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    A Date with Death
    A Date with Death
    A Date with Death
    Ebook581 pages7 hours

    A Date with Death

    By Mark Roberts

    ()

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    About this ebook

    All they wanted was to find their happy-ever-after... Instead, they met their deaths.
    Three women have been killed in Liverpool. The MO points to a stranger, and now DCI Eve Clay is on the trail of a vicious man who preys on lonely women on dating sites. He signs off the same way with each message: "Kiss kiss, night night."

    His crimes are escalating – and Eve has to stop him before another girl dies. But first she needs to find him. And that means going undercover online, and posing as his perfect victim...

    REVIEWS FOR MARK ROBERTS:

    'A fast-paced, chilling novel... Short chapters, crackling dialogue and action that never lets up for a single moment... Mark Roberts is what British crime fiction has been looking for' CRIMESQUAD.

    'Intricate, fast-paced, with a sense of the macabre... A genuinely innovative crime writer' DAILY MAIL.

    'Dark, gripping and believable. Roberts' intimate knowledge of Liverpool makes the city into a sinister character of itself' GRAHAM MASTERTON.

    'This is one of the most thought-provoking, powerful serial killing murders I've ever read. It's brutal, but I found that the plot was so deep, so twisted, intense and clever that there was no way I could put the book down until the final page' BESTSELLING CRIME THRILLERS.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMay 2, 2019
    ISBN9781786695123
    A Date with Death
    Author

    Mark Roberts

    Dr Mark Roberts is a distinguished IT expert resident in Kent. He is the editor of and contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, a spoof guide to fictional illnesses. Other contributors include Neil Gaiman and China Miéville.

    Read more from Mark Roberts

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      Book preview

      A Date with Death - Mark Roberts

      cover.jpg

      A DATE WITH DEATH

      By Mark Roberts

      The Sixth Soul

      What She Saw

      The Eve Clay Thrillers

      Blood Mist

      Dead Silent

      Day of The Dead

      Killing Time A Date With Death

      A Date With Death

      Mark Roberts

      www.headofzeus.com

      First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

      Copyright © Mark Roberts, 2019

      The moral right of Mark Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Cover design: kid-ethic.com

