The Handshaker (10 page)

She fell into a brooding silence. Alongside her, Croft allowed it and waited to see where she would go next. At length, she faced him again.

“Tell me something; he’s led us a merry dance for two years now. He’s the very reason I was posted to Scarbeck. He has us beaten and I don’t think we’ll ever catch him unless he makes a mistake. Do you think that in writing to you it’s the old story of a murderer always seeking to be caught?”

Croft shook his head. “No. I’m no psychologist but I think that theory is so much nonsense. I think I was right this morning and that he’s signing his work. I also think that we’re in a passive position. We have to wait for developments.”

“Hmm, maybe not.” Millie opened her bag and began to root through it again. As she did so, she said, “You asked this morning if you could see the other notes we’d had from him. Our guys never made much sense of them, but you may be able to. Now where the hell… ah, here they are.” She came out with a small wad of A4 sheets. “The words appear nonsensical and our linguists have been able to do no more than translate them into clear English. They haven’t made anything of that. Would you mind giving them the once over?”

He took them from her. “Gladly.”

“I’ve included background notes with each sheet, covering the relevant killing.” She levelled a candid eye on him. “One last thing.”

“Yes?”

“Ernie refused to let you see them,” she reminded him. “I asked again, and he denied me permission. Fortunately, at my level, I can amend or even override orders when I have good reason. But for Christ’s sake keep it under your hat. If he finds out I’ve disobeyed him, he’ll have my backside fried on toast for breakfast.”

11

The Handshaker yawned. What was the woman doing? It was risky enough taking her on a petrol station forecourt, without having to hang about so long.

He glanced over his shoulder again to the tyre pressure gauge on the wall. There was actually nothing wrong with his tyres, but he had to be seen to be doing something to account for the length of time he had been there after he followed her in the place.

Life, he reflected, must have been so much simpler in 1930s Heidelberg. People were simpler back then. There was no suspicion of everyone and everything. They did not ask the same questions as they did these days.

He looked up straight into the prying eye of the forecourt camera above the shop. They didn’t have intrusive CCTV everywhere, either.

Not that he was worried about it. The hood of his old parka, aside from keeping off the interminable rain, kept his face hidden from its lens and it wouldn’t be the first time they’d had him on security cameras. His picture had been all over the
Scarbeck Reporter
when he picked up Janice Turner from the market, but the photograph was indistinct and grainy, and no police officer had ever knocked on his door.

Janice was one of the early ones. It was thanks to her that he had coined the nickname The Handshaker, after the camera caught him shaking hands with her. If only they knew about that handshake… well, after today’s note to Croft, they probably did know. Even a thickhead like Croft should be able to put it together with such a blatant hint, and if that did not work, it would certainly be rammed home by the early evening.

To lend verisimilitude to inflating his tyres, he moved to the rear, nearside and fiddled with the dust cap.

It had been a good day. A successful abduction early in the morning, a couple of enjoyable fucks with her, and later, he had watched Croft leave the Lumbs’ place, then later still stood by the windows when Alf Lumb wandered back from the pub.

Lumb was a bully. A huge bear of a man, well over six feet tall, broad shouldered, with a large belly, massive arms and fists which he was only too ready to bring into play. A crook too, always willing to handle stolen goods from the Winridge Inn, quick to steal from the warehouse where he worked. If anyone deserved a brutal death it was Alf Lumb.

The Handshaker’s contemptuous grimace had turned to one of puzzlement as he watched the half drunken Alf meander along the street. How did his employers feel when he turned up for work at ten in the evening, full of beer?

Alf had had some serious arguments with Croft. Once, he had actually threatened to beat the living daylights out of the hypnotist. Croft wouldn’t be intimidated: he was a public schoolboy, and despite what many people thought of privately educated men, they were tough. The Handshaker would love to have seen a scrap between the pair of them, watch them fight over Sandra Lumb’s problems, each accusing the other, neither aware of the real cause.

Sandra was a simple, waif-like creature, small, slender and pretty, the butt of much of Alf’s bullying, yet utterly devoted to him. Simple as she was, she had other advantages. She was highly suggestible, easily hypnotised, she was possessed of a lovely tight snatch, she was brilliant on her back, and tomorrow she would become the shining star in the world of hypnotic abuse. Tomorrow, she would do what everyone said could not be done.

The Handshaker turned his attention from the anticipation of tomorrow back to the here and now as Victoria came out of the shop. About time too.

He watched her walk briskly across to her car, putting her credit card back in her purse. He left his car at the airline, she unlocked her passenger door and dropped a bag of shopping on the seat. She closed the door and he stood at her shoulder. She turned, slightly alarmed at his presence and appearance. Then she recognised him.

“Oh hello. Long time no see.”

He offered his hand. She took it.

“Combarus,” he ordered and her eyes glazed.

He spent a brief moment studying her, making certain, then ordered, “Come with me.”

They crossed to his car, she got into the passenger seat, he climbed behind the wheel, and as he drove her away, the driver of the car waiting to get onto the pump now blocked by her car, half climbed out of his seat to protest.

Driving off into the late afternoon, The Handshaker ignored the protests and in the passenger seat, Victoria Reid never heard them.

12

While Millie was still there, Croft looked over the notes she had given him and spotted that all but the first two ended with a typewritten signature, ‘The Handshaker’, and he rejoiced in his intellectual victory over the police.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” he gloated. “That’s why you won’t tell the press and public how you thought of his nickname because you didn’t. He did.”

