Текст книги "Scent of a Killer"

Автор книги: Kevin Lewis

Соавторы: Kevin Lewis
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11

By the third day the routine had become well established. Collins and Woods would stop off at the incident room for morning prayers and a general catch-up with other members of the team. From there they would make their way over to the ViSOR offices to continue ploughing through the files of sex offenders and compiling a list of all those who had gone ‘missing’ in the hope that one might turn out to be their unidentified third victim.

It had taken only a few hours of sifting for Collins to become thoroughly pissed off and disillusioned with the task at hand. Soon the names and faces of countless paedophiles and rapists seemed to be swimming through her head day and night. No matter how hard she tried to put them out of her mind, they seemed to have become a permanent fixture. They even haunted her dreams, along with the gruesome details of the crimes they had committed and the terrified screams of their victims.

More than once she found herself secretly hoping that some of the men who had been listed as missing had indeed been tracked down by the killer, decapitated and emptied of all their internal organs. She knew the victims had been put through untold agony, but scum like this had caused great suffering themselves. She felt sympathy for Edward Miller’s widow, but none for the man himself. Men like him did not deserve to live. And they certainly did not deserve the undivided attention of good officers like herself and Woods.

She was supposed to be hot on the trail of a psychopathic killer who had committed the most horrific acts of violence, but the more Collins learned about the group he appeared to be targeting, the more she felt herself feeling a measure of sympathy for his cause. If he did turn out to be, say, the father of one of the victims, she knew she would find it almost impossible to remain entirely objective.

Johnson was focusing his attention on the computer system, working with technicians to find ways to isolate cases that fitted the criteria the murder detectives were looking for. Collins and Woods, in the meantime, were having to laboriously work their way through the paper files holding details of the cases that had been deleted from the computer system.

They sat at opposite ends of a long wooden table in a spare office a few doors along the corridor from Johnson. Each had a large pile of files on the floor beside them and a thick notepad by their writing hand. They would take one file at a time and examine its contents: a photograph of the accused, details of the crimes they had committed, and information about where they lived and worked before and after conviction. The files also contained details of the last-known sighting of each offender.

Files that held no promise were placed on the floor on the other side of the chair; those that were possibly of interest were kept in a new pile in the middle of the table. These would be taken to the incident room so that DC Natalie Cooper could add the relevant details to the case database.

The number of files on the table, and therefore the list of missing men, was growing by the day, but they were no closer to finding their killer or identifying the third victim. Johnson had been right. When Collins started making inquiries to try to trace the whereabouts of one missing man who might have been a likely target, she ran into brick wall after brick wall. The missing men were already deep underground and desperate to hide away from the authorities, but their files held a great deal of information that gave clues to their likely whereabouts. Many were creatures of habit and had gone back to old haunts in the hope of starting their lives over. Others had clearly changed their details in a bid to continue their sexual offending away from the watchful eye of the authorities.

Some of the men on the list had managed to stay missing for years. Unless their bodies turned up, it was unlikely they would ever be found.

‘Do you ever wonder about what we’re doing here, Tony?’ asked Collins as the two of them sat in the beer garden of a riverside pub, washing down scampi, chips and peas with a couple of Diet Cokes.

Woods chewed thoughtfully and swallowed before he replied. ‘You mean here in this pub, here on this assignment or here in this universe? I’m not entirely clear on just how philosophical you’re trying to be.’

‘Ahh, now I get it.’

‘Get what?’

‘Why you’re still single.’

Woods smiled, pushed another forkful of scampi into his mouth and then pushed it into the side of his cheek so he could speak. ‘You’re still really struggling with all this, aren’t you?’

‘Not as much as I’m struggling with your table manners.’

Woods waved his fork so that the prongs were pointing towards his colleague. ‘I think we should have a rule. Once a week or so you should temporarily give up your rank, just so I get a chance to tell you what I really think of you without risking being hauled in front of the commander on a discipline charge.’

