entrance. He stood still as a flood of old memories overpowered him, the rush he felt when entering the building, the noisy surroundings of keyboards being tapped by quick fingers and telephones constantly ringing from all desks. He tried to picture the internal layout, attempting to find the Briefing Room from an old mapped memory.
‘Can I help you?’ the woman’s voice sounded welcoming and fresh.
‘Morning, I’m attending a briefing with Jack Dawson this morning, I’m just…’
‘Mr Nathan Cawley?’ she interrupted, Nathan nodded
‘Chief Inspector Dawson informed me of your visit, the briefing began fifteen minutes ago. I suggest you take the lift, second floor, turn right, end of the corridor and the room is on your left’.
‘Thanks’ he attempted to remember the directions hoping not to need a repeat from the young woman. He imagined her temper becoming un-friendly, even after he used his ageing memory as an excuse. He headed for the large metal doors of the advised method of transport.
The rapping of his bare knuckles against the solid oak door caused a pause in the brief, heads turned to the location of the sound. Nathan edged the door open and poked his face inside cautiously, a precautionary move on the off chance he had the wrong room.
‘Nathan, please come in’ greeted Jack, the huge smile on his face displaying the humour he felt for Nathan’s late arrival, ‘Everybody I would like you to meet Nathan Cawley, a veteran of the Met and a good friend’ his bony finger waved to an empty chair to his side. Nathan acknowledged and made his way towards it, planting himself under watchful eyes.
‘Nathan has being asked to assist us with the case, you may be aware of his previous efforts in assisting us with The Golden Boy case four years ago. He has a very keen eye for this type of material and it is a great relief to me that he has accepted to help with this new case. Nathan, give us your thoughts’.
He stood slowly, not expecting the immediate introduction or to voice his own opinions,
‘Firstly, I’m just here to assist with the case, nothing more. I know as much as everyone else at this point so for now we are all singing from the same song sheet. I looked through Doctor Lime’s portfolio last night, a lot of what he states is usually found within cases such as this. But as of now we have only the one body, which means a connection from the victim to the killer is difficult to establish. The fact that he has sent us the package containing the images of the victim when she was alive and also the movie he had made, tells us that he wants to be known. He wrote a name upon the cover of the package, the Wolf, which is obviously what he goes by, he wants us to know this, he wants us to look for him and he isn’t scared of the chase. The girl’s body was found in an open area used regularly by walkers and ramblers, this again tells us that he wanted her to be found before the body was covered by the snow or eaten by the wildlife. He will consider his work important and mistakes will rarely be made, if not at all’.
‘Sir’ the young PC spoke softly, the front row turned their heads to establish where the voice came from. Nathan scanned the four rows of chairs and spotted the woman at the rear, her hand slowly rising.
‘Where would you start with the evidence we have so far?’ she asked
‘Well, firstly we should look at what we have. The killer abducted the young girl, this we know as her parents had filed a missing person report around sixteen hundred hours the day she went missing. So the killer may know that area well, may live or have lived there. They may have family, relatives and friends or work in that area. The first thing should be a door to door questioning, ask the locals for any information they may have. Check the local CCTV for any footage in and around the hours of her disappearance. It was a business day so she would have been going home from school. We need to establish the route she used and how often she used it. Look to see if there are any cameras on that route as the killer may have followed on foot or slowly behind in a vehicle.’ He paused to drink from the small glass on the table, the cool water soothing his throat.
‘I can say for definite that the killer used a vehicle, something with a deep boot space, possibly a people carrier or van of some sort. He would need one to transport a body in. We can look on CCTV or ask locals if they spotted a vehicle matching this description. It may seem like we have nothing to work off, but, we need to break this down as small as we can, we have to disseminate the information into small fragments and build a case. Yes it’s hard but it’s our job to catch this person, team work is a huge key to breaking this lock, we must work together……………thank you’ he smiled awkwardly.
Nathan stepped down and moved toward Jack who was resting his back against the magnolia wall. He adopted a similar posture and exhaled heavily.
‘Been a while?’
‘Four years Jack, I’d call that a while yeah!’ smiling.
Doctor Lime moved toward the rear of the room and dimmed the lights, the room gradually became darker. He aimed the small black remote control at the white canvas hanging just behind the briefing box. The room was filled with a brilliant white light as the projector started up.
‘Morning ladies and gentlemen’ he began. Nathan detected a slight lisp in his voice, the ‘s’ at the end of ladies dragged on a little too long, imitating a snake. William moved in front of the canvas and suddenly stepped back sharply, his hand held up to his face as the light blinded him. He decided to stand at one side.
‘Can I start by thanking Nathan for voicing his opinions, every little helps.’
‘I believe this person to be of a controlling nature’, he continued. ‘Due to the age of the victim we find that killers or sexual predators target young children as they are easier to manipulate and control. We can’t say right now that the killer is a Paedophile until the results come back from the coroner, but we can’t rule it out either’, he paused to re-position his glasses.
‘The footage you are about to see is what the killer had filmed themselves and sent to us, some may have seen this already but I can imagine that all of you will be watching it again at some point in the investigation, more than once.’
The room darkened again as the film began, the camera out of focus, gradually zooming in to display the girl bound to the chair. William froze the footage.
‘Just to let you know I will be pausing throughout to discuss certain aspects of the movie, things that display the behaviour of the killer and so on……do please feel free to take notes’.
Nathan watched the Psychologist as he addressed the audience, he imagined William feeling a sense of power and purpose as all the faces starred in his direction. His eyes scanned the doctor from head to toe. His Suede shoes, worn and fading at the toes. The brown Corduroy trousers clashed with his grey jacket, his shirt, un-ironed and starting to un-tuck its self. His small eyes were slightly sunken into his head and his fine framed glasses balanced at the tip of his stubbed nose. Nathan had lost count of how many times the doc had pushed them closer to his eyes, his nose scrunching and creating prominent creases as his finger glided over it.
He was never one to judge, but sometimes, when an individual wound him up just by their appearance he couldn’t help but dislike them. William Lime was one of those people.
***
The tapping sound caught his attention. The moth flew wildly into the light as it flickered to life. One by one the fluorescent lights illuminated the room. The Wolf stood and observed his den, the smell of bleach stinging his nostrils. He walked over to the chair which held his previous victim, the same wooden structure that will house his next girl……..and the one after that.
The blood had been scrubbed from the concrete floor, the bleach helped to break the dried speckles that littered around the main pool of crimson life. He lowered his athletic frame to one knee and stroked the palm of a hand over the place where the red stuff had formed…….dry, as he had expected.
Pushing his body up with the bent knee he regained his posture. His skin felt smooth as he brushed the small particles free from his hand with two fingers. He enjoyed the preparation before the abduction, the previous went exceptionally well. The next was to be the same…….better if possible.
Firstly he walked clockwise around the room from wall to wall, keeping the painted bricks to his left. He checked that the image he had painted himself was intact……it was. The decorating had taken him several weeks, the planning phase eating up two months in total. The bricks were hidden behind scenery of woodland and green fields. The trees stretched from the base of the wall to the ceiling, eight feet in height. The branches housed an array of leaves, green, red and orange. The sun hid behind the forest, the bright yellow ball peeking through the gaps of the branches. In the middle of the wood lay a faint path, the sign displaying directions:
