The Handshaker (26 page)

“What? What is it?”

“Something just under the bed, guv,” he said. “Can’t quite see what it is.”

Millie got down on her knees and peered under the divan. It was close to the floor, raised only an inch or two on its castors, but by pressing her face to the carpet, she could see the object, too. Something shiny. Digging into her pocket, she came out with a pair of forensic gloves, pulled them on and stretched her fingers under the bed.

“Can’t reach it,” she grumbled.

Thurrock moved from the chair, gripped the bottom of the divan and raised it a couple inches. Millie stretched further and gripped the object. As Thurrock let the bed go, they looked on a gold-plated ballpoint.

“Now where have I seen one of these before?” Millie asked herself.

34

After finding Victoria, Croft was in no mood for Shannon’s irritability.

Realising that he had rushed out without his mobile phone, he had hurried back to Oaklands, called the police from the hall, and then took a shower. Soaking under the hot water, his filthy, wet clothing, discarded on the tiled floor, served to remind him of the suspended body in the woods and he found it impossible to get the awful image of her from his mind. He had encountered death before but never death so pointless and sadistic.

He scrubbed his muscular body hard; as if he could wash away the terrible memory, wipe himself clean of the dark tracks The Handshaker had forced him to follow. Eventually, his concentration became so obsessed that he could take no more and was sick in the toilet bowl.

He returned to the kitchen, dressed in training pants and a close fitting T-shirt, to find Shannon and Detective Sergeant Fletcher waiting for him. In the background Mrs Hitchins made tea. Croft refused her offer. He did not trust his stomach to take in food or drink. Instead, with a glass of water at his elbow, he told the police of his find. The superintendent called the SOCOs on his mobile and gave them precise directions to the body and then got into an argument with Sergeant Fletcher who insisted he should be with the SOCOs.

“I need you here, at least until Millie shows up,
if
she shows up,” said Shannon pacing the kitchen like an angry bull. He whirled and vented his anger on Croft. “Three deaths in the last twenty four hours. Three deaths and one other person missing, and at every turn we come back to you.”

Croft had imagined that Shannon would be possessed of a degree of compassion. But he was not. Had the superintendent stopped to consider the delicacy of the situation, he would have realised the Croft was suffering the after-effects of his appalling discovery and his missing partner. He was close to exploding under the pressure.

The hypnotist recognised the symptoms in himself, and learned to his dismay that, like the anxiety of the drive home two evenings ago, despite all his training, he was unable to do anything about it.

“I thought it might be Trish,” he protested weakly.

“And only one of the three deaths follows The Handshaker’s normal pattern,” Shannon ranted as if Croft had not spoken, “and even then it’s right outside your property. I mean, what is it with you academics? Do you think we’re all thick? Do you think we’re not sufficiently educated to see what’s really going on?”

The words blurred in Croft’s head. They no longer made sense to him. All he could feel was a rising, explosive anger swelling up from deep inside, threatening to engulf him in an outburst of volcanic fury.

The look on Mrs Hitchins’ face suggested that she could see it coming. Fletcher too was keeping a close eye on him, but Shannon carried on, totally oblivious to the problem he was creating.

“We have our own experts who are just as educated as you, but they specialise in this field. And I’ll tell you something else, their analysis doesn’t agree with yours.” Shannon stopped pacing and rounded on Croft. “Well?” There was a momentary silence. “I’m talking to you.”

“Sir…” Fletcher began with the obvious intention of pouring oil on troubled waters.

He never finished what he was going to say. Croft, who had been staring down at the floor tiles getting angrier and angrier, slowly raised his blazing eyes to face his tormentor.

“I find it difficult to believe that a … a
fucking
moron like you could rise as far as you have.” His voice was a hiss, and took them all by complete surprise. At the rear of the kitchen, Mrs Hitchins tutted at the uncharacteristic invective. “You don’t have the brains of a rat. You shouldn’t be put in charge of a market stall, never mind an investigation like this.”

