Chapter 45
I drove north-east slowly, unsure what I was looking for. The roads were quiet out here: a fringe hemming the top corner of the city, spreading out towards occasional factories and isolated properties, but little else.
The land was half wild. For much of my journey, the road cut through woodland: walls of trees on either side, the branches sometimes meeting overhead, so that I passed through natural, leaf-lit tunnels filled with midges.
The morning sun mottled everything. Where the trees cleared, it created bright expanses of shimmering tarmac.
More than once, I saw deer darting between the trees parallel to the road, little more than shadows that resolved into animal shapes in my mind only after they had vanished.
I kept the window rolled down, my elbow on the sill, listening to the clicks of the undergrowth and the trill of birdsong.
For long stretches, I was totally alone.
The few vehicles I met coming the other way were mostly rusted pick-ups, scooters, an occasional cyclist angling past. I drove slowly, the tarmac passing smoothly beneath the car, keeping my senses tuned for a sign.
I didn’t know what. What could there be that would be obvious?
But still …
And then I braked – a little quicker than I intended.
Something had caught my attention. For a moment I wasn’t sure what it was. But as the car slowed to a halt, I heard a slight crackle and realised it had been that. Just a sound. The slightest variation in the texture of the road beneath the tyres.
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. So I cranked on the handbrake and got out of the car.
Outside, the smell of the countryside hit me properly.
The area felt fresh and full and alive; a slight breeze wafting through the woodland brought out the rich scent of the undergrowth.
The trees to either side were packed tight.
The grass at their bases was swirled and messy, but had grown high enough in places to wrap around the lowest branches, forming green curtains.
I listened. At first, everything was silent, but then the world resolved itself into tiny clicks and buzzes. Not human noises. Looking all around me, I might as well have been the only person in the world.
I walked a little way back down the road, kicking at the tarmac, looking for whatever had made the noise. It didn’t take long to find it – to find them. Hundreds of tiny, white pellets of wax, scattered over the surface of the road.
I crouched down. The car tyres had smeared a lot of the wax into streaks, while the morning sun had already begun to melt other bits. It looked like glue on the tarmac.
He waits by the roadside, I remembered.
Maybe flags down cars for help.
Maybe knocks cyclists over.
I stood up quickly again. The world remained quiet and still.
It took a minute or two to establish the range the wax had spilled over and work out where the accident must have happened.
Levchenko would have been riding from the opposite direction, back from the warehouse, and come off his bicycle a little past where I’d pulled up.
At which point, the bike would have skidded along, the wax spilling across the road.
I imagined the sound of rice pouring into a metal pan.
There was no sign of the bicycle itself, but that could easily have been hidden in the undergrowth somewhere along the road.
The killer could have dealt with that. But not the wax.
There was nothing he could have done about that; there was too much of it.
Maybe he’d figured it would disappear soon enough, as it was already beginning to.
Or maybe he hadn’t noticed it at all.
I walked back to the car, feeling nervous but excited.
I kept an eye and ear on the woodland to either side of me.
It appeared deserted. Dead. Even so, I reached under my jacket and unclipped my gun holster.
In all my years of active duty, I’d never had to use my firearm.
Not once. And I didn’t take it out now. Not yet.
Okay.
Now what?
My radio was on the passenger seat of the car. I picked it out, clipped it onto my belt, then locked the vehicle. The sensible thing to do – the right thing – was to call the scene in. SOCO wouldn’t be pleased to have me trampling all over it any more than I already had.
I listened again. Nothing. No human sounds. It was deceptively tranquil here.
Let’s just see first.
I walked up and down the road, looking for a likely entrance into the woodland.
There was nothing obvious at first glance on either side, so I picked the beginning of the wax as my starting point.
It must have been more or less where Levchenko had been struck, and it stood to reason that the killer wouldn’t have wanted to drag a semi-conscious man too far up the road.
He’d have wanted to get him out of sight as quickly as possible.
The undergrowth crunched beneath my shoes as I stepped through, using my shoulders rather than hands to support me against the trees.
