The 50/50 Killer Read online

  Two minutes later, feeling pretty much the same, I was there.

  I’d forgotten how quiet and still the room was. The soft light lent it a feeling of peace, underlined by the soporific constant of Scott’s pulse on the machine by his bed. He was still propped up where I’d left him, his head tilted away to face the slatted blinds on the window. He looked comfortable, though, and for a moment I thought he might be asleep. But then he turned to look at me.

  ‘It’s you.’ Almost immediately, he turned back to the window. ‘I thought it would be the doctor again.’

  I closed the door gently.

  ‘Do you want the doctor? I can get one if you like. Believe me, there are hundreds of them out there.’

  ‘No. I was hoping it would be you. I’m sorry about before.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about.’

  I sat down in the chair by the bed, my legs trembling slightly, and switched on the recording equipment.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Just after three,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve not found her yet?’

  ‘Not yet, no,’ I said. The questions were interesting. Was he aware on some level about the dawn deadline? ‘But we will. Officers are searching for her in the woods right now. There are a number of places we think she might be being held.’

  Having been out of the room for a while, I’d forgotten the horror of Scott’s appearance. Even hidden behind the bandages and gauze, his injuries were painful to look at.

  ‘But it’s a large area to cover,’ I said, ‘so we really need any help you can give us. Difficult as it is, we need you to remember as much as you can about what happened to you.’

  Perhaps it was a trick of the light or my memory, as well, but I thought the shadows in his face were deeper than before, and the hurt there more settled, more internal. He looked haunted, as though the memories he was avoiding had been left for dead in the woods, and now their ghosts were beginning to solidify in the half-lit dusk of the room. He was so crushed down by sadness that the physical pain seemed barely to register.

  Finally, he turned to look at me, too tired to be embarrassed by his misery. But he didn’t shake his head or make excuses.

  ‘I have remembered something. It’s strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the van. Do you remember I thought we stopped a couple of times on the way?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Well, this is strange, but I think there was a child in the van with us.’

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. ‘A child?’

  ‘I mean a baby,’ he said, as though that made it sound more normal. ‘The guy in the devil mask, he kept whispering to someone in the passenger seat. Like, reassuring them? And I remember hearing a baby crying. And then, after one of the stops, I didn’t hear it any more.’

  I looked at him for a moment, weighing it up. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, exactly, but I had to consider the trauma he’d been through, the medication he was on. His mind might be trying to make sense of something entirely different by visualising it in a certain way.

  Or else it might be true. In which case, he was right: it was strange. I filed it away for discussion downstairs.

  ‘Can you remember anything the man said?’

  ‘Not really. Not then, anyway.’

  I paused. ‘At some other time?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Actually, I think he was talking to me a lot. But it’s like waking up with a bad hangover. You know you spoke to someone, but what you talked about is blank. Like we had a big conversation, but I can’t remember what it was about.’

  He thought hard for a moment, then shook his head. But he didn’t seem distressed, only confused, and I got the impression that some part of him wanted me to keep asking questions.

  ‘This man,’ I said carefully, ‘he follows people for a long time. He learns things about them. And what he finds out, he uses that information against them.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What does that mean?’

  ‘You know that he’s hurt you. The thing is, the way he hurts people isn’t just physical. He’ll have been saying things to upset you. He might have told you bad stuff about Jodie, for example.’

  Scott looked at me.

  ‘Does that mean anything to you?’ I said.

  But he seemed to have gone far away.

  ‘Scott?’

  He said very quietly: ‘Kevin.’

  I tried to hide any recognition of the name.

  ‘Is that something you remember?’

  ‘I think so. He was talking to me about Kevin.’

  ‘Who’s Kevin?’

  He started to answer, but then stopped and turned away.

  Be careful, I told myself. Don’t lead him anywhere. Let him tell it in his own time.

  He stared at the window for a long time. I sat as patiently as I could, listening to the gentle beep of the machine and wondering whether he was searching for words or memories, or simply gathering the resolve to talk to me at all.

  Finally, he said, ‘Jodie had an affair.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Not an affair. A one-night stand.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A couple of years ago. Kevin was a friend of hers from university. When they left, they set up this company together, built it from nothing. It was starting to do quite well, and this one time, they were away on business for a night. Staying in a hotel.’

  He took a deep breath, and then went through the facts quickly, as though they were the last few reps in an exercise session.

  ‘She got drunk. Ended up fucking him. Called me the next day and told me. And I know it doesn’t make any sense, but I think the man in the devil mask was talking to me about that.’

  I sat back.

  It wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting, and it took me a moment to put it into context. He was telling me not only that Jodie had started CCL with Kevin Simpson and had a brief affair with him two years ago, but that the 50/50 Killer had known about this. Even though it was possible he’d been following the couple for that long, it seemed unimaginable. But we hadn’t heard from him in two years, had we? And, like Mercer said, he’d been planning something in that time.

  ‘What happened after that night?’ I said.

  ‘We talked about it, about stuff. Splitting up. But it was just a drunken mistake. I didn’t want to break up with her over it.’

  I remembered what we’d talked about downstairs: that Jodie worked for an insurance firm now.

