A Killing Mind

‘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 manipulatedthe 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.

Again he pulled at the metal sheet, once more filling the night with that terrible grating sound, until the gap was big enough to fit through. He took a couple of steps back to the floodlight and switched it off, unclipped his mini-Maglite from his belt and clicked it on.

Alarmed by the sounds coming from the scene and the sudden darkness, the constable Sean had spoken with earlier called out, his voice full of concern: ‘You all right there, sir?’

‘I’m fine,’ Sean shouted back. ‘I need to look at something without the light on.’ He headed to the garage entrance and stood peering into the darkness with only his small torch for illumination. He remembered there had been a camping lantern at the scene and figured it would have given off about the same amount of light. Now he was seeing the scene as both killer and victim had seen it.

He shone his torch at the pattern of blood on the ground – the cone of light tracing it from the small stain by the entrance to the larger dried pool deep inside the garage. He walked on, careful to avoid the area where the killing had taken place, while also watching every step he took, shining the light on each area of ground before placing his foot down, until he reached a patch from which he could see everything he wanted. Again he traced the blood smear from the small stain to the large pool and back again as the scene that had played out here became clearer and clearer in his mind.

‘You were hit on the back of the head by the entrance and then dragged inside where he sliced across your trachea and carotid artery. The cut across the throat was survivable, but the cut to the artery was not. The pressure in the artery would have caused death through blood loss, but … Shit,’ he cursed as he lost his way and his thoughts became confused and tangled. He took a few deep breaths to clear his mind, then started again.

‘You’re not thinking like a homeless teenager,’ he reprimanded himself. ‘What was he thinking? What was going through his mind?’ He thought back to the crime scene reports. There was evidence the victim had been preparing his crack pipe, though he never got to use it. ‘What would keep an addict from his drug?’ he asked softly. He took a few more deep breaths while the image of the victim began to form in his mind as if he was watching him on CCTV footage. He could see Dalton, eagerly but carefully preparing to get high and forget the pointlessness of his life.

‘You live your life in fear,’ Sean found himself quietly saying. ‘You don’t feel safe anywhere. You only escape the fear when you get high, which is what you were planning on doing, but something disturbed you. You heard something outside, didn’t you? Something anyone else could have ignored, but because you live in fear you had to be sure it wasn’t a threat – had to make sure no one was waiting for you to pass out stoned when you’d be at your most vulnerable. So you went to take a look outside.’ He walked back to the entrance and looked out into the night just as William Dalton had.

‘It was raining hard that night,’ he reminded himself. ‘It must have been difficult to see properly with the rain driving into your face in the dark. Did you call out – demand to know if someone was there? But no one called back, did they? Did you move further from your shelter to try and see better – playing right into his hands? He used your fear to lure you into his trap, didn’t he? And when you stretched too far into the darkness, he hit you hard – not hard enough to kill you, but enough to knock you down, to leave you confused and disorientated while he dragged you back inside. Did he close the entrance before he did the things he did to you? The report said it was open when the body was found, but he could have left it like that when he went.’ He thought back to the original crime scene report. ‘You had a camping lantern, but there was no mention of any light being on – so it was never turned on or he turned it off when he came in … or when he left. Was that why he wasn’t afraid of being seen – because it was dark in here?’ Another thought crossed his mind as he searched with his torch for the lantern, quickly finding it. He walked carefully towards it and crouched next to it, shining his torch close as he examined the on/off switch. It was set to on. Clearly the batteries had gone flat by the time the body was discovered. Sean nodded as he thought it through. ‘Batteries are expensive. You would have used the lamp sparingly, but you needed light to prepare your drugs and then there was the noise outside. Your fear meant you kept it on when you went to look, but when he dragged you inside he left it on. Because he wanted to see. He had to see everything. And when he left, he left you in light – because he wanted the world to see.’

He remembered the words of the crime scene report and the photographs. There was no evidence of the victim fighting back – no defensive wounds or arterial blood-spray patterns on the walls. ‘So you were too badly injured to fight back, or he was too strong. Strong enough to pin you to the floor while he cut through your throat and carotid artery. Did he hold you still while he watched the life drain from you? And when you were dead or near-dead, he took your teeth and nails – so he could relive killing you over and over again.’