Crime At Home by Catherine Moloney

Author:Catherine Moloney [Moloney, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JOFFE BOOKS cosy crime, mysteries and thrillers
Published: 2020-04-27T23:00:00+00:00

9. A Lit Fuse

Thursday morning dawned cold and crisp with a hard frost.

There was no sign of a thaw as yet, Markham noted with a sense of relief as he drank piping hot black coffee. He hated it when the snow turned to black sludge.

Idly, he wondered if they would have a white Christmas, as opposed to a rain-puddled washout, and smiled to himself as he thought of Olivia’s child-like eagerness on that score. The snow’s crystalline delicacy entranced her, so for his lover’s sake he hoped the town might wear its mantle a while longer.

His smile faded as he looked out of his study window at the blanketed cemetery and recalled that there would be no more Christmases for four souls in Bromgrove.

He had passed an uneasy night in which an old childhood nightmare resurrected itself.

Hands coming out of darkness towards him.

Hands invading, burrowing . . . molesting . . .

Last year’s investigation in Bromgrove’s art gallery had featured hands too. Pale hands gleaming in the darkness . . . Reaching out to snatch a little boy . . .

And now he was on the track of another faceless wraith. He needed just one magic irrefutable connection to this phantom killer. And still it eluded him.

Come on, Markham, snap out of it, he told himself. With Sidney to face, this was no time to get fanciful.

But the interview with Gary Coslett the previous evening had unsettled him.

Noakes, predictably, had been sceptical. ‘Grade A creep, guv,’ he’d growled. ‘Prob’ly into a bit of prowling hisself . . . perk of the job. Looks the type to get off on women’s knicker drawers.’

But no sweat beaded on Coslett’s forehead and the man’s body language betrayed little tension. His close-set eyes, beneath the heavy hooding of their upper eyelids, watched the two detectives with blank passivity. He might as well have been made of clay or plastic for all the animation he displayed.

And Markham remembered what Dimples Davidson had said about the artistry of these murders — the sense of there being some malign choreography in play, a puppeteer enjoying his string-pulling.

What if those hands snaking through the living-room curtains represented the eruption of an urge that could no longer be repressed? An urge that was subsequently channelled into the staged murders of Marian Bussell, Dawn MacAlinden and Kenneth Dowell?

Stacey Macmillan’s murder felt different from the others. Impulsive. Hurried. No time to savour, to enjoy his handiwork — his revenge. Just that moment when he yanked her from her life into oblivion. Trapped like a rabbit in a snare.

If the killer was decompensating, unravelling, then they were up shit creek without a paddle. No knowing where he might strike next.

Was there any chance of them making an arrest by Christmas? Or would the killer be sitting down to a turkey dinner and opening presents with a clear-eyed smile, hiding what lay beneath his mask?

What were they up against here? Some brilliant maniac who could take on experienced detectives and thumb his nose

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