Collins cocked her head to one side and placed a finger on the corner of her mouth in a mock gesture of deep thought before screwing up her nose. ‘Nah, I don’t think so.’

‘Joking aside, boss,’ said Woods ‘at this stage we don’t even know if the other two bodies are linked to any kind of sex crime. Everything we’re doing here could be a complete waste of time. This might not have anything to do with it. There’s no point in letting your feelings get in the way of doing the job before we know the whole truth about what the job actually involves.’

Collins’s mobile began to ring before Woods had finished speaking, and while she fished it out of her bag he quickly stuffed the remaining pieces of scampi into his mouth.

He watched as Collins listened intently and then got out her pad and frantically scribbled notes, her face stern with concentration.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked as she ended the call.

‘Looks like the mystery is about to be solved. That was Anderson. We’ve had a hit on the tattoo.’

Brazilian-born Roberto Medina first fell in love with the trendy North London district of Crouch End when his wife suggested they go there for a drink one summer’s evening. Medina had been bowled over by the vast number of bars and restaurants seemingly representing the four corners of the globe, but he had also been struck by something else.

Despite a thriving high street scene and thousands of young, hip residents, there was not a single tattoo parlour anywhere to be found. Medina had first become interested in the body-art business as a teenage graphic-design student in his home town of Rio de Janeiro. After graduation, he had spent five years working as an apprentice at a parlour on the Ipanema beach front before feeling confident enough to set up on his own.

He had arrived in the UK a decade earlier to study English but, like so many others before him, had met a girl, fallen in love and decided to get married and stay put. The tattoo parlour in Crouch End, the most recent of his many business ventures, had been running for a little less than three years and was thriving.

‘Man,’ said Medina as Collins and Anderson arrived at his tiny workshop. ‘I always check the papers and watch the news – it’s like there’s usually some tattoo they want to know about; it’s much more common than you’d suppose. But never in a million years did I ever think that I’d actually recognize one of them. To be honest, it’s a little spooky.’

Collins was finding it a little spooky too. Every few years she toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo herself – something small and discrete, perhaps one of those inspirational messages in Chinese characters – but she always managed to talk herself out of it. She didn’t like the idea of doing anything to her body that she might later regret.

The patrons of this tattoo parlour clearly had no such reservations. Every inch of wall space around them was filled with a host of weird and wonderful images. Some were original drawings of designs; others were photographs taken of works performed on satisfied customers, stretching and flexing their body parts in order to show off the results to best effect.

She could not deny that some of the tattoos appealed to her: tiny multicoloured butterflies on hips, bunny rabbits on ankles, hearts on shoulder blades. They were simple, understated, almost cute. Others made her want to shake her head with disbelief: a lime-green iguana stretching from the small of a young woman’s back all the way up to the base of her neck; a fire-breathing dragon emerging from a cave that covered an entire arm.

A large board close to the door listed the prices for having tattoos applied on various body parts. The thought of some made her wince in horror while there were others that made her brow wrinkle in confusion. She had no idea which parts of the anatomy some of the terms referred to, and she had no wish to know.

Collins turned back to Medina. He drew nervously on a cigarette as he explained in his soft South American tones how he had been watching the early-evening news on a small television in the corner of the workshop during a quiet spell when he spotted his handiwork.

‘I said, “Oh my God!’ I recognized it right away. I called my wife, Maria, and said you’re never going to believe this. I’ve just seen one of my tattoos on the telly. I was in complete shock. Especially when they said the guy was dead and no one knew who he was.’

Collins waited until Medina put the cigarette back in his mouth before asking her question. ‘How can you be sure it was one of yours?’ She waved a hand at the walls surrounding them. ‘You’ve obviously done so many.’

‘You’re right,’ he said, a stream of wispy smoke emerging from his thin lips. ‘But this particular one stands out. That’s what’s so weird about it. Before I opened up this place I had a parlour down in Brixton. That’s where I was living when I first came to England. There’s a big Brazilian community there. We’re talking nine, maybe ten years ago.

