Fatal Crossing Read online

  Nora stayed another half an hour and wasn’t allowed to leave until she had accepted a jar of home-made strawberry jam.

  Back in the car she rang her brother on impulse. It rang four times before going to voicemail, which invited her to leave a message.

  ‘Hi, it's sis. I’m in town.’ Nothing more was needed. If he wanted to meet up, he would get in touch.

  She reversed the car out of the drive and drove back to Bagsværd.

  X

  The birthday party exceeded all expectation. Aunt Ellen could liven up any occasion with her floral dresses and her belly laughter, and her gregariousness was only heightened when surrounded by her beloved family and friends. There had been toasts, songs and a long walk by the sea in the evening sunset.

  The next morning Nora had the rare pleasure of a phone call from David and she drove to the allotments on Amager with fresh crusty rolls and one of those cinnamon Danish pastries she knew he couldn’t resist.

  They spent a couple of hours together, and David seemed to be in a good mood as he showed her around his collection of peonies — one of his few interests to rival his passion for algorithms. Not once did he ask her about her life in London.

  Nevertheless, she told him. About Andreas, who was in London, and how the week before last she had been out driving with Pete and how the ‘photo mobile’, as they had christened Pete's Ford Mondeo, had nearly conked out on the motorway. Nora smiled fondly when remembering the photographer's impressive arsenal of Aussie swear words. Rather than laugh at the comic tale about a panicking Pete, David declared gravely that it was very important to always check the engine oil before embarking on a long drive.

  ‘I think he's learned his lesson,’ Nora assured her brother before driving back to Bagsværd.

  Her father wasn’t at home, so Nora wolfed down a quick sandwich before packing her things and catching the train to the airport.

  5

  An hour later, Nora was checking the departure board in the transit area. It was still too early to go to the gate. She pottered around the bookshop and scanned the bestseller lists without getting her hopes up. There was no point in buying anything in English; books were much cheaper in London, but every now and then she felt the need to sink her teeth into a good Danish novel.

  She wasn’t tempted by any of the fiction though, and carried on past the travel literature to a small, non-fiction section with books on the quickest way to succeed in business, and how the Soviets endured the siege of Leningrad. In the crime section, however, she found a blood-curdling bestseller promising accounts of the most macabre British murders in recent history, called Murders of the Century.

  The notorious British child killer Yvonne Loft stared maliciously from the cover with a smile on her lips, as if the ten young lives she had been convicted of taking were nothing but a cruel joke understood only by her and her accomplice lover.

  Nora picked up the book on impulse and flicked through to a central section of black-and-white photographs. To illustrate the Yvonne Loft case further, the author had found a picture of the murdering lovers eating ice cream while holding hands and grinning from ear to ear. The caption made Nora want to throw up.

  ‘Yvonne Loft and Harry George enjoy a day out in Brighton. The picture is believed to have been taken a few hours before the couple abducted and killed seven-year-old Timothy Kent.’

  Was it possible to eat ice cream while planning to kill a child, Nora wondered? It wasn’t the cruelty itself that was the most horrifying. It was the imperceptible way it wormed its way into normality, into everyday life, thus teaching us that we can never feel safe. That a friendly face can hide the most profound evil.

  The smiling couple in love, licking strawberry ice cream from a cone while planning to rape and strangle someone's son. The friendly schoolteacher from a village in Rwanda going berserk with a machete in a rush of blood. The nice husband in a suit who drowns his wife in the bath to get his hands on her life insurance. Nora shuddered and was about to put the book back when her gaze fell on the opposite page where a picture in the bottom left-hand corner jumped out at her.

  The small picture made the hairs at the back of her neck stand up.

  Resolutely she stuck the book under her arm, marched up to the counter and paid for it, before making her way to the gate.

  As soon as she had found her seat on the plane, she returned to the picture and studied it in more detail.

  A young woman with her hair piled up on her head was staring silently into the camera. She was standing with her hands by her sides in front of a white wall. Nora didn’t remember seeing the face before, but it could easily have been one of the Polaroids from the suitcase.

  The caption wasn’t particularly informative. ‘Nineteen-year-old Jean Eastman, the discovery of whose body led police to the apprehension of William Hickley.’

  Nora found the chapter about William Hickley — or Bill Hix as he insisted on being called.

  The book was riddled with clichés: William Hickley had suffered a deprived and loveless childhood with a domineering mother. He had never known his father. The boy had had major problems making friends at school pretty much from day one, and had instead turned to photography, which became his all-consuming hobby.

  He was living with his mother when at the age of thirty-two he was undone by something as trivial as a flat tyre. He had pulled over on a main road to change the tyre one Friday afternoon in October 1992. A friendly rural police officer had stopped to offer his assistance. Before William Hickley had time to decline his help, the kind-hearted police officer had already opened the boot in search of a jack and the spare tyre.

  What PC Ross Carr saw that day left such mental scars that he never returned to active service, but retired with a nervous breakdown and sleep problems two years earlier than planned.

