Chapter 18
There were a couple of things that surprised me about Vicki Gibson’s funeral.
The first was that it was held at a non-denominational chapel: for some reason, I’d had Carla Gibson pegged as a religious woman.
I was right about that, as it happens, but Vicki herself had not been, and her mother had chosen to respect her daughter’s wishes rather than her own.
The second was the number of people that turned up.
It was a quiet, warm morning. Gravel crunched softly beneath my shoes as I walked up the drive, which was lined on either side by luscious, perfectly trimmed green hedges.
Funeral homes, even non-denominational ones, often seem to try to recreate a vision of heaven, of peace and rest. Outside the chapel itself, a crowd had already gathered in advance of the service.
I looked around at everyone slightly wonderingly. Other people’s lives can be mysterious from the outside, and it’s wrong to rush to snap judgements. Vicki Gibson had never been the isolated outsider that her poverty and living circumstances had led me to believe.
I circulated a little – carefully avoiding the officers who were attending more discreetly.
It wasn’t unusual for serial murderers to turn up at the funerals of their victims, or observe them from a distance.
In the immediate absence of other lines of enquiry, the funeral was a high priority for us.
Nobody stood out.
There were a few of the regular customers at the launderette: two women and an elderly man.
Vicki’s co-workers from both jobs turned up, clustered together in two large bunches.
Members of her extended family had travelled to be here.
And there were countless friends from the community, dressed as sombrely and neatly as they could afford.
Everybody present seemed to know somebody. Nobody appeared to be here alone.
After a while, the hearse arrived and a silence settled on the assembled crowd, like a blanket falling.
Six professional pallbearers carried the coffin into the chapel, stepping forward in solemn, practised unison. Gradually, the people followed in after. A few officers mingled with them, although most would remain stationed quietly in the grounds.
I went in last of all.
The chapel was a large hall with a peaked roof. It reminded me, bizarrely, of a holiday chalet: varnished wooden floorboards, clean, white walls and small high windows framed with thick dark wood. Wedges of sunlight hung in the air above.
There were few seats left. I found one at the back.
The coffin rested on a series of rollers in front of a set of drawn, red-velvet curtains at the far end of the room.
The officiant, an old man in old-fashioned clothes, was standing on a small stage to the side of it.
With his glasses and eyebrows, he looked a little like some kind of clockwork owl, bookish and well read.
He kept glancing up, patient and serious, waiting for people to settle and the murmur of conversation to fade.
Every now and then, he smiled gently at the front row.
Through the sea of dark suits, I could make out the back of Carla Gibson’s head, all but lost beneath the frills of a black lace hat.
My attention kept returning to the coffin.
It was the unspoken focal point of the room: the ghost in a crowd that everyone could sense but nobody wanted to acknowledge. Inside it, there was Vicki Gibson as she was now. Reduced from the attractive, hard-working young woman who connected all these people together to nothing.
For obvious reasons, it was a closed coffin, but when you see a dead body nothing is clearer than the realisation that the person is gone.
The absence hits you immediately. And it’s made more striking because the thing in front of you looks like a human being even though it palpably isn’t one anymore.
A dead human body is an awful thing to see.
For a moment, it makes you as still and silent as it is.
Once you get past that, though, there’s usually at least the affirmation that this is what we are: a piece of complex biological machinery that has stopped working – or been stopped. Unlike some officers I know, I’ve never had a problem being an atheist at a crime scene.
Funerals are a different matter though. It seems to me that when people are gathered together, with all their thoughts and memories, it can somehow rekindle the essence of the person lost – almost resurrecting them, but not quite.
They’re not present, but it’s easy to believe they exist again as an odd kind of shadow, one cast not by a presence but an absence, and that they’ve come alive again just enough to hear everyone say goodbye.
Rubbish, obviously – it’s just an illusion. When people are dead, they’re dead, and life for everyone else continues to unfold in its unpredictable manner. Nobody is paying attention apart from us. Nobody else is noticing or keeping score.
