Kill Me Again (15 page)

The new custody suite was better than most, but an interview room was an interview room. The smell of fear hadn’t yet permeated the walls, but if anybody was frightened right now, it was Maggie, not her client. Her job was to find a way to get this dreadful man off – to have him found innocent of crimes she was certain he had committed. Before facing him, though, she had asked Frank Denman to attend for the final time to assess whether Horton might be considered mentally disordered, bringing into question his fitness to plead.

‘How have you been, Maggie?’ Frank asked as he walked into the featureless room, removing his overcoat. For a man who she guessed was in his mid-fifties, Frank’s clothes had always struck her as belonging to somebody older. Maybe it was the shades of beige that he favoured and the chunky knitted sweaters, which seemed to accentuate, rather than disguise, his slender form.

‘Fine, thanks. Let’s make a start, shall we?’

‘Fine? Really? Why don’t I believe that?’ he asked, his eyebrows raised. ‘You don’t look fine. Do you want to talk about it?’

Maggie took a breath and let it out slowly. ‘Thanks for asking, but honestly I’m okay. Just stressed by bloody Alf Horton. I’m sorry I was snowed-in yesterday, but I’m here now so let’s get on with it, shall we?’

‘Okay. You know where I am if you need me. Any time.’ Frank pulled some papers out of his briefcase and stuck a pair of frameless glasses onto his slightly beakish nose. ‘What do you know about personality disorders?’

‘Not much. Why? Do you think that’s what Horton has?’

Frank shrugged. ‘At one time psychopathic disorder was classified as a mental disorder. But not all psychopaths are violent, and not all violent people are psychopaths. Whether we can still play that card or not, I don’t know. I suggest you look at the most up-to-date thinking on personality disorders. You might find it useful. I’ll email you some links.’

‘Thanks.’

Frank made his way into the adjoining room so that he could listen to the interview, and Maggie put on a headpiece so he could prompt her with any specific questions. Frank had opted to be absent from the interviews, convinced that Horton would respond better to a one-on-one situation, particularly if that one was female, but she was relieved that he was close by.

She looked up and saw the custody sergeant at the glass window in the door. He nodded to her – the signal that he had brought her client.

She shuddered at the thought of having to talk to this man. But the police were right outside the door, and Frank in the next room. Nothing could happen to her.

By the time her interview with Horton concluded, it was almost lunchtime. Maggie normally grabbed a sandwich at her desk, but today she was going to take her full hour and drive into town to visit the newly refurbished Central Library, the home of the more recent
Manchester Evening News
archive. She wasn’t holding out much hope that the scrap of newspaper would prove significant, but she would try anything at this point. She was desperate.

The impressive Central Library building made little impact on Maggie as she entered, although she was struck by how the atmosphere of libraries had changed. There was no sense of a hush and whispered voices; people were talking at their normal volume. The smell of fresh paint mingled with a whiff of burnt toast coming from the café on the right, and she felt her stomach rumble. She had barely eaten for the last two days, and had no idea what would happen if she tried. Her throat felt permanently closed with fear and stress.

She looked around at the banks of computers and microfilm machines, unsure where to go until a helpful volunteer pointed Maggie in the direction of a small, insignificant-looking desk at the back of the room. It was unmanned. Maggie looked at her watch and scanned the room right and left, unable to sit or stand still.

‘Come with me. We need to go to the microfilm section,’ the librarian said when she finally turned up. ‘Can you give me the year, dear?’

Maggie gave her the full date and the woman selected a drawer and pulled out a white cardboard box marked ‘November 10th-16th, 2003’. She took Maggie over to a microfilm machine and threaded up the reel.

‘There are fast and slow buttons in both directions – it’s really easy to use,’ she said with a smile.

Maggie knew she should respond positively, but said nothing. Her hands had gone damp. She didn’t know if she should look or not. Would it be worse to find something that related to Duncan, or to find nothing and discover her only lead – if that’s what it was – was worthless? She didn’t know.

Finally she leaned forward and stared at the screen. She pressed a button and heard the machine whirr into life. It was easy to find the date she wanted. One story dominated the front page.

It was a report of a hit-and-run accident in central Manchester. A boy, Stephen Latimer, had been on his way home from a club in town at two in the morning. He had stepped out into the road to avoid some people walking in the opposite direction. A car had hit him from behind, but the driver hadn’t stopped. He was now critically injured in hospital. There was a description of the car – a dark blue Renault – but no registration number. Stephen had been with two other people, Carl Boardman and Adya Kamala. The driver of the car was described as young – no more than early twenties – with dark hair.

Maggie leaned back in her chair and looked up hoping for inspiration.

The librarian walked across. ‘Are you okay?’

Maggie sat up straight. ‘Yes, I’m sorry. Is it possible to get a printout of this page?’

Five minutes later Maggie was handed the page, paid and put it into her bag. A glance at her watch told her she still had about fifteen minutes before she needed to get back to the office. She had noticed the signs advertising free Wi-Fi so pulled her laptop out of her bag and found a desk. She started to work her way through the names she had found in the newspaper article and found plenty on Stephen Latimer and his accident but nothing on either of his friends. It appeared that the driver of the car had never been traced – or at least if he had, it was never reported.

