A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes) (32 page)

Finding
a bottle of Radox, she poured some of it into the bathwater and climbed in.  A little of the built-up tension melted away.  She decided that she had time.  He seemed to want her alive, to use her to tattoo and fuck.  She had to be more than just a body to him.  She thought that his defences were weakening.  He was calling her Julie instead of bitch.  And this measure of freedom was a step in the right direction.  Could she hope that he might become infatuated with her?  No.  To expect any mercy from him would be false optimism.  She had to keep in mind that he was a self-confessed killer, and that he could never let her go because she had seen him.

She jerked up and coughed out
a hot stream of the juniper-scented water.  Gagged and retched against the liquid that had entered her mouth and nostrils to flood her throat.  She had dozed off and sunk below the surface.  Stupid cow!  Almost drowned and robbed Wolfie of his pleasure.

“
What the fuck are you doing?” Lucas said, rushing into the steam-filled room.

“
I...I fell asleep,” she rasped, wiping strings of frothy spittle from her mouth.

Lucas grinned.  She was like a little girl. 
His
little girl.  He leant forward and planted a kiss on her forehead.

“
Come on,” he said, helping her up.  “Let’s get you dried, and then we’ll have a nice cup of coffee.”

He was feeling better than he had for a long, long time.  Maybe the best he had ever felt.
The photograph and fingernail were on their way to Barnes by express delivery.  That would give the cop something to think about.  He had done a check on the DI.  Logged on the ’net and pulled up several hits on Detective Inspector Matt Barnes.  He was a manhunter; some kind of specialist at winkling out serial killers.  Newspaper articles made him out to be a Supercop; a British answer to the fictional Dirty Harry.  He got things done, and was not above putting himself in the firing line.  He had been in at the kill of at least two ritual murderers, and had almost died in a shooting in Finchley last year.  By all accounts he and other cops were protecting a grass.  A psycho hitman had whacked the snitch and all the coppers apart from Barnes, who had taken two slugs himself but survived and was instrumental in hunting down the killer.

Lucas nodded to himself.  He had seen the steel in
Barnes’s eyes that day at the Natural History Museum.  Certain individuals, including himself, exuded a propensity to meet the worst scenarios imaginable without flinching.  Barnes was dangerous, which was a challenge.  He wanted to humble him.  Cause him aggravation and illustrate graphically that the SCU was not such a big deal.  No one wins them all.  He was better than anyone that the hotshot cop had come up against.  Maybe it would be fun to jerk him around for a while.

Matt opened the folded sheet and saw the fingernail taped to the foot of it.  The blood was dark and dry.  Not fresh.  He removed the loose Polaroid photograph and studied it.  The woman was posed, looked to be petrified, and was holding up a copy of
The
Sun
.  He could see the date.  It was yesterday’s.  He passed the photo to Tom and read the separate note that had been produced on a computer in caps:

BARNES
,

HOW
’S THIS FOR AN ATTENTION-GETTER, EH?

JULIE IS JUST FINE, AND MIGHT STAY THAT WAY

IF YOU COME THROUGH WITH MY MONEY.

I
’VE READ ALL ABOUT YOU.  YOU THINK

YOU CAN SAVE THE WORLD
, BUT ALAS

YOU CAN
’T.  IT’S A LOST CAUSE, PAL.

I
’LL GIVE YOU A BELL SOON, SO HAVE THE

CASH
AND MY RING READY TO GO.

WOLF.

Matt passed the note to Tom and took the photograph back.  Studied it carefully for clues that might give some pointers to where the woman was being held.  There was nothing.  Julie was sitting on what appeared to be black plastic, and the backdrop was the same.  Just a myriad points of reflected flashlight glinted like diamonds on the shiny Delphic surfaces.  There was absolutely nothing else in the shot to give the slightest intimation of her whereabouts.

“
He’s getting off on involving us,” Tom said.  “I’ll get a DNA profile worked up on this nail, and have a comparison made with samples from Julie’s home.”

