You Are Dead (32 page)

He kept up the pressure, holding her head below the surface, invisible in the inky darkness.

Gradually, her struggling lessened. Then she became still, inert. He continued lying there, shivering, his hands growing numb with the cold, his entire body growing steadily numb, his brain racing.

Then, finally, when he was sure she had been under the water for long enough, he scrambled to his feet, climbed back onto dry land, and ran across the grass and up the steps to the promenade. Then, waving his arms like a mad thing, dripping with water, he ran out into the road, screaming, “Help me, help me, someone! Oh God, please help me!”

A passing car pulled up and he ran, crying, over to the driver's window. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you. Please help me.”

 

69

Thursday 18 December

Roy Grace left Iain Maclean in charge of the 8:30 a.m. briefing, then drove with DS Cale the short distance down the A27, over a series of roundabouts and up a hill that climbed steeply, adjacent to the dual carriageway. He pulled up close to a five-barred gate and noticed the padlock chain had been cut through and had fallen to the ground. Then they hurried up a grassy hill, avoiding a line of horse dung. It was a cold, sunny, blustery day and Grace was grateful that the rain of the past few days had stopped.

After ten minutes of hard, uphill climbing, following tire tracks in the soggy grass, he saw the small, domed temple-like structure over to the right nestling among the hills. The tire tracks veered toward it. The Chattri was one of the city of Brighton and Hove's most beautiful but less well-known landmarks. It was a round, white temple at the top of several flights of stone steps, in a beautiful location on the South Downs. Open to the elements, it comprised a dome supported by a circle of columns.

During the First World War, many Indian soldiers who had been wounded fighting for the British Empire had been brought to makeshift hospitals in England. One had been sited in Brighton in the Royal Pavilion. The Chattri had been constructed on the site where those who had died had been cremated.

As the two of them approached the fence around the monument, Roy Grace stopped, suddenly.

Ahead were two women with long brown hair, lying motionless, side by side on stone slabs at the foot of the monument steps, in front of a neat row of empty benches, their arms folded behind their heads as if they were asleep. But they were too still. Impossibly still. He raised a cautionary hand to DS Cale, signaling her to follow him.

As he stepped closer to them again he stopped. He'd seen enough bodies in the course of his career to be able to tell the difference, even from a distance, between the dead and the living.

These two women were clearly dead.

Young women. One was in jeans and sneakers, wearing a puffa over a knitted sweater; the other was in jeans, also, and a soiled T-shirt. Both had long, dark brown hair.

In death, human expressions changed. They became inert, like waxworks in a museum. But, he knew sadly, he was not staring at two waxworks. From the photographs he had committed to memory he was looking at the bodies of Emma Johnson and Ashleigh Stanford. Their faces were alabaster white. Both of them had their eyes open, blind to the vapor trail of a plane high in the sky.

He did not need to go any closer and touch either of them. Instead he stayed where he was, not wanting to contaminate this crime scene any more than he already had, and pulled out his phone.

He was as close to despair as he had ever felt in all his career.

Then he noticed something fluttering in the wind, behind the neck of the woman he believed might be Emma Johnson. Signaling DS Cale to stay where she was, he stepped forward and knelt down. There was a note wedged between her fingers. Snapping on gloves, he teased it out and read it.

HERE'S ANOTHER PRESENT, ROY. I'M SURE YOU'D LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE RECIEPT. THE DOWNSIDE (NO PUN INTENDED RE THE LOCATION) IS I HAVE TO REPLACE THEM. LIFE'S A BITCH, HEY? THEN A BITCH HAS TO DIE. HAPPY SLEUTHING. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! CAN YOU GUESS MY NEXT VICTIM? CAN YOU SAVE HER? FEEL FREE TO PUBLISH THIS NOTE IN ANY PAPER YOU LIKE. VERY BEST REGARDS. MR. BRANDER.

 

70

Thursday 18 December

Six hours later, in the mortuary, Roy Grace's worst fears were confirmed. Both young women were branded, on the inside of their right thighs, with the wording,
U R DEAD
.

Pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha was standing over Ashleigh Stanford's naked body, taking fluid samples from her stomach and bladder for testing, but she was already fairly confident of the cause of death for both young women. Both had the tiny, blotchy red spots of petechial hemorrhaging in the whites of their eyes, on their eyelids and at the top of the cheekbones, which was brought on by oxygen starvation through asphyxiation. Neither of them had bruising around their necks, nor damaged hyoids, but their lungs were filled with water. They had drowned. Both women had been sexually assaulted but no DNA was found.

Ashleigh Stanford had bruises to her body and abrasions to her face, consistent with falling off her bike. She also had a large bruise to her forehead, sufficient to have caused concussion. In addition, she had seventeen contusions to her body consistent with being struck with a blunt instrument, as well as bruising on her knuckles indicating she had, perhaps, tried to fight off her attacker.

Emma Johnson had ligature marks on her neck, stomach, thighs, wrists and ankles, indicating she had been kept a prisoner.

There was no evidence of strangulation in the two women from thirty years ago either. But there had not been enough soft tissue left of the victims to establish for sure how they had died. They could have been stabbed—but there were usually nicks on the bones of stabbing victims. Possibly shot, but again bullets often struck bones. They might have been poisoned—toxicology tests were being carried out on samples from both bodies. But one problem with testing for poisons was that the pathologists needed to know what they were testing for—which restricted them only to the most obvious ones.

Had they drowned, also, he wondered?

Had the same sicko branded, raped, then drowned them?

What the hell was going on in the Brander's mind?

Was Logan Somerville being held prisoner? Did that mean she might still be alive?

Photographs of the brandings had been sent to an analyst, and in less than an hour he had confirmed they were, in his opinion, an exact match to the brandings on Katy Westerham and Denise Patterson.

In Grace's view, the idea of a copycat could now be ruled out. The Brander, intelligent, arrogant, whoever the hell he was—and wherever he had been for these past thirty years—had resurfaced. He postponed today's press conference, in the light of the present developments, until tonight at 7 p.m.

*   *   *

Shortly before 4:30 p.m., he had left Glenn Branson at the post-mortem of the two women, which was likely to continue for several more hours, and was now back in his office, seated at the round conference table with DCI Sweetman and the forensic psychologist Tony Balazs.

The three of them were staring at the note recovered from Emma Johnson's fingers this morning. Because of the sensitivity of the location of the deposition site, Grace had already arranged for a representative from the Chattri memorial committee to join the Gold group, to manage any possible community impact.

HERE'S ANOTHER PRESENT, ROY. I'M SURE YOU'D LIKE TO ACKNOWLEDGE RECIEPT. THE DOWNSIDE (NO PUN INTENDED RE THE LOCATION) IS I HAVE TO REPLACE THEM. LIFE'S A BITCH, HEY? THEN A BITCH HAS TO DIE. HAPPY SLEUTHING. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK! CAN YOU GUESS MY NEXT VICTIM? CAN YOU SAVE HER? FEEL FREE TO PUBLISH THIS NOTE IN ANY PAPER YOU LIKE. VERY BEST REGARDS. MR. BRANDER.

“He's angry,” the psychologist said. “And he's leaving you in no doubt of his intentions.”

“That he's about to kill again?” Grace said.

“Yes,” said Tony Balazs. “Twice.”

Sweetman nodded in agreement.

“How the hell do we find him before he strikes again?” Grace asked.

“Well,” Balazs said, “one positive is that we've succeeded in riling him. Calm people don't make mistakes, angry people are the ones who do. The Brander is now
Mr. Angry.
He's determined to strike again very soon to make a point. One of our best hopes is, as we've discussed, that he'll make a mistake through being in a hurry.”

Sometimes the psychologist came over as highly self-important and pompous, which irritated Grace. There was something about people who wore bow ties, other than at formal functions, that he had never liked. Balazs, in his loud, striped suit and even louder bow tie, irritated him now.

Irritated him, he knew, because he was telling a truth that Grace did not want to acknowledge.

