A tactical team, the same one as earlier, were at his disposal and he was holding court over them all. This was going to be his crowning glory. All they had to do was work the case in a methodical manner, narrowing down the possible locations for the serial killer and his victims until they found them.
Whether the victims were dead or alive would not impact greatly on the magnitude of his achievement, yet he knew he would be conferred hero status if he got to them in time.
Addressing his audience, he clicked the mouse to bring up a new slide.
‘This is Valerie Mitchell. Born Valerie Babington, she is presumed to be his first victim. I will hand the floor now to Dr Richard Ventin, a criminal behaviouralist and profiler from Scotland Yard. Dr Ventin.’
Standing back to allow the expert to step up to the microphone, Quinn stopped listening so he could watch to make sure everyone else was. The egghead droned on in a monotone voice, citing various papers on serial killers and their patterns of behaviour. None of it was going to get him any closer to the location of the Sandman but there were a lot of people working on it.
The discovery that Ramsey Mitchell owned and ran a chain of successful locksmith franchises aligned with Jane Butterworth’s notes about entering locked properties without leaving anything to indicate someone had. That revelation led almost instantly to one that made his eyes pop out.
Every single one of Ramsey’s employees was a criminal. They had all served time in prison and all had serious psychological issues. Many had committed crimes against women and could most likely be relied upon to do so again given the chance.
That Ramsey Mitchell singled them out for training and employment as his locksmiths explained how it came to be men, not just a man, who broke into the home in Harrietsham to kidnap Karen Gilbert and terrorise the couple living there. That they both survived was amazing.
Dr Ventin was explaining a theory he had about the Sandman trying to recreate an event in his life. In the doctor’s words, Ramsey Mitchell was locked into a period when his wife died and that was why he took only women who resembled her.
There was no death record for Valerie Mitchell, but if her husband murdered her, he would not report her missing. She was his first victim, buried somewhere in the Kent countryside no doubt. When they caught him, would they spend years attempting to find the bodies of his victims? Would he have a map somewhere to tell them where each was hidden, or would Ramsey simply not remember?
As a precaution, Chief Inspector Quinn had directed two plain-clothes officers to watch Tempest Michaels and his friends. How they could succeed when he had taken all their information and left them with nothing, he couldn’t fathom. He felt sure they couldn’t, yet it still felt like a sensible step to keep an eye on them.
Impatient for a call from them, or a breakthrough from the officers trawling through the Blue Moon research, he turned his attention back to the boring profiler.
Tempest. Locksmiths. Saturday, December 24th 1406hrs
Jagjit and Alice had been busy, and if the bags under their eyes were anything to go by, they’d had less sleep than us last night.
‘It was when you left last night that we started talking about who the real person was,’ he explained.
‘We had all these different names,’ continued Alice. ‘But we didn’t know which was the real one or if any of them were.’
Jagjit opened his laptop. ‘We figured it had to be Ramsey Mitchell because that was the name of the juvenile with the arrest record.’
‘That’s almost certainly the case,’ agreed Amanda.
Jagjit nodded. ‘Well, would you believe he’s a locksmith?’
Big Ben cursed. ‘I knew it!’
It explained the bit where he was getting into properties, but we guessed as much already.
Jagjit got on with telling why that was important before I had to ask.
‘He owns a whole firm,’ he explained, ‘and it looks like all the people he employs are criminals.’ He spent the next ten minutes showing us what he meant.
Jagjit used the laptop to show us what he had found and took us to the website for the locksmith business. ‘This is it,’ he announced.
I stared slack-jawed at the logo. ‘Sleep Safe Locksmiths,’ I read aloud with a slightly hysterical stutter. ‘It’s like he’s bragging.’
Amanda read the catchphrase beneath the firm’s symbol. ‘You’ll sleep safe with us.’
It was genuinely hard to believe he was so blatant and obvious with it.
Jagjit clicked into the next page which showed vans and smiling locksmiths holding up shiny new keys. Big Ben sputtered out his coffee, making us look his way. He had liquid dripping off his nose.
‘That’s Smiler,’ he jabbed a finger at the screen. Sensing that his comment required more explanation, he said, ‘I punched him in the head yesterday. He was one of the fake monks that attacked me in Aylesford. I’d rather like to meet him again, actually.’
I sniffed in a slow deep breath and exhaled again. ‘He employs people with a criminal record and uses them to help him commit murder.’ It made my stomach turn. ‘He killed his wife and has been killing ever since. I’m no profiler but I would be willing to bet this is some kind of weird need to recreate the original act.’
Jagjit said, ‘Um.’
We all looked his way. All except Alice who said, ‘We couldn’t find any record of her death.’ When no one said anything, she added, ‘There’s no obituary for her. We couldn’t even find a story about her going missing.’
Amanda scrunched up her face a little. ‘There wouldn’t be if he murdered her, and no one
