Текст книги "Scent of a Killer"

Автор книги: Kevin Lewis

Соавторы: Kevin Lewis
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On top of that, she had day-to-day access to police records, reports and living breathing officers whom she could use as sounding boards to ensure she had covered all the bases. And that was exactly what she had done. Collins herself had played right into her hands. She wondered how many other officers she had pretended to give a helping hand to, knowing it would make them far more willing to spill the beans about future cases.

Late in the afternoon there was a flurry of excitement from within the house when one of the search team found a laptop computer tucked away behind the bed in Matthews’s spare bedroom. Collins knew better than to attach any importance to the item. If it had been left behind, it was either completely worthless or it was a deliberate red herring, a ploy to send them off on yet another wild-goose chase.

An excited Rajid arrived at the house half an hour later and was set up in a corner of the kitchen to see if the laptop contained any useful information. It took only a few minutes for him to uncover logs showing that Matthews was indeed shygirl351, but Collins couldn’t help but feel that they had already known that anyway.

Rajid found little else of interest – certainly nothing pointing to an alternative address or a place where Matthews might have been taking her victims to slaughter them. They were all still in the dark.

By ten in the evening Collins was fighting a losing battle against exhaustion and Anderson could tell.

‘I think we can call off the search for the day. There’s nothing useful to be gained here and I don’t think there’s any point in being too exhausted for work tomorrow. I want you to head off home and get a good night’s sleep. I’ll get the team to tag and bag everything they find here and get it over to forensics. We can start going through it all tomorrow from the comfort of the office.

‘There are two questions we need to answer. Who the hell is Jessica Matthews? And where the hell is Jessica Matthews? If you can have both the answers on my desk tomorrow, you’ll make me a very happy man.’

Collins managed a weak smile. She felt certain that if she told Anderson that it was her fault Matthews had gone on the run, he would be forgiving and understanding. But she was too exhausted to take the chance.

‘What about Rajid?’

They looked down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Rajid’s face was illuminated by the light from the computer screen. He was staring intently and typing furiously as a stream of letters and symbols whizzed past his eyes.

‘He’s young,’ said Anderson. ‘When I was that age I didn’t even wake up until it was dark. If anyone can work through the night without suffering any ill effects, he can. There will be someone to take him home when he’s done. Go on, you get off, otherwise you won’t make it home at all.’

Thirty seconds later a thoroughly exhausted Stacey Collins finally climbed into the back of the unmarked patrol car that had brought her to the house that morning. She collapsed across the seat, curling up like a baby.

‘Wake me up when we get to my house.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

The big Vauxhall pulled away from the kerb and off into the night. A few seconds later a second car pulled away from the kerb five hundred yards along the road.

With her hair dyed a different colour and cut into a different style, Jessica Matthews was totally unrecognizable. She smiled as she eased her foot off the accelerator to keep an even distance between herself and the car she was following.

Collins should not have gone to her house but she had done so anyway. The least she could do now would be to return the favour.

21

The full details of Jessica Matthews’s true background and traumatic childhood emerged slowly as the result of painstaking research by every member of the murder team.

At an emergency morning prayers session in the hours that followed her disappearance, assignments had been handed out to ensure every aspect of her life was uncovered and explored.

All were shocked by what they found but few more so than Collins herself, who felt like a fool for allowing herself to be thoroughly manipulated by a dangerous and psychopathic woman who had clearly had an agenda right from the start.

Although she tried her best to stay focused on the task at hand, it was impossible to stop her thoughts from returning time and again to the lunches and dinners and coffees that she and Jessica Matthews had shared over the years. She was beating herself up about having failed to spot any of the clues about the woman’s behaviour and actions that now, with the benefit of hindsight, seemed oh so obvious. Woods, Anderson and the rest of her colleagues did their best to be supportive and told her not to be too hard on herself – after all Matthews had managed to fool many others besides – but Stacey couldn’t help but feel she had let them all down.

Interviews with friends and colleagues shed little light on Matthews’s character – no one had a bad word to say about her, professionally at least. It was only when Collins and Woods met up with the pathologist’s parents that they truly began to understand just what a troubled individual they were dealing with.