“
The callous bastard,” Matt said, looking at the photo again, and the bandaged finger curling round the edge of the newspaper. “We’ll get nothing from the note paper, tape or envelope, it’ll all be generic.  He isn’t going to make it easy for us.”

Tom ran fingers through his rapidly thinning hair. 
“Maybe not.  But everyone makes mistakes.  We’ll stick to procedure and hope that he isn’t as clever as he’d like us to believe.”

“
If he was clever, he wouldn’t be interacting with us.  His conceit is his worst enemy.  He’s like all homicidal sociopaths; doesn’t give us enough credit.”

He
decided to give it twenty-four hours and then phone Barnes and send him on a fool’s errand.  There was no way he would let them follow the money to him.  They would employ all the tricks of their sneaky trade to lift him, to no avail.  They may have the technology, but that wouldn’t help them.  He was just playing with them.

Three punters came into the studio that day.  One retard wanted a dotted line tattooed around his neck with the illustration of a pair of scissors and the instructions:
‘cut here’.  He had told him to fuck off.  He was an artist, and wouldn’t demean himself by doing inane work.  The second person to walk in off the street was an old biker wearing full leathers.  He had a grey, nicotine-stained walrus moustache, wore his yellow-white hair drawn back and fixed in a single thick braid that hung down to the middle of his back, and had the look of someone who had been born for trouble, though not in the same league as Lucas.

“
You did some good work on a coupla friends of mine, man,” the ageing Hell’s Angel said.  “I want something original on the backs of my hands.”

Lucas showed him some drawings from one of the portfolios he kept on a shelf at the back of the studio.  Garth Harmon, as the burly biker introduced himself, selected two different Celtic circle designs, and settled in the chair for Lucas to reproduce them on his hands.  With one completed, Lucas made an appointment for Garth to return the following week.

The third prospective customer to breeze in was a woman in her forties.  She had a Mohican haircut, dyed green.  The shaven sides of her skull were tattooed with simple stars.  She had at least ten silver rings in each ear, and a large stud in her tongue that caused her to lisp.  She was slim and angular.  Looked twenty from the neck down, but her lined face appeared unused to smiling.  She wore a short top and hipster cargo jeans that left her flat stomach bare to display the piercing in her navel.  She was an over-the-hill punk, refusing to let the passage of time compromise her credo, and would not have been out of place on the pillion of Garth the Biker’s Harley.

She said to Lu
cas, “I want the picture of a dog on my groin.  Can you do that?”

Lu
cas nodded.  “Why a dog?”

“
You should know.  You do Celtic stuff.”

Lu
cas grinned.  He knew that in Celtic Christianity dogs were an important and almost sacred animal, denoting obedience to duty, prowess at hunting, and faithfulness. Talents and qualities that were the cornerstones of that bygone culture.

He locked the door and showed the woman to the curtained area at the rear of the studio.  She removed her Nikes and jeans
– no panties – and lay down on the cushioned surface of the table.

Shani Singleton might have been visiting her gynaecologist.  She was without any trace of embarrassment.

“Just there,” she said, placing a purple-nailed finger on the shaven fatty pad of tissue above her vagina.  “Make it an Alsatian bitch.”

“
How about a wolf?” Lucas said.  “An alpha female.”

Shani smiled. 
“Sounds fitting,” she said.  “Do you tattoo labia?”

“
I tattoo anywhere that I can reach with a needle,” Lucas said.

He worked for over two hours on Shani, with a short break for coffee, and for her to take a leak.  When he had finished, and she had inspected the work with a mirror, she reached for his zipper, tugged it down and slipped her hand inside to extricate his penis.
She gasped at the sight of the dark blue bands of knotwork on it.

This was almost as good as it got, he thought, climbing atop Shani and treating her and himself to a little of what makes the world go round.

“I’ll be back for some more,” Shani said after dressing, and paying him.  “I want something really special on my undercarriage.”

“
No problem, hot lips.  Give me a call and I can book you an appointment.”

