Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Luke Delaney 2018

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Roy Bishop/Arcangel Images

Luke Delaney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007585762

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780007585786

Version: 2019-03-01

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Two Weeks Later

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Luke Delaney

Keep Reading…

About the Publisher

Dedication

I’d like to dedicate this book to my brothers and sisters: Kirsty, Cathy, John and Alex. Thanks for always being so supportive, funny and caring. You’re a pretty cool bunch.

Luke Delaney

1

William Dalton was glad to be alone in the lift that jerked and rocked its way from the platforms in the depths of the Borough Underground station towards the streets of Southwark high above. The shiny metal walls of the large steel box reflected his image from all sides. There was no way to escape his own dishevelled appearance. Only eighteen years old, but the ravages of crack cocaine and living without a home had taken a heavy toll. His white skin had taken on a yellow tinge, his blue eyes were faded and sunken, his fair hair unkempt and tangled. At least with the lift to himself he didn’t have to worry about disapproving or pitiful looks from the more fortunate or worry that it was his odour that made them contort their faces or cover their noses with sweeter smelling hands.

The steel cube jolted to a stop and the doors scraped apart. Quickly he moved through the ticket area, nodding to the guard he recognized from previous days and nights, and used his treasured Oyster card to open the barrier and head into the freezing night streets of this ancient part of London. He moved as fast as he could along Marshalsea Road, only looking up occasionally to check for any possible threats. The money he’d earned from a hard day’s begging in London’s West End was carefully hidden in the crotch of his underpants; the last place anyone would put their hands – or so he hoped, although he knew other beggars desperate for cash would not hesitate to search everywhere. The only other serious risk was gangs of drunks or groups of feral youths who might decide to kick him to death purely for entertainment, but it was late and the night was bitterly cold – like only January can be – so the streets were practically deserted.

As he scuttled towards his current home – an abandoned garage at the back of a low-rise residential block – he was oblivious to the faded detritus of Christmas hanging from some of the lampposts, and the torn, dirty streamers and decorations that adorned the windows and doors of the flats he passed, fairy lights forlornly trying to cling to a happier, less bleak time. He turned into Mint Street and was soon at the garage that served as home. He could have stayed in the West End, but that would have meant sleeping on a bed of cardboard in a shop doorway till he was kicked awake by frustrated employees or owners. He moved some corrugated metal sheets aside and slipped into the garage, pulling them back into place behind him as he took a small torch from his pocket and surveyed the interior, relieved to see his few possessions were still where he’d left them. With a sense of urgency, he turned on both his camping lantern and a battery-powered outdoor heater. Its effectiveness was minimal, but it took the bitterness from the air and provided a comforting, almost homely glow. He rubbed his hands and began to search the garage for food he’d been given by donors who wanted to help but didn’t want to give him cash. On a night like this he was grateful for the food and was soon devouring a packet of biscuits as if it was his last meal.

After he’d retrieved the cash bag from its hiding place he settled down to count his daily earnings on the old broken car seat that served as his sofa, the foam protruding from gaping wounds in the vinyl cover. He pushed another biscuit into his mouth and tipped the money next to him on the seat, pushing the coins around with the tips of his fingers, satisfied at a glance that he had enough to take to his dealer tomorrow to replenish the supply he was about to use. He wiped the mix of saliva and crumbs from his lips, gathered the coins back into the bag and carried it to the wall at the back of the garage. His fingers traced the outline of a loose brick – his secret brick – and began working away at the edges until they gained sufficient purchase to pull it free and lower it to the ground.

Listening hard, he slid his hand into the hole and searched inside the cavity until his fingers touched the plastic bag he’d hidden there. He lifted it out and then replaced the brick before heading back to the sofa and making himself comfortable. As delicately as if he were handling surgical instruments, he removed the contents and placed them in a neat line in front of him: a tiny clip-seal plastic bag containing three small waxy rocks of crack, a glass pipe to smoke them with and a lighter to heat them.

Carefully he set one of the rocks on the end of the homemade pipe, placing the other end between his lips and raising the lighter towards the translucent pebble – not rushing, enjoying the moment before his world changed, for a few hours at least, from rank misery to ecstasy. But as he drew his thumb firmly over the flint of the cheap lighter to produce a spark, his head snapped around. He was sure he’d heard a noise outside. Not the normal wild noises of the night he’d grown used to hearing – the screech of a catfight or the scavenging of a fox – but something different. The clumsy noise that only another human would make.

For almost twenty seconds he sat frozen in place, his head cocked so that his ear pointed towards the entrance. He was beginning to doubt he’d heard anything, until suddenly, terrifyingly, the sound came again: unwary feet tripping over something on the ground. Another homeless person? Another drug addict? Someone who’d followed him or who’d been watching the garage, waiting for his return? Someone planning to lay claim to all his prized possessions – maybe even the garage itself? In a panic he scrambled for the six-inch kitchen knife he kept under the sofa, squeezing its thick rubber handle hard – the feel of it in his palm calming him and making him feel stronger and less vulnerable. He reminded himself he’d been surviving on the streets since he was sixteen and had yet to be seriously turned over or battered. If someone was coming for him, he’d give them what they deserved.

He moved silently towards the entrance of the garage, hoping to startle his would-be attacker by suddenly calling out: ‘I don’t know what the fuck you want, but I’ve got a serious fucking blade. You fuck with me, I’ll fucking cut you up, man.’

His bold words made him feel more confident and stronger, but it was a fragile power, fading by the second as his words met with silence. Again he started to question whether he’d imagined the noise, or whether it might have been a stray dog looking for an easy meal. But until he could be sure there was nothing out there, he knew he wouldn’t be able to relax and enjoy the blissful escape he had planned.

Forced on by the need to know, he began to pull back the makeshift front door, continually cursing under his breath until he was able to look out into the night, the darkness illuminated slightly by the glow of the city’s light. It had begun to rain; freezing pellets of sleet lashed his face, stinging his skin and making it hard to see as he peered through squinted eyes. Blinking rapidly, he wiped the water from his face with a sweep of his hand and looked up to the starless sky, opening his mouth to catch a few drops on his tongue – like he used to do when he was a child.

A smile began to spread across his lips until suddenly it was smashed away as something hit him hard across the back of the head – the blow powerful enough to crack his skull and knock him semi-conscious to the ground, but not enough to kill him. His befuddled mind was struggling to work out what could have happened when he became aware that he was moving; someone was dragging him backwards across the ground into the garage. There were no sounds of exertion; whoever it was seemed able to move him with ease. He felt his lower legs being dropped to the floor and moments later he heard the scrape of the board being replaced across the entrance, the noise of the rain outside fading to a quiet hiss.

After a few seconds he’d recovered enough to slightly open his eyes and was immediately aware that someone was circling him, first one way and then the other, like a tiger moving in on his prey. He tried to move but instantly felt a kick to his stomach that made him double up with pain. As he lay clutching his belly and trying not to vomit, his assailant crouched by his side and a gloved hand reached out to seize a handful of hair in a vice-like grip. His head was twisted around until he was looking into his attacker’s face, but the features were hidden in the depths of his hoodie so all Dalton could see were shadows, as if his torturer had no face at all. Even so, there seemed something familiar about the figure crouched next to him, although in his swirling confusion he couldn’t make a connection between this nightmare and anything that had existed in the real world.

After an age of silence, Dalton managed to draw sufficient breath to mumble, ‘Who are you? Want do you want?’

The reply came from deep within the darkness where a face should have been as the attacker, by some sleight of hand, produced a vicious-looking knife – long and thick, with a serrated edge like the lower jaw of a piranha. He held the blade close to Dalton’s face. ‘I want them all to know – I want them all to know who did this.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Dalton whimpered – his eyes fixed on the knife. ‘Did what?’

The attacker’s hand moved fast, the knife slicing deep into Dalton’s neck, opening a gaping wound through which the air in his lungs rushed out, mixing with the pooling blood. But the man who would soon kill him had been careful not to sever the carotid artery. He didn’t want him to die. Not yet. For now, he wanted silence. He wanted Dalton to be alive so he could see the terror and horror in his eyes before he allowed him the blissful release of death.

‘It’s time,’ the voice from the shadow told him. ‘Time to show them all.’

2

Detective Superintendent Featherstone entered the main office of the Special Investigations Unit in New Scotland Yard and made his way to the goldfish bowl of a room that belonged to Detective Inspector Sean Corrigan. He opened the door without knocking and tossed a pink cardboard file marked ‘confidential’ on to Corrigan’s desk to grab his attention. Sean flicked the file open before looking at Featherstone, who’d slumped into the seat opposite clutching another pink folder, and then his eyes returned to the file where he was confronted by crime scene photographs of William Dalton – his throat cut and face disfigured with dried blood congealed around his gaping mouth. He flicked through the first few photographs, making a special note of the victim’s hands, from which the fingernails had been removed, leaving behind bloody stumps. Sean winced and looked away for a second.

‘I hope he was dead before he had his nails pulled out,’ he said.

‘And before he had his teeth removed,’ Featherstone added, making Sean look up. ‘The blood and swelling in and around his mouth was caused when our killer extracted some of his teeth using a combination of knife and, most probably, pliers – too early to say for sure; nothing was found at the scene.’

Sean nodded to show he understood. ‘Who was he?’

‘William Dalton,’ Featherstone answered. ‘Eighteen years old, homeless and addicted to crack. Home was a disused garage in Mint Street, Southwark – that’s where he was killed. He sustained a significant injury to the back of his head, and then there’s the damage caused by removal of the teeth and fingernails, but that wasn’t what killed him. There were two distinct wounds to his neck and throat: his throat was cut – straight through the trachea – which wouldn’t necessarily have killed him, but the second wound sliced open his carotid artery. He bled to death, or at least that’s what it looks like. Won’t know for sure until the post-mortem.’

Again Sean looked down at the photographs and then to Featherstone. ‘Unusual and significant injuries,’ he admitted, ‘but why give Special Investigations the case? He could have been in debt to a particularly nasty drug dealer. Maybe they tortured him to find out if he had any drugs or cash hidden away. Teeth. Fingernails. All looks like torture.’ He didn’t tell Featherstone about the images the crime scene photos had conjured up in his mind – a madman stabbing and pulling at the victim’s teeth and nails, his face contorted with the effort, yet in control. Unafraid. Calm.

‘Firstly,’ Featherstone explained, ‘Assistant Commissioner Addis is aware of the case and has insisted that you take it on. His apologies, by the way. He’s away at a conference in Bramshill, otherwise he’d have briefed you in person.’

‘And …?’

‘And,’ Featherstone told him, leaning forward and tossing the other file on to his desk, ‘this isn’t his first kill.’

Sean tentatively opened the new file and was again greeted by crime scene photographs: a young woman’s body lying on the wet ground behind a large wheelie bin. Other photographs showed close-ups of wounds similar to those William Dalton had suffered: teeth and fingernails traumatically removed. He also noted that her clothing appeared to have been pulled and torn and assumed the worst had happened, but again he said nothing, knowing that Featherstone would start talking soon enough.

‘Her name is Tanya Richards,’ Featherstone obliged. ‘Twenty-three years old. A known prostitute. Ran away to the big smoke from some shithole in the Midlands a few years ago. Soon discovered the streets aren’t paved with gold and started using heroin. Prostitution paid for the drugs. Not an unfamiliar tale.’

Sean acknowledged this with a nod.

‘Her body was found not far from where she lived,’ Featherstone continued. ‘She had a room in a dump of a flat in Roden Street, Holloway. When she wasn’t there she was working the streets around Smithfield Market during the night – looking for punters. He left plenty of DNA, only it’s not on file, so looks like he has no previous.’

‘Could the DNA be from a punter?’ Sean asked.

‘Unlikely,’ Featherstone answered. ‘Looks like she was on her way to work when she was attacked. Judging by the contents of her handbag, she was careful.’

‘Condoms?’ Sean guessed. ‘Yeah,’ Featherstone confirmed, ‘and plenty of them. Also we found semen smeared on her abdomen that matches that found inside her, so everything points to it being the killer’s.’ Featherstone shook his head. ‘Strange thing to do – wipe himself off on her belly.’

‘He was marking her,’ Sean said before he could stop himself – drawing a concerned look from Featherstone. ‘Raping and killing her wasn’t enough,’ he tried to explain. ‘He wanted to mark her.’

‘Why?’ Featherstone asked.

‘That,’ Sean answered, ‘I don’t know yet.’ He turned his gaze back to the photographs, wishing he could be alone without being disturbed by Featherstone’s clumsy observations. His understanding of this killer was coming together faster than in any of his previous cases, as if the year-long gap since his last significant investigation had sharpened his instincts and senses. He needed this killer more than any of his team could possibly understand.

While his mind was engaged with the faceless killer who’d turned his fantasies into reality, using the helpless Tanya Richards as a conduit for his warped desire, Sean threw out a question to keep Featherstone occupied: ‘Was the same knife used on both victims?’

‘Hard to say,’ Featherstone admitted, inhaling deeply before continuing. ‘Neither victim was stabbed – slashed, but not stabbed. Makes it difficult to be certain. Maybe the post-mortem will help.’

Sean started flicking through the file with an increased sense of urgency. Something told him every second could be vital. ‘When was she killed?’

‘More bad news, I’m afraid,’ Featherstone answered. ‘Only ten days ago. This one’s not a once-a-year killer, Sean. He’s running hot.’

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Sean told him. ‘Didn’t see anything on the news.’

‘A prostitute and heroin addict murdered in London,’ Featherstone explained with a shrug. ‘Not exactly front-page material. The first murder got a mention on the local news – nothing more. They’ll be all over it now though, that’s for bloody sure.’

‘But the fingernails and the teeth,’ Sean frowned, ‘that must have got the interest of the media?’

‘Ah.’ Featherstone cocked his head to one side. ‘Would have, only the MIT who picked up the Richards case had the good sense not to mention the fact she’d had her nails removed. They let on some of her teeth had been pulled out, but kept quiet about the nails.’

‘To eliminate nuisance callers claiming responsibility,’ Sean said.

‘Exactly,’ Featherstone confirmed. ‘Had we let it be known her nails were removed too, the better crime journalists out there might have started getting suspicious. The MIT reckoned they could explain the teeth away as a pissed-off pimp pulling out her gold teeth for their cash value.’

‘Sensible,’ Sean appreciated their thinking, ‘but why mention either?’

‘Trying to drum up some sympathy,’ Featherstone explained. ‘Not easy getting the media interested in a dead prostitute, or the general public for that matter. It was hoped that by making it clear she suffered, we could tug on a few more heartstrings – loosen a few lips.’

‘Doesn’t seem to have worked,’ Sean replied.

‘No,’ Featherstone admitted, sounding sad and worn out by yet another violent death few would care about.

Both men were silent for a while before Sean spoke again. ‘Unusual,’ he said. ‘Looks like it has to be the same killer, yet we have a male and a female victim. So, unless he’s bisexual, the motivation can’t be entirely sexual, despite the fact the female victim was raped.’

‘Dalton doesn’t seem to have been sexually assaulted in any way,’ Featherstone added, ‘but again, it’s too early to say for sure.’

‘So what’s his motivation?’ Sean directed the question at himself rather than Featherstone. ‘If killing is his motivation, then he’s a very dangerous and rare animal. A killer who kills because he likes it rather than to cover his tracks or out of panic – that’s about as bad as it gets.’

‘Rare like Sebastian Gibran?’ Featherstone asked, dragging a ghost from the past into the small, warm office. ‘Remember him?’

‘I’m not likely to forget him, am I?’ Sean sighed, memories of the most dangerous killer he’d ever dealt with swarming into his mind.

‘He was something else though, wasn’t he?’ Featherstone reminded them both. ‘Pure bloody evil, that one.’

‘Evil?’ Sean answered. ‘Not sure that exists. He was just wired differently.’

‘You mean wired wrongly?’ Featherstone checked.

Sean ignored the question. ‘He had everything anyone could ever want, but it wasn’t enough. Killing made him feel like he was some sort of god – that taking life was his entitlement.’

‘Do you think we could have another Sebastian Gibran here?’ Featherstone sounded concerned. ‘The last thing we need is another Gibran on the loose.’

‘I doubt it,’ Sean reassured him. ‘Gibran was … exceptional. A one-off. This one’s profile should be more straightforward. Gibran constantly changed his method so we wouldn’t make a link. This one has varied the sex of his victims, but he’s already showing a strong dedication to a particular method. And taking the teeth and fingernails – almost certainly souvenirs. Gibran only took memories.’ He glanced down at the files on his desk, the brutal crime scene photographs staring back at him. ‘All the same, we have a very dangerous individual on our hands.’ He drew a breath. ‘Ten days between the murders?’

‘That’s right,’ Featherstone confirmed.

‘Not good,’ Sean replied, shaking his head. He chewed his bottom lip, deep in thought for a few seconds before continuing. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll slow down for a while – use his souvenirs to relive the killings – keep his urges at bay.’ The image of a faceless man touching, smelling, tasting the extracted teeth and fingernails flashed in his mind.

‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

Sean shrugged.

‘Anyway,’ Featherstone tried to look on the bright side, ‘it’ll be good to have a proper Special Investigations case again. Can’t have been much fun, being loaned out to other MITs these last few months.’

‘Don’t forget Anti-Terrorist, Special Branch and anyone else who was short of manpower,’ Sean reminded him.

