A Deadly Compulsion (3 page)

Hugh Parfitt didn’t like the prison officer’s reactions.  Most people broke down when faced with irrefutable proof that someone near and dear to them was dead.  Under such horrific circumstances, Hugh had expected the man to be on the point of collapse, or to at least show some sign of anger or grief.  But this guy was implacable.  The DS had seen the same purposeful resolve before, though not often.  He decided that Ron Cullen was not the type to blithely accept what fate dealt out.  He was a man who would do whatever he deemed necessary to exact rough justice for his daughter’s murder, and not give a toss if his actions were lawful or otherwise.  Hugh made a mental note to ensure that the man was monitored.  His interview with him had also been a negative experience, consisting of monosyllabic answers, grunts, and much head shaking.  The bottom line was, that the screw claimed to have no idea who could or would have committed the callous crime, although Hugh felt that if he had, he would have said nothing; just gone off and dealt with it in the manner that Charles Bronson the late actor, in his role as Paul Kearsey in the
Death Wish
movies had.

Laura and Hugh attended the funeral.  They had been present at those of the other girls.  There was also an officer secretly videoing the proceedings from behind the tinted windows of an unmarked Ford Transit van.  It was a fact that some murderers would attend the funeral of their victims, taking perverse pleasure in seeing first hand the aftermath of misery and suffering that they had been the direct cause of.

Walking back to the car, Laura decided that she would call Jim Elliott.  It would be unofficial, unethical, and completely at odds with her superiors, should they find out.
Tough shit!
  What they didn’t know wouldn’t harm them.  She had not seen Jim in over a year, and only spoken to him on the phone infrequently.  But they were soul mates, who had fleetingly been bed mates.  He would not be happy at what she would ask of him, and may even just hang up on her.  That as may be, it was worth a try.  She needed the assistance of someone with a special kind of ability; an expertise that the average copper, however good, did not possess.  She needed the insight of a rare breed of man; one who could look into the minds of human monsters with a propensity to understand what motivated repeat, ritual killers; a man who could see...
feel
the crimes from the offender’s twisted viewpoint.  Jim Elliott was such an individual.

JIM
stared out from the balcony of his top floor flat towards the large, round tower of Windsor Castle.  It was bathed in warm light, as though etched from sandstone in relief against a Levi-blue, cloudless sky.  He was sitting on a white-enamelled, cast-iron chair, sipping black coffee and savouring both the taste and aroma of the strong brew.  Luxuriating in the mild summer breeze, that teased the scent from the ornamental, red-flowered japonica that grew in a large terracotta pot against the waist-high balustrade, Jim welcomed the new day.

A glint of sunlight on steel took his gaze higher, to settle on and follow the slow descent of a distant jet as it drifted into Heathrow in the manner of a raptor gliding down to its nest.  Mug now empty, Jim rose and walked back into the lounge, pausing for the umpteenth time to look at the poster-size photograph of the castle, which was a stunning monochrome shot of the ninety-two fire; a greasy, black column of smoke rising above the royal residence.  He had added the caption:  ‘Shit Happens!’ in his own neat copperplate on a label at the bottom right corner of the gold-leafed frame.  The old photo of the burning castle constantly reminded him not to take anything for granted.  However seemingly permanent, anything could go up in smoke without warning.

Jim enjoyed every day now, relishing each as it unrolled before him like a rich, multicoloured and complex-patterned Persian carpet.  He had just reached forty the previous week, and his thick black hair was shot through with grey, and collar length.  He stood six-two, and felt as fit as he looked.  His face was even-featured, craggy, and was considered handsome by most people, especially women.  His eyes were a striking grey, almost hypnotic in their intensity, to a degree that caused many to look away, unable to meet his direct gaze, feeling disconcerted by it, as though their very souls were being examined.  They had every right to feel that way.  Jim used his formidable stare to peel back the layers of insincerity and flimflam with the precision of a surgical laser.

Jim Elliott had been with the FBI, and had risen from field agent in his home state of Arizona – based at the Phoenix office – to the behavioural science unit at Quantico, where he had soon become recognised as being one of the most gifted and ingenious profilers in the bureau.  His work had led directly to the capture of a dozen serial murderers, and his input had been the undoing of a great many more.  Jim had a unique perception of repeat killers, which defied logic.  He could somehow see past the reports and forensic evidence, to think himself into their minds.  His gift, if that was what it was, had cost him dearly.  He had lost the woman he loved, his sanity had been threatened, and ultimately his life had been drastically modified.  At the time, he had thought that it had been the last case he had worked on that put him over the edge.  But on reflection, later...much later, he had decided that it was the accumulation. The sickness he had steeped himself in finally backed up like effluent in a blocked sewer pipe, overflowing to envelop him, impregnating him with the stink of evil that he had willingly and voluntarily immersed himself in.  Every time he looked in a mirror, he saw the thin, white line across his throat; the scar of a wound that had almost killed him and had made him question his motives.  He was no paladin-style knight errant with a need to joust at windmills in quixotic fashion.  In the end, he had been more practical and selfish than to put false honour and devotion to duty above his own life.

