Catch a Killer

By Shaun Herbert

It wasn't the blackouts or strange images of childhood resurfacing on the troubled waters of his mind that worried Rick Berryman. That privilege was reserved for the voices which spoke to him from the still of the night. Voices crying out from a maelstrom of pain: they were coming - coming for him.

When the finger of suspicion is pointed in his direction - following a bloody killing spree of six young women – even Rick Berryman begins to doubt his own sanity. Could he be the psychopathic killer? A deadly modern-day Jekyll and Hyde who roams the streets of North Yorkshire or is he the unfortunate innocent trapped in the delusions of his own mind?

Based several years in the future after the re-introduction of the death penalty, the story follows Rick through the terrors of his incarceration to his trail at Crown Court and the inevitable verdict.

Shaun Herbert weaves a tale of – did he, didn't he? – which sways the reader’s judgement one way then the other in a strange sympathetic roller-coaster ride of emotion.

As ever watch out for the unforeseen twist in the tale that takes your breath away!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shaun Herbert
• Release date: Feb 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311696649

Shaun Herbert

www.shaunherbert.com Shaun was born in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England in 1967. In 1968 the family moved to London before emigrating to South Africa in 1970, where he lived for two years, returning home in the winter of ’72. Shaun stayed in the Barnsley area until he moved to Wakefield (his adoptive town) in his early twenties, where he’s lived ever since.Divorced in 2013, he is happily settled with his fiancée, Joehana a beautiful Filipino National with a wonderful smile. Shaun’s pastimes have been somewhat eclectic over the years. Art has always been a favourite hobby and his desire for creativity has flowed into many ventures. At fourteen he studied Goju-Ryu karate for eleven years attaining his “1st Dan Black Belt” at nineteen. In his early twenties he went on to play guitar as a semi-professional musician for a six year period in hard-rock venues across the country. Apart from writing, Shaun likes reading, painting watercolour and surfing the net with a vengeance...lol At forty-four, in 2011, he reduced his working hours from full to part-time enabling him to devote more energy to writing. His work is now published across the world and available in many formats.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

You bloody idiot! Jan Sawyer ranted. There’s no way I’ll be at work tomorrow. Not in this state.

Walking alone, she crossed from Kirkgate onto Doncaster Road at the edge of the City. It was dark and cold, and if that weren’t enough, a fine drizzle fell from the heavens soaking the fabric of her skimpy dress.

Hardly a good ending to a less than perfect day, she berated herself.

She’d left home around eight, ready for a ‘night out on the town’. She’d spent a little more time than usual getting ready for her date that evening. She wanted to make a good impression; she was excited about this one. Like her he was in his mid-twenties, single, attractive; a good catch for any girl, she thought.

She’d seen him for the first time several weeks ago at Beth’s twenty-third birthday party. He was strong and confident; a real hunk of a guy. The word that sprang to mind was sexy; so much so that she hadn’t been able to keep her eyes off him. Not wanting to appear over eager, she’d edged tentatively closer, stealing the occasional furtive glance, seeking out any opportunity to engage in conversation with him. But he’d been surrounded by his friends and she’d been too shy to approach him on her own.

Later, Beth had explained that he was a friend of a friend and that she was more than willing to partake in a little match-making. Jan grinned cheekily in approval.

Two weeks later and the blind-date had been set-up - that’s if you can call meeting a guy you don’t know but have in fact seen before a true blind-date. Jan remembered thinking that if his personality matched his looks then to hell with the definition. Who knew where the date might lead?

Marriage?

Stranger things had happened.

Wow! Slow down girl, she’d told herself, let’s get the date over with first. Gliding down the aisle all dressed in white is a few steps away.

Anyway, all that was hypothetical now. If tonight was anything to go by, she’d be living with her parents for a while longer. Once again, where men were concerned, Jan had been disappointed. Her date’s personality turned out to be much less attractive than his body. In fact, it stank. The guy was a total jerk. To be more precise, he was a vein, self centred, charm-free prick of the highest order; with bells on for good measure.

Feigning a dodgy tummy, she’d made her excuses and left her date heading towards a quieter bar further down the road, where she could sit alone and get smashed. Determined to drown her sorrows, Jan aimed to knock back several Smirnoff’s before catching the last bus home from Wakefield station.

