Chapter 55
‘Hicks?’ Laura said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Wilkinson’s assaulted somebody at the hospital. An orderly. Not sure how badly.’
‘Officers arriving there now. Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. I think he’s gone.’
‘Where are you?’
Where was I? I was holding the mobile phone in one hand, the steering wheel with the other, powering the car quickly but carefully between the remaining strands of morning traffic.
‘I’m on my way to his house.’
‘His house? Surely he wouldn’t go there?’
‘He might. I haven’t got any better fucking ideas.’
I’d picked a main road, busier but wider, with better scope to manoeuvre. The shops were flashing past. I blared my horn at a van in front that wasn’t shifting out of my way, watched it lean slowly off into the pavement, then accelerated past.
I said, ‘If he’s planning to run, there might be stuff he needs to get first.’
Not his son, though.
That much was obvious. He was sharp: he’d figured there was no way past me out front of the hospital, so he’d led me back inside, made me think I knew where he was going. But it seemed that he’d never wanted Jake …
Jesus, was that the whole point?
‘Did we check Wilkinson’s alibi?’ I said. ‘Not for all the murders. Just for Marie Wilkinson. For that morning.’
‘Hang on.’
I tried to remember the chronology – we’d made him go over it enough fucking times. Left for work at eight thirty, or thereabouts. Phone call logged from Marie Wilkinson’s neighbour fifteen minutes later. Police on the scene by nine …
‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘But we couldn’t confirm it for sure. He said he got there at nine, but nobody saw him. He had an alibi for some of the others. He – oh, Christ, Hicks.’
‘What?’
‘He works at the army base.’
I nodded to myself. ‘The General.’
‘He’s a janitor,’ Laura said. ‘But why would he get Miller to –’
‘Static.’
‘What?’
‘Static.’
I blared the horn again. Get out of the fucking way.
‘You remember what Joyce said – that the pattern might be hidden amongst the clusters? Well, it was. Except it wasn’t a pattern at all. It was just one murder. Everything else was the static to hide it from us.’
It was unimaginable, but it was the only explanation I could think of.
Wilkinson had paid Miller to provide us with so many killings that it became impossible to keep track of every detail, every alibi.
The people who have died mean nothing to me.
And of course they hadn’t. Only one person had, but by the time he’d killed her – him, not James Miller – that victim appeared to us to be just another part of the series. His uncrackable code.
‘That’s why he got Miller to videotape the killings,’ I said. ‘Nothing to do with wanting to sell them. He just wanted to see them. Study them. So he could make the one he carried out look identical.’
The only indoor murder.
I wanted to punch the steering wheel in frustration at having missed it.
The truth is I still don’t know quite when it will begin myself. That is why it’s going to work.
That is why you’ll never catch me.
‘But Hicks, this is …’
‘I know. Incomprehensible.’
Evil.
And although I didn’t believe in that, I didn’t know another word to describe what Wilkinson had done. It didn’t fit anywhere in my architecture of crime. It wasn’t from any kind of room at all, no matter how dark. It was something from the outside.
‘I know,’ I said again. ‘I need backup, just in case.’
‘They’re on their way. I’m heading out too.’
‘Good.’
I knew I would get there first.
But I sped up anyway.
Five minutes later, I arrived at the semi-detached house where, until last week, Tony and Marie Wilkinson had lived.
That whole time, she must have believed they were in a happy, loving relationship, expecting their first child together, when the opposite was true.
The whole time he’d been planning, ever so carefully, to get rid of her. To get rid of his child.
And it had all been for nothing. His plan hadn’t worked, because he’d been disturbed before he could finish the only murder he cared about. Jake had survived.
His car was outside the house – or at least, a car was: a silver hatchback parked across the driveway.
It looked abandoned. I pulled close in alongside it, blocking it in as best I could, then got out and crouched down, surveying the house.
I was vaguely familiar with its internal layout from my last visit, but the exterior was a different matter.
