The 50/50 Killer Read online

  Our job is to support him.

  ‘Finish that up for me,’ I told the officers behind me.

  And then, carrying the photograph, I walked over to the house.

  3 DECEMBER

  8 HOURS, 40 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  10.40 P.M.

  Jodie

  The first thing Jodie had done when he left her alone was follow the advice of the voice in her head and take a full inventory of the situation. Where she was, and what she had that might help her get somewhere else.

  The ‘where’ was easy enough, provided she wasn’t too specific. The man in the devil mask had made them walk deep into the woods, eventually bringing them to a location he’d obviously had in mind from the beginning. There was a clearing in the trees where he’d already built a large fire. Chunky logs were piled up, and he’d balanced a large rusty sheet of metal on top of four stone columns to keep the fuel dry. There were a number of old stone structures at the periphery of the clearing, most of them broken down to their foundations.

  All except two, in fact.

  The man instructed Scott to wait by the side of the unlit fire. He did as he was told - just stood there, his head bowed, his body still. With a single gesture of the knife, Jodie was ushered across to one of the stone buildings. She followed the order, and had to duck to get inside.

  It was an old storeroom, barely wide enough for her to move into. At the back, there were slabs of granite stacked on top of one another, covered in moss and cobwebs. The walls were like that, too - threaded through with green veins, covered with the grey, dusty hair.

  She paused, but the man prodded her forwards. She understood what he wanted.

  Sit down. She did.

  The man was framed in the doorway for a moment, then he swung the wooden door closed and the room collapsed into total darkness. She felt a section of her heart sink away into it. A second later, there was a click of metal as the door was locked.

  Just like that. No more words or threats. Nothing.

  Alone in pitch darkness.

  With nothing left to observe, the voice was at a loss as to what advice it could offer her, and for a short time she began to panic - really panic, the darkness around her filling with small curls of light - before the calm attempted to reassert itself.

  Where are you?

  What do you know?

  The questions were insistent, and after a time she tried to answer them.

  Two, maybe three, miles into the woods, handcuffed in the freezing cold in some old building. A place you stored things until you needed them. The man had built the fire in advance, so they were obviously being held here for some purpose.

  The bag, too. He had brought things with him in that bag.

  Stick to what you know for sure, the voice suggested.

  Not long after the door closed, a flickering yellow outline had appeared around the edge: the man had lit the fire. He must have had petrol or lighter fluid with him, because it went up quickly. She could hear it crackling, the wood beginning to blister and pop. Almost immediately, she smelled the charcoal aroma of the smoke.

  But not the heat, she thought. Or at least, not enough.

  Ignore that. What have you got on you?

  Her bag was gone, of course - her mobile phone with it. The man wasn’t that stupid. So what else?

  It was difficult to search her pockets in the cramped space, especially with her hands still cuffed in front of her, but she did what she could. She bent double and patted down her trousers. House keys; small change. Possibilities there? She had attended a self-defence course at university, and some of the more unlikely suggestions came back to her now. You could throw a handful of coins into an attacker’s face. Bunch your keys between your fingers, create a spiked fist. It was pretty desperate stuff. But still, a small advantage was still an advantage. Don’t discount anything.

  Next, her coat. There were a couple of old receipts in the outside pockets, which even the self-defence instructor would probably concede were useless. The iRiver in the inside pocket. At least she had that. An electronics expert would probably take it apart and find a way to make it broadcast a distress message, but she couldn’t think of any use at all for it. From the instructions, she had a vague memory that it could receive radio, but she’d never used it for that and didn’t know how.

  Perhaps they would be on the news.

  It was dark outside, which meant that she’d been missing for some time. What would have happened when she didn’t return to work that afternoon? Probably nothing. It was too much to hope that search teams were combing the woods for them. Michaela would have reminded her bosses that she hadn’t been well, so the most they would have done was call her mobile, which was lost, or else her home number, where there was nobody to answer. Maybe someone had seen or heard something at the flat when the man attacked Scott?

  But even if they’d been reported missing, the police would have no idea where to look.

  They were on their own out here. At this man’s mercy.

  Time passed.

  As it went on, Jodie couldn’t help thinking about Kevin. The guilt and despair were too much, but still, she couldn’t stop. How could she have done that to Scott? To them both? She thought about all the ways she had let him down, in fact, and about how she might now never have the chance to explain.

  The voice advised her not to.

  Then Scott began screaming.

  Jodie had been sitting in the semi-darkness, blanking her mind, but when she heard that she lurched back to the present and her heart started hammering in her chest.

  It was an awful sound, the worst thing in the world, and more than ever before she wanted to go to him, help him, make the man stop whatever he was doing.

  Calm down.

  The screaming carried on.

  She wanted to throw herself against the stone walls until they broke down, kick the door until it splintered. Instead, she sat there, trembling and terrified, and then started to cry with frustration and fear, punching her thighs over and over.

