The Handshaker (11 page)

Croft noticed instantly that it didn’t matter whether “brakes” was spelled as it was or spelled “breaks”, the only reason for its inclusion was to provide an anagram of the victim’s name: Brakes up no oil. Pauline Brooks.

In the second note, referring to the death of Emma Fisher, the anagram was just as easy to see.

Ayve kilt another she’s got such a tite and suking yoni frame is hem witch hangs on to mi nob ill suspend her up there with god.

Frame is hem
virtually leapt off the paper at him, although he wondered whether it would have done had he not known her name.

Consulting the background notes Millie had left him, he learned that Emma was 28 and had been abducted from the Bentley Grange area of town as she made her way home after a late night party at a pub. Her friends had insisted that she had had a few drinks but was sober when she left. A bus driver recalled seeing her on his last run, and she got off at the terminus on the Bentley Grange estate. There were only two other passengers on the bus, both male, and they got off at the terminus too. Both men had come forward after seeing her photograph in the newspapers and both men were cleared of suspicion. Three days after her disappearance, workmen found her body hanging from a girder in the rear yard of a warehouse off Manchester Road.

The remaining notes told Croft nothing, but in each case, there was the anagram of the victim’s name. Janice Turner became
ran in jet cure
, Sheila Greenhalgh was
I gag hells hare hen
, Pat Laughlin became
plug hail tan.
Eggs marg rig rat
was a substitute for Margaret Griggs, Aileen Collier was
I clean role lie
, and Susan Edwards was
drawn sea suds
. This man was not merely raping and murdering the womenfolk of Scarbeck, but he intended making sure that the police knew they were his victims by cryptically naming them in his communications.

Reading through the badly cobbled texts, Croft noticed a change after the murder of Margaret Griggs, when the notes took on an almost verse-like quality. While the early correspondence was simply boasting, hiding the name of the victim, the later ones took on a more surreal aura.

With Eggs marg rig rat

as I fukt her too

rope swings on

There was no poetic meter recognisable to Croft.

Narrowing his thoughts he stared at the verse for a long time. Why the change? Why suddenly break up the piece into clear lines? After going to such trouble to make himself appear illiterate, why suddenly demonstrate this knowledge of…

It struck him. He read it again and one final time to ensure he had not made a mistake. Then he scrabbled about the desktop seeking the note concerning Aileen Collier.

pulld it off in her quim

evry time after tea

all i lie role clean

rubbing it on her tits

They were acrostics.

Reading the letters down at the beginning of each line and carrying on with the letters down at the end of each line, from the note concerning Margaret Griggs he got W-A-R-T-O-N and from Aileen Collier, he got P-E-A-R-M-A-N-S. Margaret had been abducted from the Warton area of Scarbeck, and Aileen had been taken at Pearman’s supermarket. The Handshaker was confirming his identity by telling the police where he was picking up his victims…

Croft frowned. That was not right.

He took up the background information again and studied it.

Margaret was not abducted from Warton. Aileen collier was. And it was Susan Edwards who had been snatched from Pearman’s car park. That meant The Handshaker was not confirming where he abducted his victims, but where he would strike next.

Heart pounding with excitement at the knowledge that he could help put the police ahead of the game for the first time, he fumbled through the morass of paper on his desk until he found the verse concerning Susan, which had arrived at the police station this morning as he received the Heidelberg note.

Of ’em all shes gr8t drawn suds sea

A tidy bint and such fukin gud fun

Kilt her I’ve left her stone dead

L8r I’ll show u I never miss

His heart leapt. Oaklands! His own home!

Gathering up the papers, jamming them into his briefcase, he dashed from the room, scurried along the corridor to the stairs, and hurtled down them taking them two at a time. He burst through reception, paused briefly at the counter to tell them he had an emergency, and then rushed out of the college, leaping into his car.

Frantically, he fumbled the keys into the ignition and at the same time fished into his pocket for his mobile phone. He dropped the phone, gunned the engine and jamming the transmission into ‘drive’ leaned over into the passenger footwell to retrieve the phone as he tore away from the building.

He barely paused at the main gate, and cut up a large van as he joined the homebound traffic. As he drove, one eye on the road, accelerating onto the motorway, he recalled Millie’s number on his mobile. She took an age to answer and he was already heading for the motorway by the time he got through.

“Millie. It’s Croft. The Handshaker. He’s after Trish.”

13

At the police station, having photocopied Croft’s article for distribution to the investigating team, Millie read through it a couple of times, then sat back, mulling over her thoughts.

Her first impressions were that it was impossible, but the more she read, the more convinced she became of its reality. It had happened, and if a hypnotist back in the thirties had managed to abuse his skill to this extent, why not now, here, in Scarbeck, in the 21st century with its plethora of chemical substances to assist the criminal.

Croft, she suspected, was right, but where did it take them?

Millie, an I.T. graduate, knew the risk of relying too heavily on one person’s opinions. She liked Croft, despite his arrogance and barely concealed sexual attraction to her, but she could not blindly follow his lead based on an obscure case that was almost eighty years old and which had happened in another country, another
world.

Despite his scepticism and dislike of Croft, Shannon had already ordered the junior officers to chase up the hypnosis angle with the families, but what could she, Millie Matthews, do to speed things up, get this deranged individual locked up for the safety of every woman in the town?

