The 50/50 Killer Page 13

  But for now, at least, there was going to be no question where my loyalties would lie.

  ‘Obviously, I’ll follow your lead.’

  ‘Okay,’ Pete said. ‘Basically, our job is the same as it’s always been. We’re here to support him. One way or another, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to hope we can find these two people before dawn.’

  ‘Jodie and Scott,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Because Christ knows what it will do to him if we can’t.’

  We sat in silence for a moment longer, then Pete pushed his tray back and got to his feet. He looked tired.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘come on. Hard job done. Let’s get back to the easy stuff.’

  We all stood up, and as we did I heard a beeping. Pete took his pager off his belt, frowned at it for a second.

  ‘One of the vans.’ He inclined his head slightly, then glanced at me. ‘Your door team’s got something. A thousand pounds, wasn’t it, Greg? You’ll be wanting your chequebook.’

  3 DECEMBER

  10 HOURS, 50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  8.30 P.M.

  Scott

  It was an old building, and the space he was in was very confined. The walls to either side were made from big stone slabs, laid out in uneven rows, as though whoever had built it had done so with whatever rocks were close to hand. The place must have been abandoned for years, left to generations of spiders and ants. Season after season of dead leaves had blown in and rotted away to dust on the flagstones. The cobwebs on the ceiling were either thin and grey or else hanging down like dirty string.

  Scott had no idea what this place had been used for in its lifetime. Perhaps it had been an outhouse or a storeroom. Which would be fitting, as it was now being used to store him.

  If he leaned to either side, he could touch the wall with his shoulder, and despite the spiders, which were big and brown and ugly, he kept doing so. That and stretching his head to one side: trying to relieve the tension and cramp building in his neck and the muscles of his back.

  He was sitting on something, he couldn’t see what. His hands were cuffed, his forearms resting on his thighs. The man in the devil mask had tied rope round all four limbs at once, lashing him into place.

  His nose was running; he kept having to sniff. It was partly a result of the cold and partly because he kept crying. He couldn’t help it. Before today he’d thought of himself as strong and capable, but now he knew different. He was no hero; not as calm and collected as people seemed to feel in the movies.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  There had been anger to begin with, but not any more. Determined to free himself - to get to her - he had fought against his constraints as hard as he could, gritted his teeth and stretched as much as he could bear, but they were too well placed. The rage and hatred had swiftly given way to frustration.

  He was held firmly in place, utterly powerless.

  Panic and fear had set in; he had cried. It disgusted him, but he was so scared. He was at the mercy of the man in the devil mask and right now, his heart fluttering so quickly, he wanted to say the right thing, do whatever it took to get himself out of here.

  He would do anything.

  In front of him, the walls and ceiling continued for about two metres. Then there was an open doorway through which he could see the woods. The building was in a rough clearing.

  Out of sight, the man must have built a fire. Orange light flickered and danced on the ground, and he could hear the burning wood crackling and snapping. There was only a little heat from it, but when the wind shifted, smoke drifted across the doorway, full of softly illuminated texture.

  It had also started to snow. The light from the flames turned it into yellow blossom. It was already forming a thick carpet.

  He shivered, trembled. It was partly the cold and, again, partly not.

  Jodie, he thought. He couldn’t bear the thought of what might be happening to her.

  The man appeared in the doorway.

  Scott stopped thinking and tried to shuffle backwards. But there was nowhere to go. The man bent down and moved into the outhouse, kneeling down in front. Practically a silhouette, although the firelight gleamed off the edges of the mask, highlighting its crimson, beetle-like ridges.

  The man leaned his elbows on Scott’s knees and held two items up between them.

  In one hand, he had sheets of paper, stapled together.

  In the other, a screwdriver.

  ‘Shhhh,’ he said.

  Scott realised his breath was so quick that he could hear it coming out of him: bursts of breathlessness. He did his best to calm down and stop. He must do anything this man wanted.

  ‘We’re just going to talk a while,’ the man said. ‘You see what I have here? Before we left your house, do you remember what I did?’

  Scott couldn’t remember, although he desperately wished that he could.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was on your computer.’ He emphasised the sheets of paper slightly and seemed to be studying them intently. ‘I printed these. “Five Hundred Reasons Why I Love You”, it says. But there’s only two hundred and seventy four here. Why’s that?’

  The fire popped. Other than that, the world outside the storeroom was silent and still. For some reason, it felt important not to disturb that.

  ‘I’ve not finished yet,’ he whispered.

  ‘It was going to be a Christmas present?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s funny. A Christmas present for her. This.’ The man shook the papers. ‘This is a plaster for a gunshot wound. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, you don’t. But you will.’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  Scott’s voice broke slightly, and his vision blurred. Damn it. He didn’t want to cry in front of this man. He sniffed hard. The tears came regardless, and through them he saw the man watching him, pitiless, as though he was a specimen under a microscope. When he spoke, it was like the answer should have been obvious.

