At least this house had only had its current owner in for two years. There would not be a legacy of lifetime killing here, just that of forty-eight months. What Trent could have achieved in that length of time was pretty terrifying, though. Three corpses in the basement for starters. Would more be found?
Sitting there, one floor above, Henry was certain that more bodies would be discovered.
A scraping noise made him stop breathing, listen intently.
Nothing. It was nothing.
As much as he could, he relaxed in that normal room.
His thoughts stayed with those bodies, the remnants of three young girls, murdered by the hands of Louis Vernon Trent and probably George Uren. Their terrible fate made Henry surge with anger. Kidnapped, abused, probably filmed, kept alive for how long? Months, possibly. Then murdered. His eyes moistened as his imagination ran riot. They had been given no chance and no hope. Plucked from the streets, from surroundings they knew well, felt safe and comfortable in. But in an area in which two ruthless predators swooped to survive; firstly by targeting old people, stealing from them, terrifying them and destroying their lives in the process; then pouncing on the young and ending theirs just to feed their perversion.
Henry knew he was the last hope for all those victims. If he missed Trent this time, he would never see him again, of that he was certain. He had disappeared for several years once already, but then come home to build a lair in which he lived with impunity. If he could do it on his home soil, he could do it anywhere. He would learn by his mistakes and would never be found again, and he would still go on living at the expense of the defenceless.
A car drove by. Its headlights sent brief rods of light through the chinks in the curtain.
Henry stayed still, checked his watch. It was a few minutes after midnight, into a new day, and although he had been there for less than an hour, he felt that the chances of Trent returning were ebbing away. Part of him believed Trent would not show, because he was a feral animal with highly developed senses that kept him one step ahead of the game. If he hadn’t already gone, Henry was sure he would intuitively know that his lair had been invaded and would not come back.
Henry had bustled everyone off the property, got the joiner in to do a quick repair to the front door, and the house was back to square one, on the face of it — with the exception that Henry was sitting in the living room, and everyone else, including a bleating Karl Donaldson, had been withdrawn. Henry had been insistent with Donaldson, who said it was foolish just to have only one person in the house. He and Henry had almost had a stand-up row about it, before Henry agreed to a suggestion made by the American which was a bit of a compromise. The nearest plain police car was at least a quarter of a mile away. Others were even further away. Their personal radios were all on a single talk group and ordered not to transmit anything unless urgent.
Another hastily-devised plan, Henry thought, leaving him exposed and a little nervous. He was prepared to give it until daylight. If Trent had not returned by then, it would be all hands to a manhunt.
To Henry, the return seemed unlikely, but it was worth a try.
The time passed on. Henry settled in for the wait, yawned. His earpiece fell out. He replaced it, screwing it in. Sometimes he thought his ears were not the right shape for anything other than good quality headphones.
‘DCI Christie — contact call,’ Henry whispered over his PR.
‘Received,’ comms answered.
He settled back. His stab vest was not the best thing for comfort, especially with the covert cuff/baton/CS harness hanging under his left armpit.
Twenty minutes later he found himself nodding off, the toil of the long hours beginning to play on him. He struggled to keep his eyes open.
‘Shit.’ He took some deep breaths. ‘Not good.’ He sat up and urged himself to keep going. He went ten more minutes before his head fell forwards, the earpiece came out, and he jerked his head upright, rubbed his eyes hard.
Then he sensed something dreadful, but before he could react, his head was yanked backwards and a knife placed across his throat.
‘Long time, no see,’ Louis Vernon Trent whispered into Henry’s ear. ‘If you move, I’ll slit your throat.’
He could feel the narrow, fiercely sharp blade digging into his skin, not quite cutting the surface. Trent was standing behind him, leaning forward so that his head rested on Henry’s right shoulder. Trent’s breath was warm on his ear, the man’s left hand on Henry’s forehead, holding his head back.
‘This is a good trap,’ Trent said.
‘Yeah, I scream, they all come running.’
‘They being?’
‘Lots of cops.’
Trent thought about this and pressed the knife harder into Henry’s skin. ‘Do you know how long it takes to slit a throat? Before they come, that’s how long it takes … and actually, it’s not that good a trap.’ His voice was quiet, no more than a whisper. He seemed calm and relaxed. In control.
‘Good enough for you.’
‘What, you alone in this house? I don’t think so.’
‘How do you know I’m alone?’
‘Watched you all coming and going. I have a friend next door, nice old lady, until she saw you lot and asked me why all you nasty policemen were raiding my house. Now she’s a dead old friend.’
‘Why come back?’ Henry asked. ‘If you knew we were here?’
‘Need to get my money before leaving. And I knew you were here. Couldn’t resist one last chance to kill you, could I, Henry? I always wanted it to be Danny, but she came to another sticky end, so that’s all right. Just had to have the last word with you.’
‘Ego,’ Henry said.
Trent adjusted his stance slightly, getting a better hold on Henry’s head, the knife digging deeper. It felt sharp and deadly. Henry’s nostrils flared. Just one cut — zip — and he was dead, or at least bleeding to death. ‘Ego?’ he laughed. ‘You’re the one with the ego problem, if you think you can catch me all by yourself, with the nearest help, what, three minutes away. You’ll be dead, I’ll be gone by the time they land, when they realize you haven’t made that last contact call.’
Trent’s face was right next to Henry’s. He could feel the skin of the man’s face next to his. He could smell him.
Henry moved his right hand a fraction.
‘So where’ve you been?’ Henry needed to keep him talking.
‘Around … left a trail behind me … such memories.’
‘Including a cop in Florida?’
‘He was getting too close.’
‘That why you came home?’
‘Where the heart is … now I have to uproot again, and it was going so well.’ Trent stiffened, the knife at Henry’s throat cutting in now. Henry gasped as a trickle of blood dribbled down his neck. Trent relaxed, and the knife came off. ‘Time for me to go, Henry. Don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth.’
‘So you kill me, set me on fire, is that it?’
‘Could be.’
‘Where’d the incendiaries come from?’
‘America — small-time white supremacists. Idiots, but their hearts are in the right places, I guess.’ He twisted the knife and scraped it across Henry’s skin. ‘I’ll make sure you die quickly, Henry … sort of.’ He stuck the point of the blade into the soft fleshy part underneath Henry’s chin. ‘It’ll go behind the Adam’s apple, right through, and I’ll dig around, and blood’ll fly everywhere.’
‘Thanks for that — just like George, eh? Why kill your buddy?’ Henry’s right hand moved an inch more as he slid it across his stomach towards his left arm.
‘He panicked. It was obvious you wanted him and I knew he’d crack if caught. A weak man. I had to shout at him to run you down, and then he didn’t do it well … he would have crumbled, and that would have been the end of my quiet life, occasionally fulfilling my desires and making recordings for posterity.’ He was speaking in a cold, matter-of-fact way about filming his killings. The voice of a psychopath, a man whose beat was Psycho Alley, who could see nothing wrong in the way he lived.