A Deadly Compulsion (14 page)

IT
was forty-eight hours later that Laura got a call from the Forensic Science Services in Leeds.

“The two pieces of nylon rope are a match, Laura,” Dr Miles Atherton said.  “Both are from the same length.”

“Christ, Miles!  Is that categorically and without doubt a hundred percent certain?” she asked, reaching for her cigarettes with her free hand, adrenaline pumping with the anticipation of what this bolt from the blue meant.

“Under the evil eye of the electron-microscope, no fibres can conceal their individual characteristics, my dear.  In a world of uncertainty, this is unambiguous; beyond conjecture. This baby was cut with a serrated blade at a fifteen degree angle.  The fibres are a perfect match.  Also, the density and dye signatures are identical.  And there are traces of blood on both pieces that are AB positive, which is the same as that of the Stroud girl.  DNA matching will no doubt confirm that it is her blood.”

“I think you’ve just wrapped up the Tacker murders for us, Miles.  A mere thank you seems a little inadequate,” Laura said, her hand clenching the receiver in a finger-aching grip, and her heart beating like a big bass drum.

“So buy me a malt whisky the next time you’re in the neighbourhood, a large one.  I’ll have this paperwork hand delivered to you before lunch.”

“If we get a conviction, I’ll buy you a bottle of Scotland’s finest, Miles.”

Laura ground her cigarette butt out in the ashtray, slid the drawer closed and headed out of the office, down the corridor to a much larger office that they were using as an incident room for this case.  Hugh and DCs Neil Abbott, Jack Mercer and Clem Nash were sifting through the case files again, searching for new leads, now that their suspect was looking whiter than white.

“We’ve got him!  It
is
Cox,” Laura said as she entered the room like a stormtrooper out of a Star Wars movie.  “Arrange to have him lifted by an armed response team.  If he thinks we’re on to him he may go for broke.  Forensic checked the rope, and guess what?  It matches.  It’s even almost certainly got Shelley’s blood on it.  He doesn’t appear to be stupid, but he has a licensed shotgun, so let’s assume that he’d use it if push came to shove.”

It took the Chief Superintendant’s clout to pull strings and sanction an Armed Response Unit to be unleashed.  What was commonplace in London seemed to be a big deal and take an interminable length of time to organise in the Vale of York.  It reminded Laura that the overall pace of life in the sticks was several gears below the frenzy of the big city.  Usually, that was no bad thing.  But at times such as this she felt as though she was trying to operate in some foreign land with a ‘mañana’ mentality, where easy-going procrastination was the rule of thumb.

Derek was twenty-five yards from the house, knelt, planting seed potatoes, his bronzed body bathed in a sheen of perspiration.  He wore only frayed-cuffed denim shorts, wrangler work boots and garden gloves.  He thought he would make a prime candidate for a raunchy gardeners’ calendar, though the picture that came to mind of a semi-nude Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don reclining on a potting shed table amid spring bulbs and plant pots was, to say the least, off-putting.  He froze as a distorted, magnified voice sounding like a Dalek, said: “Derek Cox.  We are armed police officers.  Put your hands behind your head, fingers interlaced...NOW.”

He looked up, around him, and saw what appeared to be several SAS men, all in black, and all pointing what looked like submachine guns in his direction.  He let go of the potato he was gripping and placed his hands behind his neck.  It was a broiling August day, but he was suddenly very cold.  The skin over his entire body tightened, and gooseflesh spread over him like a rash.

“Lay flat, face down.  Keep your hands where they are,” the disembodied voice crackled through an unseen bullhorn.

“The cheques in the post, whoever you are,” Derek shouted, even as he obeyed the command, a second before being circled by a ring of armed police.

A gruff voice.  “Shut the fuck up,” followed by a knee digging in his back as his hands were roughly jerked down behind him and his wrists were cuffed.  “You are being taken in for questioning.  Anything that you say can and will―”

“Okay, enough. I’ve heard it all on TV shows.  Cut the crap and help me up, this soil tastes nearly as bad as you heroes smell.”

The knee ground down again, hard into his right kidney this time, making him cry out as he was yanked up by the ratchet cuffs with such force that he thought his arms would be popped from their sockets.

