Eye Snatcher (9 page)

Carter tossed her apple into his un-bagged wastepaper bin and walked away from his desk. “Comes with the territory of being a granddad, Granddad.”

Knotting of his stomach. Bad choice of words, Samantha. Bloody bad choice of words.

“Shall we head down there then?” Brad asked.

Brian stared into space. Stared at the photographs of Sam Betts, at his scooped out eyes, his disembowelled belly, the little mark where his piercing was in his ear.

“Brian?”

“Yeah. Sure. Whatever. You drive.”

Brad gave him a squinty, uncertain look, then led the way.

Brian stared at the Sam Betts photograph some more.

The Booths’ toilets were a state.

There was blood smeared all over the mirrors. A pool of blood covering the white tiled floor, hand marks and vomit in it that the cleaner, Jeff Milton, insisted belonged to him.

He was shaken up. Pale as anything, which was to be expected. Brian had him sit outside with a coffee while they took a look around. But that look in his eyes. That glazed eye look, like he’d seen something he really shouldn’t have—parents fucking in the shower, something like that. It was there. There in his eyes, etched in, like it was etched into the eyes of every police officer.

The look of no innocence.

When Brian peeked around the cubicle door, doing all he could to keep the soles of his shoes out of the bloodied pool, a feeling that was becoming horribly familiar built up inside him again.

“Fuck,” Brad said.

There was a girl. Dark hair, wearing no clothes just like Sam Betts had been. She was spread out atop the loo.

And her belly had been opened up.

Brian looked away, composed himself, then looked back at the girl.

Her eyes were gone, just like Sam Betts. Looked like a few areas of her intestines had been nicked, too. He leaned down. Crouched down, trying not to inhale, doing all he could to avoid the stench that powered through the Vaseline he’d spread on his upper lip to dampen the smell.

He saw the hole where the girl’s stomach was missing.

He stepped back. Shook his head.

“Looks like our killer,” he said.

Brad just nodded. Nodded and stared.

Brian stepped away from the cubicle door. Looked around at the smeared blood on the mirrors, on the floor.

“Want me to call forensics?”

Brian stopped. Stared right at the red stains on the mirror. “Yeah. Get CCTV looked at too. There has to be something here. This place, it’s no Westhaven Road.”

“In what sense?”

Brian moved his hand towards the blood on the mirror, came close to touching it, trying his best not to look at the dead Janie Doe in the toilet behind him. “It’s theatrical. There’s more… more of a show to this killing. Not just the blood on the mirrors, the mess made, but the location. A shopping mall. The killer, he has to have been seen. He has to be on CCTV at some point. A man walking in and out of the ladies, that—”

“What makes you so convinced it’s a man?” Brad asked.

Brian looked back at the girl. “The marks. They add up with rape.”

“But we’ve no semen. So our ‘man’ is still just a ‘killer’ for now.”

Brian nodded just to humour Brad. “So on Wednesday, someone kidnaps Sam Betts from the dirt track off Westhaven Road. Body only found Friday. And then today, Saturday, we find this Janie Doe’s body. We need to check missing persons out again.”

“Carter’s already on it,” Brad said. His phone rang. He fumbled it out of his pocket. “Yeah, hello?”

Brian did all he could to dull down his senses, his reactions, and he took another look around the room. At the sticky blood on the mirrors, circling around the plughole. At the trail of blood that had poured out of the poor kid and onto the tiles of the bathroom. This had to have happened last night. Last night, when nobody else was around. Or someone would have reported it yesterday.

But had it happened here? Or had it happened somewhere else and the killer had moved the body?

He looked back at her. Back through the cubicle door, which didn’t have a smidgen of blood on it. Back at the poor girl’s terrified expression, the way her tongue dangled between her teeth, some of which were still little milk ones.

Her brown hair resting atop her ear.

Her earring …

“The piercing,” Brian said.

He turned and looked at Brad, who had just put his phone away. “Brian, we—”

“The piercing,” Brian said. “Sam… Sam Betts had a piercing missing. And so too does this girl. Look at her ear—it looks like the piercing’s been torn out of her. Which—”

“Brian, you need to—”

“The killer, he must collect them. Collect piercings. Some part of his sick game or… or trophies, I don’t know. But they’ve both had jewellery taken away. We need to find that jewellery. We need to—”

“Brian, the DNA from the bloody coat has come back.”