That was the plan anyhow; although in practice, she lost count of the number of vodka’s consumed, missed the last bus and ended up in a night club until 2.00 a.m.

Normally, she’d have caught a taxi back home but not tonight. It was another four days to payday and she’d frittered her last fiver away on the admission fee to the night club. Walking was her only option - a less than appealing prospect when wearing six inch high-heels.

Cold, wet and dejected, she took a left, crossing onto Black Road, which marked the edge of the common; a desolate place if ever there was one. In twenty minutes she’d be at Pineapple Hill, half a mile from where she lived, in a tiny hamlet called Warmfield.

Folding her arms across her ample bosom, Jan trudged on, shivering as a blast of cold air hit her exposed body. Her pale skin was covered in tiny goose bumps not unlike those of a raw chicken, stuffed and ready to roast. The dress she wore, what little there was of it, wasn’t designed for warmth. In reality it had been crafted to hug the figure so tight that it couldn’t fail to catch the eye of any unsuspecting guy in close proximity.

She laughed.

It was the type of garment her Nan would have called a ‘pneumonia frock’, if only she’d been alive to see it.

Mind you, at this rate her, dear old Nan, might just be right.

The night was quiet, as she walked up the hill’s steep incline, the silence interrupted only by the rhythmic tip-tapping of her stiletto heels upon the paved surface. Her calves ached as lactic acid built up in her muscles.

She really must go to the gym more often.

What was that?

Another sound entered her consciousness. In contrast to the sharp tip-tapping of her own footwear, she heard the dull thud of a man’s heavy shoe behind her.

She wasn’t alone.

Her heart raced, as adrenaline pumped through her body, sharpening her mind as it pushed the last vestige of alcohol from her system. She fought to suppress a natural urge to panic.

Be calm, she told herself. There’s nothing to worry about.

Gathering every ounce of courage she could muster, Jan glanced over her shoulder hoping to allay her fears. The man was closer to her now. A long rain coat almost like a dark sou’wester cloaked his body. The hood was up and cast his face into deep shadow. Only the glaring eyes and wild grin were visible as he launched himself at her.

Terrified, Jan kicked off her heels, running bare foot; she pounded across the paved surface, in an attempt to outrun her pursuer.

Please God, let me run into someone else, anyone, anyone so that I’m not alone with this demon. Gasping for breath, she tried to scream and failed, as a ‘latex covered’ hand grabbed her from behind. The man’s fingers tugged at her hair, threatening to rip it from her scalp, as he yanked her to an agonizing halt.

She tried to turn and face him to gouge out his eyes with her fingernails but he was too powerful. Pushing her violently to the ground she screamed as skin grated from her knees as she slid across the pavement. Jan tried to stand, to flee once more from this maniac but he pounced on her back as she rose, crushing her body with his weight.

His sickening breath warm on the nape of her neck made her want to vomit.

‘No, please, noooooo,’ she pleaded as she saw the serrated blade flash before her eyes. Her cry for mercy fell on deaf ears as her attacker slashed her throat, forcing a mix of blood and air to spray from the deep wound in her windpipe. Her eyes rolled in their sockets, until only the whites were visible as air whistled from her lungs. The killer slashed her again, splattering the pavement below her body with a second wave of blood.

Strength ebbed from Jan’s body as she sank into semi-consciousness. As she convulsed, darkness claimed her vision. Sounds morphed into incoherent babble as she floated on a sea of nothingness. No longer cognisant, unaware of whom she was, where she was, she descended into a well of oblivion.

Love, life and marriage; were things, Jan Sawyer, no longer needed to worry about. They would be forever beyond her grasp.

PART ONE

To Catch a Killer

CHAPTER ONE

Rick Berryman sat cross legged on the pine wood floor of his shed. The smell of wood preserve from the timber frame clung tenaciously to his nostrils. He looked around the confined space where he sat. To his left, a work bench loomed above him, littered ominously with tools. To his right, an electric lawn mower lay dormant; unused like the spade and pitch fork amidst the plethora of other garden equipment; waiting to be used as the winter finally gave way to the warmer spring months that lay ahead.

