The Element Of Death

As for my own career, it changed markedly after that night. Any officer might have made the connection had they been in my situation, but I liked to think my peculiar talents had come to the fore that evening. I had always been fascinated by words, numbers and patterns, and, because of the nature of the Magpie rhyme, had possibly put more thought into it than most. As soon as Beverley Evans mentioned who she worked for, my subconscious picked up on the name and made the link. Gregory might well have derided me for being lucky; I liked to think that it was good policing, hearing a seemingly innocuous word and understanding its relevance.

Buoyed by the headlines the case generated, I found myself moved away from the front line and thrust into the plain-clothes role that I had never previously considered. Only Eddie Parkinson seemed to resent my success, claiming that if it hadn’t been for his specialist knowledge, we wouldn’t have known it was Gregory. I ignored his cheap jibes, though, and threw myself into my new job with gusto, yet I didn’t forget the chance encounter that had put me in that position. I used my spare moments to research thoroughly into the Magpie Murders, to try and get into the killer’s mind in the hope that it might prepare me for my new career.

It worked, perhaps too well in one respect. I became obsessed with my attempts to understand him, to the extent that, like Gregory, I became a slave to the clock. At first, it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience, though I found myself unable to make a move into or out of a building unless the second hand had reached the sixty-second mark. Nobody else was aware of my new-found foibles, fortunately, and my work didn’t suffer to any noticeable extent.

I didn’t find my new position as easy as I had thought it would be. I had to try and get used to the fact that a detective’s life was nowhere near as precise as a beat constable’s. In my old role, I had a defined set of rules to work to, and kept meticulous notes detailing exact times, locations and actions. All of that seemed anathema now, and I began to realise that the ‘maverick’ detectives portrayed on screen were not as far from reality as I’d believed. Nevertheless, I tried my best to adapt to the expected persona of my new role, and, although I didn’t know it at the time, the Gregory incident would eventually change my life.

*

I felt as if I’d been released from captivity as I drove through the Preston streets. I’d no idea how long my ‘working’ from home would have continued, but the phone call from Creswell altered the dynamic. Now, I was on the case once more. I knew I would have to face blood and gore once again, but it still felt good to be back in action following my enforced sabbatical.

I arrived in Fulwood and parked the Jaguar in a leafy suburb close to the newspaper buildings. I wondered if the press were already onto this case. It was easy to see where the crime had taken place, as dozens of police cars were on the scene. I walked over to the Do Not Cross line, flashed my warrant card and ducked under the tape. The house was a fairly modern detached two-bedroomed affair, and looked to be in immaculate condition. I stepped onto the plush white carpets, my feet sinking a couple of inches into the deep pile. The living room was tastefully decorated and a white three-piece suite took centre stage; or, it would have done under normal circumstances. Now, though, it was heavily blood-stained, as was everything else within the room.

My immediate reaction on entering the room was to gag at the stench. “What is that?” I asked.

A PC, from the local nick, no doubt, answered. “It smells a bit like ammonia, sir.”

“Where’s it coming from?”

“It appears that the body was doused in it for some reason.”

I walked towards it, and the smell intensified. The combination of ammonia and the stink of death was overpowering. I sneezed and reached for a tissue.

“Careful, sir. You’ll contaminate the crime scene.”

“I probably already have,” I muttered, reminding him that I hadn’t been given any protective clothing to wear when I entered the building. I leant over the body, looking at all of the disfigurations. “Were these made before or after death?” I asked.

“The pathologist hasn’t said yet, sir.”

“Where’s the message? The one I’ve been called here to see.”

The officer pointed towards the far wall. I looked across, at the dried maroon lettering that stood out sharply against the bright white wall-covering; the woman really had loved that shade. The letters covered three quarters of the wall space. “That must have taken a lot of writing. Who would have thought a body could contain that much blood?” I looked at the officer, who shrugged his shoulders.

