Slice (22 page)

THE MAN IN
the red silk dressing-gown had been pacing his bedroom for the best part of two hours, throwing searching glances out of the window as he gradually emptied his half-bottle of brandy into the lead crystal glass he was gripping tighter than a baby grips a favourite toy. His cadaverous features were even more drawn than usual and his eyes had an unnaturally bright glint to them which suggested a heightened state of anxiety. In fact, he was right on the edge: stressed, exhausted, but most of all, very frightened – and he had every reason to be.

His Nemesis would come, of course – if not tonight, then tomorrow – and though he had prepared his security as well as he could, with all the doors and windows of the house locked or bolted and his pet Dobermann left to wander the half-acre garden at will, he had his doubts as to whether this would be enough. The creature they called the Slicer seemed to be able to kill with impunity and even a team of experienced detectives had failed to put a stop to the catalogue of atrocities that had already been committed.

But what else could he do to protect himself? Enlisting the help of the police was out of the question, for they would want to know why he considered himself to be at risk in the first place. That would mean revealing the guilty secret he had nursed for fifteen long years and destroying himself and everything he had worked for in the process.

Ironically, it had not occurred to him when the first two murders had been committed that he might later become a target himself. He had naturally assumed Lyall’s death was something to do with his previous position as a crown court judge – a revenge killing by an ex-con maybe – and that Lenny Baker had probably been a key informant in the same case. Even with the murder of the Reverend Cotter, he had tried to convince himself that he was looking at nothing more than a coincidence. It was only when the link with Drew House had been established, that he was finally forced to face reality and scurry for cover.

Now his only hope was that he could stay out of harm’s way until the Slicer was caught – with his departure for Malta in six hours on a last minute holiday his best chance of doing just that – but, as a gambling man, he knew that the odds in his favour were not great.

Emptying his glass, he set both it and the bottle on the bedside table and stretched out on the coverlet, the pillows banked against the headboard behind his head. In a few hours it would be light. Time enough to think about the sleep he so desperately needed once he was on the plane. For the present he would have to remain vigilant. The dog should warn him if he had any visitors, and anyway he was confident that his own sharp ears would pick up the sounds of anyone trying to force an entry. His hand closed on the bayonet lying beside the brandy bottle – a Second World War relic he had inherited from his deceased father years ago – and his mouth set into a hard uncompromising line. Were they to try it, he would certainly be ready for them – at least, that’s what he told himself.

He was wearing the same determined expression as he drifted off to sleep and despite his sharp ears, he failed to pick up the soft ‘crunch’ of an expertly taped-up window breaking downstairs or, shortly afterwards, the squeak of a loose floorboard in the corridor outside his room.

The police helicopter located Tango Two-five exactly twelve minutes after the displaced traffic patrolman ran into one of the search teams and reported his car stolen. Fulton could not have felt more relieved that he had acted on gut instinct and ditched the car when he had, rather than driving what would have been a fatal extra half-mile to his objective. As it was, after abandoning the vehicle on a patch of waste ground in the middle of town, he had only just managed to lose himself in the labyrinth of adjacent streets when the familiar thud of rotor blades announced the chopper’s arrival.

He had kept to the backstreets after that and, apart from one scare when he was forced to throw himself into a pile of rubbish to escape the powerful spotlight of the helicopter during a low-level sweep of the area, he had got to Saddler Street without any major problems. Once there, gaining access to the police station itself proved easier than he had anticipated. A transom window had been carelessly left open in the basement – the locker room, as it turned out – and a convenient external drainpipe enabled him to haul himself up on to the sill. The locker room was empty and in darkness, but a sheet of brilliant white light washed down the side of the building and flooded into the room like an advancing tide as he levered himself off the inside sill. He knew it was unlikely that the helicopter was directly targeting the police station – more likely that its probing beam was scanning streets much further away and had brushed the building in passing – but he couldn’t take the chance and he remained crouched on the floor below the window for several minutes until the light was suddenly withdrawn and the helicopter’s rotors faded.

