Chapter Forty-Three

 

Soon, the whole team was lined up on a quiet road in the Seaview Estate. It was a nice early morning with clouds scudding over a blue sky. Emma was hot and bulky in her stab vest. With her were a couple of uniforms who were holding a ram to open the front door. The rest of CID were there too, Brian and Suse looking hopeful. Nick looked even more uncomfortable in his vest than Emma. Kev Slater had actually brought a clipboard to the party. She caught Rob's eye – he was standing at the back looking like a gate-crasher, studying everyone with a frown. She gave him a brief thumbs up and watched as his eyes darted from one person to another. Luckily for Rob, they had to be quiet and everyone was nervous, so there was little small talk.

One of the uniforms went to the front door, everything ready to put it in. He put a hand to it, ready to start breaking it down. And the door swung open on its hinges.

Emma and Suse looked at each other and back to Kev. 'Go on then,' he said. 'We've got a warrant and the door's open.'

They walked up the path and opened the door fully. There were no lights on and the interior was dark, all the curtains drawn.

'Ever feel like you're expected?' Emma said darkly. Suse didn't reply.

They stepped over the threshold.

Emma recognised the layout was similar to the other houses on the estate. It reminded her of Margaret Watt's house. There was a corridor leading away from them, with doors opening off to either side. It was obvious that the place had been well looked after at one time, but then not maintained. Obviously when Jeremy had moved in, he hadn't bothered with redecorating. There was a nice carpet which matched the wallpaper but both were faded and worn.

Emma gently pushed open the door on the left. In Margaret's house this led to the front room, kept for best, where Emma had been entertained. However, this room was dark, with the curtains not only drawn, but nailed down around the edges. Both Suse and Emma had torches in their left hands and batons drawn.

They both jumped as a light flicked on automatically. It was single spot lamp which illuminated a model on a table in the middle of the room. Suse impatiently flicked her torch around the room – it was bare apart from the model on the table.

'It's empty, he's not in here,' Suse said. 'This is a distraction, move on.'

'Wait a minute, haven't you seen the model?'

'It's an architectural model, our suspect used to build them for a living. It means we have the right house.' She shrugged and turned to leave.

'No, look at it. It's the station.' Both women looked more closely at the model. It was indeed a street scene, with the Bradwick Police Station right in the centre. 'Look at the detail. Think about the hooks and wires in the hotel room. Tell me that the same hand didn't make both. It's the same attention to detail.'

'I already said it meant we had the right house,' Suse said, but she sounded less certain now.

But as they both looked closely at the whole scene – the trees and the little people outside the buildings, they instinctively leant back. They could smell smoke. In the light, a thin wisp of smoke started creeping out of an upper window. Soon there was a yellow flickering, and flames started licking out of a window.

Slowly the two women backed out of the room.

'You don't think that means?' Emma asked nervously.

'No, it's just a model. All that voodoo rubbish isn't real.' But Suse looked worried all the same. Tucking her torch under her arm, she pressed the button on her Airwave. 'It's DS Berman, can we have someone with a fire extinguisher in here, please. First door on the left.' She paused slightly, then pressed the button again. 'And can you get in touch with the station?'

'Will do. What do you need from the station?'

'Nothing,' she said sheepishly. 'I just need to check that everything's okay back there.'

While they were waiting, they continued down the corridor. The next room was obviously used as a bedroom and equally obviously never cleaned. They heard someone come in behind them and the hiss of a fire extinguisher.

'Nothing happening at the station. What were you expecting?'

'Nothing, really,' Suse said uncomfortably. 'Thanks for checking though.'

'Kitchen ahead,' Emma said, gesturing to the obscure glass door ahead of them. She wondered what waited for them ahead. She could hear another team moving around to check the upstairs rooms.

She pushed the door open with her baton. The room was well lit. Both women entered and stood to either side. With a whirring, a pair of small toy cars ran across the room in front of them, each with a pinkish white rubber glove glued to its back. They gasped as they realised that it was a pair of human hands. The fingers wobbled slightly as they drove in circles.

