A Deadly Compulsion (13 page)

The cone of light moved, circled her and blinked out to leave an afterimage blazing on her retinas; twin red planets hanging in a Delphic vacuum.

Trish couldn’t talk, beg, scream or move.  Her mouth was covered, and her hands and feet were bound.

“You’re going to die, news lady,” he whispered in the darkness next to her face.  And as she grunted in fear and pulled away from the words and the hot breath on her cheek, she caught the unmistakable scent of Aramis.  She was encompassed in silence and lay rigid with her muscles tensed in readiness for a piercing pain or heavy blow; her ears straining for sound, unable to follow his movements.  She expected to be knifed or bludgeoned at any second.  A squeaking, metallic shriek made her cringe for a moment, before ice-cold water hit her, drumming against her; a powerful jet that pummelled her body and face, hurting where it hit, rolling her over on to her side.

He hosed her down and then turned off the tap and lit a hurricane lamp.  She was shivering, shaking uncontrollably as he cut through the tape at her wrists and replaced it with stock wire, using pliers to twist it tight, this time with her hands in front of her, and with one end of the thick wire wound and secured through a steel ring that was set into a large concrete block.  On a whim he had decided to keep the bitch alive, for now.  She would be there to use, to satisfy him; sex on tap.  She was separate to his need, an added dimension to the game.  It would be fun to have her watch when he worked on another with the knife and stapler.  As a journalist, she would surely be only too pleased to gain such an insight to the Tacker; one that no one else had been privy to.  He left her, suddenly ravenous, and locked the barn doors and headed for the house to relax and plan his next move.  Having a minor celebrity of his own under lock and key gave him a rush.  And he would be wanting much more from her than an autograph.

It was a consideration that the Tacker may have abducted Trish Pearson, but as an outside possibility, not a likely probability.

“She’s a blue-eyed blonde, boss,” Hugh said, stirring semi-skimmed milk into the brew he had made with Laura’s gear, before walking back across the room to place the mugs on the only patch of desk that was not piled high with papers and files.  “And she slagged him off something rotten on TV a couple of nights back.”

“I bad-mouthed him too, and so have other broadcasters and the press in general.  I don’t see him trying to take out everyone that has called him what he is.  We don’t know that he took her, and she seems a little old for him.”

“Meow.”

“I’m not being catty, Hugh.  He likes younger girls.  Apart from one they were all teenagers. I think it’s a coincidence, unrelated.  Have we checked out anyone that she might have been having an affair with?”

“Her only affair seems to have been with her career.  There was a rumour that she was screwing a producer at the station, but he seems to be in the clear.  He says he tried it on but got nowhere; thinks she must be a dyke.”

Laura glared.  “It’s amazing how many men accuse women of being bloody gay when they can’t get their ends away. The chauvinist pigs need castrating with bricks.”

“Ouch!”  Hugh exclaimed, crossing his legs and grimacing.  “I still believe that he took her.  She was last seen leaving the studio at about eleven p.m., heading for the car park.  I think she was snatched and driven, or forced to drive to where her car was found.  It was a dark lane.  He could have easily got her into another vehicle and then torched her car to destroy any evidence.”

“You might be right, Hugh.  But I think it’s a long shot.”

“If this is a mother thing, like you and the Yank believe, then she fits the bill.  Her verbal attack and having the right hair and eye colour would pull his chain.”

“Maybe, and for the record, remember that Jim isn’t officially involved in this.  We just go back awhile.  We’re old friends.  He’s helping us out on his own time with a few pointers.”

“Hey, boss, it’s me, not the super’.  The guy was reputedly one of the best profilers in the FBI, but that was years ago.  Excuse me for thinking that he might be a little rusty and out of date in his methods.  I still think that he could put us way off track and confuse the issue.”

“I doubt that.  What Jim does isn’t learned and forgotten, it’s a gift.  His input will be valid, and I’ll feed anything that he gives me to you and the team.  He happens to agree with you that Trish Pearson is in all probably the guy’s latest victim.  He doesn’t believe in coincidences until all other alternatives have been ruled out.  And then he still doesn’t believe in them.  I don’t understand why you have a problem with him.”

