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

  If someone had asked him why he was clinging to life when everything that he had lived for was gone, and if he had answered truthfully, he would have said that the rage kept him alive. Only a dark malevolence inside him forced his feet one in front of the other. Beyond the moment of revenge, the future was a pool of blackness. Afterwards, after he had washed his hands in the blood of retribution, they could throw him on the human garbage heap, but until then he had to keep a promise to himself, his wife, and his two children.

  Forgiveness was not a concept he had any time for. A man had the right to bludgeon his family’s killer to death if he wanted to. He had already sentenced the man to death. Now, it was just a matter of finding him and carrying out the execution. The asylum Chaplain had come to see him when he had first arrived. Randall told him to, ‘Piss off and don’t come back.’ He had never been religious. He reasoned that if there was a God, and He had let a sick bastard butcher his family, then Randall was coming after Him next.

  After Molly had been to see him, his solicitor had arrived – blood-sucking bastard. When Abraham Bram Stoker had written about vampires, surely he had solicitors in mind?

  ‘On your behalf Tibbs, Lucien, and Cantor will apply for compensation,’ Archibald Millhaven had said. The dark thin pinstriped suit that he wore like a uniform covered a tall wiry frame. The smile, for those who were looking, revealed incisors that sucked your life’s blood until all that was left was a shrivelled carcass. Randall wasn’t fooled by his disarming manner.

  ‘Do whatever’s necessary,’ he said. He deserved compensation after what they’d put him through. After all the years he’d done on the force, not one of his superiors or his colleagues had questioned the evidence. The bastards had all been too ready to believe that he could cut up his own family like that. Yes, time for some payback.

  For a year he had tried to remember anything from that night, but there was nothing. After the evening meal he had taken his beer and wandered out into the back garden. The light activated as he stepped outside. He was sitting at the patio table thinking that he should put the garden furniture away in the shed for the winter. With no movement, the light switched itself off. After a long day, he closed his eyes. Then he felt a hand over his nose and mouth. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the living room soaked in the blood of his beautiful wife Sarah, Mathew his ten-year-old son, and Tilly his seven-year-old daughter. The clock on the mantelpiece displayed two-twenty in the morning.

  His head still thick with an unknown drug, he had stumbled from room to room searching for signs of life and trying to understand what had happened.

  The pieces of Sarah were mostly in the kitchen. The headless Mathew was in the living room, and Tilly lay face down on the stairs, as if she had been trying to escape the madman wielding the butcher’s axe, which protruded from her back. If she was attempting to reach her bedroom, to hide under her bed or in the closet, she never made it.

  He was sitting on the stairs next to his darling Tilly, cradling her head in his lap, holding her hand, too stunned to shed a tear. Useless questions with no answers ran through his mind. What had happened? Who had done this terrible thing to his family? Why, why, why?

  It was then that DI Jack Miller, with a firearm’s unit from CO19, arrived and jumped to the obvious conclusion. Randall’s fingerprints were all over the axe, and he was drenched in three people’s blood. In the garage, in a box hidden on a shelf amongst the paint, nails, and sandpaper, they found three photographs of the previous murders with his fingerprints all over them. Photographs that only the killer could have taken. If he had found what they had found would he have reached the same conclusion?

  Cole Randall didn’t speak to the police, his solicitors, the barrister appointed to defend him, or the psychiatrist ordered to assess his mental capacity to stand trial. Cole Randall’s life was already over. Nothing mattered anymore. They sent him to Springfield Asylum to exist as a shadow in the half-light underground. The second basement level was for Category A patients – those who were considered beyond redemption.

  Alone in the room, alone in the darkness, alone with his thoughts, he had doubted himself. At times, he believed he had killed them. The truth was too far-fetched, too ridiculous to be true. There were times, in the hours before his morning medication, when he would have taken that butcher’s axe and cut himself up until nothing remained but a bloody stain on the floor. But each night he had made it through the darkness, and those nights had joined together to form the terrible emptiness that was his life now.

  The bus arrived. He stepped on and paid for Tooting Broadway tube station. It would take a few days for the synapses in his brain to fire normally. In the meantime, he still felt like an inmate trying to stay awake. Outside the tube station he bought and relished a burger and French-fries. He’d forgotten food could taste so good. He bought a ticket to Hammersmith and jumped on the Northern Line to Embankment, changed to the District Line and travelled west to Hammersmith. He was glad to reach the surface and breathe in the cold air. After wandering along King Street, he found a Letting Agent on Ravenscourt Park. The woman who dealt with him looked wary of his dishevelled appearance and after ringing someone to let them know where she was going, and who with she ushered him out and locked the door.

  ‘A woman can’t be too careful these days,’ she said. ‘You could be that axe murderer for all I know.’

  He nearly smiled, but realised that he had forgotten how.

  She took him to what looked like a derelict building and climbed two sets of wooden stairs. A door opened into a narrow cold damp room. At the far end of the room there was a small kitchenette behind a Formica breakfast bar. To the right behind the front door was a single bed, at the foot of which was a desk and a collapsible chair. On the desk was a tiny 14-inch television. Beyond these was an alcove with a curtain that had a shower, toilet and washbasin. To the left of the room against the wall was a ramshackle sofa, and between that and the breakfast bar a window with a green curtain looked out into a dark alleyway. She showed him how to operate the boiler for the hot water and the heating.