The locker-room door made a cracking noise as he opened it, but there was no one around to hear; the corridor outside was empty. He glanced at his watch. It was just on two. There would only be a skeleton staff upstairs now anyway: the station duty officer, the team of communication operators sealed up in their control room and a replacement custody officer. The rest would be out on patrol – no doubt looking for him.

The station seemed dead and as usual was full of shadows. He made it to the first floor, which was unlit, then stopped abruptly in the darkness as a door closed somewhere along the corridor. He waited, listening intently. Soft footfalls sounded to his right, then another door opened with a groan and louder footsteps rang on what sounded like a bare stone surface (the back stairs?) as they faded away. He remained motionless until the walker had gone, then switched on his torch and moved off.

He found the office he was looking for – the words ‘Administration’ on the door – and carefully tried the handle. As he had expected, the door was locked, but it opened easily enough with the help of his Visa card, and he gave a critical shake of his head. He found it ironic that the very organization that liked to lecture the public on the importance of crime prevention failed to practise what it preached when it came down to fitting a modern thief-proof lock to the door of the office where, amongst other things, the police area’s imprest account cash was kept. Still, the lapse served his purpose well enough now and he slipped inside and closed the door gently behind him.

The office was large, accommodating three separate workstations in the centre and a row of three-drawer filing cabinets along one wall. He guessed that, unlike the door, the cabinets would be securely locked because of their contents, and he shone the torch round the room, looking for the key cabinet that he knew would be there. When he located it he was astonished to find that someone had actually left the flap of the metal box wide open, with the keys still in the lock. It seemed that security at Saddler Street nick needed a very big kick up the backside.

The keys on the row of hooks inside were all neatly tagged. He selected the one labelled ‘Area P/Fs’ (personal files) and crossed the room to unlock the relevant metal cabinet. He eased out one of the long drawers on its runners with great care, knowing full well what a racket they could sometimes make if handled roughly.

The suspended files inside were neatly positioned and in alphabetical order, with senior officers grouped in one section, followed by supervisory ranks and then constables. This made his search a lot easier; within seconds of finding the file he was looking for and opening it up on top of the cabinet, he knew he had struck oil.

Like every other P/F in the force, the bundle of papers inside the familiar blue folder comprised confidential memos, letters and reports. Among these were the multi-paged annual appraisal reports, giving not only supervisory assessments and grades for each calendar year, but the officer’s qualifications, achievements and personal details, including the information Fulton most wanted – his private address – which he quickly noted.

But there were other things in this particular personal file that were totally unexpected; things that made Fulton’s heart once more beat twice as fast as he leafed through the documents, speed-reading as he went. ‘Former military service in Royal Marines (commando unit) …’ he murmured, his torch tracing a shaky path across the page.
The bastard knew how to kill, then
! ‘Previously employed as charge nurse at Braxton psychiatric hospital.’
A charge nurse
?
So his killer had medical qualifications too. No wonder he knew how to use chloroform and drugs like GHB effectively. Probably had an illicit stock stashed away somewhere
.

And there was more, too. Thumbing through a clutch of papers near the back of the file, he came across something which really focused his mind. It was a three-year-old report notifying the headquarters personnel department of an impending medical operation. That in itself was not so startling, but it was the nature of the operation that gave Fulton a shock as he noted the contents: ‘… Specialist diagnosis – testicular cancer … No option but surgical removal … Necessity for several weeks’ sick leave …’

Before returning the file to the drawer, the big man leaned on the cabinet for a few moments, digesting the information. Testicular cancer? Surgical removal? It was too much of a coincidence. There had to be a connection between his suspect’s misfortune and the mutilations that had accompanied the murders of both Herbert Lyall and Andrew Cotter. Any lingering doubts he might have had as to whether he was going after the right man were now put to rest. It had to be him and all that remained now was to find the swine and nail him. To do that, though, he needed some wheels – and he knew exactly where to get them.

There was no one in the briefing room when he poked his head round the door and the place was in darkness, but his torch soon picked out the row of ignition keys on the cork board just inside, each with a metal tag attached carrying the vehicle’s registration number. With a grim smile he remembered what Derringer had said to Phil Gilham about car keys being so easy to obtain. He made the mental observation that the station was a long time learning its lesson.

