The Murder Code (15 page)

No pale ghosts forming in the bushes tonight, but there didn’t need to be. I could feel one anyway.

Her.

Emmeline Levchenko.

I do my best not to bring my work home with me, it’s true, but still. Some cases stay with me all right.

And now, a tickle at the back of my mind, there was Buxton to think about too.

I took a swig of beer.

Whatever I told myself about nothing being weird, I couldn’t escape the feeling of storm clouds gathering. A
tightening
, almost: the sensation that there was more going on with this case than I realised, and that as time went on, I was going to become more and more entangled in it. Buxton meant nothing, of course; it was just a coincidence. But there it was, all the same, and it was making me uneasy.

Irrational, Andy.

Remember? Being rational was one of the things Rachel loved about you.

Which brought me back round to the counselling sessions. They were a waste of time as things stood. What was the point, if I wasn’t going to engage? If I wasn’t going to tell her the truth?

I finished off the beer and stared out into the darkness. At the empty bushes across the street.
It’s like there’s something he wants to say and won’t.

Intuition, all right—but she wasn’t entirely right.

Not won’t say, but can’t.

B
LINKING AGAINST THE HEAT
of the morning sun, Billy walks up Killer Hill.

It’s a name the children have passed down between them over the generations, mainly because it’s so steep it kills you to run up it—and even at a gentle pace, in this heat Billy is already sweating. Killer all right.

As far as he knows, it doesn’t have a real name; it’s one of those places marked out by children as important but ignored by adults. The older boys and sometimes girls used to get drunk at the top and have campfires and things like that. One time, Carl told them all, he was there and some of the older kids had a cat in a cage. One of them poked it with sticks. Carl was laughing as he explained how it had hissed and squawked at them, until eventually they had got bored and set fire to it.

The other children didn’t believe Carl, but Billy did. He snuck there the next day and saw the scorched ground and the cage, buckled with fire, with what looked like burnt branches inside. He passes it now, and the scorched patch has grown back over, as though it was never there at all—or as though, as Carl had laughed, it was only a cat so why should anyone care?

Billy doesn’t like coming this way, but it’s the quickest route into the woods, which are his favourite place to play. The path at the top runs between the dark trees like a doorway.

He wanders half a mile through the woods. The trees here are enormous, like the pillars in some dusty museum, supporting a canopy of branches and leaves that fractures the sunlight high above. Nevertheless, the ground has been baked dry by the summer heat. In places, it is as cracked as old clay. Roots stick up like frayed, rusted pipes, hooping back into the ground, as though once upon a time the trees were padlocked in place by giants.

Sometimes dirt-bikers come growling and buzzing through this part, chasing each other over the undulations of the hardened earth. The sound is always abrasive, nasal and angry. None today—all Billy can hear is the gentle ticking of the forest. But he wants to make sure he is alone, so he takes a tight, rustling path through a sprawling patch of bright green ferns, some as tall as he is. The air flickers with midges. He wafts and splutters them away, bending fronds to one side as he goes.

This is a secret route he doesn’t think anyone else knows: a route not even known to most children.

Once he is clear of the ferns, there are a number of older trees, then a broken-down stone wall. Beyond that, a stream trickles through the wood. Stepping stones dot it, polished slippy and smooth by the burbling water. Beyond that, the trees get thicker and more tightly packed, gradually condensing into the deep forest that bases the mountains in the misty middle distance.

At school, children are warned about straying too far here. There are wild animals, for one thing. For another, it is deceptively easy to get lost. A few walkers every year end up missing, and not all of them are found again. But the wood will look after Billy, he thinks; it won’t let him lose his way. And as for wild animals …

Well.

He stops by the stream and unfolds the sheet of instructions, then clicks open his penknife.

Let them try.

He is going to build a bow and arrow, well, he is going to have a go.

The instructions have been torn from a page in the army survival handbook. As well as that and the penknife, he has a ball of string; all he needs from the forest are suitable pieces of wood to work with. The principle is easy enough: a supple length of wood for the bow, sterner shoots for the arrows. You just carve the correct notches and cut the string to the right length.

