The Murder Code (27 page)

Kate Barrett. This one is more hurried—a mistake. Her husband is audible in the background, shouting in distress, and the clip ends raggedly, the road juddering as he runs.

Paul Thatcher. The video begins with him already lying on the woodland floor, mouth gaping, one half of his head bright red. Even with the interruption halfway through, the torture shown is prolonged, and Thatcher takes an age to die. Again, he is learning.

Marie Wilkinson. The clip begins with the pregnant woman already subdued, this time on her kitchen floor. She is struck several times in the face. There are inaudible words from outside of the frame. The camera remains focused on the dying woman on the floor as the intruding old man is beaten to death out of shot.

Seven more victims killed in the same woodland location in similarly abhorrent ways. None of them have been identified in the media yet, so he has no way of knowing their names. Not that it matters to him.

Sixteen murders, including the old man, and the code is unbroken.

It is enough. So, yes. It is time to stop this.

The General walks into the bathroom and takes one last look at himself in the mirror, wearing his father’s army uniform. He never earned one of his own, much as he tried, but he has done his best since to honour his father’s memory and make him proud. To become the kind of man he would have wanted as a son. He remembers the sequences he used to create as a child, all of which the old man broke. And so yes, in some sense, there is that too. Honour, become … and beat.

As he looks at himself, another memory of his father surfaces. Not telling stories at the dinner table, but at a later date: the man hopelessly drunk, lost, his wife—the General’s mother—long gone. In the memory, the old man is wearing this same uniform, and he has a pistol in his hand.

I’m a soldier,
his father says. Although the General is standing directly behind him, talking to him, he knows the old man is speaking to himself. His father looks down at the weapon in his hand with something close to bewilderment. As though the weight is a surprise to him. The gun weighs more than the buttons pressed and stories told; it has a tangible real-life heft. It demands to be held and carried.

I’m a soldier
, his father repeats, slurring the words.

So I should be able to do this.

The General shakes his head, chasing the memory away—and the memory of what came later.

Dear Sir,

We reject your application on the basis
…

No. He won’t think about that.

Instead, he changes his clothes and gathers together the items he needs, trying to concentrate on the positives.
The code was not broken!
The other things that have gone wrong are not his fault—just dumb luck and misfortune, which can happen to anyone. Any soldier can stumble, especially in an operation as complex as this one. But the police never came close to breaking his code and catching him. And that is something. His father would surely be proud of that much.

The General shrugs on a coat, ignoring the horrific
thing
in the corner of the room behind him, and tries to tell himself all of this.

When he is ready to leave, he slips a rubber band carefully around the pile of CDs and places the bundle in his jacket pocket. Outside the house, he steers his car into the morning traffic and joins the loop road, heading towards the town centre, trying to keep the anger he feels under control.

Time to end this.

He heads for the train station.

B
ACK UPSTAIRS IN THE
operations room, I phoned the warehouse to verify that Levchenko had indeed got that far and collected his order, then spent a few minutes studying my road map.

The place was north-east of the city, out in the sticks. His house was in the countryside too, but closer in. The area between was within our potential search area and had, according, to the reports already been visited. That didn’t mean something hadn’t been missed.

Okay.
Making the assumption that Levchenko wouldn’t have taken some crazy route, I drew a vertical eye shape on the map, with his house and the warehouse at the corners. Looking at the space in between, I could see two likely networks of roads he might have cycled along.

‘What are you doing?’ Laura said, putting a coffee down.

‘I’m thinking.’

She peered at the map.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Missing-persons report. This is where he was last seen; this is where he was going.’

I rubbed my jaw. It would take me half an hour each way, starting from his house and heading to the warehouse along one set of roads, then back again down the other. Levchenko hadn’t been missing that long in the grand scheme of things, and I wasn’t convinced anything had happened to him. But it was too … coincidental.

