Brothers in Blood (22 page)
Snow knelt down by the corpse.
‘You’re not intending to … er, well to interfere with the dead man, are you, sir?’
Snow was aware of the rather bizarre farcical element of the situation and also amused at Fellows’ failure to find a word other than ‘interfere’.
‘I’m just going to get the man’s keys out of his trouser pocket, Sergeant. Look away if you wish’, he said handing Fellows the metal box.
Snow studied the two pockets of his trousers. One seemed bulkier than the other. He felt waves of Fellows’ disapproval as his hand reached inside the pocket. He knew that he should not be tampering with a murder victim in this fashion. He should wait for the SOCOS to complete their investigation and take the crumbs from their table but he’d never been one for the rules when his instinct told him that his way was better – that his way would lead to a result.
Within seconds he had the key ring in his hand. A little skull with a circle of wire through its nose containing several keys. A house key, a car key and several others, including a miniature key that Snow knew instinctively would fit the lock of the metal cash box.
He slipped the key from the ring and held it up in triumph for Fellows to see. His sergeant gave a wan smile.
‘Now let’s open the treasure chest and see what goodies are inside.’ Snow took the box from Fellows and led him into the kitchen. Placing the box on the work surface, he slipped the small key into the lock. Snow felt a tingle of pleasure as it turned easily releasing the lid.
The box contained very little. There a few sheets of paper, a faded old letter, a brown manila envelope and one photograph. The photograph was of a bulky individual sitting astride a motorbike looking arrogant in a kind of moorland setting. The letter was on hotel headed notepaper – a place called The Sea Royal in Brighton – and dated eight years ago. The letter just had a date, time and location ‘August 6th 1976, 1.00 p.m.’, and a signature, simply ‘L’.
He passed it to Fellows. ‘A few things to check up on here and there’s the handwriting, too.’
The other sheet was a series of dates going back to the beginning of the seventies, each one followed by a red tick. The most recent date was less than a week ago. The tingle came again. It was the date of the murders at Matt Wilkinson’s house.
‘This is all very interesting,’ he murmured, more to himself than his companion. Then he turned his attention to the manila envelope. Gently, he tipped the contents out on to the work surface. There were a series of cuttings from various newspapers, some of them brown with age. He sorted them out into a neat pile and scrutinised a few for some moments.
‘What are they?’ asked Fellows.
‘They are all reports of murders. Some of them going back ten years’ He read a few more of the cuttings before continuing. ‘The murders took place all over the country. And they all seem to be without motive – or at least that’s what the press are saying. Fascinating stuff. This gives us quite a lot of material to sort out and follow up. We should be able to find about these killings and whether the culprits were caught.’ He shook his head in disbelief and held up the tin box as though it was exhibit A. ‘What have we stumbled on here, Bob? It’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box. Either Mr Marshall had a fascination with murder or… he was a keen participant.’
‘What, for ten years?’
Snow raised his eyebrows. ‘The idea is fantastic, gruesome, I agree, but you know as well as I do in our job we encounter this sort of thing – and worse – on a regular basis. This affair is far more complex than it first seemed and there is something sinister and uniquely nasty about it.’
He began scooping up the newspaper clippings and slipping them back into the envelope. ‘Right, you’d better ring HQ and tell them we have a body here – another homicide.’
Fellows looked relieved. He wasn’t a maverick like his boss and was not happy with them tampering with the murder scene before the appropriate officers had dealt with things in the approved manner.
‘Right, sir.’
‘But at the moment, not a word about this little treasure chest.’
Sergeant Fellows opened his mouth but Snow silenced him with a glance.
‘I need to give it my close attention. I don’t want it leaving my sight to be dusted, tested and photographed etc., etc. It’s timewasting. There’s likely to be another murder and I’d like to prevent it. I am sure I can extract all the relevant juice out of this particular lemon overnight.’ He held up the box and shook it. ‘This could provide us with all the answers we need.’
