47
BRIGHTENING DARKNESS
Oh, something wicked this way comes,’ said Bryant with a shiver. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’ It was still early in the morning, and the trees behind them were rattling in the rising wind. ‘Do you believe that evil can grow inside a man? A brightening darkness, like a torch in reverse?’
‘I don’t think you should keep putting the willies up people, Bryant,’ said Raymond Land. ‘It’s bad enough that we’re having to work in some kind of satanic sorting office without you adding to the sinister atmosphere all the time.’
Land hovered uncomfortably in front of the door to the St Pancras Mortuary. The strange building unsettled him. He thought of heading back to the office, but that place was almost as bad.
‘What’s taking Kershaw so long?’ he demanded. When he looked back, Rosa was standing in the open doorway staring up at him. Land recoiled in fright.
‘He’s waiting for you downstairs,’ she answered, drifting back into the corridor.
‘And she gives me the bloody heebie-jeebies too,’ Land whispered. ‘Creeping up like that. There’s something extremely odd going on around here.’
‘So you’re finally allowing the dark history of Battlebridge to get to you,’ said Bryant cheerfully. ‘Good. You need shaking up a bit.’
‘Why is it so gloomy in this place?’ Land complained, searching the hall for the light switch. He hated being dragged out of his office, but May was over at the headquarters of ADAPT and Bryant liked having someone to talk to.
‘What have you got for us, Giles?’ Bryant asked as they entered the morgue. ‘You have Maddox Cavendish’s head now. That’s all the body parts accounted for.’
‘I’ve still got a long day in front of me,’ said Kershaw. ‘I can’t access any information. The system won’t recognise my PCU status. I’m having to use my predecessor’s tutorial notes—it’s very primitive methodology. I feel like a Victorian coroner, operating from old medical textbooks. At least Professor Marshall was thorough when it came to keeping records.’
‘Have you got anything fresh for us?’
‘Not this head, for a start. The rats have been at it. Let me show you.’
‘Do you have to?’
‘Perhaps you’d rather start with Mr Standover.’ He crossed to the farthest autopsy table and rolled back the green plastic sheet on it. ‘The puncture wound suggests the same weapon: slender, flexible, long, four-sided. I’d go for a sharpened meat skewer. He stabs behind the base of the ear and punches it hard upwards, penetrating the brain to cause instant—and I mean instant—death.’
‘Can you be absolutely sure that it’s the same attacker?’ asked Land.
‘Well, I can’t without referral to a national DNA database, can I? Dan is dying to pick up an LCN sweep from the items he removed in Delaney’s apartment, but he can’t do that, either.’ The Low Copy Number project could track DNA from tiny sources, but was expensive, time-consuming and only available through routes that were currently closed to the PCU.
Kershaw indicated the slashes across the victim’s left palm. ‘He’s got a distinctive sweep from right to left, giving Standover a faint defence cut on his raised left hand. He’s a little shorter than his victims, but his arms are long and strong. It’s the same man all right, but now he’s attacking more violently. This time he’s gone a lot deeper. The earlier hits were nowhere near as deep. But I have to say that even in his anger he’s got a steady, purposeful hand. He’s a danger, this one, attacking in fury but always maintaining control. Very, very angry with himself.’
‘Himself?’ said Land in surprise. ‘You mean with the victim.’
‘No. Things have gone wrong for him. The first two victims were dismembered and hidden. Even if he hadn’t planned to kill them, he certainly worked at hiding them. But the third and fourth were attacked with no thought of the consequences.’
‘So now that his housekeeping has been completed, he can go to ground until something drives him to kill again.’ Bryant was tapping an old pipe stem against his false teeth, thinking. The noise irritated everyone. ‘That chap in the Midlands, former nightclub bouncer, just got convicted of murdering seventeen girls over a period of twenty years. That’s what worries me.’
Silence followed as the others tried to figure out what he was talking about.
‘Driven by an unstoppable anger, of course, but something else develops over time. An arrogance born of familiarity. This chap knows the area. He hides in plain sight. He’s a lousy burglar, but he’s accidentally become a good killer. He gets away with it; he kills again. He considers himself invulnerable. He thinks he’s wiping away the traces that lead to him, but in doing so he’s creating another path, one that we can follow.’
‘You’re a very annoying man, Bryant,’ said Land suddenly. ‘You’re like a Blackpool fortune-teller, handing out bits of information without actually helping.’
‘Well, you always have a go at me if I say what I really think.’
‘Good God, if you’ve got any clue as to where we find this man, I think now’s the time to tell us!’
‘All right. First, I think the first two victims are connected by something more than the methodology. There’s the area, for a start. All of the victims have been found within a tight radius. We’ve established that our killer lives right here, knows these streets, knows when they’re busy and when they’re deserted.’
‘If we could access the CCTV cameras around the church and the station we might be able to pick him up,’ suggested Land.
‘He knows how to stay outside of their limits. Besides, it would take days to go through all the cameras and the hours of footage. What did we do before we became so reliant on technology? We managed perfectly well before, and we can again. Second point, he severed the heads for a reason, even if it’s a subconscious one. He knows the history of Pentonville, St Pancras, King’s Cross and Battlebridge. It’s too much of a coincidence that he picked the one place in the city where such specific rites were recorded.’
‘Please don’t suggest he’s performing human sacrifices,’ groaned Land.
‘I didn’t say that. He’s interested merely in saving his own skin, which is why he threw Xander Toth in our path. He knows we’re here.’
‘What?’ Land all but exploded. ‘How do you work that one out?’
‘Look at the map. Caledonian Road, King’s Cross, York Way, the railway line. Islington Met handle the east side; Camden have control of the west and south. Remember Islington had to give Delaney’s body to Camden because the boundary line runs down the middle of the Caledonian Road? I checked the maps at Camden Town Hall; it doesn’t, not quite. The boundary line stops one road back. The two areas don’t meet up. There’s a small gap in the middle that neither of them covers—the west side of the Caledonian Road isn’t patrolled by anyone. That’s where he chose to leave the body, and that’s exactly where we arrived a couple of weeks later. We’ve been asking around, walking the streets, conducting interviews. The local shopkeepers already know about the PCU moving in. If this is our man’s patch, he’ll know, too. The advantage to us is that others must know him. Beneath the commuter crowds this is still a village, with residents, store owners, street vendors, neighbours who see each other every day. You can’t operate here and not be seen.’
‘We’ve been talking to people ever since we arrived,’ Land pointed out.
‘We haven’t asked the right questions before,’ Bryant replied. ‘Who is the area’s most vocal resident? Who knows everything that’s going on?’
‘Toth,’ said Land.
‘Precisely. Toth’s a historian; he runs the local community Web site; he’s made it his business to know about everyone who lives here. We were too busy treating him as a suspect to think of him as a lead. I’m sure Toth knows the identity of the man we’re looking for. And that means our killer knows Toth. And if he’s really planning to clean up all of his loose ends, Toth’s life could also be in danger.’
‘We’d better not find this one dead,’ Land warned. ‘We’ll take my car.’