The officiant looked up, over his glasses, and smiled gently at the room. It was the exact same expression he’d given Carla Gibson, as though our loss was equal to hers. When he started talking, he addressed the assembled people like friends.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Thank you for coming to this, one of the saddest occasions imaginable.’
One of the saddest occasions imaginable.
Difficult to quantify that, but in some ways the funeral of Derek Evans was worse.
At least Vicki Gibson had the company of her family and friends as she was laid to rest; Evans only had me and Laura, who joined me for this.
None of the ‘friends’ Evans had made below the city had come to bid him farewell.
And the two of us weren’t enough to raise ghosts, shadows or anything else.
‘Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.’
Laura and I stood side by side with the priest in the graveyard, watching as Evans’s cheap coffin was lowered into a hole barely large enough to contain it.
As the priest finished up the perfunctory service, I glanced around.
The cemetery was open and sprawling, the flat ground interrupted only by occasional trees and gravestones – but not here, where the city-funded plots were adorned with nothing grander than a plywood cross and a nameplate.
There was nobody within fifty metres. Nobody watching.
Despite the heat of the day, the breeze drifting across the grass and stone felt cold.
After the service was over, and the coffin had been lowered into the ground, Laura and I wandered away from the grave.
‘He didn’t show,’ I said.
‘You weren’t really expecting him to.’
I shrugged. Not expecting, maybe, but hoping. Because serial killers often did. It was a case of playing the odds again: working the statistics and probabilities. What else did we have right now?
It had been three days since the last known murder, and since then there had been no activity whatsoever.
I didn’t know what to make of it: the initial flurry of killings, the alleged letter, then silence.
It didn’t fit with my expectations based on the textbooks.
Serial killers tend to accelerate. Spree killers continue.
So there had to be some reason for our murderer turning shy, but I couldn’t think what it might be.
Was it deliberate – perhaps part of his supposedly uncrackable code – or was there another explanation?
‘What are you thinking, Hicks?’
We sauntered along. I kicked at the gravel on the path.
‘I’m wondering when we’re going to hear from him again.’
‘You mean a letter?’
‘No, I don’t mean that. He’s not stopped killing. That wouldn’t make any sense.’
‘Not unless he got stopped for some reason.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he was hit by a truck.’
‘We’re not that lucky.’
‘Right now, it feels like we need to be.’
I nodded. Right now, hard work alone wasn’t getting us very far.
The break in the killings had at least allowed us to catch our breath slightly and thoroughly investigate the victims we did have.
Even without taking his letter at face value, every possible connection between the victims – every possible motivation – had to be followed up.
Sandra Peacock, the working girl who’d died first on the waste ground, was thirty years old and a single parent to two little girls.
As an intermittent drugs user and a prostitute she clearly fell into a vulnerable category that separated her from Vicki Gibson.
The only connection between the two women was their similar age.
Beyond that, there were no obvious parallels at all.
John Kramer was forty-three years old: a bouncer at Santiagos nightclub in the Beeston area of the city.
It seemed obvious that he’d been on his way to a different type of work entirely, but discreet enquiries at the club had failed to turn up what that might be.
Regardless, it was clear that the number of people who might want to hurt him was substantially higher than the other victims. That was part of the problem we had.
We might find a plethora of individual suspects for a single murder, but without an over-arching explanation it meant little.
The third victim on the waste ground had been identified as fifty-three year old Marion Collins.
From what we’d learned, she’d had no enemies whatsoever.
Her husband had reported her missing the same morning, but it had taken hours for the report to trickle through to us.
Collins had worked the night shift as a cleaner in an office – a different one to Vicki Gibson – and during the day was a carer for her husband, who was disabled and wheelchair bound.
Despite the age difference, she fitted into a similar demographic to Vicki Gibson – hard-working women, scrabbling to make enough money to support themselves and their loved ones.
But nothing else was similar about the two of them, apart from the devastation their deaths had left behind for their loved ones.
As far as we could establish, neither woman had outstanding debts that might have warranted retribution.
Forensics had given us nothing either. Not on the victims. Not on the letter. Not on fucking anything.
