50/50 Killer (8 page)

The voice on the recording sounded strange. It was mostly dead and flat, but there were also curious lifts in it, as though the man was talking to himself rather than his victim, occasionally asking himself rhetorical questions.

'It's about you and Jodie and Scott,' the man said.

Mercer clicked his fingers: remember those names. Then he returned to the position I'd walked in on: elbows on the desk, fingers steepled, staring intently into space, index fingers tapping his lips. He seemed calm, but there was an edge to the rest of us. Simon was very still; Greg had his head on one side, listening professionally to the recording; Pete had his eyes closed. For me, each sentence felt like a jab in the chest.

'I watched you today,' the man said. 'With her. And I've read all your emails. I know what was happening here. And we both know where she is now, don't we? Back home with her boyfriend.'

Jodie, I thought. Shoulder-length brown hair. About my age.

'How do you think she's feeling now?' the man said. 'Do you think she feels guilty about lying to Scott and spending the day with you?'

In reply, there was only the urgent rush of hot water in the house's pipes, and then a quiet slosh from the bath. Simpson didn't answer out loud. In my mind's eye, I saw him there in the bath, a gag wrapped round his pale face.

'Is she pleased she's home?' the voice carried on. 'Or does she wish she was still here with you? Is she even now writing an email to you, the way you were to her?'

Mercer looked across: 'Greg?'

Greg shook his head. 'No old emails from or to "Jodie". No "Scott". Nothing in his Contacts folder, either. The killer must have cleared everything out.'

Mercer frowned. Beneath the desk, his foot was tapping impatiently.

The voice said: 'You think you love her.'

Nothing.

'Don't you.'

Still no reply; not even a slosh of water. When the man spoke next, he sounded disappointed not to have received at least some kind of response.

'Well, we're going to find out. The rules of the game are very simple, but you won't have much input. If Jodie emails you before dawn, I'll stop hurting you and I'll let you go. But if she doesn't ...'

There was a slight pause, followed by a creak. I got the impression the man was turning to pick something up.

'... I'll pour this down your throat and over your face, and I'll set fire to you. Nod if you understand.'

There was another pause.

'I said, "Nod if you understand."'

Simpson began thrashing in the bath water, slapping around everywhere. I couldn't see it, but somehow I knew that the killer had squirted lighter fluid at him, reinforcing the point.

'That's good.'

Another creak.

'Try to keep calm. We have so much to talk about.'

The recording continued for a moment, then cut off.

Greg turned to me.

'My IT team have been working on Simpson's computer,' he explained. 'They found two new audio files saved on the desktop. That was the first.'

'Play the second,' Mercer said quietly.

We all looked at him. His head had slipped down so that his hands obscured his face. His foot had stopped tapping. There was nothing to be impatient about here. He knew what was likely to be on the second file - we all did - but at the same time we needed to be sure. CCL hadn't recorded the phone call they received this morning, the one filled with terrible screaming, but we were probably about to hear it for ourselves. It wasn't anything to relish.

'Okay.'

Greg double-clicked, and it began.

'I'm sorry,' the voice said. 'I hope you understand now how stupid you were. How little she deserved everything you invested in her.'

He paused.

'Do you understand?'

There was frantic noise then: desperate splashing and muffled cries.

'If it's any consolation, Jodie and Scott are one of my couples. I will be visiting them later, and they'll have their own game to play. But ours is finished.'

My heart was beating too quickly for comfort. My hand began rubbing my chin, while all around me the office was receding.

'Picture her in your head now. Imagine her sleeping peacefully in her boyfriend's arms.'

More noise from the bath.

'Shhhhh,' the man whispered.

He must have taken Simpson's gag off, because now - finally - we heard his voice. It was shrill and full of panic. He was pleading and begging for his life, but speaking so quickly that it was impossible to make out the words. Almost immediately, they were cut off, replaced by a terrible choking as the liquid was squirted into his face, his mouth. The recording was full of coughing and hacking breath.

It hurt me in the heart to hear it. Nothing could have prepared me for this; there was almost a spiritual pain to listening. A complicity; a frustration.

I closed my eyes when I heard the scrape of a lighter.

Perhaps I expected a
whumph
of some kind, but there was nothing like that. You could only detect the moment Simpson was set on fire by the way he began screaming - and even then, most of the sound was lost. He was gargling with flame: able to vocalise his panic and shock only with a thin, breathless whine. I imagined his throat contracting. The unbearable burning, crumpling his lungs like tissue paper. It was the most awful thing I'd ever heard.

Knowing how it would end, I wanted Simpson to die quickly. But he didn't, because it was out of his control; his body refused to give up, fighting against an oblivion that must surely have been welcome. His murder seemed to go on for ever.

And all the time there was another, quieter sound in the background. It was an inhuman hissing, and it took me a moment to work out where it was coming from. It was the killer.

A shiver ran through me.

While his victim was dying in agony, this man was standing above him, watching it, taping it, his mouth open, teeth slightly apart, sucking in the smoke and smell of it.

It was as though he was drawing Kevin Simpson's soul in through his teeth, piece by piece.

I opened my eyes and looked at the team. We could all hear it, and on every face I saw a reflection of my own feelings: disbelief and horror. Every face except Mercer's. I couldn't see his because he was staring at the desk. His hands were clasped in front of him, almost in prayer.

The noise continued, slowly abating, and then the recording mercifully cut off. When it did, the silence in the office felt tainted. Nobody said anything for a moment; nobody even moved. Then Mercer leaned slowly back and rubbed his face, looking like a man who had just woken up.