DI Creswell saw that I had arrived and he walked towards me. “How are things, Ben? Have you got over…? I mean, how are you dealing with the Monika situation?”

“Monika?” I laughed. “She’s not a problem, I assure you.”

Creswell looked relieved, and I could understand why; especially if he knew how I really felt about her.

*

Monika. I certainly wasn’t ‘over’ her, and I wasn’t dealing with the situation well at all. My time at home hadn’t helped me come to terms with what had happened; in fact, now, it was all about Monika.

I hadn’t been a detective long when our paths crossed. I was working on a joint venture with the German Bundespolizei in Düsseldorf. Our remit was to investigate a sex club that was believed to be a front for a large drug importing and exporting operation. That was where I met her. It was exactly seven years ago to the day. Just to make it clear, she, too, was working undercover, and I was assigned to work alongside her. Our first meeting, though, didn’t augur well for the future. I remembered in great detail how she sashayed in at quarter past three in the afternoon as if she owned the place. She reminded me of the oval-faced actress Naomi Archer, star of one of my favourite television shows from my youth, All Saints and Sinners, but I tried to ignore that image. I disapproved of women who willingly worked in the sex trade and didn’t want to associate the person standing in front of me with the woman I had a crush on during my teenage years.

“You can’t come in here,” I said as she tried to enter the club.

From the look of disdain on my face, she obviously knew what I was thinking.

“I’m working here,” she replied, in a voice without a trace of accent. She spoke slowly and carefully, as if she were explaining her actions to a child.

“Not today, you aren’t. The club is closed. This is official police business. I suggest you go somewhere else and do whatever it is that you do. Go on, leave, achtung,” I added, thinking that she’d probably understand more if I used her native tongue.

I expected her to go, but she just said, “Gott im Himmel, dummkopf.”

I looked startled, and she laughed, icily. “I thought that would get a reaction. You English think we all talk like that. I will not leave because I am on duty here.” She pulled out a card and held it close to my face. It read ‘Monika Ziegler, Polizeimeister’. “Satisfied? We are to work together on this case.” She flicked her head, sending her flowing blonde locks cascading over her face, but the look she threw at me indicated that she had no hope that ours would be a successful collaboration.

I tried to make up for the bad first impression I had made by buying Monika what I thought was an amusing present as a reminder of my misunderstanding during that meeting. It was a purple aluminium mini vibrator. Unfortunately, Monika failed to see the funny side of this, as she said, “I wouldn’t be seen dead with that inside me!” I realised that, instead of improving matters, I had made an awkward situation much worse.

However, despite our rocky start, the joint operation was a success. I soon saw that she was extremely proficient in her job, and I think that she found me to be a fairly competent policeman and gradually began to have a little respect for me.

The more we worked together, the more we began to understand each other, and we found that we shared common interests in music and literature. I knew that the appeal of Conan Doyle was worldwide, but I hadn’t expected Christie, with her tales of predominantly upper-class middle England, to travel so well. Monika was twenty-seven, three years younger than me, and lived in Mönchengladbach, a journey of around half an hour by rail from Düsseldorf. She had always wanted to work in England, and this case gave her the opportunity to experience, at firsthand, British policing procedures. When the case was successfully concluded, I returned to Preston, but we kept in touch and six months later she transferred to the Lancashire Constabulary, and came to live and work at what we termed ‘the station’ at Hutton.

Our working relationship extended our friendship away from the station, that friendship became a romance, and eventually we moved in together. That was six years ago. In the months and years since, a lot had happened. Being a front-line detective brought me into contact with some of the lowest of life forms. I would defy anybody to witness some of the brutalities that man inflicted on his fellow man and remain unchanged by them. Some people could get through this and come out the other side unscathed. I wasn’t some people.

