Son of a Serial Killer (12 page)

37

Neighbours had gathered around the cordoned off driveway, bright police lights had attracted them like moths to a candle.

Summers examined the body
whilst Kite was inside the house, along with a female officer, trying to calm down the distraught Tanya.

There
were two explanations that rattled around Summers’ head.

Firstly,
The Phantom had killed David Reynolds, using his typical methods and disappearing into nothingness, as he always did, and as per usual, leaving no trace of his ever being there, except the mutilated body leaking blood everywhere. The problem with this theory, was that the frequency of The Phantoms killing had shot up from around two a year to two a day. Certainly not an improvement to the situation, although, the more murders committed at a higher pace could, in theory, lead to a mistake being made on The Phantoms part. That was the only silver lining she could think of.

Secondly,
there was more than one killer. Was there a copycat? Or maybe The Phantom was in cahoots with someone else? Maybe it was
The Phantoms
they should be looking for.

The corpse that lay in front of her certainly looked like a victim to
The Phantom to the untrained eye. It wasn’t a robbery, as David still wore an expensive watch that he must’ve forgotten to take off before his run. It was also unlikely to be an argument, as none of the neighbours so eager to be involved by attending the crime scene had heard or seen a commotion of any sort, not this evening or any evening involving David or Tanya in the time they had lived there.

But, his throat was sliced,
this was new. And although The Phantom did sometimes stray from his preferred methods of killing, using a screwdriver instead of a knife for example, this didn’t sit right with the detective. But then, if it was an accomplice and not a copycat, this wouldn’t have happened either.

So could it be a copycat?
What were the chances?

The murders had been on the television and in the newspapers, on and off, for years now. Obviously the last couple of days this had turned into full blown coverage
again, and it was hard to not know all about The Phantom and his unfortunate victims. If somebody felt the urge to murder, would using the techniques that they had likely read or heard about in the last couple of days be the preferred method? It had worked wonders for The Phantom, after all.

Sum
mers concluded that if it was a copycat killer, there was a good chance that the forensic team would find evidence of some sort, as not everybody could be as careful as The Phantom, not in the heat of battle, when the blood is pumping or the mind is racing and a major crime is being carried out.

Kite walked out of the house and informed his boss that neither he nor the female officer could get much out of Mrs Reynolds for the time being. They had agreed that Tanya be escorted to a cousin’s
house on the edge of the city then collected in the morning and brought to the station for a formal interview.

Kite added that the heavily pregnan
t and hysterically upset Tanya, in his opinion, could not and would not have been responsible for the death of her husband. Summers took his word for it, for now, although she would make her own mind up tomorrow at the station.

Finally forensics arrived.

The first thing they did was erect a large, white tent and try to stop the area being contaminated any further than it already had been, also so they could get on peacefully with their work without being hounded by the public or the press who were bound to arrive shortly.

Summers noticed she had a touch of blood on her shoe and slowly moved away from the head of forensics, who would quite rightly give he
r a good telling off for potentially contaminating the crime scene.

As per usual, there were no witnesses to offer any useful information to the investigators, and no cameras on the residential street meant that there wasn’t much point in the detectives hanging around.

It had been a long day, so Kite drove Summers home, before retiring for the night himself.

38

Ben sat at the kitchen table, drinking out of the wine glass his mother had poured for herself before evidently passing out. She was sat on the chair opposite him, her arms and head rested on the hard wood table, unconscious from the alcohol.

He'd been crying again,
over the situation he found himself in, the loss of what once seemed to be a bright future. And he cried over pain he now felt in his heart, the heavy ache he carried in his chest since leaving Eve's apartment. He'd never believed in love at first sight, thinking it was only ever lust that could grab somebody's attention that quickly, but now he wasn't so sure.

Was twenty-four hours enough to fall
in love? It was for Ben, he believed that now. And it was real love, the kind of love where you would sacrifice for that person to do the right thing, even if it meant breaking the two hearts that until that moment had bonded as one.

H
e'd also cried over the ever-increasingly complicated relationship between him and his mother.

For years she'd had problems, mental problems, she'd been prescribed all sorts of medication to balance herself out, but hadn't take
n the pills as routinely as needed, even with her husband placing the pills and a glass of water beside her bed in the morning, and next to her dinner plate in the afternoon. Was she deliberately disobedient? She started refusing the treatment altogether.

It was almost as if someone was telling her not to take the medication. On one occasion, Mr Green found around a month's worth of pills under his wife's side of the bed, which led
to him to try and force the tablets into her, which led to physical struggles, which Ben once saw.