Of course, he could just buy one. Many of the boys at school have weapons—lock knives and catapults they’ve either bought from illicit market stalls or passed between each other. Carl even has a throwing star that he showed them all round the corner in the playground, winging it at a tree. Everyone had a go except Billy, because then someone said a teacher was coming.

But he doesn’t want to buy a bow and arrow.

At school, the boys probably wouldn’t sell him a weapon anyway, and might even laugh at him if he asked them. The market is out for similar reasons: the big men in the bulky coats would probably not even laugh, just ignore him altogether.

The main reason, though, is that deep down, he doesn’t
really
want one.

He just wants to play.

And the woods are, for want of a better word, Billy’s best friend. He feels at home here, playing in the trees and discovering paths through the undergrowth. All woodland has secret trails, and it is always delighted when little boys care enough to discover them. That is how it seems—that there is a benevolence to the forest. He plays in it and, after a time of watching and wondering, it begins playing back. Despite always being by himself here, it is the one place in the whole world he feels least alone.

And that’s also why he’s not afraid, even though the news on the TV has been saying not to go to isolated places on your own. He can’t explain it, but he feels the wood will look after him somehow. That if this murderer is around, it will like Billy more than it likes him—that in fact it probably won’t like
him
very much at all.

Billy understands the sort of man they’re looking for. Sometimes he fantasises about killing some of the boys who bully him at school, but that’s not evil because he wouldn’t do it. If he had them in his power—like a cat in a cage—he wouldn’t hurt them. He might poke them with a stick
once
, just so they knew how it felt, but he would stop when they started crying. It would be too upsetting to hurt something helpless. Evil is not getting that, and that is what the man in papers is like. The killer. He is like someone who could torture a cat to death and then laugh about it afterwards, and there are loads of them about.

Half an hour later, Billy has built the bow and sharpened a single arrow. He isn’t sure what wood he’s used for either, but both are certainly fit for purpose. He’s pleased with himself. The bow is supple enough to bend into a semicircle without it snapping, and the string is tied carefully into the notches he cut. It took a while to find a branch straight and thin enough to carve into an arrow, but he scavenged around the base of the tree and found one that would do: chopping it off flat at one end and drawing a ridge with the knife to fit the bowstring, then sharpening the other end like a pencil.

He loads the bow now and holds it out in front, aiming at the ground, then closes one eye as he draws back on the string—it’s surprisingly fiddly to keep the arrow level, but he tries to rest it on his fist. The string slips out of the end a couple of times, but after a minute he gets the hang of it.

Twang!

It goes fast, but doesn’t fly straight and stick in the earth like it did in his imagination. Instead, it lands at an angle and scatters the other twigs around, like a fish squirming suddenly on a seabed, then lies across a thatch of them. It forms a nice pattern, he thinks—an angle crossing three straight branches beneath. Neat.

He picks it up. He’s ready.

He glances across the stream.

Ready to go hunting.

There are no wild animals to be seen.

Billy runs through the trees for a while, resisting the urge to whoop like an Indian, occasionally stopping quickly—
ambush!
—and firing the arrow at a tree, and pretending it’s one of the boys at school. In real life, it never sticks in, mainly just clatters sideways against the trunk, but at least he nails a couple of dead-on shots, so much so that the arrow gradually dulls at the tip.

He stops to sharpen it, hunkering down in the bushes, his heart thudding in his tiny chest and the blood pulsing in his ears.

Then he’s off again, running and ducking.

Deeper into the woodland.

After a while, he catches sight of a cluster of birds in the branches of a tree overhead, little more than larger, darker leaves amongst the green. He stops and takes aim, closing one eye. Letting the moment pan out as long as he can. Imagining scenarios: needing to bring food back to a camp; needing to hunt to survive. But he knows that he doesn’t, and the birds are low enough to be vulnerable, despite the awkward trajectory, so he doesn’t fire, just lowers the bow, keeping the string tense.