As Laura and Hugh interviewed Cox again, the Chief Superintendent stood behind a one way mirror, silent, content to watch and listen.  As chief, he wanted to keep up to speed on what appeared to be the solving of the serial killings.  He needed to be au fait with what he would step in at the right time and take the lion’s share of credit for.

Derek could feel the pressure.  It was the same as pre-storm static that quieted birdsong and weighted the air.  A growing sense of impending doom flash-froze his spine.  They had decided that he
was
the killer.  Even the vibes from his solicitor – who had told him to answer nothing without his consent – did not inspire confidence.  The dapper little geek might be representing him, but had already made up his mind that he was defending a murderer.

“The rope, Derek,” Laura said.  “It was in your garage.  How do you explain that?”

He shook his head slowly.  “I can’t.  It doesn’t belong to me.  I’ve never seen it before.”

“Among the thousands of items that fill your garage, you expect us to believe that you can identify a piece of nylon rope as definitely
not
being your property.  Is that what you’re saying?”

Derek swallowed hard.  “I’ve never owned any blue nylon rope.  Somebody must have put it there.”

Laura paused to exploit silence as a weapon, slowly taking a cigarette from the pack in front of her and hesitating for long seconds before lighting up.  She inhaled deeply, tilted her head back and blew the smoke out and up into the air, to watch it rise and spread across the ceiling; a diaphanous cloud.

“Let’s get this straight, Derek,” she continued, eventually.  “The killer picks you out at random, breaks into your garage and hangs a length of rope over a bracket, trusting to luck that for some reason we will suspect you and search your property.  Does that sound plausible?”

“Don’t answer that,” the sallow-faced solicitor said. And to Laura.  “My client isn’t in a position to know what the killer did, and doesn’t expect you to believe anything other than his innocence.  He has never seen the rope that you allegedly found in his garage, and if all you intend to do is harass him over the same point, then I suggest that this interview be terminated.  You are going to have to charge Derek with what you have, or release him.  And we both know that you haven’t got a case that’ll stand up.”

Over the following two days, the smallholding of Derek Cox was turned into a building site.  The lab boys used the latest sonic tomography equipment, which enabled them to scan beneath the ground and search for human remains.

“What exactly are you doing with this hi-tech gizmo?”  Laura asked Dr Ed Wells, who looked remarkably like a younger version of Bruce Willis, though was not follically challenged and wore his long red hair in a ponytail that hung down between broad shoulders to the middle of his back.

“Sure can, er, sir...ma’am.”

“Make it Laura.  You don’t work for me, so there’s no need to be formal.”

“Okay, Laura.  This is a sophisticated radiography scanner.  We bounce shock waves at a predetermined depth in the ground, and bingo, we have an image on a monitor in the van of any details within the selected plane.  This will show us everything from a buried pitchfork or unexploded bomb, to a skeleton.  It saves guessing, and more importantly, saves digging.”

The scanner found the remains of a dog that had presumably been buried by a previous owner of the property, but nothing more sinister.  And the house and Cox’s car were clean.  A lot of man hours and expenditure left them with the piece of rope as the only incriminating evidence against him.  Then it all went down the pan.  Odontology contacted Laura with results that put them back to square one.  Their suspect, who was still being held in custody, much to his and his brief’s annoyance, got a break.

“It wasn’t Cox,” Laura advised the team.  “He may be an accomplice, but he didn’t do it alone.  His teeth don’t match the bites.  If he sticks to his guns, he’s home free.  We don’t have enough to merit holding him for another second.”

“He did it, I know he did,” Hugh said, cracking his knuckles as he paced the office. “He could have worn special dentures over his own teeth to bite off the nipples.  He’s a clever bastard, but he fits the profile that your FBI buddy came up with.  And finding the rope, well that ties it up for me...no pun intended.”

“We needed a body, or bodies.  At least some hard forensic evidence.  We’ve got nothing but the bloody rope, that he denies owning,” Laura said.  “Put that together with his known sexual preference, and there’s not enough to work with.”

“More good news, if your name happens to be Derek Cox,” Neil Abbott said, racking the phone that he had been talking on.  “They checked his online times.  When the first two girls were lifted, he was playing the market on the Internet.”

“You mean, someone was online using his computer,” Hugh snapped.

Laura shook her head.  “Give it up, Hugh.  We need more.”

Derek had an irritating smirk on his face.  “Any time,” he said when they completed the paperwork, told him not to leave the area without informing them of his plans, and cut him loose.  “Only don’t send the bloody SAS lookalikes in again.  Just give me a bell and I’ll drive down.”