Millie was not prepared to let him celebrate his victory. When she replied, it was in tones of a teacher reminding a student of something already drilled into him. “I told you. On this kind of case, we get any number of cranks ringing in to confess and if they can’t tell us where the nickname came from, we know we haven’t got our man.”

“Why did he sign them from the third letter? Why not the first two?”

Millie’s normal decisiveness left her. “We’re not sure, but when he abducted Janice Turner, we publicised a CCTV image from the market security cameras, in which the man we wanted to interview was holding Janice’s hand. Ernie mentioned it, if you recall. We assumed the man was trying to drag her away, but then the note turned up with the signature on it, and we took a different line. He may just have been shaking hands with her.” Taking in Croft’s look of accusation, she hurried on to explain, “We’re not saying that the man in the photograph is The Handshaker. He was simply someone we wanted to speak to because he was one of the last people to see Janice alive. She was carrying bags – shopping we assume – and we figured she was on her way off the market when she spoke to this guy. Neither she nor the bags were ever seen again, until she turned up naked and hanging from a tree in the Parish Church yard.”

Croft would not entertain her excuses. “That man was The Handshaker,” he asserted. “He saw the photograph, realised the interpretation you would put on it, and thought of his own nickname.” Croft’s smooth features creased into a frown of great worry. “Shaking hands to say hello, shaking hands to trigger a post-hypnosis suggestion making her docile, compliant, and obedient; it’s the most natural thing in the world. You meet someone you know, he offers his hand and you shake it. I told you, this man knows his victims.”

Darkness had descended by the time Millie left. On duty for a compulsory evening shift, which would keep him here until 9:30, he locked the notes in his briefcase then cut along to the refectory, where he chewed his way through a bland, tasteless salad. The place was well lit, warm and comfortable, half full of staff and students, but he had little mind for the surroundings. His eyes strayed constantly to the briefcase and its contents. It was almost as if the sheets inside were calling to him, urging him to tackle their complex messages.

He enjoyed intellectual puzzles. He had become a sudoku fanatic almost overnight, and had been tackling cryptic crossword puzzles since he was twelve when he would often study his father’s completed
Times
grid, analysing the answers to see how the old man had arrived at them, effectively backward engineering the puzzle in the same way the compiler must have done. At university, he had compiled his own puzzles for the student magazine and had received much acclaim for the obscurity and general difficulty of some of his clues. Even now, he still compiled the odd puzzle as and when time permitted, usually placing his work in dedicated puzzle magazines.

Working his way through the meal, he reminded himself that The Handshaker was no crossword puzzle. Women were dying. Eight already and how much longer before number nine was abducted?

It was too much to hope that these notes would give him any clue to The Handshaker’s identity. Scarbeck CID had a team of psychologists, criminologists, and experienced detectives working on that problem and they had got nowhere, so it was safe to assume that he would not make any headway either. Rather, he hoped it may give him a deeper insight into the man’s makeup and thereby help the police narrow down the possible suspects.

“At the moment we have no suspects,” Millie had admitted, confirming what Croft, along with most of the town, already knew. “To be more correct, just about every man in Scarbeck is a suspect, aside from those who volunteered for DNA testing last year.”

Twelve months previously, after the killing of Sheila Greenhalgh, in a sure sign of desperation, the police had put out a call to males in Scarbeck asking them to come forward for DNA testing and about 10,000 had done so, and yet the man still evaded detection. They had not anticipated that The Handshaker would come forward, but they had hoped for a better response, which would have allowed them to narrow down the suspects. As it was, although 10,000 was good, it meant that over 40,000 men had
not
volunteered.

From there the police had staggered on from one murder to another and made little progress.

All of which, he reflected as he left the dining hall just after 5:30, got them no nearer knowing why he had suddenly elected to drag Croft into his world of insanity.

Getting back to his room, he first checked his mobile phone and again rang Trish, only to receive an automated message telling him that her phone was switched off.

It was strange. Even when she was in court, she usually managed to find a minute or two during which she would ring or text him, if only to let him know that she was all right, or more frequently to get the day’s frustrations out of her system, and even if she had been with a client earlier, she should have rung by now.

He called her chambers.

“Hello, it’s Felix Croft, can you tell me, has Ms Sinclair left yet?”

“Sorry, Mr Croft, she’s not even been in.” Julie, the receptionist, a petite brunette in her late forties, knew Croft and was quite happy to divulge what could be considered confidential information. “She didn’t ring, either. Not like her at all.”

Strange. Why would Trish… Croft suppressed a sense of growing alarm. “She was fine this morning when I left. I suppose she could have taken ill quite suddenly. If she contacts you, and I doubt that she will now, would you ask her to ring me on my mobile?”

“Of course.”

He cut the connection, then dialled Oaklands. He let the telephone ring out for several minutes before finally cutting the connection off. Mrs Hitchins went home at twelve and Croft did not have her home number to hand.

Although concerned, common sense told him that somewhere along the line there would be a perfectly reasonable explanation. She had probably taken very ill all of a sudden, and gone to bed to sleep it off. Her father’s death, back in May, still troubled her. That kind of shock, as Croft well knew, could linger in the system for years, and could easily takes its toll on a person.

Making a mug of tea, he turned his thoughts to The Handshaker notes. He could hold back his curiosity no longer, and seating himself at the desk with his electric fire turned towards him, churning out its meagre heat, he opened his briefcase, took out the A4 sheets and scanned the first note.

It had been received the morning after Pauline Brooks was found hanged in Alexandria Park. Like the one Croft had received, it was produced on a typewriter.

brakes up no oil i shag this one and she’ fukin bril and she riggle lyke a fish on a lyne but this is ony the begginningg.