Student of Death: A Flesch & Stone novel, page 1
STUDENT OF DEATH
FLESCH & STONE
BOOK 1
IAIN ROB WRIGHT
ULCERATED PRESS
CONTENTS
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Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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VISIT THE BACK OF THE BOOK FOR DETAILS.
To my wonderful readers for being as disturbed as me.
With my greatest thanks to the following:
Suzy Tadlock
Marie Warnquist
Anthony Wilkins
Paula Bruce
Murder Shrimp
Ruth Witcomb
Andrea Oakes
Francis Keenan
Michael Greer
Angela Rees
Philip Clements
Elaine Anderson
KT Morrison
Trudy Meiser
Tracy Burrows
Steph Brown
Julie Adams
Richard Keeble
Sue Jones
Bridgett Duffus
RynoTheAlbinoRhyno
Susan Hall
Marci J Green
Julie McWhorter
Julian White
Wendy Daniel
Fear kitty
Renee Master
Mike Waldinger
Lola Wayne
Sarah Crossland
Lanie Evans
Lorraine Wilson
Sue Newhouse
Dominic Harris
Lindsay Carter
Rach Kinsella Chippendale
Leonard Ducharme
Jonathan & Tonia Cornell
Rigby Jackson
Carmen Hammond
Katrice Tuck
Minnis Hendricks
Kelli Herrera
Terrie-Ann Thulborn
Darrion Mika
Suzy Tadlock
Gillian Moon
Armando Llerena
Stephanie Everett
Ali Black
Angela Richards
Adrianne Yang
Angelica Maria
Kristina Goeke
Andrew Moss
Emma Bailey
Xya Marie
Leona Overton
Susan Hayden
Jennifer Holston
Roy Oswald
Chris Aitchison
Catherine Healy
Carol Wicklund
Lawrence Clamons
Mark Pearson
Dabney Arch
Tracy Putland
Tracey Newman
David Greer
Sandra Lewis
Windi LaBounta
Stephanie Hardy
Janet Carter
Lauren Brigham
Clare Lanes
Cindy Ahlgren
John Best
PROLOGUE
She bled from every orifice, her legs so bruised they were swollen to twice their normal size.
But she was free.
The cold night air kissed her face like a mother offering safety. Behind her lay hell, a temple of decaying flesh and evil biting monsters. Teeth marks punctured her flesh in the most intimate of places.
But she was free.
She had survived.
She had escaped.
The knee-height, wet grass tried to bring her down, but she wouldn’t let it as she picked up more and more speed. Her body was desperate, her spirit broken, but her will to survive was intact.
Panting, her tongue darted in and out of the gaps between her splintered teeth. Moaning, she found herself hoarse and without a voice.
But she was free.
Only darkness and isolation lay ahead, but it was a blinding, sun-drenched paradise compared to what she had just endured. The monsters were sleeping, and by the time they awoke, she would be gone. All she had to do was find help. Find rescue.
She was free.
But not yet saved.
CHAPTER
ONE
The airwave radio on the dashboard squawked to life, jolting Detective Richard Mullins from his thoughts. “DI Mullins, requesting ETA. Over.”
Mullins leant forward and thumbed the transmit button. “Arriving at scene. ETA two minutes. Over.”
“All received. Thank you. Out.”
Truthfully, Richard’s driver had parked their silver Ford Fiesta outside the derelict train station twenty minutes ago at 14:03, but Richard had just been sitting there ever since, trying to calm his nerves. Blood, death, murder – these were the things that ignited his synapses and sent his mind spiralling. He needed to keep control of himself. Stepping into a murder scene could be overwhelming.
Overexciting.
Intoxicating.
“You can do this, Richard,” he told himself, his voice barely a whisper. He was alone in the car, his driver having gone to stretch his legs. Tony was a civilian, and he would be left with nothing to do for the next few hours while Richard did his job. The man had chosen to go for a walk rather than sit in the car.
From inside his trouser pocket, Richard retrieved a weathered brown auger shell. He had stumbled upon it eighteen years ago at a beach in Saltburn, and he had kept the tiny item ever since. Gripping it now, he drove the sharp point of the spiral shell into the base of his thumb and focused on the pain, using it to block out everything else. It pushed aside the approaching brain fog that had been threatening to occlude his thinking.
There was one final ritual that would help him prepare his mind for the grim task ahead, and then he would get out of the car. He opened the glove box and retrieved a crossword book, quickly flipping to the most recent puzzle he’d been working on. With a Staedtler ballpoint pen taken from his blazer’s inside pocket, he started to fill in the answers with lightning speed.
Retire from a job? Six letters… Resign.
On drugs? Five letters… Using.
