Death Watch (22 page)

Other sex offenders – if that was what you wanted to call them – might perhaps provide just the diversion he was seeking.

There were some who would always claim they'd only done what the girl had wanted them to.

He had heard them himself.

In court and
elsewhere
.

Sometimes their heads would be bent and their voices would be full of whingeing self-pity at the predicament they found themselves in. Sometimes they would hold their heads erect, and speak with obvious pride.

But always they would say the same thing – ‘I'd never have forced myself on her.'

As a defence, it was most common among paedophiles – a group of sad pathetic little men.

But others, who took their pleasure in far more exciting ways, would sometimes use it, too. It was even used – and he found this almost incredible – by men who shared his own urges. He knew this for a fact, because one of them had told him – had actually confessed as much to him.

Not that the man in question had considered it a confession at all, he thought. No, it had been more a boast – meant to demonstrate that he knew, better than most people, how things really were.

‘She liked the pain I was causing. I could see she liked it,' he'd said in a low, thick voice.

The Invisible Man had said nothing to contradict him. In fact, he'd nodded his head, as if to indicate that had been his experience, too.

But he was thinking, Oh yes! Absolutely! Spot on! Girls
love
being slashed with sharp razors. They like nothing better than having an electric current pass through their genitalia!

And yet he'd been sure that this man – like others he'd read about, heard, and talked to – really
did
believe what he was saying.

The Invisible Man despised such weakness and self-delusion.
He
never told himself that the girl enjoyed it. Indeed, it would have quite spoiled things for him if she had – for where was the sense of control over your victim, if all you were doing was pleasing her?

There was nothing even vaguely godlike in that.

It was doing what she
feared
– what made her
soil
herself to even think about – that brought the rush of blood to the head. And to … to other places.

It was the pain and suffering she emitted which released a truly Olympian feeling of power.

He'd meant to distract himself, and he failed. No matter – he'd held out long enough. He slid back the cover to the spyhole, and pressed his eye tightly against the lens.

The girl was huddled in the corner, as the previous one had been. But this one would be better than Angela Jackson. Much more satisfying.

He did not know
how
he knew this. Only that he did.

If they ever caught him, they would call him a madman, he thought. And perhaps they would be right. Perhaps he
was
mad. But perhaps the reverse was true. Perhaps he was one of the few sane people left on earth – one of that chosen band who knew what they wanted and went out and got it.

The girl looked frantically around the room. She didn't know about the spyhole – how could she have done? – yet she could still sense that she was being watched.

That was good. That was
very
good.

‘It won't work,' Paniatowski said flatly, taking a sip of the vodka that Woodend had brought with him.

‘What won't work?'

‘Any of it.'

‘So we do nothin', do we? We just sit on our hands while the man kills this girl – an' the next, an' the next.'

‘Look, I want this bastard caught as much as you do,' Paniatowski said. ‘Ever since I first heard about this new kidnapping, I haven't been able to look at Louisa without imagining a time when she's grown up and at the mercy of a man like that.' She glanced quickly across at the bedroom door, beyond which the child was sleeping peacefully. ‘But we can't carry out a proper investigation from a distance. It simply can't be done, sir.'

He'd been expecting just this kind of resistance to the idea, Woodend told himself.

But he was encouraged by the fact that she'd stopped calling him Charlie – that now he was ‘sir' again. That was a clear indication, he argued, that though she was saying they couldn't work together on this case, she was acting as though they already were.

‘We're a couple of very smart bobbies,' he said. ‘We won't get our hands on as much information as Mortlake an' Stevenson will have access to, but we can make more from the crumbs that fall off their table than they can make from the whole bloody feast.'

‘Assuming that any crumbs
do
fall,' Paniatowski pointed out.

‘An' then there's what we learned during our investigation into Angela Jackson's disappearance,' Woodend argued. ‘They can't take that away from us, however much they might want to.'

‘True,' Paniatowski agreed. ‘What we know is ours for ever – but then we don't know
much
, do we?'

‘That's where you're wrong,' Woodend told her. ‘We stopped thinkin' about what we'd learned because we'd been taken off the case – an' because we'd lost our main battle, which was to find Angela alive. But the fact that we were no longer lookin' for leads doesn't mean there weren't any to be found. I'm honestly convinced we've already got the key to crackin' this case – it's just that we haven't recognized it for what it is yet.'

Paniatowski looked sceptical. ‘You're saying that we missed something, are you?'

‘We're bound to have done.'

‘Like what?'

Yes, that was the problem, Woodend agreed.
Like what?

‘We always knew – because of the timin' – that the killer's hideaway couldn't be that far from Whitebridge,' he said, ‘but from what we learned just before we were taken off the case, we now know it has to be actually
in
the town.'

‘And you base this theory on …?' Paniatowski asked.

‘On where Angela Jackson's body was found. The killer wasn't goin' to dump her far from where he murdered her, was he?'

‘Why not?'

‘Because the longer she was in the car, the more he was at risk. And he'd have known that! If he only transported her dead body half a mile or so, the chances of anythin' goin' wrong were minimal. But if he had to drive her halfway across the country, there was always the danger that he could be involved in an accident, or stopped by a motor patrol doin' a random check, or—'

‘You're clutching at straws,' Paniatowski interrupted.

‘An' there's the wounds,' Woodend ploughed on.

‘What about them?'

‘The point of torture is to inflict pain, isn't it?'

‘Of course.'

‘But a lot of those wounds were made when the poor kid was already dead. How do you explain the killer behavin' in that way?'

‘Didn't you tell me that Dr Shastri thought it was part of some kind of ritual?'