      Cover images: Shutterstock

      ISBN (HB): 9781786695130

      ISBN (ANZTPB): 9781786695147

      ISBN (E): 9781786695123

      Head of Zeus Ltd

      First Floor East

      5–8 Hardwick Street

      London

      EC1R 4RG

      www.headofzeus.com

      Contents

      Also by Mark Roberts

      Welcome Page

      Copyright Page

      The Past

      1977

      Day One

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Chapter 21

      Chapter 22

      Chapter 23

      Chapter 24

      Chapter 25

      Chapter 26

      The Past

      1979

      Day Two

      Chapter 27

      Chapter 28

      Chapter 29

      Chapter 30

      Chapter 31

      Chapter 32

      Chapter 33

      Chapter 34

      Chapter 35

      Chapter 36

      Chapter 37

      Chapter 38

      Chapter 39

      Chapter 40

      Chapter 41

      Chapter 42

      Chapter 43

      Chapter 44

      Chapter 45

      Chapter 46

      Chapter 47

      Chapter 48

      Chapter 49

      Chapter 50

      Chapter 51

      Chapter 52

      The Past

      1980

      Day Three

      Chapter 53

      Chapter 54

      Chapter 55

      Chapter 56

      Chapter 57

      Chapter 58

      Chapter 59

      Chapter 60

      Chapter 61

      Chapter 62

      Chapter 63

      Chapter 64

      Chapter 65

      Chapter 66

      Chapter 67

      Chapter 68

      Chapter 69

      Chapter 70

      Chapter 71

      Chapter 72

      Chapter 73

      Chapter 74

      Chapter 75

      Chapter 76

      Chapter 77

      Chapter 78

      Chapter 79

      Chapter 80

      Chapter 81

      Chapter 82

      Chapter 83

      Chapter 84

      Chapter 85

      Chapter 86

      Chapter 87

      Chapter 88

      Chapter 89

      Chapter 90

      Chapter 91

      Chapter 92

      Chapter 93

      Chapter 94

      Chapter 95

      Chapter 96

      Chapter 97

      Chapter 98

      The Past

      1982

      Day Four

      Chapter 99

      Chapter 100

      Chapter 101

      Chapter 102

      Chapter 103

      Chapter 104

      Chapter 105

      Chapter 106

      Chapter 107

      Chapter 108

      Chapter 109

      Chapter 110

      Chapter 111

      Chapter 112

      Chapter 113

      Chapter 114

      Chapter 115

      Chapter 116

      Chapter 117

      Chapter 118

      Chapter 119

      Chapter 120

      Chapter 121

      Chapter 122

      Chapter 123

      Chapter 124

      Chapter 125

      Chapter 126

      Chapter 127

      Chapter 128

      Chapter 129

      Chapter 130

      Chapter 131

      Chapter 132

      Chapter 133

      Chapter 134

      Chapter 135

      Chapter 136

      Chapter 137

      About the Author

      An Invitation from the Publisher

      The Past

      1977

      When her father returned from Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, she didn’t know if the new baby was a boy or a girl. She asked how the baby was and the answer came as a cold silence she knew so well, and that made her want to be sick.

      Following this, she knew not to ask after her mother.

      That night, as she lay in her bed wondering about the new baby and thinking about her mother in the hospital, she heard the telephone ring in the hall downstairs.

      She got out of bed and crept four paces – one for every year of her life – to her bedroom door and listened to her father answering the telephone.

      ‘Yeah?’

      He sounded at his angriest and, in one slurred word, fear overwhelmed her.

      There was a silence as her father listened to the person on the other end.

      ‘If you must know, the little bastard’s a boy!’

      Bastard?

      It was a word she didn’t know the meaning of, a word her father used frequently but one she had learned never to repeat again after the slap in the face he’d given her the one and only time she’d said it.

      Downstairs, he slammed the receiver in its cradle and she scurried back to her bed, burying herself under the blankets and pretending to be fast asleep.

      At some point, and she didn’t know when, she drifted into a dreamless sleep.

      In the morning, nothing unusual happened.

      As usual, at a quarter to eight, her father left the house to run his businesses, leaving her alone with Mrs Doyle, the cleaning lady, who’d been given a few pounds to stay with her but who she’d overheard being given strict instructions not to talk to her and, especially, not to answer any questions about the little shit.

      Shit?

      Same as bastard, she guessed, as she watched the scene in the hall between her father and Mrs Doyle unfold through the struts on the staircase, the memory of his open-handed slap when she’d used the ‘b’ word causing her cheek to sting at the thought of it.

      She confined herself to her bedroom and, as the morning rolled on, she wondered if there was something wrong with her baby brother.

      At lunchtime, when the antique grandfather clock chimed twelve in the hall downstairs, the phone rang and Mrs Doyle answered it.

      ‘Hello?’ Mrs Doyle sounded as plain scared as she felt.

      She listened and heard her father’s voice leaking from the telephone receiver. Not talking then, shouting.

      ‘Half past the hour it is then, sir?’

      Sir. The name Mrs Doyle had been commanded to call her father.

      She stood at the bedroom window but couldn’t see the whole of the garden and drive at the front of the house. On her knees, she pushed her toy box to the window and, when she managed to get it there, she climbed up and had a perfect view of what lay below.

      She waited and heard the quarter hour chime and guessed that something important was going to happen when the clock sounded the half hour.

      In the top left-hand corner of her bedroom window, she saw a fly struggling against the stickiness of a spider’s web and watched as the arachnid drifted towards its prey. It wrapped a tight thread around the fly and, before long, the captured bug looked like it was entombed in a mini blanket.

      The throb of the engine of her father’s Bentley as it slowed to turn into the drive at the front of the house brought her back into the moment.

      The gravel grated against the tyres of her father’s car and, as he pulled up to a sharp halt, she knew that things were not good.

      The driver’s door swung open and her father got out of the car, slamming the door shut as he did so. His mouth was moving as he fumbled with his house keys, making his way to the front door.

      She watched the Bentley as her father opened the door, stomped inside the house and threw the door back after himself.

      Slowly, the back door of the car opened and her mother stepped out on to the gravel. Even from the height of her bedroom window, she could tell that her mother had been crying.

