The Reckoning on Cane Hill by Steve Mosby

Author:Steve Mosby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

I confess: I put it off slightly. Back in my office, I worked quickly through the various updates that had arrived in my tray first.

There was a fresh list of hospitals. Two thirds of them were crossed out now, representing the rapidly diminishing possibility that Charlie was simply a missing patient. She wasn’t; I knew that deep down.

The door-to-doors at the flats had turned up nothing. Nobody remembered seeing Charlie being dropped off, or the vehicle that might have brought her there. A woman who had been in the crowd at the grocery when she was found had come forward, but couldn’t tell us anything useful.

Priority number one, then.

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I decided to go crazy, loading up every single investigation Mercer had been involved in for the eight years prior to his departure from the department, and working methodically through them.

There was no obvious connection in any of them. While looking at them collectively, though, it was immediately apparent that one case had dominated the latter years of Mercer’s long career. The 50/50 Killer investigation hung suspended through them, like a dirty black branch frozen in clear ice. Its tendrils seemed to touch the other cases: ever present; always active. It was there in the period of absence Mercer had taken from work following his breakdown, and it was there again after his return, eventually providing the bookend that finally destroyed his career.

However unhealthy writing a book about it might be, I understood why it continued to haunt him, and he couldn’t let it go.

I scanned through the file.

It was impossible to read it all: with all the forensic reports, interviews, statements, photographs and footage, there were over two thousand separate records in the file. The process reminded me of my first day when, new to the team, I’d needed to familiarise myself with the main details quickly. They came back easily again now. Even after a year and a half, my memories of the investigation remained as sharp as the words on the screen.

I loaded up the section on the murder of a man named Kevin Simpson. On my first day, I’d overslept, and finally met the team at Simpson’s house, where he had been found burned to death in his own bathtub. He was the latest – but not the last – victim of the 50/50 Killer. I learned that the murderer spent months following and studying the couples he abducted and tortured. He was patient and methodical, learning the secrets of their relationship so that he could tease out the weaker strands, weathering and cutting them, eventually forcing one of the couple to betray the other.

I opened one of the photographs of the spiderwebs.

A normal person embarking upon such a study of others might have taken notes, keeping pages of details about his targets, but the 50/50 Killer had an entirely different way of visualising the information he gathered. On the wall in Kevin Simpson’s study – and, I learned later, the homes of all of his victims – he had drawn an intricate spiderweb pattern.

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