‘We had him on the rack there. Why did we stop?’ Tina asked when they were out in the corridor.
‘There’s been a development. DC Grier just called through on the earpiece. Apparently, there’s something we need to see.’
‘Any details?’
‘No,’ he said, looking at her seriously, ‘but I don’t like the sound of it.’
Five
The incident room on the fourth floor of Holborn station, where CMIT had been carrying out the Night Creeper murder inquiry, was absolutely silent as Tina and MacLeod entered.
Half a dozen officers, all members of Andrew Kent’s arrest team, were gathered in a loose circle around a widescreen Apple Mac laptop on a desk in the middle of the room. DC Grier stood closest to the desk, his features pale and drawn, his prominent Adam’s apple, still bruised from its encounter with Kent’s hand, visibly pulsating, as if he was trying to keep something down. The expressions on the faces of the other officers present — a grim mixture of nauseated, depressed, tense and stoical — told the same story. Whatever they’d just witnessed had affected every one of them, and the eyes of DC Rodriguez were wet with tears.
‘What have we got then?’ asked DCI MacLeod, his soft Edinburgh burr somehow easing the tension in the air. There was a quiet decency about MacLeod that naturally drew people to him, as did his air of calm unflappability, that made you look beyond the beer belly, the thinning grey hair and unfashionable moustache, and see only a natural leader. Once again, Tina was glad she worked for him.
‘We’ve found stuff on here,’ sighed Grier, running a hand roughly across his face as if he were trying to remove the memory of whatever it was. ‘Films.’
‘What kind?’ asked Tina, feeling a twitch of morbid excitement.
‘Footage of the murder of two of the victims. It looks like he filmed it himself.’ Grier paused. ‘It’s extremely graphic.’
‘It’s more than that,’ said DS Simon Tilley, normally an exuberant copper with a big personality and a laugh like a bass drum, but who was also the father of two young children. ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’
MacLeod took a deep breath. A father himself, he clearly had little appetite for the task ahead, but was far too professional to let that stop him. ‘We’d better take a look then.’
He turned to Tina, his expression suggesting she didn’t have to watch if she didn’t want to. She noticed some of the others looking at her, including Grier and Rodriguez, and had this feeling they were willing her to back out of it.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told MacLeod bluntly without looking at them. ‘I can take it.’
‘I can’t,’ said Grier, getting to his feet. ‘Not again. Just press the play button when you’re ready to begin.’
There were murmurs of agreement from the other officers and they moved away from the desk. Although they remained in the incident room, it seemed to Tina as though they were keeping as far away from the laptop as possible, as if whatever was on it was somehow infectious.
MacLeod leaned forward and pressed the button on the screen. Then he and Tina stood side by side as the screen lit up to reveal a lengthways shot of a young woman lying on a bed. Tina immediately recognized her as the final victim, Adrienne Menzies, a thirty-three-year-old accountant from Highgate with hair the same dark colour and style as her own, and whose DNA was on the hammer found at Kent’s apartment. She remembered the bed’s expensive yet old-fashioned teak headboard, which she later found out had been handmade by Adrienne’s father. It was always the little details that stayed with you, even amid the horror. And the horror here was unrelenting.
Adrienne was naked and bound to the bed with black PVC bondage straps of the kind Kent had used in all but one of his murders, and her mouth was gagged with duct tape. The picture quality was very good and Tina could make out the bruises and scratches on her thighs and round her breasts. The camera moved in slow, jerky movements more akin to a homemade film as the person holding it walked carefully round the edge of the bed, filming Adrienne’s vain struggle to free herself from the bonds that kept her firmly in place. Beneath the gag, her muffled cries of fear grew steadily more desperate and her eyes widened and bulged as if the fear in them was a living thing trying to squeeze its way out.
The cameraman stopped moving and focused in on her face so that it filled the screen entirely with a pleading expression Tina found hard to bear because she knew exactly what was about to happen to this pretty young woman who, until a few hours before this, had lived a generally happy, ordinary life with family and friends who cared for her. Tina had been at the murder scene. She had stood in that bedroom, looking down at the unrecognizable face in a mask of coagulated blood; the thick splatters on the bed linen and the walls; the long smear only just visible on the teak headboard. .
The camera panned out and the screen suddenly went black. Tina’s mouth was dry and she was conscious that she was rubbing her hands together with such force that it was almost painful. She needed a drink. More than she’d needed one in ages. A bottle of good Rioja with a couple of vodka chasers. Anything just to forget about all this.
The screen lit up again, and this time the camera had been placed in a fixed position about three feet away from Adrienne’s head, and slightly above it — most likely on a bedside table. Tina couldn’t remember if Adrienne had had a bedside table or not. Her head swung from side to side, the moans loud beneath the gag. There was music playing in the background. ‘Beautiful Day’ by U2. Only just audible. Tina would never be able to listen to that song again without being reminded of Adrienne Menzies’ bloody murder.
The hammer came out of nowhere, striking Adrienne full in the face, only the head and the top of the handle visible.
Tina flinched and turned away. She’d seen some terrible things in her career, including a young woman being shot dead in front of her, but this was somehow worse, because it felt sickeningly voyeuristic, almost as if she was giving the killer her tacit support by watching.
She could hear the crunching sound of the hammer as it struck Adrienne again and again, but it wasn’t that sound that Tina would remember. It was the rasping, gurgling wail of pain and terror that Adrienne made in time with her tortured but surprisingly deep breathing as she lay dying.
Tina forced herself to turn back, knowing that it was part of her job to view the evidence. She kept her eyes rigidly on the screen, her world reduced to this laptop and the savagery being played out on it.
It seemed to last for an interminably long time, although she found out later that the film was only seven minutes and twenty seconds long, and it involved the killer doing other things to his victim, terrible sexual things that she recalled from the autopsy reports. And throughout it all there was not a single glimpse of him, not even a gloved hand at the end of the hammer. Even in the midst of his bloodlust he was being careful and controlled in his actions, and when he’d finished, and what was left of Adrienne Menzies was no longer moving, the camera shut off abruptly. Just like that.
Tina swallowed hard, and for a number of seconds continued to stare at the blank screen, conscious of how hard and fast her heart was beating — a thought that made her feel ashamed. Beside her, she could hear DCI MacLeod’s laboured breathing. Then he stepped forward and shut the laptop’s lid, as if by doing so he could shut out the horror they’d just witnessed.
‘Good God,’ he said quietly. ‘What drives some people?’
There was no answer to this. All Tina knew for sure was that she’d met far too many of them in her police career, and the crimes they committed never got any easier to handle. More than once in recent months, her parents and brother, still reeling from the fact that she’d killed a man in the line of duty, and even more horrified that she’d joined the team tasked with tracking down a serial killer, had suggested that her job was doing her more harm than good. They were almost certainly right, yet Tina was capable neither of leaving the career that she seemed to love and loathe in equal measure, nor of coping with its constant pressures.