‘And tell me this,’ Rowlands continued. ‘Why the fuck would this guy go to all the trouble of leaving absolutely no trace at the scene of the murder and then confess to the first copper who turns up on his doorstep?’
‘He didn’t confess. He wanted me to know. There’s a
difference. He doesn’t want us to prove it, guv, he wants to keep doing it. He’s laughing at us.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘It’s a classic case of super-ego. This is the first of a series, guv. He knows we wouldn’t finger him for The Reaper in a million years, unless he gives us a nudge. He’s killed three people and we can’t touch him for it. But he can’t have his fun unless he can watch us running around like headless chickens trying to pin it on him.’
‘But we’re not trying to pin it on him, Brooky.’
‘I am.’
Rowlands began to pant. His breath came quickly these days. Even the mildest difficulty enervated him. ‘Give it up, son. You’ll get nowhere with it. Our best, our only chance to catch this bastard is when he does it again. If he does it again.’ Rowlands spoke softly, deliberately. Brook saw the sign. His superior had nothing more to say on the matter, even if he could summon the necessary breath.
‘He will, guv. And when he does, I’ll be ready.’
There was an awkward silence between them and Brook wasn’t sure why. There hadn’t been many. They were friends as well as colleagues since Elizabeth’s death. Brook had nursed Rowlands through that dark time. He was still nursing him. There had been some difficult moments. These matters were usually suppressed, emotions weren’t easy–their job had no use for them. They were a hindrance, an encumbrance to efficient function. Extreme events were often turned into humour to make them easier to deal with. Even Rowlands’ de rigueur divorce had been a source of thin amusement to Brook and his boss. But the death of a child…
Rowlands pushed a piece of paper towards Brook. ‘Here, take your mind off things. Go for a drive in the sunshine.’
‘What’s that?’
‘An address near Ravenscourt Park. Uniform have found us a body to check out. It’s probably just a derelict with an exploded liver…’
‘I’ll take a look.’
‘And stop worrying so much about Sammy Elphick and things you can’t change. It’s not good for your health.’
Brook glanced at the cigarette and the flask, then at Rowlands and raised his eyebrows. They grinned in unison.
‘Point taken.’ Rowlands broke into a tarry chuckle. ‘I’m serious though. It’ll cost you if you make it personal, Damen. That way lies madness. Take it from me. Besides,’ Rowlands searched for a justification and came up with one that guilt would only allow him to mutter under what passed for his breath, ‘it’s only Sammy Elphick. When all’s said and done, who’s bothered?’
Brook paused, mulling over something, then nodded. ‘You’re right, guv. It’s only Sammy Elphick. He won’t be missed.’ Then quieter, ‘You’re right.’
A sudden cloud glided over them, as though both men were confronted by something they’d rather not face. Save for the distant ringing of telephones there was nothing to disturb the moment.
Brook was the one to break it. ‘Do you remember that night, on the stairwell? When I asked you if it was a bad one and you said you didn’t know. I think I understand what you were saying.’
‘Do you? I hope not.’
Brook ignored the warning and stared at the wall
,
conjuring the scene. ‘I saw what you saw. I saw Sammy. I saw his wife. I saw the boy. This is a bad one, I thought. This is a brutal, heartless killing of man, woman and child, and every right-thinking person in this world should be appalled. And do you know what, guv? I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about those people. I looked into that boy’s face and all I saw was a case–a problem to solve. I didn’t see a family. I didn’t see a history–work, play, life, death. I saw three corpses and a challenge. I didn’t see a brutal killing and I wasn’t appalled.’ Brook looked hard at his boss. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Rowlands raised a bloodshot eye to Brook and nodded.
Brook missed the attempt at closure. ‘I thought it would hit me later. I’d have nightmares. But it hasn’t. And I know it won’t.’
‘No,’ agreed Rowlands. He took another pull on the flask and thought for a second. ‘How old are you, Brooky?’
‘Twenty-seven. Why?’
Rowlands nodded, a bemused look spreading across his countenance. ‘Christ. I was twenty-seven,’ he glanced up at Brook as though to reassure him of the relevance of this information, ‘when I stopped.’
‘Stopped what?’
‘Giving a shit.’
Wendy Jones closed the folder and turned to Brook. ‘I see your point. Bobby Wallis and Sammy Elphick could have been brothers.’
