Chapter 10
‘Derek Evans,’ I said.
Laura glanced up as I walked triumphantly back into the office. I didn’t know how long she’d been back from the post-mortems but she still looked a little pale. Still managed to whip out the sarcasm though.
‘You’ve got the wrong office then. This is Laura Fellowes and some jerk called Hicks.’
‘Lame.’ I closed the door behind me. ‘That’s the name of our John Doe. Derek Evans.’
‘Okay.’
She began typing. As she pulled the name from our files, I told her what I’d found out in Troll East.
According to the guy I’d spoken to, Evans was somewhere in his fifties and had been a squaddie when he was younger.
After leaving the service, he’d wandered for a bit, never landed fully on his feet.
Dragged a troubled history underground with him and found some kind of god to help salve it with.
He was a big guy that nobody messed with.
‘Nothing on the files for him.’
‘No convictions,’ I said. There were a dozen other databases we could check.
Evans was bound to show up somewhere, especially having served.
And despite my unease about the man I’d spoken to in the tunnels, the details all fitted.
‘He hadn’t been seen around for a few days, but that’s not unusual.
Evans liked the open air, apparently – liked to sleep outside when the weather was good enough. So that seems right.’
Laura nodded.
‘Where does this leave us?’
‘We’ll need to check for connections to Vicki Gibson. Seems unlikely, but you never know. What did we get from the post-mortems? You still look a bit green, by the way.’
‘Mmm. I think you got the better deal after all.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
She told me what the autopsies had revealed, although a lot of the information remained provisional and tests still needed to be run. The upshot so far was that Dale was convinced the same weapon had been used in both attacks – or, at least, the same type of weapon.
‘A hammer, he guesses.’
‘That fits.’
‘Time of death is also roughly what we were expecting. Some time between two and three in the morning, although it’s hard to be totally sure. He can’t say what order they were killed in. Well, not from that anyway.’
I frowned. ‘Not from that. Explain.’
‘There’re two things. The first is the ferocity of the attacks. It’s not conclusive, but a lot more damage was meted out on Evans. That might indicate that after Gibson the killer wasn’t …’ She grimaced. ‘Spent.’
‘Nice.’
‘That’s Dale’s choice of words.’
‘Dale needs to see a psychiatrist,’ I said. It didn’t seem all that conclusive to me, not necessarily. ‘What’s the other thing?’
‘The other thing is what makes it almost certain that we’re dealing with the same killer. Dale found traces of polythene in both bodies.’
‘Polythene?’
‘Traces of it,’ she said. ‘In their wounds, to be precise. And there was much more of it in Evans’s skull than in Gibson’s.’
She let that sink in.
‘A carrier bag?’ I said.
Laura nodded. ‘That’s Dale’s guess. Still to be confirmed. But it looks like the hammer was in a bag when the killer hit the victims with it. It must have got slightly damaged while he used it on Gibson, so he left a lot more behind during the assault on Evans.’
I blew out slowly.
The horror of it was one thing – the imagery it conjured up – but I tried to concentrate on what it meant. Had the killer been attempting not to leave evidence behind? That didn’t make much sense.
‘He wanted to keep the weapon clean?’
‘Could be,’ Laura said. ‘Or else he wanted to carry it around without arousing suspicion. Beforehand, obviously. Not much chance of that afterwards, I’m guessing.’
‘Unless he turned the bag inside out.’
Laura grimaced again. ‘You have a sick mind, Hicks. But that’s also true.
The river search has turned up lots of old bags, so that’ll keep us busy.
I’ve also amped up the search of bins in the vicinity.
It’s possible he abandoned the bag when he was done with it, especially if it had ripped that badly. ’
‘Maybe.’
I didn’t think we’d get that lucky though.
I leaned back in my chair, thinking it all over.
Our killer had come prepared to attack Vicki Gibson; he’d been successful enough in that – but then he’d wandered a reasonably short distance, found Evans asleep on a bench, and killed him too, even more viciously.
I said, ‘We need to find the connection between them.’
‘If there is one.’
‘There must be something. If not, it means we’ve got a guy who attacks people at random. And that doesn’t make any sense to me. None. At. All.’
‘Maybe not entirely at random,’ Laura said.
‘What do you mean?’
She sighed, then gestured vaguely at the piles of paperwork on the desk. The witness reports – the interviews that had got us nowhere because, for some inexplicable reason, nobody had seen anything at all.
‘Explain?’
‘Maybe she was just the first available person, and Evans the second.’
I looked at the statements. And thought about it. A killer carrying his hammer out of sight in a carrier bag. Just wandering. Innocuous. Someone who didn’t stand out.
Laura said, ‘We were wondering how he’d managed to catch Vicki Gibson at a time when nobody was around and nobody was looking. But maybe that’s not what happened at all.’
‘He didn’t find her deliberately,’ I said. ‘He just happened to be in a place without witnesses when they crossed paths.’
Laura nodded. ‘I think that’s what might have happened.’
‘That would mean it could have been …’
‘Anyone,’ she said. ‘Yes. I think it could have been anyone. Anyone at all.’