  She was tied up in the woods around a campfire. A monster out of her nightmares was torturing Scott - hurting him for fun. They had been reduced from people to playthings. She—they were going to die out here. Suffer beyond anything they’d ever felt before, and then die.

  It continued for a long time, and Jodie sat, rocking gently, trying not to listen. Sometimes it went quiet, but then she could hear the man talking gently to Scott and Scott talking back, and there was something conspiratorial - something horribly intimate - about it. Sometimes she could hear him sobbing. But the screaming was worst: it broke her heart. He sounded like an animal.

  It was too much. She kicked the door, but it was solid despite its age and didn’t move, didn’t break. She worked her fingers into the bright gaps between the wood and the stone and shook it. Nothing. There was a small hole on the edge of the frame near the top where she could insert her whole finger and try to pull. It all did nothing.

  She pressed her eye to the hole instead. She could see the fire burning, the flames licking at the underside of the metal. It was snowing - the air was thick with silent flurries and the ground was covered.

  Nothing else for a time.

  But she kept looking. After a while, the man in the devil mask walked across to the fire from the other side of the camp. He was carrying a screwdriver. She couldn’t breathe.

  He crouched down by one of the stone columns and began heating the end in the flames. Turning it round casually, snow falling all around him.

  Something on the point caught fire, burning briefly.

  Jodie sat down again. She couldn’t bear this.

  There was no option but to hear, though. Not unless she miraculously managed to shut down entirely.

  Do not shy away from this.

  The voice didn’t sound sure of itself any more. But it reiterated its point.

  Do not shy away. Remember this. Use it when it comes to it.

  So Jodie listened to
her boyfriend’s screams, his crying. She gritted her teeth and she tried her best to use what she heard to weld some resolve in her heart. The man who was doing this would pay for each and every second of it.

  No matter what, she wouldn’t allow it to happen to her.

  You are going to get out of this. And if you get the chance, you’re going to hurt him for what he’s done.

  At some point, the sounds stopped. All she could hear was the fire. She waited, but the next scream didn’t come. No more quiet conversation. No crying. Just the crack and spit of flames feeding on wood. She held her breath, counting slowly to ten and then twenty. Over and over again. Nothing.

  Was Scott dead?

  Everything went a little hazy then. She remembered waking up with him this morning, a lifetime ago. It seemed incomprehensible that he might be gone. If she hadn’t been sitting already, she’d have fallen. As it was, she sagged and went weak, and the stars in her vision returned. She was going to faint - she wanted to, in fact, wanted to faint, and then wake up when all this was done, or else not wake up at all.

  Pay attention!

  No. She’d run out of patience with the voice. Until now, she’d done everything it wanted; and it had helped her as much as it was ever going to. She had her keys to punch with, her change to throw. She knew roughly where she was. She’d tried being calm, but now Scott was dead. She wasn’t going to listen to the voice any more.

  Jodie fumbled awkwardly at the inside pocket of her coat, pulling out the threads of the headphone cables. She might not be going to faint, but she could certainly find another way to shut the voice away. Shut everything away for a while.

  Her hands were shaking with the fear and the cold.

  First one ear; then the other.

  She clicked the button to turn the player on and waited for the library to assemble itself. Seconds passed.

  Finally, a beep.

  Another click on the button. Faint music entered her ears - the track she’d been listening to on the waste ground, picking up where it left off - and the volume steadily increased. Up and up, overtaking the crackling of the fire, filling her head, drowning out her thoughts.

  She closed her eyes and emptied her head of thought.

  A few minutes later, when she felt a waft of air on her face as the door to her cell was opened, she kept them closed. She blocked out what he said to her, and she thought about nothing at all.

  PART THREE

  It’s a paradox, but often you find that an investigation can become clouded by the facts. The more you uncover, the harder it sometimes is to understand how it all fits together. As a team leader, you’re constantly receiving updates about the case, and one of the most difficult skills to learn is the ability to sort what’s important from what should, for the moment, be held to one side. As developments occur, often unexpectedly, and evidence accumulates, it can become a classic case of ‘not being able to see the wood for the trees’.

  So when in charge of an investigation it is usually necessary, every now and then, to take a step back. Although the specific facts - and the hard evidence that supports them - are always cornerstones of the case, nevertheless it is easy to become overwhelmed and then to feel lost among the detail. When that happens, the only solution is to extract yourself a little. You take a step away from the facts, and move to a distance from where you can see the whole picture developing at once.

  From Damage Done, by John Mercer

  4 DECEMBER

  6 HOURS, 35 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  12.45 A.M.

  Mark

  Nearly one in the morning. It was still snowing and the roads were solid with it - a time to drive carefully, you would have thought, especially after such a long day. But Greg had only one hand on the wheel. With the other, he was counting off symptoms and trauma, and he kept glancing at me to make sure he had my full attention. He certainly had.

  ‘Hypothermia,’ he said. ‘Frostbite, shock, God only knows what else. I mean, look at this fucking weather.’