There is nothing quite as sickening to a child
, regardless of age, as witnessing the two people you love and care for more than anyone else, fighting and shouting and screaming at each other, and then seeing your mother forcing herself to throw up, if your father was lucky enough to get her to take her medication in the first place.

She should have been in a home for the mentally ill a long time ago, but Mr Green was old school, for better
or for worse, in sickness and in health. Looking back, Ben could now see that this was a mistake on his father's part.

Was it his only mistake?

Ben had moments when he believed in the awful words his mother had mumbled to him in the last day or so, the fact that his father had been a serial killer, that he carried the same murderous gene that his father had, and that he could only fight his natural instincts for so long before they took over.

Why did his mother have to tell him that?
Why couldn't she leave Ben to believe that his father was a saint? Just let him think his father was a great man who loved and cared and gave and shared.

Why did she have to break Ben's heart again?
Why?

Ben felt a rage build in his body and before he knew it, he'd smashed his fist down hard onto the kitchen table, his mother's head bounced up from the surface from the impact.
She awoke from her alcohol-induced slumber and smiled as she stared bleary-eyed at her son, as she sat back in her seat and looked for her glass of wine before realising it was in Ben's hand.

‘
So, Charlie's dead,’ said Ben, staring into his mother's eyes, searching for a reaction, a sign of how much she knew, how much she understood or cared about the torment he was going through.

‘
You did well, my son.’ she replied. ‘Yes, I heard it on the radio. How do you feel?’

‘
How do I feel?’ said Ben, ‘I didn't do it. The police had me in the station for a murder I didn't commit. Thank god they're so stupid they didn't realise I'm the bastard who killed those fucking kids!’

Ben leaned in towards the table, finished the glass of wine and poured some more.

‘Of course you killed him, Ben,’ said his mother, ‘who else?’

‘
I bottled it, mum,’ he said. ‘I couldn't go through with it. I ran away. Then the next thing, four policemen are at my front door, asking me to the station to answer some questions.’

Mrs Green held out her hand and Ben gave her the wine glass.

‘Your father used to forget as well, Ben,’ she said, before taking a large gulp of the red wine. ‘He would sometimes wake up, specks of blood on his face and in his hair, and deny he'd done anything wrong. He denied it so much. I could only believe that he didn't know what he had done, like he'd chosen to forget.’

She emptied the wine glass with another large gulp, slid it along the table to Ben, who filled it again.

‘He chose to forget?’ said Ben. ‘You can't just forget these things, mum, not even you with your unstable mind and fucking drinking problem.’

Ben swiped his arm across the table and the glass flew into the wall to his left, brok
en glass crashed to the floor and wine ran down the wall.

His mother didn't flinch.

‘Now, now, Ben,’ she said, ‘calm down. This is not the moment to panic. Your mind lets you forget what you have done because you are not ready to accept what you are, not yet. It will come. For now, your mind is protecting you, hiding your ills deep down, and we'll wait, we'll wait until you're ready.’

It was at this point, Ben realised how much he hated his mother. He hated looking at her, he hated the sound of her voice, but more than that, he hated the awful words that she spoke. She spoke them like the truth, and Ben didn't know if she was lying, and exploiting his instability to fulfil some bizarre fantasy she had turning around in her sick head, or if she was telling the truth, that not only was he a cold-blooded killer, but his mind was also playing
incredible tricks on him.

Sometimes when you hate someone, you don't want to believe what they are saying is the truth, even if you haven't an argument against it.

Mrs Green was now telling Ben how she first discovered that his father was The Phantom. There was the stress and the anger, things that Ben never saw in his father, then his late night walks and coming home late at night and crying himself to sleep on the sofa, thinking that his troubled wife upstairs couldn't hear.

She explained that she took some of the blame, for being such an exhausting wife, that her illness affected the people around her, she knew that, but ultimately, it was Ben's father who had this desire inside him, the need to shed
the blood of another to ease the pain and torture inside of him.

Eventually, at a time of weakness for Mr Green, she approached him and told him that she knew what he had been doing, he broke down in tears, she swore to secrecy, and together they'd get through it.

He’d explained he did it to quieten the voice in his head, how he’d put on some of his painting overalls, take a knife and stalk the streets, keeping to the shadows until he found a victim, someone on their own, someone who wasn’t ready to defend themselves, then he’d claim them as his own, sacrificing them, in the hope that their death would buy him peace of mind.

