The Murder Code (17 page)

You haven’t found most of them yet.

H
ALF AN HOUR AFTER
reading the second letter, Laura and I were seated in a suite in the IT department.

It was a long, narrow room that reminded me of a university computer lab—rows of benches covered with terminals, interspersed with bulky printers, photocopiers and cabinets full of spare cables and hard drives. It was lit, dimly, by the thin remains of daylight coming through the open slatted blinds, and it smelled of carpet cleaner and electricity, like ozone in the air before it rains.

We were sitting at one of the terminals with a techie called Garretty, waiting as he took all the necessary precautions with the item the killer had sent along with his second letter.

A CD.

I could sense Laura fidgeting beside me: biting her fingernails and shifting slightly on her office chair, rotating it back and forth with her heel. I was doing my best to keep still. Inside, though, I was doing the same.

‘Maybe it’ll be music,’ I tried. ‘We can get him for copyright infringement too.’

Laura gave me an awkward smile. I returned it.

Of course, both of us had a good idea of what we were going to find on the disc. There wasn’t much it
could
be other than a recording of some kind. Audio, photo or—God help us—video. Given the nature of the crime scenes so far, I imagined neither of us was looking forward to that. I certainly wasn’t.

At the same time, I kept telling myself, it was more evidence. He might have slipped up. However horrible it was, there might be some detail that would prove his undoing. That was the hope here. Pretty much the only thing to cling to.

‘We’ve got a single file,’ Garretty said.

‘Just one?’

‘There are the usual extraneous files you’d expect to find on a CD, but only one has been written to the disc by the user. It’s non-rewritable, so he couldn’t have deleted or added anything after recording it. MPEG encoding.’

‘MPEG?’ Laura said.

I nodded, feeling grim. ‘It’s a video.’

‘Christ.’

Under normal circumstances, you could just open the file and let it play. Under these, the techie was using various programs to deal with it. These machines were all secure environments, and the contents of the CD would be ghosted across into a virtual environment so as not to risk losing any data from the disc itself.

The internal safeguards would also take care of any malware the killer might have kindly thought to include—although I wasn’t expecting anything like that. Our man was clearly malicious, but for now, for some reason, I was prepared to take the letter at face value. He wanted us to know it was him. He wanted to give us some insight into what he was doing.

But could we take it at face value? Maybe it would be a mistake to do so—to believe a single word he’d written. The thing to remember was that ultimately he didn’t want to be caught, so whatever his claims, he wasn’t going to tell us anything that helped us.

That was what I’d normally think, anyway. But this guy felt different. Unless I was missing something, we weren’t particularly close to catching him: up until now, he’d been killing with relative impunity. Then there was the challenge implicit in his letters. And the crimes did seem to match what he was saying—that he was killing apparently at random, for some reason we couldn’t guess.

Or maybe I just wanted to believe there had to be something. Some reason for what he was doing.

He’s playing with you.

If so, he was doing it successfully.

‘Okay,’ Garretty said. ‘Let’s set it going.’

‘This is likely to be upsetting.’

It felt only fair to warn him, but he shrugged and clicked the mouse. ‘I’ll take a walk if I feel like it.’

The video began playing in a window that filled most of the computer screen. At the bottom, a bar tracked the time elapsed and remaining. It was clear from this that the file was just over seven minutes long.

‘Hand-held,’ Laura said.

I nodded. As the footage played, it was obvious the camera was in someone’s hand: the view was moving loosely and jerkily, tracking over blurred undergrowth, never settling long enough to make out any detail. The crunch of woodland underfoot came from the speakers. He was walking somewhere, dangling the camera by his side.

And then the sound fell away as the man drew to a halt and brought the camera up.

