The 50/50 Killer Page 29
After a moment, I opened up the photograph of the spider web at Simpson’s house. If Mercer was right, this was how the killer saw the relationship between Kevin and Jodie; this was his intended ‘victim’. But if I was right, there hadn’t been a relationship as such, certainly not a mutually accepted one. And that wasn’t the only difference from the earlier crimes. There was the nature of the game. Jodie wouldn’t have had to suffer to save Kevin Simpson. In fact, she hadn’t even known there was a choice to be made.
I’d been assuming the 50/50 Killer used torture to make the person with the choice change their mind: either through the pain of their own suffering or through the guilt and grief from their partner’s. But despite the torture here, there had been no back-and-forth; no opportunity for the decision to be changed and the victims to switch. Why? Had the differences in the relationship dictated the differences in the game? I tried to think through the repercussions of that. What was he doing?
In the corner of my eye, I saw the screen flicker: the circles moving, making steady but slow progress. Just over halfway there.
Ignore it.
Impressions and ideas were reeling through my mind. I needed something to settle long enough for me to see it. I stared at the spider web design, rubbing my chin, teetering on the edge of understanding.
4 DECEMBER
1 HOUR UNTIL DAWN
6.20 A.M.
Jodie
Careful.
She turned the headphone round between her fingers. Her dexterity was a bit lacking. There was an intense, numbing coldness in her skin, which would have hampered her even without the handcuffs. But also, in the relative darkness, she could hardly see what she was doing.
At least she knew what she was doing.
Jodie’s pulse was fluttering. Timid excitement kept flaring inside her and she had to resist the urge to shout, or even laugh out loud.
Ever since she’d thought of it, she couldn’t start quickly enough. The man outside might wake up at any moment. In fact, she wanted to reach back in time and throttle herself - curled up listening to music, all terrified and self-pitying. He could have been asleep for hours. She had wasted so much time feeling guilty and frustrated and terrified. But there was no point in thinking back on it.
The headphone was like a small oval stone. She ran it round between her fingers.
Normally, it would slot into her ear and rest there. The cables formed a Y, one arm slightly shorter than the other. At the base was the plug that went into the iRiver.
She had already detached that, discarding the base unit. Then she had knelt down by the pile of slabs at the back of the storeroom, taking the shorter cable and running it back and forth over the sharpest edge of rock she could find. Cutting the thin plastic and then the wire inside: weakening it until she could snap off the headphone.
Now, crouching by the door, she had about a metre of cable with one solid curl of plastic at the end.
She checked through the gap in the door. The man didn’t appear to have moved. He was still lying there, apparently sleeping. Apparently. She couldn’t be sure because she couldn’t see his face. Perhaps he was entranced by the fire, his thoughts lost in the flames. Or maybe waiting for her to try something like this.
Fuck him, though. One way or the other, she would find out.
Just get on with it, the voice told her.
It sounded a lot more confident now - but then it had every right to. When she’d collapsed onto the makeshift seat it had kept reassuring her that she wasn’t done yet, telling her to go back over what she knew. Even if she’d convinced herself there was nothing, maybe she was wrong. There could be one small detail she’d not considered. A flaw in his plan, an opportunity. Her life would be saved or lost because of it.
Years ago, she’d watched a programme on serial killers. There was one - she couldn’t remember his name - who kidnapped his victims and held them for a long time. As it went on, they became pliant, subservient, willing to do anything to please their captor, even though the end result was always the same. The policeman interviewed on camera had calmly explained that one of the photographs they’d uncovered showed a victim - untied, unrestrained - sitting meekly, with the killer’s thumb lodged in their eye socket. And that fucking well wasn’t going to be her.
So she’d worked back through it, as much as she could bear.
The waste ground.
The ride in the van.
Walking through the woods.
Slipping; nearly falling.
Being locked in here.
Scott screaming.
At that point she’d paused, convinced that she’d missed something. She backtracked a little.
Being locked in here. It was something to do with that. She tried her best to recall every sensation, but all she got was a handful of general impressions. The voice had told her to observe everything, and she had. Where was it now she needed it?
She thought it over, frantically trying to recall.
The answer had come to her a second later. Immediately, she’d moved over to the door, kneeling down on the cold stone and searching along the edges. Not interested in the hole in the wood any more, but checking out the same side, a little further down.
The answer lay in what she didn’t remember.
No padlock, no chain, and yet the door was locked somehow.
There. She hadn’t been able to reach into the gap between door and frame to touch it, but the light from the fire had showed it to her in silhouette. A thin black line stretching across. That was the lock.
Jodie’s pulse had quickened.
She had squatted there for a moment, picking apart the memory. She’d ducked down, working her way awkwardly into the storeroom. What else? Gradually, she’d convinced herself of what she’d seen on the way in.
