Slice (23 page)

THE BIG PSEUDO
-Georgian house sat squarely in around half an acre of neat lawns and mixed laurel and rhododendron groves that screamed landscaping from every glossy moonlit leaf. The place was ablaze with light when Phil Gilham swung in through the open gateway at the head of the police convoy, and he spotted the Dobermann pinscher dog lying motionless beside the ornate stone fountain as he jumped out of his car. He approached the animal with caution, well aware of the breed’s nasty reputation, but a cursory examination was enough to confirm that the animal was dead. There was froth around its gaping jaws that suggested some kind of virulent poison, and a bloody wound was visible in its side.

‘Someone wasn’t much of a dog-lover then?’ the uniformed inspector commented at his elbow as he straightened up.

‘Well, the brute didn’t top itself, that’s for sure,’ Gilham retorted, his tone terse and strained as he added: ‘You’d better have your crews check the grounds.’ He threw an irritable glance at the police helicopter now hovering noisily overhead. ‘And get that dratted chopper doing something useful, will you?’

The front door of the house stood wide open and there were ominous dark spots on the step, with a wet smear on the inside edge of the doorframe itself that looked suspiciously like part of a bloodstained handprint. Gilham was conscious of his heartbeat quickening as he stepped into the hallway and his narrowed gaze followed a trail of dark spots either leading to or from the foot of the staircase.

‘Hello?’ he called automatically, wondering why he was bothering with such a pointless formality in the first place. ‘Anyone about?’

Outside, car doors slammed and loud voices joined with the clatter of the helicopter to drown any response he might have received, but he didn’t try again, sensing that there was no one there to answer him anyway.

He saw more blood spots on the stairs and further smears on the banister rail as he headed for the next floor. The trail finally led him across the landing to a luxuriously appointed bedroom.

‘Broken window round the side of the house,’ the inspector said, joining him again. He bent down to study a wicked-looking bayonet lying on the carpet, resisting the temptation to touch it. ‘Something nasty happened in here all right.’

Gilham nodded. A table-lamp had been knocked over on its pedestal beside the double bed and telltale red spots dotted the badly rumpled coverlet and one pillow. ‘Someone certainly sprang a leak,’ he agreed, ‘but whoever owned the bayonet, it doesn’t look as though that was the culprit.’

The inspector shook his head. ‘Blade seems to be completely clean,’ he confirmed. ‘Could be the dog had the intruder before he managed to get into the house.’

‘Gilham frowned. ‘Let’s hope that was it, but then how was he able to poison the brute afterwards?’ He sniffed loudly. ‘And what’s that awful stink?’

His junior colleague also sniffed the air. ‘Smells like antiseptic, sir.’

‘Chloroform,’ Gilham exclaimed, wheeling on him, his eyes gleaming. ‘Quick, where’s Jack Fulton?’

The uniformed man seemed taken aback. ‘Mr Fulton, sir? I haven’t seen him.’

‘But he must have been on his way here. He knew Mr Skellet was to be the killer’s next target.’

The inspector thought a second. ‘Well, I know he left Rafferty Close pretty rapid – nearly caused a multiple as we drove in – but that’s all, and the chopper’s since radioed in to say he shot off in the opposite direction to us.’

Gilham’s expression was incredulous. ‘He did
what
? Then why the devil didn’t someone go after him? He’s still a damned fugitive, isn’t he?’

The inspector shrugged a little uncertainly. ‘I suppose so, sir, but when you called in from Rafferty Close to say Mr Skellet was at risk, control instructed all units to head here as a priority – including Hotel X-ray 19 – so any pursuit would have been abandoned.’

Gilham seemed to sag under an invisible weight. ‘Gordon Bennett,’ he breathed. ‘So it’s all down to Jack now, is it – wherever he’s off to? I just hope he knows what he’s doing.’

