

I was already holding out the photographs when he looked up at me, revealing a bearded face mottled with red veins, and eyeballs as yellow as butter. Greasy flecks of black hair poked out from beneath the hood like spider legs. I recoiled slightly. He stared up at me, and his bleary eyes seemed to focus.

‘Do I know you?’ he said.

‘No.’

The man shook his head, confused. ‘You put me away once?’

‘Not that I remember,’ I said.

He stared at me for a few seconds longer, still trying to work out whether I was a real figure from his past or just a stranger overlaid with a ghost. Then he looked down at the photograph I was holding, which showed the wedding ring on the necklace.

He nodded slowly to himself.

‘Yeah, I know him.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

I waited some more, but he didn’t volunteer anything.

‘And?’ I said. ‘What about a name?’

‘Fifty.’

‘That’s a weird name. Parents are cruel, right?’

‘I meant—’

‘I know what you meant.’

I looked around. Just outside the entrance, the flames were crackling louder than before. I had that same impression that something was waiting down here in the shadows. The pressure felt like it had gone up a notch. I wanted out of here; my forehead was suddenly damp. But instead, I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and tried to smile.

‘You do receipts?’

‘D
EREK EVANS,’ I SAID.

Laura glanced up as I walked triumphantly back into the office. I didn’t know how long she’d been back from the postmortems, but she still looked a little pale. Still managed to whip out the sarcasm, though.

‘You’ve got the wrong office then. This is Laura Fellowes and some jerk called Hicks.’

‘Lame.’ I closed the door behind me. ‘That’s the name of our John Doe. Derek Evans.’

‘Okay.’

She began typing. As she pulled the name from our files, I told her what I’d found out in Troll East.

According to the guy I’d spoken to, Evans was somewhere in his fifties and had been a squaddie when he was younger. After leaving the service, he’d wandered for a bit, never landed fully on his feet. Dragged a troubled history underground with him and found some kind of god to help salve it with. He was a big guy that nobody messed with.

‘Nothing on the files for him.’

‘No convictions,’ I said. There were a dozen other databases we could check. Evans was bound to show up somewhere, especially having served. And despite my unease about the man I’d spoken to in the tunnels, the details all fitted. ‘He hadn’t been seen around for a few days, but that’s not unusual. Evans liked the open air, apparently—liked to sleep outside when the weather was good enough. So that seems right.’

Laura nodded.

‘Where does this leave us?’

‘We’ll need to check for connections to Vicki Gibson. Seems unlikely, but you never know. What did we get from the postmortems? You still look a bit green, by the way.’

‘Mmm. I think you got the better deal after all.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

She told me what the autopsies had revealed, although a lot of the information remained provisional and tests still needed to be run. The upshot so far was that Dale was convinced the same weapon had been used in both attacks—or, at least, the same type of weapon.

‘A hammer, he guesses.’

‘That fits.’

‘Time of death is also roughly what we were expecting. Sometime between two and three in the morning, although it’s hard to be totally sure. He can’t say what order they were killed in. Well, not from that, anyway.’

I frowned. ‘Not from that. Explain.’

‘There’re two things. The first is the ferocity of the attacks. It’s not conclusive, but a lot more damage was meted out on Evans. That might indicate that after Gibson, the killer wasn’t …’ she grimaced, ‘
spent
.’

‘Nice.’

‘That’s Dale’s choice of words.’

‘Dale needs to see a psychiatrist,’ I said. It didn’t seem all that conclusive to me, not necessarily. ‘What’s the other thing?’

‘The other thing is what makes it almost certain that we’re dealing with the same killer. Dale found traces of polythene in both bodies.’

‘
Polythene?
’

‘
Traces
of it,’ she said. ‘In their wounds, to be precise. And there was much more of it in Evans’s skull than in Gibson’s.’

She let that sink in.

‘A carrier bag?’ I said.

Laura nodded. That’s Dale’s guess. Still to be confirmed. But it looks like the hammer was in a bag when the killer hit the victims with it. It must have got slightly damaged while he used it on Gibson, so he left a lot more behind during the assault on Evans.’

I blew out slowly.

The horror of it was one thing—the imagery it conjured up—but I tried to concentrate on what it meant. Had the killer been attempting not to leave evidence behind? That didn’t make much sense.

‘He wanted to keep the weapon clean?’

‘Could be,’ Laura said. ‘Or else he wanted to carry it around without arousing suspicion. Beforehand, obviously. Not much chance of that afterwards, I’m guessing.’

‘Unless he turned the bag inside out.’

Laura grimaced again. ‘You have a sick mind, Hicks. But that’s also true. The river search has turned up lots of old bags, so that’ll keep us busy. I’ve also ramped up the search of bins in the vicinity. It’s possible he abandoned the bag when he was done with it, especially if it had ripped that badly.’

‘Maybe.’