'Everybody take five,' he said.

I went out front, into the ice of the afternoon air. The temperature was a slap in the face, which I needed. The rain had stopped, but the sky remained thick with dark-grey cloud and the wind, when it came, was freezing. A crisps packet went skittering across the tarmac. The forecast had been snow, and it didn't feel far off. Even in my coat, I was trembling - but that was also down to the poison of unused adrenalin. I felt like I could run for ever. I wished I could.

Dying is one of the great taboos. I'd seen my share of bodies before, and those had been horrible enough. But bad as that could be, it was only ever the end result. You felt sadness and grief, of course, but by that point you were looking at something that was already dead, and that's a world away from being forced to hear or see it happen: to experience the terrible process by which a living human being, no different from yourself, is deadened and ruined, reduced one spark at a time to an empty shell.

Inevitably, it made me think about Lise. But I didn't want to do that, and I couldn't afford to, not right now. It was hard enough to deal with the end result - that she was dead and gone - without plunging my imagination into the deeper horrors of what it must have been like for her. What she might have been thinking as her life disappeared.

I shook my head, turning my thoughts back to Kevin Simpson instead.

Five minutes?

I could take five fucking years and that recording would stay with me.

But five minutes would have to do.

Back in the office, everyone still looked grim, but also professionally determined. Each of us had put his feelings about the recording away, perhaps to examine later, perhaps to forget for ever. Once again, Mercer seemed detached from it. He was staring into space when I went in, giving the appearance of feeling nothing. No doubt it was down to his experience, and I wondered whether I'd ever be capable of doing that: of abstracting myself from the situation and seeing it solely as a puzzle to be solved. It seemed heartless, but I didn't doubt that in reality he felt what had happened every bit as keenly as the rest of us. This was simply his way of dealing with it - by concentrating on solving the crime and catching the man responsible.

Greg started off: 'Like I said, we've got no Jodie, not Scott--'

'But the killer mentioned emails,' Mercer interrupted, 'so they must exist.'

'Yes, and if he deleted them it might be possible to recover them. But it depends how thorough he's been. We'll try, but we shouldn't count on finding them through the computer.'

Mercer frowned. 'It seems clear from the recording that this Jodie, whoever she may be, was having an affair with Simpson. If we can't find her and her boyfriend in time, our subject will. That's if he hasn't already.'

'We've got a description,' I said.

He turned round immediately. 'Tell me.'

I explained about Yvonne Gregory, relating the details she'd given me of the girl leaving Simpson's house - Jodie, presumably. Late twenties, brown hair, bag, headphones. Obviously, it wasn't specific enough to be very useful, and I was aware of that as I spoke. After listening to the recording, I didn't feel so triumphant any more. I finished up by describing the white van, and at that point Mercer nodded, as though he'd been expecting it. He cut me off before I could finish.

'CCTV?' he said, directing the question to Greg.

'The nearest is on the main road.' He took a deep breath. 'It doesn't capture Simpson's street, but I guess we'll be able to check traffic.'

'Well, that's your priority, then. Find us any white vans there between eight and nine this morning. Check yesterday afternoon, four thirty to five thirty, see if we can find this girl. And we have to find this girl.'

Greg didn't say anything.

'What are you thinking?' Mercer asked him.

Greg was rotating his chair, using his heels, as he had been at Simpson's house that morning. He looked preoccupied.

'I guess I'm still not convinced,' he said.

Mercer spread his hands, as though this should all be obvious and he couldn't understand why it wasn't. It certainly wasn't obvious to me, but of course there was a context to the day's events I wasn't included in.

'We have the signature,' Mercer said. 'We have a white van at the scene. We have the game. We have torture. And, despite how it seemed to begin with, we have a second victim.'

'I'm not saying there aren't compelling similarities.'

'So what are you saying?'

Greg sighed, and I was surprised by what seemed to be open rebellion. Mercer was in charge here, and I'd have expected Greg just to do as he was told. He clearly had doubts about continuing, but after a moment he decided: fuck it.

'I'm saying that at the end of the day white vans are very common. Girls are very common. The signature's compelling, like I said, and yes, there's the mention of the game. But otherwise the scene is different.' He counted on his fingers. 'The killer held him in the bath. The girl walked out of there yesterday afternoon and wasn't an active part of the game ...' He ran out of things to count and leaned back. 'It's totally different.'

'Of course it's different. It's been two years.'

'I know it's been two years.'

'Well, he's been planning. It shouldn't surprise us - surprise you, I mean - that he's changed. It's our job to understand why and how he's changed.'

Greg looked sulky, as though he wanted to disagree more but couldn't. I noticed that Pete was eyeing him carefully.

But Mercer wasn't going to let Greg off the hook that easily. 'Well?'

Greg looked up at him. My surprise increased. There was a pointed meaning in his expression. I didn't know what it was, or what lay behind it, but I knew it wasn't good.

'Maybe it's not that I'm not convinced,' he said. 'There's just something about this that's making me uneasy. Sir.'

They looked at each other for a moment, and the atmosphere in the office hardened into something awkward and sharp. Nobody said anything, and I decided it might be a convenient and possibly even helpful moment to butt in. Gently.

'Can I ask ... ?'

'Yes. Of course.' Mercer turned to me, face full of stone. 'The situation is this. I believe that this murder is connected to an earlier case. There are a large number of similarities, many of them conclusive. On the other hand, Greg is quite right to point out that there are also some small differences. I believe this particular killer has slightly altered his MO.'

'Right,' I said. 'So--'