James Carol - The Quiet Man

The ladder clattered and Anderton came through the hatch. She stopped with her body half in and half out. Her gaze started at one end of the attic and kept going until she got to the other end. She didn’t say a word. There was a wondrous expression on her face, like she’d just stepped into an Egyptian tomb that had lain undisturbed and undiscovered for the last five millennia. Winter knew where she was coming from. There wasn’t much you could say to something like this. He held out his hand to help her. She took it and climbed the last three steps.

Most attics were black holes for junk. Not this one. There were no boxes and no junk. Whatever had happened to the wife-slash-girlfriend’s stuff, it hadn’t ended up here. At one end of the attic a work bench stretched the width of the house. At the other end was an actor’s make-up table. There might not have been any pictures in the rest of the house, but there were plenty up here. The walls were covered with ten-by-eight prints. They’d been arranged in pairs and held in place with staples, one in each corner, the long sides of the staples running exactly parallel with the tops and bottoms of the photographs.

Winter moved in closer to get a better look. Eric Kirchner was on the left side of the pair that had caught his eye. His face was all screwed up and he was crying. Fat tears ran down both cheeks. It was an intensely personal moment that had been captured without his knowledge or permission. The picture had originated from a webcam. It had been cropped and manipulated and enhanced. Quality-wise it was nowhere near as good as the pictures on Gifford’s website, but it was still excellent work. Gifford’s talent lay in his ability to capture those unique moments. That was his trademark, and that’s what was evident here.

Winter had never seen the man in the right-hand photograph before, but it had to be Gifford. He slightly resembled the photo composite. At the same time he looked nothing like it. There were tears on Gifford’s cheeks too. His expression was almost identical to Kirchner’s. Winter moved to the next pair of photographs. Again, they’d been set out with Kirchner on the left and Gifford on the right. There were no tears but Kirchner’s face was still masked with misery. Gifford was trying to copy the expression.

David Hammond was in the next pair of pictures. He might have run to the other side of the country to escape the past, but the past wasn’t quite done with him. That was the beauty of the internet. You could reach out and touch anyone, anywhere in the world. There were no borders or limits to how far you could reach. It didn’t matter how far someone ran, or how hard, you could still find them. Hammond was desperately trying to hold back his grief. This was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. This was the face of someone who missed their wife every single day. Every single minute. This was the face of someone who would never forget.

And there was Gifford in the next photograph, doing his damnedest to copy the expression.

Anderton was moving along the wall, her gaze flitting from one pair of photographs to the next. She glanced over her shoulder and met his eye. ‘I’ve seen some things in my time, Winter, but this is something else. This is about as weird as anything I’ve come across.’

‘No argument there.’

Anderton moved across to the opposite wall and started examining the pictures that had been stapled to it. Winter carried on examining those on his side, moving slowly along the wall from left to right.

‘Take a look at this,’ she called over.

He walked across to where she was standing. This grouping of photographs was different. To start with, they hadn’t been separated into pairs. There were a hundred of them in total, arranged in a ten-by-ten formation. Gifford and the husbands weren’t in these. Instead, there was a woman that Winter had never seen before. These ones had also been taken without the woman’s knowledge or permission.

‘Gifford’s wife-slash-girlfriend?’ Anderton suggested.

‘That would be my guess.’ Winter pointed to a picture on the left side of the arrangement. ‘This one was taken downstairs in the living room. I recognise the sofa.’

‘What’s the chance that she’s still alive?’

Winter glanced at the pictures again. ‘I’d say it’s pretty unlikely.’

‘What do you make of these?’

Anderton was pointing to a three-by-three grid of photographs. Some of the pictures had been taken at weddings, while others had been taken during the house calls Gifford had made to create those everlasting memories. The picture of Cody belonged to this latter group. He was ginning his goofy grin, oblivious to the fact that the person behind the camera would end up murdering his mom. The pictures of David Hammond and Eric Kirchner had been taken at weddings, cropped from crowd shots to isolate their faces. Sobek was there as well. Gifford had cropped the head-and-shoulders shot from the website so that his face filled the entire frame. Winter didn’t know the people in the other five photos, but they were still familiar. Three of them could have been related to Sobek. The other two could have been Cody’s brothers.

‘This is how Gifford chooses his victims,’ Winter said. ‘He gets called in to do a job and if he sees someone who meets his criteria their picture goes up here. Sobek he saw at his office, Kirchner and Hammond were wedding guests, Cody ended up here because his mom wanted a nice photograph to remember him by. One of the pictures from this session was on the wall of their living room.’

‘Approaching him in the park was a huge risk. What if Cody had recognised him?’

‘Judging by what I’m seeing here, I’d say the picture was taken a couple of years ago. Do you remember everyone you met two years ago?’

‘Even so.’

‘We also need to take into account the fact that he’s got away with this three times already.’

‘You think that he’s getting overconfident?’

‘They always do.’

Anderton looked at the grid of pictures again. ‘The five faces we don’t recognise must be possible victims for the future. He’s spotted them while he’s been working, decided that they tick the boxes, and so they’ve ended up on this wall.’

Winter nodded. ‘Exactly. He’s working on a year-long cycle. For the moment the latest murder will be meeting his needs but somewhere along the line he’s going to start thinking about next August 5. When that happens he’s got options.’

‘How long do you think he stalks his victims for?’

‘You’re looking at months rather than weeks, maybe as many as six or seven. Gifford likes to move slowly and carefully. By the time he arrives on his victim’s doorstep with a bomb he’s going to know them as well as they know themselves. That’s the beauty of watching them on a webcam. He gets to see his victims with their masks off.’

Anderton was nodding to herself. ‘This is the intersection point that I’ve been looking for. It’s like you said, he wasn’t planning on stopping any time soon.’ She paused. ‘These people actually let Gifford into their lives. The really scary thing is that none of them had a clue what sort of monster he was.’

Winter turned his attention back to the photos of Gifford’s wife-slash-girlfriend. He honed in on one of the pictures on the bottom row. The woman’s eyes were red from crying and she was trying to pull herself together. Her face wasn’t distorted from an overload of emotion, so he was able to get a better idea of what she actually looked like. She was in her late twenties. Black shoulder-length hair, brown eyes. She had the sort of face that you wouldn’t look at twice. Back at high school, she would have been one of the last girls to get asked to the prom. That said, she would definitely have got a date.