“Now listen, Croft –”

Shannon’s assertiveness was wasted. Croft cut him. “No. You listen. It doesn’t matter what you think, what you want. It’s him. The Handshaker. He’s yanking your chain so hard that you’re thinking exactly the way he wants you to. He needs an opponent who can meet him on a level playing field, so he can show us all just how smart he is. He wants me, not you. He has Trish, and now he wants me. Wants me looking for him so that somewhere along the line, when I have him cornered, he can eliminate me and declare himself the true master.” He pointed a shaking finger at Shannon. “You don’t matter. To him and me you are an irrelevance, a necessary but unwanted nuisance between two combatants. Like the referee in a boxing ring, you’re only there because the rules say you have to be. You haven’t a hope in hell of catching him and he knows it, but unless someone confronts him, he can never show the world how clever he is. Until I pointed it out to Millie, your people didn’t even realise he was sending you anagrams of his victim’s names in the notes. Until I turned up at Scarbeck police station, you didn’t know you were looking for a hypnotist. You’re out of your depth, Shannon. He can lead you where he wants from now until forever and you can’t do anything about it, other than run along the blind alleys he’s opening for you. So why not get out of the way and let me give him what he wants? An opponent worthy of him.”

To his credit, Shannon did not back down totally. His gaping mouth betrayed his shock but he quickly countered. “You’re close to being arrested.”

“On what charge?” snapped Croft. “Telling an idiot the truth?”

Shannon threw the latest note back at Croft. “All right then, smartarse, what have you made of the rest of this shit?”

Croft glowered. “Nothing.” He noted the look of smug satisfaction creeping over Shannon’s face. “I haven’t had the chance yet.”

A grumbling silence fell over the kitchen. Like gladiators in the arena, the antagonists glowered at each other. Eventually, breathing deeply, evenly, flooding his mind with the order, ‘calm, calm, calm,’ a soothing, internalised mantra, Croft averted his gaze, took up his pen and studied the second line of the note;
and where wee grind eats it, they saw a bum fall.

As his temper cooled and intellect rose to supremacy once more, his analytical brain began to take the puzzle apart.

At first glance, the anagram could have been any combination of words in the line, but investing its author with superior intelligence, and bearing in mind that the first line of the note had already pointed him at Allington Woods, he assumed that the first words were to be taken literally; an instruction to look somewhere in Scarbeck where something of importance had already taken place or was about to. Eventually, he decided that the anagram was contained in the words,
wee grind eats it,
and he started toying with the letters.

“And where the hell were you first thing this morning?”

In the background, Shannon’s voice arguing with Fletcher, which to Croft’s tired brain sounded like nothing more than the superintendent releasing his pent up anger, made concentration difficult. Warton, a small area of South Scarbeck was contained within the anagram, but what did it leave behind?

Croft could get the word ‘green’ easily, but there were probably many streets in Scarbeck that ended in ‘green’. Allington Green, for example, just down the road from Oaklands. The same applied to the word ‘west’ and even ‘estate’, both of which he could get from the available letters, but there was nothing in the remainder that made apparent sense.

“I was catching up on some sleep, sir.” Fletcher’s use of the word ‘sir’ in no way made him subordinate to Shannon. It was a verbal appendage; a necessary protocol, demanded by the book, and he might have used the word ‘prick’ which, to Croft’s way of thinking, was more accurate.

Sedate wet ring
was contained in the words, but it made no sense as a location and it left a single letter ‘I’ unused. No matter what he had and had not done, The Handshaker’s anagrams had always been perfect.

“We have a couple of nutters to pull in,” Shannon shouted. “We don’t have time to sleep.”

The increasingly bitter exchange between Shannon and Fletcher created a distracting buzz in his head. Why did Shannon insist that there were a ‘couple of nutters?’ Croft knew there was only one.

Determined to ignore them, he fine-tuned his concentration. He could pull out the words
winter sea
but that made no sense either, and he could make nothing of the remaining letters.

