High John the Conqueror, page 28
‘The serial killer, of course, Terry. The one explanation it was always most likely to be once we had ruled those other ones out.’
‘You have a serial killer? Are you serious?’
‘No, not yet, but I don’t need one, not as proof that I am right anyway. It’s only a matter of time before we or someone else will get hold of the bastard, and then you better hold me back, because I’ll tear him from his guzzle to his zatch.’
‘Then what do you have?’
‘What I have, is what you’ve been looking for.’ Orridge jabs his cigar at me. ‘Bodies. Bodies of course. I have the mispers, or what remains of them, the poor sods. I have your bodies, and now we have our crime. We know what we are dealing with at last, thank God,’ he says, addressing our audience as much as me.
‘Easy, Max. Aren’t you over-egging the pudding a little…’
‘You be quiet, Dexter,’ Orridge points the cigar at Christopherson, who is lurking up the other end of the trailer. ‘I’ve been good to you, but you misstepped. This has got nothing to do with you now.’
‘When did this breakthrough occur?’ I ask. ‘You might have thought of telling me in real time.’
‘I tried that, but your and Red Riding Hood’s phones were turned off.’
‘It’s true, Terry,’ says Tamla. ‘I just needed the sleep.’
‘This is last night, then?’
Max nods. ‘Last night, yeah.’
‘What happened? Take me through it.’
‘I got a tip off, not one of my regular sources, a voice I don’t recognise on a burner mobile…’
‘I thought you knew everyone?’
‘I do. But I can’t be expected to remember them all, especially if they’re trying hard to not be recognised, which this particular voice was. Gave me nothing but a location, a copse off a drove way that runs behind Wick, that tiny hamlet near Downton, joining it up to Whitsbury. Mainly used by off-roaders, farm vehicles, the occasional fly-tipper, but a nice and deserted spot. Anyway, he says…’
‘He?’ I ask.
‘Yeah, he was a man — I could grasp that much. Woke me up, he did. I was all settled for an early one because of today. He says there’s a decomposing body halfway down the track by a burnt out old Outlander, just tucked into a little woody bit between the two main paths, and signs of fresh digging too. Well that was all I needed for the alarm bells to get going…’
‘Haven’t we had any teams search down there?’
‘May have, may not. There’s been a lot of ground to cover and we haven’t had the men or time to get everywhere yet.’
‘He’s right about that,’ says Christopherson. ‘There hasn’t even been any public search parties organised.’
‘And now we don’t need them, thank God,’ says Orridge. ‘This spot, and I take no pleasure in saying it, is journey’s end for our mispers. So anyway, I got on straight down there. It was as the source said. A body, quite fresh I’d say from the state of it, and then shallow graves, a few just covered in branches and leaves, no big effort to disguise anything, not rushed either — you get the feeling he was confident about not being caught. Which made me think there may have been something in what you said after all, Terry…’
‘Very generous of you. How do you mean?’
‘I give credit where it is due. Whoever offed this lot didn’t think we were going to miss them enough to look very far or thorough, that’s true, as whoever did it didn’t bother to go very hard covering their tracks. Like I say, my guess is that he either thought he would get away with it, or didn’t care if he didn’t.’
‘So what exactly do we have?’
‘One fresh kill and bones, lots of them, taken apart by animals, foxes and what not. In a terrible state most of them are, and they’re spread all over the place. I only picked up a small sample of debris, not half of what was out there.’
‘You shouldn’t have picked up any of it all.’
‘Easy to be wise after the event when you were safely in bed. What if our chum came back and moved the lot while I was away, because he’d been watching me all the while? You have to trust instinct.’
‘What about the body? Not long dead you say?’
