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Authors: Steve Mosby

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BOOK: The Murder Code
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All it took was a few discreet enquiries to find the guy’s address.

He steps out of the end of the ginnel.

It’s four in the morning, so the wasteland looks deserted. The ground is pale and dead-looking; what isn’t open is just patches of shivery grass and larger clumps of night-black bushes. Even a dumping ground like the estate needs one of its own. The wasteland is the kind of place you find burnt-out cars and illegally tipped rubbish—piles of counterfeit CD cases and ragged bags of old torn clothes. Kramer picks his way carefully along one of the makeshift paths that leads across its heart. He can see the sprawl of the estate in the background, the houses as dull grey and dead as teeth in the dark.

His breath still fogs, but he can hardly see it now. His trainers crunch softly on the gravel and dirt. At his side, the bag rustles.

Kramer follows the path through a cluster of bushes. Up close, the leaves are almost invisible in the darkness. The branches are skeletal. In front of him, it’s difficult to see—

He stops.

There is someone a little way ahead of him.

He starts swirling the saliva around his mouth again. The figure is about ten metres away, but it’s impossible to make out any details. Not big, not small. Little more than a silhouette of a human being against a silhouette of bushes.

But facing him. And standing very still.

For a moment, Kramer does the same. Neither of them moves.

Then the figure turns around and walks away, disappearing off to the side, round the back of the bushes.

Kramer remains standing in place, but a few seconds later, relief floods him, and he almost laughs at himself. It was just someone doing the same thing as him—taking a short cut across the waste ground, coming the opposite way. The guy saw Kramer, froze up, and decided it was sensible to back off and go a different way.

Obviously he doesn’t look like someone to mess with. What’s that saying?
Wouldn’t want to meet him down a dark alley.
That’s what the guy is probably thinking about him right now.

Kramer shakes his head and starts walking again, slightly annoyed. Despite the fact that nothing really happened, the encounter has given the adrenalin a little kick and brought it to life: started it working before he wants it to. He feels invincible right now, but that’s—

He stops again.

Someone
else
is standing there, backed into the bushes where the stranger was. Kramer can see the red glow of a cigarette in the darkness.

Two guys meeting up out here? Well, there’s certainly an explanation for that. Not one he cares for exactly, but not one he’s scared of either. He’ll just walk past—he starts doing so—and ignore the man …

But it’s not a cigarette, he realises. The light from it doesn’t fluctuate. Doesn’t change.

As he reaches the spot, Kramer peers into the bush and sees the red LED light burning small and intense between the leaves. Then the black circle of a lens. A camera, pointing into the bush on the opposite side of the path.

He turns.

There’s a small clearing. There is a chance—briefly—to see the woman lying on her back there, and to see there is something
wrong
with her. To realise, just, that she is far too still and that her face isn’t where it should be.

But there is not time to put all the facts together in his head and make sense of what is happening. Because right then, he hears the quick, heartbeat punch of feet in the gravel behind him, and the whipping, wing-like sound of polythene cracking the night-time air.

And then nothing.

DAY THREE
Twelve

T
HE NEXT MORNING FELT
colder than it should, even though the sun was as bright and warm as it had been when I’d driven up Mulberry Avenue two days earlier, listening to Carla Gibson’s screams.

Nobody was screaming here on the wasteland. It felt like a pocket of silence: the eye of a storm, maybe. We’d set up a perimeter around the entire waste ground and a couple of the surrounding streets on the Garth estate—nobody in or out that didn’t need to be—so the area was still, disturbed only by the quiet, diligent work of the SOCOs as they moved between the bushes. But it also felt like there was a cold presence here, one that chilled the air simply by preventing the sunlight reaching the ground.

Ridiculous, of course.

But it felt that way all the same.

‘Our guy,’ Laura said.

‘Yes.’

We were standing at the end of one of the paths that snaked across the waste ground. Next to it there was a tiny clearing, surrounded on three sides by prickly bushes, and just large enough for the three bodies we’d found, lying side by side. They had been laid out as if sleeping peacefully next to each other. They couldn’t have died peacefully; their killer must have arranged them the way they were for some reason.