The high level of police activity still appeared to be ongoing when he climbed out through the open window, but the river of blue light pulsing among the buildings was much further away this time, and the helicopter’s silhouette in the night sky had shrunk to the size of a child’s toy as it hovered over the east side of the town. It reminded Fulton of some nocturnal bird of prey about to swoop on its unsuspecting victim.

The vehicle he was looking for turned out to be one of two marked area cars, parked alongside a couple of CID cars. He wasn’t too happy about using such a highly visible vehicle, but he couldn’t risk returning to the station to swop the keys for those of a plain CID car. He was behind the wheel and heading for the exit within seconds, feeling relieved that at least he had got away without detection.

Unbeknown to him, however, his departure had not gone completely unnoticed and he would have been more than a little concerned had he been aware of the other car pulling out of a corner parking bay moments after he had driven away. Significantly, the vehicle not only paused for a moment in the wake of the exhaust plume he had left floating in the entranceway, but then headed off in the same direction, maintaining a discreet distance behind him and hugging the nearside kerb with its lights extinguished. He would have been very interested indeed to see who was behind the wheel.

RAFFERTY CLOSE WAS
a cul-de-sac on the east side of town, adjoining a disused branch of the East Molten Canal and almost within spitting distance of the street where John Derringer had had his flat. Number 13 was at the end of a terrace of former Victorian workers’ cottages, which could not have been more unsympathetically renovated if the developers had tried. Like its neighbours, it scowled over a tiny unkempt garden into a potholed street, which had once echoed to the clop of horses’ hoofs, as the heavy drays had rumbled through the gates of the long since derelict Wimbles Wharf to meet the barges off-loading their cargos of black gold from the Midlands pits.

Fulton parked the police car behind a beaten up VW camper van, left half-on and half-off the pavement under a broken streetlamp, and sat there for a moment, studying the target premises along the inside wing of the other vehicle, wondering why someone with the sort of money his man must be earning would choose to live in a rathole like this. The place was in darkness, which was to be expected at – and he consulted the luminous dial of his watch – 2.45 in the morning. But if he was right, this particular resident would not be found buried under a mound of bedclothes; he would already be closing in on his next victim – if he was not there already – and Fulton just prayed that by adding burglary to his own growing list of offences, he would be able to discover the identity of that victim before another life was lost.

He took a deep breath, climbed out of the car into the frosty night and pushed the door to behind him. Then, keeping to the shadows, he followed the low walls of the neighbouring two houses along to the end – only to freeze into immobility beneath an overhanging tree when the thud of rotor blades announced the arrival of the police helicopter carrying out yet another low-level sweep of the area, with its powerful spotlight tracing a diagonal path across the street.

A couple of minutes later it was gone. He slipped through the open gateway of Number 13 and mounted the three stone steps to the front door. He was quite certain that the doorbell would only ring in an empty house, but he pressed it all the same, just to make sure. Nothing stirred and he grunted his satisfaction. On returning to the small patch of garden, he discovered a sideway between the house and the corrugated iron fence of Wimbles Wharf and investigated further.

The rear garden was as unkempt as the front, though slightly bigger, and through gaps in the rear fence he caught the gleam of the moonlight on the turgid water of the canal. The back door gave access to what many years ago would have been called a scullery and his elbow soon took out one of the small panes of glass to enable him to reach the key left in the lock.

His torch picked out a Belfast sink and a pile of washing in a plastic basket on the draining board as he made his way through an internal door to the kitchen. He almost trod on a black cat, which shot out of a litter tray by his feet and disappeared through the back door with a blood-curdling cry that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
Good or bad luck?

A poky dining room and sitting room opened off the hallway that lay beyond, but they contained nothing of interest, save shabby furniture and photographs of military vehicles and helicopters in various locations around the world.

The stairs creaked like arthritic joints as he headed for the upper floor and he felt a bit like the private detective in the cult horror film,
Psycho
, when he reached the landing, half-expecting a nightmare figure to suddenly rush out of one of the adjacent rooms wielding a long-bladed knife.