My response was to immerse myself in my work, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I didn’t even notice the effect this was having on Monika, although, with hindsight, I suppose it was obvious. The more I withdrew into myself, the more my compulsions began to take over. At first, she found my little foibles endearing. I was obsessively neat and tidy. She wasn’t. She would come in from work and fling her jacket across the room, then smile while I stopped whatever I was doing to ensure it was picked up and neatly put away in the correct place. I couldn’t settle until the washing up was done; Monika would happily go out leaving a sink overflowing with pots.

She stopped smiling about my idiosyncrasies when they began to affect her life. My obsession with the clock was becoming so serious that it affected everything I did. I viewed it as therapeutic, as concentrating on the clock allowed me to temporarily prevent the gory images from overwhelming me, but I hadn’t taken into consideration the effect I would have on Monika.

What had initially been an inconvenience, as I would wait until the second hand reached sixty before doing anything, became a problem when I found I had to wait until the minute-hand also reached a five-minute mark, and then it was further extended to my only being able to enter or leave a room at quarter-hour points.

Whenever we went out, it became a major operation, and on numerous occasions we were late because I had been unable to leave until the minute hand completed its slow traverse across the clock face. It put a strain on our relationship, although I worked hard to combat my illness. Eventually, when my inability to make an instant decision almost led to a colleague’s injury, I had to admit that it was having an effect on my ability to do my job, and I applied for a transfer to a less onerous position.

Management were sympathetic and allowed me to transfer to a back-office role at constabulary HQ in Hutton, where my technical expertise came to the fore. I knew more than most about computers, and I had the type of mind that could solve logic problems that baffled many people. Working on the crime-fighting software packages seemed the natural way to go, especially as in that job my obsessive behaviour was less likely to put any other officers at risk. Away from the front-line action, I was once again able to make a valued contribution to the crime-fighting team, and I began to exert a level of control over my obsession, although I was never able to banish the images that were imprinted on my mind.

Although I kept my rank — indeed, in some aspects I was seen as important as any DI as cyber-crime was becoming one of the biggest problems for forces worldwide — Monika was less happy with the change. I had told her it would be healthy for our relationship, as to be together every day at work and every night at home, especially given the stressful nature of much of what we encountered, would have put too much strain on any couple. At least, that was my opinion.

I didn’t see how much things had deteriorated until a few weeks ago. I remember every moment clearly. It was the first day of autumn, and with the changing of the seasons came an unexpected — for me — changing in our relationship. The time was shortly after three in the afternoon and we were at home, watching the DVD of The Hobbit, but Monika seemed distracted. I paused the film and asked if anything was bothering her. It was. I wasn’t making her happy any more. The clock chimed the quarter hour, but it was as if it were sounding a death knell to our relationship. Half an hour later, Monika was leaving, her bags already packed, to ‘stay with a friend’ while she thought things through.

I resolved to become a new man, to win her back, and began to court her at work with gifts of chocolates and flowers, while giving her the time and space to ‘find herself’. I had decided to leave it exactly four weeks from the night she left, then I would ask her to move back in again. I used those days well. Monika’s leaving had an effect on me that no doctor had been able to match, and I gradually began to take control of my life again. I still had obsessions, and I supposed I always would, but I didn’t let them govern my life any more. I was looking forward to her surprised reaction when she saw that the clock no longer influenced my actions.

The day before the four weeks was up, I found out that the ‘friend’ she was staying with was Theo Atkins, one of the detectives who we had both worked alongside when I was on the front line. It was hard to put into words how I felt when I found out. I supposed if I had to describe my feelings in five words, they would be desolate, betrayed, hurt, bewildered and angry. I tried to exclude Monika from blame, reasoning that she must have been extremely vulnerable and lonely after the break-up. No, there was only one villain of this piece.

I didn’t say anything to her when I saw her at work; I didn’t say anything to Atkins. Not verbally. My fists spoke for me, Atkins was hospitalised, and I was sent home with a huge question mark dangling over my career.

