Senseless, page 26
‘They haven’t turned up any witnesses either,’ he admitted.
‘Great,’ Addis said sarcastically. ‘Well, you’d better fill me in on the details of this latest bloody tragedy.’
Jameson took a breath before beginning. ‘We believe the victim is Ruby Richards. White. Thirty-two years old, local woman. Married with a young child.’
‘Wonderful,’ Addis moaned as he slumped into a chair. ‘I assume she fits the profile of the killer?’
‘Yes,’ Jameson told him. ‘Right age group. Slim. Attractive. Was out walking close to the cliffs. Everything fits.’
‘I assume she was raped and murdered in the same way as the others?’ Addis asked, believing he’d answered his own question.
‘Not exactly,’ Jameson told him, making Addis sit upright.
‘Oh?’ he said.
‘She wasn’t mutilated in the same way as the others,’ Jameson explained. ‘And we don’t believe she was sexually assaulted. Her shirt was ripped open, exposing her chest, but no slash marks. Her trousers had been pulled down, but only slightly. Not fully like the others. And he returned to strangulation as the method of killing her. She wasn’t stabbed to death.’
‘Then he was disturbed,’ Addis said, perking up. ‘Which means there must be a witness.’
‘No witnesses, other than a guy called Andrew Stoker, but he’s not telling us much. He says he saw a guy in the clifftop car park close to the time of the attack, but his description is vague and he didn’t take a number plate,’ Jameson said, deflating him. ‘And no reports from any members of the public reporting anything suspicious in the area.’
Addis relaxed back into the chair, tapping his lips with his index finger as he thought for a few seconds before speaking. ‘If you’re convinced he wasn’t disturbed, then why the change in behaviour? I’ve been in charge of SIU long enough to know that this type of offender doesn’t just suddenly alter their behaviour.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Jameson answered unconvincingly.
‘You must have some idea,’ Addis insisted.
‘Maybe,’ he tentatively began, ‘he’s trying to stop.’
‘What?’ Addis asked, sitting bolt upright. ‘Why would a clearly vicious serial killer suddenly decide to stop?’
‘Because he’s got whatever it was he was hoping to get from killing and doesn’t need it anymore,’ he answered. ‘Maybe it took the last killing for him to truly realise it. He had to kill her because she’d seen him but he didn’t need or want to go through with the other things.’
‘Sounds highly unlikely,’ Addis scoffed. ‘Are you sure he’s not some sort of lunatic who is now back on his meds and calming down?’
‘He’s not insane,’ he insisted. ‘Not in the way you’re thinking. He’s always in control. Never raging. I’m not saying he’s sane. If he was, he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing, but he’s careful and calculating. I get the feeling that when we’re finally face to face with him we’ll all be surprised how normal he appears.’
‘One of them,’ Addis said, as if he’d had personal experience of such killers although he hadn’t. ‘But I’m not convinced about your theory that he’s trying to stop. I think you need to seriously consider the possibility that this isn’t down to the man we’re looking for. Perhaps we should kick this back to the local police. I don’t see the need to cause unnecessary panic amongst the public when it’s doubtful it’s the same killer.’
‘It’s the same man,’ Jameson said, trying to persuade him. ‘Trust me. And once Jackson finds out there’s been another murder you can be sure he’ll splash it all over the front page of The World and he won’t be holding back that it’s the same killer. If we try and say it’s not, it’ll come back to bite us.’
‘Jackson,’ Addis spat his name. ‘When I find out who is giving him his information, I’ll finish them.’
‘But until then,’ Jameson told him, ‘we need to assume he knows pretty much everything we do. If not now, then soon.’
‘Well then, you’d better get on with it,’ Addis said, getting to his feet. ‘You need to get ahead of this investigation, Ruben. Instead of always chasing it.’ He strode from the office without waiting for a reply.
‘Shit,’ Jameson muttered under his breath before lifting the photograph of Ruby Richards from his desk, alive and happy. ‘Shit,’ he said again and tossed the photograph amongst the reports.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When he was eighteen years old, Martin Thomas finally left the children’s care home. He decided against doing A-levels and going to university. The thought of the lack of privacy, living in halls of residences or shared houses, didn’t appeal. In order to live as he wanted to live, he needed to live alone. His first step to independence was to get a job as an apprentice with a wind-farm company and rent a small flat. When he wasn’t at work, he spent most of his time alone, although he had a small number of people who were somewhere between friends and associates – no one close. What they didn’t know was that his main motivation for tolerating them at all was so he could observe their behaviour and learn from them – learn how to act like a normal person. It also gave him a veneer of being just like everybody else.
