The 50/50 Killer Page 8

  Scott got to fifteen reps with the barbell and then forced himself to do just one more, raising the weight a fraction at a time, his arms shivering with effort.

  The weight clanked down on the struts.

  He sat up, breathed out.

  Number 89, he thought, calming down. When I wake up in the morning and you’re looking at me.

  She’d kept smiling as she read the list. There was a quiet happiness that seemed to be mostly inside her, but he could see it on her face, too, and it pleased him more than he could tell her. The sensation it created threatened to burst something inside him. That smile, on that single occasion - he’d immediately marked it down in his head as Number 101.

  ‘I really, really love you,’ she’d told him.

  ‘I love you, too.’

  He’d been flushed with success. It had turned out to be much easier than he’d thought; in fact, as he’d closed in on Number 100 there had been more reasons in the front of his mind, and even more - he was sure - ready to rise up and take their place. He could have kept going all night. That, coupled with wanting to keep her smile from fading, had led to what happened next.

  ‘It was easy. I could have got five hundred.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Right - give me that here.’

  She’d pulled the notepad out of reach. ‘Don’t be silly. You’ll be here all night.’

  ‘Okay. But I won’t forget. Perhaps it’ll be a Christmas present.’

  ‘That might be more acceptable.’ She put it down on the settee beside her and patted it safe. ‘But you’ll have to start again from scratch, because I’m keeping this.’

  ‘No problem.’

  That was what he’d said, feeling relieved if he was honest. But determined, too. Christmas had been more than eleven months away so there was plenty of time to work on the other four hundred reasons. He’d even had crazy ideas of reaching a thousand. Except that now, with Christmas only three weeks away, it didn’t seem like ‘no problem’ any more. He wasn’t even going to finish what he’d promised.

  Scott took the weight down to forty kilos and began to do overhead presses with it from behind his neck.

  One, two, three.

  Would three hundred reasons do? She was expecting five, so what did it say if he ended up giving her less?

  I don’t love you as much as I thought?

  But then again, he could be too hard on himself. How many people could come up with three hundred reasons, let alone five? How many would even try? So it did say other things, too.

  He grimaced from the strain of the weight, but kept going anyway. Nine, ten ...

  Three hundred reasons said: I’m doing the best I can.

  It said: I realise not everything’s perfect, least of all me, but I’m still trying. Because I so desperately don’t want to lose you.

  Clank.

  For the next three-quarters of an hour, he worked through the rest of his usual sets: upright and bent-over rowing; bicep curls; tricep extensions. He finished off with a hundred sit-ups, his feet lodged under the barbell on the floor. When he was finished, he stood up, drank the rest of the water and turned off the music.

  Part of the music continued.

  Scott stood still for a second, listening. It wasn’t part of the music. It was another sound, which had been there all along, only now he could hear it better. He frowned and walked towards the door. His first thought was that Jodie had come home early for some reason and was watching the television. He opened the door and called out.

  ‘Jodie?’

  Yes, it was the television.

  Scott stepped into the corridor.

  The front door was closed. Momentarily, he felt a flash of disappointment that she’d come in and not said hello, but it was replaced almost immediately by concern. If she was back early, perhaps something was wrong. He headed towards the front room, calling again, ‘Jodie?’

  He pushed the door open slowly, unease keeping him a little way back from it. It creaked. Came to a halt.

  The television was on in the far corner, but there was no sign of Jodie. He walked across into the middle of the room.

  Too late, Scott thought about the doorway into the kitchen, off the right-hand side of the lounge. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, felt motion towards him, and he flinched sideways from it - but again, too late.

  It was as though he’d walked into a lamp-post: a sickening collision. Suddenly he was looking at the ceiling.

  Fuck!

  And then the devil leaned in from above.

  PART TWO

  As an investigation progresses - and in general in this line of work - it always helps to remember a difficult but necessary truth: there are no such things as good and evil. Your opinion may differ, but in my experience thinking like that won’t help you sleep any easier at night, and it certainly won’t help you catch the people who commit serious crimes.

  Labelling someone ‘evil’ is too convenient. The hideous effect these people can have on the lives of others is such that they shouldn’t be swept under the carpet so easily. In reality, they are cogs in the mechanism of society that have slipped from their axes. The machinery that churns out useful, caring citizens like you and me went awry as they passed through it. They have been manufactured into the ‘monsters’ we see, and we owe it to their victims, and the victims of others like them, to attempt to understand the flaw in the process that has created them.

  In police work, there is no God, no Devil, no Good and no Evil. There are no monsters. There are just damaged people.

  The people we seek, like everyone else in the world, stand at the focal point of the damage done to them and the damage they do.

  From Damage Done, by John Mercer

  3 DECEMBER

  15 HOURS, 50 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN

  3.30 P.M.

  Mark

  It was over six years since I’d driven up the long, curling road to the Niceday Institute in order to interview Jacob Barrett.

