50/50 Killer (40 page)

He leaned over, reaching out, allowing the flames on the wood to lick at the screwdriver. He turned it round, this way and that.

Please no. Please don't hurt me any more.

'When this body falls apart, I will return in another shell to continue my collection. And another.'

As the man took the screwdriver out of the flame, Scott's panic intensified - but then he stared, horrified, as the man lifted the screwdriver to his own face instead. He put the spike of it into his eye and held it there. Something sizzled and crumpled, and the man turned the handle slowly, side to side, smoke curling up his forehead. When he spoke next, his voice was neutral and impassive, and Scott believed every single word of it.

'Eventually,' the man said calmly, 'I will be allowed to take my collection home to my true father.'

Scott woke up and opened his eye. It was difficult. Either the lid was enormously heavy or else the muscles that worked it were too numb for his nerves to find.

So cold. He was so cold. His body was trembling and shaking, but there was no sensation accompanying the movement. He was just aware it was happening. When he had first been sat down here, the cold had burned him. Now it was as though his body belonged to someone else.

It must be nearly morning. The sky was slowly coming to life, and far above him in the trees, birds were beginning to sing. But everything was very distant; there was no feeling in his body, only a small core of heat left, and he could feel that dwindling. He was dying from the outside in.

He didn't feel panic any more. Even all the impossible pain had dimmed, while the adrenalin simply sat in his veins, sluggish and frozen. His heart could barely raise the energy to beat.

At least he could close his eye, and it was grateful for the reprieve, falling back into place. There was a breeze against his skin, but it might have been hot, cold - he couldn't tell. It didn't matter.

Scott allowed himself to drift. The world seemed reluctant to fade away, but in the end it couldn't cling to him and he fell back into sleep. The dreams returned, solidifying around him, only these were more like proper dreams. They were made-up, fantasies.

In one, Jodie was standing behind him, reaching round to knot his tie.

He smiled. He still loved her, despite everything. She was so perfect for him.

Jodie said: 'You don't have to go. Not if you don't want to.'

And then he was on a beach he'd never seen before. He was sitting on the sand, watching the waves, listening to the sound of them swelling in and breaking on the shore. It was a gentle, rushing noise, repeated over and over.

In his dream, Jodie was there, too: sitting quietly next to him, the wind rolling her hair. It was sunny, and it felt wonderful. There wasn't any cold, not any more. Jodie looked at him and smiled, and when she leaned her head against him he reached over and took her hand.

Even this was slowly fading. He closed his eyes and listened as the noise of the sea grew dimmer.

And as Scott died, it told him very gently:
Shhhhh
.

4 DECEMBER

22 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

6.58 A.M.

Mark

Was it wrong, what I was thinking?

As I ran along the hospital corridors, yelling at people to move, I wasn't frightened. Even though I was unarmed. Even though I knew now, from the photograph I'd seen of Colin Barnes, that the man I'd spent all night talking to had never been the real Scott Banks at all.

I wasn't scared. In fact, my main concern was that I was going to be too late, and I knew from the alarm that I probably already was.

Was it wrong? Aware of all the other people the 50/50 Killer had murdered, part of me believes I should have been thinking of them - or at least of my job. I'd like to think I was bravely, selflessly doing my duty, that I was running upstairs to stop this man before he got away and hurt someone else.

Into the lift.

Foot tapping: come on, come on.

Ting
. Out through the doors and running again.

'Get out of the way!'

The truth is I wasn't charging along the corridors because of my job, or because of concern for his past or future victims. Instead, I was thinking about my last conversation with him - with Scott, or Carl Farmer, or Colin Barnes. I was remembering his expression when I told him about Lise; the way he'd thanked me on my way out. I was thinking that he was the wolf of space, pulling relationships to pieces and draining the world of love.

Most of all, I was hearing that sound again in my head. Not the noise from the audio recording this time, but the sound of his slow breathing as I made my confession, as he listened to me describing her death, and explaining how I felt I'd betrayed her. As he added her to his harvest.

He was only a man - I knew that deep down. Just as I knew that the fourth spider web Mercer had found at the woods couldn't really represent me and Lise. How could it? He'd left all of those before he even met me. It was impossible.

But, regardless, that was why I ran so hard. Because if I didn't take him down now, I was sure I would lose a part of myself for ever.

There was a crowd around the entrance to his room - nurses, doctors, orderlies - all looking anxious, panicked. The sight of me bearing down on them probably didn't help.

No security guard, I noticed.

'Police.'

They moved out of the way, clearing to either side of the door.

'We don't know what happened,' an orderly said.

'One of the nurses found him like that.'

I stepped through them. 'Move away, please.'

I was desperate for a confrontation, but it wasn't going to make me careless. I kept my distance from the doorway and took in what I could of the room.

Just inside, a woman in a nurse's uniform was crouched over someone lying on the floor. The security guard. Where was Barnes? The bed was empty, the covers pulled roughly aside. The window was open, the blinds that had been closed all night now raised halfway. A breeze was slowly freezing the air, and the plastic rattled against the glass.

I moved in, checked quickly around. There was nobody else in the room, nowhere for anybody to hide. He was gone.

I put my hand on the nurse's shoulder, crouched beside her.

'I found him like this,' she said.

'Okay.'

It was obvious from the tone of her voice that she'd already checked him for signs of life and found none. She sounded lost.

'Would you go outside?' I said, as gently as I could. 'I'd like you to wait in the corridor and make sure that nobody else comes in here. That's very important.'

She nodded slowly and stood up. There was blood on her hands; she rubbed them absently on her uniform as she walked to the door.

Immediately, I went over to the window, shivering as I reached it. There was blood on the sill and the glass; blood on the pull cord for the blinds. Careful not to touch anything, I looked outside. We were at the back of the building, only one floor up - it was possible that he had jumped. But the stones in the wall were uneven, so he could have climbed down, his fingers and toes clawed into the gaps in the brick.