‘The guy I did the work for, he seemed well enough when he first came in, but, looking back, I guess I must have missed the warning signs somewhere along the way. I remember I could smell beer or something like it on his breath, but a lot of people have a drink or two in order to dull some of the pain so I thought nothing of it. And it’s not like he was really drunk or anything like that.

‘He looked through a few samples, then said he wanted me to combine a couple of my own original designs to create something unique – that’s another reason it stands out. So anyway I did the job and then a few days later, just when the first scabs were starting to form, the guy comes back into the store with his girlfriend and starts having a go at me while I’m trying to work with another customer. He started ranting and raving, complaining that I tricked him into getting it done.

‘I’d never had a complaint like it before so I really didn’t know what to do. He was saying he was going to sue me and that he would shut my business down. The guy was going crazy. At one point I thought he was going to start to trash the place. And his girlfriend, she wasn’t saying anything, but it was like she was urging him on. I think she was just as upset about the tattoo as he was, maybe more so.

‘I told the guy there was nothing I could do about it. He’d signed the consent form and that was that. But I ended up giving him details of a place where you could undergo laser treatment to have tattoos removed. I don’t know if he ever followed it up. I spent the next few months living on tenterhooks, waiting for a solicitor’s letter in the post. But it never came and eventually I managed to put the whole thing out of my mind. Well, until now.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ said Anderson, seemingly bracing himself for a potential disappointment, ‘you kept a record of the man’s name or address, did you?’ Medina nodded. ‘Of course! In the old days anyone could walk in and out and you’d have no idea who they were. But ever since AIDS we have to keep records of everyone, partly because of the risk of infection but also to prove consent and that the client is over eighteen. I dug out his old form for you already.’

Medina picked up a sheet of paper from the table beside him and handed it to Anderson. He scanned the contents before passing it on to Collins. The top of the form was taken up with a medical-history checklist, asking if the customer had a history of heart disease, low blood-pressure and a range of allergies. Below this was a section taken up with the customer’s name and address, their date of birth and the location of the place where they wanted the tattoo to go. Collins focused immediately on the spidery handwriting that gave the name: James Gilbert. It seemed that at long last, they had a name for their third victim.

Back at the incident room, Collins, Anderson, Hill, Porter and Woods crowded around a computer terminal as DC Cooper entered Gilbert’s details into the missing persons database.

It took only a few moments for the system to come back with a match. The screen was suddenly filled with the image of a clean-cut young man. He had a boxer’s nose and dark, intense eyes. His wavy, bushy, black hair was piled untidily on top of his head and a wispy beard and moustache covered his chin and upper lip. He wore an open-neck shirt and a tiny silver crucifix was visible at the base of his neck. He was half smiling and one eyebrow was raised in a quizzical manner as if he wasn’t a hundred per cent comfortable with having his photograph taken.

‘That’s our man. James Gilbert,’ announced Cooper. ‘Unmarried. No siblings. No kids, both parents dead. Lived alone. Reported missing by his boss, a Mr Roger Wincup, just under eight years ago.’

Anderson sighed as he read through the on-screen details to the right of the picture. ‘Not much to go on there. No grieving widow, no heartbroken mother, no brother or sister wondering what happened to him. Looks like it’s going to be something of a dead end so far as our investigation is concerned.’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Collins. She reached forward and touched the bottom-left corner of the screen with the nail of her little finger, distorting the image slightly. ‘Look at where he used to work.’

Anderson peered forward. ‘The Penvsey Private School in Dorset,’ he read out loud. ‘Sorry, I don’t see the relevance.’

‘That’s because you haven’t spent the last three days going through shed-loads of records from ViSOR the way that Woods and I have. It’s been driving me absolutely barmy having all this stuff going through my head all the time.’

As Woods and Anderson looked on with confused expressions on their faces, Collins made her way back to her desk and began sorting through the large pile of files that she had brought back from ViSOR. She smiled triumphantly as she located the set of records she had been looking for, then quickly made her way back over to the others.

