The Scribbler by Iain Maitland (a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT) 📗

That won’t be her real name because her proper name would be harder to pronounce …” Gayther hesitated for a moment and then went on, “Chinese people usually choose their own names when they arrive here. So she’d have picked Sally probably because she liked the sound of it.”

“Jen, then … or maybe Sally was adopted by The Scribbler’s family?”

“Pushing the coincidence a bit far, Carrie.”

“More than The Scribbler happening to turn up where one of his victims lived?”

“Yes, because for it – your supposition – to have been possible, The Scribbler would have had to have confided he was a serial killer to his supposed sister and – and – she would then have had to stumble across Lodge, the talkative victim. That’s two big ifs. The latter’s conceivable, the former isn’t, not in my book.”

Carrie nodded.

“But look, it does no harm … if you do some digging and, later today or tomorrow, if you want to see if you can talk to them again separately … that’s fine by me. Do what you need to do to discount them. Low profile though … I don’t want Mrs Coombes complaining about harassment. I’m due a meeting with the boss man – Bosman – later this week. I don’t want to be hauled before him to explain myself before that.”

“So, who else do we put in the magic circle?” piped up one of the young men. Gayther did not look up fast enough to see who it was. No matter, they were identical twins to him.

“Okay, Thomas, Cotton … We also have the man who visited Miss Bright and asked about the vicar. Did Carrie cover that? So, we put Karen Williams, the care assistant who dealt with him, on the board for him. Elsworthy is the singer who came in to entertain the residents. He’s on the list, too.”

Gayther added ‘Bright?’ and ‘Karen Williams’ and ‘Elvis Elsworthy’ to the board, then thought better of it, and rubbed out ‘Elvis’ with the corner of his sleeve. “We’ve got their details and I’m going to pay a visit to them, one this afternoon, one in the morning.”

“And us, sir?” one of the young men asked. Gayther could not remember which was which. The one on the left. “What can we do?”

“We’ll also go back to the original three suspects,” said Gayther. “Challis the plumber, Halom the drag act and Burgess the sales agent. We want to know what they were doing the night of Lodge’s death. You never know. See what you can find out about them first – bring me updates and addresses as soon as possible and we can take it from there. But online only at this stage. I don’t want you to get ahead of yourselves, alert them to the investigation. Can you can start now?”

“We’ll get straight on to it, sir,” one said.

“Right away,” echoed the other.

“And then,” said Gayther, writing on the whiteboard, “we have ‘Mr X, The Scribbler’. He may not be … Bright or Elsworthy … Challis, Halom or Burgess. He may be someone we can find in the files … or someone who’s not on the radar at all.”

He stopped and pointed at the two young men.

“As well as following through on the suspects, I want you to go through all of the files, see if anything catches your eye, that might have been missed. Suspects first, then files. And the two victims who got away, see what you can find on them too.”

They looked at each other, ready to go.

He waved them down, just for the moment.

Then turned to Carrie.

“And you, Carrie. I want you, as well as seeing Sally and Jen … and looking at the files … to find me a list of men in their twenties who died within a month, three months, maybe six of the last murder. Why did he stop killing? They sometimes keep going until they’re caught. Why did this one, with all that blood and death, suddenly stop?”

He went on, talking to Carrie still.

“And then get me a list and details of the other men who have gone missing from Norfolk and Suffolk … maybe Cambridgeshire, too … over the years. Those who have never turned up again. Maybe he hasn’t stopped killing. Maybe he’s been doing it for the past thirty-odd years in different places and we’ve just not realised it. If that’s the case, God help us, we’ve one of the biggest serial killers of all time on our hands.”

* * *

“Karen? Karen Williams?” Gayther stood in the porch of the neat, semi-detached house in a close in a nondescript housing estate in Saxmundham in Suffolk.

He’d arrived half an hour or so earlier and been told by a truculent teenage boy that she was out at work but should be back just after three-thirty. He had sat in his car at the top of the road since then, waiting for her arrival.

He had spent most of the time Googling her but could not find anything beyond an old entry for her and a David A. Williams on the 192.com site; no Twitter account, Facebook, Instagram, nothing.

And then she’d walked by him, this slight, anonymous, middle-aged woman in her beige blouse and skirt, and he watched as she went into the house. Waited five minutes, then stepped into the porch.

“Yes, yes, that’s me,” she answered, her hand raised to her forehead, brushing away an imaginary strand of hair. “Kai told me you wanted a word about Reverend Lodge, although I’m not sure how I can …”

She then stopped, as if something had occurred to her suddenly, and she stepped back and added, “… but, where are my manners, do come in and sit down. Can I make you a cup of tea?”

He nodded as he stepped inside the clean but tired-looking house. Not much money, he thought. Just about making ends meet. Struggling, most likely, whenever an unexpected bill came up.

He sat in the living room perched on the edge of an