The Handshaker (35 page)

Passing the motorway access, turning off the large feeder island and following the signs for North Manchester, she told herself that she was doing it because she truly did not want the investigation sidetracked, but it was a thin excuse. She did not believe Croft was guilty of anything other than trying to save his girlfriend’s life. She did, however, believe that The Handshaker had murdered Victoria and Joyce, and was behind the sleight of hand that had seen Croft arrested, and that the note received this morning was from him, not Croft. She knew for a fact that Croft had not abducted Rehana, and it was impossible for anyone else to know about it other than the real kidnapper, The Handshaker.

Having thought it all through, she realised she could have followed this line of inquiry with Croft locked up in a cell while Shannon happily pressed on trying to prove the improbable.

The open gates of the university loomed ahead. A large, semicircle, with a spacious drive between the wrought iron gates, enough room to park a car and still leave access for a bus. A patrol car was parked there, the two officers asleep.

She rattled the windows, woke them both, gave them a roasting and sent them away, saying she would relieve them.

“It’s because it’s Croft,” she told herself, coming back to her thoughts as she spun her car into the semicircle, and backed off to leave the gates clear.

And she knew it was the truth. Over the past three days, he had had an effect on her like no other man she could remember. Even when she confronted him with his pen, found beneath Joyce’s bed, she had not wanted to believe he would use a prostitute, let alone murder one.

She recalled how quickly she had agreed to go out to Oaklands when he rang so distressed at Trish Sinclair’s apparent abduction. She could, she
should
have taken other officers with her, but she elected not to. Why?

The answer was obvious and unwelcome. And yet, he had done nothing, said nothing to indicate interest in anyone but his missing girlfriend.

“You’re getting old and broody, Millie,” she muttered, and picked up the latest note to distract her lurid thoughts.

‘Cunny Joe D’ and ‘do vets roger’ took her attention. They were obvious anagrams. Millie had seen the puzzle freak, Croft, at work and she began to play with the letters, the way he did, looking for words that made sense. It was hard work, but once she eliminated D-U-N-N it clicked into place. Joyce Dunn, and that meant that ‘do vets roger’ was an anagram of Dorset Grove.

She glanced at the clock and was surprised to find that cracking the code had taken her eight minutes. She still did not consider it bad, and was busily congratulating herself when Croft opened her door, bundled her roughly across into the passenger seat, jumped behind the wheel, fired the engine and spun the car away from the gates, heading for the motorway.

Angrily, Millie reached for her radio, but he snatched it from her.

“Just behave, Millie, and we’ll get on fine,” he told her. “I don’t want to hurt you and if you’ve done your homework as I hinted, you should know by now that The Handshaker is playing this game, not me.” He put the radio in the door pocket at his side.

Millie let rip with her temper. “You are a fucking idiot. Do you know every cop in the country is looking for you?”

“Yes. I also know that while I’m free and still being hunted, The Handshaker’s plans are in tatters.”

Millie was surprised. “What?”

He turned west onto the M62 and accelerated quickly into the mid-morning traffic. “You should try going on the run, Millie. It helps clear your thinking processes.” Up ahead the mile marker for Birch Services appeared, Croft eased off and tucked in behind a lorry. “The Handshaker wants me. Killing these women is his way of passing the time, but his ultimate target is me. That’s why he took Trish. She’s the bait. But while I’m on the run, he’s up the creek. He needs me released and free to follow him to wherever he’s trying to lead me. Something Shannon won’t allow. When I saw that footage from Oaklands, everything clicked into place. For some reason, known only to him, The Handshaker wanted me arrested, but not charged. He took Rehana to let you people know that he was behind it all. Now, I’m afraid that poor girl is the next victim, not Trish. He has my partner, but he won’t kill her yet. Instead, he’ll murder Rehana. You should know by now that even if yesterday lunchtime’s footage was live, I hadn’t had time to get back to Oaklands, considering I was on foot, to kidnap her. Besides, my car was still in the drive and I left Thurrock handcuffed to yours. Rehana was there when we left, so logically, if it wasn’t me, then it had to be The Handshaker.”

