Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Richmond, London – DI Marchant

DI Sarah Marchant pulled up to the crime scene, her fingers drumming an agitated rhythm on the steering wheel. The flashing blue lights of police vehicles cast an eerie glow over the riverside, turning the placid waters of the Thames into a surreal, pulsating mirror. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for what promised to be the first of many long, gruelling days.

As she stepped out of her car, the acrid smell of burnt plastic and melted metal assaulted her nostrils. The charred remains of the generator stood as a stark reminder of last night's chaos. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the breeze, a garish barrier between the curious onlookers and the grim reality within.

"What a bloody clusterfuck," she muttered under her breath, wondering who she’d pissed off enough to have this pile of shite unceremoniously dumped in her lap.

Marchant could still hear her boss's voice ringing in her ears from when he’d introduced her to her new team. DCI Thompson had been livid, his face an alarming shade of puce as he'd torn into the team.

"How the hell did this happen?" he'd bellowed, slamming his fist on the desk. "We've got a serial killer on the loose, and you lot can't even secure a damn crime scene! And now we've got some nutter claiming to be related to the vic? Christ on a bike!"
She winced at the memory. Thompson wasn't known for his subtlety or his people skills at the best of times, but this morning he'd been in rare form. The vein on his temple had throbbed so violently she’d genuinely worried he might burst a blood vessel right there in the incident room. And she couldn't exactly blame him.

This case had been bad from the start, but the press getting into the mix, obtaining pictures from the fourth and seventh scene and publishing them in all their bloody glory had turned it into a living nightmare.

They’d managed to keep the vultures out since then, thank God, but the press had been busy crucifying them ever since. Depending which paper you read, the Met was lazy, incompetent, or both for its inability to track down the mysterious ‘coven killer’, it’d even been suggested that we were complicit a couple of times. Hell, some of the shit coming from the tabloids would be funny if this wasn’t so serious.

Apparently they were looking for a modern day Jack the Ripper, a demon worshipping cult or, if you read The Eye, the ghost of the original Ripper back to haunt the streets or a werewolf, depending who had the byline on any given day.

And now, with the discovery of a twelfth victim, the ‘coven killer’ was sure to be front page news again today. Not that the papers had been running much else for several weeks now but the body, and last night's fiasco… fireworks, a blackout, and then the discovery of an intruder – a reporter, probably, who was claiming to be the victim's sister. It was like something out of a bad crime novel. She could imagine the headlines already.

As she approached the crime scene tape, Marchant caught sight of a slightly familiar face. The young officer looked like he hadn't slept a wink, dark circles under his eyes and his usually neat uniform rumpled.

"Morning ma’am," he said, stifling a yawn. "Forensics team's already inside. They're not happy about the contamination, but they're doing their best."

Marchant nodded grimly as she scanned the sign-in sheet. She knew, as the new SIO, precisely where the axe would fall if anything else went wrong.

“OK, help bring me up to speed here,” her voice trailed off as she tried, and failed, to recall the uniform’s name.

“Jenkins ma’am,” he provided, “body was dumped on the riverbank, found by an old chap out walking his dogs. Well, more accurately, it was found by one of his Alsatians who carried a loose foot back to him. Looks like it scared the poor guy half to death too, a passerby found him collapsed up on the main road and called an ambulance, the ambulance crew called us when they saw the foot.”

“Our good Samaritan,” he continued after a sip of his coffee, “was found snapping selfies next to the body. Claimed he’d followed the dog’s tracks down to the river to look for an injured person after he saw the foot, that the pics were for his own, personal use; and that he ‘simply hadn’t got round to calling the police yet, but was just about to, honest’.”

Well, she mused, the waste of oxygen might get his phone back. Eventually. Possibly. Maybe… assuming he didn’t end up going down for something.

Marchant thanked Jenkins as she passed back the now signed access log, slipped on her gloves, hairnet and plastic booties and walked up to the tent’s opening. She stood there quietly watching the Scenes of Crime team working over and around the deceased: A young woman, probably no more than twenty years of age, head partially detached with her bloody grin showing what remained of her teeth. An ugly tear truncated the right arm just below the elbow. The rest of the arm, assuming she wasn't unregistered, complete with ID chip was missing. Her abdomen lay open to the cooling night air, ripped from sternum to pubis. This was definitely messier than the previous victims, it looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to her.

