The 50/50 Killer Read online

  ‘A lot of this is just woodland, and the paths probably aren’t as clear as this.’ The pointer touched several small white outlines dotted around the screen. ‘These are old stone buildings. Broken-down structures.’

  Pete had been looking at all this, his expression growing more dubious with every word.

  ‘That’s fantastic, Greg,’ he said. ‘We’ll take this in with us, shall we? Fill it in while we fucking go?’

  Greg held his hands up. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

  ‘Well, no, it looks really pretty onscreen. But from where I’m standing, those trees back there are just a long, black, fucking wall. So I’d like a bit more guidance, please, before I start sending good officers into the middle of that.’

  Mercer had been peering intently at the screen. Now he reached across and took the mouse from Greg. The pointer moved to the cluster of yellow circles by Carl Farmer’s van.

  ‘This is what’s obvious to me,’ he said. ‘Banks and his girlfriend were taken into the woods here. Along this path.’

  He moved his hand and the cursor traced the white line up the monitor - the left leg of the n.

  ‘Judging from where Banks came out of the woods, I think at some point they must have gone into this area here.’

  He moved the mouse pointer across, circling it between the legs of the n.

  I nodded to myself. It was guesswork, but it was educated guesswork. Scott had run from wherever he’d been kept prisoner and emerged out of dense, difficult woodland between two paths. If he hadn’t been in that area already, he would have had to cross one of those paths to get there. Surely, if he’d been running through undergrowth and had stumbled across an easier route, he would have shifted onto that instead.

  It was only an assumption, of course. Given his disorientation, Scott might have blundered across a path without realising it. And even if the killer was still holding Jodie alive somewhere in there, he might well have moved her, taken her deeper into the woods. But it was a good call, simply because it wasn’t possible to search forty square miles of dense woodland in the time we had left. Even cut down by the pathways, it was ridiculous. But by designating a more limited search area, Mercer had turned an impossible task into something that felt more manageable. We had a place to start.

  ‘Okay.’ Pete sighed. ‘Let’s say you’re right. That’s what? About eight square miles?’

  ‘If that. You’ve got warm bodies?’

  ‘I’ve got bodies, not warm ones. Thirty officers, apart from the ones in the cordon - nowhere near enough. We’ve got volunteers from Search and Rescue here, too. Ten civilians, three dogs.’

  ‘Have the dogs picked up anything?’

  ‘Not yet. The handlers have got them here and by the van. But the dogs are trained to find people who are lost, not track down where they’ve come from. And the snow’s not helping. There are no marks on the ground, and the scent trail’s buried.’

  Mercer looked unimpressed by this. ‘What about the helicopter?’

  ‘Against their better judgment, it’s in the air and on its way.’

  ‘That’s something. We need it to feed back any heat traces it finds; each and every one needs to be checked. In the meantime, there are all those structures to be looked at.’

  Pete grimaced, perhaps at the prospect of the task ahead, but more likely at the use of the word ‘we’. If Mercer noticed it, he ignored it:

  ‘Chances are he’d be holding her indoors. He wouldn’t want to be outside in weather like this.’

  ‘No,’ Pete agreed, ‘he wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t. He could be anywhere.’

  He could be on the other side of the city by now.

  ‘Well, we have to limit the search somehow, don’t we?’ Mercer said patiently. ‘Otherwise it’s impossible. So we’ll assume he’s inside one of these buildings. And also check out heat traces as they come up. Unfortunately, it’s all we’ve got to go on for now.’

  For a second, snow falling around him, Pete simply stared out of the screen. Then: ‘So we haven’t got anything from Banks so far?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Mercer said. ‘He seems to be blanking a lot out.’

  I sank a little inside, annoyed at myself for not recognising the way the conversation had been steered. Pete was dismayed, even borderline antagonistic, about the scale of what needed to be done out there; and I was reluctant to press Scott. Mercer had turned two problems against each other, probably figuring that any objections I had wouldn’t cut much ice with a man standing out in the snow facing a difficult, lengthy search. And of course he was right.

