Authors: Jill McGown
“He did kill Mrs. Fenton,” he said. “I know that now. And then he went on to kill again, as a sort of challenge to me. Grace must have told him what I said about the money being spread out, though naturally she denies that. I feel so stupid about telling her, but as I told you, I genuinely believed that Stephen was innocent at that point, and that theatrical detail was one that I thought might stop her worrying so much. It was much later that I began to realize how wrong I’d been.” He shook his head. “I, of all people, should have realized that murderers come in all varieties. I tried, I swear to you, I tried to make up for what I’d done. I thought, if I could only work out what was in his mind, I might be able to stop him killing the next person, but—”
Lloyd held up a hand. “I know you were a journalist,” he said. “And a writer. And now you’re a columnist and broadcaster. You’re a very versatile man, Mr. Baker. Were you an actor, too?”
Tony frowned. “I’m sorry?”
“The distress is very good,” said Lloyd. “Very good. And, I have to admit that you had me fooled. My superintendent here was never just as beguiled as I was, I have to admit that, too. And her predecessor was even less taken in by you. But then I have this tendency to be a little bit starstruck. Not unlike Mrs. Halliday.”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Of course you have!” Lloyd stood up, and walked over to the old-fashioned frosted-glass sash window, open slightly to admit fresh air on this warm day, but barred, presumably to prevent escape from this ground-floor interview room. He leaned on the windowsill, and looked out. “Stephen Halliday may or may not have killed Wilma Fenton,” he said. “But he didn’t kill Lewis, or Guthrie, or try to kill his mother or Jack Shaw. You did that.”
Tony looked at Judy Hill, whose brown eyes regarded him with curiosity. He smiled. “I think,” he said, “that you’re making the same mistake as Grace. You’ve found my research, and jumped to conclusions.”
“No, Mr. Baker,” she said. “What we found in your room merely confirmed what we already believed.”
He didn’t launch into the explanation that he’d offered Grace—somehow he felt that it would be unlikely to have the same effect on the cool, composed woman who sat opposite him. But the photographs and plans weren’t enough to convict him—not even to charge him. He could prove that was how he had hunted down Challenger’s potential victim, that it was how he worked. He had kept them for the book he was going to write for publication after his death, telling the world how he had led the police in a murderous dance while apparently working with them. When Grace Halliday had found them, he had thought of destroying them, but then he had realized that such an action would suggest his guilt, so he had kept them quite openly. What guilty man would do that?
He looked over at Lloyd, but he seemed to be engrossed in whatever it was he could see through that window.
“The psychological profiler that we brought in said that the writer of the letters had what amounted to an obsession with you,” said Superintendent Hill.
“It does seem that way,” said Tony.
“And the only person I’ve met during this investigation who is obsessed with you
is
you,” she said.
Tony dismissed that with a smile and a shake of his head. “I realized when I got the very first letter that you might consider the possibility that I’d written it to myself, but really—that does seem a very flimsy basis for an accusation of serial murder.”
“Oh, it is. Very flimsy,” said Lloyd. “But you see, real murder has a motive. It doesn’t matter whether it’s God telling someone to kill, or someone trying to get his hands on Wilma Fenton’s prize money—there is always a motive, and that gives the investigators something, however nebulous, to get hold of.”
In the street outside, Tony could hear traffic rumbling past, and Lloyd was still staring out at it as he spoke.
“But there was no motive for these murders. The victims were chosen for ease of dispatch. And, to be perfectly frank, all that the police can do in a situation like that is wait for the murderer to make a mistake. And you finally did make a mistake.”
Lloyd turned as he spoke the last sentence, and Tony wondered if he had seen the moment’s irritation that he had felt at the suggestion that he had made a mistake. He mustn’t give himself away, because they were on a fishing expedition, and nothing more. He had left them no evidence, and he didn’t make mistakes.