“You mean it had to be someone else.” Millie wondered why she was arguing when she agreed with him.”

“Do you have another candidate in mind?” he wanted to know.

Millie maintained her defiance. “How did The Handshaker know Rehana was there? It was a spur of the moment decision to put her on the drive. He can’t have planned it.”

“He didn’t,” Croft said as he drifted off the motorway into the service station. “He was in the village all the time, watching. If you hadn’t put Rehana on the door, maybe he would have murdered Mrs Hitchins. I don’t know, but I’m betting that ultimately, his plan was to have me arrested then cleared. Leaving an officer on the door may have foxed him, but when he realised it was a woman, and an Asian woman to boot, he made an
ad hoc
move to show you just how resourceful he is. He took her, he’s probably raped and hanged her by now and if Shannon hadn’t been so obsessed with a quick fix, arresting me for something I didn’t do, it wouldn’t have happened.”

He cruised along the lines of parked cars and reversed into a gap. Killing the engine, he half turned in his seat and faced her. “I need to be out and free to operate or we’ll never get him, but I need an ally, Millie. I need someone to keep me posted on what’s happening.”

“Turn yourself in.”

Croft shook his head determinedly. “Shannon will jail me at least for the weekend and The Handshaker will carry on killing. Worse than that, he may panic, murder Trish and clear off, then we’ll never get him. I need to be free. It has to end and sooner rather than later. He will only get to me when he thinks he can and he can’t while I’m inside. I don’t know how long Trish has, but it won’t be too long. He won’t kill her until he can draw me closer in and take me out too, but if you people panic him. . .” he trailed off with a shrug.

Millie was adamant. “Turn yourself in.”

“No.”

For a moment, she looked out at the dark, rainy day. Then she passed over the latest note and her interpretation of it. “This arrived first thing this morning.”

Croft studied it. “Line two refers to Joyce Dunn and Dorset Grove, line three is a reference to Rehana Begum. Cliff or Tex is me, rawl tarn fez is Franz Walter, of Heidelberg fame, and shark hen death is The Handshaker. He’s saying that Franz Walter didn’t do it, The Handshaker did and I’m an amateur.”

Millie’s head spun. “Bloody hell. It took me ten minutes to get Joyce Dunn and Dorset Grove. You did all that in a minute.”

“I use Cliff or Tex myself when I’m compiling crosswords,” he admitted, “but I saw shark hen death on a website, yesterday. A link from Carol Russell’s site.”

The admission forced a wan smile to Millie’s lips. “You were surfing her site. She hates you and you’re no fan of hers, so why?”

“Whatever I may think of her personally, it doesn’t alter the fact that she is
the
authority on The Handshaker,” Croft explained. “Did you know that she knew one of the victims. Sheila Greenhalgh. They had bereavement counselling together.”

Now Millie’s pretty features creased into a frown. “Bereavement counselling? With Evelyn Kearns?”

“No. She doesn’t say who. Did you speak to Evelyn?”

Millie shook her head. “She wasn’t in when I called. I’m supposed to go back there today.” She picked up her bag and began to root through it. Croft’s face paled and Millie looked concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just occurred to me. Did you speak to anyone about Evelyn?”

“Yes. I asked Ronnie Simpson to get me her address.”

“If The Handshaker took Rehana, he may have had her radio. You didn’t ask for it over the air did you?”

Millie felt uncharacteristically doubtful. “I, er, I can’t remember. I may have done. Why?”

“If he overheard it, he’ll realise you were onto her. You couldn’t get Evelyn to answer yet I had no problem. She had a list of clients to see, so she wouldn’t have gone far. Millie, if he knew we were on that track, he may. . .” He trailed off not wanting to put his thoughts into words.

“I’ll get onto it right away.” She grinned sheepishly. “As soon as you give me back my car, I’ll get onto it.” She paused a moment. “Felix, this kind of conditioning. Can it really be made to last so long?”