  I nodded, peering through the windscreen. The snow was unfolding out of the sky: quiet, relentless and heavy. The van’s wipers kept squeaking across, clearing it away, but a dozen handfuls of wet, white kisses were thrown onto the glass after each swipe. Despite the heaters being on full blast, my hands still felt numb from being out and about around Carl Farmer’s house.

  We were in one van, Mercer and Pete in a second, Simon in a third. The others were slightly in front, and we were all heading for the hospital. The haze of this long day had erased much of the pre-first-day research I’d done on the city’s geography, but I thought we’d be there soon. Assuming we didn’t crash, of course.

  The report had come through after I’d finished filing the door-to-door reports. A couple of hours earlier, a half-naked man had run out of the woods at the north of the city, onto the ring road, where he’d nearly been hit by a car. The vehicle’s occupants, Neil and Helen Berry, had stopped just in time, and then called the police. The man claimed that he and his girlfriend had been kidnapped and held hostage in the woods, and that his girlfriend was still in there. The report also mentioned he had a number of injuries.

  The details were interesting, but - even given the killer had changed his MO - holding people in the woods was a huge deviation from the previous crimes. But the report also gave the man’s name. It was Scott Banks. His girlfriend was Jodie McNeice.

  The names were enough. Within ten minutes of the report coming through, we were on our way.

  On our way to interview him.

  Greg said, ‘The doctors aren’t going to let us talk to him tonight.’

  ‘They might.’

  It would depend on what kind of condition he was in, and from the initial report we simply didn’t know. Given how cold I felt - and I’d been wrapped up for the evening - Greg was probably right about the hypothermia and frostbite. If Scott Banks had been out in this weather for any length of time, he was going to be in trouble. And if his other injuries were serious the doctors weren’t going to let us anywhere near him for the time being.

  But at the same time, Mercer wasn’t likely to be easily dissuaded. At Farmer’s house, I think we’d all felt a little aimless: unsure of where to go next. We had until dawn to find the killer’s next victims, but no indication of where to start looking. For once, Mercer looked as up in the air as the rest of us. When I’d told him about the confirmation on the photograph, he listened but was obviously distracted by other concerns. People’s lives were at stake, after all. So he was impatient, waiting for something to happen, and frustrated at not knowing where to move in the meantime. When this report had come through it was obvious he’d been hoping for it, or something similar. Immediately he was galvanised again: back on track. I didn’t envy anyone who attempted to tell him ‘No’ right now.

  ‘You’ve interviewed victims before, right?’ Greg said.

  ‘Sure.’

  Never anyone in quite this situation, admittedly, but I had some experience with trauma victims; I knew what I was doing.

  ‘Nervous about it?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  That was true in a way. On a purely practical level, I knew it was a real chance - both to use my skills and to make an impact on the investigation. But I also felt a lot more nervous than I was prepared to admit. Remembering the footage of Daniel Roseneil, it wasn’t going to be an easy or pleasant experience, but talking to victims never is. There was more to it than that. Despite my tiredness, I was on edge.

  I glanced at my watch. Greg saw me looking.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ he said.

  ‘Me too.’

  A minute later, he pulled left, following Pete and Simon into the car-park at the front of Accident and Emergency. It was a large expanse of tarmac with Reception at the far end, the lights inside so bright they hurt my eyes. The ground was solid with snow in places, cut to slush in others by the loops of tyre tracks. Pete and Simon took their van
s all the way across to the side of the ambulance bay. Greg followed, parked up beside them, and we all got out.

  A couple of paramedics in green overalls were smoking by the entrance. We nodded to them as we went past; they nodded back, unfazed by the sight of five police officers arriving at this time of night.

  In Reception, to the left of the sliding doors, there were rows of orange-peel plastic chairs screwed onto metal frames, separated into bunches by vending machines and cheap metal tables. About half the seats were occupied. There were two teenagers standing rocked back on their heels in front of a third, who was seated and dazed, holding his bloody forehead. An older man in denim sat imperiously against the far wall, arms folded high up on his chest, underlining a face gone crimson from years of alcohol. A few chairs along, there was a couple on either side of a small, teary child, who was holding her arm out like it was a dead bird she’d found in the garden. A drunk was slumped in the corner. A thin old woman sat in a wheelchair, skin the colour of vinegar. Three younger couples were dotted among the rest, the men all looking flushed with drink.

  The police department this morning - I remembered thinking it looked like a doctor’s waiting room. Now, I was walking through a hospital reception area which looked like a holding bay. As we crossed to the main desk I could feel everyone checking us out.

  An electronic screen above it displayed red digital messages to the people waiting. You will not be seen in the order you arrived ... It is not first come first served ... Average current waiting time: 2 hours. Behind the desk, it looked and sounded like any other office: filled with the quiet sounds of phones ringing and fingers typing, the buzz and hum of computer equipment. The counter was wide and deep. A young nurse was sitting behind it. She looked up and smiled. Mercer leaned on the counter and didn’t attempt to smile in return.

  ‘Detective Sergeant John Mercer,’ he said. ‘We’re here to see a Doctor Li? About Scott Banks.’