Хилари Боннер - Deadly Dance

‘So,’ Vogel continued gently. ‘Why didn’t you make it with young Melanie Cooke?’

The other man’s eyes narrowed.

‘Because she was a vicious, knowing bitch,’ he said, still sounding Scottish. ‘She wasn’t the way I like them at all. She was no child.’

Vogel almost had to physically gulp back his repulsion. He had worked with this man, lived out his professional life alongside him. Vogel wanted to attack him, just as the creature he had once known as Willis had attacked him, only more effectively. He controlled himself with difficulty.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You can’t ever do it with a woman, can you? Not really. Not the way they want. Not the way you want.’

The other man’s eyelids flickered. He made no reply.

‘You’re all right as Leo though, aren’t you? You can fuck a man all right. Can’t you? That’s no problem for you is it, Leo?’

Vogel felt Nobby Clarke’s eyes upon him, burning into him. Had he really gone too far now? The man they had known as Willis took a huge intake of air, exerted his not inconsiderable strength, forced himself to his feet not withstanding the restraining hands of the two uniforms and stood, directly facing his four inquisitors.

‘I am Aeolus,’ he said, in that curious mix of English public school and classic Latin.

‘I know not of what you speak. I am Aeolus.’

Prolonged further questioning brought about little change and next to no information from the multi-personalitied suspect. Leo, Al, Saul and Willis all seemed to have effectively disappeared beneath the wings of Aeolus. The CPS remained unsure whether a prosecution could be successfully brought in view of such extensive mental health issues.

Meanwhile, the Avon and Somerset Constabulary successfully applied to the courts to be allowed to remand their suspect in police custody without charging him for four days — the maximum period allowed except in cases of terrorism — whilst they continued their investigations into the case.

The Greater Manchester Police were asked to check out Willis’s early life. They quickly found that the story he had told his ex-wife, although factually based, had strayed significantly from the truth.

Willis’s father may well have been a wife-beating philanderer, who had yet to be found, but his stepfather, Peter Maxwell, was not as Willis had portrayed him. And he was dead. He’d killed himself soon after his daughter had been discovered drowned in her bath. Manchester Police had located Maxwell’s brother, who told them that Peter Maxwell could not come to terms either with the death of his daughter or being suspected of involvement in it. The brother further maintained that Maxwell was a gentle man, who had never been violent or abusive to his wife, his stepson or his daughter.

But the brother said Maxwell always thought John Willis, whom he considered to be a highly disturbed child, may have attacked the little girl, even though he had only been twelve at the time. Maxwell’s brother claimed that the young John had resented the presence of his stepfather from the start and been seriously jealous of his stepsister, whom he believed to have stolen the affections of the mother he adored.

It also transpired that Willis’s mother was not dead. She’d suffered from lifelong mental health problems, which she certainly seemed to have passed on to her only son. She remained in a secure hospital having been sectioned under the mental health act when Willis was twenty and at engineering college. Eighteen months later, Willis had suddenly decided to change his career choice and become a policeman, selling the Manchester family home and relocating to join the Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

Chillingly, there was more. At about the time Willis left Manchester, a fifteen-year-old girl, who lived nearby, had disappeared and never been found. Following the new information indicating that Willis was a multiple murderer, the Manchester Police organised a search of the house which had been the Willis family home. They dug up a concrete patio, which neighbours told them the young Willis had built and found the decaying body of a young female. Nobody had much doubt that she would prove to be the missing girl. It seemed that Willis had something of a fondness for concrete.

To an increasingly shocked Vogel, the greatest puzzle was why on earth Willis had decided to become a police officer. He wondered if it could have been a sick joke, but Willis had kept up a highly plausible act for an extraordinary thirteen years. Vogel supposed it was possible that, in his day-to-day identity, Willis had genuinely wanted to become a normal, everyday policeman. That he’d been subconsciously fighting off his other, highly disturbing identities, along with any memories of his already violent past. Freda Heath considered that could have been so.

Vogel wondered if Willis had ever actually succeeded in fighting off his other identities but, given the accumulating murders the police were finding, the DI had his doubts. So the terrible possibility remained that Willis had been responsible for more unknown deaths, and more bodies might be buried at his Bristol home — which was now being searched on a scale verging on virtual demolition. But none had been found yet.

All they could deal with was what they knew. Hemmings and Vogel pushed the Crown Prosecution Service as hard as they could. Ultimately, it was agreed that the suspect, now calling himself Aeolus, would be charged with the murders of Melanie Cooke, Tim Southey and Manee Jainukul. The magistrates advised that further charges may be added at a later date.

The alternative would have been for Willis/Aeolus to be detained indefinitely, under the mental health act. Broadmoor and similar mental institutions served their purpose and were no picnic, but Vogel, along with Hemmings and Nobby Clarke, had been determined that the due process of law be pursued.

All three of them believed it vitally important, not only because of the nature of his crimes, but also because of Willis’s position as a detective sergeant in the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, that justice should be seen to be done.

Having been duped himself, Vogel accepted that the creature genuinely suffered from dissociative personality disorder. Vogel was no expert on the health of the human mind, however he believed absolutely in the concept of evil. He’d seen too much of it in his police career not to. Vogel hoped Willis would be tried in a court that also recognised the concept of evil. A court which would judge him to be an evil man, with a number of twisted perversions which he indulged by the adoption of disparate personalities. He hoped the jury would follow the example of the one in the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper. In 1981, Peter Sutcliffe was charged with the murder of thirteen prostitutes and the attempted murder of seven more. No doubt on the advice of clever, but, in Vogel’s opinion, unscrupulous counsel, Sutcliffe had pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, owing to a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. But, in court, the jury had rejected the plea.

On the fourth day after the arrest, Vogel formally charged the detained suspect under his birth name, John Henry Willis. Willis stood before the DI, vacant and glassy-eyed, as if not really aware of what was happening to him. He had a brief already muttering about him being unfit to stand trial. Vogel remained hopeful but not unduly optimistic.

However, Vogel was not hopeful about his own professional future. He’d already been told that he could face suspension, at least, on all manner of grounds. In a way, he didn’t mind, because he felt he must have been guilty of some sort of dereliction of duty in failing to recognise the kind of man Willis was. He did mind being used as a scapegoat, though, as he certainly hadn’t been the only one fooled by Willis, but there was little doubt that a scapegoat was what the Avon and Somerset Constabulary were desperately seeking.