Behind Dead Eyes
Authors: Howard Linskey
Linskey
BEHIND DEAD EYES
Howard Linskey has worked as a barman, journalist, salesman and catering manager for a celebrity chef. Originally from Ferryhill in County Durham, Howard now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife and daughter.
No Name Lane
THE DAVID BLAKE SERIES
The Drop
The Damage
The Dead
For Erin & Alison
NUMBER THREE
Perhaps you think I'm a monster. Is that it?
Maybe that's why you've not been in touch. Have you read terrible things about me, Tom? Heard stories that disturbed you? None of them are true.
I've done bad things of course, who hasn't? None of us are saints. Let's not bother to pretend we are. I know the one thing you truly understand is human frailty, Tom. I've had to account for my actions and I've paid a very heavy penalty for my misdeeds but I can assure you I never killed anyone.
Did you believe the poison that drips from the pens of those so-called reporters? They're not interested in the truth, none of them. They spend their lives wading through other people's trash looking for dirt, turning over rocks to see what crawls out. And they have the nerve to call me names.
The Lady-killer.
What chance did they give me?
Please see me. I'd visit you but clearly they won't allow that. If we were to meet face to face, I'm certain I could convince you I am not the man they say I am. If you can look me in the eye and actually believe I am capable of such savagery, then I promise I won't blame you for leaving me here.
I think you are a truth-seeker, Tom, but you don't seem to be at all interested in my truth. That's disappointing.
You are my last and only chance, Tom Carney. Please DO NOT continue to ignore me.
Yours, in hope and expectation.
Richard Bell
Tom
Carney was having a very bad day. Maybe it was the new kitchen cupboard doors and the way they refused to hang straight or the boiler going on the blink again or perhaps it was the letter from a convicted murderer.
No, it was definitely the boiler.
He hadn't owned the house long but it seemed virtually every part of the offending boiler had failed and been replaced at great cost, only for another of its components to buckle under the strain and cease to function. He should have got a new boiler when he bought the creaking old pile but funds were short then and virtually non-existent today, so he'd opted for the false economy of replacing it bit by bit instead of wholesale. How he regretted that now, as he stood tapping the pipes with a wrench in an attempt to knock the ancient thing back into life. Tom exhaled, swore and surveyed the stone-cold water tank ruefully. It came to something when a personal letter from a man who had beaten someone to death with a hammer was the least of his concerns.
He went back downstairs and tried to phone the plumber again but the guy didn't pick up. If events ran their usual course, Tom would have to leave several messages before the plumber eventually got back to him. He might then grudgingly offer to âfit him in' towards the end of his working week. If Tom was really lucky, the bloke might even turn up on the actual day but he knew this was far from guaranteed.
Tom recorded a message then picked up the letter from the hall table. The words âFAO TOM CARNEY' had been scrawled on the envelope in large block capitals with a marker pen, above an address handwritten in biro. It was disconcerting to realise one of the relatively few people who knew where Tom lived these days was a murderer.
For the attention of Tom Carney?
Why not some other reporter? One who was actually still reporting, and not so disillusioned he'd turned his back on the whole bloody profession, to plough what was left of his money into renovating a crumbling money pit? This was the third letter he'd received from Richard Bell. Tom had read then studiously ignored the previous two, hoping one of the north-east's most notorious killers would eventually tire of contacting him but, just like his victim, Tom had clearly underestimated the killer's resolve.
Bell was a determined man, but was he a psychopath? He read the letter again, surveying the handwriting for evidence of derangement but this wasn't some rambling, half-crazed diatribe, scrawled in crayon and inspired by demonic voices. It was angry, and there was an undeniable level of frustration at Tom's failure to engage with him, but that was all. Having singled Tom out, Bell presumably felt the hurt of rejection. The handwriting was neat enough and it flowed evenly across the page. Tom couldn't help wondering if this really was the same hand that brought a hammer crashing down repeatedly onto a defenceless woman's skull until she lay dead in the front seat of her own car? A jury thought so and the judge had told Bell he was a monster. Tom remembered that much about a case that dominated the front pages for days a couple of years back. Was Richard Bell insane, or was he really an innocent man; the latest in a long line of
miscarriages of justice in a British legal system discredited by one scandal after another?
Tom took the letter into his living room, if he could still accurately call it that with the carpet ripped up and tools scattered everywhere. He sat in the armchair and read it once more. Richard Bell's message in all three of his letters was consistent and clear. He wasn't mad and he wasn't bad. He hadn't killed his lover. Someone else had done that and he was still out there.
