A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes) (38 page)

“
If that’s what went down, then they called at his place and he sussed her as being a cop.  They struck gold and didn’t know it.  But I still don’t see what good it would do him to take such a risk.  She obviously didn’t suspect him.”

“
I don’t pretend to know what makes wackos tick, Matt.  If it
was
him, then it narrows the field to twelve calls that Carrie made.  How do you want to run with it?  We don’t have any trace evidence worth shit.  And we know that he’s careful.”

“
Any of them that bear even a slight physical resemblance to the CCTV footage from the museum can be looked at,” Matt said.  “A background check should give Beth enough to point him out.  And if he did murder Carrie, then he torched her place for a reason.  Maybe she injured him.  He might have unwittingly left blood at the scene.  The techs should be able to retrieve something.”

“
That’s not a given.  Seems he turned the cooker on.  Fire and gas don’t mix.  The house looks like the aftermath of a missile attack.  And the water that the fire teams put in turned what was left to ash soup.”

“
I’ll come in now and start putting it together.  I’ve got the feeling he’s all but gift wrapped.”

“
Unless we’re wrong and it isn’t germane to this Wolf nut.”

“
It’s something to hang our hats on.  Have you told Grizzly any of this?”

“
No.  Adams can sweat.  He’s getting more heat than I am over this case.  I don’t think he’ll be here for much longer.  Some prat let it out that he’d been screwing Marsha Freeman.  A poster-size blow-up of his starring role in one of her videos got Blu-Tacked to a khazi door on the top floor.  His credibility took a nosedive.  I don’t think he’ll be able to ride it out.  In fact I know that he won’t.”

“
He’ll get offered a decent retirement package, and walk,” Matt said.  “It’s all old school ties upstairs. They cover their own arses, which is something they probably didn’t do at Eton, or wherever they learned how to give a half-decent blowjob.”

“
You give me the impression you don’t like him.”

“
I don’t like to see good space being wasted, Tom.  He should be chewed on by the ICC and get busted down to street level.  Maybe I could have him on my team and make a half competent cop out of him.”

“
Relax, Matt, he’s not the enemy.”

“
Most of the tossers on the top floor are the enemy within.  They juggle with the truth, bend stats and play politics.  We’re as expendable as any other foot soldiers in their eyes.”

“
Yeah, well...”

Matt
disconnected and swung himself up off his elbow to sit on the edge of the bed.

Beth got out at her side and slipped a robe on. 
“Sounds as if you might be closing in on Wolfie,” she said.

“
Maybe.  We had a female officer, Carrie Tucker, wired.  She was visiting parlours in the area we think he may operate from, on the pretence of wanting a tattoo of a Celtic design done.  The drawing she was showing them was a derivative of a detail found on the body of the burned girl.  Whoever did the work was bound to recognise it as being similar to his.  At the end of her shift, Carrie was dropped off and took a tube home. Within hours she was murdered, and her house was burned down.”

“
You could be adding two and two together and coming up with five.”

“
It’s all we’ve got.  Checking out the dozen places Carrie had called at that day might throw up a suspect.  If it does, then we can start digging and see what skeletons are hanging in his cupboard.  You’ll be able to see if the guy’s history could be a trigger for the killings.”

“
You want me to―”

“
I want for you to get some sleep and stay away from the Yard.  I’ll get any paperwork we come up with to you.  If nothing else, we know how unpredictable these crazies can be.  If it was him who murdered Carrie, then no one is safe.  Your job is to keep a very low profile and stay in the background.”

Beth felt the blood drain from her face. 
Matt was right.  Memories and thoughts of the past circled in her mind.  She did not want to ever come face to face with another unglued repeat murderer; not outside the confines and relative safety of the hospital. Evaluating them as incarcerated patients was one thing, but being in their sights in the open was not something she ever wished to experience again.  You could not rationalise with a malfunctioning brain.  They did not have the same thought processes as ‘normal’ people, or have the ability to stop committing atrocities that satisfied some diabolic and diseased part of their psyche.  Serial killers were not the product of any particular socio-economic background. They could be, and were, well-heeled and highly intelligent, or down and outs with no education. It was sometimes impossible to see behind the facade that they manufactured and developed to cloak that side of their nature: the hunger that they fed by ritually and repeatedly taking life.

Beth
’s newest patient was such a man, or beast.  Outwardly, Adrian Blyton was as timorous as a church mouse; a balding fifty-nine year old with poor eyesight, a lisp, and a nervous tic in his right eye.  There was nothing apparently remarkable about the man, and yet when not running his DVD store in Ealing, he was frequenting toilets and lay-bys, picking up eager and consenting gays to take back to his bungalow off Broadway, to drug, have sex with, then murder and mutilate.  Over a period of ten years, Blyton had – to the authorities’ knowledge – done away with at least thirty-two men and boys.  He had boiled down the remains and concealed the bleached, odourless bones in the bungalow.  Had he not been selling under-the-counter pornographic DVDs, then he might not have been apprehended.  With a warrant to search his business premises and home, Vice Squad officers found the pickled genitals of more than a dozen men in the roof space of the bungalow, and a mass of skulls and complete skeletons under the floorboards of the spare bedroom.

“
Why did you do it?”  Beth had asked Adrian.

He had shrugged his narrow shoulders and sighed. 
“I wanted them, then felt inadequate when they came home with me.  It was less stressful to...to take them when they were drugged.  Afterwards, I just wanted rid of them without it becoming confrontational.  I tied a plastic bag over the first one’s head before he woke up.  It was so easy.  I suppose it became a habit.”

“
But you kept their genitals...”