As they travelled to Matthews’s home town Collins and Woods hoped they might finally gain some kind of insight into the making of the monster.

The house where Jessica Matthews had grown up was a nondescript semi-detached in the heart of suburban Enfield. It was only a few doors away from a large, partly forested park that had a sizeable play area complete with swings, slides and roundabouts as well as a paddling pool that operated during the summer months.

With dozens of other families living nearby, shops and other amenities all within easy reach, the area seemed to provide the perfect setting for an idyllic middle-class childhood.

Each house on the street had an immaculately kept front garden – to allow even a single blade of grass to be out of place was to risk being accused of lowering the tone by the head of the residents’ committee. Rear gardens, though hidden from public view, were a matter of equal pride, with the local MP – a Tory of course – being chief judge of the annual contest in which prizes were awarded for the best-kept plot.

For those who had chosen to make this part of North London their home, the only cause for concern came in the form of three enormous tower blocks from a local housing estate that rose up over the horizon like angry weeds. Much to the dismay of the parents outside the estate, it was here that many of their children found most of their fun and recreation, travelling up to the top floors in the lifts, running in and out of the underground garages and hanging out with gangs of kids hell bent on vandalism and mischief. These were exactly the kinds of children the parents had warned their offspring to avoid at all costs, and fear that their influence might spread had resulted in constant vigilance throughout the area.

This was the reason that, although the car that Collins and Woods arrived in was unmarked, curtains twitched on both sides of the road as they emerged and made their way up the front path towards Number 230.

‘You think they already know?’ asked Woods, glancing around.

‘Doubt it,’ said Collins. ‘I think it’s just that kind of area. Everyone is into everyone else’s business. Try to make a mental note of where the biggest busybodies are – the houses where the most noses are poking through the curtains. Might be worth having a word with them later on. We’ll get a different take on the home life of young Miss Matthews.’

The door was opened by WPC Louise Mitchell, who, earlier that morning, had been appointed family liaison officer to Jessica’s parents. It was her job to fend off the unwanted attention of the press, remain with the family at all times and provide a direct link to the highest levels of the investigation. It was a service performed not just for victims but also for families of the accused, who, in many cases, became victims in their own right. Although some parts of the press were likely to end up calling Matthews a hero for killing off paedophiles, they could never be sure exactly how people would react.

‘They’re in the sitting room,’ said WPC Mitchell. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

The living room was like something out of a catalogue. Beautiful but entirely sterile. It was the kind of room that existed more for display purposes than anything else. Only on special occasions would anyone actually be allowed to sit there. The carpet was deep and luxurious, the shelves filled with figurines and trinkets far too delicate to touch. For Woods it was the sign of a house ruled with an iron fist. The kind of house where discipline was a constant companion. The kind of house that any young girl would be dying to run away from.

‘Mr and Mrs Matthews, I presume,’ said Collins, extending one hand in greeting.

The man and the woman were sitting close together on the larger of the two sofas in the room. Their hands were tightly clasped together between them. The woman was slim, her hair cut just below the line of her chin in a kind of carved bob. She looked tired and strained but smiled up at him. The man wore a full beard that was starting to show patches of grey. He had a muscular build, his broad shoulders pressing tightly against his shirt. His eyes twinkled with a fierce intensity. He wore a cream and brown Pringle-pattern knitted vest over a thin-striped shirt and tie.

‘Actually it’s Robertson,’ said the man, extending his own hand to meet that of Collins. ‘Larry Robertson. I’m Jessica’s stepfather and this is my wife, Lucy. Jessica’s birth parents died when she was young. Matthews was their name. She was Robertson for a while during the time she was with us but changed back to Matthews almost as soon as she left home.

‘During her time here we did our best to make her comfortable but she could be incredibly difficult, very mischievous and at times, to be perfectly honest, a little bit frightening.’

‘I understand,’ said Collins.

