Luke Delaney - A Killing Mind

‘You all right, Dave?’ he asked unpleasantly.

‘You want something to eat or drink?’ Donnelly replied, ignoring Zukov’s sarcasm.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘Still got work to do, you know. I’ll get something later – when I’m finished.’

‘Suit yourself.’

‘Was that DCI Ramsay?’ Zukov asked with suspicion.

‘Aye,’ Donnelly answered warily. ‘Didn’t know you knew him.’

‘Our paths have crossed a couple of times,’ Zukov shrugged. ‘What was he doing here?’

‘Same as most people in here,’ Donnelly tried to dismiss it. ‘Having a drink.’

‘Why not use a pub nearer to London Bridge?’ Zukov pushed.

‘Too busy, maybe. How the fuck should I know?’

‘Only asking, Sarge. Only asking.’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly moved on. ‘Never mind. How’s the door-to-door going?’

‘Maybe if you helped knock on a few doors yourself, you’d know,’ Zukov told him.

Donnelly stared at him in contemptuous silence for a while. ‘I’m here to supervise, remember? Not wear the soles of my shoes out. That’s your job.’

Zukov scowled. ‘You’ll be needing a lift back to the Yard then?’

‘Don’t worry yourself,’ Donnelly told him. ‘I’ll walk to London Bridge when we’re done and get the rattler home from there. Anyway, you were about to tell me how the door-to-door’s going.’

Zukov shrugged. ‘Plenty people have seen Dalton around over the last few weeks. Plenty people know of him, but no one really knew him. We’re not getting anything about the night he was killed, other than one of the night staff at Borough Underground says he recognized him from the photo. Says the victim came home most nights between ten and eleven and is pretty sure the night he was killed was no different.’

‘So it looks a sure thing he used the tube and not the bus,’ Donnelly told him. ‘Thank God for small mercies. CCTV from the stations and the route he used will be easy enough to track. If he’d been jumping on and off buses it would be a nightmare.’

‘The Underground staff have been told to preserve the CCTV footage for the last week,’ Zukov assured him.

‘Good,’ Donnelly replied, taking another sip of his beer. ‘Keep at it. Hopefully someone will come up with something useful.’ His phone chirping and vibrating on the table stole his attention. He read the text. It was from Sean. ‘You better get back to it,’ he advised Zukov. ‘The boss is on his way.’

‘Corrigan?’ Zukov asked.

‘Who else?’ Donnelly replied. ‘And that’s DI Corrigan to you.’

Zukov didn’t move – a troubled expression spreading across his face. Donnelly couldn’t tell whether it was real or fake.

‘Well. What you waiting for?’

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,’ Zukov explained, ‘about you and the guv’nor.’

‘Oh?’ Donnelly asked and immediately regretted leaving a gap for Zukov to walk through.

‘I’ve heard things, you know.’

‘Aye,’ Donnelly said, sensing trouble. ‘Like what exactly?’

‘Like you and he aren’t getting along too well right now,’ Zukov told him. ‘Since the Goldsboro shooting.’

Donnelly couldn’t help but tense at the sound of someone else saying that name, but he tried not to show it. ‘Bollocks,’ he replied. ‘You shouldn’t listen to any of that shit.’

‘Some people say,’ Zukov continued regardless, ‘the shooting didn’t have to happen – that the guv’nor manipulated the situation so you’d have no choice but to shoot Goldsboro. He created the circumstances and you pulled the trigger.’ Zukov let his words hang in the air.

‘And that’s what you think, is it?’ Donnelly asked after a few seconds.

‘I don’t think anything. I’m only telling you what I’ve heard.’ Zukov paused for a second. ‘I’m one of the senior DCs on this firm now,’ he reminded Donnelly. ‘If there’s a serious problem between the DI and his DS, then it could impact on the rest of us. I’m just trying to look out for the rest of the team. I’m sure you understand.’

Donnelly swallowed his seething resentment at Zukov’s veiled threats, but what hurt more was that it was the truth. He cursed Sean every hour for making him take a life and constantly thought of other ways they could have taken Goldsboro down without killing him. Again and again he kept coming back to the same conclusion: Sean had wanted it that way. Things had happened exactly as Corrigan wanted them to happen. Donnelly may have been the one pointing a gun at Goldsboro, but it felt like it was Sean who’d pulled the trigger.

Conscious that Zukov was waiting for an answer, he told him, ‘You worry about doing your own job,’ he warned him. ‘I’m still the senior DS and it’s my job to look after the team – not yours. You clear on that?’

‘Yes, Sarge,’ Zukov smiled unpleasantly. ‘Enjoy your supper,’ he said as he got to his feet and headed for the exit, leaving Donnelly alone with his drink and his thoughts.

Sean approached the two young uniformed constables who’d drawn the short straw and been left to guard the scene. He held up his warrant card for them. ‘DI Corrigan,’ he identified himself. ‘Special Investigations Unit. This is my crime scene.’

The tall, fit-looking young man who was holding the Crime Scene Log looked down to check the information in his book. ‘Will you be going into the scene, sir?’ he asked nervously.

‘Yeah,’ Sean answered. ‘I need to take a look at something.’

‘No problem,’ the constable told him, and made an entry in the log book.

Sean nimbly bent under the tape like a boxer entering the ring and immediately began to walk towards the garage that was now lit by a solitary mini-floodlight. Halfway there he suddenly stopped and turned through three hundred and sixty degrees.

‘Where did you come from?’ he quietly asked the trace of the killer that would forever remain at the scene like an ethereal fingerprint of violence that could never be scrubbed away. ‘Did you walk straight towards it? Did you walk across the same ground I’m walking across now – feeling unstoppable – feeling like a god? Or did you skirt around the outside of the park and come up behind him?’ He waited a few seconds for the answer to come, but he neither heard nor saw anything, so he continued his walk to the garage, trying to feel the killer’s presence, his mind, with every step, until he reached the brick and corrugated-iron shell that William Dalton had called home.

The forensic team had pulled the metal sheet back across the entrance as best they could, but the floodlight penetrated deep inside, illuminating the squalor Dalton had lived in and the violence that had claimed his life. Sean peered through the gap in the makeshift front door. ‘Is this what you did?’ he asked the ghost of Dalton’s killer. ‘Did you move quietly up to the garage and look through the gaps, watching him for a while before you somehow lured him into your trap? And how did you do that?’ He looked down at the floor inside and instantly found what he was looking for: the bloodstains from the crime scene photographs. In real life, they looked far less vivid. There was a small patch of blood at the entrance and then what appeared to be a smear mark for several feet that connected to a much larger bloodstained area where Dalton had his throat and carotid artery sliced wide open, causing him to bleed to death in seconds.

Sean remembered the report said the victim had almost certainly been hit over the back of the head. The photographs of Dalton’s matted, bloody hair around the wound flashed in his mind. He pulled at the sheet of metal that had served as a door, the noise loud and grating – screaming through the stillness of the bitter night. He froze for a few seconds as he looked around. Surely someone would have heard the metal being pulled away? ‘Or at least you must have thought it would have been heard,’ he whispered. ‘You must have thought it would attract unwanted attention, that someone might look out of a window and see you … yet you didn’t walk away. You did what you came here to do.’ He thought silently for a while, seeing the killer standing in the darkness – calm despite the frightful noise. No sense of panic or fear. Just a determination to kill. A shiver ran down his spine, partly because of the cold, but mostly because of the dawning realization of the type of killer he was hunting. This one was as calm and careful as he was vicious. Those were always the most difficult to catch.