‘A bloke. Maybe a week or so since he was in the land of the living. A bit of his dick is still there. But with half his head sliced off, which doesn’t exactly help with a positive identification if you’re about to ask me who he is!’ There are knowing laughs round the room. ‘And the other half the birds have had a go at, crows I’d say, carrion scavengers, clean eaten most of the remaining face, bleach poured all over him and no hands to fingerprint, lopped off at the wrists, all rolled in a carpet. Very nasty, cause of death could be anything. He’s resting at the morgue at the hossie now. And the bones are with forensics for all they can do with them. Looked to me like our suspect could be some kind of cannibal. Some of the bites on that body might have been made by a human, if that’s what you’d call the animal who did this, though that’s for others to determine. But a pal I have up there, that was the first thing he said when I showed him the marks.’
‘You have any idea how many bodies might have been left in the wood?’
‘God knows. Could have been a Civil War battlefield for their ubiquity.’
‘And “headless” — he’s at Odstock now?’
‘Safe and sound at last, cold packing in the ice box.’
‘Jesus,’ says one of the uniforms, ‘it’s just fucking beyond the pale, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, sickening is the word, most absolutely bloody sickening,’ Orridge adds, looking at me meaningfully, his tag-line for South Today safely laminated, ‘a horrific and completely unforgivable crime.’
‘What do you think?’ I turn to Tamla. ‘Shall we have a look?’
‘Have to,’ she says.
Orridge stirs in his chair, suddenly agitated. ‘Best cremate the lot in time I say. There’s no helping them now. Or making sense out of that jumble.’
‘Now, now, Max. It is far too early to jump to conclusions.’
‘But I saw it all. You didn’t!’
‘Which is exactly why I’m on my way to the hospital now…’
‘Save yourself the bother. There’s bound to be more of them popping up now we’ve found the first — you know how it goes.’
‘I do.’
‘So what’s the point of going now?’
‘As you say, Max. Instinct.’
‘Good luck to you, then. A complete waste of time I say.’
‘You’re coming too,’ I retort, ‘unless someone you know has already gone on and squeezed our corpse into an oven with last night’s dinner.’
‘What the bloody hell do you mean by that? There’s no point now, we’ve got the Queen and…’ Orridge starts to his feet and looks genuinely discomforted at the thought of losing more of his day to this relative triviality. ‘…I mean…’
‘He’s there, isn’t he?’
‘…Who?’
‘Your half-headless corpse,’ I say.
‘Of course he is, but I need to get ready for the Queen, you know. We’ve put this thing to bed for the moment, parked it as it were, and it can be revisited later. But the Queen, she’s only here for one afternoon…’ Orridge obfuscates.
‘We’ve plenty of people to turn up for her, Max. She’s a popular assignment, whereas we’re the ones that do the jobs the other fellows can’t, aren’t we? What could be more important with a serial killer running about than tying up loose ends, lest something happen to Her Majesty?’
Orridge looks about the room, but there is no sympathy for his predicament, only the curiosity of the vacillating centre that cannot wait to find out what will happen next. He is coming with me and he knows it.
‘Max, there is a kind of view of policing that sees some crimes as so traumatic that it doesn’t matter who you catch for them, just so long as they go away, bring closure, and then never need to be thought of again. You might think this is just such a crime. But that doesn’t just show contempt for the victims; it shows solidarity with the criminal, because then you and he — are on the same side.’
‘What bollocks are you spouting?’ Orridge splutters.
‘I’ll drive,’ says Tamla, pulling open the door. A current of clean air sweeps purposefully through the trailer with the briskness of a new invention, and I see something in Max’s eyes that reassures me as nothing else has.
Panic.
*
Eileen has never been the sort of woman who thinks she has closed a door only to find it open, and nor is her daughter, who is her twin sister in practical matters. The front door, never the most robust of objects, has been forced off its lock and the mechanism broken. It has also been shut in such a way as to look closed until it responds to her slightest touch, and pops back all too readily.
