Redemption of the Dead (3 page)

‘Because he hasn’t worked out how to yet,’ Sean told him. ‘He’s comfortable in wooded areas, but they can’t give him the privacy he needs – not in the daylight – which is when he likes to work.’

‘Work?’ the man questioned.

‘A figure of speech,’ Sean explained.

‘Really?’ the man asked, but let it slide. ‘So what’s he going to do about it, this man of ours?’

‘He’ll wait. He’ll wait until he sees an opportunity to attack someone in their own home. Then he can take his time – all the time he wants – and get cleaned up before leaving the scene.’

The man pursed his lips and shook his head as he stood and crossed the room to Sean, holding out a hand as a goodwill gesture. ‘Detective Chief Superintendent Charlie Bannan, but you can call me guv’nor or boss, take your pick.’

Sean felt his stomach tighten with tension as he accepted the hand, the grip much firmer than he was expecting. ‘PC Sean …’

‘Sean Corrigan,’ Bannan finished for him, seeing the confusion in Sean’s eyes. ‘I saw you fight, last night. Very impressive.’ Bannan looked around the room to make sure everyone was listening. ‘This young man won the Lafone Cup last night, yet look at him – not a mark on his face and back to work the next day. Still, seeing as how no one managed to lay a glove on you there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be – is there?’

‘No, sir … sorry, guv’nor,’ Sean answered.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Bannan told him before spinning on his heels and heading for the door. Sean hesitated for a second before following, finding he had to almost break into a jog to keep up with the older man. ‘How long you been boxing for?’ Bannan asked as they walked the corridors.

‘Since I was a teenager.’

‘You’re good,’ Bannan said. ‘Very good. Ever thought about going professional?’

‘No,’ Sean told him. ‘Amateur’s enough for me.’

‘Shame,’ Bannan declared, looking him up and down out of the corner of his eye. ‘In here, son. My office.’ Sean followed him inside the tiny, cluttered space. ‘Bit of a broom-cupboard, but it’ll have to do for now. Not as palatial as my office back at HQ, but as a temporary home it serves its purpose. Take a seat.’

‘Thanks,’ Sean told him and sat in one of only three scruffy, worn-out chairs in the room, while he watched Bannan rifling through a metal filing cabinet that took up more than its fair share of available space, until finally he pulled a pink folder marked
confidential
from within and threw it on the desk in front of Sean. ‘Have a butcher’s at that,’ Bannan told him, but the
confidential
stamp made Sean stall. ‘It’s alright – you have my authority to look inside.’ Sean shrugged and carefully opened the file, the horrific crime-scene photograph that immediately confronted him – its terrible bright colours – making him look away involuntarily.

‘Fuck me,’ he said slowly and quietly before he was able to look again. ‘Jesus Christ. I didn’t know it had been that bad.’

‘Recognise her?’ Bannan asked.

‘Yeah,’ Sean solemnly admitted. ‘Rebecca Fordham. She didn’t deserve this.’

‘Does anyone?’ Bannan asked.

‘Maybe,’ Sean said without thinking.

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing,’ Sean answered, ‘just thinking out loud.’

‘Rebecca Fordham was murdered in her flat in Putney a little more than a year ago – raped, throat cut and stabbed forty-nine times. No witnesses to speak of.’

‘This is the same man,’ Sean declared, shaking his head in disbelief at what he was seeing. ‘It has to be – a beautiful young woman in daylight – the level of violence – stab wounds made by a large bladed instrument – sexually assaulted and sexually mutilated. This just feels like our man.’

‘She was wasn’t she?’ Bannan suddenly asked, knocking Sean from his train of thought.

‘She was what?’

‘Beautiful,’ Bannan told him, reducing them both to silence as they sat and thought about the smiling, radiant woman the papers and television had shown pictures of almost constantly after her cruel death. She’d been so full of life, yet they had to see her like this – as the maniac had made her look. ‘You said he wants to kill again, but can’t, not until he works out how to. What did you mean?’

‘Like I said, there are certain things that are very important to him – attractive young women, preferably with their children present and daylight and violence. But he can’t use the knife again unless he’s inside.’

‘But there were no children present at the Fordham scene.’

‘I know,’ Sean agreed through his confusion. ‘But maybe there was something else?’

‘Such as?’

‘I don’t know.’

Bannan allowed a few moments of silence before continuing. ‘So why doesn’t he use something else or strangle them?’

