Luke Delaney: Redemption of the Dead

‘If it was him,’ Sean said without thinking.

‘Sorry. I don’t follow.’

Sean cleared his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Whatever,’ the caretaker said with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘Take as long as you want. Just remember to drop the keys back when you’re done, although I don’t know what you expect to find — police and council cleared everything out months ago — to keep the ghouls and press away they told me. Anyway, I’ll leave you in peace — place gives me the bloody creeps.’

Sean watched him shuffling away, huffing and puffing under his own weight, before he turned back to the flat, the darkness inside almost warning him not to go any further — warning him he would be consumed with the horror that still permeated the very walls of the interior. He’d covered a couple of sudden deaths as a probationary constable and one had even been a murder — a semi-vagrant kicked to death by his drinking friends. But this felt different — completely different, as if a pure evil had left its mark there. He felt the same presence he’d felt back in the park in Hither Green. The same malevolent force. He took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The caretaker had been right — the inside was nothing more than a shell now. Everything that had made it a home was long gone. All that remained were the fixtures and fittings that were too big to remove: the built-in cupboards, kitchen cabinets, bath, sinks and toilet. Everything else was gone — even the carpets. But Sean could see them nonetheless, and he could see the blood — see the blood on the floor, the sofa, the table and surrounding chairs, the crime-scene photographs turning his mind into a projector for the images from the past.

He walked along the narrow hallway, within a few steps reaching the doorways on both his right and left, causing him to pause. He pulled a copy of the confidential case file from an innocuous looking envelope and thumbed through it to the photographs that showed the flat how it was when the murder had first been discovered. He checked his orientation and deduced that the room on his left would have been the son’s room and the one on the right the kitchen. He checked the case file report — the killer had come in through a window Rebecca had left open in the kitchen. Why had she done that? Was she trying to disperse the heat that had built up during the hot summer day, or was she trying to dispel the odours of cooking? It was a normal thing to do — something hundreds of thousands of others would have done on the very same day. ‘Only it cost her life.’ He suddenly found himself speaking out loud. He checked the file and the photographs again. She’d been attacked in the hallway initially, probably as she came across him as he walked from the kitchen. Blood spray patterns indicated he’d stabbed her in the stomach area and then dragged her to the lounge where he’d cut her throat with a large, extremely sharp-bladed instrument. It would have taken her only seconds to bleed to death. Why didn’t you kill her straight away? The shock of being stabbed in the stomach would stop her from crying out, but why not kill her as soon as she found you? What were you waiting for? Again he checked the file. After she’d bled to death he sexually assaulted the body in almost every way imaginable and then extensively mutilated her, paying particular attention to her breasts and sexual organs. You hate women, don’t you? You hate them so much it drove you to do this.

Sean walked deeper into the flat, past the bathroom and the bedroom that the victim used until he reached the lounge — the place where the final scene from hell unfolded. He stood in the middle of the room and used the photographs to put everything back into place in his mind, just as it had been when the victim was discovered — before a single thing had been moved. But the pictures were so vivid and terrible he found it hard to look at them for more than a few seconds at a time. He wondered what it must have been like for the first police at the scene — cops who’d been called by the childminder when the mother wouldn’t open the door, expecting to find her asleep or drunk or at the local shop, but to discover this. Surely they’d be haunted by it for the rest of their lives, even if they never admitted it. And what must have it been like for the forensic team, who would have had to work in the scene for hours before the body was removed? How could they have concentrated totally — not been distracted? Not missed something?

Again he flicked through the photographs until he found the one he was looking for — a picture of a doll that had been sitting on the chair opposite the sofa on which the victim had been mutilated and violated — as if it had been watching the killer — watching the killer perform. Sean looked closer, using the size of the chair for scale, speaking out loud so he could hear his own thoughts — hear if they made any sense. ‘You put the doll there. You put the doll there so it could watch you rage all over her. And you chose the largest doll you could find because it felt more lifelike — as if you were being watched — watched by a child — by her child. You dragged her in here and you cut her throat, but then you left her and went to find the boy, didn’t you? But he wasn’t here, and that made your rage burn all the brighter, until you saw the doll — large and ornate — something an adult might own, but not a young boy, so you knew it was probably the mother’s and not the child’s. And that made it even more real for you. So you brought the doll back in here and placed it where it could see everything. Only, did you forget yourself, for a few moments when you thought you were going to seek out the child, did you forget you’d taken you gloves off? Because you did take them off, once you were inside, didn’t you? You couldn’t bear to have a barrier between you and the victim. You needed to feel her skin and you knew you couldn’t leave your prints on skin, so you took your gloves off. But while your gloves were off, did you touch the doll? Did you touch its plastic face? Did you leave us your prints? Did we miss them — in all the hell you left behind — did we miss them? We did, didn’t we? Fuck,’ he suddenly punctuated his thoughts as he closed the file and slipped it back into the unmarked envelope.

He walked to an unboarded window, hoping the view of the heath might chase away the images that threatened to lock themselves away in his mind forever. But as he looked out over the common land and dense wood he could think of one thing and one thing only. This is our man. It has to be. Rebecca Fordham’s killer is the Parkside Rapist, and he’s going to kill again. As he stared at the heath, all he could see was the dark figure of a faceless man moving quietly and quickly through the trees. Waiting.

* * *

‘This is bollocks,’ Sean swore as he sat on the opposite side of the desk to Charlie Bannan. ‘It’s wrong, just like McCaig was the wrong man and they know it.’

‘It’s politics, son,’ Bannan tried to explain ‘and they don’t know they’ve got the wrong man. They may suspect it, but they don’t know it. As far as they’re concerned the criminologist told them McCaig’s the right man and the top-brass told them to listen to her.’

‘Then they should have told her to go fuck herself,’ Sean suggested.

‘Yes they should,’ Bannan agreed with a chuckle, ‘but they didn’t and they won’t. And there’s something for you to learn and never forget — don’t ever, ever, let outsiders tell you your business. We’re the police — we decide who is and who isn’t guilty — not some historian looking to make a name for herself, not some politician trying to make himself feel important. We put the guilty before the courts and if they fuck it up that’s not down to us and we move on. The Fordham Investigation team fucked up — they let an outsider tell them their business and somewhere down the line it’s going to cost them — it’s going to cost them big-time.’