  Jean Eastman had been a local beauty, who worked at a florist's in Dorchester, but there was nothing beautiful about her as she lay curled up, naked and cold, on a piece of dark green tarpaulin. Where her eyes had once sparkled, there were now two gaping holes and in her open mouth PC Carr saw a darkness that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Her tongue had been cut out.

  William Hickley fled on foot while the officer threw up on the verge. But after being on the run for one week following a national manhunt, he was eventually spotted by an ornithologist near a holiday cottage in the Lake District.

  The cottage was surrounded and when Hickley realised that he was outnumbered, he gave himself up. The investigation led police to Hickley's mother's house and down to the locked basement, which was her son's domain. Vanessa Hickley fought tooth and nail against the police investigation and continued to insist to this day that her son was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

  In the basement, which had been turned into a darkroom, police found a rental agreement for a warehouse outside Dorchester. The address was three kilometres from the location where Hickley had had the puncture. In the dilapidated building police found three wrecked cars, five women's handbags, a set of scalpels, eight bras, two sofas and a locked cupboard. When they broke into the cupboard, they found driving licences and other personal papers belonging to five women who had all been reported missing, including nineteen-year-old Jean Eastman.

  At the bottom of the cupboard police also found an envelope containing twenty-three pictures of women, all in the same pose: standing against a wall with their gaze aimed straight at the camera. But it wasn’t that which shook the team of investigators or caused the biggest headlines. It was the macabre discovery of fifteen tongues, neatly preserved in vinegar in a glass jar and placed at the bottom of the cupboard, which the press named the ‘Cabinet of Horrors’.

  Detective Inspector James McCormey's hope of a simple confession and a guilty plea was dashed during his first attempt at interrogating William Hickley.

  It soon became clear that Hickley intended to plead insanity in order to avoid a prison sentence. He claimed that God had told him to kill and ea
t Jean Eastman.

  ‘Why did you cut out their tongues?’

  ‘God told me to eat their words. Their empty, girly chatter. Stuff them right into my mouth with love,’ William Hickley explained in all seriousness.

  James McCormey tried repeatedly to appeal to William Hickley and his alter ego, Bill Hix, to end the uncertainty and suffering of the families of the missing women. And to identify the fifteen tongues.

  He was met with only gibberish or silence. William Hickley was sent for psychiatric evaluation.

  A panel of five experts agreed by a majority of one that Hickley was capable of understanding the extent and consequences of his crimes, and he was thus declared fit to stand trial.

  Dorchester police managed to identify nine girls from the twenty-three photographs that Hickley had left behind. The remaining pictures were released to the UK media. Five women contacted them. Two hadn’t even known that William Hickley had photographed them. The other three told similar stories of a young, dark-haired man who had promised them modelling work.

  Mary Johnson, aged sixteen, said she had been approached while waiting for her father outside the National Gallery in London. When her father came out and she turned to introduce him to the photographer, the young man had vanished into thin air. She didn’t see him again until police asked her to pick him out from eight photographs of men who matched his description. She pointed to William Hickley without a moment's hesitation.

  James McCormey and his team worked themselves ragged trying to find the earthly remains of the fifteen women with no tongues. They excavated Vanessa Hickley's garden from top to bottom. An operation whose only results were the bones from a long dead dog, which was categorised as a Collie, and a claim from Mrs Hickley for police harassment.

  Next forensic technicians concentrated on the ground around the warehouse. Slowly and methodically they worked away from the building in concentric circles. A cheer went up when a technician found evidence that the earth four hundred metres from the warehouse had been disturbed within the last year. Experts carefully worked their way through thin layers of soil only to reveal the remains of bones, which turned out to be those of cows.

  The Crown Prosecution Service decided to concentrate on the one case where there was enough evidence to secure a conviction rather than compromise future trials. William Hickley was duly convicted of the murder of Jean Eastman and was given a whole life tariff. He was transferred to Wolf Hall Prison where he remains to this day, the author stated, adding that four British Home Secretaries so far had refused to allow Hickley to appear in front of the parole board.

  However, for James McCormey the investigation wasn’t over. Every year without fail he would visit William Hickley in an attempt to make him give up the location of the remaining fifteen bodies. For the first two years Hickley sat behind armoured glass, picked up the phone and listened to McCormey with a contemptuous smile. He never said a word, but let McCormey plead desperately while staring him down.

  The third year he indicated that he had found God and was willing to atone for his sins.

  ‘The families need peace of mind,’ he confided in McCormey with feigned piety while drawing a map of Underwood, a forest some thirty minutes’ drive from his childhood home in Dorchester.

  McCormey had to twist several arms and call in more than a few favours before being allocated resources to examine the area.

  Even so the Crown Prosecution Service tried to talk him out of it by appealing to his common sense: Hickley was already behind bars and there were plenty of new and unsolved murders to occupy police and forensic examiners without them having to dig up the past.

  ‘Why are you really doing this? The man is in prison. For life.’

  ‘The truth. We owe it to all the families who live without knowing what has happened to their loved ones,’ was McCormey's answer.

  ‘At the time this book went to print,’ the author wrote, ‘no bodies have been found in Underwood.’