‘Indeed,’ Featherstone agreed. ‘Nothing Addis could do to stop that happening. Can’t justify detectives sitting on their backsides doing nothing, not in this day and age.’

‘No,’ Sean admitted. ‘I suppose not.’

‘Still,’ Featherstone perked up again. ‘Your unit’s back now – with a proper investigation.’

‘So it would appear,’ Sean said, but without any cheer, although inside he felt himself coming to life – adrenalin and ideas, memories and anticipation beginning to flow through his body, sparking the darkest areas of his being that had lain dormant for months. Dark areas that he knew were dangerous to him and everything he’d achieved in his life, just as he knew that the answers tended to lie hidden in that darkness. Answers that could help him catch a killer before he claimed more lives.

‘Speaking of investigations …’ Featherstone appeared to change tack, ‘you should know that this will be my last.’

Sean leaned back in his chair. ‘Oh,’ he managed to say. He liked and trusted Featherstone. With him gone, there would be no protective buffer between him and Addis. Worse still, Addis could put someone else in charge of overseeing Sean and his team. Addis’s own man or woman. His own gamekeeper. ‘How so?’

‘Time for me to call it a day, Sean,’ he told him. ‘I’ve done more than my thirty years. Could have gone a couple of years ago. Was clinging on in the hope of making it to Commander, but it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen. Every time it looks like it might, I get passed over by some graduate on accelerated promotion. Who gives a fuck if they don’t know their arses from their elbows, right?’

‘Will you be replaced?’ Sean asked.

‘You mean will you get a new boss?’ Featherstone smiled, sensing Sean’s concern. ‘Who knows? That’s Addis’s call.’

‘Great,’ Sean moaned.

‘You’ll survive,’ Featherstone assured him. They were silent for a while before he spoke again. ‘I was meaning to ask: how’s DS Donnelly getting on?’

‘Dave?’ Sean asked, confused.

‘Since the shooting,’ Featherstone added. ‘Not an easy thing to take a life.’

‘If he hadn’t shot Goldsboro,’ Sean reminded him, ‘Goldsboro would have shot me. Dave’s got nothing to feel … guilty about.’

‘We don’t all process these things the same way,’ Featherstone told him. ‘We don’t all have your … clarity of thought.’

Sean knew what he meant: if it had been Sean who’d pulled the trigger and killed Jeremy Goldsboro – the suspect in their last major investigation – he would have felt no guilt. It would simply have been something he had to do. ‘Well, the inquiry concluded it was a justifiable shooting. I think we’ve all moved on.’

‘Good,’ Featherstone replied, though he seemed less than convinced. ‘Well, speaking of moving on,’ he added, getting to his feet, ‘time I wasn’t here. Good luck with this one.’

‘Thanks,’ Sean replied.

‘Oh, one last thing,’ Featherstone turned at the door. ‘Addis wants Anna Ravenni-Ceron to work alongside you on this one. Given the nature of the killings, he feels the input of a psychiatrist would be useful. Since you’ve worked with her before, he thought best to stick with her.’

Sean felt an instant stab in the heart and a tightening in his stomach. He’d barely seen her in over a year, but his feelings about Anna remained confused. The only stability in his life came from his family and his job. Anna was a threat to both. ‘Fine,’ he answered without elaborating.

‘Regular updates would be appreciated,’ Featherstone told him as he left. ‘And watch out for the press.’

Sean’s eyes followed Featherstone across the main office and through the exit before he took a single photo from each file and slumped back in his chair – looking from victim to victim. The more he looked, the more he was sure the killer’s motivation was the act of killing. For some reason he felt compelled to kill.

Again Sean found his thoughts turning to Sebastian Gibran. He threw the photographs back on to his desk and cursed under his breath. ‘Shit.’

David Langley sat at his desk in the manager’s office of the Wandsworth branch of Harper’s Furniture store. Forty-two years old, six foot tall and muscular, he looked fit, tanned and handsome in an everyday way, short brown hair pushed back from his face to show off his deep green eyes. The office was hidden away from the customers who patrolled the showroom outside looking for bargains in the seemingly never-ending ‘All must go!’ sale, the office was crammed with cheap, utilitarian furniture, filing cabinets and computer equipment. The Christmas decorations had been removed from the showroom on 2 January, but a few tattered and depressing remnants still hung in the office.

Anyone who looked in through the office’s only door would have seen Langley facing forward, typing away on his keyboard like a man hard at work. He’d strategically positioned his desk so that no one could sneak up behind and look over his shoulder at the computer monitor. If they had, they would have seen that instead of checking stock levels or placing orders, he was searching the internet for news of last night’s murder of a homeless man in Southwark. To his intense frustration, only the local press carried any mention of the killing. The removal of the victim’s teeth seemed to have generated some interest, but there was no mention of the missing fingernails. He assumed that detail had been deliberately withheld by the police, so they could eliminate crank callers claiming responsibility for his unique handiwork. Planning and carrying out the killing had been sweet enough, but now he craved the fear and awe that only media attention could give him.

Disgusted, he gave up the search for in-depth coverage – the coverage he deserved. He told himself he shouldn’t be surprised his greatness had not been recognized. Only a blessed few were gifted enough to see in these two early works the blossoming of his special talents. But he had no doubt that his legacy would surpass everything that had gone before – even if he had to rub their faces in it before he was truly appreciated.

Almost without thinking he began to type the names of some of the gifted few into the search engine – those serial killers who had achieved fame on a global scale. He bit his lip to suppress his rising jealousy and anger. Why should they have been given so much coverage when he received so little? Could it be that the police had failed to make the connection? Fools! How easy could he make it for them? What would he have to do to make it more obvious? Cut out their eyes as well?

Though he tried to resist, it wasn’t long before he typed in the name of his most revered and hated rival: Sebastian Gibran. Several years had passed since Gibran had been sent to Broadmoor, but barely a month went by without yet another documentary devoted to him or another true-crime paperback trying to explain his compulsion to kill or speculating how many victims he’d claimed. Most pundits came to the same conclusion: the final tally would never be known. So varied were his methods of dispatching his victims, some would inevitably have been attributed to others, some would remain forever unsolved.

That was where he and Gibran differed. That’s what made his work superior. Where Gibran tried to hide his crimes, or at least his responsibility for them, Langley was proud of his work. He wasn’t afraid of the police or anyone else knowing these murders were the work of one man, and he knew the day would come when he’d be caught or, better yet, surrender himself to custody before he was cornered. After all, what was the point in creating such a storm of infamy if he could never stand in front of the world’s press and drink in the acknowledgements that he was the best ever? The most feared ever.

Unlike Gibran, who had settled for terrifying individual victims, he would terrorize an entire city. The world barely knew of Gibran until his capture, but soon everyone in London would be living in fear of David Langley. He would be the new bogeyman – the vampire in the night – the werewolf in the forest – the monster under the bed. His power would hang over the city like a vast black cloak. Soon no one would be talking about Sebastian Gibran any more.

The door burst open without warning, making Langley jump in his seat as his fingers scrambled to close down the browser and open an accounts file. ‘Christ’s sake, Brian,’ he complained as he recovered – his accent tainted with a trace of London. ‘Don’t you ever knock?’

‘Why?’ Brian Houghton asked, his beady eyes sparkling with mischief behind his thick, heavy-rimmed spectacles. ‘You watching porn again?’

Langley couldn’t stand his short, chubby assistant manager. Houghton’s jovial, over-familiar demeanour inevitably gave rise to thoughts of slashing his throat, maybe taking a pair of pliers to those nasty yellow teeth of his. Ever since he was a teenager, he’d been entertaining similar thoughts about any number of people who’d crossed his path. Then those thoughts had turned into visions – signs of what he was destined to be. And now the time had come to act.

‘I won’t tell if you won’t,’ Houghton continued cheerfully. ‘Just remember to clear your search history. I hear the area manager’s a real bitch.’

‘She is,’ Langley sighed, disinterested. ‘I’ve met her. Listen, did you want something?’

‘I need a bit of paperwork from the cabinet,’ Houghton explained.

‘Then don’t let me hold you up,’ Langley told him, losing patience.

‘Yeah, sure,’ Houghton shrugged and made his way to one of the tall cabinets before noisily pulling a drawer open and searching inside. ‘So,’ he asked, turning back to Langley. ‘Is it true then? Did you almost get the sack for banging some young assistant?’

Langley winced at the memory. It had been embarrassing and beneath him. How dare they insult him with their innuendos and accusations. ‘She was twenty-three,’ he replied through gritted teeth.

‘Sounds young to me,’ Houghton leered. ‘Fair play to you, I say, but head office frown on that sort of thing. They don’t like the managers messing around with the junior staff.’

‘Like no one at head office ever does it,’ Langley complained, the bile of jealousy and hatred rising in his throat.

‘Yeah, but that’s head office,’ Houghton crowed. ‘Law unto themselves. Besides, I heard it wasn’t your first misdemeanour. Like the young ones, do you? Can’t blame a man for that.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything you hear,’ Langley warned him.

‘Just saying. I’ve heard the rumours.’

‘Rumours are all they are,’ he insisted.

‘If you say so,’ Houghton smirked as he pulled some forms from the cabinet and slammed it shut.

‘You’ve only been here two weeks,’ Langley reminded him. ‘Maybe you should wind your neck in.’

‘Fair enough,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll let you get on then.’

‘You do that,’ Langley snarled as he watched Houghton trail from the room. Once he was alone he took several deep breaths to calm himself before reopening his browser, the screen instantly filling with the unsmiling face of Sebastian Gibran staring back at him.

Geoff Jackson parked his battered old Audi saloon in the visitors’ car park outside Broadmoor Hospital and immediately checked his phone for missed calls from his editor or network of informants that included everything from pimps to politicians. The display told him he was in the clear. He stepped from the car wincing at the various pains that stabbed at his body as he tried to stretch them away – looking over at the building site that would soon become the new hospital, spelling the end to the foreboding Victorian building that could never look like anything other than a prison. He’d heard it was going to be turned into luxury flats or something. He could only assume they would be sold to wealthy ghouls with more money than sense. ‘About fucking time,’ he muttered under his breath as he lit another cigarette – squeezing in one last smoke before entering the sterile smoke-free zone that Broadmoor along with every other building had become. He needed something to calm his excitement and fear before meeting the inmate he’d come to interview.

He pulled his trench coat tight around himself and walked across the wet and freezing car park under a leaden grey sky heading for the reception building. It seemed to him that every time he’d been here the weather had been as bleak as it was today. He tried to imagine Broadmoor in the sunshine, but somehow he couldn’t. After having his authorization letter for the visit scrutinized he was fed through several layers of security, including passing through a scanner and having a full and thorough body search before being led to an interview room and being told to make himself comfortable and wait. Thirty minutes later he checked his phone for the umpteenth time and was about to call for assistance when the door swung open and a large muscular man in his mid-thirties wearing a white nurse’s uniform filled the doorframe eyeing him and the room suspiciously. After a few seconds he finally spoke.

‘You here to see Sebastian Gibran?’

Jackson swallowed involuntarily before speaking. ‘Yes. Geoff Jackson, from The World newspaper.’

The big nurse merely nodded as he stepped further into the room, breaking right to reveal the man walking directly behind him – his hands secured to the restraint wrapped around his waist in soft leather bindings secured to his posey belt and handcuffs. He reminded Jackson of a prisoner on death row being taken to his execution, only unlike the deliberately overfed and sedated fatted cows of America’s final solution, the man in restraints looked athletic and strikingly strong. Like a leopard in human form. Jackson had heard about his strength before, but now, up close for the first time, he could actually feel it. Following Gibran into the room was an equally powerful-looking man, only this one wore an HM Prison uniform – such was the dilemma that was Broadmoor. Was it a hospital or a prison?

‘You have authority to interview this Broadmoor patient?’ the big nurse asked rhetorically.

‘I do,’ Jackson replied searching for his paperwork.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ the nurse assured him, keen to move on. ‘And you have agreed to this interview?’ he asked the man in restraints.

‘I have,’ the man answered, his cold, black eyes never leaving Jackson. His voice was calm and assured.

‘Mr Jackson,’ the nurse told him, ‘I strongly recommend that you have myself and Officer Brenan here throughout the interview – in the best interests of everyone.’

‘No, no, no,’ Jackson argued. ‘The agreement was that the interview is to be conducted in private. I’m a journalist and therefore anything I’m told is journalistic material and subject to journalistic privilege,’ Jackson reeled out the well-practised spiel. ‘This has all been arranged and agreed in advance with the hospital directors. The agreement was for the interview to be conducted in private – as I’m sure you have been informed.’

The big nurse took a deep breath as he looked back and forth from Jackson to the prisoner in restraints. ‘Very well,’ he submitted, ‘but we’ll be right outside watching everything on CCTV. If you need us, we’ll get to you fast.’

Jackson swallowed hard as he noticed the concern in the big nurse’s eyes. ‘Fine, so long as there’s no sound on the monitor,’ he managed to say while hiding his fear, ‘and no bloody lip readers either.’

The nurse ignored him. ‘In order to allow this interview to be conducted with no hospital staff present it has been necessary for the patient to consent to wearing restraints at all times. That consent has been given.’ He looked at the man in the leather handcuffs, who gave a single nod. ‘Sit down please,’ the nurse ordered. Gibran did as he was told and slid into a seat opposite the spot where Jackson remained standing, his eyes never leaving the journalist – studying him. ‘I’m going to remove your hands from the waist restraint now,’ the nurse explained, ‘and secure them to the table fastenings. If you resist in any way we’re authorized to use whatever force is necessary to make you compliant. Do you understand?’

‘I understand perfectly,’ Gibran answered politely, turning his wrists as much as he could to make it easier for the prison officer to release them. After a nod from the nurse, the officer stepped forward and released one arm, securing it to the table then doing the same with the other, before stepping back a little too quickly, betraying his fear.

‘He’s all yours, Mr Jackson,’ the nurse told him, ‘but remember – don’t get too close or touch the patient in any way. And under no circumstances are you to give him anything whatsoever. All items the patient receives must be submitted to the hospital staff first for clearance. Do I make myself clear?’

‘I know the rules,’ Jackson answered, trying to sound confident and in control, despite his pounding heart.

‘Very well,’ the nurse said, turning on his heels and leaving the room, closely followed by the prison officer. Jackson watched the heavy door being pulled shut and listened to the key turning heavy locks and he knew he was now alone with arguably the most dangerous killer of modern times.

‘Sebastian Gibran,’ Jackson struggled to speak, barely able to believe that he was alone in the room with Britain’s most notorious serial killer. ‘Thank you for seeing me. I can’t tell you how much it means.’

‘Geoff Jackson,’ Gibran ignored Jackson’s platitudes. ‘Chief crime editor for The World,’ he continued, referring to the red-top newspaper Jackson worked for.

‘Britain’s most read,’ Jackson couldn’t help himself saying, although he regretted it almost immediately.

Again Gibran ignored him, his black eyes searing into Jackson, probing him, until he suddenly smiled and seemed to relax – inhaling the tension in the room and replacing it with an atmosphere of cooperation in that way that only the truly powerful and self-confident can. ‘Well, I should congratu-late you on getting permission to see me, Mr Jackson. You appear to have succeeded where many have failed – and, believe me, many have failed, although I would never have agreed to meet them anyway. Half-baked novelists and playwrights looking for titbits to shock and scare the poor unsuspecting members of public. Can you imagine anything more tedious?’

‘I know a couple of the directors here,’ Jackson explained. ‘Promised I’d show this place in a good light, if I was allowed to meet you.’

‘I see,’ Gibran nodded.

‘You said you wouldn’t have seen the others who wanted to meet you,’ Jackson reminded him. ‘So why me? Why did you agree to meet me?’

‘Because you have a pedigree, Mr Jackson,’ Gibran told him. ‘You’ve earned the right.’

‘Please,’ Jackson told him, shaking the confusion from his head. ‘You can call me Geoff.’

‘No,’ Gibran consolidated his control. ‘Mr Jackson will do for now.’

‘Erm,’ Jackson wavered slightly, ‘if that’s what you’re comfortable with. You were saying – I have a pedigree?’

‘You interviewed Jeremy Goldsboro – correct?’

‘Yes,’ Jackson answered. ‘Yes, I did. While he was still at large and the police were looking for him.’

‘That must have taken great courage.’ Gibran’s eyes continued to scrutinize him. ‘To meet a killer. Alone.’

‘It was a great story,’ Jackson tried to explain. ‘A killer with a cause. A man of the people trying to fight back for the little man.’

‘Only it was a lie,’ Gibran reminded him. ‘He killed for his own satisfaction. Tell me, Mr Jackson, would you have still met him if you’d known he was really just a vengeful, jealous killer and not the man of the people he pretended to be?’

‘Probably,’ Jackson admitted.

‘Why?’ Gibran demanded.

‘It would have been a great story in any case,’ Jackson explained. ‘Perhaps even better. A unique insight into the mind of a coldblooded killer while he was on the loose and killing. It would have been huge anyway.’

‘And if you’d ended up becoming one of his victims?’ Gibran asked.

‘Wouldn’t have happened.’ Jackson smiled. ‘Whether I’m dealing with a killer with a cause or a mindless killer, it makes no difference. They’re not going to hurt me.’

‘Why?’ Gibran pushed.

‘If they’re talking to me, it’s because they want publicity,’ Jackson answered. ‘Why kill the person who’s going to give them what they want?’