  ‘It ain’t the Ritz,’ she said.

  He agreed with her and grunted his acceptance. He’d feel right at home, it looked just like his room at the asylum.

  She handed him the key.

  He accompanied her back to the Letting Agents and used his card to pay the £1,000 she wanted. Half of it was for a month in advance, the other half was a deposit just in case there were any damages.

  He could have rented something more upmarket, but he didn’t need anything fancy. The flat was only a temporary resting-place until he went to join Sarah and the kids, a short-term base of operations.

  There was certainly money in the bank. After the cleaners and decorators had been into the house at 45 Poplar Close, near the Olympia Exhibition Centre, his solicitors had arranged for the house to be sold. That money had remained in his bank for nine months earning interest. Soon, he would also get a tidy sum in compensation and back pay. The money meant nothing to him. Everything that had meant anything in his life was gone.

  He returned to the flat and slept. That’s what the drugs did to him, they made him sleep most of the time. Invariably, when he had picked up one of the novels in the room at the asylum, he could only read two pages before his eyes closed and he was dribbling on his T-shirt.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was three minutes to nine. Anybody who was anybody in the UK media was in the press briefing room. It wasn’t a large room, but that didn’t stop them shoehorning themselves in. Molly was sitting at the front on her own behind a collapsible metal and plastic table covered in a blue cloth. On the wall, directly behind and slightly above her head, was the Hammersmith & Fulham coat of arms with the motif Spectemur Agendo – Judge by Our Labour. Yes, she had no doubt she would be judged by her labour. There were six days left, and she still didn’t know whether she had until the beginning or the end of next Thursday, or whether it would make an
y difference.

  Digital cameras flashed, television cameramen pointed shoulder-mounted video cameras at her. She tried not to look directly into the powerful lights mounted on top of each camera.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press,’ she began wanting to get the ordeal over with.

  A hush descended and they waited expectantly.

  ‘In the early hours of yesterday morning Steven and Fiona Turner, together with their two children, Ben and Patty, were murdered by a person or persons unknown. This is the fourth family that has been murdered over the previous two years, and we have re-opened the investigation into the earlier murders.’

  ‘What about Cole Randall?’ a man shouted from the back.

  ‘He is being released from Springfield Asylum as we speak.’

  There was uproar as many in the room rummaged in pockets and bags for mobile phones, and rang their offices.

  ‘Is he being reinstated?’

  The flashlights and video camera lights blinded her and she couldn’t see who was asking the questions.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you any idea who the killer might be yet?’

  ‘We are pursuing a number of leads.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘It means that as soon as we have anything concrete you’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘What about the families with two children? Should they go on holiday until you find whoever’s doing this?’

  ‘There’s no need to feed people’s fear.’

  ‘We’re not the ones creating panic, Inspector, we’re simply trying to get to the truth, which you keep avoiding.’

  ‘Are there any more sensible questions?’

  ‘Do you know why the killer stopped, and why he has now started again?’

  ‘No, at this point we have no idea.’

  ‘You have no ideas at all, Inspector, do you? Why don’t you just tell us the truth?’

  ‘Thank you for your time. The next press briefing will be at nine-thirty on Monday morning.’

  She stood up and left the briefing room. Outside in the corridor the trembling began. She walked up the stairs to the toilets, went into her usual cubicle, and retched in the bowl. Someone hadn’t flushed the chain after a bout of diarrhoea, which made her retch even more. She eased the toilet lid down, pulled the chain, and sat. It was nine-twenty when she checked her watch, and she had ten-minutes to compose herself. At the washbasins, she swilled out her mouth and washed her face. After deciding she wouldn’t be able to face the rest of the morning without a cigarette she went down the rear stairs into the freezing cold car park and lit up a cigarette.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked, DI Stone,’ Chief Smart said.

  Molly wondered how an ugly woman, the size of the Chief, could walk on gravel without making a noise.

  ‘The odd one, Chief, especially after stressful press briefings.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Well, lets hope you have some good news to tell them soon, Inspector.’

  ‘Yes, let’s hope so, Chief.’

  ‘Will you?’ the Chief said nodding in the direction of the back door and indicating her two full arms.

  Molly opened the door like a concierge at the Ritz.

  ‘Have a good day, Inspector. I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Thanks, Chief, see you later.’

  She finished her cigarette, stubbed it out in the container provided, and followed the Chief inside.

  ***

  The team was in the incident room ready to go. Molly poured herself a coffee and sat down.

  ‘Go,’ she said.

  The first up was DC Lucy Ling. Lucy was of Chinese extraction with long dark hair, pale skin and a pretty face. She lived in Soho with her parents, and helped out in their Chinese Restaurant when she wasn’t chasing murderers.

  ‘The Bates’ family was murdered at 12 Carthew Road two years ago on 29th October,’ Lucy began.

