Slice (21 page)

FULTON CAME UPON
Derryman Hospice without warning when the lane he had been following ended abruptly before twin stone pillars surmounted by huge lions, rampant and ghostly white in his headlights. He braked beneath the jaws of the sculptured guardians, extinguished his headlights and slipped into second gear, half-expecting the beasts to leap on to the car from their crumbling stone pillars and tear their way through the metal to get to the soft flesh inside. That they didn’t was no small surprise to him in his almost surreal state of mind. He pulled away again at a crawl, nosed through the open gateway and bumped off the driveway into some trees.

For a few moments he just sat there with his window down, listening to the ticking of the hot engine. He was taking one hell of a personal risk, he realized that only too well. Alone, unarmed and tracking a psychopathic killer in wooded grounds at night, he couldn’t have been more vulnerable. He knew the rules – had spent enough time in his service telling his staff to comply with them (even if he himself often failed to practise what he preached) – but with the killer already en route, there had been no time for phone calls or rules. This was his shout. He had let Carlo Vansetti down, just as he had let Abbey down, and he had no choice but to deal with it.

Buttoning up his coat against the cold, he grabbed Abbey’s torch from the front seat and climbed out of the car, carefully pushing the door shut behind him before picking his way through the trees towards the house. Wide lawns, silvered in the moonlight by a light frost, encompassed the turreted mansion and the grass crunched underfoot like fine shingle as he took a chance on being spotted by night-duty staff or a resident insomniac and headed for the ornate porch at the front of the building.

The main doors were locked from the inside; Fulton could hear the bolts rattling when he gently tested the large brass knobs that served as handles. So it was a case of looking for another way in, then – and he completed nearly a full circuit of the building before he found it.

The ground-floor transom window had apparently been forced open and not too expertly either. The killer? Probably, and he was no doubt in a hurry. Directing his torch inside, he saw the beam bounce off rows of book spines. The hospice library? Must be.

He ducked through the open window, swung a leg over the sill and felt thick carpet beneath his foot. Somewhere above his head a clock provided a discordant version of the Westminster chimes. Swinging his other leg over the sill, he dropped into the musty darkness of a long, galleried room with stuffed bookcases and a heavy panelled door at each end. Fortunately the nearest door proved to be unlocked and he was able to make his way without difficulty along the corridor that lay beyond – only to freeze in the archway giving access to the front foyer.

A rectangular workstation stood in a pool of light to one side of the main entrance doors, the swivel-chair behind it conspicuously empty, though a transistor radio on an adjacent filing cabinet played soft music. Obviously someone was around somewhere – a night nurse perhaps – but there was no sign of him or her, so it was likely that they were out and about on their rounds. Then he grimaced as another possibility occurred to him, prompting him to stride across the foyer and subject the area behind the desk to closer scrutiny.

But there was no body lying there, nor any dark pools glistening in the lamplight, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He had been presented with enough corpses during this hideous business to last him for the rest of his enforced retirement. He just hoped Carlo Vansetti would be as lucky as the hospice’s night nurse seemed to have been – though that depended on his finding the former gang boss before the Slicer did, which would not be easy in a building this size.

His break came when he happened to glance at the computer monitor on the desk top. The night nurse had not shut the system down before leaving his or her station and the menu was clearly visible. He grabbed the mouse and quickly clicked on to ‘Patient List’. There were some thirty names on the page that materialized on the screen, all in alphabetical order. He found Vansetti’s immediately. ‘Room Eighteen,’ he breathed and headed across the foyer towards an illuminated ‘Stairs’ sign, well aware of the fact that if he had been able to locate Carlo Vansetti so easily, his quarry would have been able to do exactly the same thing.

A security light fizzed into life the moment he went through the doorway, revealing a wide stone staircase in front of him marching up into a darkness pierced by shafts of moonlight from a high window. To his left a narrower iron staircase dropped away into its own black pit. A notice on the wall provided a list of the room numbers on each level and he saw that Room Eighteen was located on the top floor. ‘Just my luck,’ he muttered as he started up the staircase, wondering whether the Slicer had thought much the same thing a short time before.

