Blind Alley (3 page)

Chapter Four

Friday, 25th October: 9:01 a.m.

Brady sighed. Regardless of how often he read the victims’ files, they still made no sense. His head was pounding. He had hoped that it would ease up, but instead it had intensified. He opened a drawer, took out some painkillers and swallowed them back with a mouthful of bitter black coffee. He grimaced in disgust. It was cold.

He checked his phone: 9:01 a.m. He had been sitting in his office, mulling over every nuance of the case for over an hour now, in the vain hope that he would have more to say to his team. He had scheduled a briefing for 9:30 a.m. Twenty-nine minutes left and he still had nothing.

Shit . . . shit . . . shit.

Brady knew he was missing something obvious.

But what? What couldn’t he see?

He ran his hand through his long dark hair.

He was tired. He’d hardly slept last night – tortured by the fact that they were no closer to catching the serial rapist. It was the rapist’s latest victim – Chloe Winters – that had really got to Brady. Ordinarily, he would have said that she’d got under his skin. But given the sadistic injuries she had suffered at the hands of her attacker, the irony made him feel physically sick.

Three young women had been raped in the last two months. With each victim the rapist’s violence had escalated. So much that Brady was certain that if they didn’t stop him, his next victim wouldn’t just be raped, she would be tortured to death.

His boss, DCI Gates, was breathing down his neck for results. It was understandable; Brady would be exactly the same if he was in Gates’s position. Not that he ever would be; he was under no illusions. Promotions always bypassed Brady. He was still surprised he’d succeeded in making it to the level of Detective Inspector.

But Brady knew who he was indebted to for his rise to DI. And it definitely wasn’t Gates. Despite Brady delivering against targets, albeit at times by the skin of his teeth, Gates had made it clear that he didn’t consider him anything more than some maverick cop from the wrong side of the tracks who would inevitably end up like his ex-colleague and friend, Jimmy Matthews. A bent copper who’d found himself in a segregated wing of a maximum security prison, doing time and being protected from the criminal element he’d once policed.

It was Gates’s boss, Detective Chief Superintendent O’Donnell, that Brady thanked for believing in him. O’Donnell had known Brady when he was a wayward teenager looking for trouble on the poverty-stricken and crime-infested streets of the Ridges estate in North Shields. Streets that O’Donnell policed when he joined the force as one of Northumbria’s first black coppers. It was O’Donnell’s perseverance with Brady that had steered the teenager away from a life of crime and into a job that was the antithesis of everything he had ever known. Brady owed everything to O’Donnell; without him, Brady would have ended up on the other side of the law. But he knew that he had earned his promotion the hard way. It wasn’t down to nepotism. It was down to sheer bloody hard work and doggedness. And, perhaps, a few unconventional methods thrown in for good measure. But he got results. Results that got noticed and finally rewarded. However, Brady knew that he had climbed as high as he could in the police force. There was only one direction he could move now, and that was down.

Brady irritably pushed his hair back from his weary face. He was wasting time. He was sitting musing about his dead-end career instead of coming up with something that would appease Gates and keep the scavenging rats from the door. In other words, the press: in particular, Brady’s personal snitch, the hardened hack Rubenfeld.

Someone had kindly left a copy of last night’s
Northern Echo
on Brady’s desk. It was now in the wastepaper bin where it belonged. Brady’s headache had kicked off as soon as he saw the vitriolic attack on the front page. Worse still, Rubenfeld had written it.

Rubenfeld sold papers; and lots of them. He was known for his scathing investigative articles, which typically dominated the front pages. And at the moment, Rubenfeld had his poisoned pen poised against the Northumbrian force. Or, to be more exact, Whitley Bay police station.

Rubenfeld was stirring up a public frenzy with the fact that the police – or Brady to be precise – had still not caught the serial rapist.

