Jacob's Ladder (Stone & Randall 1) Read online

  Jacob's Ladder

  Tim Ellis

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  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2011 Timothy Stephen Ellis

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  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  Books written by Tim Ellis can be obtained either through the author’s official website:

  http://timellis.weebly.com/ at Smashwords.com or through online book retailers.

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  To Pam, with love as always

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  Day One

  Thursday, 5th November

  Chapter One

  The sweet coppery smell of coagulated blood wafted out of the door and lodged in Molly’s throat. She forced herself to put the paper suit on over her tight faded jeans and leather jacket. As she pulled the hood up and put the mask and gloves on, her heart rate increased at the thought of what was to come. If she could, she would have turned around and walked away from 16 Crisp Road in Hammersmith without a backward glance, but she knew she had to go in.

  ‘Welcome to purgatory Detective Inspector Stone,’ Senior Scientific Officer Carl Perkins from forensics said without a trace of humour in his voice. ‘Keep on the plastic sheeting, please.’

  Oh my God, she thought looking round the entrance hall. Blood dripped from the ceiling and ran in rivulets down the walls. ‘Is it the same as the others?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. There are choice cuts of human meat all over the place. It’s as if the fucking butcher ran riot in the abattoir, excuse my French.’

  This was the fourth family that had been mutilated over the previous two years. The trouble was, after slaughtering his own wife and kids, Cole Randall had been arrested, tried and committed to Springfield Asylum for the murders a year ago.

  ‘It must be a copycat,’ she said, not knowing whether she wanted to be right or wrong. DI Cole Randall had been her boss and partner at the time, and it was a long tortuous journey to come to terms with the idea that she had been working with a serial killer. Now, it might not be true after all.

  Perkins raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t see how. Besides the killer, the only people who knew about the first three crime scenes were those who investigated the murders. Are you pointing a dirty stick at them now?’

  Her head was full of cotton wool not ideas at this time of the morning. ‘What about one of his admirers?’

  ‘I know Randall has a large fan-base, but it’s extremely unlikely it’s a copycat. I’ll need to go back and check, of course, but if I was a betting man I’d lay odds on Cole Randall being innocent.’

  Molly shook her head. ‘I feel as though I’m in the middle of a fucking nightmare I can’t wake up from.’

  ‘I think we all have bit parts in that nightmare, Inspector.’ Perkins scratched his nose through the mask. ‘Except DCI Miller, he has a starring role.’

  Jack Miller was promoted to DCI for solving the Butcher Murders as the press had named them. At each crime scene the killer left the murder weapon – a butcher’s axe.

  Molly had taken a leave of absence to bury her father. When she came back to work it was all over and she had a new partner. She reviewed the case files in her own time, but there was so much evidence against Randall that she didn’t know what to believe. In the end, she was promoted to DI herself and moved on with her life.

  Molly saw the daughter on the stairs, the butcher’s axe protruding from the girl’s upper back. Putting one foot on the fourth stair, she squatted and brushed the girl’s dark brown hair aside to look at the bloody half-inch symbol on her forehead.

  Each murdered girl had a different character carved into the flesh. Jack Miller had never found out what the symbols meant, and Randall had never told him. Well, she thought, if Randall was innocent then he never knew. She’d need to get someone in to decipher the bloody things, but who?

  She followed the strip of plastic sheeting and turned into the living room. There were two forensic officers filling up the available space. One was kneeling down examining a boy’s arm hacked off at the shoulder, the other was taking photographs of the blood-drenched room. With each explosion of the flash, the two children from previous crime scenes came into sharp focus in Molly’s mind.

  Even through the mask, the stench of congealing blood, human faeces, and urine was overpowering. She unzipped the paper suit, took the small jar of Vick’s VapoRub she always carried from the pocket of her jeans, and dabbed a thin smear of the camphor, eucalyptus and menthol mixture under her nose. The relief was immediate.

  The father’s torso had been propped up on the sofa in front of the television, and if previous crime scenes were anything to go by, the rest of him would be scattered throughout the house.

  In the kitchen was the headless torso of the wife. Her decapitated head would be in the bathroom, lined up on the windowsill opposite the door, next to the heads of her husband and son like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls. Perkins was right, looking at the photographs taken by forensics was bad enough, but walking the crime scene was like a stroll through Hell.

  ‘Have you had enough yet, Gov?’ Detective Constable Tony Read, her partner of a year, asked. He had joined the Murder Investigation Team at Hammersmith after pounding the beat for five years in Pimlico. Slightly taller than her five feet ten, but underneath his clothes he had the body of someone who could have been a professional middleweight boxer if it hadn’t been for his glass jaw.

  ‘Yes, I’ve had enough.’ She felt sick. This was something she hoped she would never have to see again. Even though her own partner had been locked up in an asylum for the murders, she prayed the butchering was over.

  ‘Is it a copycat?’

  ‘Perkins thinks not.’

  ‘Being only a dumb DC, I can’t even imagine the implications if it’s not a copycat, but I guess someone’s gonna be drowning in a sea of shit.’

