50/50 Killer (17 page)

isz5jlm: [Hi - how are you?]

'isz' signified the department - computer studies - although he had no idea where the abbreviation for it came from. '5' meant the year of university entry was 1995: the same year as him. And 'jlm' were the person's initials.

He stared at it for a couple of seconds, trawling through his mental list of friends, and then the circle of acquaintances that surrounded them. Maybe it was somebody he'd met at a party. JLM, JLM ... If it was, he couldn't remember.

He frowned, and clicked on the cross in the corner of the window, closing it down. Then he turned his attention back to the web.

Twenty seconds later another message appeared.

isz5jlm: [Ooops - sorry!]

And that was all.

At least the second message made it clear: the first had been a mistake. Scott felt strangely disappointed.

Seconds of inactivity passed. Moments of time, he thought later, where the wonderful life he would have was hanging in the balance without him even realising.

He opened up the list of logged-on users for his network. There were about two hundred and fifty, but they were arranged in alphabetical order so it was easy to scroll down to the iszs. There were several. isz5jlm was the last on the list.

He deliberated over it some more, and then thought,
Why not
? Double-clicking on the name brought up a small dialogue box. He typed:

[Am fine thanks. Hope you are too. But who are you?]

The mouse-pointer hovered. Perhaps he should just forget about it, he thought. It was clearly a mistake, and there wasn't anything to gain by pursuing it. At worst, the person might ignore it, making him feel stupid.

But hell, if that was the worst then - once again - why not?

He pressed [send].

The snow outside was coming down much harder now and Scott's breath clouded in the air as he spoke, billowing around the man in front of him.

'We just started emailing each other,' he said. 'We didn't meet for about a month and a half.'

'So it was an accident?'

Scott nodded, but the man was looking at the papers and ignored him.

'The odds against that happening must be astronomical,' he said. 'But everybody feels the same way. People look into each other's eyes and talk about what might have happened if ... How things could be different. Did you ever do that?'

Scott found the smallest trace of rebellion.

'No.'

'I think you did. People always start by telling each other they're soul mates, that they couldn't be happier, they were meant to be together.' The man looked at him curiously. 'Is that what you believe?'

'Yes.'

'That's good.'

Suddenly, the pressure on Scott's knees increased, and then lifted altogether as the man stood up and went back outside.

Gone.

For a moment, he could have been entirely alone in the woods. The snow beyond the entrance was peaceful and silent; the fire beyond, burning away happily. It was almost serene. But the man's footprints were there on the ground in the snow. He had been here. He would come back soon.

Scott tested his bindings again, but they were as tight as ever. All he could do was twist and stretch as much as they'd allow, trying to ease the cramp in his muscles. Everything was becoming solid.

A minute passed. Then another.

The footprints outside were almost invisible now. Already becoming lost among the white all around them.

Perhaps he really
had
gone.

But then, footsteps.

The man moved back into the outhouse and crouched down where he'd been before: a huge presence, filling the world. The pressure on Scott's knees returned. The man was still holding the papers and the screwdriver, but this time he had brought something else.

Not an item so much as a smell. A sensation of heat.

He heard the man breathing out through his nostrils, sighing.

'Like I said, you have something I want.'

Scott nodded quickly. He'd identified the source of the smell and the heat - both came from the screwdriver the man was holding. He knew what had happened. The point of it had been heated in the fire.

The man held the screwdriver up between them and Scott thought he could see the steam curling off it.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

'And you're going to give it to me. Do you understand?'

He put the papers down and reached out to Scott's face. Scott whipped his head round, but the man caught him: grabbed a fistful of his hair at the back. Held his head steady. God, the man was so strong. His voice fell over itself, it ran from him so quick:

'Don't, please don't, don't--'

'Do you love her?'

Scott wasn't breathing right. It was too short, too fast, all in the nose. There was electricity running through him, building up as his body insisted that he needed
to get away
. But he couldn't move, and it built up and up--

He was screaming in terror and
panic
.

'Do you love her?'

'Yes!'

The man nodded.

'That's what I want,' he said.

And then put the screwdriver into Scott's eye.

3 DECEMBER

9 HOURS, 50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

9.30 P.M.

Mark

In a quiet, sleepy street, an enormous police presence acts as an alarm call. Lights flash across windows; fists bang on doors; and people look up from the television and wonder what the hell's happened. Everybody feels afraid.

I stood at the top of Carl Farmer's steps and looked down at the scene before me. We'd sealed off the housing complex at the entrance from the main road, and the vehicles inside the cordon - four vans, three cars - were illuminating everything with steady sweeps of blue. There were lights on in every house, and most of the residents were out at the top of their steps. I could hear the scratchy noise from police radios, the echo of quiet voices.

Earlier in the evening, before we left the department, it had started to snow. There was a soft layer of it on the ground here, blackened in places by the slush of footprints and the cut of tyres. It was still falling, descending heavily from the sky. Thick and heavy and slow, filling the ice-cold night air as far as the eye could see, blurring into the night. It caught the streetlights and formed amber static across the street.

The four vans below were lit up from within by white monitors, the light obscured by the huddle of rain-slickered bodies waiting by the open doors. I spotted my door-to-door team and checked my watch. Half past nine: I'd been at work for twelve hours. It was tempting to go and grab another coffee, but there'd be time for that before we started the interviews.

The interviews ...

I looked around the street and sighed. We were in one of the nicer areas of the city. I'd driven through on the way here, and most of the houses were large and expensive, occupied by middle-aged families or older couples. Normally, for an interview man, that would have been encouraging, but Carl Farmer's house was in one of the newer developments that backed onto the canal. Although they were in the heart of the district, these areas were an entirely different proposition.

