The Advent Killer (4 page)

Nothing like a bit of rain to dampen people’s enthusiasm for rubber-necking.

Amid the onlookers, Hawkins picked out Frank Todd and Amala Yasir as they moved slowly from face to face:
Did you know the occupants; were you witness to any unusual events here?

The trick was to gather information without imparting any in return, but those in the crowd who didn’t already know who lived there soon would.

And suddenly the nerves were there again.

Hawkins’ mind jumped back to her first appearance in a primary school play, watching the audience from the wings, waiting for her cue. She’d just been able to make out faces in the front row, among them her parents: Dad beaming from ear to ear; Mum stoic, so often short of anything that resembled a compliment. Yet she knew, deep down, it was her mother she wanted to impress the most. And she was still having trouble with
that
line.

Hawkins shook her head, evicting the memory. There was no time.

She remembered Kirby-Jones’ words from two weeks before: ‘… good opportunity to make a name for yourself on this one, Hawkins. As senior investigating officer, you’ll be responsible for getting results. Can your team handle it? Can you?’

Lawrence Kirby-Jones had several dog-eared speeches about equality and developing those he deemed credible. Others might have been fooled, but Hawkins knew a closet misogynist when she saw one. If this investigation wasn’t a resounding success, his report would say: ‘Secondment fluffed. Do not promote beyond DI level again.’

What annoyed her most was that Kirby-Jones must have known the lack of available resources when he’d offered her the case, but only when the fan had been truly coated had
she
been informed. So far, the investigation had gone from suspected suicide, to murder, to multiple homicide; and now they were looking at a
savoir-faire
serial killer with the apparent ability to butcher half of London, and scare the other half to death, completely unimpeded by anything the Met tried to do about it.

Her first case as SIO was turning out to be a real banana skin, especially as she was lumbered with a makeshift team. Her four current subordinates included a trainee, and someone from the Irish Flying Squad who apparently hadn’t been deemed good enough until the situation became desperate.

Until then, Hawkins had believed that developments in the case had taken her boss as much by surprise as they had everybody else. But what if that wasn’t true? She’d wondered at the time why no existing DCI had offered to take on this allegedly simple investigation; there were those who could have stretched it to fill two personal development reviews and a bid for promotion.

So had Kirby-Jones warned them off?

Hawkins pushed the thought away: paranoia wouldn’t help matters.

She refocused on the case. Inquiries into the first two murders were still underway. Telephone records and interview tapes of family, friends and any potential witnesses were being analysed, and the Police National Computer database was being scoured for the slightest similarities to past murders. Even the Family Liaison officers dealing with the bereaved were on alert for any piece of useful information, however small, that a friend or relative might happen to regurgitate.

Unfortunately, television appeals for witnesses and the interviews had produced few leads, and even fewer potential suspects, although they were still trying to trace a couple of the victims’ ex-boyfriends. So far they had nothing.

But the worst part was that this jigsaw still lacked its most crucial piece: motive.

The guy popped up out of nowhere, created his gruesome calling cards, and evaporated.

These murders were far beyond anything Hawkins had experienced. In the past she and Mike had worked on cases involving rival gangs, where games of revenge killing tennis just ran and ran, sending the body count skywards. But for a lone individual to execute a string of apparently unconnected women, in such diverse but clinical ways, was almost unrecognizable as human behaviour. With each attack the killer became more inexplicable to Hawkins.

Her team’s ongoing research into his methods was looking more and more futile. They’d already been reduced to trying different combinations of letters in the victims’ names, to see if a hidden message might emerge.

Nothing had.

And now the case had escalated around her, along with the need for a sacrificial lamb if Operation Charter wasn’t a success.

At one a week, bodies were appearing faster than they could be processed and, unlike other serial homicide cases, they knew almost for certain when the next one would arrive. Sunday – Christmas Day. Less than a week from now.

They needed an arrest. Fast.

Hawkins’ attention returned to the crowd outside. An elderly woman had appeared and started shouting at the uniformed officers to tell her what was going on. A younger man was trying to coax her away with offers of a cup of tea.

In the confusion, a lone reporter slipped unseen
through the cordon, tucking his press badge inside his jacket as he sleazed up the stone steps beside the slightly open window.

‘Let us in, ay, love?’ He addressed the WPC manning the front door. ‘Say I’m a colleague. It’s worth a hundred to you.’

Hawkins moved forwards and tapped on the glass, edging the window further open and showing him her badge, ‘Please move back behind the cordon, sir.’ She dropped her voice. ‘In other words, take your camera and fuck off.’

Hawkins took a moment to enjoy her victory as two uniformed officers, having heard the louder of her statements, practically carried him back past the front gate.

She returned the WPC’s grin.

But she wouldn’t have smiled had she known that, from across the street, the killer watched her turn back into the room.

A distant, metallic sound reached his ears through the interference. Its torpid shockwave spread. Memories spun and echoed, the static of recent events choking his senses.