How many exits did I need to take into account?
There was a driveway to the left, ending in a garage, with a wooden door beside it that appeared to lead off behind the house, presumably into the back garden.
The house itself was two storeys. The front door was shut.
There was a living room to the right of it, I remembered, and a small kitchen to the left, where we’d found Marie Wilkinson, and where the desperate paramedics had been forced to deliver Jake Wilkinson.
I hadn’t been upstairs. Looking up to the first floor now, there were two windows of equal size. Both sets of curtains were closed.
He won’t be here.
Because, as Laura had said, why would he be?
And yet, the thought that he might be escaping out of the back of the house even now was too much for me. He couldn’t be allowed to get away, not after what he’d done.
I wasn’t going to let him. And so, for the second time in my career – and the second time in a week – I took my gun out of its holster and started forward.
Making my way around the car, I kept my gaze focused on the front door but took in the areas around it too, trying to catch any movement in the windows or the driveway, and then headed up the path as quickly as possible, crouching low, gun held double-handed, pointed at forty-five degrees, ready to raise it.
My heart was thumping, and I tried to breathe slowly to keep myself calm. But when the front door opened without a sound, my heartbeat went up again.
Someone’s here.
Unless he’d just left it unlocked.
Peering inside, the house felt silent and empty. There was nobody in the hallway. Nobody visible at the top of the stairs.
I stepped in, immediately covering the open kitchen on the left.
The last time I’d been here, bloodstains had been swirled and crusting on the floor.
In the intervening time, someone had cleaned the blood away, but the air still smelled faintly of it.
A couple of flies had settled on the tiles and were turning slowly, as though pinned in place.
No sign of Wilkinson.
I cleared the rest of the ground floor quickly, sweeping the living room and then the kitchen at the rear of the house. The window there gave a smudged view of the back garden, enough to tell it was fenced off on all sides. Nobody in sight. I tried the back door anyway, but it was locked.
I moved back to the staircase and scanned the first floor landing again. Nobody to see. I listened carefully, and heard nothing.
He wasn’t here.
Sometimes you just know. The silence has a different quality when a place is empty. He had probably been back here, because the front door was open, but I’d missed him.
In the distance, I could hear sirens.
I raised my gun anyway and started up the stairs, which creaked softly under my feet.
I slowly lowered it to horizontal as I reached the landing, turning to face the small hallway.
There were three doors up here: two open, one closed.
The open ones revealed a bathroom and the main bedroom, both empty.
I approached the closed one more cautiously, keeping to one side of it as best I could.
Just in case. Took one hand off the gun to turn the handle and push –
Wilkinson was here.
He was standing with his back to me, head bowed so far that I could only see his neck and the bottom of his crew cut, gelled black by sweat.
He was dressed in full military regalia – a starched-straight, dark-green suit with red tassels circling the shoulders. The General. He looked impossibly broad. His arms were at his sides, slightly away from his hips. In his right hand, he was holding a gun.
I stepped away to one side of the doorframe and pointed my own gun at the centre of his back.
‘Tony.’
I said it softly, not wanting to startle him, but he showed no signs of hearing me. Didn’t move the single muscle it would probably have taken for me to open fire on him right there and then.
I looked around the room.
It was a nursery – or the makings of one anyway.
The walls were painted a childish sky-blue, but needed a second coat, and there was a half-constructed crib resting to one side.
Opposite, on the other, there was a desk with a computer monitor on it.
At the far end, beyond Wilkinson, the cream curtains were drawn, catching the morning sun and filling the room with soft light.
To him, if he had his eyes open, it probably felt like facing heaven.
‘Tony. Put the gun down.’
Again, no response. I edged even further to the side of the doorframe, as far as I could get while still maintaining my aim. Despite his stillness, or maybe because of it, there was a tension to the air. The feeling that something might explode at any moment.
I forced myself to ignore the sensation. It was the kind that can hypnotise you if you let it. It can get you killed.
