Luke Delaney - A Killing Mind

‘You don’t care if he puts himself in danger, do you?’ she accused him. ‘So long as he solves the high-profile cases quickly. Right?’

Addis ignored her question. ‘Do you accept my offer?’ he asked briskly.

Anna sighed, but knew she had no choice. ‘If it helps catch the killer, how could I say no?’

‘Good,’ Addis smiled, satisfied. ‘Then I look forward to your reports. Can I get you something to eat? To drink?’

‘No,’ she told him, getting to her feet clutching the file he’d given her – feeling like she needed to shower and change her clothes. ‘I have to be somewhere.’

‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘Please. Don’t let me keep you.’

‘Goodbye, Robert,’ she replied, and headed for the entrance and the fresh, cold air she desperately needed beyond.

Addis watched her all the way. He hadn’t missed the difference in her attitude. She’d been more questioning than during their previous meetings. He would have to do what he always did the second he had the slightest doubt about anyone’s loyalty. He would assume she could no longer be trusted. Perhaps she’d been too close to Corrigan and his team for too long. She was supposed to be helping the gamekeeper, but maybe the poacher now had her allegiance. He decided the best way to be sure was to play along with her – for the time being.

Geoff Jackson was working at his desk in the huge open-plan office of The World newspaper when his editor appeared over his shoulder.

‘Sue,’ he acknowledged her and swivelled in his chair to face her.

‘Well,’ Dempsey asked him, sitting on the edge of his desk. She was tall for a woman – her slimness making her appear taller, with short blond hair that augmented her attractive face. At fifty-one she’d lost little of her appeal to men and knew it. ‘Did you get the interview?’

‘Yeah, I met him.’

‘And?’ she pressed.

‘And,’ he mimicked her, ‘it was very interesting.’

‘I bet it was,’ she said. ‘But what did Gibran tell you? Did you get him to talk about the murders the police think he committed?’

‘No,’ Jackson deflated her. ‘Nothing that specific. He’s too smart to talk about something he could be charged and tried for. We kept it more general – what goes through the mind of a killer, that sort of stuff. It’s good, though – even if I say so myself. Good enough to be our lead story. I’ll have it polished and ready to go for tomorrow’s edition. I’ll email it to you when it’s done.’

‘Fine,’ she told him, springing off his desk, ‘but it won’t be front page. Not without him confessing to something.’

‘I agree,’ Jackson replied, surprising her somewhat. He rarely agreed to anything without a fight. ‘I was thinking more centre-page spread – with a leader to it on the front. Lots of old photos of Gibran, his victims, DI Corrigan – that sort of thing, in amongst the interview. As I do more interviews we can run more centre-page spreads – build up a serialization.’

‘Do I sense a book in the making?’ Dempsey asked.

‘Maybe,’ he evaded, knowing she would be aware that was his plan, but that she wouldn’t care.

‘Fine,’ she smiled and was about to walk away when she remembered something. ‘By the way – have you heard about the Mint Street murder?’

Jackson leaned back in his chair looking slightly confused. ‘I wasn’t even a journalist back then,’ he answered, ‘but I’m aware of the case. Most good crime reporters are. Some crazed teenager killed a young courting couple with a knife. Can’t recall his name …’

‘Jesus, Geoff,’ Dempsey told him. ‘Not the murder from the eighties. Another one. A new one.’

‘What?’ he asked, surprised that a murder could have slipped past him. The Gibran interviews had distracted him from current affairs.

‘Some homeless guy,’ Dempsey explained, immediately deflating his interest. Who cared about a homeless man meeting his end? ‘Probably connected to the murder of a female prostitute about eleven days ago,’ she continued, reigniting his interest.

‘Linked?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘Linked how?’

‘Both had their throats cut,’ Dempsey answered, but that wasn’t enough for Jackson.

‘And?’ he pressed.

‘And,’ she told him with a trace of relish in her voice, ‘they both had a number of teeth pulled out or cut out or something.’

Jackson felt the surge of excitement he always felt when he could smell a big crime story brewing and this one sounded like it had real potential. He hadn’t had a killer who’d captured the public’s imagination since he covered the story of the Jackdaw – a name that he, unbeknown to the rest of the world, had bestowed on the killer. ‘Anybody covering it?’ he asked urgently.

‘Bill Curtis,’ she replied. ‘One of your own.’

‘Curtis,’ he muttered under his breath. He wasn’t about to let a junior reporter like Curtis have what could be the crime scoop of the year.

‘I would have put you straight on it,’ Dempsey explained, ‘but you were off meeting Gibran. Maybe you could get Curtis to give his expert opinion on this new killer,’ she teased him before walking off.

‘Very funny,’ he answered with a grimace, grabbing his phone and checking his messages and missed calls. He’d been so wrapped up in the Gibran interview it had been hours since he’d looked at his mobile. There’d been several missed calls, including one from Dempsey and one from Curtis. ‘Shit,’ he cursed. He tapped the screen to call Curtis back, shaking his head at Dempsey’s attempt at being funny – Maybe you could get Curtis to give his expert opinion, but even as he repeated her words to himself in his head a smile began to spread across his face. ‘Sue, my friend,’ he whispered under his breath, ‘you’re a genius and you don’t know it.’ He heard the scuffling sounds of the phone being answered.

‘Bill Curtis speaking,’ the reporter answered curtly.

‘Talk to me, Bill,’ Jackson demanded. ‘I want to know everything on these murders. Everything.’

Sean sat alone in his office, poring over the crime scene photographs, studying every square centimetre of each one then swapping it for a corresponding report, searching both for something that might have been overlooked. Something he might have missed. But to his frustration he could find nothing he hadn’t already seen. He was about to go through the whole procedure again when Sally knocked on his door, entered without being asked, and slumped exhausted into the chair on the opposite side of the desk. He looked her up and down. ‘You look tired.’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Nothing a dose of caffeine won’t fix.’

‘You find the family?’ he asked.

‘Was easy enough,’ she told him. ‘Dalton had a long and illustrious criminal record, going back to his early childhood. His mum and dad, Jane and Peter, still live in the family home in Lewisham. Neither had seen William in a few months, but they were pretty devastated when they got the news.’

‘They’ve lost a child,’ Sean reminded her. ‘Doesn’t matter to the parents what that child may have become. He’ll always be their boy.’

‘I know,’ Sally agreed. ‘Anyway, they tried repeatedly to help him turn it around, but ultimately he chose drugs over them. If we need them to formally identify the body, they will.’

‘We do,’ he confirmed.

‘Apparently, he has an older brother: Sam,’ she continued. ‘He tracked William down to the West End, found him on the streets begging. When he tried to get William to go with him, stay at his place for a while and get cleaned up, the lad wasn’t having it.’

‘Some people don’t want to get clean,’ Sean reminded her. ‘They prefer their own version of reality.’