‘Because not everybody does what’s expected of them,’ Gibran argued. ‘In some people the urge to kill overpowers everything else. Perhaps you should remember that.’

Jackson paused before answering. ‘Would you have?’ he asked. ‘Would you have killed me, if we’d met when you were free?’

Gibran leaned back in his chair, his restraints straining and creaking under the strain. ‘Maybe,’ he smiled, ‘but that’s because I’m mentally ill, Mr Jackson. That’s why I’m in here and not prison.’

‘Right, OK.’ Jackson nodded.

A silence spread between them before Gibran spoke again.

‘So what is it you want to ask, Mr Jackson? I should remind you that I can’t talk about the murder and attempted murder I was charged with.’

‘The uniformed cop and the woman detective,’ Jackson clarified.

‘Exactly,’ Gibran confirmed. ‘I may one day be deemed mentally healthy and fit for trial. It would be foolish of me to hand my enemies a stick to beat me with.’

‘By your enemies, you mean the police?’ Jackson asked. ‘Or more specifically Detective Inspector Corrigan?’

For a second all the fury and anger that burned deep inside Gibran flashed in his eyes, but he immediately dragged it back under control. ‘Corrigan is irrelevant,’ he dismissed the man who’d caught him. ‘What is it that you want me to tell you about, Mr Jackson?’

Jackson cleared his throat before he began. ‘Well, some people – quite a lot of people actually – believe you have committed many murders. That you are in fact one of the most prolific serial killers there’s ever been in this country.’ Gibran went to speak, but Jackson held his hand up to stop him. ‘Obviously I’m aware that even if this were true, you’d hardly be likely to tell anyone about it. But perhaps you would give me your thoughts on what it would be like if you were a serial killer. What do you think might motivate such a person? What would be going through their mind? How would they kill and not get caught? No need to mention any specific crimes that may have happened. We could keep it more … generic.’

Gibran considered him in silence for a few seconds. ‘I see,’ he eventually responded. ‘And what would you do with such … information?’

Jackson shifted in his seat before answering. ‘My intention is to serialize the interviews in the paper. One a week. Maybe more. We’ll see how it goes, but I believe readers will be fascinated.’

‘Even though I’m not discussing details of real crimes?’ Gibran queried.

‘Trust me,’ Jackson smiled. ‘The readers will fill in the blanks for themselves. It’s your … unique background that will sell it. The fact you’re locked up here in Broadmoor won’t hurt either.’

‘And how do you profit from all this, Mr Jackson?’ Gibran asked. ‘To increase your standing with your editor doesn’t strike me as sufficient motivation for a man like you.’

‘No,’ Jackson agreed, once more squirming uncomfortably. ‘The pieces in the paper would be largely to draw people in. A few weeks after they stop I’ll release the book of our interviews. The bigger picture. What it’s really like to be someone like you.’

‘Someone like me?’ Gibran questioned, leaning in as close as the table and restraints would allow. ‘How could you or your readers ever know what it’s like to be me?’

‘They might,’ Jackson argued. ‘If you tell them.’

Gibran leaned back in his chair before changing tack. ‘Why do you want to write a book about me when you’ve already had one published? One that contained a great many unsubstantiated allegations, I may add.’

‘Allegations made by the police,’ Jackson explained. ‘Not me. I was just reporting on the investigation, working on what the police gave me. There was no opportunity to put your side of things across. But there is now – if you want to.’

‘And why would I do that?’ Gibran asked. ‘Why should I care what the police or public think I am or what I’ve done? What makes you think they’re anything to me?’

Jackson knew Gibran would never be enticed into cooperat-ing by the chance of helping others understand what he was. Gibran existed to satisfy himself and no one else. Jackson knew his psychological profile well. Gibran was as pure a sociopath as had ever allowed themselves to be caught – totally incapable of feeling remorse or guilt. He’d most likely been that way since the day he was born – a killer created by nature or God. Not some sorry case of a normal man turned into a monster by tragic circumstances of child abuse or mental illness. He’d had a privileged background and an apparently happy childhood, although even then he probably knew what he really was. He was well educated and went on to have a successful career, a wife and children, yet it had all been a smokescreen, cultivated to provide cover for the real Sebastian Gibran: a psychopath who killed for the pleasure of killing.

The only way to persuade such a man to play ball would be to convince him that doing so would benefit him.

‘Do it for yourself then,’ Jackson told him. ‘Do it for your own … amusement.’ Gibran said nothing. ‘You would be able to see the final manuscript before it’s published,’ Jackson tried to persuade him.

‘If I was the type of person you think I am,’ Gibran responded, once more changing the subject without warning, ‘why would I have to kill? Tell me, Mr Jackson: why would I feel compelled to kill?’

‘No,’ Jackson answered, the excitement swelling in his stomach. ‘You tell me.’

‘Because, if I was like that,’ Gibran explained, ‘it would be in my nature to kill. It would be as instinctive to me as breathing is to you. I would have to kill to live. I could survive without it, but I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t kill to satisfy some sexual urge, or because voices in my head told me to, or because I’d grown to hate a world that had spited and tortured me. I’d kill simply because it is in my nature to do so. That is, if I was the person you think I am. You see, Mr Jackson,’ he continued, leaning into the table, ‘people like that aren’t mere human beings. They’re superhuman. Gods amongst mortals. It is their right to take the lives of inferior beings at will. Is it not a basic principle of evolution that the superior branch of a species eventually brings about the extinction of the inferior strain? Read Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman philosophy, Mr Jackson. Since God is dead it is necessary for the emergence of the Overman, who is to replace God.’

Jackson stared at Gibran, opened-mouthed, before recovering his senses. ‘I’ll look it up,’ he answered. ‘Sounds very … interesting.’ Jackson blinked unconsciously as he cleared his mind. ‘So … how would a person like this select their victims?’ he asked. ‘Would they be attracted to a particular type of person? Do their victims unwittingly draw these … Overmen to them?’

‘To the Overmen, everyone is a potential victim, Mr Jackson. But enough for one day,’ Gibran insisted, his mouth suddenly smiling – his teeth straight and white despite years of incarceration in a mental hospital. ‘I’ve enjoyed our chat. Make another appointment and we can speak again. But for now, could you do me a favour and summon my protectors.’ He pointed with his chin to the intercom attached to the wall. ‘I’m afraid I can’t quite reach.’

‘Of course,’ Jackson agreed, getting to his feet while trying to control his excitement at having potentially hit the jackpot. ‘And you can be sure I’ll make another appointment.’

‘Well then,’ Gibran closed the interview. ‘Until next time.’

Sean took one last hard look at the two photographs he’d selected from the files. One from each murder scene – both showing full-length body shots of the prostrate victims lying flat on their backs, arms limp and straight at their sides. He suspected they were dead or as good as dead before the killer set to work removing their teeth – stretching his victims out before him to make the task easier. Or was there some other reason for the positioning of the bodies? Some ritual act of the killer or killers? He shook the thoughts away before they led him to a path he could end up following for hours – trying to get an early glimpse of the man he was now hunting. That was how it happened. He’d woken that morning just another man. A detective investigating serious, but not unusual crimes. Crimes that any good detective could handle. Over the last few months, investigating those everyday crimes, he’d grown calmer; happy to be at home with his family, working to earn money to pay for the mundane things all families need, leaving it all behind when he left the office instead of being haunted night and day by the crimes he was investigating. But the instant Featherstone had handed over those two folders, all that changed. Now he was a hunter of men again.

Already he sensed there was something about this killer. Something that made Sean feel their destinies had been set on a collision course. He took a deep breath before snatching up the files and heading to the office next to his where his two deputies, DS Sally Jones and DS Dave Donnelly, were both staring intently at their computers, swearing and moaning as if they were competing with each other in a profanity contest.

Sean rapped on the open door and instantly their fingers froze over their keyboards as they looked up in unison. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ Sean told them.

‘Saw you with Featherstone earlier,’ Sally told him. ‘Please tell me he gave us a proper investigation. I can’t stand working with Anti-Terror again. It’s doing my head in.’

‘Hear, hear,’ Donnelly agreed. ‘I’m sick of being shunted around like a stray dog. We need our own job.’

‘Well, we’ve got one,’ Sean announced, ‘and it’s a bad one.’

‘Go on,’ Sally encouraged him.

‘I haven’t got time to repeat myself,’ Sean answered curtly. ‘Get the team together and I’ll brief everyone at the same time.’

Donnelly looked out into the main office and shook his head. ‘Only about half the team here, boss. Rest are busy running errands for the world and his wife.’

‘It’ll have to do for now,’ Sean told him. ‘The rest will have to catch up as and when they can.’ He spun away and marched to the whiteboards that dominated one side of the room, quickly followed by Sally and Donnelly. As Donnelly called everyone to attention, Sean swept the boards clear of any information relating to other investigations and began to pin up photos of the two victims before writing their names above them. Once he was happy with his display, he turned to the gathering audience of detectives and took a deep breath.

‘All right, everyone,’ Donnelly made one last call for attention. ‘Listen up.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Sean addressed them, ‘we have a new case.’ A few nodded their heads in quiet satisfaction; although nobody spoke, Sean could sense their relief. ‘Two victims. One male. One female. Killed ten days apart. The first – Tanya Richards – was a known prostitute and drug user. The second – William Dalton – was a homeless beggar; he too was a drug user. Both were young. Both were vulnerable. Neither deserved what happened to them. We all know how unusual it is for a killer to vary the gender of their victims, but these two are definitely linked. The killer has a very distinct modus operandi and has been kind enough to leave us his calling card.’

‘Which is?’ Sally asked.

‘He takes some of their teeth and most of their fingernails,’ Sean explained, causing his audience to wince.

‘Jesus,’ Donnelly said for all of them. ‘Before or after they’re dead?’

‘Probably after,’ Sean told him. ‘They weren’t restrained in any way, so they would most likely have been incapacitated in order for him to do what he did. The relatively small amount of blood from the wounds to the mouth suggests their hearts had stopped or were close to it.’

‘Trophies?’ Sally asked.

‘That would be my guess,’ Sean agreed. ‘Something to help him relive his crimes.’

‘Where were they killed?’ DC Alan Jesson asked.

‘Both outdoors,’ Sean continued. ‘The first in Holloway, North London, and the second in Southwark, Southeast London.’

‘Then the killer’s a Londoner,’ Sally added.

‘Probably,’ Sean agreed, ‘or at least they know London well. Killers like to know their surroundings,’ he reminded them. ‘It makes them feel … comfortable.’

‘Any signs of sexual assault?’ the tall and well-spoken DC Fiona Cahill asked.

‘The first victim was almost certainly raped,’ Sean confirmed. ‘Too early to say with the second. His post-mortem is tomorrow and his clothes are already being processed by the lab, so we should know more then.’

‘Maybe they both crossed the same drug dealer,’ Donnelly argued, his bushy moustache twitching as he spoke. He could always be relied on to look for the simplest solution.

‘That’s what the MIT who initially investigated Tanya Richards’ murder thought. Drug dealer or pimp,’ Sean answered. ‘But they couldn’t find anything.’

‘Now we have another murder, though,’ Donnelly reminded him. ‘If we can find a dealer they both used, then we’d have a link.’

‘Maybe,’ Sean admitted without enthusiasm. ‘We’ll look into it, but I don’t think so. Doesn’t … feel like that sort of case to me.’

‘So what was his motivation?’ DC Paulo Zukov asked in his thick London accent, his sharp blue eyes peering from a gaunt, unattractive face.

‘Well,’ Sean thought out loud, ‘very few stranger attacks result in murder. Most are fights between males that go too far and someone ends up getting killed, but that’s certainly not what we’re dealing with here.’

‘And?’ Zukov prompted, trying to hurry him along.

‘And,’ Sean continued, ‘sexually motivated attacks where the killer only kills in order to cover his tracks, to get rid of the main witness, i.e. the victim. Or – and this is much rarer – where the motivation is the killing itself. Usually committed by someone with extreme mental health issues, although occasionally, very occasionally, by someone of sound mind who just can’t stop themselves. Someone for whom killing is in their nature.’

‘Like Sebastian Gibran,’ Donnelly mentioned the toxic name.

‘Yes,’ Sean agreed. ‘Like Sebastian Gibran.’

Sally looked at the floor, her hand automatically going to the place on her chest where her blouse hid the two scars where Gibran’s attack had marked her for life.

‘You all right, Sally?’ Sean asked, his eyes narrowing with concern.

‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘I’m fine. Haven’t heard that name for a while, that’s all.’

‘To go back to the teeth and nails,’ Donnelly intervened, saving Sally from any more unwanted attention. ‘Why take them as trophies? Bloody hard to get out. If he wanted a body part, why not cut off the fingers or ears? A good knife or pruning scissors and he could have had the job done in seconds. Pulling teeth must take time and effort.’

Sean had been giving it some thought. ‘It’s possible he has experience of extracting teeth and wanted to stick to something he was familiar with.’

‘A dentist?’ Donnelly questioned.

‘Unlikely,’ Sean told him. ‘Someone who tried dentistry and failed is more likely. We’ll have to check it out anyway, but I think the reason he took the teeth and the nails is because he wanted something durable – something from their bodies, but also something that would last. Something that could last forever.’

‘Jesus,’ Donnelly said quietly.

‘Other body parts would eventually degrade,’ Sean explained. ‘Even if he kept them in a fridge – especially if he’s constantly getting them out to spend time with them. They wouldn’t last long.’

‘He could freeze them,’ Zukov suggested. ‘Could last for years if he did that.’

‘No,’ Sean dismissed the suggestion. ‘Not personal enough. A lump of frozen meat wrapped in something like clingfilm – that would never be enough for him. When he holds his trophies in his hands he needs to feel them, to have them right there with him. Nails and teeth are perfect for that. He can handle them as much as he wants and whenever he wants and they’ll never degrade to nothing. Or—’ Sean stopped, momentarily lost in his own thoughts.

‘Or?’ Sally tried to bring him back.

‘Or,’ he continued, ‘he did it simply because he liked it. He liked pulling their teeth and fingernails. It made him feel … good.’

‘How the hell could doing that make anyone feel good?’ Zukov asked.

‘He’s not like you,’ Sean warned him. ‘He doesn’t think like you, any more than you think like him. He’s different.’

‘You mean us,’ Sally said. ‘He doesn’t think like us.’

‘What?’ Sean asked, confused by her words before another question saved him.

‘Why not take some of their hair?’ Cahill asked. ‘Hair’s personal and non-biodegradable and a lot easier to remove, so why not take hair?’

Again Sean had considered it. ‘Too gentle,’ he answered. ‘Too compassionate. Parents keep locks of their children’s hair. Lovers keep locks of each other’s hair. It’s a sign of affection and caring.’ The connection he felt with the killer was growing stronger as he expanded on each theory. ‘He wants us to know he feels no compassion. Wants us to know how strong he is – mentally – that he’s capable of anything. For this one, it’s all about the violence – and he wants us to know it.’

‘Killers in the past have eaten parts of their victims,’ Sally reminded them. ‘It’s a way of keeping them forever – as if they’ve ingested the victim’s soul. Any obvious reason why he didn’t consume something at the scene? It would have certainly been a statement of his violent intent.’

‘That’s not his mindset,’ Sean answered without having to think about it. ‘Yes, plenty of serial killers – if that’s what he is – have consumed a part or parts of their victims, but it’s not usually out of violence or anger. For them, it’s an act of love. They want to be one with the victim – keep them alive and with them forever by consuming them.’

‘Love?’ Donnelly asked disbelievingly. ‘Hell of a funny way to show love.’

Sean paused, wondering how to explain. ‘You’re a parent, right, Dave?’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly answered in his gruff voice with an accent part East London and part Glaswegian – the city where he’d spent that part of his life before joining police.

‘Remember when they were young and you used to play with them and hold them and tell them you were going to gobble them all up?’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly replied, shaking his head, ‘but that was different.’

‘No,’ Sean insisted. ‘Psychologically, the same. But not for this one. He doesn’t feel compassion or love for them and he doesn’t want them to live forever inside of himself. He wants them dead. He wants to destroy them.’

‘Why?’ Sally asked. ‘Why such strong feelings of violence and hatred towards strangers?’

‘Who says he hates them?’ Sean corrected her. ‘Maybe they’re simply a means to an end.’

‘What means? What end?’ Sally pushed him.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her honestly. ‘Not yet.’

‘Great – another paranoid schizophrenic off his meds,’ Donnelly said, dismissing anything more sinister.

‘No,’ Sean explained. ‘There’s no frenzy to these attacks. They’re controlled and planned. This isn’t someone hearing voices in their head or seeing demons on the train. I don’t sense mental illness here, or at least nothing a court would recognize as such.’

‘Then we’re looking for someone who’s made the conscious decision to select victims and kill them,’ Cahill asked, ‘but with controlled violence?’

‘That’s what these photographs say to me,’ Sean agreed. ‘And I reckon we’ve got about ten days to find him before he kills again. I could be wrong, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to become a sleeper. Now he’s started, he’ll keep going, probably at about the same pace or faster.’

‘Do you think he’s killed before? Sally asked.

‘Possibly,’ he admitted. ‘We’ll have to look into it – anything that looks remotely similar will have to be checked. But I think Tanya Richards was his first. He tried something new and he liked it. It didn’t scare him or freak him out. It was probably everything he hoped for, maybe more and he needed it again – and quickly, hence …’ he turned and tapped a photograph of William Dalton ‘… ten days later he strikes again. It’s a drug to him now. He needs it.’ He looked around at the quiet, stoical faces – all eyes on him, waiting for ideas and leadership. He let the responsibility sink in before speaking again.