Brook looked straight ahead, focusing on the motorway. ‘They were both small-time villains, though there was never any evidence of child abuse in the Elphick case. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
Jones pondered for a moment. ‘You know, if it weren’t for the children being killed as well, I could almost imagine it was a policeman or somebody striking back…’
‘A vigilante?’
‘Right. I mean, who’s going to miss Bobby Wallis? Or Sammy Elphick?’
‘We went down the same road. If it weren’t for the children…’
Time gathered around them and Brook waited. He could sense Jones thinking hard, forming her ideas, identifying questions. He was pleased she didn’t feel the need to fill silence.
‘Why the name?’
‘What?’
‘The name. Why was he ever called The Reaper?’
‘That was my fault. I’d seen a lot of violent crime before Harlesden. Bad things. Killings, gangland executions, domestics, overdoses. You’ve seen corpses?’
‘Not many. My mother. In the hospital.’
‘Sorry.’
‘There’s no need.’
‘Any violent deaths?’
‘I was first to that tramp a couple of years back. In Markeaton Park.’
‘Beaten to death?’ Brook remembered. Jones nodded. ‘What did you notice?’
‘Sir?’
‘When you stared at him longer than was necessary, hoping that no-one would think you were being ghoulish, what did you notice?’
Jones pondered for a moment. ‘Everything.’
‘In particular?’
‘The face, his face,’ she corrected herself, ‘it was all out of shape, his mouth was open but not like people open their mouths. It was like…a caricature of what the human face should look like.’
‘Anything else?’
‘The body. Every muscle, every joint seemed to be in the wrong position. It put me in mind of that game Twister people used to play at parties years ago.’
‘At Christmas,’ Brook smiled and looked away.
‘It was like a grotesque game of that, only worse. Think of the most difficult position to hold the human body and then freeze it. That’s what I noticed.’
‘Violent death does that–throws up all sorts of weird
and wonderful positions. That’s what spawned The Reaper. When I looked at the Elphick family that first night, the violence was missing. The boy was hanging from the ceiling but he didn’t seem unduly troubled. The parents were tied and killed quickly. They’d suffered more from seeing their son die, they’d cried, same as Wallis and his wife. But in the end they were just sitting there, dead, their throats cut. They looked quite normal–apart from a look of surprise.
‘And talking about it later with Charlie Rowlands, I said it seemed less like a murder, and more like the Grim Reaper had just breezed in and removed their lives. No fuss, no bother, no struggle. Three less people in the world. Who’s next?’
‘And Brixton?’
Brook hesitated before saying, ‘Same.’ There was nothing to gain from elaborating further.
Jones nodded. ‘Brixton. December 1991. Dark evenings again. That’s why he does it round the turn of the year, isn’t it?’
‘And in bad weather, to discourage witnesses.’
‘Floyd Wrigley, West Indian origin,’ she read from the file, ‘his common law wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Tamara. Aged eleven.’ Her verbal tremor was not lost on Brook. She leafed through the file for the pictures and stumbled through them. ‘Did you see the scene?’
‘No. Yes. I mean, not really. It wasn’t my case but they asked me in on a consult. It was the same as Harlesden. Parents tied up, throats cut, watching their daughter die–all to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem. This time the girl’s throat was cut, unlike the Elphick boy.
And she’d been drugged like young Kylie, I assume to limit her suffering.’ Brook turned towards Jones to ensure she saw his approval. ‘She was innocent you see–as you spotted the other day.’ Her colour darkened.
‘It says here that the man, Floyd Wrigley, had a deeper cut than the woman and the girl. The blade hit a bone and the cut didn’t run from ear to ear.’ She turned to Brook. ‘That’s different.’
‘Maybe.’ Brook was sombre now. Jones caught his mood and stopped herself, thinking she might be digging up unhappy memories. He, in turn, recognised the change in her and tried to lighten up. ‘He worked out in a gym. Had strong neck muscles which were difficult to cut.’
‘Wouldn’t he have been hard to overpower then?’
‘He was also a junkie. If you can believe the two go together. Heroin. He was high as a kite. They both were.’
‘Any hint that race was significant?’
‘I don’t think so. Just the criminal tendencies. Wrigley was a thief and a violent man. All round scumbag. Had a couple of ABHs on his CV, and a Wounding, some guy he knifed during an argument about paying for sex with Tamara. The things people do for their fix.’