  ‘Well, I appreciate that,’ Pete said. ‘But we’re assuming his girlfriend’s life is at stake here. Anything he can tell us is going to help. Even if it’s just remembering being inside somewhere.’

  Mercer turned to look at me. I glanced at the map and then looked at Pete’s grim face on the screen, snow falling in the background. My objections suddenly seemed trivial, and I didn’t have the energy to argue.

  ‘Okay.’ I sighed quietly. ‘I’ll talk to him.’

  4 DECEMBER

  4 HOURS, 30 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  2.50 A.M.

  Scott

  As the night went on, the tone of Scott’s dreams had begun to shift. His sleeping mind seemed to be at war with itself. Something had happened to him. Part of his subconscious was insisting that it be brought out and examined, while another part was attempting, increasingly ineffectively, to bury and hide it. On the surface the dreams were comforting, but increasingly he could feel poison seeping up from below the surface.

  Happier thoughts and memories were a house made of tissue, the foundations resting in a pool of black ink. Gradually, everything was darkening.

  In this dream, the phone had woken him, and for the duration of the call his mind remained tangled in the last sticky threads of sleep. On the other end of the line, Jodie was crying. When she spoke, her voice was shaky and weak. She told him what was wrong. She told him what she’d done.

  He was sitting upright on the edge of the bed, listening. As he did, he was twisting the cord with one hand: tangling the coils around his fingers. He stopped and reached out, moving the yellow curtains aside, eyes flinching against the early-morning sun. Six twenty. Already, it looked warm. It was going to be a hot day in the office.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Jodie told him.

  That should have been his line, shouldn’t it? It was absurd to feel so unaffected. He’d always been the patient one in the relationship - the one who remained calm, the one who reacted with understanding - but this was ridiculous. Jodie might as well have been sleeping in the bed behind him, rather than a hundred miles away, phoning to tell him what should have been the most horrible thing he could imagine.

  He said, ‘I don’t know, either.’

  Cars were heading past. The world outside seemed oblivious. He let go of the curtain and the bedroom settled back into a more comfortable darkness.

  ‘I’ve been up all night trying to think of something to say.’

  ‘It didn’t work, did it?’

  She deserved that, but straight away he felt the urge to apologise for being so sharp. Don’t. For once, he needed to suppress that side of himself.

  ‘I guess not. I was rehearsing this, trying to make it into something coherent. I guess I’ve fucked that up like I fuck everything up.’

  Normally, when she wandered into this kind of self-recrimination, he wanted to reassure her. But that would be out of place. He wasn’t going to turn this round and give comfort to her, as though she was the one who’d been hurt.

  ‘You’ve not slept at all?’ he said.

  ‘No, I’ve been up all night. Being sick, mostly.’

  He didn’t laugh.

  She told him again, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Well, you said that already.’

  ‘But I don’t know what else there is.’

  There’s nothing, he thought. You just have
to keep saying that, because for now it sums up everything perfectly. I don’t know what to say.

  For the rest of the conversation, they circled each other. Jodie asked whether their relationship was over; Scott told her he needed time to think. In reality, though, he needed time to feel. He was surprised at himself for taking it so well. Generally, he was quite an insecure person, but for some reason this didn’t feel like the end of the world. She’d fucked her business partner? It wasn’t so bad. Only the sensation that he’d been hollowed out deep inside convinced him that, some time soon, he was going to collapse inwards and start caring very much.

  I am emotionally concussed.

  Nothing could be worked out over the phone. But even so ...

  ‘I’ll call you after work,’ he said.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  It was ridiculous: she sounded so wounded and upset, as though he’d done something wrong. Half of him wanted to reach across all that distance and slap her as hard as he could. The other half wanted to hold her and tell her it was okay. Ridiculously, there was something about the battle between those two sides that almost thrilled him.

