Hurt (The Hurt Series) (5 page)

‘Boss...’ Mason called.

Excusing herself, she met Mason stood over what used to be George Armitage, slumped in a puddle of blood. The old man’s face had been reduced to a bloodied pulp of flapping skin and sinew. His neck, sliced and punctured enough for his throat to hang out.

‘He used a
penknife
do to this?’ Mason asked Harris.

‘Yep. One of those Swiss Army jobs. He was like a goddamn animal with it.’

‘And all because George made a joke about his dog?’

Harris shrugged. ‘Spartan, his
dead
dog, apparently. That’s when he went into some crazy shit about there not being happiness or misery in the world, and that you gotta feel the deepest of grief to experience real happiness or something.’

Jessop glanced at Mason, who already had his phone to his ear and was calling Davies. ‘What time did he arrive this morning?’

‘Eleven-thirtyish,’ Harris said. ‘Same time as yesterday.’

She mentally mapped out the quickest route from Tanya's estate to here. Following the river, the distance could be covered in about thirty minutes. ‘How was he behaving before he lashed out?’

‘The same as yesterday, withdrawn and tensed up.’

'And he didn't speak at all.'

'Not even his goddamn name.' Harris glanced to the back of the van, in which sat his friend's restrained killer. ‘Although I think you should know there was already blood on his trainers before he got here.’

She followed Harris' gaze to the man wearing the black bomber jacket, dark hoody, and blue jeans, breathing heavy and mumbling to himself. Spotted the smeared blood on his dirty white trainers and silently prayed to God that it was Tanya’s blood.

With her wedding day approaching, her face could do without another worry line.

Chapter
Nine

Just five minutes drive from the bridge, located on the crest of Castle hill, one of the six main arteries in and out of the city centre, stood Reading Police Station. Six brown brick stories high, the building housed a discreet underground carpark that led directly to the station’s eleven holding cells and two interview rooms.

It was within the mint green walls of Interview Room A that George Armitage’s killer sat, cuffed wrists resting heavy on the top of the bolted down table. His name was Wayne Thacker, and after surprisingly testing negative for alcohol and drug intoxication, he was pronounced fit by the duty doctor to interview.

However, Thacker had yet to even make eye contact with Jessop or Brooke. The only word to have passed his scabbed lips since they’d entered the station was a mumbled yes when Brooke had confirmed for the purpose of the tape recording that he'd wavered his right for a duty solicitor.

This was the dance. A waltz of wills between captor and captive, which never failed to bemuse Jessop seeing as though the captive would remain that way for as long as their silence continued. Guilty or innocent, they were there for a reason, except Thacker appeared to have no idea of that reason or his whereabouts. Either that or the lanky, homeless twenty-three-year-old was so used to his surroundings from the string of offences listed in his file, he thought he was home.

After ten minutes trying to establish where Thacker was at the time of Tanya’s murder this morning, only to be greeted with a silent curtain of dirty lank hair, she asked, ‘The name Tanya Adams mean anything to you?’

Still no reaction.

Beside her, Brooke scribbled something on her notepad.

‘Okay, Wayne. What can you tell me about the blood we found on the tissue in your pocket and on your trainers?’

Not a flinch.

‘Is it going to match Tanya Adam’s blood, the girl who was bled to death in her flat at the Holmes estate this morning?’

Nothing.

She decided to change tact. ‘Tell me about your dog, Wayne.’

Thacker’s fists clenched into tight balls.

‘Spartan, right?’ she urged cautiously. ‘Died recently?’

‘What the fuck do you care about my dog?’

Jessop tensed as the flat, whispered words curdled her gut. ‘I don’t. But what I do care about is George Armitage, the man you stabbed to death for making fun of Spartan.’

‘He should’ve kept his mouth shut, then.’

‘And what I also care about is what you said before you attacked him.’ She read from her notes. ‘Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion which the physician within you heals your sick self, so therefore trust your physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity.’ She sat back, waiting for a reaction to her bluff. She got it in the form of Thacker’s face contorting into a mask of confusion. This was not what she had hoped for.

‘Dunno what the fuck you’re talking about,’ Thacker hissed. ‘I didn’t say that shit.’