  The plane started circling Stansted, and Nora yawned to relieve the pressure in her ears.

  She checked the copyright page of the paperback. It was the fifth edition. Much could have happened since it was first published. She wondered what McCormey would say about the case today.

  Had Lisbeth and Lulu been the victims of William Hickley, the man who called himself Bill Hix? Nora was tempted to dismiss the theory as more than a tad absurd. After all, Dorchester was a long way from Harwich, and no one knew if the two girls had even made it to the UK. On the other hand, the year was about right. As was the photograph, except it featured two women rather than just one. But it could have been taken by another disturbed person, a copycat.

  Nora reviewed various scenarios in her head while she queued at passport control, a line that seemed to grow longer each time she entered the country.

  While she waited for her suitcase to appear on the conveyor belt, she turned on her mobile and called Pete.

  ‘Airport emergency,’ was all she said.

  It was their code to activate a longstanding agreement to provide company and dinner for whoever arrived alone at a London airport. Being a single traveller was fine most of the time, but some days it was just too depressing to weave in and out between kissing couples, overjoyed families and taxi drivers with signs that never displayed your own name, in the certain knowledge that there was no one to pick you up, and you were going home to an empty flat. Their airport emergency agreement postponed the inevitable and made it slightly more bearable.

  ‘Daaaarling!’ Pete exclaimed in what was supposed to be his domestic goddess voice. ‘I’ve been waiting for your call for ages. I’m sitting here with a family-sized portion of chilli, all on my ownsome. And me, who can’t tolerate all those beans.’

  ‘I’ll be there in ninety minutes,’ she promised and rang off.

  She grabbed one of the few remaining copies of The Sunday Times at the newsagent and discarded the boring sections on Home, Sport and Driving before taking the news sections with her to the coach and letting herself be transported back into town.

  Pete served his chilli with cold Corona, home-made guacamole and a lengthy speech about why they ought to go to Ghana soon to investigate. A couple of hours later Nora called a cab, which took her the last stretch home to Belsize Park.

  She picked up her post in the hallway and turned on her laptop, which warmed up while she changed out of her travelling clothes. Pete's chilli was still burning her throat, so she found a bottle of water in the fridge and drank it in big gulps.

  She checked her inbox. Two emails from the Crayfish. She barely had the energy, but knew from past experience that she might as well open them now or she would just be tossing and turning in her bed, and ultimately get up to read them anyway.

  The first was short and imperative: Call!

  She checked her watch. It had to be a quarter past one in Denmark, and she had a hunch that the Crayfish's poor sense of time zones didn’t include an appreciation that the phenomenon worked both ways.

  She clicked to open the next one.

  Planning meeting tomorrow. What's happening with that ferry story?

  ‘Take a chill pill,’ she said out loud. Typical Crayfish to think that hey presto she could magic up the world's best scoop over the weekend.

  A thought, which had been nagging her ever since the plane, suddenly resurfaced.

  She rummaged round the bottom of a chest of drawers and eventually found what she was looking for: a pair of grey woollen gloves. She had taken on board Svend Jansson's words about not leaving fingerprints.

  Then she pulled the suitcase from Brine out from under the coffee table and opened it.

  At first she removed the envelope with the remaining Polaroids. She intended to take a closer look at them later. Then she adjusted her desk lamp so it would act as a spotlight while she examined the scuffed leather suitcase.

  She felt along the lining and discovered a hole in the stitching that might explain how the photographs had
come to be sold along with the suitcase. She carefully checked the rest of it. There was nothing else of significance. A few specks of tobacco, a red button and a receipt dated 1983 for petrol from a BP station.

  Disappointed, she turned the suitcase upside down to shake out more secrets. And that was when she spotted it. On one side of the suitcase a name had been written with a silver pen in a thin, quivering hand.

  Bill Hix

  ‘Bloody hell!’ she burst out.

  For a while she sat staring alternately at the suitcase and out of the window, where refuse collectors had started the night shift and were scrambling around with recycling bins.

  Then she sat down in front of her laptop and wrote an email to the Crayfish.

  6

  The Crayfish rang the moment he checked his emails that morning.

  ‘You just keep working on that story. Two missing girls and a suitcase that used to belong to a British serial killer. Sounds like a scoop to me. When can you have something ready?’ he asked before Nora had even had time to say her name.

  Rumour had it the Crayfish was such a workaholic that he couldn’t stop himself from opening his laptop at breakfast, where his long-suffering wife and two children had to compete for his attention with the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Financial Times websites before the first cup of coffee. And, of course, his emails. And his breakfast.

  Nora could hear crunching and she presumed that the Crayfish's jaws were busy churning their way through a bowl of cornflakes.

  ‘It won’t be this week,’ she quickly interjected when the Crayfish paused to swallow his coffee.

  ‘Humph. Why not?’ He sounded almost offended.

  ‘Because things take longer over here,’ Nora explained for the umpteenth time.

  The problem with editors back home was that they were used to working for important media. In Denmark, magazines and newspapers were taken so seriously that even government ministers, as a rule, would make the effort to return calls when a journalist asked for a comment.