Steven Dunne - The Reaper

Rowlands raised a bloodshot eye to Brook and nodded.

Brook missed the attempt at closure. ‘I thought it would hit me later. I’d have nightmares. But it hasn’t. And I know it won’t.’

‘No,’ agreed Rowlands. He took another pull on the flask and thought for a second. ‘How old are you, Brooky?’

‘Twenty-seven. Why?’

Rowlands nodded, a bemused look spreading across his countenance. ‘Christ. I was twenty-seven,’ he glanced up at Brook as though to reassure him of the relevance of this information, ‘when I stopped.’

‘Stopped what?’

‘Giving a shit.’

Wendy Jones closed the folder and turned to Brook. ‘I see your point. Bobby Wallis and Sammy Elphick could have been brothers.’

Brook looked straight ahead, focusing on the motorway. ‘They were both small-time villains, though there was never any evidence of child abuse in the Elphick case. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

Jones pondered for a moment. ‘You know, if it weren’t for the children being killed as well, I could almost imagine it was a policeman or somebody striking back…’

‘A vigilante?’

‘Right. I mean, who’s going to miss Bobby Wallis? Or Sammy Elphick?’

‘We went down the same road. If it weren’t for the children…’

Time gathered around them and Brook waited. He could sense Jones thinking hard, forming her ideas, identifying questions. He was pleased she didn’t feel the need to fill silence.

‘Why the name?’

‘What?’

‘The name. Why was he ever called The Reaper?’

‘That was my fault. I’d seen a lot of violent crime before Harlesden. Bad things. Killings, gangland executions, domestics, overdoses. You’ve seen corpses?’

‘Not many. My mother. In the hospital.’

‘Sorry.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘Any violent deaths?’

‘I was first to that tramp a couple of years back. In Markeaton Park.’

‘Beaten to death?’ Brook remembered. Jones nodded. ‘What did you notice?’

‘Sir?’

‘When you stared at him longer than was necessary, hoping that no-one would think you were being ghoulish, what did you notice?’

Jones pondered for a moment. ‘Everything.’

‘In particular?’

‘The face, his face,’ she corrected herself, ‘it was all out of shape, his mouth was open but not like people open their mouths. It was like…a caricature of what the human face should look like.’

‘Anything else?’

‘The body. Every muscle, every joint seemed to be in the wrong position. It put me in mind of that game Twister people used to play at parties years ago.’

‘At Christmas,’ Brook smiled and looked away.

‘It was like a grotesque game of that, only worse. Think of the most difficult position to hold the human body and then freeze it. That’s what I noticed.’

‘Violent death does that-throws up all sorts of weird and wonderful positions. That’s what spawned The Reaper. When I looked at the Elphick family that first night, the violence was missing. The boy was hanging from the ceiling but he didn’t seem unduly troubled. The parents were tied and killed quickly. They’d suffered more from seeing their son die, they’d cried, same as Wallis and his wife. But in the end they were just sitting there, dead, their throats cut. They looked quite normal-apart from a look of surprise.

‘And talking about it later with Charlie Rowlands, I said it seemed less like a murder, and more like the Grim Reaper had just breezed in and removed their lives. No fuss, no bother, no struggle. Three less people in the world. Who’s next?’

‘And Brixton?’

Brook hesitated before saying, ‘Same.’ There was nothing to gain from elaborating further.

Jones nodded. ‘Brixton. December 1991. Dark evenings again. That’s why he does it round the turn of the year, isn’t it?’

‘And in bad weather, to discourage witnesses.’

‘Floyd Wrigley, West Indian origin,’ she read from the file, ‘his common law wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Tamara. Aged eleven.’ Her verbal tremor was not lost on Brook. She leafed through the file for the pictures and stumbled through them. ‘Did you see the scene?’

‘No. Yes. I mean, not really. It wasn’t my case but they asked me in on a consult. It was the same as Harlesden. Parents tied up, throats cut, watching their daughter die-all to the accompaniment of Mozart’s Requiem. This time the girl’s throat was cut, unlike the Elphick boy. And she’d been drugged like young Kylie, I assume to limit her suffering.’ Brook turned towards Jones to ensure she saw his approval. ‘She was innocent you see-as you spotted the other day.’ Her colour darkened.

‘It says here that the man, Floyd Wrigley, had a deeper cut than the woman and the girl. The blade hit a bone and the cut didn’t run from ear to ear.’ She turned to Brook. ‘That’s different.’

‘Maybe.’ Brook was sombre now. Jones caught his mood and stopped herself, thinking she might be digging up unhappy memories. He, in turn, recognised the change in her and tried to lighten up. ‘He worked out in a gym. Had strong neck muscles which were difficult to cut.’

‘Wouldn’t he have been hard to overpower then?’

‘He was also a junkie. If you can believe the two go together. Heroin. He was high as a kite. They both were.’

‘Any hint that race was significant?’

‘I don’t think so. Just the criminal tendencies. Wrigley was a thief and a violent man. All round scumbag. Had a couple of ABHs on his CV, and a Wounding, some guy he knifed during an argument about paying for sex with Tamara. The things people do for their fix.’

‘He pimped his eleven-year-old daughter?’ Jones looked into the distance, her voice little more than a croak. Brook was annoyed with himself. He’d been carried away. Such embellishments were out of character. Unnecessary. It rarely happened with him, the adrenaline rush of the showman. Perhaps, unconsciously, he’d been trying to degrade her a little-all her sex. A little payback for, well, where to start?

He looked across to see the mark his words had left. Too often he forgot that even fellow officers hadn’t waded as deeply into the sewer as he had. They could all identify and acknowledge the stench of society’s entrails, but their clothes didn’t need a boil wash at the end of each day.

His inability to gauge the emotional threshold of others was a terrible weakness, and he was ashamed. Wendy Jones was still an innocent abroad, a provincial girl with an endearing ignorance of the world as dung heap. He tried to soften the blow.

‘Actually that was just a whisper. Probably not true, otherwise they’d have had him on toast, wouldn’t they?’

‘How did The Reaper gain entry?’ asked Jones.

‘Brixton? Same as Harlesden and the other night-bearing gifts. A VCR in Harlesden, though you won’t find that in the file, and an expensive new compact disc player for Mr Wrigley and family. Once inside he had the element of surprise. Not that he needed it with Wrigley and his girlfriend doped up to the eyeballs.’

‘He still tied them up?’

‘Sure. Adrenaline at the point of death can be a powerful ally.’

‘But he didn’t tie up Bobby Wallis and his wife.’

‘No. He’s had a long time to polish his act. He’d found a way to disable them without force.’

‘The last one was 1993 in Leeds. Although I couldn’t see any…’

‘Don’t bother. There’s nothing in there on Leeds. I could only photocopy Met documents. Besides, I’ve never been convinced about Leeds. It was a copycat and a pretty ropey one at that.’

‘Did the Leeds Force speak to you?’