Laurence sat in the Boy and Barrel pub staring into space. He had returned to the hotel and once again ditched his disguise. He had been in two minds whether to try and make it back to London straight away but he was tired and he didn’t want to raise suspicions at the hotel by leaving without spending the night there having paid for the accommodation. Besides, he was emotionally and physically drained. To avoid thought and pain, he shut down various systems in his own mechanism to reduce himself to an automaton. He almost succeeded – but not quite.
However, he couldn’t bear sitting in his bedroom alone and so he wandered up the road from the hotel and landed in this shabby but busy pub filled with rowdy teenagers and a pulsating juke box. The noise, the crowd and the atmosphere thick with cigarette smoke were a comfort to him as he sat in the corner, a silent, immobile character amidst the whirl and cacophony. He was still coming to terms with what he had just done. It had been necessary, he reasoned, and inevitable but that didn’t make it palatable. He was surprised how upset he felt. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t killed in cold blood before and, indeed, enjoyed the experience – but they had been strangers and losers. Not someone he knew. Not a ‘friend’. More importantly – not a Brother. Although he had known from the beginning that he would do it one day, he had not been prepared for the emotional turmoil it would unleash. He had thought it would bring an extra frisson of delight to the killing. That had been the whole point. He thought of all those years of climbing up the mountain to achieve the greatest thrill on reaching the peak, but this had not been the case. Perhaps he wasn’t as strong, as detached, as nihilistic as he imagined. Or was this just a blip, an irritating nervous reaction that would vanish with the morning light. It had to be – because it wasn’t over yet.
And yet he could not shrug off this strange depressive mood which enveloped him. The weariness and futility of life,
his
life weighed him down with such heaviness that he could hardly move. Lifting the glass to his lips was a major effort. Perhaps he should top himself and have done with it all, the whole weary business of living.
He growled in anger at his own weakness and with an effort, he finished the pint of beer in three gulps, the liquid dribbling down either side of his mouth in the process. He knew that alcohol was not the answer, not the permanent answer anyway, but it was a very effective anaesthetic: it softened pain, remorse, guilt and thoughts of the future. Just what he needed. With leaden limbs he made his way to the bar and ordered another pint.
Oblivion tonight could not come quick enough.
It was hot black coffee that Paul Snow was consuming with relish as he sat at his dining room table, studying the papers from the tin box he’d found in Alex Marshall’s house. He was able to correlate the press cuttings about a series of apparently unrelated unsolved murders with the dates and locations recorded on the separate sheet of paper. The last one on the list, before the Wilkinson killings, was less than two years ago, in Norwich. A small time drug dealer had been knifed to death and then his clothes set alight in the Tombland district of the city. Tombland. How ghoulishly appropriate, thought Snow wryly, taking another sip of coffee.
It seemed that all the victims were some kind of ne’er do well. There was a prostitute, a mugger, a couple of drug addicts, a few tramps and other similar low life characters. In many ways – easy targets.
Snow placed his hands around the mug, receiving a pleasurable warming sensation as his mind wandered. Was it some kind of game? A bizarre game? The murders were apparently motiveless and took place with such regularity. What had a prostitute in Glasgow got to do with a drug peddler in Doncaster? It would need a super Sherlock Holmes type genius to provide some kind of credible link between these victims. No, they had to be random killings which took place in different locations approximately a year apart.
Like an annual game
.
What kind of person would do something like that? Treat murder as a sport. Had Alex Marshall carried out these crimes himself or were others involved, sharing the game? His pals at Matt Wilkinson’s house.
Ah, but that was the fly in the ointment: the Matt Wilkinson murders. Alex Marshall had been a victim of Wilkinson and his cronies and this crime had all the hallmarks of revenge. Here there
was
a definite motive. That spoilt the pattern – but nevertheless there was a pattern. If forensics were correct, there were three men at Matt Wilkinson’s house the night of the killings: three murderers. One for each victim. One of these murderers was Mr Alex Marshall who had made sure that Ronnie Fraser, the surviving victim, did not recover sufficiently to talk to the police and help them to identify the perpetrators. Now Marshall had been eliminated also. No doubt for the same reason Ronnie Fraser was silenced. Presumably he was killed by the other two murderers, or one of them, in a desperate bid to protect their anonymity. Things had got messy and they had grown desperate. That was good. People make mistakes when they are desperate.