Fulton left the area car in a lay-by and headed up the long driveway of Drew House on foot, keeping close to the adjacent shrubbery and directing anxious glances at the moon which, though clearly visible, was beginning to lose some of its brilliance with the approach of first light. He fully anticipated the police helicopter’s reappearance overhead at any second and was surprised that it wasn’t actually there already. But the flying bug did not materialize and after a few minutes it dawned on him that the chopper had either lost track of him, which was pretty unlikely, or had actually abandoned its initial pursuit – maybe to provide aerial back-up for the troops en route to Norman Skellet’s house instead. Whatever the reason, however, the absence of Hotel X-ray 19 could not have been more welcome as far as he was concerned. The last thing he needed was his quarry to be alerted by the clatter of rotor blades before he could find him.

He was convinced that Drew House – or more specifically, the church at Drew House –
was
where the Slicer would be heading to carry out his final bloody execution. The fact that those sinister ruins had now become an active police crime scene would be no deterrent to him either. The murderous psychopath had already shown himself to be an arrogant risk-taker and, as the church crypt and what had taken place there all those years ago was central to the pursuit of his bloody vendetta, it was logical to assume that he would seek to end his killing spree in the place where it had all started.

But logical or not, the big man knew his hypothesis relied heavily on what really amounted to nothing more than a hunch. As he slipped down the side of the sprawling carcass that had once been Drew House, he was unable to shake off a growing sense of unease, with the little doubting voice in his brain starting to dissect that hypothesis and ask some challenging questions that he preferred not to think about. What if his hunch was actually false and his own arrogance had led him to entirely the wrong conclusion? What if the killer was nowhere near Drew House, but miles away on the other side of the police area? What if, even as he wasted his time searching an empty ruin, Norman Skellet was being forced to stare into a mirror somewhere else and watch his throat being cut?

‘What if, what if, what if?’ he snarled, trying hard to ignore the negative whispers in his brain and concentrate instead on the task in hand – and it was then that he caught the glitter of moonlight on glass and knew, with a sense of relief, that his gut instinct had not played him false after all.

The old black Transit van had been reversed into a break among the trees a few yards ahead of him. It was so far in that he might have passed it by altogether had the headlamp glass not given the vehicle away. Taking a closer look, he found the back doors had been left half-open and a familiar strong, sickly smell hit him as soon as he stuck his head inside. The van contained little of interest, except a pile of blankets in one corner, but the chloroform smell was enough of a giveaway on its own and there were dark smears, like blood, on the outside of one door. He returned to the front of the vehicle and placed his hand against the radiator grille. He found it was still warm, suggesting the vehicle had only recently arrived. He felt a new sense of optimism. Maybe there was still time. He paused only long enough to immobilize the Transit by removing the rotor arm from the distributor, which he slipped it into his pocket and returned to the track, following a thin trickle of moonlight towards the back of the house.

Then the ruined church was there, directly in front of him, cold and hostile. He studied the place for a few moments, looking for any sign of movement, listening for the slightest sound, but there was nothing; just a heavy threatening stillness as if the building itself were holding its breath in some sort of gleeful anticipation. He made straight for the front porch, his feet kicking up clods of earth from the derelict kitchen garden as he cut a diagonal path through the overgrown plot and his eyes narrowed when he reached the double doors. The blue-and-white ‘Police Crime Scene. Do Not Cross’ tape, which had been strung across the entrance, had been ripped from the corner posts to which it had been fixed. Moving into the shadows of the porch, his torch picked out dark spots on the flagstones, which glistened like droplets of melted wax in the light. He remembered the smears on the Ford Transit’s door and grimaced. Someone had been injured, that was for sure, but the question was who?

Gently easing one of the double doors open, he was immediately greeted by the flutter of wings in the gloom beyond, but otherwise there was not a sound. He switched on his torch, masking the beam with one cupped hand, and negotiated his way through the dismembered pews towards the north-east corner, where the stairs to the crypt were. He heard the muffled cry before he had gone more than a few feet and stopped dead, dispensing with caution by removing his cupped hand from his torch and directing the full beam into the blackness in front of him.