‘All right,’ he stirred his team, ‘we’ve all done this before. We all know what an investigation like this means and how to get a result.’ A few heads nodded. ‘Dave,’ he turned to Donnelly. ‘You sort out the door-to-door. Dalton was living in a garage, so maybe he was something of a local celebrity. People might know him more than usual.’

Donnelly nodded. ‘Want me to do the same for Richards?’ he asked. ‘Not sure I want to trust some other MIT’s findings.’

‘Fine,’ Sean agreed. ‘They won’t like it, but do it anyway.’

‘They’ll survive,’ Donnelly shrugged.

‘Sally,’ Sean continued assigning tasks: ‘track down Dalton’s friends and family, will you? Chances are they don’t know he’s dead yet. He was a heavy drug user working the West End. Let’s find out what his associates can tell us about his lifestyle. They might have some useful information, as might his family – especially about how he ended up homeless. There’s a crucial piece of information hiding somewhere waiting for us. We dig and dig and dig till we find it. Don’t second-guess what could be important and what’s not.

‘We know he had an Oyster card and used it regularly, so let’s get it interrogated and see where and when he’s been moving around. Fiona …’ Cahill looked up from the notes she was scribbling; ‘Take care of it, OK.’ Cahill nodded her agreement. Sean turned to Jesson. ‘Alan: Dalton moved around the West End most days and travelled back to Southwark most nights, most likely to Borough Tube if he was living off Mint Street, so we’ll have CCTV coming out of our ears. Get hold of British Transport Police and tell them to preserve all CCTV from those areas and routes until we can give them something more specific once we’ve looked into his Oyster card.’

‘BTP. Done,’ was all Jesson said in his Liverpudlian accent.

‘As I’m sure you all understand, the original investigating team will not be happy about losing this case,’ Sean reminded them. ‘No MIT wants to lose a job like this, so if you come into contact with them, keep it nice. No rubbing their faces in it, please. We need them onside and cooperative. Don’t want them holding back any information to make things difficult for us. I’ll do my best to smooth things over with them and I expect each of you to do the same.

‘That’s it for now,’ Sean told them. ‘Get yourselves organized and ready to go. Dave will be office manager and will put you into teams as soon as he can and give you your individual tasks. OK – let’s get on with it.’

As the meeting broke up, the team moved quickly back to their desks gathering phones, notebooks, pens and anything else experience had taught them they might need, chatting loudly and excitedly to each other as they did so. Sean drifted back towards his office followed by Sally, while Donnelly remained in the main office and started barking out orders.

Sean paused next to him as he passed and quietly spoke in his ear. ‘Keep them on it,’ he told Donnelly. ‘Two victims is enough.’ Donnelly merely nodded. As soon as he entered his office, Sean started putting on his coat and filling his pockets with the detritus from his desktop.

‘Going somewhere?’ Sally asked.

‘Ugh,’ Sean grunted as he looked up, suddenly pulled out of his own thoughts. ‘Yeah,’ he rejoined the world. ‘I need to go out.’

‘Where?’ Sally pushed.

‘The scene, of course,’ he told her.

‘The MIT will be all over it,’ Sally reminded him. ‘Maybe we should leave them to it and take control of their exhibits when they’re done.’

‘No,’ Sean replied firmly. ‘I want our people on it. I want DS Roddis and his team. No one else. Roddis is the best.’

Sally didn’t argue. ‘OK. Want some company?’

‘No,’ Sean told her. ‘I’ll go alone. Stay here and help Dave.’

‘Fine,’ Sally reluctantly agreed. ‘If that’s what you want.’

Sean sensed her doubt. ‘But …?’

‘So long as you haven’t decided to try and solve this one all on your own,’ she voiced her concern. ‘It’s been a long time since we had a proper investigation. I know what you’re like, Sean. You’re hungry for this, I know you are, but we’re a team, remember? We work as a team we solve this quicker. You try and do it alone, it could be …’ She let her words trail off.

‘Could be what?’ he asked, puzzled.

‘Dangerous,’ she said with conviction. ‘For you and everyone around you.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘We’re a team – I get it. It’s early days and there’s much to do. We just need to divide and conquer until things are moving, is all. You’re more use to me here, helping Dave, than you are trailing around after me.’

‘Thanks,’ she replied sarcastically.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he tried to recover. ‘Look, I’ll be back soon and I’ll tell you everything I find. OK?’

‘Fine,’ she relented.

‘I won’t be gone long,’ he insisted as he brushed past and headed across the main office before disappearing through the door.

David Langley returned home to the small rented flat in the wrong part of Wandsworth that had been his home since his wife decided he’d had one too many ‘encounters’ with other women and had thrown him out. Where low-rise estates dominated and danger was never far away. The bitterness he felt towards her and at having to leave the family home burned deep in him like a stove of hatred. He blamed her for the failure of their marriage. She’d enjoyed pushing their sex life to the boundaries of near torture in the early years, but as he tried to push even further she had suddenly turned conservative and uninteresting. No wonder he’d looked elsewhere.

He grabbed himself a beer from the fridge and drank it quickly before taking another. The drab walls of the flat began to close in on him, making him feel trapped and depressed. He decided to phone his ex-wife, who still lived in their smart terraced family home in upwardly mobile Earlsfield. Maybe she would let him speak to their two children instead of constantly trying to poison their minds against him. So what if he’d forgotten he was supposed to pick them up or take them out a few times? He was busy providing for them, wasn’t he?

He punched the number into his phone and listened to the ringing tone as he waited for it to be answered. There was a click, followed by a familiar voice.

‘Hi. This is Emma, Charlie and Sophie Hutchinson.’ Hearing her use her maiden name for his children as well as herself started his blood boiling. How dare she? ‘We can’t get to the phone right now, so please leave your name and number and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. Bye.’

‘Pick the phone up, Emma,’ he demanded. ‘I know you’re there.’ He waited a few seconds; nothing. ‘I said, pick the phone up. I want to speak with my children.’ Still nothing. ‘Stop being a bitch, Emma and answer the damn phone. You can’t stop me speaking to my own children. I have a right to speak to them whenever I want.’ He was met with more silence. ‘Fine,’ he shouted into the phone. ‘Have it your own way. I’ll be speaking to my solicitor first thing in the morning. Who’s paying for that bloody house you live in anyway?’ He slammed the phone down. ‘Fucking bitch,’ he cursed to the empty flat.

Painful memories of the day she made him leave the family home swept back into his spinning mind – him blaming her for his infidelities while she screamed at him to get out, calling him a complete loser. ‘Loser,’ he repeated the insult she’d thrown at him. ‘I’ll show you who’s a fucking loser. I’ll show everyone.’ He breathed in deeply and felt himself begin to calm as images of his victims washed over him, leaving him feeling powerful and in control. He chastised himself for not having mastered his temper. Control was everything. If he was to achieve his ultimate goal, he needed to put aside everything from his past – including his children and lost wife. He needed to let them go.

Calm once more, he knew he needed to feel strong again. Needed to relive the moments when he was at his most powerful. He returned to the fridge, opened the freezer compartment and removed a plastic box containing all that was now precious to him.

The first thing he took from the box was a transparent freezer bag that contained what looked like oversized playing cards. Again he took a deep breath before removing the items and spreading them out before him. Photographs of his victims, taken while they were alive. Tanya Richards leaving her flat. Tanya Richards walking to the tube station. Tanya Richards sitting on a bus. Tanya Richards walking the streets close to Smithfield Market. William Dalton begging in the West End. William Dalton walking into Tottenham Court Road Underground station. William Dalton walking out of Borough Underground station. William Dalton entering the garage he called home.

He arranged the cards carefully and neatly before retrieving two more small freezer bags from inside the plastic box and placed them side by side on the table. Again he took a deep breath to steady himself before emptying the first bag, which was marked with a number 1 in permanent marker. The nails and teeth slid out in front of him – the teeth rattling on the table like dice, whereas the nails sounded like tinkling raindrops. He picked up a few of the nails and dropped them into the palm of his other hand. They were still coated with cheap red nail varnish that blended perfectly with the traces of her blood. He hoped they would never fade. It may be necessary to repaint them if it did.

As he held the nails he could picture them as they had been when they were attached to the young woman’s slim fingers. They’d possibly been her best feature. That and her crystal blue eyes that were yet to be destroyed by whatever drug she was addicted to. He remembered her eyes staring into his in disbelief as she realized he had come to end her existence. He sighed almost happily at the memory before delicately spilling the nails from his palm back on to the table.

Next he picked up the teeth one by one and dropped them into the palm of his hand. Molars with gold fillings and other lesser teeth that showed little decay or staining. As young teeth should, despite her lifestyle. He pinched one of the molars from his palm and held it up to the light as if he were examining a diamond – slightly twisting and rotating it as he took in every detail of the tooth – every curve and peak – every scratch on the enamel. Finally he held it under his nose, closing his eyes as he inhaled deeply – each trace of its dead owner bringing exquisite memories of pulling them from her jaw flooding back. How he wished she’d been fully alive and conscious when he’d gone to work on her, but it would have been all but impossible to perform the extractions on a struggling victim.

Satisfied with the relics of his first victim’s death, he ritually placed all the items on top of the clip-seal bag and put them to one side. His back straightened as he took hold of the other bag – glancing at the photographs of the living William Dalton before sliding the seal open and allowing the odour of its contents to rush at him. To the uninitiated, the scents were barely detectable, but to him they were as vivid and raw as the smell of a zoo – animalistic and pungent.

He carefully tipped the contents on to the table and shifted them about with the tips of his fingers – ensuring each item had its own space to shine before picking up one of the larger fingernails that he assumed must be a thumbnail. It, like all the others, was in poor condition. The dark dried blood, mixed with the dirt that had built up over months of not being able to clean himself properly, had left the nails looking much older than they were. They looked as if they’d been taken from a body that had been buried for years – brittle, broken and jagged at the tips. But they were no less precious to him. He’d enjoyed killing the prostitute more, but the homeless man was still an experience beyond most people’s stunted and dull imagination. In any case, it was important that his second victim was a man so the police and media would know he wasn’t some perverted sex offender. They needed to understand he was much, much more than that.

He swapped the nail for a clean-looking molar, although the root was stained with the victim’s blood – the sight of it ignited images of the nearly dead homeless man lying on his back and gurgling on his own blood as it slipped down his throat. The memory pleased him and made his muscles tense as he remembered the power he’d felt as he crouched over the dying man. It was as if he was absorbing the victim’s energy, becoming more powerful with each new kill.

Without knowing why, he was suddenly overcome with the urge to taste the tooth, to engulf it in his tongue and roll it around his mouth. Wary of sucking the blood and odour away, he made do instead with delicately placing the tip of the tooth against the point of his tongue and holding it there – his eyes closing with the pleasure of it as his entire body became aroused. Removing the tooth, he cursed his body’s physical reaction and knew that others would use it as evidence that his actions were driven by sexual needs. But he knew they were not. Yes, he’d ejaculated inside the dying prostitute and done things to the dying homeless man, but they were not sexual acts. His body had simply become so electrified by the power he felt that it was overwhelmed with every sensation – as if he was feeling every emotion and physical feeling a person could ever have, only he was feeling it all at the same time. It was too much for any person to control – even one as strong as he was. Ejaculating in and on his victims had merely been an emergency release – to allow him to regain control of his own growing power. Still, he knew he needed to do better in the future and suppress his body’s crude needs when in a heightened state of stimulation. It was either that or risk forever being branded as a sexually motivated killer, which would undermine everything he was trying to achieve.

Using a breathing exercise he’d picked up from a yoga video, he tried to calm his tense body and relax. The killings had left him feeling invincible, but it was gratifying to know he remained in complete control of his own body.

After a few minutes of sitting in silence, he picked up the photographs and mementoes, placing them neatly in their bags before packing them tenderly into the plastic box that he returned to the freezer compartment of his fridge. As he closed the door he was already debating what type of person he should choose next.

3

Sean pulled up close to the police cordon in Mint Street, Southwark – the area of London south of the Thames from the City. Some of that wealth had spilled across the river, but the financial institutions clung to the bankside like limpets, leaving the south side of the river dominated by sprawling housing estates. It was an area he knew well.

He was about to climb from the car when his phone rang. Cursing under his breath, he struggled to free the phone from his jacket and looked at the caller ID. It was Dr Anna Ravenni-Ceron. His heart skipped a beat and his stomach tightened. It had been a good few months since he’d spoken to the psychiatrist. He’d hoped distance and time would fade his feelings towards her – remove the temptation she always seemed to represent when they were close. Now another murder investigation appeared to be bringing them back together. He cleared his throat and slid his finger across the screen to answer.

‘Anna,’ was all he said.

‘Sean,’ was all she replied.

They allowed a few seconds of silence between them before Anna spoke first. ‘How have you been?’

‘OK,’ he answered, shrugging as if she could see him. ‘Busy with other people’s problems.’

‘I heard,’ she told him. ‘How’s Kate? How are your kids?’

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘And you?’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Though finding life dull, compared to being part of an SIU investigation.’

‘And now you are again,’ he reminded her.

‘Only if I want to be,’ she explained. ‘And only if you want me to be.’ He didn’t answer – her question making his mind swirl too much to be able to speak. Did he want to be close to her again? Every day. ‘Assistant Commissioner Addis wants me on the investigation.’

‘Featherstone told me.’

‘Right,’ she replied.

‘I assume Addis wants the same as always?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t met him yet,’ she explained, ‘but I’m assuming so.’

‘Keep an eye on me while pretending to be helping profile the killer,’ Sean spelt it out, ‘and report back to him on whether I can be … trusted.’

‘I would imagine,’ Anna agreed, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, our arrangement stands.’

Sean thought hard for a while. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘If Addis ever found out you were feeding everything back to me, he could make things very difficult for you.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ she reassured him. ‘I’m not a police officer. There’s a limit to what he can do to me – whereas you …’

‘I’m an asset,’ he reminded her. ‘It buys me some leeway, even with Addis.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked him bluntly.

He chewed his bottom lip for a few seconds. ‘Meet him,’ he found himself saying, although in his mind he was urging her to walk away from him, from Addis and the Special Investigations Unit and never come back. ‘Find out what he wants and if it’s the same as always, agree to do it. At least that way if he decides to come after me I’ll have a heads-up.’

‘OK,’ she agreed solemnly.

He sensed her unhappiness, how confused her feelings were. ‘You don’t have to do this,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have to do this for me.’

‘No,’ she answered. ‘I want to.’

‘OK,’ he agreed, then tried to move things on: ‘I could use you anyway. This new one,’ he explained, ‘feels … complicated. Anything you can tell me about him will help.’

‘No doubt Addis will give me a copy of the file,’ she went along with him. ‘Once I’ve read it, I’ll give you my thoughts.’

‘Good,’ he told her, then struggled with what to say next. ‘It’ll be nice to see you again,’ he managed, immediately wincing at his own words.

‘It’ll be nice to see you too,’ she answered.

He touched the screen to end the call and stared at the phone for a while before sliding it back into his jacket pocket. Climbing from the unmarked car, he made a beeline for the two uniformed officers who were guarding the tape that marked the cordon. He spoke to the tall female constable who was clutching the crime scene log. Sean held up his warrant card so they could both see.

‘DI Corrigan – Special Investigations Unit. This is officially my scene now,’ he told them.

The constables looked at each other, confused. The woman spoke for both of them. ‘Sorry, sir. The DCI from the MIT is inside with forensics. DCI …’ she looked down at the log, ‘DCI Vaughan.’

‘Like I said,’ he reminded her, ‘it’s my scene now.’ He pulled a business card from his warrant card and handed it to her. ‘No one in or out without my permission,’ he insisted. ‘You call me before letting anyone in. I don’t care if it’s the Commissioner – you call me first. Understand?’

The female constable gave a shrug of resignation before answering. ‘Whatever you say … sir.’

Sean awkwardly covered his shoes with a pair of forensic foot protectors he’d pulled from his pocket and ducked under the tape before heading to the garage some forty metres away where he could see figures in blue forensic suits working under the spotlights that lit the scene. As he drew nearer he noticed a figure standing in the dark observing the activities. The man wasn’t wearing a forensic suit, but stood in a long dark coat, his back to Sean, although his feet too were covered with protectors. Once Sean was within a few feet of the man, he turned to face him. His face appeared tanned, despite the depths of winter; he was in his early fifties, but handsome, his physique stocky and powerful. Sean noticed some of the grey strands of his hair reflecting the streetlights.

‘DCI Vaughan?’ Sean asked, holding up his warrant card.

‘Yes,’ Vaughan answered in a London accent – his demeanour immediately telling Sean he was dealing with another career detective and not someone racing through the ranks on accelerated promotion. ‘And who might you be?’

‘DI Sean Corrigan,’ he told him. ‘Special Investigations Unit.’

‘DI Corrigan,’ Vaughan smiled knowingly. ‘I’ve heard so much about you I feel I already know you. So what’s SIU doing here?’

Sean felt uneasy, knowing that he’d been talked about by people he didn’t know. He preferred to be anonymous. ‘This murder’s linked to another,’ he explained. ‘That makes it SIU’s.’