The victim's right foot had been liberated from the dog and was now sealed in an evidence bag, locked away in a portable cooler. She hoped they’d got hold of that phone in time - people were justifiably scared, the whole city was already panicking, but if photos of this had got out... yeah, she was certain it would have been splashed all over the front pages, drawing out the crazies with their outlandish theories, and mobs of 'citizen defenders' with promises of fame and riches for information leading to the killer, putting the Met in an impossible position while vilifying them for a complete lack of progress.

Now there were bite marks too, sure they were most likely from the dog that picked it up but heaven help them if The Eye were to see this 'proof' of a werewolf's involvement.

"You've been with her for hours Terry," Terry jumped slightly at the sound of her voice, looks like he was the only one so engrossed in his work that he hadn't noticed her arrival, "please tell me you've got something, tell me he's finally made a mistake?"

"Haven't found anything yet boss. Well, aside from the obvious," Terry said, stepping back from the body and walking towards her, "branded, by eye, sequence matches for the last seven, positioned identically to the others – so a tentative yes on it being the same perpetrator: No ID, no chip or dental, fingerprints not on file. DNA was sent off, but that could take days assuming she's even in the system. If she’s not full of it, maybe our mystery girl can help there. I’d say the unsub was interrupted, the head's only partially off - with a single incision starting on the left, extending to about eight inches, deep enough to sever the carotid and internal jugular."

"So, a long bladed knife?" she posited, breathing a small sigh of relief that, at least, they didn’t appear to have a copycat running round, "same on the abdomen?"

"Possibly, it was a minimum of an inch wide, strong, wicked sharp and employed with considerable force to do that to her neck in one stroke... the cervical vertebrae are exposed, with any luck there'll be some tooling marks we can use for identification later. The abdominal wounds were also deep, liver and kidneys removed same as the other vics…”

“Looks like something chewed on her abdomen.” She interrupted.

“Yeah, lots of good fat easily accessible there. Sort of thing a dog would go for, or a fox maybe, bite radius is too big for rats. Anyway, we have the Alsatian kennelled, ready to measure up for a bite mark comparison when we get back."

"What the hell else would have been chewing on her?" She snapped, anger and frustration rising to the fore and mistargeted, "Sorry Terry, long day but that was out of order."

She knew that nobody on the team would assume the dog was responsible, something else could have been dining on the corpse after all and, with the pressure they were under to catch the asshole responsible, nobody wanted to let a potential clue slip through their fingers, they didn't need her reminding them to confirm everything. Twice.

“No worries boss,” Terry scrunched his face up, snarled and raised his gloved hands like claws above his head, “How many ‘werewolves’ have we had from The Eye’s tip line the last couple of days anyway?”

She couldn’t help but laugh, Terry was certifiable but they all needed the release, at least he wasn’t howling at the moon.
“OK, I’m heading back,” she announced with a wave, “hopefully our interloper will have something for us.”

***

Thanks to the traffic, the ride back to the station was just about long enough for her to review her predecessor’s notes.
Eleven unidentified and unclaimed victims, she mused, twelve now assuming this was confirmed as the unsub's work. The victims were a mix of ages, genders and races. Other than being unregistered, they hadn't found a single connection between any of them. They'd all died extremely violent deaths and been mutilated further post-mortem, all without leaving any useful evidence to lead them back to the killer.

The brands had been identified by the folks at the science museum from a sixteenth century alchemical text, and appeared to be following a pattern. The first four victims had been branded with ‘nigredo’, representing cleansing; the remainder had been marked alternately with ‘albedo’ and then ‘citrinitas’, representing purification and self-reflection, respectively.

They'd yet to find any bodies with the final symbol, ‘rubedo’, which apparently represented success or completion. She was beginning to feel they were running out of time though. The perpetrator was definitely escalating, this was the third body in the last two weeks, but would he vanish without a trace or would he continue to escalate until someone finally stopped him?

Stopping him would take luck, or evidence. And they had sweet fuck all of either. Nothing recovered from any of the scenes; nothing from the millions of cameras that blanketed the city; profilers were as divided, and useful, as the tabloids, who’d decided our killer is, or believes he is, some kind of alchemist, a satanist, or is just plain bat-shit crazy; and a complete lack of witnesses.

According to the pathologist the brand was applied ante-mortem, something that could be neither quiet nor subtle yet, somehow, nobody had come forward claiming to have seen or heard anything.

Well, she mused as they pulled up to the station, perhaps ‘sleeping beauty’ would have something to tell them.