Keeping (5 page)

Oliver blinked, attention still on the crumbs. He seemed lost elsewhere, seeing something other than those crumbs. “Being bathed.”

A frisson of unease snuck up Langham’s spine. Something was off here, he sensed it. Being bathed meant—

“Bathed by that man,” Oliver said.

Shit. He’d known they had a whacko on their hands, but Christ, if that killer was bathing them, washing them…

Oliver cleared his throat. Stared at the crumbs as though each one of them meant something, formed some kind of pattern that only he could read. “The man who…”

The man who’s taking the women.

“In bleach,” Oliver said.

“What the fuck?” Langham blurted, dropping the last bite of cookie. “Jesus fuck— Sorry. Sorry. Go on.” He resisted asking questions.
Where is she? What does he look like? When was she taken? How long ago was she taken? Has he treated her okay?
He almost laughed at that. Bathing her in bleach was a good indication the man wasn’t right in the damn head.

“It stinks—of two things,” Oliver said. “The bleach is strong—I’d say he uses the undiluted kind, you know, the thick stuff, and lots of it. Plus, she shit herself.”

“I’m sure any woman would be frightened.”

It wasn’t unknown for a person to crap themselves in certain situations. Their bodies had a mind of their own when fear came into play. The person’s usual hold on their functions went out of the bloody window. Piss, shit, vomit, Langham had seen evidence of it all.

“Yes, she literally
shit
herself,” Oliver said.

“Oh. Fuck.”

“That’s why she was in the bath. He took her from the Morrison’s field—she can’t remember when, said time has gone skewed—that he stabbed her dog then forced her into his car. She can’t remember what type, just that it’s brown.”

Things were starting to make sense. He’d wondered where some of the dogs had gone from the previous cases. The man clearly liked the idea of getting rid of two bodies, one with skin, the other with fur. Did that have some significance? Did the woman
have
to have a dog with them in order for him to approach them? If that were true, that was something, at least. Women who didn’t walk dogs were safe, but he couldn’t totally rule out that they weren’t until he had more information.

Before he could stop himself, Langham said, “What does he look like? Where did he take her?”

“She doesn’t know. He drugged her. She wasn’t with it for the whole journey, mainly spent it with her eyes closed. She’d tried to work out where he was taking her by judging the turns he took, but she went spaced out and lost track. As for what he looks like… He wore a mask. One of those latex things. Dark peach with wrinkles all over it, except the cheeks are smooth. She remembered thinking that was weird. It’s got eye holes, so she could see his eyes. Green, dark green.”

“A mouth hole?” Langham sipped his tea, trying not to lean forward, invade Oliver’s space, put pressure on him.

“Yeah, like a scream, like someone’s screaming. Wonky.” Oliver closed his eyes.

Langham held his breath, waiting for the images to fill Oliver’s mind. That was a recent development, Oliver being able to see—or rather, know things. He’d said it was like an information dump, data swooping into his head so that he just knew, as though someone had told him. Langham had to admit that Oliver’s talent progressing was a godsend. With the Sugar Strands case it had just been words spoken by the dead, none of this seeing things shit, but now, having Oliver being able to literally watch what had gone on, yeah, that was a massive bonus. Like having an eye witness.

Oliver shuddered. “Shit, it isn’t nice. The eye holes sort of droop down, like one of those Hush Puppy dogs, and the mouth is the same, except it’s a sideways version. He has pink lips, dark pink—no idea whether he wears lipstick or what—and blond stubble, like, a day or two’s worth. Possibly from him being too lazy to shave, but I get the impression he prefers it like that. Makes him feel manly, less of a kid—and that’s a key point. He doesn’t want to feel like a kid.”

This was good, a major breakthrough. But what did that mean? Were they dealing with a youth? It wasn’t unheard of that teenagers or those just entering manhood killed, but to such a degree… Shit, were they dealing with someone who’d just gone out on a whim to kill before he’d nurtured his needs like other serial killers usually did? Or had he been having thoughts of killing like this since he’d been a young kid? What sobering thoughts. Damn scary ones too.

“He’s…young,” Oliver said. “I get the sense he’s no more than twenty-five to thirty.”

