You Are Dead

70

Thursday 18 December

Six hours later, in the mortuary, Roy Grace’s worst fears were confirmed. Both young women were branded, on the inside of their right thighs, with the wording, U R DEAD.

Pathologist Nadiuska De Sancha was standing over Ashleigh Stanford’s naked body, taking fluid samples from her stomach and bladder for testing, but she was already fairly confident of the cause of death for both young women. Both had the tiny, blotchy red spots of petechial haemorrhaging in the whites of their eyes, on their eyelids and at the top of the cheekbones, which was brought on by oxygen starvation through asphyxiation. Neither of them had bruising around their necks, nor damaged hyoids, but their lungs were filled with water. They had drowned. Both women had been sexually assaulted but no DNA was found.

Ashleigh Stanford had bruises to her body and abrasions to her face, consistent with falling off her bike. She also had a large bruise to her forehead, sufficient to have caused concussion. In addition, she had seventeen contusions to her body consistent with being struck with a blunt instrument, as well as bruising on her knuckles indicating she had, perhaps, tried to fight off her attacker.

Emma Johnson had ligature marks on her neck, stomach, thighs, wrists and ankles, indicating she had been kept a prisoner.

There was no evidence of strangulation in the two women from thirty years ago either. But there had not been enough soft tissue left of the victims to establish for sure how they had died. They could have been stabbed — but there were usually nicks on the bones of stabbing victims. Possibly shot, but again bullets often struck bones. They might have been poisoned — toxicology tests were being carried out on samples from both bodies. But one problem with testing for poisons was that the pathologists needed to know what they were testing for — which restricted them only to the most obvious ones.

Had they drowned, also, he wondered?

Had the same sicko branded, raped, then drowned them?

What the hell was going on in the Brander’s mind?

Was Logan Somerville being held prisoner? Did that mean she might still be alive?

Photographs of the brandings had been sent to an analyst, and in less than an hour he had confirmed they were, in his opinion, an exact match to the brandings on Katy Westerham and Denise Patterson.

In Grace’s view, the idea of a copycat could now be ruled out. The Brander, intelligent, arrogant, whoever the hell he was — and wherever he had been for these past thirty years — had resurfaced. He postponed today’s press conference, in the light of the present developments, until tonight at 7 p.m.

Shortly before 4.30 p.m., he had left Glenn Branson at the post-mortem of the two women, which was likely to continue for several more hours, and was now back in his office, seated at the round conference table with DCI Sweetman and the forensic psychologist Tony Balazs.

The three of them were staring at the note recovered from Emma Johnson’s fingers this morning. Because of the sensitivity of the location of the deposition site, Grace had already arranged for a representative from the Chattri memorial committee to join the Gold group, to manage any possible community impact.

‘He’s angry,’ the psychologist said. ‘And he’s leaving you in no doubt of his intentions.’

‘That he’s about to kill again?’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ said Tony Balazs. ‘Twice.’

Sweetman nodded in agreement.

‘How the hell do we find him before he strikes again?’ Grace asked.

‘Well,’ Balazs said, ‘one positive is that we’ve succeeded in riling him. Calm people don’t make mistakes, angry people are the ones who do. The Brander is now Mr Angry. He’s determined to strike again very soon to make a point. One of our best hopes is, as we’ve discussed, that he’ll make a mistake through being in a hurry.’

Sometimes the psychologist came over as highly self-important and pompous, which irritated Grace. There was something about people who wore bow ties, other than at formal functions, that he had never liked. Balazs, in his loud, striped suit and even louder bow tie, irritated him now.

Irritated him, he knew, because he was telling a truth that Grace did not want to acknowledge.

‘Great, Tony, that’s helpful. But what we have to do is find this bastard before he does that. The press fallout when we announce the double murder is hardly going to reassure the citizens of Brighton and Hove, or Sussex. We have to find him. They will be asking the question: Have the police tactics caused the deaths of these two young girls? And we need to deal with it.’

‘I agree with you, Roy,’ Balazs said. ‘But how are you going to do that?’

Sweetman had Roy Grace’s policy book open in front of him. ‘You’re doing this investigation correctly, Roy. I’ve checked everything, in the light of the resources you have deployed, and I can’t find any windows of opportunity you’ve missed. I think Tony’s right.’

‘You’re saying we have to wait for the offender to screw up?’ Grace said, his temper flaring. ‘Is that how all serial killer investigations work? Because that doesn’t work for me.’

‘What do you want to do, Roy?’ Sweetman said. ‘Put 24/7 surveillance on every woman in Brighton aged between eighteen to thirty who has long brown hair? You have the resources to do that?’

‘The motto of Sussex Police is “To Serve and Protect”,’ Grace replied.

‘So do you want to put out a statement telling every woman in that category to stay indoors until the Brander is behind bars? Put your whole city into a state of even bigger panic?’

Grace shook his head. ‘No, of course we can’t do that. I will use the press conference to tell the media that this huge investigation continues, with many lines of enquiry being followed. The tactic of using the media to help identify and flush out the killer is only one aspect of this complex and fast-moving enquiry. We will never know whether the fate of these two young ladies has been hastened by current events, but we do know for sure that their abductor has killed at least twice before.’

The DCI and the psychologist both nodded.

‘God, what the hell are we missing? There’s something staring us in the face that we’re not getting. Where the hell has this bastard been for the past thirty years?’ He rested his face in his hands for some moments. ‘The HOLMES team has covered every murder in every county in the UK in the past thirty years and there is no potential suspect who matches his profile. Every offender who has killed a woman of similar age and appearance is either behind bars, confirmed as being in a different part of the country, or dead. Interpol has not produced anyone in Europe or further afield and nor has the FBI. Our man is smart.’

‘There are parallels with the BTK case,’ Sweetman said.

‘From what I’ve researched, he enjoyed taunting the police, the way the Brander seems to be enjoying taunting us, from this note,’ Roy Grace said. ‘We know he has different vehicles — and somewhere to store them — which suggests to me he’s a man of means.’

‘The universal profiles of serial killers,’ Balazs said, ‘is they are aged between fifteen to forty-five at the time of their first murder and between eighteen to sixty at the time of their last.’

‘Which fits exactly with our offender,’ Grace said. ‘If his first murders, that we are aware of, were committed in his late teens or early twenties, being approximately thirty years ago, that would put him somewhere between fifty and sixty now.’

‘I would agree with that, Roy,’ Sweetman said.

‘Have you considered using a decoy, Roy?’ the psychologist asked.

‘This is not a case for using a decoy,’ Grace said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘I agree, Roy,’ Sweetman said. ‘But I think from the tone of this note that he’s already selected his next victim. Our best hope is that he screws up because of his anger. I think he may strike again — within hours, possibly.’

‘Within hours?’ Grace said.

‘I’d bet the ranch on it.’