Something erupted from a niche in the stonework to his left and skimmed over his head, stirring his thinning hair – another bat, just like before – but he saw nothing else and was about to direct his torch elsewhere when he heard another cry, apparently coming from the far end of the church. He moved forward again, picking his way round fallen debris and trying to avoid walking into anything likely to cause injury, conscious all the time of an uncomfortable prickling sensation at the base of his neck as if he were being watched from somewhere in the gloom close by. Twice he actually turned to direct his torch back down the nave, convinced he had detected stealthy movement among the pews, but he saw nothing and in the end he put it all down to the mischievous action of a newly arisen wind, which seemed determined to restore the ruins to life and awaken the ghosts that had slept there for centuries.

Reaching the north-east corner, he was surprised to find that the hole in the bricked-up archway leading to the crypt had been sealed with a steel plate – no doubt by the SOCO team in an effort to preserve the scene – and closer inspection revealed that the plate was still intact, secured to the wall with businesslike bolts. The discovery certainly threw him, for it meant that no one could possibly have visited the crypt since the thing had been fitted. So where the hell had his quarry disappeared to?

His answer was not long in coming. The high-pitched scream seemed to issue from directly above his head, cutting through the suffocating gloom with the surgical precision of a laser and sending the bats into a panic-stricken frenzy as his torch flashed wildly among them in the ruins of the vaulted roof. The sound lasted for no more than a couple of seconds before it was abruptly cut off, but that was long enough to tell him exactly what he wanted to know. The tower! The bastard was up in the tower.

There had once been a padlock on the half-open tower door, but it now lay on the floor with the buckled remains of the hasp. The notice on the wall beside it was faded, but still legible:

Fulton bared his teeth in a fierce grimace as he jerked the door wide. Obviously health-and-safety issues did not feature prominently in the killer’s mind at the present time – and neither did they in
his
.

The stone staircase that started up the shoulder-width gullet inside the doorway curled away sharply to his left, disappearing behind the curve of the wall, and his torch picked out what looked like more blood spots on the lower steps. The steps themselves were chipped at the edge and worn away into hollows in the centre from centuries of heavy use, and there was no handrail or guide-rope in evidence. He decided that the easiest method of tackling the steep climb was to revert to his childhood days and lean on each rising step with both hands, then grope for the next as he went up in a semi-crouched position. He switched off his torch and pushed it through the belt of his trousers, his straining eyes making as much use as they could of the weakened moonlight stealing in through the long narrow windows.

The feel of the cold stone beneath his palms and the taste of the damp mortar at the back of his throat evoked poignant memories of another time and place when, as a boy, he had climbed similar steps in his father’s own church in exactly the same way. Then his mission had been to help with the ringing of the eight huge bells secured to their equally massive A-frame high up in the bell chamber, his legs shaking with trepidation at the thought of having to mount the wooden box waiting for him in the bell-ringing room above, where he would have to grip the thick rough rope under the glare of the fanatical bell captain, Harry Duncan.

Now, all these years later, his legs were shaking once again, but this time it was due to fatigue rather than trepidation as he was forced to draw on every ounce of energy he possessed to haul his ponderous bulk up what seemed like a never-ending spiral, while his heart threatened to explode under the strain and his lungs teetered on the edge of collapse. He should never have attempted such a climb in his poor physical condition, he knew that only too well. But what he lacked in natural stamina, he made up for in sheer dogged determination and that, coupled with the hatred that burned deep into his soul, drove him on regardless of the consequences.

As he climbed, the wind seemed to home in on him, buffeting the tower with increasing force, its moaning breath setting up unnerving vibrations that rippled through the ancient structure like mini seismic aftershocks, threatening to bring the whole lot down on top of him. Then, forty steps up – he could not help himself counting them one by one – the first glimmer of artificial light showed; a watery stain in the gloom that touched his fingers with a timid curiosity before strengthening appreciably as he rounded the curve of the wall. Now he was able to see the outline of a small wooden door on his right (the bell-ringing room?) past which the steps marched on, heading for the top of the tower and almost certainly the bell chamber itself.