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.’
Without realizing it, he suddenly switched point of view from victim to killer, as if in the moment Dalton died he left his dead body and entered the murderer’s very much living body. For a few seconds he was sure he could feel the excitement and power the killer had felt coursing through him, making him feel more alive than he’d ever been.
‘You raped the first victim, but your crimes are not sexually motivated,’ he said, almost too quietly to be audible. ‘Your excitement spread through every inch of your body, didn’t it? You became aroused by this great thing you had just done, but the tension in your body was too much, wasn’t it? You needed a release, so you raped her while she lay dead or dying.’ He closed his eyes for a second and allowed the images of William Dalton lying dead on the ground to flood in. His clothes appeared to be fully intact, his genitals unmolested. ‘Did you feel the same almost uncontrollable excitement when you killed for the second time? Did you need to release? But this was a man … Shit,’ he suddenly cursed. This one was coming to him too fast. Thinking like him was almost overwhelming, but at the same time it was intoxicating and seductive to follow the conscious and subconscious steps of a killer towards what most would consider to be madness, but what to them was a transformation into something greater and more powerful. He drew in deep breaths to regain his focus – to regain his own voice. To take back his own mind.
‘OK,’ he told himself, trying to think like a detective and not the killer he hunted. ‘No matter how hard you tried to keep clean, you would have been a fucking mess. Your hands, sleeves, everything would have been covered in the victim’s blood. Blood has a nasty habit of getting everywhere, but once you cut through his carotid artery you had to deal with arterial spray too – blood spraying out under pressure from a heart trying to stay alive. You must have been covered in it – warm and wet on your skin like slick hot oil— Fuck!’ he chastised himself for drifting back into the killer’s mind.
He gave himself a few seconds to regain his composure. ‘You must have been a mess. You couldn’t have casually walked on to the tube or a bus like that, and even if you had a car nearby, you wouldn’t have risked walking to it covered in the victim’s blood. No. You plan too much. Somehow you got clean or clean enough to slip past a casual look. So you took water with you or knew where to find it or had something with you that would cover your blood-soaked clothes until you could get home and get clean. But what about your wife and family, or your parents? They would have noticed something.’ He thought for a second. ‘So you live alone. The bloody ones always live alone.’ He paused for a few seconds to allow his observations to settle into something more solid in his mind. The first sketching of a mind-map that he knew, one way or the other, would eventually lead him to the killer of William Dalton and Tanya Richards.
He took one last look around the inside of the garage – at the squalor of Dalton’s life and the bloody hell that was his death. ‘What do you want?’ he asked the killer. ‘You’re not just killing because you can’t stop yourself, are you? You’re trying to … you’re trying to achieve something. But what?’
He clicked his torch off and walked into the darkness that waited for him outside.
Next morning Sean was in his office at New Scotland Yard, a takeaway black coffee steaming on the cheap wooden desk that had snagged more than one pair of trousers. Engrossed in typing up his findings on the virtually obsolete computer he refused to allow IT to replace, he was unaware that he had a visitor until a sharp knock on his doorframe alerted him. Somehow, without looking up, he knew who it would be. Maybe he’d subconsciously detected her perfume. His entire body froze with tension when he saw her standing in the doorway.
‘Anna,’ was all he could say.
‘Sean,’ she replied, looking at the floor for a split second to avoid his eyes.
‘Been a long time,’ he told her.
‘You’ve not had an investigation that needed my input,’ she reminded him.
‘You mean one that Addis wanted your input on?’ he replied. ‘Your input about me.’
She walked into his office and took a seat without being asked. ‘We’ve talked about this, Sean. My loyalty is to you. I’ll only tell Addis what we agree he should be told. I’ll keep him off your back while you try to find whoever committed these crimes – and maybe I can help you with that too.’
He
