Sacrifice (35 page)

Its headlights snapped on at full-beam.

It took everything Claire had to yank herself away and stumble back towards the station shop. Behind her, an engine came to life. Moaning, she blundered back inside, slamming the door closed. Her eyes had already attuned, so she was able to grab what looked like an old mop leaning nearby, bracing one end of it against the door’s inner face and jamming the other against the nearest skirting board. She pivoted around, looking for somewhere to hide. As she did, searing light poured in behind her again. This time the shadows fled in different directions.

The vehicle was pulling onto the forecourt.

With a clunk, a handbrake was applied.

Claire tried to make her way across the room without bumping anything. It was still possible they wouldn’t know where she had gone. They might – just
might
– think that the abandoned shop had been left locked.

Footfalls sounded outside.

She spun around again. She couldn’t see clearly beyond the mesh-covered window, but a figure – a brief, blurred silhouette – moved past, heading towards the door.

She’d be safe in here, she whispered to herself. They wouldn’t think she’d been able to get in. They’d search through the woods instead. She could now distinguish the service counter just ahead of her. Behind that stood a tall, slender oblong that was even blacker than the shadows around it. A door, she realised, standing ajar. She moved over there, only to kick something metallic, which might have clattered more loudly had it not rolled through matted heaps of fallen magazines.

Even so she froze, not daring to breathe.

There was a corresponding silence from outside, followed, seconds later, by a dull, prolonged creaking. Someone was applying their weight to the front door. Frantic, Claire scrambled over the counter. The space on the other side was filled with plastic bottles and empty crisp packets, which crunched and squeaked as she trod on them.

The creaking of the front door abruptly stopped.

Claire stopped too, face prickling with perspiration.

BANG!
… the massive blow reverberated through the entire building.

Another one followed, and another.

Claire lurched forward, more terrified than she’d ever imagined it was possible to be without collapsing. She shoved at the half-open door, and it swung back. Beyond it was a second room that was almost completely dark, only dim moonlight filtering in through a high, frosted window. Claire scanned it at a glance, identifying what looked like another doorway at the other side – and went rigid at the sight of a human outline close beside it.

For a second she was so shaken that she couldn’t even whimper. But then she realised the truth: partly because of its stiff, inflexible posture, partly because of its hairless cranium and bland, featureless face.

A mannequin on a pedestal. An obvious thing, really, in a storeroom.

Another loud bang at the front of the small building sent her scurrying across the room towards the next door, which also stood ajar. Beyond this, a narrow passage led to a door standing open to the outside, where misty moonlight dappled a tarmac-covered parking bay and beyond that, a line of foliage. Claire hesitated. The way was lit for her. It was a straight passage out of here – but for some reason she delayed.

No one could be out there. Whoever had followed her here was still trying to get in through the front. Another heavy impact landed on the main door. That mop handle was proving sturdier than she’d expected, but it couldn’t resist for much longer. She started forward along the passage, only to stop after four steps.

Movement.

Had the foliage twitched? No, it wasn’t that … because now she saw the movement again.

It was a shadow on the tarmac. At first it had been difficult spotting one particular shadow lying among so many, but when she looked hard there was no mistake. It undeniably had the shape of a man: a head, arms, a torso; an incredibly broad torso, incredibly long, apelike arms. Claire backed along the passage into the storeroom. Another thunderous blow echoed through the building, accompanied by a splintering of wood as the mop began to sag. Helpless and mumbling, she turned and turned.

People walled up alive, nailed to crosses, fed to crocodiles for Christ’s sake!

With tears streaming down her cheeks, she tucked herself into the dark, narrow space behind the mannequin. Who knew … perhaps they wouldn’t look very hard? Or maybe they would, but would miss her here? There was another blow, followed by an explosive
crack
as the mop broke. From the passage leading to the rear, feet thudded on the tiles.

‘There’s still a chance,’ she whimpered in a tiny voice. ‘There’s always a chance.’

‘Not today,’ someone whispered from the darkness behind. Before Claire could react, a slim but muscular arm hooked around her throat, locking the scream into her chest. Hot breath spilled across the back of her neck. ‘Definitely not today.’