‘No, I didn't. I said she
suggested
it as a possibility – no more than that. But I wasn't convinced at the time, an' I'm even less convinced now.'

‘So what
do
you think?'

‘I think he had a plan – a timetable, if you like. On the first day he was goin' to do this to her, on the second he was goin' to do that, an' so on. But somethin' happened to disrupt that plan. Somethin' happened to make him kill her earlier than he intended to. An' so what he did to her after she was dead was what he'd
wanted
to do while she was still alive. Now if we could work out what that somethin' that forced him to act prematurely
is
, we'd be halfway to catchin' him.'

‘What other ideas have you got?' Paniatowski asked.

‘We could use the shrink again.'

‘And do you really think he'd be willing to help us – especially when his own wife is on the team investigating the second kidnapping?'

‘Yes,' Woodend said firmly. ‘I do. The impression I get of Martin Stevenson is that he's a thoroughly decent feller. Of course, he's not blind to the fact that it wouldn't do his reputation any harm if he helped to catch the killer, but I think there's more to him than that – I think he genuinely wants to be of use.'

‘But why would he want to be of use to
you
? Why wouldn't he want to help his wife instead?'

‘Because he's got faith in me.'

‘Oh, come on, sir, you're not saying that because it's true, you're saying it because it's what you need to
believe
!'

‘You didn't see his face, that day in the Drum an' Monkey, when I told him I was bein' taken off the Angela Jackson investigation. Trust me, Monika, the man looked devastated.'

Paniatowski took another sip of vodka, sucked greedily on her cigarette, and then shook her head wonderingly.

‘So, to sum up,' she said, ‘what you have on offer is a vague theory that the killer's hideaway is in the centre of Whitebridge, an unsubstantiated belief that he killed the girl before he'd been planning to, and a desperate hope that Martin Stevenson will be idealistic enough to help us, even though it may damage his wife's career?'

‘That's about it,' Woodend admitted.

Paniatowski suddenly smiled. ‘Well, we've solved cases before with less than that to go on,' she said.

T
he Drum and Monkey opened its doors for business at eleven o'clock in the morning. Even at that hour, there would be a couple of potential customers pacing impatiently up and down outside, and by a quarter past eleven there would be a fair number of drinkers in the pub – the unemployed and the under-employed; shift-men who had finished their day's work and shift-men yet to start it; bank clerks out on their break, who were looking guilty about drinking so early in the day and always carried a packet of strong peppermints in their pockets; and the criminal fringe which didn't look guilty of anything, even though it usually was.

And today there was the addition of the big bugger, the blonde, and the smoothie, the landlord thought, glancing across at the table in the corner. He hadn't seen the three of them together for quite a while.

‘Are you sure you want to get involved in this, Bob?' Woodend was asking Rutter.

‘Why
wouldn't
I want to be involved?' Rutter countered.

Woodend shrugged. ‘Well, you know, we will be stickin' our necks out a bit – an' there's always the chance we'll lose our heads as a result.'

‘There's nothing new about that, is there? We've done it often enough in the past.'

‘True, but circumstances have changed, haven't they? You've got Louisa livin' with you now. An' you've got a cushy job in crime prevention, which means you work regular hours, an' usually get home in time for tea.'

‘What is this?' Rutter demanded angrily. ‘Are you trying to exclude me from the investigation as a punishment for seeing someone who neither of you happens to approve of?'

‘No, it's not that all,' Woodend told him soothingly. ‘It's just that we thought you might prefer to play it safe.'

‘There's a poor bloody kid out there who desperately needs the help of the best team available,' Rutter said hotly. ‘And that's us, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' Woodend agreed.

‘Well, then?'

Woodend nodded. ‘All right. If that's your decision, you're in,' he said. ‘Has anybody got any new ideas?'

‘I have,' Paniatowski said. ‘Or rather, it's not so much a new idea as an old one we never got to follow through.'

‘Go on,' Woodend said.

‘The killer used a drug on Angela Jackson that isn't readily available to members of the general public. If we can find out where he got it from, it might give us a lead on him.'

‘I've got the perfect excuse for looking into that,' Rutter said. ‘I'm a
crime-prevention officer
.'

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Woodend found himself grinning. ‘The way you say it, you make it sound more like an insult than a job description,' he told the inspector.

‘Yes,' Rutter agreed. ‘I do, don't I?'

‘The other idea that the boss and I have agreed on is that the murderer's likely to have dumped his victim no more than a mile or so from the bolt-hole where he killed her,' Paniatowski said to Rutter. She pulled a map out of her handbag, and spread it on the table. ‘So this is the area we need to look at,' she continued.

She'd drawn three circles on the map, and she was indicating the points at which the circles intersected.

‘Why
three
circles?' Rutter asked.

‘One has as its centre the spot where Angela Jackson's body was found,' Paniatowski said. ‘The centre of the second one is where she was kidnapped, and the centre of the third is where Mary Thomas was snatched – because if he didn't want to drive far with a dead victim, we can be almost sure he didn't want to drive far with live ones.'

‘It's good thinking, and by employing it you've certainly cut the search area down a lot,' Rutter admitted, ‘but there are still an awful lot of buildings to look at, and people to question.'

‘There are,' Woodend agreed. ‘But it's not quite as formidable as it might at first appear. The hideout would have to be somewhere comparatively quiet – somewhere the neighbours would be unlikely to see him carryin' the girl.'

‘And somewhere they were unlikely to hear her screams,' Paniatowski said sombrely.

‘So there's already whole streets in this area we should be able to rule out,' Woodend continued.

‘Shouldn't we suggest to Superintendent Crawley and DCI Mortlake that they carry out the search?' Rutter wondered. ‘They're the ones who've got the manpower for it.'