  Using a wooden pointer and smiling like a flight attendant showing passengers where the emergency exits and oxygen masks were, Frank drew attention to the address highlighted on the street map of Hammersmith & Fulham, which was attached to the wall behind and above the boards.

  ‘At first,’ Lucy continued, ‘because the murders were so brutal, everyone thought it was a revenge attack. Enquiries produced no leads in that direction. Then a second family was murdered, and we realised a serial killer was plying his trade on our patch.’

  Frank transferred the pointer to his left hand and indicated the gory photographs on the second board.

  ‘Hey, don’t start using my board,’ Abby said.

  ‘The way the crime scene was arranged hasn’t changed for all four murders, with the exception of the third family because Cole Randall was left alive.’

  Frank pointed to a photograph of Cole Randall on the third board.

  ‘We checked the backgrounds of both parents – Terry Bates had recently been made redundant from a sweet-making factory, his wife worked in a chip shop – there was nothing significant about either of them. The children – Terry Jr and Margaret – were normal kids. As far as we could ascertain, there was no reason this family was selected over any other family – they were just unlucky. There also appears to be no motive, or should I say, if there is a motive we haven’t found it yet.’ She looked at Molly. ‘Maybe Dr. Grady can give us some clue on that when she arrives later.’

  Molly gave a nod, but said nothing. She was making notes on a sheet of paper.

  Lucy continued. ‘The killer forces entry through a downstairs window or door. The parents are chloroformed first, and then the children. He strips the adults, and it’s possible he has sex with the woman, but that has yet to be confirmed. He dismembers the man in the living room putting the torso on the sofa, and scattering the limbs throughout the house. The woman is butchered in the kitchen, leaving the torso on the table or worktop, again scattering the limbs. The decapitated heads of both adults are put on the windowsill in the bathroom facing the door. He then strips the children. The boy’s torso is left in the bedroom, the limbs dispersed around the house again, and the head put next to the parent’s heads in the bathroom.

  Throughout Lucy’s description of the killer’s behaviour, Frank pointed at the photographs on the first board to add graphic colour to her words.

  ‘The girl, however, is an anomaly. The killer carves a symbol on her forehead, leaves the axe in her upper spine, and puts her on the lower stairs in the same position at each crime scene.’

  Frank pointed at the bloody symbol first, then the naked photograph of the ten-year-old Margaret Bates.

  Lucy sat down.

  Next up was Abby. Frank used the pointer again. It was like watching double acts auditioning for the same parts: ‘Craig and Carol Anderson, with their two children – Wendy and Tom – were the second family murdered on 7th May the following year. We have no explanation for the sixth month gap between the two crimes. The murders took place at 65 Aspen Gardens. The bodies were arranged in exactly the same way as those at the Bates’ crime scene except for the symbol on the girl’s forehead, and the Tarot card.’

  Lucy stood up. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mention the Tarot card, I thought we could talk about them at the end.’

  Molly nodded again. ‘Carry on Abby.’

  ‘Well, that’s all we have really.’

  Paul covered the Randall family murders at 45 Poplar Close. ‘DI Miller thought he’d solved the case. As Lucy said, this crime scene was exactly the same as the previous two except that the father – DI Cole Randall – was left alive. His fingerprints were on the murder weapon, the blood from each family member was splattered on his clothing, and his footprints were all around the house. But what put him in the loony bin were the photographs of the first two murders found in the garage with his fingerprints all over them. Also, he couldn’t remember anything after the evening meal, and the psychiatrist said he’d probably had a psychotic break, which made it
easy for DI Miller to convict him. Now, of course, we know he didn’t do it, and the killer must have drugged Randall and planted all the evidence.’

  Paul sat down.

  Molly said, ‘Tony you’re on.’

  Tony leapt up. ‘The Turner murders took place in the early hours of yesterday at 16 Crisp Road. The crime scene was a mirror image of the first two except that the pathologist – Doc Firestone – has found a blonde pubic hair on the mother, which doesn’t belong to either of the adult victims. The DNA is being extracted and put through the National Database, we’ll know if there’s a match this afternoon.’

  Molly took centre stage. ‘Thanks, Tony. Okay, let’s see what we have. I’ve made a couple of notes here. First, how did we find out that the families had been murdered?’

  ‘Anonymous tip-offs,’ Frank replied. ‘The call came in at two-fifty a.m. on Friday 29th October from a man.’

  ‘A 999 call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tape?’

  Frank rummaged in one of the Bates’ evidence boxes and held a tape up.

  ‘Find a player, Tony,’ Molly said.

  Tony came back with a cassette player and an extension lead. They listened to the distorted message:

  Police?

  A family have been murdered.

  Your name, Sir?

  The address is 12 Carthew Road.

  Molly said, ‘Someone should have compared all three calls, maybe obtained voice analyses. Now we have four. Get all the tapes out, we’ll take them up to forensics later.’

  While Frank found the other tapes and placed them on the table Abby said. ‘We should re-interview any witnesses, and check their statements to see if they’ve remembered anything else.’

  ‘Good idea, Abby,’ Molly said. ‘I’ll leave each of you to do that by tomorrow evening. Anything else?’

  ‘What about the locations, Gov?’ Paul said.

  ‘Meaning?’