The Handshaker (43 page)

“Give me one moment, sir, and I’ll sort it out.”

Alongside Shannon the foreman of the demolition crew looked anxious.

“Disconnect the explosive,” Millie ordered.

Shannon’s face was just as explosive. “Now listen, Matthews –”

“Croft,” she cut in, “Trish Sinclair and possibly Gerald Humphries are in there. I mean it, you idiot. I’m not just taking the piss. They are in that building.” Her arms flailed wildly in the direction of the mill half a mile away.

For a moment Shannon floundered. Then he nodded at the foreman and addressed the Mayor again. “I think, sir, we’d better put the job on hold.”

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In many ways, the cellars were more dangerous than the upper floors. Dust and occasional debris fell through the large holes in the ceiling, and the basement’s concrete floor was covered in small heaps of rubble amongst which Croft could hear rats and mice scrabbling.

There were no windows and consequently only the minimum of illumination, reflected sunlight coming from gaps above, to guide him. He closed his mind to the terrors Trish must have endured over the last few hours.

He had left Humphries secured by the pipe and after a nervous, final few minutes, when the time finally turned eight o’clock, confident that either Millie or Shannon had managed to halt the demolition, he made his way down into the basement, moving cautiously in the dim light, careful not to trip over fallen masonry, careful not to stand on Trish.

Something scurried past his foot and darted for the comparative safety of a pitch-dark corner. A rat. Would they have... again he thrust the idea from his mind.

Up ahead, the basement turned into a side well, created by the pregnant bulge of the old lift shaft. Stepping out for a better view, Croft could just make out her foot. He hurried to her.

She was naked, bound hand and foot, tied to a girder. Gagged with her own underwear taped across her mouth, her eyes were closed and she did not move. Croft dare not touch her as if to do so would hurt her all the more, but he knew she was beyond pain. He could see that she had died, probably of exposure, sometime during the night.

He was torn by different emotions. The awful grief of his loss and the even more dreadful fury at the monster above who could have done this to her. He wanted to hold her, to hug her to him, to breathe fresh life into her, and he wanted to clasp his powerful hands around Humphries’ throat and squeeze the life out of him. Let his tongue loll the way Victoria Reid’s had. Force him to confront the eternal void, the terror of his own mortality as the life drained from him, the way he had compelled so many of his victims to do.

He reached out a shaking hand and touched her frozen cheek. She stirred and Croft jumped. She was alive!

He worked feverishly at her bonds, freeing her, gently withdrawing the tape from across her mouth, casting the underwear to one side. He removed his shirt, ignoring the snap of November cold to his bare arms, and wrapped it around her. He took her hands, rubbed them urgently, encouraging the circulation. Finally, he lifted her into his arms, and whispering to her, carried her back towards the light.

“Felix?” Millie’s voice came from the staircase. “Where are you?”

“Down here. She’s alive, Millie, but only just. Bring me blankets or something.”

He could hear Millie cursing as she made her way down the dark, concrete steps, the bobbling pool of a flashlight coming ahead of her.

“As if I’d be carrying blankets.” Her dark shape appeared ahead of Croft and she quickly assessed the situation. “Here. Use this.” She removed her topcoat, Croft put Trish gently down and wrapped it around her, then lifted her again.

“Have you got Humphries?” he asked

“Yes,” Millie replied, “we’ve got him. He’s complaining that you’re off your rocker and you tried to kill him. Has he told you everything?”

“He told me enough,” said Croft. “Did you, er, look up?”

The inspector’s face was grim as they climbed the steps into welcoming daylight. “Rehana? Yes, we’ve seen her.” She took out her mobile. “I’ll get an ambulance for Trish.”

November 22nd

59

The interview room felt excessively cramped to Millie; more so than when she had interviewed other suspects for other crimes.

And yet, there were no more people in there. She and Shannon sat on the side of the table closer to the door, Humphries and his lawyer, Simon Wainwright, on the other. Wainwright was the smallest person in the room, and Humphries did not have the stockier build of, say, Felix Croft, and yet the room felt more crowded.

Evidence, she thought to herself; the items encased in seal-easy bags, most of it heaped on the floor, ready to confront Humphries.

Much had happened in the last 48 hours. Millie had been reinstated on the understanding that she would still face disciplinary charges, and SOCOs had gone over Humphries’ place with the proverbial fine toothed comb, coming away with a welter of evidence against the man. Humphries had been questioned once and denied everything.

She looked over his statement. Bullshit, to coin a Shannon-ism. Alongside her, the superintendent cleared his throat, checked again that the cassette recorder was working and addressed the suspect.

“Mr Humphries ... Mr Burke, to give you your correct name, this is the second time I have questioned you on the matter of the so-called Handshaker and the Handshaker murders. Do you maintain your innocence?”

Wainwright answered for his client. “Mr Humphries denies all knowledge of them, Superintendent.”

“Very well,” said Shannon, and looked down at his question sheet. “Let’s see how you account for several anomalies. First, we have many samples of DNA taken from The Handshaker victims, including Patricia Sinclair and Rehana Begum. Preliminary analysis indicates that the chances of those samples coming from someone other than you are less than one in a billion. How do you explain that?”

Humphries looked to Wainwright for guidance. The solicitor nodded.

With a sigh and shrug, he said, “I cannot. I’m not a scientist. I know nothing about DNA, so I don’t know. I am innocent.”

Shannon left the next question to Millie.

Her dark features brimming with obvious distaste, she refrained from looking at Humphries, and instead read from a prepared sheet. “You may or may not be aware that when files are erased from a computer, they’re not fully wiped out. They can be restored. When we checked your computer, we found the hard drive had been wiped on Saturday night, but when we restored it, we found two letters sent to the Scarbeck police, cryptically telling us what had happened to various victims, one of which, concerning the location of Patricia Sinclair’s death, and mentioning your father, Graham Burke, also known as The Great Zepelli, was found on the seat of Ms Sinclair’s car which had been abandoned outside Scarbeck railway station on Tuesday morning. How do you explain that?”