Hugh arched his eyebrows.  “Call me a sceptic, boss, but I don’t rate instinct, hunches or sixth sense when it comes to solving a case.  I think formal investigative procedure and forensic science are the only way to go.  You always hear about the successes that these behavioural science blokes have, but not so much about the ones they get wrong.  I’m not impressed with profilers or the FBI in general.  They’re a legend in their own minds; overrated and full of bullshit.”

“You shouldn’t judge Jim’s methods by what you’ve read in thrillers or seen on TV,” Laura said, realising that she was jumping to Jim’s defence, and that Hugh’s ridicule of him and his talent had got under her skin. She was a little rattled.  “He believes in formalistic investigation.  Any hunches, as you call them, are just a part of the whole package.  He proved countless times that he could process raw information and interpret it better than most other profilers.  He takes what evidence there is and builds a mental picture of the offender from it.  He doesn’t pretend that he’s infallible, but only a fool would underestimate his capabilities.”

Hugh put his hands up submissively.  “Point taken.  It can’t harm to consider every option.  The only important thing is that we don’t ignore the possibility that he
could
be completely wrong on this.”

“When you’re drowning, you grab hold of anything that floats by...right?”

Hugh lightened up and smiled.  “Right, boss.  I’ll try to look at it that way.”

THE
fluorescent tube hummed continuously within a grimy plastic housing laden with the hot and brittle corpses of flies and moths.  The diffused light shone down thinly on to the top of the ancient table below it, which was scarred by scratches and brown, lozenge-shaped cigarette burns; a captive, its legs bolted by brackets to the cold concrete floor.

Derek Cox was seated at one side of the table, slouched as nonchalantly as he was able to in the PVC bucket chair.  He was wearing a black Adidas sweat suit, top of the range Reeboks, and was sipping bitter coffee from a polystyrene cup, wincing at the taste of the hot, acerbic brew that the station’s vending machine deemed suitable for human consumption.

“Your coffee’s crap,” Derek said, grimacing and thumping the cup down on the tabletop and pushing it away with his fingertips as though it was a toxic concoction.

When asked to accompany them to the station, ‘to help with their inquiries’, Derek had been only too happy to comply.  From the outset of the taped interview, he stated that he had nothing to hide, and saw no reason or need to ask for legal representation.

Laura and Hugh were sitting opposite him, trying to find a chink in his armour of affability and self-assurance.  They couldn’t rock him, and he remained unfazed by the insinuation that he might be involved in the spate of recent killings.  Laura had not encountered a guilty person this unconcerned or relaxed.  The young man before her could have been a Zen Buddhist; he was so ‘together’ and serene...outwardly.  Christ, the average person was more uptight queuing at a supermarket checkout.  In fact most of Joe public acted guiltier than Cox appeared to be if they spotted a police car in their rearview mirrors.

“You haven’t really been able to help us at all, have you, Derek?”  Laura said after formally reopening the interview with fresh tapes that had been unwrapped in front of their suspect, after they’d taken a fifteen minute break and left him to hopefully sweat.

“I’d love to be able to help you with this, DI Scott,” he replied, a slight twist to the smirk on his face giving him the look of a young Harrison Ford.  “But without having the foresight to know that I might need alibis, I haven’t got any.  I’ve told you, I don’t get out as much as I should.  If I were your man, I would have made sure that I had plausible, bullet-proof answers for all your moronic questions.  As it is, I really can’t remember the last time I murdered anyone.”

“It’s not funny, Cox,” Laura said, feeling her cheeks prick with the heat of anger at the man’s attempt at childish, school yard humour.

“I think it is,” he said, looking from Laura to Hugh, then back to her, his eyes now fixed and penetrating; a small, cruel smile replacing his previously mild expression.  “Humour is subjective.  I’ve told you, I don’t mind answering all your inane questions.  That you don’t like the answers I’m giving is your problem, and tough shit.  I don’t even know why I’m a suspect.  Do I fit some description of your serial killer?”

“Listen, Mr Cox,” Hugh said.  “We want to eliminate you from our inquiries, and we’ll be able to do that a lot quicker if you start being more cooperative.”