“Jesus,” Langham breathed.

To find out a serial killer was so adept at that age was frightening. If they never found him, if he continued on this path, the man would grow in confidence to such a degree that his acts might become unparalleled by the time he hit forty. A force to be reckoned with.

A force Langham intended to stop before it got any stronger.

“So, like I said,” Oliver went on. “He jabbed her with something sharp, and it made her woozy. Got to rewind a second… Jabbed her at the bloody dog-walking field. She couldn’t walk. He dragged her through the forest to his car—he parks it on the other side of the woods—shoved her on the back seat. She wanted to call out but couldn’t speak, like her mouth wasn’t working properly. She couldn’t get up, couldn’t move.”

Langham gritted his teeth. A sharp pain shot up into his head so he relaxed his jaw. Took another sip of tea while jotting down notes. So this man had access to drugs, needles. Was he a doctor? Langham wrote down that he’d need to take a look at how long it took for someone to become a doctor, what the youngest age was. Or was he an assistant, some bloke who worked in a doctor’s office or hospital?

Oliver sniffed. “She wasn’t sure how long they’d traveled, and like I said before, she lost track of where they might be going, and by the time they arrived at his place she couldn’t open her eyes. I get the feeling like they were glued shut, but they weren’t. It was just the drug doing its thing. He got her out of the car, put her over his shoulder.”

So he had no restrictions? He could just take people to his place without worrying someone might see? Did he live out in the sticks, then? Somewhere like Dorton, a sleepy village where no one saw much after nine o’clock because they were sequestered behind their closed curtains, sitting on couches too engrossed in what was on TV for them to see anything else? Langham jotted that down. So many bloody questions, the answers remaining elusive. Fuck, he needed more.

“And then?” Langham prompted quietly.

“She remembered the sound of his feet and the feeling of going upwards, up some stairs—lots of stairs.”

Apartment, a flat. So not somewhere like Dorton then. Who the fuck has the balls to cart someone into a flat? What kind of monster are we dealing with here?

He thought about the apartments and flats in the city—too many of them to count. Shit, he had a hard task ahead trying to narrow the possible locations down.

Oliver continued, “She’s slept on and off since. Then she woke needing the toilet but couldn’t move again. Tried to call out but couldn’t speak. So she had to shit and piss herself. After that, he’d told her to have a bath, said if she thought about escaping it’d be pointless because they were several floors up.”

Damn excellent information.

“She fell asleep in the bathroom, and when she woke up she was naked, in the bath, and he was…he was washing her. I can see him doing it—well, just his hand. Freckles on the fingers, hairs stopping at the wrist—and it doesn’t look or feel to me like he gets off on that. She doesn’t interest him sexually. She’s just someone he needed to wash, make sense?” Oliver rested his cheek on his hand, eyes still closed.

Yeah, that made sense. The previous women hadn’t been sexually molested. They hadn’t struggled during an attack. No scratches or bruises on their bodies, other than on one woman, and that bruise had been old, yellowed from the passage of time. She hadn’t been missing long—what was her name again?—so she’d hurt herself long before she’d been abducted. Their fingernails had been pristine. None of the victims had fibers of any kind on them. If they’d had any prior to being dumped, the stream had merrily jostled along and swept them away.

Oliver’s breathing was growing heavier.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Langham said gently. “Try for more. If you can’t see more, feel more, try and think if she told you anything else.”

“She…she said he’s soft-spoken, like his voice is a woman’s.”

Oh dear Christ. An out and out nutter.

“Calls her a good girl. Strokes her cheek. A lot.” Oliver sighed, the exhalation rippling as he shuddered. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” He sat up, bleary-eyed, then stood. “I need a damn Coke.”

He looked wretched. Fucking wretched.

Langham watched him leave the room, wishing Oliver didn’t have to go through this crap but glad he did at the same time. Selfish, he knew, wanting Oliver to see and hear things when it distressed him so much, but his information was so needed at the moment. He wondered something then. If Oliver could switch it off, block them out, would Langham be happy about that?

He jumped up, leaving his office to stop himself going deeper with that. Strode past Oliver at the vending machine. “Come by when you’re ready.”

