Son of a Serial Killer (4 page)

13

Mrs Lily Green, in her mid-forties, was clearing out what her late husband called his office, one of the small rooms in her now near-lifeless home. She put details of Graham’s clients in a black rubbish bag, along with quotes and invoices he had prepared.

She gathered the picture-frames of Graham and Ben fishing, the picture of Ben graduating from university, an old polaroid of herself when pregnant with Ben, twenty-seven years ago, and another with her and Graham, a much older man, with arms wrapped around each other. She dumped them all in the black bag with all the other junk.

Satisfied, she looked around at the room. All that remained was a desk and two chairs, a computer and a printer.

Through the window she saw a black cat in the garden, a
n unwelcome visitor who left Mrs Green a present every other day on her lawn, be it a dead mouse or just cat poo. She wrapped her knuckles on the window and the cat scarpered. Then she heard a key turn in the front door, so dropped the rubbish bag and walked to the hallway to greet her son, in her own, special way.

‘
Thought you’d come and see if I was still alive did ya?’ she asked.

‘
Sorry, Mum. You know I haven’t been feeling too well,’ he replied, defensively.

Ben
now looked pale and had guilt written all over him from his earlier activity.

‘
Ignoring my phone calls,’ she said, accusingly.

‘
You haven’t phoned me, Mum,’ he protested.

‘
You and that slag you live with, laughing at me,’ said Mrs Green.

‘
Jesus, Mum. Have you stopped taking your pills?’

Mrs
Green had been on antidepressants and anti-psychotic drugs for as long as Ben could remember. She used to see a psychiatrist who wanted her hospitalised, for her own good, but she refused.

Her husband, Graham, could only do so much, and found himself carrying the responsibility of raising Ben almost single-handedly as well as caring for his mentally unstable wife. Maybe that’s why he loved working s
o much; he just needed some ‘me time’, away from the house, time to blow off some steam, even.

Now Graham was gone,
Mrs Green was rapidly declining into full-blown madness.

Ben walked past her and sat down at the large table in the kitchen. His mum followed him and with a smile offered him a cup of tea, that’s
how quickly she could change, Ben forced a smile back.

‘Thanks
Mum.’

She made his tea as Ben explained about losing his job, how Charlie was a selfish bastard,
and then going home to find Natalie in bed with another man, who happened to be his old friend, David. Annoyingly to his mother, Ben explained that he was partly to blame for Natalie’s disloyalty, as he had been so lost in his own little world recently.

‘
That’s nonsense, Ben, utter bullshit. She was always a slippery one, that Natasha,’ said Mrs Green.

‘
Natalie,’ he corrected.

C-CLINK

Ben jumped at the sound of the local newspaper being pushed through the letterbox. Mrs Green noticed and asked why he was so nervous. He denied anything was wrong and stood to get the newspaper. He avoided his mother’s gaze as he sat back at the table and laid the paper down in front of him, ‘ANOTHER DETECTIVE GIVES UP ON THE PHANTOM’ read the headline.

Ben skimmed over the article. The words
‘MURDERS, DEATHS, VICTIMS’ jumped out at him from the page. He pushed the paper to one side and caught his mother’s eyes still staring at him.

‘
What are you not telling me, Ben?’

‘
I’ve told you everything, Mum. I lost my job and my girlfriends shagging one of my mates,’ he said, struggling to maintain eye contact with her. He shifted awkwardly in his seat.

Mrs
Green knew when her son wasn’t telling all. It might not have been pure love, but there was a very special bond between this mother and son. She knew when he was happy or sad. She had a great instinct when it came to her son, they shared the same blood, but it was more than that. She could read him like a book.

‘
You’re sweating, Ben,’ she said. ‘And pale. Go look in the mirror.’

‘
No,’ Ben snapped.

Mrs
Green reached across the table, grabbed Ben by the wrists and stared deep into his eyes. She saw something, something that shocked her, although it was a pleasant surprise. She let his wrists go and sat back in her seat.

‘
I’ve seen those eyes before,’ she said.

‘
What are you talking about?’ asked Ben.