‘Maybe he’s not strong enough, or more likely he has some emotional attachment to the knife – he always used a knife in his fantasies and now nothing else will do.’

‘Interesting,’ Bannan told him. ‘Have you studied psychology or criminology?’

‘No,’ Sean answered, ‘not really.’

‘I’m surprised,’ Bannan said before pushing on. ‘So what does he do now – break into some unsuspecting woman’s house and commit murder?’

‘He already has murdered,’ Sean insisted, pressing his index finger into the crime scene photographs.

‘So you say, but I’m more interested in what he’ll do next, then maybe I can stop him.’

‘Well he won’t break in – I know that much.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if he was going to he would have by now. My guess would be he’s not comfortable with locks – doesn’t have the skills to open locked doors and he doesn’t want to break a window because he’s too scared of being heard and disturbed. Maybe he has bad memories of almost being caught trying to break in somewhere, so …’

‘Go on,’ Bannan encouraged him.

‘So he looks and waits for the right opportunity – for someone getting careless and leaving a door open or a window he can fit through.’

‘Then we can assume he’s already looking for that opportunity, right now, as we speak?’

‘Yes,’ Sean told him, ‘but he keeps failing, which is when he goes to the parks and woods.’

‘Because something is better than nothing,’ Bannan agreed.

Sean nodded slowly before asking another question. ‘What evidence do you have so far?’

‘From the Parkside rapes – we have his DNA from his semen, but the DNA database is so new there’s almost no one on it yet and our man certainly isn’t. A decent description: male, white, average build and height etc, but nothing that sets him apart.’

‘Then what about fingerprints – fingerprint records go back for years.’

‘No fingerprints.’

‘But he’s reckless at the scenes,’ Sean argued, ‘and he doesn’t wear gloves.’

‘That may be so, but he hasn’t touched anything we could lift a print from.’

‘What about from the Rebecca Fordham investigation? Do we know if he left a print there?’

‘I don’t and they’re not telling even if he did.’

‘They can’t do that!’

‘Yes they can, son and they are. Listen, as far as they’re concerned Rebecca Fordham’s killer is dead and they don’t want anyone rocking the boat. If we link our crimes to her killer then Ian McCaig couldn’t possibly be guilty – he’s been dead while our man’s been running amok.’

‘Then they got the wrong man.’

‘Possibly, but they don’t want to hear that, do they? You know the story – it was all over the papers and telly – McCaig was on remand waiting for his trial, but he couldn’t take it – couldn’t take being locked up, couldn’t take being tortured by the media and hated by the public, so he topped himself. The public and media took it as an admission of his guilt and the investigating team took it as case closed. No one wants to open up old wounds and have an investigation into a miscarriage of justice, particularly one that ended up with a suspect killing himself. That would not be good for business, son.’

‘We need to see everything they’ve got,’ Sean insisted, not interested in maintaining the status quo.

‘They won’t give us access,’ Bannan warned him.

‘But they must know there a decent chance they got the wrong man?’

‘From what I know they’ve convinced themselves McCaig was their man.’

‘How?’ Sean asked, still confused how anyone would not want to remove the doubt – to remove any lingering possibilities.

‘They’ve got some criminologist or what does she call herself – a forensic historical criminologist – looks at cases from history to help solve
current crimes. She’s quite the expert on Jack the Ripper by all accounts. She gave them a profile of what they should look for in the man who’d killed Rebecca Fordham and apparently McCaig fits the profile to a tee.’

‘Then the profile’s wrong,’ Sean replied angrily, ‘and why the hell is the investigation team listening to a damn historian?’

‘Because they were told to.’

‘Who by?’

‘The powers-that-be, son.’

‘That’s a heap of shit.’

‘No son, that’s politics.’

‘They need to understand they’re wrong,’ Sean insisted.

‘They don’t want to hear that.’

‘Then we need to go and see them – speak to them and explain what’s happening.’

‘Don’t you think I haven’t already tried? Furthest I’ve got is a chat on the phone. They ain’t budging, son. They have McCaig and as far as they’re concerned, that’s that.’

‘Then we try again – tell them we have something new. Lie to them if we have to.’

Bannan smiled and even laughed a little. ‘It’s not going to happen, son.’

‘Then I need to see the scene,’ Sean told him.

‘That scene’s more than a year old now. There’s nothing there for us anymore.’

‘I need to see it,’ Sean insisted, his boyish face made old by his haunting seriousness, ‘with the crime scene photographs. That’ll be enough.’