The security lights activated all the way to the top floor, spookily sensing his presence a fraction of a second before he got to them and shutting down again the moment he passed by. When he eventually reached the upper landing, however, the light was forced to remain on a lot longer while his nicotine weakened lungs did their best to catch up after the climb. As he stood there gasping for air and holding on to the banister rail for support, he was struck by the unnatural silence that prevailed.

There was not a sound to disturb the stillness of the night; no footsteps from a patrolling night nurse, no snoring from sleeping patients, not even the creak or groan of expanding or contracting timbers. It evoked a weird sense of isolation within him and, staring down the staircase into the hostile blackness that cowered before the pool of light in which he now stood, he felt vulnerable and exposed.

Not surprisingly, he was relieved when his breathing returned to near normal and he was able to move on again, but straight away he encountered a different sort of problem. For some reason, the light sensor system did not extend beyond the stairs and when he jerked the landing door open, he found himself confronted by an even deeper brooding darkness. Despite the aid of Abbey’s torch, it took him a few seconds to find and operate the light switch and then it seemed like for ever before a row of strip lights flickered into life in uneasy succession along a wide yellow-painted corridor with white-panelled doors on both sides. A strong smell of antiseptic greeted him the moment he stepped through from the landing, but the corridor itself was deserted.

Room Eighteen was halfway along on the right. The door stood ajar, a glimmer of light showing through the crack, but not a sound was audible from inside. He took a deep breath and pushed the door open, expecting the worst. Instead, he found himself staring into a smart well-appointed bedroom with the resident patient apparently soundly asleep in his bed, just the top of his head showing above the sheets. He frowned, an innate sixth sense telling him that something was wrong, though he was unable to put his finger on it.

Stepping into the room, he wheeled quickly to check behind the door, half-anticipating an ambush, but there was no one there. Next, he crossed to the en suite bathroom, pushing the door open on one finger and peering inside. The room was empty. Still that strange, uneasy gut feeling, but why?

Leaving the en suite, he stood for a moment by the door, his gaze travelling slowly round the bedroom, trying to spot anything that did not look quite right. The transom window was open at the bottom, the curtains stirring slightly in the draught, but otherwise everything appeared neat and tidy – only the oxygen cylinder, standing on a trolley beside the bed and the chart on its clipboard at the end indicating that this was a sick room, rather than a suite in a good-class hotel.

He moved closer to the bed, studying the motionless shape beneath the sheets and wondering whether he should waken the old man to see if he was OK. Somehow it didn’t seem right, but there again, Carlo Vansetti was the reason for his being at the hospice, so it was the logical thing to do.

Holding his breath, he bent over the bed to carefully peel back the sheets – then promptly recoiled with the shock. Carlo Vansetti was certainly the one lying in the bed, though it was not sleep that had claimed him, but something a lot more permanent. The pale skeletal features resembled those of some mummified pharaoh, with the lips drawn back over toothless gums in an obscene rictus grin. Death seemed to have amused him – probably because in the end, by succumbing to the cancer that had been eating away at him, he had cheated the Slicer of his prize.

Fulton’s mobile rang as he pulled the sheet back over the corpse and he guessed who the caller was even before he jerked the phone from his pocket.

‘Hello, Jack. Bit of a bummer this time, isn’t it? Old bastard snuffed it before I could get to him.’

Fulton crossed to the window and peered out, hoping to spot where his caller could be hiding, but his gaze met only moonlit lawns and purple tinted shrubbery. ‘Got yourself a new mobile then?’ he commented, keen to keep the conversation going while he worked out his next move.

There was a chuckle, embodying all the warmth of a death rattle. ‘Courtesy of the hospice team, Jack. Little night nurse on reception left it on her desk when she went walkabout. Very careless of her – oh, by the way, you’ll find her in the laundry cupboard next door, recovering from a chloroform hangover.’

Fulton’s involuntary sigh of relief was louder than he had intended and there was another chuckle. ‘What’s up, Jack? Did you think I’d stiffed her as well?’

‘It wouldn’t have surprised me.’

A loud sigh down the phone. ‘As if I’d slice a nice little girl like that – especially after she’d let me have her mobile to enable me to keep in touch with my old mate, Jack.’

Fulton grunted. ‘You’re really getting off on all this, aren’t you? You think you’re some kind of celebrity.’

