Laughing Boy (18 page)

“When we identify the latest victim we might have
something
to go on,” Dave said.

“Yes, but we might not,” I argued. “It’s looking as if she’s a prostitute that he picked up on a street corner. I’m not an
expert but I suspect that he didn’t normally go with prossies. I’ll ask Adrian about that.”

“If he did he might not have turned to murder,” Maggie interrupted.

“Perhaps not, but he did. We’ve asked everyone in Halifax, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford and Greater Manchester to hang on to their CCTV tapes for Friday night. When we learn where her patch was we can have a look at them, but it’s a long shot, and we can’t afford to wait.”

“So what do you have in mind?” Dave asked.

“Going on TV again,” I told him. “Another appeal. Ostensibly to try to trace the latest victim, but I leak out that we know he did the London murders. He wrote to one of the SIOs after them, so maybe we can get him writing to me. What do you think?”

“Worth a try, I suppose,” Dave muttered. Displays of enthusiasm from him have all the substance of desert
showers
, but this was more like snowfall on Mercury.

“Well don’t blow a gasket,” I said.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Maggie said. “And it might check his momentum. He’s due to kill again in a week or so, maybe if you give him something to think about he’ll delay things.”

“That’s what I hoped,” I agreed.

Dave looked thoughtful. After a few seconds he said: “When I suggested that he lived in Birmingham I wasn’t exactly joking.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“It’s possible that he drove a hundred miles south to do the first murders and now he’s driving a hundred miles north.”

“Yep, makes sense.”

“OK. So how about this: you make the appeal, but to start with it only goes out on YTV and BBC Look North. Then, if he sees it we’ll know he must live up here
somewhere
.
If there’s no response from him put it out nationwide in a day or two.”

“Good idea. So you’re agreed it makes sense?”

“Yep.”

“Yes.”

“Right. The papers will pick it up but we’ll have at least twenty-four hours. You go see the press office, Maggie, and ask them to arrange it, if possible for tonight. Dave, you join the hunt to identify victim four, bearing in mind what I said about links. That’s got to be top priority. Meanwhile, I’ll notify the boss of what we’re doing and compose my speech.”

I spent a couple of hours reading reports then went for a walk through town to clear my head. I met Jeff Caton in the yard, on his way back from interviewing the man at the
centre
of Wednesday’s racial attack. “Can we keep it out of the papers, Jeff?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he replied. “He’s playing the aggrieved hero. He has a defensive wound to his right hand which is genuine enough – he might lose the use of a couple of fingers – but the rest of it is decidedly fishy. There were four of them, he says, Pakistanis armed with knives, and he’s given detailed descriptions of them all, right down to the makes of their trainers. He bravely fought them off but was injured in the process.”

“Any witnesses?”

“His wife.”

“Do we know him?”

“Yeah. Paul Usher, aged twenty-eight. He’s been through the washing machine more times than a pub tea towel. All petty theft. He hangs around with younger kids, hasn’t ever grown up.”

“OK, keep on it.”

“What about you? Anything new?”

“No, but I might be on TV tonight.”

I walked into town, down the High Street and through the mall, stopping to look at trainers in a few shop windows. The weather had settled into a routine of cold, bright
mornings
and rainy afternoons, confusing the plants and the birds because they don’t have calendars. Town was busy, as it always is, crowded with people, mainly couples, out
shopping
or meeting friends. Dress code for the day was shell suits for the men, fleece jackets for the women. I walked down the middle of the precinct, coat open, feeling the cool air on my stomach and hands. I like the cold. The buildings in that part of town are shops with living quarters and store rooms above them, built in Victorian times. I looked up, admiring the ornate stone and brickwork, wondering how they did it. Stone could be carved on the job, but bricks in special shapes, with curves and angles, would have to be
purpose-designed
and manufactured elsewhere. So was it all laid out on the floor first to make sure it fit together? I don’t know, they were much cleverer than me. There were
parapets
around the roofs where a man could hide. A man with a gun. I scanned them as I walked, squinting into the bright sky. Last year somebody took a contract out on me. £50,000, for me dead. Is he still out there somewhere, watching and waiting? I doubt it, but I like to imagine he is. Anything is better than indifference.