Hugh wanted to drive his fist into the man’s face.  “If we lift you again, Cox, it’ll be because we’ve got enough to put you away for the rest of your natural,” he said.  “You’re guilty in my book, and I aim to prove it.  So be aware that you’re on a short leash.”

“Are you threatening me?” Derek said, smiling contemptuously, and even stepping up close to Hugh, so that their faces were only inches apart.

Hugh fought to keep his cool.  He leaned forward until their noses were almost touching.  “Yeah, you murdering little queer,” he whispered.  “I’m on your case, big time.”

Derek sighed.  “It’s a shame you feel that way.  I like macho types, and you’ve got a lovely arse.  If you ever want to have a really good time and try a little bit of something that I know you’d like, give me a call.”

As Hugh’s face flared red and his fists balled, Derek withdrew, blowing him a kiss as he hastily stepped out onto the street and vanished.

“You’ll get yours,” Hugh muttered.  “All bad things come to those who wait.”

TRISH
shuffled across the dirt floor on swollen, bruised knees, and bobbed her head to sip water from one of the stainless steel dog bowls.  She was now shackled with one ankle attached to the concrete block by a long rusted chain comprised of links as thick as her fingers.  Her pale body was anorexic-thin, all sharp angles and protruding bones that pushed against taut skin mottled with sores.

He visited her once a day, removed the tape from her mouth and filled one bowl with fresh water and the other with what looked and smelled like cat food.  The rules were simple: if she spoke without being asked to, he removed a fingernail.  She had only lost one.  He had withdrawn it with pliers, standing on her wrist as he wrenched it from its bed.  She had never experienced pain like it before, and had wailed in agony as the nerve endings acknowledged the damage and her brain converted the signals to mind-crushing torment.  And he used her as though she were brain dead; just warm flesh to pleasure him with.  She had become an object; a non person with no rights, increasingly devoid of any hope or expectation.

The days and nights became a blur as darkness, light, heat and cold merged in her feverish mind.  The skylight high above her was her window on the world; a square that presented an ever-changing vista of colours that formed a rich palette ranging from dawn-grey and robin egg-blue to sunset-red and lampblack.  The grimed pane of glass became Trish’s focal point; the centre of her now small universe.  It was a gallery of heavenly art.  She became aware of the beauty of clouds in all their changing forms and hues, and was excited by the fleeting glimpse of an unrecognised bird, and dazzled and burned by the sun at its zenith.  At night a myriad stars appeared as twinkling diamonds, glittering against a black velvet drape.  And at times the moon slowly passed across her field of vision like a ghost ship adrift on the high seas.  It was as if she were in H.G. Wells’ time machine, looking out from it as the days, weeks, months and years sped by.  Time was without meaning as she grew weaker; centuries and millennia could have passed as she lost all focus and was driven by a semiconscious meandering current out into a vast ocean, with no reference points on the horizon to give perspective to her existence.

The fear of pain and the supposition that she would ultimately be murdered had been unbearable at first.  Every time he entered, a hot wire burned in her stomach, and her heart skipped beats, almost stopping, then raced madly, pounding against the cage of her now well-defined ribs.  She cringed from him at the end of her chain, hoping that it was only sex that he had come for.  She was now anaesthetised to his member pounding into her; could disassociate herself from the act as though it was someone else’s body being violated.  She had become desensitised to his cruel acts; just so much numb and bruised flesh.

On occasion, he would lay out dozens of Polaroids in the dirt and order her to look at them, before showing her the tacker that he had used to staple the pictured girls’ lips together.  He would then press the cold metal of the tool to her mouth, trigger it, empty, and snigger at the distress it caused her.  At other times he ran the blade of his knife across her throat so lightly that the honed steel could have been the kiss of a feather’s tip.

“First I use them,” he had said on his last visit, smiling at her, proud to share his secrets.  “And then I staple their mouths.  While they’re alive I know that my mother inhabits them.  I can see her hiding behind their eyes.  The bitch comes back again and again, and I make her suffer.  Then I cut their throats, hang them up and bleed them out.  Once they die, I know that she’s gone for a while.  Did I tell you that this barn is full of them?  They’re under you, dissolving in lime.  You’ll probably join them soon and be under the earth and with them.”