A loop of rusted metal attached to the stone. An old black hook on the door itself.
The excitement had flared.
Now she took one last look through the spy hole to make sure the man hadn’t moved. He was still there: still sleeping. It was now or never.
Carefully ... so carefully ... Jodie put the headphone into the spy hole. The door was thick, but the hole was large enough to take her index finger and she used it to push the head through. When it was clear, she fed the cable through after it. It was slow going. The head caught on the rough outer surface of the door, the cable looping out, but she kept feeding it through, and eventually the tension and weight of it dislodged it. The head clattered slightly, and she winced.
Keep going.
More and more cable.
She kept tight hold of the plug. When the cable was almost all through, she pressed her face against her hand, peering through the spy hole as best she could.
The man was gone.
No!
She stared out in disbelief. There was just the fire, crackling and beginning to die, and the ruffled blanket he’d been lying on. She was too late.
Calm down. Think.
Okay, she told herself. Footprints - she should be able to see his tracks in the snow. There were none coming towards her, so surely he hadn’t noticed the cable emerging from the door. If he had, wouldn’t he have been over here by now?
A fresh set led off to the left, which was the opposite direction from where Scott had been kept, which was the way out of the woods as well. There were no new tracks heading in that direction. Wherever he’d gone, it was deeper.
She listened. Nothing.
He’s woken up, walked a little way into the woods.
Slowly, Jodie pulled the cable back through. The headphone was oval, curled, a little like a hook. If it could hang in her ear it could—
The cable stopped coming. She took a deep breath and hoped her memory was good. That it wasn’t a bolt across the doorframe. She pulled harder.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then there was a tiny screech of old metal as the hook lifted out of its cradle. She pushed the door, and it opened.
Yes!
The clearing was smaller than she’d thought, no more than fifteen metres to the tree line at the far edge. The fire was closer as well. Immediately, the heat from it warmed her.
To the right, another old stone building. To the left, the footprints leading off to the tree line. Beyond that, between the trees, there was only darkness. The woods were quiet and peaceful - barely any sound. There was a slight early-morning breeze, though: wafting the flames and icing her skin.
The fire cracked.
Run.
But she couldn’t run. Scott might still be alive in that other storeroom, and even if he wasn’t, she couldn’t bring herself to leave him here. She loved him, and he deserved better. If she could - now that she could - she had to look after him.
Jodie walked across to the fire. A lot of it had burned out, but a thatch of wood in the centre was still alight. She rummaged at the edges of the ash, picking up one piece of wood, discarding it. Then another.
This one would do. It was the width of her wrist and about a half-metre long, solid and sharp. The end was blackened, but glowing red in places.
Lighter fluid, she thought.
It was there, shielded from the flames by one of the stone columns. She edged round and picked it up. Half full.
That was when she saw him. She froze.
The man with the devil mask was standing in the trees to the left, about ten metres away. Holding the knife and staring at her. Even through the mask, Jodie could tell he was shocked at seeing her free.
She rose slowly to her feet, the lighter fluid in one hand, the smouldering wood in the other. It was awkward because of the handcuffs; she had to hold them pressed together.
He didn’t say anything, but took a hesitant step into the clearing. She took a corresponding step back, moving towards the other stone building.
Run.
No. It was too late for that. She could never outpace him.
And whatever happened, after everything she’d done, she wasn’t going to leave Scott.
4 DECEMBER
50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN
6.30 A.M.
Mark
I opened up the photograph taken of the wall at Carl Farmer’s house, moving the window so that it rested alongside the other picture, the spider web at Kevin Simpson’s.
The first thing I was drawn to was the poem.
In the space between the days
you lost the melancholy shepherd of the stars.
The moon is gone and the wolves of space move in
grow bold
and pick his flock off one by one.
Earlier on, I’d wondered about his mental landscape, trying to imagine how he saw the world, and the nature of the mental filter that allowed him to transform relationships into those ragged things. The poem still hadn’t been identified, so we were assuming for now the 50/50 Killer had written it himself. It was one of the few insights we had into his state of mind.
I stared at the words. All around them, the spider webs were painted on the wall like trophies.
The wolves of space.
There was obviously a religious element to the poem, although it was far from an orthodox one. The devil mask, too, I thought: he didn’t use it simply to frighten his victims or obscure his identity; he used it because of what it represented to him. Did he see himself as a demon? As some cold, calculating force of evil?
He studied the couples for such a long time. He listened and watched, carefully drafting designs. Making plans.
These are his notes.
Picking the flock off, one by one.
When he finally visited them, he was equally clinical. There was the calm, gentle way he spoke to his victims: reassuring them even as he cut and burned them. No emotion to it; no immediate pleasure taken from the torture and pain. He didn’t care about the people. He wasn’t attacking them so much as the relationship between them, and the methods he used were just the means to an end: a way of getting what he wanted from them.
