The Scribbler by Iain Maitland (life changing books txt) 📕

you … don’t … fuck off right now, I’m going to put this sledgehammer through your fucking windscreen … understand?”

Gayther nodded as he started the car and began to reverse it away from Challis.

As he did so, Challis walked alongside the car shouting. “I’ve got your car number; I’m reporting this to your Chief Constable. I know who that is. Wicks.”

Gayther continued to reverse the car, gradually gaining speed, until Challis stopped walking, but then he shouted after them, “And don’t fucking come back if you know what’s good for you.”

Ten, twenty yards further on and Gayther stopped the car, then started to make a three-point turn.

Carrie glanced across at Gayther and noticed he was sweating.

“Well, that was an over-reaction,” she said. “What rattled his cage so hard?”

Gayther swung the car back in his second manoeuvre as he answered, “Piss and wind, Carrie. He’s blustering and bullying because he’s covering up … he has something to hide, simple as that. I doubt it’s just his son. Not with that level of anger.”

She nodded, “Could he be being harassed? Police? Taxman and all of that?”

Gayther noted her worried face. He smiled at her.

“This isn’t Russia, Carrie. There’s no state surveillance, not at this level anyway. If … if … it’s all true, what he says, it’s just coincidence. But I don’t believe it.” He thought and then added, “We can’t harass people anyway … we don’t have the resources.”

“Should we have arrested him then, for threatening behaviour, taken him in for questioning? That would have got the truth out of him.”

Gayther stopped as he was doing the third part of his three-point turn. “No, there’s no way he’d have talked voluntarily, and with his son there it would have all blown up out of proportion … it would have ended in an undignified pushing and shoving match. Anyway, I want this all low-key for now. And besides, there’s a more important question I want answering.”

Gayther put his foot down on the accelerator and roared away.

“Which is?”

“How the hell is it that everyone who looks at me knows immediately that I’m the police?”

They both looked at each other and laughed. 11. WEDNESDAY 14 NOVEMBER, AFTERNOON

“This is it then, guv? The Burgess place?” Carrie looked out of the car window at the ramshackle cottage on its own at the bottom of a wooded lane just outside Aldeburgh. “Hansel and Gretel’s old home. Do you think anyone lives there? Just the wicked witch? Look at the state of it.”

Gayther, taking the file out again from beside his seat, surveyed the scene.

A tumbledown building, peeling paint and decay everywhere.

An overgrown garden, full of nettles and weeds.

Beyond that, sparse trees, broken and at odd angles, and mud, lots and lots of churned-up, dried-out mud.

“It’s long past its glory days, Carrie, that’s for sure.” He thought for a second or two. “You know, if Burgess is The Scribbler, those woods and fields beyond will turn out to be his burial grounds.”

“Would he dare, if he did carry on killing? Bring them back home instead of leaving them in ditches far and wide? What if the local authority gave permission to build a hundred homes over there? He wouldn’t take the risk, surely. To look out of his bedroom window one morning to see a crane churning over mud and skulls and bones.”

Gayther shrugged. “Who knows, Carrie, but I’d like to see if we can get Kevin and his cadaver dog out for a walk there some time soon. See what Pigflesh can sniff out.”

“Pigflesh, guv? Kevin Pigflesh?”

“The dog, Carrie,” Gayther laughed. “Kevin called it Pigflesh because that’s how he started training it when it was young. To find bits of pig flesh.”

Carrie looked back towards the woods and fields. “Imagine being here at twilight with the mist rolling in. Proper creepy, it is. A Halloween nightmare.” She shuddered and Gayther wasn’t sure whether she was joking or not.

He looked across at the bleak landscape.

A First World War no-man’s land. Imagined the horrors that might be buried out there in shallow graves.

Decided she was not.

“According to Cotton’s notes,” Gayther said, looking down at the papers as he propped them up on his steering wheel, “he has vanished into thin air. Google air anyway. She is now living here on her own. Angela Burgess, wife, or possibly former wife, of Simon Burgess.”

“The ungodly creature to be burned to ashes,” mumbled Carrie. “Hansel and Gretel.”

“Well, possibly. To recap, she wrote to the police in Suffolk when she was living with him in Sussex and he was coming up once or twice a month to deliver baby goods to little shops. She said he was The Scribbler; that he used to make her dress up as a schoolboy and then forced her to have anal sex with him.” He grimaced. “I can’t help thinking of Jimmy Krankie whenever I read that bit.”

“Jimmy Krankie, guv?”

“It’s Friday, it’s five to five, it’s Crackerjack!?”

“Not with you, guv.”

“Oh, never mind, Jimmy Krankie was a woman who dressed up as a schoolboy and appeared on a children’s television programme called Crackerjack! years ago.”

“Like a transvestite?”

Gayther puffed theatrically … “No, not really … Jimmy Krankie was more of a panto act … oh, never mind.” He then went on.

“Burgess was in the area for each of the murders, even though he spent only a few days a month up in this neck of the woods. So that’s a strong pointer to him. He just happens to be here every time someone’s killed. What are the chances of that if he were an innocent man?”

He coughed and added, “An old boy who talked to The Scribbler on the night one of the victims went missing … Fotherby was the victim … saw the police appeal and the identikit drawing and recognised Burgess. He then, by a sheer stroke of luck, saw Burgess in his van a week later and had the good sense to note the number plate and ring in with it.”

“Well, that’s a good