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

toilets. Still meeting places for sad old men trying so hard and for so long to subdue their urges and hide their dirty secrets. And he went so far, up the A1 and down to the M25, ever searching. Harder and harder as time passed and, he guessed, so many of these men found what they wanted on the internet.

But there were always one or two. One here, another there. All middle-aged men in suits.

Six, nine months apart, sometimes a year. He once held out for as long as eighteen months.

Never the same part of the country the next time, though.

He had not killed in Suffolk for almost five years. Last time, the man’s disappearance made the front page of the local newspaper, as they often did. A respectable man goes missing. Sobbing wife and bewildered children make an appeal. A flurry of publicity and then a sudden deafening silence; no doubt because the man’s secret life had been exposed. Assumptions were made by the police and finally the family. A runaway off to start a new life with a gay lover. Or a suicide, as likely as not. The wife and children eventually accepting, in the unending silence, that he had taken his own life.

Only now did he dare to come back, to his home patch of East Anglia, to hunt. Felt it safe to do so. Great Yarmouth, Beccles, Acle and now Lowestoft. He had checked out all of the parks there, one by one, making sure they met all of his criteria before he made his next killing. No speed cameras nearby. No CCTV in or around the park. A public toilet, run-down and unnoticed. Out of the way. And an empty, largely unused park free of mothers with young children, and teens on pushbikes, and families.

Again, as dusk was falling fast, he saw a man walking by. A young man, maybe thirty, thirty-five. Married, most likely. With a pretty young wife and two little children. Blonde-haired girl. Cheeky-faced boy. All oblivious to his other, sordid life of public toilets and casual sex with strangers; men he’d never see again. Thought maybe this was a place where men like this still met.

The young man stopped.

Turned towards the man with the latex gloves. Smiled.

About as obvious as he could be.

The man with the latex gloves watched as the young man turned away and walked into the toilets. A final look back and the young man disappeared inside the building.

He sighed to himself, the man with the gloves, patting the bin bags in one pocket and then the black tape in the other.

He wanted an older man, someone like himself these days, someone who he could kill easily. Not someone young and strong and more powerful than him.

He rose from the bench, looked towards the toilets and then turned and walked away, screwing up the crumpled brown bag in his hand and throwing it angrily towards the ducks.

He knew exactly who he wanted.

For his thirtieth kill.

Someone old who looked like Father. 9. WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER, MORNING

Gayther and Carrie sat opposite each other in the staff canteen the next morning. Gayther had a fabric plaster stuck to his forehead, which Carrie tried hard to ignore.

Both held paper cups of coffee in their hands and shared a packet of three custard creams.

Carrie broke the last biscuit in two and gave Gayther the slightly larger piece. She wanted to tell Gayther he’d look better without the plaster on his head but could not quite bring herself to raise the matter.

“So, what’s on the schedule today, guv?”

“Have we got the likely lads in?”

“Likely …? Oh, no, Cotton and Thomas are on a course today. ‘Politically Correct Bollocks’ I think you’d call it, guvnor. We should have them back again tomorrow, I think, or at least part of it. Did you have something in mind for them, guv?”

“No, not especially, they’ve given me their notes so far. All of their thoughts. I wanted to arrange for the evidence we had from the original murders to be taken for DNA testing, though. They could have done the to-ing and fro-ing, dogsbody work on that for us. No matter, we can leave it just for the moment.”

“Anything they’ve spotted that we haven’t? In their notes. They’re bright boys.”

Gayther laughed.

“Not exactly. For one of the murders, they found a mention in a statement that Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, they explained, in case I didn’t know who Quasimodo was, had been seen lurking in the pub. And for another, there was a reference to Frankenstein being there … again, they explained the difference to me between Frankenstein, Doctor Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s monster, his creation. Kind of them, I’m sure.”

“And what did you say?”

Gayther saw her smirk.

He laughed again.

“Um … I said to them that it was Norfolk and it’s like the Hammer House of Horrors up there – Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon …”

“Count Duckula?”

“Him too … and I explained the whole inter-breeding thing to them as well … marrying cousins and aunties and all of that … and so, for Norfolk, looking like Quasimodo and Frankenstein—”

“Frankenstein’s monster.”

“Yes, well, it’s normal for Norfolk.”

“And what did they say, guv, Cotton and Thomas?”

“They seemed a bit bemused, to be honest.”

Carrie laughed as she finished her biscuit and cleared her throat.

“So, being serious for a moment, guv, what exactly do we have from the original murders? When I went through the notes, it wasn’t clear.”

“Not a lot, Carrie. I’ve just been checking. Long time ago. Another world. You’ll have seen the typewritten reports of each case from Hendry, the officer in charge at the time. There were three or four others involved. Hendry’s long gone. He passed over back in the 1990s. Lung cancer. I went to his funeral. His wife seemed surprisingly cheerful, if I remember right. The others will have one foot in the grave by now. We’ll catch up with them at some point, have a quiet word with those who are still