Mrs Robertson spoke up for the first time, her voice cracking with emotion at the end of each word. ‘Is there any news? Have you found her? We’re worried sick. Do you think she might have done something to herself? We’ve been looking in the papers. All those terrible things she is supposed to have done. I can’t believe it would really be her. And that’s why I think she might do herself in.

‘It’s just awful, so awful. And then this … this killing. How on earth could that little girl be involved in something so horrible …’

Her sentence trailed off into a stream of sobs, and Larry edged towards her on the sofa, putting his arm around her shoulder and pulling him towards her. ‘Come on, love,’ he said gently. ‘They’re here to help. We need to help them so that they can help us.’

Collins and Woods watched them closely. Larry pulled the woman’s sobbing face into his shoulder before speaking once more.

Larry Robertson was speaking again. ‘I don’t want to believe it’s true, I really don’t, but the more I think about it, the more some of the clues have been there all the time. We used to have a small holding up in Bedfordshire. That’s where we were when Jessica first came to live with us. We thought it was the perfect environment for any small child – lots of fresh air and dozens of animals to play with – but she was never that happy there.

‘And then one year we had a spate of attacks on the animals. A couple of horses got slashed, one of the rabbits was killed. At the time it was all blamed on gangs of local lads looking for kicks, but now I’m not so sure. The finger of suspicion never turned to Jessica – well, it wouldn’t, would it – but the following year we had to sell up and leave. New health and safety regulations and all that. Made it impossible for us to continue. We shut the whole thing down and that’s how we ended up here.

‘Jessica seemed to like living near London – a lot more for teenagers to do – but when I think back … well, you just wonder, don’t you? We always feared there would be some backlash, considering what had happened to her before. But we never imagined it would be anything like this.’

Collins and Woods looked at each other, silently confirming that neither knew exactly what it was that Mr Robertson was talking about.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Collins. ‘When you say what happened to her before … I think you need to explain.’

22

Thirty Years Earlier

She had relaxed in a nice warm bath, brushed her teeth thoroughly and spent twenty minutes reading from her favourite story book, but she was still far too excited to get to sleep.

‘Please, please, please, Mum, can’t I just stay up a bit longer? I really don’t feel tired at all.’

Joanne Matthews looked down at the pleading face of her young daughter and smiled. ‘Now then, Jessica, we talked about this. If you don’t get to bed soon you’re going to be too tired to enjoy your party tomorrow. And all your friends who come and give you presents will end up being very disappointed. And we don’t want that, do we?’

Jessica shook her head slowly. The seven-year-old had been ready to burst with excitement over her birthday for the best part of the past month, and now that the day had almost arrived, she was ready to go into overdrive.

Joanne Matthews kissed and cuddled her daughter, pulled the blankets up so that her little shoulders were covered, switched on the nightlight and then shut the door.

‘Sleep tight, my little angel. I’ll see you in the morning. Love you.’ Jessica shut her eyes tight, certain that if she closed them tightly enough and for long enough, the next time they opened it would be morning.

She was somewhere in the in-between twilight world of sleep and wakefulness when she heard the doorbell ring. She turned over and lifted the thumb of her right hand up to her mouth. It was an old habit she had repeatedly fought but failed to kick. Despite knowing it made her look incredibly childish, nothing else gave her quite so much comfort. Sleep did not always come easily and the fact that the following day was her birthday was making it more difficult than ever for the little girl to drift off.

The sound of footsteps, the creek of the front door opening, followed by her father’s voice, deep, low, serene. A voice like a warm blanket. A voice you could wrap yourself up in. A voice as smooth as warm chocolate. It was a voice that for years had been at the heart of a massive dilemma. Each night she would have to choose which of her parents she wanted to read her a bedtime story. Her father’s voice was so thick and dreamy that it would send her to sleep within minutes and she would get to hear only a few pages of whatever story they were reading. By contrast, her mother’s voice was delicate and expressive and displayed a talented mimicry that made a story’s characters seem to truly come alive. But her mother often stuttered and stumbled over her words and lost her place, which meant they would often have to go over the same parts of the story time and time again in order to make sense of it all.

