I started down the ladder – and then stopped.
Done lim hurd mm. Don’t let him hurt me.
I looked at her. Her body, her face, painted with blood. ‘I won’t let them hurt you,’ I said. ‘Not Adrian. Not Eric. Not any more.’
But it seemed to give her no comfort, and then – slowly, inch by inch – she started shaking her head. ‘… nnnnnnn a … is …’
‘Try not to move.’
‘… no … adrrri … nnnn … no … e …’
And as she lay there with her life leaking out of her, something unspoken passed between us – and I realized what she was telling me.
Not Adrian. Not Eric.
She was talking about someone else.
I moved down the ladder, wiping each rung clean with the shirt. At the bottom I looked around: what had I touched? I had about seven or eight minutes before the ambulance arrived – maybe a little more if the traffic was bad.
Downstairs, Wellis was still on the kitchen floor, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling. He was woozy: when he tried to roll over on to his back, he couldn’t. I left him and wiped down the door frames, door handles and walls.
Next, I headed back upstairs, one half of the shirt around my hand, one half tucked into the back of my trousers, and opened the bathroom door. Gaishe was inside, perched on the edge of the bath. As soon as I looked at him, I felt the burn in the centre of my chest. ‘Come here, shithead.’ I grabbed him hard by the arm. His face was still streaked with blood and tears and he looked terrified. A man out of his depth, led astray by someone much worse than him. Now he was as deep in as he could get.
I marched him downstairs and shoved him into the wall at the bottom. He stayed there, just staring off at Wellis, and I realized he was dazed as well as scared.
I can use that.
‘Eric,’ I said. ‘Give me a hand with Adrian. We need to get him out of here before the police arrive.’ He thought he recognized something in my voice – something positive, something he could cling on to – and he came over immediately.
We hoisted Wellis on to his feet, I cut the duct tape at his ankles and wrists, and tore it away from his mouth. Then I told Gaishe to get me a long coat from Wellis’s wardrobe. He did just as I asked. When he returned, we dressed Wellis in it. I buttoned it, and left Gaishe holding him while I did one last circuit of the house. At the bottom of the ladder I told the woman that she was going to be fine, and that the ambulance was on its way. And then, grabbing the crowbar and the duct tape, we all left.
Gaishe was on one side, I was on the other, Wellis was in the middle. Gaishe had blood on his face, I had a crowbar and a shirt tucked into the back of my trousers, Wellis had no shirt or shoes on – but it was still early, not even six, and there was no one around. ‘Are you going to help us?’ Gaishe asked as we got to my car.
‘Yes,’ I lied, and flipped the boot.
I glanced up and down the road. No one watching. No one around. I lined Wellis up, his eyes widening as he continually tried to focus, then I pressed his head down and forced him into the back. He folded easily; he still didn’t have the power to fight me.
‘What are you doing?’ Gaishe said.
‘What does it look like?’
‘You’re putting him in there?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘And you’re going in too.’
He frowned, and then I grabbed him by his neck and jammed him down into the space. He climbed in clumsily, hit his knee and his head, but then finally came to rest next to Wellis. They both looked up at me, one dazed, one scared. Rapists. Animals.
And then I shut them in.
28
8 March | Three Months Earlier
They now had a third photograph to pin to the wall of the incident room. Steven Wilky, Marc Evans and the very latest: a 24-year-old office cleaner called Joseph Symons. He’d been gone eight days by the time his father reported him missing, nine by the time the task force realized they had another victim and had descended on his place in Clerkenwell, a pokey fourth-floor flat in a tower block called Dunkirk House. Healy had given Craw a lift from the station.
Now they were the only ones left in the apartment.
The approach to the flat had been in near darkness – the lights in the hallways out, the ones at the entrance too; broken, vandalized – and Healy stood by himself in the bedroom looking at the bed. Forensics had taken the hair from the pillow, fibres from the sheets and trace evidence from the floor, and finally the flat had a strange kind of silence to it. The faint creaks and groans of the walls and floorboards, the drip of rain on the windowsill, but nothing else.
Healy stepped away from the bed, turned and took in the room. There was no sign of a break-in, which meant – just like Wilky and Evans before him – Symons knew who the Snatcher was. He’d invited him in, maybe innocently, maybe not-so-innocently, but he would have had no idea who he really was, and no sense of what was to come. From there, the case became guesswork. When did the Snatcher strike? How did he suppress his victims? How did he get them out without being seen? Where did he take them? What did he do with them? The press – ravenous, pumped-up and baying for blood – referred to him as a serial killer, but you were only a serial killer if you killed people. All the police had so far were three missing men, all tied together by a single piece of evidence: the hair from their heads, left on their pillows.
For a moment, sudden and uncontrolled panic hit Healy. What if you can’t find him? What if you haven’t got it in you any more? What if this one breaks you like the one before? He took another step back and reached out to the nearest wall, his mind turning over and over like a trawler being rolled across the waves.
He remembered Leanne, his daughter; the way she’d looked when he’d found her body, and the road he’d had to walk to get there. And then he remembered the case before that. The one that had ripped his life, and his marriage, apart: two eight-year-old girls raped and killed down in New Cross, and he’d never been able to find the bastard who did it. It had consumed him, completely and utterly suffocated him, until one day it all came out: he discovered his wife was having an affair and he flipped. In a moment of weakness, a moment that was filled with so much shame and regret he could hardly bear the weight of it, he hit his wife.
Don’t let them see you like this. Don’t show any weakness.
He stepped away from the wall, breathed in and moved to the window in the bedroom. It looked down across the rain-soaked front entrance of the tower block. In a patch of darkness out towards the main road, he could see flashbulbs going off, and cones of light where TV reporters were broadcasting live. Off to the left, where a thin walkway connected this building with the next, people watched, gloved hands on the railing, breath forming above their heads like balls of gauze.
‘You all right?’
He looked around. DCI Melanie Craw was standing in the doorway of the room, head tilted, eyes analysing him. She’d given him his chance, made an unpopular decision, and for that he owed her. But she still looked at him like all the others did: waiting for the moment he said something or did something stupid; the moment he screwed it all up. And sometimes her gaze was even more intense than that: sometimes it felt she was looking right into his head, reading his every thought, and he became worried that she’d figured out what he was doing at the prison.
‘There’s no sign of forced entry anywhere?’ Healy asked.
Craw stepped into the bedroom. ‘No. Symons is just like Wilky and Evans. Our suspect is definitely invited in. Most likely he follows them, gets to know their routines, then initiates a meeting and gains their trust.’