      Mother was dressed in a fur coat and hat, wearing flat, black shoes and a green skirt; she knew her father had spent a lot of money on the clothes because he often repeated the same phrase to her mother – sometimes in anger, sometimes not – your outfits are costing me an arm and a fucking leg.

      Mother leaned into the back of the car and, after a few moments, she emerged with a small wicker basket, which she carried towards the front door.

      She looked down from her bedroom window into the top end of the basket and saw a ball of pink flesh. The baby’s face. Her brother. Her brand-new baby brother. All the uneasiness rose from her and was replaced by a sense of awe and wonder.

      In her head, a picture she had seen of Jesus walking on the water flashed through her memory and, as she watched her mother bringing the baby closer to the house, she said to herself in a brittle whisper, ‘It’s like a miracle…’

      The house was filled with the sound of the doorbell as her mother rang to be let in.

      ‘Don’t fucking talk to her, Mrs Doyle! Don’t say anything nice about the baby or I’ll fire you on the spot!’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      She crept at speed to the top of the stairs and watched Mrs Doyle walk to the front door, her stomach dancing as a net of butterflies was unleashed inside her.

      Mrs Doyle opened the front door, stood to one side as her mother stepped into the house with her baby brother in the basket, and closed the door.

      Her father walked past her mother and the baby towards the door and flung it open again.

      ‘Where are you going?’ asked her mother.

      ‘I’m going to register its birth at Brougham Terrace and then I’m going back to work.’

      Her mother placed the basket down on the ground and lifted the baby out.

      ‘Look at him. Look… at him! He’s the spitting image of you,’ said her mother.

      ‘Not looking, not listening!’

      On his way out, her father closed the door with the same sour energy that he had opened it.

      Her mother looked at Mrs Doyle, who was slipping her arms into the same coat she had worn forever.

      ‘Mrs Doyle…’ said her mother.

      Mrs Doyle shook her head and opened the front door to leave.

      As Mrs Doyle left, her mother placed her baby brother back in the basket and took off her fur coat. The baby started to cry and her mother said, ‘All right, all right.’

      Her mother pulled up her sweater and, picking up the baby, fastened him to her left breast, walking around the hall and rocking him.

      The baby stopped crying and her mother walked out of the hall and deeper into the house.

      She listened and through the walls of the house came a sound she knew very well.

      As her mother fed the new baby, the grandfather clock ticked, hitting the air with a stern metal finger.

      And beneath this there was that other sound.

      In the morning room, her mother wept.

      Day One

      Wednesday, 1st December 2021

      Catoptrophobia

      Fear of mirrors

      1

      6.44 am

      The tide went out and death came in.

      Detective Chief Inspector Eve Clay walked along the mudflats of the River Mersey towards the remains of a human being, guiding herself forward in the pre-dawn darkness with a torch that sliced the freezing gloom before her.

      Walking further away from the concrete promenade that followed the twisting path of the river, Clay felt her rubber boots being sucked into the thick silt beneath her feet.

      Tall and slim with long brunette hair snatched back in a ponytail, Clay looked ahead at the random pattern of jagged black rocks and the dead person beyond them but knew there was no mileage in using them as stepping stones. Being floored on the mud with a broken ankle was simply not an option.

      Clay glanced back at Otterspool Promenade.

      Beneath a pair of arc lamps, Clay saw the marked police car and the constables who had discovered the body. Beneath the artificial light, rain raged in the wind and into the deluge a black mortuary van pulled up alongside Detective Sergeant Gina Riley, a small, rotund woman with fair hair and a dreamy expression that hid her quicksilver mind. Riley raised an arm, acknowledging Clay.

      Three supporting officers climbed down the concrete steps from the railings and on to the riverbed.

      She carried on, stepping as lightly as she could and shivering in the ice-cold wind, her eyes fixed on the body washed up on a rock at the centre of a large pool of water.

      Female, thought Clay, as she concentrated on the body that was becoming clearer with each step forward. On your back. Naked.

      A foghorn sounded in the distance, its moan like the dying breath of a mythical beast.

      Young. Eyes wide open and startled, the gate to your soul exposed to the elements.