I glanced around, and then overhead. No tents had been erected so far. They’d be tough to construct in the undergrowth, but we’d need them shortly. It wouldn’t be long before the news ’copters started circling overhead—searching for a shot that would be of no use to them anyway, one that they would have to blur extensively if they even used it at all.

What would they see? Two women and one man—although from high above, that might not immediately be obvious. You would be able to tell they were fully clothed, but above the neck there would be nothing but red smudges staining the dirt. You would be able to tell that something awful had happened to them, but it wouldn’t prepare you for what you’d see where Laura and I were, standing on the path itself and staring down at what was left of their faces and heads.

Beyond the bushes, residents of the estate would be lined up against the cordon, craning their necks, trying to see. They’d been there when we arrived; they’d still be there now. They weren’t the types to be dissuaded by the police. Clusters of kids in too-small tracksuits stretched over thin shoulders, smoking roll-ups, strolling here and there. Older people remonstrating, wanting to know who we’d found—whether any of the bodies belonged to one of theirs. Getting the same answer each time:
we can’t say right now.

Not least because we couldn’t tell.

Laura said, ‘Trying to show us how powerful he is?’

‘What?’

‘Come back to earth, Hicks. The way’s he’s left them.’

‘Yeah, maybe.’ I looked at the three bodies, lying side by side, as though they’d all lain down there and gone to sleep, and he’d killed each in turn without waking the others. As though it had been easy for him. ‘He’s made it look like he could kill three people without any resistance at all. Without them managing to fight back.’

I shook my head.

‘But?’ Laura said.

‘But they couldn’t have died like that. And he couldn’t have killed them all at once.’

‘Unless it’s more than one killer.’

‘It’s not.’

‘We can’t say that for sure.’

I didn’t reply. It was possible, but it didn’t make sense. It was rare—practically unheard of, in fact—for two people capable of this kind of horrific violence to find each other and work together. Not impossible, but … no. It was one person and we were missing something.

Come back to earth, Hicks.

It was difficult, though; my head was all over the place. Under normal circumstances—or as normal as it ever gets—I’d have been on top of things, but this was quickly moving far out the other side of normal, and it was unnerving me. The cold and the quiet were getting to me, when I wouldn’t normally have paid any attention to them, and certainly wouldn’t have put any stock by them even if I’d noticed. I wasn’t superstitious. Things didn’t get
weird
for me.

And yet … this whole case felt different.

‘Hicks?’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Possibly more than one killer. But that would be unlikely, wouldn’t it? The probability is that it’s one guy, working alone.’

‘Go on then, Sherlock.’

I glanced to either side, up and down the path, still feeling the atmosphere of the place. The waste ground had already been dead and barren, and somehow he’d left it feeling even more so …

Already
dead and barren.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘So this could be the same as the Gibson scene—what we were saying about it yesterday. It’s not the victims themselves, it’s the place. He picked an isolated place and waited.’

‘Somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Somewhere he’d be disturbed just often enough.’

Laura was silent. It was a horrible idea, of course, but it felt right. I looked up and down the path again.
Yes.
I was sure of it. Our guy had waited here during the early hours of the morning and killed people as they came along. Ambushed them—struck out at random. Just allowed … what, fate? Fate to choose his victims for him.

I remembered what Laura had said yesterday.

‘It could have been anyone,’ I said.

Laura glanced overhead.

‘No helicopters,’ she said. ‘Won’t be long, though. We need to get the tents up.’

I nodded absently. Still thinking.

‘That’s why they’re arranged the way they are,’ I said. ‘He’s not showing off to us, or at least that’s not all he’s doing. He just put the bodies in there to keep them off the path. And he lined them up the best way to leave space for the next.’

‘Christ,’ Laura said.

I stared at the bodies, neatly filling the alcove.

‘And maybe that,’ I said, ‘is the only reason he stopped at three.’