I was lucky, I supposed. Morgan Gregory’s escape that same day, and the well-known threats he had made against me, changed everything. My bosses decided a course of action of ‘working from home’ would be in everybody’s best interests, and that was where I had spent much of the intervening time, catching up on my reading and spending hour upon hour thinking. I thought about Monika constantly during that period, grudgingly accepting the reason for her leaving but imagining a range of increasingly unlikely scenarios where she came back to me. It was only the thought of getting her back that kept me going through my darkest moments. Not once did I feel remorse for what I had done to Atkins; doubtless he had felt none when he stole my woman from me.

*

I snapped back to the present as I realised that Creswell was talking. “…a nasty case here, Watson. A man doesn’t want to see more than one like this in his career.” Creswell looked older than his fifty-nine years. It was hardly a surprise. For a man who was on the verge of retirement, to be faced with a serial killer on the loose for what might be his final case was tough indeed. I felt sorry for him as I saw him brush back the few remaining strands of ginger hair that made him the spitting image of the man from the Hamlet advert; it was tough on him, yes, but, unfortunately, it went with the territory. Besides, he was able to dish it out, so he had to be able to take it as well; think of the irascible editor J Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman films and you’d have a pretty good picture of the DI. His colleagues would often refer to working for him as being in a love-hate relationship without the love part.

I could see that he was waiting for me to respond, so I asked him, “Any ideas what happened?”

“Not yet, though the pathologist reckons she’s been dead for about twelve hours. Her name is — was — Mandy Norris, twenty-four years old, single and an investment banker. She was one of the high-flying set.”

“So robbery’s a likely motive, then?”

“It doesn’t look like that, but we can’t be certain yet. If it was robbery, they left plenty behind. Her purse contained several hundred pounds, and it was in plain view in her bag.”

“So I guess it does sound like him again, then. What time was she killed?”

“I wondered when you’d ask that. I take it you’re still obsessed with the clock.” His face was expressionless as he spoke, but I could detect an element of contempt in his voice. I surmised that this was probably my one and only chance to convince him that I was fully recovered. And, once he had accepted that I was no longer a liability, I was certain that the word would get around and Monika would return home. That, though, would have to wait for another day.

“The clock watcher?” I said, with a hint of a grin. “That was another person in a different life. Here, I don’t need it any more.” I took off my watch and threw it onto a chair. “I mentioned the time because it was the right question to ask. I’ll put it another way, then. Did any of the neighbours hear anything?”

Creswell smiled. “You still have that investigative streak about you, don’t you? Such a shame, such a waste. To answer your question, the woman next door said she heard a scream at around four a.m. She was annoyed, because she expected they would have stopped by that time.”

“They?”

“The trick-or-treaters. They were around in droves until almost midnight, according to the neighbour, but it had been reasonably quiet since then.”

“If that was the case, didn’t she think to report it at the time?”

“No, because she said she heard the woman laugh as well. And, as I said, there’d been screams all night with it being Halloween. There are a lot of younger people in the neighbourhood and four a.m. is still early as far as they’re concerned. If she’d reported every scream, there’d have been police here on a dozen occasions.”

“Old Hercule was right,” I muttered.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of a line I read recently. Something that Poirot said. To paraphrase it slightly, when do you notice an individual scream least? When it is one of a number of related screams.”

“You and your damned detective fiction! This is real life, damn it, not a story book. Somebody is dead here. It’s nothing like anything you’ve read. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sorry, sir. Of course I understand. What do we know about the victim?”

Creswell let out a deep breath before continuing. “From what we’ve been able to gather so far, she was out last night at a Halloween-themed event with some friends from work. They said the party broke up in the early hours, they all left the club, and that’s the last any of them saw of her. She didn’t turn in for work today, but they figured she’d probably had too much to drink. She wasn’t the only absentee, as a few of the girls had over-indulged themselves.”

“Who found the body?”

“Her boyfriend — he’s with the same bank. He had been to a morning meeting in London, and left for the capital yesterday early evening. He arrived back early this afternoon to find this. His alibi is rock-solid, though we don’t really need it. Not with that,” he added, pointing at the wall.