      In her head, a clock started ticking, taking her into the recent past and a crime scene outside Liverpool that she hadn’t been directly involved in but one she remembered clearly.

      Number two, she thought. But a first time outing in Liverpool for the perpetrator.

      She looked back and saw Detective Sergeant Karl Stone, a tall thin man with prematurely grey hair slicked back, at the head of an advancing human triangle, the base of which consisted of Detective Sergeant Terry Mason and Sergeant Paul Price from Scientific Support.

      A seagull landed close to the woman’s body, looked it up and down with jet-black eyes.

      Clay quickened her pace in the direction of the body, deeper into the freezing mist that masked the Wirral Peninsula on the opposite bank of the River Mersey.

      The destruction to the dead woman’s face was now clear to see.

      Her eyeballs poked out of the sockets and her swollen and bitten tongue jutted out of her mouth.

      Definitely number two.

      Clay recalled an image from a local television news broadcast that had quickly progressed into the national media.

      Sandra O’Day, a slim blonde woman in her mid twenties, slaughtered in the late summer twenty or so miles away in Warrington.

      Clay looked down at what was left of the woman in front of her and thought, yes, the same again.

      Where her shoulder-length hair should have hung down in sorrowful clumps, there was nothing except the side of her head, her left ear missing, leaving a pitiful hole in her face.

      Clay stood where the seagull had just flown up from and looked at the body from the feet upwards.

      Her feet were blue but there was no apparent damage to them.

      ‘Anything?’ called Stone.

      ‘She’s not the perpetrator’s first. I’m guessing she was a natural blonde,’ replied Clay.

      ‘How do you know?’

      Her legs were slim and long, just like the other victim she knew of, and her face was a knot of purple muscle.

      ‘He’s skinned her face and scalped her.’

      In the sky to the east, the first crooked finger of muddy light appeared, pointing down in the direction of the docks at Garston, and reminded her of just how close to home she was.

      Clay pictured her son, Philip, asleep in his bed and her husband, Thomas, getting up in their bedroom, ready for the start of another day without her because she had been drawn away by the imperative of work.

      She dismissed any notion of home as her eyes paused at the surreal sight of the woman’s limp hands, fingers floating strangely in the shallow pool around them, as if there was a semblance of life still in her.

      What’s he doing with the part of you he removed? she asked herself, taking a series of deep breaths to bottle the sour emotion the question provoked and the bitter taste in her mouth that accompanied it.

      Stone arrived just behind Clay.

      ‘Last August in Warrington,’ replied Clay. ‘Sandra O’Day. She was blonde and in her mid twenties. She was dumped in the River Irwell after being missing for ten or eleven days, scalped and with her face removed.’

      They stood in silence over the woman’s body, the dark air around them studded with flashes of light as Sergeant Paul Price took a series of photographs.

      Clay stooped, pointed her torch at the base of the woman’s neck and up to her jawline, and saw the place where the perpetrator had cut away her scalp and face.

      She pushed into her memory to recall the name given to the killer by the tabloid press when he’d first struck in Warrington but it eluded her.

      ‘What do you want me to do?’ asked Stone.

      ‘Stay right here, Karl. Oversee the APTs and Scientific Support.’

      Detective Sergeant Terry Mason walked past the body and looked at the mudflats as Sergeant Paul Price continued taking pictures of the woman’s body.

      ‘What are you thinking, Terry?’ asked Clay.

      ‘I’m thinking this is the crime scene from Hell,’ replied Mason. ‘If there was any evidence around the body it’s probably been washed away and could be anywhere between the Pier Head and the Irish Sea. Sorry to be so negative, but that’s the reality of it.’

      Clay stood up and, taking out her mobile phone, dialled Detective Sergeant Gina Riley on the shore.

      ‘I can see you from the promenade, Eve. What’s happening?’

      ‘I think the victim may well be from Liverpool.’

      ‘OK?’

      Clay heard a sliver of doubt beneath the neutral tone of Riley’s voice.

      ‘How do I know? A woman’s body was found in water in Warrington earlier this year. If this is what I’m pretty sure it is, our victim’s a girl local to us. Either on the Wirral or somewhere within a mile of here in the South Liverpool suburbs, Aigburth, Mossley Hill or the Sefton Park district.’