  ‘Yes.’ DCI Jack Miller was now her boss. Crap, she thought, what a fucking mess.

  The two of them walked outside and discarded the all-in-one paper suits in a waste bin specifically located for the purpose. It was twenty-five past three in the morning and had just started to drizzle. She looked around at the houses in Crisp Road. Some were shrouded in darkness, but others had people watching from upstairs windows as if they sitting in balcony seats at a West End show. She could hear the boats on the Thames, and the early morning traffic on Hammersmith Bridge.

  ‘You’ve got all the details?’ she asked lighting up a cigarette. Smoking was a filthy habit she knew, but it had prevented her from spiralling into whirlpools of depression countless times.

  Read pulled out his notebook and angled it so that he could read what he’d written by the light coming through the open door. ‘Steven and Fiona Turner. Two children: Patty was eight yesterday, and Ben was ten. Steven Turner was a kitchen fitter, and his wife worked in Waterstones bookshop on Glenthorn Road. An anonymous 999 call from a male was redirected from central to the station at two-thirty. The response unit arrived at two-forty and called it in at two forty-seven.’

  ‘What about the post mortems?’

  ‘Doc Firestone is upstairs, he says he’ll try fitting the pieces together tomorrow… no, today at two. Getting called out in the middle of the night fucks-up my internal chronomet
er.’

  ‘Thanks, Tony.’ God, she was tired. She couldn’t wrap her head round Cole Randall being innocent after struggling in the same way with his guilt.

  ‘Do you fancy something to eat?’ Read asked. ‘I’m bloody starving.’

  ‘Not for me, but I’ll have a coffee while you’re stuffing your face.’ She had time to fill. There was no point in going home to an empty flat. It was too late to go back to sleep, and she didn’t want to be on her own with her thoughts.

  ‘I’m a growing boy,’ he said.

  She followed him up Chancellors Road in her three-year-old Ford Fiesta, and then into Fulham Palace Road where he pulled in outside the Noshery, which advertised twenty-four hour meals with a neon sign. The windows of the café were steamed up, except for a small circle that had been created by a wide-eyed girl with dark hair and porcelain skin who stared at them as they approached. Probably a runaway, Molly thought. Running away from what though? Should she ring for a car to take the girl back to a sexually abusive father, or a heroin-addicted mother?

  As they pushed through the door, the decision was taken out of her hands when the girl squeezed past them.

  ‘Just coffee, are you sure?’ Read asked as she sat down at a table half way into the café facing the door.

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said staring at the other three customers. A prostitute aged between forty and fifty was sitting with either a trick or her pimp. The woman looked haggard, and well past her sell-by-date. About the same age as the prostitute, the man had a scar that started just above his left ear and disappeared under his chin. He was white, with cold eyes and a thin hard mouth.

  The third customer, a younger man of about twenty-two, nursed a mug of something hot. Molly guessed that she was looking at an insomniac. The dark rings around his sunken eyes betraying a person who failed to live a normal life. He stared through the concrete walls into a world that only he could see.

  Tony put the steaming black coffee down in front of her. She wrapped her hands around the mug.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Randall?’ he said.

  ‘Well, if he didn’t kill anybody they’ll have to let him go, won’t they?’

  ‘Jesus, a bloody fuck-up, or what?’

  ‘Full English,’ a male voice shouted behind her.

  Read grinned and went to collect his breakfast. He came back with a plate full of grease and two pieces of toast. ‘I’m going to enjoy this,’ he said.

  ‘Your heart certainly won’t,’ Molly said like a dietician.

  Chapter Two

  Molly parked in the car park of Hammersmith Police Station at eight-fifteen. She was relieved there was one parking space left. Only the senior officers had dedicated spaces. Everyone else had to brave the crazy wheel clampers and quota-driven parking attendants on the side roads around the station, or get up in the middle of the night to claim one of the few free spaces available. Not for much longer though, she’d heard that the Council were thinking of charging for workplace parking. The next thing would be the toilet facilities. God help us all, she thought.

  Leaning against her car, she lit up a cigarette and looked up at the Grade II listed three-storey building, comforted in the knowledge that it had been designed in 1939 to withstand arial bombardment. Her office and the squad room were on the top floor.

  It was still drizzling, and if she’d had the urge she could have reached up and touched the dark sagging clouds, but the only urge she felt was to curl up and sleep without the nightmares sucking the life out of her. She crunched over the gravel towards the back entrance, and stubbed her cigarette out in the container on the wall. After keying in the access code on the door keypad, she entered and walked up the back stairs.

  On the third floor, she knocked on the Chief’s door at eight-thirty. After going home, showering, and changing her clothes she felt a little better, but she wasn’t looking forward to confronting Miller considering what had happened.

  ‘Come.’

  The voice was one she didn’t recognise, not least because it was a female voice. As far as she knew, DCI Jack Miller didn’t do female impersonations. She pushed the door open.