Adrian
closed his eyes, dropped his chin on to his chest and shuddered.  Not with the disgust that Beth felt, but at the renewed sexual excitement derived from memories of removing the penises and testicles with a well-honed knife.  The flaccid, bloodless organs had engendered him with a strong sense of his own continued potency.  They were visceral reminders; trophies of the magical episodes he had enjoyed with partners who had been pliant and unaware of the vile acts he had committed on their senseless bodies.

When he eventually opened his eyes and looked up, Beth could see the unbounded glee in his expression.

“Didn’t you ever buy a souvenir, or pick up a shell from a beach to remind you of a favourite place, Doctor?  Mementoes can help you relive the good times.”

Beth knew that no therapy yet devised would cure Blyton of the mental disorder that afflicted him.  He felt absolutely no sense of guilt at having murdered the men
, whose only crime had been to want sex with a willing stranger.  They had given themselves up to a monster who offered his body as bait to lure them to their deaths.

All the data collected and studied by Beth and other criminal psychologists around the world had not thus far given any proper insight as to how a sexual predator with a total absence of moral conscience could be rehabilitated.  The various symptoms that allowed them to categorise sociopathic mental disorders did little to present a method that might reverse ingrained behaviour.  There was still an ongoing argument in the field, as to whether a subject
’s brain was traumatised and patterned by personal childhood experiences or, on the other hand, was programmed that way in the womb.  Beth had come to the conclusion that both hypotheses held water.  She had – reluctantly – acknowledged that evil was a valid force.  The thrust of her work as a member of the Criminal Personality Programme at Northfield was to probe the warped and depraved minds of murderers, to assess and try to find common denominators in an attempt to determine the reasons that prompted them to act out the dark fantasies they harboured.  The fundamental problem being, that even the serial killer himself cannot fully understand or readily explain what drives him to commit such barbarous acts.

“
You know that this one won’t give himself up, even if you find him, don’t you?”  Beth said to Matt.

“
They usually make me earn my pay,” he replied.  “And don’t tell me to be careful again.  I will be.  Why don’t you make coffee while I get dressed?”

More
than anything else, she wanted to see daylight.  The naked bulb illuminating nothing but her body, the mattress, blue, plastic chemiloo, and the black plastic walls, ceiling and floor was mind-destroying.  The depravation of natural light and other everyday distractions was gnawing at the edges of her sanity.  She could imagine the eye-searing light bulb to be the last star burning in the remote corner of some otherwise lifeless vacuum of the cosmos.

Time had become meaningless.  Had the creature who called himself Wolf last visited her a few hours or several days ago?  When had she last eaten?  Gnawing pains cramped her insides.  And her ankle hurt like hell.  The steel handcuff that she was shackled to the ring by had chafed the skin.  But that was minor, compared to her finger
end, which was swollen and throbbing.  Every movement made her wince.  Good! Pain was something to focus on.  As long as she could still feel, then she knew that she was alive.  And where there’s life, there’s hope.  Bullshit!  Tell that to all the terminally ill patients in hospices throughout the land.  What hope did they have?  Their life was a melange of drug-altered memories, as they slipped ever nearer to the edge of non-existence.  How the hell could they have any hope?

Was she dreaming or awake?  She was still in the purpose-built prison, but could hear a pattering on the plastic.  It could have been someone drumming their fingers, or drops of rain falling.  She held her breath and concentrated
.  There, again, a furtive scurrying.  A mouse?  Or a...please God, no!  Don’t let it be a rat.  She could not abide the vermin.  She remembered as a nine or ten year old the horror of being sat on the toilet when one came up from the main drain, through the water-filled U-bend to scrabble up between her legs and leap onto the floor.  She had felt its wet, coarse fur brush against the inside of her thighs.  Jumping up, she had leapt into the bath, to stand rigid and scream until her father came running up the stairs to see what had happened.  He had seen the dripping rodent in a corner, and had used a pair of hairdressing scissors to stab it repeatedly.  Julie had never forgotten the piercing screams that the rat had made as it curled up against the onslaught.  From that day forth she had never, ever sat on a toilet seat.  Instead, she would rest her hands on her knees and brace herself above the pan, thigh muscles quivering as she looked down between her legs at the small rectangle of water, ready to jump away if a head broke the surface.

Her worst fears were realised.  A rat slunk warily from the shadows, to sit up on its haunches and test the air with its twitching snout.  And then another appeared, and another.  She counted over a dozen of them.  They could smell her.  She had started her period, and knew that the pungent odour of menstrual blood had lured them out from their lair in the roof space.

Pulling back as far as the chain would allow, Julie lifted the thin mattress and held it in front of her, bending and drawing her free leg back behind it.

One of the rats, the largest, crept forward, advancing towards her with its body stretched and low to the floor.  Cautious, purposeful and cunning.

Ignoring the pain, Julie shook her foot to rattle the chain, waved her arms and shouted:  “Go away!  Shoo!  Leave me alone.”

The rats froze in place, but did not retreat.  Could they sense that she was defenceless and unable to take flight?

As if motivated by an unheard command, they attacked.  The first to reach her buried its powerful incisors into her foot.  Others scrambled over the top of the mattress to latch onto her face and arms.  And one slipped behind her flimsy barricade to bury its incisors into her side.  Her scream was stifled by a hand clamping over her mouth, and she reared up, eyes rolling as the sensation of tearing teeth and claws evaporated.

“
I think you were having a nightmare,” Lucas said, taking his hand away.  “I hope it wasn’t about me.”

“
Rats,” she said.  “I was being eaten by rats.”

“
Sounds fun.  And it could be arranged, if you scream like that again.”

She did not reply.  Telling him had been a mistake.

“You hungry?” Lucas asked.

Julie
nodded.  Yet again her eyes were drawn to his highly-illustrated body.