The Murder Code (23 page)

Professor Joyce nodded her head once. And because she understood what we were talking about here—that these weren’t just strings of code, but people who had been murdered—her face betrayed open emotion for the first time. She looked grim at the underlying reality of what she was telling us.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s certainly possible.’

‘I
KNEW I RECOGNISED
something
about it,’ DS Renton said. ‘I’m still not sure, and it might be nothing. But this is what I was thinking of.’

We were sitting in LG15—the dark room—again. This time, rather than analysing our video clip, Renton was logging into a website. The screen was pitch black aside from grey bits of text and a header of devil’s hands clutching a row of bloody skulls.

‘What is this?’ I said.

‘It’s a shock site. A forum filled with extreme images. Footage of death and torture. Suicide, rape, murder …’

‘There are forums for that?’

The strip light in the ceiling was humming ominously.

Renton shrugged as he typed in a username and password.

‘That kind of material is all over the internet,’ he said, ‘but this place is a bit of a hub for people. I mean, you don’t need to come here to watch a beheading video, say, because they’re everywhere, but this place sort of
catalogues
them. And the rest.’

‘Wow.’

‘Thousands of users online at any one time. Most new material of that nature gets posted here and commented on.’

Oh Christ,
I thought.

‘Our video’s not …’

‘No, no. Don’t worry. But we scan these sites quite often—five minutes at the beginning of every day, just to keep an eye out for anything we might need to get involved with. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes someone’ll break the rules and post something they shouldn’t.’

I watched as the page changed to the forum listings. Still the same image at the top of the screen, now with rows of sub-forums underneath. True Gore Images. True Gore Video. The numbers to the right showed that each category contained thousands of postings.

‘This place has
rules
?’

‘Oh yeah. No kiddie stuff is what it mainly comes down to. Even nutters have their own conceptions of morality. But every now and then someone’ll figure the secrecy here means open season. So we keep an eye out.’

‘Secrecy?’

‘Yeah. It used to be open, but now you need to be a member to view or post, and they’re not allowing new members any more. It’s a closed community of weirdos, and that allows them a certain degree of freedom. Or the illusion of it anyway.’

‘Okay.’

‘Here we go.’ Renton clicked on a link on his profile marked ‘Favourites’. ‘I scanned through last night and found it again, saved the thread. It’s an interesting one. Not nice. Brace yourself.’

He opened the thread and clicked on the video link in the first post. After a moment, a new window opened and the file started playing.

It showed a static image of grassland: a short stretch that ended in a line of dark, shadowy trees. The day it had been recorded, the weather had been good: the grass itself was bright and inviting, untended and shimmering slightly in the faintest of breezes, as though under calm water. In the audio feed, I could hear birdsong—and then something else. A clatter.

A hissing.

A few seconds later, a figure entered the frame, walking a little distance ahead of the camera. He was wearing blue jeans, a black coat—and a black balaclava, with tufts of brown hair emerging from the back of the neckline. In one hand he was holding a hammer, turning it round and round in his grip. And in the other—by the scruff of its neck—a tabby cat. It was twisting, jerking in his grasp.

‘Oh God,’ I said.

Renton nodded. ‘Yep.’

The footage didn’t last long—just over a minute in total. The man pressed the cat down against the ground and struck it repeatedly in the head with the hammer. The hissing and fighting ended after the second blow, but that only allowed him to let go and concentrate on hitting it again and again.

When he was done, the man stayed crouched over the animal’s body for a few moments, tilting his head and peering down dispassionately at the damage he’d inflicted. For all the distress and emotion he showed, he might have been studying a butterfly on a leaf. Finally he stood up and walked back behind the camera. The screen went blank.

For the last few frames, I had been holding my breath.

‘
When
was this posted?’

‘Last year,’ Renton said. ‘It’s local, too, which is what originally caught my eye. He’s posted a few of them. This is the only video he took outside: the others look like interiors—a garage of some kind. There are photos too. Here.’

