The Death Collector (20 page)

Carl looked towards the floor. ‘So what about the woman who was in here, the dead one? Did you collect her too?’

The man pushed the knife into Carl’s neck, the tip just breaking the skin, making Carl cry out.

‘Don’t make it sound so cheap,’ the man said, anger in his voice.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Carl said desperately. ‘I don’t understand, that’s all. When you say collect, you mean that the woman on the floor was someone you just wanted to have?’

‘I’d already had her,’ the man said, and then he laughed, moving the blade from Carl’s neck. ‘Her problem was that she wanted to leave, to get away.’ He shook his head. ‘No one ever gets away.’ He paused before he said quietly, ‘I’ve got someone coming round later. Whatever happens now is your fault. You’ve accelerated this. I need to act quickly. I want you to know that everything that happens is down to you.’

‘What do you mean, that it’s my fault?’

‘The end is getting closer. So I’ve just got some loose ends to tie up.’

The man reached into his pocket and pulled out some rags. Carl knew what was going to come and tried to pull away, but it was no good. One of the rags was jammed into his mouth and, before he had chance to spit it out, the other was wrapped around his head, keeping it in place, the knot tight behind him.

And with that, his captor turned and left the cellar, the key louder in the lock this time.

Carl put his head back against the wall, taking deep breaths through the gag. He needed to decide which put him in most danger: going along with the man, or against him. Hunger and fatigue weakened him though. His legs didn’t feel strong and his body swayed.

He didn’t know how much longer he could last.

‘So what are you expecting when we get there?’ Charlotte asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the road ahead.

Sam had co-opted Charlotte after leaving Evans’s office under the pretence of speaking to some of Sarah’s friends, to build up a picture of her husband, but he had disclosed his true purpose on the drive away from the station. They were heading for the spot where Sarah’s body had been discovered to try to work out if there was anything special about it, anything that might indicate why the killer had chosen that place to leave her.

‘You can back out, you know,’ Sam said. ‘Hunter will be unhappy if he finds out, and Evans won’t back us up.’

‘But Evans knows what you’re doing?’

‘She’ll take the credit if I’ve got it right. Sell me out if I haven’t.’

‘That’s okay then,’ Charlotte said, smiling. ‘Hunter has only got a couple of years left in him. It’s people like Evans we should worry about. She’s got another decade in her, and even if she sells us out on this case, she’ll remember that we tried and be all right with us.’

When Sam focused again on the road ahead, she repeated her question. ‘So, don’t keep me in suspense, what are you expecting when we get there?’

‘I just thought we would look at the scene with fresh eyes,’ Sam said.

They were driving uphill in Charlotte’s car, leaving behind the late-afternoon Manchester rush hour.

As they got closer, the moors flattening out and creating a barren plateau of browns and purples, Charlotte sat forward, her arms on the wheel. ‘It looks quiet,’ she said, confusion in her voice.

Sam didn’t say anything but a sense of dread crept into him. He had expected to see some poor uniformed officer stationed behind fluttering crime scene tape, hunched up in a coat and questioning his career choice. Instead it was all back to normal, as if the discovery earlier hadn’t happened at all. There was only a small bunch of sunflowers attached to a post as a memorial.

Charlotte parked her car where she believed the killer must have parked his, in a small bay closest to the obvious route to the body, and stepped out. The wind was cold, despite the season. It seemed to whistle across the surface, fluttering the heather and making the soft white heads of the hare’s tail grasses wave. The sharpness made Sam’s eyes water as he reached in for his coat before heading to where the soft soil and heather began.

He looked at the spread of the moors, disbelief on his face.

‘Hunter has released the scene already,’ he said.

Charlotte walked beside him, pulling on her own coat. ‘They did a sweep this morning, the usual lines, dog and stick thing. What else is there to do?’

‘It just seems too early. We’ll have all the ghouls up here later, once the details come out.’

‘It’s a public space. We can’t preserve it for ever.’

She was right, he knew that, but it seemed that the horror from earlier in the day had been forgotten as the landscape returned to normal. There was a small group of walkers in dark fleeces and heavy boots. Cyclists in Lycra rode past. A couple held each other as they looked at the view, her long dark hair streaming back in the wind and over the shoulders of her denim jacket.

‘How far along was she?’ Sam asked. ‘It all looks the same once you get away from the road.’

‘There.’ Charlotte pointed to a cluster of grass a long way ahead. Sam could see where it had been flattened by the attentions of the crime scene investigators.

They both walked in silence before Sam stopped. He turned around, his hands on his hips, and shook his head.

‘What’s wrong?’ Charlotte said.

‘Look around.’

Charlotte turned. The moors spread as far as they could see. There was the barely audible hum of the motorway a couple of miles away. There was nothing to block the sound, no trees or buildings, just the long roll and tumble of grass and heather, so the noise hovered over the landscape like a loud whisper. In the distance there was the glimmer of a reservoir, trees clustered along its banks, the view down the valley giving a hint of the urban sprawl at the foot of the hills, the tower blocks of a satellite town just visible.

‘What am I looking at?’ she said.

‘The view of the road is just the same here as it is where she was left. So why dump her there,’ and he pointed, ‘fifty yards further ahead? How long would it take him to get there? Legs, arms, a torso and a head. That’s three trips at least. A hundred yards extra with each run. It could add on a minute each time, meaning he opted to hang around for three minutes extra, arousing suspicion the whole time. It makes no sense.’

‘What if he used something to carry the body?’ Charlotte said. ‘A wheelbarrow or a sheet.’

‘There’d be marks – a line of flattened heather or a wheel track. There’s nothing.’

‘So you’re saying that the specific spot is important?’

‘It’s the only thing that makes sense,’ Sam said. He set off again, the clumps of grass making his trousers wet, the ground soft underfoot.