To his relief no such apparition appeared, but he felt a definite sense of unease as he strode towards a half-open door, unable to shake off the feeling that he was not alone. He checked a sparsely furnished bedroom, finding little of interest there, and was about to move back out on to the landing when he stiffened to what sounded like stealthy movement in the hallway below. He strained his ears to listen, but the sound was not repeated and a few moments later the returning helicopter put paid to any chance he had of hearing anything.

With the room temporarily caught in the beam of the chopper’s spotlight as it raked the street, he instinctively flattened himself against the wall as much as his bulk would allow and waited. Eventually the beam passed on – jerked away as if on a length of elastic. In the darkness, he strained his ears again and this time he heard a series of familiar creaking sounds. His face hardened. Someone was coming up the stairs.

Shuffling sounds on the landing. Fulton held himself in check, resisting the urge to charge out of the bedroom to confront whoever had followed him into the house. But instinct urged caution and he waited, heart pounding and fists clenched tightly by his sides.

A light blossomed in the gloom and he edged closer to the door, inwardly cursing when his knee caught a projecting handle on a chest of drawers, shaking the glass ornaments on top and producing a tinkling sound.

‘Jack, you in there?’

Fulton jumped. The last thing he expected was to hear his name called, but the familiar voice drew him out of his hiding-place. Phil Gilham’s flashlight blazed in his eyes and he jerked the other’s hand away irritably. ‘What the hell are
you
doing here?’ he snarled.

‘Following you,’ Gilham retorted, his tone cold and hostile.

Fulton snorted. ‘I thought you’d be dealing with the intruder at Derryman Hospice.’

‘I would be if I hadn’t seen you borrowing an area car from the nick as I was about to drive out of the car park.’

Fulton pushed past him and flashed his torch around a second bedroom. ‘So how come you weren’t already tucked up with the missus tonight?’ he said without any real interest. ‘Lover’s tiff?’

Gilham took a deep breath, stepping quickly to one side as the big man came back out of the room. ‘Worse than that. Helen and I had a massive row. She’d stumbled on one of Abbey’s old letters in my study and when I got back from seeing Abbey at the hospital, she went totally ballistic.’

‘Serves you right.’

‘Yeah, well, I spent the rest of the evening at my local and when they closed, I decided to head for the nick and kip in the office rather than return home for round two.’

Fulton nodded. ‘Brave of you,’ he said, rattling the handle of another door. ‘Damned thing’s locked,’ he muttered.

Gilham watched him bunch his shoulder and, realizing what was in his mind, quickly grabbed his arm. ‘Jack, I can’t be privy to something like this.’

The big man shook himself free. ‘Then piss off!’ he retorted and, slamming his shoulder into the thin panelling, whooped his satisfaction as the lock burst open and the door flew back against the wall with a splintering crash.

Gilham groaned. ‘For heaven’s sake, Jack, what do you think you’re doing? You’ve already got half the force out looking for you as it is?’

Fulton gave a short laugh. ‘Yeah, I seem to have become quite the celebrity, don’t I?’ he said, brushing against the shattered door as he flashed his torch around the room.

Gilham followed him with obvious reluctance, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder towards the blacked-out staircase. ‘Jack, you’re right out of order. I mean, whose house is this anyway – and what the devil are you looking for?’

Fulton’s sharp intake of breath was like the ‘phut’ of a bullet discharged from a silenced pistol. ‘Why don’t you see for yourself?’ he said grimly as he threw caution aside and switched on the main light.

Blinking in the harsh, unshaded glare, Gilham found himself in a cramped study, maybe seven feet square, furnished with a corner desk and a couple of drawer units. A laptop computer occupied the centre of the desk, connected to an adjacent printer, and both were switched on, with the computer displaying the photograph of a ruined mansion as a screen-saver.

Gilham stared at the photograph for several seconds, then emitted a low whistle. ‘Gordon Bennett, that looks like Drew House.’

Fulton followed his gaze. ‘It
is
Drew House,’ he said. ‘And the rest of what we have here speaks for itself.’