I stared at the screen.
Getting what he wanted from them.
Many of the drafts - even the final versions of the spider webs - were complete, unbroken. The lines were uncut; there were no checks or smears. But when he was finished with his victims the designs were ruined. So he didn’t take the relationship away with him: he left it there hanging, broken, on the wall. What he took away was the difference between the two.
He took love.
I continued to stare at the screen, allowing it to come.
That was the reason behind the choice. The torture was directed at one of the couple to force them to give up the other. Then that partner was tortured physically and emotionally, so that when they were finally - mercifully - killed, they would die in the full knowledge that the person they loved had condemned them to it. Reardon isolated the one he murdered, and ripped apart the relationship in their head. He destroyed any illusion they had of the love they thought they’d possessed, taking it from them.
That was why. Reardon really did think he was some kind of devil. And in his own mind, he was doing the devil’s work: erasing love from the world one small bit at a time; turning it bad and taking it inside himself. Collecting it.
There was no need for me to open the audio file again to recall the hideous noise he’d made as Kevin Simpson died below him: that sucking, breathing sound. I’d thought at the time that it was as though he’d been drawing Simpson’s soul in through his teeth. Now I was convinced that I’d been closer than I’d realised. In his head, the killer had been capturing the love Simpson had once imagined he felt for Jodie.
Picture her in your head now. Imagine her sleeping peacefully in her boyfriend’s arms.
The dark thrill in me had intensified. Why had the game with Kevin Simpson been so one-sided? Because the relationship was one-sided. The only person with anything the killer wanted was Simpson himself. He was the one who loved Jodie, knowing that she didn’t feel the same in return. She had used him and walked away. The whole game with the emails was the killer making Simpson understand that: turning his love bad so the killer could harvest it. And he didn’t need Jodie there to do that.
I hope you understand now how stupid you were. How little she deserved everything you invested in her.
The killer had spelled this out to him, and then taken his ruined emotions.
I blew out heavily, leaning back in my chair and rubbing my eyes. I was sure I was right.
On the monitor, the small group of circles had reached the stream. Mercer would be there soon. If his theory was true he’d be meeting Reardon, the wolf of space, very soon, and I felt a chill run through me at the prospect. But he had four well-trained officers with him. He knew what he was doing. Rather than being concerned for him, I forced myself to will him on. Get there in time. Save Jodie’s life. Stop this man doing what he does.
Reardon’s only a man. He’s not really a devil.
I had to keep thinking like that. No matter how the 50/50 Killer saw himself, in reality he was James Reardon, painfully human, and there would be clear and understandable reasons for what he did. Causes and effects. Never excuses, but explanations.
Keeping that in mind, I minimised the photograph of the spider webs, opened the file on James Reardon and began to go over the details, searching for the patterns below the surface.
4 DECEMBER
45 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN
6.35 A.M.
Jodie
Just one opportunity, she’d told herself, was all she needed. A single gap in his plans that she could exploit. The voice had been preparing her for it all night, but now that the opportunity had arrived, it had deserted her, left her in silence.
Jodie had no idea what to do. Her mind was blank.
She backed up towards the closed storeroom. The man in the devil mask took a few care
ful steps towards her.
‘Get back,’ she said.
She squeezed the can of lighter fluid towards him. A string of fuel squirted out into the snow, not quite reaching his feet.
He stopped where he was and held out his hand. ‘Give me that.’
She glanced behind her to make sure of her footing, and then stepped back until she was nearly touching the storeroom door. Now she was here, she was committed. She wouldn’t let him get anywhere near Scott again.
The man left his hand out, as though she was bound to reconsider, see sense. Now that he’d got over the shock, she could tell that he was angry. Really angry. These were the first emotions she’d seen from him, and she thought: Good. Be angry, you fucker. She hated him. Although she was frightened, she also wanted to hurt him for what he’d done. Kill him if she could. Rip him to pieces.
Come and see what you get.
The threat of the fuel and the burning wood might be enough to keep him away from her, but she couldn’t stop him moving - not without tackling him directly.
He circled round slowly, trying to approach her from the far side of the fire. The flames obscured him for a moment, and all she could see was the devil’s face, and then he was beyond them, back in sight.
Slow, cautious movements.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing, and she realised he’d cut off her escape route. She could still attempt to run towards town, but now he was even closer. There were miles of wood, and she’d be running with him right on her heels. If there’d ever been a chance of making it before, it was gone.
Keeping her eyes on the man, Jodie reached and pulled the door. Perhaps if Scott was still alive, and she could get him out of there, they might stand a chance of fighting off this man together.
‘Why don’t you put that down?’
She shook her head.