Once he’d completed his apprenticeship, his job came into its own, allowing him to travel all over the south-east alone, discovering a number of different locations that over the years he grew to know very well. Places where his hearing disability was actually an advantage. He could read the lips of others to understand what they were saying, whereas they could neither hear what he was saying or even hear him approaching.
Over the next few years, he continued to grow into a seemingly decent and pleasant young man. Everybody he met liked him, albeit on a superficial level and the company bosses were always pleased with his work. Something that earned him several promotions, although he had no intention of reaching the heights of more senior management and being required to work from an office in headquarters. He needed a lot of time to himself and to be able to search in and around London for suitable locations, preparing for the future. Locations that were away from the wind farms as, although they were perfect in many ways, they were connected to him. Better to hunt elsewhere.
Once in his mid-twenties, the belief in what he needed to do began to cement in his mind. Actions would lead to change, beginning the process of repairing his damaged senses, clearing the way for him to recover what had been stolen from him when he was a child and allow him to feel the things other people could feel that he’d jealously craved for so many years, while at the same time remaining different. Superior. Stronger and smarter. More resilient and cunning. More resourceful and adaptable. More intuitive and instinctive. Merciless and determined. Strategic and relentless. More than just a man, as if his tortuous childhood had caused him to undergo a type of accelerated evolution into an advanced form of human. But it had come at a cost he was no longer prepared to pay and now sought to cheat nature and reclaim things that had been stolen from him by the sacrifice of other living creatures.
He started by strangling a cat with one hand, holding the forlorn creature straight-armed out in front of his face as it hopelessly fought for its life. But he felt nothing other than the scratches it left on his wrist and forearm. Injuries that would have made most people release the animal or should they choose not to, wince and contort at the pain, whereas he only felt a mild stinging sensation as his face remained emotionless and his grip around its throat was unrelenting. He still bore the scars today, although they were lost in the forest of other marks that plagued his skin like a tapestry of his suffering.
The next sacrifice was a small dog. He had cut its throat and watched it writhe and scratch around in confusion. He’d watched the last few seconds of its life until it fell still, barring a few final twitches as the blood from its throat finally stopped pumping. But as with the cat, he felt almost nothing. No emotions were stirred, or dormant senses woken. In that moment he knew that the taking of animals, big or small, were not the path to the reincarnation of his human side. He needed more.
In the end, the answer came almost by accident. When in his early twenties, he travelled to Clacton-on-Sea, on the east coast, to observe how other people behaved on holiday as well as to give his own life a veneer of normality, spending most days walking along the seafront watching the holidaymakers enjoying the feel of the sea breeze on their skin and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, along with the smell of fish and chips cooking and the taste of ice cream. While his damaged nervous system meant he could just about feel the wind on his skin, he couldn’t hear, taste or smell any of the other things they were enjoying. It stirred in him his deep sense of envy. He knew he was born to be special, but he couldn’t understand how God or nature could have given such inferior creatures such an easy path to what were clearly great pleasures that he was denied. It was not enough to understand that he was born to be better than them. He wanted what they had too.
On his last evening in Clacton, he went for a meal alone in a pub that served decent-looking food. He had a steak cooked rare and tried to imagine how it tasted and smelled, using his eyes to feed his imagination. Occasionally he thought he could actually detect a sense of flavour on his tongue, but he couldn’t be sure. He drank it with a glass of the heaviest-looking red wine they had, fascinated by its beautiful deep burgundy colour and oily texture as he again tried desperately to imagine how it could possibly taste, but it was an impossible task. He guessed it tasted like blood, although he didn’t know what that would be like either.
Frustrated and disappointed with the sensationless meal, he headed home, walking through the quieter backstreets to avoid people only to come across the very scene he’d been hoping to avoid. The two young men and the woman, all in their late teens or early twenties, had clearly been drinking for some time and still were – swigging from plastic bottles of cider as they sat on a low stone wall, talking and laughing loudly. He couldn’t hear them, but it was clear by their behaviour that they were drunk, raucous and potentially trouble. Most people would have turned back and found a different route to avoid them, but it wasn’t in his nature to run from a threat.