He tried the handle again, but still the door wouldn’t open. He looked down at numb fingers. They were no longer holding the key.

He screwed his eyes shut as emotion reared, and steadied himself against the doorframe.

He’d expected this backlash; spent the whole of the day before lying on his bed, waiting for the emotional disorder to arrive. But it had taken so long that he’d begun to think it might have bypassed him altogether. So he had left the house today as normal.

That decision now seemed foolish in the extreme as he’d been overcome, almost collapsing in the street.

He swallowed hard, having to concentrate so his legs didn’t give way, until he became aware of something else.

In the distance, his own voice was telling him to pick up the key.

He scanned the ground, not seeing it at first. Then it appeared, partly hidden in the weeds by his feet. He stared at it as he bent, reaching out.

Gripping the key, he instructed his body to straighten. Slowly it complied and, this time, despite hands that felt
like they belonged to someone else, the key slotted home in the lock with a dull click.

The door opened to reveal a small kitchen, as unfamiliar to him as everything else had become in the last few hours. He stepped inside, his gaze immediately catching hers.

Jessica Anderton regarded him from the opposite side of the room.

He turned his face away, cowering for a moment, before he lurched over and tore the picture from its pin, angered suddenly by the inequity of his situation. But recent history flared again, and the hands he had managed to control sufficiently to begin ripping the picture in two froze mid-reprisal.

These thoughts were poisoning him.

And still she stared.

He turned the picture away, unable to meet her unwavering gaze, bright and immortalized. Eyes that challenged him.

Eyes of a woman he had killed.

Hawkins waited while the stragglers took their seats, drumming her fingers on the desk and glaring from face to face. The wall clock said 08:36.

Unfortunately it also showed the date, whose significance Hawkins was trying to ignore. Back in June, when she and Paul were still pretending things were salvageable, they had almost booked a holiday in Barbados over Christmas and New Year. In fact, they might have been in the air at this very moment.

Still waiting for the laggards to settle, Hawkins reflected briefly on her path to acting Chief Inspector, and the moment she’d received fortuitous expedition. The day when, after seventeen years of service with a flawless health and attendance record, her boss, DCI Norman Parr, had collapsed on duty and died. Hawkins’ feelings for him hadn’t changed, despite his tragic end: she’d considered him a slimy, underhand backstabber ever since they’d begun working together three years earlier. But that hadn’t put her off stepping into his role when it had been offered to her.

And so for now, a week before Christmas, she was shackled to a case she wouldn’t have wished on a City banker, presiding over a bunch of corpses that looked like props from the
Saw
movies.

Fortunately, her core team understood the gravity of
the situation sufficiently to have arrived on time. Her most experienced DI, a forty-five-year-old Geordie named Frank Todd, sat in the front row, next to the younger and far more exotic Detective Sergeant Amala Yasir. John Barclay and Eddie Connor occupied seats on the other side of the central aisle.

She’d have to explain later to the four of them that the frustration she was about to show wasn’t with them. Todd and Yasir had been in early to prepare this briefing room with the latest information, and she had to admit they’d done a great job. Connor had only been here a day, and she’d arrived in her office that morning to find the huge stack of files from another case she’d assigned to Barclay the previous week for analysis. The excerpt she’d checked seemed flawless. She couldn’t imagine where he’d found the time to get them all done.

But the rest of her extended team really weren’t helping themselves.

The rest of the medium-sized briefing room had filled up fast, with officers of varying familiarity. A small group of uniforms huddled in the far corner, the ringleader holding forth about his shed roof. Opposite them, the analyst contingent consisted of six equally uninterested parties, perhaps in attendance only because it was their goal to suffuse every room in the building with the aroma of over-brewed coffee. Arriving in the remaining space were the three supplementary detective constables that Hawkins had been promised for the middle of last week.

While the initial four days of lateness probably wasn’t their fault, Hawkins decided, the last six minutes of insouciance would cost them.

‘Right.’ She stood, talking loudly to subdue the mouthy uniform at the back. ‘I’ll open by welcoming anyone who isn’t familiar with this ritual I like to call the eight-thirty briefing. The clue’s in the name: a briefing given by me, to you, at eight thirty in the morning. Not eight thirty-one, not eight thirty-six, not bloody lunchtime, understood?’

Silence.

‘Good.’ She waited a beat and then said, ‘Welcome to the new faces on the team. It’s good to have you here, and I know the others will be glad to get you up to speed as soon as possible.’ She smiled briefly at the nods of appreciation around the room, then got down to work.

Hawkins moved around the desk to the whiteboard, where several pictures of the latest victim now flanked those of the previous two. ‘Thanks to the discovery of Jessica Anderton’s body, Operation Charter is already the biggest real-time serial homicide investigation since Sutcliffe. And it’s about to get bigger.’