Bannan had used Sean’s type
before, but he’d never met one with such intensity or clarity – such insightfulness
.
‘Very well,’ Bannan relented. ‘Keep the file and the photos from the scene, for a while at least. The flat’s still unoccupied, but there’s a caretaker on site who’ll let you in if you flash your badge and sweet talk him.’

‘I’ll go there tomorrow,’ Sean reassured him.

‘Of course you will,’ Bannan told him. ‘Of course you will.’

Sean stood to leave before turning back towards Bannan. ‘By the way, how did you know?’ he asked.

‘How did I know what?’ Bannan replied.

‘If you weren’t on the case yourself, how did you know about the caretaker?’

‘Well, let’s just say I never was very good at keeping my nose out of other people’s business. Trick is – don’t get caught doing it.’

It was a little before nine a.m. when the caretaker opened the door to the flat where more than a year earlier Rebecca Fordham had been brutally murdered. He stepped aside to let Sean enter the dimness inside, half the windows long since smashed by local youths with nothing better to do, and replaced with hastily nailed-up wooden boards.

‘Here we are then,’ he told Sean in a thick London accent, although his voice was surprisingly high-pitched for such a big, threatening looking man; his shaved hair and do-it-yourself tattoos making him look like an ageing football hooligan. Sean had found him pleasant enough and decided his appearance was probably deliberately crafted to keep the local yobs and criminals at bay. ‘Last bloke that came snooping around here was a detective superintendent or something, but I guess she’s not a priority anymore, eh?’

‘What?’ Sean asked, suddenly realizing he’d not been listening.

‘I said your lot used to send superintendents, now they send constables – since the bastard who killed her done himself in, and may his soul rot in hell by the way.’

‘If it was him,’ Sean said without thinking.

‘Sorry. I don’t follow.’

Sean cleared his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Whatever,’ the caretaker said with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Take as long as you want. Just remember to drop the keys back when you’re done, although I don’t know what you expect to find – police and council cleared everything out months ago – to keep the ghouls and press away they told me. Anyway, I’ll leave you in peace – place gives me the bloody creeps.’

Sean watched him shuffling away, huffing and puffing under his own weight, before he turned back to the flat, the darkness inside almost warning him not to go any further – warning him he would be consumed with the horror that still permeated the very walls of the interior. He’d covered a couple of sudden deaths as a probationary constable and one had even been a murder – a semi-vagrant kicked to death by his drinking friends. But this felt different – completely different, as if a pure evil had left its mark there. He felt the same presence he’d felt back in the park in Hither Green. The same malevolent force. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The caretaker had been right – the inside was nothing more than a shell now. Everything that had made it a home was long gone. All that remained were the fixtures and fittings that were too big to remove: the built-in cupboards, kitchen cabinets, bath, sinks and toilet. Everything else was gone – even the carpets. But Sean could see them nonetheless, and he could see the blood – see the blood on the floor, the sofa, the table and surrounding chairs, the crime-scene photographs turning his mind into a projector for the images from the past.

He walked along the narrow hallway, within a few steps reaching the doorways on both his right and left, causing him to pause. He pulled a copy of the confidential case file from an innocuous looking envelope and thumbed through it to the photographs that showed the flat how it was when the murder had first been discovered. He checked his orientation and deduced that the room on his left would have been the son’s room and the one on the right the kitchen. He checked the case file report – the killer had come in through a window Rebecca had left open in the kitchen.
Why had she done that? Was she trying to disperse the heat that had built up during the hot summer day, or was she trying to dispel the odours of cooking? It was a normal thing to do – something hundreds of thousands of others would have done on the very same day.
‘Only it cost her life.’ He suddenly found himself speaking out loud. He checked the file and the photographs again. She’d been attacked in the hallway initially, probably as she came across him as he walked from the kitchen. Blood spray patterns indicated he’d stabbed her in the stomach area and then dragged her to the lounge where he’d cut her throat with a large, extremely sharp-bladed instrument. It would have taken her only seconds to bleed to death.
Why didn’t you kill her straight away? The shock of being stabbed in the stomach would stop her from crying out, but why not kill her as soon as she found you? What were you waiting for?
Again he checked the file. After she’d bled to death he sexually assaulted the body in almost every way imaginable and then extensively mutilated her, paying particular attention to her breasts and sexual organs.
You hate women, don’t you? You hate them so much it drove you to do this.