“Ye’ll need a tap,” he said, grinning broadly as he pointed at her foot and the hem of her dress, “and a scrubbing brush.”
“Yes,” said Robin shakily. She bent to pick up her mobile. The screen was cracked.
“I live up there,” he said, nodding towards the flat she had been watching on and off for a month. “Ye can come up if y’want. Clean yerself up.”
“Oh no—that’s all right. Thanks very much, though,” said Robin breathlessly.
“Nae problem,” said Donald Laing.
His gaze slithered down her body. Her skin prickled, as though he had run a finger down her. Turning on his crutches, he began to move away, the plastic bag swinging awkwardly. Robin stood where he had left her, conscious of the blood pounding in her face.
He did not look back. The earflaps of his hat swayed like spaniel’s ears as he moved painfully slowly around the side of the flats and out of sight.
“Oh my God,” whispered Robin. Hand and knee smarting where she had fallen, she absentmindedly pushed her hair out of her face. Only then did she realize, with relief, from the smell on her fingers, that the slippery substance had been curry. Hurrying to a corner out of sight of Donald Laing’s windows, she pressed the keys of the cracked mobile and called Strike.
48
Here Comes That Feeling
The heatwave that had descended on London was his enemy. There was nowhere to hide his knives in a T-shirt, and the hats and high collars on which he relied for disguise looked out of place. He could do nothing but wait, fuming and impotent, in the place that It did not know about.
At last, on Sunday, the weather broke. Rain swept the parched parks, windscreen wipers danced, tourists donned their plastic ponchos and trudged on through the puddles regardless.
Full of excitement and determination, he pulled on a hat worn low over his eyes and donned his special jacket. As he walked, the knives bounced against his chest in the long makeshift pockets he’d ripped in the lining. The capital’s streets were hardly less crowded now than when he’d knifed the tart whose fingers sat in his icebox. Tourists and Londoners were still swarming everywhere like ants. Some of them had bought Union Jack umbrellas and hats. He barged into some of them for the simple pleasure of knocking them aside.
His need to kill was becoming urgent. The last few wasted days had slid past, his leave of absence from It slowly expiring, but The Secretary remained alive and free. He had searched for hours, trying to trace her and then, shockingly, she had been right there in front of him, the brazen bitch, in broad daylight—but there had been witnesses everywhere…
Poor impulse control, that fucking psychiatrist would have said, knowing what he’d done at the sight of her. Poor impulse control! He could control his impulses fine when he wanted—he was a man of superhuman cleverness, who had killed three women and maimed another without the police being any the wiser, so fuck the psychiatrist and his dumb diagnoses—but when he’d seen her right in front of him after all those empty days, he’d wanted to scare her, wanted to get up close, really close, close enough to smell her, speak to her, look into her frightened eyes.
Then she’d strutted away and he had not dared follow her, not then, but it had almost killed him to let her go. She ought to be lying in parcels of meat in his fridge by now. He ought to have witnessed her face in that ecstasy of terror and death, when he owned them completely and they were his to play with.
So here he was, walking through the chilly rain, burning inside because it was Sunday and she had gone again, back to the place where he could never get near her, because Pretty Boy was always there.
He needed more freedom, a lot more freedom. The real obstacle was having It at home all the time, spying on him, clinging to him. All that would have to change. He’d already pushed It unwillingly back into work. Now he had decided that he would have to pretend to It that he had a new job. If necessary, he’d steal to get cash, pretend he’d earned it—he’d done that plenty of times before. Then, freed up, he’d be able to put in the time he really needed to make sure he was close at hand when The Secretary dropped her guard, when nobody was looking, when she turned the wrong corner…
The passersby had as little life as automata to him. Stupid, stupid, stupid… Everywhere he walked he looked for her, the one he’d do next. Not The Secretary, no, because the bitch was back behind her white front door with Pretty Boy, but any woman stupid enough, drunk enough, to walk a short way with a man and his knives. He had to do one before he went back to It, he had to. It would be all that could keep him going, once he was back pretending to be the man It loved. His eyes flickered from under his hat, sorting them, discarding them: the women with men, the women with kids clutching them, but no women alone, none the way he needed them…
He walked for miles until darkness fell, past lit pubs where men and women laughed and flirted, past restaurants and cinemas, looking, waiting, with a hunter’s patience. Sunday night and the workers were returning home early, but it did not matter: there were still tourists everywhere, out-of-towners, drawn by the history and mystery of London…
It was nearly midnight when they leapt to his practiced eye like a cluster of plump mushrooms in long grass: a bunch of squawking, tiddly girls cackling and weaving along the pavement. They were on one of those miserable, rundown streets that were his especial delight, where a drunken tussle and a shrieking girl would be nothing out of the ordinary. He followed, ten yards behind them, watching them pass under streetlamps, elbowing each other and cackling, all except for one of them. She was the drunkest and youngest-looking of them all: ready to throw up, if he knew anything about it. She stumbled on her heels, falling slightly behind her friends, the silly little tart. None of her friends had realized what a state she was in. They were just the right side of legless, snorting and guffawing as they staggered along.
He drifted after them, casual as you please.