When they got to the spot where Sarah had been found, Sam looked down and shook his head. ‘It’s all gone. No trace left. Everything back to normal as if it meant nothing.’

‘They’ve done the sweep, the body has gone,’ Charlotte reiterated. ‘They can’t close off the moors.’

Sam’s mind flashed back to when his own sister was killed. The path through the woods was closed overnight, but by the next morning it had been back to normal, apart from the few ghouls it attracted, who like to gawp at murder scenes under the pretence of laying flowers. By the following day, it was as if her death had meant nothing. The path became quieter, some parents warning their children away, but over time Ellie was just forgotten.

When Sam looked at Charlotte, her brow was creased with concern.

‘What’s wrong?’ Sam said.

‘You’re taking this too personally,’ she said. ‘Follow the orders, submit your paperwork, don’t make a hash of anything.’

‘Murder is important. It can’t be relegated to paper-turning.’

‘Do you think I don’t know this?’ Charlotte said. ‘That you’re the only one who really knows what murder means because your sister was killed?’ When Sam flinched, she softened. ‘I don’t want to fall out with you about this, Sam, but you need to be careful. If you get it right, bravo, and you’ll get a reputation and some respect, but what if you don’t? What if Hunter’s hunch is right and the husband did it? You’ll just be the man who almost derailed things by thinking he knows best. Your career will be finished.’

‘And if I’m right and I don’t do anything, I should just be happy that I followed Hunter’s direction?’

‘They’ll blame Hunter, not you.’

‘
I’ll
blame me,’ Sam said, exasperated. He looked down and shook his head. ‘It shouldn’t be about me. It’s about the victim, making it right for her; I’ve got to go with how I feel.’

‘And you’re ready for the consequences if you’ve got it wrong?’

Sam nodded. ‘I joined the police for emotional reasons. I’m not going to forget those.’

‘Your sister.’

‘Yes, my sister, and how the Force tried to look after us and make it right. When I approach a case, I think of how those detectives tried to do the right thing. I don’t blame them for not catching whoever murdered Ellie, but I want to do the same, follow my instincts.’

‘Not orders?’

‘We’ll do what Hunter says. I just think we should do a little extra too.’

Charlotte rolled her eyes and put her hands on her hips. ‘All right, I can see you’re not going to change your mind.’ She smiled, despite herself. ‘Go on then, Sherlock, look around. What do you think?’

Sam looked at the grass, flattened and muddied. The dumping ground.

‘Why didn’t he bury her?’ he said. ‘Think of those poor children murdered by Brady and Hindley. Keith Bennett is still under here somewhere. It’s as if the soil just swallowed him up.’

‘It moves,’ Charlotte said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that. It’s peat, and it’s soft, so sometimes it shifts around. It means a body can move from its original location. Even if Brady was willing to point to the exact spot where he buried Keith Bennett, his body might have gone walkabout through the decades, shifted around by the moving peat.’

‘So all the more reason to bury her,’ Sam said. ‘She would never be found and go down as just another runaway. These moors could be a graveyard for a lot of people and no one would know. So, yes, the isolation makes sense, but why not bury her?’

‘X marks the spot,’ Charlotte said, a half-smile on her lips.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think of how the body was set out,’ she said. ‘The arms and legs were splayed out like an X-marking. If the location is important, what better sign is there than a big cross spelled out by a dead body?’

Sam’s smile spread as he thought about that. ‘You might have something there.’

‘So what now?’

Sam checked his watch. ‘Now, we go home.’

‘And tonight?’

‘I do some research, see if I can discover anything about this location.’

‘And if you find something?’

‘I speak to Hunter. Hopefully he’ll listen if I do.’

His hand clenched the steering wheel tightly. Carl Jex was still in the cellar. It had been a couple of hours since he had been down there. It made everything riskier but he couldn’t stop now. Emma was next to him, sitting quietly.

She leaned forward and looked through the windscreen. They were outside his house. ‘You’ve never brought me here before.’

‘It feels like the right time,’ he said.

He climbed out of the car and held out his arm for Emma to hold onto as they walked to his door. As they went inside, he reached for her coat to slip it from her shoulders. He hung it on a tall wooden coat stand as the light in the hallway flickered, as if the bulb was about to go. He glanced upwards and grimaced. The mood had to be right. He didn’t want to spoil it by searching for spare bulbs.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

He turned round. ‘A bulb, that’s all.’ He pointed ahead. ‘Go in. First door on the right.’

‘You should have brought me here before,’ Emma said. ‘Hotels are nice and all that, but I’d rather see where you live.’

Her footsteps made loud clunks on the polished oak floorboards as she walked slowly, her hand trailing along the deep red wallpaper, the light bulbs shielded by purple shades with small tassels, so that the way in looked dark but warm.

He slipped off his silk scarf and wool jacket and hung them over the end of the banister.

The fire was smouldering as he entered the living room, so he went over to the brass bucket to put on more coal. As they clattered into the grate, the oily smell of the coal dust made his mouth water. It took him back more than twenty years, when it had been his job to do this, to keep the fire stoked on those nights in.

For a moment, he smelled his father’s cigarettes, the atmosphere heavy with them, the smoke swirling around the room like a faint blue cloud, the aroma warm as it made his throat tickle.

He thought he heard a laugh. The sound of his mother. He whirled around. There was only Emma there, turning on the spot, her heels making small marks in the rug as she looked around the room. She wasn’t laughing.

He swallowed. His parents came back to him more each time. As he watched Emma he saw his mother dancing, just turning on the spot, swaying, singing.

This was the time he loved the most, the anticipation. It was more than lust. It was excitement, felt by the fast hammer of his heart, the tightening in his throat, the room fading as he thought of what lay ahead.