‘Well, it’s gratifying to know I have earned a place in crime history – become a somebody at last – though I must admit I would have preferred a better nickname than the one that was picked. At least the Yorkshire Ripper received the accolade of being linked to his celebrated predecessor, whereas in my case Sweeney Todd has not even had a mention.’

But Fulton was no longer listening, for the psychopath had unwittingly triggered a reaction in the policeman’s weary brain that was little short of cataclysmic and he swayed drunkenly for a moment, his eyes widening and his whole being suddenly coming alive as understanding erupted from his subconscious with the force of a massive heroin fix. Sweeney Todd! But that was it; that was the missing link and it had been so obvious all along. Now he knew what had been bugging him all through the inquiry and as the last few bricks were swept from the wall that had been constructed between the conscious and subconscious parts of his reactivated brain, whirling strands of previously unconnected thought fused into one, providing a composite picture that was as unsavoury as it was illuminating.

‘Forget about your place in history,’ he said, a new confidence in his tone. ‘Just think about the place that’s been reserved for you with all the other nutters in Broadmoor.’

Another chuckle. ‘Why? Feeling lucky, are we, Jack?

‘Could be – now that I’ve finally sussed who you are.’

The killer seemed unperturbed. ‘What if you have? It won’t do you any good anyway. The last miscreant on my little list will have been chastised long before you have any idea who it might be.’

Fulton froze. ‘The
last
miscreant?’ he echoed and, caught off guard for a second, said a lot more than he intended. ‘But all the members of the syndicate are now dead.’

A harder, more measured laugh. ‘Aha, so you know more than I thought,
Mr
Superintendent. But never mind, you’re still way off course and by the time you manage to extricate yourself from your current predicament my job will be done.’

The meaning behind his words suddenly became clear as, right on cue, a battery of blue beacons illuminated the night sky beyond the perimeter of the hospice grounds and, lurching to the window, Fulton was just in time to see a convoy of police cars sweep up the drive.

‘Thought I’d give the old three-nines a ring on behalf of the night nurse, Jack,’ the killer continued, ‘just to let them know there was an intruder on the premises. Could take a while explaining to your old colleagues why you broke in – and why you chloroformed that nice young nurse and stuffed her in a cupboard.’

As the phone went dead, Fulton saw maybe a dozen uniformed figures springing from their vehicles to fan out round the front of the building and, seconds later, he heard the inevitable heavy pounding on the front doors of the hospice as flashlights grazed the upstairs windows, neatly capturing his silhouette. Once again he had been expertly fitted up by his antagonist and as he lumbered out into the corridor, snarling a succession of choice curses, the question uppermost in his mind was how the hell was he going to get out of this one?

THE HOSPICE WAS
already waking up, with doors banging and people shouting on the floors below, as Fulton lumbered from Carlo Vansetti’s room and made for the illuminated fire escape sign at the end of the corridor. But his luck was out. The door was securely padlocked. So much for fire regulations and health and safety, he mused grimly as he turned on his heel and headed back towards the main staircase.

Anxious faces peered at him round a couple of the doors when he reached the second floor and he glimpsed a short, thickset woman in a white dressing-gown hurrying towards him from the far end of the corridor with the look of ‘staff’ imprinted on her. ‘Just a minute,’ her authoritative voice boomed after him as he went for the next flight. ‘What the devil are
you
doing in here?’ But he had no intention of stopping to explain and he reached the ground floor well before she began her descent. The corridor below was miraculously empty, but the assault on the front door by the police was continuing with a vengeance and he glimpsed flashlights probing the shrubbery outside as he slipped into the library, closing the door tightly behind him.

‘Window open here, Sarge!’ a voice shouted above the now muffled banging and he breathed another curse. ‘Going to take a look.’

The next instant a powerful beam exploded in the gloom, just missing him as he slipped behind a convenient bookcase. The bobby stood there for a few seconds, sweeping the room with the flashlight before clambering inside, his heavy boots scraping on the sill in the process. Fulton tensed behind the bookcase, stepping quickly to one side when a floorboard cracked a little too close for comfort and taking refuge behind a stout wooden pillar a second before the flashlight illuminated the spot where he had been standing. Silence. Even the banging on the front door had stopped. Maybe ‘Florence Nightingale’ had let the police in after giving up chasing her intruder down the stairs.