He nodded. “It needs constant reinforcement, but Franz Walter abused Mrs E for seven years and even then he was only caught because he got greedy, which made her husband suspicious.”

Croft’s mention of the German hypnotist reminded Millie. “I did mean to tell you, according to Ernie Shannon, there’s no such thing as The Heidelberg Case. He says you made it all up. He and his men couldn’t find a single reference to it anywhere on the Web.”

“Which means it’s a figment of my imagination, eh?” Croft laughed cynically. “Go to my rooms at the university. Check the bookshelves, and somewhere there, you’ll find a copy of Hypnotism and Crime by Doctor H. E. Hammerschlag. It’s quite an old book, first published in England in the fifties.” He gave her an amused stare. “Nearly twenty years before I was born. It contains a detailed account and brief analysis of the case. Oh, and while you’re there, you’ll find an old Remington typewriter which you can take away for comparison to the new notes you’ve received. You’ll find they were not produced on that machine.”

Millie made a note. “All right. Getting back to what you told me about the case, Franz Walter had weekly access to Mrs E. What you’re suggesting is that The Handshaker had access to his women years ago and then left them alone for … well for years.”

Croft disagreed. “How do we know that? We’re assuming that he abducted these women, kept them for three or four days while he fucked them senseless, and then topped them. But how do we know he didn’t have them weekly or fortnightly, and for years? We don’t and none of the women have survived to tell us anything, have they? Not even Sandra.” He checked the clock. “I’m going, Millie. If you have your boys running a GPS track on this car, they’ll be here before long, but you need to speak to Evelyn … if she’s able to answer. With luck, this time tomorrow, you could be knocking on his door. Millie,” he appealed to her, “I need your help. I need you to keep me posted.”

“Turn yourself in.”

“No. Look, you either help me or you don’t. You know I’m innocent. Persuade Shannon of that. Get him to lay off.”

“You obviously don’t know Shannon,” Millie argued. “He will hunt you forever, and if he finds out I met you and then let you go, he’ll have my arse flame grilled for lunch. Turn yourself in.”

He scribbled a number on the bottom of the Handshaker note Millie had given him to translate. “It’s a borrowed mobile. I don’t keep it switched on, but if you text that number I’ll check it several times a day and I won’t be on long enough for you to track me on GPS, or if you do, I’ll be long gone before you can get there.” He opened the door, climbed out and walked away.

Millie watched him disappear, thought about following him for a moment, and then climbed sadly into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine and drove slowly back towards Scarbeck.

49

After Croft left her at the service station, Millie drove to the university, where the Principal, recalling his caustic exchange with Shannon, authorised security to let her into Croft’s room.

Under the officer’s watchful eye, she first took Croft’s Remington typewriter and dropped it into a carrier bag. Leaving that in the armchair nearest the door, she turned her attention to the books on the shelves lining the rear wall.

There were hundreds of titles and with Croft’s typical lack of organisation, there was no rhyme or reason to their arrangement: a beaten, hardback copy of Dickens’
A Christmas Carol
stood adjacent to a paperback on UFOs by Nick Pope, a block of eight James Bond paperbacks were interleaved with a hardback copy of
Mysteries of Modern Britain
by Janet and Colin Bord, and also two paperbacks from American authors, one on the Nasca Plain in Peru and the other discussing the relevance of the Great Pyramids to the constellation Sirius. There were books on ghosts, telepathy, general paranormal studies, more on UFOs, a dozen texts on hypnosis, one or two on crimes with supposed supernatural links, and to cap it off, he even had a copy of Conan Doyle’s
The Hound Of The Baskervilles
.

Without any idea of the book’s cover, Millie had little option but to run along them with her finger on each spine, reading the titles, until after fifteen minutes, she finally found Heinz Hammerschlag’s
Hypnotism and Crime
slipped in between a text book on O level English and an
Andy Capp
cartoon annual, which, judging from the state of the cover, dated from the 60s.