I bought a mug of coffee and ham sandwich with plenty of French mustard and sat at a pavement table to eat it. A couple of retired officers saw me and we exchanged
greetings
. It’s hard to go anywhere without meeting someone from the job, usually retired. I watched the people go by and thought about what I might say on the TV. Heckley is not a prosperous town, the good days went long ago, and they were only good for the fortunate few. But it’s a friendly town. The people are ugly and overweight and speak in a
vernacular
as hard and abrasive as the millstone grit that tops the hills. But they hold doors open for you, and say “good morning” whether you know them or not, and if there is a
mistake in your change it’s just as likely to be in your favour as theirs.

And one of them kills people. Over the road from where I was sitting was a small patch of lawn with a couple of
statues
. A yellow council van drove over the block paving that designated the pedestrianised area and a workman extricated a lawnmower from the back of it. I watched him go through his routine: fit the grass box; remove fuel filler-cap and check the level. He gave the machine a shake to disturb the surface of the fuel and make it easier to see. Apparently there was enough in because he replaced the cap and
produced
the string that he used to start it. He wound it round and round a pulley and gave it a sharp pull. There was a
handle
, probably just a piece of wood, on the end of the string to make it easier to grip. The engine coughed but didn’t start. He repeated the procedure and was lucky second time. Within seconds he was following the mower across the grass, barely able to keep up with it. The smell of
newly-mown
grass laced with two-stroke fumes and atomised dog turds is not my favourite perfume, so I finished my coffee and went back to the office.

We met on neutral ground, at Millgarth police station in Leeds, in a lecture theatre that they use for press
conferences
. YTV and the BBC co-operated fully with us and each other, agreeing to share the film, which meant that there were only two cameramen and one producer present. No press had been invited, so there’d be no questions. This was a straightforward statement and request for assistance. Our press officer was with me, and we’d prepared the statement together. I was told I could have three minutes.

I talked about the body that Gina had found on the edge of the moors, because this was the reason I’d put forward for the broadcast. We’d supplied an artist’s impression of the woman and photos of her clothes and jewellery, which would be shown on the screen as I spoke. I told the viewers
that she was the fourth murder that we believed had been committed by the same person and it was imperative that we find out who she was so we could bring her killer to justice.

“And now,” I said, “I’d like to end on a more personal note. These deaths are a tragedy for the victims and their families, as we can all imagine, but the ripples spread much further than that. The latest body was found by a
seventeen-year-old
schoolgirl who had gone up on to the moor to feed some neglected ponies. She’s that sort of kid. Someone any parent would be proud of, but now traumatised by what she saw up there. And it’s not easy for my officers, either, and the back-up staff who are called to the scene of each crime. They have wives and families but they can’t go home and talk about their day’s work. So we have our own techniques for handling the pressure. For instance, the first three
murders
in this sequence were designated X, Y and Z, ostensibly to avoid confusion but also to remove the human aspect from the cases. We have to be dispassionate, but it isn’t always easy. There is no escaping that X, Y and Z were real people who had died in horrible ways. So, if you can
identify
this woman, or have your suspicions about someone you know, please ring the number that will be shown at the end of this broadcast.

“And finally,” I went on, “I’d like to appeal to the killer himself. So far we have received dozens of letters and calls purporting to be from you. If you do contact us, please give us some code word so we can more easily identify your approaches. It goes without saying that you need help and should give yourself up before you create more misery for yourself and others. Thank you.”

