A Need To Kill (DI Matt Barnes) (6 page)

Pete inwardly cringed.  He was positive that the woman was not privy to the fact that her daughter had been a prostitute.  This was going to be a bitch.  “What line of work was she in?” he asked.

“
Marsha runs...my daughter ran a model agency.  She used to be a top model herself.”

Pete nodded and fought for inspiration as he took time to jot down what she had said in his notebook.  He could work around the truth or be up front and hit her with the facts.

“Do you know of anyone who bore her a grudge or threatened her, Mrs. Freeman?”

Sylvia shook her head. 
“She was a lovely person.  No one could possibly have had any reason to harm her.  Marsha’s friends and contacts were not the sort of people who would harm anyone.”

“
We believe that Marsha enjoyed a very active social life,” Pete said.  “She had an address book that listed a great many men friends...clients.”

“
Just what are you implying?”

“
That Marsha might have been murdered by someone who knew her intimately. We need―”

Sylvia shot to her feet, causing Pete and Errol to jerk back in their seats. 
“How dare you imply that my daughter was that type of person,” she shouted.  “Get out of my house.”

Neither Pete nor Errol moved or spoke.  After a few seconds, Sylvia
’s resolve broke and she wilted in a way that made Pete think of a flower’s life filmed by stop-motion photography.  Her head and shoulders drooped, and she seemed to age a decade and cease to be the person who had manufactured a front to present to strangers.  She became just a disconsolate woman who had lost her child and sat down again and lifted her head to make eye contact with Pete.

“
She was a wonderful girl,” she said wistfully.  “Her father and I could not have wished for a better daughter.  What she did was not what she was.  After her modelling career began to falter, she was at a loss as to what to do.”

“
So you knew?” Errol said.

“
That she worked as an escort?  Yes.  She was a beautiful woman.  Any man would have been proud to be in her company.”

“
It went further than that, Mrs. Freeman,” Pete said, almost hating himself for having to inflict even more pain.  “Marsha was also known as Trudi Jameson, and was a―”

“
Don’t you dare say that word,” Sylvia said, her voice spiked with venom.  “What Marsha might or might not have done, didn’t harm anyone.  For God’s sake, my daughter is dead.  What possible reason would you have to blacken her character?”

“
Our only aim is to find the man who murdered her, Mrs. Freeman.  We are not being judgmental.  Did she ever mention any man who she was afraid of, or who was persistently making nuisance calls, or following her?”

Sylvia shook her head. 
“She did not confide in me over her personal life. But she never gave the impression that she had any problems.  As I said, her father and I did not see a great deal of her.  And she would not have been so thoughtless to worry us unduly.  She was a very independent, self-reliant person.”

“
Is Mr. Freeman at home?” Errol asked.

“
No, I’m afraid not.  Hugh was in Hong Kong on business when I got the news.  He’s flying home.”

Pete made a note: 
Hugh Freeman/father/Hong Kong?

If it checked out that Marsha
’s dad had been abroad on business when she was slain, then he could be eliminated as a suspect.  The scenario of a father finding out that his daughter was a whore and subsequently losing the plot was not without precedent.

They left soon after, and
Pete’s mobile came to life as he and Errol climbed back into the car.

“
Deakin,” he said.

“
What’s your location?” Matt asked.

“
Outside the Freeman household.”

“
Anything?”

“
No.  I think the mother knew that Marsha was on the game.  And the father is supposedly out of the country on business.  I’ll check his movements.”

“
Okay.  I want you and Errol to get over to Marsha’s apartment.  Looks like she took video of all the trade that passed through.”

“
We looked everywhere, boss.”

“
No, we didn’t.  I think she will have kept the flash drives and disks close at hand, but hidden the videos.  If you can’t find them, then get a team in to rip the place apart.  It might be a long shot, but we could have the killer posing for us.”

She
appeared to be dead.  Only the thin, glistening string of drool hanging from the side of her mouth and an almost imperceptible trembling of her hands gave away the presence of life.  She was curled up; a shaven-headed bag of bones with sunken and dull eyes staring at nothing, looking inward and praying for it to be over with once and for all.  Life had long since lost its appeal for Janice Clayton.  She eagerly awaited release from the torment, and could hardly recall a former life without pain and humiliation.  She had lost everything; her free will, dignity and all human rights.  She had been reduced to being little more than an object; a possession of the depraved creature who had stripped her of all hope and aspirations. Time had become elastic.  She might have been his captive for a lifetime.  And he had only spoken to her once, to condemn her while he worked the glowing cigarette ends into her flesh.

At first, she had attempted to talk to him, to bond on some level and remain a person in his eyes and not become just an object.  It had not worked.  It was as though he were a deaf mute.  She might have been the insentient plaything of a child, to be taken out of a toy box and abused before being returned to the darkness, to wait until she was once more withdrawn and manipulated in any way that gave him some infernal pleasure.

At nineteen, Janice was fast approaching the end of her short life.  The attractive and well-proportioned young woman of only three months ago was now a six-stone shadow of her former self.  He had stopped feeding her, and her body now subsisted wholly on water.  Sores had appeared on her face and body, and her organs were beginning the process of shutting down.  Her only remaining ambition was to escape him by slipping into a coma, to be finally liberated and no longer suffering.