Heck and Quinnell were engaged for quite a few hours at Preston Central, interviewing Tubbs about his various offences.

With his anxieties wearing off and a more belligerent personality re-emerging, the prisoner wasn’t inclined to be as compliant as he had been on his initial arrest, though only his denials about the Desecrator crimes rang true. Antecedent searches indicated that Tubbs had no known criminal associates and, up until this point at least, no criminal record of any sort, let alone form for sadistic or sexual crime. What was more, a search of his premises by Preston officers had turned up nothing suspicious, apart from a credit card bearing someone else’s name.

In the end, Tubbs was charged with theft of the credit card, deception and the assault on DCI Garrickson, for which he was remanded in custody.

When all that was done, Heck and Quinnell travelled down to the Royal Preston Hospital, to find that Garrickson had suffered compound fractures to the radius and ulna. The DCI was seated alone in the A&E waiting area, naked from the waist up, his anorak draped over his back, his left arm plastered from the fingertips to the shoulder. Thanks to the painkillers pumped into him, he only looked half awake, his face grey and crumpled as soggy paper. Despite this, when Heck and Quinnell trooped in, his mouth hitched up sideways in an attempted smile.

‘Did we charge him?’ he asked drowsily.

‘Not with murder, boss,’ Heck said. ‘It isn’t him.’

Garrickson nodded, as if he’d suspected this all along. ‘What a fucking balloon.’

‘You got that right,’ Quinnell agreed.

They helped him outside, where a blue-gold dawn was rising from the east and birds twittered in the hedges – at long last, spring seemed to have arrived. Garrickson was so groggy that he didn’t ask for any further details about Tubbs. Within ten minutes of the journey back to the motel commencing, he was asleep in the rear seat. Quinnell nodded off in the front passenger seat five minutes after that. Heck yawned as he drove; he was aching and stiff all over, but frustration and disappointment were keeping him awake.

Then his mobile began bleeping.

He glanced at his dashboard clock – it was just after five a.m., which led him to suspect that this was going to be bad news. When he saw that the call was from Shawna McCluskey, he
knew
it was.

The maypole had been erected in a place called Fiddler’s Meadow, which was actually a farm field in rural Cheshire, midway between Whitchurch and Nantwich.

It was a maypole in name only. It comprised a tall timber post, painted white, with a pink twirl around it. A few ribbons had been dangled from it to indicate its purpose, but these were inconsequential. The most obvious item of interest was perched on top, about twelve feet in the air. When Heck, Shawna McCluskey and Gary Quinnell first spotted it from the nearby country lane, it initially resembled a doll that some deranged child had brutally disfigured. But when they got closer they saw that it was a human body. At least, that was what it once had been.

She was female, and the tip of the maypole must have been sharpened to a very slender point, because she’d been impaled upright on it, possibly through the vagina, but most likely, to keep her in a vertical position, through the anus. Her arms had been bound to her sides with what looked like garlands of briars, some kind of dark circlet encased her brow, and her face was charred beyond identification. A grim-faced medical examiner, who’d already been up there on a ladder, told them that the circlet was iron and that it had been red-hot when first placed on the victim’s head. It had now cooled but at the time had burned clean through to the bone, which had probably been the cause of death.

‘You can’t have a May Queen without a crown,’ Heck observed.

The figure was wearing one thigh-high leather boot, though the other had fallen off and lay at the foot of the pole; such items marked her out as a good-time girl of some sort. But over the top of her own tacky garb she’d been made to wear an extravagant light-blue frock, which, though it was now smeared with blood and fecal matter and hanging in ragged strips, was recognisable as a coronation gown. Somehow, this only added insult to the already grotesque injury; but not so much as the green spring grass, the pebble-blue sky and the pink, fluffy cherry blossoms in the trees bordering the field.

They’d known they were going to see something bad on the way there.