“I’d expected he would target me instead of embarking on another spree,” I said. “Not that I want some maniac to try and kill me, but at least it would stop innocents like Amanda here from getting themselves butchered.”

“Amanda? Oh, Mandy, you mean.”

“Yes, that’s right, Mandy. I guess it’s my formal logical side, imagining her entry on the police database under her full name.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Anyway, we’d hoped he would go after you — not that we want any harm to come to you, Ben. You remember what he said at his trial? He promised you a special welcome, but he also said he was going to start again, but on a longer sequence this time. You stopped him when he’d completed six of his seven self-appointed tasks. He is an obsessive. His mental state can’t allow something to remain unfinished. He has to have a perfect run. The problem is, how many will he go for next time? Ten? Twenty? A hundred?”

“Thanks,” I said, wryly. “So what you’re really saying is that if I hadn’t called it in when I found that underwear model, she would be dead, but nobody else would be in danger. That makes me feel really good about myself. Of course,” I added, “given his mental state, who’s to say that he wouldn’t have started a brand-new series anyway? Ten years is a long time. His first series lasted half a year. We could easily have had half a dozen such sprees since.”

“You misunderstood me. I didn’t mean to imply that you were in any way to blame. You were a damned good copper who used your initiative when we’d been trying to locate the potential victim for several weeks, without any success.”

“I know, it’s just me feeling a little sorry for myself. I realise that you don’t blame me for what happened tonight. The problem is, I blame me.”

“Don’t! That’s an order. I still outrank you, so put any such nonsense thoughts right out of your head. Now, about this message.”

“Thanks,” I replied, “and the best thing for me to do is try and solve this before it escalates out of control.” I looked at the congealed writing again, then walked over for a closer view. “I was right,” I said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I know. That’s one reason why we called you in. The other, of course…”

“Yes, I know. Because the killer has aimed it specifically at me. I know that, and, believe me, I’m not over the moon about it. I’m still a serving officer, though, so it’s my duty to respond. I accept that I’m probably the last person you want looking at this, given what nearly happened last time I was on a case.”

“No, that’s not true at all. We called you in because of your obsession with him over the past ten years. There’s nobody else — other than Gregory himself — who understands his mind as much as you do. We’re going to need to get inside his head to work out what he’s going to do next. You’re going to need to get inside his head.”

“Thanks, boss,” I muttered. I read the message:

This is for Holmes’ lapdog. He thinks he’s so clever, so if you want to try and stop the next one happening, you’d better hope he’s as good as he says he is.

I paused. “That’s the easy bit,” I said, trying to inject a small amount of levity into a sombre situation. I read the remainder, the part that didn’t make sense:

Kds’r rszqs vhsg zm dzrx nmd. Sghr hr sgd ehqrs ne lzmx. Gnv lzmx? Ad z fnakhm gdmbglzm, dke. Knnj enq Zmcx vgdm sgd mdws nmd nbbtqr.

“Any ideas?” asked Creswell.

“Not immediately.”

“Isn’t there some software you can use to crack codes like these?”

“There are plenty of applications out there, yes, but solving this depends on the code used. Some cyphers require a keyword, and without that you don’t stand a chance.”

“We’re stuffed, then.”

“No, I don’t think so. The message is clearly taunting me. There’d be no point to it if it was impossible for me to crack. Leave it with me — I’ll get home and work on my laptop to see what I can find. Can you email me a photograph of the message to make sure I don’t write it down incorrectly? The positioning of the letters might have some importance.”

*

I arrived at HQ shortly after eight a.m. the following morning. Any awkwardness that might have been felt at my return had gone; this case was far more important than petty jealousies. I was relieved to find that Atkins was still on sick leave, and, as he had never been the most popular detective at the station — only Eddie Parkinson took his side — the sympathies were well and truly with me.