‘No one’s told me it’s linked,’ Vaughan argued. ‘And no one’s told me to hand over my investigation to you or anyone else. SIU’s not needed here. Me and my team will have this wrapped up in a few days, tops. We know how to hunt down bastards like this. Why don’t you save yourself for something a bit more exotic and leave this to us old-fashioned by-the-numbers detectives.’

‘I can’t do that,’ Sean told him. ‘Orders of Assistant Commissioner Addis. SIU are to take over this investigation.’

‘Addis hasn’t told me about SIU taking over anything,’ Vaughan growled. ‘Until he does – the investigation stays with me.’

‘He left it to me to tell you,’ Sean explained. ‘Addis wants SIU to take over and Addis gets what he wants. And you don’t want to get on Addis’s wrong side. Believe me – I know.’

‘I don’t take kindly to DIs marching into my crime scenes and telling me what’s gonna happen,’ Vaughan continued to dig his heels in.

Sean didn’t have time to argue, but neither did he want to alienate Vaughan and his MIT. He needed them onside and cooperative. He couldn’t afford to have anyone withholding some important fact they’d discovered – deliberately or otherwise. ‘I understand it’s a difficult situation,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, ‘but my unit was set up to deal with exactly this sort of investigation. I know you and your team could find whoever did this, but the fact is I have access to things you don’t, which means I’ve a better than decent chance of finding him sooner – before he kills again. That’s what we all want, isn’t it?’ Vaughan looked him up and down – weighing up Sean’s words. ‘All I need is full cooperation. I need everything you’ve found to date and in return I promise you’ll get full credit for what you’ve achieved.’ Still he sensed Vaughan wasn’t satisfied. ‘If we need any help I’ll come straight to you. Fair enough?’

Vaughan sighed in resignation. ‘Very well. Fair enough, but no airbrushing us out of what’s been done.’

‘Of course,’ Sean readily agreed, ‘but I need the forensic team to stop whatever they’re doing and prepare their exhibits for transfer.’

‘You want them to stop?’ Vaughan questioned his wisdom.

‘Like I said,’ Sean reminded him, ‘I have access to things you don’t – including a specialist forensics team who know exactly what I expect from them.’

‘If you insist,’ Vaughan agreed, unconvinced.

‘And I’ll need all the paperwork you have so far. Door-to-doors, witnesses spoken to. Anything you’ve generated – in order and filed properly, so I can find what I’m looking for.’

‘It will be,’ Vaughan assured him.

Sean moved on. ‘I understand the body’s been removed to the morgue at Guy’s?’

‘It has.’

‘Good,’ he said, knowing that it would fall under the care of his most trusted pathologist – Dr Simon Canning.

‘Your forensic team on their way?’ Vaughan asked.

‘No,’ Sean told him. ‘They’re briefed and preparing, but no point starting now. Better to start afresh in the morning, when your people have packed up and gone. Just make sure everything’s secure till then.’

‘Very well,’ Vaughan answered, but Sean had already started to drift away – looking out across the streets and the park close to the garage where William Dalton came to his violent end.

Vaughan noticed it. ‘You want to take a closer look at the scene?’

Sean looked at the houses and flats around the scene – full of light and life – children awake, meals being prepared, people walking home across the park, the smell of heavy traffic thick in the freezing air, its sound a constant hum in the background. It wasn’t right. ‘No,’ he told Vaughan. ‘This isn’t how it was.’

‘Excuse me,’ Vaughan asked, confused.

‘Nothing,’ Sean realized he’d been speaking out loud. ‘I’ll send a couple of my people over to your office tomorrow to pick up whatever you have.’

‘It’ll be ready,’ Vaughan assured him.

‘Good,’ Sean told him and turned to leave. ‘I need to be somewhere.’

‘One thing,’ Vaughan stopped him.

‘Which is?’

‘If you ever decide you’ve had enough of the SIU, give me a call, will you,’ Vaughan told him. ‘I wouldn’t mind that job myself some day.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Sean replied before heading off back to his car, fully aware that Vaughan wouldn’t be the only one who’d like his job and that Addis wouldn’t hesitate to replace him if he ever looked like he’d lost his special edge.

Anna Ravenni-Ceron entered the private members’ club in St James’s Park, close to New Scotland Yard, and was led to a large dark dining room where Assistant Commissioner Robert Addis sat in full uniform looking as trim and tidy as ever – his peaked cap and brown leather gloves perched on the edge of the table next to him. He sipped water from a crystal glass as he read from an open file he held expertly in one hand.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ the hostess murmured discreetly, making him look up. ‘Your guest has arrived.’

‘Anna,’ he smiled, but remained seated and made no effort to shake her hand. ‘Please, have a seat.’

‘Thank you,’ Anna told the hostess as she seated herself on the straight-backed chair that had been pulled out for her. Slim and elegant with a head of unruly wavy black hair caught and tamed into a mass of swirls and ringlets, her dark brown eyes stared from a pretty oval face, studying Addis as he waited until the hostess had left before speaking again.

‘I’m glad you could make it on such short notice,’ he told her. ‘You’ll understand this isn’t the sort of thing I’d want to discuss over the phone.’

‘So you said.’

‘Being the head of the Specialist Crime Operations can make one somewhat … cautious.’

‘No doubt,’ she agreed, before realizing she was being more assertive and questioning than she’d been with Addis in the past. If she didn’t play the game better he would pick up on the subtle change and become suspicious. He might even deny her access to the investigation and with it her chance to help or protect Sean. ‘Face-to-face is preferable,’ she lied.

‘Good,’ Addis relaxed somewhat. ‘Good.’

‘Is this the new case?’ she asked, her eyes indicating the file in his hand.

‘Yes,’ Addis told her, closing the file as if she’d somehow spied on its contents. ‘Have you heard anything?’

‘Only what you’ve told me,’ she lied again. ‘Two young adult victims. No apparent links between them. DI Corrigan and the SIU will be investigating … Which makes me wonder what you want from me.’

Addis handed her the file, which she accepted. ‘Same as always, Anna.’

‘I see,’ she said, trying to hide her disappointment. ‘You want me to look like I’m helping profile the killer, but really you want me to keep an eye on DI Corrigan and report back to you?’

‘No,’ Addis smiled condescendingly. ‘I want you to assist in profiling the type of person we’re looking for – not merely look as if you are.’

‘I understand,’ she replied, a hint of frustration in her voice, ‘but you also want me to observe DI Corrigan? Correct?’

‘You make it sound as if I’m asking you to spy on him,’ Addis said without a hint of irony.

‘Aren’t you?’ Anna asked.

Addis leaned back in his chair and watched her for a long few seconds before answering. ‘We’ve discussed this before, Anna. DI Corrigan is an asset not just to the Special Investigations Unit, but the Specialist Crimes Operations. Indeed, he’s an asset to the Metropolitan Police Service. He has a rare and special talent, which is why I have personally seen to it that he became day-to-day leader of the SIU. But these cases are by their very nature high profile, constantly under the glare of the media spotlight. I can’t allow serious mistakes to be made during such investigations. I need to see any such mistakes coming before they actually happen.’

‘But Sean— DI Corrigan is an outstanding detective and investigator,’ she reminded him. ‘Yet I can’t help but feel you’re expecting him to make a mistake, sooner rather than later.’

‘I’m not talking about him missing or overlooking some vital piece of evidence,’ he explained. ‘He’s as thorough as he is instinctive and imaginative – as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s almost as if he can think like the very people he’s trying to find and stop.’ He let his words hang in front of her, the silence pressurizing her to say something.

‘He’s simply able to combine years of experience with an excellent and active imagination,’ she tried to argue. ‘Nothing more than that. It’s a trait I’ve seen in other detectives.’

‘Yes,’ Addis agreed, but his eyes had narrowed to slits and his voice lowered to a hush. ‘But with Corrigan it’s much more than an active imagination. I leave you psychiatrists to decide its precise nature, but what I do know is that in order to make whatever it is work, he needs to tread a very thin line. He needs to be very close to the edge.’ He paused to take a sip of water. ‘Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before he falls from one of those edges.’

‘Then move him from the SIU,’ she told him, though she knew Sean would be furious if he found out she’d suggested as much to Addis. Much as she valued their friendship, if she had to sacrifice it to protect him, she would. ‘Before he puts himself in harm’s way again. It’s within your power.’

‘I can’t do that,’ he replied. ‘As I’ve said, Corrigan is an asset. A valuable asset. Police officers are paid to make sacrifices – to take risks. They just need to be controlled – which is why we are having this conversation.’

‘You don’t care if he puts himself in danger, do you?’ she accused him. ‘So long as he solves the high-profile cases quickly. Right?’

Addis ignored her question. ‘Do you accept my offer?’ he asked briskly.

Anna sighed, but knew she had no choice. ‘If it helps catch the killer, how could I say no?’

‘Good,’ Addis smiled, satisfied. ‘Then I look forward to your reports. Can I get you something to eat? To drink?’

‘No,’ she told him, getting to her feet clutching the file he’d given her – feeling like she needed to shower and change her clothes. ‘I have to be somewhere.’

‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Please. Don’t let me keep you.’

‘Goodbye, Robert,’ she replied, and headed for the entrance and the fresh, cold air she desperately needed beyond.

Addis watched her all the way. He hadn’t missed the difference in her attitude. She’d been more questioning than during their previous meetings. He would have to do what he always did the second he had the slightest doubt about anyone’s loyalty. He would assume she could no longer be trusted. Perhaps she’d been too close to Corrigan and his team for too long. She was supposed to be helping the gamekeeper, but maybe the poacher now had her allegiance. He decided the best way to be sure was to play along with her – for the time being.

Geoff Jackson was working at his desk in the huge open-plan office of The World newspaper when his editor appeared over his shoulder.

‘Sue,’ he acknowledged her and swivelled in his chair to face her.

‘Well,’ Dempsey asked him, sitting on the edge of his desk. She was tall for a woman – her slimness making her appear taller, with short blond hair that augmented her attractive face. At fifty-one she’d lost little of her appeal to men and knew it. ‘Did you get the interview?’

‘Yeah, I met him.’

‘And?’ she pressed.

‘And,’ he mimicked her, ‘it was very interesting.’

‘I bet it was,’ she said. ‘But what did Gibran tell you? Did you get him to talk about the murders the police think he committed?’

‘No,’ Jackson deflated her. ‘Nothing that specific. He’s too smart to talk about something he could be charged and tried for. We kept it more general – what goes through the mind of a killer, that sort of stuff. It’s good, though – even if I say so myself. Good enough to be our lead story. I’ll have it polished and ready to go for tomorrow’s edition. I’ll email it to you when it’s done.’

‘Fine,’ she told him, springing off his desk, ‘but it won’t be front page. Not without him confessing to something.’

‘I agree,’ Jackson replied, surprising her somewhat. He rarely agreed to anything without a fight. ‘I was thinking more centre-page spread – with a leader to it on the front. Lots of old photos of Gibran, his victims, DI Corrigan – that sort of thing, in amongst the interview. As I do more interviews we can run more centre-page spreads – build up a serialization.’

‘Do I sense a book in the making?’ Dempsey asked.

‘Maybe,’ he evaded, knowing she would be aware that was his plan, but that she wouldn’t care.

‘Fine,’ she smiled and was about to walk away when she remembered something. ‘By the way – have you heard about the Mint Street murder?’

Jackson leaned back in his chair looking slightly confused. ‘I wasn’t even a journalist back then,’ he answered, ‘but I’m aware of the case. Most good crime reporters are. Some crazed teenager killed a young courting couple with a knife. Can’t recall his name …’

‘Jesus, Geoff,’ Dempsey told him. ‘Not the murder from the eighties. Another one. A new one.’

‘What?’ he asked, surprised that a murder could have slipped past him. The Gibran interviews had distracted him from current affairs.

‘Some homeless guy,’ Dempsey explained, immediately deflating his interest. Who cared about a homeless man meeting his end? ‘Probably connected to the murder of a female prostitute about eleven days ago,’ she continued, reigniting his interest.

‘Linked?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Linked how?’

‘Both had their throats cut,’ Dempsey answered, but that wasn’t enough for Jackson.

‘And?’ he pressed.

‘And,’ she told him with a trace of relish in her voice, ‘they both had a number of teeth pulled out or cut out or something.’

Jackson felt the surge of excitement he always felt when he could smell a big crime story brewing and this one sounded like it had real potential. He hadn’t had a killer who’d captured the public’s imagination since he covered the story of the Jackdaw – a name that he, unbeknown to the rest of the world, had bestowed on the killer. ‘Anybody covering it?’ he asked urgently.

‘Bill Curtis,’ she replied. ‘One of your own.’

‘Curtis,’ he muttered under his breath. He wasn’t about to let a junior reporter like Curtis have what could be the crime scoop of the year.

‘I would have put you straight on it,’ Dempsey explained, ‘but you were off meeting Gibran. Maybe you could get Curtis to give his expert opinion on this new killer,’ she teased him before walking off.

‘Very funny,’ he answered with a grimace, grabbing his phone and checking his messages and missed calls. He’d been so wrapped up in the Gibran interview it had been hours since he’d looked at his mobile. There’d been several missed calls, including one from Dempsey and one from Curtis. ‘Shit,’ he cursed. He tapped the screen to call Curtis back, shaking his head at Dempsey’s attempt at being funny – Maybe you could get Curtis to give his expert opinion, but even as he repeated her words to himself in his head a smile began to spread across his face. ‘Sue, my friend,’ he whispered under his breath, ‘you’re a genius and you don’t know it.’ He heard the scuffling sounds of the phone being answered.

‘Bill Curtis speaking,’ the reporter answered curtly.

‘Talk to me, Bill,’ Jackson demanded. ‘I want to know everything on these murders. Everything.’

Sean sat alone in his office, poring over the crime scene photographs, studying every square centimetre of each one then swapping it for a corresponding report, searching both for something that might have been overlooked. Something he might have missed. But to his frustration he could find nothing he hadn’t already seen. He was about to go through the whole procedure again when Sally knocked on his door, entered without being asked, and slumped exhausted into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. He looked her up and down. ‘You look tired.’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Nothing a dose of caffeine won’t fix.’

‘You find the family?’ he asked.

‘Was easy enough,’ she told him. ‘Dalton had a long and illustrious criminal record, going back to his early childhood. His mum and dad, Jane and Peter, still live in the family home in Lewisham. Neither had seen William in a few months, but they were pretty devastated when they got the news.’

‘They’ve lost a child,’ Sean reminded her. ‘Doesn’t matter to the parents what that child may have become. He’ll always be their boy.’

‘I know,’ Sally agreed. ‘Anyway, they tried repeatedly to help him turn it around, but ultimately he chose drugs over them. If we need them to formally identify the body, they will.’

‘We do,’ he confirmed.

‘Apparently, he has an older brother: Sam,’ she continued. ‘He tracked William down to the West End, found him on the streets begging. When he tried to get William to go with him, stay at his place for a while and get cleaned up, the lad wasn’t having it.’

‘Some people don’t want to get clean,’ Sean reminded her. ‘They prefer their own version of reality.’

‘Well, he sure did,’ Sally said. ‘None of the family knew he was living in a disused garage,’ she continued. ‘Or at least, they didn’t until now.’

‘OK,’ Sean sighed. ‘Find the brother and talk to him. He probably knows more about the victim’s life than the parents. Siblings usually do when a brother or a sister go off the rails.’

‘Won’t be a problem,’ she told him. ‘Parents gave me his address.’

‘And see if the parents will give us a decent headshot photograph,’ Sean continued. ‘Have some of the team hit Oxford Street and show it around. We’re going to need the homeless community to talk to us, but I don’t want to alienate them by using a mugshot of a victim taken while he was in custody. Let’s not create a them-and-us feel when dealing with them.’

‘Got one here,’ Sally told him and pulled a photograph of a smiling William Dalton from her jacket pocket, taken shortly before the ravages of crack took hold and he ran away from home. ‘Parents let me have it. Had a feeling we’d need one.’

‘Good work,’ he acknowledged. He checked his watch. ‘It’s late, Sally. Why don’t you go home? You can start fresh in the morning.’

‘Trying to protect me?’ she accused him. Ever since Gibran almost took her life, Sean had been treating her differently to anyone else on the team; he couldn’t seem to help himself.

‘No,’ he argued. ‘I know you can handle yourself. But you look tired.’

‘We’re all tired,’ she reminded him, ‘and we’re going to get a lot more tired before this is over. No,’ she said, dragging herself to her feet. ‘Now’s a good time to hit the West End. It’ll be reasonably quiet and the homeless will be settling into doorways. Easier to talk to them when they’re static and not trying to hassle tourists for coins. I’ll stir up some unwilling volunteers and see what we can turn up.’

‘OK,’ he reluctantly agreed. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘What about you?’ she replied. ‘Gonna try for home – see Kate and the kids while you have a chance?’

Again he glanced at his watch – more to make a point than to check the time. ‘Too late for that,’ he told her. ‘For the kids, anyway.’

‘So what are you going to do instead?’ she asked. ‘Not sit here all night driving yourself insane reading reports, I hope?’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Thought I’d check on Donnelly and the door-to-door team, and then maybe …’ Sally’s scrutinizing gaze stopped him finishing.

‘And then maybe what?’ she pressed.

‘I thought … as I’ll be in the area,’ he tried to convince her, ‘I’d take another look at the scene.’