There were days when she wanted her father to read to her and days when she wanted her mother to have a chance. Even at the tender age of five she had been mindful of the fact that favouring one more than the other might lead to the one who was left out being upset. If she could, little Jessica was determined to please everybody.

Lying in bed on the eve of her birthday, she listened hard to her father’s voice, hoping it would soothe her. But for the first time ever it did the complete opposite. At first he had sounded the way he always did – calm and serene. The voice of whoever was at the door was nothing like it. Far more excited, far more agitated. Far more angry.

In response her father’s voice began to rise in both volume and tempo until he was sounding so unlike his usual self that it was almost as if he had been taken over by another person.

She had heard her parents argue only a handful of times and it had always been a shock to her. She hated the ugly, brutish tones they used on one another. But now her father was using that tone once more, not to her mother but to whoever it was at the door. Much of the sound was being muffled or distorted and she couldn’t work out exactly what was being said. He was shouting at the top of his voice and Jessica was sure she could hear flashes of the words her mother had told her never to speak, the naughty words that she and her schoolfriends giggled about in the corners of the playground. The one that rhymed with cluck, the one that rhymed with knit.

Her eyes were open now. She pulled her thumb from her mouth and tucked her knees up so that they were touching her chest. The voices were continuing to get louder and more violent, and now her mother’s voice seemed to have joined in, pleading, crying, screaming.

And the sound of movement. Feet shuffled back and forth on the wood floor of the hallway. The door slamming hard, the slim telephone table at the side of the stairs being overturned. The slaps and thuds of punches and kicks being landed with force. Her mother’s desperate, warning scream. ‘Look out, he’s got a …’ Her father’s voice, a grunt followed by hollow, gasping, choking, coughing, spluttering sounds as the very air he needed to breathe spilled out of his chest.

More screams from her mother, footsteps running up the stairs. Footsteps following close behind. Then the voice of the man, the intruder, screaming, cursing, as if he had been tripped up. More kicks, more punches, more impact sounds Jessica simply didn’t understand. Cries of agonized pain from her father. The sound of her name, her mother’s name, her name again, on his lips. Again and again.

Her mother burst into the room, her silhouette illuminated by the lights from the hallway. She scooped Jessica out of her bed and carried her over to the wardrobe. Jessica had never seen her mother look so frightened, so completely and utterly terrified. She had never seen any human being look so terrified. She was speechless with shock.

Her mother opened the door and shoved her daughter into the base at the back. ‘For God’s sake don’t make a sound,’ she pleaded, then slammed the door shut.

Tiny shafts of light slipped in through the door’s wooden slats. Through them Jessica could see her mother quickly, frantically smoothing out the sheets on the bed before picking up the portable cassette player from Jessica’s bedside table and returning to the hall.

By now her father had fallen silent. The footsteps that started making their way up the stairs were slow, deliberate. There was no need to hurry. There was no escape.

The man appeared at the top of the stairs, directly opposite the open door of Jessica’s room, slightly to the right of where her mother stood. The man’s hair was wild and matted, his clothes were filthy and threadbare. He looked like the homeless men they often saw sleeping in shop doorways late at night. In his right hand he held a long, thin knife, the tip of which sparkled in the light like a tiny star.

Jessica’s mother was holding the cassette player high, waiting for her moment. When the man reached the top of the stairs she threw it towards his head with all her might. He ducked easily and moved quickly towards her, knocking her down to the ground with a punch to the side of the head. For a moment it seemed he was going to advance on her with the knife but then he paused, turned and walked right into Jessica’s room.

He looked around slowly, his eyes taking in every detail.

‘Is there a kid here?’

Jessica could see her mother crawling slowly along the corridor floor. She shook her head but he did not see her. ‘Hey, bitch, I asked you a fucking question. Is there a fucking kid here?’

Jessica heard her mother speak through her swollen jaw and loose teeth. ‘She’s having a sleepover,’ she lied. ‘She’s not here.’

The man looked around the room again. The bed seemed unmade; everything else seemed to be in order. ‘Shame,’ he hissed, before turning his attention back to Jessica’s mother, who was now slowly pulling herself to her feet.

