The Sister (48 page)

He'd always taken an interest in the places he passed through. The sleepy towns where nothing much ever happened were the best. The residents were complacent and never expected anything to happen, because nothing ever did.

It was a policy of his never to strike twice in the same place. Not even in a neighbouring county unless you
wanted
to draw attention to yourself. Since the fight, he had no need of work. The breaking and entering here and there was just for fun. It wasn't going to spark a manhunt, and that was the key. Hit a town. Blitz it and then move to the other end of the country and do the same. The police might catch on eventually, but by then, he'd be on to something else. There was
always
something else.

The games no longer held the same appeal, and he understood why many killers felt the need to taunt. It created a challenge, and he was bored.

Whoever had read the newspaper previously, must have dropped it and then put it back together in the wrong order. With the front page apparently missing, he leafed through the pages looking for it. It was there, but reversed, near to the back. He lifted the page out and turned it round.

The headline struck him.

Boy Missing - Police Appeal . . .

A five-year-old kid on his way to school that morning never arrived.
Five years old!

What is it with people these days?
He sipped the hot coffee. It scalded the oversensitive scar on his top lip. Gritting his teeth in anger, he blamed first the surgeons who hadn't knitted the wound together properly, and then the headline for distracting him.

He blew across the surface of the steaming liquid and continued to read.

He'd noticed over the years on his travels that someone was kidnapping little boys; he'd stumble on the odd headline, hundreds of miles apart. They always started the same.
Boy Missing…

None of the boys were ever found. He hoped this kid would turn up safe and sound, but he had his doubts. If police suspected a serial killer of children was at large, they were keeping quiet about it. He clenched his fists so hard that the knuckles popped.

Criss-crossing the same old roads, he noticed things and he'd look at people more closely. He was more wary of familiar faces than the unfamiliar ones. He developed an expertise in body language, another of the few skills he'd picked up from his father and learned to sense if someone was watching or masking an interest in him.
You feel that, boy, those people over there are talking about us.

The same feeling came over him in the café. It was a type of radar, and the two men hunched over on the table in the far corner, blipped onto it. He'd seen them around before. His memory for faces was without equal. Glancing back at the front page, other headlines covering
years
, flashed in his mind's eye.

The two were always
there.
Unable to believe he'd never made the connection before, he'd always thought they were just travellers on the lookout for places to rob. He'd known from the look of them they were up to no good, but now he knew exactly what they were.

They were staring back at him; their own radar had kicked in. Something in the way he looked at them gave him away. They exchanged looks, trying to act as if nothing was happening. They talked urgently, occasionally shooting a look in his direction.

What he saw in them, they saw in him. The cold eyes, the sense of detachment and something else, too. The stranger was utterly without fear.

He checked the heat of the coffee, and took another sip, openly watching them.

They were talking about him.

He'd learned to read lips as a boy due to his mother's speech impediment and pieced together what they were saying.

A further quick exchange passed between them so close across the tabletop their faces almost touched. They whispered urgently.

"We can't wait any longer . . . it's too risky."

"Are you sure that isn't him?"

"Don't be fucking stupid!
He's
not one of us."

"Let's just go. That guy over there . . . he's making me nervous."

They stood up and left.

He drained the last of his coffee. It made him want to piss, but he daren't go for fear of losing the two men.

Outside they entered a large, dirty white van. He followed at a distance for miles. Eventually, they turned off the main road, driving in the darkness down ever narrowing roads, until they reached a farm track.

Five minutes later, they pulled up outside a run down house surrounded by old shipping containers.

The stranger had switched his lights off as soon as he'd turned onto the track, navigating by moonlight alone. He pulled up two hundred yards away and observed from his car.

One of the men retrieved a small figure from the back wrapped in a blanket. The other looked around furtively as he slammed the back doors of the van shut. The two men hurried inside with the boy. Dogs barked excitedly. He could tell from the depth and resonance of the barking that they were big and at least two of them.

Sprinting as fast as he dared in the darkness, he got to within a few yards, and then walked the remaining distance on the sides of his feet. He pressed his back against the wall outside the house, next to the door they'd entered.

The low growling informed him that the animals had sensed his presence.

Damn dogs!
He hadn't fully recovered from the bite he'd received before Christmas. That one had come out of nowhere. Its owner had trained it to go for the nuts. He winced at the painful memory. One day he'd go back for the owner, for what he did to him.

Damned perverts probably think the animals are excited about having a child in the house. No time to lose.

He kicked in the door.
Rottweiler's!
The first leapt at him. He buried his knife to the hilt into its head, killing it instantly. He snatched at the knife, pulling up on it hard to retrieve it. The dead dog's head and shoulders rose from the floor. The knife wouldn't come out. It was stuck in deep, right through the bone.
No time!
The second one was on him; hot breath and saliva sprayed his face as he grabbed a front leg. Side stepping away, he pulled and lifted, swinging hard, he smashed it against the wall. He felt its leg break or dislocate; it didn't matter which. He stamped hard on its neck.

Face down on a table, trussed up and crying; the sound muffled by a gag; the boy was trying to turn round to see what was happening.

"Look away kid!" The stranger commanded.