If she threw up in the street the noise would attract her friends, who would stop and rally around her. While she fought the urge to vomit, she could not speak. Slowly, the distance between her and her friends increased. She swayed and wobbled, reminding him of the last one, with her stupid high heels. This one must not survive to help make photofits.
A taxi was approaching. He saw the scenario play out before it did. They hailed it loudly, screeching and waving their arms, and in they piled, one by one, fat arse after fat arse. He sped up, head down, face hidden. The streetlamps reflected in the puddles, the “for hire” light extinguished, the growl of the engine…
They had forgotten her. She swayed right into the wall, holding up an arm to support herself.
He might only have seconds. One of her friends would realize any time now that she wasn’t with them.
“You all right, darling? You feeling bad? Come here. This way. You’ll be all right. Just down here.”
She began to retch as he tugged her down a side street. Feebly she tried to pull her arm away, heaving; the vomit splattered down her, gagging her.
“Filthy bitch,” he snarled, one hand already on the handle of his knife under the jacket. He was dragging her forcibly towards a darkened recess between an adult video store and a junk shop.
“No,” she gasped, but she choked on her vomit, heaving.
A door opened across the street, light rippling down a flight of steps. People burst out onto the pavement, laughing.
He slammed her up against the wall and kissed her, pinning her flat while she tried to struggle. She tasted foul, of sick. The door opposite closed, the gaggle of people passed by, their voices echoing in the quiet night, the light extinguished.
“Fucking hell,” he said in disgust, releasing her mouth but keeping her pinned to the wall with his body.
She drew breath to scream, but he had the knife ready and it sank deep between her ribs with ease, nothing like the last one, who’d fought so hard and so stubbornly. The noise died on her stained lips as the hot blood poured over his gloved hand, soaking the materia
l. She jerked convulsively, tried to speak, her eyes rolled upwards into whiteness and her entire body sagged, still pinned by the knife.
“Good girl,” he whispered, pulling the carving knife free as she fell, dying, into his arms.
He dragged her deeper into the recess, where a pile of rubbish sat waiting for collection. Kicking the black bags aside, he dumped her in a corner then pulled out his machete. Souvenirs were imperative, but he only had seconds. Another door might open, or her dozy bitches of friends might come back in their taxi…
He slashed and sawed, put his warm, oozing trophies in his pocket, then piled up the rubbish over and on her.
It had taken less than five minutes. He felt like a king, like a god. Away he walked, knives safely stowed, panting in the cool, clean night air, jogging a little once he was on the main road again. He was already a block away when he heard raucous female voices shouting in the distance.
“Heather! Heather, where are you, you silly cow?”
“Heather can’t hear you,” he whispered into the darkness.
He tried to stop himself laughing, burying his face in his collar, but he could not restrain his jubilation. Deep in his pockets, his sopping fingers were playing with the rubbery cartilage and skin to which her earrings—little plastic ice-cream cones—were still attached.
49
It’s the time in the season for a maniac at night.
Blue Öyster Cult, “Madness to the Method”
The weather remained cool, rain-flecked and faintly blustery as June entered its second week. The blaze of sunlit pageantry that had surrounded the royal wedding had receded into memory: the giddy high tide of romantic fervor had ebbed, the wedding merchandise and congratulatory banners had been removed from shop windows and the capital’s newspapers returned to more mundane matters, including an imminent Tube strike.
Then horror exploded across Wednesday’s front pages. The mutilated body of a young woman had been uncovered beneath bin bags, and within a few hours of the first police appeal for information the world had been informed that a twenty-first-century Jack the Ripper was stalking the streets of London.
Three women had been attacked and mutilated, but the Met appeared to have no leads. In their stampede to cover every possible aspect of the story—maps of London showing the location of each attack, pictures of the three victims—the journalists revealed themselves determined to make up for lost time, aware that they might have arrived a little late at the party. They had previously treated the killing of Kelsey Platt as a lone act of madness and sadism, and the subsequent attack on Lila Monkton, the eighteen-year-old prostitute, had gained virtually no media coverage. A girl who had been selling herself for sex on the day of the royal wedding could hardly expect to oust a new-minted duchess from the front pages.
The murder of Heather Smart, a twenty-two-year-old building society employee from Nottingham, was an entirely different matter. The headlines virtually wrote themselves, for Heather was a wonderfully relatable heroine with her steady job, her innocent desire to see the capital’s landmarks and a boyfriend who was a primary school teacher. Heather had been to see The Lion King the night before her death, had eaten dim sum in Chinatown and posed for photographs in Hyde Park with the Life Guards riding past in the background. Endless column inches could be spun out of the long weekend to celebrate her sister-in-law’s thirtieth birthday, which had culminated in a brutal, sordid death in the back lot of an adult entertainment store.
The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus. There were discussions of the deplorable drunken tendencies of the young British woman, with reciprocal accusations of victim-blaming. There were horror-struck articles about sexual violence, tempered with reminders that these attacks were far less common than in other countries. There were interviews with the distraught, guilt-stricken friends who had accidentally abandoned Heather, which in turn spawned attacks and vilifications on social media, leading back to a defense of the grieving young women.