Finished for the day, Lucas was suddenly overtaken by a bleak mood
.  His mother was wittering in his head, condemning him and calling him degenerate and not worth the labour pains she had suffered before finally ejecting him out into a cruel world.  His frame of mind deteriorated as the evening turned to night.  He needed to shut her up.  And there was only one remedy.  He took food up to Julie, but did not linger.  If he had, then he would have killed her.  That was what he had to do: kill.

D
ressed in dark clothing he went out in the van.  He was like a junkie without a fix.  He
needed
so badly that it was giving him cramps and making him shake from head to foot.  There was no time to be selective.  The craving would not abate.  The stalking and planning was usually all part of the pleasure.  But his need was quickening.

His mother’s phantom voice cajoled him.
She was still alive after all this time, if only in his mind.  ‘You pathetic little mutant,’ she said.  ‘Killing a hundred sluts won’t rid you of me.  I’ll be with you until you do everyone a favour and die’.

Why couldn
’t he dismiss the bitch’s grating voice?  He knew that it was only a projection that his subconscious was producing.  It was not real.  But knowing that did not stop the tirade of insults.

He was desperate.  Pulled into a wooded lane where lovers parked up and made out in their vehicles.  There was one
car nose-in to dense shrubs.  The rear window of the car was misted.  He stopped thirty yards past it.  Got out and furtively made his way back. There was rain in the air.  Low cloud made it almost too dark to see where he was going.  He let the faint sound of music lead him to the car.  Bent down and stealthily made his way to the front passenger door.

Cheryl and Jamie were both married, though not to each other.  They could not have picked a worse time, place or date to cheat on their respective partners.

Cheryl Smith was no longer in love with her husband, Lorne.  After ten years of wedded sorrow, she wanted more out of life than a semi in Stanwell.  She wanted a jet-style life, not to just watch and hear them roar into Heathrow over her roof.  If it hadn’t been for her son, Neil, then she would have got out years ago.  Lorne – named by a father who had been an avid fan of the old TV series;
Bonanza
, and of the star of the show, Lorne Green, who had played Ben Cartwright – was a bus driver with no future worth talking about, and no ambition to better himself.  When he wasn’t working, he was either watching Sky sports, seeing how many cans of lager he could sink, or out in the garage tinkering with an old Yank car that he had bought four years ago and was still working on.  And the annual holiday in a caravan at Southend was not something she ever wanted to do again.  Cooking and sitting around alone for most of the time while Lorne and Neil went off beach fishing did not press the right buttons.

Jamie had been just what Cheryl needed.  He was the owner of Judd
’s Carpet Warehouse, where Cheryl worked in the office.  He had been coming on strong for six months, and she had weakened and let him have his way with her in the stock room, on a partly unrolled carpet that cost fifty quid a square metre.  Not a shag pile, that would have been more appropriate, but a high-grade felt backed broadloom.  Good job it was stain resistant, she had thought when they had christened it.  But screwing around at work was too risky.  Jamie’s wife, Alana, called in two or three times a day, in between horse riding with her pals and spending Jamie’s money on anything that took her fancy.  The old cow had a too bright sun bed tan to better show off her gold trinkets, and her eyes were drawn up as a result of too much cosmetic surgery, not epicanthus.  It wouldn’t do to have Alana find them thrashing about in the altogether.

Jamie was in love with Cheryl.  He wanted to wake up next to her each and every morning
, take her on trips to romantic and faraway places, and maybe have the son that Alana was past bearing.  Greed was stopping him from pulling the rug – very apt – from beneath Alana’s feet.  He wanted out from the clutches of a woman whose mission in life seemed to be to spend money almost as fast as he could make it.  She was a parasite, attached to him like a tic to a sheep, sucking the very life from him.  Cheryl was his ideal woman.  He felt so alive and optimistic in her company.  At first it had been a very pleasant aside; a diversion from a dull world that consisted of floor coverings and paperwork.