‘At the scene?’ she questioned him. ‘At this time of night – alone? Despite the fact you were there earlier?’

‘That was the problem,’ he tried to ease her concerns. ‘Earlier, it wasn’t right. There were too many people around, too much traffic, too many lights on in the houses and flats. Too much … life. It wasn’t how it would have been when Dalton was killed. And the place was crawling with forensics. I couldn’t think. Couldn’t get a feel for what happened.’

Sally sighed deeply. ‘Be careful, Sean,’ she warned him. ‘It’s been a while since we had a case like this. Maybe you should ease yourself into it – go through the normal motions of an investigation rather than trying to look into that crystal ball of yours. Don’t put yourself under too much pressure to solve this one by yourself. Don’t get isolated, Sean.’

‘I don’t have a crystal ball,’ he told her, getting to his feet, ‘and I won’t get isolated. You’ll know what I know.’ He grabbed his coat from the stand and began the ritual of filling his pockets with the phones, Maglite and a few other items he thought might be useful. ‘I need some time alone at the scene at the right time of day or night. I need to see it like he saw it.’

‘Feel what he felt?’ Sally asked accusingly.

‘I want to analyse the scene as the suspect would have seen it, that’s all,’ he lied.

‘Fine,’ she gave in.

‘Don’t worry about me so much,’ he told her as he brushed past on his way out. ‘Worry about finding whoever we’re after before he kills again. I’ll text you later,’ he promised, then headed off across the main office and through the exit.

Dave Donnelly sat alone in the Lord Clyde pub in Clenham Street just around the corner from the Mint Street crime scene, sipping a pint – not his first – and nibbling on a sandwich. He’d long ago abandoned the idea of eating the chunky chips that had accompanied it. The pleasant effects of the alcohol came all the quicker on an empty stomach, but they couldn’t stop the images of Jeremy Goldsboro, better known to the public as the Jackdaw, racing through his mind: Goldsboro pointing the shotgun at Sean until a bullet from Donnelly’s gun smashed him backwards. That should have been enough, but the Jackdaw had raised his shotgun again, leaving Donnelly no choice but to pump two more shots into his chest to end the stand-off. The memories brought bile flooding into his mouth. He swallowed it down with another mouthful of beer just as DCI Ryan Ramsay entered the sparsely populated pub. Spotting Donnelly, he made his way across the room and took the vacant seat across the table.

‘Drink?’ Donnelly offered.

‘No,’ Ramsay told him. ‘I won’t be staying long.’

‘Fair enough,’ Donnelly shrugged and raised his glass. ‘Mind if I do?’

‘Go ahead,’ Ramsay replied, uninterested.

‘So what d’you want to talk about?’ Donnelly cut to the chase. ‘Why did you ask to meet me?’

‘Thought we should have a chat,’ Ramsay said, as if it was nothing. ‘It’s been quite a while since we last talked.’

‘You mean when you asked me to pass you insider information about SIU cases?’ Donnelly reminded him. ‘When you asked me to give you information about Sean Corrigan?’

‘Information that you never gave me,’ Ramsay countered.

‘I’m not in the habit of talking out of school,’ Donnelly warned him.

‘You wouldn’t be talking out of school.’ Ramsay’s voice took on a persuasive tone. ‘I’m a DCI, remember? I can get the information I need from the same places you do.’

‘Then what do you need me for?’ Donnelly asked.

‘Details,’ Ramsay told him, leaning in closer. ‘Those little extras Corrigan might be holding back and perhaps a few details about Corrigan himself.’

‘And why would I tell you?’ Donnelly demanded.

‘Because we’re both getting close to retirement, Dave,’ Ramsay reminded him. ‘You want to try surviving on a sergeant’s pension? Got any kids at university?’ Donnelly said nothing. ‘Listen. I can get us both a very nice gig in our retirement. All you have to do is work with me on this, give me what I need.’

‘Oh aye,’ Donnelly stared at him with deep suspicion. ‘And what would this gig be?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ Ramsay insisted. ‘Not yet. But it’s not working as an investigator for some shitty company or as a glorified security guard. It’ll be good work and not too taxing. You won’t do better.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Donnelly told him.

‘You do that,’ Ramsay said quietly. ‘I hear the whispers about you and Corrigan. You owe him nothing.’

‘I said I’ll think about it,’ Donnelly repeated, irritated.

‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Ramsay warned him. ‘There are other detectives on the SIU.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Donnelly asked, though he knew exactly what was meant.

Ramsay ignored the question and got to his feet. ‘Stay in touch,’ he told him.

Donnelly watched him make his way to the exit. No sooner had he passed through the door than DC Zukov entered. Seeing Donnelly, he made straight for him, sliding next to him on the bench and eyeing his food and drink jealously.

‘You all right, Dave?’ he asked unpleasantly.

‘You want something to eat or drink?’ Donnelly replied, ignoring Zukov’s sarcasm.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Still got work to do, you know. I’ll get something later – when I’m finished.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Was that DCI Ramsay?’ Zukov asked with suspicion.

‘Aye,’ Donnelly answered warily. ‘Didn’t know you knew him.’

‘Our paths have crossed a couple of times,’ Zukov shrugged. ‘What was he doing here?’

‘Same as most people in here,’ Donnelly tried to dismiss it. ‘Having a drink.’

‘Why not use a pub nearer to London Bridge?’ Zukov pushed.

‘Too busy, maybe. How the fuck should I know?’

‘Only asking, Sarge. Only asking.’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly moved on. ‘Never mind. How’s the door-to-door going?’

‘Maybe if you helped knock on a few doors yourself, you’d know,’ Zukov told him.

Donnelly stared at him in contemptuous silence for a while. ‘I’m here to supervise, remember? Not wear the soles of my shoes out. That’s your job.’

Zukov scowled. ‘You’ll be needing a lift back to the Yard then?’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ Donnelly told him. ‘I’ll walk to London Bridge when we’re done and get the rattler home from there. Anyway, you were about to tell me how the door-to-door’s going.’

Zukov shrugged. ‘Plenty people have seen Dalton around over the last few weeks. Plenty people know of him, but no one really knew him. We’re not getting anything about the night he was killed, other than one of the night staff at Borough Underground says he recognized him from the photo. Says the victim came home most nights between ten and eleven and is pretty sure the night he was killed was no different.’

‘So it looks a sure thing he used the tube and not the bus,’ Donnelly told him. ‘Thank God for small mercies. CCTV from the stations and the route he used will be easy enough to track. If he’d been jumping on and off buses it would be a nightmare.’

‘The Underground staff have been told to preserve the CCTV footage for the last week,’ Zukov assured him.

‘Good,’ Donnelly replied, taking another sip of his beer. ‘Keep at it. Hopefully someone will come up with something useful.’ His phone chirping and vibrating on the table stole his attention. He read the text. It was from Sean. ‘You better get back to it,’ he advised Zukov. ‘The boss is on his way.’

‘Corrigan?’ Zukov asked.

‘Who else?’ Donnelly replied. ‘And that’s DI Corrigan to you.’

Zukov didn’t move – a troubled expression spreading across his face. Donnelly couldn’t tell whether it was real or fake.

‘Well. What you waiting for?’

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,’ Zukov explained, ‘about you and the guv’nor.’

‘Oh?’ Donnelly asked and immediately regretted leaving a gap for Zukov to walk through.

‘I’ve heard things, you know.’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly said, sensing trouble. ‘Like what exactly?’

‘Like you and he aren’t getting along too well right now,’ Zukov told him. ‘Since the Goldsboro shooting.’

Donnelly couldn’t help but tense at the sound of someone else saying that name, but he tried not to show it. ‘Bollocks,’ he replied. ‘You shouldn’t listen to any of that shit.’

‘Some people say,’ Zukov continued regardless, ‘the shooting didn’t have to happen – that the guv’nor manipulated the situation so you’d have no choice but to shoot Goldsboro. He created the circumstances and you pulled the trigger.’ Zukov let his words hang in the air.

‘And that’s what you think, is it?’ Donnelly asked after a few seconds.

‘I don’t think anything. I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.’ Zukov paused for a second. ‘I’m one of the senior DCs on this firm now,’ he reminded Donnelly. ‘If there’s a serious problem between the DI and his DS, then it could impact on the rest of us. I’m just trying to look out for the rest of the team. I’m sure you understand.’

Donnelly swallowed his seething resentment at Zukov’s veiled threats, but what hurt more was that it was the truth. He cursed Sean every hour for making him take a life and constantly thought of other ways they could have taken Goldsboro down without killing him. Again and again he kept coming back to the same conclusion: Sean had wanted it that way. Things had happened exactly as Corrigan wanted them to happen. Donnelly may have been the one pointing a gun at Goldsboro, but it felt like it was Sean who’d pulled the trigger.

Conscious that Zukov was waiting for an answer, he told him, ‘You worry about doing your own job,’ he warned him. ‘I’m still the senior DS and it’s my job to look after the team – not yours. You clear on that?’

‘Yes, Sarge,’ Zukov smiled unpleasantly. ‘Enjoy your supper,’ he said as he got to his feet and headed for the exit, leaving Donnelly alone with his drink and his thoughts.

Sean approached the two young uniformed constables who’d drawn the short straw and been left to guard the scene. He held up his warrant card for them. ‘DI Corrigan,’ he identified himself. ‘Special Investigations Unit. This is my crime scene.’

The tall, fit-looking young man who was holding the Crime Scene Log looked down to check the information in his book. ‘Will you be going into the scene, sir?’ he asked nervously.

‘Yeah,’ Sean answered. ‘I need to take a look at something.’

‘No problem,’ the constable told him, and made an entry in the log book.

Sean nimbly bent under the tape like a boxer entering the ring and immediately began to walk towards the garage that was now lit by a solitary mini-floodlight. Halfway there he suddenly stopped and turned through three hundred and sixty degrees.

‘Where did you come from?’ he quietly asked the trace of the killer that would forever remain at the scene like an ethereal fingerprint of violence that could never be scrubbed away. ‘Did you walk straight towards it? Did you walk across the same ground I’m walking across now – feeling unstoppable – feeling like a god? Or did you skirt around the outside of the park and come up behind him?’ He waited a few seconds for the answer to come, but he neither heard nor saw anything, so he continued his walk to the garage, trying to feel the killer’s presence, his mind, with every step, until he reached the brick and corrugated-iron shell that William Dalton had called home.

The forensic team had pulled the metal sheet back across the entrance as best they could, but the floodlight penetrated deep inside, illuminating the squalor Dalton had lived in and the violence that had claimed his life. Sean peered through the gap in the makeshift front door. ‘Is this what you did?’ he asked the ghost of Dalton’s killer. ‘Did you move quietly up to the garage and look through the gaps, watching him for a while before you somehow lured him into your trap? And how did you do that?’ He looked down at the floor inside and instantly found what he was looking for: the bloodstains from the crime scene photographs. In real life, they looked far less vivid. There was a small patch of blood at the entrance and then what appeared to be a smear mark for several feet that connected to a much larger bloodstained area where Dalton had his throat and carotid artery sliced wide open, causing him to bleed to death in seconds.

Sean remembered the report said the victim had almost certainly been hit over the back of the head. The photographs of Dalton’s matted, bloody hair around the wound flashed in his mind. He pulled at the sheet of metal that had served as a door, the noise loud and grating – screaming through the stillness of the bitter night. He froze for a few seconds as he looked around. Surely someone would have heard the metal being pulled away? ‘Or at least you must have thought it would have been heard,’ he whispered. ‘You must have thought it would attract unwanted attention, that someone might look out of a window and see you … yet you didn’t walk away. You did what you came here to do.’ He thought silently for a while, seeing the killer standing in the darkness – calm despite the frightful noise. No sense of panic or fear. Just a determination to kill. A shiver ran down his spine, partly because of the cold, but mostly because of the dawning realization of the type of killer he was hunting. This one was as calm and careful as he was vicious. Those were always the most difficult to catch.

Again he pulled at the metal sheet, once more filling the night with that terrible grating sound, until the gap was big enough to fit through. He took a couple of steps back to the floodlight and switched it off, unclipped his mini-Maglite from his belt and clicked it on.

Alarmed by the sounds coming from the scene and the sudden darkness, the constable Sean had spoken with earlier called out, his voice full of concern: ‘You all right there, sir?’

‘I’m fine,’ Sean shouted back. ‘I need to look at something without the light on.’ He headed to the garage entrance and stood peering into the darkness with only his small torch for illumination. He remembered there had been a camping lantern at the scene and figured it would have given off about the same amount of light. Now he was seeing the scene as both killer and victim had seen it.

He shone his torch at the pattern of blood on the ground – the cone of light tracing it from the small stain by the entrance to the larger dried pool deep inside the garage. He walked on, careful to avoid the area where the killing had taken place, while also watching every step he took, shining the light on each area of ground before placing his foot down, until he reached a patch from which he could see everything he wanted. Again he traced the blood smear from the small stain to the large pool and back again as the scene that had played out here became clearer and clearer in his mind.

‘You were hit on the back of the head by the entrance and then dragged inside where he sliced across your trachea and carotid artery. The cut across the throat was survivable, but the cut to the artery was not. The pressure in the artery would have caused death through blood loss, but … Shit,’ he cursed as he lost his way and his thoughts became confused and tangled. He took a few deep breaths to clear his mind, then started again.

‘You’re not thinking like a homeless teenager,’ he reprimanded himself. ‘What was he thinking? What was going through his mind?’ He thought back to the crime scene reports. There was evidence the victim had been preparing his crack pipe, though he never got to use it. ‘What would keep an addict from his drug?’ he asked softly. He took a few more deep breaths while the image of the victim began to form in his mind as if he was watching him on CCTV footage. He could see Dalton, eagerly but carefully preparing to get high and forget the pointlessness of his life.

‘You live your life in fear,’ Sean found himself quietly saying. ‘You don’t feel safe anywhere. You only escape the fear when you get high, which is what you were planning on doing, but something disturbed you. You heard something outside, didn’t you? Something anyone else could have ignored, but because you live in fear you had to be sure it wasn’t a threat – had to make sure no one was waiting for you to pass out stoned when you’d be at your most vulnerable. So you went to take a look outside.’ He walked back to the entrance and looked out into the night just as William Dalton had.

‘It was raining hard that night,’ he reminded himself. ‘It must have been difficult to see properly with the rain driving into your face in the dark. Did you call out – demand to know if someone was there? But no one called back, did they? Did you move further from your shelter to try and see better – playing right into his hands? He used your fear to lure you into his trap, didn’t he? And when you stretched too far into the darkness, he hit you hard – not hard enough to kill you, but enough to knock you down, to leave you confused and disorientated while he dragged you back inside. Did he close the entrance before he did the things he did to you? The report said it was open when the body was found, but he could have left it like that when he went.’ He thought back to the original crime scene report. ‘You had a camping lantern, but there was no mention of any light being on – so it was never turned on or he turned it off when he came in … or when he left. Was that why he wasn’t afraid of being seen – because it was dark in here?’ Another thought crossed his mind as he searched with his torch for the lantern, quickly finding it. He walked carefully towards it and crouched next to it, shining his torch close as he examined the on/off switch. It was set to on. Clearly the batteries had gone flat by the time the body was discovered. Sean nodded as he thought it through. ‘Batteries are expensive. You would have used the lamp sparingly, but you needed light to prepare your drugs and then there was the noise outside. Your fear meant you kept it on when you went to look, but when he dragged you inside he left it on. Because he wanted to see. He had to see everything. And when he left, he left you in light – because he wanted the world to see.’

He remembered the words of the crime scene report and the photographs. There was no evidence of the victim fighting back – no defensive wounds or arterial blood-spray patterns on the walls. ‘So you were too badly injured to fight back, or he was too strong. Strong enough to pin you to the floor while he cut through your throat and carotid artery. Did he hold you still while he watched the life drain from you? And when you were dead or near-dead, he took your teeth and nails – so he could relive killing you over and over again.’

Without realizing it, he suddenly switched point of view from victim to killer, as if in the moment Dalton died he left his dead body and entered the murderer’s very much living body. For a few seconds he was sure he could feel the excitement and power the killer had felt coursing through him, making him feel more alive than he’d ever been.

‘You raped the first victim, but your crimes are not sexually motivated,’ he said, almost too quietly to be audible. ‘Your excitement spread through every inch of your body, didn’t it? You became aroused by this great thing you had just done, but the tension in your body was too much, wasn’t it? You needed a release, so you raped her while she lay dead or dying.’ He closed his eyes for a second and allowed the images of William Dalton lying dead on the ground to flood in. His clothes appeared to be fully intact, his genitals unmolested. ‘Did you feel the same almost uncontrollable excitement when you killed for the second time? Did you need to release? But this was a man … Shit,’ he suddenly cursed. This one was coming to him too fast. Thinking like him was almost overwhelming, but at the same time it was intoxicating and seductive to follow the conscious and subconscious steps of a killer towards what most would consider to be madness, but what to them was a transformation into something greater and more powerful. He drew in deep breaths to regain his focus – to regain his own voice. To take back his own mind.

‘OK,’ he told himself, trying to think like a detective and not the killer he hunted. ‘No matter how hard you tried to keep clean, you would have been a fucking mess. Your hands, sleeves, everything would have been covered in the victim’s blood. Blood has a nasty habit of getting everywhere, but once you cut through his carotid artery you had to deal with arterial spray too – blood spraying out under pressure from a heart trying to stay alive. You must have been covered in it – warm and wet on your skin like slick hot oil— Fuck!’ he chastised himself for drifting back into the killer’s mind.