I didn’t think we’d get that lucky, though. I leaned back in my chair, thinking it all over. Our killer had come prepared to attack Vicki Gibson; he’d been successful enough in that—but then he’d wandered a reasonably short distance, found Evans asleep on a bench, and killed him too, even more viciously.

I said, ‘We need to find the connection between them.’

‘If there is one.’

‘There must be something. If not, it means we’ve got a guy who attacks people at random. And that doesn’t make any sense to me. None. At. All.’

‘Maybe not entirely at random,’ Laura said.

‘What do you mean?’

She sighed, then gestured vaguely at the piles of paperwork on the desk. The witness reports—the interviews that had got us nowhere because, for some inexplicable reason, nobody had seen anything at all.

‘Explain?’

‘Maybe she was just the first available person, and Evans the second.’

I looked at the statements. And thought about it. A killer carrying his hammer out of sight in a carrier bag. Just wandering. Innocuous. Someone who didn’t stand out.

Laura said, ‘We were wondering how he’d managed to catch Vicki Gibson at a time when nobody was around and nobody was looking. But maybe that’s not what happened at all.’

‘He didn’t find her deliberately,’ I said. ‘He just happened to be in a place without witnesses when they crossed paths.’

Laura nodded. ‘I think that’s what might have happened.’

‘That would mean it could have been …’

‘Anyone,’ she said. ‘Yes. I think it could have been anyone. Anyone at all.’

K
RAMER’S HEART IS THUMPING
hard as he walks.

His breath clouds in front of him. The night is cold, the sky overhead clear of clouds. You can’t usually see the stars here in the city, not with the light pollution, but a few have prickled through. The moon is bright and full, a worn silver coin hanging over the city.

He shivers as he walks, his teeth chattering.

It’s partly the cold, but most of it’s adrenalin.

That’s okay. When he first started working the doors, Trevor told him it was natural to be scared. Everybody is scared of physical confrontation. On the door, you have to hide it, but only on the surface, only ever from your opponent. If you hide the fear from yourself, it fucks you over, but if you’re canny you can use the adrenalin. That’s what gives you the edge.

Ideally, though, he wants to dampen it down a little before he reaches his destination, so he rolls saliva around in his mouth. That’s another piece of advice Trevor gave him: control the fear by rolling spit. It works too, although he doesn’t know why.

So he walks, trying to stay calm but ready. Trying to keep everything coiled up for when he needs it.

Not far now. Not long.

Kramer checks the carrier bag he’s holding. If there was anyone around, to all appearances it would just look full of laundry. That will be his immediate explanation if he’s stopped by the police. It’s unlikely they’ll search the bag. If that happens, he’s in deep shit. Hidden beneath the clothes, there’s a ten-inch double-bladed machete, a luminous-green water pistol full of ammonia, and a hammer.

Not that he’s spotted any police so far, mind, and he doesn’t really expect to round here. So he won’t see those items again until he reaches the house he’s heading to, on the edge of the Fairfield estate.

Kramer leaves the main street and heads down a ginnel, lined on either side with tall wooden fences. It’s the quickest cut-through. A few bends and he’ll be out on to the edge of the waste ground, then just across to the estate beyond. He’s been there before, from time to time, calling up debts. It’s certainly the place for them: a maze of grey one-storey blocks, with lots of little alleyways in between; all feral kids, barking dogs, and bins lying in the middle of the streets. The whole place is one big fucking debt.

He doesn’t think too much about what he’s going to do when he gets there. It’s pointless to get ahead of yourself. Knock on the door. When it opens—or if it doesn’t, kick the fucking thing off its hinges—go in. A faceful of ammonia to put anyone down, then it’ll be hammer in one hand, machete in the other. That’s as far as he’s thinking, because when you get hung up on a plan, you get strung out when the plan goes wrong. He’s seen it with traditional martial artists on the door. In the dojo it’s all straight lines, but there aren’t any straight lines when you’re rolling around on the fucking pavement. You need to adapt.

But he knows this: a message needs to be sent.

The first time it happened on the doors, it was some dealers trying to muscle their way in, figuring they were fifteen strong and the door team were five. Trevor explained to Kramer what would happen and asked whether he was cool with it, and Kramer said he was. They picked out the main guy and, the next morning, staged a little home invasion: smashed his knees and elbows with a hammer and put the machete up his arse. He didn’t die. Didn’t tell the police either. But most importantly, he didn’t turn up at the club again. None of them did.

The difference tonight is he’s doing it alone. But that’s okay—and even if it wasn’t, it’s the way it needs to be, because the slight was personal: the black bodybuilder, Connor, mugging him off in front of everyone last night. Making threats, fancying himself. Kramer isn’t the biggest guy, and probably looks like an easy mark to make for a guy on the up. Of course, anyone who’s anyone knows Kramer behaves badly out of hours. Maybe Connor has been told since, as he didn’t turn up at the club tonight. But that isn’t good enough.