His threats became hollow.  She finally reached a saturation point and her spirit broke.  She was no longer the person she had been.  The thin veneer of sophistication had been scoured away, and with it all the posturing and affectation she had created to shield her true self.  She had cast off her cloak to reveal a naked, tortured soul who had acquiesced to the unremitting horror of her plight, as victims of the Holocaust must have done in Hitler’s concentration camps; the torture, starvation and the palls of greasy, black smoke from the crematoria chimneys reducing them to silent, unmoving beings with staring, vacant eyes, awaiting the inevitable, with their former lives and loved ones gone and with no future to contemplate; all their hopes and dreams behind them.  That was how Trish felt.  There were odd moments when she was saddened at her predicament, but in the main she now just wanted it to be over with, to have release and eternal peace from the torment. Even the knife had lost its ability to frighten her, as apathy replaced continual fear.  She imagined the blade piercing her throat, laying it open, and the sting of the cut and the warm spurts of blood that would rob her first of awareness, and then of life.

In the darkness, a sharp, stabbing pain pulled her from the edge of troubled sleep.  She winced and drew her legs up as another bolt of liquid fire ate into her calf.  Lashing out at the hunched form that clung to her, she felt razor-sharp incisors puncture the soft flesh between her thumb and index finger, ripping and tearing, shaking her hand as a dog would savage a slipper.  She screamed into the tape and swung her arm against the concrete block, once...twice…three times before the huge, bristling rodent let go and scurried into the corner of the barn, vanishing among the dark pools of shadow.

Now, jerked back to vivid cognizance by this fresh danger, Trish moaned with renewed terror.  She inched her weak body up on to the two-foot-square cube of concrete and huddled on its cold surface, like Gollum from
The Lord of the Rings,
to search the gloom for the new enemy that had found her and judged her to be no more than food.  A deep-seated and petrifying fear of being eaten alive revived her flagging spirit, returning her to the harsh reality that she had not wanted to face.

The sound of the bolt sliding back was almost a relief.  He would bring light, and the vermin would be kept at bay...but for how long?

He lit the hurricane lamp and frowned down at the pallid and gaunt woman who squatted on the concrete, reminding him of a chicken on a perch.

“What the fuck are you doing up there?” he said, putting down the lamp and ripping the tape from her mouth.

“R...rats...b...bit me...Want to die...Enough,” she whimpered, her eyes downcast, not able to look him in the face.

He examined her and saw the thin streams of blood running from the bites on her leg, and the gaping rent in her hand that glistening muscle bulged from.

“Fucking vermin,” he seethed.  “They won’t leave you alone now that they’ve smelt you out and tasted blood.  I doubt that there’ll be much left of you by morning; just gnawed bones with most of the marrow eaten out.”

“So get it over with, you bastard.  Fucking kill me and put me out of my misery,” Trish shouted, her voice breaking, but loaded with anger that temporarily outweighed her fear.

He lashed out and backhanded her across the face, splitting her top lip, whipping her head back and knocking her to the ground.  Unbelievably, she began to giggle as though her plight were some dark satire; a fictional two-hander play; the barn a stage in the round with an audience sat beyond the footlights in a hushed and unlit auditorium.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked her, wondering if she had slid over the edge into madness to escape him.

She spat blood, which coated her breasts and stomach in a fine spray.  “Because if the rats don’t eat me, you’ll butcher me,” she said.  “I can’t win, and it’s so fucking sad that it’s making me laugh.  If that doesn’t make sense to you, then tough shit.  Now, why don’t you just finish it?  I think you’ve had your money’s worth for what I called you on TV. Nobody likes a greedy bastard.”

For a second he fully intended to kill her, there and then.  But she had balls.  He had stripped her of everything, snatched her from all that had made sense in her glossy, fickle, side-show world.  But she had more grit than all the others put together.  Her spirit was strong.  She had even spoken without permission,
and
called him a greedy bastard.  Even the fear of losing more fingernails could not override her need to talk back to him.