Disorientated, Rick soaked in his surroundings. He wondered what had led him here sitting crossed legged on the floor, drenched to the bone in the still of the night. Shaking away the haze that clouded his mind he glanced at his watch. Hell, it was four thirty in the morning, another couple of hours and daybreak would be here, along with the dawn chorus, as black bird, finch and sparrow competed for the prize of most beautiful song.

Thank God it was late March; if Rick had been in this situation only a few weeks earlier when the night temperatures had hit -8oC, hypothermia would have claimed his life for sure.

What was he doing here anyway?

That’s a stupid question, he scalded himself. He must have had one of his ‘blackouts’. There could be no other explanation.

The last thing he recalled was sipping at a mug of hot drinking chocolate in his living room whilst watching the end of the ten o’clock news. As usual the big story had been about the recession and how the FTSE 100 had fallen against the Dow Jones for the sixth week in a row.

Then nothing.

His memory was totally blank as if someone had not only wiped the blackboard clean but taken the trouble to scrub its surface with a sponge and bucket of soapy water for good measure. He scoured his mind for any snippet of information that might provide a helpful insight into the lost hours and came up with absolutely nothing. Not even the smallest scrap of sight, sound or smell.

That part wasn’t unusual.

He’d suffered from similar lapses of memory since being a small child. In the early years he wouldn’t even have termed them ‘blackouts’ at all. More a strange kind of slip in time and space. Some kids suffered with nervous ticks, others stuttered, had nose bleeds or were prone to vomiting, but not him. His little foibles were so brief they were over in a heart-beat, as if he had phased out of reality, whilst casually pausing for breath. Rick hadn’t seen the point in telling anyone about them. Why should he? Didn’t everyone get them?

It wasn’t until he hit puberty, when his condition grew more pronounced, that he started to question this belief. The lapses no longer went un-noticed, increasing in duration and intensity. It was hard for anyone to miss the vacant expression which froze his face, as his eyes glazed over, plunging him into some strange alien reality which consumed his mind.

Most of his teachers sympathised, controlling those who sought to mock him. But kids are cruel and there was no way he could have avoided their taunts forever.

He’d always been a shy kind of boy, especially at high school, but as the bullying increased so did his lack of self-confidence, allowing him to gradually withdraw deeper and deeper within his psyche. He knew that was a form of self preservation. A protective act that kept his tormenters at bay. Not that it did any good. It merely added to his aura of strangeness, until titles like, schizo, psycho and spasser became a pseudonym for his own name.

One teacher in particular regularly encouraged this type of behaviour. He was affectionately known as Bastard Blythe. A name given to him by the other kids, which he liked to cultivate and definitely lived up to. Rick remembered him being an absolute sadist who should have been sacked for his attitude towards children long ago.

On one occasion he recalled Blythe openly mocking him in front of the class during a midmorning lesson. Rick had been recovering from a blackout. Still dazed, he recalled the man roughly shaking him by the shoulder, shouting: Hey! Ground control to Major Tom. Come back to planet earth, over. A cruel wave of laugher washed over him as Rick’s peers enjoyed the cutting remarks made by good old Bastard Blythe.

How could a teacher instigate and openly encourage such behaviour? They weren’t all like that of course. One teacher had actively tried to help him. She was a kind old lady called Miss Coney, known to the kids as ‘Iron-Knickers’ on account she was still a spinster at the age of fifty-six. It wasn’t a name that ever passed Rick’s lips. She was a caring person. The only one who took it upon herself to contact his parents asking if they’d taken him to see a doctor because of his condition?

Unfortunately, for her, she received the same type of quick witted remarks from his parents that he’d received from his class mates.

She was told, in no uncertain terms to ‘keep her nose out’ of other people’s business. For her information, Rick, didn’t need to see a doctor, because they were doctors, and they were aware of his ‘blackouts’. And yes, he did show signs of suffering from epilepsy, to be more precise, petit mal seizures. And no, medication was not necessary at this moment in time. And please, can you stick to the profession you’re paid for, which has nothing to do with diagnostic medicine of any kind, now does it Miss Coney?

The fact that his parents were scientists and not doctors never came into the conversation. If people thought he was a little strange then they’d never met his mum and dad. Maybe that’s why he’d been teased so vigorously for being a chip off the old block?