Overlaying every story was the shadow of the unknown killer, the madman who was hacking women’s bodies apart. The press again descended upon Denmark Street in search of the man who had received Kelsey’s leg. Strike decided that the time had come for Robin to take that much-discussed but daily postponed trip to Masham for a final fitting of her wedding dress, then decamped yet again to Nick and Ilsa’s with a backpack and a crushing sense of his own impotence. A plainclothes officer remained stationed in Denmark Street in case anything suspicious turned up in the post. Wardle was concerned lest another body part addressed to Robin arrived.
Weighed down by the demands of an investigation that was being conducted under the full glare of the national media, Wardle was unable to meet Strike face to face for six days after the discovery of Heather’s body. Strike journeyed again to the Feathers in the early evening, where he found Wardle looking haggard, but looking forward to talking things over with a man who was both inside and outside the case.
“Been a fucker of a week,” sighed Wardle, accepting the pint Strike had bought him. “I’ve started bloody smoking again. April’s really pissed off.”
He took a long draft of lager, then shared with Strike the truth about the discovery of Heather’s body. The press stories, as Strike had already noted, conflicted in many possibly important essentials, though all blamed the police for not finding her for twenty-four hours.
“She and her friends were all shitfaced,” said the policeman, setting the scene with bluntness. “Four of them got into a cab, so ratted they forgot about Heather. They were a street away when they realized she wasn’t with them.
“The cabbie’s hacked off because they’re loud and obnoxious. One of them starts swearing at him when he says he can’t do a U-turn in the middle of the road. There’s a big argument, so it’s a good five minutes before he agrees to go back for Heather.
“When they finally reach the street where they think they left her—they’re from Nottingham, remember, they don’t know London at all—Heather’s nowhere to be seen. They crawl up the road in the cab, shouting for her out of the open window. Then one of them thinks she sees Heather in the distance, getting onto a bus. So two of them get out—there’s no bloody logic to it, they were out of their skulls—and go running down the road screaming after the bus to stop while the other two lean out of the cab screaming at them to get back in, they should follow the bus in the cab. Then the one who got into an argument with the cabbie earlier calls him a stupid Paki, he tells them to get the fuck out of his cab and drives away.
“So basically,” said Wardle wearily, “all this shit we’re taking for not finding her within twenty-four hours is down to alcohol and racism. The silly bitches were convinced Heather had got on that bus so we wasted a day and a half trying to track a woman wearing a similar coat. Then the owner of the Adult Entertainment Centre goes to put his bins out and finds her lying there under a load of bags, nose and ears cut off.”
“So that bit was true,” said Strike.
Her mutilated face had been the one detail all of the papers had agreed on.
“Yeah, that bit was true,” said Wardle heavily. “‘The Shacklewell Ripper.’ It’s got a great ring to it.”
“Witnesses?”
“Nobody saw a bloody thing.”
“What about Devotee and his motorbike?”
“Ruled out,” Wardle admitted, his expression grim. “He’s got a firm alibi for Heather’s killing—family wedding—and we couldn’t make anything stick for either of the other two attacks.”
Strike had the impression that Wardle wanted to tell him something else, and waited receptively.
“I don’t want the press to get wind of this,” Wardle said, dropping his voice, “but we think he might’ve done two more.”
“Jesus,” said Strike, genuinely alarmed. “When?”
“Historic,” said Wardle
. “Unsolved murder in Leeds, 2009. Prostitute, originally from Cardiff. Stabbed. He didn’t cut anything off her, but he took a necklace she always wore and dumped her in a ditch out of town. The body wasn’t found for a fortnight.
“Then, last year, a girl was killed and mutilated in Milton Keynes. Sadie Roach, her name was. Her boyfriend went down for it. I’ve looked it all up. The family campaigned hard for his release and he got out on appeal. There was nothing to tie him to it, except that they’d rowed and he once threatened a bloke with a penknife.
“We’ve got the psychologist and forensics on to all five attacks and the conclusion is they’ve got enough features in common to suggest the same perpetrator. It looks like he uses two knives, a carving knife and a machete. The victims were all vulnerable—prostitutes, drunk, emotionally off balance—and all picked up off the street except for Kelsey. He took trophies from all of them. It’s too soon to say whether we’ve got any similar DNA off the women. Odds are, not. It doesn’t look like he had sex with any of them. He gets his kicks a different way.”
Strike was hungry, but something told him not to interrupt Wardle’s moody silence. The policeman drank more beer then said, without quite meeting Strike’s eyes,
“I’m looking into all your guys. Brockbank, Laing and Whittaker.”
About fucking time.
“Brockbank’s interesting,” said Wardle.
“You’ve found him?” asked Strike, freezing with his pint at his lips.
“Not yet, but we know he was a regular attendee at a church in Brixton until five weeks ago.”
“Church? Are you sure it’s the same bloke?”
“Tall ex-soldier, ex-rugby player, long jaw, one of his eyes sunken, cauliflower ear, dark crew cut,” reeled off Wardle. “Name Noel Brockbank. Six foot three or four. Strong northern accent.”
“That’s him,” said Strike. “A bloody church?”