The man placed the knife on a bedside table, moved out into the corridor, grabbed Joanne by her hair and dragged her into the little girl’s bedroom. What he did next would stay with little Jessica for the rest of her life.

He threw her down on the floor in front of the bed. She held up her hands, palms outward, in a gesture of helplessness, of powerlessness. He flew at her, knocking her back down. Then he was on top of her, his left hand clasped over her nose and mouth, pushing her head down hard into the carpet, his knees pinning her elbows, his right fist pounding down again and again. As her resistance started to fade, he reached down with his right hand, tugged up her skirt and ripped away her knickers. He then began to undo the waistband of his jeans.

So far as she could remember, little Jessica Matthews had twice walked into her parents’ bedroom when they were making love. Not that she knew what they were actually doing. It was only later, during talks with friends at school, that she learned other children too had seen the strange positions, heard the curious grunting noises and the angry shouts. She had watched that special embrace transfixed for several seconds, unnoticed by either parent, until a change of position brought her face to face with her mother.

What the man was doing to her mother was nothing like what she had seen. Her mother wasn’t moving, wasn’t making any noise. The man was doing everything. He was facing one side, directly towards the door of the wardrobe, as if he were staring directly at her.

Suddenly he stopped thrusting, moved his left hand from Joanne’s face and looked down at her. He slapped her cheek a couple of times, hissed a stream of swear words and then moved off towards the bedroom door. As he did so Joanne’s head rolled to one side so that she too was facing the wardrobe door. Her lips and nose were a mass of blood; there were deep lacerations on her forehead; tufts of hair were missing from her fringe. Her eyes were wide open but utterly lifeless.

Jessica couldn’t help it. She gasped in horror.

The man was in the doorway and spun round in an instant. His trousers were around his ankles but that didn’t seem to slow him down as he flew towards the wardrobe, ripping open the door and pulling Jessica out by her hair.

She screamed. He slapped her face. She screamed again and he slapped her even harder, picking her up and throwing her across the room so forcefully that her head smacked against the wall as she landed on her bed. Now she could only whimper and sob. He was on her in an instant. She could smell cigarettes on his breath mixed with the sweat from his skin. His rough hands were everywhere, pulling up her nightdress, holding her down, shaking her this way and that. Poking, probing, prodding. His black eyes were shiny with excitement.

She punched and bit and tore with her own small hands but it was useless. He was too strong, he was too powerful. There was no way to stop him. All she could feel was pain, a burning sensation between her legs that grew and grew. The vision of her mother’s face a few moments earlier flooded into her mind along with one single thought: she would not let it happen to her.

Her hands were flailing about uselessly, trying to pull herself away. One landed on the bedside table. On the knife. She grabbed it. His eyes were closed now, he was smiling, pulling himself towards her, hurting her more and more with every thrust. She swung the knife as hard as she could. The blade sank into his neck, just below his ear. His eyes opened wide in shock and horror. He tried to scream but could only gurgle, blood spattering out of his mouth and his wound at the same time.

He fell hard to one side. She fell too, landing on top of him, feeling the beat of his heart slow, watching the pool of blood behind his head grow, weeping softly as the light in his eyes slowly faded away to nothing.

The four days that followed passed by like shadows on the curtains. Little Jessica Matthews managed to crawl off her attacker and into the corner of the room but was too terrified to go any further. She stayed there, without food or water or sleep, looking across at his body and that of her dead mother.

On the third night she could have sworn she heard her mother call out her name and shift towards her. She stared hard into her mother’s cold glassy eyes, willing her to say something else, willing her to move and wrap her up in her loving arms. It would only be years later, after she had trained in pathology, that she would learn the sound was simply the result of built-up gases escaping from her mother’s body as a result of decomposition.

Lighting streaming through the curtains on the fourth morning showed that her mother’s skin had begun to develop dark, bruise-like patches all over and had started to swell up significantly. Fluids began to seep out of every orifice and there was a strong smell of decay in the air. A smell that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

That same afternoon, alerted by concerned neighbours and work colleagues, police broke into the house. They found her father dead from multiple stab wounds at the foot of the stairs. It seemed he had used the last of his strength to try to reach his wife and child upstairs but had been unable to make it.