Janice
mentally retreated from where she lay on a bright red lilo on the boarded floor of the loft. The hissing of the water tank next to her became indistinct, and in her ensuing dream she reinvented it as the gurgling sound of fast-flowing water over the rocks of a stream. She was twelve again and on holiday in the New Forest with her parents.  She could feel the prickly heat of the sun on her face and bare arms, and watched occasional cotton wool clouds drift by high above in a denim-blue sky.  A movement caused her to look towards the greenery on the far bank of the stream.  Leaves were rustled and moved, preceding the appearance of a baby deer.  It could have been Bambi.  She held her breath and did not move, to be rewarded by the sight of it nervously moving out to the water’s edge, to lap at the cold water.

The idyllic setting froze, became fragmented and was gone.  She opened her eyes to the reality of her situation, and to the sight of the naked monster that was once more standing in front of her.  She attempted to withdraw, back into dreams of better times, but could not cajole her brain into evading whatever depraved acts or new mutilations were imminent.

It was time.  He turned on the
loft light from the switch on the landing, unhooked the door and pulled the aluminium ladders down.  Climbed up and walked across to where the emaciated whore prisoner – who he had kept in his home for so long – lay asleep on the shit-encrusted lilo.  He would miss having accessible material so readily to hand, but it had now become too used and therefore of little further interest to him.  That he had slowly starved it of late was primarily to make its impending disposal easier.  He had marked it in such an individual and distinctive manner that his work might be recognised if the carcass was recovered, and so he would have to bury it in quicklime or burn it, to eradicate any physical clues that might some day come back to haunt him. Prevention was better than cure.  He would not be party to his own downfall.

It looked up at him with beseeching eyes.  They were all the same
: imperious cunts in need of being taught the error of their ways.  Well, he certainly did that.  They had met their match the day he selected them to pay for the misery he had been through.

There was little more to be done, save
for ending whatever constituted life in the creature that was voiding its bladder in abject fear at the sight of him.  Though the power he held over it still caused him to grow hard.

He knelt down on the plastic sheeting that covered the chipboard floor and spoke to it for only the second time since he had initially abducted and brought it into his home.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

She nodded and began to cry.

“Good.  I want you to know that you have given me a great deal of pleasure.  But it’s over now.  I’m going to set you free.”

Janice could hardly believe that not only was he speaking to her, but was telling her that he intended to let her go.  But why was he holding a pair of tights in his hand?

He moved over her, and though hardly able, she managed to roll on to her back and open her legs to accommodate him.

It was only when he looped the tights around her neck and began to strangle her with them that Janice understood.  The freedom he had spoken of was purely in the spiritual sense.  Even though the deep-seated will to survive generated a feeble and short-lived struggle, she quickly succumbed and was already still and lifeless as he spent himself in the skeletal earthly remains of a victim now beyond suffering.

He lifted the corpse up by an ankle, dragged it across to the open hatch and dropped it down to career off the ladders onto the landing carpet.  Within less than half an hour he was ready to transport the now bagged remains to where he had decided to dispose of them.

The body was in the back of the van in a large potato sack, along with the deflated lilo and the plastic sheets that had protected the floor from being contaminated by the faeces and urine.  Some seepage had stained the boards, but it was nothing that a scrubbing brush, bleach and a little elbow grease would not remove
.

Going back into the house, he
made himself a cup of tea and settled to wait.  He employed the darkness as a cloak to conceal his iniquitous conduct from the eyes of the world.  It was his ally; a friend that aided and abetted him.

Funny.  He already missed the convenience of having a subject in the house with him. 
But he would soon procure a fresh one.  He absolutely never kept anything that belonged to the tarts he killed.  He had no need of souvenirs.  He had forgotten about the pages he had ripped from the posh whore’s address book.  But as a rule he was ultra careful.

The taking of the slut
, who was now wrapped up like a fish supper in his van, had been the inspiration for all he had done since.  Before abducting her he had been consumed by a rage that threatened to consume him for almost two years.  He had needed to vent it, or knew that he might self-destruct.  His brain had felt like a tyre’s inner tube being pumped up to a pressure it could not sustain.

Sandra had made him what he was.  She could have been his salvation, but had been no better than his fucking mother.  They were all the same; a wanton, filthy species
that fed off and used men.  He had somehow survived his nightmarish childhood: found a deep well of strength that protected him from the ill-treatment meted out by his whore of a mother and her crackhead pimp boyfriend, Leroy Brown.  They had used him as a punch bag in an attempt to alleviate their own frustration and dissatisfaction with the lives that they felt trapped in and could not escape from, but had fashioned for themselves, and so deserved.  He had been blessed with an almost inhuman tolerance to pain, being able to close down the neural pathways that received messages of physical discomfort.  In the end, the lack of response to being held down and branded with cigarette ends, and punched, kicked and subjected to all manner of abuse, had made further violence against him a pointless and unrewarding undertaking. By the time he was thirteen, he was just tolerated, and in the main ignored by the wretched couple who he had the misfortune to have as his custodians.

He still rated the day he had murdered his mother as his finest hour.  It had been late one evening shortly before Christmas in
oh-four when the unpremeditated act took place.  The episode coalesced in his mind.  He was back in time, watching the television in the front room of a council semi on a slum estate in Catford.

His mother was not the good-looker she had once been.  Cigarettes, too much crack, and an overall despair at her lot in life had hardened her features.  She had felt ill and not worked that evening, and Leroy was not amused.  He was hurting, needing a fix, and his main source of income was sitting on her arse instead of lying on her back
and earning money