Someone had suggested five-a-side, get fit, make new friends, have a laugh and a few beers afterwards. He’d turned it down. It wasn’t for him. Not that he was unsociable. He was just more used to his own company.
He tried not to conform to the stereotypical image of a police detective, believing that suits, crewcuts and shiny black shoes were just another police uniform. He didn’t even own a tie, and more often than not wore a T-shirt instead of a formal shirt. His dark brown hair was spiky and quiffed, and he wore anything on his feet rather than black shoes. Today he had teamed the jacket and waistcoat of a pin-striped suit with dark blue Levis, a striped shirt and brown boots.
But his eyes showed the strain he was under. A poet’s eyes, an ex-girlfriend had once said. Soulful and melancholic. He just thought they made him look miserable. Now they had black rings under them.
He breathed deep, rubbing his chest as he did so. Luckily the panic attack he had felt in the flat hadn’t progressed. That was something. Usually when they hit it felt like a series of metal bands wrapping themselves round his chest, constricting him, pulling in tighter, making it harder and harder for him to breathe. His arms and legs would shake and spasm.
It was something he had suffered since he was a child. He had put it down to his upbringing. Given up for adoption by a woman he never knew, he was bounced from pillar to post in various children’s homes and foster homes as he grew up. Never fitting in, never settling. He didn’t like to dwell on those times.
Eventually he was sent to the Brennan household and the panic attacks tailed off. Don and Eileen Brennan. He wasn’t one for melodrama, but he really did believe that couple had saved his life. Given him a sense of purpose.
Given him a home.
And they loved him as much as he loved them. So much so that they eventually adopted him.
But the panic attacks were still there. Every time he thought he had them beat, had his past worked out, another one would hit and remind him how little progress he had made.
Don Brennan had been a policeman. He believed in fairness and justice. Qualities he tried to instil in the children he fostered. So Don couldn’t have been more pleased than when his adopted son followed him into the force.
And Phil loved it. Because he believed that alongside justice and fairness should be order. Not rules and regulations, but order. Understanding. Life, he believed, was random enough and police work helped him define it, gave it shape, form and meaning. Solving crimes, ascribing reasons for behaviour, finding the ‘why’ behind the deed was the fuel that kept his professional engine running. He was fairly confident he could bring order to any kind of chaos.
He turned away from the window. Do it now, he told himself.
He would start with the two previous murders.
6
Lisa King and Susie Evans. The two previous murder victims. Phil pulled those two names from his mental Rolodex, focused on them. He had seen their faces so many times. Staring out at him from the incident room whiteboard, imprinted on his memory.
Lisa King was a twenty-six-year-old married estate agent. She had arranged a viewing of a vacant property on the edge of the Greenstead area of town. She had never made it out of that house. She was discovered later that day by one of her colleagues. Laid out on the floor of the house, drugged, brutally knifed. Her stomach ripped to pieces. Her unborn child mutilated, killed along with her.
There had been a huge media circus and Phil and his team had doggedly followed every line of inquiry, no matter how tenuous or tedious. The appointment had been made over the phone, from a cheap, unregistered pay- as-you-go mobile bought from a branch of Asda with cash. Lisa had taken all the details herself; the client was hers. A woman’s name had been given, according to the file in the office. No such woman existed.
Phil and his team had tried their hardest but failed to make any headway. No forensic evidence, no DNA, no eyewitnesses coming forward, no CCTV pictures. Nothing. It was as if the killer had materialised, murdered, then vanished into thin air.
Appeals had been made to the woman who had called the estate agent to come forward. She was promised protection, confidentiality, anything. Lisa’s husband had been brought in, questioned, and released. The usual informants, paid or otherwise, came up with nothing. Everyone was talking about it; no one was saying anything.
Then, two months later, Susie Evans was murdered.
A single parent living in a council flat in New Town. Pregnant with her third child and, as she had laughingly said to her friends in the pub, between boyfriends. A part-time prostitute and barmaid, she hadn’t made such a sympathetic victim as Lisa King, but Phil and his team treated her exactly the same. He didn’t hold with the view that one life was somehow worth more than another. They were all equal, he thought, when they were dead.
Her body was found in a friend’s flat. She had asked the friend if she could borrow it as she had a client who was going to pay her handsomely. Her eviscerated, broken body had been dumped in the bath, the walls, floor and ceiling covered in arterial blood sprays, the baby cut out, left on the floor beside her dead mother.
A door-to-door had been mounted, but it was an area that was traditionally unsympathetic to the police. A mobile station had been set up on the estate but no one had volunteered any information. Again there was no DNA, no forensic evidence and certainly no CCTV.They had speculated on many things: that it might have been a particularly twisted punter with a pregnant woman fetish. Even that it had been an abortion gone horribly wrong. And, most worryingly, that it was the same person who had killed Lisa King and his crimes were escalating. But the investigation went nowhere. And they were left with just a dead mother and child.
Then nothing for another two months. Until now.
Phil took out his mobile. Eileen Brennan, worried that he was in his thirties and unmarried, had been trying to fix him up with Deanna, a friend’s daughter, a divorcee the same age. They had never met, and weren’t particularly keen to, but had agreed on a date to keep the two older women happy. This evening. He had to phone her and, with not too much reluctance, call it off.
He had the number dialled, was ready to put the call through, when his phone rang. Grateful for the diversion, he answered it.
‘DI Brennan.’
DCI Ben Fenwick. His superior officer. ‘Sir,’ said Phil.
‘On my way over now. Just wanted a quick chat beforehand. ’The voice strong and authoritative, equally at home in front of the cameras at a news conference or telling a joke to an appreciative audience in an exclusive golf clubhouse.
‘Good, sir. Let me tell you what we’ve found.’ Phil gave him the details, aware all the time of the missing baby, the clock still ticking inside him. He was pleased the rubberneckers on the bridge couldn’t hear him. He hoped there were no lip-readers in the crowd. Hid his mouth just in case.
‘Oh God,’ said Ben Fenwick, then offered to deal with the media as Phil knew he would. It wasn’t just that he never missed an opportunity to get his face on TV; he had so many media contacts he ensured the story would be presented in a way that would benefit the investigation.
‘Sounds to me like we’ve got a serial. What do you think? Am I right?’ Fenwick’s voice was tight, grim.
‘Well, we’ve still got the party aspect to pursue, the boyfriend to question…’
‘Gut feeling?’
‘Yeah. A serial and a baby kidnapper.’
‘Wonderful. Bad to worse.’ He sighed. It came down the phone as a ragged electronic bark. ‘I mean, a serial killer. In Colchester. These things just don’t happen. Not here.’
‘That has been mentioned, sir. A few times. I’m sure they said something similar up the road in Ipswich a couple of years ago.’
A serial killer had targeted prostitutes in the red-light area of the Suffolk town. He had been caught, but not before he had murdered five women.