  ‘She left the company?’

  ‘It was her decision - I didn’t ask her to.’ He looked frustrated. ‘I didn’t stop her, either, but staying on there, our relationship wouldn’t have worked. She’d poured so much of her energy into it that she ended up seeing more of him than she did of me, and I wouldn’t have been able to carry on like that. I guess she knew that. So she chose me.’

  ‘Okay.’

  And then what? I wondered.

  What Scott was talking about had happened two years ago. Had Jodie been carrying on an affair with Simpson the whole time? And had the 50/50 Killer talked to him about that as well? Surely, he must have done.

  But Scott was becoming distressed.

  ‘She chose me,’ he repeated.

  I thought his use of words was telling: ‘She chose me.’ He was fumbling in the direction of what had happened, and if he found it he wasn’t going to like what he held in his hands.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘Like I said before, the man who did this to you, he was talking about that to hurt you. Do you understand? He was using it to upset you.’

  ‘Is that “the game”?’

  I looked at him, considering what to say. He seemed desperate for an answer, but the truth might be too much for him.

  ‘What do you remember about that?’

  ‘I just remember those words. He said something about a game. He said I’d thank him for it in the end.’ The half of his face that wa
s visible suddenly looked determined. ‘Tell me.’

  I stared at him. His expression didn’t change. Part of me was sure I should back off at this point, but the truth was we needed information and I’d said I’d press him as much as I could. If he was willing to ask, I should be willing to answer.

  ‘The “game”,’ I said quietly, ‘is that he targets couples. One of the couple has to die at dawn, and it’s always up to one of them to decide which it will be. He picks one, and then uses emotional and physical torture to force them to betray their partner. That’s what the game is.’

  It sounded harsh and bleak, but there was no safe way of explaining it. ‘Tell me,’ he’d said. There it was. I leaned back.

  On the surface, the determination remained, but something else was creeping in. Memories surfacing, perhaps, or the implications of what I’d told him. The determination disappeared. Ever so slowly, panic began to take its place.

  ‘So I betrayed her?’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘That’s what it means—’

  ‘Whatever happened,’ I interrupted gently, ‘there was nothing you could have done.’

  He swallowed. His voice trembled slightly: ‘Why?’

  I leaned forwards.

  ‘Why does he do this?’ Scott demanded.

  That was the question.

  And it’s always the question, isn’t it? I’d asked it myself enough times in the last six months, and I’d always been left with the same inadequate handful of answers. Why did she drown? Because of the events that took us to the beach. Because of the physics of the waves. Because of the biology of a body in the water. Those are the only reasons. I wanted something deeper than that, but the truth is, the world doesn’t care about what seems important to me.

  Why did the 50/50 Killer do this to people? He did it to destroy the love between them, to make them turn their backs on each other. He was a wolf of space, whatever that might mean. A devil. But all of that only raised more questions. When you ask ‘Why?’ the answer is the sum of a hundred different reasons, none of them satisfactory on its own, none of them satisfactory together. Like me, Scott didn’t want those answers. He was asking ‘Why?’ on a level where answers don’t even exist.

  ‘We don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘All we can do is interpret the facts and make theories. When we catch him, perhaps then we’ll be able to ask him why he does it. But what’s important right now is that we stop him before he hurts Jodie.’

  Any more than he already has.

  The panicked look hadn’t left Scott’s face, but at least the emotion hadn’t overtaken him yet.

  I reached into the file I’d brought, picked out the photograph of Carl Farmer and passed it to Scott. He took it from me and looked it over, his face growing still. His hand started shaking.

  He asked, ‘Is this him?’

  ‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

  He concentrated, staring at the photograph intently.

  ‘I’ve seen him before. I know I have. He’s been to the house. A few months ago. He checked our meter.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I thought: yes. That was two IDs we had now, from two independent sources. However unlikely it might seem, the 50/50 Killer really had allowed us to see his face.

  ‘But I don’t know if it’s the man in the woods.’ He passed the picture back to me. ‘All I remember is that he looked like the Devil. Not just because of the mask. The man in my head ... he wasn’t even a man.’

  He turned to face the blinds, and I allowed his comment to hang in the air. Daniel Roseneil had said something very similar: He was the Devil.

  He wasn’t, of course. There was no such thing as the Devil. There were just malformed people who had grown up twisted. But even though I knew that, I wasn’t so sure that Daniel and Scott were entirely wrong. In our unsatisfactory world of cause and effect, where the answers never satisfy, maybe it was as true as it could be.

  ‘Stone walls,’ Scott said quietly.

  He was still turned away from me, still facing the window. Despite myself, I felt a flutter of excitement.

  ‘Stone walls?’

  ‘The place I was in, it had stone walls.’ He swallowed. ‘I remember that. It was narrow, cramped. The walls were close to my shoulders.’

  ‘Okay, Scott. That’s good.’

  So he’d been held inside one of the buildings in the woods. That limited the scope of the search a little - there were several, according to the map, but it wasn’t impossible. Perhaps we had a chance of finding Jodie alive before dawn after all.

  ‘Can you remember anything else about it?’