Anyway, after Miss Coney’s telephone conversation, she never mentioned the subject again. Unlike his parents, who for the first time he could recall, had gone to great lengths to discuss the matter further with him.

You’ve nothing to worry about, son. What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal, dad explained. All our family get them. It’s best to tell other folk you’re epileptic and leave it at that.

I’m epileptic?

No darling, you’re not, mum had told him. You’re the last of a kind. A very special boy. And when the time comes you’ll know more.

The conversation stuck in his mind as if it had only happened yesterday. He loved his parents with a depth like no other but even by their standards this type of stuff was odd ball.

What had it all meant? He didn’t have a clue, but the subject certainly raised more questions than answers. If he wasn’t epileptic then why had they used it as an excuse to explain away his blackouts to others? Surely such lapses in memory couldn’t have been passed down the gene pool, could they? And even if they were hereditary, a product of defective DNA, then why hadn’t he ever seen his parents suffer from the same kind of thing?

An even greater conundrum played on his mind. Why, hadn’t his parents, his loving parents, taken him to see a doctor?

He guessed they had their reasons, but now they were dead, he’d never have a chance to ask them. There was so much he wanted to know but losing them so suddenly in an untimely car crash last year had devastated him to the core. Would he ever recover from his grief to rebuild his life once again? He hoped the answer to that question was yes.

Could the recent trauma he had suffered account for the ever increasing duration and intensity of the blackouts he was experiencing?

It was a possibility that worried him.

Perhaps he should arrange to see a doctor now his parents were no longer around to stop him? He definitely needed some form of medical intervention to lift his spirits and control the blackouts. If only he could muster up enough courage to free that particular genie from the bottle. To break the conditioning that had been drilled into him as a small child - not to seek help.

He laughed to himself. God, I’m so screwed up it’s no wonder I have so few friends and manage to scare the girls away. Maybe that’s what mum meant when she said, ‘you’re the last of a kind?’

If he kept up his ‘singles’ act much longer then the ‘Berryman’ blood line would definitely die out. Not that he really cared. If he was being truly honest with himself then girls didn’t interest him. It was as if they were some repellent species that he couldn’t quite stand to be around.

True, he’d gone out on the occasional blind date with one or two of the fairer sex. More often than not at a colleagues insistence to make-up a foursome, rather than for any other reason. But the dates he’d been forced to endure had all been an uncomfortable experience that pained him. The plain and simple fact was that girls weren’t attracted to him nor him to them.

Rick looked around the shed one last time. Now fully recovered from his blackout, he used the work bench on his left to pull himself off the floor. God, every fibre in his body ached as if he had run a double marathon. What on earth had he been up to last night?

If only he could remember.

Time to go indoors, he told himself. I need to dry off and grab a little sleep if I’m to make the afternoon shift later in the day. He didn’t really believe the internal dialogue. Intuition told him he’d phone in sick anyhow.

He always did; it was becoming something of a ritual.

CHAPTER TWO

Detective Chief Inspector Ian Haimer was a portly man in his mid-forties and given the amount of time he spent at the station, surprisingly still married. Precariously sat on the edge of a sturdy metal table at the head of the briefing room, one foot firmly planted on the floor, the other swinging mid-air, he chewed on his finger nails. It was a bad habit for sure, especially as far as his wife was concerned. But she was safely at home and no one else in the station had the authority to bring his failings to his attention.

The sky outside Wakefield Police Station was overcast; a deep velvet black that reflected the mood of the officers inside. The beige sandstone structure, uninvitingly barren to the eye, housed the Murder Investigation Team. As Senior Investigations Officer, DCI Haimer, politely known to his team as The Governor, headed a squad of sixty-two personnel, including twenty forensic officers and thirty homicide detectives seconded from across the West Yorkshire area.

The task at hand which faced them was huge and definitely not one to be underestimated. Over the past twelve months, six local women had been brutally murdered by the same attacker and the body count was rising alarmingly.

Haimer, continued to bite his finger nails under the glare of the overhead fluorescents, as his detectives filtered into the briefing room. Patiently waiting for his officers to sit he allowed