Phone calls started coming in almost immediately and the letters began to arrive on Wednesday morning. Two names were suggested for the victim several times, and both were probably right. Ladies of the night often give themselves new, more erotic identities, so chances were that Naomi
Huntley and Norma Holborn were the same person. What you knew her as depended on the nature of your relationship with her, and the several men who identified her as Naomi had a marked reluctance to leave their own names.

All the mail was taken straight to the incident room. I’d supplied them with photocopies of the envelope received by the Hatfield SIO, in which the murderer had claimed the XYZ killings, and they had strict orders to look out for something similar. It arrived by the second post.

I dashed down when they rang me, closely followed by Dave. It was a long white self-sealing envelope, with the address typed slightly cock-eyed in Courier script, probably by a computer printer. “Just leave it there,” I said, “until forensic have had a look at it.”

Two hours later one of them, wearing latex gloves and a surgeon’s mask, slit the envelope open with a scalpel and extracted the single sheet of A4 it contained. She unfolded it using a pair of tweezers and the blunt end of the scalpel and held it down on the desk. I peered over her shoulder,
holding
my breath, but I couldn’t make out the words and didn’t want to go any closer.

“Could you read it, please,” I asked, and she did. It said:

I asked her to repeat it while I wrote it down. We’d have copies made but first the boffins would go over it with an electron microscope. If he’d as much as exhaled on the paper they’d find evidence of it.

“XYZ – so it’s definitely from him,” Dave said.

“You bet.”

“Who’s the Property Developer?”

“He is, he’s the Property Developer.”

“Which means what?”

“I don’t know.” I’d wanted more, not some enigmatic nonsense that probably had no intellectual foundation.

“So what’s he saying?”

“I don’t know!” I spun round, away from them, resisting the temptation to smash my fist down on a desk. “He’s laughing at us,” I shouted. “The bastard’s laughing at us.”

“Sorry,” Dave said, “but you didn’t expect his name and address, did you?”

“I don’t know what I expected.”

“Look at it this way, Charlie,” Dave went on. “He’s
talking
to you. That’s got to be an improvement, hasn’t it?”

We took mouth swabs from everybody we spoke to about the case. If you had a white pickup, or were in the vicinity of any of the murders, or came forward for any reason
whatsoever
, we asked you for either a mouth swab or six hair roots. “For elimination purposes only,” of course. We had nothing to compare them with, so far, but when we had we’d be
prepared
.

Dave went to Leeds University with photographs and photocopies of both the envelopes and letters that the Property Developer had sent us. Graphology is the study of handwriting, but lexicography is slightly different and more scientific. It is the study of the content of a piece of writing, of the words and what they say, rather than the shape of the letters. We had no handwriting because the notes were typed on a word processor, but we did have a small amount of
content
. Small amounts of anything were gratefully received and analysed to destruction. He took them to the English department to let the experts have a look.

Letters and calls came flooding in after the appeal went out nationwide, but Dave’s idea had paid off. Laddo’s reply came after the local TV broadcast, so he must live in the North of England. This was another piece of near-worthless
information that would confirm how clever we were, after some rookie PC had arrested him for peeing in the street and found his mask and club in his car boot. That’s how he’d be caught, because that’s where all the real policing is done: out on the streets, by the boys and girls in uniform. I had three days in the office, looking at reports, sifting information, typing names into HOLMES, checking for matches. A few came up. The trouble with requests for information is that they declare an open season for
grudge-bearers
. Noisy neighbours, the mentally impaired and the bloke at the office who was having it away with someone’s wife all had the finger pointed at them by concerned
members
of the public, and we had to check every one.

A pair of Adidas Ballistics were what I finally decided on. Big Geordie took the team on training spins in the park but I elected not to join them. It would have looked bad if the press had seen us out
en bloc
, enjoying ourselves, so I trained alone. I was all in favour of the efforts we were making for several reasons. Ostensibly we were doing it for the retina blastoma unit, but, as with all these things, we’d be the ones who benefited most. It kept up the team’s morale, and
exercise
, the harder the better, is the finest antidote to stress and depression yet discovered.