Spider - Michael Morley [12]
‘Would it be fair to say…’ said Fenella, checking dates in her file, ‘… that just before your collapse, the stress was at its peak?’
‘Stress comes with the job,’ said Jack. ‘I’m not sure I felt significantly pressured then.’
‘But if we look at the timings, we see your mother dies, and then weeks later you collapse at an airport. You think they are entirely unconnected?’
Jack hated easy-fit psychology. Life was full of shitty coincidences and sometimes lots of good things happened all at once, sometimes you got dealt several crappy hands one after the other. ‘I don’t for one moment buy the idea that my mother’s death in any way contributed to my illness,’ he said, sounding slightly annoyed. ‘Of course I loved her, of course it saddened me deeply, but I’d dealt with that. I’d understood that part of my life was over. Listen,’ he continued, more sharply than he’d intended, ‘every working day of my life, I was up close and personal to some form of death. I saw all variety of dead mothers, dead children and even dead babies. I met death in binders of crime scene photographs, on slabs down at the city morgue, under the buzz of a cranium bone saw in an autopsy and I saw death in the eyes and souls of all the evil bastards who had taken a life. Death and I are no strangers, we’ve been in close contact for a lot of my life.’
Fenella paused. She let the heat from his monologue cool in the air around them. She knew she needed to give him some space. In time he’d come to recognize that even he should have given himself the opportunity to grieve properly for his parents. She decided to move on and opened the file on the coffee table. She found herself swallowing hard and steadying herself for what lay ahead. The details of the Black River Killer’s reign of terror made horrific reading, even for a hardened professional. ‘This was the case you were working on when you were taken ill. Sixteen victims, maybe more, going back at least two decades?’
‘Undoubtedly more,’ said Jack. He glanced at the file papers and the gates to his memory burst open: victims’ faces, glazed dead eyes, corpses mutilated as the killer hacked off the body part he always kept as a trophy; all the abominations rushed through again.
‘Tell me about him,’ urged Fenella.
There was so much Jack could say that he barely knew where to begin. ‘BRK, that’s what the press called him, started like so many of them do. His first prey, or at least what we think was his first, was a young woman living in an isolated area. Somehow he abducted, murdered and killed her, then he dumped her body in the Black River, hence his nickname. Once he realized he could kill and get away with it, he developed a taste for it. He grew more confident and started to experiment. His paraphilias probably widened, his fantasies grew deeper and we started to discover evidence that he tortured the women before he killed them.’
Fenella took a sip of water and made notes as Jack continued.
‘It became part of BRK’s MO to keep the corpses for as long as possible. Then, as soon as decomposition set in, he moved quickly to get rid of them, disposing of their bodies in the Black River. As time passed and he grew more experienced, he began dismembering the bodies and weighing down their severed limbs in plastic refuse sacks before scattering them miles apart. With every kill he’d become harder to catch.’
‘How often do you think about the Black River Killer?’
‘A lot. I still think of him a lot.’
Fenella glanced at some dates in her notes. ‘It’s more than three years since you worked on the case, what makes you still think about him so much?’
Jack shrugged.
‘Is it when a new murder occurs, or do you find yourself just thinking about him without any reason?’
‘He’s not killed since I was working the investigation. His last victim