‘Here you are,’ she said, holding open the relevant pages. ‘I came across this case yesterday. Five years ago, they uncovered a paedophile ring based at the Penvsey School made up of staff and outsiders who worked together to procure children to be abused. The whole thing was thought to have been run by one of the senior teachers, a certain Roger Wincup, who, it turns out, had prior convictions for possession of child pornography.’

She pointed at the picture of Wincup in the file. His face was far more youthful than would have been expected for a man in his late fifties. He was looking off to one side, the light reflected in his round silver glasses. His neatly trimmed hair was greying a little at the sideburns and his face had a few dimples and liver spots towards his chin, but he looked to all intents and purposes just the way a teacher should. Strict but fair. Trustworthy.

‘He resigned in disgrace and was charged a few weeks later. He served three years and was placed on the register after he was released but vanished into thin air a few weeks later. No one has seen hide nor hair of him since. Now, take another look at the missing person record DC Cooper has up on her screen. James Gilbert worked at that same school before the scandal broke and was there when he went missing. It has to be more than a simple coincidence, don’t you think? I really think we’ve found our connection.’

Anderson shook his head. ‘It’s not exactly rock solid, is it? There’s no evidence at all that Gilbert was involved in any kind of abuse.’

‘But I don’t think there would be any evidence,’ said Collins. ‘If whoever is behind these murders is doing what I think they are, they’re going after people who have managed to get away with their crimes. The ones who perhaps should have been convicted but got off due to a lack of evidence or the fact that their victims were too scared to come forward. That was what happened with Miller. Maybe it’s what happened with Gilbert too. We’re not going to find any hard evidence of involvement because it’s unlikely to exist.

‘The way these rings operate, they’re so far underground they’re almost impossible to locate. It’s the CSI effect. These guys watch TV, they read books, and they follow other court cases. They know what we’re capable of and the methods we use to try to track them down. And that means they know how to avoid coming up on our radar. Miller, Chadwick and Gilbert could all have been working together and we’d never have any way of proving it.’

Anderson reached up to stroke his chin. Collins fought the urge to reach across and slap his hand away.

‘If what you’re saying turns out to be correct, then it takes us right back to one of our original theories,’ he said. ‘The one that supposes this is the work of one of the abuse victims, taking revenge against those who wronged him, or a member of the ring itself who wants to silence the others. Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to dig out all of the Penvsey School case files and go to see each and every victim and each and every offender. We’re looking for anyone with the motive, the opportunity and the capability to carry out this crime. We’re looking for anyone who fits the profile that has been drawn up for us. We look at everyone and then eliminate them from our inquiries one by one. If what Dr Bernard says is true, then there are a lot more bodies to be found, and someone who was connected to that school is responsible.’

The paedophile ring that had been operating at the Penvsey School for more than two decades was uncovered not as the result of diligent police work or high-level intelligence, but rather through the stupidest of mistakes. A peripheral member of the gang had taken his home computer to a local workshop in order to repair a fault with its USB connectors. Carefully following the advice from colleagues within the ring who were far more technically savvy than he, the man had, of course, diligently erased the thousands of pornographic images and videos from the machine’s hard drive. As an added precaution, he then used special ‘shredding’ software to ensure even the most skilled technicians would not be able to find any trace of the illegal files on the machine. Rather than lose the precious pictures he had worked so hard to collect and that gave him so much pleasure, he copied them to a dozen DVDs. These he kept stored in a safe concealed beneath floorboards in the spare bedroom of the home he shared with his wife and young child. He had been astonished at just how many images there had been – it had taken many, many hours and a total of fifteen blank DVDs to store them all.

The day after he took the machine to be repaired, another member of the ring asked him to supply copies of a particular photo set that had become hugely popular among the Penvsey devotees. It was while he was searching through his copied DVDs to find the correct one that he made a horrifying discovery: there was one missing.

He had taken every possible precaution when it came to wiping information from the machine itself, only to leave one DVD full of images inside the drive of the machine.