Jessica herself was close to death. She was badly dehydrated and malnourished and had painful sores on her legs and buttocks from barely having moved since seeing her mother murdered before her very eyes. Rushed to hospital, she spent the next two weeks in intensive care.

It was clear what had happened and what she had witnessed, but child psychologists cautioned against asking her to relive any part of her ordeal. Her mind, they said, was far too fragile and still in deep shock. There would, they insisted, come a time when she would be able to deal with what had happened, but it might be many years away.

Two months later Jessica left hospital and was taken into the care of a foster family. With the help of extensive trauma counselling, she slowly began to rebuild her life. Much to everyone’s surprise, there seemed to be little long-term damage as a result of what had happened to her. She enrolled at a new school, made friends easily and quickly began to warm to her new mother and father who did their best to make her feel welcome in their home. Two years later, they adopted her, changing her name to Robertson.

No one ever brought up what had happened to her parents or what she had done to defend herself, and Jessica never showed any inclination to speak about it. She became a normal, somewhat shy, happy-go-lucky and occasionally troublesome teenager before knuckling down to study for her exams.

She had dreamed of becoming a doctor since the age of twelve and worked hard to make it into medical school. It was only while she was there that the seemingly long-forgotten trauma of what had happened to her as a child finally returned with a vengeance.

It was towards the end of her first year as a medical student, during an anatomy class, that she saw a dead body close up for the first time since witnessing her mother’s murder. The class involved learning about the position of the organs of the body by dissecting a corpse.

Matthews did not react when the white sheet was drawn back to reveal the freshly chilled body. She did not react when the tutor pointed out the first signs of putrefaction on the skin, indicating bruise-like marks similar to those that had appeared on the body of her mother in the days following her death.

Nothing untoward occurred until Matthews was invited to make the first incision into the corpse. As the scalpel pierced into the skin, something happened. Something utterly unexpected. At first she attributed the tingling sensation to something to do with nerves, but it grew and grew. Then for a moment it felt as though time had stood completely still.

Her breathing went from being fully relaxed to little more than a series of short, desperate gasps. An electric tingling sensation began to spread out from between her thighs. The feelings grew and grew until she felt as though she were going to explode. Muscles all over her body started to go into contraction; her hands began to tighten up. Her back started to arch against her will. Her legs began to tremble, her toes started to curl under, and from somewhere deep within her belly she heard herself let out a low, guttural moan.

Desperate to hide what was happening from the other students in the class, Matthews faked a fainting fit, collapsing to the ground in dramatic fashion. It seemed to work. Students were always fainting during the early years of medical training, especially when it came to the less savoury parts of medicine, so her classmates were none the wiser.

Only Matthews herself knew the truth of what had happened. It had not by any means been her first orgasm, but it had been by far the best.

Her initial shock soon turned to concern. She knew what had happened to her parents and, although she could remember almost nothing about the night her mother died and the days that followed, she was also vaguely aware that she had been the victim of something brutal and violent. But none of that answered the question that was now ringing throughout her mind: what on earth was wrong with her if she reacted in that way to death?

It did not take long for her to discover that she was not alone. The links between death and sexual arousal were everywhere, and her position as a medical student gave her access to vast amounts of information on the condition. Both the legendary seducer Casanova and the controversial physician Magnus Hirschfeld wrote about women who masturbated while viewing public executions. Casanova personally witnessed the execution of a French criminal who had attempted to kill the king. He was tortured first with red-hot pincers; then the hand he had used in the attempted assassination was burned down to the bone using sulphur, molten wax, lead and boiling oil. Horses were then harnessed to his arms and legs and made to run in different directions with the intention of pulling him apart. Despite being in absolute agony, the man’s limbs refused to separate and he did not die. Finally the executioner used a sharp knife to cut into the man’s joints and the body was successfully torn apart. And all the while at least two couples in the middle of the crowd had frantic, passionate sex while they were watching the spectacle.