  ‘Because you have something I want, Scott.’

  He knows my name.

  The man held the papers out in front of him.

  ‘All this belongs to me now. It’s a burden for you, and I’m going to take it away. You should thank me.’

  Scott didn’t understand. He sniffed again, said nothing.

  ‘I imagine it was all done fairly randomly, but the first reason you’ve put down is interesting. Can you remember what it is? Think hard, now.’

  He remembered. Of course he did.

  His voice came out thick: ‘Something about how we met.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The man nodded. ‘“Number One”, it says. “We were so lucky to find each other.”’

  Scott took deep breaths and made an effort to stop crying.

  ‘What does that mean?’ the man said. ‘I want you to tell me about it.’

  ‘About how we met?’

  ‘Yes.’ He leaned a little closer and the light wormed around the contours of his mask. ‘Tell me about how lucky it was.’

  The message appeared on the screen without fanfare or warning. If he’d been typing his essay rather than surfing the internet, a pressed key would have instantly dismissed the small window and that would have been that. It would have flashed up, disappeared, and their lives would have been very different.

  They’d talked about that and laughed, looking into each other’s eyes. ‘Can you imagine how terrible it would have been if ... ?’ Later, he read somewhere that it was a standard early stage of a relationship, the ‘I might have never met you’ conversations.

  At university, Scott often got network messages from his friends. You could access a list of usernames that showed who was logged on, and then click on someone you knew and send them a message. This time he didn’t recognise the sender.

  isz5jlm: [Hi - how are you?]

  ‘isz’ signified the department - computer studies - although he had no idea where the abbre
viation for it came from. ‘5’ meant the year of university entry was 1995: the same year as him. And ‘jlm’ were the person’s initials.

  He stared at it for a couple of seconds, trawling through his mental list of friends, and then the circle of acquaintances that surrounded them. Maybe it was somebody he’d met at a party. JLM, JLM ... If it was, he couldn’t remember.

  He frowned, and clicked on the cross in the corner of the window, closing it down. Then he turned his attention back to the web.

  Twenty seconds later another message appeared.

  isz5jlm: [Ooops - sorry!]

  And that was all.

  At least the second message made it clear: the first had been a mistake. Scott felt strangely disappointed.

  Seconds of inactivity passed. Moments of time, he thought later, where the wonderful life he would have was hanging in the balance without him even realising.

  He opened up the list of logged-on users for his network. There were about two hundred and fifty, but they were arranged in alphabetical order so it was easy to scroll down to the iszs. There were several. isz5jlm was the last on the list.

  He deliberated over it some more, and then thought, Why not? Double-clicking on the name brought up a small dialogue box. He typed:

  [Am fine thanks. Hope you are too. But who are you?]

  The mouse-pointer hovered. Perhaps he should just forget about it, he thought. It was clearly a mistake, and there wasn’t anything to gain by pursuing it. At worst, the person might ignore it, making him feel stupid.

  But hell, if that was the worst then - once again - why not?

  He pressed [send].

  The snow outside was coming down much harder now and Scott’s breath clouded in the air as he spoke, billowing around the man in front of him.

  ‘We just started emailing each other,’ he said. ‘We didn’t meet for about a month and a half.’

  ‘So it was an accident?’

  Scott nodded, but the man was looking at the papers and ignored him.

  ‘The odds against that happening must be astronomical,’ he said. ‘But everybody feels the same way. People look into each other’s eyes and talk about what might have happened if ... How things could be different. Did you ever do that?’

  Scott found the smallest trace of rebellion.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you did. People always start by telling each other they’re soul mates, that they couldn’t be happier, they were meant to be together.’ The man looked at him curiously. ‘Is that what you believe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Suddenly, the pressure on Scott’s knees increased, and then lifted altogether as the man stood up and went back outside.

  Gone.

  For a moment, he could have been entirely alone in the woods. The snow beyond the entrance was peaceful and silent; the fire beyond, burning away happily. It was almost serene. But the man’s footprints were there on the ground in the snow. He had been here. He would come back soon.

  Scott tested his bindings again, but they were as tight as ever. All he could do was twist and stretch as much as they’d allow, trying to ease the cramp in his muscles. Everything was becoming solid.

  A minute passed. Then another.

  The footprints outside were almost invisible now. Already becoming lost among the white all around them.

  Perhaps he really had gone.

  But then, footsteps.

  The man moved back into the outhouse and crouched down where he’d been before: a huge presence, filling the world. The pressure on Scott’s knees returned. The man was still holding the papers and the screwdriver, but this time he had brought something else.

  Not an item so much as a smell. A sensation of heat.

  He heard the man breathing out through his nostrils, sighing.

  ‘Like I said, you have something I want.’

  Scott nodded quickly. He’d identified the source of the smell and the heat - both came from the screwdriver the man was holding. He knew what had happened. The point of it had been heated in the fire.