She explained the three murders, marking the scenes on a large map she’d had printed for the purpose, also adding the victims’ previous addresses and places of work. But the resulting configuration only reinforced the apparent lack of connection between them. They hadn’t worked, lived or even shopped in the same locations. Normally after three killings of this type, some sort of pattern would become obvious. Here, so far, there was none. Even the latest geo-mapping software, which compared and analysed people’s movements over specified periods, looking for event ‘hotspots’, hadn’t produced anything so far.

Hawkins emphasized that, up to that point, they had
released to the media only the most basic details regarding the attacks. The press office had actively played down speculation that the two previous deaths were linked, and no information had been published about the horrific state in which the killer had left the second body.

All that the outside world had known until that morning was that two women had been killed in London at similar times on consecutive Sunday mornings. But, true to form, the papers had made the most of even these scant facts: the past seven days’ press had been full of speculation about whether a third successive Sunday would yield a third successive victim.

And now it had.

Which blew a dirty big hole through what was left of the ‘freak incident’ hypothesis.

Add the fact that the latest body also happened to belong to prominent politician’s wife and ex-model Jessica Anderton, and the story suddenly became
big
news.

Once the relentless media machine released her name, Hawkins told the room, all of effing hell was going to break loose. From then on, the killer’s notoriety was assured: the remainder of Operation Charter would be conducted in full public view.

Of course, those who lived near the victims needed no such encouragement. Jessica had been the focus of local gossip long before she was murdered, and even though her neighbours held wildly differing opinions of her personality, several had confirmed one thing: a young, Mediterranean-looking man had been seen leaving the Anderton residence on Sunday morning; a matter of hours after Jessica was murdered.

Add in the fact that none of the witnesses knew who he was, and the fact that he still hadn’t come forward, he became the closest thing they had to a suspect. Even if he wasn’t the killer, he had to know
something
. Now it was just a case of finding him.

She covered her anxiety with a dramatic pause, glancing around at her subordinates. She was a general, impressing on her troops the solemnity of war. As someone who desperately wanted the job into which she was seconded, Hawkins knew the outcome of this case would decide her future, regardless of anything she might previously have done. Usually, when the Met started taking a proverbial kicking for its inability to stop an incumbent perpetrator, someone got fired – or unseconded – pretty damn fast.

Was there a record for the length of time between a temporarily promoted DCI being given a case, and then being taken off it again? Fifteen days would take some beating.

She moved on, listing the individuals they most needed to trace, including Gary Ward, the first victim’s less than desirable stepson, currently elusive. Then she doled out initial responsibilities, prioritizing four lines of enquiry: why the killer struck repeatedly at such a specific time on one particular day of the week, the significance of each MO, how and where he had obtained the Taser, and if the victims weren’t connected, how they were being selected.

She concluded with, ‘Any questions?’

A couple of uniforms raised issues about overtime rates, but everybody seemed to have received the message about the case itself, so Hawkins thanked everyone for
their work thus far, made a statement about expecting continuing full commitment from everyone, and left.

She strode along the corridor, head still full of the case.

The two earlier murders hadn’t necessarily denoted a regular sequence to come. Deaths on three consecutive Sundays, however, meant this killer, whoever he was, had a plan.

Regardless of whether it was by design or coincidence, next Sunday was Christmas Day, and the Sunday after that was New Year’s; the two days of the year when most people were off work, all scratching around for a subject they could broach with the in-laws.

Unless the case was resolved in the next week, Hawkins thought grimly, come Christmas Day it would at least be uniting disparate relatives across the country.

She reached the end of the corridor, looking back as she turned the corner to see uniforms and analysts exiting the briefing room. Her core team weren’t among them, which meant they were probably waiting for the others to leave so they could discuss the case.

She knew three of them well enough to imagine how the conversation would go.

Frank Todd would be first in, with hard Northern censure:
Did you see that? Little Miss Promotion was brickin’ it. Told you she wasn’t up to command.

Amala Yasir might counter:
You’re too harsh, Frank; the chief’s doing a good job.

Barclay, still on trainee’s best behaviour, would abstain.

Which left Connor, the new recruit, as deciding voter. Hawkins was well aware of his significance: somehow she had to keep him out of the
No
camp. But that wasn’t
going to be easy; plenty of officers had listened to Frank Todd over the years. What really worried her was that he could be right.

What if she wasn’t up to this?

In reality, this sort of case was incredibly rare, despite what people might be excused for thinking given the consistency with which Hollywood churned out comparable scenarios.

Most murder cases not associated with terrorism or war were simple, isolated incidents, the results of overwhelming desperation or rage that usually burned themselves out within moments, leaving the killer either sated or contrite.

The difference between someone responsible for a crime of passion, and an individual who planned and committed compound homicidal acts over a protracted period, was immense. The latter demanded an almost inhuman state of mind. But it looked increasingly like that was what they were dealing with.