The Handshaker (24 page)

Joyce struggled, a futile gesture; they all did it. He lowered himself onto her, riding her fast, hard, wickedly, until he exploded inside her.

He lay still for a few moments getting his breath back, then stood up. Her terror now more real than ever, she heaved on the bonds, straining to free herself. The Handshaker watched as he pulled on his shorts and shirt.

He unfastened her left foot. She lashed it at him. He caught it expertly, pressed it back to the mattress and knelt on it. The pain of his weight crushing her ankle brought tears to her eyes. He released the other foot, and while she struggled, he brought both feet together and bound them. Then he straddled her chest, released her right arm and forced it down, under his left knee to keep it under control while he released her left arm and wrapped the binding from the bedrail more securely round it. Pressing on both arms with his hands, he climbed off her. Joyce struggled, he rolled her over, forced the hands together behind her back and wrapped the spare binding round her free hand. With them secured, he spent a moment tightening the bonds, then stood back to regain his breath.

“I knew you’d fight,” he gasped, “but I didn’t think you’d have that much strength left. I thought I’d have fucked it all out of you.” He tittered. “Maybe I’m not as good as I think I am.”

He took a few deep breaths and lifted her from the bed, throwing her easily over his shoulder. Joyce kicked and bucked to no avail other than exhausting herself. The Handshaker climbed one step of the ladders and rolling her from his shoulder, sat her firmly on its tiny platform, her back rattling into the cold metal frame, drawing a muted yelp from behind the gag.

He reached up, drew the noose down. Joyce dodged her head this way and that to avoid it slipping over her neck and for a moment, he fought a running, childish battle with her, before finally slipping into it place. Once it was done, he slipped the knot down and secured it lightly at the back of her neck. At last, he stood back and admired her near-nudity and trembling terror. Her eyes, misted now with tears, begged him for mercy. Lowering his shorts he began to massage his member into a fresh erection. He bent to her feet and cut loose the bonds, then stood back again.

“Can’t kick with your feet together, can you?” He smiled cruelly up at her. “According to my calculations, Joyce, you’ll fall about three or four inches, and your feet will be a foot or so from the floor.”

Showing her his proud rod, he stretched his right leg out to the ladder. From behind her gag, Joyce begged and pleaded for her life, her cries muffled and incomprehensible behind the restraint.

With a kick, he knocked the ladder backwards into her wardrobe where it smashed the mirror. Joyce fell and stopped falling. She swung freely, her legs thrashing wildly, her whole body bucking to relieve the closing pressure on her airway. The Handshaker masturbated, feeding his sadistic urges on her helplessness.

And when it was done, when he had ejaculated, on the bed rather than on her body, he dressed slowly, mechanically. Only the occasional twitch told him that Joyce was still alive.

Leaving the tools scattered on the carpet, picking up his overcoat, he reached into the inner pocket and carefully removed a gold plated, ballpoint pen wrapped in tissue. Kneeling at the side of the bed, he allowed the tissue to flop open and the pen to roll under the divan.

Satisfied, he got to his feet. A simple call to the law tomorrow morning should be enough to see Croft arrested. It would not take the police long to learn that he was innocent and he should be free within 24 hours, but that would be ample time for Croft to learn the meaning of punishment before he met his destiny.

November 17th

31

“Good morning, Mr Croft, sir.”

Mrs Hitchins delivered her customary greeting and placed the mail on the kitchen table.

Reacting with a taciturn grunt, Croft picked up the envelopes, sifting through the usual collection of bills, statements, official letters and junk, putting to one side, those that were addressed to Trish, until he came across another plain envelope with his name and address produced by typewriter.

After another largely sleepless night, tossing Millie’s final question over and over in his mind, racking his memory for those who might possibly bear him or Trish ill-will, it was almost as if the sixth sense he had so long sought in others, had manifested itself in him and told him to expect this third communiqué in three days.

He made to tear it open. Mrs Hitchins tutted. “Are you sure you should be doing that, sir? The police will want –”

“Want what?” he cut in. “More of the same forensic that tells them nothing? The Handshaker has Trish and I want to know where she is.” He tore the envelope along its sealed, top edge, squeezed the edges to pop it and under a baleful glance from his housekeeper, drew out the sheet of A4, unfolded it and read the two lines along the top edge.

Check load glint on sow for the latest suspension.

And where wee grind eats it, they saw a bum fall.

The first thing that struck Croft was that every word was correctly spelled. There was no use of text shorthand, no vernacular and the punctuation, such as there was, was precise. There was no acrostic, but several possible anagrams. While Mrs Hitchins simmered in silent disapproval of his blatant disregard for police instructions, he took out his pen, snatched up
The Independent
and using the blank margins, began work on the puzzles.

In the first line, the anagram stood out;
load glint on sow.
Taking the word,
check
, in context, as an instruction to investigate, Croft assumed that the anagram was a location and struck out the word “towns”, then “land”, leaving O-G-L-I-O, from which the only word he could get was “igloo”. No matter which way he looked at it,
town’s land igloo
made no more sense than load glint on sow.

Scrubbing that and finding no words such as ‘road’ or ‘street’, he looked for abbreviations, like ‘Rd.’ or ‘St.’ but all he could get out of it was Downing St., which he knew to be somewhere in West Scarbeck. Even then he was left with the letters, O-L-A-L-O.

Then he noticed that the centre portion of ‘load glint on sow’ almost spelled Adlington, a small town south of Chorley on the A6, where he had attended a sixties-themed car boot sale some years previously. The word had nothing to do with Scarbeck, but reminded him of Allington, the village just along the road from Oaklands. Using that as a starting point, he eliminated the letters of ‘Allington’ from the anagram and the solution shouted at him.
Allington Woods
! He was being instructed to check Allington Woods.