She knows at once that it would be safest if she walked straight back down her path again and checked in with her cousin who lives on the opposite side of the road. The woman is already looking after the Pertwee children, martyr that she is, and she would doubtless tell Eileen to call the police. But since Eileen has fallen in love with a policeman, she does not know where she stands with that organisation anymore, if ever she did, and she does not want to get her lover into trouble by bringing attention to herself, especially not today, so whatever is going on, she realises, must be faced by her alone. Eileen drops her overnight bag by the door, leaving it ajar, and steps into her house. Inside everything is as it should be, or at least as it was when she last paid any attention to it, and she is about to grasp false consolation with both hands, gratefully, as she has a shift starting in four hours and all she desires now is to sleep, when she hears a fit of giggles coming from her living room, complicit and secretive, malicious and uncaring, and careless in regard to its discovery: whatever is making this noise knows she is listening and enjoys that knowledge.
Eileen understands she should really turn tail and run now; there is still time to make a clean break to the door. Every instinct of hers loudly announces this course, all save one: her pride. To be driven out of her own house, in light of what she believes has happened to her family and to others, is an impulse that would have her hiding for the rest of her days. It would be better for it to all end suddenly on a high, for she has never been this happy before, than sully the last few days by becoming a self-identifying coward. God knows, she has met some pleasant snivelling weaklings in her time, but you always despise yourself for ever trusting one, making plans with them or waking up in their company.
Very slowly, Eileen enters the living area, resisting the spur to simply call out and challenge the intrusion, which is always a sign that, beneath the bravado, you are bricking it. Although there is no sound now, she is undoubtedly in the presence of others, she can feel them there waiting for her. In her hand is a can of Mace her lover has given her, and she has faith in the damage it can do to the first wave of an attack, after which she has her entire body to fall back on, before she has to contemplate anything so desperate as screaming for help.
Disconcertingly, though she is positive she heard the laughter coming from here, the living room is completely empty, and just as she is about to check the adjoining kitchen, which really is too small to hide anything, she notices a trickle of liquid gathering at the foot of the drawn curtain, which is the way she leaves them when she goes out these days. The curtain shakes a little and there is more suppressed laugher. Eileen has seen and smelt so many things that do not exist lately that she can hardly believe her eyes, as she watches a small pool grow in volume, to the accompaniment of the same idiot laughter, gruff and disrespectful, no longer willing to even contain itself. Tearing the curtain right off its rails, she drags it away from the windows, back over the sofa.
Standing there, carelessly urinating with diabolic smirks on their faces, penises pointed towards her, are two well-built, but short, young men in their mid-twenties, recognisable to her as the beaters on a local shoot, also faces on the bare-knuckle boxing scene, failed suitors to her daughter and occasional visitors to Iggy’s caravan, now ransacked and torn to pieces in her garden. Fortunately, the curtain has absorbed the initial force of their collective trajectory, and despite their cheerful jeering, by the time they register an angry woman brandishing a can of tear gas, their jet stream is no more than the trickle of a pair of ineffectual shower roses.
‘I know you two cunts!’ Eileen shrieks.
‘Easy now!’ one laughs, conspicuously not putting his penis away, rather looking to manually harden it into a more statuesque posture, his brother more warily shifting his out of view.
‘You filthy pigs,’ she says, shaking the can hard. Eileen is not going to make the same mistake the big talkers do in the films, chattering away a prime opportunity for effective violence that might settle things in their favour, and taking aim, she sprays point blank into the first one’s eyes, his brother foolishly staring at her in disbelief, and so wide open for the same treatment seconds later.
Eileen drops the can, somehow she has already emptied it. Both men are on the floor at her feet cursing her loudly, and that is before she takes the opportunity to stamp on one set of fingers, and grind down on the other, quickly stamping on the ear of the boy closest to her, and kicking the other in the neck. The woeful noise they make could even call in the cavalry, and Eileen is about to congratulate herself on a job well done, when she feels fat sausage fingers grasping her throat from behind, squeezing dangerously, and the stench of rotting vines and unwashed stone floors overpowering her will to resist.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ says Swillcut. ‘You’ve met my nephews, the most unfortunate of boys at the best of times. Only look at them now! Hopeless, absolutely hopeless!’