Brian’s thoughts and speculations froze right there. “The coat? The one from the dirt track?”

Brad stared at him blankly. Nodded once.

“And?”

A pause from Brad. A longer stare.

“We’ve got a match. And it’s not Sam Betts’ blood.”

Anticipation fluttered around Brian’s belly. He stepped closer to Brad. “Then whose is it?”

Brad looked over at the cubicle. Looked at the girl, torn apart as she rested on the toilet seat.

“Blood belongs to Beth Turner,” he said. “Aged eleven. Reported missing first thing this morning.”

Brian’s stomach sank as he turned and looked at the dead girl on the toilet.

“Think we’d better pay the Turners a visit, then.”

The Turners were already standing outside their front door when Brian and Brad arrived at their house.

They lived in a nice little detached house around Woodplumpton. A fair way from Westhaven Road and the dirt track where Sam Betts was found. The lounge looked warm and homely with an artificial fire flickering away, photographs of Beth Turner lining the marble mantlepiece. A flickering, soundless television played muted images in the background. The smell of burned toast wafted in from the kitchen.

Abigail Turner sat on the edge of her blue leather sofa sniffing and crying while Tony Turner held his arm around her shoulder. She was a big woman, with short dark hair and freckled cheeks. She wore a blue shirt and grey jogging bottoms, while her husband was a slight man with a bald head and a ginger beard that wrapped around his face. He had on a burgundy v-neck T-shirt that looked a few sizes too small for him, and blue jeans with little rips and tears in.

“We just thought… we just thought she was at Jenny’s,” Abigail said, lips quivering, words blubbering out. “They—they had an inset day yesterday. An inset day and… and she stayed at Jenny’s last night. And I just… we just thought she was still there. She sometimes does that. Doesn’t answer her phone. You know what kids are like. We got worried when we didn’t hear from her though. She always texts us when she’s coming home but… but… we rang Jenny’s parents and they said she’d not stayed there after all. She’d never even been round.”

Abigail descended into another fit of tears. Her husband rubbed her back.

Brian tried his best to hold as neutral and professional face as possible, but doing so was proving hard considering how damned sorry he felt for this couple. “Bridgemore High had an inset day yesterday?”

Abigail sobbed some inaudible words. Tony frowned and shook his head. “Bridgemore? No, I… I think it was just Our Lady’s.”

“Wait—so Beth wasn’t a Bridgemore student?” Brad asked.

More blubbering from Abigail. Another shake of the head from Tony.

Great. So Sam Betts and Beth Turner went to different schools. Which ruled out creepy teachers. Unless a supply teacher was involved.

And shit. Andy Wilkinson just so happened to have history as a supply teacher…

“When was the last time you heard from your daughter?” Brian asked. He looked at both Tony and Abigail.

Tony scratched at his torn blue jeans. “Yesterday morning. Friday morning. She—she got the bus to Jenny’s. Me and Abi were working so we couldn’t take her. But we gave her the money.”

“And what did she have to say?”

Tony looked at his wife then up at the police. “We—we wanted to know she was okay. She said she was. That was it. But… but she said something. Something about her—her bus breaking down. Said she was—was gonna have to walk part of the way to Jenny’s. And we worried. We worried but… but then she said she was okay. She said she was okay.”

Brian and Brad exchanged a glance as they stood there in the middle of the small living room, neighbours twitching curtains outside.

“Which bus is this?” Brian asked.

Tony shook his head. “I, er… Bus twenty-two. I think.”

“Goes from here through Broughton then right down the A6,” Brad chipped in. “And what about Jenny? Where does Jenny live?”

Through her sobs, Abigail said, “Fulwood. She—Plungington side. Ashton. With the terraced houses.”

“And did Jenny tell you where the bus broke down?”

Abigail and Tony both shook their heads, both held each other close.

Brian crouched down beside them. “We’ll have someone have a word with Jenny and her family. In the meantime, it’d be really appreciated if you… if you just took some time to rest. And then when… when you’re ready, we’d like you to come down to the station. To, erm… to formerly identify your daughter.”

Abigail looked at Brian with red, tear-drenched eyes. A look that cut him deep. “Do you have children, detective?”