Snow rubbed his forehead in a vain attempt to banish the headache, which was developing rapidly. He believed that his ideas held water and fitted the facts but they were built on a great deal of surmise and naked guesswork. While the scenario was neat and feasible, he could be wrong. His theory implied that he was dealing with madmen. Unhinged bastards at least. Murder, however unacceptable, was to some extent understandable if the crime brought about some tangible benefit to the killer, but to end someone’s life for no reason was madness. What prompted them to go out and kill without any apparent motive? Just for kicks? For a laugh? Just to prove that they could? Only madmen would maintain such a grisly routine over a long period of time. Oh yes, if this were the case, these chaps are candidates for Broadmoor, pals for Hindley and Brady, thought Snow.
However, even if he was right in his assumption that there was a strange homicidal vigilante group on the loose – three men who kill someone they don’t know every year in a different location – he still didn’t have sufficient evidence or information to guide his future actions. He was no nearer identifying the remaining murderers.
Not yet anyway.
He looked again at the brief note which was signed by the single letter ‘L’.
The date and location mentioned – The Sea Royal Hotel, Brighton, August 6th 1976 – coincided with the killing of some alkie derelict on the beach. The letter ‘L’ wasn’t going to get him very far. But he could try. He knew from experience that successful policing often depended on the little things.
Then he remembered something else he needed Fellows to check up on in the morning and made a mental note of it.
He sat back, sighed and rubbed his temples again. He realised how tired and stressed he was. This case was a devil and… For a split second Michael Armitage’s face flashed into his mind and a wave of depression crashed over him. What on earth was he going to do about him? The bastard was not going to be satisfied with one payment was he? He would have to drip feed him on a regular basis. Snow knew he couldn’t allow that to happen. But what was the alternative?
That night as Laurence crept between the nylon sheets in his hotel bed, he had decided what his next move was going to be. He accepted that he had reached the last act of the drama and there was no point in prolonging it. It was time to bring down the bloody curtain at last. With this thought, he slipped into a gentle untroubled sleep.
Laurence sat in his rented Cortina parked across the street from the school gates. Once more he was in his countryman disguise. He was relaxed and patient, smoking a series of his favourite small cigars. Shortly after 3.45, the kids began pouring out of the building, shouting, laughing, pushing, pulling, and jumping, all celebrating the release from their scholastic confinement.
It was a mild October afternoon, although the sky had remained implacably grey, hinting at the gloom of the winter months to come. It suited Laurence’s mood. He didn’t like sunshine anyway.
With the aid of a map, he had spent the early part of the afternoon seeking the ideal location for his purposes. He had been successful.
He watched the flood of children reduce to a trickle and then members of staff began to emerge from the building heading in a weary fashion for the car park, clutching bulging bags and briefcases. There was no jollity or exuberance with them, just grey, tired faces and shoulders rounded by invisible burdens. Laurence waited a further ten minutes before leaving his vehicle and crossing the road towards the school.
Once inside the building, he put his head through the hatch of the reception desk. Beyond was a cramped and untidy office inhabited by two chunky middle-aged women with crisp perms, woollen cardigans and fancy glasses. They could have been twins. They were self-absorbed in their own tasks and took no notice of Laurence.
‘I’m looking for Mr Blake’s classroom,’ he said cheerily, realising that he would have to make the first salvo if he wanted to elicit any response from these cardiganned worker ants.
One of the women looked up from the pile of papers she was sorting through. She appeared flustered and annoyed at being interrupted. She threw Laurence a suspicious glance.
‘I’m here to see him about my son,’ he said.
‘Down the corridor to your left, go right to the bottom, turn left again. It’s 13G,’ the woman announced in peremptory and charmless fashion before returning to her chores.