‘Thank you,’ she said, before hanging up the phone.
‘A woman?’ she repeated to herself.
Surely The Phantom wasn’t a woman! Could it be? Or if the hair did belong to the killer, who was female, could she be responsible just for the related killings of Charles Peacock and David Reynolds? This seemed more likely.
She began to head back to her office and nearly tripped on Tanya’s handbag at her feet.
‘Shit,’ she said, as she picked it up and ran toward the exit.
She opened the door to see Tanya at the bottom of the steps, talking to a man, his arms wrapped around her, comforting her. It was Ben Green.
41
Ben had bumped into Tanya as she was leaving the station and he was on his way back to his car, before picking up Natalie in town.
He hadn’t even known Tanya was pregnant, and when asking what she was doing at the police station, he was completely shocked to discover that David had been murdered.
What the hell is going on? He thought.
Tanya had broken down into tears again, and Ben gave her a much needed hug, doing his best to help an old friend through the emotional anguish she was going through. He wondered if she knew about the episode between David and Natalie, he knew that if she did, and if she mentioned it to the police, then it wouldn’t be long before they paid him another visit.
Or was this the reason he was let out last night? Did he get lucky, so to speak, when somebody murdered David, drawing the suspicion away from him?
His inner self smiled and laughed, ‘you got what you deserved, Dave.’
Ben noticed Summers at the top of the steps that lead to the reception area of the police station. He stood back from Tanya and watched, as the detective who last night all but accused him of murder, descended the steps towards them.
‘You forgot your bag, Mrs Reynolds,’ said Summers. ‘Good morning, Mr Green, how nice to see you again.’
Tanya took her bag and smiled at Summers, then turned to Ben.
‘They’ve been asking for your help too?’ she asked, innocently.
Ben glanced at Summers before answering.
‘Yeah, they had some questions about Charlie, someone killed him as well,’ he said.
Summers eyed Ben up and down, not sure exactly how this man was linked to her investigation, but sure that they’d meet again. She began to leave then stopped in her tracks. Sometimes you just needed to throw something out there, and so she asked them both a question.
‘Do either of you know a woman with long, red hair?’ she said.
Tanya and Ben looked at each other and shook their heads.
‘No,’ they said, in unison.
Summers gave a swift smile then headed back into the station and out of sight.
Ben offered Tanya a lift home, or if she needed some company, she could spend some time with him and Natalie. But she declined, she wanted to get some fresh air, take a short walk and spend some time alone with her baby.
Ben watched as she rubbed her tummy, turned and walked away. Tanya was a wonderful woman, not the brightest as everybody who knew her knew, but she was kind, loving, honest, everything that the world needed to be, in order to be a better place.
Then Ben looked at his hands, the hands of a killer, and the hands of a man who had become a monster. Then it hit him, ‘red hair?’ his inner voice screamed at himself, ‘The fucking witch!’
Ben was back in his car and had driven to the pre-arranged meeting point with Natalie. He could see her sitting across the road, drinking an orange juice and checking her watch. He could see the bags of shopping she had accumulated, and asked himself how he’d ended up with a superficial, lying slut such as the woman he was supposedly going to marry and raise a child with.
He realised that Natalie would have suited David better than he, and maybe even Tanya would have been the shining light to keep Ben out of the darkness he now found himself in. But that wasn’t how things had turned out, far from it.
Ben, at this point, had realised that he hadn’t killed Charlie. It was his mother. The one who for reasons beyond comprehension was convincing Ben that being a murderer was something to be proud of, that it was what he was born to do.
He thought about his father, too, now seeing clearly that he was an innocent man, guilty at most of not putting this mad woman into a special home when she started to lose her mind, guilty of sticking to his marriage vows.
And maybe his mother was right, maybe Ben was a killer, a monster, he certainly felt that way when he looked in the mirror and saw his reflection pulling faces that he had no control over, and when he heard voices talking, shouting, screaming, and even crying in his head. If this was true, and this was the way in which life would be from now on, things couldn’t go on.
If his mother was a killer, and if it wasn’t his father after all, then he still had the mad gene inside of him, this was what he was built from. He would have to end it, take his own life to protect those potentially innocent victims in the future.
But murder his mother? He didn’t think he could kill her, no matter how much he hated her at that instant. The ability to strike down a stranger at any random moment may be within his twisted skill set, but to plan and execute the death of the woman who brought him into this world was too much for him. He knew that at least.
And Natalie, what would happen to her and the baby after all this?
Then, he decided, something would be done.
42
Summers and Kite sat across from Watts at his desk.
Kite was updating Watts on the door to door enquiries taking place as they spoke by five teams of two uniformed officers. Each team had a list of names and addresses of the men who fit the age range of the psychologist’s profile of The Phantom living in the right area at the right time. There were nearly sixty names on each list.
The officers had been told to get through this exercise as quickly as possible, and flag up anyone who refused the DNA swabs straight away. Realistically, to get through all the names on the list could take days, what with people being at work or just out of the house, maybe even out of the country for the time being.
Watts had been told about the red hair, both by the forensics department and by Summers, and although he knew that this was potentially evidence that The Phantom had been a woman all along, he wanted to hear Summers’ thoughts on the subject.
Summers knew that Watts didn’t believe that it was a woman, if so he wouldn’t have given the nod to the use of ten of his uniforms. He was testing her, working out how she was coping with the case, if she still had a direction, making sure she wasn’t losing sight of her goal.
She explained that firstly, the hair didn’t necessarily belong to the killer; although after re-examining the car of the deceased, forensics had alerted Summers that another hair was found on the dashboard of the car, again, tainted with blood. Suspicious? Yes. But it hadn’t confirmed anything, as of yet.
Also, a woman could have maybe overpowered a man sat down in a car, being positioned better than her