Any hope that the repair man might not have noticed was utterly shattered just two days later when a dozen police officers arrived at his front door early one morning and arrested him for possession of child pornography.

From there the investigation grew swiftly, extending to his colleagues from work, his friends and his contacts worldwide via the internet. Before too long victims of the ring, emboldened by the fact that those responsible for the abuse were finally being brought to justice, were coming out of the woodwork from all directions.

Many of those pictured or filmed by the gang had been pupils at the school. They told members of the inquiry team how they would be summoned one at a time out of extra-curricular lessons and taken to specially set-up offices where they would be subjected to one horror after another. Threats of severe punishment and even death were made to ensure the young victims never breathed a word of what had happened to them.

At first the members of the Penvsey board of governors played down the scale of the problem, hoping all the blame could be attached to one or two errant members of staff. But it was not to be. With increasing numbers of teachers and associates being drawn into the police inquiry, it soon became clear that this was no storm in a teacup. Midway through the summer term, the school announced it would be closing its doors for ever and that the few remaining pupils – most had been extracted by their parents in the days after the scandal first broke – would have to find somewhere else to go.

The raw details of what had transpired over the years at the school made harrowing reading, but, for the first time in weeks, the members of the inquiry team felt they were finally getting somewhere. The fact that they had identified the third victim, combined with the emergence of their first credible lead about where whoever was responsible for the murders might be found, had acted like a shot of adrenalin.

In the days that followed the incident room was a hive of constant activity as phone calls were made, files studied and meetings arranged with officers from the original inquiry. While Anderson oversaw operations, tracking down the whereabouts of the victims and the remaining perpetrators was split between the two main teams: Collins and Woods, along with Hill and Porter.

A key task was to compare the profiles of both the abused and their abusers to see if any of them fitted into the patterns of behaviour identified by Dr Bernard. It did not take long for a shortlist of potential suspects to emerge and the officers set out to conduct their first interviews.

‘You seem pretty fired up by all this,’ said Woods as they made their way down to their car one afternoon on their way to see a former teacher at the school. ‘Does that mean you’ve changed your views on what we’re doing?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Collins flatly. ‘I just want to get it over with. I want to be done with it all as quickly as possible. If we don’t nail this case soon, we’re going to be working on it for the next three months at least. I can’t handle that. It’s doing my head in. I want to get a result because, once we do, we can get back to some proper police work.

‘If there’s an arrest to be made, I would rather let Hill and Porter take the lead on it. I’m sure they’ll be more than eager anyway. I don’t want to have to deal with this shit for a moment longer than is necessary.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Woods. ‘Give me a dead drug dealer or Yardie gangster any day over this lot.’

First on their list was a 47-year-old former geography teacher named Albert Davidson who had been on the edge of the ring and served an eighteen-month suspended sentence for possession of indecent images. He had been accused by several pupils of being actively involved in the actual abuse, but insufficient evidence had meant he had managed to escape being charged.

Banned from working with children, Davidson had switched professions and now sold life insurance. Collins hated being with him. He seemed every bit as clammy and slimy as she expected a sex offender to be. He appeared completely unrepentant about anything he had done, claiming he had only started looking at the pictures out of curiosity, not out of a genuine sexual interest.

‘You had almost two thousand images on your computer. You must have been very curious indeed,’ snapped Collins.

Davidson shrugged. ‘I never counted them. I never realized there were so many.’

Short and skinny with a history of lower-back problems, Davidson was obviously not someone capable of overpowering those bigger and stronger than himself. After forty-five minutes of uncomfortable conversation, Collins was ready to dismiss him from the inquiry.

‘I feel like I need a shower after talking to him,’ she told Woods as they made their way back to the station.

‘You’re not the only one.’

‘You do realize, don’t you,’ said Collins thoughtfully, ‘that if we’re right about what this killer is up to, someone like Davidson could easily be the next victim?’

‘I try not to think about it too much,’ said Woods.

