The proper course of action would be to call the police. But Hunter’s threat had felt very real. The only thing that mattered now was finding Logan and making sure she was safe. He needed the man to come back, then he would find a way of ensnaring him. Getting the truth out of him. But how long did he have? The rest of tonight? The weekend?
What if Harrison Hunter was just delusional? Someone who had read the Argus, and was imagining his involvement?
And had fallen at the first hurdle. U R DEAD. Logan had no tattoos.
He sipped some more wine, then sliced into the first cutlet. It was pink in the center, just how he liked it. “Beautifully cooked, my dear,” he said.
She gave him one of her penetrating stares. “Is it something you can tell me about?” she asked.
“Not really,” he replied. “No.”
“It is so terrible. I mean, what on earth can have happened to her? She’d broken off her engagement—do you think her boyfriend might be behind this? Or involved in some way?”
He continued to stare at the light dancing off the glass. Then he dipped his fork, with a morsel of cutlet, into the mint jelly on the side of his plate and began to chew. When he had swallowed he said, “Rachel, have you ever in your life had to make a decision that you don’t feel equipped to make?”
“You’re talking in riddles again, my love. Like you so often do.”
“I apologize. This is delicious, by the way.”
“Good.”
He dabbed his lips with the linen napkin. “Patient confidentiality.” He picked up his glass and stared, forlornly, at it. “That’s the decision.”
“What kind of a decision?” she prompted.
“Well, imagine for a moment you are me, in my office. A new patient comes in, who confesses to killing people. My assessment is that he’s delusional. But what if I’m wrong and he has killed? I may have to report this to the police. But if it’s merely his fantasy, then I would be failing in my duty of care if I report him. He will never again talk openly with confidence to anyone. He won’t trust anyone again.”
“Is that what happened to you today?”
“Yes.”
“Does this have anything to do with Logan? Was he telling you he’s the man who abducted Logan?”
He sliced another morsel of lamb. “No, he didn’t claim that, he claimed he knew who had taken her.”
“Can you tell me anything about him?”
He chewed slowly, then sipped his wine. “I can’t say too much, but this man told me something that he assured me would be proof of his bona fides. I checked it out after he left—part of the reason I was so late home tonight—and it wasn’t correct. Which leads me to believe he is—I’m not sure…”
“A fantasist?” his wife prompted.
“That would be the easy conclusion,” Van Dam said. “I’m foxed.”
“Then you should call the police and tell them your thoughts.”
The psychiatrist sat silently for some moments, then drank another sip of his wine. “And risk Logan’s life?”
“Why would that risk her life?”
“Because this man told me categorically not to go to the police.”
“That’s how seriously you take him?”
“Yes.”
“Then somewhere inside that strange brain of yours, that I’ve never managed to penetrate fully in all the years we’ve been together, you must believe, deep down, he was telling you the truth.”
Van Dam smiled at his beloved and wise wife. “Yes, yes I do.”
36
Friday 12 December
After leaving the pub, Roy Grace returned to Sussex House, sat in his office and began to look again at the file Glenn Branson had brought him. He pulled out a yellowing, black and white A4 printed sheet, headed, “SUSSEX CRIME INFORMATION—MURDER”.
At 8:35 a.m., Saturday, 3/4/85 the body of the after-described was found in Ashdown Forest, Sussex. Cause of death undetermined—but believed to be asphyxiation.
He looked again at the photograph of the pretty young woman, with poker-straight long brown hair, freckles and glasses, and wondered where the picture had been taken, because she was staring at the photographer with a warm, almost serene, expression of trust.
He read on down through the sheet.
The following property is missing from the body.
1) Pair of black shoes, size 6, label on sole “Made in U.K. Real leather. Leather uppers with man-made soles.”
2) Bunch of keys with a leather tag bearing the words “Chandlers of Brighton BMW,” containing one BMW key, one Yale-type key and possibly one other key.
3) Handbag, contents unknown.
The next sheet of paper looked like a blow-up of an Ordnance Survey map. Up in the top right-hand corner was a circle in red, marking the spot where the body had been found.
He turned to the next item, a faded orange book marked “MAJOR INCIDENT PROPERTY REGISTER.”
The next was a color photograph showing a group of men in gumboots, sweaters and jeans, each holding a long pole, standing in a woodland clearing around a dark shadow. He shook his head.
God, what a difference! Today these same people would have been in oversuits to prevent them from contaminating the crime scene.
The next photograph showed a dark, human-shaped shadow in deep undergrowth.
In the next, he could make out a pair of blue jeans. Then, as he turned to the one after, he took a sharp intake of breath—as he always did when he saw a new dead body.
There was something so terribly sad about murder victims. He couldn’t help it, but for a few moments he always felt like a voyeur. As if he had gatecrashed some party that no one, ever, would have invited him to.
And always, he wondered, would he one day be turning up to the bones of his missing wife, Sandy?
The dead had no choice in who turned up at their deposition sites. It fell upon everyone present to be respectful. Even now, seated at his desk, with darkness pressing against the rain-spattered windowpanes, he felt just that, staring at the side-on photograph of the blotchy face, as if stage rouge had been applied, with the eyes missing, pecked away by birds, dark brown hair unkempt and straggly, in what looked like a home-knitted gray pullover.