  ‘I promise,’ he said. ‘I just need to think about things.’

  That produced a new burst of desperation: ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  The telephone clicked down, cutting off the sound of her crying.

  Scott sat there for a few moments, feeling the silence crawl all over him. The air was pressurised: it was like being underwater. He could hear the cars outside, people’s voices, but he was numb to it. He was an empty house. The light was hitting windows while nobody looked out; the wind was hitting the walls, the walls not feeling it.

  On the bedside table, the clock said 6:34 in bright red figures.

  He heard a noise behind him. A breathing sound.

  Scott turned around very slowly, the bed creaking underneath him.

  The thing was standing in the doorway, its shoulders rising and falling quite heavily, as though it had been forced to run a long way to find him. It was holding something in its hand.

  When he saw that, Scott tried to move - but he couldn’t. His forearms were held pressed against his thighs, held tightly in place by bonds he couldn’t see.

  Panic.

  ‘Number Eighty,’ the thing said. Its voice sounded more normal than it had in the earlier dreams. ‘“You chose me.” What does that mean?’

  What did it mean? Scott started to tell it that he didn’t know. If it was about Jodie ... it was wrong. She hadn’t chosen him at all, quite the opposite. But then an image pressed itself into his head. Jodie, sitting on the bed in her hotel room, her head in her hands. Crying.

  ‘She didn’t have to phone me,’ he said. ‘She could have pretended it never happened. She never even had to tell me.’

  The devil inclined its head.

  ‘And what did you do next?’

  ‘I’m not well,’ he told the answerphone at work. The tape was whirring slowly around in the empty office. His boss was never in until at least nine, sometimes didn’t come in at all.

  ‘I’ve been up half the night. I think I’ve eaten something dodgy. I feel dreadful.’

  He said a few more things, none of them particularly convincing, and put the phone down.

  Then he threw the glass of water on the bedside table against the far wall. It shattered, blew apart, and immediately he regretted it. The floorboards whispered as he swept up the broken glass, and the bin downstairs gave a few dusty rattles as it accepted the debris.

  He collected his keys, his wallet and his coat, and headed out of the door.

  ‘You went to see her, didn’t you?’

  The devil was crouching in front of him. Scott’s sleeping mind accepted this; on one level he understood what was happening. These memories of Jodie’s affair were two years old, but the devil existed in more recent memories, and the two were connected. They had spoken about this event. And when the memories shared moments, the narrative had a chance to cross. The poison could seep up.

  He nodded.

  Her hotel bedroom was much bigger than he’d imagined it would be. Normally, he liked hotels. There was something reassuring about the narrowness of the corridors, the soft lighting, the cave-like ambience of the rooms. But there was nothing comforting about those things now. He kept imagining Jodie and Kevin together.

  She met him in the corridor and they walked to her room without saying much. She flicked on the light.

  There was a cabinet along one wall, supporting a small television and a tray of tea and coffee-making equipment. No discarded sachets or dirty cups, he noticed, but she would definitely have made a drink. He wondered whether room service had cleared away one used cup or two.

  The double bed was against the opposite wall, a lamp at either side of the headboard. A double-seater settee and two chairs circled a low table at the far end of the room.

  ‘Coffee?’ she said.

  He nodded, but she was making it anyway.

  ‘This kettle takes ages to boil.’

  He watched her fidgeting; she didn’t seem able to stand still or relax. A long minute of silence later, steam ribboned up from the kettle’s spout. She passed him the mug of coffee, holding it gingerly by the rim and base so that he could take the handle.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Are you surprised I came down?’

  ‘I’m pleased.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Please don’t ...’ As she said it, the words ran out of air, and she had to try again. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  ‘We need to talk about that.’

  ‘Please don’t leave me. I don’t know what I’ll do if you do.’

  He sipped his coffee.