It showed a man lying on his back on the ground, surrounded by swirls of brambles and grass. The man wasn’t a derelict. He was wearing an old brown suit over a white shirt that had ridden up to reveal a pale stomach, heaving slightly from the heaviness of his breathing. From his face—eyes closed, mouth working soundlessly—he was clearly disorientated, although there was no clue what had happened to him. His grey hair was in disarray, some of it plastered to his forehead with sweat.

The camera moved in to get a good view of his face, then swung quickly away, and there was the familiar crunch of undergrowth as the man stepped back.

The view steadied again, then moved from side to side, as though the camera was shaking its head. Then it tilted forward so that the display now showed the entire body of the man a short distance in front.

Laura said, ‘He’s mounted it on a tripod.’

‘Yes. That he has,’

‘A short introduction to show the victim. Then mounting the camera to leave his hands free.’

‘At least it suggests he’s working alone,’ I said. As grim as I felt, I was trying to be professional and detached. ‘If he had a partner, the other guy could film it for him. Or vice versa.’

‘Do you think he filmed the others?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where is this?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

The view remained still—the victim just lying on his back, his stomach undulating, as though he was trying to be sick but couldn’t.

‘I don’t think it’s the woodland where Billy Martin encountered him,’ Laura said. ‘Certainly rural, though.’

I nodded. ‘Maybe north-east of the city? Lots of winding country roads out that way. Patches of forest and woodland in between them. Miles and miles of them, in fact.’

Laura didn’t reply.

I knew what she was thinking, though—that the area was huge, and we desperately needed a way to narrow it down. Because what the man had written in the letter was true: the man on the floor was a victim we didn’t know about yet.

The killer stepped into view.

Here he was, then. Walking across to the man lying on the floor. Billy Martin had seen him and lived. Several others—we didn’t even know how many—had seen him and died. And somewhere on our board of images, we had a blurred image of him visiting a postbox. But this was a clear sighting.

Aside from a pair of white trainers, he was dressed entirely in black: jeans and a rainproof jacket. A wool balaclava. Ski gloves. It was difficult to tell, but he appeared to be of medium height and build. Nothing exceptional. Without the mask and gloves, he wouldn’t have looked out of place on any street in the city.

Anybody. Nobody.

He was holding a white carrier bag in one hand. You couldn’t really tell what was inside, but I knew from the previous murders that it would be a hammer, and that something awful was about to happen.

And then it did.

Standing astride the prostrate man, the killer smacked him five times straight in the face with the bag. Mercifully, the detail was obscured by the quality of the footage. All you could really see was the man’s head bouncing repeatedly and his face turning steadily crimson. But the audio captured each wet collision.

‘Okay,’ Garretty said. ‘I’ll just take a walk now.’

‘You do that.’

I wished I could join him. We were only two minutes into the footage. There was—somehow—another five for us to sit through.

And we did.

We watched the killer use a screwdriver on the man’s lower stomach, stabbing at him like a sewing machine, and then we watched him standing on the wounds. He used the screwdriver on the remains of the victim’s face, avoiding his feeble attempts to hold his arm in front. The whole time, the soundtrack recorded an awful gargling as the man failed to breathe and scream properly through a nose and mouth that were no longer where or what they should have been.

Finally, the killer beat the man about the head with the hammer until his whole body had gone floppy. Even then, it was difficult to be certain he was dead.

The killer disappeared from view again, retreating behind the camera. The view held the unmoving body for a few more seconds, and then juddered as he lifted the camera from the tripod.

‘He’s made a snuff film,’ Laura said.

Her voice sounded odd.

I nodded. ‘Are you okay?’

‘No.’

‘No. Me neither.’

There was nothing else to say. But we watched for the final minute as he carried the camera over by hand, zooming in to create a full, horrific record of the injuries he’d inflicted. What was left of the man’s head wasn’t even recognisable as a human being any more: just something red staining the bright green grass.

‘Where is this?’ Laura said quietly.

‘I don’t know. We need to find it, though—’

But then the killer moved the camera away from the dead man in the grass and panned carefully across the land around him. And my skin, already shivery, became even colder.