Derek thrust his chin out in defiance.  “No.  You listen,
officer
.  I could be awkward.  But up until now I’ve been happy to waste a lot of time that I could have spent more productively elsewhere.  Your procedures are interesting, better than watching Sherlock on Telly, but you just happen to have the wrong man.  Why not just take my prints and some blood, hair and semen samples?  You won’t find anything to match them to, but it’ll save a lot of fucking about.  You’ve searched my property, and there’s obviously nothing there, or you’d have charged me by now.”

“I want an impression of your teeth, Derek,” Laura said.  “Is there any problem with that?”

“You can have an impression of my cock if you want,” he said with a broad grin on his face.

“Maybe some other time,” Laura came back.  “For now, one of your much bigger mouth will suffice.”

Laura arrived home to the empty cottage and prowled through it as a stranger in a strange land.  The warmth had deserted it, gone as surely as Jim had left that morning.  She was down in a bad place, where memories and needs pulled in every direction; ephemeral fingernails raking the scabs off old wounds in her brain, opening them to release fresh torrents of pain that threatened to drown her in a deep, dark well of melancholia.  She was spinning ever inward and ever faster into a black hole that she had pulled free of once, only to now find herself back in its terrible gravitational clutch.

Jim had stayed until they got the lead on Cox, and had then gone – as though his presence had been no more than a flight of fancy – back to his life and work down south.  The days that she had spent with him had felt so right.  It was as though they were meant to be together.  As if fate had ordained it.  Now, the cottage that she had loved was teasing her with his smell, and the strong image of his presence; where he had sat, and what he had touched.  She had let her past and present come together, and the collision of the two worlds had rocked the foundations of her universe.

Sitting in the kitchen, cradling a brandy-filled tumbler, Laura was unable to check the tears that ran freely from her now puffy eyes.  It hit her like a freight train; a realisation that the cottage was no more than a retreat she had hidden herself away in.  She was nothing but a runaway, using her career as a foil against the emotions that she kept smothered, cloistered in a mental convent that was detached from her true feelings.  She loved Jim, wanted to be with him, but was scared to make the commitment.  She had failed at marriage once, and was still, after all this time, low on self esteem.

Only Kara had made sense of everything.  Her daughter’s pointless accidental death had graphically illustrated that the journey between cradle and grave was just a haphazard and chaotic series of events.  There was no such thing as security, and the future was of limited duration.  Being a copper was no big deal.  She had just made it one, to have some sense of continuity in a life that frightened her more with every passing day.  Underneath the sham of being a hard-bitten DI, Laura now acknowledged the lonely, scared little girl that hid within, under the multi-layered persona that she had wrapped around her complex identity.

“You sad cow!”  She said it out loud, almost a shout, before jerking backwards in the chair, standing up and walking to the sink to empty the brandy down the plug hole.  Christ, she was pushing forty and looked on life as a half empty glass, not half full.  Some imbecile had dreamed up the saying: ‘life begins at forty’, which was a crock of shit.  Life was well ripe by then, and most people were on the down curve, like her, wondering what the hell they’d done with the most precious commodity of all, which was time, and angry with themselves at dreams not realised or even pursued, and surprised at how fast it had all gotten away from them.

Laura went upstairs and dressed in T-shirt, sweater, Levi’s and Nikes, then returned downstairs and left the cottage by the back door to enter the woods that crowded up to the boundary of its small rear garden.

The sun was low in a dull, red sky as she walked along what she imagined to be a deer trail, tramping noisily over a carpet of dry twigs and pine needles, with the scent of conifers heavy in the evening air.  A grey squirrel ran up the deeply fissured bark of a cone-laden fir as she stopped to light a cigarette.  She watched, and the rodent headed up into the green canopy, bushy tail flicking with irritation at her presence, its movements jerky and comical.  She had entered the woods to clear her mind, and found herself reassessing priorities and looking for answers to the enigma of existence, however pointless the exercise.

On a personal level, it all came down to the job.  She was painfully aware that if she wanted Jim, she would have to jack it in and go to him.  He had turned his back on the bureau and started over, finding a life outside the world of crime that she had steeped herself in.  Walking on, she lost track of time, hardly aware as dusk sapped the heavens of light.  She stopped by the side of a small brook to sit on the grassy bank, hugging her knees and staring at the still water and the black clouds of midges swirling senselessly above its surface.  With a sudden clarity, the weight lifted from her, calmness pervaded her mind and lightened her spirit.  She would see this case through, and then resign from a police force that was already looking to hang her out to dry over the Tacker.  She had the deeds to the cottage, plus a couple of decent insurance policies and a healthy building society account.  If Jim wanted a crack at being with her, then she would go to him, begin afresh, open a bloody florists or gift shop in Windsor and start to savour each day; take time out to smell the flowers.  Christ! She had been little more than a fucking hamster, frantically running on the spot in a caged wheel and getting nowhere fast.  It was time to jump off and get a life.