What other impression could they have gleaned while weaving their way through the labyrinth of police vehicles that closed off most of the adjoining roads? Some fifty yards up the line, they’d spotted two older Traffic men in flat hats and shirt-sleeves standing by the roadside, trying to offer words of comfort as a younger colleague leaned over a bramble bush, vomiting profusely. They’d even seen teary eyes among the more seasoned coppers. Those who weren’t actually crying were granite-faced with a combination of anger and disbelief. Shawna was already asking questions among them, trying to ascertain a timeline of events, but getting little in response save dull shakes of the head.

‘It’s got to be witchcraft, hasn’t it?’ a wild-eyed young PC asked belligerently. He was so young he had to be a probationer, but that didn’t stop him squaring up to Heck and Quinnell as they stood against the tape. ‘Some kind of black magic?’

Heck was aware they weren’t far from Alderley Edge, but didn’t reply.

‘We don’t know,’ Quinnell admitted.

‘Do you know anything … anything at all?’ the probationer shrieked. ‘Because someone’s got to catch these fucking madmen! You fuckers clearly can’t!’

Two other local officers hustled the disturbed youngster away. Heck, who’d been trying without success to get through to Gemma, pocketed his mobile and glanced again at the pathetic figure atop the pole, the reddened rags of the coronation gown rippling in the May breeze.

Shawna returned to the tape. ‘Seems a little old lady walking her two poodles found the body. Medical Examiner puts the time of death somewhere between eleven last night and one this morning. He isn’t able to say yet how long she was up there first. The heated crown was applied near the end.’

‘So she was alive when she was impaled?’

‘Looks like it. Doctor thinks she probably kicked her right boot off while she was spasming in pain.’

‘Christ …’ Before Heck could give full vent to the revulsion this made him feel, the mobile began bleeping in his pocket.

It was Gemma, returning his call. He relayed everything to her, from Mike Garrickson’s injury to the latest murder, stating that they had no ID on the victim yet, but that it was almost certainly Gracie Allen, the missing prostitute from Bradford. His voice slid into a dull, emotionless drone as he watched the crane that Cheshire had now brought into the field lower the broken body to the ground, where the force pathologist and his assistants were waiting.

When Gemma finally replied, she sounded tired and despondent. ‘I won’t ask if you’re able to run the MIR in my absence, Heck, because I know you are … but I’ll be back as soon as poss. I’m on the witness stand for at least another day yet …’

Before Heck could tell her not to worry about it, one of the medical staff waved to attract his attention. ‘Gotta go, ma’am. Get back to you.’

As he pocketed the phone, one of the examiners brought something over to the tape. It was already installed inside a sterile plastic sack, but they could see that it was a scrap of bloodstained paper. A few characters looked to have been scribbled on it in pencil, though they were barely legible.

‘This was inside her left boot,’ the examiner, a young woman, said. ‘The one she was still wearing.’

Heck snapped a pair of latex gloves on before holding it up to the light. The paper was dog-eared and flaky, and blood had obliterated some of the writing, but he thought he could ascertain one or two digits; they’d been scrawled in two vaguely straight lines, one on top of the other.

‘This is a vehicle registration mark,’ he said.

Quinnell looked puzzled. ‘Why was it in her boot?’

‘Some toms have started doing this,’ Shawna replied. ‘It’s a kind of insurance policy.’ She stepped aside as a pair of undertaker’s men wheeled the body past, now enclosed in a temporary casket. ‘Not much of one though.’

‘It may be in her case,’ Heck said. ‘Albeit posthumously.’

‘Can hardly read it, though,’ Quinnell said. ‘Can we X-ray it or something?’

‘Might not help, it’s written in pencil,’ Heck said. ‘But that may not matter.’ He borrowed a radio from one of the uniforms nearby and ascertained the call-sign for the nearest Comms suite. ‘Serial Crimes Unit at Fiddler’s Meadow, to Foxtrot Zulu?’

The radio crackled. ‘
Foxtrot Zulu receiving, over
.’

‘Yeah, this is DS Heckenburg. PNC check please.’

‘
Go ahead
.’

‘Anything on the following …?’ He examined the slip of paper again. ‘Full index unknown, exact order unknown, but contains these details: Tango or Yankee – unsure which exactly – zero – Golf – Charlie?’

‘
Stand by
.’

‘There’s probably dozens of combinations,’ Quinnell said.