Once more Humphries looked for guidance and received a nod.

“I wrote them.” Before the police could interrupt with howls of triumph, he pressed on. “I know it was a silly thing to do, but I wanted to get at Croft. I wanted to cause him real suffering. But I never intended any physical harm to come to him.”

Matthews pounced on the admission. “Yet by the dates the letters were created, you knew about Rehana Begum before we realised that she had been abducted. The only way you could have known was if you killed her. DNA and fingerprint analysis indicate that Rehana was a Handshaker victim, therefore you are The Handshaker.”

This time, Simon Wainwright shook his head, warning Humphries not to answer.

The suspect ignored his solicitor. “Yes I did know, and I was going to tell you but I was frightened that you’d arrest me. I’m a twitcher – a bird watcher. I used to watch the sparrow hawks nesting on the roof of Cromford Mill. I visited the place late on Friday and saw the young woman hanging there. I didn’t know what to do. I thought if I reported it, you might suspect me.” He begged with convincingly frightened eyes. “I was scared.”

Shannon shook his head. “Quite frankly, Humphries, that’s the thinnest rubbish I’ve heard from you yet.”

“But it’s the truth,” Humphries pleaded.

“Balls,” snapped Millie.

Wainwright frowned. “Inspector Matthews, may I remind you that this interview is being recorded and that kind of language is not –”

“And you can –”

“That’s enough Millie,” Shannon ordered. He faced his suspect. “Mr Humphries, when we further examined your computer, we found references to a woman called Kathleen Murphy. When we visited her, we found she had been killed. Her neck was broken and her skull was caved in by a stout walking stick. We found your fingerprints on that walking stick and we found your semen in her vagina. How do you explain that?”

Humphries shook his head. “I cannot.”

Shannon pressed his attack. “The sobriquet, The Handshaker, was coined by the killer himself, and first brought to our attention on the bottom of a letter typed on a Smith Corona portable typewriter dating from the 1960s. Later notes were produced on a Remington machine which we found in an old car on Kent Road, quite near to your house. Given that you have just admitted to writing the letters produced on computer, and given the cryptic similarity between those letters and the earlier ones, it seems to me that you must have written them all and dumped the Smith Corona, switching to a Remington in order to further incriminate Felix Croft. It also seems to me that for you to sign the notes, The Handshaker, a fact that was never made public, that you must have coined the term, The Handshaker, and you therefore wrote the earlier notes.”

Humphries shook his head. “I wrote the two letters you found on my computer. I first read of The Handshaker in one of Carol Russell’s reports. I have never owned a portable typewriter, but Felix Croft has.”

Millie ignored the insinuation. “Let’s turn away from the letters for a moment, and concentrate on other matters.” She reached down to the floor and lifted up the seal-easy bags. “Inside that Ford Fiesta, we also found all this clothing. PC Begum’s uniform, and other items of female apparel in many sizes, some of which has been positively identified as Patricia Sinclair’s and Victoria Reid’s. There are fibres on the clothing that match a carpet and mattress in your back bedroom. How do you explain that, Humphries?”

“Inspector –” began Wainwright only to be cut off when Humphries tapped him on the arm.

“It was planted there, Inspector,” the suspect declared. “I believe Felix Croft did it when he went to my house looking for his girlfriend on Sunday morning.”

Shannon could hardly believe his ears. “He planted fibres in that car, taken from your house the day
before
he turned up looking for his girlfriend? I know he’s pretty resourceful, but that’s really clever.”

“But that wasn’t the only time he’s been in my house,” Humphries protested. “When I chaperoned his appointments with Sandra, he would often call round to talk about life in post-war Britain. He’s fanatical about it.”

“Croft insists he has never set foot on the first floor of your house,” Millie pointed out.

“He could be lying.”

“All right,” said Shannon. “How do you explain traces of urine, blood and body hair on the mattress in your back bedroom, all positively confirmed as being from Rehana Begum, Patricia Sinclair, Victoria Reid, and other women known to have been murdered by The Handshaker.”

Humphries shook his head. “I told you, I’m not a scientist. I can’t explain it.” He changed tack and began to plead. “Look, I know I’ve been very silly. I’ve tried to implicate Croft in this whole business because I don’t like the man, nor what he stands for. Money. He’s greedy, grasping and so superior. So I admit that. I shouldn’t have done it, I’m sorry and I will take whatever punishment is coming to me for that, but I am not a killer.”

Shannon refused to be swayed. “How do you account for the fact that we found fibres on a pair of your shoes that match the carpets in Joyce Dunn’s home? How do you account for the fact that we found your semen in Joyce Dunn’s vagina after she was found hanged in her bedroom?”

Humphries was convincingly embarrassed. “I was a, er, client of Joyce’s. I’d visited her that day.”

Millie came on the attack. “When you and Croft were in Cromford Mill, you told him where he could find Trish Sinclair.”

“Yes.”

“How did you know she was there, unless you put her there?” she demanded.

“It was a guess.” Humphries smiled. “Good lord, woman, I was terrified. He threatened to leave us there while you blew the place up, so I just blurted something out. Anything. I could have said the roof, the third floor, anything. You should have seen him. The man’s a maniac.”

Shannon softened his approach. “Look, Humphries, we’re not totally stupid. We know that you are The Handshaker. It’s only a matter of time before we get the proof. Probably off that anorak, or the women’s clothing. Just admit it. You’ll feel a whole lot better when you get it off your chest.”

Humphries shook his head. “I know nothing about it.”

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