‘I pledged my allegiance to my husband, like I’m doing to you
now.

Ben despised every single word she said.
How could he not know the evil that lived inside his father? It seemed impossible. He was the kindest, gentlest man. But then, until recently, so was Ben.

He'd had enough for one day.

He picked himself up and walked around the table, kissed his mother on her cheek then retired to his old bedroom. He took the mirror from his bedroom wall, placed it face down on the floor, and slid it under the bed, then lay himself down with his eyes wide open and let the thoughts run wild through his head.

For the time being, Ben still had control of his mind for fairly long periods, and he needed to make the most of his sanity.

39

It was morning, Ben had collected Natalie from home and they had driven into town.
He was going to see the solicitor to fill out any necessary forms and collect the inheritance from his father.

Natalie said she wanted to look at baby clothes and maybe pick out an outfit for their wedding, which she had decided should ta
ke place at a registry office. Waiting for a decent church could take too long, and neither of them came from large families and they weren’t religious, so she reasoned it was the better option.

Ben accepted her plans with a nod and dropped her off by the high street before drivin
g five minutes up the road, closer to the solicitor's office.

Natalie grabbed a few items of baby clothes from the first shop she went to, not much heart-felt consideration went into her purchases, just enough care to make it seem she cared. She bought whites and yellows, colours that would suit either a boy or a girl, because clearly, she didn't yet know what sex her fictitious baby would turn out to be.

As she came out of the shop she looked both ways along the street, searching for the real reason she had come into town today, a pharmacy.

Before entering, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and took a moment to get into character.

Inside
the store, she saw two of the three employees were available and decided which would be better suited to answer the questions she had. She ignored the older man, and opted for the younger woman, maybe in her late twenties and wearing some nice make-up, Natalie knew that she could relate to her.

She
told the pharmacist that she had a friend, who thinks that she may have had a miscarriage, as she had a little bleeding in her underwear.

‘
Is that likely to be a miscarriage?’ she asked. ‘What other signs would there be?’

The smile disappeared from the young pharmacists face, and turned into a face of concern.

She explained that bleeding could be a sign of miscarriage, or spontaneous abortion (SAB), but that a little bleeding happened in around one in four pregnancies. If the bleeding were to arrive and then be followed by abdominal pain, lower back pain or pelvic pressure, these were signs that her friend should be wary of. The best thing would be for her friend to see her practitioner, who would organise an ultrasound to see what’s going on inside.

On the surface,
Natalie still paid attention to the helpful woman, but inside her head were just a few words going round and round.

'Bleeding, abdominal pain, lower back pain, pelvic pressure, bleeding, abdominal pain...'

Natalie checked her watch and acted alarmed.

‘
I'm so sorry,’ she interrupted. ‘I’m going to be late for an appointment, thank you so much for your help. Have a good day.’

She turned and exited the pharmacy, happy that she had the information she'd been looking for.

Ben sat in the swanky office
of his father’s solicitor. He finished the coffee the secretary had made for him and placed the cup back onto the saucer.

The house
, along with a smaller amount of money had been left directly to Mrs Green, it should eventually be sold, with the proceeds to fund her stay in a good care home, which was for Ben to organise, explained the solicitor, as per his father’s wishes.

B
en, having received over eighty per cent of the valuation of the will, wasn't expected to spend his life looking after his mother, just to make sure she wasn't left alone to spiral further into the depths of madness.

But Ben had his own ideas with regards to what was best for his mother.

The solicitor offered Ben the name of a counsellor, someone who he could talk to about the sudden windfall he had just received. Apparently, people who’d never had an abundance of money in their lives, often lost or wasted any unexpected inheritance or lottery win that they came into, and ended back on square one, financially speaking, as they just weren’t prepared for being rich.

Ben knew this wouldn’t be a problem for him, and flatly turned down the offer. Even if Ben had plans to make the money last, the solicitor and the counsellor were probably in cahoots, sharing any money wasted on them
by the newly-rich.

Other
than that, the transfer of funds only really needed a signature and a photocopy of his identification made. The money was wired directly into the account Ben had chosen and given the solicitor details of, and would normally be available to Ben within days.

Ben stood and shook h
ands with the man, dressed sharp in a tailored suit, probably a Saville Row. On a normal day, maybe Ben would feel inferior wearing his denim jeans and plain white tee shirt, but not today, today was a day of change.

The
solicitor once again gave his condolences for Ben's loss, and wished him a happier future. Ben accepted the man's kind words with grace, and thanked the receptionist on his way out of the office.