Emma flicked her baton and flipped one on its side. But it kept running and scrubbed its way around in circles, looking more like a dead fish than it did before. 'Oh, for fuck's sake,' Emma said, getting more frustrated. She saw a battery compartment as it spun and the next time it went round, she brought her baton down sharply. There was a crack, batteries rolled out and the horrible thing was finally still. Suse took the cue and did the same thing to the other vehicle.

'Do you think...?' Suse asked.

'...they were real hands?' Emma finished. 'Given who we're looking for, I'd say it's likely to be. He's killed three people we know of. Maybe he killed more for practice? Scene of crimes will have a field day here.'

Now they were not focusing on the floor, they looked up and around at the rest of the room.

'Weren't all the cupboards closed when we came in?' Suse asked.

'They were,' Emma replied slowly. She was staring at the bread bin. In a loaf of bread, two bloody eyes were staring back at her. There were red marks and smears on the loaf.

Suse pointed dumbly at a cupboard where a stack of plates were topped with a foot. Like the previous room, everything was perfectly lit.

'You know, both of us are better than this,' Emma said. 'We've seen his crime scenes and we know what he does.' Deliberately not looking at the horrors on display, she pushed open a half glazed door that should've led to the garden. Instead, there was a kind of lean-to shed. But she didn't go through – she swept her torch left and right across the doorway in front of her. 'There. Can you see it catch the light? He's upgraded from simple tripwires to infrared beams. That over there is the sender, an IR bulb. And here is a mirror. Once we walk through them, it's like tripping a wire.'

'We have no idea what they're connected to, but he could easily know exactly where we are in this place.'

Together they stepped carefully over the beam. Emma started to feel a bit better. Now they wouldn't be controlled and led through the maze like lab rats. They would be able to choose their route and hopefully come across Jeremy Bradley unawares.

They passed through another doorway, this time having to duck under one beam and over another. They edged through a shed with several boxes lined up on a workbench.

'I am so glad we didn't trigger that one,' Emma said. She was not paid enough to go through and see what bizarre specimens were in the boxes. She was sure that if she'd tripped the wire then they would've opened like gruesome jack-in-the-boxes.

At the end of the next corridor though, something made them both stop short. There was a faint but clearly audible scratching noise.

Emma thumbed her Airwave and leant down to her shoulder to speak. 'Anyone following in, be aware that there could be tripwires or light beams anywhere. Check every corridor and doorway before proceeding.'

Suse and Emma looked at each other anxiously. 'What do we know about this joker?' Suse asked nervously.

'To be honest, I think we've gone past what we could reasonably anticipate. We need to open this door and arrest Bradley.' Emma reached for the door handle with the end of her baton.

'Are you sure it's safe?' Suse asked.

In response, Emma moved close to the door and stopped for a second.

'What the hell are you doing?' Suse asked.

'Listening. Whatever's the other side of that door is an animal of some kind. It'll know we're here and it obviously wants to get out of there.' She paused for a second. 'I can't hear any growling or barking, so we can rule out a guard dog.'

Even so, they both held their batons a bit tighter as Emma eased the door handle downwards and hooked the door open.

A white furry shape hurtled straight between the two officers and disappeared behind them. 'A bloody cat,' Emma said. 'Of all the things that had us all wound up. Poor thing must've been fed up with being cooped up in there.'

'And,' Suse said darkly, 'that beast is going to trigger half the tripwires between here and the front door.'

'Let's get on with it then, I'm getting fed up with all this nonsense.'

Suse stopped for a moment. 'Fed up? You're not worried? Scared? We have no idea what this guy is able to do.'

'Actually, I have a fairly good idea of what he's capable of. If he'd wanted us dead, he'd have found a way to get one of us alone and tasered us and then overpowered us. That's his method.' She turned around slightly to gesture behind her. 'All this, it's his trade. It might be called special effects but basically he just makes illusions. He is paid to fool people into being scared, but there's nothing behind them. It's all smoke and mirrors. Even against his victims, he wanted them to see disturbing things. He didn't want to hurt them.'

'So, you think there's no danger?'