      ‘I know the case you mean. Warrington Police got nothing on the perpetrator. It was like she’d been abducted, murdered and dumped by the Invisible Man.’

      With deepening dismay, Clay remembered the same, looked at the pool of water surrounding the body and the rock that propped her up.

      ‘Gina, we need to know who this is. Can you please get in touch with Barney Cole and ask him to trawl through missing persons, Liverpool, recent weeks, female, blonde, twenty to forty years of age.’

      ‘I’ll do that right now, Eve.’

      ‘And line up victim liaison. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain we’re going to be breaking the worst news possible to her next of kin before today’s out. Thank you, Gina.’

      Clay closed down the call.

      She called, ‘Paul?’

      Sergeant Price stopped taking pictures and looked at

      Clay.

      ‘I’m going to lift her head. I want you to take pictures of the back of her head, please.’

      Clay slid the fingers of both hands between the muddy rock and the back of the victim’s head. The backs of her hands felt grainy and wet as they slid along the mud, and her fingers sensed the contours of the skull beneath the muscle.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ said Clay beneath her breath as she lifted the woman’s head from the rock. She looked at the back of her skull, at the thin wet muscles covering the bone and the skin at the base of her throat.

      ‘Paul, place a light on the skin beneath her jawline, on her throat.’

      As torchlight hit skin, Clay saw the rough smudges around her throat and said, ‘Strangulation, same MO as Warrington.’

      In a handful of seconds, she went through the killer’s logic: Strangulation, up close and personal, and full of sadistic joy, feeling the life drain out through his fingertips and thumbs.

      Clay lowered the woman’s head back into the water and noticed that Detective Sergeant Terry Mason looked like a man seeking for a wafer-thin slice of meaning in a storm of chaos.

      ‘Terry?’ she called.

      ‘It’s literally and metaphorically a fucking washout, Eve.’

      It was only the third time in fifteen years she had heard Mason swear. She looked at the mortuary van on the promenade.

      ‘The Anatomical Pathology Technicians, Terry?’

      ‘They might as well come down and pick her up right now.’

      ‘I’ll make that call, Eve,’ said Stone.

      In the sky, the finger of hazy light was widening, stretching out at either end, and Clay faced a grim conclusion.

      ‘Karl, come on, there’s nothing we can do here. I need to talk to the constables who found her.’

      She walked back towards the concrete steps that she had just climbed down.

      ‘Terry, as soon as the ATPs leave here, call me. I’ll meet them at the mortuary as she arrives there.’

      Clay took out her iPhone and dialled Detective Constable Barney Cole. As he connected the call in the incident room at Trinity Road police station, Clay heard his voice but was lost in the woman’s dead eyes staring from the raw muscles that once opened her missing lids.

      ‘Eve… Eve? Eve, are you there, Eve?’

      ‘Barney, when you’ve finished your trawl through missing persons, I need you to contact Warrington Police. Ask them for everything they’ve got on Sandra O’Day, the River Irwell victim, August, this year. I need to speak to the SIO on that case. Roll the ball as fast as you can, Barney.’

      2

      7.15 am

      From the front of her car, Clay watched two police constables walking past the larger-than-life statue of a bright orange bull looking in the direction of the River Mersey, a huge art installation aptly named Sitting Bull.

      I wish you could speak, Sitting Bull, thought Clay. And those blind and unblinking eyes of yours could see.

      She smiled briefly at the memory of a warm day last spring when she and Thomas had helped Philip to climb up Sitting Bull’s back, how intoxicated with happiness her son had been and how bleakly anxious she had felt, fearing in case he fell down on to the concrete below.

      Clay heard a tapping at the window and snapped back into the moment. She opened the window and weighed up the constables: PC Wendy White, late thirties, a Teflon veteran, and PC Thomas Ruddock, early twenties, rattled by what he’d seen, gazing at Clay as if she were some mythical creature.

      ‘Get yourselves into the back please. And thank you for what you’ve done here.’

      As they settled into the back of Clay’s car, they brought in the coldness of the morning, and Clay hit the overhead light to dispel the bleakness of the new day.

      She turned, looking each of them directly in the eyes as she introduced herself.