“May Day was your downfall, Mr. Baker,” he went on. “Grace Halliday was your intended victim, but Jack Shaw saved her life. You knew that he must have seen something, so he had to go. But the rifle had jammed, and you found out as soon as you hit him that Shaw couldn’t be beaten to death without spattering his murderer with blood, so he had to be got rid of some other way.” Lloyd left the window, and sat down opposite him once more. “That puzzled me,” he said. “Because Jack Shaw wasn’t dead, and no one could have thought that he was. And yet you had chosen to leave your signature as if he were dead. Why? This morning, I realized why. And two hours ago, I had my suspicions confirmed—a massive dose of insulin had been administered as Jack Shaw lay unconscious.”
Tony was amused. “Really? I always understood that insulin was absorbed into the body too quickly for there to be a reliable test for its presence. Besides, it’s impossible to distinguish from the body’s own insulin.” He looked at Judy Hill. “I’m disappointed in you, Superintendent. I would have thought you would know better than to let your subordinates get up to tricks like that.”
“I can assure you that the test was thoroughly reliable,” she said, her voice as crisp and frosty as a January midnight.
Oh, dear—she really was disappointing him now. It was all on tape, and telling fibs wasn’t allowed. He had always been quite impressed by her, but she would never get to be a real superintendent at this rate. He smiled. “In that case, I obviously need to update my medical knowledge.”
“Of course,” said Lloyd, “Jack Shaw can never tell us who fired that shot at Grace Halliday and therefore who administered that injection, but I don’t think we need his testimony.”
Tony regarded Lloyd with amusement. Perhaps they did have some sort of test these days. But even if they had, what sort of proof did they think that was?
“Are you seriously suggesting that because insulin was used on Jack Shaw I must be the one who used it? Anyone who was at the Grange yesterday could have got hold of it—it’s kept in the fridge, for God’s sake! Stephen could have got it. Grace. Mike Waterman. Even that security guard—Scopes, or whatever his name is. He drinks in the Tulliver—he could have got into the kitchen when no one was looking.”
“But each of them would have had to know that he or she was going to need it,” said Lloyd. “The assailant had planned a shooting—why would he be carrying insulin with him? Unless, of course, he was diabetic, on a clinical trial that necessitated a lunchtime injection, and had been invited to lunch.”
“Oh, please.” Tony laughed, shook his head. “Do you imagine that would stand up in court?”
“I think it would carry some weight,” said Lloyd.
“Not enough, unfortunately. I suggest that Stephen took it for his next victim, but had to use it on Jack instead. I further suggest that
I
was going to be his next victim, and that he had it with him for that purpose. He used a different method for each victim, remember—I expect he thought it an appropriate way for me to die. And I think that but for the intervention of Jack Shaw, I would have been the person lying in an irreversible coma. It’s Shaw who’s in the coma, however, and without his eyewitness testimony, you’re stuck with the fact that anyone who was in the vicinity could have injected him with insulin.”
“No, Mr. Baker. I’m not. You see, none of the other people who were there—Stephen, Grace Halliday, Keith Scopes, or Mike Waterman—could have intended murdering Jack Shaw that way.”
“And how do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Because if any of these people had wanted to kill Jack Shaw,” said Lloyd, “they wouldn’t have injected the insulin into his artificial leg.”
Tony blinked at him, not speaking.
“I know,” said Lloyd. “You’d never guess, would you? He’s even a Morris dancer. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how some people can overcome adversity like that? Grace Halliday was telling me that it’s a very expensive leg—Jack got a good deal of compensation for the accident, and it was invested well for him. He’s always had top-of-the-range, state-of-the-art legs. That’s why he can dance. And why you’d never know he had an artificial leg at all. There are very few things he can’t do with ease. But getting up when he’s fallen is one of them.”
Tony still just stared at him, motionless, speechless.
“So that’s how we know insulin was used. The pathology lab at the hospital carried out a test and it was found in his artificial leg, which I think you will agree produces none of its own to confuse the issue.”
Tony was trying to come to terms with what he was being told, but his head was spinning.
“The coma that you hoped would be put down to the head injury was indeed caused by that, and was fortunately by no means irreversible. Jack’s alive, Mr. Baker. Alive and awake. He began regaining consciousness in the early hours of the morning, and I was able to speak to him very briefly just before I came here. He was fortunate—no brain damage, and his memory of the incident is intact.”
