The Retribution

have usefully speculated about the significance of the dismemberment. It might be about exerting the ultimate literal control over a victim. ‘She can’t walk away if she’s got no legs,’ he said. Or it might be about punishment. ‘She’s so evil she needs to be taken apart and put together again from scratch.’

He rubbed his scalp with his fingertips. ‘But that’s not what’s happening here,’ he said. ‘What he’s shown us before is totally different. Of course it’s about control. Serial murder is always about control. But that’s not the point of this.’ He threw his hands in the air. He wanted to pace but the boat was too small. ‘Face it, Tony, the dismemberment could be completely meaningless. Random. The first thing that popped into his head.’

Except that was ridiculously wrong. You didn’t make careful plans to go out and kill, plans that included fake number plates and baseball caps to confound the cameras, then choose a completely arbitrary murder method on the night. There was something structured going on here, even if he couldn’t work out what it was. And the harder he tried to pin it down, the further out of reach it seemed.

Tony drank his tea and stared out of the porthole at the glassy water beyond, letting his thoughts drift. Whatever had been niggling at the back of his mind since the previous murder was squirming harder now, but he still couldn’t nail it. Maybe the crime-scene photographs would help.

He went back to the computer and opened the file. And was reminded that sometimes the world worked the way you wanted it to. When Tony looked at the photographs in sequence, first murder to latest, the images fell into place like a jigsaw. All at once, he understood what he was looking at. It made sense and it made no sense at one and the same time.

‘Maze Man,’ he said softly. It had been an American import back in the nineties. Late-night Channel 5, watched by Tony Hill and three other people, if the ratings were anything to go by. It was a low-budget TV series about a psychological profiler who constantly referred to ‘the maze of the mind’ and wittered on about criminals being lost in the maze, taking wrong turnings, giving in to the soul of the Minotaur. Tony had only watched it because if he’d had a Facebook page, insomnia would be one of the hobbies he listed. That, and because the consequent rise in his blood pressure from watching something so ludicrous reminded him he was alive.

The unrelenting stupidity of its plots and the illogicality of the protagonist’s conclusions were probably what had limited its lifespan to a single series. Chances were, it had probably been revived on some satellite channel in the middle of the night, but it had passed Tony by. However, if he was right, it had not bypassed the man who was killing sex workers in Bradfield.

Excited now, Tony googled Maze Man and clicked on its IMDB entry. Twenty-four episodes made in 1996, starring Larry Geitling and Joanna Duvell. Tony barely remembered her, a cookie-cutter California blonde, but Geitling’s face remained fresh in his memory, all chin and cheekbones and crinkles round the sapphire blue eyes when he went thoughtful. Which happened mostly just before the commercial breaks, as Tony recalled. Geitling’s name rang a vague bell, but he couldn’t put his finger on it and Google didn’t help.

But he knew the name was in his head for a reason. Working on the principle that anything is worth a try, he summoned up Stacey’s patent case-indexing system. It trawled every document scanned or imported into a case and created a master index. He typed in ‘Larry Geitling’ and nearly tipped his chair over when he got a hit immediately. Larry Geitling had been the name used by the man who had checked into room five in the Sunset Strip motel, the room whose carpet and towels had been saturated with water the night Suze Black had gone missing. This was a real connection, not just the mad profiler’s hunch.

He went back to Google and tracked down an episode-by-episode chronology of the series, complete with dismally low-res screenshots, all compiled by some sad bastard in Oklahoma City who was convinced Maze Man was the most criminally underrated show ever produced by American TV. However, Tony was grateful to him today, for this peculiar little website confirmed what had been jittering away at the back of his mind for the past few days. Impossible as it seemed, the four murders in Bradfield corresponded exactly to the crimes in the first four episodes of Maze Man.

He’d been absolutely right when he’d said these killings were not about lust or sex. He didn’t even think they were about power. They were about something completely different. At the heart of these murders was a man who needed to kill, but not for any of the usual reasons. He wasn’t killing because he wanted to watch women die, or because he hated them. The paraphernalia of the murders didn’t matter to him; he hadn’t been able to come up with a coherent way of killing. It was as if he was trying on different methods to see if he could find one that worked for him. He was using the TV series as a source of templates for serial murder. Tony had never encountered anything quite like this, but it made a twisted sort of sense.

So if it wasn’t about the killing itself, what was the motivation for these murders? The answer had to lie with the victims, somehow. But what could it be?

In the meantime, he had something to share. He picked up his phone and called Paula. As soon as she answered, he said, ‘This is going to sound really weird.’

‘I was just about to call you,’ Paula said.

‘Have you had a break in the case?’

‘No, Tony. I was going to call you because I just heard about your house and I wanted to commiserate,’ she said patiently.

Sometimes Tony ran out of road when he was passing for human. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.

‘It’s what friends do,’ Paula said. ‘I’m really sorry about your house.’

‘So am I,’ he said. ‘And about Carol’s brother and his partner. And about Chris. How is she, by the way? Any news?’

‘No change. Which they say is a good thing.’

‘I wish I could do something more positive to put him back behind bars. But I don’t seem to be able to do much with Vance, so I took a look at the stuff Stacey sent me this morning.’

‘I sent it, actually. Stacey’s on her way to Worcester. Play your cards right, she might buy you a coffee.’

Tony was taken aback. How had he fallen this far out of the loop? ‘Stacey’s coming here? Why? What’s happened?’

‘The DCI’s ordered her down to Worcester to drill into the hard drives of a couple of crappy old computers from some geezer called Terry Gates. Apparently he—’

‘I know who Terry Gates is and what we’re all hoping to find on the computers. I just didn’t know Stacey was involved. I thought West Mercia had their own specialist.’