Lynda La Plante: Silent Victims

His short brown hair was a little more flecked with gray, especially noticeable at the neatly trimmed sideburns, yet the bastard was still as ruggedly handsome as ever. His eyebrows were sun bleached, standing out against his tanned, craggy features. Had she aged as attractively? She still got her share of looks on the street, workmen whistled at her from scaffolding, but inside she sometimes felt like the Wicked Witch of the West. That was the job. A woman in a man’s world. Required, expected , to handle the daily dish of crap and not flinch.

So she wasn’t surprised, as she’d noticed on entering, to be the only woman present. She’d been the only female Detective Chief Inspector in the Murder Squad, at her previous posting at Southampton Row. About to move to Vice on the northern perimeter of Soho, Jane Tennison had no doubt that she’d be the senior female officer there by several light-years.

“Mass murder is the quintessential American crime,” Hunter told his attentive audience. “Virtually unheard of a century ago, it has now become almost an epidemic. We are coming through a phase where males in the thirty-to-fifty age group are more brutal, more violent, than ever before. I have no doubt that these mass murders have a contagious element…”

They were listening silently not out of politeness or boredom, but because Jake Hunter spoke with the authority of hard-won experience. He had lived through it, been there on the front line. As a consultant to the New York Police Pathology and Forensic Research Unit, he was one of the world’s top-ranked experts in the field; not only had he studied in depth the theoretical and historical background, he had witnessed the terrible bloody fact firsthand. He had been at the forefront in pioneering the technique of psychological profiling, now used by police forces in the United States and Europe. His books had become standard texts for the training of homicide officers, and were also required reading for students and academics specializing in criminal psychology.

In recent years he’d turned to fiction, producing three best-selling novels, two of which were under option to Hollywood studios. His latest book, however-and the reason he was here, lecturing to colleges and promoting it to a wider public-was nonfiction, a distillation of his many years’ experience as a leading criminologist in the country that had patent rights on the concept of serial murder.

Another slide flashed up.

“George Henard executed”-Hunter repeated the word in his soft drawl-“ executed twenty-three people, aiming point-blank volleys to their heads before turning the…”

He stopped short, seeing Tennison, and paused, eyes blinking. Tennison gave him a warm, slightly mischievous smile.

“… before turning the nine-millimeter semiautomatic gun against his right temple for one final shot. What we cannot believe,” Hunter said, winding up to his chilling conclusion, “is that the world is full of people with the potential to do this.”

Someone had done something singularly unpleasant to little Connie. He was a slender, pale, waiflike creature with loose, curly red hair that in sunlight was imbued with a golden sheen. He was lying on a sagging sofa in the flat of a drag queen named Vernon-or Vera-Reynolds who at that precise moment, 9:35 P.M., was floating in a mauve spotlight dressed as Marlene Dietrich singing “Falling in Love Again” in a husky, tremulous baritone.

Connie tried to raise himself. His luminous dark brown eyes were muzzy. The cloud of auburn hair tumbled over his white forehead, but his beauty was marred by the dark stain of dried blood, like a slug’s trail on his smooth cheek, where it had oozed down from the sticky gash on his right temple.

Again he tried to get up, failed, fell back. There was a racing blue edge of flame on the carpet. It touched the sofa and climbed the wrinkled cover. The flames turned to orange, their bright reflection twinkling in Vera’s spangled and sequined gowns on the rack in the rear alcove.

The peacock feathers on another gown wafted in the updraft as the fire took hold. Half the room was ablaze, engulfing the sofa and the young boy so quickly that it sucked all the air from his lungs, leaving his scream stillborn in his raw throat.

The rack of gowns caught fire. Feathers and charred bits of chiffon wafted upward in a writhing cloud of smoke. The curtains went up. The paintwork on the frame of the closed window bubbled and peeled off. The entire living room and cluttered tiny kitchen of Vera Reynolds’s shabby little flat were now ablaze.

With the sound and fury of a small but powerful bomb, the window blasted out into the night. The explosion shattered the peace of the six redbrick blocks of the flats. Burning debris showered down into the paved courtyard three floors below, setting alight a line of washing.

Already, from somewhere across the city, came the wail of an ambulance siren.

He’d find that bastard! Jimmy Jackson swung the old midnight-blue Merc into a side street near the canal, the headlights making oily smears on the wet cobblestones. He gripped the wheel tightly, his scarred, pockmarked face thrust forward, his slitted eyes hot and mad, peering through the cracked windshield. His thick, fleshy lips were drawn back against his teeth. Where the fuck was the little turd! Sure bet that Fletcher was down here with the dregs, another homeless, snotty-nosed kid living in a cardboard box with winos, dossers, and sewer rats for neighbors.

Jackson spotted a movement. He snarled a grin and stamped on the big brake pedal. Next second the door was flung open and he was out and running, tall and mean in a studded leather jacket and torn jeans, knee-length biker boots ringing on the greasy pavement.

The terrified kid had taken off, heading for the iron bridge over the canal. But each of Jackson’s thumping strides was equal to three of Fletcher’s. He caught up with him by the edge of the canal that had the carcasses of bed frames, bikes, and supermarket carts sticking up from its putrid surface. Reaching out a clawed hand, Jackson grabbed the kid by the hair and yanked him to a skidding halt; the act of doing it, the thrill of power, gave him something close to sensual pleasure.

The kid was babbling with abject terror. Jackson stooped over from his lean yet muscular six foot height and smacked him in the teeth. He hit him again with both barrels, left fist, right fist, to forehead and jaw. The kid squirmed on the ground, one grimy hand with bitten nails forlornly held up to ward off more punishment.

Jackson raised his fist.

“Dunno… dunno where he is!” Fletcher screamed through his bloody mouth. “I dunno where he is-I swear!”

Jackson took a pace to one side and kicked him in the groin. The steel toe cap went in with a satisfying solid thunk. He pushed his spiky mop of hair back with both hands. The kid might not know after all, but then again he might. Jackson needed a bit more convincing. He reached down for him.

Fletcher screamed, “No, please… I dunno, I swear! Please don’t, don’t… PLEASE DON’T HURT ME!”

Small groups of people in nightclothes were standing on the balconies watching the fire crews at work. Some of the crowd had babies and toddlers in their arms. Hoses from three tenders snaked up the brick walls and over the concrete balconies to the third-floor flat. The fire was out, just a plume of dirty gray smoke eddying from the blackened, blasted-out window and wafting away on a northerly breeze.

A patrol car, siren off but with lights flashing, sped into the courtyard from the main road and stopped with a squeal of brakes, rocking on its suspension. Two uniformed officers, bulky, square framed, leapt out and ran toward the stairway. A slighter figure, round shouldered and rather hunched, wearing a shapeless raincoat that should have been given to Oxfam years ago, climbed out and shambled after them. He paused to look up to the window. The bright flare of arc lamps, set up by the fire crews, illuminated the balcony like a film set. Detective Sergeant Bill Otley sniffed and pinched his beaked nose. The call on the closed police band had reported at least one body. Not strictly his line, but Otley was in the habit of poking his nose in where it didn’t belong.