Because there were other bodies lying nearby.

He panned over one, two, three …

Four.

Oh my God.

Five.

After pausing on the fifth additional body, the camera juddered again slightly and the file stopped, leaving us in silence.

‘Fuck,’ Laura said.

It was so soft, I barely heard it. I didn’t register how unlike her it was to swear. My thoughts were standing too still to let new ones through. The first one that made it was the realisation that our man had a killing spot. One that we hadn’t found.

One that, for all we knew, he was adding to right now.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We really need to find that.’

‘W
ELCOME TO THE DARK
room.’

‘The what?’ I said.

DS Renton closed the door to his ‘office’ behind us. Suddenly he looked a little embarrassed.

‘The dark room. It’s just what we call it, off the record. No windows, you see, and we always keep the blinds down on the door. Plus, you know, because of what we deal with in here.’

I looked around. ‘Good name.’

It was a small room, probably five metres by three. The only free wall space was to allow for the single door behind me; the rest was lined with shelves of computer equipment, reference books, files and binders, above a handful of desks and gently humming monitors. Cables snaked across the fuzzy, buzz-cut carpet.

This was the fabled LG15, then—the dark room—which everyone in the department knew of and hated the idea of visiting. Few ever had need to. It was the home of the specialised ‘live IT’ unit, dedicated to dealing with the murkier end of online investigations.

On the nearest wall there was something that looked like a CD rack, except the slots were slightly larger. Each one contained a naked metal hard drive with a label scrawled on in ballpoint pen. All names. Emily. Adam. Sally. Will. Every single one of the names represented a ‘child’—a false identity, routed separately, that could be used by DS Renton and his small, hand-picked team of officers in chat rooms and online discussions to infiltrate paedophile groups.

There were also rows of disks used to store conversations and—worse—back up the confidential data from investigations: photos and videos. In this room, images of all types were analysed, categorised, catalogued.

Important work, but difficult and hideous—and done down here, behind closed doors, in a basement room without windows. Officers who worked here were screened more strenuously than those licensed to carry automatic weapons, and underwent more frequent psychological reviews.

Renton sat down at a desk and motioned for me to join him on a chair beside him. As I sat, he tapped a few keys and brought the monitor to life.

‘I’ve received the file,’ he said. ‘Not had a chance to view it yet. Do you mind?’

‘Go ahead.’

There didn’t seem to be any point warning him, given the things he must have seen in his time.

He watched the video clip in silence. My own instinct was to look away, but instead, I watched it again, hoping to spot something I’d missed on first viewing. Some clue.

It was marginally easier to watch now I’d seen it once and knew what it contained, but still tough. What played out on the screen hit you in the heart as much as the head, or perhaps even somewhere deeper. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my time, but watching someone being killed was very different. The act was alien. How could someone do that? How could someone be so vicious and empty as to cause another human being such suffering?

Do you believe in evil?

Renton, meanwhile, was professional and detached, but even he wasn’t impervious. He was obviously troubled by what he was seeing—maybe the day you aren’t any more is the day you leave this place for your own sanity.

When the clip finished playing, he leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair.

‘Okay. Shit. Tell me more.’

‘What we have here is evidence from an ongoing investigation. This recording was made a few days ago—or at least that appears to be when the copy was created. We received it, with a letter, through the post. This man is still at large.’

‘This is … the guy?’

‘Yes, this is the guy. At present, we don’t know where this location is and we don’t know the identities of the six victims shown. Obviously, we very much want to.’

Renton blew out.

‘I can help you with that. Obviously we’ve done this sort of work before. The first thing we’ll do is pull out the helpful frames.’

Renton explained the process. What he and his colleagues would do was scan through the file meticulously, frame by frame, and make sure there was nothing we were missing. They would get the cleanest shots possible of the victims’ clothes. Coupled with missing persons data, that should enable us to identify them.