Brian felt a tensing in his chest. Davey, and then the new kid. The new kid Hannah had on the way. “Yes,” he said. “I… I have two.”

“Then you’ll know how impossible it is to go down there and see our daughter in… in that state.”

Brian stared into Abigail’s eyes a bit longer. Looked at Tony, who didn’t give anything away.

Then he patted them both on their hands and stepped away.

“I’m sorry for your loss. I really am,” he said.

He caught a glance of the photographs as he started to walk away. Saw Beth’s smiley, cheeky face, and the purple earrings in her ears.

“Did Beth wear her earrings when you last saw her?”

Abigail smiled. “The—the little purple ones? Course. She… she went everywhere in those. Everywhere.”

Brian stared at the photograph. Remembered the way one of the purple earrings had been torn from Beth’s ears as she lay on that toilet. Remembered Sam Betts’ missing piercing, too.

“Thanks,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”

And then together with Brad, the pair of them walked out of the front door and the flurry of nosey neighbours disappeared behind their curtains once again.

“What do you think?” Brad asked.

Brian leaned against the passenger window. Watched as the trees went by, as kids played in Woodplumpton Primary School, blissfully unaware of the horrors surrounding them. He saw those children and then he saw eleven-year-old Sam Betts and Beth Turner in his mind, mutilated and butchered beyond comprehension.

He saw them and he wondered how he’d ever bring another kid into a world as nasty as this.

“The bus twenty-two. Wait for details on where it broke down yesterday. Then we search around there for any signs—CCTV, witness reports, anything that might give us an idea where Beth Turner went missing.”

“Something else is bothering you, isn’t it?”

Brian took a glance at Brad as he drove the car. Saw him looking at him with that side-look of his. That hawk-eyed vision that seemed to spot human feelings like an x-ray machine traced a broken bone.

“This fucking vanilla air freshener of yours is the problem,” Brian said, hitting the awful strong piece of card out of his face.

“And you’re sure that’s all?” Brad asked.

Brian started to nod. Started to carry on with the lie.

And then some other words he wasn’t expecting slipped out of his mouth.

“Hannah’s pregnant.”

There was a momentary pause from Brad. And then a whistle. “Wow. Congratulations, I guess. You look delighted.”

“Yeah yeah,” Brian said. “Quit with the sarcasm. It’s a disaster. A complete disaster. There was me thinking Hannah was screwing some bloody fitness coach of hers and all along the problem’s been that she’s bloody pregnant.”

“Again, don’t be too enthusiastic,” Brad said. “Let’s save the party for when the cheery little nipper’s born.”

Brad shook his head. “You don’t understand. But why would you? You don’t have kids.”

“I have a kid.”

Brian turned around. Looked at Brad to see if he had his usual smile on his face. But no. He had his eyes firmly fixed on the road. Deadly serious.

“My bad,” Brian said. “Never knew.”

“Got a girl pregnant when I was eighteen. She wanted to keep it, I wanted to get rid. Whole life ahead of me, I thought. Didn’t want to bog myself down in serious relationships or kids or anything like that.”

“You’ve not changed much since you were eighteen then.”

Brad ignored Brian. “The girl, Sammy, she was understanding. Too understanding. And her parents were rich so they supported her. And I moved city anyway.”

“Everything wrong with young fathers. Never thought you had it in you.”

“I sometimes wonder, you know? Wonder how the kid’s doing. Wonder if they even know I’m … yeah. You get the picture.”

Brian didn’t add a witticism to this. He wanted to break through the awkward as shit silence that had formed between him and Brad, but he couldn’t think of what to say. He could only think of Hannah. Think of the way she’d told him she was pregnant. And he could only think of what was going through her mind when she told him. Did she want to keep the kid? Or was she just negative because she knew Brian wouldn’t want to?

The thoughts went on like this until Brian’s phone buzzed against his leg.

It was a welcome break through the silence. He pulled it out of his pocket. Put the phone to his ear. “McDone speaking.”

“Brian.” It was DC Arif, and from the sounds of things he was munching some crisps. “Did a check on that bus twenty-two for you.”

Stomach tensed. “And?”

More crunching. “No record of it breaking down at all.”

“Fuck,” Brian said.