‘What are you doing, Tony?’
No reply – but the answer was obvious, wasn’t it.
He knew we’d discovered the truth, and that sooner or later we’d catch him, so, rather than running, he’d returned here to get changed into his uniform and wait.
He could have ambushed me if he’d wanted – or tried to, at least. But he hadn’t.
Which meant that, despite the gun, he wasn’t planning to take anyone else down with him. And yet, he hadn’t surrendered either.
Suicide by cop.
‘Tony –’
‘He would have been proud of me, you know.’
He sounded almost wistful.
‘Who would?’
‘My father.’
‘I doubt that somehow.’
‘Oh, but you didn’t know him.’
Outside, the sirens were louder now. Almost here, perhaps. Not that it would solve anything.
I said, ‘Is that his uniform?’
‘Yes. He was a good man. A military man. A soldier.’
‘Right.’
‘And this is his weapon. That’s what you call it. That’s what he told me: always a weapon, never a gun. Because you never know for sure what your enemy is holding, only that he’s armed.’ Wilkinson paused. ‘And you’re armed, of course.’
The tension in the air went up.
‘Yes.’ I checked my grip on the gun. ‘But I don’t want to shoot you, Tony. What I want is for you to kneel down very slowly and place the gun on the floor.’
‘You mean the weapon.’
‘Yes.’
‘And if I don’t then you’ll shoot me?’
I didn’t reply. Behind me, from downstairs, I heard footfalls. The back-up had arrived and was inside. Laura called my name but I ignored her. Wilkinson did too. He seemed oblivious to the officers storming the house below us.
‘Why did you do it, Tony?’
It was his turn now to remain silent.
‘Was it that bad for you, the prospect of becoming a father?’ No reply, so I fought for something else to say. Some other desperate insight. All I had was close to home: ‘Were you worried your son might turn out like your father?’
‘No.’ And his voice was flushed with sudden anger. ‘He was a good man. He never laid a hand on us. Raised me well. Or tried to anyway. I never made it easy for him. But he’d be proud of me now. Finally.’
‘Not if he was such a good man, he wouldn’t. Not after what you’ve done.’
‘You wouldn’t understand. You broke my code, but you still wouldn’t understand.’
People on the stairs behind me: feet clattering on the wood. I didn’t turn around, but I took a one-handed grip on the gun and waved behind me urgently –
Stay back.
– then got a better grip on the gun again.
‘You think he would have been proud of you killing your wife?’
‘He would have understood my reasons.’
‘Which are?’
He didn’t reply.
‘What about all those other people, Tony? None of those people deserved to die.’
‘He wouldn’t have minded about them.’
‘No?’
‘He would have called them collateral damage.’ Wilkinson’s voice sounded smaller now. Was he starting to cry? ‘They would have meant nothing to him.’
Christ.
‘Why the hell did you do it, Tony? What were you trying to prove? If you didn’t want a child that badly, you could have just walked away.’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I want to.’ Needed to, even. I refused to believe that was impossible. ‘Try me.’
‘I would no longer have been able to serve.’
The answer pulled me up short. To serve? What – as a fucking janitor at the army base? But then, like his father before him, he worked for the military, didn’t he? Albeit in a far more limited way …
One that wouldn’t pay enough to support a child.
Jesus.
Was that really what it came down to? All of this so he could continue to work at the base. He’d be proud of me now. A job in the army and a code we hadn’t been able to crack.
‘Tony,’ I said – but he shook his head. He was talking to himself, very quietly, almost a whisper.
His hand, holding the gun, twitched slightly.
‘Tony. Don’t.’
‘You’re a soldier. So you should be able to do this.’
Despite the words, it sounded like he was talking to someone else. His hand twitched again.
‘Tony,’ I said. ‘Don’t make me.’
‘You should be able to do this.’
And before I could react, he lifted the gun in one swift, furious movement to the side of his head, and he pulled the trigger.