There was no sign of anyone in the car-park below.

I went back to the security guard.

His head was swollen and broken, and his arm rested at a painfully wrong angle. I found that the casual brutality of what had been done to him was somehow even more shocking than the calculated burning of Kevin Simpson. It takes a surprising amount of effort to beat someone to death, and Barnes had made absolutely sure of the job. The guard had been kicked and stamped on repeatedly. There were streaks of blood on his face, a pool of it underneath his head, stains round the neck of his brown uniform. Muddy swirls all around and at the base of the wall.

Bare footprints of blood.

The bed. At the base, stained bandages were scattered. The covers were thrown aside, but there was no blood on the sheets, just an indent where Scott had lain for the night. Not Scott, of course, but Colin Barnes - if that was even his real name.

I pictured him calling out, and the guard opening the door, coming in, bending over the bed to listen. Barnes punching him hard on the side of the head, then calmly pulling the covers back, getting up to finish the job. My mind constructed a whirlwind of activity. A flurry of violence: swift, hard blows; blood spattering. I felt the starry thud of a bare heel stamping into an eye socket.

When the guard was dead, Barnes had climbed out of the window. Now he was gone. I'd lost him.

I wanted to scream.

The chair I'd sat on was knocked over on the far side of the room, but I was standing where it had been before. The place where I'd spent the night talking to this man, listening as he manipulated me.

Behind me, the blinds rattled against the window.

I wanted to collapse on the floor. I'd spent so long in here talking to Scott. I'd told him about Lise. And yet all the time it was really
him
.

He would have wanted to be somewhere he could watch what was happening and keep track of how we were doing.

There were stone walls.

Somewhere he could direct us to see what he wanted, to make us go where he wanted.

We crossed a river, crossed a path.

The whole time there'd been enough there for us to catch him if we put it together right. All day his picture had been there in the file. While he was up here, hiding behind fake trauma, parcelling out enough information for us to find Jodie by dawn if we didn't make the right connections in time to discover the truth.

Why?

The question re-occurred to me now. He'd asked me it himself earlier on - curious, I guessed, as to whether we understood him. But why had he done this? He'd used Reardon as a distraction, but there was nothing there to satisfy his pathology. He'd taken Kevin Simpson, but he wouldn't be there at dawn to collect anything from Jodie. It didn't make sense. He'd risked being caught, and he'd helped us to find her in time, all apparently for nothing. Why was he challenging us at all?

And where was the real Scott Banks?

Move.

I stepped out into the corridor.

'I'm calling for assistance. Until they arrive,
nobody
goes in that room. Understand?'

The nurse nodded again. I set off.

The fourth spider web couldn't represent me: Colin Barnes wasn't psychic. A fourth spider web, left at the scene in the woods, meant a fourth ruined relationship, and this was the main prize for him. It would be one he'd had time to study, one he could cut and destroy. Someone had to know they had been betrayed, so they could be killed and that poisoned love taken from them. A choice had to have--

He was never challenging
us
.

'Oh fuck.'

I felt a buzzing in my pocket - Mercer's phone ringing. The display showed the patch-through number from the search team in the woods.

He was only ever challenging Mercer.

Even as I answered it, I was already running.

4 DECEMBER

10 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

7.10 A.M.

The 50/50 Killer

Preparation.

The devil knew the address and the route off by heart. Two days earlier, it had driven these streets repeatedly to commit them to memory and get used to the timings. When the journey was ingrained, it had taken the vehicle back to the hospital, and parked in the long-stay car-park at the rear of the building. The car was an old, unlicensed hatchback, bought with cash and stored off-road. After locking it and making sure nobody was watching, the devil had left the clothes and items it would require inside, and taped the keys to the underside of the chassis, ready for when it needed them.

The first stop was only three minutes away.

It was one of several rented properties the devil kept: a small, cheap, sub-ground-floor studio flat in the bad area close to the hospital. It had proved ideal for this task, and not only because of its location. Most of the other flats in the block were unoccupied; the ones that weren't, there were babies crying there all the time anyway.

The devil parked the car and went down the front path and outside steps that led to the front door. It was very quiet. Had the baby died? It hoped not. The devil had buried the keys in the flowerpot by the steps, and it exhumed them now. The front door shuddered in its frame and the early morning light fell into the room.

The baby was in the pen bought for it, lying on its back. Sleeping.

The devil picked it up; the child stirred, made a noise.

'Shhh. It's okay. Don't cry.'

Karli Reardon grizzled a little more as she was carried across the room, but didn't start crying properly until they were out in the cold, where she started fighting with surprising strength. The devil supposed this must count as a rude awakening, although to it the temperature had always been irrelevant. Because of what it was, hot and cold didn't affect it the way they did normal human beings.

'Shhh. You'll be fine.'

It jigged the baby in its arms and reproduced the soothing noises it had heard other people make.

Still she wouldn't stop crying.

It strapped her into the baby-chair fitted in the car, then climbed into the driver's seat and smiled across at her. The devil was good at smiling. When that didn't work, it pulled a funny face, but Karli Reardon didn't look like she found the face very funny. The devil quickly became bored, started the engine and set off.

Halfway there, it reached across and opened the glove-compartment, retrieving the mask.

The final destination was less than five minutes away.

It had started at a funeral: the one they held for the murdered detective.

Out of curiosity, and with a dark thrill, the devil had made itself present, surreptitiously, at the back of the chapel. Even before it arrived, there had been a sense within it that something important was about to happen. It hadn't known what, not even whether it would be good or bad, but when John Mercer stood up to deliver the eulogy, the devil realised immediately that the moment had arrived.