“I was out on Winridge Estate until pushing midnight,” protested Fletcher, “cleaning up bits of Alf Lumb. Nutter or no nutter, I’m entitled to some rest.”

Croft barely heard Shannon’s threatening response to Fletcher’s acid statement. Winridge Estate? Was it possible? He quickly penned the words onto his sheet of paper, mentally cancelling them out from
wee grind eats it
. It fitted. He looked at the remainder of the line:
a bum fall
? A bum? A tramp? Someone’s backside? A shady deal of some kind? What did he mean a bum fall? Most of his victims did not fall when they were hanged. They were simply suspended there, and left to choke to death.

Croft closed his mind to the terrible images of Victoria Reid, the look of pleading on her pitiful face, the wrinkling of decomposition on her skin.

A bum fall, a bum fall, a bum fall. What was it that was so familiar about those three words. Album, fal? Didn’t make sense. Alf Album. Alf Album take away one of the letter a’s and he was left with… Alf Lumb. Christ, hadn’t Fletcher just said it? The anagram was ‘bum fall’, not ‘
a
bum fall’.

“I didn’t know I had to account to your for everything I do,” Fletcher growled. “What’s the point of making me a sergeant if I have to ring you every time I need some downtime?”

“We can soon make you a constable again,” the superintendent promised.

“Shannon, Fletcher,” Croft interrupted softly. “Just knock it off. I’ve worked the note out.” He waited until he had their full, glowering attention. “The first line told me to go to Allington Woods, where I’d find a body, which I did. The second line tells me to go to Winridge Estate where I’ll find Alf Lumb dead. He’s telling me that he killed Victoria Reid and strung her up right in my own back yard, and he also killed Alf Lumb.”

Shannon shook his head. “Really? We know who killed Alf and it wasn’t The Handshaker.”

Croft disagreed. “Sandra wielded the knife, but she did not kill Alf. The Handshaker did. He conditioned her to carry out that killing.”

Shannon snorted. “I never mentioned Sandra, did I?”

Croft felt his anger rising again. “Then who? The Handshaker did it in person? It’s not his style and your own psychos should have told you that.”

“No,” Shannon disagreed. “I didn’t need overpaid muppets like profilers to tell me anything.”

“The Handshaker did it,” Croft asserted, his tone rising in volume, “but not in person. I’ve told you before. This man is emulating Franz Walter, but he’s better. Historically, Walter never managed to get Mrs E to kill her husband and he never managed to get her to commit suicide. The Handshaker did both in the space of a couple of hours yesterday morning.” He fumed. “The bastard must have been working on her all the time I was trying to help, and the cause of her depression is blatantly obvious now. It had nothing to do with Alf. It was confabulation brought on by persistent and abusive hypnosis.”

No one said anything. Croft stared at the floor tiles again, his brow creased into a puzzled frown, his mind working over the bits and pieces of the puzzle as it had unfolded over the last 48 hours.

The doorbell interrupted the silence. Mrs Hitchins shuffled out of the kitchen to answer it.

“Mrs E and Franz Walter,” said Shannon. “Your famous Heidelberg case. I want a word with you about that.”

Shannon did not get any further. At that moment, Mrs Hitchins returned with Millie and Thurrock in tow. Thurrock stationed himself by the door, Millie drew Shannon off to one side and spoke in whispers near the back door.

Croft began to worry. Where had she been, what had she found? Had she found Trish in some other, more decrepit location than Allington Woods?

When they returned to the table, Shannon looked triumphant, not downcast, and it was Millie who took control.

With a sideways glance at Mrs Hitchins, Millie said, “Mr Croft, we need to speak to you in private.”

Puzzled, Croft’s implicit trust in her prompted him to agree, but before he could, Mrs Hitchins wedged her way in. “Mr Croft, sir, I know I don’t always see eye to eye with Miss Sinclair, but I know she would not want you to do that. She would insist that you call your lawyer friend, Mr Flint.”