‘Where are you, Snell?’ Another flashlight probed the library from the window and Fulton heard sudden movement directly in front of the pillar sheltering him.

‘In here, Sarge. Thought I heard something.’

A loud snort. ‘You’re always hearing things. Get yourself round the front. Guv’nor wants to organize a proper search of the grounds.’

The flashlight traced an arc round the library one more time, then Fulton heard the unmistakable sounds of the policeman scrambling back over the windowsill. He was alone at last and he made the most of it.

There was no one outside the library window when he got to it and he was through and into the adjoining shrubbery without being challenged, pausing only briefly among a forest of rhododendron bushes to get his breath back and work out his next move.

Trying to reach Abbey’s parked Honda was out of the question. By now that would have been secured by the police units and before long a dog team or teams would be on the scene to sniff him out. He had to get clear of the grounds before that happened or he was finished, but in brilliant moonlight it would not be easy. Fumbling for the torch he had taken from Abbey’s car, he pushed his way through the shrubbery, trying to make as little noise as possible and taking a route that kept the lofty walls of the hospice immediately on his right.

He heard the faint barking of the dogs as he emerged from the shrubbery a few minutes later and felt his stomach jolt. Before him stretched another vast expanse of lawn, but it was dotted with copses and as far as he could see, it was clear of police patrols. Gritting his teeth, he broke cover and hauled himself across the open ground to the first clump of trees, where he was forced to pause to get his breath back. The barking of the dogs was louder now and he guessed their handlers had them on short leashes, probably heading for the front of the house to report their arrival to the officer in charge. Making a sudden decision, he went for the next clump of trees, but only reached it in the nick of time as a heavy thudding sound preceded the sinister shadow of a giant flying bug that suddenly skimmed across the moonlit lawn, to freeze into immobility just yards from the trees sheltering him. The force chopper. Talk about piling on the pressure.

It was tempting – almost a compulsive reaction – to try and focus on the helicopter as it hovered directly overhead, but he knew that would be fatal and instead he dropped into a crouched position in some scrub, waiting for the inevitable. It came a second later – a shaft of brilliant light that seemed to erupt from nowhere, lasering the trees and holding for a few frightening seconds before leaping away to traverse the open ground he had just crossed. Then the shadow was moving again, racing away across the grass towards the other side of the house. Glancing upward, he watched the flashing red navigation light disappear into the night. How the hell had they missed him? He knew the chopper was equipped with every conceivable electronic aid, including thermal imaging, so they should have picked him out easily. But he had no time to ponder the point and, risking all, he went for the last few yards of open ground until he was through a broken perimeter fence into the belt of woodland enclosing the grounds.

A few yards of ferns, tangled roots and wet dripping trees and he broke out on to a hard road surface. He was in a lane of some sort, chippings in the surface glittering like polished glass in the moonlight.

Which way, that was the point? He chose left, his feet crunching on loose gravel at the road edges – only to stumble back into the woods almost immediately when he glimpsed headlights approaching round a shallow bend ahead of him, accompanied by the throbbing note of a slow-running engine.

The police traffic car was lit up like a carnival float, the driver scanning the woodland bordering the lane with a powerful roof-mounted spotlight, which Fulton knew only too well would have no difficulty in penetrating the sparse autumn foliage to pick him out when it reached where he was hiding. And to add to his woes, as the car drew closer to his hiding-place, he became aware of the distinctive thud of approaching rotor blades, accompanied by the excited barking of several dogs. Jerking round to peer through the trees behind him, he saw the helicopter silhouetted against the face of the moon as it narrowly cleared the tall chimneys of the hospice and homed in on the belt of woodland in which he sheltered, quickly overtaking a ragged line of torches that bobbed across the wide expanse of open ground towards the lane.