He opened a new window and loaded a different thread. This one contained static images. Cats pinned down like laboratory specimens and slit open. One had all its legs and its head cut off. Four or five were hanging from trees by their necks, all with a gloved hand intruding into the frame from the side to point at them.

I stared at the photographs with horror. Below, there were messages from other users congratulating him on the post. I read the first—
Great work! Can’t wait to see more!—
and felt sick.

But also, just barely, a tingle of something else.

You didn’t expect us to find these, did you?

I said, ‘How do you know he’s local?’

Renton nodded. ‘He filled his location information in. Maybe he was lying, but I don’t see why he would be. Plus we identified the location the first video was shot. Swaine Hill.’

Shit.
Killer Hill.
Where Billy Martin had entered the woods. Billy Martin, who’d talked about someone killing a cat. What had he said? My heart began beating faster.

First things first.

‘All right. Did you ever trace this guy’s account?’

‘That’s the down side, I’m afraid.’ Renton pulled a face. ‘The site’s totally anonymous. The server’s based abroad, and the registration shifts. That’s one of the things that makes it so appealing to the users. The lack of accountability.’

‘If we contact the admins?’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘Shit.’

I leaned back.

This was him. I
knew
it. He’d recorded these images last year and posted them online for some reason—to show off, maybe—and the whole time he’d been practising. Preparing for his work this year. A dry run of some kind.

The kids at school. They told me about someone who killed a cat.

Another realisation.

The guy hadn’t bothered to chase Billy Martin …

I stood up quickly and pulled out my mobile. Laura took an age to answer, then:

‘Hicks. What have we—’

‘Laura, listen to me. Get someone round to Billy Martin’s house. I think he might need protection. We’ve got to get him in here right now.’

I heard her typing. ‘I’m on it.’

‘Because I think he might have recognised Billy.’

‘What? Where from?’

‘I think …’ It was hard to bring myself to say it. ‘I think it might be a kid. An older teenager maybe.’

I reminded her about what Billy had said.

‘I’m on it,’ she said again.

‘I’ll be upstairs in a minute.’

I hung up.
Shit, shit, shit.
But there was hope now too—stronger than before. The guy might have hidden his identity online, but he couldn’t fucking hide in real life. Not for ever. No matter how fucking clever he thought he was.

Renton said, ‘Think it’s our guy? Jimmy?’

‘Jimmy?’

The username.’

He tapped the screen and I saw what he was referring to. The username for the posts was Jimmy82.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

T
HE DOOR WAS ANSWERED
by an overweight woman in her forties with an unwashed tangle of brown hair. She was dressed in black leggings and a sprawling white crop top, and had an angry speckle of sunburn across the top of her chest. A cigarette in one hand, trailing smoke. I imagined that was more or less a permanent fixture.

‘Mrs Johnson?’

‘Yeah.’

I smiled and held up my warrant card.

‘Detective Hicks. This is Detective Fellowes. We’re looking for your son, Carl. Is he home?’

Mrs Johnson slumped against the door frame and folded her arms. Not so much a gesture of defiance as one of familiarity, perhaps even inevitability. ‘What’s he done now?’

It was a reasonable question. After we’d taken Billy Martin into protective custody, he’d given us Carl Johnson’s name as the boy at school who’d bragged about being present when a cat was killed on Swaine Hill. Carl had only just turned thirteen, but was already well on his way in the world. Where Billy seemed very much like a child still, Carl Johnson had lost any innocence a long time ago. Under-age drinking. An assault charge against another child at school. Truancy. Shoplifting.

But then, looking at the run-down area and the parental concern on display here, it wasn’t so surprising. It was like Billy’s bow and arrow in a way—you twang the string and that’s it: the arrow flies, its trajectory set.

I said, ‘Is he home?’

She bellowed over her shoulder. ‘Carl!’

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ I put my card away. ‘Can we come in, please?’

‘What’s he done?’ she asked again, taking a drag on the cigarette. ‘Nothing would surprise me, to be honest. Absolutely nothing.’

‘If we can come in, we can discuss it,’ I said. ‘To be honest, we’re hoping he can help us. If he can, he might not be in any trouble at all.’