When he was almost level with them, the two men suddenly jumped from the wall and stood blocking his way. He stopped just in front of them and looked from one to the other without speaking, making the grinning men turn to each other before returning their attention to him.
‘You can’t use this street,’ the smaller of the men told him, speaking in a heavy local accent. ‘This street is ours.’
He said nothing.
‘You a tourist?’ the other man asked. ‘Where you from? London?’
Again, he said nothing.
‘We don’t allow tourists to use our street,’ the smaller one insisted.
‘Yeah,’ his friend backed him up. ‘Unless you pay a tax.’
But he remained unmoved, not looking to push past them or walk away, back the way he’d come.
The smaller man looked at his friend for reassurance before speaking again. ‘Ten pounds,’ he said. ‘For each of us. Including her,’ he added, nodding towards the smiling girl.
Still he said nothing. Did nothing.
‘You fucking deaf or something?’ the smaller man demanded.
The confrontation with them had interested him for a while, but now he tired of it and stepped forward to walk through the two men, only for the bigger man to slap a hand on his chest and prevent him from passing. ‘You’re not going anywhere until you pay.’
In one smooth, lightning-fast move, he grabbed the wrist of the hand on his chest and twisted it, spinning the man around so he was suddenly behind him with the man’s arm now bent high up his own back. A split second later, before either man could react or even speak, he’d grabbed the back of the man’s head by his hair and rammed him face first into the wall the woman was still sitting on, causing his nose and lips to explode. He immediately released him, allowing him to slump to the ground before spinning towards the other man who suddenly realised he needed to do something as he pulled his arm back as far as he could, making a fist, preparing to throw as big a punch as he could. But the silent stranger was too fast and too experienced for him as he beat him to the punch with a short sharp straight right that smashed into the man’s nose with more force than it looked possible given how small a distance his fist had travelled, causing his nose to spread across his face and render him temporarily blind. Thomas didn’t miss the opportunity, stepping forward and landing a sickening punch into the man’s left kidney that immediately dropped him onto one knee. As the blood poured from his nose, he looked up at his assailant, as if pleading for mercy, although what neither he nor anyone else could understand, was that the man standing in front of him had no concept of mercy. A kick he never even saw broke his jaw and another to the side of his head knocked him unconscious.
The threat neutralised, he turned his attention to the other man who was grovelling around on the floor, one hand pressed across his face, trying to clamp the wounds together and control the heavy bleeding. The woman stood frozen with fear, unable to move and only able to scream at the scene unfolding before her, although he couldn’t hear her terror. He kicked the man in the ribs hard enough to lift him off the floor and land on his back as he desperately tried to draw a breath through the pain. Before he had a chance to protect himself, the man he’d never seen before in his life, stamped down so hard on his face that he felt his own teeth crumble from his gums and hit the back of his throat, making him cough and splutter them out and bleed onto the pavement. Through his eyes, misted with pain, he looked up from his stricken position to see the man standing over him. ‘Who are you?’ he managed to mumble before a final stamp in his face sent him mercifully into the darkness of unconsciousness.
Thomas wasn’t even breathing heavily as he slowly turned to the cowering woman before suddenly moving almost unhumanly quickly to close the short distance between them and gripping her throat with one hand, his fingers beginning to squeeze the life from her as she struggled in vain to loosen his hold. The colour began to drain from her face and her eyes bulged as she tried to beg him to stop. He was just able to read her lips well enough to know that she was saying please over and over. Without warning, he released her, no doubt making her believe that her pleas had affected him, persuading him to spare her. But she was wrong. He’d only released her when his highly tuned survival instincts clicked in and told him to allow her and the two men to live. It would have been easy to kill all three then and there, but he hadn’t planned for it. He looked around for CCTV, relieved when he couldn’t see any, but he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been captured on it somewhere close to the scene. If he killed them, his photograph could soon be plastered all over people’s TV screens and on the front page of most newspapers. However, if he let them live no one would be too concerned over a couple of local low lifes and their whore taking a beating, even if they reported it to the police in the first place, which he doubted. He had to let them live. He punched her hard on the point of her chin, knocking her out cold.
