The King of Terrors Read online

  The King of Terrors

  D. M. Mitchell

  D. M. Mitchell

  The King of Terrors

  1

  The Body in the Barn The Unpublished Memoirs of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Rayne of the Yard December 1952

  I am not a squeamish man. That particular commodity was expunged from my being in the trenches of Paschendale during the Great War, where as a naive young man I beheld sights so dreadful and over such a lengthy period of time that I became (I am loathe to admit) all but inured to the daily horrors they presented. A body ceased to be a person. It was a dead thing, a frail, corporeal shell from which the spirit had flown. I developed the emotional tactic of mentally divorcing one from the other in order to better shoulder and carry out the duties and the responsibilities that my regiment and my country expected of me.

  In my professional — and I might say quite successful — career in the police force, I found that my hard schooling in France and Belgium, my youthful immersion in the squalid depths that constitute human perversion, left me with a clear and reasoned mind free from the shackles of unnecessary emotion. A state of being which I have found on many occasions benefited my mind’s effective operation.

  So, I reiterate: I am not a squeamish man.

  Neither, or so I thought, was Detective Inspector Wilson, whom I had known for seven years or more. A more levelheaded, objective and forthright a fellow I had never known. Hitherto I would have cast him in the same mould as I, a man tempered in the fiery furnaces of France. I had not expected to find him in the state I did. He was clearly agitated, and I suppose his agitation served to infect my own spirit that day too, for I had not expected my steel-hard shell to be breached so readily.

  It was the summer of 1929, mere months, as I recall, before the Crash in America, which would send dire economic ripples around the globe, and a full ten years before the world embarked on another orgy of bloody madness, as if out of the bitter soil of economic ruin would grow the choking weeds of dictators and despotism. In the summer of 1929 we were as yet blissfully ignorant of all that. Yet, in an old barn on the edge of a Suffolk field, I felt we uncovered portents of the evil to come. Intimations of the evil that resides eternally within all men.

  I use the word evil carefully. I am not a man given to believe in the full connotation of the word, though I am a man who believes privately in God, and by turns, I suppose, a Devil; but I never expected, during my role as a police officer, to ascribe the term to any aspect of my work. Not until that day in 1929. Not until Wilson came over to me, his face deathly pale and I instinctively knew something was terribly amiss.

  My first thought was that he was feeling under the weather, nursing a summer cold perhaps. Detective Inspector Wilson was possessed of such a resolute character and impressive determination that I had seen him carry on working whilst in the grips of a dreadful fever and refuse to give in to it. As he approached me I told him he looked shocking and that he really mustn’t overload his system so; his chest suffered badly, a legacy of being gassed during the war.

  ‘No, really, I am quite well,’ he assured me.

  ‘Well you certainly don’t look it,’ I told him pointedly.

  He did not say anything immediately; he signalled instead for me to follow him to the barn.

  There were already a number of police cars there, and an ambulance looking to get its wheels stuck in the mud. It was only when we reached the twin corrugated iron doors to the dilapidated old barn, guarded by two uniformed officers, did he stop and turn to me.

  ‘Hell, sir, I haven’t seen anything like this in all the time I’ve been on the force.’ He took a cigarette from a silver case, offered me one, which I refused. He planted the cigarette firmly between his lips, snapped the case shut and pocketed it. ‘Are you sure you don’t want one?’ he said as he flicked his lighter into life and touched the flame to the end of the cigarette. ‘You might find you’ll need it.’

  I admit I laughed, because I partly felt he was having me on. But he shook his head and I noticed his left hand shook a little as he placed the lighter into his trench coat pocket

  ‘I say, old boy, what have you got in there?’

  ‘That’s just it, sir, I’m not certain.’ He indicated with a quick jerk of the head for me to follow, tossing aside the unfinished cigarette at the door, which an officer ground into the mud with his boot.

  The unmistakable stench of death hit my nostrils, though in truth I had caught the smell earlier. It was a familiar smell, yet one I have never been able to grow accustomed to. Perhaps it is because it never failed to resurrect those painful memories of France, of man’s continued inhumanity and pathetic little existence; his ambitions, his greed, his lust and selfishness — everything he is inevitably becomes little more than a stinking soup.

  I knew instinctively, just from the smell, that the body had lain here some considerable time. The inside of the barn was dark, illuminated only by the light from the open doorway and the feeble glow from a lamp held by another uniformed officer. It took a second or two for my eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. In the far right-hand corner of the barn there appeared to be a mound of white ash.

  ‘It was found by the farmer. He thought some animal or other had crawled in here to die, like a fox or something. It’s been disturbed, as you can see, because he poked it around with his stick, not knowing immediately what it was. Then he uncovered the head.’

  What he’d discovered was a human torso, every limb, including the head, had been separated from the body, the legs and arms laid in a neat row by the body and the head placed centrally on top of them. The whole had been covered in a fine white powder.

  ‘Quick lime?’ I said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Wilson replied.

  I saw him groping for his cigarette case again.

  ‘Man or woman?’ I asked, bending to the corpse and taking out my handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth. Apart from the heavy decomposition that had taken place it had been mauled by rats too.