‘Huh. That’d be a first.’ She relaxed away from the door frame. It seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. ‘Follow me.
Carl!
’

From upstairs: ‘
What?
’

‘Get your arse down here, you little shit.
Now.
’

Mrs Johnson was trudging ahead towards a doorway on the right, trailing smoke, but I gave Laura a look as I closed the front door behind us. The stairs led straight up ahead from the front door. Carl obviously wasn’t our man, but he was a streetwise kid who wouldn’t have much love for the police, and we needed to talk to him right now. So without us even having to discuss it, Laura stayed by the door just in case the
little shit
decided to elope on us.

I followed Mrs Johnson into what turned out to be the living room: a small, dismal space with a worn carpet and a threadbare three-piece suite. The curtains were open, but the weak light only emphasised the misty air; it felt like the windows in here hadn’t been open for a long time. The room smelled strongly of the overflowing ashtray on the small coffee table and the stale, lingering aroma of old sweat.

A moment later, Carl sauntered in, shadowed by Laura. As I’d suspected, he cut an entirely different figure to Billy Martin. He was still clearly a kid beneath his cheap T-shirt and jeans, and the hair on his upper lip was as thin as eyelashes, but he had an attitude way beyond his years. He kicked at the carpet as he walked past, head down, not looking at me but with a sly little smile on his face.

‘Carl,’ I said. ‘Have a seat.’

‘Whatever.’ He could barely be bothered to form the word, and sighed as he slumped down, his body clenching at the last moment to hit the settee as hard as he could. ‘What do you want?’

‘Charming,’ Laura said. ‘Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?’

Although it wasn’t a genuine question, I glanced at Mrs Johnson anyway, and she shrugged. The gesture seemed to say that manners were something a little like a PlayStation 3, and not everyone could afford them.

‘What can I do?’ she said. ‘He runs riot. Breaks my heart. It’d be different if his bastard dad was still around.’

‘No it wouldn’t,’ Carl said.

‘Shut up. Button that smart mouth.’

He chuntered her words back at her: …
Button that smart mouth.

‘Carl.’ I stood in front of him. ‘Let’s start again. We’re not here to cause you problems if we don’t have to. If we have to, we will. You get me?’

‘Like I said, what do you want?’ He folded his thin arms and looked over at the window with a sigh. ‘I’ve got places to be.’

‘Yeah, that’s the first thing that went through my head when I saw you: here’s a kid with places to be. Well, let’s make this quick then, shall we? You know a place called Swaine Hill? It’s also known colloquially as Killer Hill.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Colloquially means that’s what some people call it.’

That got me a glare, at least. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And so …?’

‘Yeah, I know it.’

‘Amazing. So, you go there, I take it?’

He shrugged.

‘You go there for the parties, right? Beer. Dope. Older kids hanging out because there’s nowhere better for them to go, and so on?’

‘I guess.’

‘It’s not a quiz, Carl. You don’t need to guess. Yes or no—you’ve been there or not?’

‘Yeah. Sometimes.’

‘Right. So—tell me about the cats.’

He looked at me and frowned.

‘The cats?’

I sighed. ‘Cats. Furry little things. People have them as pets. Most people don’t put them in cages and set fire to them, though. Unlike you.’

Carl stared at me for a moment, confused, then scared. He unfolded his arms.

‘What? I never—’

His mother exploded. ‘What the
hell
have you been doing now, boy? I swear on—’

‘Mrs Johnson.’ I swivelled on the spot and held out my hand. She was out of her chair, as though about to attack her son. ‘Just leave this to us for a minute, okay?’

‘I never did that! That wasn’t me!’

I turned back to see Carl was half out of his seat too.

‘Word around the school is that you did, Carl.’

It was a lie, but I wanted to see his reaction.

‘
Who
said that? I fucking swear that—’

‘That’s what I’m hearing.’ I smiled at him benignly. ‘You should listen to your mother about that smart mouth. You start using it to brag and show off and you see what happens? People take you at your word. So blame yourself. Did you or did you not say that? Don’t guess this time.’

He glared at me. Folded his arms again.

‘No.’