At first, the men were slow, caught by the shock of how quickly their first line of defence had failed, but now they closed in on the intruder. He stood stock still, ready. They rushed in from both sides as if they'd rehearsed the move, but they could never have anticipated violence on the scale about to be unleashed upon them. The two of them were used to dealing with no more than a child's resistance, and the stranger annihilated them easily with a short series of heavy blows. His gloved fists hooked and hammered away, like a butcher tenderising steaks.

The boy was frozen, stunned into silence . . . unsure what would become of him.

"Don't turn round, kid."

He retrieved the baseball bat that he'd left outside by the door. When he'd first stolen it, he knew it would come in handy one day. Not quite the use he had in mind for it, but it still fitted in with his overall plans.

One of the men cried out for an end to his misery. The other one was already dead.

Afterwards, he calmly took a mobile phone from one of his victims and dialled 999.

"Stay here kid. The police are coming to get you out of here, okay?" The boy nodded quickly, obediently not looking at him.

On the way out, he retrieved his knife from the dog's skull. Stuck so tight, he had to use his boot to hold the head in place as he used both hands to twist and wrench the blade free.

He surveyed the carnage. A voice was in his head.
You risked everything to save a kid!

"
It isn't just one kid though, is it? It's for all the other kids those deviants have kidnapped, and for every kid they would have . . ." he said quietly. He shook his head to clear the voice.

You're going soft.

Chapter 103

West Lothian Police HQ,
Scotland

Detective Michael Brady entered DCI Caulson's office with a report. The DCI didn't turn to look at him. He stood with his hands folded behind his back looking out of the window onto the car park below. Brady was the new, boy, the bright young thing transferred just a few weeks ago from London. Brady sensed the DCI hadn't been particularly impressed with him so far. This could be his chance to shine.

"I have the pathologist's initial findings, sir."

"Good, leave it on my desk. Shut the door behind you."

Brady raised his eyebrows, and with a shrug, did as he was told. He could tell from the brusque manner of his dismissal that the chief was in a foul mood. He dropped the report into the in-tray. As he reached for the door handle, Caulson spoke again.

"Read it for me, Brady, and not the whole bloody thing. Just pick out the relevant points for me." The DCI continued looking out of the window.

Brady turned away from the door and approached the desk to retrieve the document. Reaching for it, he realised that Caulson could see his every move reflected in the glass against the darkness outside.

"You've read it already, I take it, Brady?"

"Yes, sir, I have."

"Then don't just read it,
tell
me what it says."

Brady cleared his throat. "Well, sir, it confirms the two men were basically beaten to death and violated with a large blunt instrument. We recovered a baseball bat from the scene. In fact, it was protruding . . ." The chief turned away from the window; he was a pinch-faced man with a stern expression and abrasive manner. Tall and thin, he looked ten years older than his sixty years. He wasn't popular, and Brady was finding out why.

"Sit down, Brady, I know all that already. What else do we have that is relevant to finding this character?"

"Well, there's evidence that he actually finished the second man off with the bat, by forcing it so far into him that it ruptured everything in its path . . ."

"You think that's relevant?"

"I do, sir, it tells us that we are dealing with someone who isn't afraid to inflict—"

The DCI did not let him finish. "So what sort of person are we looking at: The father of a previous victim, looking for revenge; a butcher or a psychopathic baseball fan? Tell me about the bat."

Brady had suddenly become very hot under the spotlight of Caulson's glare. The man wouldn't let him settle, kept catching him off guard. He realised that gaining Caulson's respect was going to be nigh on impossible. If he wanted to impress him at all, he'd have to come up with something smart. And quickly.

"The baseball bat has letters carved in just above the handle, spaced out with each one exactly one third of the way round, so the shaft, if rotated, says variously FKJ, KJF or JFK. It's extremely unlikely that the initials belong to the assailant. It's also extremely unlikely - given its low value - that it's been reported lost or stolen."

"Anything else?"

"The bat wasn't used to beat the men. Strangely enough, it seems he preferred to do that with his fists. He wore gloves. Apart from tiny pieces of leather that scuffed off them and some footprints, we don't have anything else at all."

"We got nothing from the kid I take it?"

"The man ordered him not to look, but he did see him. He told us there was only one man, and that was about it. He's a wee bit traumatised as you can imagine at only seven years old, so I don't—"

"Then don't," he withered Brady with a harsh glare; he didn't like how the Sassenach tried to ingratiate himself with the use of a Scot's term. "Any
wee
ideas on how he tracked them down?"

"Not at this stage. He could have been watching them for weeks. We're checking out the computers we found and mobile telephone records. We also found recording equipment, DVD's and so on. Early indications are that they were part of a paedophile ring."

"Sounds like this vigilante did us all a favour . . ." He lifted a cigarette from the inside pocket of his jacket and put it between his lips. He didn't light it, but he drew through the tobacco deeply. He caught the look Brady had given him. "Trying to give it up, it's not easy in this job," he exhales with a sigh. "So, in a nutshell, at the moment we don't know if it was revenge, a hate crime, or what the motive was. All we have on him, is he's likely got bruised knuckles." He drew hard on the cigarette. "Getting back to those initials . . ."

"Yes, sir?"

"I want them run through the database, all burglaries where the owners have those combined initials."

Brady groaned.