The birthday puzzle came back to me. Just because I had a connection to the guy didn’t mean anything. Sooner or later, by the law of averages, those kinds of connection would arise. It probably didn’t mean anything at all. Like Franklin’s involvement, it was just the past intruding by chance.

‘Andy?’

‘We’ve already searched most of this area,’ I said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘Right. So … what?’

I didn’t say anything. I could still picture him. Levchenko. From memory, he was a good man—not the sort to stay out and worry his wife. And then, of course, I remembered Emmeline. A black-and-white image. A face with one eye bruised shut.

I stood up. ‘I’ll go.’

‘You sure?’ Laura shook her head. ‘Hang on. What’s going on, Hicks?’

‘The woman,’ I said. ‘We’ve met before. Or rather, I’ve met her husband before. Look, it doesn’t really matter. But I’ll just check it out. It’s probably nothing, but I’ll check it out anyway, just to be sure.’

‘O-kay.’ Laura spread the word out, looking at me.

You’re being weird here, Hicks.

‘Because I owe it to them,’ I said.

I owe it to them.

Eight years ago, Gregor Levchenko had come to me asking for help, and I’d failed him. Failed him and his wife and—most of all—his daughter, Emmeline.

At the time, she was living with a man called John Doherty, who had attacked her. I’d told her father the truth: that if she wasn’t prepared to co-operate with us, there wasn’t a whole lot we’d be able to do. Two days later, Doherty had beaten Emmeline Levchenko to death.

Because of me.

Because I failed to do my job and protect her.

On the way to the long, winding Hawthorne Road on the outskirts of town, I drove past Gregor Levchenko’s house and found myself stopping outside.

It was two up, two down, with windows like black eyes. Little more than a shack: a patched-together cube of brickwork and corrugated iron. The land around it was hard-scrabble: dust and dirt and miserable clutches of yellowing grass. Chickens from the property next door pecked at the gravel.

It looked like a place where nobody lived any more, but they did, the pair of them. And this was where Emmeline had grown up. They had been a decent, hard-working family who had never expected anything more from life than that the people who were supposed to look after and protect them would do so. It wasn’t so much to ask. It shouldn’t have been.

I owed them, all right.

And there was that sense again—stronger than ever—of being entangled. Of chains of cause and effect I could only glimpse brief links in, but which held taut out of sight. The sense that what was happening now was, at least in part, the present unable to keep the secrets of the past.

Everything unfolds.

I
DROVE NORTH-EAST, UNSURE
what I was looking for. The roads were quiet out here: a fringe hemming the top corner of the city, spreading out towards occasional factories and isolated properties but little else.

The land was half wild. For much of my journey, the road cut through woodland: walls of trees on either side, the branches sometimes meeting overhead, so that I passed through natural, leaf-lit tunnels filled with midges. The morning sun mottled everything. Where the trees cleared, it created bright expanses of shimmering tarmac. More than once, I saw deer darting between the trees parallel to the road, little more than shadows that resolved into animal shapes in my mind only after they had vanished.

I kept the window rolled down, my elbow on the sill, listening to the clicks of the undergrowth and the trill of birdsong.

For long stretches, I was totally alone. The few vehicles I met coming the other way were mostly rusted pickups, scooters, an occasional cyclist angling past. I drove slowly, the tarmac passing smoothly beneath my wheels, keeping my senses tuned for a sign. I didn’t know what. What could there be that would be obvious?

But still …

And then I braked—a little quicker than I intended.

Something had caught my attention. For a moment I wasn’t sure what it was. But as the car slowed to a halt, I heard a slight crackle and realised it had been that. Just a sound. The slightest variation in the texture of the road beneath the tyres.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw nothing. So I cranked on the handbrake and got out of the car.

Outside, the smell of the countryside hit me properly. The area felt fresh and full and alive; a slight breeze wafting through the woodland brought out the rich scent of the undergrowth. The trees to either side were packed tight. The grass at their bases was swirled and messy, but had grown high enough in places to wrap around the lowest branches, forming green curtains.