Statement of beliefs? Five letters… Credo.
Montenegro’s capital city? Nine letters… Podgorica.
“Okay, I’m ready.” Richard slid the crossword book back inside the glove compartment and repocketed the pen. Then he climbed out of the car and shut the door gently behind him. Loud noises bothered him, even ones he made himself. Fortunately, the surrounding area was almost completely silent.
No traffic.
No bystanders.
Only the raspy chatter of a disapproving magpie spying him from the branches of an elm tree.
In front of Richard, the dilapidated train station stood like an ancient ruin. Nestled in the run-down ex-mining village of Pit Dean, County Durham, the station had been a victim of Beeching’s axe – a series of profit reforms in the sixties that had stripped back the nation’s railways substantially. The building only remained standing because of its unique Parisian architecture and its Grade 2 listed status.
From what Richard’s initial research had told him on the drive over, a local pit owner and native Frenchman named Hugo Alisander had wanted to import a piece of his homeland, while also increasing his standing with the local community. So, at the turn of the last century, he had paid for a flamboyant train station to be erected, designed and built by skilled Parisian architects. The station had immediately become a regional landmark, famed for its audaciousness, and yet, a hundred years later, its white facades were now mouldy and its sculpted ornaments had all but crumbled. The weeds, bushes, and trees grew so wildly that the building was barely even visible from the road.
Richard left the car, leaving it unlocked as Tony had the keys.
A liveried squad car and forensics van were both parked up ahead, blocking the narrow access road that led to the train station. A separate footpath snaked alongside the road, but it was barred by a rusty metal gate and a uniformed police officer who was currently yawning and checking his watch.
“Can I help you, sir?” the officer asked Richard when he noticed him approaching.
Richard pulled his badge and ID. “DI Mullins. I’ve been called up from Darlington. Have we locked down the scene yet?”
“Aye, sir. Forensics arrived an hour ago to secure the location, but it’s…” He sucked in a deep breath and let it out through his nostrils. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-five. “It’s pretty grim down there.”
“Death is rarely anything other than grim, officer. Who found the body?”
“An anonymous tip-off came in at eight AM. The responding officers found the body at around zero nine hundred hours, but they’re no longer at the scene. DCI Flannigan told ’em to go take a break and calm their nerves. They’ll be giving statements later.”
Richa
“Aye, sir. We, um, cannit get hold of a key for the padlock, so you’ll ’ave to climb over.”
Richard glanced at his polished brown lace-up shoes and tailored black trousers. “I’m not really dressed for it, but if needs must.”
The officer stood aside, and Richard climbed the gate’s horizontal bars, slender fingers clamping around the cold steel. The fishy tang of rust filled his nostrils, and he knew the odour would cling to his hands until he washed them.
Don’t fret. And don’t slip.
Fortunately, it was an easy enough traversal to reach the other side of the gate, and he avoided embarrassing himself. Not that he ever felt anything so mundane as embarrassment.
“Watch yersel’ around the side cut, sir. It’s a right jungle, it is.”
“I’ll employ caution. Thank you again, officer.”
Richard edged down the uneven path towards the train station. The front entryway was boarded up, but the mascaron above it – a sculpture of an inscrutable female face – was remarkably intact. Had this silent, stone-faced lady been gazing upon this patch of desolate wasteland for decades, with nothing and no one to entertain her? Had she seen those responsible for the grisly scene he was about to encounter?
The snaking path lived up to the beat officer’s cautionary words, and with every step, Richard had to fight to keep his balance as a vast tangle of ivy reached out from the station’s foundations and tried to trip him. The sprawling roots of more voracious elm trees made the ground ever harder and more uneven. Thick brambles tugged at his trousers like the fingernails of grasping corpses.
He eventually made it to the back of the station, where he found a graffiti-covered platform where passengers had once stood waiting for trains to take them to Peterlee and Durham. At the far end of the platform, rusted gantry cranes stood like silent sentinels, their colossal bulk the only thing keeping them from being pilfered for scrap. A substantial section of the station’s overhanging roof had collapsed, and it was clear that the building had been left to rot.
Richard heard the rhythmic ka-chick-ka-chick of a digital camera shutter.
Ka-chick-ka-chick.
Stop it!
Richard reached into his pocket and squeezed his auger shell. Then, taking a deep breath, he approached a small group of people clustered around a pile of debris in the centre of the platform. The photographer’s shutter continued to click-click-click, but Richard remained composed and responded with a polite nod when the man looked his way.
Please stop the clicking.
The next person Richard made eye contact with was Detective Chief Inspector Flannigan, a woman he had dealt with many times before. Her expression, as she looked at him, was less than welcoming. “Ah, DI Mullins,” she said. “Splendid you could join us. Are things a little busy at the murder university today?”