Detective
Sergeant Ian Bradshaw stared at the woman's face and wondered what she had looked like. Was she pretty once? He couldn't tell from this photograph. No one could. Someone had done one hell of a job on her.
All of the woman's teeth had been pulled out with pliers and the flesh on her face burnt with a strong acid; sulphuric most likely, of an amount sufficient to scorch away the lips, nose, eyelids and the flesh from her cheeks, leaving discoloured skin that looked like it was part of a melted waxworks dummy. In a final brutal act, the tops of her fingers had been snipped off with pliers to prevent the collection of prints.
Thankfully, these horrific injuries had all been inflicted post mortem. According to the report, the cause of death had been strangulation with a ligature of some kind. The victim would have had no knowledge of the gruesome things done to her to erase her identity. This might be some small comfort to her family but, since they would probably never be able to positively ID the body, tracing them seemed an unlikely prospect. In the absence of teeth, they'd had to resort to scientific analysis of the bones in order to put an approximate age to the corpse, which was estimated at somewhere between fifteen and nineteen years of age, according to the experts. This was all to do with the amount of cartilage present in the joints of the limbs, which transforms into bone as a body develops. The corpse was not yet
fully matured, so they were attempting to identify a relatively young woman.
The body had been found three months ago, following a tip-off about illegal goings on at a scrapyard with suspected links to some of the region's shadier âbusinessmen'. The officers who attended had hoped to find drugs or money, but figured they would more than likely have to settle for stolen goods or perhaps the discovery of a hot car awaiting the crushing machine. They didn't expect to find a body. They certainly weren't ready for one missing its face.
Predictably, the guy running the scrapyard swore he knew nothing about the body found at the back of his premises. The place was a vast out-of-town site with cars piled up all round it, so a heap of dead bodies could have been hidden in one of its messier corners without anyone spotting them. It didn't stop them giving the guy a thorough going over.
He had no idea why anyone would dump a body at his scrapyard.
He had not been asked to dispose of it.
He had no clue as to its identity, nor did he ever hang out with known criminals.
Nobody believed him of course. Nathan Connor was a shifty and feckless loser with a minor-league criminal past, presumably granted custody of the yard for those very reasons. He would do as he was told without asking questions, but was he actually a killer? It seemed unlikely and, aside from the fact that he oversaw the yard where the body was dumped, there was nothing to link him to the murder.
Efforts to trace his employer proved frustrating. They were able to interview one other man who was described as the owner but under questioning from the police he couldn't remember too much about the place. It wasn't long before
he was dismissed as a front man, whose name was on the door and ownership papers, with no actual involvement in the day-to-day running of the enterprise, which was ideal for laundering cash and ridding its real owners of awkward items like a body. The detectives gave up trying to get anything more out of either man and they were released on police bail. The threat of a lengthy prison sentence was not as frightening a prospect as grassing up whoever really owned that scrapyard.
Usually senior detectives in Durham Constabulary vied with one another for murder cases. They were rare in these parts and a successful conviction would be a feather in the cap that could ultimately lead to promotion. However, an unidentifiable victim meant the usual enthusiasm for a murder case was absent.
The Detective Superintendent placed responsibility for the case with DI Kate Tennant, a newly promoted outside-transfer who was the only female detective on the force with a rank higher than Detective Constable. She was also bright enough to realise she had been stitched up like a kipper. Nothing in those intervening months had altered Tennant's view, even if she steadfastly maintained an outward conviction that her team, which included DS Bradshaw, would ultimately solve a case that saw them plodding through a seemingly endless number of box-ticking enquiries for more than three months, with nothing in the way of concrete leads.
How could they hope to solve this murder, Bradshaw wondered for the umpteenth time, if there were no witnesses, nothing from the usual public appeals, zero intelligence from sources in the criminal world and they could not even identify the victim?
âWhat are you doing?' he hadn't noticed DC Malone's approach until she was standing over his shoulder. He could tell she was perturbed to find him staring at images of the
burned girl,
as she had become known to them.
âLooking at her photos.' He deliberately included the word
her.
â
Why
are you looking at them?' Bradshaw knew DC Malone thought he was just being ghoulish.
âTo remind myself,' he said eventually as he stared at the blackened skin on the disfigured face, âthat she used to be a person.'