He gave himself a few seconds to regain his composure. ‘You must have been a mess. You couldn’t have casually walked on to the tube or a bus like that, and even if you had a car nearby, you wouldn’t have risked walking to it covered in the victim’s blood. No. You plan too much. Somehow you got clean or clean enough to slip past a casual look. So you took water with you or knew where to find it or had something with you that would cover your blood-soaked clothes until you could get home and get clean. But what about your wife and family, or your parents? They would have noticed something.’ He thought for a second. ‘So you live alone. The bloody ones always live alone.’ He paused for a few seconds to allow his observations to settle into something more solid in his mind. The first sketching of a mind-map that he knew, one way or the other, would eventually lead him to the killer of William Dalton and Tanya Richards.

He took one last look around the inside of the garage – at the squalor of Dalton’s life and the bloody hell that was his death. ‘What do you want?’ he asked the killer. ‘You’re not just killing because you can’t stop yourself, are you? You’re trying to … you’re trying to achieve something. But what?’

He clicked his torch off and walked into the darkness that waited for him outside.

4

Next morning Sean was in his office at New Scotland Yard, a takeaway black coffee steaming on the cheap wooden desk that had snagged more than one pair of trousers. Engrossed in typing up his findings on the virtually obsolete computer he refused to allow IT to replace, he was unaware that he had a visitor until a sharp knock on his doorframe alerted him. Somehow, without looking up, he knew who it would be. Maybe he’d subconsciously detected her perfume. His entire body froze with tension when he saw her standing in the doorway.

‘Anna,’ was all he could say.

‘Sean,’ she replied, looking at the floor for a split second to avoid his eyes.

‘Been a long time,’ he told her.

‘You’ve not had an investigation that needed my input,’ she reminded him.

‘You mean one that Addis wanted your input on?’ he replied. ‘Your input about me.’

She walked into his office and took a seat without being asked. ‘We’ve talked about this, Sean. My loyalty is to you. I’ll only tell Addis what we agree he should be told. I’ll keep him off your back while you try to find whoever committed these crimes – and maybe I can help you with that too.’

He watched her for a while before answering – taking in every breath, every minute movement and involuntary twitch of her body. ‘Perhaps you can,’ he eventually said. ‘This one’s certainly a bit different.’

‘I read the file,’ she told him. Sean raised an eyebrow. She saw it. ‘Addis,’ she explained.

‘Naturally,’ he replied. ‘And what do you think?’

‘I think he’s a vicious killer who needs to be stopped,’ she answered.

‘That’s your professional opinion?’ he asked with a smile.

‘Part of it.’ She returned the smile.

‘And the rest? I’d be interested in hearing what you think.’

‘You mean you’d be interested in seeing how far behind you I am?’ she accused him.

‘That’s not true.’ Or at least, it was only partly true. He did want to hear her thoughts.

‘Well,’ she began, ‘he’s certainly high on the violence score, but low on the rage score.’

‘Meaning?’ Sean asked, although he believed he knew the answer.

‘Meaning you can almost certainly rule out mental illness,’ she explained. ‘He’s not raging over his victims – there are no multiple stab wounds, for example. He’s very precise. If he’s mad at the world, he has a very calm way of showing it. Murderous, but calm. And he’s not concerned about leaving his DNA at the scene, so it’s unlikely he’s killed before or been convicted of any crimes.’

‘Could he have killed and gotten away with it?’ Sean asked, although he was sure he hadn’t.

‘It’s possible,’ Anna agreed. ‘He may have used a completely different method. But I doubt it. He’s used the same method twice now, which means he likes to stick to what works – what he’s comfortable with.’

‘Interesting,’ Sean told her.

‘Interesting enough,’ she said, ‘but nothing you hadn’t worked out.’

‘You’ve flagged things I hadn’t considered,’ he lied. ‘You’re the psychiatrist – not me.’

Anna didn’t believe a word. ‘I’m glad I could add something,’ she smiled.

‘He raped the first victim,’ Sean quickly moved on. ‘Yet his second victim was male. What’s he thinking?’

‘I don’t believe he’s sexually motivated,’ she explained. ‘There were no obvious signs of sexual activity with the male victim, but he may well be more of a sexual predator than he thinks. Certainly, when the opportunity presented itself, he took it.’

‘She had no defensive marks,’ Sean reminded her, ‘so he raped her when she was dead – or almost.’

‘Or he threatened her into submission, or he’s strong enough to totally overpower her,’ Anna argued.

‘So what is he?’ Sean asked. ‘A rapist or a necrophiliac?’

‘Neither,’ Anna answered. ‘His reason for attacking wasn’t to have sex with them – dead or alive. That was merely a byproduct.’

‘A release?’ Sean shared his own idea.

‘His excitement would have been intense,’ she agreed, knowing what he meant. ‘It would have manifested itself in some physical way.’

‘You mean he got so excited he became sexually aroused?’ Sean cut to the point. ‘He needed to orgasm to calm himself down?’

‘I believe so.’

‘So we should be looking more closely for signs of sexual activity with the second victim?’

‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘but you were already going to – weren’t you?’

‘I was considering suggesting it,’ he admitted. ‘Though Roddis and his team would probably have done it anyway.’

‘I’m not sure I can help you, Sean,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘You’re always at least two steps ahead of me – ahead of anyone. Anything I can see you’ve already seen.’

‘You’re not going to start telling me I can think like them and all that shit?’ he pleaded.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you? Isn’t that what happens?’

‘I don’t think like them,’ he said, his voice betraying his frustration. ‘I can imagine what they might be thinking – there’s a difference.’

‘Is there?’

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

Before Anna could answer, Sally walked into the office and slumped into the one vacant chair, too tired to notice the tense atmosphere. ‘I wish I still smoked,’ she announced. ‘A ciggie and a coffee would go down very nicely round about now.’

‘What you got for me, Sally?’ Sean ignored her plea for vices of the past.

‘Well, the victim’s Oyster card is being examined today, so we should know his movements soon enough. And we’ve seized the CCTV from Borough tube station. The transport police are going to find out what train he used and seize the CCTV from that too, so if he was being closely followed we might get something. It was late and the station was pretty quiet. Could be our best bet.’

‘Then he didn’t follow him,’ Sean killed off any optimism. ‘He waited for him. He’s too smart, too careful to get caught following either victim on CCTV. But check it out anyway. You get anything from your trip to the West End last night?’

‘Nothing that sounds like it’s going to help,’ she admitted. ‘We tracked down plenty of his so-called friends and associates from the street. He was well known and well liked, but nobody has any idea why this happened to him. There were lots of sightings on the day and night he died, but he headed for home alone. No one knows what happened.’

‘Can they say what tube station he used?’ Sean asked.

‘Some reckon Tottenham Court Road,’ Sally told him. ‘We’ll know for sure once the Oyster card is examined.’

‘OK, fine,’ Sean agreed distractedly, suddenly aware of an absence in the room. ‘You seen Dave this morning?’ he asked Sally.

‘No,’ she shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon.’

Sean thought about his other trusted second in command for a few seconds, remembering how in the past he was virtually always the first one into work every morning. Since the Goldsboro shooting, he was usually the last. ‘If you see or hear from him,’ he told Sally, ‘let him know I need to speak with him, will you?’ Sally nodded as Sean’s mobile began to ring. He checked the caller ID and answered.

‘Andy,’ he began. ‘What you got for me?’

‘Early, peripheral findings only,’ DS Roddis from SIU’s specialist forensic team told him. ‘The Crime Scene Log tells me you’ve been to the scene, twice, so I doubt I’ll be able to tell you anything you haven’t worked out for yourself. Why wasn’t I given this scene when it was fresh? It doesn’t help that I’ve had to contend with another forensic team trampling over most of it and making off with exhibits.’

‘Exhibits that will be handed over to you,’ Sean tried to calm the unlikeable perfectionist that was Roddis, the best at his business Sean had ever known. ‘And the murder wasn’t connected to a series until it was too late. If we’re unlucky enough to get another scene, you’ll get it before anyone else steps foot in it.’

‘Except you,’ Roddis accused him in advance.

‘I’d be interested in your observations,’ Sean encouraged him. ‘And I want you to look for a couple of things the other forensics team may not have considered.’

Anna gave him a knowing look.

‘Such as?’ Roddis asked, intrigued. He’d worked enough investigations with Sean to know to expect surprises.

‘Semen. Probably close to where the body was found, but could be anywhere in the garage or just outside it.’

‘You think he sexually assaulted the victim?’ Roddis asked, confused by Sean’s suggestion.

‘No, but it’s possible he felt the need while at the scene. To reduce his heightened state of excitement.’

‘The need?’ Roddis questioned. ‘A killer masturbating at the scene when no sexual motivation is suspected? I’ve seen defecation, urination, killers that like to eat and drink from the victim’s fridge, but never what you’re suggesting, not when the crime isn’t sexually motivated.’

‘Let’s just say this one’s possibly confused,’ Sean told him. ‘Let’s not assume there was no sexual element to his motivation and let’s look for traces of semen.’

‘If you really think it’s worth it,’ Roddis climbed down in the face of Sean’s irritation. ‘But it won’t be easy – not at a scene of this type and not after it’s been trampled over.’

‘I know, but just do it for me, will you?’

‘Very well,’ Roddis conceded. ‘And the other thing?’

‘There was a lot of blood at the scene,’ Sean reminded him. ‘He was in close proximity to the victim when he cut through his carotid artery, meaning he must have had a significant amount of blood on him.’

‘One would imagine so.’

‘Which means he needed to clean up,’ Sean continued. ‘At least enough to get him past casual looks. There’s no water supply in the garage, so chances are he brought his own, something he may have chosen to dispose of after he’d used it – a plastic bottle, anything. Check inside the cordon – further afield too – for anything he could have used.’

‘Why you so worried about finding it?’ Roddis asked. ‘All it’ll give us is more DNA and fingerprints. We already have plenty.’

‘It’ll help paint a picture,’ Sean explained. ‘It’ll show he planned it. That he’s organized and careful – premeditating. If he tries to plead diminished responsibility, we’ll be able to disprove it.’

‘So be it,’ Roddis sighed. ‘We’ll look for your water bottle. Anything else?’

‘No,’ Sean told him. ‘You find anything interesting or unexpected, phone it straight through to me. Understand?’

‘I understand,’ Roddis answered.

Sean ended the call and threw his phone back on to the desk where it immediately started chirping and vibrating again. ‘Christ,’ he complained, snatching it back up. He didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway. With an investigation like this, he’d be getting a lot of calls from numbers his phone didn’t recognize and he’d have to risk answering them all or miss something potentially vital. ‘Hello,’ he said, withholding his name until he knew who he was speaking to.

‘DI Corrigan?’ a man’s voice asked.

‘Who’s calling?’ he probed.

‘PC John Croft,’ the man answered. ‘The Coroner’s Officer.’

‘You’re speaking with DI Corrigan,’ Sean told him. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘Dr Canning will be doing the post-mortem on your victim, William Dalton, later today. I’ve had a message from him asking if you’ll be there.’

My victim, Sean thought about Croft’s expression. Was that what Dalton was – another of his victims? ‘Yes,’ he said after a slight pause. ‘Tell Dr Canning I’ll be there.’

‘About eleven a.m. then,’ Croft told him, and hung up.

‘The post-mortem?’ Sally asked.

‘Yeah,’ he answered.

‘Want some company?’

‘No. I’ll go alone. You’re better off staying here and keeping everybody on it.’ As he spoke, his eyes scanned the main office through the Perspex wall. ‘Where the hell is Dave?’

David Langley paced the showroom floor of the furniture store. Head office had given him the grand title ‘manager’, but since they refused to supply him with a team of sales assistants to command – just an ‘assistant manager’ who was more trouble than he was worth – most of the time Langley was reduced to the role of a glorified salesman. There was a time when that would have bothered him, but now he knew it was simply something he had to put up with while he laid the foundations for his true purpose in life, his reason for being. He congratulated himself on possessing the strength of character to continue the charade of working in the furniture store until the time came to reveal his legacy to the world. The fantasies that had begun as a young teenager were now becoming a reality. He had everything planned, culminating in a final act that would see him seize complete control over the endgame. Something no one could imagine or predict. Not even Corrigan.

The automatic doors at the entrance to the shop slid open with an electric whoosh, drawing his attention to the attractive, dark-haired woman in her early thirties who casually drifted into the shop. He took in the fitted jacket and tight jeans that showed off her trim figure. No doubt another bored, wealthy housewife – plenty of those had moved into the area over the last two decades. She didn’t look old enough to have children, not for this part of London anyway. He’d had plenty of success with the bored ones in the past and fancied his chances with her, but at the same time he found himself looking on her as something other than a potential conquest, evaluating her instead as a possible victim. It would be risky; dangerous, even. This was no homeless loser or prostitute whom no one cared about; this woman would be missed and mourned, and her family would push the police hard to find her killer – not to mention the press, who would be all over it. For that reason alone, taking her life would be worth it. She would give him ten times the publicity he’d gained from killing the druggie and the whore.

He began to walk towards her as she moved between coffee tables, watching the pulse twitch in her slim, tanned neck – imagining slicing through her perfect skin until he cut through her carotid artery, pinning her to the floor as the warm, red blood emptied from her in intermittent sprays until the flow subsided with her dying heart and finally she lay lifeless. He imagined she’d smell of expensive perfume and cosmetics.

‘Can I help you with anything?’ he asked, flashing his practised seductive smile.

‘Hi,’ she smiled back, her eyes making momentary contact before returning to the coffee tables, but it was enough for him to tell she was interested. His nostrils flared at her scent. It was as he’d imagined, but warm too. ‘I need a coffee table,’ she explained in an accent that suited her appearance perfectly. ‘Ideally something I can take away today and won’t have to build. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it’s been to find anything. Everywhere’s saying eight weeks until delivery.’

‘You should buy online,’ he told her with a smile. ‘Probably shouldn’t have told you that, but how could I lie to you?’

‘Not my thing,’ she replied. ‘I like to see things in the flesh, so to speak, before I commit myself.’

Hearing her say ‘flesh’ fired a bolt of excitement through his body. ‘Well, you’re in luck,’ he continued. ‘We have plenty of good-quality tables and most are in stock, so if your car is big enough you can take one away today.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Trouble is, most retailers don’t keep stock any more. Takes up too much space. Costs too much money. They don’t like to build anything unless they know they’ve got a buyer lined up. But not here. We know not everybody wants to wait for weeks and weeks.’ He allowed a few seconds’ silence between them, until her gaze returned to him. ‘Please. Take a look. Ask anything you like. If you buy today, I can probably do you a special deal – if you promise you won’t tell anyone.’

‘I don’t know,’ she told him. ‘I’m not really seeing anything that grabs me.’

‘Let me guess,’ he tried to keep her interested. ‘You’ve recently moved to the area and upsized. The table from your old house or flat isn’t big enough and you’ve got friends coming around to help you celebrate moving into your new home, so you need a coffee table to fill that annoying space today? Am I right?’

She cocked her head to one side and smiled. ‘That’s … very clever,’ she replied.

‘So what if it’s not for life?’ he spoke in the code of illicit suggestion, hoping she would respond in kind. ‘So long as it works in the short term, who’s going to know? Once it’s served its purpose, you can get rid of it, replace it with something more permanent, but in the short term it’ll give you exactly what you’re looking for. Something to bridge the gap – without costing a fortune.’ He stood with his hands on his hips to augment his powerful physique – his chest inflated and triangular while his waist tapered away. He felt her eyes flick across his body. ‘Personally, I’d recommend this one,’ he said, resting his hand on the most expensive table in the shop. ‘It’s the best we have – a little more expensive than the others, but I’m sure you would appreciate the quality.’

‘Maybe,’ she replied shyly, a slight croakiness in her voice, a degree of dilation in her pupils. The flushing of her skin let him know she was interested even if she didn’t know it yet.

‘But,’ he blurted out cheerfully, ‘what’s the best way to test a new coffee table?’ The woman looked confused. ‘By using it,’ he explained. ‘There’s a great coffee shop along the street. You may know it – Bob’s Blends? Bit of a locals’ favourite.’

‘Like I said,’ she answered nervously, although he could sense her excitement too at his obvious interest, ‘I’m kind of new to the area.’

‘Then you have to try the coffee,’ he smiled. ‘I promise you’ll be a convert. Why don’t you take a look around’ – he was speaking fast now, denying her the chance to say no – ‘while I go grab us a couple of coffees. Don’t tell me what you usually have – let me surprise you.’

‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ she tried to back away.

‘You’re not,’ he assured her in his most cheerful tone – his smile friendly, but his eyes serious and flirtatious. ‘It’ll be my pleasure.’ He felt her slipping away. ‘You know what?’ he said, trying to sound genuinely excited. ‘I just remembered: we have some really nice tables in the storeroom. They’re old stock, due to be taken away, but they’re great tables. If you wanted one of them, I could do you a really great price and deliver today. I could even drop it round myself.’ He gave her a few seconds to understand what he was really saying. ‘Got to be worth a look – don’t you think?’

He watched her lips – her pupils – the tone of her skin – the pulse quickening in her neck – everything. If she went for it within the next few minutes he’d have both her trust and her address. Maybe he would indulge in a brief affair with her until the time came to slit her throat. He watched her mouth begin to open as the answer formed, but it wasn’t her voice that he heard – it was the all too familiar voice of his area manager.