  ‘Oh!’ That was about as much as she could muster. A squat woman she had never seen before with short brown hair and a face like a man’s was standing before her in a white shirt, dark blue trousers, a thin tie, and Chief Superintendent shoulder flashes. Molly could count the amount of seriously ugly people she had seen in her life on the fingers of one hand, but this woman would be added to the list. If it wasn’t for the high-pitched voice and the large breasts hanging down to her waist, she could have been an ugly man.

  ‘DI Stone, come in. Coffee?’

  ‘Umm, yes please, Ma’am.’

  ‘Sit down then.’

  Molly sat in an easy chair in front of the smoked glass-topped coffee table. ‘Where’s DCI Miller, Ma’am?’

  ‘Where do you think he is?’

  She had no idea. ‘On a course?’ she ventured.

  The woman laughed as if she were having a fit of hiccups. ‘I’m Chief Superintendent Avril Smart. I’ll be taking over the Murder Investigation Team from DCI Miller for the foreseeable future.’

  ‘He’s not on a course then?’

  ‘Hardly. After what you found at 16 Crisp Road last night. He’s a sacrificial offering to the gods of accountability. Someone must be seen to be responsible. That’s the way it works.’

  ‘I suppose so, Ma’am.’

  Avril Smart handed Molly a cup of steaming black coffee and a saucer to put it on. They only had mugs in the squad room.

  ‘Milk and sugar are on the table. So, give me a brief summary of where we are with the Butcher Murders?’

  Molly put the cup and saucer down on the coffee table. ‘It has yet to be confirmed, but it appears we found family number four in the early hours of this morning. As you know, Cole Randall was tried and convicted of murdering the first three families, but it would appear that DCI Miller arrested the wrong man.’

  ‘The powers that be have already concluded that. You were a Detective Sergeant on Miller’s team, what went wrong?’

  ‘I took compassionate leave to bury my father, but I reviewed the case files when I came back. If it was a set up the killer did a good job. Cole’s fingerprints were on the butcher’s axe. He was drenched in blood from his wife and two children. There was no evidence that he had been drugged, or otherwise rendered unconscious. His bloody footprints were all over the house. Randall’s story just didn’t hold up under scrutiny, especially as he said he couldn’t remember anything after the evening meal. Then, of course, forensics found a whole load of photographs from the previous two murders in the garage with his fingerprints all over them as if he’d been shuffling through them and re-living the murders. It was hard not to jump to the obvious conclusion.’

  ‘The psychiatrist who assessed Randall called the butchering of his own family a psychotic break, that’s why he couldn’t remember anything.’

  ‘It appears that everyone was wrong, Ma’am. Randall couldn’t remember because he was probably unconscious and didn’t do it.’

  ‘The question now is, why has the real killer started killing again? He was home free. Randall was convicted of the murders as he’d planned, why start again?’

  ‘It seems to me, Ma’am that he’s playing a game. Like the victims, we’re simply pieces on the board that he’s moving around. Maybe he only planned for DI Randall to be locked up for a year, to show us he could do anything he wanted. Maybe he can’t help himself.’

  ‘I guess we won’t know until you catch him. I never met DI Randall. You were his partner, what was he like?’

  ‘He was a good copper, Ma’am. He didn’t deserve to be sold into slavery by the force.’

  ‘Well, what’s done is done.’ Avril Smart looked left and right to confirm there was no one else in the room. ‘What I’m about to tell you stays between the two of us.’

  Molly shrugged. ‘Okay, Ma’am.’

>   ‘This is a disaster of epic proportions. If we were talking about an earthquake it would register 10+ on the Richter Scale. I’m here to co-ordinate the Emergency Response Team. You’re the Team Leader. First, I’ve arranged for Randall to be released from Springfield Asylum at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Before that happens, I want you to go and see him. I’ve arranged access at twelve o’clock today.’

  Molly swallowed with difficulty. She had her own reasons for not wanting to venture into Springfield Asylum. ‘Me, Ma’am? Couldn’t…’

  ‘No, I want you to go. From now on I’ll be the Senior Investigating Officer, and you’ll be my second in command. Unless, of course, you’re telling me you’re not up to the job. Do I need to find someone else, DI Stone?’

  She wanted to stand up and walk away. To wash her hands of the whole damned business, but instead she said, ‘No, Ma’am.’

  ‘Good. I want to know whether DI Randall is thinking of coming back to work. He’ll want compensation, and who could blame him. There’s no way round that, but it’ll certainly eat into the force’s budget for the rest of the financial year.’

  Molly took her notebook out and began writing. If the new Chief had a long list, she didn’t want to forget anything.

  ‘Also, try to find out whether he’s thinking of going to the papers. The media frenzy will be bad enough without him playing the victim. And with regards to the press, that will be your responsibility. There are two rules. Deny everything, and tell them nothing. Are we clear on that?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘I’ve organised a press briefing for nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Okay, Ma’am.’

  ‘Then, of course, we still need to catch the real killer. What’s your plan for that?’

  ‘Well…’ She hadn’t thought that far ahead. Stalling, she lifted her cup and took a swallow of lukewarm coffee. ‘I’ll just use my usual team, Ma’am.’