      ‘I’m DCI Eve Clay…’

      ‘I know, I know you are,’ said PC Ruddock. ‘And can I just say…’

      ‘All right, Tom,’ said PC White. ‘Listening time.’

      ‘Thank you, PC White,’ said Clay, drinking in the hint of a smile in the female constable’s steely eyes. ‘I’ll begin with you, PC White. And then I’ll ask you questions, PC Ruddock. OK?’

      ‘That’s good,’ said PC White.

      ‘Wendy. Please go right back to the beginning of what happened. Tell me everything.’

      ‘We were patrolling Riverside Drive from midnight onwards. There’s been a spate of burglaries on the houses across the way from the Festival Gardens, thieves breaking into houses through the early hours. That was our brief,’ said PC White. ‘Stop any cars and pedestrians heading away from the estate.

      ‘We were driving back from the tip at the bottom of Jericho Lane for the umpteenth time when a call came through from switchboard. There’d been a call from a man on Otterspool Promenade around the Mersey Road area. He said he thought he’d seen a dead body in the river close to Sitting Bull.

      ‘I turned the car round and high-tailed it to the location. I had to come off road and across the grass and down the straight narrow path leading to the prom.

      ‘We went up and down from the gate at the Cressington Promenade end to the path leading up to the Otterspool pub. There was no sign of anyone. We slowed right down and used the headlights to look for blood but there wasn’t a drop on the concrete. I was convinced it was a hoax call and, in my own head, I worked out it had come from the Riverside Drive burglars, pulling us away from their turf.

      ‘I decided we needed to use our headlights to look into the river. The tide was out. That was good. Tom saw something in the mud.’

      ‘Tom?’ said Clay.

      ‘We had the headlights full on to the riverbed. From the corner of my eye, I saw something light-coloured against the darkness. I thought it was, like, maybe, an animal, a washed-up animal. The caller got it wrong maybe. I said to Wendy, we need to check this out, there’s something in the mud. We got as close as we could to the railings and hit the lights fully on in the direction of… the thing. I got out and walked up to the railings. I saw flesh tones and the shape of a body. It was a naked human body. I called but there was no reply. The victim looked stone dead. There was no way he or she was alive.’

      ‘I asked Tom to climb over the railings and down the concrete steps so he could get a look from ground level,’ said White.

      Clay saw the rising emotion in the young constable’s eyes.

      ‘I still feel emotional when I see a murder victim,’ said Clay.

      Surprise tripped into his eyes. ‘You do?’

      ‘Whatever you’ve got inside right now, bottle it. Never lose sympathy for the victim. Go on, Tom.’

      ‘I took a torch from the boot of the car and got down to the mud by the steps. I managed to get closer via the rocks in the mud. Wendy called to me not to get any closer. There was something wrong with the head. I could see from the shape of the body that the victim was female.’ He looked at his colleague. ‘There was no chance of saving her. And Wendy said we didn’t want to contaminate any evidence if there was any.’

      ‘That’s when we called in for help,’ concluded White.

      ‘Have either of you got anything to add?’ asked Clay.

      ‘No,’ said White as Ruddock shook his head.

      ‘Thank you for this, you’ve done very well, both of you.’ She looked directly at PC Ruddock. ‘The tide’s due back in within the hour. She could have been lost to us for ever.’

      ‘Yes, Tom,’ said White. ‘Well done. Deals don’t come much bigger than this.’

      Clay could feel the glow of PC Ruddock’s pride and the maternal affection just beneath PC White’s tough exterior.

      ‘You didn’t see any sign of anyone else in the vicinity?’ checked Clay.

      ‘No,’ said White. ‘We stayed in place to protect the body.’

      Clay got out of the car and opened the back door on PC White’s side. As the constables got out, she asked, ‘You’re based at Admiral Street, right?’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘I’ll be in touch with Chief Superintendent Frankins. Great work.’

      As they walked away, a spark ignited a flame inside her head and, where memory had recently failed her, she recalled the lazy, summer drama of the tabloid press.

      ‘The killer has a name of sorts. The killer is human but the name isn’t.’

      It came to her like a curse through the river-bound fog.

      ‘The name of the killer is The Ghoul.’