  ‘I remember the stone walls. He was crouching in front of me, talking to me.’

  Scott kept nodding very slightly, over and over. Something was hurting him, but he was enduring it for as long as he could.

  ‘He was whispering to me in the dark. Right up close. I was so frightened. ’

  I’d got everything I needed from this second interview, and my gut instinct was to back off - move Scott away from wherever his memory was leading him. But actually, that wouldn’t be fair. It was too one-way. If he was prepared to talk, I had to be prepared to listen.

  ‘Was it pitch black?’ I asked.

  ‘No. There was some light.’

  ‘A fire?’

  ‘Yes. I think so. He used it to—’

  Without warning, the memory arrived. He stopped nodding, stopped talking, and became utterly still. Then he raised one hand slowly to his face. I fought an urge to do the same.

  ‘It’s okay, Scott,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘There were stone walls.’

  ‘Thank you. You’ve done well.’

  ‘Old stone walls.’

  He didn’t start crying this time, but he kept his hand up over his injured eye. I’d done this to him; I’d caused this. So I felt I should stay, and do anything I could to help him cope with the memory he’d just uncovered. But I was going to have to leave him for a while. I needed to get this information downstairs and let Pete know where his search teams should be looking.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can, Scott.’

  I felt guilty as I stood, picking up the recording equipment and making my way to the door. As I reached it, I turned back.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again.

  But he showed no signs that he’d heard me. He was facing towards the window, his hand still half touching the bandages on his face.

  4 DECEMBER

  4 HOURS UNTIL DAWN

  3.20 A.M.

  Charlie

  The war had begun.

  Charlie huddled, shivering, at the back of his shelter. It wasn’t from the cold. There were nerves as well; nerves which were making his body shake. Sweet threads of excitement were firing in his stomach, and his heart was trembling. The Moment was coming.

  The sky would crack and there would be ...

  He frowned in the dark. Well, there would definitely be heat, and he guessed there would probably be light, too. Beyond that, maybe he should have some faith. Maybe wait and see. Until it happened, he had the fire, and that was giving off enough heat and light for now.

  ‘You need to make a big fire,’ the devil had told him. ‘You make a big fire, and then they can’t see you.’

  Two days ago, it had shown him how. He’d come back to this camp and found the devil sitting cross-legged in the centre of the small clearing, conjuring up kindling. There had already been a large pile of dry wood beside it, which the devil had slowly added to. Can you see it appearing? Charlie couldn’t at first, and it had deflated him to think that perhaps he wasn’t worthy after all. The devil had been disappointed, too, but also reassuring, encouraging him to stare at the pile and concentrate. Eventually, narrowing his eyes, he had seen it grow. The elation had been like nothing else he’d ever felt.

  The devil had approved.

  ‘When this is over,’ it had promised, ‘I’ll teach you how to do that yourself. And not just wi
th wood.’

  Charlie’s shelter was set back among the trees, and the fire from that magic wood was burning about ten metres away, in the centre of the small clearing. It was a dancing crown of flame, large enough to fit the brow of a giant. The sky threw down snow; the fire repaid it with smoke and curls of ash, floating up on immense waves of heat. Despite the weather, it remained bright and hot: a circle of tethered Hell, raging defiantly against the heavens. The wood charred and glowed. Occasionally, a log collapsed, and a plume of burning dust flowered in the air. Even this far away, the heat was rolling off it. His cheeks felt swollen and his body was damp with sweat.

  He swapped the knife to his other hand and rubbed his hand down his leg. Then swapped it back and took a good grip on the handle. He needed to keep himself on form. Needed to be ready.

  It was a good fire - but then, it had to be.

  ‘You’re one of my soldiers now,’ the devil had explained. ‘You know what that means? It means when the angels fly overhead, they look down at you and all they see is fire.’

  The angels were flying now. There was no going back.

  ‘So you need fire to hide yourself.’

  He’d been hearing them in the sky for the last hour, and if there’d ever been any doubt about the devil’s words and promises, it had disappeared completely. The angels were terrifying. They roared through the air, the noise like a hundred heavy swords whirling round. Down below them, the trees quivered and shook with fear. Charlie held himself still in the midst of it. In the distance, lights were flashing down from the sky. The whole time, he kept calm.

  The Moment was coming, and he needed to be steady when it arrived.

  It had started about a week ago.

  Until then, Charlie’s life had been fairly regimented. The council paid for him to stay in the Home on the Hill, which meant bed and board and three square meals and everything. Unlike some of the other residents, he was allowed to stay or go more or less as he pleased. The nurses were concerned about the man who spoke to him in his head, but it was a long time since he’d told Charlie to do anything wrong. More often than not, he found the things the man said to him upsetting, and when it got very bad he took the nurses’ advice and went to bed and ignored everybody. The man shut up after a while. Charlie was happy to socialise, and the nurses didn’t mind him going into Town, or for a walk, or whatever he wanted. Sign out, sign in. But he didn’t like Town. The man told him people there were different and didn’t like him. He preferred the isolation of walking in the woods. It was quieter here. There was nobody around, and that made him happy.