It was not difficult to see what he meant by that either. The left-hand wall was occupied by bookshelves and what looked suspiciously like a hospital drugs cabinet, with rows of small bottles visible through the glass door. Part of the right-hand wall directly above the desk was covered by what appeared to be a map of the Maddington police area, peppered with coloured markers. Beside it, a large cork board carried photographs of several buildings, each one shot from a number of different angles, with the most distinctive being that of St Peter’s church where the Reverend Cotter had been preaching the night he died. Even more interesting was the whiteboard on the outer wall beside the window and the passport-size photographs that had been arranged in a vertical line down one side, with blocks of neat handwritten notes alongside each picture.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Gilham gasped. ‘This place is set up like a mini version of one of our own incident rooms.’

Fulton had pounced on a thick buff-coloured folder lying beside the computer. He didn’t look up as he leafed through the pages. ‘That’s
exactly
what it is,’ he said. ‘An incident room. Only, the intelligence that’s been gathered here was designed to
facilitate
murder rather than investigate it.’

Gilham squeezed past him for a closer look at the whiteboard, curiosity overruling his initial objections to the illegal search operation. Peering at the top photograph, he whistled again. ‘That’s a picture of Judge Lyall,’ he exclaimed. ‘And there’s the Reverend Cotter’s too.’ He broke off, half-turning towards Fulton. ‘But there’s another old boy here and I certainly don’t recognize him.’

‘If it’s photo number three, it’s probably Carlo Vansetti.’

‘Vansetti? What, the gangster you introduced me to at Derringer’s flat?’

Fulton gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘His father,’ he corrected, continuing to flick through the folder.

‘So how—’

Fulton closed the folder and held it up in front of him. ‘Never mind that now,’ he cut in. ‘I’ve found the missing crime file on Drew House, which is what really matters. The bastard had it all the time and I can see why he didn’t want anyone else to see it.’

But Gilham did not even look at the folder. His gaze had returned to the whiteboard and was now riveted on the last photograph. ‘Jack,’ he said and his voice was suddenly cracked and shaky. ‘You’ll never believe whose picture is up here with the others?’

Fulton dropped the folder back on to the desk, his eyes stony. ‘Assistant Chief Constable Norman Skellet, no doubt,’ he said, more as a statement than a question.

Gilham gaped. ‘How on earth did you know that?’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t even looked at the whiteboard.’

‘It’s in the crime file. Seems he was DCI when Drew House was torched and he and Halloran were the first officers on the scene.’

‘But if he was an IO on the Drew House job and his picture is up here with the rest, that means—’

‘He must be the Slicer’s next victim,’ the big man finished.

Gilham lunged for the telephone on the corner of the desk. ‘Hell’s bells!’ he choked, ‘then we need to get some units over to Skellet’s place pdq.’

But Fulton was already through the study door, heading for the stairs. Gilham dropped the telephone receiver with a loud curse to stumble after him, tugging at the mobile caught up in the lining of his coat pocket with one hand as he directed his own flashlight into the yawning shaft of the staircase with the other.

‘Jack, don’t be a damned fool,’ he shouted. ‘You can’t do this thing on your own.’

Conscious of a sudden familiar and increasing clatter above the house and a blaze of white light sweeping across the glazed top panel of the front door as he reached the hall, Fulton struggled furiously with the door catch. ‘Thanks for the advice, Phil,’ he snarled. ‘But this is strictly personal.’

The next moment he was hammering down the steps into the path of the helicopter’s spotlight.

‘But you haven’t even said who we’re we looking for?’ Gilham shouted after him. ‘
Or
whose place this is?’

Fulton threw a savage glance at the clattering monster hovering overhead and jerked the door of the area car wide. ‘You mean you really don’t know?’ he yelled back. ‘Think about it, Phil – there’s only one person it could be!’

Then he had spun the car round in a tyre-screeching turn and, after mounting the pavement, careered out of Rafferty Close through a sea of pulsing blue light as a convoy of police cars swinging into the cul-de-sac was forced to swerve out of his way. By the time the mêlée of vehicles had sorted itself out, he was several miles away, hurtling through the leafy outskirts of town, and praying with every ounce of his being that the hunch he had chosen to follow would prove to be right.