She glanced to Brooke, who ignored her in favour of the man across the table from them.

‘
Kahlil Gibran,’ she said. ‘You heard of him?’

‘No.’

‘No? What about Alexandre Dumas?’

‘No.’

‘Really? She flipped over a page. ‘There is neither happiness or misery in the world: there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. Alexandre Dumas, who you quoted before you killed George.’

‘I heard it somewhere.’

‘You
heard
it somewhere?’

Thacker’s knuckles turned white as his fists squeezed tighter. ‘Yeah.’

Jessop leant forward, resting her elbows upon the table top inches from Thacker’s tensed fists. ‘Where?’

For the first time since entering the room, Thacker looked directly at her from behind his tangled hair. The haunted look in his blood shot eyes sent a chill through her bones.

The answer to her question froze her blood.

‘From the fucker who killed my dog.’ Thacker sniffed, unclenched his fists and drummed bitten, yellowed finger nails on the table top, jingling the cuffs.

She sat back out of Thacker’s space, neutralising the threat she might pose. 'Go on.'

Thacker grimaced. ‘Me and Spartan were in this new squat over on Falkirk Street. We’d been there for a fortnight and thought no one else knew about it. Then yesterday morning I wakes up and finds this guy sitting where I sit in the kitchen and looking like he fucking owns the place. Spartan hides behind my legs and I know this guy’s bad news because Spartan aint scared of no one.’

‘Can you describe him to us?’

‘No. He was wearing one of those big coats with the fur around the hood. Had the hood up all the time.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

‘He said he liked what I’d done with the place. Taking the piss, you know? I told him it was big enough to share if he wanted to crash for a while.

‘Did he strike you as homeless?’

‘He was in my squat. Figured why the fuck else would he be there?’

‘What happened next, Wayne?’ she urged.

Thacker fidgeted, looked to his cuffed wrists. ‘It happened fast. He grabs Spartan’s lead from my hand and yanks him toward him. Spartan yelps in pain. I go for him but the fucker’s got a knife and is holding it to Spartan’s eye.’ Thacker paused, sucking in air. ‘He tells me if I come any closer he’ll blind my dog then blind me. So I freeze, don’t I? He tells me to watch, then spouts all that shit about feeling grief to experience happiness. Fucking makes me repeat it till I memorise it.’

Jessop pictured young Keisha touching the red blemish on her cheek.
‘Then he said I needed to watch closely, because the pain I was feeling was the breaking of the shell of my understanding. He told me to repeat it over and over till I memorised it.’

‘Then he says that in time I’ll thank him for this. Then he sticks the knife in Spartan’s neck.’ Thacker’s voice turned tight and strangled. ‘Spartan yelps and kicks, and then he’s still. That’s when I go for him.’

A surge of adrenaline had her sitting forward again. ‘Go on.’

‘I don’t give a shit if he blinds me. He can fucking cut my head off for all I care. He killed my fucking dog and he’s gonna pay. So I land a punch and floor the bastard. But just as I go in
for
the boot, he punches me in the bollocks and floors me. Next thing I know he’s out of there. Fucking gone he is. I think about going after him but then I sees Spartan and… The fucker killed my dog, man!’ The cuffed wrists slammed down heavy on the table.

She looked at Brooke, whose doe eyes were now hard and focused as she asked, ‘Where’s Spartan now, Wayne?’

‘I buried him in the squat’s garden.’

‘What about the blood we found on the tissue and your trainers? Where did that come from?’

Thacker sniffed, lifted his hands up and rubbed his nose ‘I get these nose bleeds now and then. Old habits and all that.’

Jessop stared into Wayne Thacker’s moist, red eyes, and recalled reading in his file about his old cocaine addiction.

That she believed. The question was: did she believe the rest of his story?

Chapter
Ten

‘Not exactly Mister Expressive.’ Brooke said after Thacker had left the room and Mason had sat in his vacated seat. ‘Nevertheless, his optical responses were pretty textbook.’

Jessop snuck a look at Brooke’s notes, but couldnot make head or tail of what she’d scribbled.