Small streets led off the main road into enclaves of six or seven houses. The buildings were all the same: light-brown brick, complemented by dark-brown wooden steps, sills and garage doors. The kitchen worktops, cupboards and cabinets - all the same. A single blueprint had been taken and used like a cookie-cutter, again and again, to create nice houses someone could choose off a peg if they didn't want to think too hard; which meant they were aimed at young professionals. There didn't appear to be any feeling of community here, and I imagined that nobody was likely to know their neighbours very well. My gut instinct was that the door-to-doors were going to be a nightmare.

Taking a last breath of cold air, I turned my back on the flashing lights, and made my way into the kitchen.

There were two crime-scene techs there, gamely working their way over everything from one wall to the other. The evidence so far suggested that, like the house Andrew Dyson had been killed in, this place had been another nest for our killer. Even so, the man who called himself Carl Farmer had rented it for almost a year and it seemed inconceivable that he'd left no evidence behind.

'Anything so far?' I asked one of the techs.

'Just the obvious.'

He nodded at the kitchen counter, which I'd seen when I arrived. And of course, earlier this evening, the officers chasing up the owners of the white vans caught on CCTV had arrived and seen it, too.

There were none of the usual gadgets or equipment you'd expect: no toaster, kettle or sandwich-maker; no crumbs or stains to suggest a meal had ever been prepared here. But it wasn't entirely bare. A single piece of evidence had been placed opposite the front door, ready for the officers who arrived, and the front door had been left slightly ajar, so that anyone who came up the steps would see it straight away.

It was propped against the wall at the back of the counter. Dark, bushy eyebrows. Jet-black goatee. Plastic piercings through pink skin the colour of sunburn.

I stared down at its cut-out eyes, my thoughts still on the conversation in the canteen. For one thing, our deniability was now pretty much shot. More importantly, I couldn't imagine what it must have been like for Mercer to enter the house and see this.

The devil mask that Carl Farmer had left for us.

The front room.

Or at least what would have passed for it in an ordinary house.

The furnishings were basic and had obviously come with the rent: a white leather suite, a simple wooden table and chair; an old coffee table, which had been pushed out of the way against a wall. The other rooms were bare and unused. Farmer appeared to have operated out of this one, and there was no indication of where he might have slept, if he had slept here at all. His only remaining possession here, the mask aside, was a laptop, left open and running on the table in the corner.

The room was busier now than it had presumably ever been during his tenancy. Two IT techies were working at the computer, while Simon was liaising with another two scene-of-crime officers. Mercer was standing in the centre of the room, arms folded, staring at the wall. Greg and Pete were slightly to one side of him, talking the scene over. Every now and then, Pete glanced at Mercer and looked concerned.

I walked across to join them.

'How much does it cost to rent a place like this?' I said.

'A fair whack.' The snow had wetted Pete's hair, making him look more dishevelled than ever. He seemed tired, as well, but he still reeled off the facts and figures without referring to notes. 'Seven fifty a month. I've spoken to the rep at the rental agency. He wasn't best pleased to be disturbed at this hour.'

Greg nodded at the wall Mercer was staring at so intently.

'He's going to be even less pleased when he sees what Farmer's done to the place.'

One of the SOCOs appeared behind us. 'Excuse me, can I get a picture of that, please?'

We edged aside while he prepared the camera.

In the middle of the wall, the man known as Carl Farmer had written the following:

In the space between the days
you lost the melancholy shepherd of the stars.
The moon is gone and the wolves of space move in
grow bold
and pick his flock off one by one.

Around that short poem, the white wall had been covered in the type of spider-web drawing found at each of the 50/50 Killer's crime scenes. They were drawn in black marker rather than blood, but the similarities were unavoidable. Some had been scribbled out; others had been smudged and redrawn. On some of them, there were the same little crossings and cuts made across the strands.

We'd already identified one of them as the image left at Kevin Simpson's house. It had been drawn more definitely here than many around it. Most of the others gave the impression of idle jottings, as though he'd been drafting patterns and seeing what looked right before settling on a final design. The effect was eerie. The webs surrounding the poem looked like strange, spiral galaxies around a dead sun.

I wondered what it all meant - not the meaning behind the symbols so much as the scene as a whole. By leaving the devil mask where it would be seen, he was taunting us. Or challenging us, perhaps. Certainly not indifferent to us, anyway. And now this wall here. Was it the same? If it was a display he'd intended us to see, what was the message? It was strange to think that, when I imagined him here, drawing on the wall, the man I saw in my head was very probably imagining me back.

The photographer moved on. Pete put his hands in his pockets and sniffed.

'The agent's on his way down here now, anyway.'

'What do we know about Farmer so far?' I said.

Pete deferred this one to Greg.

'He's thirty-one years old,' Greg said. 'Unmarried. No kids that we know of. No criminal record. On paper he works for a plumbing company, although I think we're going to find that's a front. All of it, probably. The guys at the section are going through the details, but so far it looks the same set-up as the Frank Walker ID he used. Just another paper trip.'

Pete glanced around the room, as though the place was derelict and he expected the ceiling to collapse. Then he took up the thread.

'The agent says Farmer paid a year's rent up front, including the deposit, which is a total of over nine grand. We'd all agree that's a hell of a lot of disposable income.'

'So whatever he does, he's well paid,' Greg suggested.

'Independently wealthy,' Mercer told us.

I turned to look at him. He was still studying the patterns on the wall: immersed in them, even, as though they were a language he might decipher if he stared hard enough.

'You think?' Greg said.

Mercer gestured at the wall. 'Look at this. It seems to me that he's gone through different drafts, practising until he's happy. The patterns may look random to us, but there's real method to it. It's important to him. And I can't see him holding down the level of job he'd require for the amount of money he seems to have.'