      3

      8.44 am

      Alone in the incident room on the top floor of Trinity Road police station, Detective Constable Barney Cole, muscular and on the verge of middle age, looked at the landline phone on his desk and saw that half an hour had passed since the duty superintendent in Warrington had told him she’d get back to him within ten to twenty minutes.

      Cole looked down at the map of the north-west of England spread across his desk and willed the phone to ring.

      He picked up the black marker pen he’d already used to make a dot on the map. Warrington. A black dot on the River Irwell near the Moore Nature Reserve, dated 08/2021.

      Cole looked at the map and stopped at the point at Otterspool Promenade where he’d learned a second body had been discovered, deposited on the mud. He dotted the place and dated it 12/2021.

      Cole tried to visualize lines between the two highlighted places to establish the beginning of some pattern but he just couldn’t see one.

      He heard the door to the incident room open, continued gazing at the map, saw the blue of the water, and wondered, with grim certainty that it would happen, where the next body would show up.

      ‘Planning your holidays?’ asked Detective Sergeant Karl Stone, heading into the kitchen area in the corner of the open-plan room.

      ‘Something like that, Karl,’ replied Cole, taking the marked map to the glass noticeboard and putting it up with Blu-Tack. ‘You sound cold, matey.’

      ‘It’s bloody freezing down at the prom. Do you want a coffee?’

      ‘Get by the radiator. I’ll make it for you.’

      Dressed in a black overcoat that looked three sizes too big for him, to Cole’s eyes, Stone was the human incarnation of a vulture.

      As Stone headed for the warmth and Cole to the kitchen, their paths crossed.

      ‘Any more from Otterspool Promenade?’ asked Cole.

      ‘Young female victim. Water. Forensic nightmare. It’s a repeat performance.’

      ‘How far from the promenade itself was she discovered?’

      Cole spooned coffee into two cups, heard the rising rumble of the kettle.

      ‘It took Eve two and a half minutes to get from the shore to the body but it was like she was walking in quicksand. I’d estimate sixty metres.’

      Cole glanced over his shoulder as he poured hot water into the cups. Stone had his back to him and was looking at the map.

      ‘I’ve got pictures from the scene,’ said Cole. ‘But what was she like in reality?’

      ‘She looked half-human,’ said Stone. ‘From the neck up, she looked like someone had grafted an alien head on to a human body. I won’t forget it as long as I live.’

      As Cole walked over to Stone, his sympathy for his colleague intensified, knowing that he had a wife and two sons to go home to and all that awaited Stone at the end of a bad day was an empty flat and a history of broken relationships to dwell on.

      Cole handed Stone a cup of coffee and looked out as daylight oozed over the Mersey Estuary, in the direction of Warrington.

      He sat down at his desk, picked up a printed-out image of the Otterspool Promenade victim’s skinned face and scalped head and was glad he hadn’t been like Stone, an eyewitness to the carnage.

      The phone on Cole’s desk rang out. He snatched up the receiver, hit speakerphone and turned on record on his iPhone.

      ‘DC Barney Cole speaking, Merseyside Constabulary.’

      ‘Duty Superintendent Kate Johnson, Warrington Con­stab­u­lary.’

      ‘Thank you for getting back to me, Superintendent Johnson.’

      ‘I’m going to send you everything we’ve got on our River Irwell victim. I’ll send you a test email. Her name was Sandra O’Day. She was reported missing on August 1st and showed up dead on August 11th. The pathologist said she’d been dead for four or five days before she’d been discovered in the river.’

      A bell rang in Cole’s head as he went on to his emails on his laptop, and watched as Superintendent Johnson’s test email came through.

      ‘How are we doing, Barney?’

      ‘All good,’ said Cole, replying Thank you to the email.

      ‘Who’s the SIO at your end?’ asked Superintendent Johnson.

      ‘DCI Eve Clay.’

      There was a brief silence.

      ‘Oh, that’s such bad news for The Ghoul. And good news for us. Tell her I’m calling a meeting of everyone involved in the case. The SIO our end’s DCI Dave Ferguson.’

      ‘You’ve just answered the question I was going to ask you next.’ As he spoke, Cole wrote the name Dave Ferguson on his notepad. ‘DCI Clay has asked me to ask you if DCI Ferguson can make it over to Trinity Road police station so we can pick his brains.’