  It had been summer, and a hot and oppressive one. I’d had my shirt sleeves rolled up, the window rolled down, and the whole way up I’d admired the acres of woodland on either side of the driveway: listening to birdsong from the trees to begin with; then, as I drew nearer the main building, to the fizz and buzz and crack of a groundsman at work with his strimmer. The hospital gave an illusion of peace and contentment that was a stark contrast to the people who were kept there. In reality, the place was run like a barracks.

  I was still a student, working on my thesis, and I was nervous. I was about to come face to face with that most reviled, feared and least encountered member of society, the serial murderer, for the first time in my life. Naturally, I was on edge, but I needn’t have been. The experience was strangely anti-climactic. It turned out that Jacob Barrett was only a man.

  Because I’d read about him, his crimes hung around him like a dark halo, but without that foreknowledge I’m sure I would have found him dull. He was a bore: self-obsessed and arrogant, while having nothing to back up those convictions. He peppered his speech with comments like ‘Now, I’m not a smart guy, but ...’ and there was never any need for the ‘but’. He could barely read or write, and he gave off sly so obviously you could smell it. His body was fat, rolls of it pushing at his tight blue shirt, and the skin on his face was mottled round beady eyes, which blinked too hard and too often, as though the light was bothering him.

  His forearms were brawny, though. That was how he did it. Jacob wasn’t a charmer; he was all about force. He slumped through the whole interview, with his arms folded in front of him, strangler’s hands resting across thick, flabby biceps, revelling in the attention he was receiving. He liked to scare people and give off an aura of danger, despite his incarceration; he liked to imagine you were in awe of him. So he didn’t like me much because I wasn’t scared or in awe of him, and I didn’t want to hear him boast about his crimes so much as I wanted to talk about his childhood.

  Behind those b
linking eyes, I knew, there was no emotional connection with other people. As he had passed through adolescence, the acceptable spectrum of sexual desires had finished up trodden and smeared. A well-adjusted adult wants to give and receive pleasure to and from another consenting adult, but Jacob’s fixations were different. People were simply objects to him. They were there to be posed as his misdirected drive required them to be. He was sexually malformed, and over the years he had learned to hide it, faking normality well enough to get by.

  How did he become that way? That was why I was there at Niceday. My doctorate involved an attempt to chart the grey area between the child he’d been and the adult he now was. Ultimately, the day formed a small, inconclusive part of a forgettable thesis, although the experience stayed with me a lot longer. I went home that night and was very quiet. Lise did her best to prod me out of my unease, but I couldn’t articulate it back then. I’d probably have trouble even now.

  One thing could be said for sure about Jacob’s past: nobody abducts a girl from the side of the road and strangles her in a quarry on his first time out. Like anything you do in life, murder takes practice. And that was how he ended up being caught. John Mercer had surmised correctly that the quarry murderer must have worked up to his first known crime. He guessed that the killer had probably picked up hitchhikers before, for example, bringing his secret fantasies into reality one trembling step at a time. So the police had worked in reverse: records of attempted abductions and assaults were checked; reports of suspicious behaviour investigated. They used the relative sophistication of the killer’s behaviour in the present to speculate on the mistakes he must have made in the past and learned to avoid.

  The same is generally true of any sexually oriented killer. It’s likely he’ll be caught on an initial step of his journey, the way an artist probably gains a pile of rejection letters before selling his first work. For a killer, there might be a history of minor sexual assaults, or other activities that would have brought him to the attention of the police - things that halted him slightly, and then allowed him to go on later, a little wiser as to what had tripped him. That was how Jacob Barrett had been caught. He didn’t rise out of Hell fully formed, because nobody does. It’s too easy to think like that.

  Yet the file in front of me now was a stark challenge to that principle.

  The first murders attributed to the man who became known as the 50/50 Killer were so elaborate, and committed with such assuredness, that everyone assumed he must have practised and refined his technique beforehand. However, despite a background investigation that spread nationwide, nothing remotely similar was ever uncovered. He really did seem to have come out of nowhere.

  His first known victims were Bernard and Carol Litherland. I scanned the details. They were both in their seventies, married for nearly fifty years, and had lived in the same house for the last thirty. They had two children, both of whom now had families of their own. The Litherlands were considerate neighbours, quiet but still active in the local community, and pleasant and agreeable in conversation.

  A neighbour discovered their bodies the morning after their murder, concerned that the front door had been left ajar. There was a photograph in the file of the house. It looked grey and ominous, the door, an opening to Hell that drew you in the more you stared.

  I read the post-mortem report quickly, reducing the extensive injuries to facts on a page.

  The Litherlands had been handcuffed to the bedposts by their hands and feet. Carol Litherland had been burned with an iron. She had also been cut and stabbed. There were fifty-six separate injuries, including blinding in one eye, and a wound to her throat which had finally killed her. Her husband had also been tortured, receiving burns and cuts to his legs, arms, chest and head. He had been blinded in one eye as well, but had died of a heart attack, probably brought on by shock.

  Steeling myself, I began to click through the photographs of the crime scene, referring back to the report as I went. The bodies on the bed, illuminated by police cameras, were hideous things, their pale hands protruding from the cuffs on the headboard, fingers splayed and still. Their tattered faces were turned away from each other, resting upon crimson pillows.