“Great, Tony, that's helpful. But what we have to do is find this bastard before he does that. The press fallout when we announce the double murder is hardly going to reassure the citizens of Brighton and Hove, or Sussex. We have to find him. They will be asking the question:
Have the police tactics caused the deaths of these two young girls?
And we need to deal with it.”

“I agree with you, Roy,” Balazs said. “But how are you going to do that?”

Sweetman had Roy Grace's policy book open in front of him. “You're doing this investigation correctly, Roy. I've checked everything, in the light of the resources you have deployed, and I can't find any windows of opportunity you've missed. I think Tony's right.”

“You're saying we have to wait for the offender to screw up?” Grace said, his temper flaring. “Is that how all serial killer investigations work? Because that doesn't work for me.”

“What do you want to do, Roy?” Sweetman said. “Put 24/7 surveillance on every woman in Brighton aged between eighteen to thirty who has long brown hair? You have the resources to do that?”

“The motto of Sussex Police is ‘To Serve and Protect,'” Grace replied.

“So do you want to put out a statement telling every woman in that category to stay indoors until the Brander is behind bars? Put your whole city into a state of even bigger panic?”

Grace shook his head. “No, of course we can't do that. I will use the press conference to tell the media that this huge investigation continues, with many lines of inquiry being followed. The tactic of using the media to help identify and flush out the killer is only one aspect of this complex and fast-moving inquiry. We will never know whether the fate of these two young ladies has been hastened by current events, but we do know for sure that their abductor has killed at least twice before.”

The DCI and the psychologist both nodded.

“God, what the hell are we missing? There's something staring us in the face that we're not getting. Where the hell has this bastard been for the past thirty years?” He rested his face in his hands for some moments. “The HOLMES team has covered every murder in every county in the UK in the past thirty years and there is no potential suspect who matches his profile. Every offender who has killed a woman of similar age and appearance is either behind bars, confirmed as being in a different part of the country, or dead. Interpol has not produced anyone in Europe or further afield and nor has the FBI. Our man is smart.”

“There are parallels with the BTK case,” Sweetman said.

“From what I've researched, he enjoyed taunting the police, the way the Brander seems to be enjoying taunting us, from this note,” Roy Grace said. “We know he has different vehicles—and somewhere to store them—which suggests to me he's a man of means.”

“The universal profiles of serial killers,” Balazs said, “is they are aged between fifteen to forty-five at the time of their first murder and between eighteen to sixty at the time of their last.”

“Which fits exactly with our offender,” Grace said. “If his first murders, that we are aware of, were committed in his late teens or early twenties, being approximately thirty years ago, that would put him somewhere between fifty and sixty now.”

“I would agree with that, Roy,” Sweetman said.

“Have you considered using a decoy, Roy?” the psychologist asked.

“This is not a case for using a decoy,” Grace said. “It's too dangerous.”

“I agree, Roy,” Sweetman said. “But I think from the tone of this note that he's already selected his next victim. Our best hope is that he screws up because of his anger. I think he may strike again—within hours, possibly.”

“Within hours?” Grace said.

“I'd bet the ranch on it.”

 

71

Thursday 18 December

At 5:30 Roy Grace attended the next Gold group meeting. As soon as it ended he sat down with the senior press officer, Sue Fleet, to go through the details for the press conference that was being held at 7 p.m.

“Our number-one priority is to protect the public, Sue. We've got to ensure people are made aware there is now a critical risk to young women on the streets of Brighton. Meantime I'm going to liaise with Nev Kemp and ask him to get every available police resource on the streets of the city, in hi-viz jackets.”

He liked working with Sue Fleet. She was a sensible, pragmatic and totally unflappable person, who always thought at least one step ahead. And frequently more.

“You need to prepare a very concise message for the conference, Roy. I suggest something along these lines:
There is a credible and immediate threat to the safety of women on the streets of Sussex, particularly Brighton and Hove. Women should avoid, where possible, being alone on the streets at any time. They should let people know where they are. Any members of the public who see anything suspicious or who think they know who the killer is should contact the police immediately, using 999.
”

Grace scrawled the words down as she spoke.