In the main room, he walked through, waving his notes. “Incident room, everyone. We have one hell of a bloody break. Oliver’s here.”

Heads snapped up. Papers shuffled. Chairs scraped back. The air changed, charged now, everyone knowing that with the mention of Oliver, things had been taken to a new level.

Everyone except Higgings.

“Oliver?” the young officer asked.

“You’ll learn, son,” Langham said. “You’ll learn.”

Chapter Four

Langham studied Higgings with wry amusement. The officer, so new to this, Langham doubted he’d even seen half the shite the other officers had seen yet, stood at the back of the room behind the rows of chairs and watched everyone with an expression of stunned wonderment. The young man’s cheeks were ruddy, and his eyes darted about here, there and every-bloody-where. His jaw was slack, tongue slightly protruding, and if Langham didn’t know better, he’d say the man was in a state between panic and shock. Cornered, almost. Like he didn’t know what to do for the best, that he had no purpose or wasn’t sure what his role was.

What is he doing on my team again? Who put him in with us?

There was a buzz in the air, people hyped up, on the verge of getting another bite of information from Oliver. The last snippet had been similar to what Langham had just been told. One of the previous women had managed to contact Oliver while she’d been held captive and on drugs, communicating with him between bouts of being out for the count. It had led nowhere, yielded no clues other than her abductor was administering ‘medicine’ via syringe and stroking her cheek. She’d gone quiet after contacting Oliver twice, and Oliver had held out hope that she’d get hold of him again. She hadn’t. Then her body—or Langham had assumed it was her body—had been found in the stream. He could only hope this latest information didn’t fizzle out the same way—that Cheryl’s life wasn’t fizzled out.

He shifted his gaze from Higgings and found a spot on the far wall, zoning out while everyone settled themselves. The shuffle of notebook pages, the pop of pen lids being pulled off, and the scrape of those infernal metal chair legs on the floor faded into the background.

Those women had been a hard sight to come to terms with. The killer had draped a couple of them over outcropping boulders in the deepest parts of the stream, their feet and heads in the water, their backs curved. From his vantage point on the bank he’d likened them to islands in the stream—the island their pasty-white bodies hued with a gray tinge. The body parts in the water had looked as though the skin would split any second from the pressure of bloating. And that skin hadn’t been white. Burgundy, purple, plum and dark blue, that’s what it had been, like humungous bruises that would hurt if pressed. When the white tents had been erected, the photographers had been and gone, and forensics had picked over the surrounding area, Langham had returned to watch every one of those women being removed from their final resting places. Some of them had been there a while, faces ballooned, a sick parody of what they’d looked like in life. Eyes missing, some skin sucked on by fishes and whatever the hell else resided in the water. Langham had been hard pressed not to puke. He’d thought himself hardened to sights like that, but shit, he’d been wrong.

A sharp bang of the door slamming shut snapped him out of his reverie. He blinked and stared at Villier, who glared back as though he’d purposely called a meeting and hadn’t told her. She’d been out and about—bullying people for information, he suspected, what she did best—and he was glad she’d returned in time, if only to save himself the hassle of bringing her up to date with a one-on-one chat later. He hated those. She always interrupted. Then again, she always interrupted in here too, so what the hell difference did it make whether she attended incident room meetings or not?

“Right,” he said, looking at everyone in one sweep then stopping on Higgings, who had remained standing at the back. “Oliver has some information, so as he explains I’ll write it up on the white board.”

Oliver stood from his front row seat and ran a hand through his mussed hair. He appeared tired, worn out from being in contact with Cheryl then getting all that data dumped in his head. The dark circles beneath his eyes seemed more pronounced than they had been ten minutes ago, and two deep gouges bracketed the sides of his mouth where his lips were downturned. Langham shook his head a bit, a private moment of wishing his lover didn’t have to go through this bollocks, then turned away to lug the white board across and select a black marker pen. Best to remain in work mode. Business and pleasure never did mix well. Oil and water.

“Sir?” Higgings said.

Langham swiveled to face him. “Yes?”

“Oliver’s that bloke in the newspaper, is he?” Higgings blushed and shifted from foot to foot. “I mean, I’ve been listening and—”