She logged onto the Internet with the intention of searching once more for references to the events in 1920s/30s Heidelberg, then changed her mind and promptly logged off again.

It was almost six and time to call it a day. She was tired, hungry, in need of a shower, a little TV maybe, and a good night’s sleep.

She cast a quick look over her shoulder and through the window.

Night had settled and vicious rain still pounded the town. The rush hour was in full flow, a constant stream of headlights cutting through the evening gloom. She lived a mile or so out of town, and to avoid the hassle, she usually ate nearby, a pub meal or takeaway, allowing the traffic time to calm before she made the journey home. She would go to the pub now. Croft’s article had given her something to think about and by the time she returned tomorrow it would be with a fresh mind.

She was gathering together her belongings when her mobile rang. An excitable Croft telling her that The Handshaker was after Trish Sinclair.

“Calm down,” she urged. “Just calm down.”

“Calm down?” he yelled. “Trish hasn’t rung me all day and she hasn’t been in work, and the note you received this morning told me that the next victim would be picked up at Oaklands. How the hell do you expect me to calm down?”

“Picked up at Oaklands?” Millie was puzzled. “I read it and it doesn’t say anything of the kind.”

“Yes it does, only cryptically.”

Over his voice, she could hear the roar of an engine. “Felix, just cool it. Are you driving?”

“Yes. I’m on my way home.”

“Well, pull over,” she ordered. “You should not be driving while you’re on the phone. Come to think, the state you’re in, you shouldn’t be driving at all.”

“I don’t have time to pull over,” he whined. “I have to get to Oaklands. Just get yourself and your team out there.”

The line went dead.

For a moment, Millie considered calling him back, but she knew there was no point. He would not answer because he would not want to hear what she had to say.

She looked around the CID room for possible assistance. At his desk, Dave Thurrock was studying the early edition of the
Scarbeck Reporter,
waiting, like her, for the rush hour to die down before he made his way home. Sharing the desk, DS Rob Fletcher, currently assigned to the SOCOs, worked at his computer. The two men were friends, but Millie understood the rapport between them had cooled after Fletcher made sergeant before Thurrock, and Thurrock was unable to understand that the decision had been made on the basis of Fletcher’s diligence at the side of his own indolence.

Her eyes passed around the room and settled briefly on the whiteboard, where all The Handshaker victims’ details and photographs were displayed. After Croft’s agitated call, Millie wondered if photographs of Trish Sinclair were soon to be added.

Ernie Shannon had gone home half an hour ago, and deciding that she did not need any other assistance, she gathered together her belongings, and with a muttered, “See you tomorrow,” left.

If nothing else, it would give her the opportunity to spend more time with Croft and see just how a millionaire lived.

14

To avoid the rush hour jams, Croft chose a more circuitous but faster route along the motorway, heading for the moorland roads.

But it would not save him any time.

After killing the call to Millie, he hared along the feeder motorway and joined the M62, only to find all three eastbound lanes slowed to a crawl. He cursed. He only needed the motorway for one mile, to the next junction.

Somewhere up ahead, through the rain, he could make out the blue flashing lights of a police car on the hard shoulder. A minor accident, he guessed, and the rest of the traffic on one of Britain’s busiest stretches of road were slowing down to gawp at the scene.

The slow progress compounded the anxiety in his gut, a fretting, jangling of his nerves, manifesting itself in exasperated pleas to “get a move on” or “come on for god’s sake”, spoken only to his empty car.

Rain poured in a relentless stream from the night and the damp air above the motorway hung heavy with exhaust fumes, highlighted by pools of headlights that ran back as far as he could see in his mirror, and red lights running as far forward as he could make out through the windscreen. He was tempted to run onto the hard shoulder, but the next junction was under reconstruction and a few hundred yards ahead, a familiar line of red cones blocked the option.

As he crawled along, he racked his brain for logical reasons why Trish should be incommunicado all day, and he could find none, other than an accident at home, which was as bad, if not worse, than the nightmare of her having been taken by The Handshaker. At least if this maniac had captured her, she may still be alive, but if she had tripped and fallen down the stairs she could have lain there, injured, all day.

It was not possible. Trish was getting ready to leave when he drove out of Oaklands. She was due in chambers at ten. If she had had an accident, it would have been while Mrs Hitchins was still there and his daily would have contacted him. Trish had not had an accident and she had not arrived at chambers. There was no reasonable explanation for her silence. Short of a serious illness overtaking her or an accident involving both her and Mrs Hitchins, with both of them carted off to hospital, Croft was left with the worst scenario.

For what seemed like hours, he crept along, his agitation increasing, frustration mounting almost to bursting point. Traffic stopped altogether as he reached the half-mile marker, and for agonising minutes, did not move again.

For months now Trish had been using work to drag herself out of the grief over her father’s death. She reminded Croft of his own father. That same, single mindedness, the dogged determination to remain at the helm no matter what happened. She would not have thrown ill at the drop of a hat. She would have turned out, no matter how dreadful she felt. The daylong lack of communication was a signal, an indication that something was severely wrong.

With traffic moving again, albeit slowly, as he passed the three hundred-yard marker, he suppressed thoughts of his autocratic father. He had more to worry about.

He crawled on and barely had his front wheels made the beginning of the exit lane, when the car ahead drifted slightly to the right, creating a narrow gap. Croft went for it, kicking the accelerator, tearing off down the deceleration lane, weaving left and right through roadworks designed to improve the junction.