The interviews continued in a similar fashion for the whole of the next day. Some were incredibly disturbing; others just downright sad. Although the abuse was long over, it was clear that some of the victims would carry the emotional scars for the rest of their lives. Each afternoon the pair returned to the incident room to write up their statements and enter the results of their investigations into the computer database.

Comparing notes with Hill and Porter, they found their experiences were broadly similar. Although the mood was still overwhelmingly positive, the fact that the expected result was yet to emerge was starting to be of concern. Word of the inquiry was starting to get around, and there were fears that whoever was responsible for the murders might get wind of the investigation and go to ground. The pressure was on to get through the lists as quickly as possible.

As the middle of the week arrived, Collins and Woods found themselves on their way to Charing Cross Hospital to interview Billy Moorwood, a former pupil of the school who now worked as a porter.

The two detectives arrived at the ward where he had been assigned to work and made their way to the nurses’ station to find out where they could locate him. The heavy-set black woman in the dark blue, scarlet-trimmed uniform of a head nurse looked around and could not see him so offered to page him instead. A few seconds later a shambling figure emerged from the other end of the long corridor of the ward. Moorwood was young but powerfully built, with a square jaw and slightly crooked nose.

One of the ring’s earliest victims, he looked far younger than his twenty-five years. His auburn hair looked an unfortunate shade of red under the bright fluorescent lights. Even from a distance his green eyes shone out like emeralds. He wore a long-sleeved pale grey top with navy blue trousers and black trainers. A red ribbon around his neck held his identity card. He had both hands thrust deeply into his pockets and whistled jauntily as he made his way towards them. Collins and Woods turned to face him, and Moorwood suddenly hesitated.

The announcement over the public address system had made no mention of anyone wanting to speak to him; it had simply asked him to come to the main nurses’ station. But the closer he got the more obvious it became that the request had nothing to do with hospital business. Moorwood’s pace slowed down more and more, until he was almost standing still, staring intently at the two officers.

He was still more than sixty feet away when Collins took a step towards him. And then it happened. The look of concern on his face suddenly turned to full-blown panic. Moorwood spun on his heels and ran.

‘Shit!’ Collins looked helplessly at Woods before taking off after the fugitive. ‘Come on,’ she called back to Woods as he started to follow her.

Moorwood had a good head start and his footwear was far better suited to the slick, tiled floor than the low heels Collins had chosen to wear that day. He dodged his way past oncoming doctors and patients, and suddenly took a sharp left. By the time Woods and Collins had reached the turn, he was nowhere to be seen.

Like all hospitals, this was a rabbit warren of interconnecting corridors and wards and private rooms. Moorwood undoubtedly knew the place like the back of his hand. There was no way in the world the two of them were going to be able to catch him.

‘Fuck,’ spat Collins, instantly regretting making the outburst in a public place. She was breathing hard, not out of exhaustion but out of sheer frustration. She looked over at Woods, who was slamming his hand against the wall in disbelief. He caught her gaze and managed a tight grimace. ‘We could call security, get them to seal the exits,’ he said.

‘It would take too long to organize. There’s only one thing to do now. Call Anderson.’

Billy Moorwood lived in the centre of a run-down estate of low-rise housing on the edge of Stockwell. The road leading to the main square was littered with rusting bicycles, discarded mattresses, abandoned car parts and huge piles of rubbish.

It had taken Woods and Collins less than twenty minutes to make their way there through the lunchtime traffic in the back of a speeding patrol car, blues and twos going like the clappers. It had taken a few more minutes for a van-load of uniformed back-up to appear on the scene. Anderson was on his way over too, but Collins had no intention of waiting any longer.

If Moorwood was their man, he would likely be trying to destroy any evidence linking him to the crimes. Time was precious. Every second they wasted would be another hurdle they would have to get over to make the case stick.

Ideally Collins had wanted Hill and Porter to make any key arrest, but with Moorwood she seemed to have drawn the short straw. The whole case still bothered her to some degree, but she had also been pissed off that Moorwood had done a runner and managed to get away from her. She didn’t like to let anyone get the upper hand.