A few minutes later he slipped into his hotel, avoiding being seen, like a ghost creeping through the shadows until he was safely back in his room where he headed straight for the bathroom to survey the damage. He was uninjured but covered in blood – far more than he’d imagined. His face, shirt, hands and trousers were all covered with spray from his victims, as were his shoes and socks. He’d been in fights before, but not this serious. The blood of others could betray him. It was a lesson he’d learn from. Always prepare for the blood. He began to strip before something suddenly stopped him. A feeling. A feeling in the pit of his stomach and in his chest. It wasn’t strong, but it was there and it was more than he’d ever felt before. Far more than killing the animals had given him and in that moment he realised what path he needed to take to rediscover the elements of humanity that had been ripped from him. Others would have to sacrifice their humanity to save his. He finished stripping his clothes and placed them in the plastic bag from his room’s bin before taking a long hot shower, scrubbing his skin and hair meticulously clean of any blood or other debris from his victims. He checked that there were no traces of blood left anywhere in the bathroom and dressed in clean clothes before packing his belongings, quietly slipping from the hotel and driving back to his flat in London.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jameson and Jones stood on the opposite side of the post-mortem examination table from Doctor Canning as they all looked down on the body of Ruby Richards. The pathologist gave them a few seconds before beginning.
‘As you can see,’ he broke the silence, ‘the body is relatively unmarked, except the area around her throat, which has clear signs of after-death bruising. I’m confident the full examination will show cause of death was strangulation. There are no signs of a ligature being used or other instruments, so it appears he used his hands. The same as the other victims. But there are no slash marks to her torso, like the others.’
‘We know,’ Jameson told him. ‘We saw her at the scene.’
‘Yes,’ Canning nodded, ‘of course. But there is evidence that her wrists were bound with adhesive tape and her mouth covered with the same. We won’t be able to confirm it’s the same type until it’s examined fully at the lab, but it’s another sign the same man is responsible for her murder. When she came to me, I noticed her lower clothing had been pulled down to a degree.’
‘Probably not enough to allow him to rape her though,’ Jones said.
‘That could well be the case,’ Canning agreed. ‘My initial examination shows no signs of sexual assault or use of a condom, but I’ll take a closer look when I fully examine her, although it certainly appears he was intending to sexually assault her. Was he disturbed?’
‘No,’ Jameson answered. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘We can’t be sure,’ Jones contradicted him. ‘If this is our man and everything indicates that it is, then the only logical explanation why he neither tortured nor raped her is that he got spooked and fled.’
‘Great,’ Addis said sarcastically. ‘Well, you’d better fill me in on the details of this latest bloody tragedy.’
Jameson took a breath before beginning. ‘We believe the victim is Ruby Richards. White. Thirty-two years old, local woman. Married with a young child.’
‘Wonderful,’ Addis moaned as he slumped into a chair. ‘I assume she fits the profile of the killer?’
‘Yes,’ Jameson told him. ‘Right age group. Slim. Attractive. Was out walking close to the cliffs. Everything fits.’
‘I assume she was raped and murdered in the same way as the others?’ Addis asked, believing he’d answered his own question.
‘Not exactly,’ Jameson told him, making Addis sit upright.
‘Oh?’ he said.
‘She wasn’t mutilated in the same way as the others,’ Jameson explained. ‘And we don’t believe she was sexually assaulted. Her shirt was ripped open, exposing her chest, but no slash marks. Her trousers had been pulled down, but only slightly. Not fully like the others. And he returned to strangulation as the method of killing her. She wasn’t stabbed to death.’
‘Then he was disturbed,’ Addis said, perking up. ‘Which means there must be a witness.’
‘No witnesses, other than a guy called Andrew Stoker, but he’s not telling us much. He says he saw a guy in the clifftop car park close to the time of the attack, but his description is vague and he didn’t take a number plate,’ Jameson said, deflating him. ‘And no reports from any members of the public reporting anything suspicious in the area.’
Addis relaxed back into the chair, tapping his lips with his index finger as he thought for a few seconds before speaking. ‘If you’re convinced he wasn’t disturbed, then why the change in behaviour? I’ve been in charge of SIU long enough to know that this type of offender doesn’t just suddenly alter their behaviour.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Jameson answered unconvincingly.
‘You must have some idea,’ Addis insisted.
‘Maybe,’ he tentatively began, ‘he’s trying to stop.’
‘What?’ Addis asked, sitting bolt upright. ‘Why would a clearly vicious serial killer suddenly decide to stop?’
‘Because he’s got whatever it was he was hoping to get from killing and doesn’t need it anymore,’ he answered. ‘Maybe it took the last killing for him to truly realise it. He had to kill her because she’d seen him but he didn’t need or want to go through with the other things.’