A little way in, the grass was more pressed down, and I spotted blood on a fanned blade of leaves.
My stomach dropped, but my heartbeat picked up, my skin tingling.
I could picture it in my head. This was where the killer had left Levchenko before returning to the road for the bicycle.
There was still no sign of that. Presumably he’d dragged it deeper into the forest, along with his victim.
I edged sideways between the trees, avoiding the blood, then crept softly through the foliage, moving branches aside as quietly as possible.
A short distance ahead of me, the trees opened out into a clearing of sorts.
The ground was uneven, as though mounds of something had been dumped in piles and had then grown over.
Here and there, recognisable debris poked out of the mulch.
The rusted corner of a washing machine, rubber hanging from the rim of its huge, half-submerged eye.
A scatter of empty CD cases. The twisted handlebars of a child’s tricycle.
An old rubbish tip, I realised. Long forgotten now.
By most people.
I stood listening for a few seconds. Everything seemed quieter than back on the road. There was a hush to the place, as though the world was holding its breath. As though something invisible was standing nearby, keeping still and silent. Waiting.
Nobody here though. Not right now …
And then, scanning the clearing, I saw it.
There was a higher ridge of earth over to the left; it looked like the lip of a crater beyond.
On the top, lying on its side, there was a bicycle.
It was old and worn, but it clearly hadn’t been here as long as the other rubbish.
The handlebars were wrenched to one side.
It looked like its neck had been broken.
Levchenko, I thought.
But he had to be here, of course. Didn’t he?
I moved around the perimeter of the clearing until I reached the bottom of the ridge.
The earth there was a mess of leaves and soil and litter.
It compressed under my feet as I walked up, then lifted itself again behind me.
I reached the top of the ridge and stared over.
Down the slope, there was another clearing, and …
It was the place.
I fell still.
They were all here. Furthest away, two bodies were like husks, little more than piles of old clothes.
What skin was visible was so discoloured that it barely stood out against the ground.
I spotted a third corpse half in the trees on the far right-hand side: a man lying on his back, with his shirt wrenched up around his armpits, black holes spiderwebbing a pale, distended stomach.
A fourth victim was lying on his front with his bottom in the air, like a baby sleeping.
Another was seated against a tree, entirely decapitated.
The sixth was curled into a foetal position in the centre of the clearing.
This was the man I’d watched being murdered in the video – and the sight of him made me shudder, because that hadn’t been how he’d been left when the camera turned off.
He must somehow have still been alive when the killer left – just barely.
Some meagre scrap of life had caused his body to move, searching out that first and final position of comfort.
And Levchenko …
He was lying on his back at the bottom of the ridge, just below me, his head tilted back as if to stare up at me.
But he had nothing to see with anymore. The killer had obliterated every feature below his hairline.
His forearms poked up in the air, fingers splayed, as though frozen in the act of playing a piano.
The slight breeze ruffled his hair softly.
This was the place. The killing ground.
I stared down at Levchenko, still holding myself as still as the victims before me –
Squawwwk!
I spun around, my foot skidding on the mulch slightly, sinking in, sending a scattering of it down the ridge. It was the radio at my hip. Birds scattered in the trees above, but the first clearing, behind me, remained empty.
I unclipped the radio.
‘Hicks,’ I said.
‘What’s going on?’ Laura’s voice sounded loud and harsh in the silence of the woodland. ‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know exactly. An old rubbish tip just off the Hawthorne Road. Not sure where – a couple of miles up from the Newark end. It’s … I found it.’
‘The dump site?’
I glanced behind me at the bodies, then started back down into the first clearing. ‘Yes. I’m going to head back to the road. I need support out here asap. This is … it’s going to take a while.’
‘Do we want –’
‘To stake it out?’ Did we want to draw attention to the scene, she was asking, or could we observe it from a distance – wait to see if ‘Jimmy’ returned.
‘I don’t know. He’s taking them from the road, so if there’s another way into the site we could maybe access it from there, keep surveillance on the road itself. ’