A crime scene team was searching Cox’s smallholding while he was being questioned. He had raised no objections, and not even insisted on being present; just asked them to respect his property.

The forensic team arrived in two transit vans, stepping out of them wearing hooded coveralls, overshoes and latex gloves.  Two of them carried bright aluminium cases, and the sunlight bounced off the reflective metal surfaces.  Curious villagers were kept back by uniformed PCs, their apprehension combining with anger as whispers of contaminated waste or some deadly virus spurred them into confrontational mood.

“We’re not bloody stupid,” Stanley Price, the landlord of the Plough Inn, said to the constable nearest to him.  “Those buggers are wearin’ protective clothin’.  An’ last month there were crop circles in the field behind us.  Somethin’s up.  We’re not daft, lad.”

“Do you think we’d be standing here if there was any danger?” PC Alan Fraser said, smiling cheerfully at the surly little man, who he thought capable of inciting the group of mainly pensionable-aged wrinklies and droolies into civil unrest.  Jesus!  That could result in embarrassing arrests of senior citizens, or at least bring about the odd heart attack, stroke, or both, judging by the look of some of them, who were all well past their sell by dates.

“You’re paid to do what you’re told, son, dangerous or not,” Stanley retorted.  “It’s a copper’s lot.  So don’t try to fob us off.  Those buggers are dressed up to deal with some sort of catastrophe, and we have a right to know what it is.”

Alan bit his lip.  It was a hot day, and his shirt and underpants were sticking to him under the black uniform that soaked up the heat.  The leather band inside his helmet was also sodden, and his hair and scalp were itching with sweat. The shifty-eyed little shit and his geriatric band of cronies were getting on his tits.  Too many daft twats were watching repeats of the sodding X-Files and assorted Star Trek spin-offs nowadays.  He would love to tell these yokels that a UFO had crash-landed, and that the forensic guys were really a team from Area 51 in the States, flown in to recover the craft and the little green aliens that occupied it.  Having not won the lottery, and still needing his salary to pay the bills, Alan took a deep breath and pinned the pain-in-the-arse publican with a withering stare.  “If you look closely, sir,” he replied tersely.  “You’ll see that the buggers in question are not wearing fishbowl helmets, and haven’t got oxygen tanks strapped to their bloody backs.  This may or may not be a crime scene, and they are dressed in protective clothing because they do not want to contaminate any evidence that might be here.”

Stanley glared, then coughed up some phlegm from his clotted lungs and spat it out through a convenient gap in his discoloured teeth, where a front tooth had been dislodged by the fist of a local farmer fifteen years previously: Stanley’s attitude was not always suffered gladly.  And had the viscous substance settled on Alan’s highly polished boot instead of on the grass next to it, then the dour landlord might have been grabbed by his scrawny neck and nicked for assault.  As it was, Alan counted to ten and refused to be drawn any further.

The house and outbuildings were clean.  The only trace of human occupation, apart from that of Derek Cox, was an assortment of head and pubic hairs, mainly found in the bed and the bathroom.  A few of them were blonde and would be analysed, but were short and most likely his.  A vast collection of gay magazines and videos were discovered, and the bedside cabinet drawer held a healthy stock of condoms and tubes of KY jelly.  Cox was obviously gay, and the only blue-eyed blondes that he was likely to be interested in would be of the male gender.  The one item of dubious significance was a short coil of blue nylon rope found hanging from a bracket in the garage.  It was bagged and taken, to be sent for comparison with the length that had been used to suspend Shelley Stroud.  It was a routine procedure, not thought too significant, when taken into account that the product was generic and as commonplace in garages, garden sheds and car boots as knives and forks are in a kitchen drawer.  The guy was a fruit, and it appeared that he would soon be eliminated as a suspect from their list of one.