Richard attempted a smile but found it difficult. He disliked the morbid nickname commonly associated with his place of work, but he understood it wasn’t far from the truth. As part of a specialised task force, dedicated to catching serial murderers and sex offenders, he knew it took a certain kind of person to do what he did.
“I apologise for my tardiness, ma’am. How can I be of use?”
DCI Flannigan was a woman in her fifties who had probably never been feminine or attractive, nor likely ever cared about such things. Her black hair was cropped to her square shoulders, and she wore no make-up at all. The only jewellery she wore was a simple gold watch. Richard felt ill at ease around most women, but Flannigan didn’t have that effect on him. She was strictly business and spoke plainly, which he found comforting.
Flannigan scrunched up her nose as if she had smelled something bad. “I want you to do your… thing. Tell me, what kind of animal would do something like this?”
Richard frowned, but when she stepped aside, his focus fell upon the crime scene. A monster indeed had visited this place. His mouth immediately went dry.
This is a work of art.
A trio of forensic technicians in white polythene suits were currently cataloguing the scene, but they scurried aside as Mullins stepped forward. They had either worked with him before or knew of his reputation.
Macabre Mullins.
The weird guy from the murder university.
Detective Ghoul.
Richard got to work.
The victim, a barefooted young woman wearing indigo jeans and a bloodstained lavender blouse, had been silenced with a black ball gag. He judged her to be around twenty years of age, but her sagging grey cheeks pulled away from her eye sockets and made her look older in death. Someone had tied her hands behind her back and hoisted her upwards by the wrists, wrapping the rope around an exposed rafter in the collapsed ceiling and tying it off around a concrete support pillar. The over-rotation of her shoulders had caused her head to hang lifelessly in front of her and her bare feet to dangle. To add even more suffering, it appeared the killer had torn out her fingernails, leaving behind bright red, bloody beds.
I can hear her screams.
She would have begged for her life and then, eventually, for her death.
Blood caked the girl’s golden hair, having leaked from a section of scalp missing from the top of her head. A translucent layer of yellowing flesh clung to her exposed skull, surrounded by some kind of cruddy black substance. Dried blood stained the rubble beneath her bare feet.
This was a bad ending.
You poor thing.
Richard closed his eyes and inhaled the metallic scent of blood and the fruity stench of human decay. The silence was unsettling, devoid now even of the magpie’s irritable birdsong. This was a quiet place, a lonely place. A place that stunk of death and echoed with memories of the past.
The perfect spot for a monster to play its games.
“I don’t think this was personal,” Richard muttered.
Flannigan’s voice carried a hint of repulsion as she regarded the dead girl hanging from the rafters. “It seems highly personal to me, Mullins.”
Richard reluctantly met Flannigan’s gaze. “This wasn’t about the girl. It was about the suffering. The killer tied her hands behind her back and strung her up by her wrists, a method of torture called strappado – or reverse hanging. It exerts agonising pressure on the shoulder blades by over-rotating them and causing them to gradually tear. The victim would have suffered over several hours as she tried to lift herself up on her tiptoes to ease the pressure on her joints, but eventually exhaustion would have caused her to collapse and most likely asphyxiate.”
“And what about her head? Is that part of it?” Flannigan was a smart woman, and likely had theories of her own, but Richard was there to give his opinion, so she wanted to hear it.
He pointed to the victim’s exposed skull. “Do you see that black substance around the edges of her scalp?”
“Yes. We don’t know what that is yet.”
“Likely tar or some kind of oil, which suggests the killer performed an additional method of torture called pitchcapping.”
“Pitchcapping?”
“Yes. It involves pouring tar or molten metal onto a victim’s head and allowing it to cool before ripping it free. It was used several times throughout history, dating back to even before the Roman Republic.”
One of the forensics grimaced, likely unsettled by Mullins’ knowledge of torture, and the enthusiasm with which he shared it.
The suffering must have been immense. I can almost smell it. The air is charged.
Flannigan was staring at Richard. She wasn’t wearing her dress hat, so she ran a hand over her short black hair to flatten it. “How do you know these things, Mullins?”
“I read a lot.”
“You read a lot about obscure torture methods?”
“It’s my job.”
Flannigan nodded slowly. “I suppose it is. Anything else you see here?”
“Like I said, this was about inflicting pain. The victim remained alive for several hours, maybe even a full day, before her lungs finally gave out. While the pain in her scalp would have been severe, it was probably minor compared to the mounting pressure on her shoulders and chest.”
“You’re sure this wasn’t personal? This girl might have pissed someone off, someone who wanted revenge. An ex-boyfriend, perhaps?”