  ‘That might have been difficult to ascertain,’ he replied, ‘had we not found this.’ He went over to a small mound of clothes and carefully picked up a wallet with his handkerchief. ‘There’s money still inside, not a great deal but enough to tell you that robbery wasn’t part of it. The identification inside says he’s one Jimmy Tate.’

  ‘The late Jimmy Tate,’ I quipped. ‘So do we know who Jimmy Tate was?’ I queried. This was no frenzied attack. The body had been carved up in equal proportions as far as I could tell.

  ‘We’re carrying out preliminary enquiries right now. Early indications are that he’s a local man. Apparently he owned and ran a small scrap yard about two miles away. We’ve got someone there now.’

  ‘Whoever did this can’t have been in a hurry. They took their time.’ The carcass wouldn’t have been out of place at Smithfield market, I thought. I looked over the head. ‘There have been a couple of sharp blows here; the skull is caved in.’ Not enough to have killed him outright, I surmised, but certainly enough to incapacitate him, to knock him senseless. The thought that he’d been hacked alive I found deeply disturbing.

  ‘I’m of the mind they brought him to the barn to finish him off,’ said Wilson, ‘probably clobbering the poor fellow at his home, dragging him here. We’ll know soon enough if we discover blood there. They most likely used a car; there are tracks out there but it’s rained quite a bit since this happened and it will be the devil to pick them out. We’re trying to see if we can find the types of tyres used.’

  ‘How long do you suppose he’s been here?’ I asked, already formulating my own opinions.

  ‘I should say two, perhaps three months. He’s well rotted.’

  It confirmed what I t
hought. ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ I said.

  ‘That’s not all,’ said Wilson. ‘There’s this over here.’ He borrowed the lamp from the officer and took me over to the stone wall of the barn. The lamplight lit up a curious symbol daubed quite carefully in black paint.

  I looked closely at it. It appeared to be a circle, but in actuality it was a serpent eating its own tail, and at the circle’s centre, acting like the four thick spokes of a wheel, was a cross. At the heart of the cross was a star. ‘Do you think this is contemporary with the murder or incidental?’ I asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ said Wilson. ‘The farmer hasn’t seen it before. Mind you, he says he hasn’t been to the barn for the best part of a year. He doesn’t use it anymore. But what other reason would there be? I’d say we had a ritualised murder in there and this played its part.’

  ‘Witchcraft?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Whatever went on here, it’s a ghastly business, make no mistake.’

  ‘I’m certain I’ve seen this symbol before,’ I murmured, though for the life of me I had no idea where.

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘No, in connection with another case perhaps. The thing’s like an itch on my mind and damned if I can scratch it.’ In the end I gave up trying and turned away. ‘Get it photographed along with the body. Get someone to cover this up,’ I said, nodding at the corpse, ‘and let’s see what this fellow’s scrap yard has to offer.’

  It transpired Jimmy Tate kept himself pretty much to himself. A few of the locals in the village knew him by sight, a youngish man; they said he’d been running the scrap yard for eighteen months or so, but to a man confirmed they’d not seen much business actually happening. The high gates seemed to be bolted shut far more often than they’d been open. From all accounts he lived on his own, a fact confirmed on searching the house which was attached to the yard. He occupied a single room downstairs, the three upstairs rooms devoid of any furniture. It had all the appearance of being a makeshift existence, with little attempt to make this a permanent home.

  Hidden beneath the floorboards under a mattress thrown onto the floor — Jimmy Tate’s bed, it seemed — we found a small wooden box. To our astonishment we discovered it to be filled with gold and silver items, but mostly gold. Rings, necklaces, pieces of gold of indeterminate origin — all told it would have kept him in reasonable comfort for some time. And yet here he was living an almost hand to mouth existence, rarely going out, locking himself behind his high wooden fence. It was almost as if he were barricading himself inside, lying low so as to attract as little attention to himself as possible. So was the gold part of this? Did it even belong to him, or was he even aware of it lying beneath the filthy mattress he slept on?

  We had hoped to gain answers to some of these baffling questions by digging deeper into whom this Jimmy Tate actually was. There were documents in the house that confirmed him as the said Jimmy Tate — a birth certificate and a detailed army service record, plus one or two bills, fully paid. But just when we thought we could start to build up a fuller picture of the dead man it soon transpired that we were dealing with something far more mysterious. The man in the barn wasn’t Jimmy Tate. His papers were an elaborate deception. The real Jimmy Tate had died some twenty years previously. What we had here was the case of a dead man using a dead man’s identity.

  The case was kept hush-hush, an order from on high decreeing that limited details about the circumstances of the murder were to be divulged. I was never privy to the reasons, but the results of this edict rather hobbled our investigations. I was frustrated that no matter where we searched we hit a dead end, and a full year later we were no nearer finding out who murdered Jimmy Tate, or what his real identity was.

  Then I discovered what I felt was a connection to the symbol painted on the barn wall. My abiding passion is medieval history and I remembered where I had seen it before. I went to my many books and papers on the subject in my library and managed to trace the reference I had previously struggled to recall. At this juncture it was little more than a shot in the dark, and even I thought it faintly ludicrous that a murder committed in the modern age had any link to a symbol I’d seen referenced in a passage first written five hundred years ago.