The problem was, the nature of the third victim’s attack made great headlines. It was gruesome, sadistic and worryingly original. The third rape had taken place less than a week ago, and Brady and his team had done everything in their power to withhold the nature of the victim’s injuries, just as they had with the first two victims. The less the public knew about the case, the better. However, someone, maybe a member of hospital staff or someone who knew the latest victim, had passed on details about the attack to Rubenfeld, who had wasted no time turning them into headline news. Money was a very persuasive tool to get people to talk. Rubenfeld knew it and abused it. But whether or not Rubenfeld had any idea how much he had compromised the investigation by publishing information that the police had held back from the public was a moot point: Rubenfeld had no loyalties, especially where Brady was concerned.

Now that the
Northern Echo
had published the extent of the victims’ injuries, there would be a public outcry against the police for not having apprehended such a dangerous criminal. But Brady, as Senior Investigating Officer, had done everything in his power to try to find him. All the relevant information they had on the rapist had been fed into HOLMES 2: the police computer intelligence database. Given the seriousness of the crimes, it was a crucial tool in the search for the rapist’s identity. It processed masses of information from police forces across the UK and cross-referenced it, making sure that no vital clues were overlooked. Gone were the days when it would take weeks, if not months, for an investigating team to collate information in a bid to track down a suspect.

The Major Incident Room, where the investigation was being coordinated, had been set up in the largest room available. Brady had a team of officers assembled there processing all the information they had on the three rapes, including whatever they had received from the public. Anything that Brady thought relevant was added into HOLMES 2. But as yet they had nothing. Nothing that would bring them closer to finding their man. The rapist had developed a style of his own, a modus operandi that Brady had never come across before. Nor had any of the other forces in the UK. It appeared this rapist was home-grown. Troublingly for the investigation, Brady was certain he was gaining confidence with each new victim, perfecting his inimitable trademark.

Brady was worried; worried that he might not be able to solve this case. It wouldn’t be the first offender to elude him, but that was no consolation. Gates wasn’t the only one who wanted results – Brady would give anything to put an end to the sick, twisted bastard who had raped and assaulted these young women. He had made a promise to the most recent victim, Chloe Winters. He had given her his word that he would get the man who damaged her so horrifically she would never be the same, let alone look the same, again. Brady did not want to break that promise but he wasn’t quite sure how he could fulfil it. That was his fear: that this man was one step ahead.

It was no real surprise to Brady that he was feeling low. This investigation had been going for two months and they were no further forward. It was what they called a ‘runner’ – never a good word in a Senior Investigating Officer’s book. The worst part of it was that they were waiting for the rapist to strike again. Anticipating when and who he would attack next.

Brady had already accepted that it would be impossible to replicate the high of intercepting an international sex-trafficking ring in the North-East of England. Since the success of that case, his superiors had expected him to deliver as quickly on this investigation. Six months ago Brady had managed to expose a lucrative business deal set up between two Eastern European brothers and a local North-East gangster. The Eastern Europeans, known to special intelligence as the Dabkunas brothers, had eluded the police. No trace of them had been reported in the UK since their illicit activity had been uncovered. It was now widely accepted that they had gone to ground in Europe. As for Ronnie Macmillan, the local gangster who had gone into business with the Dabkunas brothers, he’d found himself in Durham prison. Even Gates had been impressed with Brady. His exposure of the group had resulted in the Northumbrian force basking in media glory.

But the accolades had been short-lived. Very much yesterday’s news. Today was a radically different story.

Chapter Five

Suddenly, there was a loud knock at the office door.

Brady looked up. ‘Better be good,’ he called out.

He was not surprised when Conrad opened the door.

‘Sorry, sir, but I think you’ll want to know about this,’ Conrad said as he walked in.

‘Go on,’ instructed Brady.

‘A woman was admitted to Rake Lane hospital in the early hours of this morning, sir.’

‘And?’

Conrad cleared his throat. ‘She’s in a really bad condition from all accounts. She was beaten up last night and left for dead. She’s spent the past six hours in surgery. Internal bleeding, a punctured lung and emergency surgery to her face.’

‘Where?’ asked Brady, frowning. His head felt like it was going to explode.