Brooke was by no means an expert yet, but Jessop trusted her judgment. Behind the sweet smile and impish exterior, the petite DI was as cool and fearless as any cop she’d ever worked with. She could not remember ever seeing her flinch or turn away from a crime scene, and guessed having a lifelong passion for horror movies and a paramedic for a boyfriend probably helped, as did her hobbies of indoor rock climbing and bungee jumping.

Brooke said, ‘The first half of the interview, Thacker was almost constantly looking to his right, accessing the creative side of his brain. When you asked him if the blood on his trainers would match Tanya’s, and mentioned her bleeding to death in her flat, his eyes flicked between looking to top right and directly right.’

‘Meaning?’ Jessop asked.

‘Top right signifies he’s trying to picture the scene as it played out. Directly right suggests he’s trying to imagine what sounds could be heard; screams, shouts, etc. Both responses indicate he had no idea what had happened.’

Jessop glanced at Mason, his face hard and expressionless. She wondered if Brooke could read him as easy.

Brooke continued. ‘Needless to say, it doesn’t take a kinesics expert to know what Thacker was thinking when you first asked him about his dog.’

She recalled seeing Thacker’s fists close into tight balls, his knuckles glowing white.

‘When you tried to bluff him by feeding him the Gibran quote instead of the Dumas quote, his responses were all over the place: left, right, up and down. General confusion.’ Brooke flipped over a page. ‘Yet when you quoted Dumas and asked him about it he was looking directly to the left, meaning he was
recalling
what he’d heard instead of trying to imagine what he’d heard.’

‘And his story about the attack?’ Mason asked.

‘Again, eyes to the left, the memory side of the brain. But mostly top left, meaning he could actually visualise the events as they happened. When he came to the bit about him fighting back against his attacker he was looking bottom left, as if talking himself through his actions and contemplating what he did.’

Brooke closed her notebook, sat back and tapped her pen between her teeth. ‘Same goes for when he mentioned his nose bleeds and old habits. And we know from his file that to be true.’

A quiet moment happened as all in the small room considered Brooke’s analysis. Jessop had never been a fan of polygraphs, and was damn glad this country had not embraced them outside the dismal chat show circuit. Lie detectors measured fluctuations in heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate, all induced by the stress of deception. Most criminals lived a life of deception, and had evolved to combat the stress it brought, so being strapped to a machine and asked to answer yes or no to a series of questions they were expecting wasn’t going to faze them. And even if it did, there were a number of ways to cheat the machine, like biting your cheek or tongue during each question. The psychological response to the pain will override the body’s response to the question, resulting in an identical reading to every question asked.

However,
ask someone to regale what they did on the day in question and it was almost impossible to control the subconscious as it tried to remember or compose a lie. And that was why she welcomed kinesics.

And why she finally broke the silence with, ‘Okay. So let’s go dig up a dog.’

Chapter
Eleven

There were not many parts of the city unknown to her. She knew where Falkirk Street was, and knew the antiquated inner city neighbourhood had recently been subjected to a new one way system. Mason, however, did not, and was discreetly losing his icy cool wrestling the car through the tight grey maze of identical terraced streets.

Jessop could not help but smile to herself as a curse escaped her DI’s lips as he missed the turn into Falkirk Street and illegally reversed back up the one way street to rectify his mistake.

Crawling down the narrow, car lined road he eventually found the only free parking space situated near the far end of the street. Ignoring the permit holder sign, he squeezed his Saab into the tight space just as her mobile pinged informing her of a text message.

Only two people ever texted her: Chloe, when she wanted money, and Ray, when he wanted to cheer her up.

Fishing the phone from her pocket, she accessed the message and read the contents. ‘Christ.’

‘Trouble?’ Mason asked.

Jessop rolled her eyes, read the message aloud. ‘Why do brides wear white?’

‘No idea.’

‘So they blend in with everything else in the kitchen.’

Mason suppressed a rare grin. ‘That’s low, even for Ray.’

She’d met Ray Dalton six years ago at an incident at a book signing in Waterstones. A disgruntled fellow author with a plagiarism beef had attempted to seek justice for himself with a coke bottle of petrol and a box of matches. Incredibly, he’d announced his intentions before pouring the fuel over Ray and lighting the matches, which had given the shop’s security enough warning to grab the idiot and save Ray and a couple of dozen copies of his latest novel he was promoting.