  At once I brought it to my superior’s attention, excited that the case had opened up an altogether different, though at that stage rather tenuous, line of investigation. I was told to keep the details under my hat, at least for the time being, until I was definite that there was a connection; we had already suffered some embarrassment over the lack of progress and another, some might say outlandish, dead end, would not be tolerated.

  Less than a month later I would be fighting for my life.

  I received a tip-off about a warehouse job going down in Lewisham. The information came from one Bobby Garrick, a small-time crook whose dubious services as an informer I had used on a number of occasions, and he was doubly insistent it was I that went to see him. What I did not know was that Garrick was waiting for me with a double-barrelled shotgun.

  I do not remember much about that night, except walking into a darkened warehouse and hearing Garrick call out my name. I answered, and his response was to open fire on me. Both barrels, one after the other.

  Later he testified that he had mistaken me for someone else, that he was in fear of his life, and that he was sorry that I had been shot. He was not half as sorry as I. I had been hit in the leg with the first shot, which blasted away my upper calf, and the second shot caught me in the stomach as I fell. I hung between life and death for two weeks. They managed to save my leg, but I would never walk without a stick, and I have been troubled by severe pains in my midriff ever since. In an instant a London low-life managed to do to me what the Kaiser’s entire army had failed to achieve for a full four years.

  Worse still my career was over. I was quietly pensioned off and the case of the Body in the Barn handed over to someone else. It was a strange and bitter period for me. I am not one to feel sorry for myself, but I entered such dark months of depression that I cared not whether I lived or died, and at times I wished Bobby Garrick’s aim had been better so that he might have finished me off instead of condemning me to a painful living hell. Without my career I felt I was washed up, finished and good for nothing, a burden on my wife and family. They feared for my mental health, let alone my physical wellbeing. It did not help matters that I became haunted by the case that I had never solved, which in time eclipsed (at least in my own troubled mind) my many successes. The force no longer needed my help, though I forced myself on them for a time. In the end even they grew tired of me and slammed doors shut that previously had been open and welcoming.

  At this, my darkest point, I was approached by an aspiring young author called Justin Symons who was chronicling murder cases for a book he was writing. It had the rather uninspiring title of True Crimes, but he offered a not insubstantial payment for my help. Angry at my colleagues, whom I felt had abandoned me, and largely angry at myself and the cruel twists of fate, I blurted quite willingly all manner of details to the young man about some of the cases I had worked upon. I admit I released a number of facts about the Body in the Barn that had been kept secret from the general public. Though I regretted this afterwards, I am glad to say I never saw hide or hair of the published book, and as far as I know it never saw the light of day, which rather let me off the hook.

  My troubles increased when my poor wife succumbed to cancer, and though I had a daughter at this time, the loss of my wife was hard for me to bear. I was in danger of slipping once again into remorse and self-pity, traits I abhor in myself but which lurk like twin beasts forever behind me waiting to pounce.

  What helped me climb out of the slough of despond I was slipping into was an approach by the BBC to dramatise a number of cases I had worked upon throughout my career. I had many successful cases to report and was glad of the opportunity to set the record straight. The resulting serialisation was entitled The Case
book of Inspector Rayne of the Yard, and I was thrilled to hear it for the first time on the radio, though I do feel they rather gave my achievements, and even my voice, a touch too much of the heroic. But if I am to be honest I fancied I basked quite self-indulgently in the brief but glorious limelight. In truth the fees did help pad out the old pension.

  Yet even to the last the Body in the Barn bedevilled me. I had been careful not to make the same mistake twice and hadn’t divulged anything to the dramatists about the case but that which was officially sanctioned at the time. No one had ever been brought to trial for Jimmy Tate’s murder, so effectively it was still open. I assumed with so little to go on they’d simply omit it from the run. Yet my radio series ended upon this very case. They used whatever material they had to hand, some of it total balderdash and used for effect rather than accuracy. They included the accounts of local villagers to pad out the so-called facts, and as they were as ignorant of the majority of these as the rest of the population it proved to be a sad end to a rather gratifying series, not least because it finished with my dismal failure to solve this one crime. I felt it wiped away my other career successes, though the BBC pointed out that it added a touch of drama; people do like a mystery that remains a mystery.

  I cursed Jimmy Tate for ever soiling my life with his death. It was, and still remains, the bane of my life, the one thing I am remembered for not doing.

  2

  Miss Evelyn Carter The Unpublished Memoirs of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Rayne of the Yard January 1952

  At the height of my radio fame (and alas, as is the way with fickle fame it burnt brightly for but a short interlude in my life) I was asked to attend numerous parties and functions. Most of these I kindly declined as it is not in my nature to position myself at the centre of attention, but one in particular I graciously accepted and that was to dinner at Gattenby House. As it transpired the invitation would have curious consequences, and not least because of what happened afterwards to Miss Evelyn Carter and how this prompted me to revisit the case of The Body in the Barn, with surprising, and one might say astonishing and bizarre conclusions.