It was in therapy – after he had walked away from it all – that he had been able to look in from the outside and detach himself from that dark place.  He found that he could talk through the pain and grief that his ability had brought knocking at the door, and eventually make the first faltering steps towards rehabilitation and a new beginning.  The despair had slowly dispersed like a tropical depression moving on, its fury spent and clear skies brightening the horizon.  With the light, he had started to care if he took another breath; had stopped relying on booze and sleeping pills, to become less fragile and insecure.  But the years of trying to think himself into the minds of homicidal psychopaths and sociopaths had taken its toll; chased out the optimism and light-hearted spirit of youth to leave an open sore of fatalism that ulcerated in the depths of his psyche, stubborn to heal, but now dormant; no longer active.  To his chagrin, he found a part of him, that he despised, still missed the hunt and the ultimate satisfaction of closing in and shutting down the operations of crazed human beings, whose mission was to snuff out members of the society that they lived among.  Jim now had the same kind of problem as an alcoholic, who would always be one, even though not drinking.  He knew that it would only take a single shot to put him back to square one; just a tempting cocktail of files, photographs and the methods employed by a killer to be placed in front of him, and he would slip into the mode that had almost fused his mind.

He had fought the urge, and his depression.  With time, and from the ashes of indifference had risen a faltering flame of hope; one that he wanted to nurture, not extinguish.

After recovering from what he had come to accept as being a minor breakdown, friends in London had cajoled Jim into flying across the pond for a change of scene.  The intended short break in the UK had not only been an aid to his convalescence, but had also given him new direction and purpose. Over a decade later, he was still in Britain, which he now considered to be his home.  How he had fallen into his current line of work was just pure luck.  But he was making big bucks, or pounds, so wasn’t complaining.

Jim was now a PR man, spin doctor and image-maker all rolled into one.  He stayed anonymous, consciously avoiding the rub-off celebrity status, not courting fame as other guys like Max Clifford had , and seemed to thrive on, until they themselves were put under the microscope and found wanting.  He turned individuals and companies around, finding the edge that they needed to realise a greater success in their respective areas of endeavour, over the competition.  It was a shallow but safe harbour, in which he had established an outlet for his unique powers of understanding the human condition.

The trill of the phone snapped him from his reverie.  He stared at it as though it was road kill, but did not move, content to let the answering machine take the call: 
‘Hi, this is Jim Elliott.  I’m tied up at the moment, but if you leave your name and number, or a message, I’ll get back to you’
, his recorded voice said to the caller.

“Jim, it’s Laura…Laura Scott.  I need to talk to you.  You have my York number.  It’s important.  Please call me.  Bye.”

“Laura,” Jim whispered, now looking at the phone as if it was a work of art; a rendering that might have been fashioned by Da Vinci.

Ten minutes later, with a freshly brewed mug of coffee to hand, Jim was next to the phone, replaying the message for a fourth time.  Laura’s voice was tense, with a raw edge cutting through the controlled cadence.  Its rhythm and intonation was slightly clipped, guarded, and holding a note of desperation and urgency that was either measured for effect, or an unconscious but nonetheless compelling ploy to get his attention.  She had implied nothing and yet everything, and he knew that when, not if he called her back, he would regret it.  The icy tendrils that snaked through his mind and tightened around his brain were a warning that contacting her might lead him into a place he did not want to go.  He reached for the phone, rested his hand on it, then pulled back, to stand up again and walk barefoot across to the open door and out once more onto the balcony.  The warm breeze caught the bottom of the silk dressing gown he wore, flapping it up against his muscular thighs.  And the sun’s heat on the concrete was now almost too hot on the soles of his feet.  He squinted across at the castellated rim of the tower, sipping absently at the coffee, running through his options.

