Not your traditional client, of course. Not clients of the murder victims themselves. No, this was a different violation altogether, and Bliss understood how and why they had all been fooled by the circumstances.
Currently being held under close guard in hospital, Des Knowles nursed nothing more severe than a concussion, the remnants of the beating Bliss had administered inside the mobile home now the least of the man’s concerns. Bishop had been glad of the delay in proceedings. It meant their custody clock would not start ticking down until Knowles was brought to Thorpe Wood for questioning. It was for the best, he’d suggested. Tensions were running high, and a night’s sleep would help settle everybody. Their task once they got the man in the room was to not only have him confess his role, but also to obtain the names of the men who’d murdered four other women.
As for Abbi Turner’s killer, he’d coughed up pretty much his entire life story in the time it took Hunt and Gratton to drive him back to the nick from Pondersbridge. Whatever high he was on took some time to come down from. By the time a doctor had examined him and declared him well enough to be interviewed, a duty solicitor had attended after initially being advised of the anticipated charges via e-mail. Both Ansari and Hunt had recently received additional training in contemporary interview skills, and Bishop had given them the nod to go ahead.
That the man was in any fit state to be interviewed owed a great deal to Chandler. Having watched her partner marching Knowles towards the kennels, and on towards a small brick structure, she had spotted him pick up the length of pipe. She decided to follow at a distance, keeping one eye on the dwelling, not knowing who else might be inside or how Jimmy might have dealt with them. When she saw Knowles pull open a big steel door, her gaze switched to Bliss and the look of horror that crumpled his face. The moment he swung the pipe, causing Knowles to buckle at the knees and fall face-forward to the ground, she was up and running.
It took her three attempts to talk her partner down.
The man he wanted to lay into remained hunched above his victim, still chattering away as if he had not a care in the world. Each time Bliss raised the steel pipe, Chandler begged him to rethink. She did not approach him, nor did she attempt to wrestle the weapon away from his grasp. Given his incandescent rage, she didn’t want to think about how he might react. Her final cry was also her most forceful, and this time it got through to him. His chest rising and falling like bellows, Bliss scowled at the naked man hulking over Abbi Turner’s body, before slowly allowing his hand to fall by his side. His fingers unclenched and the pipe clattered to the rutted concrete floor. Bliss staggered once, then turned his attention to the victim.
All of which he had to be reminded of, as Chandler swiftly prepared him for his meeting with senior officers. Brain-fog made him feel woolly and disconnected, but eventually her words seeped through. They had to get their stories straight, to somehow lessen the impact of the violence he had unleashed. Bliss spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening in a haze. When Des Knowles recovered from the blow, he immediately complained about police brutality. Bliss stubbornly claimed self-defence, and although an official enquiry had to be launched, he was not overly bothered by it. He’d not struck Knowles purely out of anger – more to incapacitate the man while he was inside the brick building. He’d pulled the blow; it was hard enough to knock him unconscious, but with no intent to cause any lasting damage.
The sweaty man who had taken Abbi Turner’s life and seemed triumphant about it was the truly lucky one. Stepping towards him, the metal pipe still clutched in his right hand, Bliss could not deny the murder in his heart at that precise moment. Nobody would ever need to know the impetus behind it. There was no one else around to bear witness if he made a single blow count. A false claim of self-defence would be left to him and his conscience to overcome, but ultimately he knew who would win that skirmish.
And that was the problem. For all his faults, for all his minor deviations from the rule book, Bliss was no killer. And so the rational side of his nature had taken over. If ever a man deserved such an end, it was surely this sick, perverted rapist and murderer. Removing him from the face of the earth would be doing the planet and its inhabitants a huge favour. Such men gave up the right to expect a humane response to their horrific acts. But while Bliss was happy to play both judge and jury, he refused to also become an executioner.
He barely remembered Chandler arriving and trying to talk him out of it. There had been no need. His arm moved reflexively on a couple of occasions, a primitive instinct prepared to hand out a beating to exact some form of revenge. Instead, and despite knowing in his heart that Abbi was already beyond saving, he attempted to resuscitate her, pumping her chest so fervently the young girl’s ribs snapped, at which point Chandler gripped his hands and gently pulled him away. When the rest of his colleagues arrived, they found him holding the limp form