She was running out of time, and at the last minute thought about Frank Denman’s suggestion that she look up personality disorders. If she could find something that would get Alf Horton off her hands, that would be one less thing to worry about.

She loaded up the first of the reference pages he had suggested.

Maggie read on about how psychopaths were meticulous planners and how this distinguished them from sociopaths. She wasn’t sure how this related to Alf Horton. Had people around him thought of him as an average bloke? What did his mother, with whom apparently he had always lived, think of him? Was he, in fact, a psychopath at all, or was he a sociopath?

She didn’t have the energy to worry about Alf Horton’s mental state right now. She was far more concerned about what was going on in her husband’s mind.

24

12 years ago – May 31st

Serial killers were nowhere near as common as television and film would have you believe, and definitions varied. But most authorities agreed that two or more murders committed by one or more offenders constituted serial murder. Tom knew that if this was what was happening here, it was unlikely that the perpetrator would stop at two
.

Another myth was that serial killers are all dysfunctional loners. Most appear to be normal members of the community. But without any link between the girls, where were they supposed to look?

Two dead girls, and not a single tangible lead they could follow up with any degree of enthusiasm. Other than the fact that they were both students, there didn’t appear to be any connection between the two victims at all, although they were a similar age with the same body type and hair colour and in death they had looked practically identical. But in life they appeared very different – their makeup, their smiles, their clothes, their attitudes
.

It hadn’t taken long to identify the girl found at Mayfield station as Tamsin Grainger – a party girl, by all accounts. In photographs provided by family and friends she was clearly posing for each picture, head tilted slightly back showing a full set of teeth. Sonia’s pictures, on the other hand, showed a girl smiling shyly, as if caught unawares. Although their features were similar, in every other way they were chalk and cheese. They moved in different circles – or in Sonia’s case no circle at all to speak of – and they were studying different subjects with lectures at opposite ends of the campus
.

The truth was, Victor Elliott’s crack team of detectives couldn’t find one point of contact between the two girls, and it was getting Tom down. He knew he wasn’t the only one who was frustrated, but the dispirited air in the incident room was preventing him from thinking straight
.

He moved away from his desk, mentally shutting out the background noise of the room – the ringing phones, the quiet voices of detectives engaged in endless telephone interviews with anybody
and everybody who might know something – and looked out of the window at the darkening skies, brooding and threatening. It had been hot for May, and the pressure had been building to its current oppressive state for days. A storm was needed, but until it broke the muggy atmosphere settled around everybody like a heavy overcoat
.

Something had been nagging at the back of Tom’s mind but he couldn’t grasp the thought; it kept slipping away. He had to escape the stifling atmosphere and get some air
.

Almost without a conscious decision, Tom found himself back at the scene of Sonia’s murder, absorbing the tranquillity of Pomona Island. It felt like a place apart, removed from the real world. While the rest of Manchester carried on its day-to-day business with trains, cars and trams buzzing noisily around the city streets, here there was a sense of being cut off from reality. Manchester was reduced to no more than a background noise and by focusing on the sounds in close proximity – the lapping of the water, the birdsong and the hum of insects – it was possible to believe the city was miles away. Tom sought the same peace in his mind, thrusting his myriad confusing thoughts into the background to focus solely on what had happened here
.

He struggled to suppress an irrational sense of guilt about these murders: he had been desperate for an interesting case, anything to take his mind off his own worries. It hadn’t worked, though. He managed to focus on the case for most of the time, but his concern about his marriage kept sneaking up on him. Throughout the second half of last year Tom had been sure he was heading for a divorce. Kate had seemed to be permanently irritated by him and by his choice of career. Then suddenly she had changed – smiling more, singing around the house. A couple of months later she announced she was pregnant. Excited as he was about the baby, Tom still didn’t know what had changed, and he didn’t want to think about it too much. That was why he had silently prayed for a case that would occupy his mind – to make sure it had no time to wander into uncharted territory
.

Now, as he walked along the overgrown path that ran through the middle of Pomona Island and back towards the crime scene, it felt as if his desire for something more intriguing had been granted – and in spades. He had not one but two cases, and they were going to need all of his brainpower
.

It was over three weeks since Sonia had died and now the only thing marking the spot was a piece of crime scene tape that had caught on a woody shrub and was fluttering in the warm, humid breeze. He pictured Sonia Beecham as she would have looked before the tent was erected around her – the way she would have been found by the dog walker. She had been sitting up
.

That was another reason Tamsin’s body at Mayfield station had spooked him. Not only did she have similar colouring and hair to Sonia Beecham, she too had been sitting up, propped against the wall. Why was sitting up important? Or was it? Maybe it was convenient to leave the bodies like
that, but it seemed like something more. The similarity between them and the way in which they seemed to have been positioned suggested that they were on display. But to whom? And why?