      ‘I’ll contact him for you right now.’

      Cole listened. In Warrington Police Station on Arpley Street, a door opened and a voice spoke with rising urgency.

      ‘I’ve got to go, Barney. We’ll be in touch.’

      As Cole opened the first email and the PDF attached to it, he felt Stone’s presence at his back, moving over him with slow, steady stealth.

      The screen of his laptop was filled with an image from the River Irwell from the tail end of the previous summer, a picture of Sandra O’Day’s remains, her bloated body half in the water, the top half caught up on the bank, a dead woman without a face or a scalp.

      ‘What does he do with their faces and scalps?’ asked Stone.

      ‘Time will tell,’ replied Cole, focusing on the next job Clay had asked him to do as she stood in the mud on the bottom of the River Mersey: finding out if any women from Liverpool in their twenties to forties, blondes to begin with, had been reported missing in the last two weeks.

      4

      8.51 am

      Edgar McKee turned back the left-hand sleeve of his white tunic and saw that it was getting on for nine o’clock. The time was near for two significant arrivals into the Stanley Abattoir.

      The smudge of a cheap and ill-advised tattoo chipped into his line of vision and, not for the first time, he regretted having invaded his own flesh with ink and needle.

      The noise of the machinery revving up for the day’s labour was deadened by the red ear defenders sitting either side of the mesh that kept his hair where it should be and off the flesh of the beasts he had to process that day. He scratched his head, felt the velcro-like hooks of the hairs on his scalp irritate his fingertips.

      He looked out of the tall window overlooking Old Swan and saw the cattle truck turning into the abattoir compound from Prescot Road.

      Breathing in the disinfectant that the night cleaners had doused the walls and the floors with, and the chemicals used to sanitise the equipment from the beginning to the end of the killing and carving process, he could smell yesterday’s butchery beneath the surface, and beneath that the butchery of decades.

      As the cattle truck backed in to the reception area, Edgar removed his ear defenders and listened hard to what lay beneath the immediate noises around him.

      He closed his eyes and pictured the scene, the job he had first worked on in his early days in the abattoir, the meet and greet role.

      The tailgate opened and down the ramp came the first of the dumb cattle, eyes accustomed to open spaces and barns confused by the brick and concrete reception area. They lowed as the procession of flesh was sucked into the abattoir’s gaping jaws.

      Edgar felt his pulse thicken and his heart beat faster as memory collided with the sound of the present, the cattle’s disharmonious voices in the distance beneath the immediate and insistent thrum of the machinery close at hand.

      The leading cow moved into a bottleneck from which there was no turning back, the head of the cow behind her nudging her tail. Onwards and with no way back, the confusion in their eyes turned to fear and panic, and the emotion in the herd was contagious, registering in their voices, the lowing translating into blind terror, the sounds of extreme anguish bottled up in the confined space in which there was only one way to go: forward.

      Edgar imagined the distant sound and tilted his head to gain a better perspective of the beasts on death row as they realised what was coming next.

      Her eyes were wide, nostrils flaring as the stun gun was placed against her forehead. The first one he would always remember, his first one, the beast with no name and even less hope. He gripped the stun gun and pulled the trigger, felt the kick run up his arm like mercury in his veins.

      He looked out at the staff car park, picked out his white Ford Transit van positioned between a worn-out Vauxhall and a no-hope Honda, both of them dwarfed by the height and width of his vehicle.

      ‘Edgar?’

      The sound of his name melted all other sounds, near and far, into one euphoric blur.

      ‘Yes, Neil?’ he replied to his supervisor, eyeing up the tall young man standing alongside him, a lock of white-blond hair poking out from the net on his head, and looking straight ahead with a Christ-like gaze, as if seeing a messianic vision that was uniquely for him and him alone.

      Neil clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder, bringing him back from the place he inhabited in his head.

      ‘Introduce yourself to Edgar,’ said Neil.

      The young man scanned around Edgar’s eyes, avoiding looking directly into them.

      ‘My name is Wren but I cannot fly. Robin Wren. My mother had a sense of humour and a passion for ornithology. I dislike being called Robin. Wren will do.’

      Edgar felt his heart turn to lead but

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