‘He pimped his eleven-year-old daughter?’ Jones looked into the distance, her voice little more than a croak. Brook was annoyed with himself. He’d been carried away. Such embellishments were out of character. Unnecessary. It rarely happened with him, the adrenaline rush of the showman. Perhaps, unconsciously, he’d been trying to degrade her a little–all her sex. A little payback for, well, where to start?
He looked across to see the mark his words had left. Too often he forgot that even fellow officers hadn’t waded as deeply into the sewer as he had. They could all identify and acknowledge the stench of society’s entrails, but
their
clothes didn’t need a boil wash at the end of each day.
His inability to gauge the emotional threshold of others was a terrible weakness, and he was ashamed. Wendy Jones was still an innocent abroad, a provincial girl with an endearing ignorance of the world as dung heap. He tried to soften the blow.
‘Actually that was just a whisper. Probably not true, otherwise they’d have had him on toast, wouldn’t they?’
‘How did The Reaper gain entry?’ asked Jones.
‘Brixton? Same as Harlesden and the other night–bearing gifts. A VCR in Harlesden, though you won’t find that in the file, and an expensive new compact disc player for Mr Wrigley and family. Once inside he had the element of surprise. Not that he needed it with Wrigley and his girlfriend doped up to the eyeballs.’
‘He still tied them up?’
‘Sure. Adrenaline at the point of death can be a powerful ally.’
‘But he didn’t tie up Bobby Wallis and his wife.’
‘No. He’s had a long time to polish his act. He’d found a way to disable them without force.’
‘The last one was 1993 in Leeds. Although I couldn’t see any…’
‘Don’t bother. There’s nothing in there on Leeds. I could only photocopy Met documents. Besides, I’ve never
been convinced about Leeds. It was a copycat and a pretty ropey one at that.’
‘Did the Leeds Force speak to you?’
‘Sure. They were taking no chances after the Yorkshire Ripper. It was just wrong. As far as I could see it was a gangland thing. Drugs. Professional job. But the Leeds boys wouldn’t have it, I don’t know why. They insisted on chalking it up to The Reaper. You’d think they’d have been pleased to know a serial killer
hadn’t
struck on their patch.’
‘Why so sure it was gangland?’
‘The victim was Roddy Telfer. He moved to Leeds from Glasgow in 1992. A real slime ball whichever way you look at it: junkie, pimp, thief, small-time, same as the others, but someone disliked him enough to put a sawn-off in his mouth and blow his head off.’
A shotgun? That’s not The Reaper’s MO.’
‘No. Far too messy.’
‘Then why think it was The Reaper?’
‘Because, using what was left of Telfer’s brains and a gloved finger, a leather glove I might add, he wrote ‘SAVED’ on the wall. Actually, he only got as far as the E when he was interrupted by Telfer’s girlfriend…’
‘Interrupted? Wasn’t she there from the start?’
‘No she wasn’t. She came home during, or straight after, Telfer’s murder. It doesn’t fit. That sort of chance occurrence wasn’t, isn’t, a feature of The Reaper’s method. He’s too careful. He would have had them both there at the start.’
‘So what happened to her?’
Brook hesitated but decided that he couldn’t avoid
cast iron facts. ‘He strangled her, which wasn’t easy. His hands were covered in Telfer’s blood, so it was hard to get a grip. She wasn’t easy to manoeuvre. She was eight months pregnant and…’
‘Oh God!’
‘You didn’t know that?’
‘No, why would I?’ Jones put her own leather-gloved hand to her brow and then her mouth. She closed her eyes, composing herself the best she could.
‘I’m sorry…’
Brook said nothing. It would serve no purpose telling her the rest. Even the hardened Yorkshire CID officers who’d briefed him had blanched at the memory.
They were approaching a service station and he pulled into the inside lane. He was pleased in a way that she was so sickened by this detail. The death of an unborn child should sicken. Once Brook would have felt the same way. Now Brook’s distress could only ever be vicarious. After the Maples girl, all deaths could be squared away–even that of Roddy Telfer’s unborn child. The offspring of a criminal–rough justice certainly, but life goes on.
Moments later Brook pulled the car into the slip road of the service station and parked. ‘Open the window.’