  I moved quickly through close-ups of their wounds, pausing on a photograph of the wall above the headboard.

  Immediately, the events of the day made more sense.

  The Litherlands’ killer had finger-painted a large pattern on the wall, almost identical to the one found in Kevin Simpson’s study. Again, it was like a dreamcatcher or a spider’s web, but distinct from either. The lines of the webbing were smeared and broken. Whatever it was supposed to represent, the report revealed it had been drawn in the Litherlands’ blood.

  From the beginning, it was clear that the murder of the Litherlands wasn’t a burglary gone wrong. When the killer had finished with them, he had cleaned the house, and exited when the street was empty. No prints were found at the scene. Not a shred of forensic information had been left behind that would help catch him. Nothing appeared to have been taken.

  The investigation started nowhere and didn’t progress much beyond, and as time went on the number of officers assigned to it dwindled. At that point, the case belonged to Detective Sergeant Geoff Hunter and his team. Mercer didn’t own it for another five months, when the next two victims were discovered and the police began to understand a little better what they were dealing with.

  After finishing the first section of the file, I clicked back to the photograph of the spider web design on the Litherlands’ wall, maximising the window so that the image filled the computer screen.

  Then I leaned back, considering it.

  As Mercer had said, it was too similar to the design today for it to be a coincidence. The same killer was surely responsible for both. So I wondered again about Greg’s initial reticence - and also the less vocal reluctance of the rest of the team. Where could that be coming from? Certainly there were differences - some aspects of the older crimes seemed to be missing from the current one - but what had been found was conclusive enough, and I couldn’t understand what was bothering everyone so deeply.

  Maybe it’s not that I’m not convinced. There’s just something about this that’s making me uneasy.

  I frowned, remembering Greg’s words. Then I returned to the file.

  At the second crime scene, the 50/50 Killer had closed the front door upon exiting the house, and this became the first real insight into his methods and motives. The Litherlands’ door had been left open because they had both died. But one of his second pair of victims was still alive and able to attract attention. The 50/50 Killer wanted his victims to be found.

  The Roseneils, twenty-three-year-old newly-weds, had been restrained in the same way as the Litherlands. Daniel Roseneil was gagged during the ordeal and passed out at some point, through pain or terror or both. Upon regaining consciousness, he found the killer gone and his wife lying dead beside him. The killer had removed his gag but left him tied to the bed. Daniel screamed for over an hour before the neighbours broke in.

  The Roseneil murder was assigned to Mercer’s team before it had been officially tied to the previous case. Under different circumstances, Hunter would have handled both, but Mercer recognised something in the crimes he couldn’t shake off, and he petitioned for and won the whole case. I could imagine that wouldn’t have gone down too well. But whatever the internal ramifications, from that point on the hunt for the 50/50 Killer belonged to our team.

  Again, I skimmed the details.

  Julie Roseneil’s body displayed similar injuries to Carol Litherland’s, in both number and intensity. Extensive cuts and burning; disfigurement of the breasts and genitals; mutilation of the face and head. Like Carol’s, Julie’s throat had been cut. Daniel Roseneil had been tortured as Bernard Litherland had, but in the end the killer had left him alive.

  I clicked through the scene-of-crime photographs, attempting without success to maintain some distance from what I saw. I noted
that a similar pattern to the first one had been painted on the wall above the Roseneils’ bed. Half dreamcatcher, half occult symbol, the webbing smeared by those little cross-checks.

  This was the 50/50 Killer’s signature, then, present but subtly different at each of the crime scenes. None of the patterns had ever been identified from books, but it was clearly meaningful and important to him. Whatever his motivations for the murders, these designs played a key role in the underlying pathology.

  The photographs concluded with a black-and-white picture from the Roseneils’ wedding, taken four months before the attack. They were both standing. Their bodies were facing away from the camera but they had turned back slightly to smile for it, hands held between them. It was hideous in comparison to the other pictures: the ones taken afterwards. They seemed so young and happy; their grip on each other’s hands looked good and strong. And then Daniel had regained consciousness to find his dead wife beside him.

  There was interview footage in the online file. It was in black-and-white, like the wedding photograph, but that was the only similarity. In these images, Daniel Roseneil’s face was bruised and downturned, his body language one big flinch. He didn’t look at the camera once. The video reminded me of the Gulf War clips of captured US soldiers forced to make statements, only this was infinitely worse, the injuries far more extensive and disfiguring. Text in the corner of the screen stated that the interview was conducted by Detective Andrew Dyson.

  I put in the headphones attached to the monitor.

  Dyson: ‘Daniel, could you tell us what you remember about the night?’

  Daniel Roseneil was looking down and to the left. His features were swollen and ruined. As he spoke, his lips clicked, sticking together slightly.

  Roseneil: ‘There was a man in the bedroom. I don’t know what time it was. I woke up and he had a knife at my throat.’

  Dyson: ‘Did he say anything?’

  Roseneil: ‘He was whispering. I think he was reassuring me. But I can’t remember exactly what he said.’