  ‘I’ll do anything,’ she said. ‘I really will. I’d do anything to be able to take it back, and I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can do is say sorry. I was so drunk. It was such a huge mistake.’

  He put the cup down on the floor.

  She said, ‘I hate myself for it more than you ever could.’

  ‘I don’t hate you, Jodie.’

  ‘You should.’

  Self-pity again, all but begging for reassurance in return. Instead, he spread his hands and tried to talk plainly.

  ‘We need to figure out where we go from here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I want things to work out,’ he said. ‘But the truth is, I really don’t know how they’re going to. I’ve felt weird all day. Weird, and so, so hurt. It’s not sunk in yet.’

  ‘I’ll quit if I have to.’ She said it too quickly. ‘If that’s what you want, I’ll do it. I’ll do it right now.’

  He looked at her. She’d made it sound so easy, so simple, but she’d been a partner in this business from the beginning; there had been three years of hard work before it started taking off. There should have been more conflict on her face, but instead she looked utterly committed.

  She would choose him. If he wanted her to, she would walk away from everything else. To save their relationship. He continued to stare, not knowing what to say in reply.

  On the one hand, there was no way he could ask her to do that. But he knew they couldn’t be together if she was still working with Kevin, still seeing him every day. There was no middle ground between the two.

  So he didn’t say anything. After a moment, she nodded.

  Over the next two years, Scott remembered that gesture and used it to justify what happened. That one nod gave him the ability to lie to himself. It hadn’t been his decision.

  He hadn’t asked her to give up her life.

  She did it willingly, of her own accord.

  You chose me ...

  Suddenly, he was somewhere else: some horrible place where the images were shorter and sharper. It was the dark, stone building, and the devil was leaning over him, holding the screwdriver in one hand. Steam was rising off it.

  The devil press
ed the red-hot blade down on his shoulder. Scott tried to flinch away, but he couldn’t move. Everything was numb for a moment ... but then he felt the pain reverberate through his collar bone, all the way down to his ribs.

  He began to scream, his mouth open, his head whipping from side to side. The noises he was making he couldn’t even identify.

  But the devil kept the blade pressed down hard. Scott could hear his skin sizzling. He could smell himself burning.

  Was it possible to pass out within a dream?

  As the thing took the screwdriver away and moved it down to the inside of his thigh, he discovered that it wasn’t.

  4 DECEMBER

  4 HOURS, 20 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  3.00 A.M.

  Mark

  After Pete had signed out and headed off to co-ordinate the search, I logged onto the virtual briefing room and flagged down my door-to-door team. Annoyingly, all three of them looked as though they could keep going for days, and I felt momentarily inadequate. I was so tired I could hardly keep my thoughts in a straight line. But then, they were coding interviews in a nice warm office with access to as much coffee as they could physically drink.

  I went through what I needed them to do. Wake Yvonne Gregory up - politely - and take round the picture of Jodie McNeice for identification, then get hold of someone at Jodie’s work and see if they could confirm where she’d been for the last few days. There would be more to do later, I said, probably vaguely. It was two onerous tasks with the threat of more to follow, but they appeared to soak it up. I envied them their energy. However much I dressed it up, it couldn’t be entirely down to caffeine.

  On the way up to Scott’s room, the tiredness hit me properly. I was walking down corridors and my vision was prowling ahead of me, occasionally getting distracted and lost. At the same time, I was doing my best to leave most of my thoughts behind. When I stopped, everything around me seemed to keep moving for a second. I was drunk on my own exhaustion.

  ‘Excuse me, Officer.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  It wasn’t so bad downstairs. On the lower level, people were moving about in small numbers, carrying cardboard files or pushing trolleys and cleaning-carts. But one floor up nobody was fucking around. There were lives to be saved, and everything was all very urgent and practised. I had to minimise myself as much as possible and keep out of the way, and the task was a little beyond me. I felt unsteady in my body and in my mind, and I needed to get some calm and resolve together before I talked to Scott.