Sacrifice. Paul Finch

Chapter 11

      According to the piles of documentation they’d each been provided with, all bound in special folders and stencilled: ‘Operation Festival’, the withered corpse walled into the base of the old factory chimney had been a homeless man called Ernest Shapiro.

      ‘He was sixty-eight years old and so far down the pecking order that he was never even reported missing,’ Gemma told the thirty-five SCU personnel gathered in the DO.

      They gazed at the big screen in fascinated silence.

      ‘In case you were wondering, this was done to him while he was still alive,’ she added, ‘as evidenced by the loss of tissue from his wrists where he’d attempted to wriggle free of his manacles. The cause of death was slow dehydration – in other words, thirst – which meant he’d been imprisoned in his brick coffin at least a week before the lads in Yorkshire found him.’

      There was a similar astonished silence when she brought up images of the second crime; a double homicide in this case, a young male and female facing each other in the front seat of a parked motor vehicle, the female seated on the male’s lap. His head had slumped to the right, hers to the left. They were covered front and back with thickly clotted blood.

      ‘Todd Burling and Cheryl Mayers,’ Gemma said, ‘twenty and nineteen respectively – killed a month and a half after Shapiro, on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Believe it or not, they were transfixed together through their hearts by an arrow while having sex in Burling’s parked car.’

      ‘The Father Christmas victim was found on December 25?’ Shawna McCluskey asked. ‘And this happened on Valentine’s Day?’

      ‘Correct.’

      ‘Someone has a sense of humour,’ Charlie Finnegan snorted.

      ‘It gets funnier.’ Gemma hit her remote control and brought various images of a third murder scene to their attention. These were the most graphic so far. They portrayed an elongated, only vaguely human form, blackened almost to a crisp and lying on leaf-strewn grass. ‘This was Barry Butterfield,’ she explained. ‘Male, aged forty-three, and a registered alcoholic. His body was found last autumn, late on the evening of November 5, on the outskirts of Preston, Lancashire.’

      ‘Not burning on a bonfire by any chance?’ Detective Inspector Ben Kane wondered.

      He was one of Gemma’s more bookish officers, a stout, bespectacled man of about forty, with neat, prematurely greying hair and a neat line in corduroy jackets, checked shirts and dickie-bows.

      ‘However did you guess?’ she said, hitting the remote control several times more, presenting a number of grisly close-ups.

      Some fragments of clothing still adhered to the burnt carcass, but charred musculature and even bones were exposed. The face had melted beyond recognition – it resembled a wax mannequin after blowtorch treatment, yet somehow its look of horrific agony was still discernible.

      ‘It wasn’t initially treated as suspicious,’ Gemma added. ‘Apparently Butterfield went off on solo pub-crawls every night. The first assumption was that he’d got thoroughly intoxicated and found his way to some unofficial bonfire on wasteland outside the town, probably looking for more booze. Whether there were other people there at the time, or it was after everyone else had gone, there was no obvious indication … but it seemed possible that in his inebriated state he passed out and fell into the flames.’

      ‘So the cause of death was burning?’ Shawna asked.

      ‘That’s the problem. The coroner ordered a post-mortem, which then revealed that Butterfield had died before he was put into the fire … as a result of neurogenic shock caused by massive internal tissue damage. Almost every joint in his body was either torn or dislocated.’

      ‘It was like he’d been stretched out on a rack.’ This came from Detective Chief Inspector Mike Garrickson, who had recently been seconded to the unit to act as Gemma’s DSIO and up until now had been sitting quietly to one side.

      ‘And if you remember your school history,’ Gemma said, ‘Guy Fawkes was stretched on a rack before he was executed. And we celebrate the anniversary of this event on November 5 by burning his effigy on bonfires.’

      ‘We’re dealing with some kind of calendar killer?’ Gary Quinnell said. He almost sounded amused by the notion, but the expression on his face told a different story – even to hardened homicide detectives like the Serial Crimes Unit, the graphic images of Barry Butterfield were stomach-turning.

      ‘It would seem that way,’ Gemma replied. ‘And he’s now struck three times.’

      ‘I take it there are no other connected homicides or assaults that we’re aware of?’ DI Kane asked.