Eileen’s disgust, outrage and cold fury has passed into the hands of brute inevitability, wielded by one who offers no choice, to resist is to die. There are no odds now, she is their prisoner and she must make plans as a captive would. Life is too good to fight to the death over. She does not want to quit at the top or go out like this. She only wants to see Terry again — and to do whatever it takes to make that happen.
‘Wait until we dose you up,’ chuckles Swillcut, dragging Eileen out through the back door into the garden. ‘Old John will wear you, wear you and your mind!’
*
‘Why did you do it, Uncle Silas?’
‘What?’ Orridge barks back.
I let the question sink in before repeating it, angry that I could have been frightened of anything so farcical. ‘Why, Silas? You were coasting, playing nice safe shots. All you had to keep doing was sit tight and let your mates take care of everything. Just keep playing dumb, throwing the odd red herring into the mix and generally getting in our way without looking like you were. No more than the usual. But this? Acting on your own initiative has never been your bag. What a fuck up to start thinking otherwise now.’
We are stood over what remains of the remains of Nick the Well, the corpse easily identifiable by his badge and the rump of the jacket, which though a bloody shredded mess, still boasts the unique hallmarks that once made it so unmistakable in life. In the interests of privacy, and so as to not distress anyone called in to identify a deceased loved one, the body has been laid out for us in the secular ‘quiet area’ beside the hospital chapel, lending the corpse an arid dignity that its former owner struggled to reach in life.
‘What the fuck? What’re you on, Terry?’ Orridge barks through the handkerchief he is affecting to hold over his nose, lest our close proximity to murder threaten to overcome his nerves.
‘The mother of all unforced errors, Max! You should know — you’re the one who made it.’
‘Speak the English? I don’t understand bullshit.’
‘This is a fucking mess isn’t it, Max? Or Silas? Which is it, which one is the real you? And I’m not just talking about the body here, I mean the whole shoddy hole-ridden thing. Really, it’s so poor I’m actually shocked you had the brass balls to try it on at all.’
‘For the life of me, what’s he on?’ Orridge appeals to Tamla. ‘I have not the foggiest fucking idea what you are talking about!’
‘You heard me, I’m embarrassed for you, Max, plain embarrassed.’
‘Has your friend gone completely mad this time? He needs his head checked,’ Max tries to grab Tamla’s arm, who brushes him off.
‘You can leave us now,’ Tamla says to the embarrassed student nurse, who, having led us here, does not need to be told twice. ‘What was that you were saying, Max?’
‘He’s mad!’ Orridge says gesticulating at me wildly with his handkerchief. ‘Finally totally lost the plot and his marbles into the bargain! I don’t need to stand around and hear this shit.’
‘Oh you do,’ says Tamla. ‘Best humour him until he’s finished.’
‘I know Wiltshire PD can be pretty sloppy — Christ, you know that too — but even our lot would have been able to see through this mess,’ I say. ‘How did you think you were going to get away with it? No, don’t tell me, you actually thought that your friends in high places would cover for you? Was that it?’
‘He’s bloody mad!’ Max enthuses. ‘He needs a full fucking medical!’
‘What gets me is how you failed to identify this corpse as Nicholas Toll to start with. Nick the Well. One of your snitches, isn’t he? That’s a pretty glaring omission for someone with eyes and a memory.
‘For Christ’s sake, Terry. Look at the bloody state of him! Who’s going to recognise that poor sod from this mess…’ — Orridge points at the corpse — ‘…and it was dark, I told you… and I didn’t get to see him this end. I was busy with the paperwork…’
‘Come on, Max. There’s a badge on that jacket that is as good as his name, rank and number.’
‘There wasn’t time for that! We needed to bring him in before the foxes got to him again…’
‘Serial killer, Max. I thought it was a serial killer that did for him, not a fox.’
‘You what?’