‘Sounds highly unlikely,’ Addis scoffed. ‘Are you sure he’s not some sort of lunatic who is now back on his meds and calming down?’
‘He’s not insane,’ he insisted. ‘Not in the way you’re thinking. He’s always in control. Never raging. I’m not saying he’s sane. If he was, he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing, but he’s careful and calculating. I get the feeling that when we’re finally face to face with him we’ll all be surprised how normal he appears.’
‘One of them,’ Addis said, as if he’d had personal experience of such killers although he hadn’t. ‘But I’m not convinced about your theory that he’s trying to stop. I think you need to seriously consider the possibility that this isn’t down to the man we’re looking for. Perhaps we should kick this back to the local police. I don’t see the need to cause unnecessary panic amongst the public when it’s doubtful it’s the same killer.’
‘It’s the same man,’ Jameson said, trying to persuade him. ‘Trust me. And once Jackson finds out there’s been another murder you can be sure he’ll splash it all over the front page of The World and he won’t be holding back that it’s the same killer. If we try and say it’s not, it’ll come back to bite us.’
‘Jackson,’ Addis spat his name. ‘When I find out who is giving him his information, I’ll finish them.’
‘But until then,’ Jameson told him, ‘we need to assume he knows pretty much everything we do. If not now, then soon.’
‘Well then, you’d better get on with it,’ Addis said, getting to his feet. ‘You need to get ahead of this investigation, Ruben. Instead of always chasing it.’ He strode from the office without waiting for a reply.
‘Shit,’ Jameson muttered under his breath before lifting the photograph of Ruby Richards from his desk, alive and happy. ‘Shit,’ he said again and tossed the photograph amongst the reports.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When he was eighteen years old, Martin Thomas finally left the children’s care home. He decided against doing A-levels and going to university. The thought of the lack of privacy, living in halls of residences or shared houses, didn’t appeal. In order to live as he wanted to live, he needed to live alone. His first step to independence was to get a job as an apprentice with a wind-farm company and rent a small flat. When he wasn’t at work, he spent most of his time alone, although he had a small number of people who were somewhere between friends and associates – no one close. What they didn’t know was that his main motivation for tolerating them at all was so he could observe their behaviour and learn from them – learn how to act like a normal person. It also gave him a veneer of being just like everybody else.
Once he’d completed his apprenticeship, his job came into its own, allowing him to travel all over the south-east alone, discovering a number of different locations that over the years he grew to know very well. Places where his hearing disability was actually an advantage. He could read the lips of others to understand what they were saying, whereas they could neither hear what he was saying or even hear him approaching.
Over the next few years, he continued to grow into a seemingly decent and pleasant young man. Everybody he met liked him, albeit on a superficial level and the company bosses were always pleased with his work. Something that earned him several promotions, although he had no intention of reaching the heights of more senior management and being required to work from an office in headquarters. He needed a lot of time to himself and to be able to search in and around London for suitable locations, preparing for the future. Locations that were away from the wind farms as, although they were perfect in many ways, they were connected to him. Better to hunt elsewhere.
Once in his mid-twenties, the belief in what he needed to do began to cement in his mind. Actions would lead to change, beginning the process of repairing his damaged senses, clearing the way for him to recover what had been stolen from him when he was a child and allow him to feel the things other people could feel that he’d jealously craved for so many years, while at the same time remaining different. Superior. Stronger and smarter. More resilient and cunning. More resourceful and adaptable. More intuitive and instinctive. Merciless and determined. Strategic and relentless. More than just a man, as if his tortuous childhood had caused him to undergo a type of accelerated evolution into an advanced form of human. But it had come at a cost he was no longer prepared to pay and now sought to cheat nature and reclaim things that had been stolen from him by the sacrifice of other living creatures.
He started by strangling a cat with one hand, holding the forlorn creature straight-armed out in front of his face as it hopelessly fought for its life. But he felt nothing other than the scratches it left on his wrist and forearm. Injuries that would have made most people release the animal or should they choose not to, wince and contort at the pain, whereas he only felt a mild stinging sensation as his face remained emotionless and his grip around its throat was unrelenting. He still bore the scars today, although they were lost in the forest of other marks that plagued his skin like a tapestry of his suffering.