It was a little strange.  He had actually got used to her being around.  It had become pleasant to know that when he arrived home, she would be here, waiting for him, reliant on him for food and water...for life itself.  Whether she hated him or not, he was now the centre of her small, restricted world.  He wanted to keep her.  She was the perfect woman, never refusing his advances, however debased and distasteful she must find them.  Now that she was at the end of her tether both physically and mentally, he could take the game a stage further, develop it, and by so doing maintain the excitement of having total control over another human being.  He would meet the challenge and try to gain her trust; brainwash her into appreciating him.  During the lull in his activities this would be a fine distraction.  He had decided to wait until autumn before resuming his acts of retribution against his mother.  He was satisfied for the moment, and would start afresh with new methods; change his pattern to throw those who hunted him into turmoil.

Unshackling her from the cement island that stood in the sea of straw-covered soil, he then doused the lamp and lifted her up, noting how little she now weighed; how infirm and weak her body was.  It was as though she was a cancer patient, her body hardly more than a shell ravaged by a malignancy that was eating her from within.  He tingled with pleasure as her head fell onto his shoulder.  She was safe, for the time being.  He would care for her as though she was a wounded animal in need of treatment and warmth and nourishment.

Pushing the barn door closed with his knee, he turned and carried her across the yard into the house and up the stairs to the bathroom, where he sat her on the lowered seat of the toilet.  He drew a hot bath, then lifted her again and gently placed her in the steaming water.

Trish thought that he was going to drown her; push her beneath the surface until her lungs filled like balloons, to burst as she suffocated on the hot liquid.  Or maybe he would cut her throat or wrists, to watch as the water turned crimson and she bled to death.  Instead, he reached out, picked up a bottle from the low windowsill above the taps and poured fragrant lavender Radox into the bath, stirring it with his hand.  He knelt, rested his forearms on the edge of the bath and let her soak for a few minutes, saying nothing, just studying her.  After a while he sponged the grime from her body, washed and rinsed her hair under the shower head, and finally sat on the toilet seat, smiling at her as though they were lovers, or husband and wife.

Trish felt the soothing heat melt the knots in her tight muscles, loosening them and relaxing her.  As he gently sponged her, she began to cry softly, hardly able to face the comfort after so much suffering.  Her eyelids felt weighted, her body jelly.  And as he lathered her hair and massaged her scalp, she had to fight against sleep.  She was sapped of strength, still scared, but now somehow sure that this would
not
be the time or place that he would kill her.

Helping her to stand, he held her arm as she stepped out of the bath, and then draped a thick, warm, fleecy bath towel around her shoulders.  “Dry yourself,” he said, turning to open the mirrored, wall-mounted cabinet and withdraw a new, boxed toothbrush.  “Then brush your teeth.”  The smell of pet food on her breath offended him.  “I’ll find something for you to wear.”

He left the bathroom, but almost immediately bobbed his head back around the door, locked eyes with hers and just stared, as though looking into her very soul, searching, probing.  “Trish,” he said.  “Be sensible.  Don’t try anything stupid, or you’ll be back in the barn, for good.  You’re on trust, do not abuse it.”

She dried herself, towelled her hair and brushed her teeth; the spearmint-flavoured paste taking away the sour taste from her mouth.  She brushed until her gums bled, before rinsing the foam of Colgate and blood from her mouth and chin.  The mirror above the sink was fogged.  She wiped it clear of condensation with the towel and stared at the emaciated stranger that looked back at her; studied the dull, sunken, lifeless eyes that were highlighted by dark purple crescents beneath them.  The chalk-white skin was stretched tightly over the underlying skull.  She was still standing, mesmerised by her reflection, when he came back and led her by the hand, out of the bathroom and along a short landing to a bedroom.  He sat her on an ottoman at the foot of the bed and handed her a baggy Bart Simpson T-shirt; the character’s stupid yellow face beaming wide-eyed from the black cotton.  He then passed her a pair of Union Jack emblazoned boxer shorts.

“Put these on,” he said.  “You’ll feel better.”

Trish slowly pulled the T-shirt over her head, grunting as her weakened, unused arm muscles shook with the effort.  The shorts were ridiculously big on her, but the elasticised waistband kept them up under the T-shirt that hung almost to her knees like a short dress.

Once more he took her hand, led her out onto the dimly lit landing and down steep stairs, along a hall to a large country kitchen.  He pulled a chair out from under the timber built table and motioned for her to sit, then went to a wall unit, returning with a bottle of antiseptic and a wad of cotton wool.

“This’ll sting a bit,” he said, soaking the cotton, before kneeling, lifting her leg and dabbing at the angry red rat bites.