I listened. At first, everything was silent, but then the world resolved itself into tiny clicks and buzzes. Not human noises. Looking all around me, I might as well have been the only person in the world.

I walked a little way back down the road, kicking at the tarmac, looking for whatever had made the noise. It didn’t take long to find it—to find them. Hundreds of tiny white pellets of wax, scattered over the surface of the road.

I crouched down. The car tyres had smeared a lot of the wax into streaks, while the morning sun had already begun to melt other bits. It looked like glue on the tarmac.

He waits by the roadside,
I remembered.

Maybe flags down cars for help.

Maybe knocks cyclists over.

I stood up quickly again. The world remained quiet and still.

It took a minute or two to establish the range the wax had spilled over and work out where the accident must have happened. Levchenko would have been riding from the opposite direction, back from the warehouse, and come off his bicycle a little past where I’d pulled up. At which point, the bike would have skidded along, the wax spilling across the road. I imagined the sound of rice pouring into a metal pan.

There was no sign of the bicycle itself, but that could easily have been hidden in the undergrowth somewhere along the road. The killer could have dealt with that. But not the wax. There was nothing he could have done about that; there was too much of it. Maybe he’d figured it would disappear soon enough, as it was already beginning to.

Or maybe he hadn’t noticed it at all.

I walked back to the car, feeling nervous but excited. I kept an eye and ear on the woodland to either side of me. It appeared deserted.
Dead.
Even so, I reached under my jacket and unclipped my gun holster. In all my years of active duty, I’d never had to use my firearm. Not once. And I didn’t take it out now. Not yet.

Okay.

Now what?

My radio was on the passenger seat of the car. I picked it out, clipped it on to my belt, then locked the vehicle. The sensible thing to do—the right thing—was to call the scene in. SOCO wouldn’t be pleased to have me trampling all over it any more than I already had.

I listened again. Nothing. No human sounds. It was deceptively tranquil here.

Let’s just see first.

I walked up and down the road, looking for a likely entrance into the woodland. There was nothing obvious at first glance on either side, so I picked the beginning of the wax as my starting point. It must have been more or less where Levchenko had been struck, and it stood to reason that the killer wouldn’t have wanted to drag a semi-conscious man too far up the road. He’d have wanted to get him out of sight as quickly as possible.

The undergrowth crunched beneath my shoes as I stepped through, using my shoulders rather than hands to support me against the trees. A little way in, the grass was more pressed down, and I spotted blood on a fanned blade of leaves. My stomach dropped, but my heartbeat picked up, my skin tingling. I could picture it in my head. This was where the killer had left Levchenko before returning to the road for the bicycle.

There was still no sign of that. Presumably he’d dragged it deeper into the forest, along with his victim.

I edged sideways between the trees, avoiding the blood, then crept softly through the foliage, moving branches aside as quietly as possible.

A short distance ahead of me, the trees opened out into a clearing of sorts. The ground was uneven, as though mounds of something had been dumped in piles and had then grown over. Here and there, recognisable debris poked out of the mulch. The rusted corner of a washing machine, rubber hanging from the rim of its huge, half-submerged eye. A scatter of empty CD cases. The twisted handlebars of a child’s tricycle.

An old rubbish tip, I realised. Long forgotten now.

By most people.

I stood listening for a few seconds. Everything seemed quieter than back on the road. There was a hush to the place, as though the world was holding its breath. As though something invisible was standing nearby, keeping still and silent. Waiting.

Nobody here, though. Not right now …

And then, scanning the clearing, I saw it. There was a higher ridge of earth over to the left; it looked like the lip of a crater beyond. On the top, lying on its side, there was a bicycle. It was old and worn, but it clearly hadn’t been here as long as the other rubbish. The handlebars were wrenched to one side. It looked like its neck had been broken.