The next sacrifice was a small dog. He had cut its throat and watched it writhe and scratch around in confusion. He’d watched the last few seconds of its life until it fell still, barring a few final twitches as the blood from its throat finally stopped pumping. But as with the cat, he felt almost nothing. No emotions were stirred, or dormant senses woken. In that moment he knew that the taking of animals, big or small, were not the path to the reincarnation of his human side. He needed more.
In the end, the answer came almost by accident. When in his early twenties, he travelled to Clacton-on-Sea, on the east coast, to observe how other people behaved on holiday as well as to give his own life a veneer of normality, spending most days walking along the seafront watching the holidaymakers enjoying the feel of the sea breeze on their skin and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, along with the smell of fish and chips cooking and the taste of ice cream. While his damaged nervous system meant he could just about feel the wind on his skin, he couldn’t hear, taste or smell any of the other things they were enjoying. It stirred in him his deep sense of envy. He knew he was born to be special, but he couldn’t understand how God or nature could have given such inferior creatures such an easy path to what were clearly great pleasures that he was denied. It was not enough to understand that he was born to be better than them. He wanted what they had too.
On his last evening in Clacton, he went for a meal alone in a pub that served decent-looking food. He had a steak cooked rare and tried to imagine how it tasted and smelled, using his eyes to feed his imagination. Occasionally he thought he could actually detect a sense of flavour on his tongue, but he couldn’t be sure. He drank it with a glass of the heaviest-looking red wine they had, fascinated by its beautiful deep burgundy colour and oily texture as he again tried desperately to imagine how it could possibly taste, but it was an impossible task. He guessed it tasted like blood, although he didn’t know what that would be like either.
Frustrated and disappointed with the sensationless meal, he headed home, walking through the quieter backstreets to avoid people only to come across the very scene he’d been hoping to avoid. The two young men and the woman, all in their late teens or early twenties, had clearly been drinking for some time and still were – swigging from plastic bottles of cider as they sat on a low stone wall, talking and laughing loudly. He couldn’t hear them, but it was clear by their behaviour that they were drunk, raucous and potentially trouble. Most people would have turned back and found a different route to avoid them, but it wasn’t in his nature to run from a threat.
When he was almost level with them, the two men suddenly jumped from the wall and stood blocking his way. He stopped just in front of them and looked from one to the other without speaking, making the grinning men turn to each other before returning their attention to him.
‘You can’t use this street,’ the smaller of the men told him, speaking in a heavy local accent. ‘This street is ours.’
He said nothing.
‘You a tourist?’ the other man asked. ‘Where you from? London?’
Again, he said nothing.
‘We don’t allow tourists to use our street,’ the smaller one insisted.
‘Yeah,’ his friend backed him up. ‘Unless you pay a tax.’
But he remained unmoved, not looking to push past them or walk away, back the way he’d come.
The smaller man looked at his friend for reassurance before speaking again. ‘Ten pounds,’ he said. ‘For each of us. Including her,’ he added, nodding towards the smiling girl.
Still he said nothing. Did nothing.
‘You fucking deaf or something?’ the smaller man demanded.
The confrontation with them had interested him for a while, but now he tired of it and stepped forward to walk through the two men, only for the bigger man to slap a hand on his chest and prevent him from passing. ‘You’re not going anywhere until you pay.’
In one smooth, lightning-fast move, he grabbed the wrist of the hand on his chest and twisted it, spinning the man around so he was suddenly behind him with the man’s arm now bent high up his own back. A split second later, before either man could react or even speak, he’d grabbed the back of the man’s head by his hair and rammed him face first into the wall the woman was still sitting on, causing his nose and lips to explode. He immediately released him, allowing him to slump to the ground before spinning towards the other man who suddenly realised he needed to do something as he pulled his arm back as far as he could, making a fist, preparing to throw as big a punch as he could. But the silent stranger was too fast and too experienced for him as he beat him to the punch with a short sharp straight right that smashed into the man’s nose with more force than it looked possible given how small a distance his fist had travelled, causing his nose to spread across his face and render him temporarily blind. Thomas didn’t miss the opportunity, stepping forward and landing a sickening punch into the man’s left kidney that immediately dropped him onto one knee. As the blood poured from his nose, he looked up at his assailant, as if pleading for mercy, although what neither he nor anyone else could understand, was that the man standing in front of him had no concept of mercy. A kick he never even saw broke his jaw and another to the side of his head knocked him unconscious.