Game over. Tony steepled his fingers and pressed them to his lips, closing his eyes. This wasn’t how it had been supposed to end, but that was how it was with games of chance. Someone won, someone lost.
He opened his eyes, and looked at Judy Hill. “I expect you would like to know why I did it.”
“I know why you did it,” she said. “You were being blackmailed.”
“Has Stephen confessed?”
She shook her head. “We used our powers of deduction,” she said. “We do have some.”
They were much sharper than he’d imagined they would be. He smiled. “I was indeed being blackmailed,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve destroyed all the letters.” He hadn’t been too worried when the detectives came with their search warrant, because the letters were the only thing that could have helped them, or so he had thought. “I got the first one after Mrs. Fenton’s murder.”
He could still remember how he had felt when he had opened that letter, and realized that it had to be from Wilma Fenton’s murderer. He could remember all the blackmail letters, word for word, because he had examined them minutely in the hope of finding a clue to who was writing them.
I know what you did in that alleyway on Sunday. You made that woman’s murder look different. Her bingo prize was stolen, but you left yours there instead and changed the time it happened. Leave £1000 in a padded envelope in the yellow wastebin behind the Civic Center in Stansfield by half past ten at night on Friday March 24 or your newspaper will get the story.
Lloyd turned from the window again. “What I don’t understand is why murder seemed to you to be the solution to the situation.”
Tony smiled. “It was the trigger, Chief Inspector. I told you serial killers are born, not made. I played fair—I told you the money might be meaningless. I explained that the ultimate in murder was the motiveless, random killing. I think I’ve always known that eventually I would murder someone myself. The mind of the murderer is so fascinating, and I knew I had the mind of a murderer.”
And he fancied that Lloyd was looking at him with a kind of horrified fascination.
“I thought if I ever did murder someone, it would be simply as an experiment, an experience. But as you say, most murders are motivated, and I needed more motive than mere curiosity. That letter provided it. Only Mrs. Fenton’s murderer could have written it, because only Mrs. Fenton’s murderer and I knew that her money had been stolen. Her murderer—at that point I still didn’t believe it could be Stephen—was writing to me, and threatening me with exposure that would ruin my reputation, my career, my life. Paying him his paltry thousand pounds wouldn’t alter the fact that he had this power over me. He had given me the motive that I needed. That’s when I conceived my plan.”
“Your plan being what?”
“Plan A was to establish the blackmailer as a serial killer, and once his existence was undeniable and his identity was suspected, to kill him—in self-defense, of course.” He smiled a little ruefully. “It didn’t work out that way, but I thought plan B was working, until today.”
Lloyd frowned. “I don’t quite understand.”
“Why should you? You don’t have the devious mind of a serial killer.”
Lloyd acknowledged his shortcomings in that regard with a nod of his head.
Tony glanced at Judy Hill. “I wrote the letter that I brought to you, Superintendent. I made it look exactly like the letter I had received, and I put it in the genuine envelope. Then I wrote to the newspaper.”
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Just so that you would be back on the front pages?”
Tony shook his head. Of course, they were bound to think that it was for the publicity it had generated, pushing him right back into the public consciousness, but that had been the effect of it, not the reason for it.
“I know that I’m seen as having little regard for the way the police go about their business, but I don’t have that low an opinion of your capabilities, and I was embarking on a very risky venture. I wanted to be certain that you and your colleagues were working under as much pressure as I could possibly produce. I knew I would leave you virtually no evidence to go on, and by giving the impression that you were being fed with information by the murderer and still getting nowhere, I could rely on the British press dogging your every move, criticizing your lack of results, and making your job difficult to the point of impossibility.”
“That part of your plan succeeded admirably,” said Lloyd.
Tony looked over at him. “Thank you. I was particularly gratified when Detective Chief Superintendent Yardley stepped down from the inquiry on Saturday. Turmoil at the top—that’s always a distraction for the investigation team.”
“And once you had set that in motion?” asked Judy Hill. “What then?”