Who had knitted it, he wondered? Her loving mother? Grand-mother?
The sweater she had been murdered in.
Then another photograph, this time full-face, showing dark, marbled skin, and the empty eye sockets, like she was wearing a balaclava.
God, he thought. You were at Sussex University. Your dad had lent you his car for the night, because he trusted your driving and didn’t want some drunken student driving you home. But you never did come home.
He phoned a mobile number, thinking it unlikely that Tony Case, the Senior Support Officer, would still be here at this hour on a Friday night, but to his surprise he caught him just as he was leaving. Case said he had been working late, helping to reorganize the Major Incident rooms.
Five minutes later, he followed the stocky figure of Case down into the basement of Sussex House. Case had been a Traffic officer before retiring after thirty years’ service, and then rejoining the force as a civilian, as was common among many officers. He was holding a massive bunch of keys in his hand.
They walked along a corridor then stopped outside a steel-barred door. Case riffled through his keys, selected one and opened the door, then switched on the lights. Several dusty, bare bulbs, two of them with spiders’ webs, threw a weak light along the length of the vast storeroom, which was racked out on both sides and at the far end with floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, stacked tightly with green plastic crates filled with evidence bags, manila folders and piles of papers.
Roy Grace always felt a strange sensation when he entered this storeroom, as if it were filled with ghosts. He knew it well from the days when he had been put in charge of cold cases—reviewing all the unsolved murders in the county of Sussex, to see if advances in fingerprint technology and DNA could he
lp solve any of them. Sussex Police never closed the file on any unsolved murder. All of these green crates contained material dating back as far as the Second World War, and a few even further back than that. Each of the cases filled as many as twenty or more crates, and he had felt the burden of responsibility for each case that he re-examined, knowing he might well be the last chance the victims had for justice.
He walked along past the hand-written labeled sections. OPERATION GALBY. OPERATION DULWICH. OPERATION CORMORANT. Several of them he knew well. He could even recall the stomach contents of some of the victims, from the last things they had ever eaten or drunk.
Ghosts.
They stopped when they reached the section, with forty-three crates, labeled OPERATION YORKER. The unsolved murder of Katy Westerham.
Tony Case looked at him. “Which ones do you want up in your office, Roy?”
Grace ran his eyes along the crates. Each of them was filled with dusty folders, with a blue and white label, the serial number written in black ink and sealed with a tamper-proof cable tie.
“All of them, please.”
* * *
Finally, close to 11:30 p.m., having done all he could that evening on the disappearance of Logan Somerville, Roy Grace went home. Cleo had left a cold platter for him on the table. But she heard him come in and came downstairs to join him.
“Sounds like it’s been quite a day,” she said.
Roy Grace smiled thinly across the dining table at her. “You’re right, it has been. One hell of a day. Sorry if I’m not being good company. You’re stuck home all day with the baby, and then I arrive and you’re looking forward to some conversation, and all I do is sit in silence and brood.”
“So share it with me.”
“I have a very bad feeling about the case I’m on.” He shrugged and reached for the bottle of sparkling water that Cleo had set in the cooler in the middle of the table, and poured some into his glass.
“Operation Haywain?” she prompted.
He nodded.
“Are you worried about Cassian Pewe?”
“Right now he’s the least of my problems.” He could have done with a couple of really stiff drinks, but he needed a clear head more than ever at this moment and, of course, he was on call. “We’ve had almost every imaginable kind of crime in this city, but so far we’ve had precious few—if any—of what could be defined as serial killers.”
“What defines one?” Cleo asked.
“Someone who commits three or more murders on separate occasions. We had a young man, back in 1985, who murdered his father, stepmother and stepbrother with a baseball bat, at the Lighthouse Club in Shoreham. But that was all on the same night. It was a multiple homicide but he wasn’t a serial killer.”
“Do you think you have one now?”
He fell silent, picked up his glass, then set it down. “I don’t know, yet. But it looks like we might have found a murder from thirty years ago. It’s too early to tell for sure.”
“Could he still be around?”
He said nothing, thinking.
“Come on, you’ve got to eat something, darling.”
He looked at his bowl of avocado and prawn, nodded, and picked up his fork. “Yes, I’m ravenous, thanks.” But he only swallowed one mouthful before lapsing back into his thoughts.
U R DEAD
Thirty years ago. A double killing? More? Was there a third branded victim out there? A fourth? A fifth? Somewhere else in the UK? From all he had studied in the past on serial killers, they tended to operate in big landscape countries, like the US, Australia, Russia, where they could move vast distances without arousing suspicion. But on occasions they didn’t follow that pattern.
Time could be a distance, too.
Catherine Westerham, found dead in 1985, was nineteen and had long brown hair with a center parting. Emma Johnson, who had disappeared two weeks ago, was twenty-one and also had similar features, and long brown hair. Logan Somerville, who was now missing, had long brown hair. Was he just being fanciful?
Unknown Female, whose skeletal remains had been found in Hove Lagoon, and was as yet unidentified, appeared to have had long brown hair.