Laura’s call was business.  And it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to know what that business was.  There had been speculation in the media of a serial killer on the rampage up in Yorkshire, but he had avoided the details, hit the remote and switched channels if it was mentioned on the news.  He had no intention of allowing his profiler’s thought processes to kick in and begin to overwhelm him again.  Goddammit to hell! There were no options to mull over.  Laura was going to ask him to help, and he couldn’t...wouldn’t.  She had no right to expect anything of him.  Anger swept through him briefly like a bush fire, but was almost instantly smothered as Laura’s face – with winsome smile and magnetic brown eyes – materialised in his mind.  He stared into his cooling coffee and recalled the nearness of her; the sweet smell of her hair, and the alluring scent of the perfume she wore.

“I’ll put you through, sir,” a slightly bored sounding female voice said.  He waited, ten, then twenty seconds, his stomach in freefall mode.

“Hi, Jim,” Laura’s voice said, breaking through a background thrum of static.  “Thanks for calling.  I thought you might not.”

He absorbed each syllable greedily, one at a time.  Their texture was crushed velvet, and he realised just how much he missed Laura Scott.

“It’s been too long,” he replied.  “How’re you keeping, Laura?”

“I’m fine.  You?”

“I
was
okay.  Why the call?”

He heard the intake of breath and knew that her mind was racing, searching for the right words to broach what she knew would be a taboo subject.

“This isn’t easy, Jim,” she began.  “But I need your help, advice...anything you can give me.”

So there it was, as he had expected.  This had been what had stopped their relationship from blossoming into more than just a six month fling.  Jim had loved her, and maybe he still did.  But the police work came between them, chafing his still raw nerves.  He had recoiled from the sordid side of life that he had run away from; the side that Laura still embraced and was seemingly so passionately involved with.

“I know what you want, Laura.  You have a big problem up there.  But it’s your problem.  It goes with the patch.”

“I know that, Jim.  I haven’t forgotten how you feel, believe me.  But I want to save lives.  If I don’t get a handle on this killer...well, we’ll be up to our ears in dead teenage girls, and you know it.”

“Don’t try sending me on a guilt trip, Laura.  You have good people of your own.  Why don’t you go through the official list of capable criminal psychologists who will be available to consult and work up a profile for you?”

“Because they’re not Jim Elliott.”

“I’m sorry, Laura, but that life’s behind me, and flattery will get you nowhere.  You know it never ends.  At the present time there are maybe a couple of hundred active serial killers in the States, probably treble that, who knows?  If I wanted to be involved, I would have all the work I could handle back there.”

“Just advice, Jim, for Christ’s sake, that’s all I’m asking for.  Let me send you some stuff to look at.  Give me your thoughts on it off the record, will you?”

“You are one pushy broad, but the answer is still no.”

“Have you still got that old fax machine?”

“Yeah, but―”

“I’ll fax it anyway.  Nothing ventured, eh?  And don’t let’s leave it so long next time.  If I remember rightly you owe me a meal.”

She hung up before he could reply, and the short conversation had not been enough. It had been an appetiser that left him unfulfilled, hungry for an entrée.

The ‘meet’ and round of golf at Wentworth was rewarding.  Jim bonded immediately with his prospective client.  The guy was a fading pop star, only remembered because of a handful of minor hits from the late eighties and early nineties.  And then only by the middle-aged, who were reminded of him by the odd ‘golden oldie’ that got aired once in a blue moon on Radio 2, and the release of his now dated hits, available at cut-price on CD.  He needed reinventing.  Jim gave him an outline of what he would try to do.  He explained that it would be more than a makeover; that it would be the whole nine yards. The singer needed to shed two stone, his present manager, and his habit.  Jim assessed the old rocker as still being hungry, and wanting to be back in the limelight. He had been performing in second-rate venues for over twenty years, tooting coke as he spiralled ever downward into obscurity.  Unbeknown to the singer, Jim had caught his act at a pub in Hounslow, and had been impressed.  He could still hold a tune, and play an audience, and so deserved to be doing better.

Golf is a good yardstick of character and personality.  Jim blew the guy off the course, and admired the grit and determination that his opponent displayed, fighting all the way to the eighteenth, even when he knew that he could not win.  He had control, composure, and most importantly, hated defeat.  He still had the potential to make it happen, with Jim’s help, and was taken on as a client as they left the course and headed for the locker room.

Jim did not consider himself a PR supremo.  He didn’t like labels.  He was just good at recognising what was needed to boost a client’s fortunes.  His last major success had been with an MP of outward mediocrity.  All that had been needed was a change of hairstyle, a new tailor, and good press over a fortuitous incident during which the politician had given roadside assistance to a badly injured teenager who’d managed to steer his motorcycle into an oncoming lorry.  That the youngster was black and survived the accident, was a bonus.  It made good copy.  The MP was now a junior cabinet minister, and would probably rise even higher.  All he had needed was a push in the right direction, and Jim had given it to him.