The threat neutralised, he turned his attention to the other man who was grovelling around on the floor, one hand pressed across his face, trying to clamp the wounds together and control the heavy bleeding. The woman stood frozen with fear, unable to move and only able to scream at the scene unfolding before her, although he couldn’t hear her terror. He kicked the man in the ribs hard enough to lift him off the floor and land on his back as he desperately tried to draw a breath through the pain. Before he had a chance to protect himself, the man he’d never seen before in his life, stamped down so hard on his face that he felt his own teeth crumble from his gums and hit the back of his throat, making him cough and splutter them out and bleed onto the pavement. Through his eyes, misted with pain, he looked up from his stricken position to see the man standing over him. ‘Who are you?’ he managed to mumble before a final stamp in his face sent him mercifully into the darkness of unconsciousness.
Thomas wasn’t even breathing heavily as he slowly turned to the cowering woman before suddenly moving almost unhumanly quickly to close the short distance between them and gripping her throat with one hand, his fingers beginning to squeeze the life from her as she struggled in vain to loosen his hold. The colour began to drain from her face and her eyes bulged as she tried to beg him to stop. He was just able to read her lips well enough to know that she was saying please over and over. Without warning, he released her, no doubt making her believe that her pleas had affected him, persuading him to spare her. But she was wrong. He’d only released her when his highly tuned survival instincts clicked in and told him to allow her and the two men to live. It would have been easy to kill all three then and there, but he hadn’t planned for it. He looked around for CCTV, relieved when he couldn’t see any, but he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t been captured on it somewhere close to the scene. If he killed them, his photograph could soon be plastered all over people’s TV screens and on the front page of most newspapers. However, if he let them live no one would be too concerned over a couple of local low lifes and their whore taking a beating, even if they reported it to the police in the first place, which he doubted. He had to let them live. He punched her hard on the point of her chin, knocking her out cold.
A few minutes later he slipped into his hotel, avoiding being seen, like a ghost creeping through the shadows until he was safely back in his room where he headed straight for the bathroom to survey the damage. He was uninjured but covered in blood – far more than he’d imagined. His face, shirt, hands and trousers were all covered with spray from his victims, as were his shoes and socks. He’d been in fights before, but not this serious. The blood of others could betray him. It was a lesson he’d learn from. Always prepare for the blood. He began to strip before something suddenly stopped him. A feeling. A feeling in the pit of his stomach and in his chest. It wasn’t strong, but it was there and it was more than he’d ever felt before. Far more than killing the animals had given him and in that moment he realised what path he needed to take to rediscover the elements of humanity that had been ripped from him. Others would have to sacrifice their humanity to save his. He finished stripping his clothes and placed them in the plastic bag from his room’s bin before taking a long hot shower, scrubbing his skin and hair meticulously clean of any blood or other debris from his victims. He checked that there were no traces of blood left anywhere in the bathroom and dressed in clean clothes before packing his belongings, quietly slipping from the hotel and driving back to his flat in London.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jameson and Jones stood on the opposite side of the post-mortem examination table from Doctor Canning as they all looked down on the body of Ruby Richards. The pathologist gave them a few seconds before beginning.
‘As you can see,’ he broke the silence, ‘the body is relatively unmarked, except the area around her throat, which has clear signs of after-death bruising. I’m confident the full examination will show cause of death was strangulation. There are no signs of a ligature being used or other instruments, so it appears he used his hands. The same as the other victims. But there are no slash marks to her torso, like the others.’
‘We know,’ Jameson told him. ‘We saw her at the scene.’
‘Yes,’ Canning nodded, ‘of course. But there is evidence that her wrists were bound with adhesive tape and her mouth covered with the same. We won’t be able to confirm it’s the same type until it’s examined fully at the lab, but it’s another sign the same man is responsible for her murder. When she came to me, I noticed her lower clothing had been pulled down to a degree.’
‘Probably not enough to allow him to rape her though,’ Jones said.
‘That could well be the case,’ Canning agreed. ‘My initial examination shows no signs of sexual assault or use of a condom, but I’ll take a closer look when I fully examine her, although it certainly appears he was intending to sexually assault her. Was he disturbed?’
‘No,’ Jameson answered. ‘It doesn’t look like it.’
‘We can’t be sure,’ Jones contradicted him. ‘If this is our man and everything indicates that it is, then the only logical explanation why he neither tortured nor raped her is that he got spooked and fled.’