She smiled to herself and sipped her tea as Ben
took back the paper and flicked through the pages, anything to keep him from having to talk to his mother. He came across the page which gave details on local events and meeting groups. He scanned down and fingered the advertisement for a local anger management class.

‘
That won’t help you,’ said Mrs Green, reading his thoughts. ‘You had the urge, didn’t you, my darling?’

‘
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mum. I think we need to get you back to the doctor,’ he said.

‘
I can see it in your eyes, Ben. You’ve crossed a line. You’ve done it haven’t you?’ she persisted.

Ben made a mental note of the time and address of the meeting
that night. He explained to his mother that he had just popped round to check she was ok, and if she needed him to just call. But she was paying no attention to the words he said as he made his way to the kitchen door.

‘
Ben.’

He
turned his head to face her.

‘
Your father was just the same, Ben.’

She r
eached across the table, closed the newspaper, and placed her hand on the article involving The Phantom.

‘
It’s in your blood,’ she said.

Ben took a moment to dig
est what his mum had just said.

‘
Keep taking your pills, mum,’ he said, then left.

14

Two uniformed officers had sealed off the crime scene, unofficially identified the bodies using the identification found on them, and taken down a brief statement from Mr Wilson, who was walking his dog along the canal when he made the unfortunate discovery of two young corpses floating in the murky water.

He had fished the bodies out
and made a fruitless attempt at CPR before calling the police. It was only after he’d put on his glasses to use the phone, that he clearly saw how dead Ricky and Alexia really were.

They had been in the water at least an hour, concluded Summers,
as she stood over the recently deceased. She noted the giant wound on the side of Ricky’s head.

Her medical training enabled her to give a rough assessment, fatal blow to the head and damage to the neurocranium.
More specifically, his head had been hit so hard that the synarthrosis joint between the Parietal and Temporal bones on Ricky’s left side had cracked open. The Temporal bone jolted inward and probably pierced his brain.

It took a few seconds for Summers to register
Alexia’s cause of death, a brief moment before she saw the back of the girl’s head was held together only by matted hair. It seemed the Occipital bone, and one or both of the Parietal bones, the bones at the back of the skull, had been smashed to pieces, exposing and damaging the brain.

Both bodies, battered, cold and soaked
, didn’t make for a pretty picture.

As the corpses
had already been moved, there was no need to leave them exposed to the few members of public who had now gathered. Summers called out to one of the uniformed officers to help the coroner bag up the bodies, so they could be taken to the lab.

The chances of finding any DNA evidence was extremely slim due to the circumstances, but she asked the other uniformed
officer to take a swab from Mr Wilson, in order to eliminate his DNA from any alien DNA found on the bodies. She had already ruled him out as responsible for the deaths; his alibi had been confirmed by phone where he was all morning until thirty minutes ago. Besides, she could see he wasn’t a murderer. He didn’t look capable; trying to save two people, yes, to murder them, no.

Summers joined Kite who had just taken a photo of a bloody mess on the floor. She pointed out small bits of brain in the blood.

‘Thanks for that,’ he said.

Summers positioned
herself between the sprays of Ricky’s blood and the canal, facing away from Kite, with her right side closest to the water.

‘
This is where the boy stood when he was struck, facing this way,’ she said, thinking out loud. She looked at the lines of claret on the ground, ‘It looks like four, maybe five squirts of blood before he fell, or was pushed, this way,’ gesturing toward the canal, ‘into the water.’

She turned around and
Kite stepped to the side so as to not block her view, of what they had rightly assessed to be the girls blood and pieces of brain.

Summers moved to approximately where the girl’s feet would
have lay at her time of death, looked back at Ricky’s blood and then again to Alexia’s.

‘
He killed the boy first,’ said Kite, answering the question he thought Summers was pondering.

‘
I know,’ she said, ‘which means she watched him die, and waited to die herself.’

‘
Maybe she panicked, couldn’t decide whether to fight or flee,’ said Kite.

He was right
, Summers thought to herself.

She had check
ed the hands of Alexia. There were no bruises on the knuckles or palms nor any skin or fibres under the fingernails. She didn’t fight. She didn’t flee. She was paralysed by fear. She paid the price as well.

Kite stated the obvious, that Alexia had had her head bashed against the concrete until she was dead. But he wasn’t sure on the weapon used on Ricky.