'You know that body that was dropped onto the car? He secured the barrel so it didn't fall into the traffic.'

Suse stopped a minute and thought. 'So he avoided collateral damage?'

'Yeah, I should've seen it earlier. He was only targeting those three women.'

'It always easier with hindsight,' Suse said. 'What about the explosives then? We might be heading for a makeshift bomb?'

'There's not much chance. I got a reply back from the army. The amount he reported as missing would be enough to blow up the body plus a couple of test runs. Likelihood is that he hasn't got a lot of it left.' After she'd said this, Emma strode off down the makeshift corridor. At the next doorway, she checked for tripwires and beams and then stepped in carefully. Suse was at her heels.

It was the workshop. On the walls were racks of tools, each in its place, neatly outlined in marker pen. A workbench was covered in steel, hardly a scratch on its surface. Along the edge of the bench were a range of vices, in varying sizes. All around were wall-mounted sets of plastic drawers. Most disturbing however was a chest freezer against the wall opposite.

'I'm guessing it's not full of chickens and ready meals,' Emma said, pointing to the freezer.

'I don't really want to know what's in there.'

'But the rest of this place,' Emma said. 'It shows that we have the right man. Everything from the tiny hooks to the bracket for the head could've been made here. Probably the bomb in the body too.'

'You're right though,' Suse conceded. 'I mean, we don't know what would've triggered if we'd just blundered in, but there's no threat. Just a sad little man playing make-believe.'

'There can't be many more rooms,' Emma said, looking at the door.

Once she was through, with the usual precautions, she saw that the room was small and hexagonal – obviously originally a summer house. The floor had been carpeted in white and the only furniture was a large white globe mounted on a large white round foot. With a start, Emma realised it was a chair from the sixties and it was turned away from her.

Nothing happened. Emma and Suse looked at each other nervously. Emma cleared her throat, and as she did so, the chair spun around. Sitting in it was a man, thin and scrawny, with a neat goatee beard and glasses.

'I'm afraid we've already let Mr Bigglesworth escape,' Emma said with a half-smile.

Jeremy Bradley frowned from his chair. 'You know what I was going for,' he said testily. 'And it wasn't Austin Powers.'

'I got that,' Emma replied. 'But Blofeld's cat was never named.' She could tell that Jeremy Bradley was impressed, so she decided to press home the advantage she'd gained over all those afternoons watching films with Rob Haines. 'Although Ernst Stavro Blofeld appeared in over half a dozen films, his cat was never named. So I went with the most obvious parody.'

Bradley looked put out. 'I must admit that it isn't going the way I expected. It's not what I planned out at all. You're meant to arrest me, not banter film trivia.'

'I must admit, I agree with our suspect,' Suse said. 'Although this is much more civilised. I'm used to chasing and tackling them.' She took a deep breath and formally arrested Jeremy Bradley on suspicion of at least three murders. As he stood up to have the cuffs put on, Emma was struck by how unimpressive he was. He was short in stature – certainly no Telly Savalas or Donald Pleasance. The sort of person you'd never notice in the street.

Emma saw the outline of another door and went over to it. It was bolted from the inside and opened easily to a passage up the side of the garden.

Soon enough Jeremy Bradley was loaded into the back of a police car. Various uniformed and technical officers were already starting a room by room search of the whole property.

Emma looked around nervously. A small crowd had gathered – not coherent but a few groups of people standing around with their phones out. Emma could feel the mood was restive. Someone called out that they should be sorting out the drug problem, not spending all their time harassing residents of the estate.

'You coming back to the station to help with the interview?' Suse asked. 'This is a proper result, you should be proud.'

'Yeah, I'll be along in a minute. I'm just going to give Rob the edited highlights of what happened. Then I want to go and talk to one of my contacts.'

'Don't take too long, you'll miss all the action.'

'Seriously, I'll only be a couple of minutes. Margaret only lives three streets away. If I tell her what happened here, she's got contacts on the estate and should be able to calm things down a bit. The last thing we need is everything kicking off around here.'

Suse looked at the groups of people and nodded. 'If you think you can help, you should do it.'