  The man held the screwdriver up between them and Scott thought he could see the steam curling off it.

  No, no, no, no, no, no.

  ‘And you’re going to give it to me. Do you understand?’

  He put the papers down and reached out to Scott’s face. Scott whipped his head round, but the man caught him: grabbed a fistful of his hair at the back. Held his head steady. God, the man was so strong. His voice fell over itself, it ran from him so quick:

  ‘Don’t, please don’t, don’t—’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  Scott wasn’t breathing right. It was too short, too fast, all in the nose. There was electricity running through him, building up as his body insisted that he needed to get away. But he couldn’t move, and it built up and up—

  He was screaming in terror and panic.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Yes!’

  The man nodded.

  ‘That’s what I want,’ he said.

  And then put the screwdriver into Scott’s eye.

  3 DECEMBER

  9 HOURS, 50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  9.30 P.M.

  Mark

  In a quiet, sleepy street, an enormous police presence acts as an alarm call. Lights flash across windows; fists bang on doors; and people look up from the television and wonder what the hell’s happened. Everybody feels afraid.

  I stood at the top of Carl Farmer’s steps and looked down at the scene before me. We’d sealed off the housing complex at the entrance from the main road, and the vehicles inside the cordon - four vans, three cars - were illuminating everything with steady sweeps of blue. There were lights on in every house, and most of the residents were out at the top of their steps. I could hear the scratchy noise from police radios, the echo of quiet voices.

  Earlier in the evening, before we left the department, it had started to snow. There was a soft layer of it on the ground here, blackened in places by the slush of footprints and the cut of tyres. It was still falling, descending heavily from the sky. Thick and heavy and slow, filling the ice-cold night air as far as the eye could see, blurring into the night. It caught the streetlights and formed amber static across the street.

  The four vans below were lit up from within by white monitors, the light obscured by the huddle of rain-slickered bodies waiting by the open doors. I spotted my door-to-door team and checked my watch. Half past nine: I’d been at work for twelve hours. It was tempting to go and grab another coffee, but there’d be time for that before we started the interviews.

  The interviews ...

  I looked around the street and sighed. We were in one of the nicer areas of the city. I’d driven through on the way here, and most of the houses were large and expensive, occupied by middle-aged families or older couples. Normally, for an interview man, that would have been encouraging, but Carl Farmer’s house was in one of the newer developments that backed onto the canal. Although they were in the heart of the district, these areas were an entirely different proposition.

  Small streets led off the main road into enclaves of six or seven houses. The buildings were all the same: light-brown brick, complemented by dark-brown wooden steps, sills and garage doors. The kitchen worktops, cupboards and cabinets - all the same. A single blueprint had been taken and used like a cookie-cutter, again and again, to create nice houses someone could choose off a peg if they didn’t want to think too hard; which meant they were aimed at young professionals. There didn’t appear to be any feeling of community here, and I imagined that nobody was likely to know their neighbours very well. My gut instinct was that the door-to-doors were going to be a nightmare.

  Taking a last breath of cold air, I turned my back on the flashing lights, and made my way into the kitchen.

  There were two crime-scene techs there, gamely working their way over everything from one wall to the other. The evidence so far suggested that, like th
e house Andrew Dyson had been killed in, this place had been another nest for our killer. Even so, the man who called himself Carl Farmer had rented it for almost a year and it seemed inconceivable that he’d left no evidence behind.

  ‘Anything so far?’ I asked one of the techs.

  ‘Just the obvious.’

  He nodded at the kitchen counter, which I’d seen when I arrived. And of course, earlier this evening, the officers chasing up the owners of the white vans caught on CCTV had arrived and seen it, too.

  There were none of the usual gadgets or equipment you’d expect: no toaster, kettle or sandwich-maker; no crumbs or stains to suggest a meal had ever been prepared here. But it wasn’t entirely bare. A single piece of evidence had been placed opposite the front door, ready for the officers who arrived, and the front door had been left slightly ajar, so that anyone who came up the steps would see it straight away.

  It was propped against the wall at the back of the counter. Dark, bushy eyebrows. Jet-black goatee. Plastic piercings through pink skin the colour of sunburn.

  I stared down at its cut-out eyes, my thoughts still on the conversation in the canteen. For one thing, our deniability was now pretty much shot. More importantly, I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for Mercer to enter the house and see this.

  The devil mask that Carl Farmer had left for us.

  The front room.

  Or at least what would have passed for it in an ordinary house.

  The furnishings were basic and had obviously come with the rent: a white leather suite, a simple wooden table and chair; an old coffee table, which had been pushed out of the way against a wall. The other rooms were bare and unused. Farmer appeared to have operated out of this one, and there was no indication of where he might have slept, if he had slept here at all. His only remaining possession here, the mask aside, was a laptop, left open and running on the table in the corner.