Frozen to his seat, he stared from the sheet of paper through the windows and across the rear of the house, beyond the high retaining wall to the dense foliage of the woods.
Check Allington Woods
. He snapped out of his trance, leapt to his feet and ran.

“Mr Croft,” the daily called as he disappeared into the hall.

He dashed for the front door and, barely pausing to snatch up a dark blue, waterproof blouson, rushed out of the house into torrential rain. One word rang through his head; a word not mentioned in the note.
Trish!

No point taking his car, he thought as he ran between the blackened, sandstone pillars at the boundary of his property. The entrance to the woods was less than three hundred yards along Allington Lane and there was no proper track through the woods for a car.

His clothing was instantly soaked as he struggled to put on and zip up the blouson while still running. He hardly felt the cold, barely noticed that the thin coat, designed to stave off summer showers, had already adhered to his wet shirt. He was due to attend a staff meeting at the university at ten o’clock – the Vice Principal was an unsympathetic cow when she wanted, and would not let him duck out on the grounds of Trish’s abduction – but thoughts of the UNWE were furthest from his mind. All he could think of was an anagram pointing him into the woods and the remote possibility that Trish may be there, still alive. It was no better than a faint and ridiculous hope. All logic told him that if she was there, she was dead, but even that tiny spark of optimism, as distant and dim as the most remote star ever seen by human eyes, drove him through the foul weather and into the woods.

Croft hurried through thick grass and moss that formed a soft and treacherous carpet underfoot.
Which way, which way?
He was confronted with thousands of square yards of land, most of it a condensed mass of uncontrolled vegetation. There were three or four paths through the woods coming out in various places: Allington, the main road between Allington and Esterham, the moors, and Huddersfield Road, but in the dim light of a grey, rainy November morning, all he could see were dark trunks and fading foliage, a riot of centuries old, arboreal propagation, twisted into dark, often macabre shapes.

Was that a pair of green eyes staring at him or his imagination? Croft blinked the rain away and they were gone.

He paused a moment to considered his options. If this note was serious, and he had no reasons to suspect it was not, then The Handshaker must have brought her here by car, and although there was no vehicle track this side of the official car park, it was well known that lovers often drove into the woods.

He cursed his hastiness. If he had stopped to think, instead of rushing blindly out of the house, he would have brought a flashlight with him so he could check the grass for signs of a car having been driven this or that way.

He pressed forward, running along a barely visible path of flattened grass that had been worn down by years of common usage. His foot slipped, he threw out an arm to prevent a fall and his hand landed in something soft and vaguely disgusting. Mud? Shit? He didn’t know and didn’t pause to wonder. Instead, he righted himself and pushed on, running blindly, deeper and deeper into the woods, driven on by the image of a woman struggling to cling to whatever was left of her life, and the absurd hope that he would be in time.

He tripped over an extended, buried root and fell flat on his face. His clothing now thoroughly soaked, he swore, got to his feet and stared wildly around. In the semi-darkness, monstrous things lurked, moving, shifting stealthily, surrounding him. Something flitted through the branches above him and he looked up in alarm, the rain streaming into his eyes.

He took several deep breaths and forced himself to calm down.

You are a rational, educated man and there is nothing in this wood that can hurt you. Think. Use your mind.

Reason began to take over. He turned his mind from imaginary fears populating the dark woods with hideous creatures, turned it from The Handshaker’s actions, and concentrated on The Handshaker as a person. What was he about? A braggart. A man who had successfully eluded detection and arrest for two years and yet a man with a desperate urge to show the world how smart he was. He would not wait around. He had not planted some clever trap for Croft. That would not serve his ego. He had left a body here – Trish’s body? Croft prayed it was not – but he would not hide it too deeply. It would not be in broad daylight, but it would be easy to see for someone who knew it was there. So where?

There were, Croft knew, a number of clearings in the woods, places where, during the summer months, visitors to the area would pause to catch their breath, listen to birdsong, watch squirrels dart through the trees. They were used infrequently at this time of year and only then by couples seeking somewhere for discreet sex. Perhaps… No. Croft cut the thought off before it could properly mature. Those same couples would present too big a risk for The Handshaker. He could never afford to be seen stringing up one of his victims. It had to be somewhere other than the clearings. Somewhere deeper in the woods, somewhere where perhaps the maintenance workers might find her when they came to repair the fences or trim the trees overhanging Oaklands’ retaining wall, or clear out…

His thoughts came to a tumbling, stuttering halt. Oaklands’ retaining wall! How many times had he complained to the council about trees encroaching on his property? It was somewhere to his left; twenty, thirty yards away. Not far. Would The Handshaker have the audacity to leave her there where he may have been seen from the first floor windows of Croft’s home? Would he have left her hanging so that in her final moments she would be able to see the place where she had been so at peace with the world? He wanted Croft to find her, so the answer was obvious. Yes, he would.

The rain ran down Croft’s face in a continuous stream. Making his way towards the dark shadow that was the high wall surrounding his property, he was suddenly aware that he was filthy. Less than an hour ago, he had climbed out of the shower, slipped on a pristine, white shirt, clean tie, brushed off his business suit and prepared for the coming day’s argument with the Head of Department, the Bursar and Vice Principal. Arguments on student numbers, on research funding, on meeting government targets. Now he was wet, mud-stained, clambering, scratching his way through impossibly dense and untamed woods on the trail of a madman and his acts of savagery. There was something surreal about it.

Close to the wall he looked in either direction. The maintenance men had done their job well this year. Looking up he could see the bland, leaden cloud unleashing its fury on the land. Following the line of the wall east and west, there was not a single branch threatening his property.