‘David,’ she ambushed him, making him curse himself for having not kept an eye on the shop entrance. ‘A word please.’ Her voice was sharp, as if she was scolding an unruly dog.

He took a step back, before recovering from the surprise and answering, ‘Of course.’ Turning to the customer, he apologized: ‘Sorry to keep you – I won’t be a minute.’

The area manager had set off towards the far corner of the shop, indicating she wanted privacy. Where she was concerned, this was never a good thing. Reluctantly, he followed.

Jane Huntingdon was younger than him, but had been an area manager for more than a year and was clearly destined for higher things. He’d wanted the job she now had, but the company passed him over in favour of her. A clear signal he would never progress and would do well to hold on to what he had. In so many ways she looked and sounded like the customer he’d been trying to seduce, only she was formally dressed and had short blond hair.

‘What the hell are you doing, David?’ she demanded, her eyes looking over his shoulder at the customer. ‘Haven’t you learnt anything?’

‘I was trying to sell her a coffee table,’ he lied. ‘That is my job.’

‘Bollocks,’ she cut him down. ‘I heard you offering to personally deliver to her home. I know what you were trying to do.’

‘I was trying to make a sale,’ he insisted.

‘You’re a salesman, not a delivery driver.’

‘Store manager,’ he told her. ‘I’m a store manager – not a salesman.’

‘I don’t care what you call yourself,’ she replied. ‘What I care about is your conduct while you’re at work. Jesus, if it’s not female staff members, it’s female customers.’

‘I’m a single man,’ he tried to argue. ‘I can do what I like.’

‘Maybe if you’d changed your behaviour, you wouldn’t be single,’ she told him.

He knew what she was getting at. ‘You have no business bringing my wife and children into this,’ he warned her. ‘That has nothing to do with you.’

‘Look,’ she relented somewhat, holding her hands up. ‘That wasn’t my intention. You’re right: you’re a single man and you can do as you like – but not here. Not in the store. This is not your private pulling place. It’s work. You understand?’ He said nothing, merely stared blankly into her blue eyes. ‘After your last transgression, you can’t afford any more mistakes.’ Still he didn’t answer. ‘Listen, David, I’ve fought for you more than once at central office. There are others who’d gladly see the back of you, but you do a decent job here and I believe everyone deserves a second chance. Don’t blow it – that’s all. Do you hear me, David?’

Again he didn’t answer. He didn’t trust himself to speak, not while his mind was flooded with images of the blood flowing from her neck, images of cutting and pulling the teeth from her pretty mouth. It took an act of will to remind himself that killing her would have too much of an element of vengeance. His work was about so much more than petty human emotions – no matter how extraordinary her warm, viscous blood would feel as it covered his hands.

‘Do you hear me, David?’ she repeated, her voice raised.

‘I hear you,’ he managed to answer, pulling himself back into the world. ‘I hear you.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll check back with you later in the week. In the meantime, make sure you keep your social life and work life separate. OK?’

‘Fine,’ he replied, managing to fake a slight smile. ‘It won’t happen again.’

She dismissed him with a shake of her head. ‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, and headed for the exit – watched all the way by Langley as he studied every inch of her body.

When she was gone he spun around, hoping to find the customer and pick up where he’d left off, salvage something from the day. The store was empty; she was gone. ‘Fuck,’ he swore under his breath as the anger swelled, making his head hurt. He needed something. He needed something soon. Something to allow the thoughts in his head to become reality instead of beautiful images of what could be. He needed to feel skin and flesh in his hands as a sculptor needs to feel wet clay. Needed to feel blood run between his fingers as an artist needs to feel paint. He needed another victim.

Donnelly stirred late – his eyes flickering open, then closing again as they registered the grey winter light seeping in through the windows. Through the fog of the previous night’s drinking he began to realize he was not alone in his bedroom and that it was his wife who’d opened the curtains and was now talking to him. Though he couldn’t yet make out what she was saying, he could tell from her tone that she was lecturing him. Slowly her words came into focus.

‘Dave,’ she pleaded. ‘You’ve got to get up. You’re late for work.’

‘Jesus, Karen,’ he complained. ‘What time is it anyway?’

‘Getting on for nine o’clock. I’ve got to get Josh to school. The others have taken themselves off. Christ,’ she moaned as she got closer to him. ‘You stink of booze. Where were you last night?’

‘Eh?’ he bought himself some thinking time. ‘Just had a few beers with the boys,’ he lied. In fact he’d remained drinking in the Lord Clyde until it came time to head off for London Bridge Station – stopping at the Barrow Boy and Banker en route for a couple of scotches – then catching a train home, only to stop at his favourite pub in Swanley, Kent, for more shots. By the time he got home it was all he could do to walk. ‘We picked up a new case,’ he elaborated on his lie. ‘Looks like a bad one. Thought we’d grab a few while we had the chance.’

‘Looks like you had a few too many,’ she pointed out. ‘What’s happened to you lately?’ she asked. ‘You always used to be up with the birds. Now you struggle to get up at all. You sure you’re OK, love?’

‘Aye,’ he tried to laugh it off. ‘I told you. Just not as young as I used to be, eh?’

‘Maybe you should lay off the booze for a bit,’ she suggested.

‘Aye,’ he played along. ‘Maybe.’

‘Right,’ she announced. ‘I’m officially out of time. I’ve got to go. Fix yourself something to eat and get cleaned up,’ she ordered. ‘And then take yourself off to work or Corrigan will have your head.’

‘Don’t worry about Corrigan,’ he tried to reassure her. ‘He needs me more than I need him.’

‘Not like this, he doesn’t,’ she warned him. ‘We’ve been married a long time and if there’s one thing you’ve taught me about the police it’s that no one is indispensable – not even you. Plenty more detective sergeants in the sea, I should imagine. I’ll see you later.’

Donnelly grunted a reply as he watched her stride from the bedroom. For a second he considered going back to sleep, but knew if he did he’d be out for hours. Instead he forced himself to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed, grimacing and groaning with every movement. He rubbed his face with both hands, feeling the stubble ‘Jesus,’ he complained and stood on unsteady feet, the nausea of the morning after the night before taking its revenge.

He headed downstairs in his old T-shirt and boxer shorts, flicked the kettle on and thought about eating something to counteract the lingering effects of the alcohol, but couldn’t stomach the idea of food. A wave of nausea hit him and made him close his eyes, but the darkness allowed images to invade his mind – images of bullets ripping through Jeremy Goldsboro, pinning him to the side of the van until he slid to the floor spitting blood. Donnelly snapped his eyes open. ‘Fuck,’ he cursed his own memories. ‘Leave me alone,’ he found himself pleading. ‘Leave me alone.’

He checked his watch and winced at the time. His mobile would soon be ringing with people wondering where the hell he was. He needed to get straight and he needed to do it quickly, but he couldn’t eat and coffee alone only intensified the tremors in his hands. His eyes wandered to the kitchen cupboard where the spirits were kept – a cupboard that until recently had rarely been disturbed other than at Christmas. He told himself it was self-medication, safer than antidepressants, but in his heart he knew what he was becoming. He opened the cupboard looking for the vodka – much harder to smell on the breath than scotch. A shot or two of the clear, oily liquid and he’d be good for a few hours. Even with a few drinks on board, he could do his job better than most. Mouthwash and mints would disguise the truth well enough until he could find a reason to be out on enquiries and head off to a pub close to his home. But this wasn’t going to be another routine day helping other teams and units with their enquiries; this was a new murder investigation, so the pressure would be on and people would expect him to be visible and vocal – the old Dave Donnelly.

‘Shit,’ he cursed and reached for the vodka, his fingers connecting with the glass of the bottle then recoiling – the magnitude of what it meant cutting through his clouded mind. The last time he’d taken a drink first thing in the morning had been a stag do over twenty years ago. This was different. This would mean losing himself – possibly forever. ‘No,’ he told the room, and shut the cupboard door. ‘No.’

Sean walked along the sterile corridor that led to the morgue at Guy’s Hospital. It wasn’t an easy place to find, hidden away from the main hospital complex, out of sight from the public and staff alike – neither of whom wanted to be reminded of the grimmest possible outcome for a loved one or a patient. But he knew the route well, having walked it many times in the past. He paused for a few seconds outside the large rubber doors at the entrance, took a deep breath, then entered.

Inside the morgue, six sparkling metal trollies were lined up in two banks of three. Two had bodies on them, hidden under clean, pressed, green hospital sheets, whereas the others were empty. Only two sudden deaths today for Dr Canning to explain. People who died of obvious natural causes, the old or terminally ill, were not deemed suitable for his special attention. Sean saw Canning hunched over the naked body of a young white male, his face close to the dead man’s skin. Satisfied, he straightened up and began to scribble notes on the pad held in his hand.

Sean recognized the corpse, though as ever it looked different from the crime scene photographs – less garish and vivid, and somehow less real. Like a yellowish, rubber imitation of a real, living person.

‘I see you’ve met William Dalton?’ he asked loudly enough to distract Canning from his examination.

‘Indeed,’ Canning answered, glancing up from his notes. ‘I heard this one was yours.’

‘Yes, it was passed to SIU because of the probable link to another murder.’

‘Tanya Richards,’ Canning confirmed. ‘I’ve read the file, but haven’t seen the body. She hasn’t been buried yet, so I should be able to take a look before she heads off to a better place. In the meantime, you certainly have an interesting one here. A rather unfortunate end for a rather unfortunate young man.’

‘Yes,’ Sean agreed. ‘Yes, it was.’

They both remained silent for a few seconds, paying their last respects to the victim. Then all emotions were set aside in order to find the evidence that would catch and convict his killer.

‘What have we got so far?’ Sean asked.

‘What we have so far is unusual and rare. Most of the dead I’ve seen with their throats cut were victims of organized crime. South American drug gangs are particularly fond of cutting throats, but it’s rare in this country. I can’t remember ever seeing it in a domestic murder scenario or anything of that nature.’

‘It’s too cold for that,’ Sean told him. ‘Domestic murders are hate-driven or anger-driven, which means uncontrolled stabbing, or strangulation, but slitting a throat is cold and precise. Not an act of anger. Not rage, or at least not as we know it. But it’s not gang stuff either. Something else.’

‘Interesting,’ Canning said. ‘And the removal of the teeth – also something I’ve only ever seen in gang-related deaths. West African, usually. Bit of a habit from the old country they brought over here with them: if someone’s double-crossed you or stolen from you, punish them by taking their teeth – and use the gold ones to settle the debt.’

‘Nice,’ Sean winced.

‘But I fear that’s not what we have here,’ Canning said.

‘No. I doubt William Dalton had any gold teeth.’

‘I’m sure you’ll check with his dentist anyway?’ Canning grinned.

‘Naturally,’ Sean admitted, allowing himself the briefest of smiles. ‘And the removal of fingernails,’ he brought things back to the grim reality in front of them. ‘First time I’ve seen that.’

‘Same here,’ Canning told him, tilting his head to study the dead man’s hands. ‘Judging by the fraying of the soft tissue that attaches the nail to the finger, it’s clear the nails were pulled off as opposed to being cut away. Most likely used a pair of pliers – no doubt the same pair he used to extract some of the teeth, although there are also clear signs of a bladed instrument being used to cut away sections of the gums to make extraction easier.’ Canning moved to the victim’s head and opened the mouth to better show Sean the internal wounds. ‘Do you see?’

Sean moved in closer, unclipping the small torch from his belt and shining the beam of light into the unholy sight that was now William Dalton’s mouth. Deep cuts to swollen gums and gaping holes marked the places where he’d once had teeth. ‘I see,’ he said, and clicked off the torch.

‘Clearly, your killer isn’t the squeamish type.’

‘Psychopaths rarely are,’ Sean reminded him.

‘I suppose not. You think he might have some link to dentistry? Even for a psychopath, the removal of healthy teeth isn’t easy to accomplish – either physically or mentally.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sean answered. ‘Perhaps if he’d only taken the teeth I’d consider it more likely, but with him taking the fingernails as well …’

‘But you’ll check anyway,’ Canning said, with another grin.

Sean nodded and gave him a faint, sad smile.

‘Your initial thoughts then, Inspector?’ Canning asked. ‘If he has no special affinity for teeth, or nails for that matter, why did your killer go to such lengths to take them?’

‘Souvenirs,’ Sean told him.

‘But surely there must have been easier souvenirs to take? The victim’s personal belongings, for example.’

‘Not intimate enough for this one,’ Sean explained. ‘He needs the ultimate reminder of his victims – parts of their body. At the same time, he wants something he can keep forever. So he took their teeth and nails.’

‘I see,’ Canning nodded, keen for Sean to continue with his insights.

‘At the same time, he’s showing us his strength,’ Sean added. ‘Showing us what he’s prepared to do to achieve what he wants. Where he’s prepared to go. A challenge, if you like.’

‘A challenge to you?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe to someone else.’

‘Someone else?’ Canning pressed, intrigued.

‘The lack of defensive marks interests me,’ Sean said, keen to move on. ‘Neither victim had a single mark.’

‘In each case a blow was administered to the back of the head,’ Canning explained. ‘Not with sufficient force to kill them, but enough to render them unconscious or to incapacitate them while the killer inflicted the fatal wounds.’ Sean shook his head and frowned. ‘Something bothering you, Inspector?’

‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘That just doesn’t feel right.’

‘What exactly?’ Canning asked.

‘This one wouldn’t want them unconscious,’ he explained. ‘He’d have wanted them to know what was happening, to know that he was going to kill them. He would have wanted to look into their eyes and see the terror. Ideally, he would have wanted them to be alive when he took their teeth and nails. He wanted them to feel his power.’

Canning cleared his throat. ‘Have you considered that he might have inflicted the fatal wounds just as they were coming to?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ he answered, sounding unconvinced. ‘But why the first wound to the throat? It wasn’t necessarily fatal. Why take the trouble to cut through the front of the throat and then follow up by cutting through the side of the neck and the carotid artery? Why not administer the fatal wound straight away?’

‘Maybe it was the other way around,’ Canning suggested. ‘Maybe he killed them quickly with the severing of the carotid artery and then slit the throat.’

‘But in that case, why slit the throat at all?’ Sean asked himself more than Canning.

‘He derived pleasure from mutilation?’ Canning offered.

‘No,’ Sean dismissed it. ‘The mutilation to the fingers and mouth was coincidental, a side effect of removing his trophies. Mutilation after death’s not what this one is about.’

‘Certainly it would have been difficult for either victim to have screamed or cried for help once the trachea had been dissected. Maybe he wanted their silence.’

Canning’s words set Sean’s mind on fire as he cursed himself for not having seen it himself – the victims trying to scream, to call for help, but only able to make sickening gurgling sounds as the air from their lungs mixed with the blood from their wounds.

‘That’s why no defence wounds,’ he announced. ‘He cut their throats so he could watch them struggling in fear for as long as he dared until it was necessary to kill them. They had no chance to recover from the shock and horror of what was happening to them and fight back.’

‘Fight-or-flight instinct,’ Canning nodded. ‘Even the gravely wounded can inflict significant damage once the body’s flooded with survival endorphins. But surely that contradicts rather than explains the lack of defence wounds?’

‘Their hands’ – Sean turned to him, seeing it clearly in his mind now. ‘Their hands would have been clawing at their own throats. They were too busy trying to stop the flow of blood to fight back. He wanted to watch them. Watch them in silence.’

‘And before the fight instinct took over,’ Canning went on, ‘he cut the carotid artery, giving them only seconds to live.’

‘He watched the life drain out of them,’ Sean continued, ‘and then he went to work on their teeth and nails.’

‘Interesting,’ Canning admitted. ‘But you realize it’s all guesswork – I’ll never be able to say for sure which wound was inflicted first.’

‘No,’ Sean accepted. ‘The crime scene should help though: blood-spray patterns, footprints in the blood, anything else we can find.’

‘Build up a picture, eh?’

‘Try to, at least,’ Sean told him. ‘If you just give a jury a long list of evidence, you’ll lose them.’

‘Not sure that would be the case here,’ Canning argued. ‘The viciousness of these attacks would keep most juries interested, not to mention his distinctive modus operandi.’

‘I suppose,’ Sean reluctantly agreed.

There was a moment’s silence, then Canning spoke again. ‘Does it worry you?’

‘Does what worry me?’

‘That he wants to leave you in no doubt that the crimes are his.’

‘It does,’ Sean admitted. ‘It tells me he wants the world to take notice of him and that’ll he’ll never stop until it does.’

‘Why does he want the world to take notice of him?’

‘Don’t we all?’ Sean answered with a question. ‘But that’s too general – not specific enough to him. I don’t think killing is the thing that drives him. I think it’s a means to an end. The way he can achieve whatever it is he’s trying to achieve.’

‘Are you sure?’ Canning asked doubtfully.

‘No,’ Sean shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘Well, one thing we can be sure about,’ Canning told him, ‘is the type of victim he seems drawn to. Young and vulnerable.’

‘Victims of society become the victims of killers,’ Sean explained.

‘Indeed,’ Canning agreed sadly.

‘And there’ll be more of them,’ Sean warned. ‘Unless I can find him and find him quickly.’

‘Then you’d better get on.’ Canning turned to his tray of torturous instruments and removed a lethally sharpened scalpel. ‘And so had I.’

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