‘It wasn’t a blade of any sort, maybe a hammer? But you’d expect the hole to be more…’ he paused, ‘round?’

He flashed the close-up image on the screen of the digital camera.

‘It almost looks like a point, but what could make a hole like that?’ he asked.

Summers took another look at the
photo; the corner of the brick had left a clear indent in Ricky’s head. They both surveyed the ground, seeing stones, litter, cigarette butts, more stones, and the occasional broken brick.

Summers turned to the wall that went from the ground up to the bottom of the bridge. It was old, and a few of the bricks had literally fallen from the wall on to the pathway over time. She carefully picked up a broken brick in her latex-gloved hands.

‘If I were to smash this brick extremely hard, into the side of your head, what kind of wound do you imagine it would inflict?’ Summers asked Kite.

She examined the brick and found no traces of skin, hair or blood so tossed it into the canal.

‘And that’s where it’ll be,’ said Kite.

Both detectives knew the murder weapon would hold no DNA evidence if it had
been discarded into the water, no prints would be found on the rough surface of the brick, so there was no point in sending in a team to search it.

Their best hope at this
point was to speak to as many people in the area and try to find a witness. Summers would still have the area combed for the murder weapon, more a PR stunt than anything. The search would likely be a waste of time for the six officers called out to do it.

Summers and Kite
spoke briefly with the small crowd who had seen the police cars, it turned out they were just being nosey and had nothing of value to add to the investigation, other than one old lady, another dog-walker, who had seen the young couple together around two hours ago, walking in this direction. Over the next day or so, the detectives would also have to speak to family and friends, to see if anything was amiss or anybody knew something of interest.

But Summers had a gut feeling. The attack looked random to her. If it was planned, why wasn’t a real w
eapon used? Ricky had nearly twenty pounds in his pocket, if it was a robbery, that didn’t work out either. Ricky’s mother had been called and asked to go to identify the body at the morgue later that afternoon, and on the phone she said he should have been at home, doing chores. Alexia certainly should have been at school, so Summers concluded that hardly anyone, if anybody, knew that the couple were where they were. This would rule out premeditated murder. Both were fully dressed so a sexual motive wasn’t clear either.

So was it just a random act of violence?

The killer could have left the scene either way along the canal, north or south, or gone up the steps to the bridge that crossed over the water and escaped east or west.

Summers thought the likely escape route was along the canal, as one would expect less human contact that way, meaning less chance of witnesses, but she walked up the steps to the road and had a look around anyway.

There were CCTV cameras recording the activity on and around the road above the canal. This would cost more man hours, going through any recordings, but never-the-less that had to be done as well. Anyone filmed near the bridge that morning could be the killer, or maybe seen the killer, before or after the murders took place.

She descended back down to the crime scene as her mobile phone began to vibrate in her pocket.

‘Yes, chief,’ she answered.

Summers gave Watts a quick run-down of the situation. Two dead bodies, viciously murdered, no witnesses so far and probably no DNA evidence.

‘That bloody Phantom,’ he said. ‘He must have left some sort of clue. He’s bound to fuck up sooner or later.’

Looking thoughtfully at the stains of blood on the concrete floor, Kite overhea
rd Summers say to Watts, ‘We’re not even sure The Phantom is responsible, sir.’

‘
What?’ Watts said in a lowered voice. Wherever he was, he didn’t want people to listen to what he was about to say. ‘Listen, Summers, at this moment in time, our number one suspect is The Phantom, understood? The last thing I need is the press reporting another murderer is on the loose, it will only cause panic.’

And there it was, a
s Summers had thought.

Certain murder cases, those going cold with no real evidence and no chance of being solved, were being attributed to
The Phantom. It was the Chief’s way of purging paperwork, maybe. This would, or could, explain the five cases Summers had separated from the seventeen she was given earlier that day. It didn’t mean that The Phantom was not responsible, but it would be harder to prove, even circumstantially, that they are all linked. The best bet in clearing up this situation, is to gather concrete evidence against the killer, and hope he confesses, taking responsibility for all his murders. The cases leftover could then be passed to the Cold Case Department for further investigation, or dropped off the radar completely.