‘Back to earth, Hicks.’
‘I’m totally on earth, Laura. I’m one hundred per cent grounded.’
‘You’re not. You’ve been doing that a lot recently – disappearing off into the ether. It’s not like you to be so dreamy.’
‘It isn’t?’
‘No. Normally you’re more ambivalent.’
‘Wow.’
‘Not in a bad way.’
She meant it as a joke, but I didn’t like to think I came across like that.
‘I’ve never been ambivalent. It’s just there’s no point overdoing it, is there? The dead stay dead regardless. And our job is just to catch the people who made it happen. We’re not …’ I glanced behind us, back to the graveside. ‘Well, we’re not priests, are we?’
‘So what’s different now? Because something is.’
I shrugged. It was difficult to explain. It wasn’t just the case, but it was fair to say the case had come along at the wrong time for me, what with the issues Rachel and I were having.
‘Problems at home,’ I said.
‘Ah. Want to talk about it?’
‘Nope.’ I thought about it. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Shoot.’
‘Do you believe in good and evil?’
‘Fucking hell, Hicks.’ She pulled up. ‘Are you serious?’
I nodded.
‘Okay.’ We set off walking again. ‘I suppose it depends what you mean. Personally, I don’t have much of a problem using those words to describe people. I mean, they’re just words. They’re as good as any, for some of the things we come across, aren’t they?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘But then, there have been some occasions when I’ve had my doubts.’ She shook her head. ‘Like when you see some bastard crying over what he’s done, not understanding how it happened. It’s as though someone stepped in and did it when he wasn’t looking. You know?’
I nodded. ‘Do you think people can be born evil?’
‘Oh, Christ. I don’t know. No. I think people can be born empty. And have shit lives. But that’s not the same thing, is it? It’s like you always say. It’s cause and effect.’
‘Yes.’
‘But it’s all bullshit, Andy. Like you said, we’re not priests. We just have to catch the bastard, not explain him. And we will.’
‘Yes. We will.’
‘And when we do, there’ll be something. He’s not a force for evil. There’s something. There’s a reason.’
‘Because there always is.’
‘Exactly.’ She elbowed me gently. ‘You taught me that. Most of the time I despise you, but deep down I know you’re right about that. You should have more confidence in yourself. I need you on full power right now.’
‘You really hate me most of the time?’
‘It’s more mild irritation.’
‘That’s more what I aim for.’
We walked along a little way. I wanted to believe what Laura had said, but I wasn’t sure I did.
Up ahead, I spotted a groundskeeper. He was an overweight guy in blue overalls, raking the path free of a vague scattering of leaves that had fallen from the trees.
‘Wait here a second,’ I told Laura.
He looked up as I reached him, squinting from beneath a blue baseball cap. He was in his sixties, at least, with skin that was worn and reddened by the elements and by alcohol.
‘Hey there,’ I said.
‘Hey.’
‘You’re the groundskeeper, right?’
‘One of ’em, yeah.’
‘I’m Detective Andrew Hicks.’ I showed him my badge. ‘You work here most days?’
‘Yeah.’ He leaned the rake against a tree. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Not about anything in particular. What’s your name?’
‘It’s Henderson. Stephen Henderson.’
I made a mental note.
‘Okay. Here’s my contact card. It’s got my direct number on it.’ He took it, albeit a little reluctantly. ‘It’s probably nothing, but you ever get any vandalism here?’
Henderson looked around.
‘Not much. Every now and then, you know. The Jewish graves get done over sometimes, but that hasn’t happened for a while.’ He sounded almost accusatory. ‘We called you about that though.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I just want you to keep my card and let me know if anything happens in the future. Okay? Anything at all. Will you do that?’
Henderson frowned.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll be talking to your management too. It’s just that a guy like you, you might notice something that other people don’t. So, anyone hanging about who shouldn’t be, any vandalism, I’d like you to call me. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Thanks for your co-operation.’
I walked back to Laura.
‘What was that about?’ she said.
‘Just thinking on.’ We started walking again. ‘Just thinking on.’