And then he hears something.

The sound makes the fine hairs on his arms stand on end.

At first he thinks it’s a wild animal he can hear—an animal in distress—as there’s nothing remotely human about it. It’s a birdlike cawing. But then again, it’s not like any bird he’s ever heard, and right now it’s the only real sound in the forest. None of the usual birdsong. Even the ticking of the undergrowth has fallen silent here.

The sound is coming from just up ahead, over a ridge in the earth topped by a row of bushes.

Another sound:
thud, thud, thud.

The cawing disappears. But then, after a second or two of silence, it is replaced by a rattling, gurgling noise, like someone trying to suck up the remains of a milkshake through a straw. And that sound continues.

Suddenly it feels as though Billy is very far away from civilisation: that, aside from whoever—whatever—is beyond the ridge, he is totally alone here. He looks around, feeling helpless. If the forest was his friend before, it has deserted him now. Every instinct in his body tells him to turn around and run away, back through the vast expanse of wood he can feel behind him.

And yet slowly, ever so slowly, Billy creeps forward up the slope. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t turn around. Something draws him on.

As he approaches the bushes, he checks the arrow is still tethered in place on the string. It is, and that makes him feel a little more fierce. He isn’t scared—or rather, he is, but he is also brave. Even if he can’t fire straight, whoever is here won’t know that.

Just as Billy reaches the bushes, the gargling increases in pitch, becoming sharper and more urgent.

He uses the tip of the arrow to move a branch—ever so carefully—to one side.

There are two men. One is lying on his back, just a few feet past the foliage. His bright red face is bubbling angrily from the remains of his nose and mouth. One arm is casually tracing an arc through the dust, like a lazy snow angel. The second man, wearing a black balaclava, is crouched over the legs of the first, poking him leisurely in the stomach with a screwdriver, as if attempting slowly to stir his insides.

Billy’s heart stops.

Then starts again.

He is stuck in place, unable to retreat. He doesn’t
dare
move. For the moment, the man is intent on torturing the victim on the ground—poking into his intestines almost inquisitively—but he could look up at any moment.

Billy swallows.

Too loud.

The man’s head turns, and their eyes meet.

For a second, the forest is entirely frozen and Billy still doesn’t dare move. And then suddenly everything comes to life. The man goes from crouching to upright in one motion, as though it’s on film and some frames have gone missing. And Billy fires the arrow at him, then scrambles up, not even waiting to see if it hits, just turning and running back through the vast, empty woods.

As fast as he can.

‘I
T’S DEFINITELY ONE OF
ours,’ Laura said.

‘Fantastic. Tell me everything.’

She’d just got back from a briefing with the police in Buxton, after which she’d attended the post-mortem of Kate Barrett. And she had returned bearing gifts.

The first photograph she slid across to me made me wince inside, and regardless of anything else she was about to tell me, I knew she was right, that this was our guy. The photo had been taken at the scene. It showed a close-up of the remains of a woman’s face, hair splayed out on the blood-soaked tarmac on which she was lying.

The damage wasn’t as extensive as to our victims, but it was close enough. The killer had been interrupted, after all. I pictured David Barrett, a man I’d never seen, plummeting across a field in an attempt to reach his wife—and the whole time the man ahead of him was just striking her repeatedly in the head.

It was more an emotion than an image: a frantic, keening sensation of desperation, anguish. Because he had not been in time. Most of the injuries were to the right-hand side of her head and mouth. The latter hung open, the destruction obvious. Her right eye was lost under blood; her nose hung off, leaning away from it. The remaining eye stared upwards, as clear and empty as the sky it must have dully reflected.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘From the full report alone, it’s him.’ Laura took the photo away again. ‘Her husband managed to give a full statement, the poor bastard. He didn’t understand. He said the guy could have easily got away with the scooter, if that was what he wanted. There was no way he needed to do what he did.’