He was trapped! The realization hit him with a numbing sense of finality, but as he straightened up to await the inevitability of discovery, there was a totally unexpected reprieve. For no apparent reason, the patrol car suddenly lurched to a stop just feet away from where he stood and almost at the same moment, the uniformed officer at the wheel threw open the door and leaped out. Leaving the headlights blazing and the engine running, he dashed into the trees with the panic of a man in acute physical distress. His groans of satisfaction as he relieved himself in the bracken brought a sympathetic smile to Fulton’s tightly compressed lips, but he recognized an opportunity when he saw one and was behind the wheel of the car and pulling away in a shower of gravel even as his ‘saviour’ was shaking off the last few drops.

In fairness, the patrolman reacted pretty quickly and he obviously didn’t wait to do up his trousers, for he was out in the road and futilely giving chase on foot before the car had gone more than a hundred yards. But the powerful 3.5 litre engine soon reduced him to a speck in the moonlight and Fulton noted with a feeling of relief that in addition to the radio fitted to the car, there was a mobile phone lying on the front passenger seat, which meant that, unless his dispossessed traffic man had a second mobile or a portable radio pack-set in his pocket, he was not in a position to report what had happened to anyone.

The test came when the helicopter thudded overhead, forcing Fulton to brake right down to avoid attracting attention. The traffic car was supposed to be looking for a fugitive – a difficult thing to do when travelling at fifty miles per hour – and he waited for the call he knew was bound to come.

He was not disappointed. ‘Tango Two-five,’ the car’s built-in radio suddenly blasted, apparently on the open channel ‘talk-through’ facility. ‘This is Hotel X-ray 19. What’s the hurry? Do you have a sighting?’

Fulton made a grimace. The flying bug was now pacing him, the curiosity of the crew evidently aroused. He had to assume Tango Two-five
was
actually the call-sign of the car he was driving, which meant coming up with an answer straight away – silence would only create suspicion – but he prayed no one who knew the regular patrolman’s voice was listening in and that the observer in the chopper failed to spot the bobby he had just left in the woods.

‘From Tango Two-five,’ he responded. ‘Thought I saw something up ahead. False alarm. Just a fox.’

A pregnant pause and then, to his relief, a throaty laugh. ‘Copied, Tango Two-five. Suggest you change your optician.’

The next instant the helicopter had banked sharply to the right and disappeared into the night sky, its flashing red navigation light soon becoming just an acne spot on the face of the moon.

Fulton took a deep breath. So far so good, he mused, but it would only be a matter of time before the bobby he had left in the woods got to a phone or attracted the attention of one of the search teams. Then that would be it, with the clearly marked and highly visible traffic car suddenly becoming a liability instead of an asset, drawing all the other police units to it like flies round a jampot and shouting its identity to the force helicopter through its radio call-sign, which, like the rest of the police fleet, was certain to be printed in giant black letters on the roof.

Almost as a reflex action, he hit the accelerator pedal hard and felt the powerful vehicle respond instantly, leaping away into the night with a snarl of pure class, as if it actually sensed his urgency. He all but lost it on the next bend, chopping a sizeable chunk out of the nearside verge, but slackened only briefly when the lane then ended in a T-junction, before he swung hard left on to an empty dual carriageway with a squeal of tortured tyres.

A speed camera flashed as he passed it at over ninety miles an hour, but he hardly noticed. The demon on his shoulder held him possessed and his focus was far removed from the strictures of road traffic regulations, his thoughts concentrated instead on the daunting task he had set himself.

OK, so he now knew who the Slicer was – or at least he thought he did – but it was one thing knowing his identity and quite another proving it. He needed hard evidence, but there was no time for that. Search warrants, forensic analysis and the rest of the official trappings of the criminal justice system would only get in the way and make it all too late for the killer’s next victim. The old-fashioned ‘Ways & Means Act’ (traditionally resorted to by bobbies seeking a practical, though not strictly legal solution) was the only realistic course open to him in the circumstances and he would worry about the consequences of that later. After all, he had enough criminal charges to look forward to already – murder, withholding evidence, breaking and entering, taking and driving away a police car and excess speed – which meant that whatever he did from now on was pretty academic anyway.

Yeah, but what if he was wrong about the identity of the killer and it was actually someone else, what then? His teeth clenched tightly for a second in an involuntary spasm. Well, in that case it would be the end of Plan A, wouldn’t it? And the only problem he had then was that he didn’t have a Plan B.