Thirteen

W
E HELD THE EARLY-AFTERNOON
briefing in the largest operation room on the first floor of the department. There were whiteboards and projectors, twenty desks, room for rows of seats. Laura and I had also moved down there. Young had relieved us of extraneous cases; we would work from desks in here for the foreseeable future. He had also granted us ten extra sergeants, and them as many officers from the grunt pool as they wanted. As of today, this case was the department’s number-one priority.

Because we had a serial killer.

We waited for the room to settle, and then Laura led the briefing.

‘As of today,’ she told the assembled officers, holding out a splayed hand, ‘we are working on the assumption that we have
five
victims. Vicki Gibson and Derek Evans were killed two nights ago.’

She gestured at one of the whiteboards, where photographs were pinned along the top. We had a former photo of Vicki Gibson, but not Evans. The crime-scene photos for both were pinned below, standing out stark red against the white background.

‘Details are below the photos, and on the information we’ve circulated, which you’ll all be familiar with by now.’

I watched the room as she spoke. Many of the officers were making notes. That was good: I wanted everyone one hundred per cent intent, everyone alert. I also wanted
ideas
. I still had the same feeling I’d had back on the waste ground. A kind of dazed, sleepy feeling, but somehow also on edge. As though at some point I was going to start shaking slightly.

‘As you’ll be aware,’ Laura said, ‘this morning three further victims were discovered on waste ground beside the Garth estate. The first is believed to be Sandra Peacock, a working girl from the estate. The second is John Kramer, a door supervisor from the Foxton area; we’ll come back to him in a moment. The third victim is yet to be identified.’

She moved to the projector and then clicked through a series of photographs: hideous shots from the crime scene. I kept my expression implacable, but heard a few half-suppressed gasps from around the room. For many of them, this was their first encounter with the extent of the violence close up. The victims’ heads had almost literally been smashed to pieces.

‘Injuries are consistent with those inflicted on Gibson and Evans. The likely weapon is a standard hand-held hammer. As you can see, the victims have been struck so many times that their features have been obliterated.’

She flicked through most of the photos quickly, but paused on the final one, which showed the carrier bag believed to have belonged to John Kramer. Inside, hidden beneath tangles of tatty old clothes, we had discovered a machete, a hammer, ammonia and a ski mask.

‘As of this moment,’ Laura said, ‘we have no explanation for these items being in John Kramer’s possession. One of you will be following that up, but in the meantime, it’s important we separate them out. None of the weapons were used in this attack. As far as we can tell, the killer didn’t even look beneath the clothes.’

A hand shot up: a male officer at the front.

‘Shout out,’ Laura told him. ‘This isn’t a schoolroom.’

‘The blood on the clothes?’

‘Yes. As you can see, there is a substantial amount of blood on the clothes Kramer brought with him in the bag. We believe—though again, this has yet to be confirmed—that the blood belongs to one or more of the victims. We believe the killer used the clothes to clean his own weapon following the murders.’

The same officer: ‘You say he didn’t look in the bag. So no robbery at all?’

‘Nope. Not only does robbery not appear to be our killer’s motive, he doesn’t seem to even consider it. As far as we can tell, nothing has been taken from any of the scenes. By that, I mean we’ve uncovered several valuables in addition to the weapons believed to belong to John Kramer.’

‘Do we have any motive at all?’ A different officer—a female sergeant.

‘Not yet. Detective Hicks may have more to say about that, but so far there is no obvious connection between any of the victims. No real similarities in their profiles. What’s most important is the locations of the murders.’

Laura explained our working theory that the killer had chosen isolated locations rather than specific victims. She didn’t need to spell out the implications of that—that our man didn’t want to kill anyone in particular; he just wanted to kill, and it didn’t seem to matter to him who his victims were.

So what are you getting out of it?
I wondered.

Laura said, ‘If you don’t know the Garth estate, it’s in the north-west of the city, approximately eight miles from the grids, the location of the first incident. Here.’

BOOK: The Murder Code
10.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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