He realized more and more urgently that he needed to find the Lagoon Unknown Female’s identity. Fast.
Thirty years was a long time. But he knew from case histories of serial killers that he had seen presented at the grandly titled International Homicide Investigators Association’s Annual Symposium in the US, which he attended most years, that there could be long gaps sometimes. Twenty years was not uncommon. Dennis Rader in Wichita, Kansas, self-styled BTK—Bind, Torture, Kill—had a hiatus of around fifteen years and had been about to strike again when he was finally caught. The end of Rader’s first killing spree had started when his first child had been born. Grace had worked on a case in Brighton, a while ago, a serial rapist who took his victims’ shoes—he had stopped for many years before starting to offend again. The reason he had stopped was that he had got married.
Thirty years. Was that too long?
37
Saturday 13 December
He called it hunting.
The word had a nice ring to it.
The entire city was his hunting ground. In the summer months, dressed in a blazer and wearing his straw hat at a jaunty angle, he would regularly stroll along under the arches, and then along the pier. Next he would ride on the Volks Railway, where in the cramped intimacy of its hard seats he liked to talk to strangers, telling them this was the world’s oldest still-running electric train, and boring them with facts about it.
All the time as he hunted, walking along or sitting among the grockles, he was taking surreptitious photographs of those he considered had potential to be a project.
Photography had become so much easier these days, thanks to his iPhone camera. His potential projects would just see a man making a phone call. They would never know that they would become part of his Hall of Fame. He liked to spend time studying them all. And planning. Pages and pages of notes filling the filing cabinets in his VSP—his Very Secret Place—where he liked to go sometimes to do his planning, because he could think clearly there, away from the distraction of his current projects, and he enjoyed the fact that it was in such a very visible location.
VSP! He liked having a VSP!
The potentials he most studied were those who radiated vulnerability. Everyone was vulnerable at some point in their lives—but some were always vulnerable. These were the people who showed the biggest fear. And he wanted them to be afraid of him. Very seriously afraid. Nothing excited him more than seeing fear. Hearing fear. Touching fear. Feeling fear. Smelling fear. Tasting fear.
He liked to keep his potential projects under observation for long periods of time. Months, often. He liked to follow them. Of course, a lot merely went to the station to return to wherever they had come from. Some went to their cars. Those he would lose. But some walked home or took buses. They made his life much easier.
Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights were his favorite times. West Street in Brighton in particular, where it was so easy to be invisible. This gaudy strip of road, which he called “Chav Central,” ran from Brighton’s Clock Tower down to the seafront. It was lined with amusement arcades and clubs, and populated with drunken, scantily clad youngsters, and boisterous hen and stag parties often in ridiculous costumes, all under the watchful eye of a massive police presence. In his view it was a sewer of humanity. A cesspit.
He was always ready to rid it of one of its occupants.
Like the one he saw now, wobbling along on her bike, swinging out, with no lights on, into the sparse King’s Road traffic.
It was just gone 12:50 a.m.
Her name was Ashleigh Stanford. She was twenty-one years old. He had been keeping an eye on her for six months now. She worked Friday and Saturday nights behind the bar in a pub in the Lanes. When she had finished, she cycled back home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend in a quiet street in Hove, always l
ooking a little bit drunk.
She was studying fashion design at Brighton University.
Ashleigh Stanford was, it turned out from his research, a distant but direct descendant of the dynastic landowning family, whose ancestors dated back to the seventeenth century and had at one time owned huge tracts of land around what was then called Brighthelmstone. He liked her historic connection to his city.
But there was something that he liked much more about her. Oh yes.
Ashleigh Stanford was perfect!
He started the engine, glanced in his mirrors, and drove the Streamline taxi liveried Skoda estate he had chosen tonight away from the meter bay, very slowly, his lights on dipped beam. He smiled to himself at his cunning. It was important to vary his vehicles. Taxis never looked out of place, anywhere, and this model was one of the most commonly used in Brighton. He’d bought the vehicle secondhand from a rural dealer in Yorkshire, and had a body shop local to them paint it with the distinctive turquoise bonnet. The taxi insignia decals he’d had made to order from a firm on the internet, and the roof light had been easy to come by.
Ashleigh, with a small rucksack on her back, was pedaling hard, wobbling and swerving around, heading west. Heading home? He’d find out soon enough!
There was something very symmetrical about the number three. Two’s company, three’s a crowd!
Felix would be fine with that. Harrison, as ever, would not be so sure. And bloody pedantic Marcus, he would really be against what he was about to do. And that proved he was right. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.
As his old science teacher at school liked to say, QED.
Quod erat demonstrandum!
He tailed Ashleigh at such a long distance that his dipped headlamps did not even register on her rear reflector. She pedalled on past the Peace Statue, and swung onto the cycle path alongside the Hove Lawns. He checked his mirrors and there was nothing behind him. Just himself and his pretty, young project. Heading home to her boyfriend.
Perfect!
She came off the cycle path and onto the road, to avoid a detour, and went over a red light at the junction with Grand Avenue, below the stern gaze of the statue of Queen Victoria. Then a few minutes later she shot the lights at the junction with Hove Street.