‘Sir?’

‘Where was she attacked, Conrad?’

Brady put Conrad’s uncharacteristic obtuseness down to the fact he’d only just returned to work after a significant period of sick leave.

‘The lower part of North Shields leading down to the docks. She was found in an industrial bin at the back of the Ballarat pub. If it hadn’t been for the landlord’s two Rottweilers kicking up such a fuss when he let them out in the back alley before going to bed, she’d definitely be dead.’

Brady massaged his throbbing temples as he thought about it.

‘Ballarat pub isn’t a great area to be hanging around, is it? At least, not for a woman.’

Conrad knew exactly what his boss was insinuating.

‘We don’t know whether she was working or not, if you get my drift, sir.’

‘Look, I’m not being funny, but doesn’t North Shields have its own Area Command? This is clearly out of our jurisdiction. We’ve got a briefing in about twenty minutes and I have a hell of a headache from trying to figure out what I’m going to say to DCI Gates afterwards,’ Brady said.

As far as he was concerned the conversation was over.

It felt as if he had been sitting behind a desk for months now. Staring at files . . . whiteboards . . . witness statements . . . following false leads like the one Conrad had just brought to him. But, crucially, not out there running this bastard down. He stood and walked over to the large window. His leg had stiffened up and he found himself limping slightly from the old wound in his thigh. His office was on the first floor of the old Victorian building that was Whitley Bay police station. The room was large enough to have an old leather couch in front of the window for the odd occasion when Brady didn’t make it home. He prised the dusty Venetian blinds open and looked down at the street below. It led out to the centre of the small town. It was late October, which meant that it was typically overcast and grey. The rain and biting wind had been almost continuous now for six months. Spring had been a week of blazing sunshine at the beginning of May, and then the temperature had plummeted. It had remained that way since. Climate change had a lot to answer for when it came to the bleak drizzle that constituted seasonal change in the North-East. Gone were the scorching hot summers of the seventies. Now all they got were flash floods and hailstones. Brady wasn’t surprised that an estimated 5.5 million Brits permanently lived abroad. That was almost one in ten of the UK population. Not that he could blame them.

Brady scanned what he could of the street; it looked normal. Whatever ‘normal’ meant. However, at night it was a different story. The small, rundown seaside resort had a dark underbelly to it. And somewhere out there a sadistic rapist waited. He was upping his ante – the question was, why?

‘What day is it, Conrad?’ Brady asked, his back to Conrad.

‘Sir?’

‘Friday. The answer is Friday. Which means that we’re going to have another weekend of watching and waiting to see if he strikes again. It’s exactly seven days since he last attacked and given the fact that his cooling-off period is lessening, I would say he’ll be starting to look for another victim.’

Brady turned around.

Conrad was silent. He rarely spoke unless it was necessary, but Brady knew there was something wrong. He could read it in Conrad’s face. His narrowed eyes and tightly clenched jaw always gave him away.

‘What aren’t you telling me, Conrad?’

‘The victim was raped, sir.’

The news didn’t surprise Brady – sex workers were at high risk of sexual and physical assault purely by the nature of their job.

So far, the rapist had only ever attacked in Whitley Bay in the early hours of a Saturday or Sunday morning. And so far, he hadn’t attacked prostitutes.

‘And . . .’ Conrad faltered. He knew what would be going through his boss’s mind; that it couldn’t possibly be their suspect. But there was something about the injuries that this victim had sustained that leaped out when Conrad learned the details. He’d made quite a few friends during his police training days; one of them was stationed at North Shields. They still got together for drinks every other week – mainly to gripe about their bosses and the impossible tasks they were asked to perform. Conrad hadn’t needed to update her on the serial rape case. After the third victim, it had made national news. But Conrad had told her the gruesome details that had been held back from the press. His friend contacted Conrad as soon as she could after being called out to the new crime scene. The victim had suffered an unusual wound that was startlingly similar to the one found on the third rape victim. When she told Conrad, he knew it was something he couldn’t ignore.